SSD.Ep.89: Lyle McDonald: Everything about Rapid Fat-Loss!

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Okay, so welcome everybody. Thank you for tuning in. And I have back on Mr. Lyle MacDonald for the third time. And nowadays, a lot of people are picking his brain about women's fat loss because his books just came out recently. And I could certainly pick his brain about that topic too, but I want to be considerate towards the people who will sure as hell attempt a rapid fat loss phase now that the summer period is slowly approaching. So, um, as Lyle, as someone who has written the Rapid Fat Loss Handbook, which is kind of a legendary entity that exists out there on the, on the fitness book space, I would be curious, Lyle, you know, after, I don't know, when, when was the time that he wrote this book?

I think I wrote the first edition in like the early 2000s and then I made some updates and expansions in 2008 and I haven't really, nothing, nothing changed since then or certainly nothing meaningful. Even the changes I made between the first and second edition, it was, yeah, I went from recommending like flax oil to preformed fish oils when it became very clear that the body is terrible at converting alpha-linoleic acid to the fish oils it makes. Into the exercise section, it wasn't quite as thorough as I wanted it to be, but, you know, by and large, nothing really changed meaningfully about the diet. So, and nothing I've seen since 2008 has really changed either. You know, nutrition, as far as what's required, there's been no significant differences.

Yeah, you know, it's, I find this very interesting and I'm glad to be able to talk with someone like you about this. That there are a couple of concepts in fitness, such as always staying at a very low body fat percentage or to attempt a very rapid pace of fat loss, that we generally tend to advise against. But these are obviously things that guys always want to do. And when they quote-unquote find a science-based rationale for doing these things, they obviously become very enthusiastic. So I would be wondering that, as someone who has written this book, when someone comes to you these days and asks you about, you know, "I'll, I have whatever, two months to get ripped. Now I'm whatever, 16% body fat. I want to get ripped as quickly as possible." These days, what do you tell these people?

Well, I mean, the reality, and, and, you know, back when I first read this book, you know, a lot of it was in response to a couple of other approaches that were out there. And, and make no mistake, you know, rapid, rapid fat loss programs and the protein-sparing modified fast has been around, you know, since the 70s, I want to say. Very low-calorie diet, you know, based on protein. At the time, there were a couple of similar diets that were either tend to be based on, you know, amino acid supplements, things of that nature. There just wasn't very impressed with. So it, at the time, I kind of took the stance of, you know, people are gonna do it no matter what you tell them. So knowing that, you might as well give them the, the best way of doing it. You know, if they're gonna do something, whether it's right or wrong, I mean, yes, it'd be great to talk them out of it, but if you need to, but it's not gonna happen. So you need to give them at least the best approach to it. Since then, and of course, my approach to it was, you know, to, to build a diet around Whole Foods, all of the essential nutrients, which means sufficient dietary protein, fruits and vegetables, which contain numerous micronutrients, and then of course, essential fatty acids. From a nutritional requirement standpoint, that's all we need. So the goal was to create the lowest calorie diets that provided, excuse me, um, you know, complete nutritional support. You know, for example, back in the low state, late 70s or early 80s, there's a diet called the Last Chance Diet. It's a protein-sparing modified fast based around collagen protein, which is great for the hair, nails, terrible for the body because it's, it's not a complete protein with no electrolytes. And a bunch of people died because they actually went in there, they threw out their electrolyte balance so much that their heart stopped. So I wanted to clearly avoid that. Since I wrote that book, there's actually been a recognition, and I should just read a really good paper a couple days then, I would have to find the title of, basically pointing out that the idea that rapid fat loss or rapid weight loss is always more likely to cause a rebound is actually untrue. And their significant amounts of research that fast for initial weight loss is associated with better long-term maintenance, which goes very much against, like you said, these, these fitness concepts, kind of the dogma. And if there's a couple things going on, one is this may just be a reversed, maybe the people who lose weight faster or more likely to succeed. Like that's always the possibility. You're right, people who do better early on may be better just genetically or behaviorally or whatever. But a lot of the issues with, you know, that rebound weight gain came out of how those diets were being set up, which was liquid meals. They were giving them liquid meal replacements, basically a protein drink. This was doing nothing to retrain eating habits. Exercise was very rarely included. We know full well that exercise is arguably be more important for weight loss maintenance than for weight or fat loss acutely, especially for overweight individuals. I'll come back to lean folks. All the way, people cannot do the amount of exercise to really have much effect, right? To burn 500 calories a day in exercise, that's an hour of hard training. To reduce 500 calories in your diet when you're eating a ton is relatively trivial. It needed to be based around, you know, change, cognitive behavioral therapy, you know, learning better approaches. So I set up my diet and they surround the whole foods of a base nutrition, right? Whole proteins, fruits and vegetables, essential. No one would argue with that being required. Once you want to slow fat loss down or achieve maintenance, you add foods back to that. And that was kind of the, you know, I even joked, like, I could make meal replacements for rapid fat loss that would make me a lot of money, but I wouldn't because I don't think it's optimal for long-term retraining of eating habits. Now, again, maybe this is an issue for lean individuals who already have good eating habits, but for the average overweight individual, that's critical to me. Long-term maintenance, exercise was key. And here, resistance training, we know is superior as far as limiting muscle loss, maybe even increasing muscle mass. Like we know aerobic exercise, again, just doesn't have a big effect. So that's sort of the general comment. And then the paper I just read, it was like 20 tenets of obesity that are probably wrong. And one of them was that rapid weight loss always has poorer results. It may just depend on how you do it.

Alright, so let's go back to lean individuals. You know, lean guys, let's focus on, you know, that college age, mid-20s. What do they want to do before spring break? Why do they want to be? They want to have abs on spring break so they can hopefully, you know, meet girls and get laid. And that's all good and well. For women, it's, it can be that bikini season is coming up, you know, reunions, weddings. That's often a driver for women's rapid weight loss. And I'm not saying either is better or worse. Just like the real, the reality is, we know they're gonna do it. I wanted to give them the best ways to do that safely and effectively with the least chance of rebound, assuming they wanted to maintain that. So that's what rapid fat loss is. You know, yes, it would be ideal for, for leaner individuals to maybe start a little bit earlier. But so long as they use it for limited periods, rapid fat loss isn't a problem. You know, sort of within the context of the woman's book, chronic very low-calorie diets can cause a lot of problems in one menstrual cycle dysfunction, hormonal, all kinds of issues for a leaner individual. And here I'm talking 10 to 15% fat for male, 20 to 24% for female. You know, for weeks, if you want to push it, is the longest I would say. Beyond that, that diet, because realistically, the fat loss for a lower germel should be in the two pound per week range, maybe pound and a half of fat for women. It'll be a little bit lower. But, but anyone that lean, that five or six pounds of fat loss, true fat loss, not just the water, that should get them to where they need to be. Um, you know, at which, if that's how long they've got, then, then that's what they have to do. When you kind of map it out, the deficit ends up being so big that, you know, for a small female at 24, 22%, four pounds of fat loss is going to reduce her eating out of 17, 18% or somewhere in that range. I'd have to do the math. For a man at 12%, you know, for six pounds of fat, that should get into close to single digits. You know, he's not gonna be bodybuilder contest lean, but he's certainly gonna be lean enough to, you know, look good on the beach for all that it matters. So that's kind of, I guess, I hope that answers at least one of those questions. You know, can it be done? Sure. There are better and worse ways to do it. And, you know, of course, I like to think mine is certainly a better way from a safety and effectiveness standpoint.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, um, you right away identified, I guess, the, the two biggest issues when it comes to this whole question. So one of it is the mechanical side of things. So how do we actually get there? How do we actually get to beyond destination? And the other big part of this equation, of course, is the maintenance of the results that, that we achieved. And, and I want to touch on both of these things. But first, on the how fast can we go side of things. So you mentioned these two pound-ish kind of figures for leaner guys, for example. So what, what kind of percentages we are talking about? One percent? Do you think we can potentially go over one percent? And the reason I'm asking that is because generally, you know, the evidence-based kind of fitness community generally, this half a percent, one percent body weight loss per week is generally the figure that we mention the most often. But guys are still, of course, tempted to ask, you know, can I potentially even go faster than this? You know, maybe even risking a bit of muscle loss because the rebound muscle gain after, you know, finishing a cut is so quick. So, so what are your thoughts on this?

