I remember.
Sorry.
I did not think I would cry in this podcast so much.
Lane Norton scientist record-setting bodybuilder and is one of the most respected voices in the health and nutrition
space who debunks all the different Fitness and Nutrition myths out there. Let's go to the technical
stuff. Oh, yeah, let's do that calories in calories out. So the first point of confusion a lot of people may think they're in a calorie deficit but they're not because one people don't really understand portion sizes. If you've never had the experience of like weighing out your food you will be shocked and the other thing
is auspicious sweetness. I won.
It for a while whether Diet Coke is healthy or
not. If we look at the randomized control trial, they salt 6 kg of weight loss just from switching people from regular soda to diet soda. Now when they compared it versus water, this is gonna be the most commented thing about in this entire interview. I'm sure they found that one
of the big misconceptions about intermittent fasting
is it okay if I get deep into the Weeds on this one your head in studies people in intermittent fasting groups tend to lose more weight, but it's not because of anything magic about intermittent fasting. It's because what's your thoughts on his impact?
I think it's a net positive. And here's
why when it comes to weight loss. Keep little Googling how to lose belly fat
practically. It's kind of irrelevant because and then is sugar addictive. This one's gonna get in trouble too. So
quick one quick favor to ask from you. There is one simple way that you can support our show and that is by hitting that follow button on this app that you're listening to the show on right now this year in 2024. We're trying really really hard to level up everything we're doing and the only free thing I'll ever ask from you is to hit that follow button on this app. It helps the show more than I could probably articulate and it allows us enables us to keep doing what we're doing here. I appreciate it dealing on to the show.
Blaine who are you? And what is the mission you're on
I am trying to make
Fitness information more accessible Fitness more accessible to everyone and trying to act as a bridge between academic research and your average person because so much Gets Lost in Translation because social media the news it is a fire hose of information a lot of which is misinformation or you only get part of the story and so I have noticed people
So frustrated because they feel like they understand what it is to eat healthy and then a new documentary comes out a new podcast comes out a new article comes out and says, okay. Nope, you're do it. Whatever it is you're doing it's wrong and here's why and I just want to help clear up some of that confusion and help people understand the big stuff that really matters versus not getting lost in the weeds of the stuff that just doesn't matter that
much and when you say Fitness,
how do you define that because you talked about you then talked about diet and food. So what is the sort of bucket that you put yourself in? What are the categories that you really focus on
great question, but you know, I would say that my wheelhouse is nutrition. So I did a PhD in nutritional sciences and I also feel
Pretty equipped to interpret exercise information as
well. And what did you serve actual academic sort of background? What is your lived experience? What experiences have you had as a coach to people as a trainer in your own personal life that have added to that academic information that you have
great question. So I'll try to give The Abridged version of this. I got bullied a lot growing up is really skinny kid hyperactive weird, you know.
And so when you're young what makes you stand out is actually, you know, not such a good thing and I got bullied a lot and I started lifting weights to I thought if I got bigger muscles, you know girls would pay attention to me and I stopped getting bullied. It didn't work for either of those two things, but I did gain more confidence not because I built bigger muscles, but because the process of lifting and getting through plateaus and move.
I'm through setbacks and all those sorts of things. That's what built confidence and I started lifting when I was 15 and when I got to college I changed my major because I decided to do my first bodybuilding show. I did it. I won the team Division and I was hooked. I was like, this is the thing I want to do but back in this is 2001. I was 19. I'm 42. Now the Avenues to make money and fitness. We're basically be a personal trainer open a gym.
Started supplement company try to be mr. Olympia.
And I didn't know how feasible any of those work. So I started looking at a PhD literally for no other reason I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, but I figured if I delay the real world by 48 year for 26 years. Maybe I'll have it figured out by then. But in that meantime, I had started posting on different body building message boards, and so
I would get a bunch of emails about my articles and people asking me questions and I was like basically doing full-on diets and nutrition for people for free because I just liked it and then when I got to grad school, it's like man, I you know, this is a lot of my time now.
Maybe if I just like charge people a little something I can do this instead of a teaching assistantship make a little bit of money, you know didn't really think much of it. And so I took my first online client back in 2005 and within three years, I was making a full-time income from it with no advertising just word of mouth. And then in my fourth year, I think was the first year I ever made like six figures from it. I remember thinking
What is happening? I want to take one step back. Yeah, because it's clear from what you said, but also clear from a lot of the research that I did on you and your backstory that much of the driving motivation behind why you are what you are today and why you help people and why you do the work you do and make the content you make was because of this early experience with bullying and I've sat here with so many people who are real anomalies in their lives for a variety of different reasons, you know, maybe in business or
or in science or in sport and I so often find that the reason why they're brilliant is also fundamentally into linked to the reason why they struggle or they struggled shall I say and in your story that seems to be
Very pertinent. I read a quote you set on a video you made seven years ago where you said I had intense and sustained emotional bullying. I would be put in a corner by four to five people and be obliterated repeatedly.
Yeah, I mean, you know what? I'll tell people like the the reason I started lifting weights and bodybuilding it was not the noblest of reasons, you know, it was very much you say I'm worthless. I'm going to prove you wrong, you know and even
And I mean, I would love to say that it it has no remnants today, but I would be that would be a lie, right some of the stuff I still struggle with in terms of I have a hard time trusting myself a lot of the times because I got told for so long or trusting some decisions. I make I got told for so long you do it wrong, you know, you suck your worthless, you know, those sorts of
things when you went to therapy with diagnosed with a form of PTSD bullying PTSD they call
it. Yeah my my
Rapist she diagnosed me and I remember saying I don't have PTSD like that's that's four soldiers. That's four leaf has and she goes first off Lane. You don't like it when people correct you as a professional in your field. Don't correct me and
You're right. You didn't witness people died. Nothing like that. But trauma is trauma and her explanation of it was it is all relative and it may not have been you know Horrors from war but for your brain, it was traumatic and the way she explained it is trauma is something that causes you to react or act.
T' in response to something even after that event has passed, right? So for me, for example, I've struggled in personal relationships. We're either Partners or friends trying to give me feedback and I immediately get defensive very defensive and if you read about relationships, that's not great. Right? It's one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse for relationships.
And I never understood I just thought well, I'm just explaining myself. I'm just and then now I understand it. So it's because that was my response to the bullying because feedback or criticism to me feels like bullying even though it's not so you have a defense mechanism because you had to defend yourself back then and it's so interesting the things that we adopt to survive when we're young become maladaptive when we get older.
Go to unpick all of that when you're an adult, isn't it? Because it's as you know, it's very hard word. They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. But Ivy we've I've got my own trauma responses that I'm still trying to work through and I'm now aware of them, but they still on a bad day on a nun slept day. They can still come to the
surface. I tell people I don't know if you can like completely undo your default setting right, but I think what you can do is get mindful of it and learn tools to manage it right? And I mean, it's interesting.
How this ties into obesity.
Because I used to be somebody I've never been obese never been overweight nothing like that. When I got to grad school. I was very much more towards the side of if you're obese. It's because you're lazy, it's your fault, you know, and then the more I just observed.
I realized that that can't be true because look at all these old. There's so many obese people that are successful in other areas of their life when they apply a lot of discipline. What is it about this thing? Right? And I remembered I read a study and I hopefully I get this correct because it was a while back but they looked at obese women and they found that obese women were 50 percent. I believe 50 percent more likely to have
Sexual assault trauma in their past and you also look at the Obesity literature and people who are obese tend to have a greater reward response from food. Whereas people who are lean or normal weight. It's not like that huge reward that they get it's like some people, you know, they can they can have a drink they can of beer they go I like the bear, you know, and other people
become alcoholics, right? And so so much of this stuff gets tied up in it gets wired in as a kind of coping mechanism. If you look at like for example binge eating what's happening during a binge is that person is getting a flood of dopamine right there masking. They want to mass that feeling whatever made them feel uncomfortable. I always tell people I'm like, you don't really find people binge eating a
After they've had eight hours of sleep at 10 a.m. In the morning when they're low stress, right? It's at 10 p.m. At night after a long day that I'm fighting with their spouse or kids are driving them nuts and they just they want to turn it all off. Right and I think staying mindful is one of the hardest things we have as humans. I mean, I know what my addiction is. Unfortunately based on my current job. I get way too into social media, you know, I just end up you know, it kind of started as well. I'm doing
Great, and I'm responding to comments also and pretty soon. I'm looking at my screen time. I'm going oh my gosh, right and so that was something for me to numb up and turn my mind off right but for other people it's food for other people. It's gambling for other people. It's alcohol for the people. It's some other drug.
So what do we do with that then so fact we first have to figure out what our relationship is on a psychological level with these addictions with with our food. For example, if we're just focusing on weight.
Loss to start with when you if you were to be coaching someone would you try and understand their propensity to binge to have that sort of like dopamine craving or do you focus somewhere
else? I kind of said. All right, like what me through a typical day for you want me through a typical week? Where is where your struggles really at? Right and one of the things I we call it the Bayou laneway when we when we kind of teach our coaches is we do coaching with you have to
have two things are critically important accountability with empathy because if you're just the accountability coach the drill sergeant who's you know, most people if they screw up they've beat themselves up more than anybody else. I know I'm that way. I'm sure you're that way so you don't need to beat them up again.
The empathy portion. So if you're just beating somebody up for just holding them accountable without empathy you just become the drill sergeant and what happens is people end up tuning you out or they're not honest with you anymore because they don't want to constantly feel like they're failing right the empathy portion if you just have empathy and you're saying I'm so sorry that happened. That's so hard. I understand but you're not holding them accountable. There's no impetus for change, right? So it takes it takes both and so the way I doffed
when coach like let's take up. Somebody had a binge something like that. The first thing I'd say I understand why it happened. You know, that's really hard. We're what was the antecedent to this like? Well, what started this right? Okay. Now let's look at if we had to go back and do it over again. What are some things we might be able to do to put some to put some barriers, right? So I had one client he's a hedge fund manager and when he started with me, he was binging pretty much.
I would say almost every day and I said, okay, where do you find that this is happening? And he said well usually it's after everybody's gone to bed. And you know, I just find myself in the kitchen and it just happens. So, okay, so it's not reasonable lock yourself in your room. Right? But what if we just did a few things to increase your mindfulness right put a post on the cabinet where you where you keep that?
The junk food right not saying anything nasty or anything, but it said write down am I hungry or am I just upset then on your on your door right lock it from the inside. It's not you know, it doesn't keep you from going out, but you have to unlock it. Right like you're having to turn your brain on right and it the more barriers you can put there the better it gets
the more sort of mindful moments you can have where you make you have to kind of make a decision and you don't you come out of autopilot because I notice when
Never I have my binge moments which happens once in a while. It is like unthinking. Yeah, it's just like a robot has taken over
exactly and with this like this particular client, right? He'd have a rough day at work hedge fund manager. Very stressful job. I say, okay if you've had a rough day at work first thing to do when you're driving home say man. I've had a tough day at work. This is usually where I'd have a bench session like say it out loud like name it. You know what? I mean? Sometimes just naming it is enough to stop it.
It I mean I not the same thing but I struggle with I'm sure you know as ADHD during conversation.
I've something to say have something to say I want to say I want to say I want to say it right and I'll end up cutting people off and making them feel bad. And so I still have that inclination. But now I'll go if I start on I'm sorry. I jumped in please finish, right? Mmm. And so just like calling it out to yourself can make a huge difference on changing the behavior that which gets monitored gets changed. I
really want to focus on this point of the psychology of both exercise and weight loss.
In all the research that I do on even your conversations and other conversations clearly the like fundamental that sits underneath doing all the things we're going to talk about is like having the motivation that discipline and mastering one's own like mind because as you kind of said we can have all the diet plans in the world and many or all of them might work, but without the psychology of how to lose weight and to motivate ourselves to get to the gym, none of it really matters. So what else do we need to think about when we're trying to understand how to master?
Like the beasts within our mind
there's a lot to unpack here good. I'll start with this, you know, Ethan suply you familiar with him. So Ethan is actor. He was in My Name is Earl. He was an American History X and he was in Remember the Titans some of the big movies. He's been in Wolf of Wall Street as well. And he was over 500 pounds like he and like everybody knows him as the really big guy in those movies and shows now. He's like,
And 20 pounds and looks like he would play a military operator in a show. Right? And he said something that really stuck with me. He said if the house is on fire just get out of the house. We can worry about why the fire started later but just get out and there's so much like paralysis by analysis out there.
That people don't end up actually starting and if I put two plates in front of you, you know with different food. Yeah, we can quibble but for the most part if I'm sitting something out with the cheeseburger fries and I was okay versus lean meats vegetables. We know which one is more conducive to health right people will argue about these little things low-carb low-fat those sorts of things.
