Modern Wisdom - #615 - Thomas DeLauer - Stop Making These Mistakes When Intermittent Fasting

Episode Date: April 15, 2023

Thomas DeLauer is a fitness expert, nutrition specialist, entrepreneur, YouTuber, and author. Improving your physique is one of the journeys that almost everyone faces challenges in, with both body and mind. Thomas has devoted his entire career to understanding the science of training and nutrition, specialising in the connection between mental and physical well-being.  Expect to learn how to build muscle while fasting, what is the easiest step-by-step plan for fat loss, what takeaways can we glean from 100-year-olds around the world, the zero-calorie hack to kill your cravings, the extraordinary childhood that shaped Thomas, his best advise on how to overcome past traumas & much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Subscribe to Thomas on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@ThomasDeLauerOfficial  Check out Thomas' Website - https://thomasdelauer.com/  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 friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Thomas T'Lower, he's a fitness expert, nutrition specialist, entrepreneur, YouTuber, and an author. Improving a physique is one of the journeys that almost everyone faces challenges in, with both body and mind. Thomas has devoted his entire career to understanding the science of training and nutrition, specializing in the connection between mental and physical wellbeing. Expect to learn how to build muscle while fasting, what is the easiest step-by-step plan

for fat loss, what takeaways we can glean from 100-year-olds around the world, the zero calorie hack to kill your cravings, the extraordinary childhood that shaped Thomas, his best advice on how to overcome past traumas, and much more. You might have seen earlier this week that I did an announcement saying that I am doing some live shows toward the end of this year and the rumors are true. I will be on stage in a venue not a million miles away from where you live and the way that we are rooting this tour is based on where people that listen to the show live. So if you go to ChrisWilliamson.live, you can sign up there, tell me your city, just tell me where you live

And this will determine where the show goes to, the more signups in each particular city, the more likelihood There is of me going there. ChrisWilliamson.live And you will be the first people to find out about tickets and dates and locations and all that stuff too And it's going to be incredibly exciting terrifying and over-, and everything else. I thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Thomas DeLauer. I'm just a guy on the internet man. I'm just, you know, for me, I'm a translator of science. I'm not a biochemist.

I don't pretend to be one. I take the research. I know how to read a paper very well. And I tend to get really overly excited about stuff like that. And then I translate it. And I try to put it into layman terms and do a decent job at articulating complex subject matter into a way that's digestible for people so that they can have a chance to really review the research

and understand and put another brick in the wall for themselves towards being healthier, having more vitality and just being better humans. Why did you get interested in that? I realized not that long ago, that I'm not that great at many things, but I'm decent at a lot of things. And I realized the one thing that I am really good at is articulating and communicating.

And for a long time, I tried to fight that. I always wanted to be the strongest guy in the room or the smartest guy in the room. I always wanted to kind of face adversity and I just want to be that guy. And then I realized that, you know what, it's actually really good to be a good effective communicator. And I started leaning into that. And the moment that I leaned into that, and I fed the stallion starve to the pony, so to speak, I realized that I can take all these things that I'm halfway decent at, but really get people excited about them with my ability to communicate it.

Talk to me about childhood for you. You have a very interesting background. What was that like? Yeah, my childhood, you know, it's interesting. I don't talk about it much. And recently it's been coming up more. Probably just people are trying to figure out what makes me tick. I came from what looked like a pretty normal

conventional childhood on the surface. I had a loving mother, a very loving father. I ran my first like 10k when I was, I think, five years old, right? So I was kind of got into running at a very young, young age. And then I, ultimately, I'm flashing forward. I ran my first marathon when I was 11. And the reason that I'm starting with that is not to say, hey, I'm this amazing person looking at me.

It's because now as an adult, and as a father myself, I look back at that. I'm like, wow, that's interesting. Like, what was my mom thinking? And I love my mom, and I'm close with my mom. And I did everything with my mom. Like, I was always along by her side, right? And I realized that she did these things. And I wanted to be like her. I wanted to with my mom. Like I was always along by her side, right? And I realized that she did these things

and I wanted to be like her, I wanted to be with her. And my mom would run Marathon, so I would run Marathon's too. And my mom sort of had this mentality of like, hey, well, you know it, if you wanna hang out with me, then you're gonna do the stuff that I'm gonna do. And there was no real worry about it. It was just the way that it is.

Hi, and so we're talking age four. You know, to be able to get ready to run this it. I don't even think I really, I mean, I was running like, I remember running like two, three miles at age four, five. And it was with mom. Yeah, with mom, you know, and I remember people, because we lived really close to these wineries,

like we were living in Sonoma, and I remember people like clapping, you know, like when I would go on runs, I'd be like, wait a go, like, wait a go mom, you know, wait a, like it was cool. I enjoyed it. There was never a mom where I a, like it was cool. I enjoyed it. There was never a moment where I didn't like it. Like I always loved it.

That evolved into sort of loving the pain of it too, which I mean, you talked to endurance athletes and that's a pretty common trait. They kind of almost have this massacistic type feeling with it. Yeah, so I mean, I was training at a very young age for that. And that just became part of my life. I was the skinny runner kid that was made fun of because it was weird to run, you know, your elementary school and you're the kid that wants to go out for a run. You're the kid that decides to like run home for school.

Like, I was a weird kid. Don't get me wrong. I was like the hiking boots and shorts type of kid. So yeah, I was weird, but my mom exposed me to so many different crazy experiences to the point where other kids thought it was insane. So I was the weird kid. As a result of my mom, always exposing us to very interesting things. When I was 11 years old, I backpacked the John Muir Trail from Yosemite to Mount Windy, just 230 miles, took us 16 days and no experience in backpacking,

and then went back again the next year to do it again and did it in 11 days. And ran out of food, you know, ran out of food for four days. We come back, CPS gets called on us because I'm emaciated. My mom's like, no, these kids wanted to do this. And we're like, yeah, we want, no, no, mom is awesome, like, trust me, we want to do this stuff.

It's, the child who was just crazy, but at the time, nothing felt weird about it because it was normal to us. And nothing was ever, we were never put in a situation where we felt in danger or anything like that, but we were always subconsciously held to this very high standard. Like, you should perform.

And it made me a very result-oriented person, that unfortunately damaged me a little bit as an adult because being a result-oriented person has resulted in me being, well, results oriented, which I don't necessarily know is the best way for me to go through life. But yeah, there's a lot of nuance, a lot of detail that goes on there, but just interesting experiences that made people look at me funny. Were you bothered by school?

Were you interested in school? Hated school. Hated it. Why? I just, well, for one, I I always felt like I could go faster. Like, I felt like very restricted. And I don't mean that in some conceited way. Like, oh, I'm smarter than people.

That's not even, I just felt like, this is not a good use of my time. Like, I felt like this is terrible. From what age? Oh, shoot. I got it, it's funny. So I got expelled from preschool. The only person in the history, the only person at that time in the history of Sunshine Preschool in Sonoma, California,

probably can fact check this to get expelled. I just wouldn't have it. I wanted to go home and it was I tried to escape. I did escape and I wanted to go home. I would just scream and cry until my mom came to pick me up. I said, I don't want to fucking be here. And kindergarten, I made it through kindergarten, but it was like every day after school, I would cry waiting for my mom to come home. I'm not gonna come pick me up

because I wanted to go home so bad. I just did not want to be there. I hated it and I don't know to this day like why. Kids weren't particularly mean to me. I actually had friends. I was weird, but it wasn't like I was bullied. I mean, I was catapict on because I was the skinny runner kid, but it was more just like people joshy all the time.

Yeah, but I hated it. I hated being confined. I hated being restrained. And what was home life like? Home life was, you know, it was as a young kid, it was pretty normal. My mom went to school. She was a microbiology major, so she never really used it professionally.

She owned a landscaping business for a while, and then she became a school bus driver randomly. It was very interesting. She randomly decided I'm just going to drive the school bus because it's a way for me to have summers off with my kids and a way for me to have the same hours as my kids. And that was a root of me getting made fun of a lot of times mom's the school list rapper. My dad owned a bookstore

in Oakland. This was very interesting because at the time my kid I don't really care. My dad owns a bookstore, whoopty do. But as I grow older I realize that this bookstore to Lourdes super newstand, 13th and Broadway in Oakland, was the only, was the world largest newsstand. So it had newspapers and magazines from all over the world that would come there one to two days later after they were released in their respective countries. So as a result, my father's bookstore was like this massive cultural melting pot in Oakland, where people from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Australia,

whatever would come there to pick up respective papers and whatever from their countries. So not only was it a culture melting pot where people all came together and put aside their differences, which is very interesting. It was also the site of a lot of hate crime, the site of a lot of, so massive thing in history. So if you look up to Lauer's super new stand, you see that. It's been around in a family business. So I never realized that until I was adult, I was like, wow, that's very wild.

My dad worked a lot, but he was still a very present father. So home life was good. It was, I could pick apart little things everyone can. There were extreme situations. There were situations that I probably wouldn't talk about publicly, but nothing that was ever dangerous or bad. What about when you get into teen years, when you start to take life a little bit more seriously?

Yeah, so by the time I was about 9 or 10, I ended up with obsessive compulsive disorder. I used to have to flip light switches. I was always, I remember these, I had these like hardwood floor in one, like transitional area of my house, and I had like these squares. It kind of looked like where the Celtics play, like that courthouse has like that, you know.

