Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Layne Norton on Mini-Cuts and Mini-Bulks

Episode Date: April 5, 2019

As you’ve probably guessed, these are shorter-than-usual cuts and bulks, normally in the range of three to four weeks, and in this podcast, Layne and I talk about how well they work. Are they worth the trouble or should you just stick to the traditional bodybuilding approach of “lean bulking” until you’re uncomfortably fat, cutting until you can see your abs again, and then repeating? That’s the question we answer in today’s interview, where we share what we’ve learned from our experiences with our own physiques as well as the thousands of people that we’ve worked with over the years. So, if you want to know the pros and cons of continuous versus intermittent lean bulking and cutting and what’s probably going to be best for you, keep listening. 8:25 - Is it better to do longer or shorter periods of bulking/cutting? 13:30 - Should women do mini-cuts? 18:00 - What are the benefits of implementing diet breaks while cutting? 24:10 - What’s the body’s evolutionary response to caloric restriction? 28:00 - Is exercise a good means for fat loss or not? 32:46 - Do you think eating nutritionally bankrupt food increases the desire for more food? 42:20 - Should someone follow the carnivore diet? 54:45 - Should someone cut or bulk if they’re brand new to weightlifting and at a high body fat percentage? 57:35 - Where can people find you and your work? Mentioned on The Show: Triumph Multivitamin: https://legionathletics.com/products/supplements/triumph/ Layne’s Website: https://www.biolayne.com/ Fat Loss Forever: https://www.biolayne.com/fat-loss-forever/ The Complete Contest Prep Guide: https://www.biolayne.com/the-complete-contest-prep-guide/ Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

All this other stuff is great. Diet breaks, high carb days, calorie cycling, getting fancy with some of this stuff. At the end of the day, if you can't stick to it, you've got to rethink what you're doing because it's very clear in the literature. If you want to sustain fat loss, you have to sustain the behaviors that caused you to lose that fat. And if you don't, you'll just get it back. don't, you'll just get it back. Hey, Mike Matthews here and welcome to another episode of the Muscle for Life podcast. This one is an interview with my buddy Lane Norton. It has been a while since Lane has come on the podcast and I don't even remember what we spoke about the last time. I just remember it was popular. So I reached back out to him and asked if he wanted to come on and talk about something that I am asked about here and there. I wouldn't say it is a top three

or top five question, but I do get people asking every couple of weeks or so, and that is mini cuts and mini bulks. So you probably know that to consistently gain muscle and strength, you need to consistently eat more calories than you burn. And that's particularly true for intermediate and advanced weightlifters. Obviously, if you are new to weightlifting, you can gain muscle and lose fat at the same time, meaning that you can gain muscle and of course gain strength in a calorie deficit. However, after your first six to eight months or so, you got to pick muscle and strength gain or fat loss and muscle preservation. And of course you do that by manipulating your calories, by manipulating your energy balance. And specifically, if you want to be in a gaining

phase, then you're going to have to be in a calorie surplus. And that means you're going to have to put up with some body fat gain. And the reason for that is there's just no better way to boost your body's muscle building machinery than to be in a calorie surplus. And you really need that extra horsepower to continue gaining muscle and strength after your newbie gains phase is wrapped up. And of course, the price to pay for that is fat gain. No matter what you do with your training, no matter what you do with your macros, your meal timing, or anything else, supplementation, a calorie surplus is a calorie surplus and your body fat level will rise. If you do it correctly, even if you just stay in

a surplus seven days a week, it will rise slowly and you should be able to maintain a surplus for many months before you are just too fat and then you have to cut. But still, you are going to gain fat over time. And if you stop gaining fat as an intermediate or advanced weightlifter, it also probably means you're just not gaining weight anymore. And that, of course, stretched out turns into a plateau. Now, many people, they struggle with this because yeah, they want some more muscle and strength, but they don't want to give up their tight waist, their washboard abs and vascular arms. And I understand I've been there myself. There is definitely a strange satisfaction that comes with being very lean.

You look good. you know it, you really like what you see in the mirror, you get more attention from other people, you feel kind of special. It's true, right? And it can be hard to give all that up for what can feel like absolutely excruciatingly slow progress, both in the mirror and in the gym.

And especially when the chirpy little devil on your shoulder reminds you every chance it can, that it might be nice to have that six pack back. And you know, is this lean bulking stuff really necessary? Come on, there's got to be a better way. Yeah, there's not. Unfortunately, no amount of natural pills or powders or changes to your dietary or training protocols can stand in for a calorie surplus. Lean gains of all fat and, or sorry, of all muscle and no fat is really just a mirage. And this is where mini cuts and mini bulks enter the picture. Because according to some people, this is how you quote unquote hack your body composition and enable yourself to gain muscle and strength without having to ever allow your body fat levels to rise even noticeably, not even

rise to a level where you're unhappy with them, but even rise an amount that you can see in the mirror. And in case you haven't heard about mini cuts and mini bulks, you can probably guess that they're simply shorter than usual cuts and bulks, normally in the range of three to four weeks or so. And this is what Lane and I are going to talk about. We're going to talk about how well they actually work. Are they worth the trouble or should you just stick to the traditional bodybuilding approach of lean bulking until you are just uncomfortably fat and then cutting until you can see your abs again and rinsing and repeating until you are just uncomfortably fat and then cutting until you can see your abs again and rinsing and repeating until you have the body that you want? Well, that is the question

that we answer in today's interview where we share what we've learned from our experiences with our own physiques as well as the thousands of people that we've worked with over the years. So if you want to know the pros and cons of continuous versus intermittent lean bulking and cutting and what is probably going to work best for you, then you should keep listening. This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I'm not big on promoting stuff

that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm just going to quickly stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm just going to quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my high quality sports multivitamin Triumph. Now Triumph was designed for athletes and physically active people who want to optimize their health and fight off stress, fatigue, and overtraining. It contains 21 vitamins and minerals, as well as 14 additional ingredients that improve overall health and wellbeing, enhance physical and mental performance, and help protect against disease. All that is why Triumph has over 500 reviews on Amazon with a

four and a half star average and another 180 plus on my website with a five star average. So if you want to plug any nutritional holes in your diet, improve your mood and mental and physical performance and boost your resistance to stress, sickness, and disease, then you want to head over to www.legionathletics.com and pick up a bottle of Triumph today. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code podcast to check out and you will save 10% on your entire order. And lastly, you should also know that I have a very simple 100% money back guarantee that works like this. You either love my stuff or you get your money back, period. You don't have to return the products. You don't have to fill out forms. You don't have to jump

through any other hoops or go through any other shenanigans. So you really can't lose here. Head over to www.lesionathletics.com now, place your order and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet. And if for whatever reason, they're just not for you, contact us and we will give you a full refund on the spot. All righty, that is enough shameless plugging for now at least. Let's get to the show. Lane, you're back. It's been a couple of years. Thanks for taking the time, man. I'm excited to speak with you today. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Mike. I appreciate it. I think it's always when you and I have had discussions, they've always been pretty productive.

