The art of maintaining leanness ft. Lyle McDonald

Um, okay. So the diet break, again, is just, think of it as, you know, eating at maintenance for longer periods of time. I originally wrote about this in a weird little study by Wing, who's been in the field for decades, R.R. Wing. And what they were trying to study was, why do people, what happens when people fall off their diet? Right? They weren't looking at metabolic stuff.

And so what they did is they put folks, I think it was either on two weeks of an extreme diet or six weeks in extreme diet, and then they told them, "Okay, we want you to take two weeks and go off your diet." And what they were hoping to find out is, what happens? How much weight do they gain? How much does their eating go up? What changes? Because this is supposed to be a model of what happens when people quit dieting. And they completely failed to find what they were looking for because the grand majority of the subjects didn't gain a lot of weight, didn't have trouble returning to their diet when their break was over.

So the study completely failed, but to me, found a more, a more interesting observation. And that has to do with control. Right? The way most people break their diet, whether acutely, whether in the long term, is they've been dieting for some period of time and then they, quote unquote, "cheat." So I don't like using cheat meals or cheat days. There's no positive connotation of cheating. The industry needs to stop. It's a free meal or a maintenance day or a refeed for an athlete. Because cheating is always negative. And this whole, uh, binary good, bad, black, white, moral, this, this stuff has to go away. Eating food is never, should not be considered cheating. Or a negative. You cheat on your wife, you cheat on your taxes, you cheat on, uh, on your test, cheating on your, um, well, anyway.

So whatever they break their diet, they get wrecked. "Oh, I've screwed it up. I'm a failure. Screw this diet." And they fall off the wagon. Same thing long term. Suddenly life gets in the way for whatever reason, they stop adhering. Two weeks go by. "Screw it. Given up all my progress." And they quit. That's what we wanted to study. That's not what they found.

And what I think happened is, when a researcher in a lab coat tells you to do something, might as well be the word of God because that's how people think of scientists frequently. I think it was very different for the subjects to go into this. To in there, I think psychologically, this wasn't them breaking their diet. This was part of the study. This was them being told consciously to do this by choice. And there is a huge difference in that. There's a huge difference in choosing to eat at maintenance and overeating because you, and feeling like you're a failure. And that's what I originally wrote about. I was like, "Okay, cool. I think this is a big part of it. I think planning to eat at man, again, the ICR data, same thing. It's not your maintenance day. It's you couldn't stick to your diet. That's just what you do every three or four days." And they don't find people by and large overeating. It's just, just eat normally. They don't tell them to overfeed. They don't tell them to refeed. They don't use the terms we use for athletes. And some to overeat carbs, just eat normally. And they do.

And I think that has to, I think there's a way of parsing this psychologically and semantically for people that does. So anyway, that was the Wing study. Found I wrote about it. And of course, there was also, okay, you've been dieting, leptin is down, adaptive component of metabolic rate, training intensity and quality is probably down because training eventually goes to crap when you diet for too long. We know that. NEAT goes down frequently when you diet. Like all these adaptations. Well, when you bring calories up to maintenance, you at least normalize those, right?

And one thing we also know, there's a funny paper. The title was funny. And it said, "The Illusion of the Adaptive, The Illusion of Metabolic Rate Slowdown." Because a lot of the early measurements of that adaptive component of metabolic rate, like that that increased drop, that's not predicted by body weight, was always made when the subjects were still actively dieting. And it was fairly large. What you found is that when you brought them to weight maintenance and brought their calories up, it mostly went away. In this particular study that used the word illusion, the difference when they were, the the decrease in resting metabolic rate when they were at maintenance was 38 calories below predicted. It's nothing. And, and in others, from again, from memory, it's been a long time since I've read this stuff and I'm old, my memory is failing. It, it's pretty significant when people are dieting. And when they go off, like that, the reduction in resting metabolic rate is almost insane. Again, in overweight individuals, it's like 50 to 100 calories. It's just not that big of a deal. And it's never really like been super explanatory in terms of weight regain. That's probably an appetite thing, right? We know that appetite is being overdriven at the end of a diet. I mean, it, but an energy expenditure thing or resting metabolic rate, it's just not there.

So by, by bringing calories up to maintenance for that seven to fourteen day period, presumably that would reverse many of those adaptations or at least normalize them again, let you train a little bit harder, regain less muscle, yada yada yada yada. Also gives you that psychological break. And we'll come back to the behavioral stuff, right, towards the end. And then you start dieting again. Now, the debate then becomes, well, don't you just go right back into the crapper? Well, we have a little data on that. What is it? The Matador study? Is that what it's called? Yeah, which I'll get to, right? Maybe.

But again, if we're kind of going from a logical, you know, the lower leptin gets, and eventually in lean individuals, lean men, leptin is untraceable below 10% body fat, not untraceable, undetectable below 10% body fat, right? It is essentially, it's as close to zero as you're going to get. At higher body fat levels, it's higher. We know that at the extreme levels of body fat, leptin can be so high that you see almost no metabolic adaptation because it's above this presumed saturation threshold for the brain. If you look at a lot of studies in very, very overfat individuals, the initial stages of the diet, there's essentially no adaptive component. And then once they clear a certain leptin level, which is about 25, I want to say nanograms per deciliter, don't swear me to that, then you start to see the adaptate. Because above that level, their brains are like, "Huh, we're fine. We're not starving." Because you've got a ton of body fat left and still the signal's still there. And anywhere in between those extremes. So like, if we speculatively assume that there's some critical leptin threshold, well, if you've been dieting for six weeks, leptin's been below that level for three of them, and you go back to maintenance and leptin comes up very significantly without regaining body fat, it'll take some period of time before it gets back below that. It should at least give you some period of time where you are in a metabolically superior place in terms of your, the metabolic adaptations being lessened. Again, you can never reverse them without getting completely fat again. This is the unfortunate reality.

An injectable leptin never made it out of out of the clinic except for amenorrhea, and it's like a thousand bucks a day, or was last time I looked. Yeah, actually, that's why I wanted to ask, sorry to interrupt, but, uh, is, is that not something that pro bodybuilders are able to use for their contests? I don't know. You know, that's, I'm not really too tied into that. And premise, if they could, it would be the most fantastic diet drug ever. Because if you look at what pro bodybuilders are doing with their drug stacks, what they are trying to do is replace everything that goes kerflooey, which that's a technical physiological term, on a diet, right? Testosterone drops, SHBG, just sex hormone binding globulin goes up, cortisol goes up, T3 goes down, HGH goes down, IGF-1 goes down, appetite goes up, metabolic rate drops. I think that covers that. So what do they take? Steroids replace the testosterone, thyroid to replace the thyroid, clenbuterol, ephedrine, or DNP if they're, you know, brave enough to raise metabolic rate, injectable growth hormone, they can afford it, injectable IGF-1, their cortisol blockers, their appetite suppressants. That's pro bodybuilding. Or as one pro I heard say once, "There are no magic diets. Starve for as long as you can and buy as many drugs as you can afford." That's pro bodybuilding dieting, folks, in a nutshell.

