#804 - Dr Mike Israetel - Exercise Scientist's Masterclass On Losing Fat

Chris Williamson
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is doctor Mike Isratal. Hes a professor of exercise and sports science at Lehman College and the co founder of Renaissance periodization. If youve ever wondered, is this diet actually working, then youre probably not alone.

However, there are now scientifically proven optimal methods for losing fat in the most efficient way possible. And today we get a full breakdown of the most evidence based approach for fat loss from the best teacher on the planet. Expect to learn how the physiology of fat loss actually works, whether calories really matter in your weight loss journey, if you need to count macros when trying to lose fat, how to actually build and keep six pack abs, whether there are any fat loss supplements worth your time to take, how long you should stay on a diet for before taking a break, and much more. Mike is probably the hottest thing in sport and exercise science at the moment from the evidence based community, which is basically just the truth when it comes to everything to do with health and fitness. I don't think there's anyone growing more quickly or as popular or as candid as him.

And you know, he is a competitive bodybuilder himself. So it's not just something that's theoretical and maybe even works in practice, but practically how he is using these insights and applying them to his life in a way that's frictionless. It's all here. So we did one about how to build muscle. This one is the other side of the coin about how to lose fat.

So I hope that you're shredded in two weeks after listening to this. Before we get started, a slightly sad statistic for you, which is that 60% of you listening to this aren't subscribed. If that's you, please just navigate to Spotify and press the follow button in the middle of the page or an Apple podcast. There's a plus in the top right hand corner. If you subscribe, I promise that you will lose body fat at least 10% more quickly then you were already intending for it to happen.

And it'll make me happy and you won't miss episodes when it goes up. So please go and do it. Thank you very much indeed. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Doctor Mike Israetel.

Look at how lean you are. Lean tight head. I think most people, when they get lean, they become more attractive. They become less because my grotesquety of my whatever this is is more revealed. Someone commented on our last episode saying that watching Chris and Mike talk to each other is like seeing two alien head races meeting for the first time.

I think it was a predator versus alien reference. Which way am I? I'm predator because of this ledge. I have a prominent brow. Mm.

Mike Israetel
You could have been a good wrestler. That's good in wrestling. Stick it in your face. Okay. You are mister science man.

Chris Williamson
Doctor science man of exercise and getting jacked. Our last episode is fantastic. Everyone should go and check that out. Today I want to talk about how to lose fat. People can get jacked, but if you're not that lean, getting jacked kind of isn't as good as it could be if you were a bit more lean.

So today, I want to do one stop shop. Ultimate breakdown, fat loss. What is the fundamental physiology when it comes to fat loss? So if you download the RP diet coach app, it actually makes tiny little app molecules that go into your bloodstream and make you happy and lean. No, wait.

Mike Israetel
The plug was supposed to be for later. The fundamental physiology of getting leaner is a question of sort of what is your body fat there to do? And your body fat there is there to do a few things for you. It lubricates your joints, it provides some of the architecture to your cell surfaces, etcetera. But adipose tissue is a subcategory of all of your body fat.

And it's designed a little bit to protect internal organs and some other things like that, but it's mostly designed as an energy reservoir, because in our evolved ancestral timeline, everything up until modernity, food availability was predictably intermittent, which means you had some food today, maybe a lot of food, maybe the tribe killed a mammoth or something, and if you could only eat what was there, and then you got full and you were like, mehdeh, and you kind of buzzed off. Then the day after, it's rotting mammoth and you can't eat it anymore. And if you didn't gorge yourself like crazy and have somewhere to put that mammoth stuff, then in the next maybe two weeks, that you didn't get a lot of food, some fraction of the people with that particular kind of adaptation that wasn't prone to or physiologically, anatomically able to store excess energy away was just gonna die and their ancestors would not have and did nothing reproduce. Which is why all extant humans today have the ability to store adipose tissue as a reservoir for calories, energy that we can use for later. Because of that predictable intermittency of calorie availability.

It's curious that we're talking about how to lose fat. Notice we're not talking about how to gain fat because we're really already super good at that. You've got a lot of seminars for people about how to get someone to work harder. How do I improve my diligence? Have you ever been to a laziness seminar?

Would be absurd. Some people need it for sure. You and I probably do. But for most people it's like, well, just like that's the default state. So for most people, the ability to gain body fat is default, precisely because evolution has designed us to be damn good at that, precisely because we used to be intermittently starving.

So when you get a bunch of food in you, it goes to a few places. The first place, once the food exits the GI tract, that it goes, is the bloodstream, broken down into various molecules, amino acids, which are the sub components of proteins, carbohydrates, typically glucose, fructose, as well as various parts of fat. And there's some places for them to go. Some of them just go through the bloodstream and get absorbed by all the various cells of your body. I mean, your brain cells need food, your liver cells need food, every cell needs food.

And they just go and are used right in the cell right there. Some of those molecules of food, so to speak, are used to raise your blood sugar enough so that, you know, if you don't have food for the next 15 minutes, you're not just going to drop over dead or something like that. Still another part can go into putting a little bit of fat into your skeletal muscle. Your skeletal muscle inside of itself has a little bit of fat reserve, which is cool. It serves some cool functions.

It's not a lot of reserve. And still another part, and there's a couple of parts I'm sort of skipping for conciseness to a little bit, is mostly carbohydrate gets loaded as what's called glycogen. And that's just a lot of carbohydrate. And it's stored in your liver, and a lot goes to your skeletal muscles, which is why when you mega cram in a bunch of carbs the next day, you kind of look beefier and you're like, what the hell is going on? Because that glycogen brings in another roughly 3 grams of water for every gram of carbohydrate you bring in.

So it really gets you going. But that's all measured in the hundreds to several thousands of calories that you can put away into your body. If that's all you are capable of, you'd be unreal. Lean all the time. And in our ancestral environment, dead in a few days, or emaciated from muscle loss.

So all, once you fill all the calorie needs, for the moment, you have to put the calories somewhere else. Once your glycogen stores are relatively full, they don't accept any more food. Your muscles, unfortunately, technically don't act as a reservoir of excess calories or amino acids. Wouldn't that be sweet? You just like eat a ton of thanksgiving dinner and you just wake up that much more.

Jack. Yeah. Where it goes, for the most part, in that excess number of calories eaten that isn't attending to your, let's say, daily needs is it goes to your adipose tissue, your subcutaneous and intra abdominal layers and layers of body fat. Now, this tissue is specifically designed to do mostly one thing, which is take any kind of calorie, transform it, and it gets transformed in various places, including in the fat cells themselves, into very easy to store fats. So you can eat proteins, they generally don't get converted to fat super simply, but they can displace other food.

And then that food gets converted to fats, carbs get converted to fats, and fats need only minimal modification for transport and storage. And now everything basically vectors into fat. That fat gets stored into fat cells and there it chills. That's got metabolic activity, it's got a ton of hormonal activity. But fat stores.

Adipose tissue isn't nearly as metabolically active as most other tissue. It's like a fuel tank, more or less. There your fat sits. Now if you keep eating a lot of food over and over, your body's like, man, I know that famine's coming soon, but not today, baby. We're packing it in.

And it turns out one of the reasons why humans are able to get unbelievably fat in many cases is because there was really no selective pressure in evolution for a tolerance end limit of too much fat. How you would evolve that selective pressure is you would have to have humans evolve for at least thousands of years in an insane food abundance environment. And then the people that got cardiovascular disease or were mobile or found unattractive by mates because they were too fat, they would win out. And eventually everyone would kind of look like, I dont know, the average nigerian person whos just stripped to bits for no reason and just got it all right, so people can get unreal fat because your fats kind of like a super welcoming giant corporate hotel. People check in and it's like, we got room for you, no problem.

More people check in, it's like, hey, build another side of the hotel, it builds another side and it just keeps going. So the question is on fat burning. How do we get the guests to check out of the hotel? And there's really only one way to do it, and that is stop sending guests in or send in less. Because if you have a situation where you're eating a certain amount of food and it's fulfilling only your daily needs, what we call maintenance calories, your body fat doesn't get re upped and then it just stays the same.

It can't possibly grow because there's no food being shuttled for it to grow. If you eat less than maintenance, let's say 250 calories less than all of your body processes need to keep you doing whatever you're doing. That 250 calories is going to have to come from somewhere. And your body's like, hey, listen, no problem. And it goes around sort of by analogy as an index.

It's all the board meeting and all the, the board is together and the CEO is like, all right, nervous system, what are you doing with your calories? Dude, I need to run the whole body. Are you crazy? Like, okay, we're not going to break down the nervous system for calories. That's insane.

Muscular system. It's like, dude, I'm doing stuff now. We'll get to this later. But if you exercise a lot and you train with weights, the muscles like, bro, I need all of this. Leave me alone.

If you're sedentary and there's nowhere to go for calories, yeah, your muscle can be used for breakdown, but it's not super efficient to do that. It'll go to your organs, stomach, liver, brain, etcetera. This is important stuff. And then it goes over to body fat. Hey, body fat, what are you up to?

Nothing at all. Why? Whats wrong? Do you got any calories? What are you doing with them?

Its like, nothing. Give it up. And then, so your body fat will release calories through various digestible forms of fat into your bloodstream. They will go wherever theyre needed, and then that will supply that deficit. Itll fill up that deficit for you.

So as measured internally in your body as a whole, you're at maintenance. But for your fat stores, you're at a severe deficit. And over hours and days and weeks and weeks and weeks, the amount of fat you're storing starts to winner down. Your body's still operating pretty well, and that's fundamentally how you lose body fat, by creating a calorie deficit. So do calories matter?

Chris Williamson
And if they matter, why do so many people say that they don't matter.

Mike Israetel
I'm gonna pre contest right now a few months out from some bodybuilding shows, so Im trying to channel my kindness attitude more difficult than usual. So calories are the thing that matters the most in fat loss writ large. Period, end of conversation. Calories always mattered among people who study physics and thermodynamics. On the whole, among actual nutritionists that go to school for nutrition, physiologists, medical doctors, researchers.

Do calories matter or not? Was never a question that was asked, because it was answered in like, 1910 or something like that. There are two kinds of people that say calories don't matter. One group are well meaning people who have noticed something. They've noticed that when they started to exercise, they've noticed that when they started to eat certain types of foods and not others, that their body changed pretty rapidly.

And they noticed that they weren't counting calories. But because they were eating a diet high in fibrous vegetables and lean meats, they didn't have to. They just kept losing weight. Maybe they've had hormonal trouble in the past. Thyroid hormone was low.

They got thyroid hormone fixed up through exogenous medication. All of a sudden, things are going great. Testosterone, replacement therapy, and so on and so on. They didn't try to track their calories. They didn't try to lower their calories, and they lost fat.

So these very well meaning people, it's totally understandable how they could think, well, geez, I mean, calories matter, I guess. The science book says that I never tracked my calories and I lost a ton of fat. How do you explain that? There's not really a mystery in the scientific community about how to explain that. Your expenditure went up maybe a little bit, your intake went down maybe a little bit.

The combination of those two created a net calorie deficit. And that's like 99.9% of the way that anyone ever loses fat. That's really what's going on. Does that mean you have to count your calories? No.

Does that mean if you had diets before where you count calories and you really struggle to do it and it doesn't work, and you're like, calorie counting stupid. You try to keep keto diet, you get a massive reduction in appetite. A bunch of your favorite cheat foods cant eat because theyre not keto. You lose a bunch of weight and youre like, see, it was hormones. It was keto.

It was never the calories. Well, actually, it was always the calories. But the keto diet allowed you to get into a calorie deficit so powerfully that you didnt even need to track calories. You were just never going to make it back to what you could only do with potato chips and ice cream. So thats the group one that its understandable.

Group two are people that range anywhere from honestly misinformed folks that have noticed these changes in themselves and have created digital products and YouTube channels to help other folks figure things out all the way through sociopathic charlatans that maybe know what's really going on and maybe don't, but don't care. And they'll tell you calories don't matter. Calorie counting is a myth because they some combination of truly believe that to be the case erroneously or they have no true beliefs. They're just, there's no soul in there and theyll say whatever the hell they have to get that bottom line for their corporation to go up. Doctor Oz type of people.

So a lot of the calorie balance is a myth, comes from those second groups of people that make digital content and say these things and is taken quite well by that first group of people. Thats like, well, yeah, thats what ive noticed in my life. And thats how you have that continuation of that insane, totally bonkers, upside down myth. So certain changes that people can make with the choice of foods that they have has a downstream consequence on the amount of food that they eat and also perhaps the way that they feel, the amount that they move around, perhaps it's tied in with a more overall change of I'm going to care about health and I'm going to eat more meat and whole foods and stuff. And that means that maybe they take the stairs a little bit more.

Chris Williamson
And this combination of a reduction of hyper palatable, calorie dense foods on the front end and maybe a little bit of a change on the back end means reliable weight loss. Over the longer term, this creates fertile ground for magic foods. This is a food that'll burn fat. This is the thing that you need to eat or shouldn't eat or whatever. And that is then sort of slotted into by the fuel is provided to a very sort of dry heap of potential grass that can then be set.

Mike Israetel
Ablaze by arsonists of the human mind. Arson about charlatans, arson about. Yeah, that's very well put. Okay. Do you have to count calories in order to be successful?

Chris Williamson
If calories are the most important thing that matters, is it mandatory that everyone needs to track calories? If they're going to lose body fat. Great question. It is no more mandatory to count calories in order to lose fat than it is to count your money in order to become wealthy. If your input stream on money is like the Gucci brand level, you don't have to count it.

Mike Israetel
You just have to forklift the cash into a warehouse or something. God knows what those people do with their money. And then of course burn it. Because you're that rich, you don't need them. So if you are losing weight, you look leaner, your clothes are fitting better and better and better, but you don't count calories.

Don't you dare start. God bless you. Whatever you're doing, it's working. Keep it up. You feel better, everything's awesome.

Don't even worry about looking at a label accounting calorie. But if you're not losing weight, you're trying a certain kind of diet. You gained a pound last month and you want the ultimate almost never. But for weird body water issues been defeated hackath. Counting calories is going to get you there.

It is unequivocal because if you understand what your maintenance calorie level is very well by taking a few weeks to just get to know what youre eating. Like the RP diet coach app, you can do that with, you can do it with myFitnesspal, you can do it with macro factor, tons of great apps to do that with. You get a feel for your maintenance because like if you eat a little bit less, you start losing weight, a little bit more, you start gaining and after a while it looks like this just kind of like, oh, it looks like 2500 calories, like right around my maintenance. And you want to lose weight. You take anywhere between, and I can get on the specifics here, roughly 250 calories per day to 750 calories per day, depending on a few factors.

