Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Lyle McDonald on How Women Can Improve Fat Loss

Episode Date: October 14, 2016

In this podcast I interview the one and only...the inimitable Lyle McDonald. Lyle is a health and fitness researcher and writer, and I have to say, one of my favorite authors in the space. He’s the first person that I found in my journey whose work really resonated with me, so it’s pretty cool to sit down and chat fitness with him. What I like most about his work is not just that he really knows his stuff and deals with subjects very holistically, he also does a fantastic job breaking down dense, complex subjects in terms that anyone can understand. In this interview, we talk about a subject that has consumed much of Lyle’s life for the last year and half or so, and that’s female fat loss. Specifically, he breaks down how things differ between men and women in the realm of losing fat, and especially when we’re talking about getting really lean. As Lyle points out, the fundamentals like energy and macronutrient balance are what they are, but the strategies that work beautifully for men wanting to get shredded won’t necessarily work as well for women. In fact, you can count on them being far less effective, and Lyle dives into why, and what you women can do to squeeze the absolute most fat loss out of your diet and training. I hope you like the interview! 7:20 - How are women different from men? 25:34 - What are your top tips for better results in losing weight? 35:04 - Tips on the exercise component of weight loss. 40:58 - What is a refeed and does it help? 46:51 - Do flexible dieting and "If It Fits Your Macros" help? 1:22:49 - Where can people find you and your books? 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/

Hey, it's Mike, and this podcast is brought to you by my books. Seriously, though, it actually is. I make my living as a writer, so as long as I keep selling books, I can keep writing articles over at Muscle for Life and Legion and recording podcasts and videos like this and all that fun stuff. Now, I have several books, but the place to start is Bigger Leaner Stronger if you're a guy and Thinner Leaner Stronger if you're a girl. Now, these books, they basically teach you everything you need to know about dieting, training, and supplementation to build

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Now, as you probably know, I'm not a fan of the supplement industry. I mean, I've wasted who knows how many thousands of dollars over the years on worthless supplements that really do nothing. And I've always had trouble finding products that I actually thought were worth buying and recommending. And well, basically I had been complaining about this for years and I decided to finally do something about it and start making my own products. And not just any products, but really the exact products that I myself have always wanted. So a few of the things that make my supplements unique are one, they're a hundred percent naturally sweetened and flavored. Two, all ingredients are backed by peer-reviewed scientific research that you can verify for yourself because

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about my supplements at www.legionathletics.com. And if you like what you see and you want to buy something, use the coupon code podcast, P O D C A S T, and you'll save 10% on your order. All right. Thanks again for taking the time to listen to my podcast, and let's get to the show. Hello again. This is Mike Matthews with the Muscle Life Podcast, and in this episode, I am interviewing the one and only, the inimitable Lyle McDonald. Lyle is a health and fitness researcher and writer, but that doesn't really do him justice. I mean, I have to say that he's one of my favorite authors in this space. He's probably, I don't remember if he was the first or if it was Martin Burkhan, but he was one of the first people that I found in my journey whose work really resonated with me

and really helped me. So it's pretty cool to be able to sit down and chat fitness with him. And what I like most about his work is not just that he really knows his stuff, which he really does, but that he deals with subjects very holistically. And he also does a fantastic job breaking down dense, complex subjects in terms that anyone can understand. As you can tell, I'm a bit of a fan. But anyways, so in this interview, we talk about a subject that has consumed much of Lyle's life for the last year and a half or so, and that's female fat loss. Specifically, he breaks down how things differ between men and women in the realm of losing fat,

and especially when we're talking about getting really lean. Now, as Lyle points out, the fundamentals like energy and macronutrient balance are what they are. They apply to everybody equally, but the strategies that work beautifully for men wanting to get shredded won't necessarily work as well for women. And this isn't exactly surprising because women are facing some pretty unique physiological challenges when it comes to weight loss that men don't have to deal with. So in this interview, Lyle dives into why that is, what those big differences are, and what you women can do to squeeze the absolute most fat loss out of your diet and training. So I hope you like the interview. Lyle, thanks for coming on the

show. I'm excited to have you. You're someone I've been wanting to talk to for quite some time now. Thanks, Mike. Glad to be here. Yeah. So this is going to be, as everybody knows from the subject matter, just clicking into this, we're gonna be talking about women and fat loss. And I'm glad to have you on this because I know this has been, how long have you been working on this book for? It's been a bit now, right? Yeah, it's been coming up on like a year and a half. This book kind of, I went, the short version of the long story is I found out that someone plagiarized another of my books last year and it sort of annoyed me and it

was my original flexible dieting guide. So I went to rewrite it. It's a rough book. It was 2004 and I sort of kept adding sections and adding sections and thought, you know what, I should just do a general fat loss book. And I kind of got most of it written and got to the section on women. I was like, you know, I've been avoiding this topic for a decade, because I know it's going to be a nightmare, started working, it started expanding. So I talked about it, of course, women on my feed were like, we need this book. And I'm like, you know what, I should just spin this off to its own project. And it kind of took on a life of its own. At one point, I've actually had to split it up into two volumes,

which is going to be a nutrition and fat loss, which is volume one, and then training is separate because it was pushing over 420 pages to begin. Yeah, a tome. It's absurd. And women are simply just complicated in a way that men aren't. To that first point, by the way, if the plagiarizing is egregious, there's obviously there's possibly for copyright infringement. You know, when I actually talked to a lawyer years ago and he said the problem is since I'm writing about things that are generally in the scientific literature, in premise, anyone could go into that literature and use it. It's not intellectually – it's not like writing fiction or intellectual property. I mean there are sections I've seen where it's like the punctuation is the same, especially when it's one of my typos. But he said it's just really extremely hard to prove in that case.

I mean, I know for a fact that the two people who have done this, yeah, in premise, they could have read the science. I guarantee you they didn't. One of them, when I called him out on it, the second version of that book, he took it out and said, I'm not going to go into the details because he still looked at it. But anyway, it's extremely difficult to prove. And the lawyer just said, you're probably just chasing up the wrong tree. So I figure it's better to just go write a better book. Makes sense. So to that point, then, let's just start with why focus in on women.

So obviously, you have the fundamentals that most of the listeners of the podcast here are going to know the basics of energy balance and macronutrient balance and so forth. So what are you, we could say physiologically speaking or experientially speaking, how are women different than men? I mean, okay. So first off, yes, of course, but you know, the fundamentals always apply. Like there's not, you know, the, the basics of what needs to be done in terms of training, in terms of fat loss, you know, creating caloric deficit, yada, yada, yada. You know, women have different, some different issues in a lot of, I mean, a lot of ways. One obviously is, you know, how their fat is stored.

Men tend to be central fat, visceral fat, abdominal. Women tend to be hip and thigh fat. I remember Duchesne writing about, God, in the 90s about women's lower body stubborn fat, and women frequently have a lot of trouble mobilizing that. And we know the reasons. I wrote about that extensively in my Stubborn Fat Solution. It's got to do with blood flow and alpha and beta adrenoreceptors. And there are clear evolutionary sexual dimorphic reasons. Women's hip and thigh fat exists to support childbirth. And an interesting tidbit is during like the latter part of pregnancy and breastfeeding, hip and thigh fat is mobilized the most easily for women. You'll actually hear women experientially, you know, they'll either,

they usually set calories at maintenance because breastfeeding is like 300 calories a day and the fat just drops off. I've seen, I've seen much higher numbers. I've seen upwards of 600 to 800 calories. I'll be honest, one of the topics I will not be covering in this book is pregnancy and childbirth just because I don't have that medical background and the potential to give recommendations in a situation that could harm a developing or postnatal child is just not something I want to touch. So that is one topic I'm really not getting into. But yeah, it very well may be higher. But I know women that they want to get back to their pre pregnancy way, they just keep calories and maintenance, and it just

drops off like crazy. So that's one of the, you know, the big reasons. There's also some, you know, just different in fat storage patterns. There's differences in how women store fat so after a meal high fat meal men tend to burn more fat for energy more of it sits in the bloodstream which is actually why matter more likely to have heart attacks men tend to store fat more in visceral abdominal fat which is bad and then it's correlated with health risk but it's good and that it's very easy to mobilize anyone that starts exercising like they feel leaner but don't look any different and it's because that visceral fat's coming off and just to clarify for the reader so visceral fat is you have fat under your skin subcutaneous

and visceral kind of covers your organs and yes when you see the big pot belly where it's a hard it's a lot of fat under the right and you touch it and it's just like really physically hard to the touch um women can get that too. It's interesting. As women get extremely over fat, and here we're talking like 50% body fat, the fat cells in the lower body kind of run out of room, and they start to develop a more male-like fat pattern. In men, it's the opposite.

