The #1 MISTAKE That Keeps You From Losing Belly Fat (NOT SUGAR & CARBS) | Max Lugavere

what do you think is especially in the context of people who consider themselves healthy what is one of the biggest mistakes they make when it comes to going down the weight loss Journey such a great place to start I think on social media there are these especially within the realm of of weight loss there are these two seemingly warring factions one group is the group that claims that calories don't matter at all right like calories in calories out is a fallacy it's all a big myth it's all some big you know conspiracy pushed by the junk food industry or Fitness influencers what have you and and so they completely ignore that fundamental tenet the first law of thermodynamics that does ultimately dictate whether or not a person gains or loses weight it's important to recognize that that is the that is the mechanism right it's not necessarily the method which I'll get into but it is the mechanism so whether you're on a ketogenic diet or a paleo diet diet or a vegan diet or a low carb or low-fat diet if you are losing weight by necessity you are going to by definition you're going to be in a calorie deficit if you're gaining weight you're going to be in a calorie Surplus and just to unpack what that means is a calorie deficit implies you are burning more calories and you're ingesting every day a calorie Surplus on the other hand is implies that you are ingesting more calories than you are burning every day so that that creates a a weight gain um situation and then of course you could be weight stable at maintenance calories and not gaining or losing any weight so that does matter unfortunately I mean it's it's sort of the it is the as I mentioned the mechanism and there are many roads to to take you know if you if you if you want to as I mentioned achieve a calorie deficit you can go on any number of diets they all work um provided you adhere to them and uh unfortunately on the other hand most diets fail because people tend to adopt these extreme diets right so the other warring faction is the side that claims that um calories are all that matter right so of course calories matter but they're not all that matter because it's you know I think of a calorie as a unit well a calorie is a unit of measurement similar to a mile like a mile is a unit of measurement whether you are walking a mile uphill or downhill it's still a mile right obviously walking uphill is going to be more difficult than walking that mile downhill they're both miles but it's the quality of the road that makes the difference in terms of your your subjective experience with with traversing that Mile right now when it comes to sustaining over you know on a chronic basis a calorie deficit um with the intent of losing weight there are a number of variables that come into play that determine whether or not or that influence whether or not that is going to be something that is more or less difficult for you to sustain for example one um one data point that we uh received over the past couple years from a seminal study funded by the NIH from Kevin Hall who's a you know really highly regarded obesity researcher is that if you're consuming primarily Ultra processed foods which are foods that you couldn't possibly make in your own kitchen they tend to be shelf stable package processed foods that line our Supermarket aisles you're essentially setting yourself up for failure because when consuming those foods to satiety by the time you've consumed them to a point of fullness you've already over consumed them to the degree of about 500 additional calories if that's essentially all the food that you're that you're provided to provided over the course of a day so by sticking to minimally processed foods the kinds of foods that you were perhaps to create in your own kitchen cooking at home that's akin to making that that mile that you inevitably are going to need to Traverse to lose weight the equivalent of the downhill model it's going to be a lot easier because that same study showed us that when people are given only minimally processed foods to consume they tend to effortlessly to the same degree of satiety come in at a calorie deficit of about 300 calories so both variables matter calories do matter but they're not the only thing that matter yes hormones matter yes insulin to some degree matters although I think that micro attempting to micromanage insulin is putting the cart before the horse and um and then even within within the foods there are other variables that play a role like protein protein is the most satiating of the macronutrients yeah do you want to talk about that one for a second so this is a number three on your cheat code list and right and sorry to interrupt you but the reason that I got excited was that you were also saying like I wanted to lose weight but in an effortless way yeah right but you didn't want to lose weight you wanted just independently you want to lose fat or burn fat but still maintain your muscle mass and you gave me your in-body scan over here yeah right here's your receipts these are the receipts yeah this is no BS and not only did you drop down to 8.5 or 8.3 I don't know exactly where it is on this uh this list over here but you also added a little bit of lean muscle mass we'll talk about that as related to strength training but one of the things that you've shared on social media that has helped you make this as effortless as possible which also meant that you weren't trying to go overboard you would try to lose about a pound a week right that was your goal a pound a week without going crazy hungry and still feeling like you could focus and live your life and you felt that one of the top things on that was protein so let's talk about that that's number three on the list prioritizing lean proteins on the fat loss cheat codes yeah so protein is a very important macronutrient with regard to body composition I mean it's important for I mean it's an essential nutrient but focusing squarely on its role in fat loss and and muscle retention and possibly even muscle growth if that's your goal which I think it should be probably for most people it's the most satiating macronutrient so when I when I say macronutrients what I'm referring to are the three big ones carbs protein and fat You could argue that alcohol is in a way a macronutrient provides seven calories per gram You could argue that fiber in a way is a macronutrient um although we technically classified as a carbohydrate but generally we're talking about carbs protein and fat carbs and protein provide about four calories per gram fat provides nine calories per gram protein when we consume protein it tends to fill us up the most it activates gut derived hormones that basically send the signal quicker than carbohydrates and pro and fat do that we've consumed food and that we're essentially getting what it is that we ultimately require from our food which is nutritional value right Not Just Energy but nutritional value and protein is really important because it breaks down to amino acids which you know builds our body essentially like our neurotransmitters are made of of amino acids that are derived from the protein that we ingest we you know our bones our muscles all made from protein enzymes you name it and so there's this idea that our our drive to consume food is in many ways dictated by our necessity for protein it's actually referred to as the protein leverage hypothesis that we leverage our food environment to ingest adequate amino acids because they're so valuable it really is like the most valuable macronutrient and so it's highly satiating as a tool to turn off your hunger signals which is a struggle for anyone who's ever endured a diet right particularly somebody who's endured the you know just move more eat less Paradigm which is like let's take the obesogenic food that I'm currently eating that has gotten me into this state where I aspire to you know that I aspire to improve on I'm just going to eat less of that that's less fast food whatever yeah you're just you're setting yourself up for failure because you're going to be hungry right and nobody wants to be hungry when on a diet that's just a recipe for disaster with regard to long-term adherence and so protein is a really important tool it fills us up when we under consume protein we tend to consume more carbs and fat which is Just Energy like whichever way you like to slice it carbohydrates and fatter energy like we can use we use carbohydrates in the form of glucose for energy we store fat as an energy source when those carbohydrates cease to be available to us and so protein is actually not readily used as energy it's it's very difficult for the body to store as fat the body doesn't prioritize storing protein as fat because it's as I mentioned so valuable um and so if you're hungry reach for protein whether it's a high protein snack you should be basing your meals around protein I know you know some of our colleagues like to downplay the role of protein and suggest that you know protein isn't really all that important that it should be almost like a side dish to our to our plates um but I actually think that when you look at the data and particularly clinical trials it's always the high protein diets that lead to like the greatest Improvement in terms of metabolic health and body composition it's so hard to over consume protein because it's self-limiting it's that satiating so protein is a little bit of a you get a little a bit of a caloric free ride with protein too about 30 percent of the calories that you ingest by way of protein are actually burnt off in the digestion of that protein it's called the thermic effect of feeding and it's higher for protein than it is for carbohydrates and fat I mean you know if you do tend to be the kind of person who enjoys tracking which you know I don't think most people need to but it certainly is a tool that many people have adopted and see value in you still want to track it as you know roughly four calories per gram but um but that's just you know it's it's got a very high thermic effect it's highly satiating it directly supports your musculature and it tends to come it tends to provide along with those valuable amino acids other important nutrients so Stuart Phillips is a highly credentialed protein expert and he's actually published research showing us that high protein foods are actually also very nutrient dense foods they contain nutrients that Americans tend to under consume like zinc vitamin B12 and the like So for anybody who's trying to like lose fat you really want to keep your protein High that's not you wanna modulate ultimately the carbohydrates and the fats in your diet to uh to a ratio that you know basically is is going to be sustainable for you and incorporates the foods that you know ultimately you enjoy that are going to make this a sustainable plan for you but protein is not the variable that you want to mess with you want to actually keep protein high if not increase it over the course of this process because when you're dieting particularly for people who are already starting out at a somewhat lean body composition you're keeping your protein high is one of the best ways aside from resistance training from a dietary standpoint it's the best way to ensure that you're losing only fat which is what you want right you don't want to lose weight because then you're just going to end your diet as a smaller version of yourself that's not what most people want if you want to lose the fat right and so by keeping protein high you're insuring to your body you're ensuring in in in in no small way that it's the fat that you're going to be losing yeah you don't want especially older people losing muscle unless if they're like severely obese which they just need to lose a total amount of weight but at some point in time still the protein is going to help them stick to the diet and most people are would you say most people are probably already under eating a lot of protein in their diet compared to how much they need yeah they're overeating a lot of other calories exactly yeah I mean most people in the western world are not protein deficient the RDA for protein is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight and so that's essentially to avert population deficiency but that's not and that uh that guideline hasn't been updated in decades you know new research now is showing us that even for non-sedentary for non-uh physically active people you really want to uh set your protein Target to about 1.5 times that so about 1.2 grams per kilogram of body weight and then for the resistance training for the for the active you know weight training individual and resistance training doesn't mean that you're like necessarily going to the gym and like you're a bodybuilder or an athlete or anything like that I mean you know resistance training could be like yoga you're resisting Against Gravity which is your body weight your body weight yeah you really want to be double what the RDA is 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight here in the in the U.S you know we don't use kilograms it's roughly 0.7 to 0.8 grams times your body weight so take whatever your body weight is if you want to get really granular if you're if you're really overweight you could you could use your um your goal body weight no body weight yeah your ideal body weight multiply that by 0.7 or 0.8 and that's what you should be getting roughly every day and in yours when I was reading your sort of tweet storm about this which we have linked to yeah it as well that people can follow um you were shooting for about a pound of you're sorry you're shooting for a gram of protein for for for your sort of you weren't overweight when you started this you just had a little bit extra body fat percentage and you wanted to lean out right I wanted to lean out um because I wanted to I want I wanted to like as an experiment as a challenge as a personal like just Endeavor to really understand what it takes because I had the mechanism in the back of my you know in my in my knowledge base right the mechanism calories and calories out but I really want to understand the methods so that I could speak to it and make it really easy for people because today as simple as fat loss should be it's really not that simple because we have all these Cooks in the kitchen no pun intended you know influencing people's decisions and making it really complicated for people and to me I felt like if this is something that I wanted to speak to and help people unpack and and get to the truth of then I needed to kind of undergo it my the process myself and so I was already at a healthy body weight 15 16 body fat for a male is totally healthy there's a range for men it's it's roughly I mean there's obviously