Modern Wisdom - #804 - Dr Mike Israetel - Exercise Scientist’s Masterclass On Losing Fat

Episode Date: July 1, 2024

Dr Mike Israetel is a Professor of Exercise and Sport Science at Lehman College and the Co-Founder of Renaissance Periodization. If you’ve ever wondered “is this diet actually working” then you're probably not alone. However there are now scientifically proven optimal methods for losing fat in the most efficient way possible. And today we get a full breakdown of the optimal approach for fat loss from the best teacher on the planet. Expect to learn how the physiology of fat loss actually works, whether calories actually matter in your weight loss journey, if you need to count macros when trying to lose fat, how to actually build and keep 6-pack abs, whether there are any fat loss supplements worth your time to take, how long you should stay on a diet for before taking a break and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 30% off Create Creatine Gummies at https://trycreate.co/wisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get up to 20% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr Mike Isretel. He's a professor of exercise and sports science at Lehman College and the co-founder of Renaissance Periodization. If you've ever wondered, is this diet actually working, then you're probably not alone. However, there are now scientifically proven optimal methods for losing fat in the most efficient way possible. And today we get a full breakdown of the most evidence-based approach for fat loss from the best teacher on the planet. Expect to learn how the physiology of fat loss actually works, whether calories really matter in your weight loss journey, if you need to count macros when trying to lose fat, how to actually build and keep six-pack abs,

whether there are any fat loss supplements worth your time to take, how long you should stay on a diet for before taking a break and much more. Mike is probably the hottest thing in sport and exercise science at the moment from the evidence-based community which is basically just the truth when it comes to everything to do with health and fitness. I don't think there's anyone growing more quickly or as popular or as candid as him and you know he is a competitive bodybuilder himself so it's not just something that's theoretical and maybe even works in practice but practically how he is using these insights and applying them to his life in a way that's

frictionless it's all here. So we did one about how to build muscle. This one is the other side of the coin about how to lose fat. So I hope that you're shredded in two weeks after listening to this. Before we get started, a slightly sad statistic for you, which is that 60% of you listening to this aren't subscribed. If that's you, please just navigate to Spotify and press the follow button in the middle of the page or an Apple podcast. There's a plus in the top right-hand corner. If you

subscribe, I promise that you will lose body fat at least 10% more quickly than you were already intending for it to happen. And it'll make me happy and you won't miss episodes when it goes up. So please go and do it. Thank you very much indeed. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Mike Isretel. Look at how lean you are. Lean, tight head. I think most people when they get lean, they become more attractive. I become less because my grotesquety of my whatever this is, is more revealed. Someone commented on our last episode saying that watching Chris and Mike talk to each

other is like seeing two alien head races meeting for the first time. I think it was a predator versus alien reference. Which way am I? I'm predator because of this ledge. I have a prominent, I have a prominent brow. You could have been a good wrestler. That's good in wrestling. You stick it in your face.

Okay. You are Mr. Science man, Dr. Science man of exercise and getting jacked. Our last episode is fantastic. Everyone should go and check that out. Today. I want to talk about how to lose fat.

People can get jacked, but if you're not that lean getting jacked kind of isn't as good as it could be if you were a bit more lean. So today I want to do one stop shop, ultimate breakdown, fat loss. What is the fundamental physiology when it comes to fat loss? So if you download the RP diet coach app, it actually makes tiny little molecules that go into your bloodstream and make you happy and lean.

No, wait, the plug was supposed to be for later. The fundamental physiology of getting leaner is a question of sort of what is your body fat there to do? And your body fat there does do, is there to do a few things for you. It lubricates your joints. It provides some of the architecture to your cell surfaces, etc. But adipose tissue is a subcategory of all of your body fat. And it's designed a little bit to protect internal organs and some other things like that.

But it's mostly designed as an energy reservoir. Because in our evolved ancestral timeline, everything up until modernity, food availability was predictably intermittent, which means you had some food today, maybe a lot of food, maybe the tribe killed a mammoth or something. And if you could only eat what was there and then you got full and then you were like, man, and you kind of buzzed off, then the day after it's rotting mammoth and you can't eat it anymore. And if you didn't gorge yourself like crazy and have somewhere to put that mammoth stuff, then in the next maybe two weeks that you didn't get a lot of food,

some fraction of the people with that particular kind of adaptation that wasn't prone to or physiologically anatomically able to store excess energy away was just going to die. And their ancestors would not have and did not reproduce, which is why all extant humans today have the ability to store adipose tissue as a reservoir for calories, uh, energy that we can use for later because of that predictable intermittency of calorie availability. It's curious that we're talking about how to lose fat.

Notice we're not talking about how to gain fat because we're really already super good at that. You've got a lot of seminars for people about how to get someone to work harder. How do I improve my diligence? Have you ever been to a laziness seminar? Would be absurd. There's some people need it for sure. You and I probably do, but, uh, for most people

it's like, well, just like that's the default state. So for most people, the ability to gain body fat is default precisely because evolution has designed us to be damn good at that precisely because we used to be intermittently starving. So when you get a bunch of food in you, it goes to a few places. The first place once the food exits the GI tract that it goes is the bloodstream, broken down into various molecules.

Amino acids, which are the sub-components of proteins, carbohydrates, typically glucose, fructose, as well as various parts of fat. And there's some places for them to go. Some of them just go through the bloodstream and get absorbed by all the various cells of your body. I mean, your brain cells need food, your liver cells need food, every cell needs food, and they just go and are used right in the cell right there. Some of those molecules of food, so to speak, are used to raise

your blood sugar enough so that, you know, if you don't have food for the next 15 minutes, you're not just going to drop over debt or something like that. Still another part can go into putting a little bit of fat into your skeletal muscle. Your skeletal muscle inside of itself has a little bit of fat reserve, which is cool. It serves some cool functions. It's not a lot of reserve and still another

part, and there's a couple of parts I'm sort of skipping for concise and conciseness to a little bit, um, is, you know, the, the, the, the It's not a lot of reserve and still another part, and there's a couple of parts I'm sort of skipping for concisen, conciseness to a little bit, um, is mostly carbohydrate gets loaded as what's called glycogen. And that's just a lot of carbohydrate and it's storing your liver and a lot goes to your skeletal muscles, which is why when you mega

cram in a bunch of carbs, the next day you kind of look beefier and you're like, what the hell is going on? Because that glycogen brings in another roughly three grams of water for every gram of carbohydrate you bring in. So it really gets you going. But that's all measured in the hundreds to

several thousands of calories that you can put away into your body. If that's all you were capable of, you'd be unreal lean all the time and in our ancestral environment, dead in a few days or emaciated from muscle loss. So once you fill all the calorie needs for the moment, you have to put the calories somewhere else.

Once your glycogen stores are relatively full, they don't accept any more food. Your muscles, unfortunately, technically don't act as a reservoir of excess calories or amino acids. Wouldn't that be sweet? You just like eat a ton of Thanksgiving dinner and you just wake up with that much more Jack. Where it goes for the most part in that excess number of calories eaten that

isn't attending to your, let's say daily needs is it goes to your adipose tissue, your subcutaneous and intra abdominal layers and layers of body fat. Now this tissue was specifically designed to do mostly one thing, which is take any kind of calorie, transform it, and it gets transformed in various places, including in the fat cells themselves into very easy to store fats so you can eat proteins. They generally don't get converted to fat cells themselves, into very easy to store fats. So you can eat proteins. They generally don't get converted to fat super simply, but they can

displace other food and then that food gets converted to fat. Carbs get converted to fats and fats need only minimal modification for transport and storage and now everything basically vectors into fat, that fat gets stored into fat cells and there it chills. It's got metabolic activity, it's got a ton of hormonal activity, but fat stores

adipose tissue isn't nearly as metabolically active as most other tissue. It's like a fuel tank more or less. And there your fat sits. Now, if you keep eating a lot of food over and over, your body's like, man, I know that famine's coming soon, but not today, baby, we're packing it in. And it turns out one of the reasons why

humans are able to get unbelievably fat in many cases is because there was really no selective pressure and evolution for a top end limit of too much fat. How you would evolve that selective pressure is you would have to have humans evolve for at least thousands of years in an insane food abundance environment.

And then the people that got cardiovascular disease or were mobile or found unattractive by mates because they were too fat, they would win them out. And eventually everyone would kind of look like, I don't know, the average Nigerian person who's just stripped to bits for no reason and just got it all. Right. So people can get unreal fat because your fat's kind of like a super welcoming giant corporate hotel. People check in and it's like, we got room for you.

No problem. More people check in. It's like, Hey, build another side of the hotel. It builds another side and it just keeps going. So the question is on fat burning, how do we get the guests to check out of the hotel and there's really only one way to do it and that is stop sending guests in or send in less because if you have a situation where you're eating a certain amount of food and it's fulfilling only your daily needs, what we call maintenance calories,

your body fat doesn't get re-upped and then it just stays the same. It can't possibly grow because there's no food being shuttled for it to grow. If you eat less than maintenance, let's say 250 calories, less than all of your body processes need to keep you doing whatever you're doing. That 250 calories is going to have to come from somewhere. And your body's like, Hey, listen, no problem. And it goes around sort of by analogy is an index. It's all the board meeting, all the, the board is together.

And the CEO is like, all right, nervous system, what are you doing with your calories? He's like, dude, I need to run the whole body. Are you crazy? Like, okay, we're not going to break down the nervous system for calories. That's insane.

Muscular system. It's like, dude, I'm doing stuff. Now we'll get to this later, but if you exercise a lot and you train with weights, the muscles like, bro, I need all of this. Leave me alone. If you're sedentary and there's nowhere to go for calories. Yeah.

Your muscle can be used for breakdown, but it's not super efficient to do it. It'll go to your organs, stomach, liver, brain, et cetera. Uh-uh. This is important stuff. And then it goes over to body fat. Hey, body fat, what are you up to? It's nothing at all. Why?

What's wrong? Do you have any calories? What are you doing with them? It's like, nothing. Give it up. And then, so your body fat will release calories through various digestible forms of fat into your bloodstream, they will go wherever they're needed.

And then that will supply that deficit. It'll fill up that deficit for you. So as measured internally in your body as a whole, you're at maintenance, but for your fat stores, you're at a severe deficit. And over hours and days and weeks and weeks and weeks, the amount of fat you're storing starts to win out down. Your body's still operating pretty well.

And that's fundamentally how you lose body fat by creating a calorie deficit. So do calories matter? And if they matter, why do so many people say that they don't matter? I'm on a pre-contest right now, a few months out from some bodybuilding shows. So I'm trying to channel my kindness attitude, more difficult than usual. So calories are the thing that matters the most in fat loss,

writ large period end of conversation. Calories always mattered among people who study physics and thermodynamics on the whole, among actual nutritionists that go to school for nutrition, physiologists, medical doctors, researchers. Do calories matter or not was never a question that was asked because it was answered in like 1910 or something like that. There are two kinds of people that say calories don't matter. One group are well-meaning people who have noticed something. They've noticed that when

they started to exercise, they've noticed that when they started to eat certain types of foods and not others, that their body changed pretty rapidly. And they noticed that they weren't counting calories, but because they were eating a diet high in fibrous vegetables and lean meats, they didn't have to. They just kept losing weight. Maybe they've had hormonal trouble in the past. Thyroid hormone was low. They got thyroid hormone fixed up through exogenous medication, all of a sudden things

are going great, testosterone replacement therapy and so on and so on. They didn't try to track their calories, they didn't try to lower their calories, and they lost fat. So these very well-meaning people, it's totally understandable how they could think, well, cheese, I mean, calories matter, I guess, as the science book says, but I never tracked my calories and I lost a ton of fat. How do you explain that? And there's not really a mystery in the scientific community

about how to explain that. Your expenditure went up, maybe a little bit. Your intake went down, maybe a little bit. The combination of those two created a net calorie deficit. And that's like 99.9% of the way that anyone ever loses fat. That's really what's going on. Does that mean you have to count your calories?

No. Does that mean if you had diets before where you count calories and you really struggle to do it and it doesn't work and you're like calorie counting stupid, you try to keep keto diet, you get a massive reduction in appetite, a bunch of your favorite cheat foods, can't eat cause they're not keto,

you lose a bunch of weight and you're like, see, it was hormones, It was keto. It was never the calories. Well, actually it was always the calories, but the keto diet allowed you to get into a calorie deficit so powerfully that you didn't even need to track calories, you were just never going to make it back to what you could only do with potato chips and ice cream. So that's the group one that is understandable.

Group two are people that range anywhere from honestly misinformed folks that have noticed these changes in themselves and have created digital products and YouTube channels to help other folks figure things out, all the way through sociopathic charlatans that maybe know what's really going on and maybe don't, but don't care. And they'll tell you calories don't matter. Calorie counting is a myth because they, some combination of truly believe that to be the case, erroneously, or they, um, have no true beliefs. They're just, uh, there's no soul in there and they'll say whatever the

hell they have to do to get that bottom line for their corporation to go up. Um, Dr. Oz type of people. corporation to go up, um, Dr. Oz type of people. So a lot of the calorie balances and myth comes from those second groups of people that make digital content and say these things and is taken quite well by that first group of people that's like, well, yeah, that's what I've noticed in my life.

And that's how you have that, um, continuation of that insane, totally bonkers upside down myth. So certain changes that people can make with the choice of foods that they have has a downstream consequence on the amount of food that they eat. And also perhaps the way that they feel the amount that they move around, perhaps it's tied in with a more overall change of I'm going to care about health and I'm going to eat more meat and whole foods and stuff. And that means that maybe they take the stairs a little bit more.

And this combination of a reduction of hyper-palatable calorie dense foods on the front end and maybe a little bit of a change on the backend means reliable weight loss over the longer term. This creates fertile ground for magic foods. This is a food that'll burn fat. This is the thing that you need to eat or shouldn't eat or whatever.

Uh, and that is then sort of slotted into by that's the, the, the fuel is provided to a very sort of dry heap of potential grass that can then be set ablaze by. Arsonists of the human mind. Arson about. Charlotten. Arsonists. Of the human mind. Arson about. Charlotten. Arson about.

Yeah. Um. That's very well put. Okay. Do you have to count calories in order to be successful? If calories are the most important thing that matters, is it mandatory that everyone needs to track calories if they're going to lose body fat? Great question.

It is no more mandatory to count calories in order to lose fat than it is to count your money in order to become wealthy. If your input stream on money is like the Gucci brand level, you don't have to count it. You just have to like forklift the cash into a warehouse or something. God knows what those people do with their money.

Right. And then of course, burn it because you're that rich, you don't need them. God knows what those people do with their money. Right. And then of course, burn it because you're that rich. You don't need them. So if you are losing weight, you look leaner, your clothes are fitting better and better and better, but you don't count calories.

