Modern Wisdom - #605 - Ben Carpenter - What Science Actually Says About How To Lose Body Fat

Episode Date: March 23, 2023

Ben Carpenter is a personal trainer, researcher, international speaker, fitness model and diet expert. There are a million diets out there. All of them claim to work. Many of us have tried many of them, and many failed. So which diet is the best? What are the principles of fat loss that science agrees on as the most effective? How do we all get a 6-pack? Expect to learn whether calories are a total lie, why the weight loss industry is filled with so much conflicting advice, the 4 key components to any good diet, how there can be so many approaches to the same end goal, whether diet or training is more important, how to improve your willpower, the single most important contributor to fat loss and much more... Sponsors: Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://craftd.com/modernwisdom (use code MW15) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Buy Everything Fat Loss - https://amzn.to/3YAoOA2  Follow Ben on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bdccarpenter/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Ben Carpenter, he's a personal trainer, researcher, international speaker, fitness model and a diet expert. There are a million diets out there. All of them claim to work. Many of us have tried many of them and many failed, so which diet is the best? What are the principles of fat loss that science agrees on as the most effective? And how do we all get six backs? Expect to learn whether calories are a total lie, why the weight loss industry is filled with so much conflicting advice, the four key components for any good diet, how they can be so many approaches to the same end goal, whether dieting or training is more important,

how to improve your willpower, the single most important contributor to fat loss, and much more. Very important conversation, I think, to try and cut through what the hype and muddy waters of weight loss and dieting say to something which feels a little bit more firm. I very much appreciate Ben. He is a fellow Brit, and if you enjoy this episode you should go and check out his book, which is a great resource for everything fat loss. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ben Carpenter, look at the show. Thank you very much for having me, pleasure to be here. I came up with an idea this morning that I've been thinking about for a little while. Quote from Mark Manson that says, Identity lags reality by one to two years. There's a lot of psychological fallout from a rapid change in status.

And I needed a name for it. The name that I came up to was having a look through your book earlier on today is Identity Dismorphia. Okay. My thinking is starting. Yeah, my thinking behind this is that whether it's with fat loss, whether it's with a glow up or a glow down or a change in the job role that you've got or your status on social media or if you get plucked out of obscurity and put on love island people's identity their understanding of their identity does seem to lag behind a little bit and I think that the same must be true in terms of our body image

who we see ourselves as. I mean, there's even memes and jokes about guys that go to the gym to try and sort of hit on girls that are in the process of getting into shape in the hopes that they can sort of buy Bitcoin at five cents. What do you think about identity dysmorphia? To be honest, I'm actually kind of intrigued to hear where you were going with that. I'm not used to hearing a host go off on such an interesting monologue to begin with. What can I say? All that I was thinking was that, given that we're going to be talking a lot about fat

loss today, someone's body image, how they see themselves, probably largely determines their enjoyment of their health and fitness regime and drives their changes and what they want to do moving forward as well. So you posted a video I think yesterday all the day before depending on social media's post timing so you're talking about Mr. Olympia and you said if you compete in Mr. Olympia regardless of how your physique looks, depending on the date that you compete, you may be second in the world, you may be third in the world.

And why it's important not to have those kind of external yardsticks as the things that are judging your progress because you're not in control of all the external yardsticks. And I think that's kind of an interesting parallel to fat loss advice or muscle building advice in general, because a lot of people go into, say, a fat loss journey or a muscle building journey using these as kind of proxy goals for health and happiness. If I lose fat, I will be healthier, which is not always necessarily true. Or if I build muscle, I will be more confident, I will be more attractive to the opposite sex, I will. My life will become complete, which again isn't always true. And the way I like to view it

is take muscle building, for example, if you say I'm going to be happy when I build muscle, a lot of people will attest that it's just not that straightforward. They build muscle, but they become more critical of how they look. Body dysmorphia, muscle dysmorphia, especially in men. And it can almost be this kind of spiral where people think, oh, if I gain a few pounds of muscle, if I get slightly bigger arms, I'll be happier. And then they gain a few pounds of muscle, they get slightly bigger arms. But then they want slightly bigger shoulders, and they want slightly bigger arms again, then they want a more chiseled six pack. And it can sometimes, if you're not careful, it can sometimes be a kind of spiral towards body dissatisfaction because you're putting too much emphasis on how you look, that kind of self-objectification, on how you look in the mirror and how other

people perceive you. And you can chase that proxy goal of muscle growth so steadfastly that you can inadvertently sacrifice your mental health elsewhere. What is the antidote to that? I don't know, it's a great question. It's a great question. So, one of the things, as a kind of an anecdote of something that I personally say my personal journey, research on this is kind of difficult because you can do surveys and you can ask people how they feel about their body and whether

they weight train and you can identify trends, you can identify associations and discrepancies. And you can say for example, oh, bodybuilders who compete often have higher levels or body dissatisfaction, but what you don't necessarily get are randomized control trials identifying how you fix that. You can't say one group of bodybuilders did this and it helped. Another group of bodybuilders did this and it didn't help. So some of the things that I personally think are good to consider, for example, let's say me and you both started weight training. We did exactly the same regime, we did followed exactly the same nutrition plan, but there are behaviors

that you do or I do that the other one doesn't. Some of them that I suspect could cause issues, are things like self monitoring. So for example, how often you weigh yourself, how often you test your body fat, how often you look in the mirror can be another one. You call it body surveillance. People that tend to look in the mirror a lot to monitor their physique tend to have lower levels of body satisfaction, which is again seen in bodybuilders and competitive bodybuilders, more so than your average control population. So people who look in the mirror a lot to monitor their physique, that is not necessarily, I would say, a red flag, but perhaps at least a yellow flag, people that weigh themselves obsessively or people who track their calorie intake obsessively,

these are things that can be identified as risk factors for kind of disordered eating and worst body image. Another one is training just to change the way you look. So correct me if I'm wrong, but you have trained in many sports over the years. And what you may have noticed is if you find a sport that you enjoy, even if it's a sport that can modify your body composition, doing it for the enjoyment can change the outcome of how you feel about your own body. So if I go to the gym and I'm lifting weights with the sole focus of changing the way I look, I may have, I may be more critical of my infosique and have that kind of self-objectification than

you would be, who's lifting weights just because you enjoy it. Yeah, I mean, that was the huge red pill that I saw when I started CrossFit because as it happens when anybody starts to do CrossFit, they go, my God, this is so cool and it's kind of like a cult and no one's wearing any clothes and Friday night lights and I get to PB and yeah That drove me to train so much more than any desire to have a six pack ever did and Perhaps surprisingly I ended up in the best condition that I've ever been in because of my Compliance with training. So I was training incredibly hard because I wanted to train because the outcome I got from training was something inherently enjoyable in and of itself downstream from that I got ripped. That's exactly it and that's one

of the things that I feel really passionately about because I kind of went on my own journey of I'm trying to build muscle, I'm trying to probably be more attractive to the opposite sex, probably trying to make myself less insecure, which is how I felt as a teenager and adulthood, probably. But you can do exactly the same thing. You can do the same thing with your program. But by approaching it differently, you can have very different mental health and body image outcomes. And I think one example of that. So one thing that I really like about, say, a typical CrossFit studio, or at least the ones that I've seen,

is they tend to have far fewer mirrors. People who train there tend to train hard. They're often topless, which is the type of thing that you would expect, puts more pressure on you to look a certain way. But because you don't have mirrors, there's no everyone standing there flexing between sets. You're going in there, you're training hard, you're doing all the things from a workout that will

cause your body to adapt, grow muscle, lose fat, whatever. But I think that the mental health outcome of that is probably different to traditional bodybuilding gyms. And I've been to a fair few where it's very common for people to do one set, then take their top off and stand in front of the mirror and flex and pose from different angles, and it's that body surveillance where you're constantly looking at your body, and also the critique, critiquing your body, if you're a professional bodybuilder, for example, to use a very extreme end of the spectrum. They will have often whole training cycles developed to bringing up their weak points.