Leptin controls literally all of this. Leptin controls LH and FSH release, testosterone. Leptin inhibits CRH. When leptin goes down, CRH goes up, cortisol goes up. I don't know if leptin controls sex hormone binding globulin. I don't think so. That's an insulin thing. Leptin controls, uh, appetite in an enormous way, along partly in and of itself. There are other hormones, obviously, ghrelin, CCK, PYY, all that other crap that they're finding. But, but leptin sets the brain's tone to those hormones. When leptin's low, ghrelin sends a stronger signal, PYY and CCK send a weaker signal. So leptin helps control appetite. Leptin will, uh, keep energy expenditure from dropping as much. Leptin's probably involved in, I mean, leptin, the way the way I described it once is, you know, when people buy like crappy cars, this might be a US thing, people will buy low-end cars and then they will trick them out. They'll put a spoiler, an air dam, a special kind of muffler. This, they're addressing the peripheral things. When what they need is to put a better motor in it. Using leptin would solve the problem centrally and solve these peripheral issues.

To the majority, to my knowledge, the only thing it's been clinically approved for is lipodystrophy. It's a complete loss of body fat. And they found that in a very few people. Well, no, congenital leptin deficiency, there's like 11 people that have been found. You're not one of them. Lipodystrophy, I believe. And then they have at least tested it for menstrual cycle dysfunction in women. But I don't know how, I don't think it really made it out of the clinical setting because it didn't work the way people want obesity drugs to work, right? They wanted leptin to cause fat loss. Leptin does not cause fat loss for the most part. Leptin keeps the diet working and or reverses the adaptations to dieting. The last time I looked, it was either $500 or possibly more than that dollars per day. Don't swear me to this. For all I know, somebody can get access. For all I know, people are using it. I doubt it. Not that I would hear or know about it. I'm just not tied into that world. Um, it would be the most fantastic dieting physique dieting drug ever because it would fix all the problems centrally. But you can't take it orally. They did look at it, a nasal, nasal leptin for a while. You can actually snort it. That never, you can do the same thing with insulin and it has affected the brain. That never, nothing ever came of that.

The only thing we ever had, and that's why I was so focused on it, to raise leptin to even a better level, not even a pre-diet level, was raising calories. And that was what was driving the refeed, full diet break concept. So in that sense, I do think if you look, start looking at what limited data is out there. So one of the first studies I think that's really interesting in this regards is that famous Navy SEAL study from many, many years ago that you might have read. And basically, they looked at, is it Navy SEALs? It might have been Army Rangers, especially on military special forces who go through hell. They were four hours of sleep, hours of forced activity, carrying a heavy pack on ludicrously low calories, which is common in special forces units. Like that's what happens when they're out in the field. And over the span of like six weeks, the men reached the lower limits of body fat percentage. Their testosterone levels were castrate, thyroid was tanked, cortisol was elevated. I mean, all the adaptations you'd expect. This is what happens in natural bodybuilders, right? This is why pros can do different things than naturals. Natural male bodybuilder dieting down, by the time he's contest lean or even before that, his testosterone levels will be hypogonadal, leading to my amusing observation that guys want to diet till they get, they think guys think that getting super lean will get them, help them get chicks. But even if it does, nothing works. Um, they don't have a sex drive to begin with. And even if they did, they can't, they can't function. In pros, they're replacing it all. A pro at 5% body fat probably has super physiological hormone levels because they're all coming out of, out of the drug use. So that's what they saw in these men.

What they then did was brought calories to maintenance, even with like the activity increase. Or sorry, the activity stayed the same. And this is important because without getting too deep into the weeds, that energy availability thing I talked about, there's always some debate. Is it the activity? Is it the food intake? Is it the combination? Like, which is it? And what Ann Luke's really showed was how much activity someone is doing doesn't make much of a difference. It's a matter of if they're consuming enough calories to cover that activity, right? So if you're doing 18 hours a day of activity, please don't do that. As long as you're eating enough, the body will be, you will hormonally be fine, assuming you could eat enough anyway. The military study then raised calories for seven days while maintaining this ludicrous activity, brought calories up to their, their current maintenance. Within seven days, all of these hormonal changes were reversed. Which also supports the idea that it's, it's the imbalance between calorie intake and activity, not rather than if you're doing zero activity, you don't eat as much and your energy availability may be fine. During high activity and eating enough, your energy availability may be fine. Surgical energy availability is not calorie deficit. And that's a key distinction. It's not calories in versus calories out. It's calories in minus exercise, which is how many calories are left over for the, the rest of the body. So that's at least proof of concept. All right, if we raise calories to seven, even for seven days, everything will normalize. I always included the second week because there's other factors, thyroid, T3, there's gene expression. I think to get the full metabolic effects, you probably need a little bit longer than just seven days. Like, just bringing hormones to normal won't automatically reverse the adaptations instantaneously. Unfortunately, they didn't measure metabolic rate from what I remember. Um, which is why I always tended to to argue for slightly longer periods of time. But I know that gets to another issue, extending your dieting time. And that's an issue if you're on a time schedule. Again, who are we talking about? Physique athletes or general public? Physique athlete, you got to be in shape on a Saturday in October. You got to be in shape on a Saturday in October. You have to seriously consider. And your dieting is already six months long, generally, if you're natural. If adding those diet breaks in prevents you from reaching your goal or makes the diet too long, then that's a consideration. If you're the gym, and also physique athletes aren't expected to maintain after the contest is over. They're going to rebound, or they should. You got to get fat again. The general public, it's a very different situation. I think a lot of where my my differences now versus 16 years ago, it's like, you do have to consider that population very strongly. And for the general public, yes, everyone's in a hurry. But big picture, what's the rush? If taking those two weeks off, a, maybe improves adherence because it's breaking your dieting into smaller blocks, that's a good thing, right? If you've got a lot of fat to lose, you may be looking at a year or two. And if I told you you got to diet straight for two years, you'd walk away. If I said, "I want you to diet for 16 weeks, and then we're gonna have you take a break for two weeks," that's survivable. That's, they get. And then again, if you put in a day at maintenance every week, you're only ever dieting for three or four days straight. So I think there's a benefit there. I think without getting real deep, you know, maintaining fat loss is a skill. Dieting is a skill. And it has to be learned, usually through a lot of mistakes. Doing two weeks at maintenance, even if there were no metabolic advantages, and we'll talk about the Matador study in a second, it gives the general dieter, not the extreme physique dieter, not even extreme athlete who's going to rebound, a chance to practice maintenance and see what it's all about. Because frequently, as I said, maintenance is much harder than either active dieting or active gaining, right? Dieting is a goal, gaining weight is such a, is a goal. Maintenance is this weird, nebulous gray. Eh, you're not, I mean, it, it gets a new approach versus avoidance goals. If you want to go down that route, it's like dieting is an approach goal, gaining weight is an approach goal, avoiding weight loss is an avoidance goal. You have to sort of psychologically parse those differently. But it's much harder for people frequently to maintain. It gives them an opportunity to practice maintenance, see what problems are going to come up so that they can address those next time. Because again, we've known how to take fat off of people for five decades. There is nothing new to be learned. They don't need to do another damn diet study on why fiber helps with weight loss forever. We know. We've got the answers to this, guys. We've had where we're failing people is maintenance. And there's a learning component in terms of, is intermittent fasting right for you? Is this right for you? Maybe you are better off eating normally. You know, I told you, I did a consult for them telling them to eat at maintenance one day a week wasn't gonna work. They said, "It's easier for me to stay on a diet for five days." I go, "Cool. Have the one high calorie day because you're not going to control it anyway when you're dieting. Makes day seven a hard diet day. When you're at maintenance, make day seven a maintenance day." Done. For them, it was better to stay diet. Another client, another consult I did, he's like, "Dude, I can do all carbs or no carbs." Cool. Rather than doing seven days with no carbs, which is how you're dieting down, at two days high carbs in conjunction with your training, or the day before. Boom. There's your maintenance plan. And I'm not saying either one of these is right for anyone listening to this, saying that learning what's going to help you maintain long term. That's where maintenance, that's where diet break can also benefit, practicing that.

