[ 00:00:00 ]You’re a very special guest. No, you are Dr. Mike Isratel. Thank you. Um, we have a part one and part one was so good. And then all of a sudden that I heard you and your lovely wife were going to be in Houston. Um, and now here you are. Thank you for having us. Um, really, thank you for coming because I would like to say the world is really confused about fat loss, about muscle, and especially women. And again, we don’t have to gear this all towards women, but most 16-year-old guys, they’re like, they read Muscle & Fitness. They knew how important it was. Maybe it helped them get girls, and, uh, no, didn’t it? Well, not for me. Well, I mean, I had other struggles. Um, where can we start with fat loss?

[ 00:00:55 ] Yeah. Great question. I think the principles are probably a good place to start, kind of just general theoretical guidelines because I think it really helps to ground yourself in a pretty well understood reality. And though it can seem really confusing and social media and media in general about like, there’s so many competing voices about how fat loss is best done. The mainstream science on how the basics work or just hasn’t been contested in, I don’t know, probably 60 years, if not more than that. So you can lay down a lot of fundamental, fundamental understanding. And then after that, we can have a lot of, well, how do you do this in practice kind of things, but the fundamental understanding takes you to three-quarters of the way to practice anyway.

[ 00:01:36 ] Why do you think it’s so confusing for people? That’s a really good question. There’s a couple of reasons. One, a lot of people are operating on inadequate knowledge to even begin to understand the problem. So if I hear an economist on TV say that the nominal GNP is falling, I actually don’t know what nominal means or GNP. So when someone’s like, it makes sense of the economy for me, or the G something or other is good. So if you know, like calories are a thing, carbs are bad, maybe, but maybe it’s fats and you know, like junk food’s probably not good, but maybe some of it’s okay. You really start to, you know, piece out the fact in your brain that you don’t really know anything about the subject.

[ 00:02:19 ] Like if you asked me to describe like, Mike, like how does a car work somewhere between the engine connecting to the wheels is where you lose me. And so that’s definitely a big deal because. Maybe this is too, too meta of a statement to be true, but I think people, when they swipe a lot, you know, the TikTok stream, they get these little bites of information. They really like them. No science pages like doctors discovered a new molecule or whatever. Oh, cool. Like swipes onto your friends. They feel like they’re getting an understanding, but they’re not. They’re getting a couple of sprinkles. Uh, another, uh, off color analogy. I can tell when Vietnamese is being spoken around me. I can tell when Tagalog, the main Philippine dialect is spoken around me.

[ 00:02:59 ] I can’t understand a word. Those people are saying I can, I can differentiate between Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese Chinese. I can hear it every time, but I can’t speak and understand it. So when you talk to people like calories, fat loss, dieting, right? Like tell me in a principled manner, what you know about that. They’re like, why did I just hear things? And so that’s a big part of it. Because you hear a lot of stuff, but you might not have ever put it together and no one ever wants to look like they haven’t put it together. So when you say like, well, you know, like health and fat loss, they’re like, oh yeah. And it turns out, no, it really was not the case.

[ 00:03:31 ] Another problem is that there are people that are loudly proclaiming things that are one of two categories, wild exaggerations or things that are just categorically untrue. Can you give me an example? Yes. Yes. Categorically untrue calorie balance is a myth. Calories don’t matter. Wild exaggeration. The low-carb lifestyle is great for everyone. And you hear that enough from those people, and they’re iconoclastic enough, that you come up on your social media feed, they write best-selling books and all this other stuff. And all of a sudden, you know, your idea of the thing, like I’ve had people tell me like, well, so like diet soda is like bad for you. And I’m like, no, it’s near consensus that it’s totally fine. It’s essentially almost inert.

[ 00:04:18 ] And they’re like, well, I heard like, well, you’re, you’re hearing lies and half-truths and misunderstandings from lots of people on social media that just say a lot of stuff. But I wouldn’t say that it’s bad for you. I wouldn’t say that it’s bad for you. But I wouldn’t really only point the nasty blame finger at the producers of this kind of knowledge. I think most of it comes down to a consumption problem. A lot of people are not really interested in what maybe they consider dry and boring ideas. They’re interested in sexy ideas. They’re interested in quick fixes, um, kind of a serendipitous fix where you like, there’s this really complex puzzle and you click one piece and it goes, it’s all in place versus like having to do this and that.

[ 00:04:59 ] You know what this reminds me of? This reminds me of success. Oh yeah, sure. What you’re saying, you’re modeling it after fat loss and getting fit, whatever that means for an individual. But the same thing would go for success or executing on something meaningful and creating a business that people feel that there is a special hack or a secret. There has to be right. Yeah. It’s called discipline and, um, sacrifice. Yes. And hard work. My, uh, co-founder of RP, my co-founder, my colleague and co-founder, Mr. Nick Shaw, he actually has a book called ‘Fit for Success.’ And he talks about a bit of his personal journey, a bit of fitness, and a bit of business success. And the things in common between fitness success and business success are actually quite massive on a principle level.

[ 00:05:48 ] They both have that little sting at the end, like, man, I gotta do all this fucking principled work for years. Fuck that. Give me one hack. Just one thing is so I can get successful. So I can lose fat. And here’s the thing. I absolutely, at a deep level, never blame people for looking for shortcuts because as we develop as a society, we come up with shortcuts to things. If you told someone 150 years ago, ‘yeah, that’s fair’. They’re like, ‘Hey, like, how do I get to 90 miles away?’ You’re like, ‘well, you get in a car and just do this and it goes.’ And if we say this in about three or four years, you’re going to be like, ‘you just actually get in the car and just do this.’ And it just goes, like, I’m not getting, what the hell is a car?

[ 00:06:25 ] Yeah. What the hell is a car? And you’re like, ‘right’. So this, this, this thing that drives, it’s like, it’s like having 150 horses, but all in one chariot and the horses are invisible. They’re like, ‘you’re out of your mind.’ And they were like, ‘yeah, it’s all shortcuts in the future’. You want to go get food? You don’t farm. You don’t know anything. You just show up to the grocery store. You just kind of weirdly swipe some kind of a weird little card and you just take whatever you want and you leave. They’re going to be like, this is a nonsense. So if people didn’t want shortcuts, if they didn’t want massive efficiency improvements of orders of magnitude, they would have never invented amazing things.

[ 00:06:55 ] Like if we were like, it’s all hard work, we’re a brother. Someone’s trying to invent like the industrial revolution, like the farming equipment. You’re like, man, this guy’s just a fucking pussy. He’s just trying to get out of work. Like, dude, you’re an insane person. Right? So it’s great to look for shortcuts. It’s awesome. But you gotta be able to tell what shortcuts are cutting you right into bullshit that doesn’t work and which ones are actually effective. And there are some effective little shortcuts or hacks, but in the diet realm so far, they’re few and far between, and you can exploit them really well if you’re good at the rest of the thing. So, uh, I remember, I was listening to a podcast once on, uh, by a gentleman, uh, named Robert Keller, who’s a Delta Force operative.

[ 00:07:33 ] And he was like, ‘Yeah, man, I was, you know, I got accepted. I got, you know, passed through trials or whatever. I went to Delta school. I just, we’re not allowed to say a lot about what we learned there, but it’s like, I was expected to just like machine gun car chases. And he’s like, they just go back to weapon handling basics for like six months. What, what? But then you realize like that is actually the main thing that makes you good at warfare. So for dieting and training and a lot of stuff, business success, it’s similar, is you’re back to basic principles and you get really, really good at them. So now we’re here, back talking about basic principles, and it’s like, ah, okay, fine. Okay.

[ 00:08:03 ] So give me the, give me the hierarchy, and I’m gonna give you what I would consider probably the hierarchy and you tell me where I’m right, where I’m wrong. Oh, you’re wrong. Cause you’re not me. I’m the only one that knows the hierarchy, It’s called the Dr. Mike hierarchy. Well, I’ll take it. Of things that Dr. Mike knows. Cause he’s special and important. Oh, I’m on a podcast. You are, but you are especially important. That’s what my mom said. Um, calories in, calories out. The next thing that I would think about is, well, I guess the first thing you would have to consider is what are your goals? Are you looking to lose fat gain muscle or maintain? Then the next thing would be calculate that number and you determine what that number would be-mm-hmm calorie number.

[ 00:08:47 ] Yes, you determine what that calorie number would be. And then you would set your dietary protein intake to, for me, I would set it at one gram per pound, ideal body weight or one gram per pound. And then depending on my activity, I could choose carbohydrates or fats. You do well on your way girl. I don’t even, I don’t even have to do the podcast. You just keep going, huh? Huh? I’d be like, yeah, that was Dr. Mike. Thank you so much. See you later. No, right on. Right on. Yeah. Tell me where, how, how I would think about fat loss. Cause that’s what everybody wants. Sure. Sure. Sure. Okay. You don’t have to count your calories. You don’t have to count your calories, but it’s really good idea to understand that calories matter.

[ 00:09:33 ] Imagine you’re in a shooter video game and you have a certain number of bullets in your gun. You got to reload. It doesn’t matter if you count the bullets one by one, but you have to understand the concept that you can run out of bullets. There’s such a thing as too much shooting at an empty screen. And then the bad guy comes in and he eats you. So you don’t have to count calories by the calorie, many ways of doing things, but calories as a physics concept is not so up for dispute. No, it can be up for dispute. If you want to disprove calorie balance, you do a lot of real deep physics equations and deep experiments and bomb calorimeters, and you submit to the various journals and five or 10 years later, they’d be like, ‘it’s fucking Einstein.’ You’re revolutionary, but good news.

[ 00:10:09 ] We don’t have to do that because it’s pretty well set in stone. And all calorie balance says is within a very general sense, if you want to become larger, you have to eat more than you’re used to, or spend a little bit less energy. The energy spending thing I can get into considerably, but the short long and short of it is energy expenditure is not a big factor in most people being overweight. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s just unambiguously true. What is a big factor is people eat too goddamn much. And I know that’s crazy. We are in Houston, Texas where everyone’s so fucking lean means it’s just shredded. It’s all skinny people and trying people. No, it’s the total opposite. I thought everything was bigger in Texas.

[ 00:10:51 ] I mean, like really, no, it’s impressive here. Texas is great. Everything is bigger, literally everyone, and it looks like people having a lot of fun with their food. I will say that, but um, so the biggest thing about calorie balance is if your calorie level is here and your body weight is here, probably a big part of your journey to getting your body weight down is going to be to take your calories and put them down to some level. That would that be a controversial statement that people are eating too much, I don’t know where well, I mean I think the only reason I say that is because you hear a lot of people say that individuals are under-eating; yeah, and um, yes, I don’t know if you hear that, I do hear that, so there’s a nuanced, caveated Way that can be true, and there’s a way that many people mean that this is categorically false.

[ 00:11:40 ] So the nuanced way if we’re really going to steel man that is I think a lot of people who get tired of being overweight, which is a lot of people, decide you know what I’m not going to eat a whole lot I’m going to lose weight and they take their calorie level and they bring it down to a level that’s unsustainable like 800 calories, sure. Energy grounds hunger grounds mental clarity grounds getting fired from work because you can’t make sense of things grounds sleep goes to hell, that whole thing and it is true that in that acute time frame. That lasts days for most people, weeks for some, months for very few; they are actually under-eating so the statement is true in that sense, but uh because they under-eat way too much they go back around and go, ‘Gas me up they go to Taco Bell late at night, you know how it starts and it doesn’t stop because your boys in the Taco Bell parking lot all day.

