The TOP FOODS That Melt Fat, Build Muscle & Prevent CHRONIC DISEASE! | Stan Efferding

six out of seven people who go on a diet lose weight it's pretty simple it's not easy people don't adhere long term to diets about 90 plus percent of people gain the weight back within three years having said all of that if you're overweight significantly overweight obese probably a bmi exceeding 30-35 95 of the health benefits that you'll realize are strictly from the weight loss itself irrespective of the diet stan efferding welcome to the show thank you for having me i appreciate it i'm really excited so changing your body composition is one of the most difficult things i've ever done in my life it's also when i think about mindset and i think about entrepreneurship if i could give anybody the gift it would be to get them to go into the gym to change their body because you really realize in a super tactile way that change is possible because the mind is so invisible that if you've never gone through a body transformation it's i think difficult for people to believe in the depth of change that's possible tell me a little bit about your background did you start obviously i know the punch line but did you start big did you start small like how did you get to the muscle mass we see i wrestled 98 pounds in high school the freshman sophomore is 106 as a junior 115 106 is a junior as a senior i weighed 115. oh how tall were you i was almost six foot i was reasonably close to that's like yeah i'd only gained about another inch or two my senior year i had a late uh uh on set puberty i was eating terrible i was working at 7-eleven from the time i was 12 years old and so my food choices consisted of the hot dogs and the nachos with the pump cheese and soda my favorite and that's what i was having we grew up in the same diet yeah it didn't help me much for i think that was probably the primary driver of the delayed onset puberty was the fact that i wasn't sleeping very well because i was working a swing shift and getting up in the morning going to school probably put in you know until midnight or so before i got home and then eating like that so i didn't have the foundation for my body even to to grow a lot of folks consider that to be just a matter of of timing of genetics but i think that your body has to have the the right substrate but if you're a lean athlete that is trying to continue continuously year-round cut weight to meet a lighter weight class such as in the case of wrestlers like we mentioned in case of distance runners uh even gymnast gymnasts ballerinas those kinds of sport that put a high priority on on weight loss especially through puberty the time at which you should be accumulating the most bone mineral density uh which is a finite time it's not like you can you can continue to do that it generally your bone mineral density the the bulk of it is acquired through your teen years dude childhood freaks me out because it is so there are mistakes that you can make that are either impossible to unwind or nearly impossible to underline whether that's psychological which is what i spend a lot of time thinking about or physiological that's pretty terrifying we were talking before we started rolling camera about the bifurcation between men and women is there a bigger do you have a bigger concern for either sex in terms of puberty and weight loss or is it sort of universal just be careful women tend to suffer from uh the osteoporosis at a greater rate so to rob them of calories is more likely to have bone density issues it's not just calcium like you said it's calories it's protein and it's resistance training that those that those together will optimize the accumulation of bone minerals because you need to put the bones under stress in order to get that formation and have protein as well and there's some other micronutrients you know that help with accumulation of bone mineral density and there's a finite period under which that is uh is the bone marrow density is accumulated and then it kind of just deteriorates over time as you age and and then the idea would be that you would maintain it as long as possible and if if you're starting with that kind of foundation uh particularly with let's say the distance runners or the wrestlers then you'll have less you've accumulated less and so that earlier in your adult years you'll you may experience some problems associated with osteoporosis so i'm looking at you you weren't huge in high school you've obviously not only gotten massive but incredibly strong known as the strongest bodybuilder set insane records for physical strength how much do you think though that one when did you start lifting and how much as kids should we be laying down like the tendon strength the ligament strength so that we can build the big muscle or because i didn't start lifting until i was in my 20s and i do worry sometimes that as much as that has been beneficial because now i can add muscle quite quickly like if i'm really focused for three weeks the difference in my physique is crazy whereas somebody who didn't spend their 20s lifting as much as i did they're probably going to struggle more but do you think that i have done myself dirty by not starting even younger i don't think so at all now if you're going to compete in athletics it's good to have a as a teenager in high school and college it's good to have a foundation the foundation would be mostly in in the kind of coordination movements say dips chin-ups sprinting it's not just weight training strength is an important component speed is an important component i think sprinting is probably the single best exercise for youth the single best more than i would believe squats and this is coming from a power lifter who thinks squats is the best well because it's so dynamic to begin with it also increases your nervous system's ability uh sports performance isn't just strength it's speed strength okay it's velocity and that's really what helps when you have kids sprinting that helps them with neural adaptation and recruitment and coordination and every time you sprint you got to remember that you got rotation and anti-rotation going on in your torso which is fantastic for your core which is you know hundreds of muscles that act like guidelines for a tower that are intended to resist movements not necessarily bend and flex so you're building all of that coordination that the speed i think is is huge plus running is very dynamic and again i mentioned the the force production from landing the decelerating force from landing when sprinting if you look at pounds per square inch is extraordinary but the ankle at the knee so you're you're putting the kind of stress that is going to force them to adapt and start to develop you know stronger joints muscles obviously as i just think it's a probably the single best movement if you were going to pick one and then other than that you know coordination and balance although some of that is suggested probably you have acquired by the time you're six or younger it's like those little kids who do skateboards and uh and snowboarding tend to have such great balance as they get older because it's something that's harder and harder to train as you age and some people suggest that once you get past 10 12 years old you really can't do much with your balance and coordination really see that's what i'm talking about like that that really bothers me i don't like that answer stan so much of this comes down to really doing things when we're young so all right as a parent as somebody who's just absolutely radically transformed your own physique and you think about okay sprinting is the single most important thing if we're only going to do one thing but as you look at your kids on balance i know you believe in sleep hugely so we'll set that aside for a second we'll just assume that your kids are eating a healthy diet what are the things like that you think about laying down the foundations