Yeah, it's so, you know, for people that aren't familiar with that concept, like of late, there's been kind of a focus. Yeah, so again, we'll be back up, back in the day, you know, you would see things like, you should never lose more than two pounds per week, or people would math it out. I want to lose one pound a week, 500 calorie deficit, 3,500 calories, one pound a week. That those numbers never work. And even the two pounds per week thing was mainly for overweight individuals and was mainly more of a behavioral thing, right? When they've done like protein-sparing modified fasts, you can see up to three-quarters of a pound of fat loss per day in an obese individual, right? Obviously not a lean individual. Their deficit ends up being, you know, 2,000, 2,500 calories a day. It's just staggering. So, you know, the problem is, you can't talk in absolute terms. Two pounds a week of weight loss for someone who's 250 pounds and two pounds a week for someone who's 120 pounds. Like those are staggering differences by percentage. If you took a thousand calories a day out of a larger person's diet, okay, they may be eating 5,000 calories a day. A thousand isn't a big deal. The smaller individual may be eating 1,800 calories. To take this, these numbers that came out of the general obesity treatment kind of got misapplied. So lately, we've been focusing on percentages because regardless of your starting weight, half a percent a week is half a percent a week. One percent a week is one percent a week, right? It's, it's still, the numbers will be different. The 250-pound person is losing two and a half pounds. The 150-pound person is losing a pound and a half. But it's still 1%. So I think that's a much better way of setting goals. And what they've kind of found in literature, researcher named Garth, there's a whole lot of work on this, that like for leaner athletes, you know, 0.5 to 0.75% per week is a reasonable fat loss. And this is in the sense of avoiding lean body mass loss, which honestly never happens if protein intake is high enough, or at least if it happens, it's too insignificant to care about. A lot of this is in the context of performance. And this is kind of a critical distinction to make. If you're a performance athlete, a runner, a sprinter, a powerlifter, even bodybuilding to a limited degree, it's not really a performance sport in the sense of what you do in the gym is very indirectly related to what you're trying to accomplish. But like, you know, you want to be able to maintain your, your performance in the gym. Bigger weight losses tend to require either so much calorie restriction or so much activity that that becomes a problem. So there's more moderate losses tend to be more, more recommended. Whereas for somebody's overweight, suit, you know, carrying 50% body fat, percent and a half, maybe nothing. That may be trivially easy. They're not learning about performance. They're not going to lose muscle in the first place because the fatter you are, the less muscle you lose, you know, etcetera, etcetera. So that's kinda where those numbers come from. And I, I generally agree with them. I, I presented them in the woman's book in terms of, you know, setting goals. And it very much dependent on body fat percentage. You know, for generally that leader individual, again, 10 to 15% for men, 20 to 24% for women, 0.75% a week is probably reasonable. But that's if you're really looking at a long-term diet, right? If you're trying to take a female at 22% to contest lean, 10 to 12%, she's gonna do that over six months. Obviously, you should probably be targeting more moderate fat losses. Same thing for the man. At the end, they might be getting half a percent a week. But when you're grinding that last 13 to 11% body fat, a woman, or 12 to 10, your, your on just the, the razor's edge of overtraining, exhaustion, muscle loss, performance loss, you know, potentially stalling fat loss, hormonal adaptations, you're looking at. But that's a six-month long diet. To the extremes, over short periods, you can do ridiculous stuff. You can do it in the weight room. You want to go train six days a week, twice a day, you can get away with that for about six weeks. You'll explode afterwards. But for short periods of times, you can do literally, you can do some really ludicrous stuff. And that's kind of a rapid fat loss is that, that's the end. It's, it's on. Is you have to accept, yes, we're gonna shoot for much faster rates of fat loss. So with sufficient protein, muscle loss is never an issue. May look a little smaller, glycogen, water, etc. But, but true muscle losses is insignificant. And to your point, the guy who wants to be ripped for the beach probably doesn't care, right? You know, what people forget is that being a little bit smaller but ripped, you'll look a lot leaner than being a little bit bit or so. You'll, you'll look bigger than you are. There, there's when guys get very lean, they look more muscular than they actually are, right? You'll essentially, with their shirt off, you'll see guys at contest, you'll see 165-pound male bodybuilders in clothes, they don't even look like they work out. And as soon as they get into their posing briefs, oh my god, they look gigantic because that's what being lean does for you. Women, not to his greater degree, but when they get leaner, their appearance tends to improve more with leaner, even with slightly less muscle. And I'm not talking about being skinny fat. But if they're, they don't lose a lot of muscle, or even gain a little bit, losing that fat will tend to improve performance for more significantly. So what you have to accept with that, though, is that you probably feel very good. People, well, it's weird. Some people get a lot of fatigue, some people feel positively euphoric. It's, there's a lot of individual difference here. Some people's brains seem to run fantastically on low carbs, others just never get over feeling like crap. A lot of that's electrolyte intake, which is frequently and stuff in like that's the big one. There's actually a group dedicated to my book on Facebook, believe it or not. And nine out of ten problems people are having, electrolytes, just use a sodium, potassium salt, and such food that solves most of the problems because that's a big part of fatigue. So you do have to cut back your weight training. And this is probably one of the places I see the most resistance. Well, I trained six days a week. Well, I don't care if you train more, you can't do it on when you're on 800 to 900 calories, or you shouldn't, more to the point. So I significantly, I recommend significantly reducing weight training to as little as two days a week. In in that second version of the book, you know, I'll add for free to, for shorter workouts, but you should be in the way to more than 30 or 40 minutes because if you are, you're doing too much. I also recommend reducing the amount that the volume, the total number of sets, because we know that intensity is more important than volume for maintaining muscle mass. And I would rather someone do three heavy sets and get the hell out of the weight room than do six less heavy sets because they don't have the work capacity to do it. So this is really fun about physique changes here, right? If you're working with an athlete or performance athlete, you, you probably don't have this option. You probably can't cut there. Now, there's, there's, there's occasional differences. Powerlifters can occasionally get away with this. Their training, you know, they can do a short taper phase. I've heard from some that they prefer short aggressive diets over longer. You know, it lets them get back to normal training. So I'll do a couple for mini cuts. You'll hear some people talking about in a mini cut is like a three to four week kind of short diet between gaining phases. It's for physique athletes or performance athletes. It's so you can train well-fed, but keep your body fat percentage in check. So that's another place where, but you have to adjust your training. Mainly, you gotta reduce your cardio significantly. And that's the other place people run into problems. People just are so programmed, I gotta do cardio and I diet. Well, it helps. It can help. But in the case of very low calories, it can actually do more harm than good. And, and that's the other big mistake people make. Did your diet? I did cardio six days a week. It didn't work. Well, what did I tell you? How many times in the book that I say you cannot do this? I realize you're special. I realize that you're the exception and you're a unique and delicate flower. But how many times did I say not to do this? But people don't listen because they believe you've got to be doing an hour of cardio a day to get lean. And the reality is that diet plus weight training has the same effects as doing all the cardio. So let the diet do the work. Let the resistance training maintain the muscle. And just, just do the diet. So certainly, that is, if you're willing to accept those limitations, you can get away with one to one and a half percent. You know, an extreme diet for leader people, it has to be very reduced in duration. Like I said, generally recommend two weeks in the book. If you need four, that's great. But it has to end. And even during that, you're gonna need to raise calories to maintenance from time to time to offset some of the hormonal changes, refill muscle glycogen for training. Like this isn't straight four weeks of murdering yourself. So these are all, these are all, and I call it my two modified protein-sparing modified fast for that reason. I made some changes to the original in terms of scaling protein intake with body fat and activity, resistance training, essential fatty acids, modifying it. It's important for everyone, but it's also for that leaner individual who has more concerns, especially if they're training.