[ 00:12:32 ] I just walk in; they already know me. You have a card, they have my Oh yeah, frequent flyer card that’s right; they have your order ready. I’m so in line with the Taco Bell corporation that they actually just eat for free; they just want to see how ridiculously over-fat I can get at this point. It’s like a science thing, and they probably support your YouTube; oh, they love us. Yeah, Taco Bell. Please don’t cancel us, but um… At some point, those people go back into like because if you drag your body weight down rapidly in unsustainable manner, especially if you lose skeletal muscle, the profound hunger that results is not something most people can relate to in their daily lives.

[ 00:13:09 ] It’s a kind of hunger that if you’re watching a TV show where a family is discussing some controversial topic and you love the show, and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, what’s the juice?’ You stop paying attention to what they’re saying and you’re looking at The dinner rolls, they haven’t touched yet. You’re like, ‘Why doesn’t somebody fucking eat those? You’re like, ‘Why doesn’t somebody fucking eat those? You’re like, ‘Why doesn’t this one of those? Oh my god, I’m not well; I’m that hungry and for most people, they get that hungry, they just go. This is a real trip, unreal unfortunate trip. They go, ‘This thing I just did, this crazy low-calorie diet. This is what I understand fat loss dieting to be, and it’s clearly just not doesn’t work for me; I’m going to go back to doing what I usually do, and I’m just going to be fat bucket because is either suffering or being fat, and being fat’s a lot easier.

[ 00:13:49 ] In almost all cases, than suffering starving for the rest of your life so, and they’d look back on their diet experience and someone tells them like you weren’t eating enough and you’re like oh that makes sort of sense. So, in the local scale it can be true, but on a global scale if you give me someone over the course of one year and they’ve gained 15 pounds, maybe they got married, maybe the first year the marriage was fun, but then after he just keeps never cleans up after himself; the guy’s a slob. You just hate and hate him, and the thing that makes your hate go away is the cookies. You just keep eating cookie and you gain 15 pounds over the course. Of a year is my wife in here, uh, crystal.

[ 00:14:25 ] Yeah, actually we wanted crystal on the show, reverse the genders for this one-I was the one eating cookies and you gain weight over the course of a year, and you tell me I was under-eating, false; you were overeating. It would be really dope if we figured out a way how to under-feed people and still allow them to maintain or gain weight, because we would send that information to the war-torn regions of the world where they would do famine control-it would be wonderful. But it’s never been seen, violates several laws of food dynamics; it just doesn’t work. So, on the grand scale, if someone’s like you. Have just gained 40 pounds, you know, and I’ve had this literal conversation with, like, I think it’s just not…

[ 00:15:00 ] I don’t eat enough and I’m just like cough up my food like no, that’s not it. And I think that that’s a really important point because oftentimes you do hear, especially women say well, I’m just not eating enough and I have to increase my calories and I’m underfeeding, and the reality is you might go through periods of starvation and then there’s a rebound hunger that seems to send people into a tailspin. Yes, what is a better way of doing things? We just get our app and then you’re just… I get rich, I don’t know what happens to the People, I mean, I don’t even know if they have you. Also, did fly here on your private jet? There were so many bags of money I could barely get you here.

[ 00:15:36 ] It’s actually powered by burned money, I mean it’s just it’s insanely inefficient but it’s very very uh… But all kidding aside, one reason why I was really excited to interview you is that there’s a huge divide in what and again, I-I-I don’t mean to alienate you, I don’t mean to alienate you, I don’t mean to alienate the male listener guys, welcome. They’ve been highlighted, you know, men, women, female hormones, male hormones… But one of the reasons why I really wanted you on here is in sincere Appreciation for the fact that there doesn’t need to be this division between, ‘Yes, you look, you know. Jacked not very tan, but you are jacked, and there are core, core fundamental principles that I think will do a lot of great for women, like it will, will create another lot of interpretation and change what you think’s possible for you as well.

[ 00:16:36 ] So, it’s an allow me for a second to kick off a bit more um, and first off, I do want to thank you because I know you did great job out there. Yeah, thank you for the information, thank you both of you for being on our show tonight; their comments really strive to make sense of the type of information that We have when we start talking, oh yeah, and then I want to kind of recap, okay. I do want you to support the other video how we can think about it. You’ve been doing this for a very long time. You’re a PhD in exercise physiology, and I think your nutrition is part of that. I’ve taught as a professor of nutrition. So real underachiever, but realistically, um, yeah, we need to hear it and the women need to hear it.

[ 00:17:10 ] So real quick to your point, there’s kind of, um, bit of an interesting kind of sinusoidal function, like a wave between, um, many social forces trying to say kind of gender is not like a thing or whatever. Everyone’s kind of similar deep down. And then that goes sometimes quite well. And then it comes around and it goes into the extreme territory of like, everyone’s completely different. Like women do not lose fat. Like men, the fucking laws of physics are different, but there’s some nuance between those two points. But I think a lot of times to your point, women are like, they look at how men lose weight. They’re like, that’s not going to work for me. Well, if you just scale the calories, actually, actually will like my husband eats everything and he doesn’t ever gain weight.

[ 00:17:57 ] Like, yeah, but he also works construction and he, he weighs 215 pounds. You weigh 135 and you sit at home and that means you can’t physically eat as much food as him. But relative to what you normally eat, if you eat a few hundred calories less for a few months, you will almost certainly lose weight, improve your health, and improve your overall well-being, so forth. So calories are king. And what I would say is typically cutting somewhere between 250 and maybe 500 at the extreme calories daily from your typical intake is a really good situation to have. And this is just a reduction of food. And that’s the core thing. That core thing being the thing that sort of powers fat loss is also going to explain the mega crazy observation that we see so many different diets working for people.

[ 00:18:44 ] You’ll have, I mean, if you go to the vegan section, you’ll see that there’s like carnivores and vegans. And comment sections yelling at each other. It’s amazing. I always wanted it to be a terrarium, like a, like a combat to the death. You could probably find that up in my kids’ room. Yeah. It’s available there. Kids are quite brutal. And, uh, so they’re like, no veganism works, no carnivorism works. And they both have great blood work after and all this other stuff. And the thing is the calorie deficits, really that thing doing most of the work. And so one thing we try to promote. And kind of evidence-based fitness is, you know, if you’re taking care of your calories, getting that little deficit going and a few other things, a little quality control type of stuff, there’s many ways to get there and you don’t have to be super dogmatic about like, no, it’s only this one.

[ 00:19:28 ] Because there’s. And how do people, um, determine the amount of calories? So there’s Harris-Benedict. There’s so many different equations, online equations. Uh, we know that they’re not totally accurate, but is there one primarily that you like? I don’t like equations. Mostly because I’m too stupid to understand them. I never know what the equal sign means. Can I move things around? You guys know he’s lying. No, but on a serious note, I’m not a big fan of equations because there are a bunch of factors they can’t account for. And people tend to view equations as a very precise thing. So once they get their number, they’re like, well, I’ve been eating 19,00 calories, but I’m not losing weight. What’s wrong? They’re like, what’s the, why is it? Would you get 19,000?

[ 00:20:10 ] And they’re like the Harris Benedict equation or whatever. And I go, that’s nice. That’s actually an estimate that, that varies in accuracy by 700 calories per person up and down. So no big deal. Fuck. Right. So you could be in a surplus deficit. Who knows? All right. So I would say probably the best way to do it is get a feel for your overall diet, do a diet log, just get go my fitness pal and type in for a week, everything you eat. And then it’s just going to tell you how many calories you’re eating and macros, proteins, carbs, fats, and you’re like, ah, okay. And you just take like 350 away from that number and voila, you’re well on your way.

[ 00:20:44 ] Because the actual calories you’re eating, assuming your body weight remains relatively stable, last week or last few weeks, whatever that is, uh, what we would call a completely integrated measurement. It integrates every single aspect, hormones, diet, lifestyle, food choices, digestion, meat, uh, non-exercise activity thermogenesis, the whole thing. It’s the resultant one integrator that says, this is, this is actually the calories you’re eating. And this is keeping your weight stable. If it makes zero assumptions, which is awesome. It’s like, um, it’s like seeing, um, you know, you could have a, an airplane whose average speed is said to be 700 miles per hour. You don’t know if the speedometer works. You just take off time and landing time. You get an average speed, cannot be wrong.

[ 00:21:32 ] As long as the plane flew in a straight line, you started here and you got here. It’s real evidence-based for the individual. So once you have an amount you’re eating, that tells you what you’re eating. And if you’re still, stable at weight at that amount, you can’t be that far off. That’s roughly your maintenance calories. Now that you know, roughly your maintenance calories, she’s got to take a little chunk out of there and kick the diet into gear. What about, um, the macronutrient distribution? How do you think about that? Because obviously you want them to lose fat and is there, have you found you’ve been doing this, uh, just since last year? Um, so very recent. And this is also my first podcast. Yeah, I know. I know. I’m so grateful.

[ 00:22:11 ] How long do you think, or let me ask it in a different way. Can someone just lose body fat or do you think, um, there must be some lean mass lost? Is there a way to do it? Under some conditions you can actually gain lean mass while you lose fat, but the, the condition has to be, you’re pretty new to training, um, or you’re not new to training, but you’re new to significant quantities of anabolic steroids. Um, there are a few other conditions, but generally speaking, when already lean people lose weight, they’re not going to lose weight. They use some combination of fat and muscle when people who aren’t exercised, they haven’t really trained and they haven’t lifted weights much.

[ 00:22:52 ] And their diet is like just whatever they feel like when they start getting a healthy diet, higher in protein, and they start lifting weights, which we covered on your lab, my last appearance here on the show, then they can actually gain muscle and lose fat at the same time for months and months and months and months and months, if not years. But for people who are already pretty lean, or people who already lift weights, um, yeah, there’s going to be some combination of muscle and fat. Now, how would you define pretty lean? So let’s say someone was, um, an overweight female who is now consuming 1,800 calories for two weeks. She has determined what her maintenance calorie is. Let’s say it’s 1,800 and she decides to decrease her calories by 350, 500.

[ 00:23:42 ] So she’s eating what is that? Um, 1,300 calories. Okay. Um, do you account for activity or that’s the number? The activity question is a little bit of a different question. Okay. Well then I, I shouldn’t go there yet. Sure. Sure. We can, we can definitely handle it whenever you like. Um, so how do we determine who’s fat or not fat? Who’s lean? I’d say the easiest test in the real world is like someone’s wearing clothes and you just come up to someone else. You’re like, ‘Is she fat? Or not?’ This is really straightforward. If you at least look like an up and down shape, you’re good. If there’s stuff coming off the sides and the front and the back and the, the whole thing, you’re fat.

[ 00:24:22 ] Now it’s ruthlessly unscientific and quite discourteous to say to someone, ‘You would never tell someone something like that,’ but it’s one of those things. You look at documentaries in the 1950s. How many people were fat? None. But how do you know? I mean, they’re just clothes, right? That’s it. But, but yeah, that’s what I mean by generally lean. Like no one would, no one would look at you and be like, ‘That’s definitely a fat person.’ Right? So if we like, take a little walk, no offense, Houston, Texas, the ‘fatometer’ is going to be at the grocery store, like ‘fat’, ‘fat’, ‘fat’, ‘fat’. I mean, are you sure you don’t think that 600-pound ladies mostly lean body mass? No. Yes. I would, I would not say that.

[ 00:24:54 ] So people who are generally like, uh, close enough within 15 pounds of their insurance table adjusted body weight, you can consider them fairly lean. And without some rigorous weight training and very perfectionist diet, they’re going to typically experience significant amount of muscle loss. People who are significantly more overweight may, uh, lose less muscle, but also a lot of that is because they start being more physically active as they lose the weight. So that’s a big deal as well. If both groups of people start weight training, when they start losing weight, then they just build muscle and lose fat at the same time. And that’s a really, really big deal. As a matter of fact, on that note of weight loss, if you don’t lift weights and you start losing weight, you do lose significant amounts of muscle.