going to be some contention around this but 10 to 10 to 20 body fat for males totally healthy and normal for a woman it's 20 to 30 percent roughly I could be getting those numbers you know not like somewhat skewed but generally it's you know higher for women than it is for men and so I was at a completely healthy body fat percentage but I did want to lose weight from uh just from a challenge a personal challenge standpoint um and you also made it a challenge for your audience too that if they wanted to do this and they wanted to follow cheat codes you put it out there he said text me for your cheeks for the cheat codes and try this yourself see what you notice what are the things that you saw back because I saw a bunch of people reply to you some people sent you photos before and afters like what kind of feedback did you get back from people doing all 10 of these and of course we'll be getting to the rest of these in a second yeah I mean people thought that the like so I put them out in this document fat loss cheat codes and people just like it it like spread like wildfire people were like started embracing and integrating these so-called cheat codes into their into their into their Lifestyles and they said they were starting to see like really impressive um gains people that have been dying on like yo-yo dieting for years read this document that I put together and um and suddenly everything like clicked for the people who read like this document and you know I don't like to gatekeep this information because I think people should have it and ultimately as I mentioned it does whether or not you are losing fat or or gaining comes down to energy balance but today we live in a highly obesogenic food environment and as I mentioned there's so many different voices trying to like keep this process and make it sound super mysterious but it's really not that mysterious the one of the one of the first things that I did that made a huge impact aside from the the protein angle which is very important was I started eating home more now I'm not like a super extravagant like I'm not talking about like fancy restaurants or anything like that but I you know whether if I'm on the road I'm eating in fast food chains or maybe not fast food for me fast casual yeah um and then you know because social engagement is so important I do find myself in restaurants with with friends fairly often I started eating home more like cooking my own food and that right there is uh an intervention if you want to call it that that that um pays is going to pay massive dividends because when you eat out in restaurants restaurant food tends to be coded in mystery fat calories that essentially nobody in the western world needs you know any any additional like fat calories like we're arguing about like carbs and fats Mo your average American is eating too much of pretty much everything and in the restaurant setting food tends to come coated in whether we're talking butter or you know unhealthy cheap cooking oils or even cream sauces right like if you're if I were a chef and I've written a cookbook but I wouldn't classify myself as like a classically trained Chef I would want my food to be delicious and one of the ways that you make a food delicious is you cover it in butter right and so if you're eating out on a regular basis you're ingesting tons and tons of phantom fat calories and fat is the most calorically dense of of you know the macronutrients for one but oil is the most calorically dense food that exists period And so when you're consuming excessive amounts of of oil or any oil for that matter I mean I think it's really important for people as much as I love to talk about the benefits the health benefits of extra virgin olive oil for example it's a very calorie dense food and so during over the course of this journey I reduced my consumption of a very healthy food extra virgin olive oil and I and I basically it I said it I you know made the plan to get all of my Essential dietary fat from food from red meat from eggs and things like that and I cut out the added fats and the oils and things like that and that was like another huge win for me I mean that was like because I think another another big thing that people don't realize especially in the with the warring like Diet tribes online carbs versus fats you know a lot of people assume and I see on social media that they've got to cut the carbs to to lose fat but this is another even where I had to like misconception where I had to challenge my own biases if you look at any bodybuilder who's preparing for like a show right and they're going to be exceptions to this there always are but one of the first macronutrients that bodybuilders will reduce their intake of is fat right and success leaves Clues and bodybuilders are like a tremendous source of not just inspiration but information and they're not often regarded as such they're so diligent yeah attract everything every workout every rep every food they eat exact amount of macros the weight of it everything 100 so if you follow any bodybuilder diet right the the standard bodybuilder meal is lean chicken broccoli and rice yeah right it incorporates carbs now why does it continue why do bodybuilders continue to incorporate carbs why don't they just cut the carbs why are they cutting the fat well because carbohydrates are an energy source that becomes particularly valuable when you are in a calorie deficit and you want to sustain intensity in the gym which is that second signal that I mentioned earlier that tells your body okay we're going to shed the fat we've got to keep the muscle because you know we're whoever like whoever it is like is demanding that like that we're using our muscles on a regular basis in the gym right so that's when the body like recognizes okay well the fat is the most like Expendable here so let's get rid of it but the carbohydrates are what provide you the energy so you can sustain those lifts so early on for any bodybuilder they cut the fat calories and just to be really clear it's not a no-fat diet it's not even a low-fat diet it's just like a reduced fat diet yeah and I think this goes back you know you hit a few points there but I'm jumping ahead this goes back to this large idea that you talk about which was number two you already hit number one which was eating home way more that already was a simple win I have a few questions about that we'll come back to that but your point that you just made goes back to number two which is people actually don't know how much food they're consuming because they've never really ever had to weigh it or kind of roughly it doesn't mean that you track your calories forever but roughly get an idea of how many calories for their regular meals they're consuming are so they never as you called it they never audited their portion size yeah let's see if uh Tessa if you can bring up Max's Instagram but Max I think you know the image that I'm talking about it was the image where I think it was from your friend Meow Mix or whatever her account is Amanda yeah and she had uh three different photos of what looked like the same meal yeah but the first one is titled right weight loss the second one is maintenance like a meal that's made for maintenance and the third one which looks very similar is just a little bit more and has some extra bananas was weight gain and the whole idea this image was if you're not careful and you haven't ever had a chance to audit or note down how many calories your favorite meals are which again doesn't mean you do it forever you can easily be in a place even if you eat healthy and I think that's a lot of the people that we're talking to today they think of themselves as being healthy but every year they keep on adding more weight and they're wondering like what's going on and how do I maybe reverse it a little bit to look as good as I did when I was 18 19 20. so if you're not careful you can just easily over consume and I think my last point on this is that there are and we've all benefited from this there are so many healthy tasting Wellness junk food that's out there that still they're clean and still they're a healthy part of a regular diet but they're so good it's easy to overeat nut Butters keto snacks anything like that food that has olive oil and this thing in it that thing in it is just so easy to overdo those if you're not paying attention to these 10 Chicos yeah well this is a massive misconception I think that pervades the wellness industry is that you can overeat super high quality food and still get fat in so doing right like that's why this polarity doesn't do anybody any favors right it's counterproductive we can't make it all about calories but we can also make it only about food quality because if you're over consuming avocados and extra virgin olive oil and grass-fed beef and nuts foods that are super healthy right like we know how beneficial nuts are from the standpoint of Health extra virgin olive oil but you can over consume those things and get fat in the process so we have to like take the middle ground where we recognize that like yeah food quantity matters and and so does food Quality quality influences quantity right but at the end of the day that mechanism you know you have to hold that mechanism in the back of your head that if you're ingesting more calories than you're than you're burning on a daily basis you are going to put on fat and the one thing that I'll add so you you brought up this like food auditing and and portion size auditing with it which I think is super important also in the wellness industry we live in a time where you know there's there's endless there's an endless barrage your average Wellness interested person is inundated by an endless barrage of marketing for biohacking tools gizmos gadgets and things like that in my house trust me is loaded with them like I'm I'm very much a consumer of these kinds of things but I will say that the number one biohacking Wellness tool that a person can have in their kitchen by a long shot is a digital food skill like the digital food scale is like the number one investment from like a technology standpoint it sounds rudimentary but from a technology standpoint it's the number one investment that you can make in your in your health it's like 10 bucks on Amazon 10 12. it's super cheap yeah I mean mine was like 16 and so just explain to people who have never used a digital food scale what are you using this for in your day right when you're thinking I don't know if you do meal prep or you're planning out your meals exactly or you you know how you cook at home but walk them through how you're using a digital food scale and how that's tied into you dropping down to you know you probably lost how much fat total do you think you lost I probably lost like 15 15 to 20 pounds of pure fat yeah and as you can see on there I've actually increased my skeletal muscle your skeletal muscle yeah which is not which is not the most uh not necessarily the easiest thing to do for most people anybody who's tried to do it it's tough yeah but it's actually pretty easy when you follow the the cheat codes when you keep your protein high and when you train intensely when you keep your your training up it's actually so this is what's called body recomposition so losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time many people think that that's uh that that's an impossibility but it's actually not an impossibility and particularly for somebody who's naive to training like you can you can very easily gain muscle and lose fat at the same time and the leaner you get it becomes more difficult but provided you're keeping your protein intake up it's still possible it's still very much possible it's not inevitable that you lose muscle is the whole point which is really important because again nobody wants to come out of a diet looking just like a smaller more gaunt version of themselves right they want to look more muscular more able-bodied right um whether you're a male or female yeah and so the digital food scale I think is really important for one all the calorie counts of all foods well there's a few there's a few reasons for one the calorie counts of foods are determined by food weight so volume can lie right but food weight typically doesn't like the volume of a food I mean we see this on on you can see this on food packaging right like the volume is foods are measured um and and packages are filled with accordance in accordance to their weight not necessarily their volume Foods settle over time um so that's one two just the mere Act of observing your your the amount the serving size that you're consuming and the number of servings that you're consuming is actually um there's a phenomena called the Hawthorne effect where when a person is being observed they tend to act more morally morally sound right just because they feel like they're being observed so that it automatically influences the way that we behave so I've actually applied this effect to just observing the amount of food that we're eating observing ourselves essentially When You observe that you're consuming um three servings of a food right it's just a it adds a little bit of friction right like you if because you you see the amount of calories per serving and like are you really intending on consuming three servings of a food like is that really what you need right now um or are you just pouring mindlessly you know the the rotini from the you know from the from the box because I mean that's super it's super easy to over consume and like you know we have no sense of how much we're consuming when we're just pouring mindlessly on the other hand when you use a digital food scale that weighs on a gram to gram basis it's just a lot easier to audit and become and thus become conscious of what it is that you're eating which I think is just so important bringing a little bit of like mindfulness to our food right and so yeah and so I think that that's like a big a big Boon to health right to make sure that we're not over consuming food and to just put a little bit of attention on the food that we're on the foods that we're consuming last year I turned 40 and it's funny you mentioned olive oil like I am such a huge olive oil fan and like I go on olive oil tastings during my vacation it's like a big part of and I and I love going to Italy and my wife have been a few times so for my 40th birthday I took my whole family to Italy and we were at this Villa and we had set up this olive oil tasting and you know you're generally there and you're eating a lot and other stuff but I go ham on olive oil like I go crazy so then I came back and I said all right uh largely in part of like interviewing really great guests on this podcast some of the people that have been on your show as well too Dr Gabrielle Line and other individuals