The Calories Expert: Health Experts Are Wrong About Calories & Diet Coke! Layne Norton

I can sorry I did not think I would cry on this podcast so much. Lane Norton, scientist, record-setting bodybuilder, and is one of the most respected voices in the health and nutrition space who debunks all the different fitness and nutrition myths out there.

Let's go to the technical stuff. Ooh, yeah, let's do that. Calories in, calories out. So, the first point of confusion: a lot of people may think they're in a calorie deficit, but they're not because one, people don't really understand portion sizes. If you've never had the experience of like weighing out your food, you will be shocked. And the other thing is artificial sweeteners. I've wondered for a while whether Diet Coke is healthy or not. If we look at the randomized control trial, they saw 6 kg of weight loss just from switching people from regular soda to diet soda. Now, when they compare it versus water, this is going to be the most commented thing about in this entire interview, I'm sure. They found that...

What are the big misconceptions about intermittent fasting? Is it okay if I get deep into the weeds on this one? Go ahead. In studies, people in the intermittent fasting groups tend to lose more weight, but it's not because of anything magic about intermittent fasting. It's because...

What's your thoughts on his impact overall? I think it's a net positive, and here's why. When it comes to weight loss, people are Googling how to lose belly fat. Practically, it's kind of irrelevant because...

And then, is sugar addictive? This one's going to get me in trouble too. So, it's absolutely crazy to me that so many of you have decided to watch our show, um, and so many of you have decided to subscribe to our show. We now have five million subscribers on YouTube, which is a number that I just can't comprehend, and it's a dream that I absolutely never could have had. We started the DI of just over three years ago now, and in my wildest expectations, we might have had 100,000 subscribers by now. So you can imagine how shocked I am that so many of you have chosen to tune into these conversations every week, um, and spend some time with us. So thank you.

And I made a deal with you. I made a deal that if you subscribed to this show, that we would continue to raise the bar. And in 2024, we're going to raise the bar like never before. I've been working for the last nine months on a surprise for all of you that have subscribed to the show, and I'm very excited to deliver that for you. The production's going to change, we're going to go even further with our guests, and we're going to tell even more global stories. So, as always, if you appreciate what we're doing here, the simple, free, favorite ask from you is to hit the subscribe button. Let's get on with the [Music] episode.

Lane, who are you and what is the mission you're on? I'm trying to make fitness information more accessible, fitness more accessible to everyone, and trying to act as a bridge between academic research and your average person because so much gets lost in translation because social media, the news, it is a fire hose of information, a lot of which is misinformation, or you only get part of the story. And so I have noticed people are so frustrated because they feel like they understand what it is to eat healthy, and then a new documentary comes out, a new podcast comes out, a new article comes out and says, "Oh, nope, you're whatever it is you're doing is wrong, and here's why." And I just want to help clear up some of that confusion and help people understand the big stuff that really matters versus not getting lost in the weeds of the stuff that just doesn't matter that much.

And when you say fitness, how do you define that? Because you talked about, you then talked about diet and food. So what is the sort of bucket that you put yourself in? What are the categories that you really focus on? Great question. But, you know, I would say that my wheelhouse is nutrition. So I did a PhD in nutritional sciences, and I also feel pretty equipped to interpret exercise information as well.

And what is your, so that's your academic sort of background. What is your lived experience? What experiences have you had as a coach to people, as a, as a trainer, in your own personal life, that have added to that academic information that you have? Great question. So I'll try to give the abridged version of this. Um, I got bullied a lot, uh, growing up as a really skinny kid, hyperactive, weird, you know. And so when you're young, what makes you stand out is actually, you know, not such a good thing. And, uh, I got bullied a lot. And I started lifting weights to, I thought if I got bigger muscles, you know, girls would pay attention to me and I'd stop getting bullied. It didn't work for either of those two things. But I did gain more confidence, not because I built bigger muscles, but because the process of lifting and getting through plateaus and moving through setbacks and all those sorts of things, that's what built confidence.

And I started lifting when I was 15. And when I got to college, I changed my major because I decided I was going to do my first bodybuilding show. I did it, I won the Teen Division, and I was hooked. I was like, this is the thing I want to do. But back in, you know, this is 2001, I was 19, I'm 42 now. The avenues to make money in fitness were basically: be a personal trainer, open a gym, start a supplement company, try to be Mr. Olympia. And I, I didn't know how feasible any of those were. So I started looking at a PhD, literally for no other reason. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, but I figured if I delay the real world by four to eight year, four to six years, maybe I'll have it figured out by then. But in that meantime, I had started posting on different bodybuilding message boards. And so I would get a bunch of emails about my articles and people asking me questions. And I was like, basically doing full-on diets and nutrition for people for free because I just liked it. And then when I got to grad school, I was like, man, I, you know, this is a lot of my time now. Maybe if I just like charge people a little something, I can do this instead of a teaching assistantship, make a little bit of money, you know. Didn't really think much of it. And so I took my first online client back in 2005. And within three years, I was making a full-time income from it with no advertising, just word of mouth. And then in my fourth year, I think was the first year I ever made like six figures from it. I remember thinking, what is happening?

I want to take one step back, um, because it's clear from what you said there, but also clear from a lot of the research that I did on you and your backstory, that much of the driving motivation behind why you are what you are today, and why you help people, and why you do the work you do, and make the content you make, was because of this early experience with bullying. And I've sat here with so many people who are real anomalies in their lives for a variety of different reasons, you know, maybe in business, or, or in science, or, um, in sport. And I so often find that the, the reason why they're brilliant is also fundamentally interlinked to the reason why they struggle, or they struggled, shall I say. And in your story, that seems to be very pertinent. I read a quote you said on a video you made seven years ago where you said, "I had intense and sustained emotional bullying. I would be put in a corner by four to five people and be obliterated repeatedly." Yeah. I mean, you know, when I, I'll tell people like, the reason I started lifting weights and bodybuilding, it was not the noblest of reasons. You know, it was very much, you say I'm worthless, I'm going to prove you wrong. You know, and, uh, even, I mean, I would love to say that it has no remnants today, but I would be, that would be a lie, right? Um, some of the stuff I still struggle with in terms of, I have a hard time trusting myself a lot of the times because I got told for so long, or trusting some decisions I make. I got told for so long, "You do it wrong, you know, you suck, you're worthless," you know, those sorts of things.

When you went to therapy, you were diagnosed with a form of PTSD. Bing, PTSD, they call it. Yeah. My, my therapist, she diagnosed me. And I remember saying, "I don't have PTSD. That's, that's for soldiers. That's for..." And she goes, "First off, Lane, you don't like it when people correct you as a professional in your field. Don't correct me. And you're right, you didn't witness people die, nothing like that. But trauma is trauma." And her explanation of it was, it is all relative. And it may not have been, you know, horrors from war, but for your brain, it was traumatic. And the way she explained it is, trauma is something that causes you to react or act in response to something, even after that event has passed, right? So for me, for example, I've struggled in personal relationships where either partners or friends trying to give me feedback, and I immediately get defensive, very defensive. And if you read about relationships, that's not great. It's one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse for relationships. And I never understood, I just thought, well, I'm just explaining myself. I'm just. And then now I understand it's, "Oh, it's because that was my response to the bullying because feedback or criticism to me feels like bullying, even though it's not." So you have a defense mechanism because you had to defend yourself back then. And it's so interesting, the things that we adopt to survive when we're young become maladaptive when we get older. It's difficult to unpick all of that when you're an adult, isn't it? Because it's, as you know, it's very hard. They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but I've, we've, I've got my own trauma responses that I'm still trying to work through, and I'm now aware of them, but they still, on a bad day, on an unslept day, they can still come to the surface.

I tell people, I don't know if you can like completely undo your default setting, right? But I think what you can do is get mindful of it and learn tools to manage it, right? And I mean, it's interesting how this ties into obesity. Because I used to be somebody who, I've never been obese, never been overweight, nothing like that. When I got to grad school, I was very much more towards the side of, if you're obese, it's because you're lazy, it's your fault. You know, and then the more I just observed, I realized that can't be true because look at all these obese, there's so many obese people that are successful in other areas of their life where they apply a lot of discipline. What is it about this thing, right? And I remembered, I read a study, and I, I hopefully I get this correct, because it was a while back, but they looked at obese women and they found that obese women were 50% – I believe 50% – more likely to have, uh, sexual assault trauma in their past. And you also look at the obesity literature, and people who are obese tend to have a greater reward response from food. Whereas people who are lean or normal weight, it's, it's not like that huge reward that they get. It's like, some people, you know, they can, they can have a drink, they can have a beer, they go, "I like the beer." You know? And other people become alcoholics, right? And so so much of this stuff gets tied up in, it gets wired in as a, as a kind of coping mechanism. If you look at, like, for example, binge eating, what's happening during a binge is that person is getting a flood of dopamine, right? They're, they're, they're masking. They want to mask that feeling of whatever made them feel uncomfortable. I always tell people, I'm like, you don't really find people binge eating after they've had eight hours of sleep at 10:00 AM in the morning when they're low stress, right? It's at 10:00 PM at night, after a long day, they've been fighting with their spouse, their kids are driving them nuts, and they just, they want to turn it all off, right?

And I think staying mindful is one of the hardest things we have as humans. I mean, I know what my addiction is, unfortunately, based on my, um, current job. I get way too into social media, you know, I just end up up, you know, it kind of started as, well, I'm, I'm doing work, right? And I'm responding to comments and all that. And pretty soon, I'm looking at my screen time and I'm going, "Oh my gosh." Right? And so that was something for me to numb up and turn my mind off, right? But for other people, it's food. For other people, it's gambling. For other people, it's alcohol. For other people, it's some other drug.

So what do we do with that then? So do we first have to figure out what our relationship is on a psychological level with these addictions, with with our food, for example, if we're just focusing on weight loss to start with? When you, if you were to be coaching someone, would you try and understand their, um, propensity to binge, to to have that sort of, like, dopamine craving, or, or do you focus somewhere else? I kind of say, all right, like, walk me through a typical day for you. Walk me through a typical week. Where, where's, where are your struggles really at? And one of the things that we, we call it the Bio-Lane Way when we, when we kind of teach our coaches, we do coaching with, you have to have two things are critically important: accountability with empathy. Because if you're just the accountability coach, the drill sergeant, who's, you know, most people, if they screw up, they've beat themselves up more than anybody else. I know I'm that way, I'm sure you're that way. So you don't need to beat them up again. The empathy portion. So, so if you're just beating somebody up, if you're just holding them accountable without empathy, you just become the drill sergeant. And what happens is people end up tuning you out, or they're not honest with you anymore because they don't want to constantly feel like they're failing, right? The empathy portion, if you just have empathy and you're saying, "I'm so sorry that happened, that's so hard, I understand," but you're not holding them accountable, there's no impetus for change, right? So it takes, it takes both. MH.

And so the way I'd often coach, like, let's take a, somebody had a binge, something like that. The first thing I'd say, "I understand why that happened. You know, that's really hard. Where, what was the antecedent to this? Like, what, what started this?" Right? Okay. Now, let's look at, if we had to go back and do it over again, what are some things we might be able to do to put some, to put some barriers, right? So I had, I had one client, he's a, a hedge fund manager. And when he started with me, he was binging pretty much, I would say, almost every day. And I said, "Okay, where do you find that this is happening?" And he said, "Well, usually it's after everybody's gone to bed, and, you know, um, I just find myself in the kitchen, and it just happens." So, okay. So it's not reasonable to lock yourself in your room, right? But what if we just did a few things to increase your mindfulness, right? Put a Post-it on the cabinet where you, where you keep that the junk food, right? Not saying anything nasty or anything, but I just said, "Write down, am I hungry, or am I just upset?" Then on your door, right? Lock it from the inside. It's not, you know, it doesn't keep you from going out, but you have to unlock it, right? Like you're having to turn your brain on, right? And it, the more barriers you can put there, the, the better it gets. The more sort of mindful moments you can have where you make, you have to kind of make a decision, and you don't, you come out of autopilot. CU I notice when whenever I have my binge moments, which happens once in a while, it is like unthinking. Yeah, it's just like a robot has taken over. This exactly. And with this, like, this particular client, right, he'd have a rough day at work, hedge fund manager, very stressful job. I say, "Okay, if you've had a rough day at work, first thing to do when you're driving home, say, 'Man, I've had a tough day at work. This is usually where I'd have a binge session.' Like, say it out loud, like, name it, you know what I mean? Sometimes just naming it is enough to stop it. I mean, I, not the same thing, but I struggle with, I'm sure you know, as ADHD, during conversation, I have something to say, I have something to say, I want to say it, I want to say it, I want to say it, right? And I'll end up cutting people off and making them feel bad. And so I still have that inclination, but now I'll go, if I start, I go, "Oh, I'm, I'm sorry, I jumped in. Please finish." Right? And so just like calling it out to yourself can make a huge difference on changing the behavior. That which gets monitored gets changed.

I really want to focus on this point of the psychology of both exercise and weight loss because in all the research that I do on even your conversations and other conversations, clearly the like fundamental that sits underneath doing all the things we're going to talk about is like having the motivation, the discipline, and mastering one's own like mind. Because as you kind of said, we can have all the diet plans in the world, and many or all of them might work, but without the psychology of how to lose weight and to motivate ourselves to get to the gym, none of it really matters. So what else do we need to think about when we're trying to understand how to master, like, the beast within our mind? There's a lot to unpack here. Good. I'll start with this. Um, do you know Ethan Suplee? You familiar with him? So Ethan is an actor. He was in, uh, "My Name Is Earl," he was in "American History X," and he was in "Remember the Titans," some of the big movies he's been in. Uh, "Wolf of Wall Street" as well. And he was over 500 lbs. Like, he, and like, everybody knows him as the, the really big guy in those movies and those shows. Now he's like 220 pounds and looks like he would play a military operator in a show, right? And he said something that really stuck with me. He said, um, "If the house is on fire, just get out of the house. We can worry about why the fire started later, but just get out." And there's so much like paralysis by analysis out there that people don't end up actually starting. And if I put two plates in front of you, you know, with different food, yeah, we can quibble, but for the most part, if I'm sitting something out with the cheeseburger, fries, and all this kind of okay versus lean meats, vegetables, we know which one is more conducive to to health, right? People will argue about these little things, low carb, low fat, those sorts of things. Just get out of the house. Stop, stop eating so, so much of this very energy-dense, hyper-palatable food. Start moving away.