Yeah. And they've always been popular. You are definitely one of the more requested guests where when I reach out to ask people, Hey, who should I have on the show or have back on the show? You're always in the top three. So here you are. And today's discussion, we just kind of decided it just 10 minutes ago, is something that I get asked fairly frequently about. I don't know about you, Lane, but that is mini cuts and mini bulks. And so specifically for people listening, if you don't know what those things are, the idea is, generally speaking, is it better to stretch your surpluses, your calorie surpluses out for as long as possible, which then basically you kind of just ride it until you get too fat.

And if you're a guy, let's say it's somewhere up around 17, 18% or so is when you, most people are like, all right, I need to lose some fucking fat. And then you go into it, you go into a sustained deficit to get rid of the fat and retain as much of the muscle as you can that you gained. And then just rinse repeat. Is that a better strategy for long-term muscle and strength gain or is it better to do shorter periods of surpluses and deficits so i thought lane would be the perfect guy to talk to about this because he's had a lot of experience both personally and with clients doing it both ways. And yeah, so with that, Lane, here's the microphone. Yeah, so great question. And as people who know me, what I'm going to say is it depends.

So I think in general, talking off air, but I agree with you that I think when you first get into lifting, especially for guys, women are a little bit different just because psychology makeup and we'll talk about that. But for guys, you know, you want to spend a good portion of that in a surplus. So you can really maximize what you can do in that first year, because that's where you're going to get people argue about how much you know, if your overall gains you make in the first year, but I mean, it's probably over 50% of the muscle you're going to gain in your entire life from training is going to be in the first year of consistent training. It's an astronomical amount compared to the other years.

So I think being in a deficit, because you're going to recomposition anyway, even if you're in a surplus, you're going to be partitioning a lot more of those nutrients towards building muscle and lean body mass as opposed to gaining fat than you will at any other time in your training career regardless so i don't think we're not saying eat like an idiot but i think you know a sustained i was gonna say like let's qualify that to be like really i can you know super bulk and gain 50 pounds in a year i don't think that's productive i think a sustained several hundred calorie surplus is probably productive where you're gaining a solid two to four pounds per month. I think that that's probably want to shoot for like the average of right around two or three, but if you're new and obviously it depends on if you're tiny and you're 110 pound guy, you don't want to be probably gaining four pounds a month. That's probably too rapid. So in any case, I think in those cases, what I tend to see is people who get into lifting, they want to be shredded and huge at the same time. They do these things improperly because the timing is really important.

And what they do is they end up chasing their tail. They kind of half-ass a bulk and then they get a few weeks into the bulk and they go, oh, man, I want to be shredded. And then they go, they do a few weeks of cutting and they kind of half-ass it. Screw this cutting. I want to be jacked. I want to be huge. I don't care if I'm fat. And then they start to get a little fat and they just go around chasing their tail. They don't make any progress. I think if you're doing targeted, I used to do this. I'd been lifting about three or four years consistently. And I started doing, I guess what you would call cyclical bulking. So I would do four to eight weeks in a surplus, and then I would do two to three weeks in a deficit. And the reason I liked that was because one, two to three weeks of cutting is

not enough to really drop your metabolic rate. You'll have a small amount of drop in that short of time period, but it's not much. It's not going to be anything that lasts for a meaningful period of time. And you're probably also not going to notice much difference in the way of training, right? That's right. The other benefit is you're going to lose the most amount of fat. Anybody who's ever done a long cut, when do you drop easiest? Right at the beginning, right? Right after you've been in a surplus, it's when you get to the end that it becomes an absolute and utter grind. You're going to be able to cut fat more efficiently during those early weeks. So you get that, it's kind of like, you know, you get in, get out,

get some fat off, feel more comfortable. And I found that that actually did a good job with motivating people to get back on their bulk because they've cut off a little bit of excess fat. They feel a little more comfortable and okay, now I'm happy to go back into this bulk and try to build some more muscle. And that's kind of how I did it for about four or five years. Things changed a little bit because of grad school and then I was competing in powerlifting and things kind of changed, but I thought that was a pretty viable way to do things. And the other advantage you get is two to three weeks isn't really enough to drop your you know testosterone that much or anything like that but you do get some benefits for insulin sensitivity and blood lipids and

overall health as well so again and i also what i would do is i would kind of space these cuts out how it fit my lifestyle right so if I knew I had a trip coming up okay well boom I'm going to schedule that two to three week mini cut right before the trip to Mexico you know or if I knew that I don't have anything coming up and it's going into winter all right well I'm not going to do a cut until this day or whatever so I would still schedule them in every you know eight weeks because that was important. But I usually allowed them to fall in line with something I had that maybe I wanted to look a little bit leaner for. So I always liked doing it that way. I think I may sound misogynistic to some or sexist, but I think they work better for men than they do for women, just from a purely psychological point of view.

Women have a really hard time with these because their mentality has always been lose fat, lose fat, lose fat, lose fat, lose fat, lose fat. I find that a lot of women I work with, honestly, their metabolisms are just so slow from years of dieting that I kind of need to get them in a sustained surplus for a good period of time. And I talk about this in my book, Fat Loss Forever, quite a bit. But every time you diet, you're activating your body's self-defense system in terms of you're telling your body food is scarce, right? Now, think about it. The way I grew up, I was a dude, I chose putting on mass i think you

were kind of a little bit skinnier uh to start too is that right mike yeah i started at 155 pounds basically six one six two right so dieting wasn't something we even thought about for a long time right we just wanted to not be tiny and a lot of guys are like that so and then when they go do their first cut it's actually not that hard. Right. I don't know how yours was. I don't want to speak for you. It's very easy.

Yeah. Right. That was the first someone just like, Hey, here, this is, these are macros. Just eat this much protein, this much carb, this much fat every day. I don't really care what you eat and do that long enough and you'll get shredded. And I was like, what did that? And yeah, I got, I got pretty lean. I was like, huh, that's a, that's interesting. Yeah.