Don't you dare start. God bless you. Whatever you're doing, it's working. Keep it up. You feel better. Everything's awesome. Don't even worry about looking at a label or counting calories. it up. You feel better. Everything's awesome. Don't even worry about looking at a label or counting calories. But if you're not losing weight, you're trying a certain kind of diet. You gained a pound

last month and you want the ultimate, almost never but for weird body water issues, been defeated, hack. Counting calories is going to get you there. It is unequivocal because if you understand what your maintenance calorie level is, very well, by taking a few weeks to just get to know what you're eating, like the RP diet coach app you can do that with, you can do it with my fitness pal, you can do it with macro factor, tons of great apps to do that with.

You get a feel for your maintenance because like, if you eat a little bit less, you start losing weight, you eat a little bit more, you start gaining. And after a while, it looks like this just kind of like, yeah, it looks like 2,500 calories like right around my maintenance. Cause like, if you eat a little bit less, you start losing weight, you eat a little bit more, you start gaining. And after a while, it looks like this just kind of like, yeah, it looks like 2,500 calories like right around my maintenance and you want to lose weight. You take anywhere between, and I can

get on the specifics here, roughly 250 calories per day to 750 calories per day, depending on a few factors. Chunk that right out and you watch the magic happen, but if you never count calories and you're not losing weight, the mystery factor is a big deal. Another quick analogy, let's say you're Elon Musk and you're counting your billions or whatever he does in a spare time. Just kidding, he doesn't

have spare time. And you have a rocket that you're launching and it takes off and shoots through the atmosphere. Do you have to calculate a thrust to weight ratio and see that it's positive? No, it's in fucking space. Of course, it's positive. But if it doesn't leave the platform after a nice 30 second burn, you got to start calculating stuff. It's like, are we off by a rounding error or are we off by an order of magnitude? The whole engine could be the problem or it could be like, oh, Bob didn't do this with the spigot. So calorie balance doesn't have to matter. It always matters under the surface So calorie balance doesn't have to matter. It always matters under the surface, but you

don't have to count calories if the times are good. If the times are confusing and you're like, what the hell I'm trying to eat healthy and I'm not losing weight, it's time to give calorie counting a shot. Knuckle down. What about weighing yourself? How frequently should people do it? What's the way that you advise them to?

Is there an app? Is there a blah, blah, blah. Multiple times a day for your self-esteem. No way. That's just what I do. Is it good or bad? It's always bad. Um, there are definitely many apps that can help you track your weight.

RP Diacoach app does that, a whole bunch of them do. I'm here pimping the app all the time. I just want people to know we make a great app, super high quality product. It is not the only great app. There's tons of other awesome, awesome apps. If you are maintaining and living an awesome, healthy life, you're not trying to lose weight or fat. I would say you can weigh in from somewhere between never to once

every month or two weeks. Why do I say that? Because sometimes you have a, you know, like a real holiday season, not just a holiday, pre-Thanksgiving, you go to four or five other people's Thanksgivings, you go to your own Thanksgiving, Christmas isn't like a day, we know how it works, it's like work Christmas, leisure Christmas,

your buddies, blah, blah, blah. And January rolls around and you're like, I feel fine, but kind of a little, you know that a little kind of puff, fluffy, fluffy. If you weigh yourself every two kind of a little, you know, that a little kind of puff. Fluffy. Fluffy. If you weigh yourself every two weeks to a month, just as a normal healthy human, you can notice like, damn it, I gained seven pounds and that can give you the

hint to go, you know what, let me, uh, let me clean my shit up. And dial it in a bit. Yeah. And that just means like eating up on the junk food for the next two or three weeks. You're chilling with your wife at home Friday night. She's like pizza. You're like sushi.

She's like, yep. So it's just an early warning system. That's it. Why do I say that? Because on unreal number of people, I mean, literally millions of people in the modern free countries of the world in which food is excessive, almost no one just wakes up one day and they're like 400 pounds. How the hell it goes up by a few pounds here and there.

And if they don't catch it until six months later, when they see their doctor, it's a 15 pound problem. Now you do need the RP diet coach app because this is a meat and potatoes problem. But if it's three to seven pounds, two or three weeks of just cleaning up your eating and making sure to get your physical activity up a little Cause this is a meat and potatoes problem. But if it's three to seven pounds, two or three weeks of just cleaning up your eating and making sure to get your physical activity up a little

bit, you kibosh it and it's just not there. And you go back to living your best life, weigh yourself every few weeks. Two weeks later, after that, you can weigh yourself, you're even lighter than you thought. Hell yeah, pizza tonight. So it's good to keep your eye on it. Now, if you're actively in a fat loss diet,

weighing yourself at least once a week is a real good idea. It's probably not the best idea because water weight fluctuations can give you a ton of air. Let's say you stuck to your macros 100%. All the proteins, carbs, fats, and calories you were supposed to eat on Sunday. You always weigh yourself on Monday. But a part of those macros was you made an omelet and you sprink some fat free cheese on it and you like salt. You're a salt person. Sometimes when people eat a lot of salt, it makes them thirstier.

And then some people will have that salt in that water and they'll retain a little bit of that. And maybe you have an element to drink too, cause they're delicious and they're good for you. You have a couple elements and well it's another 3000 milligrams of salt. You wake up the next day and even though tissue wise, if you had an MRI scanner, which I own six in my home as a

trillionaire, one of them is just for show, by the way, it's not even plugged in. Isn't that absurd? So, uh, that's the one I show to people, the nuclear regulatory commission does not know about that one. So you have a situation where in reality you lost one and a

half pounds of fat last week. Everything about your diet and training is set. Don't you change a thing, but because you had excess salt, just randomly, um, it looks like you gained a pound and a half. Cause you only weigh in once and all you have is a weak point of data. So you, you have one data point, you have a whole week. You're like, all right, did I get bloated from last night or what the hell is going on?

And then you cut your calories even more. And well, I'm sure we'll get to this later, but if you cut your calories way more than the recommended amount for a long time, you develop an excessive amount of diet fatigue, and then that can really put a spoke in your wheels for sustainability of your fat loss. It's nothing you want to do. So our recommendation or RP is generally weigh yourself two to three times a week.

Seven days a week is totally fine, but there's nothing magical about it. So if you're going up somewhere, you know, if you're a New Yorker and you go to the Hamptons for a weekend, my word. I mean, who's still, who's still poor enough to go to the Hamptons, am I right? And you're like, Oh, I'm not going to have

a scale in the Hamptons. Is that a problem? Absolutely not a problem. Your five days that you were weighing are totally great. But you know, if you go a week without weighing yourself, you're kind of in the dark and it could have been a good week, could

have been bad week, never can tell. So a few times a week, all the way up to every day is totally fine. In other news, this episode is brought to you by 8Sleep. I have been using my 8Sleep mattress for years and I literally cannot imagine life without it. Having a actively cooled and heated mattress is THE game changer. Now they have

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A checkout that's E I G H T S L E E P dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. What or how much truth is there in set point theory? Your body getting accustomed to a particular weight that you sit at and not liking to change too much from that one? Yeah, that's a good question. The modern interpretation I'm most familiar with is now called settling point theory. Now, because I'm a dogmatist for science, I don't like that it's called theory. Theory is reserved for interconnected frameworks of facts well supported by evidence – evolution, gravitation, etc. Even the standard model in theoretical physics isn't

called a theory, but it's way more predictive than settling point theory, by ten orders of magnitude. So, the settling point model, or hypothesis, says there's not one set point that your body is supposed to be. You weren't born to weigh 200 pounds and doesn't matter what happens, you always trend back to 200. What it says is there's a couple of inputs to how much you weigh and given that they are of certain values, you're going to settle temporarily in a certain weight range.

For example, let's say you live a lifestyle where you go out to eat twice a week, you're going to settle temporarily in a certain weight range. For example, let's say you live a lifestyle where you go out to eat twice a week, you have certain meals, you prep at home, you train a certain number of times, you get a certain number of steps. If those things are rather constant, you might weigh 200 pounds. If we put you in a food environment that's way more obesogenic as the term goes, let's see what's the most obesogenic food environment? Cruz.

America. The United States. Anytime I'm anywhere in the world and someone jokingly talks smack about the US, I always have the same joke back and it's old as hell, but I love overuse it. I go over, I'm like, do you see that over the horizon over there? Like I'm in Sydney and you just look over the harbor and they're like, no, like, that is US aircraft carrier battle group. God damn it, Nick, and enter country in five minutes, woo!

And then they do Texas thing, they do the gunshots, so any case, the US is the best. That's why we're here. So it's biggest at least. Well, yeah. Well, it's actually, so funny enough, the UK just overtook us, I believe in, uh, in obesity rates. So really have to, do you find it?

Yeah. It's, it's a neck and neck battle. Now the U S is still King in a few different categories. We have the highest absolute number of fat people. Cause we have a lot of people and fat people. We also have the highest absolute number of very, very, very fat people. Like you go to the UK, there's some fat people, a lot of people and fat people. We also have the highest absolute number of very, very, very fat people. Like you go to the UK, there's some fat people, a lot of people are fat, but you come to the U S especially like Southern Texas, you will regularly

see four and 500 pound people. That's an American. Rascal fat. Yes. But on fractions of super fat people, we are inferior to a few of the peoples of the Pacific islands, folks from Tonga, folks from American Samoa, uh, them some big people over there. And they do two things super well.

Eat amazingly tasty food. Three things, uh, be incredibly jolly and super awesome to hang out with and are statistically completely overrepresented of any racial group in American football pro performances. And rugby probably as well. Yeah. Well, that's, you know, that's a step down for them. Like, this is easy. I usually do this against way bigger people.

So, um, sorry. What was that point? There's a settling point. Settling point. Yeah. Yes. So if I get you over to a cruise ship for two weeks, I mean, cruise ship food is so good and

it's kind of 24 hours and it's always there and you leave the main restaurant and they're like fresh baked cookies. And you're like, who the hell am I to say no to this nice young person? And all of a sudden you're taking in 600 more calories per day, just normally. Now your settling point, if you stayed there for weeks and weeks,

would be whatever it was, but higher. You take it the other way. When you get into a time machine and you go back to the 1940, late 40s in the United States, you're like, all right, I'm ready to eat. What are you going to do? There's a few fast food places, but they're not that good. You got to drive pretty far to get them. And they're not even open 24 hours. You just quite a fence.

That's why the 40 sucked. And you go, okay, how do I get some food? You go to the grocery store. It's almost completely bereft of convenience food. And you're like, how am I supposed to cook my food? Cause there's some interesting cultural stuff that just, it's baffling in retrospect. You know, the idea of a nice Sunday dinner, like a ham dinner or a turkey dinner, that is as far as I'm

concerned, archeology at this point. Because any person of basically any income in a modern country can just buy a turkey or a ham every single day for every meal. It's a nominal cost. So if you go back to the 1940s in the US, people say, why weren't there so many fat people? You want to be fat? You've got to cook your own food.

And if you're a bad cook, it's not even tasty. So if the average tastiness and convenience of the food in your area goes down, you're settling point eight, 200 anymore. It's 160 now. No, it could be 200. If you were on a cruise ship, then it could be 220. So based on those factors, your food environment, your activity level, who you hang around with, et cetera, your settling point can move up and down. But in any one situation, yes, settling points are a real thing.

And there's some physiology to your body being a little annoyed at having to make a change. It's less annoyed if the environmental factors change and then it's like, well, I'm just living my best life and I'm just losing weight. Cause I just don't eat tasty food all the time. So there is something just to settling points. And there is a genetic factor for sure.

The absolute biggest by a mile genetic factor for settling points is hunger levels and food pleasure response. I'm sure you've hung around with a lot of people in your life. Some people, are you a food guy? Do you like to eat? Yeah. Yeah. But notice the way you said like, yeah, some people are like, bro, are you kidding me?

I can inhale food. Some other people, and I've been friends with many people like this in the past, uh, they just like food to them is like this thing they have to remember to put in their bodies. Otherwise they like, Oh, I can't see clearly. Right. So the biggest factor by a long shot in any one individual is what are their hunger levels like and what are their enjoyment of food, neurochemistry like, and that goes a big way. How do you get the American obesity, the global obesity epidemic?

You take hyper palatable, ultra convenient, relative to income, super cheap food. You make it insanely ubiquitously available. You vary it constantly. So no one gets used to it. Like if you want a new type of crisp to eat in the UK and you go once a week to the store, you just never run out. Cause there's always new stuff. And you pair that with a population of people, some fraction of

that population, totally unaffected. They just do meh crisps. I have a crisp. I sit down, I do nothing. I don't have another one. Some people give them tasty food and it's cheap and convenient. That's their hobby now is eating food and they love it. And the pounds just smack on and on and on.

So for them, their settling point in that environment sometimes doesn't have a number yet because they're still working their way up to it. Yeah. Yeah. I think this has been the most interesting thing I've learned maybe over the last year. Um, orbiting a number of people talking about why is modern society so fat?

There's all of these images from the 1960s of beaches in America and everyone looks lean and athletic and you see it's because of the insert, your favorite food demon of choice here. It's the red 40, it's the seed oils, it's the carcinogens in the water. It's the estrogen levels. It's the whatever, whatever. Uh, but the sort of Occam's razor of this is just food is tastier, more

calorie dense, cheaper and more available than it's ever been before. Yes. What did you think was going to happen? What would it just, just from first principles, just make that forget the constitution of it. What's the molecular weight? Where is it? Is it artificial or is it natural? What, what do you think would happen to those people?

Yes, very predictable. And in a certain sense, a little bit disappointing because it would be cool if we could have like one type of food additive or something in the water supply that we discovered was insanely obese, and we managed to put in some sensible regulation and take it out of the water supply or reduce it by a factor of a thousand. And everyone just like over the next year had this Renaissance where they leaned up. That would be awesome.

It would be awesome for two reasons. One, it would solve the problem really quick. And two, it would remove any onus of actually the problem's worse than you thought. It's like, if you go to couples therapy for a while and you want your partner to change. And after like 12 sessions, you, uh, the psychiatrist or

psychologist requests you come alone. And she kind of like dances around it and she's like, you're the fucking problem, Chris, it's kind of all on you. Nancy's great. She's been great the whole time. It's you. You're like, that's not what I went to couples therapy to hear. And so when someone's like, it's actually all the insanely tasty

food you love to eat all the time. That's making you super fat. You got to tend to say to be like, fuck, what, I gotta stop eating that stuff. What wasn't it? The microplast can I eat the other, can I make microplastics tasty? So at some point it's this insanely simple reason that describes probably 90% or more of the variance and obesity from historical times to now. But it's also a bit like, ah, crap.