so that later they can really do something extraordinary is it focusing on hitting a certain level like being able to bench press twice your body weight by the time you're 18. like are there any sort of things like that that you think set people up for success i don't think so especially for young boys primarily because until they have achieved puberty and start to have an increase in testosterone they're not going to get a significant improvement in lean muscle mass they're going to have you know certainly some growth but it's not going to be as significant as it was through puberty so i'm working on things like coordination speed maybe just going through those movements having them learn the basics of a push-up of a chin-up uh of a squat you know there's your push-pull legs right there and that's and that's really what the foundation would be the big thing is is the consistency at that point and building the habits uh because you know as they get older generally what happens is is they may be uninterested uh or not have the discipline or the consistency that's needed to to be able to progress because the progression isn't about any one workout or a week or a month even it's about consistently doing this year-round the big piece uh i think for for kids is to make it fun and i'm opposed to specializing at an early age meaning having to do one thing round you can get some repetitive strain injuries we see this in gymnasts in particular with the you know tendon surgeries and the carpal tunnels we see it even in ten-year-old badminton players who blow out lateral collateral ligaments just from repetitive strain from doing the same thing over and over again and so it continued to involve them year round in sporting activities and now they're staying active they're they're continuing to get stronger more coordinated better habits better conditioning you know it's another piece of this uh this whole thing is is to make sure that their their cardiovascular fitness is is continually supported throughout the year and so the kids that participate in sports year-round you can pick different sports you know they can do gymnastics or track or play soccer or football but there's no off season per se because you keep them involved in something and that will help them progress i think also in the ten thousand hour rule they talked about at what age do kids get involved with more time in sports and better coaching we looked at that in terms of hockey players born in january and february seemed to bring up you know consist of the bulk of your pro hockey players in canada because explain that because when i read that that made all the sense in the world to me i think it's utterly fascinating well kids can't start playing hockey in canada until they're six years old well are they six years old are they six years and 11 months old right and chronological age and physiological age is very different especially at that age a kid that's six years 11 months may be physiologically far ahead of a kid that's just six years old and so that kid's going to get recruited first because he's bigger stronger faster than the younger kid and then that kid is going to be able to play on the teams that have more ice time better coaches more practices than the other kids and so what you find is is then again as in the other examples that compounds over time just more hours better coaching better facilities etc and so the time they're 10 11 12 years old they're way ahead of the ones who were you know playing part-time and so that's bananas to me it's a year-round thing and it doesn't have to be these balls to the wall workouts but it's consistency it's access to the coaches like you said and then also there's the psychological component of i'm bigger i'm stronger because they don't get it right they don't think about oh wait yeah i guess i am 11 months older they just know i'm better and then they start getting more attention and that the confidence that builds from that this episode is sponsored by future go to try future dot co slash impact to get your first month for only 19 you can also click the link at the top of the episode description now enjoy the episode and in fact i'll what was it so for the gains that you've had which are just utterly extraordinary what made you so interested that you kept pushing and what do you think has been the key to your success other than consistency let's take that off the table yeah well first and foremost i fell in love with the sport of bodybuilding why i was 140 pound 18 year old freshman in college and i i really you know i picked up a magazine and i'd always wanted to be bigger stronger and have a better physique it just you saw it and you responded yeah my soccer coach asked me to go lift weights that summer because i was a little light for the team i was undersized for a soccer player for a collegiate soccer player and i just fell in love with it i really liked lifting i liked the way it made me feel i like seeing the little gains more than anything i like seeing the weight progress we use that intentionally as coaches with our clients if we can get them in and find something measurable that they can progress at in a very rapid pace of time which happens mostly from neurological adaptation as you know somebody just begins to learn a deadlift they'll get stronger out every single week you deadlift them two three times a week they get stronger every single workout do they get stronger or do they get better at the movement more coordinated more skilled we call neural adaptation they learn to recruit the muscles and fire that is how we lock people into the passion of weightlifting is by showing them progress and we use that strategically better than say a metcon you know they're going to go in and do battle ropes and jump around and breathe hard which is not a terribly effective way to do do you think that's because psychologically we're wired to get turned on by strength i i don't know what it is but i see it like even in crossfitters who who either switch over or often on the side will compete in power lifting and it's something about that feeling so powerful and the progression this this week i did 200 pounds next week i did 210 next week i did 230. i'm going to try 240 next time it never ends it's coming from a powerlifter competed for over 30 years you know what's next it never ends whatever your total was or whatever your lift was it's like you're thinking about can i get what headspace do you go into when you're doing like a just a brutal lift you know i look at everything [Music] in terms of repeating the same movements i do the exam exact thing that i did in practice so for you it's clinical you're not like in rage mode i'm going to [ __ ] tear these weights apart you're not imagining anything there is some evidence that smiling as opposed to frowning can actually have an adverse impact on your strength output and clenching your fists there is some evidence to suggest that that those kinds of behaviors are making a loud noise i thought for sure you were going to say the opposite and i was like oh my god that's so contrary to how it feels to me but i've never hyped myself up for real particularly what yeah i just i've always been ocd my whole life adhd as a kid and so i i used to count my steps and have ticks and uh you know every i did things repetitively my whole life and so when i got into bodybuilding it was perfect for me sets and reps and workouts and and all these different blocks the meals the timing of everything you know eat every three hours prep your meals go to the gym at the same time you're doing you know everything's all mapped out the reps time sets times weight the progression so for you the consistency is the super oh it was magic for me because it preoccupied my my ocd behaviors it gave me an outlet to do things repetitively that that i could you know progress with over time i had to channel rage like for me in the beginning the only