I said okay I'm 40. I know that I'm under muscle I grew up vegetarian I wasn't really eating protein you know I gotta focus on that and I gotta start strength training I kind of started to get into it but I haven't been like working out since high school like you so I was like let me get serious about it so I knew I needed support I signed up with this group here in La called ultimate performance and they were the ones that really were like okay we're gonna look at every single thing that you're eating you're gonna take a photo and they made it simple through an app and everything and initially because I had some very strong goals I needed to um not only take photos of it but I had to use a food scale for it and I actually had to enter into the app they have their own custom app but there's plenty of apps that are out there that people can use and I got a chance to see firsthand that I was having in one of my sort of big fat salads or whatever I was having like a quarter of my total calories just from like olive oil and dressing alone and when you are trying to in my case I was trying to drop fat because sure it was right after the trip but I came in I didn't do in body scan but they did um caliber testing right multiple Point Body caliber testing I came in at 26 body fat well right probably before that trip I was probably more like 22 still out of my ideal zone of what a you know a young healthy male should be so I started at 26 body fat I started tracking things I started following we were kind of on a simpatico Journey but I didn't know your cheat codes at that time yet but I was kind of following it with this group who was also respecting the fact that hey I don't like to eat a ton of carbs because when I ate a ton of carbs some of my markers on my life force get out of whack My fasting insulin my glucose availability variabilities all over the place I can't focus as much so I don't want to eat no carbs or low carbs I just don't want to eat a ton of carbs so they were willing to work with me on my journey I want to have some questions for you on that and just through regular strength training and cutting back on some of these things following a lot of these cheat codes that you have here keeping my protein High by January I gotten to 12.5 body fat amazing we'll have to throw up a little before and after wow I went from skinny fat to skinny lean and now I'm just trying to add muscle mass you know just add like 0.8 to a pound of lean muscle mass a month through strength training and things and I think that was a big aha moment for me similar to some of the things you're talking about I don't study nutrition I'm not like writing about it like you I'm definitely not the expert I get just get just to ask great questions to people like you but even I found myself in that position of the confused individual thinking I'm eating really I'm eating so healthy I'm eating all these clean Foods I'm even watching all these glucose spikes and watching my continuous glucose monitor My fasting insulin is in the optimal range it's like a 2.53 and yet still I have all this belly fat around me right I'm in the skinny fat category like a lot of Indians are and I had to go through this own process myself to see oh wow you cannot ignore the whole calories conversation I think a lot of people are waking up and having that moment as well how do you think if you would think from the other side of things right like you said there was two groups there's the extreme and energy balance people that even say like doesn't even matter to have extra chemicals in your diet everything's a chemical right yeah that's one of your favorites to this other group it's like look whether it's extreme carnivore or fat people that just say look just eat Whole Foods and nothing else matters yeah how did the Whole Foods extreme fat people if you would stress test their sort of framework or how they got there not to lump them all together but kind of have to for the sake of this question what do you think LED them to that conclusion that calories you know didn't matter yeah not that they weren't important which is what you're saying here you're kind of somebody that I see that's in the middle but they got to a place where they were like hey calories don't matter at all you don't even need to really be tracking them or thinking about them yeah I mean just because somebody doesn't count calories doesn't doesn't mean the calories don't count right a lot a lot of people make the mistake of adopting these diets whether it's a ketogenic diet or the carnivore diet or whatever and it's just so dramatically different from their prior diet which and often often cases is the standard American diet right so people somebody on the standard American obesogenic way of eating will will you know they'll get caught up in one of these diet tribes on social media typically how it happens you know whether it's a ketogenic diet or the carnivore diet or the vegan diet and any diet generally any dietary modification any any added attention that one puts on their diet is going to be better than the standard American diet and so they'll start to see progress right they'll start to see an improvement whether it's in their health or their body composition especially when adopting a diet like the ketogenic diet which is um you know going to be higher in protein higher in fat a carnivore diet which is typically going to be way higher in protein again protein is the most satiating macronutrient and so these are these are diets that are inherently more satiating than their standard American diet counterpart right same with the vegan diet the vegan diet you know maybe it's maybe they are more protein conscious if they if they you know if they're on ramp to it was like you know a more rash reasonable um you know uh advocate for it but even if not I mean the vegan diet is tends to be higher in fiber which is satiating right so generally people will adopt these somewhat more satiating diets and they'll lose body fat to a point right until they start adding in the fat bombs or they start you know or their their carnivore diet is composed primarily of really fatty meat right and then they see their weight loss stall and that's typically what you'll see happen right people on you know ketogenic diets you know they're putting lots of butter in their coffee perhaps right which don't get me wrong I think you know buttery coffee is delicious but um but that's when people will start to see these like weight loss stalls and they're wondering like what am I doing wrong I'm doing all the things that I'm supposed to be doing right and that's where it becomes clear that they're neglecting the fact that or maybe they haven't just haven't been told that calories still matter regardless of what your dietary way of eating you know what what your preferred way of eating is right and so they may there's this fallacy that calories don't matter because it got them to a certain degree of progress it led to a certain degree of progress but if they neglect to acknowledge that calories do matter then that often times can serve as a pitfall where they stall and that's where you really start to have to you have to look at your at your diet and be like okay well where can I remove maybe I can cut back on some of the fat calories I thought it was really cool when um Sean Baker who's a well-known carnivore advocate for the carnivore deities a fairly aggressive personality on social media but I you know I enjoy his content um he he only eats meat right and uh and he acknowledged recently that he aspires to get leaner and to get leaner what's he doing he's cutting back on the fat calories because he already doesn't eat any carbohydrates so to get leaner when you're on a carnivore diet turns out calories do matter after all you do have to reduce the fat calories and you see this all the time with the carnivore diet ketogenic diet because if the carnivore diet and the ketogenic diet you know if for whatever reason calories didn't matter on those dietary plans then everybody on those diets would be shredded and they're not like I look at people all the time on social media I go into people's accounts and usually it's the people it's those that have their you know carnivore diets you know carnivore diet or ketogenic diet or in their bios hashtag hashtag yeah it becomes like that's part that's there that's suddenly their tribe and they're not they don't have like they're not they don't have like great body compositions right so we have to acknowledge that that calories do matter but they're not all that matter it's kind of like one group is saying hey look it doesn't matter that you save it's all about how much money you make yeah and the other group is like no no it's about saving and then it's actually like if you're really trying to build wealth in your life it turns out it's a little bit of both yeah right it's how much money you make and it's also spending because we've all read those stories of celebrities who made a [ __ ] ton of money and yet ended up bankrupt because they were spending a [ __ ] ton of money yeah absolutely and I think that you know it's yeah I mean you just like for me somebody who was starting out at 15 16 body fat and is well aware for example of the benefits of extra virgin olive oil like I was consuming extra virgin olive oil liberally and I was healthy and we know that extra virgin olive oil is the healthiest oil to consume it's it's got an anti-inflammatory Effect meta-analyzes Show and it's a staple in the Mediterranean dietary pattern which we know is associated with positive Health outcomes and the like so a perfectly healthy food right but one tablespoon of oil has as many calories as a large honey crisp apple and when you're looking to economize in your diet and to reduce the calories so that you can drop some body fat it's a lot more I think enticing to look at where you're ingesting all of these added fat calories so that you continue you can continue to eat really satiating Whole Foods like a Honeycrisp apple for example I'm just using that as an example and ultimately it's only 500 calories a day that you need to cut and maintain on a on a consistent basis to lose a pound of fat a week right and so if you're ingesting two tablespoons of oil which if you're eating out on a regular basis or if you're consuming you know as I often recommend a salad a day and you're just liberally pouring the extra virgin olive oil and without auditing it right you could be ingesting hundreds potentially of calories of just pure fat that could be sabotaging your your weight loss yeah even though it tastes great and you add a little bit of salt it's just so easy to consume yeah like I go to a salad chain frequently there's a salad chain you know like there's a few of them on the coast I don't you know they're probably they're probably fairly ubiquitous at this point and I would get my salads made with a custom dressing of extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar right and the person behind the counter underpaid staff asks you would you like your your oil light medium or heavy right they're not measuring it they're just kind of willy-nilly squirting it in there like and you're essentially leaving your fat loss progress in their hands without properly auditing that fat and the swing is likely massive right it makes a lot less of a difference with the balsamic vinegar which has negligible calories but with something like oil which is the again the most calorie dense food that exists um yeah it can be a big barrier to to somebody like losing you know and it could also be a source of like unintentional fat gain right because we talk all the time about how healthy extra virgin olive oil is for you but even that needs to be like we need to I think it'd be really helpful to audit right like where these added fat calories are coming from it's so true so when you were covering a few of those cheat codes ones just to kind of summarize you covered the first one on your list which was eating home way more right and you talked a little bit about that um do you typically for yourself obviously you don't have kids you're single right now do you typically would you do meal prep would you do anything to sort of make that easier for you would you plan out your meals or do you feel like generally you kind of know because even though you're in a chef you're pretty good in the kitchen so you just make something as you need to yeah well one of the yeah meal prep is a fantastic option I think one of the best things that people can do is to um to essentially have meals that they eat on a consistent basis I think variety is is great it's really important to keep things interesting and I love you know Variety in in The Culinary sense but it can be really helpful to especially for you know on for somebody on a weight loss journey to have you know one maybe even two meals a day that they that they can lean on and they know you know that they basically have already audited and they just eat on a consistent basis first of all it reduces decision fatigue right so it reduces the amount of times in a day that you can quote unquote screw up right so to know that I'm eating a breakfast every morning of three whole eggs and um what have I been eating well I work out in the morning so I've actually been uh which is a very controversial food but I'm enjoying uh the occasional like uh gluten-free oats like organic gluten-free oats pre-workout um which you know a lot of people think is like a not a health food but it's a starch and it actually provides the energy that I require when I when I you know have those morning workouts right um three eggs fruit uh again highly satiating self-limiting and I kind of generally know that that's going to be like a 500 calorie breakfast you know I can vary it up I can change it up I can increase the protein I can do two whole eggs with a bunch of egg whites added and so I'm increasing the protein calories while keeping the fat calories static and I'm still getting those highly nutrient dense egg yolks um but yeah adding adding like egg whites to a to a scramble is a great um low-cost way to increase the amount of protein calories in your diet and then for lunch you know I think it's really great to just generally like opt for a grilled protein of some sort like whether it's a beef tenderloin grilled chicken breast fish things like that some kind of you know non-starchy vegetable always incredible and then you know because I'm working out on a consistent basis I love those you know those carbohydrates are really valuable to me so again not a no fat diet I'm still getting plenty of fat and like whether it's fish or steak um but then I've been integrating like the occasional like rice or sweet potato yeah um and again you go to look at any bodybuilders diet and