Yeah, it actually, it's, you brought up a lot of points that sparked some, some thoughts in my head. One is just a note that when you mentioned that for short periods of time, you can do ridiculous stuff, you just might feel like crap. And I talked about it on the podcast a few times that some months ago, I did a really rapid fat loss phase. I think over the course of maybe a month, I think my average rate of fat loss would have been something like 1.2% body weight loss per week. And body composition-wise, it was well worth it. However, and, and during the process, I actually did feel this weird euphoric sensation that you mentioned. Probably a lot of it was psychological. But after that, you know, it took me a good month to let, you know, libido and all those things renormalize. So something to keep in mind for people.

Yes, so, you know, there's, there's certainly pros and cons to both approaches, you know, and, and the enforcers individual differences. I know folks that, you know, some people would rather suffer a lot for a short period of time than suffer a little bit for longer periods of time. You know, I know a lot of people that once they establish, you know, that, that they're not going to have a big rebound afterwards. And some people still do, make no mistake. I'm not trying to say that this works for 100% of people. Some people are still going to rebound and gain a lot of weight back. And if that's true, this isn't for you. Like that's, you know, if I see a lot of people are like, "Yep, dude, my third stint on RFL." Like, well, maybe this is not the right approach for you personally. And I feel that way about all diets. So there is, there is that individual difference. And you do have to be aware that there may be consequences. You know, again, you see that at a contest diets when people diet very pathologically for physique contests, you know, chronic low calories, no days at maintenance, no diet breaks, too much cardio. They get there, and then they're wrecked for months or longer. You know, it may take them five to six months to achieve any sort of normalcy. And that's just the price you're gonna pay to get lean beyond the point that your body, you know, is gonna get a really fight back. And it can, again, it's durational, it's individual, and you just gotta, you gotta make your choices. And either way, it's gonna suck one way or the other.

And we did that. I want to talk about a little bit, a little bit about, you just mentioned diet breaks. And I think, you know, the more I'm hearing about kind of new research and, and some interesting findings coming out about these cyclical diets where you may be diet for a week, take it and take another week of break, or maybe have some interspersed low, low-calorie day during the week and eat maintenance for the rest of the time. The more I'm hearing about these things, the more convinced I get is that the biggest benefit of these is kind of the lifestyle retraining of things. Because I think one big reason why people are unable to maintain their fat loss results is because they have no practice in sort of normalcy and practicing the new lifestyle that they have to take on. Because I guess, you know, nutrition, it will be something that will be with you for the rest of your life. It's not something that you can just treat this as a period of running this print and then all rings are loose. So, um, kind of what do you personally see as the biggest benefit of this cyclical approach to dieting?