So if you ask a pro bodybuilder what their weak points are, they will often say, my medial deltoid isn't quite as sculpted as it could be or my vastness medialis isn't quite as big as I'd like it to be in relation to my vastness lateralis. And it's like an obsessive amount of body surveillance and kind of self-objectification. Yeah, that's scrutiny card. So we're going to get into talking about fat loss today and health and training. But before we do, what's your background? The people who don't know you, what gives you any license to talk

about the subject of fat loss? So I have been a personal trainer since I was 2006, general personal trainer working in commercial gyms with very diverse range of clients. So I would have clients who came to me who were fitness models wanting to diet for a show. I would have people like middle-aged housewives who want to lose a few pounds because they want to feel healthy or perhaps increase their lifespan. And then I had elderly clients who were just trying to make themselves a bit more resilient, should they fall, which was literally their goal. And I worked in commercial gyms for years, this was obviously approaching 20 years now.

And working with a diverse range of clients, the question that always came up, it was always fat loss. Fat loss was the goal that superseded everything. Fat loss is the most common goal in the fitness industry, and it's estimated that half or around half of adults, at least in America, diets at least once per year. And the more clients that saw me about fat loss, the more I research fat loss. And it just became this spiral of me going deeper and deeper into reading research papers. So I have

no higher academia background. I was never someone who started thinking I want to become a PhD. I was a personal trainer who was working with people one-on-one as my primary income. And then behind the scenes, I was just a kind of self-described research net, where I have folders upon subfolders upon subfolders of different research studies, just trying to communicate the best objectively current, most factually correct information to social media, at my mind. What would you describe? How would you classify your approach to health and fitness? Like, where is it that you're coming from? For me, it seems like science-based, evidence-based, is that the camp that you identify with? Is that who you've pinned your colors to?

Is that the camp that you identify with? Is that who you've pinned your colors to? I would say my main goal, if you will. If you ask the average person on the street to name one scientist in the field of nutrition, weight training, aerobic training, whatever. Most of them can't do it because scientists are working behind the scenes to write research papers. What I tend to do is communicate those research papers, research papers to a big audience. So I try and read many, many scientific papers and then simplify them into videos that go on social media. So I kind of bridge that gap by trying to simplify evidence-based information to a wider audience. Yeah, I mean your social media content is some of the most digestible, easily understood. It's the equivalent for diet, I think, of what Derek from More Plates More dates does with a number of the studies that he does. And I imagine that you must find at least a little bit of affinity

with the way that he goes about things, deep dives, papers, evidence-based, etc. Yeah, so as an example, I was editing a video today on kind of bodybuilding contest prep and body image, and it will be a 90 second video, and I think I cite six research papers in that. It's a lot of effort, but it's trying to make it in a way that it's super easily digestible for people. So when they watch it, they learn something, but it's not boring, it's not dry, which scientific research papers tend to be.

So it's trying to make science a little bit easier digestible by making it a bit more entertaining as well. Hope. If you can do it, why is the weight loss industry so shitty? If I can do it as in communicate things objectively. Correct. I think there are probably at least a bazillion reasons for this. I think one of them is always going to come down to finances. When there

is an industry that is kind of fraught with desperation, which the weight loss industry tends to be, it makes it very easy for people to sell you something. So if you look at, for example, the general trend in obesity rates, they have been going up since the 1970s. So people on the whole, on the population level are gaining weight, but more people are dieting now than they have in the past. So body weights are going up, but dieting rates are also going up. And I think when you compare those, it kind of makes you realize that a lot of people actually trying really hard is not necessarily uniform lack of willpower or laziness is that our environment is nudging people towards

gaining weight and people feel probably more desperate than ever to lose weight. And I think when people are more desperate than ever, it's easier to prey on them and sell them things. So for example, when if you go to Amazon top-selling diet books, you will often see completely different dietary methodologies. You will see several keto books, you will see several intermittent fasting books, you will see this diet plan, this diet plan, this diet plan. And it's almost like a conveyor belt diet plan, so people are having their best punt selling a book. And that's not the solution. That's not the solution.

What is the solution? So how it tends to be communicated to make it really simple, it is believed that one of the main drivers for obesity rates going up is the development of the obesity genic environment. So if you went back to the 1970s, if you looked at the food selection that was available to you, you wouldn't have the vast array of biscuits, cakes, muffins, crisps or chips for Americans that are filled in grocery stores now. And foods tend to be cheaper, tastier, hyper-political, extra tasty, more convenient because they're more shelf-stable than they used to be. So it's easier to consume more calories than it would have been in the past

when food processing wasn't as rampant as it is now, but also there are developments in technology that can drive sedentary behaviors. So for example, just to roll a few examples together. Let's say, Person A wakes up in the morning, they sit in that car, they drive to work. They get in an elevator, a lift, or an escalator, they go up to a desk job where they work for eight, nine hours. Then they get back on the escalator in the lift, elevator, whatever, go back to their car and they drive home. And technology is advancing that

acts as labor-saving devices. Even in the home, dishwashers save people washing up by hand, washing machines, save people washing up by hand. Electric toothbrushes save you having to do this because you can just hold it in your mouth. Even bin lids, you can hover your hand over a bin and the lid will cut back. Things are getting easier to conserve us time and energy and convenience. And that's making us fatter. Right, it's estimated that energy expenditure, the number of calories we burn per day, trends downwards because of these, because of the advancements in technology and modernization of the world. And when you put that along with all of the foods that we're now surrounded by, everywhere, think of it like this,

that we're now surrounded by, everywhere. Think of it like this. Even if you walk through a train station, there will be vending machines. In the vending machines, typically, I know it's different depending on country and depending on train station, typically will be filled with things like chocolate bars and crisps and things like that because they are shelf stable, they are cheap, they are tasty, they're not going to perish and rot inside a vending machine. It's more convenient for us to eat these foods than it ever has been, and it's driving calorie and takes up. So, this trend of body weight going up has been described in some research papers as a natural body weight going up is a natural consequence to the change in

our environment. If you viewed a different species say for example rats, rats easier to study for many reasons. If you have rodents in a cage and you change their diet so they still allow to eat as much as they want their rats you're not telling them how much to eat But you change their regular chow with a cafeteria diet Muffins biscuits cakes etc. They gain weight reliably And you don't blame the rat you've changed their food and the rat is suddenly wanting to eat more because the foods are fucking delicious That's what's happening to us on a human level so I view it as people trying to diet now probably feel

like they're swimming upstream more than they would have 30 years ago when it would be easier to stay leaner. That's very interesting. And it's a much more holistic view, I think, of the weight gain epidemic problem that we've seen since the 1970s, that I always see black and white photos of Venice Beach in 1960 or whatever, and everyone looks like the 12% body fat even the women and everyone's in super healthy condition. And it's used to kind of cast aspersions on, look at this decadent modern civilization, everyone's a fat slob, everybody just gets their,

like, rumber to clean up after them as they eat cheetos laying on the couch. But the reality is that most people that are overweight, don't want to be overweight, most of the people that I know, even the guys that are in shape would like to be in better shape. And even if they're in fantastic shape, they want to improve their health in different ways. So it very much is massively influenced, I think, by the environment that we're in, the different types of stimulus that we have around us. I mean, you did some

studies. I heard you talk about how the placement of different foods in supermarkets and fast food places and default selections on food menus can have a huge impact as well. Yeah, so as an example, there are a few research trials that look at things like this. So it's described as a food proximity effect. If you give people a binary choice of two options and you have something like apples or popcorn, even though participants will rate popcorn as a tastier snack, if you make the popcorn sit closer to them and you place the apples two meters away on the other end of the table, people will naturally eat more popcorn.

If you flip those around and the apples are close, people will just naturally eat the apples even though they know the popcorn is tastier, because you have made it more convenient. And this can affect food purchasing habits as well, not just immediate food selection. So if you spoke to anyone who's higher up in a supermarket, and you ask them about shelf placement, they will say that it is strategic, because they know that items placed at eye level, for example, people are more inclined to buy the item sitting at the bottom or items that are placed near the checkout are easier to upsell because people are there waiting and while they're waiting

and they've got 30 seconds, they just turn to the side and they see this selection of chocolate bars. Oh, yeah, I'll grab one and these are examples of how you can kind of subconsciously influence people's food selection. So as an example of one of the research studies, if you take a cafeteria and there are vending machines in the corners, there are, sorry, fridges in the corners, not vending machines, or there's a fridge by the checkout scanner. or there's a fridge by the checkout scanner. It was shown that if you reposition sodas and waters, you can get people to buy less soda, solely based off placement.