Just get out of the house. Stop. Stop eating so much of this very energy-dense hyper palatable food start moving away and Ethan. I think it was Ethan. He has this he is this thing he says when he when he whenever he posts a picture in the gym, he'll say I killed my clone today and I never I never quite understood it and then I read a systematic review of successful weight loss.
maintainers now what that means is
Weight loss we know diets can help you lose weight, but they don't tend to work long term because people their adherence wanes and they just kind of regain the weight over time. And if we look at like out about three years after initial weight loss. It's like depending on the statistics you use it anywhere from 90 95 percent of people end up regaining almost all the way. They lost and this study was about people who had successfully kept it off for a long period of time. So this is the
the unicorns right the the five ten percent of people who actually have that long-term success and there were things on there that you would expect, you know, they practice some form of cognitive restraint. They did a cognitive faint being counting calories or doing low carb or timer started eating some form of restraint, but the thing that stood out to me that really grabbed my attention was so many of them specified and pointed out they felt like they had to develop a new identity.
And I texted Ethan I was like is this what you mean by killed my clone? He goes out is exactly what I mean. And so one of the things I'll tell people now is think of the person that you want to become.
picture them
think about what do you think their habits and behaviors look like on a daily basis now reverse now start to reverse engineer that right and you mentioned motivation and I my thoughts have changed about motivation.
a lot of people
Wait to get motivated or inspired and hey, like I think all that stuff's great. But in the course of anything and I would bring it back to you and building a startup. I'm guessing there were days where you were not motivated to do what you were doing, right? Yeah by
stays right, right so many
days. So motivation is great when it comes I say that's like nitrous on a car right give you a quick boost and make you a lot faster.
But discipline the is the gas tank. That is it doesn't I tell people detach your feelings from the process. Okay. I have a very cold calculus when I look at my goals.
What is my goal? What will it take to get there some form of work in time right? No matter how you slice it.
Let's take so I won the Masters World Championship in powerlifting in 2022. It took me thank you took me. I went to open worlds in 2015. So the world squat record there but then went through a lot of different injuries and a lot of pain took me seven years to get back and win but there were times where a very unmotivated to go to the gym because I couldn't lift heavy I was you know in a lot of pain.
I knew if I want to get back there.
This is what it's going to take. And so it was it doesn't matter. If I'm motivated I have to do the things that I said I was going to do and I tell people try to detach how you feel from the process. It takes to get there and that's really hard for a lot of people to do but here's the thing as you do the process.
You start to see the results and then the motivation becomes more sustained, right? The the hard part is when you are down in the ditches and you you aren't seeing that progress. So when I'm coaching people on this stuff a lot of it is trying to build their confidence. And so many people they'll start a new year's resolution. Let's say because beginning there I'm going to go the gym five days a week. I'm like stop you haven't been going at all.
How about this? You're going to be active at least an hour for three days a week? Let's start there. If you go five days fantastic, right but it's different. If you said you're going to go five days. You only go three you feel really bad about yourself. You say you're going to go three and you go three feel really good about
yourself. What's the harm of feeling bad about yourself? So there was a year 2017 where I said, I'm a cold every day Steve. I was like, I'm going to the gym every day every day with 2018. I believe it was
and I'm going to tell you what happened because I think you know, but I want to ask the question. What is the harm of setting a huge goal and then failing and feeling bad about
yourself, you know, there's a lot of different versions of like what builds confidence but I think one of those things is keeping the promises you make to yourself, right and also just doing the thing you said you were going to do and that's why I tell people like hey for me if I say I'm going to go four or five times a week. That's not a problem because for me it takes discipline to keep
Me out of the gym, right like I love that that's fun for me. But if you're somebody who hasn't been going.
Just start with something. Like I'm not saying don't be ambitious overall, but you have to build confidence in increments. Right like so for example, I'm going to go back to my own personal experience eyes and 2015. I said a World's court record 668 pounds at 205 pound body weight class. But when I first started lifting, I was horrible at squats. I've got long legs. I am in fact one of the world powerlifting coaches.
has looked at the video of my squad and said
I don't know how you did that and
squats were very intimidating to me. I would get really scared trying to do it my back would hurt, you know, all these sorts of things, you know, eventually I ended up squatting 668 pounds, but the first time I went in the gym, I was able to do it the first 5 years 10 years. I couldn't I couldn't even imagine that right and one of the things I tell people what confidence is I thought when I if I squatted that amount of weight for 500 pounds of feel easy.
It still feels heavy. I just got better at handling it. Right and I kind of use that euphemism for life that analogy for life because life doesn't get easier, but you can get better at handling those things and the confidence that I built to be able to do that came through the repetition doing it over and over and over again, and that's what people need the problem is. They don't get the repetition in.
Because they do things like you were talking about which is they start to it'd be like me going in the gym. My first time said I'm gonna squat 400 pounds. I'm gonna get crumpled into a heap, right? But if I do it if I do what I can do at the time and slowly build that confidence that can wind up in me doing something that I never thought possible for
myself. I think it was Jordan Pederson that said to me when he deals with some of his clinical patients. The starting point for them is so small that it
Makes makes them feel shameful. So they don't do it. So he says he's dealt with people who literally can't get out of bed because their depression is so severe and telling someone that their goal is just to walk down the hall and walk back feel so small and inconsequential and so full of shame that that they just think know that doesn't matter. I'm not going to do that and there are a lot of people out there that are listening right now and they think about where they're starting point might be and it might literally be getting out the house putting the trainer's on going for a five-minute walk. But in their heads they'll
Go that's not going to do anything. That's not going to get me to that Mountaintop that I know I need to get to so I'm not going to bother
lot of people like that. And I mean, you know, you can take your cliche that you want it, you know Journey Of A Thousand Miles begins with a single step. How do you know if it one bite at a time? I mean, it's cliche, but it's very true. Right and I think if you're climbing a mountain if you're only looking at the top you're going to feel like you're getting nowhere, right? So if you want to climb a mountain have in mind the mountain that you want to climb
I'm but when you're climbing it look at the next ledge and just do that as the checkpoint, right so somebody asked me once if somebody had a lot of weight to lose like over 100 pounds. Where would you tell him to start? I'd say, you know, I'd look at where they're at right now. What are their habits their behaviors? What are they doing exercise wise? Let's get them to the next ledge. Right? So let's let's just, you know, we can go into this too. But you know if they're drinking a bunch of soda per day trying to get
them to go straight to water that might be very daunting for them. Right? Okay. Well diet soda is better than regular soda and and people argue about it, but I can cite the studies on this. Okay. They're they're you know, they're eating certain foods. Can we do something somewhat close to what they're already doing, but find a way to cut out some calories from that right? Let's let's try and I'm going to try and meet them closer to where they are and then slowly pull them.
Back
this way when you think about what it takes for someone to make that decision to change their life so often it seems that there's some kind of adverse event like I'm talking here about the why that sits behind the reason to change to change to lose the way to build the muscles. Do you see that often that there's some kind of catalyst moment
you actually see a lot of parallels between like the way addicts talk and people who have lost a lot of weight in terms of they had to develop a new identity.
They often have to get a new set of friends not on purpose. But if you think about if you were hanging around a certain type of people and you became and you were very overweight, you've probably fallen in with people who have similar habits to you. And even if you still care about those people as you start to come out of that there's a few things that are happening one. If they're not joining you in the things you're doing that creates a gap and people can also be very insecure when people they know start improving
Selves and they start trying to pull them back
in problem crabs in the bucket. All
right. Why why why do you got to eat that? Why can't you enjoy this? Why can't you know, that's
because you're holding up a mirror to them by changing your life, right?
Correct. So, you know, I think he Minds we talking about this my my brother was an addict and he like he went to prison for a period of time get a lot of really bad stuff go down.
His life and now one day I asked him. I'm like was it was going to prison was out like your rock bottom and he goes no because honestly, I just woke up one day and realize I lose everything I'll get a job and I lose it. I get some money and I lose it. I get a relationship and I lose it. I just got sick and tired of losing and not always but you hear a lot of similar stories from people who drastically changed our lives as they just got to the point where they were sick and tired.
Of being that way and they just realized that if I don't make some kind of change this is going to continue and I think one that takes a self-awareness that which is hard and having that mirror brought to you is really hard. I can relate another areas of life, but that why really is at the core of it because at the end of the day if you don't have a really strong why it is hard when you start to lose motivation
No, I was watching a story of a guy who had a heart attack when he was like in his 40s and then he lost 150 pounds and he's like whenever I started whatever I didn't have motivation or started feeling like I wanted to fall back into bad habits. I thought about my kids growing up without a dad and it made it very easy for me. And so when you have that really strong why
it makes it easier to get through it. I'm not saying either
me or you're gonna be able to figure out and see here, but I feel like
maybe there's something we can offer to the question about how to cultivate the why is there anything that you do on those days? I need disciplines. You think you can put in place that will just keep the why front and center. I'm going to throw out one something that kind of helped me a little bit was just changing the background on my phone to an image that reminded me of who I wanted to be and it just meant that even if it gives me a 1% psychological reinforcement in the direct it so that I fall on the correct side of a decision relating to dial Fitness.
Maybe that would help you know, because it's there
a couple things I think about I think about the people I care about my life and wanting to make them proud think about my kids. You know, how would I want now? I'm gonna get emotional. How would I know? How would I want them to remember their dad? You know, I can remember coming back from all these injuries and and I was lifting in the garage one day and my daughter she was 6 at the time and she's such a little
spark plug and she would watch me and sometimes she would come in and like do some lists with me and stuff and I was kind of explaining to her why I do this stuff and why it was important to me and I said, you know Dad almost was a world champion. I got really close and you know, I that would be something that I would really treasure if I got the chance to do that and she said are you going to try and be a champion again? And she said it in the kid way that like but oh my gosh when
He said that whenever I felt tired whenever I felt down or whatever. I just moved my daughter saying are you going to try to be a champion again Made Easy? You know and so I had my like it's going to sound goofy, but it worlds in 2022. I was going through a lot of personal stuff at the time and I had picture my kids on my phone and I was looking at that and I was almost in tears before I go out for lifts because I was so amped up and psyched up and that was that was my wife something about my
Kids and I also think about you know, my parents and like great people want to make them proud and then honestly, like my my personal hero is my grandfather. So my grandfather is part of the greatest Generation. He was the funniest person I've ever met with the most Integrity of anybody I've ever met and so so many times when I think about the person I want to be I think about my grandfather and you know still to this day,
I'll think about it before I if I feel like low motivation or if I've really screwed something up, you know like that sort of thing.
Let's go to the technical stuff. Yes, let's start with so we're talking here about dieting and weight loss if I'm trying to lose weight, should I be counting my calories? So the first point of confusion people assume calories in calories out is the same thing as counting calories.
That's like saying the law that in order to save money you have to earn more than you spend is the same thing as keeping a budget keeping a budget can help you save money, but it's not the same thing. So let's break down calories in calories out calories inside pretty straightforward. It is the food you eat, right the calories in the food that you eat. Now, I would add one caveat to that the metabolizable energy. So when we say calories calories
is literally a unit of energy and so I'll have some people say well calories aren't a real thing. You can't look at Cal my microscope. You're right. It refers to the potential energy contained in the chemical bonds of food that through the process of digestion absorption and Metabolism that energy is captured in one way or another. So that's the energy into the system calories out is more complicated. So that involves a few different.
Energy outputs the first one being your basal metabolic rate. So your BMR is basically the cost of keeping the lights on. So if you just laid down didn't move that's how many calories your body would burn and that's actually the majority most people the majority of the calories they burned per day. It's around 50 to 70% depending on how active they
are and it fluctuates person to person. So as a man with fairly big muscles that yes will be bigger than mine because I liked you have more going on over there.
So those
you can tie about at least based on the regressions. You can tie about 90 percent of the variance and BMR to someone's lean mass. Okay, if you look at the studies, it's very tightly correlated with lean Max, right? Because lean tissue is more metabolically active than non lean tissue. So be a Mars one bucket, then you have What's called the thermic effect of food. So your TEF our bodies are kind of like for lack of a poor analogy, but analogy that
Is cars internal combustion engine you don't just put petrol or gas in your car. It also not just spontaneously starts up. You got to start it the battery puts in energy. So you can get energy out of the fuel right your body has to put an energy to extract the energy out of the food that you eat. And so a lot of the confusion people say well calories in calories out assumes that all calories equal it doesn't because TEF accounts for this because for example protein
As a higher thermic effect of food than carbohydrates or fat. So if you look at
soy protein requires more energy to basically process it, correct.