way i could motivate myself to lift because whatever the dopamine rushes that people get from either exercise or lifting i don't get it but to imagine somebody attacking my wife and not being able to stop them was insanely motivating and so my wife and i would go lift at the same time and i would literally just stare at her and think about protecting her and having to be strong enough to defend her and of course i probably would have been way better off putting all that time and energy into learning jujitsu or something like that but it worked and so learning to capture anger to foment it to channel it um and then to your point about progress a hundred percent like when you see yourself getting stronger like it's really cool there's something super addictive and this feels very sad saying to you but at my height i was dead lifting 385 pounds i remember thinking i can bend over and pick up almost 400 pounds like that's crazy like that felt so cool and so for me dead lifting was like the most fun thing i ever did and that sense of being strong is really cool yeah you said something interesting or you talked about channeling that same kind of behavior into business and i've said before when people ask me about my success in business i've said that anybody who has been very successful in say bodybuilding or powerlifting or some sport with the the discipline the consistency and the time management that's involved in that if they applied that same amount of time and effort and consistency and time management into any income producing venture and would repeat those behaviors over and over and over again you know discard the things that didn't work double down on the things that did and do it over you know an extended period of time would have a similar level of success i said they'd be a millionaire in five years if they could do that like when i look at schwarzenegger and what he accomplished and you hear him talk about exactly what you're saying like well this is exactly what i was doing in the gym and that was the thing that made me good and you understand you can change and that you have to be insanely consistent and work way harder than you ever think you're gonna have to and then you watch him channel that into a gazillion areas and it's like why aren't more people doing that i think it's the goal i think it's harder to see you know if you say my goal is i want to make a million dollars it's not specific enough it's hard to break that down uh there are setbacks obviously it always takes longer and costs more than you ever anticipate that it will i mean you can make an excel spreadsheet say anything and they'd be like oh this is awesome uh the goals in bodybuilding and powerlifting etc are shorter term i'm going to compete in this event three months from now very measurable easy to break that down go to the gym creates a sense of urgency because you told everybody you're going to compete and you're certain numbers that you want to achieve and then as soon as you do that there's you set another one and so i'm not sure that people identify a specific enough goal and then break down the steps to get to that goal that are in achievable chunks because people are looking at the finish line instead of the journey and i think that is probably what impairs people's ability to to to progress in business that and obviously there's a lot of unknowns there it's pretty we pretty well know uh now in bodybuilding powerlifting what you know is required to progress and your progression is is only going to really be limited by your genetic predisposition um not you know by doing things wrong because it's it's a pretty simple pattern get into a business we'll come back to business which i'm very intrigued by how much you've been successful at both but what is that sort of base set if somebody wants to really get big and strong yeah what do they have to do well i said that the caveat being as we know now i've always said if i knew then what i know now in 1985 when i started bodybuilding we didn't have all the science we have today i used to think because we didn't have the internet back in 1985 i went to the gym and the guy behind the counter was jacked and he was getting ready for a bodybuilding show and he was eating tuna fish out of a can and some rice cakes so ding ding ding you know let me take this one step back i'm this 115 pound kid in as a senior in high school and i go out to my uncle's farm in pennsylvania uh that winter and i was eating at 7 11 every day and all of a sudden the neighbors got a a dairy farm and i'm going down i'm getting bottles of raw milk with cream on the top like this that you have to shake and they're making every single day my uncle is making steak and my grandma and my aunt is cooking bacon in lard and i'm eating you know potatoes and steak and bacon and eggs and raw milk next thing you know i'm 140. 135 i put on like 20 pounds went through puberty during that time frame because i gave my body what it needed more sleep it was winter time got dark we worked in the fields on his farm during the day and then at night i would sleep i would sleep longer hours and more soundly than ever before sleep in you know until i woke up rather than on my alarm to get up for school at 6 a.m and i grew for the first time significantly put on 20 pounds so i get to college after eating steaks and raw milk and eggs and potatoes every day and i see these guys eating tuna fish and rice cakes i switch to tuna fish and rice cakes because this guy's a bodybuilder and i want to be a bodybuilder and then i get arnold schwarzenegger's encyclopedia bodybuilding and i start training two hours a day seven days a week you know every single exercise you can imagine that's in that encyclopedia so i'm over training and i'm under eating i also thought that the stronger i got the bigger i would get which now we have plenty of evidence suggests that that's also not the case that the amount of weight you lift is not nearly as important as a host of other factors we call volume load sets times reps times weight and then the range of motion it's also a critical component and so i had everything asked backwards for about two years i went from 140 pounds to 158 pounds in two full years and i competed in my first bodybuilding show at 158 pounds at six feet tall that's not a big guy right you know that's certainly not anywhere near my goal of trying to become a pro bodybuilder which at six foot i would need to be 240 250 in order to accomplish that goal so i was a long way off and i of course at every turn had people laughing and telling me that that was a ridiculous goal and so i spent you know the next 10 years uh gradually growing but fortunately after that first show the promoter was also a gym owner and a competitor and he said look you need to flip the script you need to train less and eat more so what we know now is that you obviously need to be in a calorie surplus you have to get a sufficient amount of protein generally about a gram of protein per pound of body weight uh and the training's per body weight or lean ideal lean muscle mass as ideally goal weight or lean weight particularly for you know people who are significantly have a bmi over 30 that would be sufficient in order to maintain lean body mass when dieting et cetera but if you're an athletic individual you know if you're a high school athlete and and you've got you know at least four pack shoot for a gram of protein per pound of body weight just shoot for it uh i think that that you can go up to as high as say 1.2 and still see although it kind of gradually tapers off an improvement in in lean mass accretion uh from what most of the research has shown us uh more recently for about two years i did two grams per pound yeah of lean body mass it was hateful yeah it's all lean like chicken yeah oh god it was so horrible it's hard uh dr jose antonio from international society sports nutrition has done a lot of protein over feeding