I got pretty lean. I was like, huh, that's, uh, that's interesting. Yeah. So it's very interesting that for guys like us, because if you think about from an evolutionary perspective, we had been in a, in a surplus so long that your body actually starts to waste more energy. For example, when you were bulking coming up from 155 pounds, you probably found that eventually you had to eat just copious amounts of food just to gain more weight, right? Yeah. Upward of 4,000 calories a day or so was the last lean bulk that I did really. Right.

So I'm actually trying to gain some weight right now and I'm up around 3,900, 4,000 calories as well. So when you do that, you're telling your body food is plentiful. We don't have to be efficient with our food because we're not going to starve. This is the signal you're sending to your body from an evolutionary perspective. I was 10. I was 7. It's pretty scary. And you think about from the perspective of what you're telling your body, if you consider, especially for females, since they have to actually carry a child, evolution cares about you surviving long enough to reproduce. That's what it cares about at the crux of things. And especially when a female is the sex that's carrying the child, evolution is going to do its best to conserve energy as much as possible. If you're telling your body energy scarce, energy scarce, energy scarce, well, then you're not going to

waste a lot of energy. Your body's going to lower its metabolic rate and it's going to be really hard to lose fat in the future. And so I usually don't do that many, many cuts with females because I find that a lot of the clientele that I work with, and it could just be because I talk about the metabolic slowing and that sort of thing, that since I talk about it a lot, I get a lot of those clients. You know what I mean? We tend to self-select our clients by what we talk about. If I talked about teen bulking, I'd probably get a lot of teen clients. You know what I mean? But I get a lot of these clientele who are females, who have a long diet history, who have very slow metabolic rates compared to what you would predict based on their

lean body mass and whatnot. And so I kind of have to do a lot of, I don't want to call it, for lack of a better term, metabolic repair, where we're trying to slowly add calories back in to, for lack of a better term, convince their bodies that they're not going to starve, that food isn't scarce. So that hopefully in future, we go to diet down, they can be more effective. But if you've been dieting for a really long time, you know, on and off, a lot of these girls, I get, you know, six weeks in, they're like, oh, can we cut? Can we cut? And I'm thinking, you're at 1500 calories, maintaining your body weight. No, we're not going to cut you know so i think for people who they have a healthy metabolic rate and they haven't been doing yo-yo dieting all

their life i think it can be really cyclical walking can be a great thing i mean we kind of have cyclical cutting now um i don't know if you've seen any of the recent research on diet breaks yeah i've uh written and spoken about it a little bit, actually. Yeah. So really interesting stuff. I'm actually on a recent review of literature with a couple of those Jackson Pios, Eric Helms, and Andy Galpin. It's pretty interesting. It's kind of like the same concept, but in reverse, when you do one to two week phases at maintenance while you're cutting, it seems like it preserves your metabolic rate much better than if you're just doing a straight deficit. Whereas in the off season or bulking

season, I don't want to call it, you're putting in these little cuts and they do really well because your metabolic rate's really fast. Now you're putting in these little periods of maintenance to kind of convince your body that, hey, I know we've had this deficit, but here's some food. You know, food's not scarce. You don't have to go so aggressive with metabolic adaptation because what happens during dieting is your body tends to overreact to your deficit. It will slow down much more than you – your metabolic rate slows down much more than you would predict just based on the amount of lean body mass you lose and fat mass. So, yeah, I think that these kind of cycles can be really helpful. But it also depends on the psychological makeup of the person.

I mean, I had somebody who during cutting, I was doing diet breaks with them. And they were like, I hate this. I hate feeling like I get into a rhythm and then boom, now I've got a week where I've got to eat more. And I just want to do straight deficit. I don't want high days. I don't want low days. I want the same every day. And you know, for me, what I tell people is the most important thing is having a plan that you can stick to. So I said, Hey, if that's something that that's more sustainable for you, then that's what we'll do. But I think they are a useful tool as long as they're implemented appropriately.

Yeah, I tend to be that way. I tend to just stick to a straight deficit for a period. And then I guess the last few times I've gotten pretty lean, down to whatever, 70% photo shoot leaner or whatever. I would usually do one or two kind of high carb days or just feel good or just take a bunch of calories, give them to carbs and maybe bump my calories up to around maintenance. I wouldn't do, I guess, formal breaks of several days, but yeah, I tend to be one of those people. I'm like, yeah, I'll just do a straight deficit for a while until I feel and I'll have some higher carb days here and there and just kind of play it by ear basically. Yeah. I mean, there's more than one way to skin a cat.

People have gotten lean all different kinds of ways. At the end of the day, the most important thing, and I wrote about this in Fat Loss Forever, the number one most important thing is just to find something that you can stick to. Because at the end of the day, people don't fail on diets because they didn't have the right macros or they uh they didn't do their diet break right or something they fail on them because they just they quit you know they stopped doing it they don't do something that they can continue for a long period of time so all this other stuff is great diet breaks high carb days calorie cycling you know getting fancy with some of this stuff at the end of the day if you can't stick to it you've got to rethink what you're doing because it's very clear in the literature.

If you want to sustain fat loss, you have to sustain the behaviors that caused you to lose that fat. And if you don't, you'll just get it back. Yep. And that means that really it should be enjoyable. That should be the standard. Like, yeah, sometimes you're going to be a little bit hungry. Sometimes you're going to wish you can eat a bit more or you're going to wish you could eat an entire pie. And that's normal. But on the whole, I think it should be you should be eating foods that you like. You should be looking forward to your meals. You should have good energy levels. You should have workouts. It should be pretty smooth sailing if you're doing the major things right. smooth sailing if you're doing the major things right. Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural evidence-based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. Every ingredient and every dose in every product is backed by peer-reviewed scientific research. Every formulation is 100% transparent. There are no proprietary blends and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored. To check

everything out, just head over to legionathletics.com. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout, and you will save 20% on your entire order if it is your first purchase with us. And if it is not your first purchase with us, you will get double reward points on your entire order. That's essentially 10% cash back in rewards points. So again, the URL is legionathletics.com. And if you appreciate my work and want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. I always tell people dieting and exercise is like the stock market. If you, if you look at, and the reason I say that is if you look at the stock

market, at least a few years ago, when I checked years ago when I checked the statistic, I believe in the entire existence of the U.S. stock market, there is not a 10-year period where it didn't at least break even. And overall, the economy continues to grow. So it expands. Overall, it goes up and it goes down and there's recessions and you have days where there's big spikes and you have days where there's big falls but overall it goes up your training and your nutrition is kind of like that we've all had days where we go in the gym we feel like we could just crush any weight that was in there like we just feel good and then next time you go in and you feel like garbage you know and you're just like what the hell happened and that's normal and what i tell people with that is if you're invested in a good

stock you know it's good apple facebook whatever are you going to sell that stock because you had one bad day or one bad week of course not you're going to keep that stock and hope that it continues to go up so training is like that. If you're doing the right things, you're in there, you're not going to feel good every day. The important thing is that you continue to do it and make it so it is fun and sustainable and have faith that if you do it right, it's not going to be bad every day and it's going to get better again. What I tell all my clients when they get hungry, I'm like, I know that this is a really hard emotion to deal with being hungry. But remember that we tend to get caught in an emotion and feel like it's going to last forever.