So they did this as a kind of food preference thing where they had read, quote, unquote, high sugar beverages that they want people to consume less of, consuming few added sugars in the diet is a fairly universal recommendation for improved health and body weight. So what they did was they just made those red items less convenient by taking them out of eye level or moving them away from fridges that were more convenient. So rather than having them right at the checkout so people can grab one while they're buying, they would move them to the other side of the store and they would replace those with water to make water more convenient.

And just that can influence people's purchasing habits. So, although that's a very small scale experiment, it's kind of suggestive of how the overall environment can subconsciously influence what you buy, but then also what you consume. And when you kind of zoom out and you think about your life, there'll be multiple instances of this throughout the day. If someone's working at a desk and their colleague brings in donuts and they put them on the desk, suddenly you really want donuts. You might not have even been thinking about donuts before. If your colleagues are, by the way, they're a donut in the kitchen, you might carry on working and think, I might get to one later, but when you can see it and when you can smell

it and it's visible, you're more inclined to eat it. And in today's environment, high calorie, hyper-palatable foods are more convenient than ever. What belief that is widely held either in mainstream media or amongst most people with regards to fat loss, do you wish that you could get rid of? Like what do most people misbelieve about fat loss and how it works that you would like to try and dispense with? I think there are a couple of big ones. Number one, that there is a best diet. I don't think people's search for what diet should I start next is a fruitful question, because it isn't a case of picking keto or picking intermittent fasting or picking time-restricted feeding or whatever.

Those are all vehicles that ultimately take people to the same destination of a reduced calorie intake. I also think that the more, I want to kind of wear this delicately, the more intelligent someone tends to be within the fat loss obesity research space, the less they point the finger at the individual. So obesity researchers will say, typically, yes, there is obviously individual responsibility. If you go to the gym or not, no one is going to force you to do so. But obesity researchers will say that obesity rates are going up because of the interception between genetics, biology and the overall environment and they don't look at people gaining weight as a kind of willpower deficiency. They view it as in some ways you need more willpower now to lose weight

then you would have 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. And to go back to the kind of rodents example, if you change the food that you give rodents, no one blames the rodents for gaining weight, it's a natural consequence to you changing their diet. But on a global level, our diets have been changing because of the powers that be above us, food manufacturers, governments that implement taxes on, say, sugar, sweet, and beverages, for example, governments can influence the food supply as well, food subsidies can influence the food supply. In some ways, we are just pawns in the bigger game of chess.

I really, really like that. And I think the genetics component is so fascinating. I'm going to guess you'll have looked at the behavioral genetics outcomes that correlate twin studies, parents with children. You know, a lot of the time you may see two overweight parents with an overweight child, it's like seven or eight years old, and they're not super overweight, but you're going to be a fat adult, I can already see it. And a lot of the time you think, oh my god, you know, look at this, this family causing this child to eat too much due to their unhealthy lifestyle. And again, you're right, you do have to be delicate here, because if everybody was born on an island that didn't have any unhealthy food, no one

would be overweight. Everybody would be, you know, the optimal size that they should be. So individual agency plays a massive role in what you can do, but just how much willpower and self-soverity do we expect from people? Do you want to create a world in which it is easier for people to be healthy or more difficult for people to be healthy? And this is a conversation. Again, we'll get on to seed oils and the quality of water and thalates and stuff in a little bit. But that's something that doesn't really get spoken about all that much. Even going past the quality of food, simply the environment and the availability of this type of food, the triggers that you see all the time, the chocolate bars next to the check out, etc, etc. But you see these children, I think I'll be right in saying that

body weight correlates 0.6 to 0.8 between children and biological parents, and it correlates basically zero with adoptive parents. So what I mean by that is that if you take two identical kids who have two healthy parents and put both of them into an overweight parent's household, the likelihood is that both of those children will correlate very highly with their healthy weight parents and not at all with their environmental adoptive parents. And the reverse is true too, that you can have larger parents give birth to twins that get separated into different adoptive households that are healthy, that end up being overweight, despite being in this healthy environment. Robert Plom and the number one behavioral geneticist on the planet is a guy who says he has a predisposition

to overeating, but he gave me this really great insight, which is there are many ways to become fat, that you can become fat because you have an overactive, grueling response, perhaps. So your stomach makes you feel a little bit more hungry, or perhaps you are less prone to enjoying exercise. Perhaps your sleep quality tends to just be worse, your baseline for sleep quality tends to be worse. Perhaps your baseline set of happiness downstream from that, you comfort eat because of your perhaps depressive episodes, et cetera, et cetera. All of these can exist individually or together

or can combine to create some monstrous situation in which this person very much is swimming upstream. And, you know, Jocker Willing and David Goggins have been on the show and I'm all for taking personal responsibility and I want to encourage people to do that and, you know, I don't need to bang that drum yet again. It is a delicate line to walk to say, we know that genetically things may be more difficult for you with regards to your predisposition, not biologically. You don't even need to

do the, I've got a metabolism and gluten makes me inflamed. It's like, your psychology is different around food, the way that like, your psychology is different, around food, the way that you relate to food is different. The protein folding in your brain literally makes you taste food in a different way to other people. And on top of that, the environments changed a lot. Those are two huge triggers

that can cause downstream from that a ton of people's relationships with food to be incredibly different? Firstly, your last five minutes you have talked about something above and beyond almost any personal trainer or fitness professional I see talking about on social media why. That's a rhetorical why, but I haven't heard people summarize that facet of obesity research as eloquently as you have. And it's in some ways it's kind of worrying because that should be more mainstream, but

the number of things you touched on there are brilliant, by the way. So as an example, let's talk about kind of biological variants. When people, if you say there is a genetic factor or predisposition to obesity, a lot of people will immediately say you're talking bullshit. And their straw man argument to this is babies are never born obese. And you would be amazed how many times I've heard people say that, as if it's just this binary thing, it's like, well, no, that baby wasn't obese, so there's no genetic component. But that's not what geneticists will say. Genetists will say that they have predispositions to certain things.

So, like you have alluded to, there can be biological predispositions that affect appetite. There can be genetic variants that make people feel hungry on an emotional level, something that you touched on, for example. If you look at emotional eating studies, if you impose an emotional stimulus on people, you can influence their food intake immediately. So if you make people watch a sad video clip, a subset of people who are described as emotional eaters will immediately eat more food afterwards. Whereas people who do not score highly on an emotional eating questionnaire, their food intake kind of remains the same. And if you use that as like one example, one of the relationships that has been noted is obesity and depression are described as having a bidirectional relationship. In that obesity could increase someone's risk of depression, but depression can also

increase someone's risk of obesity. And most people wouldn't say that depression is something that falls solely on personal responsibility. Yes, people might say, if you have depression, maybe you could improve it if you adopted these habits. I know people will say, if you go outside and exercise, that might help. If you change your diet, maybe that will help. But ultimately, most people will

acknowledge that if someone has severe depression, that isn't quite as easy as just telling them that telling them that they have to change their behaviors and it will fix it. It's obviously more complicated than that. But when it comes to obesity and body weight, people have a tendency to point the finger solely at the person. And like you say, this isn't eliminating individual agency, it's just saying that there are other factors that influence individual agency. And another one that you touched on, which again is great, is say, for example, sleep susceptibility. If you look, sleep quality susceptibility, if you look at sleep studies, you can influence how much food someone eats just by giving them a reduced sleep opportunity.

So for example, if you give someone 8.5 hours sleep opportunity per day or you cut that down by around half, the next day the people who have slept less will consume more food. It will skew appetite-related hormones and they tend to feel hungrier. Also, people that sleep better will find it harder to gain lean body mass, or they will be more susceptible to losing lean body mass than people who sleep for longer. But there is obviously a biological intersection on how well people sleep. Yes, there are some things that you can do yourself, but there are also some biological drivers that can ruin sleep quality that are very hard for you to overcome just on your own.

