The Jordan Harbinger Show - 841: Adam Bornstein | The Real Skinny on the Weight Loss Industry

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

Adam Bornstein (@BornFitness) is the founder of Born Fitness, an award-winning writer and editor in the fitness space, and a bestselling author. His latest book is You Can't Screw This Up: Why Eating Takeout, Enjoying Dessert, and Taking the Stress out of Dieting Leads to Weight Loss That Lasts. What We Discuss with Adam Bornstein: Why are more than 70 percent of Americans overweight or obese despite 40 percent of men and 60 percent of women observing multiple diets per year? The common misbeliefs and flawed mindsets around fitness and weight loss perpetuated by a wellness industry that prioritizes its profits over the people it purports to help. How the wellness industry inflates bogus "sciencey" claims in order to fool us into buying routines, diets, and supplements that, at best, do nothing for us. What calorie restriction really does to the brain. How extreme, all-or-none beliefs make us fail our fitness goals, and what we can do to actually move the progress needle forward. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/841 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. This episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show has some explicit language, so if you're offended by that, well, skip to the next one. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. If you go back to when we weren't so overweight and obese, so that's going back to like the 50s and 60s. You're looking at anywhere between like 7% of men

and 14% of women are on a diet, and you're looking at a pretty low overweight and obesity rate, about 10% of people, right? So low amount of people dieting, low amount relative to the total population, obese or overweight. Today, like 40 plus percent of men, 65 percent of women are on multiple diets per year, and more than 70 percent of people are now overweight or obese in America alone. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people

and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to imagine. impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, to performers, even the occasional mafia, four-star general, or extreme athletes. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, and of course I appreciate it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs as a place to begin. These are collections of our favorite episodes, while my producer's favorite episodes,

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It's maybe a week or two behind on episodes because it ingests them, so to speak. But yeah, check it out. Let me know what you think. And let me know if it tells you that my mom is racist because it did that once. And that was weird. And not true, by the way. Today, something a bit different than usual. I don't cover health or wellness, as you all know.

But today, my friend Adam Bornstein and I will be discussing why the wellness industry is largely, well, it's largely a scam. that overcomplicates things in order to sell us routines and diets and supplements. This probably should have been a skeptical Sunday, 20-20 hindsight, but whatever. We'll also cover beliefs and mindsets around fitness and weight loss that don't serve us but are propped up by the wellness industry in order to make money. All or nothing beliefs in how those can make us fail, diets, stress, obesity, what calorie restriction does to the brain, and more.

And if you're really well-versed in nutrition, psychology of weight loss, you're a fitness guru, whatever, or you're just not interested in this stuff, and I totally get it, then this might not be the episode for you. Again, I realize this is a departure from our normal fare, but I enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you will as well. Now, here we go with Adam Bornstein. Look, let's ruin the diet and wellness industry as much as we can in the next hour and change, shall we?

Oh, I am ready. I figured you might be. You know, you know I've been friends for years, and I was like, well, I don't do fitness episodes. I don't really do health episodes, and I don't plan to start now with this one exception, because the plan is this going to be more of a takedown of the wellness industry, as opposed to like a how-to for weight loss.

And the reason is because, well, one, people could read your book for the weight loss stuff, but also what we're going to talk about is it's not entirely that complicated. And also, I appreciate that you're not trying to be a weight loss dieting guru. This episode is not in service of like you becoming an MLM huckster for some diet. Nothing to sell, no back end offer, not pushing supplements. None of that. Yeah. I think writing this book started truly nine years ago,

the simple question that I asked myself, which was, what if diets never existed? Because it might sound funny coming from me, someone who has been in this industry in different ways for 20 years now. But at some point, you look at all the diets and all the money being spent, and then you look at the results

and see that we are getting heavier and sicker and unhappier and more miserable. And you can't help but ask, is it a coincidence or is like the poison in the pill? And that's what I wanted to figure out. And the answer is kind of yeah. Yeah, the poison is kind of in the pill. The dieting industry is one of the only places

where we seem to be adding more and more and getting worse results aside from, and this is probably also not a coincidence, health care in America. We spend way more than any other country. Our outcomes are way, way more terrible than pretty much any other developed countries' healthcare system or just a longevity of the humans that are using it. And I can't help but think that's two sides of the same coin.

I could be connecting dots that aren't there as one of my favorite phrases to use on the show. But it seems like those two things are related or extremely similar in any case. They're related. So the one thing I will say is that like anything in life, it is probably dangerous, and misguided to try and point it one thing. And I say this very importantly because most diets do just that. And you will see it almost formulaic over the last 40, almost 50 years now, where diets will find your villain, whether it's fat, whether it's carbs, whether it's gluten, whether it's sugar, whether it's inflammation, whether it's hormones. We can go on and on and on and on and on.

They find a singular villain. They blame every problem under the sun for it so that people overreact to something and it leaves people worth soft. So the example is that like from diets, we can see that this magic pill, one thing being the, you know, the crux of this house of cards is not the solution. And if we're looking at multiple problems that have contributed to us being less healthy and all of us should care about our health, but none of us should be going to such measures that we in a quest to become healthier just feel miserable. And that's typically what happens. That's why I don't like the industry. The wellness industry should be designed to improve wellness. Instead, it is designed to optimize industry. And that was kind of

this, I guess, inspiration to write this book of like, how do we remove the shackles from people? And just like from a very, very simple standpoint, if you go back to when we weren't so overweight and obese. So that's going back to like the 50s and 60s. You're looking at anywhere between like 7% of men and 14% of women are on a diet. And you're looking at a pretty low overweight and obesity rate, about 10% of people, right? So low amount of people dieting, low amount relative to the total population, obese or overweight. Today, like 40 plus percent of men, 65% of women are on multiple diets per year, and more than 70% of people are now overweight or obese in America alone. That's crazy to me. So we have gone ahead in 4 to 5x,

the number of people on diets and not just one. Now, multiple diets while at the same time jumping to three-fourths of the population being overweight or obese. And at what point do you just stop there and say like, wait a second. This is so messed up. That to me is, it's an observation you can't get away from. I was an exchange student a long time ago. I went to Europe in the 90s and I was in Germany. And I remember that almost everyone was physically fit. There'd be like one girl in high school who was a little bit overweight or something. and every, it was like that was, it was almost like the 1950s. Like, that's the girl that is overweight.

And I know that sounds awful, but it was like, it was so rare. There was only like a couple of people like that. And so it was noticeable. Whereas then I came back to the United States and I brought my host brother, the kid that I lived with in Germany, back with me. And he was like, oh my God. I've never seen humans that look like this. I was barely batting.

And I noticed it more because I'd been gone for so long. Right. But my parents were like, what? And they're like, my brother would go, but look at this person. I've never seen a human like that. And he wasn't making fun of them or laughing. He was just like, I can't believe what I'm seeing. I didn't know it was physically possible for people to get this big.

And granted, we were in Michigan, which I think, which is where I grew up, I think we're the second fattest state besides Texas or top five. I also remember this trend when I was a kid where the first villain, going back to what you said at the top of the show, was fat. And it was like, oh, now all the cold cuts. in your lunchbox are going to be fat-free bologna or salami. And I didn't really understand that back then, but then apparently that since fat was the flavor in all the food, they just added more sugar into a lot of those same foods, maybe not the meats in your sandwich, but they added sugar

into those things to add the flavor back. And now you're eating something that would have had a little bit of fat from butter, and now it's just got a crap load of high fructose corn syrup in it, which is somehow even worse. Correct. Well, I mean, it's not even worse, but it's just like we constantly overindex. So, like, high fructose corn syrup in and of itself isn't bad. But when you were dumping truckloads into things in order to make them more enjoyable, and then you start manufacturing foods based on people's fear, and that is what has really happened.

