Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Stan Efferding on Making Fitness Simpler & More Sustainable

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

What’s the secret to a sustainable diet that actually works? And how can you successfully integrate fitness into your busy schedule? Stan Efferding, acclaimed powerlifter, coach, and creator of The Vertical Diet, returns to the podcast to reveal how simple, realistic habits can transform your health. If you’re not familiar with Stan, he’s a two-time holder of all-time raw world powerlifting records and famously dubbed the “world’s strongest bodybuilder.” He’s also a sought-after coach who’s worked with elite athletes like Hafthor Björnsson, Ed Coan, Ben Smith, Flex Wheeler, and Jon Jones. In this episode, Stan shares his straightforward approach to health and fitness, focusing on practical strategies that work in real life. In this interview, you’ll learn . . . How to fit nutrition and fitness into a busy life The importance of sustainable habits over extreme programs The role of micronutrients and gut-friendly foods in overall health The surprising benefits of small, frequent movement throughout the day over long, intense exercise sessions Why consistency, not perfection, is the key to long-term success And more . . . So, if you want to make fitness simpler and more sustainable, click play and join the conversation. --- Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (09:29) Enjoy your workouts (15:44) 10-min vs 30-min walks (17:18) Walks after meals (25:01) Why exercise isn’t for weight loss (31:37) Macronutrients for goals (44:28) Do we need fruits/veggies? (55:41) Multivitamins: yes or no? (57:23) Easy-to-digest foods --- Mentioned on the Show: Creatine Gummies The Shredded Chef Stan Efferding The Vertical Diet Stan Efferding YouTube Stan Efferding Instagram

I just said to a client last week and not a couple days later, I saw a popular influencer post about this that don't fit your life into your training program and diet, you know, fit your diet and training program into your life. It has to be something that, as I, on the cover of my book, says simple, sensible and sustainable, something that becomes part of a lifestyle. Hey there and welcome to another episode of Muscle for Life. I am your host, Mike Matthews.

Thank you for joining me today for an interview, another interview with Stan Efforting on sustainable fitness, sustainable diet, sustainable training, nutrition and exercise that you can successfully turn into a lifestyle that you can maintain for the long haul because the goal is not just to get into good or even great shape it's to stay in good or great shape for the rest of our life and to do that it has to be a lifestyle. It can't be a crash diet, it

can't be a crash exercise challenge, it can't be a crash diet. It can't be a crash exercise challenge. It can't be a regimen that requires an extraordinary amount of willpower that we have to push ourselves continually into. It mostly needs to draw us into it. It mostly needs to appeal. It needs to be enjoyable. We need to be eating meals that we like. We need to be doing workouts that we generally like. And Stan is going to be talking about all of that in today's episode. And if you are not familiar with Stan,

he is a two-time holder of all-time raw world powerlifting records. He is famously called the world's strongest bodybuilder, he's a sought after coach, he's worked with many elite athletes like Hafthor Bjornsson, Ed Cohn, Ben Smith, Lex Wheeler and more, and Stan is also the creator of the vertical diet. We will tackle today's episode shortly, but first I need to tell you about creatine gummies. You probably know that you don't need supplements to build muscle, to lose fat, to get healthy, but the right ones can help. Like creatine for example, which is the most studied molecule in all of sports nutrition,

and hundreds of studies confirm that it can safely boost muscle and strength gains and improve muscular endurance, reduce muscle damage and soreness from exercise, preserve lean mass and strength when dieting, when you're restricting calories to lose fat. And there's even new research that suggests that creatine supports brain health and cognition as well. And that's why my sports nutrition company, Legion, just released creatine gummies. Which sounds like a gimmick, but many people actually prefer gummies over powders and pills for a few reasons. One, there's no dosing and mixing with liquid, so there's nothing to clean up.

Two, gummies are portable, so that means they're great for on the go, they're great for traveling and so forth and three they are a deliciously different and I hate to say the word I'm groaning inside vibe they're like creatine candies now creatine is not going to help you pack on brain shrinking amounts of muscle in 30 days flat it it's not gonna add another plate or two to the bar, but it will help you train harder, it will help you recover better, it will help you gain muscle and strength a bit faster, and it will do those things

without any of the unwanted side effects associated with other performance enhancing compounds. And so, yeah, you should buy my creatine gummies because you'll love them, because it's science. And you can get them over at bylegion.com. That's B-U-Y-L-E-G-I-O-N.com slash creatine gummies. And because you are a valued podcast listener, you can save 20% on your first order

with the coupon code muscle. Again, that's bylegion.com slash creatine gummies save 20% with the coupon code muscle. Hey Stan, it's nice to see you again coming from American Samoa, a place that I was checking your Instagram, looking at potential topics and so forth. And it reminded me that, that, that, oh, that's right. That actually, that is a place that you don't hear about it much. You don't know it's a tiny little island, about four hours off the coast of Australia and New Zealand down here. Fiji might be something somebody's familiar with as far as the South Pacific goes.

And it's just a beautiful little place, about four miles wide and 20 miles long, although not perfectly a rectangle, but that's about the size of the community. Maybe 50,000 people in total reside here on the island. But my wife was born and raised here and we visited many times over the last couple of decades. Finally, over Christmas when we came down, we were looking at each other, why don't we just come back. So when home sold the house, here I am kind of on a permanent vacation, island time. I'm really loving it. The weather is about 75

to 85 degrees, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. If it rains then just wait 10 minutes the Sun will come back out. It's one of those types of environments. Kind of like Hawaii's weather but a little warmer. It's one of those types of environments. It's kind of like Hawaii's weather, but a little warmer. It's been fantastic for the kids too. My kids are 10 and 12 now. So we put them into school here and they just love it and they're enjoying island life. Of course, you got the ocean every day. We've got a great big swimming pool down here. Just took my kid to play some golf lessons yesterday. As mentioned before we jumped on air, I picked up a nasty little pickleball addiction about a year ago in Las Vegas.

I lived right there on Sunset Park where they have a 26-quart professional facility with lighted from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. And I got kind of hooked on it. And so down here, they've got some indoor pickleball and a pickleball group that gets together and tries to pretend like we're good at the game. And so I managed to blend right into the community here. I'm enjoying it. I drive around every day on my little golf cart. The speed limit's 25 miles an hour. So I can actually speed on my golf cart. It goes almost 30. It's a tough life. I've been enjoying it.

And I know a couple of people who live in Puerto Rico and sounds similar to, it's the golf cart, it's the pickleball, it's the ocean, it's the lower stress, good sense of community. Yep. All the things I used to laugh at other people for doing and here I am. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Until you experience it yourself and you're like, I actually have to admit this is kind

of nice. Yep. I went from a life of studying PRs to now AARP. Is there a good gym? There are a few decent gyms. They're kind of little rust buckets as everything here on the island rusts very quickly. And so there's a good little place called Evolve where they shipped over some equipment and you can get everything done, but you definitely need to have your tetanus shot. Kind of like where Ronnie Coleman used to train all those years. Was that MetroFlex?

Yeah, down in MetroFlex. It's a hot box. It's obviously somewhat humid inside these tin buildings. So you sweat a lot and the equipment doesn't last very long with the salty, windy air that pours through there. But they open the garage doors and you always get a good breeze and you get good workouts. So I haven't missed much in terms of training, although I must admit I train a little less now and play pickleball a little more.

So kind of embarrassed to really talk about how far from grace I've fallen. And yeah, what does that actually look like though? Like what is your training now? Yeah, now it's a three day a week. I was just gonna say it's a three day, three days a week, you know, and that's shame, shame, shame. Indeed. I found that when I started playing pickleball, there's a lot of people find as they age that

you tend to lose certainly my lateral movement ability, but also my speed is something that I hadn't utilized in many years, although I was doing a little bit of sprinting on my overspeed treadmill back at my gym in Las Vegas, in City Iron. But the pickleball, it's probably six to nine months really for some of the nagging, aching pains that come from the ankles and the knees and the hips from starting to do all of that lateral movement. Now mind you, people who are good at pickleball don't have to move around very much. But when you're crappy like me, you end up running all over the place chasing balls. That side to side lunging really hit me hard initially because you go out

there intending not to do too much but you get caught up in the game and then next thing you know you're trying to win and you do things that you're not accustomed to it's it's way too much volume way too fast because you're just into it yes then then you you might win a couple games and so you stay in you know there's these challenge courts and so next thing you know you're playing five, six, seven games. It's two hours later you're still in there playing and don't realize until the next morning how much, you know, we talk a lot about load management and about not training beyond your current level of fitness, but that all goes out the window when you're competing for something, however trivial it may be. Yeah, and when you're having fun and then you don't even realize really that you've been out there for two hours.

Yeah, indeed. And I'll say that, you know, I've often said from people who have watched some of my YouTube rants on weight loss, I've said the best diet is the one you'll follow and the best exercise is the one you'll do. And I hope people find something that allows them to move that they enjoy to the degree that I've enjoyed doing playing the Spickleball because you want to go. If you tell somebody their workout program is battle robes and burpees, the likelihood they're going to attend that with any degree of frequency or longevity is pretty slim.