So if you look at like say fats, for example, TEF is about 03 percent meaning if you eat 100 calories from dietary fat you capture about 97 to 100 calories of it carbohydrates about 5 to 10% So if you 200 calories from carbohydrate you capture about 90 to 95 calories from it a lot of that depends on the fiber content the more fiber
Lower the metabolizable energy. So fiber actually has a higher thermic effect of food as well. Then protein is about 7080 percent. So if you eat a hundred calories from protein you capture about 70 to 80 calories. So some people out there will say well there's negative calorie know those don't exist. You're always getting more energy out of it than you put in but some are lower than others. Right? And so that TEF is about 5 to 10% of the energy you expend per day. So now we've
BMR TEF and then you have your physical activity which we can further break into two different buckets. The first one is obvious, which is exercise. All right, you go to the gym burn some calories and that's energy out. The second one is less intuitive. It's called non-exercise activity. Thermogenesis neat and that is the small unconscious movements that you make per day. Give an example, like what I'm doing it, like now it's not subconscious because I'm thinking about it.
But fidgeting when you're talking with your hands pacing right, in fact, they've actually shown that people who have a more they called obese resistant phenotype when they eat more they tend to just become spontaneously more active without realizing it and so people who are more obese prone when they eat more food. They tend to not compensate by becoming more spontaneously active and people
It's kind of pedantic but it's important to understand the difference. I'll heard people say well I'm going to take the steps and get mine eat up. No, no you made a decision. That's exercise Okay, the reason being neat really isn't consciously modifiable. Right? And so I'll give you an example of like an extreme example of this. So when I was getting ready for my last bodybuilding show back in 2010, the fatigue that you deal with is unbelievable. It's hard to describe in words.
Soul-crushing would be a way to describe it and I had gotten done, you know train two hours at the gym that day I done an hour of cardio got home and I remember I sat down on the couch and my exit my wife at the time she had like real housewives of whatever County on the TV. I hated those shows but the remote was about 7 feet away.
I watch the entire show. I did not get up and move because I was so fatigued. That's an example of neat and neat is very modifiable. So they've shown that even a ten percent reduction in body weight can reduce neat by up to four 500 calories per day. So you're just a lot of people end up moving glass without even realizing it. So here's the rub.
This so you got your calories in you got your calories out be m r+ t EF + neat + exercise.
People think of these two things as static, they're not static. And as I talked about in the book a lot, we have various adaptations that fight us for weight loss. First of which is on the metabolism side when you lose body weight your BMR drops, but part of that is because you're carrying around less weight, right? So if I 200 pounds and I drop down to 180 pounds, I just have last mess to carry around and so your BMR goes down.
B which is again, which again is your base metabolic
rates, right, which is the the cost of keeping the lights on basically, but there's actually what's called metabolic adaptation which has shown that with a ten percent body weight loss on average. You can see a reduction beyond what you would expect of 15% for BMR. So let's take an example here because people will say well calorie deficit in work for me because you know, I was eating this many calories. I was exercising this much period
Of time and I was so I like what happened. Well you thought you were in a calorie deficit.
But let's take me for example. Okay, my BMR, I've had it measured it's about it's about 2,000 calories little bit lower 2,000 calories. My total daily energy expenditure is around thirty four hundred calories per day. So that's all this stuff added up. Right? But if I lose 10% of my body weight for me 2700 calories per day is a pretty significant calorie deficit, but if I lose 10% of my body weight
If I drop my BMR by 15% 15% of 200 thousand calories days 300 calories drop my knee by 400 calories. That's 700 calories all the sudden that deficit is no longer a deficit that's now maintenance right now. This doesn't happen all at once. This is a progressive thing over time, but there's a reason like I tell people I'm like if it was a calorie deficit as soon as you like from the time you did it indefinitely you would starve to death, right? But all of us,
Us most of us have had the experience of starting a diet losing some weight and eventually even though you're eating the same way doing the same exercise it plateaus right? And then you have to do something else to further establish that deficit and the other way. So that's on one side with that's kind of working against you to try to bring you back to your original body weight, right? We talked about weight regain. The other side is your hunger hormones go up as
You died it right. So they've actually then they have shown obese people who lose weight to become normal weight when you compare them to normal weight people who were never obese with the same similar lean body mass.
The formerly obese people have a lower total daily energy expenditure.
And they have higher markers of hunger. They have higher appetite. So it's working on both sides of that equation to push you back. So The Devil's Advocate argument is well, you know, I ate this amount of calories that should have been a calorie deficit and I didn't lose weight or it's the you know, all calories are created equal. I'll tell people all calories are created equal because saying a calorie is not a calorie is like saying second hands on the clock.
Lock or different. No, they're just a unit of measurement all sources of calories are not equal. So let's take budgeting right? I used that earlier sports car. Okay. So let's say somebody makes a million dollars a year, right if they want to spend 100. Let's assume no loans just for sake of ease if they want to spend a hundred fifty thousand dollars in a sports car, but they're still able to pay their mortgage. They can take care of the responsibilities and they can put money away for retirement.
Aunt can they buy that sports car sure they can write it isn't a bad investment.
I guess you could argue it's a bad investment because they could put the 150,000 dollars in those Investments. But maybe that sports car makes them feel good and gives them a little carrot on the stick to you know, keep working and whatnot. But if I take somebody who makes two hundred thousand dollars a year, so they buy the 150,000 dollar sports car. If it means they can't pay their mortgage. They can't you know save for retirement. No, of course not right similar thing with energy right? So if I'm
You know somebody who's very active and I burn a lot of calories. Is it a big deal if I have a Pop-Tart say if I'm still getting enough protein, I'm hitting my target energy. I'm getting enough fiber in and my micronutrients if that
gives me that little carrot on the end of the stick to keep being consistent not a big deal. But if we're talking about a smaller woman with less lean mass who needs to eat 1200 calories a day to lose weight. That's not a very good investment, right? It's not a very good use of funds. So what I'll tell people is, you know, people say well, how do I know? What a deficit is? How do I know? How many calories to eat
right because also just on that point I heard you talk about food labeling as well and how inaccurate
look
You can have up to a twenty percent are in food labeling, right? So some people will use so what that means is it can say 100 calories. It could be 80. It could be 120 now. I will say if it's coming from a big food company and they have pretty rigorous standards. It's probably not that far off but there are allowed up to that right because they recognize that some food sources are very heterogeneous. It'd be difficult to like get it exactly on so you'll have some people say
Well see calorie counting is useless because you can't know exactly how many calories you're taking in. And are you going to get your BMR measuring you're going to need measure to get this measured it can be much more simple than that.
Again Financial analogy. I could make the argument that keeping a budget is useless because you never know what inflation is exactly doing and if you have Investments, you can get differential, you know Returns on it and on the output side you have unexpected expenses. You have fluctuations in expenses. Your power bill is going to be different from month to month, right your car breaks down one month, but if you look at the average over time,
You can get a pretty good idea of on average what your expenses are like, right and you can get a pretty good idea over time unlike entrepreneurs like us but even like us you get you can start to kind of see the trends and get a relatively good good idea of what it's going to be. So when it comes to calories in and calories out. Yes tracking exactly can be very very difficult. But if you are monitoring your body weight and you're being consistent,
With how you track you'll know if you're in a calorie deficit and I think another thing that's Crossing people off this actually shown up on that that review of the successful weight loss maintainers. They actually talked about one of the things that was a barrier for them or hard for them was the weight fluctuations because you know, if you've ever if you ever weighed in every day, have you ever have you ever done this for you? Wait every day even first thing in the morning, right Uptown Dallas is all over the place, right? So actually when we with our coaching and then with our app we
Not just looking at one weight. We encourage people to wait as long as it doesn't cause them a lot of stress and anxiety way and daily and then it's taking the average of those because day-to-day changes in weight are much more dictated by fluctuations in fluid, but week to week and month to month averages reflect loss or gain of mass. So for example, if you're monitoring your body weight, you know taking averages and looking at
That over time you'll know if you're in a calorie deficit because on average, you're seeing it go down right now. I wanted to make one more point which is you don't have to track calories to lose weight. Absolutely not it's just one methodology because no matter what you do, you have to have some form of restraint, right and my friend Peter T actually breaks it down nicely into a couple different three buckets, right? You can have dietary restriction T, which is low carb plant-based Whole Foods.
You know, whatever it is. You're restricting some sort of food group or type of food, right? Then you have a time restriction you eat within a certain time frame of a certain window. Then you can have just straight-up calorie restriction where you're tracking and monitoring what you choose to do. I think a lot in terms of what is best for an individual balls down to their psychology and what feels easy so this is where a lot of the diet worst.
Start because somebody will do say low carb, right and they'll get results from that and they'll say man. It felt like I wasn't even dieting and for whatever reason that clicked with the algorithm in their brain and felt easy and they got progress from that but then they assume that everyone else will have the same response. Somebody else does low-fat somebody else does intermittent fasting whatever have you and you have all these stories me personally. I was the kind of person on the kind of person that if
If I tried to restrict certain foods, I end up getting that binge response, right? But if you tell me I can eat whatever I want as long as I'm tracking it.
I become ridiculously consistent and I mean I'm still eating mostly like Whole Food minimally processed foods, you know those sorts of things because they're better for society, but I don't stress out about having some snacks here and there that are you know bad consistent because I'm being very consistent right?
How important is that consistency?
It is the most important thing so there is actually a meta-analysis and for when I say meta-analysis think a study of studies. Okay, so it's not
A new study. It's what they're trying to do in a meta-analysis is they are trying to take studies that are similar and compile them together to see is there a consensus here. Is there an overall effect here? Right. So there was a meta-analysis of where they looked at 14 different like popular diets and these ranged from low carb to you know, high carb low fat right and what they found is on the long.
And none of them were better than the others for weight loss. But when they stratified them for adherence from least adherent to most adherent what does that mean? So people who were consistent basically, so when they stratified them for I think compliance another way to put it when they try to find him that way regardless of diet a linear effect of adherence on weight loss. So what that tells me is actually the best diet for the individual is
the one that they consistent the can consistently execute they all function the same way which is, you know, creating some sort of calorie deficit now, some people will say that's not true. I did a low-carb diet and I was eating more food. You probably felt more satiated because you were eating less calorie dense food. You probably weren't eating a greater quantity in terms of weight of food, but you were eating less
calories. Is that any way to lose weight in a current calorie
Surplus not
Not if that's so what I'll tell people is all right, you take in food in the carbons that you take in they have to go somewhere right and if you are.
If you are not in a surplus what you are saying is you are creating energy out of nothing if that's the case NASA needs to study you because we figured out how to not worry about fuel on Long space flights, right? We have a perpetual motion machine again. A lot of this the confusion becomes when you have you know, for example metabolic adaptation. Yeah, so, you know people they may think they're in a calorie deficit, but they're not or there.
Overestimating how many calories they burn and here's the other thing that people don't want to talk about because this gets down to the mirror, right? So there's a classic study. I think it was from 1992 and I think the title I'm a butcher but it's discrepancy between reported and actual calorie intake. It'll be subjects I want to say is the name of the study. And so what they did was they had people they screened for people who said that they could not lose weight, even though they were eating locale.
These and the the average calorie intake that was reported by participants was 1200 calories a day. And so they measured a bunch of different stuff. They measured the lean mass their fat Mass. They measured their BMR. They measured their total daily energy expenditure. They found that their BMR was very average when it was one of his four was based on the lean mass, right? And actually if you look at obese people they actually have a higher BMR and higher energy expenditure typically than lien.
People but on average it's because they have more lean mass because when you have more mass to carry around your body has to create more locomotive, Mass, but when they so they and they told the subjects we will we are going to monitor you and we will know if you're eating more than you say you are the average in the study was they underreported their calorie intake by about 50 percent and they over reported their physical activity by just under 50% Peace now,
And some of the participants argued with the researchers about it, right? Here's where people miss the message the message a lot of people take from that is I'll see they're lying and that's a really hard thing to take to somebody to be like, well, you're probably Under reporting your calorie intake. You're probably eating more than you think you are that feels very, you know aggressive and I don't think it's lying. I think that
One people don't really understand portion sizes. If you've never had the experience of like weighing out your food you will be shocked like way out a serving of cereal or a serving of ice cream or if you want to be really depressed way on a serving of peanut butter because the tablespoon that you're grabbing I promise you is probably two or three servings and then you know, like if the first time I weighed out ice cream when I see when I started weighing my food, I was like, this is a serving
it's like two bites, you know, and so I don't think people have a really good understanding of serving sizes. And even remember I never get this was an Instagram DM and this lady was saying that she was eating 1,600 calories a day and not losing weight and we kind of you know had a little back and forth and we were talking and I said, well how she's like, I am measuring my futon my how are you measuring it? She's like I'm doing volume measurements. So she's doing cups tablespoons that sort of thing. I said do me a favor.