[ 00:25:36 ] And it doesn’t actually matter where your protein is. We think, I mean, yes, protein has a protein sparing effect, but without activity, without, without muscular specific training to get more jacked, it’s actually protein doesn’t have a terribly protein sparing effect. That’s right. You can’t like eat 300 grams of protein up to like getting jacked. If you don’t lift weights, it actually just gets burned and excreted and all that whole thing. So you’re totally correct about that. So, it, it, the lifting weights thing does matter, but a little while back, um, one of the new anorectic drugs, Ozempic. Um, I think it was, I think it was, I think it was, I think it was, I got a little bit of hot water because people were like, oh, like it’s causing people lots of muscle mass loss.

[ 00:26:15 ] It was true, but it was no more muscle mass loss than you would expect with people who lost like 50 fucking pounds in a year. That’s just going to be a lot of muscle loss. It’s not especially a thing that GLP ones even do. And there’s actually a new review that came out. There was like exactly what we would expect if you just lost a lot of weight. The thing is those people never lost that much muscle because they never lost that much weight because the thing is that, and I’ve got all sorts of great things to say about the anorectic drugs, whenever they do have a big role to play in all this. I agree.

[ 00:26:40 ] I want to, so I want to, um, finish covering the macronutrients, how you would dose dietary protein, how you would think about dosing carbohydrates and how you would dose fat. And if there is a particular distribution that you would use, I am coming to you, Dr. Mike, and I want to lose weight from where in any case, let’s pretend you’re just enormous, like not just overweight, but like offensively enormous. Are you pretending, um, right now? Oh yeah. Well, I was looking at crystal. Stop checking out my wife. I mean, she’s the best by the way. Um, she is going to be a, another podcast guest here. Thank you, Andrew Coates. I now put two and two together. So there are two ways to go about it for macros.

[ 00:27:31 ] One way is to use the expanded fitness approach, which includes macros that are not ultra specific because the people who are using this, they want a diet that they can easily do. It does not require a huge departure from normal eating habits for those people. I would say take your body weight in pounds and multiply it by like 0. 6, 60%. So, if you weigh 200 pounds, anything at close to at, or over 120 grams of protein, per day is more than enough to provide a great amount of protein for almost every need that you have. So wait, so say that again. So it’s 60% of your body weight. So instead of a gram per pound, it’s 0 . 6 grams per pound for someone who’s wanting to lose weight.

[ 00:28:24 ] Correct. And that is more than enough protein to meet all of your needs. If you begin to resist his train, it’s more than enough protein for most people’s goals. It’ll largely prevent muscle mass loss and a actually get some accretion going. So that’s really good stuff. And is that roughly an average? Is that a 1. 6 grams per kg is that how that? I don’t know, okay, okay, okay. I’m in America, damn. We are okay, well we’re in Texas, so I don’t know. You never know. That belongs to America. Don’t mess with Texas, man. Um, 0. 6% of your body weight, yeah, in pounds right, which is not a lot. And so, but that’s the scientifically honest answer to how much protein we probably really need, with a capital N, especially people that aren’t like trying to optimize hardcore.

[ 00:29:16 ] That’s an important point if you’re not necessarily fully trying to optimize, you just want to dip your toe in and get some great results, that’s totally cool because a lot of people get the gram per pound thing which is what I use if the number I’m going to say next, that’s the optimization number. So if you weigh 200 pounds it’s roughly 200 grams of protein a day, but even if they’re trying to lose, if they’re trying to lose weight from 200, you would still say meet the 200 or would you say meet their goal body weight? Um, there’s a few ways to go about that. One is a protein has a decent anti-hunger effect and so if you actually eat 200 even though you don’t need it, it can be pretty decent.

[ 00:29:53 ] Um, the goal body weight is totally fine; you can scale it to lean body mass which also works just fine, yeah, you don’t have to get your body measured who knows, yeah. So you’re saying that there are multiple ways to do something right for sure, but any answer between taking your body weight and multiplying it by pretty close to half. 6 all the way up to a gram per pound per day is a lot of really good answers in there, yeah, and it’s nothing is if someone was sitting next to me on the airplane first of all it would be highly inconvenient because my arms I mean you just i feel bad for that person, you’re just kind of on their seat, you know.

[ 00:30:28 ] I tried, I really, I tried, get the seat belt going and I put my hands in it; I really try to stay out of people’s ways. I did not pay for that side of the seat but um if they told me, listen, you know, like I weigh 200 pounds and I’m really trying to get fit, I have like 160 grams of protein a day-is that like too little? Absolutely not; you’re doing great. Now if you want to step on stage Mr. Olympia, you might have a different goal if you want your optimized super physique, you’re already lean and jacked, you might need more protein if you’re significantly older et cetera et cetera et cetera; you might need more but for most people, especially like the our hypothetical female audience uh for this podcast point six all the way to a gram a dollar is totally fine so that’s for protein.

[ 00:31:07 ] Do you care the kind of protein? If you go to get your protein in a really wacky way, yes. If you eat mostly lean uh meat animal products and lean vegan products that are complete protein sources and complementary, no big deal. But if you’re counting mostly protein from bread and just peas by themselves, you’re going to run into some problems. Yeah, so protein quality is a thing that’s actually in a later part of the discussion of like when it comes from vegan food. I’ve been trying it in context, yeah, really, I’m very excited about it. Sometimes I’ve had protein, protein for like 9 to 9 or something. I’m like, I’ve had it for six hours so now I’m like, ‘oh shucks yeah.

[ 00:31:35 ] Was a great question for carbs and fats, there is a very distinct story for athletic performance and optimization of hypertrophy, and all this stuff. And that story is kind of like meet your needs for fats, and then the rest should probably come more from carbohydrates than fat. What is the need? What is the needs for fat? So, from what I understand, for males, and probably on females as well, you just generally have two classes of need: one is the essential fatty acids, of which you need like a total of two grams per day-that’s what you need need to like stay alive and well. And then there is a need that comes from hormone optimization, testosterone, etc and that number is significantly higher; that number is measured more in the 20 to 30 to 40 percent of your calories per day.

[ 00:32:20 ] Many people can do a broad range of that; some people really prefer one or the other. Another consideration for how many fats you eat is this: it’s kind of the main point of the carbs versus fats-if you’re just trying to lose some goddamn weight and get a little leaner, and get a little healthier, maybe a lot leaner and healthier; how much carbohydrate versus fat you have as long as you’re meeting that technically speaking two grams of EPA and DHA fats per day. The rest is down to very, very nuanced specifics. It just doesn’t matter that much, so if someone says, ‘You know I have 20 grams total of fat per day, but I do have a central fat supplement; I feel great, best time of my life.

[ 00:33:01 ] All of veggies, eat I love it, I’m losing weight, you won’t hear me say a damn thing.’ But if someone says, ‘Look, I’m trying to low-low-fat high-carb,’ Mr. Twinkie that’s what I call him; there’s a reference to my genitals by the way. Oh, I have no idea; it doesn’t work anymore, I you have like totally lost interest to live; I’m depressed all the time, like okay, you’re eating too few fats, your testosterone’s in the gutter; you need to eat more fats, but a big one is preference and what works. In your daily diet, so if you’re the kind of person that likes salmon and steak, whole eggs which are great healthy foods, you should probably a little bit fewer carbohydrates and more fats.

[ 00:33:46 ] Same calories, protein is already squared away, but more fats, fewer carbs. If you’re the kind of protein, the kind of protein, the kind of person that’s super cool with higher carb, you’re not really into fats, nothing in your diet really you don’t crave fats, you can dunk the fats pretty low and keep that carbs much higher, but for carbs, the low end is considered something like, oh I don’t know, 10 to 30 grams of carbs per day, predominantly from green Vegetables because they have a lot of fiber and nutrients in them, very low that’s low. I wouldn’t recommend that as a first principles thing, but there are a lot of keto people and carnivore people eating that and a little less.

[ 00:34:27 ] At least in the medium term, they get lean; they’re very healthy; they love their life; they’re very healthy; they’re very healthy; they’re very healthy; they’re lifestyle and all as well. So there’s a big broad range of carbs and fats as long as the calories are held constant, you got your protein squared away, plus or minus. Carbs and fats is mostly um, try it, see how you feel best, some. People fat, give them a lot of fullness through the day. Are you are you a higher fat or higher carb person? I haven’t, I haven’t eaten to preference in a generation; interesting, what is your decided curiosity? I’m currently on about uh 25 grams of fat per day. Okay, so you’re a lower fat person.

[ 00:35:04 ] I mean, I’m not because I hate it, but I have to do it for bodybuilding. But I’m not the demographic for this talk, holy cow! But it’s interesting; you might not be the demographic for this talk, but I’m telling you that I’ve been doing this for a long time, and the knowledge that your demographic has for body composition is second to none. Yeah, no, like the bodybuilders kind of figured out how this all works, but, um, that’s a great point. The thing is that, like, if you want to learn how to teach your 16-year-old how to drive, you don’t need Mario Andretti to come teach him how to drive; you don’t need an F1 legend. You need someone he would listen but he would listen more because there’s nothing he’s not going to be able to teach you exactly.

[ 00:35:52 ] If you tell him, ‘Hey, I have these ideas about how to drive; are they right or wrong?’ He can definitely be like, ‘That’s wrong,’ ‘That’s right here you go, so for sure, and it’s good to hear from someone who’s unequivocally doing the thing, you know, um, the cool thing about bodybuilders is like you see their glutes they’re all striated and stuff and you’re like these people have to know something about getting lean yes absolutely they do a ton now some of them just know their way that works and there’s this plethora of ways that aren’t that way but work great some of them can’t speak to that luckily i went to school for the last like it’s for like uh forever forever uh carbohydrates so your fat is very low your fat’s 25 grams a day which is which is low what about i mean i guess low

[ 00:36:32 ] what is your carbohydrates like uh anywhere between three and four hundred depending on the day And protein, three, and four hundred, between three, and four hundred, uh, 250-ish, okay, what a great split! I do better on something like that myself. No way, do you there you go, I do, and you feel good about it because I, I feel terrible. Oh, you do. Oh my god, yeah. Oh my god, you’re doing great in this podcast, thank you. How wait, how far into dieting are you? I’m like uh, how you count it. This is like either my 12th week of dieting but if you take out like a three or four week diet break it’s like my 30 something week, something like that. And would the and why so you died for?

[ 00:37:14 ] How long before a show, it depends generally between 12 and 24 weeks and between 12 and 24 weeks, and you have a show coming up, obviously, a few, okay, so um, but this is now a way; no, it’s not okay, God, no, no, this is a way of death, but uh, it feels like death, but um, that’s the kind of extreme stuff. Now I’m, I’m happy to hear that you have a really good fit for you and what works with lower fats and higher carbs and that’s awesome. But what we have to be aware of is some people have a completely different experience; when they say keto works really well for them or they just have a few veggies a day and everything else is like fatty meats, and it’s great; they’re speaking some personal truth that’s real; their blood work looks great.

[ 00:38:05 ] It works for them, results-wise, and because calorie balance, protein essential fats, and some healthy carbs have been taken care of, the rest is just um, it’s just not super consequential for their general goals, and if they like it and they can maintain it, that’s a big deal, so we want to be as inclusive as possible. I think. Let me ask you this: how long did it take you to get to this? So, how long have you been doing this? How long have you been going through uh cyclical dieting, dieting for a show, all of that stuff? How many years? I’ve been competing in bodybuilding since 2013, so I would make it 11 years. But I was doing some kind of diet modification.

