The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Most Replayed Moment: The Fastest Way To Lose Fat Without Losing Muscle! - Dr Andy Galpin

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

Dr. Andy Galpin is a professor and performance scientist with a PhD in Human Bioenergetics. He specialises in muscle, strength, and human performance - translating exercise science into practical plans that actually work. In today’s Moments episode, Andy explains the fastest way to lose fat while preserving muscle - without falling into the crash-diet, over-cardio trap! Listen to the full episode here! Spotify: Apple: Watch the Episodes On YouTube: ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Dr. Andy Galpin: https://www.andygalpin.com/

I've definitely grown up my whole life thinking that the way that you burn fat is by running. I mean, this is what most people think, right? You want to burn fat around here, the belly fat? The best way to do is go for a run. And a lot of people have very little luck with that and end up beating themselves up. So to close off on this conversation, I'd like to hear your take on that. You need to think about fat loss in a broader approach than most people give it to. which is to say when you say fat loss, let's get specific.

What we're meaning is we're losing fat, and ideally we're preserving muscle. That's what we typically want, okay? We're also talking about losing fat so that it stays off as long as possible. Those are baked in to that phrase, but oftentimes forgot. So the advice I'm going to give you is with those two assumptions in mind. You're trying to keep as much lean muscle as you can, and you're trying to make this a successful journey and not something you have to repeat again,

time and time. Totally, right? Yo-yo dieting. In fact, one of the more, probably the highest most cited paper I've ever published was on yo-yo dieting. Like a review article on that. So you can go read that.

People love that paper. I was just a co-author. Jackson wrote that paper. So credit goes to Jackson for that. But making sure you're paying attention to say, with those parameters in mind, how do I lose weight? You can look across meta-analyses and review articles,

and you will see the number one predictor, a long-term successful weight loss, and by weight loss, I mean fat loss, is always adherence. It's adherence to your workout program, and it's adherence to your nutrition program. So step number one, before we worry about any change in diet, we start arguing about which method of exercise is best,

before we start really going way down the line to things like genetic testing, like you're really wasting your time here. And a lot of that stuff, especially if you're not paying attention to what's going to make you adhere the longest amount of time. In fact, if you just stopped right there, that's enough for most people. Can you put yourself in a position where you're able to feel abundant with your nutrition approach? And notice, I'm trying not to say diet here.

It should be a nutritional approach. you have a balance between living life and flexibility, but then also figuring out what triggers you and maybe you don't have a trigger, maybe you can be more flexible, maybe you need more stringent, like all the things that go into it. You got to figure out a system.

So you're not, people will not be on a diet very long, collectively, right? On average, diets don't work, quote unquote, for those exact reasons, right? You got to get to a caloric deficit somehow. But you got to do that in a way where you still are happy and sustainable. Totally, right?

And you still feel energy. And you're there. and that it's working for you, right? And that's different for every physiology. Okay, great. And you've got to be the exercise system, the same thing, all right? If you hate running, there's no reason. You don't have to run a step to lose a ton of weight.

If you love running, you shouldn't run. If you hate lifting weight, fine. I can work with any parameter you give me, if all we're concerned about is preserving lean muscle mass and losing fat over the long term. That's really what we have to consider the most. Okay, now within that, does that mean every training and nutrition program is the same?

no, no, no, not at all. There are fundamental differences. Here's the problem to think about. If I said, hey, you're going to do the same training program in the rest of your life. You'd probably be like, well. But if I told you that with nutrition, people are like, well, yeah, of course.

