Lyle McDonald's Guide to Rapid Fat Loss

It sounds a lot worse than it is. How's it going?

"The same as always. What kinds of results can you expect doing RFL the right way in terms of like fat losses?"

"They will see true fat losses of 3 to 5 pounds a week."

"Oh yeah? People bitch so much like, 'Oh, the food's so tasteless!' Just learn to use seasoning."

"D, it was just the tan. He would have placed. He could have been except the tan. I'm like, 'Look like I never tanned.' I'd like to blame the tanning company for that."

"Wait, wait, wait. Discount code: MikeHasNoTan, all lowercase, 10% off Lyall's books."

"Yep, I'll go, I'll go make it after we're done with [Music]."

In this video, I interview Lyall McDonald about the protocols he outlines in his 2008 Rapid Fat Loss Handbook. We tried to be comprehensive, but as a consequence, this video ended up being rather long. So, I've broken it down into chapters, which you can access via timestamps in the description box below. Without further ado, let's talk fat loss, starting with what is rapid fat loss.

We can talk about, because you raised them, the purported risks of these aggressive diets later and how to mitigate them. But for now, I think it would be good just to describe your RFL diet. So, you call it a modified PSMF, which stands for Protein Sparing Modified Fast. Yes. What the hell is a PSMF? Okay, what are your modifications?

Right, all it really is, all the PSMF is fundamentally is a ketogenic diet without the fat. When you get right down to brass tacks, it's just a ketogenic diet without the dietary fat.

In case this is unclear, I'm going to explain what Lyle means by a ketogenic diet without the fat. So, there are three macronutrients that make up our food: protein, carbohydrate, and fat. A ketogenic diet is where you only eat protein and fat. So, a ketogenic diet without the fat, that is a PSMF, is where you only eat protein.

As a result, many traditional protein sources are off-limits due to excessive carbohydrate or fat content. So, let's, I'm going to, the easiest way to explain this is with just a story I like to tell. I told it recently in my Facebook group. I've written this out a bunch of times. All right, so take the way back machine to, I don't know, the late 70s, thereabouts. So, at the time, the typical approach to obesity treatment was the low-calorie diet. Typically, that was in the realm of 1200 to 1500 calories a day. They were set up very differently. Sometimes it was a fixed calorie level, usually women got 1200 and men got 1500, and there's a little more nuance, but that's typically what it was. And that worked, you know, about as well as any of it works, which is to say, not very. I mean, it, it worked until it stopped working, but that's neither here nor there. They always get about, you know, 2.8% weight loss. Ha.

Sorry, Ike and I were talking before we started recording. So, at some point, they just said, "All right, for people with severe overweight or obesity, this isn't fast enough." So, they developed a very low-calorie diet. Now, the very low-calorie diet was typically between 400 to 800 calories. And I'm going to work from 400 because that was, you know, somewhere in that range. Now, typically, it was given in a hospital setting because there could be some electrolyte issues. Like, and usually it was with people with very severe overweight, severe over, severe obesity who did need to be medically supervised. It's typically liquid meal replacements, which gave massive control, very low calories, because lower calories generate faster weight loss than higher calories. I mean, it's not, it's not that complicated. But they were set up appallingly because again, well, I'll come back to that.

So, a typical 400-calorie VLCD might be 50% protein, which sounds like a lot, and 50% carbs and fats. But 50% of 400 calories is 200 calories. That's 50 grams of protein. That's 50 grams of protein a day. Yeah, that's barely what we now in the US call the DRI, what used to be the RDA, which is probably too low anyway, right? But okay. And, and consistently, researchers saw massive nitrogen losses. Right. The time they were using nitrogen balance. We know it's not super accurate. They were seeing the body was just hemorrhaging protein. So, for a bunch of years, these researchers were like, "Well, let's see what if adding more, what if we had more carbs? What if we had more fats?" And they [ __ ] around with this for absolute years to see which would spare more protein. I think this is part of where the whole carb-spares-protein thing comes from, right? And usually, short-term carbs helped more, and in the long-term adaptation to ketosis, ketones, ketosis helps a little bit more. But none of it could completely stop the nitrogen losses.

And then, at some point, and I don't know what year, I've got a paper, I'll send you the reference. It's called "The Very Low Calorie Diet: Learning More and More About Less and Less." This, that's probably, there's any paper that stimulated RFL was probably that that paper, right? And at some point, some, some genius was like, "Hey guys, why don't we try more protein?" Because, you know, they're losing protein, so maybe if we try more protein, they won't lose as much protein. Like, it's right there in the name. And, and that worked.

To be fair, that could be the fallacy of composition. Yeah, I get that. But we're talking nutritional physiology. We're like, "Look, if you're losing X, you don't try to put in Y to fix it, right? Like if you're vitamin C deficient, you don't put in vitamin D." Like, I, I understand what you're saying generally speaking. But again, it was worth testing. Yeah, for sure. For sure. There, it's easy to be critical in hindsight, but come on, this, this one isn't a big logical jump, right? Just leap here.

And over the next, however many years it took, you know, they, they [ __ ] around with numbers and they found that again, for individuals with obesity, you needed a protein intake of roughly 1.5 grams per kilo, which is a little more than 0.7 grams per pound. Now, they used ideal body weight, which I, that is a whole separate kettle of fish. But ideal body weight roughly equates to lean body mass. Good enough for government work, right? It's close enough. It's, it's in that realm. So, and that's, so that's there you go. And that's about easily double what they had been giving, right? 80, 90, 100 grams per day. Voila! Suddenly, there was no nitrogen being lost, or certainly most of it was eliminated.

Because there's also, there was no exercise going on. We know that. We know now that that's the other variable. Lyle's RFL involves more than just omitting carbohydrates and fats. In this chapter, we examine how RFL differs from a traditional Protein Sparing Modified Fast. So, we're talking about here, here's how the diet, these are the modifications. So, you're only eating protein, and you set your protein based on your activity and your body fat percentage. And then you add in fish oil, you add in vegetables and fiber. Keep going. And at that point, you have met all of your essential nutrients, right? And that book has a boring chapter on, you know, essential. Did we mention electrolytes? Yeah, that's included in supplements. That's later. You need supplement sodium, potassium. That was all in keto. It's all the same stuff. You need like five grams of sodium a day. Just don't just salt out of your food. Um, which also helps a lot with some of the, the keto fog, brain cell fatigue. So, that was the, that was the prime, first, that was the primary modification, adjusting protein based on body fat percentage and activity levels. We know that as folks get leaner and they have less body fat, they tend to lose more body protein on a diet, right? We know that protein requirements go up, right? A male at 10% needs more protein than a male at 40%. Right? We've known that for years. I've been writing about that already for a while, right? Uh, the P ratio and all that stuff. Again, I'll come back to that.

So, the way I wanted to do it was to say, "Okay, we need to scale protein based on initial body fat percentage, right?" That's when I developed my little cat category system, right? In that book, in Flexible Dieting, I presented Category 2, 3 based on body fat percentage in men and women have different values based on rough cutoffs of where the physiology changes. And like, it's not like you can go, "Oh, boom," you know, it's one thing on this side or the other, but I had to set a limit somewhere. And so, I developed this category system. So, I was like, "All right, and Category 3 is higher body fat percentages. Category 2 is middle. Category 1 is lean." Right? So, so I would be Category 1 because I'm like, beneath 15%. 15% is Category 1. It's like 15 to 25 is Category 2, and above 25 is Category 3 for women at about 10%. And it's, that's about where it, it puts it. So, women at 20 to 20, 22% or lower is Category 1. 23 to 30 or 30, 20, whatever, 35 is Category 2, and above that is Category 3. It's in that range. And realize that's for older methods, right? If you read any of mine, anything new, like the women's book or anything that I've written since then, DEXA gives systematically higher values than the older methods of like calipers and stuff for reasons about 3-6%. So, I have to, in my books now, I have to be like, "Here's the body fat for the older methods, and then here's if you use DEXA to set your categories." Neither here nor there. Buy my books. MikeHasNoTan, 10% off.

MikeHasNoTan, tax to my discounts in general. Category 3, carrying excess body fat, more likely to be sedentary than not. But there are athletes in many sports, sumo, American football, that are absolutely Category 3. It's not universally inactive. More often than not, Category 1, most likely people that train, but not universally. There are people that are, you know, normal weight that are who are not, who don't work out and who may want to lose weight. They're the ones that really get bad results when they do, when they diet badly, and they always do, right? Most Category 1 people probably are already training to some degree or another. Most Category 2 is the most variable. Since it's men 15 to 25% body fat, that could be, you know, an out-of-shape offseason bodybuilder like Ike. Oh, hell, that could be an onstage bodybuilder like Ike. That could be a completely untrained dude who works in an office or works construction or works any job. Category 2 females between like 22, 24 and 35%, something like that. That's a range that it could be someone who trains but isn't super lean. It could be someone who doesn't work out. So, Category 2 is really the hardest for me to predict. Yeah, sure. Category 3 doesn't need the weight training as much, and they may be able to do it initially. Category 1 mandates weight training. Y. More likely than not to already be involved in training. Category 2 can go a lot of different ways. So, that was, that was the first modification.

But I also added exercise, right? We know that exercise can adj, can change protein requirements, right? So, then I had, if you're doing no exercise, aerobic exercise, which included interval training, or weight training. So, I had this chart and I was like, "All right, Category 1, 2, 3, set your basal protein levels, 1.5 grams per kilo for Category 3 where the study started, and then however, whatever math I made up to bump it up. And then if you were doing exercise, it went up further, right?" So, Category 3 with no exercise was the lowest. Category 1 weight training was the highest. Category 1 weight training is, uh, 1.5 grams to 2 grams protein per pound of lean body mass, I think. Yeah, it's, it's upwards of 3.3 grams per kilo. Which, if you read Eric Helms' review paper on that about, right? My scale. That's another place I might change it. I've, I've changed, gone back and forth. I think two grams per pound might be excessive. But neither here nor there. That would be something else I might modify. Um, so, yeah, so it, it can go up. But we know that that's what it takes to prevent all lean body mass loss, all, sorry, all muscle loss.

Why vegetables? So, you got the proteins, very modified fast, it's basically protein, uh, fish oil capsules, uh, basic multivitamin, electrolytes. Yeah. Why vegetables? Um, it gives you something crunchy to chew on. It helps keep you regular. Many people complain about constipation on RFL, although some of that is the, is just the reality of most of the poo bulk that we make comes from carbs, right? Protein is digested with like 90 to 95% efficiency. It doesn't create a lot of poo. So, you don't, you don't have anything to come out the other end. And what does come out is often rather pebble-like when it comes out at all. So, vegetables just, like, it helps. It gives you something crunchy. It does provide micronutrients, fiber, helps keep things moving from one, you know, one end to the other. They actually do always include it as part of the VLCDs. Like, one, one approach is it's like 600 calories of liquid [ __ ] and then they're like, "200 calories of fruits and vegetables." Which kind of goes to your question about minor modifications. The other one was liquid meal replacements, but they gave him some like, "All-Bran cereal." It's just to keep things moving. Yeah, sure. Because pooping is enjoyable. And it also, but provides micronutrients. But as much as anything that I was trying to do was rapid, this will give you the most rapid fat loss, no muscle loss, it will maintain all essential nutrients, but critically, it will build a baseline food intake to move back to maintenance. Good. Yeah, so it's to establish, in some measure, healthy eating habits so that you're in a good spot when you're back at maintenance. Which, that was part of it, yeah. That, that makes it superior to a traditional liquid VLCD or liquid PSMF. But another thing I'd add is vegetables keep you bloody full for negligible calories. Exactly. They fill your damn stomach. I mean, not all of them are great candidates. For instance, there are some that are a little starchier, but green vegetables like broccoli, you know what I mean? How about eggplant? You mentioned cucumbers before. I mean, there's something to chew on, something to fill you up, make you feel nice like you're actually eating. Yeah, that's the other, without any of the calories. It just gives you more of like, "Something I did." So, we've got over here these konjac noodles. These, I love those. They're awesome. They're fibrous. Yeah, yeah. Like, they're zero calories. They're just all fiber. And like, so I will actually, so like, one of my big RFL meals is I'll make stir-fry. So, I cook a bunch of chicken breast, put teriyaki, steamed vegetables with like broccoli, cauliflower, and there's usually like little carrot and stuff, which I don't worry about. Throw that over the top of either konjac rice or noodles. This is a full, I mean, that that is a meal. It's a brilliant meal, you know? Now, sometimes, like earlier, I had five slices of ham and a protein drink. But when I, like, for an actual dinner meal, like that's a full meal. It takes me a good 20 minutes to eat. The dogs love it while I eat, and it keeps me full. You make it for the dogs too? Oh, they love it. Yeah. A, that's nice. Um, yeah, they, yeah, right. That's why they always share my meals with me. But yeah, so like, absolutely. It gives you, it makes it more like food. All right? Like, actually being able because just eating protein again, if unless it's really gristly meat, it's, it's a real quick meal. Yeah. Excellent answer. Yeah, you're spot on. You're spot on. Yep. Yep. Yep.

The early PSMFs didn't make a big deal about essential fatty acids. I do. So, needed to find an omega-3 supplement. Um, that could be either fish oil or flaxseed oil. But you prefer oil? Okay. In the first, this is the only book I've ever revised, I think. Make some extra money. It's the only book I've ever done a second edition of because I don't like to revisit projects. I like to write about new things. In the first book, I said flax oil. The second book, I said flax oil won't work because the conversion to EPA and DHA is abysmally poor. So, actually, flax oil will not work. Its conversion to EPA is poor, and you get almost no DHA. And I wrote this really boring article on my website. There's a video version of it, I think, where I actually make the argument. I don't think alpha-linolenic, alpha-linolenic acid is the essential fatty acid. I consider EPA, DHA, and maybe even only DHA, DHA. I'm not convinced ALA is anything but a precursor for the other two. The conversion is trash in most people. So, that I changed. If you eat a lot of cold-water fatty fish, that's your fish oil source. I live in America. We don't eat that stuff.

The only supplements Lyle really emphasizes on RFL are the electrolytes: sodium, potassium, and magnesium. Lyle has a section in his Rapid Fat Loss Handbook about some other potentially useful supplements, but he described them as, and I quote from an email exchange, "far from required."

The other big change I think I made from, like I said, in the hospital setting was typically done with very, you know, liquid commercial product that gives amazing control. However, and this goes to a different data set we'll talk about in a second, one of, one of the supposed problems. I based mine around food because when you look at some of the earlier data that talks about, you know, rapid weight loss because the belief is, "Oh, if you lose weight rapidly, you're more likely to rebound." That's still a very common belief, and it's not wrong, but it's not completely right either. It depends on how you do it. If you do the diet with nothing but liquid meal replacements, you hit your goal. Now, what, what do you do? How do you transition back into eating food? You have not, you can't. You have not learned food habits. Now, in the hospital setting, realize, and again, writing for the hospital setting, typically they do the liquid VLCD for so long, or the PSMF, and then they start a gradual transition to whole foods. But that's for people that are hospitalized for severe obesity, right? Out in the real world, we don't do that. Right? There was, we used to have a thing over here called SlimFast, and you would have these two protein shakes and then a real meal for dinner. And then people got tired of paying for that. They don't know how to eat right. What do you do? So, my belief were as if you base it around whole foods, there is more potential for long-term because when you go to maintenance, you're not having to go from, "I was drinking nothing but liquids. What do I eat?" So much as, "Well, I've already got a great base of protein, EFAs, and vegetables. You simply add other foods to that." M. The end. So, that was the other, because again, I was writing for the general public. That is something also I would, um, we can talk about. You know, and I was, I was very adamant. I'm like, "Don't use protein drinks." Don't, don't do that because, trust me, it'll, it'll get you down the road. That's something else that I would contextually change depending on where the person was. We can come back to that too. Yeah, something that I would update from the book. That I was very adamant about. That in hindsight, there are places where that is absolutely appropriate. And there is actually quite a bit of data that allowing up to like two meal replacements a day actually does facilitate long-term success because control, just because it helps you keep calorie. But not the whole diet. So, I was very adamant about using whole food because we talked about moving to maintenance at the end because you need an exit strategy. Well, some people do. Now, some people's gonna like, "Whatever, I gotta lose 20 pounds for my wedding and I don't give a [ __ ] if I regain it," or my high school reunion or whatever. Cool. I, I flat out said in the book, "Look, some of you are going to do that. Go with God." I mean, whatever. It's not, it's never been my place to tell people what to do. I'll just tell them how to do it and not hopefully die. Um, but assuming the goal is long-term maintenance, you need an exit strategy. And you can only do that if you change your food habits. And you can't do that if your diet foods were one thing. Again, what do you do? You can't just go to suddenly. So, I based it around whole food. And that basically, I said earlier, I tend to be kind of adamant about not doing protein drinks. I know people that have done it very successfully, but there's an X-factor to consider with those people. These are always people that have been in this subculture for years, that have extreme, well-developed eating habits. You know, your typical athletic stuff. I mean, God, I was an athlete since I was 15, 40 years till I got smart and retired, right? My eating habits, I mean, they'll fall apart. I still eat like a 14-year-old sometimes, but like, that's just because I don't, I don't care anymore. Like, I stopped caring when I stopped competing. But I still eat, generally, I always eat lots of protein. That's been part, no matter what else I'm eating. And if you've got years of established eating habits to go back to, yeah, you can do a two-week protein powder RFL because you've got. But if you're coming from the typical Western eating habits and you do nothing but liquids, you're [ __ ]ed when you come off of it. For other people, there's a guy that, that I just sent an email to. We're going to talk about him when we get back to the muscle was thing, and back to the fitness industry version of this, and some of the other, uh, supposed dangers. And like, at two grams per pound, that's a lot of protein. Like, that's a lot of meat. And a pound of lean body, just body, Category 1, that Category 1 doing weights, right? If you're at two grams per pound, that's a lot of protein, man. It's 350 grams of protein for you. It's a lot of protein. And he said, he really, like, he was eating, you know, pounds of chicken a day. And I said, "Look, CU, he had the earlier book." And said, "Look, I see no problem." Like, again, for the, the athlete, it's not that big of a deal. I said, "Alternately, look, just use protein powder like I just did on top of the food." Yeah, right? You know, rather than eating four chicken breasts, eat two chicken breasts, have a couple scoops of protein powder. In that context, that's fine. For the general public, again, I would rather it be mostly food. I realize that they use meal replacement, but there really aren't a lot of PSMF-friendly meal replacements. I guess like that Isopure, no-carb protein or whatever. I would just rather people establish good food habits. Also, the Category 3, they don't, when you only need to eat 120 grams of protein, come on, figure it out. You, you can. I promise, even if it sounds enormous, and to some people it does, usually smaller women are used to eating like, "Oh my God, 90 grams of protein? How?" Like, trust me, you can do that meal if you put your mind to it. But I would rather see food. So, again, it's very contextual. And there are things that I would change in that. It would be like, "Okay, for this 1% of the population that is the elite lean male athlete who already has years of established eating habits, yeah, you can do protein drinks or do them in addition to food. If you are Category 3 beginner with a lot of bad eating habits that you need to change, you need to establish a baseline of protein, veggies, fat, acids to build on later in life." So, very, another issue is the time frame. There is something, this comes to application. Many people I know that do the old protein drink thing use the RFL as, you know, the mini-cut. The new fat. They're like, you know, they'll do a gaining phase or whatever, or they just start to get a little sloppy and they're like, "I'm gonna do a two-week RFL. I'm gonna do liquids because I can do it to take the fat off as quickly as possible." Because again, they have established eating patterns to return to that's already stable and in place. Would someone want to do liquids for like an entire contest prep? I doubt it. They might do it in addition. Liquids are filling unless you throw a bunch of casein and guar gum and stuff. And I do that too. I put soluble fiber in my protein drinks to mix it up so it, you know, looks chewy. At least keeps me a little full. That's the other reason I use milk. Is I justify that. Well, the casein slows digestion down. Put milk and soluble fiber. No, it's one of the other. Just do like. But you just like two, or like, if I want dessert, I'll have a cup of Greek yogurt, throw a chocolate protein powder and some guar gum, and it turns into glue, and I have to eat it very quickly. Um, so like, yeah, so like, you can do liquids or even protein drinks or whatever. They have their utility. Just depends on the context and how long you're going to do it. It's a, said in a hospital setting, they want control, so they just use these commercial liquid meal replacements. I looked up two of them. They were using a couple studies. One was okay, about 80 grams of protein because actually they let them mix the powder and milk. And the other was just from start to finish, 50 grams of protein per day. Like, it is 2024. You've got to be kidding me.

What kinds of results can you expect doing RFL the right way? People will want to know that. You mean in terms of like fat losses? Yeah. I mean, it, it ultimately, I mean, it sort of, it depends on, you know, category and activity. So, you know, if you go to the research, people with extreme overweight, they will see true fat losses of three to five pounds. And if you do the math on that, that's about right. A wait. Oh, yeah. So, very, very overweight people, right? Can lose three to four pounds of fat mass a week. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. On top of the extra water weight. I mean, some of it will be lean tissue, but the grand majority of it will still come from body fat. And yeah, like that's actual real fat losses. And if you work out, if you back-calculate the deficit, that's about right, right? Someone like, I said, who's, you know, even someone who's extremely overweight, they may be 50 to 60% body fat. Like, I did the math on the, the case study I told you about, based on a couple of assumptions I made. She's like, 80% body fat. Whoa. 670 pounds. Because there's an upper limit of lean body mass. I think I assumed about 140 pounds of lean body mass, which is actually higher than you usually. Like, women usually come in 90 to 110, maybe 120 if they're super athletes. Beyond the point, it's going to be fat. Now, men can get big, heavier than that. But even so, if a dude is 400 pounds and we know that muscle mass tops out at about 200, he's 50% body fat, right? Lean body mass doesn't just keep going up and up and up. No way. Yeah. So, beyond a certain point. And then if you work it out and go, "Okay, so that person, right? Okay, so he's going to be on 150, you know, female, 100 pounds lean body mass. That's 45 kilos. 1.5 grams per kilo protein, that's 90 grams of protein, 360 calories plus change, call it 500. Her, you know, her maintenance is whatever, 1800. She's got a 12,300 calorie deficit per day." Math it out. That's, you know, one-third of a pound of fat a day. It's a lot. Yeah. The bigger you are, the more you can lose. Y. The bigger you are, the more you can lose. But even in very lean and smaller individuals, the fat loss can be considerable in a relative sense. Yeah. So, compared to a traditional diet, because like I said, the way I set it up, as you get leaner and activity goes up, your relative amounts of protein have to go up, which means that your total calorie level will be higher, which means the losses will be slower. Like I said, the way I set it up, it automatically reduces your your total deficit, right? Oh, aggressive deficit is 400 calories a day. Well, a lean individual is not going to be on 400 calories a day because they're going to be on 200 grams of protein. It automatically, because they have more muscle mass, more lean body mass, and they're leaner. But it's both. It's because they've got more muscle and because they're leaner, they need more protein. Relative amounts of protein, like I said, the system automatically corrects itself. So, at Category 2, you're going to have someone at say, you know, maybe they're at, what is it? Two and a half grams per kilo? Is that right? Like 1.2 grams per pound? All right. So, they've got, you know, now you've got a female, she's now at 140 grams of protein. So, she's at five or 600 calories. Add the change, 750, 800. Her daily deficit is now only 800 calories a day, maybe a thousand. All right. It's still two pounds. Yeah. Compare that what's recommended by the fitness industry, half a percent a week. Yeah, it's a joke. It's a complete joke. Losing, you're losing three-quarters of a pound a week. Well, I can get you two. Yeah. And then at Category 1, and the half a percent works for some people, no doubt. It's worked for many people in the past. But it's champion is the one and only and best approach, you know, which is erroneous. And then by the time you get into Category 1, because someone, again, this was a Facebook question. Somebody were like, "Okay, I did the math. My proteins here. They're like, I thought this was supposed to be rapid fat loss, but it's only two pounds a week." I said, "Well, on any other diet, it would be less than a pound. It's rapid. It's rapid by comparison." Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's relatively rapid, right? Compared to what you would get with a low-calorie diet or a typical deficit. Sure, yeah. Category 3 person, rather than getting even the magic two pounds a week, is getting four to five. The Category 2 person, who might only be getting three-quarters to a pound, is getting a pound and a half to two. Or no, sorry, maybe more like two to two and a half. The Category 1 person may only be at a pound and a half to two, but they'd be getting half that with a normal diet. Yeah, absolutely. But that has to be taken into account that the Category 1 person has less total fat to lose anyway. Yeah. So, the answer is, is, is, you can only really answer it knowing someone's starting point, right? But it's going to be in that. And you, and you can, right? And I, like I said, if I were ever to revise RFL, one thing I would do would be like, "Look, here's how you can estimate your maintenance. You don't need this value for anything, but when you calculate out your RFL calories, you can rough estimate your predicted fat losses." Yeah, taking the difference and multiplying by seven and dividing by. What I do in my consultations, I'm like, "All right, here's the theoretical math. It never works out this way, but in theory, this is." And what you typically see is that like, one RFL day, depending on the person, is worth, you know, between a third and two-thirds of a pound of fat. Right? Category 1 is probably closer to a third, and you multiply that by seven and you get 7/3, which is a little bit over two. Might be a little bit less. It's in that range, right? And for Category 3, it's more like two-thirds of a pound, and you see, you know, four to five pounds. So, it's always in that range, just because of the way the calories, the way I, I set it up. So, yeah, somewhere, you know, so I might, like I said, Category 3, three to five pounds, probably women are probably always going to be on the lower end because they're typically lighter. Men probably on the higher end on average. Category 2, maybe cut that in half by one, you know, maybe one and a half to three. Two to three pounds. True, true tissue loss, not just water. Sure, sure. And then Category 1, you're probably going to be anywhere between one to two. Smaller female, smaller female might be hard-pressed to get one a week. But I'm sorry, if you're 120 pounds, if you're 40, you know, if you're 50 kilos, there's nothing you can do to lose faster than that other than, well, there's nothing legal. Um, it's just that. Sorry, it sucks. I mean, if you're 120 pound female, that's that's life in the big city unless you're going to ride a bike six hours a day to burn 4,000 calories. That's that's just what it's got to be. And there's nothing you can do about it.