But what about metabolically? And that brings us to the Matador study. Because finally, I think there was one more, wasn't there another one recently that looked at the same thing? I'm only familiar with the Matador study. But yeah, I could be wrong. I, I, so far behind on my reading. I again, I often hallucinate these sorts of things. Anyway, so what it did, from memory, is it either had people diet straight for 16 weeks, something like that, or they dieted two weeks on and two weeks off. Meaning that two weeks off were essentially the full diet break. And from memory, what I, what they found was both groups lost the same amount of fat. But the diet break group showed a decreased adaptive com, showed they didn't show as great of a drop in metabolic rate in terms of that adaptive component. So in a sense, during any individual dieting block, they were dieting more efficiently. They weren't fighting against as big of an adaptation. Is that more or less an accurate way of describing it?

Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing is that there were actually some issues with that, uh, study as well. So actually, if I recall correctly, what happened was initially they actually had a bigger drop in metabolic rate and near the final weeks, it somehow tapered back up again to more normal levels. And in the other group, it was kind of the reverse of that, which is how some people concluded that there was probably some adherence issues in that study. Sure. Which is, I mean, that is always a huge problem. And every single one of these ad lib, ad-lib studies in the general public, right? Although I'm looking at it, let's see, the control versus intermittent. There was, look at figure one. There was a difference in weight loss of about, I mean, it looks like five kilos. Um, the, the ending point was about minus 11 for the normal diet and about minus 15. But yeah, whenever you look at this, especially when they present the individual data, damn it, it's just all over the map, right? If you go look at that Campbell study that I know you and Dave talked about, like the differences in like fat loss and lean body mass change, some were positive, some were negative. It turned out that in the cyclical group, there were a couple more who gained or maintained lean body mass and that pulled the average up. So a statistic, like whenever you're doing these types of free living studies, you're always dealing with, you know, staggering variance. I mean, the, the weight loss in the continuous group in the Matador study, minus 7.4 kilos plus or minus 4.7. Right? So whatever, however standard deviations work, you're looking at a range of like 3 to 11 to cover 95% of the group. In the intermittent was 10.9 plus or minus 7.2. Bigger change. However, there was also a bigger variance. They don't seem to have provided the individual data, but I bet it was just as messy as anything else. And all it really does take is like a couple of weird outliers to, um, to really skew the average. You see that in a lot of the hypertrophy studies. There will be one freak show who gains double what everything else did and it pulls the, and when you take that one out, everyone's right about the same place. So, so yeah, and these kind of uncontrolled studies, it's interesting. But you know, even looking at resting energy expenditure, continuous group lost 500 plus or minus 565, intermittent minus 356 plus or minus 644. It was certainly less for adjusted to fat-free mass, minus 600 plus or minus 500 versus minus 251 plus or minus 500. So it's like, yeah, like I, I don't, you know, like I said, it's, it's tough to do this in any sort of controlled, uh, group, you know, unless you're giving them all their food and that's too damn expensive. Yeah. What's tough about that study? So I think the difference in energy expenditure that they measured at the end was like a difference of about 100 calories. And then the weight loss is like staggeringly more in the ref, the diabetic group. So probably there is a lot of adherence stuff that factors in there. Sure. Or if I wanted to make a super hand-waving BS argument, could go, "Well, the reason is that coming out of every two-week diet break, they had a larger deficit because their energy expenditure was still higher." And I'd be talking out of my butt. But you know, it's what this industry is mostly based on. Um, yeah, so like, so I'm looking at it, okay, energy balance versus follow-up. This is figure four. Yeah, the continuous group minus 10 versus about minus 16 kilos. You know, then everybody started to regain. And it looks like the continuous group just kept ending up in a worse position. But like the rates of regain were, the slope was like literally identical. So it's like, yeah, they did. But you know, they still ended up lower. They stand it up minus 11 versus minus four. And yeah, I mean, again, this is something I, I would love to see done in a more controlled fashion, but it's very difficult to do. I think they're now doing a replication of that with Bill Campbell. And okay. Um, you know, so that, you know, and again, this is also in obese individuals. We're looking at a very different, um, different population than in lean athletes. Although my argument would be that the drop in metabolic rate is quantitatively much higher in leaner individuals. It's just not that big when people are carrying an excess amount of fat. It's just not, um, at least certainly not from resting metabolic rate. It can be from other components, but not from that one. Whereas, you know, if we get into like the Minnesota study or some of the stuff in lean individuals, it can be pretty significant. Like I've math it out somewhere roughly, and it was like, if you're carrying excess body fat, like every pound lost, it's like 25 calories thereabouts. But when you're lean, like every two pounds or every kilo or whatever it was, it's like 100 calories off your, your resting metabolic rate or thereabouts. Like, so would, and we know that the body is adapting more significantly in leaner individuals, would it be different? Would it be better? Would it be worse? The other thing to consider is that, um, they had to diet twice. Did they have to diet twice as long? I think so. Yeah. Right. And that is, of course, the other factor that gets involved here is incorporating a full diet break will extend your dieting time. Doesn't matter. Depends. Depends on who you're talking about. Um, and whether or not they have, you know, a time frame to get in shape by. I think everybody thinks that they have a time frame and most people just don't, in reality. Well, of course, yes. I mean, and I, and I get it. One of my oldest, Lyle's rule number 427, right? No matter how quickly you're losing, you always want to be twice as fast. Right? Everybody expects their fat loss to occur about twice as quickly as it actually does. You know, the best of conditions, like I, by the time the body starts adapting, it's like, take your mathematically predicted time frame, double it, if you're lucky. And that's assuming perfect adherence. Um, so yeah, so again, you know, we get into sort of some other like, so I still think for, for even for athletes, it allows them to sort of bump training volume and intensity if, especially if they're starting to see some major performance losses. I do think that's worth it. For the general public, I'd say probably behaviorally, it's more about, um, learning, practicing maintenance. And I think that's true of any diet. Like, I'm not even saying like, you know, we know that there's this situation, oh, it, that only matters if you're on extreme diet. That doesn't matter if you're dieting them properly with like, even if you do that, there's still a mental difference. And I think anybody will tell you that that, that even if they're dieting on whole foods, moderately, under perfect conditions, nothing extreme, maintenance is still a pain in the butt because it sucks. It's just such a non-goal. Um, because it's just such a non-concrete goal for people that it's much, much harder behaviorally sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, that brings up a topic which you mentioned a couple of times, the practicing maintenance component. And whenever I think about this, how, you know, as you mentioned, this maintenance strategy is just this nebulous thing for people and it's just unappealing. And what I always think about is, I think for many people, the reason they struggle with maintenance is because basically the only way they can enjoy their nutrition is if they just go all out, complete, just going ham on food. And of course, dieting sucks, but at least that has a clear purpose behind it. But even like you mentioned, that a very tiny deficit is just so drawn out. You're kind of eating what you like, but just not as much. But I think for a lot of people, even maintenance is like that, because they get to eat normally, they're not in a deficit, but they still don't get to eat as much as they would want ideally. And I think that's how a lot of people end up in this chronic dieting phase because they either let go completely or they go back to restricting, which sucks, but at least it has a clear purpose behind it. Yeah, basically, I, I agree completely. You know, and that, it is, it's, it's even for everybody. I think when you start looking at, you know, the, the obsessed neurotic athletes. And I don't use that necessarily as an insult. Like, let's, let's face it, you have to be sort of a professional neurotic to, to be, to reach high levels of any task. And I mean, let's also face it, many physique athletes, at the very least, I would say they have a subclinical eating disorder. Like, you know, to be able to diet at that level, you don't have to have an eating disorder, but it doesn't hurt. And I know that sounds awful, and I'm not trying to dismiss, uh, how catastrophic eating disorders are. But let's face it, the sport selects for people that enjoy starting anyway. So I think the pro, you know, and they, I'd say physique athletes or athletes don't have such a problem going to maintenance because they have practiced it for absolute years because they've been obsessional about their food intake for absolute years. And unfortunately, for writer, for wrong, a lot of dieting ideas and dieting lore comes from that population who, yes, they're the best dieters on the planet for one day. And that's what doesn't get talked about. All those strategies, many of which are valid, and some of which are terrible, they come out of physique dieting people. Forget it's not meant to be maintained. They are often doing things that you shouldn't do. Yeah, of course, they always eat enough protein, yada yada yada. But by and large, it's like, yeah, you may not think that, that may not be the best thing. They may not have as much of a problem. Although most of them go to maintenance for long enough to move back into trying to fix weak points, right? They're probably not really at maintenance for extended periods unless they're doing multiple competitions in a row. They're re-achieving normal physiology by getting, gaining, regaining the body fat, and then they're going right back into a build phase to some degree or another. The general public, very different situation. Eventually, they're going to reach their goal. Their goal will always be lower than they want. But at some point, right, there, they're kind of gonna have to have to just like, okay, this is where you need to stay for a while. Maintenance then becomes nightmarish because, like you said, some researcher said once that, you know, maintenance of fat loss doesn't mean, God, how did he put it? Doesn't mean not eating what you want. It does mean not eating as much as you want. And that's sort of the distinction here. This whole, there's no good foods or bad foods, and you can include everything on a diet. And I agree with that up to the point that it becomes zealotry. But yeah, you don't get to eat as much as you want unless you set up some sort of maintenance where you do restrict a couple days a week. Maybe you do do the 5-2 plan where you deliberately like, well, you know, there's an old paper, you may or may not have read it. It's called "Fasting: The Ultimate Diet." And I should totally sue that guy. Not like I came up with that. Um, it is by researcher name, and he's written a book on it. Where's the paper? Oh, um, researcher named A.M. Johnstone, a BC review, 2007. So he basically, you know, he looks at the data of the time and points out that fasting has been used religiously and historically forever. Whatever. Um, we know that there was that one subject, the famous 380 days, and 382 days of straight fasting on water and vitamins and minerals. Like for people carrying excess body fat, complete fasting can be done, right? There's not a lot of muscle loss. Like, I'm not a huge fan. Like, at least have some protein. Protein-sparing modified fast. Haha. That's what it's called. What it is. But neither here nor there. There is an oddity where for some people, not eating makes them less hungry than eating something. It's not universal, but it's not uncommon. And we can probably parse this in whatever way we want from a biological standpoint. Maybe it's dopamine, maybe it's reward. You know, someone on my group is like, "Well, but in an evolutionary sense, doesn't it make sense that if you're starving, that eating something would make you fall?" I said, "Or if you're starving and you eat something, that tells your body you've found food, and maybe you should eat as much as possible, right?" I could, I could see both sides of that. The point of this being that in some cases, not eating anything is easier than eating a little, because nothing is nothing. And there can be a weird loss of appetite that occurs under those conditions for whatever reason, whether it's ketones or who cares, doesn't even matter. So he wrote this paper, he was like, "Okay, hey, this will cause the fastest potential fat loss. These individuals don't get a lot of lean body mass lost anyway. And what much of it is non-essential connective tissue and crap like that." But then his bigger point was, when you move to maintenance, what this has taught is that you can go hungry and not eat for a day or two or three, right? Because if you've done it for however many weeks, it's like, "Oh, okay. I didn't die. I didn't starve. Maybe a little peckish, but it got better." And he goes, "So if you're moving to maintenance and you find that you're starting to slip, well, just fast for a few days." Done. And, and I think for some people, like I mentioned again, this consult that I did, it very much, they were used to the traditional advice. They'd done all the work in terms of, but and they were just like, "Camp for me, it doesn't work to eat at maintenance." And I said, "Well, let's work with you rather than forcing you into a template. Let's work with what you've found." Cause they've done, they tried it all already. Which is why I suggested what I suggested. Well, stay on a diet for five days. It's your work week schedule structure. And then on the weekend, if you want to maintain, have two normal days. Start to gain weight, cut one of them down. Boom. They were like, "This is mind-blowing to me because I can't imagine that anyone would have even potentially recommended this as a maintenance approach." I go, "Well, that's why you hired me and not somebody else. Because whatever, I don't care. Whatever works. It all works in the big picture as long as it works for the individual." So yeah, so that, but that, that's a matter that the maintenance, the full diet break gives you an opportunity to practice some of those things.