It's like trying to make it on a JV basketball team and you're like, coach, is it hard? Is it, do I have to practice dribbling anymore? And it's like, you're just an Ashkenazi Jew, dude, you're never going to be good at this. That's what I heard from my basketball coach

when I was five foot zero back in, just kidding. I'm not five feet yet. One day, Chris, I'll get up there. It's, it's something you don't want to hear, but once you process it, you're like, of course it's true. The good news is for the first time in history, we can start taking real big bites out of that.

No pun intended with modern pharmacology, which is going to save us all from everything, begin insane rant about how drugs are great, but was I'm picking all of those drugs and I do find it at this point comical that was Zempik gets all the attention that it gets because this is a third generation GLP one agonist. There's already in late stage clinical trials, a fifth generation agonist. Zempik to zapotide. That's Gen four. Oh, Ozempic's Gen three.

Right. Okay. So I think a lot of people have sort of reset the number because one and two kind of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like liraglotide and stuff. No one. And what's the fifth gen, which is the one that's really hard to pronounce. So there's a bunch of them, but I pronounce it retatratide.

Right. You can also say it retatratide if you want to say like three words instead of one. Okay. Yeah. So like retatratide is not a GLP one agonist technically, it's a triple agonist. It's a GLP, GIP, glucagon agonist.

Not only does it kibosh your appetite from two different separate pathways, but somehow I have no idea how these guys managed to modulate the glucagon pathway to increase your resting metabolic rate. Retatratide is gen five. It is, was invented years ago and what they're inventing right now in the pharmaceutical industry is going to make retatratide look like a joke. And retatratide, uh, left Ozempic behind completely in clinical trials.

It beats a terzapatide, uh, left ozempic behind completely in clinical trials. It beats a terzapatide, no problem. And we're talking about more weight loss for less side effect. The stuff they're developing right now is going to lead to a late 2020s in my view, in which for almost everyone, if you don't want to be obese anymore, you just take the medication and you won't be. But if you do, you just don't take the medication and you will be. Why is, why can just one pill or one injection do so much? Because it makes you less hungry fundamentally.

And then when you're not really hungry, you stop eating as much food and all these weird other hypotheses about why we were getting fat. Ozembe kind of crushed all of them out. Cause it's like, how does it just do all that? That's so funny. I mean, there's a big, I'm going to be fascinated to observe the why we were getting fat. Ozempia kind of crushed all of them out. How does it just do all that? That's so funny. I mean, there's a big, I'm going to be fascinated to observe the way that most people see the GLP-1 category of drugs.

I've been surprised by the negativity of the pushback. I haven't. You haven't been surprised by it? No, not at all, my God. Why? People have a reflexive anti-pharmaceutical, anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, anti-drug attitude. It's some kind of smorgasbord of those comes out anytime, all the

time with tons of people. Oh, so this is like the natty or not of fat. Like it's the fatty or not. Fatty or not. Definitely fatty. Like I meant that in a different way. Yeah. Okay.

That's, that, that makes sense. I think, uh, some people have an issue with the fact that they feel like it's kind of cheating. You know, I had to get there. The fucking. I love to tackle that one. Okay. Yeah. It's, um, I see where people are coming from for the respectful

part of my talk, which ends now and begin with the disrespectful part of my talk. It's pure nonsense. You use air conditioning when you break your leg, you go to the hospital and of my talk. It's pure nonsense. You use air conditioning. When you break your leg, you go to the hospital and you get antibiotics. You cheating motherfucker. Aren't you supposed to be eating rocks and

bashing your head into a caribou to kill it or something like that? As a matter of fact, the first, the first tool industry millions of years ago, the proto humans made one of them is like the Olduvan tool industry. They discover these now where it's like, you know, Flint rocks that are shaped in a no longer natural pattern, whittled down into something like a little club head or a little spike

that you can at least like pull an animal's guts apart easier or even kill something with. They were cheating. That's the first cheating they've ever done. Artificial. And it made them better at stuff. Mm. Your ability to lose weight can be a test of your willpower. Or you can take the fucking pill or the injection,

and with no added willpower, lose all the weight you want. And then you can test your willpower on tending to your family better, being a kinder person to others, being someone of moral authority to others by how you live your life, coaching little league football and being on time for the kids instead of standing in a fucking Hardee's line getting your third cheeseburger for that day. You can start a business, you can save the world, you can clean up the atmosphere, everything. We're not running out of problems. So if we have body fat as this thing that's going to sharpen our will and we get rid of

that, the set of problems remains approximately infinite still and you can sharpen your will on what's left over. If you think you're tough, improving your willpower to yourself by losing fat, you're right, but you're not getting jacked. You're not building a business because you're draining all of your willpower on that one thing. Um, it's a good thing we have pills to help us with as much as possible. So then we can have more bandwidth to do all the other good

stuff that we want to do. Getting back to the fat loss in the diet, protein carbs fat. How should people be thinking about those? How do they contribute? What should they be eating? Yes. Proteins are essential because they compose all of the organs, all of your enzymes, all the stuff that does work is pretty much protein. It's non-negotiable. And also protein supports your skeletal muscle, which is kind of important because there's two types of getting lean. One is people think you're sick and ask you if you're okay, because you lost a bunch of muscle.

The other is like people compliment you or saying nice things behind your back because they're jealous and they want to have sex with you, but they can't. I'm used to that sort of thing. The jealousy part, me being jealous. So protein is a big deal. they can't. I'm used to that sort of thing. Uh, the jealousy part, me being jealous. So protein is a big deal for most people who are not pursuing exotic hyper bodybuilding pursuits. As little as just over half a gram per pound of bodyweight per day protein is going to take care of most of your needs.

So if you weigh 200 pounds and you eat something like 120 grams of protein per day, you're probably golden and you can probably lose fat and lose a very little or no muscle at all. The top end is maybe about double fat, real insurance policy type of stuff. You're doing crazy hardcore weight training, crazy amount of cardio and activity. You're already very, very lean and you're prone to losing muscle and you're a little older than average over 40. then it's just over one gram per pound.

So if you ate 200 grams, if you ate 200 grams, if you ate 200 pounds, then maybe you have 220 or 240 grams for a very serious fitness person. Gram per pound is an amazing rule. Just understand that for most people, like if your mom asks you for diet advice, just a little bit over half of that is totally solid. Often best consumed for most muscle mass retention and building through three to five

meals, evenly spaced per day. But if you just have like two meals for the average person, if they're eating lots of protein, they're going to get great results. Okay. Carbs. I'll do carbs and fats at the same time. If you don't mind, there is a big difference between optimizing for athletic

performance and muscularity and just losing some goddamn fat. So you can see Mr. Twinkie again. Well, there you are, buddy. It's been a while. Carbs and fats kind of combine into one index of extra calories after protein has been taken care of.

A really great app for fat loss that you can use is called macro factor. And they have this turn dial where you can like turn up the carbs and turn down the fats. And it's one comes out of the other because for many people, it just doesn't matter as long as you get a minimum of both. If you're getting some fibrous veggies and maybe

a few pieces of fruit per day, but you're down to very low levels of carbs, you eat no grains, no breads, no rice, none of that, but you eat plenty of healthy fats, you're golden. You're going to lose tons of fat and be super healthy. If you have minimal fats, like you take an essential fat supplement every day and the rest of your diet has no fat in it whatsoever. You're doing starches, grains, Gatorade, the whole nine yards,

but your calorie balance is set. You've generated a 250 to 750 daily calorie deficit and your protein is good. You're going to lose fat until the cows come home. And it's going to go super well. How you feel on each one of those, how your sport and athletic hobbies are supported, how convenient it is for your life, those are secondary discussions, but very important ones.

So it's kind of two points here. One, as long as you get minimum levels of fats and carbs, which are very very low and most people won't hit, whichever one you want higher or lower, it doesn't matter. But also consider this, if you're more physically active, more carbohydrate generally works better. If carbs kind of make you just want more carbs, but if you get a big satiating effect from fats and you're like, that's enough, maybe you can consider more fats. Some people get more energy from carbs and they prefer more carbs. Some people get a more even keeled mental clarity from lower carbs and higher fats and their go-to is to have higher fats.

Most people would be served best with an even combination of them, roughly the same calories coming from fats and carbs. Once your protein is taken care of, Because in many cases that afford you the most flexibility in your diet, you show up to a restaurant with your friends, you're on a fat loss diet, and you look up what menu items you can eat. Obviously you're on a fat loss diet. You're not going to eat five of the menu items and be a pig. But a lot of real food in the real world, it's tough to get zero carb.

It's also real tough to get really low fat, but most of them have a bit of carbs, bit of fats. And if you have that middle combination, it's a really, really awesome way to go to town and still hit your calorie goals. So, uh, carbs and fats, plus or minus, no big deal, as long as your calories are in check and your protein is in check, the conversation for fats versus carbs, it's individually based preference and very nuanced. Is there a kind of fat which is best?

Well, our company started making this fat supplement. I'm just kidding. Just trying to show as many I'm showing products. I don't even have to sell, uh, get on the mailing list. Super fats. Uh, generally speaking on average, the preponderance of your fat should probably come from poly and mono unsaturated fat sources.

There's a conversation that is more poly or more mono, probably more poly than mono, but what kind of foods are we talking about here? A bunch of the oils, most of the plant oils are really, really awesome. Olive oil, canola oil. Yes, I said canola oil. Just do it. IMDB. Do a PubMed search for canola oil health benefits review, and you'll see that it's super, super healthy.

Uh, all the different kinds of oils are usually generally very good. I can't respect a doctor who proposes seed oils as part of his diet. I never asked for your respect. Nameless faceless troll person who's in a troll farm in China. Um, but yeah, by the way, the Cedar oils thing is really funny. I get smacked for that all the time, but. You did a video about why Cedar oils aren't bad for your health. Yeah, totally.

We have that on the RP strength channel and like, you know, I was curious about the issue because so many people were talking about Cedar oils being bad and it just did like one PubMed search and there was a few review articles that are like, yeah, Cedar oils generally tend to be better than, so they've done multiple studies where they take people who eat a lot of saturated fats, which are totally fine by the way, but they replace some fraction of those with seed oils and in almost every study the people are months later healthier. And so like the idea that seed oils are bad for you is usually concluded by folks that are like really deep into lipidology research and they're inferring that seed oil should be bad for you based on various, um,

cooking process modifications, but inference is dope. And I use it all the time in decision-making, but it never beats actual empirical randomized control trials. Cause that's like what the real world actually is. It's like, well, I think Stacey likes me, go ask her. She's like, no, you're like, okay, I was wrong. Right. Inference doesn't beat the real thing. So seed oils are super great for your health.

They're totally fine. And then there's all kinds of nuts, all kinds of nut butters, avocados, those types of fats tend to be amazing. Fats from fatty fish also super awesome. Saturated fats are also just fine for your health. And you can have a lot of them, but you generally want something like two thirds of your fats to come from plant fats, poly and mono unsaturated. Maybe one third of your fats to come from saturated fat sources,

like eggs and beef and things like that. Where you want to maybe go easy on fats is ultra processed sources with trans fats in them. Trans fats don't just kill you. When you're walking one day and you just keel over it's trans fats. The police put up a line of like trans fats on it. But they're not great in aggregate over the longterm. So if you know, like your primary source of fats is like McDonald's fry

grease, it's not great. Cheesy puffs is not great. So if you do mostly minimally processed whole foods, saturated McDonald's fry grease is not great. Cheesy puffs is not great. So if you're eating mostly minimally processed whole foods, saturated fats are totally fine. But if you're having trouble with your lipids and your doctor's like, look, you ought to change something. Replacing some of your saturated fats with poly and monounsaturated fats, just from directly the literature seems to work pretty well.

But it's not a crazy thing. Here's another thing. For many people that listen to this, who are already eating a pretty healthy diet, their total fan intake is so low, the composition of those fats barely matters at that point. If you have a very high fat diet, let's say you're trying to do the keto thing or the carnivore thing. Yeah. You got to take a look at your fat sources a little more because that's

a lot of fats now and it's going to matter for your blood work. I wonder what, is there not something to do with reheating fats and oils? That's bad. Is it bad? Allegedly. Is it? Is that true? I haven't looked into it in great depth

because the preponderance of the people that espouse that are insane people whose epistemological anchor is total nonsense on average. So like, I haven't looked into deep refutations of the first two years of the pandemic. I haven't looked into the second year of the that espouse that are insane people whose epistemological anchor is total nonsense on average. So like, I haven't looked into deep refutations of the flat earth idea, but I'm not going to anytime soon.

If anyone has any compelling evidence that the reheating process is insanely deleterious for health, then they have randomized clinical trials to support this. I'm super interested in it. I'm out of my depth on that one, but after about five minutes of talking to chat GPT, I could get back into my depth. No problem. It's one of these things that, um, where do you get reheating of oils all the time?

Literally in fry grease, stop eating McDonald's every day. And you're not going to have that. Yeah. So so much of this stuff, so many of the demon foods that people have got an issue with, whether it's particular colorants, whether it's artificial sweeteners, whether it's seed oils, come along for the ride with foods, food types, hyper palatable, calorie dense, very processed, probably just not all that great for you to be having very regularly.

So it's not about the components of this individual thing. It's like saying this circuit board is very dangerous. Well, it is when it's attached to a fucking javelin missile. Yes. Uh, and you pointing at all of the circuit boards and saying, look at how bad these circuit boards are for everybody. And you go, well, yeah, it is because for the most part, that circuit board exists inside of that fucking missile.

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Meal timing. How often should people eat if they're trying to do fat loss? How much of a spread between meals do they need? For weight loss, it just doesn't matter. They've compared eating six or more meals per day regularly to what's called alternate day fasting, where one day you eat and the next day you're just really pissed at everyone because you don't eat. For weight loss, it doesn't matter over the long term.

And it makes sense because the calorie balance is the same. It's calorie controlled. That day that you're eating is real fun on that diet. The day you're not eating is really extra not fun. So weight loss, not a concern. How does it become a concern? Well, the fat loss is muscle growth and muscle retention are processes that prefer multiple meals spread evenly throughout the day.

So if you want to lose weight and you just don't care about muscle, let's say it's not a problem for you, you train hard anyway, because you love it, but you're like, I have plenty of muscle. My doctor tells me I need to lose weight. Whatever meal frequency is something that schedule wise, culture wise, preference wise that you like, do it up. One meal a day, no problem. One meal every other day, no problem. Seven meals a day, dope.

If you're trying to build and maintain muscle mass as much as possible, and you're really full sending this and you're training with weights regularly, which is a big deal. Any number of meals up to you hit four per day, evenly spread, each of them high in protein, marginally increases how much muscle you can grow and maintain. After four meals per day, in all of the research, we see that there is no more effect that we can detect. So if you're like, dude, I'm growing crazy muscle on four meals a day. Should I go to five? Hmm.