And Ethan, I think it was Ethan, he has this, he has this thing he says when he, um, when he, uh, whenever he posts a picture in the gym, he'll say, "I killed my clone today." And I never, I never quite understood it. And then I read a, um, a systematic review of successful weight loss maintainers. Now, what that means is, weight loss, we know diets can help you lose weight, but they don't tend to work long-term because people, their adherence wanes, and they just kind of regain the weight over time. And if we look at, like, about three years after initial weight loss, it's like, depending on the statistics you use, it's anywhere from 90, 95% of people end up regaining almost all the weight they lost. And this study was about people who had successfully kept it off for a long period of time. So these are the unicorns, right? The, the 5, 10% of people who actually had that long-term success. And there were things on there that you would expect. Um, you know, they practiced some form of cognitive restraint. They, uh, did cognitive restraint being, um, counting calories, or doing low carb, or time-restricted eating, or some form of restraint. But the thing that stood out to me, that really grabbed my attention, was so many of them specified and pointed out they felt like they had to develop a new identity. And I texted Ethan and I was like, "Is this what you mean by 'I killed my clone'?" He goes, "That is exactly what I mean."

And so one of the things I'll tell people now is, think of the person that you want to become. Picture them. Think about what do you think their habits and behaviors look like on a daily basis? Now reverse, now start to reverse engineer that, right? And you mentioned motivation. And I, my thoughts have changed about motivation. A lot of people wait to get motivated or inspired. And hey, like, I think all that stuff's great, but in the course of anything, and I'm, I would bring it back to you, in in building a startup, I'm guessing there were days where you were not motivated to do what you were doing, right? Yeah, most days, right? Right. So many days. So motivation is great when it comes. I say that's like nitrous on a car, right? Give you a quick boost and make you go a lot faster. But discipline is the gas tank. That is it. It doesn't. I tell people, detach your feelings from the process. Okay? I have a very cold calculus when I look at my goals. What is my goal? What will it take to get there? Some form of work in time, right? No matter how you slice it. Let's, let's take, um, so I won, uh, the Master World Championship in powerlifting in 2022. Thank you. Took me, I went to open, uh, worlds in 2015, set a world squat record there, but then went through a lot of different injuries and a lot of pain. Took me seven years to get back and win. But there were times where I was very unmotivated to go to the gym because I couldn't lift heavy, I was, you know, in a lot of pain. But I knew if I want to get back there, this is what it's going to take. And so it was, it doesn't matter if I'm motivated, I have to do the things I said I was going to do. And I tell people, try to detach how you feel from the process it takes to get there. And that's really hard for a lot of people to do. But here's the thing, as you do the process, you start to see the results, and then the motivation becomes more sustained, right? The, the hard part is when you are down in the ditches and you, you aren't seeing that progress.

So when I'm coaching people on this stuff, a lot of it is trying to build their confidence. And so many people, they'll start a New Year's resolution, let's say, because it's beginning of the year, "I'm going to go to the gym five days a week." I'm like, "Stop. You haven't been going at all. How about this? You're going to be active at least an hour for three days a week. Let's start there." If you go five days, fantastic, right? But it's different if you said you're going to go five days, you only go three, you feel really bad about yourself. You say you're going to go three and you go three, feel really good about yourself. What's the harm of feeling bad about yourself? So there was a year, 2017, where I said, "I may call every day, Steve." And I was like, "I'm going to go to the gym every, every day of 2018." I believe it was. MH. And I'm not going to tell you what happened because I think you know. But I, I want to ask the question, what is the harm of setting a huge goal and then failing and feeling bad about yourself? You know, there's a lot of different versions of like, what builds confidence. But I think one of those things is keeping the promises you make to yourself, right? And also just doing the thing you said you were going to do. And that's why I tell people, like, hey, for me, if I say I'm going to go four or five times a week, that's not a problem because for me, it takes discipline to keep me out of the gym, right? Like, I love that, that's fun for me. But if you're somebody who hasn't been going, just start with something. I'm not saying don't be ambitious overall, but you have to build confidence in increments, right? Like, so for example, I'm going to go back to my own personal experience. I, in 2015, I set a world squat record, 668 pounds at 205 pound body weight class. But when I first started lifting, I was horrible at squats. I've got long legs. Um, I am, in fact, uh, um, one of the world powerlifting coaches looked at the video of my squat and said, "I, I don't know how you did that." And squats were very intimidating to me. I would get really scared trying to do it. My back would hurt, you know, all these sorts of things. You know, eventually I ended up squatting 668 pounds. But the first time I went in the gym, I wasn't able to do it. The first five years, 10 years, I couldn't, I couldn't even imagine that. Right? And one of the things I tell people about confidence is, I thought when I, if I squatted that amount of weight, 4 or 500 pounds would feel easy. It still feels heavy. I just got better at handling it, right? And I kind of use that euphemism for life, that analogy for life, because life doesn't get easier, but you can get better at handling those things. And the confidence that I built to be able to do that came through the repetition, doing it over and over and over again. And that's what people need. The problem is, they don't get the repetition in because they do things like you were talking about, which is they start to, it'd be like me going in the gym my first time saying, "I'm going to squat 400 pounds." I'm gonna get crumpled into a heap, right? But if I do it, if I do what I can do at the time, and slowly build that confidence, that can wind up in me doing something that I never thought possible for myself.

I think it was Jordan Peterson that said to me, when he deals with some of his clinical patients, the starting point for them is so small that it almost makes them feel shameful. So they don't do it. So he says he's dealt with people who literally can't get out of bed because their depression is so severe. And telling someone that their goal is just to walk down the hall and walk back, feels so small and inconsequential and so full of shame that that they just think, "No, that doesn't matter. I'm not going to do that." And there are a lot of people out there that are listening right now, and they think about where their starting point might be. And it might literally be getting out of the house, putting their trainers on, and going for a five-minute walk. But in their heads, they'll go, "That's not going to do anything. That's not going to get me to that Mountaintop that I, that I know I need to get to. So I'm not going to bother." A lot of people like that. And I mean, you know, you can take your cliché that you want, you know, "Journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step," "How to eat an elephant, one bite at a time." I mean, it's cliché, but it's very true, right? And I think if you're climbing a mountain, if you're only looking at the top, you're going to feel like you're getting nowhere, right? So if you want to climb a mountain, have in mind the mountain that you want to climb, but when you're climbing it, look at the next ledge and just do that as the checkpoint, right? So somebody asked me once, if somebody had a lot of weight to lose, like over 100 pounds, where would you tell them to start? I'd say, you know, I'd look at where they're at right now, what are their habits, their behaviors, what are they doing exercise-wise? Let's get them to the next ledge, right? So let's, let's just, you know, we can go into this too, but, you know, if they're drinking a bunch of soda per day, trying to get them to go straight to water, that might be very daunting for them, right? Okay, well, diet soda is better than than regular soda. And and people will argue about it, but I can cite the studies on this, okay? They're, they're, you know, they're eating certain foods. Can we do something somewhat close to what they're already doing, but find a way to cut out some calories from that, right? Let's, let's try and I'm going to try and meet them closer to where they are, and then slowly pull them back. This way, when you think about what it takes for someone to make that decision to change their life, so often it seems that there's some kind of adverse event. Like I'm talking here about the why that sits behind the reason to to change, to change, to lose the weight, to build the muscles. Do you see that often? That there's some kind of catalyst moment?

You actually see a lot of parallels between like the way addicts talk and people who have lost a lot of weight, in terms of they had to develop a new identity. They are often have to get a new set of friends, not on purpose, but if you think about if you were hanging around a certain type of people and you became and you were very overweight, you've probably fallen in with people who have similar habits to you. And even if you still care about those people, as you start to come out of that, there's a few things that are happening. One, if they're not joining you in the things you're doing, that creates a gap. And, uh, people can also be very insecure when people they know start improving themselves, and they start trying to pull them back in. Crabs in the bucket. "Why, why do you got to eat that? Why can't you enjoy this? Why can't you?" You know, that's because you're holding up a mirror to them by changing your life, right? Correct. Correct. So, you know, I, I don't think, he reminds me talking about this, my, uh, my brother, um, was an addict. And, um, he, he, like, he went to prison for a period of time. Um, he had a lot of really bad stuff go down in his life. And I, one day I asked him, I'm like, "Was it, was going to prison like your rock bottom?" And he goes, "No. He goes, honestly, I just woke up one day and realized I lose everything. I get a job and I lose it. I get some money and I lose it. I get a relationship and I lose it. I just got sick and tired of losing." And not always, but you hear a lot of similar stories from people who drastically changed their lives, as they just got to the point where they were sick and tired of being that way, and they just realized that if I don't make some kind of change, this is going to continue. And I think one, that takes a self-awareness that, which is hard. And having that mirror brought to you is really hard. Um, I can relate in other areas of life, but that why really is at the core of it. Because at the end of the day, if you don't have a really strong why, it is hard when you start to lose motivation. You know, I was watching a story of a guy who had a heart attack when he was like in his 40s, and then he lost 150 pounds. And he's like, "Whenever I started, whenever I didn't have motivation, or I started feeling like I wanted to fall back into bad habits, I thought about my kids growing up without a dad." And it made it very easy for me. And so when you have that really strong why, it, it, it makes it easier to get through it.

I'm not saying either me or you are going to be able to figure out an answer here, but I feel like maybe there's something we can offer to the question about how to cultivate the why. Is there anything that you do on those days? Any disciplines you think you can put in place that will just keep the why, um, front and center? I'm going to throw out one. Something that kind of helped me a little bit was just changing the background on my phone to, um, an image that reminded me of who I wanted to be. And it just meant that even if it gives me a 1% psychological reinforcement in the direction, so that I fall on the correct side of a decision relating to diet or fitness, maybe that would help, you know? Because it's, it's there.

A couple things I think about. Um, I think about the people I care about in my life and wanting to make them proud. Think about my kids, you know, um, how would I want, now I'm going to get emotional, how would I want them to remember their dad, you know? Um, I can remember, um, coming back from all these injuries and, and I was lifting in the garage one day, my daughter, she was, uh, six at the time, and she's such a little spark plug. And she would watch me, and sometimes she would come in and like do some lifts with me and stuff. And, uh, I was kind of explaining to her why I do this stuff and why it was important to me. And I said, "You know, Dad almost was a world champion. I got really close. And, you know, I, that would be something that I would, I would really treasure if I got the chance to do that." And she said, "Are you going to try and be a champion again?" And she said it in the kid way that like, "But oh my gosh." When she said that, whenever I felt tired, whenever I felt down, or whatever, I just remembered my daughter saying, "Are you going to try to be a champion again?" Made it easy, you know? And so I had my, like, it's going to sound goofy, but at Worlds in 2022, I was going through a lot of personal stuff at the time. And I had a picture of my kids on my phone, and I was looking at that, and I was almost in tears before I'd go out for lifts because I was so amped up and psyched up. And that was, that was my why. So I'm thinking about my kids. And also think about, you know, my parents and like great people, wanting to make them proud. And then honestly, like, my, my personal hero is my grandfather. So my grandfather is part of the Greatest Generation. Um, he was the funniest person I ever met, with the most integrity of anybody I ever met. And so so many times when I think about the person I want to be, I, I think about my grandfather. And, you know, still to this day, I'll think about them before I, if I feel like low motivation, or if I've really screwed something up, um, you know, like that sort of thing.

