Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 485 - Alan Flanagan

Episode Date: February 19, 2021

Alan Flanagan has an MSc in Nutritional Medicine, is currently pursuing his PhD. He is also a former practicing Lawyer (Barrister) from Dublin, Ireland. Alinea Nutrition is his online education hub, dedicated to empowering others with clear, impartial evidence-based knowledge and understanding about the science of nutrition. Alan is the founder of Align Health, an online coaching practise, and a medium to communicate evidence-based nutrition and health science to the general population. From working professionals to professional athletes, Alan provides science-based solutions and protocols to guide motivated individuals to their goals. Subscribe to the NEW Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Special perks for our listeners below! ➢LMNT Electrolytes: http://drinklmnt.com/powerproject ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Sling Shot: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

You don't want to miss what this guest had to say on Mark Bell's Power Project. The difference is huge in terms of in type 2 diabetics. For example, there was a study done in a group here. The glucose response after lunch when breakfast was consumed was 95% lower than when the participants skipped breakfast and had their first meal at lunch. What the fuck? So, yeah. Seriously, that's crazy. I've never heard that before. participants skipped breakfast and had their first meal at lunch what the fuck so yeah right so seriously that's crazy i've never heard that before what's up pat project fam this episode is brought to you by element electrolytes speaking of element electrolytes i actually

wanted to ask you in suma you being all jacked and tan and all strong and pretty uh do you take your element electrolytes pre or post workout i actually take it uh pre during and post and sometimes i'll do more than one pack so if i finish the pack of element that i had during like my workout or my jujitsu session i'll pop out another one sometimes post and that hydration really helps my recovery because sometimes after you get done with a really hard workout when you are sweating a lot you feel sore you feel kind of tired and you feel drained there is absolutely no problem with taking more than one pack of element yeah i'm really interested in trying it like uh intro workout right i've always i've always been one of those guys that's like oh you got to have

your your pre-workout and then your post-workout and in the middle it's like usually water or something right but now with element electrolytes from what rob wolf told us about how it like maintains strength and all this other just amazing benefits i'm just i'm really stoked about it and uh if you guys want to be like us we actually like getting the value bundle because you essentially get a box for free but if you're not ready to fully commit element is still offering you guys a free element recharge pack. So that's an eight sample pack. All you have to do is cover the shipping. You can do so by heading over to drinklmnt.com slash power project. Again, it's absolutely free. You just have to cover shipping. Make sure you guys go there and check it out right now. What up power project crew. This is Josh Settledge, AKA Settlegate

here to introduce you to our next guest, Alan Flanagan. Alan Flanagan has a master's of science in nutritional medicine and is currently pursuing his PhD. His company, Alinea Nutrition, is his online education hub dedicated to empowering others with clear and partial evidence-based knowledge and understanding about the science of nutrition. Alinea is the name of a typographical symbol for a new paragraph representing clarity, structure, and logical thought. These concepts are the foundation of Alinea Nutrition. These core values reject the belief system paradigm within nutrition, the inflexible and dichotomous thinking, and the disempowering effects of polarizing extremes.

Within this construct, Alinea Nutrition strives to bring its members a logical and intelligent approach to nutrition science based on the best available evidence. Allen had founded Align Health as an online coaching practice and as a medium to communicate evidence-based nutrition and health science to the general population. From working professionals to professional athletes, Alan provides science-based solutions and protocols to guide motivated individuals to their goals. On top of that, Alan is also a former practicing lawyer from Dublin, Ireland. But that's a different story for another time. Not sure if you guys want to hear about that. So without further ado,

please enjoy this conversation with Alan Flanagan. something else come get it bro hoping for we got some phil's coffee over here and uh we have uh alan flanagan on our on our show today which you just heard from joss settle gate and uh we're excited to have him on the show because he talks about some things that are a little different than some of our other guests he talks quite a bit about the timing of your food and, you know, having in the morning or having it at night. And he talks about basically these just windows, you know, like having an eating window. I think sometimes having a restricted, time-restricted feeding as he calls it and other people are calling it. I think that's almost easier to look at that you're going to eat in a certain amount of hours rather than trying to count.

Because it gets to be a little weird when you're trying to count 18 hours and 20 hours. I get confused half the time. Like, I don't know. I don't know when that is. But if you do eat around the same times every day, it can work out pretty well. But I don't know. Just a really easy thing, too, for people is probably just to eat, like, for five hours a day, four hours a day, you know, have a four hour eating window. I'm not saying eat continuously for four hours, but you know, seems reasonable to me.

I'm going to speak a little louder since the mic is on. Dude, what do we got to share? That's what you get for showing up on time today. for showing up on time today um no most definitely i think uh if you know it it does become easier if you do restrict the time that you eat during the day just because like naturally you're not going to eat as much in those hours especially if you're trying to diet like it's going to be hard to fit in a crazy amount of calories in five hours you can do it right it's possible right but um i think especially if you're eating low quality food really palatable food you can do it but it's possible right but um i think especially if you're eating low quality food really palatable food you can do it but if you're eating high quality food if you do that it's going

to be much easier to diet but there is a cool post on his page that i saw earlier this morning um he was comparing like the i guess i don't know the the thermic effect of food of eating breakfast versus dinner and apparently breakfast played out a little bit better. So that's what I think like what you said. In terms of the times of eating during the day, I think he's a guest that has or has looked into that a lot more than other individuals. Because like to me personally, I don't care about that for myself. But this could play into people who are really trying to get a lot extra out of their timing during the day. could play into people who are really trying to get a lot extra out of their timing during the day and maybe it helps someone better with their sleep because maybe somebody at the moment is eating

when it's dark and maybe i don't know i guess if you just went back in time you know before we had electricity you know and it was really dark and all you had was like a fire uh it'd probably be really rare to be eating um later in the day just because it'd be pitch black and you'd be like it's creepy outside I hear owls and shit I'm gonna go to bed or whatever I think you were just not left with a whole lot of options

when it was pitch black out you wouldn't be eating at 10pm plus also we've had people that have talked to us about eating too close to bed and sleep right how it's gonna be good resting heart rate and things like that. Great to have you on the show today. Thanks for having me lads.

Looking forward to the chat. So we, we actually just were talking about, you know, breakfast versus dinner. And we saw that that's some of your, some things you've been talking about more recently. A lot of people are utilizing intermittent fasting and they're fasting off

until the later part of the day. And they might eat at like 4 p.m. and then maybe again at like 7 p.m. and that might be it for the day. But it may be dark out depending on what time of year it is if you're eating in some of these eating windows, some of the results that you've seen, it appears that eating while the sun's out might be a better option. So it's, yeah, it's the sun being out, but also the actual time of day itself. The thing about these internal biological rhythms

that we have is that they are synchronized to the 24-hour period um and so that provides a lot of adaptability so if you're in a part of the world you know if you're in sweden or canada right and you get this big extreme between your summer light hours and your winter light hours depending on the kind of cues that you are giving your your body uh you could still you know have a situation and most people do where they're still anchored to that to that time of day so to speak to a degree um and what's changed that variable is artificial light that's kind of opened up the whole so what you have interestingly for example is that more people nowadays are what you would call like night owls or evening types whereas 20 years ago more people were kind of just in the middle really really. They weren't extreme morning types.

They weren't extreme evening types. So what we have is an area of human research that's still pretty kind of early doors with a lot of the different hypotheses and ideas. A lot of previous research in kind of mice and rats. And there was a lot of excitement, probably overexcitement, as you tend to get with like rat studies, where it's like, look, we can shovel calories into these rats, but we can just, you know, time restrict their feeding, and they're not going to get, they're not going to develop obesity or, you know, or get famine. So everyone kind of thought, well, this is, this is the way this, you know, might operate in humans.

And, you know, we know that in reality, the reason it's effective for people to kind of shorten the eating window is because it tends to lead to a reduction in total energy intake. But in terms of the timing of that eating window, we do have differences in our metabolic responses earlier in the day versus later in the day. And that's quite well established, particularly for glucose levels. Now, does that matter for an otherwise healthy individual who's, you know, presuming, you know, a lot of a lot of your audience, like there are people who are strength training athletes. And, you know, probably to be honest, time restricted feeding wouldn't suit a lot of them because their sheer amount of energy they need to get into the day,

you know, trying to squeeze that in four hours in the evening is not going to be great. But, you know, for otherwise healthy people, there are some differences that we could see. And what's always difficult is, you know, we look at a study and we say, okay, well, the difference is not that great in otherwise healthy people. The question then is, but what's the effect of that over 20 years, you know, so we always need to kind of think about how we contextualize research. But yeah, I mean, there are differences that we can see, particularly for glucose and insulin responses to meals that are kind of amplified in the early part of the day and a bit impaired later in the day. Specifically, we see that become more important as people get more glucose intolerant. So the potential real benefit to interventions like time-restricted feeding

could really be in people that are pre-diabetic or already have type 2 diabetes, for example. So it's an interesting area, yeah. Okay, so there's so much that we're going to be able to talk about during this podcast. But the first thing that I want to ask you was what you mentioned as far as night owls are concerned because of artificial light. Sure. People are doing things much later, light out much later. And you said that that's an area of research that hasn't been like, you know, gone into as much. But what would you think is more ideal for those individuals? much but what would you think is more ideal for those individuals would it be trying to figure out how to have their nutrition favor that lifestyle and i know there are some individuals

that work at night nurses um they can't just they can't just change that but the people that can would it be more ideal to like tailor their nutrition to that or to try to flip things in terms of maybe not being a night owl getting out of art like what do you think would be better and healthier in the long run from what you know so far right so so we have some clues to answer that i mean the first thing is that fighting against someone's internal biology is not a good idea we We know that. The system, you know, or their kind of circadian system or system of circadian rhythms, it is flexible, right? It can adapt. And everyone listening probably knows that it can adapt because if you've ever flown from

New York to LA or, you know, LA to London or Sydney, you know, you've experienced jet lag and you get over it. It's shit for a few days, but, you know, you eventually jet lag and you get over it it's shit for a few days but you know you eventually adapt so you adapt to this new light and dark cycle you adapt to these new time cues you're giving yourself but there are limits to your natural rhythms in terms of how far that can be adaptable and so you we have a phenomenon that's emerged in the research known as social jet lag. So for someone who's a late chronotype, for example, or a late a night owl, if they, for example, have kids, they need to get to school in the morning or they've got a commute that takes like an hour to get to work. jet lag describes the difference in the timing and the amount of sleep that someone who's, for example, a night owl gets when they have complete control over their schedule. So like free days or weekends versus working days. And what you tend to see is that on days they're allowed to sleep just kind of to their own preference. They'll go to bed later, they'll

sleep later. But during the working week, because they're not tired in the evening, they don't go to bed earlier, they don't compensate by going to bed. So they still stay awake and go to bed at the same time. But then the alarm's going off at 5, 6am. And there's this big disconnect. And there's some interesting research that links the greater amount of social jet lag that an individual has to greater risk of metabolic disease, basically. So fighting against biology probably isn't a great idea on this. I think that someone, and there was an interesting study published last year, which looked at what they called a chronotype-adjusted diet. So they categorized people

based on their preference, their time of day preference, and then they tailored their energy intake and timing accordingly. And both groups lost an equal amount of weight. It was a weight loss intervention, even though the late group were eating slightly more energy later in the day overall. So I think the best preference, as far as we know now, would be to try and actually tailor things to your kind of preferences. But we know that there's a limit to that flexibility because irrespective of whether someone's a night owl or morning type, night shift work, for example, we know that eating at 3m just doesn't work for for anybody irrespective of whether they you know are slightly kind of more night out than morning type

so you know shift work's a pretty a pretty difficult one um and it really just depends some people find eating on night shifts is really a comfort thing it helps them get through the shift um so yeah there's there's a whole bag of stuff to get into with shift work but yeah i think in general from what your question is someone is better off not trying to completely change their preference their time of day preference um because in doing so they might actually just, you know, cause themselves to be more tired, less functional, you know, during the day. And they might be eating at times they're not hungry and all of this kind of stuff. So when it comes to nutrition, like we know at the very basic level, like you just can't,

you can't have an onslaught of eating. Even if you're trying to eat quote unquote healthy, you can't just completely obliterate food all day long. It sounds to me like in some of the podcasts I listened to that had you on the show, um, you were, I think you were just being very basic about it. And I really, I really liked that because I think people just, they need something simple, you know, and I think sometimes fasting and sometimes people get confused on how to do it and stuff. But simply having some sort of time restricted eating, time restricted feeding during the day, people are probably just not used to that. They probably wake up and they probably like go to food right away or they or they maybe take a shower.

