Modern Wisdom - #682 - Stan Efferding - Do This To Build Muscle, Burn Fat & Get Healthy

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

Stan Efferding is a professional bodybuilder, powerlifter, entrepreneur, author and a nutrition expert known for creating “The Vertical Diet”. Earning the title of the world’s strongest bodybuilder isn’t an overnight achievement. With 35 years of experience in bodybuilding, powerlifting, and dieting, Stan is one of the most accomplished and knowledgable coaches on the planet, and today we get to dig into his biggest lessons. Expect to learn what the main causes of the obesity epidemic are, why diet culture is so tribal, the 3 core principles of the Vertical Diet, whether red meat is actually healthy for you, the relationship between sleep and weight loss, Stan's top 10 exercises for building muscle, why a 10 minute walk after eating will change your life, how to hack meal prep for the rest of time and much more... Sponsors: Get 2 months free from Levels on an annual membership at https://levels.link/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10)  Extra Stuff: 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 Stan Effeting. He's a professional bodybuilder, powerlifter, entrepreneur, author and nutrition expert, known for creating the vertical diet. Earning the title of the world's strongest bodybuilder isn't an overnight achievement, with 35 years of experience in bodybuilding, powerlifting and dieting, Stan is one of the most accomplished and knowledgeable coaches on the planet, and today, we get to dig into his biggest lessons. Expect to learn what the main cause of the obesity epidemic is, why diet culture is so

tribal, the three core principles of the vertical diet, whether red meat is actually healthy for you, the relationship between sleep and weight loss, Stan's top 10 exercises for building muscle, why a 10 minute walk after eating will change your life, how to hack meal prep for the rest of time, and much more. Don't forget, if you're listening, you should have also got a copy of the Modern Wisdom reading list. It is 100 books, the most interesting and life-changing that I've ever read, and it's completely free

right now on the internet for you. Go to chriswillx.com slash books, pick up your copy for free, and it adds you to my three-minute Monday newsletter, which makes you the most interesting person in your office every Monday morning. That's chriswillx.com slash books. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Stan Effeting.

What do you think are the main causes of the obesity epidemic? Why is it that the average Americans got so much fatter over the last few decades? I don't want to talk about what stand things. I want to talk about what we see as probably what the academic community's consensus is. I'm kind of a co-later of information as a personal trainer for 30 years. And I wanted to deliver that information to my clients and make sure it's evidence-based. And so I'll refrain from opinions.

I've tried that in the past, and I've been probably correctly and soundly informed of my inaccuracy. So at the core of it all, we're consuming more calories than we used to 50 years ago. We know that from all the research. And the majority of those calories, the cause of that seems to be hyper-palatable ultra-process foods. And it seems to have interfered with our ability to become satiated.

So we're eating too much. And we're in this food environment where that's really easy to do It's hard to shut it off and so it really is calories. I know that sparks a whole bunch of bad feelings from folks and it kind of gets you a strong man arguments about Kiko calories and calories out to see you know, it doesn't work and and all of that but it's a little it's more complex than that I've said, move more eat less is truthful, but not useful. Necessary, but not sufficient, perhaps.

Yeah, well, it's just, it is what's happening and it is the solution. It's simple, but it's not easy. So there's a whole host of factors, I think we can dive into on that. But, the fact of matter is, it is calories. The Kiko is an oversimplification. It's actually an energy balance equation

that accounts for all of these variables, which we may talk about, the total daily energy intake, minus the total daily energy expenditure. And there's a whole host of things that go into both sides of that equation that it really accounts for just about everything that goes into weight gain. Why is calories in, calories out, and diet, fads, and discussions in general? So emotionally charged.

I would think that this would just be... I'm not calling you a good or a bad person. There's no reason for you to believe that you are anything this isn't a comment on you and yet diet discussions online some of the most virulent. And aggressive that you see they really are I think part of it might just be that we want to find I said. Pin the tail of the donkey find one single source that maybe is something that we could fix. If we just got rid of it, the carbohydrate insulin model spawned from that, where if you eat a grape and your insulin goes up that you're going to gain fat and you can't lose fat, certain demonizing, certain foods became very popular.

There's still a lot of that going on, whether it's spructose or seed oils or anything that might correlate with overconsumption. I think also that when you talk about calories and calories out, it seems to blame the victim, the individual who's having a hard time losing weight, they become blame them. You're overeating, you're lazy, you're undisciplined, that kind of thing without paying attention to all the other factors that go into that. And it's an oversimplification. I suppose that calories and calories out when you fold in how hyper-politable these new foods are,

it's not putting all of the blame at the feet of the victim. It's like, look, this is a relatively unfair battle because of how well engineered these foods are for you to overeat. Now, ultimately, it's you to put it in your mouth. But it is a more difficult uphill climb. Agreed. And another problem is that while we have a genetic predisposition, obviously, now, we're starting to see that certain people have

different hunger signaling, growling release, growling release, leptin sensitivity, or lack thereof, and release, leptin sensitivity, relax thereof. And certain people, while we don't believe their basal metabolic rate is significantly different, we do see that some people are more active, what's called non-exercise activity thermogenesis than others. My son and daughters like that, my son almost check and see if he's breathing when he's sitting there watching TV sometimes. He's just, it's like a zombie, and my daughter can't sit down, and she's humming all the time and tapping her toes,

and bouncing around and skipping, and she has to get up, and two very different, you know, movement patterns, and people with high non-exercise activity thermogenesis can burn over a thousand calories a day more than somebody with loan, non-exercise activity thermogenesis. We see that in active individuals birth versus say sedentary jobs versus say a construction worker

waitress is opposed to desk worker so we see a lot of calories can be accounted for in that component of the equation the energy balance equation so those things all play play into it and then there's also a big social component to talk about some folks in lower socioeconomic environments are exposed to more of this hyper-palatable ultra-process food from an earlier age. It's very affordable, it's very convenient and accessible. And that has a huge impact. What role does the formative years of growing up have on our palette and what we enjoy? There's a period of life, I think it's between about 10 and 15, and the music that you listen to

during that time is very formative for the kind of music that you will enjoy throughout the rest of your life. Are you aware of this in equivalent when it comes to tastes and diets and stuff? I'm not sure, but I think that, you know, obviously, children are going to migrate towards the kind of foods that taste the best, presuming they're allowed in the home in whatever degree. But we all, what we do see that children with obese parents tend to gain more weight at an earlier age and have a higher likelihood of becoming obese as they get older. So it is definitely a problem that has to be addressed at a very early age. You mentioned C dials, which is one of the forehorses of the diet apocalypse.

I'm not sure what the other three are. Just how about a sea dials? What's the truth about them? Well, you know, before we jumped on here, I talked about people evolve, science evolves. You know, when you overlay a graph of sea oil consumptions against obesity, you see a very strong correlation.

I mean, they would just look identical. And so one would, you know, correlation is not equal causation. One would think that that was one of the potential causes. Everything else seems to have gone down over time. The fruit of us, the sugar consumption seems to have stabilized or gone down over time. or gone down over time. But seed oils like a lot of things, how can I best explain this? There's, they're not all the same thing. So here's what the academic community is saying now, that we don't have any evidence that that seed oils cause inflammation in their natural form, if that can even be said about seed oils. There's nothing natural necessarily about them. But in so much as they are a part of processed foods,

ultra processed foods, about 70% of seed oils are consumed as a part of ultra processed foods and fast foods. Now seed oils reheat it. Think French fries, you know, any of those chicken McNuggets, whatever, in those big vats of oil that you reheat, those do show inflammatory response and increase the cardiovascular disease risk. So that is a problem. I did a video many years ago that the real poison that's killing us. So I'm certainly guilty of having put all seed oils into one bucket.

But in that video I did say, I'm bias. They are a poison to me. Seed oils I discovered many years later give me diarrhea. I go into great detail if anybody wants to know if it's not TMI in my video. So one of those where you're running to the bathroom and you can't quite make it and you have to stop and do that kegilexercise or something bad is going to happen before you get there. It's one of those deals. And it's very unique to seed oils. And I know when I have consumed too much of them, flat iron steak cooked in a big pool of seed oil at a restaurant. Otherwise you, you know, I wouldn't have a problem if it was grilled on a flame, or when I cook at home in an ninja grill or something. Very different

response. Even going to restaurants and getting, you know, I want a meal prep company. And so we have to, we have to get eggs for the meal prep company. And some of those eggs come in five gallon buckets, like at some of the restaurants that you would eat at a denny's or the like. And they just ladle the eggs and put them on the grill. And so I would ask, please, no oils, because I'm allergic to these oils. Well, come to find out a lot of those buckets of eggs. We had a hard time finding them that weren't already adulterated with seed oils, we had a hard time finding them that weren't already adulterated with seed oils, whether it was canola oil or soybean oil, partly for preservation because it is observative,

but probably partly because that's an inexpensive additive, which would increase, I guess, the profit margin on the five gallon bucket. When I would consume those, because there's already seed oil in the mixture, then I would have the same problem. So it's been very difficult for me over the years. I used to love to go to some of these, one of those all-you-can-eat grills that they have with, and they, y'all just get steak and chicken and, you know, rice and have them grill them, but they would put a big ladle of these oils on there to cook it in, and I would have gastric distress. So as a personal matter, I've objected quite strongly. I went down the Weston A price rabbit hole,

and Nina Tycold's rabbit hole for seed oils. And I was fully on that team, but the literature does not support if you're not allergic to them like I am and you're not reheating them or overconsuming them, it doesn't support any other adverse effect than that. Have you got any idea how common a adverse reaction, a intolerance of C. Doz's is? I don't. And I used to think it was relatively common because a lot of people would suffer from IBS and IBD. But I can't make that assessment. I just know that's how I respond.

And I have, of course, in my business come across a lot of people who maybe felt that was the same, but I just don't think there's research to support it. You had a problem with one of the great American institutions that I'm a massive fan of Cheesecake Factory. Yeah. They didle you. They didle you with a burger, maybe. Yeah.

Now, I can get one of my favorite meals that I've been promoting for years. It's the Monster Mash. I trademarked that Monster Mash. It's just a blend of, say, ground beef or bison with white rice and Some bone broth and I'll mash all that together I might cook some peppers and throw it in there a little bit of spinach and maybe even scrambled egg And I had this is my my mash is I make this and sell it ship it all over the states to people and I give it to all my clients that You know Hofthor Bjornsson and Brian Shaw and the rest of them. Lane Johnson's favorite meal, the Monster Mash.

And so I can get that meal at cheesecake factory, but they will either based or put the burger in sear it first, in vegetable oil before they put it on the flamethrower grill to prevent it from burning to keep it. Same thing would be true, say, of those roasted chickens, the rotisserie chickens at Costco. They base those with a vegetable oil because it helps prevent them from burning. They can cook there a little longer.

And so those are the little things I have to watch out for. So yes, cheese cake factory is my one device, but because I'm so OCD, I'm a creature of habit that ever since I've been going there, I go order my little monster mash from them. I get a side hamburger patty, a side of white rice, a side of bone broth, maybe throw in some pickles, and of course the sourdough bread is always good.

And that's my favorite meal at cheesecake. And I don't much participate in desserts. I've never been that way. Needless to say, my wife and kids order something very different. But that's my favorite spot to stop at is they're generally in every big city in the country and I travel a lot. I'm a cheesecake guy. Yeah. A big fan of cheesecake factory. What is, how do you explain to people? Let's say that somebody hasn't been introduced to the vertical diet before. How do you conceptualize it? How do you explain it to people?

Yeah. You know, the vertical diet is really everything I want my clients to know and to do. It's a compilation of everything I've learned from over 30 years, from college to coaching, to competing, to being coached, collaborating with great athletes, and then partnering with Dr. Damon McEwan, who's a PhD, RDN, Director of Diatetics at UNLV. And we got together and spent a couple of years together producing and putting science

to over 250 peer-reviewed published articles. And then of course references to lots of videos. And just I think professionals in the industry and they're each in their respective fields that help my clients navigate all the things that are important because it's multifactorial. It's not just a diet, right? It's obviously, you know, it's nutrition, it's digestion, it's sleep, hydration, injury

prevention, and rehab, blood testing, blood sugar, blood pressure management. It's just a chapter after chapter after chapter of the things that I commonly have questions I've been asked and things that I want my clients to do to be successful in a program because it's not just one thing. Poor sleep, we diet's not going to fix that problem. We've got a crappy diet, then everything else suffers. I try and make sure that I cover all these bases for them. Of course, there's a lot of inter individual variability, so I have to,

it feels like I'm rewriting every program when I deal with a client. I give them a detailed questionnaire and have them respond, I find out. But their goals are what their genetic predispositions are, what they prefer in terms of foods that they like to eat and when they like to eat, where they like to eat, just kind of their lifestyle,

but constraints they might have, any injuries, digestive distress, I love the blood work, because then I might be able to see challenges that need to be overcome. And then try and make sure that they can improve each and every one of those areas that I think are important.

And I ask them to send me on a daily basis, not weekly, because I think by then, if somebody goes off the rails for three days, they might ghost you, and you lose them on a daily basis, I ask them to send me their hours of sleep, their morning body weight, and a picture of each meal. So that it's more for their information, their accountability, that which gets measured, gets improved, and then it is for my information, their accountability, that which gets measured, gets improved. And then it is for my information, necessarily unless I see something

that's significantly or I. And then weekly we do waste measurements and progress pictures, because oftentimes we're the last to see our progress. And if I get a client to take a progress picture on day one, two months later, they're like, I'm not making any progress, you put those side by side and generally you see a significant change that they don't see.