There's only so much that individual behaviors can do to override that biology. And that's the thing that not many people talk about. And you have just talked about so many facets of that better than most fitness professionals that I know. The reason that it's not fashionable for any fitness professionals to talk about it is that it fundamentally de-agencies them. Like they are cutting the legs out from underneath an industry that they need to make money in. Right? If you say, well, look, Ben, we're going to do our best with you, mate. But, you know, the best thing that could have happened would have actually feed to

have had a different set of parents who provided you with a separate genetic baseline for you to work from. And this is something I've been an idea that I've been playing about with a lot recently, which is the the danger of taking too much responsibility and the backlash that we are seeing against victimhood culture. So again, I've been Mr. Personal Agency Sovereignty like since I began this show, it was the reason I began this show, because I wanted to take control of my own desires, my own life, everything, right? But I do understand that this is heavily as a reaction to a what seems to be increasingly soft world in which people will blame their circumstances and systemic whatever, for something which it isn't the fault of the circumstances or the system. It is because of them and they are fully in control of the decisions that

they are making and they choose to make bad decisions over and over again. However, there are many contributing elements here, including your genetic baseline, including the environment that you're around, including your level of education, I imagine, must be correlated as well with the weight that you gain or lose. A lot of these things, it's like, it's so hard to thread the needle and it's so much easier to come out and say, if you're fat, it's exclusively your fault. And again, that's not to say that anybody who is absolutely superbly obese, if they were deposited on a desert island, they would be skinny, right? They're going to lose weight.

So the point isn't that people can't do these things. It's how difficult is it going to be for them to do it? And there are incentives within the fitness industry to over blow the impact that personal agency can have on weight change. And again, it can be ultimate. It could be 100%. You could kill yourself with dieting, but how much will power is it going to take?

And then there are incentives on the other side with regards to the food and drinks industry. For them to not necessarily do this. So I think that's a really nice primer that hopefully makes people feel, well, not right-chessly angry, but you know, like there is a battle to be waged here and the challenges that you face

when it comes to your fat loss journey and your alterations with regards to your diet and your training, you know, if you're finding it difficult, yeah, perhaps quite rightly, this isn't the easiest environment in which to be healthy. Oh, it's never been easier to get access to food from someone, so I said, well, yeah, but it's also never been easier to be fat. So it is very much a set of scales. I think there's something really interesting that you said there. And when you talk about almost

like a reactive response to a victimhood, I think people often fall in kind of very binary camps where if I talk about environmental reasons that one person might find harder than another, I will get some hatred from people saying you are removing personal responsibility and I've never said that, it isn't this binary dichotomy as few where it's black or white. And I've never said that. It isn't this binary dichotomous view where it's black or white. And as an example of this, which is maybe easier for people to understand, is you couldn't take, let's say almost anyone,

let's not say anyone, because then people will interject with medical conditions. You can take almost anyone on the planet and you can make them lose weight and this is seen reliably in controlled feeding studies. So in the most aggressive controlled feeding studies, people will lose huge amounts of weight. This has been seen in numerous extreme circumstances. What is a controlled feeding study? You lock someone in a building that's only got sort of a supply of food?

Yeah, I mean, that is literally what it is. So you will have something like a described as a metabolic ward and you can precisely control how the metabolic ward. Yeah, you can have live-in studies where people will live in a metabolic ward for say 50 days and you can feed them precise amounts of certain foods to see exactly what happens. And some of these are brutal. So for example, there was a meal frequency study which would have been, I think say 50 years ago now, and they would feed people who would be described as morbidly obese. I don't necessarily love the categorization, but that's how they would have been described at the time. And they were fed 600 calories per day via liquid nutrition.

So it's like skimmed milk, I think corn starch, some other things, it's like a not very tasty drink. But you can do that, and you will see people lose ridiculous amounts of weight. And I think people will look at experiments like that and say, see, if the person wants it enough, they can do it. Because technically they can do it. But what we are saying is that, yes, someone can do it.

There is always personal responsibility there, but it's harder for one person to get to the finish line than it is for another person. Some people will feel like they're swimming upstream more than other people. So for me, for example, I was always like a very active kid. I wasn't someone that ate a lot of ultra-process foods. I grew up in a really rural area where

there were almost no convenience foods. I was over 20 years old when I ever ordered my first takeaway because food restaurants couldn't deliver to us. So I grew up with a loving mother who I lived with all the time, who would cook everything from fresh. I wasn't one of those kids that grew up sedentary. I was a child that had activity like installed on me when I was probably five years old, playing

all different kinds of sports. And as most people will probably already know, it's very easy to continue habits versus trying to create new ones or trying to stop old ones. And for me, I was always an active kid. I was never someone who grew up loving the taste of ultra-process food. I was never someone that scoffed every time ate a vegetable. Even things like vegetable enjoyment, there's a genetic component there. And people know this, like coriander. Some people, it tastes like soap. Some people don't. There are

genetic variants where brassicle vegetables can be really bitter, but other people don't have those same kind of genetic alterations and just things like this can make it harder for someone. And no one is really saying that you can't lose weight under the right conditions. If you lock someone in a room and you take away all their food, they will lose weight. What we're saying is when left to their own devices, it's much harder for that person to reduce their food intake on their own. Okay, we've set the landscape, we know the modern environment, we've pissed off everybody that wanted to blame it on person responsibility. What are moving on to that person responsibility,

moving on to the toolkit that people need to understand if they want to lose body fat. What are the absolute fundamentals that everybody needs to understand when it comes to fat loss? Great question. Firstly, I would kick things off by saying how much you weigh is not a behavior. It is a consequence of some biological factors and a combination of behaviors. So fat loss itself can be achieved via various methods, some of them healthy, some of them less healthy. And I think it is easier to break it down to individual behaviors, going back to the example you used or I used of you, where you're talking about having external rewards. If you set a goal, sometimes the goal isn't always within your control. There are other factors that influence whether you get there, but if you can break it down to behaviors, it's easier to kind of build those habits. So the most

universally agreed upon recommendations, which aren't very controversial, but they're surprisingly controversial in today's day and age, is reduced calorie intake, consuming adequate protein, consuming enough protein tends to have a mildly beneficial effect on weight loss or fat loss. It can help retain lean body mass. Lean body mass can raise energy expenditure mildly if someone's consuming, if someone's building muscle tissue, reduce energy density diets are also a big one. Energy density is calories per gram of food. To use an easy example, if you had an apple here which is primarily sugar and water, no protein, no fat, and then you had jelly beans next to it, which is

also primarily sugar, because the concentration of sugar is much higher in the jelly beans. The number of jelly beans you would eat for the same number of calories would be disgustingly small. Like a hundred calories of jelly beans would be almost nothing versus a whole apple, and this is an example of energy density. Foods that contain a lot of calories per gram tend to be easier to over consume and tend to be worse for appetite regulation, which is one of the many reasons why prioritizing unprocessed foods is an almost universally agreed-upon recommendation for health and body weight. Eating things like meats and fishies and vegetables and fruits and things that are kind of more close to their natural state versus ultra-processed products that are engineered often to be as tasty as possible, often

very high in calories, often very hard to stop eating. Those are the things that are very difficult to disagree on. Is the reason for that because satiety, as in just how much real estate is taken up in your stomach, is one of the key determinants in terms of making you feel full? Yes, and this has been tested with a series of very weird experiments. So for example, let's say there are two milkshakes and you have identical milkshakes, but you aerate one or you add more water so there's more volume.

So exactly the same calories as a foundation, but you put more air into one add more water, so there's more volume. So exactly the same calories as a foundation, but you put more air into one or more water to increase the volume. By lowering the energy at density of this one and having more volume for the same number of calories, this will cause people to consume fewer calories afterwards. So it is better for appetite regulation, like you say, because there is a certain

aviol state in the stomach. And if you are eating a higher volume of food, it influences not only how much you eat at that meal, but also at your subsequent meal. So as an example, I mean, there are various examples of this. You can aerate, you know, like cheese snacks, cheese balls, cheese, cheese, cheese, whatever. If you put more air into those snacks, so it has exactly the same number of calories, but it's bigger, people will consume few of them. Big balls is what you're prescribing, Ben. Yeah, that is an example of reduced energy density.

I mean, in the real world, a more easy way to implement it would be things like cooking with less fat. If you have a portion of vegetables and you cook them with a load of butter, that will increase the energy density significantly. And almost super reliably will cause people to consume more calories without feeling more full afterwards. So reducing the amount of added fat, I'm not saying fat is bad, but if you had potatoes and then you had deep fried potatoes, it is much easier to consume more of the deep fried potatoes by some taste perspective and a calorie perspective. You can also do things like food substitutions.

