Modern WisdomEating Hacks, Best Foods & High IQ Training Methods - Dr Mike Israetel
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,294 words- 0:00 – 9:50
Fundamental Physiology of Fat Loss
- CWChris Williamson
Look at how lean you are, lean, tight head.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
I think most people when they get lean, they become more attractive. I become less because my grotesquity of my... whatever this is, is more revealed.
- CWChris Williamson
Someone commented on our last episode saying that watching Chris and Mike talk to each other is like seeing two alien head races meeting for the first time. I think it was a, a Predator versus Alien reference.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Which way am I?
- CWChris Williamson
I'm Predator because of this ledge.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Do you have a ledge?
- CWChris Williamson
I have a prominent, I have a prominent brow.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Hm. You could have been a good wrestler. That's good in wrestling-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, you can stick it in your face.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
... rubbing it in people's faces.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. You are Mr. Science Man, Dr. Science Man of exercise and getting jacked. Our last episode was fantastic. Everyone should go and check that out. Today I want to talk about how to lose fat. People can get jacked, but if you're not that lean, getting jacked kind of isn't as good as it could be if you were a bit more lean. So today I want to do one-stop shop, ultimate breakdown, fat loss. What is the fundamental physiology when it comes to fat loss?
- MIDr Mike Israetel
So if you download the RP Diet Coach app, it actually makes tiny little app molecules that go into your bloodstream-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- MIDr Mike Israetel
... and make you happy and lean.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- MIDr Mike Israetel
No, wait, uh, the plug was supposed to be for later.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- MIDr Mike Israetel
The fundamental physiology of getting leaner is a question of sort of what is your body fat there to do? And your body fat there is do, is, is there to do a few things for you. It lubricates your joints. It provides some of the architecture to your cell surfaces, et cetera. But adipose tissue is a subcategory of all of your body fat, and it's designed a little bit to protect internal organs and some other things like that. But it's mostly designed as an energy reservoir because in our evolved ancestral timeline, everything up until modernity, food availability was predictably intermittent. Which means you had some food today, maybe a lot of food, maybe the tribe killed a mammoth or something. And if you could only eat what was there and then you got full and then you were like, "Meh," and you kind of buzzed off, then the day after, it's rotting mammoth and you can't eat it anymore. And if you didn't gorge yourself like crazy and have somewhere to put that mammoth stuff, then in the next maybe two weeks that you didn't get a lot of food, some fraction of the people with that particular kind of adaptation that wasn't prone to or physiologically, anatomically able to store excess energy away was just gonna die. And their ancestors would not have and did not reproduce. Which is why all extant humans today have the ability to store adipose tissue as a reservoir for calories, uh, energy that we can use for later because of that predictable intermittency of calorie availability. It's curious that we're talking about how to lose fat. Notice we're not talking about how to gain fat because we're really already super good at that, okay?
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- MIDr Mike Israetel
You've got a lot of seminars for people about how to get someone to work harder. How do I improve my diligence? Have you ever been to a laziness seminar? It would be absurd. Uh, some people need it, for sure. You and I probably do.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
But, uh, for most people it's like, well, just, like, that's the default state. So for most people, the ability to gain body fat is default precisely because evolution has designed us to be damn good at that, precisely because we used to be intermittently starving. So when you get a bunch of food in you, it goes to a few places. The first place once the food exits the GI tract that it goes is the bloodstream broken down into various molecules, amino acids, which are the sub-components of proteins, carbohydrates, typically glucose, fructose, as well as various parts of fat. And there's some places for them to go. Some of them just go through the bloodstream and get absorbed by all the various cells of your body. I mean, your brain cells need food. Your liver cells need food. Every cell needs food. And they just go and are used right in the cell right there. Some of those molecules of food, so to speak, are used to raise your blood sugar enough so that, you know, if you don't have food for the next 15 minutes, you're not just gonna drop over dead or something like that. Still another part can go into putting a little bit of fat into your skeletal muscle. Your skeletal muscle inside of itself has a little bit of fat reserve, which is cool. It serves some cool functions. It's not a lot of reserve. And still another part, and there's a couple of parts I'm sort of skipping for concisen- conciseness to, to a little bit, um, is mostly carbohydrate gets loaded as what's called glycogen. And that's just a lot of carbohydrate, and it's stored in your liver and a lot goes to your skeletal muscles, which is why when you mega cram in a bunch of carbs, the next day you kind of look beefier and you're like, "What the hell is going on?"
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Because that glycogen brings in another roughly three grams of water for every gram of carbohydrate you bring in. So it really gets you going. But that's all measured in the hundreds to several thousands of calories that you can put away into your body. If that's all you were capable of, you'd be unreal lean all the time, and in our ancestral environment, dead in a few days (laughs) or emaciated from muscle loss. So all... once you fill all the calorie needs for the moment, you have to put the calories somewhere else. Once your glycogen stores are relatively full, they don't accept any more food. Your muscles, unfortunately, tech- technically don't act as a reservoir of excess calories or amino acids. Wouldn't that be sweet? You just, like, eat a ton of Thanksgiving dinner and you just wake up that much more jacked.
- CWChris Williamson
Get more jacked. Yeah.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Where it goes for the most part in that excess number of calories eaten that isn't attending to your, let's say, daily needs, is it goes to your adipose tissue, your subcutaneous and, uh, intra-abdominal, uh-... layers and layers of body fat. Now, this tissue is specifically designed to do mostly one thing, which is take any kind of calorie, transform it, and it gets transformed in various places, including in the fat cells themselves, into very easy to store fats. So you can eat proteins. They generally don't get converted to fat super simply, but they can displace other food and then that food gets converted to fat. Carbs get converted to fats, and fats need only minimal modification for transport and storage. And now everything basically vectors into fat. That fat gets stored into fat cells, and there it chills. And it's got metabolic activity, it's got a ton of hormonal activity, but fat stores, adipose tissue isn't nearly as metabolically active as most other tissue. It's like a fuel tank more or less, and there your fat sits. Now if you keep eating a lot of food over and over, your body's like, "Man, I know that famine's coming soon, but not today baby-"
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- MIDr Mike Israetel
"... because we're packing it in."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
And it turns out one of the reasons why humans are able to get unbelievably fat in many cases is because there was really no selective pressure in evolution for a top end limit of too much fat. How you would evolve that selective pressure is you would have to have humans evolve for at least thousands of years in an insane food abundance environment. And then the people that got cardiovascular disease or were mobile or found unattractive by mates because they were too fat, they would winnow out and eventually everyone would kind of look like, I don't know, the average Nigerian person who's just stripped to bits for no reason and just got it all. Right? So people can get unreal fat because your fat's kind of like a super welcoming giant corporate hotel. People check in and it's like, "We got room for you, no problem." More people check in, it's like, "Hey, build another side of the hotel," and it builds another side, and it just keeps going. So the question is on fat burning, how do we get the guests to check out of the hotel? And there's really only one way to do it, and that is stop sending guests in or send in less. Because if you have a situation where you're eating a certain amount of food and it's fulfilling only your daily needs, what we call maintenance calories, your body fat doesn't get re-upped and then it just stays the same. It can't possibly grow because there's no food being shuttled for it to grow. If you eat less than maintenance, let's say 250 calories less than all of your body processes need to keep you doing whatever you're doing, that 250 calories is gonna have to come from somewhere. And your body's like, "Hey listen, no problem." And it goes around sort of by analogy as an index. Uh, it's all the board meeting, all the, the board is together and the CEO is like, "All right, nervous system, what are you doing with your calories?" It's like, "Dude, I need to run the whole body. Are you crazy?" Like, okay, we're not gonna break down the nervous system for calories. That's insane. Muscular system, it's like, "Dude, I'm doing stuff." Now, we'll get to this later, but if you exercise a lot and you train with weights, the muscle's like, "Bro, I need all of this. Leave me alone." If you're sedentary and there's nowhere to go for calories, yeah, your muscle can be used for breakdown, but it's not super efficient to do that. It'll go to your organs, stomach, liver, brain, et cetera. Uh-huh. This is important stuff. And then it goes over to body fat. "Hey, body fat, what are you up to?" It's, "Well, nothing at all. Why? W-what's wrong?" "Do you got any calories? What are you doing with them?" And it's like, "Nothing." "Give it up." And then so your body fat will release calories through various digestible forms of fat into your bloodstream. They will go wherever they're needed, and then that will supply that deficit. It'll fill up that deficit for you. So as measured internally in your body as a whole, you're at maintenance, but for your fat stores, you're at a severe deficit. And over hours and days and weeks and weeks and weeks, the amount of fat you're storing starts to winnow down. Your body's still operating pretty well, and that's fundamentally how you lose body fat by creating a calorie deficit.