And I used to, I could only step on the ones that had the grains facing forward. If I stepped on the grains facing, laterally, it was terrible. And it was almost always surrounding something happening to my mom. If I stepped on the wrong one, my mom would die. I literally took the step on a crack, break your mother's back thing, literally. So I was like, I can't, I can't, well break my mom's back.

I had this attachment to my mother. So I suffered with that, but as I was in middle school, I can't remember the term for it. I was pulling my hair out. So I had bold spots in my hair because I was pulling my hair out just from anxiety. So I was put on, you know, benzodiazepines, like H13, but I didn't really take them.

They were just- How common is that for a child to be prescribed benzos at that age? Not very common. It's not a healthy thing. It was like for an emergency case situation, right? So it was in one of those things where, like it was not like my mom was so

extremely in control of them and things like that. And I don't even ever recall taking them, right? So it was one of those things where with that, I ran into all kinds of crazy situations. I mean, it was just, I felt constantly anxious. Like my teen years were really, really tough. And of course pulling my hair out and it was just, I felt constantly anxious. My teen years were really, really tough. And of course, pulling my hair out led to getting made fun of.

And the only thing that I really found control in was running. I could be in control when I was running. So for me, running became even more part of my identity. It was like, this is, and that carries through to me today. I don't necessarily feel whole unless running is a part of my life. And I'm very self-aware of that because it goes all the way back to, you know, a coping mechanism for me. So 10 years, early 10 years were particularly rough for me.

What is happening with your sense of your own body as your, if you've got anybody to smoke here at this age? Not as much now because I'm very aware of it. as you got anybody this mafia at this age. Not as much now, because I'm very aware of it. Definitely went through phases, even phases of self sabotage. When I became overweight, I ultimately had an idea in this where I talk about this with Nick Bear.

There was a point when I was like 13, 14, where I used to kind of like measure my wrist with my fingers. And if I could have room to like rattle my wrist around in my fingers, that was like a win for me. Like, no, I didn't want to be skinny, I didn't care. It was an element of control. All of this is an arbitrary measure that you decided, especially given the fact that like the width of your wrist

growing and the length of your fingers growing between the ages of 12 and 16, aren't going to happen in sync with each other. Correct, Correct. So there's nothing, nothing there. There's an arbitrary choice. Yeah, it was the same kind of satisfaction that I would almost get out of it. It was the same kind of satisfaction that I would almost get out of flipping like switches. It was just something like, but I also felt very in control with that. I felt like I can control when I don't eat, I can't control what I don't eat. I didn't really have an obsession with body composition. I suppose if I reverse engineer it,

I could think about it and say, yeah, I wanted to be lighter for running and it made more sense. So I was very skinny, very frail. And then when I was like 13, 14, I did discover the gym and I got really interested in the gym. And actually the gyms,

I would arguably say safe my life. Like it was one of this, because I was one of those people that had I gotten into the wrong drugs at that point in time, I think it could have been very bad. I've always been a very obsessive person, but to come back to your question, like the body just morph you in now, to a certain degree, yes, because my profession depends on me being lean in a lot of ways. So do I have anxiety around not looking a certain way? I would be lying if I said no,

but it's in control on myself aware of it. But when I became overweight, which we'll talk about in a little bit, I reverse engineer that and I think about it. I was like, it's almost a means of self-sabotage. It was like, it was me in a way like, I was aware that I was gaining weight and like gained a bunch of weight fast. And it was almost like this revolt like, I was aware that I was gaining weight and like gained a bunch of weight fast.

And it was almost like this revolt against how I was before. And it's interesting. It's just a very wild thing. I'm very self-aware, psychoanalytical person. So I try to look at these things. But yeah. Didn't you say something about psychedelics when you were younger? So yeah, so yeah, that's what's interesting.

So like when I was in seventh and eighth grade, I tried acid, like I tried. And like I smoked pot like a crazy kid, seventh grade, seventh eighth grade. It was, and I know some people judge on that, but I mean, I was a kid, I was a lost kid, right? Like what, and I look back at that now, being a father, I'm just like, what was I missing? Because I feel like my childhood wasn't fucked up.

Like I don't, it doesn't look like it went on the surface, right? But there's certain things, but I'm like, why was I doing that stuff? And I got that stuff out of my system so young, but the time I was 14, I was like a total square. You know, like I didn't even drink. Were you doing that with people? So generally, yes.

I had like two close friends that I would. You know, and it was just, it was weird. And I lived in Italy for a semester, went to school in Italy for a semester when I was, I can't remember, I was 12 or 13. I guess it would have been, I think I turned 13 when I was there. And that was a cool, cool experience because my mom said, hey, we're going to enroll you in homeschool so that you can study abroad and take college courses if we can get you approved for it. So basically we did, we got me approved through like AIFS

and I was able to get college credits to study art history as a 12, 13 year old ball concurrently homeschooled. Great experience, but all the college kids that I was around thought it was really fun to like get me drunk, get me shit face, pump me full or whatever the fuck they wanted to. And for me it was like, it was kind of fun because I was the cool, like, 12-year-old.

And these, I mean, you're taking people that are like 19, 20 years old and they're just like, oh, cool, let's fuck with this kid. And I look back at that and I'm like, I was exposed to some interesting stuff at a very young age. But then you come out of that and you've almost had a, like, hedonistic period before you've even hit puberty and now you're going through your teen years being a little bit more. How did the OCD blend with being ripped out of your hometown, being taken over to Italy,

also all of these new experiences, all the kids coming in and getting you to do stuff? I would have imagined that those two things would have clashed very badly. Dude, I think it actually was a pattern interrupt for me. I think it's exactly what I needed. And sometimes I wonder if it's like, did my mom know this? Like she, my mom's philosophy when things was like,

when everyone goes this direction, go that direction. You know, where everyone wanted to put me in therapy and everyone wanted to fix the problem and everyone wanted to, you know, hypnosis this and nothing was working, I was still anxious. I was still dealing with problems. My mom was just like, you know, maybe this fucking kid needs the mountains, you know, let's do this.

Maybe this freaking kid needs some like different cultural experiences. And that shit helped me. It absolutely helped me. But in certain ways, it may have made it worse. But I don't think keeping me in the confined little box, I hated my hometown. You know, as an adult now, like, I look back at it and I appreciate it, but I hated't think keeping me in the confined little box, I hated my hometown. You know, as an adult now, like I look back at it

and I appreciate it, but I hated my hometown. And I just couldn't stand it. And I just wanted to get out of time. And I've always felt like that, or I had always felt like that as a kid. I felt very confined in any situation you put me in school, my town, even my state. And I would sometimes develop resentment towards it

because I'm just, I gotta get out of this. And the only way for me to get out of it is to hate it as much as I possibly can until I finally explode and get out of it. Okay, so you're getting toward the end of your teens now. When do you start to game weight? So, game weight at the, probably like 19-20. Okay, so we've got a little bit of time in there. Yeah, so I mean, I put on some muscle and that was kind of the golden period of my teens, like right, like 15 to 18. I was independent study and a lot of the reason I did that is after my mom and dad's divorce when I was 13, I lived with my mother. My mother was dealing with a number of different things, both legally, mentally, just a lot of struggles that I don't necessarily need

to go into detail, but she know, she needed some help and stuff So for me it was independent study where I was like home school But I was still part of the school You can still enroll in school sports a really cool program worked well for someone like me But then I also worked 40 or 50 hours a week to help support my mom and to help just kind of keep life going So from 14 the time I could get my my workers permit What are you doing? So I had 50 hours of your bagging groceries. So bagging groceries, and then I worked for a financial services company where I would just like file stuff. So I'd work as many hours as I could.

So when you have your workers permit, I think you could only work like 30 hours at a select roll, and then I would go to like a different roll and get paid under the table. You know, so it's in a school. Plus school. But I was independent. Honestly, I was never challenged by school. Like independent study, I could get all my work done in like two hours for the week. Like it wasn't a big deal. And honestly, I held like a 3.98 GPA. Like it wasn't hard for me. And like school just didn't challenge me.

Of course, I wasn't trying to be challenged. Like I wasn't taking, I was like in AP English, you know, I was in high English. I sucked at math. So I was like baseline math and just like, you know, so I kind of skated through getting by. Yeah. Just getting by, but with good grades. And but it just was not challenged. And for me, it was like, I learned the value of a dollar really quick because I'm like, okay, well, I know how to work. And that was what was important to me was like, how do I, how do I work? How do I get all this done? You realize how much of an outlier situation that is, right, to be working between 40 and 50 hours at the

age of 14 or 15 plus doing self-directed homeschool while supporting mum while trying to learn about yourself in the world around you while dealing with the after effect of OCD. Yeah, probably is a lot. But everything prior to that felt so normal, right? It's wild. Well, that's one of the interesting things about anybody's life experience, right? You're never going to, until Elon fully dials in your link, you're never going to be able to feel what it's like to be in the texture of somebody else's mind. You're never going to know what life is like to live as

somebody else. And with the advent of the internet and social media, which kind of just give us the view through the eyes of other people, at least in a small dose. But as a kid, you know, when you're relatively sheltered, you're not exposed to as many people or things and you don't have that ability to use theory of mind,

the life that you have is the only one that you've ever known. So it is normal, very much is. Mine as well. I couldn't imagine So it is normal. Very much is. Mine as well. I couldn't imagine what it would be like to have siblings. It was an only child. So I'm like, well, this is just what life is, isn't it? It's you and mum and dad and the dogs.

