Everything You Need To Know About Getting Lean - Stan Efferding (4K)

Stan Efferding, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

What do you think are the main causes of the obesity epidemic? Why is it that the average American's got so much fatter over the last few decades?

I don't wanna talk about what Stan thinks. I wanna talk about what we see as probably what the academic community's consensus is. Um, I'm kind of a collator of information as a personal trainer for 30 years, and I wanna deliver that information to my clients and make sure it's evidence-based, and so I'll, I'll refrain from opinions. I've tried that in the past, and I've been (clears throat) probably correctly, um, and soundly (laughs) uh, informed of my, my inaccuracy. So, uh, at, at the core of it all, we're consuming more calories than we used to 50 years ago. We know that from all the research. Um, and the majority of those calories, or the, the cause of that seems to be, um, hyper-palatable, ultra-processed foods, and it seems to have interfered with our ability to, um, uh, become satiated. And, um, so we're eating too much and we're in this food environment where that's really easy to do. It's hard to shut it off. And so it really is calories, and I know that sparks a whole bunch of, uh, uh, bad feelings from folks, and it, it kinda gets you those straw man arguments about KECO, "calories in, calories out" is, uh, you know, it doesn't work, and, and all of that. But it's a little m- it's more complex than that. Um, I've said, "Move more, eat less" is truthful but not useful.

Necessary but not sufficient, perhaps?

Yeah. Well, it's just, i- it is what's happening and it is the solution, uh, but, you know, it's, it's simple but it's not easy, and so there's a whole host of factors I think we can dive into on that. But fact of the matter is, it is calories. The KECO is an oversimplification. It's actually an inner bal- energy balance equation that accounts for all of these variables which we may talk about, the total daily energy intake minus the total daily energy expenditure. And there's a whole host of things that go into both sides of that equation, uh, that a- it really accounts for, uh, just about everything that, that, uh, that goes into weight gain.

Why is "calories in, calories out" and diet fads and discussions in general so emotionally charged? I would think that this would just be, i- it's, uh, I'm not calling you a good or a bad person. There's no reason for you to believe that you are anything. This isn't a comment on you. And yet diet discussions online are some of the most virulent, uh, uh, uh, and aggressive that you see.

They really are. I think part of it might just be that we want to find, uh, I said pin the tail on the donkey, find one single source that maybe is, uh, something that we could fix if we just got rid of it. Uh, the carbohydrate-insulin model spawned from that, where if you eat a grape and your insulin goes up that you're gonna gain fat (laughs) and you can't lose, uh, y- you're g- you can't lose fat. Uh, m- certain, demonizing certain foods became very popular. I mean, there's still a lot of that going on, whether it's fructose or seed oils or, uh, anything that might correlate with overconsumption. Um, I think also that when you talk about "calories in, calories out," it seems to blame the victim, the individual who's having a hard time losing weight. Um, they become, uh, you blame them. "You're overeating. You're lazy. You're undisciplined," uh, you know, that kind of thing, uh, without paying attention to all the other factors that go into that. And it's just an oversimplification.