It's just not very fun. And so I would say that any sports, if you like playing basketball, play basketball, if you like going to Zumba class, do that. So I'm reluctant to prescribe a specific cardio routine to my clients. I usually ask them, what do you like doing? Or any number of different activities. It doesn't have to be a specific one. And obviously we like to get our step count up beyond that. The only thing you're going to do consistently long term is something that you enjoy, something that's, as you said, playful. And, and, you know, I think it's, it's a good idea to look at your weightlifting, look at your strength training through the same lens

and, and try to make it as enjoyable as you can. Like I also, I train three days a week now versus five for a long time, I trained five days a week. And the reason I went to three, well, a couple reasons. One is I'm just looking to maintain my physique, maintain my health, and three days, three hours of weightlifting per week is enough to do that. And two, I didn't want to spend more time in the gym because of work, really. I have other things and I have a family.

And so when I was doing the five days and my workouts were a bit longer and I was really pushing for progress and there was something that was enjoyable about that but after doing that for some period of time I just found myself not really enjoying a lot of the time that I was spending in the gym and I'm a disciplined person and I can just ignore that and just keep going but I also had to be honest and say, okay, so sure, I could do that, but why?

Why keep doing that? There's the inertia, that's a reason, but that's not a very good reason. Well, there's a few critical points to what you're talking about. It's very important. I said this again on my obesity rant some seven years ago. I said, if you create a program, either a diet or an exercise program, that's not sustainable. Something that you feel as though you have to do to make progress, although it is a significant departure from your regular routine, you're not gonna comply with it. It's also important

to recognize that I think we've convinced ourselves we need to do more than what's necessary in order to get results. We're finding now the maintenance required to hold on to your current level of fitness is very small. We're talking about two heavy sets a week to maintain strength, maybe four sets a week to maintain your muscle mass. Something as simple as 150 minutes a week, which is 20 minutes a day of walking can improve, you know,

obviously health span and lifespan. That's the recommendation by the American Heart Association. Obviously we do more than that, but the idea that you're required to do more than that just doesn't seem to be supported by the evidence. And so again, my goal is to meet people where they're at and get them to do a little more than they're currently doing if they want to make progress. But I just said to a client last week and not a couple days later, I saw a popular influencer

post about this that don't fit your life into your training program and diet, you know, fit your diet and training program into your life. It has to be something that, as I, on the cover of my book, says simple, sensible, and sustainable, something that becomes part of a lifestyle. And interestingly, as we get older, my understanding of the relevant research I've read is if we're looking at long-term health and vitality,

it becomes more important to increase the volume of cardiovascular exercise than strength training because to your point, we can maintain certainly for the purpose of again health, vitality, longevity, we can maintain plenty of muscle and strength on just a couple of hours of strength training per week. But if we want to maintain our cardiovascular fitness, if we want to maintain our metabolic health as we get older, that seems to, again, my understanding of the research is it seems to take more work on those systems in particular.

And we don't want to neglect those things as we get older because that can become problematic, even if we've stayed relatively strong. Yeah, certainly more frequency. We see this even in single day studies, sitting versus standing. You've seen a lot of information posted recently. I've been talking about the 10 minute walks for 10 years. More recently, there's been a lot of research suggesting

that just a couple of minutes out of every hour has a dramatic effect. And three 10-minute walks a day, just getting up and moving around periodically throughout the day is superior to a 30-minute bout of exercise at the end of the day for a whole host of different health markers. So I think you're hitting the nail on the head. The frequency is important. You just want to move your body every day.

And so it doesn't necessarily have to be we call exercise activity. It can be these little exercise snacks. The duration doesn't have to be something that's onerous is the point. The idea that you've got to be careful not to create too many barriers to entry for people, that you got to come home, get changed, get in the car, drive to the gym, get on a treadmill or an elliptical. You don't have to do any of that. You can just walk for 10 minutes down the street if possible. Even many of my athletes as you may have seen over the years, people like Hofthor Bjornsson and Brian Shaw and others, now Mitchell Hooper, current world's strongest man. They just take... If the weather's

bad, they have a recumbent bike or a bicycle, Hofthor and his garage in Iceland in the winter when I went and visited. After meals, we'd go out to the garage and we'd just ride the bike for 10 minutes. You can watch a video on YouTube. Do that after each meal daily. That's more than sufficient. And then, you know, if you have greater goals in terms of VO2 max and cardiovascular fitness, you could throw in, like I mentioned, a couple of two, three days a week worth of something that's a little more challenging. And can you speak more to what you said about a few 10-minute walks being superior to one 30-minute walk, that and then also if there's something particular about the timing of after

meals doing this little exercise snack? Yeah, interestingly enough, yeah. Astrid, what's her Instagram site is anti-diet dietitian. And she just made a post on this within the last week or two. I tend to follow a lot of these folks and I watch all their posts and it's kind of keep my finger on the pulse of what the industry's discussing, you know, what's currently relevant to people. And she said the same thing, some research that I had mentioned some time ago, that it seems that sitting is the new smoking and that you can't undo the damage of a full day of sitting. We're talking about office workers who might spend

eight or 10 hours in front of a computer during the day and something as simple as getting up for two minutes and just doing 10 air squats or walking around briskly for a couple of minutes every hour or three 10-minute walks again the day being superior to one 30-minute bout of exercise at the end of the day. It has a greater effect on cardiovascular fitness, on cardiovascular disease risk, the whole host of other health markers for longevity and you know health span and lifespan that you just the body needs to be moved frequently throughout the day more important than the duration at one point at the end of the day. And we have some good evidence now to suggest that you just want to move more often. It doesn't have to be this grand event at the end of the day. And it certainly won't undo

a lot of sitting. And this point of after meals in particular, is there a special benefit to? Yeah, interestingly enough. And I used to think that you would want to wait 20 or 30 minutes to at least get some digestion done. But we now have another study showing that the immediacy following meals imparts a better what we call post-prandial or post-meal glucose regulation. Your peak glucose elevation and duration is

reduced, what we call the area under the curve, when you walk immediately following a meal. And I've recommended that that be the way that you... The reason I originally attached the walks to a meal is because, as we know from some of the habit research in terms of compliance that when you attach a new behavior to an existing behavior it's more likely that you'll create a new habit that it'll become something that you'll regularly do. And so even when I would go to a restaurant when I was traveling a lot and I used to travel quite a bit I was I've been in 17 countries in all 50 states, performed over 200 seminars. Almost every weekend I was on a plane there for six, seven years. And so I would do these

10-minute walks as kind of something that would fit into my schedule. Whether it was going through the airport, I would just pick up my pace a little and walk a little more briskly. If I was going down to get my baggage claim while everybody's standing there staring at the turnstile that's not moving, I was actually taking laps around the baggage claim area. Of course, people would look at me kind of funny because it's a brisk pace. I don't intend it to be a jog and you're not going to sweat and get your heart rate up too high, but it should be deliberate. Also, when I would go to restaurants, I would lead the restaurant. I would set my little timer on my phone for five minutes and I would walk down the street. And then when my little alarm went off, I

would turn around and walk back before I got in my car. And that was a way for me to get my 30 to 40 minutes of and my steps in for the day, my step count, whatever I felt that step count should be at the time, depending on my goals. I was able to achieve all of that without having to miss a scheduled event. Of course, like you say, with kids, oftentimes the schedule gets changed. And whether you go pick them up for school and take them to some sort of sporting event or activity that they're participating in, or if you're a real estate agent working out of the trunk of your

car, driving from place to place, meeting people and your schedule changes constantly. Sometimes it becomes really hard to plan these exercise events but these little 10-minute walks you get up in the morning take a 10-minute walk. You know after lunch take a 10-minute walk. Certainly after dinner at night you should have an opportunity to do 10 minutes. You might not have enough time nor may you have the desire after a long hard day of work to go to the gym at night, but you can most certainly take that walk and it just really recharges your battery, especially if you do it with the family,

it can be a great time to spend time with your family. That's exactly what I do. Fifteen minutes in the morning after I wake up, 15 minutes around lunchtime either before or after lunch, and then 15 minutes around dinner time either before or after lunch, and then 15 minutes around dinner time, either before or after dinner. The dinner walk is basically always with my wife, so it's a little bit of time that we can spend together.