- 9:50 – 17:30
Do Calories Matter?
- CWChris Williamson
And if they matter, why do so many people say that they don't matter?
- MIDr Mike Israetel
(laughs) I'm on a pre-contest right now, uh, a few months out from some bodybuilding shows, so I'm trying to channel my kindness attitude. More difficult than usual.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- MIDr Mike Israetel
So calories are the thing that matters the most in fat loss, writ large, period, end of conversation. Calories always mattered among people who study physics and thermodynamics on the whole, among actual nutritionists that go to school for nutrition, physiologists, medical doctors, researchers. Do calories matter or not was never a question that was asked because it was answered in like 1910 or something like that. There are two kinds of people that say calories don't matter. One group are well-meaning people who have noticed something. They've noticed that when they started to exercise, they've noticed that when they started to eat certain types of foods and not others, that their body changed pretty rapidly. And they noticed that they weren't counting calories, but because they were eating a diet high in fibrous vegetables and lean meats, they didn't have to. They just ke- kept losing weight. Maybe they've had hormonal trouble in the past. Thyroid hormone was low. They got thyroid hormone fixed up through exogenous medication. All of a sudden things are going great, testosterone replacement therapy and so on and so on. They didn't try to track their calories. They didn't try to lower their calories, and they lost fat. So these very well-meaning people, it's totally understandable how they could think, "Well, geez, I mean, calories matter, I guess. That's what the science book says. But I never tracked my calories and I lost a ton of fat." How do you explain that?" And there's not really a mystery in the scientific community about how to explain that. Your expenditure went up maybe a little bit. Your intake went down maybe a little bit. The combination of those two created a net calorie deficit, and that's like 99.9% of the way that anyone ever loses fat.That's really what's going on. Does that mean you have to count your calories? No. Does that mean if you had diets before where you count calories and you s- really struggled to do it and it doesn't work and you're like, "Calorie counting's stupid"? You try to ke- keto diet, you get a massive reduction in appetite, a bunch of your favorite cheat foods, you can't eat 'cause they're not keto. You lose a bunch of weight and you're like, "See? It was hormones, it was keto, it was never the calories." Well, actually it was always the calories but the keto diet allowed you to get into a calorie deficit so powerfully that you didn't even i- need to track calories. You were just never gonna make it back to what you could only do with potato chips and ice cream. So that's the group one that's understandable. Group two (laughs) , are people that range anywhere from honestly misinformed folks that have noticed these changes in themselves and have created digital products and YouTube channels to help other folks figure things out, all the way through sociopathic charlatans that maybe know what's really going on and maybe don't but don't care. And they'll tell you calories don't matter, calorie counting is a myth because they, some combination of truly believe that to be the case erroneously or they, um, have no true beliefs. They're just, uh, there's no soul in there and they'll say whatever the hell they have to to get that bottom line for their corporation to go up. Um, Doctor Oz type of people. So a lot of the calorie balance is a myth comes from those second groups of people that make digital content and say these things, and is taken quite well by that first group of people that's like, "Well yeah, that's what I've noticed in my life."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
And that's how you have that, um, continuation of that insane, totally bonkers upside down myth.
- CWChris Williamson
So certain changes that people can make with the choice of foods that they have, has a downstream consequence on the amount of food that they eat and also perhaps the way that they feel, the amount that they move around. Perhaps it's tied in with a more overall change of, "I'm going to care about health and I'm going to eat more meat and whole foods and stuff." And that means that maybe they take the stairs a little bit more, and this combination of a reduction of hyper-palatable calorie dense foods on the front end and maybe a little bit of a change on the back end means reliable weight loss over the longer term. This creates fertile ground for magic foods. "This is a food that'll burn fat. This is the thing that you need to eat or shouldn't eat," or whatever. Uh, and that is then sort of slotted into by... That's the, the fuel is provided to a very sort of dry heap of potential grass that can then be set ablaze by a p-
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Arsonists of the human mind.
- CWChris Williamson
... arson about.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Charlatans. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Arson about.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Um-
- MIDr Mike Israetel
That's very well put.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. Do you have to count calories in order to be successful? If calories are the most important thing that matters, is it mandatory that everyone needs to track calories if they're going to lose body fat?
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Great question. It is no more mandatory to count calories in order to lose fat than it is to count your money in order to become wealthy. If your input stream on money is like the Gucci brand level, you don't have to count it. You just have to like forklift the cash into a warehouse or something. God knows what those people do with their money, right? And then of course burn it 'cause you're that rich and you don't need the money. So if you are losing weight, you look leaner, your clothes are fitting better and better and better but you don't count calories, don't you dare start. God bless you. Whatever you're doing, it's working. Keep it up. You feel better, everything's awesome. Don't even worry about looking at a label or counting calorie. But if you're not losing weight, you're trying a certain kind of diet, you gained a pound last month and you want the ultimate almost never but for weird body water issues been defeated hack, counting calories is gonna get you there. It is unequivocal, because if you understand what your maintenance calorie level is very well by taking a few weeks to just get to know what you're eating. Like the RP Diet Coach app you can do that with, you can do it with MyFitnessPal, you can do it with MacroFactor. Tons of great apps to do that with. You get a feel for your maintenance, 'cause like if you eat a little bit less you start losing weight, you eat a little bit more you start gaining, and after a while it looks like it's just kind of like, "Yeah, it looks like 2,500 calories is like right around my maintenance." And you wanna lose weight, you take anywhere between, and I can get on the specifics here, roughly 250 calories per day to 750 calories per day depending on a few factors. Chunk that right out and you watch the magic happen. But if you never count calories and you're not losing weight, the mystery factor is a big deal. Uh, another quick analogy. Let's say you're Elon Musk and you're counting your billions or whatever he does in his spare time. Just kidding, he doesn't have spare time. And you have a rocket that you're launching and it takes off and shoots through the atmosphere. Do you have to calculate a thrust to weight ratio and see that it's positive? No, it's in fucking space, of course it's positive. But if it doesn't leave the platform after a nice 30 second burn and it just goes... you gotta start calculating stuff. It's like, are we off by a rounding error or are we off by an order of magnitude? The, the whole engine could be the, the problem or it could be like, "Oh, Bob didn't do this with the spigot." So calorie balance doesn't have to matter. It always matters under the surface but you don't have to count calories if the times are good.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
If the times are confusing and you're like, "What the hell? I'm trying to eat healthy and I'm not losing weight," it's time to give calorie counting a shot.