Like there's magic diets that do, like, no. Keto, great, metatrain, great, high carb, great, great, great. You can do them all. They can all work for you. some people taking out gluten helps some people great great great sure

all of it is possible right we come from very different backgrounds if you look at any of the research for example like a really interesting point on genetic testing if you're not taking account

genetic background on that genetic testing for things like nutrition precision nutrition is entirely worthless because we see classic markers that are associated

with say more effective carbohydrate utilization or fat utilization or body composition and they might predict a decent percentage of variance in European Caucasians you apply those exact same things to West African or East African and those variants go to zero people forget that part when they start talking genetic testing they have not been validated across all ethnic backgrounds

and the ones that have have shown they range from like 40% variance to zero So, like, really, like, you're way, way, way ahead of the cart here, paying attention to things that just do not matter. We got to get you on a system that works. Okay, great. For some people, that might be more nutritionally based. All right, you can lose and preserve muscle mass really well

by just going decently high on protein and then regulating your calories. The example I gave you earlier, you want to go more carbs, less fat? Great, you want to the opposite? Like, we can play those levers. No problem. all right what's your problem though oh I struggle with

cravings okay great oh I struggle with hunger pangs okay great I struggle with okay well then we're gonna make those decisions based on more of this

more than that based on like where is your pain point what's your problem I struggle with the okay great I have to now we're personalizing

now we're individualizing based on things that are going to matter orders of magnitude more than other things that I've just talked about right that stuff will trump it

exercise the same thing maybe you you hate exercise okay great maybe we can get you to walk a few times a day and we'll get most of our fat loss through nutrition maybe the opposite you love training but pooh man you just struggle to eat whatever or not eat something all right great maybe we'll play the game more with you know willpower will push the pace on our exercise high intensity fine low intensity fine weights great cardio's great surfing great like don't zone six to i don't care all of it can be done okay some of the foundational things that tend to be consistent for those two things on most people is you need to make sure protein

is adequate, hard to maintain muscle mass with lower protein, especially if we're going hypochloric. So keep protein high. You want to do something revolving strength training, at least once a week, for the same exact reasons, something that makes you burn a lot of calories, long duration, high intensity, either way, that's all you really have to do. If you can do that stuff, consistently, over time you're going to get there. You're going to be just fine. Where we see problems are people that put themselves in a position of scarcity. What do you mean by scarcity for anyone that doesn't know? Depriving themselves. Depriving themselves. You feel like you never get to do the thing you want to do. And this is a psychological thing, right? Which causes

the yo-yo effect. Which causes the problem of consistently adherence over time, right? So making sure you do that. I personally have some go-to standards. I like to do, I'll happily share that with you. I tend to like to have a decent balance between kind of our anaerobic strength training, high heart rate stuff and our more steady state, longer duration. So if someone's going to be able to work out three times per week,

I'm probably doing one thing where we're going long duration. Call it a hike, call it a swim, call it a run, whatever we can do. And then the other two days I'm probably doing a combination of lifting and then probably finishing with some high heart rate thing, right? So we'll do like a little bit of strength and hypertrophy muscle growth work and then we'll do a circuit or an aerosolte bike or some sprints or like what can we get you into it's like really really hard. If I can get you an environment where you're working out with some other human, I love that. Is there any reason why you do the strength first and then? Absolutely.

That's a great question. If you do strength training before endurance work, your strength training will not compromise your endurance. In fact, sometimes it exacerbates it. If you do your endurance first, you're going to be more fatigued and you're going to lose strength and so have worse performance in your strength training. What's the most important thing we haven't spoken about? If there was one more thing you could add of all the things you know, that would allow Jennifer, who's a 34-year-old single mother or Dave,

who's a black cab driver in London, the average person. I think it is a. exciting what's coming in the world of human health. And I think it's helpful for people to know that stuff because a lot of the challenges we're facing, we're going to get worse, we have things that are going to be possible pretty soon. Kind of the stuff I'm talking about, this idea of precision exercise, precision nutrition. It's not really available to many people, too expensive, et cetera. We're going to cross those barriers pretty soon.

