Transcription
What are the biggest nutrition mistakes people make while dieting?
But before you answer, can I explain why I think it's a harder question to answer? Go now. Go ahead.
It's cuz like nutrition when it comes to training mistakes that concerns a circumscribed class of people. We're already talking about people who are lifting weights, whereas, oh, yeah. The nutrition mistakes question concerns a broader class of people because that encompasses not just lifters but also non-lifters, and they could on average be making different or worse mistakes, you know.
So, I bring that up just cuz if we start rambling about all the things lifters are doing wrong from a nutrition standpoint, sure, then that's not going to be very helpful for the general population who might be making different mistakes. And likewise, if we focus on gen pop, sure, it's not going to be so helpful to lift.
So, yeah. Either way, and I mean, I mean, yes, in as much as obviously lifters do make mistakes in dieting, I dare say it's a subculture. Well, the mistakes tend to be different when they, yeah. Right. Like there are certain things that are so endemic to the lifting subculture that there are problems that would be extremely rare to see that you might see or you do see damn near universally outside of it. Mainly to do with protein intake.
It is rare. Rare indeed. Even getting away from the quibble about, you know, the protein debates. Yeah. You're simply not gonna find a lifter dieting on extremely low protein things. Yeah, it just doesn't, I mean, it rarely. It would be such, yeah, there are some lifters who do total fasting and we can talk about that later, but there's people that do lots of stupid, and that's among that, that being one of them. But by and large, you just that pro, that at least that singular problem doesn't tend to occur very often. Whereas in gen pop, it's more likely than not. Not universal because at least some, just undering protein. Yeah. Some minor niches of gen pop dieting have at least figured that out. That's, I mean, 30 years ago I would have said it was universal. Now there are at least some nutrition cults that are better about it that would app, that would appeal to general.
So that that would be one. So like, okay, so lifters, what, you know, what would the major mistakes make be? I think if there's one and this that that I see often enough, there is still unfortunately an idea that like it, it's a missing the forest for the trees question that usually shows up on forums or Facebook, my Facebook group or whatever, in the following context. "Hi, I'm trying to lose body fat. I am currently, now just take your pick from which one of these I'm going to list. I am currently eating clean, eating six meals per day, eating paleo, eating keto, eating zone, eating this, eating that, eating the other, and I'm not losing any body fat. What am I doing wrong? Also, I'm lifting this and I'm doing x amount of cardio and I'm taking this supplement." You provided every piece of information except what matters, which is your body weight, your body fat, your activity, your calories, and your protein. Because none of that matters. Not clean eating, not six meals per day, not intermittent fasting, not paleo, not keto, not none of that. None of that matters without these, without this data. And they go, "Well, I'm not counting my calories." Well, that's why you're not losing fat because you can eat six meals a day. You can eat clean. You can eat any way you want. And if you're not in a deficit, I saw this real. Some RD is like, "Here's why you're not losing fat even though you're eating high protein and lifting." And he was like, "Because you're choosing nuts as a protein source, because this, because that." And I said, "You listed everything except the one thing that matters. You're not in a deficit. You're not training intentionally enough. The weight training doesn't matter. You mentioned every possible explanation except the one that does. They're not in a deficit. Why are you focusing on irrelevancies? Not lifting to fail is not what's preventing you from losing fat. It's because you're not in a deficit. Period."
And that's probably the glo people have gotten this idea frequently that, oh, as long as you eat six meals a day, as long as you eat clean, long as you eat low fat, that was the 80s. As long as you eat low carb, that's keto. As long as you eat paleo, as long as you eat this. How much do you weigh? How much, what's your activity? How many calories? That's it. Even protein is only relevant in as much as muscle loss. The only requirement for fat loss. The only biological requirement is a sustained deficit. That's it. That's it. One factor. Protein is important to prevent muscle loss. Resistance training is also important. Those are training factors. If you're done with the commonalities, all diets that work that generate some amount of weight or fat loss. Sustained deficit. That's it. Nothing else matters outside of its ability to either create or not create that and sustain or not sustain that for the individual. Period.