And the scale might not tell the whole story. You might get a client only loses two pounds, but they might lose four inches on their waist and look significantly tighter and they'd be stronger and feel better. So all of those things factor into it. From the diet side, what are the principles that you're following that? What are the thermodynamics of the vertical diet? See if I can go down this one, two, three calories or king. If you want a gain weight, you have to be in a surplus. And remember, I did both bodybuilding and powerlifting throughout my career. So I bulked up to over 300 pounds, and dided down to single-digit body fat to

compete as a bodybuilder and then you know, bulked back up to compete as a powerlifter. So conservatively speaking over a 25 year of competing, going back as far as 1988, I've gained and lost well over a thousand pounds. And I've learned a lot of lessons along the way. That's insane. I did I did a lot wrong. I always say if I knew then what I know now, I would have saved myself a whole lot of trouble and probably been able to perform at a much higher level at a much younger age, because I didn't reach my peak until I turned 40.

So calories are king. Surplastic gain weight, deficit to lose weight. Next to be your macros, protein being the most important of those, getting sufficient protein to fuel, or to build muscle or at least to retain lean mass when dieting. And protein can be manipulated to either eat less of it in order to be less satiated so you can eat more total calories.

That's actually a strategy that we use for people of a hard time eating enough food because it's very satiating and has a high thermic effect of food, meaning for every 100 calories, you consume you net out about 70. The calorie cost of digesting protein is more so than carbs, e-fats. Or if you're trying to lose weight, we might bump that up instead of a gram per pound of gold weight, we might even go up to 1.2 grams for the very same reason, flipping the script, it's more satiating and has a higher thermic effect of food. So you can feel like you're eating more volume of food, but you're knitting out less total calories.

So that's macros, protein being the most important of which, you have to have sufficient fats for health to get to sleep, for your hormones. You start getting too low on fats and you're going to have some problems with both of those things. But, and now we start getting into my personal preference because fats beyond that which provides you a health benefit, don't provide you a performance benefit. And so the rest for me is carbs, about 30, 35% protein, about 30% fat, and that's actually about a two to one protein to fat ratio.

If you're gonna consume 200 grams of protein, you get in about 100 grams of fat. They're equivalent in terms of calories because you've got nine calories per gram for fat and four calories per gram for protein. But it's around 30, 35% protein, around 30% fat, and that would leave about 40% carbs, which I think are important for performance.

Just me think that, but that's what science tells us, that's especially anaerobic performance, which would be, you know, strength training, sports, explosive sports, that those carbohydrates are very important for those bouts of training and performance. And so I leave room in there, I also find that that, more closely, is what's commonly consumed,

although the protein's a little higher. I think people would consume more commonly around 18%. We see that say in the Mediterranean diet. That's about an 18% protein diet. No one accidentally eats more than about 0.7 or 0.8 grams of protein per kilo of body weight. No one accidentally, unless you go to the buffet that you mentioned earlier on,

it has to be purposeful. And it should be. I believe it should be. You heard Dr. Gabriel Lyons talking about being the organ of longevity. It's a sink for glucose. I think those are great descriptors of what protein is. We also see that when you compare a 30% protein intake

to an 18% protein intake, an 18% in protein intake, say, with the Mediterranean diet, you see improved insulin sensitivity, improved glucose numbers. Again, for a couple of reasons, protein seems to decrease post-prandial glycemia, particularly when you eat it first in a meal. That's right. After a meal, post-brand meal, glycemia, that would be the peak elevation and duration of blood sugars, it kind of measured as an area under the curve. And so when you eat protein first and you eat a large amount of protein, you have fewer fluctuations, less area under the curve of blood sugar post meal. And so that tends to help for that reason as well.

And likely because you're eating less of other foods if you're eating more protein. And just less what we call glycemic load, probably fewer total carbs. So that's kind of where I put my percentages, I find that that's, and then those carbs, the proteins consist of a wide variety of proteins. I like to, I like to see red meat in the diet and we can dive into that.

I like to see salmon in the diet, at least two or three times a week, obviously, for EPA and DHA and Mega Threes. I like to see dairy in the diet. Preferentially yogurt, fat-free Greek yogurt is one of my favorites. It's a superfood. Have you got a brand of Greek yogurt that you prefer? I like Costco's Kirkland Greek yogurt as fat-free because it's a superfood. Have you got a brand of Greek yogurt that you prefer? That you really like. I like Costco's Kirkland Greek yogurt as fat-free, because it's not chalky, it's still creamy,

just as a personal preference for taste. I like to see eggs, it could be an egg egg white blend, because I wanna keep the yolk in there for it's, all the vitamins and minerals in there, the coldine and the biotin and the like. I mentioned red meat, and I should have said iron B12, zinc, all of those things, but I'll use a leaner cut because ultimately, and I probably should have started with this, it's the overall dietary pattern that matters a lot more than individual foods.

I don't think you should eat too much of anything. You could potentially leave you exposed to having too little of something else, possibly. And in the case of, say, red meat, of course, there is maybe some concern that fatty meats or too high saturated fats intake may elevate LDL in some individuals, and therefore increase cardiovascular disease risk. And that's multifactorial. I don't, you know, presume to think that that's the only thing that matters, but that is something that we do pay attention to, particularly in blood work,

because we certainly want to keep people's LDL within the range that, you know, we generally saturate fats are under 10% of total calories. It's kind of easy to do. If 30% of your total calories are fats, and something like a top sirloin steak or even an egg egg white blend, only about a third of that is saturated fat. So you got 30% times 30% or is your 9% below the American Heart Association's recommendation

for 10%. So you can have steak and eggs every morning for breakfast along with, you know, monitoring the type of fats that you take in, along with, say, a fat-tree-grieke yogurt, which is cardioprotective. So you get some benefits from that, along with some fruits, which, again, cardioprotective reduces inflammation. Those citrus flavonoids are incredible. So the dietary pattern matters most.

On variety of protein sources, the fats are generally in the protein, although it might be nice to get a little olive oil in there with your salad with dinner that tends to be a lot of nice things going on with extra virgin olive oil. And then the carbohydrates, I start with high potassium carbohydrates, which would be, say, a daily potato, has a thousand milligrams of potassium over twice set of a banana. Fruits are great for that, especially low sugar fruits, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, those kinds of things.

Oranges, another reason I like oranges and potatoes is which this conversation should evolve into very shortly, satiety. There is a satiety index that measures the length of time certain foods keep you full. It's a subjective measurement when they just interview people based on foods that they eat. And way at the top of that list, of course, you're going to have proteins and fibers, but you're also going to have foods like boiled potatoes and oranges. And so I like the dual benefit of the hypotassium, relatively low sugar in those fruits, but also the satiety benefit, because anybody who's in a calorie deficit, that's what I'm shooting for.

I might do just the opposite of somebody's gain weight. I might pull the potato out and throw in white rice. I might pull the orange out and put in orange juice just to flip the script on that. I don't mean to keep bouncing back and forth, but the diet isn't all things for all people. And so that, once you get, you know, of course you throw your salad in there, you can get some more, certainly some more potassium from spinach or whatever, you know, fiber, some nuts,

if you get a little bit of magnesium out of that, some mixed nuts, and that is pretty much the foundation of the vertical diet. If you wanna talk specifically about the kinds of foods I recommend and the macros, it's kind of all contained in that explanation. This episode is brought to you by levels. One of the single biggest predictors of how long you live

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Plus get that 90 day money back guarantee that's levels.link slash modern wisdom to take advantage of an exclusive offer plus get that 90 day money back guarantee that's levels dot link slash modern wisdom two different foods that you've touched on there which are often demonized red meat. No. Is it killing everybody? Well, again, what's the dietary pattern? Are you eating a ton of really fatty meats, bacon, butters usually thrown into that group even though it's not a meat, but it's commonly... To side of a meat, right.

Tons of rib eyes. Are you susceptible? What's your body composition? What's your exercise look like? Are you consuming sufficient fiber? Well, let's say that someone is not a total renegade with this, and they realize that they shouldn't be eating super fatty cuts of meat, that they shouldn't be cooking it in tons and tons of butter, that they shouldn't be having bags and bags and bags of bacon.

There is a movement at the moment, guys like Brian Johnson, who are emtore activating the emtore pathway as a nightmare. I avoid red meat specifically. There is concerns from the FDA, there is concerns from all manner of people who are experts in some circles with regards to diet that say red meat is something that you should have once a month at the absolute most.

Why, what is it that you're seeing that they're not? Well, you mentioned, there's the first one you mentioned, oh, MTOR stimulation, well, that there's a difference to an acute and chronic inflammation or MTOR stimulation and the acute inflammation or stimulation of MTOR doesn't seem to be a problem.

And that would be the same protein in general, wouldn't be specific to red meat. Any protein would stimulate emitor. And the problem that you get is, as we age, we become anabolically resistant at some point or less and less anabolically what we're just sensitive. And a lot of people as they age suffer from, they don't eat enough protein and they suffer from sarcopenium. And that can be a bigger problem for mortality risk than consuming red meat or any meat there,

you know, for that matter. And I think if I'm citing the right person, I think Kevin Hall has done a lot of research on that and is the, and opposes that theory, that longevity theory that comes a little bit from Sinclair, a little bit from Valtor Longo, those folks, you know, it's a lot of mouth studies. We have no human evidence, no human outcome trials showing that that is going to limit lifespan.

The problem with a lot of that research is it's usually influenced by the healthy user bias. People who tend to eat more red meat tend to smoke more, drink more, weigh more exercise less. And they eat all the things that are associated with it. The bacon, double cheeseburgers with the bun and the soda pop and the fries.

And you know, and and dessert with that and maybe a couple of beers. That's obviously you know they try and control for that in some of the epidemiology imperfect and they try and stratify the risk based on other health markers but for the most part again as part of a healthy diet keeping your you, you know, watching your LDLs, I guess the only other concern would be cancer. And you mentioned that the World Health Organization, you may have mentioned an eye arc. I find it interesting now, we've got this big blowback

on Asper team. Eye arc came out and said that Asper team was associated with cancer risk. What's your read on that? Well, my read is that they study, they look at mouse studies with cancer risk. What's your read on that? Well, my read is that they study, they look at mouse studies and with huge doses and it's not their job to look at doses. And so what was the, do you know what the relative, how much are human, is it, would I have

had to have consumed three and a half cases of Dr. Peppas? Something like 800 coaks or something a day. A day? Yeah, to get that level of a spurtame. But the point of that story is, and none of the nutrition PhDs, which is the people that I usually turn my ear towards when things like this come out,

none of them consider this to be a concern. We do have plenty of human trials, randomized control trial showing evidence that when you replace sugar sweeten beverages with diet sodas, you see weight loss and therefore improved health outcomes. Right, let's just dig in this for one second. This is something that came up with a bunch of different stories I've heard from you.

A lot of the time, people will demonize the thing which is seemingly less natural. It's got a name like Aspartame instead of Sugar. But what they don't realize is that the weight loss from switching from sugar to Aspartame is so significant that tons and tons of downstream benefits for health come from that and it seems like the concern from Aspartame has to be at dosages so insane that you would essentially be hooked up to an IV, like Warren Buffett's nightmare, just pumping it into events.

It's nothing for anybody to worry about. You've had an interesting point there when I talk about the importance of the overall dietary pattern and then your general physical health. Weight loss, I said this on a podcast not too long ago and it was clipped and thrown onto the internet, just a little clip of it, and I said that 95% of health benefits are realized strictly from weight loss itself, irrespective of diet. And I referenced the McDonald's diet. We have multiple studies now, the McDonald's diet, the Twinkie diet, the 7-Eleven diet, where when people eat even a lot of quote unquote crappy food, junk food, fast food, when they're able to maintain

a calorie deficit and lose weight, they see decreases in all of their biomarkers, they see lowered cholesterol, lowered blood sugar, lowered blood pressure, and weight loss itself, we know, is associated with decreased cancer risk. So that should be the primary goal, weight loss. Obviously, those kinds of diets long-term, particularly if they're high insaturated fats and maybe your LDL starts to go up eventually, potentially if you're not exercising

or if you lose a significant amount of lean muscle mass because you're not lifting weights. So there's a whole host of problems. At the end of that, I said I would never recommend a McDonald's diet. That gets clipped out. Internet. Internet. Please leave that bit in. Yes, which we've touched on already. So,

tidy being the key of the reason for that is that the best diets when you'll follow and hunger is the biggest reason why people will fail on a diet. And hunger is the biggest reason why people will fail on a diet. And when you're looking at the highly processed, very calorie dense foods, that if you were to do the McDonald's diet, and it is possible to lose weight on it, I think it was 1800 calories, 1850, something like that. You'd be very hungry.

But precisely, because think about how dense those calories are. Think about how little food you get for those 1800 calories. I mean, it's probably a medium, maybe a large meal with a coke. A full-fat coke would be... It wouldn't be a lot of food. Yep. It'd be, like you say, maybe a cheeseburger, probably...

I think he had to eat half of this, half of that to get through the day. But nonetheless, the point is that the weight loss is the primary goal. And we see this with a lot of diets, a lot of diet tribes. We see this with keto. And my goal here isn't to shit on anybody's diet plan. There's many paths to the same destination.

And I believe they're all very individualistic. And the best path is the one that seems the least restrictive. So you can adhere to it long term. And some people like to lower their carbs. Some people like to eliminate, I guess we should just say, there's three paths. There's not many paths. There's three paths to dieting.

All of them result in a calorie deficit one is Calorie restriction. That's where your counting calories and you're checking the labels on and you're weighing and measuring food and you're using your little You know your computer your phone to track your calories. That's that's one method of controlling calories The other one is time restriction And that's you're just gonna eat like with a 16-8, or maybe that doesn't work for you, you gotta go to an 18-6 or a 24 until you just can't eat enough calories in your window to gain weight and you start losing weight. The other ones would be dietary restriction, and that's where you start eliminating foods.

That would be a keto, get rid of carbs. That would be a vegan, get rid of meats. That would be a paleo, get rid of everything that was created after 1960 or something like that. Gravitarian, everything that didn't fold to the ground, did zone a cold. Yeah. So those are your options. And you pick one, if you may, or find something that works, or a combination of the two, the intermittent fasting keto diet became real popular as a one, two punch for a while. But how sustainable are they for you?