What are the applications of Rapid Fat Loss? RFL is in, what, what groups of people are candidates for RFL?

I'm going to say everybody. MikeHasNoTan, all lowercase, 10% off. Buy my book. It's, I advocate RFL for all people under all conditions. But absolutely, don't. It has a lot of right. And, and this is again, this is verbiage in the first edition that I would very much change if I were going to redo it at some point because I was like, "Look, there are situations where you may need to." We talked about some wedding's in two weeks and you waited too long to take care of it. You got to get it off. At least do it right, right? High school reunion, you're going to the beach in a month. You like those. Now, those may be situations because as much as I would love to say this isn't the case, some people don't care about maintenance, right? I, I want to look good at my high school reunion and I don't give a [ __ ] if I regain fat. Do I agree with that? I mean, well, I don't care. It's none of my business. What your individual choices don't concern me, and that's perfectly legitimate. Use it for that. Take off the weight as best as you can, and then go back and be happy. And that's perfectly fine. So, that would be one. Any sort of, I mean, any sort of short-term thing. We talked about some others, you know, it for people, you know, who are doing gaining phases where they're gaining weight or gaining excess body fat that need to stay lean, whether it's for physique reasons, appearance reasons, even weight class athletes eventually have to make weights, right? They can only get so far. You can only manipulate so much water. That final week, you have to stay within a certain range. And if you're a GFG powerlifter, Olympic lifter, and you get, and you got to make, at some point, maybe you just do a couple weeks RFL to get where you need to be. Just to be clear, GFG stands for Get Freaking Huge. That Freaking Huge. That's just the old "eat everything in sight, get as big as quickly." I mean, do you get freaking huge? Just not in the way you hope, because you cannot force speed muscle gain. Even if you're on Ike's steroid stack, you still cannot force. You force feed fat gain, as Ike proved year after year. You cannot force feed muscle gain. Um, calories beyond a certain point, you will not build muscle any faster, no matter what you think. And the surplus you need is very small. So, that would be another one. Would be to use, you know, as short mini-cuts for people to just want to get it over with. That just want to be like, "I'm training year-round, but I need to stay lean enough, but I don't want to lose six weeks of my productive training." So, I'm going to taper, maybe, you know, make this a couple, you know, do it a de-load, couple de-load weeks, get it done, and then I can go back to real training and eating again. We talked about using it, you know, I guess, you know, potentially, you know, could be like the dude is like, "Oh, I'm gonna do a bodybuilding show in four weeks," which is just nuts. And he did it straight through. I don't think most people do that. Buying large, that was impressive. Uh, it was something. Fine line between, you know, brave, crazy, and stupid. I don't know where that one lies. But I mean, it worked. So, like, so that, you know, that would be one. We talked about using it, saving it as a tool in the middle of a long diet when someone had to be at a specific place at a specific time, if they were behind and you had to get them on track, and that was all that was the only option. And it might, in some cases, it might be. I mean, yeah, ideally, you always start your diet early enough, you always get things moving. But happens, like I said, Pedor got sick, things happen. And there's out of your control. By and large, it can't always be chalked up to just booger-eating incompetence, as is the case in some, as in some cases. So, that'd be one. I mean, you could, like I said, you could, you could use it to quick-start, you know, a a contest diet and then move them into a moderate deficit. Even, like I said, they used to use that clinically, use it to quick-start weight loss for individuals with severe overweight for four to eight weeks, and then transition into a low-calorie diet. Now, why, given that earlier PSMF data showed like 35 kilos weight loss with extended PSMF, like I don't know why exactly you would do that. I think the idea was, "Oh, we need to transition them back to a more reasonable eating pattern." Is a low-calorie diet? Hey, here's a better idea. Do my RFL where it's already based around food, then you don't have to worry about that. You can just jack the maximum fat loss possible and then worry about it. But that's just what they, like I said, they like the control, hospital situation, yada yada yada. That's fine. But that would be another application for it. Even if you're planning on a moderate diet, go, "You know what? I just want to do a couple weeks, get things moving." So, it's just like, I hate to say, you know, a diet reset because that term is so abused, but it's like, "Look, if you just want to like, really quickly break some old eating habits." Maybe, you know, that's where Atkins did kind of get it right where he was like, "If you've got an unbalanced physiology, you need an unbalanced diet to correct that." And I don't agree with that completely, but for a lot of people, bright line boundaries, they don't do well with, "Well, I could eat this, or I could eat more carbs." Or, "I could RFL makes it simple. You get to eat these three things. Deal." And for a lot of people, that's, they like. There's another guy in my group. He's like, "I spent 30 years trying to lose weight and I didn't do it till I tried RFL." And I said, "I'm just curious, what was the difference?" And he said, "One, it took the choices out of my hands." And there's earlier data that people like diets with simple rules for that reason. Like, you and I can sit here and go, "Well, you know, I'm gonna have a heavier training day and I'm gonna raise my carb and all that," because we've been doing this for too long and we're both nuts. But for the average person, "Don't eat carbs" is easy. "Eat carbs sometimes" is not for a lot of people. RFL is the ultimate bright line boundary diet. You can eat these three things. Either deal or don't. But even then, M says, "Whatever, whatever." You get my point. So, and he was like, "That, it also, there was something about the more extreme approach. It helped for him with buy-in because it was like, 'Okay, I'm doing like, this is it. I'm this is this thing and it's this specific hard thing.'" And that was psychology. H. And whatever. I forget the other reasons. I can't find the C right now. So, like, yeah, so those, you know, for some people, even that three or four weeks, it just breaks old food habits because you are not allowed to eat certain things, even if you see them. If you know it's not, because again, if I go, "Oh, you can have a free meal." Well, guess what? You're going to justify that after the fact. You're not going to go, "Oh, I'm gonna have a free meal." You're going to go, "Oh, huh, cake. You know, I think I need a free meal today." Yeah, you're, you're pre-rationalizing it. Um, so with that, you just, and for a lot of people, stricter is better. Just so there are the, there are lots of applications. And there are people like we talked about, if you've got previous issues with binging and purging, where extreme restriction tends to kick you into binging when you break, don't do it. Period. There is no question. There is no right. There is no good way to do an extreme. There may be no way to diet, period. If you have that severe level of, of, you know, binge-purge issues. Um, if you've done restrictive diets in the past, then you always, they don't work well. If you didn't do it my way, try it my way once, and if it doesn't work, don't stop. You know, W.C. Fields, I love it in the fitness industry. Don't, don't hang out with anybody that tells you to give up on your dreams. No, that's toxic as hell. Do not be that guy. At 50, still hoping your band is gonna gonna break, right? Do not be that guy. Do not listen to the person says, "Never give up on dreams." W.C. Fields said it best: "If at first you don't succeed, try again, and then give up. There's no sense being a damn fool about it." Which is something Ike should have done for his competition body. You can't figure out how to get into shape within a couple tries, you're not going to figure it out the next five. So, yeah, if you've done crash dieting, rapid aggressive dieting, and it failed, you didn't do it RFL way, try it. And if it still doesn't work, do something else. It's not for you. And it doesn't have to be. I'm sure there's applications I can't think of. But great response. Thank you.

Earlier, Lyle discussed how Category 1 dieters, that is males under about 15% body fat and females under about 22% body fat, generally don't do that well on RFL when they don't engage in resistance training. This chapter discusses whether there are any other populations that might want to avoid RFL. And you did touch on for a moment the sorts of people for whom RFL isn't a great approach. You mentioned binge eating disorders. Are there any other populations, and why should people with binge eating disorders maybe not do RFL?

I mean, they probably could, and it's more when you get into like alternate day fasting and refeeds and some of that cyclical stuff, it can push them very rapid into a binge eating pattern. Right? When you're doing even intermittent, even time-restricted feeding can do that. It ends up being an early day per, you know, you starved early in the day, and then you start binging later in the day. Whether it turns into, you know, UD2. Do I like cyclical diets? Yeah, for people that alternate between super restraint and binging, it's, that's it. Sets them up for that. Is RFL, I mean, well, anyone that has sort of any subclinical eating disorder does not need to be buying my books. They need to be seeing, you know, uh, dieting in and of itself can cause its own set of problems. Yeah. Actually, there's also, there's some old evidence. We can talk about this. That it's actually just a conditioned response. And they, there's some early case studies, small pilot studies, where they basically fixed binge eating with n, nothing but cue exposure response prevention. It's pure. It, it. I don't get me wrong, are there other issues deeper going on? Yeah, but it's still basically a conditioned response, or that's part of it, certainly. And it becomes self-promoting because eating is rewarding. But that's a whole separate 14-hour discussion. So, yeah, there are basically, you're screwed if you have a binge eating disorder. I mean, you, that you need to be in professional counseling.

People will come into my Facebook group and if it's if they say, "You know, I have a CL like you. Do not get advice here. Nobody here can give you any useful ADV. We've got a couple people who are experts in that." I go, "Having the average talking head tell you about restricting your diet because you've got no go get professional."

He, um, you know, RFL. I, I guess I, I don't know. I don't know. Could that potentially put someone back into, like, you know, T, you know, classical anorexia? I don't know. Because even though it's low calories, it's still actually food. Like, I know anorexia has been recharacterized with a lot more subtypes now. And look, I am not an eating disorder expert. Make that absolutely clear. Um, trust me, I know a little bit, and that's it. But like when I think of anorexia, I think of, "I ate an apple today." I mean, at least eating 120 grams of protein and some veggies would be. And, and I mean, actually, I, someone I knew years ago came from an anaus background. We're talking, you know, 40 kilos at five. You know, and they got into bodybuilding. Now, it is very real, in a very real way, a weaponized eating. Like, they weaponized their eating disorder. They were great at dieting. They made it to stage. They loved being hungry. Right? What I'm going to say right now is gross, but it's probably true. Sports do select for that stuff, right? They've often said, "Oh, running causes people to develop eating disorders," or maybe people who are thin and have a pre-existing eating disorder are drawn to running. Cause and effect is very difficult to determine here. And like I said, this is going to sound gross. What I'm going to say, you don't have to have an eating disorder to be a successful bodybuilder, but it helps. But it, but it helps. And yeah, that's great. That is great, but it's true. Every sport selects for certain psychological physiological characteristics. If you don't have a certain level of aggression, you cannot do MMA. If you are a psycho, you'll probably be great at MMA, right? If you are not good at being hungry, and people with eating disorders love being hungry. My bodybuilder I knew, but at least with bodybuilding nutrition, she was eating enough protein and vegetables. Like, I don't think I've ever seen her eat a starch. But at least she's getting nutrition in a way that classical anorexia wasn't. But even so, like I said, I don't, that just gets too far out of my, out of my ken.

But I mean, what I would add, and I think I mentioned this consult, or maybe when we were just talking separately, a lot of people are psychologically drawn to extreme diets, and they repeatedly fail on them. They crack. They regain all the weight because when they come off, they go, they, they cannot, no matter what they do, they cannot successfully transition into maintenance. They are just that either-or kind of person. And I had a consult tell me that. He said, "Yeah, I've done it a number of times, and it works until it doesn't." And I just said, "Well, don't do that." And that's the thing. Even if you are drawn to it, if your past history has informed the fact that you do not succeed on them, now, maybe it's because you didn't do it the way I recommend it. Maybe your previous crash diet was a shitty liquid diet without any vegetables and no training and didn't prepare it. And maybe it didn't, I, I can't say. Maybe my RFL would allow it to work, but I would never claim that RFL works for everybody. It works very well for a lot of people. But like any, it definitely didn't work for Mana. No, because he lost 100% muscle because he's just that good, or I'm just that bad. So, but yeah, but some people, it's just they, they come off of it, and it's not a good approach for them. And that's perfectly legitimate. Um, you know, so yeah, maybe you haven't tried it the right way. But honestly, if you tried something multiple times and it's never worked, try anything else because it can't work worse than than that. So that would be the, like, you know, unless this is your first time dieting. And nobody listening to this, I mean, we all have our first time dieting. But realistically, by the time you've heard my name, you've done this a bunch of times. One of the best things you can ever do is just go back and look, okay, what did or didn't work at some point in my life.

And there's weirdness. There's this one, everything. I see this every once in a while, and it shouldn't work where people are on very low calories, and where I believe them, right? It's not, I think I am, and I'm underestimating, and nothing is happening. And you look at the calories and go, "This doesn't make any sense whatsoever." When I was younger, I would have said, "You're all misestimating calories." And in 99.9% of the time, that's true. But there are these occasions, and there's this weirdness. There's this weird little paper from a couple of years ago, and it was this diet group that has done like 10,000 people through their program. And there's this one population that is diet resistant. That on low calories, nothing happens. I mean, we're talking like provably controlled low calories, nothing happens. So they did a study and they took a subgroup. They took the diet-sensitive people and the diet-resistant people, the ones who lost nothing with just diet. And they put them through an aerobic exercise program. And only the diet-resistant people got an improvement in like mitochondria and muscle energetics. And I've heard of people. I, I did a consult with a guy as a coach, and he coaches like, and he called me with his hard cases. He's like, "I got these four, why nothing's happened on low calories? I've tried it all. Tried RFL, tried ADF, nothing." And I'm like, like, "Okay, maybe this, maybe that." And I said, "Well, tell me what worked in their past." And he goes, "Well, for two of them, what they found was that they lost on higher calories and more activity than with lower calories and no activity." And I said, "Well, have them do that." He said, "Well, they can't because their life won't allow." I go, "Well, I don't know what to tell you." But what that suggests to me, that paper, is that there is something going on bioenergetically in a, not a big population, but they're out there. If in the long term, if you've been on it for a month and you're adherent to it, and literally nothing has happened, something is either you're a night eater. I, like, I don't have an explanation. That that person, you know, again, at some point, you have to just go, "Not gonna work. Go do something else." Maybe you will be that person that's better off with more activity and higher calories. Can I explain why? Magic. It's the best thing. You know, bioenergetic magic.

Okay, so you mentioned food choices, um, in the form of liquid calories. I want to ask a question that's related that might help illustrate how to go about RFL the right way, just for the general population viewer. The question is, what might the average good day of RFL look like? As in, here's meal one, here's meal two, meal N, cuz I haven't asked you about meal frequency yet. Um, what's like a sample day of eating? Let's just say I'm such a god. I'm not a meal plan guy because I'm terrible at it. But I mean, basically, when people complain about this, and Suey actually put together a little RFL cookbook because I mean, like, there's a reason my books don't have meal plans. A, I don't like them because people fall in a trap of, "I must eat these foods," and if I don't have them, I don't know what to eat. B, I'm terrible at them. That's the real reason. I'm terrible at setting them up. I mean, I don't know what foods people have, what they like, what they can afford. I give generalities. Fucking work it out. So basically, let's say you need 120 grams of protein a day, you're category three, and not super, 480 calories a day, not counting the trace carbs and fats. Okay? Well, four ounces of any meat, any hunk of animal flesh, which is like 170 grams in commi units, something in that range. It's about that much. It's about a deck of cards. That's about 30 grams of protein, right? A scoop of protein powder, and we'll come back to that, 24 grams. So scoop it a little bit, 30 grams of protein. So eat that much meat, a cup of vegetables, four times a day. Figure out some seasonings. Seriously, fucking work it out. Here's what I just ate when we had the break, when your internet crapped out. Uh, I had, I've got this, this ham from Costco, the slimy ham. I feed my dogs. Five grams of protein per slice. Had five grams of that. And I had a scoop of protein powder, which is 24 grams. And I had it in milk because I like milk. So I had 32 grams of protein plus 25, that's 53 grams of protein. Some carbs in the milk because, whatever. And I took a couple fish oils. Do that four times a day. So that wasn't true RFL as such because of the milk. Yeah.

But that ties into something I wanted to talk to you about because I think, you know, people could potentially make a mistake in thinking RFL is the one and only way to do this sort of a diet. When I think introducing some carbs beyond trace in the form of, let's say, strawberries or, you know, sort of minimal carbs can kind of keep the calories really relatively low next to most diets and have the weight loss be extremely rapid without potentially some of those psychological adherence related issues. I agree completely. And I know people that have done that, but they typically had very established food patterns from before, right? I've been doing this a long time. I've been doing this way too long, which is why I'm angry at everything because I've seen literally every possible way that someone can screw something up. I have had situations where I wrote in a book, "Do not do X," and someone emailed me and said, "So, should I do X?" I cannot make it up. This is why my books are so tediously overwritten because if I don't warn someone six fucking times, they won't mess it up and they'll send me and they'll get mad at me that my program sucks. That's why I do it. Yes, that absolutely works. I know people that have added, you know, and I'll do it too. I might have half an apple. I like apples and I like fruit and I can eat that in moderation. Like Bora's wife, she likes apples. I can't eat now because my wife, she likes apples, apples, apples. The fudge pie I have in my refrigerator from Thanksgiving, I cannot taste that because then it will disappear. Happy Thanksgiving, by the way. Sure. Uh, yes, happy, happy oppression of the natives. Good job, us. Whatever. I like, I had sushi. Like, yeah, whatever. So yes, that can work. However, what I found with people is when you give them a little bit of leeway, things start to go off the rails. Even again, this is a change from first edition to second. The first, I said, "Oh, unlimited vegetables." Well, many people took "unlimited" a little bit too seriously. There was someone, there was another nut job at the industry a bunch of years ago who was basically constantly overtrained and had an eating disorder, and they were eating an entire head of cabbage four times a day to stay full. It is difficult to do, but you can actually eat a significant number of calories from vegetables. So in the second edition, I'm like, "One cup steamed per meal." Because people were, believe it or not, you have to believe me, the way people will find to mess things up is phenomenal.

Here's a favorite story that really sends this home. So back in the day, Bill Phillips, who is must be 2000, brilliant marketer, wrote this book called Body for Life. That was actually one of the better books. He brought bodybuilding nutrition and training, high protein, still six meals per day. We were back in that day, resistance training to the general public. It's a very good book, oh, by and large. But he had a cheat day. And the cheat day, he wrote, "You can eat anything you want for 24 hours." Oh, there were hordes of people who would wake up at 12:01 AM and start force-feeding as much crap as they could put down their gullet till 11:59 the next night. He said 24 hours, and then they wondered. You just, you don't know this until you write a book on this and start getting the emails and see. So you tried to offset that with the five-hour refeed. But I imagine people found creative ways to screw that up. You can fucking it up in like, there was this book called The Carbohydrate Addicts Diet by the Eids years ago. And it was again, it wasn't the dumbest book I've ever seen. You had like two low-carb protein meals and you had a reward meal where you could eat anything you wanted for an hour. In an hour, I could eat six out. You let me go to the buffet, I can do it right now. I can eat three days' worth of food. Dan, some tricks. They're like, "Okay, you had to start with salad. You had to fill up first. Then you had have some protein. Then you could have a reward." They had to even, even dog crap. Dante had a lot of weird rules for the dieting stuff. Yeah. One of which was carb cutoffs, which was you couldn't eat carbs after 6 PM. That's right. Yeah. Now, this was couched in a bunch of, and look, don't get me wrong. Dante and I are buddies. I think very highly of him. We tied it up back in the day because we were both young and and young. And now we're old and weathered, and we're buddies now. Like that's true with me and a lot of people. And, um, there was all this made-up physiology. Yeah. But what it came down to was people go, "Oh, I'm bulking. I gotta have a pint of ice cream at bedtime to stay anabolic." He was just trying to protect people from their own stupidity because humans are just, we're dumb. And I'm not, trust me, I'm not saying I'm above this. I've done the same shit. I've learned it through my own mistakes and I've learned it from the, like, I'm not saying I'm all, I'm not being all and mighty. We all do it because what separates man from the animals is the ability to rationalize. There's even a thing in the literature, human beings will pre-rationalize what they want to do so that they don't feel so guilty about it. I've done it. "Oh man, I'm gonna be training hard tomorrow. I should go ahead and finish that fudge pie." You make the decision. I want to eat the fudge pie now. I have to convince myself why I'm not, you know, a slacker on my RFL. B great. Yeah. So he did that. He set a bright line boundary of no carbs after six. So these guys wouldn't crush a pint of ice cream and gain too much fat in the off-season. Maybe Mike should have tried that, um, just as a thought. Now he has these Captain Crunch in the afternoon. "You gotta stay anabolic, man." Do Westside style Snickers every hour to keep your insulin up. That was a Dave Tate recommendation. Or really fantastic stuff, guys.

So, so yeah, so fundamentally, what you're saying, I absolutely agree with. And when I do consultations, when I talk to people on an individual basis, I will often say things to them or allow things that I will not put in a book. And this is a fact that's often lost, right? Like, and again, I'm not saying I'm lying to people in my books. I don't know who my reader is. No, you're just trying to make them idiot-proof in a way, right? Until we, you know, find a new idiot. Right? What I can do coaching Sumi, my elite powerlifter, author of Mental Training for Tough Shit, available now at Amazon, I do very different things than what I could ever put in a book. I can't explain what I'm doing set to set, day to day, week to week with her. I can't put that in book form and have it mean anything. I have to give be more general. This is something a lot of coaches forget because they're like, "Oh, when I coach people in person, I do this. I can write. I can tell." Start in Strength did that, right? Yeah. It's one thing to teach people five by five when they are in your gym and you cannot let them be morons. Add way too quickly. And then they give them a book and say, "Add five pounds every week." And then in six weeks, their form is even worse than what you're purported to teaching them, right? What you can put in a book and what I can tell someone as an individual because I have to gauge, and I do this during consults, and I like to think I'm good at it. I have to gauge who I'm talking to. And a lot of it is asking them, "Tell me what's happened. What worked for you in the past? What didn't work for you?" And if they tell me, "Yeah, if I have too much leeway on a diet, I fuck it up." I don't give them leeway with a book. I don't. I can't. I can't give that option. I can't because I unfortunately know where that ends for most. Suddenly, "Oh, half a cup of strawberries." "Have a cup of strawberries." "Well, then a cup of strawberries, little whipped cream won't hurt." "Well, find a little whipped cream, pumpkin pie." It's a slippery slope for many people. So, yeah, yes, I agree with you, but I would never put that in a book, um, fair enough, without without qualifying it to such a degree as to make it pointless. Even if I tell people, "Look, if I say, look, you can have up to five grams of carbs and fats per meal on RFL," they'll end up at 10. Right? If I get say three, they'll maybe end up at five. Just an inter story. When I, I went through my stuff in 2014 and and was was uh getting treatment, they were like, "Oh, you know, we want to eat exercise five times a week." And I was doing most things they were doing. And I go, "Wow, five seems like a lot." And they go, "Here's what we've learned. We tell people five, they might do three. And if we tell people three, they'll do one." I'm like, "Yeah, that's exactly what I do in my books." You have to protect people from themselves. The, now, somebody listening to this is gonna get really angry. I'm not like that at all. I'm not talking to you, hypothetical person who's going to get shit in the comments. I'm speaking in averages. I'm speaking in generalities. I can find an exception to everything I've said here. I don't give a fuck about the exceptions. Period.

