 I've been to the edge. I stared into the abyss and I didn't blink, you know? And it's like, when you have that kind of mentality where you know you could go back to zero, somebody could take everything from you, but it doesn't matter, because you're still who you are, you know? I think that's true confidence, but that starts small. I was the most unconfident kid, you know? But what happened? I started lifting weights. And then I was like, oh, I got stronger. I bench pressed 300 pounds. I never thought I would do that. Let's do a bodybuilding show. Did a bodybuilding show. Everybody was like, Lane, you're crazy. Like all my friends from high school, like you can't win, I won. And it's like, oh, I can do something else. And then it was, let's try a PhD. Let's do that, right? This is like progressive overload for life. The more hard shit you do, the more hard shit you can do. What's up, everybody? Today's episode, Lane Norton crushing all the craft that's out there in the fitness industry. Remember, he's a PhD nutrition champion, power lifter. He's been in the space for a very, very long time. You probably already know who he is. That's why you're here. And he's somebody that doesn't pull any punches, very objective. So it's great to have him back on the show. By the way, we're giving away a program today. We're gonna give away Matt's aesthetic. If you want a chance to win that program, comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop it, subscribe to this channel, and turn on notifications. If you win, we'll let you know in the comments section. We're also running a sale on two workout programs. Maps Anabolic and Maps Split, both 50% off. If you're interested, just click on the link at the top of the description below. All right, here comes the show. Science, like the scientific method is perfect. Okay, and then here's why it's perfect because replication is the mother of all science, right? Like, yes, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but eventually somebody in a lab that actually does the right thing is gonna try and replicate it, and they're gonna be like, oh, that motherfucker's full of shit, you know? And so that's why I tell people it is a perfect method being exercised by imperfect people, you know? Well, so this is a great place to go because we saw this, or we see this with nutrition advice. There's so much mistrust now in nutrition advice because you're old enough to remember this. The advice that we got for, I don't know, decades, now in hindsight, like, wrong, you were wrong. That's not what's happening. That's not the cause of obesity. That's not the cause of heart disease. And this thing that you said is healthier and this thing is actually worse than this thing, and we know this. So now we're at a point, we're getting to a point where people are gonna be like, I don't trust you. But here's the problem with that. It's not that they don't trust anybody. They don't trust you, and I'm not specifically you, but the scientific community. So then who do they go to? These numb nuts on- Somebody with their shirt off who looks good. Yeah, liver king. Oh, he must be right because he looks jacked or whatever. Mike, I didn't bring it up. My buddy's like, stop, harp it on this thing. You look bad. I didn't bring it up. I brought it up, I brought it up. No, no, I mean, it's, I think, you know, when I first got into fitness, circa early 2000s, there was a decent barrier to entry, right? Like in terms of if you wanted to be known, you had to get in the magazine somehow. You had to have some voice of authority. Now, it didn't mean you knew what you were talking about, but regardless, now anybody can go viral. And typically the crazier the message and the crazier the shtick, the more well-known you can become. And the reality is these people just wanna get eyeballs on however they can get it, right? What's the best way to get eyeballs on you in a space that's very, very crowded with quite frankly, there's a lot of people who put out good information. Like, if you know what Rogan was talking about this the other day on his podcast, he's like, we really live in a time like if you're in a physical fitness, there's a lot of really good people to go learn from. There is, yeah. So when you're in that space where you have people who are actually really qualified, because I used to be unique like 10 years ago and now there's a bunch of people who have like PhDs, who actually lift, who like understand how to apply it as well. How do you become well-known if you don't have those credentials, you don't have that knowledge? Just say some really crazy sht really loudly for a long period of time. Now here's the argument I have with that because that's true. However, what we're seeing and what we've always seen in markets and this is frustrating but true is they do get a lot of attention very quickly but they tend to not last. So like if you look at you for example, you didn't explode out of nowhere. It was a slow gradual grind slowly built authority. Same thing with us, we've been around now for eight years. We hit number one a while ago, we've maintained that and it's a slow kind of growth. We didn't come out of nowhere and I think we're proving the model that if you do things the right way, you'll have a longer lasting business and you'll stick around. But you still gotta battle these like crazy people that come out of nowhere and then