Welcome to the Dr. Gabrielle Lyon show. In this episode, I sit down with my friend, Dr. Alan Bacon. Dr. Alan Bacon holds a doctorate in dental surgery from the University of Maryland, who left his career and became a nutrition and training coach. Here’s why I love Alan. He addresses sustainable weight loss. In this episode, we dive deep into emotional hunger versus physical hunger. What are the things that are holding you back from being able to lose weight and maintain that health and longevity that you desire? This was an amazing episode. Dr. Alan is extremely well spoken. He’s been reading research for the last 15 years, and this guy puts out incredible content. And most importantly, I think it’s going to be so valuable for you. Now, without waiting any further, as always, if you like this episode and you like this free material that we are providing, please take a moment to share, subscribe, go to my website, sign up for my free, completely free newsletter, and let’s raise awareness on what it means to be forever strong together. Now, let’s jump into the show.

 Dr. Alan Bacon, I should say aloha because you did come from Maui. So I guess aloha. Absolutely. That works for me. Thank you for having me, Dr. Gabrielle. I’m really excited to have you on. And you have a unique background. You were you’re going to have to tell us all about it, but you were an oral surgeon. So you went to dental school and then became an oral surgeon. And at some point you practiced for 10 years and then at some point made a career transition. So tell us a little bit about your background. So I had practiced dental surgery for 10 years and there were a couple of things that happened all at the same time that led to the shift in careers.

 This is going to sound sad, but it is it’s you know, it’s an OK experience because it ultimately ended up becoming something that was very, very beneficial for me. My father ended up getting throat cancer and through his battles during that and he was a dentist as well. Through his battles, one of the things that I had asked him was,

 was there anything that you would have done different if you were given another chance? And he said that he wanted to spend more time with his friends and family. The same year I was performing emergency surgery, 830 p.m., December 24th, missing out on dinner, you know, Christmas Eve dinner with my in-laws.

 And my wife and I had always been pretty interested in fitness and health and everything like that to begin with. She was a regional’s qualified crossfit competitor. She was a Olympic weightlifter. She had made worlds in 2019, got silver.

 And I turned to her at that time and I was like, you know, I’ve been thinking about this. I’m formulating in the dietary supplement industry. We kind of have our foot in the door in fitness and it’s both a passion of ours. So why not set up a coaching business on the side? We do it for our friends already. We’ve been doing it for years just for free. And this would be a way to make a little bit extra money and have fun doing it. She said, yeah, sure, let’s do it. And while you were practicing dental surgeon, you read all the time. And one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on is number one, I like you as a human. And number two, we won’t tell the other Alan that, but Alan Argonne, shout out. But number two, when you go to your page and Instagram is really interesting, it’s very difficult to find new talent. And for whatever reason, the algorithm or just the capacity to for the viewer, listener, learner, there’s a lot of really good content out there. And it’s difficult to find. And I think that you do a wonderful job at reading a lot of the data and sharing it in a way that is understandable.

 Digestible, digestible. I mean, a little bit, you know, it’s interesting. You and I were talking at dinner and you guys, I really encourage you to go check out Alan’s Instagram, Dr. Alan Bacon. We’re going to link everything. And here’s what I want you to get from it. Twofold. This guy loves to educate and the way in which he has been somewhat forced to educate, maybe myth busting. Is that fair to say? Which you would love to do it anyway. I like doing the myth busting. I think it’s something that needs to be done because we need to bring it to the forefront because unfortunately, what you were talking about with the way that the algorithm works is part of the issue. And it’s part of the issue why people have so much confusion surrounding health and fitness.

 If you put out hyperbolic content or inflammatory content, it takes off like isn’t that crazy? Well, it takes off for a couple of reasons. It takes off because one, it grabs your attention from the beginning. If you’re going out and you’re giving just general good information, it’s a little bit, oh, I kind of understood this. You know, if it’s something different, it’s like, oh, hey, let me take a look at this, see if this is something that maybe I should be paying attention to. The people that want that secret, want something hyperbolic, want something hacky or secret or, you know, amazing. They’ll grab onto that and they’ll comment and they’ll share. And then the people like you and me that have a little bit more of an understanding of the background will say, hey, you know, that doesn’t necessarily make sense. This might be why. We also comment, we share, we discuss the fact that this is something that could be leading you astray. It gives the original content double traction. And so you will see oftentimes that this more extreme type of content does very, very well on social media because it essentially gets double reach. Yeah. And so it’s difficult as a general population person to get through all of the noise that’s out there in the fitness and nutrition space because you’re being inundated with a lot of this bad information. Yeah, it’s a really good point. And we’re going to talk about very practical application based information, which you do such a great job. And, you know, frankly, if I have a question about, say, resistance training, I call you and what’s also interesting is you’re not traditionally trained. You’re trained as a, you know, as a surgeon, as a dentist, which and also you went to the University of Maryland and another, where was the other place that you went, which is a very good institution. Wake Forest for undergrad. That’s right. Wake Forest for undergrad. So you have a foundation understanding and then obviously going through dental school, you can choose two routes. You can be someone who looks at data and reads, which you clearly do. You both, the Allen’s do that. And that’s where the real magic is, is reading the information and then being able to apply it, which you’ve done with your individuals that you coach. Now, my question to you is when you decided to make that transition to Instagram and education, was there a moment where you thought I have to do this? I have to put myself out there and do this kind of content because you’re very also unfazed by the internet, which you guys, it’s not a friendly place. No, it’s not. It’s and we’ve talked about this, you know, prior in the medical field, you have a lot of support, you get a lot of, you know, peer colleague support throughout throughout things with the fitness industry. It’s a little bit different and it’s almost like people view each other as as a challenge or or maybe like you had said, you have to work up to do the the level of expertise that I had to go through to get to this point. So it’s it’s difficult as far as the way that the industry runs. But I think that if you just continually put out the right information, that’s where you can actually start to help people. And the whole basis of doing all of this is to be able to help people. That’s right. And it’s noble, you know, yeah, it’s noble to be able to do something that is meaningful and really makes people’s lives better and educate you. When you work with your clients, so I’m going to read this statistic and this is following weight loss. Studies show more than half of the weight loss, the weight loss is regained within two years. Right. So the recidivism rate is there’s 80 percent over 80 percent is regained within five years. It’s very high. And our population really struggles with weight loss. And my question to you, the first question is what are some really common reasons that people hit plateaus in their weight loss journey? So plateaus and recidivism are slightly different, but it’s they’re related. And that’s a good question. Plateaus are typically due to metabolic adaptation and a misunderstanding of what’s actually going on. So metabolic adaptation, the way that your body fights weight loss is through two main mechanisms. Most people have this misunderstanding that it’s going to really lower your metabolic rate. And it doesn’t do that. If you look at the data surrounding drops in metabolic rate from what it should be as a predicted level, if you lose twenty five pounds, we use a predictive equation. We say this is what a person who’s one hundred and fifty five pounds should be. If you look at somebody that went from one hundred and eighty pounds to one hundred and fifty five pounds, they’re typically only off from those predictive equations between five and twenty five calories. So these metabolic rate drops aren’t really the causes of these stalls. I want to put that out first, because if we know that that’s not the cause, then we can actually start to focus on what is important. And so what we find with metabolic adaptation, this is the body’s main mechanism for preventing you from losing weight. And you have to think about this from a biological perspective. Our body doesn’t want to lose weight. It doesn’t realize that we’re in the twenty first century. We have calories that are in such abundance. It’s amazing. We think that we’re still in caves. We’re foraging. My husband definitely thinks he’s still in a cave and he’s got the beard to prove it. And so we think that we’re in this position where food could become scarce at any time. And so biologically, the way that we evolved was our body said, OK, I need to prevent myself from losing weight. But what’s funny is it doesn’t seem to work in the opposite direction because gaining extra weight was always a good thing because if you put on body fat, you had that extra ability to have that for when times became scarce. Do you think so in the way that so I think about myself or my sister, very active. We move a lot. Right. I am a fidgeter. I’m always moving. I think it would be very difficult for me to put on weight and to put on, say, body fat. And I look at, you know, my producer Matt over here, I think it would be really difficult to change that baseline. Is that do you think that there is is truth to that? Is that just something that potentially I made up? So what you’re getting at is one of the two mechanisms that our bodies use to prevent. It’s part of the metabolic adaptation that uses to prevent that weight loss. The two ways that it really affects us, one are hunger levels ramp up. And so people who are stalled technically are probably just not following their diet as close as they thought that they were. They’re either having tracking errors or they’re simply binging more than they thought that they were in causing themselves to go into a calorie surplus to and what you’re kind of hinting at the levels, the non-exercise activity, thermogenesis, all of that movement that we do that is not dedicated exercise slows down. And this is one of our body’s main ways to prevent that loss in weight. You stop fidgeting, you stop walking around, you stay on the couch a little bit more. And so this can really drop total daily energy expenditure to the point that people’s weight loss progress stalls out. And you know, one of the ways that we tell people to help adjust for this is this is where we use step count as a proxy of need. Now, obviously, there’s no easy way in a free living person to say, hey, you know, how is this person’s need levels going to be, you know, moving up and down based off of other types of movement? You know, we can’t monitor how much you’re moving your arms really, we can’t monitor how much you’re fidgeting really, but we can monitor step count. And so one of the best ways to be able to see as a person’s losing weight, what the cause of their stall may be is to monitor step count. And if you see, hey, you know, in the beginning, when we started, you were at 9000 steps per day. And now that you’ve lost 20 pounds, all of a sudden, you’re at 6500 and you can no longer lose weight and we have not adjusted your calorie and takes from food. Well, there you go. There’s there’s one of the reasons that it’s happened because your total daily energy expenditure has dropped.

 And so when you’re talking about it’s very difficult for you to gain weight because you are an active person, you fidget, you move around a lot, you’ve got an active lifestyle. I mean, need can can can account for up to 2000 extra calories per day. It’s a lot. It’s a lot. Now, that’s not the average person. That’s somebody that’s in, say, an agricultural job. And is there before you before you continue, do you think that there is a body set point that even though if we’re living in, I know this is somewhat hypothetical, but even though we’re living in an obesogenic environment, do you think that, for example, how much you weigh? I weigh 225 pounds.

 That’s why you had to get that special chair for a small human.

 Do you think that your body would prefer to be, say, for example, 225 pounds?

 So there’s there’s a couple of theories about this. It’s a very interesting question, actually.

 There’s the there’s the body fat set point theory. But the one that I would recommend people look into is something called dual intervention point model and dual intervention point model suggests that there are both environmental and genetic factors that come into play for your your your body fat essential set point. And I certainly believe that, yes, there there are influencing factors that are both genetic and environmental that keep people where they roughly are or where their body roughly wants them to be. And it’s difficult to change. And this works in both directions. You know, it’s difficult for people to gain weight that have these really active lifestyles like you were saying. It’s difficult to lose weight for these people to have these really sedentary lifestyles and whose bodies have, you know, this this.

 Predetermined notion that they need to be at this certain weight and part of it that is controlled a lot through hunger cues, you know, and discordant hunger cues are one of the really big problems that a lot of people have. Can you explain? Yeah, explain. Explain what that is. Well, we know that through information from the NIH, Kevin Hall does a lot of these great things that talks about the calories in versus calories out energy balance models, that calories in versus calories out is essentially the guiding principle between why you would either gain weight or lose weight. Right. So not the carbohydrate insulin. No, that’s that’s been roughly debunked for a long period of time. So if we know that this is the guiding principle, when we test it, it seems to hold true. If you take an obese person and you put them into the calorie deficit that they should be in, they lose weight. However, just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy. And there are a lot of things that particularly obese people, particularly people that have dysregulated emotions, dysregulated hunger cues, dysregulated ability to cope with these types of stresses that they’re facing. Their challenge is much higher than say you or me whose bodies naturally want to be a little bit lighter. I mean, when I started lifting weights, I started lifting weights because I was like you. I was six foot one and 165 pounds.