Interesting that you bring that up, because I agree completely. This is something I've been sort of thinking about the last couple of years and have talked about on at least one podcast, which is, you know, dieting and long-term weight maintenance as a learning process. You know, we've still got the ongoing diet wars. Would this diet's best? This approach is best? This? And it's still missing the point, right? You've got that, and it's just as illusory. Then you got the science that's basically like, the best diet is one you can stick to, which I basically been saying for over a decade. And people get so married to a strategy that works for them, whether it's intermittent fasting, keto, high carb, cyclical keto, carb cycling, intermittent caloric restriction, alternate day fasting, like, you know, I can go on and on and on and on and on. And a faddy diet, you can find a group of people that just did stunningly on it, it changed their lives. You can find a group of people that failed completely on it. And you can flexible, even flexible diet. And I'll come back to that a second. There's a group in the middle that's kind of like, it worked about as well as everything else. We're getting in individual differences. We're getting into context. For what I see happening is people go, "Okay, intermittent fasting is the way." And don't hear that this isn't criticism of intermittent fasting. It's just one of the current very popular approaches. And it's achieved a very zealous, a zealot-like fanbase that since I mean, it's, I could without fail, if there's any thread in my Facebook group that the word breakfast is mentioned, someone will have to tell you, "Oh, I haven't eaten breakfast for three years." Well, goodie. I could give the first damn, but I can guarantee you that they will be the first ones to let you know about how superior they are. They're, you know, they're the new vegans. And but it's true of all diets. Sorry, it's not, I can't, it's not fair to pick on any. So someone goes, "Okay, intermittent fasting is the best." And they try it, and it fails for them. And then they're all they think is, "Well, I failed." Well, maybe, you know, there are better and worse ways to do things. But maybe intermittent fasting is not for you. Maybe intermittent fasting is not for you. Now, right now, changed a lot of my attitudes about flexible dieting approaches compared to what I, when I wrote about in 2004, which is a lot of people who get the best results out of flexible dieting strategies. Here, I need to make a distinction, right? Flexible dieting is an attitude of not seeing food as black or white, good or bad, that you're on a diet or off a diet. This is distinct from flexible dieting strategies such as free meals, refeeds, full diet breaks, or if it fits your macros. Right? Those are specific applications that you will never, ever, ever, ever find in the research under the heading of flexible dieting. They're deflection leading in the research is a way of thinking about food. So, you know, originally, when I was much younger and wrote that book, I was like, "Yeah, flexible dieting strategies, everyone should use free meals, everyone should use refeeds." And I know better now, right? The people who do best with that frequently have a background of rigid, rigid eating. I did, and I was just projecting. And I realized that now. The people who do best with if it fits your macros, A, know how much they're eating, B, have very good food control because they probably spent five or ten years eating very rigidly, very measurably, no matter what they're eating, they're aware of it, right? I go to the buffet, I know how much I'm eating. I don't care, but I know how much I'm eating. The, the average overweight beginning dieter, who their taste buds have adapted, the reward system has adapted with decades of, of relatively poor eating habits, if you tell them in the first week or two that I want you to go have a free meal, it may work fantastically, but it's just as likely to kick them off their diet because all of a sudden, you give them, you know, that they may need to spend 10 or 12 weeks eating very strictly. And I don't mean they heard they're eating rigidly, I mean they're adhering very strictly to a specific diet, whether it's low carb or I don't care what it is. But, but inserting these strategies too early may do more harm than good for them. It's not that they failed. The set, again, like I said, there are better and worse ways to do it. And I would usually say, you know, try giving strategy a few times, and if it doesn't work, it, it's not good for you. Maybe ever, maybe it's not good for you now, maybe 12 weeks from now, when your taste buds have adjusted, you can have that free meal or have that small snack and not get blown off your diet. But which is a long way talking about dieting is a learning process over time. I think successful dieters and their generalities find the cluster of strategies that work for them, and they do it with practice. They do it by screwing up. I certainly have, right? I know factually that if I try to be intermittent fast, if I, if I eat about 4 o'clock and have, you know, normal meal, I'll be fine. If I kind of keep extending it, I get hungry and end up at the buffet. So for me, it's a matter of how I approach up. If I want to do if it fits your macros, I have to, you know, I don't keep stuff in the house. I go to the store, I buy exactly what I want to eat. I don't bring the bag home. That's because I found out the hard way that that, that's what's best for me. And most thing that's best for anybody else. This is how I've learned over the years on top of my other. So anyway, so I agree with you completely that I think getting to practice maintenance, whether it's on a day-to-day basis, right? Intermittent caloric restriction, where they're alternating heavy fasting with a maintenance day, not only do I think it, it has potential psychological benefits, you don't feel like you're dieting all the time, it may have physiological benefits. It is giving you a chance to be like, "Okay, that's a diet day, but I get to just practice what quit, you know, what's normal eating? What is a normal maintenance day for me now?" And you get to practice it, and you get to make mistakes, and you get to figure out through that learning how to solve those mistakes. Full diet breaks have the same potential issues, right? And there's a weird psychology. Dieting is almost, I don't know, say dieting is easier than maintenance because obviously physiologically it sucks, but psychologically it can be easier than maintenance in the sense that dieting feels like you're moving towards a goal. Even gaining weight if you're an athlete trying to gain muscle mass, that feels like you're moving towards a goal. Maintenance is very nebulous because the goal seems very abstract. You're not moving towards or away from something, you're just kind of sitting where you are. And my mentor actually said, "There's no such thing as maintenance. You're either moving forwards or falling behind." Maybe in the gym, that's true. In the context of weight loss, clearly it's not. So it can be a very weird psychological switch that, "Okay, I'm at maintenance now. Now what? Now what? Now what happens?" And you can get in, you can get in deep of the social psychology work of, you know, approach versus avoidance schools. You know, if you're trying to lose weight, that's an approach goal. You are actively seeking, moving forwards. An avoidance goal, you're actively trying to avoid something happening. And in the case of maintenance, you're actively trying to avoid weight gain. So you might conceptualize, they might need to be conceptualized differently. But giving that, you know, there was that study you mention, well, there's the original study way back in the day that I, that kind of drove my first book by Wing, when they gave him prescribed diet breaks of two weeks, nobody regained weight. Everybody went right back to their diet. Like there was something they failed in their study design. But they make kind of a cool discovery. There's a very recent study that I want to say they diet, and was it was two weeks on, two weeks off compared to a group that dieted straight through. And I think they, and the group that took the frequent breaks, like they both lost the same amount of weight over time. I believe there was better adherence. I believe there was, I forget the specifics of it, but it was a very interesting paper. You know, I recommend taking a diaper ate that frequently? Probably not, depending on people want to lose weight faster than than they ever will. And that slows things down. But maybe if it gives you better long-term results, maybe that's superior, right? And that's the other issue. Unless you just want to lose weight and don't give a damn what happens afterwards, long-term maintenance is what matters, right? Everybody can lose weight. Most fail like keeping it off. The problem is to keeping it off. And that's honestly where I want to see more research. I don't care that fiber is healthy. I don't want to see another study that fiber helps weight loss. We get it. We get it. Fiber's good. We get it. Why can't we get people to stay on a diet long term? This is what we're failing at. And that's where the research needs to focus. So yeah, absolutely. You diet for a couple weeks, you get some habits ingrained. Okay, now you're gonna take maintenance for a week. Say, "Well, what happens? Do you completely lose track of all your previous what you're doing on your diet? Do you find that suddenly you, if you regain a bunch of weight?" Like you get to go through that learning experience quite frequently. And to figure out, okay, what's, what's the best way for me to approach maintenance? It gives me the best long-term chance of success. There's a lot of ways to do it. You know, there's one researcher whose believes that fasting is the ultimate diet, which I don't know. I don't agree with complete fasting. It can work for very overweight individuals. And his premise, and I think intermittent caloric restriction has the same advantages. It teaches you that you can be hungry for two or three days at a time because you can eat less for two to three days at a time or eat nothing for a day. Once you've learned that, once you've learned that you will not die, especially if you get to eat normally, well, what's to stop you from inserting a low-calorie day once a week, right? If you know that, like intermittent caloric restriction is typically like 25% of maintenance. I would do that for leaner individuals. But just to make the point, well, you do that, you go ahead and diet. Wasn't a lot of food, but whatever for a day. I can do it. Well, if you're in maintenance and you know that you have a little bit of a tendency to overeat on other days, well, one day a week, put in a quote-unquote fasting day, boom, problem solved. You just created a 2,000 calorie deficit that will help thaw. And that's probably closer to what flexible eating attitudes are than anything else. Is letting slight increases on one day be offset by adjustments on other days. It's a little more proactive, but that's not a bad proactive strategy on top of any other potential health benefits. So yeah, I absolutely agree that, and on top of, I also think in that two week on, two week off study, the two week on, two week off might have actually lost more fat. They didn't see quite the same drop in metabolic rate because they were basically kind of normalizing stuff in between. Which, huh, sounds familiar. It's nice to see direct date on that. But that's part of what I could talking about for, you know, a decade and a half this point. But regardless, Dandy Shane was talking about it before me, so I shouldn't take credit. And so yeah, so I think it has physiological benefits. I think it has psychological benefits of, you know, anybody can diet for two weeks. If I tell you you got to diet for two years, that's wet. It's exhausting. It's exhausting. Even think about anybody can diet for three or four days. Anybody can diet for two weeks. Anybody can pry for three or four weeks. But if you know that, okay, cool, after that, I get to kind of eat normally. The psychological stress is reduced. And I think that's huge. The physiological benefits of metabolic rate, that's huge. The hormonal benefits across the board, that's huge. Giving the chance to practice maintenance more frequently, I agree with you completely. Probably as he, as equally, if not potentially more important, because the whole model stuff, all that other stuff can be dealt with. Long-term maintenance habits, that's where we're failing and where we need to find solutions.

Yeah, and, and I guess really, that the key is that, that for people who, I interact with people fairly frequently for whom it's seemingly the only two states they know is a state of overeating and just being kind of, you know, no conception of how a day-to-day balance, reasonable nutrition would look like. And the other extreme is rapid fat loss. And that's the real problematic thing because I always tell them, you can lose all the fat you want, but what makes you think that once the fat loss phase is over, you will have any idea how to eat normally? Because you have no practice in that. When was the last time you just ate normally for an extended standard period of time without any radical swings in any direction? That's the real issue.