Right. I mean, I don't want to go too psychology based, but if you think about what's the worst thing that could ever happen to you, it's you die. People still take their own lives. Again, I'm not a psychologist, but my guess is a lot of times is because they feel like things are never going to get better because the emotion that they're caught in at that moment, they feel like it's never going to get better. I don't want to compare suicide to nutrition, but the point being is that when you're hungry, you can't imagine not being hungry. It's like an all encompassing. I'm sure you've been very lean before. You've had that experience where you were just so hungry that you couldn't even think about anything else. Have you had that? Absolutely. Where I remember once sitting at my desk, my mouth was salivating at the thought of

eating, I think it was like apple pie or something. Like I was like, this is fucked up. Yeah, exactly. And that's actually part of the evolutionary response to calorie constriction is for your body to trigger those things, not just slow down your metabolic rate, but try to. So it works that, you know, calories in calories out. Well, what it does is it, it tries to reduce your calories out and tries to really jack up calories in because it's trying to get rid of that energy gap. The words I like to use are more energy is desired than is required. So, but yeah, that's when you were in that feeling, you probably could never have imagined that you would ever not feel hungry. The important thing is don't use our lizard brain. Our hind brain is to use our front brain, our smart brain and talk to yourself and be mindful and say, all right, I feel like this now, but it's not going to last forever. It will pass. And hunger does pass. Like if you've ever had intense periods of hunger, if you don't give into it, it does pass. It just sucks for a little while.

Yeah. And if you do that, it allows you to dissociate a bit from it and not feel to feel where something's separate to you, as opposed to where now that is all you can think about. It's all you can look at. It's all you can feel. Yeah. And just, uh, not to get too like metaphysical or whatever, but just tell yourself like, this isn't real. You know, this is just my body. I'm not starving. My body is just trying to trick me. And listen, I've been there. I've been there where I'm like, it's just my body. I'm not starving. My body is just trying to trick me. And listen, I've been there. I've been there where I'm like, it's just all encompassing. But I kind of use the, I have a friend who is a Navy SEAL and he said that they have

a term that they use called embrace the suck. And when training is hard or when dieting is hard or whatever, I always just tell myself embrace the suck because it's probably making you better. Yeah. I mean, something simple and practical is if you can distract yourself, if you can get your attention onto something that just takes it away from being hungry, regardless of whatever it is, that can help. Yeah. It's very interesting. My girlfriend, Holly, she tends to overeat less when she exercises more just because she's not bored.

Yeah. So she likes to go out. Um, we go for walks a lot. We do bike rides. We do all that kind of, she's like, if I'm sitting by myself in the house, then it's like really hard for me not to overeat because now I don't have anything to distract myself with. I think that's really important to at the end of a diet, like if you're going into maintenance and you want to keep more of those cuts that you got, I think it's really important when you end your diet, quote unquote, like you haven't ended it and the next thing is you're at an all-inclusive resort with no means to exercise for the next five days and all the food you want. Yeah, like on a cruise ship or something.

Yeah, that's a really, really, really bad idea. Really bad idea. That's how people gain 30 pounds in a week. So it's funny because people will argue with me about this and they'll be like, oh, you can't gain fat from just one meal. Yeah, you can. Of course you can. Like what kind of stupid logic is that? Like if you couldn't store energy from one meal, logic is that like if you couldn't if you couldn't store energy from one meal that is a stupid now you might not store a ton of fat from one meal sure just because you know you requires a certain level of caloric excess but absolutely you can store fat from one well of course i mean mechanistically speaking that's what happens right so we're eating food body is very energy efficient so if the meal is substantial whatsoever it's going to supply a lot more energy than the body needs to just stay alive. And so what is it going to do with a portion of

that excess? It's going to store it until all of that food is processed. And then, okay, now it needs to live on its own energy stores until you feed it again. But that's the process, right? I mean, that's the fat gain, fat loss process. And when you look at the balance over time tells you, are you getting fatter? Are you getting leaner? Are you more or less staying the same? That's right. So yeah, I think having some of those strategies of, you know, it's really interesting, not just the activity to keep yourself occupied, but also I dug through a lot of this research when I was writing fat loss forever. And we hear a lot that exercise, you've probably heard this exercise really isn't a means for fat loss, right? And it is true from the perspective of if you just have people do exercise,

they don't really lose a lot of fat, that they get healthier, they get much healthier. So I don't want to, people get this twisted. But exercise is like the only thing you can do where you don't even have to lose weight, and you'll get substantially healthier. You can be fat and actually in shape if you exercise. It's pretty incredible. But what exercise does that really contributes strongly for weight loss is one, yes, it helps you maintain your lean body mass when you're dieting, which is important. But more important than that, it actually sensitizes you to satiety signals. And we live in a society where we have what's called an obesogenic environment. We have readily accessible, extremely high calorie, highly palatable, minimal satiating foods that are cheap. For less than a buck, you can go grab stickers bar that packs you know 250 calories in a really

small piece of food yeah which again i've talked about this i'm a flexible dieter that's not inherently fattening those 250 calories aren't magic compared to 250 calories from rice and peanut butter it's not magic it's just that rice and peanut butter is probably gonna be a lot more satiating than 250 calories from stickers because it because it's more volume. But so when you have all this access to this obesogenic environment, it's so easy to eat through normal satiety signals. It really is. And if you don't exercise, it's even easier. There was actually a study done in Bengali workers in the 1950s, and they had people who were either sedentary, lightly active job, moderately active job, or heavily active job, like heavy labor. And they looked at how much food

did they eat? They didn't tell them any instructions or anything. They just wanted to see what they did. What they found was the people who were from lightly active to heavily active pretty much linearly increased their calories to match their activity, right? The people who were sedentary actually ate more than both the lightly active and moderately active groups. Interesting. So that's why I say that exercise sensitizes you to satiety signals. And they've actually seen this in animal studies as well, where if they give rats free access to a treadmill and the rats exercise, the amount of calories they burned was pretty insignificant compared to their total daily energy expenditure. It was like 3% or something. Because what other people don't realize is when you exercise, yeah, you burn more calories when you exercise, but your body actually is very smart and compensates by lowering its BMR or you just move less throughout the day.