And then I was thinking when you were talking, so a couple days ago, my son is doing boxing. He wanted to do boxing, so I'd take him a few days a week to boxing. And so while he's doing his boxing class, then I was in the parking lot across the street walking because I was like, okay, I need to do some work calls anyway. So I'll do my, I'll take him to boxing. I'll do my work calls and I'll get steps in. Eh, works. My kids want to play at the park after school, the playground with the other kids. I use that as an opportunity. I said, great, play with kids. I walk around that park. It's a beautiful, it's a perfect opportunity. So whenever I take them to do their events, whether it's a sport or

something like dance or a choir or, group or organization that they're participating in at the time, I use that time to do my walks. And it's very efficient and you don't, again, it's something that can become part of your lifestyle that you can sustain rather than having to, you know, drop the kids off and go to the gym. I'm a gym rat. You know, I grew up in the gym. I love training. But I also have, you know, like you, a lot of other things that take priority. And so it's not necessary to go to a gym, but for maybe the twice a week or three times a week that we're discussing to get some sort of loading, unless you can do push-ups and

lunges and chin-ups at home, that's certainly sufficient as well. So I'd like to meet clients where they're at and ask them what their schedule looks like and how much time they can commit to this and then fit that training program into their current lifestyle. I mean, speaking of bodyweight training, if you add some bands that you can easily travel with, it actually is pretty difficult. I'll do that when we travel, like if we're out of the country and sometimes even if you're staying in a

good hotel, the hotel gym, I'm thinking of one hotel in particular when I was in France, it was a nice hotel, but their gym was nothing basically. But I had bands, just simple upper lower, like one day just do 30 minutes of upper body work with the bands and then next day do 30 minutes of lower body or a couple days later. And with again, a little baggy of thesegy of, of, of these exercise rubber bands, you can get a pretty good training stimulus actually. Agreed. Yeah.

I think that there's been some, uh, influencers that especially during COVID, I think Brett Contreras did a great job of covering a lot of banded hotel workouts. Yeah, absolutely. Bands are, they're amazing. And, and one other thing just to comment on the walking after meals, it's just interesting because again, thinking more of thinking of times of being on vacation, because when I'm not on vacation, I tend to eat the same types of foods every day. It's stuff I like, but I just don't need a lot of

variety in my diet. So it's a lot of just simple, you know, nutritious, relatively unprocessed food, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, seeds, legumes, blah, blah, relatively unprocessed food, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, seeds, legumes, blah, blah, blah. But then if I'm traveling, I don't eat poorly, but I don't pay too much attention to calories or macros. Generally the food quality is gonna be good, but I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna eat stuff

that is not a normal dinner or a normal lunch or breakfast. And I had developed a habit of going for walks, especially after the larger meals, which you go and you eat a good dinner, that could easily be 1,500, 2,000 calories if you're eating an appetizer, an entree, and a dessert. And I developed a habit of going for walks, particularly after the larger meals,

because I would just feel better than if I didn't go on the walks. And again, it was maybe anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes after eating those meals. And I hadn't really thought much or looked into the mechanisms. It was just something that I noticed. And so it just developed that habit.

But I just thought of that when you were talking about the post-perandial response. Yeah, we see improved digestion as well in the studies where you're taking the walk immediately following a meal. It's just from the muscular contraction and the enzymatic action, we just see less bloating, less frequency of things like GERD, you know, acid reflux. So there's a host of benefits that go beyond just the glycemia control. And I don't really do them for calorie burning purposes. I've spoken before and I constantly get people.

What are we going to burn? 100 calories from the 2000 I just ate? That wasn't it yet. Yeah. Yeah. I get a lot of folks that will straw man my comments on, you know, 30 second or 60 second clips on Instagram. But the research shows that exercise is not the best way to lose weight. But you can get some benefit, but the vast majority of your weight loss effort should be invested into controlling how much you eat. Exercise is great for your health but more exercise might not equal more

weight loss. We see a phenomenon called compensation take place where if you go to the gym and bust your ass doing battle ropes and burpees that it tends to cause you to sit more and eat more and then you have a bit of a balancing of the equation where non-exercise activity is reduced and that's a greater chunk of change, the non-exercise activity, just staying on your feet and being active throughout the day. I see folks that do these aggressive workouts and they end up sitting quite a bit and then they get hungry and then they end up in the fridge foraging on stuff they

shouldn't be eating and so be cautious. I ask people to be cautious that if you invest that much energy into your training, you're going to find that you're going to be more tired and more hungry, you're going to sit more and eat more. Yeah, what I've seen people miss on that point is that what you explained is not refuting anything regarding energy balance. Yes, it's true that if you burned a thousand calories

per day exercising and were very regimented in your eating and basically stuck exactly to your meal plan to maintain some large calorie deficit, yes, you are going to lose weight faster than if your deficit were half of that number through less exercise. But the point is compliance, and the point is what actually happens in reality.

Are you gonna have the energy and the will to do those tough workouts and then not just sit around more than you would otherwise? Take the stairs instead of taking the elevator, parking, not trying to find the closest parking spot to the entrance of the grocery store, and then also not randomly snack. So that's really the crux of it, right? Yeah. And I might mention, while we're just kind of closely on this topic, people associate me

with training lots of great athletes over the years. Of course, I've worked with many professionals. And more recently, John Jones, who just won the UFC Heavy Weight Championships, congratulations to him. But earlier, I mentioned some of the strongmen and CrossFit national champions, certainly bodybuilding figure, physique, bikini competitors for over 25 years. But the vast majority of the people I work are our dad, Bob's, and soccer moms.

They're just, you know, folks trying to lose weight and feel great. But when I get, sometimes a bikini competitor will come to me and they're 30 days out from a competition and they'll say that they have hit a plateau, they haven't lost any weight in two weeks and they're already eating just way too few calories. I'm talking sometimes the slowest 1200, 1300, 1400 calories a day. They're already doing two hours of cardio a day, just going to the gym for an hour in the morning, an hour in the evening, just walking in a treadmill. So I can't reduce calories and I can't increase their cardio. So the one thing I asked them to do is to stay on their feet all day. Continue doing what they're doing. You can't change that. You're 30

days out. I've often said that if you want to be healthy, don't compete. Just one of the things that you're going to suffer through. At some point, you know, you're going to end up in the gray area of, you know, health and fitness aren't the same thing and oftentimes people pursuing fitness goals will do it either modest or severe sacrifice to their short-term health. So I'll tell them to stay on their feet, just don't sit down all day and sure enough they'll lose two pounds that week. It's an incredibly underutilized tool and I don't think we appreciate that sitting versus standing even in and of itself absolutely will provide some benefit to you. So those are rare circumstances, extreme condition.

I certainly wouldn't put one of my clients in that situation. I would never have them on that low of calories or that much cardio to begin with. When I trained Nadia Wyatt who took third in the Miss Olympia and second in the Arnold Classic for figure competition. She would do mostly lifting. I also worked with a lot of female athletes who just enjoy lifting. I'm not saying that's the situation with everybody, but we had her do two-a-day lifting rather than two-a-day cardio. Another reason for that is that retaining lean mass, particularly if you're competing in one of those bodybuilding figure physique bikini, if you're competing in one of those bodybuilding figure physique bikini. If you're competing, that's your primary focus is to retain lean mass.

But even if you're not competing, and you know we've talked a lot about this recently with the introduction of the the GLP-1 agonist semiglutide, WGOV, azempic and the like, that people are losing a lot of muscle And there's the biggest concern with that is that at least my biggest concern with that is that the appetite signaling. When you lose weight you get hungrier. The more muscle you lose the hungrier you get and then the bigger the rebound becomes because you're hungrier longer until you get that muscle back. But what you first gain back is more fat. That's the problem with the yo-yo dieting. You lose a lot of muscle on the diet. You gain back more fat

when you regain the weight. Body decomposition, every time you go through this oscillation, this yo-yo dieting, you end up losing more muscle and then gaining back more fat. That's what happens in the immediate sense. And so obviously the recommendation is that you lose weight slower. You eat more protein and you lift weights to retain the immediate sense. And so obviously the recommendation is that you lose weight slower, you eat more protein, and you lift weights to retain that lean mass. And then you find that when you get, you know, then you're losing mostly fat, there's less appetite signaling because, you know, hunger is the biggest problem with long-term dietary adherence.

And if you're setting yourself up to be hungry and then your body, that hunger signaling can last well beyond the regaining of all of your weight because you haven't gained your muscle back yet in many cases for people who don't track that and don't lift. And so that's why I spend so much time focusing on muscle, even if it starts with a DEXA scan at the beginning of a program when I'm working with a client. And then I really want them, as I said before, the best exercise is the one you'll do. But I can't offer any alternative than some kind of loading that helps, gives the sufficient stimulus for your muscles. And I push that pretty hard.

It doesn't mean you have to squat, do free weight squats or whatever. There's a machine that you can just move the pin and do a leg extension or a leg press. I do try and take clients through a number of exercises till I find one that they enjoy because there's no best exercise. They all tend to impart the same stimulus as long as they're loaded. Let's talk about tailoring macronutrients based on training goals. How do you approach that with different types of people who have different goals, different body compositions? Yeah, well, I mean, obviously, there's a broad range of things to cover, whether it's gen pop or athletes.