Maybe it'll make some teeny difference, but maybe not from the theoretical work. Probably not. Mostly because if you eat bigger meals, they just take longer to digest. So the pulsatility of nutrients in your blood, it basically just looks like this the whole day. Cause you start eating breakfast, by the time you're right out of breakfast, you get lunch and then dinner and then you're done. What about the earliest that people should

eat the latest that they should eat? Is there something to do with the parentheses of your eating window throughout the day? If you eat in a very constrained eating window, the result you can expect starts to look more and more like a very small number of meals per day. Your body doesn't really count meals. Your peripheral cellular structures count how much of a flux of nutrients they get

exposed to. So if you say my eating window is from 8 PM to 10 PM at night, and I have four meals in my eating me dough every half hour. Your body's like, I hear that, but it's just one meal. One big meal. Like if you still have stomach contents, not in the intestines yet, and you're eating meal number two, like it's still the same meal. So a very constrained eating window does do that.

But as far as spreading it out long or short, again, for weight loss, none of that matters for fat loss, you want to spread it out not as far as possible, but you probably want to be ingesting food at something like at least a four, 12, maybe 14, maybe even 16 hour situation, contest bodybuilders who've near mastered the art of losing fat while maintaining muscle.

They'll eat almost as soon as they wake up, and they'll have their last meal an hour or two before bed, if not even closer, and they eat multiple times throughout the day so that their body's never starving for protein. Is that excessive for most people? Yeah. What do you think sensible advice is? To wake up? Again, if you want muscle mass retention, eat within a few hours of when you wake up. Again, if you want muscle mass retention within a few hours of when you wake up,

don't be like, it's like six hours later and you're working at projects at work and your stomach does one of those like angry growls or, oh shit, you exist better get a Twinkie. Don't do that. And if you take longer than four or five hours before you go to bed, after you've eaten that can work out great for you. But for some people, especially as the diet wears on, especially as they get more hungry, it might interfere with sleep in two ways, at least.

One is if you're already hungry when you're trying to fall asleep, it's a non-starter. You're not falling asleep. You're just counting sheep and one sheep jumps over and one, two, three, it's like a sheep, but it's like sectioned into meat parts. It's like lamb, rack of lamb. You're like, oh shit, I'm thinking about food again. And then you go into the fridge and you're getting a cheeseburger. So the other way is if you've eaten many, many hours before you went to sleep,

but not so many that you can fall asleep, you might wake up in the middle of the night or very early morning starving. Your cortisol goes up, you ain't falling back asleep anymore. Sleep is so unbelievably critical to fat loss and to muscle gain and retention. It is a non-negotiable variable. So eat in such a way that gives you the best sleep is probably the best advice I can have in a meal timing perspective.

So for most people eat, you can eat as soon as you wake up, no problem. You can eat right before you go to sleep, no problem. Some people, if they eat right before bed or even an hour or two before, you know, there's digestion, the body temperature goes up and they're tossing and turning, they can't sleep, don't do that. Then back that meal up a little bit. But if you're one of these people, especially late towards the end of a diet, a higher carbohydrate and protein meal before you go to sleep knocks you the fuck out and that's perfect. So very individual, generally spread your meals out, play around with

what feels best for you. Is there anything to say about prejudicing certain types of foods earlier or later in the day, backloading the carbs until the evening time, starting off with more protein first thing in the morning? There's no matter. Good question. The research on that in general has been a giant like, nah, not really. Um, every now and again, someone will pull out a single study or two in isolation and they'll see like, see, you gotta eat more carbs in the morning. And then someone else a couple of years later will be like, it's the nighttime

carbs that are really good. On average, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. So I would say you can play around with things yourself, but as long as you have an even-ish fraction of your protein in every meal, how you do carbs and fats doesn't matter much. At RP, we like to bias carbohydrates closer to the workout. ish fraction of your protein in every meal. How you do carbs and fats doesn't matter much. At RP, we like to bias carbohydrates closer to the workout. So let's say you work out in the middle of the day, we're going to want you to eat

slightly lower fats and slightly higher carbs in the meal before you go train. It's going to give you lots of energy. Fats are more difficult to digest, not in a bad way, it just take a little longer to digest, so you might like be warming up for bench and feeling kind of like burpee and are like, oh, God damn it, this shit hasn't gone through yet. But if you eat low fat, you're like all your rice is in your muscles and you're good to digest. So you might like be warming up for bench and feeling kind of like burpee and are like, oh, God damn it, this shit hasn't gone through yet. But if you eat low fat, you're like all your rice is in your muscles and you're good to go. After training to set up recovery and an anabolism, there's probably a slight advantage

in having more carbohydrates. Your muscles are more ready to absorb it. Your fat isn't. So that's a really good thing. And so we like to push our fats towards, uh, away from the workout and push the carbs a little bit closer, but we're really splitting hairs here. Right.

Uh, and so it's not some kind of magic formula. If you're a contest bodybuilder, yeah, it's a little bit more magic of a formula by a small shot, but generally speaking, the spread is, I'd say this. Almost anyone that's telling you that the circadian rhythm of food and the spread of macros is a very important is misunderstanding the state of the evidence. Okay. When it comes to the kinds of foods to avoid or lean into when dieting for fat loss, what are the things that you think people often overlook?

What are the things that are unnecessarily demonized? Where should people be putting their attention? What's the best food groups to make fat loss easy? Yep. Raspberries are great. Blueberries will kill you on their terrible next question. As far as specific foods, short of like eating soap or poison, there are really no individual foods that are bad for you. And there are no individual foods that stall fat loss.

There have been foods historically that have been demonized, not as individual foods, all of them have gone through the ring, or at least ones, but food groups. Sugars. People will say sugars are bad for you. It's just categorically false to say that. Sugars aren't bad for you. Sugars are no more prone to adding body fat or making body fat loss any more difficult.

It's a non-starter. In direct evidence, in theory, the whole game. Nowadays, it's fun to poke fun at sugar and at carbs. Back in the 80s and 90s, if you told someone you were health conscious, and then you put butter on something, they were like, listen, you're going through some psychiatric problems, we should probably get you checked into a center. Because you were delusional, because everyone knew that saturated fat, especially just straight up killed you where you stood, and you were never going to get lean eating

a diet high in fats. They were also wrong. Calorie balance is so king that it doesn't discriminate hardly at all among food groups. Fats versus carbs is none of that. So the myths of fats are too high, or carbs are too high, or sugar is too high, they're just that myths. However, a very important thing to consider is the palatability of your food and the fullness factor your food gives you.

Because hunger is a real thing. So you want to choose food when you're dieting for fat loss, creating a caloric deficit, that does at least two things for you. One, it's not so damn delicious that you just want to eat more and more of it. And if you don't, you're just suffering. Like if you were deep into a fat loss diet, I was like, hello, Chris, would you like a Cheeto? You'd be like, don't.

Why? Cause as soon as you want them Cheetos hits your lips, paradise, you know, purple angels flying around better than acid at that point. He just wanted another Cheeto. So if you're on a fat loss diet, something bodybuilders discovered a long time ago and a gentleman named, I'm going to butcher his name for sure. Stefan Giena, Gien, he says, pronounced like DNA. I would just say Guy in it.

Cause I'm American. Woo. He, I believe coined the term or at least exposed the public to it of something called the food palatability reward hypothesis. Properly couched as a hypothesis. So he's really the fucking man. And it's basically says something baffling when When you think about it, it's ultra simple and explains most of the variants we've already

talked about with obesity. When food is a really tasty, people tend to eat more and they get fat. They just want more. And if you have tasty food, but you've relegated yourself willpower style, like look a good person to not eating it. You're just going to be more miserable.

You ever smell cheeseburgers being made while you're in the single digits body fat, you're like, dude, if there was an entire family of people between me and those cheeseburgers, like, I'll insert politically. Boom, boom, boom. Shoot them. I'm going to eat my way through them. Right.

So things that get taken out of that. I went, I went native, native American. That my man. So basically if you're dieting for fat loss, try to have foods that aren't like exotically delicious, veggies, fruits, whole grains, lean meats, not a ton of sauces, not a crazy ton of flavor.

And here's the really fucked up part. It's going to be completely counterintuitive. What do you want when your body is telling you, listen, you need to put the fat back on. You want exactly the food that you shouldn't be having. So it's, it's kind of like abstaining from jerking it or something where it's like, what do you

really want to do? You're like, I want to jerk it. Like, what are you not supposed to be doing? Not supposed to jerk it. Right. But if you can, uh, eat at home, if you can clear all of your shelves at home of junk and just have that lower palatability food.

First of all, if you're hungry enough, that should taste real good. Plain chicken and broccoli tastes amazing. If you're actually hungry, have that stuff. That's really, really awesome to do. And secondly, you want to have food that keeps you fuller for longer. Food with a lot of fluid volume, food with a lot

of fiber, food that takes longer to digest. Minimally processed fruits, veggies, whole grains, lean meats, and healthy fats are just kind of undefeated in that category. And so for all the calories you're allowed to have, it's a lot of food. It's not ultra tasty. So you kind of feel like you're laboring through it.

Halfway through your meal, you don't even want anymore. You're stuffing yourself and every week you're losing weight. Fucking paradise. You're really doing it. But it's not paradise because you're going through this boring diet. It doesn't taste as nice as it could be. Dr. Mike's told me that I can't, the exact thing I want to do, which is to make this

as tiny morsel scrap of food. Please sir, can I have some more? So you can turn dial it to go, okay, I'm going to make my food a little tastier and a little less voluminous, a little less filling such that I like my food. I can finish it. I look forward to it, but at the end of the

meal, I'm like, Ooh, okay. This is tough to finish. Then it keeps me full long enough until my next meal comes around and I can eat instead of like two hours before my next meal. I'm like, okay, where's the food? Where's the food? I'm losing it. As you progress through a diet, it's possible to start with pretty normal food and turn dial that food palatability down and that fullness factor up such that

you finish your diet with quite different foods than you started. But the entire time your perception in relation to food is basically the same. You adjust to your preferences. Now that works really well. Can you give some tactical examples of good switches from food types that people may be cooking with at the moment, maybe using more typically and you saying more voluminous, more full of water, more insoluble fiber, et cetera. I bet. What are some of the easy switches?

Let's get rid of this. Let's put some of these in. Yep. Couple examples. Creamy sauces to non-creamy sauces, to dry r rubs to salt only when you're real miserable. Tons of rice and pasta and breads down to whole grain breads, whole grain pasta, brown rice. Like it's still, it's funny. You go to a sushi place and it's like option for brown rice sushi. And I'm like, the Japanese people did not suffer for this.

What the hell is that even? So you go from that to reducing your grain intake, more expanding your fruit intake and eventually expanding your veggie intake. If you have 50 grams of carbs to eat and it's all white rice, that's like a little bit more than a cup of white rice at the beginning of a fat loss diet. Shit. You're barely finishing that. I'll actually complete the analogy for you.

You got some rice and you got some Japanese mayo on that shit. So goddamn good. I'm balls deep into a diet. So this is incredibly difficult for me to talk about. You go a couple more weeks. Now it's the same white rice, but now you have like, you've sprinkled some like, kind of like some kind of seasoned salt on it.

It's tasty, but it's no more Japanese mayo time because you could just like put that ivy into your blood at that point. Then, and you have a little bit of veggies on the side next to it. You go to taking that rice and turning it to brown rice, but now it's not that whole scoop of brown rice, it's half a scoop of brown rice and way more veggies and even a couple slices of fruit. Still weeks later you don't have any more

rice, you have a bunch of veggies and a ton of fresh fruit. I mean you're like stuffing it in because like holy crap like if you get a whole thing of strawberries, that's like 30 grams of carbs. How many fucking strawberries do I have to get to this thing? Whereas like one, like you, you take a swig of sweetened condensed milk and it's like, boom, that's 50 carbs. Like what? How?

So eventually you might get to a point where most of your carbohydrate consumption comes from a combination of fresh fruits and green veggies. And that's going to be insanely difficult to out eat your calorie goals or to put another way, you're going to eat your meals and be like, I don't want any more chicken, broccoli and orange slices. I'm good until the next meal. And you have it again. And then when you end your diet and you start coming back up to maintenance,

you slowly reverse that process back out again. So you are using a restriction in the types of foods that you are allowed to eat in an attempt to pad out the satiety that you have by making it increasingly calorie sparse per gram of food, fewer calories and to increase suffering to make it hurt more. You're trading off two different kinds of suffering. There's the suffering of having to eat food you're not amazed with, and there's the suffering of actual hunger.

They don't compare in magnitude. It's a stupid analogy offhand is the annoyance of having to wear a sticky, gross, sweaty helmet versus taking it off in combat. Yeah, it sucks, but there's bullets flying. The alternative is way worse. A hundred percent. What about potatoes? You mentioned about vegetables there.

A lot of people that sort of starch that that is a big satiating thing. I certainly know that when I've been dieting previously, that's one of the things that I miss a lot. There's no amount of fucking ground beef at 97.3 and whatever else that I can throw on a plate with some vegetables that like, I just want a little bit of starch. How can people get that if they think it's really, that's my thing.

It just makes me, makes my diet easy. Why would you go to for that more starchy stuff? So what you have to do is you can do an experiment on yourself for any given number of grams of carbohydrates, which starts choices for you. Do you find the tastiest, the most difficult to stop eating the most difficult to understand that, okay, now you've run out of pasta, don't get any more and also the longest window after the meal of keeping you full.

On average, boiled potatoes do really well in that regard. Mashed potatoes, not as well. They're tastier. You can suck them down faster. A bunch of different types of potatoes, the more, the more minimally processed, the less processed, the better better do super well, typically rice does okay, but you can put away a lot of rice pasta.

Generally doesn't do that great. I can make fields of pasta disappear by just breathing it in. So not everyone's the same. So you want to try and figure out, but generally speaking from memory, potatoes on average, rank pretty high in the full. Good satiety index. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Create Creatine Gummies. You might've heard previous guests like Dr.

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and effectively build lean muscle, improve muscle recovery and improve brain health and longevity. Right now you can get a 30% discount off your order by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to tricreate.co slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom a checkout. That's tricreate.co slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout. We've spoken almost exclusively so far about ways to manipulate what goes into the body, but energy balance is what goes in versus what you expend.

What do we need to know when it comes to how our body actually uses calories? G flux theory. Is that a thing? Is it a hypothesis? What's G flux? I think that the way that was put across was the difference between taking in 3,500 and expending 2,500 and taking in 2,500 and expending

1,500 results in a very different type of physiology. Yeah. Definitely hypothesis. Maybe even notion. I was in a cordial discussion with my friend, Dr. Eric's Dr. Eric Helms. And I brought up the flux thing and he was like, Mike, shut up.