you gotta go. But it gives us content. I mean it gives you shit to talk about all the time. Yeah, listen. This is true. You know, Brian Cowan gave me a really nice compliment when we were at dinner and then on his podcast and he's like, you know, you did it the right way. You never gave in to the temptation to sell bullshit. You know, and he's like, you probably could have made a lot of money really quickly doing it. But just what you said, like one, like how much money do you need? Like I've done well but I'm really fortunate. You know, like I'd rather feel good about what I do. Right. You know, and then like two, I think I had that feeling like, okay, maybe it'll make it easier for a short term, but what happens once your credibility's gone? Then you're basically just left with, let me get all these new people who are coming in and fool them. You know, and that's what you've got left, right? Absolutely. And so, you know, I really wanted to have like a long lasting like legacy in the fitness industry. You know, and the only way to do that is to just be really consistent with how you do things and not consistent in that like my message has to stay the same because like obviously I've changed my position on various things over the years, but it's like still the core of the message is very similar, you know? And I genuinely care about helping people. Like that's at the crux. That's true. I'll vouch for that. When I was on Ed Milet's podcast, he texted me that I said, hey man, is there anything I can do to help you? And I said, you just did. Like just have me on again, you know? Like I just like to be able to reach people. Yeah, so again, this is, you know, we've known each other now for a long time. This is probably the fourth or fifth time on the show. And what we appreciate about you is not that we agree with you, although oftentimes we do agree, not always, but we do often. It's that you do maintain that integrity and that objectivity. So I love people like that, whether I agree with them or not. What I hate and what's so challenging and what we're constantly trying to battle are whether I agree with them or whether I disagree with them is people that don't have that because you can't trust them. You just can't trust them. You can't trust what's happening. I love sitting down with you and debating or discussing something I disagree with you on because I know where you're coming from and I know we can have a good discussion. And if I do a good job, I may change your mind. I also know that you may change my mind. That's fun. That's exciting. So that's what we're having on the show. I actually had, I was texting with Andrew Huberman the other day and forgot how we got on this topic, but I was talking about how I actually complimented him because he was on Rogan the other day and he was describing the process of getting grants and publishing and where the holes are in it and he did a really good job of basically saying, hey, I don't wanna dog this, like it's not a perfect system, but I'm not sure what the alternative would be. And I think that's one of the things people don't realize is like, hey, let's not have this unicorn fallacy where everything's gonna be perfect because... You and I had this discussion. I actually brought it up on our show. There was that, I don't remember what it was, it was an article that came out that showed the percentage of people who work for the FDA that also used to work for either large food corporations or something along those lines. And I brought that up to you and I really appreciated... I voice memoed you, I remember. Yeah, and I really appreciated your response. You said, look, I could definitely see how there's a potential conflict of interest. But who's gonna fund it? Yeah, like, otherwise we can't do this research. Who's gonna fund if red meat is good or bad for you other than the meat industry, right? Like the broccoli industry's not gonna do that. So like, where do we go from here? And then what's the alternative? I love that because a lot of times people say this is broken. They don't consider that the alternatives are worse. So what's the alternative? We have state controlled funded everything. I don't think that's a good idea either. Again, I mean, you're probably your favorite economist, Thomas Sowell, compared to what, right? And there are no solutions, only trade-offs, right? So like I said, like the model we have isn't perfect, but at least there is, you know, there is self-policing of that society. That's right. Like if you're, like we've seen it, like the Alzheimer's papers, they got retracted because it was completely fabricated. Crazy. And I do like what Huberman said too. I don't know if you guys have heard the podcast, but he said, I think there's way less of that where stuff's just straight up made up. He said, what more often happens is the null hypotheses that don't get published, right? So like a professor has a pet hypothesis. He has postdocs or she has postdocs. And grad students under them, they want to get published, get money, get funding. They also want to be in the good graces of their advisor. If something doesn't work, doesn't support the hypothesis, they're more likely to say, well, let's try it a different way rather than to publish it. And so that got into what I was telling him. I really appreciate my advisor, Don Lehmann, because he was like, I don't care what the data