Generally speaking, if you're, you know, there's two sides to the spectrum and that's either if you want to gain more muscle or lose fat. There's different recommendations. Calories are king, so if you want to gain muscle, generally you want to be in a calorie surplus, particularly if you don't have a significant amount of body fat and you're an experienced lifter, it's kind of hard to, to recomp, to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. That becomes easier if you're a beginner. Or even, or even gain muscle and just stay really lean, right? Which is what, what many

people are trying to do because I get it. You like your abs, you don't want to give them up. Yeah. And, and you may have to compromise. You will, should, you'll get your best gains, I should say, if you're a lean individual who has at least an intermediate or advanced degree of training, it'll be very hard for you to gain muscle at the rate at which you'd like, which is always slow to begin with. I mean, gaining muscle is a challenge. And if you're already an experienced lifter that's very lean, you're going to need to increase your calories and you may compromise some degree of body fat percentage. The goal is to gain as little fat as possible and gain as much muscle as possible.

And the way to do that is to keep your calorie surplus small. We used to do the dirty bulks back in the 80s and 90s when I was trying to gain all my weight for powerlifting. And you learn a lot of lessons from doing that. You learn that you get fat. And then when you try and diet down for a bodybuilding show you have to lose so much weight that you end up losing more muscle than you should and you kind of end up kind of where you started and it's frustrating you know yo-yo for those guys too. So gain the weight a little slower, gain the

muscle a little slower, hold on to it a little longer and then lose it a little slower. So you're just going to have to give yourself more time, more months of growth and more months of dieting slowly in order to hold on to more muscle and reach the level of fitness that you want to compete. For the general population, obviously I mentioned calories are king, so for fat loss you have to create a deficit. And that's obvious. So calories are king. Protein is very important. Very important for, as we mentioned, retaining lean mass, but also because it's satiating and has a higher thermic effect of food, which means you net out fewer calories eating protein

than you would eating the same number of calories in carbs and fat. If you eat 100 calories of protein, your thermogenesis, your body burns calories digesting that protein, so you might only net out 70 grams. That's part of your energy balance equation, your thermic effect of food. So that's one of the reasons why then you can eat more food, more quantity of food, but net out fewer total calories for your calorie balance so you can lose weight. So we like to keep our protein high for the satiety benefit, for the thermic effect of food, for the retention of lean mass. Although I will say that protein is a much smaller contributor to retention of lean mass than the training stimulus. Training stimulus is far and away more important than your protein

intake. You can have a pretty broad range of protein intake from the dietary recommendations, which we all think are pretty low at 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight or about 0.4 grams per pound, all the way up to a gram per pound of protein. That range is all sufficient. We see this in some of Stu Phillips' work up at McMaster University where he would take people on about half a gram per pound of body weight versus a gram a pound of protein per pound of body weight. And if they both train intensely, they both retain their lean body mass to the same degree. But the training is intense. It's consistent and they're working hard.

They're getting to within a rep or two of failure. We did see a slight increase in lean mass in hypertrophy on the higher protein group, but it was slight. I guess the point there being is, as stated, the training stimulus is more important than the amount of protein. But with all the other benefits, that's the macronutrient that we think is the most beneficial. So I generally try and recommend for weight loss, get about a gram of protein per pound of goal weight. And that kind of accounts for the huge variation in where people are currently at, whether you're 15% body fat or 35% body fat. I can't base

your protein recommendations on your current weight. So we do it based on goal weight. And then you've got carbs and fat. And we saw from the Stanford trials, the diet fit trial out of Stanford that when you control for calories and protein, your percentage of carbohydrate and fat intake doesn't matter. The total calories matters, the protein matters, but whether you want to go high carb, low carb, high fat, low fat, dietFit studied this on over 600 participants for more than a year and they found that it didn't matter. People had equivalent weight loss and so that becomes a matter of personal preference. The caveat to that would be that you need a minimum amount of fats

for your general health. It should help with sleep, to help with hormone optimization, to help with the fatuble vitamin absorption. So there is a minimum amount of fat that you do need to get for your general health. But beyond that, any additional fat doesn't contribute to performance. Some people might find a higher fat diet is more satiating to them and that they can lose weight and adhere better to that diet. And that's a matter of personal preference. And I always ask the clients give me feedback on.

In my experience, that seems to be the exception rather than the rule. The people I've heard from and just worked kind of virtually with and kept in touch with many, many people over the years and I'm comfortable saying that from my observations, the rule seems to be higher protein, higher carb with moderate fat seems to work best for most people. That's the best starting point at least unless they know, no, I really do like that low carb, high fat. Even if you said low fat, higher carb. Yeah, I find that that with the high protein just seems to work best for most people. It fits their preferences, keeps them full.

Even if you disagree with that, you have to recognize the research suggests that that's where people tend to go back to anyhow. Then you watch when they go ad libitum. When you're controlling everything they eat and tracking it, whether you're giving them their food or they're tracking everything, and you keep them on a low carb diet, as stated, they can get equivalent results to many people on a high carb diet. But over time, we see, generally speaking, people trend to go back to more of a 30, 30, 30, well, actually, they would trend to even eat lower protein. And so that's something that you have to keep reinforcing is for them to eat, keep their

protein up to 25,30% of total calories. But the trend is to reincorporate the carbohydrates. And the challenge is that a lot of the carbohydrates that people eat, people talk about these highly palatable ultra-processed foods and they start blaming sugar, but those highly palatable ultra-processed foods are a combination of sugar, fat, and salt. It's the combination that's causing people to consume more. Those are those Kevin Hall studies where they compared processed foods to whole foods and found that people just bypassed their satiety signals and they tended to eat more at each

sitting and throughout each day, but to the tune of about 500 calories a day, which is hugely significant. That's 50 pounds a year if you were to just map that out although we understand there's a lot of variables there. So I say get the minimum amount of fat in and I think there's a minimum amount of carbs too. I think it's 130 grams I think that we see that from what the brain uses and I know the immediate feedback from the keto community is that you can make carbs. The problem is it's not the most efficient method for performance.

As you know, we've got different fuel sources that we use for performance. Obviously, your creatine phosphate system is your first 10 to 15 seconds and then you've got carbohydrates. Your glycogen starts to be utilized, especially for resistance training at a higher rate, a higher percentage of carbohydrates than fats initially. And then your fats have the, that can be used for longer duration exercise. But carbohydrates are certainly make the training effect more enjoyable and more effective. You might get one more rep, be able to do one more set.

You just find that people aren't as tired. And that would include, you know, things like just rolling in jujitsu. If you're sufficiently glycogen loaded, that workout, you just seem to have more energy for performing that workout. And so in terms of performance, and we have lots of research on this, I like to keep the carbohydrates in. Plus there's, and this isn't sugar. Strong men tend to that argument as well. It's a foundation of lots of fruits and vegetables and whole grains, like you mentioned. For those people who can tolerate them, we'll probably end up talking some about that as well. Generally speaking, you can get a lot of micronutrient value from which we should talk about as well.

Now that we're on macros, I think that those carbohydrates, particularly a broad range of fruits and vegetables, are hugely beneficial for just a healthy dietary pattern that also is consistent with people's lifestyle and provides performance benefits. We will get back to today's episode shortly, but first I need to tell you about my best selling flexible

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And so if you wanna see if it can help you reach your fitness goals faster, just head over to Amazon, pick up a copy and enjoy. Let's talk about micronutrients and let's just take an argument that you'll find all over social media, which is that if you just eat enough of the right animal foods, and so there's a lot of emphasis on meat, on eggs, maybe it's, there seems to be some weird

session now with, or there has been with honey and certain select fruits. And so, so again, the argument is that, well, if you just eat mostly these animal foods, maybe with one or two other kind of more exotic type of foods you wouldn't typically eat, you don't need to, you don't need to eat any fruits and vegetables. And actually, any fruits and vegetables. And actually, the fruits and vegetables are inferior for providing all these key nutrients. Can you speak to your thoughts on that? And then just more broadly, your thoughts on meeting

micronutrient needs and the most effective and efficient and enjoyable ways of doing that for people who will need to personalize their food choices to some degree to make their diet sustainable. Yeah, that kind of introduces people's individual health, their current circumstance with their health because there are... Where are these, what term to put on them, but where these alternative diets, the ones that aren't necessarily balanced per se, say if you were to measure the Mediterranean diet, you would call that a balanced diet, have a dietary pattern that included lean proteins like you mentioned earlier, fish, fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, whole grains. I mean, that's really just kind of a healthy diet according to the large body of evidence,

right? Yeah. Yeah, the Mediterranean diet certainly consistently has shown better lifespan and health span. And there's caveats, there's exceptions to that. Not everybody can eat all of those foods. Can you get all of your nutrients from a more restrictive diet? Yes. Now, to what extreme the restriction would obviously make it more and more likely that you'd find some deficiency somewhere if you're just eating a single food. Good luck. Which seems like, is this has the carnivore, has it evolved from all you need is

steaks to like, okay, fine, now it's steaks. Cause I don't pay too much attention because I just hate it so much. And I've. Yeah. Well, you're describing what Paul Saladino has certainly migrated into that area. Sean Baker has stayed most of the carnivore. He tried to introduce some fruit, but as I think he made the mistake of introducing a bunch of apples,

which are a high FODMAP food and it's hard to digest. So he might've gone, I might've suggested he use lower amounts of fruits that were easier to digest in order to add those. But nonetheless, I was on Paul Saladino's podcast a number of years ago and I brought this same information to him. The same information that I've talked to a lot of the female athletes that I've trained over the years, they get on these guru diets and they start demonizing whole food, whether it's just carbohydrates and entire macro group or specific foods.