studies and he the dropout rates for people trying to eat two grams of protein per pound of body weight is there's hardly anybody who stays in the program and they have to be down in protein shakes you're so sick of eating yeah it's unbelievable it's actually a strategy that we utilize to help people with weight loss the more protein you want to eat eat all you want eat all the chicken breast and top sirloin steak and lean meats that you want if you're hungry are you hungry or are you bored or are you stressed because if you have to sit down and eat 40 grams of protein are you still hungry yeah real fast yes has a high thermic effect of food it has a very high satiety effect and so we push protein first with weight loss for those very reasons it's a strategy that we utilize to help people with hunger and primarily also very beneficial for blood sugar control as we were talking earlier to your assistant one of the primary things you do to try and control blood sugars is get at least 30 percent of your daily intake with protein and then eat the protein first in the meal it has a ameliorating effect on postprandial glycemia which is the elevation of blood sugars after a meal and there's some other strategies and we get too far off to the side with that but so we do have uh with respect to hypertrophy a pretty good hypertrophy just getting big muscles getting big muscles we do know you need to be in a calorie surplus you need to get sufficient protein and then you need to start going down this list of evidence-based hypertrophy guidelines that that we see in the research you want to train everybody part twice a week you want to get about 10 to 20 sets per body part per week that's kind of a minimum effective volume and a maximal recovery volume you want to generally train in the you can get just as big training heavy at five reps as you can training moderately at 10 to 12 reps as you can training with light weight to 20 reps presuming you take each set to within a rep or two of failure having said that and you don't buy into like do you have to go all the way to failure no you don't the research has shown us that now too that there's a stimulus to fatigue ratio and if you go to failure you're going to have more fatigue you might have a little more stimulus but you'll have more fatigue which might delay recovery and that's going to affect total volume and volume is a superior driver than fatigue than muscle damage and so what we find in that 10 to 12 range i was saying that that you can grow just as well in the five rep 12 rep and 20 rep ranges the fives are going to be a lot heavier you're going to build up accumulate more fatigue the 20s as well you'll accumulate more fatigue and so the bulk of your volume although we like to get a variety the bulk of your volume like in that mid-range 8 to 15 reps kind of the bulk of your 80 percent of your volume or so and then throw in a heavy set of five once a week and throw in a an am wrap at the end of your workout with a set of twenty if you'd like an amrap uh as many reps as possible yeah i'm learning these things too i thought that was a breakfast burrito when somebody mentioned it years ago we always just called it failure but it's nice to train in each of the rep ranges to to hit some different muscle fibers you slow twitch fast twitch fiber so but the bulk of your training in that mid-range because it affords you the opportunity to do more volume and then recover at a at a faster rate that covers intensity as well or effort which is within a rep or to a failure and then we get down into some you know less important things such as maybe the um the rest periods we'd like to see those between 90 seconds and three minutes people who go in and do a set and 30 seconds later do another set that's probably better for muscular endurance not for hypertrophy so it's kind of hard for some folks though that are really active in the gym to wait two minutes for busy individuals and people that like to move a little faster or get a better cardiovascular benefit from the workout now i start combining antagonistic body parts i'll do a back and a chest workout together i'll have them do a dip rest one minute do a chin up rest one minute and go back and do the dip the reason being is because then you've had at least two minutes between the dip sets each subsequent set on dips should be relatively close to the number of reps you got the first set because that shows that your muscles have recovered to the point where you can then stress them again and then the limiting factor doesn't become your cardiovascular fitness or your lactate clearing capacity the limiting factor becomes did your muscles get stressed did they adequately recover to get stressed again and so your your repetitions you might be able to do 15 reps the first time 15 reps the second and then 14 and then 12. that's sufficient to stay within uh the loading necessary to to give you a good hypertrophy stimulus the speed of the repetition is on this list uh you don't want to go too fast on the way down you want to have under control but doing a 10 second negative doesn't uh impart any better hypertrophy benefits than doing a two to five second negative or interesting so time under load which is something this idea that you hear a lot about and when you were giving us the multiplier earlier i was i may have filled in a gap but you didn't actually say with with that you do want to go slow on the negative but no you want to go under control you want to be under control on the negative but they've looked at a two-second negative and a 10-second negative isn't there's no difference there's no difference it doesn't there's no added benefit a lot of time in the gym doing these real slow negatives i know and there was a phase there there's always been a lot of phases i've been the business for over 30 years i've seen all of the fads and phases i've tried them all but now we have research that that is pretty definitively shown us that there's kind of an ideal range there in terms of time of two to five seconds and then uh on the negative one of the reasons being is is that that eccentric load causes more muscle damage but you're also stronger on the eccentric and that's another uh you know fatigue ratio issue uh stimulates a fatigue ratio issue to where if you're doing a lot of eccentric loading it's going to take you longer to recover it's going to affect your total volume for the week and the volume is the primary driver mechanical tension first and then the volume and frequency after that so there's some smaller things i think the split is really not that important whether you train your whole body monday and whole body friday or whether you do a an upper body monday and a lower body tuesday and then an upper body thursday and lower body friday or you do a push pull legs monday tuesday wednesday and then repeat it or take a day off and then repeat it it doesn't seem to matter your body adapts to the stimulus provided if that stimulus doesn't increase over time the body has no incentive to continue to adapt and get stronger or bigger have you set a goal to work out more but don't know which exercises to start with future is here to help future is a new fitness app that connects you with an online personal trainer who will send you workouts each week monitor your performance and message you to keep you motivated if you don't already have one future will send you an apple watch to borrow for the duration of your membership which is amazing and your trainer will use that to monitor your progress tracking your heart rate and activity data while you work out your phone your watch and your trainer all work seamlessly together so if you want a workout plan that's built for you not the masses that will keep you focused and motivated then go to try future dot co slash impact to try your first month for just 19 that's cheaper than most gym memberships once again go to try future dot co slash impact