That was a T nation article and nothing more. And I was like, fuck, he just clowned me. Christian Tibbida. What are you doing to me? God damn it. He usually gives great advice. We all fuck up every now and again. The upright Rose, you need the upright Rose.

The accent alone, I'll believe anything he says. So there is something to that, but let me give you kind of the grand narrative here. There's something called the Ponser paradox named after Herman Ponser, it's discoverer. And this is a gentleman that's actually, I think, trained as a maybe like an ethnographer or an anthropologist or something like that. And he went around the world, various colleagues, and studied the physical activity levels

of various peoples, peoples of India, of Africa, of China, of indigenous tribes, of modern peoples. And he found that the levels of physical activity are almost the same for everyone. This is crazy, ready? We do not have an inactivity epidemic in the modern world. Hmm. Sedentary-ness is not the big problem. No.

And if you actually live with indigenous tribes, unless they have to, they fucking sit around as long as they can and do diddly-dick, because you got to conserve calories. You go out to get calories when you're hungry and when there's an opportunity. Otherwise, why the fuck are you going out and walking around? There is absolutely variation there. Between individuals in any one culture, there are huge variations in physical activity. But on average, physical activity is neither the cause of the obesity epidemic nor the likely solution to the obesity epidemic.

However, if you want your best tools brought to the game of your personal fat loss, what I would say is this. We can have three options for you in physical activity terms. Option one, and this is a little bit to the G-flux situation, you eat very little, but you're very physically inactive. You're going to generate the same caloric net deficit as all the other two groups of people I'll talk about, two ways of doing things. It'll work for some people that work great. I code all day.

I don't want to have to exercise for five hours, get out of my face. I don't, not really a hungry person. I can just drink a Soylent shake when I'm coding and I'm golden. No problem. The second group are people that have a moderate to high level of physical activity, something typified by, oh, 10,000 ish steps per day. For example, group one would be like two to 4,000 steps per day, AKA the average of error.

And that group of people ends up having a situation where they can eat more food and plenty of food, and that helps them stay more full, but they're so active that they burn lots of fat and lose the same amount of weight. And the physical activity is additive to their health outcomes because physical activity is independently important for health regardless of how skinny or fat you are. So that's a really good option for most people, probably better than option number one.

Then there's a third option, what I like to nickname the grand illusion. And that is you continue to eat like the giant swine that you are. Taco Bell employees know you by name. They have your order ready for you every three hours. But you tell yourself, I'm just going to out exercise thisercise this thing. I'm going to go to Kenya. I'm going to sign up for their marathon team. I'm going to hang out with those homies, and we're going to do the thing. The problem with that is, this has been researched by Ponser's group and associated colleagues.

This has been researched in athletics for a long time. When you ask consistently, and I mean weeks on end for your body to have a very high throughput of activity calories, something like north of 15 to 20,000 steps per day, every day on average, your body doesn't like to do that. It, it makes you very tired. It's making you tired so that you sit the hell down and stop bothering it as much. And it works. If you got through it, you've just chosen a way that is a way to lose fat that works exactly as well as option number two, which is just a moderately high physical activity and then crazy, consistent and a decent amount of food. but it's just way harder. And you suck up way

more of your time exercising where you could be doing a bunch of- And eating and cooking. And eating. Now eating's fun, right? And who the hell cooks anymore, right? Trying to steal man the argument here. Your butler? Butler's plural. I don't have one butler. I'm not poor, my God. If you don't want to change your eating habits and you think you're going to out exercise your diet, we run into two problems. Problem one is what I just said, you're going to be so drained on energy, your life's going to suck and you will quit 99% of the time.

Problem number two is it is easy to say as what, uh, economist and philosopher Tom Sowell has coined a term notion is beyond high is a below hypothesis in its intellectual seriousness, just a high idea you had at a party, not even couched to be tested like a hypothesis would be. And the notion is that, um, I'll just like exercise so much. I'll eat whatever I want and I'll still lose weight. The thing is though, if you do the math on that and it's frightening math,

you can take a mile run, throw back like one Twinkie and goodbye calorie balance. Half a donut nukes like half a mile run or some crazy shit like that. And so it's perfectly fine to say out loud, well, I'm just going to eat whatever, but you can eat with a healthy appetite. And if really you mean whatever, and you like fast food and junk food and chips and crisps and all that, you can put down four or five K calories a day. No problem. You ever see the average fast food meal? Like if you just go and have the number two or supersize it, it's like 2100 calories, but you have that three times a day.

You've seen supersize me or whatever. It's like, holy shit. How do you out exercise that? Well, now it's not just marathon runner pace. It's like two marathons a day. You're not going to do that. So because of that situation, option two is the preferred option. For some folks option one works. Eating very little, exercising very little, totally cool. Exercise is good for you should probably get more of it, but it works. Option two, moderate high levels of physical activity.

Weight train a few times a week, get an average of 10,000 ish daily steps or so, and eat a little bit less than you normally would, you're golden. Option three, where you eat a ton of food, you don't change your ways, but you try to exercise a ton all the time. It just doesn't work in the real world for almost anyone.

We'll get back to talking to Mike in one minute, but first I need to tell you about AG1. 90% of Americans are not getting the nutrients that they need every day to be healthy. AG1 provides daily nutrients and gut health support in one comprehensive, convenient and tasty daily drink. You do not need a handful of pills or potions to support your body and give it nutritional insurance. The average supplement is tested for 10 contaminants. AG1 is tested for 950 plus it's NSF certified for sport, no banned substances meaning that even Olympic athletes can use it.

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And that's what the example about running half a mile to burn off half of a donut. Running half a mile is not easy. It sucks. And. Unless it's to the donut shop. No way that it also sucks. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I guess you could run there half a mile, run back half a mile, burn it off. Terrible. No, no one's going to do that. Yeah. Running back would hurt. But yeah, I, you know, as someone who's tried to find a way to defeat thermodynamics to get lean, uh, just thinking like that, Oh God, I hate being hungry.

I hate this fucking restrictive diet. I can't have any sauce on anything. Oh, you know, this really, really sucks. I'll just exercise more. And the net outcome has usually been, I can't, I can't keep it up. I'm fatigued already. I'm still not actually eating what I want in any case. If you were to create some sort of pie chart of what contributes to fat loss,

uh, what would be the components and what would come from, uh, nutrition, calorie intake, exercise, whatever the fuck else. If it's just your diet versus your physical activity, I'd say it's 70, 30, or 80, 20 diet versus physical activity measured as real world explaining the variance of why people are lean. You take a thousand people, some are really lean, some are really fat. And you try to see what is it that the lean people are doing more than the fat people other than obviating genetics aside, it's going to be like,

yes, I'd lean people are like a bit more physically active a bit. Uh, and other than the morbidly obese, most people are plenty physically active. Here's another thing. You weigh 240 pounds and you take 6,000 steps a day, just cause your parking lot's always full when you come to work. Um, you know how much you burn fucking walking when you weigh 240? It's probably the same as 10,000 from someone who weighs 180. Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. 100%. Maybe, maybe even more than that. And so you look at who's really getting leanest and it's mostly those people eat differently. So diet is just, it's a bigger lever. Than it's more direct. A hundred percent. It's like, it's like, if you were, you know, trying

to support a country's military to beat another country and you're like, you get to pick one weapon system and we'll give you the top of the line, we'll give you logistics, we'll give you support, we'll give you maintenance. Do you want the newest rifle or do you want the newest air superiority fighter? You're like, I'll take the jet, please. So the rifle matters, but.

Okay. Getting onto energy expenditure, cardio. What do people need to know about cardio for fat loss? It sucks. Next question. So cardio is best seen in most cases outside of a sport context, because then it's cardio for sports, totally different. You do what you have to do. Cardio is best seen as I need to burn a certain number of calories to get

me to that moderate high level. And I have a couple of considerations. One is preference. One is convenience. One is time cost and a few others. And so if you think there's something magical to the step mill, One is convenience, one is time cost, and a few others. And so if you think there's something magical to the step mill or to driving to the gym and getting on the cycle ergometer or incline walking or something, you're going to be in

for a rude wakening because none of that shit matters. Just your step count can get you as lean as your dietary adherence and genetics are capable of getting you. Cardio is a way to burn calories. Any kind of physical activity is roughly equivalent for it. You just measure the amount of time that you're doing it. To me, the two big factors that stand out, maybe three, sustainability, enjoyment, and time cost competing with other

activities through the day. On these three, step tracker and step counting is like a huge deal. I don't want to oversell it, but it kind of wins on all counts. Why? If you have to get 11,000 calories every day is part of your plan. That's what my current amount, 11,000 calories. Good God. 11,000.

Yeah. That's right. Where's the KFC 11,000 steps a day. What ends up happening is can I get on the treadmill and do 11,000 steps? Sure. But also I can talk to Mr. Nick Shaw, CEO of RP and do a business meeting while I'm hands free on my phone and walk around my backyard.

I can take a walk with my wife. I can walk the dog. I can go to the grocery store. I can pace around. I can do every activity of daily living that actually accomplishes something else and it's always adding to my step count. Right. So the advantage of steps walking is that it is not constraining as many other

things that you can do as sitting on a, a salt bike and doing nothing but that. Correct. Yeah. And it can actually empower those things. Take two scenarios. One is a person is doing only pre-planned cardio. They're on the elliptical for 30 minutes a day to burn whatever number of calories and they don't track anything else.

They do the elliptical, their husband comes home late from work and he goes, Hey, um, I got to run to the store. Do you want to come? Wife's tired. You go, honey. It's okay. Husband's alone at the store. He sees a woman that's marginally more attractive.

You know, the rest, that's it. Divorce, post-nup. The elliptical caused my break. That's it. The alternative view is if you're doing step tracking, you can go to the store and not have to worry about how tired you're going to be from cardio. Because once people check box their cardio, the human body, when it's under caloric constraint for long is really, really finicky and cheap.

And it wants to make sure you don't spend anything else. So once you've done your cardio for the day, you just sit on the couch and you do this. Not ideal, but if you have a step tracker, everything counts. So if your kids are like, mommy, mommy, play with us. You're like, well, shit, I'll just go over my steps today. And tomorrow I can take a bigger break. Everything you do, the step tracker picks up.

Is that how you see your steps in the same ways you would see calories across a week? Yes, absolutely. Some days you step a bit more, some days a bit less, some days you eat a bit more, some days a bit less. So you're aggregating that across a week. Totally. That's the thing that matters in the end.

Now you don't want to get too crazy where you don't move at all and then you have a day of 40,000 steps, it's unsustainable. It's the same as the alternate day fasting thing in some ways. Yeah. Which some people love apparently, but if you catch me at 8 PM of the day I'm fasting, don't catch me.

What about the different impact that intensity of cardio has on the body? I've heard about the afterburn effect. Yeah. Well, surely you're not going to get that if you're just lollygagging in zone two, as you saunter down the road for 11,000 steps, plodding. You walk to a chair from your living room couch, you sit down, they're like afterburn. So great question.

The afterburn effect or EPOC as it's known, excess post exercise oxygen consumption is colloquially one of the most overrated things in exercise science. It's just not that big of a deal. It adds up a little over time, but the way you get crazy EPOC, as you do like repeat hill sprints or insanely highly damaging whole body lifting workouts, then you see a, you know, couple dozen, maybe a hundred or two extra calories burned over a 24 hour period, but over a hundred extra calories burned up is already a real big deal, very unlikely. And so the intensity of the exercise, as far as aggregate ability to burn fat and lose weight,

basically doesn't matter. What's much more of a concern is sustainability. If you think you have to run jog for cardio, cause it's intense and it's going to burn that fat in a super special way. And your knees start to hurt. You stop jogging. There goes your diet plan, but you probably aren't going to injure yourself walking or swimming or doing an elliptical. And if you like to do those things, even though they don't occur at 5,000

miles an hour, not dunking a basketball for reps or some kind of crazy high intensity shit, it's going to burn the same number of calories because the afterburn effect was so small. And if you're lifting weights, you get that anyway. It's not a thing. So, you know, you made kind of a great point earlier where the sort of diet versus activity, one of those is really much more responsible. How many calories your physical activity burns is so much grander scheme of a

thing than how much afterburn it causes. Then I just wouldn't really worry about the afterburn much. I would worry about like, is this kind of physical activity schedule something I can do today, tomorrow, next week, next month. If that's the case, that's your shit. And to that end, I would encourage some people who get bored of just walking to do a couple of different things.

You can do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, you can do Thai boxing, you can do regular boxing, you can do Zumba class at your gym. You can do swimming, you can do cycling, you can do running, you can do the elliptical. You can walk some days as long as you're getting the calories going some way, it can be as monotonous as you like. Some people, they do a podcast, they walk around the block 18 times, they love it.

They want nothing else. That's me. Other people, they need some different stuff. Different is great. What you don't want to do is do the same thing over and over that you hate, especially if it's high impact and high intensity. Like every time your feet hit the concrete,

your knees are like, I hate you. What the fuck are you doing to me? And you're like the concrete, your knees are like, I hate you. What the fuck are you doing to me? And you're like, wow, my knees are gone, but I'm leaner, not sustainable, not good. But if running twice a week is fine, as long as you swim and bike and maybe walk the other days and your total aggregate calories are the same, then you're

really in a winning formula. It's going to be slightly difficult for some people to work out. Okay. I did 10,000 steps. Dr. Mike said do 10,000 steps and do 10,000 steps, but I just did pickleball for an hour. What's that? Am I counting my steps in pickleball?

I ran presumably running 10,000 steps burns more calories than walking 10,000 steps. Do I count my steps there? How do you think about factoring in cardio output to compare it or comparatively to your 11,000 steps? Yeah. There's two ways to do it. I think are good. I'm sure there are others.

One is you go into the one of 5 trillion free online counters that adjust for all these things and you can just get the calories and adjust for almost everything. There are hilarious pictures of back in the seventies and eighties. They did a lot of measurement of calorie expenditure and real world activities. So you got this guy with a full on gas mask with tubes into an oxygen pack and carbon collection pack and he's golfing. Like how many calories do you burn golfing?

Holy shit, you golfing in space? Yeah. So they've done all that work so you can get all those formulas. Nobody, you don't need the formulas. Just type it in an online calculator. Just. I golfed for four hours.

How many calories did I burn? They'll tell you that's body weight, blah, blah, blah. You're good to go. Um, that gets annoying a little bit. So a better alternative probably is to give yourself, um, average daily step goal. And if you know, you're a person that also likes to do pickle ball. I don't know what the fuck that is.