Do exactly what you've been doing, but way out each one a day later. She came back and said, oh my God, I mean 2700 calories a day. And so even dietitians under report their caloric intake and Studies by about 10% And these are the experts right? So you have on one side people are eating more than they think they are and then on the other side, they think they're being more active than they really are. But again, that's a hard conversation to have with people.
And even as such telling people, hey, you need to move more eat less mechanistically, that's true. But that's like telling somebody hey, if you want to save more money just earn more and spend less
we hold of this. You know, I was adding up all these discrepancies right discrepancies as in like you're weighing it wrong the labels got 20 percent wrong, and I'm my head went back to your budgeting analogy as an entrepreneur and as a CEO if my hunting was 20% off.
That if my that if it's 95% off in the till like how much money we're getting into the till and then I'm using a cup instead of a scale. So that's under 30% off as well. No wonder you know, the business would go bust right now complicated. I can what the fuck we gonna do.
Yeah, it is complicated, but I would tell people you know again if you get back to the basics of monitoring your body weight consistently, which is one of the out to be careful about this because there are some people
We're monitoring their body weight consistently ends up being like really anxiety-provoking for them to sort of these hanging. Yeah that sort of thing. So that's you know, I try to be sensitive to that but it is a very consistent thing in the literature that people who lose weight and keep it off tend to monitor their body weight pretty regularly and it's a self-correcting thing. Right? Like if you're keeping a budget very regularly and you see old man, I spent you know, five thousand dollars more this month what happens you correct? Right? And so I would use that more instead of the accounting variation. I would say
Say well, sometimes your business has unexpected expenses, right or sometimes you have less expenses, right? And so those are going to fluctuate and can be hard to anticipate right? And so what we're looking for overall is okay. Let's look back at you know, I think a lot of business operating quarters, right? Let's look at this corner. Okay on average. Here's here's our month-over-month what we're profiting, right? Okay. Well we can start to budget based on these sorts of things and expectations will try to project out a little bit.
I kind of look at that with people. I'm like, all right. Well, how much weight did you lose on average like over the past month? Okay. How much were you eating? Okay, you lost six pounds over the last month. You're definitely in a calorie deficit right? It's working. Keep going. Maybe you're eating 2,000 calories maybe reading 2300 calories. Who cares it's working right now. What happens is eventually once you plateau again, maybe writing 2000 maybe reading 2300 doesn't matter. Whichever it is if you
Toad, it means you have to re-establish the deficit so you either have to reduce your calories or you have to increase your activity or a combination of both, you know, those sorts of
things. What about one thing? I had you talked about the very start this conversation was artificial sweetener specifically. Yeah, let's do that specifically in things like Diet Coke. I've you know, I've wanted for a while whether Diet Coke is healthy or not. Okay, and there's a lot of you know people talking about this at the moment. So what's your answer to that?
Okay. This is gonna be the most commented thing about in this entire area.
Interview, I'm sure okay. So first off, let's just talk about weight loss and fat loss. Okay and leave out the other stuff. If you look at the epidemiology and the cohort studies you tend to see that people who consume more artificial sweeteners or diet soda are heavier and body weight. And so some people have said these things cause weight gain,
But the problem with that is again lifestyle behaviors. And so one of the things they've shown is that people who consume more artificial sweeteners actually tend to be more overweight to start with obese to start with they didn't cause them to become that way. They're consuming more of them because they're trying to get to a less obese state right? So there's a correlation there. But if we look at the randomized control trials right where they say hey
You're used to you guys drink soda regular soda, you guys drink diet soda. There was actually one that just got published very very really rigorously controlled one-year study.
Way more weight loss in the diet soda group and I'm thinking of another randomized control trial. I think it was six months where they saw like six kilograms of weight loss just from switching people from regular soda to diet soda, or it might have been so specifically they call them sugar sweetened beverages versus, you know, non-nutritive sweeteners beverages. So when you replace for for soda, it seems to be very effective all things being equal and people will say
Well, you know it activates the sweetness in the bar and you get hungrier from it.
Well, if that's the case, then these studies would suggest that artificial sweeteners are see the best fat burner is known to man because if people are eating more and still losing six kilograms that's amazing. They're not that's not fat burners. They they're replacing that sweet taste and then people will say well it's not better than water, you know water people who just drink water shoot the alligator closest to the Boatwright like okay. Hey if you can drink water and just drink water cool do that, right, but if somebody can lose I have people all the time.
I'm going to do a post about this. Let me say I lost 30 40 50 pounds. All I did was stop drinking regular soda and drink diet soda. Literally the only change they made in their life.
Now when they compare it versus water.
They either see the same results or the diet soda group gets a little bit better results. And yeah now it's not because of any kind of fat burning effect. What is likely is when somebody switches from regular sugar-sweetened beverage to water they may try to fill that gap of that sweet taste somewhere else. Whereas if they're just consuming the artificially sweetened or non-nutritive sweeteners can't say artificial because
I like uh, Stevia is actually, you know natural so to say so they call it non-nutritive sweeteners, but if they're consuming the non-nutritive sweeteners, they're filling that Gap compensation again compensating, right? So now again, there's nothing magic about them. People are just eating less right and if you can do that with water, you don't have to consume diets. Oh, no, you know, I would say drink water. But if you're somebody where man, you know, you really have a hard time quitting regular soda, heck. Yeah, I drinking diet soda.
A lot better and people will go. Well, what about insulin? They raise insulin that is actually one of the biggest myths out there. There are multiple not just studies. But now I'm pretty sure there's a meta-analysis as well that shows that these artificial sweeteners do not raise insulin. There is one study. I'm thinking specifically about sucralose. There's one study in there. Everybody always hangs their hats on this and I love to break it down where
R sucralose did not increase insulin, but they did is they did a sucralose group a carbohydrate only group and a carbohydrate plus sucralose group and the results were the carbohydrate plus sucralose grouped secreted more insulin than the carbohydrate only group even though they the same amount of carbs. And so people go while see maybe it's not bad. But if you're you know, drinking it with carbohydrates, it's bad and this is where reading the full text and really going deep on a study is very important.
So the carbohydrate only group was sucrose, which is 50% glucose 50% fructose. The carbohydrate plus sucralose group was maltodextrine maltodextrine. If you look at are you familiar with glycemic index
Loosely?
Yeah. So glycemic index basically looks at like, you know how quickly glucose appears in your system and usually you can kind of correlate the insulin response to that.
Multi dextrin has a significantly higher glycemic index and causes a greater insulin response than sucrose because it is a it actually causes a greater insulin response than even glucose itself because it's kind of getting the biochemistry, but because it's like this polymer it is actually a little bit more rapidly digested and absorbed into the circulation. So it was actually an inappropriate control group to
Try to assess that because if you look at the difference in insulin response, it's about what you'd expect. If you just look at maltodextrine versus sucrose So based on the research. There's no evidence. It affects glycemia or increases insulin. And in fact in these studies where they you know, these randomized control trials were they look at you know weight loss you see improvements in insulin sensitivity hba1c, you know, because people were losing weight not because of anything magic with these
sweeteners is sugar addiction.
-
this one's gonna get me in trouble too. I want to come back to the artificial sweeteners, but I'll answer that Sugar by itself does not appear to be addictive.
There are certain foods that appear to create what's called a food dependence. There's subtle differences between that and addiction but I mean kind of the anecdote is nobody's like just grabbing the bag of sucrose just you know, eating that and if you think about the foods that really are like very hard to stop eating they're using that just high in sugar the usually it's a combination of sugar fat.
That salt and texture. Okay texture matters as well and mouth feel people will say well sugar is addictive look at cakes cookies ice cream this more calories from fat and those in there are sugar in a lot of cases. So couldn't you buy that logic just argue that fat is also addictive so sugar straight sugar doesn't appear to be addictive per se now.
It's not very satiating. Right and it's utterly devoid of any other kind of nutrients. So I'm not saying it's a good idea to eat a lot of sugar but it doesn't appear to have addictive qualities in isolation. But there are certain foods cakes cookies these sorts of foods hyper palatable very great mouthfeel potato chips french fries. These sorts of foods may have like semi addictive type properties.
He's okay, but just sugar itself doesn't appear to and there's a there's a study that kind of backs that up. Basically, I think the title was like no evidence for sugar addiction in
humans. So people will say well, you know, when I eat that piece of chocolate or that, you know sugary thing I end up just eating more and more and more and more and more and more and then the next day. I feel like I need sugar more and I could I've got my own sort of anecdotal experience of
almost call it like a sugar cycle where there might be a week, you know, once every four months or six months where I have some sugar and then the next to a lot more sugar and then the next day I want more sugar and then the next day and then when I break that Sugar cycle and if I don't eat sugar flat five days, it kind of feels like the Cravings gone away. Mmm. You must hear that from people.
Yeah. I mean
like right now I have no urge to have sugar for some reason.
Yeah. It's so hard to disentangle that from just psychology in general right and just like
Could be a self-fulfilling thing where it's like, you know, people have been told sugar is addictive over they've heard sugars addictive and so they keep someone who's got that mood but also like again the chocolate usually also high in fat right like the mouth feels really good. So I'm not saying like that stuff is easy to overeat on and and people can have a hard time stopping but it doesn't appear that Sugar like independently is addictive but it can be part of foods that may have addictive like
A
tease artificial sweeteners. You said you wanted to close off that?
Yeah. So now let's talk. So we very clearly the research studies show the ones that are controlled well,
It does help with weight loss and a lot of these studies.
What about cancer heart disease and the gut microbiome because that's a lot of the questions are out there.
So we can sir a lot of people think. Oh, there's so many studies showing it causes cancer. Well, first of all again, we're talking about epidemiology. We're talking about cohort studies. So there's a lot of confounding variables, but actually so we're talking about consensus earlier. It's kind of a on their scientific Advisory Board and it's like PubMed plus J chat GPT, so you can ask it a question and it will immediately like crawl all the research literature and give you a consensus of what the research says, right and so
I did this you can synthesize it to where it'll show you what percentage of studies say. Yes. No, and then possibly right. So I think I put in do artificial sweeteners cause cancer, you know, 80% of the studies say no but you don't hear about those and why is that because it's much more newsworthy to put out - news because if you hear a study this thing doesn't cause cancer ho-hum, right, but what gets shared a lot. Oh, man.
Man and Debra she drinks Diet Coke Den. Have you seen this? You know, it's much more shareable. So that negative news tends to get published more right? And if you look at the human studies some of the the more well done ones, like I'm think of the nutria Santa cohort in out of France. The conclusion was owed increase the risk of cancer and I looked in and I think it was aspartame aspartame specifically.
If something's carcinogenic, typically what we see is a dose-response, right? So if you smoke more you have a higher risk of lung cancer. Did you know that the yes the so they compared like know or like low amount of aspartame users to like low moderate and then High moderate I want to say it was three different groups so I could be butchering this a little bit but think low medium high, right?
The medium group had a higher risk of cancer.
The High group did it actually like not compared to the the low group. It was not statistically different but it dropped from the moderate group. So to me and again, we're talking about an odds ratio of like 1.15 meaning a fifteen percent relative risk increase. Let me put that in perspective 15% sounds scary when it comes to cancer but relative risk means if your absolute risk of developing cancer and say the next 10 years is
Is 10% a relative risk increase of 15% says it goes up to eleven point five? Yeah, it doesn't mean it goes from 10 to 25. Right? So it's important to understand the difference. But again, if it's really carcinogenic we should expect to see kind of a dose-response, right? We don't see that. So to me that's especially with all the studies that don't find an association. That's that's more likely to be some kind of data artifact with who knows confounding variables.
Multi-user bias what have you but we got then so now there are studies showing that some sweeteners do change the gut microflora the composite the composition of it sucralose appears to aspartame not so much. I think saccharin also showed a change the gut microbiome now, here's what's interesting.
It's hard to know if that is a good bad or neutral change in terms of overall health because I was looking through one of the studies on sucralose and they were talking about the a couple of species are geniuses a bacteria that increased and one of them that increased was actually associated with people who are leaner have less obesity and better insulin sensitivity and also a species that produce more butyrate and butyrate.
Wait actually is associated with a whole Host. This is a short chain fatty acid produced by the gut microbiome butyrate its associated with a whole host of positive health benefits. So I've I will say it's worth monitoring because some of these do appear to change the breakdown of the gut microbiota, but there's probably You could argue just as much that there's a positive effect as you could have negative effect. So what I'll say is again if we look back at the again shoot alligator closest to the boat and
and there are no Solutions only trade-offs if somebody switches to diet soda, even if it's not the very best thing that could do maybe water is the very best thing they could do but if they lose 20 pounds
and their hba1c drops and their insulin sensitivity gets better than metabolic Health gets better.