Let's go to the technical stuff. Yes. Let's start with, so we're talking here about dieting and weight loss. If I'm trying to lose weight, should I be counting my calories? Ah, so the first point of confusion: people assume calories in, calories out is the same thing as counting calories. That's like saying the law that in order to save money, you have to earn more than you spend is the same thing as keeping a budget. Keeping a budget can help you save money, but it's not the same thing. So let's break down calories in, calories out. Calories in, pretty straightforward. It is the food you eat, right? The calories in the food that you eat. Now, I would add one caveat to that: the metabolizable energy. So when we say calories, calories is literally a unit of energy. And so I'll have some people say, "Well, calories aren't a real thing. You can't look at calories on a microscope." You're right. It refers to the potential energy contained in the chemical bonds of food that through the process of digestion, absorption, and metabolism, that energy is captured in one way or another. So that's the energy into the system. Calories out is more complicated. So that involves a few different, uh, energy outputs. The first one being your basal metabolic rate. So your BMR is basically the cost of keeping the lights on. So if you just laid down, didn't move, that's how many calories your body would burn. And that's actually the major, for most people, the majority of the calories they burn per day. It's around 50 to 70%, depending on how active they are. And it fluctuates person to person. So as, as a man with fairly big muscles there, yours will be bigger than mine because, correct, you have more going on over there. Yeah, there, there you can tie about, at least based on the regressions, you can tie about 90% of the variance in BMR to someone's lean mass, okay? If you look at the studies, it's very tightly correlated with lean mass, right? Because lean tissue is more metabolically active than non-lean tissue. So BMR's one bucket. Then you have what's called the thermic effect of food. So your TEF, um, our bodies are kind of like, for lack of a poor analogy, but analogy that works is cars, like internal combustion engine. You don't just put petrol or gas in your car and all of a sudden it just spontaneously starts up. You got to start it. The battery puts in energy so you can get energy out of the fuel, right? Your body has to put in energy to extract the energy out of the food that you eat. And so a lot of the confusion, people say, "Well, calories in, calories out assumes that all calories equal." It doesn't because TEF accounts for this. Because for example, protein has a higher thermic effect of food than carbohydrate or fat. So if you look at, um, so protein requires more energy to basically process it, correct? So if you, if you look at, um, like fats, for example, TEF is about 0 to 3%, meaning if you eat 100 calories from dietary fat, you capture about 97 to 100 calories of it. Carbohydrates, about 5 to 10%. So if you eat 100 calories from carbohydrate, you capture about 90 to 95 calories from it. A lot of that depends on the fiber content. The more fiber, the lower the metabolizable energy. So fiber has a higher thermic effect of food as well. Then protein is about 70, 80%. So if you eat 100 calories from protein, you capture about 70 to 80 calories. So some people out there will say, "Well, there's negative calorie." No, those don't exist. Um, you're always getting more energy out of it than you put in, but some are lower than others, right? And so that TEF is about 5 to 10% of the energy you expend per day. So now we've got BMR, TEF, and then you have your physical activity, which we can further break into two different buckets. The first one is obvious, which is exercise, right? You go to the gym, burn some calories, and that's energy out. The second one is less intuitive. It's called non-exercise activity thermogenesis, NEAT. And that is the small unconscious movements that you make per day. Give you an example, like what I'm doing like now, it's not subconscious because I'm thinking about it, but fidgeting, um, when you're talking with your hands, uh, pacing, right? In fact, they've actually shown that people who have a more, they call obese-resistant phenotype, when they eat more, they tend to just become spontaneously more active without realizing it. And so people who are more obese-prone, when they eat more food, they tend to not compensate by becoming more spontaneously active. Oh, interesting. And people, it's kind of pedantic, but it's important to understand the difference. I'll hear people say, "Well, I'm going to take the steps and get my NEAT up." No, no, you made a decision, that's exercise. Okay. The reason being, NEAT really isn't consciously modifiable. And so I, I'll give you an example of like an extreme example of this. So when I was getting ready for my last bodybuilding show back in 2010, um, the fatigue that you deal with is unbelievable. It's hard to describe in words. Um, soul-crushing would be a way to describe it. And, um, I had gotten done, you know, I trained two hours at the gym that day, I'd done an hour of cardio, got home, and I remember I sat down on the couch. And my, my ex at my wife at the time, uh, she had like "Real Housewives of Whatever County" on the TV. I hated those shows, but the remote was about seven feet away. I watched the entire show. I did not get up and move because I was so fatigued. That's an example of NEAT. And NEAT is very modifiable. So they've shown that even a 10% reduction in body weight can reduce NEAT by up to four or 500 calories per day. So you're just, a lot of people end up moving less without even realizing it.

So here's the rub. This. So you got your calories in, you got your calories out: BMR plus TEF plus NEAT plus exercise. People think of these two things as static. They're not static. And that's, I talk about in the book a lot. We have various adaptations that fight us for weight loss. First of which is on the metabolism side. When you lose body weight, your BMR drops. But part of that is because you're carrying around less weight, right? So if, if I'm 200 pounds and I drop down to 180 pounds, I just have less mass to carry around. And so your BMR goes down a little bit, which is again, which again is your base metabolic rate, right? Which is the, the cost of keeping the lights on, basically. But there's actually what's called metabolic adaptation, which has shown that with a 10% body weight loss, on average, you can see a reduction beyond what you would expect of 15% for BMR. So let's take an example here, because people will say, "Well, calorie deficit didn't work for me because, you know, I was eating this many calories, I was exercising this much period of time, and I was, um, you know, so, so I, like, what happened?" Well, you thought you were in a calorie deficit. But let's take me for example, okay? My BMR, I've had it measured, it's about, it's about 2,000 calories, a little bit lower, about 2,000 calories. My total daily energy expenditure is around 3,400 calories per day. So that's all this stuff added up, right? But if I lose 10% of my body weight, for me, 2700 calories per day is a pretty significant calorie deficit. Mhm. But if I lose 10% of my body weight, if I drop my BMR by 15%, 15% of 2,000 calories a day is 300 calories. Drop my NEAT by 400 calories, that's 700 calories. All of a sudden, that deficit is no longer a deficit. That's now maintenance, right? Now, this doesn't happen all at once. This is a progressive thing over time. But there's a reason, like I tell people, I'm like, if it was a calorie deficit as soon as, like, from the time you did it indefinitely, you would starve to death, right? But all of us, most of us have had the experience of starting a diet, losing some weight, and eventually, even though you're eating the same way, doing the same exercise, it plateaus, right? And then you have to do something else to further establish that deficit. And the other way. So that's on one side where that's kind of working against you to try to bring you back to your original body weight, right? We talk about weight, weight regain. The other side is your hunger hormones go up as you diet. Right? They've actually then they have shown obese people who lose weight to become normal weight, when you compare them to normal weight people who were never obese with the same, uh, similar lean body mass, the formerly obese people have a lower total daily energy expenditure and they have higher markers of

Hunger, they have a higher appetite, so it's working on both sides of that equation to push you back. So, the devil's advocate argument is, "Well, you know, I ate this amount of calories, that should have been a calorie deficit, and I didn't lose weight." Or it's the, "You know, all calories are created equal." I'll tell people all calories are created equal because saying a calorie is not a calorie, it's like saying, uh, second hands on the clock are different. No, they're just a unit of measurement. All sorts of calories are not equal.

So, let's take, um, budgeting, right? I used that earlier. Sports car, okay? So, let's say somebody makes a million dollars a year, right? If they want to spend $150,000 on a sports car, but they're still able to pay their mortgage, they can take care of their responsibilities, and they can put money away for retirement, can they buy that sports car? Sure, they can, right? And is it a bad investment? I guess you could argue it's a bad investment because they could put the $150,000 in those investments. But maybe that sports car makes them feel good and gives them a little carrot on the end of the stick to, you know, keep working and whatnot.

But if I take somebody who makes $200,000 a year, should they buy the $150,000 sports car if it means they can't pay their mortgage, they can't, um, you know, save for retirement? No, of course not, right? Similar thing with energy, right? So, if I'm, you know, somebody who's very active and I burn a lot of calories, is it a big deal if I have a Pop-Tart? Say, um, if I'm still getting enough protein, I'm hitting my target energy, I'm, uh, getting enough fiber in, and my, my, my micronutrients, if that gives me that little carrot on the end of the stick to keep being consistent, not a big deal.

But if we're talking about a smaller woman with less lean mass who needs to eat 1,200 calories a day to lose weight, that's not a very good investment, right? It's not a very good use of funds. So, what I'll tell people is, you know, people will say, "Well, how do I know what a deficit is? How, how do I know how many calories to eat?" Right? Because also, just on that point, I, I heard you talk about food labeling as well and how inaccurate that can be. So, you can, you can have up to a 20% error in food labeling, right? So, some people will use... So, what that means is it could say 100 calories, it could be 80, it could be 120. Now, I will say, if it's coming from a big food company and they have pretty rigorous standards, it's probably not that far off. But they're allowed up to that, right? Because they recognize that some food sources are very heterogeneous, it'd be difficult to like get it exactly on.

So, you'll have some people say, "Well, see, calorie counting is useless because you can't know exactly how many calories you're taking in." And are you going to get your BMR measured? Are you going to get your NEAT measured? Are you going to get this measured? It can be much more simple than that. Again, financial analogy. I could make the argument that keeping a budget is useless because you never know what inflation is exactly doing, and if you have investments, you can get differential, you know, returns on it. And on the output side, you have unexpected expenses, you have fluctuations in expenses. Your power bill is going to be different from month to month, right? Your car breaks down one month.

But if you look at the average over time, you can get a pretty good idea of on average what your expenses are like, right? And you can get a pretty good idea over time. Un... let... well, entrepreneurs like us, but even like us, you get, you can start to kind of see the trends and get a relatively good, good idea of what it's going to be. So, when it comes to calories in and calories out, yes, tracking exactly can be very, very difficult. But if you are monitoring your body weight and you're being consistent with how you track, you'll know if you're in a calorie deficit.

And I think another thing that crosses people up, this actually showed up on that, um, that review of the successful weight loss maintainers, they actually talked about one of the things that, um, was a barrier for them or hard for them was the weight fluctuations. Because, you know, if you've ever, if you've ever weighed in every day, have you ever, have you ever done this where you weighed in every day, even first thing in the morning, right? Up, down, bounces all over the place, right? So, actually, when we, with our coaching and then with our app, we're not just looking at one weight. We encourage people to weigh as long as it doesn't cause them a lot of stress and anxiety, um, weigh in daily and then it's taking the average of those. Because day-to-day changes in weight are much more dictated by fluctuations in fluid. But week-to-week and month-to-month averages reflect loss or gain of mass.

So, for example, if you're monitoring your body weight, you know, taking averages and looking at that over time, you'll know if you're in a calorie deficit because on average, you're seeing it go down, right? Now, I wanted to make one more point, which is you don't have to track calories to lose weight. Absolutely not. It's just one methodology. Because no matter what you do, you have to have some form of restraint, right? And my friend Peter Attia actually breaks it down nicely into a couple different, three buckets, right? You can have dietary restraint, which is low carb, herb, plant-based, um, whole food, you know, whatever it is, you're, you're restricting some sort of food group or type of food, right? Then you have a time restriction, you eat within a certain time frame, a certain window. Then you can have just straight-up calorie restriction, where you're tracking and monitoring.

What you choose to do, I think a lot in terms of what is best for an individual boils down to their psychology and what feels easy. So, this is where a lot of the diet wars start. Because somebody will do, say, low carb, right? And they'll get results from that and they'll say, "Man, it felt like I wasn't even dieting." And for whatever reason, that clicked with the algorithm in their brain and felt easy, and they got progress from that. But then they assume that everyone else will have the same response. Somebody else does low fat, uh, somebody else does intermittent fasting, whatever have you. And you have all these stories. Me personally, I was the kind of person, I'm the kind of person that if I tried to restrict certain foods, I end up getting that binge response, right? But if you tell me I can eat whatever I want as long as I'm tracking it, I become ridiculously consistent. And I mean, I'm still eating mostly like whole food, minimally processed foods, you know, those sorts of things because they're better for satiety. But I don't stress out about having some snacks here and there that are, you know, bad consistency because I'm, I'm being very consistent, right?

How important is that consistency? It is the most important thing. So, there is actually a, um, meta-analysis. And for when I say meta-analysis, think a study of studies, okay? So, it's not a new study. It's what they're trying to do in a meta-analysis is they are trying to take studies that are similar and compile them together to see, is there a consensus here? Is there an overall effect here, right? So, there was a meta-analysis of, um, where they looked at 14 different, like, popular diets. And these ranged from low carb to, you know, high carb, low fat, right? And what they found is on the long term, none of them were better than the others for weight loss. But when they stratified them for adherence, from least adherent to most adherent, what does that mean? Uh, so people who were consistent, basically. So, when they stratified them for, I think compliance, another way to put it, when they stratified them that way, regardless of diet, a linear effect of adherence on weight loss. So, what that tells me is actually the best diet for the individual is the one that they consistently, that can consistently execute. They all function the same way, which is, you know, creating some sort of calorie deficit.

Now, some people will say that's not true. I did a low-carb diet and I was eating more food. You probably felt more satiated because you were eating less calorie-dense food. You probably were eating a greater quantity in terms of weight of food, but you were eating less calories. Is there any way to lose weight in a calorie surplus? Not if that's the... So, what I'll tell people is, all right, you take in food. It, the carbons that you take in, they have to go somewhere, right? And if you are, if you are not in a surplus, what you are saying is you are creating energy out of nothing. If that's the case, NASA needs to study you because we've figured out how to not worry about fuel on long space flights, right? We have a perpetual motion machine. Um, again, a, a lot of this, the confusion becomes when you have, you know, for example, metabolic adaptation. Yeah. So, you know, people, they may think they're in a calorie deficit, but they're not, or they're overestimating how many calories they burn.

And here's the other thing that people don't want to talk about, 'cause this gets down to the mirror, right? So, there's a classic study, I think it was from 1992, um, and I think the title, I may butcher it, but it's "Discrepancy Between Reported and Actual Calorie Intake in Obese Subjects." I, I want to say is is the name of the study. And so, what they did was they had people, they screened for people who said that they could not lose weight even though they were eating low calories. And the, the average calorie intake that was reported by participants was 1,200 calories a day. And so, they measured a bunch of different stuff. They measured their lean mass, their fat mass, they measured their BMR, they measured their total daily energy expenditure. They found that their BMR was very average when it was, when it was for, when it was based on their lean mass, right? And actually, if you look at obese people, they actually have a higher BMR and higher energy expenditure typically than lean people, but on average, it's 'cause they have more lean mass. Because when you have more mass to carry around, your body has to create more locomotive mass.

But when they, so they, and they told the subjects, "We will, we are going to monitor you, and we will know if you're eating more than you say you are." The average in the study was, they underreported their calorie intake by about 50% and they overreported their physical activity by just under 50%. Gez. Now, and some of the participants argued with the researchers about it, right? Here's where people miss the message. The message a lot of people take from that is, "Oh, see, they're lying." And that's a really hard thing to take to somebody to be like, "Well, you're probably underreporting your calorie intake. You're probably eating more than you think you are." That feels very, you know, aggressive. And I don't think it's lying. I think that one, people don't really understand portion sizes. If you've never had the experience of like weighing out your food, you will be shocked. Like, weigh out a serving of cereal or a serving of ice cream. Or if you want to be really depressed, weigh out a serving of peanut butter. Because the tablespoon that you're grabbing, I promise you, is probably two or three servings. And then, you know, like, the first time I weighed out ice cream when I, when I started weighing my food, I was like, "This is a serving? It's like two bites." You know? And so, I don't think people have a really good understanding of serving size.