Interrupted. Yeah, no, no. Just on the topic of you mentioning that these recommendations can be highly contextual. In your sample day of eating, you gave four meals a day. Would that be a kind of general recommendation? Like, four meals a day will generally suit people best? Because I know for me personally, no, actually no. I, for most people, I dare say that that would be a mistake. Well, it depends how much protein you're eating. It's like anything else. If you are only eating 120 grams of protein, four small meals of 30 grams of protein per day is not going to be filling, right? I wrote about this in the women's book, which you can get for 10% off. Uh, coupon code Mike has no 10. Mike has no 10. I talked about, I talked about, you know, time-restricted feeding and meal frequency. And that within a range, it doesn't really matter. But it very much depends on calorie levels, right? Like, if you're on poverty calories, let's say you're just a typical lighter female who's on 1200 calories, are you gonna eat six 200 calorie meals? No, because that's awful. That's two bites of food. There's also, I swear, again, I couldn't find it. I swear to God, I've seen it asserted that any meal lower than X calories is not refilling. Don't swear me to that again. I pick up stuff in discussions of papers and forget. I, that may not be right, and I'm sure it's unbelievably contextual. But if you're on 120 grams of protein, four 30 gram protein meals is not very much. You might be better off with three 40 gram protein meals. You may be better doing it like I do it, doing time-restricted feeding. I have 50 grams of protein at three. I have a hunk of meat and or depending on how much chicken I feel like cooking and or a protein drink. And then I'll have another 75. So I'll have like three 75, 50 to 75 gram meals. I've had people I've consulted with who were only getting 120 grams of protein per day. They want to have 260 gram protein. They want to have, you know, that's ID, whatever. 60 grams of protein is about eight ounces, seven, eight ounces of meat. It's it's about that much. They would rather eat that plus a big ass salad twice a day and use time-restricted feeding. Now, for you, who's on three, you know, if you're getting even a gram and a half per pound, who's getting plus 250 grams of protein a day, you could very easily eat four 60 gram servings. Just depends.

How about one meal a day? Would you say that's too infrequent for anyone for physiological reasons? Because I, no, go ahead. No, I wouldn't. Because again, being smug, I think we talked about this, the, you know, the paper that Jord Tromlin was on that showed that if you eat 100 grams of protein at once, it takes 12 hours to digest. It doesn't make a fucking worth of difference if you were to eat all 350 grams in one meal, let's say it's even possible or 250 in one meal. 200 grams of protein, which is 40 ounces of meat. Sumi could do it too. She can eat. Oh my god, the amount of, you know, again, author of Mental Training for Tough Shit, available on Amazon. Um, she could do it, right? And it'll just take all day to digest. But for most people, that much protein at one meal is probably impractical unless they really love meat. So again, it just, but big, big picture stuff matters. It's more, you know, again, and some people, like I said, if they eat early in the day, they're hungrier throughout the day. Yeah. And if they wake up. There's all these variables that basically, here's really at the end of the day, there's all I care about in terms of fat loss: calorie deficit, sufficient protein, resistance training. Everything else is negotiable. You get those three things right, you're 95% of the way there. Everything else depends on the person in situation. Even if you're a competitive bodybuilder, sure. None of it, none of it makes the difference. Look, people, I know over, like, over the years, I have watched the physique community decide that you can only get contest ripped on this diet or these specific foods. No joke. In the 2000s, Ezekiel bread was the only allowed bread source. You could. Yeah, I've seen so many meal plans with Ezekiel bread, right? But they decided at some point that that was the only bread that would allow you to get in the contest shape. In the 70s, people got into shape on tuna and water. In the 80s, people got into shape on high carbs and low fat. In the 90s, people got into shape on the Zone and low carb and cyclical. None of it. People have gotten into contest shape for decades. And there is no magic diet beyond the deficit and get enough protein and weight train properly. That's it. It's whatever allows you to do that in the long term. The only thing I would say absolutely not to do, you know what I'm gonna say? Absolutely you should not do. You're trying to get into shape in general or for a bodybuilding contest is anything that Mike Israel does during his diet. Like, don't already a step ahead beyond that. Because again, they've done it for decades. All that shit matters is the keeping a consistent deficit, enough protein, and if they're smart enough to list of my weight training guidelines, that's it. You will get into shape. I mean, yes, are there other factors? Will carb loads help refill glycogen to improve training? Absolutely. Even as much of a, a advocate or believer, whatever you want to call it, of, you know, flexible eating and refeeds and diet breaks and all that shit. People got into contest shape without it for decades. Are they required? Absolutely not. Can they be useful sometimes? And I know at least one bodybuilder, oh, I want to say Jeff Albertson, but do not swear me to that, who tried it. He tried it all. And he said it did more harm than good because for him, for him, not saying it's for everybody. Once he went into contest mode, once he flipped what I call the diet switch, because it's stupid sounding, if he did a maintenance day or a refeed or a diet break, it broke his mental momentum. But he found that out through trial and error. They aren't required. They may be useful. The strategies may be beneficial, and they can be just as damaging for some people. It just depends. Deficit, protein, resistance training. The rest of it. And anyone who tells you that any of that, whether it's meal frequency, time restrict, free all blah blah, if they say only this works, they're wrong. Because if that were true, if there were only one diet that was the right one beyond what I just said, we would know what it is. And we do. Deficit, protein, resistance training. Everything else depends on the person, the situation, psychology, the training, their lifestyle, their environment, and every other variable that I try to take into account when I do consults. So yeah, it doesn't fucking matter. One meal a day, three a day, six meals a day. What fits your life? Are you at work all day and don't get hungry because you're busy? Are you jacked up on caffeine all day like I am and don't get hungry? Sure. Do you not have a lot of food? Maybe time-restricted feeding. Does time-restricted feeding cause you to binge? Then don't do that, right? Frequently. Here's how my consults go. I had one, this is years ago, and and he and he goes, "Yeah, he's like, I love like I love extreme diets. Just psychologically drawn to them. I love them. Get great results in the short term, and then they never last." And I just went, "Well, don't do that." Okay, folks, this is why I make the big money. I just said, "Well, then don't do that." Right? You've proven to yourself over multiple attempts that it doesn't work. Same thing. I've talked to people, talked to another consult I did, and they're like, "They, the problem is that well, the problem is the internet." Which in hindsight, we'll realize was a mistake in the future. We will look back and go, "Yeah, the internet. That was a mistake." And overwhelmed with information, and everybody says they have the right answer, and they're all wrong. Because I have the right answer. It's a little bit of a joke. And, and what they told me, they're like, "Look, so back, you know, they're like, I was doing time-restricted feeding and low carb, and I was lean. And then I read something by, I'm not going to mention the person's name. I'm going to be a little, I'm not going to be quite so tacky this time, by individual who writes about women's issues. He said, 'Women should not do time-restricted fasting and need to eat a minimum of 250 grams of carbs per day.'" No context, no nuance, just in absolute terms. And the consult said, "I did that, and I gained 20 pounds." And I said, "Well, what's more important? Their theory or your reality?" I go, "Because they're just like, I just." And they're like, "Is time-restricted feeding and low carbs, is that okay for me?" I'm like, "Did it work?" "Well, yeah." I go, "Well, yeah." I go, "That worked. This didn't." All the theory in the world, and make no mistake, I'm a theorist from way back. I love to theorize about all this shit. And occasionally reality matches up. I'm always really happy when when my shit turns out to be accurate and people's reality actually matches whatever I'm blathering about. But I just tell them that. I go, "Look, I can sit here and theorize about this and that and the other, and optimums and maximums and all this other, but pragmatically, none of it matters. Pragmatically, is what allows you, the individual, to maintain a deficit, get sufficient protein, and resistance train consistently. Everything else depends again." There are those mild exceptions, like said, we talked about, you know, the 400-meter sprinter, the powerlifter. But those, those are still contextual. If you tell me, "I don't exercise and I am just trying to lose 10 pounds," I'm having a very different conversation than if you say, "I train hard four days a week and have to make weight in 12 weeks." I'm having a very different conversation with those people. Because while the generalities will always apply, the specifics will depend. And again, that's again, that's why I don't make as much money as I could. Although 10% off, Mike has no 10. Hopefully that'll. Mike has no 10. In case people like people like absolutes, and I don't talk in them, right? Because everyone who talks in absolutes is an idiot. Get it? Yeah, I get it. Okay. W most people, most people don't get that joke. Um, yes, only Sith talk in absolutes. He said, "Absolutely." I would go as far as to say that all people don't get that joke. Exactly. Exactly. I agree with you. So, absolutely, I agree with you. So, yeah, because people don't like, like I said, what I, they, they like being told, "This is the answer." They like having a right answer. Your question, like, how do you get through the day? Because I can share an anecdote about, because I haven't, I haven't done RFL, but I've done aggressive diets. I've done, like, 1400 calories a day for extended periods. For me, it was largely a case of just, this is not, I want to make it clear, this isn't a prescription, this is just my personal experience, pure anecdote. Um, for me, it was a case of in the morning, caffeinate, then occupy myself with tasks, and then have all of my calories before bed. Because the number one thing I struggle with on an aggressive diet is getting to sleep. I can't go to bed hungry. So if I put all my calories before bed and eat absolutely nothing before dinner, I.E., caffeinate and then one meal a day, I can get it done. And that got me to the single digits. Yeah. And to occupy yourself with tasks is important. Um, when I did my cut, I got really into this video game, actually. And I know some natural bodybuilders who do this. I got into this game, a tower defense game called Rogue Tower. I have all achievements in that game. Uh, that makes me utterly insane. It's not a very well-known game. But yeah, I was just sitting there playing Rogue Tower all caffeinated, just obsessed with what was happening on screen. So I think video games helped me. But any kind of task does. I think. Yeah. Any, any distraction-based, basically. I mean, that's, you know, even that's what people, you know, talk about like time-restricted feeding and and even with an eating window, right? Which can be very useful for many people and it can completely be terrible for for others. And it's like, if you have a typical working day when you're at school or at work, you can get by on just caffeine in a drone when you're distracted, right? One thing that I've really seen during during COVID, God Almighty, like 50 to 75% of my consultations must have been, you know, "What I used to have this great schedule, my diet was great, I went to the office, I went to the gym. Now I'm home all day, I'm surrounded by food, I eat, my activity is thrown off. What do I do?" Because COVID fucked everybody's schedule, right? Lot so many things about the world change. When you're work, like it's easy to not eat when you're out of the damn house. And when you're around it, especially again, conditioned, Skinner. I'm gonna write a book. Skinner was right. Putting the behaviorism back into behavior change. It's already partially written because I start. Pro. I said, "I'm great at starting projects." I got really deep into that last year and then didn't know what to do with chapters. And you're just bored. You eat because there's nothing else to do. It's not even because you're hungry. You're bored and cued by just the same triggers. So yeah, you find ways to distract yourselves. There's a weirdness that occurs or something with cravings. And I'm going to forget what it's called because I haven't read it in a while. But when you start to have a craving, whether it's triggered by something you see or hear or sniff or think about or whatever, your your brain starts to, um, elaborate on it. Just get these intrusive thoughts, right? Like, I can, I can fucking you up right now. And I'm like, "What's your favorite sweet?" Just, "What's something sweet that you like to eat?" Chocolate cake. Okay, right? So like, okay, let's say, you know, there's, if I show you a picture of chocolate cake, and then you're going to go like, "Okay, well, I suddenly that'll link to a memory. Wow, there's this birthday I went to and this really great piece of chocolate cake." And then you're like, "Wow." And then your brain starts elaborating on that, and you're thinking about how good it tastes, how much you like it. And then suddenly, and we can only visualize one thing at a time. So when your brain is taken up by the image of chocolate cake, a Buddhist, a Buddhist would say, temporarily, you are that chocolate cake. All that is is cake. Even if the cake is a lot, you are all right. P. Um, but if you can, but it's in the visual cortex as much as anything. If you can distract yourself with a different visual input, that's shit. Because you can only focus on one thing at once. They've actually done a study where they had people play fucking Tetris, and that helped avoid because it got their brain off of the elaboration on the cra. I think I think it also helps with PTSD, right? Wasn't there a study about Tetris impact on? I think that's a different mechanism, but probably control thing. But yeah, so, so video games, just something to distract yourself. Read, play video games, go to, you know, another thing I'll say is I would spend time scrolling through my phone. And thank God I was able to identify this pattern of thought. I get lots of food recommendations like in my on my homepage, like my recommendations. It's like, "Oh, like here's this like deep dish pizza or whatever." And I just started going, "Not interested." "Not interested." And then another one, "Not interested." And eventually they disappeared. And I'm sure you do the same with fitness content. Uh, oh yeah. Now I tell YouTube, "Do not show me this channel ever again." All the time. I just, all I want, I want dogs, video games. Uh, lately I've been watching a lot of weird sports rules things. Uh, media criticism. I watch like Cinema Sins and Honest Trailers. And Todd the Shadow is my music critic guy. And I finally unsubscribed for the Critical Drinker because I got sick of their political shit. And yeah, you know, I carefully curated it. I don't get into stuff. Maybe Olympic weightlifting every once in a while. I, I want to see video game content. I don't want to watch fitness content, even my own. Um, but yeah, so like, but that's a lot of it. Like, and you hear that like competitors when they're deep in the cut, they talk about deliberately seeking out food porn. They go, "Yeah, I know better. I would. I saw that. I was looking for it and just watching it." And thankfully, like fortunately, I just went, "No, this ends now." That's that's a good sign that NPY has made you its its slave. I'm gonna use that instead of the other word I usually use. There's neurochemical Y. Neuropeptide Y is a neurochemical that goes up in the brain when you're hungry, one of many along with the changes in P and C and what the other one in in the hypothalamus. Now, NPY doesn't make you hungry, it turns your attention to food, if that makes sense, right? So they've shown that when people are starving, they are more likely, if you show them pictures of food and non-food, their attention will be drawn to the food more quickly. It's why when you're on a diet, you can be walking down the street and go, "Hey, you will see it in the window, right?" That's NPY. One of my favorite cool, as much as I don't like rat research, I read this one years ago. I love this paper. Took a rat and injected NPY into it directly into its brain. It's how they do it, rat studies. Then they gave it access to either sugar water or a sexually receptive female. Whoa. It chose the sugar water. Now, me being me, I just wondered why didn't the rat balance the sugar water on her back and have the best of all worlds? But that's just me being weird. But that's what happens when you're starving to death. All that you can think about is food. Like I said, the battle comes down to the refrigerator at the end of the day. The people that are going after food, like in in the Minnesota study, for example, towards the end, these guys were sitting around like they were, they'd have their bowl of GRL, they would pour water into it to try to bulk it up. And they, you like that? Like, you know, this is the when you start to eat your boot thing. And all they would talk about was like, "Yeah, man, we when we get out of this study, we should open a restaurant." Like your brain, that's all that is is food. And you can sit there and just struggle. And if you're at home around food, it becomes very difficult. Or, you know, you can take a GLP1, which is going to change contest prep for people. It will change contest prep for people that actually know how to diet. For like, you can't polish a turd in terms of someone's, if contest diet is too shitty, even the most powerful GLP1 still can't polish that turd. But that will change, that will change the game for prep for for the pro at the pro ranks. But yeah, so, yeah, you distract yourself. You find something to do. Also, there's a weird, there's also another weirdness that, um, your body, your body comes conditioned to want to eat when you typically eat. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Ghrelin dynamics. I don't know how this works. Ghrelin synchronizes with when you normally eat and it goes up right before you normally eat, making you hungry. Which is why your dogs don't give a fuck when the time changes. They don't know that the clocks have jumped ahead an hour. It's time to eat. Because that's so you get hungry when you typically eat. So this is why changing meal frequency the first few days is a bear. Because when you start skipping your normal breakfast, you're like, "Oh, I'm so hungry." And a couple days later, it's fine. So by the time you get to the point where you're eating, you know, one meal a day, all at dinner, on top of keeping yourself distracted, you have basically, and again, it's just conditioning, kids. That's all it is. You just, it's your body becoming conditioned to time and environmental cues hormonally and physiologically. Uh, you kind of get used. I mean, not that it doesn't mean you're going to stick to your diet. But yeah, distracting yourself, doing it. That's like, that's why when you work at home or are at home, it's a million times harder to diet. Whereas when you're busy at work all day, it's at least easier to diet when you're at work. Now, most people have the biggest problems at night, which is also a big part of the problem with all the, "Oh, you got to eat six meals a day and they're tiny and you only get 300 calories for dinner and then you're hungry and can't go to sleep and wake up in the middle of the night for me and eat half a loaf of bread because that's what I used to do back in the day." And it's like, "Look, you know, you breakfast like a king and all this other dumb shit." No, save your calories for later, right? Evening is the hard time. Back in the day, uh, the old Fen-Fen, Florine, Phentermine stack, right? Fen-Fen. It's probably before you were born. In the 90s, okay? Phentermine is a stimulant appetite suppressant. Fen-Fen is a serotonergic appetite suppressor. It's non-stimulant. In the 90s, they combined the two, called it Fen-Fen. During the day, you took Phentermine. At night, and it's a great appetite suppressant. Kind of like we're seeing now with the GLP1s and all the telemedicine stuff. All these clinics in the US showed up. You could just call them and go, "Yeah, I'm 30 pounds overweight." Cool. Script is is big business. And then some people got some heart valve issues that probably weren't at, and they banned it. But nighttime is the hard bit. And you can't use stimulants at night because then you can't sleep. So clustering your calories to the evening, shifting even a portion of them, especially if you train in the evening, then you can put them around training. Sport train, you know, yada yada. Makes a lot of sense. But of course, we can't do that because if you skip a meal, your metabolism will crash, your muscle will fall off, and all that other shit. Um, so, so let's go back to surviving the day. Because there are some other little tricks beyond just that. Because everybody just wants to do one big meal. Like, "Okay, you get snackish." We already talked about one sugar-free flavored something just to take off. People live on sugar-free Jell-O. That's also of that stuff. Yeah. Awesome. I used to mix up two packets of that every day. So I got too lazy to do it. That's another good way to just get that little, you know, little something. Um, you know, if if you're willing to accept a little bit more calories, something I would often do would be like at bedtime. Same thing. Because I have a habit of getting up in the middle of the night and wanting something. Usually, I just want a taste. And that's another reason I keep Crystal Light around. I just need the taste of something. It's not there, I'll eat something solid with calories. But if that's there, I'll just drink a little bit. Then I'm old, so I get up two hours to pee and repeat, rinse and repeat. But at bedtime, I would take like a cup of Greek yogurt, which is like 12 grams of protein. It's what, eight grams of carbs. It's not like it's a lot. Throw in a scoop of protein powder, little bit of gum, mix it up into paste. And it is, and eat that right at bedtime. Because that sits like a brick in your stomach. That will keep your ass full. And it tastes like pudding. If you, when you're on a diet. Well, yeah, yeah. When I'm like, "Yeah, want RFL and trying to survive." Something that I, I do. Because one thing that I, I do personally notice, and this is from ketogenic diets as well. Meat, you eat very quickly. The meals don't take very long because meat doesn't take long unless it's super fatty, and it shouldn't be on RFL. Vegetables give you something to, you just don't have a lot of food to chew on. I mean, I vegetables was always a big part. You can just salt the fuck out of those. A great, that's a great. So, you know, light salt delivery vehicle. But one thing I do or have done is I'll just get cucumbers. And when I just need something, I just need something. Just the physical act of chewing. Literally, that's all it is. Is cucumber, light salt, just something to get me through to the next. And like, but even for me.

Like when I was doing, I told you I mentioned 14 hours ago. Like, at one point, I was doing like two maintenance days and I do three RFL days. And like, could do maintenance, three maintenance, two. And usually, by that third RFL day, that's when it started. The first two were easy, and by day three, I'm like, "I hate this."

But since I don't like to train on different days of the week, like if I did that, what it should have done was like, maintenance, maintenance, two, maintenance, two, maintenance, two. But I don't like having my training processed through the week, uh, personally. And, um, because I don't like to be, honestly, C days of the week because I don't like to be in there on a Monday when everybody's there. So by day three, I was usually looking for snacks.

And like, so for me, like, or whatever. I mean, something they do, this is a southern thing, is you just actually get tomato slices or pickles or just something that has some crunch. You can also get some sodium in there. Like, just something like there are all kinds of little things like that, or celery with salt. Celery is bitter for some reason as a vegetable. I don't really know how, um, things like that, just because it, it's as much a, I like the taste of salt, but B, I just like that crunch. It's just something, something to chew on when I'm not surviving. Or I just go play more, B, more Batman. Uh, that'll always, Batman Arkham Knight will always keep me busy.

Cool. That's very helpful. Like I said, trust me, RFL, if you like protein and veget, it's pretty, it, it sounds a lot worse than it is when you're getting to eat, especially people B so much like the food's so tasteless. Get some allspice, Jesus Christ. Get hot. Get just learn to use seasoning of some sort. It's not that hard. You will live. Right? It's not like you're drinking. Oh my God, it's not that hard. Trust me.

How about diet sodas? I love them. I drink Coke Zero Sugar all the damn time. It's a godsend when dieting aggressively. Oh yeah. And actually, it's funny, uh, because someone we know apparently says that, you know, there's this idea that artificial sweeteners cause maintain sweet cravings, which came from shitty mouse research in the in the 2000s. And actually, direct studies have shown that artificially sweetened drinks, by which we mean sodas, I'm drinking Crystal Light right now, actually is superior to water for both weight loss and long-term maintenance because it allows you to soothe your sweet tooth rather than eating food. If hypothetically they raised your sweet cravings, then you could satisfy those sweet cravings by drinking the zero-calorie sweet.

I drink like a gallon. Like I go through a pitcher of Crystal Light a day, mainly just not because I have any issue with sodas, they just got really expensive over here. So I'm like, and I had caffeine too late, I can't sleep. And like, I can get a box of Crystal Light powder, six packets for $2.50. I can drink one, it's 50 cents worth of, and I can drink it all day if I want a sweet thing. I'm thirsty. I mean, I'm ethnically, I'm Middle Eastern, so I'm a camel. I don't really need a lot of water, but it's just if I need a taste of something. Yeah, I get a day. They work great and they make it much more survival.

Um, I, I would chew gum like it was going out of style. Just anything, just for that little. Also, gum chewing gum. Neat. You'll burn 10 calories an hour chewing gum. So you know, it could have helped. Ike, that'll get you ripped. I mean, that probably was what made would have made the difference. That actually, of course, sugar-free gum has about 10 calories per two pieces, so it's, it's kind of a wash. That's genius. We got to talk sleep. It's more powerful than steroids. Sleep is the best drug, so to speak. An hour of extra sleep that brings you from sleeping two hours less than you need to one less than you need is unreal powerful and comparable to tons of anabolic drugs. Well, you're sleeping, you can't eat, just saying. There is a logic to it.

