The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - The Calories Expert: "Health Experts Are Wrong About Calories!" "The Surprising Benefits Of Diet Coke!" & "The Link Between Obesity & Past Abuse!"

Starting point is 00:00:00 Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

Starting point is 00:00:37 thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. Sorry. I did not think I would cry on this podcast so much. Lane Norton. Scientist, record-setting bodybuilder. And is one of the most respected voices in the health and nutrition space. Who debunks all the different fitness and nutrition myths out there. Let's go to the technical stuff.

Starting point is 00:01:08 Ooh, yeah, let's do that. Calories in, calories out. So, the first point of confusion. A lot of people may think they're in a calorie deficit, but they're not. Because, one, people don't really understand portion sizes. If you've never had the experience of, like, weighing out your food, you will be shocked. And the other thing is... Artificial sweeteners.

Starting point is 00:01:26 I've wondered for a while whether Diet Coke is healthy or not. If we look at the randomized control trial, they saw six kilograms of weight loss just from switching people from regular soda to diet soda. Now, when they compare it versus water, this is gonna be the most commented thing about in this entire interview, I'm sure. They found that...

Starting point is 00:01:42 What are the big misconceptions about intermittent fasting? Is it okay if I get deep into the weeds on this one? Go ahead. In studies, people in the intermittent fasting groups tend to lose more weight, but it's not because of anything magic about intermittent fasting. It's because... What's your thoughts on the Zempek? Overall, I think it's a net positive. And here's why. When it comes to weight loss, people are googling how to lose belly fat. Practically, it's kind of irrelevant because... And then is sugar addictive? This one's going to get me in trouble too. So...

Starting point is 00:02:09 Quick one, quick favor to ask from you. There is one simple way that you can support our show and that is by hitting that follow button on this app that you're listening to the show on right now. This year in 2024, we're trying really, really hard to level up everything we're doing. And the only free thing I'll ever ask from you is to hit that follow button on this app. It helps this show more than I could probably articulate. And it allows us, enables us to keep doing what we're doing here.

Starting point is 00:02:34 I appreciate it, Dealey. On to the show. Lane, who are you and what is the mission you're on? I'm trying to make fitness information more accessible, fitness more accessible to everyone and trying to act as a bridge between academic research and your average person, because so much gets lost in translation, because social media, the news, it is a fire hose of information, a lot of which is misinformation, or you only get part of the story. And so I have noticed people are so frustrated, because they feel like they understand what it is to eat healthy. And then a new documentary comes out, a new podcast comes out, a new article comes out and says, Oh, nope, you do it. Whatever it is you're doing, it's wrong. And here's why.

Starting point is 00:03:37 And I just want to help clear up some of that confusion and help people understand the big stuff that really matters versus not getting lost in the weeds of the stuff that just doesn't matter that much. And when you say fitness, how do you define that? Because you talked about, you then talked about diet and food. So what is the sort of bucket that you put yourself in? What are the categories that you really focus on? Great question. But, you know, I would say that my wheelhouse is nutrition. So I did a PhD in nutritional sciences. And I also feel pretty equipped to interpret exercise information as well. And what is your, so that's your academic sort of background. What is your lived experience?

Starting point is 00:04:20 What experiences have you had as a coach to people, as a trainer, in your own personal life that have added to that academic information that you have? Great question. So I'll try to give the abridged version of this. I got bullied a lot growing up as a really skinny kid, hyperactive, weird, you know. And so when you're young, what makes you stand out is actually, you know, not such a good thing. And I got bullied a lot. And I started lifting weights to, I thought if I got bigger muscles, you know, girls would pay attention to me and I'd stop getting bullied. It didn't work for either of those two things. But I did gain more confidence, not because I built bigger muscles, but because the

Starting point is 00:05:06 process of lifting and getting through plateaus and moving through setbacks and all those sorts of things, that's what built confidence. And I started lifting when I was 15. And when I got to college, I changed my major because I decided I was going to do my first bodybuilding show. I did it. I won the team division and I was hooked. I was like, this is the thing I want to do. But back in, you know, this is 2001. I was 19. I'm 42 now. The avenues to make money in fitness were basically be a personal trainer, open a gym, start a supplement company, try to be Mr. Olympia. And I didn't know how feasible any of those were. So I started looking at a PhD literally for no other reason. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, but I figured if I delay the real world by four to six years, maybe I'll have it

Starting point is 00:05:58 figured out by then. But in that meantime, I had started posting on different bodybuilding message boards. And so I would get a bunch of emails about my articles and people asking me questions. And I was like basically doing full on diets and nutrition for people for free because I just liked it. And then when I got to grad school, I was like, man, I, you know, this is a lot of my time now. Maybe if I just like charge people a little something, I can do this instead of a teaching assistantship, make a little bit of money, you know, didn't really think much of it. And so I took my first online client back in 2005. And within three years, I was making a

Starting point is 00:06:36 full-time income from it with no advertising, just word of mouth. And then in my fourth year, I think was the first year I ever made like six figures from it, I remember thinking, what is happening? I want to take one step back, because it's clear from what you said there, but also clear from a lot of the research that I did on you and your backstory, that much of the driving motivation behind why you are what you are today, and why you help people, and why you do the work you do and make the content you make, was because of this early experience with bullying. And I've sat here with so many people who are real anomalies in their lives for a variety of different reasons, you know, maybe in business or in science or in sport. And I so often find that the reason why they're brilliant is also

Starting point is 00:07:23 fundamentally interlinked to the reason why they struggle or they struggled, shall I say. And in your story, that seems to be very pertinent. I read a quote you said on a video you made seven years ago where you said, I had intense and sustained emotional bullying. I would be put in a corner by four to five people and be obliterated repeatedly. Yeah. I mean, you know, when I, I'll tell people like the, the reason I started lifting weights and bodybuilding, it was not the noblest of reasons. You know, it was very much, you say I'm worthless, I'm going to prove you wrong, you know? And even, I mean, I, I would love to say that it, it has no remnants today, but that would be a lie, right?

Starting point is 00:08:07 Some of the stuff I still struggle with in terms of I have a hard time trusting myself a lot of the times because I got told for so long, or trusting some decisions I make, I got told for so long, you do it wrong, you suck, you're worthless, those sorts of things. When you went to therapy, you were diagnosed with a form of PTSD, bullying PTSD, they call it. Yeah. My, my therapist, she diagnosed me and I remember saying, I don't have PTSD. Like that's, that's for soldiers. That's for leaf. And she goes, first off, Lane, you don't like it when people correct you as a professional in your field. Don't correct me. And you're right. You didn't witness people die.

Starting point is 00:08:53 Nothing like that. But trauma is trauma. And her explanation of it was, it is all relative. And it may not have been, you know, horrors from war, but for your brain, it was traumatic. And the way she explained it is trauma is something that causes you to react or act in response to something, even after that event has passed. Right?

Starting point is 00:09:24 So for me, for example, I've struggled in personal relationships where either partners or friends trying to give me feedback and I immediately get defensive, very defensive. And if you read about relationships, that's not great, right? It's one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse for relationships. And I never understood. I just thought, well, I'm just explaining myself. I'm just, and then now I understand it's, oh, it's because that was my response to the bullying because feedback or criticism to me feels like bullying, even though it's not. So you have a defense mechanism because you had

Starting point is 00:10:05 to defend yourself back then. And it's so interesting that the things that we adopt to survive when we're young become maladaptive when we get older. It's difficult to unpick all of that when you're an adult, isn't it? Because it's as you know, it's very hardwired. They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. But I've got my own trauma responses that i'm still trying to work through and i'm now aware of them but they still on a bad day on an unslept day they can still come to the surface i tell people i don't know if you can like completely undo your default setting right but i think what you can do is get mindful of it and learn tools to manage it right and i mean it's interesting how this ties into obesity because I used to be somebody who I've never been obese, never been overweight, nothing like that.

Starting point is 00:10:55 When I got to grad school, I was very much more towards the side of, if you're obese, it's because you're lazy. it's your fault, you know. And then the more I just observed, I realized that that can be true because look at all these, there's so many obese people that are successful in other areas of their life where they apply a lot of discipline. What is it about this thing? Right. And I remembered, I read a study and I, I, I, hopefully I get this correct because it was a while back, but they looked at obese women and they found that obese women were 50%, I believe 50% more likely to have a sexual assault trauma in their past. And you also look at the obesity literature

Starting point is 00:11:45 and people who are obese tend to have a greater reward response from food. Whereas people who are lean or normal weight, it's not like that huge reward that they get. It's like some people, you know, they can have a drink, they can have a beer and they go, I like the beer, you know, and other people become alcoholics. Right. And so, so much of this stuff gets tied up in, it gets wired in as a, as a kind of coping mechanism. If you look at like, for example, binge eating, what's happening during a binge is that person is getting a flood of dopamine, right? They're, they're, they're masking. They want to mask that feeling of whatever made them feel uncomfortable. I always tell people, I'm like, you don't really find

Starting point is 00:12:35 people binge eating after they've had eight hours of sleep at 10 AM in the morning when they're low stress, right? It's at 10 PM at night after a long day, they've been fighting with their spouse, their kids are driving them nuts and they just, they want to turn it all off. Right. And I think staying mindful is one of the hardest things we have as humans. I mean, I know what my addiction is, unfortunately, based on my current job, I get way too into social media. You know, I just end up, you know, it kind of started as, well, I'm doing work, right? And I'm responding to comments and all that. And pretty soon I'm looking at my screen time and I'm going, oh my gosh, right? And so that was something for me to numb up and turn my mind off, right? But for other people, it's food. For other people,

Starting point is 00:13:22 it's gambling. For other people, it's alcohol. For other people, it's gambling. For other people, it's alcohol. For other people, it's some other drug. So what do we do with that then? So do we first have to figure out what our relationship is on a psychological level with these addictions, with our food, for example? understand their propensity to binge, to have that sort of like dopamine craving, or do you focus somewhere else? I kind of say, all right, like walk me through a typical day for you. Walk me through a typical week. Where are your struggles really at, right? And one of the things I, we call it the bio lane way when we kind of teach our coaches is we do coaching with, you have to have two things are critically important, accountability with empathy, because if you're just the accountability coach, the drill sergeant, who's, you know, most people, if they screw up, they've beat themselves up more than anybody else. I know

Starting point is 00:14:21 I'm that way. I'm sure you're that way. So you don't need to beat them up again. The empathy portion. So, so if you're just beating somebody up, if you're just holding them accountable without empathy, you just become the drill sergeant. And what happens is people end up tuning you out or they're not honest with you anymore because they don't want to constantly feel like they're failing, right? The empathy portion, if you just have empathy and you're saying, I'm so sorry that happened, that's so hard, I understand, but you're not holding them accountable, there's no impetus for change, right? So it takes both. And so the way I'd often coach, like let's take somebody had a binge, something like that. The first thing I'd say, I understand why it happened. That's really hard. What was the antecedent to

Starting point is 00:15:06 this? Like what, what started this? Right. Okay. Now let's look at if we had to go back and do it over again, what are some things we might be able to do to put some, to put some barriers, right? So I had, I had one client, he's a hedge fund manager. And when he started with me, he was binging pretty much, I would say almost every day. And I said, okay, where do you find that this is happening? And he said, well, usually it's after everybody's gone to bed. And, you know, I just find myself in the kitchen and it just happens. So, okay. So it's not reasonable to lock yourself in your room, right? But what if we just did a few things to increase your mindfulness, right? Put a post on the cabinet where you, where you keep that, the junk food, right? Not saying anything nasty or anything, but I just said, write down, am I hungry or am I just upset? Then on your, on your door, right? Lock it from the inside. It's not, you know, it doesn't keep you from going out, but you have to unlock it, right? Like you're having to turn your brain on, right? And it, the more barriers you can put

Starting point is 00:16:16 there, the better it gets. The more sort of mindful moments you can have where you make, you have to kind of make a decision and you don't, you come out of autopilot. Cause I noticed when, whenever I have my binge moments, which happens once in a while, it is like unthinking. Yeah. It's just like a robot has taken over. Exactly. And with this, like this particular client, right. He'd have a rough day at work, hedge fund manager, very stressful job. I say, okay, if you've had a rough day at work, first thing to do when you're driving home, say, man, I've had a rough day at work, first thing to do when you're driving home, say, man, I've had a tough day at work. This is usually where I'd have a binge session. Like, say it out loud, like name it. You know what I mean? Sometimes just naming it is enough to stop

Starting point is 00:16:56 it. I mean, I, not the same thing, but I struggle with, I'm sure you know, is ADHD during conversation. I have something to say. I have something to say. I want to say it. I want to say it. I want to say it. Right. And I'll end up cutting people off and making them feel bad. And so I still have that inclination, but now I'll go, if I start, I go, Oh, I'm, I'm sorry. I jumped in. Please finish. Right. And so just like calling it out to yourself can make a huge difference on changing the behavior. That which gets monitored gets changed. I really want to focus on this point of the psychology of both exercise and weight loss, because in all the research that I do on even

Starting point is 00:17:37 your conversations and other conversations, clearly the like fundamental that sits underneath doing all the things we're going to talk about is like having the motivation, the discipline and mastering one's own like mind. Because as you kind of said, we can have all the diet plans in the world and many or all of them might work, but without the psychology of how to lose weight and to motivate ourselves to get to the gym, none of it really matters. So what else do we need to think about when we're trying to understand how to master like the beast within our mind? There's a lot to unpack here. Good. I'll start with this. Um, do you know Ethan Suplee? You familiar with him? So Ethan is an actor. He was in, uh, My Name is Earl. He was in American

Starting point is 00:18:18 History X and he was in Remember the Titans. Some of the big movies he's been in, Wolf of Wall Street as well. And he was over 500 pounds. Everybody knows him as the really big guy in those movies and those shows. Now he's like 220 pounds and looks like he would play a military operator in a show, right? And he said something that really stuck with me. He said, if the house is on fire, just get out of the house. We can worry about why the fire started later, but just get out. And there's so much paralysis by analysis out there that people don't end up actually starting. And if I put two plates in front of you, you know, with different food, yeah, we can quibble, but for the most part, if I'm sitting something out with the cheeseburger, fries, and all this kind of,

Starting point is 00:19:16 okay, versus lean meats, vegetables, we know which one is more conducive to health, right? People will argue about these little things, low carb, low fat, those sorts of things. Just get out of the house. Stop, stop eating so much of this very energy dense, hyper palatable food, start moving away. And Ethan, I think it was Ethan. He has this, he has this thing. He says when he, um he has this thing he says whenever he posts a picture in the gym. He'll say, I killed my clone today. And I never quite understood it.