It's probably a worthwhile
trade-off. Are there any supplements that you would recommend everybody to take?
Mmm, so I always say I have like five tiers of supplements, right? My first tier thousands of research studies very clearly has benefits creatine monohydrate, which we've known about the performance benefits for years. We've known about the strength bit of
Fits the body composition benefits you take it every day. Yes. I do. Now it's coming out that there's cognitive benefits and I want to say man. I hope I don't I hope I don't get this wrong. So I will fact check this and make sure you ask me for the study. I'm pretty sure they did a study that showed that Cretin actually decreased depressive symptoms. And just so what I will say is if there was one I would recommend for everybody it would probably be
A two-mile hydrate because it's cheap effective. And I mean people say wow. We don't know the long-term effects are it's been around for like 40 years. We if there was long-term effects. We have seen it by now and just a quick aside creatine monohydrate. Don't wish you any money on anything else. There's people try to reinvent the wheel with creatine because monohydrate it's you know, remember when like big screen flat screen TVs came out this I might be a I'm showing my age here no iron, but I'm like a thousand dollars for a
40-inch screen TV and now you can get one for a stick of bubble gum. You know what? I mean? It's because everybody makes and they're so ubiquitous it drove the cost down, right? Everybody sells creatine monohydrate. It drives the cost down. So companies come up with new forms of creatine and make these claims around them to try to like get you to spend more money on quickly create a monohydrate saturates the muscle cell 100% You don't need to do anything else what's going on man? So a couple things we don't we don't fully understand all the mechanisms, but we know that
When creating gets in the system and gets into the cell. It bonds with a phosphate which produces creatine phosphate that is a high-energy phosphate donor. So when you're exercising basically you are using what's called adenosine triphosphate, which is ATP, which is the purest form of energy in your body. So this what we call hydrolysis of ATP is used to power a lot of reactions in your body. And so ATP triphosphate three phosphates it
To power these reactions it gets cleaved to ADP adenosine diphosphate plus an inorganic phosphate right creatine can donate its phosphate to ADP reform ATP. So what we see is, you know, especially during anaerobic exercise better performance creates and because it's a high-energy phosphate donor can help replenish that and then it also pulls water into the cell.
And we think that that's part of the body composition benefits of it because you know a hydrated muscle cell. I mean muscle cells are 70% water, but they're mostly water and people say well it's just water. Okay, but that's lean tissue and there's actually some I believe there's some evidence to actually hydrating the muscle basically actually increases the improves the contractile properties of the muscle so that could explain part of the strength benefits. And of course again, it's going to show up as lean mass, right.
Now it's not a huge effect. We're talking, you know couple pounds for most people something like that. I'll take you but but for relatively cheap effective supplement. Yeah, take it
right one of the supplements. I mean, is there anything else in the tl-one?
Yeah. I mean, like for people can tolerate whey protein. I mean, you know, it's not it's not magic but it's a cheap usually quite tasty way to get in high quality protein and you know if you get it from Whole Food
Great, but a lot of people struggle to get in, you know, the amount of protein they'd like to get in from Whole Food. And so whey protein again, very high quality use it easily digestible. The caveat is whey protein concentrate a lot of people can't tolerate it because there's lactose in there. So if you have a lactose intolerance, whey isolate which is usually micro filtered gets out the vast majority if not all the lactose and so most people can tolerate that but there are a certain percentage of people who also have a
Activity to the lacked albumins and way the proteins and way so in that case there's what's called a whey hydrolysate which is predigested way and almost all people can tolerate that. But if you don't have any digestive issues with it a concentrator nicely, it's totally
fine. What else in that Tier
1 and then I would say caffeine and just got caffeine is one of the it is the original cognitive enhancer. If we look at cognitive tests, we see consistently people perform better.
And if you look at performance people consistently perform better
right before 12, a lot of people talking about half-life of caffeine impacting
sleep. Yeah, so that I mean, that's the you know, there's even some evidence that you know, even if you have like a good dose of caffeine in the morning that it may still affect your sleep later. So again, no Solutions only trade-offs, right? I would say overall if you are an athlete or somebody.
You know relies heavily on your brain power to do whatever it is. You do caffeine probably a useful supplement. As you said, you know, if you're going to take it try to get in, you know, nine hours before you're going to sleep to cease your caffeine intake because by that time, you know, the majority of it is out of your system,
right? What are the big misconceptions about intermittent
fasting? It seems to be a really great tool for a lot of people too.
To be able to control their calorie intake in studies where they don't prescribe calories. So they don't match calories. They just tell people either internment fast or you know, follow a diet people in the intermittent fasting groups tend to lose more weight and have better improvements in their blood markers, but it's not because of anything magic about intermittent fasting it's because it's placing them in a calorie
deficit to make see that in the studies that
so when they when they when they do like randomized control trials where there
They're actually controlling calories. I'm like one great extreme version of that would be there was a study an alternate day fasting right? So people would do one day fast complete fast the next day eat a hundred fifty percent of their maintenance calories, whereas the group that was just doing continuous was doing 75 percent of their maintenance calories the entire time both groups lost pretty much same amount of weight. Actually The Continuous group retained a little
Bit more lean mass and lost a little bit more fat Mass. But you know, that's a pretty extreme form of fasting. If you look at the like the more traditional like 16:8 or those sorts of intermittent fasting. You see pretty much the same retention of lean mass compared to just continuous kind of eating programs the the myths that really get tossed around a lot of them around a longevity and people saying well because whenever I talk about this people will say why don't
Just for weight loss I fast for health I fast for longevity and at off agito this term. So what I'll tell you is there's actually more evidence that calorie restriction increases a topology than intermittent fasting but intermittent fasting are fasting does increase the topology. So let's talk about what this is. So at apogee is a type of basically lysosomal protein breakdown. So there's a few different ways that the body breaks down.
Unlike old misfolded proteins are just things that need to be turned over. One of them is through this kind of lysosomal protein degradation, which the lysosome is a organelles in the cell that can kind of engulf these old proteins and break them down. And then you get the amino acids from those proteins that can then be recycled to make new proteins right calorie restriction increases at apogee exercise increases a topology fasting can increase stuff that you too but you'll hear people say well you got a fast
4X period of time because it's when a tough OG turns on like three days
or something that 72 hours was
not true. So there's this is a tougher G protein breakdown is always occurring regardless. It's the relative rate that changes right but there's no evidence that fasting increases a topology more than eating the same amount of calories just spread out over time. Now, let me give you an example, right? Let's say somebody fasts for
The hours of the day and they eat for four hours, right? And again, the the example I'm using is because some people say well I don't do it for weight loss. I do it for you know, just health benefits. So let's say over that day. They're eating their maintenance level of calories receding in a four-hour period right? Whereas let's say x person just eats three for Mills and same amount of calories during the fasting period sure you're at apogee is going to your rates going to go up but then during that four
Worse when you're eating you having to eat a lot more food during that for us. That's what's going to happen. It's going to go way down. So while the your rate of a topology maybe lower eating continuously throughout the day compared to the time when people are fasting
When those people when the faster start eating in that window, whatever it is, since they have to eat more during that time at apogee drops. Whereas the people eating continuously. There are topology is now higher
rate. What if what if you going through some kind of disease or some kind of inflammation or whatever is there a use for intermittent longer-term fasting and that contact so say if I was I don't know if I had some inflammation or there was you know, something wrong with me. Is there ever a use case for sort of 72 hour fast?
It's that will hold me I guess in a greater depth of at
apogee. This is difficult because there's not really direct research looking at this. So I I what I will say will be speculation and I'm comfortable speculating on it again. Let's just break it down it equating weekly calories, right because
If we're comparing Apples to Apples, right we have the we know caloric restriction will increase the top of G. So if intermittent fasting places somebody in the calorie deficit overall, that's like what we call a confounding variable, right? So if we assume over the course of a week to people assume genetically identical right eating the same amount of calories, but somebody is eating them in four days. Whereas the other person is just spreading across seven, but the person eating them in four days is fasting for three days.
Well, their rate of at apogee and fat oxidation is going to be much higher during those three days, right but then when they've got to fit all the calories, they normally would in over those four days now, it's going to be much lower and the people eating continuously are going to have a higher rate of a topology and valve that oxidation body smart. It drives for homeostasis now, I'll have some people say Devil's Advocate argument is what if you're not compensating for the calories during those four days.
Well, then I are in a calorie deficit and you can't disentangle the effects from the calorie deficit, right? So in what I'll say is in the tightly controlled randomized control trials that we have where they equate calories between intermittent fasting groups versus not fasting groups. We don't see differences in weight loss and we don't really see much difference in biomarkers of Health hba1c markers of insulin sensitivity. You have some studies, but you'll see like a little bit lower fasting blood
glucose.
With intermittent fasting when they test it but I think this is an artifact of the way they test it. Is it okay if I get kind of like deep into the Weeds on this one, go ahead. So one of the problems is going to compare apples to apples if you fast for longer your fasting blood glucose will be a little bit lower if somebody's eating continuously, for example
And then they're fasting for say 12 hours before the test. But the person the fasting group has fasted for now 16 hours because they were in a defined eating window their blood glucose test out maybe a little bit lower. Right? And so you see this in some of the studies not all but some of them but then you look at the longer term markers of insulin sensitivity like hba1c and you don't typically see differences when they're equating calories. And so again, I'm not people will hear what I'm saying and
It's always like the filter right what I'm actually saying and what they hear is Lane said intermittent fasting sucks and it's worthless know if it is something that you can be consistent with and it helps you control your intake is a fabulous way for a lot of people to control the calorie intake and lose weight.
He's a question for you and then hit me. I think I know the answer but it but it turns out a lot of people don't know the answer because I was doing some research ahead of time about the types of things people struggle with are
It in and I actually did some research into what people are Googling the most and it's interesting that people are Googling the most when it comes to weight loss. Can you guess what it is
ketogenic diet.
Well even more than that is how to lose
belly fat. So interesting
and it's not so that people are really really obsessed with losing this fat right here. And I think there's some exercises out there in some diets that purport to be able to help you lose just targeted fat in this region.
What do you say to
that the answer is you may be able to spot reduce but
I think practically it's kind of irrelevant and I'll explain why so first of all the question is is that visceral or liver fat or is that just where you tend to store subcutaneous fat? And that's hard to know unless somebody's done like a, you know, an MRI and that sort of thing because some people just store their subcutaneous fat in different areas, right like some people tend to have it more in the legs like women in particular they if they store it they tend to store more in their legs. Whereas men tend to store it more
here. What's the difference between
- in
visceral so visceral is the viscera around the organs. Okay visceral fat and liver fat are gram for gram far more metabolically unhealthy than subcutaneous fat. So that's that's the point of differentiation, but the stuff that causes you to lose subcutaneous fat, which is the fat under the skin is the same stuff that typically helps you lose liver fat or visceral fat. So one of the things I tell people if we're talking about trying to lose body fat or
trying to get any big Health outcome. Let's pick up if we're going to try to make up as much in weight of Boulders as we can. You're going to focus on the big rocks first, right? And then if you got the big rocks, you can worry about picking up some Pebbles but don't drop the big rocks to pick up the Pebbles. I think a lot of people end up doing that. So before you go into some very specific protocol on trying to lose, you know, belly fat go back zoom out. Can I sustain this?
Long-term because if you can't sustain a long-term, it's not really going to matter. You're better off finding something that you can sustainably do consistently execute long-term because if you lose enough overall body fat, eventually, you will lose the belly fat and I mean, you know,
Part of it is just our genetics and how we
store. It seems really stubborn though. It seems like for me it feels like it's the last thing to
go. I will say they've shown that exercise specifically can help Target liver and visceral fat to even without a calorie deficit. So even if people maintain their body weight, they tend to lose liver and visceral fat just through exercise.
So let's talk about exercise and weight loss. So hot topic Hot Topic very hot topic. I would love an answer here on
You know one school of thought is that exercise isn't particularly useful for weight loss because if I go out for a run I then come home and I just eat more and there's a this is kind of a multi-faceted issue in the sense that there's a biochemical component to that hypothesis IE my brain produces more of the hunger hormone. So I get more hungry but then there's also a psychological part of the hypothesis where people say, it's actually because I went for a run. So I think I deserve more food so then I eat more cake because
Oh, I feel good about myself.
So this is where the way the study is conducted really matters. So let's take it mechanistically first. If we look at tightly controlled studies where they have people exercise and they're having them, you know, eat the same amount of calories as people don't exercise absolutely helps with weight loss. Absolutely.