to try your first month for just 19 you can also click the link at the top of the episode description all right guys take care and be legendary all right so let's shift gears into diet so one of the core tenets of your diet that i like a lot is that you're looking at the idea of what's easy to digest gut health is going to be hugely important as i was saying when i was on the seafood diet as uh we jokingly called it if you see food eat it just trying to get in that caloric surplus at one point i was doing shots of olive oil just trying to get calories oh it was so hateful i absolutely hated that face but i put on a ton of muscle and if i had to do it over though i would do it so differently yeah what are the core tenets of the vertical diet why does it work so well well the vertical diet is everything that i want my clients to do it's not just diet it's sleep optimization it's hydration obviously it's it's nutrition macros and micros it's injury prevention and rehabilitation it's blood testing it's blood pressure control blood sugar control so it's hypertrophy training as we just discussed strength training so uh and and cardiovascular training so it's everything that i want them to do and so if i want to talk just about nutrition in the vertical diet uh again sleep and exercise being inseparable from from from nutrition the vertical diet was intended to be more inclusive of what historically i had seen as over restrictive because i come from the bodybuilding figure physique bikini industry and those folks they get a guru and the guru tells them don't eat red meat don't eat dairy don't eat fruit don't eat the egg yolk and don't salt your food all the things i lead with now because what i saw in the guru diet industry and almost anybody that that goes to a dietitian or a guru dieter to lose weight particularly if you're getting ready for competition they walk out of there with the same diet plan it's egg whites tilapia some chicken breast and a just a ton of broccoli i remember it well and maybe a dollop of peanut butter right and and some avocado and not that any of those foods are bad foods this isn't a good food bad food conversation but they pale in comparison to the list that i just made red meat whole eggs fruit dairy sodium those are the things your body needs those are the things that are going to kill me yeah that's what people have presumed equating for calories and i'll jump into that going to kill you equating for calories and protein where you put carbohydrates and fats does not matter in terms of weight loss in terms of glycemic control it doesn't matter if you're in a calorie deficit okay and this was borne out in many randomized controlled trials it doesn't matter strictly from the position of you are losing fat because it drives me crazy when people talk about that what you eat doesn't matter now maybe if you're just talking about like losing fat maybe yeah although even that i think is questionable i'm going to take you one more step that you're going to hate too we'll start here we'll start with and this is the diet fits trial it was a year long out of stanford had over 600 people and even gary taubes was was part of the uh the promoters of the of the study itself and uh because obviously he's a keto uh researcher if you control for calories and protein where you move carbs and fats don't seem to matter for weight loss and you get similar weight loss outcomes so the best diet's the one you'll follow there's many paths to the same destination it's all a matter of personal preference at that point and personal preference can include how you respond to carbohydrates or fats and i have clients that do both so i don't respond well to these carbohydrates very well what does respondwell mean meaning maybe you have adverse glycemic responses to a certain type or quantity of carbohydrate or maybe you're when your fats go up you have difficult with bile and soft stool so you may not be able to metabolize one or the other as efficiently it may be more comfortable for you and so i'm when i talk about the vertical diet i make some very specific recommendations in terms of the macronutrients because that's what my customers your macro breakdown is maybe the most startling and i love it by the way yeah uh maybe the most startling thing in the book it's two things yeah red meat white rice yeah that's it yeah that's what and i was like well that's amazing that's what that's what folks presume to think because that's the most obvious it's right on the front page of the book red meat and white rice we can get there i'm going to go one step further first in terms of of you talked about calories or or fats and carbohydrates all diets work when they're strictly adhered to okay six out of seven people if you're in a caloric deficit if you're in a caloric deficit and they all work the same way there's no all you can eat diet whether you're keto whether you're in fasting whether you're paleo whether you're vertical they all work for the same reason you're in a calorie deficit in order to lose weight you have to be in a calorie deficit all diets work when they're strictly adhered to six out of seven people who go on a diet lose weight it's pretty simple it's not easy people don't adhere long term to diets about 90 plus percent of people gain the weight back within three years having said all of that if you're overweight significantly overweight obese probably a bmi exceeding 30-35 95 of the health benefits that you'll realize are strictly from the weight loss itself irrespective of the diet so i'm going to say and the studies have been done the mcdonald's diet a guy went ate at mcdonald's had his students track everything 850 calories a day they measured everything that he ate but everything ate was off the mcdonald's menu big macs french fries ice cream whatever fit you know presuming he got sufficient protein and he walked for 40 minutes a day and if he lost 30 pounds his blood pressure improved his blood sugars improved his cholesterol improved all of those things improved simply from the weight loss itself the twinkie diet also got the same push on that for a second and ask a question do we know what his diet was like before that i would presume standard american diet if he's because he's 30 40 pounds overweight right yeah so standard american diet for anybody keeping score is going to be high in carbohydrates which means it's high in sugar because my real question is and this is where and i i think i'm right but i'm super open to being wrong i just want to put that out there because one thing i know like what i believe 10 years ago i do not believe now so i can only imagine what i would believe 10 years from now but if he were putting on fat by overeating red meat let's say that his blood sugar because you can put on fat absolutely by overeating red meat yeah i wouldn't expect in fact i would be startled if his blood sugar went down if he were eating 1850 calories of ice cream so my hypothesis and i haven't tested it so i don't know but my hypothesis is even though i would expect him to lose fat that the blood sugar would go up so my gut instinct is that his blood sugar wasn't coming down because of the caloric deficit his blood sugar was coming down because he had even more forms of sugar which we don't think of as sugar could be potatoes it could be white rice it could be god only knows but all things that turn into glucose in your bloodstream or show up in your bloodstream as glucose is a better way to say it that that is what's causing the drop in glucose and then the caloric deficit is what's causing the loss of fat does that ring true to you or do you think i'm missing something a few things there one pretty rare that somebody who's eating you know that much protein when you say red meat that much protein is has a bmi of 35. no i agree it's pretty rare so the standard american diet usually applies to the seventy percent of the population that's overweight or