 And so I was like, that’s, that’s, I think, pretty thin. Yes. Yeah. For that height, it’s absolutely thin. And so these discordant hunger cues can be a real problem for these people that are trying to lose weight and particularly maintain that weight loss. And what you were talking about earlier with the 80 percent recidivism rate, there’s one extremely big reason for that. And this is again work out of the NIH with Kevin Hall. That was very interesting. He found that when you have weight loss in a situation, if you go from, say, 200 pounds to 150 pounds and you compare yourself to another 150 pound person who had always been 150 pounds for the people that have lost weight, you have an extra drive for 100 calories of food every day for every kilogram lost.

 OK, so you have so every two point two pounds lost, there’s a drive to a hundred extra calories per day. OK. It’s a lot. So you have the same outcomes will work, the same procedures will work, you know, if it’s roughly if it’s, you know, fifteen hundred calories or whatever it is to maintain for that one person, it’s going to be similar for this other person, assuming need and all of these other things are maintained. Right. But the person that lost the weight is going to be experiencing much greater hunger cues throughout. So the recidivism rate is not surprising because people are unaware of this and they’re unaware of the fact that they’re dealing with something that somebody else isn’t dealing with. That’s a really good point. And I think this is where this education really makes a lot of sense. Right. Because if you can understand, oh, I’m not doomed and it’s not that Stacey over here can do this because she’s better than me in some way, it’s she’s doing it because she doesn’t deal with the same things that I have. That how would someone quantify this? So if someone at home is listening and they’re thinking, I’ve really reached a weight loss plateau because I I think that there are probably very specific ways in which someone could overcome that. And you’d mentioned increasing need. I’m sure there’s other ways which that’s usually through need or diet. OK, those are the two main things that you’re going to that you’re going to use no matter what, no matter what. But so that’s the good thing. Again, if you understand what you’re facing, you can use the tools that you have to be able to fix that. Now, there’s certainly nuance into how you can create those calorie deficits and all that, but it still boils down to the same thing. You know, in the same way with with any kind of diet where people push, oh, keto is better for fat loss or oh, veganism is better for fat loss or whatever it is, it still comes down to calorie levels and energy expenditure in total.

 That’s that’s really interesting. And when you start speaking with clients, what is the first thing that you approach? Because it’s fascinating that diet, nutrition, weight loss is it is very emotional for people and very challenging. And the majority of people that lose weight without proper understanding, it becomes very difficult to keep it off. And then we see a lifetime of yo-yo dieting and not only that, but also the mental struggle and what it takes away from people’s lives. The yo-yo dieting makes it even worse, too, because this is especially in line with your field or your your area of expertise. What happens when you yo-yo diet? People will tend to drop calories really low because they want to see the scale move. They think, hey, I just need to get this done for me. You know, I’ve struggled so much. I’m very frustrated. Let me take my calories down.

 What do they do when they take their calories down too much? They lose some muscle and then they recidivize. They go back out and make up words throughout this. They go back up and then they attempt to do this again the next year. But now they got a little bit less muscle because they were too afraid to actually build muscle in that time off because I don’t want to gain weight. So every subsequent attempt at weight loss becomes harder and harder and harder and people get really frustrated with themselves.

 And I’ve heard a very reductionist take on weight loss or becoming healthy that, oh, these people just lack lack willpower. And although willpower certainly has something to do with it, I think that the coaches have kind of gone in the opposite direction to where they’re like, there’s no willpower. Yeah, willpower has something to do with it, something to do with everything. But it’s not the main thing. And what you have to understand is through education and through learning the coping mechanisms and ways to deal with it, you can put your willpower to work for you just because, you know, Stacey or whoever you know, is able to manage her stressors doesn’t mean that she faces them in the same level that you do. Maybe you don’t have the coping mechanisms that she has set up so she can use willpower, but she has to use a lot less than what you were trying to put into play.

 So that’s that’s what I want to get into today to give people some of these practical takeaways so they can start to actually put their willpower to use for them without it being overwhelming. I would love I would love for you to guide us into some of that. Before we do, I have actually I have a personal question. It’s something that I’ve wondered a lot about. We have this body fat percentage that people say, OK, well, you’ve now hit 30 percent. This is considered obese.

 Do you have a sense of and I don’t have an answer for this and I’m hoping maybe you do where body fat percentage should be again, a lot of the data that we have are there based on populations. Do you potentially think that what would be, you know, there’s just ranges. So maybe, for example, for a woman, the body fat percentage should be, I don’t know, 15 to 18 percent. Do you 15 to 18 percent would be extremely low. But that’s interesting because is that right. So these are the. And again, that would be. So here’s here’s it’s a great question. And for some people, that could be the right answer. What the number that you that you threw out there is not is not ridiculous. It is it requires nuance. And like you said, the range is probably the best thing. And if I were to to someone, if someone was to ask me, what would you recommend as ranges for men and women? I would say a healthy general range for the large majority of people for men would be between between 10 and 20 percent.

 For women, it’s going to be somewhere between 20 and 30 percent. See, that seems high to me. That’s where the general information is suggesting the best overall health. However, the general information does not always follow really fit individuals.

 So you’re going to have some room to go below that, particularly for women. And so if you’re getting down into that 17 percent range, you could be perfectly fine. And, you know, there’s there might not be a problem at all there. The issue with getting to 15 percent and maybe below that is that you might start to have a menary ik symptoms. You might start to have, you know, some malnutrition symptoms. But it’s the same thing with men. I mean, men could get down into like eight percent. There are some men that can sit there just fine and they’ll be completely happy. I mean, there’s going to be a little bit outside of that bell curve. And you’re going to be fine.

 Is 30 percent on the higher end of that bell curve for women? Yes, it is. But we still see it based on general population data as we don’t have any negative health pathology. We still have longevity. You know, that that’s really good. Is it optimal for quality of life? I would say probably not for most people, but it’s going to be dependent on the person. Yeah. And I always appreciate that about you is there is a level of nuance and you always hear experts and individuals.

 It’s not a blanket statement, right? It can’t be. Yes, you should be 30 percent or less or I mean, I suppose you should be 30 percent or less. It would be lower. But there’s no one right answer for anybody. And it is definitely as individual. Well, the biggest issue with it is and why the range tends to be a little bit large is that you’re like you said earlier, there are a lot of psychological factors that come into play and sustainability is a really big thing. And if we set this goal of like 15 to 18 percent,

 there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that for certain people, but probably for the large majority of women, that would be an unsustainable goal because of the changes to nutrition that they would have to have to go through. And I think that the the more that you coach, the more that you realize that

 coaching is more about psychology than it is about, you know, the physical aspect of the training and everything like that, because you’re dealing with the mental and emotional health of somebody. And especially when related to food, that is the main thing.

 You know, yes, absolutely. The use you mentioned something earlier, you’re you’re six to very tall. Well, I mean, everyone is tall in my eyes, but six to is is above average. It is tall. You mentioned that there you were 160 pounds. There probably is not a from what I can gather. There is not a muscle mass set point for individuals that there is no there might be an upper threshold as to how high someone could go. The genetic potential. And there’s a you know, there was a there’s some chart out there. I don’t think it’s it’s very validated. It’s a skeletal muscle mass. The fat free mass index. The fat free mass index to see how much fat free mass is possible if someone is we were joking natty or not.

 It’s a 25 point cutoff.

 But do you think from the literature there is a body fat percentage set point for individuals?

 This goes back to that dual intervention theory. I think that I think that

 I don’t think that there’s a set point in that so much as there is total body weight, but they’re certainly going below a range is going to be probably not optimal for health and obviously going above range is going to be not optimal for health.

 So my thing would be focus on where are you in your journey if you’re an individual and you’re asking yourself these questions, you know, do I want to lose some some body fat? Will it benefit me health wise? Will it benefit me confidence wise? Will it benefit me? You know, in my life in some way. And if that’s the answer, then move your your plans and your routines towards that goal. You know, a lot of the times that we talk about these types of things, people get caught up in what is my genetic potential going to be. But when it what it boils down to is what does a person want? What will fulfill their lives? And then how do we get them towards that? I think that’s the biggest focus.

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 It depends on what the plateau is from. But it is usually based on weight. And it’s in my opinion, I mean, this is probably not a research validated opinion, but it’s usually based on weight. And I say that because as you get leaner, you have less variance that you can have from whatever your, you know, calorie targets and protein targets and whatever they are, are to be able to continue to progress. Right.

 And so when people start to vary off of their diets more, those calories become relatively more influential. You know, if you’re a king sized person, you can, you can, you can move a little bit more. But when you’re a fun sized person, those changes in calories become king sized problems very quickly.

 And so I would think that total weight is probably more problematic than anything else. Now, total time could be problematic from the sense that mentally and emotionally you start to get burned out because you feel like you’ve been struggling for so long and then you start to go more and more off off plant and off diet because of the fact that you’re struggling emotionally and mentally. And that’s where some of these emotional stressors come in. Some of this emotional eating starts to really ramp up and in that that constant diet roller coaster cycle kicks in because even when you’re on that diet roller coaster and cycle, you don’t think of it as, oh, well, I dieted for two months and then I took off for eight. And then I’m dieting again. And you think I’ve been dieting off and on for years. That’s always how people view this. And so that mental wear of dieting for years and years at a time can consistently tear somebody down. And so can it be either or? Yeah, it definitely can.

 And so I would I would really start to focus on keeping some accurate records of what you’ve been doing and keeping these things in perspective to identify what might be going on there. Tell me more about that, because I think that many people, they struggle both ways. They struggle mentally and then they struggle physically, whether it’s an injury and maybe they can’t train the way in which they had hoped. How do you begin to coach someone mentally through a plateau or through frustrations?

 Well, first, you have to identify is the person actually in a plateau? And this is really important to bring up because a lot of people will say that they’re in a plateau and they’ll say, well, you know, I I have been losing weight and in the past two weeks, I didn’t lose any weight. OK, it’s only been two weeks. I mean, we could be seeing water flux in play. You might not have, you know, you might not have been been as consistent with the plan as you were before. So usually I would say give somebody at least two to four weeks to identify whether or not it’s an actual stall. Then I would look into seeing what do we have going on as far as. As far as potential errors in tracking, are we even accurately tracking? I mean, research suggests that most people are off by about 500 calories per day. And that could be an issue. Five hundred calories per day. Even our D’s seem to be off by about 200.

 And there’s a lot of reasons why we could be off and tracking. A lot of people don’t realize that there are raw and cooked measurements for foods. You know, and most of the foods that you’re going to find, it’s going to show you a raw measurement. And then some people are weighing cooked. You know, some people are using volume measurements for things that probably shouldn’t be volume measurements. I mean, peanut butter is probably something that you should be weighing in grams and not, you know, if you’re if you’re trying to accurately track and you really want distinct data.

 You know, this is one of those things that you probably tracking grams. So identifying whether or not you’re actually in a stall is probably the first really important thing. And understanding that water flux can come into play, particularly for women of menstruation age, because your cycle is going to be a little bit more important. Your cycle is going to throw a wrench into that, you know, and then you start to look at, OK, well, how was I doing four weeks before as opposed to two weeks before? Because it’s a it’s a more accurate comparison, right? I really appreciate that. I have a handful of patients that they better be listening to this right now. And if they’re not, I’m definitely sending this episode to them.