- CWChris Williamson
Knuckle down. What about weighing yourself?
- 17:30 – 23:14
How Often You Should Weigh Yourself
- CWChris Williamson
How frequently should people do it? What's the way that you advise them to? Is there an app? Is there a blah blah?
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Multiple times a day for your self-esteem.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- MIDr Mike Israetel
No wait, that's just what I do. (laughs) Is it good or bad? It's always bad. Um, there are definitely many apps that can help you track your weight. RP Diet Coach app does that, a whole bunch of them do. I'm here pimping the app all the time but I just want people to know we make a great app, super high quality product. It is not the only great app. There's tons of other awesome, awesome apps. If you are maintaining and living a awesome, healthy life, you're not trying to lose weight or fat-I would say you can weigh in from somewhere between never to once every month or two weeks. Why do I say that? Because sometimes you have a- you know like, a real holiday season, not just a holiday. Pre-Thanksgiving, you go to four or five other people's Thanksgivings, you go to your own Thanksgiving. Christmas isn't, like, a day. We know how it works. It's like, work Christmas, leisure Christmas, your buddies, blah, blah, blah. And January rolls around and you're like, "I feel fine but kind of a little..." You know that, mm, a little kind of puff.
- CWChris Williamson
Fluffy.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Fluffy. If you weigh yourself every two weeks to a month, just as a normal, healthy human, you can notice like, "Damn, I- I gained seven pounds." And that can give you the hint to go, "You know what, let me, uh, let me clean my shit up a little."
- CWChris Williamson
I'm gonna dial it in a bit.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Yeah. And that just means, like, easing up on the junk food for the next two or three weeks. You're chilling with your wife at home. It's Friday night, she's like, "Pizza?" You're like, (gasps) "Sushi?" She's like, "Yep." So it's a bit of a cleaner stuff.
- CWChris Williamson
So just an early warning system.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
That's it. Why do I say that? Because an unreal number of people, I mean literally millions of people in the modern, free countries of the world in which food is excessive, almost no one just wakes up one day and they're like, "400 pounds, how the hell?" It goes up by a few pounds here and there. And if they don't catch it until six months later when they see their doctor, it's a 15 pound problem. Now you do need the RP Diet Coach app 'cause this is a meat and potatoes problem.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
But if it's three to seven pounds, two or three weeks of just cleaning up your eating and making sure to get your physical activity up a little bit, you kibosh it and it's just not there, and you go back to living your best life, me- weigh yourself every few weeks. Two weeks later after that, you can weigh yourself. You're even lighter than you thought. Hell yeah, pizza tonight. So it's good to keep your eye on it. Now, if you're actively in a fat loss diet, weighing yourself at least once a week is a real good idea. It's probably not the best idea because water weight fluctuations can give you a ton of error. Let's say you stuck to your macros 100%, all the proteins, carbs, fats, and calories you were supposed to eat on Sunday, you always weigh yourself on Monday. But a part of those macros was you made an omelet, and you sprinkled some fat-free cheese on it, and you like salt, you're a salt person. Sometimes when people eat a lot of salt, it makes them thirstier. And then some people will have that salt and that water and they'll retain a little bit of that, and maybe you have an Element to drink too 'cause they're delicious and they're good for you, and you have a couple Elements, and well, it's another 3,000 milligrams of salt. You wake up the next day and even though tissue-wise, if you had an MRI scanner, which I own six in my home as a trillionaire... One of them's just for show, by the way. It's not even plugged in. Isn't that absurd? So, uh, that's the one I show to people. (laughs) The Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not know about that one. So you have a situation where in reality you lost one and a half pounds of fat last week. Everything about your diet and training is set. Don't you change a thing. But because you had excess salt just randomly, um, it looks like you gained a pound and a half 'cause you only weigh in once, and all you have is a weak point of data. So you, you have one data point, you have a whole week, you're like, "All right, did I get bloated from last night? Or what the hell is going on?" And then you cut your calories even more. And w- I'm sure we'll get to this later but if you cut your calories way more than the recommended amount for a long time, you develop an excessive amount of diet fatigue, and then that can really put a- a spoke in your wheels for sustainability of your fat loss. It's nothing you wanna do. So our recommendation at RP is generally weigh yourself two to three times a week. Seven days a week is totally fine, but there's nothing magical about it.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
So if you're going up somewhere, you know, if you're a New Yorker and you go to the Hamptons for a weekend, my word. I mean, who's still, who's still poor enough to go to the Hamptons, am I right? And you're like, "Oh, I'm not gonna have a scale in the Hamptons. Is that a problem?" Mm, absolutely not a problem. Your five days that you are weighing are totally great. But, you know, if you go a week without weighing yourself, well, you're kind of in the dark, and it could've been a good week, could've been a bad week. Never can tell. So a few times a week all the way up to every day is totally fine.
- CWChris Williamson
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- 23:14 – 30:16
The Truth About Set Point Theory
- CWChris Williamson
What or how much truth is there in set point theory, your body getting accustomed to a particular weight that you sit at and not liking to change too much from that one?