They'll demonize red meat, they'll demonize egg yolks, they'll demonize dairy, they'll demonize fruit, they'll demonize salt, and then they end up on these highly restrictive diets and succumb to nutrient deficiencies. Oftentimes, obviously the female triad from chronic calorie restriction and insufficient iron suffering from anemia, insufficient calcium, biotin and choline, things for skin hair and nails and for your liver, all those things are found in the foods I just mentioned. Obviously iron and red meat and biotin and choline and egg yolks and calcium and dairy, fruit for potassium and polyphenols, a whole host of benefits from all those foods and

insufficient sodium, obviously, for them to be able to train and be sufficiently hydrated. And those guru diets consisted of, you know, it was protein powder, egg whites, broccoli, maybe a tablespoon of peanut butter, which turned into an entire jar of peanut butter, and maybe some little bit of olive oil. You know, they were very, very restrictive. And, you know, that's the competitive. Oftentimes, I hate answering these questions just speaking to fitfluencers or people on extreme diets. And I think it's restrictive. I won't say extreme, but restrictive in some sense. But generally speaking with the overall population, we do see some vitamin deficiencies that occur.

Nutrients that are under consumed. And I mean, the top four or five would be your vitamin E. And we see probably three quarters of the population doesn't have sufficient vitamin E. Potassium is a big one, getting sufficient potassium in vitamin C, magnesium, calcium as mentioned. Vitamin D might be up there. Those are kind of the top ones. Vitamin A, probably nearly half of the population doesn't get sufficient vitamin A. K can be tricky as well.

Yes, vitamin K. Probably almost 50% of the population doesn't get sufficient vitamin K. So there are significant deficiencies out there in the general population, which can mostly, most of these can be remedied with food consumption. There's some that are a little harder. Magnesium and vitamin D are pretty difficult to get from food. And so there may be times at which people need to supplement, but we have to be cautious. The RDA, something like accounts for about 97 or more percent of the RDA recommendations but of the general population, the RDAs, if you get a sufficient amount based on the RDA, most people will be covered. But active individuals tend to use more of these micronutrients, in which case you may

need to go above the RDA. Having said that, consistently seen that megadosing has never provided the outcomes that have been desired. And we see from Linus Pauling's work on megadosing vitamins that we see negative outcomes. And so we don't see an improvement in performance, and we also see actually poor health outcomes from megadosing. So I want to be very cautious that people don't start megadosing particular vitamins thinking they're going to cure something. If you have a deficiency and you remedy the deficiency of that vitamin, you can see a

significant improvement in... You may see a significant improvement in your health, particularly something that's specific to that vitamin. But trying to take a whole bunch of vitamins to solve some other problems has never panned out well. So I don't want to be recommending that people have to mega dose. Even a multivitamin in many studies has not shown definitive improvement in people's health outcomes. So it's hard to make these recommendations.

But we do see some deficiencies. I mentioned vitamin E was really high and there's some things like sunflower seeds or almonds that could be very beneficial for vitamin E. That might be something you have to supplement, just a small amount. I think the best thing to do is download Chronometer app and put all of your food intake, just log it in there for the day, and it'll tell you what your micronutrients are and you can see what your exposure is to deficiencies. Potassium is another one I said this is huge with my athletes in particular. You can get a lot of potassium just from eating like a potato.

It has twice the potassium of a banana, so I'll throw a daily potato in there and probably a sweet potato because it's really high in vitamin A. Fruits, yogurt, those are all great lentils, apricots, but those are things that I'm cautious. I can tell you what has the most potassium in it, but now we have to figure out is this the food that you're regularly going to eat? And so I have to give them the whole list and let them pick from that list. Thees are generally, most people are pretty amenable to consuming a potato daily. I would, you know, I'm a big rice guy for athletes for performance who need to get a lot of calories in, but the foundation of the diet that I recommend would have a potato in there long before I would throw in some sort of something like rice or bread that

certainly a starchy carb that was refined would take a backseat. They might utilize those for people who need to consume a lot of calories, but the foundation would be potassium-rich foods, which is potato, it's fruit, and yogurt, vitamin C. Red peppers are twice the vitamin C as an orange. I often recommend dicing up some peppers with a meal. Generally try and get people to cook those and steam them in a bone broth as opposed to cooking them in a bunch of oil. That's simply for a calorie. It's not a good food, bad food

conversation. How do we reduce the total number of calories? That would be to kind of reduce the amount of oil that we're pouring into our food. That can just add a ton of calories. Magnesium, I mentioned. There's not a lot of foods, but a lot of magnesium that people generally eat. I mean, pumpkin seeds, chia seeds, I mean, how many people are consuming a lot of those things. And so, I oftentimes, vitamin D and magnesium, I make some substitutions for. Calcium, need a thousand milligrams a day of calcium, especially for women. But even for men, for performance, you know, I don't know if you saw the post recently from Dr. Stu Phillips again. He stated

that calcium or that dairy has an independent effect on improving BMI and performance. That's independent of the protein, independent of the calcium. Dairy has an independent effect on BMI. We see that in a lot of research. So I throw a lot of dairy in and I know immediately it sparks people's concern about either an allergy. If you have a whey allergy or a casein allergy then don't eat it. You know if you have a peanut allergy don't eat peanuts. But if you have an intolerance that's a range and some dairy has higher or lower amounts of lactose. Usually it's the lactose intolerance that causes people to avoid dairy for the gas. A few things here. One, a yogurt,

particularly a Greek yogurt, is going to be much lower in lactose and maybe tolerated. And then the dose matters. Maybe you just have a few ounces rather than having two cups of a particular food. And there's a process by which your lactase enzyme down regulates when you don't consume dairy for a long period of time. And that lactase enzyme can upregulate when you reintroduce dairy but you reintroduce it slowly. And then you find what your tolerance level is to which dairy and or you can use a lactosefree product that allows you to get that calcium in. Orange juices oftentimes have calcium fortified.

But I prefer dairy for all the extra benefits that it provides to get your calcium in. And then I mentioned vitamin A, and I know that your carnivore community loves their liver. But I'm real cautious about the iron content in liver, especially for men because men don't shed iron the way that women do with their menstrual cycle each month. I often see high iron in men. So just if you're going to do iron, an ounce or two, maybe three ounces at the most a week.

Sweet potato has plenty of vitamin A and maybe some spinach. Again, we're back to pumpkin, carrots. So, those are all things you can include in the diet. But that sums up, I think, the most common deficiencies and the best or most commonly consumed foods that provide those different vitamins. And you had mentioned a multivitamin. What are your thoughts on including

a well-formulated multivitamin? And that's a loaded phrase, because if you look at multivitamin research, it's fine when the media runs with something and says, hey, the study shows that multivitamins don't do anything. OK, but let's look at the details. What exactly was this product?

And you find that it's a very poorly formulated multivitamin, maybe a stamped tab. It's questionable how much it's even being absorbed. And then you look at even to the forms of the vitamins and minerals. In some cases, one form is very poorly absorbed. And then so if you have a well formulated multivitamin, this has been my opinion for some time

is I totally agree on optimizing your food choices to, you gotta make sure you enjoy your diet. Don't force yourself to eat weird things that you don't like to eat. But think about your food choices to try to meet as much of your nutritional needs as you can with food. And if you want to consider adding

a well formulated multivitamin, that can act as an insurance policy you could say, or maybe it could help plug strategically nutritional, not deficiencies, maybe you never get to a deficiency, but maybe it's an insufficiency or maybe you could benefit from a bit more of what you can get from food alone. Yeah. I can't improve on that. You hit all of the high points. I would just say that men should watch how much iron they take in in a supplement. But other than that, everything you said was right on point.

Well formulated for men would probably not have iron. I would agree. I would agree. Yeah, you said that perfectly. You had mentioned choosing foods that are easy to digest. And you've put a lot of emphasis on this and avoiding certain foods that can cause digestive issues. And often these can be foods that people wouldn't think like these are, quote unquote, healthy foods, right? Garlic, onions, cruciferous vegetables.

Can you talk a bit about that? And in your experience working with people, how common are these types of issues that can be very confusing if you've never heard of this because you think, I'm eating all these nutritious foods and why do I not feel good after I eat? Yeah, limiting foods that may cause you digestive distress. There's a number of different conditions that people suffer from, IBS, IBD, Crohn's, and there's a whole host of different digestive issues. Obviously, we're familiar with a lot of people suffering from these.