 Because some of them get very concerned week to week or day to day. Week to week is too quick. And they will say, Doc, gee, I don’t understand. I’ve put on 10 pounds in the last three months and I can’t lose it. And again, week over. And these are very fit individuals. And the week to week is is what I’m hearing you say is that one could not say, well, you’re at a plateau if it’s if we’ve only looked at a week or, you know, maybe we’re getting to two weeks. This is it’s probably two weeks. Even two weeks can be very difficult. And are you are you doing things to make sure that you’re cutting out the issues that you could have with with your weighing or your measurements? Because I recommend people take both some measurements and some weights, you know, meaning a waist circumference.

 So I do scale. I do scale weight. I do a hip measurement. I do a waist measurement. And then I do a bicep and a thigh measurement.

 And I recommend that people take this. If you’re going to do a bicep and a thigh measurement, just choose one side and consistently do that same side. But here is what I would really stress that people do when you are taking these measurements. Do it first thing upon waking after going to the bathroom before having any food or drink, preferably naked.

 If you do alone, if you have friends, depends how happy are you with everybody around you? But the important thing about doing it this way is if you follow these guidelines, you’re going to be cutting out. All of that issue that you have with food weight in play, with with water weight flux throughout the day, with having different amounts of muscle glycogen in play. I mean, if you’re eating food, if you’re eating different amounts of sodium, if you’re drinking different amounts of water throughout the day, you’re going to see your your your scale weight in these measurements going up and down naturally. And this can throw people off significantly because they will do one time they’ll measure in the morning and then three days later, they’ll measure in the afternoon. They’ll be like, I’m up five pounds.

 You know, and I just had a client start the other week who had a had her own little breakdown. And it was one of those things that it’s understandable when people have these because you don’t really know what you don’t know. And she took her measurements and then the next day she took them and she did it in the afternoon and she was up five pounds. And that could be entirely food weight. You’re not gaining five pounds of fat in one day.

 And so understanding that one, you want to create some consistency between these measurements. And the best way that you can possibly do that is in the morning after all the different things that I had said, because you’re going to cut out any risk of potentially having more water flux food weight in play than you otherwise would have.

 And then to set proper expectations for what rates of weight loss and weight gain are. And this is a huge thing. I actually have an entire infographic that I give my clients on this because it’s such a confusing thing for people. People watch things like The Biggest Loser and they think that that’s what realistic weight loss looks like. How how fast did they lose weight? And The Biggest Loser? I mean, you would lose potentially 10 pounds a week, if not more. That’s right. They would go up and they would do the did you lose weight. Right. And then you either stay in the game or you you don’t. And the problem with that is there’s a difference between weight loss and fat loss. I know that you understand this, but a lot of people don’t. And so if you want to take a client or if you are a person that you’re working on this yourself and you just want to see the scale drop, go keto. Keto will cause the scale to drop within the first four to six weeks faster than anything else. And this is why it becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy of it works better than other things for fat loss. It doesn’t. And there’s specific data that looks at this saying, hey, you know, if we actually equate protein and calories, keto does not have an advantage over standard eating patterns. But it appears to from a weight loss perspective, it doesn’t from a fat loss perspective. The reason that you see this in the weight loss is because you’re losing all that water weight, you’re losing all that muscle glycogen because you’re no longer eating carbs. And people think that this is dropping you really fast. Now, setting up proper expectations for rate of weight loss is doubly important, particularly for what you focus on, because if you’re trying to lose weight too quickly beyond this glycogen and water flux stage, you’re going to be losing significant amounts of muscle mass. It’s the last thing that you want to do. Just like we talked about before, you’re going to make it much harder to lose body fat later in life. You’re going to lower your quality of life. You’re going to increase your injury risk. And so proper rates of weight loss. I mean, if you look at the literature out there, if you’re an obese individual, once you get past that initial stage where you might have those drops from, you know, lowering your carbs, if that’s the first thing that you decide to drop to lower your calorie intakes, you’re going to drop a little bit quickly in the beginning. After four or six weeks or so, you’re going to slow down and then over time, you’re going to notice that every week you’re going to lose about two pounds. Which is a lot for the obese. For the obese. Yeah, that’s a lot. And if I told a normal person, you know, Deborah from the cul-de-sac that you’re going to lose two pounds a week, she most of the time will look at me and be like, oh, you know, that that’s a lot less than what I thought it would be. A lot less. A lot less. I see. They, you know, they expect to lose a lot more based on my experience with people. And so if you’re a normal weight individual, you’re only going to lose about one pound per week. If you’re a lean individual, you could be losing point two five to point five pounds per week in a calorie deficit. And so wrapping your head around the fact that these rates of loss are probably a lot smaller than what you would expect them to be as a gen-pop person is a really important thing because a lot of times people have these situations where the program that they’re using is working and it’s working really well. And they just don’t realize it because it’s not that expectation that they had from TV or from the before and afters that we see on Instagram. Yeah, which is that’s definitely a challenge. What what you’re saying is that an obese individual would have a higher amount of weight loss. And would you also say fat loss in the beginning or really depends on how one is approaching the process? Well, if you’re approaching the process, let’s say that all of them are have equated intelligence in the programing. You’re going to lose relative. You’re going to lose an absolute. You’re going to lose more body fat. You got more to lose. And at the same time, body fat is metabolically protective. So you can lose more without having significant hits to lean muscle mass.

 And a normal weight person, a good target would be one pound, roughly one pound a week and then a leaner individual would be 25 to half a pound. Yeah. And that’s good because as someone moves down the scale from obese to normal weight to lean, their expectation should be that the weight loss is reflective. Yeah. And it’s it’s going to there’s diminishing returns essentially on on scale weight loss. But that’s OK. Look at it as, hey, I’ve upgraded. I’ve leveled up. You know, you’re not you’re not having a struggle anymore. You’re actually doing something that’s working. And the fact that it starts to slow down is a sign that you’ve actually succeeded. And I really like to point this out to people in the beginning when they start working with me, because if you don’t know that and you’re losing four or five pounds every biweekly check in that I have with my clients and then all of a sudden three months in, it’s half that rate. It’s like, OK, well, the program is not working anymore. No, you’ve you’ve upgraded. You’ve leveled up. You’ve done the work that has given you the results. That means you now move at a slower rate. And on the flip side of the coin.

 Have you thought about how much muscle mass someone could and I know I understand this is a complex question. You’re smiling. How much muscle mass someone could potentially gain? So this is going to be one dependent on.

 It’s going to be a few things. It’s going to be dependent on one. What nutrition plan do you have in play? Because some people will try to gain muscle mass.

 And maintenance or maybe even in a calorie deficit, which is not optimal. I mean, obviously being in a calorie surplus is optimal for building lead muscle. And would you say it’s a 10? It could be 10 percent. It could be 20 percent. It could be higher than that. So there was there is some very interesting research in beginners because training age has something to do with this, too. It’s what newbie gains is called, you know. And so do beginner gains. That’s the greatest thing in the world. And so when people are in their beginner stage, I almost always try to push them towards a build or a bulk unless they’re obese, in which case we say, OK, for health purposes, it makes more sense to. What about if they’re normal weight? So they come to their normal weight. They want to lose weight. Do you focus on building muscle first or body re-comp first? I would. I mean, optimally. Now, obviously, you have to have a conversation with them and then you go with what they feel is best for them emotionally. Yeah, because a lot of women would struggle with the idea of, OK, I have to actually. A lot of men to. Oh, really? Yeah. But men tend to have a bigger goal of just adding more size anyway. So sometimes it’s a little bit easier with men. But but, yeah, I mean, you’re going to have to wrap your head around the fact that that the situation that you’re in is going to guide how much of a surplus you can be in. So training age, if you’re brand new to training, you can conceivably handle more and you can conceivably handle up to. A thousand calories above surplus and still do just fine without adding significant amounts of body fat. Do those have to. That sounds crazy. Very high. Yes. Do those calories have to come from protein?

 No, this is just total calories. Assuming you’re hitting your protein needs for the days. And like you had said in that in, you know, your content before hitting about one gram per pound of would you say ideal? Yeah, body weight. I mean, I think that that’s a great general recommendation.

 Now, we went over a bit more of the nuance in that collab that we did together where there might be times where there’s a difference because that is a very interesting conversation.

 But once you have that accounted for, then the calorie surpluses can come from conceivably anything that you want them to come from. Now, there is some benefit to hitting a certain range of carbs for building lean muscle. Three, three, three to eight grams per per kilogram of body weight seems to be where you maximize muscle building potential. Men and women doesn’t matter. Yeah. And this is to the to the dismay of the keto crowd, unfortunately. So three to eight grams per kilogram of body weight. So, for example, I don’t know if someone is.

 A hundred and who’s going to math, one hundred and fifty pounds. Can you do that in your head? Who’s going to. Why don’t we? I don’t want to do this to my head. OK, go. Do you have like an example of some of the. What that what that looks like. So. You looking at me crazy? Well, I’m thinking like if we do 220. Perfect. And divide by two point two, then we’d be a hundred.

 So, OK, so.

 Right. That’s right. Yeah.

 OK, so let’s let’s frame that up again. What is the so someone is wanting to maximize muscle gain and they are going to target between three and eight grams of carbs per kilogram of current weight or ideal? I would do currently unless you’re significantly obese. OK.

 That’s that’s robust. It is. But I mean, that’s what the research suggests. And if anybody ever has questions about these, I don’t mind sharing the research with people. But but yeah, I mean, I think that

 there are there are these things that you have to take into account to see if you can maximally build lean muscle, because what you had asked was was regarding, you know, how much can a person build?

 And most of this within a year is dependent on your training age because that gives you a much higher percentage chance. And I mean, you can get up to 20 pounds of lean muscle in your first year for a trainee. At least for men. Yeah. Women can be slightly half. Yeah. But I’ve read the same the same number. Yeah. And it goes down sequentially every year until you hit about year four or five. But that’s assuming that you actually have all of your ducks in a row when you’re setting up your plan, because most people, their very first year that they’re training are just kind of fucking around. You know, they’re not doing the things that they need to do. They’re not eating properly. They’re not sleeping properly. They’re not training necessarily properly. And so they’re they’re not maximizing that potential. So even if we say, OK, after a first year, your your these are your potential gains, those people might go a little bit longer than that first year because they didn’t actually hit that potential gain because of some errors in the way that they have things set up. And that’s important because I think that really creates a lot more discouragement. Yeah. If people are trying to do things on their own. I really I strongly recommend nobody tries to do this on their own, because it just it takes forever. There’s people that have done it and done it well. How can you figure out how to get from point A to point B? And stick with one thing. Yeah. And one coach or one physician and really execute on that for an entire year and then see. Well, it’s funny because you talk with people online and the more that you talk with them, you will always hear people say, OK, well, just look, look up stuff on like YouTube.

 That is the that’s Russian roulette in fitness and nutrition, because you never know if that person’s going to be really reputable. And I mean, that’s a very difficult thing to find in social media. You know, how can you tell how reputable a person is? And if you’re following these plans that are just generic,

 you know, you may not be maximizing that potential that you could have. And the way that I look at it is I could teach myself to fix my car, but it probably makes a lot more sense for me to go hire a mechanic who really knows what they’re doing that I don’t screw up in the beginning and have to go back and relearn stuff or fix stuff. Sometimes the investment is worth that. I think it always is. Frankly, we talked about protein, we talked about carbs. What about where does fat fall?

 Fat is an interesting thing because it is an essential nutrient. So you have to at least hit a fat minimum and fat minimums for people that are normal weight or leaner are about point three grams per pound of body weight. Now, obviously, you can go lower than that if you’re an obese person, because if you’ve got some extra body fat to lose, again, metabolically protective.