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Yeah, that's a good question. The modern interpretation I'm most familiar with is now called settling point theory. Now, because I'm a dogmatist for science, I don't like that it's called theory. Theory is reserved for interconnected frameworks of facts well supported by evidence, evolution, gravitation, et cetera. Even the standard model in theoretical physics isn't called a theory, but it's way more predictive than settling point theory, by ten orders of magnitude. So the settling point model, or hypothesis, says there's not one set point that your body's supposed to be. You weren't born to weigh 200 pounds. It doesn't matter what happens, you always trend back to 200. What it says is there's a couple of inputs to how much you weigh...... and given the- they are of certain values, you're going to settle, temporarily, in a certain weight range. For example, let's say you live a lifestyle where you go out to eat twice a week, you have certain meals you prep at home, you train a certain number of times, you get a certain number of steps. If those things are rather constant, you might weigh 200 pounds. If we put you in a food environment that's way more obesogenic, as the term goes... Let's see, what's the most obesogenic food environment? Cruise. America. Ameri- (laughs) the United States. (laughs) Any time I'm anywhere in the world and someone jokingly talks smack about the US, I always have the same joke back, and it's old as hell but I love to overuse it. I go over, I'm like, "Do you see that over the horizon over there?" Like, I'm in Sydney, and you just look over the harbor, and they're like, "No." I'm like, "That is a US aircraft carrier battle group, goddamn it, and it could end your country in five minutes. Woo!" And then they do a Texas thing, they do the gunshots. So any case, the US is the best. That's why we're here. Mm-hmm. So- I think it's biggest, at least. Uh, well, yeah. Well, it's actually... So, funny enough, the UK just overtook us, I believe, in, uh, in obesity rates. So- Really? As a percentage? ... hat tip to you fine folks. Yeah. It's a- it's a neck and neck battle. Now, the US is still king in a- a few different categories. We have the highest absolute number of fat people, 'cause we have a lot of people- Mm. ... and fat people. Mm. We also have the highest absolute number of very, very, very fat people. Like, you go to the UK, there's some fat people. A lotta people are fat. But you come to the US, especially, like, Southern Texas, you will regularly see 4 and 500 pound people. That's an American- Rascal fat. Yes. But on fractions of super fat people, we are inferior to a few of the peoples of the Pacific Islands. Folks from Tonga, folks from American Samoa, uh, them some big peoples- (laughs) ... over there. And they do two things super well: eat amazingly tasty food, three things, uh, be incredibly jolly and super awesome to hang out with, and are statistically completely overrepresented of any racial group in American football pro performances. And rugby, probably, as well. Yeah, well that's, you know, that's a step down for them, like, "This is easy. I usually do this against way bigger people." (laughs) Yep. So, um, sorry, what was- (laughs) what was your- Set point theory. ... set- settling, settling point, yes. Settling point. Yeah, yes. So if I get you over to a cruise ship for two weeks, I mean, cruise ship food is so good, and it's kinda 24 hours and it's always there, and you leave the main restaurant and they're like, "Fresh baked cookies," and you're like, "Who the hell am I to say no to this nice young person?" And all of a sudden, you're taking in 600 more calories per day, just normally. Now, your settling point, if you stayed there for weeks and weeks, would be whatever it was, but higher. Hmm. You take it the other way, where you get into a time machine and you go back to the 1940, late '40s in the United States. You're like, "All right, I'm ready to eat." What are you gonna do? There's a few fast food places, but they're not that good, and you gotta drive pretty far to get them, and they're not even open 24 hours, which is quite offensive. That's why the '40s sucked. And you go, "Okay, how do I get some food?" You go to the grocery store, it's almost completely bereft of convenience food, and you're like, "The hell am I supposed to do, cook my food?" Just blank. 'Cause there's some interesting cultural stuff that just, uh, it's baffling in retrospect. You know the idea of a- a nice Sunday dinner, like a ham dinner or a turkey dinner? That is, as far as I'm concerned, ar- archaeology at this point, because any person of basically any income in a modern country can just buy a turkey or a ham every single day, for every meal. It's a nominal cost. So if you go back to the 1940s in the US, people say, "Why weren't there so many fat people?" You wanna be fat? You gotta cook your own food, and if you're a bad cook, it's not even tasty. So if the average tastiness and convenience of the food in your area goes down, your settling point ain't 200 anymore. It's 160 now. Though, it could be 200 if you were on a cruise ship, then it could be 220. So based on those factors, your food environment, your activity level, who you hang around with, et cetera, your settling point can move up and down. But in any one situation, yeah, settling points are a real thing, and there's some physiology to your body being a little annoyed at having to make a change. It's less annoyed if the environmental factors change, and then it's like, "Well, I'm just living my best life and I'm just losing weight 'cause I just don't eat tasty food all the time." Mm. So there is something to s- to settling points, and there is a genetic factor, for sure. The absolute biggest, by a mile, genetic factor for settling points is hunger levels and food pleasure response. I'm sure you've hung out with a- a lot of people in your life. Some people cr- d- are you a food guy? Do you like to eat? Yeah. Yeah. But I noticed the way you said, like, "Yeah." Mm-hmm. Some people are like, "Bro, are you kidding me? I can inhale food." Some other people, and I've been friends with many people like this in the past, uh, they just like food, to them, is like this thing they have to remember to put in their bodies, otherwise they're like, "Oh, I can't see clearly," right? I have a few friends like that, yeah. So the biggest factor by a long shot in any one individual is what are their hunger levels like and what are their enjoyment of food neurochemistry like, and that goes a big way. How do you get the American obesity, the global obesity epidemic? You take hyper-palatable, ultra-convenient, relative to income, super cheap food, you make it insanely ubiquitously available, you vary it constantly so no one gets used to it... Like, if you want a new type of crisp to eat in the UK and you go once a week to the store, you just never run out 'cause there's always new stuff. And you pair that with a population of people. Some fraction of that population, totally unaffected. They just, "Eh, crisps, I have a crisp, I sit down, I do nothing. I don't have another one." Some people, you give them tasty food and it's cheap and convenient, that's their hobby now, is eating food, and they love it, and the pounds just smack on and on and on. So for them, their settling point in that environment-... sometimes doesn't have a number yet because they're still working their-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
... way up to it.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah.
- 30:16 – 38:18
Why Modern Society is So Fat
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, I think this has been the most interesting thing I've learned maybe over the last year, um, orbiting a number of people talking about, "Why is modern society so fat?" There's all of these images from the 1960s of beaches in America-
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... and everyone looks, uh, lean and athletic. And y- y- you see i- it's because of the insert your favorite food demon of choice here. It's the red 40, it's the seed oils, it's the, the carcinogens in the water, it's the estrogen levels, it's the whatever, whatever. Uh, but the sort of Occam's razor of this is just food is tastier, more calorie dense, cheaper, and more available than it's ever been before.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
What did you think was going to happen? What would it... Just, just from first principles, just make that... Forget the constitution of it, what's the molecular... Wait, where... Is it, is it artificial or is it natural? What, what do you think would happen-
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... to those people?
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Yes. Very predictable, uh, and in a certain sense, a little bit disappointing because it would be cool if we could have, like, one type of food additive or something in the water supply that we discovered was insanely obesogenic and we manage to put in some sensible regulation and take it out of the water supply or reduce it by a factor of a thousand.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
And everyone just like over the next year had this renaissance where they leaned up. That would be awesome. It would be awesome for two reasons. One, it would solve the problem really quick. And two, it would remove any onus of actually the problem's worse than you thought. It's like if you go to-
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
... couple's therapy for a while and you want your partner to change, and after like 12 sessions you, uh, the psychiatrist or psychologist requests you come alone and she kinda like dances around it and she's like, "You're the (censored) problem, Chris. It's kind of all on you. Nancy's great, she's been great the whole time. It's you." You're like, "That's not what I went to couple's therapy to hear." And so when someone's like, "It's actually all the insanely tasty food you love to eat all the time that's making you super fat," you got a tendency to be like, "Fuck, what, I gotta stop eating that stuff? But wasn't it the microplastics? Can I eat the other... Can they make microplastics tasty?" (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- MIDr Mike Israetel
So-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
... at some point it's this insanely simple reason that describes probably 90% more, more of the variance in obesity from historical times to now, but it's also a bit like, "Ah, crap." It's like trying to make it on a JV basketball team and you're like, "C- coach, is it heart? Is it do I have to practice dribbling anymore?" And he's like, "You're just an Ashkenazi Jew, dude. You're never gonna be good at this." That's what I heard from my basketball coach when I was five foot zero back in... Just kidding, I'm not five feet yet. One day, Chris.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
I'll get up there.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
It's, it's something you don't wanna hear, but once you process it you're like, "Of course it's true." The good news is for the first time in history we can start taking real big bites out of that, no pun intended, with modern pharmacology, which is gonna save us all from everything. Begin insane rant about how drugs are great, but Ozempic and all of those drugs, and I do find it at this point comical that Ozempic gets all the attention that it gets because this is a third generation GLP-1 agonist. There's already in late stage clinical trials a fifth generation agonist.
- CWChris Williamson
Ozempic.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Uh-huh.
- CWChris Williamson
Terzapitide.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
That's gen four.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, Ozempic's gen three.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Uh-huh.