Starting point is 00:19:53 And then I read a systematic review of successful weight loss maintainers. Now what that means is weight loss, we know diets can help you lose weight, but they don't tend to work long-term because people, their adherence wanes and they just kind of regain the weight over time. And if we look at like out about three years after initial weight loss, it's like, depending on the statistics you use, it's anywhere from 90, 95% of people end up regaining almost all the weight they lost. And this study was about people who had successfully kept it off for a long period of time. So this is the unicorns, right? The 5, 10% of people who actually had that long-term success. And there were things on there that you would expect. They practiced some form of cognitive restraint. Cognitive restraint being counting calories or doing low carb or time-restricted

Starting point is 00:20:48 eating or some form of restraint. But the thing that stood out to me that really grabbed my attention was so many of them specified and pointed out they felt like they had to develop a new identity. And I texted Ethan and I was like, is this what you mean by I killed my clone? He goes, that is exactly what I mean. And so one of the things I'll tell people now is think of the person that you want to become. Picture them. Think about what do you think their habits and behaviors look like on a daily basis? Now start to reverse engineer that, right? And you mentioned motivation. And my thoughts have changed about motivation. A lot of people wait to get motivated or inspired.

Starting point is 00:21:39 And hey, like, I think all that stuff's great. But in the course of anything, and I would bring it back to you in building a startup, I'm guessing there were days where you were not motivated to do what you were doing, right? Yeah, most days. Right, right. So many days. So motivation's great. When it comes, I say that's like nitrous on a car, right? Give you a quick boost and it'll make you a lot faster. But discipline is the gas tank. That is, it doesn't, I tell people, detach your feelings from the process, okay? I have a very cold calculus when I look at my goals. What is my goal? What will it take to get there? Some form of work in time, right? No matter how you slice it. Let's take, so I won the Masters World Championship in powerlifting in

Starting point is 00:22:33 2022. It took me, thank you. Took me, I went to open worlds in 2015, set a world squat record there, but then went through a lot of different injuries and a lot of pain. It took me seven years to get back and win. But there were times where I was very unmotivated to go to the gym because I couldn't lift heavy. I was in a lot of pain, but I knew if I want to get back there, this is what it's going to take. And so it was, it doesn't matter if I'm motivated. I have to do the things I said I was going to do. And I tell people, try to detach how you feel from the process it takes to get there. And that's really hard for a lot of people to do. But here's the thing. As you do the process, you start to see the results. And then the motivation becomes more sustained, right? The hard part is when you are down in the ditches and you

Starting point is 00:23:34 aren't seeing that progress. So when I'm coaching people on this stuff, a lot of it is trying to build their confidence. And so many people, they'll start a New Year's resolution, let's say, because it's beginning there. I'm going to go to the gym five days a week. I'm like, stop. You haven't been going at all. How about this? You're going to be active at least an hour for three days a week.

Starting point is 00:23:58 Let's start there. If you go five days, fantastic, right? But it's different. If you said you're going to go five days, you only go three, you feel really bad about yourself. You say you're going to go three and you go three,

Starting point is 00:24:11 feel really good about yourself. What's the harm of feeling bad about yourself? So there was a year, 2017, where I said, I make called it every day, Steve. And I was like, I'm going to go to the gym every day of 2018, I believe it was.

Starting point is 00:24:23 And I'm not going to tell you what happened because I think you know, but I want to ask the question, what is the harm of setting a huge goal and then failing and feeling bad about yourself? You know, there's a lot of different versions of like what builds confidence. But I think one of those things is keeping the promises you make to yourself. Right. And also just doing the thing you said you were going to do. And that's why I tell people like, Hey, for me, if I say I'm going to go four or five times a week, that's not a problem. Cause for me, it takes discipline to keep me out of the gym, right? Like, I love that. That's fun for me. But if you're somebody who hasn't been going, just start with something

Starting point is 00:25:02 like, I'm not saying don't be ambitious overall, but you have to build confidence in increments, right? Like, so for example, I'm going to go back to my own personal experience. I, in 2015, I set a world squat record, 668 pounds at 205 pound body weight class. But when I first started lifting, I was horrible at squats. I've got long legs. I am, in fact, one of the world powerlifting coaches looked at the video of my squat and said, I don't know how you did that. And squats were very intimidating to me. I would get really scared trying to do it. My back would hurt, you know, all these sorts of things.

Starting point is 00:25:44 You know, eventually I ended up squatting 668 pounds. But the first time I went in the gym, I wasn't able to do it. The first five years, 10 years, I couldn't even imagine that, right? And one of the things I tell people about confidence is I thought if I squatted that amount of weight, four or 500 pounds would feel easy. It still feels heavy. I just got better at handling it. Right? And I kind of use that euphemism for life, that analogy for life, because life doesn't get easier, but you can get better at handling those things. And the confidence that I built to be able to do that came through the repetition, doing it over and over and over again. And that's what people need. The problem is they don't get the repetition in because they do things like you were talking

Starting point is 00:26:34 about, which is they start to, it'd be like me going in the gym my first time saying, I'm going to squat 400 pounds. I'm going to get crumpled into a heap, but if I do it if I do what I can do at the time and slowly build that confidence that can wind up in me doing something that I never thought possible for myself I think it was Jordan Peterson that said to me when he deals with some of his clinical patients the starting point for them is so small that it almost makes them feel shameful so they don't do it so he says he's dealt with people who literally can't get out of bed because their depression is so severe and telling someone that their goal is just to walk down the hall and walk back feel so small and inconsequential

Starting point is 00:27:16 and so full of shame that they just think no that doesn't matter i'm not going to do that and there are a lot of people out there that are listening right now and they they think about where their starting point might be. And it might literally be getting out the house, putting their trainers on and going for a five minute walk. But in their heads, they'll go, that's not going to do anything. That's not going to get me to that mountain top that I, that I know I need to get to. So I'm not going to bother. A lot of people like that. And I mean, you know, you can take your cliche that you want to, you know, journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. How do you an elephant one bite at a time? I mean, it's cliche, but it's very true. Right. And I think if you're climbing a mountain, if you're only looking at the top, you're going to feel like you're getting nowhere. Right. So if you want to climb a mountain, have in mind the mountain that you want to climb. But when you're climbing it, look at the next ledge and just do that as the checkpoint, right? So somebody asked me once, if somebody had a lot

Starting point is 00:28:10 of weight to lose, like over a hundred pounds, where would you tell them to start? I'd say, you know, I'd look at where they're at right now. What are their habits, their behaviors? What are they doing exercise wise? Let's get them to the next ledge, right? So let's, let's just, you know, we can go into this too, but you know, if they're drinking a bunch of soda per day, trying to get them to go straight to water, that might be very daunting for them, right? Okay. Well, diet soda is better than, than regular soda. And, and people will argue about it, but I can cite the studies on this. Okay. They're, they're, um, you know, they're eating certain foods. Can we do something somewhat close to what they're already doing,

Starting point is 00:28:52 but find a way to cut out some calories from that, right? Let's, let's try and I'm going to try and meet them closer to where they are and then slowly pull them back this way. When you think about what it takes for someone to make that decision to change their life, so often it seems that there's some kind of adverse event. Like I'm talking here about the why that sits behind the reason to change, to lose the weight, to build the muscles. Do you see that often

Starting point is 00:29:20 that there's some kind of catalyst moment? You actually see a lot of parallels between like the way addicts talk and? You actually see a lot of parallels between like the way addicts talk and people who have lost a lot of weight in terms of they had to develop a new identity. They often have to get a new set of friends, not on purpose. But if you think about, if you were hanging around a certain type of people and you became, and you were very overweight, you've probably fallen in with people who have similar habits to you. And even if you still care about those people,

Starting point is 00:29:48 as you start to come out of that, there's a few things that are happening. One, if they're not joining you in the things you're doing, that creates a gap. And people can also be very insecure when people they know start improving themselves and they start trying to pull them back in. Crabs in the bucket.

Starting point is 00:30:06 Why do you got to eat that? Why can't you enjoy this? Why can't you, you know? That's because you're holding up a mirror to them by changing your life, right? Correct. So, you know, I, I don't think he minds me talking about this. My, uh, my brother, um, was an addict and, um, he, he like, he went to prison for a period of time. Um, he had a lot of really bad stuff go down in his life. And now one day I asked him, I'm like, was it, was going to prison? Was that like your rock bottom? And he goes, no, he goes, honestly, I just woke up one day and realized I lose everything. I get a job and I lose it. I get some money and I lose it. I get a job and I lose it. I get some money and I lose it. I get a relationship and I lose it. I just got sick and tired of losing. And not always, but you

Starting point is 00:30:53 hear a lot of similar stories from people who drastically changed their lives as they just got to the point where they were sick and tired of being that way. And they just realize that if I don't make some kind of change, this is going to continue. And I think one that takes a self-awareness that, which is hard and having that mirror brought to you is really hard. I can relate in other areas of life, but that why really is at the core of it. Because at the end of the day, if you don't have a really strong why, it is hard when you start to lose motivation. You know, I was watching a story of a guy who had a heart attack when he was like in his 40s and then he lost 150 pounds. And he's like, whenever I started, whenever I didn't have motivation or I started feeling like I wanted to fall back into bad habits, I thought about my kids growing up without a dad and it made it very easy for me. And so when you have that really strong why, the question about how to cultivate the why. Is there anything that you do on those days, any disciplines you think you can put in place that will just keep the why front and center?

Starting point is 00:32:13 I'm going to throw out one. Something that kind of helped me a little bit was just changing the background on my phone to an image that reminded me of who I wanted to be. And it just meant that even if it gives me a 1% psychological reinforcement in the direct, so that I fall on the correct side of a decision relating to diet or fitness, maybe that would help, you know, because it's, it's there. A couple of things I think about. I think about the people I care about in my life and wanting to make them proud. Think about my kids, you know, how would would I want now I'm going to get emotional. How would I, how would I want them to remember their dad? You know, um, I can remember, um, coming back

Starting point is 00:32:53 from all these injuries and, and, uh, I was lifting in the garage one day and my daughter, she was, uh, six at the time and she's such a little spark plug and she would watch me. And sometimes she would come in and like do some lifts with me and stuff. And I was kind of explaining to her why I do this stuff and why it was important to me. And I said, you know, dad almost was a world champion. I got really close. And, you know, that would be something that I would really treasure if I got the chance to do that. And she said, are you going to try and be a champion again? And she said it in the kid way

Starting point is 00:33:29 that like, but oh my gosh, when she said that, whenever I felt tired, whenever I felt down or whatever, I just remember my daughter saying, are you going to try to be a champion again? Made it easy, you know? And so I had my like, it's going to sound goofy, but at Worlds in 2022, I was going through a lot of personal stuff at the time. And I had pictured my kids on my phone and I was looking at that and I was almost in tears before I'd go out for lifts because I was so amped up and psyched up. And that was my why. So I'm thinking about my kids. And then I also think about, you know, my parents and like great people wanting to make them proud. And then honestly, like my, my personal hero is my grandfather. So my grandfather is part of the greatest generation. Um, he was the funniest person I ever met with the most integrity of anybody I ever met. And so, so many times when I

Starting point is 00:34:23 think about the person I want to be, I think about my grandfather and, um, you know, still to this day, I'll think about him before I, if I feel like low motivation or if I've really screwed something up, um, you know, like that sort of thing. Let's go to the technical stuff. Yes. Let's start with, so we're talking here about dieting and weight loss. If I'm trying to lose weight, should I be counting my calories?

Starting point is 00:34:50 Ah, so the first point of confusion, people assume calories in, calories out is the same thing as counting calories. That's like saying the law that in order to save money, you have to earn more than you spend is the same thing as keeping a budget. Keeping a budget can help you save money, but it's not the same thing. So let's break down calories in, calories out. Calories inside, pretty straightforward. It is the food you eat, right? The calories in the food that you eat.

Starting point is 00:35:20 Now, I would add one caveat to that, the metabolizable energy. So when we say calories, calories is literally a unit of energy. And so I'll the process of digestion, absorption, and metabolism, that energy is captured in one way or another. So that's the energy into the system. Calories out is more complicated. So that involves a few different energy outputs. The first one being your basal metabolic rate. So your BMR is basically the cost of keeping the lights on. So if you just laid down, didn't move, that's how many calories your body would burn. And that's actually, for most people, the majority of the calories they burn per day. It's around 50 to 70 percent, depending on how active they are.

Starting point is 00:36:19 And it fluctuates person to person. So as a man with fairly big muscles there, yours will be bigger than mine because you have more going on over there. Yeah, you can tie about, at least based on the regressions, you can tie about 90% of the variance in BMR to someone's lean mass. Okay. If you look at the studies, it's very tightly correlated with lean mass, right? Because lean tissue is more metabolically active than non-lean tissue. So BMRs, one bucket. Then you have what's called the thermic effect of food. So your TEF, our bodies are kind of like,

Starting point is 00:36:55 for lack of a poor analogy, but analogy that works, is cars, like internal combustion engine. You don't just put petrol or gas in your car and all of a sudden it just spontaneously starts up. You got to start it. The battery puts in energy so you can get energy out of the fuel, right? Your body has to put in energy to extract the energy out of the food that you eat. And so a lot of the confusion people say, well, calories in, calories out assumes that all calories equal. It doesn't because TEF accounts for this. Because, for example, protein has a higher thermic effect to food than carbohydrate

Starting point is 00:37:29 or fat. So if you look at... So protein requires more energy to basically process it. Correct. So if you look at, like say fats, for example, TEF is about 0 to 3%, meaning if you eat 100 calories from dietary fat, you capture about 97 to 100 calories of it. Carbohydrates, about 5 to 10%. So if you eat 100 calories from carbohydrate, you capture about 90 to 95 calories from it. A lot of that depends on the fiber content. The more fiber, the lower the metabolizable energy. So fiber actually has a higher thermic effect to food as well. Then protein is about 70, 80%. So if you eat 100 calories from protein, you capture about 70 to 80 calories. So some people out there will say, well, there's negative calories.