There's certain foods they can't eat. And so I just create awareness for that. This isn't a good food, bad food conversation. This is listening to your body, maybe going in and visiting a gastroenterologist if your digestion is so bad that you're having all sorts of painful bloating, diarrhea, any of those things, blood in the stool. So I talk about these things in the vertical diet. I do see more of these in athletes, particularly the, again, bodybuilding figure for the bikini industry, chronic dieters, people who are in these heavy calorie deficits for extended periods of time, they compromise their digestion.

And they have eliminated, as we mentioned earlier, demonized so many foods that their body has become resistant to being able to process those foods. And then when they reintroduce them, they reintroduce them at such a high quantity that they react poorly. Remember these types of digestive distress issues are individualistic, they're dose dependent, how the food's prepared matters, and they can be cumulative in nature. Some people individualistic, some people have IBS, other people don't. Those who have IBS, the best remedy for that currently, the one that's the most successful is the low

FODMAP diet. It's fermentable oligodime, monosaccharides, and polyols. That's from Monash University out of Australia. It's not 100% solution, but we see somewhere in 40 to 70% of people realize a significant decrease in symptoms of painful gas and bloating When they reduce high FODMAP foods and the high FODMAP foods, you can just Google this and see a list of these IBS foods that may cause more gas for these people who suffer from IBS. And garlic and onions and cursis rose vegetables are on that list. Again, not bad foods, but some people can't digest them.

Grains, legumes, there's a lot of bad information going on on the internet about avoiding those foods. But there is a small percentage of the population. You have celiac, 1% of the population or less suffers from celiac. Those people should avoid some of these foods. But that doesn't mean everyone should. Some people are allergic to shellfish. Some people are allergic to eggs. Some people are allergic to peanuts, as mentioned earlier. That doesn't mean everyone. This doesn't mean it's bad food or that everybody should avoid them, but you should pay attention to how you personally are affected by these foods.

And I should also mention that the FODMAP diet, if you have IBS and you utilize the FODMAP diet to reduce symptoms, the goal is that that's a temporary intervention and that you should then slowly reintroduce foods over time and keep track of that It's a very challenging process because if you so much as go out to a restaurant and they include something in a meal that you are unaware of You can have a reaction and not know what food item caused the reaction or it can be dose food item caused the reaction or it can be dose if you reintroduce it to large of a like I mentioned earlier with milk in terms of lactose intolerance it may take your body a while to tolerate that cooking you know the more you cook your

cruciferous vegetables the less lower in FODMAPS they become until they're soft as opposed to eating them raw or just lightly cooked. And then I already touched on dose dependent. Maybe you can have half a cup of oatmeal and not have a problem. But if you eat it three days in a row, all of a sudden you have a problem. And you're like, well, it didn't cause me a problem on Monday or Tuesday, but all of a sudden here on Wednesday. And that means maybe that your body, your microbiota that is adapting to the intake

of that particular nutrient has expanded to the point where now it's kind of causing you some problems. So I wish there were better answers. I mean, you go to, you speak to some of the people who have been doing this, who are PhDs and have been studying these problems for decades, and it's still a trial and error process, utilizing multiple different disciplines. And so, I'm hesitant to make any grand claims, but it's mostly just to create awareness about some options that are out there and to get to seek professional help if necessary. And I also mentioned in there, I talked about

vegetable oils at one time. I even had a video. Yeah, I was going to ask quickly just to comment. I've seen it firsthand because I have a steel trap stomach, I guess. I mean, I eat well, but I don't really experience any GI issues basically ever. But my wife doesn't have problems, but she just has a, her body's more finicky. Like I just see it where she will for periods of time, she will not react well to something random like ground turkey or peas or, or, um, or eggs.

And then, so for periods of time, there just will be things that just upset her stomach. So she just leaves them out and eats other things. And then sometimes as she eats, consistently eats other foods that then there'll, something will, some switch will flip and that can upset her stomach. And then she'll leave that out and go to something else. And so just wanted to share that for anybody who,

if you're experiencing anything like that, like Stan said, there is a bit of like, just quote unquote, listening to your body, as they say, and not trying to read too much into it and just go, well, this isn't working for me at this moment in time. So I'm going to try something else. We say that in training, too. Everything works, nothing works forever. But in diet, I've said,

I said I don't eat foods I like, I eat foods that like me, and I make that decision about an hour after I eat, and I pay attention to it, and I'll avoid foods that I generally, I can't eat ginger for some reason, and I can't even describe the feeling, but it kinda seems to penetrate my blood-brain barrier. I don't do well with coffee either for the same reason, I just kind of get lightheaded and I can't eat garlic for life. I mean garlic and onions will just tear my my gut apart. It's also could possibly be what the

food is cooked in. And I did a video on this. I said the real poison that's killing us and right now of course there's a lot of information on the internet about seed oils. And I said in that video that... It's the demonized food du jour. Yes, it's the current demonized food du jour. And there's some context to this because I said in the video that I am biased. They are a poison to me. When I eat food that's cooked in seed oils, it gives me diarrhea. And it's the kind of feeling to where you don't think you're going to make it to the bathroom.

I mean, it's like you had a suppository or something, you know, it's just, it's like, it's terrible. And I could never figure it out. Or an enema and it's about to come out. Exactly. And that's what it is. And if you try and if you try and resist, it's extremely painful. You're doing the Kegel maneuver

and it's just extremely painful to try and resist. And I could never figure that out. And I've had that problem ever since I was a kid. My mom had the same problem. Sometimes she actually would relieve herself because she couldn't make it to the bathroom because it was so painful to try and hold. And I could never figure out what it was. As a bodybuilder, of course, you end up

controlling your foods. You cook everything yourself at home, and I never use seed oils. But if I would go out and eat, even at Denny's or something, just for eggs, I would just get eggs. And I would have the problem and I wouldn't realize why I can't eat eggs at Denny's because they cook it in seed oils. And I just found that I have an allergic reaction to them. I used to love to go to the Mongolian grill. I mean, you're talking fruits and vegetables and sliced meats and you give them all to the guy up at the grill and he puts them on that grill, but he pours a huge, a whole bunch of oil on that grill first, usually canola oil, something that they cook it in. I would always have the same response within 30, 40 minutes.

Even a steak, I can do a grilled steak, a flame grilled steak, but if you cook that steak in seed oil, like a pan seared, I would have that reaction to it. I spoke about this in the video and I demonized vegetable oils as a result. Plus, they are largely consumed as part of ultra-processed foods. That's kind of the bigger issue. People are not putting their canola oils on their salads that they're making. If you're eating a high refined oil, seed oil, vegetable oil diet, it's not because you are eating great food.

You took the words right out of my mouth. Yeah. How are you consuming them? Now, we do see in the literature that, or I say we do not see inflammation as a result of consuming oils in the way that you just mentioned. We also see that if you remove saturated fats, say butter primarily or palm oil, and you replace it with a seed oil, canola, cottonseed, that we see a reduction in LDL cholesterol and a reduction in inflammation. And so you would suggest, hey, these are health foods, but that's not how they're consumed. Like you said, it's not like you're drizzling it onto a nice hearty salad. 70% of the seed oils that are consumed are consumed as part of ultra processed foods, whether as part

of packaged foods or now where they are toxic is in reheated oils, your deep fried foods and those friers. I spoke about that in the video as well. When you drop those fries or those chicken wings into those oils at your fast food place. Now those do have, I hate to use the word toxic, but they do have adverse health effects associated with them. And that's how the vast majority of them are consumed. And you'll even hear staunch advocates. Some of these oils are even further processed, but partially hydrogenated.

Yes, yeah. You will hear the PhDs in nutrition, some of the people who are most outspoken about not demonizing seed oils in general, as you said, putting them on a salad, such as Alan Flanagan, Maylini nutrition is an extraordinary, brilliant mind in the space. Lane Norton, Joey Munoz, there's a whole host of PhDs in nutrition that are defending seed oils based on the fact that what you just said, cold-pressed, drizzle on a salad, replacing saturated fats, we see benefit. But that's not how they're consumed.