And then right when they come home from work at night, they probably eat something and they probably have like either dessert or some sort of snack. And by the time the whole day is gone, they may have been, they may have been awake for 16 hours or so. Uh, but they may have eaten the entire time. And I sound like some of your suggestion is just like,

Hey, can we, can we, uh, reasonably get that down to like 12 or 10? And I think that that's a wonderful compromise for people. I think so. If you look at the US or even the UK, which are quite similar in terms of dietary trends, what you tend to see is that most people spend about 16 hours a day in a fed state.

That's a long portion of the day. And that's essentially, like you said, it's scratching their heads, wondering why they're fat. Every waking minute, you know, people are in a fed state and, you know, even, even, you know, from the perspective of, you know, someone who is otherwise like not overweight, you know, at a given point in time, the question is like the metabolic effects of that over, you know, over 10, 20 years and how that might add up. And I think that when it comes to something like time restricted feeding, I, you know, much of what we have focused on in nutrition has been, you know, the diet, right? What diet's best and this, that, and the other. And, you know, for the vast majority of

people unless they have a medical condition or or a real strong personal preference or an ethical or or kind of you know moral or environmental consideration like most of that is is irrelevant right so you can you can pick any diet lose weight you know once once energy is accounted for in this kind of thing but people struggle with prescriptive diets they struggle with adherence for multiple reasons they struggle with the idea that you know there's for most people in the population general people in the population there's this idea of what foods are good or bad for weight loss right and most people i think fitness minded would be like, well,

there's no real such thing. But for most people in the population, they need strategies that are accessible, that are a simple heuristic for which they can consider what their eating behavior is through. And time restricted eating provides a really really simple accessible heuristic for people to think about well i'll eat between this time and this time and there are different ways to achieve that right you can compress the eating windows symmetrically you could delay breakfast by 90 minutes you could bring your dinner forward by 90 minutes or you could eat early in the day and you know bring bring dinner forward so that your ear it's more early time-restricted eating, or you could delay breakfast and have a window later in the day. And we don't really have any

good evidence that suggests that one is necessarily superior to the other at this point. So you've got options. And I do think that the real world applicability of this is one of the things that makes it attractive as an intervention, because it's really taking people's mind off what to eat, so to speak. And they're focusing more on a behavior that they can engage with on a day to day basis. One thing I'd like to add to that is like, you know, people are having a hard time making the correct decisions, you know, kind of over and over again when they eat four or five times a day. Maybe they're choosing bad snacks and maybe they're, but this is so black and white.

This is just, you're just not eating. There's a time period where you just, there's no food involved. So it gets to be harder to make a mistake. And even if you're time restricted feeding, let's just say it was like a five hour window. If the first meal that you had was relatively healthy and pretty high in protein, I would say you could probably have a reasonable meal. The next meal could be something that you really enjoy as long as you're not, you know, going way overboard. But I would think that would be reasonable. That would cut down

your calories. And I think that that would be an effective strategy for a lot of people that are overweight now. And they would be able to lose a lot of weight by following some of this protocol, because by having that restricted feeding, we're probably getting rid of snacks, and we're just going to switch over to meals. We're probably getting rid of sodas and things like that that people are drinking, and you're probably getting rid of a tremendous amount of calories. The frappuccino they have in the morning that has 300 calories in it. And I think this is fantastic because it can lead people to something simple that they can follow along with. Right.

And I think when you look at the characteristics of diets in a lot of kind of Western industrialized countries, what you see in terms of patterns of energy intake is one, like you just said, massive contribution of daily energy from snacks for most people in the population. And these are snacks occurring between what we would consider main meals. And then you've also got a lot of discretionary energy intake comes in the evening after people have had dinner. So that's a big one, right? So people are just sitting around, they've actually had a dinner meal at seven, for example, or eight, which isn't exactly late, but it's all of this discretionary

energy intake that's coming in after their dinner before they go to bed. And, you know, we do have some early research that's suggesting that actually that proximity of food intake to bedtime basically is a factor that might actually, you know, over time add up to increase body fat. So I think that when we look at those patterns of energy intake and the emphasis on snacking and discretionary calories throughout the day, but particularly in the evening, then, yes, something like time-restricted eating, again, provides a pretty accessible idea for people to grasp. And one that just by shrinking the window, even to like, you know, 10, 11 hours, which is not unreasonable, you're cutting out a lot of that by default, particularly if you've got an evening cutoff of saying,

cutting out a lot of that by default particularly if you've got an evening cut off of saying well like you know my 7 p.m is my is my evening cut off then you've just got a simple rule where you know when the potato chips and whatever are coming out at nine because you're going for another netflix round like you've got something that says this may be something that i'm not going to do can we talk about the actual effects that maybe eating much closer to bedtime might cause? Does it cause effects on sleep? And you mentioned over time it could lead to weight gain. So why is that? And also to add on to that, let's say that two people have the same metabolic rate, they're eating the same amount of food, but one person eats a bulk of that food before they go to sleep or close to when they go to sleep, right? Let's say like an hour.

What would that be in effect in the long run? Okay. So you've heard of melatonin, the hormone. So what's starting to emerge, and this is early doors with this the first study on this was published in 2017 so there's still a little bit to go but we know that there's a relationship between melatonin even if someone's exposed to kind of bright light in the evening which will suppress it but it will still rise and melatonin is one of the core hormones that anchors our circadian rhythm it's what needs to readjust to a new time zone when we have jet lag so generally it's low during the day and it starts to rise then in the in the evening and it really is kind of preparing us for sleep although it's doing other stuff and because

the rise in melatonin signals to the body that we're entering the nocturnal fasting phase in humans. And that elevation means there are other impacts on metabolism. And in particular, really, there seems to be a relationship between melatonin and insulin. So when melatonin's elevated insulin action is impaired, and glucose tolerance is impaired and a number of studies have actually found and going back to this idea that you've individual difference in your biological timing one way you can see that difference is by measuring melatonin in people so a morning type would have an earlier rise of melatonin in the evening, whereas like a late type would have a later, a delayed elevation in melatonin. And what's interesting is over the years, the research on calorie intake in the

evening was sometimes inconsistent. You had some studies that suggested this big increase, you know, increase in your risk for overweight or obesity, and then some that didn't. And what might explain that discrepancy is none of them measured melatonin. And a number of studies recently have looked at measured melatonin relative to people's midpoint of calorie intake, like when in the day do they hit 50% of their energy, meaning the rest of their 50% is coming after that. And what they found was that calorie intake in close proximity to someone's elevation in melatonin, the timing of that was associated with higher, I think the group eating there with a later midpoint and consuming more calories in close proximity to

the rise in melatonin had an average body fat of 32 whereas the ones with it earlier had an average body fat of 22 wow so that's that's not a minor difference and what it could be to to just bring in the part of the question where you're saying what would be the effect to people similar body size similar metabolic rate all of this stuff you what would be the effect of consuming the same meal in terms of calories and composition one say has it a you know seven and another has 10 o'clock for example there was a very tightly controlled metabolic ward study last year that that looked pretty much at that and again they didn't measure melatonin but you saw this really exaggerated glucose response and insulin response to the 10 p.m. meal. But glucose remained elevated throughout the night while they were

asleep to a much greater degree than the 7 p.m. dinner. So you're basically asking your body, your metabolism to process nutrient intake, energy intake at a time when it's not expecting energy intake at all. Right. So over again, this is something that if we looked at that and thought about, you know, the effects of continually elevated glucose, and if someone was doing this habitually over and over, this nightly impaired glycemic and insulin response, then it does give us a mechanism. Interestingly, the late night eating or evening distribution of energy is more strongly associated with diabetes than it is with any other chronic disease. And this is giving us a plausible biological mechanism through which that might be actually occurring. What do you do for fun, Alan? Do you just put these studies

on flashcards or what? I would power lift if I wasn't in a lockdown. I absolutely love that you got this brain because my brain doesn't work that way. I'll hear stuff. I'll hear a lot of the stuff that you say today. And unfortunately, I'll be lucky if I can walk away with one or two percent of it. So I like what you're saying a lot. And I think, you know, years ago when I started to get into fitness and started to learn about nutrition, I remember there was somebody that said, like, don't eat carbs past. And they just gave you like a time. And I want to say they said like 7 p.m. or something

like that. Do you think like a strategy like that? So my thoughts on a strategy like that is it might just get rid of snacks for you and it might just get rid of you overeating at night. It might be like a strategy, not that you can never eat them, but just to kind of have a rule of thumb, like, Hey, he should probably at least cut back the carbohydrates. And if you already eat carbohydrates later on in the evening, uh, maybe it's because it's after a workout or maybe it's, uh, in the form of like vegetables or something like that. You think kind of following a rule like that, um, you know, might assist some people. I think it depends on on the person to

be honest like it's it's difficult to see what what you know rules necessarily would benefit any given individual what i like about say time restricted eating is the fact that it's not necessarily it is a rule sure but the kind of additional dietary considerations like carbs, no carbs, fat, all this kind of stuff, they kind of become secondary considerations to the eating window, which is why it's more accessible for people in the real world. I think when you look at the research on glucose tolerance, there's a very clear difference between morning and evening. that there's a very clear difference between morning and evening um you know people simply process carbohydrate better in the early part of the day than in the evening um that's much more uh pronounced in people with impaired glucose tolerance or diabetes but generally speaking we would observe that difference in healthy people as well it's just the actual magnitude of the

difference isn't huge so you know does someone need to avoid carbs in the evening not necessarily carbohydrate type matters there's a big difference between sitting down to lentils or sitting down to jellies right so you know i think i think the qualitative uh aspect of carbohydrate is is going to be an important consideration um and and and we could say the same for dietary fat and we know that the circadian rhythm in your circulating triglycerides actually peaks in the evening so you know the idea of having fat loads in you know in the in the evening or close to bedtime is not a great idea either, because it will impair your postprandial fat metabolism.

You get this really, and that's one of the reasons from a dietary perspective, although there are a number of risk factors for shift work, one of the reasons why cardiovascular disease risk might be particularly high in night shift workers, amongst others, is because of this you're eating during the biological night and like impaired postprandial or post-meal fat metabolism so you know i think it's important to try and put times on this as well for people because people just start hearing evening and they're just like shit like i'm not gonna i'm never gonna eat past 5 p.m again and that's not really what we're saying. I mean,

the evening is a broad period. And yes, there's going to be inter-individual difference. But as far as most of the research goes now, whether it's observational or even controlled interventions, that overall, there is, you know, the kind of direction that it's pointing in is suggesting that having the bulk of your energy earlier in the day having your peak energy intake earlier in the day say for example before 3 p.m give or take would be and that doesn't need to be breakfast that could be you look at some of the continental or mediterranean dietary patterns they have a kind of lighter breakfast but then this peak energy intake with lunch, the main meal in the middle of the day, smaller dinner. What you see in the UK and the US and some other industrialized countries like Australia is really a pattern of energy intake that you don't see anywhere else, which is energy at subsequent meals gets higher as the day goes on.