The hunger sides little more complex. So first off there's a compensation of exercise where
Herman pain, sir. Did this research basically showing that if you burn 100 calories from activity, you don't net 100 calories of lost your body actually compensates by your BMR reducing a little bit or you become spontaneous, maybe a little bit less spontaneously active, right? So there's a partial compensation but on average again everybody's different but on average it's about 28 calories per 100 calories. So if you do 100 calories
Of activity. You're still netting 72. It's just not as much as you thought you were going to get right. So there's that aspect to it that that exercise doesn't cause the amount of weight loss that you might predict based on how much you do, right, but it still contributes to energy expenditure.
The more interesting thing is what you touched on which is intake which is actually counterintuitive to what you think on average in the studies. Yes people tend to eat a little bit more but the compensation is not nearly complete. Okay. So peep exercise on the net actually has an Antarctic effect. Now, I'm not saying for every person there are some people who whether it's psychological or it actually is physiological they exercise more and they do feel more hunger, right?
But on average in the studies exercise either has a neutral or positive effect on appetite and there actually is one classic study from the 1950s. I reference it in the book where they looked at Bengali workers and they didn't have an intervention but they just looked at sedentary lightly active moderately active.
Very heavily active right so think heavy construction labor workers and from lightly active to heavily active. They almost perfectly compensated their energy intake right eating by eating more to match the activity right just intuitively the sedentary people ate more than the lightly active and if I recall correctly about the same maybe a little bit more than the moderately active folks.
Being sedentary actually dis regulates your appetite when you are active. It actually sensitizes you to your body's own satiety signals, they work better. So I actually think the main benefit of exercise for weight loss isn't because you burn so many calories. It's one because exercise helps with lean mass retention, which we know that the more lean mass you have higher energy expenditure and it also helps prevent weight regain. So that's one aspect.
But the actual amount of calories you expend an exercise. I mean if you look at the actual research literature, it's not that much. I mean you go to the gym for two hours. You might burn 500 calories something like that my solid right? Right, right. Like you could eat a donut boom, right but people tend to have better appetite regulation when they exercise when they're active the there's a there's multiple components to it. Like I said better sensitivity to tidy signals, but then the psychological aspect.
Of goes the other way. There are some people will say well I'm exercising. I'm going to eat this but other people exercise and they actually all their habits start to get better.
I'm one of those people as well. Right, right. I always say if I want to fix my diet, I need to go to the gym right are we said that because when I I don't I set it to its think some my friends my team either day if I'm going to go and work out for an hour and I'm going to do go do a hit work out for an hour. For example, it's so painful that the last thing I want to do is throw it all away with like a fucking Krispy Kreme, so I sent my diet then Falls in
Suddenly and that's always when I Wherever Whenever I go through a moment in my life where I'm like Steve you've lost control of your diet here. It's how can I get myself to the gym as the Catalyst to you know, get my diet in
order. That's the so that's the problem with a lot of not the problem but just a limitation of lot of studies which is you know, especially like epidemiology when I say epidemiology. It's like this group. Does this this group does this and we're looking at what other things happen?
and yeah, well
People don't do things in isolation, right? So you'll hear study. Like I'm thinking of something. Oh people who eat more protein have higher rates of this.
Okay. Well if we look at where most people get their protein sources in the western world, it's highly processed energy-dense foods protein tends to just be a proxy for overall more calories and so is the protein or is it all the calories they're taking in right and again people there.
Lifestyles and habits tend to go together right like your hair X group was more prone to part disease, but then they also tend to smoke more drink more alcohol like these it is very difficult to disconnect. Those those habits in those lifestyle habits, right they call it healthy user bias and studies. It's one of the it's one of the things we have difficulty with and that's why you know again human randomized control trials are kind of our gold standard because
I think this is important to touch on the word randomized. Okay, so if we're talking about epidemiology or cohort studies so cohort is a little bit better than your standard epidemiology because they're taking groups of people and their following from them for years. So each person is kind of their own control, right but still
people tend to who are more healthy to do more overall healthy things people were more unhealthy tend to do more as hard to disconnect those two, but when you do a study and you say okay, you know one group is going to do a low-carb diet one groups going to do a low-fat diet and we're going to randomize them. Right? Why is that important? Well, what if we let people self-select? Okay. Well, did you say we go whichever group you want?
Well, and I'm just speculating right but for example low carb diets very hot right. Now. A lot of people may have a very strong who converted to go to that group thinking it's healthier having a more positive Viewpoint of it and they may clean up a lot more other aspects of their life. But if we randomize what we can assume through that randomization process is that any inherent characteristics of the subjects are going to be equally distributed amongst the groups and that is why that's so important.
And I remember I was I was listening to a breakdown on a podcast one time and there were discussing a study that was looking at their looking intermittent fasting versus continuous energy restriction. So just normal dieting and basically the Crux of the study was they found no real difference in weight loss. And the person on there was a very Pro intermittent fasting person. I said well how you know, they don't know maybe the one group was eating a bunch of junk food or whatever and I'm thinking this person doesn't understand randomization right like you
that would be a very odd thing to just put it actually would lead you to the conclusion that intermittent fasting might cause you to seek out junk food, right? So again randomization is not perfect. But the reason it's so important is because it helps us get rid of that healthy user bias and I think again if people
But the downside to randomized control trials is you can only run them for so long because they're controlled is your view on
keto the same as you kind of said about all diets or just keto standard a bucket of its own and I asked this in part because a lot of doctors kind of prescribed cute as a diet for certain people that have epilepsy and certain types of inflammation and brain related issues.
Okay. So epilepsy is a specific case essentially for epilepsy ketogenic diet is actually a very effective treatment.
Ain't it provides a usable substrate ketones for the brain and they see it decrease the incidence of epilepsy. In fact, my friend. I've referenced Dom D'Agostino. He actually started studying the ketogenic diet as for deep water Navy SEAL divers because a lot of those divers at depth get seizures and they found that doing the ketogenic diet helped reduce those seizures now, unfortunately people have taken that to say well any brain problem just give them the keto
It there's way less evidence to support it for other brain problems. But let's let's talk about there's a lot of claims around the keto diet low carb diets. It seems to function for fat loss the same way as other diets through a calorie deficit there was a there have been several really well done randomized control trials as well as a couple of meta-analyses now if they compare diets that are equal in calories and protein but very the carbohydrate and fat amount anywhere from low.
A fat high carb to low carb high fat no real differences in weight loss or fat loss. In fact, it actually the meta-analysis showed it slightly favored low-fat diets, but it was a really like non clinically significant amount.
But how can that be? Because one of the things people say well when you do a keto diet you burn way more fat. So this is I think if there's one sound bite that might you know make it this might be it. So, yes, you do burn more fat on a ketogenic diet. Why well, when you do a kinetic diet, you're eating higher fat lower carb. So you're eating more fat. You have more fat substrate to burn. But also you're keeping insulin low, and so you burn more fat because insulin
Deuces your rate of fat oxidation and reduces lipolysis. So people take that and they go it's better right? So here's what we're getting into. We're talking earlier about mechanisms versus outcomes, right? But when we look at these studies where they actually measure the outcome of fat loss, they don't see differences between low carb and low-fat how if they're burning this much more fat fat loss and fat burning or fat oxidation are not the same.
Thing that oxidation is part of fat loss, but it's only one side of the coin so fat. Would you lose or gain fat is fat balance? You are always storing and burning fat simultaneously. Okay on a low-carb high-fat diet you are burning a lot of fat, but you're also storing a lot of fat and here's why
Carbohydrate really isn't stored as body fat your body almost exclusively has to burn it when you take it in. There was a trace they did a metabolic Tracer study where they basically labeled carbohydrates and fats. You can label them with the stable isotope. And you look at where the label lines up right less than 2% of the fat stored and adipose in a mixed diet originated as carbohydrate. Well adipose fat cells
Again
over 98% came from dietary fat. So here's the rub. If you are doing a low-fat high-carb diet, you're not burning much fat, but you're not storing much fan either. If you're doing a low-carb high-fat diet, you're burning a lot of fat, but you're also storing a lot of fat. So what actually matters in terms of fat balance is
Energy balance. Are you eating more calories than you're burning that is what we'll end up dictating that and that's why we just don't see differences in actual loss of body fat between those groups. But again, so this is where we got into earlier before we started the cameras. A lot of people get very focused on these biochemical mechanisms and one of the things I was that way when I was a undergrad in Biochemistry and I think doing that first was great doing biochemistry first was great and then going to nutrition and having a good adviser. Who's
Zoomed me out and said, hey, you're pretty far in the weeds Zoom back out. Look at the whole picture. Okay, because
Mechanisms are great. It's good to ask questions. And when we see an outcome and when I say outcome fat loss would be an outcome actual loss of body fat a change in hba1c a biomarker. That's an outcome. Right if there's an outcome there will be a mechanism to support that outcome. But just because there's a mechanism doesn't mean there's now come and what I mean by that is all these biochemical Pathways these mechanisms. This is a symphony and when you
Do one thing someplace a lot of times it's compensated someplace else. Okay, an outcome is the summation of hundreds. If not thousands of different biochemical Pathways coming together and the example I used with you earlier was getting focused on mechanisms is like looking at a mutual fund and getting focused on the individual stocks in it, right and say woo don't invest in that mutual fund. Look at those two stocks that are down by 40%
But why do I care if the overall mutual funds up by 20% I care about the overall that's the outcome and so I'm not against necessarily looking at mechanisms, but I'm always going to go to first. Okay, do we actually have human trials that are measuring the thing that we care about not a proxy measure but the actual thing and if I can invoke a former episode on here if that's okay. He's somebody said well be careful drinking caffeine because it stimulates.
It's cortisol release and that can cause you to store belly fat. So that's a mechanism. Right? If you look at the actual outcome data in terms of body fat and visceral fat or liver fat with caffeine. You actually see a neutral positive effect. So, okay, maybe that ink small increase in cortisol. Maybe that's okay. That's a negative.
But if caffeine's also stimulating your BMR and also possibly doing some other things like increasing fat oxidation. Okay, maybe there is that - component to it, but it's obviously outweighed by the positive components that end up in the outcome that we're looking at, right? So without being scientists and being able to understand all of the little instruments in the orchestra. Yeah, right because that's what we try and do sometimes we try to figure out all the little instrument in the orchestra.
True but really you're saying listen to the music listen to music and listening to the music in that analogy would be like looking at the scales or would be just looking at looking for the outcome the outcome. I mean and also I guess want one thing more would be this point about consistency and sustainability because like we will have a bias to one.
Big rewards for small investment and that sells right five minute abs. That's what we
want complete physique overhaul and six weeks and ninjatrader arms in 12 weeks.
What I'm really fascinated by is what it takes on a psychology level and we kind of talked about already because we talked about your why and all these things but you can say that you can say to someone like me in business. It's going to take you 10 years to get to get there or it's going to take your ten years to become the world record holder in this powerlifting.
T but for someone to say, yep fine, they're going to have to be a little bit there is a twisted clicking have to be a little bit.
It is the ability. I think one of the most underrated things that the ability to delay gratification right and not all areas of my life. But in that particular area, I'm a really good at it. And I
wonder how much of a choice you had on a deep level,
you know, it's interesting. I so I told the story of how squatting was hard for me.
The I had been training hard for three years and I had like these chicken legs. I used to get made fun of on the bodybuilding forums so bad and I remember thinking 34 years and I'm like man if people would like do your genetics suck like why are you going to keep doing this and it's kind of a let's find out thing. I remember literally having this internal dialogue of you know, maybe they never will be big.
But I'm going to I'm going to commit myself to training hard consistently for 10 years. And if I haven't if I don't have a decent set of legs at that time, then I'll allow myself to quit if I still feel that way and I always say paralysis by analysis and perfectionism has killed more dreams than failure ever could because
One of the one of the worst thing you can do is have no action in action is way worse than failure. Because if you fail at least you can learn something from it, you try stuff you feel I'm as sure as entrepreneur you've had a lot of stuff fail, right, but you learn from that and you okay. Well, I didn't work. Well try this and eventually if you're trying enough stuff and you're walking the path. It may not have worked out the way you drew it up, but you get something better than what you started with.
With right maybe not exactly what you wanted. Maybe get something better though, and I'll tell people that's why action is so much more important than trying to get everything laid out perfectly just start where you are right now as imperfect as it is start walking the path and if you are walking the path you're going to screw up.
Learn from it and do better the next time and eventually again, maybe you don't get exactly what you want. But I bet you get some pretty good.