And different people have different long-term results, but the research shows none of them are any better than the other long-term. Is that anything special about intermittent fasting? Is there some super secret sauce that gets activated after a particular amount of time. Does the increased growling release? Is the hunger signal hormisis response? What does the sign say here? In so much as it allows you to maintain a calorie deficit and you lose weight, it can be

a healthy diet plan. That's going to be very individualistic. Some people can skip breakfast or skip dinner and not feel as though that's too restrictive and Can adhere to that diet for some period of time But we there's been a lot of things claimed about intermittent fasting some special autophagy benefit or some special reduction in mTOR signaling or some satiety benefit which isn't consistent across the population you see It's very individualistic.

We don't see any extra benefits above the calorie restriction itself. And we see in the research that continuous calorie restriction, intermittent fasting, perform very much the same in terms of weight loss and health benefits long term. Where is the magic fairy dust claims about intermittent fasting coming from then? If you can't find it and there are people out there who say that it's happening, what are they reading that you're not or what are they seeing that's incorrect? That's the problem with the research. There's peer-reviewed published research to support just about any position on any nutrient or diet.

There's evidence hierarchy that you're familiar with. Wait out at the bottom is those mouth studies and petri dishes and anecdotes. Then you step up one step maybe and you've got expert advice, which even that one's challenging because expert at what? You get somebody who's a chiropractor talking about nutrition that's not necessarily within their domain-specific expertise. Let me see a lot of that. The nutrition PhDs take particular offense to that just because somebody has an MD or

a PhD after their name doesn't mean it's in nutrition. Next up from that you're going to look at probably epidemiology, research on large populations of people, and then randomized control trials above that, particularly ones that are performed on humans where you can adjust certain variables. And then you get up to systematic reviews or meta-analyses where they take a cluster together, the body of evidence that qualifies for the criterion, and they try and come up with something that is a little more representative of what all of the research suggests, not a cherry-picked study.

And then beyond that, even we've got professionals that will review all of that and make, you know, have a position paper like the Internet Society of Sports Nutrition. Yeah. Because those people are probably more qualified to review those systematic reviews. And there's, you know, obviously there's the Cochrane Collaboration. I think there are 51 countries with thousands of scientists that kind of recognizes the gold standard for being the least influenced potentially by maybe biases, et cetera. So there's different quality of information.

I mean, to go too far off the rails, but some people will find, you know, cherry pick is the word we use, a particular study that acted to their benefit. Sometimes, I did use keto as an example. When you control for calories and protein, you see equivalent outcomes amongst people who do high carb or low carb. We saw that in the diet fits trial out of Stanford.

There was over 600 people over a year long, and they did low carbon high carbon, didn't find any significant difference in satiety, weight loss, glycemia. They didn't see any difference in any of those things. And interestingly enough, Gary Talb's research arm was part of that study. So over and over again, when you look at the body of evidence, randomized control trials

and humans in particular and the systematic reviews of those, you just, you don't see any difference. You see that the trends are that it's very individualistic. And even within a particular study, when you show some sort of measurable result, you've got a lot of inter-individual there. You've got people who didn't have any result or you know, you've got people who lost a lot of weight, you've got people who gained a lot of weight. And what the average is might not appeal or apply to you as an individual. So, and I hate

saying all that, well, I'm on both sides of the fence on this. I like that the individual now knows they have options and there isn't a best diet and they're not required to go keto or if they want to get results. It's unnecessary. Even if they have type 2 diabetes, the weight loss itself is the driver of insulin sensitivity, not the fact that they eliminated carbs. And we've had studies done where people with type 2 diabetes did a high carbon, low carb diet, had a quibble in outcomes. So, I want people to have as many options as possible. That gets us to, now their eyes have glossed over and I'm like, well, what do I do? And that's where I come in with some very specific recommendations, which, you know, then

I got to get feedback and make those adjustments because the general audience, the general population, they don't have all this, this isn't their business. They have a different business. They have a different field of expertise. They have a family, they have kids, they have a career, they have, at the end of the day, they just tell me exactly what to eat.

And so I give them a very specific diet plan. I tell them exactly what to eat, how many ounces of this, somebody else based on the feedback that they give me from my questionnaire. But then we have to tune in and listen, how do you feel? Do you feel satiated?

There is a weight control, what's it called, registry, that has tracked successful dieters, over 10,000 dieters going back a couple of decades, who have lost over 66 pounds and maintained the weight loss for over five years. And there were some key things, some common things, it's kind of like the millionaire next door. What are things that these people do consistently? Success leaves clues. We saw that 98% of these people went on a diet.

They had a plan, okay? And it doesn't matter which diet. These people went on many different diets. I have vegan clients. I have carnivore clients. I have keto clients. I have vertical diet clients. They're personal preference.

98% one on a diet, they had a plan. That is important. 95% of them increase their activity level, walking being the number one activity level. And we can get into how important and effective that is. 78% of them eight breakfast every morning. And that's not to say you have to eat breakfast, but it's certainly not to say that intermittent fasting skipping breakfast is required to lose weight when the vast majority of the people in the largest, longest, most successful study demonstrates that 78% ate breakfast. And I don't care if you do or don't.

My daughter doesn't like breakfast. She's never hungry in the morning. My son eats breakfast. It's very personal, it's very individualistic. We can talk about where breakfast might be important, but for now we'll go on to the next one with 75% of people weigh themselves regularly. Again, that which gets measured gets improved. I have come across clients that said they have an uncomfortable relationship with the scale.

And that's generally because they let the daily fluctuations influence their mood when you should be adding up the week way in every day, at up to seven days, divide it by seven to get a weekly average and then compare that weekly average to the other weekly averages throughout the month. That's a better way to manage the scale. Well, that sounds good in theory, but in practice, my wife's been dieting for years. And when she steps on that scale, it will determine her mood. And on that note, I said that I coined a term

some years ago, compliance is the science. At the best diets, the one you'll follow. So I try and create a diet program that people comply with. Something that becomes, you know, to cover the book here, simple, sensible, and sustainable. Okay. Something becomes part of a lifestyle. And so one of the things that, one of the things that the research shows is, is that meal prep, not shilling from my meal prep company, but prepping meals, whether I prep or you prep, we see this in the bodybuilding figure physique bikini industry going back decades as long as that industry has been in existence.

Those people, those people me, that's my, that's my brethren, that's my home bodybuilding. So I came up in this industry. We pack our meals into Tupperwares and we throw them in our six-pack bag and we, you know, that's, we've got everything we need for the day. Meal prepping is one of the number one behaviors that leads to long-term success. And if you prep your meals, whether twice a week or, you know, every morning for the day, and you know exactly, and it's measured and weighed exactly what you're supposed to eat, even weight watchers. Very successful.

As long as you adhere to it and consistently eat the meals that they recommend, any meal prep provides greater opportunity for success because then you're not randomly opening their refrigerator when you're hungry and grabbing what you're hungry for, call that food reward and end up over-consuming it. Or it's lunchtime, oh my God, I'm famished. You get the car you drive to your favorite, whatever you're hungry for, fast food place, possibly at that moment, you tend to over-consume those foods. So what I try and do is instill behaviors.

The meal prep is a big one. We talked about satiety. We have a toolbox that we can use to help us improve our satiety. So we're not hungry all the time. And it's somewhat effective. It's things like increasing protein intake, increasing fiber intake, eating more whole foods and fewer ultra processed foods, drinking more fluids with meals, which is where so it and iced tea can come in very handy as well as water. It helps fill the stomach up and you know the the rougay of the stomach expands and sends the signal that you're that you're full and that satiety feeling is very desirable in a meal whether it's acquired through a massive

amount of calories or just a large volume of food that may not yield as many calories, including fluids. Beyond that, mindful eating, not sitting in front of a TV or an iPhone and shoveling in food until all of a sudden the plate's gone. Eating more protein and eating protein first in the meal tends to help with satiety. There may be a few in there I forgot, but that's kind of our toolbox that we like to utilize and encourage our clients to, because as soon as they get hungry, you're going to start losing that battle. Will power is not a good strategy to overcome hunger. You'll lose that battle every time. Why is it the case, given this many thousand person,

very successful trial study? Why is it the case that diets fail then? What's the percentage success of a typical diet? Great. Well, it's interesting, something like six out of seven diars lose weight. So losing weight isn't hard, keeping it off his heart. So long-term dietary adherence is what we like to measure. And the main reason that people regain the weight, as I mentioned, is hunger. They just stop adhering to the diet. They go back to

their old habits. They start over-consuming and generally that food is the ultra-process hyper-palatable foods. And that is where none of us are anymore successful than the other. This is a whole conversation unto itself, really, that all of us in our diet tribes, I have a name to diet, the vertical diet.

There's a whole host of people out there that claim that whether it's intermittent fasting or keto or you name it. None of us are any more successful than the other long term. There's been tons of studies on thousands of people for a year or two years. None of us can claim to have the answer to this problem. It's much bigger than all of us.

I think some of these ultra-processed, hyper-palatable food manufacturers are probably just laughing because we're all sitting around the table. There was an old Warner Brothers. Was it Warner Brothers? It was a cartoon when I was a kid. The ants were fighting over a cake and there was a cherry on top. And you had the red ants and the black ants were up there and they were drawing around the cherry to see who was going to keep the cherry and they erased it and they never

got to erase it. And they got this great big fight. And then the picnickers came back, picked up their cake and walked away while these guys were all fighting. I feel like those ants in this war on obesity. What's going to say do you feel like there is a battle going on between the designers of food and the people who want to remain healthy? That battle is for money. That battle is for investors. That battle is to sell more food. That's what their job is as a corporation and they'll design and sell and market in the most effective

way for their business to profit, not in the most effective way to help people with their long-term health and to stave off obesity. So that, I can't speak to that. I'm just saying that while we're arguing about the best diet, it doesn't seem to matter. We all have our own list of testimonials. You know, I say something about the carbohydrate insulin model, but I'll go on to Jason Fung's YouTube. And there's a whole bunch of people talking about how when they cut out carbs,

they lost weight and they feel great. But in fact, everybody has testimonials. The vegan community has testimonials. The carnivore community has testimonials. The vegan community has testimonials. The carnivore community has testimonials. I post testimonials all the time. It doesn't seem to matter that it hasn't had an impact on our obesity crisis. The cause of our, none of us are solving

the cause of our obesity crisis, which is access to the Jeep affordable ultra-process hyper-palatable foods. So it's bigger than all of us are solving the cause of our obesity crisis, which is access to cheap affordable ultra-process hyper-palatable foods. So, it's bigger than all of us, because none of us have any influence on that. What's so ever, that those companies that are manufacturing and distributing this food, that's going to take a larger intervention, like it did with smoking. This episode is brought to you by a product I've used every single day for over three years now, and that is AG1.

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that the World Health Organization and the FDA are in alignment with this? Like why hasn't the FDA or the government updated or changed their recommendations in line with this? I don't know what recommendations are necessarily specifically talking about. If you're talking about the dietary guidelines those dietary guidelines were pretty good. in line with this. I don't know what recommendations you should necessarily specifically talk about. If you're talking about the dietary guidelines,

those dietary guidelines were pretty good. They are, I think, people bastardized them when they went low fat. These food companies came in and made these high sugar foods, but it's not the sugar. It's not the fat. It's the combination of all of those. Sugar, fat, salt. It's a combination.

That's where your pastries and cakes and all these things come from. They're not just sugar. Nobody's mainlining bags of sugar. That's not how this works. There is someone out there that's doing that. Sorry, have you seen the videos of these uncontacted tribesmen

and they give them cheese cake for the first time? Have you ever seen this? I haven't seen it. People should, after this episode has finished, not now. Go and check out videos of uncontacted tribesmen eating cheesecake, and obviously, their eyes just, oh, from an orification, so the design of the texture of food,

the combination of the carbs and the fat. And if you think about it, I learned about orification a few years ago, and it blew my mind. I learned about it in high school, I'm not sure exactly what you're... I didn't, I look, I'm British, we have a lot of fish and chips.

That's teasing. Poor orification. Sounds like something to me. Sounds something else other than... It's, come on, with this professional conversation, legitimate scientific information about diet, dragging us into the gutter.

Orification, the design of the texture of food, think about, ancestrally, what you'd have typically been able to have if you were eating anything. It would have been one texture. It's slimy meat. It is berries, which kind of, if you get them at the right ripeness, can kind of have a couple of textures and a little bit of crunch on the outside.

But if you actually think about some of the most hyper-palatable foods, it's not just the flavor, it's not just the actual content, it's the texture in your mouth. And this combination of crispy or crunchy with smooth is unbelievably novel. Yeah.

Oreos. Got the crunch on the outside and that sort of smooth on the inside. French fries, sort of fluffy potato inside and the crunch that's well cooked on the outside. Cheesecake, exactly the same. It's so novel. And then when you layer on top, it's not just that, it's the spike of the sugar as it hits your tongue. And then after that, it's the fat as well on top of this. And yes, sure enough, you have these guys who've just been eating mackacks or whatever they've been having for the last. You know, immediately think of when you say that they tried it for the first time and they

were just like, wow, I immediately think of the fact that that's what children experience at their initial consumption and they no longer, we no longer experience that. It's normal to us when we eat those foods. It's almost to expect it When we eat those foods, it's almost expected. That's what we're drawn to. We don't have that same response, but we just keep going back to those foods. You can't win that battle. We aren't winning that battle. We're losing that battle. I guess that kind of brings us back to why isn't the World Health Organization, so other folks, they make some minor inroads. I think they got serial companies to reduce the sugar, you know, where, to respect the kids. They

got soda pops out of high schools and things like that. Very small places like Mexico, they started taxing sugar-laden beverages, but then they just, they go to an alternate source. That's what happens. They tend to, you know, they might just go to Kool-Aid instead of Coca-Cola. And that's generally what happens. I'm not suggesting that I have a solution. I'm just saying, I know what the problem is. We all know what the problem is. There's no secret.