says. Like whether it's, whether it supports our hypothesis or refutes it, it's good data, right? No hypothesis is just as publishable as anything else. And this is somebody who had strong opinions about his theories. But I remember this one, my first experiment I published. So we were looking at the time course of muscle protein synthesis in response to a complete meal. And my hypothesis was, well, leucine is what triggers muscle protein synthesis. I remember this, yeah. So however long plasma leucine stays elevated will be how long we see protein synthesis stay elevated. So we got, we started to get in the plasma data back in the protein synthesis data back. And we saw that protein synthesis went up, peaked at 90 minutes and then came back down by three hours. Plasma leucine was still maxed out at three hours. It's still like a upper limit plateau. And I'm like, well, that can't be right, right? So I like ran the plasma data again, right? And I ran the protein synthesis data again, came back the same. Like, well, maybe something's going on with the initiation factors. So basically MTOR signaling, right? So I looked at all these targets of MTOR. They were still elevated at three hours as well. Like, okay, well, maybe intracellular leucine is going down. So it's in the plasma, but maybe it's not getting into the cell. Nope, intracellular leucine, still the same thing. And then I'm like, okay, well, maybe some of the other plasma amino acids are getting drained from protein synthesis. And it's like short circuiting. Does that make sense? Yeah. Nope, all the essential amino acids were still elevated. I'm like, so I kept rerunning and rerunning, rerunning. Finally, layman calls me into his office like one day he's like, so we're like six months down the road in this experiment. Where are we at with this data? I'm like, yeah, I just gotta run it again because it's wrong. He's like, well, why is it wrong? I'm like, well, here's why. He's like, well, is your technique off? And I'm like, and I told him how I, you know, did the plasma analysis and everything. He's like, no, you're sounds good. He's like, your standard deviations are good. He's like, and this is a mind blowing moment for me. Maybe you're just wrong. He's like, it sounds like you're trying to get the data to fit your hypothesis. And what you need to do is change your hypothesis to fit the data. And I was like, oh, shit. And what was cool about it was it actually ended up to me being the most interesting data I published and actually was one of the reasons it changed the way I ate. So I used to eat like every two hours, you know, to keep, you know, plasma amino acids elevated. And then I'm like, well, if I believe this, if I actually believe my own data, then I actually don't have to do that. Yeah, waste of time. That's bullshit. In fact, it might actually be impeding me, you know? So I changed the way I ate. I went from eight meals a day to four meals a day and, you know, didn't notice any decrease in gains. And, you know, I actually felt better, you know? Because- Digestion's probably better too. Well, it was more like, you know, I don't know about, because it's like, yeah, you're eating more frequently but it's smaller. So, but I think moreover, like, I just, my body got used to making glucose endogenously again as opposed to relying it, relying on it. So it's like, you know, before, if I would go two hours of eating, I'd get really hungry. And now, I mean, I can even, you know, go five, six, seven, eight hours without eating or like wake up in the morning and go a few hours without eating and I don't get hungry. You know, like yesterday, I woke up and I had a phone call, because I'm, you know, on the West Coast and all my business is back on the East Coast. So I had a phone call at like 6 a.m. I had two phone calls. I forgot to eat beforehand. And I'm like, well, it almost never happens to me. And I'm like, oh, I wasn't even that hungry. You know, so it was interesting and then it changed the way I ate. Like now intermittent fasting is the whole thing, right? But like back when we were getting into this stuff, it was eat every two hours. And in between drinking amino acid drinks. Yes, yes, yes. Before you go to bed, wake up in the middle of the night. So what we'll always say is like, as a scientist, you really, there's a few things you've got to have. One is you got to be okay at being wrong, okay? And you've actually got to be a little bit excited about being wrong. And here's why you should be excited about being wrong. If I'm wrong, it means I'm not doing everything to the best I can. So there's room for improvement. If I'm already doing everything right, then this is as good as it gets, right? Well, I'm a meat-headed heart. I want some gains still on the table. You know what I mean? Like I want to do something I can do, you know? Yeah, imagine if you realized that there was something you were doing your workout that was keeping you from lifting another 50 pounds. That's exciting. Exactly. You know, I remember the first time that hit me, there was this study they did in a small town. And this is why this is so important because oftentimes what happens in reality is counter-intuitive. It's counter-intuitive. For sure. So I remember there was a study where they took the small town and the theory was, the hypothesis was, well, one of the reasons why people eat terribly is they're just