And even, I, I'll remember, I never forget this, it was an Instagram DM, and this lady was saying that she was eating 1,600 calories a day and not losing weight. And we kind of, you know, had a little back and forth and we were talking. And I said, "Well, how?" She's like, "I am measuring my food." I'm like, "How are you measuring it?" She's like, "I'm, I'm doing volume measurements." So, she was doing cups, tablespoons, that sort of thing. I said, "Do me a favor. Do, do exactly what you've been doing, but weigh out each one." A day later, she came back and said, "Oh my God, I'm eating 2,700 calories a day." And so, even dietitians underreport their caloric intake in studies by about 10%. And these are the experts, right? So, you have on one side, people are eating more than they think they are. And then on the other side, they think they're being more active than they really are. But again, that's a hard conversation to have with people. And even as such, telling people, "Hey, you need to move more, eat less." Mechanistically, that's true. But that's like telling somebody, "Hey, if you want to save more money, just earn more and spend less."

With all of this, you know, I, I was adding up all these discrepancies, right? Discrepancies in like, you're weighing it wrong, the labels got 20% wrong. And I, and then my head went back to your budgeting analogy. As an entrepreneur, as a CEO, if my accounting was 20% off, I'm dead. But if my, but then if it's 95% off in the till, like how much money we're getting into the till, and then I'm using a cup instead of a scale, so that's, I don't know, 30% off as well. No wonder, you know, the business would go bust, right? It's complicated. I go, "What the [ __ ] are you going to do?" Yeah, it, it is complicated. But I will tell people, you know, again, if you get back to the basics of monitoring your body weight consistently, which is one of the... I have to be careful about this because there are some people where monitoring their body weight consistently ends up being like, really anxiety-provoking for them, distorted eating, and stuff. Yeah, that sort of thing. So, that's, you know, I try to be sensitive to that. But it is a consistent thing in the literature that people who lose weight and keep it off tend to monitor their body weight pretty regularly. And it's, it's a self-correcting thing, right? Like, if you're keeping a budget very regularly and you see, "Oh man, I spent, you know, $5,000 more this month." What happens? You correct, right?

And so, I would use that more instead of the accounting variation. I would say, "Well, sometimes your business has unexpected expenses, right? Or sometimes you have less expenses, right? And so those are going to fluctuate and can be hard to anticipate, right? And so what we're looking for overall is, okay, let's look back at, you know, I think a lot of businesses operate in quarters, right? Let's look at this quarter, okay, on average, here's, here's our month over month, what we're profiting, right? Okay, well, we can start to budget based on these sorts of things and expectations. We'll try to project out a little bit." I kind of look at that with people. I'm like, "All right, well, how much weight did you lose on average, like, over the past month? Okay, how much were you eating? Okay, you lost six pounds over the last month. You're definitely in a calorie deficit, right? It's working. Keep going. Maybe you're eating 2,000 calories, maybe you're eating 2,300 calories. Who cares? It's working." Right?

Now, what happens is eventually, once you plateau, again, maybe eating 2,000, maybe eating 2,300, doesn't matter, whichever it is. If you've plateaued, it means you have to reestablish the deficit. So, you either have to reduce your calories or you have to increase your activity, or a combination of both, you know, those sorts of things.

What about one thing I, you talk about at the very start of this conversation was, um, artificial sweeteners, specifically? Oh, yeah. Let's do that. Specifically in things like Diet Coke. I've, you know, I've wondered for a while whether Diet Coke is healthy or not, okay? And there's a lot of, you know, people talking about this at the moment. So, what's your answer to that? Okay, this is going to be the most commented thing about in this entire interview, I'm sure. Go. Um, okay. So, first off, let's just talk about weight loss and fat loss, okay? And and leave out the other stuff. Um, if you look at the epidemiology and the cohort studies, you tend to see that people who consume more artificial sweeteners or diet soda are heavier in body weight. And so, some people have said these things cause weight gain. But the problem with that is, again, lifestyle behaviors. And so, one of the things they've shown is that people who consume more artificial sweeteners actually tended to be more overweight to start with, obese to start with. They didn't cause them to become that way. They're consuming more of them because they're trying to get to a less obese state, right? So, there's a correlation there.

But if we look at the randomized control trials, right? Where they say, "Hey, you're used to, you guys drink soda, regular soda. You guys drink diet soda." There was actually one that just got published, a very, very rigorously controlled one-year study, way more weight loss in the diet soda group. And I'm thinking of another randomized control trial, I think it was six months, where they saw like 6 kilograms of weight loss just from switching people from regular soda to diet soda. Or it might not have been soda specifically. They call them sugar-sweetened beverages versus, you know, non-nutritive sweetened beverages. So, when you replace, for, for soda, it seems to be very effective. All things being equal. And people will say, "Well, it, you know, it activates the, the sweetness in the, and you get hungrier from it." Well, if that's the case, then these studies would suggest that artificial sweeteners are actually the best fat burners known to man, because if people are eating more and still losing six kilograms, that's amazing. They're not. They're not fat burners. They they're replacing that sweet taste.

And then people will say, "Well, it's not better than water." You know, water. People should just drink water. Shoot the alligator closest to the boat, right? Like, okay, hey, if you can drink water and just drink water, cool. Do that. But if somebody can lose, and I have people all the time when I do a post about this, somebody say, "I lost 30, 40, 50 pounds. All I did was stop drinking regular soda and drink diet soda." Literally the only change they made in their life. Now, when they compare it versus water, they either see the same results or the diet soda group gets a little bit better results. And yeah, now it's not because of any kind of fat burning effect. What is likely is when somebody switches from regular sugar-sweetened beverage to water, they may try to fill that gap of that sweet taste somewhere else. Whereas if they're just consuming the artificially sweetened or non-nutritive sweetened, but we can't say artificial because, um, like stevia is actually, you know, natural. So, to say, so they call it non-nutritive sweeteners. But if they're consuming the, the non-nutritive sweeteners, they're filling that gap, compensation. Again, compensating, right?

So, now, again, there's nothing magic about them. People are just eating less. And if you can do that with water, you don't have to consume diet soda. You know, I would say drink water. But if you're somebody where, man, you know, you really have a hard time quitting regular soda, heck yeah, drinking diet soda is a lot better. And people will go, "Well, what about insulin?" They raise insulin. That is actually one of the biggest myths out there. There are multiple, not just, I, but now I'm pretty sure there's a meta-analysis as well that shows that these artificial sweeteners do not raise insulin. There is one study, um, I'm thinking specifically about sucralose. There's one study, and there, everybody always hangs their hats on this, and I love to to break it down. Where sucralose did not increase insulin, but they did a, they did a sucrose group, a carbohydrate only group, and a carbohydrate plus sucrose group. And the results were, the carbohydrate plus sucralose group secreted more insulin than the carbohydrate only group, even though they ate the same amount of carbs.

And so, people go, "Well, see, maybe it's not bad." But if you're, you know, drinking it with carbohydrates, it's bad. And this is where reading the full text and really going deep on a study is very important. So, the carbohydrate only group was sucrose, which is 50% glucose, 50% fructose. The carbohydrate plus sucralose group was maltodextrin. Maltodextrin, if you look at, are you familiar with glycemic index? Loosely? Yeah. So, glycemic index basically looks at, like, um, you know, how quickly glucose appears in your system. And usually, you can kind of correlate the insulin response to that. Maltodextrin has a significantly higher glycemic index and causes a greater insulin response than sucrose because it is a, it's actually causes a greater insulin response than even glucose itself because, um, it's kind of getting into the biochemistry, but because it's like this polymer, um, it is actually a little bit more rapidly digested and absorbed into the circulation. So, it was actually an inappropriate control group to try to assess that because if you look at the difference in insulin response, it's about what you'd expect if you just look at maltodextrin versus sucrose.

So, based on the research, there's no evidence it affects glycemia or increases insulin. And in fact, in these studies where they, you know, these randomized control trials where they look at, you know, weight loss, um, you see improvements in insulin sensitivity, HBA1C, you know, because people are losing weight, not because of anything magic with these sweeteners.

Is sugar addictive? This one's going to get me in trouble too. Um, I want to come back to the artificial sweeteners, but I'll answer that. Um, sugar by itself does not appear to be addictive. There are certain foods that appear to create what's called a food dependence. There's subtle differences between that and addiction. But I mean, kind of the anecdote is, nobody's like, just grabbing the bag of sucrose and just, you know, eating that. And if you think about the foods that really are like very hard to stop eating, they're usually not just high in sugar. They're usually, it's a combination of sugar, fat, salt, and texture. Okay? Texture matters as well, and mouthfeel. People will say, "Well, sugar's addictive. Look at cakes, cookies, ice cream." There's more calories from fat in those than there are sugar in a lot of cases. So, couldn't you by that logic just argue that fat is also addictive?

So, sugar, straight sugar, doesn't appear to be addictive per se. Now, it's not very satiating, right? And it's utterly devoid of any other kind of nutrient. So, I'm not saying it's a good idea to eat a lot of sugar. But, um, it doesn't appear to have addictive qualities in isolation. But there are certain foods, cakes, cookies, these sorts of foods, hyperpalatable, very great mouthfeel, potato chips, french fries, these sorts of foods may have like, semi-addictive type properties. But just sugar itself doesn't appear to. And there's a, there's a, a study that kind of backs that up, basically. I think the title was like, "No Evidence for Sugar Addiction in Humans."

So, people will say, "Well, you know, when I eat that piece of chocolate or that, you know, sugary thing, I end up just eating more and more and more and more and more and more. And then the next day, I, I feel like I need sugar more. And I can, I've got my own sort of anecdotal experience of, I almost call it like a sugar cycle. Where there might be a week, you know, once every four months or six months, where I have some sugar. And then the next day, I want more sugar. And then the next day, I want more sugar. And then the next day. And then when I break that sugar cycle, and if I don't eat sugar for like five days, it kind of, it feels like the craving's gone away." Mmm. You must hear that from people. Yeah. I mean, like right now, I have no urge to have sugar for some reason. Yeah. It's so hard to disentangle that from just psychology in general, right? And just like, it, that could be a self-fulfilling thing where it's like, you know, people have been told sugar is addictive, or they've heard sugar is addictive, and so they eat some, feel that mood. But also, like, again, the chocolate usually also high in fat, right? Like the mouthfeel is really good. So, I'm not saying like that stuff is easy to overeat on and and people can have a hard time stopping. But it doesn't appear that sugar, like independently, is addictive. But it can be part of foods that may have addictive-like properties.

Artificial sweeteners, you said you wanted to close off there. Yeah. So, now let's talk. So, we very clearly, the research studies show, the ones that are controlled well, it does help with weight loss. Um, in a lot of these studies, what about cancer, heart disease, uh, and the gut microbiome? Because that's a lot of the questions that are out there. So, with cancer, a lot of people think, "Oh, there's so many studies showing it causes cancer." Well, first of all, again, we're talking about epidemiology, we're talking about cohort studies. So, there's a lot of confounding variables. But so, we were talking about consensus earlier. Um, it's kind of a, um, I'm on their scientific advisory board, and it's like PubMed plus ChatGPT. So, you can ask it a question and it will immediately, like, crawl all the research literature and give you a consensus of what the research says, right? And so, I, I did this, and you can synthesize it too, where it'll show you what percentage of studies say yes, no, and then possibly, right? So, I, I think I put in, "Do artificial sweeteners cause cancer?" Do you know, 80% of the studies say no. But you don't hear about those. And why is that? Because it's much more newsworthy to put out negative news. Because if you hear a study, "This thing doesn't cause cancer," ho-hum, right? But what gets shared a lot, "Oh man, Aunt Deborah, she drinks Diet Coke. Deb, have you seen this?" You know, it's much more sharable. So, that negative news tends to get published more, right?

And if you look at the, the human studies, some of the, the more well-done ones, like I'm thinking of the NutriNet-Santé cohort out of France, the conclusion was, "Oh, it increased the risk of cancer." And I, I looked in, I think it was aspartame, specifically. If something's carcinogenic, typically what we see is a dose response, right? So, if you smoke more, you have a higher risk of lung cancer. Did you know that? The, yes, the, so they compared like no or like low amount of aspartame users to like low, moderate, and then high, moderate. I want to say it was three different groups. So, I, I could be butchering this a little bit, but think low, medium, high, right? The medium group had a higher risk of cancer. The high group didn't. It actually, like, not, compared to the, the low group, it was not statistically different. But it dropped from the moderate group. So, to me, and again, we're talking about an odds ratio of like 1.15, meaning a 15% relative risk increase. Let me put that in perspective. 15% sounds scary when it comes to cancer. But relative risk means if your absolute risk of developing cancer in, say, the next 10 years is 10%, a relative risk increase of 15% says it goes up to 11.5. Yeah, it doesn't mean it goes from 10 to 25, right? So, it's important to, to understand the difference. But again, if it's really carcinogenic, we should expect to see kind of a, a dose response, right? We don't see that. So, to me, that's, especially with all the studies that don't find an association, that's, that's more likely to be some kind of data artifact with, who knows, confounding variables, healthy user bias, what have you.

What about the gut? So, now there are studies showing that some sweeteners do change the gut microflora, the comp, the composition of it. Sucralose appears to. Aspartame, not so much. I think saccharin also showed a change to the gut microbiome. Now, here's what's interesting. It's hard to know if that is a good, bad, or neutral change in terms of overall health. Because, um, I was looking through one of the studies on sucralose, and they were talking about that a couple of species or or genuses of bacteria that increased. And one of them that increased was actually associated with people who are leaner, have less obesity, and better insulin sensitivity. And also a species that produce more butyrate. And butyrate actually is associated with a whole host, this is a short chain fatty acid produced by the gut microbiome. Butyrate is associated with a whole host of positive health benefits. So, I, I will say it's worth monitoring because some of these do appear to change the breakdown of the gut microbiota. But there's probably, you could argue just as much that there's a positive effect as you could a negative effect. So, what I'll say is, again, if we look back at the, again, shoot the alligator closest to the boat. And there are no solutions, only trade-offs. If somebody switches to diet soda, even if it's not the very best thing they could do, maybe water is the very best thing they could do. But if they lose 20 pounds and their HBA1C drops and their insulin sensitivity gets better, the metabolic health gets better, it's probably a worthwhile trade-off.