We start becoming more fearful of certain foods. We blame them for everything inappropriately, and we teach people to have fear, shame, and guilt, because that is the beautiful trifecta. that allows us to market effectively to anyone. Right. And the moment you can market to people is the moment you can get them to buy. And the moment you can get them to buy is the moment you get them to buy in. Once they buy in, it's actually very easy to get them to buy again, as long as you actually

don't help them out. It's easy to get them to keep buying as long as you actually don't help them out. So basically the diet that has the secret to weight loss, the best thing that they can do is make it just not actually work. Well, here's the trick, right? And this is where it started to get super frustrated. and it's why it was so hard to write this book. Because, you know, in order to help people change,

it's actually really difficult because diet sort of becomes like religion. And at no part in my book, while I tell you, you need to be a vegan or you need to be a carnivore, you need to eat low fat or you need to eat low carb, because we have much more agency over what will work for us than you have been told. There is an agenda to push you into something in almost a dogmatic way to make you believe that this is the one and only way to get healthier. So how do you go ahead and, A, make this clear as day and make sure that I'm not biased and wrong.

This was a hunch. It was opinion. You need enough evidence to say this is what's really going on. Yeah, I don't see a doctor in front of your name there, buddy. Right, exactly. You're no doctor. You're just some fitness guy with a six-pack abs. Why should I listen to you?

No doctor, right? Investigative journalist, though, for like 20 years. And it's like, the question here is, you know, when you see something, you just start asking questions. And then once you start asking questions, you try to go with better answers. from the better answers, you need evidence. And what you start to see is that the average diet and the average dieter, right, will work or they will stick on a diet for anywhere between two to six weeks.

That's it? Wow. That's it. I thought it would be, I thought you were going to throw months on the end of that one. No, and here's why what happens. Because most diets will push you to an extreme where it's very, very hard to not see results. Right. If you cut out all carbs or you cut out all fat, or you start working out six days a week when you

doing nothing. These are such dramatic changes that it would be very, very hard for you to not see something. But from a behavioral standpoint, not from a physiological standpoint, it's very unsustainable and it's not a way to keep on progressing your body. So what happens is you do this for a very short period of time and you see results, but because you're grinding those gears so hard, you're going 150 miles per hour. You burn out, right? Either habitually you burn out. Or physically you burn out, hunger-wise, you burn out because you're eating 500 calories a day and you can't fucking take it anymore.

And then like you eat a low for bread and you gain back 10 pounds. And this is where they get you. Because suddenly you go, wow, when I was doing that extreme shit, look at all the weight I lost and then I ate carbs and I gained the weight back. So the problem is carbs. Got to be carbs.

Instead of saying the problem, why isn't the problem, this diet that made me react so much worse to something that I used to be able to eat with no problem. So diets push you towards these to these extremes where one of two things will happen. A, the moment

you cannot sustain this plan, right? The moment you have dessert or you have a takeout meal or you skip a workout, you kind of say, I fucked up. Right? I fucked up. I might as well just stop doing it whatsoever. And like there's a great doctor, Spencer Nodulski, who says like, if you're looking at this is like if you got a flat tire,

you're going ahead and then deciding to slash your other three tires. Yeah. Or just crash the car into a Revenue. It doesn't make sense, but this is what we do because we catastrophize because we are told, your body is this

very frail and fragile system. And if you don't follow this plan to a T, you've screwed up, right? So people have this screw mentality. Or maybe you don't decide to crash the car or slash the other tires, but you've been taught that this one little mistake is so bad that you must punish yourself

by dieting harder, exercising more, taking more extreme supplements, which inevitably still leads to the burnout that gets you to say, fuck it. So all of these approaches lead to burnout. And the problem is, like, you have to get away from these approaches that break you mentally so that you end up failing physically. But because of the manipulation, you think about when did I have success? And it's when I have these extreme approach. So then you keep on returning to the extreme. So the short-term fix, long-term, failure is a 50-year experiment in dietary manipulation that we keep on recycling. And now you just

see more and more extremes popping up. And this is physics, right? Yeah. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So for every vegan, there now has to be a carnivore, right? For every, like, super pro-carve, there has to be a super anti-carb. And each of these extreme factions are pushing people towards more restrictive measures that people will then dabble in. and it just breaks them over and over and over again. It seems like most diets and most health advice, not even just diets, but health advice in general, that's bad, of course, lives in the black and white, right?

It's either on or it's off. So you have these all or none beliefs, like you mentioned, where you're either on the diet, eating three grains of rice for each meal, or you're off the diet and you're eating two big max and an extra large fry with a Coke supersized for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And it sounds dumb when you phrase it like that,

And yet I consider myself a decently rational thinker. It's very hard for me to be like, I'm on an eating plan or a fitness plan or I'm off the plan. And then it's like all hell breaks loose. And it took me years and years before I got a trainer. And of course, when I got a trainer, things got a lot easier. To get a trainer and be like, oh, I'm just going to gradually modify what I do. Like I'm going to start weighing my food, not cutting back on anything.

I just want to see what's in the food that I'm eating. And when I started doing that, I was like, wow, there's 400 calories. in this bowl of cereal that I thought was essentially like a guilt-free snack. Maybe I just don't do that. And I started to lose weight, but it was like half a pound a week, but for 10 months, right? So it added up really, really fast. And it almost felt like I didn't need to do much. But that took years to get to because before that I was like, I'm on the diet, man.

I'm paleo now. I can't eat legumes. What is a legume anyway? Let me Google this. I was doing that stuff. And it's funny because that same approach is actually how we gain. weight as well. With very few exceptions, the average person gains about one to two pounds per year. So it's not like we wake up one day and we're 10 pounds heavier. It's that we remember being

a certain weight when we're 20 and we wake up when we're 40 and we're suddenly 20 to 40 pounds heavier. And the interesting thing is when you look, there's a study at UCLA that looked at people who diet compared to people who don't diet. And over the course of the year, the dieters, over, like I I think it was a two-year period, actually saw worse results. And the reason is the same form that we talked about. It's not that when they were on the diet, they didn't lose weight. It's just they were on the diet. They lost some weight.

They go off the diet, and they gain significantly more weight. The net gain over the course of a year is actually greater than if they would have done nothing. Just nothing. And we still catastrophizes. You were talking about the person eating the burger and the Coke and the fries. And a lot of health pros hate this. But my job is to help people, right? I don't care if you think I'm the smartest person.

I care if I help people get results, claim back their health, and they can just leave this fucking game behind because I think the diet game is completely rigged. When you are playing a rig game, there is only one way to win, and it is to leave it completely. So instead of going in these dogmatic factions, I try and look at myself like behavioral change, right? The type of things that all of us, if we want to be in control of our life,

forget fitness, just in control of our life, behavioral change is founded on a very, very basic principle, which is make change so easy that it's hard to fail. And that doesn't mean you don't have any discomfort, but you have to make the changes so easy that it's hard to fail. And then we habit stack, right?

We build because what once seemed really complex becomes easier once we have some success. So I like the person eating the burger and the fries and the, you know, the sugar sweetened beverage, the Coke or the Pepsi. And I say, eat your burgers, eat your fries. Sub out your Coke or Pepsi for a diet, Coke or Pepsi or what it's called, like a non-nutritive sweetener,

right? or some people are artificial sweeteners. Some people have got big issues with this. That's another thing that's completely manipulated. I was talking to a friend of mine who you probably know, you know, Lane Norton, Dr. Lane Norton. Of course. He was like, I was like, Diet Coke. Come on, man, give it to me straight.