they're integrating these Foods because it supplies the IT Supplies your muscles with the glycogen right that the next day you can go to the gym and burn off with your exercise well I used to avoid a lot of rice I would avoid you know even like an organic occasional like organic sourdough bagel I would avoid a lot of these things because I was on sort of like that glucose train yeah and then as I started doing these and I was also regularly getting my you know lab work done like normal the interesting thing that I saw is that as I started to add more lean muscle mass and since August of last year so almost been about a year as we're recording this I added about nine pounds of lean muscle mass over that period which is like a big deal for me being like a skinny Indian vegetarian right uh and in that process one thing I saw is that even though I was eating more carbs and I've talked about this a bunch on the podcast often from things like rice sweet potatoes other things like that I was eating more carbs but my fasting insulin was still staying in the optimal category I was probably eating triple to quadruple the amount of carbs because I'm adding lean muscle mass and my muscle mass from everything that I've listened to everybody that's come on the podcast is a thing that's soaking up all that Sugar that's coming into the body so if you're strength training which is another cheat code we'll get to that in a minute if you are moving walking another cheat code and you're being mindful you can do exactly what you said you can lose fat and you can add muscle along the way and recomposition your body yeah 100 I think a lot of people will try to micromanage their blood sugar neglecting to appreciate the fact that when you increase your muscle mass and when you lose body fat your blood sugar regulation is going to improve like one of the they've they've done some really interesting research where they've found that so like we have you know our bodies have these fat silos these energy silos essentially which is our adipose tissue right our adipocytes our fat cells that store calories as a source of energy but word genetic where genes come into play is some people are better at storing fat than others right and once you hit your personal fat threshold which I think for South Asian populations might be a lot lower than it is for other populations right like you might not actually be able to get as fat as somebody with a different set of genes right but at a certain point once your fat tissue starts to become essentially filled right then those excess calories then start to spill over and get stored in what's sometimes referred to as non-professional fat storage sites so this is like ectopic fat right this is like fat stored in your liver this is fat stored in your pancreas and that's when real problems start to happen I mean that's like when like real insulin resistance type 2 diabetes starts now there was a study a couple years ago that found that all it takes is losing one gram of fat from the pancreas for essentially type 2 diabetes to be reversed right and so this is that this is fat that's not supposed to be in the pancreas right this is when you become when you're fat cells and you might not Vision in the mirror depending on your genes look all that fat you might just be skinny fat but that's your body's personal fat threshold where like you just can't store any more fat in your adipose sites right and that's when that fat starts to spill over and create insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes and widespread inflammation all the problems associated with with type 2 diabetes right but the good news is is that it's like fat is like it's last in first out right so the minute you start to lose the fat that's stored ectopically and in your in your organs and the like that's when you start to regain insulin sensitivity and your body becomes better at partitioning glucose and you know you'll start to see your blood sugar levels regardless of what you're eating improve and so I think that that's a really important um take home for people it's like you don't I think it's important to be mindful of your blood sugar curves because blood sugar also can influence hunger and things like that so we want to make sure that we're you know generally consuming foods that are not super high glycemic not Ultra refined but we also don't want to put the cart before the horse right if if you're overweight and you're focusing too much on the on the blood sugar blood sugar absolutely matters but you can improve your body's blood sugar regulation by building as you've discovered building more muscle right and losing the fat yeah and just Echo what you were saying I still occasionally would wear a CGM I would still look at my blood sugar because again Focus plays in a role if you read any of the literature on ages or these Advanced glycation uh and products and products right turns out a lot of sugar at once is something that increases those ages that are there so this is all in the context of my already quite optimized diet compared to the standard American that's out there so these were just some few tweaks but again understanding where to as you say where to major in and where to minor in when it comes to things so we talked about eating at home we talked about uh auditing portion sizes and we talked about prioritizing leaning Pro Lean proteins one question about lean proteins some folks in this podcast have said that for especially people who are not used to consuming or are significantly under eating protein um many women might find themselves in that category they would recommend that the individual might try to have 30 grams of protein sometime earlier in the morning have you seen anything about that being helpful not helpful especially with protein being as satiating as you say it is yeah I mean you've had Don Layman on the podcast yeah and he's great and he you know I mean he's definitely like somebody worth listening to in in this field um you want to consume protein soon after you wake up generally to Halt muscle protein breakdown because it's assuming you've slept eight nine hours and you know maybe you had dinner three to four hours before bed it probably was a good 12 hours before your last protein bolus so you know what in that scenario you've entered essentially muscle protein breakdown and so you do want to consume protein for your first if you're going to break your fast like with you know if you have your choice of what to break your fast with it should be with a high protein bolus and generally the reason why it's there's nothing magic about that number but why we recommend 25 to 35 grams of protein generally as the minimum threshold is because that is generally what will provide about two and a half grams of leucine which is the amino acid that's rate limiting in the process of muscle protein synthesis and halts muscle protein breakdown so 25 to 35 grams of protein is a great way to to break your fast for your first meal of the day now you can go higher than that there's also a misconception that we only will utilize 20 25 to 35 grams of protein you know per sitting but that's not necessarily the case in the context of a mixed meal you're digesting that protein you know over the span of hours so there's no need to micromanage now protein timing does become important if you're trying to as you should hit that protein threshold over the course of the day it's you know it's just difficult to hit the entirety of your protein needs in one or two meals sometimes it helps to you know supplement with like a protein shake or you know a high protein snack over the course of the day which you know again success leaves Clues like any anybody with any physique of note on social media like they're using their vegan or carnivore they're you tend to be utilizing protein shakes and things like that so it does pay to have your protein kind of evenly distributed over the course of the day um but if you're the kind of person who only likes to eat you know two or three meals a day you just want to that's when you wanna make sure you want to have you know there there's that whole nonsense that like you can only absorb 30 grams of protein per meal um not not something that you need to listen to well you can't talk about the idea of weight loss and adding in muscle so fat loss and then adding in muscle re-compositioning the body without talking about lifting you mentioned Dr Donald Layman he's been on the podcast been on your podcast too and talked about the idea that protein is key but also lifting is really where you when you talk about muscle 75 percent is related to lifting and resistance training and then 25 is the dietary side and that is number six on your cheat sheet so if somebody is actually interested in losing fat and re-compositioning their body and maybe not even adding muscle but maintaining muscle why is it so important to talk about lifting yeah so a lot of people make them this is one of the biggest mistakes from a exercise standpoint that people make when they when they you know set off on a weight loss Journey they change their workouts right they'll start going higher reps with the intent of like I don't know toning or um adding adding more cardio and reducing the amount of resistance training that they're doing it's a huge mistake you shouldn't assume that you're going to get weaker on a on a weight loss phase and you should do your best to continue to do activities that stimulate optimal maximal muscle growth because the exact whatever it takes to stimulate to stimulate muscle growth maximally in the body is also going to be what it takes to maintain that muscle when you're in a calorie deficit and so you should aspire to keep improving your lifts like keep you know lifting heavy in that I don't know the rep range kind of it's not as um uh strictly defined as I think was once thought but you know generally like between 5 to 15 repetitions for a given exercise and going to failure on at least one set per workout and focusing on the big compound movements whether it's like you know for somebody who's just starting out maybe push-ups but you know for somebody who's uh more familiar with like gym you know a gym style workout bench pressing you know incline dumbbell presses squats you know uh pull-ups and things like that you want to continue continually tell your body that we need to hold on to this muscle because strength is part of you know of daily life like we need to continue to you know we need to maintain this muscle it's and muscle like losing muscle is not an option and so keeping those workouts intense super super important that's where carbohydrates come in and play a an important role but yeah when I um when I went on this fat loss journey I kept my workouts the same and I with every workout I continually tried to lift more or for more reps that I did the the prior workout because I knew that that was gonna you know that's what it was that's what it takes to tell your body to send that signal to your body that anabolic signal to hold on to the muscle which becomes Mission critical I didn't start adding in a bunch of cardio I increased my walking that's all I did walking is like fat loss magic and I talk about that in the cheat codes as well but um but I didn't start like running or anything like that first of all running is not sustainable for me I don't enjoy it if you enjoy it by all means you know continue to do it but walking I think trumps more aggressive forms of cardio for with regard to Fat Loss because it's so low intensity it's easy to sustain and it doesn't deplete you of energy that is better put towards resistance training that's powerful yeah so walking is like literally fat loss magic you can sustain it it doesn't significantly there is data to back this and I'm not as familiar with it as I should be but to my knowledge from what I recall walking doesn't significantly increase your hunger whereas more aggressive forms of cardio does you know after like a really intense run you might be more hungry whereas walking walking doesn't seem to increase your hunger right so it helps to it helps you on on your on your fat loss Journey um the reward to Agony ratio I think is really high with walking um and it's not as high with with running meaning you know you burn significant calories from walking uh and you'll burn more with running but with walking it's just not commensurate like the increase is not commensurate with the amount of of effort that you have to put into it so walking is really something like you can easily sustain it like I can easily you know get on the treadmill and walk for 45 minutes and by the end I've burned 500 calories which again I don't wouldn't even have to change my diet in any sense and I do that every day that's a pound of fat loss and it doesn't eat it doesn't eat into your muscle because walking is a low intensity activity that primarily oxidizes fat as a fuel source so it's really I mean it from a from a from a fat loss standpoint walking is really like I think one of the best activities there is obviously it's going to vary every day and by the way walking was number seven right so right after lifting heavy is number seven was there a Target amount would you ever use a step counter was it time-based how did you sort of have a rough goal just like you're using a food scale to weigh out things and make sure you're not overeating and getting enough protein and the right gram per pound of ideal body weight what did you use for walking to help you know are you hitting your goal or not yeah so I we live in Los Angeles and Los Angeles is not a pedestrian City unfortunately and so for me I tend to walk like on a on the treadmill it's a way for me to um I get to listen to podcasts and kind of like zone out and not be afraid that I'm gonna get hit by a car which you know is a real risk in Los Angeles I also can do some work for my phone while I'm while I'm walking on the treadmill so for me walking on the treadmill is is really easy and I would set it at like a 3.5 to 4.5 incline you know not an insanely brisk walk I would set the speed to you know 3.2 to 3.5 depending on how I'm feeling I know I'd generally try to walk a mile to two miles a day nothing crazy um but here's the deal if I wanted to create a 500 we'll just say 500 calorie deficit right for me the I think the most sustainable way to do it would be to to roughly remove about 250 calories from food right and burn 250 calories via walking so to do that via walking it's like a mile right and then I only have to cut 250 calories worth of food and right there I'm like that's a pound of fat loss you know doing that roughly every day now you can tweak it on some days like you you know maybe you'll walk outside you know walk through the farmer's market or take a stroll in your