Well, yeah. I mean, I've heard that sleep, I mean, even anecdotally, if I don't sleep so well, there are more hours in the day for me to eat. I feel subjectively a little hungrier. Sure. You see there, but the research has been done with very short sleep and often they use very unrealistic amounts. They're like four hours chronically. Like it's not, you got six and a half. It's like four. You see increases in ghrelin, which makes you hungry, decreases in leptin. You see worse changes in body composition. But this is pretty severe sleep deprivation. I don't know if this is going to happen like you got six and a half instead of eight. They, I don't know that these studies are particularly ecological to the real world. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Good. So yeah, I mean, it's good if you can get adequate sleep on RFL, but no, no, no. But it's not one of the big rocks that it is sometimes made out to be. Uh, yes, because again, I think these studies are at the, and I get it, they put them at the extremes to see what's going on. But it's like, but just, I do think the bigger issue is like, yeah, being awake longer means being awake longer to be hungry.

But see, actually, that's neurochemical. So when you're dieting, there's a neurochemical called orexin that goes up and makes you awake, right? So as a side note, do you know what Modafinil is? Yeah, it's a nootropic. But well, but what it is, is an anti-orexin drug. Yeah, it's predominantly an orexin antagonist. So narcoleptics have low, they don't produce orexin properly. And Modafinil is a wakey-wakey drug because it, it acts the orexin receptor. Wouldn't it be an agonist then? Yeah, it's an orexin, it does a bunch of other things too.

Uh, yes, orexin agonist. Thank you. Um, so orexin goes up when you're dieting and as part of what keeps you awake. And I think the evolutionary logic is the more hours of the day you're awake, the more likely you are to come across food and eat it. It's one of the many adaptations that comes up to and try to make you eat more. So yeah, those are all like, yes, it's great to get eight hours of sleep, but a lot of people don't. And there is, there is an issue that this is worth, this is worth addressing. That's true of all low-carb diets.

Oh, that reminds me. Another population that shouldn't do this. Can't believe I forgot this. Some people do report sleep issues on low carbs because we know that carbs push serotonin, which person tryptophan, which is part of sleep. And some people do have issues with that, probably due to the low-carb nature of it. This is also a time that this might be a place for a, a partial modification. You're having that maybe you need to have some amount of carbohydrates at dinner. Like, not much. Have 25 grams, right? This will reduce your daily deficit by 100. Well, your daily deficit is 600. You're going to lose, you know, one, what is that, 135th less a pound of fat per week. Yeah, it's like, uh, yeah, it's, it's, yeah, it's microscopic in the big picture. Again, because when you got this monster deficit, that extra hundred doesn't matter. And if it helps you sleep, it's, it's worth. That's a trade-off that's absolutely worth worth it. It's like 0.1 kilos a week maybe. Yeah, missing in the big picture. It's nothing. Yeah. And if it improves adherence and sleep and quality of life, then it'll undoubtedly be worth it. So that, that is another place where you could consider that that variation.

When I put all my calories before bed, I actually sleep well on an aggressive diet. And in fact, I think it's my body's way of conserving energy. Maybe like I'm kind of catatonic, dead to the world. I can sleep for, you know, 9, 10 hours pretty easily on an aggressive diet. Well, that's, you know, they used to talk about the Thanksgiving effect. It was like, oh, it's the tryptophan and turkey. Actually, turkey doesn't have that much tryptophan. It's just the gigantic ass meal that makes you sleepy. So there's abs, uh, you know, and other options. 5-HTP, which converts to tryptophan. If you got sleep issues, you can actually get tryptophan in some countries now. There used to be a company that made a high-tryptophan protein powder, but I don't think it exists anymore. Um, but in that vein, again, this is not just aggressive dieting, this is our, this is any low-carb diet. People who are prone to certain kinds of serotonin-related depression often have low-carb diets. Really make that worse, right? It doesn't matter what the deficit is. However, RFL is a low-carb diet. So some people may, that is a consideration. That is for a serotonergic depression. You got a dopaminergic, noradrenergic depression, it won't matter. This is for people that, like if you've used an SSRI in the past or you know that, you know, going on low carbs makes you depressed, this is not a good approach for you. Y, yeah. Diet with sufficient carbs will be way better. Sure.

Oh, let me mention going back to that. Something else I put in the book that confused a lot of people. There is not a calorie target for a rapid fat loss. You are not attempting to hit a certain calorie target. You hit your protein targets, your EFA targets. Calories fall where they fall. You'll be lower for category three doing no activity because their protein will be lower. They will be higher for leaner weight trainers, which actually has a consequence of altering weekly fat loss and scaling the deficits automatically to body fat. Someone who's lean, right? So consider how much do you weigh, uh, at the moment? 75 kilos, which is about 160. Yeah, that that one I can do. So 75 kilos, if we were to give you, you know, three grams per kilo of protein, right? That's going to be 200 grams of pro, 25ish grams of protein, that's 800 calories. Add on the tag-alongs, you're going to end up at 1,000 calories. Now, take someone who's category three with zero weights who's getting grams per kilo. Let's say we'll use the same numbers, they would be on about 100 grams of protein. They'll be on about 400 calories plus tag-along. The way I set it up, it automatically sets the right. Because the leaner you are and the more active you are, the slower you have the ability to lose fat. Fatter you are, the more fat you're carrying, and the less active you are. Because again, in some of those early studies, very obese individuals on a PSMF would lose up to two-thirds of a pound of fat per day, like three to five pounds a week of true fat loss. So with no incredible, without really trying, I just, like I said, I, I built it into the system without having. So there is no calorie goal. But the mistake I made was I said, yeah, you'll probably end up at about 800 calories, and it just confused the [ __ ] out of everybody.

I personally would probably still track calories on RFL just because I'm interested in the data. Well, yeah, but there's no, like most people think, myal, like most diets, you set calories and then work the macronutrients backwards. Yes, which is how I typically do it. Okay, you're on 1,200 calories, you need X amount of protein, got this left for carbs and fats, and we work it out. RFL, you go from the top down. RFL goes from the bottom up. Yep. Giving [ __ ] where your calories are. Yeah, don't eat too many extra carbs and fats, and it works. So calories don't matter unless you're, because somebody in my group was like, oh, my RFL calories are a thousand per day, and I'm like, what are you [ __ ] up to do that? Because they were not heavy enough to be at that calorie level. You're doing something very wrong.

How about, is it okay to do RFL without exercising? Because undoubtedly, there's going to be, you know, a large number of sedentary obese or overweight folks watching this. And obviously, it would be ideal for them to start exercising, but the fact of the matter is, not everyone will. And you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I would argue it's better to be a sedentary healthy weight person than a sedentary overweight or obese person. So I mean, it's kind of a weird question that I just answered in asking you. Not, it's not a weird question, actually, because there are considerations. Like, and I talk about this in the book. Mike has no tan, all lowercase, 10% off all books. Will stack with other coupons? Is that reality of exercise? Is that the amount most people can do as a beginner, and especially as an overweight beginner, is so irrelevant? Like, it just does not have an impact, right? Especially compared to diet. With RFL, I can take 500 calories out of your diet in a day. That would be more exercise than you can imagine. That would be like four hours of moderate activity a day. Cannot be done, especially if you're carrying excess weight. Now, weight training in premise can be done relatively compared to cardio. But there is the reality, and I'm going to say this again, I live in the US, so I'm always checking myself language-wise. I know you don't care, the Australians don't care, but there's just the reality of when you're carrying excess weight, movement in general can be difficult. It's just a statement of fact, right? When you're carrying that much weight, what you often actually see as people start to lose weight, often their spontaneous activity goes up because it's easier to move around. And this is one of those things that self-righteous fitness pricks can't figure out. Just do cardio, dude. Put on a 300-pound fat suit and then you tell me that you can go. Right now, I've never been that very overweight, but I can at least understand. There's there's a guy in in the industry, I think he's left finally, Finn Marco, I forget his last name. He was like 400 pounds. And Marco Rubio, thank you, love that guy. He actually, and he had that perspective, and he's like, look, you've never been that heavy. The name of a Republican politician that just trolled you. It's Marco. I can't remember his name. Really great guy. He was extreme. And and the problem is in the fitness industry, is most of us who were in this weren't ever extremely overweight. We have no perspect. We are not our our clientele. But it can be difficult, and that's just the reality of it. And frequently in, you know, you don't bring in, you have to, as much as I don't like the, I want to get in shape before I go to the gym, frequently there has to be some amount of weight loss. Now, when you're carrying excess body fat, the reality is, number one, the percentage of total tissue, lean tissue losses, yes, you will lose water, glycogen, none of that [ __ ] counts. We're talking about actual muscle mass loss. When you carry more body fat, the body doesn't need to break down as much protein for energy. There is the additional fact that is often left out that as I mentioned, as you gain excess weight, up to 25% of that is lean body mass. Some of it is muscle. Actually, I did back when people used to ask me to contribute to this stuff for the side te me, and they asked, you know, what's, what advice do you give for people to get big calves? And I said, gain 400 pounds. Have you ever seen someone extremely overweight that had small legs or calves? No, because it's progressive overload, progressive tension overload. At that, some of that weight that's gained is muscle and other lean body mass. Many obesity researchers feel that up to 25% of total weight loss, both can and should be from lean body mass because you're losing the excess that you gained. Now, they also distinguish in essential and essential lean body mass and, you know, muscle versus. But it doesn't matter. The reality is, if you can't or won't exercise, now this is for people in like category three, muscle loss is much less of a risk. May be beneficial in many ways. You might have to do that to get to, you know, a reasonable body weight. It just, it is. Now, if a category one person said, I want to do RFL without exercise, I would tell them absolutely not. Because even with sufficient protein, you will lose muscle. You are the population that you will lose muscle faster than you can regain it. You will end up fatter than you started. You will do more harm to body composition. So it does dep, and category two is in that weird middle ground. But as far as exercise, and I really tried to drive this home, the beauty of resistance training is it takes so very little, right? To burn, not from a calorie burn standpoint, because most X doesn't burn jack calories, that's just the reality of it, unless you can do a lot of it. And most people can, if they're beginners, especially if they're overweight beginners. 10 to 20 minutes of resistance training twice a week is all it takes to prevent muscle loss, which still may not happen. But for someone with a lot of weight to lose, if you need to drop 30 pounds by doing eight weeks of PSMF with or without a GLP-1 to get to the point that you can incorporate exercise, well, I'd rather you do that than not lose the weight at all. Especially if you're leaner, you must resistance train because we know factually that is those two things, sufficient protein and resistance training, prevent muscle loss, period. Aerobic activity doesn't do it except in newbies. Most people don't have the wherewithal to do interval training consistently. I mean, as far as exercise, it's basically just walking plus low volume weight training, maintaining intensity if you can, if you can. And if not, wait till you can. And then, and I did, you know, and with RFL, it comes this dumb little, this like little home exercise handbook was like, here's some really basic exercises that you can, minimal equipment that, because not everybody wants to go to the gym. I totally get that. I really do for a number of reasons. Or like, look, I don't even like to go to my gym, but I do it anyway because I have to. But like, I get that. But for some people, like it doesn't take long. Three or four exercises, basic exercises, can at least get you started. Maybe it is a couple months so you drop some weight and it's easier to do. That's perfectly fine. But that's only for the category three beginner. And and among all the other reasons is a resistance training spares muscle in a way no other exercise can. It helps with bone mineral density in a way no other exercise can do. It prevents muscle loss. You end up looking better, improves body composition, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if there's any single advantage be above and beyond that, it takes no time at all. 20 minutes, twice, you know, well, 10 minutes twice a week. Go to the gym, one hard set leg press, one hard set chest press, one hard set row, one hard set abs. Go home. You have worked every muscle in your body. Can you do a little bit more? Sure. That will get it done. Add one exercise per muscle group. Should take you 20 minutes tops, maybe. Wouldn't want to go that route for a bodybuilder getting ready for a show. No, sorry. I'm talking about the R. Yeah, no, no, for sure, for sure. Right. That's yes. Bodybuilder needs more, but not much more. Not, not as much as they think. Yeah, certainly. But if I'm just because the the biggest roadblock people report for exercise is a lack of time. That is the single largest roadblock for most people. I'm not talking about the crazies that will make time that are like, H, you know, I'm on the grind. Like, you've got time to work out. Like some people work two jobs. [ __ ] some people need to sleep. Stop being such a judgmental prick, fitness industry. If you can, but you can find 20 minutes, even if you break it up during the day, right? You can do bodyweight squats to a chair. Later in the day, you can do push-ups against a wall. Yeah, in this little book we put together, we literally, like this sounds silly, but a gallon jug, a gallon milk jug in this country, and a gallon is, I don't know, four liters. Yeah, it's almost four, four liters, 3.8 liters, I think. Fill that up with water. That will weigh about six pounds, just under three kilos. That, trust me. Look at, I, I got this one right. One gallon of water is six pounds. Makeshift dumbbells. Got a handle. You can do one arm row, do some basic stuff. Fill it with sand, it's even heavier. [ __ ] it. Use heavy cans, like whatever. When you're just starting, it doesn't matter. You can work at 50% of your maximum, you know, like Ike does consistently, and you will still get results. Something will be better. Nothing is fine if you're in that category three situation until you can. But something, it doesn't take much. It takes so little. Do some arm curls, do some triceps. Like that's all in this little book. And then I've got some progressions. And I would probably update that now. Um, Sumi Singh, also author of, uh, mental training for tough [ __ ], available on Amazon.com. She did a book years ago called Mom Strong. It was really more for like postnatal moms that we're trying to get back and Sh. But she, we did a bunch of exercise things for her that's available on her website that shows all these different progressions from easier to harder. Right. It just doesn't take much. Couple times a week to get most of the results you're going to get. One set gives you like 80% of the results as three sets. Two days a week gives you like 80% of the results of three days a week. One set twice a week will give you such a return on investment that hard to even describe compared to what are you going to go do walk on the treadmill for an hour to burn sweet jack? You're not going to do interval training despite what people think. Beginners are going to do because they're all high. Like you're not. Basic weight training does so much more. Agreed. Yeah. And that would be the third. And that's true of all resistance training programs. Like the three prongs or diet, fat loss programs, deficit, protein, resistance training. I mean, begin in an amazing position because it's not even a case of how do I diet to attenuate muscle loss? It's, you know, I can diet and gain muscle at the same time doing rather little. It's amazing. Yeah.

So the one, briefly, the one, the one study I sort of skirted over. So they did a VLCD for eight weeks and they actually brought in Liraglutide, one of the early GLP-1s, exercise only, and Liraglutide plus exercise for the next like 52 weeks. Some ungodly amount. These studies are always like a year long. Liraglutide group lost a little bit more weight, couple kilos, and stabilized. The exercise only group lost a couple kilos more weight, but they gained muscle. So they actually lost more than a couple kilos of fat. Then the exercise plus Liraglutide group lost the most and gained a little bit of muscle because it was the combination. But now, here was the exercise program. It was very not what you would typically see. So this is after 12 weeks, they'd already lost 30 pounds. This kind of goes to what we're talking about. They were already lighter and in a position to be able to incorporate activity. So they did six weeks ramp up, building in some exercise, but then they were assigned to a trainer and they were asked to do two high-intensity interval classes, like aerobic classes type thing, with the trainer, and then two sessions on their own. And they actually did pretty well. They reported like 110 minutes a week of vigorous activity. And that's way more than you usually see. But we've got a situation where A, they were in a study intervention, B, they were given free access to a trainer. But but even in that population, that high-intensity interval training did cause a little muscle gain, to improve bone mineral density. Would resistance training have worked better? Absolutely. Can you do that in a large population study? Absolutely not. Right? There are practicalities in the research that I understand. But there are endless papers now even about the GLP-1s that this is still relative. Look, all GLP-1 does is it puts you on a chemically induced diet. That's truly what it does. So when people like, well, you lose muscle. Yeah, just like on a shitty diet. That's it. Yeah, it's the deficit. It's not the drug. Yeah. But these papers are coming out now that are like, could resistance training ameliorate muscle loss on a GLP-1? Gee, you think? But the thing is, it hasn't been studied. But they're like, well, we see this, but we know from five decades of resistance of of diet studies that resistance training and sufficient protein prevents all this. Maybe we should try that on the GLP-1. And I'm like, hey, that's a great idea. I am adamant right now. I've been pushing this for years, right? There's this dumb idea, I believe Dr. Israel, that you should do more volume when you're cutting. Point number two, your weight training five to six days per week of weights because you want to present that best physique. You got to put as much throughput into the muscles, catabolism and anabolism, as possible. Dumbest ever. It comes out of drug-driven training because Mike, what is it? Free calorie burn? Is that what he said? Yeah, free. Yeah, basically high volume. Generally, you're pushing the limits because you want the most throughput possible. High volume training not only builds the most muscle, it breaks down the most muscle and requires the most calories to repair. So if you do relatively high volume training, then your total amount of body change is very high, both on the fat burning end and the muscle building end. And set a five, just don't burn as many calories. And here we're trying to burn so many calories that your weight training workouts, as illustrated by the short rest intervals being okay, they double as caloric burn workouts. So sets of 10 to 30 reps will be brutal, especially if you do it in superset style, but boy oh boy will that burn a whole lot of calories for you. Except for the joint. I mean, you don't get joint pain training at a rep reserve. But yeah, other than the exhaustion and fatigue that you get from just walking, low-intensity cardio, yeah, just brisk walking or just increasing your step count, right? There is no free. When your recovery is down, and I'm adamant, you must reduce your volume severely by up to two-thirds. I've been saying this for 20 years. The fitness industry still says I'm wrong.

How about beyond two-thirds? Well, what the research I'm basing this on says it's actually a lot of the tapering research. But they look at maintenance. And so they do three, you got frequency, how many times a week, intensity, how hard, volume. If you reduce, and they reduce two out of those three by up to two-thirds, usually if any of those combinations reduces intensity, you lose fitness. You can reduce frequency by up to two-thirds, you reduce intensity, you lose fitness. Can reduce volume, and you keep volume the same, reduce the volume by two-thirds, and keep frequent, drop, keep frequency. If you lose, reduce intensity. Only thing that works is maintaining intensity, which in the weight room means weight on the bar.