Is this bad for me? He's like, no, just enjoy it. And Lane will tell you the same thing. And I've experienced the same thing. And I have legitimately seen people who have lost 50 to 75 pounds just by subbing that out because they drink three to four of those a day. Oof. Right? Those are 30 to 40 grams of sugar.

They're loaded with calories. When you have that much sugar, it's not necessarily that the sugar is the problem is the sugar makes you hungry for more things. It doesn't leave you satisfied. So you end up overeating other food. Sugar in and of itself is not bad if you can control it. When you eat a lot of sugar, it makes you crave more sugar. And the more sugar you eat, the more calories you eat overall. So it's this domino effect of things for people villainize sugar. But like it's not the same thing as cocaine. If you're going to make the same argument that like sugar is like cocaine, then you have to make the argument that sex is like cocaine. Right. But like we choose to selectively villainize

things because it's a wonderful narrative that gets headlines. It's just not true. But those people who then sub out those four drinks, the sugar is gone because it's a non-nutrile sweetener. There's no calories. Your microbiome is not being destroyed. That is again something that fundamentally not proven. It's just not. Maybe find out 10 years from now this was the case. Maybe. But at this point, and there's a good amount of research, it doesn't. You can make the argument that the diet so does you drink actually improve the gut bacteria that makes it easier to lose weight, which might be a reason why people who use these artificially sweetened drinks are non-nutrative sweeteners, right? Stevie is not an artificial sweetener. They end up losing weight and they lose a lot

because that one habit change is so easy to do. It's so easy to change. They're not completely restricting it. And then it leads to other better behaviors where they're not overeating because they're not flogging their system with 150 grams of sugar per day and not being satisfied by it. So I try and identify those simple things where it's like still eat your burger and prize, man. Enjoy your life. If the conquest of health causes you to make decisions that fundamentally make you feel worse about yourself or mean that you're missing out on life, that is the least healthy thing in the world. I find it so funny that, you know, if someone talks to you about like getting healthier or losing weight, everyone's probably heard the old, you don't need a diet. You need a lifestyle change.

And to that I say, well, when was the last time you asked any of these? people what you want their life to actually look like. Sure. And that's what I care about. Like, I want to know what you want your life to look like, how you want to eat the things you want to enjoy. And that's even like socially, right? Like social interaction is such a huge part of life.

And we are very isolated people right now. I used to do intermittent fasting or a bestselling book about it. If people ask me if I intermittent fast, I'll tell you no. And people like, oh, why'd you do? Was it the science that changed? I'm like, A, yes, it did. Like most of the claims people make about intermittent fasting are vastly overstated. But B, I realized when I became a dad,

that I didn't want to be the shithead, not eating with my son, because I was waiting until 2 o'clock for my 16-8 fasting. It was the dumbest thing. Like, how many years of meals and moments and laughs was I going to miss out of? And the health sacrifice of not intermittent fasting was no. It was nothing. It was such a good tradeoff to stop intermittent fasting, so we're going to have breakfast with my kids every day.

And I was like, why is it that we do these things? And it's like, we're just pushed towards behaviors because it is. It's manipulation. Right. Okay. So for people who don't know what intermittent fasting is, because this is not a health podcast and by any means, this is essentially you're restricting your eating to an eight-hour window per day.

So instead of eating breakfast. Or more. Some people will do like a 24-hour fast. So the idea is don't eat for a big window of day. Right. Starve yourself. And then like, you're going to lose weight because you don't eat 20 hours of the day. And I'm like, well, what a shocking finding we have here.

You're listening to the Jordan Harbour. The Jorbinger show with our guest, Adam Bornstein. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I manage to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it is because of my network. And I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. The course is about improving your relationship skills and not being gross and cringy and

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You'll be in smart company. You can find the course at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Well, back to Adam Bornstein. So a lot of people, what they would do is they would go, okay, I don't eat breakfast. I don't have any calories until, like you said, 2 p.m. And then I can eat until 7 or 8 at night or 10 or whatever the window is. It's funny. I laughed when he said intermittent fasting because that was trending so hard for so long.

It had like a better part of a decade where early in 2010, it was like every fitness guy was, only the edge of case fitness guys were doing it. And then towards the end of the teens, every fitness person was doing it, like every crossfitter was doing it. But it was so annoying because friends of mine, for example, who I go, hey, I'm coming to Phoenix, man. We got to go out and we don't, you know, I know you're sober now. We don't have to have a drink. And he goes, ah, so not only am I sober now, but I'm doing intermittent fasting. so I don't eat anything after 6 p.m. And I'm like, well, I land at 545.

It's going to be like 6.45. Can we eat then? No. So I'm like, well, I don't really want to go out to dinner with you if you're going to stare at me and not do anything. And so we did that and it wasn't that interesting because I was eating and he's like, I can't watch you eat that. I'm going to go for a walk.

Call me when you're done and I'll come back and we can talk at the table. And I'm like, this sucks. Like, I'm on a dinner date with myself. I flew in to see a friend and he can't even. sit here because he's intermittent fasting. So it does, it screws with your social life. And it seems like at the end of the day, the reason people lose weight on intermittent fasting is in part because maybe they were eating way too much for three meals.

Now they only eat two meals. Surprise, surprise, they lost a couple of pounds. Right. And that's so much of the health changes are not the scienceification of ideas, right? Humans, it's funny. Like we're brilliant creatures, but our brains sometimes are wired in a little messed up. way. There's a lizard brain. I mean, science says this isn't true, but there's a lizard brain in there somewhere, right? Well, there is, but like a perfect example is our brains react to

novel things as opposed to boring things in social media is the greatest example of this in all time, right? We can't help but stop and look at the car crash, right? Because it's novel, it's different, it's eye grabbing. And I talk about this, like FMRI studies when you show people something new or different or seemingly crazy. We stop and pay attention. when we show something boring or like seemingly too simple to possibly work, we completely ignore it. So we are like victims of a system of our own wiring. Yeah, interesting.

Because the type of things that are going to gather our attention, and again, you can make this akin to the health industry now where like the crazier shit you say. It's why a lot of people hate health, right? Like I have this love-hate relationship where I want to help people, but I don't want to play this game. I just want to tell people like, do these. five things, make them apply to your life, and, like, hopefully you never need me again. I've said for 20 years that my job in health is to, like, be so good that people, like,

never need me again, right? It's to get fired, because if you do your job, like, you know what to do. And if you want the accountability, if you want the support, that's another aspect, right? Sometimes, like, compliance is just about knowing that, like, you've got someone there with you, which is totally great. I have my own, like, support system. But, like, the information itself shouldn't be under lock and keen. it shouldn't be changing the type of things that change your body, right? Us as humans have not

physiologically changed much. Why are we going in the wrong direction of the last 50 years when our bodies are fundamentally the same? Yes, food environment is different, but it's these diets, it's these behaviors, and it is this way that we manipulate people to break their mindsets, create a terrible relationship with food and overcomplicate everything. And I'm just tired of it, right? If you want to look at intermittent fasting as a way to do something, don't worry about how many hours you need to fast, right? Don't even worry about fasting at all. Habitually, look at Other areas in life where you see that like burnout would happen and why does burnout happen? And I talk about in the book, right?