- CWChris Williamson
Right, okay. So I'll, I think a lot of people have sort of reset the number because one and two kind of meh.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like Liraglutide and stuff no one-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
... takes up high.
- 38:18 – 44:07
Managing Protein, Carbs & Fat
- MIDr Mike Israetel
- CWChris Williamson
Getting back to the fat loss and the diet. Protein, carbs, fat. How should people be thinking about those? How do they contribute? What should they be eating?
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Yes. Proteins are essential because they compose all of the organs, all of your enzymes, all the stuff that does work is pretty much protein. It's non-negotiable. And also, protein supports your skeletal muscle, which is kind of important 'cause there's two types of getting lean. One is people think you're sick and ask you if you're okay 'cause you lost a bunch of muscle. The other is, like, people compliment you or saying ni- nice things behind your back 'cause they're jealous and they wanna have sex with you but they can't. I'm used to that sort of thing. Uh, the jealousy part. Me being jealous. So protein is a big deal. For most people who are not pursuing exotic hyper bodybuilding pursuits, as little as just over half a gram per pound of body weight per day protein is gonna take care of most of your needs. So if you weigh 200 pounds and you eat something like 120 grams of protein per day, you're probably golden, and you can probably lose fat and lose very little or no muscle at all. The top end is maybe about double that. Real insurance policy type of stuff. You're doing crazy hardcore weight training, crazy amount of cardio and activity, you're already very, very lean and you're prone to losing muscle and you're a little older than average, over 40, then it's just over one gram per pound. So if you weigh 200 gram, uh, if you weigh 200 grams, if you weigh 200 pounds, then maybe you, you have 220 or 240 grams. For a very serious fitness person, gram per pound is an amazing rule. Just understand that for most people, like, if your mom asks you for diet advice, just a little bit over half of that is totally solid. Often best consumed for most muscle mass retention or building through three to five meals evenly spaced per day. But if you just have, like, two meals for the average person, if they're eating lots of protein, they're gonna get great results.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. Carbs.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
I'll do carbs and fats at the same time, if you don't mind. There is a big difference between optimizing for athletic performance and muscularity and just losing some goddamn fat so you can see Mr. Twinkie again. Oh, there you are, buddy.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- MIDr Mike Israetel
He's been alive.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Carbs and fats kind of combine into one index of extra calories after protein has been taken care of. A really great app for fat loss that you can use is called MacroFactor, and they have this turnstile where you can, like, turn up the carbs and turn down the fats, and it's one comes out of the other.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Because for many people, it just doesn't matter as long as you get a minimum of both. If you're getting some fibrous veggies and maybe a few pieces of fruit per day, but you're down to very low levels of carbs, you eat no grains, no breads, no rice, none of that, but you eat plenty of healthy fats, you're golden. You're gonna lose tons of fat and be super healthy. If you have minimal fats, like you take an (laughs) an essential fat supplement every day and the rest of your diet has no fat in it whatsoever, you're doing starches, grains, Gatorade, the whole nine yards, but your calorie balance is set, you've generated a 250 to 750 daily calorie deficit and your protein is good, you're gonna lose fat until the cows come home and it's gonna go super well. How you feel on each one of those, how your sport and athletic hobbies are supported, how convenient it is for your life, those are secondary discussions, but very important ones. So there's kind of two points here. One, as long as you get minimum levels of, of fats and carbs, which are very, very low and most people won't hit, whichever one you want higher or lower, it doesn't matter. But also consider this. If you're more physically active, more carbohydrate generally works better.... if carbs kind of make you just want more carbs, but if you get a big satiating effect from fats and you're like, "Ugh, that's enough," maybe you can consider more fats. Some people get more energy from carbs, and they prefer more carbs. Some people get a more even keeled mental clarity from lower carbs and higher fats, and their go-to is to have higher fats. Most people would be served best with an even combination of them, roughly the same calories coming from fats and carbs, once your protein is taken care of. Because in many cases that afford you the most flexibility in your diet. You show up to a restaurant with your friends, you're on a fat loss diet, and you look up what menu items you can eat. Obviously you're on a fat loss diet, you're not gonna eat five of the menu items and be a pig. But a lot of real food in the real world, it's tough to get zero carb. It's also real tough to get really low fat. But most of them have a bit of carbs, bit of fats, and if you have that middle combination, it's a really, really awesome way to go to town and still hit your calorie goals. So, uh, carbs and fats, plus or minus, no big deal as long as your calories are in check and your protein is in check. The conversation for fats versus carbs is individually based, preference- and varying nuance.
- CWChris Williamson
Is there a kind of fat which is best?
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Well, our company started making this fat supplement. I'm just kidding.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- MIDr Mike Israetel
I'm just trying to shill as many ... I'm shilling products I don't even have to sell. Uh, get on the mailing list.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- MIDr Mike Israetel
SuperFats. (laughs) Uh, generally speaking, on average, the preponderance of your fat should probably come from poly and monounsaturated fat sources. There's a conversation that it's more poly or more mono. Probably more poly than mono. But what kind of foods are we talking about here? A bunch of the oils, most of the plant oils are really, really awesome. Olive oil, canola oil. Yes, I said canola oil. Just do an IMDB. Do a PubMed search for canola oil health benefits review and you'll see that it's super, super healthy. Uh, all the different kinds of oils are usually re- generally very good.
- CWChris Williamson
I can't
- 44:07 – 49:46
Are Seed Oils Actually Bad for Health?
- CWChris Williamson
respect a doctor who proposes seed oils as part of his diet.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
I never asked for your respect, nameless, faceless troll person who's in a troll farm in China. (laughs) Um, but yeah, by the way, the seed oils thing is really funny. I get smacked for that all the time, but ...
- CWChris Williamson
You did a video about, uh, why seed oils aren't bad for your health.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Yeah, totally. We have that on the RP Strength channel. And, like, you know, I was curious about the issue because so many people were talking about seed oils being bad, and I just did like one PubMed search, and there was a few review articles that were like, "Oh, seed oils generally tend to be better than ..." So they've done multiple studies where they take, uh, people who eat a lot of saturated fats, which are totally fine by the way, but they replace some fraction of those with seed oils, and in almost every study, the people are months later healthier. And so like, the idea that seed oils are bad for you is usually concluded by folks that are like, uh, really deep into lipidology research, and they're, uh, inferring that seed oil should be bad for you based on various, um, cooking process modifications. But inference is dope, and I use it all the time in decision-making, but it never beats actual empirical randomized control trials, 'cause that's like what the real world actually is. It's like, "Well, I think Stacey likes me. Go ask her." She's like, "No." You're like, "Okay, I was wrong." Right? Inference doesn't beat the real thing. So seed oils are super great for your health. They're totally fine. And then there's all kinds of nuts, all kinds of nut butters, avocados. Those types of fats tend to be amazing. Um, fats from, uh, fatty fish, also super awesome. Saturated fats are also just fine for your health, and you can have a lot of them, but you generally want something like two thirds of your fats to come from plant fats, uh, poly and monounsaturated. Maybe one third of your fats to come from saturated fat sources, so like eggs and beef and things like that. Where you wanna maybe go easy on fats is ultra processed sources with trans fats in them. Trans fats don't just kill you. When you walk in one day and you just keel over, "Oop, trans fats." The police put up a, a, a line of like trans fats on it. Um, but they're not great in aggregate over the long term. So if, you know, like your primary source of fats is like McDonald's fry grease, it's not great. Cheesy Puffs is not great. So if you eat mostly minimally processed whole foods, saturated fats are totally fine, but if you're having trouble with your lipids and your doctor's like, "Look, you gotta change something," replacing some of your saturated fats with poly and monounsaturated fats just from directly the literature seems to work pretty well. But it's not a crazy thing. Here's another thing. For many people that listen to this who are already eating a pretty healthy diet, their total fat intake is so low, the composition of those fats barely matters at that point.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
If you have a very high fat diet, let's say you're trying to do the keto thing or the carnivore thing, yeah, you gotta take a look at your fat sources a little more, 'cause that's a lot of fats now and it's gonna matter for your blood work.