[ 00:38:43 ] Most of my life since I was about um 17 or 18 years old, how long did it take you to figure out this iteration? How long have you been doing this iteration for you? Because I’m guessing you know exactly what you need to do to get to where you want to go. You don’t know no each time uh you learn more each time. This new iteration is about three weeks old uh and because I just hired a coach Mr. Jared Feather, he’s my colleague, he’s an IFB pro and one of the best coaches in the world um and so uh I gave him the reins at least to some extent and so this is the diet that we agreed on that we’re going to try and it’s working super well, it does not mean I like It doesn’t mean it’s so interesting, um, and I guess for the listener, I’m asking this because likely on how you do things, diets work in different ways at different times, and what did you do?

[ 00:39:37 ] Your last show was what, last July? Now I have so much more; I’m I feel very uh sensitive and protective because I didn’t realize that maybe so. I have done shows in the past, and when you are dieting um, the fact that you’re sitting here and smiling mostly um, my resting Russian bitch face is amazing it is amazing it is oh man! When I was dining for shows, I just don’t even talk to me; everything felt like a lot of work. I definitely feel like that. Wow, um, I have a hell of a facade. You’re doing great, doing great, um. The iteration before this, what kind of nutrition were you doing and I guess like peak week and all that stuff is different, different.

[ 00:40:24 ] I was eating fewer calories on average, okay, and I was exercising more and I was uh, had significantly more work and life stress, and that broke me down completely. Um, since I have to pull my wife back away from burning into the sun, Icarus style, also we’re both kind of workaholic and sane people. She tried to do a similar version under my tutelage, of course, and she got to her all-time best shape but she gained back like pounds of muscle. Afterwards, because we had lost pounds, we shouldn’t have been losing so essentially went too extreme this time; it’s less extreme about it. So when I was hitting six years and getting stronger and I finished my eight twenties, a bunch of fat, I’ve lost six of them and so I think my rebellion process is

[ 00:41:14 ] that’s interesting. Um what that’s interesting is like books are spray toughest like he’s like ‘Yeah’ but I’ve been through so much pain-free talking love them Judaism. I haven’t male everyone infuriated me sometimes so that’s been a challenge for me because having money, you know it’s something for sure doesn’t I get I get really-Up until the point where pushing harder exceeds your body and brain’s various abilities to recover. Believe it or not, it was technically a postulate that I came up with called maximum recoverable volume a few years back. And I just didn’t listen to myself because mostly what I was doing is kind of feeling my way through stuff. And I told myself, you know, if putting the best physique of mine on stage is something I want to do, I’m just going to crank the willpower to a thousand and just go-just less food, more training.

[ 00:42:00 ] I don’t give a, I don’t care how I feel. It doesn’t matter. And, uh, that turns out that the body hates it. And when the body hates something, uh, to quote one of my mentors, Broderick, uh, Chavez: stress is the great killer of physiques. And it turns out that when you have your best exotic physique, it’s when you do the deficit and you take all the fun supplements and you train really hard, but you don’t go overboard and you take care, and you as little stress as possible. Now I can’t honestly tell you I have as little stress as possible, but less, much less. And that’s been a huge difference maker. And one of the big de-stressors has been getting a coach because now that Jared’s my coach, I don’t have to second-guess myself all the time.

[ 00:42:43 ] Jared sets the plan. We confirm the plan that I do the plan and I’m really good about shutting up and doing the plan, but I’ve never had a coach before. So it’s been really great. So de-stressing is a big part. Now that’s like for exotic pursuits. I don’t know. Do you think so? Or do you think that. That is probably really helpful for anybody because I don’t know, calories in calories out, whether there’s a hormonal influence, there’s many things that influence exactly what you said. Calories in calories out, whether again, there’s a million things that can influence that stress eating. Yes. That’s the thing. Yes. And getting the protein, carbohydrates, fats correct outside of nutrition. And we didn’t talk about alcohol. So. Where does that fall in for someone who’s trying to lose weight?

[ 00:43:34 ] Do you want me to tangent off that now? No, no, no. I’m just curious. So is that. Is that in the plan? Is that in the plan? Is that. So it is. Alcohol has somewhere between the calories per gram between fats and carbs. And that means it’s got plenty of calories per gram. And if you calculate it into your daily calories, it’s fine. Alcohol. Preferentially. Preferentially makes it difficult for you to build and retain muscle tissue. Why is that? Oh my God. There’s like 80 reasons. Poison. Yeah. Yeah. There’s that. And it alters your hormonal profile to be more estrogen, less testosterone. It screws up your sleep. There’s like 10 things. So there’s lots of reasons why someone should drink that. Yeah. Alcohol.

[ 00:44:17 ] The biggest problem with alcohol and dieting that I’ve seen with real humans in the world is that one margarita in. You just got your margarita for the day, and you’re good to margaritas and you’re like, dude, screw all this. Who gives a shit past the chips and salsa? A matter of fact, let’s get some queso on this table and get a party going. The hypocaloric condition, the condition of being a little bit hungry is not one the body likes, but you can use your prefrontal cortex and your willpower and your ability to be inhibited, not disinhibited. So just carry through, eat what I’m supposed to go to sleep when you get a lot of alcohol in the mix.

[ 00:44:57 ] A lot of folks will find that they don’t give a shit anymore, which is nice, super big stress reliever in the, in the moment, huge anxiety reliever. But then you wake up covered in Oreos and you’re like, right. I was in a diet. That was a bad idea. So if you can manage your alcohol intake, have a little glass of wine at night, it factors into the calories. So someone could lose weight. Oh yeah. All the time. Happens all the time. I mean, Italy exists. They’re all skinny and they pretty sure the alcohol and red wine and cigarettes is all they consume. Do you care if someone comes to you? And says, okay, I’m doing the calories, I’m eating my, um, 60% body weight protein. I’m getting my essential fatty acids.

[ 00:45:38 ] We’re preferentially deciding whether it’s carbohydrates or fats. Do you care where activity is? If you say this is what you should do, is it even, um, cookie cutter enough? Could we say, these are the things that you need to do? To lose weight, potentially everything is over-complicating it. Some people have a response to eating fewer calories that makes their involuntary proclivity to move, for example, or it, it reduces substantially for other people. It’s moderately for some people, it’s really not a thing, but for most people, it’s going to be some effect for some people quite large. So let’s say, you know, your friend Stacey from college calls you remember Stacey, she was great, and she’s like, ‘Oh my God, let’s catch up.’ Hi. You’re like, ‘Okay,’ hi.

[ 00:46:33 ] Do you sit on the couch and talk to Stacey or do you pop in your earbuds and you sort of walk around the walk around the block? People typically who are not starving, not on hypocaloric restricted diets, there is a high percentage chance. They’re going to choose walking and then they’re going to burn like, oh, I don’t know, 300 calories during that hour of yapping to Stacey. Big deal. When some people begin to lower their calories, their body’s like, do you want to sit down? Some people are all people, some people much worse than others, and this reduction in non-exercise activity thermogenesis, which is unplanned, is a big deal because it can chunk away a lot of calories.

[ 00:47:15 ] And then all of a sudden you thought you were in a deficit, but your body basically brought you back to maintenance by reducing your physical activity to such a huge capacity. So I think one of the best real-world modern ways to obviate this is to get you a step tracker, just like the one I’m wearing from insert Chinese company name here]. And um, you just peg your steps to whatever they used to be before you started dieting or something like eight to 11,000 steps a day, and there’s caveats there. There’s nuance. Yes. 10K steps. This is a rough, rough, really good indicator. And that step tracker can remind you that like, oh yeah, I’m on a diet. I don’t want to walk, but I have 6,000 steps.

[ 00:47:58 ] Like we’ll come out of our respective offices halfway through the night or something. My wife and I, I’m like, baby, how many steps you got? And she’s like seven thousand and I’m like, all right, let’s go walk and we’ll go walk. If you don’t have anything telling you that you’re just like, bam, I’m beat. And you sit down and then you don’t lose weight because your body told you to stop moving and you’re still on your quote unquote deficit calories. But now your deficit is maintenance, because your body doesn’t like to lose weight, likes to gain weight. You’re not eating enough. So it’ll tell you to slow down. Sometimes that’s a big deal.

[ 00:48:26 ] So pegging your activity, 10,000 steps is what I would call a moderate high level. Moderate high means that it’s challenging and it’s a thing and it’s to get to 10,000 steps. Like yeah. Uh, to get to it every day, getting to it once is easy. Getting to it on average all the time. I agree with that. That’s why I have a walking treadmill desk over there. Yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah. I saw that. And, um, and a refrigerator. It’s from the 1950s. Isn’t that cute? It’s adorable. Um, it was actually in the waiting room, but, uh, I have that massive crystal, the Crystal of Negativity. It sucks all that negative energy. Oh, nice. I felt it sucked my negative energy away. Yeah. I know.

[ 00:49:08 ] So, uh, don’t tell anybody, but we moved the 1950s, uh, fridge in here cause I thought it was so cute. Excellent. It is adorable. So, um, basically if you have that moderate high level of physical activity. That means you’re never dipping down into really, really low levels of activity that would result in you just weight loss, but stop or slow down substantially. But it’s not really high levels of physical activity, which you don’t want very correct. Um, they are high levels of physical activity or caloric deficit end up accumulating a lot of fatigue for you and they just become unsustainable because you feel so tired and your body’s a very, very, very good at doing that. Yeah. So if you’re like, yeah, I’m just going to eat whatever I eat normally, but I’m really going to exercise super hard.

[ 00:49:57 ] Your body goes, okay, gotcha. So when you’re not on the treadmill and you’re not on the bike, I’m going to sit your ass on the couch and you’re going to fucking burn zero calories. Stacy’s going to call and you’re going to look at the phone and you’re like, ‘fuck that.’ I’m not talking to Stacy. That bitch. Yeah. I don’t have time for that shit. Yeah. Just like that. And then it’ll do that for you. So with the ROI on a lot of physical activity goes like that real quick, but at a moderate, it’s kind of like, uh, don’t do that. It’s like turning your furnace onto like, like simmer, just simmering your body enough physical activity to do all the good things, but it’s not super challenging.

[ 00:50:31 ] And then you take the deficit, you create it in the diet, it takes some food away. And then that slow burn weeks and weeks and weeks of fat loss, it’s probably the best way to go about it. You can do totally normal levels of physical activity, but then often you have to reduce the intake so much that you become really hungry and really crabby and really food-focused. So, with a moderate level of physical activity, not only do you have like plenty of food to eat, but also that moderate level of physical activity, especially if it’s with a step tracker, you can get a lot of stuff done. I mean, you have kids chasing your kids around shit. That’s 20,000 steps right there. 30. Here’s another thing about step trackers is so, so amazing.

[ 00:51:05 ] If you have like pre-prescribed cardio, like 45 minutes on treadmill, five days a week, that’s dope. Nothing wrong with that. If you do your 45 minutes. You know that 50% of Americans don’t, don’t exercise at all. Oh yeah. That’s surprising. It’s that low. 75% don’t meet both recommendations. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So that’s just what I count. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. It’s also not surprising if you go look at how people look and act. Yeah. Um, so if, if you have your 45 minutes on treadmill checked off and your husband’s like, ‘Hey honey, I’m gonna grow a grocery store.’ You want to come along? If you’re tired and you’re hungry, you’re like, ‘I’m good, man. Thank you.’ Give me some Oreos.

[ 00:51:37 ] And he’s like, ‘okay, no, but great.’ But if you have a step tracker, you know, the girls only at 7,000 steps, I need three thousand more. Hey, if I go to the grocery store, I checked the list off. I do some fucking shopping and I had to go; I went to Target. Because I’m a Caucasian woman, and that’s where I belong. You guys listening to this? You have to know Mike; he’s hysterical, and he’s fully being sarcastic right now. You don’t have to know anything. Am I really being sarcastic? Have you ever been to a Target? Yes. Many times. Have you ever seen any white women in there? Yes. So, you can like, be like, ‘Oh my God, I can do all these things.’ Uh, and it all counts towards your steps.