A perfect example is work. Burnout and work has increased over time. And a major factor, not the only factor, but a major factor is that the work day no longer has boundaries. Right. It used to be nine to five. So what happens is the stress of always needing to be on, right? The expectation that you always need to check your email, right? It is just like it is a 24-hour work cycle, just like it's a 24-hour work cycle, just like it's a

24-hour news cycle, and that creates feelings of anxiety and stress that make work harder for a lot of people. Diet's the same way. We're open kitchen 24-7, right? We don't in our minds think, well, I should start eating at this time and I should stop eating at this time and anything outside of those parameters, right? I probably shouldn't eat because eating shouldn't be a 24-7 thing. So I say, forget the intermittent fasting, but like have open kitchen, closed kitchen rules. And like, there was a fascinating study that did just that. I love studies that are so basic, done with humans, not lab rats and mites, and just, like, get long-term outcomes.

And in this study, what they did is they told people, don't change anything about your diet. What I want you to do is move your breakfast back 1.5 hours. So if you ate breakfast at 7, you'd be eating at like 8.30. And take your dinner, let's say you eat dinner at 7 o'clock, and move it up at 1.5 hours. And so you're eating at 5.30. That's it. These people lost significant amounts of weight and kept it up for you. is because that one change created boundaries where yeah like if you break it every now and then

don't worry about again the whole idea is you can't screw this up our bodies are very very resilient we catastrophize things but like create a boundary and eat within that boundary whatever the boundary is but how is that not intermittent fasting adam it sounds like the same thing with a different name no no no because like intermittent fasting presupposes the fasting is the magic oh i see so so you become obsessed with i need to fast for 16 hours i need to fast for 20 hours the big thing right now is alternate day fasting. I need to fast every other day. Or they make you stress about calories. Like two days a week, you can only eat 500 calories a day. And I'm saying you don't have to count calories. You don't have to count numbers. The idea, again, make it so easy that it's hard to fail. So for

me, my rule is I don't take dinner time. I take when I go to bed, right? Because I can't move up my dinner time an hour and a half because my kids are still in school. They're going to come home and be like dad. And I'm like, sorry, guys. missed dinner. Yeah. Too bad. Soccer practice. Can't eat with dad now. Have fun eating on your own, sucker. It's about making it practical, right? So I start breakfast at a time that works for me because I want to eat with my kids. So it's not based on when I woke up. It's based on when I want to eat with my children. And I say two hours before I go to sleep, I'm not going to eat anymore. So again, instead of playing by someone else's rules, play by your rules, but create boundaries that make it easier for you to not be your own worst enemy. In intermittent fasting,

gives you these rules, these times, these restrictions, that literally they're people who are like sitting there, like, looking at their clock and it's like, one 52 and they're like, I got to wait another eight minutes. And I'm like, it doesn't matter. Stomach's growling into the microphone. Right. Yeah. The stress and the anxiety of dying is why we obsessed over all these behaviors that do not really

make that big of the difference. I know, you're tight with Tim Ferriss. You worked with him for, I don't know, like a decade or something. And one of the ways that I met him, I thought he was such a friend. freaking weirdo. And I can say that because we're buddies now, but I thought it was such a freaking weirdo because we're at this event and it was like, I don't know, 1158 PM, right? And I'm in a conversation with, it was like a hoity toady event. I'm talking with like an NFL player and an actress or whatever and we're having fun. And he walks up and he's like shoveling granola

bars into his mouth at like a speed that is highly uncomfortable to watch. I go, what are you doing? And he's like, oh, I'm Tim. I'm like, I know who you are. This is just, and it's an honor to meet you, but what are you doing right now? Like, this is just, it's painful to watch you eat a kind bar at Blitzkrieg's speed. And he's like, well, I only have three minutes left before my fast starts. Or no, sorry, it was like three days left until my cheat day ends. It was one of those things. Right.

And it was so funny. And I don't think he does anything like this at all anymore, but it was really comical. And I remember everybody was talking, in the conversation was talking about this for so long, because we'd never seen anybody do the work. to eat six granola bars in four minutes or however long it was. It was just ridiculous. And essentially you bring up Tim, right? Because I talk about Tim that, like, I did work with Tim for a long time.

And a lot of the things that I learned from Tim have nothing to do with health and fitness. We, you know, probably disagree on several things. But the best thing I learned from Tim is kind of a paradigm that helped me create a more effective way for food healthy. And it was a question that Tim would ask me all the time from a business lens, right? And it was like, if this were easy, what would it look like? And it's a really, really difficult question to answer. But when I looked at health, when I looked at the health industry, it was like, if this were easy,

what would it look like? And the answer is kind of like everything different than what diets tell you. Because I found like behaviorally, there are three huge barriers, right? You've got cost, you've got convenience, and you have complexity. D diets tell you that you need to buy really expensive foods, which don't necessarily have any benefit. They make the plans super complex, like having to shovel down, you know, 18 granola bars before your cheat day. hence, right? And they make them very, very inconvenient, right? Where it's like, some will tell you you have to eat six meals a day. Some will tell you have to eat one meal a day. Some will tell

you that you have to measure your macros. And it's not to say that none of these things can't work. It's just to say that they're so complicated and inconvenient that it makes it less likely it will work for the long term. And I want to stop that, right? Like if things were easy, you could eat takeout. You could have dessert, right? You could not stress about every single thing. that you eat, and I would argue, like, that's the position that people need to come from. Like, health shouldn't be about this game where we're trying to get you to buy a solution. That's an interesting point that I had a note about, right? Because a lot of the marketers, and that's just what they are, right?

Selling diets and exercise and stuff like that. Correct. People keep changing things and making up new stuff, terms, whatever, in order to, well, confuse things or confuse you in order to sell stuff. That's why we see, like, scientists hate him, three weird tricks that result in a lower waistline within 24 hours. And those are dumb, extreme examples that I bring up,

and most of us can see through those. But what we don't necessarily see through is, look, this is a diet that all the celebrities are on. It's the one they don't tell you about. I'm a celebrity trainer. My name's Jordan Harmanjur. I'm going to show you how to lose X weight, and it's all about, and it's always trending, right?

Like the guys in the movie 300 that everybody was like, damn, look at those six packs. It's like, here's their workout and their diet. But it's not really that. Those guys were probably all on different diets with different trainers. They just had to come in looking crispy for the role. In different drugs. And different steroids stacks. Lots and lots of drugs.

You guys have played the Hollywood game for a while. Lots of drugs. That is the majority of these changes are not natural whatsoever. But like you sensationalize that answer, but it's true. And like, if you ask me, you don't even have to pick up the book for this one. If you are taking information from someone who is fundamentally pushing a message of fear in order to get you to act in general run. Like the research, even new study that came up last month about this, about, you know,

and there was one another like a week ago about FitFluencers about like the top 100 accounts on Instagram, like 60% of them make people feel worse about themselves. And then this is associated with body image issues, food image issues, becoming more unhealthy. Right. And like 50% of those top 100 trainers, none of them had like any credentials whatsoever. And the message was about fear. And again, it is great marketing. The two primary emotional drivers of marketing, and I know this because I'm a marketer,

are fear and greed. Fear and greed will drive people to purchase or act more powerfully than any other emotion, even the good stuff. And if that is the messaging and the people you're taking, they're trying to make you afraid of shit, oh man, that is like as big of a red flag. And if you just were to avoid the people

who were trying to get you to fear and react and live in fear of these things, I'd argue you'd be way better off because you're not going to fall prey to so many of these things that just really short-term fix, long-term failure. You see it when you know an area better.