Are there any supplements that you would recommend everybody to take? So, I, I always say I have like tiers of supplements, right? Um, my, my first tier, thousands of research studies, very clearly has benefits, creatine monohydrate, um, which we've known about the performance benefits for years. We've known about the, um, the strength benefits, the body composition benefits. You take it every day? Yes, I do. Um, now it's coming out that there's cognitive benefits. And I want to say, man, I hope I don't, I hope I don't get this wrong. So, I will fact-check this and and make sure you ask me for the study. I'm pretty sure they did a study that showed that creatine actually decreased depressive symptoms. Interesting. So, what I will say is, if there was one I would recommend for everybody, it would probably be creatine monohydrate because it's cheap, effective, and, um, I mean, people say, "Wow, we don't know what the long-term effects are." It's been around for like 40 years. We, if, if there were long-term effects, we'd have seen it by now. And just to quick aside, creatine monohydrate, don't waste your money on anything else. There's people try to reinvent the wheel with creatine because monohydrate, it's, you know, remember when like big screen flat screen TVs came out? Uh, this I might be a, I'm my age here. No, I remember. But I remember it was like $1,000 for a 40-inch screen TV. And now you can get one for a stick of bubblegum, you know what I mean? And it's because everybody makes them, they're so ubiquitous, it drove the cost down, right? Everybody sells creatine monohydrate, it drives the cost down. So, companies come up with new forms of creatine and make these claims around them to try to like get you to spend more money on creatine. Creatine monohydrate saturates the muscle cell 100%. You don't need to do anything else.

What's going on there? So, a couple of things. Um, and we don't, don't fully understand all the mechanisms, but we know that when creatine gets in the system, um, and gets into the cell, it bonds with a phosphate, which, uh, produces creatine phosphate. That is a high-energy phosphate donor. So, when you're exercising, um, basically, you are using what's called adenosine triphosphate, which is ATP, which is the purest form of energy in your body. So, this, what we call hydrolysis of ATP, is used to power a lot of reactions in your body. Um, and so, ATP, triphosphate, three phosphates. It, to power these reactions, it gets cleaved to ADP, adenosine diphosphate, plus, uh, an inorganic phosphate. Right? Creatine can donate its phosphate to ADP, reform ATP. So, what we see is, you know, um, especially during anaerobic exercise, uh, better performance of creatine because it's a high-energy phosphate donor, can help replenish that. Um, and then it also pulls water into the cell. And we think that that's part of the body composition benefits of it because, um, you know, a hydrated muscle cell, I mean, muscle cells are 70% water, they're mostly water. And people say, "Well, it's just water." Okay, but that's lean tissue. And there's actually some, I believe there's some evidence that actually, uh, hydrating the muscle basically actually increases the, improves the contractile properties of the muscle. So, that could explain part of the strength benefits. Um, and of course, again, it's going to show up as lean mass, right? Now, it's not a huge effect. We're talking, you know, couple pounds for most people, something like that. I'll take it. But, but for a relatively cheap, effective supplement, yeah, take it.

What are the supplements then? Is there anything else in the tier one? Yeah, uh, I mean, like for people who can tolerate whey protein. I mean, you know, it's not, um, it's not magic, but it's a cheap, uh, usually quite tasty way to get in high-quality protein. And, you know, if you get it from whole food, great. But a lot of people struggle to get in, you know, the amount of protein they'd like to get in from whole food. And so, whey protein, again, very high quality, usually easily digestible. The caveat is, whey protein concentrate, a lot of people can't tolerate it because there's lactose in there. So, if you have a lactose, uh, intolerance, a whey isolate, which is usually microfiltered, um, gets out the vast majority, if not all the lactose. And so, most people can tolerate that. But there are a certain percentage of people who also have a sensitivity to the lactalbumin in whey, the, the proteins in whey. So, in that case, there's what's called a whey hydrolysate, which is pre-digested whey. And almost all people can tolerate that. But if you don't have any digestive issues with it, a concentrate or isolate is totally fine.

What else in that tier one? And then I would say, uh, caffeine. Interesting. Caffeine is one of the, it is the original cognitive enhancer. If we look at cognitive tests, we see consistently people perform better. And if you look at performance, people consistently perform better. Right before 12? A lot of people talk to me about the half-life of caffeine impacting sleep. Yeah. So, that, I mean, that's the, you know, there's even some evidence that, you know, even if you have like a good dose of caffeine in the morning, that it may still affect your sleep later. So, again, no solutions, only trade-offs, right? Um, I would say overall, if you are an athlete, um, or somebody who, you know, relies heavily on your brain power to, you know, do whatever it is you do, caffeine probably a useful supplement. As you said, you know, if you're going to take it, try to get in, you know, nine hours before you're going to sleep to cease your caffeine intake because, um, by that time, you know, the majority of it is out of your system, right?

What are the big misconceptions about intermittent fasting? It, it seems to be a really great tool for a lot of people to be able to control their, their calorie intake. Um, in studies where they don't prescribe calories, so they, they don't match calories, they just tell people either intermittent fast or, you know, follow a diet, people in the intermittent fasting groups tend to lose more weight and have better improvements in their blood markers. But it's not because of anything magic about intermittent fasting. It's because it's placing them in a calorie deficit. Do they see that in the studies that when they, when they do like randomized control trials where they're, they're actually controlling calories? I'm like, one great extreme version of that would be, uh, there was a study on alternate day fasting, right? So, people would do, um, one day fast, complete fast, the next day, um, eat 150% of their maintenance calories, whereas the group that was just doing continuous was doing 75% of their maintenance calories the entire time. Both groups lost pretty much the same amount of weight. And actually, the, the continuous group retained a little bit more lean mass and lost a little bit more fat mass. But, you know, that's a pretty extreme form of fasting. If you look at the, like, the more traditional, like 16/8 or those sorts of intermittent fasting, you see pretty much the same retention of lean mass compared to just continuous kind of eating programs.

The, the myths that really get tossed around are a lot of them around longevity. And people saying, "Well, 'cause whenever I talk about this, people will say, 'Well, I don't, I don't fast for weight loss. I, I fast for health. I fast for longevity.'" And autophagy, you probably heard this term. So, what I'll tell you is, there's actually more evidence that, uh, calorie restriction increases autophagy than intermittent fasting. But intermittent fasting or fasting does increase autophagy. So, let's talk about what, what this is. So, autophagy is a type of basically lysosomal protein breakdown. So, there's a few different ways that the body breaks down, like, old, misfolded proteins or just things that need to be turned over. One of them is, um, through this kind of lysosomal protein degradation, which the lysosome is a, is an organelle in the cell that can kind of engulf these old proteins and break them down. And then you get the amino acids from those proteins that can then be recycled to make new proteins, right? Calorie restriction increases autophagy. Exercise increases autophagy. Fast can increase autophagy too. But you'll hear people say, "Well, you got to fast for X period of time 'cause it's when autophagy turns on, like 3 days or something, 72 hours or something." Not true.

So, this, this is autophagy, protein breakdown is always occurring, regardless. It's the relative rate that changes, right? But there's no evidence that fasting increases autophagy more than eating the same amount of calories just spread out over time. Now, let me give you an example, right? Let's say somebody fasts for 20 hours out of the day and they eat for 4 hours, right? And and again, the example I'm using is because some people will say, "Well, I don't do it for weight loss. I do it for, you know, just health benefits." So, let's say over that day, they're eating their maintenance level of calories, you're just eating in a 4-hour period, right? Whereas let's say ex-person just eats three, four meals and the same amount of calories during the fasting period. Sure, your autophagy is going to, your rate's going to go up. But then during that 4 hours when you're eating, you're having to eat a lot more food during that 4 hours. Guess what's going to happen? It's going to go way down. So, while the, your rate of autophagy may be lower eating continuously throughout the day compared to the time when people are fasting, when those people, when the fasters start eating in that window, whatever it is, since they have to eat more during that time, autophagy drops. Whereas the people eating continuously, their autophagy is now a higher rate.

What if you, what if you're going through some kind of disease or some kind of inflammation or whatever? Is there a use for intermittent longer-term fasting in that context? So, say if I was, I don't know, if I had some inflammation or there was, you know, something wrong with me, is there ever a use case for sort of 72-hour fasts that will hold me, I guess, in a greater, um, depth of autophagy? This is difficult because there's not really direct research looking at this. So, I, I what I will say will be speculation. And I'm comfortable speculating on it. Again, let's just break it down to equating weekly calories, right? Because if we're comparing apples to apples, right? We have the, we know caloric restriction will increase autophagy. So, if intermittent fasting places somebody in a calorie deficit overall, that's what we call a confounding variable. Right? So, if we assume over the course of a week, two people, assume genetically identical, right? Eating the same amount of calories, but somebody is eating them in 4 days, whereas the other person's just spreading them across seven. But the person eating them in four days is fasting for three days. Well, their rate of autophagy and fat oxidation is going to be much higher during those three days. But then when they've got to fit all the calories they normally would in, mhm, over those four days, now it's going to be much lower. And the people eating continuously are going to have a higher rate of autophagy and fat oxidation. The body's smart. It, it strives for homeostasis.

Now, I'll have some people say, "Devil's advocate argument is, well, what if you're not compensating for the calories during those four days?" Well, then now you're in a calorie deficit, and you can't disentangle the effects from the calorie deficit, right? So, in what I'll say is, in the tightly controlled randomized control trials that we have, where they equate calories between, uh, intermittent fasting groups versus not fasting groups, we don't see differences in weight loss, and we don't really see much difference in biomarkers of health, HBA1C, markers of insulin sensitivity. You have some studies where you'll see like a little bit lower fasting blood glucose with intermittent fasting when they test it. But I think this is an artifact of the way they test it. Is it okay if I get kind of like deep into the weeds on this one? Go ahead. Um, so, one of the problems is, if you're going to compare apples to apples, if you fast for longer, your fasting blood glucose will be a little bit lower. If somebody's eating continuously, for example, um, and then they're fasting for, say, 12 hours before the test, but the person in the fasting group has fasted for now 16 hours because they were in a defined eating window, their blood glucose tests out maybe a little bit lower, right? And so, you see this in some of the studies, not all, but some of them. But then you look at the longer-term markers of insulin sensitivity, like an HBA1C, and you don't typically see differences when they're equating calories.

And so, again, again, I'm not, people will hear what I'm saying and and it's always like the filter, right? What I'm actually saying and what they hear is, "Lane said intermittent fasting sucks and it's worthless." No, if it is something that you can be consistent with and it helps you control your intake, it is a fabulous way for a lot of people to control their calorie intake and lose weight.

Here's a question for you. And, um, help me, I think I know the answer, but it, but it turns out a lot of people don't know the answer because I was doing some research ahead of time about the types of things people struggle with are interested in. And I actually did some research into what people are Googling the most. And it's interesting that people are Googling the most when it comes to weight loss. Can you guess what it is? Ketogenic diet? Well, even more than that, is how to lose belly fat. Oh, interesting. And it's not, so that people are really, really obsessed with losing this fat right here. And I think there's some exercises out there and some diets that purport to be able to help you lose just targeted fat in this region. What would you say to that? The answer is, you may be able to spot reduce, but I think practically, it's kind of irrelevant. And I'll explain why. So, first of all, the question is, is that visceral or liver fat, or is that just where you tend to store subcutaneous fat? And that's hard to know unless somebody's done like a, you know, an MRI and that sort of thing. Because some people just store their, their subcutaneous fat in different areas, right? Like, uh, some people tend to have it more in their legs, like women in particular, they, if they store it, they tend to store more in their legs, whereas men tend to store it more here.

What's the difference between subcutaneous and visceral? So, visceral is the viscera around the organs, okay? Um, visceral fat and liver fat are gram for gram far more metabolically unhealthy than subcutaneous fat, okay? So, that's, that's the point of differentiation. But the stuff that causes you to lose subcutaneous fat, which is the fat under the skin, um, is the same stuff that typically helps you lose liver fat or visceral fat. So, one of the things I tell people, if we're, if we're talking about trying to lose body fat or trying to get any big health outcome, let's pick up, if we're going to try and make up as much in weight of boulders as we can, you're going to focus on the big rocks first.

And then if you got the big rocks, you can worry about picking up some pebbles. But don't drop the big rocks to pick up the pebbles. I think a lot of people end up doing that. So before you go into some very specific protocol on trying to lose, you know, belly fat, go back, zoom out. Can I sustain this long term? Because if you can't sustain it long term, it's, it's not really going to matter. You're better off finding something that you can sustainably do consistently, execute long term. Because if you lose enough overall body fat, eventually you will lose the belly fat.

And I mean, you know, part of it is just our genetics and how we store it. Seems really stubborn though. It seems like for me, it feels like it's the last thing to go. I will say they've shown that exercise specifically can help target liver and visceral fat, uh, to even without a calorie deficit. So even if people maintain their body weight, they tend to lose liver and visceral fat just through exercise.

So let's talk about exercise and weight loss. Ah, so hot topic, hot topic, very hot topic. I, I would love an answer here on, you know, one school of thought is that exercise isn't particularly useful for weight loss because if I go out for a run, I then come home and I just eat more. Um, and there's a, this is kind of a multifaceted issue in the sense that there's a biochemical component to that hypothesis, I.E., my brain produces more of the hunger hormone, so I get more hungry. But then there's also a psychological um, part to that hypothesis where people say it's actually because I went for a run, so I think I deserve more food. So then I eat more cake because I feel good about myself.