So on a plate, if you have beef and rice and vegetables, the vegetables have the lowest energy density out of all of them. And if you increase the serving of vegetables relative to the other two items of food, people will consume fewer calories based off that. So you can use it with food preference, like the way you cook, the foods that you're selecting, and the aerated food snacks is like an extreme example, but it's a way of testing that mechanism of food volume versus satiety. Everybody when the dieting has used those low calorie popcorns, everybody, everyone's gone for them, and you go,

how the fuck what what Harry Potter wizardry has gone on to make this bag of popcorn, 89 calories, like how he looks like the massive bag of popcorn and it's salted or sweet or whatever. Charity popcorn in the UK is the one that I seem to remember eating when I was getting lean for a beater. Have you looked at the science of orification. So that is the corner of the food industry that designs the texture of foods. And I remember reading an evolutionary cycle. I have read some. Cool. Not well-versed. It was really interesting, this Eve's psych book I read, and it talked about how, ancestral novel it would be to have a food that was both soft and fluffy,

but also crunchy. So if you think about most foods, naturally, that we've spoken about, I mean, an apple kind of does have that. You know, it's got that kind of crunch to it, but it's not super fluffy. It's not a milky way or a snickers bar. Or specifically fries, french fries, you know, or an Oreo.

So what you have, when you actually look, and as soon as you, it's like the matrix, once you see this, you can't unsee it in food. What you're looking at, not just with regards to the combination of carbs and fat and sugar and the taste profile and the ability for it to spike that sensation of sugar and saltiness on the tongue that would have been very novel, ancestral, but the texture of what you're eating is unbelievably like super normal in terms of the stimulus. So an Oreo, two crunchy bits of biscuit with

something sort of soft and lubricating in the middle or French fries as exactly the same. It's so... When you actually look at it as a... What is the sort of thing that goes on in my mouth from a texture perspective when I bite into this? It is unbelievably novel. And if you could just say, okay, please try and replicate this in something that would have been regularly available. Ancestrally, your liver doesn't feel like that,

and berries aren't really like that, and apples and roots and tubers and stuff. None of these things, I like that. So yeah, that's just another thing to layer on top. I always like to think about, no one ever considers the attractive texture of foods. So there's a slightly different angle on texture as well. So as you have rightly explained, food manufacturers will engineer foods to have a certain reward value that we can't access elsewhere. So typically in nature, you will find things that are high in

sugar, such as fruit or higher in sugar. You will find things that are high in protein and fat like fish and meat, but it's very rare that you will find things that are both high in sugar and high in fat, which is what things like ice cream and chocolate and cheesecake, all of those tend to have this combination that you don't really find in nature. And texture can also influence appetite. So there was one experiment where they took food. I think it was beef and potatoes and vegetables. And they mashed it and cut it into smaller parts

to make it easier to consume. And what they found was that because it was faster to consume, people naturally ate more food. So the simplified version is, when you start your meal, there is perhaps a certain amount of time before you appetite signals kick in and say, you know what I've probably had enough food. So the faster you can consume food within that, if you watch anyone that's in like an eating contest, they will tend to eat quick to try and race against those signals. And if you modify the texture of food to make it easier to

consume quickly, people tend to consume more. That the extreme example of that is if you have a very high calorie milkshake and you're drinking it with a straw, you can consume sugar faster than you would tend to when you're chewing it. Have you seen the ice cream competitive eating competition? So, have you seen what they eat to help them eat more ice cream? No. They've got a bucket of french fries next to them. So, if you're in an ice cream, keep eating competition. The guys will go down and grab a handful of salty french fries. And conversely, you would think, I want every square cent cubic centimeter of my stomach real estate to be used to the ice cream We're clearly that One of the main reasons that you are

Struggling to eat more ice cream as a competitive eater Brain freeze apart from the brain freeze actually how the fuck do they get around that that must be said fries I thought you meant like something hot to try it. They've got a little hat on. I've got a heated one of those heated hats. No, it's to do with, I think, again, mixing up this texture that's going into the mouth, which must make more ice cream eating less disgusting to them. But it's just hilarious to see a competitive ice cream eating competition and then someone, yeah, exactly, dunk in and eat fries. Have you ever heard of the term sensory specific satiety, which is what you've already been discussing, I just don't know. So sensory specific satiety is simplified, is almost like you get bored of the same thing, basically. And you also

talk about it with taste. So, for example, if you feed someone sandwiches and they have one filling, or you feed someone else, sandwiches with multiple fillings, the person who served multiple fillings will consume more food, and the idea is you can get bored of consuming the same thing. And the easiest example of this in everyday life, perhaps, is if you went to a food buffet. If I served you your regular dinner on its own, alacart, you eat it.

If you go to a food buffet, and that first plate is your regular dinner, you don't stop afterwards because you see all of these very tasty foods and you see all of the, I want to try a bit of that, I want to try a bit of that. And it, there is supposedly a possible kind of evolutionary basis for this. In that in times of food scarcity, if you found another type of food, it is beneficial for you to

keep eating because you now have more food than you are used to. And supposedly it's almost like overriding your typical appetite signals, because you have multiple sources of food. This is a good time for you to consume more. So if you've hunted an animal and you've eaten it, but then you find another source of food. You could eat that now. And the theory behind sensory specific satiety is you will get

border of a certain taste or texture, but that is complemented with a different taste or texture. French fries. It's easier for you to keep eating. So for example, if you had a bowl of french fries or you had a bowl of french fries and ice cream, it is sometimes easier to keep going. Or even things like if you have french fries, but then you have ketchup or sauce, or something on the side, is often easier to keep going because you don't get bored of that same thing.

Okay, so important things to know, calories, you said that calories matter, but I said I saw Dr. Giles You and he said that great guy by the way calories tell you absolutely nothing that right? So Giles you Professor of genetics a Cambridge I think he's he's an incredible guy and I think he got some backlash on social media recently In my opinion without casting too much shade, I think people through shade at him

without realizing who he is. Because the way people talk to him, like who's this guy that doesn't know what he's talking about, is like, dude with a stellar academic career for decades and decades. Very, very much, chill the fuck out, pause, research, and then come back. So, Jal's Yo, he's a fantastic guy.

And I actually listened to his podcast in full, his recent one. And I feel like the video that went on social media and what he said in the podcast didn't match but it was a hell of a trailer and I understand why it riled people up. So, what Jal's Yo will say, like the simplified version, and this is echoed with other people

who are also some of which are very intelligent, is the simplified version, and this is echoed with other people who are also some of which are very intelligent, is calories matter yes, but there are limitations within that. So for example, it is very difficult to accurately quantify how many calories you're consuming. It doesn't matter how meticulous someone is with calorie counting. Calorie counting is impossible, nearly impossible to get perfect gear accurately. And often that's for reasons outside of your control. Labels, the nutritional information is allowed a natural variance. So just because something says it's 100 calories, doesn't mean it's 100. It might be 110, it might be 90. Also, the way you prepare food,

for example, can change the calorie content of that food or the energy content of that food. Just like if you juice vegetables, you can remove fiber. You may put the vegetables in and then you juice it. But if it removes the fiber, you have changed the qualities of that food, even though the food itself is the same. So the way you prepare food can influence the calorie values of that food. But one of the things that he has explained, which is really important, is the caloric availability of food, or something referred to as metabolizable energy of that food. So for example, say nuts. If you have 100 grams of nuts, or say 100 calories of nuts, when you consume them, some of those nuts will go through you. If you checked in the toilet afterwards, you would probably

see fragments of nuts. So you have not absorbed all of the calorie content from those nuts. Now if you break the nuts down so they're easier to digest by making them into peanut butter. So let's say you have peanuts, peanut butter or even peanut oil, which is obviously refined right down. It's changed to the food matrix completely. The calorie availability goes up so you will absorb and utilize a higher percentage of those calories. So just because you're consuming a hundred calories on paper doesn't mean that the end result is the same. And I think that's one of the big things that trips people up because you have people that keep saying all calories are the same. And then you have other people that go, well, actually, no, because we know that

calories, certain foods can behave differently in the body. We know that the calories you eat from foods aren't necessarily the same as the number of calories you absorb from food. And you almost get two camps are going past each other. So in a general, like mixed diet, let's not use outlier examples of sweet corn or nuts or how you blend vegetables or whatever. If you take a mixed diet and you change the quantity of that mixed diet so you're consuming more calories or fewer calories, that can predict body weight gain or body weight reduction.