You know, it's like watching the news and you go, wow, I know a lot about I don't know, tanks, right? And I don't really, but like, let's say you do. And you hear something on the news and you go, that's totally wrong. But then you watch the rest of the newscast about things you don't really know that intimately. And you're like, wow, I'm so worried about all these other things. And if you think about it, what if they're as wrong about all of those other things as they were about tanks,

the thing you knew a lot about? There's probably a term for this that I'm not getting that I don't know about. But that's kind of what I see with marketing. So internet marketers will say something like, the technology is so completely. but we automate it for you. And if you don't know how business or real estate investing or whatever works, you buy this course thinking like, oh, they're going to simplify it for me and they're going to do this and that and the other thing. But if you talk to somebody who's like a real, real estate investor, they're like, you buy properties and you manage them. And then when that gets to

be too much, you hire managers to manage them for you. You don't need all this special software that finds the deal. Like all that is just hypey nonsense that's sold by some sheister who knows that if he goes, yeah, you just buy properties and manage them well, and here's how you find good deal. Like, that's too simple. So they want to make it really complex and weird because it appeals to your greed because you're going to make money, but also it appeals to your fear. Like, I don't think I can do this unless I have somebody guiding me because it's so complicated. And I think you wrote about this in the book. You said, when we learn new things, we get a dopamine hit. And I didn't actually know that, but it makes total sense. It's why I like documentaries

and why people watch crap on YouTube. So selling new and complex BS diet and fitness info, it actually gets us a little high in real fitness advice, like, hey, diet and exercise and maybe get some sleep. It's just too boring for most of us to care about on an emotional lizard-brain-ish level. It's not interesting. And it sucks, right?

Because we associate complexity with effectiveness. But if you talk to anyone who is like the best, at their craft, they will tell you the reason they are so good is that they mastered the basics, right? And if you are good at something, you could probably look at this and be like, well, I can do the basics so well that I am capable of doing some more advanced things, but only because I have mastered the basics. And diets do not care about the basics, right? I'll even like, I'm happy. I told you this before. Like, even like, one of the most basic things that people can do if you feel hungry. And again, this is going to sound so crazy. Like, it can't possibly work,

is just take longer having your meal. I say in the book, like, try and take at least 20 minutes to have a meal. I don't care if you eat longer, it doesn't really matter. Most of the thing like, oh, if I'm going to spend an hour eating, I'm going to eat way more. That's not what they find. People who eat take longer to eat their meals. Eat significantly less, and here's why. The average person takes nine minutes to scarf down a meal.

We're all pretty much guilty of this because we're in a rush or we're eating in front of our computer or we're eating in front of our phone or the TV or listening to a podcast. We're distracted. I feel seen slash attack. Yeah. We're distracted and we eat really rapidly. Or we're trying to like feed our kids at the same time, right? Like I'm trying like waiting for my kids not to kill each other.

Start throwing food at each other. And it's just like, I've got three minutes. I've got to eat my meal so I can enjoy this. And then it's like, all right, off to go get them ready for bed or bedtime, whatever it is. Hunger works in a very interesting way in that, you know, your stomach has essentially a satiety center. All right, boring word for it's going to send a signal to your brain to tell you it's full. But this ain't the free way. It takes about 20 minutes for your stomach to send a signal to your brain.

So a lot of us eat so quickly and then keep eating, thinking that we're not full, simply because our body hasn't had enough time to digest and send a signal. I see. This is why I feel uncomfortably full, but not right after I'm done eating. Exactly. And this happens to most people. And like, what happened? I wasn't hungry, right?

It just, you needed to give your body more time. And then, right, so if our stomach is essentially there being like the navigator, it's the skipper, right? It's the second May, first May. Your brain is the quarterback. It's the captain. So your brain is trying to take in other signals to tell you like, hey, stop eating because we're trying to survive.

Your brain wants your body to be healthy, but you have to give it a chance to succeed. So they have looked at what happens when people will eat a meal where they can't see the food on their plate versus when they can't. Right? So essentially, are you paying attention to what you're eating versus are you not because the real-life example is you're watching TV, your skull and your phone, whatever it is. When people can see what is on their plate, the brain is setting that signal like, oh, this is enough to make you full.

The people who were blinded, couldn't see the food, right, eating without being able to see what's on the plate, ate more than the people who are able to pay attention. So if we pay attention to what we eat so our brain can see what's on the plate and we slow down so our stomach can tell our brain no more, that alone saves people a significant amount. Some studies show up to hundreds of calories per meal, which could be hundreds per day, which could be thousands per week. And it isn't rocket science, but I had 500 people do the plan that's in the book, right? Which is all habit-based change.

It's not like you're not counting calories. And the hardest thing for them to do was take 20 minutes to eat a meal. I bet. That sounds painful. I don't even know where I would find 20 minutes to eat a meal with kids. I'm not saying it's easy. And that's why the point of the book is like, I get people tools, but it's like you don't have to do all of these. The idea of being 100% with your diet is such a myth. Instead of trying

to be 100%, the goal is just don't be 0%. Don't be 0% and you will be healthier. So if you can apply one tool, you are better off. You blue 2, 3, 4, whatever. The idea is just don't go 0% because most people go 0% and stay 0% for months at a time. And they come up for error and then they go to another desperate, extreme restrictive diet, lose a little gain more. And like, this just keeps on compounding, but the real compounding is how you feel about yourself, how you feel about your body, how you feel about your life. And if you don't think these diets are breaking people outside of the physical, you're kidding yourself because we all care about our health on some level, right? I truly, especially like I don't care if I have a six-pack. I love eating dessert and I

have frosted flakes from every single night. I want to live long. I want to be healthy and I don't be around from my kids. And I want to have the energy to like run my businesses and do things. That's it. And that's most people, but the things that you need to do to achieve those goals are nowhere as complicated of what you're given to live this extreme lifestyle that you don't even want. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Adam Bornstein. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And you can

always search for any sponsor using the AI chatbot on the website as well, Jordan Harbinger.com slash AI. Thanks for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Adam Bornstein. It is interesting. It's almost like psychological warfare, right? We're constantly bombarded by things. We fall back into our old habits because we're confused. Then our brains are seeing novelty as rewards, so we're looking for the new thing. I had a friend, I guess, ex-business partner, and he had a new diet probably every two or three days. Obviously, he was overweight, and he never stuck with anything, and he would break his diet and

eat like a whole large pizza for one meal. And it was just really annoying and sad because he would tell you all about this new thing, and it was always ridiculously complicated. I mean, it was never like, okay, I'm going to eat half portions today. It was always like, well, I've got 78,000 moving parts, and it's like maybe just, like, go for a walk every day instead. And he could never do it. And it was deep shame with him, right?

And the shame cocktail that we're all being fed with the marketing is probably a big reason why many of us are not able to lose any weight successfully. You give this great analogy in the book where if you had a job and they said, okay, we're going to ask you to do everything different about how you do work. And also, you can't take any days off. And we're going to extend your workday by two hours. And you can't use a computer to do this anymore. You got to use an abacus or whatever instead of like Excel.

You would look at them sideways and walk out the door because what are you talking about? And yet when you have to do a diet, it's like, so you got to do everything except you got to do it standing on your head and you got to cut your portions in half, but you can only eat during the summer solstice or whatever. It's impossible. But we look at that and we go, okay, I can do this. I could do this. I got the will power to do this. It doesn't make any sense.