What is it? I actually don't know what it is. It's like tennis for old people or paddle for poor people. Right. My, um, Wimbledon ranked tennis instructor tells me I don't need to worry about things like that. He only works for me. He stopped playing. He also, no, the massage guy does that. Chris, we run a professional organization here. I was going to say a bunch of jokes that we're

all going to get us canceled. In any case, let's say you're pretty physically active. You do some pick up this, you do some pick up that you walk more, you do this and that maybe set your goal at 8,000 steps every day. On average, you get 8,000 steps. I give an example with my wife. My wife trains multiple times a week in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu hardcore. She's an addict now. It's scary because she's going to kill me sooner or later. If I ever turn up dead, she's suspect.

Number one, I want this official and public. And some days she'll just do her 10,000 steps. Other days she'll do 8,000 steps, which is like maybe a minimum for her. And then she'll do jujitsu for an hour, live rolling with psychotic and sane people that burns way more calories than the, just the steps alone, but because she always hits 10,000 a week on average, any extra Jiu-Jitsu is extra. And she loses weight a little faster. If she's tired, she'll ease up on the Jiu-Jitsu and do more technique

stuff and not as much live rolling. So if you're a person that knows you're pretty physically active outside of walking, I'd still do walking and do a tracker and just peg it at 8k or 7k. That's my average. And I know I work on top of that. But if you are a person who does nothing else, yeah, peg your steps at 10 or 11k a day. And like, there's no pickleball anywhere because that's not a real sport. I swear to God, I made that up. I'm going to guess as well that having a more consistent number of steps that you take every single day means that you don't need to reset that habit.

How many did I do? I did that thing to, you know, carry the three, sort of cross this over. I certainly found that with, um, any diets that were inconsistent, any training plans that were inconsistent, even any productivity days, like sometimes on a Monday coming back after a weekend feels really great because I've taken a little bit of time. Then sometimes I'm like, uh, I got to restart the fucking beast a little bit after I had a couple of days where I was chilling out.

So I think maintaining consistency in the things that don't fatigue you or ideally rejuvenate you at least a little bit, that seems to make sense to me. It makes a hundred percent sense. Consistency is an enormous superpower in a fat loss diet because consistency means honoring the plan you chose. And when you lose weight for long enough and get lean enough, every fiber of your being starts to tell you, do anything but this, train less, eat more, reconsider.

Maybe you can stop your diet today. You can pick it up next week. No big deal. If the consistency is there and you do more or less similar things every day, every week, just do the thing and the results will happen. What about the role of resistance training during a fat loss protocol? Super resistance training doesn't really help you lose weight. Uh, it does in the sense that it burns calories, but it doesn't burn a crazy amount of calories. It's a good amount, but nothing too insane.

Resistance training builds and preserves your muscle tissue. So if I have someone lose 15 pounds over the course of 12 weeks, reasonable for a larger sized person, they don't resistance train at all. Many of the Ozempic studies showed something like this. They'll lose like, and you know, half of that will be muscle. Maybe five pounds will muscle 10 pounds will be fat. If you're lucky, you're healthier. You look better.

Your blood work is better. You feel better. It's not amazing. If you resistance train, and you've been resistance training consistently already, almost all of that weight loss will be fat, maybe like 13 pounds of it, and only two pounds of lost muscle. And because you keep resistance training after you regain that two pounds back, like three weeks later, and then so measured at three weeks after you finished that 12 week diet, you lost, well, 13 ish pounds of fat and no muscle. Visually, health-wise, feeling-wise, night and day.

Here's the real kicker. If it's your first time losing fat and you don't train with weights, starting to train with weights while you start to kind of clean up your diet and lose a little fat, you can gain pounds of muscle while losing pounds of fat. I thought it was impossible to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time. Yeah. A lot of people, uh, misinterpret more difficult than average to mean impossible. It's like saying flight is impossible.

And then a helicopter goes by like bullshit. So a really good example of this recently in the media was a UFC president, Dana White. Dana White had an unreal transformation as health markers just through the roof. And I think he lost something like a total of maybe 35 pounds on the scale. But because he started taking weight training very seriously during that time, he must have gained anywhere from 5 to 15 pounds of muscle. I mean 15 is a bit extreme, but I'm willing to go 5 to 10 for sure. Just guessing.

And that means he actually lost maybe 45 pounds of fat while gaining muscle. So he didn't go from with all total respect looking like, Jesus Dana going to be okay. I'm not really, geez, Dana's really enjoying his wealth kind of look. Yeah. It was an opulent weight. My man, that Caesar type of shit.

Other people feed me. The biggest concern is gout. Exactly. Oh, again. So is this something wine can cure? He went, he could have gone from that with no resistance training to like, Oh, Dana White lost weight. And that's nice to hear.

But he went from the fat to like, yo, what the fuck Dana is Superman. When the hell is he getting on the octagon? You feel me? That's a big deal. It's a big deal at deep health markers. It's a big deal at deep health markers. It's a big deal at how you feel. Some people feel weaker after a diet because they are, they lost a bunch of muscle. You gain muscle or maintain it through a diet.

You feel stronger after a diet and the look. And since I'm on the modern wisdom podcast, I can say this and it's fit for purpose. How attractive you are to yourself. Fuck everybody else matters. And if you lose exclusively or mostly fat, shit, even gained some muscle during that time, you transform your attractiveness in most cases up a bunch of notches. It's a positive feedback cycle for yourself as well, as opposed to going from God, I was overweight to, well, I'm not overweight anymore, but I'm not. It looks sick.

Yeah. Yeah. And look, most people prefer bodies that are smaller and slimmer. That's just a statistical fact, but even more people prefer fit bodies for themselves and definitely for other people. So if you resistance train when you're losing weight, and yes, this is a message to almost all modern women that are in their forties and fifties, get in the weight room, lift weights hard, get good personal trainer, download

the RP hypertrophy app, Lincoln bio. What was I, did I just say something? Well, the RP hypertrophy app, Lincoln bio. What was I, did I just say something? And while you clean up your diet, while you lose fat, what you can do is see a completely transformative effect and no, you will not turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger by accident overnight. I mean, I used to be biologically female 120 pounds body weight yesterday. And it took one day for me to do this.

Dude, that's the, my favorite Psyop is the one that women give to themselves, which is if I lift weights, I will become too jacked. Meanwhile, those of us that have desperately been lifting weights for approaching two decades now in the hopes that one day I might look remotely like I do. Someone will be able to tell I work out at the store.

I'm like the chance that you're going to wake up one day and become Arnie, given how hard me and all of my friends have worked at doing that and you still not achieved it is zero. It's you don't need to worry. It's real close to zero. Uh, it's one of these things where they're doing it at like two orders of magnitude, less serum testosterone as well.

All women are hypo gonadal. If you're a female and you show up the doc and you're like, Hey, my testicles don't produce testosterone, he's going to do blood work. He's like, Oh my God, you're right. You have almost no testosterone. You're not the candidate for rabid muscle growth. What's going to happen is you're going to diet

down and you're going to look less like you're sick at the end and more like you look healthy and vital and like a little young bebop or like, you know, when younger women almost don't walk, they kind of just bounce around that like shit they have. You can have that it's called muscle mass. It changes the shape of your body. It does this to your ass. It makes your legs look awesome.

It does everything wonderful and it does not turn you into Arnold Schwarzenegger overnight. It's a huge deal. Are there any specifics when it comes to training during a fat loss phase resistance wise? We did a great breakdown that everyone can go and watch on how to train for muscle growth. Are there any adjustments when you're in a deficit?

For most people, no. If you are at the very end of an insane fat loss phase, if you're a competition bodybuilder, you might want to try to reduce the amount of load you're lifting by a little and increase the repetitions just because it's the same hypertrophic drive on average, but, uh, you're marginally reducing the risk of injury by a tiny little bit. It's also through some bio biochemical mechanisms, easier to maintain your muscular endurance and improve it as you're dieting down than it is to maintain or increase your strength.

And so that is a very exotic concern for almost everyone is just kind of the same resistance training as we talked about on our earlier video all the time. Should people be trying to increase the weight and the reps that they're doing as they go through fat loss? Should they have it in the back of their mind? I might get a bit tired, you know, I'm four weeks in, I'm eight weeks in, I'm 12 weeks in. What about dealing with the mental pain of maybe not being the progress of strength, not going in quite the direction. Great question.

The hypertrophy app does that for you. Mike seriously shot the hell up about your stupid app. You should anticipate that the rate of progression is going to decline. Maybe you've been really gunning it for a while and adding five pounds to the bar and everything every week. And when you're not adding weight, you might be able to add two reps to the exercise, especially at the tail end of a fat loss phase, trying to aim for adding two and a half pounds to the bar every week and maybe adding a rep every week.

Or if you're pretty advanced and things really slow down every other week, go up by two and a half pounds or a rep and every other week. Just maintain. And so instead of trying to gain at a fast rate, you're trying to either gain at a very slow rate and in the end you win some, you lose some, and you end up maintaining, but you still got to try to push it.

What you don't want to do is start trying less hard to really take it to the teeth when you're in a fat loss phase, because the total catabolic muscle destroying muscle burning stimulus as high as fuck. Now you've got to fight against it by keeping your training volume up. Of course, within the ability to recover, which is going to decline, you still have to test your limits a little bit. Cause if you train easy and your diet really hard

for fat loss, you might lose some muscle still. If you train as hard as you're capable of, you might lose no muscle and maybe gain a little. If you train or try to train as hard as you were when you were massing, you'll just overreach and have to deal with it every third week. And that might not be a fun experience. Abs, how do people get abs?

I mean, something you download at the Google Play Store. Oh, abs. I wouldn't know anything about that. No personal experience. Next question. Abs are one of those 80-20 things, but in this case, it's like 95-5. Every single human has abdominal muscles, except for people that are involved in tragic accidents or something like that.

And almost always and almost ever, the reason you can't see yours is because your layer of fat on top of them is too much. And there's this term from bodybuilding that's really great. It's abs are made in the kitchen, not the weight room and not on the cardio machine and it's fucking true. If you just impose a caloric deficit through moderate activity, you're And there's this term from bodybuilding. That's really great. It's abs are made in the kitchen, not the weight room and not on the cardio machine and it's fucking true. If you just impose a caloric deficit through moderate activity, good resistance training, you can train your abs or you can not.

It doesn't really matter. And your body fat windows down to a small amount you're going to have whatever kind of abs you have shaped down there. Many people have six packs. Some even have eight packs. I have like a two and a half pack or some shit like that. No God, but it's almost all that calorie deficit. Just straight up getting lean. I would love to dispel a mega myth.

People who have a high level of body fat, who want to find out how to do some exercise or eat some food that's going to give them abs. Ain't them for you. It doesn't exist. It's just the layer of fat that's keeping us from seeing your abs. Now, if you do get lean enough and find that instead of those like, you know, like hunk romance novel abs where the woman's like grading her face on the guy's abs and he has like a unicorn or whatever, I don't read too many romance novels. You've been featured on a few covers, haven't you? Yeah.

Against your will. You're still in a copyright dispute. Nasty legal paddle. You may find that instead of having those ravioli abs, you have just kind of like semblance of abs, but they're real flat. The cool thing about that is you have a really small waist, which is sweet, aesthetically, universally considered attractive near universally. There's a community of gay folks that are in the hairy bear culture that if you

have a gut with abs, you're the fun. Now we're talking about your market. Yes. Yes. Bow to your leader folks. When I grow my hair out, I can't go around the gay club cause I just get pulled in. Yep. In any case, um, it's cool. folks, when I grow my hair out, I can't go around the gay club cause I just get pulled in.

Yep. In any case, um, it's cool. It's a cool look to have just kind of like no crazy, crazy abs, but some people are like, damn it. I wanted abs abs for those folks. Training abs works exactly the same way as any other hypertrophy training.

We covered that in the last video, two to four times a week training, multiple sets, close to failure, full range of motion, big stretch, increasing loads and reps over time. The same, the planks, the Superman's all that bullshit, the twists. It does stuff, but if you want big abs, you just go about it. Like you would get big calves, big forearms, big shoulders, big anything, consistent resistance training.

That's the way to get it. And then don't just train abs during your fat loss plan. If in a year from now, you want thick abs, start training them now. The last 12 weeks of that year, you're going to diet away the fat. Then your abs will be eaten good.

They'll get real thick and then they're going to reveal themselves as meaty. But if you just train abs during the fat loss phase, they'll grow a little bit cause they're new to the shit, but it's not going to be super impressive. Does training abs make them more visible at higher body fat percentages? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. That seems good.

That seems like a reason to train them. If you're interested in being at a high body fat percentage. A higher body fat percentage. I'm kidding. I'm being a dick. Totally. But it also gives you like more of a pooch kind of look, which you may or may not be into.

It's a concern for folks that are, no offense meant on kind of the smaller side of things. For them, maybe that's a cool thing. For folks that train with weights at your level, below your level, quite a bit through your level and above the compound exercises and kind of stuff makes your abs so goddamn big to begin with. It's like a drop in the puddle for extra app training. Like right now I have ravioli abs. I have abs right now if I'm relaxed and I have Ravioli abs. I have abs right now.

If I'm relaxed and I have like, I just had genetically have like a gut. My gut has fucking abs. I have a six pack when I'm relaxed now with a veins in it. And so people are like, what do you do for abs? I'm like, I don't train abs. They're like, no, absolutely not.

When I transition away from bodybuilding in a few years to try and become really, really good at jujitsu, we're good for my purposes, not anyone else's. I suck in general. I'm going to start training abs, not for the purpose of having abs, but for the purpose of developing a much stronger anterior chain, the ability to do this because of jujitsu, that's a big deal. Yeah. Then I'm going to be training abs, but for now abs are just a waste of time for

me because they're absolutely big enough for contest bodybuilding, which is my current pursuit. And I would just be wasting literal time and recovery energy on training abs. I suppose just trying to sort of speak to the lay person. You are, you've got what four shows this year, four or five shows. The plan is to do about four shows. Okay. So you have four individual days this year with which you're going to be very, very lean and your abs will be displayed unbelievably well, given the low level of body fat.

I'm going to guess that most people like the idea. I know that for most of my twenties, what I wanted was to have abs. I didn't care about being lean. I don't hold that much weight in my face. I look sort of relatively lean in my arms in any case. So it didn't really matter. So I wanted abs. So if training abs allows me to have abs, visible abs at a slightly higher body fat percentage, I achieve my leanness goal, which was visible

abs without having to diet myself down quite so hard. Brilliant. I'm going to say right now, first of all, that works and I encourage people to do it. Second of all, they should do it conventional resistance training approaches, uh, exercises that work full range of motion, lengthened exercises. For example, one of the best AB exercises and there's tons of them is the AB wheel, the rollout fucking brutal.