 But as long as you’re hitting fat minimums, the main thing when you’re constructing your nutrition plan is hit your protein targets, hit your calorie targets, and then within the other two, the fats and the carbs, the ratios can be roughly whatever is best for preference and best for sustainability. Now, I did give numbers where the.

 Hypotropy and stuff like that is optimized. Yes. So if you want to be a little bit more neurotic about it, you can certainly do that. But I think that as long as you’re hitting protein and hitting calories, you’re doing 99 percent of what you really need to do. You know, and for people that really want to maximize for people in physique sports, yes, then start to pay attention to the other things for the fat minimums. I have very rarely seen a person that doesn’t hit fat minimums naturally because cheese tastes good. And so we just add it to every meal that we have. Speak for yourself. And so and so it’s you know, it’s one of those things that that people just tend to not have a problem hitting. The only people that I see that usually have issues with hitting the fat minimums are really distinct, physique competitors. And they think if I cut more fat out, then I’ll be more lean, you know, eat fat, I’ll get fat type of of thought process. That’s the main part where we start to see some real issues. And particularly with women, like we were talking about, I’m a menorrhea can be a real problem if you cut things too low. You know, cell wall integrity, production of sex hormones, all those types of things really go down if you cut fats too low.

 Do you care the source of carbohydrates and fats and proteins?

 So I care to the. To the extent that the more traditionally whole and healthy foods will tend to be more micronutrient full, they’ll tend to have cofactors, they’ll tend to have some other beneficial constituents, they’ll tend to have more fiber, which is a very big benefit for overall health. So should you be making this off of Pop Tarts and Cheerios?

 Probably not.

 But the way that I like to point this out to people and so we don’t get this mindset of foods are good and bad because I think that could be really problematic. It’s very damaging. I think it’s actually one of the reasons that we have the craving issues that we have in society, the feeling of restriction is what causes cravings at its core.

 So what do you do? Here’s some guidelines. So people can have the grace to have something that they would like without also feeling the guilt that they’ve screwed up in some manner. I like to tell people that depending on what your goal is, having a discretionary calorie intake of between five and 20 percent of your daily calories, you can use that towards more traditional. I don’t want to say junk food, but non-traditionally whole minimally processed foods. I like that. So between five and 20 percent. Yes. And it’s going to change depending on the person, depending on their goal. So say you are very happy with your body and you don’t have any distinct goals of progress. You’re performing really well and you are going to eat 80 percent whole minimally processed foods. Well, you might be able to fit 20 percent of, you know, popcorn or, you know, some dark chocolate or whatever it is, you know, into your life and be just finding content. If I’m somebody that wants to step on a bodybuilding stage, it’s probably going to need to be closer to that five percent because you’ve got distinct goals. But anywhere within that five to 20 percent range is a good guideline for most people to use. It can cut out that stress, it can cut out that guilt, and it can give you the grace to be able to have something that can keep your diet, nutrition and sanity intact. Which is really important. Yeah. How do you think about spacing meals, thinking about someone is listening to this and they’re like, wow, I really like what Alan is saying. This makes a lot of sense because on this podcast, we talk a lot about the science. We do talk about mindset. You know, I had Julia Mitchell and she’s our nutritionist in the practice. And she echoes a lot of what you’re saying, especially when it comes to being an individual and that you can’t follow on TikTok. This program for this person, because it truly is individual.

 Do you feel that when someone is going to do a, we’ll say weight loss, because I think that people are really interested in weight loss. How would someone design a day? Should it be, you know, there was the big trend for, there’s a big trend for fasting. There’s a big trend for one meal a day. Remember, OMAD, that was a big deal. There seems to be a lot of discrepancies between how someone should create a nutrition plan. So how should we focus on meal frequency? Yeah. Essentially. So. And should we fast three days at a time? Oh my God. I know you’re setting me up for this one. So I’m not. I’m just setting you up because he still uses an Android phone. And I deserve it. Yes. So I’m obviously not a big fan of extended fasting and I’m going to get that out of the way to begin with. And I’m not a big fan of extended fasting because. But why? Doesn’t it help with autophagy? Oh God, don’t do this to me. So autophagy is interesting. There is, first off, if you’re in a calorie deficit, that is actually what runs autophagy, not fasting itself. Exercise increases autophagy.

 Sleeping increases autophagy. And so there are so many things that actually increase it that we don’t have distinct health benefits that we’ve seen from these people that do these extended fasts. But we do have distinct negatives. We see IGF one drop. We see loss of lean muscle mass. We see micronutrient deficiencies.

 That doesn’t mean that we can’t use.

 Time restricted feeding in a proper manner like intermittent fasting, a 16, eight intermittent fast can be used effectively. That’s not long enough to really cause these micronutrient deficiencies, to cause these protein deficiencies, to cause these other issues that we may be having with these extended fasts. But there is in the literature no benefits to extended fasts beyond the calorie deficit. None. And if you look at any of the research, anybody that points out, hey, look, we’ve got this study and it says that if you fast for this long, you know, this period of time, you’re going to get this benefit to fat loss or whatever it is. Well, if you have a continuous diet control and you reach the same levels of calorie deficit over time, you get the exact same benefits without the negatives.

 And so this this long term fasting has been set up as a way for people to essentially get immediate gratification, to see this this loss in the scale really quickly or to see that what they’re doing really works. And unfortunately, it’s probably going to come at the cost of health of a lot of people. And you, like me, really wants to preserve lean muscle as much as possible in people. And this is not a great idea, especially with this idea of muscle span. It it becomes more difficult to maintain that tissue as we age. The idea that it’s very difficult to maintain and build muscle, I mean, it does seem that as we age, it becomes more difficult to build muscle. I know that the data supports we can get stronger and build it any time. But the reality is it seems as if the youthful gains are not mirrored in a 50, 60 year old individual. We’ve got a couple of problems. You know, hormonal patterns change. You know, men’s testosterone starts to dip in the 40s.

 We tend to become less active and and that becomes really problematic.

 Protein utilization tends to go down a little bit and that becomes more problematic because we’re probably not eating enough protein as is. And then we also start to use less of what we’re already eating. So we should probably up our protein contents.

 So there are a variety of different things that can cause problems, you know, as you age, that that will make it more difficult to build lean muscle. But that’s why it’s even more important to maintain as much as possible along the way. Yeah. So fasting would not be the appropriate way to maintain. No. Lean muscle. No. Now restricted restricted time restricted feeding like 16, 8 fasts, the intermittent fasting can work just fine. And the reason that that can work is you still get in multiple meals in a day. You still space out some of your protein intake, which is probably good for for muscle protein synthesis, since muscle protein synthesis acts at last about five hours, five to six hours or so at a time.

 And so when we talk about the whole how much can you absorb at one time and, you know, that general recommendation is 30 grams or that general myth that you hear around. I’m actually not sure where that even came from. It came from a study by Aretto in 2015. Don’t don’t quote me on the date. It might be earlier than that, but it’s an Aretto study. And what they did was they looked at the way that muscle protein synthesis was affected under a condition where a person was fasted and then they just took whey protein.

 Now, the problem with using this is protein is used for more than just muscle protein synthesis. And so maximizing muscle protein synthesis isn’t the entire story on top of the fact that if you have a mixed meal scenario, say that you have your protein in a meal or you take that protein shake with, you know, you blended in peanut butter or you you ate oats along the side of it, it’s going to slow protein absorption, which is a net benefit. You know, people think I have to get my protein in and have to absorb it as fast as possible. But the reality is when you have things like mixed meal scenarios that slow absorption, when you have the ileal break, it allows you to absorb that protein over a longer period of time. And that can be used towards both anabolism, you know, doing everything that it needs to do for the immune system, muscle protein breakdown benefits, all those kind of things. So that’s where the 30 came from because they were they were positing a situation that’s unrealistic. They starved. People just gave them protein in a whey protein supplement with no carbs or fats. And then they saw, oh, this cycled through the body really, really quickly. And, you know, you couldn’t do anything with more. Well, you can in mixed meal scenarios. And that’s a that’s a really good point. The idea that most of us most of the time, especially if you’re following the 80 percent rule that you said, we’re eating meals. A lot of the data is based on whey protein or amino acid isolate type of delivery systems in a lot of the literature. And this is one reason why an individual should have a higher protein overall content per meal for that potentially slowing down of absorption. This is seems to be what is suggested in the literature or or different protein sources. You know, whey protein is digested very quickly. I mean, if you’ve got, you know, chicken and then eggs and steak and, you know, all these different kinds of sources, they’re going to to digest at different speeds. So over the day, this kind of handles itself. You know, it’s it’s it’s a self-limiting problem that we don’t see, which is why when the general question is asked, the answer is you can pretty much eat whatever you want. Now, there is for the meal frequency question, there is rationale to having a little bit of a meal frequency nuance to your situation. For most people, the main focus is just get your daily protein calories in play from whole minimally processed foods. If you’re doing those two things, that’s your focus. You’re going to do the large majority of what you need to do. And if you’re a person that is, you know, just trying to get healthier, just trying to improve their physique, they want to go to the beach, that’s great. If you have specific goals, you know, these these physique competitors that we talk about, meal frequency may make a little bit of a difference. And it may make a little bit of a difference due to what I was talking about before with the fact that the maximize anabolic response to a meal lasts between five and six hours or so. So if we want to keep that maximized for longer periods of time, say we want to gain muscle as much as possible, then maybe what we do is we eat multiple meals, five to six hours spaced apart. And that’s reasonable. It’s it’s very reasonable. The data would also support in terms of meal frequency. If someone is older, number one, the overall protein ingestion is most important. And number two, I would say that there is some benefit to having at least that first meal and that last meal optimized for protein, especially someone is aging.

 As we know, as you mentioned, there’s a decrease in muscle protein synthesis, proteostasis, the there’s anabolic resistance. So there is certainly some benefit. We definitely believe, I could say we both believe that more than two meals is probably more optimal. But we could say that the literature, at least from what I’ve seen, two meals is OK. I’m in a cut. I don’t see any problem with two meals.

 If that’s if that’s what allows you, if you’re comfortable with that and that’s what allows you to get in your daily intake, say that you want to do the intermittent fasting and you’re like, OK, well, I’m not going to eat until one p.m. Or whatever it is. First, understand that the fast itself does nothing. There’s no benefit to the fast. You are literally just providing yourself with a framework to not overeat. And so if you tell yourself, I’m not going to eat in the morning because I’m you know, I don’t want to eat then I’m going to go to work. I’m going to focus on that. I said, that’s great. I mean, that’s that’s just a habit that you can put into play. And it’s fine for people that are cutting two meals may work just fine because you can spread out some of that protein intake. You can spread out some of that nutrient intake to be able to absorb them a little bit better. You’re not necessarily trying to maximize lean muscle building in that with that goal. And so two meals can be perfectly fine when you start to switch to I want to really gain lean muscle, then it’s probably closer to four. I agree with that. Maybe more. I agree with that. For meals, that’s usually where I start. People is four meals a day. And I definitely try to hit a minimum of 30 grams depending on what that person’s goal is or their total protein need between 30 and 55. Could be higher. It just depends. I mean, 30 is where you’re you can pretty confidently say that you’re going to maximize MPS. In that meal. And it’s also easier if people spread their their protein intakes out because all of a sudden you’re going to be caught with like 75 grams at night if you didn’t pay attention to this earlier in the day. So I think that’s a great recommendation. And I think it’s a it’s a great way to really move forward with with clients for sustainability. And where do you feel that there are components that are overlooked in fat loss? What are we missing? What are we maybe not paying attention to?