- CWChris Williamson
I wonder, w- is there not something to do with reheating fats and oils that's bad? Is it bad-
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Uh, allegedly.
- CWChris Williamson
Is it? Is that true?
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Uh, I haven't looked into it in great depth, because the preponderance of the people that espouse that are insane people-
- CWChris Williamson
Hm.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
... whose epistemological anchor is total nonsense on average. So like, I haven't looked into deep refutations of the flat earth idea, but I'm not gonna any time soon. If anyone has any compelling evidence that the reheating process is insanely deleterious for health, and they have randomized clinical trials to support this, I'm super interested in it. I'm out of my depth on that one, but after about five minutes of talking to ChatGPT, I could get back into my depth no problem. It's one of these things that, um, where do you get reheating of oils all the time? Literally in fry grease. Stop eating McDonald's every day-
- CWChris Williamson
Right, yeah.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
... and you're not gonna have that problem.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, so so much of this stuff, s- so many of the demon foods that people have got an issue with, whether it's particular colorants, whether it's artificial sweeteners, whether it's seed oils, come along for the ride with foods, food types, hyper-palatable, calorie dense, very processed, probably just not all that great for you to be having very regularly. So it's not about the components of this individual thing. It's like saying, "This circuit board is very dangerous." Well, it is when it's attached to a javelin missile.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, and y- pointing at all of the circuit boards and saying, "Look at how bad these circuit boards are for everybody."
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Yep.
- CWChris Williamson
And you go, "Well, yeah, it is, because for the most part, that circuit board exists inside of that missile."
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Yeah.I like that you used, uh, the Javelin missile. Uh, so very pertinent to the news cycle. Maybe YouTube will pick it up.
- CWChris Williamson
In other news, this episode is brought to you by Momentous. Two fundamental parts of recovery are proper sleep quality and proper hormone levels, which is why Momentous' sleep packs and that Tongkat Ali, yep there it is, have helped me recover. They contain only the most evidenced-based ingredients at perfect doses to help you and your body recover. So if you've been looking to naturally improve your testosterone, Tongkat Ali is a fantastic place to start. And if you've been struggling to fall asleep on a nighttime, stay asleep throughout the night, or if you're not waking up feeling rested and revitalized in the morning, these sleep packs are fantastic. They've got an evidence-based blend of magnesium L-threonate, apigenin, and L-theanine in a perfect dose to help you get to sleep on a night. Best of all, there is a 30-day money back guarantee. So you can buy it, try it, and if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back. You can get a 20% discount sitewide by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernwisdom using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-R-T-N-O-U-S.com/modernwisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout.
- 49:46 – 57:20
Optimal Mealtimes for Weight Loss
- CWChris Williamson
Meal timing. How often should people eat if they're trying to do fat loss? How much of a spread between meals do they need?
- MIDr Mike Israetel
For weight loss, it just doesn't matter. They've compared eating six or more meals per day regularly to what's called alternate day fasting, where one day you eat and the next day you're just really pissed at everyone 'cause you don't eat. For weight loss, it doesn't matter over the long term. And it makes sense because the calorie balance is the same, it's calorie controlled. That day that you're eating is real fun on that diet, the day you're not eating is really extra not fun. So weight loss, not a concern. How does it become a concern with fat loss is muscle growth and muscle retention are processes that prefer multiple meals spread evenly throughout the day. So if you wanna lose weight and you just don't care about muscle, let's say it's not a problem for you, you train hard anyway 'cause you love it. But you're like, "I have plenty of muscle, it's just my doctor tells me I need to lose weight." Whatever meal frequency is something that schedule wise, culture wise, preference wise that you like, do it up. One meal a day, no problem. Meal every, uh, one meal every other day, no problem. Seven meals a day, dope. If you're trying to build and maintain muscle mass as much as possible and you're really full sending this and you're training with weights regularly, which is a big deal, any number of meals up to you hit four per day evenly spread, each of them high in protein, marginally increases how much muscle you can grow and maintain. After four meals per day, in all of the research we see that the, there is no more effect that we can detect. So if you're like, "Dude, I'm growing crazy muscle on four meals a day. Should I go to five?" Mm, maybe it'll make some teeny difference, but maybe not. From the theoretical work, probably not. Mostly because if you eat bigger meals, they just take longer to digest.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
So the pulsatility of nutrients in your blood, it basically just looks like this the whole day, 'cause you start eating breakfast-
- CWChris Williamson
You're grazing.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
... and by the time you run out of breakfast, you get lunch and then dinner and then you're done.
- CWChris Williamson
What about the earliest that people should eat, the latest that they should eat? Is there something to do with the parentheses of your eating window throughout the day?
- MIDr Mike Israetel
If you eat in a very constrained eating window, the result you can expect starts to look more and more like a very small number of meals per day. Your body doesn't really count meals. Your peripheral cellular structures count how much, uh, of a flux of nutrients they get exposed to. So if you say my eating window is from 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM at night and I have four meals in my eating window every half hour, your body's like, "I hear that, but it's just one meal, bro."
- CWChris Williamson
It's one big meal, yeah.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Like, if you still have stomach contents not in the intestines yet and you're eating meal number two, like it's still the same meal. So a very constrained eating window does do that. But as far as spreading it out long or short, again for weight loss, none of that matters. For fat loss, you want to spread it out not as far as possible, but you probably wanna be ingesting food at something like at least a four, 12, maybe 14, maybe even 16 hour situation.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Contest bodybuilders who've near mastered the art of losing fat while maintaining muscle, they'll eat almost as soon as they wake up and they'll have their last meal an hour or two before bed, if not even closer. And they eat multiple times throughout the day so that their body's never starving for protein. Is that excessive for most people? Yeah. But I think sensible advice is to wake up, again if you want muscle mass retention, within a few hours of when you wake up. Don't be like, it's like six hours later and you're working on projects at work and your stomach does one of those, like angry growls. You're like, "Oh shit, you exist (laughs) . Better get a Twinkie." Don't do that. And if you take longer than four or five hours before you go to bed after you've eaten, that can work out great for you. But for some people, especially as the diet wears on, especially as they get more hungry, it might interfere with sleep in two ways at least.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
One is if you're already hungry when you're trying to fall asleep, it's a non-starter. You're not falling asleep. You're just counting sheep. And one sheep jumps over and one, baa, two, three. It's like a sheep, but it's like sectioned into meat parts. It's like lamb, rack of lamb. You're like, "Oh shit, I'm thinking about food again." And then you go in the fridge and you're getting a cheeseburger. So the other way is if you've eaten many, many hours before you went to sleep, but not so many that you can fall asleep, you might wake up in the middle of the night or very early morning starving.... your cortisol goes up, you ain't falling back asleep anymore. Sleep is so unbelievably critical to fat loss and to muscle gain and retention. It is a non-negotiable variable. So eat in such a way that gives you the best sleep is probably the best advice I can have on a meal timing perspective. So for most people, eat, you can eat as soon as you wake up, no problem. You can eat right before you go to sleep, no problem. Some people, if they eat right before bed or even an hour or two before, you know, there's digestion, the body temperature goes up and they're tossing and turning, they can't sleep, don't do that. Then back that meal up a little bit. But if you're one of these people, especially late towards the end of a diet, a higher carbohydrate and protein meal before you go to sleep-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
... knocks you the fuck out and that's perfect. So very individual. Generally spread your meals out, play around with what feels best for you.