not informed. We just need to inform that. So here's what we're going to do with this town. I know that's not true. I know, right? This is what we're going to do with this town. We're going to mandate all restaurants put calories and proteins, fats and carbs on all of their meals. This way people know what they're eating and then they're going to make better choices. And so they did, and they tracked this. And what they found was people ate worse. So the scientists went back and like, well, how is this possible? And then they said, oh, okay. I think I know what's happening. Instead of looking at the menu and saying, well, the cheeseburger is 600 calories. The salad is 400 calories. I'll go with the salad. What they're saying, which we know this to be true just by training people, as they said, the salad's 400 calories. Wow, just for 200 more calories. I can eat the cheeseburger? I mean, the cheeseburger. So it actually encouraged people to eat worse, which is so counterintuitive at first. Now, had we not done that study, imagine if they implemented that nationwide and then trying to figure out what the hell's going on and, you know. Well, you know, I think I've said this for a while. We don't have a knowledge problem. Like people generally know how to eat. Like listen, you can do plant-based keto, whatever. Put two different plates down. Generally people can tell you which one looks healthier, right? Minimally processed food, you know, not hyperpalatable food, fruits, vegetables, lean meats, like those sorts of things, right? Most people get that. We don't have a head knowledge problem. There's a lot, you know, like Dave Ramsey kind of says this stuff for finances. Like I always use this comparison. I'm like, okay. People will say calories in, calories out, way too simple. Can't possibly explain everything. And I'm like, well, you're confusing like a simplicity of an outcome with like the individual components being simple. And also just because something simple and concept doesn't mean changing is gonna be simple in execution, okay? Look at finances. Would anybody argue that in order to save money you have to earn more than you spend? Yeah, duh. No, no, no. I think I can spend more than I earned and I'll find a way to say, no, nobody's gonna say that, right? Tell that to a person who's not saving any money. You can't figure it out. Oh, you just gotta make more and spend less. Just make more than you spend, yeah. Okay, you have that knowledge now, so go not be broke. No, that's because we take out the human behavior component. For sure. I wrote something yesterday about like stop talking about optimal. Like I get, like I'm an optimal guy and I like to talk about that kind of stuff. But most of you having paralysis by analysis and perfectionism, it's just an excuse to not do shit. Like really, like you're sitting this, well, I don't wanna put the effort in until everything's like, that's why you're never gonna do it. Yeah, yeah. One thing I'll say about me is I am perfectly happy to wait into uncertainty with no perfect plan in place. And even if you had a perfect plan, guess what's gonna happen once you start executing it. You get punched in the mouth, right? And actually, in fact, that's the only way to realize what you need to iterate. You know, you mentioned calories and calories out. Let's go there for a second because the debate continues to rage as to whether or not a calorie is a calorie. Calories in versus calories out. What's going on here? Why do you think this debate continues? And why do you think that there's otherwise smart people? Cause it's not just, you know, morons. There's some like smart people otherwise, right? They're educated, they seem intelligent. Who are saying this, that calories in versus calories out doesn't work, is wrong, a calorie is not a calorie. Why? What's going on? What's your opinion on that? So I think for the majority, I'll tell you why. It's because no matter how you slice it, if you talk about calories in versus calories out, there is an inherent component of personal responsibility built into that. And people don't like that. It's much easier to be, which regardless, what's really funny is like the low carb people who are like calories in, calories out is weight shaming. I saw this from some low carb person. And I'm like, okay, so you're basically saying that saying you ate too many calories is fat shaming, but saying you ate too many carbs is not fat shaming. Please explain to me how this logic works, right? But for whatever reason, it's just more palatable. You know, it's kind of like, no, no, it wasn't your fault. It was process carbs are addictive and that's why you became overweight. And listen, I think this is actually kind of broader culture war, which is 100% personal responsibility versus nothing is your fault. You're just reacting to your circumstances and trauma and all that kind of stuff, right? So I used to be way more on this end of like, yes, everything is a choice. It's all your personal responsibility. And now I've, I would still say I'm more towards this end, but I definitely have come back a little bit because- You're realizing the influence of all that stuff? Because they're like my own life and seeing certain things that I struggled with, not with calories and stuff, but like I was a people pleaser and I had trouble setting boundaries with people and it's like, why am I like, oh, because