obese that's consuming about that's why i'm saying that i think that his drop in blood sugar would have more to do with he was already eating a terrible diet yeah and now he's eating another variation of a terrible diet just with more calories which would also mean fewer carbs right i would say this as well that when people get a bmi over 35 generally speaking they have some degree of fatty liver which compromises your insulin sensitivity losing seven percent of your body weight if you're 300 pounds you've got to lose 20 pounds we'll resolve 95 percent of fatty liver as tested by biopsy irrespective of how you lost the weight and so you become a little more efficient at metabolizing carbohydrates simply from the weight loss itself and the fact that the liver doesn't have the the fatty liver strain on it stopping as well because that elevates triglycerides you know they convert blood sugar to triglycerides lipids start increasing so there's some nuance there but i i would want to suggest and i'll you know as i progress through this i'll come back and say that that this applied to the twinkie diet it applied to the 7-eleven diet it applied to the you know a whole host of terrible diets which when uh consumed in a deficit and associated with weight loss uh people realized an improvement in their metabolic markers their blood tests having said that i would never recommend that kind of diet for a few reasons one because a 30 or 60 day trial tells us nothing about long term in terms of micronutrients deficiencies i kind of glossed over that when i was talking about the guru diet with the egg whites and the broccoli and the tilapia as compared to whole eggs steak and fruit one of the things that happens over time is that those people in those restrictive diets start experiencing the deficiencies associated with just eating egg whites you're not getting the biotin and the avid and the egg whites robs the biotin from your body well that's for skin hair and nails then being in a deficit you're going to suppress your thyroid function next you know that dry skin and dry hair starts falling out that gives us back to the metabolic syndrome when you're just eating egg whites and tilapia where's your iron especially for women and now they suffer from anemia so we start seeing all of these things manifest over time they can get to the show and compete and they got lean but within a week after the show they're at the doctor's office getting injections for for iron and d3 and sometimes antidepressants and sometimes it's this huge rebound of 20 pounds of weight this is all micronutrient problems it's all the deficiency in the diet it's it's these it's the too much of a deficit and over restrictions efficiency though in what calories and micronutrients like i mentioned in terms of the iron deficiency the biotin deficiency the you know the cause of the usually iodine deficiency the hypothyroidism the water imbalance from not getting adequate sodium and potassium and then they end up with edema following the show i mean really serious like painful like i have to go to the doctor the ankle swollen kind of this is what i was seeing in the late 80s i started training women for competition back in the late 80s and early 90s and i was seeing this quite regularly that they would just torture themselves to get ready for a show and then have this enormous rebound they would gain 20 pounds within a week or two unintentionally unintentionally obviously you know they'd have that rebound eating but your body gains the fat back much faster than the muscle it's a problem with this with this yo-yo dieting is that you lose a lot of muscle with the fat if it's done incorrectly if it's not done gradually enough without adequate sleep and resistance training and protein and then when you binge in you know to recover from this this cravings from the dieting you gain a significant amount of fat back and so your body composition changes over the years that's what gets us that metabolic adaptation that we saw in the biggest loser studies to show that their basal metabolic rates had been significantly suppressed by somewhere between 300 and 700 calories a day even after they gained the weight back they had a lower bmr so that i see the same kind of thing with when i talk about like the mcdonald's diet and that kind of thing is i would not recommend that because it can manifest in in micronutrient deficiencies long term and i i've over the years discovered hey there's a better way to do this and that's kind of why i speak out against these guru diets for both men and women i want to go back to specifically the vertical diet so in the book you say that the macronutrients are red meat and white rice then under that you get into micronutrients and you've got a whole [ __ ] host of let's define macronutrients proteins fats and carbs and then we'll attach foods to those afterwards my macronutrient percentages are 30 protein as a percentage of total calories in the diet that's what i recommend so i've been recommending for for a decade probably what i've been eating for 30 years and but most of the bodybuilding figure physique bikini industry probably accepts to be uh most beneficial for performance and lean mass retention and growth about a gram of protein per pound of body weight or you know lean weight or goal weight if you're significantly uh heavy uh 30 protein and that's been studied extensively as well we've seen even in a recent study comparing the mediterranean diet which is louder as the healthiest diet right the mediterranean diet only has 18 to 20 percent protein so they put the mediterranean diet next to a 30 protein diet the 30 protein diet outperformed the mediterranean diet for glycemic control and glycemic control is the most important factor because it it's the most predictive of of long-term disease hyperinsulinemia type 2 diabetes far above even blood pressure obesity and lipids way down at the bottom uh so when you're trying to make the most significant comparison you want to look at blood sugars first and it's a you know obviously hugely important and we keep going back to that that is kind of it's kind of what precipitates everything else the fatty liver and all the other metabolic syndromes the high blood pressure it's all the foundation of it is is hyperinsulinemias high blood sugars um so i start with 30 protein and very effective for controlling blood sugars and retaining lean body mass and then i about 30 fats in the diet and i may make some adjustment on those based on you know the individual's personal preference but you need fat obviously you need cholesterol you know every membrane cell in the body is it has a lipid bilayer and you need the ad and k need to be able to move nutrients through the body fat's important you can't eliminate fat it'll affect your hormones oh i've tried it yes misery it's terrible pain yes sucked so we need fats in the diet uh and then i put in 40 carbs there's a does that only work when you're lifting or is would you if somebody weren't going to lift would you still recommend 30 30 40 i would bring the carbs down if they were inactive but again just like sleep is as important as diet is exercise and exercise not so much in terms of burning calories for weight loss but exercise in terms of cardiovascular health and long-term weight loss maintenance which is is important both in the step count throughout the day in terms of suppressing appetite and doing some sort of resistance work the the muscle is is the most important organ in the body the largest organelle people think it's the skin but it's the muscle it's the largest organ in the body it's a single in your body yeah it's a sink for glucose that's what the muscle is so effective at particularly when you're moving it and working it i mentioned that post meal if you move your muscles take a ten minute walk ride a recumbent bike you know something like that you'll uptake glucose from the bloodstream without