Breakfast, lunch is bigger and it peaks in the evening. And you just don't really see that in a lot of dietary patterns. Certainly in dietary patterns we would associate with health outcomes like the Mediterranean or say kind of traditional Japanese diet. Now, with what you said there, I have a question that might, I think it relates for some individuals, as far as their lifestyle is concerned. Some people don't like eating big meals, maybe in the morning or the afternoon, because they feel a little bit of a lull afterwards. So my curiosity for you here is like, is there a strategy to those meals or a strategy to like some people have the luxury of being able to take a nap in the afternoon after that meal, like a 30 minute nap. People that work a nine to five can't necessarily take a nap. Right. So what is how can people strategize those meals so that they don't feel sluggish or potentially tired afterwards?

that they don't feel sluggish or potentially tired afterwards yeah and again you look at some cultures that do have that peak afternoon intake and they've got like a siesta afterwards this kind of thing so but yeah most people in a kind of typical nine to five that's that's not an option um so i think there's there's there's two components to this one there's actually a circadian component we tend to have so we we talk about circadian rhythms which are biological rhythms that are aligned to the 24 hour day and then we have these cool things called ultradian rhythms which are little rhythms that go along during the day right and they often tend to go roughly with a kind of period of about 90 minutes. So generally, give or take about six to eight hours after someone has woken up, people will have a slump, they'll just have a dip. And that's considered one of these kind of like just natural dips in the day. But then there's also the effect

of, you know, a large volume of foods, everyone knows after Christmas dinner, right? It's like nap on the couch or Thanksgiving dinner. So we do have an effect where, you know, there's blood flow to the stomach. There's all of these kinds of aspects of eating a big meal that make a bit of lethargy, you know, a common kind of phenomenon in that post meal period. I think people can maybe think about dietary composition in this context so like higher protein meals um can be something that you know people often find they're kind of fuller on a lower kind of overall energy intake and they don't tend to get that slump protein is

obviously quite thermogenic so you get that kind of postprandial thermogenic response and so that could be one factor to consider um the other as well is to just i get this question a lot because um from morning types people are like well if i wake in the morning you know does that mean i have to eat instantly and you know my general answer to that is no like so i would fall into kind of morning type and i tend to wake at say at, say, six-ish and I get up. But I'm never hungry before nine to ten o'clock. So I'm still extending a morning fast. It's just relative to me getting up at 6 a.m. I'm still not eating for three hours.

That's my own personal anecdote. But it's an example of how, you know, the idea behind this is not necessarily that you have to like eat immediately upon waking you know you can still kick that back and you can think about how you time that energy intake over over the course of of your day and maybe manipulate diet composition as well and kind of you know focus more on kind of complex carbohydrate or, you know, vegetables, high fiber kind of carbohydrate protein, you know, good fats, this kind of thing. So I think there is room for people that are going beyond this, because I'm assuming, you know, your listeners aren't like gen pop, you know, so, you know, we can kind of take this concept a little further and actually talk about manipulating diet composition in a way that could avoid that, like, you know, 2 p.m. slump after a big meal.

You're, unfortunately, you're unbelievably reasonable. So I don't think anybody's ever going to listen to you because in the nutrition space, you got to be a little bit of a quack, you know? Yeah. Yeah. That's it. I need to tell everyone to eat within an hour or something you gotta tell them to eat like this exact time every day and that's the only way to do it otherwise they're gonna blow up or something explode um well what's it what's interesting about that um sorry to cut across but i just i've always found that when it comes to some of the like intermittent fasting kind of protocols or like i remember coming across a thing called the warrior diet and like there's a lot of this like evolutionary speculation that you know man would have got up and gone hunting for the day and has his main meal in the evening

and i'm like there is metabolically no sense to that based on what we know about human metabolism like there's literally who who makes these things up but because it's speculating about our evolutionary past you can fill in the blanks with whatever shit you want. And it seems like what you're sharing is just like, hey, you know what? Just try to, you know, work on having some sort of time restricted feeding. Whatever time you can make it work would be great. But if it can fall into a pattern that, you know, meets our circadian rhythm, that might be a little bit superior. You might have a small edge.

I think that's great because people kind of need to do what they need to do. Otherwise, they can't comply. Otherwise, they can't, you know, they can't move forward and lose weight in the first place. Sure. And I think for me as well, it's impossible to be in this kind of area of research and and not see the importance of these related factors right so yeah i i study kind of chrononutrition but like you you you can't divorce that from sleep and the importance of sleep for example um you know when i look at social jet lag you know touching on what we talked about earlier, I think, you know, how debilitating that must be if you're someone who does work a nine to five, for example.

And, you know, you're a kind of midnight, 1 a.m. bed person. And if you were on your own with no alarm, you'd sleep maybe from 1 to like 9.30. Right. And that's your that's your rhythm. And you feel good. You come into your own in your brain kind of mid-afternoon late afternoon early evening um and you're faced with a situation where you have to have an alarm scream you out of bed at 6 a.m because you need to get up and shower and get kids ready and then get a commute how knackered you'd be by friday evening like and how that would affect your ability to train your motivation to train how we know that it affects people's decision making with food it

it affects even in the brain we know that that kind of sleep curtailment affects people's sensitivity to food signals right you're walking by a coffee shop you smell donuts it's just like you've no defense at that point your brain is just because the hypothesis is that your brain is is conscious of the of the level of fatigue that you have and is looking for quick quick hit energy basically can that have an impact on your uh on your hormones when you just smell food it was my understanding that you might release some insulin even just from smelling food i'm not sure i think there was the hypothesis i don't i there there is some like ain't that a bit you didn't even eat it yeah i don't think i don't think in response to the stimuli but i do think if i remember that you know it's certainly with the circadian stuff is like part of the reason you

have certain responses is because if you're consistent with your diet right you get this essentially anticipation that's what circadian rhythms allow you to do is to anticipate changes in the environment so yeah uh i think we can you know i think we could say that the the issue with the donut is is not necessarily that smelling it might release insulin. It's that eating three of them might actually just contribute to 1,200 calories or whatever. As far as the chronotype is, it's like if you're a morning person or if you're a night owl, right? That's what you mean by chronotype, right? So my question is, how easy is it or how potentially difficult is it for someone to change mean chronotype right so my question is how easy is it or how potentially difficult is it for someone to change their chronotype i mean can you change it can you like

i mean you can try to how do you even know it or how do you like yeah how do you even know it like could you just try to go to sleep earlier often and then you can shift it or are you the way you are you you most of the research suggests you are the way you are in that sense like even if we factor in the adaptability in the system which is there because yeah you you fly to you know if we take a late chronotype and they go from london where i am to la you know once they've adapted they're still a late chronotype right so they've got over the jet lag but their actual timing of their their biological rhythms is the same because there's genetic underpinnings to this stuff as well um that we're starting to to learn more about um

even breakfast intake the desire to eat more early in the day might have a genetic underpinning. So there was a genetic study from a chrono group in Spain two years ago that took twins and basically looked at whether breakfast, desire to eat breakfast, for example, or different meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner had any sort of genetic underpinning. And what they found was that breakfast itself had a really big heritability component genetically, whereas dinner didn't really. And this was an interesting study, because what it suggested was that people with a strong preference for breakfast, you know, probably have that as some sort of kind of underpinning, it's more genetic. probably have that as some sort of kind of underpinning it's more genetic but dinner is probably more modifiable it's it's it doesn't have a strong genetic underpinning it's probably more

modifiable behavior so i thought that was interesting but yeah there are limits to the extent to which you can you can change it and I said, if you were to try and force yourself from being a night owl into a morning type, you'd probably just be basically subjecting yourself to social jet lag in the process and you wouldn't be getting any beneficial adaptive response out of it. And I think I want to know about this.

Because some listeners right mark asked a question like how do you even know if you are because i feel like there are lifestyle effects like if you're a person um who let's say that you actually are a morning person but most of your social life happens at night so you know on a weekly basis all your friends like to go out and like have some drinks and have dinner and this all happens on weekdays like 10 11 p.m. that's your social time so you never skip it but you your criminal type technically would actually be a morning person right how does an individual know the differences of like this is I'm doing like I'm having these issues because of my doing like i'm having these issues because of my

lifestyle versus i'm having these issues because of my chronotype right it's a mix it's the interaction between chronotype and and environment and and we have more input now from there's kind of three ways of thinking about clocks in a way, time, biological time, there's biological time, which is what we're talking about. And then there's like solar time, time of day, which is the light dark cycle. And that's relative to where you are in the world. And then there's social time. And generally our social time in modern society is largely organized around the industrial revolution, right? Factory hours, nine to five, church, school start times, this kind of thing.

So our kind of, you know, a lot of our social clocks in that sense are geared more towards either people who are neutral or early types. But social life is something that because of the workday timing very much for most people occurs in the evening, right? So, you know, unless you're going to like a football game on a Saturday morning or something like that, or a Sunday morning, you know, so most of our socializing is nocturnal or evening based. And although much of the research is focused on the negative impacts of being a late chronotype in terms of social jet lag or even eating patterns, we tend to forget

that morning types, particularly very early morning types, can have the same negative effect if they're trying to keep a social life that has them out till midnight. The effect for that person, social life that has them out till midnight you know the effect for that person they're usually in bed by nine you know and waking up at five or six and the effect of like a night out or extended or having to work late is going to have the same effect where it's going to basically be eating into when they would otherwise like to be asleep so how do you find out there's questionnaires you could you can get for example the munich chronotype questionnaire people could google that they could they could do that self administer um and yeah there's a number of chronotype questionnaires that that you can get and you can help determine and really when people are doing it what they'll realize is a lot of this is very intuitive right

so the questions are like if you had the complete freedom what time would you go to bed at if you had complete freedom what time would you wake up at if you had complete freedom when would you like start work day for example when do you feel most alert during the day you know all this kind of stuff and really it's getting people to just actually think about their own kind of preferences. But there are people that may be based on how they kind of live lifestyle wise, that could be just so unattuned to their, you know, because they're just constantly overriding it. And they're just like living on caffeine and, you know, never get enough sleep and all this kind of stuff. There are people like that, obviously. But, you know, again, I'm sure most of your listeners are pretty much, you know, taking sleep seriously is something that aids recovery and performance. And yeah, we're all going to have nights out. We're all going to have, you know, the wedding where we get to bed at 5 or 6 a.m. know the wedding where we get to bed at five or six a.m but it's really again like most things it's kind of what you do over time that that adds up but not not those kind of random variables

yeah is there a um like any statistics or like a ratio on percentages of people that are you know uh like the night owls versus the early risers because i just i have this feeling that there's going to be a lot of people that are like, oh, I'm definitely on the later chrono type because X, Y, and Z. But in reality, maybe they just have poor sleep habits and they're not taking sleep seriously. So as a percentage, if we factor in all of the evening hours, kind of, you know, all of the evening kind of hours there. I think if I remember correctly,

it's like 41 to 46% of people would fall into evening types. Now the percentage of them that are extreme evening types, you know, the kind of people that maybe go to bed at two and sleep later is, is very small, like less than 5%. Give or take about 20% are morning types and kind of the rest kind of fall in the middle. And there's nuance within that, right? Like I said, because evening's a broad category. So you've got people that are kind of earlier evening, later evening, and morning is the same, you know, you'll have people that are awake at, you know, 4am and getting up and you'll have people that kind of wake up maybe seven. So as a percentage, it's definitely uh you know nearly kind of half or or certainly

just about a third of the population falls into that bracket but you're absolutely correct because i do find that people are often saying oh well i think i'm just a late type because i'm awake and you know i feel active in the evening or or they're like i'm tired in the evening and i can't sleep which is a big giveaway and this is the effect of environmental stimuli that we have is people are are a little divorced from that so i'm like well if you're sitting in front of a 60 inch plasma and it's blurting out like and your e and your you know your phone is six inches from your face. And you've all of these, your body doesn't know it's a phone. Your retina detects light and spectrums of light, and it relays that information to your brain, right? It's not going, oh, this light doesn't

count because it's from my smartphone. So I think that people's exposures in the evening have a big part to play in kind of influencing how they feel um and generally speaking i think even for for late chronotypes it's a good idea to try and be mindful of things like light exposure and stuff in the evening um and and people might get a bit more kind of in tune so to speak with with how they actually feel in the evening as opposed to actually having a stimulus come in um you know that has a has a stimulating effect on your wakefulness um and your kind of your your brain is there research on uh like really condensed time restricted feeding i know like some people do like one meal a day but is there like some research behind maybe just like a two or three hour eating window or

something like that? There is some, there was a study published, uh, towards the end of last year, which compared a four hour and a six hour window. And the four hour window was from, I think, And the four hour window was from, I think, 2 to 6 p.m. or something like that. And the six hour window is maybe from 3 to 7 or 8. And both groups reduced energy pretty similarly. There was no real difference. Both groups lost the same amount of weight. Both groups had pretty similar improvements in glucose tolerance so it really doesn't and some of the other studies for example have can have looked at six hour time restricted feeding or eight it doesn't seem like

that two hour difference is is that material which is why i think for most people, you know, even 10 or 11 hours is probably beneficial. And the greater restriction probably isn't necessary. But again, it depends. I mean, is it preference? Is it, you know, just a really simple tool for someone to be able to drastically kind of drop energy intake. If we're talking about diabetes management or pre-diabetes, then it's different considerations. They probably want to front load their energy intake and have most of that kind of early in the day because the improvement in their overall 24-hour blood glucose levels is much greater if they have that kind of distribution of energy. But as far as the super tight windows go,