And even people who suffer from obesity or overweight, it's not like they're confused about the fact that the foods that they're eating are causing that problem. It's just the fact that it foods that they're eating are causing that problem. It's just the fact that it's just too good, too affordable, too available. My wife grew up in Samoa. She was born and raised in Western Samoa, which is British Samoa. Sometimes she was born, sometimes she was about six years old. She got 12 brothers and sisters all older than her. And they grew all of their own food. They raised goats and chickens. They would go out in the ocean and harvest whatever they could get from the sea. They grew tarot root. They had pineapple. And they would sell a lot of that at the marketplace, at a

very vibrant marketplace in Western Samoa. Every week, you see three generations of family, from the kids to the parents to the grandparents, at marketplace, selling whatever it is they were able to grow and and put together for the weeks to make money. They didn't have any obesity in their family. They grew all their own food, ate all their own whole foods. At some point when she was about six years old, their whole family moved to Americans some more. And in American Samoa, they had food stamps. And they had big, huge stores with white flour, sugar, seed oils, salt. And those were the most affordable things to buy. Obviously, there's cheapest to make and ship over there. And that became the foundation of their diet.

They stopped growing their own food, the marketplace in American Samoa is laughable and comparison nobody cooks or raises and cooks their own food. They became what I said, food rich instead of food poor. They had food stamps and they had availability. They started consuming all of those ultra-crosses, hyper-palatable foods, all of her family, and the vast majority of them ended up gaining a significant amount of weight

and her father ultimately died from complications of diabetes, the black feet and the whole nine nerves. So I'm not suggesting I have a solution, it's pretty obvious what happened, what has happened. We just didn't have access to these kinds of foods as conveniently as this, back in the 1950s, because people always show those beach pictures in the 50s. Yeah, these are super popular in the moment. Yeah, what's really exciting, really popular.

And none of those people are fat, or they show them in the 40s, walking, you know, bustling up and down the streets of New York, and there's no fat people. And it just didn't have access to this food environment that we have today. It's a calorie problem and it's the ultra-process foods that we're over-consuming. So, I mean, we're doing the best we can. I don't, any more, I don't claim to be able to solve anything other than the clients that I'm working with.

You know, I try and put out good information, but we're all losing this battle miserably. Obesity has, our weight has continued to climb. Insular resistance has continued to climb. Type 2 diabetes. And I don't see a solution in the horizon because nobody's working on the actual problem. There's a lot of money involved in that. It probably would take some sort of governmental intervention on a big scale. And I got a lot of blowback from this when I brought this up

but a podcast previous says, I got a tag saying, oh, it's personal responsibility. And I'm like, well, yes it is. But how's that working out? You know, at some point, we're gonna have to find a better solution. And I yield to people who are, you know, at some point we're going to have to find a better solution. And I yield to people who are a lot smarter and a lot more connected than me to try and drive that agenda, but that's where we're at.

How legit are the blue zone studies? A lot of problems with the blue zone studies. One in particular is the lack of verifiable birth certificates. A lot of these people would assume their parents a registry issue. It's not a diet issue, it's a registry issue. There was a study done, I forget the name of the individual, but I actually included a reference to that in my, I have an ebook, a vertical diet ebook where I've updated that periodically because I can add some version 3.0 currently and soon to be 4.0 on my website. But those are the kinds of links to research that I supply

and there are people ask me, what about blue zones? I've gotten this question. I've probably answered over 100,000 DMs in the last six or seven years. And a lot of those questions are the same, which is kind of what creates the foundation of the information that I provide. I know that this is what people want to know.

This is what they ask. And so I pool those into most common questions and I endeavor to answer those so that they're covered. And then I refer people to those answers, but one thing. Yeah, we have a lack of verifiable. There is a little cherry picking going on with those studies. I think that some of the places that were left out, Iceland, even in California, the difference between, say, 7th day Adventists is at the group that's vegan, that's in the blue zones.

And I think right up the street, we've got Mormons who consume significantly more meat, but have the other lifestyle characteristics. They don't smoke, they don't drink, they exercise a lot, they're not overweight, have similar lifespans. And so the blue zones are tough. I think they make solid recommendations in terms of overall dietary patterns, but the idea that we can put a lot of weight in those diets vary quite a bit. There's meat consumption in the Mediterranean diet. There's meat consumption in the Okinawan's ham in particular. The blue zones was I think kind of an effort to go to point more towards vegan.

In fact, a lot of those, those areas aren't vegan. A lot of meat, some meats in their diet, which again gets us back to dietary pattern fruits and vegetables are very important. I think it's Hong Kong, the highest red meat consumers in the world have some of the longest lifespan. But they eat a ton of fruits and vegetables and they eat pretty lean meats and they don't suck down cubes of butter. So, you know, all of that matters.

What are some of the commonalities, either in terms of lifestyle, movement, diet, social life, that you do think the blue zones do get right. Yeah, I think they get all of that right, other than trying to demonize a particular food item. I think they get all of that right. I think that they have better sleep, they have better body mass index, BMI, which is not the most accurate measure. Obviously, overmuscle people will look to be fat on BMI, but they move more in terms of the number of steps that they accumulate every day. And you hit the nail on the head there, too.

They have a better, I think, social interaction with family, all of those things. What's interesting is that a lot of these zones were very poor, which lent itself well, of course, not being very well documented and acquiring their parents' information so that they could continue to receive any governmental assistance that was associated with that. But usually lower socioeconomic populations have less access to medical care and therefore maybe a shorter lifespan. But amongst all those other characteristics, that's probably less important. What do you make of grounding and the usefulness of that in general overall health? Yeah, I don't know that it's meaningful.

There's a lot of things. I try and stick with the big rocks. I'm cautious about... There's a lot of folks, more recently, and I don't mention any names, but they're popular folks that'll get into a lot of... They might dive into a plausible or possible reasons, bio-mechanical, you know, in the biochemistry, and try and explain why something should work or could work,

but they take these giant logical leaps and make these outcome-oriented claims about things that they just aren't meaningful when compared to the things that really matter. The sleep, maintaining the weight, exercising regularly, you know, said the social stress reduction, you know, you said the social stress reduction, those kinds of things, a healthy diet. Everything else, I kind of put it into like the 99% and then the 1% and everything else kind of goes into that little 1%. A lot of it's placebo, this happens a lot in the,

in pain and pain rehabilitation. I talk a lot about this in my book. A lot of that stuff, I say generally speaking, things that are done to you or for you are never as effective as things you do for yourself. Active recovery, movements, right? Actually getting your heart rate up, exercising, lifting weights, as opposed to massage.

As opposed to massage. I'm not saying massage is not beneficial, I'm just saying that in comparison, this isn't me. It's what the research suggests. To quote Greg Knuckles on it, he said that for this is a study on lower back pain, 95% of which resolves itself spontaneously within six to eight weeks. So any intervention that somebody with pain submits themselves to gyro practice physical therapy electric stem Gwasha

Dry needling I mean list goes on on on a non inversion table anything wearing a copper bracelet It's coming along for the ride any is coming along for the ride they will attribute their Spontaneous recovery to whatever intervention they're participating into time. Oh my God, that worked for me. It was fantastic. It's worked for thousands of other people. Greg's words were to quote, he said, maybe it's better than nothing, but it pales in comparison to any kind of movement.

It's not an indictment on physical therapist or chiropractors, it's that they should be facilitators of movement, a good physical therapist, Professor Michael Ray, the folks at Barbell Medicine, who talk about the Biosyco social method, which I think came from Laramar Mosley's work, explain pain out of Australia. They're on the front lines of this, where manual therapy, not as effective as movement.

It's a facilitator of movement. If someone by touching you can distract you from that pain signal, from the brain to the location that you're experiencing pain, call it placebo, called it distraction therapy. And that then allows you to move with less inhibition. Greg calls it to chanicephobic when people have pain, they stop moving, which is exactly the opposite of what you want to do. You want to begin moving as early as possible and as much as possible with as little pain as possible. And that's what's going to help facilitate the recovery.

So I didn't mean to get too far off track there, but that's where I always end up when people talk about, it's going to be true of ice baths, you know, contrast showers, and I'm like, great, you know, if it makes you feel good. Do it, by all means, if those things, you know, give you an emotional or a, there's just no evidence that they provide a significant physiologically measurable benefit. One of the other big move is sleep. What is the relationship between sleep and weight loss?

Yeah, a few things. One, when you don't get sufficient sleep, you have increased a grellen release, which makes you hungerier, makes you eat more. You also have compromised insulin sensitivity, which makes it a little easier for you to gain weight. Sorry, you've mentioned insulin sensitivity a couple of times today, just to high level what's up. Yeah, we would say, say prediabetic or diabetic, is that when you eat foods, your blood sugars,

elevate, and there's no place to store them, because your overfat, your fat stores are full and so you can't put those there, your muscles, maybe don't have sufficient muscle mass to store that there. And then that stays elevated for an extended period. Not good, right? Understood. So, sleep weight loss.

Sleep does affect insulin levels as well. We also find that people who don't get sufficient sleep when they start losing weight, they might lose a disproportionate amount of muscle as opposed to fat. The body becomes stingy at preserving the fat. And so those are all things that can happen. Other, just being awake more hours in the day gives you another opportunity to get hungry and eat, you know, sleep through one meal and you're probably better off. Yeah. Yeah.

Wow. Whole host of benefits from getting sufficient sleep. Would you say that sleep is more important than cardio for fat loss? Well, I did put it this way once. I said, if you're waking up at 4 a.m. to do your fasted cardio after only five hours of sleep, you're stepping over $100 bills to pick up nickels. That's been something I've said for many years. If somebody had, to me, I would do the cardio later.

Or I don't even really recommend cardio at all to most of my clients because it's a pretty significant departure from their standard lifestyle and it might not be something they enjoy. It might not be very sustainable, and we see it has diminishing returns over time as your body kind of adapts to that stimulus and becomes more efficient and reduces the calorie of burns. I focus on non-exercise activity, particularly aggressive exercise activity. I'm not shitting on any of these forms. If the best exercise is the one you'll do, if you enjoy doing it, do it. But if somebody starts crushing themselves, I call it battle ropes and burpees, thinking that they're going to burn calories just for fat loss, a phenomenon called compensation

takes over where you just go home and sit more and eat more because you're hungry. You're tired. And you're hungry. You're tired. And you earned it. You just trained while. Hey, and you can burn 300 calories in one of those battle-rope and burpee episodes, and you can go home and have one piece of bread, and then negate all of your gains or losses, we should say. But I'm cautious about prescribing cardio for weight loss for all of those reasons. Prescribe an extra hours sleep instead.

I prescribe an extra hours sleep and more non-exercise activity. I just think that the barriers to entry, having to come home, get your car, drive to the gym, to your cardio, and we're too busy. So I see if you've got a family in a career. That's the first thing that gets sacrificed in that scenario. It's why I love the 10 the 10 minute walks because they're more convenient, more sustainable. I can attach them to an existing behavior, which as we know, increases the likelihood that that new behavior will become a habit. They can be done anywhere at any time.

Let's say it's the first time that somebody is hearing about walking as a significant performance in answer. What do we need to know? Frequency, structure, why is it working? What's the best way that you found to integrate it? How do you stick to it? Well, we see dramatic improvements in health span, simply from going from 2,000 steps a day to 5,000 steps a day. We see a significant decline in blood pressure, improvement in heart rate, all the health

markers. It also improves satiety of all things, just walking somewhere in that, I want to say about five or six thousand steps a day. You can get about 1,300 steps from a 10 minute walk. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that moving periodically throughout the day, say 10 minutes, three times a day, is more effective than 30 minutes once a day on all cause mortality as well. Why?

Well, it seems that the sitting for an extended period of time actually does some damage and moving more frequently throughout the day, getting your heart rate up. Even if it's five minutes out of a hour while you're at work, you know, they've got those standing desks or the bike desks and those kinds of things. And just movement in general. And then getting sufficient steps in. Now, we do see differences in the intensity of that. They should be deliberate. The heart rate should elevate a bit. I mean, we're not jogging. You don't necessarily have to be out of breath, but we see the folks that can get their heart rate elevated

just a little bit. We stay in zone two, I think everybody's talking about now, is it not such that you can't still talk while you're doing it. So it should be deliberate. It's tough to get to zone two walking. Zone two whilst walking. Like a 4.0. It's a quick pace. It's a decent pace. It's deliberate.

And it should be. You're going to get better benefits from it. Yeah. I didn't. I mean, I'm not cardiovascular, even, even remotely competent. But for me, and I wear a hoop, I absolutely love it. I would need to be weight-vested, or I would need to be moving at one hell of a clean. Yeah. For me, like speed walking, I would look silly to get to properly get into zone. That's the neat thing about exercise in general and improving your health span is that when you go from what's described as the bottom quartile into say the 50% or above, that's where you see the majority of your health benefits.

Yeah. So I think something is better than nothing and then I try and make that something into something that's sustainable and easy to do. On the walk, this is something that I realized while I was talking to a friend. A friend moved into this gorgeous new apartment in Austin And friend moved into this gorgeous new apartment in Austin on West 7th Street. It's on the 23rd floor. He's got a view on three sides. He can see the sunrise and the sunset. It's amazing. If he wants to go for a walk, takes him seven minutes to get downstairs because there's

only three elevators for 1500 people that live in this apartment, block, and so on and so forth. And I was like, dude, like, I love this place. And then where I live, I am as soon as I put my crocs on, I am about 15 seconds from a park. And it's the first time I live in a parent's house who's like that back home. My house in Newcastle is kind of similar. And then this one's by far the closest. And it's such a hack. and it's an unseen cost. Yeah. A vertical living, I think.