Chunk that right out and you watch the magic happen. But if you never count calories and you're not losing weight, the mystery factor is a big deal. Another quick analogy. Let's say you're Elon Musk and you're counting your billions or whatever he does in a spare time. Just kidding.

He doesn't have spare time. And you have a rocket that you're launching and it takes off and shoots through the atmosphere. Do you have to calculate a thrust to weight ratio and see that it's positive? No, it's in fucking space. Of course it's positive.

But if it doesn't leave the platform after a nice 32nd burn and it just goes, you got to start calculating stuff, it's like, are we off by a rounding error or are we off by an order of magnitude? The whole engine could be the problem. Or it could be like, oh, Bob didn't do this with the spigot. So calorie balance doesnt have to matter. It always matters under the surface.

But you dont have to count calories if the times are good, if the times are confusing and youre like, what the hell? Im trying to eat healthy and im not losing weight, its time to give calorie counting a shot. Knuckle down. What about weighing yourself? How frequently should people do it?

Chris Williamson
Whats the way that you advise them to? Is there an app? Is there a blah, blah, multiple times. A day for your self esteem? No weight.

Mike Israetel
Thats just what I do. Is it good or bad? Its always bad. There are definitely many apps that can help you track your weight. Rpdico chap does that.

A whole bunch of them do. I'm here pimping the app all the time. I just want people to know we make a great app, super high quality product. It is not the only great app. There's tons of other awesome, awesome apps.

If you are maintaining and living an awesome, healthy life, you're not trying to lose weight or fat. I would say you can weigh in from somewhere between never to once every month or two weeks. Why do I say that? Because sometimes you have a, you know, like a real holiday season. Not just a holiday.

Pre Thanksgiving, you go to four or five other people's thanksgivings, you go to your own Thanksgiving. Christmas isn't like a day. We know how it works. It's like work, Christmas, leisure, Christmas, your buddies, blah, blah, blah. And January rolls around and you're like, I feel fine.

Kind of a little, you know that? A little kind of puff. Fluffy, fluffy. If you weigh yourself every two weeks to a month, just as a normal, healthy human, you can notice, like, damn it, I gained seven pounds. And that can give you the hint to go, you know what?

Let me, uh, let me clean my. Shit up and dial it in a bit. Yeah. And that just means, like, easing up on the junk food. For the next two or three weeks, you're chilling with your wife at home Friday night.

She's like, pizza. You're like, sushi. She's like, yep. So it's just a early warning system. That's it.

Why do I say that? Because an unreal number of people, I mean, literally millions of people in the modern free countries of the world in which food is excessive, almost no one just wakes up one day and they're like, 400 pounds. How the hell. It goes up by a few pounds here and there. And if they don't catch it until six months later when they see their doctor, it's a 15 pound problem.

Now, you do need the RP diet coach app because this is a meat and potatoes problem. But if it's three to seven pounds, two or three weeks of just cleaning up your eating and making sure to get your physical activity up a little bit, you kibosh it and it's just not there. And you go back to living your best life. Weigh yourself every few weeks. Two weeks later after that, you can weigh yourself.

You're even lighter than you thought. Hell yeah. Pizza tonight. So it's good to keep your eye on it. Now, if you're actively in a fat loss diethyde, weighing yourself at least once a week is a real good idea.

It's probably not the best idea because water weight fluctuations can give you a ton of error. Let's say you stuck to your macros 100%. All the proteins, carbs, fats and calories you were supposed to eat on Sunday. You always weigh yourself on Monday. But a part of those macros was you made an omelet and you sprinkled some fat free cheese on it.

And you like salt. You're a salt person. Sometimes when people eat a lot of salt, it makes them thirstier. And then some people will have that salt and that water, and they'll retain a little bit of that. And maybe you have an element to drink too, because they're delicious and they're good for you.

And you have a couple elements and, well, it's another 3000 milligrams of salt, you wake up the next day and even though tissue wise, if you had an MRI scanner, which I own six in my home, as a trillionaire, one of them's just for show, by the way. It's not even plugged in. Isn't that absurd? So that's the one I show to people. The nuclear regulatory commission does not know about that one.

So you have a situation where in reality, you lost one and a half pounds of fat last week. Everything about your diet and training is set. Don't you change a thing. But because you had excess salt, just randomly, it looks like you gained a pound and a half. Cause you only weigh in once and all you have is a weak point of data.

So you have one data point. You have a whole week. You're like, all right, did I get bloated from last night? Or what the hell is going on? And then you cut your calories even more.

And im sure well get to this later. But if you cut your calories way more than the recommended amount for a long time, you develop an excessive amount of diet fatigue and then that can really put a spoke in your wheels for sustainability of your fat loss. Its nothing you want to do. So our recommendation RP is generally weigh yourself two to three times a week. Seven days a week is totally fine, but theres nothing magical about it.

So if youre going up somewhere, you know, if youre a New Yorker and you go to the Hamptons for a weekend, my word. I mean, who's still poor enough to go to the Hamptons? Am I right? And you're like, oh, I'm not going to have a scale in the Hamptons. Is that a problem?

Absolutely not a problem. Your five days that you were weighing are totally great. But you know, if you go a week without weighing yourself, you're kind of in the dark. And it could have been a good week, could have been bad week. Never can tell.

So a few times a week, all the way up to every day is totally fine. In other news, this episode is brought to you by eight sleep I have been using my eight sleep mattress for years and I literally cannot imagine life without it. Having an actively cooled and heated mattress is the game changer. Now they have launched their newest generation pod, the pod four ultra. The pod four ultra can cool down each side of the bed up to 20 degrees below room temperature, keeping you and your partner cool.

Chris Williamson
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That's eightsleep.com modernwisdom and modern wisdom a checkout how much truth is there in set point theory? Your body getting accustomed to a particular weight that you sit at and not liking to change too much from that one? Yeah, that's a good question. The modern interpretation I'm most familiar with is now called settling point theory. Now, because I'm a dogmatist for science.

Mike Israetel
I don't like that it's called theory. Theory is reserved for interconnected frameworks of facts well supported by evidence, evolution, gravitation, etcetera. Even the standard model in theoretical physics isn't called a theory, but it's way more predictive than settling point theory by ten orders of magnitude. So the settling point model or hypothesis says there's not one set point that your body's supposed to be. You weren't born to weigh 200 pounds and doesn't matter what happens, you always trend back to 200.

What it says is there's a couple of inputs to how much you weigh, but given that they are of certain values, you're going to settle temporarily in a certain weight range. For example, let's say you live a lifestyle where you go out to eat twice a week, you have certain meals, you prep at home, you train a certain number of times, you get a certain number of steps. If those things are rather constant, you might weigh 200 pounds. If we put you in a food environment that's way more obese as the term goes, let's see, what's the most obesogenic food environment? Cruise.

Chris Williamson
America. America. The United States. Anytime I'm anywhere in the world and someone jokingly talks smack about the US, I always have the same joke back and it's old as hell, but I love overuse it. I go over, I'm like, you see that over the horizon over there?

Mike Israetel
Like, I'm in Sydney, and you just look over the harbor and they're like, no, like, that is us aircraft carrier battle group. God damn it. It can end your country in five minutes. Whoo. And then the Texas thing and do the gunshots.

So, in any case, the US is the best. That's why we're here. China's biggest, at least. Well, yeah, well, actually. So, funny enough, the UK just overtook us, I believe, in obesity rates.

Chris Williamson
So really, hat tip to you? Find percentage. Yeah, it's a neck and neck battle now. The US is still king in a few different categories. We have the highest absolute number of fat people, as we have a lot of people and fat people.

Mike Israetel
We also have the highest absolute number of very, very, very fat people. Like you go to the UK, there's some fat people, a lot of people are fat. But you come to the US, especially, like southern Texas, you will regularly see four and 500 pound people. That's an american rascal. Fat.

Yes, but on fractions of super fat people, we are inferior to a few of the peoples of the Pacific islands. Folks from Tonga, folks from American Samoa, dem some big peoples over there and they do two things super well. Eat amazingly tasty food. Three things. Be incredibly jolly and super awesome to hang out with and are statistically completely overrepresented of any racial group in american.

Chris Williamson
Football, pro performances, and rugby probably as well. Yeah, that's a step down for them. Like, this is easy. I usually do this against way bigger people. So.

Mike Israetel
Sorry. Set point, theory. Settling point. Settling point. Yeah.

Yes. So if I get you over to a cruise ship for two weeks, I mean, cruise ship food is so good and it's kind of 24 hours and it's always there. And you leave the main restaurant and they're like fresh baked cookies and you're like, who the hell am I to say no to this nice young person? And all of a sudden you're taking in 600 more calories per day, just normally. Now, your settling point, if you stayed there for weeks and weeks would be whatever it was, but higher, you take it the other way.

When you get into a time machine, you go back to the 1940s, late forties in the United States. You're like, all right, I'm ready to eat. What are you going to do? There's a few fast food places, but they're not that good. You got to drive pretty far to get them, and they're not even open 24 hours, which is quite a fence.

That's why the forties sucked. And you go, okay, how do I get some food? You go to the grocery store. It's almost completely bereft of convenience food. And you're like, the hell am I supposed to cook my food?

There's some interesting cultural stuff that just. It's baffling in retrospect. You know, the idea of a nice Sunday dinner, like a ham dinner or a turkey dinner, that is, as far as I'm concerned, archaeology at this point, because any person of basically any income in a modern country can just buy a turkey or a ham every single day for every meal. It's a nominal cost. So if you go back to the 1940s in the US, people say, why weren't there so many fat people?

You want to be fat, you got to cook your own food. And if you're a bad cook, it's not even tasty. So if the average tastiness and convenience of the food in your area goes down, you're settling 0.8200 anymore. It's 160 now. No, it could be 200.

If you were on a cruise ship, then it could be 220. So based on those factors, your food environment, your activity level, who you hang around with, et cetera. Your settling point can move up and down, but in any one situation, yeah, settling points are a real thing. And there's some physiology to your body being a little annoyed at having to make a change. It's less annoyed if the environmental factors change.

And then it's like, well, I'm just living my best life and I'm just losing weight because I just don't eat tasty food all the time. So there is something just to settling points. And there is a genetic factor, for sure. The absolute biggest by a mile genetic factor for settling points is hunger levels and food pleasure response. I'm sure you've hung out with a lot of people in your life.

Some people, are you a food guy? Do you like to eat? Yeah, yeah. But notice the way you said like, yeah, some people are like, bro, are you kidding me? I can inhale food.

Some other people, and I've been friends with many people like this in the past, they just like food to them is like this thing they have to remember to put in their bodies. Otherwise they like, see clearly, right? So the biggest factor by a long shot in any one individual is what are their hunger levels like and what are their enjoyment of food, neurochemistry, like? And that goes a big way. How do you get the american obesity, the global obesity epidemic?

You take hyper palatable, ultra convenient relative to income, super cheap food, you make it insanely, ubiquitously available. You vary it constantly so no one gets used to it. Like if you want a new type of crisp to eat in the UK, and you go once a week to the store, you just never run out because there's always new stuff. And you pair that with a population of people, some fraction of that population, totally unaffected. They just crisps.

I have a crisp, I sit down, I do nothing, I dont have another one. Some people give them tasty food and its cheap and convenient. Thats their hobby now is eating food, and they love it. And the pounds just smack on and on and on. So for them, their settling point in that environment sometimes doesnt have a number yet because theyre still working their way up to it.

Chris Williamson
Yeah, I think this has been the most interesting thing ive learned maybe over the last year, orbiting a number of people, talking about, why is modern society so fat? There's all of these images from the 1960s of beaches in America, and everyone looks lean and athletic. And you see it's because of the insert your favorite food demon of choice here. It's the red 40. It's the seed oils, it's the carcinogens in the water, it's the estrogen levels, it's the whatever, whatever.

But the sort of Occam's razor of this is just food is tastier, more calorie dense, cheaper and more available than it's ever been before. Yes. What did you think was going to happen? What would just, just from first principles, just make that, forget the constitution of it, what's the molecular, is it artificial or is it natural? What do you think would happen to those people?

Mike Israetel
Yes, very predictable and in a certain sense a little bit disappointing, because it would be cool if we could have one type of food additive or something in the water supply that we discovered was insanely obeseogenic, and we managed to put in some sensible regulation and take it out of the water supply or reduce it by a factor of 1000. And everyone, just like over the next year, had this renaissance where they leaned up. That would be awesome. It would be awesome for two reasons. One, it would solve the problem really quick, and two, it would remove any onus of actually the problems worse than you thought.

It's like if you go to couples therapy for a while and you want your partner to change, and after like twelve sessions, the psychiatrist or psychologist requests you come alone. And she kind of like dances around it and she's like, you're the fucking problem, Chris. It's kind of all on you. Nancy's great. She's been great the whole time.

It's you, you're like, man, that's not what I went to couples therapy to hear. And so when someone's like, it's actually all the insanely tasty food you love to eat all the time that's making you super fat, you got a tendency to be like, fuck, wait, I gotta stop eating that stuff. What wasn't it? The microplastics? Can I eat?

Can I make microplastics tasty? So at some point, it's this insanely simple reason that describes probably 90% or more of the variance in obesity from historical times to now. But it's also a bit like, ah, crap. It's like trying to make it on a JV basketball team. And you're like, coach, is it heart?

Do I have to practice dribbling anymore? You're just an Ashkenazi Jew, dude. You're never going to be good at this. That's what I heard from my basketball coach when I was five foot zero back and just kidding, I'm not 5ft yet. One day, Chris I'll get up there.

It's something you don't want to hear. But once you process it, you're like, of course it's true. The good news is, for the first time in history, we can start taking real big bites out of that, no pun intended, with modern pharmacology, which is going to save us all from everything. Begin insane rant about how drugs are great, but ozempic and all of those drugs. And I do find it at this point comical that ozempic gets all the attention that it gets, because this is a third generation GLP one agonist.

There's already in late stage clinical trials a fifth generation agonist. Ozempic to zepetide. That's gen four. Oh, Ozempic's gen three. Uh huh.