you know, most of the research hasn't gone lower than four hours. I think anything, anything on OMAD diet, any information on like research that you've seen on just a one meal a day. I haven't seen anything on just specifically one meal a day. Um, unless you're thinking about the five two type

fasting uh which was basically born out of the what you what's known as the alternate day fasting and that was basically people eat normally with no restrictions on on one day and then the next day they completely forego all calorie containing food or drinks and so every second day you're fasting and and with the adf um you know there were improvements in some metabolic markers but they weren't what you would expect for such a dramatic intervention right and also they didn't lose as much weight as you might expect because there was compensatory intake on the on the non-fasting days and also the self-reported hunger and cravings and everything was through so it was considered probably not a great intervention um and it was modified so that

you only fast two days a week but you have maybe 500 calories on that day. It's kind of like a modified alternate day fast. And there's, again, a couple of studies using that type of protocol. The intermittent fasting, as opposed to time-restricted feeding, where people always go, what's the difference? to time-restricted feeding where with with people always go what's the difference well with trf or tre you're keeping the same window every day and relatively the same meal timing within that window every day so it's daily whereas with intermittent fasting you know it could just be two out of seven days a week or one day or or this kind of thing and and even that day that people fast on could be different from day to day or from week to week but the the the code those kind of modified fasting protocols i'm just

for what it involves i'm not particularly impressed by the benefit that people get from it in terms of metabolic improvements or even weight loss. What about the fasting mimicking diet from, I think it's Walter Longo? Yeah, that's really, I mean, that's a fascinating area generally. And what I like about Longo's research is that he's really built it up from every level. You know, he started with animal models, got a kind of basic you know mechanism that he thought could be useful in humans and brought it into human trials and um what i what's really difficult to extrapolate is the fact that the fmd has been designed specifically as an adjuvant intervention for people undergoing chemotherapy so you know how

do we say what benefit that has in otherwise healthy people like it's impossible um the research on the fmd in humans so far is is quite interesting the suggestion that for example the five days of the kind of fasting mimicking diet kind of primes the body that when there's a refeed subsequent to that they seem to get this boost in you know white blood cell production and some of this stuff that then assists with obviously the the overall process of chemotherapy and otherwise so i think it's one of those areas where it's pretty fascinating anyway, just to talk about. I think it's got encouraging enough preliminary results in the limited human studies that they've done to warrant further investigation. Would it benefit someone

who's otherwise healthy? I don't know, perhaps. I mean, what tends to be over extrapolated in the fasting, time-restricted feeding, kind of circadian rhythm space is the whole longevity thing, right? And it's just like, oh, look, you know, lifespan increased with 30% energy restriction. I was like, yeah, it's a mess. Like you probably you probably are going to gain what, 30 minutes on your lifespan if we, if we extrapolated, you know, the, the, the gain that the mouse got. So would stuff like this help people, you know, live longer? I don't, I don't know that we'll ever actually be able to, to say one way or the other. And, uh, you know, for me, if I was really thinking about my longevity i think i'd be focusing more on things like you know my sleep hygiene my kind of day-to-day trying to be as in

kind of yeah sync with the things we know that promote health rather than the things that might and are completely speculative you know since we've been talking about like doing things close to the sleep how eating food close to bed is has an effect um how what what what about exercise like what about the people who like they can't exercise in the morning they have to work so maybe they end up exercising two three hours or maybe even an hour before they try to go to sleep. Do you, do you have like, does the research show any positive negative effects of that? So I think, you know, a lot of what we're talking about, we're, we're talking about in the context of kind of wider general application. And I think when it comes to getting a bit more granular for,

for athletes, recreational or otherwise, then I think the considerations change. I mean, we know that exercise dramatically alters your metabolic landscape, your insulin independent glucose uptake, all of these factors. And so for someone who can't train in the morning and gets to the gym at seven or eight, you know, and lifts for 90 minutes or two, you know, I think we can say that the effect of that intervention at that point is to change their metabolic physiology. We know that that will be the case. case. So, but when I've had this conversation before trying to factor in the athletic context, I still think it's a good idea overall for that person to still have had the majority, the bulk of their energy leading up to training. And, you know, we know that, you know, they don't need a huge calorie intake to maximize muscle protein synthesis or glycogen

resynthesis. So they could still have the bulk of their energy intake up to that point and then have like a, you know, a shake or like a kind of, you know, protein rich enough to kind of stimulate the muscle protein synthesis response without having a huge energy load, know right right right before bed but um yeah generally the you know their metabolic response to food intake after training is going to be completely different to someone who's entirely sedentary eating at 10 p.m because of the effect of of you know a training bout on on their physiology and then also i'm curious since

we've been talking about life so much or not like light um how you personally like guard yourself in terms of light in the evenings tv etc do you use those blue blockers like what do you put within your life to help with that yeah Yeah. So I have blue blockers. I've two, two pairs. I've a pair that are clear in terms of, they just look like reading glasses and I'd wear them if I was out and about,

cause you don't look like Bono. And, you know, and they just look like, and they don't block it the full blue light spectrum but they block the vast majority of it so i always think you're you know i'm getting getting something and generally that's just because i'm out and about right i'm not i'm not out to watch tv and yeah for for for being about the the house in the home or i do have the orange tinted ones as well and and we know

from research that they are effective they do block blue light and they do allow your melatonin to rise they did a cool study in kids well teenagers late teenagers playing video games so they they were able to control how close they sat to the screen and they looked at a group wearing blue light blockers and a group just not. And they looked at the timing of their melatonin and what you got in the people wearing the blockers was they got an earlier rise in melatonin and a, and a kind of higher peak. So they were getting the kind of rhythm and melatonin that you,

that you would want to see. So I wear them in the evening and then I, I just generally have my kind of home light environment pretty dimly lit in the evening um i don't have bright lights overhead i have a software which is free to download on the laptop called flux um and that will dim your screen in the evening as well and then in the morning i always try to get kind of 15 minutes of outdoor bright light. And even in a climate like I'm looking out the window, it is gray and wet. But natural light is quite potent, even when you might not have the ability to see the sun or it's a completely overcast day.

the ability to see the sun or it's a completely overcast day but for days that it's bucketing rain or in the winter when it's very dark to kind of 8 8 30 i have a an artificial blue light um which i'll just have on while i'm working at the desk and it it basically shines um you know the a very kind of bright blue light the same kind of intensity that you would get from a blue sky, essentially. And I find that really helps in the winter. Just even like how kind of alert and awake you feel. I've always found a real benefit to the to the blue light. And then, you know, in the summertime summertime here a lot of these things kind of go out the window because it's it's bright till 10 p.m so i don't necessarily throw on the blue

blockers because it's bright outside anyway and it's bright at 5 a.m so i'm always going to get natural light in the morning so a lot of what i'm describing is very much has a seasonal kind of component to it as well, based on the time zone that I'm in. You know, for people that are in places like Australia, where they have this really nice, you know, seven to seven, same, same like dark cycle all year round. It's just like they've got it easy. But if we're in these kind of other climates in the world, you we need to think about this stuff a bit but yeah so i i try and as a simple kind of summary i try and maximize my exposure to to bright light natural if possible early in the day and in the evening i try and do the opposite i try and minimize my exposure to intense light and try not to do stuff that's like meant to mentally stimulating kind of in the hour before bed. Um, so that there's a bit of a wind down because I'm kind of one of these people, everyone's

a bit different, but like, if I go to bed mentally wound up, like I won't sleep, I'll just lie there and like just running, running through stuff. In studying, uh, you know, nutrition from a chronological standpoint, what have you seen in regards to age? Because, you know, people have their kids and they like a lot of households, they're like, oh, we have that junk in the pantry and it's for the kids, the Cheez-Its and the cookies and the cereal and those things like that. And, you know, I've always kind of said, well, you know, they, they should probably be eating a little bit more similar to us if we can, if we can figure that out. I understand the kids, uh, you know, they want snacks and they want

treats and stuff. Their friends have them and stuff like that. What are some of your, like, what have you seen research wise? Do kids actually get away with being able to eat, uh, some of this crap or is it more because they move a lot until they're like 10, 12 years old or what have you seen? There's definitely the energy intake in kids. I mean, you know, kids are generally quite good at matching energy intake to kind of energy expenditure for the most part you know that's that's a technically they are obviously the more that kids are exposed to hyper palatable foods the less that ability to kind of naturally regulate energy intake gets what we tend to see as well is this phenomenon where in teenage years, from maybe about 11 or 12 to kind of 18, 19, there's a shift in all teenagers' chronotypes.

This is really interesting. So for whatever reason, there's all sorts of little evolutionary theories. But kids, this whole idea of, oh, lazy teenagers sleeping till 10 a.m. No, no they they need to sleep till 10 so there's a big conversation in this in this in the wider chronobiology uh research about changing the school start time for example because there's just like kids are you pull kids out of bed at 5 a.m when their body wants to be asleep and they're they're you know they perform worse on tests and all this kind of stuff they They're tired. So they've got the element of fatigue and lack of kind of regulation that comes with from a dietary component.

So there's all these potential knock on effects of this. But in terms of a lot of what we see in adults, like there's still little chronotype differences in kids. And generally we still see the same pattern where kids who don't eat till much later in the day tend to have worse overall diet quality for multiple reasons. They're probably just very hungry by the time they start eating. They tend to distribute more energy to later in the day, the evening, the nighttime, and they tend to have much more of an emphasis on kind of like snacks and hyper palatable foods so it does seem that that pattern of energy intake in in adolescence in particular is is broadly associated with a lot of the same outcomes that we'd see in adults um whereas you know more regular kind of earlier meal consumption tends to have a positive effect on kind of regulating meal

timing and intake, less discretionary snacking. So yeah, a lot of it is slightly similar with the caveat that adolescents in particular are naturally going to kind of be a little later with their timing on some of this stuff. In regards to, you know, the teenager that does need to sleep in a little bit more, can we help, I guess, aid that by having just an earlier bedtime or is it just naturally going to happen to where they're just going to sleep in late? I mean, this is the difficulty with some of this stuff because, you know, how do you get someone to go to bed earlier when they're just not tired right yeah get in there and go to sleep it's like i'm not tired so that's one

of the challenges with with particularly this the adolescence phase and school start times and stuff is you know their their their natural rhythm at that point in their life is such that they're not really ready to go to bed early and so they're they're probably not going to sleep even if you put them to bed um but there is there was a study a couple years ago which did look at like just bringing bedtime forward by an hour um which is not too extreme and and that did have a kind of benefit in terms of even like sleep quality um i think for for teenagers in particular the research on like their light exposure is is some that that would be like if i had a teenage kid that would be what i'd be trying to have a conversation about is like

sleeping with your iphone under the pillow you know having your notifications going off being being you know aroused because you're involved in all these conversations back and forth and your mental stimulation is peaked all that kind of stuff and then of course taking out the phone to have it six inches in front of your face and that that'd be all the stuff that i'd be trying to kind of like you know model help modify some behaviors around um but as far as like you know really changing the kind of internal and biological preference within that age group i mean maybe bringing you know bedtime forward by an hour could help but anything you know too extreme and they're just simply not going to be in a state where they're even

tired or kind of ready to go to sleep. Yeah. Removing some of the modern technologies that will cause, you know, the suppression of melatonin and everything you just spoke of. Is there an evolutionary reason why humans, when we're in our late teens, that this does happen? when we're in our late teens that this does happen so the theory one of the kind of ones that i've seen relates to and i think this is interesting and that it ties into um why as we age we need less sleep so one of the theories that i've seen a chronobiologist offer is that if we were, you know, small tribes, 100, 150 people, this kind of thing, that kids or adolescents would essentially have been the ones that kind of were the lookout, so to speak, at night. so to speak, at night. So this, and that perhaps this shift also served a benefit as like, that's the age where you start to socialize,

you start to become sexually active, you start all this kind of stuff that would be beneficial for humans to start doing, but they wouldn't maybe want to do, you know, with mom and dad awake, this kind of thing. So there's this kind of theory that from a sociality perspective, right. So from a sociality perspective, they'd be, you know,

it'd be better to be sneaking off into the woods to do whatever, you know, when, when, when everyone was asleep, plus also perhaps the idea that, well, someone's going to have to stay up and make sure that no predators arrive. You know, the the next tribe or the wolves don't don't come to the door. And that's just a theory. I like I like playing around sometimes with these different ideas, but there's no there's no way we'll ever know for sure. What's up, everybody?