I mean, you know, I can go up and down the stairs and you could take the stairs between the three flights. You could do 10 minutes of stairs. Yeah, which would be great. But I mean, you're seeing a gray brick, dry stone. That's another thing getting exposed to sunlight. That's a whole other psychological benefit, of course. Of course, as far as the walk goes,

I've traveled, I've been in 12 countries in all 50 states, and over 200 seminars in the last five years. And so as in hotel to hotel, airport to airport, I use the opportunity walk from security to the gate as a 10 minute walk. I use the opportunity at baggage claim. I'm walking around circles. All people are standing there waiting for the baggage thing

to go. Such a good hire. Looking at me like I'm an idiot. My favorite thing, especially at airports, is get to the gate, even if I'm an hour early, which I'm not usually in walk, but have a look. Okay, is it gonna leave early? Is it gonna leave early?

This is the actual gate. The gate's not down some secret escalator. There's a bunch of these in London. He throw. Yeah. Okay, right. I know where I need to go. And I'll just, if you do laps, if you do laps that are 10 minutes, you're never going to miss your flight because every, you know, you're never more than five minutes away from the gate. And sitting before you're going to be sitting, it seems like an awful waste of time because you're going to get on that plane. You're going to be sitting for two, three, five, seven hours.

Okay. So three more things about walks. Yep. I like to describe them post-meal. They're twice as effective as metformin for preventing or reversing type two diabetes. Because of their impact on post-prandial glycemia, the after-meal blood sugar elevation and duration, your muscles will uptake the glucose from that meal into glycogen in the absence of need of insulin. So you get less sustained elevated insulin. Additionally, it helps your digestion, just the, yep, just the musculature, the enzymatic action

and the muscular contraction. All of those things are of great benefit. I also find that it helps a lot with people that are trying to recover from things like hips or knees, just to get lots of movement. It's also a cue, right? You're gonna have at least two meals a day, sometimes three.

Okay, so if you're money should get a morning walk upon waking, which I absolutely adore. It's the most reliable part of, a morning routine that's wax and wane, does my workload has changed. That has not changed. So for me wake up, element in water, because I really enjoy the way that that makes me feel, then walk 10, 15 minutes, get back. Okay, if I walk after the next two meals, there's my three. And if I actually end up having three meals a day,

okay, that's four. Something else that I noticed when wearing a continuous glucose monitor was that I could see in the data what was happening to my blood glucose whilst going on that walk. Absolutely. Here's something,

well, last thing on 10 Minute Walks is that we find that when you do them after meals, again, they become a habit. Sometimes I'll go to a restaurant at night. I took my daughter to dance class last night. There was a sushi place right next door. I went to the sushi place. I walked out the door and I set my timer for 10 minutes, I started walking. If he did take in you before you'd even plan to do it almost. Yeah, you can leave any restaurant, set your clock for five minutes, walk down the street

and the alarm goes off, walk back, then get in your car. So these are really easy bite-sized, what they call exercise snacks, I think. And what sort of an impact do you sing? So we extol the virtues of it and I live next to a park and I can be the kind of a dog pervert as well, because there's quite a lot of dogs there and I love dogs. What are the outcomes that you see between somebody that doesn't do this and then does, even for a normal, moderately healthy person?

All the research suggests the satiety benefit, the blood sugar control, just like recharging your battery, you know, if you're at work and you're sitting there for an extended period of time, you start to get tired. A lot of people think that posture contributes to soreness, back tightness, neck tightness. Well, they've studied people that use quote unquote good posture and poor posture. They have similar outcomes. Some of the good posture people had worse outcomes in terms of pain. It was really the duration of time

that you stayed in any one position. It wasn't the position itself. And so the movement becomes pretty critical. Well, get back to talking to Stan in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Gymshark. Gymshark make the best sportswear that I've ever found. I absolutely love this fluoro color, which is cheating and making me look a lot more tanned than I actually am.

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The other thing that I really found was especially if I'm eating a large meal during the middle of the day, and sometimes I'll forget to eat or just have not had time to eat until maybe one or two pm. And that big dump of food often causes my thoughts to be muddy. And I don't like that.

I don't like the way that I feel when I don't have access. I'm not as nimble. It's one of the things we didn't mention it earlier on, but certainly, you know, on the pro intermittent fasting side, even if the autophagy and some of the claims and blah, blah, blah, you're pretty sharp. Mentally, I do feel quite sharp when I do that, or at least I feel sharp if I avoid spiking my blood sugar

too early in the day. But if I do have this large meal, I'm like, I'm muddy, I maybe I've got to record in a little bit, and I gotta be on my game because stan Effeting's coming or whatever, that walk really brings that back. I've got some fresh air. I've got a ton of sunlight in my eyes. I'm looking at my, um, the ocular focus is changing too.

I'm looking at stuff in the distance. I'm looking at stuff up close, getting out of my head. I'm reflecting. Don't take your phone. Don't listen to the air pods. I don't know what sort of concerns we have around Wi-Fi signals and non-ionizing radiation from AirPods.

I am a, if that's the case, and my AirPods are a danger, I will be the first one to die because they are essentially glued to my ears. But that opportunity, a single decision downstream from it, there are so many things that happen. And I noticed as well, this was something that you may have heard, a human has talked about this, and I noticed it on my morning walks that I was doing before Andrew Heubman said to do them, and then he backed me up. I found ambient anxiety. If I woke up, I don't know about night sleep or there was something playing on my mind, decreased during the walk. And he talked about the lateral movement

of the eyes, whilst walking, whilst locomoting, being something that down regulates a migdala response. No idea if you've come across this, but I knew that my felt sense was, ah, I feel a little bit more. I'm kind of, I kind of, everything's not quite as shit and terrifying as I thought it was. Yeah. And after doing the morning walk

and you're looking, you've got to cross the road. There's a cat, whatever. That helped. Yeah. I'm a pretty simple guy, you know, if it works, it works. I've had extraordinary results personally. And of course, I've been talking about this for,

I can't remember the first time Mark Bell. And I discussed this probably seven, eight years ago on his podcast. And the feedback I've gotten from an extraordinary, I mentioned it, you know, recharges your battery. You mentioned a couple of things. First, we were talking about blood sugars after, and you mentioned you ate a big lunch.

There seems to be more of this post meal sleepies associated with the size of the meal than necessarily the blood sugar or the glycemic load, depending on the individual's insulin sensitivity. What's that you two? Stomach being full? Yeah, I mean, you should lie down,

work, you're not a blood that gets shunted to your stomach to handle all that food. It just seems to decide when they when they were studying the carbohydrate load is compared to just the calorie load. It seemed that the calories is what made you most tired. But moving after meals has a significant But moving after meals has a significant impact on that. Type one diabetics. We've had extraordinary results. These are insulin-dependent type one diabetics who avoid carbohydrates for obvious reasons. And their workouts suffer.

These are people who want to lift weights or do crossfit and have a high anaerobic requirement. They'll ask what they can do to be able to improve their performance without compromising their diabetes. And what we'll do is have them train after they eat. So now we can include carbohydrates in that meal and then have them do, if it's weightlifting in particular,

this has been the most successful for us, they'll just do 15 minutes or so of weightlifting, whether it's chest and after breakfast, shoulders after lunch, triceps after dinner. That sounds like my ideal day actually, yeah. Yeah, well, I got that from diabetes doctor, actually it was on, I think he was talking Dr. Peter Atias some years ago,

and he was discussing the research showed that doing treadmill for 20 minutes after a meal cut their insulin dependency in half. They were able to reduce the total amount of insulin they used in half. And we started seeing that as well when we started doing that with our clients having... Even from a financial standpoint, let alone the health standpoint. Just look at how they cost. And then you also mentioned sometimes to skip breakfast, we talked a little bit about dieting. I mentioned 78% of successful dieters eat breakfast. There is some evidence that eating breakfast

and skipping dinner would be the better of the options if you were going to intermittent fast and wanted to skip a particular meal. For a host of reasons, one of which is, of course, when you wake up in the morning, your cortisol is high, your muscles haven't been fed in a long time, and so getting them protein is pretty important to start that muscle protein synthesis in the rebuilding process. It's certainly more important for athletes or people who are concerned about building or maintaining the body mass. Another one is circadian rhythms. It seems there's some benefit when eating breakfast and how it helps you in getting to sleep that night.

Another one is satiety. It seems that you need to eat a larger breakfast, you're likely to be less hungry and subsequent meals. Another one is blood sugar, post-brandio glycemia again, is reduced, measurably reduced in subsequent meals. And so the old, it was the old saying, like a king for breakfast, a prince for lunch, and a popper for dinner, seems to have some science behind it now for what we refer to as chrono nutrition. One of the things that is accounted to that the eye struggle with is my willpower is

highest. It's sticking to my diet in the morning and the lowest in the evening very few people wake up and eat a chocolate bar upon waking right so I think a back you know a car back loading and skip loading was in yeah that all of this stuff appealed to me was it allowed me to do the sacrifice reward mentality boxed within a like a 16 hour period, right? Well, power's high in the morning, I'm not going to cheat on my diet, I'm going to get after this, I get to the evening and I've still got 1200 calories, 1400 calories to go, and there is some cookies, but I have so much other food still to go in and the cookies aren't so nice anymore. If I did the reverse, I did sometimes struggle with that. He was the second order challenge. One of the most reliable ways for me to give myself a shit night sleep is to eat late. I really struggle with being horizontal with a full stomach. Some people eat loads of food

and I'm going to lie down to digest this. I require gravity. I need it to be pulled down from here, down into my stomach, and I don't enjoy lying down. And the time that I have, my own business partner would happily eat a meal, a full meal, a full dinner that we would go for 30 minutes before he was going to go to bed and wash it down with a coffee because the guy, I don't know what he's made of. He's a father of three with two dogs, so I think he's built different to me.

I can't do that, so I have two things going on, I have the willpower, and I have the late night disruption of my sleep, yeah, due to being too full. In general terms, two meals a day or six meals a day, if you control for calories and protein, you get equivalent weight loss outcomes. In general terms, if you eat a huge meal before bed and no breakfast, same calories, same protein, you get similar outcomes. And so it's not necessarily a bad thing if that's your personal preference to eat a big dinner. I was just suggesting there were some other reasons why breakfast might be good.

One of the things I left off of that list of satiety toolbox, there are tools that we have in our toolbox was the fact that it makes a lot of sense to get as many of those snacks, those hyper-palatable foods out of the house, the ice creams, whatever your kind of go to is. Environment design. Yeah.

Now, there's some evidence to suggest that you shouldn't abstain from things that you enjoy because you might binge and go off to your diet, but you should make them harder to obtain if you can't. I've had clients that, you know, what's the pringles once you pop, you can't stop. I've had clients who said they can't keep certain foods in their diet because they'll overeat them. And then there's no way that I can eat this in a moderate amount. I can't eat just one. So that's one strategy is to get all that stuff out of the house, but really important piece of that is is you have to replace it with something else.

Fruit bowl. I eat more massive fan of fruit bowl. Fat free Greek yogurt with strawberries. A pound of strawberries, I think, is only 120 calories. Fruit bowl, as in that's lots of fruit. Also, buy a bowl that you put fruit in. That being visual, it being somewhere that is almost borderline and convenient. I've got to get past that to get to the whatever. For me, everywhere that I've lived has made a massive difference. I always forget about it for six months, and I don't buy it. And then I do, and there's always pairs, or there's always bananas, or there's always whatever.

The same thing with the fridge, even like little things, putting the berries at the front of the fridge. Within reach, that's another one of those strategies, the food that's furthest away and that is as close as to closer to you. These are all been studied to show that that's our behavior. I talked about barriers to entry. This would be a barrier to access. A lot of people have taken sleep very seriously over the last few years.

Given that that is one of the longleavers, what are the principles that you rely on when it comes to good sleep, optimizing sleep, preparing for it, doing it overnight? Yeah, there's a list of things that, well, the big one is, if you suffer from sleep apnea, which a lot of my large clients do, and I certainly have since over the years when I got up to 300 pounds and the like. If you suffer some sleep apnea, that's a killer. That'll raise your blood pressure, thicken your blood. It'll make it very hard to recover from workouts. There's a whole host of potentially deadly

signs of, or problems associated with sleep apnea. I was shocked when I worked with Haftar Bjornson, Brian Shawling, Johnson, Dan Green, the list goes on and on of people who were not wearing their CPAP who They've been prescribed it. They had been prescribed in many cases or others just to just hadn't done it and you One quick question to their wife or significant other does he snore and it it's like, oh God, if you snore and wake up tired, there's a questionnaire as you can just Google, it's called stop bang, STOP, stop bang questionnaire. That you can, little quiz you can take

to show what the likelihood is that you suffer from some degree of sleep apnea. Obviously getting a sleep study is ideal. It could be very expensive and time consuming, especially internationally. It could take many, many, many months to get into a doctor for a sleep study internationally. And more like I get from Canada and Australia, my clients from the UK. And then when you do go in, if you don't have severe sleep apnea, they'll just tell you to lose weight because obviously it's very expensive to outfit you with a CPAP. Here in the States, if you snore and wake up tired, there's a good chance, particularly if you have

significant neck growth, and that could be from being overweight or it could be... neck growth. neck growth. I always reference Dr. Jordan Faganbaum from Barbell Medicine. Great name. He's 198 pounds, and he wears a CPAP. He's got a thick neck, squats a lot. So it's related to neck growth and the closing of the airway at night when you sleep.

If you have some degree of CPAP, the CPAP, first and foremost, needs to be the first thing that you do. And if you don't have a doctor, you're not insured, you can't afford the expense of that. They actually do resell these on Craigslist. And I have a provider that refurbishes them. And I provide my clients with them. It's that important, particularly if there's a cost as an issue. Now, there's good sleep hygiene.

All the stuff most people have heard about. First and foremost, give yourself an opportunity to be successful. You know, people are burning the candle at both ends. They go to bed late, and they're scrolling through their feed, and then it's a midnight one o'clock in the morning, and they've got to get up at 6am. You just haven't even given yourself an opportunity to be successful. I set my alarm to go too bad not to wake up in the morning, so that about an hour before I'm supposed to sleep, I know to start shutting things down.