I was fucking bullied terribly growing up and I wanted people to like me and all this kind of stuff. And then you realize, why can't I just tell somebody no, it should be easy, right? And it's like my whole body will like start fucking, it's like, why am I like this? So you realize how come that couldn't happen to somebody with food, right? So I think when you look at people who are obese or overweight, they did a study in obese females and they found that they were 50% more likely to have some sort of sexual assault trauma in their background. And then- It's a very similar profile to drug abuse. Yeah, obese people get a greater, on average, get a greater reward sensation from food, so they don't have the same response to satiety signals. We got really focused on the metabolism side of things for 30 years. It's like, okay, well, there's gotta be like a slowing of metabolism or thyroid. And what we found really is there's nothing wrong with obese individuals' metabolism in terms of metabolic rate. In fact, if anything, they have a little bit higher metabolic rate because they have more weight that they're carrying around. But what we found was on the appetite side of things and not just appetite, food intake. And here's why I don't just say appetite. People eat for a lot more reasons than just hunger. Almost nobody eats for hunger. People aren't even in touch with their hunger. 100%. I'm so aware of it from tracking and being regimented for so long that when I actually get hungry, I'm like, what the fuck is this? I'm like, wait, why am I hungry now? And then I'm like, man, imagine if I had to get this feeling to make myself feed myself, like God, I'd be a miserable human. Which by the way, I think this is the most valuable thing that fasting has to offer. Not all the other shit that everybody tries to sell it. I think that's what it is, is helping someone get in touch what real hunger feels like. So here's the problem that the extremists make in our space is that they try to separate the physiological from the psychological and you can't. You can't. And you can't. So like, to use a different- It is, psychological is physiological. That's right. So here's a different example. It's like pain, okay? Like, wait. You work out. Okay, you work out almost every day. You train really hard. You probably feel more pain than the beginner who starts working out during your workout. However- But they perceive it differently. Totally different. In fact, you don't run for it. It's not scary to you. You probably enjoy it. You understand, you have a different connection to it. Hunger is a physiological signal, but there's a subjective, how we perceive hunger is also very subjective. And what that's like and our appetite, am I satisfied? Why am I not satisfied? There's a subjective part to that. So if we just look at the physiological, we're not gonna get the full story. It's the psychological we need to strongly consider. And now I wanna go back to calories versus calories. I don't wanna miss this because I have a little bit of a different theory- So you're gonna stop playing from squirreling. Yeah. I have a little bit- No, I'm gonna squirrele myself. I have a different theory and I'd love your opinion on this. I think, I don't necessarily think, I think the personal responsibility part plays a role. So I'm not disagreeing with you 100%. But I think the reason why the calories versus calories out debate continues to rage is because the calories in part influences, to some extent, the calories out part. And this is where people mess up because they say, well, I changed this. Why did I lose weight then? Because if I'm only burning this many calories. So I think the message needs to be, calories in versus calories out is real. But what you do, your behaviors, your sleep, your exercise, sometimes the foods that you eat, your hormones can affect the calories out portion, which is why it's not this one-to-one black and white. It's crazy math. That's right. So that's why it seems strange to people where they're like, well, I was eating more and I got leaner, it must be this other thing. It's like, no, no, no. We affected the calories out part. Your metabolism is very complex and is never stagnant. It's never the same. It's always changing. So- No, you're absolutely right. That was gonna be the second part that I touched on. Because you're right. People hear calories in, calories out and they immediately think, well, I tracked my calories and I didn't lose weight. And it's like, okay, so you kept a budget, you didn't save money. Guess what? You're missing something, right? You know what I mean? Now, I'm not saying, I like using financial examples because I think it's more easy to understand for people. So when it comes to calories out, well, let's take calories in, for example, all right? Food labels are allowed to have a 20% error on them. People don't know that, okay? So it's hard to track exactly how many calories you're taking in, okay? Also, different foods have different amounts of metabolizable energy. Fiber, for example, fiber is anywhere from basically zero to four calories. It can be a regular carbohydrate or it can be nothing, okay? So depending on the type of fiber you eat, your individual gut microbiota, there's no way to know exactly how many calories you're getting. Now, people will use that to see this is why you shouldn't track calories and I'll get