As men gain a lot of body fat, they tend to get hip and thigh fat. So obesity sort of shifts women towards men and men towards women. So that's a big of body fat. They tend to get hip and thigh fat. So obesity sort of shifts women towards men and men towards women. So that's a big part of it. There's even some evidence if women are fed a very high fat meal, the calories go directly to the lower body fat. There's an old, old, old saying among women that a minute on the hips, a minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips. And it's actually true. a final issue with that is surprisingly when scientists have looked at this women and men actually both store initially a lot of the fat in their abdominal subcutaneous fat and this really raised a good big question well if that's

the case why do women get hip and thigh fat in the long term what happens is after that storage it eventually starts to mobilize and if it's not burned women repartition fat from the abdominal area into the hips and thighs interesting so it kind of starts there and then it shifts down right so as long as you burn it off and stay in energy balance it doesn't happen but in the long term women's body and there's an old old old claim that nobody believed that women who were dieting would lean out in their upper body and their hips and thighs would get fatter. And actually, there's some truth to that because women's bodies can pull it out of the upper body. And if it doesn't get burned off for energy, it goes to the hips and thighs.

Yeah, and in many cases with workouts, I mean probably in all cases, you're going to mobilize more than you're going to burn depending on what you're doing at least. Right. And even there, right, it's interesting also. Women have more fatty acids in their bloodstream at rest, not after a meal. And they actually burn more for fuel at low-intensity exercise. And the question has been, well, if this is true, why aren't they losing more fat more easily? And it's because women's bodies will actually, what's called re-esterification. fat more easily and it's because women's bodies will actually it's called re-esterification so the fatty acid comes out and then gets put right back in the fat cell or it gets transferred to a

different fat cell through a different pathway so that's one of the big ones uh there's also some indication right we know about body weight regulation leptin and ghrelin i'm not gonna i'm assuming you're not writing about it a basis in below. A basis in that. This is really what controls mainly the dieting end of things, which is what I'm sort of focusing on here. Women's systems seem to respond differently to leptin. This has been theorized for a long time. It drops faster in women, even in responsive. If men exercise at energy balance, their leptin doesn't change.

If women exercise at energy balance, their leptin doesn't change. If women exercise at energy balance, their leptin still goes down. And there's a lot of early data, some of which has been drawn into question, that women exercise alone is ineffective for women. And it's a little more nuanced than that. But there's definitely indication that women's hunger and appetite will go up higher than men's in response to exercise. More than that, there's more variability among women. I mean, I've worked with and emailed with thousands of people, and I can say that anecdotally, I've seen that much more with women than men, a lot more. Right.

Yes. And there's actually one very classic study. And realize, you know, studies are reporting averages. And when it looked at the weight loss for men, all the men lost some amount of weight, ranging from a lot to a little. When they plotted it for for women though, about half lost, but about half gained. Now the consequence of this was they said, well, on average, nobody lost weight. Well, that's true. Some women lost a ton of weight. Some women actually gained weight with exercise. And there's other reasons we know that people become disinhibited. They do the, I did an aerobics class.

I earned the cheeseburger thing, but typically that's not the cheeseburger is the beginning. And they're like, well, I ate the cheeseburger. So, right. It becomes a whole separate thing, but there is definitely a physiological basis to that. We know we've known for a while. Women are more likely to survive famines than men. And this makes, and this was years ago in a paper by some researchers, Hoyenga and Hoyenga, which they must have been married. And they were looking at some early animal research

and they theorized that, well, this is again, an evolutionarily conserved behavior. Women's bodies have to be able to support childbirth and they have to live long enough to make sure that kids live in a very real way. Cause let's face it, once men have done what they need to do to make a baby they're not really needed it's helpful if they're there don't miss here but if you're in a famine physiologically speaking if you're physiological speaking the woman is far more important to the survival of the human race and this isn't me just pandering to women this was the theory that they they proposed and if you're in a famine situation it's actually better if the man does die, because that leaves more food for his offspring. Like, there's real logic to this.

And, but what, you know, this is an evolutionarily conserved thing that's great for survival, not so great for fat loss. So, you know, there are some practical consequences that we'll come back to. But there are other things going on. One big one that will tie some of this together, right? So when men do lower intensity exercise, they burn more carbs and less fat. Women do lower intensity exercise, they burn more fat and less carbs. So it's always really weird. Okay, so why do women have,

why is it harder for if they're using more fat? Well, we know, you know, the old idea that what you burn during exercise and what you lose is not true, right? What you burn in that hour slot doesn't compare to the other 23 hours of the day. And what happens is women's bodies use fat during exercise and then switch back to carbs for the other 23 hours. Men's bodies use carbs for exercise and then use more fat for fuel. And those other 23 or however long is far more important. There's other stuff, which is more of a practical note, the way a lot of women approach dieting. They don't eat enough protein. But even that's physiologically based.

There are gender differences in food preferences. Men love protein and fat. Women love carbs. And a lot of females, on top of that biological preference, how do they think they should diet? Protein is bad because protein might have fat. Bill, get built in bulky fat is bad. So they live on carbs. So that's a very, like I said, there's chapters of this stuff and there's endless, endless differences, but that's just kind of a quick overview. Yeah, that's great. That's very interesting. Some stuff that I have come across

in my own reading, writing and some stuff that I haven't, which is one of the reasons why I myself am looking forward to reading the book. And part of why this turned into such a nightmare is, originally I was going to kind of lightly reference it, and then as it went, I'm like, you know what? This is going to become another ketogenic diet protein book. I'm just going to go ahead and make it, and it's likely so. And the deeper I look, the more I find. I would add really quickly, usually when I do these podcasts, like the first question is, you know, what's the big difference?

The big difference between men and women is hormones. For men, we've got testosterone. Look at it on any day of the month, and it's basically here. Women have the menstrual cycle, right? We have this fluctuating set of hormones where estrogen comes up the first half and then goes down and back up and progesterone goes low and goes up women every week of the cycle maybe you're dealing with a slightly different physiology that men don't have as i've put it repeatedly men have one long cycle of 65 years of being an asshole women can change week to week and and they use different fuel in the first half of the cycle versus the

second half of the cycle there's hunger is different in the first versus the second half how they store fat is different in the first and the second half we've got pms to deal with you get a slightly increased metabolic rate in the second half of the cycle but hunger and cravings go up to offset this like there's all these changes that are happening and if you're used to only working with men both for diet and training especially training you can a man every day he comes to the gym is the same person yeah a woman feels the same way and sure it's easy and if they've got a normal menstrual cycle and by normal i just mean the standard i'm not saying this is like the norm because there's a bunch of other

stuff every week you may be dealing with someone different and in training especially you can you may see radical changes in performance where the final week of the cycle women may lose their coordination they may be uh what they have labile mood state which is just to say that they're emotionally unstable essentially um i talked to a therapist about this once and he was like, yeah, with women, I don't know who's coming in on any given day. And if she's crying within the first two minutes, okay. Nurse practitioner told me she may have to change antidepressant medications at different points in the cycle. Like there's just, and that's before you get into things like birth control, of which there are enormous type.

And that took me forever to work through women can suffer from what's called polycystic ovary syndrome and they may have elevated testosterone which gives them a more male physiology they're finding a lot of women athletes have subclinically elevated testosterone and maybe 30 above normal which isn't much but in women it's huge yeah and they tend to be better as athletes they respond better they better. Then you get into the loss of menstrual cycle, which is this big issue, right? Women are losing their menstrual cycles left and right when they diet to very low levels.

Men don't have a menstrual cycle to lose. And when women do it, they can lose bone density, impair their health. It's a really bad thing for them. And then you've got the changes that occur at menopause. And there's a perimenopause before it, and then there's postmenopause. And then you've got to worry about occur at menopause and there's a perimenopause before it and then there's postmenopause and then you've got to worry about are they on hormone replacement or not so writing about men i can discuss men and when i got women i have to discuss five potentially distinct situations yeah no that's uh that's a daunting task trying to cover

all of them and it's i'm in hell so i mean i'll be glad when i'm done with it yeah because most of what's out there is either textbook related or there's a lot of bad information so anyway moving on yeah that's one of those i forget who said it there was a quote as a writer said he doesn't so much like the act of writing he likes having written that's going to be one of those things it's absolutely especially in cases like some of my little quicker books that I didn't have to referencing stuff as a nightmare. And this is, I mean, this was a research base that I just wasn't familiar with. As a man, I don't have a conception other than observationally of what's going on in the menstrual cycle, even learning the terms, the changes, all of that.