I got, you know, you don't know what it's like to have a house that's got cats, you don't know what it's like to have a house that's got blah, blah, blah. You know, like, I didn't know what it was like to have a house that had it. We always, every house that we were in, mum and dad, love baths. So we always had like a bath. So I'm like, the first time that I lived in every house that we were in, mum and dad live baths. So we always had like a bath.

So I'm like, the first time that I lived in a house to the showers, when I went to university, I'm like, your life experience, especially if you're a little bit more sheltered or sheltered, but like constrained sometimes, whether by availability or habit, can be difficult for you to sort of rip yourself out of that and work out what's going on. I could never understand why my sister who was four years older, when she went off to

the Air Force Academy, I never understood why she was so manically worried about me. Because I was 14, I'm just like Liz, like everything's fine. Why are you freaking out? You're so stressed out worried about me all the time. Like what's going on in the Thomas, what's going on in the Thomas? And all I could think I was like, oh, you're dealing with some serious issues there, girl. And then I'm like, yeah, I talk with her now.

She's like, you see why? I was freaking back out. Maybe I was one of the potential issues. Okay, so you are now working full time while doing your self directed stuff for school. Going to the gym, gaining a... But you're saying that this is also the golden period? Well, I felt great.

There was nothing like... It was a period of time where I felt in complete control. Like, I've got infinite energy. I'm in my teens. Made it work. Made it work. I'm getting tired. Like, whatever.

Like, I could work. I was making money, helping support mom, but I was also making my own money. And so by the time I was, you know, 15, 16, things started to kind of mellow out a little bit. I didn't need to work as much. I was still working probably 30, 40 hours. And then at that rate, I was still running cross country

in the fall. So I was obviously, I was a runner, of course, I'd run cross country. I discovered a rugby my junior year. So I played rugby, I was a runner, of course, I'd run cross country. I discovered a rugby my junior year, so I played rugby. I was a winger. I really enjoyed rugby. It was a way for me to connect. I didn't really, on the surface, I didn't have any issues socially.

Like, I had what would look like a normal social dynamic, but deep down, it was a struggle for me. Deep down, it was really hard for me me to I had to work to maintain friendships because I felt like it just didn't come natural. It was an introverted person in the past came, I think that was a nurture versus nature thing. I think that was something that was manufactured as a result of working and just probably not a typical upbringing.

Yeah, it's not having the time. And my mom also did kind of like make it seem growing up as though anything conventional was not okay. She used to pull us out of school. My sister and I, pull us out of school sometimes to like, you know, screw school, like we're gonna go hike. We're gonna go do some, you know, pull us out of school. Like no parents would do that. Like, but my mom really wanted to be around us.

Did she want, was she wanting to be around us was she wanted to groom us? I don't understand, you know, right? But I enjoyed it because any opportunity to not be in school I was all about. So for me, the fact that I could independent study didn't have to spend time at wasting my time at school could work and actually do something constructive. So yeah, I was still running, not as much running, but I was starting to lift. And you know, I got in pretty good shape in high school. I was, I, and then I met my wife when I was 16 and she was 14. And that's when things just got really good.

Like things felt great. Like I had met ultimately what I felt was the woman of my dreams and is the woman of my dreams. And then I married her and have two kids with her. Never been with another woman of my life. And talk about coping mechanisms, right? Like talking about like my wife had a similar background, not the same, of course, but her family dynamic was very twisted.

And we found each other and we just like locked onto each other and like our messed up family dynamics and, you know, two divorced families. And we're just like, we got each other, you know, and I was like, finally, this chick understands me. Someone understands me. Someone loves me for me, short shorts and hiking boots. And it's awesome. So like that.

That sounds like a blessing. Dude, it's fucking amazing. Do you think about what you would be if you hadn't met your wife at the moment? Oh, my dude, I honestly think I think I'd probably be dealing with addiction and things like that. I really do, because like she is the Jane to my Tarzan. Without that, I'm just fucking crazy.

I would fly off the handle because I'm just so high energy, so I need a little bit of that guardrail. I need that. I think now I've developed traits and I'm mature enough that having forbidden something ever happened to her, like, I don't think I'd spiral off, but I think during those fundamental years, it was so unbelievably, like, critical. What happens with the weight gain? So, the weight gain came, I always joke about this, because I never out there on the internet,

it makes it seem like I was this obese slob that was always that way and I struggled with my weight. The struggle was real, but what people don't understand is the mental issues that came from that and stemmed that. So a lot of it started as somewhat of a bulk gone wrong. It started out as I'm going to put on some weight from muscle, right? I'm going to try to gain some muscle. And then over time, I just kind of stopped working out, got obsessed with, you know, I ended up going into a commission only, a healthcare recruiting job, and all this high stress stuff where I was just trying to make money. So in the same stuff I was doing

earlier, except now I am completely on my own, and I've got responsibilities. And my body just wasn't working the same way that it used to. So it was very easy for me to put on muscle, but then I also put on a bunch of fat it used to. So it was very easy for me to put on muscle, but then I also put on a bunch of fat with it too. So I always kind of joke. It was like, this was a classic example of a bulk gone wrong, but it wasn't like, I was bulking on six cups of brown rice per day.

I was eating jack-in-the-box tacos. I was eating everything under the sun. I remember my wife's brother being like, looking at this baking sheet that I had full of tater tots, like just an entire giant baking sheet. I remember him being like, that's healthy. And I just remember that such a snide little comment

and I was like convinced myself like this is healthy, I'm bulking. I was totally like fucking Eric Cartman in beef cake like that. I was like, uh, weight gain 5,000 like as long. So fortunately, I wasn't overweight for a long period of time. I was like two and a half years where I was like, uh, weight gain 5,000 like as long as so. Fortunately, I wasn't overweight for a long period of time. I was like two and a half years where I was, but I tip the skills close to 300 pounds at one point. And the fact that I gained the weight that fast at the time, I didn't think of it, but now I think

about it now, I'm like, what the fuck was mentally going on with me? This was like a some weird element of self sabotage. It was like, I'm a, I'm not a stupid guy. Smart enough to know and self-aware enough to know that like, if you eat 10,000 calories, it was like I was stuffing my face trying to gain weight. I remember my wife even making comments like, you know, I love you anyway. I don't know what you're doing, but it was crazy. It's like, you see those my 600 pound life. You see that stuff where these people are laying in bed and they know what they're doing and they're doing it to themselves. And I was walking down that path and then I think about like, oh my gosh, my sort of disorder eating past

with being somewhat anorexic. This was like the opposite of it. I'm like, holy crap, I've got some serious eating disorder stuff that I got to work with. Fortunately, I was able to get a grasp on it. I always joke about the moment when I saw someone that was in acquaintance of mine. They were driving down the road and they saw me eating Jack in the Box Tacos. And maybe you've heard the story because it's floating around the internet all the time.

But I went through Jack in the Box, pulled into a stall afterwards and was eating my translucent Jack in the Box Tacos because they're so full of grease you can see through them. And this person drives by and he's not a close friend, he's an acquaintance, but he just waves at me, nonchalantly. And it was the fact that it was such a nonchalant wave that I'm like, this dude, like he wasn't shocked by the fact that I'm sitting here stuffing my face. This was status quo normal to him.

This is how people see me. The fact that he didn't, wasn't like, oh my God! The fact that he looked at me and was like, oh, what's up, Tom? It's like, oh, fuck, I my God! The fact that he looked at me and was like, oh, what's up Tom? It's like, oh fuck, I'm caught. I'm not guy. I'm that guy. And that was it.

That was the moment. People were like, what was your call to action? Did someone say you're gonna die? No, but I did make myself type-do diabetic. I did give myself hypertension. I clinically made myself type-do diabetic. So in a two year period of time. And that let that be a testament to how a fucked up diet

can really mess you up, right? You can mess you up quick. And it took me like seven years to get that shit normal again. But anyway, that all of that aside, that's, you know, so this time, by the time I'm like, you know, 22, 23, you know, given my background and kind of what I was doing, I mean, there's a lot of stuff that's kind of happening in the background there with my healthcare career, healthcare administration going into ancillary lab services in the private equity world for a short period of time, I really developed a really strong knack for biochemistry because I was essentially in medical sales.

So I knew I had to be able to sell to physicians and be able to explain various lab services, salivary, cortisol testing, explain these things. And I'm like, I knew I was a really good sales person with that because I was able to, I knew so much about the body just because I was so in tune of myself. And I got super into biochemistry, just super into it to the point where I'm like, I wanna go back to school for biochemistry.

I dropped out of college. You know, and I wanna go to school for biochemistry, I wanna go back. And then I realized like, you know what? Like, I'm actually making good money doing what I'm doing without that. And I'm really good at what I do. And physicians respect me and the community respects me and the scientific community was respecting me. Then so anyway, the point is that I had a good breath of knowledge. So all it took was like that catalyst for me to be like, I got to get my life in order.

And you know, then there's this kind of whole interstitial period between when I launched my brand and everything like that, which is kind of there's some downtime. What did you do to take yourself from, like, what's the type of diabetes that you gave yourself and what does that mean, that big of a potential, all that shit? And then how do you go from where you were to even anything approaching health? Yeah, so, well, type two diabetes, I mean, clinically, if you're over 125 nanogas per deciliter glucose, you're technically clinically diabetic and you're fasting glucose or prediabetic and then when you start claiming over 140, then you're kind of in that clinical range.