Chris Williamson
Right. Okay. So I think a lot of people have sort of reset the number because one and two kind of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like liraglutide and stuff.

Mike Israetel
No, one. And what's the fifth gen? Which is the one that's really hard to pronounce. So there's a bunch of them. But I pronounce it ratatratide.

Chris Williamson
Right. You can also say it retrutide if you want to say, like, three words instead of one. So, like, retatratide is not a GLP one agonist. Technically, it's a triple agonist. It's a GlP gip glucagon agonist.

Mike Israetel
Not only does it kibosh your appetite from two different separate pathways, but somehow, I have no idea how these guys managed to modulate the glucagon pathway to increase your resting metabolic rate. Retardide is a gen five. It was invented years ago. And what theyre inventing right now in the pharmaceutical industry is going to make retardatide look like a joke. And ritatratide left ozempic behind completely.

In clinical trials, it beats terzepatide, no problem. And we're talking about more weight loss for less side effect. The stuff they're developing right now is going to lead to a late 2020s, in my view, in which, for almost everyone, if you don't want to be obese anymore, you just take the medication, and you won't be. But if you do, you just don't take the medication, and you will be. Why is, why can just one pill or one injection do so much?

Because it makes you less hungry, fundamentally. And then when you're not really hungry, you stop eating as much food. And all these weird other hypotheses about why we were getting fat. Ozempa kind of crushed all of them out. How does it just do all that?

Chris Williamson
That's so funny. I mean, there's a big. I'm going to be fascinated to observe the way that most people see the GLP. One category of drugs. I've been surprised by the negativity of the pushback I haven't had.

You haven't been surprised by. No, not at all. My God. Why? People have a reflexive, anti pharmaceutical, anti capitalist, anti corporate, anti drug attitude.

Mike Israetel
Some kind of smorgasbord of those comes out anytime, all the time with tons of people. Oh, so this is like the natty or not of fat. It's the fatty or not fatty or not? Definitely fatty. I meant that in a different way.

Chris Williamson
Yeah, okay. That makes sense. Some people have an issue with the fact that they feel like it's kind of cheating. You know, I had to get there. The fucking.

Mike Israetel
I love to tackle that one. Okay. Yeah, it's. I see where people are coming from. For the respectful part of my talk, which ends now and begins.

The disrespectful part of my talk, it's pure nonsense. You use air conditioning when you break your leg, you go to the hospital and you get antibiotics, you cheating motherfucker. Aren't you supposed to be eating rocks and bashing your head into a caribou to kill it or something like that? As a matter of fact, the first tool industry millions of years ago that protohumans made one of them is like the olduvan tool industry. They discover these now where it's like, you know, flint rocks that are shaped in a no longer natural pattern, widowed down into something like a little club head or a little spike that you can at least pull an animal's guts apart easier or even kill something with.

They were cheating. That's the first cheating they've ever done. Artificial, and it made them better at stuff. Your ability to lose weight can be a test of your willpower, or you can take the fucking pill or the injection, and with no added willpower, lose all the weight you want. And then you can test your willpower on tending to your family better, being a kinder person to others, being someone of moral authority to others by how you live your life, coaching little league football and being on time for the kids instead of standing in a fucking Hardee's line, getting your third cheeseburger for that day.

You can start a business, you can save the world. You can clean up the atmosphere, everything. We're not running out of problems. So if we have body fat as this thing that's going to sharpen our will and we get rid of that. The set of problems remains approximately infinite still.

And you can sharpen your will on what's left over. If you think you're tough and proving your willpower to yourself by losing fat, you're right. But you're not getting jacked. You're not building a business because you're draining all of your willpower on that one thing. It's a good thing we have pills to help us with as much as possible, so then we can have more bandwidth to do all the other good stuff that we want to do.

Chris Williamson
Getting back to the fat loss in the diet, protein, carbs, fat, how should people be thinking about those? How do they contribute? What should they be eating? Yes, proteins are essential because they compose all of the organs, all of your enzymes. All the stuff that does work is pretty much protein.

Mike Israetel
It's non negotiable. And also protein supports your skeletal muscles, which is kind of important because theres two types of getting lean. One is people think youre sick and ask you if youre okay because you lost a bunch of muscle. The other is like people compliment you or saying nice things behind your back because theyre jealous and they want to have sex with you, but they cant. Im used to that sort of thing.

The jealousy part, me being jealous. So protein is a big deal for most people who are not pursuing exotic hyper bodybuilding pursuits. As little as just over half a gram per pound of body weight per day. Protein is going to take care of most of your needs. So if you weigh 200 pounds and you eat something like 120 grams of protein per day, you're probably golden and you can probably lose fat and lose very little or no muscle at all.

The top end is maybe about double fat. Real insurance policy type of stuff. You're doing crazy hardcore weight training, crazy amount of cardio and activity. You're already very, very lean and you're prone to losing muscle and you're a little older than average, over 40 then is just over 1 gram per pound. So if you ate 200 grams, if you ate 200 grams, if you weigh 200 pounds, then maybe you have 220 or 240 grams.

For a very serious fitness person, gram per pound is an amazing rule. Just understand that for most people, like if your mom asks you for diet advice, just a little bit over half of that is totally solid. Often best consumed for most muscle mass retention in building through three to five meals, evenly spaced per day. But if you just have like two meals for the average person, if they're eating lots of protein, they're going to get great results. Okay, carbs.

I'll do carbs and fats at the same time, if you don't mind. There is a big difference between optimizing for athletic performance and muscularity and just losing some goddamn fat. So you can see Mister Twinkie again. Well, there you are, buddy. It's been a while.

Carbs and fats kind of combine into one index of extra calories after protein has been taken care of. A really great app for fat loss that you can use is called macro factor and they have this turn dial where you can like turn up the carbs and turn down the fats. And it's one comes out of the other because for many people it just doesn't matter as long as you get a minimum of both. If youre getting some fibrous veggies and maybe a few pieces of fruit per day, but youre down to very low levels of carbs. You eat no grains, no breads, no rice, none of that.

But you eat plenty of healthy fats. Youre golden. Youre going to lose tons of fat and be super healthy. If you have minimal fats, like you take an essential fat supplement every day and the rest of your diet has no fat in it whatsoever. Youre doing starches, grains, gatorade, the whole nine yards.

But your calorie balance is set. Youve generated a 250, a 750 daily calorie deficit and your protein is good. Youre going to lose fat until the cows come home and its going to go super well. How you feel on each one of those, how your sport and athletic hobbies are supported, how convenient it is for your life. Those are secondary discussions, but very important ones.

So its kind of two points here. One, as long as you get minimum levels of fats and carbs, which are very, very low, and most people wont hit whichever one you want, higher or lower, it doesnt matter. But also consider this, if youre more physically active, more carbohydrate generally works better if carbs kind of make you just want more carbs. But if you get a big satiating effect from fats and youre like, oh, thats enough, maybe you can consider more fats. Some people get more energy from carbs and they prefer more carbs.

Some people get a more even keeled mental clarity from lower carbs and higher fats. And their go to is to have higher fats. Most people would be served best with an even combination of them or roughly the same calories coming from fats and carbs once your protein is taken care of, because in many cases that afford you the most flexibility in your diet, you show up to a restaurant with your friends, youre on a fat loss diet, and you look up what menu items you can eat. Obviously youre on a fat loss diet. Youre not going to eat five of the menu items and be a pig.

But a lot of real food. In the real world, it's tough to get zero carb. It's also real tough to get really low fat. But most of them have a bit of carbs, bit of fats. And if you have that middle combination, it's a really, really awesome way to go to town and still hit your calorie goals.

So carbs and fats plus or minus, no big deal. As long as your calories are in check and your protein is in check. The conversation for fats versus carbs is individually based preference and very nuanced. Is there a kind of fat which is best? Well, our company started making this fat supplement.

I'm just kidding. I'm just trying to shill as many. I'm shilling products I don't even have to sell. Get on the mailing list. Super fats.

Generally speaking, on average, the preponderance of your fat should probably come from poly and monounsaturated fat sources. There's a conversation that is more poly or more mono, probably more poly than mono. But what kind of foods are we talking about here? A bunch of the oils. Most of the plant oils are really, really awesome.

Olive oil, canola oil. Yes, I said canola oil. Just do it. IMDb. IMDb.

Do a pubmed search for canola oil health benefits review and youll see that its super, super healthy. All the different kinds of oils are usually generally very good. I cant respect a doctor who proposes seed oils as part of his diet. I never asked for your respect. Nameless, faceless troll person who's in a troll farm in China.

But yeah, by the way, the seed oils thing is really funny. I get smacked for that all the time. You did a video about why seed oils aren't bad for your health? Yeah, totally. We have that on the RP strengths channel.

And I was curious about the issue because so many people were talking about seed oils being bad and I just did one pubmed search and there was a few review articles that were like, yeah, seed oils generally tend to be better than. So theyve done multiple studies where they take people who eat a lot of saturated fats, which are totally fine by the way. But they replace some fraction of those with seed oils. And in almost every study, the people are months later healthier. And so like, the idea that seed oils are bad for you is usually concluded by folks that are like really deep into lipidology research and theyre inferring that cd oil should be bad for you based on various cooking process modifications.

But inference is dope. And I use it all the time in decision making. But it never beats actual empirical randomized control trials because thats like what the real world actually is. Its like, well, I think Stacey likes me. Go ask her.

Shes like, no, youre like, okay, I was wrong. Right. Inference doesnt beat the real thing. So seed oils are super great for your health. Theyre totally fine.

And then theres all kinds of nuts, all kinds of nut butters, avocados. Those types of fats tend to be amazing. Fats from fatty fish, also super awesome. Saturated fats are also just fine for your health. And you can have a lot of them.

But you generally want something like two thirds of your fats to come from plant fats, poly and monounsaturated, maybe one third of your fats to come from saturated fat sources, eggs and beef and things like that. Where you want to maybe go easy on fats, there's ultra processed sources with trans fats in them. The trans fats dont just kill you when youre walking one day and you just keel over. Trans fats, the police put up a line about trans fats on it, but theyre not great in aggregate over the long term. So if you know, like your primary source of fats is like McDonalds fry grease, its not great.

Cheesy puffs, its not great. So if you do mostly minimally processed whole foods, saturated fats are totally fine. But if youre having trouble with your lipids and your doctor is like, look, you gotta change something. Replacing some of your saturated fats with poly and monounsaturated fats just from directly, the literature seems to work pretty well. But its not a crazy thing.

Heres nothing for many people that listen to this who are already eating a pretty healthy diet, their total fat intake is so low, the composition of those fats barely matters at that point. If you have a very high fat diet, lets say youre trying to do the keto thing or the carnivore thing. Yeah, you got to take a look at your fat sources a little more because thats a lot of fats now and its going to matter for your blood work.

Chris Williamson
I wonder, is there not something to do with reheating fats and oils. That's bad, allegedly. Is it? Is that true? I haven't looked into it in great depth because the preponderance of the people that espouse that are insane, people whose epistemological anchor is total nonsense on average.

Mike Israetel
So, like, I haven't looked into deep refutations of the flat earth idea, but I'm not gonna anytime soon. If anyone has any compelling evidence that the reheating process is insanely deleterious for health, then they have randomized clinical trials to support this. I'm super interested in it. I'm out of my depth on that one. But after about five minutes of talking to chat GPT, I could get back into my death, no problem.

It's one of these things that, um. Where do you get reheating of oils all the time? Literally in fry grease. Stop fucking eating McDonald's every day and you're not going to have that much. So, so much of this stuff, so many of the demon foods that people have got an issue with, whether it's particular colorants, whether it's artificial sweeteners, whether it's seed oils, come along for the ride with foods, food types, hyper palatable, calorie dense, very processed, probably just not all that great for you to be having very regularly.

Chris Williamson
So it's not about the components of this individual thing. It's like saying, this circuit board is very dangerous. Well, it is when it's attached to a fucking javelin missile. Yes. And you pointing at all of the circuit boards and saying, look at how bad these circuit boards are for everybody.

And you go, well, yeah, it is. Because for the most part, that circuit board exists inside of that fucking missile. Yeah, I like that you used the javelin missile. It's very pertinent to the news cycle. Maybe YouTube will pick it up.

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That that's livemomentous.com modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout meal how often should people eat? If they're trying to do fat loss, how much of a spread between meals. Do they need for weight loss? It just doesn't matter. They've compared eating six or more meals per day regularly to what's called alternate day fasting, where one day you eat and the next day you're just really pissed at everyone because you don't eat for weight loss.

Mike Israetel
It doesn't matter over the long term. And it makes sense because the calorie balance is the same. It's calorie controlled. That day that you're eating is real fun on that diet, the day you're not eating is really extra not fun. So weight loss not a concern.

How does it become a concern with fat loss is muscle growth and muscle retention are processes that prefer multiple meals spread evenly throughout the day. So if you want to lose weight and you just don't care about muscle, let's say it's not a problem for you. You train hard anyway because you love it, but you're like, I have plenty muscle. My doctor tells me I need to lose weight. Whatever.

Meal frequency is something that schedule wise, culture wise, preference wise, that you like, do it up. One meal a day, no problem. One meal every other day, no problem. Seven meals a day. Dope.

If you're trying to build and maintain muscle mass as much as possible, and you're really full sending this and you're training with weights regularly, which is a big deal, any number of meals up to you hit four per day. Evenly spread. Each of them high in protein, marginally increases how much muscle you can grow and maintain after four meals per day. In all of the research, we see that there is no more effect that we can detect. So if you're like, dude, I'm growing crazy muscle on four meals a day, should I go to five?

Maybe it'll make some teeny difference, but maybe not from the theoretical work, probably not. Mostly because if you eat bigger meals, they just take longer to digest. So the pulsatility of nutrients in your blood, it basically just looks like this the whole day because you start eating breakfast. By the time you run out of breakfast, you get lunch and then dinner and then you're done. What about the earliest that people should eat, the latest that they should eat?

Chris Williamson
Is there something to do with the parentheses of your eating window throughout the day? If you eat in a very constrained eating window, the result you can expect starts to look more and more like a very small number of meals per day. Your body doesn't really count meals. Youre peripheral cellular structures count how much of a flux of nutrients they get exposed to. So if you say my eating window is from 08:00 p.m.