 That’s a good question. The biggest things I think that that mindset is probably the the number one thing that we really need to work on as far as as fat loss goes. And I mean, this kind of goes back to the emotional eating and the cravings are really where I would I would focus this type of thing on. Because I think that when I was talking earlier about it being simple, we know, again, that, you know, calories and protein, all those types of things are going to be the main focus outside of actually paying attention to it. And when you have to pay attention to fiber from whole foods, which I think a lot of people ignore,

 I think that focusing on your coping mechanisms are probably the best idea that you could possibly have. Have you found one in particular that seems to really benefit people?

 This goes back to how I would attempt to treat emotional eating and cravings in general, because I think that these are the biggest problems that people run into whenever they’re dealing with fat loss and trying to defeat these types of things.

 understanding of what’s going on is really important. I think a food diary is something that everybody should be keeping. – And is there a pause if someone is going to, maybe they had a very stressful day or they’re going to reach for that thing.

 Do you potentially, is there something that they can do to take a beat and maybe, I don’t know, do 10 pushups or anything or remove themselves from the situation?

 – So first what I would do, this is a nuanced question. I actually love this question. There’s so many answers to this and the answers are different depending on what each individual person. Because again, we’re dealing with people’s individual psychology, right? And so what I would do first is I would set up a food diary to understand your stressors. Because if you set up a diary and you say, “Okay, well, every time I get a craving “or every time I get an emotional eating spike, “what I’m going to do is I’m going to write down “what I was feeling then and what I was feeling “within the hours and days leading up to that.” Over time, you’re going to start to notice environmental and emotional stressors that may be triggering these issues. So number one there, you’re cutting these things off at their source because you’re starting to understand and gain an insight into what’s going on. And that way you can start to address them specifically. – Also, if someone has a low reserve, for example, they haven’t slept. They maybe have wild kids or who knows, whatever is happening.

 There are definitely things that seem to lower capacity to execute on a plan. And understanding if you can mitigate those things, maybe not staying up and watching Mandalorian

 asking for a friend or something like that. – This goes back to the whole willpower thing. Yes, willpower has something to do with it. But if your lifestyle is hectic, if your food environment is not controlled, you’re going to stress your willpower more than somebody else who’s got these things in line. And food environment is a very, very important thing in this. And that’s one of the second steps. That’s actually the second step that I would look to.

 After doing a food diaries, I would look into adjusting a food environment.

 Remove items of temptation, either from your line of sight or your house entirely. If there’s something, some sort of food that you have that is consistently a problem food for you, every time you come home, you see that Oreo package sitting on the top of the fridge. Get rid of it. And a lot of people will say, well, I’ve got kids so I can’t get rid of it. Okay, put it in the back of the– – Definitely get rid of it. – Well, there’s some people that’ll fight you on that. – And definitely get rid of it. – Okay, put it in the back of the cabinet, put it in the back of the freezer. It’s in the back of the freezer, at least if you have to go towards it and you want one, it’s going to take 20 minutes for that to thaw out and that might be time to give you that cravings will subside anyways.

 I agree with you. Getting it out of the house entirely is typically the right choice, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t have it. And that’s really important to understand because those feelings of restriction are what can lead to those severe cravings. So you can have it. It’s just going to force you to actually go out to pick it up. – It’s true. You know, one thing that I did with one of my patients is that one of the things that she would tell me is that she couldn’t resist sweets and it just wasn’t possible for her. In order to prove to her that that wasn’t true, we chose her favorite, it was like a chocolate. And I had to keep it on her desk.

 And at some point she was like looking at it, could care less.

 And it was almost like inoculating her to the stimulus. – The exposure. – And that actually worked. It worked. So for you guys listening, you can remove the food or you could even do the opposite.

 – Fighting food anxieties is interesting. And there’s a couple strategies to do that. And one of the ones is what you talked about here. The one that I like to use initially is if somebody has a food that they find is particularly problematic for them, I will say, okay, well, let’s set up a moderated amount that you can have every day because it can show them that it is something that’s acceptable to have in the diet. They can continue to progress just fine by keeping it in moderated amounts and it can build confidence over time. – Do you ever find that you have to not allow that food? For example, if someone needs to abstain from it, that a little, that they just cannot tolerate that food. – Yeah, I find that all the time. And that’s step two. If we’ve tried that moderated amount. – How long will you try that? – I usually have an ongoing conversation with them. So every time they check in, I’m like, how are you feeling about this? What is your experience emotionally? Are you feeling confident that you still wanna continue trying this? Because people need to have that autonomy in their own health and in their own choices. So you talk about the benefits of some of these things and then you listen to them and base your changes off of what they’re saying. So if they’re telling me, hey, I still wanna continue trying this. I feel like I’m getting a handle on it. I’m not quite there yet, but I wanna continue. Sure, we’ll continue. When people start to tell me that they’re frustrated, that’s when I suggest having a short-term detox from whatever that problem food is. And one, it’s important that it’s their decision. It has to be the client’s decision. As a coach saying, you can’t have this is probably more damaging than anything else. But assuming that they say, okay, I’m on board, let’s try cutting this out. Set a timeframe. Set four, eight weeks, something like that. – That’s a long time. – Yeah, people can typically do a couple months pretty easily, as long as they know that there’s an end date. So you say, okay, anywhere between this timeframe, set it up, you won’t have this food. They’ll say, okay, let’s say six weeks. So six weeks goes by and then you reconvene and you say, okay, well, how do you feel about this food? Do you feel like you have a better sense of control? Would you like to reinstall this into your life? And if they say, yeah, I would like to try bringing this back in again, then you switch back to that step one where you start to set up a moderated amount daily. You essentially break that cycle of craving and giving in because that becomes a learned response. And once you break that learned response, you can actually start to gain some control over the situation. And what you will often find after that six week period, and I find this more often than not, we’ll come back and I’ll say, okay, how are you doing and how are you feeling with this food that you were struggling with so much before? And they’ll say, hey, I don’t really need it anymore. And it kind of comes to the situation where you had with having the food on the desk. It’s, I kind of got over it and I don’t eat it. And that’s wonderful. When it’s the person’s decision not to have it, that’s perfectly fine. If they’re choosing not to have it because their labeling foods is good or bad, that’s a problem. – Yeah, and we definitely see that. I’m sure you then teach people about physical hunger and emotional hunger. How do people and how could one recognize the difference? – So there’s some key distinct differences between the two. Emotional hunger tends to be acute. It tends to come on very quickly and it’s unrelated to the timing of your most recent meals.

 It tends to be insatiable. I mean, when you eat something physical, when you eat something for physical food reasons or physical hunger reasons, it tends to be filling. When you eat something for hedonic or emotional stress reasons, it tends to not really fill you up. On top of that, it’s mindless eating. And so you’ve got this combination of eating mindlessly and then at the same time not getting the hunger cues that you should be getting. And this is where you down that entire sleeve of Oreos or that entire bag of chips before you even noticed anything.

 You know, and so these two things in combination can be very problematic for people if they’re not aware that it happens.

 Emotional hunger is located in the mind. Whereas physical hunger, you feel the hunger pangs in your stomach. You’ve got that growling going on. Emotional hunger is more about the experience that you’ll have if you can just have that food.

 And then emotional hunger is something that’s often ridden with guilt. You know, if you’re emotionally hungry and you eat, you feel guilty afterwards. You don’t tend to feel that with physical hunger.

 And I know that these things can be very difficult to disseminate and understand when you’re in the moment. So one of the things that I like to recommend for people who are having problems identifying whether they’re dealing with emotional hedonic hunger or whether they’re dealing with physical hunger is the apple test. Have you heard about this? – I haven’t, but it sounds like the chicken breast test. If you’re really hungry, go ahead and eat that chicken breast and– – Yes, it’s very similar in the fact that you would say, hey, in this situation where I’m hungry, wouldn’t apple solve this problem? Wouldn’t apple get rid of this craving that I’m experiencing? If the answer is no, well, that’s very telling in and of itself. It’s telling you that you’re focused on the experience. You’re focused on the flavors. You’re focused on the textures. You’re focused on the smells. You’re not focused on actually solving a physical type of hunger. Now it’s stupid and it’s very simple, but that’s what people need to actually make changes. You need something simple and readily available at all times that you can turn to and asking yourself if an apple would work is about as base as it can get. But it really does tell you whether or not you’re dealing with an emotional type of hunger or a physical type of hunger. – And do you find that people get diminishing returns? You can have one cookie, two cookies, but after the third cookie, it probably doesn’t taste as good. They’re just not getting as much of that emotional type of response anymore. It’s, again, this diminishing return to experience. – I think that this, at least anecdotally, I’ve found that that’s pretty true. And particularly once you start to move away to more homely processed foods, some of this traditional junk food just doesn’t taste the way that it used to. It doesn’t taste as good as it did. I mean, have you ever gone from drinking mainly water or like, you know, pressed juices and then having a soda and all of a sudden you’re like, wow, this is kind of overpowering with the carbonation effect and you know, and everything like that. It’s a similar experience. And so I think that over time, whenever you’re doing these things, starting up a little bit higher and then moderating down can be a good way to essentially wean yourself off. It’s like tight training off of a drug, essentially.

 It’s a bad analogy, but it does seem to work and the palette changes over time. People’s tastes change over time. And the more that you eat home minimally processed foods, the easier that becomes. And that’s a great thing to know. You know, when people first start out, they’re overwhelmed by the fact that there’s so many things that I need to do differently. I mean, I’ve had decades of habits and now all of a sudden I’ve got to change everything up. And you know, learning that things do get easier can be a very, very helpful thing. – Very freeing. – Yeah. – You mentioned soda. What is your stance on artificially sweetened drinks like diet soda or crystallite, any of those kinds of things in eating someone for weight management? – I think that they’re perfectly fine. I mean, if you look at any of the data out there about them in otherwise healthy people, in typical daily intakes, there doesn’t seem to be an issue as far as health concerns go. You know, and the biggest gaps that we have these days are the changes of the microbiome,

 as far as the research goes. Now we do know that it changes the microbiome, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that causes a health problem. And so I really want to point that out to people when we talk about this type of thing, because there’s never been shown to be a negative health consequence in the microbiome.

 Anything that you eat will change the gut microbiome. Anything that you eat and drink will change the gut microbiome. You know, how you sleep, how you exercise changes the gut microbiome. So rather than worrying about having a diet, Dr. Pepper, once a day, I would focus more on, am I actually eating fruits and vegetables? You know, am I getting fiber in my diet? Am I sleeping? These are the areas that people ignore in lieu of I need to demonize something like non-nutritive sweetener. – It’s distraction. – It is. – From my perspective, it’s somewhat of a distraction. – And it’s really taking away from, you know, filling that basket with big rocks. Don’t focus on the tiny rocks that are, it’s gonna take your effort, and it’s gonna take your time when you could be doing the things that really matter. Lifting weights, eating protein, eating fruits and veggies, sleep. – I mean, those are all great actionable things that people can do. Do you limit, for example, would you say, one diet, Dr. Pepper, and I know this is a,

 a little tricky, but would you say, okay, three is too much? – I don’t set a personal limit, and I don’t set a, first off, I want people to understand that you should be getting most of your hydration from water. – And how much water should people be drinking? – That’s going to vary depending on the person. Different coaches and different scientists that you talk to will give you different recommendations. I’ll tell you what I do. – Right.

 – There are people that will say, excuse me, there are people that will say, you know, monitor things like your feelings of thirst or your urine color. I don’t love monitoring feelings of thirst, and I say that because I’ve worked with enough clients to see that if we monitor feelings of thirst, some people will only drink like 40 ounces of water a day.