This episode of Mark Bell's Power Project podcast is brought to you by Piedmontese Beef. Yeah, World Carnivore Month is over and I think I'm totally done with me. No, you're not. everybody. This episode of Mark Bell's Power Project podcast is brought to you by Piedmontese Beef. Yeah. World Carnivore Month is over and I think I'm totally done with me. No, you're not. I'm going vegan. You're fibbing. No. That's no fake news. Yes, I am actually lying.

Told you. There's no reason. I'm going to put all type. Pause. I'm going to eat. There's no way of saying that I want to eat all types of Piedmontese Beef. Especially when dudes are in the room. Yeah.

Like a bunch of children. Yeah. Well, they have a lot of great cuts of Piedmontese beef. Especially when dudes are in the room, like a bunch of children. Yeah. Well, they have a lot of great cuts of meat. There you go. They have a lot of protein. Some have lower fat, some have higher fat. You really can't lose with the options, and they all taste great. So eat all the meat you want, gentlemen.

Yeah, and I'll one-up you. And ladies. Yeah, well, see, here we go. Go ahead and check out the Piedmontese hot dogs because those things are incredible. Hey, yo! All right. Get the Piedmontese all beef hot dogs. Cut them up like you're, you know, four or five years old trying to eat some hot dogs

and then enjoy them that way. I promise you they taste incredible. They're somehow like they, I don't even, they're super low in fat, super high in protein. Doesn't make any sense. All I can say is you need to go try these things out right now.

Head over to Piedmontese.com. That's P I E D M O N T E S E.com. Check out enter promo code power project for 25% off your order. And if your order is $99 more more, you get free two-day shipping. I was laughing at all of this because I vividly remember every single morning in high school. There was not a single morning that I stayed awake during the commute to school. And there wasn't a single first and second period that I wasn't nodding off or totally asleep during the whole class in the back. I've gotten in trouble for that a lot.

But now it's not because I was lazy or a bad student it's because i was a teenager yeah that's just naturally what was supposed to happen how about when your mom comes in your room to wake you up and you got morning wood going on why aren't you getting up you're like uh you know you're like i got something going on over here like i don't want to expose i guess we don't knock in this household yeah bro you have a horrible story about that oh man you know what i'm just telling now story guess is here when i was younger bro oh god i think i was like it was the first time this is why nobody watches our show i'm sorry alan i think you'll find this kind of funny but also slightly disturbing

um i was maybe 11 10 or 11 and i didn't know what a boner was okay so the first day it happened to me i was i was like what is going on here it won't leave like no no i was like i was like hitting and shit and it wasn't going away and then i ran to my mom single parent household she's the mother i was like mom mom what's going on mom i don't know what's going on she's like and sema don't worry it's okay it's okay it'll go away i was like mom it's not going down that shouldn't really happen bro oh my gosh i'm sure you're not the only person yeah yeah that was that was yeah that's so good yeah then you find out what's going on you're like don't look at me alan how do you eat you know like do you you have specific restrictions for yourself in terms of what you eat?

Do you have a certain style of eating for yourself? I guess I kind of... So yeah, I think I alluded to... I guess I do have some degree of TRE, but that's more of a kind of natural thing as opposed to I'm going to eat within x hours of window and what about choices of food uh so i think my diet would probably be fairly moderate across the board i'm obviously always thinking i don't track anything anymore i tracked for years and you get to a point of

kind of nutrition knowledge and you know you know that i don't need to track to know you know how much yogurt is going to give me 20 grams of protein kind of thing you know so um and i just started to enjoy cooking more so i was just like i don't want to like get to dinner and have these macros dictating what i can what i can eat so um i tend to generally, you know, think about, obviously, you know, if I'm training, you know, I'll eat to fuel that. I think my diet would be, you know, would it be carb based? Not necessarily. I think it would be kind of moderate protein, probably, I'd say the predominant macronutrients, probably carbohydrate. And I'd say I have pretty moderate fat. So like typical day of eating for me, I'll have a bowl of oats,

big bowl of oats with Greek yogurt in it. Some nuts or seeds, fruit, berries on top, that kind of thing. Lunch will kind of generally be i mean if i'm training that often kind of ties me over and i don't want extra heavy especially putting on a weight belt like you know stuff comes back up right so if i'm training i tend to train in the mid-afternoon just to kind of refresh the brain so i'll have a shake uh just blended shake in the blender like protein powder um you know milk peanut butter banana that kind of thing lighten the stomach and if i'm not training

lunch will like always be like a big green salad hummus bread this kind of thing olive oil bread this kind of thing olive oil dinner is generally some form of like legume or like butternut squash curry make a lot of curries cook a lot of indian food actually because goes goes well and i i've reduced like meat consumption um just purely factoring in the environmental side so i've started tinkering around more with some like you know um like meat substitute like uh corn mints and stuff like that um but yeah i eat again my main protein sources would be like dairy eggs. And then I still do eat meat, but I don't, my kind of rule was not to like buy it into the home. And that's not an ethical concern,

but it is an environmental one. So I was just like, all right, I'm going to, I'm going to have to do something. And that would be my, my thing. And there's obviously different, there thing. It does obviously different.

There's different low hanging fruit. People can pick. You might be interested in Rob Wolf's new book. Rob Wolf wrote a book called sacred cow. And then he also did a documentary called sacred cow. And I think it's available on, I think you can buy it off of YouTube and maybe off of some other platforms,

but really gives you a lot of great information on regenerative agriculture, which, you know, in the lot of great information on regenerative agriculture, which, you know, in the documentary, they explain how it doesn't leave behind a negative footprint. So it might be something you're interested in because you might still be able to eat a certain type of meat. Yeah, well, when I do, so I eat more meat kind of in these months because I love venison and there's basically no carbon footprint to venison so um i also eat a lot of fish uh should have said that as well so i'll have i'll have oily fish a couple of times a week um and i eat a lot of like like you know snacky type fish like i eat

a lot of kind of like baccarons or kind of anchovies um that kind of thing so so that yeah eggs eggs fish eggs dairy are kind of my main protein sources now i do eat more venison during the winter months when it's because it's only seasonally available but when i do get meat like if i'm cooking something up in the slow cooker i do then try and opt for like locally sourced and all of that to try and factor those things in but yeah I did watch a great TED talk a few years ago by a guy the British maybe climatologist and he was talking about um yeah regenerative agriculture and some of the research that they had done in i think africa using essentially um herds to to kind of mimic what once would have been a natural cycle of um you know eating a bunch of grass shitting on us moving on somewhere else and then watching that whole and it was it

was pretty fascinating seeing areas that were essentially arid start to actually show signs of growth of foliage and stuff again and you were just like wow so what about to uh some of your clients and people that you help uh what is there a specific style of diet do you recommend certain foods to them or is it mainly just talking about uh timing of food so i don't work with clients um i i love the science side but like coaching people one-on-one is a whole different ball game absolutely it's one that's one that's not for me um i i i yeah i just i i like the research side and there are people who are way better at coaching people and working on behavior change and all of that so um but but if i did as a hypothetical uh no i think i'd be very tailored to the kind of individual right because everyone you know particularly people that are

thinking about nutrition now you know they there's different things they want to factor in there's different ideas that they have and I'd be happy for someone to kind of take whatever course they want once they're not coming at it from a place of misinformation I think that's my big worry is when I see people like I'm doing x diet because a and b and I'm like I don't mind you doing x diet but if your reasons are A and B, then, and that's really motivating you to do it. And those reasons are bullshit. Then that's not a good thing for that person to do. So as long as someone knows what the sus is with whatever dietary intervention or diet

style they want to adopt, I'm happy once they kind of know what the, what the actual story is with it. Yeah. Um, I want to know about this because, you know, it's when you were tracking food, I don't know how many years back it was, what was the reason that you started tracking? Um, because I found for myself too, it's like, uh, there was a period of years that I tracked food and it was for competition reasons and body composition reasons. But after a point, um, when I started actually focusing on eating higher quality food, when I took out a lot of processed food that was making fit into my diet, it just got very easy to manipulate my body without ever having to use a scale. And I haven't touched a scale in a very long time. So for you, what, where did that start? Uh, and how did, did your diet change to

a point where you were like your, your food quality was better, so you didn't find it necessary or yeah. How was that for you? So I just liked being shredded. I liked being lean, you know, a lot of the, and I kind of liked being lean all year round. I didn't like gaining a bunch of weight just because, and, you know, even if I did want to kind of add a bit of muscle, you know, I would tend to do that in a fairly kind of controlled way. So I just liked kind of maintaining that body composition. So I tracked and I did definitely kind of use flexible dieting principles, but I never kind of took the piss with that. You know, I wasn't like just seeing how much crap I could fit into my macros. I think I've always been focused on the health aspect as well. you know so even when i tracked even when i got very lean like i never got on stage but i would

get to you know kind of seven eight percent body fat pretty comfortably i never tracked vegetables for example i never counted spinach you know people would be like oh some of my friends would be like oh but there's like four grams i don't give a fuck i'm eating spinach right like i'm not so so you know there were some things that i just didn't include in that because i was just like i'd rather eat the vegetables i'm still gonna get there anyway and then yeah over time i just i started there were a couple of things that you realized one is that like you're you're i think tracking can really benefit in terms of like you start to understand foods right you understand portions and I got to a point where like,

I knew for the most part that I was going to need every day to get the amount of protein I wanted to get. And really the carbs and fat can fall where they may for me, for the most part, you know, there are some days I'm not training where my diet would look very, you know, low carb, high fat, right. Just out of food choice choice and there are days when i'm training or there are some days when my diet might look literally like a kind of a lacto-vegetarian diet right so so how it looks macronutrient composition wise once i realized that didn't really matter that much then it started to evolve and then I just kind of started to get a little sick of the monotony of tracking and I'd see something and I'd be like oh I want to make that for dinner

and once I realized that actually I didn't need any of these tools to stay relatively lean or I didn't need it to eat to boost performance that I could, I kind of had that knowledge stowed away. Then I kind of got to a point where I was more interested in food being enjoyable and delicious. Do you maybe, do you maybe still track it in your brain a little bit? Like if you, you look at a recipe and it calls for butter and olive oil, you know, it requires a large amount of fat and a large amount of carbs do you sometimes just pick it apart a tiny bit or you just kind of go for it and just load it up with fat so so the only thing that my brain has this like funny little radar on that every time i'm about to eat i'm thinking is protein right i do i have a little protein clock in my head that's just like

particularly if it's a meal where i'm not gonna have a lot of animal source proteins then i'm then the cogs are going and i'm just like right well how am i how am i getting adequate protein here you know um so it really just depends but yeah i have a protein cog i don't have a carbs or fat cog at all i i literally eat those as i as i prefer um and you know but with protein i'll definitely be like you know yeah how am i going to get adequate protein in this meal and try and get that and you know three to four decent boluses of protein across the day and that's literally that's a habit i guess at point, as opposed to something I have to really think about too much. But yeah, I do think about it on a kind of meal to meal basis. Have you seen huge differences in people having, you know, like a pre-workout type

of meal, an intra-workout type of meal or post-workout type of meal? You know, people talk so much about the post-workout, you know, protein shake or something like that. Do you think, have you come across, you know, information where you're like, you know what, this is kind of a must. Like, I think people should really look into doing this. You know, I think, I think we, you know, particularly that aspect of nutrition used to be very much focused on these really tight windows right it's like you and i think most of the muscle protein synthesis research now would kind of suggest you know what the window's a little longer than we thought right it might be several hours right it's several hours and and again there's you know are you protein fed going into the

workout versus fasted and all this kind of stuff. So like if someone trains first thing in the morning, and they're and they're fasted, you know, they might want to start that that process and get adequatenoon you know there's there's less of that impetus because they have circulating amino acids so yeah sure they could eat two within two to three hours of that of that and and that those are the little things that like as i kind of have been more in nutrition it's interesting that you know where i was in my mid-20s where everything had to be like spot on and and like as you gain more knowledge the benefit of that is that you actually just fucking relax most of this stuff you just chill out like um and you get to a place where you're kind of suiting your personal preference and you know if you have performance goals or this kind of thing yeah then you can tailor things to that but i think most people do not need to micromanage their diet to be yeah to really to achieve a lot of what we're talking about you don't necessarily have to track