Starting point is 00:38:14 No, those don't exist. You're always getting more energy out of it than you put in, but some are lower than others, right? And so that TEF is about 5 to 10% of the energy you expend per day. So now we've got BMR, TEF, and then you have your physical activity, which we can further break into two different buckets. The first one is obvious, which is exercise, right? You go to the gym, burn some calories, and that's energy out. The second one is less intuitive. It's called non-exercise activity thermogenesis.

Starting point is 00:38:46 Neat. And that is the small unconscious movements that you make per day. Give you an example. Like what I'm doing, like now it's not subconscious because I'm thinking about it, but fidgeting, when you're talking with your hands, pacing, right? In fact, they've actually shown that people who have a more, they call it obese resistant phenotype. When they eat more, they tend to just become spontaneously more active without realizing it. And so people who are more obese prone, when they eat more food, they tend to not compensate by becoming more spontaneously active.

Starting point is 00:39:26 And people, it's kind of pedantic, but it's important to understand the difference. I'll hear people say, well, I'm going to take the steps and get my need up. No, no, you made a decision that's exercise. Okay. The reason being neat really isn't consciously modifiable. Right. And so I'll give you an example of like an extreme example of this. So when I was getting ready for my last bodybuilding show back in 2010, the fatigue that you deal with is unbelievable. It's hard to describe in words. Soul crushing would be a way to describe it. And I had gotten done, you know, I'd trained two hours at the gym that day. I'd done an hour of cardio, got home. And I remember I sat down on the couch and my ex, my wife at the time,

Starting point is 00:40:15 she had like real housewives of whatever county on the TV. I hated those shows, but the remote was about seven feet away. I watched the entire show. I did not get up and move because I was so fatigued. That's an example of neat and neat is very modifiable. So they've shown that even a 10% reduction in body weight can reduce neat by up to four or 500 calories per day. So you're just, a lot of people end up moving less without even realizing it. So here's the rub this. So you've got your calories in, you've got your calories out, BMR plus TEF plus neat plus exercise. People think of these two things as static. They're not static. And that's, I talk about in the book a lot. We have various

Starting point is 00:41:06 adaptations that fight us for weight loss. First of which is on the metabolism side. When you lose body weight, your BMR drops. But part of that is because you're carrying around less weight, right? So if I'm 200 pounds and I drop down to 180 pounds, I just have less mass to carry around. And so your BMR goes down a little bit. Which again is your base metabolic rate. Right. The cost of keeping the lights on, basically. But there's actually what's called metabolic adaptation, which has shown that with a 10% body weight loss, on average, you can see a reduction beyond what you would expect of 15% for BMR. So let's take an example here because people will say, well, calorie deficit didn't work for me because I was eating this many calories. I was exercising this much period of time.

Starting point is 00:42:00 And I was, you know, so like what happened? Well, you thought you were in a calorie deficit. But let's take me, for example. Okay, my BMR, I've had it measured. It's about 2,000 calories, a little bit lower, about 2,000 calories. My total daily energy expenditure is around 3,400 calories per day. So that's all this stuff added up, right? But if I lose 10% of my body weight, for me, 2,700 calories per day is a pretty significant calorie deficit. But if I lose 10% of my body weight, if I drop my BMR by 15%, 15% of 2,000

Starting point is 00:42:42 calories a day is 300 calories, Drop my NEAT by 400 calories. That's 700 calories. All of a sudden, that deficit is no longer a deficit. That's now maintenance, right? Now, this doesn't happen all at once. This is a progressive thing over time. But there's a reason, like I tell people, I'm like, if it was a calorie deficit,

Starting point is 00:43:02 as soon as you, like from the time you did it, indefinitely, you would starve to death, right? But all of us, most of us have had the experience of starting a diet, losing some weight. And eventually, even though you're eating the same way, doing the same exercise, it plateaus, right? And then you have to do something else to further establish that deficit. And the other way, so that's on one side where that's kind of working against you to try to bring you back to your original body weight, right? We talk about weight regain. The other side is your hunger hormones go up as you diet, right? So they've actually, they have shown obese people who lose weight to become normal weight, when you compare them to

Starting point is 00:43:45 normal weight people who were never obese with the same similar lean body mass, the formerly obese people have a lower total daily energy expenditure, and they have higher markers of hunger. They have higher appetite. So it's working on both sides of that equation to push you back. So the devil's advocate argument is, well, you know, I ate this amount of calories that should have been a calorie deficit and I didn't lose weight. Or it's the, you know, all calories are created equal. I'll tell people all calories are created equal because saying a calorie is not a calorie is like saying second hands on the clock are different. No, they're just a unit of measurement.

Starting point is 00:44:29 All sources of calories are not equal. So let's take budgeting. Right. I use that earlier sports car. Okay. So let's say somebody makes a million dollars a year. Right. If they want to spend a hundred, let's assume no loans,

Starting point is 00:44:46 just for sake of ease. If they want to spend $150,000 on a sports car, but they're still able to pay their mortgage, they can take care of their responsibilities and they can put money away for retirement. Can they buy that sports car? Sure they can, right? Is it a bad investment? I guess you could argue it's a bad investment because they could put the $150,000 in those investments, but maybe that sports car makes them feel good and gives them a little carrot on the end of the stick to keep working and whatnot. But if I take somebody who makes $200,000 a year, should they buy the $150,000 sports car if it means they can't pay their mortgage, they can't, um, you know, save for retirement. No, of course not. Right.

Starting point is 00:45:29 Similar thing with energy, right? So if I'm, you know, somebody who's very active and I burn a lot of calories, is it a big deal if I have a pop tart say, say, if I'm still getting enough protein, I'm hitting my target energy, I'm getting enough fiber in and my micronutrients, if that gives me that little carrot on the end of the stick to keep being consistent, not a big deal. But if we're talking about a smaller woman with less lean mass who needs to eat 1200 calories a day to lose weight, that's not a very good investment, right? It's not a very good use of funds. So what I'll tell people is, you know, people will say, well, how do I know what a deficit is? How do I know how many calories to eat? Right? Because also just on that point, I heard you talk about food labeling as well and how inaccurate that can be. You can have up to a 20 error in food labeling right so some people will use so what that means is it could say 100 calories it could be 80 it could be 120

Starting point is 00:46:33 now i will say if it's coming from a big food company and they have pretty rigorous standards it's probably not that far off but they're allowed up to that, right? Because they recognize that some food sources are very heterogeneous. It'd be difficult to like get it exactly on. So you'll have some people say, well, see calorie counting is useless because you can't know exactly how many calories you're taking in. And are you going to get your BMR measured? Are you going to get your neat measured? Are you going to get this measured? It can be much more simple than that. Again, financial analogy. I could make the argument that keeping a budget is useless because you never know what inflation is exactly doing.

Starting point is 00:47:14 And if you have investments, you can get differential returns on it. And on the output side, you have unexpected expenses. You have fluctuations in expenses. Your power bill is going to be different from month to month, right? Your car breaks down one month. But if you look at the average over time, you can get a pretty good idea of, on average, what your expenses are like, right? And you can get a pretty good idea over time, and like entrepreneurs like us, but even like us,

Starting point is 00:47:45 you can start to kind of see the trends and get a relatively good idea of what it's going to be. So when it comes to calories in and calories out, yes, tracking exactly can be very, very difficult. But if you are monitoring your body weight and you're being consistent with how you track, you'll know if you're in a calorie deficit. And I think another thing that's crossed people off, this actually showed up on that review of the successful weight loss maintainers. They actually talked about one of the things that was a barrier for them or hard for them was the weight fluctuations.

Starting point is 00:48:22 Because you know if you've ever weighed in every day, have you ever done this where you weight every day? Even first thing in the morning, right? Up, down. Bounces all over the place, right? So actually, with our coaching and then with our app, we're not just looking at one weight. We encourage people to weigh, as long as it doesn't cause them a lot of stress and anxiety, weigh in daily.

Starting point is 00:48:42 And then it's taking the average of those because day-to-day changes in weight are much more dictated by fluctuations in fluid, but week-to-week and month-to-month averages reflect loss or gain of mass. So for example, if you're monitoring your body weight, you know, taking averages and looking at that over time, you'll know if you're in a calorie deficit because on average, you're seeing it go down, right? Now, I wanted to make one more point, which is you don't have to track calories to lose weight. Absolutely not. It's just one methodology because no matter what you do, you have to have some form of restraint, right? And my friend Peter Atiyah actually breaks it down nicely into a couple of different, three buckets, right? You can have

Starting point is 00:49:27 dietary restraint, which is low carb, plant-based, whole food, you know, whatever it is. You're restricting some sort of food group or type of food, right? Then you have a time restriction. You eat within a certain timeframe or a certain window. Then you can have just straight up calorie restriction where you're tracking and monitoring. What you choose to do, I think a lot in terms of what is best for an individual boils down to their psychology and what feels easy. So this is where a lot of the diet wars start because somebody will do, say, low carb, right? And they'll get results from that. And they'll say, man, it felt like I wasn't even dieting.

Starting point is 00:50:12 And for whatever reason, that clicked with the algorithm in their brain and felt easy. And they got progress from that. But then they assume that everyone else will have the same response. Somebody else does low fat. Somebody else does intermittent fasting, whatever have you, and you have all these stories. Me personally, I was the kind of person, I'm the kind of person that if I tried to restrict certain foods, I ended up getting that binge response, right? But if you tell me I can eat whatever I want, as long as I'm tracking it, I become ridiculously consistent. And I mean, I'm still

Starting point is 00:50:47 eating mostly like whole food, minimally processed foods, you know, those sorts of things, because they're better for satiety. But I don't stress out about having some snacks here and there that are, you know, bad. Consistency. Because I'm being very consistent, right? How important is that consistency? It is the most important thing. So there is actually a meta-analysis. And when I say meta-analysis, think a study of studies, okay? So it's not a new study. It's what they're trying to do in a meta-analysis is they are trying to take studies that are similar and compile them together to see, is there a consensus here? Is there an overall effect here? Right? So there was a meta-analysis of where they looked at 14

Starting point is 00:51:33 different like popular diets. And these ranged from low carb to, you know, high carb, low fat, right? And what they found is on the longterm, none of them were better than the others for weight loss but when they stratified them for adherence from least adherent to most adherent what does that mean uh so people who were consistent basically so when they stratified them for i think compliance another way to put it when they stratified them that way, regardless of diet, a linear effect of adherence on weight loss. So what that tells me is actually the best diet for the individual is the one that they can consistently execute. They all function the same way, which is creating some sort of calorie deficit. Now, some people will say, that's not true.

Starting point is 00:52:23 I did a low-carb diet and I was eating more food. You probably felt more satiated because you were eating less calorie dense food. You probably were eating a greater quantity in terms of weight of food, but you were eating less calories. Is there any way to lose weight in a calorie surplus not if that's so what i'll tell people is all right you take in food it the carbons that you take in they have to go somewhere right and if you are if you are not in a surplus what you are saying is you are creating energy out of nothing if that's the case, NASA needs to study you because we figured out how to not worry about fuel on long space flights, right? We have a perpetual motion machine. Again, a lot of this, the confusion becomes when you have, you know,

Starting point is 00:53:20 for example, metabolic adaptation. So, you know, people, they may think they're in a calorie deficit, but they're not, or they're overestimating how many calories they burn. And here's the other thing that people don't want to talk about, because this gets down to the mirror, right? So there was a classic study, I think it was from 1992. And I think the title, I may butcher it, but it's discrepancy between reported and actual calorie intake in obese subjects, I want to say is the name of the study. And so what they did was they had people, they screened for people who said that they could not lose weight even though they were eating low calories. And the average calorie intake that was reported by participants was 1200 calories a day. And so they measured a

Starting point is 00:54:05 bunch of different stuff. They measured their lean mass, their fat mass, they measured their BMR, they measured their total daily energy expenditure. They found that their BMR was very average when it was based on their lean mass, right? And actually, if you look at obese people, they actually have a higher BMR and higher energy expenditure typically than lean people. But on average, it's because they have more lean mass because when you have more mass to carry around, your body has to create more locomotive mass. But when they, so they, and they told the subjects, we will, we are going to monitor you and we will know if you're eating more than you say you are. The average in the study was they underreported their calorie intake by about 50%. And they overreported their physical activity by just under 50%. Peace. Here's where people miss the message. The message a lot of people take from that is, oh, see, they're lying.

Starting point is 00:55:09 And that's a really hard thing to take to somebody to be like, well, you're probably underreporting your calorie intake, or you're probably eating more than you think you are. That feels very, you know, aggressive. And I don't think it's lying. I think that one, people don't really understand portion sizes. If you've never had the experience of like weighing out your food, you will be shocked, like way out a serving of cereal or a serving of ice cream. Or if you want to be really depressed, way out a serving of peanut butter, because the tablespoon that you're

Starting point is 00:55:42 grabbing, I promise you is probably two or three servings. And then, you know, like if the first time I weighed out ice cream, when I, when I started weighing my food, I was like, this is a serving. It's like two bites, you know? And so I don't think people have a really good understanding of serving sizes. And even I'll remember, I'll never forget this. It was an Instagram DM. And this lady was saying that she was eating 1600 calories a day and not losing weight. And we kind of, you know, had a little back and forth and we were talking. And I said, well, how she's like, I am measuring my food. I'm like, how are you measuring it? She's like, I'm doing volume measurements. So she was doing cups, tablespoons, that sort of thing. I

Starting point is 00:56:18 said, do me a favor. Do exactly what you've been doing, but weigh out each one. A day later, she came back and said, oh my God, I'm eating 2,700 calories a day. And so even dieticians under-report their caloric intake in studies by about 10%. And these are the experts, right? So you have on one side, people are eating more than they think they are. And then on the other side, they think they're being more active than they really are. But again, that's a hard conversation to have with people. And even as such, telling people, hey, you need to move more, eat less. Mechanistically, that's true. But that's like telling somebody, hey, if you want to save more money, just earn more and spend less.