You want to wake up at the same time every morning get exposed to sunlight, and that helps start your circadian rhythms for the day and your melatonin and all that and are building up sleep pressure. Cool room, quiet room, dark room. All those things, whether it's blackout lines, a separate air conditioning unit, all those things. If you have a dog that sleeps in the bed or somebody that comes in later and disrupts you, that's all going to interfere with the quality of your sleep. Blue light, that would be TV and phone, obviously. Electronics are huge. After that, there's some smaller things,

like you mentioned, not eating too close to bed, not drinking too much or having too much caffeine as you get close to bedtime. Another one might be, just kind of trying to run down all the things that are associated with good sleep. They'll come to me, but that's kind of the main checklist. I have a sleep hygiene chapter in my book, of course, and I send that to my... That's the biggest thing. That's why I haven't sent me the hours of sleep every morning, and I ask them how are

their energy levels, because that that's the biggest thing. And that's why I happen to send me the hours of sleep every morning. And I ask them, how are their energy levels? Because that's usually the reason why. A lot of people, I think, are struggling to fall asleep. Even the ones who've taken the red pill of you need to sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom. But there is a difficulty that I hear from a lot of people that they wish that they could fall asleep more easily and that you know They go to bed maybe even early and they're tossing and turning

Temperatures good the room is Black and cool. Yeah, and I'm just tossing and turning and tossing and turning and I got a sleep What would your advice be to someone that's struggling to fall asleep on a night? Now it might be somewhat individualistic Now it might be that some people, some keto people find that they have a hard time sleeping. There might be some benefit to having a little bit of carbohydrates before bed for some folks or with your dinner might help you sleep. We find oftentimes that as cortisol elevates throughout the night from a low carb diet.

That's usually because it's stimulating the liver to release glucose. You see high-fastig glucose in the morning on keto diets sometimes in high cortisol in the morning. So it could be influenced by your diet. There's some evidence that may be taking glycine. And again, it's very individualistic and it's not really well. It's not really universal in a literature. So at that point, we're kind of, you know, we're spitballing, trying to pinpoint some problem. I had, throughout almost all of my 20s,

a very inconsistent sleep and wake pattern. In fact, COVID was the first time, as an adult, I ever went to bed and woke up at the same time. Yeah. Ever. Yeah. Because we were running these nightclubs and it would mean that one night I'd try to go to bed at 11 and another night I wouldn't get in from work until 5am because I was in Manchester and I had to drive back and it was two and a half hours.

And like doing this intense thing, trying not to crash and die. And then especially since being in Austin and since having the show which allows me to lean my workload even further this way, I've dialed in my wake time and my body knows to raise me at 6.59, and I can turn over and look at the clock at 6.58 and see it turn in the radio. Come on. The problem is, we're on Pacific time. So yesterday morning, I was in Vegas, recording a big episode. I fly in, the flight's delayed. We have an eaten, I'm tired, I'm stressed, gets a bed, midnight, one in the morning,

5am, at 4.59. 4.59, up, yeah. This morning, same thing again. So I don't disagree, the beauty of waking up knowing that this is the time to wake up feels kind of freewheeling to be able to do it. That rigidity, your body unfortunately doesn't have the adjustment clock when you've got to get yourself into a new time zone. Yeah, I move an hour a day. So it could take you like if you fly that one I flew to Australia, I was exhausted for

the whole week. And when I flew to Kuwait, I was exhausted for the whole week. I was walking zombie during the day. I had a debate in Qatar at the start of this year, which isn't out yet, but it will be eventually. And the guy that I was debating my other side was, he didn't sleep at all the night before. And I think I managed to get, I'd flooked four hours, a five hours of sleep. And I thought, oh, this is going to be really, really difficult. And then he came in and was like, dude, I didn't sleep sleep last night I was like, ah, I feel brilliant, this is unfair advantage.

But yeah, I departed LA at 4pm and arrived in Qatar, 6pm, the next day, having been on a plane for 15 hours or something. I also did a in November last year, Johannesburg to Atlanta, which was one hell of a whore of what year is this whore of a bean? Yeah, travels an interesting one, especially when you've got sleep dialed in. It's actually in some ways less flexible, it's more rigid. I did a video called Why I'm a hypocrite? Because when I was competing at a very high level, I had the time and the resources and the coaches. I didn't have a job, I didn't have a mortgage,

I didn't have kids. And it's all I did was eat, sleep, and train. And then as I traveled around and I talked to people, whether it's online or what have you, and you've had nurses and doctors and police fired ambulance and people working shift work and the like. It's very easy for me to sit here and talk about good sleep hygiene, but those are challenging, newborns, you know, a couple of kids. Those are all conditions that are hardly controllable. There's a very visceral response that I see reliably

online from parents that have got young kids. And I really do understand. I don't fully understand, but I can tell that it's not a resentment of the child, it's not. But it's a, it's a wistfulness for a bliss of sleep that feels like a bygone era. And you know, if you end up having two kids or three kids and they're one or two years apart, it's like, guess what? You're locked in for the best part of the next decade with this suboptimal sleep and then

when you finally train this child to be able to go to bed, another one arrives. And it was your fault and you love it. And it's recklessly fall over again. So I really do, I really do, I feel for parents. I mean, the World Health Organization classes any type of shift work as a health risk. Yeah. That's petrol pump station attendant, check out cashiers, the work night shift. That's firefighters, that's nurses.

I do, it's, you know, it's rough and that was me. That was me for 15 years. That was my video guy. My video guy taking, doing nightclub photography and then we expect the album to be up the next day by midday. So guess what? He's getting in, staring at the screen

so that he can make sure that photos of 18-year-olds drinking Budweiser available for us the next morning is. Yeah, I tragic some of the feedback I get from Fireman, like I mentioned, police fire and ambulance, nurses and the like who work those long hours and those long shifts, doctors. I mean, how is that even safe? Did you see, was it Matthew Walker's book, the percentage of doctors or surgeons who work particularly extended shifts and then get in their car to drive home and then arrive back at the same hospital having just been in an accident. It's like a non-insignificant number of doctors and surgeons.

Well, I think it was Matthew Walker also talked about how. They were able to predict win-loss percentages in basketball games based on looking at the sleep schedule not knowing the teams. Wow, just looking at when they were doing back-to-back east coast west coast travel and just looking at who was going to lose the most sleep they had like a 78%. Win-loss accurate guess and I think that. accurate guess. And I think that at least as I understand it from the study is that that prompted maybe it was LeBron at the time to go into the players' union and say, look, we need to fix this. So it was like four games and five days and they were East Coast, West Coast and stuff like that. It was increasing injury risk. Yeah. I mean, I think I ruptured in the kele's three years ago playing cricket in gentleman's way to do it. And I can't remember how good my night sleep was leading up to it. And I wish I could actually could probably maybe even go into the, maybe I have my

whip date, maybe go in and have a look, but I bet it was shit. Yeah. I bet it wasn't on point. It was the back end of coming out of COVID. I was probably doing things and seeing friends again and stuff. That was all over the place. Okay, so the third pillar, we've spoken about diet, we've spoken about sleep training, having done every different modality known to man. When it comes to training for muscle growth,

training for lean body, looking good with a balance in health. What are the principles that the best training programs rely on? Reps, duration, rest, intensity, frequency, all that stuff? Well, there's a lot of it. There's a list just as you mentioned. Obviously, you'd like to do some cardiovascular work and some resistance training for the muscles. I think they compliment each other in many ways. The 10 minute walks could probably satisfy a lot of that. Maybe doing a couple of hit sessions.

I actually do a brief hit session before leg day just because it really helps warm me up and gets my, I'll do it on a bike. I'll do it on one of those aerodine bikes or a solute bike. So touch your machine. Yeah. And that enables me to get my hips and knees through a range of motion. As we age, we lose a little bit of our explosiveness, our power, our speed. That helps me keep stimulating that particular training stimulus.

So now we're down to weight training. And again, the best exercise is the one you'll do. I want people to consistently do some sort of exercise, but loading becomes really important as you've seen a lot of the longevity folks. I think Peter T has been real prominent in in that. Of course, Dr. Gabriel Lyon is talking a lot about importance of muscle and you know, we as bodybuilders and power lifters, of course, we're just kind of, I think, soaking it all in because we've loved lifting weights for all this time.

I don't presume to think that everybody loves lifting weights. And so one of my first challenges is to find exercises that they enjoy doing, so they'll do them consistently. And that can be a challenge, you know, depending on who the individual is, what their experience is with lifting, because I love, you know, exerting that effort and getting the pump. And some people might find that to be almost physically painful to the point where they

just don't want to do it. But you can do reasonably little, you know, it's kind of like out of 10 minute walks as opposed to 40 minute cardio sessions on a treadmill. You can do reasonably little and make significant progress, particularly as a beginner. And by that I mean if you could get to the gym twice a week and you wouldn't even necessarily have to go to the gym as a beginner. You could do some push-ups. You could do some kind of modified chin-ups, even not on a bar above, but just laying in a plank position, doing some chin-ups, and some air squats, so be a heck of a start.

And if you could start to use your spotty resistance, twice a week, full body, be fine. Now eventually, you're gonna graduate to the point where hopefully you enjoy it enough and you actually wanna build some muscle. I think that's most of the people here, that training age will be at least moderately mature, they'll be good amateur at understanding how to be a bro.

Yeah. In my book, I supply what's called an evidence-based guidelines for hypertrophy that I shoplifted from Brett Contreras, PhD. I put his name on it, I'm happy to give credit, but he does an excellent job of summarizing a lot of the research that comes out of Brad Schoenfeld's organization. Brad's probably one of the most prolific researchers in hypertrophy.

And there is a list. There's a pretty significant list. One people always ask about his frequency, how often do I need to train? And generally speaking twice, train a body part about twice a week. So you could go in on Monday or Friday or you go in on Wednesday or Saturday, you know, for busy folks who work all week, I might have them do a small session on one evening of the week and then have them do a longer session on the weekend or you could go Saturday Sunday. Just get money for that. It doesn't seem to matter all that much.

But you wanna train everybody apart twice a week, try and get at least 10 to 20 sets per body part per week. That's working sets, not including warm up. That would be working sets. And so that's five sets of chest on Monday, five sets of chest on Friday. Let's just assume we're setting up a full body workout. And then five sets of, say, some back exercise, push pull legs. Five sets of chest, five sets of back, five sets of legs.

Do that twice a week. You could make gains on that. Eventually, if you needed to increase your volume and there was a time constraint for how long you could spend in the gym in that given hour, maybe you add an extra session that week. Currently, I train upper body day off, lower body day off, and I repeat that. So I'm on an eight day split.

So I work everything every eight days. So I'm not training things on the same day every week, it changes. But that suits me because at my age and with the intensity that I still lift, I need a little more recovery. Talk to me about intensity. That would be kind of next on the list.

So we know how many times a week to train and we know about how many sets to do. Let's hit reps real quick. Reps is gonna be, it doesn't seem to matter. Anywhere from five to 30. As long as you lift it within a rep or two of failure, you can get high-purchase equivalence, high-purchase the outcomes.

Phil Heath sat in that seat yesterday. And he was saying regularly, he would go to 20 reps. Yeah. And I said, dude, I've been told that anything over 14 is cardio. Yeah. It's like, who's telling you that? In our industry, Phil actually got picked on a little bit because, you know, Ronnie Coleman was the one who lifted really, really heavy weights.

And Phil always lifted lighter weights. And Phil had equivalence hypertrophy outcomes. Phil was extraordinary, Mr. Olympia, and he did not do a ton of super heavy stuff. Dorian lifted reasonably heavy, but he still lifted in the 10 to 12 rep range. And he found that in his younger years, when he was trying to lift heavy like with squats,

he actually started getting injured. And so there is a greater injury potential. There is more fatigue accumulated at the five rep range. You also get stronger, but strength is not the primary driver of hypertrophy. There are two very different things. I found throughout my career, competing in both, bodybuilding and powerlifting,

that powerlifting didn't necessarily help bodybuilding very much. So those big single rep exercises recruiting multiple muscles. There's something else to say about the difference between a 1 RM and an 85% RM. 100% to very different. Some people's strength curves are that they're two rep max and that three rep max aren't that far off, whether one rep max is, that's me. Yeah.

Other people have a number of friends in the UK, Johnny is one of them who's two rep max is not even in the same universe as his one rep max. So trying to work off of percentages, which is why the RPE revolution was, I think, very useful that going off how difficult does this feel feel? Level to playing field for precisely this problem. Yeah. So if you look to really heavy weight, say 85% of your 1R at max for 5 reps, and you might have been able to get 6, that's going to give you equivalent hypertrophy outcome.

If you lift 50% of your 1R at max for 30 reps, and you probably couldn't have gotten 32. Is that any difference? There isn't really any difference other than the strength component. You'll get stronger at the five. You probably accumulate more fatigue at the five. CNS. CNS, and that's important though,

because in terms of strength, part of that is specific. Part of that is nervous systems ability to handle the load. So that kind of handles reps and intensity because the intensity is get within a rep or to a failure. If you do 10 reps and you could run 20, likely not a sufficient stimulus to give you hypertrophy results. Why not go to failure all the time? Why not do get to 12, drop down, rest pause, myoreps. Doesn't appear to give you any more benefit.

Might even in terms of powerlifting, be a deficit, be a decline in performance. Increases fatigue, which will reduce, which will increase domes, delayed onset muscle soreness, which might impair your volume and frequency. Of a time, because in three days time, when you go back to the... Probably both in that single workout and when you'll be able to train. How soon you'll be able to train again.