Like this was starting very much from scratch for me. So it's been, it's been a very exhausting but ultimately beneficial process so yeah and what's just out of curiosity what are you looking to achieve like what's your end goal with the book you want because i mean obviously the the basics are the basics but are you is this geared more toward competitors or you know bodybuilders or is this meant is this going to be meant to be for any woman that it's it's very general and this is another part of why it's so exhausting like i think originally it started out as more dieting physique type stuff but let's face it a lot of women women are far more prone to be seen in extra in diet studies or dieting you know what is it two and

three or not one and three are dieting at any given time so another part of what's so complex is i've tried to cover the general female who may be overweight or obese, the lean dieter who has a completely different set of situations. Like if you've got 40% body fat, a lot of this doesn't apply. At 18, that's when you're starting to starve, just like with men. 40% body fat male and a 12% are different systems. I've tried to at least cover some different sports. So we've got the physique sports, you know, bodybuilding, physique, fitness, figure, bikini, although there's not much to that last one, strength, power sports. There are a lot of women getting involved in powerlifting. Just as a tangent, I frequently find that those women

either have overt PCOS or elevated testosterone because to want to push heavy weights in the squat, you kind of have to have a different body structure. That's another issue. Women have a variation. That's the training book more, but women with wider hips are not really built for heavy power lifts and they don't have the psychological, and this isn't meant as a criticism. It's just, right. Have you ever met a man that didn't want to lift heavy weights unless they were 60 years old? No, you never have. You've never met a man that didn't want to max out. Women love high reps. They love leg training. They love doing certain things. And even taking that into account, most trainers have traditionally been male. Most coaches have traditionally been

male. We've treated women like little men. So I am am trying to cut so then so do the math on that we've got general fat loss lean fat loss different sports strength power endurance uh high intensity mixed and then like team sports multiply that times all the hormonal modifiers i spent i spent weeks i'm drawing up blinding little training and diet charts. Every model modifier. You have to almost mind map it out just to even know what exactly you're supposed to be covering. Oh, I had to keep intense because I couldn't remember what I was actually writing about. And a lot of them are very similar, but a lot of them are extremely distinct. Yeah, but even the ones that are similar, you have to still make that point, though, because that person is going to be wondering, hey, what about me?

And even there, I mean, I can provide generalities. Sure. No problem. As you know, with studies, they, they present averages and there's huge and women can vary. I've seen women across the menstrual cycle. Strength was stable. I've seen some that went PR, moderate, strong. Oh my God.

Could not. I had one trainee went from being able to hit PRs in Olympic lifts to not being able to do more than 60% on the leg press. Her coordination just went out the window. Her strength dropped. And again, you just don't see this in men. And unfortunately, a lot of women are being dieted like men, and it's doing a lot of damage to them. There's slight differences in refeed frequency, diet break frequency, things about their diet because losing the menstrual cycle or menstrual cycle dysfunction can do a lot of permanent damage to a woman

because they can lose bone density that never comes back. Yeah. I've, uh, I touch on that in my, I have a book of women, but it's, it's very much the basics. I'm writing to people more to women that are in the higher, they're, they're, they're overweight, but they don't even know about energy balance. They've heard that calories don't count, and that's an old myth, and you know what I mean? So I understand where you're coming from in that I tried to say, well, I don't want to overwhelm this person.

I do want to give them, okay, good. Here's something you can do that works right now and that isn't going to be unhealthy, isn't going to harm you. There's a lot more you could do to make this better, but I don't. And I would also say in the women's realm, like there's just, there's almost more utter nonsense. Sometimes it's women that do have, you know, higher testosterone or that are projecting, but oh my God, whenever I'm at the grocery store and I want to get my blood pressure up, I look at women's world and whatever article there that says new plant-based diet better than thyroid medication 23 pounds in a week and i read this stuff and it's just where you get on instagram and just look at the oh god you know you get uh jesus ridiculous

exercise programs you get you know then you've got the trainers i forget her name just like don't ever lift more than three pounds or you'll get bulky. There's just like so much utter nonsense. And as much as anything physiological, I think just pathological dieting habits and exercise habits, right? A lot of what men do is right. If a man wants to lose weight, what does he do? Eats more protein, gets in the weight room. If women want to lose weight, they eat all carbs and do low and they walk on the treadmill and that ties into the physiology, which I think is a later question.

So yeah, yeah, yeah. So what women should be doing. Exactly. And that's, that's a good segue into, again, I mean, obviously you have so many things you're gonna be covering in the books or in the book, but if we, if you were to say, okay, here are the top three or five actionable tips, women listening, here's what you can do to have a better experience in your weight loss efforts, better results and better experience. Probably a main one, right? Because we've also seen this endless times. One wants to lose weight, boom, 800 calories, two hours of aerobics a day. Women can actually disrupt their normal menstrual cycle function within five to seven days of doing that kind of nonsense. Like it's that quick.

It's related to the energy restriction in particular, right? Yeah. There's something in the research, like it's been debated for a bunch of years. They used to think it was body fat percentage and all this other stuff. And that's, it's related in that lean women are more at risk for this, but you will find women at 12% with a menstrual cycle, and you will find women at 22 that have lost. And a researcher named Ann Lukes came around and did some really compelling studies showing that it was what she called energy availability, which is not energy balance. It's the key aspect. And energy availability is the number of calories being eaten minus activity. And that, basically what that represents is how many calories are left to the body for everything else.

Right. And there are processes in the body. Your heart has to keep beating. Your brain has to keep working. Your kidneys have to. There are critical functions for life. And there are non-critical functions. Right.

Some early, very low calorie diet studies. Hair would start falling out. Right. Keeping your hair growing doesn't make it. Yeah. From the body's perspective. Correct. It wants to stay alive, and if you have limited calories, that goes into what is required. The menstrual cycle happens to be one that's really, in that sense, not critical because you don't need it to survive. So there's also the issue that if you're starving to death, trying to become maintain pregnancy is not a good

idea. And that's what that whole women. So women can screw themselves up in five to seven days. And what Luke found was that there's what she called a critical energy availability threshold, which was 13.6 calories per pound of lean body mass. And that's the key. It's mainly it's lean body mass, not total or 30 30 K cows per kg and it was really interesting you look at her studies hormones are normal normal well they're like normal normal normal boom and they just they just drop like a rock and one of the things they lose luteinizing hormone which is one of the reproductive it it drives the reproductive system you lose what's called luteinizing hormone pulsatility when you cross that threshold

And that's what starts to induce that menstrual cycle dysfunction so coupling Enormous amounts of calorie restriction with enormous amounts of activity is a big part of it. There's some indication She doesn't buy it I'm not you know that they stress in and of itself can cause problems and if you in I'm not you know that they stress in and of itself can cause problems and if you in Some some work shows that if women ease into exercise they don't over stress the system so Gradually progressing into exercise. I described something. I called a pre diet phase which is you know rather than Jacking your activity and dropping your calories. It's like either keep your activity

consistent if it's already high and bring calories down or keep calories at maintenance and gradually increase your and again this depends on population overweight female not as big if you've got a leaner female who's already highly active she can probably just keep her activity the same and bring her calories down there's an interesting phenomenon actually lighter women are sometimes more more to be dieting. And there is this weird subpopulation of lean women who aren't athletes, who aren't trainees, who want to lose weight. And they're the ones that do the worst stuff. And they're the ones that rebound to higher body weights because they do basically. And I'm not saying that it's through their own fault. They have been given such terrible

information of what a diet should be. So one of them is easing gradually into the diet. And you'd probably find that the psychological people with, you know, where it's kind of a psychological problem as well are more going to fit into that. And there's that as a separate issue. There are people that can psychologically stress themselves into loss of menstrual cycle. It's called the, referring to sort of the psychogenically stressed dieters. And they've shown that those people are perfectionists. And they have, they're extremely dependent on external validation about their appearance.

And if that doesn't describe 90% of physique athletes, I don't know what does. So you have this situation where you've got, you know, what I call the psychogenically stressed diet or the woman who's just like, must lose weight. They are drawn to these extreme diets and it all adds up to this huge problem. There's also an issue I've written about extensively that jacks up cortisol. Cortisol causes water retention. This is on top of the normal menstrual cycle fluctuations. And now they're doing everything. They're dying so hard and they're not losing a pound because they're holding so much water. So what do they do? They double down. They add more cardio. They cut calories. Then they start binging and it just becomes a complete FUBAR situation. Whereas if

they diet more gradually, take a day off, chill, I've joked repeatedly, these kind of women, they need to take a day off, get drunk, get stoned, and get laid. And the next day, they'll be five pounds lighter. It works without fail. So you've got this combination of issues that's relatively more common to women. I've seen it happen in men. There's a certain personality of dieter that thinks more is better, convincing them. That's actionable, point one. Ease into the diet. Unless you're

doing a short-term diet, don't use big deficits. I address those. If you're a physique competitor and you immediately take 800 calories out of your diet, you may lose weight quickly, but what happens when it slows down? do you go now yeah you can only take you only can push activity up so high i mean then what sure and you've got i mean you hear about this you've got the women doing 800 calories a day and three hours of cardio and if you start more gradually you don't and and there are better and worse ways to diet especially for leaner dieters so let's say that's action point number one. Number two is really is the diet. And it's interesting.

In the physique community, you don't see these problems. But in the general female community, right, physique athletes and even strength power athletes, they know the benefits of protein. They may reduce their fat a little bit. Endurance athletes typically are a little too carb crazy because they don't think protein is important. I see a lot of bad diets in that group. But sufficient dietary protein, as we know, is critical for all dieters. To spare lean body mass, blunts appetite, maintains blood sugar, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada.

Like every study done in the last 20 years after scientists spent three decades crapping on bodybuilders, they did the studies were like huh yes higher protein is really better for everyone really for every oh god the study the the research is changing they're now thinking that the rda is about half of what it should be for older people especially to avoid sarcopenia they need more protein they need faster protein like it's everything is about protein these days physique competitor strength power they've known this. So they don't usually do. Usually their issues are more calorie activity related.