to get to like you know 10 body fat you probably have to start tracking if you wanted to go beyond that right you'd need precision you don't necessarily need to track to put on muscle you might want to think about it a bit more if you wanted to just avoid piling in a bunch of extra energy and and maybe gaining a lot of fat with that so it depends and for most people, even recreational athletes, you know, the level of detail that they need is probably slightly less than they think, unless they have a kind of elite goal. You know, there's a very specific body composition or performance goal. Then things need to get a bit more granular. But for me, I just I want to deadlift and squat and bench more. And I want to enjoy food like

things become really simple like you know yeah um if we could take like a step or two back um we didn't get too lost in the weeds and the way you explain things is very easy to digest so i really appreciate that we all definitely appreciate it we talked talked about, you know, chronotypes. We talked about eating at night versus early in the day, fasting, time-restricted eating. If we could, and then you also mentioned like, well, people who listen to this podcast are probably beyond this or that. But if we can just think about the general population, because we're on the internet, YouTube and stuff, literally everybody can listen to this. So thinking about people that have never once tuned into this show, what are like maybe the first three steps that somebody can take if they do want to take control of their body weight, they want to drop some LBs, where do you recommend that

they actually start? I mean, I think one in the theme of everything we've discussed today i think one simple thing is to look at how much of the day they spend in a bed state eating right um and the other thing within that that they can look at is the distribution of that energy intake right and it is a bulk of it in the evening do they do they tend for various reasons to maybe like under eat in the early part of the day because that tends to be something that kind of tees people up to over consume in the evening and what's interesting about the circadian rhythm in in ghin, the hunger hormone, is that it actually peaks at a clock time of about seven or eight o'clock. But people who eat more earlier in the day have a suppression of that rising growth. So the reason that, you know, binging happens in the evening is not

strange to me. If you've under eaten during the day, you get this peak in hunger naturally in the evening. You're going to be vulnerable to that, whereas more energy in the day dampens that. So I think people could very easily look at how long of the day they spend in a fed state and how they distribute most of that energy. And they can benefit from, you know, compressing that eating window in a way that suits their, this is the nice thing about time-restricted eating is it's pretty flexible. You know, you can compress that window in a way that really suits your preference, suits your workday, suits all of this kind of stuff and then maybe think about within that window how energy is distributed overall and particularly for people that maybe don't want to

start tracking calories and all of this kind of stuff big meals earlier in the day are generally in some of the research we've got a good way of kind of appetite regulation in a natural sense. And when people have the bulk of their total daily energy intake or over 50% of it earlier in the day, you often get these like smaller kind of meals consumed in the evening.

So that could be another thing to think about. And then I think the final thing, if we're, if we're going for three, I think the final thing would be to, to try as best as possible to take sleep more seriously. And I think, I think that's something people go, well, that's not a diet tip. It's like, oh, it is. Trust me. You know, it's also a training tip, I would say. And a training tip, yeah.

Goes right with all of it, yeah. Right. So if you're, you know, if you're sleep deprived, as we said earlier, and you, the waft of donuts, you know, it impacts on so many areas. So, you know, I think all of this kind of ties into something where, you know, you're sleeping better. So, you know, I think all of this kind of ties into something where, you know, you're sleeping better or longer, you know, you're not eating for 16 hours across the day. You're not having the bulk of your energy intake come as discretionary snacks at 9, 10 PM. And these kinds of things that are very characteristic of the general typical kind of diet in the U.S. or the U.K.

So they're really actionable, simple, low-hanging fruit that people can pick. And their behavior is not, we're not saying eat carbs, don't eat carbs, eat fat, don't eat fat, eat protein.

We're just giving a series of behaviors. And I think that makes it a lot more accessible. And just in case, so just, we just, so we don't leave anybody behind. Can you give us a quick definition of energy?

Energy as in calories? Correct. Yes. Done. I wasn't sure where you were going. Yeah, no, it's just cause like,

I don't want somebody to stumble upon uh this clip and then be like he keeps talking about energy in certain times i'm not sure what he what he means like does he mean like a physical energy yeah like an energy drink or something but you of course mean calories sorry yeah that's that's that's me being too researchy like yeah and so that's what i mean like let's you know take it back a couple of steps so that way we can you know not leave anybody behind yeah good clarification yes calorie intake that's what i'm talking about got it and also more specifically like when you're talking about energy calories do you mean like carbohydrates and fat earlier or like do you count protein into that as well i mean i i i i would say that there

is a benefit to to thinking about protein earlier in the day because of its benefit on appetite regulation so i i do think that there is merit to a high protein meal first or second in the day and and even if people aren't particularly hungry in the morning, going back to what we were talking about earlier, you know, they don't want a meal that's like heavy in carbs and, or, or fat. And, you know, there there's a, you can still easily have, you know, a pretty high protein meal with, without, you know, you could have like a big bowl of

Greek yogurt, for example, and you're getting a pretty high protein meal and you're getting the benefit of satiety and stuff like that. But, you know, you're not having a big boatload of calories at that point. So I do think that there is merit to, there was a really interesting study from a group in Israel that does a lot of this research. And they looked specifically at high protein, high carb breakfasts, where the calorie content of that meal was really high, right? It was the majority of their daily, it was a weight loss study. They weren't eating a lot of food. It was overweight women. They were eating, I think about 1400 calories a day and 700 of that was breakfast. And it was a high protein, high carb

breakfast. And one of the big problems, as we know from weight loss research, is rebound weight gain, right? People lose weight, they get to the end of a diet, they're hungry, they have cravings. This study measured ghrelin. And what was really interesting was the intervention itself the weight loss was 12 weeks but then they did monitoring for 16 weeks into the post weight loss phase the group that were having the high protein high breakfast high high protein high carb high calorie breakfast were after 16 weeks of the maintenance phase still had suppressed ghrelin so their hunger hormone was still there was this like legacy effect of this of this approach and so there's there's there is some evidence to suggest that for from an appetite regulation perspective this

kind of high protein high energy first meal and my hypothesis on this i know they used a high protein high carb breakfast i think my hypothesis would be you would get the same effect from a high protein high fat breakfast because there's satiating mechanisms to fat as well as to you know high fiber kind of intake as well so but i think that that could be an effective approach for someone that wants to think about better appetite regulation, decrease their later evening energy intake because they're not hungry, and maybe do so in a way where they don't have to track calories or macronutrients even. They're just making food choices.

Are you aware in some of your research, have you kind of stumbled upon anything talking about, you know, eating protein and fat in combination together before having another meal? Because earlier you talked about, you know, if we eat at these certain times and we do some of these quote unquote like hacks, we might have an opportunity to eat a little bit more food. have an opportunity to eat a little bit more food. And in some of the research, one of my friends have done, Joel Green, he talks about eating some protein and fat maybe about a half an hour before you have a meal. And it allows you to eat a little bit more and allows you to maybe not get the same surge of insulin that you might get from a large meal or a large carbohydrate meal. Have you seen anything like that or heard of anything like that? No, I mean, I've seen some of the preload studies, but most of them are focused on energy intake, right, or calorie intake.

So a lot of those studies where you give someone a preload 30 minutes before a meal, and then you present different diets, different, different you know kind of macronutrient kind of combinations and you see how much people eat you see what foods they select you know some of that is interesting but there are a lot of factors other than the macronutrient composition that actually influence if you preload you know there's like the sensory properties of the meal so using soups for example like because it's liquid, tends to have this effect on subsequent meals. But it's not surprising to me that having some protein, for example, in terms of a better postprandial glucose and insulin response, that having some protein before a second meal helps with that um fat doesn't result in an insulin response so it's probably not the but we do know that the protein doesn't

and what this is probably describing is a thing called the second meal phenomenon and this does occur with carbohydrate as well and basically the second meal phenomenon is is is most observed with an a meal in the morning time and what you tend to see after that is you tend to see a large insulin response and people would go oh that's not. But that's actually a response that's because the circadian rhythm in the hormones that facilitate insulin secretion and reducing postprandial glucose are aligned to that part of the day. And what happens subsequent to that is in response to a second meal at lunchtime, the blood glucose response is much lower and the insulin response is much lower. And this is being shown to this is one of the reasons why I think timing of food intake could be important diabetes management, because they've shown this kind of phenomenon occurs in people with type two diabetes.

The difference is huge in terms of in type 2 diabetics for example there was a study done in a group here the glucose response after lunch when breakfast was consumed was 95 percent lower than when the participants skipped breakfast and had their first meal at lunch what the fuck so yeah right so seriously so crazy i've never yeah it was yeah i'll show you some of the graphs are so impressive because you just you you get this first meal you get this big insulin response after breakfast and you get this glucose response but the insulin response is comes down very quickly so it's quite a sharp peak and then it comes down but it seems to have some sort of priming effect such that the next meal the response is much less uh there's there's much less of a spike it does come up quite the first phase insulin response

is quite strong but the actual blood glucose increase is much lower than it was after breakfast. And the overall, then if you pull that out over 24 hours, you've got this really beneficial profile of blood glucose that gets lower as the day goes on. And insulin gets lower as the day goes on. So is that the protein component of the meal or just the fact that the meal happened at that time? We don't really know what the respective contributions are yet. So that's something to tease out in the future. But, yeah, I think, you know, what you were describing there could be beneficial for someone, you know, again, if they're not particularly hungry in the morning, but they know it's probably good to get something in.

Maybe they just struggle with carbohydrates maybe they have a hard time you know maybe every time when they eat carbs they have a poor response to it maybe by eating breakfast maybe it would help cure that for some people it it could do i think you know i think i think with the way that our current diet patterns are it's it's easy to look at carbohydrate in the diet and be like this is you know potentially something that is quite responsible for a lot of the kind of conditions that we have but the idea that chickpeas are equivocal to a can of coke is just it's just we're not we're not dealing with, with, with, with like for like, and, and it's the same for, for dietary fat, right? You know, it's,

it's, you know, the idea that the, the kind of, you know, fat composition, uh, is independent of fat quality is just, is not the case. So I think when it comes to this like sure individual factors and tolerance and even just preference comes in to to play right and if someone would rather scramble eggs in the morning because they just prefer that and they feel more energized afterwards and a bowl of porridge like i would have maybe they're just like that would put me to sleep or i'd feel yeah fine this is there's always room for these kind of like individual tinkering with diet and with food preference that we can we can have um but yeah in terms of the distribution factor i do think obviously for like managing diabetes carbohydrate restriction to some degree can be effective but it still doesn't address the underlying pathology it doesn't carbohydrate restriction

and diabetes doesn't rejuvenate beta cell function um in fact the only evidence that we have that we can achieve that restoration of beta cell function is from these like 800 calorie a day liquid diets um that you know are resulting in say 15 kilos of weight loss in six or eight weeks and massive reductions in liver fat and pancreas fat and that that allows it to kind of restart so you know that that's a very specific clinical nutrition intervention that someone would want medical and nutrition professional oversight with. But for general people, yes, there is a potential that considering the distribution of energy could be something that benefits their overall glycemic control over the course of the day. And the magnitude of that benefit is greater in people with impaired glucose tolerance.