And it doesn't work. And I will bet you there's probably going to be if there's not already a summer solstice. diet. That's how stupid the industry is. It's just so ridiculous because we can take any hook and I saw it. Some people have asked me like why I wrote a book, right? Why in 2023 am I writing a diet health book when I have audience? I have all this. And part of the motivation is, you know, I love writing books. But part of it is when I went to sell this book, the publishers were like, well, what's the hook? And I'm like, well, the hook is it like, run healthy. And like these books, no offense guys a lot of them that you're putting out are bullshit i bet they love that answer right

we're not helping people like i care about helping people it's what i've done for 20 years right i don't care i don't need credit i help people behind the scenes i help people in front of the scenes i help people the hook is man like the data's right in front of us right 40% obese 75% obese are overweight some people stress anywhere between like 10 to 12 times per meal about what they're going to eat right because they worry about what they're going to eat they're how they feel and they internalize guilt and like this is wrong it is so wrong and I'm like, guys, like, let's just help people, right? They're like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's really good. But what's the hook? It's one thing. You're going to tell them the change.

And I was like, you know what, at some point, someone, and I don't know if it's going to be me. Someone's got to write a book that fundamentally gets publishers to look at this differently so we can actually stop producing so many diet books. We can just have a few that help people and let it be that because there are other people with other books that can help people feel better about themselves or leave this dieting game. And it was kind of my North Star, but it's crazy because the more you look at the system, right? Even the publishers, the publishers want to make money. And they see that, like, the books with the sensationalized thing sell more.

Right. So then when I'm like, no, this book is going to be great, it's going to help people. And they're like, well, show me a comp of a book that didn't have a hook that was a bestseller. You know, and I get it because part of the reason I had a New York Times best seller in 2013 and I stopped writing it for that. And I had this idea to write this book, but it took me forever to report it and research it and do it the right way. But part of it was like, I was guilty of it. it to a decade ago. I had the intermittent fasting book and I overstated claims and I thought it would help people at the time and it didn't and I felt really, really bad about it because it was

part of it at the time, but I saw like I was actually contributing to the problem. Right. And I was playing the game and I knew partially why I was. Even when it came to selling this book, I couldn't sell the book with the title that it is. You can't screw this up. What I really wanted to call it was the comfort zone. But what I had to title it in order to sell it was the takeout diet. Oh yeah. Okay. Interesting. Yeah, because one of my foundational principles here is like, I loathe the fact that every single diet is like, either A, you can never eat takeout, or B, when you go to eat takeout, never touch the bread basket, don't get the chips. When you order your entree, cut it in half, and set half of it aside and

ask your serve it to take the other half away, and don't ever touch dessert and never like drink alcohol. And a lot of these things are choices, right? If you don't want to drink alcohol, that's fine. If you don't like dessert, that's fine. That's not sustainable. That's not enjoy, but that's ridiculous, right? Like, for a lot of people, going out to eat is a treat. And diets make us fundamentally in opposition of our food environment. Right. Like take all the fun out of the thing you used to love doing forever. We're constantly fighting it, right? More people eat out than ever before. Some of this is a byproduct of COVID. And yet more people are unsatisfied after they eat a meal because they live in the shame and guilt. And like those two things should not coexist. So instead of just

constantly fighting against the food environment. Why can't I just like, we teach people to coexist? So I sold this book knowing that when I was going to submit it, I was going to submit it with the title of the comfort zone, which they didn't want to take. But I had to sell it under a different packaging because that's the industry, right? We could talk about the book industry forever, the marketing industry, the supplement industry. It's like it has to be packaged up a certain way. And I'm like, all that is doing is perpetuating the problem, whereas like the goal of all this should be to help people. I can't say it enough. And it sounds like goody two shoes. And Most listeners probably don't know me from like a hole in the wall.

But man, like, this has been my battle for a long time. It's why I had to write this book. I had to like stubbornly write this book. So it's like, someone has got to do something to just like call out the industry, point out, you know, throughout the book and point out all these different diets that are just like complete fucking nonsense and be like, it doesn't have to be this hard. It doesn't have to be this miserable. And you don't have to abandon everything that you think you love in order to be healthy.

I was talking to a mutual friend of ours, Jason Pfeiffer, who's been on this show, and he works, he's the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. Is that right? Yeah. That is correct. Yep. Yeah. I wasn't sure if he was an editor, editor-in-chief. EIC, the big boss over there. He's the big man. He runs the show. And he worked with you a long time ago at men's health, which back then was under this brand, Rodeale. And they always had these sort of in-house published diet books. And it was always like, abs for summer. These diet books are not written by experts at all. They're just written by, like staff writers, and they have the hook that you mention, and it's marketed like crazy, and you get a coupon with every issue for that year of men's health, and it's just like a profit center for the publisher. And Jason told me, he's like, oh, yeah, I couldn't believe that they would pump out these diet books by writers that were not experts. The rationale for the diet was just completely made up. Nobody knew if it would work, because it wasn't really tested. It was just a machine. And he said it, and people are supposed to read these things and then devote their health and the rest of the year.

to this diet. It's just absolutely insane. So that element of marketing and dieting and publishing was crazy to me. But you're right. The publishing industry itself is probably a whole different type of conversation because I have a friend. He's a really good writer. He wrote a really interesting book. I sent it to a friend of mine who's an editor, a big time, sort of big time editor over to big publisher. I said, how does this guy get a book published? And she's like, I don't know. I don't have time to read it. And I'm like, I did. It was really good. and she goes, yeah, I don't know. I'm not, it's not really my area.

And then I go, well, if this guy who already wrote a book can't get it published, I'm never writing a book. And she goes, no, no, no, no, you should. And I go, well, why? I don't know what I'm going to write. This guy already wrote something good. He can't get it published. Why would I get published?

She goes, well, look, your friend needs a book proposal. And I go, oh, God, I'd have to do one of those two. She goes, oh, no, you don't need to do that. And I'm like, I'm so confused. This guy has a book, but he doesn't have a proposal. And so he can't get published. I don't have a book, and I don't need a proposal. And she's like, no, we'll just have somebody write a book for you and market it under your brand and you'll do great.

But this guy who actually has a good book, he doesn't have a marketing machine behind it other than us and we're not interested. And I was like, wait a minute, that is like the opposite of what I thought books were supposed to be. I thought books are written by people that had something to say. And it's almost not true anymore. They're by and large written by people who can just make a million dollars for the publisher off the book. And that's the rationale for even creating it in the first place. So if you're on a reality show and you can make some shit up about that show and your life and it's even remote mildly interesting doesn't really matter.

90% of the copies will never get read, then you have a book and you get a million dollar advance dot dot, dot profit. And it's like that's why it's probably when most books suck because nobody reads them. And how many great ideas and never see a letter day, right? And it's very easy to say, and I'll be honest, hey, maybe my book sucks. I don't think so. Like if you asked me to pick, I always say like choosing between books is like Sophie's choice, but there's no Sophie's choice here for me.

This book is my favorite one I've written because it's the most honest is the one that I feel will just stand a test of time. Right. But like I tried to pitch this book in 2017 and my book agent who was phenomenal told me he's like it's not good enough. Right. So I've had people, I surround myself people, which is a good thing in general, who keep you honest. I waited until I was ready and he was like, this thing is freaking awesome. And still the friction was there. And that's frustrating for me.

Right. Like industry shouldn't be determined by who has the biggest marketing machine. Yeah. Industry should be determined by where are the best. ideas that create the most greater good for all or for the people who need it most. And yeah, the publishing industry, by and large, and there are exceptions to this, but by and large is driven by marketing and exposure, not ideas. And that's not a good place to be.

No. For society. So you try and create ecosystems that allow these forward-thinking people, the people who are trying to do good, like have platforms. Much of my work has now been behind the scenes trying to do this because I saw, like, the machine itself was broken. So I had to go build my own to go and give people distribution in a platform because so many of the people who had helped the most and get away from this dogmatic, obsessive, stress. People hate health for a good reason.