 I think that’s very, very low. My wife doesn’t drink anything.

 And particularly athletes and pregnant women have discordant thirst cues, more so than anybody else. – Interesting, do we know why that is? – I don’t know the mechanism for that, but they tend to have discordant thirst cues more than anybody else, and the elderly do too. – Yeah.

 – And so what I do as a practical reference is I tell people, get spread out three liters of water throughout the day, and if you’re thirsty, drink more.

 It’s slightly below national recommendations for, or slightly above national recommendations for women, slightly below national recommendations for men. But at least if we’re getting them in that right range, it can be a really beneficial thing. Now, I’m not saying that people, the coaches that say, hey, drink when you’re thirsty are wrong.

 I’ve just found that it hasn’t worked entirely with my clientele because I’ve seen way too many people that drink basically nothing if you don’t give a guideline. And so this at least puts people into a decent range. It’s not gonna cause any health problems by those people that massively push large amounts of water. It’s gonna help health, and it’s gonna give them something to shoot for, which I think is more important than anything else. – Is there any specific influence on weight loss, or is that more of the hunger control? – There’s some minor effects on weight loss, but it is more hunger control than anything else. – That’s what I thought. What about mindfulness techniques for individuals?

 – So the Food Diary is one of the mindfulness techniques that I like to use. The other one that I like to use is a set of awareness questions that I have clients ask themselves every night. And so before you go to bed, what I would do is I would ask myself these three questions. What am I doing? Why am I doing this? And where is it taking me? These questions make us aware of our daily routines. They make us aware of what’s influencing the choices that we make. – So what are the questions? What am I doing? Why am I doing it? – Why am I doing this? Where is this taking me? – Where is this taking me? And these three questions span exercise, nutrition, life. – Everything, yeah. And it’s a great way to really ground yourself and realize what you’re doing on the daily. Because like I said, it puts into perspective what you’re doing, the influences behind the choices that you’re making, and it puts into perspective whether or not that’s bringing you towards your goals.

 Now, this is again one of those things that it’s very simple and very straightforward, but I think that if we don’t ask ourselves these questions, we kind of coast through life.

 And we don’t take that account. We become less mindful because we don’t understand what we’re really doing on the daily.

 – Where does meditation fit in?

 – I think meditation is a great thing. I’m not really good at it. And I’m not a coach for meditation itself, but I think that it serves some very real purpose. And I think that I don’t think that anybody can really downplay the benefits that meditation can provide. I mean, we see, this is a bit of a tangent or a bit of a reach, but we see the benefits of the placebo effect, right? I mean, you’re in medical, you’ve seen- – 30%. – They’re massive. – It’s gonna be 30%. For example, if I give you water and I tell you, this water is this magic elixir, there is a high percentage of chance that you might feel better. – It’s amazing how much it works. There was a study done in competitive power lifters. So not newbies. They’re these people that actually compete for a living. And they gave them either a non-nutritive sweetener or they gave them a pill. Well, they gave them two non-nutritive sweeteners, but one of them they told them was a fast acting steroid, a new steroid.

 They took baseline levels of their squat bench and deadlift. They followed up in one week and they did them again. The average rise for the lifts was 11 kilograms in one week. – That’s a lot. – 11 kilograms in one week in competitive power lifters. These are guys that aren’t just coming out and trying their one rep maxis for the first time.

 And then a week later, they told half of them that it was fake. – Did their numbers go back down? – Every one of those guys dropped. The guys that were not told that it was fake, that continued on, continued to have that rise. But this just goes to show that placebo is an extremely powerful thing. And like you said, it can be upwards of 30% and the effect is incredible. Meditation has similar effects to placebo without tricking yourself.

 Positive visualization. – Do you think that that helps with someone’s weight loss journey? Body comp journey? – Yes, and I don’t think that it helps directly with burning fat or anything like that, but it helps with confidence. It helps with the ability to maintain the protocol. It helps with motivation levels. It helps with feelings of contentment. And what do people struggle with the most when they’re on these journeys? I mean, they struggle with the way that they view their bodies, the way that they view their competence, the way that they feel confident in a situation. And all of these things combined cause people to quit, burn out, say, given to what is essentially the fuck it mentality, where it’s, I’ve been trying so hard for so long and I don’t feel like I’ve gotten as far as I want to. And so I’m just gonna have that box of donuts instead of continuing to push forward those behaviors and habits that we were working on. And saying, hey, I’ll have one, and then move forward with your life. But things like meditation, positive visualization,

 they’re incredibly beneficial when used correctly, not only for that mental boost that they give, but for that grounding that they can give. – And people will likely move into that direction.

 Potentially subconsciously, again, I don’t have any data to support that, but how we see ourselves and how we envision where we’re going, I think, allows us to move in that direction. How much time during a week do you spend reading literature? – Oh my God, this is probably three or four hours a day. – Three or four hours a day. How long have you been doing that?

 – 15 years.

 So this is neuroticism at its finest, right? – It’s wonderful, actually.

 Do you have a photographic memory?

 – No, I don’t have photographic or idiotic memory, unfortunately.

 – Have you found something over the years that really surprised you?

 – So we can talk about a time that I was wrong, and this was a surprising situation for me. So not that I was wrong, but what I was wrong about. So I used to always tell people

 that the guiding principles for weight loss or weight gain hold the same for everybody. You’ve got to be in a calorie deficit. You’ve got to be in a calorie surplus to gain weight.

 So if a person’s not losing weight, they’re simply not in a calorie deficit. You cannot defeat thermodynamics.

 Previously, I used to think that the difference in RMR, the resting metabolic rate of people, was not really that drastically different. It actually is a little bit more different than what I thought, and it surprised me. And so what we see now is that, at least through some of the more recent research, is that RMRs can differ between somebody of similar body composition and weight by up to maybe 800 calories. 800 extra calories per day for somebody can be significantly different. Now this is in the broadest outlier cases, and like we said before with losing weight, there’s that bell curve and everything like that. But if a person is struggling because they’re following one of those online calculators to determine their maintenance level, well, their maintenance level might just be off because their RMR may be different than the normal bell curve. – That is a challenging point because, so basically, people want to understand how many calories that they need so that they can understand their maintenance. There are calculators, there are many ways to do it. It’s somewhat of a guess. – Every calculator is a guesstimate. – Right. – And they tend to be worse the more obese you are or the more muscle you have. They’re, I mean, it’s data that’s based around the average population, right? And a lot of times what we’re going for is not the average population.

 So if people ask, how do I find my maintenance calories?

 The real answer is get a coach because it’s going to make your life a lot easier. – Yeah, the real answer when you get a coach is what they’re going to do is they’re going to make a guesstimate based off of experience, based off of your height and weight, based off of your potential body composition and based off of what they think you do as far as your daily activity levels. So they’ll make a guesstimate. I don’t even use calculators whenever I do it for my clients because I don’t need to at this point. The real work comes into play the two, four, six, eight weeks following. If you can get a person to be adherent and consistent with their nutrition and with their training and their sleep, you will start to see patterns in their rate of weight loss and weight gain. That’s where you make those adjustments to those calorie counts to actually dial them in. Nobody can dial you in immediately. There’s nobody that is omniscient that can tell exactly what your calorie needs are.

 So what you do is you make those adjustments over time and that’s how you figure it out. And you can do it relatively quickly, about four weeks for most people if you’re adherent and consistent. But from a client’s perspective, understand that there’s going to be time in the beginning where there’s going to be variants and things may go in the opposite direction than what you thought that they would go in. And I actually put this in my onboarding paperwork. In the first four weeks, you may gain weight, lose weight, stay the same. None of these things mean the program is off or wrong. This is that dialing in period that we need. Once we’re outside of this period, you will progress relatively consistently as long as you follow the plan. – One of the most important responsibilities you have as a human is to get your blood work done in a regular cadence. You cannot outwork, outthink, or outmaneuver your own health. Health is the great equalizer to all dreams. Inside Tracker is the blood work company I use and recommend. No one loves getting their blood work done, but at least I can make it easy and affordable. By using my link, inside tracker.com slash Dr. Lion, you can get 10% off the Inside Tracker subscription and any plan. By using data from your blood, nobody else’s, DNA and fitness trackers like Apple Watch or a Inside Tracker gives you personalized and science-backed recommendations on things you can take control of to optimize your health. You have to be able to see if what you are doing is working and where you need to improve. Whether you want to improve your hormones, brain, heart health, Inside Tracker reveals the exact areas of your health that needs improvement through comprehensive blood testing, DNA analysis, sleep, and fitness tracking data. And of course, currently your daily habits. I love you guys and deeply believe that you are responsible for your own health. So if no one is coming to save you, you have to save yourself and save 10% off the Inside Tracker subscription and any plan. Go to inside tracker.com slash Dr. Lion. That’s inside tracker.com slash Dr. Lion for 10% off.

 Inside Tracker subscription and any plan. Let’s talk about your muscle. If you care about muscle health and aging, which everyone should, then I want to share with you the only urolithmic compound I recommend that is evidence-based and proven to help not just muscle mitochondria, but all mitochondria in the body, and that is Mytopure. Old and dysfunctional mitochondria is one of the greatest measurable hallmarks of aging. There is now a compound that helps repair the health of our mitochondria, and Mytopure has made that available to everybody. If you care about strength, endurance, and overall energy, there are multiple randomized control trials supporting urolithmia. If you want to age well, then utilizing compounds such as Mytopure help our mitochondria produce energy more efficiently, replacing damaged mitochondria with fresh new ones, they have a beautiful product line with low sugar, gluten-free, whatever it is that you need or want. They’ve got you covered. You can try their various powders or soft gel, which is what I use. Timeline is offering our community 10% off your first order of Mytopure. Go to timelinenutrition.com slash Dr. Lion and use the code Dr. Lion to get 10% off your order. That’s timelinenutrition.com slash Dr. Lion. I recommend trying their starter pack so you can get a sense of what works for you. What happens when you have an individual who has a maintenance calorie of 800 calories? Has anyone come to you and said, “Okay, well, I’ve been eating 800 calories a day.”

 – Do they– – This is a tricky one, right? – Well, the answer to that is they’re typically not eating 800 calories per day. There’s almost no one that’s going to be eating 800 calories per day and maintaining because are we at least on the same page that metabolic damage isn’t a thing? – Yeah. – Okay, so if metabolic damage isn’t a thing, then we know that– – And explain that. Just highlight what someone would say metabolic damage is. – So the idea of metabolic damage is that someone has either died it so drastically or for so long that their metabolism has been damaged and that no matter how low they go on calories, they can’t lose weight. It’s physically impossible. Literally all dieting research suggests this. We find that when people suggest that this is happening, there are just errors in play. They’re tracking wrong or they’re overestimating their calorie burn or whatever it is. So if somebody comes to me and they tell me that they’re eating 800 calories per day and they’re not changing weight, I first check to see if they’re four foot five.

 And if we’re not looking at somebody that’s extremely small or bedridden, then we know that there’s probably something going on with their expected calorie intakes. – Regardless of the amount, they should be losing weight. – Yeah, it’s an Occam’s razor type thing. I mean, the simplest explanation is probably gonna be true and you cannot break the laws of thermodynamics.