Okay, so great. Dumb Mr. McDonald said I should eat at maintenance minus five percent with at least 150 grams of carbs. And all I found was that I ended up overeating. God, that guy is stupid. All right, well, cool. That didn't work for you. Try something else. Oh, I tried intermittent fasting and all it did was put me on a binge-purge program. Yeah, it does for a lot of people. Does for me. So I don't use it. Try different things. Try, you know, whatever. Try restrict. You know, maybe you need to stick to your diet for five days when you're at work. Well, there's no work in Coronaville, but you know what I mean? They're Monday through Friday, and then eat and don't worry about it on the weekends. Maybe eat what you're going to eat. And then one day a week, do an alternate day fasting, 25 calorie day. Practice until you find the combination of strategies that works for you. It's what I've done. I'm sure you've done. And Dave McConaughey has talked whenever I've talked to him, talk to people who've been doing this for a while. We've each found our own individual set of rules that works for us. That doesn't mean they're right for anybody else or wrong for anybody else. All it means is that this is the approach. I know what I've found the hard way. I can and cannot do. Usually the easiest strategy for me is just to stop caring. And that's the easiest solution. Just not give a damn. But even with that, after God almighty, 35 years of doing this, being involved in sports, even my baseline don't give a damn eating is not bad because I've just done it for so long. It's just a matter of degrees of how bad it is. It's a matter of did I buy sugary cereal because I eat like a 14-year-old this week or not? But you know, for me, whatever, big turkey sandwich, glass of milk, like that. To me, that's just a baseline meal because I've been doing this for decades. For people that are trying to change long-term eating habits, full diet break is a time to practice and figure out which set of strategies. You know, this is where I get really annoyed with the diet wars. Going off topic as usual. Everyone makes it sound like I have found the right approach. This is the only approach. No, this is the right approach for you. You need to be quiet. There are several generalities, sufficient protein, EFAs, calorie control, etcetera, etcetera. Beyond that, it doesn't make a shit's worth of difference what you do. Big picture. Yeah.