Mike Israetel
to 10:00 p.m. at night and I have four meals in my eating window every half hour, your bodys like, I hear that, but its just one meal, its one big meal. Like if you still have stomach contents not in the intestines yet, and youre eating meal number two like its still the same meal. So a very constrained eating window does do that. But as far as spreading it out long or short, again for weight loss, none of that matters.

For fat loss, you want to spread it out not as far as possible, but you probably want to be ingesting food at something like at least a twelve, maybe 14, maybe even 16 hours. Situation contest. Bodybuilders who've near mastered the art of losing fat while maintaining muscle. They'll eat almost as soon as they wake up and they'll have their last meal an hour or two before bed, if not even closer. And they eat multiple times throughout the day so that their body's never starving for protein.

Is that excessive? For most people, yeah. What do you think? Sensible advice is to wake up again. If you want muscle mass retention within a few hours of when you wake up, don't be like, it's like 6 hours later and you're working at projects at work and your stomach does one of those like angry growls.

You're like, oh shit, you existed. Better get a twinkie. Dont do that. And if you take longer than four or 5 hours before you go to bed after youve eaten, that can work out great for you. But for some people, especially as the diet wears on, especially as they get more hungry, it might interfere with sleep in two ways.

At least. One is if youre already hungry when youre trying to fall asleep, its a non starter. Youre not falling asleep, youre just counting sheep and one sheep jumps over and one, two, three. Its like a sheep, but its like suctioned into meat parts. Its like lamb.

Rack of lamb. Youre like, oh, shit, im thinking about food again. And then youre going to the fridge and youre getting a cheeseburger. So the other way is if youve eaten many, many hours before you went to sleep, but not so many that you can fall asleep, you might wake up in the middle of the night or very early morning starving. Your cortisol goes up, you ain't falling back asleep anymore.

Sleep is so unbelievably critical to fat loss and to muscle gain and retention. It is a non negotiable variable. So eat in such a way that gives you the best sleep is probably the best advice I can have in a meal timing perspective. So for most people eat, you can eat as soon as you wake up, no problem. You can eat right before you go to sleep, no problem.

Some people, if they eat right before bed or even an hour or two before, you know there's digestion, the body temperature goes up and they're tossing and turning, they can't sleep. Don't do that. Then back that meal up a little bit. But if you're one of these people, especially late towards the end of a diet, a higher carbohydrate and protein meal before you go to sleep knocks you the fuck out, and that's perfect. So very individual, generally spread your meals out, play around with what feels best for you.

Chris Williamson
Is there anything to say about prejudicing certain types of foods earlier or later in the day, back loading the carbs until the evening time, starting off with more protein first thing in the morning. Does it not matter? Good question. The research on that in general has been a giant, like, meh, not really. Every now and again, someone will pull out a single study or two in isolation and itll see, like, see, you gotta eat more of your carbs in the morning, and then someone else a couple years later will be like, its the nighttime carbs that are really good on average.

Mike Israetel
It doesnt seem to make much of a difference. So I would say you can play around with things yourself, but as long as you have an evenish fraction of your protein in every meal, how you do carbs and fats doesnt matter much. At RP, we like to bias carbohydrates closer to the workout. So lets say you work out in the middle of the day. Were going to want you to eat slightly lower fats and slightly higher carbs in the meal before you go train, its going to give you lots of energy.

Fats are more difficult to digest. Not in a bad way. Just take a little longer to digest. So you might like be warming up for bench and feeling kind of like burpee. And God damn it, this shit hasnt gone through yet.

But if you eat low fat, youre like all your rices in your muscles and youre good to go. After training to set up recovery and anabolism, theres probably a slight advantage in having more carbohydrates. Your muscles are more ready to absorb it, your fat isnt. So thats a really good thing. And so we like to push our fats towards, uh, away from the workout and push the carbs a little bit closer.

But we're really splitting hairs here. Right. Uh, and so it's not some kind of magic formula if you're a contest bodybuilder? Yeah, it's a little bit more magic of a formula by a small shot. But generally speaking, the spread is, I'd say this.

Almost anyone that's telling you that the circadian rhythm of food and the spread of macros is very important is misunderstanding the state of the evidence. Okay. When it comes to the kinds of foods to avoid or lean into when dieting for fat loss, what are the things that you think people often overlook? What are the things that are unnecessarily demonized? Where should people be putting their attention?

Chris Williamson
What's the best food groups to make fat loss easy? Yep, raspberries are great. Blueberries will kill you, and they're terrible. Next question.

Mike Israetel
As far as specific foods, short of like, eating soap or poison, there are really no individual foods that are bad for you. And there are no individual foods that stall fat loss.

There have been foods historically that have been demonized, not as individual foods. All of them have gone through the ring or at least once. But food groups, sugars, people will say sugars are bad for you. It's just categorically false to say that sugars aren't bad for you. Sugars are no more prone to adding body fat or making body fat loss any more difficult.

It's a non starter in direct evidence, in theory, the whole gamut. Nowadays, it's fun to poke fun at sugar and at carbs. Back in the eighties and nineties, if you told someone you were health conscious and then you put butter on something, they were like, listen, you're going through some psychiatric problems. We should probably get you checked into a center because you were delusional, because everyone knew that saturated fat, especially just straight up killed you where you stood and you were never going to get lean. Eating a diet high in fats.

They were also wrong. Calorie balance is so king that it doesn't discriminate hardly at all among food groups. Fats versus carbs, none of that. So the myths of fats are too high or carbs are too high or sugars too high. They're just that myths.

However, a very important thing to consider is the palatability of your food and the fullness factor your food gives you. Because hunger is a real thing. So you want to choose food when you're dieting for fat loss, creating a caloric deficit that does at least two things for you. One, its not so damn delicious that you just want to eat more and more of it. And if you dont, youre just suffering.

Like if you were deep into a fat loss diet, I was like, hello, Chris, would you like a cheeto? Youd be like, dont. Why? Because as soon as you want them, cheetos hits your lips. Paradise.

You know, purple angels flying around better than acid. At that point you just want another cheetah. So if you're on a fat loss diet, something bodybuilders discovered a long time ago, and a gentleman named, I'm going to butcher his name for sure, Stephan Guienne. Guienne, he says, pronounced like DNA. I would just say guynet because I'm american.

Woo. He, I believe, coined the term, or at least exposed the public to it, of something called the food palatability reward hypothesis, properly couched the hypothesis. So he's not really the fucking man. Okay. And it basically says something baffling when you think about it.

It's ultra simple and explains most of the variants we already talked about with obesity, when food is really tasty, people tend to eat more and they get fat, they just want more. And if you have tasty food but you've relegated yourself, willpower style like a good person to not eating it, you're just going to be more miserable. You ever smell cheeseburgers being made while you're on the single digits body fat? You're like, dude, if there was an entire family of people between me and those cheeseburgers, like I'll insert politically boom, boom, boom, shoot them. I'm gonna eat my way through them to the cheeseburgers.

So things that get taken out in. Editing, I went native, Native American there, my Mandez. So basically, if youre dieting for fat loss, try to have foods that arent like exotically delicious veggies, fruits, whole grains, lean meats, not a ton of sauces, not a crazy ton of flavor. And heres the really fucked up part. Its going to be completely counterintuitive.

What do you want when your body is telling you listen, you need to put the fat back on. You want exactly the food that you shouldnt be having. So its kind of like abstaining from jerking it or something where its like what do you really want to do? Youre like, I want to jerk it. What are you not supposed to be doing?

Not supposed to jerk it. Right. But if you can eat at home, if you can clear all of your shelves at home of junk and just have that lower palatability food, first of all, if you're hungry enough, that shit tastes real good. Plain chicken and broccoli tastes amazing. If you're actually hungry, have that stuff.

That's really, really awesome to do. And secondly, you want to have food that keeps you fuller for longer. Food with a lot of fluid volume, food with a lot of fiber, food that takes longer to digest, minimally processed fruits, veggies, whole grains, lean meats and healthy fats are just kind of undefeated in that category. And so for all the calories you're allowed to have, it's a lot of food. It's not ultra tasty, so you kind of feel like you're laboring through it.

Halfway through your meal you don't even want anymore. You're stuffing yourself and every week you're losing weight. Fucking paradise. You're really doing it. But it's not paradise because you're going through this boring diet.

Chris Williamson
It doesn't taste as nice as it could be. Doctor Mike's told me that I can't. The exact thing I want to do, which is to make this tiny morsel scrap of food. Please, sir, can I have some more. So you can turn dial it to go.

Mike Israetel
Okay, I'm going to make my food a little tastier and a little less voluminous, a little less filling, such that I like my food, I can finish it, I look forward to it, but at the end of the meal I'm like, ooh, okay, this is tough to finish and it keeps me full long enough until my next meal comes around. Yeah, I can eat instead of like 2 hours before my next meal. I'm like, okay, where's the food? Where's the food? I'm losing it.

As you progress through a diet, it's possible to start with pretty normal food and turn dial that food palatability down and that fullness factor up such that you finish your diet with quite different foods than you started, but the entire time, your perception and relation to food is basically the same. You adjust to your preferences. Now that works really well. Can you give some tactical examples of good switches from food types that people may be cooking with at the moment, maybe using more typically and you saying more voluminous, more full of water, more insoluble fiber, etcetera? What are some of the easy switches?

Chris Williamson
Let's get rid of this. Let's put some of these in. Couple examples. Creamy sauces to non creamy sauces to dry rubs to salt only when you're real miserable. Tons of rice and pasta and breads down to whole grain breads, whole grain pasta, brown rice.

Mike Israetel
It's funny, you go to a sushi place and it's like, option for brown rice sushi. And I'm like, the japanese people did not suffer for this abomination. What the hell is that? Even so, you go from that to reducing your grain intake more, expanding your fruit intake, and eventually expanding your veggie intake. If you have 50 grams of carbs to eat and it's all white rice, that's like a little bit more than a cup of white rice at the beginning of a fat loss diet.

Shit. You're barely finishing that. I'll actually complete the analogy for you. You got some rice and you got some japanese mayo on that shit. So goddamn good.

I'm balls deep into a diet, so this is incredibly difficult for me to talk about. You go a couple more weeks now. It's the same white rice, but now you have, like, you've sprinkled some, like, kind of, like some kind of seasoned salt on it. It's tasty, but it's no more japanese mayo time because you could just, like, put that iv into your blood at that point then, and you have a little bit of veggies on the side next to it. You go to taking that rice and turning it to brown rice, but now it's not that whole scoop of brown rice.

It's half a scoop of brown rice into way more. More veggies and even a couple slices of fruit. Still, weeks later, you don't have any more rice. You have a bunch of veggies and a ton of fresh fruit when you're, like, stuffing it in. Because, like, holy crap.

Like, if you get a whole thing of strawberries, that's like 30 grams of carbs. How many fucking strawberries do I have to get to this thing? Whereas, like, one, like, you take a swig of sweetened condensed milk and it's like, boom, that's 50 carbs. Like what? How?

So? Eventually you might get to a point where most of your carbohydrate consumption comes from a combination of fresh fruits and green veggies. And that's going to be insanely difficult to out eat your calorie goals. Or to put another way, you're going to eat your meals and you'll be like, I don't want any more chicken, broccoli and orange slices. I'm good until the next meal and you have it again.

And then when you end your diet and you start coming back up to maintenance, you slowly reverse that process back out again. So you are using a restriction in the types of foods that you are allowed to eat in an attempt to pad out the satiety that you have by making it increasingly calorie, sparse per gram of food, fewer calories, and to increase suffering to make it hurt more. You're trading off two different kinds of suffering. Theres the suffering of having to eat food youre not amazed with, and theres the suffering of actual hunger. They dont compare in magnitude.

Its a stupid analogy. Offhand is the annoyance of having to wear a sticky, gross, sweaty helmet versus taking it off in combat. Yeah, it sucks, but theres bullets flying. The alternative, put your helmet on, is way worse. 100%.

Chris Williamson
What about potatoes? You mentioned about vegetables. There a lot of people thats sort of starch. That is a big satiating thing. I certainly know that when I've been dieting previously.

That's one of the things that I miss a lot. There's no amount of fucking ground beef at 97, three and whatever else that I can throw on a plate with some vegetables. Like, I just want a little bit of starch. How can people get that if they think it's really, that's my thing. It just makes me, makes my diet easy.

Where would you go to for that more starchy stuff? So what you have to do is you can do an experiment on yourself. For any given number of grams of carbohydrates, which starch choices for you? Do you find the tastiest? The most difficult to stop eating?

Mike Israetel
The most difficult to understand that. Okay, now you've run out of pasta. Don't get any more. And also the longest window after the meal of keeping you full. On average, boiled potatoes do really well in that regard.

Mashed potatoes not as well. They're tastier. You can suck them down faster. A bunch of different types of potato. The more minimally processed, the less processed the better do super well.

Typically rice does okay, but you can put away a lot of rice. Pasta generally doesn't do that great. I can make fields of pasta disappear by just breathing it in. So not everyones the same. So you want to try and figure out.

But generally speaking for memory, potatoes on average rank pretty high in the sample. Good satiety indexed. In other news, this episode is brought to you by create creatine gummies. You might have heard previous guests like doctor Rhonda Patrick and doctor Peter Attia. Lets face it, taking creatine every day is not fun.

Chris Williamson
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That's tricreate co modernwisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. We've spoken almost exclusively so far about ways to manipulate what goes into the body. But energy balance is what goes in versus what you expend. What do we need to know when it comes to how our body actually uses calories?

G flux theory. Is that a thing? Is it a hypothesis? What's g flux? I think that the way that was put across was the difference between taking in 3500 and expending 2500 and taking in 2500 and expending 1500 results in a very different type of physiology.

Mike Israetel
Yeah, definitely hypothesis, maybe even notion. I was in a cordial discussion with my friend doctor Eric Helms, and I brought up the flux thing and he was like, mike, shut up. That was a teenage article and nothing more. And I was like, fuck, he just clowned me. Christian Thibodeaux, what are you doing to me?

Chris Williamson
God damn it. He usually gives great advice. We all fuck up every now and then. The upright rose. You need the upright rose.

Mike Israetel
The accent alone, I'll believe anything he says. So there is something to that. But let me give you kind of the grand narrative here. There's something called the Panzer paradox, named after Herman Pontzer, its discoverer. And this is a gentleman that's actually, I think, trained as a, maybe like an ethnographer, an anthropologist or something like that.