I want to talk about this. So in your recommendations, when you're talking about keeping the weight on the bar, you're usually talking about doing sets of six to eight with similar weights you were using before you started the diet, not just similar, the exact same, preferably. Doesn't always happen on lifts like the bench press as your leverage is worsen, but ideally, you keep the weight the same on the. But I have a question. If you do sets of higher reps, let's say like 15 to 30, done close to failure, does that satisfy the tension requirement or will you lose muscle? No. Or put differently, like, could I preserve all of my muscle mass, let's doing two to three sets a week, like all of the muscle in my lats, doing two to three sets of rows and pull-ups in the 15 to 30 rep range, provided that they're all taken very close to failure? Do you mean when you had been doing sets of six to eight prior to that? Let's start with yes, and then let's also say no. So I imagine there might be a different answer to both. Yeah. So back in the day, right? Like that's what the drug-using bodybuilders did. Oh, you switched to high reps to burn in the cuts or etch in the striations or cuts and burn. You that all that dumb sh. And when naturals do it, they hemorrhage muscle. When you reduce tension on the muscle, we know that tension is primary, period. When you reduce the tension, you lose muscle. Because my old training partner found that out the hard way. Now, so if you, but that's they also weren't going, you know, to limit failure. We know that high rep sets to true limit failure, in premise, the last few five reps are high tension stimulus because of recruitment and fatigue and metabolites and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yep. I don't know. And I mean, I've written, I've talked about, you know, using metabolic weight training to, you know, deplete glycogen and do other things. If you'd been doing sets of 15 and kept doing sets of 15 the same way, I would say absolutely that would work. If you switched, I don't know. I understand. I see exactly where your question is coming from. I thought you actually asked a different question, but I don't, I don't know. And my gut would say don't, because I think the reason you're, you're like, oh, you know, joint stuff, you know, oh, my joints are going to start to hurt because I'm dieting, and that's true if you don't reduce your volume. Good. Theon end up all achy and stuff on a diet. There's this dumbass idea I've seen people say it. What builds muscle maintains it? No, no, it doesn't. Every piece of research says that's not true. Yeah, like we talked about last time, it's something the supposedly evidence-based people argue without evidence just because it sounds good. It sounds physiological. Here's their argument. Here's their argument, which I can also take apart. Well, when you're dieting, there's anabolic resistance and the muscles refractory to training, which there is an element of truth to. But there are studies. There's two different ones. One used three sets in a workout and the other used six. And three heavy sets plus protein immediately after overcame the anabolic resistance. So they can [ __ ] off. Their argument is like, oh, well, the maintenance studies weren't dieting, so they don't apply. Come on, you can do better than that. You can, you can do better than that. I mean, they're not wrong. But so what? What changes? Why? And the increasing volume thing is even as stupid. When your recovery is down, how, why can you do more? And people, well, it's because you can't train as hard, so you need more volume to compensate. No, this is more, you know what the dumb things. Yeah, I ever read. You ever read the Juggernaut manual? It said in one section, said, all right, talking about setting, figuring out your volume when you're dieting, you should do more volume. Right? When you're sick, you should do more volume. Yeah, sure. Yeah. When you're stressed, you should do more volume. Which means that the highest volumes you should do are when you're dieting, sick, and stressed. Sure. How can people write this and not see how dumb it is? I think what they're basing it on is there's this continuum of anabolism on the one end and catabolism on the other. And dieting moves you closer to this end. So to compensate, you have to do more in the weight room to bring you closest to the anabolism end of the spectrum. But you're not going to be training. You're not going to be anabolic. You're trying to be anti-catabolic. Yeah, those are different terms. And they, we used to make a distinction between those two. You're not trying to gain muscle in a deficit because it's not going to happen without drugs. You're trying to prevent muscle loss. Like I said, three to six heavy sets with protein right afterwards will maintain protein synthesis in the face of a deficit. The research is there, and I'll send you the references. How low can you go in terms of volume? I mean, well, I usually say two-thirds of current volume, which of course, you know, well, what if you're doing three sets? Does that mean you can do one? There's probably a lower limit. I just usually go, look, do two to four heavy sets, right? Because I would rather, because what happens, right? Especially now, okay, let's back up. If you're early in prep, you're six months out, you're on a moderate deficit because you don't, you think aggressive deficits are bad, you can probably maintain your volume at that point. I mean, I don't know why you would, but I, you can. And as you get deeper into prep and you're fighting the hard fight, it needs to go down, or you need to replace it. You can recover from low-intensity cardio. Right back in the, the 2000s, you probably weren't in this yet, right? The the morons. This is when interval training became real popular. Low carb diets were real popular. Resistance training was really popular. And the the dip were like, oh, when you're dieting, you do interval five days a week because somehow low-intensity cardio adds fat on low carbs while resistance training every day, and everybody got ruined. And I said, this is idiotic. Thing. I was a toddler during those years. Yeah. And then everybody said I was wrong. And then five years later, everybody changed their ttin. Oh yeah, what? Look, low-intensity walking worked for decades for a reason. You can recover from that when you're deep in a deficit. You can't recover from, you know, 50 sets of length and partials or whatever [ __ ] the industry is selling these days, right? So yeah, you're, you're early in a diet and your deficit is not big, you can probably maintain volume. You don't need to. You might as well replace some of it with, because weight training does burn sh for calories, period. I don't care how you do it. Just do the, the treadmill grind. Just, just it's worked for decades. The fitness industry wants to pretend that anecdotes are evidence. Don't ignore the ones you don't like. And they do, right? 50 years of morning fasted cardio worked, but one study, fasted cardio is dead. Sure, guys. Sure. Cool story. I'm not saying it is or it isn't. I'm saying the data is not strong enough to throw the out with bath water. If those be like anecdotes as part of the evidence based, well then why are we ignoring 50 years of anecdotes that got people into better shape than, you know, Mike Israel, for example, to mention a random bodybuilder. Appo of nothing. So yeah, but as, but if you're doing a bigger deficit, your recovery is down. Yeah, must reduce volume. So I usually throw out two-thirds volume in frequency, as long as you maintain intensity. Because I would rather see someone go, and if you like, all right, I'm dieting, I'm tired, I got to do eight sets. You are going to pace yourself. Just will get the volume. I would rather see you do three quality sets and go the home or get on the treadmill. Right? Two to three sets even once a week, I'm not usually a big fan of once a week training frequencies, but in a diet for maintenance, it'll work in a pinch. Yeah, I've done it before. It's not most people like to train. So I usually look, two to three sets twice a week per muscle group is plenty. Um, and if you look at the second edition RFL, I, you, I was like, look, if you want to do two days a week, here's how you do it. You do three days a week, ABA, you could do push pull legs, whatever. You can do four days a week as long as they're like 30 minutes, right? Like it should be boom, boom, boom, in and out of the way room. Yep. Quick, quick, quick, quick, quick. If you want to do more, you can do a little brisk walking. But again, that 100 calories you burned means nothing against the size of the deficit. It's not going to hurt, but it's not going to help either. Most people aren't going to do sets. So I mean, whatever. I just go two to three sets up to twice a week. Go with God. It's fine as long as you don't do anything truly stupid. Yep. Slash volume by two-thirds. I believe there's some kind of benefit in clustering most of your calories around training. Supposing I would have train, you know, wake up at 7, train at 8 AM, and then have my dinner at PM. So that's 11 hours after I start my workout. I mean, would you say that's, uh, not advisable? No, I say no. I would say it doesn't matter. Yes. Thank you. Because like, because like I said, like that, like the Tolin paper showed, and I did that smug video, like it's exhausting being right all the time because I've been saying this for years. If you eat 1,400 calories at dinner with 300, however much protein, 250 grams of protein in carbs and fats, that protein is going to be digesting for roughly 20 plus hours. You have nutrients in the morning. You, you don't digest 1,400 calories in eight hours. It matters. Now, if your dinner was 400 calories, you would have re-entered what, you know, the postprandial state when you're between meals and no longer digesting. Sorry, the postabsorptive state in between meals. Yeah. If you have all this Cal, and why, like if you actually look at like Martin's and intermittent fasting and lean gains, yeah, it really, the number of hours you were spending in that postabsorptive state, by which I mean there's no calories being left to digest where you're shifting back to, you know, mobilizing stored fuels, actually wasn't that much, right? The way Martin did it, you had your first meal at what, two? You trained, had like 80% of your calories post-workout, and then you had dinner. And if you calculate out how long that dinner would take to digest, it would probably be till about 4 AM. Well, then from four to two, you actually are not having any nutrients into the system. Well, that's about 10 hours. If you have dinner at 8 and have a relatively small meal, you will have about the same number of hours postabsorptive. L, and that's why when you look at the studies that intermittent fasting versus the spread meal pattern, it doesn't make a sh forth a difference for growth because big picture stuff. You have a big ass dinner meal, it's just digesting, and it's still there at 7 AM. It's just a really extended pre-workout meal. So for naturals, now, I will maintain, we're getting way off topic, but we always do. That's the way I roll. I maintain that nutrition in terms of meal for frequency, timing, all that is more important for drug users than it is for naturals. And here's why I say that. The reality is, a natural, as you train, muscle protein synthesis goes up by three-fifths of jack for 24 hours. Whatever. You can put the nutrients in whenever, as long as you've got some coming in, it doesn't really matter. You're, you're going to grow about the same, which is to say, not very well, because being a natural sucks. If you're on steroids, on anabolics, or performance enhancing drugs, where you are maintaining elevated protein synthesis and nutrient utilization 24/7, 365, you must keep nutrients coming to the system constantly. I, and if you look, if you look at a lot of that stuff, a lot of that, all the meal frequency and all that other sh, and even like, even periodization comes out of drug protocols. The Soviet volume due to intensity. It's because they used heavy androgens in the offseason and switched to heavy anabolics to pass the drug test. So they did volume in the offseason and changed the quality before competition so they could pass. All that [ __ ] comes out of drug use. The German protocols, three, three hard weeks, one easy week. They did three-week oral Turinabol cycles and then one week off. They were synchronizing training with drugs, period. I had a dream last night where that was the routine you wrote for me. Oh, that three on, one off. I don't use that. Yeah, I know. And that's why it was such a weird dream. Yeah, I know that you're not a fan of that three to one paradigm. No, no. That's just not. Yeah. So, so the same thing. If you, if you are elevating, and then if you're using insulin, of course, and you don't eat carbs for a meal, you die. So like, once you, like that is mandating much of much of what you do. And also in the gym, right? When you're on drugs, you can just about and let the drugs do the work. And actually, you don't want to go too heavy because you get hurt. Like the rules change. But yeah, so like for a natural, whatever, there's there's a reason that it doesn't seem to matter. Intermittent fasting, spread pattern, whatever. Six, one half does the other. So yeah, it doesn't matter. That one big meal at night, early. And as for cardio, probably just brisk walking. And that doesn't even have to be, if you can be bothered, basically. I mean, step count is a way to do it, you know, that will burn some calories, but it, it cannot be like, even approaching low intensity steady state, right? Like brisk walking, you're not going to hit your heart rate above a 100. If you're even getting into the aerobic zone or doing, God forbid, hard aerobic training or intervals, it will do more harm than good. And I realize that makes no sense whatsoever, but you got to trust me that it does. I've got the paper on it. It causes severe water retention on top of what else can already occur, which stalls everything out. Like everything goes bad when you try to do lots, either lots and/or hard and/or both cardio on like. And I wrote this article on my website, something to the effect of combining large deficits with large, like you can do one or the other, right? If you want to do a ton of activity, you have to keep your calories higher. Want to do a hard deficit, you must cut the activity. It's the both that people over the long term. And an oddity had one paper that I could not find again, probably, that actually showed that doing excessive aerobic activity on very low calories caused more harm than good. So I wrote a diet book that said, don't do too much cardio, even if everybody [ __ ] it up. Yeah, couldn't wrap their head around, because not only does it not, I mean, mathematically it doesn't help. So you're on 800 calories, yeah, right? You've already created a 1,200 calorie per day deficit. Wow. The 150 you burned in cardio really does a lot, doesn't it? Right? So I'm like, look, not only does cardio not help, actually, if you do too much, it hurts. Yeah, for sure. It actually causes metabolic rate to crater more quickly. I've heard about bodybuilders recommending cardio on a bulk actually to appetite. It's kind of, I mean, that's at least logical. I already thought you say the really stupid thing. Oh, to prevent fat gain. Doesn't work that way, guys. No, no. Yeah, no, you hear that too, but like, sure, but it doesn't work. Yeah. Seen people do it. Dante Trudel used to recommend that. Oh, an hour of morning fasted cardio so he wouldn't get fat on a bulk. And then he looked at his guys in the offseason. Didn't. Yeah, no way. It's very interesting this notion of cardio and don't pig out on, you know, protein bars wrapped in tortillas, for example. That's how you don't. If you don't eat too much. And that's the other place. So people typically, and that, so that was the other thing. So in the first edition, like I had some pretty general exercise stuff. And then in the second edition, I severely expanded the exercise recommendations, especially like the early, the first edition had like, here's a big beginner exercise program, this little dumb home exercise thing I put together. But then in the second edition, I'm like, look, people out in the world who are already training are still [ __ ] it up. I'm like, look, because the other thing that people get wrong, they do two things wrong on the diet that's not diet related. A

They do too much cardio, which I explicitly say not to do. And whenever somebody comes to my group, goes, "Yeah, I did RFL and I did all this cardio and it didn't work." What did I say? Was I unclear? Are you Mike Israel, who is incapable of understanding simple words like, "I'm not advocating failure"? What? Why? Just do that. It works. Just do what the book says. So they do that. That is the big mistake because, and I get it, the idea of getting lean without cardio is very foreign to people. So I do understand from whence this comes. But the sentence, "Do not do cardio, lots of cardio," is not unclear.

So this is a prescription, or a protocol rather, that would work nicely for many different populations. This sort of maintenance days on training days, and then RFL days on rest days, right? Because a lot of people, now, it's not for everyone, right? Like if you have like problems with binge eating and stuff like that, yes, I did want to talk about binge eating. Absolutely not. Any more than UD2 is the right approach for you. Like, it is not for everyone. Do not mishear me here or misrepresent what I'm saying. Like, people like, you know, Mike Israel, for example, love to do. For those people, this is absolutely the wrong approach. For some people, psychologically, they just prefer moderate daily deficits. That every day, they say, "Those are like bodybuilders. Those are crazy people. Those are psycho athletes. These are people that train hard." Like, I get that. But for a lot of people who are general public, when I tell them, "Okay, look, you can go through the tedium of 25% deficit every day. That's a huge pain in the ass and a real grind," or like, "You can just do four hard days a week of nothing but protein and veggies, and you lose the exact amount of fat, the same amount of fat per week." And they're like, "Wait, you're telling me I can lose the same amount of weekly body fat only having to diet four days a week?" And I go, "That's exactly what I'm telling you." They're like, "Son of a bitch, I'm in." Yeah, not everybody. And some people try and it doesn't work for them. That's fine for whatever reason. Not, and I'm not playing a because they [ __ ] it out. Like, for some people, it's just not the right approach, and that's fine. But in many cases, whether it's preference, you know, a lot of people, I get again, in the real world, they like, "Look, on one day a week, I go to my families, and if I don't eat like, I can't diet on those days." Or I've heard a lot of, "If I don't take my girlfriend or wife out once a week, I'm gonna be single." And I'm like, "Look, relationships are temporary, abs are forever." I'm kidding, right? Like, there are situations or PR preference, or they don't want to have to like, they just don't. It gives you leeway. You don't have to worry so hard about the maintenance days when the deficit is so big on the RFL. When you end up with, you know, a 1,500 calorie deficit on the RFL days minimum, and that's 6,000 calories a week. Even if you eat a little bit over maintenance on the other three days a week, you're still in a big ass deficit, right? Like, I mean, you can absolutely [ __ ] it up if you go out of your way. Like, it can be done. Make no mistake. But you have to almost go out of your way for it. So that is absolutely, and again, it's just, it's a balance. You will get less weekly fat loss, but it may be more sustainable in the long term. Something I often, and again, it depends who are we talking about. Are they trying to change major eating patterns? Well, a strict period on RFL may be the best way to break those old habits, right? People, some people love bright line boundaries. They don't want to have to think, "Well, should I eat this? Can I eat this?" They like, "You can't. You cannot." Right? Period. Again, this depends on the person, and there's a lot of variables that go into this. I do that, and that's where my consults always run so long because I have to figure out all those, you know, apply my heuristic and my rules and stuff depending on the situation. For many people, what I'll recommend is, "Go look, you know, some people like the flexibility of, well, maybe I just want a pet maintenance day." And whenever, some people want a strict. Depends on the person. It depends on their psychology. But with some people, if they're just starting out, have a lot of fat to, for example, I may go, "Look, let's do two weeks of strict RFL. If you feel good, go to four. Get some real quick fat loss." Right? We might take eight or 10 pounds of true fat loss, more weight because of water. That might get you a third of the way to your goal. Boom. People love it. It's rewarding. Change his food habits. Get them in good protein. I go, "Now, maybe you take a maintenance day when you feel like it. Feel like you're cracking? Feel like you can't take it anymore? Have a maintenance day." Maybe that's enough. Maybe you don't need to incorporate. And that's something else I've very much changed since my early 20s. For a lot of people who are just changing habits, some of those flexible eating ideas, refeeds, and free meals and [ __ ] do more harm than good because they break people's momentum of changing their habits. Frequently, that longer. Also, there's a weirdness where often on lower calories, people's appetite goes away. It's a bizarre. They've known that decades. Frequently, complete fasting, people's appetite disappears. For some people, eating makes them hungry, and actually eating less is better than eating more. Or reasons, the protein helps too because protein is the most filling. That's why we do it this way. So for them, I'll be like, "Okay, bring it in. Have one. Maybe you get another 10 days, then have another one. Then maybe you need one every eighth, and then every sixth, and maybe eight weeks from now, you are on alternate day fasting as a gradual progression." And other people wanted me to tell them, "Two days a week, I want you to do it maintenance or whatever it is." Like, it just depends on the person. But that is absolutely a valid way, right? That's one thing I don't think I put in the book, but people, someone mentioned to me, and I go, "That's a really good idea." And they do this in the hospital setting. They'll do eight weeks of VLCD, liquid VLCD, and then transition people back to a low calorie diet on food, right? You use it to kickstart things because again, in eight weeks, you can lose 20, 25 pounds, 12 kilos, in eight weeks of tissue or just waste. Oh, no, actual. Well, yeah, tissue. Wow. I mean, if do the M, if yeah, it's extremely overweight. I mean, if you want, yeah, that's, I mean, I can math it out, right? If you got a 1500 calorie per day deficit, that's a 10,500 per week. That's three pounds of fat. Eight weeks, that's 24 pounds of fat. So yeah, tissue weight, weight, which is another five or 10 pounds. So you do, yeah, then you transition them to a lower. So that's what they do in hospital settings. But again, my readers of my books, probably not in hospital settings, probably not in that kind of clinical setting. So I approach it this way. I go, "Yeah, that's a completely valid way to do it. Maybe you use it initially like that, and then you start to bring in the occasional maintenance day." And if you bring it in and it shits the bed and it kicks you off the diet, well, you're not ready for it. No harm, no foul. It's a learning process. Everyone's got their own, you know, thing. Even now, for long-term weight maintenance, be like, "Look, there's no law that says you can't keep an RFL day in even at maintenance, right?" We usually think of maintenance as 100% maintenance every day. But why? There's no wall.

Free meals, refeeds, and diet breaks in 2024. Where do you stand? Um, free meals are probably the least relevant of all of those approaches. They just don't have much purpose. I mean, they can still be useful. Did a consult once and the guy was like, "If I don't get to go to my country club and have steak and lobster once a week." I go, "Cool, free meal." But by and large, they don't serve a lot of purpose for most people. So I've kind of, of all of them, they can be thrown away. All right. I don't use the term refeeds anymore. I prefer maintenance days. We talked about ADF and ICR. Refeeds, they have their place if you're doing a carb load, if you're an athlete. However, for general public, even it's not as bad as cheat day, but it still puts people in this mindset of, "I must gorge on carbs." Nope. Maintenance day. It has a psychological break. It includes the free meal because you have a little more leeway. So it kind of obviates the need for that. If you're doing an ADF approach, it's already built in. So we don't need to structure them. And as I mentioned, for some people, usually the ones that are getting started with a lot of eating habits, they're better off maybe not doing those till later. But again, ADF is different. ADF works for everybody from the get-go. But that's because of it's a, it's a maintenance day. Just eat. Eat normally. Don't pig out. Just eat normally.

Diet breaks. Um, I, the data does not support the metabolic effects that I wanted them to have back in the day. I wish. I mean, any effect is small in a physiological sense. They limited data, and there's not a lot of work on this. And the ones that have been done are kind of bad because they don't do them right. They're like, "One week every three weeks." I'm like, "That's not how they..." Why don't you just ask me how to design the study, for God's sakes? You're not using them right. There doesn't seem to be any major metabolic effect. However, they can be psychologically beneficial, like guiding into more manageable blogs. But again, with day fasting, it may be less relevant. It's even in that research, it did seem to decrease hunger and fatigue, right? There is a, there is a dieting fatigue that occurs psychologically. And if you're training intensely, physiologically, they are a good place where if you are training intensely and do feel like your performance is decreasing, you take two weeks at maintenance calories. You can use that to bump things back up. Probably the biggest benefit does, and this is more for general public than for competitors or athletes, it gives you a chance to practice maintenance. And that may be the biggest benefit of all, because maintenance is the hard bit. By every so often moving in maintenance, somehow there other benefits. Gives you a chance to identify red flags, problem areas. When I relaxed my dietary restraint, did I immediately fly off the handle? Was this a trigger? Was this a problem? Identify the problems so that you can fix them going forwards so that when you're ready to move to permanent maintenance in the long term, you will have already pre-identified. So, but metabolically, just didn't have the effects that I thought it would. This is why I've gotten away from free meals, why I don't like the terminology cheat meals, why I've gotten away from refeeds. People psychologize those differently. If I say eat at maintenance, that just means eat at maintenance. If I say do a refeed, that means stuff your face with Captain Crunch, right? So in his mind, he was still using cheat meal. I wasn't going to get a big argument with him. And he's like, he saw that as a cheat meal. And doing it too early for him. Like, if I just said, "I just eat at mate," that might have been different, or it might not. But for him, it was better to stay strict until he broke those behavior patterns. Then it could become a one-time thing. So there's a lot of moving parts, and it really just depends on the person. I, I swear to God, I saw a study where they did this and they watch leptin levels do this and not go down, and I've never been able to find it again. So I might have dreamt it. I might my Google Fu might be failing. But from a physiological standpoint, telling someone, even psychologically, right? Okay, because if you're dieting seven days a week, you're dieting forever. If you're even dieting six days a week with one day off, it's never more than six days. That's psychologically so different. Same thing with training, right? If I say you're never going to have to be on low calories, have to be on very low calories, but never more than one or two days at a time before you get a break, it's easy. Psychologically, it may not have any bet. Now, of course, in those ads, studies are not using training either. Like I said, if you're training, but the training on the maintenance days, you can actually train worth a [ __ ] RFL on the non-training days, you're not doing anything anyway. Like even in sports nutrition now, right? So back in the day, they would be like, "Oh, you're an endurance athlete, you need 10 to 12 grams per kilo of carbs every day." What if you're only doing a 30-minute run? What if you're only riding the bike for an hour and not six? It wasn't until the 2000s or so that sports nutrition people were like, "You know, we should adjust calories and carb intake based on how much training someone does." Jesus Christ, really? They're like, "Yeah, if you only do an hour, you only need five grams per kilo." Like, really? No [ __ ] you need less calories when you don't ride the bike for six hours and only ride one. Wow. It seriously. It was amazing. Took them like 30 years of this stuff. And yeah, so you could like, there's all these ways. Oh, anyway, so this consult I had was a younger guy, teen, well, teenager, younger guy. I'm old, everyone's a younger guy to me. And he died before had problems. You know, we set it up and I asked like, what about maintenance days or free meals or whatever? I don't like to use cheat meals for various reasons. And he goes, "Look, he's like, I've tried them and they don't work." He's like, "Because here's what I do. I have one on a Friday." And go, "Wow, that worked really well." And then I'll have it again on a Saturday, and then on a Sunday, and then my diet's over." Go, "All right, cool. You're gonna have to be strict for the first however long to break those habits." Right? Again, breaking conditioned cues. So I reconsult with him, however many months later, and he's made great progress. And he's like, "Yeah, so here's what I found. He said, over this time period, and like it was bright line boundaries across the way, no, no options. He wasn't good with them. And some people aren't." And he said, "Yeah, what would happen is I would see these foods that I wanted to eat, but I couldn't eat them, and it's broken my need to eat them." Like I said, it's again, you're breaking conditioned cues. And he said, "And then I did. He's like, then I tried. I went to Five Guys Burgers on a Friday." It was like eight or 12 weeks later, after he'd done strict RFL. And he's like, "And I did it. It's my reward." And I went, "Right back to RFL and I was fine."

So is there an argument that using RFL strategically as a bodybuilder can lead to better results, period, like over the course of a year? Well, D, it's going to resensitize your muscle to an an stimulus. That's a joke, folks. We talked about it last time with the Eric. So, so yeah, so that is, and again, I'm not saying that's the only way to do it. That is another application for RFL is if you're in a gaining phase and just want to make sure you don't get too, you know, gain too much fat in the offseason. Do I mean? Yeah, you could do a six-week mini cut, and that's six weeks that you're not getting to train well. Or you can RFL for two weeks, take four pounds of body fat off, and get back to life. And again, it's not for everybody. Some people would rather just suffer harder for less time. But if you're ahead, you can always slow it down. If you're behind, it's very difficult to catch to to speed it up. And the same thing is true with contest prep. If someone is ahead of schedule, it's very easy to slow things down and stabilize them, whatever. Or, you know, but you have, but I would always rather someone be in shape a week early than a week late, right? Because again, for this particular application, Saturday at 9:00 AM, that's prejudging. They got to be ready. I can have them ready a week before. I cannot have them ready a day after. So you'd always start early. And in that case, again, we might use the initial phases to kind of figure, feel somebody out. All right, how are we losing? You know, how are you responding? All that kind of [ __ ] after things start moving, and I might, in that case, I would keep RFL in my back pocket if we need it. And this will use this as an example of how I might do it, and also how it might apply to, you know, our hypothetical bodybuilder. So let's say I am working with someone and I'm like, "Okay, we're three months out, and there, you know, I, I know kind of, you know, I know where they need to be. Like, I know people like judges don't care what your body fat percentages." Yeah, that's true. But it gives me a rough idea of how much more fat they have to lose. Like, it's like, no, the number doesn't matter, but an estimate will still tell me more than not an estimate, right? Calipers are fine. But if I'm looking at visual stuff and not working with the person, you know, in person, I'm like, "Got to use something." And I'm pretty good at making visual estimates. And I'm like, "Okay, you're behind. You're, you know, you still need to lose X amount of fat. You got 12 weeks. We're not going to get you there. We have to, you know, bam, kick it up a notch." You know, use the spice weasel. Uh, like Elar. I've been rewatching Futurama. So blood love Futur. H. Just don't watch the reboot. I'm not. It's not as good. They can't. They tried to recapture the magic, and it didn't work. I watched first seasons through the movies, and the reboot isn't very good anyway. So yeah, I might, in that case, go, "Look, I mean, it might need not even be straight. I might go, we're going to put in a couple of RFL days to try to accelerate your fat loss by another three quarters of a pound a week." If they're way behind, I might go, "I got bad news for you. We're doing two weeks straight RFL to try to get you back on schedule." And sorry, you know, too bad. Either, you know, again, hopefully, if I was working from the get, I realize I really don't prep people. I will occasionally help towards the end. I don't like doing it, um, because I don't like neurotic emails every day about, "I ate an extra tomato, should I do more cardio?" I don't have time for that. At least Sui was only neurotic the week before when she was making weight. I can live with that. Bodybuilders are a whole another level. Are crazy. And I just don't have the energy for it. Um, so, you know, again, hopefully, it would be my job to make sure they started early enough. But happens. For example, the competitor that I was helping got sick for 10 days. Nothing in their control, or in my control, or in anybody's control. And it, it slowed them down by 10 days. Happens. So I was like, "Okay, well, bad news. This is your life for the next three weeks. Like, you don't get refeeds, you don't get a break. You're going to have to just put your head down, and you might still not make it." But that was through no fault of their own. And this is the same person that I'd said before, "You won't make your show. Now pick one six months from now. It's still gonna be close." Yeah. And then they got sick. And I mean, I would have normally, I would have said, "Look, pick another show." But there wasn't one. Right? At this point, it was their, it was their first show. It was a trial run. They were not doing it for fun. It was just kind of like, they didn't have expectations of winning. First time out. It was to figure, you know, it was different. I mean, nobody does that [ __ ] for fun. But also, it wasn't bodybuilding. I want to say it was bikini. I don't know. Uh, it wasn't, you know, for, it wasn't 10%. It wasn't that extreme. And they wanted to go up on stage in in the mermaid bikini and and the heels and the glitter and all. Right, cool. Um, so all good. So, but that was the case. So like, yeah, I was like, "Well, [ __ ] happens. You're 10 days behind. No, you know." And but I might, and again, like I said, we could modify it in any number of ways. Let's say I had that competitor and needed to just accelerate fat loss a little bit. I might bring in a few RFL days and do it ADF style or whatever, just to start, you know. So yeah, we've got a 25% deficit four days a week. I wouldn't let him do maintenance on training days, but we're going to, you know, bang, kick it up a notch a few days a week to try to increase fat loss by another, you know, half, three quarters of a pound, you know, quarter, whatever, 375 kilos a week, just to kind of get that, you know, because it accumulates, right? You get three months, and you can get, you know, an extra, you know, two kilos a month. That adds up, assuming that remotely close on top of the fat loss that's in addition to what they would be getting otherwise.