But when you compare calorie values between foods, things get a little bit more complicated because foods that are higher in fiber can decrease the metabolizable energy value of that food, foods that are higher in protein, your body will burn a little bit more energy digesting those foods. So what Giles is saying is calories matter, but they don't tell you about food quality, which is important. People can focus so much on calories that they overlook the kind of health aspect of food. Well, in back in 2010, 2011, when if it fits your macros first came out and car back loading. Great example, by the way. Keep going.

Yeah, and skip loading. Did you ever do skip loading? No, what's that? Skip loading was like carb night, but it was on a Sunday and the only goal each Sunday. So you went completely carb free. You went like keto slash carb free throughout the week. And then on a Sunday, the goal was to eat as many carbs as possible, disregard everything else. So the

advice was to eat an entire box of children's cereal upon waking, and this was offsetting the metabolism going through the floor. And, you know, the day you had to track the day that your body weight went back to the baseline that it was on the Saturday. And this was also used by competitive bodybuilders to see where they were at. I did. I did. were at. I did. With a different name. Okay, cool. Nice. It was rebranded. But so when you've got, especially if it fits your macros, my guys from Brooklyn Fitness, one of their most viewed videos is we got a six past, we got a six pack eating haribo and cheesecake. And you know, what you're doing is you're

sticking a middle finger up at food quality, at satiety, at all of these things. And personally, for me, I actually think I timed it quite badly because a lot of what I learned, some of the inherited wisdom that I learned during a very formative period of me starting to understand dieting was the if it fits your macros phase. And the problem that I had there was I really didn't think about food quality all that much. I didn't think about satiety, I didn't think about energy density, I didn't think about where is this come from, what has this been washed in? Could I, why am I not buying for an extra 70 pounds, why am I not buying a kilo of organic chicken breast instead of a kilo of god knows

where they're from, chicken breasts, not that those are bad, but my point being that I disregarded exclusively anything which wasn't kai ko. It's like, look, if it's not calories, I don't care, bro. And I got lean and I was like, what, I've 23 or something, so I was made out of rubber and magic so it didn't really matter. But yeah, I feel like this sort of insight, the kind of insights that you're putting across here, although there are a lot less sexy, sorry, but- Yeah, there they are. Unfortunately. They, I think, should set somebody up for a much better long-term relationship with food, which is significantly more sustainable. Yeah, so you're kind of if it fits your macro's example.

I think it's a really good extreme end of the spectrum to why someone like Jaldo will say calories don't matter. They're not the be all and end all. So traditionally in bodybuilding culture people used to diet on a very restrictive list of foods. There are top bodybuilders that will say they only ate five foods for 16 weeks going into their show and it's like chicken breasts, sweet potatoes, oats, rice and vegetables or whatever.

So people were dieting on very restrictive lists of foods. And if it fits your macros spawned from the idea of food substitution. So on bodybuilding forums, if someone said, hey, I'm supposed to eat rice, but can I eat potatoes instead? They would say, sure, if it fits your macros, that's fine. And the idea was that you can interchange foods with similar properties.

If your meal plan says chicken, you are allowed to eat fish if you want. You are allowed to eat turkey if you want. That's how neurotic and obsessive bodybuilding that used to be. And then if it fits your macros, kind of spiral to the point where people were saying, food quality doesn't matter as long as you are consuming the same number of calories. And whilst technically it's kind of true in some ways, if you ate nothing but ultra processed junk food and you consumed it within a calorie deficit, you would lose body fat and body weight, which you already know. But it's not

saying that all the other properties of food aren't important. So you can have two diets at 2,000 calories. But if this one is more nutrient dense, it is less processed, it has a lower energy density, it is higher protein, it is higher fiber. Although they start as 2,000 calories each, the end result in their body is starkly different. What's the difference in their body is going to be? Okay, so from an energy density perspective, appetite regulation would be superior on the unprocessed diet. If a diet is higher in fiber, it reduces the metabolizable energy within that diet. So basically higher fiber diets you

excrete a little bit more energy than you will on a lower fiber diet. Higher protein diets, you will burn more energy digesting. That because protein has a higher energy cost of utilization, something called the thermic effect of food, or diet induced thermogenesis. Where else have I got to? Protein fiber, food quality, appetite, health. For example, ultra-processed foods, I know health like very unsexy topic.

Ultra-processed foods, the higher percentage of your diet that comes from ultra-processed foods, there is a link with an increased risk of various non-communicable diseases and all-caused mortality. And it's not necessarily saying that it's purely from the ultra-process foods, it might be that unprocess foods are being displaced out of your diet. So if two people are consuming 2000 calories, but one of them is consuming a lot of vegetables and the other one is consuming a lot of jelly beans, obviously the health effect of the diet is different. It's not that the jelly beans contain some carcinogen. It's that the replacement of some other food that would have been neuroprotective, physiologically

protective, etc., etc. It could be that the beneficial compounds that are found in diverse unprocessed nutrient dense diets are removed when consuming a diet that's high in ultra-process foods that are nutrient spars. It is possible that certain foods are more facking than others for various reasons, but it's very hard to isolate those without looking at very long-term studies. It gets very difficult to say, is this one compound additive E number that we use in this donut going to cause people to gain more weight over the next 20 years?

It's not a study that you tend to engineer. But generally speaking, diets that are high in ultra-process foods are worse for health, obviously. So although the two diets are the same, the actual health impact and the body composition impact can be different despite the same number of calories when first ingested. Okay, someone's listening to this and they say, I understand that the environment that we're in is more difficult now to lose weight.

I understand that I have genetic predispositions and biological set points that are different to other people. I also understand that there are some principles that I need to look at when I'm designing a diet. Yeah. What do I do, Ben? There's all of these different diets out here. There's intermittent fasting, time-restricted eating, keto, carnival, veganism. Is it your suggestion that you should find the diet, which allows you to remain in a calorie deficit with as many whole and processed foods as possible, sustainably for as long as possible whilst feeling good about yourself. Is that the rough heuristic? Done, completed it. It's a great explanation. So the slightly more long-winded explanation

for anyone that's curious is dietary trials that look at weight loss interventions tend to be short. So for example, low carb versus low fat, which is better for fat loss. One group consumes a low carb diet, the other group consumes a low fat diet for six months. And they might notice that the low carb group lost a little bit more body weight at the end or a little bit more fat at the end. But when you extend these trials for longer periods of time, most of the differences wash away and they wash away for biological reasons that make weight loss harder in the long term,

but also adherence tends to decrease over time. So if someone watching this is like, you know what, my friend got great results on keto, so I'm going to try keto. But ultimately, unless someone can stick to keto for X number of months, slash years, it's almost knowing that you're going to get into a yo-yo cycle of, I'm doing keto now. I'll know keto has sapped my will to live. I'm going to stop doing keto. You're not fucking hate keto. I tried it. I tried it. And it just, I'm so hungry, my stomach doesn't enjoy it. I can't do it. And this is a perfect example, because some people watching this will be like,

I love keto. When I am on a keto diet, I find my appetite is way better. My hunger levels are down. My mental clarity is improved. I feel better. And whether that's keto or low carb, which are kind of another same umbrella. When you look at long term trials, most, the, the differences between named diets wash away, there is no best weight loss diet. Anyone that's telling you there's a best weight loss diet normally has something to sell you. But when you look at what's described as the inter individual data, some people get better results than others. So just because DietX might not be better than DietY on paper doesn't mean that

one person gets better results on DietX, one person out there loves Keto, someone else out there like yourself hates Keto, and it's important to be aware of those because some people will find that their app tight is better on diet X or they feel better on diet X. And if that allows them to adhere to a calorie deficit for an extended period of time, then that's important. Are you saying that adherence or dietary compliance is the biggest lever or the most important factor when it comes to weight loss? 100%. So, diets are more important than exercise for pure weight loss in general for multiple reasons, but it's very difficult for exercise to trump the importance of dietary changes. Multiple reasons. Number one, it's quite hard to burn a lot of energy purely to

exercise. So you do crossfit, which means that you work harder than your average person. And let's say you burned just for round figures, 500 calories per workout, which is again above the average for most people as gym program. If you did that four times per week, which is again above the average of most gym programs, that's 2000 calories. But in the grand scheme of it across the week, it's not a huge amount of energy when you think someone like yourself,

let's say you were burning 3000 calories per day, that's 21,000 calories over the course of the week. So it's kind of like the icing on top. On top of that exercise routines tend to make people feel hungrier, some people feel hungrier, not universally, but if you get 100 people to start running and you don't tell them what to do with their diet, some of them will lose a lot of weight, but some of them will not only not lose weight, but they will gain weight. And some people will say, for example,