So I think on that front, I think there are two important conclusions. One is what I think a lot of people miss. And I think even you mentioned this, that maintenance could be like plus or minus three percent or something. Or it may have been someone else. I think it was you. Oh, sure. I mean, what, you know, what I recommend because we know coming out of a diet, there's still a little bit of an adaptation. I've always told people, take your calculated maintenance, you know, 15 per pound or whatever thereabouts, take five to ten percent off of it to be safe to start, and then kind of adjust it upwards. Um, you know, all we know that total energy expenditure is a moving target, right? I think that's where a lot of these ideas about, whatever, not, you know, building metabolic capacity or, oh, I'm eating more and I'm maintaining at a higher calorie level, right? Because you're able to train more and train more intensely and your needs probably higher. And it's not because you've built metabolic capacity, it's because all of these components can change under certain conditions. Same way that when they go down, they can change. Like maintenance has always been a, a moving target and a goal, you know, a range rather than a value. And we've sort of forgot that for a lot of years. And I think it's really important to emphasize. So yeah, I mean, any given day, hell, we know under best conditions, under ad lib conditions, people's calorie intake can vary, can vary like 23% in either direction. It's enormous. And yet, for the majority, over time, body weight is extremely well regulated. I'm sure you've read those papers that do the math and they're like, over the long term, calorie balance is regulated to like within one or two percent over the span of a year for most people. Like the environment is overwhelming that. Yes, people are gaining body fat, but in the big picture, people who are maintaining weight without paying any attention to it, their bodies are regulating calories in the long term to just a staggering degree. Now, coming out of a diet, that's not true. Hunger is up, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that, all that stuff. We'd love to talk about that. That's great. So you do have to be a little bit more attentive. But yeah, it's absolutely a range. And even there, if we want to tie this back into, you know, the whole general idea, flexible eating principles. I've stopped using flexible dieting because I, that connotes a certain thing. Flexible eating. Flexible eating was never the strategies I talked about. And again, I didn't invent them. I like to think I kind of formalized them. You know, the free meal, the refeed, the, the diet break. If it fits your macros, I had nothing to do with. Um, if you read the literature, they don't ever talk about that. If you read the literature on rigid and flexible eating patterns, they don't talk about any of that. That was me and the others. Flexible eating attitudes are the realization that there are no good, it's not good food, bad food. It's not black and white. It's not yes or no. It's not diet or overeating. It is also that if you eat a little bit more on one day, whatever, compensate the next day. Don't compensate the next day. It's not a big thing. So you ate a couple hundred calories, who cares? Big picture, weight gain and weight loss is long term. Whether you're actively dieting or maintaining. Now, if it becomes a chronic thing, then we have a different issue that has to be addressed. But most people are not going to count calories every day forever unless they're neurotics. You know, physique athletes, even then, I don't think they do. Once they get the basic pattern set in place, most of them just eat the same six meals every day. So it just comes down to, okay, hopefully you've established some good patterns during your diet, enough protein, vegetables, blah, blah, whatever meal frequency is right for you, all that crapola. Maintain some of that. Some days a little bit more, some days you may need a little bit less. The bigger thing to me, rather than even the acute stuff, is this gets into a whole different topic, is tracking. So that you don't backslide so far that you give up. And that, that gets into a whole separate thing that we know that, you know, if you look at all the NWCR data, National Weight Control, yeah, um, one of the most common vari factors among long-term weight maintainers is keeping track. Getting on the scale, piece of clothing, tape measure, doesn't matter. Because what people do, they come out of their diet, they go to maintenance, quote unquote, stop paying attention. Body weight starts to come on. What they put the fat blinders on, they don't want to see it. Suddenly, of the 20 pounds they've lost, they've regained 10. And they go, "Screw this. I spent months. I've thrown it all away." Whereas if they catch it when they're at three or two pounds, one kilo, one and a half kilos, boom, diet for two weeks, you're back. Get it. Even soon, like real weight, not acute daily fluctuations. You know, real weight loss, real a real real weight or fat gain, boom. And another paper I read had to do with how do we define maintenance? The idea that maintenance is a fixed body weight day in day out, that's unrealistic. No one can achieve that. It's going to go up a little, it's going to go down a little. That's, I mean, day-to-day fluctuations, even weekly trends, nobody maintains the same perfect way ever again. Maybe neurotic athletes, one percent of the dieting population or whatever. And what they suggested was, we need to define maintenance. And I think, I, I want to say was plus or minus one to two percent. It's been many years. I don't remember exactly. But it was in that range. So it's like, of your current body weight. So you've dieted down, you're 80 kilos, one percent would be 0.8 kilos, two would be 1.6 kilos, three would be 2.4 kilos. If you haven't, if you have American listeners, that's about a pound and a half, three pounds, about six pounds, right? If, if you, and what he, his, what he said was basically like, if your body weight goes up or is up for real by one or two percent, well, you know what to do because you already did it. Go do it for two weeks and move and move on with your life. And I think, you know, and that, that, they combine because then you start to figure out, all right, which set of strategies during my full diet break allows me to at least slow the inevitable weight regain. And then by tracking it, well, I can figure out where the problems are. Okay, I started started going out for junk, you know, going out every Friday night and started drinking. Whatever. Clearly, what I'm doing strategically or behaviorally is not working long term. But I can always catch it, get back to where I was because I know how to do that. Then start trying different strategies to at least, you know, I said it's normal to go up and down and up and down. So, so that, I think those two kind of combine. Yeah. And I think as well as trying to find a strategy that works best for you, which is gonna be experimentation. I mean, yeah, like you said, for some people, even the five days tricked and on the weekends, you know, the cheat meal, cheat day, hopefully you're not calling.

It's a cheat day, but you know, for people who are structured, they have nine to five, five days a week, and on the weekends, they have more time to sit around. It might actually work well.

And then another thing I would add on top of that is also identifying what your kind of culprit things are that get you off track. Like, I, for example, found for me, uh, just being isolated, spending too much time at home, uh, just bored, I'm eating. I mean, it's a real issue. I always find that when I go out for the weekends, even if there's a lot of eating out in restaurants, I often tend to actually lose weight because I'm just more engaged with the things that I'm doing, which is kind of crazy.

Sure. Well, yeah, I mean, yes, it's absolutely true. It's, it's part of why I think, you know, some of the, the evening intermittent fasting patterns work. Like, when you're at work from eight to five or nine to five, it's easy to not eat, just take some caffeine or whatever. You're busy. It's when you're at home doing nothing. It's the weekends, like I said, back when we had weekends, um, which don't really exist anymore for a lot of people because of what's going on in the world. It's like, yeah, that's absolutely it. And you eat out of boredom.

You know, for me, just, I've got, I grew up eating a lot of, you know, sugary refined stuff because that was the nature of the world and where I, my life. I, I have a sweet tooth. I've always had a taste for it, and I'm certainly the type of person that if I start, I'll eat a lot of it. So for me, I just don't keep it in the house anymore. Right. I know people that can do it. I know people can keep bags of cookies in the house. Fantastic. I can't do it. This doesn't work for me. I'm not saying it will work for you or for anyone else.

So for me, if I want something like that, if I'm sitting here at the computer, whatever it is, I'm like, okay, I have to get up, put on pants, put shoes on, drive to the grocery store, buy. And if I do, assuming that I get past all of that, because usually by the time I get to the putting on pants stage, I can't be bothered. Right. That's usually, that's that's the, uh, that's the curb I can't quite get over because I'm just like, I can't be bothered to put on pants right now. And, uh, and I don't want them to ask me to leave another store.

So, but if I go, if I do actually make it out the door, I only buy what I intend to eat. Right. If I buy a bag of cookies, the bag of cookies will be one serving. If I buy, in America, has lots of this, we've got little individual servings or two packs of cookies or whatever it is. If I buy that, that's what, and I'll go home, that's what I'll eat because I guarantee you, I'm not putting pants back on to go out again. That is just a strategy that works for me.