So I got an email from a guy this is a few weeks ago and very apropos of nothing. And I think I sent you the pictures. And he said, "Hey, I've got an interesting, you know, feedback story for you." And for some reason, he decided to do a bodybuilding show four weeks before the show. I find that odd, but okay. Now, he was already lean, right? He was easily single digits already. I'll throw out the pictures on screen. You want me to? You want to do that now? Oh, no, I, I can do it like in editing, post-production. Yeah, because you said he was, yeah, yeah, he was already already pretty, he was pretty lean. And he's like, "Yeah, so I did straight RFL. He might have had it at the high carb day, but not many for like a straight month. He looked insane. Oh, F better than Ike. And he had a tan. So he, exact, yeah, as a natural and looked better. RFL, he said he lost no muscle, pure fat. Yeah, leaner, better shape, actually had a waist, better props, you know, I mean, ab lines." He's like, "A 34-year-old guy doing his residency as a medical doctor too." Well, yeah, exactly. Emailed me back, and I responded to him. And because I asked him if I could, you know, share this when we talked. And he was like, "Yeah, I'm actually, you know, in, uh, in med school or residency." And I'm amazed. I'm just like, "Jesus Christ, you did this while you were in med school?" Yeah. Like working a real job. It's amazing. I do nothing all day and I don't have that level of dedication. But yeah. And he did RFL as written. So this guy, Larry Shiped it, I think we talked about, we did, yeah, bodybuilder that I helped. And again, I don't claim to coach him, although I'm going to be helping him going forwards. I helped him sort of optimize his diet there towards the end. And he was doing my Ultimate Diet too. And first, we moved him to a two-week cycle, which is a grind. It's 11 straight days of low carbs. Although hilariously, there's actually a paper that did 11 days of low calories and three days at higher calories that got great results. I'm like, "Huh, wow, that sounds like my two-week one RFL cycle. How strange." Anyway, so, but I also told him, I'm like, "Look, you can, I said in UD2, I was like, don't go below 1,200 calories. Keep car blah blah blah stuff that I would absolutely not say anymore." And I said, "Yeah, you can do RFL." So we set it up as RFL on all the low calorie days. Now, he's an elite bodybuilder. Those people are crazy. And again, I'm not saying that to be negative. It goes with the sport, right? You, you have to be a little nuts to be able to to starve yourself to that level, or you don't succeed, right? You have to have more discipline than any human in, you know, than most human beings, which some people claim to have, and then yet can't cook up tilapia and broccoli like a normal human being. You've never met anyone with as much willpower as me. And whatever it is, you think you're good at in your life, I'd probably take about a year and and become an authority in the field in which you think you're good. Mr. I have more discipline than anyone in the world, why can't you eat contest prep food? Just saying. It's true. Larry did. True. Yeah, Larry was, I mean, he did, you know, 11 straight days of RFL into the carb load with minimal training. I had him doing full body, two to three heavy sets every few days, low intensity cardio. He came in shrink wrapped. He lost zero muscle, he lost essentially no strength because he did what I said. So that was a case that he, now, the average lean person might not be able to do that because when you're leaner and your body wants to fight, just depends, some, you know, it just really, really depends. Well, happens, you're 10 days behind, through no fault of your own, you're gonna have to RFL straight. Sorry. And that's just what it was. Uh, you know, we already brought up Larry again. It's rare in bodybuilding. Many athletes do that. You know, they have warm-up competitions. Olympic lifters do it to it. Runners do it. Like, this is not an important competition. This is to start getting me into shape, right? So he did his first show, NPC, and I didn't really do much with him on that one, I don't think. And then he had another four weeks. And I said, "All right, give yourself a couple days break, then let's, and, you know, that's when he went into the full-on 14-day UD2 with RFL on the low carb days." I mean, hard, but changed his training, did everything the way I told him to do it. He was, I, I generally don't like working with dudes because they won't listen. They hire you and think they know better. Um, I suspect that Ike would have done that, would have hired a coach and then thought he knew better than him, and then blame the coach because that's what people like Ike do. And, um, did exactly what I said, kept getting leaner. You know, I had him do things like, and this is not RFL related, but maybe people listening will learn from this. He looked perfect two days after the final carb load. I said, "All right, cool. You finish your carb on Thursday." I had him do a different workout. Do different thing because you don't want to cause muscle damage. Short full body to set up the carb load. Go Friday. You go back to no carbs, RFL with C with no activity. Saturday, he looked perfect. And he won his pro card at his second show. That's a. Listen, the running joke actually isn't me making fun of Mike. The running joke is Mike. Except he probably doesn't run. Let's say I was coaching Ike, who number one, you know, got sloppy in the offseason, started his contest prep too late. And for some reason, I was dumb enough to keep trying to save it. Well, D Shane used to write about that. The best article he ever wrote was in Dirty Dieting Newsletter called Death Wish Dieting. And he talked about a female competitor who had 12 weeks to get from like 23% body fat to 10. And he, he even said, he goes, "Yeah, I learned all my contest prep tricks working with fuckups." Because he was like, "It's not difficult to take someone from 10 to four percent. It's not. It's not rocket science." I'm sorry. Prob bodybuilding is not rocket science. Take as many drugs as you can afford and starve for as long as you can handle it. That's it. That's how you get into shape. Pro level. And even I couldn't do that. He took even more drugs and still couldn't starve hard. Implying he was even at the pro level. Fair enough. Um, he was in his own mind, he identified as a pro in the modern era. We have to accept how he, his pronouns, pronoun. Anyway, so hang on, right? So assuming I, I was like, "Okay, like, I'm gonna be a [ __ ] I'm gonna try to get you there through for whatever." Like, at that point, usually just go like, "Again, were I to coach Ike and he came to me 12 weeks out or four months out, and I would go, you're not going to make it." I mean, maybe if we did every drug known to God and man and RFL straight, maybe. And I would just go, "Pick a show. Come back. Come back when you're 12%. Don't, don't even bother me till like, you can't be bothered to be sort of in shape to start out. Don't, don't waste." But let's say that, you know, I had a head injury and decided, or he was like, "I will pay you. I will sell." Let's say he had a gym with $250,000 of equipment that still couldn't help him get into shape hypothetically speaking. Let's say he said, "I'm going to sell my gym equipment and give you that money if you can get me into shape." And I was dumb enough to do it. This is awesome. Um, blood pressure PR. I, I'm telling you, we're gonna, we're gonna do it this time. When I real, when I realized that some point, I would be like, "All right, let's get things moving." And I would probably start aggressive enough like, "We got to get [ __ ] moving, right?" Like, and again, when you got a lot of drugs to throw at it, and I'm not, not a drug guy. I know a lot about fat loss stuff. Like I would know what to throw at that for damn sure. Um, and it wouldn't be Reditride, that's for damn sure. It's a good drug, but there's way easier, cheaper stuff than that. And in the middle of it was like, "You're still behind." There would only be one option. We're gonna do RFL. It is going to be the only way to even have a chance of getting you back on schedule will be to get six pounds of fat off you in the next two weeks rather than waiting six because you're a diet up, right? That would be the only way to do it. So I might, in that case, I mean, I might not. Like if he came to me and was like, "I'll pay you all the money." And I'd be like, "All right, cool. We're gonna RFL you for two straight months and then see where you're at and then do what we need to do." But the reality is that even as great of an idea or possibility as that might be in that, that case, I would also have realized early on talking to Ike that he doesn't mentally have what it takes to do it. Because, you know, RFL won't allow you to wrap your protein bars in tortillas or eat Captain Crunch after your training, you know, to carb up. You actually have to be able to like eat contest prep food, which means having the willpower to cook chicken and and tilapia or whatever [ __ ] meat you want to eat and actually steam vegetables like I do every night. Um, so yeah, it would be a tool for a tool, but it wouldn't be a tool that, that particular tool would have the ability to do. And and having known one of his, Ike's hypothetically previous coaches, his hypothetical previous coach said, "Yeah, Ike doesn't have what it takes." I mean, clearly. But that would be one way. Another way to do it, and I know coaches that have done that, they have told me, and I don't want to get too far into this, that like it seems to work a little bit better for for male than female competitors for reasons. And I don't know if that's how they're applying it or I mean, I would probably do something like RFL. I would probably just do like a 14-day UD2 cycle rather than straight. Like, you lose a few days, you know, of of dieting. But that helps to ameliorate some of the hormonal stuff at least. Um, I would also, again, and if we're going to do that, be like, "All right, you're going to be training four days a week for 30 minutes." And then if, like said, the weight training is free calorie burn, I'd say, "I don't give a [ __ ] go get your step meter, get your pedometer out, go outside and get a bit of 10. Go outside." Yeah, right. Well, exactly. So that would be another way to use that.

What if you're say, like, a track and field athlete, like you compete in the 400-meter dash and you want to drop some fat? Um, yeah, get it. It does. And it would, you can't really. When I wrote this, it wasn't aimed at any sort of performance athlete. It was aimed at just dieters. Yeah. And we'll come back to when it may or may not apply along with some of the other ideas that come from more the fitness subculture come from in just a second. With athletes, and this was not in that book, it's something that I do a lot in consultations and use frequently in general, but especially with athletes. That's when I would use an RFL as part of like an alternate day fasting or intermittent caloric restriction approach. I don't want to, like, we could talk for hours about that and I don't want to get too far off topic. But basically, so for example, I had a powerlifter a couple years ago, and in her offseason, she got way out of her weight class. She goes, "Look, I got however many months to, I gotta, I gotta make weight now." You can do moderate deficits every day, but I've had many strength power athletes report that their performance actually craters more doing that, right? You end up doing half-ass training because you're half-ass fed. I set up for just training four days a week and I said, "Okay, on four days a week, you're gonna get maintenance. You're gonna do three RFL days on non-training. You will get the same fat loss as if you did a moderate deficit seven days a week. You only have to suffer three days a week, and you will be able to sustain your training." She made her weight class, she lost zero strength, she [ __ ] her car, she F her re her rehydration, but that was separate. She lost no strength, she lost no performance. But that's a very severe. So RFL, same with UD2, right? Like when I wrote UD2, I wrote something that in hindsight was very wrong. Should never go below 1,200 calories a day because that was the belief at the time. Well, that's wrong. That where that comes from is below 1,200, you cannot get all micronutrients. Well, that's why we have a fat. That's why we have sores. Obviously, RFL can take you much lower than that depending on where your protein falls. So I mean, just going back to athletes, it almost sounds as if you would, that's sorry, yeah, you would quite recommend RFL traditionally conceived the way you outline it in the book for athletic populations? Not, not unless you were in a position where you could massively curtail your training. It's not the case for performance athletes. It would not. But you could modify it by having, you know, typically a 400-meter sprinter or a short sprinter might have three truly hard days and three or four lower intensity days. So will you get as rapid fat loss as doing it seven days a week? Of course not. But the compromise is that you can sustain your training. And even like, if I were to redo it, or if I were to say, write a book on on ADF and ICR, I would say, look, even for lean athletes, look, if you really, like, you want to maintain your training because you're addicted to the gym or whatever, like, I'm perfectly happy to get in and out of there in 20 minutes and get my work done. Like, yeah, you could very much just proactively modify RFL and go, "I'm going to RFL five days a week and eat at maintenance two days a week." You will get proportionally slower fat loss, but it may be more survivable and more sustainable, and your training may not suffer as much. I mean, I'll be honest, that's actually what I do. So coming out of COVID and everything else, my weight was up because it wasn't training and I was too busy, you know, coaching, uh, World National State Record Holder Sumi Singh, author of Becoming a Tough Mother or Mental Training for Tough [ __ ] Bu. Now, Su, Sui Singh, S N G. And I'm like, "Okay, I, so what I did, I had to get back in the weight room. So I was lifting twice a week, full body. And on those days, I would eat basically ad lib. I just wouldn't track calories. And I did RFL the other five days a week." It's very survivable because you only, the, the nice thing about ADF on day fasting or intermittent caloric restriction, you never have to be hungry. You never have to suffer for more than two, three days at a time, right? It's basically just a way, like it would be the modern way of implementing a refeed. And I don't use that terminology anymore.

Coming back to women, how would you modify RFL if it all for women who are menopausal? I don't think I would, honestly. I mean, the same, the same basic, you know, physiology still applies. You know, I mean, you, you will often hear, I hate to say claims because it it seems dismissive, but you're like, "Oh yeah, you know, I'm this, I've got PCOS and, you know, it's impossible for me to lose weight." And it's usually the same problems as always of, yeah, you're underestimating your true calorie intake, you're overestimating your activity. I mean, goofy [ __ ] happens, you know, at the menopausal transition, hormones go wacky, to use a technical term, and, you know, dropping estrogen can cause weight gain and body decomposition, loss of muscle and gain effect. Like, there's some weirdness that goes on. Make no mistake, but the calorie math still holds. And when you do studies with controlled calories, weight loss still absolutely occurs. It, you know, you can see drops in NEAT as hormone drops, but things are just kind of all over the map and and things do get a little strange. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't really. But, you know, strange things maybe a foot at the Circle K in that condition because like I said, perimenopausal hormones are all over the place. But not in such a way that RFL is contraindicated. Not, no, not this would be contraindicated any way I could think of that would like necessarily make it work better. Yeah, because really HRT is what kind of solves those problems.

Let's talk about vegans and RFL. Can't be done. Next. I mean, you'd have to live on protein powder. I don't, I don't, I don't think it could be done realistically. But my solution whenever people ask me, you know, what, how, how vegans can do X, Y, or Z is very simple. Don't be vegan. Vegan gains is not going to like this. He loved down Mike Israel [Music] video. Well, that was a good video. Yeah, I saw. Yeah, I, it was weird. I tried to find the link to. Does YouTube keep live streams? Can you go back and revisit those? He doesn't save them. Got it. I mean, yeah, there is no, there is no actual vegan food that would be pure enough protein to not have so many tag on calories. It would have to be done with protein powder. And I just don't see any realistic way of doing it. I mean, if you wanted to do it that way, I suppose. But I mean, that's the thing. All these people that are like, "Well, I'm vegan and I do." I make all the like, right, list all the supplements you take to make up for the inherent nutritional deficiencies of veganism. Show me the [ __ ] laundry list of 12 supplements you take that you cannot get from food. It's really sad. I think that it's so hard to do veganism right in terms of health-wise because ethically, I stand by it 100%. You know, sex-based differences. Often I will see women will come into my group and go, "Look, I've been doing RFL for two weeks and my weight's up." And I'll will ask them a very simple question, "Where are you in your menstrual cycle?" And they'll go, "Oh, I'm just about to start my period." I go, "That's why. Talk to me in three more days." Because with women who have a menstrual cycle or on certain forms of birth control, body weight can do weird [ __ ] during the month. So if you do RFL and do the two-week version because you're category one, it may look like you've lost nothing because of the water shifts that easily overpower the fat loss. Right? If you're a, if you're category one, or even a lighter category two, you may only be losing, you know, four pounds in two weeks of true fat. Women's water weight, and like way more than that before ovulation, or way more than like. So for women in that situation, you have to wait. You can only compare week one to week one, week two, week two. So like that can often do that. But if in the long term, if you've been on it for a month and you're adherent to it, and literally nothing has happened, something is either you're a night eater. I, I don't have an explanation that that person, you know, again, at some point, you have to just go, "Not going to work. Go do something else." Maybe you will be that person that's better off with more activity and higher calories. Can I explain why magic? It's best thing. You know, bioenergetic magic.

All right, let's talk briefly GLP-1 drugs because they have been a game changer. Do you think RFL plus one of these appetite control GLP-1 drugs could be the holy grail for fat loss and put you out of a job? Well, well, they might. Doesn't put you out of a job because you did the damn RFL. But yeah, anyway, just wanted to be. And the answer is, I mean, absolutely. That would be because I mean, again, for many people, RFL really isn't as horrible as it sounds. A lot of people get into rhythm and their hunger goes away. A lot of people, they want to eat their arm. And adding a GLP-1 to blunt appetite, which is most of what they do. Anybody that like thinks that they're doing more much more than that, Reditride, maybe energy expenditure, but it's mainly just suppressing appetite. Um, there have actually been a couple studies that did that. So well, they use V VLCDs badly set up because they always are. Well, one was, one wasn't. And but in one of them, so they used 650 calorie VLCD. They used that plus semaglutide, which is one of the earlier GLP-1s. And then they use semaglutide alone. This is basic nutrition advice. Semaglutide brand name is Ozempic, right? Yeah, it's Ozempic, Wegovy. And then Tepatide is Mounjaro, Zepbound. And Reditride doesn't have a name yet. We can, we have a name for it, but that's for our private correspondence. Yes. Um, Mike's Ike's non-magic pill. So call it that. So what? And so what was really interesting? So the, it was, it was a 12-week study. And so they escalated semaglutide over eight weeks. And then maintained it, right? So the semaglutide group only, over 12 weeks, lost like 13 pounds, which is not bad. About a pound a week. Okay, it's not great, but it's not bad, right? The VLCD group at about 650 calories lost 28 pounds, 13 kilos. Now, they didn't do body composition. Some of it was probably absolutely lean body mass, make no mistake. But it is what it is. It points out that over eight weeks or over 12 weeks, low calories stomp semaglutide flat.

Actually, that 28-pound loss is almost what semaglutide will do in a year by itself, and they did it in 12 weeks. Amazing. It's interesting, the VLCD plus semaglutide lost like one pound more than the VLCD alone over that time frame. Well, it's that semaglutide is only an appetite suppressant, so it's basically like it makes RFL easier, right? Because, and here's just so that makes sense. Okay, so what happened? What they actually sell, the semaglutide group reduced their calories from about 1,600 to about 1150, and that, if you do the math, that works out to about 13 pounds in 12 weeks, right? That's what sem alone will do, about 500 plus a little bit over 500 tons.

VLCD was a reduction of 1150 calories from like, actually like 1,800 to 650 with diet alone. Okay. Now, if semaglutide only decreases calorie intake spontaneously by by 500, and the diet has already brought it down by 1100, the semaglutide can't bring it down any further, right? It's not, it doesn't do that, right? That's why the semaglutide group lost less and why it didn't add to the results in terms of the weight loss. But it should have made it more sustainable in the long term. But, but the researchers didn't measure it. They didn't even ask him about hunger.

Now, at least over that, but the thing is, both groups lost the same way. VLCD and VLCD plus semaglutide both lost 28 pounds. That suggests that over 12 weeks, adherence was not a problem. But longer than 12 weeks, as the semaglutide really started to work, it would have been so much more sustainable. Got it. And to put this in perspective, there's a case study that I mentioned to you before we started talking. Woman with severe obesity, by which I mean 690 pounds, what's that? 320 kilos, 330 kilos, about there. 320 something like that. 26 weeks in the hospital on a VLCD, they gave her five weeks of L-glutide. And 4 kilos over 26 weeks on a liquid very low calorie diet. She lost 174 pounds, which is 80 kilos. 174 pounds, it's about 80 kilos. Yeah, 81.60, that's 79. Yeah, 79 kilos. Incredible weight loss, 25% of her body weight. Yeah, damn fantastic.

So, and, and without getting too deep into this, because that then raises the question, like, okay, would be the best way to do it? Because the way the GLP-1s work, you start at a baby dose so that you don't get blown out by it, and you escalate the doses typically every four weeks. So it really kicks in a little later on. Well, but see, there's huge variability. For some people, they immediately respond, and for others, it takes 20 weeks. Like, there's no way to know until you know, which is a problem. Some people are hyper-responders, and some people are non-responders.

What do you think explains that into individual variability? Uh, uh, oh God, I have a guess. I mean, it's not like physiological, though. It's more psychological. Oh, no, it's, I mean, well, have you can't separate the two? The speculation, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, speculation. To date, it could be related to membrane permeability due to elevated levels of cholesterol and statins. One group is looking at statins to see if they help. It might be related to the gut microbiota, because in the modern era, everything is related to the gut. That's Miles' research, right? It, I mean, in a fundamental sense, I think there's two predominant issues. One, obesity is multifactorial. Yes, the GLP-1 system is a big part of it, but that doesn't mean it's the cause in any given individual, right? If you're not, if that's not the limiting factor, that might not help, because you're not fixing the problem. If I may venture my theory, it's that GLP-1 is an appetite suppressant. That's entirely physiological, but the way in which we negotiate with our own individual appetites is very much, I would say, argue, a psychological thing. Oh, some people can kind of, they can be at ease with feeling a bit of hunger. Others feel a bit of hunger, and they want to eat everything in the pantry, you know? So, so I think that might explain. So I'm just, I'm just talking out of my eyes. I've never looked into the literature.

People often fall into that trap of like, "Oh, I'm taking the GLP-1, I don't have to care what I eat." I've seen, I saw someone online literally ask, "So if the GLP-1s control blood sugar, that mean I can eat all the candy that I want?" Like, this is, is your name Ike? Is Ike Misel? My chance, because that's that's an Ike Misel kind of question. I'll just let the drug do the work. So it could be, I think there's, I think there's a precision specific, because some people respond better to one drug than another. That's true in all treatments. Could be that, but I think in, in a general sense, some people, people's receptors are more responsive to anything, right? We know that some people have more responsive or more antigen receptors, some people are more insulin sensitive. It's entirely possible that all the neurons that are involved in this, for some people, may be more resistant. And some of this is at least indirectly supported by the fact that with every compound, higher doses generate fewer non-responders. Within any given drug, as the dose goes up, the percentage of non-responders goes down, which means you may simply need more to overcome that resistance. As well, with every increasing compound, the number of non-responders at the lowest doses goes down, and the same dose effect occurs, right? So with like semaglutide at the lowest dose, there's like, I don't know, there's a really large. With L-glutide, some people [ __ ] gained weight. With the early drugs, they weren't just non-responders, they gained weight. That's weird. But with, they were GLP-1 agonists, right? It was one of the early ones. It just wasn't, what the hell happened, right? Okay, okay. They just, they see the same thing in every diet study. You look at the numbers, right? And they're like, "Well, the average weight loss is one pound." But you're like, "Some people gained five kilos, and some people lost five kilos." There's this just this curve that happened on L-glutide. Presumably, the people who got more appetite suppression or were more attuned to the intervention, because they always give a diet intervention too, lost more. And those that weren't, gained. It happens in every study it's ever been done. But like with Retatrutide, for example, which is still in, in research stage, which is the most potent. Once you get to the, there's four doses, five, 10, 15, 20 milligrams. By the time you get to 15 milligrams, there are zero non-responders. Now, non-responders means less than 5% body weight loss. By the time you get to 15 milligrams, it reaches zero. Now, again, the higher weight losses, you're still seeing varying ranges. But with every better compound, there's less non-responders for any given compound. So it suggests that it's having to overcome some sort of. I mean, yeah, of course, it's behavioral. It's interacting with your, your behavior. Like, if you don't get a big appetite suppression, and you make the mistake of assuming, "Well, I can eat whatever I want because the drug will do the work," you may actually end up eating more. That happens. We know that happens with everything. When you give people a multivitamin, they often eat worse because they go, "Well, the diet, the pill will make me healthy." I, I, when you give people fat burners, they're like, "Well, I don't, I don't, I can eat whatever I want now." People do with diet soda. People do with sugar-free. It's why most studies are like, "Sugar-free foods don't cause weight loss." It's not because they don't cause weight loss, they do if they're reducing calorie intake. But when people go, "Well, I'm eating artificial sweeteners, so I can justify more of this," because humans are great at justifying our own [ __ ]. So, so yeah, there's just this huge variability. Meaning that if you were going to try to pair RFL with GLP-1, it might kick in immediately and might work great. It might not kick in for 16 to 20 weeks, and you don't know until you know, right? By which point the RFL diet on its own may have done its thing. Well, or made, yeah, exactly.