- CWChris Williamson
Is there anything to say about, uh, prejudicing certain types of foods earlier or later in the day? G- backloading the carbs until the evening time, starting off with more protein first thing in the morning? Does it not matter?
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Good question. The research on that in general has been a giant like, "Meh, (laughs) not really." Um, every now and again someone will pull out a single study or two in isolation, and it'll see like, like, "See, you gotta eat more of your carbs in the morning." And then someone else a couple years later will be like, "It's the nighttime carbs that are really good." On average, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. So I would say you can play around with things yourself, but as long as you have an even-ish fraction of your protein in every meal, how you do carbs and fats doesn't matter much. At RP, we like to bias carbohydrates closer to the workout. So let's say you work out in the middle of the day, we're gonna want you to eat slightly lower fats and slightly higher carbs in the meal before you go train. It's gonna give you lots of energy. Fats are more difficult to digest, not in a bad way, just take a little longer to digest. So you might, like, be warming up for bench and feeling kind of like burpee and you're like, "Oh, goddamn it, this shit hasn't gone through yet." But if you eat low fat, you're like all your rice is in your muscles and you're good to go. After training to set up recovery and anabolism, there's probably a slight advantage in having more carbohydrates. Your muscles are more ready to absorb it, your fat isn't. So that's a really good thing. And so we like to push our fats towards, uh, away from the workout and push the carbs a little bit closer, but we're really splitting hairs here.
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Uh, and so it's not some kind of magic formula. If you're a contest bodybuilder, yeah, it's a little bit more magic of a formula by a small shot. But generally speaking, the spread is... I'd say this, almost anyone that's telling you that the circadian rhythm of food and the spread of macros is, uh, very important is misunderstanding the state of the evidence.
- 57:20 – 1:10:13
Best Foods to Make Fat Loss Easier
- MIDr Mike Israetel
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. When it comes to the kinds of foods to avoid or lean into when dieting for fat loss, what are the things that you think people often overlook? What are the things that are unnecessarily demonized? Where should people be putting their attention? What's the best food groups to make fat loss easy?
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Yep. Raspberries are great. Blueberries will kill you and they're terrible. Next question.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Um, as far as specific foods, short of, like, eating soap or poison, there are really no individual foods that are bad for you. And there are no individual foods that stall fat loss. There have been foods historically that have been demonized, not as individual foods, all of them have gone through the wringer at least once, but food groups. Sugars. People will say sugars are bad for you. It's just categorically false to say that. Sugars aren't bad for you. Sugars are no more prone to adding body fat or making body fat loss any more difficult. It's a non-starter, and direct evidence, in theory, the whole gambit. Nowadays, it's fun to poke fun at sugar and at carbs. Back in the '80s and '90s, if you told someone you were health conscious and then you put butter on something, they were like, "Listen, you're going through some psychiatric problems. We should probably get you checked into a center, 'cause you are delusional." 'Cause everyone knew that saturated fat especially just straight up killed you where you stood, and you were never gonna get lean eating a diet high in fats. They were also wrong. Calorie balance is so king that it doesn't discriminate hardly at all among food groups, fats versus carbs, none of that. So the myths of fats are too high or carbs are too high or sugars are too high, they're just that, myths. However, a very important thing to consider is the palatability of your food and the fullness factor your food gives you, 'cause hunger's a real thing. So, you want to choose food when you're dieting for fat loss, creating a caloric deficit that does at least two things for you. One, it's not so damn delicious that you just want to eat more and more of it. And if you don't, you're just suffering. Like, if you were deep into a fat loss diet and I was like, "Hello, Chris, would you like a Cheeto?" You'd be like, "Don't." Why? 'Cause as soon as you, one of 'em Cheetos hits your lips, paradise. You know, purple angels flying around, it's better than acid at that point. You just want another Cheeto. So if you're on a fat loss diet, something bodybuilders discovered a long time ago, and a gentleman named, I'm gonna butcher his name for sure, Stephane, uh, Guyenet, Guyenet. He says pronounced like DNA.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
I would just say Guyenet 'cause I'm American. Woo! He, I believe, coined the term, or at least exposed the public to it, of something called the food palatability reward hypothesis, properly couched as a hypothesis. So he's really-
- CWChris Williamson
Not a theory.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
... the fucking man.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Okay.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
And it basically says something baffling when you think about it. It's ultra-simple and explains most of the variants we've already talked about with obesity. When food is really tasty, people tend to eat more and they get fat.And they just want more. And if you have tasty food, but you've relegated yourself willpower style, like, like a good person, to not eating it, you're just gonna be more miserable. You ever smell cheeseburgers being m- made while you're in the single digits body fat? You're like, "Dude, if there was an entire family of people between me and those cheeseburgers," like, I don't know, insert politically incorrect term-
- CWChris Williamson
Boom, boom, boom.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
... "shoot them, I'm gonna eat my way through them to the cheeseburgers."
- CWChris Williamson
Right, yeah, sorry.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
So... (laughs) Things that get taken out in editing.
- CWChris Williamson
I went, I went native, uh, Native American there.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
My man.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Yeah.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
So basically, if you're dieting for fat loss, try to have foods that are, like, exotically delicious, veggies, fruits, whole grains, lean meats, not a ton of sauces, not a crazy ton of flavor, and here's the really fucked up part. It's gonna be completely counterintuitive. What do you want when your body is telling you, "Listen, you need to put the fat back on"? You want exactly the food that you shouldn't be having. So it's, it's kind of like abstaining from jerking it or something-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
... where it's like, "What do you really wanna do?" You're like, "I wanna jerk it." "What are you not supposed to be doing?" Not supposed to jerk it, right. But if you can, uh, well, eat at home, if you can clear all of your shelves at home of junk and just have that lower palatability food... First of all, if you're hungry enough, that shit tastes real good.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Plain chicken and broccoli tastes amazing if you're actually hungry. Have that stuff, that's really, really awesome to do. And secondly, you wanna have food that keeps you fuller for longer, food with a lot of fluid volume, food with a lot of fiber, fl- food that takes longer to digest. Minimally processed fruits, veggies, whole grains, lean meats, and healthy fats are just kind of undefeated in that category. And so for, of the calories you're allowed to have, it's a lot of food, it's not ultra tasty so you kinda feel like you're laboring through it.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
You, halfway through your meal, you don't even want any more, you're stuffing yourself, and every week, you're losing weight, paradise. You're really doing it.
- CWChris Williamson
But it's not paradise because you're going through this boring diet, it doesn't taste as nice as it could be. Dr. Mike's told me that I can't a-
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... the exact thing I want to do, which is to make this-
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... tiny morsel, uh, scrap of food-
- 1:10:13 – 1:21:50
How Our Body Expends Calories
- CWChris Williamson
We've spoken almost exclusively so far about ways to manipulate what goes into the body. But energy balance is what goes in versus what you expend. What do we need to know when it comes to how our body actually uses calories? G flux theory, is that a thing? Is it a hypothesis, uh?