I want to know, as far as the idea of metabolic flexibility is concerned, right? Because like, like you were mentioning, you know, some people have comes to eating a bowl of oatmeal. They're like, Oh my God, I'd feel so sluggish afterwards. Um, but some people, they feel fine and some people prefer to maybe have eggs and some fat or whatever. Um, but can we kind of define what exactly metabolic flexibility is? And is that something that people want to be seeking out? Is that something that

is necessary, you think? Or is it just like, you know, eat what you prefer within these guidelines so that you're healthy? I think there's, there's so that you're healthy? I think there's, there's basically a little bit of both. I mean, for example, there was a study two years ago, which looked at the order of preference in terms of, so it compared, uh, high carb, lower fat meal early in the day versus, day versus low carb, high fat in the afternoon and the opposite. And what was interesting was that the high fat in the afternoon, when it was preceded by, there was kind of a degree of metabolic inflexibility. So actually starting the day with really high

fat content and then introducing the carbohydrate in the afternoon was if i remember this correctly that was the order that was associated with kind of like a bit of an impaired blood glucose response in the afternoon um and and there was the same with with with with with the other directions so i think the participants in that study uh i can't remember the status of their metabolic health but it was a study that did highlight that well actually if you're now these were extreme you know high fat like so it was kind of looking at a at at a, at a, at a, at an idea, you know, at a hypothesis. But I think for people who are, for people who are otherwise metabolically healthy, particularly for people who resistance train, I think a lot of that idea of metabolic flexibility is maybe overstated a little bit. is maybe overstated a little bit. Generally, people, if they're lean and resistance trained and whatever,

are going to have metabolic flexibility simply because they're metabolically flexible, right? There is some evidence from Kevin Hall's research that a ketogenic diet, if you're on it, when you reintroduce carbohydrates, you'll have this kind of exaggerated or impaired glucose tolerance, but that's likely transient. And once you, if someone reintroduced carbon, like a lot of those test meals are just test meals after they've been on a ketogenic diet. So they're adapted to this unique physiological state and then they reintroduce carbohydrates kind of, well, it's not a surprise that there's a degree of impaired glucose tolerance that wouldn't be permanent so um you know but but for people who are metabolically compromised pre-diabetic and this kind of thing then you know they're they're not metabolically

flexible i i do think that a more consistent kind of dietary approach in terms of like macronutrient content and macronutrient timing can be important for, for, for people that fall into that bracket, but for, for otherwise lean resistance training people, you know, they're metabolically flexible because of their metabolic state. Yeah. probably the truth of it is they should be burning something instead of, you know, continually introducing something and what they're actually burning, it's probably almost irrelevant as long as they do that more often than they're consuming energy. Right. Yeah. And that's where, you know, going back to that idea of how long people are eating over the course of the day, I think that's where, you know, going back to that idea of how long people are eating over the course of the day.

I think that's a major factor that we don't tend to give enough credence to because you're asking your body is constantly having, you know, glucose and circulation, constantly having fat and circulation. Constantly, then you're talking about an exposure elevated glucose levels the effect of like continually elevated cholesterol and all this kind of stuff is just like there's never an opportunity for you know their metabolism to kind of fluctuate in response to meals across the day because you know they're constantly introducing more more intake, you know, in between meals or even quite regularly between meals. So I think that's a major factor that we probably don't think about because we're always focused on the calorie content. And then secondly, we tend to be quite focused on macronutrients and, you know know the different macronutrient compositions of diet but actually the reality that it can take up to five to six hours to fully process a meal depending

on the calorie load and the nutrient composition macronutrient composition you know that's a long time to be to be processing food and that that that calorie intake that energy has to go somewhere. So for people that aren't using it or providing a stimulus for it to be used, then over time, it's not a surprise that population health is where it's at in terms of these variables. In SEMA and I, a lot of times we utilize some intermittent fasting and our eating window, I think is similar ish. We eat maybe two, maybe three times a day. And it's usually just later on in the evening. I think, uh, and SEMA does it cause he has like jujitsu and, and does some lifting, uh, during the day I do it because just my major, uh, like kind of workload and lifting is during the day. And then, so when I go home at like three or something

like that, or four, that's when I'll have my first meal. And the last meal will usually be somewhere between like seven and eight. I've been kicking it forward a little bit more recently to kind of see how that will affect my sleep. What are some of your thoughts on that? And is there any reason to shift any of this around or you think that's i mean i think for you again you're you're training in the middle of the day and you're you're introducing that stimulus um and you know it's the we talked about this study earlier the one that compared the four and six hour eating windows and those eating windows were were later in the day um than some of the earlier ones so yeah i mean i don't necessarily see a difficulty with with that um you know you describing that kind of eating pattern and and

adding training into the mix is a lot different to us talking about someone in gen pop who doesn't eat till three but then spends from three till 10 or 11 you know eating right a diet of very kind of high calorie intake and and poor poor nutritional quality so they're completely different so you know the the the additional considerations for someone who's active and you know isn't eating but you're not eating particularly late you're not eating early um but your last meal is not particularly late and personally i i i think that that may be more of one of the reasons why some of these time restricted eating studies have a benefit is it's not the duration of the eating window necessarily it's the fact that they end up bringing their last meal forward a bit from kind of later into the

biological night yeah that's something that i'm going to be doing more of because i yeah i do personally have a tendency of like having like my bigger meal to closer to sleep like an hour an hour and a half before i go to bed. Um, and there, I definitely think that I could benefit from just changing that, shifting that two hours before three hours before. It's kind of hard when you're not used to it. Cause like, I'm used to kind of stuffing myself and then I go to bed like about an hour, about an hour later, just kind of, you know, preparing for bed or whatever. And they're part of the reason for that is, you know, I used to be 330 pounds and coming down from being so big, I just, I love food, you know? And so

intermittent fasting has really helped me a lot because I get to push all the food off until later in the evening and I still get to feel really full and stuff myself. And so the next move is like, well, if I stay up any longer,'m just gonna keep eating so i better i better just i better go lay down and and kind of run to bed yeah yeah exactly like chain myself or something you know yeah yeah i that's i mean i used to remember when i used to do the kind of um more of the 16-8 um this is a few years ago and martin birkin's kind of lean gains and so i remember like that time like my eating window would often be like you know three or two to like 10 i'd often have dinner at 10 um and that was often a pretty big meal. I was training in the evening. But I did used to find that going to bed on a really full stomach,

and there is some research with this, is like the actual depth of my sleep. So my sleep quality was always a bit, you know, I'd find myself kind of like restless in bed with this big full stomach, you know, or food sweats sweats and i'd be like not always easy to have sex in that state either stomach all sloshing around and stuff right but that's that's that's the that's the funny thing about like about about kind of like time of day preference right is is is even like feeding into that like

kind of granular level like because i'm i'm one of these like i do wake up earlier and i tend to go to bed earlier um my girlfriend's like a like wide awake at like 11 and i'm like look is this gonna happen you know it's 8 it's 830. Come on. Awesome having you on the show today. I really appreciate your time and all the research that you've been doing. It's really, this is really helpful to us. And we're going to put a couple of these things into practice. Where can people find out more about you?

I know you have like online courses and all kinds of cool stuff going on. Where can people find out more stuff about you? I know you have like online courses and all kinds of cool stuff going on. Where can people find out more stuff about you? Yeah. So I've kind of two main outlets online. One is with Sigma Nutrition, which people may have heard of Danny Lennon. And we, we do a pretty regular podcast and, and we produce some kind of written educational content as well. And then I have my own website, which is Alinea Nutrition, and that's basically a kind of a research review focused. We do a weekly research review, and we do some kind of like webinars and video lectures and stuff. And that's very much kind of aimed at nutrition professionals, like dieticians or nutritionists or,

or people with enough of an interest to kind of, um, you know, be, be, be interested in the scientific side. So they're my two main kind of online outlets. And then my only social media profile is Instagram. It's at the nutritional underscore advocate. See, I tend to stay away from twitter because it's a lunatic asylum nothing good happens there awesome thanks again and uh have a great rest of your day appreciate it you too lads really appreciate that thank you thanks man so much goodness like this

this is a really good episode a lot lot of, yeah, I love that. Super practical. Uh, you know, he's, he's so, uh, like simple and he's just,

he's kicking us just real information. I mean, look, if you, if you have a, if you have a time restricted window and let's just say you're able to get yourself to like eight hours even, you know,

and within those eight hours you, you know, and within those eight hours, you have three meals. Again, it's recommended by us all the time. We're not huge fans of snacks. You know, I'd say like, you're not allowed, you ain't allowed any snacks, right? And then I'd also say, treat everything like a meal and everything that you eat should have protein in it. If it doesn't have protein in it, then it's not a meal. It's more like in the category of snack. And we don't want you snacking because it's just, it's too easy for that part of your diet to get out of control.

Now, if you could start to make better decisions and start to understand how your eating works and how you feel when you eat certain things, yeah, You could have a small thing of yogurt, a piece of cheese, an apple, and maybe a protein shake or something that could be a smaller meal that would kind of be a snack. Right. But for the most part, we're talking about like highly processed foods and figuring out a way to stay away from those. When you do a ketogenic diet, at least in the good old days before, like there was a lot of keto snacks and fat bombs and things like that. Back in my day, like there was a lot of keto snacks and fat bombs and things like that. Back in my day, we didn't have any of those fat bombs. A keto diet and intermittent fasting are ways of keeping things where there's a line and you don't cross over that line. And

when it came to snacking, you just didn't have any options for keto, really. I mean, I guess you could cook up like three strips of bacon. That'd be a snack. But you didn't have, you know, when we think snacks, we're thinking of like these things that are crunchy. I'm thinking of, I guess, you know, what comes to mind is like a Pop-Tart, Cheez-Its, maybe potato chips, something in a a bag something that's crunchy something that's highly processed that when you're done eating it you're like i'd love to have more that you crush the whole bag you're like i'd love to have more of that but when you get into some of this time restricted feeding stuff um it helps cut a lot of that stuff out through you know through

intermittent fasting throughout the day you're not gonna have those same urges and you're just going to know like, hey, that's not on the plan. And I'd even go as far to say that I think that you could have some of those things after you've eaten a really nutritious meal. So if you still wanted like pretzels or a couple Doritos or something, if you can control yourself,

you could probably have a couple. You might be able to have like a couple Oreos, but if you're the person that eats a whole entire sleeve of Oreos, you just need to know who you are and then be honest with yourself with that. You know, there are some people that can eat. Like I know a handful of people that they love chocolate and they just keep chocolate around. They have like a chocolate bar for like a month in their house, which I don't know how

that happens. Like they just take little pieces of it here and there. No way. They're a sociopath. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. They're called lunatics, these people. But you could see how just adopting some of these principles can really assist you because they're getting rid of snacks. They're getting rid of sodas. They're just getting rid of just excess calories. And then it gives you a, this is your plan. I mean, this is, I think this is the simplest thing. Like we're not asking you to make some crazy adjustment. We're not saying, Hey, don't eat any carbs. We're not really saying any of that.

I think that this is the ticket for a lot of people to get themselves out of fat land. I loved Andrew's question. andrew asked like the top three things i hate andrew because he doesn't talk and then when he does he kills us he has to fucking ask the best thing he fucking drops the mic and the mic goes right and that's that's all we needed because like he mentioned you know having that window having a bulk of your energy calories earlier in the day which in essence this leads to a third thing of guarding your sleep. If you can knock out these three things, you will make immediate progress. Then maybe the next steps are, you know, maybe taking out the process.

Well, you do want to take that process if you don't have your diet, but maybe making sure you're not eating a crazy amount in all those meals, doing that. But if you're able to follow those three simple steps, you will absolutely make great progress. I love that he talked about controlling hunger because that's huge. And he, you know, we're talking a bunch about, you know, some time restricted eating,

but he talked about if, if you're new to a diet, we always tell you on the show every single time, take at least two weeks, maybe even a month, get used to the food that you're eating. Fuck fasting. Don't mess with any type of fasting at all. Eat. Every time you're hungry, I want you to eat and fucking plow through food like you've never had before. Eat more, like for a little bit, because this is part of a long-term plan that we need to have in place.

And you heard what he said, what he referred to about people gaining weight back and then some, that's called the fat paradox. And the fat paradox says that when we shrink down fat cells really fast through means of exercise and through means of not taking in a whole lot of nutrients, not taking in a whole lot of energy, calories, that we shrink the fat cells down really fast and they have kind of rubber bands attached to them. And those bastards, as soon as you go back to having those bad habits, they're just going to go poof and they're going to come back a little bit faster. And they're there. They are ready. They are like ready to grow because the body's not designed for you to lose a lot of fat all the time. You could burn fat certain times a year and stuff like that due to the weather and due to circumstances,

you know, but for the most part, your body's not real pumped about you having this plan to lose 50 pounds. Your body's like, yo, I don't think this is a good idea. And so you have to make sure that you're fed. You can't do this through just, you can't do this through trying to overexercise and you can't do this through a ton of under-eating. It has to be precision. The name precision nutrition is an outstanding name by John Berardi, because it does have to be precise. It does need some precision to it. You have to exercise. You have to eat properly. And in order for those things to function properly,

and for you to function optimally as a human being, you have to be able to sleep. So all three of those things, one of them doesn't have a higher importance than the other. They're all, they're all hugely important. If you just want to maybe look jacked and have some muscle on you and whatever, you might be able to get there by not sleeping a whole lot. And you might be able to get there by, you training your training your face off and just being big and going after some calories you might be able to get to some of that but you're going to be so far away from what your body can actually really do you don't have full access of everything that's actually within the human body you have partial which isn't great like who wants partial who wants who wants to be represented

with 60 of their best or 70 of their best we would like to be 90 or 100 if we can if we can uh you know be super strict about something but that's what i would love to have and so you got to take all three of these things very seriously yeah uh quick question for, it's probably not going to be a quick question, but, or a quick answer, I mean, for both of you guys, how do you, how would you advise somebody to consume all the information that they heard today? Let's just say as an example, Andy Galpin, the last time he was here, he was talking about having a big meal before bed to help with sleep. You're right. But today we heard, you know, like, hey, maybe that's not like a really good idea because of the, oh, man, all the stuff he said today. Yeah, he's just restless and stuff like that. Yeah. And then, you know, how eating at night can actually do something different than eating early.