Starting point is 00:57:04 With all of this, you know, I was adding up all these discrepancies, right? Discrepancies as in like you're weighing it wrong. The label's got 20% wrong. And then my head went back to your budgeting analogy as an entrepreneur and as a CEO, if my accounting was 20% off, I'm dead. But then if it's 95% off in the till, like how much money we're getting into the till, and then I'm using a cup instead of a scale. So that's, I don't know, 30% off as well. No wonder, you know, the business would go bust. It's complicated. I go, what the fuck are you going to do? Yeah, it is complicated, but I will tell people, you know, again, if you get back to the basics of monitoring your body weight consistently, which is one of the – I have to be careful about this because there are some people where monitoring their body weight consistently ends up being like really anxiety provoking for them.

Starting point is 00:57:55 Disordered eating and stuff. Yeah, that sort of thing. So that's – you know, I try to be sensitive to that. But it is a very consistent thing in the literature that people who lose weight and keep it off tend to monitor their body weight pretty regularly. And it's a self-correcting thing, right? Like if you're keeping a budget very regularly and you see, oh man, I spent $5,000 more this month, what happens? You correct, right? And so I would use that more of, instead of the accounting variation, I would say, well, sometimes your business has unexpected expenses, right? Or sometimes you have less expenses, right?

Starting point is 00:58:30 And so those are going to fluctuate and can be hard to anticipate, right? And so what we're looking for overall is, okay, let's look back at, you know, I think a lot of businesses operate in quarters, right? Let's look at this quarter. Okay, on average, here's our month over month what we're profiting, right? Okay, well, we can start to budget based on these sorts of things and expectations. We'll try to project out a little bit. I kind of look at that with people. I'm like, all right, well, how much weight did you lose on average, like over the past

Starting point is 00:58:53 month? Okay, how much were you eating? Okay, you lost six pounds over the last month. You're definitely in a calorie deficit, right? It's working. Keep going. Maybe you're eating 2000 calories. Maybe you're eating 2300 calories. Who cares? It's deficit, right? It's working. Keep going. Maybe you're eating 2000 calories. Maybe you're eating 2300 calories. Who cares? It's working, right? Now what happens is eventually

Starting point is 00:59:11 once you plateau, again, maybe you're eating 2000, maybe you're eating 2300. It doesn't matter. Whichever it is, if you've plateaued, it means you have to reestablish the deficit. So you either have to reduce your calories or you have to increase your activity or a combination of both you know those sorts of things what about one thing i heard you talk about at the very start of this conversation was um artificial sweeteners specifically yeah let's do that specifically in things like diet coke i've you know i've wondered for a while whether diet coke is healthy or not okay and there's a lot of you know people talking about this at the moment so what's your answer to that okay this going to be the most commented thing about in

Starting point is 00:59:48 this entire interview, I'm sure. Okay. So first off, let's just talk about weight loss and fat loss. Okay. And leave out the other stuff. If you look at the epidemiology and the cohort studies, you tend to see that people who consume more artificial sweeteners or diet soda are heavier in body weight. And so some people have said these things cause weight gain. But the problem with that is, again, lifestyle behaviors. And so one of the things they've shown is that people who consume more artificial sweeteners actually tend to be more overweight to start with, obese to start with. They didn't cause them to become that way. They're consuming more of them because they're trying to get to a less obese state, right? So there's a correlation there. But if we look at

Starting point is 01:00:41 the randomized control trials, right, where they say, hey, you're used to, you guys drink soda, regular soda, you guys drink diet soda. There was actually one that just got published, a very, very, really rigorously controlled one-year study, way more weight loss in the diet soda group. And I'm thinking of another randomized control trial. I think it was six months where they saw like six kilograms of weight loss just from switching people from regular soda to diet soda. Or it might not have things being equal. And people will say, well, it activates the sweetness in the bread and you get hungrier from it. Well, if that's the case, then these studies would suggest that artificial sweeteners are actually the best fat burners known to man, because if people are eating more and still losing six kilograms, that's amazing.

Starting point is 01:01:42 They're not fat burners. They, they're replacing that sweet taste. And then people will say, well, it's not better than water. You know, water, people who just drink water, shoot the alligator closest to the boat, right? Like, okay, hey, if you can drink water and just drink water, cool, do that. Right. But if somebody can lose, and I have people all the time, when I do a post about this, somebody say, I lost 30, 40, 50 pounds. All I did was stop drinking regular soda and drink diet soda. Literally the only change they made in their life. Now, when they compare it versus water,

Starting point is 01:02:18 they either see the same results or the diet soda group gets a little bit better results. And yeah, now it's not because of any kind of fat burning effect. What is likely is when somebody switches from regular sugar sweetened beverage to water, they may try to fill that gap of that sweet taste somewhere else. Whereas if they're just consuming the artificially sweetened or non-nutritive sweetened, but we can't say artificial because like stevia is actually natural, so to say. So they call it non-nutritive sweeteners. But if they're consuming the non-nutritive sweeteners, they're filling that gap. Compensation again. Compensating, right. So now again, there's nothing magic about them. People are just eating less, right?

Starting point is 01:03:06 And if you can do that with water, you don't have to consume diet soda. I would say drink water. But if you're somebody where, man, you really have a hard time quitting regular soda, heck yeah, drinking diet soda is a lot better. And people will go, well, what about insulin? They raise insulin.

Starting point is 01:03:24 That is actually one of the biggest myths out there. There are multiple, not just studies, but now I'm pretty sure there's a meta-analysis as well that shows that these artificial sweeteners do not raise insulin. There is one study, I'm thinking specifically about sucralose. There's one study, and everybody always hangs their hats on this, and I love to break it down, where sucralose did not increase insulin, but they did a sucralose group, a carbohydrate-only group, and a carbohydrate-plus sucralose group.

Starting point is 01:03:58 And the results were the carbohydrate-plus sucralose group secreted more insulin than the carbohydrate-only group, even though they ate the same amount of carbs. And so people go, well, see, maybe it's not bad, but if you're drinking it with carbohydrates, it's bad. And this is where reading the full text and really going deep on a study is very important. So the carbohydrate only group The carbohydrate-only group was sucrose, which is 50% glucose, 50% fructose. The carbohydrate plus sucralose group was maltodextrin. Maltodextrin, if you look at – are you familiar with glycemic index? Loosely.

Starting point is 01:04:38 Yeah. So glycemic index basically looks at how quickly glucose appears in your system. And usually you can kind of correlate the insulin response to that. Maltodextrin has a significantly higher glycemic index and causes a greater insulin response than sucrose. Because it is a, it actually causes a greater insulin response than even glucose itself. Because it's kind of getting the biochemistry glucose itself because it's kind of getting

Starting point is 01:05:05 the biochemistry, but because it's like this polymer, it is actually a little bit more rapidly digested and absorbed into the circulation. So it was actually an inappropriate control group to try to assess that because if you look at the difference in insulin response, it's about what you'd expect if you just look at maltodextrin versus sucrose. So based on the research, there's no evidence it affects glycemia or increases insulin. And in fact, in these studies where they,

Starting point is 01:05:34 you know, these randomized control trials where they look at, you know, weight loss, you see improvements in insulin sensitivity, HbA1c, you know, because people are losing weight, not because of anything magic with these sweeteners. Is sugar addictive? This one's going to get me in trouble too. I want to come back to the artificial sweeteners,

Starting point is 01:05:55 but I'll answer that. Sugar by itself does not appear to be addictive. There are certain foods that appear to create what's called a food dependence. There's subtle differences between that and addiction. But, I mean, kind of the anecdote is nobody's like just grabbing the bag of sucrose and just, you know, eating that. And if you think about the foods that really are like very hard to stop eating, they're usually not just high in sugar. They're usually, it's a combination of sugar, fat, salt, and texture. Okay. Texture matters as well

Starting point is 01:06:35 and mouthfeel. People will say, well, sugar is addictive. Look at cakes, cookies, ice cream. There's more calories from fat in those than there are sugar in a lot of cases. So couldn't you, by that logic, just argue that fat is also addictive? So sugar, straight sugar doesn't appear to be addictive per se. Now, it's not very satiating, right? And it's utterly devoid of any other kind of nutrient. So I'm not saying it's a good idea to eat a lot of sugar. But it doesn't appear to have addictive qualities in isolation. hyper palatable very great mouthfeel potato chips french fries these sorts of foods may have like semi-addictive type properties but just sugar itself doesn't appear to and there's a there's a study that kind of backs that up basically i think the title was like no evidence for sugar addiction in humans so people will say well you, when I eat that piece of chocolate or that, you know, sugary thing,

Starting point is 01:07:47 I end up just eating more and more and more and more and more and more. And then the next day, I feel like I need sugar more. And I've got my own sort of anecdotal experience of, I almost call it like a sugar cycle where there might be a week, you know, once every four months or six months where I have some sugar

Starting point is 01:08:03 and then the next day I want more sugar and then the next day I want more sugar and then the next day. And then when I break that sugar cycle, and if I don't eat sugar for like five days, it kind of, it feels like the craving's gone away. You must hear that from people. Yeah. I mean, like right now I have no urge to have sugar for some reason. Yeah. It's so hard to disentangle that from just psychology in general. Right. And just like, that could be a self-fulfilling thing where it's like, you know, people have been told sugar is addictive or they've heard sugar is addictive. And so they eat some of that mood. But also like, again, the chocolate usually also high in fat, right?

Starting point is 01:08:38 Like the mouth feels really good. So I'm not saying like that stuff is easy to overeat on and people can have a hard time stopping, but it doesn't appear that sugar like independently is addictive, but it can be part of foods that may have addictive like properties. Artificial sweeteners. You said you wanted to close off there. Yeah. So now let's talk. So we very clearly, the research studies show the ones that are controlled well, it does help with weight loss in a lot of these studies. What about cancer, heart disease, and the gut microbiome? Because that's a lot of the questions that are out there.

Starting point is 01:09:16 So with cancer, a lot of people think, oh, there's so many studies showing it causes cancer. Well, first of all, again, we're talking about epidemiology. We're talking about cohort studies. So there's a lot of confounding variables, but actually, so we're talking about consensus earlier. It's kind of a, I'm on their scientific advisory board and it's like a PubMed plus chat GPT. So you can ask it a question and it will immediately like crawl all the research literature and give you a consensus of what the research says, right? And so I did this and you can synthesize it too, where it'll show you what percentage of studies say yes, no, and then possibly, right? So I think I put in, do artificial

Starting point is 01:09:56 sweeteners cause cancer? Do you know 80% of the studies say no, but you don't hear about those. And why is that? Because it's much more newsworthy to put out negative news. Because if you hear a study, this thing doesn't cause cancer, ho-hum, right? But what gets shared a lot? Oh man, Aunt Deborah, she drinks Diet Coke. Deb, have you seen this? You know, it's much more shareable. So that negative news tends to get published more, right? And if you look at the human studies, some of the more well-done ones, like I'm thinking of the NutriSanti cohort out of France, the conclusion was, oh, it increased the risk of cancer. And I looked into it. I think it was aspartame specifically.

Starting point is 01:10:43 If something's carcinogenic, typically what we see is a dose response, right? So if you smoke more, you have a higher risk of lung cancer. Did you know that the, yes, the, so they compared like no or like low amount of aspartame users to like low moderate and then high moderate. I want to say it was three different groups. So I could be butchering this a little bit, but think low, medium, high, right? The medium group had a higher risk of cancer. The high group did. It actually, like not compared to the low group, it was not statistically different, but it dropped from the moderate group. So to me, again, we're talking about an odds ratio of like 1.15, meaning a 15% relative risk increase.

Starting point is 01:11:34 Let me put that in perspective. 15 15% says it goes up to 11.5. Yeah. It doesn't mean it goes from 10 to 25, right? So it's important to understand the difference. But again, if it's really carcinogenic, we should expect to see kind of a dose response, right? We don't see that. So to me, that's, especially with all the studies that don't find an association, that's more likely to be some kind of data artifact

Starting point is 01:12:14 with who knows, confounding variables, healthy user bias, what have you. What about the gut then? So now there are studies showing that some sweeteners do change the gut microflora, the composition of it. Sucralose appears to, aspartame not so much. I a good, bad, or neutral change in terms of overall health. Because I was looking through one of the studies on sucralose, and they were talking about a couple of species or genuses of them that increased was actually associated with people who are leaner, have less obesity, and better insulin sensitivity. And also a species that produced more butyrate. And butyrate actually is associated with a whole host. This is a short-chain fatty acid produced by the gut microbiome.

Starting point is 01:13:18 Butyrate is associated with a whole host of positive health benefits. So I will say it's worth monitoring because some of these do appear to change the breakdown of the gut microbiota, but there's probably, you could argue just as much that there's a positive effect as you could a negative effect. So what I'll say is, again, if we look back at the, again, shoot the alligator closest to the boat, and there are no solutions, only trade-offs. If somebody switches to diet soda, even if it's not the very best thing they could do, maybe water is the very best thing they could do, but if they lose 20 pounds, and their HbA1c drops, and their insulin sensitivity gets better, and their metabolic health gets better, it's probably a worthwhile trade-off. Are there any supplements that you would recommend everybody to take?

Starting point is 01:14:10 So I always say I have tiers of supplements, right? My first tier, thousands of research studies very clearly has benefits. Creatine monohydrate um which we've known about the performance benefits for years we've known about the um the strength benefits the body composition benefits you take it every day yes i do um now it's coming out that there's cognitive benefits and i want to say man i hope i don't i hope i don't get this wrong. So I will fact check this and make sure you ask me for the study. I'm pretty sure they did a study that showed that creatine actually decreased depressive symptoms. So what I will say is if there was one I would recommend for everybody, it would probably be creatine monohydrate because it's cheap, effective. And I mean, people say, wow, we don't know what the long-term effects are.