Right. And really any use case like what you just mentioned that would be health promoting, you probably would prefer olive oil. I know I would because a good olive oil tastes better than any sort of seed oil. Well, and even then, Omega-3s become even more important. And I don't know, I don't want to put too much stock in the Omega-6 to 3 ratio, but just getting sufficient omega-3 is important. Of course, two servings, two five ounce servings of salmon a week satisfy that requirement. I would lastly say on the seed oil argument that in a diet, as you and I have been describing and discussing here, whether it's the vertical diet or whether it's the Mediterranean diet, a generally healthy whole food diet, there isn't anything I would take out of that diet and replace with a seed oil because we already

have our fats below 30% of total calories. We have our saturated fats below 10% of total calories, which is important for those people who are hyper responders or suffer from hypercholesterolemia. If your LDL is significantly elevated, a large contributor to that is saturated fat, is butter and bacon and fatty meats that will raise your APLB in your LDL and increase your cardiovascular disease risk. And that's a whole other podcast because I know there's a whole bunch of... I'm just gonna say it, a whole bunch of quacks out there who are arguing against that very agreed upon science using a host of stupid strawman arguments. And are even trying to say that the exact opposite is true, actually. You want high LDL.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just, it's painful to listen to how uneducated or how blind they are. Even to Dr. Baker's defense, he said, look, he said, I don't think you should let your LDL run out of control and I don't think this diet's for everyone. I like Sean Baker and I think he's been reasonably sensible about a lot of his recommendations. But he's a staunch advocate of the carnivore diet and there are other... Here's the thing that people forget is that LDL is, ApoB in particular, is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease. There are other risk factors. Both can be true. High blood sugar, high blood pressure, now anything that damages the endothelial lining with inflammation,

both can be true that you can have an even more increased risk. I commented on a site the other day where someone was arguing LDL didn't matter and I said, well, it certainly does, but just because you wear your seatbelt doesn't mean you can text while you're driving. They're both true. If you want to lower your cardiovascular disease risk as much as possible, you want to manage all of those things.

You want to keep your LDL down. you want to keep your blood pressure under control, you want to make sure you don't have insulin resistance. All of those things are important. Not too high iron. Iron can damage the endothelial lining. There's a whole host of different things that can do that. And so I'm not sure why they try and etch out an exclusion to that one independent risk factor. But in the absence of high LDL, you have no, there's no atheroma, there's no, there's no atherogenic disease. So... I think part of the problem is that people, and this is not everyone, but a lot of people who are drawn to the more carnivore style of dieting. They like the idea of just eating rib-eye steaks every day

with sticks of butter and bacon and cheeseburgers. And they don't really want to eat vegetables because they just don't really like vegetables. And again, the steaks are more delicious than the fruit or a lot of the stuff you've been talking about. And so we have, you know, some motivated reasoning in place and just cognitive biases in play where People want to believe it. So that's where they're starting and then you hear some

Sciencey explanation that quote-unquote makes sense and that's enough well, and also it's hard to deny you can't deny because there's plenty of anecdotal evidence out there that we see all over the internet that some people who... We just got done talking about people who have food allergies, FODMAP diets and for the IBS, et cetera. When you lose weight, yeah, when you eliminate the source of the problem, your health is going to improve.

And that's great. And I think that that's certainly a reason for people to eat that diet. I would like to see them gradually reintroduced so they're not so restricted. But if they don't want to, they're going to have to. But that doesn't mean that the adverse effects don't still exist. But it's a cost-benefit analysis. You get to decide whether or not the long-term risk of potentially increasing your cardiovascular disease risk outweighs

how you feel now about the diet. Same could be said for weight loss. We know that research shows us, and I've talked about the McDonald's diet, the 7-11 diet, and the Twinkie diet, it shows us that 95% of health benefits are realized simply from weight loss itself, irrespective of diet. That the McDonald's, the professor that conducted the McDonald's diet with his students... Halb, right? Oh no, sorry, that was... Halb was, I think that was the Twinkies. He ate in a calorie deficit, but he ate at McDonald's every day and he lost 40 pounds.

Everything improved, including his cholesterol. And that initially, that is certainly the response when you lose weight on any diet. And that can make people start prosthetizing their specific diet. It becomes their new religion that that's the reason why they're healthy is because they ate that way. They lost weight, that's the reason why. And if they had lost weight utilizing a different diet, they'd probably be singing the praises of that diet as well. You know, we see that in the pain industry, not to get too far off the track here, with pain, but I'm certain you've studied much of the relevant information regarding pain and rehabilitation, and we

see that the vast majority, something 95 plus percent of pain, resolves itself spontaneously within four to six weeks. And so any intervention that an individual undergoes, whether it's chiropractics or physical therapy or dry needling or, you know, guashto or you name the intervention, wearing a copper bracelet on your wrist, whatever you were doing during that time that your pain spontaneously improved, you're going to attribute the improvement to that intervention. And we know now that most people's pain just goes away and any type of movement far exceeds the specific interventions that are currently that people go out and spend their time and money on.

There's a large psychological component to it as well, but circling that back to dieting, if you get a result from whatever diet intervention that you're currently employing, and we see the same kind of testimonials for vegan, we see I've got thousands of testimonials to the vertical diet, but I can't make claims about it for the general population. I have to be careful to talk about what's actually evidence-based. Everybody has their own testimonials. Their own people singing the praises of their diet because they've gotten results from

utilizing that diet. But the results, the weight loss occurred because of the calorie deficit and the health benefits occurred as a result of the weight loss occurred because of the calorie deficit and the health benefits occurred as a result of the weight loss for most people. And again, there's some specific nuances to that with respect to the fact that if you've eliminated a particular food that was causing you problems and you reintroduce it too soon or too much, then you may have that problem again and it's going to even further bolster your feeling that what you're doing is not the only way.

It could be the right way for you. And we said that earlier in terms of dietary adherence, whether you're low carb, high carb, you have to go with a diet that feels the least restrictive to you and makes you feel the best. And one final comment on seed oils. It's also part of the appeal of this popular narrative right now. It seems to also be that... Yeah, big food.

Yeah, there's that, which I actually understand because if, I mean, you mentioned sugar, salt, fat, there's a book by Michael Moss. I might have mixed up the, might be salt, sugar, fat, or I don't remember the title, it has those words in it, right? And I read his book and I had him on the podcast. And so when you actually look into the history of big food, you have a reason to be skeptical. You have a reason to assume that these big conglomerates

do not have your best interests in mind, because they factually do not. Even you just look at the history of what they've done and the history of food science and what it's been driving at, which is how do we get people to consume as much of our low quality food as possible? As much per sitting, as much per day, per week, how do we get these people just completely hooked on our Cheetos or whatever nonsense that we're making? And so I understand and I think they deserve skepticism

and actually they do not deserve the benefit of the doubt and because they've proven that again, they're in it for the shareholder value and that seems to be about it. Further than that, it would be outright malice. I don't know, but we can just stick with shareholder value and you can apply that same logic to big pharma. Totally valid and there are many examples, a lot of evidence of malfeasance that rightfully earns skepticism. So I actually do understand that. There's also though this factor of you

have a person who let's say they're overweight, they have health problems and they're being told that it's this one thing. It's just the seed oil and this is the toxin. It's the red dye 40. Yeah. Correct. Correct. As opposed to a number of things that are not helping, but if we're talking about body composition and health, a lot of it, of course, just comes back to the lifestyle and how is the person choosing to eat? How is the person choosing to use their body?

So of course, these are the things that most people don't wanna hear. They wanna hear that it's big food, putting seed oil and everything. That's why. Yeah, no, you're right. It's not the Red Dye 40. It's not the seed oil necessarily. It's not any one food item. The chemicals in the receipts, I saw whatever the... Who is it? It was the carnivore guy like getting his receipt with his with his shirt and talking about how these are endocrine disrupting chemicals like, okay,

fine. If you were if you were maybe eating receipt paper, like a pile of it every day, that might not be good for you. But you don't have to grab your receipt with your shirt. Yeah, it could very well be the food that the red die-40 is in because it could be a highly palatable, ultra-processed, generally micronutrient-deficient food. I always have to say ultra-processed, highly palatable. There's a lot of processed foods that aren't over-consumed. Protein powder is a processed food. A lot of foods that are processed.

A lot of nutritious foods are processed to some degree. I mean... A lot of nutritious foods, yep, and including some of those ones that have preservatives in them so that they have better shelf lives and make it more convenient for us. That doesn't necessarily mean that that's a bad food or one that you might be likely to overconsume. And so you have to be cautious. And when you talk about these foods, which ones cause you to overconsume and eat too many calories. And that's those ones in the Kevin Hall study where he talked about ultra-processed, highly

palatable foods. It's hard for me to say. Like again, if you've got somebody that wants to go in there like Food Babes saying, we got to get rid of Red Dye 40, that will do fuck all for our dieting, for our obesity epidemic. It will do nothing. If you take that ingredient out, it does absolutely nothing. Or replacing seed oil with any other kind of oil, if the foods... What are we accomplishing exactly?

Right. If it's calorie for calorie, if you eliminate seed oils, then maybe you're eliminating some of these foods. But there's, like you say, there's other ways, whether you dip the fries in seed oil, you dip the fries in beef tallow, it's the same number of calories. They're highly palatable. They're a combination of carbohydrates, sugar, and salt.

People are going to over-consume them more so than they would a whole food. So now how do we employ that intervention? I did a video called, ironically enough, now that I live here, it was about the population here in Samoa, called What Can We Learn From the Fattest People in the World? I'm not pretending to be rude, I just spoke about that in the video. I talked about how my wife grew up here, and they used to grow all their own food. They raised pigs, and they grew taro, and they had fruits, and they would go out in the ocean and harvest different sea life, fish, et cetera.