 So these people that say that they’re eating 800 calories probably aren’t eating 800 calories. So what you do is you either, figure out a different way for them to track and whether that’s like setting up a flexible meal plan if they were doing macros, because this is almost always an issue for people doing macros. Because– – Yeah, why do you think that is? – Because macros is not easy to track. Everybody thinks that it’s super easy to track. They watched one hour long thing on YouTube and they think that it’s super easy, but there are tons of mistakes that people make. And so you either audit those practices and figure out where the mistake is and what they’re tracking. You set up a different way of tracking that may be more accurate. What I like to do with people is a flexible meal plan because I will calculate all of the macros based off of foods that they like to eat. And then I’ll give them a plan where they’ve got all these different choices based off of what they like to eat. They don’t have to calculate macros. They just go and they weigh the food and then they heat it up and they go. There’s no way for them to essentially screw that up unless they’re choosing foods that aren’t on the plan. But for people that are determined to do the macros and stick with it, you just have to figure out where your error is because there’s a 99% chance that’s an error unless for some reason you’re massively hypothyroid not aware of it or you’re diabetic or something else that’s causing some of these issues, which is, that’s rare.

 – Is it rare? I mean, I guess from my perspective, I see a lot of hypothyroidism. I see many chronic dieters that these diets have definitely influenced their hormone status. And it seems that we have to correct their thyroid. We have to do, we do increase their calories to just see things move for them. It seems like that from my perspective that happens. – Shifting calories up will typically not majorly reset hormones if you’re continuing in a calorie deficit. And so you have to actually regain weight and regain body fat for the metabolic adaptation to reverse. Shifting calories up can work, but it works a lot of times for differences than what most online coaches are pushing. It works because if you shift calories up, all of a sudden those two metabolic adaptation issues that we have start to become a little bit easier to handle. – And remind us what those are. – So if you have been chronically dieting for too long, you can have issues with the fact that your hunger levels have really ramped up. And so maybe adding in more calories can allow you to actually stay with the plan a little bit better, which is an amazing thing. All of a sudden you’re more adherent and then you maintain that calorie deficit. And then when you start to bring the calories back into play, you start to move more subconsciously. So the need levels go up. So the combination of you actually staying on plan and then the total daily energy expenditure increasing, puts you in a negative energy balance. Whereas before you were staying completely sedentary because you were just feeling– – That’s a really good point. – You’re just feeling so weak. – That’s a really good point. – And so we always hear these people that come in and they’re like, you need a reverse diet because reverse dieting will fix your metabolism.

 If we’re considering your total daily energy expenditure as your metabolism, then yes. If we’re considering RMR or BMR as your metabolism, then no, because it’s not doing anything to those. Because like we said, the average drop in RMR or BMR is about five to 25 calories. – Which is not much. – No, if a quarter of a fun sized Snickers bar is throwing you off, something’s wrong. In the greatest cases possible, in this Minnesota starvation experiment, people lost 25% of their total body mass. Their predicted RMR was only off by 75 to 100 calories.

 So why is Deborah from the cul-de-sac thinking that that’s gonna throw her off when in reality, she’s probably down 10 calories on average from what she should be, you know? – That is really helpful for people listening.

 If they can execute, keep a plan. And you’d mentioned kind of the online fitness era, which is where we’re at. How does someone find a reliable source and or even red flags? And truth be told, I have encouraged Alan to go on. You may see him on other podcasts of individuals that he might not agree with because I think it helps clear up the space.

 – I think so this is a very difficult thing. And it’s a very difficult thing, not just for GenPop, but for other professionals. Because what do you do as a professional when somebody is, you want some information, but it’s in an area that you’re not a professional in. It’s difficult because you don’t necessarily know everything about that, you know, specific genre either. So I think that the best thing that you can possibly do is one, see if somebody is willing to share some research to back up whatever claim that they’re making. I think that’s a great thing. Look into the research that they’re claiming. If it’s actually stating what they’re stating, great. I think it’s very difficult for most people to really read research. I think that that’s a skill. And so I don’t blame people for being confused. – And there’s a lot of epidemiology out there. There’s a lot of low quality data that individuals will make very strong statements based on low quality data. – There’s a lot of epidemiological data. There’s a lot of molecular data and there’s a lot of animal data. And animal data doesn’t necessarily translate to humans. And I think that people have a hard time understanding that. And the other big thing is, just because something causes an effect, just because you see, say, an inflammatory marker go down in a molecular data sample, doesn’t mean that causes a practical health effect in a human.

 Because just like with food and nutrition, the dose is the poison in a lot of instances and the dose could be the benefit in a lot of instances.

 And so learning to read the research is a very difficult thing. But when you’re trying to find somebody that’s credible, at least ask them for the research because if they’re on board, they should have some idea of what they’re talking about and be able to provide that to you.

 But more importantly than that, and what I like to point out as probably the best way to be able to identify this for GenPop and the people that are looking to essentially build their education, ask them to explain the other side and why it’s wrong.

 Because if a person can understand the other side’s perspective and can point out why it’s potentially inaccurate, that shows that you’ve got an understanding of the entire idea as whole.

 So rather than the people that just focus on, okay, this is what my side says, look at this, finding somebody that can say, this is what my side says, this is what their side says, this is why this trumps that, that’s the important step that people tend to ignore. Because you don’t see it very often. You don’t see that type of thing offered by many of the online outlets out there. And it’s for a variety of reasons. One, maybe they don’t understand the other side, maybe it’s time constraints and whatever. – Definitely time constraints. It takes a lot of time to prove a side wrong. To prove a point wrong definitely takes a lot of time. – Particularly when it’s something that’s very pervasive. You know, like extended fasts. Because with extended fasts– – That’s a wonderful point. – It’s a good example because people will point out the benefits of extended fasts. They’ll say, okay, look, it will increase autophagy. You will see weight loss. You will see potential benefits in cancer scenarios. None of these things are wrong. But then you start to look at the other sides.

 Cancer is not one disease. It is a large majority of, it’s a large variety of different diseases. And not only is there data suggesting that fasting can prevent and improve outcomes of cancer, it can also exacerbate cancer. Because cancer cells are uncontrolled growth and autophagy can work to their benefit to cause more growth. And so there’s just as much data out there suggesting it can cause problems with cancer. And I’m not saying if a doctor says, hey, we want you to fast to help your cancer out, don’t follow him. What I’m saying is it’s specific to the type of cancer that you have. And so when somebody tells you, hey, I need you to long-term fast because there was one guy that was making claims we’re not gonna name him. But he was saying that it’ll drop your cancer chance throughout a lifetime by 70%.

 Where did you get that number? And which cancer?

 It’s a broad range of things. And along with the weight loss, well, if you put a continuous diet into play, we see the same benefits without the negatives. And so there’s all of these different little nuances to these things. And so if you listen to just one side, it’s like looking at a room that has these beautiful pieces of art, but you’ve only been giving a really small flashlight. Whereas if you hear both sides, you get to turn on the light in the room and you get to see everything.

 Very insightful. I don’t think anyone on the podcast has ever, Matt, has anyone ever mentioned that? I don’t think anyone on the podcast has ever mentioned really thinking about both sides and how that would make a lot of sense for understanding. – I think it’s the only thing that people can do. And it’s tough because I’ve tried to put myself in the situation where, what do you do if you can’t adequately read research? And most people can’t because it is a very distinct skill. I mean, you’ve got to understand a lot. You have to have understanding of the human body. – It takes time. It also takes time. – It takes a ton of time. You’ve got to understand methodology. You’ve got to understand at least rudimentary statistics. You know, and that’s not easy. – And then it gets very complicated, especially in protein research, the tracers and whether someone is using insulin clamp, they’re, the methodologies of some of this metabolism research is very complicated. – It’s very in depth. – There was one interesting study that talked about there’s no upper limit of protein absorption, but they used multiple different tracers. – Is that trouble in 2023? – It is, but I love you guys. They’re one of the best labs in the world.

 An amazing research group, but that’s interesting that you knew that. But the tracers that they use, it wasn’t a normal, it was a very complicated way in which it was set up. It was not a standard tracer study. I think there were four different tracers used and the outcomes that were, the statements that were made from the data that was collected, I think are a bit overstated and it was, I don’t want to go into a rabbit hole about it, but I’ll link a review that we did with Dr. Donald Lehman of the study for this episode. If you’re interested, that is an example of had I not studied protein metabolism, I would have no idea. – Well, so the other issue that people have is that you look at a study, so say I present a study to you and it comes to this conclusion.

 It’s a snapshot of what the overall breadth of data suggests. And so a lot of times to really be able to understand the nuance of an individual study, you need to understand what’s going on in the rest of that field.

 And that’s just impractical for the average person to do. I mean, you’re not a nerd where you’re sitting around reading for three to four hours a day. – I don’t know, anyone like that? – And so it’s a really difficult situation to be in for people. – Where can people turn to for reliable information? Are there organizations that you suggest people look at?

 – This is a difficult one.

 I don’t have any specific organizations that I really point towards. I mean, there are good people out there. When people ask me this question rather than a specific organization, because I’ve never found one that is 100% that I would agree with. But I think that that’s gonna be the same with any professional out there too, right? Even the people that you think are really smart, you’re not gonna agree with everything. And that’s okay. That’s just the difference in the way that people view research, people with the interpretations and everything. But I would recommend people look into specifics like Alan Aragon, you, Lane, you had mentioned Dr. Andy Galpin earlier, Joey Munoz, Adrian Chavez, all of these types of people have really good information out there that’s very solid and research-backed. Dr. Ids tends to do a really good job with his reliability with the research that he puts out. But as far as a specific organized body, I don’t really have one for that.

 – I think that, so from my perspective, what I do is I look at particular research groups. For example, I know that Van Loon’s group puts out and has been putting out a ton of stuff for a long period of time, or Stu Phillips or Martin Gabala, different researchers that have labs that really continue to put out good data over years. That’s, from my perspective, where I go. – That’s very smart. I mean, Kevin Hall from the NIH is probably one of the best of all time for that. Zordos, Helms, Krieger, Eric Trexler, those guys that are working at Science, what is it, Science-based, or stronger by Science. Yeah, they’re very good as far as that goes.

 But yeah, the official certifications in those types of organizations, those are a little bit more hit and miss. – It’s tricky. It is definitely tricky with the organizations because when you think about things like dietary guidelines, these dietary guidelines committees, it is a collective of information from various scientists with various opinions and various perspectives. That becomes challenging. – Yeah.

 – But I suppose it’s all a process. – Yeah.

 – Supplementation.

 Tell me, do you recommend supplementation? Are there a handful of supplements that you think everyone should be on? That is certainly the wild, wild west. – It absolutely is. And unfortunately, there’s very few that have significant enough backing to really recommend to the large majority of people. I mean, there’s some easier ones that are pretty back that make a lot of sense. I mean, creatine monohydrate makes a lot of sense for a large majority of people. I actually think that well-dosed fish oil makes a lot of sense for a large majority of people.

 You know, protein powder of some sort, if you have issues meeting protein needs during the day, tends to make a whole lot of sense. And then everything else seems to be situation specific.

 And health supplements in general may make more sense than certain things like performance supplements. Because performance, we have very few that tend to… – What are the differences? – You’ll really good results.

 Performance supplements just, they just don’t work quite as well. – For exactly what you mean. – Like improving things like maximal strength, improving things like hypertrophy outcomes, improving things like endurance outcomes. Now endurance stuff, you’re gonna find a lot better than maximal strength, but… – Because it’s just been studied longer or… – They just seem to work better. It’s easier to raise nitric oxide levels to get oxygen to the blood to be able to increase endurance performance than it is to increase satellite cell differentiation for muscles and stuff like that. Now, you’ve got some supplements that could work in both realms, but it’s theoretical at best at this point. I mean, we don’t have distinct proof, but it’s funny, you’ve seen those pump supplements that are out there. They could theoretically aid in strength and lean muscle building. We just haven’t proven it yet. They’ve got mechanisms for which they could work.