[ 00:52:13 ] So, there’s no longer this fight between, ‘Oh, I have to do this cardio,’ but then there’s the rest of my life. You have a step tracker. It takes care of everything. But you’re talking steps. Do you care about the intensity of the training? Okay. Basically. Okay. So we’ve gotten that, so we’re talking about moderate weight loss. We are not talking about, or are we? Any weight loss is just a matter of physical activity and steps are a really good way to measure physical activity. Not the only way, but good. We’re talking about weight loss. We’re not talking about fat loss while preserving as much muscle as possible. See, that’s what I want to talk about. I want to talk about fat loss. Sure. Sure. Let’s get through weight loss real quick.

[ 00:52:49 ] Okay. Okay. So weight loss modifications are super, super easy. Right. So we got the macros pretty well dialed in. We got the calories dialed in. The next question is a question probably of either nutrient timing or food composition. And food composition is actually really important, especially for this sort of podcast that we’re doing now. And it’s kind of like, okay, I know I need proteins. Only my mom is going to listen to this. So we’re good. Mom. Hello. Shalom. Yes. She’d be very excited. Great. Yeah. Yeah. And so proteins, carbs, and fats, believe it or not, you can’t just buy at the store. They don’t exist. They come in foods. So your next question is, well, what kind of foods do I eat?

[ 00:53:28 ] For a variety of reasons, providing enough nutrients, avoiding a bunch of weird junk foods that aren’t so healthy for you, providing you with a lot of satiety, like filling you up, giving you lots of energy, generally the best overall categories to choose from are lean protein sources. Meat and milks and all kinds of poultry and fish, no wrong answers, egg whites, skin milk, etcetera. Then from carbs, you have veggies, fruits, and whole grains, roughly in that order. So if you’re like, I’m going to- Veggies, fruits, whole grains. Veggies, fruits, whole grains. So if you’re like, I’m in very low carbs, most veggies, and pretty low carbs, veggies and fruits. I’m on a decent amount of carbs, veggies, fruits, whole grains. And then for fats, healthy fat sources, which are typically plant fats, like olive oil, canola oil, avocado, anything.

[ 00:54:17 ] Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, nuts, any kind of nut butter. Those largely unprocessed, mostly whole food sources are the ones that are going to check all those boxes. And they’re probably the best thing to eat most of the time. That doesn’t mean it’s some kind of shibboleth and you can never violate it. You can eat some junk here and there, no big deal. But if more or less 75% of your average intake per day comes from really solid foods, just like that, you’re good. Yeah. And I do submit, I have a sort of a hunch slash hypothesis. I think most people, more or less, regardless of education level, know what healthy food is and what it’s not.

[ 00:54:59 ] There’s not really a part of America you can come to and you give them a picture of a plate has like, you know, a brown rice, a little salmon cut, some veggies and stuff, a little orange slices, and then like a fucking cheeseburger with some chips on it. Like, which one of these is healthier? Who are you going to get to say ‘cheeseburger’? Nobody. Nobody. And by nobody, I mean one out of a hundred people is going to be just trolling you in regards to that. Let me get out of here. People know what healthy food is. Mostly unprocessed foods that are lean protein sources, veggies, fruits, whole grains, and healthy fats. If you choose most of your foods from there, you’re super, super winning at life.

[ 00:55:32 ] And your, your nutritional value is up because they have vitamins and minerals and fiber and fiber chemicals and all that great stuff. And also, they keep you quite satiated because someone’s like, ‘all right, you get a free meal’. Get the f**k out of here, all right! I can’t wait. But it’s got to be lean meats. Veggies and fruits go. You’re like, really? Yeah. You know, you’re going to crow. You get some lean turkey, you get some broccoli florets, and you get a couple orange slices and you’re like, this sucks. This is not what I had in mind. And if someone said no rules, you would just go over physically to Ben and Jerry’s house. I assume they live together and you would just start to interrogate them: ‘Where is the ice cream?

[ 00:56:08 ] You motherf**kers! I want to know where it is.’ And you just eat as much as you can; you pass out. So it’s really, really helpful from a satiety angle and the health angle to know, because if you look at calorie balance and isolation, say I’m at 2,000 right now, I need 1,500 fine. If you get it from junk food sources, then what ends up happening is a lot of them are ultra palatable. They’re just really tasty. Um, and it’s not up for debate. It’s, uh, it’s, uh, hugely like engineered. It’s engineered. It’s engineered, but it’s engineered by people who can only make money if you buy their candy again. And people just generally, most people have just one metric.

[ 00:56:47 ] And how they buy food is it, is it tasty and maybe the price, but usually not even not in today’s world where food is insanely abundant, super cheap. So most junk foods are designed to be fucking delicious. And the way our biology has been designed by evolution that correlates really well to have a lot of calories in them. And now, uh, food industry companies would really take a real good swing at making food that was ultra delicious, but very low in calories. Yeah. If like a huge fraction of people gave a shit about the calories, but they don’t. So the food industry is like, fuck it, put all the calories in there. They don’t care. Um, and so a lot of people will say, oh, 2000 calories, 1500. I’m starving.

[ 00:57:32 ] Then I have half of my Reese’s cup every day. Oh my God. Do you have every day? I have to, I’m kidding. I’m totally kidding. That would, that would drive me insane because you could only have half. Well, even one would drive me insane. I’m at this point. Five would drive me insane. Because I can. Eat like 50. If you really put me down to it, this is, you know, I do have weird lines across my glutes and veins in there. So my body’s like, please, God, give me fat. I’m dying. So when people don’t have those healthy food categories and really look at their food palatability, making sure not to eat the junky, super tasty, super caloric foods all the time, they end up having a really good time with their diets because they feel full all the time.

[ 00:58:10 ] They feel energized. It feels great. But if they have just the calories they’re looking at and they’re still trying to eat junk and fill in the lines with junk. Then it’s really tough because junk makes you want to eat more junk. Like, you never give someone a Cheetos bag and you’re like, would you like one Cheeto? Now, to be completely frank, there’s a bit of a spectrum with dieting. There are abstainers and moderators. Abstainers are people who are like, nah, get that nonsense away from me. I’m sticking to my clean food. Moderators are people like, if I have a few cookies, I’m totally fine. And that’s something you have to experiment with yourself. But what I would say is, which one are you an abstainer? Uh, it depends on the person.

[ 00:58:46 ] It depends on how hard I’m dieting and how lean I am. Everyone starts out a moderator and everyone ends up being an abstainer. If you push it hard enough. Do you think everyone should try that at least once? Just out of curiosity, like a gnarly fat loss diet to see what their body’s capable. I know it’s like kind of a crazy question, but it is. That’s a good question. I would say it’s something like a question you would ask: should someone try to train for a marathon? Uh, should everyone train for a marathon once in their lives? Um, I’d say you, you should really kind of figure out what you want out of it and really be purpose driven, but the things you want out of it really need to make sense to you.

[ 00:59:25 ] I think that if you do a fat loss diet, that’s really extreme. You can get a lot of insight into the human condition. You get a lot of insight into yourself. It’s an unreal journey that tests you, but there are a lot of other journeys that can test you and have a really cool thing at the end of it versus just, you look like you have like a sunken in face and people ask you if you’re sick. Why do you do this? Why do you do it? Oh, me personally. Yeah. Uh, like trying to get lean and jacked. I mean, I know that we’re, we’re talking about for the listener weight loss and you promised me that we’re going to circle back to fat loss, but why I am curious about why you are putting yourself through this.

[ 01:00:00 ] Uh, that’s a good question. Art art, because when I’m in my, uh, gym at home, actually any gym, this is a bit of a problem. Pull up the shorts a little bit, the quads going, get a little chest tricep pump, maybe a huge chest tricep pump. It’s flexing like this cross ratios everywhere. There’s something, and it’s not for anyone else. It’s just for me. Yeah. And, uh, it’s a personal satisfaction. Yeah. It’s like making a sculpture for a real long time and like kids run up to it. Don’t touch that. Uh, that’s how I view my body. Um, it’s, it’s just cool to be able to make something a little better and a little better and a little better.

[ 01:00:38 ] Um, if you told me tomorrow, I could have the body of my dreams by pressing a button, I’d be like, eh, maybe in a year or two, I’d press that button, but I’m still on this. It’s really mega journey. And so for me, it’s the journey. It’s just, it’s pure artistic expression. It’s totally pointless. I can assure you and is insanely stressful and probably not worth my time in any objective sense. But, but it’s amazing. You know, we had, um, do you know who just, uh, Justin Gatlin is? He’s yes. A former Olympic sprinter. Yeah. And so he was on the podcast, uh, last week. No, we did not. But, um, one of the things that we talked about, it was about the process. Yes. I think I actually saw that.

[ 01:01:14 ] You know what you’re talking about? Is. The process. I feel very grateful that I get to speak with many people who are truly the trailblazers. They trailblaze in life, but they, they trailblaze for themselves, and there are continuous things that they all seem to say. Yeah, that’s the kind of stuff that things people always seem to say when they’re successful and when they’ve surmounted challenges. That’s the kind of stuff you can really learn from a hardcore fat loss diet, but this is not the only place you can learn. You can learn that from having a few children and trying to raise them. I mean, the motherfuckers push you way more on the fat loss than that girl, that shit is easy. That’s a Tuesday.

[ 01:01:52 ] You get three, two, three year olds and you’re like, ‘I don’t know what the hell’s going on.’ Uh, trying to get really good at your career, trying to push any hobby super far forward. Um, of course, you know, like military folks, it’s a whole different ball game. And that’s like, that’s the same kind of like quest for maybe not perfectionism, but quest for becoming damn good at the art. Um, and that is a thing that that journey of difficulty and sacrifice can teach you a ton of stuff about yourself, et cetera. So I wouldn’t recommend everyone tries to get lean, but I would recommend that many people can probably do with a bit of difficulty in their lives for a prolonged period, a period that results in something being made.

[ 01:02:35 ] Like my wife, I got to watch her go through medical school and then residency and then fellowship. And the ship broke her front to back, but God damn, did she come out hard as f***? Isn’t that amazing? And that’s like, you can’t come out hard as f*** unless you suffer for a long time. And so fat loss dining is a category of that, but it’s a bit of an arbitrary category. Most people who if you’re lean and healthy, you don’t need to like see your glutes do fluttering butterfly things in order to get some kind of meaning from life. Although if you’re really a foodie, if you get lean enough, food takes on a qualitative taste that you never thought was possible.

[ 01:03:09 ] And also maybe even this idea of, um, taking away the thing that drives you or you are addicted to, and if it’s something like food, then you put in to place the challenge, whether it’s a physical challenge, whether it’s a fat loss challenge that you felt like you could never do. And actually, quite frankly, you can’t. Yeah. And they can teach you how hard things are and can teach you that you’re more empowered than you thought because you were successful with it. Yeah. I just think it’s, it’s valuable, but, um, fat loss, fat loss. Okay. So, um, we got calories, we got macros. Roughly. Roughly, we have food composition, just a few more categories, timing, very, very small one. I can talk about the nuances of timing, Tom blue in the face.

[ 01:03:53 ] We have a whole book at RP has massive chapter about theoretical timing, but basically if you eat anywhere between, to be honest, for, for the average person that just wants to lose some pounds and get in better shape, anywhere between two and five plus meals per day is totally fine. Two meals a day can get you into really, really great shape. You want to step on stage. You want to have your best look. It’s probably like four meals is the answer for five or six, but two meals and above is totally workable. And the timing doesn’t matter much. If you want to conserve as much muscle as possible, which we’ll talk about just a little bit, even timing is probably best.