Starting point is 01:15:09 It's been around for like 40 years. If there was long-term effects, we'd have seen it by now. And just a quick aside, creatine monohydrate, don't waste your money on anything else. There's people try to reinvent the wheel with creatine because monohydrate it's, you know, remember when like big screen, flat screen TVs came out, this i might be i'm showing my age here no i remember i remember it was like a thousand dollars for a 40 inch screen tv and now you can get one for a stick of bubble gum you know what i mean it's because everybody makes them they're so ubiquitous it drove the cost down right everybody sells creatine monohydrate it drives the cost down so

Starting point is 01:15:44 companies come up with new forms of creatine andohydrate. It drives the cost down. So companies come up with new forms of creatine and make these claims around them to try to get you to spend more money on creatine monohydrate, saturates the muscle cell 100%. You don't need to do anything else. What's going on there? So a couple of things. And we don't fully understand all the mechanisms, but we know that when creatine gets in the system and gets into the cell, it bonds with the phosphate, which produces creatine phosphate. That is a high energy phosphate donor. So when you're exercising, basically you are using what's called adenosine triphosphate, which is ATP, which is the purest form of energy in your body. So this, what we

Starting point is 01:16:21 call hydrolysis of ATP is used to power a lot of reactions in your body. And so ATP, triphosphate, three phosphates, to power these reactions, it gets cleaved to ADP, adenosine diphosphate, plus an inorganic phosphate, right? Creatine can donate its phosphate to ADP, reform ATP. So what we see is, you know, especially during anaerobic exercise, better performance with creatine because it's a high energy phosphate donor can help replenish that. And then it also pulls water into the cell. And we think that that's part of the body composition benefits of it. Because a hydrated muscle cell, I mean, muscle cells are 70% water. They're mostly water. And people say, well, it's just water. Okay, but that's lean tissue. And there's actually some, I believe there's some evidence that actually hydrating the muscle basically actually improves the contractile properties of the muscle. So that could explain part of the strength benefits.

Starting point is 01:17:27 And of course, again, it's going to show up as lean mass, right? Now, it's not a huge effect. We're talking a couple pounds for most people, something like that. I'll take it. But for a relatively cheap, effective supplement, yeah, take it, right? What are the supplements then? Is there anything else in the tier one? Yeah, I mean, like for people who can tolerate whey protein,

Starting point is 01:17:58 I mean, you know, it's not, it's not magic, but it's a cheap, usually quite tasty way to get in high quality protein. And, you know, if you get it from whole food, great, but a lot of people struggle to get in, you know, the amount of protein they'd like to get it from whole food, great. But a lot of people struggle to get in the amount of protein they'd like to get in from whole food. And so whey protein, again, very high quality, usually easily digestible. The caveat is whey protein concentrate, a lot of people can't tolerate it because there's lactose in there. So if you have a lactose intolerance, a whey isolate, which is usually micro-filtered, gets out the vast majority, if not all the lactose.

Starting point is 01:18:26 And so most people can tolerate that. But there are a certain percentage of people who also have a sensitivity to the lactalbumins in whey, the proteins in whey. So in that case, there's what's called a whey hydrolysate, which is pre-digested whey. And almost all people can tolerate that. But if you don't have any digestive issues with it a concentrator and isolate is totally fine what else in that tier one and then i would say uh caffeine interesting caffeine is one of the it is the original cognitive enhancer if we look at cognitive tests we see consistently people perform better and if you look at uh performance people consistently perform better,

Starting point is 01:19:05 right? Before 12, a lot of people talk to me about the half-life of caffeine impacting sleep. Yeah. So that, I mean, that's the, you know, there's even some evidence that, you know, even if you have like a good dose of caffeine in the morning, that it may still affect your sleep later. So again, no solutions, only trade-offs, right? I would say overall, if you are an athlete or somebody who, you know, relies heavily on your brain power to, you know, do whatever it is you do, caffeine, probably a useful supplement. As you said, you know, if you're going to take it, try to get in, you know, nine hours before you're going to sleep to cease your caffeine intake. Because by that time,

Starting point is 01:19:53 you know, the majority of it is out of your system, right? What are the big misconceptions about intermittent fasting? It seems to be a really great tool for a lot of people to be able to control their calorie intake. In studies where they don't prescribe calories, so they don't match calories, they just tell people either intermittent fast or follow a diet, people in the intermittent fasting groups tend to lose more weight and have better improvements in their blood markers. But it's not because of anything magic about intermittent fasting. It's because it's placing them in a calorie deficit. Do they see that in the studies?

Starting point is 01:20:27 Yeah. So when they do like randomized control trials where they're actually controlling calories, like one great extreme version of that would be there was a study on alternate day fasting, right? So people would do one day fast, complete fast, the next day eat 150% of their maintenance calories. Whereas the group that was just doing continuous was doing 75% of their maintenance calories the entire time. Both groups lost pretty much the same amount of weight. Actually, the continuous group retained a little bit more lean mass and lost a little bit more fat mass. But that's a

Starting point is 01:21:06 pretty extreme form of fasting. If you look at the more traditional like 16-8 or those sorts of intermittent fasting, you see pretty much the same retention of lean mass compared to just continuous kind of eating programs. The myths that really get tossed around are a lot of them around longevity. And people saying, well, because whenever I talk about this, people will say, well, I don't fast for weight loss. I fast for health. I fast for longevity and autophagy. Autophagy, yeah, yeah, yeah. This term. So what I'll tell you is there's actually more evidence that calorie restriction increases autophagy than intermittent fasting. But intermittent fasting or fasting does increase autophagy.

Starting point is 01:21:51 So let's talk about what this is. So autophagy is a type of basically lysosomal protein breakdown. So there's a few different ways that the body breaks down like old misfolded proteins or just things that need to be turned over. One of them is through this kind of lysosomal protein degradation, which the lysosome is an organelle in the cell that can kind of engulf these old proteins and break them down. And then you get the amino acids from those proteins that can then be recycled to make new proteins, right? Calorie restriction increases autophagy. Exercise increases autophagy. Fasting can increase autophagy too, but you'll hear people say, well, you got to fast for X period of time because it's when autophagy turns on. Like three days or something, 72 hours or something. Not true. So this is autophagy protein breakdown is always occurring regardless. It's the relative rate that changes, right? But

Starting point is 01:22:47 there's no evidence that fasting increases autophagy more than eating the same amount of calories just spread out over time. Now, let me give you an example, right? Let's say somebody fasts for 20 hours out of the day and they eat for four hours, right? And again, the example I'm using is because some people will say, well, I don't do it for weight loss. I do it for, you know, just health benefits. So let's say over that day, they're eating their maintenance level of calories. You're just eating in a four hour period, right? Whereas let's say X person just eats three, four meals and same amount of calories. During the fasting period, sure, your autophagy is going to, your rate's going to go up.

Starting point is 01:23:30 But then during that four hours, when you're eating, you're having to eat a lot more food during that four hours, guess what's going to happen? It's going to go way down. So while your rate of autophagy may be lower eating continuously throughout the day compared to the time when people are fasting. When the fasters start eating in that window, whatever it is, since they have to eat more during that time, autophagy drops, whereas the people eating continuously, their autophagy is now a higher rate. What if you're going through some kind of disease or some kind of inflammation or whatever? Is there a use for intermittent, longer-term fasting in that context? So say if I was, I don't know, if I had some inflammation or there was something wrong with me,

Starting point is 01:24:16 is there ever a use case for sort of 72-hour fasts that will hold me, I guess, in a greater depth of autophagy. This is difficult because there's not really direct research looking at this. So I, I, what I will say will be speculation. And I'm comfortable speculating on it. Again, let's just break it down, equating weekly calories, right? Because if we're comparing apples to apples, right? We know caloric restriction will increase autophagy. So if intermittent fasting places somebody in a calorie deficit overall, that's what we call a confounding variable, right? So if we assume over the course of a week, two people assume genetically identical, right? Eating the same amount of calories, but somebody is eating them in four days, whereas the other person is just spreading them across

Starting point is 01:25:08 seven, but the person eating them in four days is fasting for three days. Well, their rate of autophagy and fat oxidation is going to be much higher during those three days, right? But then when they've got to fit all the calories they normally would in over those four days, now it's going to be much lower and the people eating continuously are going to have a higher rate of autophagy and fat oxidation. Body's smart. It strives for homeostasis. Now, I'll have some people say devil's advocate argument is, well, what if you're not compensating for the calories during those four days? Well, then now you're in a calorie deficit and you can't disentangle the effects from the calorie deficit, right?

Starting point is 01:25:45 So what I'll say is in the tightly controlled randomized control trials that we have where they equate calories between fasting groups versus not fasting groups, we don't see differences in weight loss and we don't really see much difference in biomarkers of health, HbA1c, markers of insulin sensitivity. You have some studies where you'll see like a little bit lower fasting blood glucose with intermittent fasting when they test it. But I think this is an artifact of the way they test it. Is it okay if I get kind of like deep into the weeds on this one? Go ahead. So one of the problems is if you're going to compare apples to apples, if you fast for longer, your fasting blood glucose will be a little bit lower. If somebody is eating continuously, for example, and then they're fasting for, say, 12 hours before the test, but the person in the fasting group has fasted for now 16 hours because they were in a defined eating window, their blood glucose tests out maybe a little bit lower, right? And so you see this in some of the studies, not all, but some of them.

Starting point is 01:26:47 But then you look at the longer-term markers of insulin sensitivity, like at HbA1c, and you don't typically see differences when they're equating calories. And so, again, I'm not – people will hear what I'm saying, and it's always like the filter, right? What I'm actually saying and what they hear is, Lane said intermittent fasting sucks and it's always like the filter, right? What I'm actually saying and what they hear is, Lane said intermittent fasting sucks and it's worthless. No, if it is something that you can be consistent with and it helps you control your intake, it is a fabulous way for a lot of people to control their calorie intake and lose weight. Here's a question for you. And I think I know the answer, but it turns out a lot of people don't

Starting point is 01:27:25 know the answer because i was doing some research ahead of time about the types of things people struggle with are interested in and i actually did some research into what people are googling the most and it's interesting that people are googling the most when it comes to weight loss can you guess what it is ketogenic diet well even more than that is how to lose belly fat. Oh, interesting. And it's not so... People are really, really obsessed with losing this fat right here. And I think there's some exercises out there and some diets

Starting point is 01:27:56 that purport to be able to help you lose just targeted fat in this region. What do you say to that? The answer is you may be able to spot reduce, but I think practically it's kind of irrelevant and I'll explain why. So first of all, the question is, is that visceral or liver fat or is that just where you tend to store subcutaneous fat? And that's hard to know unless somebody's done like a, you know, an MRI and that sort of thing. Because some people just store their subcutaneous fat in different areas, right? Like some people tend to have it more in their legs, like women in particular, if they store it, they tend to store more in their legs,

Starting point is 01:28:36 whereas men tend to store it more here. What's the difference between subcutaneous and visceral? So visceral is the viscera around the organs. Okay. Visceral fat and liver fat are gram for gram, far more metabolically unhealthy than subcutaneous fat. Okay. So that's, that's the point of differentiation, but the stuff that causes you to lose subcutaneous fat, which is the fat under the skin, is the same stuff that typically helps you lose liver fat or visceral fat. So one of the things I tell people, if we're, if we're talking about helps you lose liver fat or visceral fat. So one of the things I tell people if we're talking about trying to lose body fat or trying to get any big health outcome,

Starting point is 01:29:12 let's pick up, if we're going to try and pick up as much in weight of boulders as we can, you're going to focus on the big rocks first, right? And then if you've got the big rocks, you can worry about picking up some pebbles. But don't drop the big rocks to pick up the pebbles. I think a lot of people end up doing that. So before you go into some very specific protocol on trying to lose, you know, belly fat, go back, zoom out. Can I sustain this long-term? Because if you can't sustain it long-term, it's not really going to matter. You're better off finding something that you can sustainably do, consistently execute long-term because if you lose enough overall body fat, eventually you will lose the belly fat. And I mean, you know,

Starting point is 01:29:58 part of it is just our genetics and how we store. It seems really stubborn though. It seems like, for me, it feels like it's the last thing to go. I will say they've shown that exercise specifically can help target liver and visceral fat even without a calorie deficit. So even if people maintain their body weight, they tend to lose liver and visceral fat just through exercise. So let's talk about exercise and weight loss. Ah, hot topic. Hot topic, very hot topic. I would love an answer here on, you know, one school of thought is that exercise isn't particularly useful for weight loss because if I go out for a run, I then come home and I just eat more.

Starting point is 01:30:36 And there's a, this is kind of a multifaceted issue in the sense that there's a biochemical component to that hypothesis, i.e. my brain produces more of the hunger hormone, so I get more hungry. But then there's also a psychological part to that hypothesis where people say, it's actually because I went for a run, so I think I deserve more food.

Starting point is 01:30:56 So then I eat more cake because I feel good about myself. So this is where the way the study is conducted really matters. So let's take it mechanistically first. If we look at tightly controlled studies where they have people exercise and they're having them eat the same amount of calories as people who don't, exercise absolutely helps with weight loss. Absolutely. The hunger side is a little more complex you become maybe a little bit less spontaneously active, right? So there's a partial compensation. But on average,

Starting point is 01:31:54 again, everybody's different, but on average, it's about 28 calories per 100 calories. So if you do 100 calories of activity, you're still netting 72. It's just not as much as you thought you were going to get, right? So there's that aspect to it, that exercise doesn't cause the amount of weight loss that you might predict based on how much you do, right? But it still contributes to energy expenditure. The more interesting thing is what you touched on, which is intake, which is actually counterintuitive to what you think. On average, in the studies, yes, people tend to eat a little bit more, but the compensation is not nearly complete. Okay? So, exercise on the net actually has an

Starting point is 01:32:38 anorectic effect. Now, I'm not saying for every person. There are some people who, whether it's psychological or it actually is physiological, they exercise more and they do feel more hunger, right? But on average, in the studies, exercise either has a neutral or positive effect on appetite. And there actually is one classic study from the 1950s, I reference it in the book, where they looked at Bengali workers and they didn't have an intervention, but they just looked at sedentary, lightly active, moderately active, very heavily active, right? So think heavy construction labor workers. And from lightly active to heavily active, they almost perfectly compensated their energy intake, right? By eating more food. By eating more to match the activity, right?