No, I agree completely. And I think there's also, you know, this is something I could almost see, I could write even a separate book about. There are just beliefs in dieting subculture that have existed since, or maybe it's just how can you, the human brain works or whatever, that I describe as pathological. Because when you go into a diet with these beliefs, you've already failed. And that's one of them. There's this idea that, well, I should, I can just diet till I hit my goal and I can go back to eating the way I was before and the way it will magically stay off. If someone believes that, they might as well not bother because they have failed before they've started. Any, I'm not, this isn't meant to be critical of people. Like this is such a long-held belief. It has just become like part of the dieting mentality, right? I'm not trying to like tell someone you're stupid for believing this. You can't know what you don't know. And when you've been raised in a dieting culture, that, that's what everybody believes. I can't, it, you can't expect someone to know differently. All you can try to do is go, "Well, you've done this for the last five years. Maybe it's time to try something else, right?" You know, the old repeating the same thing and expecting a different result. But there are so many ideas in dieting lore or in dieting attitudes that, you know, some people have been found like there are diet foods and there are non-diet foods, right? And that's where the flexible eating, at that's a very rigid approach to diet. When I'm on a diet, I eat these foods. One, but there's even when you tell people something as a diet food, they will report that it doesn't taste as good. I think some of that is just this psychological negative of dieting. And I know people get twitty about, "Oh, it's not diet, you can't spell diet without die." Diet actually derives from the Latin word for day. And once you eat in the day. But whatever, people have these negative associations because, and I'm like, I'm old. I remember my mom, even remembers better the way you dieted in the 50s and 60s. You went, had your cottage cheese on salad. It's a very miserable way of eating. Diet foods, diet meals used to be terrible. The new food technologies, at least in the US, I can go get a Fit Kitchen meal, microwavable meal that has 24 grams of protein or more, you know, of lean protein, rice, veggies. The sauces are great. It tastes delicious. Like this idea that diet foods have to or should taste terrible. You know, old Jack LaLanne, the, the first or Thor xyx said, "If it tastes good, spit it out." How in the world can you expect anyone to live like that, right? And that's where flexible eating and even if it fits your macros, and even that realization that look, there aren't a specific dieting foods. A lot of this comes out of physique subculture, right? Everyone's like, "But they, they do the best with dieting." Well, the ones that succeed, and you don't see the three months afterwards that they blow up like this. You must eat tilapia, broccoli, you know, you have six foods that are acceptable for diet. And you go, "Look, you can eat these other's food." "No way, I'll never get lean doing that." Okay, whatever. You can't argue with that. But when they're held up as the way to diet because of their success, well, that just makes it worse. And you get dieters that are starting with a set of beliefs, an approach to eating that for the grand majority will fail. Even for the people it seems to succeed for, it frequently fails because, like I said, you can go on to any of the physique boards, everyone that makes the contest shape, there's 10 times as many who crack and Omega or end up with an eating disorder or end up far worse than where they started. So you can't just focus on the successes. We need to focus on what's working for the majority. And we know that there's commonalities. But, but yeah, these attitudes of "I'm on a diet, I'm off a diet." These are my diet foods, these are my non-diet foods has to go away to have any chance of long-term success. The recognition that yes, you will have to show some restraint. You can't just eat everything you want. However, the idea that you can never eat anything you want again is equally untrue. And there's a happy medium.

Yeah, and not to take this to an overly philosophical direction, but I really think that a lot of this mindset comes from this idea that once I lost the fat, everything will change and I will be a different person and life will be so awesome. And I will somehow, because everything will be so cool, I will surely be equipped with some enlightened kind of idea about how to do things from then on. And really, it's easy to get into that mindset. I can attest to this. I've done in the past a lot that, you know, I sleep like [ __ ] because I'm hungry. All I can think about is my next meal. I don't go out to

Social events, but it doesn't matter because I'm progressing towards my goals, and it's a it's it's exciting. But once you get there, then it's like, okay, congratulations, you achieved your goal. Now you have the rest of your life to actually maintain this. Now what? And it's really easy to all of a sudden flip your mindset over, and that's where a lot of people run into trouble, I think.

No, I, yes, and I again, I agree with you completely. There's even some work. There's a, I couldn't find the reference right now, but you know, and they ask people, what do you think will happen when you lose weight? And people will report things. Women will say, I'll get a better job, I'll get a boyfriend, people will like me. Of course, every guy is like, once I have abs, women will fall to my feet. And they get there, and it doesn't happen, and they go, why did I bother? Right? Because they're, their expectations of any of this. And I do think that the diets can differ in that regards in terms of how they're set up to either improve or, you know, someone's overall eating habits. You know, again, quick fix diets, even the ones that are set up fairly intelligently, don't really do that. They're just like, okay, you're gonna do this one thing. Cut carbs, cut fat, cut this, cut sugar, and that's all you have to do. And you get to the end, and you, very few of them cover maintenance. And it's like, okay, well, now what?

One of the more interesting papers I saw recently, and so they compared a high carb diet, which I think was like 45, 50% high-ish, to a low carb diet. But what they had the low carb route do is kind of once they got close to their goals, they started adding back carbohydrates foods to what they thought would be a sustainable level. And, and we, and the diets didn't end up being very different. It was like 45% carbs versus like 32% carbs or something. But I think the point was the instructions were much more specific. Look, you're gonna use this fairly extreme approach to get to your goals, but once you get there, we want you to start modifying in such a way, like again, on the base of what you've already been doing, which is what I, you know, my goal with rapid fat loss. And we're good, we want you to modify because that's, that's usually the biggest issue. People can't sustain a lot of these diets and nutrition rate is staggering. And, and that's that's a bigger reason, or that's a primary reason for weight regain. Right? It's not generally metabolic for overweight individuals. It's not hunger is up, but it's just they stopped sticking with diet, usually because of the way the diet is set up. And dieting, it's boring. But if you, if you realize you can include any foods within limits, I think a lot of that, and that's what this study did. It's like, well, people like carbs, they're not gonna do well forever not being able to eat, you know, the stuff they want. Let them increase it to the point that they're happy with. But the, the adherence rate went up staggeringly, and weight loss was at least as good. I forget if it was better. Of course, the low-carb zealots who are, oh, it's about the same. And I know why, I don't know why I know that. But a lot of carbs dollops were like, wasn't superior because it was a truly low carb. Yeah, but who cares? Because I don't care about that kilo difference, that two pounds difference over a year. I care about five years down the road and, and stuff like that. So yeah, I think there's all these factors that that go in the outside of the diet itself, outside of any other issues as far as beliefs, attitudes, expectations that are completely false, and that people are setting themselves up for failure from the get-go.

Yeah, yeah, agreed completely. And you know, for people who are probably looking for some practical recommendations, if someone was to do a kind of a cyclical, cyclical approach to dieting, there are many ways to skin a cat. So one could do, for example, maybe one week of really hard dieting and then one week off, or maybe two weeks of semi-hard dieting, one week of maintenance. Or maybe they could do maybe two or three, even potentially fasting days during the week and eating normally for the rest of the day. From kind of these sort of approaches, which ones are some of those that you tend to favor more?