But no one shouldn't care about their health because it's what allows us to live this gift that we call life. It's what allows us to connect with people and do the things that we'd love to do. It's just become so convoluted and gotten away from like what it needs to be. I want to get back to some of the diet stuff. I know you and I were talking a couple weeks ago now, and you had said scientists have essentially created food that has end run our brain into thinking we want more food, even when we're full. You talked about satiety. What is happening with food, aside from bigger portion sizes, which I think we have all sort of come to accept as fact, what is happening with food where the technology has exceeded our ability to kind of get past it?

I've read somewhere, again, maybe your book, that the biggest, sweetest thing a hunter-gatherer would have had, thousands of years ago, it was like a carrot. Right. Probably a little sweeter. You got the berries and other things like that. But the thing that has happened, and this goes back to what you're talking about earlier, right? In the 80s, you had like the no fat movement and we poured sugar into this. And this wasn't the first time, but it was kind of a tipping point, if you will, of when food manufacturers went and like, like, snack wells is the big one at the time, was like, oh, wait, we could manipulate food.

and we can manipulate it so much that people just keep eating it. And people are surprised when an author Michael Moss has written about this where he talks about the bliss point, which I mentioned in the book. And the bliss point is this sweet spot of salty, sweet, and fatty that makes us insatiable. And these foods are now make up 60% of what are in grocery stores. Now, the mistake is to think that you can't eat any of these food, right? because the poison is in the dose.

Our bodies are resilient. The example I say is like if you were to work out one time every month, would you think you'd be in fantastic shape? And the answer would be no, better than doing nothing. But once a month, not doing it. If you eat a couple bad meals per week, it's not going to have any impact, right? In life, I said, like, most people eat three meals a day, right? Seven days a week, 21 meals a week.

If you had three shitty meals and you were 18 out of 21, so you're roughly 90%, you're going to be in phenomenal shape, right? But we don't think that. We have like the one bad meal, and they're like, fuck it, slash those tires, and we go off. But what happens is we eat these hyper-palatable foods, and they make us almost a bottomless pit. And there is this fantastic researcher at the NIH named Dr. Kevin Hall. And what he did was this fascinating experiment where he would take people who were eating like a whole food diet and not tell them what to eat, how much to eat, just basically buffet style, eat this food. and then they would give the same amount colorically of the foods,

but also tell them eat as much as you want of things like Chef Boyardee and Mac and Cheese. Again, the ultra-processed foods. And without telling them how much to eat, without manipulating anything, and these were in two weeks stints where it was the same people. The people on the ultra-processed foods ate 500 calories more in a meal. Oh, wow. And then the craziest part is they would then switch them back to the less processed. So I'm not saying all processing.

These are the ultra-processed foods where you are adding in sugar, fat, salt, unnaturally. So sugar, not bad. Fat, not bad. Salt, not bad. Adding it in unnaturally to foods in a specific amount. These people ate 500 more calories per meal. Switch them back to these foods that are like minimally processed or not processed at all. They suddenly stop eating 500 calories less.

Just like that. Again, no guidelines whatsoever. And scientists are still trying to figure out. we do not know yet exactly what it is. That like, is there a way to essentially turn this off? But when we eat these foods all the time, it's easy to see why it's so simple for people to be overweight because the food industry, the food environment is now filled with so many. And it's even why I argue, like sometimes you're actually better off going and eating takeout, right? Going and getting some sushi eating some of the favorite things you want because it's these ultra.

to process foods that are most likely the most problematic thing in general, instead of like all of these individual villains, right? The sugar, the fat, the carbs, like independently. So that means if you look at anything, independently, sugar's not going to make you fat. A gram of sugar is four calories. No one's getting fat off four calories, right? Carbs, it's the same thing. And most carbs have fiber, which leaves you full, right? Fiber is one of the biggest cheat codes in all of dieting. You eat fiber, you eat less. End of story. That means you could eat whole wheat bread. You can eat pasta. Like, the things that people tell you don't, you can eat potatoes.

Potato is literally the most feeling food that we have, period. It's crazy to think how many people have, like, afraid to even eat like a white potato. But, like, it's something that will leave you more full than almost anything else. But it's these ultra-processed foods, the things that are chemically engineered, that we don't need to completely avoid, but probably need to limit the most. I also read, and I think, again, in your book, that when we avoid certain foods, we end up eating 133% more calories than before, which I was like, does he mean 33%? Because 133% more than twice as much when we're avoiding certain foods, that's insane. So if we're saying avoid carbs,

we're really just doubling up on the calories by eating more meat or something? And who hasn't done that? Who hasn't been like if they swear off pasta and bread and rice and I'm going to eat no white foods, right? So I have a short rib thing instead. Yeah. And then a couple weeks go by and you're like literally at the bottom of a bucket of pasta and you're like, what if I done? I'm such a horrible human being. But like, again, we are we are simple creatures, but sometimes that, you know, you can almost laugh about it. We want what we can't have, right? And when we fundamentally tell ourselves that something is completely off limits, it changes triggering, basically wiring in our brain to make us desire it more. And a much more effective way is to not put things completely

off limits because it's just going to increase the compliance of behavior. If you tell yourself you can eat dessert and you tell yourself to enjoy dessert and you savor it and when you have it, you don't feel guilty, cravings actually decrease, right? This is what the idea of like of gratitude and being present as all about. Like when people who are in the moment experiencing things differently than people who are clouded by other emotions and yeah, the idea of just like cut everything out is so, funny. We want to talk about express lanes. We wish we had an express rain from our stomach to our brain, especially these parents, so we could fill up. The express lane to eating more

of the foods that you want to eat less of is telling yourself you can never have it. Right. And then you're power chugging ice cream in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven. Exactly. Or so I've heard. Or so I've heard. Allegedly, hypothetically speaking. Yeah, hypothetically. Let's wrap with some bad diet red flags because I think in the beginning at the top of the show, we kind of talked about time frames or like, this is a six-week diet that's going to get you down to X. Like, you're going to lose 25 pounds and 25 days or whatever. A lot of these, what do you call it, front-loaded diets, I guess you would say, a lot of it's water weight, I understand. And also, if something stops working after a certain period of time,

that's suss, right? That was a battle with the publisher. They're like, tell them how much weight they're going to lose in four weeks. And I'm like, I will do no such thing. I will provide you with a plan of certain amount of weeks so that you can have the training wheels, right? So you can crawl, walk, run, right? The great example I gave in the book is that, like, if you really want to make sense of nutrition and fitness, just look for examples in other areas of life outside of nutrition and fitness where it's not so damn manipulative.

If you want to learn how to swim, is it a good idea to start in the deep end? Yeah, nobody's like, you know what, do a cliff dive into a riptide. That's how you're going to learn that. That's the only way you're going to learn how to swim, kids. Right. You put your, like, toe in the shallow. So you know, like, the water is safe. You learn how to tread water.

Things that fundamentally are super complex, right? You're like, there's no way I should be able to do this run from. Right? And like when you put this timestamp, and this is what somebody dies when we talked about it earlier, it's like, you will lose 15 pounds in four weeks. Okay. What happens after the four weeks? You gain 25 pounds.

Right. Exactly. The reason people put these boundaries with parameters and set expectations because that's, when it stops working. And that's fundamentally a problem. And again, it's just manipulation because you see, oh man, 15 pounds in two weeks, that's great, right?

It's like the eight-minute apps. When they come up with seven-minute apps, right? Everyone is just trying to keep on pushing it. No, I say, right? It is like we're moving the goalpost to get people to buy. But that usually just means that A, right, to your point, like the slow and steady, like wins the rate, If you were to lose like half a pound, or I would say like healthy weight loss isn't done in days or in weeks.