[ 01:04:31 ] Don’t go like nine hours without eating and then eat, you know, one hour, one hour, one hour ago to sleep. But for most people just trying to lose weight and get healthier, the timing doesn’t much matter. You probably want to eat in such a way that gives you energy throughout the day and also eat in such a way that you could have good sleep, fall asleep at night and not have like, you know, um, gastroesophageal reflux disorder waking you up. So that’s really all there is to say about timing, unless you have any specific questions on that. It’s not really exciting. I think that that’s, that’s well said supplements. Yes, that was, I’m so glad you brought that up. Yeah. So there are some supplements you may be interested in taking during weight loss journey.

[ 01:05:12 ] There’s a little bit of an insurance policy, magnesium, zinc, vitamin D, a multivitamin, multi-mineral, maybe a greens powder, maybe not, maybe a fruits powder, maybe not, maybe some healthy fat supplements, maybe not. And those just make sure everything’s squared away and working fine. And it probably is anyway for eating mostly healthy diet, but these are things that are like super, super minor that you can do. It’s the very least of multivitamin, multi-mineral every day, probably a good thing as far as supplements that really last. And what kind of supplements? I think that the ones that have like, have a wallop effect after that, they don’t exist. Stimulants are okay, but. And what kind? Like a Yohimbe, FEDRA. FEDRA, damn girl, back in the nineties. Is that even legal anymore?

[ 01:05:59 ] I don’t think so. I don’t know. And guys, we’re not saying to take it. I am purely picking Dr. Mike’s brain. So before you guys get excited, please understand. You picked right to the Fedra. So. I mean, you did say stimulants. I did. Okay. I probably should have gone to coffee. Coffee, yeah right, stimulants. I would say that’s kind of like a really uh pretty gnarly sword, like a powerful sword, but there’s no handle; you just grab the sword and bleed right into it, and some people have really calloused hands; they do just fine. Some people think that doesn’t work what kind of what stimulant type of thing are you talking about? Yeah yeah, so some people uh, stimulants make their their brain go really well and they’re productive and aware and all; they feel great.

[ 01:06:43 ] Some people just get a lot of anxiety from them like way more than they get anything else, and they’re like this: I can’t live like this. Some people fall asleep fine; I could just do a natural experiment you give my wife an espresso; it’s 8 p.m. M, you wait until 8:45; she’ll pass out on the couch. See my husband too, actually. You give him espresso at eight and by 8:05 that guy is done. So if you gave me an espresso at eight at four in the morning I would be like connecting the dots and conspiracy theories and checking into a psychiatric well, not that part but yes um… But you talked about caffeine. Are there other ones? I mean, yes, uh, let’s say over-the-counter stimulants.

[ 01:07:20 ] I mean, is the main driver of all of them yep, and other stimulants are interesting; they have some interesting fat loss and health benefits, but teeny tiny. Actually, caffeine is quite teeny tiny, so if you can use caffeine to give you a bit more energy if it doesn’t interfere with your sleep much, and if you can do it um it’s got a pretty interesting decent hunger suppressive effect. What about nicotine? Nicotine, nicotine is in that same situation; nicotine has some health downsides that caffeine does not um so it’s just not my first go-to uh and nicotine has a substantial addiction potential so it’s Just it’s not something you use on a diet and then quit because you’re like, ‘I’ve been more nicotine right now. Just go straight to cigs, not even the filtered ones.

[ 01:08:04 ] I’m talking about 1956.’ Like your fridge probably has in there right now, oh yeah definitely just full of cigarettes and uh shrunk heads, yes if you open that you never know what’s gonna people that died from smoking cigarettes, it’s a lesson but nicotine because you hear um with the fasting community them using nicotine pouches, yeah that works great for fasting but the nicotine is a pretty hard drug you know it’s a drug, drug like capital D drug so if you want to get addicted to nicotine, dope, nicotine also doesn’t have like great uh profiles on your blood pressure from what I understand, heart dynamics aren’t great, caffeine is a little bit of that

[ 01:08:39 ] but they’re substantially more muted from from my understanding not an expert area of mine so if you were to pick one it might be caffeine yeah for most people I probably started caffeine and working after cocaine as that happens um he’s kidding guys he’s just joking yes don’t don’t go go taking cocaine unless you’re in the 80s and having a good time uh so basically um stimulants are on paper sometimes really cool and for many people Who are great, kind of adjunct to this process of dining that works pretty well. They have downsides: they have the downsides interfere with their sleep when you’re not on them; you get headaches and literally like physiological drug withdrawal. Um, if you’re not on enough of them in your phase after you’re done dieting, you’re really hungry and it drives you insane!

[ 01:09:23 ] If you wake up in the evening or in the middle of the night or in the morning too early to take stimulants yet, and you’re hungry, there’s no way out for you because the your anti-hunger thing is also wakefulness thing. So, I’d say stimulants are um, also in study after study: caffeine doesn’t. by itself have a very good raw thermogenic effect and so if it can control your appetite for you that’s okay but also your body gets used to it real fast and so like coffee worked great week one and week eight you need like eight monsters and five coffees and the barely does anything and it’s all side effects at that point you’re like this is unsustainable so as far as supplements that work well I would say caffeine is a cool thing to use stimulants are cool in context but they’re not this panacea that everyone should have

[ 01:10:08 ] at the time to talk about modern anorectic drugs yeah please yeah yeah so um and what does that mean yeah yeah so anorectic is uh means something that reduces your drive to eat food drive and so anorectic drugs are drugs that reduce appetite and so there are a couple of classes there are two classes right now of anorectic drugs that work really well um it’s uh the so technically the like ozempic aka some aglutide and then there’s uh the fourth generation uh JLP GIP combined agonist and that’s uh is that bound terzepatide they work amazingly well they’re the first kinds of drugs really of their kind and mass market they get at the problem of hunger from a pretty root perspective compared to caffeine for example so their suite Of side effects, is much more minimal.

[ 01:11:08 ] Their suite of side effects that improve health is substantial. Their net health improvers, if you just give them to a random person, they’ll just get healthy over time. It’s fascinating, that’s fascinating. It’s a big deal because usually, you’ll get drugs like that, like yeah, but it’s killing you. Like nope! This is actually, oh yeah. Well, the stimulant-based drugs have suffered from a lot of the same problems. Here’s another really trippy thing: there are now at least a few studies that are multiple years long that show people do not get used to GLP ones, however much hunger it is in the first. several weeks is exactly how much hunger it’s going to make you lose

[ 01:11:41 ] in week number 92 which is unreal and how fast and they you know um they work pretty fast people will say oh well it takes I don’t know what is it 46 or 48 weeks to reach peak or there’s multiple um inflection points that an individual could be good to lose weight but I mean we see it in practice by you know four weeks into I mean they’re losing weight yeah whether it’s 24 weeks in they’ve lost a substantial amount of weight I think it’s very individual yeah um whether it’s 13 or 22 percent so I can speak to that with some detail most people will feel an anorectic Effect within several hours of administration of the drug, much of its subcutaneous once weekly so, within several hours you look you may have an idea that you’re gonna eat a lot of food, you put the typical amount of food on your plate halfway through, you’re like ‘Am I doing I don’t want this anymore.

[ 01:12:36 ] Yeah, yeah, right. And so it’s kind of hits right away, more or less. And then um, these drugs have very long half-lives that are measured in a week or longer and so you take it once a week which means if you run the math, a lot. For example, semaglutide reaches its peak at any given small like any given dose you start, let’s say 0. 5 milligrams per week, it reaches its peak effect in your blood five weeks later; even if you don’t add anything, it’s just like once a week you take 0. 5 milligrams and the dose, and your blood goes up so one of the big take-home points from this is if you have an amount of semaglutide you’re taking and you just started taking it, and you’re like, I don’t really feel a lot of the hunger effects.

[ 01:13:19 ] Easy, just stay on it for a few weeks after a few weeks, you’re gonna be like, holy yeah, thank God I didn’t change my dose because that would have caught up to you big time. And then it takes weeks for it to go back down, and you could be, um, sick and nauseous, throwing up. You could be um the side effects definitely if you increase the dose too fast or uh gnarly. And a lot of times people will get on social media and blame the drug like, what didn’t work for me and made me throw up? Like, how much did you take, Betty, and she’s I don’t know, like the whole thing? Oh my God, it’s unreal powerful drugs. So for most people, they’re not going to need that much.

[ 01:13:48 ] And then it’s really kind of a turn dial for hunger, the more drug you take, the less your hunger is, and then you just like lose as much weight as not you want but pretty close, more or less I mean, as long as you can tolerate the side effects and big time if your diet and lifestyle. Comport well with the drug, about these drugs is if you give yourself high palatable foods that are also high in fat then you’re able to like outrun the drug at the mouth and brain and eyes level. You’re like cookies and then your stomach’s like two middle fingers and up it goes or you feel really sick or all sorts of both holes situation, uh, and so it’s really a big mistake to do that.

[ 01:14:30 ] So, the best diet you can have for these drugs is a healthy diet, relatively low in fat but low in calories and high in healthy food so that you never have to run to this problem of tolerating the drug poorly, uh. We have a friend that has been taking these Drugs and she’s completely transformed her body, and she had what we lovingly call the macaroni and cheese incident. She’s a few weeks into the drug; she was at like a family gathering, and they’re like ‘oh, mac and cheese.’ And she took the right kind of portion, too-a little bit of it, and she was like ‘nope’ ( bathroom the body’s like ‘nope,’ too much fat.

[ 01:15:02 ] And so if you manage your diet properly, and you take these drugs, the primary way in which they work is they use their anorectics; they reduce food drive, and they do all kinds of really awesome things for your health, including mental uh side effects. They actually make you less prone to every Kind of addictive behavior they’ve studied so far all the time in practice, yeah. Individuals that are interested in alcohol seem to be no longer interested in alcohol, anything, yeah, yeah. It’s fascinating, yeah. And so these drugs aren’t mandatory; you can lose tons of weight and get super healthy without them, but I would say that in the modern context with the evidence that we have, they’re definitely like a tool on the in the toolbox, and if you’ve really been struggling without them, I would say going to talk to your primary health care provider about them is a real small idea.

[ 01:15:47 ] I absolutely agree; there’s nothing has been as effective. since gastric bypass yeah that’s right and the numbers of the glp1s and the gips um the weight loss percentage again it might be 13 percent for a semaglutide or a glp1 agonist might be 22 percent for zip bound or again it depends you know it’s it’s interesting I was on a podcast and I said okay well how long does it take to see these results could it be 24 weeks and yeah it could be it all depends it’s a funny question it is yes it’s like saying you know how long is it going to take me to get to Cleveland Ohio if I drive from Detroit we can answer that but the question of how long am I going to really like is my car really going to be going Pretty fast, like, oh, Like within 30 seconds, if you’re getting out of your driveway, bathroom stops, right?

[ 01:16:41 ] A hundred percent. And so when people say, ‘How long until I see these results?’, it’s like, well, like every week you’re going to be losing a pound and a half for as many weeks as you keep cranking until you need a psychological break. That could be 12 weeks. Easy. It’s like, just keep doing it. And what I would say psychologically, a really good advice I think is don’t worry about that end goal too much. The process, eat your healthy foods, get your 10,000 steps, take your zap bound, just let it cook. Look, it’ll do its thing. Don’t you worry. And if it’s not, you adjust your food, you go to the doctor, they adjust your medication dosage and the cycle repeats itself. And it’s another quick public service announcement because it doesn’t get said enough.

[ 01:17:17 ] I don’t think a lot of people have all sorts of interesting ideas and opinions about Olympic and all that whole craze. And most people, many people come from some place of either kind of a reflexive anti-drug ideology, which is nonsense to begin with. You can steal man it, but it’s really tough. And other people come from kind of an iconoclastic. I’m like, well, I’m not into these. These drugs have there’s a problem and it’s mostly just people’s feelings. It’s not really based on ideas, but it’s true that some of these drugs are, um, can be improved upon, but it’s not a hypothetical because I can tell you two true things. One is there are already drugs in late stage clinical trials that blow Osempic out of fucking water.