there are people out there who start trading for a marathon and by the end of it, they've gained weight. And it's a biological response to the increase in exercise volume where they suddenly feel hungry. We should interject there, that's not necessarily bad weight though. Someone starts going to the gym and they start doing a push pull leg split and they gain

weight. Well, I mean, that's that's what you were hoping for presumably. This isn't people training for weight loss. This is people training for performance. Yeah, so where weight is an easier metric to measure because getting accurate body composition measurements is difficult when you're looking at kind of population studies. But if you look at aerobic training interventions for weight loss, rather than bringing in resistance training, which tends to increase lean body mass as you rightly pointed out, even aerobic training interventions, which are supposedly the best

interventions for weight loss, some people, when they exercise, their weight will stay stagnant, despite the fact they've increased their exercise volume. And some people's appetite ratings, their subjective appetite ratings go up. So let's say your typical person wants to lose weight. So they start going to the gym for the first time ever. They go three times a week, they burn two or

three hundred calories while they're there, but what they don't necessarily realises when they leave the gym, they feel a little bit hungry than they were before they went it. So without realising it, they can slowly creep up their calorie intake and the weight loss effects of exercise interventions in isolation are underwhelming, which is why dietary interventions need to be paired. What would you say to the people that are listening to this and say, well, fuck, why do I even need to bother to train? I evidently don't need to exercise if I want to lose weight. I can just lose weight on the couch. Yeah, so the kind of important, the important thing to point out is technically that is correct. You can of course, I mean, you can lose weight by

smoking more cigarettes and doing meth and fetamine and cocaine and Ibiza, if you want. And that is why I say, how much you weigh is not a behavior? Because just because someone weighs less doesn't mean that their health is equally improved regardless of the vehicle that took them there. So we know that health, we know that the health benefits of exercise are profound and diverse. So people who are more sedentary, there are associations with increased risk of non-communicable, non-communicable diseases and all cause mortality. And people who exercise more, there is a decrease of non-communicable disease risk and

all cause mortality. So whether exercise helps you lose weight or not is almost looking at exercise at the thing that that's not its main job. Yeah, that's a very good way to put it. The only, the sole goal of exercise is not to help you lose weight. It's a product that it can help you with. Exactly. And like you said, if someone started doing CrossFit, like something that you have done, just because the number on the scale changes, firstly, doesn't mean that your body composition hasn't changed.

You may lose body fat and gain lean body mass and your weight might remain static. But perhaps more importantly, it doesn't necessarily mean your health hasn't changed. And this has actually been seen in a few research papers where people's attitudes towards exercise, there are a lot of people's main motivation to exercise is to lose weight. And when they're not losing weight, their external reward has been removed and they no longer know how to judge the effectiveness of their exercise training regime. So when they go into the gym with the goal of losing weight, at some point they will hit a weight plateau, which is inevitable because if you

lost weight forever you would die, which is suboptimal. And when you hit that weight plateau, they're like, well, what's the point? And it's because they're only in their head, their only way of judging how effective their exercise program is, is a number on the scale. And that is a problem because unless they have other metrics to judge the effectiveness by all, like you said earlier, enjoyment that makes you want to go to the gym in the first place, as soon as the number on the scale stops moving,

what's the point? Okay, so to recap. Yep. The best diet is the one that you can adhere to the most. For weight loss, correct. For weight loss. For weight loss. The principles that you need to be looking at are that calories do matter, and awful lot, and that they are the fundamental thermodynamics that underpin what's going on, that you should

be prioritizing protein intake, that you should be aiming for whole foods that are as satiety inducing as you can and as what's the opposite of energy dense? Low in energy density. Yeah, energy density is almost as spectra is like high or low energy density. Okay, that a low in energy density. Yeah. You can trial through a number of different diets, you find one that both tastes good and feels good and that you think that you can stick to. Adherence now, it seems

comes down to a number of things, but one of the key levers will be willpower. How can people improve their willpower when it comes to dieting? That is a hell of a question and I don't have any furt monsters for that. You're the science guy Ben, come on science us. I personally, so the thing with willpower is I feel like, I feel like it does that thing where it points the finger at the person, which is fine to a degree, but I think that there are factors that influence will power that people aren't necessarily aware of. Like consciousness.

Yeah, consciousness is massively, and the industry is both massively heritable. Genetics and environment, for example. So like as an example of that, and it's an extreme example, but most people won't try and refute it. If your only gym was 30 minutes away from you, and you had to go there on your lunch break and you had to jump in the car and drive 30 minutes away, or you had a gym that was literally within your office,

most people would train more when the gym is more accessible to them. And although you can say we're going to the gym is just about willpower, it takes far less willpower to override the, I don't fancy working out today, when the gym is literally right there. And I say that as someone who has a garage gym, it is far easier for me to make that kind of conscious willpower decision to exercise when I can be in and out in 30 minutes without having to jump in the car and get changed and show at the gym etc etc.

I don't know, I don't have an answer for how someone can unlock more willpower to make their weight loss journey easier. Well, what you've identified there is that environment is a key cue. And given the fact that a lot of the people that are listening to this will have a... they're not at Guantanamo. I don't think this is being piked through the speakers there, although it might be. And given that, there are ways that you can set up your environment that will engender. That is where I look at things. So when you say how can someone kind of increase

their willpower for it, that is actually how I would answer it. So if you can make the hard decisions easier, I don't think that's necessarily a willpower perspective as such, but if you can engineer your environment to make it easier, that is where I would focus my attention. So as one kind of example of this, if I put a doughnut right in front of the person listening and say, don't eat this doughnut, assuming they like doughnuts, they will have to kind of recruit some willpower to override their natural inclination to eat the donuts. But when the donuts

not there, it doesn't require the same amount of willpower. So it's not necessarily about how can people recruit more willpower. It's about how to make their journey easier to engage in the behaviors that will take them to the goal. And that is how I would approach things. So as an example of this, going back to kind of individual adherence, what factors, and this can be an open question, what factors will make someone more inclined to exercise that don't just depend on willpower? Let's say for a moment that you can never influence

someone's genetic level of willpower, you can still influence how easy it is for them to exercise. What factors could you change? So the listeners to this podcast will say, oh, I could do that. I would say making the gym, choosing a gym, which is not only one that you enjoy, but one which is very convenient for you to get to. In between your commute to and from work, the gym that I trained at in Gospels, the new

castle for a very long time, I had to drive past on my way home. So it made me feel like an extra piece of shit if I didn't go in because I was already going past. Other things like the ease of parking, removing extra steps from going to the gym. If you've got to pay a dollar or a pound every time that you need to park outside, there's always going to be something there that's like, oh, I don't want to pay that pound today

and it's just justification. So finding something that's nice and frictionless like that, something which has got in terms of training, good open times. If you are looking to move to a different apartment, the place that I'm staying now, I'm right next to a park in Austin, which means I have a 12-minute 45-second loop, I've timed it an awful lot, that I can do. And that means that for me getting 10,000 steps in a day is super easy, because the second that my phone rings, whether it in a day is super easy, because the second that my phone rings, whether it's a prank call or someone that I need to speak to, immediately

my trainers are on, I'm out of the door, trainers at the back door or flip flops at the back door and just going for little walks here and there, leaving mobility, resistance bands and kettlebells just strewn around the house, I find is great, because if I'm just bored and I'm waiting for the state to finish cooking or whatever, I'll just strewn around the house. I find it's great because if I'm just bored and I'm waiting for the state to finish cooking or whatever, I'll just pick a kettlebell up five times or I'll do some overhead presses with a resistance band. That's another thing.

When it comes to diet, for me, I remember seeing, and this will be in your wheelhouse, people who bought a fruit bowl for the house had massive increases in the amount of consumption of fruit. You've got this beautiful display of all of this stuff that you know that you should be eating more of and that you're not eating enough of. Yeah. By fruit bowl, don't have confectionery out.