But for the average female, she's doing 80% carbs. She's doing almost no protein. She's doing almost no fat. Even low dietary fat itself can contribute to menstrual cycle dysfunction. And that kind of plays in, like you were saying earlier, to a lot of women prefer to eat carbs. So it's easy to sell them on it. It's, Hey, you can eat all these great carbs and you're going to lose, you know, 23 pounds in a week. And getting them to eat more protein is often a real challenge. But whenever you do, I had someone very close to me and I got them on higher protein and she was just like this is a life changer for me like

suddenly their appetite goes down everything gets under control all of that it's just like once you get them to do it it's usually a need and it is it's interesting watching the marketing change now we're seeing you know high protein foods now some of them are crap you know high protein kellogg cereal 10 grams of protein if you add six grams of protein from milk but it's a start protein getting into the general consciousness we'd rather have that than the low fat berries that was absolutely we've got quest bars that are 20 gram quest chips or 20 grams of protein in a bag of potato of snack chips and they're really like quest is doing things very right that's shifting so it's i think it'll

be a little bit easier to sell once it's been programmed into women's consciousness you know and even even if you don't get them to where they need to be initially even getting it up to appropriate you know it doesn't have to be the gram a pound or whatever it is oh and and there's also women do have slightly lower protein requirements. And so it's not as hard. And it's funny when you give women the numbers. You're like, okay, you need 120 grams of protein per day. They're like, oh my God, that's so much. Like, look, a cup of grape yogurt, 23 grams.

A can of tuna fish, 32 grams. That much meat, you know, that's 28 grams of protein. And throw in one or two scoops of powder and there you go. And you're done. Exactly. Once they realize just how, you know, it's like, fine, get your salad. That's great. Get them to put a chicken breast on top of it.

Exactly. And that's one third to one fourth of your protein for the day. And it's not that hard, but getting them to, you know, scoop protein powder, stuff like that. So getting sufficient protein and moderating carbs. And that really brings me to, I think, the third and the most potentially actionable, the most important point is the exercise component. Like I said, men kind of do it right by intuition.

Men hate cardio. They love lifting weights. Whether they do it right or not, different issue. They love eating protein. Men love the Atkins diet. And so women, and they've done the work on this right so like i said earlier if all you do is woman does this low intensity cardio burns fat for fuel now realize women are not and also just doesn't burn that much energy yeah it's like that's the other issue like even when they do the studies

and they're like yeah women may be burning 20 more for fuel. When you're burning 300 calories an hour, great. You burn six more grams, right? You burn one 60th of a pound of fat. The calorie, and there's also indication women burn more of what's called intramuscular triglycerides, the fat within their muscle cells, and that's great. If you're trying to lean out your muscle and not, women's bodies spare body fat, subcutaneous body fat. But they've done, so men who use carbs, right? So I said women use fat during low intensity and use more carbs for fuel later in the day.

Men burn carbs during exercise and use more. And that's very illustrative because we know very well that how much glycogen, the carbohydrate in muscle, how high of muscle glycogen really determines how much fat you use for fuel if muscle glycogen is always topped off you use carbohydrates right and it turns out by using more carbohydrate during fuel that depletes muscle glycogen a little bit for men that's why they use more fat for fuel right so right away this point and and so what have we seen online you get the woman who's been doing, which is a good point to just call out because I get people right in now and then, and they'll be asking about that. Like, Oh, so this burning carbs concept that I guess that how, how does that even help with fat loss as the whole, I mean, obviously these are

even, even aside from energy balance, but just that point that it's not worthless in that sense is that, okay, so you are, uh, that's true. You're burning a lot of gly not worthless in that sense that okay so you are uh that's true you're burning a lot of glycogen in that workout but what are the downstream effects and correct those help right and they'd shown like even in both lean and obese individuals if you deplete muscle glycogen with high intensity exercise that you know it fixes the metabolic inflexibility in the obese and it has the same effect and then i use that in my ultimate diet too, using depletion circuits. And so what do you see online all the time? Some woman who did the two hours of cardio, the high carbs, and finally she starts lifting weights and cuts her cardio down, which automatically that takes that low energy availability out of the equation.

It takes the stress, it takes the cortisol. And invariably, when women get into proper weight training, they always change their diet, they eat more protein, they eat more fat, they eat less carbs. And what happens six months later, they're like, magic, magic is what happens. Like I really cannot emphasize that enough. And it's really that combination, which, which often but not always comes hand in hand, you still see a lot of women doing goofy stuff in the weight room and eating bad diets. But when you get those women, same thing with like I think part of why intervals got so popular, even more so among women, is because of the benefits that it had, the hormonal response to intervals, the glycogen depletion. When you start doing that and moderate your carbs, you start maintaining muscle glycogen at a lower level.

You turn your body into, and I use this phrase in the book, and I hate to use it now, but I'm going to. You turn your body into a fat-burning machine in a physiological way. Sell the sizzle. But it's true. And they've done that work. If you deplete muscle, if women who do interval training will burn more fat, more like men, throughout the rest of the day. I mean, unless they refill it, if they put all the carbs back in, that effect goes away. But combined with those changes in diet moving to more moderate, and clearly there's women,

you know, if you're a marathon, if you're an endurance athlete, and you're doing 30, you need a lot of carbs, but you're also ultimately depleting and refilling them, and your energy expenditure is enormous. But the reality is weight training doesn't burn a lot of calories. It certainly doesn't use a lot of carbs for fuel. You have to do it unless you just do a ton of volume. Exactly, especially if you're doing it right, which means you're really focusing on heavier lifting. Correct.

Shorter workouts. Yes. And again, a lot of women aren't built for it and don't have that you know women love high reps sure and that gets into the training physiology they don't generate as much lactate they're more efficient at higher repetitions um women love training lower body but like watch a guy do a heavy set of heavyish set of 10 squats he needs a five minute rest watch a minute watch a woman do a set of 10 15 seconds later she's going again women recover and a lot of that is they think they, she's going again. Women recover. And a lot of that is they think they need to maintain this pace.

They're not going. And when you start to get them to gradually go heavier and get them to work higher quality instead of just basically pissing around for two hours. So that's kind of the number two and number three go together, which is do sufficient, but not, you know, women who got into the interval thing started doing it six days a week and they blew themselves out. It's a matter of, of balance is if all you do is two hours on the treadmill a day, you're not doing yourself any favors. If you're walking at four and a half miles an hour, do two or three days of intervals, some low intensity cardio to burn, you know,

to burn calories in general, and then add some proper weight training, change your diet up a little bit. Like I said, that's when the magic absolutely happens for women. Um, getting out, I can, I can attest to that. Just, I mean, just, yeah, just in, just in working for a lot of people, because that's my general advice for women is lift weights. I like, I don't do more than maybe an hour, hour and a half of interval work per week when cutting. And I do some walking in addition to that. And that's what I recommend. And it works.

It works. It works. They don't get overstressed. Yeah. So that's a big one. The next really the big issue is the whole refeed thing in terms of most you know, most general definition of a refeed is you're either deliberately jacking up carbohydrate intake, or even, even if you just return calories to maintenance. And what's interesting, I talked about the energy availability work.

And so like three to five days of very low calories can start to tank the menstrual cycle. Now Luke's did a study where she did one day of just massive overfeeding. It was like 6,400 calories. It was some ridiculous amount. That is, that's hard a study where she did one day of just massive overfeeding. It was like 6,400 calories. It was some ridiculous amount. That's hard for guys to do. It felt like they're going to throw up. It might not have been that big, but it was a stupid number of calories and no hormonal effect, quite surprisingly. Another study kind of accidentally, they did three days of fasting, saw the same effects, and they just brought them to maintenance for two days and happen to remeasure them boom the system had reversed itself so that

really again it kind of indirectly is very telling is for women I think almost more so than them doing even if just bringing calories to maintenance it doesn't even have to be like that forced high carb refeed but even bringing calories to maintenance with a sufficient frequency. And that depends on how lean they are, how long they've been dieting, how long they've been dieting. You know, there's a bunch of variables that go into that. And like Eric Helms, who actually contributed a section of this book and who's been invaluable

for giving me feedback. It's funny because he like kind of like you, he's found out sort of observationally a lot of what's working. And so, like, he might start at the beginning of a diet, he might be using one refeed day. You know, athletes also have the issue, if you're depleting glycogen, that's great for fat loss. Eventually, your performance tanks. You have to find that balance. You do have to refill muscle glycogen to get through your weight training workouts. that back. Eventually, you do have to refill muscle glycogen to get through your weight training workouts. Again, it's not nearly as important for weightlifting as it is for an endurance athlete

doing two hours a day. You're rotating body parts. Alan Aragon wrote that great article on, is the post-workout anabolic window relevant? For most people, it's not. If you're an athlete doing two a day within six hours, it's hugely important. Physique athletes, typically not. So he might use one refeed for the first block of dieting, take a break. The full diet break I wrote about so many years ago, it might be two days of maintenance. And then towards the end, it might be three. And he adjusts the deficit days to keep the weight loss where he needs. But it's just a very logical approach to it.