So what do you recommend people do with everything we just heard? You know, how can they, you know, your stomach's talking, trying to get on the mic. Um, yeah. How should they, you know, take in this information? Um, what, you know, obviously you don't want them to go run on top of, you know, uh, their soapbox and being like, yeah, nobody should be eating at night and like, you know, like what, what can people do to, I guess, responsibly utilize some of the information they heard today? I would say that if we're talking about, you know, talking about something like weight loss and we're,

and if we're specifically talking about, you know, what to do at night or how to have your time restricted feeding, you know, work best for you or any of it, really, we have to go back to like, what are you trying to do? And we need to take everything from there. And we have to go back to what Stan Efferding preaches all the time is compliance is a science. So how do we allow you to stay on plan? If that means, you know, if you're 300 pounds and, you know, I lay out some diet stuff for you, but I don't really mention, like, exactly what times to eat and so forth.

And you eat at 10 p.m. and you go to bed at 10 or 1 p.m. But you're making progress. We don't really have a problem. We have to go back to the basics every single time. And remember Stan said, uh, 7% weight loss, uh, fixed people that had fatty liver disease by only losing 7% of their body weight. And I think it's like something like 90% of all cause, all cause mortality, um, markings, uh, blood, blood markers of your health are fixed by losing 10% of your body weight. So if someone's 300 pounds and they lose 30 pounds, they get to 270,

which all of us would agree in this room, we've seen hundreds upon hundreds of people accomplish that. And it happens pretty fast. So losing 10% of your body weight can increase your health into some regard by like 90%. I mean, that's like, that's, that's, that's craziness. And so if your goal is to lose weight and be a little healthier, we just have to always keep that in mind. And we have to say, you know what, that information is great, but I'm just going to fuck what I heard right there because it doesn't apply to me because I, I, I would like to do that. I would like to, uh, eat at seven and go to bed at

10, but it doesn't, I'm not focused on that right now. It's going to make everything that I'm trying to do too difficult. Remember what he said about eating breakfast as well and how it, I wrote it down. So I was like, that's so simple. But he said more energy intake during the day dampens. I love like that word. It dampens binge eating at night. How useful is that to someone who's overweight? What is the major problem with most? I would say, I mean, I don't even have any clue, but I would just say 90% of people that are very overweight probably binge eat at night.

They probably eat like, I mean, I don't even know, but probably like 2000 calories from some 6 p.m. to midnight or something like that. You know, and it's probably throughout the day. They're probably not too crazy. It's probably not too bad because there's a lot of other people around and people that are fat, they don't want to eat in front of other people. And so a lot of this stuff is behind closed doors in the comfort of your own home. And sometimes just in your own pantry, you're rifling through food. I've done it many times myself.

So I know what some of that's like, but we need to, if you're trying to lose weight, the main goal all the time is to shoot down hunger. Hunger and cravings. You need to beat the fuck out of those things as much as you can. So you need to figure out a way to get your body used to being full with good, solid nutrition. Once you have done that, you want to experiment with some fasting and you want to start to partner up and be buddies with hunger and you want to start to recognize that hunger isn't really a problem hunger is actually very healthy it's actually great to be a little bit hungry being hungry for you're going

to be hungry anyway well i tell people this all the time when i was 330 i was hungry i was still hungry multiple times a day and it wasn't because, it wasn't because of lack of food. I was stuffing my fat face with food all day. So with intermittent fasting or the time restricted eating, you have an opportunity to be a little bit hungry throughout the day and something that's going to help you get towards your goals. And I mean, by listening to this episode, all of you already know, but you know, when you're, if you're choosing to have most of that food earlier in the day,

you've got to absolutely make sure that your food quality is high. Like this isn't like, this isn't super palatable processed foods that you're just going to ram through and not feel hungry. This needs to be quality food. That's going to make you full. So absolutely make sure that's a deal. Now, as far as what you're asking Andrew you know in terms of like eating close to sleep and he got them said that that could help you sleep and and he's then our guests was just meant Alan was just mentioning how like you know a few hours before is better this is totally anecdotal but the reason why I was laughing when he was mentioning like when he used to fast and eat late and I

was like my this always happens when I eat really close to bed. I wake up in a puddle consistently when I eat farther away from bed. Like I did last night. I think I ate about two and a half hours, three hours before I went to sleep. I wake up with the sheets dry, like, like literally that's like, that's what always happens. But sometimes I just can't avoid having to eat late. I'd rather not, but sometimes I can't avoid it because of everything that's going on during the day. So personally, I know it's better for me if I, if I eat a few hours before bed. But I think that's just something you have to experiment with, you know, maybe, you know, have a few meals during the week, two, three hours before you go to sleep and see how you feel in the morning. See how your sheets are like.

Yeah. Pay attention to that and see how it is for yourself. What are you doing in your sheets, bro? Dude, I'm having so many nocturnal emissions. You don't even realize it. It's just like it's crazy. It's absolutely insane. What's nocturnal emissions? I was just going to.

I don't know what that means. Are you polluting the earth? Pause. Y'all don't know what nocturnal emissions are. This is a joke, by the way, for all the guests out there. Is that a wet? I'm assuming it's a liquid. Oh, yeah.

Wet dreams? You're busting nuts in your sleep. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. That's what nocturnal emissions are. I figured your testosterone levels are still rising. You still haven't even matured fully.

Not in your final form. So that makes sense. Oh, I'm playing, guys. I'm playing, guys. But I loved what he said about teenagers, man. He's not playing. That made me laugh so much it's just like it brought me back to high school oh yeah sleep and all that that was great yeah you're just tired as fuck all the time yeah you

know i think if like um there's been a few people where i've given some recommendations to and i kind of almost forget that i've even ever talked to them, but I remember there's one person in particular, I said, um, they were like, you know, they're like, I'm confused on what to do. And I don't know, you know, how I should do it. And I said, eat twice a day and get in, uh, you know, one gram per pound of body weight and protein. And I just left it at that. And the guy lost like 40 pounds.

He came back and he's like, I just, that's what I followed. I'd followed, i followed exactly that and imagine if you threw in another rule or two in there um you know and said you know get it get in two servings of vegetables or something like that as well well now you're really screwed because you the two meals that you're going to eat you have to have some vegetables with them or if you made a goal to have i don't know 20 grams of fiber or something like that uh that would be a pretty damn good serving of vegetables at both meals. Now you're responsible to split up over the course of two meals, you know, and or have a protein shake with a meal or something like that. You got to split up, you know, if you weigh 200 pounds, you got to split up 200 grams

between two meals. You end up with a good amount of food. And then how hungry were you throughout the day? And then how satisfied were you? Like, you get a huge benefit. You get a huge, like, dopamine rush from when you get home and you get to eat those hamburger patties or whatever it is that you're into. You're like, you're like really, really excited about food.

I'd say way more excited about food than if you just went out to lunch and grabbed a sandwich with a friend or something like that. You're like, I mean, it, you're really, really, I mean, how much are you looking at? You have a smile he's got on. How much are you looking forward to driving home from jujitsu and just being like, I am going to crush fucking food tonight. Yeah.

It's. Like when you came over, you just kept eating. Yeah, I know. When I went to your house, I was just plate after plate after plate. Yeah, we had like wings and burgers and we had all kinds of stuff going on. I couldn't deny everything that you guys were cooking. I was trying to be a good guest. You know, I can't say no to what you give me.

That'd be rude. I can't be rude. It was fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. I loved it. I loved a lot of the stuff that he shared with us today. So, good show.

Absolutely. Want to take us on out of here, Andrew? I will. Hopefully you guys appreciated this episode as much as we did. If you did, please hit the like button. Go ahead and share it with somebody. Leave a comment down below what you guys appreciated this episode as much as we did. If you did, please hit the like button. Go ahead and share it with somebody. Leave a comment down below what you guys appreciated the most. Please make sure you're following the podcast at Mark Bell's Power Project on Instagram,

at MB Power Project on Twitter. Also, we've been doing stuff on Clubhouse, so make sure you're following everybody here, but especially Mark Bell, because that's where we've been hosting the rooms. But yeah, my Instagram, Club clubhouse and Twitter is at, I am Andrew Z and SEMA. Where are you at? Um, Instagram clubhouse,

YouTube at and SEMA and Yang. That's my name, uh, Twitter and SEMA union. And guys, if you guys are subscribed on iTunes, leave a review. It takes a few seconds.

Hit that five stars. Cause you know, that's the only amount of stars you want to, and you should hit and And leave a review. We'd love you for it, Mark. You can manage your hunger through a bunch of really simple things. One of them is through exercise. One of them is through eating.

Another one is through intermittent fasting, which sounds odd. But when you get used to intermittent fasting, it really helps you gain control over your hunger. But when you get used to intermittent fasting, it really helps you gain control over your hunger. It teaches you that your hunger is not an emergency like you may have thought it was. And then let's not forget about the massive impact of protein leveraging. So eating more protein, having protein be part of your primary source of food, I think, is essential for people that are really trying to lose weight. You know, keeping yourself full so you make better decisions throughout the day. You know, that's what I continue to get from this podcast when we have, you know, it doesn't matter if we had Ken Berry on the show.

It doesn't matter if it was Lane Norton. It doesn't matter if it was Joel Green or Sean Baker. Baker, it seems to kind of come back to this every single time that, you know, even Lane Norton, he talks a lot about, you know, calories in, calories out type of stuff and flexible dieting and things of that nature. But even when he's talking, he's like, hey, yeah, you need fiber and you need protein, you know, and he says you need those things in reference to being able to manage your hunger. And I think that that's that's where the focus should be, because people are fucking hungry and they make bad decisions when they're hungry. You got any extra tips to add to that?

I guess I guess sleeping would would help manage the hunger as well. But absolutely. Like, that's that's why our guests talk so much about sleep, sleep because you know, you're doing all these things in your diet and if you're still not living a lifestyle that allows you to get quality sleep, you're just shooting yourself in the foot for the next day. Cause now you're all these cravings emerge. That's going to fight against you and hunger. It's good. It's going to, it's going to make it harder to resist urges. So if you're doing all this in your diet, you're not taking care of your sleep. We harp on it all the time. You have to do that to be successful.

And we talked about it. So go fucking sleep. And I think you want to try to figure out a way to manage stress and we can't manage everything that comes at us. But could you manage, you know, can you resist like overworking yourself, overtraining or just never saying no to anything or never pushing something off to a different day so your day is better organized. I mean, these are all things that we can do, but we just kind of push forward and like, ah, you know, I got it.

And those stresses, they impact us negatively in so many different ways that it's hard to really even calculate. But things like that, they'll throw off your sleep. They'll throw off your preparation, being prepared. So you have to, when we're talking about, you're really trying to nail down that hunger and shoot the hunger down. Let's not forget about meal prep as well. You know, having, having meals that are right there that are convenient for you to grab a hold of. We talked to a guy yesterday who was cooking meals in an air fryer at a video game store that he owns. And he lost, what, 150 pounds? Yeah, that's our boy, Matthew. Yep, that's him. Yeah, that's insane. That's amazing. That's what we need. More people

need to pay attention to those things because it actually makes losing weight pretty darn simple. Yeah, I like that he said, he's like, yeah, I didn darn simple. Yeah. I like that. He said, he's like, yeah, I didn't actually meal prep. I just brought stuff to, you know, to work, to just make food here. Talk to your employer, you know, or if you're your own employee, then you don't got to talk to anybody. You can just do it yourself, but see what they'll allow to have at the office. Can you have a fridge there?

Can you have a microwave there? have at the office? Can you have a fridge there? Can you have a microwave there? You know, and if they don't want to have one there, then maybe you say, hey, you know what, I'll manage it, I'll clean it. You know what I mean? Like whatever you got to do to be able to get yourself heading the right direction. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.