So it doesn't seem to be necessary. Can be detrimental. If you're a little more patient, leave a rep or two in the tank. It's not what you do in any one workout. You've probably seen the videos on Instagram. I can't remember who started them, said, if you go to the gym and workout, and you come home and look in the mirror, you'll see nothing. And he goes on to say, you know,

do you have the next day, you'll see nothing. It's the cumulative effect of being consistent and progressing this training over time that's gonna start to, you'll start to see small gains. And so, be cautious, how much you invest into anyone work out. And at the same time, be cautious of junk volume. I mentioned if you're doing 10 reps and you could have done 20, that's not a sufficient stimulus.

That would be considered be junk volume, not getting any return on that investment. Rest. Exercise. About rest. Rest periods are interesting. It seems that you get better hypertrophy from longer S. And the comparison here was again shown

fell to study between one minute and two to three minutes. It seems there are some substrates that are depleted and then replenish after you do a hard set. ATP? Something else? Yeah, creatin phosphate, the creatin phosphate system,

getting those creatin phosphate stores replenished, getting the acid to dissipate. There's the lactate buildup and causing the hydrogen ion getting that. And then the nervous system to be able to adapt and come back into another set. The goal would be that you could, that you wouldn't have such a significant decline in repetitions set after set after set, because it might be less related to mechanical tension and more a matter of those substrate depletions or it could be cardiovascular insufficiency. Maybe you just aren't able to recover fast enough

because you cardiovascular stressed. Now the real money maker, tempo. Time and detention. Is it bullshit or is it legit? Yes and no. That's the thing. It's always yes and no. You can go too fast and you can go too slow.

Okay. Seems two to five seconds is a pretty good range of time. You want to control the negative. Two to five seconds from rep to rep. Two to five seconds. Yeah, deep. Two seconds down. Yep. And then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, ratio. It's 10 seconds as a giving you more benefit than five. So control the negative would be what would be important there. What is it because the eccentric portion of the movement is the one that is supposed to grow the most muscle? Is that scientifically backed? They're both important. There is some benefit to it. I'm not sure if you could You could say it does potentially create the most damage. It's a essential part of

the movement, obviously. But it seems that damage is not a driver of hypertrophy. It's kind of a passenger. The mechanical tension is important. It seems that it's just associated. If you're training hard, you're probably going to have some soreness understood. So I've asked this question of Ryan Terry. He'll quickly. You can get sore running a 5k. You're not going to build any muscle. So you and you can get sore doing new exercises all the time. Right? Because you know,

the doctor saying soreness doesn't necessarily provide a sufficient, is an indicative of having performed a sufficient hypertrophy exercise. Because again, you go around a 5k. your legs aren't going to get any bigger. You're not going to grow from hypertrophy. And if you do a bunch of different exercises every time you come in, the whole P90X thing, just from what we call a novel stimulus, you're going to be sore, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to improve hypertrophy outcome. How many times have you taken a break from training, extended break?

You come back. Do the same thing you did before. And you can't straighten your arms. For a week. You go, oh, I guess this is my life now. This is just me for the next seven days. Right. That'll happen.

That's a detraining effect. And when you come back, of course, if you do that again in three days and again three days later, the same exercises, the same amount of sets and reps and weight, you're going to have a lot less soreness. Your body will adapt to that. So, I've asked this question of Ryan Terry, Phil Heath, and Chris Bumstead. If you only had 10 exercises for the rest of time to build and maintain as much muscle as possible, what would you choose? I'd have to

Choose a push pull in a legs and I'd probably throw a hamstring in there So that's gonna be for I maybe get two of each so I'm looking at a specific what would be looking at a at a squat movement Bob Bell back squat front squat Smith machine all of them You can only have one stand. I'm limiting. If I've got a barbell, I can back squat. This is my game. These are my rules. Front squat. No, these are my rules.

This is stop breaking the game. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you for me personally, because I use a lot, because of my anthropometry, my long femur length is compared to I would probably need to do a high bar squat to effectively train my quads. My glutes are preferentially developed from a low bar squat. So high bar squat would be a big one for me. My favorite hamstring exercises, I love the the cambered bar good morning. It's one of my favorites. You go on Instagram, I crushing the good

morning. And that's where you put the weight up here and you bend forward and try and keep your legs real totally straight. It's for hamstrings. Why the combat bomb? For me, I just find that it puts more of the stress on the hamstrings as opposed to the lumbar. By bringing that moment on a little bit more than able to pull the the camber back just a little bit here rather than having it. The further the bar sits, we call the moment arm, from the glutes, you know, from where your body's trying to, you're back and is trying to adjust the movement. The more stress that's gonna put on

a little bit less axial load, Dr. Stuyma Gell will be happy. Okay, so we've got a high bar back squat. Yeah will be happy. Okay, so we've got a high bar back squat. Yep, amber burn. Yep, and we've got that. So we've got legs, legs are pretty smoked. Yep, legs are pretty smoked. I would put in one more quad exercise and it would probably be a unilateral movement, so it would probably be a, which could be how there are single leg leg press, a walking lunge, or a bulgarian split squat. I kind of like the bulgarian split squat the best, because I can do repeat repetitions with the same leg. I like that supposedly. I hate Bulgarian splits. And that's why I like them.

Because they're psychopaths. Yeah, the things, the hardship always works better than the easy shit. That's why I'm picking these exercises. With that, have you got a preference for how you would do that? Were you holding dumbbells? Would you have Bob alum back? The loading? I would probably hold dumbbells with those. Yeah, Bob alum back is kind of an awkward setup. Now we're gonna move to a chest exercise. I like the incline dumbbell press. Just a slight incline dumbbell press.

I did a lot of heavy benching in my career and I'd never built my pe packs as well as when I trained with Flex Wheeler using incline dumbbell presses. They allow more depth and they allow independent rotation of the shoulders. So I get less potential shoulder injury. What are the cues that you're thinking of that you're telling your clients when you're looking at the incline dumbbell press? This is the 1.5 degree angle of the elbow. This is the one exercise so far that every single person

has had in and no one's had flat bench dumbbell press. So it's something that a lot of people seem to be using. Try to get up here a little more. Yeah, 45 degree angle on the arms. Deep elbow. Try and wrap that peck around the ribcage as best you can. I don't want to be out here. It's going to hit the shoulder. I want to be in here so it wrap that peck around the ribcage as best you can. I don't want to be out here, it's going to hit the shoulder, I want to be in here, so it's the peck. I want to use that ribcage,

in order to do that, I'm going to actually lift my sternum up and expand the ribcage, and then the deeper I can get my elbow, use that because you want to have as much lengthening of the chest muscle or any muscle that you train is possible. It's going to grow better in the length and position, full range of motion. Okay. Does five that were at, I think that's four. I think I had a, I had a high squat back squat. Good morning. Good morning.

You're right. Yeah. Quad, you had the Romanian, no, you didn't, you had the Bulgarian split squad. Bulgarian split squad. Yeah. Inclined. And then we jumped on to Inclined for the chest.

Yep. Next one on chest, I would probably do, oh, I just love that Inclined dumbbell, Inclined dumbbell so much. Some people like to fly, I'm not a big fan of flies. Might throw a dip in there because I'm going to hit some triceps at the same time too. So I get a nice deep. Yeah, what are you thinking cues to dips?

Work on the dip. I'm trying to, if I'm working triceps, I'm trying to keep my feet underneath me, if I'm working chest, I'm trying to keep my chest forward. And again, I'm trying to wrap that peck around the weight belt if you need to increase resistance. Yeah, just hang weights on if you need to increase resistance. I've thrown another one for hamstrings. I had a hip hinge.

I have to have a knee hinge. And so I'm going to do any standing, lying seated. I like seated preferentially because usually on the standing curl and on the lying curl, the weight stack bottoms out before you get full extension before the hamstring really gets stretched. Yes, because if you're lying down, it's going to rip you up off the machine. Yeah, when you bring the weights down, the stack usually bottoms out. And so on the seated curl, you've locked yourself in and you've locked up those feet up. Especially if you lean forward on it,

you can get a full extension and not bottom the weight stack out. Yeah, so that would give you your best length and position. First time that I ever had the lean forward cue was Alex Homozi in Vegas. His training vlog is about to be released at some point on the internet and you will see him take me through.

Okay, so sit back, okay, now flex feet, okay, now sit forward, Now push toes. And the difference is that's why I was in pain flying home the next day. Yeah, because of the domes. Yeah. That's going to take us to a back exercise. I'm going to do a chin. A chin up and I don't care. Do I have to pick one? Yeah, I went to Handova, Handova, let's get specific. I've got to be specific about it. I would probably do reverse script mainly because I could get more bicep out of it.

So I'm getting a little extra benefit. And then I'm gonna do, I like the chest supported row. I used to do a lot of T bar row, which really helped my deadlift, but it was a lot of cheating, range of motions, not as good. Meaning the extending the weight isn't nearly as good. You're pulling on your lumbar, but the time you get that weight extended.

So chest supported, but not seal row, not a completely flat. Would you be? It could be. I mean, some of the chest supported rows are angled and some of the chest supported rows are flat, but I like those. They're lower fatigue. I can do more volume there. Generally back, you can train with a lot of volume.

You've usually got a number of handles that you can mess around with on one of those. Yeah, the one we have currently has an adjustable handle, so you can the width and it spins. Those are any chest supported rows, going to give you the advantage of not having to stress your lumbar doing bent rows or t-bar rows, which I think just what are we working here? Yeah, that's my point. And one of the best things, of course, for all the muscle groups is to get a full extension. And when you're doing that with a bent row or a t-bar row, you're going to get you're going to put a lot of stress on the lumbar spot and so on. Yeah, which is great when I was powerlifting, you know, and that kind of thing transfers over well

to a strong deadlift, but just for back training. So, we've got two back exercises. I like a Viking press and a side lateral. What's a Viking press? That's a standing shoulder press. I can't shoulder bar. It's pivoted on the thing in front of you. Yeah, I can't shoulder bar on how flexibility. And so by the time I get all

back here, now I've got my, you know, my back all bent. Yeah. And so this becomes, so you wouldn't want to do with standing barbell press from a rack or whatever. You would rather go neutral with this Viking press. Yeah, the handle doesn't concern me. It could be, it could be a normal grip or neutral. It would be that one. And then side lateral. Side lateral raise, a good one. I think I topped out at 10, I didn't even hit arms yet. But I got my biceps and my curl and I got my triceps and my dips on my dips. Now the only one that leaves is calves, I've always struggled with calves.

I'm actually looking to start a class action lawsuit against the manufacturers of cap machines because they clearly don't work. I think it's false advertising I've been using those things for 30 years And I'm still part of the no-calf group and so yeah, but if you had to you know if I was given the option I would throw in a seated calf in particular for the solias. Yes. Is there any truth in the The size of your calf is more determined by your genetics than any of the part of the body? Yeah, I think that's true of all muscles, though.

You're right. It really is. Yeah, I'll see my wife Simone, so a lot of the men in her community and women, by the way, have great calves, and they never trained them. A lot of it's just kind of how much weight you put on them and how you walk. I see some people, some pretty big calves that never trained them. It's frustrating. You're a partner with Marik Health? Yes, indeed.

So, Mike? Yeah. First time that I've ever had consistent blood work done. What are the lead markers, not just from Marick in terms of blood work? Sat down with Dr. Peter Atea and he's talking about there is no single metric more important or more predictive of longevity than your VO2 max. I was like, where did this come from? The VO2 max I'm hearing everything about zone two,

you know, slow and long training. Generally, what do you think is some of the metrics that people are, I think everyone's optimizing because of wearables, everybody's optimizing their HRV now. Everybody's optimizing for breath rate and for resting heart rate. What would you, if you could say, these are some things that you should watch out for a little

bit more than you do, whether it be blood profile or other mockers, what should people focus on? Yeah, well, the blood profile is different, obviously, than the VO2 max. I think Dr. Peter T is right about that, that your cardiovascular fitness is going to be a pretty good predictor of lifespan and health span. I think that is more to do with it demonstrates just how active you've been throughout your life. You say the same thing about strength.

Remember, the original is grip strength studies showing that those with the higher grip strength that everybody was running around doing grippers and static hands. That's the wrong. Our relation is not working in the right way. It's a proxy for general strength. And even that general strength is a proxy for just having lifted for many years heavy weights Or maybe your job was such that it required you to do some eye-producting. It's a byproduct as his cardiovascular and if you're you know participate in any exercise consistently for an extended period of time you're gonna have

Good lifespan. You know, we said that no one flukes a 1 gram per kilo of body weight. No one flukes a high VO2 max, no one flukes high hand grip strength. You can't hack it. Yes. You know, something you could take in a pill or a potion or a powder, it's something you have to earn. Well, that's kind of the frustrating part when people come to you for some advice on longevity

and it's like, well, you just got to work harder. And it's, I didn't mean that. I meant, what do I take? Yeah. Okay, what else? Any other things that stunned out? Those are the big ones, now you got into blood work.

Now, I had over a hundred blood tests throughout my career. I started when I was 20 years old. I was hypogonadil as a result of varicoseal. I had been training in the gym for two years. I only gained about 14 pounds in two years of hard training. I finally went to the doctor and found out I had about 120 tests. I had varicoseal, which doesn't cause hypogonadism. Everybody who has it, but it is a side effect in a significant percentage of those people.

And so blood testing is important. You can tell you a lot. If you've got a client that's unable to lose weight and you're pretty sure that they haven't been overeating, you know, sip snacks, bites, licks, you know, just cheating on their diet in general, there may be at some point a need to get a blood test and see if they're low thyroid, which has some impact on their basal metabolic rate, not as significant as people think, but it has a significant impact on their energy and their non-exercise activity, their

magenta. Got a client that's lifting weights, can't gain muscles, not getting any bigger, not getting any strength. You've been working hard, you've tried all the lifestyle things that you can do, better sleep, better diet, regular weight training, going into blood tests. Maybe they're hypo-goenadil. Maybe they got low T. That's going to have a significant impact on their ability to gain muscle. So, I throughout my career utilized blood tests, sometimes on a monthly basis, particularly when I got heavy. I do it with all my clients. I see things like metabolic syndrome,

high blood sugars, fatty liver, which would be high triglycerides, hyperinsulinemia, might see blood thickness, might see with performance enhancing drug usage, elevated liver enzymes and kidney enzymes, it'd be ASTALT and your kidney markers are creatinine and then bun and EGFR. And so I take a look at all these.