We are working on a project right now called the Human Digital Twin. So this is a combination of a couple of my companies, so the sleep company, Absent Rest, our blood work company, Vitality, Blueprint, Springbok, there's another company called Axiophores that actually has four sensors in your shoe. And we can see early changes potentially in Gate,

so how you're walking, which could potentially, and research is needed here, but potentially be early signs of Parkinson's development, their logical disorder. So we'll see this in gait before we'll see this in symptoms. Companies that are involved in this entire thing, we can take all those data,

we're actually doing this right now, put them together and make what's called a digital twin. This allows us to make your physiology. And so from our perspective of vitality, we've got all your blood work and molecular biomarkers. From absolute rest, we've got your sleep. We've got your movement patterns. We can actually work with another company

to watch you physically move would do those stuff. We can take your physiology and upload it. Then from there, we can run endless simulations of combinations of nutrition and training and supplementation, medicine, movement, daytime patterns, sunlight, water, all those things, and figure out really quickly how you're going to respond the best for whatever outcome we want. It's not ready at all right now. But we're actually, again, running it right now. We'll have our first cohort done probably in the next week or so. We have really, really soon. I don't know how well the model is going to be the first time through it.

I don't know if our group's going to be the best at it. It doesn't matter. But this is clearly going to be something the world is capable of. As we get better at being human sensors, and we can bring those data in, we're going to be able to deploy things like this and say, hey, yo, this is most likely to work for you. The digital twin is already being used for like the heart.

It's in place. The digital twin of the kidneys is as well. the lungs are coming soon, the heart is coming pretty soon. There's lots of groups. I'm not involved in any of those projects. But that's coming on board. So the ability to not have to guess anymore

and most importantly, try. I tried this for six weeks. It didn't work. I tried this for nine. That's going to go away really fast. Great. You still have to go do all the work. The technology won't work out for you.

Well, we have some stuff that'll do that too. What's the cost, though? Like when you were saying all of that, I go, do you know what I mean? We spent the entire length of human history with one, maybe arguably two singular goals. One of them at the core was stress reduction. That was what we're after, right? You create communities so you're safer.

You create homes, so you're environmental. You create agriculture, so our food. And we all wanted to reduce the stress thing, right? I didn't call that, but that's what it was. And then we got to the year 2000 or so, we realized, Oh, fuck. Maybe that was the wrong target. I saw in your bookshelf at home there's a book called The Comfort Crisis.

Oh, yeah. And that just flashed in front of me as you were saying that. Yeah, shut out. Michael, it's a great book. When we have astronauts come back from the International Space Station, getting people to live on Mars, it's a bit of a rocket problem, but it's a bigger physiology problem. and this

HDT project Rwana's part of the people we're working with is Cody Burkhardt runs human works at NASA figuring out that line of going hey you don't want to release stress

if you do what happens when we send people up to space because there's no gravity your physiology tanks really quickly right they come back

oftentimes astronauts come back and they can't physically walk for a few days because in that case that aspect Now, other aspects of stress are way up. We've lost some of the core tenets that it means to be human, and we are not ready for that. We are not ready at all to be able to be told, oh, yeah, we're in this scan, and here's the exact combination of life you need to run. Not even counting the

ethics behind all that. Like, the ethics of genetic testing alone are really, really interesting, to say the least. The ethics of doing something like that, we have not thought through this stuff, right? Collectively, we. There is more in our world than our human experience than just straight answers, right? This is one of the beauties

of this ride we get to take. I don't know if we have good answers. I think we've clearly shown we're not very good at asking those questions before. Never. Because the incentives in the short time is so tempting. We're seeing this with AI at the moment.

It's just so tempting. Yeah. And then we figure, we get the results back in 20 years. is and by then it's just too late. I mean, look at the current health position that we're in, right? We went after that entire idea of minimizing as many stressors as we possibly could. And, uh-oh, it worked.

Yeah. Oops. Now we have to go back and do this weird thing where we re-engineer stress back into our lives. You have to be very careful and judicious when you pull things. out of a natural state. I'm being very choosy with my words there. If you're not directing stress, you're letting something else direct that.