- MIDr Mike Israetel
What's G flux?
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, I think that the way that was put across was the difference between taking in 3,500 and expending 2,500, and taking in 2,500 and expending 1,500 results in a very different type of physiology.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Uh. Yeah. Definitely hypothesis.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh-huh.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Maybe even notion. I was in a cordial discussion with my friend Dr. Erix- Dr. Eric Helms, and I- I brought up the flux thing. And he was like, "Mike, shut up. That was a Teen Nation article and nothing more." And I was like, "Fuck, he just clowned me."
- CWChris Williamson
Christian Thibodeau, what are you doing to me?
- MIDr Mike Israetel
(Laughs) .
- CWChris Williamson
God damn it.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
He usually gives great advice. We all fuck up every now and again.
- CWChris Williamson
The upright rows.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Half of mine is bull-.
- CWChris Williamson
You need the upright rows.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
The accent alone, I'll believe anything he says.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
So, there is something to that. But let me give you kind of the grand narrative here. There's something called the Panzer paradox, named after Herman Panzer, its discoverer. And this is a gentleman that's actually, I think, trained as a, maybe, like, an ethnographer or an anthropologist or something like that. And he went around the world, various colleagues, and studied the physical activity levels of various peoples. Peoples of India, of Africa, of China, of indigenous tribes, of modern peoples. And he found that the levels of physical activity are almost the same for everyone. This is crazy, ready? We do not have an inactivity epidemic in the modern world.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm. Sedentariness is not the big problem.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
No. And if you actually live with indigenous tribes, unless they have to, they fucking sit around as long as they can and do diddly dick, 'cause you gotta conserve calories. You go out to get calories when you're hungry and when there's an opportunity. Otherwise, why the fuck are you going out and walking around? There is absolutely variation there. Between individuals in any one culture, there are huge variations in physical activity. But on average, physical activity is neither the cause of the obesity epidemic nor the likely solution to the obesity epidemic. However, if you want your best tools brought to the game of your personal fat loss, what I would say is this. We can have three options for you in physical activity terms.Option one, and this is a little bit to the G flux situation, you eat very little but you're very physically inactive. You're gonna generate the same caloric net deficit as all the other two groups of people I'll talk about, two ways of doing things. It'll work. For some people it worked great. "I code all day, I don't wanna have to fucking exercise for five hours. Get out of my face. I'm not really a hungry person, I can just drink a Soylent shake when I'm coding and I'm, I'm golden. No problem." The second group are people that have a moderate to high level of physical activity. Something typified by, oh, 10,000-ish steps per day, for example. Group one would be like two to 4,000 steps per day, AKA the average American. And that group of people ends up having a situation where they can eat more food, and plenty of food, and that helps them stay more full. But they're so active that they burn lots of fat and lose the same amount of weight, and the physical activity is additive to their health outcomes because physical activity is independently important for health, regardless of how skinny or fat you are. So that's a really good option, for most people probably better than option number one. Then there's a third option, what I like to nickname the grand delusion, and that is you continue to eat like the giant swine that you are, Taco Bell employees know you by name, they have your order ready for you every three hours, but you tell yourself, "I'm just gonna out-exercise this thing. I'm gonna go to Kenya, I'm gonna sign up for their marathon team, I'm gonna hang out with those homies and we're gonna do the thing." The problem with that is, this has been researched by Ponzer's group and, uh, associated colleagues, this has been researched in athletics for a long time, when you ask consistently, and I mean weeks on end, for your body to have a very high throughput of activity, calories, something like north of 15 to 20,000 steps per day every day on average, your body doesn't like to do that. It makes you very tired. It's making you tired so that you sit the hell down and stop bothering it as much.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- MIDr Mike Israetel
And it works. If you gut through it, you've just chosen a way that is a way to lose fat that works exactly as well as option number two, which is just a, a m- a moderately high physical activity, nothing crazy, consistent, and a decent amount of food, but it's just way harder and you suck up way more of your time exercising where you could be doing-
- CWChris Williamson
And eating and cooking.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
... a bunch of, and eating. Now, eating's fun, right? And who the hell cooks anymore, right? Trying to steel man the argument here.
- CWChris Williamson
Your butler.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Butlers plural. I don't have one butler. I'm not poor. My God. Um, if you don't wanna change your eating habits and you think you're gonna out-exercise your diet, we run into two problems. Problem one is what I just said, you're gonna be so drained on energy your life's gonna suck and you'll quit 99% of the time. Problem number two is it is easy to say, as what, uh, economist and philosopher Tom Sowell wa- has coined a term, notion, it's beyond hi- it's, uh, below hypothesis in its intellectual seriousness. Just a, a high idea you had at a party, not even couched to be tested like a hypothesis would be. And the notion is that, um, "I'll just, like, exercise so much, I'll eat whatever I want, and I'll still lose weight." The thing is though if you do the math on that, and it's frightening math, you can take a mile run, throw back, like, one Twinkie, and goodbye calorie balance.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- MIDr Mike Israetel
Half a donut nukes, like, half a mile run or some crazy shit like that. And so it's perfectly fine to say out loud, "Well, I'm just gonna eat whatever," but you can eat with a healthy appetite, and if really you mean whatever and you like fast food and junk food and chips and crisps and all that, you can put down 4,000 or 5,000 calories a day no problem. You ever see the average fast food meal? Like if you just go and have the number two or super size it, it's like 2,100 calories, but you have that three times a day. You've seen Super Size Me or whatever, and it's like, holy shit, how do you out-exercise that? Well, no, it's not just marathon runner pace. It's like two marathons a day. You're not gonna do that. So because of that situation, option two is the preferred option. For some folks, option one works. Eating very little, exercising very little, totally cool. Exercise is good for you, should probably get more of it, but it works. Option two, moderate high levels of physical activity, weight train a few times a week, get an average of 10,000-ish daily steps or so, and eat a little bit less than you normally would, you're golden. Option three, where you eat a ton of food, you don't change your ways, but you try to exercise a ton all the time, it just doesn't work in the real world for almost anyone.
- CWChris Williamson
We'll get back to talking to Mike in one minute, but first I need to tell you about AG1. 90% of Americans are not getting the nutrients that they need every day to be healthy. AG1 provides daily nutrients and gut health support in one comprehensive, convenient, and tasty daily drink. You do not need a handful of pills or potions to support your body and give it nutritional insurance. The average supplement is tested for 10 contaminants. AG1 is tested for 950. Plus it's NSF certified for sport, no banned substances, meaning that even Olympic athletes can use it. Here's the best thing. If you are uncertain about trying AG1, they have a 90-day money back guarantee, so you can buy it and try it every single day for three months, and if you do not like it, if you do not feel better at the end of those three months, they will give you the entirety of your money back. So you can try it right now risk-free. Try AG1 and get a free one-year supply of vitamin D3 and K2, plus five free AG1 travel packs with your first purchase by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to drinkag1.com/wisdom. That's drinkag1.com/ ...... wisdom. There is asymmetric warfare between what you can put into your mouth and what you can burn in your body, and that's what the example about running half a mile to burn off half of a donut. Running half a mile is not easy, it sucks. And-
Episode duration: 2:22:32
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