You know, now when I go out, whatever, if there's food there and there's cake and stuff, I'll eat it because I don't care. But, you know, even when I was in Salt Lake City skating, usually Saturdays after training, we would go to like the China buffet. And I can, for a little guy, where I was a little guy then, I could eat a lot. Um, I've always felt I should have been a competitive eater. Maybe we'll see, uh, still got that possibility in my future. And one of my training partners was like, how do you stay so skinny when you eat so much? I said, because I only do it one day a week. I do this one meal. I eat normally, whatever that means. The rest of the time, we train our absolute butts off. It's a, and same thing now, right? That is the strategy. Like, I'm not, I'm not going to be that guy that goes out for dinner with somebody or, you know, that's not going to eat and enjoy myself. I'm not, I'm not that guy anymore. It's that guy when I was younger, but now I'm too old to care and it's just, it's not a fun one, but I just don't do it all the time.

So those are those kinds of individual strategies that are important for people to sort of determine for themselves. Um, and that does, you know, I said, you're going to do it, you're going to screw it up, or it's not, sorry, bad phrasing, it's not going to work for you again. That's why I don't like the diet wars. People, people get this sensation that if I tried a strategy and it didn't work, I'm the one at fault. No, it's entirely possible for a diet to fail a person. Absolutely. It's possible. Bad, bad strategy for any given individual. It's even, that's something else I've actually changed, just because I think it's worth making this point.

When I first did the flexible dieting book, like I said, I was much younger, much more excited about it, and not that I'm not excited about it now, not that I don't think it has utility, but I was like, everyone should start doing this right off the bat. And I know now that I was wrong because it's one thing for a neurotic athlete like myself, for yourself, for all that fits your macros zealots, who spent 10 years programming these eating habits into themselves to say, I can have two cookies and stop, or I can have a free meal, I can have a diet break. But if you start looking at the general public, who may be dealing with two decades of certain eating habits, who are frequently dealing with differences in the neurological reward system, all kinds of brain function that is different. We're not, we have nearly enough time to get into that, but it is different.

If you then tell them in the early stages of their diet, every five days, I want you to go either have a free meal and break your diet, or deliberately overfeed carbs, it is probably going to backfire. Not saying universally. Whenever I say that, I'll always get one email. I did it. Don't care. Not talking about you, talking about any aggregate. We know that habits take time. It's not three weeks. Taste buds take about four to six weeks to turn over and change. Someone has a super sweet tooth and you tell them, I want you to include sweets from week one, you're probably putting them at a great risk to do more harm than good because they're not going to be able to have the one cookie and stop.

Now, down the road, they might, or they might be able to have that free night. There's a guy on my forum years ago, and he failed and failed and failed over and over and over again because he kept making bad choices in his diet. And he was like, all right, I've been dieting for two weeks. So friends invited me to the buffet. Gonna go for it. I said, don't. So what do you mean? I go, just please listen to me. Don't. You're not ready. You are going to go to that buffet, you are going to eat all the food, and you are going to self-destruct. Please listen to me. And of course, he didn't. And of course, exactly what I said would happen.

Right. We can even get into the addiction literature with this. People trying to quit alcohol, they cannot go into a bar sometimes. They can never go back to a bar. That depends on the person. Years later, they might. They might be able to go have, you know, their minimal water. They have to set a bright line boundary. And in that sense, telling a beginner dieter who's overweight, carrying excess body fat, 20 years of certain eating habits, certain taste buds, to include these types of things very deliberately can backfire.

Now, I'm going to walk back on that because there's something in the diet literature that seems to completely contradict what I just said. And that's the ADF and the ICR research. Because isn't that exactly what they are doing? Right. They are saying eat normally every other day or every couple of three days. What's the difference? This is actually when I listened to your podcast of Dave McConaughey, there's a section in there where you were sort of discussing this. And I think there was a semantic issue that you were sort of, you know, sort of talking across one another. Because one of you is using the term refeeds, and one of you is using the term maintenance eating. And in a sense, they're the same. In a sense, they're not. Right.

In the women's book, even though I discuss refeeds in that concept, I even started calling them maintenance days. Right. The refeed idea was, I want you to deliberately overeat carbs, just like the cheat day went from, you can eat whatever you want, to, I'm going to eat as much crap as I can put down my gut. That's what people, what turned it into. Not that I can do this, I must do this, I must eat as much crap as humanly possible because I'm cheating. Right. In the ICR on the ADF data, they are not saying, I want you to deliberately overfeed carbohydrates to raise leptin in an attempt to reverse blah, blah, you know, they're just saying, just eat normally. And that is a very different thing.

So I do think, so what I'm saying does kind of contradict itself and kind of doesn't contradict itself. In, but whatever, as someone once said, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. So I don't have to be consistent. My point being that some of these strategies, that's why I get really angry. If it fits your macros zealots, you're like, if you're not doing this, you're orthorexic. No, you're not. That's not what the word means. But they don't realize that they have 10 years of being neurotic, of measuring everything, of knowing what food portions are. They can do this very easily. Everyone else who is new to this may not be able to feel the same way about the intuitive eating, the, the fitness version of intuitive eating, where you've got people that were neurotic for 20 years going, oh, I eat intuitively and I stay lean. No, you don't. You have an unconscious program set of rules that you put into your brain over the last 20 years.

People in the modern world are eating it intuitively, and obesity keeps getting worse because that's what that word means. Our intuition is to eat sugary, carby, fatty stuff. So these folks forget they came, and again, when I was younger, I did too. I was projecting because I'm like, I can do it, ergo, everyone can do it. And I was wrong. But it took me a little while to grow up and mature and realize that. So in that case, some of these specific flexible eating strategies, at least in the way they're typically prescribed, might not be a good idea for the general public.

And this gets into, I think, the last topic we should cover, both in that, and I'll try to be quick because I do think it's relevant. Drawbacks to these strategies. We've talked about the potential benefits, some of which are established, some of which are more questionable, some of which I want to see the data, be happy to be right or be wrong. But what about the drawbacks? Are there potential negatives? We talked about a couple. They can extend the length of the diet. In the case of the full diet break, does it matter? Depends on the population. But if you take a beginner and you say, okay, once a week, just go have a free meal, what I call that's just a non-diet meal. Like, don't go berserk. Don't go to the buffet. Don't get ice cream on the way to and from the restaurant. Just go and eat something that you're craving. Which can have pros and cons.

Well, for some people, it's great. It's a psychological break. It has no physiological benefits. It's purely just a mental break because cravings happen. But for many people, it throws them off the diet. Now, I gave as many warnings and strategies. I was like, don't eat it at home, go to a restaurant, do it at night because then overnight, you kind of reset the diet brain. But for many people, there's a switch that flips when you're dieting. Right. It's kind of like we talked about the difference between dieting, gaining, and then maintenance. When you're dieting, boom, the dieting switch goes on. I'm ready. I'm mentally there to restrict calories. It's going to suck, but it's going to get me to my goal. Frequently, unflipping the diet switch, even acutely, makes it very hard for people to flip it back.