[ 01:18:02 ] If you’re at home, Google Retatratide, Retatrutide. Alright. One word: triple agonist hits the GLP pathway, GIP and glucagon. And I don’t know how the fuck they did it, but the glucagon pathway non-stimulant increases your resting metabolic rate. You just burn more calories. It doesn’t worry you out. No psychoactive effects. You just burn more calories, and you’re less hungry, and whatever the fuck GIP does. I don’t even know. Triple agonist. Retratride is going to be on the market probably in a year. And Osempic is going to be like super discounted. Cheap drug because it’s saying something. If you look at the studies, how much weight people are losing, it was like, Osempic was a big deal. Trisepatide was a bigger deal. Retratride is that same step and major pharmaceutical companies around the world.

[ 01:18:48 ] So retatratride would be generation five in this drug scale. They’re working on six is an early testing. Seven is in development. I have to ask you a question. Um, I don’t want to go down a conspiracy rabbit hole, but I love those. Okay. Um, now. We have a highly palatable processed food, massive food industry. I love that industry by the way. Yes. I will sit here and defend it. Okay. Now we have a drug that is severely limiting people’s challenges with obesity. I mean, people are losing weight, food addiction from some of these highly palatable foods are going away. Mm-hmm . Mm-hmm . Uh, do you think that some of the influx of anti-obesity narrative drugs, do you think that potentially that is influenced at all by the food industry or where do you think the, um, division is going to be, if at all?

[ 01:19:57 ] Mm-hmm. That’s a great question. So, you have the situation where the food industry is just trying to get you to spend as much money as possible. Mm-hmm. So, you have the situation where the food industry is just trying to get you to spend as much money as possible. They’re not such big fans of you dying. Because then you don’t spend money anymore. They’re also not big fans of you getting out of shape. Because then you don’t like your life and you blame them. And that sucks. It does not like a Hershey’s CEO that when they see morbidly obese people, barely getting out of our car, perfect. They don’t like that at all. They would ideally like to see people eat Hershey’s candy bars in a state of caloric balance and enjoying their lives.

[ 01:20:28 ] That’s how they were meant to be eaten. That’s how they were eating in the fifties and sixties, et cetera, et cetera. So the vast majority of the food industry wants you to have the. Tasty food you want and have a great time and not die. The problem is they have no idea how to do those last two things. Cause most people were like buttered popcorn. I’ll take 50. They blow up the food industry is like, sure. How we can help these people. But then, we don’t even know how the fuck the food executive has no idea how to lose weight. And that’s not his job. His job is just get people to buy tasty food. And it’s not a job. He chose to be like, this is what we’re going to make Americans do.

[ 01:21:01 ] There is no conspiracy. The reason the food industry exists and it’s massive. It makes. All these. Foods that kill you is because you want it. Motherfucker, not you, but the Royal, you, you get me to get a stop people from pulling up to taco bell every fucking hour of the day. I’ll start to believe there’s a food conspiracy. If they’re still pulling up, talk to those people. Be like, who, where did you see this? Where’s the advertising? They’re like, I just fucking like Taco Bell. Get out of my face. Wait, wait, don’t, don’t, don’t get out. Hold up. Watch this. Crunchy. Now go people want the stuff. So that’s the food industry. Then you have the anorectic drug industry. Very nascent. Very just getting born. That’s going to combat a part of that.

[ 01:21:40 ] The excess part. There are two ways for the food industry to respond to this. Primarily one is to change their advertising and go, Hey, you’re on these drugs. Amazing. You do you, but you can still have a Snickers bar every now and again. And they’re completely correct. Healthy balance. I love dope. Cause like, I don’t know about you, but I’m not interested in living in a society where the government’s like ‘no more’, no more Babe Ruth bars or whatever, no more fucking kitties. They’re illegal because people are too fat. What the fuck? I moved from the Soviet Union to get the fuck away from that kind of stuff. So that would be great. Another other idea they could have, there will be a combination of these ideas employed over the next several years is they’re going to try to outrun the drugs.

[ 01:22:19 ] It’s competition. They’re going to try to make their food even tastier so that it used to be something you could resist on some amount of Maglultide and then, you need retractor tied to resist that now when that competition is going to heat up very likely over the course of the late 2020s and 2030s. Yeah. I think it’s entirely reasonable to expect this will either age very well or very poorly; that in the mid-2030s, at some point, most of us, maybe all will have at home universal robots cooking all of our meals for us. And they’ll be able to source recipes from all over the internet and make it the tastiest thing you’ve ever seen in your life. So if you want to get fat, the 2030s will be dope time to get that.

[ 01:22:55 ] But the degree of drug advancement at that point will also be really gnarly. So what we’re leading to is a world, and this has been increasingly true for the world, the developed world for as long as we can measure. Yeah. You can get more of anything you want in the United States, which is one of the freest countries in the world. Most developed capitalist countries, one of the most developed capitalist countries, people observe time and time again. If you want to get fat and lazy, best place in the world to do it. You want to get lean and fit and shredded, the best place in the world to do it. It’s options. You can take the anorectic drugs and here’s a really cool idea to try. Is this crazy?

[ 01:23:27 ] I know when you go to the grocery store to fucking buy the junk food, the food corporate doesn’t lie to you. It’s not like broccoli is really chocolate on the inside. They fucked with you. It’s really broccoli. I can attest to that. And you just listen to me. The food industry does not care what they sell you fundamentally as long as you buy it. So if a lot of people are like, dude, I want healthy shit. Oh my God, they’re healthy shit right away. McDonald’s had a thing where they tried like some salads and shit for a while, a couple of different sandwiches. They were healthier, and it turns out there just wasn’t enough market demands. They pulled them off. That’s not a McDonald’s problem. That’s an us problem.

[ 01:23:57 ] And so there’s going to be tastier and tastier junk foods guaranteed. You don’t even need an anorexic’s battle for that. People just want to taste your junk food. And there’s going to be an anorectic situation. In the end, the anorectics will win because at some point, if you just successfully show up to the doctor’s office once a month and he gives you whatever 20th-century eighth-gen drug, you know, you’ll not look at food and be able to put it in your mouth past a certain point. Fascinating. It’s fascinating where we’re going. And if anyone wants to understand how that feels at an intuitive level, they’ve never taken the drugs. Take all of the malaise away. It’s a little tough from a foodborne illness, stomach flu.

[ 01:24:39 ] And just remember how hungry you weren’t like you sit with someone who has stomach flu and they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re like, Hey, juicy cheeseburger.’ What is it? I can’t even think about it. You can get that not hungry on two and a half megs of Ozempic for six weeks straight. Someone talks about food. Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t. I’m going to throw up. There’s so much upside on that. And the drugs are slowly reducing side effects, increasing primary effects. They’re going to win against the food industry. But those people who don’t take the drugs and just-well, say it exactly as I mean it randomly buy food at the grocery store, they’re going to get real fat because the food’s just fucking delicious and getting cheaper all the time. It’s getting great.

[ 01:25:16 ] At some point, an individual has to say, ‘I want something out of my body to go a certain way.’ If you just show up to the store and eat as much as you want, but many of those people aren’t even compliant with medications. You’re a practicing doctor. You know how it is. You’re like, take a shot every week. And they shot. And they’re like, eh, you got great patients. I know that’s a typical, most of the folks that are severely obese, they’re not your most compliant patients. They forget to take all kinds of drugs because he fundamentally just likes maybe giving a little bit less of a shit than most other people, which first of all is kind of dope because you’re like, fuck it. YOLO Taco Bell. It’s great.

[ 01:25:54 ] I watch fat people eat food and I’m like, dude, they’re really getting out of that. Something I don’t; I just think that’s just amazing. But on the other hand, it’s going to lead to some side effects you’re going to have to deal with sooner or later. So the whole conspiracy thing. There is no conspiracy. We can try to find one. It’d be a great New York Times piece. I really like this answer. And also it’s more of like, I think the world’s a little bit more libertarian than people like to think, which is great because we have so much freedom, but it’s also kind of meh because like, yeah, freedom means you can make terrible fucking choices and there’s no one conspiring to make you do it.

[ 01:26:23 ] You’re the one that pulled up to Taco Bell at 2: 30 in the morning. So, what you’re saying is you can tank your health or you can actually be an incredible health-truly a choice. And we have education and resources like your RP strength and your app, which you should probably sign me up for free because I’d like to try it. Oh, free, huh? Well, I mean, I didn’t become a trillionaire by giving away. I know. But, um, what you’re saying is powerful is that actually there are choices and we here have the opportunity to leverage those, uh, whatever those choices are in an extreme way-100%. What? Oh, tell me. Yeah. I wanted to make sure we hit up your, the muscle fact. That’s what my next question was because I still cannot get over the fact that you’re dieting and talking to me. So we took care of most of the theory behind how people can lose weight, but there’s a missing piece. Weight loss is cool and it’s really healthy in almost all cases, but we can do better. We can do fat loss, weight loss with confidence.

[ 01:27:42 ] Weight loss needs made for failing in the right strength. That’s great. I’ll do that. I think I know I know it. I’ve got a lot of weight. I think. So what was B Bahrain trying to say is temperature. Tviewer, right? I mean, I can go any distance. Um, well, that’s what I want to put it on there for right now, right? Yeah. Sure. You might just analyze that and see if you make any changes. You know, shit, JLo’s got curves. What do you think curves made of? Either fat or muscle. And if you get lean enough and have enough muscle, everyone’s got awesome-looking curves. Now, you may not be into muscular people. I find them grotesque, to be completely honest. Just kidding. I was like, ‘Is that a joke?’ I can’t tell.

[ 01:28:19 ] I never can tell. I can’t tell. That’s my whole shtick. Yeah, yeah. I can’t even tell if it’s a joke coming out. I have to hear it again and be like, ‘Oh, I guess I was joking.’ And then I don’t remember. So basically gaining muscle or keeping your muscle while you lose fat has a completely transformative effect on your health in the best possible way. Like if you just lose 50 pounds and the doctor gets the blood work done, they’re going to be like, a lot of stuff is going good. We’re a little bit worried about your muscle mass level, a little bit of sarcopenia here and blah, blah, blah, your bone mass. But if you do the kind of thing we’re talking about where you spare muscle, your doctor’s going to be like, I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, but I want some of it.

[ 01:28:58 ] Do you have like a website or what is, who’s your coach? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s all great stuff and it makes you physically stronger. So when you lose weight, a lot of times when people are pretty overweight, I’m currently technically on paper, quite overweight. It’s just a lot of body to carry around. It’s annoying. It’s just, it just sits there. You gotta like get up to go to the fridge, like lean on stuff. If you lose, just lose weight, you feel better and healthier and cleaner. You don’t feel that you can still kind of feel a little bit frail. If you lose weight while keeping your muscle or increasing your muscle mass, you just get more or less superpowers. Um, people talk about how they felt when they were in their twenties.

[ 01:29:37 ] Generally have almost no idea what they’re talking about. Cause I crush my 20-year-old self, like with one hand, like Matrix-style. What do you mean you crushed yourself? I can, I can crush my 20-year-old self because that he’s a fucking little bitch compared to what I am now. Mostly because my skeletal muscle mass is much higher, but if it was comparable and my fat was lower, then you see like that fucking like shiny, golden 55-year-old man at the gym who still has hair somehow and the fucker how, and he’s got that like Florida, Texas sort of tan. This is gorgeous. And he still has like a trim waistline and he’s like pretty lean. You could talk to him. You’re like, Hey, like 55, huh? You must be feeling it.