the need of insulin and you can reduce your postprandial glycemia by up to 30 just with a 10 minute walk post meal that's twice as effective as metformin the number one prescribed type 2 diabetes medication taking a 10-minute walk after each meal is twice as effective as metformin for reversing or preventing type 2 diabetes just from moving the muscles and getting your your body to do what it's supposed to do your muscles to take up glucose from the bloodstream without the need of insulin so i will bring carbs down if people aren't training but i'm lifting weights to me i come right out of the gate with that it's the first thing i prescribe along with ten minute walks is the two things above cardio as a priority over cardio uh to me ten minute walks are cardio uh you do them briskly you can elevate your heart rate significantly enough to where it'll provide you some improvement in vo2 max sufficient to give you a you know a longevity benefit so i think that that's sufficient if you're not competing in something but three ten minute walks a day following meals and then some weight lifting two to three times a week would be to me a minimum prescription if you're really serious about trying to uh to improve your general health and body composition and long-term weight loss maintenance and your energy levels and so i like to keep the carbs in there primarily for performance like you said and it might be that you eat a few more carbs around workouts in the day that you train and a few less on the days that you don't train if that's what you prefer if your energy levels yeah take me back so i the vertical diet really lines up with how i accidentally eat yeah so minus the i don't eat a lot of rice um but i eat a metric [ __ ] of red meat yeah that's like my primary source of calories eggs i eat a lot of eggs whole eggs um and then i eat vegetables but i don't like go way out of my way i probably get 85 80 for sure percent of my calories from meat and eggs yeah why isn't it gonna kill me and salmon a couple times a week i don't [ __ ] with salmon yeah but any fatty fish sardines um yeah just thinking you can make it through sometimes yeah but i don't go out of my way for it yeah so i'm super curious i know you do i'm super curious to know if you think like that's a big part of your strategy and that's a real missing part of my game small item it's omega-3s you can probably get a sufficient amount from two five ounce servings a week salmon has 200 times the omega-3s as as beef as riveted animals i choose beef ruminant animals bison cow beef sheep deer i choose beef because it's a ruminous animal it has a four-chambered stomach digestive system it can ferment cellulose pre-digests provides you with a better omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acid ratio than say a monogastric like a chicken or a turkey three times as much iron i think six times as much b12 nine times as much zinc carnosine creatine selenium it's just a more nutrient dense and i personally don't eat chicken i don't enjoy it uh i don't think it's it's kind of a good better best scenario where i think that beef is i get more bang for my buck it's more highly bioavailable and has a lot more nutrient density um and so i prefer to eat steak but i eat a leaner steak i am somewhat cautious and again this depends is that just for calories are you worried about saturated fat like what's the concern i'm cautious about saturated fat because i uh have him historically when i've been overweight because i've bulked up to over 300 pounds many times throughout my career as part of this power lifting bodybuilding nothing in the dirty bulking et cetera and i had some elevated ldls triglyceride hdls were always great great ratio you know everything else looked really good but my ldls would be elevated and one of the you know primary drivers of ldl is saturated fat and so i tend to control especially now being 54 years old i tend to control you look [ __ ] amazing by the way thank you you look amazing for a lot of ages but 54 especially thank you and my goal now really because i don't compete anymore and haven't since i was 45 is really it's just long-term health maintenance i just lift you know because i really love it and i enjoy it but i'm focused mostly on my nutrition my sleep my cardiovascular fitness you know all the all the indicators my my blood sugars my blood pressure my lipids i focus on these things i've had over a hundred blood tests most of them throughout the last 10 years of my uh competitive career from 2006 to 2015 and then about every other month or every third month since so i've you know i'm kind of a hypochondriac that way and i have a lot of clients who are around my age who aren't as healthy and their blood tests uh you know show that and so i i try and help them with a broad you know foundational program like we talk about the vertical diet and improve their sleep get a cpap where necessary if they've got high blood pressure and they've got sleep apnea and then go to work with the high blood pressure and high blood sugar quick fix kits that i provide in the book to show them i kind of put things i'm a big lists guy and i like to put things in a hierarchy of most importance you have two quick fixes that i think are really powerful and i think it would be helpful if you break them down for people so you've got a blood pressure quick fix and you've got a glucose blood glucose sugar quick fix kit walk people what are the show us the diet through the lens of those two things yeah high blood pressure quick fix kit probably the most just as an aside a lot of people think that because i've talked about how i like to make sure i keep sodium in the diet a lot of people think that sodium is a major contributor to cardiovascular disease or high blood pressure and it's not it's very small and only for hypertensives it's a small portion of the population maybe 25 of the population is hypertensive salt sensitive and generally those people are overweight to begin with and that's why they have you know a poor reaction but reducing salt in those people even down to you know really small amounts uh uh like 2 500 milligrams a day only results in two to five millimeters of systolic blood pressure decrease it's not significant it's not uh it's not nothing but it's not significant starting at the very top losing weight you get about a a millimeter of systolic blood pressure decrease for every pound that you lose you lose 20 pounds you can drop 20 points on your systolic blood pressure you go from 150 to 130. wow just like that you eliminate salt you might go from 150 to 147. so not that that salt shouldn't be considered for hypertensive and salt sent as individuals but i'm just trying to make the comparison um the next big one on there is hypothyroidism can have a significant impact on on blood pressure underactive thyroid yeah an underactive thyroid especially in women can be up to a 20 point difference between normal thyroid and hypothyroidism between women in terms of blood pressure sleep apnea is a monster for high blood pressure uh i i cannot believe sometimes i'll get people to contact me they went to their doctor and the doctor gave them blood pressure medications and understandably so they're under obligation to do so you walk in there with high blood pressure and they don't prescribe you medicine and you drop in the street and you know they're going to get a lawsuit but without mentioning do you have sleep apnea in is it the lack of sleep or is it something about the constantly waking up a combination of both holding your breath uh has an effect on it uh the inflammation from that but it's something that's that's fixable immediately with a cpap it's like a 99 fix to get a cpap i deal with this with a lot of my clients myself i've used a cpap off and on since 1993. ever since i got over 240 people say do you need it because of all the muscle mass it's neck girth fat or muscle if you get above say 