And it really tenses your abs at long lengths, which grows them like crazy. Isometric work for the abs generally isn't that great. So I would say if you want that train abs, train them two to four times a week, and essentially train them right. Don't train them as a special group. Cause people say about like, how do we get my biceps bigger? And I was like, how do I get my abs bigger? Like same shit motherfucker.

But lastly, what I would say is the effect on how visible your abs are versus your body fat is very small. So you're not going to see your abs at 22% body fat and give a shit how big they are. Realistically, they just don't get that big. One, two, maybe 3% body fat difference. Could there be a visual difference there? Yeah, potentially, but you need years of training

your abs to get to that kind of look. Understood. To the first time that I've trained as consistently as I have over the last, so far this year, like five months, um, and not done any direct ab work and also not to be honest, been tracking calories all that much, although I've been on like a hardcore fucking FODMAP SIBO thing. So that's kind of just been built in. Auto diet.

Yeah, precisely. Just boring diet. Uh, but for the, I always presumed that, um, lower ab vascularity, like waistband vascularity was something that came about due to the dieting that I was doing and the ab work that I was doing. It's like, I'm adamant that that's the case right now. I've got a shit ton of lower ab vascularity and I'm like, I'm

not dieting that hard. My weight's dropped a little bit, but it's not dropped that much. Where the fuck is this coming from? And I was like, Oh, I've been training legs, like very aggressively with quite a amount, quite a long, uh, eccentric pause on everything for five months. Uh, and I think that that kind of shows at least as an N of one, sure, what you were saying. You're bearing down deep, the inter abdominal pressure.

That's a lot of ab work right there. And it adds up any one squat or set of squats is not that much ab work. It's an isometric. It's like a Superman hold. It's kind of a fucking waste of time. But if you do that bracing for almost every exercise, five times that you go to the gym, you're training abs for like five hours every week. And adds up.

Are there any supplements that offer an edge for fat loss? The modern anorectics like Ozempic and Trisepatide, absolutely. And you know, for some people, various stimulants, caffeine, a couple of other ones, yohimbine, et cetera, they have a marginal effect on reducing appetite, improving mental clarity and focus. If they don't interfere with your sleep, you can take them. The problem with stimulants is that you develop a tolerance to them quite quickly when you're ending the diet, which I'd love to talk about as far as how to transition out, because that's super important when you're ending

a diet and you have to manage your stimulant use again, and you maybe come off of them, you get radical rebound hunger and just, you know, stimulants are just. Oh, because it's suppressing your appetite artificially. And so you don't want five monsters every day anymore. You're like, pull out the monsters and you're like, dude, brownies instead. It's tough.

Caffeine is like, you know, you have like a circuit board with a little nail and you're like giant hammer. That's like, Oh, hit all the other stuff. So as far as real supplements that just straight up work for fat loss, they kind of don't exist. If you have the yohimbines and the other things, they can kind of add a little bit to

the thing. It's yohimbine. It's like a, it's a, it's like a stimulant derivative sort of thing. And it has some cool health effects. It burns a little bit of body fat, but this is something that you shouldn't write home about. It's this a, it's like a stimulant derivative sort of thing. And it has some cool health effects. It burns a little bit of body fat, but this is something that you shouldn't write home about. It's this teeny little thing.

It's a bodybuilder take it. They'll take a fedra, they'll take other stuff and it all works. It just works a bit and has quite a few side effects and the stuff that doesn't have a ton of side effects generally just doesn't tend to work that much. Big Pharma won this one. The ultimate supplement quote unquote to a fat loss diet are the modern, what they're called really is anorectics.

I like to take people away from terming them GLP agonists or GLP ones because it's already not true for trisepratide and it's GLP one plus GIP and for ratatratide is leukogon as well. And so anorectic is the general term for drugs that make you less hungry. And that's how they were. Anorectic.

Correct. And so modern anorectics, cause there used to be some back in the day that were also stimulant based like. Fenfen. Fenfen. Um, subuterine. That fucked up.

They fucked up a lot of people. Subutramine was quite healthy, but the regulatory agencies didn't think it was quite as safe as they wanted to probably was, but they got wigged out about it. It's also, it's a stimulant derivative. So it's got some side effects, dry mouth, et cetera.

Uh, the trade name for the drug was Meridia. It was a cool drug, not approved for use in the United States. I don't believe it's approved for use in Europe. Of course you Cavalier Europeans like, we'll take anything, but, um, the modern day interact, currently the GLP and et cetera, a group of drugs, they're just fucking good. Now, do they have side effects?

Yes. Can they be managed with, with how you do your diet? Almost, almost completely. Are they not for some people? Totally. Do they have really tiny downside risks in some cases? Uh, yeah, they do. Every drug has that.

But are they just, as a general rule, insanely effective and make dieting 50 trillion times easier? Yeah. So do fat burners not work? Fat burners work, but they burn these little bunch of fat and they just make you super anxious and awake at night. Most fat burners are stimulant based, non-stimulant fat burners are kind of a joke at the current time.

And so, yeah, it's just like how much caffeine can you cram in an energy drink is most of the question with fat burners. A pill you can take that doesn't wig you out, that burns fat in enough of a margin that you can tell in a realistic diet is just not around. Okay. Given this relatively easy to follow format that you've explained about how much food you're putting in your face, but where you should portion this prioritizing protein, looking at how much exercise that you're doing, tracking

steps, trying to keep it consistent. Why do so many people fail at diets? Yeah, it's a good question. Geez. I think as we've seen with the anorectic drug trials, um, some aglutide, trisepatide, ritachretide, other drugs. When you take away, or better put, reduce substantially hunger drive, almost everyone loses a bunch of weight.

It's also precisely the reason that we've seen obesity trend up is because there's tons of super palatable, super tasty food, uh, over historical time. If you reverse that, like people in the 1950s probably didn't have any more average willpower than people today. We like to romanticize and think they did probably didn't. And so most people fail diets because evolution designed most of us to fail diets. It's a similar question to if you take a bunch of 22 year old dudes and you put

them into a controlled facility, I don't want to say prison, but a scientific research facility and you tell them no wanking. That's what you guys call it in the UK. And you stretch it out for 60 days. You're going to ask a real weird question. How come everyone started wanking after a while they failed because evolution designed you that at some level of sex drive is just going to turn you fucking wild and you're going to do the thing. Same idea for diets.

I don't think there's a necessary extra level of causal inference. We have to make, I think most of the reason people screw up on diets is because food tastes really goddamn good and they get fucking hungry and they're like, fuck this. Now you can architect your preparation for a diet to try to minimize that. Being around people in your family and friends group that are at least neutral and hopefully supportive of your diet versus actively trying to be like, come on, have a french fry. That's terrible.

Getting rid of the junk food in your home and eat out less or have places you eat out where you know exactly what to order and it works part of your diet. A big one is not having Napoleonic goals. If I say to myself in one month, I'm going to lose 30 pounds of fat. I'm almost certainly going to fail. And it wasn't any crazy explanation on the fact that like, I should have made it 15 pounds and made the goal three months. The magnitude of depravity and hunger per any day is now like six times less.

And then I can every day is sustainable. I'm not trying to crash and burn. So a ton of people crash and burn. Another reason, and it all threads into eventually they just eat junk food and stop so it's all the core reasons still the tasty food Another reason is a lot of people Simply a lot of people actually do well with diets the vast majority of people will lose weight on diets The vast majority of those people will regain it back. Why? Because most people don't have a habitual reference intake pattern, a diet they do that allows them to stay healthy and lean.

And it isn't radically different from what they do normally. For example, a lot of the folks that have used RP, RP diet coach app, it is you eat three to six meals a day and it portions it out into proteins and healthy carbs and healthy fats. People will eat it and be like, this is the diet I'm losing to lose fat. Like I'm just going to do it. I don't give a shit how hard it is. But after they're done with it, and this happens even more in our private

coaching, they're like, wait, if I just add a bit of junk food to this every now and again, this is a maintenance plan. I know how to eat now. I know how to put together meals of protein and carbs and, and healthy fats. I know what I'm doing at the grocery store. I can even eat out and I know how to make core good meals. There are a lot of people who fail diets. Their idea of a diet is cabbage soup and protein shakes.

And then when the diet ends, they go back to what, What are their habits? The same shit they used to do. What gets you the same results you used to have? Same shit you used to do. They go back into the world. They start doing Taco Bell again. They blow up, do the diet, diet works. Stop the diet, diet reverts. If you can from the diet, take some healthy habits that aren't just

psychotic things you only do on a diet, knowing how to build a meal of a core of protein, healthy protein, veggies, knowing how to time it, getting into the habit of eating every four or six hours. Knowing how to shop at the store, knowing what to order at a restaurant, practicing saying, you know what, I don't want 18 trillion pounds of French fries. If you do that on a diet, all you need to do is layer in a bit of bullshit and junk food every now and again. And now that's your maintenance.

You constricted a little bit. If you're gaining weight again, you loosen it up if you lose weight again, and then you can for years indefinitely maintain that new healthy lean you. But many people who do diets, they never build the habits to begin with, which is one of the reasons why fad dieting is so terrible. This new weird stuff you're never going to sustain. Listen, here's the thing, keto, carnivore, great ways to diet. And for many people like Joe Rogan, a lifestyle, awesome. But for many people, they're like,

I'm doing keto to lose weight. Okay, so you just never going to eat a lot of breads any, because if you told Joe Rogan, for example, like, hey man, so you're really good with just like having an occasional bread and pasta every few months when you're on business trips with people, and otherwise you just like stick to your elk or whatever. He's like, yep, I love it.

Frank down the street, he's going to be like, well, no, I do the keto diet. Then I lose weight. What are you doing after that Frank elk all the time? He's like, fuck that. I'm going to Olive Garden. Guess who's going to come back then old fat Frank again. It's the lack of those core abilities to have that habit of good eating and the fad diets do not help that at all.

If appetite and hunger are primarily to blame, is there anything that you can do to mitigate or help reduce hunger? Yes, anorectic drugs. Apart from those? There's a bunch of stuff. Eating a diet higher in protein tends to work well, not going a very long time without food until you're psychotically hungry, you show up to whole foods to buy your groceries for that day or a few days and you're

like, you eat two hours ago, you'll buy all the stuff you need to. You go to whole foods after six hours, not eating. You're going right to the vegan junk food section and put whatever the fuck in your car. So a meal schedule is a really good thing. Having a diet high in fibrous vegetables and really filling foods, tons of veggies, tons of fruits, reducing the overall palatability.

I don't mean eating total shit like space gruel. Then you go to space jail to give you the gruel and the slug always wants more, but you're like, fuck, take mine. This is awful. Hopefully he's not your roommate, you know, but you're jail celly. Right. And so sometimes just not trying to make your food taste the best

it's ever going to taste. Cause some people do this and this is really common. The cocaine on a diet. I know my macros, I know my calories. I'm going to do it. I'm going to take these minimal macros. I have in this meal. I'm going to try to make it taste as good as possible.

I can't use mayo, but I'm going to sprinkle all this fucking shit on it. That meal just leaves you really hungry afterwards. You look forward to eating it so much, it screws up your day entirely. So it's kind of counterintuitive. Very counter, Chris, it's not kind of counterintuitive. It's completely cut, completely counterintuitive. Intuition is literally designed for your ancestral

evolutionary environment. We're like tasty shit is a good thing to eat because you're going to die. Nothing in this world that the ancestral peoples from whom we evolved had. Ever fucks with a double cheeseburger from McDonald's paradise. It doesn't taste like anything they've ever seen because it's engineered to be the best tasting thing anyone's ever tried. It's an unstoppable thing.

Real. You ever see those like survival wilderness shows where they kill an animal and they like throw it on the grill and like, yep, tastes pretty good. No, it doesn't. You don't have salt on it. Are you out of your mind? You can only get grilled meat for so long until it's like, oh, is there anything else?

So ultra super tasty food back away from it a little bit. Another one is make sure you're nice and hydrated. Have a little bit of fluid before you start a meal and it fills up your stomach a bit. It's a huge hack. It can help some people a little bit. Another one is if you tell yourself, look, I'm at a party and I'm going to be eating normal people, food, try to fill up on proteins and veggies first.

And then maybe have a cookie or two. But if you go fucking right for the cookies and you know, I mean, yeah, sure. Well, if it depends on what game you're playing, if you're, if you're gold coins or calories shit, you just broke all the level records. Right. So, uh, stuff like that, these kinds of pieces of advice, they're not revolutionary, but when you're hungry and you're dieting, all of them can help to a considerable degree.

I like the sort of strategic tactical stuff, because those are the things I think that people keep in the back of strategic tactical stuff, because those are the things I think that people keep in the back of their mind. And also their small behaviors that you anchor your sense of, your new sense of identity to, don't forget. I'm going to have the, I must drink my 300 milliliters of water before I sit down to

have this meal. Why am I doing this? It's the same reason I have a book of poems, Tim Burton's, The Melancholy death of Oyster boy, and it sits on the desk next to where I record my podcast. Okay. And just by having that, that was given to me by my speech coach. And I read a couple of poems before I start the episode because it's whimsical

and it's good for vocal diction and precision and stuff like that. But the main reason is that that is a physical representation of I care about precision in speech and by having it there, every time that I go into the room, I go, must remember to be precise when I speak. Yes. When you're at a business dinner and everyone's ordering fucking lobster bisque dipped in French fries or some shit, you're like, Hey, like, what does your fillet look like?

Can I get some grilled veggies to the table? Because you give a shit and you have that plan. And eventually you combine giving a shit with having a plan for at least a few weeks, you have habits. You do that. Another few weeks, you have the beginning of not identity with a capital I, but a lowercase I, I'm a person who gives a shit about my health. I care about what goes into my body.

And here's the thing. One of the funny pieces of feedback I get every now and again from like business people and stuff is like, well, you know, I do a lot of client dinners and I'm like, yes, like, well, you know, like I'm drinking alcohol. I'm eating all this stuff. I'm like, if you tell the CEO of Nvidia,

who's you're sitting across from a business dinner, he's like, are you going to have any of the crazy fries or whatever? You're like, actually I'm trying to clean up my weight and stuff like that. I'm just going to order a steak and have some veggies. There's no way Jensen Wong is going to be like,

pathetic guys, clean this up. We're not doing a deal with this guy. Unreal. Keep, take your data center and shove it. And he walks off. He's going to be like, amazing. Good for you. You don't mind.