Starting point is 01:33:26 Just intuitively. The sedentary people ate more than the lightly active. And if I recall correctly, about the same, maybe a little bit more than the moderately active folks. Being sedentary actually dysregulates your appetite. When you are active, it actually sensitizes you to your body's own satiety signals. They work better. So I actually think the main benefit of exercise for weight loss isn't because you burn so many calories. It's one, because exercise helps with

Starting point is 01:33:59 lean mass retention, which we know that the more lean mass you have, higher energy expenditure, and it also helps prevent weight regain. So that's one aspect. But the actual amount of calories you expend in exercise, I mean, if you look at the actual research literature, it's not that much. I mean, you go to the gym for two hours, you might burn 500 calories, something like that. Half my salad.

Starting point is 01:34:19 Right, right, right. Like you eat a donut, boom, gone, right? But people tend to have better appetite regulation when they exercise, when they're active. There's multiple components to it. Like I said, better sensitivity to satiety signals, but then the psychological aspect of goes the other way. There are some people who say, well, I'm exercising, I'm going to eat this. But other people exercise and they actually, all their habits start to get better i'm one of those people as well right i always say if i want to fix my diet i need to go to the gym right i always say that

Starting point is 01:34:52 because when i i don't i said it to i think some of my friends in my team the other day if i'm going to go and work out for an hour and i'm going to go do a hit workout for an hour for example it's so painful that the last thing i want to do is throw it all away with like a fucking Krispy Kreme. So I said, my diet then falls in place suddenly. And that's always when I, whenever I go through a moment in my life where I'm like, Steve, you've lost control of your diet here. It's how can I get myself to the gym as, as the catalyst to, you know, get my diet in order. And that's the, so that's the problem with a lot of not the problem but just the limitation of a lot of studies which is you know especially like epidemiology when i say epidemiology it's like this group does this this group does this and we're looking at

Starting point is 01:35:36 what other things happen yeah well people don't do things in isolation, right? So you'll hear a study like, I'm thinking of something, oh, it's highly processed, energy-dense foods. Protein tends to just be a proxy for overall more calories. And so is it the protein or is it all the calories they're taking in, right? And again, people, their lifestyles and habits tend to go together, right? Like you hear X group was more prone to heart disease, but then they also tend to smoke more, drink more alcohol. It is very difficult to disconnect those habits and those lifestyle habits, right? They call it healthy user bias in studies. It's one of the things we have difficulty with. And that's why, you know, again, human randomized control trials are kind of our gold standard because I think this is important to touch on the word randomized. Okay. So if we're talking about epidemiology or cohort studies, so cohort is a little bit better than your standard epidemiology because they're taking groups of people and they're following them for years.

Starting point is 01:37:02 So each person is kind of their own control, right? But still, people who are more healthy tend to do more overall healthy things. People who are more unhealthy tend to do more. It's hard to disconnect those two. But when you do a study and you say, okay, one group is going to do a low-carb diet, one group is going to do a low-fat diet, and we're going to randomize them, right? Why is that important? Well, what if we let people self-select? Okay, well, if they just say, go whichever group you want. Well, and I'm just speculating, right? But for example, low-carb diet's very hot right now. A lot of people may have a very strong proclivity to go to that group thinking it's

Starting point is 01:37:41 healthier, having a more positive viewpoint of it, and they may clean up a lot more other aspects of their life. But if we randomize, what we can assume through that randomization process is that any inherent characteristics of the subjects are going to be equally distributed amongst the groups. And that is why that's so important. And I remember I was listening to a um, a breakdown on a podcast one time and, and they were discussing a study that was looking at, um, they were looking at intermittent fasting versus continuous energy restriction. So just normal dieting. And basically the, the crux of the study was they found no real difference in weight loss. And the person on there

Starting point is 01:38:20 was a very pro intermittent fasting person. They said, well, how, you know, they don't know, maybe the one group was eating a bunch of junk food or whatever. And I'm thinking, this person doesn't understand randomization, right? Like you, that would be a very odd thing to just, it actually would lead you to the conclusion that intermittent fasting might cause you to seek out junk food, right? So again, randomization is not perfect, but the reason it's so important is because it helps us get rid of that healthy user bias. And I think, again, if people... But the downside to randomized controlled trials is you can only run them for so long because they're controlled. Is your view on keto the same as you kind of said about all diets,

Starting point is 01:39:04 or does keto stand in a bucket of its own? And I ask this in part because a lot of doctors kind of prescribe keto as a diet for certain people that have epilepsy and certain types of inflammation and brain-related issues. Okay, so epilepsy is a specific case. Essentially, for epilepsy, ketogenic diet is actually a very effective treatment. It provides a usable substrate, ketones, for the brain, and they see it decrease the incidence of epilepsy. In fact, my friend that I referenced, Dom D'Agostino, he actually started studying the ketogenic diet as for deepwater Navy SEAL divers, because a lot of those divers at depth

Starting point is 01:39:43 get seizures, and they found that doing the ketogenic diet helped reduce those seizures. Now, unfortunately, people have taken that to say, well, any brain problem, just give them the keto diet. There's way less evidence to support it for other brain problems. But let's talk about, there's a lot of claims around the keto diet, low carb diets. It seems to function for fat loss the same way as other diets, through a calorie deficit. There have been several really well-done randomized control trials, as well as a couple of meta-analyses now. If they compare diets that are equal in calories and protein,

Starting point is 01:40:20 but vary the carbohydrate and fat amount anywhere from low fat, high carb to low carb, high fat, no real differences in weight loss or fat loss. In fact, it actually, the meta-analysis showed it slightly favored low fat diets, but it was a really like non-clinically significant amount. But how can that be? Because one of the things people say, well, when you do a keto diet, you burn way more fat. So this is, I think if there's one sound bite that might, you know, make it, this might be it. So yes, you do burn more fat on a ketogenic diet. Why? Well, when you do a ketogenic diet, you're eating higher fat, lower carb. So you're eating more fat. You have more fat substrate to burn, but, you're eating higher fat, lower carb. So you're eating more fat,

Starting point is 01:41:05 you have more fat substrate to burn, but also you're keeping insulin low. And so you burn more fat because insulin reduces your rate of fat oxidation and reduces lipolysis. So people take that and they go, well, it's better, right? So here's where we're getting into, we were talking earlier about mechanisms versus outcomes, right? But when we look at these studies where they actually measure the outcome of fat loss, they don't see differences between low carb and low fat. How, if they're burning this much more fat? Fat loss and fat burning or fat oxidation are not the same thing. Fat oxidation is part of fat loss, but it's only one side of the coin. So fat, whether you lose or gain fat, is fat balance. You are always storing and burning fat simultaneously, okay? On a low-carb, high-fat diet, you are burning a lot of fat, but you're also storing a lot of fat.

Starting point is 01:42:07 And here's why. Carbohydrate really isn't stored as body fat. Your body almost exclusively has to burn it when you take it in. They did a metabolic tracer study where they basically labeled carbohydrates and fats. You can label them with a stable isotope. And you look at where the label winds up, right? Less than 2% of the fat stored in adipose in a mixed diet originated as carbohydrate. What's adipose? Fat cells. Over 98% came from dietary fat.

Starting point is 01:42:44 So here's the rub. If you are doing a low-fat, high-carb diet, you're not burning much fat, but you're not storing much fat either. If you're doing a low-carb, high-fat diet, you're burning a lot of fat, but you're also storing a lot of fat. So what actually matters in terms of fat balance is energy balance. Are you eating more calories than you're burning? That is what will end up dictating that. And that's why we just don't see differences in actual loss of body fat between those groups. So this is where we got into earlier before we started the cameras. A lot of people get very focused on these biochemical mechanisms. And one of the things, I was that way when I was a undergrad in biochemistry.

Starting point is 01:43:31 And I think doing that first was great. Doing biochemistry first was great. And then going to nutrition and having a good advisor who zoomed me out and said, hey, you're pretty far in the weeds. Zoom back out, look at the whole picture, okay? Because mechanisms are great. It's good to ask questions. And when we see an outcome, and when I say outcome, fat loss would be an outcome, actual loss of body fat, a change in HbA1c, a biomarker, that's an outcome, right? If there's an outcome, there will be a mechanism to support that outcome. But just because there's a mechanism doesn't mean there's an outcome. And what I mean by that is all these biochemical pathways, these mechanisms, this is a symphony. And when you do one thing someplace, a lot of times it's compensated someplace else.

Starting point is 01:44:20 Okay? An outcome is the summation of hundreds, if not thousands, of different biochemical pathways coming together. And the example I used with you earlier was getting focused on mechanisms is like looking at a mutual fund and getting focused on the individual stocks in it. And saying, don't invest in that mutual fund. Look at those two stocks that are down by 40%. But why do I care if the overall mutual fund is up by 20%? I care about the overall. That's the outcome. And so I'm not against necessarily looking at mechanisms, but I'm always going to go to first, okay, do we actually have human trials that are measuring the thing that we

Starting point is 01:45:03 care about? Not a proxy measure, but the actual thing. And if I can invoke a former episode on here, if that's okay. Somebody said, well, be careful drinking caffeine because it stimulates cortisol release, and that can cause you to store belly fat. So that's a mechanism, right? If you look at the actual outcome data in terms of body fat and visceral fat or liver fat with caffeine, you actually see a neutral positive effect. So, okay, maybe that small increase in cortisol, maybe that's, okay, that's a negative. But if caffeine is also stimulating your BMR and also possibly doing some other things like increasing fat oxidation, okay, maybe there is that negative component to it, but it's obviously

Starting point is 01:45:51 outweighed by the positive components that end up in the outcome that we're looking at, right? So without being scientists and being able to understand all of the little instruments in the orchestra. Yeah. Right? Because that's what we try and do sometimes. We try and figure out all the little instruments in the orchestra, but really you're saying, listen to the music. Listen to the music.

Starting point is 01:46:14 And listening to the music in that analogy would be like looking at the scales or would be just looking for the outcomes. The outcome. And also, I guess one thing more would be this point about consistency and sustainability because we all have a bias to want big rewards for small investment. And that sells, right?

Starting point is 01:46:37 Five minute abs. That's what we want. Complete physique overhaul in six weeks. Add an inch to your arms in 12 weeks. What I'm really fascinated by is what it takes at a psychology level and we kind of talked about it already because we talked about your why and all these things but you can say that you can say to someone like me in business it's going to take you 10 years to get to get there or it's going to take

Starting point is 01:46:57 10 years to become the world record holder in this power lifting activity. But for someone to say, yep, fine, they're going to have to be a little bit, dare I say, twisted. They're going to have to be a little bit. It is the ability, I think one of the most underrated things is the ability to delay gratification, right? And not in all areas of my life, but in that particular area, I'm really good at it. And- I wonder how much of a choice you had at a deep level. You know, it's interesting. So I told the story of how squatting was hard for me.

Starting point is 01:47:32 I had been training hard for three years, and I had like these chicken legs. I used to get made fun of on the bodybuilding forum so bad. And I remember thinking three, four years in, I'm like, man, people was like, dude, your genetics suck. Like why, why are you going to keep doing this? It's kind of the let's find out thing. I remember literally having this internal dialogue of, you know, maybe they never will be big, but I'm going to, I'm going to commit myself to training hard consistently for 10 years. And if I haven't, if I don't have a decent set of legs at that time, then I'll allow myself to quit if I still feel that way. And I always say paralysis by analysis

Starting point is 01:48:19 and perfectionism has killed more dreams than failure ever could. Because one of the worst things you can do is have no action. Inaction is way worse than failure. Because if you fail, at least you can learn something from it. You try stuff. I'm sure as an entrepreneur, you've had a lot of stuff fail, right? But you learn from that. And you go, okay, well, that didn't work. We'll try this. And eventually if you're trying enough stuff and you're walking the path, it may not have worked out the way you drew it up, but you get something better than what you started with, right? Maybe not exactly what you wanted. Maybe you get something better though. And I'll tell people that's why action is so much more important than trying to get everything laid out perfectly.

Starting point is 01:49:10 Just start where you are right now, as imperfect as it is, start walking the path. And if you are walking the path, you're going to screw up. Learn from it and do better the next time. And eventually, again, maybe you don't get exactly what you want, but I bet you get something pretty good. I got really obsessed with the idea of failure because of business, because I take stock on the things that moved me forward the most, the things that were most course correcting. And it was never an accolade or an achievement. It was always when life says you were wrong about that. And from that, I have this really clear phrase in mind that failure is feedback, feedback is knowledge and knowledge is your power.

Starting point is 01:49:53 And I then went on to study Jeff Bezos, Amazon and booking.com and Thomas Watson, who was the richest man on earth at one point. He was the founder and CEO of IBM. And through all of their writing, they are absolutely obsessed with increasing their failure rate. So much so Thomas Watson was once asked in an interview after one of his employees had failed at something that cost the company,

Starting point is 01:50:17 I think 400 or $600,000. He said, are you going to fire him? He goes, fire him? I've just spent $400,000 training him. And then when I looked at Amazon's shareholder letter, said the same thing it says we have jeff bezos wrote we have to be the best place on earth to fail he goes on to say in life like it's not about perfecting that perfect swing it's how much you swing because in the case of amazon you'll never know about endless.com which is in the graveyard or the fire phone which is in the graveyard or

Starting point is 01:50:43 um a9.com which is in the graveyard but you know aws which will make them 70 billion a year so he goes on to basically say in he uses a baseball analogy where he goes in baseball you swing you get a great hit you might get four runs but in life you swing and you get a great hit you can just absolutely change your life so it's really about making sure you're swinging. Yeah, I mean, Kobe Bryant said, I love this quote, and I might butcher it a little bit, but he said, you know, whether you win or lose, if you win, it's great, but you're still going to wake up the next day and do the process over again. If you lose, it sucks.