It's like the training thing. I wrote this ranty piece in my Facebook group. I was like, you're getting lost in the details instead of focusing on the commonalities. The eight sets thing, two versus four exercise versus this. None of that matters. Does it hit the target muscle? Are you progressive? You add weight to the bar. None of the rest of that [ __ ] matters outside of what you, what works for you and what you can adhere to. For diet, it's even easier. Does it create a sustained deficit? Period. Does this provide enough protein? Cool. Resistance training, great. All the other stuff doesn't matter outside of adherence and context. Time-restricted eating lets you adhere better, cool. It causes you to binge, uncool. That's it. So that's the big place people still make the mistakes. They think that the minor, the details somehow replace the fundamental because they're like, "I don't know how much I'm eating." Well, that's why you're not losing fat. Go figure it out and then come back because, period, you're eating more than you think because otherwise you'd be losing fat. The end. And then they usually get mean and they get madly. So, which is fine. That's it. So that's the big one I think that I do still occasionally see among lifters in context.
Now tell me about general population.
Gen pop, I think you run into a lot of other pro. Now, that is one of them, certainly, but that's because, just like overfixating on minutia. No, it's not even overfixating on minutia. It's thinking that doing one thing is all that it is required, but also believing that calories don't matter because that's what they've been told by stupid diet books. Right? Every diet book is literally the same. Chapter one, your fat is not your fault. Here is why this one thing that you're eating is causing you, and take your pick. Carbs, fats, flour and sugar, seed oils. The best books, hilarious books. I, I'd never been able to find it again. The guy had been sitting in a restaurant and noticed that people who were overweight were all drinking ice cold drinks and people that were thin weren't. So, he came to the conclusion that ice cold drinks were what caused people to gain weight. I don't remember the logic beyond that, but it was one of the most amazing things I've ever read because it was beyond stupid.
So, chapter one, the insulins, the fats, the carbs, whatever it is. Then it's a bunch of [ __ ] to sell you on the diet telling you, "But but cutting calories doesn't work. Strictening restricted calorie diets always fail. We're going to give you a diet you can eat as much as you want and lose weight because we've eliminated the X factor." And then they trick you into eating less. That's it. That's every diet book that's ever been written. Doesn't matter. They will tell you that calories don't count and then trick you into eating less. Period. Because invariably whatever they're eliminating contributes a large number of calories to the diet. They were writing about that even with Atkins, with all of his metabolic magic. Um, forget the researcher's name now. At the time, carbs made up like 70% of the modern diet. If you cut all of those out, you will eat less. It's that there's no more magic.
Yeah. When you reduce dietary fat to very low levels, at least for a while, you eat less and you lose fat. Period. If you say you can't eat sugar, that eliminates most hyperpalatable foods and people eat less. That's it. There is no magic. Now, on the one hand, I don't necessarily disagree with this approach, right? As soon as you tell people you have to restrict your food intake, it causes psychological cause. If you can trick someone into eating less without realizing it, I'm all for it. Right? Time-restricted eating, formerly intermittent fasting. And it's not, it's not considered fasting really. Time-restricted eating sometimes does cause people to lose weight. Why? Because they eat less because with less time to eat, they may eat less food. Except when they don't, then they eat more food, which happens as often as not, right? A standard keto diet, higher in protein, which is good, restricts dietary carbs, which is where most people overeat. By by definition, that means the carb, fat, sweets are off limits. And they work until they came out with all those high-fat, high-calorie keto foods, and it stopped working because keto candy has just as many calories as a regular stuff. Paleo diet eliminates all processed foods. Well, that's where most of your calories come from until they had paleo protein bars, you know, like Paleo Man used to hunt that have worse macros than a metric bar because they're low in protein and high in carbs and fat because it's just nuts and seeds and [ __ ] right? It works until it doesn't.