Now, this isn't universal. This depends on the person. So what I would recommend is what I put in the women's book. Try it. Doesn't work. Try it a second time, a little bit differently. Start with a big salad. Do this. If it doesn't work after three times, it's not for you. It's not required. None of this crap was ever required. People got into contest shape without this stuff for decades. Was never required. Still not required. It may be beneficial. And those are very different words. So try it. Try this strategy. Did it work? Like I said, with intermittent fasting for me, fight like a normal me at four o'clock, big turkey sandwich, some milk, or whatever. It's fine. And I'll eat them dinner and whatever, and that's fine. But it's frequently not happens. We're trying to intermittent fast. Four o'clock, I'm not that hungry. Five, six, seven, eight, starving. Go to the buffet and eat four times what I've eaten if I just spread meals.

So if I do it a certain way, it works. If I do it another way, which is typically what I do, it doesn't work. That's for me. For others, it's fantastic. Try it. Try it a couple different ways. Try it a third time. It doesn't work. Don't do it. It's not for you. Or it's not for you. Now, maybe after someone, a beginner has dieted for 16 weeks without these things, without structured refeeds, without free meals, without diet breaks, without if it fits your macros, and all these changes have occurred, maybe now you can use it. Maybe you still can't. Maybe you never can. It doesn't matter because again, the flexible eating stuff was never about specific strategies, as long as the person is changing their mental state and attitude towards the process. That's all the flexible eating stuff was ever about. And several studies have shown that the biggest predictor of long-term success is adopting flexible eating attitudes. Again, not the strategies. That was just our attempt to formalize it. The attitudes that can be done without any of this stuff, making people realize that there is no good or all that stuff. I already talked about. So that's for the general public.

But what about for athletes or physique? Because this is something that someone brought up to me 18 podcasts ago. I don't remember names or dates or any of this anymore. And getting old sucks, guys. Don't do it. It's a trap. I promise you. Nothing good. Nothing good. Nothing good comes of it. And they mentioned a top pro bodybuilder. I don't remember who it was. You might know. He tried refeeds. He tried diet breaks. And he'd abandoned them because they weren't, they weren't right. Because again, remember, these were never required. Physique athletes got in shape. Athletes got in shape with doing any of this for decades. Attempts to make things easier or better, more efficient. Because what he found that for him, when he was in contest diet mode, he was in contest diet mode. The switch was flipped. And physique athletes, it flips hard. Successful physique athletes. And he found that even days at maintenance unflipped and flipped the switch and made it much harder for him to diet in the long term.

Cool. I got no argument with that. People might expect me to. I'm sure people were expecting me to be the refeed zealot. But fantastic. They weren't right for him. He has found what works. What is right for him. Who the hell am I to say that he's doing it wrong if he tried it and it worked? And for other people, it works fantastically. Same thing with it fits your macros. Same thing with anything you've talked about. For the people it works for, us the people that it works for. And for the people that it doesn't. Cool. There's only a few absolute concepts to fat loss dieting. Everything else truly is negotiable and is up for argument. And of course, that's what keeps the fitness industry going is arguing about all these different ways to accomplish the exact same damn thing, which is to create a long-term calorie deficit while maintaining muscle. That's it. That's all that it comes down to. And how you go about making that happen for long enough and hopefully being able to stick to it.

But certainly for both, you know, the general public and even potentially for obsessive athletes, many of these, especially the deliberate strategies, again, I might kind of again walk back on that now. It's hard when you're when you're starving yourself to five percent body fat. There is no eating normally. Right. There is no, there is no normal eating day. There is dieting. There is only a controlled overeating day at best. And frequently, even that is all right. There is no, I'm going to let myself eat to fullness because at eight percent, fullness equals 18,000 calories. Right. So it's not like the ICR data, we're saying eat the maintenance. They'll end up right about where they are. We're talking about a different population. We're talking about 35% body fat. So in that case, even maintenance days have to be controlled because it is still counting calories. It is still a controlled diet because if you eat too much on that maintenance day, you have set your diet back. And if you get behind, you're gonna have a bad time.

So I do think that is another potential negative that that the flexible eating zealots, which again, I think people expect me to be one, but I'm not. Uh, certainly not anymore. Don't tend to talk about. They talk about the successes and certainly there's lots of them. But when something isn't working, I find that more instructive because then I got to wonder why. Why did my perfectly beautiful theoretical idea fail in practice? And I think, uh, when I was younger, certainly I tended to for, you know, ah, humans were just a physiology and a brain because that's the way I sort of work, right? Just like, you know, if I can jack my brain into the internet, I'll be thrilled. But behavioral components, environmental components, real life. I don't have a wife. I don't have kids. I can control what I eat, just like control my dogs eat. Not everybody's in that situation. And many of these strategies that look great on paper simply fail for some people in the real world. And if that's the case, fantastic. Move on.

Yeah, it's, um, it's an unfortunate thing because obviously, even the hardcore, if it's your macros approach, back in the day was a definite step in the right direction. But some of the issues were, and, you know, like I don't want to throw that many people under the bus, but I will, a little bit. So Lane Norton, for example, sure, it was a good message initially. But then it kind of escalated into this idea that if you're not eating half a cookie and eating all of these treats in moderation, and you're eating quote unquote clean, then you're having an eating disorder. And no, it's just for some people, it's much easier to control things that way. So that got lost a little bit over time.

Well, I mean, I, I wasn't even aware he went down that road, but I certainly saw others stating that they're like, oh, if you're not eating these foods by choice, because people don't know what orthorexia actually means. Orthorexia is choosing not to eat a food for some perceived moral or health reason, right? It's this idea. And that's it's interesting that they use the word clean in this regards because the idea is that you are morally or physically or spiritually unclean by eating this food. It's almost a religious aspect. And if you want to get into some real insanity, back in the early 20th century in America, you know, or just look at the dietary hygiene movement, if you're familiar with that. Is or, and, you know, basically, and again, look at the terminology, hygiene, it's about cleanliness. And there was very much a religious undertone to this.

And, uh, Kellogg, the guy who invented Kellogg's Corn Flakes back in the day, he had this, he had this place, this healthitarium that you would go and he would give you enemas. And he said red meat was bad for this reason. Any animal protein was bad because he felt that, no joke, stimulated the sex drive and that would lead you to a lewd, a lewd lifestyle. Corn flakes was deliberately created as a low protein food because he felt that protein would cause you to act in a non-Christian, non-religious way and have lewd thoughts sexually, right? And that's that's orthorexia. You're getting into these weird moral parsings. Choosing not to have cookies in the house because they are a trigger food. It's not orthorexia. It's intelligent. It's making a logically rational choice to keep something. Think about it. Think if somebody was like, oh, someone choosing not to drink alcohol because they can't drink it in moderation has a drinking disorder. Yeah, drinking disorders usually go the other way around. But that's the law, kind of the logical equivalent. Oh, you're saying, oh, you must think, you know, you have a disorder. You must be a prude. You must be straight edge because you, you, you choose not to drink because when you do, you black out and you can't eat it in moderation. Haven't you just tried discipline? Like that's, that's where that comes from. And it just makes me want to smack people.

That to me is just, you've learned, probably through repeatedly bad experiences, that having this in the house doesn't work. Ergo, choosing not to even touch it. A bright line boundary, which is used heavily in drug addiction treatment, works better. And there's even research, you've probably seen, where diets based around simple rules tend to work better than complex diets for the general public. Because it's one thing to say you can have some carbs or some sugar if you want, but not if you want. If you just say no sugar, it's easy. There's not a choice. I'm not saying it's effective long-term. I'm not saying it's the best way to diet. However, for people that aren't obsessive neurotics with extremely good food control, frequently that's the best way to do it. And saying, I want you to adhere to your diet strictly for the first 12 weeks until we establish some good habits before we even consider bringing these strategies in, is not orthorexic. It's not an eating disorder. It's a rational approach to that population to try to improve where we are failing, which is long-term maintenance of these habits. Because if people start to feel like failures early, they tend to quit.