And they would eat everything that they raised themselves and grew themselves and they would take a lot of it to the marketplace and they had a vibrant marketplace with four generations of family there, bartering, exchanging and buying and selling food items. And they didn't have any obesity in their family when she was a little girl. And then food stamps were introduced to the island sometime later. People stopped growing their own food. Now the marketplace doesn't even exist. Too much of trinkets for the Carnival Cruise Line that comes in.

They just don't have the same. They grow a lot of food on the island, but it's fruits and stuff. But the families don't. Usually it's people just doing it for the stores and little fruit stands on the side of the road. But people don't raise their own food to eat very much here anymore, certainly not a significant portion. The vast majority of the food they eat now is the three things that we just talked about. The bags I see down at the Costco left, Costco affiliate here on the island.

They have aisles and aisles and aisles of these highly processed, ultra-processed hyperpalatal foods, big bags of white flour, big bags of sugar, and can after can after jar after jar after bucket after bucket of seed oils. They combine those three very inexpensive items. And that's the bulk of what they eat, and they use food stamps now. And the obesity epidemic here is one of the worst in the world. The highest up there was Tonga, and here's Samoa. It's horrific.

And I don't know, I don't have the answer on how to solve that problem. I know it's not red dye 40. And it's not the seed oil per se. It's a bigger problem. Yeah, it's those foods. Now, we've speculated that education is probably... I don't know what other intervention you can do. I spoke about this in that video as well where in New York, they imposed some restriction

on the size of the big gulps and then people started just buying two. We saw that in Mexico as well where they put taxes on soda. Well, then they just go drink Kool-Aid. And it's finding an alternative, you know, that's equally contributes equally to the problem. Behavioral economics explains like that those things should have who actually thought those interventions were going to work like any anyone even just going to college to study behavioral economics could have said, hey, you realize this is what people are going to do, right? Like real people. This is almost like game theory that they're going to college to study behavioral economics could have said, hey, you realize this is what people are going to do, right? Like real people, this is almost like game

theory that they're going to respond to your strategy with their own to get what they want. Yeah, it's hard to see that you could employ the same beneficial efforts that we employed with cigarettes. You know, that was huge taxes, and that was also labeling and getting rid of advertising and certainly to kids. But food, it's hard to see how you can... I mean, you could do some labeling. You could... I mean, we already have the nutrition facts and calories right on there. You certainly shouldn't market... And we've already adjusted the sugar intake on cereals. I don't think we should be marketing... There certainly shouldn't market, and we've already adjusted the sugar intake on cereals. I don't think we should be marketing. There certainly shouldn't be sugar-laden sodas in schools.

There's just no way. But then they're drinking apple juice and Kool-Aid, and I'm not suggesting apple juice is the same. There are some polyphenol benefits to juices, but I mean, just the idea of kids drinking calories is challenging to me. Not just kids, but adults too, but they can make their own decisions. But I have a hard time seeing that beyond education, there's a whole lot that we can do legislatively.

And then that gets you into politicians, you know, and that's a dirty business too now. It's what's going on now. Anyhow, they're getting so much money from these companies. I have a hard time seeing how we can make significant inroads without aggressive marketing, education. But certainly banning a couple items like we discussed is an absolute waste of time. It seems like it's just people just waving their arms, trying to act like they're making a difference and they're really not. I can't put my finger on the solution, to be honest with you. Yeah, I think you're right in that education alone obviously has not been enough.

But there is a lot of institutional capture, regulatory capture, and so there are very perverse incentives at work. And if that could be addressed and if there were economic incentives in getting people to eat better and be healthier? Yeah, you hit the yes. Yes, I had forgotten about that. That is that's getting in front of the problem. Right now we're subsidizing a lot of these foods, the corn, etc. Why wouldn't we stop subsidizing those foods? They would obviously get more expensive as a result. But then we would need to provide for people with food insecurity and lower

income folks, we need to provide them an alternative, more affordable. We need to subsidize the kinds of foods that they should be eating. And that's a tough term, should be eating. If that could happen, yeah, if that could happen, if they could go in and be able to, in the most affordable foods, although a lot of them are still pretty darn affordable, you know, your legumes and rice and the like. And then you got Mediabu crapping on rice and you've got some of the healthiest communities in the world, Japan and China and others, eating 10 times as much rice as we do. But they eat a lot more fruits and vegetables.

They don't eat as much total calories. They have less, more and more as they're starting to become more Americanized. But Japan's obesity is 3%, although they largely use shame. But they have a much healthier food program in their schools. It's a great place to start, to get your kids to start eating healthier foods. But because of time and convenience, we tend to send them to school. I ask my kids every day, what do you have for lunch? Hot dog, pizza.

It's just, oh, I just shake my head. I'm like, here, take this to school today. But I can control what they eat at home. You know, in Japan, they eat very healthy food. The kids prepare it oftentimes, and they, lots of fruits and vegetables. They have very healthy food that we don't have. I agree. It starts at home. And as a parent parent modeling that behavior. I've seen many parents over the years struggle because they ate one way. They ate a lot of relatively non-nutritious food and then they would try to get their kids to eat another way and but especially as the kids get a little bit older and they see that it basically

just comes across as hypocrisy. Yeah the kids menu at the restaurant, what the hell is that? It's always a corn dog. It's terrible. Yeah. But if you can, as the parent, eat well, and if you can show if that's, I mean, I'm speaking personally, my kids have always seen my wife and I eat well. And so for them, it's

normal to eat vegetables. They don't like all vegetables, but there's a variety that they're willing to eat. And it's normal for them to have whole grains. They're again, they're still kids and they can be picky, but their version of picky is they like cauliflower more than broccoli. Okay. They like white rice more than brown rice. Okay, cool. And so that and then balanced with letting them have little amounts of sugar and little indulgences and not being too restrictive,

unnecessarily restrictive with foods. Not keeping it in the house for them to help themselves to it in the refrigerator at times. I push proteins. We even do it. They just don't really, they just never like, we have these little Yasso bars they like or whatever. I let them, I mean, they don't know this,

but I'm thinking with, I have a 12-year-old and a 7-year-old. So I'm thinking, you know, 100 calories or so of whatever. Whatever's tasty. And that's their dessert. And maybe for the 12-year-old a little bit more if he wants a little bit more. And so there have been times where they've eaten more than that. But typically, that's good for them. Like, they have their little ice cream bar or their little whatever and they're satisfied.

And they wouldn't even want more if I offered it. Right, right. And the basics are all there. You've always got the healthy foods and the lean proteins and we start with those. Every time my kids ever ask me for something that I think is more of a treat, I'm always like, have you had your protein yet? And so now they know.

They don't even ask unless they have protein with it or before it. So I've got them trained at least in that respect. Nice, nice. Well, we've been going for an hour and a half. I originally asked for, I asked for an hour of your time and so on to make sure that it didn't take way more than I asked for. But this was a great discussion.

I enjoyed it per usual. And why don't we just wrap up quickly with where people can find you, can find your work. You've mentioned the Vertical Diet. Anything else you want them to know about? Yeah, everything's at Stand Efforting. I have a website, standefforting.com. And on there, there's links to my meal prep company,

The Vertical Diet. We provide meals nationwide, delivered to your door. I also have an e-book. It's 250 pages now. It's in version 4. Anybody who bought a previous version gets the updates for free. It covers everything we discussed today and much, much more in terms of blood testing and training, etc. That's on there. It's the Vertical Diet 4.0 e-book. I do still take clients. I've had more time since being down here in Samoa. You have online coaching available on there. Next week I'm releasing my world's

strongest bar. It's a protein bar, carbs, fats, meal replacement bar with a whey isolate and the MCT oil and some rice syrup solids. It's just something you can use for convenience and for travel. But everything's at stanefforting.com and my Instagram is at stanefforting and my YouTube is at stanefforting.com and my Instagram is at stanefforting and my YouTube is also stanefforting. I've got some great rhinos rants. They're a little dated, but they're still just as relevant and kind of fun to watch. Awesome. Well, thanks again for taking your time, Stan. Thanks for having me, brother. We will conclude today's episode shortly, but first I need to tell you about creatine gummies.

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And because you are a valued podcast listener, you can save 20% on your first order with the coupon code muscle. Again, that's by Legion.com slash creatine gummies save 20% with the coupon code muscle. Well, I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful. And if you did subscribe to the show because it makes sure that you don't miss new episodes. And it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people

who may like it just as much as you. And if you didn't like something about this episode or about the show in general, or if you have ideas or suggestions or just feedback to share, shoot me an email, mike at muscleforlife.com, muscle, F-O-R, life.com, and let me know what I could do better or just what your thoughts are about,

maybe what you'd like to see me do in the future. I read everything myself. I'm always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.