So, I'm not fundamentally opposed to a diet that gets people to eat less without being aware of it. The problem is that once they've been told that the calories don't matter, when they plateau, you cannot fix it. You can go to any keto forum that exists because I used to. And people are like, "I've stalled for six months." And you go, "Well, how much are you eating?" "No, no, no. Calories don't count." So, okay. And they're like, "Is it the dairy? Is it? You should do a fat fast. Eat the fat bomb." All this other nonsensical crap. You go, "No, because you're eating too much." Because what's happened is as your energy expenditure went down and your appetite went up, you started unconsciously eating more and/or you started eating all this Atkins pre-made food and you come back into energy balance. Hell, the GLPs are the same way. Look at the weight loss curves on the GLP drugs. Everything happens in the first 20 weeks and then it's crap for the next 48 because these people are not tracking their calories. They're not tracking their food. As they're getting lighter and their hunger is coming up, their food intake, their food intake is unconsciously increasing unless they deliberately track it. Why people I know that have done RFL with a GLP1, their weight loss curve is a straight line because they're tracking calories. When you go to these keto forums or paleo or whatever cult it is, they look, "Calories matter." "No, it doesn't." "No, but you're not losing any weight." "Oh, it's probably the insulins or the dairy or this or that or the other." Or well, no, it's because you're eating too much, but they won't believe it. And that's the danger with those approaches is is that misunderstanding because it's impossible. And you just, and I, people will still argue this crap. And I go, "Well, let's just look at the facts. Anyone who has successfully lost body fat has created a sustained deficit over time. And anyone who has not has not. Argument over." Everything else is horshit. Every diet that's ever been tested in a deficit will cause fat loss. Period. There is huge individual variability. That's a different topic. Any diet that doesn't create a deficit will not cause fat loss. The end. No other argument exists because in the real world, that's how it works. Everything else. But you can't convince them of that. So that's a big problem with many popular diets. Probably number two.
Well, there are what I would call in the gem, in gen pop, although this has translated to some of the stupidity in the fitness industry, are just, it's what I would just call toxic dieting. There are so many idiotic, the broth diet and macab, like just there's nothing too dumb that has not that it just all it's doing is cycling water and poo off, right? There's a million diets like that. Like I love it. I get because it, it amuses me and B, it keeps my blood pressure up. Like in the US, when you go to checkouts, they have these like, like Women's World and Women's Magazine and every cover of everyone, "Lose 26 pounds in two weeks." I'm like, "Oh, I gotta read this. Maybe they've got the secret. I want to know." And it's always just the dumbest stuff. It's like, "Harvard University finds nutrient resets thyroid." Just always gibberish, but I got to read it because I got to know. Maybe, maybe they found the keys to the kingdom. But there's so much stuff like that that almost by, I mean, by definition, even if it causes some amount of weight loss, weight including water, poo, glycogen, maybe a little fat, and probably a good bit of muscle, like it is by definition unsustainable and it always causes a rebound because they're just dumb. There's a lot of approaches like that.
But then probably the, the biggest one you see in gen pop, more so among women than men, is insufficient protein intake. Men, it's usually not a problem. Men love keto diets. "I can diet on bacon and burgers." Oh, hell yeah. Right. They are, they are all about that life. It's changed in the modern era. Like again, everyone listen this, I'm old as [ __ ] and realize that I'm partially this reflects dieting culture 10, 20, 30 years ago, but it's still a problem in gen pop frequently. Women just don't want to eat protein. Some of this is biological. There are, there are sex-based differences in food preference. Some of it is absolutely cultural, but frequently getting them to eat fish and protein, like they live on either carbs, carbs and fats, getting them. Now, there are exceptions, right? That is one advantage when you start to look at like all the keto versus non-keto studies. We're like, "Oh, keto showed better results because it's keto." No, it showed better results because the protein intake was 50% higher because a ketogenic diet or a paleo diet or god forbid a carnivore diet, it will ensure sufficient protein if it does nothing else. I will give it credit for that. It will almost ensure sufficient or at least better protein intakes compared. But to me, that's not an argument of keto versus high carb. That's an argument for you can eat sufficient protein intake on a carb-based diet, too. Right? That's the thing the keto cultism is. It's not like they're mutually exclusive because when you do those studies and control protein intake, you don't see the benefit, right? That is an ad lib thing, which is not a bad thing.