Yeah, again, I think it probably is more to do with the individual than anything else. Like the intermittent caloric restriction stuff, you know, yes, this is my confirmation bias because this is what I've been saying again, since like for as long as I can remember. And for people that aren't familiar with it, so so typical dieting is just straight calorie restriction, right? You reduce calories by 30%, seven days a week or whatever, for as long as you can can stand it. Intermittent caloric restriction alternates periods of what they call fasting. And again, this can be anywhere from 25 to 60% of maintenance. Usually they use like 25% of maintenance, one meal a day, and then every two or three days, they let them eat normally. It's kind of an extension of that alternate day fasting idea on the internet fasting community. And when you math it out, right, if you've got maintenance, and people, what they find is that on the maintenance days, people eat kind of their normal maintenance calories or maybe a little bit higher. And part of this is that there's a delay and hunger when you start dieting and when the brain responds. And like even in studies are like, ah, we calorically restricted them and hunger went up on about day four, I think that's kind of a the time course. So it's like, well, why not, why not cut that off the past? If we know that on day four, people are gonna get hungry and miserable, well, let's give them the maintenance day on day four. Boom, problem solved. And that's kind of what I see our does. And it also, to me, breaks up that psychologically, right? And I like to use a car analogy, right? Imagine you're driving across country, as I've done it, and I've driven from Tennessee to Los Angeles, it's 2,214 miles. That number will be embedded in my brain for the rest of my life because I did that drive so many times, right? If I said, you got to drive 36 hours straight, that's overwhelming. If I break that up into two 16-hour days, well, that's still a tough day of driving. Well, I break it up into how often do I stop for gas and pee? That's about every three hours. I can drive three hours and then take a break. I can drive maybe 12 hours in a day and then go to bed. Buy it, buy it, buy it, buy knowing that there's a light at the end of the tunnel that removes a lot of us. It's kind of like with the, the flexible dying type concepts. I tell you, you can never eat french fries again, well, that's all you want. If I say, once a week, if you want to go out and have a meal and include french fries, suddenly forever becomes every six days. And that is a profound sight. Now again, that can kick people off the diet, but I think that just focus on this principle. And I think with ICR, that's a big part of it. Is suddenly, you know, that, okay, well, every third or fourth day, I get to eat what I want within limit. It's like, you don't get to pig out. And most people, and, and, and the weekly deficit ends up being about the same. By the time you math had a 75% calorie deficit, say four days a week or five days a week, and then three days of maintenance, it ends up being about the same 30, 35% as a straight calorie restriction. It's just with a different pattern. Now, early studies showed that it seemed to be superior. More recent studies show that it works at least as well. And I think there's probably an individual difference. Does the day off take you off your diet? If it does, this isn't for you. If not, you know, more power to you. There's been a couple of studies. One was like, I think it was two fasting days a week, and then eat normally for five days. Weight loss wasn't enormous, but again, if you're looking at an overweight individual with the maintenance of say, 3,500 calories, and you give them a fasting day and they only ate five or 600, well, that's a three-thought. They might be losing a pound and a half a week. Dieting two days a week, anybody can do that. Now, is it better to go to two extreme weeks and then to maintenance weeks? Or I think we start getting kind of these overlapping macro and micro patterns. Or it's like, okay, we can extend. You know, people will certainly lose more fat in two weeks of extreme dieting than with two days of extreme, you know, rather than a pound and a half a week, they might be losing three pounds a week. So they might get six pounds in two weeks versus three. Then they normally for two weeks and stable. Is it six and a half? Does the other? I suspect it's more the individual at this point. And, you know, but again, like to your point, they're gonna have to practice maintenance eventually. But maybe not. Maybe if they're doing two or days of dieting a week and five days of eating normal, maybe they just do that for the rest of their life. Right? May, you know, maybe that's all they really. Or once they're at goal, they do one day of hard dieting and then six days of normal eating. Or they insert a fasting day when they start to feel like, you know, their body weights if they're, if they feel like they're backsliding, which gets into another set of issues with maintenance in terms of like monitoring and tracking. And probably stuff either you and I have talked about or you've talked about with other other guests, you know, the critical net, the necessity of tracking changes to see that if you've lost 20 pounds and you've gained 3 real pounds, not 3 pounds of water weight, you need to tighten up a little bit. And the best part is, you know what to do. You lost the 20, don't focus on the regain, which is what people do. Like, this success, you know, what to do. So for three or four weeks, insert two hard fasting days again, like you did before. You know, you can survive, get back to where you were. Boom. There's another expectation. People think that maintenance means never, their body weight should never change. Also unrealistic. Nobody does that. Weight goes up a little bit, weight comes down a little bit. It should be a trend line around your maintenance goal. The key is, you got to, you got to catch it early. Once you gain two or three pounds, that's easy to get off. Once you've regained 10, ah, screw this, and you're, and you're gonna give up earlier rather than later.

Yeah, a related question, and I know that there is some research that also speaks of what I'm about to say, that it seems like there's just a huge amount of inter-individual variability between people as to how they respond to cyclic caloric restriction. Because for example, I, I mean, I can put myself at a five or six hundred calorie deficit when I'm, whatever, 16% body fat, and I can just stay on that calorie level until I have like veins on my abs. But some other people, like for example, not long ago, I just coached a guy, and he was just strolling out at all times at a pretty decent caloric deficit. And, you know, at some point, I just told him, like, look, dude, are you up for something more hardcore? If you are, then let's put you on a substantial core deficit. Basically, it was a pretty hardcore protein sparing modified fast twice a week, and we accumulated a good 4,000 calorie deficit within just two days, and all of a sudden, fat loss started to take off. Do you find the same thing that people just differ in this regard?

I think there's a couple issues going on there. One, that there is actually very large difference in how quickly and to what degree people's metabolic rate goes down. That has been shown. Like, there's great individual variants of us. Some people even like, you go way back, right? The Minnesota semi-starvation study, which, which is still kind of the seminal study, you know, they measured a pretty large decrease in in resting metabolic rate and stuff, but with huge variance. Like it, you know, they'd be average was whatever, 250 calories a day, but it was like 100 to 500. So like, let's say you have two people who were gonna do a moderate deficit, and they both go on a 500 calorie deficit, and just for example, say one sees a drop of 100 calories a day, right, off the bat. Well, they've still got a nice deficit. The other sees a drop of three to 400 calories a day, which probably doesn't happen, but again, just for as an example, they're gonna get very or more likely the changes in NEAT levels. It's usually non-resting metabolic rate. It's like, for whatever reason, they just stop moving around. Well, that that 500 calorie deficit suddenly is a 200 calorie deficit because they're sitting on their, but later in the day because they're tired. Well, boom, one guy's losing fat and accelerated rate, and the other's not. So I think, but the thing is that that adaptation will never scale with the deficit. Suddenly, boom, you put them on, you take them from that moderate deficit where they're getting, you know, five or tighter deficit, NEAT slows down by 300, so their deficit's tiny. You put them on a thousand calorie two episodes, they're NEAT may go down a little bit more, but it may be it's 400 calories. Well, boom, they still have a 600 calorie per day deficit, right? That the body can never keep up with a deficit that large. None of the adaptations will ever scale linearly. Maybe a little bit larger, but they're never, you're never gonna see, you know, if they got that 4 calorie reduction in energy expenditure to 5 calorie reduction in, you know, daily deficit goal, they're not gonna get 900 in response to a thousand. So it will be large. So there's part of it. There's also part of it that's just cortisol, stress, and water retention. This is something else I've been talking about for over a decade. Some people are higher strung than others. Some people have elevated resting cortisol. Some people stress out more. And one thing with cyclical dieting and Eric Helms, and I talked about this because he's used, you know, maintenance days with his physique dieters for for a while now, for a number of reasons, including the ones I've talked about. And he's like, when you raise calories to maintenance, well, a bigger calorie deficits do you raise cortisol more, which can cause water retention. But even one day at maintenance will cause cortisol to go back down. So I think a lot of it, when you get into for people that are prone to that sort of water retention, which is very individual, putting those maintenance days in in conjunction with bigger deficits on the diet days helps to offset that. So I think that could be part of what's going on. So I do think there's a couple different reasons why if you, again, if you've got someone that does show a fast or large or dropping metabolic rate, and on a moderate deficit, they may not have a very large effective deficit. When you really crank those calories down, they're gonna have big deficit, you just can't get around it. So I think that's, I think that's two factors.

Yeah, definitely. Now, another thing I wanted to ask you about is, um, the utility of this cyclical caloric approach on the way up. So, for example, during a bulking phase, we had maintenance, you know, some people like to do, for example, super low calories on their rest days, for example, when they are walking to kind of keep body fat in check that way. And I addressed this topic not that long ago and talked about kind of the potential negative psychological implications of this, like it could almost induce a mild form of exercise bulimia in some people if they know that on any day that I'm not training, I'm not eating [ __ ]. But yeah, like what, what do you think of this?