I got really obsessed with the idea of failure because of business because I take stock on the things that move me forward the most the things that were most course-correcting and it was never an Accolade or an achievement. It was always when life says you are wrong about that and from that I have this really clear phrase in mind that failure is feedback feedback is knowledge and knowledge is your
Power and I then went on to study Jeff Bezos of Amazon and booking.com and Thomas Watson. He was the richest man on Earth at one point. He was the founder and CEO of IBM and through all of their writing they are absolutely obsessed with increasing their failure rate so much. So Thomas Watson was once asked in an interview after one of his employees had failed at something that cost the company I think 400 or 600 thousand dollars. He said he's gonna fire him he goes by him. I've just spent
Thousand dollars training him and then when I looked hours and shareholder letter it said the same thing. It says we have to Jeff Bezos wrote. We have to be the best place on Earth to fail. He goes on to say in life. Like it's not about perfecting that perfect swing. It's how much you swing because in the case of Amazon, you'll never know about endless.com, which is in the graveyard or the fire phone, which is in the graveyard or a nine.com which is in the graveyard, but you know AWS, which will make them 70 billion a year. So he goes on to basically say in he uses a baseball analogy.
See where he goes in baseball you swing you get a great hit you might get four runs, but in life you swing and you get a great hit you can just absolutely change your life. So it's really about making sure you're
swinging. Yeah, I mean Kobe Bryant said I love this quote and I might butcher it a little bit but he said, you know, whether you win or lose if you win, it's great, but you still got to wake up the next day into the process over again, if you lose it sucks. He's still gotta get up and do the same process over.
over again and it's that
Willingness to somebody said confidence is the willingness to wade into uncertainty and I really like that quote because I mean that's that the foundation of kind of like any big goal that you're going after there is no certainty. You can't guarantee anything in life. And so we can say it's important to fail. It's but when you're actually in that moment, you're not like yes, this failure is great. I love this. It's very stressful and it sucks.
Looks like it really really sucks. But I can tell you in most cases the best stuff in my life came out of some of the worst stuff in my life, you know, and if I hadn't been willing to try and Wade back into it.
Repeatedly, I might not have gotten some of the great things that have happened in life. And whether you win or lose you're still going to have to wake up and do the process over. But if you stop doing the process if you stop trying to stop walking the path.
That's what you really lose. I think a lot of this like getting back to the diet stuff. A lot of this the diet hacks and stuff like that. It's people trying to shortcut that that painful process but that process is where you are going to learn so much about yourself and where the actual fulfillment
is. So that kind of brings me on to xenpak because obviously that's a big subject to the moment with dieting which is we're talking about, you know, quote unquote.
Shortcuts here, huh? What's your opinion on his impact?
Okay. I think I'm gonna give a very balanced view of this overall. I think it's a net positive and here's why so
go 100 years back 200 years back. Whatever very rarely. Did you see an obese person? Right. It was just we didn't have such crazy access to hyper palatable extremely energy dense foods right even go back 60 years, right if you wanted a cake or cookie going to go to the bakery.
There was barriers to get there now you we are surrounded 24/7 with unlimited access to cheap calorie-dense hyper palatable foods. And again, we know people who tend to become more obese have a greater reward response to food. Here's the real tough part and where you can tie it back to addiction, right? So imagine you were
Were a gambling addict and I said well, we don't want you to gamble so much, but you got to gamble a couple times a day.
We don't want you to drink so much but you got to drink a couple times a day, you know don't do blow so much, but you gotta do it a couple times a day. Now. I mean again people argue about food addiction is there really a food addiction is there not but imagine being somebody who struggles with appetite regulation, but knowing you have to eat you can't just not eat right? So I think
If we look at the actual data on those impact what we're talking about just to give the background biochemistry are glp-1 memetics glp-1 is a hormone that's secreted by your gut in response to feeding and it acts on the GI to tell your full and also acts on your brain to tell you too that you're full to decrease your appetite and these things work very well. We see on average about a 15 to 20 percent reduction in body weight in the studies. So pretty much the
The most effective anti-obesity treatment that's ever been created now glp-1 itself is 0 its Half-Life is only a couple of minutes but what they've done is they modify the protein so that now the half-life is much much longer. So it has the opportunity to act on the brain and the gut for a much longer period of time and again, very effective. So what are the potential downsides?
What does that do to the body then so that they've extended the sort of half-life of the protein and then that means that
Feel satiated
longer. Oh, yeah, so
I don't feel hungry.
Yeah. In fact, it can be such a powerful effect. A lot of people. It feels like almost nauseating like you you here again, every drug has side effects, right? Some people initially get nausea vomiting that sort of thing. It tends to decrease with time, but on an anecdotal level, I've talked to people who've done the drug.
And they've said that some have said even after they stopped.
The best way they described is I don't have the food noise anymore. I'm not always thinking about food or I'm not thinking about food nearly as much it calmed it down for me, even if the made stumped for some people even after they've stopped. Okay, so perhaps there's some long-term changes to the brain chemistry that happened. We're not sure or perhaps they just got more confident because they lost some weight and realize because it's not increasing your metabolism. That's one thing to point out. So I've had some people say, you know,
Slow metabolism. So I've got to take those epic and I'm like, well you're going to be disappointed because it's acting on the appetite side of things it so some people will say well.
They The Devil's Advocate Army as well. They could just eat less. Right? But if it was that easy people would just be doing it. Right. So some of the criticisms of the drug are well, we see a lot of lean mass loss know if you've
heard yet. Some people said something
I don't think that's as much of a concern as some people do and the reason is most of these studies with glp-1 memetics people aren't
It's training and so if you look at studies where people aren't resistance training and they just diet and they're not like the normal protein that high protein. You see anywhere from like a like a 30% to 40% of the weight. They losses from lean mass and Olympic is it's right around that area which makes sense because they're eating less and if not resistance training reading high-protein again, they're feeling very full so hard to eat high-protein because
Teen tends to be quite satiating so I don't see that as being like more necessarily at risk for lean mass loss. I think what I would say that could be problematic is if people are so full they may not be choosing the healthful most healthful food choices because they feel full if they just end up eating less of the foods. They normally eat these calorie-dense hyper palatable foods and they don't modify their habits when they get off of it. They may be prone to regain and so
So I look at this as I am if I have to pick I'm Pro on board with these just say it should be done in conjunction with nutritional counseling and lifestyle modification. Right like encouraging people to exercise educating them on healthy food choices that I think it's a great option for a lot of
people. Do you think there's enough data especially when we think about sort of long-term studies on the impact of exempt because I you know, one of the things I've come to believe in life is that there's no such
Things are free lunch. And this sounds too much like a free lunch to me right now, you know, so here's what I'll
say. We don't have I mean long-term 1020 your data, you know, some people say well those are risk of thyroid cancer. I mean, I think that was from like some kind of rodent study where they were using a much higher dose than normal. I'm always I tell people be very careful less than 50% of animal studies and up translating into like actual human outcomes when we say earlier. There's no Solutions. There's only trade-offs. Yeah, so
So maybe there is some side effect some Downstream effect that may have a negative effect. If it helps somebody lose 50 100 pounds. I'm still going to bet that it's a net positive right could have been better if they did it through diet and exercise alone, maybe but most of those people weren't going to get there anyway or is going to be really really tough for them to get there. It's funny because a lot of Fitness industry people are very very much against this drug.
And then they tell you what fat burner that you can buy with the discount code in their bio, and I'm like wait wait this math doesn't matter to me. So your fat burner that probably doesn't work. Okay this drug that actually works not okay make it make sense.
What do you think of the fitness industry.
I have a love-hate with it the big problem with the fitness industry is a couple things first is there's really no barrier to entry right like if you want to be
Medical Professional there are some barriers to entry right like you gotta do some work. Anybody can call themselves a fitness coach. There's no barrier at all. And anybody who has a six-pack will get a lot of clients because as as I found out science is way less sexy than just hey look, you know and you know, it's funny. I for a couple years. I went up a weight class in powerlifting I wanted
105 kg class which is 231. I'm not I'm not fat at 231 but I I put it on here quickly, right? My face will get pretty in fact, there's a reason there's a nice beard here because it's like makeup for men right? Like it hides my chubby cheeks and man the comments on my videos and I actually saw I sold less stuff and then when I drop back down a power lifting and I was leaner, I sold more stuff and I'm like, this is so weird like
My knowledge isn't any different. It's the same dude and it's not like when I was 231 that was on purpose. I didn't get there by accident was like I forgot how to do nutrition, you know, but if you
were a normal person and you didn't know anything about Fitness and there was two PTs in front of you here
you go to the one that looks better you go to what you want to say how I want to look like that right? And that's that's tough. It's a very tough thing to Wade through and what I will say people ask me all the time.
You think a personal trainer needs to look the part. Do you think you know a medical professional needs to look the part? I say no, but people like to see application and I do think there is value in being able to tell one of the things I was able to tell my clients from competing in bodybuilding and powerlifting and doing all these hard things. I say hail. I'll never ask you to do anything. I have not done or would not be willing to do myself.
Right? And we we said earlier that humans aren't logical that emotion.
Rational and all these things and we to conserve mental energy. I mean funnily enough. I read about this brat study. It just goes to show how the brain works and they put a rat into a maze and put chocolate the end of it. The first time it goes through the maze. The rat's brain is going crazy. Second time. It goes to the same maze. It's brain is basically there's like almost no activity there at the activity is dropped and it's turned into autopilot. The study goes on to talk about how
Always looking for shortcuts to this to
decisions. What I would tell people is again. You can never turn your brain off. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah and
It's it's just hard it's hard to identify who knows what they're talking about. I mean, you know, I'll be on this podcast and then you know, people say well what about this guy's guy has a doctorate he has this and and
You know, that's one of the reasons I actually started my research review where I review studies me and my team review studies every month and try to like translate it into plain language because I did see this like kind of Gap right and trying to build this bridge because it's so hard for the average person to know and one of the things actually I missed talking about was if you would are having a conversation if we're on a certain topic.
It becomes clear to both of us pretty quickly whether or not one of us is more knowledgeable on the topic or whether about the same right like pretty quickly can tell like if we're going into Investments and and how to start a company and marketing like your demand for that right comes to nutrition like you can tell pretty quickly. Hopefully, I know what I'm talking about being me, right? Right, right, but what we're really bad at is if two people are disagreeing on a topic both of whom are more knowledgeable.
Isabel than us on said topic we pretty much have no way to sort out. Who's who's right or wrong.
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What is the most important thing we haven't spoken about
today Josh? I think we touched on a lot of stuff. But let's talk about resistance training real quick. You know, a lot of people think resistance training is just you know for for vanity and for Meatheads and we see now a resistance training decreases the risk of cancer decrease the risk of heart disease. Do you drastically decreases the risk of sarcopenia of Falls of broken bones?
And you know people talk about calcium vitamin D. Probably the single best thing you can do to improve your bone density is too resistant strain and you know, you'll hear people say well I'm 40 or I'm 50 or I'm 60. It doesn't matter you can still put on muscle in fact right across the street from I was doing my PhD they took basically frail elderly people who had trouble like sitting and standing up.
And put them through like I think I want to say it was a 16-week program and resistance for them start out just squatting to a high chair, you know, and then slowly they lowered it downloaded down some of them started using weights as well. They saw a significant increases in their muscle mass as you know older people so you can still put on muscle even getting older. In fact, who is a I think Alan Oregon. He's a another good nutrition person.
And on social media his he was posting a video of his father showing. I think his father's like over 80 years old and was doing goblet squats with like a 50-pound kettlebell, you know, the amount of quality of life Improvement, you can get and people from either resistance training throughout the course of the life or just getting them started regardless of age. It's a huge Improvement in quality
of life, didn't I think no I think I'm gonna be honest here, right? Mmm.
This morning. I was I got up right and my like lower back her a little bit and I remember thinking the first thought is our God. I'm getting older. That's why that that is and I remember thinking. Oh, I should probably question that thought because that's a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way. I if you start to see yourself becoming less mobile and less flexible your break you kind of you chalk it off as an inevitability of Aging there if we do nothing about it before it gets worse. Whereas really this other
Came into my mind, which was okay go to the gym and train your lower back to strengthen it.
One of the most damaging messages that Physicians have given is when people have pain in an area they tell them to stop doing activity.
As you age you are going to have pain you can be strong and have pain or you can be we can have pain my I love my dad great dude, very sedentary, right? He has really bad sciatica. He doesn't lift weights.
But if you lift weights you it actually has been shown to decrease back pain like on the whole. Yeah, like when you do what I do where you're like, you know lifting cars essentially. Yeah it like I'm when you're so it's funny. I'll post videos of me lifting like once a week just because most people don't care about be lifting. They just want to get information out of me and the comments are always
Is that bad for your lower back or you know, isn't that going to end all those say you've had so many injuries? So I've been doing this 25 years show me an athlete who's competed at a really high level for two decades who also doesn't have a laundry list of injuries and pain.
Tiger Woods swing the golf club. He had all kinds of back issues and knee issues and leg issues, right?