He's coupled that with, I don't know if you've ever talked or written about this, you know, intermittent caloric restriction. It's kind of this new model of dieting that they're using in the obese individuals. It's kind of an out, it's kind of related to intermittent fasting. And what they're doing is rather than just straight calorie restriction, minus 30% every day, they're using big deficits three to four days a week and then letting people come back to maintenance every so often. And the variations they've done, an 11 and 3 cycle, they've done kind of random, so say you might do three days of very hardcore deficit and then a day of maintenance.

And they find that the maintenance day doesn't really go off the rails. And even if it goes up by 10%. Just eating intuitively? Yes, just eating out of the womb. What they're doing, they're using, they call it fasting in the literature, and this is for obese individuals, but they're giving them 25% of maintenance, mostly protein. But do the math, that's a 75% deficit for three days. Even if you're at 110%, you're 10% above maintenance on day four, your effective deficit is still about 30 or 40%. That's huge. And it's much less psychologically stressful, right? If I tell

you, you got to diet 30%, you got to be restricted every day versus, hey, every fourth day, you get to eat normally. It breaks diets. What I wrote about in flexible dieting so many years ago, psychologically, the stress is enormously different. It may be better for lean body mass retention, debatable. The adherence is better. It's at least the same, if not slightly better, fat loss. They've done alternate day fasting. Every other day is super low calories, maintenance super low. And again, if you math it out, the deficit ends up being, if you do four days of fasting and three, you actually end up at about a 40% weekly average deficit.

That's bigger than doing 30% every day. And it's easier anyway. So he's using kind of a variation of that. So in the first, I mean, this, the standard where people like, yeah, that's kind of the point of cheat meals. That's the same kind of concept. Yes. Once a week, you're going to go, essentially you're going to, you know, maybe you'd say you can get down 2000 calories or 1500 calories in a meal. You add that on top of what you ate for the day and bring things to maintenance. So like, so early in the diet, Eric might, you know, would be using like one, one ad lib. So you've got six dieting days. You're still breaking it up. You know that there's never more than four or five days before you get a mental and physiological break later. I'd be too, it might be Wednesday, Saturday or whatever. Later on, it might be a Tuesday, Wednesday, and then two days in a row. At that point, you're getting into some of the cyclical dieting

structures. What he's found is better performance maintenance, less lean body mass lost, and women are not losing their menstrual cycle as early. That's huge. Realistically, women will experience some degree of menstrual cycle dysfunction. Especially if they're trying to get really lean for sure. If they're trying to get 10%, it's kind of a matter of when it's going to happen rather than if it's going to happen. But the longer you can stave it off, the better off you are for a number of reasons. I mean, I discussed menstrual cycle dysfunction for pages and pages and pages because it's such an important issue for women.

So that's another big one. And given that their systems do adapt a little bit quicker and more differently, they may need refeeds or full diet breaks that two week period between dieting blocks, which also will basically reset all the hormones and will do a lot of good. If you've got time, they may need them a little bit more frequently than men, and I've sort of mathed those out back of the envelope. So that's another big one. To that, I would probably add, we all know about flexible dieting. We know that it's a fantastic tool. We know that all the studies show that flexible restraint is better than rigid restraint. Rigid restraint causes people, can cause eating disorders. People go off the rails, they become disinhibited

you can find endless stories of women that are just like if it's not a perfect day of clean eating if they put a tablespoon of milk you know what you might as well go eat four blizzards and what's funny is you know then they have the nerve nerve is the wrong word audacity is probably a better word to say that the if it fits yourros, people doing a treat every couple of days are eating a less healthy diet. Okay. Look, you're binge day and it is a binge day. It's not a cheat day. It is a deliberately trying to put as much crap down the pile. You're eating more junk food in a week than any intermittent, any IIF whammer, if it fits your macros person. And within the flexible diet, there's people that know what they're doing there. It's not like they're doing there.

It's not like they're just eating Pop-Tarts and hot dogs every day because they can't. Yeah, and believe it or not, I addressed this one too because you've got a few very vocal YouTube celebrities going, I'm eating Pop-Tarts and protein powder. A full day of eating. Look at this shit. Correct, and people are like – I've seen people ask, do I have to eat Pop-Tarts if I – like it's been – it's done a real disservice to what the concept actually is. And if you look at most people using it, if it fits your macros, you – they're eating 80% clean diet. They're not even doing a treat every day. They may be doing – it's just whenever they need it to kind of stave off the cravings and keep themselves sane. But even there, there's some differences, right?

A, women do show more dietary restraint than men. They often show higher levels of rigid restraint, which is also associated. The difference, rigid restraint, rigid dieting is, you know, if your listeners aren't, it's that very black and white, good food, bad food, diet food, bad food. Eat this, don't eat that, clean, unclean. Correct. food, bad food, diet food, bad food. Eat this, don't eat that, clean, unclean. Correct. And if you eat a little bit of the wrong food, you've blown your diet for the day. You become disinhibited and you overeat. Flexible restraint, right? Because dieting is still, you have to restrain your food. Sure. That's what diet is. But there's flexible restraint

where you realize that, hey, a little bit, it doesn't blow the diet. I can compensate tomorrow. Flexible dieting in the literature is actually very different than how it's being applied in the physique community, and I address that a little bit. We've got different free meals, we've got refeeds, we've got diet breaks, and we've got the newest one if it fits your macros. I didn't invent these. I think I was one of the people to really first formalize

them in 2000. My guide to flexible dieting. At the time, people were like, what is this guy now? Now everybody has flexible dieting books. Some of them even give me – some of them even credit me. One of them stole it completely. Neither here nor there. I credit you in my book.

Thank you. You're mentioned. A lot of people, to tell them learning flexible dieting behaviors does take time. Taking someone who's a rigid dieter and going, be flexible, is like telling a cat to be a dog. Like, they can't change their mental thing overnight. At the same time, there are issues with flexible dieting that I think the really rabid people have lost sight of. And this is something, like I said, part of the reason I wanted to update my older book. I'm 12 years older. I know a lot more. For a lot of overweight people, right,

they're trying to change longstanding eating habits, bad eating habits. They've got a lot of issues in their brains in terms of how they respond to highly palatable foods. For a lot of folks, I think introducing those approaches as strongly as I believe in them too early might be a mistake. Because I think it's one thing to say just eat normally and it's another to say I need you to put down five grams per kg of carbs. And it's funny. I've done that with people. It's just, okay, let's start simple.

Let's take all the sodas. Let's drop those out. Let's add some protein in these meals. those out let's uh sure let's add some protein in these meals you know so in for certain people i think it may be better to wait a little bit if they're overweight or haven't you know i think what a lot of the really rabid flexible dieters forget especially the the if it fits your macros people right every single one of them comes from a decade or five years of very rigid dieting they counted they measured they every three hours they have extremely good food control. I don't give a damn how much there's one particular individual who I will not name, who's big on like intuitive eating. Just eat normally. Okay. If I ate normally, I'd be 300

pounds, right? There is no such thing in the modern environment. What she, what this person- Too much delicious food everywhere always. But what this person forgets is they had 10 years. and if you look at what this person is eating as an eat normally, it's like half a bowl of cereal. Okay, even I, I've spent so much time dieting and measuring. Even when I go to the buffet, I know exactly how much I'm eating. I am completely aware of it on every level. So are these people. When they say, oh, I'm just eating normally, bullshit.

You know exactly how many calories is in this you may not be measuring it or being rigid about it yeah but do not tell you know your range you know you did not eat 6 000 calories yesterday you know it was like 2500 sure you know exactly and you have a level of food control that a lot of people may not have there's even a very interesting study that lean and obese people's their frontal cortex, that part of the brain that makes us aware, if you feed the lean people's frontal cortex turns on earlier, they know what they're eating. The obese person's does not. They're just blah. So to tell people this, and that's part of why I did sort of this structured

in my first book, those structured, it's like, look, I would love to tell you to just eat and be okay with it. But maybe we need to put some, it's like structured flexible dieting, which is a screwy way of thinking about it. But it's like, here's a way to ease into it. You get a meal, you've got an hour, go eat out at a restaurant because you're not going to get three desserts. Start with this, like you need to put some sort of because god we saw it before people did cheat meals and it's 4 000 calories people will cheat days about body for

life i literally heard of people setting an alarm 12 to 1 a.m and they would eat till 11 59 p.m i've never come across that and all that's i like that this is that's that's dedicated it's a day and they'll eat as much crap as they can. It's not saying it's common, but there are ways to game that system and still pretend and then things go wrong. The biggest thing relative to women is, aka they are, they tend to be more restrained. They are often more easily disinhibited where they lose control of their diet. In that sense, the flexible dieting strategies are fantastic. I think you've probably found most of the really rabid, if it fits your macros, people are bigger males. This is something that gets forgotten constantly. Men get to eat more. Men burn more calories during exercise, right? It's fantastic to say no one should have

to do two hours of aerobics a day. I got news for you. If you're a 120-pound female and already on 1,400 calories and you have nowhere else to go without starving to death, you have no choice. I'm not saying you shouldn't do it right off the bat. Sure. But many smaller women, they just don't have the calories. A 180-pound guy has got tons of calories. He could burn a lot more calories during exercise and and the really egregious uh if and why are usually big bodybuilders i mean

these are guys that so then people they don't they don't even understand really what is when when people just are looking for their instagram they have no idea what's really going on behind the scenes in terms of there's acting and drugs and whatever there's another really informative study right this one group having seen the literature that women may not lose weight with exercise. It's been addressed. There's a lot of reasons that doesn't happen, but they took obese men and women. And what they did is they equated that. Usually the studies are like, we had men and women do 30 minutes at the same intensity.