Starting point is 01:51:20 You still got to get up and do the same process over again. And it's that willingness to, somebody said confidence is the willingness to wade into uncertainty. And I really liked that quote. Because, I mean, that's at the foundation of kind of like any big goal that you're going after. There is no certainty. You can't guarantee anything in life. And so we can say it's important to fail. But when you're actually in that moment, you're not like, yes, this failure is great. I love this. It's very stressful and it sucks. Like it really, really sucks. But I can tell you in most cases, the best stuff in my life came out of some of the worst stuff in my life, you know? And if I hadn't been willing to try and wade back into it repeatedly, I might not have gotten some of the great things that have happened in life. And whether you win or lose,

Starting point is 01:52:24 you're still going to have to wake up and do the process over. But if you stop doing the process, if you stop trying, if you stop walking the path, that's where you really lose. I think a lot of this, like getting back to the diet stuff, a lot of this, the diet hacks and stuff like that, it's people trying to shortcut that painful process. But that process is where you are going to learn so much about yourself and where the actual fulfillment is. So that kind of brings me on to a Zen pack. Because obviously that's a big subject at the moment with dieting, which is, we're talking about, you know, quote unquote shortcuts here. What's your opinion on a Zen pack? Okay. I think I'm going to give a very balanced view of this overall i think it's a net positive and here's why so go 100 years back 200 years back whatever

Starting point is 01:53:17 very rarely did you see an obese person right it was just we didn't have such crazy access to hyperpalatable, extremely energy-dense foods, right? Even go back 60 years, right? If you wanted a cake or a cookie, you had to go to the bakery. There was barriers to get there. Now, we are surrounded 24-7 with unlimited access to cheap, calorie-dense, hyperpalatable foods. And again, we know people who tend to become more obese have a greater reward response to food. Here's the real tough part where you can tie it back to addiction, right? So imagine you were a gambling addict. And I said, well, we don't want you to gamble so much, but you got to gamble a couple of times a day.

Starting point is 01:54:21 We don't want you to drink so much, but you got to drink a couple of times a day. You know, don't do blow so much, but you you got to drink a couple of times a day. You know, don't do blow so much, but you got to do it a couple of times a day. Now, I mean, again, people argue about food addiction. Is there really food addiction? Is there not? But imagine being somebody who struggles with appetite regulation, but knowing you have to eat, you can't just not eat, right? So I think if we look at the actual data on Ozempic, what we're talking about, just to give the background biochemistry, are GLP-1 memetics. GLP-1 is a hormone that's secreted by your gut in response to feeding, and it acts on

Starting point is 01:55:00 the GI to tell you you're full, and it also acts on your brain to tell you that you're full, to decrease your appetite. And these things work very well. We see, on average, about a 15% to 20% reduction in body weight in the studies. So pretty much the most effective anti-obesity treatment that's ever been created. Now, GLP-1 itself, its half-life is only a couple minutes. But what they've done is they modify the protein so that now the half-life is much, much longer. So it has the opportunity to act on the brain and the gut for a much longer period of time. And again, very effective. So what are the potential downsides? What does that do to the body then?

Starting point is 01:55:41 So they've extended the sort of half-life of the protein, and that means that i feel satiated for longer oh yeah so um i don't feel hungry yeah in fact it can be such a powerful effect a lot of people it feels like almost nauseating like um you you hear again every drug has side effects right? Some people initially get nausea, vomiting, that sort of thing. It tends to decrease with time. But on an anecdotal level, I've talked to people who've done the drug and they've said that some have said even after they stopped, the best way they described it is, I don't have the food noise anymore. I'm not always thinking about food or I'm not thinking about food nearly as much. It calmed it down for me. Even after they had stopped? For some people, even after they'd stopped. So perhaps there's some long-term changes to the brain chemistry that happened. We're not sure. Or perhaps they just got more confident because they lost some weight and realized, because it's not increasing your metabolism.

Starting point is 01:56:46 That's one thing to point out. So I've had some people say, you know, I have a slow metabolism, so I've got to take Ozempic. And I'm like, well, you're going to be disappointed because it's acting on the appetite side of things. So some people will say, well, the devil's advocate argument is, well, they could just eat less. Right. But if it was that easy, people would just be doing it, right? So some of the criticisms of the drug are, well, we see a lot of lean mass loss. I don't know if you've heard that. Some people have said that. I don't think that's as much of a concern as some people do. And the reason is most of these studies with GLP-1 memetics, the people aren't resistance training. And so if you look at studies where people aren't resistance training and they just diet and they're not like their normal protein, not high protein,

Starting point is 01:57:39 you see anywhere from like a 30% to 40% of the weight they lose is from lean mass. And Ozempic is right about in that area, which makes sense because they're eating less. And if they're not resistance training, they're eating high protein. Again, they're feeling very full, so hard to eat high protein because protein tends to be quite satiating. So I don't see that as being like more necessarily at risk for lean mass loss. I think what I would say that could be problematic is if people are so full, they may not be choosing the healthful, most healthful food choices because they feel full. If they just end up eating less of the foods they'd normally eat, these calorie dense,

Starting point is 01:58:22 hyper palatable foods, and they don't modify their habits, when they get off of it, they may be prone to regain. And so I look at this as I am, if I have to pick, I'm pro on board with these. Just say it should be done in conjunction with nutritional counseling and lifestyle modification, right? Like encouraging people to exercise, educating them on healthy food choices. Then I think it's a great option for a lot of people. Do you think there's enough data, especially when we think about sort of long-term studies on the impact of Zempek? Because I, you know, one of the things I've come to believe in life is that there's no such thing as a free lunch. And this sounds too much like a free lunch to me right now, you know? So here's what I'll say. We don't have, I mean, long-term 10, 20 year data. You know, some people said, well, there's a risk of thyroid cancer. I mean, I think that was from

Starting point is 01:59:14 like some kind of rodent study where they were using a much higher dose than normal. I'm always, I tell people, be very careful. Less than 50% of animal studies end up translating into like actual human outcomes. What did we say earlier? There's no solutions. There's only trade-offs. So maybe there is some side effect, some downstream effect that may have a negative effect. If it helps somebody lose 50, 100 pounds, I'm still going to bet that it's a net positive, right? Could have been better if they did it through diet and exercise alone, maybe, but most of those people weren't going to get there anyway, or it was going to be really, really tough for them to get there.

Starting point is 01:59:54 It's funny because a lot of fitness industry people are very, very much against this drug. And then they tell you what fat burner you can buy with the discount code in their bio. And I'm like, wait, wait, this math doesn't math to me. So your fat burner that probably doesn't work. Okay. This drug that actually works, not okay. Make it make sense. What do you think of the fitness industry? I have a love hate with it. The big problem with the fitness industry is a couple of things. First is there's really no barrier to entry, right? Like if you want to be a medical professional, there are some barriers to entry, right? Like you got to do some work. Anybody can call themselves a fitness coach. There's no barrier at all. And

Starting point is 02:00:41 anybody who has a six pack will get a lot of clients because as I found out, science is way less sexy than just, hey, look. And it's funny. For a couple of years, I went up a weight class in powerlifting. I went up to the 105-kilogram class, which is 231. Now, I'm not fat at 231, but I put it on here quickly, right? My face will get pretty – in fact, there is two 31. Now I'm not, I'm not fat at two 31, but I, I put it on here quickly, right? My face will get pretty, in fact, there's a reason there's a nice beard here because it's like makeup for men, right? Like it hides my chubby cheeks and man, the comments on my videos and I actually saw I sold less stuff. And then when I dropped back

Starting point is 02:01:22 down at powerlifting and I was leaner, I sold more stuff. And I when I dropped back down to powerlifting and I was leaner, I sold more stuff. And I'm like, this is so weird. Like my knowledge isn't any different. It's the same dude. And it's not like when I was 231, that was on purpose. I didn't get there by accident. It wasn't like I forgot how to do nutrition, you know? But if you were a normal person and you didn't know anything about fitness and there was two pts in front of you you go to the one that looks better you go to the one you want to say i want to look like that right and uh that's that's tough it's a it's a very tough thing to wade through and and what i will say people ask me all the time do you think a personal trainer needs to look the part do you think you know a medical professional needs to look the part? Do you think, you know, a medical professional needs to look the part?

Starting point is 02:02:14 I say, no, but people like to see application. And I do think there is value in being able to tell, one of the things I was able to tell my clients from competing in bodybuilding and powerlifting and doing all these hard things, I say, hey, I'll never ask you to do anything I have not done or would not be willing to do myself. Right? And we, uh, we said earlier that humans aren't logical, they're emotional, irrational, and all these things. And we, to conserve mental energy. I mean, funnily enough, I read about this brat study. Um, I don't need rat studies. Most of my research was in rats, but it just, it just goes to show how the brain works. And they put a rat into a maze and put chocolate at the end of it. The first time it goes through the maze, the rat's brain is going crazy. Second time it goes to show how the brain works. And they put a rat into a maze and put chocolate at the end of it. The first time it goes through the maze, the rat's brain is going crazy.

Starting point is 02:02:47 Second time it goes to the same maze, its brain is basically, there's like almost no activity there. The activity has dropped and it's turned into autopilot. The study goes on to talk about how we're always looking for shortcuts to decisions. What I would tell people is, again, you can never turn your brain off. Right. And it's, it's just hard. It's hard to identify who knows what they're talking about. I mean, you know, I'll be on this podcast and then, you know, people say, well, what about this guy? This guy has a doctorate and he has this. And, um, you know, that's one of the reasons I actually started my research review, where I review studies or me and my team review studies every month and try to like translate it

Starting point is 02:03:31 into plain language because I did see this like kind of gap, right. And trying to build this bridge because it's so hard for, for the average person to know. And one of the things actually I, I, I miss talking about was if you and I are having a conversation, if we're on a certain topic, it becomes clear to both of us pretty quickly, whether or not one of us is more knowledgeable on the topic or whether about the same, right? Like pretty quickly can tell, like if we're going into investments and, and how to start a company and marketing, like you're the man for that, right? Comes to nutrition, you can tell pretty quickly, hopefully, I know what I'm talking about.

Starting point is 02:04:10 I'm lifting me. Right, right, right. But what we're really bad at is if two people are disagreeing on a topic, both of whom are more knowledgeable than us on said topic, we pretty much have no way to sort out who's right or wrong. Let's talk about Zoe, who you may know because they're a sponsor of this podcast and I'm an investor in the company. You guys know health is my number one priority. Zoe's growth story has been absolutely incredible so far. They're doing science at a scale that I've never seen before. Because of their members and recent breakthroughs in research,

Starting point is 02:04:48 they can now continue to offer the most scientifically advanced gut health test on the market. Previously, the test allowed them to analyze 30 bacteria types in your gut, but now, thanks to new science, they've identified 100 bacteria types. This is a huge step forward and there's nothing else that's available, even close to it, on the market at all. So to find out more and to get started on your Zoe journey, visit Zoe.com slash Stephen. You can use my exclusive code CEO10 for 10% off. Don't tell anybody about that, okay? Just for you guys. What is the most important thing we haven't spoken about today?

Starting point is 02:05:23 Gosh, I think we touched on a lot of stuff, but let's talk about resistance training real quick. A lot of people think resistance training is just for vanity and for meatheads. And we see now resistance training decreases the risk of cancer, decreases the risk of heart disease, drastically decreases the risk of sarcopenia, of falls, of broken bones. You know, people talk about calcium, vitamin D. Probably the single best thing you can do to improve your bone density is to resist the strain. And, you know, you'll hear people say, well, I'm 40 or I'm 50 or I'm 60. It doesn't matter. You can still put on muscle. In fact, right across the street from where I was doing my PhD, they took basically frail elderly people who had trouble

Starting point is 02:06:14 like sitting and standing up and put them through like, I think I want to say it was a 16 week program and resistance for them started out just squatting to a high chair, you know, and then slowly they lowered it down, lowered it down. Some of them started using weights as well. They saw significant increases in their muscle mass as you know, older people. So you can still put on muscle even getting older. In fact, um, who is, uh, uh, I think Alan Aragon. He's another good nutrition person on social media. He was posting a video of his father showing, I think his father was like over 80 years old and was doing goblet squats with like a 50 pound kettlebell. get in people from either resistance training throughout the course of their life or just getting them started regardless of age it's a huge improvement in quality of life do you know what i think though i think i'm gonna be honest here right this morning i was i got up right and um my like lower back hurt a little bit and I remember thinking the first thought is oh god

Starting point is 02:07:25 I'm getting older that's why that that is and I remember thinking oh I should probably question that thought because that's a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way I if you start to see yourself becoming less mobile and less flexible your brain you kind of you chalk it off as an inevitability of aging they therefore you do nothing about it therefore it gets worse whereas really this other thought came into my mind which was okay go to the gym and train your lower back to strengthen it. One of the most damaging messages that physicians have given is when people have pain in an area, they tell them to stop doing activity. As you age, you are going to have pain. You can be strong and have pain, or you can be weak and have pain. My, uh, I love my dad. Great dude. Very sedentary, right?

Starting point is 02:08:16 He has really bad sciatica. He doesn't lift weights, but if you lift weights, you, it actually has been shown to decrease back pain, like on the whole. Yeah. Like when you do what I do where you're like, you know, lifting cars, essentially. Yeah. Like I'm when you're, so it's funny, I'll post videos of me lifting like once a week. Um, just cause most people don't care about me lifting. They just want to get information out of me. And the comments are always, you know, isn't that bad for your lower back? Or, you know, isn't that going to, and they'll say, well, you've had so many injuries. I said, I've been doing this 25 years. Show me an athlete who's competed at a really high level for two decades, who also doesn't have a laundry list of injuries and pain. Tiger Woods swings a golf club. He had all kinds of back issues and knee issues and leg issues, right? Activity is medicine. Yes, if you're doing it at a very high level, athletes, what's the dosage needed to improve at the highest level of exercise is always going to be right up against what will get you injured because you get to the point where you simply can't recover from it enough.