to why that's not, you're kind of throwing the baby out with a bath. Right. So it's complicated on the calories inside because we can't know exactly how many are coming in, right? But it's infinitely more complicated than the calories outside because your metabolism is not static, right? So let's take BMR, for example. That's your basal metabolic rate or it's also kind of used interchangeably with resting energy expenditure, resting metabolic rate. They kind of use these terms interchangeably. There's subtle differences to each but essentially it's like, what is the energy cost to keep the lights on, right? Like if you just laid down all day, what would the energy cost be? So that's for most people anywhere from 50 to 70% of their total daily energy expenditure. That's another part that's like, I've heard Jason Fung talk about this and I'm like, you actually don't understand the difference between total energy expenditure and metabolic rate. These are two different things. So metabolic rate is just, again, your basal metabolic rate. Total daily energy expenditure encompasses all of the energy you expend in a day. And one of those buckets is your metabolic rate. Another bucket is your physical activity, okay? So that includes neat, which you just mentioned, Adam, and your exercise. Now it's important to understand the difference between these two because people hear physical activity and they just think, well, I'm still exercising an hour a day. Right, but then you sit at your desk all day. Right, so there's a few different things. One, your willingness to volitionally exercise when you're in a deficit goes down over time. So we see this with lab rats. They'll just voluntarily exercise less. But even if you keep it up, you actually, the more you do an exercise, the better you get at it. It's probably not a huge difference, but you do get more efficient and you burn less calories over time. Again, it's probably not a ton, but there is some sort of adaptation that happens there. So that's also not static. Then you look at neat, which quite frankly, I actually now think neat might be the most powerful metabolic output that people don't realize. And I think people dismiss it because they're like, well, it's in a physical activity bucket, so you can just do more of it. No, you can't, because neat is subconscious. You are not actively thinking about it, right? So all these little movements that you're doing, like you're rubbing your fingers and you're tapping and you're tapping your foot. You stand more than you sit. Like you're pacing when you're on the phone. You're not thinking about doing that. And your body manipulates that based off of whether or not it wants to burn or save more calories. Correct, correct. So it doesn't sound that much like that powerful, but there was a classic overfeeding study, I think from 1995 by Levine. I believe they overfed people by like 1,000 calories a day. They had them in a metabolic chamber, so they estimated they're totally under the energy expenditure. And then overfed them by 1,000 calories a day, I believe for six weeks. On average, the average weight gain was something like, I wanna say six or seven pounds, right? But there were people who gained as much as like 15 pounds, and then there was one person who gained less than two pounds. And what they found is that person who gained less than two pounds basically just spontaneously increased their physical activity without even realizing it. They just burned so many more calories fidgeting. They didn't even realize it. So when people say, oh, I'm gonna go for a walk, get my need up. Okay, I realize I'm kind of being pedantic, but as Jack Reacher says, details matter. If you go for a walk purposefully, that's not neat. That's purposeful exercise, right? So when we look at neat, a 10% reduction in body weight can induce up to a four to 500 calorie reduction per day in neat. Okay, now couple that with the fact that your BMR can drop by about 15% with a similar reduction in body weight. So let's say you're like, take me for example, my total daily energy expenditure is about 3,300 calories a day. My BMR is around 2,000, okay? So if I get a 15% reduction in my BMR from losing 10% of my body weight, okay? I go to now that's 300 calories down. Plus let's take 400 calories off neat at 700. My maintenance calories just went from 3,300 to 2,600. So when I, so when people go, why ate a deficit, I didn't lose weight. What do you think is more likely that you're somehow defying the laws of the conservation of energy or that maybe you're just not able to track the changes in this? Yeah, there's one thing I'd like to have your opinion on as well, Lane, which is that besides movement, which is, that's big, okay? So neat and intentional movement, all of it burns calories. It seems, and I'd love your opinion on this, it seems that the metabolism itself can also through many complex mechanisms, some that we understand and some that we don't, decide to burn more or less calories by becoming more or less efficient. So, and you can influence this through, I mean, look, you could give a man with low testosterone, testosterone change nothing and you start to see more muscle, less fat. That's one signal, that's an obvious one. But there's a lot of things that are happening that are quite complex. And this is why when the people who are like the, well, one pound of muscle only burns this