The sort of man that I want to be in business with. It like, at the very least it's neutral. If it's a negative, you don't want to be in business with that person. Yeah, that's not the sort of person you want to deal with. But it's usually like, like a cool positive. Now, usually I like to say like, but please

order anything you want. Temptation is not a factor by all, cause most people be like, Oh God, I was going to get the pizza, but I don't want to make you, and they'll do that cause they're super nice. His diet is not my diet somehow. Exactly. They start feeling guilty.

You don't want that kind of energy. So be like, Hey, like you guys order whatever you want. I'm just going to do me. His diet is not my diet. Exactly. They start feeling guilty. You don't want that kind of energy. So be like, Hey, look, you guys order whatever you want. I'm just going to do me. I promise I'm having fun. And you say it in a way that hopefully can look like you're having fun. That's great. Is there anything else that we haven't spoken about from a strategic hack tactical style perspective where you think, you know, if I actually

rely on that quite a lot, I like that idea of if you're having dinner with somebody else and say, I'm, uh, on a diet at the moment, working quite hard at this, I'm going to get myself some, some meat and veggies, but you're free to get whatever you'd like. I'm temptation may show on my face, but don't worry. You're not going to, you're not going to break me type thing. Like that's a charming way to go about delivering a diet. The water beforehand I think is great. Uh, actually dialing back the tastiness of your meals and continuing to push that.

Is there anything else from the toolkit that we haven't touched on? There's tons of other stuff, but one thing that I would bring attention to that's really helpful and this happens with time is have an arsenal of ideas about what to eat. You don't want to go to the grocery store balls deep into a diet or a business dinner balls deep into a diet and look at either the groceries in front of you, the aisles and aisles, or the menu

as like a child looks at something for the first time, because you're just going to end up ordering chicken nuggets or just buying pounds of cheese sauce and drinking it in the back crying. My last Tuesday, my coach Jared knows about this. It was a rough conversation. You want to have go-tos. When I go to the store, I know where the veggies are, I know where the lean meats are, I know where the grains are, I know what I'm buying. My wife and I, when we go to the store, we go with a shopping list.

Mostly because we're the kind of anal people that don't do anything without a list, but also on a hardcore diet we know are getting. I guess online shopping for this would be the ultimate hack. Amazon just sends you all the shit you need and not the shit that you don't. The grocery store stuff, because man, this shit looks so good. Our Kroger in our city in which we live has precisely three full separate American mega size aisles just of chips. Menno Henselmans was visiting me cause we're IRL friends and I was like, you gotta see this. He's like, man, he sees it.

He's like, holy shit. So like, if I go there without a plan and I'm starving, it's game over. You go to a restaurant, it's over. One of our, um, RP coaches, Dr. Jen case, she has a whole list of how to read restaurant foods. And if it's like breaded glazed blah, blah, she's like, stay away from this.

Stay, you know, broiled, baked, et cetera. If you go to a restaurant, you can even go so far as to look at their menu before. And I'd be like, what would, what would I choose if you go to Japanese food, sashimi is good. Teriyaki is good. Maybe the ponzu mayo super roll isn't the best. If you show up in a normal state of you're just living your best life to a restaurant, it's a beautiful life thing to just look at a menu and being like,

what do we have? You're on a mission when you're on a diet. Don't forget that you show up, you're looking for specific things. And that's a big tip because if you show up and go, well, I wonder what I should eat, uh, man, you might order some good stuff. You might not. Yeah. I've been surprised by how many restaurants will let you kind of just go off piste from it's, I don't actually see this on here, but is it possible to get that without the other thing on that?

And can we sub such and such for such and such? There are two things to say about that. One is oftentimes the better the restaurant, the more likely they are to accommodate. And some people be like, well, I'm going to Michelin star place. Those people will do whatever the fuck you tell them. They'd be like, oh yeah, that guy like owns Nvidia. Don't, don't modify the caviar. Like give him whatever the hell he wants.

The other thing is real chefs look at contest bodybuilding food or diet food and they laugh at how easy it is to make this. You've just made his job half as hard. He's not like, he's not interested in making that super Alfredo And they laugh at how easy it is to make. This is not. You've just made his job half as hard. He's not like, he's not interested in making that super Alfredo carbonara for the 50th time that day. Sure.

He likes it. We're like, Hey, like no sauce, just noodles, some grilled chicken. He's like, did I get this right? You're like, uh huh. He's like, done. No problem. So oftentimes you're not inconveniencing people.

Another thing is choosing restaurants to go to that are conducive to selection, subway, So oftentimes you're not inconveniencing people. Another thing is choosing restaurants to go to that are conducive to selection, subway, burrito places like Chipotle. You can make a bowl or a sandwich with mostly just meats and veggies and a little bit of rice and beans and you're golden. They ask you, do you want the cheese sauce? You don't have to say yes versus if you go to

like McDonald's, yeah, there's a grilled chicken sandwich, but like, there's just not a lot of mix and match and make your own good stuff. So even the places you go out to eat, another one is like a lot of people in California have those like, that's a call like fast casual Asian dining, like broiler, uh, with flame broiler Panda express. A lot of those have like just grilled meats and rice and veggies. Yeah. They got other tastier shit, but if you know they have that, you

know what you want, you got a plan, you show up, you get it done, you eat it in the corner, you cry yourself back to your car and then you're mean. What about people who have a sweet tooth? They're deep into a diet and they, they used to finishing off a meal with something that's a, a little bit of a treat. Uh, what would you say to those people? What are some of the hacks that people who have a sweet tooth can use to keep

satiated during a fat loss? Yes. One of your recent guests, Menno Henselman's just shared an excellent study. Artificial sweetened beverages beat water in a weight loss trial. So that means if you have a diet sprite or five sweet tooth problem solved, all of your food comes from irregular food. You have a couple of sprites with the meal or after you're golden mission accomplished. So artificial sweeteners are as they're technically called non-nutritive sweeteners.

Cause some of them are natural, like Stevia, Stevia, Stevie, just like a guy named Steve at the office, you kind of want to natural, like Stevia, Stevia, Stevia, just like a guy named Steve at the office. You kind of want to know, but not know, no. You know? Um, and there's monk fruit and other stuff that's totally fine. Very low calorie or no calorie. So non-nutrient sweeteners, those are totally

great. They're safe. They're effective. They're awesome. No, an aggregate, they don't fuck up your gut microbiome. The people who don't like artificial sweeteners at this point is just the

argument from nature fallacy or AKA the naturalistic fallacy, just writ large. Like you are an example, there's a picture of your face in the dictionary by that shit at this point, just a dumb deal. So it's totally fine to have those in very high amounts. The testing limits are just absurd. Like you can feed rats half their body weight and aspartame and they're like, I still got it, baby. So they talk though.

That's kind of weird. Why is there anything else? Yes. Yes. Uh, there are many ways to make tasty things that are sweet, that are insanely high in calories. You can plan your diet. One of them is fresh fruit.

I mean, fresh fruit, peaches, apples, pears, berries. You can have a bunch of them and realize like, Oh my God, I actually need double this to get my carbs for the day or just a handful of berries after meal. If you put it on the food scale, it takes care of the sweet tooth and it's awesome. Now look, I'm all about like giving people real talk science shit, trying to motivate a little bit, but I'm not ever going to bullshit anyone or at least try are the fucking

handful of berries going to taste like fud, brownie? Fuck. No, they're not, man. Nothing beats real ice cream. I will say though, two companies come to mind. Enlightened ice cream and halo top. Enlightened was actually started by a friend of Mr. Nick Shaw and I's he's great. Uh, uh, halo top. I know no human at that place, but I eat halo top ice cream all the damn time

because it's like a third of the typical calories of a Caben and Jerry's pint. And when you're deep into a fat loss time and that shit tastes good and it used to taste not so great, they're getting real good at the shit. Have you tried legendary foods? Have you tried that? Um, they do sort of protein pastries, cinnamon rolls. Their pastries are great.

And it's one of those like, here's my big thing. If you're expecting diet foods to taste like real foods, stop, they're not gonna. But if you expect them to taste like some kind of chemical artificial, the aliens in the simulation are like, this is real food. And you're like, bullshit, I can taste the difference. If you expect it to taste like that, it's actually quite good nowadays. And here's another thing. If it tastes too icky, you don't really have a sweet tooth motherfucker. Just skip it and eat your normal food.

If you're hungry enough, that shit will taste amazing. Give that a try. Yeah. I think anything that's got 20 grams of protein in and resembles a cinnamon roll and tastes pretty nice and you can put it in the microwave for 15 seconds. It's a game changer. I've been really, really impressed with what they've done. That's the absolute wizardry of some kind that they've done to make 20 grams

of protein and four net grams of carbs. Go fuck yourself. I don't, I don't know what's in it. And I don't want to know. I know it's going in my mouth. Yes. Like everything. Most things, male things, huh?

I have a wife. Diet transitions and diet breaks. Can we cover that? Yes. Or am I skipping ahead? No, no, no, let's go. Dieting is dope. Constricting your caloric intake to generate a deficit is the critical way in which you transform your body.

But as I said earlier, the vast fraction of people that do diets, regain the weight because there's no diet afterwards. After you're done dieting, you have to prepare for the action of people that do diets regain the weight. Cause there's no diet afterwards. After you're done dieting, you have to prepare for the fact that as soon as the diet is over, the next day, your body is still screaming at you that you're starving to death. It's not like finishing a marathon and you get your gold medal and you're like, we're done. And the next day you just go to work. Your body has a memory and it hates you.

That. Like an abused child. That's right. He'll remember even when he's older. Yep. So what you have to do is understand that the diet doesn't end when the diet ends. The diet ends when you have finished the weight loss phase and slowly reintegrated back into

maintenance. A few weeks later, maybe a few months later, if the diet was hardcore enough, you'll feel normal again. So what does that mean practically? After your diet is over, you already have a rough idea of what your maintenance intake is, go back up that next week to your maintenance intake, but do it exclusively in the same kinds of foods that you had on the diet. You're eating brown rice and broccoli and chicken. That's an example. You were eating brown rice and broccoli and chicken.

That's an example meal you were eating. The day after the diet is not brownies with honey glaze on top. It's more chicken and rice and broccoli or whatever. You're going to gain a little bit of body water. Don't freak out. It will come back down in a few days. Stay on that same diet.

Can you have a cheat meal or two? Sure. Some people think it's great. Some people, it just, their eyes get really big and they just want to keep cheating. So I would say save your cheat meal, your pizza with friends for two to three weeks after. So what you have is you finish the diet and then for two to three weeks you eat at your new maintenance, which is way more food than you're eating at the diet, but it's still

clean food, quote unquote, it's that healthy food. It's that low palatability food. After a few weeks, you are going to physically have a hard time eating that food, you're going to look at your fifth meal and you're going to be like, fuck this, can someone eat this for me? Now you're not freaking out anymore. Your diet fatigue is way lower. And now, Hey shit, you can go with your friends to have pizza.

You'll have four slices. It'll be baller. You don't want anymore. You leave the next day, healthy food again, blah, blah, blah. And then you're back to having a few junky items a week. Uh, everything in balance. You're golden. Keep weight training, keep your activity nice and high.

Keep most of your food nice and healthy. And if you get a little too heavy, dial back the junk. If you get a little too light, dial up the junk or eat more of that healthy food, don't just fall off the face of the earth at the end of the diet and just go back to whatever. That's a big problem. And if you want to diet again, to lose more fat, let's say you weigh 200 pounds, you get down to 185, but your real goal weight is like, you want to weigh 165.

That's where you're going to look your best. For any given length of time you diet, say it's 12 weeks, at RP, based on our examination of the evidence, and are working with hundreds and thousands of clients at this point, we've determined that something like two thirds to one times the length of the previous diet is how long your maintenance phase or slow bulk should be after. If you want to get a little thicker, if not just maintenance phase. So what does that mean? You dieted for 12 weeks. Your next eight weeks should be a diligent attempt at maintenance.

Being aware of the fact that you could regain eating tons of that healthy, not so great palatability food and slowly threading in a bit more high palatability food, this is where desserts that are way outside what you would eat on a diet, but still way below what you would normally come in really handy. For example, Halo top. Halo top is great. Legendary foods is great. Another one is a frozen yogurt.

You ought to do ice cream, ice cream, bro. That fat level is just going to blow you out, but frozen yogurt, it's actually not a ton if it's plenty of calories, but not a ton. It fills you up a lot. Froyo is super dope in that after two or three weeks of healthy food, get some fro. That's a trait. Amazing.

Um, tons of veggies, sorry, tons of veggies, tons of fresh fruit mixed with regular yogurt, stuff like that goes a long way eight weeks later. If you feel good and you could honestly tell yourself, I can do another several months of dieting. I want to do it. Try that thought on for size. It fits. Do it.

You could try that thought on for size and be like pizza. Like if your brain's a GPT, you're like, Hey, do I want a diet? And it just returns pizza. You're like, shit, then just maintained for longer until the diet fatigue drops. The huge problem people run into is two things. One, they'll finish the diet and they'll just jump off a cliff and eat pizza on the way down and then they get fat. And the other one is they'll maintain diligently.

I didn't mean the scare quotes for a few weeks and they'd be like, I feel pretty good talking for another hardcore diet. They do three weeks of that. They try to eat their own hand. They fall off the wagon and reek in all the way. So dieting is a phasic process. It is by definition unsustainable. You diet down for eight to 12 weeks, even six to 12 weeks, and there's no bonus points for 12.

If you're getting kind of crazy at nine weeks, stop the diet. Maintain for at least six weeks. Then diet for seven or eight weeks. Maintain for six to eight weeks. You've got some trips coming up. Keep maintaining for three months, four months, five months, who cares? You already won.

And then later you can take another stab at it. The idea that you have to try to lose all of your weight at once is a nonsense and is going to set you up for failure. Dr. Mike Isretel, ladies and gentlemen, Mike, I appreciate you. It's very, very nice to have this evidence-based

community coming to the forefront yourself. Mano, Lane, these guys, it's good. I really, really like it. And I think that you're doing great work. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the things that you need to shill. They should continue to watch your podcast

because it's fucking amazing, man. Thank you so much for having me on. Um, if you guys want to learn more about stuff than RP strength, YouTube channel, we blab about this incessantly. There's tons of other great creators in the space. The three DMJ folks, stronger by science, Mano Hanselman's, Dr. Pack, Dr. Milo.

These are awesome people. I've left out a ton. Jeff Nippert, of course, the king of the evidence-based community. Um, just get on the internet, type in evidence-based fitness, evidence-based dieting, and you're're gonna get much more good stuff than bad stuff And if you want to buy stuff, our funnels at the RP YouTube should do their job But we have the RP diet coach app. You can download it. You can use it it's super great the RP hypertrophy app to get jacked and

I come to Instagram and be my friend I'm on there and you'll notice that I have a giant ugly head. That's the real me. I Appreciate you man. Thank you so much.