Your NEAT goes down because, again, the body is trying to conserve. But again, what it does do is it sensitizes you to those satiety signals and you actually end up eating less. And that's what the rats did in this study was the rats that were exercised actually ate less than the rats that were sedentary. The rats that were exercised actually ate less than the rats that were sedentary. And so practically speaking for people, then really what it is, is it helps your body regulate its appetite better, right? Yeah, correct. So, you know, people, everybody tries to make the obesity crisis out to be kind of, well, this thing caused it.

Well, that thing caused it. Fat caused it. Carbs caused it. Sugar caused it. It's not one thing. It's a bunch of stuff. Yes, there's more added fats in the diet there's also more added sugar and there's just more calories in general so people are less active generally now than they were decades ago right so and that's a huge part of it that's absolutely a huge part of it. So people are less active, more calories.

There's also how food has become part of our society since it's become so readily available. You know, back in the Great Depression, if you wanted to have a get-together, you might not be able to have a bunch of food there, you know, or to interact with your friends. Can you remember ever going to a get-together with friends, even if it was just, Hey, come over and watch the game on Sunday where there wasn't food. Yeah. It's always, it ranges from semi maybe quote unquote diet friendly to thousands and thousands of calories laid out and that look and smell delicious. Right. Not only that, but like our dinner plates are like 50% bigger than they were back in the 1800s. So there's all kinds of, there's physical reasons, physiological reasons, psychological reasons, sociological reasons. There's a lot of reasons why people are getting fatter.

Do you think that the nutritional value of food is playing into that? Because as we know, it has been generally declining over time due to soil erosion and other things it's not to be alarmist about that but there was a book the dorito effect and i was reading the book summary of it because i do that first before i dive into any book just to see if it is going to be worth the time investment really and there was they were talking about and i have a note to look at the research because i'm not going to take it at face value but that basically basically, okay, so you're eating food. What's really the reason biologically to eat food? It's to give our body the nutrients that need to stay alive. Okay. And if you're eating food that is less nutritionally dense, then if that's what you're

primarily eating would be more highly processed. Even if the foods have been fortified, it's still not going to be the same as eating like some fruits and vegetables and grains and stuff. So if you're eating a lot of nutritionally bankrupt food, let's say you're getting calories, but have you come across, and I'm actually genuinely asking, this is on my list of questions to answer myself. Have you come across good evidence that that alone can increase the desire for more food where the body's like,

yeah, the calories are nice, but I'm not getting enough actual essential nutrients. Give me more food and please make it nutritional. So by just to, I want to make sure I understand clearly nutritional density, they mean like vitamins and minerals. Yeah. The natural nutrients that you find in foods that you have to make yourself and that mostly plant-based obviously fruits vegetables grains seeds legumes blah blah blah this is kind of similar to the protein stat theory i don't know if you've ever heard that no basically what it says is that even though our protein intake has remained the same we've had to eat more calories to get the same amount of protein okay

and the body wants a certain amount of protein before you could get the amount of protein you needed from say 2 000 calories now you have to eat 2700 that's kind of the argument that's being made just with vitamins and minerals correct yeah same concept although the protein one sounds odd what they're saying chicken breast has fundamentally changed a lot. No, I think what they're saying is the food selection has shifted so that in order to get the same amount of protein, you're going to be overeating calories. Right. Because of how the diet on the whole has changed. I haven't looked into the vitamin and mineral stuff. What I will say is if you look at organic food versus non-organic food you don't see differences in

vitamin and mineral content i think in some cases there are rights like certain fruits and vegetables are a bit more nutritious in certain ways even though it's not all that i haven't seen it but i mean i i i haven't seen it i have i don't pretend to have seen every single study on on them either but the ones the ones i have seen have not been able to show a difference in vitamin or mineral content, but maybe some have. I haven't looked into this, so I'm just going to give you my perspective and my tenuous opinion. So I guess my pushback against that would be, well, then if everybody just took a multivitamin, that would solve all our problems. I don't know, but I inherently don't think that that's true. I don't want to completely dismiss the idea that vitamins and minerals may have an impact on satiety.

I'm not sure of any that do or at least documented. I think where this may come into play is that the fiber, people are getting less fiber than ever relative to their calorie intake. And fiber certainly does seem to have an effect on satiety. Yeah, that was a note that I made as well. I wonder if they're just mixing up causation here. It's not the vitamins and minerals per se, but. I think that that's probably more likely, Mike, is that you're right, that they're mistaking the reduction in vitamin and mineral content.

You know, what's actually happening is due to, you know, processed food versus unprocessed food. Again, I'm not an alarmist. And I'll sit here and I eat some processed foods. I don't think they're inherently dangerous or bad for you. But I think that it's hard to get enough dietary fiber if you great benefits in terms of satiety gi irregularity as well as a short chain fatty acid production from fermentation and that that has seems to have some effects on metabolic rate as well so my i would speculate that it's probably more likely that the foods are being that are being chose now in the diet are lower in fiber and that might be

a bigger reason why you're seeing some overeating. But again, I really haven't looked into that in depth. So, you know, I could be wrong. Yeah. And the takeaway there is, I mean, it's soluble fiber in particular, right? So, which is particularly beneficial to your gut health with the short chain fatty acid. So, I think the takeaway there is make sure you're getting enough fiber. And really the easiest way to do that is eat several servings of vegetables every day you can have a serving of to a fruit eat some whole grains if you do that well careful now the carnivore people will tell you that you know fiber is actually bad for you yeah i i i wrote about that recently and then recorded a podcast

on it and when i first heard of that i was like come on is that actually a thing and oh yes oh yes it's a thing i think it's i think what we have is we have reactionary culture now so i remember when i first started talking about bad coaching in the industry and i talked about like some of the things that people did and people started saying well i had a person come to me and they were like well this coach put me on 1100 calories a day. So they were a bad coach, right? And I kind of looked at what they did. And I looked at what their data was. I said, not really, not really. I mean, they were trying to get you lean for a show. They didn't start you out at 1100 calories. You got down to that by the end. And, you end. That's not a bad coach. That's just,