Um, well, actually, that's an interesting point, and I think it's worth kind of returning briefly to the whole, whether it's intermittent fasting or ICR or whatever it is. For people that they come from like a previous eating disorder background, um, especially any type of bulimia or binge purge type of thing, I think it's, it's, I think those are the people that from just a general principle standpoint, probably shouldn't do cyclical dieting approaches because I, you know, in terms of caloric restriction or even daily intermittent fasting becomes, I'm gonna starve all day and then go nuts. And I think it can, can cause a relapse on that regards. So far as, as, you know, when gaining, I think there's that possibility. I don't know what risk. You know, I think that the typical person who's kind of trying to to gain or bulk quote-unquote, I don't know how how prone they are to that, but of course, that is always a possibility. It's like, oh, on my training days, I'm gonna, you know, you've got that quart ice cream to support growth, and then I'm just gonna starve myself the next day to offset that. Yeah, I could see that as a possibility. I think the bigger, bigger danger, you know, this is where there's a difference from dieting. Is adaptation is ongoing, right? You train on a Monday, it's not like growth starts and stops that Monday and by Tuesday, you're back to normal. I think big calorie deficits on the off days can potentially inhibit adaptation. You know, say, let's say you're training Monday, Wednesday, Friday, which should be a fairly low frequency for most people trying to gain mass. If you did, you know, high-calorie days on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and the big, big deficits on Tuesday, Wednesday, sorry, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. I think there's very much the potential to harm your overall gains. I'm more inclined in that, you know, depending on the training structure, and if you go back way in the day, Fred Hatfield recommended reverse cyclical dieting, five days of high calories, two days of low calories on the weekends, which is exactly the reverse of comfy cyclical types of diets that I used to write about. The problem there again, is if you have a high penny, it's not like suddenly on the weekend when you're resting, you're not adapting or seeing any sort of changes physiologically. I'd be more inclined if you're gonna do it that way, you know, to do, and I believe this is, this is how Martin Berkhan structures his lean gains approach, you know, 5, 10% over maintenance on the training days, and maybe 5% below on the non-training days. I think that's a very real possibility. I think another one, like, let's say you're training Monday through Friday, take Saturday off. I could see making Sunday a big calorie deficit, right? Mo most of the adaptations from the Friday workout will probably be over by the end of Saturday. So you might do higher calories on your training days, like let's say you train Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. I would, you know, say 5, 10% over maintenance on the training days, maybe maintenance on Wednesday, maintenance on Saturday, which are your days off, right? Your days off after training days. And then on Sunday, if you wanted to do, you know, a big deficit day with, you know, when it would be mainly mainly sufficient protein, veggies, and fish oils, like that's what I would want to see it as, basically an ara rapid fat loss day. Then I think that would be a legitimate approach. And, you know, that that 2,000 calorie deficit, that should be about 2/3 of a pound of fat loss roughly, and that should offset most of the most of the fat loss you're gonna get during, you know, during the training week without, I think, causing too many problems. So I'd be, yeah, then if you train Monday through Saturday, well, puffs, don't eat such a big surplus. You know, that's something else people, I think, have forgotten. And, you know, and I again, like we talked about percentage weight loss, the same percentages should apply to weekly weight gain. And a beginner, intermediate, advanced trainee should be targeting very, very different numbers. The rate of growth in an advanced trainee, it's very slow. You know, if you're, if you're getting a pound a month, you're doing real well. And a woman's getting half of that. And when you map this stuff out to gain a pound of muscle a month, it's maybe 3,000 calories over maintenance. That's a whopping 100 calories a day. Like that extra Apple is all you really need to support all the growth you're gonna get. So mainly, don't fall into that trap of, I trained today, I have to eat all the calories. No, you probably need a few hundred over, you know, you don't need that many. If you're a newbie, for an underweight high school or maybe, and I hear those goes up 20 pounds in three months. Yeah, well, half that was fat, and you're 15. So do do that when you're 28 and let me know what happens. Yeah, absolutely. And old fart like me.

Yeah, so, uh, what, one thing, another thing that might be useful for people who will be going through fat loss phases, just because you mentioned setting off the surplus or fat gain with some deficit periods. Everybody knows that when they start losing fat, there is that annoying kind of transition period where seemingly nothing is happening except that you start looking flatter and softer. Do you, do you think that this is merely an illusory, like just the visual effect, or do you think there is actually some effect going on where seemingly your body is just throwing around fluids and some glycogen and no actual fat loss is happening?

Um, I think it's both. Eric Helms, he calls that the skinny fat phase. And I noticed that too, like, you know, you're coming out of a gaining phase, you start dieting, and for like the first two weeks, you look fatter. It's really annoying. And then, you know, when you're dieting, you come out, you start raising calories, and the first two weeks, you look leaner. And it's like, what the hell? And I, you know, I think I theorized that at one point, there is some sort of fat loss momentum. It's a goofy article on my website called the long-term delayed fat loss effect. And I sort of taught, you know, because there are enzymatic changes that I have to occur. I do think just fundamentally, you have to be losing fat if you're in a deficit. The body has to pull energy from somewhere. And I mean, if protein is too low or you weren't training, it could potentially come from muscle, but I think that's unlikely. I do think most of what you're seeing, I think you're seeing two things. One is, yes, muscle glycogen goes down because by definition, on a diet, unless you're using all cardio to create a deficit, nobody does that or endurance athletes do that, you have to be eating less carbs, right? If anything, protein has to go up from your previous level. I mean, I suppose if you cut dietary fat to the bone, but most people don't do this. So you're gonna must have, like, you get a little bit flatter, your muscles aren't as full, you look flabbier, you just do. I think the reason the fat loss doesn't show up is just it's a numerical issue, and it has to do with a those water shifts, right? If water shifts underneath the skin for some reason, you just look puffier, even if you're at the same level of body fat. And even if you lose fat, some fat, right? The rate of fat loss is generally gonna be fairly slow. And I think part of the problem is that the amount of measurable fat loss that can occur in those first couple weeks is just too small to show up visually or by any measurement method. Right? When bought, when calipers have a two to three percent error bar on body fat percentage, okay, you lost 1% body fat in that first week, that's noise. Right? Until you, till you lose enough fat to show up. It also depends on your starting body fat percentage. People also forget, you know, when you're lean, like if you ever prepped for or gotten that lean, right? When you're like 8% or 9%, half a pound of fat loss is just visually profound. Even like, you'll see in late, late, late level like contests dieters, it's almost day to day, you're seeing visual changes somewhere in the body, a little bit more lean, it's a little bit more condiment, more vascularity, almost daily. But this is a percentage issue, right? So if you're, if you're a lean male, let's say you're 150 at 8% body fat, you've got about 12 pounds of body fat left. If you lose half a pound of fat, right, that is like 5% of your body fat. That's enormous. And since it's also probably coming from very specific areas at this point, like right, we lean from top inside out and top to bottom, right? First, you lose the visceral fat. If you're a dude, face gets lean, shoulders get ripped, you know, pecs just come in. If you're a woman, your abs come in, and then your thighs are last. If you're a man, abs and low back come in last. But when everything else is lean, and you've got an area that only has a little bit of fat left, half a pound of fat loss is a staggering percentage of what's left, right? Then you look at someone who say 40% body fat, then you lose 10 pounds and don't look the same. Because when you're carrying, you know, 70 or 80 pounds of fat, right? If you're 300 pounds at 50% body fat, which is not unheard of, you're carrying 150 pounds of fat. If you lose 10, 10 pounds of fat, that's what it's not even 1%. And it's, it's visual, and it's gonna come off so evenly, it is visually indistinguishable. It's also impossible to measure. So I think, you know, your dude, you're 15%, you get started, you lose a pound or two, maybe a pound, a pound and a half if you're lucky. But it's not visible. Certainly by the time you flatten out a little bit, your water shifts to your skin, you look for about two weeks, and then boom, you tighten back up as the body reestablishes water balance, and the fat loss starts to exceed easily, you know, the visible, the visual threshold or the measurable threshold. But it sucks. You know, what, one thing I've recommended in this regards, I ran a really long, tedious article about it, which was, you know, transition periods, right? And I think a lot of this is worse if you go straight from dieting to bulking or straight from for bulking to dieting. And it's like, if you spend a couple of weeks kind of just maintaining where you're at, you know, kind of, you know, you might see some small changes as you come into these, talked about cleaning up the diet and see some small changes there. And then, you know, there's there's some evidence your fat burning enzymes, fat mobilizing pathways might down regulate a little bit. So throwing in, you know, starting to bring a little bit of cardio during those maintenance weeks can frequently maybe help a little bit with this. But it's just the phase everybody goes through. I mean, it would be interesting to see if a male who is like starting at 10%, which most men aren't gonna hold long term, which that was actually one of your first questions that I never really addressed. I'll bail at 10% might not see see the same thing. Yeah, guy 15 will definitely experience this. Woman at 24 will definitely experience this. I don't know that someone who was already fairly lean would go through this. But most people aren't coming out of that that situation when they start dieting to to extremely knows or certainly they probably shouldn't be.