So, I remember my glucose being like 144 fasting repeatedly. Bad, really bad. Knowing what I know now, I know why that happened. Knowing what I know now, I know why that happened. Knowing what I know now, I know how I was corrected. All I knew was that I needed to reverse it. And I needed to fix this issue because I looked at my wife and I'm like, this is stupid. Like all this happened in a pursuit of building muscle, fucking up my body and a pursuit of building muscle, but also then losing side of that and fucking up my body in a pursuit of building muscle, but also then losing sight of that and fucking up my body in a pursuit of making money.

So these two vanity things, muscle and money, could have completely fucked up my life. I did fuck up a lot of my life because it took me years to get my health back. And there's certain things I still struggle with to this day as a result of just massive, basic binging for a couple of years. Well, I mean, for example, it's still like my testosterone levels are still pretty tanked,

right? I think that I did that damage at a very critical age. I think at a time when testosterone levels should have been peaking, I was ruining them, right? So, you know, things like that, I deal with that, the mental repercussions of it. So there's a lot of attributes where, you know, maybe it's more difficult for my body to produce hormones naturally because at that point, you know, obviously I stay in shape. Obviously I'm lean. It doesn't affect me too much like on the surface, but maybe there's stuff deeper down. Did I take years off my life? Possibly. Was it a massive hormetic stressor that's going to make me live to be 130 maybe? I don't know.

That would be great. If the secret was jacking the box, tackles for you to the whole time. Sentinarian. Yeah, it was staring us in the face the whole time. So what you've mentioned there is these two things around money and vanity. But as you said earlier on, you have this sense of obligation to be in shape now because your business relies on the condition that you're in, at least in part. So that dynamic is maybe much more integrated, maybe much more into your control, maybe much more holistic, transcended, and included. But it's definitely still there.

It's definitely still there. And if it wasn't for having my first kid, my son, having my first kid, my son, I think I might have been chasing this for all the wrong reasons. You know, I thoroughly enjoy helping people, but I was starting to notice that I enjoyed the validation of helping people. I didn't just enjoy helping people. And it wasn't like I'm doing this for me, but at the same time I was like, I'm doing this for once again, a dopamine hit. Like this dopamine hit that I get out of, this was five, seven years ago, creating content.

I was like, for my son was born, I'm just like, I'm good at this. The brand is growing, but felt so fucking empty. Feels so good. I felt so wrong, right? Like nothing felt good. And when I had my son, you know, five and a half half years ago or at least when I found out we were pregnant so six years ago six and a half years ago. Things changed man like life just has to change.

And all of a sudden like when my son came into this world and actually you know right before my son we found out we are pregnant a few days later my dad passed away. So there was a lot of very interesting stuff that happened that sort of shifted my, like rocked my world, man. And what probably needs to be said to be able to explain the full story is, you know, you notice I haven't said much about my dad. And it realized that like my mom, in an effort to like keep us with her all the time, sort of kept us away from our dad. And I don't think she was meaning to do it. Maybe she was, I don't know. I never want to speak ill of my mom. I love my mom so much.

But it's weird because I felt like I didn't really establish a relationship with my dad until I was an adult. And then pretty much as soon as I established a relationship with him, he got a cancer diagnosis and I didn't get it. So I never got the relationship with my dad. And like to this age day now with like my age, like I crave a dad so fucking much, right? Like I missed like, and we found out we were pregnant on Valentine's Day of

2017. And my wife gives me a Valentine's Day card and a scot dependency test in it. And she had just found out that day too. So like, we're like, this is, I almost passed out. Like I think my wife videoed it, sneaky bastard. Like she videoed it, turned fucking pale. And I kind of like put a fake smile on, you know, for a second. And then, you know, 30 seconds a minute goes by and I'm like, wow, okay, this is gonna be cool. Like, there's no turning back.

So like, this is gonna be awesome. And then my dad was in hospice, but then the next day we get the call that, hey, he's going down. You gotta come up to the Bay Area and come see him. And four days prior to this, we lose our dog that had been with my wife and I since we were together in high school, right?

So it was like lost the dog, found out we're pregnant, and then we got, okay, let's make a bee line up to see my dad. So go see my dad, hold my dad's hand, and tell him he's totally incongruent, you know, he's out. And so dad, you know, you're gonna be a grandpa. And like, he hadn't made any signs of life whatsoever. Like, he was just breathing, like, and crack the smile,

and hour and a half later, he died. You know, and it was like, he waited just breathing and cracked a smile and hour and a half later he died. You know, it was like, he waited and it was like, so just talk about just powerful stuff all happening at once where it was like, I got this like a little bit of closure, but also this sense of like, I don't wanna go super deep, but like right before the night before my son was born,

I had a dream where my son was born. I was walking down my childhood hallway. My brother, who's 15 years older, half brother, was there and just giving me a nod of approval. I walk past the bathroom, my sister standing there giving me a nod of approval. And then I walk, I turn the corner in my hallway, and my dad, I just remember his big Italian hands of this dream that's reached out. I didn't see his face. I I just remember his big Italian hands of this dream that's like reached out. I didn't see his face, I could just see his hands and like handed the baby over to him. And then I woke up from the dream

and my wife was going into labor. This is the weirdest crazy thing, man. And like, with all of that, like, dude, something just clicked, man, it was like, I gotta like change, like something needs to change. And I don't, I can't tell you what actually changed, man, it was like, I got to like change. Like something needs to change. And I don't, I can't tell you what actually changed, man, but like how I looked, how I created content, how I looked at how I wanted to help people, how I looked at how I wanted to like make the world

a better place for my son, how I wanted to be a father that was present for my son, that my dad didn't fortunately have the ability to really do for me. Yeah, long-winded explanation. Given the fact that you're now a father of two, you have the opportunity to reflect on your experience both with mom and dad. Has this given you a new insight that you didn't see before? Has it thrown into harsh lights? Some things that you thought that were totally normal?

Has it motivated you to be a particular way as a father? Yes. A million percent. Yes, it's, I try to look at things, there's things that are maybe unconventional, but not necessarily bad that I look out with my childhood. I do try to look at the world through those color glasses as much as I can. I try to find the positive and things. So all these things have made me who I am today.

But the fact, I see a lot of times, especially in divorced families, where parents, children against one another. And it happened to my wife's family, and unfortunately, I think it happened in mine. And I don't think that it was necessarily intentional. I think sometimes it's human nature to kind of like take, you know, like, oh, I want to reach I want to grab on hold this.

And those are the kinds of things where my wife and I talk about all the time. Like, if we ever go our separate ways, like if something ever happened, like, we can't be like that. Don't use kids as leverage. Like, never ever. That happened a lot. And I think that I look back at when I was dealing with most things, I even have a poll on the hair out. I was right at the peak of the divorce. You know, and I'm like,

what was I feeling as a kid? So like, for me, it's like, man, just to be able to shower my children with love, but be able to just make them feel like they can, they can do anything in the world as long as they put in the work, and that they're always going to have a safe place. Whereas I grew up thinking that like, no, like, you were only really loved if you perform. I'm like, up until having children, I kind of thought that was the way it was supposed to be. It wasn't give this tough love. Like, you perform, you perform, you perform, and you equals love. Let's keep a spreadsheet, you know, where it's now. It's like, fuck, man, you can do whatever you want want kiddo. Like, if you were sincerely happy

and you are accomplishing and you were doing good in the world, I got your back. And that is definitely transcendent into how I create content. Because now I'm like, I used to live in this echo chamber with what works for me. Intermittent fasting worked for me. I lost a lot of weight with it.

It fucking worked for me. 100% kiddo worked for me. So that means it's gonna work for you, man. And here's why. And let me give you all the justification as to why and let me create all this content surrounding why, why, why justifying, justifying, justifying, suddenly I'm like, holy crap. I'm using my gift for all the wrong shit. Like I'm using my gift to justify what worked for me. And I motivated and inspired a lot of people. But I'm like, man, I can reach millions more people. If I stop leaning into my gift as being my transformation and being my gift as my ability to articulate

complex subject matter that gets people passionate and excited to be the best they can be sincerely. Less dogmatic, less rigid with the way you're talking about stuff. 100%. Yeah, I mean, dude, I talk about this so much, the fact that you cannot understand the price that certain people pay to be in a position that you think you want to be in. You know, so from the outside, the three and a half million person YouTube channel and respected by scientists all over the world and walking around at five to six percent body fat and jacked and wife and kids and money and so on and so forth. Be okay. Let's just take a small inventory of all of the things that have had to happen in

order to contribute to this. The entire childhood, the working from the age of 14, the pulling the hair out, the social awkwardness, all of that. That is the price that you need to pay to be Thomas DeLauer. I think it's very important for people to see the human behind the success. I think it's one of the most important things. It's one of the most useful things about having conversations like this because all of the people that I respect who have achieved success have done it in spite of a thing, not because of a thing. And, you know, for all that success looks fantastic from the outside, a lot of the time people are running away from something that they fear as well as running towards something that they want. And the vast majority of people, Michael Jive,

the guy that does seeking greatness, I think, chasing elite performance, the podcast. I asked him, he's worked with like every high performer on the planet, he helped Felix Baumgartner jump from the edge of space for the Red Bull stratos mission. And I said, on average, do you think that high performers are happier or more miserable than the normal person. It's like by a million miles more miserable. It's like people that perform, people that are successful on average are more miserable. You go, okay, well, what does it mean that the people that are the most successful are the ones with the least admirable internal states? Like what does that mean?