if you're a female and you're small. You're a small human. I'm sorry. I've had that discussion too. Poverty macros, poverty calories. I'm like, you're 110 pounds and you want to be super lean and exactly that. You've been dieting for a while. I mean, I hate to say it, but that's the price that you're going to have to pay. You will never be eating 1,600, 1,700 calories a day getting down to 10%, 11%, 12% body fat. I'm sorry. It's just not going to happen unless all you do is like, I don't know, sit in the gym all day, every day, but then your body's going to fall apart. So something's got to give. every day, but then your body's going to fall apart. So something's got to give. Yeah. So I think that's kind of like an example of that, right? So I was talking about how, you know, all these coaches starving their clients and how they, you know, bad coaching. Well, then, then it went to, if you ever take some of these calories under 1500 calories, you're a bad coach. Whoa. Hey, Hey, whoa, let's pump the brakes on this. You know what I mean? Like context is important. And same thing here. It here it's like well there's this big vegan movement that demonizes anybody who eats meat and is trying to convince

you that you know vegan blood can cure cancer and all this other nonsensical crap and so what's the reaction to that well fuck you we're gonna only eat meat and it's just stupid i was on a podcast i did the uh mark bell's podcast and i was debating sean baker one of the big proponents of the carnivore diet who to his credit said that people probably should eat vegetables but it's weird because he kind of promotes not eating vegetables but in any case um you got him to admit that much wow yeah he did but it's like i'm a protein guy i did my phd protein metabolism. I was funded by the egg and dairy industry. And here I am on this podcast defending vegetables. Of all the things I never thought would happen. I never thought I would say, hey, eating that much meat is probably not a great idea. And maybe you should have some vegetables. I never thought in a million years, I would be having that conversation because usually my battleground had been with vegans,

you know, who've been saying that, you know, eating meat is the same thing as smoking or, you know, whatever it is. I'm like, you know, guys, maybe meat has some health benefits and maybe vegetables have some health benefits and maybe just maybe an extremist diet is not the best way to do things yeah and that it just the thing is that's not very sexy from a marketing perspective right if you can take an extreme position it just generates more buzz and especially if you can then position yourself against something like veganism which is uh hot a lot of people it's controversial so i mean i understand it from a marketing perspective, but from a physiological perspective,

the carnivore diet makes absolutely no sense. Yeah, I mean, I think that... Unless it's an extreme elimination diet, right? So if you have someone who has real problems and they're like, fuck, I don't know what foods are doing this to me, I have to strip my diet down to nothing basically and rebuild it piece by piece so I can discover what is actually causing these issues. Then I think that makes

sense. Yeah. And a lot of people have been getting benefits by, you know, again, it's correlation versus causation. They eat only meat. Some of their autoimmune stuff dies down and their digestive issues die right they go oh see eating meat is is the best thing well no that's like somebody with a lactose intolerance who drinks milk they stop drinking milk and they feel better and they say everybody should not drink milk it's like no yeah or they start drinking pineapple juice instead of milk and they're like pineapple juice is amazing. It cured my GI distress. Right, exactly. So it's, like you said, it's hard to make something sexy when you're promoting kind of moderation.

You know, I always said, you know, I went to grad school. I wanted to find magic foods. And if I had found some magic foods, I'd be sitting on a yacht in the middle of the Pacific getting fanned by five supermodels on either side, right? Because I'd be worth like a hundred billion dollars. Can you imagine if you found like just foods that solved everything? You know, that's just not going to happen. You know, the other thing people don't want to admit is that there probably isn't one best diet for everything. You know, if you have autoimmune issues, then maybe some kind of elimination diet is going to be

best for you where you're eating a little bit more meat less vegetables or whatever depending on your situation but that's probably not best for cancer and what's best for cancer probably might not be best for heart disease and what's best for heart disease might not be best for alzheimer's i don't know for sure but i'm just putting this out there sure it's going to be completely and and all of that may not be best for just your average everyday healthy person that exercises and just wants to look good and feel good. Here's what we know with very high confidence. If you're not obese and you're exercising and you're not smoking and you're not drinking too much, you're 95% of the way there. And any bad thing that happens is some kind of genetic anomaly. I actually was at a longevity clinic this weekend.

My best friend from college is now the medical director of a longevity clinic. Really fascinating stuff what they do. They can do genetics. So it's expensive. It's like five grand. But you come in in they take a sample they sequence your your dna and everything not these bullcrap kits that you buy online that you do a saliva test like they actually sequence your entire genome they look for these different mutations that are known to cause disease and they put together a risk profile for you so they show you what your predisposition is. Then they do a complete whole body scan with magnetic resonance looking for anything. So that shows you where you are.

And then they give you advice, like lifestyle modifications you can make to minimize your risk. So for example, you know, maybe you go in and they caught, they found two and a half percent of people had aneurysms that were undocumented. Like they had this technology that they could go in and basically find stuff that other doctors wouldn't be able to find. These people would. So they found, I think they said they found 14% of the people they put through this service had immediately actionable things, but were otherwise, they were diagnosed as healthy by their normal docs because normal docs don't have this technology. But it was pretty cool, you know, to see that. But I mean, that kind of stuff, that's going to be the future of medicine, right? Highly personalized, preventative. That's cool. Exactly. And I think they said that when

the first genome was sequenced, it cost, you know, a hundred billion dollars to do or something insane, you know, or a hundred million dollars, maybe it was, and now it's, you know, a few thousand dollars. And by 2020, it's going to be like a thousand dollars, you know? So this is going to get into the realm of doable for most people pretty quick. And so I wouldn't, you like to know, wouldn't anybody like to know, Hey, you know what? You're high risk for Alzheimer's, but if you make these lifestyle modifications, you can knock that risk way down. The reason I bring this up is like I said, if you're exercising, you're not obese, you're not drinking too much, and you're not smoking, man, you've knocked out 95% of the biggest risk factors. And yes, you can be healthy,

you can exercise regularly, you can eat right, and you may still drop dead of a heart attack at 35. But you got much lower chance of dropping dead of a heart attack at 35 if you do that stuff. And in that case, some of these genetic things like, for example, a BRCA1 gene, if you have the BRCA1, I think there's a couple different variants, but in general, if you've got BRCA1 and you're a female, 99.9% chance you're getting breast cancer. You might as well just get a mastectomy now. It's extremely, extremely powerful. So you can have a person who exercises their entire life, they eat the healthiest diet, all that kind of stuff, and they're still going to get breast cancer, right? Just because of that mutation.

So I think we have this misconception that if we do everything right, our risk goes to zero. There's never a zero risk a zero risk. You know, there is no such thing. But we can do as much as we can to minimize those risks. And I think that a lot of people screw up and then they get so caught up in the devil of the details. Like I know people who like don't even try to eat right. Cause they just feel so frustrated because they're like, well, this TV show said carbs are bad. And this one's at fats are bad.