Well, guess what? That means women are generating 75% of the energy deficit. Of course, they lose less weight. A lot of the reason women lose less weight, part of it is they're lighter. If you normalize weight loss for their starting body weight, it's very similar. But if you give them, reduce your calories by 20%, for men that might be 600, for women it's 400. Well, no shit, they lose less weight. So anyway, they set up a study, and they took overweight men and women, and they very gradually increased their energy expenditure. It took them like six months.

They were doing like 400 or 600 calories per day of hard exercise. Guess what? The women and men lost identical amounts of fat. However, the women had to do about 25% longer because they're burning less calories. For every minute of exercise. Exactly. That's the reality of it on top of the adaptations that are. For every minute of exercise. Exactly. That's the reality of it on top of the adaptations that are. That's a good point, even what you said earlier,

because I'll hear from women now and then that are kind of new to all this, and they'll be surprised to hear that to lose weight. Let's say a girl's at 160 pounds, and she's surprised to hear that to lose weight with doing some exercise, nothing crazy in the exercise, but doing a moderate amount of exercise that she has to eat maybe 15 or 1600 calories a day. And so they'll write me thinking, you know, not necessarily attacking me, but as if that's a starvation diet because of how they're used to eating. So it comes back to that point of like, yeah, I'm sorry, you don't get to eat that much food.

I know that your boyfriend gets to, but you're talking about a totally different situation. I've also seen the other extreme. Women who think that a diet is 800 calories are like, oh my God, I can't possibly eat that much and lose weight. You're like, trust me. Of course, they think they're eating 800. They're really eating 2,000 because they're binging and not talking about it. But the other point I was going to make about if it fits your macros, as great a strategy as it is, right?

The current term in the physique community is poverty macros. It's women who are on like 1,400 calories or less per day. Again, if you're a 115-pound female, you don't get to eat very much. Okay, it's great for a 180-pound male with 2,000 calories to spend 200 of them on a cookie or pop to whatever they're eating. That's not very filling. That's tasty. Cause guess what? They've still got 1800 calories from a practical standpoint. Women on poverty macros don't have that option. They're already fighting gnawing hunger. And if they eat anything that calorie dense,

forget it. They're just not going to make it happen. It's not going to make it through the day. It's just not going to happen. So I find that there's that, you know, it cuts across everything from training to diet to everything else. What larger male athletes think should be done or what they can get away with. And I don't mean get away with by like that they're cheating the system or whatever. Just what is possible for them to be the deficit they can create, the amount of calories they burn in exercise, what they can do with their diet will not work for a 120-pound female. It just won't.

They don't have the calorie burn. Like I said, these are all great concepts to not do two hours, and I wish it didn't have to be, even with that energy availability thing. When that first came out, a lot of people became very extreme about it. You can't ever go below that value. Well, yeah, you do have to, or you can't ever go below that value well yeah you do have to or you won't lose any more fat it is a reality of being that lean and that small at some point you will cross that threshold you will have to if you're trying if you're trying to get 10% body fat you have no choice yeah and that just to specify for the listeners that these sure i'm

talking about the general female and the general female the only time they've even seen menstrual cycle loss and obese weight when obese women was with gastric bypass because their calories went from high to effectively zero but this is something that unless till a woman's below 24 body fat none of this is an issue but if you're a female at 15 percent 14 trying to get to 12 you will eventually have to cross that threshold. There is no getting around it. All you can do at that point is bring calories to maintenance at a sufficient frequency, take a diet break. But what we're getting at, if it fits your macros, may not be an option. But as long as you're having the maintenance day, well, guess what? That encapsulates if it fits your macros, because that's a day where your calories may go from 1,200 to 1,800 or 2,000.

You can afford the chocolate now or the whatever. On that day, exactly. So there's a lot of things just, you know, and I, of course, being who I am, I have to think about all of this and discuss it ad nauseum and some of the other silly criticisms if it fits your macros on both. ad nauseum and some of the other some of the other silly criticisms if it fits your macros on both but i find a lot of the if it fits your macros crowd is becoming as as much of zealots as the clean eaters and i find that frustrating they are becoming well this is the only way anyone should diet well no and some people have trigger foods i have even found people they don't you know if they do that free meal it's beneficial they're just like it's just psychologically there's a switch a lot of people turn when they're dieting from people exact same thing yep they don't they actually don't like to have cheat meals or free meals or

whatever because they know psychologically it like it's it's better for them just maybe to eat a bit more of the foods they're used to eating and not go there yes and that's perfectly fine and that's something that like i said i've with 12 more years of experience, these are things that I've have changed, have written about in this book and another book I'm working on. It will be there as well. And it's like dieting to a great degree is a skill and it's something there are variations, even for the intermittent caloric restriction. I think it's a great model. But if people find that on that ad lib day, they're going nuts, well, straight calorie restriction may be better for them. One of the things I suggest, if you're going to try any of these flexible dieting strategies, try it and it fails. Well, try it again and change something.

And if you fail two or three times, stop. Like, it's just that simple. Learn from the experience, right? So one thing I got involved very deep into, there's actually some really good stuff in the addiction literature that can carry over to dieting. And there's something they talk about. It's called the abstinence violation effect.

What happens when you fall off the wagon, right? The alcoholic goes and has a drink. Shit happens. The drug user, I mean, shit happens. We're all human. You can either take that as a failure of will and just drive yourself and go on a binge, or you can learn from it and go, okay, I can't go into a bar with a friend. I cannot be around these people. I thought I could. You learn from that experience. And over time, you learn what's going to be most you know and of course even

flexible dieting is how bodybuilders got in shape without it for years there's no i won't debate that and that's one of the silly the critics well clean eating works well yeah but this works because here's what you don't see you see the people on stage well by definition the people who made it to stage ready were the people that made it to stage you don't hear about the 90 that cracked yeah and who failed and who blew up it selects for people who succeed often also have advantages that the others don't i'm not even just talking about the the secret drug use nobody talks about i'm just talking about the differences in physiology some women's systems are more robust they don't lose their menstrual cycle others lose in a heartbeat there's so much individual there is testosterone in men varies threefold a guy with 900 testosterone very different situation the dude started 300

and i find that we assume that the success stories are how things should be done well maybe maybe not also there's a lot of lying that goes on. I saw a recent story. As a pro-level, it was either physique or bodybuilding, female competitor, one of the magazines wanted her to write up her diet. She wanted to write that she used flexible dieting. They wouldn't let her. They refused to run the piece because it goes against their narrative, which is all successful people eat clean and use our supplements. There is a lot of disinformation as much as I'm surprised they even cared enough about it. I'm surprised they even have a narrative. It seems like they just, it's, they'll contradict themselves one month. They will. But if you're, if you've written a magazine and your entire concept is, you know, cleaning, you really can't allow someone to say, you know what I not, but anyone is going to say is even the success stories, right? We see them in their pinnacle of physique perfection. Let's talk about what happens the next month. Let's talk about the 40,

20 pound weight regain. Let's talk about how they quit training for a month because they're so overtrained and exhausted. You don't hear that talked about. And what I found is that people who use ReFeed's flexible dieting strategies, they don't have, if you do six months of complete restriction, of course you're going to blow up. And I prepped someone years ago with body opus and everyone in her gym, that'll never work. How can you eat pancakes every week and lose fat and low carb high and yada, yada, yada. And after the contest, they all blew up and she'd never felt that restricted. So it wasn't that big of a deal. So it's one thing to focus on the purely short term. That's that type A rigid.

In the short term, it works great. And in the long term, you blow up eventually. Are there people that can probably do it? Sure. Do I actually think they're doing it all the time? No. I think they're not telling you about the binges. They're not talking about it.