neighborhood you won't have to do that on the treadmill maybe some days and also like you know it's important to take diet breaks too especially the more you do it so like this is not a this is not cheating this is part of the plan when you're on a a diet plan to you know to lose body fat and you are sustaining that for a while as you need to you know consistency is what is really the name of the game here it can be useful from a psychological standpoint to take what are called diet breaks so you know depending on what circles you peek into they're called they're referred to either as diet breaks or refeeds but from a psychological standpoint can be really effective and so like you don't even need to be in a calorie deficit every single day sometimes it pays to take a break um so that you can you know follow through on the following day um and maybe go to like the restaurant with your friends or whatever and just like stop thinking about dieting for um for a period of time this is all done regularly by people in the fitness space the difference for me I think Drew is that I'm not like a fitness competitor I'm not a bodybuilder I'm not an athlete I'm not particularly obsessive about this stuff I just wanted to see what what what it would take you know to to easily and with like the least amount of effort possible do this but I think by studying kind of how the pros do it I think you know it's very valuable to see like how they do it right because they're the professionals and success leaves Clues and so um yeah so so kind of splitting it up like a mix between you know a 250 calorie deficit with your food which you know maybe that's like two tablespoons of oil maybe that's like just putting a little more attention on like reducing the added oil and then a mile of walking on a treadmill like daily or like taking a mile long walk around the around your neighborhood I mean that's pretty easy like you know you'd have to be like really um stubborn to not to not see that so that 500 calorie deficit a day coming from walking or some sort of you know movement like that a little bit of food you're splitting it between the two that leads up to the what you were saying about a pound yeah because a pound of fat is um about 3 500 calories so a pound of fat on your body sitting on your hips or in your belly that stores about 3 500 calories right so what's 3 500 what's 500 times seven thirty five hundred yeah so all you got to do is burn 500 calories a day being a 500 calorie per day calorie deficit and you lose a pound of fat yeah it's so straightforward when you look at it this way and obviously a lot of people have had that aha moment kind of going through your cheat codes and it's like wow this is really doable if it's so doable why aren't people normally in their life sort of automatically losing weight what actually throws them off in this process yeah that's a great question well it's the obesogenic food and environment is that today sixty percent of the calories that your average adult consumes comes from minimally satiating highly calorically dense Ultra processed foods that are depleted of protein depleted of fiber depleted of hydration so they're minimally satiating we over consume them in part for those reasons but also because they're they're very easy to consume rapidly so eating rate is another variable um that makes these foods easy to over consume it takes a bit of time for our stomachs to register that they that it has food in them right so um the fact that Ultra processed foods are so readily consumed especially when they're you know when we're talking not even food but like sugar sweetened Beverages and the like um we just consume these calories so quickly in a way that our bodies just don't you know are not set up to be able to like register and so the standard American diet is defined in part by the over consumption of these Ultra processed foods and by the way machine learning there was a study that came out showing us that 73 of the foods in your average Supermarket are Ultra processed so that's I mean that's the big problem it's that these and these Foods aren't here's the other thing that um that is that I've learned that's really interesting is like you don't have to you can still integrate all of your favorite foods while losing fat like if you if there's an ultra processed food that you happen to love it's not that that food is you know the soul Smoking Gun for all of your health problems is that you tend to over consume them as those foods are designed to you know that that phenomena that those foods are are really designed for right these foods are designed to create repeat customers and we see that they they tend to very easily be over consumed but chips potato chips yeah but if you have a food scale in your house for example and you know maybe if the potato chip is the one thing that's going to make it easier for you to sustain this diet at the end of the day you get to go home and and like after a after a day of essentially dieting and you get to have your your single serving of potato chips and that's going to be the one thing that helps you to adhere for some people it's like diet soda I don't drink diet soda I don't drink artificial consume artificial sweeteners but for some you know if that's the one thing that is going to allow you to sustain this diet over the long haul that at the end of the day you get to enjoy your whatever it is you know by all means like you should be able to right and that's where I think being a little bit more moderate about our you know how we think about these variables and not so polarized right like it's all calories calories don't matter at all that's when we start to realize that like you can actually integrate you know these foods that you thought were you know perhaps off limits to you over the course of this process for me I didn't really you know exclude any foods that um you know that I that I love like I I found a way to continue to incorporate them but I just became more mindful of like of of portion sizes which you're really unable to do without without uh I don't know if I mean I think a food scale really helps and it's a lot easier not to overeat on those Foods when you're following all the other fundamentals that allow you not to be super hungry like prioritizing protein and it being so satiating you know etc etc right monitoring auditing your food it's just harder and then on top of that you're working out people naturally when they start to do a lot of the basics they just find themselves actually not reaching as much for a lot of these Ultra processed foods but as you mentioned that doesn't mean that you don't have to ever reach for them because how much you can stick with a diet is the best indication that it's actually going to end up working for you in some capacity yeah I mean the biggest enemy when you're on a diet is hunger that's like the the number one enemy right and also your proximity well I would say it's it's it's a little reductive to say it's just one thing I mean hunger is a big problem but also boredom boredom is a major uh reason I think for people to mindlessly snack on things sometimes when I get bored I just you know I miss that phenomenon of like opening the fridge I'm not even hungry I'm just opening the fridge to see what's in it okay so talk about this this is number eight no boredom snacking yeah okay so when would you find yourself in a place of boredom snacking like what time of day you know people generally have their schedules like what was going on that you would find yourself boredom snacking yeah I mean I personally work from home and we live in an era now where more people are working from home like right like remote working is a is a big thing ever since the pandemic and lo and behold data suggests that over the course of the pandemic people gained more weight right more time at home more time spent in proximity to the foods that we love which tend to be ultra processed right and so when we're bored we tend to be on the lookout for that dopamine hit and for most people the easiest way to increase dopamine is to go and eat something tasty right and I'm no different like I when I'm working from home I'm always like chronically in and out of my Cupboards in and out of my fridge whether or not I'm hungry I'm always looking for something to put in my face right because it's fun and it and it assuages for a brief moment that boredom maybe I'm in between meetings and you know and I'm just like it's just been a really like rough day maybe I'm stressed out maybe my cat puked in a place that it shouldn't have that she shouldn't have and uh and you know we all want like that we all want that reprieve from the daily stresses that are inevitable to some degree today and so I will typically go to the cupboard I'll look for something tasty but oftentimes what I've had to come to realize that it's literally just that I'm not hungry if I'm just able to bring a little bit of awareness to it I'm not necessarily hungry I'm just bored I want to put something in my mouth so I've stocked my fridge now with Sparkling Waters um which are great like you can throw some Stevia drops into your favorite flavored sparkling water and suddenly it becomes a calorie-free soda with no artificial sweeteners um teas I think are phenomenal I also now stock like high protein snacks so if I do want a snack it's going to be something that is going to be most Adept at assuaging my Hunger so you know cold cuts or Greek yogurt is a great option uh you know even the occasional protein shake um which you know is technically a processed food but it's pure it's essentially pure protein um and so yeah and then you know also what I'll do is I'll just get out of the house like I think it's like a big uh boredom is like a is is definitely like a number one driver of of snacking yeah a lot of people struggle with it especially there's that late at night snacking were you ever a late at night snacker oh definitely yeah and and most things that people are consuming it's not necessarily although there is data that suggests that late night snacking does increase next day hunger and to some degree reduce next day energy expenditure the biggest problem with late night snacking is that nobody's snacking on anything healthy late at night yeah right unless we're talking fruit which is great um but most of the times most of the snacks that we reach for when we're sitting on a couch binge watching our favorite streaming show those snacks tend to be some combination of carbs and fat usually both highly calorically dense typically Ultra processed and so by cutting out those Foods I mean that's where intermittent fasting or time restricted eating I think can play a role I mean there is good data on it now coming out about circadian rhythms and all that stuff but um at the very least it's a parameter that you can put in place that ensures that after dinner or whatever time you set for yourself whether it's 8 PM or 9 pm you're not going to be snacking because again most snacks for people tend to be of that Ultra process hyper palatable variety you know that that that that quality that food manufacturers assign to ultra processed foods that just makes them so delicious it's impossible to you know to stop our or to to moderate our consumption of those Foods it's amazing that when I really started hitting for me my protein goal every day was a hundred and about 48 grams of protein a day right 145 150 you know 50. when you're eating that much protein from whole food sources and not I never was really eating Ultra processed food since I was a kid you are also just not as hungry not that I don't have a sweet tooth just like everybody else but genuinely you feel like you're not reaching for things as much because you just feel so full in the day I was never a big late night snacker but even what little I might have you go and have a meal even if it's out and you're prioritizing that protein first you just don't feel as hungry that's something that I've noticed yeah I mean one of my favorite foods is uh are is fruit and I love honey crisp apples right I have never eaten a Honeycrisp apple and then immediately felt the compulsion to go and eat a second one I've never felt that and they're one of my favorite foods and so right there we can see you know one example of where Whole Foods are more satiating than processed foods right like whole fruit is self-limiting it's rough the food Matrix that you know invaluable food Matrix that you know I've done I've talked a bit about this in the past but the fibrous Matrix the water the minerals right it's like you don't feel compelled that that compulsion to go and eat more after you've eaten one the same way that you would with like an ultra processed food and the same thing goes with you know chicken or steak or you know eggs like you know people don't tend not to over consume these Foods because they're so self-limiting so I mean yeah if that's I mean that that's another important intervention that people these are all tools you know like maybe maybe intermittent fasting rings a bell you know for your average person maybe eating home more is going to be the trick minimizing your consumption of ultra processed foods that's another huge one today when your average adult is consuming 60 of their calories you know by weight from these or but you know by calories from these types of foods reducing their intake of those is going to be a major win and I think even for people that are already considering stuff like super healthy they listen to your podcast listen to mine maybe some others that oil concentrated calories in the form of nut Butters I can't tell you how many friends of mine that are just like dude I feel like something really complicated is going on with me right maybe it's cortisol levels maybe it's my insulins out of that a whack maybe my hormones are thrown off I just can't lose the weight and then doing a little bit of auditing not that I'm a nutritionist dietitian but just asking good questions and referring them to somebody they saw that just that avocado toast that they make with extra guacamole and extra olive oil and then extra this and then they're also having you know some oatmeal but they're putting in four tablespoons of nut butter yeah and they don't realize that great none of these foods are bad in themselves there's nothing wrong with the fat there's nothing wrong with the carbs nothing wrong with this but it just got a little out of whack and some small changes can help them bring themselves back into balance absolutely yeah if you are carrying extra weight audit your way of eating and just see what reducing you know like your consumption of these Ultra fatty foods you know Ultra you know high fat foods will do this doesn't have to be permanent this could just be like a little experiment that