What do, how should we frame success? How should we consider what we think of as being admirable, desirable? It's very difficult to work out. You want the outward success, but do you really want to go through the pain and the mental texture that comes along with it. 100% man. It's a Lewis Howe's asked me, what's your level of self love, what scale of one to ten?

And I was like, dude, maybe like a six, five, six, I was like, some days I wake up and I'm an eight, but other days I wake up and I'm a four. It's like, so maybe it averages out to like five or six. And he was like, really? And then I flipped around and I'm a four. It's like, so maybe it averages out to like five or six. And he was like, really? And then I flipped around and I asked him sort of the same thing. I was like, you talked to a lot of successful people. And he said, yeah, they all kind of fall around the same

as you. You know, there's a level of, like I don't, I don't loathe myself, but I don't love myself. But as I try to get a grasp on this, you know, being self-aware of what drives me forward, what makes me, what makes me tick, I really, I try to be aware of that and I try to be aware of like, okay, just because myself love is a six, that doesn't mean it's actualized into me performing at a six. So I still try to say, like, I'm still going to perform like a 10,

I'm still going to eat like a 10, I'm still going to like live my life like a 10, and maybe it'll fake it till it makes it a little bit. But so far it's not. I think that that's the way to do it, man. I believe that we lead with action. And I think that small steps are much more difficult for your psyche to deny, even if you are a glass half empty kind of person. If you continue to show up, if you continue to do the things that are good for you, if you continue to succeed in spite of your absolute certainty that you're not going to succeed, after a while you just have this crushing weight of evidence that shows you that you are able to do this thing, or you can achieve in the you that you are able to do this thing. Or you can achieve in the way that you are that you're intending. So one of the things that you

mentioned there was that intimate and fasting was like a bit of a godsend for you. It has been highly contested on the internet. What is in your opinion, someone that has spent a lot of time researching, practicing, and coaching intermittent fasting? What is the optimal structure and the most important foundations to understand about intermittent fasting? The best structure is the structure that works best for you as the individual. It's not the sexiest answer, but it comes with practice and it comes with determining, am I someone that likes to eat in an eight-hour window, am I someone that likes to eat in a four-hour window,

or a six-hour window? The best form of intermittent fasting is the one that you don't get addicted to. The one that you can still use as an effective tool without using as a crutch. The best form of intermittent fasting for the individual is going to be the one that you feel the best on. The one that you get the heightened mental alertness, that clarity that you seek out. The moment that you start to do it because of an arbitrary number is the moment that you've already lost the battle. The biggest benefit to me with intermittent fasting is not body composition changes. It's not cognitive awareness.

It's not this. It's the element of mastery that comes with it. And that's where people miss the boat, because you cannot contest that. You can sit here and you can fight every single look and cranny of intermittent fasting based upon where you stand in your views of nutrition, time restricted feeding.

Say, oh, well, caloric restriction is just as good. Well, yeah, intermittent fasting is kind of caloric restriction. You know, this, that, whatever. You cannot argue with me that there is an element of mastery that comes into place with abstaining from something. We talked about this with caffeine. We talked about this with alcohol. Food is a drug that we are constantly exposed to, which means that it's incredibly difficult to abstain from it in a proper way. And we are bombarded with social cues to

tell us that it's okay to eat whenever we want. Is that the truth? Like, should we eat whenever we want? Should we eat ad-libotim? I don't know, I mean, it's certainly real world because that's the world we live in today, but is it accurate? Is it fair to assume that that's how we should eat? Regardless of your beliefs there, being able to stain from food and having the control to do so, seemingly gives me control in much, much many other, or gives me control in a lot of other elements of my life. And maybe that reflects back to my childhood

and wanting to have some control, but there are a hell of a lot of people that respond in a very similar fashion to I do. That's very interesting, the fact that it's about the story that you tell yourself to do with the intimate fast, as much you tell yourself to do with the intimate fast, as much as it is to do with some magic that comes along for the ride. Yeah.

I had Peter Atira on the show yesterday, and he said the exact same thing. Every study that he has found so far hasn't suggested that there is any secret source hiding in time restricted eating beyond caloric restriction, that there is no it just doesn't seem it seems to be a very easy to follow root for caloric restriction. Is that your reading of the literature as well? Yeah, yeah, and I think there is a little bit of nuance there. I think that people that are severely metabolic, I think that people that are severely metabolically deranged and have severe metabolic disorder

probably get different benefits, slightly different benefit because there's something that needs to be unraveled there. And I think Peter's actually even talked about that. It's like people that, when you're in a severe situation where you are very, very unhealthy, then abstaining from food in particular of time fashions could have other advantages.

That autophagy. No, autophagy is one of these things. I think it's a word that's thrown around, right? Is it bullshit? Is autophagy bullshit? It's not bullshit, but it's definitely not this magic. Like it's happening all the time, right? If I go into a caloric deficit or if I take some time in between meals or, you know what, the biggest driver of autophagy is, is exercise, right? If I go into a caloric deficit, or if I take some time in between meals,

or you know what the biggest driver of autophagy is, is exercise, right? Nobody talks about that, that's not sexy. I can't say like, oh, exercise is gonna induce autophagy. He's gonna induce it three times more than fasting will. Now, there are different types of autophagy. There's macro autophagy, micro autophagy. There's lipophagy, which is where you're actually

sort of recycling fat cells, all different varying forms that happen at varying levels based upon what someone is doing, fasting, exercise, general caloric restriction. And autophagy is dictated a lot of times by many things, but at the very simple level, AMPK phosphorylation, which is a dimmer switch, not a light switch. So yes, the more aggressive the caloric yes, the more aggressive, the caloric restriction, the more aggressive the exercise induced deficit, the more aggressive the autophagic flux.

Now, with that being said, it's like you can turn that to a certain degree and it's probably gonna reach a maximum before you start degrading tissue and having a negative outcome. So it's not a light switch where it's like, as soon as you go into a deficit, you flip a switch and you have maximum autophagy. The argument with that is like, okay,

well intermittent fasting, you're abstaining from food, you're ending up in that caloric restriction phase significantly faster because you're just not eating. So one could argue that you flip that dimmer switch a little bit faster, and if you combine that with exercise, maybe you get more autophagy. That's certainly a valid argument, but it does not warrant us to say that,

like, intermittent fasting is the best way to get autophagy, not by any means. Okay, what about building muscle while fasting? So, I think it sounds almost insane to say, like, while you are literally fasting, you're going to build muscle. It's funny enough, I think Peter Atia had actually mentioned some point in the past,

like, muscle protein breakdown and muscle protein synthesis are always a balance of each other. And when you are in a fasted state, you have a high degree of muscle protein breakdown. That does not mean that you're necessarily catabolizing muscle. What it implies is that you could be breaking down tissue from one area of your body. And then after the fastest complete, when muscle protein synthesis increases, you reestablish formation in another area of your body or in that same area, right? So as long as basic protein needs are met within your eating period, you absolutely can build muscle with intermittent fasting. But I think there's a line.

I usually kind of draw an arbitrary line at like 24 hours. I feel like if you're doing consistent 24 hour fast like every other day, perhaps it's harder to build muscle, but if someone's doing like an 18, 6, 3 or 4 days per week, of course, you can build muscle. I talked about this recently. Look at your calories over the course of a seven day period, not daily. Like, if you want to be in a surplus, be in a slight surplus at the end of the week. If you want to be in a deficit, be in a slight deficit at the end of the week, maybe Monday, you eat 4,000 calories, maybe Tuesday, you eat 1,000, maybe Wednesday, you eat 4,000, maybe Thursday, you eat 1,500.

It's like that constant undulation might be good for the human metabolism because it doesn't reset every night at midnight to zero. What about looking at a fat loss plan overall, if you were to design the non-negotiables that should go into it, regardless of time restricted, regardless of how someone who's coming into this, what are the non-negotiables for a fat loss plan? Yeah, for me, I still have to side with just about everybody and say thermodynamics are probably the most important thing. Are we going to discover that to possibly be different later in the life?

We might. Who knows? We always have to be open to that. But I think right now, the evidence is just too strong to ignore that. That Thermundanamics matter. Too many camps trying to like oppose that. So let's just all agree on that. That's when you said that you mean Kaiko, right? You mean calories and calories. Yeah, which is a very complicated matter.

It's not as simple as people think, but people try to make it simple for the sake of content, but it is very complex because it's all kinds of influential factors that determine that, right? How much calories we're actually burning, how much we're actually consuming. Did you juice this fiber, etc. It says. Yeah, it all kinds of stuff that comes into play. The other piece that I think is a non-negotiable is having adequate breaks between meals. I feel for me at least, that's a non-negotiable. And the reason that comes under fire a lot is because that implies that you're suggesting

that insulin has to always be low. Not at all. I'm suggesting that we have periods of time between meals that we do allow insulin to be low. Maybe that's an 18 hour fast. Maybe it's just having adequate three hours between meals. I think for maximum... What would be the problem with just grazing every hour and a half? are fast, maybe it's just having adequate three hours between meals. I think for maximum

what would be the problem with just grazing every hour and a half? Personally, well, even an hour and a half, as long as you were just like taking that adequate break, because you have this spike in insulin, and then insulin level needs to come down for glucose on the counter regulatory hormones to release, which are ultimately going to allow fat loss to occur. Like, liposis, as far as I know, cannot occur in the presence of insulin. Like, if insulin is elevated at that particular moment, liposis cannot occur at that moment.