I'm just frustrated. I don't even care. And it's like, well, man, I feel so bad because it's like, no, you don't, it doesn't matter if you just lost some weight. Yep. It's really a matter of missing the forest for the trees, right? Yeah. It's so frustrating. And I know a lot of what I do is I try to, again, not to pit my book too much, but in fat loss forever, I try to lower the barrier of entry for people who want to diet and say, hey, you can do this any way you want mostly because, hey, guess what? Let's say you love the carnivore diet. I don't think it's probably the best diet for your health. However, if you're overweight and it allows you to get to normal and lose 30 pounds, then it was better than anything else.

Yeah. It's going to improve your health a lot. I mean, look at the, I've cited a few of these examples. There was one guy, Professor Mark Haub, I believe, who lost 30 pounds eating like protein shakes and Twinkies and cookies and shit. And his health had improved by the end of it in a number of ways. His cholesterol was better. His doctor didn't believe it. No way. You ate like shit, basically. But losing 30 pounds, 27 pounds, whatever it was, that alone was enough to improve your health in pretty much every way that we could quantify it.

It was like, wow. Yeah. So there was actually a meta-analysis done by – the author's name was Naud. He did two. name was Naud. He did two, or there was two done, and they basically determined that 95 to 99% of the health effects that we can measure from dieting are completely due to the weight loss. Basically, it didn't matter how you lost it. It didn't matter if it was high carb, low carb, whatever. It was 95 to 99% were completely explained by the weight loss. So if that's the case, the best diet is probably the one you can stick to.

And then that's for getting there, right? And then it's for in terms of maintaining a healthy body weight. Yeah. Then it's figuring out what's really going to work for the long term. And for some people, I'm sure you've had this experience. I have, those are not always one in the same. Some people do actually prefer, let's say, for example, when they're cutting, they prefer a more restrictive diet because they find that they understand flexible dieting and they totally get it. But for them, certain foods are like trigger foods, so to speak. And they would rather just cut them out of their diet completely because they know they tend to overeat them. So they go pretty restrictive to lose the weight, but then they loosen up for maintenance. And for some people that works. Yeah.

And again, it's just very individually dependent. And one of the things I tell people, again, is you have to try different things and don't dismiss what works for you. Because as cliche as it sounds, what some people are going to find easy for a diet, some people swear by low carb and they say, oh my God, I feel hungry. Everything's great. Other people hate low carb. I'm always hungry, this and that. Well, then if you hate low carb, it doesn't matter what the study that came out said. You probably shouldn't do low carb. I've made this point with training as well that, you know, I hear from a lot of people

fairly often who are concerned that whatever kind of program they're following is not the quote unquote best program. It's not the most scientifically optimized program. And I remind people of this, that, hey, so long as your programming is following, there are some principles that it should be based on and there are some boundaries, but there are a lot of the things are negotiable, not non-negotiable. So, so long as it's not absurd and ridiculous, if you enjoy it and you are making progress with it, even if it is not quote unquote scientifically optimal or the best possible training programming out there, if it's working and you enjoy it, like that's good. And if someone were to give you here is, you know, five, this dude has five PhDs or this chick has five PhDs and he or she knows everything about training. Here's the absolute

best possible training program that anyone can create based on the current state of the literature. If you don't like it and you can't stick to it, it's not for you. That's exactly right. And that's why actually they've shown flexible periodization is actually better than rigid periodization because people have more freedom to make choices. So that's a whole nother discussion, but yeah, typically flexibility increases adherence usually, but it's not always the case. Like you said, some people prefer a little bit more rigidity in their diet for certain periods of time. Just to give some context to Mark Halb, we call his nickname is the Twinkie Diet Professor.

He bet his students that – I had him on my podcast years ago. He bet his students that he could lose weight eating just Twinkies. Basically, Twinkies, protein shakes, and a multivitamin. I think he took a fiber supplement too. As long as he essentially hit his macros, right? He did the extreme form of IFYM, and I get this all the time. People say, well, do you think you could just eat Pop-Tarts and protein shakes and take a fiber supplement and a multivitamin and you'd be healthy?

And I'm like, well, yeah, mostly like I wouldn't necessarily advise it, but yeah, I don't know. I wouldn't stand by that over the longterm, but if we're talking about it, well, I don't think it's sustainable for most people to be honest. So to put it in context, how was only eating 1800 calories a day? And he said, he actually didn't really enjoy it that much because it really wasn't that much food. If your 1,800 calories is coming from mostly Twinkies, that's not a lot of food volume. He said he would have preferred like a salad or something filling. And he used to start his speeches off or his slides off when he would present this data.

He would put up a slide of his nutrition intake. So his protein, carbs, fats, vitamins, minerals, fiber. And he would ask the audience, does this look like a healthy diet? And most of them, you know, he's like, if I was in a room with professors, somebody might say, oh, well, you're a little bit low in vitamin K, but yeah, like everything looks good. And then he would, he'd say, okay, is this a healthy diet? And he would show pictures of the foods he ate. And everybody would go, no, no. And he goes, what if I told you these were the same thing?

And then everybody's minds proceed to explode. The other thing was he also documented – because people will – like, okay, well, I think he lost something like 27 pounds, I want to say, over 12 weeks. And people will say, well, that's fine. He lost weight, but did he get healthier? Or do you think he's really healthy? Well, what was going on on the inside? I always hear this. Well, yeah, like his cholesterol and all his measurable health markers improved drastically. So what that says is that, again, it's mostly from the weight loss is what causes these health benefits so if you could just lose weight and keep it off that's 90 to 99 percent of the fight right there and whatever allows you to do that should come

first and all that other argument about well saturated fat versus polyunsaturated fat or carbohydrates versus fats or how much sugar all that shit should come way second to what is sustainable for you and what can you take in to lose weight and keep it off because that is the vast majority chunk are the health benefits come in. But that's not sexy. That's not sexy to sell. That's not sexy when you can say well just have my celery juice and it will take the mucus out of your gut and it'll do everything it'll yeah make your dick bigger

and your asshole tighter you know like like just uh some of the claims you see are just ridiculous but people buy into them because they want to believe that there's these magic solutions and yeah it's just not totally agree and I know you have to run in a minute. I have one last question for you on the mini bulk. It'd be quick, but I know there are going to be people out there who are wondering, cause I got asked it. All right. So you have someone, well, it could be a guy or a girl and they're starting with a relatively high body fat percentage. Let's say it's a dude at 20 or 25% or a girl that's, um, at 25, 30 plus, what are your thoughts there? And they're just getting into weightlifting. They're going, okay,

should I just get into it? Yeah. I think I'm probably going to have them cut first. And here's my reasoning with that. Since they're new, they're still going to gain muscle, uh, regardless because one, because they have a big surplus of energy their body fat stores so they can they can do some body recompositioning and the drive to adapt to the stimulus is going to be so great at the onset of training that they are going to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time right for the most part so yes and the other thing is too is like if you take somebody who's not comfortable in their diet and they say, you know what, we're going to put you on a bulk or not comfortable in their body.