Now, this is the genius advice that the researchers give. This is true of all anti-obesity medications. Here's how you know when the drug doesn't work for you: if after 16 weeks, you've lost less than 5% of body weight, so you know it's not a good drug for you when it's completely failed after four months. I do not find this helpful. Yeah, not everyone has those four months, and that means you've wasted four months to accomplish. But again, it's a problem we have all drugs with, like with many psychotropic drugs. You give someone a medication, you wait two months, nothing happens. All right, now we got to take you off and let it wash out for a month and start you on a new drug and give you two months. You're now six months in and maybe still haven't found the right drug. But we're not at the point yet where we have precision medicine to go, "This is the right drug for you. This is the right drug for you. This is the right drug for you." You don't know till after the fact whether or not. And there's nothing that can be done about it, only except to say that most people at the higher doses will start to send, some will start to get a benefit. And as the drugs get stronger.

So how do you interact, how do you incorporate this with with RFL? First timeout, you don't know if you're a hyper-responder. Well, the one thing you don't do is escalate the dose more rapidly because you get massive side effects, or do what some people do and jump into higher doses right off the bat. Don't do that. You must start low and escalate. And one thing I've seen, this is super anecdotal, we're talking handful of people. Leaner individuals seem to need lower doses than others, presumably because their system is relatively more sensitive. Because we know that with developing obesity, there's inflammation in the brain, there's insulin, there's all these things that occur that either were there first or develop or both. That with leaner individuals, they're like, "Yeah, by the time I get to the second dose level, I can't eat a thing." It depends on the person, but that's like, said handful of people, that could be noise regardless.

So what do you do? Well, you could start G RFL immediately and hope that you're either a high responder or that it starts to kick in by the eight-week mark. Of course, if you only need eight weeks, then why? You know, by the time the drug will help with maintenance, and it's they've studied it for that repeatedly. A different study did VLCD for eight weeks, 28 pounds, and then added L-glutide for maintenance. And there's more to that paper, I don't have time for it. But that is another use for that. But again, you have to ask, did it kick in immediately for these people? Because let's say you're a non-responder, you diet for eight weeks, lose 28 pounds, and add the drug. If it doesn't kick in for three more months, you're going to regain during that three months, right? So in most cases, it makes the most sense to start it right with RFL. But there is a logic, and I told someone in my group this. I said, "Maybe what you want to do is start with a moderate deficit diet and start the GLP-1. When you feel the drug starting to kick in, then you move to RFL." That might be the best of both worlds, because you can do the moderate deficit before it kicks in, hopefully, and then you, once you really feel like, "Oh my God, my appetite's suppressed," boom, spice weasel, kick it up a notch. So that would be, there are options, basically just depending. Yeah, great, great.

So, yeah, it's interesting because like, yes, as phenomenal as the GLP-1s are, the reality is that over the short term, the VLCD actually is superior. Yes, PSMF would have been even better. Yes, over true comes the VLCD, but the earlier drugs, VLCD stomps it in terms of total weight loss. Did I immediately fly off the handle? Was this a trigger? Was this a problem? Identify the problems so that you can fix them going forwards, so that when you're ready to move to permanent maintenance in the long term, you will have already pre-identified. So, but metabolically, just didn't the effects that I thought it would. I've identified a fix as regards long-term weight maintenance that works really well for me, and it's using a food scale for every single meal and tracking my calories and macros with particular attention to my calories. And I take that damn food scale to restaurants, something of a joke, wherever I go. I mean, but I mean that it keeps me in check. Sure. And that's that, there's an awareness, there's a feedback issue. Without getting, we could talk about, you know, maintenance issues, but a couple things I recommend on top of the potentiality of you know, keeping in a couple of diet days. You need feedback. You got to keep weighing every day because what people do is they stop. Oh no, they stop getting on the scale. They put on what I call the fat blinders. Suddenly, like, and we know we, especially if you're training, right? You're like, "Yeah, I'm getting heavier, but it's probably muscle." Oh, the lies we tell ourselves. And suddenly three months later, you know, "Oh my God, I woke up five kilogram, five kilos fatter." No, you didn't. You ignored what was happening because you start, the lies we tell ourselves. You weigh every day, not only because you need the feedback and you average it, you do the whole thing, or at least a few times a week. Every time you step on the scale in the morning, it's a cue. It is a mental cue that, hey, even maintenance still requires attention, right? So, yeah, what you do is you say, "I'm going to set an upper maximum limit of weight regain." Right? It's very, the idea of of maintenance being this is very unrealistic. It's, it's a wave problem. Is that people lose and they lose, say, 10 kilos, right? And then they come off their diet and two, four, five, oh [ __ ]. Okay, you spent three months losing 10, you've regained half of it. Now you got to spend two more months taking it back off, and you go, "You know what? F fat and happy." So what you, an upper limit. And I usually recommend 1 to 3% over target weight. So if you end up at 75 kilos, you're going to use 1 to 3% of that 75, two kilos and change. Let's just split the middle, right? One and a half to three and a half pounds, call it two pounds, about one kilo, one and a half, whatever in that range. If your trend line body weight gets to that point, it's time to get together. The more quickly you catch it, the sooner you catch it, the easier it is. If you, you'll go from, "Oh, this will take me a few days of, yeah, RFL," to, "Okay, I need to do a full-blown extended diet." Exactly. If you catch it a kilo up, you go, "Okay, I'm letting it slip. Throwing a couple RFL days or keep them in proactively. Take that kilo back off. Maybe figure out what was going on." It's like, as I tell people, every one of us that's figured out long-term maintenance has our own set of rules. Yes. Got yours with the scale. I don't do that because I, I mean, I'm just too, too tired. I had a buddy years ago, and he decided he said, "I will never let my belt go beyond a certain hole." And that was his cue. When he was about to lose that hole, he knew it was time to tighten down his diet and get his training together. But you need objective feedback. Our eyes can lie to us. Our clothes can lie to us. Scale can't lie to you. So you set that upper limit. When you hit it, you get it because it, at most, if you're up a kilo, at most a couple of weeks of maybe, you know, of putting your nose to the grindstone, figure out what went wrong, what happened. Eventually, you will zone in on what the right rules, whether it's keeping in two RFL days every week, or one per week, or whatever it is, you have to practice it, and it does take time. So, right.

Okay, so to wrap up, long-term weight maintenance. Number one, you want an upper limit. Number two, you want feedback. It could be body weight, or it could be a given hole in a belt, or "I want to fit into this favorite item of clothing." Oh, crap, it's feeling a little too tight around my waist. I need to clean up. Yes. Occasional, yes, occasional diet days. Number three, either as a prophylactic or to keep you in check when needed. So you feel your dress getting a little tight, you feel your, you know, "Oh, I can't fit the, you know, belt buckle into the hole." Yeah, you clean up a little bit with the diet so that you don't have to do a full-blown. Sorry, I say diet, what I mean is you clean up with a few days of RFL so that you don't need a full-blown diet. Uh, number four, if you're a total neurotic like me, then you can do what I do, which is to weigh every meal. And that works finally for me because I'm crazy. Well, but that's just it. It just, it is so talked about. It is, you, that's what, if that's what works for you, great. The mistake would be in assuming that everyone else should do that or could do that. I mean, I had a body, my old training partner, he did the same thing. He took his food scale when he was in diet prep, and he would have them, he would ask them to not only not cook the chicken with oil, he would dip it in water just in case and pat it with it because he had to keep his fat to zero. But yeah, some people are crazy, and they need that level of detail, and other people don't want that. And keeping a couple RFL days in every so often allows them to not have to be crazy. Just depends on you. A little more of that could have helped Ike. Anyway, I'm really glad we went through that. Um, and that was the point that really, really hit home with me. So what I really tell people when consults is like, look, there's kind of two ways to approach maintenance. Like, I mean, hey, you got to track and you set an upper weight gain limit. And there's this other stuff that goes into it. I'm like, if you just want to eat at maintenance all the time, that's fine. If your weight goes up and hits a certain cut-off point that you've decided on, just add a couple RFL days in. You've already done them, you know how to do them, you've known that you won't die, except for that one person who could not eat bread, but everybody else can do it. Said that's completely legitimate. Said, or why not just proactively keep one in or two in per week? Yeah, which, which I've speculated. Well, I think that's two benefits. One of them is very speculative, which is that when we finish losing weight or losing fat and go to maintenance, it's this very nebulous area. Fat loss is a goal, weight gain is a goal, maintenance is this very nebulous thing, and we tend to lose focus. By keeping, I think, one diet day in a week, it keeps people in the mindset of like, "Okay, I can't just, you know, let everything go to pot because I'll just regain it." Yeah, that's speculative on my part. But more importantly, it creates a calorie buffer because at that point, weekly calorie and weekly calorie averages are more important, right? Let's say that on average, your RFL day creates a 500 calorie per day deficit. You do one of those a week, that's a 1500 calorie buffer. You would have to go 250 calories over maintenance every other day of the week to break even, and you would have to go more than that to gain weight. At any rate, can it be done? Sure. Now, if you keep two RFL days in, that's a 3,000 calorie per week deficit or buffer, rather. You would have to go 600 calories over maintenance every day of the week, every other day of the week, to break even, much less to regain. And you're only going to do that wrapping protein bars and tortillas and eating Captain Crunch after training. Can it be done? Sure. Go to the China Buffet every day. [ __ ] yeah, I could do it. I could do it in a heartbeat. But that's the easiest maintenance. And then on the off chance, on the off chance you start your regain, on the off chance, just throwing a couple more, take it right back off. Done until you figure out. So this actually, just because this is interesting, this is like the first consult I ever did. And they had, you know, they'd done the up and down and up and down thing like everybody, like we've all done. Um, and they were also very data driven. I can always tell. I can tell when the people I'm doing consults with are, uh, anal retentive neurotics. And I don't mean that in a negative way, it just is, right? That's just who they are. They, they are accountants, they are engineers. They are, I can always see it in their face. And I'm like, "You want me to turn on screen sharing so you can show me your spreadsheets?" They're like, "Yeah, I want to show you my graphs." I mean, whatever it is, what it is, right? I, I work, I meet them where they are. People that aren't like that, I don't do this. And, you know, so they're showing me their thing, and the way would come down, and it would come back up, and all this other [ __ ]. And what they told me, they were like, "Look, on the weekend, like, they're like, I'm very all or nothing. And like on the weekends, I go and I, I cook with my father-in-law, and I'm not gonna count calories." So during the week, super rigid, super rigid schedule, get up, cardio, work, weight train, strict. Said, "All right, cool." So the initial diet was six days of RFL and one day of cook with your father-in-law. And then we got to maintenance. What they actually wanted to do, and what we set up, and this is very atypical, but I don't give a [ __ ], right? Like the traditional nutrition person would look at what I'm about to say and go, "Are you [ __ ] crazy?" And like, "Well, yes, but doesn't change the fact that I'm right." And what we set up for them, I said, "Five days a week during the week, you're going to stay on RFL, and then on the weekends, you can do whatever you want." And if even that doesn't work, if you start to regain weight, go from five RFL and two maintenance to six and one. Take it back off until you figure it the [ __ ] out. How did you go in the end? Um, I didn't hear from them again for a few years later, and that's about when the world caught fire. So I don't really know. Um, but I mean, it would have, like, it failed. That screwed everybody up. But as far as I can tell, while, while they were able to do it, worked fine because it fit their life, it fit their psychology, it fit their schedule. It's just at that point, it's just weekly. Like, yeah, most people go like, "Oh, learn to not, you know, overeat when you're cooking with your father-in-law." Or maybe just set it up and work, work with what you got, right? Like, you can't, you can't put a square peg in a round hole, or whatever. Like, I'm just like, "Look, we're gonna work with who you are and what your situation is, and if this is what it is." So, so like, you can do that. That would be another way of like, that would be a maintenance approach. So like, there are ways that from the strict RFL of such and such, so many weeks with the strict episode, which can work. Here's another console I'd love to bring this guy out. My favorite story. I used to tell this in my group. Repeat came to me about 300 pounds, about 140ish kilos, 135, 35% body fat. And it's going to Italy to be with family in like nine months, and he's like, "I got to get lean before I go." So I set up RFL, gave me option, you know, to do maintenance days or free meals or whatever. This dude did RFL straight for like seven plus months, no break, no maintenance days. Like, talk about a man of sheer will and discipline. He hit 210 or 220. He lost like 70 or 80 pounds, some just ungodly amount of weight before he got had to travel. Then funny, like I've consulted him like nine or ten times, we talk all the time, it's been years. And he got to Italy, he's like, "Oh my God, I'm so scared of carbs. I don't know what to do." And then I'm just, just like, "Just breathe. Just, it's okay. It's okay." Like, number one, they don't eat in Italy the way we eat in the US. Like, just trust me. And I go, "You're gonna be walking all the time." Like, "Just, it's fine." And you can keep these RFL days in. And he did. Like, every time I heard about him, he's like, "Dude, the more I raise my carbs, the leaner I get." I don't know what's going on. I'm like, "Because he was still, and years later, like he trains hard three days a week in the weight room, and he does RFL four days a week, and maintenance three days a week to train." And he just keeps protein the same. He just brings stuff in and takes it. That's a lot. That's just his lifestyle. And he's still, he's like 210, low teen, single digit body fat year-round. So that would be, I mean, I'm not saying again, I'm not saying this is what everyone should do, but there are ways that you could modify the strict long-term RFL. But for some people, under certain situations, you got a ton of fat where you're not going to suffer so much. Maybe you do four straight weeks. Maybe you get to week four and go, "This is easy," and you just keep going until you feel like you're gonna crack, and then you take a maintenance day or you, or whatever. Even now, for long-term weight maintenance, be like, "Look, there's no law that says you can't keep an RFL day in, even at maintenance." Right? We usually think of maintenance as 100% maintenance every day, but why? There's no law.

Yeah, I remember in the introduction, you wrote a sort of guarded passage that I understand you would now take back if you could book over again, which is basically, you know, um, I'd love to live in a world where nobody crash dieted, everyone followed safe and sane dieting strategies, where there's a kind of implication that RFL is neither safe nor sane, being a crash diet of sorts. It was the same dumb [ __ ] I believed the same dumb [ __ ] then that people still believe now. The difference is, I know better, and the data actually, in some ways, again, with some new on, says the opposite. There's this belief that, "Oh, aggressive diets are always bad." And that's, well, like so many things, it's contextually true. It depends on the things that it depends on, which is what it depends on, which is who are we talking about? What is the situation? How is it being set up? How is it being implemented? Is there an exit strategy? Saying X is bad is just not quite nuanced enough. There are times when it is absolutely the wrong approach. There are modified desperately. There are times when it is completely appropriate. And there are times, like, you know, when you're behind on your contest prep, like, like Israel, for example, they may be mandatory to have any chance of coming into shame. So it's just a matter of, you know, and again, I, I tend to look at things in a more contextual way. So I, I wrote that book as, like I said, at the time, I was more of a, "If you're going to do it, at least do it right." Now, I would certainly update that to that, that verbiage in terms of who might use it when or when not. But there is undoubtedly a wrong way to do an aggressive diet. Like, I think the, the scare to an extent was legitimate because, you know, there were these diets, well, these very low calorie diets or abbreviated to VLCDs, we'll use that later, where they didn't contain enough essential nutrients. Like you talked about in your book, this last chance diet, which I looked into, it's absolutely fascinating and kind of sad. It was like a liquid protein, very low calorie diet, basically the worst possible way you could do RFL. Well, at least there was an emphasis on protein, but anyway, the liquid protein formulation didn't have certain essential amino acids in it. I don't know which ones. They use collagen protein, which has a zero. Yeah, it has a zero BV. It cannot support it. It is one of the few, literally a zero biological value or PE, or whatever. That's right. Yeah, they use the cheapest and the single worst protein they could have used. On top of which, they didn't provide electrolytes, which is critical. Very low carbs. So there were two things that seemed to have occurred, which is that one, people got electrolyte imbalances, but people actually saw like organ tissue breakdown because they were getting literally zero protein. Yeah, the last chance, but not in the way they intended. And people died. People died. There's a 1979 paper on it examining why 17 people died following this diet from, I think, cardiac issues. Yes. So it was an electrolyte question, an essential amino acid question. Yes. It was absolutely. But, but, but, but there are other terrible ways to do it that you still see go. When I, when my blood pressure feels low, I'll go read the women's magazines, the [ __ ], the like grocery store checkout. It's like, "Lose 37 pounds in 14 days." Because I just, like, when I got to get angry, and it's always ridiculous. Like, this or you'll see, "Oh, the cabbage soup diet," or broth diets, or water fasting, or non-water fasting. The truly dumbest [ __ ] I've seen recently. Yes, badly set up crash diets are absolutely terrible, and most of them are. But that's neither here nor there. It tends to be stated across the board, aggressive deficits are bad for various reasons that we can talk about. Well, your training suffers. Yeah, if you're a numbskull and don't cut your volume, for God's sake. I mean, that would be another one. If someone was like, if someone was like, "I'm addicted to training." Well, number one, I would say, "Your psychological needs do not determine physiological reality," because they don't, right? But if you're simply not going to change your training, then I'm not going to give you the diets that's going to work because you're going to [ __ ] it up. So I mentioned the, the, in the last video we did, I mentioned one of Mike Isel's reasons for not wanting to do an aggressive. And I, oh, yeah, yeah, Ike, my apologies, has no 10, 10% discount on L's website. So Ike goes, "Well, I, I got his reason wrong." He goes, "I, what I thought said was, you lose muscle when you do an aggressive diet of PSMF." What he actually said was, "All this weird stuff happens with body water." That was the first thing. Number two, your training energy goes to [ __ ]. Those were the reasons he gave. I could just not eat. I could just straight up not eat, or or just eat protein. I've done that before for weeks on end. And, and if all that worked, it would work. But it doesn't because your training energy goes to, uh, and all this other crazy stuff happens with body water. Uh, so it just, it's not the best idea. Okay, I mean, yeah, you might. What I said about, I, I gave a rebuttal of my own in post-production. One, as for the body water issues, like, so what? You can just reintroduce some carbs one to two weeks out of the show and stabilize. You know, that that is entirely controllable, even when you're on gear. And as for the reduced training energy, well, why is Mike weight training 10 times a week in the first place? Contest prep, I train with weights a lot. 10 times a week. I walk 12,000 steps a day, and I train Jiu-Jitsu and all the stuff. Yes, like a more well-thought-out routine could mitigate that issue. Yes, and not overtrain you and not get you injured. Well, the other thing is, like, did he expect it to be easy? Contest prep, like every competitor that actually gets in shape complains about training at some point. Sure. It's, it's a fact. Like, even, even with a reduced volume routine, like what you should be doing on RFL, you're still going to run into some tough workouts. Sorry. I mean, yeah, sorry. It's hard to get into. I mean, it's, it's tough to get good at stuff. I mean, sorry. Um, oh, speaking of, I got a great comment on Mike's, that is Ike's video. "It would only take me a year to become an authority in the field in which you think you're good." But it would say things that, uh, that really got on his [ __ ] and, um, things like, "You just need to learn to put the fork down." And like that. And what I wanted to say is, "I still want to reach out to them and say, you've never met anyone with as much willpower as me. And whatever it is you think you're good at in your life, I'd probably take about a year and become an authority in the field in which you think you're good." It's like, "Okay, so why didn't you do that in bodybuilding too?" Mean, I mean, true, but I mean, that's a good point. Um, that's awesome. That's hilarious. So, yeah, a few things. I mean, yeah, I mean, believe it or not, Sumi did have to do hard workouts, which is a big part of why, you know, she did the work and ended up writing her book, Mental Training for Death Tough Mother, available on Amazon, because, yeah, especially the way I coach, her workouts range from hard to, "Oh my God, unsurvivable." I mean, even my, okay, my speed skating coach, because speed skating is one of the hardest sports, I know every athlete says that, but every speed skating workout is hard. There's no such thing as a low intensity. You can do low intensity bodybuilding, you can do low intensity, you can do low intensity speed skating. He said, "A good workout is one in which you just exclaim, 'Oh my God.'" And a great workout is one in which you ask God to take you from this Earth to make the pain go away." And he wasn't wrong. But her, her peaking workouts would have killed most people. Yes. Sorry, Ike. It's hard. It just, even with all the drugs, it's, it's should be easier with all the drugs, and yet still here we are. So there's a couple things about that, and I want to come back to the muscle loss thing, because that's usually the criticism. As far as the body water thing, yeah, it's water only matters on contest day. So who gives a [ __ ]? This whole thing, bodybuilders are again, this is why I don't deal with them, right? They're like, "I'm 12 weeks out and I'm holding water." And it's keeping your joints healthier. This is, I knew a guy years ago, a very, uh, unsuccessful natural back in the day, who would forget to diet, but he would start taking his diuretic pills 12 weeks out. What? Okay, he's a great guy, he just didn't know what he was doing. But he didn't claim to be an expert either. That was the difference. He just didn't know what he was doing. And this was the '90s, the internet wasn't a thing. He didn't know any better. Water only matters on competition day. I mean, yeah, bodybuilders want to look great four weeks out. Although Ike, I mean, if Ike didn't look good on stage, he sure didn't look good four weeks out. I also remember Ike claiming one, that his body holds water differently than other people. I also have quite unique physiology, which takes me like two or three days of water depletion to look my best. And almost everyone I talked to at the time was saying like, "Water depletion is overrated. You don't need to peak." Which for people on drugs and people with my physiological response is like, backwards, total nonsense. And so I ended up caring 20 pounds of body water on stage. That's thoroughly embarrassing. That's why he needed a new diuretics coach. It's on his Instagram a couple years ago. Yeah, about that. Remember? Yeah, because he's a unique flower. But yeah, okay. Yeah, I can cause some weirdness with water. I've talked about that. I've talked about the whooshes, which everyone says is not a thing, but it's absolutely a [ __ ] thing. And water retention. We talked about why. And like, yeah, and do a one-day carb load, and it drops right off. So what's the issue? That's a non-criticism. It only matters on competition day. And as a pro, he should have had the diuretics to do it. Um, but his diuretic prot was only 20 years out of date. So I'm not surprised. The training thing. Well, he's approaching it from the wrong direction, because of course he is. Right? This is something that, that, uh, your listeners probably know. Brock, who's a buddy of mine, Brock Shane, and I talked about this, and about training and contest prep and cardio and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the way he looks at it is, well, when you're looking, you look at the goal, and what is the goal? And the goal of contest prep is getting ripped. I mean, yes, you don't want to lose muscle, like, yes, there's a, but the primary goal of this exercise is to get ripped. What you do in training should reflect that goal. My buddy Dan John, who I mentioned, same thing. And he's like, "Look, trying to lose fat, you don't do yoga. Like, you don't stretch, right? You pick what's going to get you there." And it's like, "Well, if your goal is fat loss, the deficit is primary. Sufficient protein should be, man, is mandatory as far as I'm concerned. But like, weight training is not what's going to get it done, especially if you got every anabolic in the F world to prevent muscle loss. Starting from, 'I want to train 20 hours a week in the gym in the weight room on prep,' argue, 'I'm not going to set a sufficient deficit to get lean.' Is ass backwards. Now, I'm not saying again, I'm not saying automatically do RFL or automatically do aggressive dieting, but saying that a given diet is bad because it won't let you train obsessively far in excess of what you could ever need when you might as well just be doing the hour grind on the treadmill is missing the point. The diet is primary to the training. Now, again, like we talked about, for a performance athlete, the training is primary, and the diet must, um, yeah, it's not, I know what you're trying to say. I can't think of a 25-cent word that I want to use, but like, basically, like you have sublimate. Is the word I'm looking for, right? For a performance athlete, the diet must sublimate to the training requirements. For a bodybuilder, the training must sublimate to the diet requirements, period. Because deficit is way more important than using the three lateral machine R that Ike has in his $250,000 gym. That's useful [ __ ] for that much money. For two of those machines, could have gotten a consult with me and maybe gotten in shape. Not that I would coach him. You mentioned he could get a meal prep service too. Oh, I mean, for God's sake, if you got, if he's got that much money, and I know he does, and that's perfectly fine, like, whatever he, why not just [ __ ] pay someone to make his meals? What level of hubris when you live? I mean, yes, I guess he truly believes he has more discipline than any person, while he's eating a [ __ ] bowl of Captain Crunch post-training and wrapping protein bars and tortillas. Like, for God's sake, hire a meal prep company to bring you chicken breast, broccoli, and rice, like every [ __ ] other human has ever used. Like, okay, look, we can argue the lore of contest prep until the cows come home. I can make all my arguments for flexible dieting. We can talk, we can argue about that till the end of days. And as much as I don't like the trit, success leaves cues. Success leaves cues because that people use that to defend what they like and ignore it when they don't like something, right? People free. But regardless of that, okay, we know what causes fat loss. A deficit. We know what's what prevents muscle loss. Protein. We know all these things about nutrition. It's 2024. We, we know these things. There's no debate about this anymore. And we know what has worked for nearly 60 years of competition bodybuilders. I mean, yeah, were there variations? Sure. So they did tune-in water back in the '70s. They did low carb, high carb, low fat in the '80s. You know, we've seen all these variations, but it's always been basically that with minor variations for any given individual. Some have used flexible eating for naturals, others don't like it and don't use it. The people who get into shape all follow the same basic template, except for Ike, because he apparently knows better than every other competitor in the world without having an [ __ ] like me telling them how many calories to eat or what to do. Like, somehow they figure it out. And yet our PhD expert, "I can be better than you in your field within a year," can't do it in 15 years. Phenomenal stuff. Phenomenal stuff. Yes, all I had to do is hire, hire a meal prep and say, "Feed me 400 calories of this much protein, carbs, and fats, and bring me food." And that's all it would have taken. But apparently he doesn't have the discipline. I mean, you got the discipline to buy two more lateral raise machines, but not pay a meal prep company. Phenomenal. Phenomenal stuff. Okay, so one more thing. The idea that is prevalent in the industry that aggressive diets cause muscle loss, because that is a very common criticism. And I am told before I get into the details that Meno Henselman, super douchebag supreme, by the way, just for people who have not heard this story, many years ago, I criticized one of his articles, and his first response to me was, "Ly, or are you off your meds again, Meno?" If you watch this, eat a [ __ ]. He apparently told people in his, he's got a certification, you know, to teach them, because I mean, who better than a statistician to teach a nutrition course, and a bad statistician at that. He apparently claims that he did my RFL and lost 100% muscle. So if you're like 10% body fat, a true 10% body fat as a guy, and you go into 50% energy deficit, you are almost certainly going to lose muscle mass. We see quite clearly that excessive energy deficits, especially at low body fat levels, cause muscle loss and pretty much prevent the ability to recomp successfully. A physiological impossible. There is no study that's ever, there is no situation ever where you will lose pure muscle, ever. Well, okay, that's not true. When you are 4% and start into death with no food and no protein, your body will start to eat organ protein to try to prolong life. That's not a normal situation, and certainly not for him. And I think there's probably two reasons that he claimed that, which I'll come back to. Here's where this idea comes from. Well, it comes from two things: one, science, and one, I think, misunderstanding. So we go back to, want to say, the late '70s, early '80s. There's this guy named Gilbert Forbes. And it's always interesting to me, researchers always have like that hard on for like one thing. Like this, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be the one that really. The guys that study like poo, like the microbiota, and they're like, "Yeah, we studied poo samples." At what point in your life do you go, "You know what? I want to study poo." What series of life choices lead you to that? Unless maybe you're German. Okay, let's not go down that way. All right. Gilbert Forbes was the body composition guy. This is all he did. And he wrote this book called Human Body Composition. And what he did is he aggregated all the data on everything to date. And anyone who's heard of, you know, the P ratio, which has to do with the ratio of protein lost to body weight, that he wrote a lot about that. He was the one that showed a number of things.