Activity is medicine. Yes, if you're doing it at a very high level athletes, what's the dosage needed to improve at? The highest level of exercise is always going to be right up against what will get you injured because you get to the point where you simply can't recover from it enough and that's why I actually if you look at like what actually prevents injuries it's not stretching. It's not Mobility work. It's not warm up its sleep psychological stress reduction.
Action, those are two of the main movers and just load management appropriate load management. We could get into a whole thing on pain science, but one of the really damaging messages is well took an MRI your lower back and got a bulging disc, so just can't lift anymore.
If you eat my ride my lower back right now, I promise you I have bulging herniated discs. I'm sure I do but I don't have pain and we there was a study done where they I think they Mr. I'd like people over 40 who were asymptomatic had no back pain. Like I think almost half of them had bulged or herniated discs. So we've got this like model where it's so if you have pain you must have damaged.
If you have damage you must have pain and it doesn't really work that way. I mean look at people who lose limbs they have pain not just at the stump, but where the limb used to be they sense pain pain is just as much a psychological experience as it is an actual tissue damage experience and when you get things that are that are painful for years your tissues heel in 6 to 12 months for most things.
But if you're still having pain that's because you've developed a sensitivity to that particular area. And so one of the worst things for pain is becoming an active but the reason Physicians do this in Orthopedics do this. Is it straight up a liability coverage? Because if they say if somebody says, you know you have pain but you could probably go back and you know, so you back off your low little bit on your left and you know progressively work it back up you probably
Fine. Well if they go in and they injure themselves guess who's going to complain about the doctor give a one star review and say they cause me to blow my back right? But if you look at this stuff, I mean on the whole resistance training decreases pain,
I want to build my muscles line like your muscles on muscles like yours question on the way that I'm working out just sort of practical advice. Do I have to work out sort of overload till I fail sometimes
Build my muscles so that they're like yours
great questions. So if I say a
shrink
them even just having the biggest times in the podcast what matters for building muscle we think we have a the amount of hypertrophy research in the last 10 years has absolutely exploded compared to what it was before and hypertrophy.
Muscle growth is what we're talking about.
What seems to be the cause of it is what's called mechanical tension. So just creating a lot of tension on the muscle because now we're actually having studies coming out. We're doing like hard stretching. They actually see increased muscle growth from like sustained hard stretching. There was a study done with the calf muscles so they put them in this contraption or basically, they're like stretching their calves and holding it there. I think I care what the duration was, but it was a long time, right?
And then we're comparing that to traditional resistance training and it was I mean, it's a pretty painful stretch. I think they said it was like a seven or eight or nine out of 10 in terms of pain level for the stretch.
But they built as much muscle as people who were doing Cavs three times a week resistance training. I think they were doing these stretches every day. So it was it was pretty intense, but that's really interesting right? Because even if you don't have weight, you can still create that tension through stretching right now the stretching again, not your traditional like, you know, it's pretty intense and pretty painful I would argue that resistance training is probably a more practical methodology to getting it and more fun.
In terms of mechanical tension, it does to maximize muscle growth. So we always have to be careful about like
a lot of things can cause muscle group overcome about absolutely maxing muscle growth. You do have to get close to volitional failure, which is basically like if I'm doing a bicep curl, right or maybe a bench press better example, I'm doing reps reps like gonna start that's failure, right the research suggests. You don't have to go to failure, but you have to get pretty darn close within a couple reps, you know, and if you've never trained to
Failure. It's actually really hard to know what that feels like and so like in actually in research studies where they take people who are beginner intermediate and they ask them like they have them do a set and they asked him. Hey how many more reps could have you gotten they underestimate by like five? Yeah,
especially difficult when you're training alone and something like bench, press if I failed the thing bucket function, so I'm like I've put in a buffer of maybe three reps there just so that I don't embarrass myself in front of you know,
Exactly mechanical tension appears to be cumulative and what I mean by that is if it was just about creating as much attention as possible just load the bar up and just do one rep, right? So it's cumulative throughout asset. Now the way I like to describe it is intensity is the medicine and the number of hard sets, which number of sets close to failure is the dosage now when you first start
Art, you can get results on a very low dosage because your body has literally done nothing. It'll scroll off anything as you progress. I mean remember when you first start lifting you had five ten pounds every week right like clockwork eventually you can add that anymore. Right but you can still a lot of times you can increase the Reps right with the same way. Well, eventually you can't do that anymore. So how do you continue to progress? Well, you can add more hard sets
and between bahat
says volume. So for example, if I'm let's
Bench, press again. Right? Let's say I'm doing three sets close to failure and eventually stopped progressing. I can add another set and that is still another form of progressive overload, right because again mechanical tension is cumulative. And I mean there is there are some debate about this in the resistance training field, but for the most part I would say it's generally agreed upon by most experts that higher volumes improve muscle growth relative to lower volumes meaning more hard.
It sets and it doesn't really seem to matter about machines versus free weight either seem to cause equal kinds of muscle growth. So when it comes to building muscle the cool thing is you got a lot of options and if you have pain doing one thing, you know joint pain, whatever lower back pain try something else
fantastic news for me Lane. We have a closing tradition on this podcast. Okay, where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to leave it for and the question that's been left for
you.
Oh, I like this. I know my question will be.
You want a really difficult
one?
Okay, so I didn't get to see until I open this book. But Jack has a has a little peek before else the gas was there any was no actually wasn't Andy because okay one person between them and they're the person that left this question for you. That's very difficult question. I think have you ever stayed in a relationship that was harming you and why?
Yeah.
Because of a lot of reasons one being perception from other people, I felt like I had to make it work the other being because of some of the remnants of bullying.
I found it very hard to trust myself in personal relationships, too.
I could be easily talked into me being the problem for everything and I'm not saying that I was never the problem because I definitely was I've made a lot of mistakes in personal relationships and I have my own toxic behaviors that I know I do but yes, I have definitely stayed in a relationship too long. And I think one of the hardest things for me and for a lot of people is
knowing when is it time to give up and when is it time to push through and I don't think we have
I don't think anybody has a clear parameter, but for me staying in was not trusting myself not trusting my gut and feeling like I had to make it
work because of a kids so because of this or because of
whatever because of a whole host of many things and again, you know, I think
I'm not a relationship expert but you know, I've I've gone to therapy for eight years. Now one of my good friends John Maloney is an expert on this and very rarely does a relationship breakdown because of just one person. It's usually a dynamic and but I think that is one of the hardest things to figure out when mmm when is it time
Because we talked about like not quitting, you know these sorts of things but there's also like sometimes it's not quitting. It's just moving on to possibly something better, right and learning from what happened. And yeah, that is a really tough question and I've definitely stayed in things too long and not just not just like romantic relationship but also like
Is this Partnerships friendships, you know where it became highly toxic. And again, I think the next hardest thing to do after that is looking back and going what did I contribute to that lane
in my life. I've lost people I've lost a lot of you know people along the way from grandparents Friends lady who said was sort of my proxy mother when I was younger.
Died in a motorcycle accident and it's only in those moments that you you kind of have the regrets of all the things that you could have said, you know you what you wish you could go back and often for people somewhat similar to me somewhat maybe similar to you who have had struggles with expressing their emotions. We probably have the greatest amount of regret because we found it harder to maybe tell these people when we had the chance so my closing question for you, which is a question of my own.
is if right now you could send a message to
Your kids I'm going to let you send one as well to your granddad and your dad and it was the last thing you were going to say.
What would you
say?
Okay, my kids I would say of course. I love you more than anything. You got dang it you you fulfilled a hole in my life. I didn't know I had and I
wish I could go back and do a lot of things differently, but I love you more than anything and
I don't care what you do with your life.
Find something that you love and it is a positive contributor to the world.
and go to that and
try to make somebody else's life better along the way.
And to my dad I would say.
Thank you, like for not following in your dad's footsteps and not like stepping in front of that wildfire and saying not on my watch. Sorry, you know, my dad's not perfect but both my mom and dad are really great people and you know,
They've saved struggle with some health issues. And you know, if I had to say one thing it would be you know, thanks for always believing in me always having my back accepting me for who I was in some ways. I feel like they're the only people who always accepted me for who I was and they never put expectations on me for what I want to do with my life when I told him I wanted to get into bodybuilding they were like, oh this seems weird, but
Okay, when my first bodybuilding show there was a loudest people up there supporting me, you know, they're you know what I won worlds in 2022. I was going through a very hard personal time my life basically the front end of a divorce and it had just kind of come to a head like just the Whirlwind kind of chaos stuff and my mom called me they were watching online with my kids and my mom was like
Son, how the hell did you just do that with everything going on your life? How did you do that? And you know, they just always been such big supporters of me. Even when they didn't understand. You know, my mom didn't understand like you know every what are you studying again? What are you studying again? But, you know came to my PhD exit seminar. You know, Mom was in every baseball game growing up Dad was on the road a lot, but, you know couldn't
Became to everything he could, you know, they they showed up for me a lot and I knew you know, I knew I was loved and so if I had to say anything to them it would just be thank you for everything that you did and when I had kids I was like six weeks and I called my mom. I'm like, oh my God, you did all this stuff for me and I gave you all that grief. I'm so sorry, you know, so yeah, they're amazing. And if I had to say something my grandfather it would just be God.
You know, I would give somebody asked me this the other day. I was I would give anything to have five more minutes my granddad and asked him so many questions about life that I just didn't know enough about to even ask the question, you know, because the man just oozed wisdom, you know, but I had to say anything I'm like, we just say thanks for what you did for your family, you know, my grandfather when he passed. I mean, this is a man who had like
his first heart attack in his 50s and this back in the nineteen like late said late 1970s when like open heart surgery was like carpentry, you know his expert his like life expectation. I think was five years at the time. He was in the Battle of the Bulge the deadliest battle in World War Two One More Story. He I forget what country was in but he was supposed to go on leave the next day.
And a convoy was coming through and it was going to the place where he was going to go on leave right behind the lines and his commanding officer said hey, why don't you just take it like just go today that night a German soldier dropped a grenade down killed his entire unit.
and sorry
dang, I didn't think you'd give me to cry in this podcast man so much and he said, you know after that day I just
Everything was I was living on borrowed time in my opinion. He's like I should have been down there and he said I get up every day that look at the obituary and if I'm not in and I figure I'm good for another day and he had I think three heart attacks three open heart surgeries two strokes had a boat fall on them long story. So this guide we always joked he had nine lives and whenever he was on his deathbed. I mean we kind of it was we
Do like six weeks in advance. He had kind of multi-system fight just basically old age and I never occurred to me. I was 20 years old and never sorry 22 it never occurred to me the idea of how you die as being so important and he went exactly how you would draw it up, you know, he was in the hospice. So he was at his home his whole family was around him. And again, he was the funniest man.
I ever knew and I walked in and all the seats are taken.
And he still Lucid talking and I said he had his little like portable toilet, you know, but he had been using it whatever seat was down. And I said do you mind if I sit here because I was going to sit next to him and he said yeah, you can't clog that one up because I was known for in my family for clogging toilets, right? So he still cracking jokes on his deathbed and even like the doctor asked him when he was basically the doctor telling them. Hey, you've got like six weeks left doctor said. Hey we
No, you're an organ donor, but we can't really use anything. You know, it's all bad. Basically, would you be interested in donating your body as a cadaver for Med students? He goes always wanted to go to med school. I figured it's only way I'm getting there now. So just like had this great outlook on life, you know, and just when he passed I can't
sorry
my mom looking at him and saying it's okay Dad. It's okay. We're going to be okay
and
I wasn't even sad because I'm like that guy. He got every bit out of it. He milks life for everything. He had had a great family and so many people who love them. And if I could just have that kind of impact even half that impact on my family. Oh man, that'd be worth so much to me.
Me so I would just tell him thank you for being an
inspiration.
Lane you have been you've been exactly that you've had an impact on millions of people's lives and I think back to that young kid five six seven years old and I think back to what you said about fighting your way out of it. You fought your way out of all of that. So now Inspire an impact millions and millions of people's of lives, but you'll never get to me in such a positive way in the same way and with the same integrity and fight that your granddad so clearly had it's funny because when you went through all of those people I saw an element of you in
Every single one of them and I think that's a credit to all to them, but it's also a credit to you and I know that if your granddad was I'm sure he's watching us now crackin jokes
about you probably got my toilet habits,
but I'm sure you'd be so incredibly proud of you because of the work you've done but continue to do so, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you, especially for your honesty and openness because you have no idea how many people that side of you the willingness to be honest about faults and nuanced about yourself as you are.
The new work will have on millions of millions of people's lives. I feel rich of having this conversation. So thank you Lane.
Thank you. I've never cried a podcast like that. But you know, I actually was kind of cathartic, you know, I was thinking of a lot of different things while I was going on. So thank you for having me on