17 inches for a male you're generally going to start to experience some degree of apnea uh there's a stop bang questionnaire that i i have in the book that goes through and talks to you about you know your neck size snoring uh waking up tired did your partner observe you holding your breath uh those kinds of things and getting a cpap is a resolution for that has a significant effect maybe up to 20 points on your systolic blood pressure is significant take bricks 10 minute walks after meals that helps with postprandial glycemia and insulin seems to be a driver of blood pressure hyperinsulinemia uh resistance training is huge it it helps with uh it releases nitric oxide which of course vasodilates and it also helps with uh the blood vessels uh elasticity so lifting weights has a significant impact on that um and then we're down to things like consuming sufficient amounts of potassium and calcium and magnesium and it's hard to do and most people don't do it you want to get over 4 000 milligrams probably closer to 4 500 milligrams of potassium and i have a whole list in the book that shows you kind of how to do that that's why i eat a potato every day and i recommend it as part of the foundation of the of the vertical diet is because i'm trying to get potassium in first and the potatoes twice the potassium as as say um a banana even wow and so i'm trying to get that 4 700 milligrams of potassium in and so these are some some key things i mentioned thyroid uh i mentioned salt for salt sensitive people vitamin d avoiding diuretics and caffeine those can although caffeine is an acute uh has an acute effect not a chronic effect on blood pressure might just be something to consider how you respond to it uh and then another one is uric acid high uric acid can cause high blood pressure and a lot of people think uric acid is related to meat it it has a bigger effect on uric acid with things like um this is the one fructose is one the biggest one is beer things that are high in rna and dna beer sardines uh can have a significant effect so in your blood test get your uric acid tested if that's elevated that's something that you're going to want to minimize fructose but those studies run pure fructose not fruit fruit always has a fructose glucose combination glucose helps with the digestion of fructose and the quantity with the fiber in the water is so low that fruits aren't going to have a significant impact on uric acid beer will purines in in the rna and dna and beer and sardines is probably the primary driver the second person to talk about that it's really interesting never considered uric acid at all until about two months ago yeah very interesting yeah and it's something that you look at with people who have these uh these conditions you know for high blood high blood pressure uh and i did mention here lower fructose intake that is the high blood pressure quick fix kit it's very similar to the high blood sugar quick fix kit uh we talked a little bit about blood sugars these kind of go together because blood sugar affects hyperinsulinity affects blood pressure and so we're back to losing weight we talked about eating sufficient protein 30 percent protein in your diet has a significant effect on ameliorating um postprandial glycemia also eating protein earlier in the day the bigger protein meal that you have for breakfast has an effect on subsequent meals postprandial glycemia seems to have an important effect and then eating the protein first in the meal also interesting has a huge effect on on your glycemia taking the 10 minute walks after meals as we were mentioned resistance training is important sleep obviously is huge for blood sugars uh insulin resistance occurs in less one night of bad sleep and so that's a huge one uh getting adequate vitamin d seems to be important for blood sugars as well but you know potassium magnesium iodine i even threw eat carrots in here for a source of fiber one of my favorite sources of fiber because it's low gas it's a low fodmap food which i talk about in the diet in terms of digestibility i mentioned eggs in here for choline choline helps prevent and reverse fatty liver disease and you get about 150 milligrams of choline for each egg yolk uh you want about a thousand milligrams a day that's about six eggs your body can only absorb about two or three hundred milligrams of choline at any given meal and so i spread them out uh you know half and half or a third third third but i get about six eggs a day it would seem counterintuitive that i get a 400 pound guy like half thor bjornsson with metabolic syndrome and fatty liver and high blood pressure and i start feeding him more whole eggs but it's for the choline primarily is it just for the choline or is it that a lot of the wrap that eggs have is unwarranted a lot of the rap is unwarranted and people would used to assume that the choline in your diet affected the cholesterol in your diet affected the cholesterol in your bloodstream and it doesn't for the vast majority of people there's a small percentage population has hypercholesterolemia who has to be cautious about how much cholesterol they eat but more importantly how much saturated fat because that affects cholesterol clearance which seems to be a bigger problem than the cholesterol that you're consuming is that you're just not clearing it and that it's partly because of fatty liver it's partly because of inadequate bile production because a lot of the cholesterol is sequestered and uh and eliminated with through the bile system and so those are all things to consider and that's when we start to maybe get into supplementation start looking at nac and acetyl cysteine which is a precursor to glutathione that can help the liver and also something like tudka which i'm not going to try and tudka t-u-d-c-a i'm not going to try and spell that one out but it's a big long name but tudka helps with inflammation in the liver to allow the bile that's bound up in the liver to escape so that that you don't have bile formation so that's really interesting about all the different ways that inflammation ends up affecting somebody that people don't necessarily think about it's really interesting or can people find out more about you everything's at stan efforting my website is stanford dot com my instagram is at stan efforting my youtube and i have some rhinos rants on youtube where i've gone through a lot of this it's kind of a fun little thing where i talk about all these topics is youtube's also stan efforting and then i have uh the vertical diet meal prep company is a nationwide meal prep company where we make low fodmap meals that are high in protein and we deliver those nationwide door-to-door and that's at theverticaldiet.com love it guys his results speak for themselves highly encourage you guys to check it out and to try it out for yourself n of one experimentation ultimately is all that matters when it comes to diet so it may work for other people may not for you or something that other people think is crazy uh may work perfectly for you so definitely experiment on yourself and find the things that give you the results you want it is so important to experiment with diet to take this stuff seriously your health is everything uh protect it experiment see what works speaking of things at work if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 1,330,605

Keywords: Stan Efferding, The White Rhino, pro bodybuilder, Tom Bilyeu, Tom Bilyou, Impact Theory, Health Theory, Conversations with Tom, interview, health tips, health advice, diet, vertical diet, body composition, body transformation, athletes, weight loss, protein, muscle, hypertrophy training, resistance training, muscle mass, puberty, lean muscle mass, powerlifter, delayed puberty, sports performance, weightlifting, diet advice, nutrition, high blood pressure, being overweight, CPAP

Id: iw-4l9pTKOU

Length: 63min 21sec (3801 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 20 2022