Yeah, yeah, for what it's worth, usually I find that in the next, like in the second month of dieting is where I actually start to look good. And in the first one, I just kind of, for the first two weeks, certainly, I just look worse. Maybe second two weeks, man. And then the second month, I'm like, okay, I'm actually starting to look pretty good. So, so but like, so when, when this is occurring, like what, what body fat percentage are you starting out generally?

Yeah, it's, I'm talking about starting right from that 15% ish. Yeah, men. Yeah, which again, is, you know, kind of about what I would expect, just sort of based on, you know, just general physiology. You're just again, if you lose, if you're losing a very moderate, you know, two fat a week, ribbon a pound and a half. Yeah. So like, what's your body weight or what was your body weight done then? Must have been around 190 pound issue. All right. So if you're 190 and 15%, you've got 28 and a half pounds of fat. If you would say even six pounds, right? Whatever X, you know, that's, you know, it's, it's a significant percentage of the total, but it's also coming off pretty evenly. And some of this also depends on where you carry the body fat, right? You know, men, if you're male, that has a very abdominal, you know, the typical male fat patterning, which is gonna be mostly around the midsection, you will frequently see, you know, lean is starting to show up in the face, the upper body tends to get a little bit gaunt. Some folks carrying their body fat very evenly, and oh my god, they'll diet, diet, diet, and 10, 15 pounds of fat, and nothing happens visually. They just don't look any difference. And then overnight, maybe maybe it all comes in. They reach a point where suddenly everything just comes in all at once. And they get really frustrated because they're just like, my diet isn't working. You're like, you're down 15 pounds, and your strength is the same in the gym. What are you, what do you think you're losing? But it's, it's really easy to get frustrated for those folks. So yeah, but that's just like it is. It's, it's very, it's very annoying. And this is a place where as much as people say the scale should never be used, like it can be more telling in some some situations. Certainly for an overweight individual, they're not gonna see big visual changes, but the scale should be dropping fairly. And I'll drop real rapidly in the first few days, and they'll slow back down. But it's like, I used to tell people for years, no matter what's going on visually, if your scale weight is dropping and your your performance in the weight room is staying at least close to pre-diet levels, you're losing fat. I mean, if you're a beginner, if you're returning from the layoff, like there's some weird exceptions, but if you're just like the general trainee who's training consistently, has been training for over a year, you start dieting, your weights coming down, your performance in the weight room is unchanged, I guarantee you're losing fat. It may just take a frustrating amount of time to, you know, quote-unquote appear. There's also a weird phenomenon or it out that I was, was it was told to me in in college, and I found some research much later on that acutely fat cells can fill back up with water. The fatty acids are dumped, but glycerol, which is the backbone of fatty of triglycerides, can actually absorb water. Right? You might remember when glycerol supplements were kind of all the rage for endurance athletes because it let them hyper hydrate and store more body water. So like transiently, fat cells can fill up with water, and eventually the water is dumped, and that's where you get like the woosh phenomenon. And, you know, people be dieting and dieting and nothing happens, nothing happens, and then BOOM, overnight, five pounds off the scale, appearance just boom, changes drastically. And that's, you know, the woosh, which can be related to cortisol, but my na P sometimes. And I found a paper at some point that visceral fat in overweight individuals has a higher water content. They've lost the fat, and it just refills back up with water for a little while. So frustratingly, yeah, it is it is very frustrating.

Well, Lyle, I actually think that I managed to ask all the questions that I wanted to, which is rare that it actually happens. But yeah, super awesome. We actually in just over an hour, and I think I don't know what else people would want to know about rapid fat loss for the summer. I think they are pretty well set. So yeah, thank you so much for taking the time. This was a pleasure.

Last, last thing I want to ask you is, what, what kind of resources would you like to mention for them to to check out? What are you working on? I'm sure you, I know that you have put out some really cool stuff lately. Um, so, you know, as far as, you know, all my articles are still up, my main website, which is body recomposition dot com. I think there's over 500 of them at this point. And like, genuinely, I've, I've run out of things to write about. I'm probably writing about training a little bit more. I've fat loss, diet, I just, I got nothing. I got nothing left other than details that not even I care about. You know, my Facebook group is extremely active, and it's also called body recomposition. I'm there daily. Lots of smart people in my group. Like I tend to attract experts in a lot of fields. So like, I learn from them. We've got a guy researching doing cancer research. We've got three fantastic physiotherapists to the rehab questions. We've got a great OVG YM, we've got a great eating disorder specialist. Like I tend to be very much generalist. Fat loss is kind of my, and training are my main things. But any questions I can't answer, there's somebody in my group that can. So that, that's probably a good resource. You know, I did just finally release the woman's book, volume one, in the end of January after three and a half years of soul-crushing work. I have actually, you know, there there is a volume two, which will be on training. The volume one was just specifically diet, nutrition, fat loss, and it was way too long. Currently, the the training book, which is volume 2, is the next project. And shockingly, I haven't even kind of started working on it a little bit. So hopefully, it won't take too long. And that's pretty much, you know, pretty much where I can be found. I'm sort of all over the web. If you understand rapid fat loss, there is a group on Facebook. Let me find it real quick. That is the PSMF press. Yeah, the protein sparing modified fast diet that I essentially is basically based off my book. And I'm actually occasionally active there since I'm in that group. So those are kind of the main places. I have a forum, but for all practical purposes, it's dead. I would father, I think forums are dead in the world of, in the world of Facebook. I think the internet forum has gone bye-bye.

Yeah, awesome. Cool. I'll, I'll link to all of those in the show notes. And once again, thank you so much for taking the time. This was a pleasure.

Yeah, for me too. Thank you so much. All right, guys, I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please leave a comment and subscribe. If you watch this on YouTube, if you listen to this on iTunes, please leave a rating to help this stuff grow. Some clouds and pot beam, you can just follow me to be notified on future episodes. And to be a contributing member of this podcast, join the sustainable self development Facebook group, where you can drop ideas about future podcasts. I very often ask my listeners for tips and advice on who to get on next. So if you're interested in getting into discussions like that, be sure to join the Facebook group. And if you don't want to go through the searching process, just click one of those links in the show notes/video description. It is all there. All right, thanks for hanging around up until now, and see you next time.