I have none of the food that you ever want to eat anywhere with an arm's reach. Put them in a pantry, put them in a really awkward cupboard to get to. Ideally, don't have them in the house at all. You can't eat the foods that aren't there. Those would be some environment designed things. I think these are really good examples of how it isn't necessarily about a willpower deficiency. That's why I said I don't know how someone would increase their willpower because I think often it's not necessarily about willpower, it's about changing the decisions so they require less willpower in the first place. So as an example of that, when I was traveling a lot, I, at one point I was staying in London, and it's very easy to look at

a different person and say that person's lazy. But when you look at individual circumstances, it's harder to do that. So I train a lot, I do some form of exercise every day, even if it's small, and I went to this apartment in London and I did my work, this was on a Sunday, and I walked to the nearest gym, which at the time was 10 minutes away. And what I didn't realize is that gym shut at 4 p.m. I think on a Sunday. And I was like, shit, where do I go? The next gym was, I think, a mile and a half away. So immediately, for me to train at that specific time

of that specific day, which for a lot of people is maybe when they finish work. If they're gym shuts at 8 p.m. And they can only go to the gym after 8pm, if they have to drive further to get to that gym, it's harder to do. On top of that, the gym I went to was expensive. I, when I got there for a guest pass, I had to pay 10 pounds, but I, their monthly membership,

I was like, a lot of people just couldn't afford this. And for me to get there, I had to jump on the tube to get there, or I would have to walk. So it's either more time effort, it requires more time, or it requires more expense to get the same result. So for me, I personally love convenience. I love the idea that if someone is struggling to get to the gym, can you make exercise or physical activity more convenient? So an example that I know you'll love, pickleball, great game. Fantastic, best sport in the world, yep. Me and my wife have just moved, we moved like a year ago, and in our neighborhood, they're at communal tennis courts,

they're free for us to go on, and they have pickleball there. I have never played a sport on a court for the last probably like 20 years, not tennis, I used to play at Babminton, but since we moved here, because that court is three minutes to walk to, we're playing pickleball multiple times per week, and we would never have done that before,

because if you said, oh, John's gonna play tennis or or John's going to play pickleball, we're like, OK, where's the nearest court? 20 minutes away. You know what can't be bothered? It's going to be two hours by the time we go there for an hour and then come back and find parking, whatever. So this is how I prefer to engineer things where you look at ways to make the hard easier. So going back to food proximity studies, it's not necessarily will'll rely on willpower to make small conscious decisions of, I am not going to eat that donut, for example. But you can decrease the amount of willpower required to do that if healthier food is

more convenient for you, hence the fruit bowl example. If I came to your house and emptied it from ultra-process foods and I made the fruit bowl look exquisite, the tastiest fruit you've ever looked even to people that don't like fruit. All of a sudden you're like, yeah, I could have one of those exotic papayas. Why not? Yeah, have you, do you wear a trach or do you wear a wop or anything similar? No, I wear an Apple watch, but... Do you wear it during pickleball? Yes, but I never look at the stats. Dude, it depends if you're playing doubles or singles, but if you get a good, hard game,

a competitive game of singles in for about 90 minutes, it's two hours is like the real sweet spot. For me, I average a thousand calories in two hours. It's fucking insane. So I actually used this as an example. I am traditionally, I've never played tennis, I used to play badminton. So if you told me to play tennis, I'd be shit at it.

And I would go on the court, I would keep hitting it out, and I'd be like, and you know what, I'm probably not enjoying this. The fact that pickleball is easier, it's like a mini tennis, to anyone who doesn't know it. Because it was easier, it was easier for me to play with a couple of friends, even if they've never

played before. And it was a more accessible version for the beginner that doesn't know what they're doing. But because it was more accessible, I enjoyed it more from day one. So rather than trying to pick a complicated sport and being like, you know what, I suck at this. We went in and we're like, God, that's really fun. And I am someone who is admittedly not someone who tends to love traditional cardio. If you said, if we were doing this podcast in person and you said, you know what, let's go for an hour jog afterwards. I can't think of fewer ways that I would rather spend my time. But if you said, you're going to play pickleball,

I would still jog for an hour. I would run for an hour doing these prints on the club. Yeah, faster. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I probably enjoy it. Yeah, time would pass. But it's not necessarily about, I need more willpower to go running.

I need better decisions to decrease my needful willpower. A better incentive around that. Yeah, I mean, dude, the secret cardio that it sneaks in is, and the difference between monostructural work, sitting on a bike, sitting on a roller, doing skier, or whatever, and playing a game, that you're not focused on the discomfort of the cardio. You're focused on the game that you're playing and trying to win and just

extracted by high-fiving your teammate and talk in the opposition and stuff. One thing that I would say, I've spoken about this on the podcast before, I bought a bike desk, so it's a recumbent cycling desk. Finally, the one. Yep, and this thing has been an absolute game changer for me getting zone two in. So zone two is something that I made myself a promise at the beginning of the year that I would stick to. I wanted to increase my HIV, I wanted to decrease my resting heart rate, I wanted to decrease my breath rate, and I just heard a lot, an awful lot from, you know,

your Brian McKenzie's of the world and your human beings of the world about 180 minutes of zone two a week would be really good for you if you could get it in. But if you actually realize what zone two is, it's the shitest of the heart rates because it's quicker than a walk, but for me it's slower than a run. So I'm like, what can I do? How am I going to find myself at zone two? And then if I do do it, I'm going to be sat on a bike in Golds gym, South Central Austin, hating myself, hating, hating every second of it. Whereas now, I can sit and do all of the emails that I didn't really want to do in any case. While I was doing the zone two that I didn't really want to do in any case, put some good music on, and both of those

things have made each other a lot more enjoyable. I'm like, ah, get to do emails. But if I do the emails I can, you know, get a good bit of training in and that's going to make me feel good after. And it's a bit of a treat for me because I can get to put my music on. And that's, that's my, that's my hack. That's my zone to hack. I love this. And I love that your, your, your, your is a perfect example of if I came to

as a personal trainer, let's say I'm one of those cliche, wanky personal trainers, and I said, you need to do more zone two training as an example. And you said, I don't really enjoy it. And I'm like, you need more willpower, you're lazy, you need to suck it up. That is what a lot of personal trainers would do when they approach your problem. They say, go to the gym, go for a jog, sit on the bike and the gym, and you're like, but I fucking hate that. Whereas you're looking at it from the perspective of how can I make that more convenient? So you buy a recumbent desk bike and use that. Of my wife did something similar where she bought one of those treadmill desks, and she has to walk her admittedly a pretty slow pace without distracting her emails because

bobbing up is now one of the typings difficult. But Bakochi works from home on her laptop and has a remote career. She realized that on a bad day, she would walk about 600 steps because she's just on her laptop from the morning to the evening. She would get up for lunch and she stays in the house. But then she got a treadmill desk and suddenly she is walking a lot. But it doesn't feel like effort because she's doing it in her own environment. She's not having to drive to the gym.

She's not having to stand on the treadmill surrounded by people that she doesn't necessarily like. It's not an inconvenient time of the day. She's not having to find a place to park. It's reducing the need for willpower by doing that. And it's important to point out that in both of these instances, it's, it does, it has cost money. There has been an investment into that. Like her treadmill desk is more expensive than a lot of people would be able to afford. And I'm not kind of dismissing that. But this is just an example of how when faced with a difficult decision telling someone just to do it, perhaps isn't quite

as effective as finding different solutions that take that person from A to B. Yeah, I mean, my bike desk is 350 bucks and I think you can get it in the UK for about 300 pounds. It's called an exapotic, exa work, 2.0 with Bluetooth. That's the one that you're actually after. That sounds like a bike name for a man. It's a real fucking piece of kit. Final thing, what have we not spoken about so far with regards to the world of eating with regards to personal impact of eating and with regards to the fundamentals that people need to understand?

I think that on the whole we have discussed the most important fundamentals that people would need to adopt. I think breaking weight loss goals down into individual habits is important, focusing on the things that are more within your control, such as the type of exercise you're doing, how much physical activity you're doing, what foods you are consuming. These are all kind of individual habits

that are easier to isolate and focus on and check off versus I want to lose X number of kilograms. From a fundamental's perspective, I would say you have been an incredible host and I wouldn't say there's anything that we really needed sandwich in here. There are lots of other side conversations that we could have, we could talk about body image or muscle growth

or other tenets of fat loss. But I think the questions that you've asked and the conversations that you've put forward I would say you've done an incredible job. If I've got your seal of approval, that's good enough for me. Why should people go if they want to check out the book and everything else that you do? Finding me on social media is fine. I'm on Instagram, TikTok, et cetera, under the handles BDC carpenter. Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you.

Thank you very much for having me on. Thank you for everyone listening. you