So those are, you know, and like, yeah, fine, we could probably, you know, ah, you know, they, the crash diet and too low calories, you know, what that's really not a problem and the studies always show that actually results are better with faster weight loss, so get bent. There was a paper a couple years ago that basic literally was titled, uh, "Slow and Steady Does Not Win the Race." They used a much faster weight loss rate. Not only were they better off in the short term, they maintained more in the long term. The idea that that slow and steady weight loss is superior.
Could there be a bit of survivorship bias going on there?
I don't think so. It's indicative of just, you know, more effective dieters in general, the ones who can survive that. At any st, like strictly controlled diets to generate different weight losses, right? And over the short term they lost more and over the long term they kept more off. So because earlier studies were more observational and it is absolutely, like, maybe, maybe the people who lose earlier are more likely to be successful, but this was literally, they set them up on diets to generate specific rates of weight loss and they saw the same benefits and they were like, and for there are various potential mechanisms behind this, including behavior change, breaking conditions, food Q habits, all this other stuff, but long term they still, because they, the Yel's idea was like, "Oh, if you lose it faster, you're more likely to rebound faster." Nope, didn't happen. They were still way, like all three groups regained some weight, but they regained about the same amount a year later, and the rapid fat loss, weight loss group was still way ahead. So, that's not the problem per se, except the way most people do it is a problem per se. Like, this was a food-based diet. When people do, you know, all liquids or over here we had Slim Fast, it was like two shakes and then one real meal, like at the same time. There's research that meal replacement powders do facilitate both weight loss and long-term maintenance because it gives you control, but it's always in conjunction with real food. When people do all liquids or they do, you know, prepackaged foods or whatever, they don't learn how to eat. And there's a lot of diet, which is fine if all you want to do is make short-term changes, but if assuming long-term maintenance is the goal, any diet has to fundamentally A, have an exit strategy, but B, teach you, it has to give you the opportunity to change habits. That's why rapid fat loss, even though most of the the PSFMF studies tended to use liquid nutrition, I advocate against for most people because, yeah, brain control, perfect calorie control. It doesn't teach you how to eat. You need, you need, pardon me, you need an exit strategy and that means learning how to eat real food. Um, RFL Mike has no TAM availed on my website. I mean, we did, we talked about that in the podcast. The description, that I have, I have relaxed that a little bit in recent years. I know people that do like a two-week RFL mini cut who have very well-established eating habits. They will do liquids only, but they have eating habits to return to.
Yeah. I also allow now, like if you got a really large protein requirement and don't want to eat all the meat in the world, you can use protein powder to supple. That's what I do. Like, I'm using, I did an RFL 52 diet for a while and I'm using some RFL days for maintenance right now. I just can only eat so much chicken breast in one sitting or so much canned chicken. So I'll have that and then like a protein drink with it, but it's never in lieu of food. It's always to, so like they have their place, but all liquid diets for average, for the average person doesn't teach them any long-term habit they can return to. So at some point.
Yeah, unless you actually enjoy and. But nobody's gonna do that. Nobody's gonna do that. Majority liquid diet, I mean. Brian Hock once tried to convince me that what grocery stores needed was containers of carbohydrate powder, protein powder, and fat powder. And I'm like, "What for? You and the other six people that eat like a crazy person?" Like, dude, are you out of your mind? Do you think the average, any normal human being is going to just go mix up their ghoul? One of the dumbest things about love that guy, dude. But dude, come on. You and the other six people that eat like that. Like, yeah, I mean, like whatever. Like I think in terms of macros, right? Like food, like. Just, yeah, it's just sustenance for the most part, but normally human beings. So like I say, pri, those are the big ones which are just like picking dietary approaches that are so absurd that they couldn't possibly work. Insufficient protein, which I think is again, generally more women than men on a like on average. There are exceptions. I've, it's funny, the consultations I get and this is very, a lot of selection bias. It's almost never do the consultations with women I do, they never are not getting enough protein, but that's because they're already involved in this silly subculture.