This is where the way the study is conducted really matters. So let's take it mechanistically first. If we look at tightly controlled studies where they have people exercise and they're having them, you know, eat the same amount of calories versus people don't exercise, absolutely helps with weight loss. Absolutely. The hunger side is a little more complex. First off, there's a compensation of exercise where, uh, Herman Ponzer did this research, basically showing that if you burn 100 calories from activity, you don't net 100 calories of loss. Your body actually compensates by your BMR reducing a little bit or, uh, you become spontaneous, maybe a little bit less spontaneously active, right? So there's a, a partial compensation. But on average, again, everybody's different, but on average, uh, it's about 28 calories per 100 calories. So if you do 100 calories of activity, you're still netting 72. It's just not as much as you thought you were going to get, right? So there's that aspect to it that that exercise doesn't cause the amount of weight loss that you might predict based on how much you do, right? But it still contributes to energy expenditure.

The more interesting thing is what you touched on, which is intake, which is actually counterintuitive to what you think. On average, in the studies, um, yes, people tend to eat a little bit more, but the compensation is not nearly complete. Okay? So exercise on the net actually has an anorectic effect. Now, I'm not saying for every person. There are some people who, whether it's psychological or it actually is physiological, they exercise more and they, they do feel more hunger, right? But on average, in the studies, exercise either has a neutral or positive effect on appetite.

And there actually is one classic study from the 1950s, I referenced it in the book, where they looked at Bengali workers and they didn't have an intervention, but they just looked at sedentary, lightly active, moderately active, very heavily active, right? So think heavy construction labor workers. And from lightly active to heavily active, they almost perfectly compensated their energy intake, right? By eating more, by by eating more to match the activity, right? Just intuitively, the sedentary people ate more than the lightly active. And if I recall correctly, about the same, maybe a little bit more than the moderately active folks. Being sedentary actually deregulated your appetite. When you are active, it actually sensitizes you to your body's own satiety signals. They work better.

So I actually think the main benefit of exercise for weight loss isn't because you burn so many calories. It's one, because exercise helps with lean mass retention, which we know that the more lean mass you have, higher energy expenditure. And it also helps prevent weight regain. So that's one aspect. But the actual amount of calories you expend in exercise, I mean, if you look at the actual research literature, it's not that much. I mean, you go to the gym for two hours, you might burn 500 calories, something like that. Half my salad, right, right, right. Like you could, you eat a doughnut, boom, gone, right?

But people tend to have better appetite regulation when they exercise, when they're active. There, there's a, there's multiple components to it, um, like I said, better sensitivity, satiety signals. But then the psychological aspect of goes the other way. There are some people who say, well, I'm exercising, I'm going to eat this. But other people exercise, and they actually, all their habits start to get better. I'm, I'm one of those people as well, right? I always say, if I want to fix my diet, I need to go to the gym. Right? I always say that because when I, I don't, I said it to, I think some of my friends in my team the other day, if I'm going to go and work out for an hour and I'm going to do, go do a HIIT workout for an hour, for example, it's so painful that the last thing I want to do is throw it all away with like a [ __ ] Krispy Kreme. So I, I, suddenly my diet then falls in place. Suddenly. And that's always when I, whenever I go through a moment in my life where I'm like, Steve, you've lost control of your diet here, it's, how can I get myself to the gym as, as the catalyst to, you know, get my diet in order?

And that's so that's the problem with a lot of, not the problem, but just the limitation of a lot of studies, which is, you know, especially like epidemiology. When I say epidemiology, it's like this group does this, this group does this, and we're looking at what other things happen. Yeah, well, people don't do things in isolation, right? So you, you'll hear a study like, um, I'm, I'm thinking of something, oh, um, people who eat more protein have higher rates of this, okay? Well, if we look at where most people get their protein sources in the Western world, it's highly processed, energy-dense foods. Protein tends to just be a proxy for overall more calories. And so is it the protein, or is it all the calories they're taking in, right? And again, people, their lifestyles and habits tend to go together, right? Like you hear X group was more prone to heart disease, but then they also tend to smoke more, drink more alcohol. Like the, these, it is very difficult to disconnect those, those habits and those lifestyle habits, right? They call it, um, healthy user bias in studies. It's one of, it's one of the things we have difficulty with. And that's why, you know, again, human randomized control trials are kind of our gold standard.

Because I think this is important to touch on the word randomized. Okay? So if we're talking about epidemiology or cohort studies, so cohort is a little bit better than your standard epidemiology because they're taking groups of people and they're following them for years. So each person is kind of their own control, right? But still, people tend to, who are more healthy tend to do more overall healthy things. People who are more unhealthy tend to do more. It's hard to disconnect those two. But when you do a study and you say, okay, you know, one group is going to do a low-carb diet, one group is going to do a low-fat diet, and we're going to randomize them, right? Why is that important? Well, what if we let people self-select? Okay, well, if they just say, go whichever group you want, well, and I, I'm just speculating, right? But for example, low-carb diet's very hot right now. A lot of people may have a very strong propensity to go to that group, thinking it's healthier, having a more positive viewpoint of it, and they may clean up a lot more other aspects of their life. But if we randomize, what we can assume through that randomization process is that any inherent characteristics of the subjects are going to be equally distributed amongst the groups. And that is why that's so important.

And I remember, I was, I was listening to, um, a breakdown on a podcast one time, and and they were discussing a study that was looking at, um, they were looking at intermittent fasting versus continuous energy restriction, just normal dieting. And and basically, the, the crux of the study was they found no real difference in weight loss. And the person on there was a very pro-intermittent fasting person. They said, well, how, you know, they don't know, maybe the one group was eating a bunch of junk food or whatever. And I'm thinking, this person doesn't understand randomization, right? Like, you, that would be a very odd thing to just, it actually would lead you to the conclusion that intermittent fasting might cause you to seek out junk food, right? So again, randomization is not perfect. But the reason it's so important is because it helps us get rid of that healthy user bias. And, um, I think again, if people, but the downside to randomized control trials is you can only run them for so long because they're controlled.

Is your view on keto the same as you've kind of said about all diets, or does keto stand in a bucket of its own? And I ask this in part because a lot of doctors kind of prescribe keto as a diet for certain people that have, um, epilepsy and certain types of inflammation and brain-related issues. Okay, so epilepsy is a specific case. Essentially, for epilepsy, the ketogenic diet is actually a very, um, effective treatment. It provides a usable substrate, ketones, for the brain. And they see it, um, decrease the incidence of epilepsy. In fact, my friend that I referenced, Dom D'Agostino, he actually started studying the ketogenic diet as for, um, deep water Navy SEAL divers because a lot of those divers at depth get seizures. And they found that doing the ketogenic diet helped reduce those seizures. Now, unfortunately, people have taken that to say, well, any brain problem, just give them the keto diet. There's way less evidence to support it for other brain problems. But let's, let's talk about there's a lot of claims around the keto diet, low-carb diets. It seems to function for fat loss the same way as other diets through a calorie deficit.

There was a, there have been several really well-done randomized control trials, as well as a couple of meta-analyses. Now, if they compare diets that are equal in calories and protein, but vary the carbohydrate and fat amount, anywhere from low-fat, high-carb to low-carb, high-fat, no real differences in weight loss or fat loss. In fact, it actually, the meta-analysis showed it slightly favored, um, low-fat diets, but it was a really, like, non-clinically significant amount. But how can that be? Because one of the things people say, well, when you do a keto diet, you burn way more fat. So this is, I think if there's one soundbite that might, you know, make it, this might be it. So yes, you do burn more fat on a on a ketogenic diet. Why? Well, when you do a ketogenic diet, you're eating higher fat, lower carb, so you're eating more fat. You have more fat substrate to burn. But also, you're keeping insulin low. And so you burn, uh, more fat because insulin reduces your rate of fat oxidation and reduces lipolysis. So people take that and they go, well, it's better, right?

So here's where we're getting into, we were talking earlier about mechanisms versus outcomes, right? But when we look at these studies, so they actually measure the outcome of fat loss. They don't see differences between low-carb and low-fat. How, if they're burning this much more fat, fat loss and fat burning or fat oxidation are not the same thing. Fat oxidation is part of fat loss, but it's only one side of the coin. So fat, fat, whether you lose or gain fat, is fat balance. You are always storing and burning fat, fat simultaneously. Okay? On a low-carb, high-fat diet, you are burning a lot of fat, but you're also storing a lot of fat. And here's why carbohydrate really isn't stored as body fat. Your body almost exclusively has to burn it when you take it in. There was a trace, they did a metabolic tracer study where they basically labeled carbohydrates and fats. You can label them with a stable isotope and you look at where the label winds up, right? Less than 2% of the fat stored in adipose in a mixed diet originated as carbohydrate. What's adipose? Uh, fat cells. Okay? Over 98% came from dietary fat.

So here's the rub. If you are doing a low-fat, high-carb diet, you're not burning much fat, but you're not storing much fat either. If you're doing a low-carb, high-fat diet, you're burning a lot of fat, but you're also storing a lot of fat. So what actually matters in terms of fat balance is energy balance. Are you eating more calories than you're burning? That is what will end up dictating that. And that's why we just don't see differences in actual loss of body fat between those groups.

But again, so this is where we got into earlier, before we started the cameras, a lot of people get very focused on these biochemical mechanisms. And one of the things I was that way when I was an undergrad in biochemistry. And I think doing that first was great. Doing biochemistry first was great. And then going to nutrition and having a good advisor who zoomed me out and said, hey, you're, you're pretty far in the weeds. Zoom back out, look at the whole picture, okay? Because mechanisms are great. It's good to ask questions. And it, when we see an outcome, and when I say outcome, fat loss would be an outcome, actual loss of body fat, a change in HBA1C, a biomarker, that's an outcome, right? If there's an outcome, there will be a mechanism to support that outcome. But just because there's a mechanism doesn't mean there's an outcome. And what I mean by that is all these biochemical pathways, these mechanisms, this is a symphony. And when you do one thing someplace, a lot of times it's compensated someplace else, okay? An outcome is the summation of hundreds, if not thousands, of different biochemical pathways coming together.

And the example I used with you earlier was getting focused on mechanisms is like looking at a mutual fund and getting focused on the individual stocks in it, right? And saying, woo, don't invest in that mutual fund. Look at those two stocks that are down by 40%. But why do I care if the overall mutual fund is up by 20%? I care about the overall. That's the outcome. And so I'm not against necessarily looking at mechanisms, but I'm always going to go to first, okay, do we actually have human trials that are measuring the thing that we care about? Not a proxy measure, but the actual thing. And if I can invoke a former episode on here, if that's okay, you know, somebody said, well, be careful drinking caffeine because it stimulates cortisol release, and that can cause you to store belly fat. So that's a mechanism, right? If you look at the actual outcome data in terms of body fat and, um, visceral fat or liver fat with caffeine, you actually see a neutral, positive effect. So, okay, maybe that in small increase in cortisol, maybe that's okay. That's a negative. But if caffeine's also stimulating your BMR and also possibly doing some other things like increasing fat oxidation, okay, maybe there is that negative component to it. But it's obviously outweighed by the positive components that end up in the outcome that we're looking at, right?

So without being scientists and being able to, um, understand all of the little instruments in the orchestra, yeah, right? Because that's what we try and do sometimes. We try and figure out all the little instruments in the orchestra. But really, you're saying, listen to the music. Listen to the music. And listening to the music in that analogy would be like looking at the scales, or would be just looking, looking for the outcomes. The outcome. I mean, and also, I guess, one, one thing more would be this point about consistency and sustainability. Because like, we all have a bias to one big rewards for small investment, and that sells, right? Five-minute abs, that's what we want. Complete physique overhaul in six weeks. Add an inch to your arms in 12 weeks. What I'm really fascinated by is what it takes at a psychology level. And we kind of talked about it already because we talked about your why and all these things. But you can say that, you can say to someone like me in business, it's going to take you 10 years to get there, or it's going to take you 10 years to become the world record holder in this, uh, powerlifting activity. But for someone to say, yep, fine. They're going to have to be a little bit, their, I say twisted. They're going to have to be a little bit. It is the ability. I think one of the most underrated things is the ability to delay gratification, right? And not in all areas of my life, but in that particular area, I'm really good at it. And I wonder how much of a choice you had at a deep level.

You know, it's interesting. I, so I told the story of how squatting was hard for me. I, I had been training hard for three years and I had like these chicken legs. I used to get made fun of on the bodybuilding forum so bad. And I remembered thinking, three, four years in, I'm like, man, people were like, dude, your genetics suck. Like, why, why are you going to keep doing this? And it's kind of the, let's find out thing. I remember literally having this internal dialogue of, you know, maybe they never will be big, but I'm going to, I'm going to commit myself to training hard consistently for 10 years. And if I haven't, if I don't have a decent set of legs at that time, then I'll allow myself to quit. If I still feel that way. And I always say, paralysis by analysis and perfectionism has killed more dreams than failure ever could. Because one of the, the one of the worst things you can do is have no action. Inaction is way worse than failure. Because if you fail, at least you can learn something from it. You try stuff. You, I'm sure as an entrepreneur, you've had a lot of stuff fail, right? But you learn from that and you go, okay, well, that didn't work. Well, try this. And eventually, if you're trying enough stuff and you're walking the path, it may not have worked out the way you drew it up, but you get something better than what you started with, right? Maybe not exactly what you wanted. Maybe you get something better though. And I'll tell people, that's why action is so much more important than trying to get everything laid out perfectly. Just start where you are right now, as imperfect as it is. Start walking the path. And if you are walking the path, you're going to screw up, learn from it, and do better the next time. And eventually, again, maybe you don't get exactly what you want, but I bet you get something pretty good.