And he went around the world various colleagues and studied the physical activity levels of various peoples, peoples of India, of Africa, of China, of indigenous tribes, of modern peoples. And he found that the levels of physical activity are almost the same for everyone. This is crazy. Ready? We do not have an inactivity epidemic in the modern world.

Chris Williamson
Sedentariness is not the big problem. No. And if you actually live with indigenous tribes, unless they have to, they fucking sit around as long as they can and do diddly dick because you got to conserve calories. You go out to get calories when you're hungry, when there's an opportunity. Otherwise why the fuck are you going out and walking around?

Mike Israetel
There's absolutely variation there between individuals in any one culture. There are huge variations in physical activity. But on average, physical activity is neither the cause of the obesity epidemic nor the likely solution to the obesity epidemic. However, if you want your best tools brought to the game of your personal fat loss, what I would say is this. We can have three options for you in physical activity terms.

Option one, and this is a little bit to the g flux situation. You eat very little, but you're very physically inactive. You're going to generate the same caloric net deficit as all the other two groups of people. I'll talk about two ways of doing things. It'll work.

For some people, it works great. I code all day. I don't want to have to fucking exercise for 5 hours. Get out of my face. I'm not really a hungry person.

I can just drink a soylent shake when I'm coding and I'm golden, no problem. The second group are people that have a moderate to high level of physical activity, something typified by, oh, 10,000 ish steps per day. For example, group one would be like two to 4000 steps per day, aka the average American. And that group of people ends up having a situation where they can eat more food and plenty food and that helps them stay more full, but they're so active that they burn lots of fat and lose the same amount of weight. And the physical activity is additive to their health outcomes because physical activity is independently important for health regardless of how skinny or fat you are.

So that's a really good option for most people, probably better than option number one. Then there's a third option. What I like to nickname the grand illusion. And that is you continue to eat like the giant swine that you are. Taco Bell employees know you by name.

They have your order ready for you every 3 hours. But you tell yourself, I'm just going to out exercise this thing. I'm going to go to Kenya. I'm going to sign up for their marathon team. I'm going to hang out with those homies and we're going to do the thing.

The problem with that is this has been researched by Ponzer's group and associated colleagues. This has been researched in athletics for a long time. When you ask consistently, and I mean weeks on end for your body to have a very high throughput of activity calories, something like north of 15 to 20,000 steps per day, every day on average, your body doesnt like to do that. It makes you very tired. Its making you tired so that you sit the hell down and stop bothering it as much.

And it works. If you got through it, youve just chosen a way that is a way to lose fat that works exactly as well as option number two, which is just moderately high physical activity, nothing crazy, consistent and a decent amount of food. But it's just way harder. And you suck up way more of your time exercising where you could and eating and eating. Now, eating is fun, right?

And who the hell cooks anymore, right? Trying to steal man. The Arkham butler. Butler's plural. I don't have one butler.

I'm not poor. My God, if you dont want to change your eating habits and you think youre going to out exercise your diet, we run into two problems. Problem one is what I just said, youre going to be so drained on energy your lifes going to suck and youll quit 99% of the time.

Problem number two is, it is easy to say, as what economist and philosopher Tom Sowell has coined a term notion, its beyond below hypothesis in its intellectual seriousness. Just a high idea you had at a party not even couched to be tested like a hypothesis would be. And the notion is that ill just exercise so much, ill eat whatever I want and ill still lose weight. The thing is though, if you do the math on that, and its frightening mathematic, you can take a mile run, throw back like one Twinkie and goodbye calorie balance, half a donut, nukes like half a mile run or some crazy shit like that. And so it's perfectly fine to say out loud, well, I'm just gonna eat whatever.

But you can eat with a healthy appetite. And if really you mean whatever and you like fast food and junk food and chips and crisps and all that, you can put down four or five k calories a day, no problem. You ever see the average fast food meal? Like if you just go and have the number two and super size it, it's like 2100 calories. But you have that three times a day.

You've seen supersize me or whatever. It's like holy shit, how do you out exercise that well? No, it's not just marathon runner pace, it's like two marathons a day. You're not going to do that. So because of that situation, option two is the preferred option for some folks.

Option one works. Eating very little, exercising very little. Totally cool exercise is good for you, should probably get more of it, but it works. Option two, moderate high levels of physical activity, weight train a few times a week, get an average of 10,000 ish daily steps or so, and eat a little bit less than you normally would, you're golden. Option three where you eat a ton of food, you don't change your ways, but you try to exercise a ton all the time.

It just doesnt work in the real world for almost anyone. Well get back to talking to Mike in 1 minute. But first I need to tell you about ag 190 percent of americans are not getting the nutrients that they need every day to be healthy. Ag one provides daily nutrients and gut health support in one comprehensive, convenient and tasty daily drink. You do not need a handful of pills or potions to support your body and give it nutritional insurance.

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There is asymmetric warfare between what you can put into your mouth and what you can burn in your body. And that's what the example about running half a mile to burn off half of a donut. Running half a mile is not easy. It sucks. Unless it's to the donut shop.

Mike Israetel
No wait. And it also sucks. Yeah, yeah, I guess you could run there half a mile, run back half a mile, burn it off. Terrible. No, no one's gonna do that.

Chris Williamson
Yeah, running back would hurt, but yeah, as someone who's tried to find a way to defeat thermodynamics, to get lean, just thinking like that, oh God, I hate being hungry. I hate this fucking restrictive diet. I can't have any sauce on anything. This really, really sucks. I'll just exercise more.

And the net that outcome has usually been, I can't, I can't keep it up. I'm fatigued already. I'm still not actually eating what I want. In any case, if you were to create some sort of pie chart of what contributes to fat loss, what would be the components and what would come from nutrition, calorie intake, exercise, whatever the fuck else. If it's just your diet versus your physical activity, I'd say it's 70 30 or 80 20.

Mike Israetel
Diet versus physical activity measured as real world. Explaining the variance of why people are lean. You take a thousand people, some are really lean, some are really fat, and you try to see what is it that the lean people are doing more than fat people. Other than obviating genetics aside, it's going to be like, yes, lean people are like a bit more physically active. A bit.

And other than the morbidly obese, most people are probably plenty physically active. Here's another thing. If you weigh 240 pounds and you take 6000 steps a day, just because your parking lots always fool it when you come to work, you know how much you burn fucking walking when you weigh 240? It's probably the same as 10,000 from someone who weighs 180. Oh yeah, oh yeah.

100% maybe. Maybe even more than that. And so you look at who's really getting leanest and it's mostly those people eat differently. So diet is just, it's a bigger lever than, it's more direct, 100%. It's like if you were trying to support a country's military to beat another country, and you're like, you get to pick one weapon system and we'll give you the top of the line.

We'll give you logistics, we'll give you support, we'll give you maintenance. Do you want the newest rifle or do you want the newest air superiority fighter? You're like, I'll take the jet, please. The rifle matters, but moot point, okay? Getting onto energy expenditure, cardio.

Chris Williamson
What do people need to know about cardio for fat loss? It sucks. Next question. So cardio is best seen in most cases outside of a sport context because then its cardio for sports, totally different. You do what you have to do cardio is best seen as I need to burn a certain number of calories to get me to that moderate high level.

Mike Israetel
And I have a couple of considerations. One is preference. One is convenience. One is time cost and a few others. And so if you think there's something magical to the stepmill or to driving to the gym and getting on the cycle ergometer or incline walking or something, you're going to be in for a rude awakening, because none of that shit matters.

Just your step count can get you as lean as your dietary adherence and genetics are capable of getting you. Cardio is a way to burn calories. Any kind of physical activity is roughly equivalent for it. You just measure the amount of time that you're doing it. To me, the two big factors that stand out maybe three, sustainability, enjoyment and time cost.

Competing with other activities through the day on these three step tracker and step counting is like a huge deal. I don't want to oversell it, but it kind of fucking wins on all counts. Why? If you have to get 11,000 calories every day as part of your plan, that's what my current amount. 11,000 calories.

Good God. 11,000. That's right. Where's the KFC? 1111 thousand steps a day.

What ends up happening is, can I get on the treadmill and do 11,000 steps? Sure. But also I can talk to Mister Nick Shaw, CEO of RP, and do a business meeting while I'm hands free on my phone and walk around my backyard. I can take a walk with my wife. I can walk the dog.

I can go to the grocery store. I can pace around. I can do every activity of daily living that actually accomplishes something else. And it's always adding to my step count. Right.

Chris Williamson
So the advantage of steps walking is that it is not constraining as many other things that you can do as sitting on a salt bike and doing. Nothing but that, correct? Yeah. And it can actually empower those things. Take two scenarios.

Mike Israetel
One is a person who's doing only pre planned cardio. They're on the elliptical for 30 minutes a day to burn whatever number of calories. And they don't track anything else. They do the elliptical. Their husband comes home late from work and he goes, hey, I gotta run to the store.

Do you want to come? Wife's tired. You go, honey, it's okay. Husband's alone at the store. He sees a woman that's marginally more attractive.

You know the rest. That's it. Divorce, post nup. The elliptical caused my breakup. That's it.

The alternative view is if you're doing step tracking, you can go to the store and not have to worry about how tired you're gonna be from cardio. Because once people checkbox their cardio, the human body, when its under caloric constraint for long, is really, really finicky and cheap and it wants to make sure you dont spend anything else. So once youve done your cardio for the day, you just sit on the couch and you do this. Not ideal, but if you have a step tracker, everything counts. So if your kids are like, mommy, mommy, play with us, youre like, well shit, ill just go over my steps today and tomorrow I can take a bigger break.

Everything you do the steps. Is that how you see your steps? In the same way as you would see calories across a week? Yes, absolutely. Some days you step a bit more, some days a bit less, some days you eat a bit more, some days a bit less.

Chris Williamson
So aggregating that across totally. That's the thing that matters in the end. Now you don't want to get too crazy where you don't move at all. And then you have a day of 40,000 steps. It's unsustainable.

It's the same as the alternate day fasting thing in some ways. Yeah, which some people love, apparently. But if you catch me at 08:00 p.m. of the day, I'm fasting. Don't catch me.

What about but the different impact that intensity of cardio has on the body. I've heard about the afterburn effect. Surely you're not going to get that if you're just lollygagging in zone two as you saunter down the road for 11,000 steps plodding, you walk to a. Chair from your living room couch. You sit down, you're like afterburn.

Mike Israetel
So great question. The afterburn effect, or epoch as its known excess post exercise oxygen consumption, is colloquially one of the most overrated things in exercise science. Its just not that big of a deal. It adds up a little over time. But the way you get crazy epoch is you do like repeat hill sprints or insanely highly damaging whole body lifting workouts.

Then you see a couple dozen, maybe 100 or two extra calories burned over a 24 hours period. But over 100 extra calories burned is already a real big deal. Very unlikely. And so the intensity of the exercise, as far as aggregate ability to burn fat and lose weight, basically doesnt matter. Whats much more of a concern is sustainability.

If you think you have to run, jog for cardio because its intense and its going to burn that fat in a super special way and your knees start to hurt. You stop jogging, there goes your diet plan. But you probably arent going to injure yourself walking or swimming or doing an elliptical. And if you like to do those things, even though they dont occur at 5000 miles an hour, not dunking a basketball for reps or some kind of crazy high intensity shit, its going to burn the same number of calories because the afterburn effect is so small. And if youre lifting weights you get that anyway, its not a thing.

So you made kind of a great point earlier where the sort of diet versus activity, one of those is really much more responsible. How many calories your physical activity burns is so much grander scheme of a thing than how much afterburn it causes, that I just wouldnt really worry about the afterburn much I would worry about is this kind of physical activity schedule something I can do today, tomorrow, next week, next month, if that's the case, that's your shit. And to that end, I would encourage some people who get bored of just walking to do a couple different things. You can do brazilian jiu jitsu, you can do thai boxing, you can do regular boxing, you do zumba class at your gym, you can do swimming, you can do cycling, you can do running, you can do the elliptical, you can walk. Some days, as long as you're getting the calories going some way, it can be as monotonous as you like.

Some people, they do a podcast, they walk around the block 18 times. They love, they want nothing else. That's me. Other people, they need some different stuff. Different is great.

What you don't want to do is do the same thing over and over that you hate, especially if it's high impact and high intensity. Like every time your feet hit the concrete, your knees are like, I hate you, what the fuck are you doing to me? And you're like, well, my knees are gone, but I'm leaner, not sustainable, not good. But if running twice a week is fine, as long as you swim and bike and maybe walk the other days and your total aggregate calories are the same, then you're really in a winning form. It's going to be slightly difficult for some people to work out.

Chris Williamson
Okay, I did 10,000 steps. Doctor Mike said do 10,000 steps and do 10,000 steps. But I just did pickleball for an hour. What's that? Am I counting my steps in pickleball?

I ran, presumably running 10,000 steps burns more calories than walking 10,000 steps. Do I count my steps there? How do you think about factoring in cardio output to compare it comparatively to your 11,000 steps? Yeah, there's two ways to do it I think are good. I'm sure there are others.

Mike Israetel
One is you go onto the one of 5 trillion free online counters that adjust for all these things and you can just get the calories and adjust for almost everything. There are hilarious pictures of back in the seventies and eighties. They did a lot of measurement of calorie expenditure and real world activities. So you got this guy with a full on gas mask with two tubes into an oxygen pack and carbon collection pack, and he's golfing. How many calories do you burn golfing?

Holy shit. You golfing in space? So they've done all that work so you can get all those formulas? No need the formulas. Just type it into an online calculator.

Chris Williamson
I golfed for 4 hours. How many calories did I burn? They'll tell you body weight, blah, blah, blah, you're good to go. That gets annoying. A little bit of a better alternative, probably is to give yourself average daily step goal.

Mike Israetel
And if, you know, you're a person that also likes to do pickleball. I don't know what the fuck that is. Shut up. What is it? I actually don't know what it is.

Chris Williamson
It's like tennis for old people or paddle for poor people. Right? My Wimbledon ranked tennis instructor tells me I don't need to worry about things like that. He only works for me. He stopped playing.

Mike Israetel
He also. No, the massage guy does that. Chris, we run a professional organization here. I was going to say a bunch of jokes that were all going to get us canceled. In any case, let's say you're pretty physically active.

You do some pickup this, you do some pickup that, you walk more, you do this and that. Maybe set your goal at 8000 steps every day. On average, you get 8000 steps. I give an example with my wife. My wife trains multiple times a week in brazilian jiu jitsu.