[ 01:30:19 ] He’s like, I feel I’m in the time of my life. My dad is just a person that’s genetically pretty good shape and he’s very physically active and eats really healthy. He’s like a damn near 70 years old. He’s like, things are great. That’s how you’re going to feel. If you lose weight without losing muscle and gaining it, you’re just going to look at all this fucking shit. I can do things. If you lose a lot of weight and you lose a lot of muscle, you might be feeling a little bit frail, a little bit tired. Walking up the stairs is tough. Picking up groceries is tough. How do we lose fat without losing muscle? One of the things that protein intake, but 0. 6 to a gram per pound makes very little difference for most people in there.

[ 01:30:56 ] The biggest thing is resistance training. And if you want to know about that, tune into our last podcast. Yeah, but resistance training, training with weights two to four times a week is enough for most people, whole body, et cetera. We cover that in the other podcast. It’s a huge stimulus to your body that when you have a caloric deficit, your body points metaphorically at various things. It goes organs, brain, and we still need you. Don’t siphon off any of your resources, body fat. What are you up to? But if it’s a good, I’m busy. I’ve got meetings. Fuck you. Start losing yourself. Oh, crap. Throws parts of itself off, right? When it goes muscle, what are you up to?

[ 01:31:35 ] And if you’re not training muscles, like meetings all day, shut up, give up some of your muscles, start losing it because we need you. But if you’re resistance training, that still happens. But then the muscle, when you’re in your off hours, recovering from training goes, Hey, I’m going to take some of those amino acids and carbs and fats from the blood, and I’m going to put them back in me and grow. And guess where all those nutrients don’t go? Your fat. So your fat’s doubly starving. Not only is it starving, but it’s also starving. The deficit, but the fats, like finally food comes into the blood and the fats like, ‘Oh, come to me.’ And it’s no muscle takes it. And then it gets small and small and smaller.

[ 01:32:09 ] And so that effect of resistance training is massive and it’s transformative because, um, a great example of that effect recently was, uh, Dana White UFC. I made a video about; I’m not a big fan of the gentleman he worked with. Uh, I said all sorts of mean things about that in that video, but huge, huge fan of Dana White, huge fan of what he’s doing and a big fan of Dana White, which is he lost something like, I think 35 pounds-ish of weight, but he must have gained 10 or 15 pounds of muscle at the same time. So the metabolic effect is something you would see in someone who’s lost maybe 60 pounds of fat, but the muscle came up. He looks amazing. His blood work is amazing. That’s the ticket.

[ 01:32:53 ] And he trained with weights multiple times a week with Miller Sarchive. Who’s one of the best ever do it. I mean, we can’t all be trillionaires like Dana and get the best guy ever to do it, to be our personal trainer, but everyone go to the gym more or less. Well, almost everyone at Planet Fitness is like $10 a month, which is if you can’t afford that, I don’t believe you say that. Um, everyone has access to it. And the resistance training is that big of a deal. But one thing that really starts to be important with resistance training is important in its own right is let’s say like the periodization of, because people say, okay, I’ve got all the tools to do fat loss. They take their headphones off.

[ 01:33:30 ] They stop listening to your podcast. They’re like, I got it. I’m going, uh, but we’re like, wait, no, hold on. One important thing. Don’t turn us off. You have friends. Yes. Don’t turn us off because we have ad reads to do. No, not today. We’re doing that on a Thursday. Yeah. Tune back in on Thursday. The big thing is dieting is tough. A condition in which your body is not getting sufficient calories to maintain its weight, almost always accrues some fatigue. And we call it diet fatigue in the industry. Diet fatigue expresses itself in a couple of different ways. One is your energy levels decline. Your sleep quality declines. Your brain power doesn’t do anything good. And you’re like, sounds like being a parent. Oh, don’t get me started.

[ 01:34:15 ] I’m I’m like, uh, what did, uh, my, my, my wife did most of the dog raising at our house. So at one point she was talking to a friend on the phone and she was like, ‘Yeah, I’m a single dog, mama bitch. I’m right here.’ But she’s like, ‘You don’t do anything.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, you went, you were correct.’ So the dog’s hard enough. Kids are a totally different level, but yes. And you have met mine. So yes, they’re adorable by the way. They could just be terrible monsters and you’re like, ‘Why did I have them?’ So you’re not in that boat. And they’re so cute. See, I can even tell as a real emotion you’re sharing. They’re wonderful. There was, uh, they’re complicated. Yeah. Yeah.

[ 01:34:47 ] The, I forgot Wanda Sykes. Do you know who that is? She was a comedian, comedian. She wrote for like, uh, all the big guys like Chris Rock and stuff. She had a standup once where she was like, yeah, people with kids, man. Anytime you’re like, yeah, like, do you, do you like your kids? And was it worth it? And they’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s worth it. Like, do you mean that? So in any case, diet fatigue, the biggest problem you run into with it outside of all the other problems I already listed, which are kind of gnarly is increased, um, food focus. Now food focus has hunger within it, but it has all kinds of other stuff. Like that story I told earlier, where you’re watching your favorite show and you’re just looking at the dinner rolls and the glass of milk.

[ 01:35:27 ] Why isn’t anyone looking at it? Are those just props? Are those cold? Was the shot number five is no, not really hungry. And there’s a thing where you’ve just eaten. You’re no longer hungry, but you’re still food focused. If you do the diet too long and your diet fatigue gets too crazy. So at RP we’ve, we’ve probably diet coached several hundred thousand real humans at this point. Uh, tens of thousands of them with an intimate personal coaching relationship. Cause we have a team of psychotic PhD coaches that are like, they look like we made up their certifications, but they’re real. I’m not good enough to work on that team. So I don’t bother. And we have app suite that helps with templates and apps tons on tons of people.

[ 01:36:08 ] And we found that somewhere between eight weeks of consistent caloric deficit, fat loss, dieting, and 12 weeks is where most people shine-eight weeks is like enough to really make a visual difference. If you do a diet for four weeks, the scale’s down maybe five pounds, but you order Chinese and then it’s up a pound because of the salt. And you don’t even know what’s going on. You can’t really tell the one lady from your work said you look better, but she always says nice things down there. And she just assumed she’s a liar. And so, and so it’s not, you’re not gonna get motivated by the process and you might quit and be like, I don’t know. I, what is it?

[ 01:36:41 ] There’s an amazing, uh, one of my friends had a, his mom had a sticker on the fridge, a fridge magnet. And it’s this like 1950s woman and she’s doing this. And I said, um, I, uh, I dieted for one month and lost 30 days. So like, that’s how it can feel if you don’t go long enough, you don’t have any show for it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Eight weeks. Most people with a good deficit, they’re going to feel different. They’re going to look different. People are going to say stuff. Their clothes are going to fit differently. They’re going, okay, this is great. But their diet fatigue isn’t crazy yet.

[ 01:37:07 ] In most cases, after about 12 weeks, not all, but many people, they’re getting amazing results, but the shit is starting to wear on them. It wears on them in a bunch of different ways. And there’s entire books written about this, but one of them is your type of social interaction that you can have is limited. It has to be limited. Someone, maybe you and your husband go to the movies. Maybe it’s a thing you’ve been doing for a long time. Maybe it’s a thing you’ve been doing for a long time. Maybe it’s a thing you’ve been doing for a long time. It’s just a tradition. You’re on diet for nine weeks. You go to the movies. Still, you smell that goddamn popcorn everywhere. And your husband’s like, those zombies are scary.

[ 01:37:37 ] Like what, what can I get some fucking popcorn? It’s all it’s off. And so if you’re hard as nails, you can just eat that shit. Like not literally just can’t whatever. Just no worries. You just get it done, but it strains you and it strains you and it strains you. And here’s a really cool revelation. If you go back up to roughly your maintenance calories, you’re still exercising. You’re still trained with weight. You still eat mostly healthy, but a bit of junk. You can lose a bunch of weight, go to maintenance, chill for; we would recommend roughly at least two-thirds of the time you’re dieting. So if you’ve been, did that come from any kind of literature, just experience, plenty of literature, but lots of experience.

[ 01:38:20 ] And we ended up having a separate, you die for 12 weeks. It’s probably good for at least eight weeks for your diet. So I’m going to go ahead and let you you to be at least at maintenance, maybe even a little tiny surplus if you want to get a little more jack, but at least maintenance. That brings you back to normal. It gives you breathing room. And then you can hit it again if you want to lose more weight. One of the biggest problems in weight loss is people, whatever number they are, let’s say you weigh 231 pounds and you’re like, I want to move in 70. And you’re like, okay, great. You get your zap bound, you get your diet and you just go.

[ 01:38:50 ] It doesn’t work like that because you’re going to accumulate so much diet fatigue that by the time you get below 190, you’re going to be like, oh, I’m going to eat my own eyeballs today. Fuck it. And if you have to take enough anorectic drug for that to go away, you still, they don’t take away all the food focus. You still look at cheeseburgers on TV and you’re like, and it seems like you’re missing something and you are missing something because you go to the family reunion and everyone’s eating amazing hot dogs. You’re not eating them. You got your own little bullshit. That’s not a way to live life. That’s a way to accomplish a task. It’s not a way to live.

[ 01:39:16 ] So understanding it’s a multi-phase process that has times of destitution, times of deficit, and then times of getting back to normal. That is a big deal. And that eight to 12 week period coupled with another eight to 12 weeks of chilling, you get your little ratchet step-like effect that works wonders and empowered by anorectics and really good diet advice. People can get a couple of ratchets down that thing nowadays, completely transform their bodies. It’s going to take a couple of years, but again, to, to paraphrase one of my friends brought our Chavez, um, it’s baffling that people think that something that took them years to do like gain, they’re just going to get off in weeks. But yeah, it should be like five weeks. I should be good.

[ 01:39:59 ] Like, no, no, it’s going to take years. Luckily not 15 years, but it might take two or three and you’ve got to hang in there and you’ve got to give yourself breaks. So talk to successful people. You’re writing all your notes. You’re scribbling. I’ll say you, you just happened to like the CEO of Apple just happened to fly next to you on a plane. He’s like, ‘In my private plane, it broke down.’ So could you scoot over? Okay. And he’s like, just sharing ideas about how to be successful at some point. You’re like, ‘Okay, so work straight up. 12 hours a day, no breaks, right? No vacations, no weekends.’ He’d be like, ‘No, no, you need a lot of that because you need the creative process.

[ 01:40:32 ] That doesn’t happen unless you do the stuff.’ Just the same thing is true with dieting. You’ve got to go hard for a little while until your diet fatigue is like, ‘bro,’ this is tough. You go to maintenance and then you repeat that process. Huge deal. I love that. And, um, Dr. Mike is your guest, thank you so much for coming on. Really? If you guys enjoyed this, I know that you’re going to enjoy the other episode that we did. Um, and again, I really appreciate your time and especially that you’re dieting. You’ve put a lot of great stuff out in the world. We’re going to link everything and cry about it. You’re up next, friend, get in here, sit down right now. But, um, thank you so much.

[ 01:41:09 ] Thank you so much for having me on. It’s been amazing. And I get really spoiled talking to you because you’re medically trained and you know, all kinds of things. So everything I say seems to make sense, but I bet you have the people listening. You’re like, ‘I don’t understand a fucking word of that.’ And she’s too fucking smart. No, I think that this is, um, it really bridges a gap and we need to bridge the gap because ultimately muscle is, you know, and everyone’s like, ‘ah’, it’s not all about muscle. No, actually, if it, yeah, you know, muscle demonstrates a certain mental fortitude. It does. It takes that to happen. Muscle is metabolic health. It’s protection.’ It’s a whole host of things. Great. Looks great. Great. That’s the part I care about. That’s all you care about. We know, but if somebody really cares about about their health, it’s the one organ system we can actually do something about huge and it’s anti-diabetic and the whole thing. That’s a whole different podcast. It goes on and on for the next one for round three. That’s it. Uh, Dr. Mike, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much. Dr. Thank you so much.