Especially if that type of person, because they want to project themselves as the invincible robot. Of course. I mean, if they lie about their training, they lie about how hard they're working, all of that. And we know that people misreport food intake. And what's interesting is most people do it for lack of awareness. They don't even know. But there's some indication, leaner, more athletic people, they're the ones deliberately lying

because they don't want to talk about the cheeseburger. They don't want to talk about it. Well, if they don't acknowledge it happened, then it didn't happen. Sure, they don't want the researcher to think they're less healthy than they are. So if there's any group that is being deliberately deceptive, it's them. The obese people just don't know any better. They don't know what calorie portions are. Anyway, so flexible dieting is great, but if it doesn't work for either psychological or physiological reasons, drop it. It's just really that simple. Even with if it fits your

macros, if you find a food that you cannot eat in moderation, don't eat that food. And to show you the zealotry of that, orthorexia which is this new eating disorder which is being very concerned with the moral healthiness clean eating is a very orthorexic behavior uh the early the food hygiene even that suggests food is clean because the body is clean and they have decided that if you have a trigger food that you cannot personally eat you are that is orthorexic because in their, if you don't include, it's not that you even can include a given food. If you don't include every food, you're orthorexic. And that is not what the word means. If I choose not to drink because I don't want to,

I am not a moralist. If I choose not to drink because I think it is a sin, I am a moralist. They cannot see that nuance. So if you eat a particular food, if you're like, I want to have a couple of Pop-Tarts and you eat the box, that is not a good choice for you. Sometimes, again, from the addiction stuff, set up what are called bright line boundaries. These are boundaries that you don't even consider. An alcoholic says, I do not go, not I cannot go into bars. I cannot means that I can. I do not means I don't. They do not go into bars. I recommend people doing it if it fits your macros. It's a pain in the ass. Go to the store and buy what you're going to eat and don't if you think you can have a bag of cookies and that you can stop it too you're either a liar or you're a better person than i am go get exactly what you intend to eat and no more yeah and even that that's i mean i even i even do that

and i would say that i'm probably one of the stronger-willed people when it comes to food. But I just figure that why deplete willpower on stupid things like that when I can just avoid the situation altogether? Correct. And so I find there's – I think there's a lot of good stuff that hasn't really been applied out of that literature that has just as much of an effect for dieting. But again, there's another book you're going to have to write. that has just as much of an effect for dieting. There's another book you're going to have to write. Well, the other book, the book that this derived from,

has a huge section on behavior change and adherence. And that's when I really got into that literature. And I talk about a lot of the social psychology work and willpower. And it's not pre-motivation. I can't remember the term right now. I'm like intention implementations and mental contrasting. There's a lot of good work because clearly what we're doing is not working, getting way off topic,

telling people you need to eat less and exercise doesn't work. They motivational interviewing. What are the hesitations? What are the blocks you're having? Having people do what's called mental contrasting as a strategy where they list what they want to do and then they list a roadblock while you identify the potential problem and that way you can just reading about this recently yeah and it's really powerful stuff for such a simple

approach and you set up having identified the potential problem you then come up with a strategy for one because it's going to occur right now look mean physique you mean physique competitor and become a social pariah who never leaves the house not terribly psychologically but athletes do it all the time that's neither here nor there for the average person that's not an effective strategy look you're going to have to go to a social event with food you're going to be around it unless you want to have a really unhappy life those strategies and they're better i think flexible dieting too, it puts the dieter in control of the diet, right? Most people who have a binge, who eat the cookie go, oh, I failed, I'm a loser, I wasn't perfect, yada, yada, yada. And it sets off whatever,

shame spiral, whatever pop psychology you want to use. I think with the flexible dieting, if it fits your macros, the full diet breaks, it puts them in control of the diet. It's not, I went off the rails. Today it was a diet break. I'm choosing to do this and it changes the psychology immensely. So anyway, so I would say those are really the kind of the big four is, you know, one, don't jump into extremes right off the bat. You know, there are exceptions. I've written a crash dieting book for lean people. It's it's two weeks. If you're doing a quick, what do they call it, a mini cut, fantastic. You can get away with that. If you're trying to diet long term, it doesn't really work for leaner people. These people can use that to start things off, get that good quick change.

So ease into things. You may have to progressively increase it as you go right and i think if you look at really successful competitors especially when they have a few contests under their belt they're adjusting things a little bit every week they start very moderate and then you know every week they'll add five minutes of cardio and they'll cut out a little bit more stark or whatever they're doing and they've learned to make micro adjustments so it's never abrupt right we know that you know metabolic rate is kind of you're getting smaller and they're just like okay i want to stay on the bottom of this curve so i'll cut out maybe 50 calories a day here i'll do that extra five

minutes of aerobics and it's very gradual now that may end up at the extreme but there's a difference over 16 weeks doing this and in week one doing that. And that's what most people do. So ease into things. Moderate your diet. Get sufficient protein, moderate amounts of dietary fat. And I know some people like keto diets. I address all this stuff.

Don't have time to get into it. I even write about there is the potential for synchronizing the diet with the phase of the menstrual cycle i was going to ask about that but i figured that's a whole nother it is it's too it's too and it's funny i'd written that chapter a year ago i'd put it together with all the physiology and that study that i'm sure you've read came out the menstrual lean study that actually did basically what i'd written about and i'm just like yeah pubmed reads me uh anyway online internet joke um but yeah and they basically showed exactly the same thing where they adjusted the macronutrient balance they raised calories a little bit in the luteal phase right that's when we have their cravings they deliberately allowed them a small

block of dark chocolate which is not only brilliant but is if it fits your macros in a nutshell. So, yeah, so adjust your diet in general terms. Moderated carbs, unless your activity is super high. It's still a balance issue. But physique athletes, you just don't need that many carbs. I got news for you. Even strength and power especially. They've known they eat even higher protein because they feel better. So couple that with a mix of proper heavy-ish weight training. It doesn't

have to be heavy fives. You're not built for it. But if you're doing 12s and you can do 25 reps, you need to put some damn weight on the bar. I see women leg pressing with a quarter on each side. And I just want to go, you lift more weight than that when you climb stairs. Just lifting your body weight is more than that. What are you doing? There's a funny study or something from years ago, and they asked male and female athletes to estimate their 10 rep max. Men were about 50% over, women were 50% under. Women vastly underestimate how much they can lift, and they're told to tone and rep and all that crap. Heavy-ish weight training, a little bit of intervals to deplete some muscle glycogen and increase fat burning

moderate cardio so you're not over overdriving overstressing the system within one context another whether it's the occasional full diet break which could be 7 to 14 days of maintenance eating the occasional maintenance slash refeed day, depending on how you want to approach it. If it fits your macros, if you can make it work. For smaller females, it may simply be an unworkable approach. Fremales, crapshoot on that one. Some people like them. Some people think it does more harm than good. That one is probably the least required. It's purely psychological. It has no physiological effects. If it helps, do it. If you hate it, don't worry about it. Again, a refeed maintenance day both encapsulates if it fits your macros and a free meal because you've got enough calories to eat

something to eat that tree and you can just put them together. So those are really kind of the big four players on this. I guess if I wanted to add a fifth one, it's that all the research is great. All the generalities are great. All that stuff is fantastic. I think women, as much if not more so than men, are going to have to be their own, or their coaches have to be their own scientists. You are going to have to track your own responses. Again, the variation among women, I think, is larger than in men. The menstrual cycle, and we know the average is 28 days. Almost no woman has a 28-day cycle. They say they do.

They think they do, but it's 25 to 32 days. It can vary between women. It can vary in the same woman from month to month to month. Some women, if they find that their hunger and appetite is off the rails, I've said, well, like in the luteal phase, right? So calorie expenditure goes up by about 300 calories. In premise, you could use that to create a larger deficit by just keeping your calories where you are.

Or you could technically raise your calories a couple hundred, add the dark chocolate, whatever, to offset the cravings. The net result is the same, but that's going to be an individual thing. Or you can, you know, when you have that super craving get your dark chocolate have a couple pieces buy go buy the little single pieces from lint or whoever it is and don't don't buy the bar and don't buy the bag of the lint truffles and get it out of your system and get on with your life uh from a training standpoint there's a whole other to do another podcast it physique doesn't have to worry about this. It's not a performance training in the strictest sense. We work in higher repetition

ranges. Changes in strength aren't big variables, right? If you're training at 70% and your max is 10% down, fine, it's a little bit harder. You can grind it out. If you're a strength power athlete trying to do triples at 90% and your max is down 15%, guess what? You can't make that lift. You can't. Your coordination changes, injury risk changes throughout the cycle, and this is something that, I mean, powerlifting, you may already be doing that. Heavy day, light day, medium, heavy week, medium week, light week. light day, medium, heavy week, medium week, light week. But you know, PMS, if that's the week, if the late, the final week of the cycle, if that's when your strength and coordination go to crap, guess what? Great light active recovery week. And when women start menstruating, usually

within a couple of days, their strength is off. I had one trainee, she was doing two a days and had been consistently. So I knew what her pattern was. We went in the morning, crap, just crap. She couldn't lift for squat. Her, her coordination was off. She started menstruating at like one o'clock that afternoon. We went back later that day and she's at a personal rep, personal desk. Like it is, it's not universal, but it, for her, it was a damn switch. I could predict that once I, once I got a hold of the pattern, I could predict it like the tides. I knew exactly, which is actually a horrible choice of words. No, I really am.

That wasn't deliberate. But it is like clockwork for her. I know that for seven, I knew that for seven days, I had to just give her light machine work because it's all she could do coordinatively and physiologically. And I knew that as soon as she started her cycle, a couple of days to get heavier, and then I could just punish her and then a little bit lighter the next week, a little bit heavier after ovulation, cause a little bit of testosterone spike. And then we'd be right back in the cycle. And once I started programming, according to her personal cycle, now I'm not

saying that's universal for all women, her results were far more effective because we'd go in and I'd be like, well, here's what the card says. Why can't you lift this? I could do it. I can lift the same every damn day. Like men can do that. They don't have those shifts. But it took me a while to wrap my head around it. But then again, some women, flat.