Hardcore. She's an addict now. Scary, because she's going to kill me sooner or later if I ever turn up dead. She's suspect number one. I want this official in public.

And some days she'll just do her 10,000 steps. Other days she'll do 8000 steps, which is like maybe a minimum for her. And then she'll do jiu jitsu for an hour live, rolling with psychotic, insane people that burns way more calories than just the steps alone. But because she always hits 10,000 a week on average, any extra jujitsu is extra and she loses weight a little faster. If she's tired she'll ease up on the jujitsu and do more technique stuff and not as much live rolling.

So if you're a person that knows you're pretty physically active outside of walking, I'd still do walking and do a tracker and just peg it at eight k or seven k. Thats my average. And I know I work on top of that. But if you are a person who does nothing else, yeah peg your steps at ten or eleven k a day and theres no pickleball anywhere because its not a real sport. I swear to God you made that up trey.

Chris Williamson
Im going to guess as well that having a more consistent number of steps that you take every single day means that you dont need to reset that habit. How many did I do? I did that thing, did carry the three, sort of cross this over. I certainly found that with any diets that were inconsistent, any training plans that were inconsistent, even any productivity days like sometimes on a Monday, coming back after a weekend feels really great because I've taken a little bit of time, then sometimes I'm like, I got to restart the fucking beast a little bit after I had a couple of days where I was chilling out. So I think maintaining consistency in the things that don't fatigue you or ideally rejuvenate you at least a little bit.

That seems to make sense to me. It makes 100% sense. Consistency is an enormous superpower in a fat loss diet because consistency means honoring the plan you chose. And when you lose weight for long enough and get lean enough, every fiber of your being starts to tell you do anything but this. Train less, eat more, reconsider.

Mike Israetel
Maybe you can stop your diet today, you can pick it up next week, no big deal. If the consistency is there and you do more or less similar things every day, every week, just do the thing and the results will happen. What about the role of resistance training during a fat loss protocol? Super resistance training doesn't really help you lose weight. It does in the sense that it burns calories.

But it doesn't burn a crazy amount of calories. It's a good amount, but nothing too insane. Resistance training builds and preserves your muscle tissue. So if I have someone lose 15 pounds over the course of twelve weeks, reasonable for a larger sized person. They don't resistance train at all.

Many of the ozempic studies showed something like this. They'll lose, like, you know, half of that will be muscle. Maybe five pounds will be muscle. Ten pounds will be fat. If you're lucky, you're healthier, you look better, your blood work is better, you feel better.

It's not amazing. If you resistance train, and you've been resistance training consistently already, almost all of that weight loss will be fat, maybe like 13 pounds of it, and only two pounds of lost muscle. And because you keep resistance training, after you regain that two pounds back, like three weeks later, and then, so measured, at three weeks after you finished that twelve week diet, you lost, well, 13 ish pounds of fat and no muscle. Visually, health wise, feeling wise, night and day. Here's a real kicker.

If it's your first time losing fat and you don't train with weights, starting to train with weights, while you start to kind of clean up your diet and lose a little fat, you can gain pounds of muscle while losing pounds of fat. I thought it was impossible to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time. Yeah, a lot of people misinterpret more difficult than average to mean impossible. It's like saying flight is impossible, and then a helicopter goes by like, bullshit. Fuck you guys.

So a really good example of this recently in the media was UFC president Dana White. Dana White had an unreal transformation. His health markers just through the roof. And I think he lost something like a total of maybe 35 pounds on the scale. But because he started taking weight training very seriously during that time, he must have gained anywhere from five to 15 pounds of muscle.

I mean, 15 is a bit extreme, but I'm willing to go five to ten for sure. Just guessing. And that means he actually lost maybe 45 pounds of fat while gaining muscle. So he didnt go from, with all total respect, looking like, geez, is Dana gonna be okay? Not really.

Geez, Danas really enjoying his wealth kind of look. Yeah, it was an opulent weight, my. Mandev, that Caesar type of shit other people feed. The biggest concern is gout. Exactly.

Oh, again, so is this something wine can cure? He could have gone from that with no resistance training to like, oh, Dana white lost weight. And that's nice to hear. But he went from that to like, yo, what the fuck? Dana is Superman.

When the hell is he getting in the octagon? You feel me? That's a big deal. It's a big deal at deep health markers. It's a big deal at how you feel.

Some people feel weaker after a diet because they are, they lost a bunch of muscle. You gain muscle or maintain it through a diet. You feel stronger after a diet and the look. And since I'm on the modern wisdom podcast, I can say this, and it's fit for purpose. How attractive you are to yourself, fuck everybody else matters.

And if you lose exclusively or mostly fat, shit even gains some muscle. During that time, you transform your attractiveness, in most cases, up a bunch of notches. It's a positive feedback cycle for yourself as well. As opposed to going from God I was overweight to, well, I'm not overweight anymore, but I'm not. Perhaps it looks sick.

Chris Williamson
Yeah, emaciated. And look, most people prefer bodies that are smaller and slimmer. That's just a statistical fact. But even more people prefer fit bodies for themselves and definitely for other people. So if you resistance train when you're losing weight, and yes, this is a message to almost all modern women that are in their forties and fifties.

Mike Israetel
Get in the weight room. Lift weights hard. Get a good personal trainer. Download the RP hypertrophy app. Link in bio.

What was I? Did I just say something? And while you clean up your diet, while you lose fat, what you can do is see a completely transformative effect. And no, you will not turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger by accident overnight. I mean, I used to be biologically female and 120 pounds body weight yesterday, and it took one day for me to do this.

Chris Williamson
Dude, that's the. My favorite. Psyop is the one that women give to themselves, which is, if I lift weights, I will become too jacked. Meanwhile, those of us that have desperately been lifting weights for approaching two decades now, in the hopes that one day I might look remotely like I do. Sonic, one will be able to tell I work out at the store.

I'm like, the chance that you're going to wake up one day and become Arne. Given how hard me and all of my friends have worked at doing that, and he's still not achieved it is zero. You don't need to worry. It's real close to zero. It's one of these things where they're doing it at, like, two orders of magnitude less serum testosterone as well.

Mike Israetel
All women are hypogonadal. If you're a female and you show up and you're like, hey, my testicles don't produce testosterone, he's going to do blood work. He's like, oh, my God, you're right. You have almost no testosterone. You're not the candidate for rabid muscle growth.

What's going to happen is you're going to diet down and you're going to look less like you're sick at the end and more like you look healthy and vital and like a little young bebopper. Like, you know, when younger women almost don't walk, they kind of just bounce around that like shit they have. You can have that. It's called muscle mass. It changes the shape of your body.

It does this to your ass, it makes your legs look awesome, it does everything wonderful and it does not turn you into Arnold Schwarzenegger overnight. It's a huge deal. Are there any specifics when it comes to training during a fat loss phase? Resistance wise we did a great breakdown that everyone can go and watch on how to train for muscle growth. Are there any adjustments when you're in a deficit?

For most people, no. If you are at the very end of an insane fat loss phase, if you're a competition bodybuilder, you might want to try to reduce the amount of load you're lifting by a little and increase the repetition just because its the same hypertrophic drive on average, but youre marginally reducing the risk of injury by a tiny little bit. Its also, through some biochemical mechanisms, easier to maintain your muscular endurance and improve it as youre dieting down than it is to maintain or increase your strength. And so that is a very exotic concern for almost everyone. Its just kind of the same resistance training as we talked about in our earlier video all the time.

Chris Williamson
Should people be trying to increase the weight and the reps that they're doing as they go through fat loss? Should they have it in the back of their mind? I might get a bit tired, you know, I'm four weeks in, I'm eight weeks in, I'm twelve weeks in. What about dealing with the mental pain of maybe not being the progress of strength not going in quite the direction? Great question.

Mike Israetel
The hypertrophy app does that for you. Mike, seriously, shut the hell up about your stupid app.

You should anticipate that the rate of progression is going to decline. Maybe you've been really gunning it for a while and adding five pounds to the bar and everything every week. And when you're not adding weight, you might be able to add two reps to the exercise, especially at the tail end of a fat loss phase. Try to aim for adding two and a half pounds to the bar every week and maybe adding a rep every week. Or if you're pretty advanced and things really slow down every other week go up by two and a half pounds or rep and every other week just maintain.

And so instead of trying to gain at a fast rate, you're trying to either gain at a very slow rate, and in the end you win some, you lose some, and you end up maintaining, but you still gotta try to push it. What you don't want to do is start trying less hard to really take it to the teeth when you're in a fat loss phase because the total catabolic, muscle destroying, muscle burning stimulus as high as fuck. Now you got to fight against it by keeping your training volume up, of course, within the ability to recover, which is going to decline. You still have to test your limits a little bit, because if you train easy and your diet really hard for fat loss, you might lose some muscle. Still, if you train as hard as you're capable of, you might lose no muscle and maybe gain a little.

If you train or try to train as hard as you were when you were massing, you'll just overreach and have to deload every third week, and that might not be a fun experience. Abs. How do people get abs? Something you download at the Google Play store. Oh, Abs.

I wouldn't know anything about that. No personal experience. Next question. Abs are one of those 80 20 things, but in this case it's bike 95. Five.

Every single human has abdominal muscles, except for people that are involved in tragic accidents or something like that. And almost always, and almost everywhere, the reason you cant see yours is because your layer of fat on top of them is too much. And theres this term from bodybuilding thats really great. Its abs are made in the kitchen, not the weight room, and not on the cardio machine. And its fucking true.

If you just impose a caloric deficit through moderate activity, good resistance training, you can train your abs or you cannot, it doesnt really matter. And your body fat winnows down to a small amount, youre going to have whatever kind of abs you have shaped down there. Many people have six packs, some even have eight packs. I have like a two and a half pack or some shit like that. Oh God.

But its almost all that calorie deficit just straight up getting lean. I would love to dispel a mega myth. People who have a high level of body fat, who want to find out how to do some exercise or eat some food that's going to give them abs, they ain't none for you. It doesn't exist. It's just the layer of fat that's keeping us from seeing your abs.

Now, if you do get lean enough and find that instead of those like, you know, like hunk romance novel abs where the woman's like grating her face on the guy's abs and he has like a unicorn or whatever. I don't read too many romance novels. You've been featured on a few covers, haven't you? Yeah. Against your will.

Still in a copyright dispute, nasty legal battle.

You may find that instead of having those ravioli abs, you have just kind of like semblance of abs, but they're real flat. The cool thing about that is you have a really small waist, which is sweet aesthetically. Universally considered attractive. Near universally. There's a community of gay folks that are in the hairy bear culture that if you have a gut with abs, you're the fuck.

Chris Williamson
Now we're talking about your market. Yes, yes. Bow to your leader, folks. When I grow my hair out, I can't go around the gay club because I just get just pulled in. In any case, it's cool.

Mike Israetel
It's a cool look to have just kind of like no crazy, crazy abs. But some people are like, damn it, I wanted abs. Abs for those folks. Training aBs works exactly the same way as any other hypertrophy training. We covered that in the last video.

Two to four times a week. Training multiple sets, close to failure. Full range of motion, big stretch, increasing loads and reps over time. The same the planks, the Supermans, all that bullshit, the twists. It does stuff.

But if you want big abs, you just go about it like you would get big calves, big forearms, big shoulders, big anything. Consistent resistance training. Thats the way to get it. And then dont just train abs during your fat loss plan. If in a year from now you want thick abs, start training them now.

The last twelve weeks of that year, youre going to diet away the fat. Then your abs will be eaten good, theyll get real thick and then theyre going to reveal themselves as meaty. But if you just train abs during the fat loss phase, theyll grow a little bit because theyre new to the shit, but its not going to be super impressive. Does training abs make them more visible at higher body fat percentages? Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Chris Williamson
That seems good. That seems like a reason to train them. If you're interested in being at a high body fat percentage. A higher body fat percentage. I'm kidding.

Mike Israetel
I'm being a dick. Totally. But it also gives you more of a pooch kind of look, which you may or may not be into. It's a concern for folks that are is no offense meant on kind of the smaller side of things for them. Maybe that's a cool thing.

For folks that train with weights at your level, below your level, quite a bit through your level, and above the compound exercises and kind of stuff makes your abs so goddamn big to begin with. It's like a drop in the puddle for extra ab training. Like right now, I have ravioli abs. I have abs right now. If I'm relaxed and I have like, I just genetically have like, a gut.

My gut has fucking abs. I have a six pack when I'm relaxed now with the veins in it. And so people are like, what do you do for Abs? I'm like, I don't train abs. They're like, you don't?

No, absolutely not. When I transition away from bodybuilding in a few years to try and become really, really good at Jiu Jitsu, good for my purposes, not anyone else's. I suck in general. Im going to start training abs not for the purpose of having abs, but for the purpose of developing a much stronger anterior chain. The ability to do this because of jujitsu, thats a big deal.

Yeah. Then im going to be training abs. But for now, Abs are just a waste of time for me because theyre absolutely big enough for contest bodybuilding, which is my current pursuit. And I would just be wasting literal time and recovery on training abs. I suppose, just to try and sort of speak to the layperson you are.

Chris Williamson
You've got, what, four shows this year? Four or five shows. The plan is to do about four shows. Okay, so you have four individual days this year with which you're going to be very, very lean, and your abs will be displayed unbelievably well, given the low level of body fat, I'm going to guess that most people like the idea. I know that for most of my twenties, what I wanted was to have abs.

I didn't care about being lean. I don't hold that much weight in my face. I look sort of relatively lean in my arms in any case, so it didn't really matter. They wanted abs. So if training abs allows me to have abs, visible abs, at a slightly higher body fat percentage, I achieve my leanness goal, which was visible abs without having to diet myself down quite so hard.

Mike Israetel
Brilliant. I'm going to say right now, first of all, that works, and I encourage people to do it. Second of all, they should do it. Conventional resistance training approaches, uh, exercises that work, full range of motion lengthened exercises. For example, one of the best ab exercises, and there's tons of them, is the ab wheel, the rollout.

Fucking brutal. And it really tenses your abs at long lengths, which grows them like, crazy. Isometric work for the abs generally. Isn't that great? So I would say if you want that train abs, train them two to four times a week.

Essentially. Train them right. Don't train them as a special group because people say about, like, how do I get my biceps bigger? How do I get my abs bigger? Like, same shit, motherfucker.