I got really obsessed with the idea of failure, um, because of business. Because I take stock on the things that move me forward the most, the things that were most course-correcting. And it was never an accolade or an achievement. It was always when life says, you were wrong about that. And from that, I have this really clear phrase in mind that failure is feedback. Feedback is knowledge. And knowledge is your power. And I then went on to study Jeff Bezos, Amazon, and Booking.com, and Thomas, uh, Watson, who was the richest man on Earth at one point. He was the, um, founder and CEO of IBM. And through all of their writing, they are absolutely obsessed with increasing their failure rate. So much so, Thomas Watson was once asked in an interview, after one of his employees had failed at something that cost the company, I think $400,000 or $600,000, he said, are you going to fire him? He goes, buy him. I've just spent $400,000 training him. And then when I looked at Amazon's shareholder letter, it said the same. It says, we have, Jeff Bezos wrote, we have to be the best place on Earth to fail. He goes on to say, in life, like, it's not about perfecting that perfect swing. It's how much you swing. Because in the case of Amazon, you'll never know about endless.com, which is in the graveyard, or the Fire Phone, which is in the graveyard, or, um, a9.com, which is in the graveyard. But you know AWS, which will make them $70 billion a year. So he goes on to basically say, in, he uses a baseball analogy where he goes, in baseball, you swing, you get a great hit, you might get four runs. But in life, you swing and you get a great hit, you can just absolutely change your life. So it's really about making sure you're swinging.

Yeah, I mean, Kobe Bryant said, I love this quote, and I might butcher it a little bit, but he said, you know, whether you win or lose, if you win, it's great, but you still got to wake up the next day and do the process over again. If you lose, it sucks. You still got to get up and do the same process over again. And it's that willingness. Somebody said, confidence is the willingness to wade into uncertainty. And I really like that quote because, I mean, that's at the foundation of kind of like any big goal that you're going after. There is no certainty. You can't guarantee anything in life. And so we can say it's important to fail. But when you're actually in that moment, you're not like, yes, this failure is great. I love this. It's, it's very stressful and it sucks. Like, it really, really sucks. But I can tell you, in most cases, the best stuff in my life came out of some of the worst stuff in my life. You know, and if I hadn't been willing to try and wade back into it repeatedly, I might not have gotten some of the great things that have have happened in life. And whether you win or lose, you're still going to have to wake up and do the process over. But if you stop doing the process, if you stop, stop trying, if you stop walking the path, that's where you really lose.

I think a lot of this, like getting back to the diet stuff, a lot of this, the diet hacks and stuff like that, it's, it's people trying to shortcut that that painful process. But that process is where you are going to learn so much about yourself and where the actual fulfillment is. So that kind of brings me on to Ozempic, okay? Because obviously that's a big subject at the moment with dieting, which is we're talking about, you know, quote unquote shortcuts here. What's your opinion on his impact?

I think I'm going to give a, a very balanced view of this, okay? Um, overall, I think it's a net positive. And here's why. So go 100 years back, 200 years back, whatever. Very rarely did you see an obese person, right? It was just, we didn't have such crazy access to hyper palatable, extremely energy-dense foods, right? Even go back 60 years, right? If you wanted a cake or a cookie, you had to go to the bakery. There were barriers to get there. Now, we are surrounded 24/7 with unlimited access to cheap, calorie-dense, hyper palatable foods. And again, we know people who tend to become more obese, um, have a greater reward response to food. Here's the real tough part, and where you can tie it back to addiction, right? So imagine you were a, a gambling addict, and I said, well, we don't want you to gamble so much, but you got to gamble a couple times a day. Uh, we don't want you to drink so much, but you got to drink a couple times a day. You know, don't do blow so much, but you got to do it a couple times a day. Now, I mean, again, people argue about food addiction, is there really food addiction? Is there not? But imagine being somebody who struggles with appetite regulation, but knowing you have to eat. You can't just not eat, right?

So I think if we look at the actual data on on Ozempic, what we're talking about, just to give the background, biochemically, are GLP-1 mimics. GLP-1 is a hormone that's secreted by your gut in response to feeding. And it acts on the GI to tell you you're full. And it also acts on your brain to tell you that you're full, to decrease your appetite. And these things work very well. Um, we see a, on average, about a 15 to 20% reduction in body weight in the studies. So pretty much the most effective anti-obesity treatment that's ever been created. Now, GLP-1 itself, its half-life is only a couple minutes. But what they've done is they've modified the protein, uh, so that now the half-life is much, much longer. So it has the opportunity to act on the brain and the gut for a much longer period of time. And again, very effective.

So what are the potential downsides? What does that do to the body then? So they've extended the sort of half-life of the protein, and then that means that I feel satiated for longer. Oh yeah. So, um, I don't feel hungry. Yeah. In fact, it can be such a powerful effect, a lot of people, it feels like almost nauseating. Like, um, you, you hear, again, every drug has side effects, right? Um, some people initially get nausea, vomiting, that sort of thing. It tends to decrease with time. Um, but on an anecdotal level, I've talked to people who've done the drug, and they've said that some have said, even after they stopped, the best way they described it is, I don't have the food noise anymore. I'm not always thinking about food, or I'm not thinking about food nearly as much. It calmed it down for me, even after they had stopped. For some people, even after they stopped. Okay, so perhaps there's some long-term changes to the brain chemistry that happened. We're not sure. Or perhaps they just got more confident because they lost some weight and realized, because it's not increasing your metabolism, that that's one thing to point out. So I've had some people say, you know, I have a slow metabolism, so I've got to take Ozempic. And I'm like, well, you're going to be disappointed because it's acting on the appetite side of things. It, so some people will say, well, the, the devil's advocate army is, well, they could just eat less, right? But if it was that easy, people would just be doing it, right?

So some of the criticisms of the drug are, well, we see a lot of lean mass loss. I don't know if you've heard that. Some people said muscle. I, I don't think that's as much of a concern as some people do. And the reason is, most of these studies with, uh, GLP-1 mimics, the people aren't resistance training. And so if you look at studies where people aren't resistance training and they just diet, and they're not like their normal protein, not high protein, you see anywhere from like a, like a 30% to 40% of the weight they lose is from lean mass. Um, and Ozempic, it's right about in that area, which makes sense because they're eating less. And if they're not resistance training or eating high protein, again, they're feeling very full, so hard to eat high protein because protein tends to be quite satiating. So I don't see that as being like more necessarily at risk for lean mass loss. I think what I would say that could be problematic is if people are so full, they may not be choosing the healthful, most healthful food choices because they feel full. If they just end up eating less of the foods they normally eat, these calorie-dense, hyperpalatable foods, and they don't modify their habits when they get off of it, they may be prone to regain. And so I, I look at this as, I, I am, if I have to pick, I'm pro on board with these, um, just say it should be done in conjunction with nutritional counseling and lifestyle modification, right? Like encouraging people to exercise, educating them on healthy food choices. Then I think it's a great option for a lot of people.

Do you think there's enough data, especially when we think about sort of long-term studies on the impact of Ozempic? Because I, you know, one of the things I've come to believe in life is that there's no such thing as a free lunch, and this sounds too much like a free lunch to me right now. You know?

So here, here, here's what I'll say. Um, we don't have, I mean, long-term 10, 20 year data. You know, some people said, well, there's a risk of thyroid cancer. I mean, I think that was from like some kind of rodent study where they were using a much higher dose than normal. Um, I'm always, I tell people, be very careful. Less than 50% of animal studies end up translating into like actual human outcomes. What did we say earlier? There's no solutions, there's only trade-offs. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe there is some side effect, some downstream effect that may have a negative effect. If it helps somebody lose 50, 100 pounds, I'm still going to bet that it's a net positive. Right? Could have it have been better if they did it through diet and exercise alone? Maybe. But most of those people weren't going to get there anyway, or it was going to be really, really tough for them to get there. It's funny, 'cause a lot of fitness industry people are very, very much against this drug. And then they tell you what fat burner you can buy with a discount code in their bio. And I'm like, wait, wait. Uh, this math doesn't math to me. Okay, this drug that actually works, not okay. Make it make sense.

What do you think of the fitness industry?

I have a love-hate with it. The big problem with the fitness industry is a couple things. First, say, there's really no barrier to entry, right? Like, if you want to be a medical professional, there's some barriers to entry, right? Like, you've got to do some work. Anybody can call themselves a fitness coach. There's no barrier at all. And anybody who has a six-pack will get a lot of clients because, as I found out, science is way less sexy than just, hey, look, you know. And, you know, it's funny. I, for a couple years, I went up a weight class in powerlifting. I went up to the 105 kilogram class, which is 231. Now, I'm not, I'm not fat at 231, but I, I put it on here quickly, right? My face will get pretty. In fact, there's a reason there's a nice beard here because it's like makeup for men, right? Like, it, it hides my chubby cheeks. And, man, the comments on my videos, and I actually sold less stuff. And then when I dropped back down at powerlifting and I was leaner, I sold more stuff. And I'm like, this is so weird. Like, my knowledge isn't any different. It's the same dude. And it's not like when I was 231, that was on purpose. I, I didn't get there by accident. Wasn't like I forgot how to do nutrition, you know? But if you were a normal person and you didn't know anything about fitness, and there was two PTs in front of you, you, you go to the one that looks better. You go to the one you want to say, I want to look like that, right? And that's, that's tough. It's a, it's a very tough thing to wade through. And, and what I will say, people ask me all the time, do you think a personal trainer needs to look the part? Do you think, you know, a medical professional needs to look the part? I say no, but people like to see application. And I do think there is value in being able to tell one of the things I was able to tell my clients from competing and bodybuilding and powerlifting and doing all these hard things, I say, hey, I'll, I'll never ask you to do anything I have not done or would not be willing to do myself, right?

And we said earlier that humans aren't logical, they're emotional, irrational, and all these things. And we, to conserve mental energy, I mean, funny enough, I read about this rat study. I don't hate rat studies. Most of my research was in rats, but it just, it just goes to show how the brain works. And they put a rat into a maze and put chocolate at the end of it. The first time it goes through the maze, the rat's brain is going crazy. Second time it goes through the same maze, its brain is basically, there's like almost no activity there. The activity has dropped and it's turned into autopilot. The study goes on to talk about how we're always looking for shortcuts to to decisions. What I would tell people is, again, you can never turn your brain off. Right? And it's, it's just hard to identify who knows what they're talking about. I mean, you know, I'll be on this podcast, and then, you know, people say, what about this guy? This guy has a doctorate, he has this. And, um, you know, that's one of the reasons I actually started my research review where I review studies, or me and my team review studies every month and try to like translate it into plain language because I did see this like kind of gap, right? And trying to build this bridge because it's so hard for for the average person to know. And one of the things actually I, I missed talking about was if you and I are having a conversation, if we're on a certain topic, it becomes clear to both of us pretty quickly whether or not one of us is more knowledgeable on the topic or where they're about the same, right? Like pretty quickly can tell, like if we're going into investments and, and, uh, how to start a company and marketing, like you're the man for that, right? Comes to nutrition, like you can tell pretty quickly, hopefully, I know what I'm talking about. Lifting me, right? But what we're really bad at is if two people are disagreeing on a topic, both of whom are more knowledgeable than us on said topic, we pretty much have no way to sort out who's who's right or wrong.

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What is the most important thing we haven't spoken about today?

Gosh, I think we touched on a lot of stuff, but let's talk about resistance training real quick. Um, you know, a lot of people think resistance training is just, you know, for for vanity and for meatheads. And we see now resistance training decreases the risk of cancer, decreases the risk of heart disease, drastically decreases the risk of sarcopenia, of falls, of broken bones. You know, people talk about calcium, vitamin D. Probably the single best thing you can do to improve your bone density is to resistance train. And, you know, you'll hear people say, well, I'm 40, or I'm 50, or I'm 60. It doesn't matter. You can still put on muscle. And in fact, um, right across the street from where I was doing my PhD, they took basically frail elderly people who had trouble like sitting and standing up and put them through, like, I think it, I want to say it was a 16-week program and resistance for them started out just squatting to a high chair, you know, and then slowly they lowered it down, lowered it down. And some of them started using weights as well. They saw significant increases in their muscle mass. As, you know, older people, so you can still put on muscle even getting older. In fact, um, who is a, I think Alan Aragon, he's another good, uh, nutrition person on social media. His, he was posting a video of his father showing, I think his father's like over 80 years old and was doing goblet squats with like a 50 lb kettlebell, you know? The amount of quality of life improvement you can get in people from either resistance training throughout the course of their life, or just getting them started, regardless of age, it's a huge improvement in quality of life.

Do you know what I think though? I think I'm going to be honest here, right? Mhm. This morning I was, I got up, right? And my, like, lower back hurt a little bit. And I remember thinking, oh God, I'm getting older. That's why. That is. And I remember thinking, oh, I should probably question that thought because that's a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way. If you start to see yourself becoming less mobile and less flexible, your brain, you kind of, you chalk it off as an inevitability of aging. Therefore, you do nothing about it. Therefore, it gets worse. Whereas really, this other thought came into my mind, which was, okay, go to the gym and train your lower back to strengthen it. One of the most damaging messages that physicians have given is when people have pain in an area, they tell them to stop doing activity. As you age, you are going to have pain. You can be strong and have pain, or you can be weak and have pain. My, uh, I love my dad, great dude, very sedentary. He has really bad sciatica. He doesn't lift weights. But if you lift weights, you, it actually has been shown to decrease back pain, like on the whole. Yeah, like when you do what I do, where you're like, you know, lifting cars essentially. Yeah, like I'm, when you're, so it's funny, I'll post videos of me lifting like once a week, um, just 'cause most people don't care about me lifting, they just want to get information out of me. And the comments are always, you know, isn't that bad for your lower back? Or, you know, isn't that going to? And I, and, uh, are they'll say, you've had so many injuries. I said, I've been doing this 25 years. Show me an athlete who's competed at a really high level for two decades who also doesn't have a laundry list of injuries and pain. Tiger Woods swings a golf club, he had all kinds of back issues and knee issues and leg issues, right? Activity is medicine. Yes, if you're doing it at a very high level, athletes, what's the dosage needed to improve at the highest level? Exercise is always going to be right up against what will get you injured because you get to the point where you simply can't recover from it enough. And that's why actually, if you look at like, what actually prevents injuries, it's not stretching, it's not mobility work, it's not warm-up. It's sleep, psychological stress reduction. Those are two of the main movers. And, and just load management, appropriate load management. We could get into a whole thing on pain science. But one of the really damaging messages is, well, took an MRI your lower back and, you know, got a bulge disc, so just can't lift out anymore. If you, my ride, my lower back right now, I promise you, bulge and herniated discs, I'm sure I do. But I don't have pain. And we, there was a study done where they, I think they MRI like people over 40 who were asymptomatic, had no back pain, like almost half of them had bulged or herniated discs. So we've got this like model where it's, oh, if you have pain, you must have damage. And if you have damage, you must have pain. And it doesn't really work that way. I mean, look at, um, people who lose limbs, they have pain, not just at the stump, but where the limb used to be. They sense pain. Pain is just as much a psychological experience as it is an actual tissue damage experience. And when you get things that are, um, that are painful for years, your tissues heal in six to 12 months for most things. But if you're still having pain, that's because you've developed a sensitivity to that particular area. And so one of the worst things for pain is becoming inactive. But the reason physicians do this, and orthopedics do this, is it's straight up a liability coverage. Because if they, if somebody says, you know, you have pain, but you could probably go back and, you know, you back off your load a little bit on your lifts and, you know, progressively work it back up, you probably be fine. Well, if they go in and then they injure themselves, guess who's going to complain about the doctor, give them a one-star review and say they caused me to blow out my back, right? But if you look at this stuff, I mean, on the whole, resistance training decreases pain.