You cannot be utilizing fat while insulin is elevated. That doesn't mean that you never spike insulin. That means you keep track of when things go up and down. Your fat burning mode isn't right when you eat contrary to the whole thermic effective food thing, like that's such a negligible amount. The fat burning occurs after the insulin levels have come back down to baseline and liposis and bed oxidation can occur. So I think maybe it's not a non-negotiable as far as the general world is concerned because

you could effectively eat like a pee every five minutes and be eating 800 calories. But I think for adequate muscle preservation and for maximum fat loss, I think just keeping a keen eye to that is very beneficial. Other non-negotiables, I think G-Flex is a very important thing that's not talked about enough. That's energy flux. I subscribe to this, man. Yeah. I realize this as soon as I started doing CrossFit. Yeah. Right. It's, you know, you know, it's crazy is I've had, you know, Alan Ergon. No. He's, he's great. You should have Mon. He's, he's just, he's basically the person that takes a lot of these major research papers and like writes the summaries for them. Like he's like that well versed,

so he basically writes the condensed summary. So he's so good at articulating. In fact, I literally like, I did a number of videos with him just because he's so well spoken on this stuff. And he and I were talking about it. It's like have you ever been in the presence of like an athlete that is just a crazy intense athlete

with a lot of energy? So you're around them and you can like literally feel their energy. Compare that to someone that's on their deathbed. There's like a completely different, they're literally fluxing at a different capacity. And people don't realize that there's a mobilization cost or fee associated with more energy

and using more energy. So if you eat 2000 calories per day and burn 2000 calories per day, and you eat 2000 calories per day and burn 2000 calories per day and I eat 5000 calories per day and burn 5000 calories per day, you'd say, hey, you guys are both at net zero, right? Wrong. I'm actually burning more because there is more energy cost and g flux, energy flux involved at a higher rate of metabolism. It's almost like the mobilization fee, it costs, it costs money, it costs currency to mobilize that much energy. It's almost like the mobilization fee, it costs money, it costs currency to mobilize that much energy.

It's like if you call someone over to replace your windshield, they're gonna charge you a mobilization fee because it costs the money to get there. So every time you have an energy exchange, it costs currency. The more you eat and the more you move, the more you burn overall.

This was what I realized when starting CrossFit that I'd always, up until that point, because I was doing brosupply bodybuilding, which means that really, unless you're doing incredibly intense sessions, how are you losing? You're not going to put yourself into a caloric deficit through training. You're going to do it through food, right? So it's always this sort of race chasing your tail of like fewer calories to be get fewer calories to be get lower metabolism to be get fewer calories. Now, I started in CrossFit and I'm like, okay, I need to eat three and a half thousand calories just to not be hungry when doing this. And I got Lena and I thought, oh, that's strange.

And then I started training more and getting heavier and getting fitter and Lena. I was like, I keep on eating more and more food, and yet I'm getting Lena, because I couldn't put in a food away in order to be able to compensate for the deficit that the training was putting me in. And I understand, I understand that you have much more control over the food that goes in your mouth and the calories that you expend through your output.

Ben Carpenter came on the show and gave me a really beautiful framework that helped me to understand why losing fat for most people through coloric restriction rather than the increase of exercise is at least something that they have a greater degree of control over. I think that seems to make a bit of sense to me. But for the people that do have it in the tank to be able to go and do high intensity training with progressive overload, with some loading, multiple times

maybe per day or at least every day. G-Flock's theory for me, which is the 3,000 in 3,000 in 3,000 out versus 2,000 in 2,000 out, that seemed to make a massive difference as far as I could see. Dude, it's huge. I love Ben, by the way, dude, that guy is great. He does a really good job of just distilling things and just humanizing it. Like, he just, like, there's not a lot of people that I really like, and he's kind of come on the scene recently for me, like, I've just, and, yeah,

just, I mean, just, he's crushing it. Kudos to him, he's doing good. What else, anything else? So, well, kind of dovetailing off the G-Flux thing, I think the non-negotiable that also comes to play is adequate die breaks. Like, so that comes with the G-Flux. Like, if you just continually restrict calories, you're going to end up in that, that cesspool of just, and that happens so much with intermittent fasting, it's relevant, right? Because people say, I'm going to do 16-8

fasting. So they restrict calories, and then next thing they know, they think they're fasting, but all they're doing is restrict and calories. Sure, they're eating in a certain time block, but that doesn't absolve them of thermodynamics. So at the same time, there's restrict calories, and then they have to restrict calories more. And then they're like, oh, well, I'm eating 1800 calories a day or 1500 calories a day because I'm intermittent fasting.

But I'm fasting every day. Why isn't this working anymore? Well, because you're doing the same damn thing as just restricting calories, right? Now reintroducing calories and being able to actually get the metabolism back up to an adequate state involves applying G flux with proper diet breaks. So what I mean by that is you can't just say, I'm going to have a diet break and start eating a bunch of shit.

If you do that, things are gonna go caddy-wampus, you're gonna have compensatory mechanisms that come into play that make you gain fat very fast. Probably because you've driven it for the full-sale. It's driven it down and all. Yeah. So people make the mistake of going back to eating like they used to eat. No, you have to increase the calories to where you are at maintenance now,

which is very difficult for people to understand because- Reverse diet back up gently. Yeah, well, most people aren't gonna figure that out. They're not gonna say like, okay, I've lost 30 pounds of lean mass, 20 pounds of fat mass. That means I need to adjust my calories to baseline at this for maintenance. So the easiest way to do that is when you get to those stages,

if it's possible, increase your intensity of training to allow for increase in calories. That way you're increasing that flux while taking a diet break in a very conservative fashion that limits the risk of fat regain, but still allows for metabolic rate to increase in your RMR to come back up. Right. Because that thing going to allow you to increase metabolic rate without gaining too much more weight, which then allows you to rebegin another diet from the top with this higher base metabolic rate, right?

How do you square the circle of one of the biggest predictors of longevity being caloric restriction with G-Flux theory? Yeah. So this has come to battle, right? I've seen this pop up in the comments for me multiple times. It's like, okay, where do you draw the line? And this is where I almost feel like is this where fractal eating and kind of breaking up how we eat could be beneficial? Like, because where do you draw the line of caloric restriction? Like is caloric restriction daily? Is it weekly? Is it monthly? Is it yearly?

Like who's counting? How do we know? Is it protein restriction? We don't really know. Is it mTOR phosphorylation? Like where do you really draw this line? So that is a use case where I can say, okay, maybe fractal eating makes sense.

Maybe you eat in a surplus or slight surplus with a lot of activity one day and then lower activity lower intake another day. So that your net over the course of the week maybe is a slight deficit but you have adequate muscle stimulus that still preserve muscle. The target you have if you choose to do that is that it's not a very routineized life. So in a sandbox perhaps or a petri dish or a spreadsheet that makes sense. But when it comes to humans want to do the same thing most days, I want to train five days a week and have weekends off.

I want to do three days on one day off. I want to do whatever, right? Like a more, the more complex and fractal that you make, the routine, the more poor, the adherence and compliance is going to be. Could people possibly just periodize quarterly? I mean, is that, is that too much to ask? That would be, that would be easier. Say, hey, let's say, let's look at this globally over the course of a year. Let's say this quarter, I want you to be in a slight surplus

at this quarter, I want you to be in a slight deficit and just keep on going back and forth quarterly. No one knows the answers to this. So obviously, otherwise, we'd be all be living to be a thousand years old. But then, you know, brings up the equation of the protein thing, too, right? Like, methionine and all this stuff, like protein is it aging us?

What's your read at the moment? I asked Pete of this yesterday, so I can compare and contrast your answers. There's interesting arguments on both sides. I do think that the methionine research makes sense. I do think that there's a large plant-based kind of skew to it that sort of distorts how we look at that data. I try to look at that data objectively without sort of the plant-based kind of skew to it, that sort of distorts how we look at that data. I try to look at that data objectively without sort of the plant-based skew

and say how do we apply this methionine discussion and protein contributing to aging independent of any plant-based discussion? Can this apply for the Mediterranean diet where there's still moderate meat consumption? And I think the answer is yes. I do think that being able to have adequate mTOR phosphorylation is very important for adequate recovery. I think that we are learning.

This means eating meat. Eating meat. Yes, yes, sorry. So I think it's very important for recovery. I think it's very important for cellular signaling. I think insulin is one of the most important hormones for longevity, too. And you know, as a peptide hormone, it comes under fire as this demonized thing, but I think insulin is also a catalyst for repair. So it is a balance, but do you balance at 51% towards the intor phosphorylation side or 51% more towards the AMPK side where you're trying to be like, I'm going to restrict.