you run for yourself I guarantee you'll see you know an improvement and nuts are a really interesting um food category nuts are one of the most calorie dense foods that exist but um they don't seem to be associated with obesity we seem we seem to see that the that when people consume more whole nuts they tend to actually have lower risk for obesity and there's really interesting data now coming out again just about the value of the food Matrix and particularly where nuts are concerned there was a study published by funded by the USDA that found that we actually don't absorb the full caloric contribution um contributed by whole nuts that about 30 percent of the calories that we ingest by way of nuts you could be calorie counting looking at the label actually passed through us I was in London recently and I interviewed um one of the researchers on this uh Sarah Berry they've done really interesting studies where they'll have people chew whole nuts and they'll have them spit out the bolus just prior to swallowing or they'll take people with like ostomy bags and they'll take the they'll have them consume nuts and then they'll see what comes out at the other end of the small intestine you know in these ostomy bags and they'll see that about 30 percent of the calories it differs not to not but generally uh goes un unabsorbed basically so nuts actually whole nuts contribute fewer calories than previously thought again because of this like Whole Food Matrix that the calories the fat calories are bound in some you know ineffable you know characteristic of the nuts that makes them um in in some way despite their caloric density less obesogenic than you know perhaps an ultra processed food of equal uh calorie content now where this concept goes out the window is when you take nuts and you grind them into nut butter right when you grind nuts when you process nuts into nut butter you're likely absorbing 100 of the calories from that product right when you and this goes for likely all types of foods right we see that Whole Foods not only are they more satiating but they might even have less of a caloric impact than was previously thought in fact there's a um very well known I'm not gonna I'm not gonna name the brand but there's like a well-known brand of like granola bars that's on the market you find them at gas stations and whatever they updated their their calorie uh counts on their bars after that study came out wow yeah and they were legally allowed to because that's what the data shows that nuts actually have a lower caloric contribution than was previously thought fascinating yeah I love it connecting all the dots before we go to the last few cheat codes that you have number nine which we chatted about a little bit but it's worth going through and then number 10. I want to chat a little bit about just this idea around the permission of people allowing themselves to if you want to lose weight if you want to re-composition your body that hey that's not a bad thing that's okay and it's also healthy it felt like for a while in society we weren't allowed to really talk about sort of weight loss and body composition I know you're always following the hot social topics here and there but um any thoughts that you want to toss in the mix about it and what you feel is kind of happening now where it feels like we're having a lot more of a balanced conversation about it not that there aren't still extremes that are out there but I think the world is sort of waking up and realizing like okay this is kind of nonsense that we can't talk about certain subjects in any kind of category that's there and that also doesn't mean we're blaming people who are overweight anybody who has been overweight I've never been overweight or severely obese or has family members or friends they know that that individual all they think about all day is being overweight they wish they could do something to get and they've tried so many different things they've spent so much different money they've been lied to a little bit about the things that kind of contribute to that and the role of different foods and things like that but there seems like we were in a place where you couldn't talk about weight loss and now we're kind of getting out of that what's some of your commentary on this space yeah I mean weight loss is a fat obesity is a huge problem today societally and we have to be talking about it weight absolutely matters I mean today we're trending towards a world where or country rather where one in two adults is not just overweight but obese so it's a huge problem and being obese increases your risk for any number of chronic non-communicable conditions you can be normal weight uh and and metabolically obese it tends to be the minority and you could be overweight and metabolically healthy but again that's the minority in general being you know obese is not as good for you as being not obese and that shouldn't be controversial to to say to to state obesity is a disease and so I think we need to approach it as such now the problem is when we shame and when we finger point I think a lot of people are just not set up with the tools to understand um how their food environment might be influencing their you know their their pre their you know their predisposition to weight gain um I think a lot of people like to adopt like a victim mindset which I think is has become very common today there's a lot of competing like variables right there's now this influx on the market of of actually really effective weight loss drugs right like ozempic and things like that and we have Physicians highly credentialed Physicians going on major Nightly News shows claiming that obesity is primarily genetic right which I think is highly deflating for anybody who's you know struggled on the on the weight loss Journey but at the end of the day people have the capacity to lose weight like whether you're obese or just overweight like you have the same capacity to lose the fat as anybody else with the right know-how and with the right tools and with the right dedication and motivation and ultimately discipline and um and so I think it's a big problem to be undermining that you know I mean I know a lot of people who are you see them on social media people who you know started out terribly obese and they they you know they embody they they begin to embody the hard work and they and they radically change their lives and it's like incredibly inspiring there's a guy on uh Twitter has he's gone viral recently and he's he's built up a really great following his name is Dave Deanna I think is his name I don't know his last name but he he set his mission has been to set out to conquer obesity he's like an obese guy and he takes photos of himself in the gym and he's you know he's he's making incredible progress and he's in now an inspiration to many on Twitter and so um so I think we can't we have to stop the the victim blaming and the fat shaming um I think that's a really important part of the of the equation um and we have to acknowledge when we're seeing overweight people exercising that is incredibly healthy that's amazing it's incredibly healthy to see somebody of any size exercising right it's if we see somebody who's overweight sitting on a couch and we say that's healthy suddenly we're lying that's when that's when we start lying to people so yeah that's my take and I think we just we have to we have to just continue to fight the good fight yeah you know I have a lot of being Indian and all even though it's stereotype it's true a lot of my family members are doctors Physicians and the thing that I've heard from them is that they even feel nervous about bringing up weight wild in appointments even from a very compassionate standpoint now I think that part of that is that the medical system for a long time just told patients to come in hey you're overweight you need to eat better and exercise without really giving them any more tools not that doctors are equipped with those tools they many of themselves are struggling on this journey to be into a optimal sort of body composition but the ones who are educated feel a little bit nervous about the best ways to be able to talk about it and they know that patients are quite sensitive these days and they're trying to find the right angles in fact there's this sort of movement where a lot of patients are carrying around a card that they handed their doctor and saying you know please do not weigh me unless if it's medically necessary now I see both sides of that right somebody might have a lot of trauma they might have that maybe they've had bad doctors that they should have fired and found somebody who's really a partner with them on the journey maybe somebody that's like integrative or functional leaning who has compassion for them maybe their zip code that they were raised in the fact that their parents were never taught how to cook the fact that they grew up in an area that only had 7-Elevens to shop in right you have to have compassion for people in their situation but that also said Hey listen this isn't just about weight and this isn't just about how you look this is about your metabolic Health this is about you not being in a place where you have preeclampsia during pregnancy gestational diabetes this is a place where the number one thing correlated we had Dr Sachin panda on the podcast recently you know the number one thing like you know obesity is so correlated with cancer right so many different chronic diseases that are out there and having a more compassionate conversation saying listen I know this is concerning to you but I want to tell you why it matters for all the goals that you have in your life regardless of what those goals are so It's Tricky but I feel like we're collectively waking up and sometimes it takes things getting really nutty before everybody's like okay this isn't making sense and people are just getting fatter and sicker and we need to go about things in a different way yeah and people are so judgmental I did a video recently on um on Instagram and Twitter that went kind of viral and uh the comments that I got on it were insane so I did it I did a video where I went to how do I set this up so sometimes when you're traveling you're in a pinch you can't find it's it's hard to find healthy food like you some people literally do shop at 7-Elevens and at gas stations and things like that right and I think it's important not to be a snob about like food right and I think in the wellness world it's easy to to project this perfectionist image where you know where all we're doing is eating like avocado toast and the finest organic extra virgin olive oil all day and grass-fed grass finish this and that and I think that's great it's great to like I'm very lucky and privileged and I live in in Los Angeles and I've curated and worked very hard to to build a life where I can afford these access and afford these kinds of foods but for people that can't I also try to make it really easy for people to understand like what they can do given their circumstances to eat healthier than the average person right healthier and so I went to I found out I was giving a talk recently in Arizona and it was to college students and college students typically don't have a lot of money and so one of the students who I was talking to after my talk told me that there's that McDonald's of all places has a hidden menu where you can order foods from McDonald's a la carte wow yeah I had no idea right I haven't had McDonald's in 20 years okay I'm not a fast food consumer but he told me that if you go to a McDonald's and if you order their Quarter Pounder beef patties you can order them just the just the patties and it's super cheap and it's they're prepared they give them to you in a tray ready to be consumed and God knows there's like McDonald's everywhere like McDonald's one of the most like common fast food I was in London they're all like McDonald's like if you don't have access to a McDonald's like you've got to be like living in a forest somewhere right and so this was not a sponsored post or anything like that um but I went to McDonald's I went to the drive-through McDonald's and I ordered four Quarter Pounder patties off the a la carte menu and it was like eight bucks and I got a pound of beef seasoned and whatever ready to be consumed and I sat there and I filmed it and I put it on my Instagram in the parking lot of a McDonald's and it was a pound of beef and you know what I went to the McDonald's website according to them it's 100 beef no fillers just salt and pepper I have followers that work have worked at McDonald's they don't use any oils to cook the burger no seed oils nothing like that it's just pure meat thrown on the grill right and I ate it and it I swear to God tasted indistinguishable from any other from any other Burger you know and so I posted that and I was like really psyched that I like posted this and it was provided you know if first of all if I'm on the road and I can't find access to a high quality protein I'm not saying it's high quality meat but it is high quality protein and that's all I have access to then I'm gonna go for it right and so I posted that and I got an overwhelming amount of positive comments people were like oh my God this is amazing I had no idea I'm gonna do this I you know I commute three hours a day for work or whatever and like sometimes I'm in a pinch or I have six kids and like you know sometimes they're screaming for McDonald's and I don't know what to order and blah blah so most people really appreciated it but like a small minority of people were like unfollow you know how dare you how dare you what was this paid for by McDonald's you're you're now Shilling McDonald's this is garbage I'm like it's not it's not garbage it's high quality protein that you that anybody can can go out and buy in a pinch and I ate it I had no qualms I felt great afterwards but the amount of shame that some people launched onto me just showing this was mind-blowing like absolutely mind-blowing and I have compassion for those people because I probably would have been one of those people many many years ago right when I was just starting off with my journey and everything and the more you realize that we are sure you can curate your own life and you can set up your life the way you want to to not maybe be in that situation where you have to order from McDonald's by the way if that's you probably you're part of the zoom class you're the individuals that get to work from home you're like me you you might have a podcast you you might be living in a major city like La Charlotte somewhere where you can get access to healthier food options but if you really care about Society there's plenty of people that are not in that situation and then on top of that people have kids right even my healthiest