I want to build my muscles, Lane, like your muscles. I want muscles like yours. Um, question on the way that I'm working out, just sort of practical advice. Do I have to work out to sort of overload till I fail to to to build my muscles so that they're like yours?

Great question. So, uh, if I had to say how to build muscles like me, BS three hours a day, you know, um, can we use AI to shrink them? Stephen, just having the biggest arms in the podcast. What matters for building muscle? We think, um, we have a, the amount of hypertrophy research in the last 10 years has absolutely exploded compared to what it was before. And hypertrophy is muscle growth, is what we're talking about. What seems to be the cause of it is what's called mechanical tension. So just creating a lot of tension on the muscle. Because now we're actually having studies coming out. We're doing like hard stretching. They actually see increased muscle growth from like sustained hard stretching. There was a, a study done, um, with the calf muscles. So they put them in this contraption where basically they're like stretching their calves and holding it there. I think I can't remember what the duration was, but it was, it was a long time, right? And they were comparing that to traditional resistance training. And it was, I mean, it was a pretty painful stretch. I think they said it was like a seven or eight or nine out of 10 in terms of pain level for the stretch, but they built as much muscle as people who were doing calves three times a week resistance training. I think they were doing these stretches every day. So it was, it was pretty intense. But that's really interesting, right? Because even if you don't have weight, you can still create that tension through stretching, right? Um, now the stretching, again, not your traditional, like, you know, it's pretty intense and pretty painful. I would argue that resistance training is probably a more practical methodology to getting it and more fun. But in terms of mechanical tension, it does to maximize muscle growth. So we always have to be careful about.

Like a lot of things can cause muscle growth, but we're talking about absolutely maxing muscle growth. You do have to get close to volitional failure, which is basically like if I'm doing say a bicep curl, right? Or maybe a bench press, better example. I'm doing reps, reps, like, and it starts, that's failure, right? The research suggests you don't have to go to failure, but you have to get pretty darn close, within a couple reps, you know? And if you've never trained to failure, it's actually really hard to know what that feels like. Um, and so, like, and actually, in in research studies where they take people who are beginner, intermediate, and they ask them, like, they have them do a set and they ask them, "Hey, how many more reps could you have gotten?" They underestimate by like five. Yeah. Um, especially difficult when you're training alone, as something like bench press, if if I fail the thing back, it [ __ ] so I'm like, I've put in a buffer of maybe three reps there, just so that I don't embarrass myself in front of you know. Exactly.

Mechanical tension appears to be cumulative, and what I mean by that is, if it was just about creating as much tension as possible, just load the bar up and just do one rep, right? So it's, it's cumulative throughout a set. Now, the way I like to describe it is, intensity is the medicine, and the number of hard sets, which number of sets close to failure, is the dosage. Now, when you first start, um, you can get results on a very low dosage because your body has literally done nothing. It'll grow off anything. As you progress, I remember when you first started lifting, you'd add 5, 10 pounds every week, right? Like clockwork. Well, eventually you can't add that anymore, right? But you can still, a lot of times, you can increase the reps, right? With the same weight. Well, eventually you can't do that anymore. So how do you continue to progress? Well, you can add more hard sets. And what you mean by hard sets? Uh, volume. So, for example, if I'm, let's just take bench press again, right? Like, let's say I'm doing three sets close to failure and eventually stop progressing, I can add another set, and that is still another form of progressive overload, right? Because again, mechanical tension is cumulative. And I mean, there is, there's some debate about this in the, the resistance training field, but for the most part, I would say it's generally agreed upon by most experts that higher volumes improve muscle growth relative to lower volumes, meaning more hard sets. And it doesn't really seem to matter about machines versus free weights either. Uh, seem to cause equal kinds of muscle growth. So when it comes to building muscle, the cool thing is, you got a lot of options. And if you have pain doing one thing, you know, joint pain, whatever, lower back pain, try something else.

Fantastic news for me, Lane. We have a closing tradition on this podcast, okay? Where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to leave it for. And the question that's been left for you. Oh, I like this. I know what my question will be. Your one's a really difficult one, okay? So I don't get to see it until I open this book, but Jack has a has a little peek before I ask the guest. But no, it actually wasn't Andy, because there was one person between them, and they're the person that left this question for you. Very difficult question, I think. Have you ever stayed in a relationship that was harming you, and why?

Yeah, um, because of a lot of reasons. One being, uh, perception from other people. I felt like I had to make it work. Um, the other being because of some of the remnants of bullying. Um, I found it very hard to trust myself in personal relationships. To I could be easily talked into me being the problem for everything. And I'm not saying that I was never the problem, 'cause I definitely was. I've made a lot of mistakes in personal relationships, and I've, I have my own toxic behaviors that I know I do. Um, but yes, I have definitely stayed in a relationship too long. And I think one of the hardest things for me, and for a lot of people, is knowing when is it time to give up and when is it time to push through. And I don't think we have, I don't think anybody has a clear parameter. But for me, staying in was not trusting myself, not trusting my gut, and feeling like I had to make it work because of the kids, or because of this, or because of whatever, because of a, a whole host of of many things. And again, you know, I, I think I'm not a relationship expert, but you know, I've, I've gone to therapy for eight years now. Um, one of my good friends, John Deloney, is an expert on this. And and very rarely does a relationship break down because of just one person. It it's usually a dynamic. And but I think that is one of the hardest things to figure out, when when is it time? Because we talked about like not quitting, you know, these sorts of things. But there's also like, sometimes it's not quitting, it's just moving on to possibly something better, right? And learning from what happened. And yeah, that is a really tough question. And, um, I've definitely stayed in things too long. And not just, not just like romantic relationships, but also like, um, business partnerships, friendships, you know, where it became highly toxic. And again, um, I think the next hardest thing to do after that is looking back and going, "What did I contribute to that?"

Lane, in my life, I've lost people. I've lost a lot of, you know, people along the way from, you know, grandparents, um, friends, lady who used to was sort of my proxy mother when I was younger, died in a motorcycle accident. Um, and it's only in those moments that you, you kind of have the regrets of all the things that you could have said. You know, you, you wish you could go back. And often for people somewhat similar to me, somewhat maybe similar to you, who have had struggles with expressing their emotions, um, we probably have the greatest amount of regret because we found it harder to maybe tell these people when we had the chance. So my closing question for you, which is a question of my own, MH, is if right now, you could send a message to your kids, mhm, and I'm going to let you send one as well to your granddad and your dad. And it was the last thing you were going to say, what would you say?

Uh, okay. My kids, I would say, "Of course, I love you more than anything. Um, you, God dang it, you, you fulfilled a hole in my life I didn't know I had. Um, and I wish I could go back and do a lot of things differently, but I love you more than anything. And I don't care what you do with your life. Find something that you love and it is a positive contributor to the world, and go do that. And try to make somebody else's life better along the way." And to my dad, I would say, "Thank you. Like, for not following in your dad's footsteps and not like stepping in front of that wildfire and saying, 'Not on my watch.' Sorry. Um, you know, my dad's not perfect, but both my mom and dad are really great people. And, um, you know, um, they've, they've, um, struggled with some health issues. And, um, you know, if I had to say one thing, it would be, you know, thanks for always believing in me, always having my back, accepting me for who I was. In some ways, I feel like they're the only people who always accepted me for who I was, and they never put expectations on me for what I want to do with my life. When I told them I wanted to get into bodybuilding, they were like, 'Oh, this seems weird, but okay.' When my first bodybuilding show, they were the loudest people up there supporting me, you know? They're, um, you know, when I won Worlds in 2022, I was going through a very hard personal time in my life, um, basically the front end of a divorce, and it had just kind of come to a head, like, just the whirlwind kind of chaos stuff. And my mom called me. They were, they were watching online, um, with my kids, and my mom was like, 'Son, how the hell did you just do that with everything going on in your life? How did you do that?' And, um, you know, they've just always been such big supporters of me, even when they didn't understand. You know, my mom didn't understand, like, you know, every, "What are you studying again? What are you studying again?" But, you know, came to my PhD exit seminar. You know, Mom was in every baseball game growing up. Dad was on the road a lot, but, you know, couldn't, um, but came to everything he could, you know? They, they, they showed up for me a lot. And I knew, you know, I knew I was loved. And so if I had to say anything to them, it would just be, "Thank you for everything that you did." And when I had kids, I was like, six weeks in, I called my mom, I'm like, "Oh my God, you did all this stuff for me, and I gave you all that grief. I'm so sorry." You know? Um, so yeah, they're amazing.

And if I had to say something to my grandfather, it would just be, "God, um, you know, I would give, somebody asked me this the other day, I was, I would give anything to have five more minutes of my granddad and ask him so many questions about life that I just didn't know enough about to even ask the question, you know? 'Cause the man just oozed wisdom, you know? But if I had to say anything, I'm like, I would just say, 'Thanks for what you did for your family.' Um, you know, my grandfather, when he passed, I mean, this is a man who had, like, he had his first heart attack in his 50s, and this back in the 19, like, late 70s, when like open heart surgery was like carpentry, you know? His expect, his like life expectation, I think, was five years at the time. He was in the Battle of the Bulge, the deadliest battle in World War II. Um, one more story. Um, he, um, I forget what country he was in, but he was supposed to go on leave the next day, and a convoy was coming through, and it was going to the place where he was going to go on leave, right behind the lines. And his commanding officer said, "Hey, why don't you just take it? Like, just go today." That night, a German soldier dropped a grenade down and killed his entire unit. And sorry, dang. I didn't think you'd give me to cry in this podcast, man. Um, so much, uh, and he said, you know, after that day, I just, everything was, I was living on borrowed time, in my opinion. He's like, "I should have been down there." And he said, "I get up every day, I look at the obituary, and if I'm not in it, I figure I'm good for another day." And he had, I think, three heart attacks, three open heart surgeries, two strokes. He had a boat fall on him, long story. So this guy, we always joked, he had nine lives. And whenever, um, he was on his deathbed, I mean, we kind of, it was, we knew like six weeks in advance. He had kind of multi-stem, just basically old age. And it never occurred to me, I was 20 years old, it never, sorry, 22. It never occurred to me the idea of how you die as being so important. And he went exactly how you would draw it up. You know, he was in the hospice, so he was at his home, his whole family was around him. And again, he was the funniest man I ever knew. And I walked in, and all the seats are taken, and he's still lucid, talking. And, um, I said, uh, he had his little, like, portable toilet, you know, but he hadn't been using it, whatever, the seat was down. And I said, "Do you mind if I sit here?" 'Cause I was going to sit next to him. And he said, "Yeah, you can't clog that one up." 'Cause I was known in my family for clogging toilets, right? So he's still cracking jokes on his deathbed. And even, like, the doctor asked him when he was basically, the doctor telling him, "Hey, you've got like six weeks left." Doctor said, "Hey, we, you know, you're an organ donor, but we can't really use anything. Uh, you know, it's all bad. Basically, would you be interested in donating your body as a cadaver for med students?" He goes, "I always wanted to go to med school. I figured it's the only way I'm getting there now." So just like, had this great outlook on life, you know? And, um, just when he passed, um, I remember, sorry, my mom looking at him and saying, "It's okay, Dad. It's okay. We're going to be okay." And I wasn't even sad because I'm like, that guy, he got every bit out of it. He he milked life for everything he had, had a great family, and so many people who loved him. And if I could just have that kind of impact, even half that impact on my family, oh man, that'd be worth so much to me. So I would just tell him, "Thank you for being an inspiration."

Lane, you have been, you've been exactly that. You've had an impact on millions of people's lives. And I think back to that young kid, five, six, seven years old, and I think back to what you said about fighting your way out of it. You fought your way out of all of that to now inspire and impact millions and millions of people's lives that you'll never get to meet in such a positive way, in the same way, and with the same integrity and fight that your granddad so clearly had. It's funny 'cause when you went through all of those people, I saw an element of you in every single one of them. And I think that's a credit to all to them, but it's also a credit to you. And I know that if your granddad was, I'm sure he's watching us now, cracking jokes about you not my toilet habits, yeah, but I'm sure he'd be so incredibly proud of you because of the work you've done, but continue to do. So thank you so much for your time today. Thank you, especially for your, um, honesty and openness, because you have no idea how many people that side of you, the willingness to be honest about faults and nuanced about yourself as you are within your work, will have on millions and millions of people's lives. I feel richer for having this conversation. So thank you, Lane.

Thank you. I, I, I've never cried a podcast like that, but, you know, I actually, it was kind of cathartic. You know, I was thinking of a lot of different things while I was going on. So thank you for having me on. [Music]