And with that, I lean slightly in the camp of being on the MTOR side, being protein being more important than restriction of protein. I think adequate amounts of protein with caloric restriction might be somewhat of the answer. This is an area that I find quite confusing because I've got, on one side, friends like Mikaela Peterson,

Mark Bell, and also my own felt sense that when I do lean more heavily into meat, that I think I perform better, I feel better. My body is better. The feedback that I got from Marik Health after I did my blood panel was the same. We need to get some organ meats in there, let's eat some more red meats. And then I see the other side of the world, especially the longevity by a hacking side. So the demonizes a lot of this. I don't know whether you've seen Brian Johnson,

have you seen that guy? What do you think of him? What do you think of his approach to the world? So he sort of got the approach of, I mean, moderately low protein, right? Yeah, so it's, you know, other than kind of the surface level stuff with the moderate low protein, I don Yeah, so it's, you know, other than kind of the surface level stuff with the moderate low protein,

I don't follow or subscribe in his way of thinking so I can't comment aggressively. But I think that the more that we can thoughtfully acknowledge both sides, that's really important. Because again, like we have to ask ourselves the question, like are we looking at this through a wide angle lens or not? So like what is happening globally? Like, what is your protein intake? Like, are you in a net positive protein balance? Is, I don't know

this. I mean, you might be able to answer it. It's like, it's Brian suggesting that you be in a net negative protein balance. I have no idea. He's coming on the show in a few weeks. I'm going to ask him. Yeah, it's, I mean, I still think a net, like a net neutral protein balance would be optimal. But no one's going to be able to. What does that mean? That means your muscle protein synthesis is matching that exactly of your muscle protein breakdown.

But who's going to be able to figure that out, right? So that would be the ideal situation. So until we have a way to measure that, we're always going to be in a slight surplus, which could be more, you know, methionine could be more issues facing as far as longevity is concerned, or you're slightly on the opposite. So for me, how do we attenuate certain things and activate AMPK and activate these markers that are associated with longevity and caloric restriction while also maintaining protein

levels? Because I don't think protein is the problem. I think it's one of many different elements. And if you look at the blue zones, which people talk smack on the blue zones, and understandably so. What's the blue zones for the people that don't know? Blue zones are the areas of the world that have the people that live the longest.

You've got like Costa Rica, you've got Sardinia, you've got Greece, you've got, you know, so Okinawa. And I did a video on this because I was so interested. I was like, we focus so much on the common denominators of these regions. We say, oh, well, all of them eat in a 10 to 15 percent caloric restriction. All of them eat low meat. Well, that's not necessarily true. All of them eat X-fat.

All of them do this. All of them do that. It's like, you guys are trying to find the common denominators. I want to find the outliers. What makes these unique? What makes the Okinawan diet so unique and different from the other blue zones? What makes the Costa Rican diet so different from Sardinia? Let's look at the outliers and take those outliers and craft the ultimate longevity diet.

And that video crush. I think I think it just like got people thinking and there was no scientific rigor to it whatsoever. Other than that. What was the main takeaways? The main takeaways of it were like, okay, high omega-3 content, moderate polyunsaturated fat content, fruit polyphenols, fiber and diversity of diet. So you've got things like the Okanahuans eat a crap load

of like purple sweet potatoes, you know, things like that, right? And looking at that, still being in somewhat of a deficit, but that deficit being more from like 1% to 8% versus a universal 15%. So a slight deficit. No scientific rigor to that whatsoever. It's just looking and pulling outliers and being like, what are the benefits of these outliers? And if we combine that, is that doing something? And I just encourage people to look at things like that, because we're so quick to look for patterns that we forget about the power of an outlier pulling on average. So you mentioned the thermic effective food earlier on.

Somebody that you were a little bit more familiar with, the Brian Johnson, be V-Stread. I am V-Stread. What is your reading of V-Strered and his work in the world of diet and fitness? I don't give two craps. What V Shred does, I just don't want people that confuse me with him anymore. Do you see why people confuse you with V Shred? Well, we're both charlatan total. Dude, it's, you're significantly bigger and leaner than him, but...

Well, that's a plus, if it was a dark foggy night, I could see why people could confuse you for him. Well, isn't that the most, most of social media? Like, I mean, it's a dark foggy night for most people. That's, if you put in a filters on it is, yeah, interesting. I mean, you'll speak to Z later on about this, but he did a series of adverts because you can go on, I didn't know you could do this, but if you go find out someone's ad manager account

or something, or you can press on a particular page and see all of the adverts that they're running on Facebook. And they went on and had a look at all of the different adverts that V-Stread was doing. And in one of them, they'd set him up in a studio kind of like this that had the same red curtain, the same arm the same mic the same like muffler top the same desk the same lighting as Rogan's studio But he wasn't on Rogan and it was him giving

Doing basically an ad read Fake on a podcast. I'm like, yeah, we don't need chat GPT and AI to CGI, like horse shit down our brains. Like people can do this in person at the moment. That, I mean, brings V shred up to Zach later on because he's got very strong opinions on the guy. I mean, it's, it's, I saw that months ago and I actually screen shot it into my team. I was like, look at this guy. Like, he's literally faking me on Rogan. And now, no, I notice it, it's a couple months later, it's like circulating around.

But I mean, if my shirt's off and my hair is styled the way it normally is, like, I did a video on it, like, I don't know, three, four, five months ago, and dude, I mean, hundreds of comments being like, I thought you were him, like, I'm sorry. Like, I was really confused. being like, I thought you were him. Like, I'm sorry. Like, I was really confused.

I still, wait, you're not here. Have you ever considered that you might be like cleaning up V-Shred's public image? 100%. V-Shred's really got his mind deep into the data here. He's reading the white papers. It really sounds like he's been educating himself. Well, it's, it comes up as he holds onto the coattails of your, like,

hard work. Like the best comment I saw was like, you know, oh, well, like, I thought that you had all this really good content going organically so that you could afford the ability to be more aggressive in your ad campaigns, you know, and be very superficial and simple in your ad campaigns. Be more aggressive because people are, they're not so sure, they're watching your other content where it's very deep and very scientifically backed.

Yeah, it's becoming an actual battle that I have to deal with where. Consider maybe a really aggressive design change, like a gender reassignment perhaps, or a pink hair, like, grow it out. I just think one of you needs to change, and it might as well be you.

Well, dude, I had an idea. What if I reached out to them, and I said, hey, do what you want with this ad? It's all good, but I want to film an ad with V-Stread. And you actually have both of us standing there and be like, I'm Tom Stellauer. I'm V-Stread. And yeah, actually, like, have both of us standing there and be like, I'm Tom Stalauer, I'm V-Stread. We have opposing views. Stop confusing us.

And then just let him go upon his merry way. That would be fun. That would, it would probably convert really well for them. Yeah, because it's just different. It would, they spend millions of dollars on ad spend a month. So it would get it out there. And it would sanitize you from him.

Very nice, very nice. You need to do like a, you need to identify. I have a freckle on this side. You'll notice that his ears are a little bit bit like whatever you need to identify those. They're getting back to fat loss. One of the other, so the other side of it, we've spoken a lot about diet. High intensity interval training is something that people focus on an awful lot, specifically for fat loss. I remember being at university 13 years ago, my first blood holiday was coming up, getting into the gym to do fasted cardio, first thing in the morning. If somebody is thinking, I want to use high intensity interval training, or zone two, to improve

my fat loss. What are the principles, the most important principles that they need to know? Okay. Yeah, with high intensity interval training, I am a very firm believer that the magic is in the intensity of the interval itself. Far too many people go into hit training with like, I'm going to do one minute on, one minute off, one minute on, one minute off. That's not really hit training if you ask me. That's more just high intensity training. That's not high intensity interval training. The magic of the high intensity interval training comes from the fact that your interval should be as close to maximal as possible. And if you are able to hold maximum intensity

for one minute, you're insane. That's not gonna happen. You've got 15 maybe 20 seconds in you. So my idea of high intensity interval training is like 15 to 25 seconds, maximum intensity, and then however long it takes me to recover to be able to adequately go at that intensity again. Maybe it's two minutes, maybe it's a minute, maybe it's five minutes, probably not five minutes. It's probably realistically somewhere

in the realm of like two minutes. That is to me, high intensity interval training. Other forms of training where you're going one minute on, one and off, that's more like various forms of Tabata, really, which has its place, very good for calorie burning, but it's not the same as interval training. Is there some secret source in maximal output for fat loss? I mean, a lot of central nervous system stimulation, so that definitely has an afterburn effect. There's definitely a more of central nervous system stimulation. So that definitely has an afterburn effect. There's definitely a more glycogen depletion because you're very, very, very glycolic when you're using that intensity. So if you're trying to deplete and you're trying

to get in a carb-deprived state, there's certainly evidence there for sure. Arguably, you won't even burn as many calories. So is it the most effective, not necessarily, but it's certainly good for the metabolism? What would you prescribe if somebody was going to introduce training overall, they want to add maybe two or three sessions in per week? Is that really what you want to add on top of an existing exercise protocol? Why would you go to?

We might not go to the high intensity interval training. Would you suggest something more like a tabata? I love tabata training. I love e-mom style training. You know, for me, it's like every minute on the minute, whether it's cardio-based, whether it's resistance training, dude, it keeps me honest, a clock always keeps me honest, and it keeps me moving, keeps my heart rate elevated,

but with an e-mom, I can fluctuate it every minute on the minute if I wanted to go relatively, if I wanted to do sets of five on bench press, I could do that in e-mom fashion and taper and drop set accordingly. Like, you could do so much with an e-mom. I know Marcus Philly is a big fan of that too. And he and I both are just big on e-moms.