I get a really comprehensive test and I used to do that online and I'd pay almost $400 for this test. And then Marick Health comes along and they've got the same test for around 160 bucks. And so cost became a lot more affordable. So more of my clients were able to get this test. And I've had parents ask me at what age should kids start getting a test. And you know, obviously me as early as 20, but I also I worked with a high school softball team in Arizona, a girls team some before last. And a couple of parents had told me that their kids were suffering from, they

seem to be a be really tired lately and their performance had declined. We were measuring their 40 times. And as it turns out, I asked them to get a blood test and both of them had anemia. They were both low iron. Very common high school collegiate, especially female athletes.

I worked with the University of Oregon, track runners and football players way back in the early 90s and the women in particular We saw this more recently with the Nike scandal They would they would suffer from what's called the female triad. It's the chronic calorie restriction amenorea cessation of the menstrual period and low calcium They would end up having and low calcium.

They would end up having problems with bone mineral density and they would get shin splints and they would put casts on and keep running. It was outrageous. They would get low iron, obviously, that would cause a significant amount of fatigue. A lot of them, because of their food choices, they would get hypothyroidism,

start seeing some hair loss, and a host of other problems associated with the female triad. So these blood tests helped us identify low iron in these anemia in these girls. And so, obviously you want to supplement or you take a look at their diet, to which you find out as these high school girls,

as we discussed earlier in particular, they tend to demonize certain foods, red meat being one of them. They get rid of the egg yolk. They stop, they get rid of dairy. They stop eating fruits of all things, people, you know, with the whole carb diet. No, not eating. The carbohydrate insulin model. I'll tell you what they're eating.

They're eating the guru diets, the bikini girl diet. That was so popular for, seems like decades now. It's maddening. They'll eat egg whites, tilapia, boneless skinless chicken breast, some broccoli, maybe a scoop of peanut butter or almond butter, and maybe a scoop of protein powder if that fits their

diet. And that has very commonly been a pre-contest diet for a lot of these bikini crows. And it was confined to the industry for the longest time. And so I would obviously see all the side effects from that, all of these same health problems. And especially when they were competing in post-competition, when they would rebound from that, you know, again, the hair loss and all the fatigue and the b-vitamin deficiencies, and they would end up going to the doctor and getting injections for all of those things. They would get iron, b-12, vitamin D, and all those things. And then they would have these massive weight regains and

rebounds, and edema, I mean, to the point where it's dangerous water retention from avoiding sodium as well. So that's the guru diet. And that's why it's kind of what spawned the vertical diet for me was to that you could get the same results, the same stage presence with the same chloric intake, but suffer a lot less of those problems. When it was confined to the bikini industry, and it was relatively small, it was tragic enough. But when that industry became popularized by social media, and now you've got Gen Pop, you've got soccer moms copying these same

diets, going to these same guru coaches and being prescribed these same diets and suffering all of these same problems. They're not even competing. They're just exhausted, anemia, hypothyroidism. One of the big challenges with that is the dirty little secret in the competitive fitness industry, beginning girls, figure, physique, and all of that, performance and hatching drugs are utilized to compensate for some of those problems. They'll typically take thyroid.

They'll typically take climbutra all because to burn fat, they think is gonna burn fat because they're metabolism, so sluggish. And they'll typically take anovar to prevent the muscle loss. Well, the soccer mom is not utilizing all of those. So she's getting hit two times over on that too.

She's losing muscle in a big way and suffering from all those other problems ending up with the doctor getting prescriptions from medication. So this is what's tragic about that path that I saw so clearly for decades is that it became mainstream. And so that's kind of how I preach about, you know,

keep a yoke in, it's got the biotin for skin hair and nails, you know, keep the fruit in, obviously, you know, all the benefits of fruit, keep the red meat in, particularly for women, the iron and the B12 and the zinc, you know, keep the dairy in, it's huge for calcium, I've got, you know, women suffering from shin splints and bone mineral density loss and keep the calcium in, you need a thousand milligrams a day. And of course, the weight training stimulus is required as well.

So these girls, the high school girls, we designed a diet to do just that. If you've suffered from anemia and you want to improve your iron intake, red meat is a great foundation, a hemeyerne source, add a non-heme iron source. Like spinach to that, they have a complimentary benefit and add vitamin C. That would be peppers as twice the vitamin C as an orange or you can use orange juice or whatever. And then avoid calcium in that meal.

This calcium combines to iron. And so we'll set up a four meal day. One's a high iron meal with high iron absorption with no calcium in it. And the next meal would be your dairy, be your yogurts and eggs, whatever. And we would have two high iron meals and two calcium meals. How concerned are you of, I've seen this a little bit online, people O-D'ing on spinach, folates, is folates a thing? Is that a problem with spinach? Oxolates.

Oxolates, that's what I mean. That's what I mean. And this is usually helped by cooking it, or getting sufficient calcium in the diet. Some people who are predisposed to suffering from kidney stones, the oxolates may increase their likelihood of getting kidney stones. But if you cook the spinach and you eat sufficient calcium, it's very low likelihood of that. But that is something that some people need to pay attention to. And I'm not talking about overdosing on spinach either.

Again, if there's one food that I could overdose on, I think it might be spinach. That goes with, there's very few meals that it doesn't go with. Yeah. Well, to finish off on the men's side of iron, men tend to be high iron, because they don't have the menstrual period. Women do, and that's where they lose a lot of their iron.

And so you can do a couple of things. You can produce your red meat intake. You can donate blood. You can increase calcium consumption during your red meat meals. I keep a normal iron, even though I eat a significant amount of red meat by eating a lot of yogurt throughout the day, and then a lot of fruit as well, which decreases any inflammation. Also, avoid one of those cast iron pans. I've had some episodes over the years where I've eaten a lot. I would get onto a cast iron pan state kick for a while.

And I would, because of my getting blood tests on a regular basis, I would start to see my iron levels. It's literally bleeding from the plan into the food. Yes. So what are your cooking utensils of choice? Are you a fryer guy? You a slow cook. I'm a digger to the ninja air fryer.

I mentioned them by name because that thing's magical. There's like little chefs in there cooking your food for you. I don't know how they do it. Advice for people, the specific one that Michaela Peterson got me to get is the XL max. So the XL is the XL max. So the XL is the size and then it goes 450. And from frozen, a stake, 11 minutes on one side, 11 minutes on the other, if you've salted the living shit out of it, your food never spoils.

You never spoil food because it goes from being preserved for the rest of time to being edible in 25 minutes. Yeah, absolutely. Damage changer. I'm going to stay on that because, and I'm going to come back. Let me just say it real quick. High iron for men, donating blood, not a good idea to over-donate. Be very careful about trying to keep, especially men on performance hatching drugs or testosterone replacement therapy, they'll notice their hemoglobin,

hemorrhaticrit, and red blood cells will start to elevate. It's a condition called urythrocytosis, not to be confused with polycythemia. Polycythemia is a condition where you will need to donate because you get thick blood. Urythrocytosis can happen in elevation and with testosterone use, and it doesn't necessarily indicate a thick blood or a dangerous situation that needs donating. Dr. Neil Ruzier has some great information on this. The problem is when people start chasing, normalizing those numbers, the hemoglobin and medichard red blood cells into the normal range, and they start donating on a monthly

basis, drive their iron down, mixing, you know, their ferrous in tanks, and they start giving themselves anemia. So what's, if somebody does have high ferret in high iron, one-seven, one-seven, every two months, one-seven six months? Donate, yeah, you want to keep iron down. Donate, you know, reduce red meat, increase calcium intake. Some people are high iron genetically, Dr. Chris Master John, PhD nutrition, but he still eats red meat and just donates periodically because he likes all of the benefits of the red meat.

He would hate to forego all those things that he could just donate periodically. So these are decisions that individuals can make based on their blood work, which is why I like having access to it. Just a quick trip back to the air fryer. This is a lot of times, you know, diet success is, you know, we've said, like in sports, it's 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. When I'm talking diet, sometimes I feel it's unfortunate. I spend so much time on the information because this can be boiled down to a three by five card in about less than a minute.

You can give somebody a diet plan that you know, and it's really 99% execution. And so a lot of what I focus on when I say compliance is the science, as these little things that make it easier to administer the diet. And something like that grill, your hands off, it's just so convenient, the food tastes good. That's really important. If you get on one of these diets where you don't enjoy the food, then it's a temporary thing.

So it's important I do that. Other things I call life changing, and I don't say this about a lot of things, because I've been in the business for 30 years, and I just got done shitting all over everybody's everything because it wasn't meaningful, right? But there's things that make a big difference. I talked about topperwares around your six-pack bag.

Some years ago, for some reason, I don't know why I came across the thermos, a little 24-ounce, double-insulated thermos that I came across the thermos, a little 24 ounce double insulated thermos that I would put hot food in. And it would stay hot for 10, 12 plus hours depending on how hot it was. I can see you've got a cylinder of food. I ate one when I landed at the airport. I've got one in my bag.

A cylinder of food. A cylinder of food that stays hot. So I make my monster mash, right? And I put it in there. And you need a $1 can jarring funnel. These are the things that I do for my clients that they really appreciate. It's not the diet and the macros and all that other stuff.

When I tell them to get the $1 jarring funnel, so they can easily spoon their food into a thermos that keeps it hot for 10 hours. Is there a specific brand of thermos? Thermos. That's straight of thermos. And what, uh, side. Double insulated steel wall. Leater, liter and a half, two,

24 ounce for me, gives me a good meal. I got one from my kids. It's a little smaller. It's about a liter, I think that. A half a liter, I think. Half a liter, 24 ounces, yeah. Right. Yeah.

Um, little things like that, I mean, I took five thermos to Moscow with me. That's a 22 hour day, as you know. But time you time you stop over and land and go through security and then you know, customs and end up at your hotel. I had five of these thermos when I left my house in my carry bag that I rolled in here today that slides under the seat. So every three or four hours as needed, as I desire, I'm eating a nice hot full meal.

I'll have a couple of oranges in my bag, maybe a little baggy of carrots. The only thing I can't take on the plane with me that I wish I could to finish this off would be some yogurt. Have you ever been pulled to one side with five the most flasked fill with the makiobe? Monster Mashed. Yeah, right.

That's part of, you gotta get their 10 minutes early, but it's well worth it. Okay, so you account for additional TSA checking time. Absolutely. Because of this. And that way I don't have to forage for food at the airports or at room service. How do you get to the bottom?

Can us fork get to the bottom of a thermos class? It does pretty well. Do you end up, you can reach if you extend the fingers and you can get to the bottom. Right, okay. It does pretty well. Do you end up, yeah. You can reach if you extend the fingers, you can get to the bottom, man. Okay, so Ninja Afriah. Ninja Afriah is pretty important. The thermos and the jarring funnel is pretty good.

The Monster Mash tool, this is something, I get these tips from my fans and followers and friends. Somebody sent me a picture of this Monster Mash tool. It's like on the bottom, it's like x-shaped. And so you can mash your food altogether. I was using a fork for the longest time. Oh, right, okay, that's primitive, come on. It's primitive, yeah.

And so little things like that, the CPAP of course is one that's life changing for me and for my clients. These are the kinds of things that when somebody gets done, getting a diet from me, they're like, oh my god, this tastes so good and I'm like, wife, seat, and macros with fantastic, but that thermos thing. It's amazing. So now your compliance is improved because you don't, you know, and that's, if you're a real estate agent, you know, working out of the trunk of your car during the day, what are your options, you know, fast food? Where do you have all your meals ready for you in the absence of a microwave?

You know, you can just and you got a nice hot meal with someone. Someone is listening to this right now that should make a Clippable stackable Thermos equivalent Hold heat in For a food prep. Yeah, like an upgraded six pack bag type thing. It'll probably happen.

There's a business, there's a million dollar business idea, just for free, you know what I mean? Those are the things that excite me. Hell yeah. You can see how animated I get when I talk to these. I love it, I love it. We did an entire series on this podcast, 20 plus episodes called Lifehacks.

How to make the perfect toasted sandwich off. The best carry on luggage that we'd found. 20 plus episodes called Lifehacks, how to make the perfect toasted sandwich off, the best carry on luggage that we'd found, the place that you can lie down in Amsterdam airport and sleep because it's the one set of setties that doesn't have arm bars between them to stop you from like just to be accumulated this stuff over years and years. And you're right, you know, that ultimately if compliance is the science and one of the biggest impediments to complying is the friction around doing the thing and the enjoyment of doing the thing.

You're right, a slow cooker and an air fryer is a chef inside of a box. One of them works very quickly, one of them works unbelievably slow. Put it in, you and your kids, you walk, you go about your morning and then food appears. And then food appears. And then food appears. It just comes out, and your kids, you walk, you go about your morning, and then food to pee. And then food to pee. And then food to pee. It just comes out. Yeah,

like it was cooked for you. Stan Effiting, ladies and gentlemen, Stan, I love you. I think that your work is fantastic. It's a brilliant redress, very balanced. Why should people go? They want to check out the book. They want to check out your courses. Stan Effiting. StanEffiting.com will get you access to the meal prep company and access to my vertical diet 3.0 e-book. Soon to be 4.0, I update it and I give future copies for free to anybody who bought a prize. Oh, wow. So you get it and it's always updated. It's a living document. I keep updating it all the time.

So at Stan Effording is my Instagram and then the Rhino's Rants are on YouTube at Stan Effording and there is some of them enrolled but they're fun. There is a whole bunch of good stuff. People really enjoy those. Stan, I appreciate you. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you.