We're going to put you on a bulk. You need to be in a calorie surplus. Their adherence is going to be pretty shit because they're going to be like, well, why am I doing this? I feel like I'm looking worse and worse or not getting to my goal. Whereas if you can get them to drop, you know, 20, 15, 20 pounds or something like that, they look better, they feel better, they feel better about themselves, and they're probably more encouraged and are going to be more adherent moving forward and being consistent.

Now they've got some of that progress. I usually tell people, when in doubt, cut is usually what I say. People say, well, should I cut? Should I don't? I usually say, when in doubt I cut? Should I bulk? I usually say when in doubt, cut, only from the perspective that for me and clients I work with, if they're not real comfortable with their body heading into a bulk or a muscle gaining phase, they don't stick with it very long because they start looking in the mirror and they go, oh, I mean, look at me, I've been doing this for 20 years. I'd like to think I'm pretty successful. And still, I'm about 225 right now, which is big for

me. And I'm looking in the mirror and I'm having to tell myself, you're not fat. You're just comparing yourself to what your best was, body fat wise. You're not fat. You're still lean by most people's standards. But even my mind plays tricks on me you know but that's if i was 16 i wouldn't be able to do this i mean in gaining phase when i didn't feel real comfortable with myself because i would just fall back into cutting you know so i think if it's a cut with the focus that you're going to get comfortable enough to where you can then get back into a caloric surplus build some muscle that sort of thing i think that's okay But yeah, I've just found that people have pretty terrible adherence to gaining phases when they already don't feel comfortable with their body fat level. Yep. Yep. I totally agree.

All right. Well, this was a great discussion, man. I really appreciate you taking the time. I've touched on a lot of things. I think my peeps will really enjoy. Why don't we wrap up with you just letting everybody know where can they find you and your work? And you've mentioned, obviously, you have a new book that you've released and anything else that you want to tell anybody about. Now's your chance. Cool.

Pimpology 101. So yeah, you can find anything to do with me at biolane.com. I'm on all the social medias, Biolane. And I do a lot of education stuff now. I have two e-books now, the Complete Contest Prep Guide, which is for bodybuilders. It's 320 pages. It's actually for

bodybuilders, physique, bikini, whoever. I can literally take you and show you step-by-step how to get ready for a contest, right down to even the most nitty-gritty details. And then my new one, be your own coach, right? Pretty much. Yeah. For 50 bucks, you can, you can coach yourself with this book or the C book.

It's pretty awesome. We've had a lot of great testimonials from people who have really enjoyed. And even if you are, I know a lot of coaches who have gotten it, they just kind of keep it on hand as a, as a reference guide. It's written like a textbook, but funnier and more engaging. And then Fat Loss Forever is the new ebook we just did. And that's kind of like my fat loss manifesto. It's nearly 400 pages long,

and that's on eight by 11. If it was six by nine, it'd be well over 500 pages long. That's intense. So what, it's 160,000 words or something? Oh, I don't even know what the word count is. No idea. But it's up there. Probably around that. It's up there. It's kind of half guide, half theory, but it teaches you what you need to know about fat loss. What are the real important things when you're talking about fat loss, and not just fat loss, but how to keep it off. So we go through, here's the problem with most diets right now. Here's where people fail. Here are the characteristics of people who succeed.

Here's how you can apply this information to yourself so that you can succeed. And then we give you a blueprint of how to do that. So there's really, I don't think there's any other book out there that there's plenty of fat loss books, but one, most of them just talk about it from a theory perspective of, oh, don't eat carbs or don't eat this, or they give you some cookie cutter meal plan. We teach you the process of how to do this. We also teach you how to do this over a long period of time. Like if you have a lot of weight to lose, how can you periodize your nutrition strategy to do this correctly? And not only that,

but how do you then keep it off, which nobody covers? I've never heard of a book, at least it's focused on fat loss, that really spends, we spend just as much time talking about how to keep it off as we do about how to lose it.

So I'm really proud of those two. They've sold, we're getting close to 20,000 copies of total of our eBooks sold between myself and my girlfriend, Holly. She has two recipe eBooks that kind of accompany those two that I've written. So she's kind of the chef. So she puts together recipe ideas for people who need that, who have difficulty making foods that are tasty, but that are also low calorie. So she has one book called Foods That Fit Your Macros, and she has another ebook called

The Contest Prep Recipe Guide. So those people have loved those. So they're great accompaniments to each other. And then the one other thing we do is we have what's called a workout builder on my site, biolane.com. And the workout builder is basically a customizable templates for training. Basically they are the way I train. Um, and they're there, but they're, we customize them for, you know, female or male beginner, intermediate, advanced bodybuilding,

powerlifting, bikini, those sorts of things. They are awesome. We have several thousand members to the workout builder and people love it. And you can get it for $12.99 a month. And it also comes with all of our premium content on the site, a lot of other cool stuff. And you get it for basically the price of buying a coffee each week at Starbucks. It's pretty much a no-brainer. Awesome. Awesome. Well, I've gone through both of the books, and I think I blurbed one of them, and I can vouch for the information. It's fantastic. And like Lane said, it's very thorough. I mean, I don't know what else.

I have never competed. It answered all the questions that I would have, at least, as I was looking through it. through it. And then the fat loss book also is just kind of all in everything you could want to know, uh, to not only be able to lose the fat, but like Lane said, keep it off, which can be, uh, more difficult for, for some people than, than losing it. Funny. I sent a copy of that to Sophie Lee. Do you know Sophie Lee? Yep. Yep. I've had her on the show. It's been a bit, but yeah. She's awesome. I sent it to her and her exact response. She sent me a testimonial in the email with the testimonial. Her first line says, Holy shit, you put everything in here. So yeah, if you guys are interested in those, we have them at biolainestore.com or the direct

links are for fat loss forever. It's how to lose fat forever.com for contest prep guide. It's contestprepbook.com. Awesome. All right. Well, thanks again, Lane, for taking the time. I look forward to doing it again. We can come up with something new to talk about if you are willing. Yeah. I don't think we'll run out of topics to talk about. Thanks for having me on, Mike. I really appreciate it. We always have good discussions. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did and don't mind doing me a favor

and wanna help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you're listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me convinces people that they should check the show out. It also increases its search visibility and

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