It's such a way to combine cardio and resistance training, but also such a unique way to just do cardio. Like, you could do, I'm gonna do 20 minutes of every minute on the minute, and I'm gonna have five different cardio, things that I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do 10 bird piece for one minute on the minute, and I'm going to have five different cardio things that I'm going to do. I'm going to do 10 burpees for one minute, you know, or for however many I can do, 10 burpees in that, and then the rest of the time I have that break. Next time I'm going to do 20 calories on the echo bike or whatever.

So it keeps it fresh, it keeps it exciting, it keeps the mind going, so you're not bored. It's not repetitive on the joints, it's awesome. It's external accountability as well. Totally. For the people that aren't like CrossFit Pilled yet, introducing eMOMs into your training, especially if it's starting to run out of motivation, it's just like having a coach in the room with you, but the coach is just your watch. Because even trying to do timed rest periods when doing bodybuilding, you pick up your phone, you like, if you've got 25 seconds or 30 seconds of rest, you don't

have enough time to go over and dick about on your phone. You go, look, it's a 20 minute or a 30 minute, you month or 30 minutes, I'm doing this thing. As opposed to saying, I'm going to do like four by 12 on this exercise and four by 12 on that exercise and four by 12 on the third exercise and there will be a one minute break in between. You go, it's not the same, it's not the same, because you're not accountable to the clock. I'll give you two of my favorite workouts that I do. The first one is a descending pyramid of reps for any gymnastics movement. So handstand pressup, this is great for pushups, this is great for pull-ups

particularly. So those are the three movements I like to do this with most. So you warm up on the movement. pull-ups, particularly. So those are the three movements I like to do this with most. So you warm up on the movement, however long you need to do that, and then you do a single set of max reps on that movement, strict. So you strict pull-ups, strict handstand push-ups, strict push-ups, two minute rest, then you take 50% of what that number was, you do that, one minute rest, 50% one minute rest, and then you do 25% with 30 seconds rest four times. So you do it 100% with two minutes, 50% with one minute and twice, and then 25% with 30 seconds four times. The reason that I love that workout is that it's over and done with in usually about eight minutes. You have

worked maximally each time pretty much. You are basically creating an RPE for the day that everything else then gets percentageed off. So if you go in and you're feeling shit hot, you've slapped great, you've fed great, you're hydrated, your energy's good, you're going to go, oh holy shit, my first set of strict pull ups was 16 wraps there. I'm now looking at eights and fours for the rest of the day, like this is going to hurt. But well, yeah, but your 100% was that big for a reason because you came in and you felt great, or one day you go in and it's 11, you go, okay, I'm looking at like sixes and threes. Fine, okay, we'll work with that. I really love it for that reason, and it's just over and done with so quickly, and you can always continue, okay, what did I get last time on the first one?

Right, I'll keep on pushing that. So that's my favorite for that. And then when it comes to cardio, this is an exercise I did on a concept 2 bike hug ages ago, but it would work just as well on a row, it would work just as well on a ski. You do pretty high intensity as much as you can. Two minutes off, two minutes on, one minute off, six rounds, one minute on 30 seconds off, eight rounds, 30 seconds on, 15 seconds off, 10 rounds. That's it. That's done in about 40 minutes or so.

That's a really nice recovery workout. And again, it's the same, starting off big, getting down to small. Those are my two favorites. Man, I love any kind of like ascending or descending ladder. Like they're just, they do something with my brain. They just work. That gets just like it clicks. Well, you're always motivated, right? Because there's always something coming next. You're always excited about, oh, I like, yeah, so I've got one more of the two's left. And then that's like, I'm nearly halfway done. and then you end up doing this complex arithmetic in your mind to be able to work out right. Well, I'm actually

in terms of working time. I'm really halfway done when I get to, you know, the second set of the whatever, whatever. When it comes to dieting and a lot of people as me included with my Coke Zero, have a sweet tooth and don't want to absolutely wreck our diet when it comes to satisfying that. What are your favorite personal hacks or best pieces of advice for how people can satiate their sweet tooth without pumping a shit ton of calories and bad stuff into them? I'm going to give you one that's really interesting. And if you clip this, make sure you add this note that this is mechanistic data.

OK, but it's interesting and anecdotally it seems to work. We have what are called nsd neurons in our hind brain. And a lot of times when we're craving something sweet, we're starting to see some research that we could actually be craving something salty. And it's kind of a gustatory response with the vagus nerve and what happens with the hind brain. And what I have found, and again, it could just purely be anecdotal or placebo, having

some salt actually kills that craving. And it does for me. Like every time I'm really craving something sweet, if I have something salty or just some electrolytes or something like that, it feels like that just scratches that itch so quick. It's somewhat temporary. Like it goes away fast, but there's enough small scale data for me to say hey, this might actually work But not enough you know observational data to say a hundred percent works Okay, so first thing is potentially look at throwing some element perhaps in water

Exactly knocking that back because you get a little bit of sweetness in that too. See if that blunts it if the Gravity force field pull of our desire for sweet stuff, what is some suggestions on foods that people could go to that you're okay with? Dude, I'm still a fan of like going for like 90% dark chocolate. That still has a little bit of sugar and it like don't be afraid. It's not gonna kill you. But the endorphins that you get out of the chocolate, endorphins is kind of a colloquial way of putting it, but there are basically flaminols in it that do have an impact on neurotransmitter function.

And that's been demonstrated in quite a few studies that people feel really good after they have chocolate. So that way you're getting that dopamine itch scratched, but it's not from the sugar. It's more so from the fact that the chocolate and the thiabromine is kind of having that impact. So that's a nice hack. The only downside is, you know, if you do too much of it, it's still pretty caloric. Right, okay. Another concern that I'm starting to see people talk about more on, in my corner of

the internet, is bloating after people have food. Someone hasn't done a fod-map diet. They haven't, you know, gone and done restrictions on the foods that they're doing. What are the most likely culprits do you think that people should be looking at if they do suffer with bloating? I think gut dysbiosis is a huge one. That's just a lack of diversity of food within your diet, a lack of diversity of fibers. So you're looking at very simple gut imbalance. Okay, if you imagine a forest with wolves and squirrels, and you have one wolf and you have 30 squirrels, and you throw a bunch of food into a bunch of corn or something out there. And the squirrels all eat that corn. The wolf might eat that corn, but the squirrels are going to eat that corn and their population is going to proliferate, right?

That's going to grow. Suddenly, you've got this crazy imbalance, and this dysbiosis. But if you were to have wolves, and you were to have squirrels, and you were to have some possums, and you were to have a nice delicate ecosystem with lots of different animals, and you threw that food in there, they'd all compete for that food, and they'd all grow at, you know, somewhat proportional rates. And that's what we're really lacking a lot of times in the diet. And I know it has a little bit of a skew that people don't necessarily agree with sometimes, but it's not suggesting that everyone goes out each

so bunch of fiber. One of the things that we do see across the board is that it's pretty well demonstrated that healthy guts are associated with a diverse diet and having diversity of different fibers, diversity of different foods in general, whether it's proteins, whether it's fibers, even fats, and this all has an impact. So I think in this day and age, we get really used to eating the same kind of things over and over. If you talk to people, like they don't, yeah, maybe I go to this restaurant one night and this restaurant another night, but they're not diversifying, they're gut microbiome the

way that I think they should. Like I really do try my best to like rotate different vegetables that I rotate different sources of fiber, all of chia some days, and then I'll have sweet potatoes another day. I really do try to rotate that up, and that helped my bloating issues. My wife dealt with SIBO with malintestinal bacterial

overgrowth for a number of years. For her, kind of going back down to baseline with a ketogenic diet helped her a lot, but probably just because it's eliminating so much of those fibers. It's eliminating so much that it's broader back down to baseline that when she reintroduced everything sort of recalibrated. And I know a lot of people preach that. It's just not necessarily validated with research. I have a friend called the Meet Mafia podcast to be out of that. Yeah, so both of those guys, same thing.

You know, like really, really bad stomach issues, you are going to be on medication for the rest of your life, and they just went on a really aggressive elimination, got themselves to the stage where it seemed like their stomach had been given enough time to get rid of inflammation, calm down, rebalance itself, and then they slowly reintroduced foods. And it seemed like what the stomach needed, it wasn't chronic, it was acute and consistent. And once you gave that acute problem a little bit of time to calm down, there wasn't necessarily

an underlying chronic problem under that, and it just allowed them to, they can relatively eat whatever they want. It's fascinating, man. I think that, you know, the work that you do, Ben, Peter, Andrew, everybody is really helping to educate people. It's a very, I've been someone that's been training for 15 years and I find it still now. Is sugar in or out this month? Like, am I allowed it? Should I have, should I have berries after I have meat? Is meat and fruit cool now? Or should I, do I need to, you know, it's, the, the, trends that come and go, the, um, merciness of not only what is being communicated, but even the studies that this is coming out of, uh, and all of the perverse incentives, I think the work that you do is very impressive. For the people that are listening that want

to check out more that you do. Where should they go? Yeah. V-Street.com. No, it's... Yeah, YouTube is just Thomas Talauer, just typing my name. Instagram, ThomasTalauer.com. But I don't do much there, unfortunately. Yeah, and that's it.

I mean, I'm just going to try to keep on fighting the good fight and just letting people do what they want with the information, just arm themselves with the tools and avar from there. Donner, I appreciate you. I appreciate you being very open and vulnerable today. I think there's lots that people can take away from. Robin Brothers, thank you. you