That stress is still coming one way or the other, which means adaptation is coming. So you can be intentional and point that ship in one direction, or you can cover your eyes and think it's not happening at all and realize you're getting pointed somewhere else. It's better to least have the acknowledgement.

This is why the word consciousness is in the title of my book. This is part of the process, right? You can be aware of it or you can not. From there, you can choose whatever you want. That's entirely up to you and all that. I just want people to realize you're making a choice one way or the other. So when you involve technology into the picture,

AI is another really, really challenging thing in a lot of ways. But I'll reiterate, we've seen this already play out. and we know the answer is this gets worse in terms of we're not going to make very good choices right away. How does that manifest itself in the end? I don't know. Nobody knows. But to date, we're not particularly good at making that decision.

So there's lots of consequences there. I think that we have there. One last thing I'll say on this is, if you break down, okay, the way that we structured is there's four pieces, okay? in order for you to have more success at your performance and health, you number one, have to have assessment. Once you have all this data, you have to go to step number two, which is then you have to qualify. Good, bad, great, worst ever, best in world history, okay? We're struggling on that. We don't know what healthy it looks like. I know what clinically deficient rickets looks like.

I know what obesity and type two diabetes and we know disease. We don't know what good versus great means. there are no databases I can pull from. There is no metric I can look at and say, what is a great, what's a great vertical jump number? What does somebody need to be able to jump in their 40s to be healthy? Like, we don't know these things, and I don't know it by ethnicity. And I mentioned that before, that's a critical component because it is clearly different, right?

There are some markers in basic blood chemistry that are not different in Southeast Asians, or that are different in Southeast Asians versus Northern Europeans. Like, we don't have that fully fleshed out. and if we do, it's four disease markers. We don't have the data. So I don't even know what I'm judging. Okay.

Now, assessment, great. Where are we going to get these databases as super healthy people? As the world continues to get less healthy. I'm losing my population to pull from really, really quickly, okay? Then the next piece is, okay, great.

You've told me that this marker should be here. Pick your marker, whatever you want. How do I get it there? And that's really where we're struggling. So the second problem is what I call Polaris. Like we have no North Star. We don't know where this thing should go. The third one is, okay, how do I get there?

What is the intervention? What is the thing? That's where I actually think people in my field are going to not only maintain but increase their value, such as like personal coaches, physical therapists, athletic trainers, people that are going to be nurses.

Because you might have an AI that can come in and run something and say, great, your numbers are here, and our metrics say you should be here, and then you should go do X. I want somebody there with me. I want a human taking me through X. That's going to feel better

because we don't know, there's almost no data on, okay, great. Well, what is the optimal training for that marker? What is the optimal nutrition? That is really, really limited. So we have to rely on expert. We have to rely on people that go, I know the evidence base,

but then also in my experience, I'm thinking about this this way. if you were an NFL quarterback and you tore your ACL and we ran all that stuff on you, you would still come back and go, oh great, there's a coach over there who's actually run people through ACL recoveries on 15 starting NFL quarterbacks?

Like, what's it going to cost? You're hiring that person, right? Because, like, you've done it before. Fantastic. Like, the budget doesn't matter at that point because the person has actually done it and they will be there. Fantastic.

I really feel like our field is going to increase in the value because of that. They're going to want to say, okay, awesome. The numbers came out on this. The A.I. I told me this. You've done it before, yeah? Done a lot. Great. I trust you the most.

I want you by my side. I want that companionship. As we lose more and more connection to other people, it's my biased opinion in my field that this is a great place where people want someone there. Online coaching is great. That's fine and all that. But you're seeing actually already a premium coming on

like, you know, I want to hire an in-person trainer. Can you get me that person? We're like, the boom was the opposite for a while and now it's already swinging back where people would rather have somebody there in person for all those reasons. So that is, I think, an incredibly interesting challenge. But that's the way to think about it. That top one's going to get better. Lots of problems. But what are we comparing against? And then what do we do about it? That's going be the real trick. What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.