 They could increase calcium signaling and the rate at which we induce force production.

 They could work through exercise induced hyperemia. They could work through satellite cell differentiation and a couple other things. We just haven’t gotten it down to figure out if it actually does it. So if you wanna take these things and you’ve got some extra money to be able to take them, sure, that’s about it. – Would you pick a nitric oxide beetroot type juice thing? – I like nitrates as far as for increasing nitric oxide more than anything else compared to say citrulline malate. I like the nitrates better than anything. – Do you use them? – Beetroot, yes, I do. But I do an inorganic nitrate rather than an organic nitrate. – Tell me. – I use something from a company called Hostile.

 – Did you hear that? Hostile. – Did we have that from somebody else? – No.

 (laughs) – So the issue with beetroot is not that it doesn’t work. The problem with beetroot is that it’s an organic source and it’s not typically standardized for nitrate content. So you have to get a certain amount of nitrate content to actually get effects.

 And if you’re getting your intake through a beetroot product, you may or may not be getting a dose that actually works. And that doesn’t mean that the product’s good or bad, it could be the crop yield. And so you could get one product from company A and then five months later get the same product from company A and one time you’re like, that worked really well and why doesn’t it work this time? – So let’s explain a little bit about what you’re talking about. It’s an important point. The crop yield that Alan is talking about is that the profile of polyphenols, of vitamins and minerals in foods can change from one season to the next, from one, again, you can go to the grocery store and get a mango today and then you can go and get a mango tomorrow and maybe add us half the vitamin C.

 Would you agree? It’s not– – Yeah, no, it’s gonna change. It’s gonna change. Like you said, depending on the season, depending on where it’s from, depending on the soil composition at the time, are these people doing proper crop rotations for the soil to make it nitrogen rich and nutrient rich? – So you never know. – You don’t and that’s the problem with beetroot. So can beetroot work? Yes, it can and I can’t say it can’t but an inorganic source is probably more reliable because– – Not from food, basically. – Yeah, because you’ll standardize the nitrate content so you’ll know that you’re getting the amount that you should likely get. Now the concern with inorganic nitrates is that it could cause nitrosamine formation in the gut which is a potential carcinogen.

 However, we don’t see that same issue with things like beetroot, kale, spinach, the natural sources of nitrates. Why not? It appears that when you co-administer vitamin C, 500 milligrams with your nitrates, it prevents nitrosamine formation and gets rid of this issue. So if you choose to take these inorganic nitrates, get some vitamin C with it. You’re gonna be just fine. Anything else from a, so that was kind of an endurance vasodilation, creatine, anything else? – Potential for strength and lean muscle building but we’re gonna keep that as potential. – Fair.

 Anything else that you love? And you said fish oil. – So I like total health supplements a lot more than anything else. And this might be– – I’ve never heard of them. – It might be, it just overall health. – You mean like a multivitamin? – So what I would look at is– – Like no, but I’m not like that. – Well, multis are interesting. Multis are one of those things that there’s so much data out there about them. There’s just as much data suggesting that they don’t work as much as they do. But since the data suggests that they don’t work also doesn’t suggest any real negatives to it, it’s probably fine as a nutritional insurance.

 What I was talking about was more along the lines of triglyceride type health or the like.

 Garlic, aged garlic seems to be pretty interesting.

 Citrus bergamot seems to be pretty interesting. Citrus bergamot is one of my favorites that I would love to see more and more data out about. It is really interesting to me because it’s the only supplement out there that seems to semi-reliably raise HDL, which is a very difficult thing to do. And I ran my own experiment, so it’s N equals one. How much does that matter? Not a whole lot, but it’s interesting. I did an eight month span where I did citrus bergamot and I had my HDL rise 11 points. Now again, N equals one, so it’s only worth so much, but it has been replicated in the research. And since it’s so difficult to raise HDL and triglyceride problems are such a pervasive issue for people, I think it can be a good choice for many. – And we’ll see as more and more data continues to come out. I want to touch on one more thing because I think it is extremely interesting and valuable. We were talking yesterday at dinner before my kids went absolutely berserk.

 – They were cute. – Yeah, they were cute.

 We were talking about Ozempic, we were talking about carbohydrate insulin model, we were talking about PCOS or PCOS as you said. And a lot of women struggle with that. And I think a lot of people are very interested in these Ozempic, GLP1, GIP agonists. So I’m just gonna let you kind of take it wherever you want and hear your perspective. – So this all started because we were discussing the carbohydrate insulin hypothesis, which has been pushed pretty hardcore for several decades at this point, although it’s been largely debunked for a long time now. – Will you explain to us what it is if someone’s never heard? – So the carb insulin hypothesis suggests that insulin itself is a large mediator of prevention of weight loss. It suggests that insulin, if you help control spikes of insulin, then that’s actually going to help you lose weight, it’s going to improve overall health.

 But the problem with it is it tends to use data that are based in diabetics, not in people who have actual glucose control. And it also tends to use studies that have doubly labeled water errors, which causes very strange outcomes in the conclusion data. And so this went back to where Hull started doing more and more information or more studies on energy balance at the NIH. And we found that energy balance tends to trump anything else, particularly in a calorie deficit. And we even have a lot of research out there that suggests that irrespective of whether or not you feel like you’re insulin resistant or whether or not you are spiking your insulin, if you’re in a calorie deficit, you’re going to lose weight regardless. The calorie deficit itself will trump actions of insulin. If there is not enough energy in the system to cause it to deposit fat, there’s nothing there. You can’t build something out of nothing. And so the carbohydrate insulin theory doesn’t really make any sense and it doesn’t even hold up in the real world. And one of the good examples of that is GLP-1 memetics, specifically things like Ozempic, semaglutide and all those other kinds of drugs that I think at this point, people are pretty on board with saying can yield weight loss, right? I mean, people lose weight when they’re on things like Ozempic.

 What’s interesting about this is that Ozempic actually causes a distinct rise in insulin and yet people are losing- – In response to glucose. – In response to glucose, yes. – It’s not just, don’t take Ozempic and you’re just getting a rise in insulin. And so despite these rises in insulin, people are still losing weight just fine. In fact, better than they probably were before. And it’s because insulin does not have that bearing over thermodynamics when there’s no energy in the system.

 And so people will get really focused on a weight loss journey because this is specifically to people that tend to want to lose body fat. They will focus heavily on controlling insulin, controlling insulin spikes, and managing how do I wear this continuous glucose monitor to be able to see what my foods are doing in affecting me. And it just doesn’t seem to matter. It doesn’t seem that any of these things make any difference in the outcomes as long as you’re maintaining that calorie deficit. And so what we’re doing is we’re spending all of this time, again, focusing on things that don’t really matter and losing sight of what we should actually be focusing on.

 – Well, I’m sure that that is very helpful for people because even though, and Kevin Hall has done a great job with the carbohydrate insulin model and discussing it at length, there’s still this belief that it really is just carbohydrates and insulin cause and drive weight gain. There’s probably somewhere in the middle, calories and maybe, I know you’re probably cringing right now, maybe there’s some component of excess carbohydrates and insulin with, if someone is metabolically unhealthy, maybe. – If you’re metabolically compromised, things can change. – Yeah. – So if you’re diabetic, if you’re insulin resistant in a calorie surplus, things are gonna be a little bit different because you’re probably going to be more likely to gain adipose tissue or store body fat in a calorie surplus when there is something to store if you have issues with glucose handling. – Yeah. – So it’s not that you can’t lose weight, it’s that you’re gonna have a harder time on the opposite end of the spectrum. And so if you have a hard time controlling your nutrition, controlling your activity levels, then it can give you that feeling of, well, I just can’t lose weight because I’m constantly gaining. Well, you may be gaining more readily than someone who does not have that metabolic disturbance. – And I just wanna round out with PCOS, Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. If you’re up for it, I think that you probably do get patients or, not patients, but clients that have PCOS. Is that something that people talk a lot about for infertility and love for you to just kind of highlight? – Well, PCOS is a difficult condition to deal with, but if you understand it, there’s a very good light at the end of the tunnel. So PCOS tends to have the same concerns that a lot of people with a carbohydrate insulin theory had because there is a lot of insulin resistance associated with many types of PCOS, right?

 But the good thing is the research suggests that again, as long as we are maintaining that calorie deficit, you’re going to lose weight just as readily as anybody else. That’s a similar body composition and similar weight. The difference with PCOS, and this is what’s extremely important for people to be aware of, there is a much larger dropout rate from dietary nutritional changes with PCOS versus a normal person that doesn’t have it. – What do you mean? I didn’t know that. – About 50% versus 30%. – Of people that are being studied or? – In understudied situations and under even both epidemiological and in controlled or controlled science. – Why is that? – It’s because people who have PCOS, they have lower, they’ve got lower views of their own body. They’ve got lower senses of competence. They’ve got feelings of greater stress levels and all of these things together add up to more frustration.

 And so it’s not that they’re dealing with their body necessarily fighting the act of fat loss, it’s that they’re dealing with the emotional and psychological aspects that PCOS provides that other people aren’t dealing with. So because of this, the entire fat loss process feels much more difficult. – We see great results with our patients that have PCOS that train, that do resistance training and that track their calories and take things from a very comprehensive approach and we see the needle move. – Yeah and you should. But the people that have PCOS need to have that education or at least that reassurance that you’re not broken. You can make the change, you just have to understand what you’re going through. And like we said before, this process is kind of simple at its core, lift weights, sleep, you know, e-rite, but it’s not easy and it’s particularly not easy for certain populations, PCOS is one of those. So what you’re experiencing is valid. Maybe the reasons that you think that you’re experiencing it aren’t valid, but your emotional response is valid. So use that to your advantage, use that as a strength. Hey, I know that I’m going to be less pleased with my body, but I know that if I follow the plan, it’s actually going to work out. So just focus on following the plan, take it one day at a time. – Alan, you spend a lot of time reading and a lot of time educating, why?

 – The sad thing is it’s actually fun.

 I enjoy getting out there and reading these types of things and I feel like everybody out there seems to be struggling with this type of thing. People struggle with fitness, people struggle with health. It’s very difficult to find reliable information. It’s very difficult to understand what’s really going on with your body. And I think by having somebody, groups of people there that can actually cut through the bullshit can make a big difference in people’s lives.

 And that kind of keeps me going. And one of the things that I always find really funny is when I get those emails or calls from clients and they say, “Hey, look, I’ve lost the weight and that’s great, but the biggest thing is I was able to have cake at my daughter’s birthday and I didn’t feel bad about it, but I had half of a piece that I would have had normally. And then I got back on track the next day.” That is the most fulfilling thing as a coach to be able to see those mental and emotional growth compared to even the changes in the scale. Because people will always focus on those changes in the scale in the beginning and you start to think in the back of your mind, it’s gonna be even better when we start to see these things like they went off on vacation and they were finally proud of themselves for how they acted. They didn’t feel like they were completely out of control. They were able to get back on track when they returned home. And these changes in knowledge, in their habits and their routines and in the way that they view themselves are what really keep pushing forward. – Well, Dr. Alan Bacon, thank you so much for being on. You’ll have to come back. We’ll talk all about training the next episode. And I’m really grateful for all the content you put out. You do a wonderful job. This episode did not disappoint. So articulate. I think people need to hear more of you and that is exactly what we hope to do. Where can people find you? – You can take a look at my website, mowieathletics.com or look me up on Instagram, Dr. Alan Bacon. Spell the first name right, A-L-L-A-N and you’ll find me just fine. – And we’ll link everything. Thank you so much for coming on. – Thank you, Gabrielle. Appreciate it.