And we do it. People, we do the same thing in the gym, in the fitness industry. Let's bring beginners in and make them feel horrible about themselves. Let's give them movements they can't do. Let's make them crawl out of the gym. Let's make sure that we fail them completely as professionals because I'm an enthusiastic athlete and this is how I like to train. It's the same. To me, it's the same thing in diet. These absolutists, if you're not doing this, you're doing it wrong, rather than we need to scale this to the population. The general public is very different than physique. And let's face it, physique athletes, there's a lot of, there's a lot of purge behavior. There's a lot of binge purge behaviors going on there. There's a lot of eating disorder behaviors going on there. There's a lot of stuff that we don't like to talk about. You know, you see the clean eating forums that are just, they are orthorexic, but only six days out of the week. And then they're like, day seven, blizzards all day, every day till I get sick. And then they crap on me if it fits your macros people. You're eating healthy, unhealthy junk food. And just want to go, you eat more junk food in that day than the average if it fits your macros eats in a month because they're having a couple of cookies every three or four days when they feel like it. You are deliberately binging yourself sick. But whatever, I'm just babbling at this point. The point of this being that the fitness industry is awful. Um, including, including me. I mean, we're all, we're all part of this. It has these dark moments, that's for sure.

Yeah, uh, that's actually, that's a better way of putting it. I just think, I think the nature, without one more quick tangent, I think the nature of who becomes a professional in this industry really is the problem. Those of us who got into this typically came from me motivated, wanted to be there. I remember, I remember the first time I got in the weight room at 15. Man, I, I begged for that gym membership for months till I got it for Christmas because man, I just, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to go get in that stupid Nautilus gym. And we all tend to come from that. And I think we often forget that the general public clientele is not only not coming from that, but possibly coming from the exact opposite of that. Right? Like I've been a personal trainer. Yes. Did I have people that just wanted me to guide what they were already doing? Right. But most of the people didn't want to be there or had had bad previous experiences because they got some other trainer client once that had a double mastectomy and the trainer before me put them through 20 sets of chest on their first day because that's what he did. It kills me. It makes me sad. It makes me angry.

Now we're seeing more people, or a handful more people, that are coming from a different background. I'm sure you know Darko, is it Botich? Botsick? I can't pronounce his last name properly. Thank you. Um, sorry, dumb American, cut me a little bit of slack, right? He was extremely overweight. He has a perspective on this that I will never have, that anybody who's never been that overweight and dealt with not only the physical aspects but the environmental aspects, the people being crappy to you at. Heather Robertson, who runs the Half-Sized podcast, is another good example. She has lost 50% of her body weight. She's lost like over 50 to 60 kilos, something real, and she's kept it off. She has a perspective on this that I can have intellectually explained to me. I can maybe empathize if I think about it hard enough in terms. And I like to think I've wrote an article series. I've got a lot of positive feedback called "Training the Obese Beginner," where I was like, look, you're 160 pounds, in shape. Do not give people walking lunges when they're 300 pounds. Do not give them one-arm push-up, t-push-ups, you ignorant twits. Think for one second about this about what they may be experiencing being in a gym filled with a bunch of fit neurotics. Try to at least think about it before you put them through a program that just makes them feel embarrassed and self-conscious. But we don't. So the advice is coming from the hardcore neurotic extremists. And the information is coming from there. And while that may be great for the other hardcore neurotic extremists, it is com, in the aggregate, failing for the majority who think they have to eat clean, who think they have to do this because some neurotic told them that and is in shape. And that is evidence and that is proof of concept.

So with all of this stuff, we just see so many things coming out of a population group that is not representative of, um, of the majority dieting structure. And I think these are things that need to be considered, uh, much more, much more thoroughly.

Yeah, absolutely. Well said. Well, I said, well, uh, Lyle, thank you so much again, as usual, for creating the podcast for me. Absolutely. I, I've said repeatedly, just ask me a question and let me talk for 90 minutes because I'll get there eventually. No, I mean, you're every podcast host's dream, that's for sure. I try. Yeah. You usually, it's, uh, or many, sometimes some unfortunate cases, you ask a question from the guest and it's like, yeah, yeah, I agree. It's like, goddamn it, now we have to ask the next question. I know, right? Now you actually have to do some work. And what's the point of having guests if you're gonna have to do the talking, right? Yeah, exactly.

Um, all right, sir. So please, uh, plug where people can find you or anything that you would like to plug. So, as always, you know, my website, bodyrecomposition.com, where all my articles are. That will take you to my store where my books are. Uh, best place to find me online. My forums are now dead and deceased, which is perfectly fine. Uh, the very active Facebook group called, as always, Body Recomposition. I'm in there daily, either answering questions, being obnoxious, or being annoying, or all three. Uh, I always like to point out, um, there are a lot of incredibly bright people and experts in my group. I tend to attract. I've got five top-notch physios, two of whom I believe are surgeons. Got an excellent OB/GYN. Uh, it always boggles me. Any question that's asked, even on the most incredibly obscure, extreme rare conditions, there's always like one expert and four people that have that have dealt with it. So whenever people ask questions that are outside of my generalist wheelhouse, um, there's always somebody to step in and I learn from them. I read their responses. And if they correct me and say I'm wrong, I will defer to their expertise. But, but yeah, it's like the scope of, just as an example, a couple months ago, someone had a client that was having really major, uh, woman, very major genital surgery, like severe, severe. And I want to know when they could come back to training. And I'll be damned if my group didn't have someone who is specifically a physiotherapist for that type of surgery. Like I was mind blown. I'm like, of course, because of course we do.

Um, so bodyrecomposition.com. I do always like to mention, I will let you wrap it up. Uh, someone in my group that I just, I, I think he needs to get more love than he does. It's a guy named Trevor Bunch. He runs a page called The Fit Bunch. And he does, uh, exercise and exercise videos and instructional educational things for he has a double below the knee amputation. And he does a lot of work for in terms of what individuals with that disability, uh, need to address in terms of spinal health and training their glutes. And more importantly, watching his videos, he obviously has to do a lot of adaptive exercise in terms of where to apply the resistance, how do you actually train these things? And it's not something, information I would probably ever use personally, but looking at it gives me just a different perspective. Sometimes it sort of makes me think in a way I might not otherwise because I've never really sort of had to address this situation. And I just, for, I don't know that he does works with any other sort of adaptive exercise. I don't know if he does upper body or anything else. But, um, he's an incredible resource. His page is incredible. And for anyone, or if you know anybody that has a disability in that regards, and we have their individuals in my group as well that have similar, similar issues that often will chime in. There's one guy who had a below the knee amputation, sorry, below the elbow amputation, and put up a deadlift of him doing like 600 pounds with a strap that clamped to the end of, of the remaining arm. And I asked, like, like very, I mean, like hooks, not hooks, but a clamp. And I was like, doesn't that hurt? He goes, oh, it's excruciating because, I mean, like imagine, imagine the force it would take to clamp that to to your arm. And I was just thought, I'm not going to complain about my straps pulling on my wrists anymore. I, I think I should probably not be be too worried about that. So anyway, my point, Trevor Bunch, great guy, The Fit Bunch, go check him out. You can find me on bodyrecomposition.com website and Facebook page.