But lastly, what I would say is the effect on how visible your abs are versus your body fat is very small. So you're not going to see your abs at 22% body fat. I don't give a shit how big they are. Realistically, they just don't get that big. One, two, maybe 3% body fat difference.

Could there be a visual difference there? Yeah, potentially. But you need years of training your abs to get to that kind of look. Understood. It's the first time that I've trained as consistently as I have over the last, so far this year, like five months and not done any direct ab work and also, not to be honest, been tracking calories all that much.

Chris Williamson
Although I've been on like, a hardcore fucking Fodmap CBO thing. So that's kind of just been built in auto diet. Yeah, precisely. Just boring diet. But I always presumed that lower ab vascularity, like waistband vascularity, was something that came about due to the dieting that I was doing and the ab work that I was doing.

So I'm adamant that that's the case right now. I've got got a shit ton of lower ab vascularity, and I'm like, I'm not dieting that hard. My weight's dropped a little bit, but it's not dropped that much. Where the fuck is this coming from? I was like, oh, I've been training legs, like, very aggressively with quite amount, quite a long, eccentric pause on everything for five months.

And I think that that kind of shows at least as an n of one sure what you were saying. You're bearing down to keep the intra abdominal pressure. That's a lot of ab work right there, and it adds up. One squat or set of squats is not that much ab work. It's an isometric.

Mike Israetel
It's like a superman hold. It's kind of a fucking waste of time. But if you do that, bracing for almost every exercise, five times that you go to the gym, you're training your abs for like 5 hours every week. That adds up. Are there any supplements that offer an edge for fat loss?

The modern anorectics like ozempic and trusepatide? Absolutely. Uh, man, you know, so for some people, various stimulants, caffeine, a couple of other ones, yohimbine, etcetera, they have a marginal effect on reducing appetite, improving mental clarity and focus. If they dont interfere with your sleep, you can take them. The problem with stimulants is that you develop a tolerance to them quite quickly when youre ending the diet, which id love to talk about as far as how to transition out because thats super important.

When youre ending a diet and you have to manage your stimulant use again and you maybe come off of them, you get radical rebound hunger. And just stimulants are just because its. Suppressing your appetite artificially. And so you dont want five monsters every day anymore. Youre like pull out the monsters and youre like dude, brownies instead.

Its tough. Caffeine is like you have a circuit board with a little nail and youre like giant hammer. Its like, oh, it hit all the other stuff. So as far as real supplements that just straight up work for fat loss, they kind of dont exist. If you have the yohimbines and the other things, they can kind of add a little bit to the thing.

Chris Williamson
Its yohimbine. Its like a, its an, its like a stimulant derivative sort of thing. And it has some cool health effects. It burns a little bit of body fat. But this is something that you should write home about.

Mike Israetel
Its this teeny little thing. So bodybuilders will take it. Theyll take ephedra, theyll take other stuff. And it all works. It just works a bit and has quite a few side effects.

And the stuff that doesnt have a ton of side effects generally just doesnt tend to work that much.

Big Pharma won this one. The ultimate supplement to a fat loss diet are the modern, what theyre called really as anorectics. I like to take people away from terming them GLP agonists or GLP ones because it's already not true for trisoprotide and it's glp one plus gip. And for retrotide is glucagon as well. And so anorectic is the general term for drugs that make you less hungry.

Chris Williamson
And that's how they were anorectic, correct? Yeah. And so modern anorectics cause there used to be some back in the day that were also stimulant based, like fen phen, subutrine. That fucked up, fucked up a lot of people. Subutramine was quite healthy, but the regulatory agencies didn't think it was quite as safe as they wanted.

Mike Israetel
It probably was, but they got wigged out about it. It's also, it's a stimulant derivative, so it's got some side effects, dry mouth, et cetera. Uh, the trade name for the drug was meridia. It was a cool drug, not approved for use in the United States. I don't believe it's approved for use in Europe.

Of course, you cavalier Europeans, like, we'll take anything but, um, the modern day anorectics. Currently, the GLP and et cetera group of drugs, they're just fucking good. Now, do they have side effects? Yes. Can they be managed with, with how you do your diethyde?

Almost, almost completely. Are they not for some people, totally. Do they have really tiny downside risks in some cases? Uh, yeah, they do. Uh, every drug has that.

But are they just, as a general rule, insanely effective and make dieting 50 trillion times easier? Yeah. So do fat burners not work? Fat burners work, but they burn just a little bunch of fat and they just make you super anxious and awake at night. Most fat burners are stimulant based.

Non stimulant fat burners are kind of a joke at the current time. And so, yeah, its just like how much caffeine can you cram in an energy drink is most of the question. With fat burners, a pill you can take that doesnt wig you out, that burns fat in enough of a margin that you can tell on a realistic diet is just not around. Okay. Given this relatively easy to follow format that youve explained about how much food youre putting in your face about where you should portion this prioritizing protein, looking at how much exercise that youre doing, tracking steps, trying to keep it consistent, why do so many people fail at diets?

Yeah, its a good question. Geez. I think as weve seen with the anorectic drug trials, semaglutide, trizzeptide, retardotide, other drugs, when you take away, or better put, reduce substantially hunger drive, almost everyone loses a bunch of weight. It's also precisely the reason that we've seen obesity trend up is because there's tons of super palatable, super tasty foods over historical time. If you reverse that, people in the 1950s probably didnt have any more average willpower than people today.

We like to romanticize and think they did probably didnt. And so most people fail diets because evolution designed most of us to fail diets. Its a similar question to if you take a bunch of 22 year old dudes. And you put them into a controlled facility. I don't want to say prison, but a scientific research facility.

And you tell them no wanking. That's what you guys call it in the UK. And you stretch it out for 60 days. You're going to ask a real weird question. How come everyone started wanking after a while?

They failed because evolution designed you. That at some level sex drive is just going to turn you fucking wild and you're going to do the thing. Same idea for diets. I dont think theres a necessary extra level of causal inference we have to make. I think most of the reason people screw up on diets is because food tastes really goddamn good and they get fucking hungry and theyre like fuck this.

Now you can architect your preparation for a diet to try to minimize that being around people in your family and friends group that are at least neutral and hopefully supportive of your diet, versus actively trying to be like, come on, have a french fry. Thats terrible. Getting rid of the junk food in your home and eat out less, or have places you eat out where you know exactly what to order and it works. Part of your diet, a big one, is not having napoleonic goals. If I say to myself, in one month I'm going to lose 30 pounds of fat, I'm almost certainly going to fail.

And it wasn't any crazy explanation other the fact that like I should have made it 15 pounds and made the goal three months. The magnitude of depravity and hunger per any day is now like six times less. And then every day is sustainable. I'm not trying to crash and burn. So a ton of people crash and burn.

Another reason. And it all threads into eventually they just eat junk food and stop. So it's all the core reason, still the tasty food. Another reason is a lot of people, simply a lot of people actually do well with diets. The vast majority of people will lose weight on diets.

The vast majority of those people will regain it back. Why? Because most people don't have a habitual reference intake pattern. A diet they do that allows them to stay healthy and lean and isn't radically different from what they do normally. For example, a lot of the folks that have used RP RP diet coach app, it has you eat three to six meals a day and it portions it out into proteins and healthy carbs and healthy fats.

People will eat it and they'll be like, this is the diet I'm losing to lose fat. Like I'm just going to do it. I don't give a shit how hard it is. But after they're done with it, and this happens even more in our private coaching, they're like, wait, if I just add a bit of junk food to this every now and again, this is a maintenance plan. I know how to eat now.

I know how to put together meals of protein and carbs and healthy fats. I know what I'm doing at the grocery store. I can even eat out in. But I know how to make core good meals. There are a lot of people who fail diets.

Their idea of a diet is cabbage soup and protein shakes. And then when the diet ends, they go back to what? What are their habits? The same shit they used to do. What gets you the same results you used to have, same shit you used to do.

They go back into the world, they start doing taco bell again, they blow up. Do the diet. Diet works. Stop the diet. Diet reverts if you can, from the diet.

Take some healthy habits that aren't just psychotic things you only do on a diethyde. Knowing how to build a meal of a core of protein, healthy protein veggies. Knowing how to time it. Getting into the habit of eating every four or 6 hours. Knowing how to shop at the store, knowing what to order at a restaurant, practicing saying, you know what, I don't want 18 trillion pounds of french fries.

If you do that on a diet, all you need to do is layer in a bit of bullshit and junk food every now and again. And now that's your maintenance. You constrict it a little bit. If you're gaining weight again, you loosen it up. If you lose weight again and then you can for years indefinitely maintain that new healthy, lean you.

But many people who do diets, they never build the habits to begin with, which is one of the reasons why fad dieting is so terrible. This new weird stuff, youre never going to sustain. Listen, heres the thing. Keto Carnivore, great ways to diet. And for many people, like Joe Rogan, a lifestyle awesome.

But for many people, theyre like, im doing keto to lose weight. Okay, so youre just never going to eat a lot of breads because if you told Joe Rogan, for example, like, hey, man, so youre really good with just like having an occasional bread and pasta every few months when youre on business trips with people and otherwise, you just like stick to your elk or whatever. Hes like, yep, I love it. Frank down the street, hes going to be like, well, no, I do the keto diet then ill lose weight. What are you going to do after that?

Frank elk all the time hes like fuck that. Im going to Olive Garden. Guess whos going to come back then? Old fat Frank again. Its the lack of those core abilities to have that habit of good eating and the fad diets do not help that at all.

Chris Williamson
If appetite and hunger are primarily to blame, is there anything that you can do to mitigate or help reduce hunger? Yes, anorectic drugs. Apart from those, theres a bunch of stuff. Eating a diet higher in protein tends to work well. Not going a very long time without food until youre psychotically hungry.

Mike Israetel
You show up to whole foods to buy your groceries for that day or few days and you're like, you ate 2 hours ago, you'll buy all the stuff you need to. You go to whole foods after 6 hours not eating, you're going right to the vegan junk food section and putting whatever the fuck in your cart. So a meal schedule is a really good thing. Having a diet high in fibrous vegetables and really filling foods, tons of veggies, tons of fruits, reducing the overall palatability. I don't mean eating total shit like space gruel that you go to space jail to give you the gruel and the slug always wants more, but you're like, fuck, take mine.

This is awful. Hopefully he's not your roommate, you know, but you're jail cellie, right? And so sometimes just not trying to make your food taste the best it's ever going to taste because some people do this and this is really common, they'll go cam on a diet. I know my macros, I know my calories, I'm going to do it. I'm going to take these minimal macros I have in this meal.

I'm going to try to make it taste as good as possible. I can't use Mayo, but I'm going to sprinkle all this fucking shit on it. That meal just leaves you really hungry afterwards. You look forward to eating it so much it screws up your day entirely. It's kind of counter intuitive, very counterintuitive.

Chris, it's not kind of counterintuitive. It's completely counterintuitive. Your intuition is literally designed for an ancestral evolutionary environment where like tasty shit is a good thing to eat. Cause you're gonna die. Nothing in this world that the ancestral peoples from whom we evolved had ever fucks with a double cheeseburger from McDonald's paradise.

It doesn't taste like anything they've ever seen. Because it's engineered to be the best tasting thing anyone's ever tried. It's an unstoppable thing. Real. You ever see those, like, survival wilderness shows where they kill an animal and they, like, throw it on the grill?

Tastes pretty good. No, it doesn't. You don't have salt on it. Are you out of your mind? You can only eat grilled meat for so long, until it goes or anything else.

So ultra, super tasty food, back away from it a little bit. Another one is make sure you're nice and hydrated, have a little bit of fluid before you start a meal, and it fills up your stomach a bit. Huge hack. It can help some people a little bit. Another one is if you tell yourself, look, I'm at a party, and I'm going to be eating normal people food.

Try to fill up on proteins and veggies first, and then maybe have a cookie or two. But if you go fucking right for the cookies, man, you know, get rid of them. I mean, yeah, sure. Well, if it depends on what game you're playing. If you're.

If your gold coins are calories, shit, you just broke all the level records, right? So stuff like that, these kinds of pieces of advice, they're not revolutionary, but when you're hungry and you're dieting, all of them can help to a considerable degree. I like the sort of strategic, tactical stuff because those are the things I think that people keep in the back of their mind. And also they're small behaviors that you anchor your sense of, your new sense of identity to. Don't forget, I've got to have the.

Chris Williamson
I must drink my 300 water before I sit down to have this meal. Why am I doing this? It's the same reason I have a book of poems, Tim Burton's the Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy, and it sits on the desk next to where I record my podcast. Okay. And just by having that there, it was given to me by my speech coach, and I read a couple of poems before I start the episode because it's whimsical and it's good for vocal diction and precision and stuff like that.

But the main reason is that that is a physical representation of I care about precision in speech, and by having it there, every time that I go into the room, I go, must remember to be precise when I speak. Yes. When you're at a business dinner and everyone's ordering fucking lobster biscuits dipped in french fries or some shit, you're like, hey, what does your filet look like? Can I get some grilled veggies to the table because you give a shit and you have that plan. And eventually you combine giving a shit with having a plan for at least a few weeks, you have habits.

Mike Israetel
You do that another few weeks, you have the beginning of not identity with a capital I, but a lowercase I. I'm a person who gives a shit about my health. I care about what goes into my body. And here's the thing. One of the funny pieces of feedback I get every now and again from like, business people and stuff.

Stuff is like, well, you know, I do a lot of client dinners and I'm like, yes. Like, well, you know, like, I'm drinking alcohol. I'm eating all this stuff. I'm like, if you tell the CEO of Nvidia who you're sitting across from a business dinner, he's like, are you going to have any of the crazy fries or whatever? You're like, actually, I'm trying to clean up my weight and stuff like that.

I'm just going to order a steak and have some veggies. There's no way Jensen Wong is going to be like, pathetic. Guys, clean this up. We're not doing a deal with this guy. Unrealization.

Take your data center and shove it. And he walks off. He's gonna be like, amazing. Good for you. You don't mind what sort of man that I want to be in business with.

Like, at the very least it's neutral. If it's a negative, you know, I'm being business with. Yeah, that's not the sort of person. But it's usually like a cool positive. Now, usually I like to say like, but please order anything you want.

Temptation's not a factor by all. Cause most people be like, oh, God, I was gonna get the pizza, but I don't wanna make you. And they'll do that. Cause they're super. His diet is now my diet somehow.