Starting point is 02:09:33 And that's why actually if you look at like what actually prevents injuries, it's not stretching. It's not mobility work. It's not warm up. It's sleep, psychological stress reduction. Those are two of the main movers and just load management, appropriate load management. We could get into a whole thing on pain science, but one of the really damaging messages is, well, took an MRI of your lower back and, you know, got a bulge disc, so just can't lift heavy anymore. If you get my ride, my lower back

Starting point is 02:10:03 right now, I promise you, i have bulged and herniated this i'm sure i do but i don't have pain and we there was a study done where they i think they mri'd like people over 40 who were asymptomatic had no back pain like i think almost half of them had bulged or herniated discs so we've got this like model where it's, oh, if you have pain, you must have damage. And if you have damage, you must have pain. And it doesn't really work that way. I mean, look at people who lose limbs. They have pain, not just at the stump, but where the limb used to be. They sense pain. Pain is just as much a psychological experience as it is an actual

Starting point is 02:10:50 tissue damage experience. And when you get things that are, um, that are painful for years, your tissues heal in six to 12 months for most things. But if you're still having pain, that's because you've developed a sensitivity to that particular area. And so one of the worst things for pain is becoming inactive. But the reason physicians do this and orthopedics do this is it's straight up a liability coverage. Because if somebody says, you know, you have pain, but you could probably go back and, you know, you back off your load a little bit on your lifts and, you know, progressively work it back up, you'd probably be fine. Well, if they go in and they injure themselves, guess who's

Starting point is 02:11:36 going to complain about the doctor, give them a one-star review and say they caused me to blow up my back, right? But if you look at this stuff, I mean, on the whole, resistance training decreases pain. I want to build my muscles, Lane, like your muscles. I want muscles like yours. Question on the way that I'm working out, just sort of practical advice. Do I have to work out to sort of overload till I fail to build my muscles so that they're like yours? Great question. So if I had to say how to build my muscles so that they're like yours great question so uh if i had to say how to build muscles three hours a day you know um can we use ai to shrink them steven just having the biggest arms in the podcast um what matters for building muscle

Starting point is 02:12:23 we think um we have the amount of hypertrophy research in the last 10 years has absolutely exploded compared to what it was before. And hypertrophy is muscle growth is what we're talking about. What seems to be the cause of it is what's called mechanical tension. So just creating a lot of tension on the muscle, because now we're actually having studies coming out. We're doing like hard stretching. They actually see increased muscle growth from like sustained hard stretching. There was a study done with the calf muscles. So they put them in this contraption where basically they're like stretching their calves and holding it there. I think, I can't remember what the duration was, but it was a long time, right?

Starting point is 02:13:05 And they were comparing that to traditional resistance training. And it was, I mean, it was a pretty painful stretch. I think they said it was like a 7 or 8 or 9 out of 10 in terms of pain level for the stretch. But they built as much muscle as people who were doing calves three times a week, resistance training. I think they were doing these stretches every day. So it was pretty intense. But that's really interesting, right? Because even if you don't have weight, you can still create that tension through stretching, right? Now the stretching, again,

Starting point is 02:13:35 not your traditional like, you know, it's pretty intense and pretty painful. I would argue that resistance training is probably a more practical methodology to getting it and more fun. But in terms of mechanical tension, it does to maximize muscle growth. So we always have to be careful about like, a lot of things could cause muscle growth, but we're talking about absolutely maxing muscle growth. You do have to get close to volitional failure, which is basically like if I'm doing, say, a bicep curl, right? Or maybe a bench press better example. I'm doing reps, reps, and I start, that's failure, right? The research suggests you don't have to go to failure, but you have to get pretty darn close within a couple reps you know and if you've

Starting point is 02:14:27 never trained to failure it's actually really hard to know what that feels like um and so like and actually in research studies where they take people who are beginner intermediate and they ask them like they have them do a set and they ask them hey how many more reps could you have gotten they underestimate by like five yeah um especially difficult when you're training alone it's something like bench press if i if i fail the thing like it fucks and so i'm like i've put in a buffer of maybe three reps there just so that i don't embarrass myself in front of you know exactly um mechanical tension appears to be cumulative and what i mean by that is if it was just about creating as much tension as possible, just load the bar up and just do one rep, right? So it's,

Starting point is 02:15:11 it's cumulative throughout a set. Now, the way I like to describe it is intensity is the medicine and the number of hard sets, which number of sets close to failure, is the dosage. Now, when you first start, you can get results on a very low dosage because your body has literally done nothing. It'll grow off anything. As you progress, I mean, remember when you first started lifting, you'd add five, 10 pounds every week, right? Like clockwork. Well, eventually you can't add that anymore, right? But you can still, a lot of times you can increase the reps, right? With the same weight. Well, eventually you can't do that anymore.

Starting point is 02:15:47 So how do you continue to progress? Well, you can add more hard sets. What do you mean by hard sets? Volume. So for example, if I'm, let's just take bench press again, right? Let's say I'm doing three sets close to failure and I eventually stop progressing. I can add another set. And that is still another

Starting point is 02:16:06 form of progressive overload, right? Because again, mechanical tension is cumulative. And I mean, there is some debate about this in the resistance training field, but for the most part, I would say it's generally agreed upon by most experts that higher volumes improve muscle growth relative to lower volumes, meaning more hard sets. And it doesn't really seem to matter about machines versus free weights either. Seem to cause equal kinds of muscle growth. So when it comes to building muscle, the cool thing is you got a lot of options. And if you have pain doing one thing, you know, joint pain, whatever, lower back pain, try something else.

Starting point is 02:16:45 Fantastic news for me. Lane, we have a closing tradition on this podcast okay where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to leave it for and the question that's been left for you oh i like this i know what my question will be your one's a really difficult one okay so i don't get to see it until i open this book but jack has a has a little peek before i ask the guests no it actually wasn't andy because there was one person between them and they're the person that left this question for you that's very difficult question i think have you ever stayed in a relationship that was harming you and why yeah um stayed in a relationship that was harming you and why?

Starting point is 02:17:25 Yeah. Because of a lot of reasons, one being perception from other people. I felt like I had to make it work. Um, the other being because of some of the remnants of bullying, um, I found it very hard to trust myself in personal relationships to, to, I could be easily talked into me being the problem for everything. And I'm not saying that I was never the problem because I definitely was. I've made a lot of mistakes in personal relationships and I've, I've had my own toxic behaviors that I know I do.

Starting point is 02:18:18 But yes, I have definitely stayed in a relationship too long. And I think one of the hardest things for me and for a lot of people is knowing when is it time to give up and when is it time to push through? And I don't think we have, I don't think anybody has a clear parameter. But for me, staying in was not trusting myself, not trusting my gut, and feeling like I had to make it work. Because of the kids or because of this or because of whatever. Because of a whole host of, of many things. And again, you know, I, I think I'm not a relationship expert, but you know, I've, I've, I've gone to therapy for eight years now. Um, one of my good friends, John Deloney is an expert on this and, and very rarely does a relationship break down because of just one person. It's usually a dynamic. And, but I think that is

Starting point is 02:19:28 one of the hardest things to figure out. When, when is it time? Because we talked about like not quitting, you know, these sorts of things, but there's also like, sometimes it's not quitting. It's just moving on to possibly something better, right? And learning from what happened. And yeah, that is a really tough question. And I've definitely stayed in things too long. And not just like romantic relationships, but also like business partnerships friendships you know where it became highly toxic and again um i think the next hardest thing to do after that is looking back and going what did i contribute to that

Starting point is 02:20:21 lane in my life i I've lost people. I've lost a lot of people along the way from grandparents, friends, a lady who you said was sort of my proxy mother when I was younger, died in a motorcycle accident. And it's only in those moments that you kind of have the regrets of all the things that you could have said.

Starting point is 02:20:43 You know, you wish you could go back and often for people somewhat similar to me somewhat maybe similar to you who have had struggles with expressing their emotions um we probably have the greatest amount of regret because we found it harder to maybe tell these people when we had the chance so my closing question for you which is a question of my own is if right now you could send a message to your kids and i'm gonna let you send one as well to your granddad and your dad and it was the last thing you were gonna say what would you say? Okay. My kids, I would say, of course, I love you more than anything. You, God dang it. You fulfilled a whole of my life I didn't know I had.

Starting point is 02:21:43 And I wish I could go back and do a lot of things differently, but I love you more than anything. And I don't care what you do with your life, find something that you love and it is a positive contributor to the world and go to that and try to make somebody else's life better along the way. And to my dad, I would say, thank you like for not following in your dad's footsteps and not like stepping in front of that wildfire and saying, not on my watch. Sorry. Um, you know, my dad's not perfect, but both my mom and dad are really great people. And, um know, they've struggled with some health issues. And, you know, if I had to say one thing, it would be, you know, thanks for always believing in me, always having my back, accepting me for who I was. In some ways, I feel like they're the only people who always accepted me for who I was. And they never put expectations on me for what I want to do with my life. When I told them I wanted to get into bodybuilding, they were like, oh, this seems weird. But okay, when my first bodybuilding show, they were the loudest people up there supporting me. You know, they're, um,

Starting point is 02:23:30 you know, when I won worlds in 2022, I was going through a very hard personal time in my life. Basically the front end of a divorce and it had just kind of come to a head, um, like just the whirlwind kind of chaos stuff. And my mom called me, they were watching online with my kids, and my mom was like, son, how the hell did you just do that? With everything going on in your life, how did you do that? And, you know, they've just always been such big supporters of me, even when they didn't understand. You know, my mom didn't understand, like, you know, what are you studying again? What are you studying again? But, you know, came to my PhD exit seminar. You know, mom was in every baseball game growing up.

Starting point is 02:24:13 Dad was on the road a lot, but, you know, couldn't, but came to everything he could. You know, they, they, they showed up for me a lot and I knew, you know, I knew I was loved. And so if I had to say anything to them, it would just be thank you for everything that you did. And when I had kids, I was like six weeks in, I called my mom. I'm like, Oh my God, you did all this stuff for me. And I gave you all that grief. I'm so sorry. You know? So yeah, they're, they're amazing. And if I had to say something to my grandfather, it would just be God. Um, you know, I would give, uh, somebody asked me this the other day. I said, I would give anything to have five more minutes with my granddad and ask him so many questions

Starting point is 02:24:53 about life that I just didn't know enough about to even ask the question, you know, cause the man just oozed wisdom, you know, but if I had to say anything, I'm like, I would just say, thanks for what you did for your family. Um, you know, but if I had to say anything, I'm like, I would just say, thanks for what you did for your family. Um, you know, my grandfather, when he passed, I mean, this is a man who had like, he had his first heart attack in his fifties and this back in the 19, like late seven, like 1970s when like open heart surgery was like carpentry, you know, his expect, his like life expectation, I think was five years at the time. He was in the Battle of the Bulge, the deadliest battle in World War II. One more story. He, I forget what country he was in, but he was supposed to go on leave the next day.

Starting point is 02:25:42 And a convoy was coming through and it was going to the place where he was going to go on leave right behind the lines. And, uh, his commanding officer said, Hey, why don't you just take it? Like, just go today. That night, uh, a German soldier dropped a grenade down and killed his entire unit. And, uh And sorry. Dang, I didn't think you'd give me to cry on this podcast, man. So much. And he said, you know, after that day, I just, everything was, I was living on borrowed time, in my opinion. He's like, I should have been down there. And he said, I get up every day, I look at the obituary, and if I'm not in it, I figure I'm good for another day. And he had, I think, three heart attacks, three open heart surgeries, two strokes. He had a boat fall on him.

Starting point is 02:26:34 Long story. So this guy, we always joked he had nine lives. And whenever he was on his deathbed, I mean, we knew like six weeks in advance, he had kind of multi-system, just basically old age. And it never occurred to me, I was 20 years old, sorry, 22. It never occurred to me the idea of how you die as being so important. And he went exactly how you would draw it up. Um, you know, he was in the hospice, so he was at his home, his whole family was around him. And again, he was the funniest man I ever knew. And I walked in and all the seats are taken

Starting point is 02:27:17 and he's still lucid talking. And, um, I said, uh, he had his little like portable toilet you know but he had been using it whatever the seat was down and i said do you mind if i sit here because i was going to sit next to him and he said yeah you can't clog that one up because i was known in my family for clogging toilets right so he's still cracking jokes on his deathbed and even like the doctor asked him when he was basically the doctor telling him hey you've got like six weeks left doctor said hey we you know you're an organ donor but we can't really use anything uh you know it's all bad basically would you be interested in donating your body as a cadaver for med students he goes i always wanted to go to med school i figured it's

Starting point is 02:28:01 the only way i'm getting there now so just like had this great outlook on life, you know, and, um, just when he passed, um, I can remember my, sorry, my mom looking at him and saying, it's okay, dad. It's okay. We're going to be okay. And, uh, I wasn't even sad because I'm like that guy, he got every bit out of it. He, he milked life for everything he had and a great family and so many people who loved them. And if I could just have that kind of impact, even half that impact on my family, oh man, that'd be worth so much to me. So I would just tell him,

Starting point is 02:28:52 thank you for being an inspiration. Lane, you have been. You've been exactly that. You've had an impact on millions of people's lives. And I think back to that young kid, five, six, seven years old. And I think back to what you said about fighting your way out of it. You fought your way out of all of that to now inspire and impact millions and millions

Starting point is 02:29:10 of people's lives that you'll never get to meet in such a positive way, in the same way and with the same integrity and fight that your granddad so clearly had. It's funny because when you went through all of those people, I saw an element of you in every single one of them. And I think that's a credit to them, but it's also a credit to you. And I know that if your granddad was, I'm sure he's watching us now,

Starting point is 02:29:31 cracking jokes about you. Probably, about my toilet habits, yeah. But I'm sure he'd be so incredibly proud of you because of the work you've done, but continue to do. So thank you so much for your time today. Thank you, especially for your honesty and openness, because you have no idea how many people that side of you, the willingness to be honest about faults and nuanced about yourself as you are within your work will have on millions and millions of people's lives. I feel richer for having this conversation. So thank you,

Starting point is 02:29:57 Lane. Thank you. I've never cried a podcast like that, but you know, I actually, it was kind of cathartic, you know, I was thinking of a lot of different things while it was going on. So thank you for having me on. you

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