PCOS women can be trained more like men because they have elevated testosterone, typically have a different body structure. That doesn't even get into the psychology, right? Most sports, like if you a man what do you do what are you a girl do you leave your purse at home i have news for you that doesn't work well with female athletes i mean it can i'm sure you'll find women i've had some really combative powerlifting females that are just they'll compete just as hard as women. Women in team sports, totally different psychology. If you pit them against one another, they'll hate you because women are sort of raised to be in what they call the web, which is, it's about facilitating group dynamics. You tell a male basketball player, go out and dominate. He'll do it in a heartbeat because he'll dominate the other team,

make his teammates respect him. You tell a female athlete in a team sport that, it goes against her. You have to tell, you know, it's not my area of expertise, but female coaches, which are becoming more prevalent, thankfully, are realizing you have to handle female athletes frequently differently. I'm not saying it's universal team sports psychology. The women who are drawn to powerlifting and physique, I think do tend to be a little bit different because otherwise a woman doesn't want to do a max deadlift without a very specific hormonal and psychological profile. And I'm not saying that men don't vary as well. I find that men are more constant. So there's a lot of factors that go into that with training, but this was mainly about diet. So that's probably a good place to wrap up. Yeah, no, a lot of really good information i know everyone's gonna like because i whenever i had do something specifically for women it always was it

received very well because there's just not that much out exactly there's not that much so that's why i was excited to get you on and talk about something that is a legitimate difference that's worth discussing as opposed to fake differences that are used to just sell bullshit basically correct and and unfortunately just getting way off topic you you know, there's a big push right now. And this has to do with sort of some extremist feminist ideology. And I do not want to get into that. But there's sort of this idea that, well, there are no differences. And we should.

And I personally, and I seriously, I had to make so many caveats in the first chapter of this book, right? What's happened back in the day, it was men writing about sport and men writing about everything. Men took differences and turned it into better and worse, right? Men and women are physiologically different. Men typically stronger. Women typically have more endurance. Men have strengths and weaknesses and women have strengths and weaknesses relative to each other. And there's been very much a backlash against that, that to suggest differences goes back to this patriarchal inferior and superior. And I'm not, you know, you have to make a comparison. But, and there's this general idea, you see the same thing in a lot of ethnically based medicine, that to make a distinction in physiology to make a distinction well that just harkens back to some really ugly times in the past this is my own bias

because i'm writing a book about it but you've got a group that's saying men and women are identical they can you should just treat them the same that's clearly untrue little boys and little girls are about the same at puberty everything changes to To deny the physiology is to deny reality. And there's too much damage being done to treat women just like little men, which is what has happened for decades, I think is far more damaging than the possibility that, you know, masculinist assholes are going to turn us into, see, see, women don't have as much upper body strength who cares you know when the food supply dwindles your ass is dead exactly so who won the battle so i i don't really try to it's just reframing it you're talking more about like you know they're talking there are quantitative

factual type things that have been labeled with these qualitative negative correct and that was very much men writing about it which you know for the same reason that white sports writers in the 30s black athletes couldn't get a break right n teams taboo book read about that and it's not you know and that's it was if a black athlete won he was more animal than man and if he lost it's because he was lazy well black athletes couldn't ever win on their own merits and that sort of so when Enteen wrote his book called Taboo, you know, why blacks dominate sports and we're afraid to talk about it, it had a lot of

flashback because it harkens back to a very ugly time. It harkens back to the bell curve, which suggests ethnic differences in intelligence, which is a whole separate thing. Even brain structure, men's and women's brain structure is different. Men and women parse things differently. And I'm very clearly using the word differently. Women, men's and women's brain structure is different. Men and women parse things differently.

And I'm very clearly using the word differently. Women, there's differences in how we observe spatial differences and things like that. Like ask a man, a typical man and woman to give you directions. A woman will use landmarks. And you see this in other species. A man will give you distances. A man will go a quarter mile down there, take a right, go a mile down. A woman will go down there, turn right at the Walgreens, and the HEB is up there.

And I'm not saying one is better or worse because they're not. They're simply a different way of parsing things. So, yeah, I find that ignoring those, just look at the menstrual cycle stuff. Men start with higher bone density. Part of the reason men don't get osteoporotic fractures is they die sooner. Cheery. with higher bone density part of the reason men don't get osteoporotic fractures is they die sooner cheery um they die they lose bone density slower and they die seven years earlier than women so they don't they die before they get into problems a woman who's sacrificing bone density by banishing the estrogen and deliberately avoiding losing her menstrual cycle and this is hard to convince a 23 year old female well in 50 years you're putting yourself at

enormous risk for osteoporosis because that bone density you've got till about 30 to afford to develop bone density if you don't do it now and if you're actually losing bone density you're going to be in trouble 60 years but try telling that to a young female athlete um something else that's actually is in the book i talk about bone density the best way because even a lot of exercise modalities don't really effectively build bone density. Low intensity walking is one of them. It does crap. Cycling, you can lose bone density. Swimming, you can lose bone density. Weight training is good. Explosive work is better. Stuff that puts a very high strain rate on bone repetitively. So even light jumping plus weight weight training, plus that gets into the diet

thing too, which we didn't touch on. Women often make food choices that are very detrimental. They cut out red meat and they end up anemic. They cut out dairy, they end up calcium deficient. They cut out, they also end up zinc deficient, magnesium, a lot of it through their food choices, many of which are just considered de facto how you diet. Physique competitors are living on tilapia. Dairy is unclean for some reason. They're living on- Even potatoes are unclean, right? Yeah. That's a whole separate issue, but there's a lot of specific nutrient deficiencies that can cause women a lot of problems and their food choices contribute to that.

Fascinating stuff. So fascinating stuff, fascinating stuff. There's so much to talk about. Yeah. So where can people find you so that, you know, your work and the books that you have already put out and then maybe get on a list for, cause I'm sure a lot of people listening are going to want to want your book when it's available. Is there an email list? I don't do that. I'm too lazy. Um, I really don't, but trust me when it's out, people will know that this thing has been being hyped for so long. I don't think there's any. They're going to follow you on Facebook or something.

Yeah. Okay. So my website is you can either go to bodyrecomposition.com. It's all one word or lylemcdonald.com will get you there. That's my website. I've got like over 500 articles. My store is all there. I'm on Facebook.

I've got a personal feed. I have a page that I don't do much with. I do have a very active Facebook group. If you just put Body Recomposition, it'll turn up. I've also got, if you want a fun group, I've got the Butthurt Over Lyle group that I created. People that are mad at me and

are butthurt over me. That's just like, I'll go troll them and they'll troll me. It's all good. It keeps it out of the main group. I i've got a support forum forums.lylemcdonald.com i'll be honest it's not very active i think facebook has really uh updated the need for forums at this point so probably the best place to find me personally would be in in the facebook group and then if you want to read my endless writings about stuff, that would be the website. Great. Awesome.

Well, I highly recommend everybody go check out Lyle, follow him, read his stuff. I mean, you're one of the first people whose work I came across when I decided to really educate myself in my little journey or whatever. And I've stuck around since.

Well, to show like, I realize I'm getting old now. Cause I was really, I got out of school in 95. i got on the internet very early i was certainly one of the first people to really be pushing sort of science-based research against a lot of the bs of course nobody listened and now we're all about evidence-based but you know that was 20 years ago and i've got people coming up now that are you know we've got a lot of really smart people who have PhDs.

I mean, Brad Schoenfeld is doing phenomenal, very practical research. Eric Helms is both the research and the coaching realm. And I've had a couple of them go, yeah, when I was an undergrad, it was your stuff that really kind of put. And I'm just like, I'm so old. But, yeah, there's people that are coming up. it's really interesting watching it changing very significantly, at least among a percentage, right? There's still the majority that's going to go to bodybuilding.com and that's fine. But I think there is an increasing number of people, especially coaches, that are getting away from the very six meal per day, this, that, and the other type of approach. The mythologies of the past. the very six meal per day, this, that, and the other type of approach. The mythologies of the past. Yes. To what I think are going to be far more effective approaches going forward.

So it's always good to hear people doing that. Yeah, absolutely. And that's why I try to just do my part in spreading the word of the work of guys like Schoenfeld and Helms and you and so forth. So yes, very good. Awesome. Well, thanks again for taking so forth. Yes. Very good. Awesome. Well, thanks again for taking the time. I really appreciate it.

And maybe we can line up another one sometime for the training side of things. Sounds like a plan, Mike. Cool. Hey, it's Mike again. Hope you liked the podcast. If you did, go ahead and subscribe. I put out new episodes every week or two

where I talk about all kinds of things related to health and fitness and general wellness. Also head over to my website at www.muscleforlife.com, where you'll find not only past episodes of the podcast, but you'll also find a bunch of different articles that I've written. I release a new one almost every day, actually. I release kind of like four to six new articles a week. And you can also find my books and everything else that I'm involved in over at muscleforlife.com. All right. Thanks again. Bye.