Exactly. They start feeling guilty. You don't want that kind of energy. So be like, hey, look, you guys order whatever you want. I'm just going to do me.

I promise. I'm having fun. And you say it in a way that hopefully can looks like you're having fun. That's great. Is there anything else that we haven't spoken about from a strategic hack, tactical style perspective where you think, yeah, if I actually rely on that quite a lot.

Chris Williamson
I like that idea of if you're having dinner with somebody else and say, I'm on a diet at the moment, working quite hard at this, I'm going to get myself some meat and veggies, but you're free to get whatever you'd like. Temptation may show on my face, but don't worry, you're not going to break me type thing. That's a charming way to go about delivering a diet. The water beforehand, I think, is great. Actually dialing back the tastiness of your meals and continuing to push that.

Is there anything else from the toolkit that we haven't touched on? There's tons of other stuff, but one thing that I would bring attention to that's really helpful, and this happens with time, is have an arsenal of ideas about what to eat. You don't want to go to the grocery store balls deep into a diet or a business dinner balls deep into a diet. And look at either the groceries in front of you, the aisles and aisles, or the menu as like a child looks at something for the first time. Because you're just going to end up ordering chicken nuggets or just buying pounds of cheese sauce and drinking into the back, crying.

Mike Israetel
My last Tuesday, my coach Jared knows about this. It was a rough conversation. You want to have go tos? When I go to the store, I know where the veggies are, I know where the lean meats are, I know where the grains are, I know what I'm buying. My wife and I, when we go to the store, we go with the shopping list, mostly because we're the kind of anal people that don't do anything without a list, but also on a hardcore diet we know are getting, I.

Chris Williamson
Guess online shopping for this would be the ultimate hack. Amazon just sends you all the shit you need, another shit that you don't, the grocery store stuff, because, man, this shit looks so good. Our kroger in our city in which we live has precisely three full, separate american mega size aisles just of chips. Meno Henselmans was visiting me because her IRL friends and I was like, you gotta see this. He's like, mandy, he sees it.

Mike Israetel
He's like, holy shit. So if I go there without a plan and I'm starving, it's over. You go to a restaurant, it's over. One of our RP coaches, Doctor Jen case, she has a whole list of how to read restaurant foods, and if it's breaded, glazed, blah, blah, she's like, stay away from this. Stay broiled, baked, et cetera.

If you go to a restaurant, you can even go so far as to look at their menu beforehand and be like, what would I choose? If you go to japanese food, sashimi is good. Teriyaki is good. Maybe the ponzu Mayo super roll isn't the best. If you show up in a normal state of, you're just living your best life to a restaurant, it's a beautiful life thing to just look at a menu and being like, what do we have?

You're on a mission. When you're on a diet, don't forget that you show up. You're looking for specific things. And that's a big tip, because if you show up and go, oh, I wonder what I should eat. Oh, man, you might order some good stuff, you might not.

Chris Williamson
Yeah. I've been surprised by how many restaurants will let you kind of just go off piste from it's, well, I don't actually see this on here, but is it possible to get that without the other thing on that? And can we sub such and such for such and such? There are two things to say about that. One is oftentimes, the better the restaurant, the more likely they are to accommodate.

Mike Israetel
If some people are like, well, I'm going to Michelin star place, those people will do whatever the fuck you tell them. They'll be like, oh, yeah, that guy, like, owns Nvidia. Don't modify the caviar. Like, give him whatever the hell he wants. The other thing is, real chefs look at contest bodybuilding food or diet food, and they laugh at how easy it is to make.

This is not. You've just made his job half as hard. He's not like, he's not interested in making that super Alfredo carbonara for the 50th time that day. Sure, he likes it. They're like, hey, no sauce, just noodles.

Some grilled chicken. He's like, did I get this right? You're like, uh huh. He's like, done, no problem. So he oftentimes had inconveniencing people.

Another thing is choosing restaurants to go to that are conducive to selection. Subway burrito places like Chipotle. You can make a bowl or a sandwich with mostly just meats and veggies and a little bit of rice and beans, and you're fucking golden. They ask you, do you want the cheese sauce? You don't have to say yes.

Versus if you go to, like, McDonald's. Yeah, there's a grilled chicken sandwich. But, like, there's just not a lot of mix and match and make your own good stuff. So even the places you go out to eat another one is like, a lot of people in California have those. Like, what's it called?

Like, fast casual asian dining. Like, the broiler, flame broiler, panda Express. A lot of those have like just grilled meats and rice and veggies. Yeah, they got other tastier shit. But if you know they have that, you know what you want, you got a plan, you show up, you get it done, you eat it in the corner, you cry yourself back to your car, and then you're mean.

Chris Williamson
What about people who have a sweet tooth? They're deep into a diet and they're used to finishing off a meal with something that's a little bit of a treat. What would you say to those people? What are some of the hacks that people who have a sweet tooth can use to keep satiated during a fat loss diet? Yes.

Mike Israetel
One of your recent guests, Menno Henselman, just shared an excellent study. Artificial sweetened beverages beat water in a weight loss trial. So that means if you have a diet sprite or five sweet tooth, problem solved. All of your food comes from irregular food. You have a couple sprites with the meal or after youre golden, mission accomplished.

So artificial sweeteners or as theyre technically called, non nutritive sweeteners because some of them are natural like Stevia. Stevia? Stevia. Just like a guy named Steve at the office. You kind of we want to know but not know you know.

And theres monk fruit and other stuff thats totally fine, very low calorie or no calorie. So non nutritive sweeteners. Those are totally great. Theyre safe, theyre effective, theyre awesome. No, on aggregate they dont fuck up your gut microbiome.

The people who dont like artificial sweeteners at this point its just the argument from nature fallacy or aka the naturalistic fallacy just writ large like you are an example. Theres a picture of your face in the dictionary by that shit. At this point just a done deal. So its totally fine to have those in very high amounts. The testing limits are just absurd.

Like you can feed rats half their body weight and aspartame and theyre like, I still got it baby. So they talk though. Thats kind of weird. Is there anything else? Yes.

There are many ways to make tasty things that are sweet that aren't insanely high in calories. You can plant your diet. One of them is fresh fruit. I mean fresh fruit. Peaches, apples, pears, berries.

You can have a bunch of them and realize like oh my God, I actually need double this to get my carbs for the day. Or just a handful of berries after meal if you put it on the food scale, it takes care of the sweet tooth and it's awesome. Look, I'm all about like giving people real talk science shit, trying to motivate a little bit. But I'm not even gonna bullshit anyone or at least try. Are the fucking handful of berries gonna taste like fudge brownie?

Fuck no, they're not, man. Nothing beats real ice cream. I will say, though, two companies come to mind. Enlightened ice cream and halo top. Enlightened was actually started by a friend of Mister Nickshaw and I's.

He's great. Halo top. I know no human at that place, but I eat halo top ice cream all the damn time because it's like a third of the typical calories of a caben and Jerry's pint. And when you're deep into a fat loss diet, that shit tastes good. And it used to taste not so great.

They're getting real good. Have you tried legendary foods? Have you tried that? They do sort of protein pastries, cinnamon rolls. Their pastries are great.

And it's one of those like, here's my big thing. If youre expecting diet foods to taste like real foods, stop. Theyre not gonna. But if you expect them to taste like some kind of chemical, artificial, the aliens in the simulation are like, this is real food, and youre like bullshit. I can taste the difference.

If you expect it to taste like that, its actually quite good nowadays. And heres another thing. If it tastes too icky, you dont really have a sweet tooth, motherfucker. Just skip it and eat your normal food. If youre hungry enough, that shitll taste amazing.

Give that a try. Yeah, I think anything that's got 20 grams of protein in and resembles a cinnamon roll and tastes pretty nice, and you can put it in the microwave for 15 seconds. It's a fucking game changer. I've been really, really impressed with what they've done. It's absolute wizardry of some kind that they've done to make 20 grams of protein and four net grams of carbs.

Chris Williamson
Go fuck yourself. I don't. I don't know what's in it, and I don't want to know. I know it's going in my mouth. Yes.

Mike Israetel
Like everything, most things. Male things, huh? I have a wife. Diet transitions and diet breaks. Can we cover that?

Chris Williamson
Yes. Or am I skipping ahead? Let's go. Now, dieting is dope. Constricting your caloric intake to generate a deficit is the critical way in which you transform your body.

Mike Israetel
But as I said earlier, the vast fraction of people that do diets regain the weight because there's no diet afterwards. After you're done dieting, you have to prepare for the fact that as soon as the diet is over, the next day, your body is still screaming at you that you're starving to death. It's not like finishing a marathon and you get your gold medal and you're like, we're done. And the next day you just go to work. Your body has a memory and it hates you.

Chris Williamson
Like an infuse with any child. That's right. He'll remember even when he's older. So what you have to do is understand that the diet doesn't end when the diet ends. The diet ends when you have finished the weight loss phase and slowly reintegrated back into maintenance.

Mike Israetel
A few weeks later, maybe a few months later, if the diet was hardcore enough, youll feel normal again. So what does that mean? Practically after your diet is over, you already have a rough idea of what your maintenance intake is. Go back up that next week to your maintenance intake, but do it exclusively in the same kinds of foods that you had on the diet. Youre eating brown rice and broccoli and chicken.

Chicken. Thats an example meal you were eating the day after. The diet is not brownies with honey glaze on top. Its more chicken and rice and broccoli or whatever. Youre going to gain a little bit of body water.

Dont freak out. Itll come back down in a few days. Stay on that same diet. Can you have a cheat meal or two? Sure.

Some people think its great. Some people, it just, their eyes get really big and they just want to keep cheating. So I would say save your cheat meal, your pizza with friends for two to three weeks after. So what you have is you finish the diet and then for two to three weeks you eat at your new maintenance, which is way more food than you're eating at the diet. But it's still clean food, quote unquote.

It's that healthy food. It's that low palatability food. After a few weeks, you are going to physically have a hard time eating that food. You're going to look at your fifth meal and you're going to fuck this. Can someone eat this for me?

Now you're not freaking out anymore. Your diet fatigue is way lower. And now, hey, shit, you can go with your friends to have pizza. You'll have four slices. It'll be baller you don't want anymore.

You leave the next day, healthy food again, blah, blah, blah. And you're back to having a few junkie items a week, everything in balance, you're golden. Keep weight training, keep your activity nice and high, keep most of your food nice and healthy. And if you get a little too heavy, dial back the junk. If you get a little too light, dial up the junk or eat more of that healthy food.

Dont just fall off the face of the earth at the end of the diet and just go back to whatever. Thats a big problem. And if you want to diet again to lose more fat, lets say you weigh 200 pounds, you get down to 185, but your real goal weight is like you want to weigh 165. Thats where youre going to look your best for any given length of time you diet. Say its twelve weeks at RP.

Based on our examination of the evidence and are working with hundreds and thousands of clients at this point, we've determined that something like two thirds to one times the length of the previous diet is how long your maintenance phase or slow bulk should be after. If you want to get a little thicker, if not just maintenance phase. So what does that mean? You dieted for twelve weeks. Your next eight weeks should be a diligent attempt at maintenance.

Being aware of the fact, fact that you could regain eating tons of that healthy not so great palatability food and slowly threading it a bit more high palatability food. This is where desserts that are way outside what you would eat on a diet, but still way below what you would normally eat come in really handy. For example, halo top is great. Legendary foods is great. Another one is a frozen yogurt.

You go to do ice cream. Ice cream, bro, that fat level is just going to blow you out. But frozen yogurt, its actually not a ton. It's plenty of calories but not a ton. It fills you up a lot.

Frojo is super dope in that after two or three weeks of healthy food, get some fro. Thats a treat. Amazing. Tons of veggies. Sorry, tons of veggies, tons of fresh fruit mixed with regular yogurt.

Stuff like that goes a long way. Eight weeks later, if you feel good and you could honestly tell yourself, I can do another several months of dieting, I want to do it. Try that thought on for size. It fits. Do it.

You could try that thought on for size and be like pizza. Like if your brains at GPT youre like, hey, do I want a diet? It just returns pizza, youre like shit. Then just maintain for longer until the diet fatigue drops. A huge problem people run into is two things.

One theyll finish the diet and theyll just jump off a cliff and eat pizza on the way down. And then they get fat. And the other one is they'll maintain diligently. I didn't mean the scare quotes for a few weeks and they'd be like, I feel pretty good. Time for another hardcore diet.

They do three weeks of that, they try to eat their own hand, they fall off the wagon, they regain all the weight. So dieting is a phasic process. It is by definition, unsustainable. You diet down for eight to twelve weeks, even six to twelve weeks, and there's no bonus points for twelve. If you're getting kind of crazy at nine weeks, stop the diethyde, maintain for at least six weeks, then diet for seven or eight weeks, maintain for six to eight weeks.

You got some trips coming up, keep maintaining for three months, four months, five months, who cares? You already won. And then later you can take another stab at it. The idea that you have to try to lose all of your weight at once is nonsense and is going to set you up for failure. Doctor Mike Ezra, ladies and gentlemen.

Chris Williamson
Mike, I appreciate you. It's very, very nice to have this evidence based community coming to the forefront. Front yourself. Mano Lane, these guys. It's good.

I really, really like it and I think that you're doing great work. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the things that you need to shill. They should continue to watch your podcast because it's fucking amazing, man. Thank you so much for having me on.

Mike Israetel
If you guys want to learn more about stuff than RP strength YouTube channel, we blab about this incessantly. There's tons of other great creators in the space. The three DMJ folks. Stronger by science Mano Hanselman's Doctor pack, Doctor Milo. These are awesome people.

I've left out a ton. Jeff Nippert, of course, the king of the evidence based community. Um, just get on the Internet, type in evidence based fitness, evidence based dieting, and you're going to get much more good stuff than bad stuff. And if you want to buy stuff, a lot of funnels at the RP YouTube should do their job. But we have the RP diet coach app.

You can download it, you can use it. It's super great. The RPI perch app to get jacked. And, um, I come to Instagram and be my friend. I'm on there, there.

And you'll notice that I have a giant, ugly head. And that's the real me. I appreciate you man. Thank you so much.

Chris Williamson
Thank you so much.

#804 - Dr Mike Israetel - Exercise Scientist's Masterclass On Losing Fat

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Episode Chapters

1: Introduction to Fat Loss

2: Debunking Diet Myths

3: Practical Dieting Strategies

4: Long-term Diet Management

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