It's by month. Healthy weight loss is truly one to two pounds per month, like at most. But at the end of the year, if you've lost 12 to 24 pounds, no one's going to be upset. No, that's great. And it's such a sustainable way because, again, it can be takeout. It could be dessert. But like we create these false expectations that means we're chasing suddenly we don't want to chase. and we're willingly entering into something where they're telling us

it's only going to work for a certain number of weeks. Right. And we just said we have to stop that. Back to what you said on 24 pounds in a year, 12 to 24 pounds. People, and this happens in business, fitness, pretty much every area of my life, I can sort of attest to this, you really overestimate what you can do in a year, and you really underestimate what you can do in five or 10 years. If you look at a business, you're like, I'm going to double.

my business this year and it's like that's really hard to do but if you want to double your business in three years or five years it's just a huge amount of time to make incremental gains that add up to something and the comparison is we overestimate what we should do in a month of nutrition yeah there you go and underestimate just how much we will accomplish in a year if we do something that keeps us more patient because i'll leave you with one final thought there's a study that i referenced it was a new england journal of medicine one of the most prestigious journals and they wanted to do like the diet Super Bowl, right? They stack up all the big diets at the low carb and the low fat and we're checking out

vegan and more meat-based. We're like, what is the one that's going to get people to lose the most weight? And you sit here and this was like a hyped up study and you get the results and they find out that the most effective diet was all of them. They were all equal. And the only thing that really determined the results was their compliance and sustainability. So I say like when you were picking a nutrition plan, it's. kind of like picking a business partner or a significant other where it's like if you can't

see yourself being in this person for a year or five years for a lifetime, what the hell are you doing wasting a month or two months on it? Because like you don't need those bad relationships in your life because there's so much more collateral damage. You don't have to pick a dietary camp. You have to pick up behaviors that you feel you can sustain. You don't have to do them all the time. You don't have to cut everything out. But the thing that you will sustain is what will allow you to win and also more importantly have your sanity, allow you to be social, allow you to not freak out and have these fuck it moments, allow you to enjoy food and enjoy situations. And like, that to me is real health. That's the goal of the book. And that's really what people need to know.

You don't have to buy into a dietary camp. You kind of got to figure out like what you can sustain. Adam Bornstein, thank you very much, man. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Of course, I've got some thoughts on this episode. But before I get into that, here's a sample of interview with someone with decades of experience in protecting people at every level, from the top levels of government to victims of spousal abuse. Violence is a reality. If you're not prepared for its possibility, you'll be caught off guard by its eventuality. Learn how to hone your sixth sense for danger. Discover how to spot the red flags that signify someone's a likely abuser, con artist, or predator. Here's a bite. Sixteen years ago, when I was 20, I got into a taxi cab in Mexico

City, and it turned out to be a fake taxi. And the guy was driving me further and further away from my destination, further and further away. And my brain went through this process. It said, no, it's probably going to be fine. I know he said he was going to ask for directions, but he's a cabby. He should know that. No, no, no, no, no. But I mean, I've never been kidnapped before, so that can't be what's happening. And then I remembered some guy on Oprah in 1994 or something like that when I was a kid sitting there with my mom, who said, never go to the secondary location. And I only realized a decade and a half later when reading the book, The Gift of Fear, that that was you. Everybody with a normal functioning mind and body system does have intuition,

and what we have in varying degrees is our willingness to honor it and listen to it and learn about it. It's our most extraordinary mental and physical process. The stomach lining, as an example, has a hundred million neurons, a hundred million thought cells. That's more neurons than there are in a dog's brain. When you hear the word our gut, you know, I had a gut feeling. It's a very accurate description of what's going on. And these two brains in the gut and in the skull communicate with each other through the body. And so the whole mind-body system delivers intuition to you,

which is knowing without knowing why, knowing without having to stop at all the letters from A to Z on the way, just getting from A to Z automatically. It doesn't really matter how a thing should be. It only matters how it is and how it is in terms of reality in this moment. And reality is the highest ground you can get to. That's the place where you can see what's coming. I'm so glad to hear that story, and that makes my day.

That means a lot to me, particularly as I'm about to hear, I hope how well you prevail, because I know we're here having the conversation, so you did well. I slid behind the driver's seat, and he reached over toward the glove box, and I grabbed him and threw him back to his seat because I figured he had a night. For more, including the most important thing we can do to come. cut potentially threatening people out of our lives forever. Check out episode 329 with Gavin De Becker. Interesting what he said about cravings and calorie restriction. You kind of suspect that that's the case, but I had no idea that calorie restricted diets make us crave those foods more. I just thought

it was hungry, which, I mean, is there a difference? I don't know. Binging that leads to eating disorders potentially is something that's a little scary. I never really thought about that. I didn't realize that restricting leads to tension which can snap back like a slingshot and car. is binging again. I really just thought, oh, when you're dieting, you get hungry sometimes, but it totally makes sense. You do have to be careful with that stuff. I recently lost 40 pounds, as you all know. Well, 40 pounds of fat, I should say, I gained muscle on top of that. And it was a lot of discipline, but I didn't starve myself. I really took it easy. That's why it took like 10 months to do. I probably could have done it in three and just

hated life the whole time, but I didn't want to do that. I did it in 10 months. It was just a little bit of lifestyle adjustments and a hell of a lot of turkey breast. I think it really is important to, yes, restrict a little bit of calories if you're eating a crap load like I was, but you still need to eat the foods that make you happy. There's just, it's no way to live life otherwise. You just don't need to eat the whole slice of cheesecake for breakfast, maybe. I don't know. I should speak for myself.

My diet was not great, obviously. Many diets are the equivalent of trying to bench 300 pounds on your first try because willpower, and that's just not going to work. As Adam said, a plan that exhaust you mentally will break you physically. and that couldn't be more true. 80% of people who lose weight won't be able to maintain it. That's a sad indictment of the dieting industry.

And when you fail on a diet, your self-worth goes down, you feel a loss of control, you get in that screw-it moment, and you tend to just throw things away for a while, throw your discipline away for a while. And I think it really is easy to get cut up in results.

We don't think of ourselves as healthy until we're done with the diet, right? I had to reframe this myself. I was losing 40 pounds of fat, and it was demotivating to be down 20 pounds and go, yeah, I'm down 20 pounds, but oh, gosh, I have 20 more pounds to lose until I'm, what, happy or something that doesn't make any sense. I'm looking at a six pack of abs or a four pack, as the case may have been. And I'm thinking, well, I'm not fit because I can only see my abs when

I'm standing up straight and flexing or whatever. It's like so dumb. Or they don't show up on days after I eat a bunch of salty meat. And it was just moving the goalposts and it was super demotivating. And yeah, I just strongly recommend to take it one day at a time and do your best with and restrict slowly over time. Sometimes I think with the online diets and the fads, your brain knows the diet is BS, but you just want to believe because you want to believe in the potential.

It's like a lottery ticket. You want to believe that what you're doing and what you're aiming at is possible, and you get that dopamine hit from that. But yeah, that dopamine hit is not giving you a healthier heart or a healthier body or making your pants fit better. All things Adam Bornstein will be in the show notes

at Jordan Harbinger.com or you can just ask the AI chatbot. transcripts are in the show notes, advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. I've said it once, but I'll say it again. Please consider supporting those who support this show. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And the best things that have happened in my life and business have come through my network. I'm teaching you how to do the same thing for yourself in our six-minute networking course. It's 100% free. It's not gross. It's not shmoozy. You can find it on the thinkific platform

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