friends in La will tell you they're kids unless if there's like some extreme situation they can't they're sensitive to certain foods every kid asks for fast food at some point in time right we don't have a lot of McDonald's around here but there are some right and you gotta know what you can do along the way to still feed yourself the things that you want to do so I have compassion but it's not the right solution to shame everybody else when all somebody's doing in your case here you're just trying to provide good information about a possibility we need more goodness in the world and we need more options we're not going to get eight billion people eating healthier by shaming everybody you know we gonna need a lot of different solutions and different types of Education to help people actually understand how to make these diet and lifestyle choices sustainable exactly and if you're an obese person right I've never been an obese person so I can't even imagine but if you're an obese person obviously eating an obesogenic diet right and you approach from an open-minded and naive standpoint like the like wellness world right that where again this like image of perfection tends to be portrayed it can seem incredibly overwhelming right like and Sophia so I do have compassion for your average person who is obese right and like just like maybe that's going to be a vastly healthier option than what it is that they're currently eating right like the four Quarter Pounders without the you know something that's like a meal that is incredibly satiating without the fries right like maybe you're not getting the fries but you're getting two additional Quarter Pounders for more protein right and you're not getting the um you know and you're skipping the the whatever the soft drink right which we know is is problematic that's an improvement right major Improvement major Improvement so um so yeah I think it's really important to have compassion for for obese people to remind and and you know for people with obesity and to remind people that like you know sometimes it's like those those incremental daily habits that like add up over the long term to really really big wins it's that concept of like um compounding interest right so if you if you make a one percent Improvement per day that doesn't seem like a lot right it's pretty easy to improve it's pretty just to wrap my head around being one percent better today than I was yesterday that's a pretty easy lift if I try to be 25 better than I was yesterday that's a bit more difficult I'm not really sure what that might look like right but one percent better I could probably do and if I try to be tomorrow one percent better than I was today like you do that over time and that adds up and um and yeah by the end of the year probably equates to something dramatically different than what your current today looks like well my favorite questions to ask people who are like super judgy and again I've been at that place at one point in time early on probably when I became vegan you know that was probably my most judgmental time period although I learned very quickly and started holding my tongue because I realized like nobody appreciates that you know and I didn't even want to be that person it was a very short period of time but one of my most favorite questions to ask somebody who's like very judgmental almost like a wellness elitist right that everybody should be living a particular way should is really the key word we should be doing this we should be eating this they should be supplementing this way whatever it might be is if they're open to it it's like tell me the last time that you genuinely change your mind you evolved your thinking on something right and walk me through it and when they walk you through it and they talk to you about how they change their mind maybe they have heard all the great people over the last couple years talking about how important protein is and before that they were under eating or maybe they were consuming a lot of sugar and now they're much more mindful of it they're not doing so much added sugar because even though sugar doesn't have a lot of calories it plays a role in diabetes and insulin and other stuff it's like okay great well before you thought you were doing your best right how would it feel if somebody was like super judgmental on you and putting you down you naturally had to take time and it was probably you learning through something hopefully probably in Long format where somebody explains you that there's a better way of going through things and it was through education it wasn't through somebody coming to your house and telling you you're a shitty person because you're eating or living this way it was probably because somebody educated you somebody looked up to you admired them even if you disagreed with them on certain things and that's how you shifted your mind it wasn't through harsh shaming as the bottom line so we need to get out of that especially when it comes to the internet and the whole comments and trolling I don't even know if you ever look on YouTube but YouTube's a little scary place sometimes yeah you're my favorite person to read sometimes YouTube comments I saw somebody the other day wrote a comment and they were like which by the way 90 was positive right 10 was like something like that yeah somebody said I'm unsubscribing and all you did was you put a piece Emoji which I think is a healthy healthy approach oh yeah if somebody wants to unfollow me by all means go for it go for it yeah um I don't I zero zero F's given because you know I'm just here to provide information and also to share my journey in this in this process like where we're all ultimately left to just figure things out for ourselves if I can help somebody you know accelerate their progress then that's an amazing thing um but if you're not you know if you're if you're one of these people who you know is just looking for the next thing to be triggered by then I have no business interacting with you and you're probably not even a very low you know you're not probably not even supporting me anyway you're probably just like taking the free content and whatever and so yeah I have no very little patience for those for those types all right two more cheat codes yeah one is a summary and both are kind of like a summary but the first one is something that we chatted about before it's dropping added oils and fats just do a little bit of a recap on that one right separate from oils he talks a lot about olive oil you're a huge fan of it you're still a huge you fan of it yeah you just appropriately adjusted it to factor in the calories that you're actually consuming within your total plan that's there were there any other types of fats that you had to make swaps for to achieve some of your goals yes um and I'm glad we circled back to this because I here's where I probably have updated my thinking I used to kind of how do I phrase this because when I was at 15 16 body fat I was very healthy like that's you know I was that's a healthy body fat percentage but everybody has different goals and if and my goal became to lose a little bit of body fat and if that's what your goal is one of the things that I found to be very effective was to swap the fattier meats that I was consuming with leaner Cuts now we for the past few decades have been told that fat is bad you know fat makes you fat fat is bad fat and saturated fat is not good for Our arteries and things like that right which we know is not the case like we know that fat is a vital part of food it plays a role in satiety it helps us helps us to absorb fat soluble vitamins and compounds in in plants and things like that but the um and of course that's that that kind of Dogma has led to the influx of all these low-fat and fat-free Ultra processed foods on the market and so the pendulum has swung now in the other direction where in some nutrition Pockets online it's almost like you can it's almost like fat gets a a hall pass you know we can eat as much fat as we possibly want and fat doesn't you know when over consumed doesn't lead to any negative Health outcomes which isn't true either right and so lean lean protein has almost become like I mean it is a four-letter word but it's almost become like the new four-letter word in certain nutrition pockets and what I did was I started swapping like uh fattier cuts of meat that I was consuming on a regular basis and all you know super healthful like again because it I was consuming it in the context of being 15 16 body fat so all good but you know I was eating a lot of like rib eyes for example which are it's a fattier cut of meat and I made the swap to uh consume primarily leaner Cuts so and people have this misconception that there's no such thing as lean delicious red meat and there absolutely is so I started consuming a lot more hanger steaks and flank steaks and tenderloins and New York strip steaks and things like that which are leaner than ribeyes and I also started to whereas I was consuming you know I would consume a six egg scramble in the in the mornings you know for for breakfast um without hesitation I started um I cut it down to you know two to three whole eggs and started adding some cartoned egg whites which egg yolks are amazing they're one of Nature's multivitamins and they're incredible but by doing that what you're doing is you're reducing the amount of fat calories in your diet and you're increasing the amount of protein calories so it made it really easy for me to increase the protein in my diet while still getting all the nutrition nutritional value from whole eggs but I just started eating few of them so I made the swap to some leaner proteins with dairy I started consuming more uh like Greek yogurt but I started going for like the reduced fat Greek yogurt or fat-free Greek yogurt which is essentially like a protein shake right there it's not that dairy fat is bad dairy fat is super healthy that's what all the observational research shows but these swaps what they do is they do a few things for one they give you more flexibility so they give you more dietary flexibility so whereas on a rib eye you know I was probably consuming about a thousand calories you know in that setting maybe now I'm consuming a 500 calorie tenderloin and I've got an additional 500 calories to play with to consume you know maybe it's the extra virgin olive oil in my salad or maybe it's a few extra you know pieces of fruit or whatever so that or or maybe even like uh some kind of starch so that I can have more energy in the work in my in my workouts you need fat to again for satiety to optimize hormones to optimize digestion as I mentioned right fat is important essential fatty acids like omega-3 and omega-6 fats but beyond that sort of minimal effective dose of your daily fat intake there's not there's not as uh overt a performance boost with consuming more of it as you get from consuming carbohydrates so for somebody who's resistance training you want to make sure to maintain that flexibility in your diet so that you can continue to continue to keep your carbohydrate intake up as you shed the body fat because again it's gonna it's gonna give that's going to give you that energy that you need to sustain your workouts so I just made a few deliberate swaps here and there with the added fats and oils and the fattier cuts of meat and the you know the full fat Dairy for for low fat with the intent of this being a temporary switch and without counting calories like the fat just kind of melted off which was which was great I also reduced my intake of you know fattier Foods in general like you know dark chocolate so whereas before I would eat I would easily plow through like an entire bar of dark chocolate a day because I just knew that I know that dark chocolate is very healthy but it's a very calorie dense food right and so it kind of is at odds with that like fighting off the the the optimizing for satiety and fighting off the hunger the the satiety per calorie that you get with a dark chocolate bar or with any of these higher fat foods is not really as is not really as great right there's this idea of optimizing satiety per calorie like you want your foods to be filling in as in as small with as small of a with as low of a calorie contribution as possible going back to that breakfast example that you brought up earlier you want your foods to be equally associating but depending on where you are whether you're trying to gain weight maintain weight or lose weight you have to modulate the calorie density right you want to keep your satiety up um but it's where you know reducing the fat goes a long way towards reducing the calorie density of your of your Foods any other things that you found during this experiment foods that you were trying that you felt like wow you know I've had this before but I kind of underappreciate it just like you talked about the honey crisp apple yeah and how that's one of your favorites but also you was very satiating I know this guy on Twitter dietdoctor.com right like the diet doctor I know those guys yeah yeah and they kind of been getting a lot of flack because he was I think a hardcore keto guy before hardcore who then has updated based on all these surveys and databases about what actually makes people satiated yeah right and like he's done a few where like hey butter is not as satiating as you know something else that people don't think is you know more satiating so was there any other foods that came up for you that were very satiating foods that just left you in a place where you didn't feel hungry and you're less likely to board them snack and you're less likely to reach for for the more concentrated calories they're going to have you break what your goals are well fiber is incredibly satiating we haven't even touched on that but fiber is uh you know not quite associating as protein but um it mechanically stretches out the stomach it's like one of those you know growing up as a kid we had these little things these like little uh animals that would come in a pill and you would throw them into water and they would like expand as dinosaurs yeah so that's exactly essentially what what yeah dinosaurs essentially what fiber does in your stomach so it mechanically stretches out the stomach and turns off hormones like ghrelin um which is the hunger hormone so yeah optimizing for fiber and was there a way that you found that that like there's everything to like I have no affiliation but sometimes in the morning what I'll do for my Hunger I'll do like Greek yogurt right I'll add in a scoop of whey protein inside kind of mix it together but I'll add also add in I came across this really cool fiber blend by Garden of Life which is like a bunch of different organic fibers and it's like five grams and so there's like a nice little fiber