One that initial body fat percentage percentage predicted the proportion of total weight that came from lean body mass. That's he's the guy that put that together, right? On average, it's assumed that 25% of total weight loss will come from lean body mass. That comes from his work. Higher body fat percentages, it's lower. In C curve, it can reach 25% at the lower body fat. And I've written about that for years because at one point, the UT atin had the book that he wrote. So being me, I photocopied the entire thing because, of course, I did. I've got, I've got it in PDF format now, but I, I did. I wouldn't photocopy the entire book. I did that all the time.

He also showed, well, and that data has been really reanalyzed in modern years, that that number because a lot of it, he was aggregating a lot of studies, including like diet studies and this and anorexia studies and a lot of stuff. They've gone back and other researchers have reanalyzed the Forbes Rule and shown that it's a little bit more nuanced than that. But neither here nor there, relevant to this discussion, one of the things he showed was that larger calorie deficits, more aggressive dieting, cause more lean body mass loss. Haha, you lyall. The science is there. But here's, here's what's going on. And we already actually touched on this early on. I know what you're gonna say next. But yeah, keep, keep going. Yeah, of course. You know, you know, yes. You know what I'm gonna say next. Listeners, can you predict, you know, what I'm gonna say next?

The issue, Mike has no 10, lowercase discount. Mike has no 10. All lowercase. The issue was that all of these very low calorie intake studies were like 50% protein and 50, like 50 grams of protein. It wasn't the low calories per se that was the issue. It was the incorrect nutrient intake on those low calories that was causing the problems, which, you know, just like the early VCDs, which is probably where that data was coming from. So the conclusion is correct. Contextually, it's right for the wrong reason. Yes, extremely low calories cause more lean body mass loss if it doesn't allow sufficient protein intake or doesn't contain sufficient protein. That's again, why I set up my Modified PSMF by starting with protein and going bottom up instead of starting with calories and going back down. Because if I say you're on 400 calories, at most that's 100 grams of protein per day. That might be enough if you're cat 3, not exercising, and it's not enough if you're cat one in weight training. So I go, that's why I go backwards. Where people get confused. So that's where that idea comes from from a scientific standpoint.

But here's where I really, here's where the other part that I think it comes from is this seeming non-standing. And I'm seeing this in clinical researchers that lean body mass and skeletal muscle mass are not synonyms. Okay? The two, the two, uh, when we talk about body composition, the two components model, we have fat mass, subcutaneous fat, visceral fat, essential fat, and we have everything else, technically fat-free mass. There's a technical distinction between fat-free mass and lean body mass that I don't make because nobody cares. That lean body mass includes water, glycogen, minerals, organs, connective tissue, bone, blood, anything that's not fat is lean body mass. And it also includes skeletal muscle mass. And the point that I made in a different context, on average, of your total lean body mass, 40 to 40, 40 to 45% is skeletal muscle. You'll see up to 50 in very highly trained athletes. 40 to 45%. The other 50 to 55% is not skeletal muscle.

So when you, like we talked about, you cut all the carbs out of your diet, you lose five, 10 pounds of water in two days. If, if you were to get on a DEXA or bioelectrical impedance, it would say that you lost 10 pounds of lean body mass. It's not muscle. If you take a big poo, that will show up as lean body mass loss. Glycogen is lean body mass. When you deplete glycogen, that carries water out because glycogen binds water. They're making this [ __ ] up in the GLP-1 studies because you people go, oh, GLP-1s cause 40 to 60% muscle loss. No, they cause 40 to 60% lean body mass loss, just like every other badly set up diet. Actual skeletal muscle mass is nowhere close to that. There's even a paper, and I'll send you the reference, it's hilarious. Basically, this group was like, it's, it's something like, uh, hang on, let me see if I can find it because the title is funny as hell. Fundamental body composition principles provide context for fat-free and skeletal muscle loss with GLP-1 re-agonists treatments. Basically, these researchers wrote this paper that said, well, I would interpret is, look, morons, you're confusing lean body mass and muscle mass. They put it in slightly more scientific terms. But they, and that's the other mistake.

So you take someone like Ike or Menow and they go on RFL and they lose five pounds and they flatten out and they deplete their muscle glycogen and they drop water weight. And because they don't understand, through incompetence or just because they don't like me, the difference between lean body mass and muscle mass loss, they go, oh, I lost 100% muscle. No, you lost a bunch of lean body mass. And guess what? As soon as you carb load, you'll gain 10 pounds of lean body mass. And I had this hilarious book one time, still got it up there somewhere. I forget the title. And oh, it's in my garage. And the guy was like, I'm gonna tell you how to gain seven pounds of muscle in three days. Right? Cool story, bro. And all he did was depletion into a carb load. Yeah, you can gain seven pounds of lean body mass. I once got an AR in the early creatine days. They were trying to argue that the creatine weight gain was muscle and not lean body mass. And I went to the NCA conference once to like the EAS booth and took that issue up with him. And he adamantly said, no, no, no, it's muscle. M. I go, you don't understand that water is not muscle. Really, it's, it's, it's water retention. No, you have a product to sell. Oh, yeah. EAS sold creatine. They were the first. F. I'm like, science says you're an idiot. I mean, even DuShane, as brilliant as he would have made that mistake. And he would be like, he even said he was like, yeah, you, you inevitably lose muscle when you diet. When you, you do contest prep. And there were a number of things there. One, he actually was locked into one gram per pound of protein, which is too little. But also he had guys that were going from heavy androgens and dropping a bunch of water and flattening out. And because he was just like, oh yeah, when you carb load, like if you had monounsaturated fats, you, you get so much better muscle regain. No, dude, your carb. It's lean body mass gain. It's water and glycogen. It's not, it's not muscle.

The difference is Dan had a master's in, uh, theater, not a PhD in exercise science. In Ike's case, or degree in statistics in Menow's case. So I think that's where people, they don't understand. They're like, oh, but I'm, I'm flat and I've lost five pounds, but my body fat's not down. It must be muscle loss. Carb up. Just do one day carb up. They'll come back and then some. Said I could swing three and a half kilos in two or three days with low carbs and a carb up. Easy. Doesn't matter. And even if you're worried, and again, that's where bodybuilders get neurotic. Oh my God, I look. They're six weeks out. Like, I'm flat and I'm losing muscle and I feel terrible. Dude, it only matters on contest day. And this again, this is why I don't work with bodybuilders because I can't deal with neurosis. And it's like, fine, fine. I'm tired of you complaining. Do a two-day carb load. Wait a day. You look great. And now I got to listen to you on for the next three weeks. So I think that's where that comes from. Yeah, if calories means insufficient protein, you will lose muscle. That's not how I do it because that's dumb. If you don't understand the difference between lean body mass and skeletal, because skeletal muscle mass is very hard to measure, but lean body mass is not a good proxy for this. Said connective tissue, bone, mineral density, water, glycogen, poo, minerals, that will all count as lean body mass loss and show up on a DEXA or a BIA. Doesn't mean it's muscle loss. Yeah, it's very important that it doesn't mean it's not muscle loss. Don't, don't get me wrong. But it's not, it's C. I mean, I'm sure I guarantee you in the GLP-1, in the GLP-1 studies, they are losing muscle because they're not getting enough protein. But there's also some evidence that there maybe due to changes in intramuscular triglycerides and changes in the quality of the muscle. But that's neither here nor there. Not saying that all that lean body mass, that none of it's muscle. Right? I'm not making that claim. What I'm saying is it's not 60% muscle loss. It's 60% in some studies, lean body mass loss in people that are carrying extra connective tissue, water, glycogen, minerals, and in essentially body. But yeah, so that's, I think that's where this idea comes from. Yeah, it's, I, it's very important to draw that lean body mass, skeletal muscle mass distinction. And I can't believe how many people, even people who are very immersed in the bodybuilding world, just don't understand it.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I remember the lean body mass thing was funny because, you know, back when we were arguing about the FFMI, yeah, like, oh, this 30% body fat has, he's got an FFMI over 25. I go, if you go read Pope's work, he was talking about people under a certain body fat percentage because you diet these guys down, you diet a sumo down from 400 pounds, or you diet this football player at 30% body fat down and he loses all that connective tissue, water, and glycogen. I guarantee you. Like, you do the math, right? You're like, all right, he's, you know, 300 pounds at 30% body fat, that is 90 pounds of body fat, 90, 42 kilos. Diet is ass down to 10%. He's gonna be about 215, 220 at 10% body fat and he's gonna have a maximum fat-free mass of 100 kilos, like they've always seen in every study ever. Right? All Pope's work was in relatively lean individuals. None of this counts. So yeah, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. Not to mention that it, you could technically start your prep later and just go more aggressively, right? You're gonna end up at the exact same place.

Now, okay, so there's a paper people like to invoke by Gar that looked at this, right? I'm sure you've read it. And she's one of the few, I want to say she, they are one of the few people that are studying lean athletes nutritionally. And what they did is they put one group on a big deficit to achieve, God, I don't know, 1.5% weight loss per week, some of those dumb percentage things I don't particularly care for. The other one was at like half percent, right? So much more moderate deficit. And they looked at fat loss, they looked at muscle gain, performance gain. And what they saw was that the smaller deficit took longer to reach their goal, obviously, but they gained a little muscle during that time period. Was the hard deficit got to their goal faster, but didn't gain any muscle? Aha, Ly's full of [ __ ]. I mean, I might be, but there's some things that got forgotten about this paper. Okay, number one, these were all lower body athletes. The muscle that was gained in, in the moderate deficit group was upper body in athletes that were not lifting weights for their upper body. They were no gangs. Those don't count, right? But there was the other thing. All right, so let's say, and I don't remember the numbers on this, like the moderate deficit group took, I don't know, a month to get to where they needed to be fat loss wise. The hard deficit group got there in like two weeks. Again, the numbers, what I'm saying is wrong, and I'm not going to pull up the paper because I don't care enough. We're talking concepts. But then they quit looking at the hard, at the hard diet group. What if the hard diet group spent the next two weeks training their ass off? I bet they would have gained more muscle back because fast diets get you there so you can get back to real training rather than having piss ass training for two months. You can have training for two weeks and then get back to real training for six weeks. And that's why people in my group use it for mini cuts. Something quickly that I think is pretty dumb is this idea that you shouldn't start out a diet aggressively from the gate. You should ease into it so that you don't experience the pitfalls of metabolic adaptations or whatever. Because the argument is, oh, if you start aggressive, then you have nowhere to go. There's an element of truth to that. But well, let's talk about the metabolic rate thing because that is another off-held criticism of aggressive diets. Oh, well, that will crash your metabol, your metabolism sooner, hormonally, and blah, blah, blah. And that's actually not wrong, necessarily, is it? Just because you reach your destination sooner because you're losing fat faster? Exactly, right? Who gives a [ __ ]? Yeah, you can have less of an effect of metabolic rate and lose fat slower. Yeah, lose fat faster. Either way, it amounts to the exact same thing. And there's actually, there was a paper, and I'd have to look to find it because there's this thing, it's like, oh, you, they wanted to find out when you bring people back to maintenance, is there a difference in their ending energy expenditure between aggressive and moderate diets? Right? Because you end up, let's say you've got two people, same place, right? One diet's aggressive, one diets moderately. And at the end of it, they end up the exact same place, right? They just do it a different. This person comes, boom. This person comes down gradually. When you measure it when they're at maintenance, it's identical after the diet is over. So yeah, I always had an intuitive sense that would be the case without having looked at the. And like, okay, great. So like, let's say you do a moderate deficit, you 25% def, just throw some theoretical numbers out that are made up. So you do 25% deficit, typical moderate deficit diet. And you know, you're getting whatever, a 5% reduction in or 10% overall reduction energy expenditure, net 15% deficit. So these are made-up numbers. Cool. So you do a 75% deficit, you would have to get a 60% reduction in energy expenditure, which has never happened in the history of ever, to get the same 15% net. Now, those are made-up numbers and that's not how this works. But, but there's a limit to how far metabolic adaptation can occur. There is a cap on it. Once the deficits beyond a certain point, it doesn't matter. So no, it doesn't make a difference. But I think it's just like, and again, there's the muscle loss thing. There's the reason you're muted and smiling. You need to go. I can't hear you. You're muted. Just, uh, my, uh, girlfriend brought me lunch. It's a su, eggs on some whole meal bread and some pickles. I realize I'm torturing the viewers of this whatever screw podcast. I'm sorry. T. Whatever I ate during the last one, I was eating a protein bar because I trained that day. So I'm like, I'm not gonna miss my calories on my eat day. Like I don't care on RFL days. But there was no way in hell. The things I had to edit out, folks, you have no idea. I did a podcast once and I forgot I didn't put pants on. So I was in boxers and I got up. They had the, they're like, they, I got up and walked around in front of my camera in boxers. So whatever. Yeah, yeah. Sure. Fit subculture. And we've addressed some of them, you know, we've addressed there's the metabolic rate thing, which is wrong. But again, the whole meal frequency thing is wrong too. They still be like, oh, if you skip a meal, metabolism slows down. Actually, if you fast for four straight days, your metabolism goes up a little bit because we're not mice and we're not rats, and that's not how it works in humans. Um, I mean, if you're a hummingbird, miss a meal, you die. And if you're a rat and you miss a meal, that's the equivalent of like three days for a human. In humans, metabolic doesn't change for like four days of total fasting. You actually get a big SNS output. And so same thing with aggressive dieting. Oh, well, your metabolism goes down faster. Yeah, maybe, but you lose fat faster and get to come off the diet sooner. And as soon as you go to maintenance, all of it is a wash. So it's six to one, half does the other. Doesn't matter.

To picture this goes back to something we should have talked about four hours ago. You can fix in post. So one of the criticisms of of crash dieting, of aggressive deficits, is that rapid, rapid weight loss makes it more likely to rebound. And actually, the research says the opposite. Faster initial weight loss is associated with better long-term success. Now, one interpretation would be that the faster, rapid weight loss is what's causal. However, we know that some people are hyper-responders to diet or drugs. It may simply be that the people who are more like, more like that, the people who have faster initial losses for either behavioral physiological reasons are more likely to see long-term success. That's the confound, right? It may not be that, oh, if I take someone who's had no success and put them through rapid weight loss, they're more likely to succeed. The people who su, basically, the people who succeed are more likely to succeed. Yeah, which is a, which is a total survivorship bias kind of, right? So it's, it's there is, there can be some weird confounds. So in a lot of these studies, like they'll be like, oh, you know, we only, we only kept the people in who lost more than X amount, you know, we, we got rid of the non-responders. So it can absolutely skew what results it got. I read a paper just recently, this was so bad. They looked at, it was, it's about the GLP-1 drugs, and I don't, do not want to get off on this topic, other than to show that this is not how you present data. And they looked at like nine people who'd been on GLP-1 drugs over some, and used meal replacements. This is what they wanted to examine. And they presented the data. The average weight loss was 33%, just staggering. They presented the individual data. The subjects varied from roughly 80 to 200 kilos of body weight, and the time that they were on the GLP ranged from four months to about two years. Yeah, of course, the 200 kilo guy who stayed on it for two years lost, you know, 40% body weight. You cannot average data like that. And the people who were lighter and stayed on for four months lost like 7%. This is why I read full papers because the abstract was completely misleading. Anyway, so when you look at this idea, initial, but certainly done correctly, it's no worse, right? Because, and again, depends on how you do it. If you do a crash diet and lose a ton of weight on nothing but liquids with no exercise and no behavior change, yeah, it absolutely sets you up for failure. Often. And again, it depends who are we talking about? Are they trying to change major eating patterns? Well, a strict period on RFL may be the best way to break those old habits, right? People, some people love bright line boundaries. They don't want to have to think, well, should I eat this? Can I eat this? They like, you can't. You cannot, right? Period. Again, this depends on the person and there's a lot of variables that go into this. I do that, and that's where my consults always run so long because I have to figure out all those, you know, apply my heuristic and my rules and stuff depending on the situation. For many people, what I'll recommend is go look. You know, some people like the flexibility of, well, maybe I just want to put a maintenance day in whenever. Some people want a strict. Depends on the person, depends on their psychology. But with some people, if they're just starting out and have a lot of fat to lose, for example, I might go, look, let's do two weeks of strict RFL. If you feel good, go to four. Get some real quick fat loss. Right? We might take eight or 10 pounds of true fat loss, more weight because of water. That might get you a third of the way to your goal. Boom. People love it. It's rewarding. Change his food habits. Get them in good protein. I go, now maybe you take a maintenance day when you feel like it. You feel like you're cracking, you feel like you can't take it anymore. Have a maintenance day. Maybe that's enough. Maybe you don't need to incorporate. And that's something else I've very much changed since my early 20s. For a lot of people who are just changing habits, some of those flexible eating ideas, refeeds, and free meals and shit do more harm than good because they break people's momentum of changing their habits. Frequently, that longer. Also, there's a weirdness where often on lower calories, people's appetite goes away. It's a bizarre. They've known that for decades. Frequently, complete fasting, people's appetite disappears. For some people, eating makes them hungry. And actually eating less is better than eating more. Or reasons, the protein helps too because protein is the most filling. That's why we do it this way. So for them, I'll be like, okay, bring it in. Have one. Maybe you get another 10 days, then have another one, then maybe you need one every eighth, and then every sixth, and maybe eight weeks from now, you are on alternate day fasting as a gradual progression. And other people wanted me to tell them, two days a week, I want you to do a maintenance or whatever it is. Like, it just depends on the person. But that is absolutely a valid way. Right? That one thing I don't, I think I put in the book, but people, someone mentioned to me and I go, that's a really good idea. And they do this in the hospital setting. They'll do eight weeks of VLCD, liquid VLCD, and then transition people back to a low-calorie diet on food, right? You use it to kickstart things because again, in eight weeks, you can lose 20, 25 pounds, 12 kilos in eight weeks of tissue or just weight. Oh, no, actual. Well, yeah, tissue. Wow. I mean, do the math. If, yeah, it's extremely overweight. I mean, if you want, you know, that's, I mean, I, I can math it out, right? If you got a 1500 calorie per day deficit, that's 10,500 per week. That's three pounds of fat. Eight weeks, that's 24 pounds of fat. So yeah, tissue weight, the water weight, which is another five or 10 pounds. So you, yeah, then you transition them to a lower cal. So that's what they do in hospital settings. But again, my, of my books, probably not in hospital settings, probably not in that kind of clinical setting. So I approach it this way and I go, yeah, that's a completely valid way to do it. Maybe use it initially like that, and then you start to bring in the occasional maintenance day. And if you bring it in and it chits the bed and it kicks you off the diet, well, you're not ready for it. No harm, no foul. It's a learning process. Everyone's got their own, you know, thing. Then his third argument, which is the one that I kind of, that gets back to what we were discussing, was that when people have used total fasting for weight loss, they've learned that they can be hungry, assuming they are. So that when they move back to maintenance, if they start regaining weight, they can just insert a few fasting days and take it right back off because they've proven that they can do it. Dieting sucks, no matter how you cut it. It just does, right? Like it, you know, so you can either diet moderately and be a little hungry, and you still feel deprived, you still can't eat everything you want. At least with an extreme approach or an aggressive approach done properly, at least you're losing fat quickly. And you're not, you know, when you try to do those smaller deficits, especially in that case, like it doesn't take but small misestimates to completely obliterate the deficit. Right? If you go, ah, I want a five-count, they screw up, you know, screw up, I don't, sorry, bad terminology. And they overeat by a little bit. Well, that 500 calorie deficit is now 100. They're losing nothing to [ __ ] up a PSMF level calorie deficit, you have to actively go out of your way to do it, pretty much. You have to really go out of your way for to do it.

This video explained Lyle McDonald's rapid fat loss protocol. Although we tried our best to be comprehensive, there really is no substitute for Lyle's 2008 Rapid Fat Loss Handbook, which would likely clarify any remaining items of curiosity. Failing that, Lyle and I both offer online video consultations. If you made it this far, then please leave a like, comment, and subscribe to the channel. That's all. Thanks for watching.