Yeah. Whereas I've had the occasional, "Dude, it's like, yeah, I only get like 50 or 60 grams of protein a day." What are you doing? That's a meal. Get it together, dude. Seriously, dude. Come on. Give me a break. This is stupid. So, so but again, gen pop, I think there's still this general idea, you know, ah, protein is bad and protein makes you bulky and protein makes you fat and protein does this. It's like, no, protein is the best. It controls hunger and controls blood sugar and hell, layman was writing about that 20 years ago about how dairy proteins were just like absolutely, you know, the bee's knees for fat loss dieting and higher pro, he's right about higher protein intakes even back, even for gen pop. And the critical, there was also during the calcium days, there's an entire book, it's like, ah, the key to fat loss, increase your dairy calcium, that's all it takes. And it was 150 pages of dairy recipes. I [ __ ] you not. Can't make it up, folks.
Damn, yeah. There's nothing too stupid to make a diet book out of. But make someone eat less and get enough protein, it'll work for a till it doesn't. Once they come, come into unconscious calorie balance, it'll quit working. But as long as it fulfills those two things, it'll work. And if it does, it won't work.
And this was the point of this article that I wrote, this article, this piece that I wrote on my website because I was on the Facebook group was just like, focus on the fundamentals. If the diet tells you calories don't count, it's stupid, although it's going to trick you into eating less. So generally, the Zone by Barry Sears. No. How it ever got traction is beyond me because it was really complicated. So basically, I mean, I'll give him credit. He was one of the first to really start talking about body composition, which in the early 90s was pretty novel, but he also was big on setting protein intake based on activity level. So like, I'm not faulting him. And his idea was that the carb to fat ratio, there was a magic ratio and he wrapped it up in this utter BS about eicosanoid production. Now, eicosanoids are very short-lived chemical messengers made from fatty acids. And this thing was just the biggest line of BS you've ever heard. Entire papers were written criticizing this gibberish and how saturated and monounsaturated omega-6 and omega-3 had different effects and one eicosanoid was good and one was bad and we had to shift this ratio and blah blah blah. It was just a total load of BS. Although I will say someone at the Barry Sears hotline, probably Barry Sears himself, told me my body fat over the phone and that was impressive. Huh?
Because I called. Based on what? Well, I told him I said, "Look, I've got these two different measurements." And I'm like, "One says I'm at 10 and one says I'm at 20." He goes, "You're probably at 15." I mean, all I did was split the middle. But I was super impressed that he was able to tell me my body fat percentage by my voice. I was very impressed by that.
Did you have the voice of a 15% body fat person?
Apparently, though. So, um, because I think the Zone book actually came with those cheap ass little single spot calipers. Oh, right. Now, and the whole thing was like, oh, calories don't matter. Restricted calorie diets. It was this block system. So, like you had your protein blocks based on one block of protein was four grams or whatever, 100 or whatever it was. And then you set your carb and fat blocks relative to that to maintain the magic ratios. And this would generate the magic eicosanoid balance and then that would unlock the fat atm because reasons. I'm, I think it also is where the early insulin glucagon ratio, it was whatever, but at the end of the day, it's just a low-calorie diet. And I got into this raging argument, I know that will surprise everyone listening, that I argued with some Zone cultist and I'm like, "This is just a low-calorie diet, guys." Like, "No, it's not." I go, "Let's do the math." Here's my hypothetical male female der. Here's their, I mean, I, I'm setting it up. This is exactly like in the book. Here's their protein blocks. Here's their carb blocks. Here's their fat blocks. The guy is at 1,200 calories a day. The woman is at 900. It's nothing but a low-calorie diet. Period. And I forget what the end result of that was, but that was it. It was a bunch. It was a low-calorie diet wrapped up in a bunch of BS to sell people on it and to get people to buy in, which is fine. Buy in is critical. Make no mistake. But as soon as the calories stopped working, as soon as we started getting the Zone bars and the Zone protein drinks and all the high-calorie Zone friendly stuff, the diet stopped. They had keto jelly beans, low carb jelly beans in the 1990s. They had just as many calories, if not more, than the real thing. But they were keto. They were low carb. All that mattered was carbs. So that's, that's what happens with the prick them into eating less without thinking they're without realizing they're doing it approach. And that fails a lot.