boost was there any snacks supplement anything that you found like that that was a good go-to for you besides the traditional idea of like eating a salad or having an apple yeah um well it's very counterintuitive but um when you look at the satiety index of foods potatoes rank very high which is like it's a pure starch but for some reason maybe it's because they're not that they're not really that delicious unless you until you start adding the you know the sour cream and the bacon and the cheese on top of it but but potatoes are incredibly satiating it could be because you know they contain resistant starch I mean that could be one of the mechanisms um but I definitely um leaned you know started leaning more on some of these yeah starches like potatoes as I mentioned earlier um in the mornings so I'm glucose sensitive and I work out in the morning so just again to paint the pics the picture of context I started uh consuming some morning oatmeal which is a very commonly consumed food in the bodybuilder community and I think part of the reason for that is that it's a satiating food it's a very slow burning carbohydrate not the instant oats mind you it's these are like steel cut very low glycemic index and provide that sort of slow release of of glucose like into the bloodstream which I would then take to the gym with me um and oats there are some caveats to be made obviously like you know generally if you're you want to make sure that they're gluten free particularly if you're if you're sensitive to gluten or Celiac oats can be you know pretty heavily sprayed but it is possible to find glyphosate-free certified organic oats and so if you're able to find those I think that you know oats can be a really great food for that like to supply you know a really clean burning fuel source um for for exercise and they're a great source of soluble fiber we know that they um contain compounds called beta glucans which support your immune system and they're very satiating and that's and you know this is an area where like you know I probably wouldn't have consumed them five years ago because I just thought that they were this like you know unhealthy grain and they're not the most nutrient dense food I will say that but in the context of of optimizing around your workouts you know peri-workout carbohydrates or even intro workout carbohydrates are very valuable for people who are who are exercising and so by providing starch which isn't really a nutrient but it does serve a functional role in that context um that's where I've sort of like opened my my mind to those kinds of foods which would have which would have typically been off the table for me up until just a couple of of years ago yeah love it all right number 10. and I think this is a good one to have some concluding thoughts around consistency and patience yeah talk a little bit about that yeah so I think a lot of people um want like overnight like success they want to see the scale move right away they look in the mirror they want to see a big difference but you're actually incentivized from a body composition standpoint to lose fat slowly now this varies person to person so actually the more overweight you are you can actually lose fat more rapidly and it's fine it's all good there's a hypothetical there's a study on this maximum fat transfer of about 30 something 35 calories per day that a pound of fat can release on a given 24-hour period so if you're not carrying around a ton of fat there's only so much fat that can be extracted from from your adipose tissue on a 24-hour basis before you start your body starts looking for fuel elsewhere potentially your muscle right so the leaner you are partic in particular the more slowly you want to lose the weight like you really want and you also don't want to incur any metabolic adaptation which can occur with a more rapid weight loss so there's um metabolic adaptation and what's called adaptive thermogenesis with more rapid weight losses your body basically thinks that it's starving to death this isn't like a permanent kind of damage but your metabolism slows to some degree your um adaptive thermogenesis is essentially your your body you have less energy and subconscious move you're less inclined to move um and fidget and things like that when you're in a more pronounced calorie deficit your neat actually declines non-exercise adaptive non-exercise activity thermogenesis decreases and so that's where like your calorie expenditure will start to come down which leads a lot of people to think that their diets have like failed or they've stalled you can prevent that you can you can you can prevent that by by adopting a less Stark calorie deficit so you're incentivized to lose weight to lose fat particularly when leaner more slowly you're also going to risk muscle loss less like the the risk of muscle losses lower as well as those uh adaptive metabolic changes now when you have a lot of weight to lose you can actually lose fat at a more rapid Pace because you have more fat so you're able to release more calories from that fat and also you can kind of get away with keeping your protein a little bit lower because there's just more energy to go around to fuel all the anabolic processes you know when you're when you're exercising but for somebody like me who is again at a healthy weight you know 15 to 16 body fat for if you're in that range then you really ought to approach your weight loss from a slower standpoint so that you prevent some of those like adaptive changes and a lot of people will get I think discouraged when they see that the the um the weight on the scale it's weight loss is generally not linear which I think is another area where people get kind of confused and disheartened over the course of the process weight can fluctuate I mean it can fluctuate in accordance by way of like you know food that you're like like bathroom Habits Like if you're not going to the bathroom regularly when you're on a calorie deficit over a prolonged period of time you know digestion can slow um because again your body's like trying to suck as many calories as possible out of what it is that you're eating whereas digestion is a lot faster when you're eating a calorie Surplus right because this is like your body thinks that there's more food to go around um so you know if you're if you're holding in food or whatever if you're if you're if you're experiencing a degree of constipation like you can see an increase in the scale water weight also is another major variable here like depending on how many carbohydrates you're eating whether or not you're in a calorie deficit carbohydrates cause water to be stored in your muscles so all that is to say that the scale the progress that you see on the scale isn't always linear but if you track over the long term it should Trend down um I think looking in the mirror like taking like progress photos it's a much better and more reliable indicator although the scale should change over time obviously if you're in a calorie deficit um but yeah going at a at a slower Pace I think is is super effective and it's also like um going to be the most sustainable right because like if you're trying to bite off more than you can choose so to speak with a greater calorie deficit then it's just gonna be harder to do so yeah so I think approaching it more slowly with the intent of half a pound to a pound if you're on the leaner side of fat loss per week to maybe more two pounds um or potentially even somewhat higher uh if you're more overweight I think those are all reasonable goals to um to strive for and a lot of people are like you know that's not enough like it's one pound one pound is a lot if you if you're on this trajectory for three months that's like 12 pounds of fat so I mean like who wouldn't after three months want to look back and say I've lost 12 pounds of fat right pure fat it's huge and also as you've mentioned at the beginning of this whole tweet thread is that you wanted to be as enjoyable as possible it still required effort but this isn't something extreme which also means the challenge is you know a lot of people can lose weight specifically fat for a short period of time but then because they rely on Extreme Measures for it they end up gaining back that weight and more because they're in a little bit of a yo-yo fashion yeah that's the biggest loser phenomena is that they took all these um aspiring dieters and they put them on these crash diets reducing calories to like crazy degrees without any of the stipulations that we've talked about over the you know past hour and some somewhat minutes and um and as soon as that show ended Maybe not immediately but years later they found that all of those contestants such as regained the weight yeah so part of this is like creating the healthy habits that's going to allow you to sustain that the progress that you've made and so one of the coolest aspects of this journey for myself is that I've also been able to take away from it things that I've learned that I can continue to integrate over the long term the value of you know food auditing for example like of of weighing out your portion sizes I'm not tracking but I think it's good to know if for example I were to want to for dinner have a legume pasta which I sometimes enjoy very high protein high fiber it's good for me to know that I'm consuming I like to know that I'm consuming a serving or two servings of this legume pasta and not six servings unintentionally and so that food scale that I've had is one of been one of the best investments that I've ever made because of the amount of use that I'm getting from it for a 16 investment well Max this has been fantastic I'm gonna recap these just one more time so anybody has some we'll link to you have them all in a PDF we'll link to it people can sign up for your newsletter they can get the PDF and everything so number one eating at home way more number two auditing portion size you just talked about that number three prioritizing lean proteins number four ditching the ultra processed foods number five keeping your protein high and we gave the formula for that earlier number six lifting heavy or at least having some resistance training in your workout regimen number seven walking and walking for at least you know one to two miles a day easy to do on a treadmill a little bit of an incline and then number eight no boredom snacking that's a big one for a lot of people easier to do when you practice all of these nine we just covered in our recap dropping added oils and fats and 10 consistency and patience Max as we conclude here just on that last theme for anybody who feels like man I feel like I've tried so many different things what's the last message you want to leave them with when it comes to the topic of body composition and weight loss and really related to like mindset there are a lot of people that genuinely feel like I've tried so much I've made progress or I feel like I'm older now I'm not in my 20s anymore I can't just drop the weight as easily as I used to is there any sort of final words of wisdom on the mindset piece you want to leave people with yeah I mean I just would love to add that you've got this you know I mean this is something that it's not rocket science it's totally within within the realm of possibility to do and to achieve you just have to shed maybe some of the dogma and some of the misconception and the um the dare I even say misinformation that we all tend to accumulate navigating these Wellness Waters occasionally a lot there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen a lot of people with covert vested interests and at the end of the day you've got to find the form of restriction that's going to feel the least restrictive to you I you know I think that that's such a pivotal way to think about this right and you might opt only to consume Ultra minimally processed foods right and that is a form of restriction if you think about it today because again 73 of our food food items in the average Supermarket are Ultra processed right maybe your form of restriction is you're going to track calories which I don't personally do I don't think that you you ought to need to do that today but that's another form of restriction maybe your intermittent fasting is the tool that that you'll find is going to be the most effective for you which new research you know research is starting to show isn't more beneficial than a standard reduced calorie diet but it's as effective which I think is a great day yeah I saw that so um so you've got to find the tool that's going to be that's going to work for you and at the end of the day you just have to do it like you just have to kind of you know and and not bite off more than you could chew but just try to adopt maybe it's one small habit a day one percent better it's not it's in all likelihood not your age and not your metabolism I mean there's great research um just published over the past couple of years that really seminal research has shown us that between the ages of 20 and 60 your metabolism doesn't even really change that much I mean it does tend to change it after the age of 60 but if you're between the ages of 20 and 60 stop blaming your metabolism you're probably less active and eating more Ultra processed foods and just eating more in general than you were in the past and that's really what it all comes down to you know I love it Max uh just remind the audience where they can keep in touch with you you have your own podcasts and uh your regular on YouTube as well for everybody watching on YouTube and you have a great newsletter so if you could mention those thanks brother yes so I'm super active on Instagram at maxlugavir Max l-u-g-a-v-e-r-e my YouTube channel youtube.com maxlugavir and my podcast is called the Genius life so if you listen to podcasts it's on all podcast platforms got great experts that are probably familiar to you if you're a regular listener of Drew's show and yeah we have a good time so come over and say hi always a pleasure and I really appreciate how often you're willing to be the guinea pig for the things that you're doing right your whole journey started off that way and you sharing and letting people follow and also celebrating the success of a lot of your followers who have done this and achieved great results so thank you for that Max always a pleasure thank you brother hey YouTube If you enjoyed what you just saw keep watching for more great content on how to improve your brain and your life we have to vary the way we approach fasting we can't just click into 16 hours every single day we can't click into one meal a day became very popular in the fasting Movement we can't just

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Id: 74kjMsyB4Wk

Length: 116min 22sec (6982 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2023