many extra calories and whatever, reverse dieting is baloney or whatever, it's like, it's not that black and white. We have studies, like, are you familiar with the modern hunter-gatherer studies that show that they burn like, yeah. They burn about the same that we burn. Yeah, it's like, what's going on here? Well, I mean, obviously, of course, our metabolisms can decide or move depending on the signaling to become more or less efficient with the same lean body mass because if they didn't, we would never have survived. There's no way we would have survived. Well, when we look at the HOTSA, sure they're doing more physical purpose, well, it's not purposeful exercise, but they're having to go out and do physical activity to get stuff. But my guess is when they're done with that, their body isn't trying to dissipate energy. You know what I mean? It's trying to conserve energy. That's right. So they're probably very stationary when they're not doing actual work. That's right, that's right. And this is why you can speed up or slow down your metabolism purposefully through outside signals, through changing diet, improving sleep, lifting weights has got to be one of the most effective ways it is. And this is why you have data, some data showing, oh, reverse dieting doesn't work. This isn't where you can't speed up the metabolism. Well, so I'll address that. So some people say, well, there's no reverse dieting doesn't work. There's no real studies on reverse dieting. So, you know, whatever. I have changed my tune on it. Okay, I don't think the changes in reverse and like in energy expenditure are from basic changes in basal metabolic rate. I've just, I've done enough case studies looking at this with myself, with other people. But I do think, and here's the thing, when you talk about testosterone, talk about hormones, people think it impacts their BMR. There's very little data of that. But what does happen is when you balance those things out, you feel better, you have more energy, and guess what? You start moving. Move more, you lift harder. You start lifting harder, exactly. Now, what about the downstream effects of that? Cause then you build more muscle. Right, so that'll have an effect. Sure, sure. But I think most of this stuff is happening actually through physical activity. Now, people will kind of use that to poo poo, reverse dieting or whatever you wanna call it. And I always tell people, I'm like, listen. Who cares, it works. I've never, I've never said like you have to reverse diet or anything like that. I'm just saying, hey, here's this tool that seems to work for some people, give it a try if you want, right? Yeah. But I do think, and I have seen this, I have seen people who have been able to drastically increase their calories over time with very minimal, if not any weight gain. And okay, so I'm not saying they're defying the laws of thermodynamics, obviously not. Just more factors going on. Now, I think it's probably again through spontaneous physical activity, which is hard to measure because you can't measure neat directly. The only way you can really measure neat is you control physical activity, you measure BMR, you do double leveled water to measure total daily energy expenditure or metabolic chamber, and then you use some kind of constant, like an assumption for TEF because it's also hard to measure. And then whatever you're left over with is basically neat, right? So you can't directly measure it either. I see, I think that that's a big part of it, but I still think that mammalian metabolism is so complex. Like, I don't know if you've seen the studies on POWs where they, you know, and they survive on like 300 calories a day. They're made to do physical labor. And yes, they're definitely not healthy. They definitely don't look like fit athletes, but how the hell were their bodies able to survive with so few calories? Takes a lot to starve somebody. Takes a lot to starve somebody. Yeah, I want to go back though to something that you said that I actually talk a lot about and I have a theory that, because a lot of things that you guys are what we're talking about back and forth right now, what do you think? A difference of five to 8%, maybe 10% on the high end, but you said something that I've talked about many times on our show, which is the FDA allows these labels to be off by 20%. That's a big number. And I, and in my theory, and I'd like to hear your opinion on this, is if you're in the business of selling quote unquote health foods, okay, which would include some of our protein bars and shakes and all these things like that, would it not behoove you to flirt with that 20% line because it's in your best interest. Well, some people who make protein bars don't flirt with it. They jump right over. That's right. And we've seen this. We've seen lawsuits with brands like Detour back in the days and stuff like that, where they're way off. And like honestly the, I think most of those now are under enough scrutiny to where they're probably like relatively close. Now, I think what's the real danger is some of these boutique companies who like has never gotten the FDA's radar. So there was this competition team who sold low calorie brownies, right? And we had a client who was like, I just can't lose weight. Turns out they were having three of these brownies per day. They shipped us some. We tasted them. We're like, you can taste butter. That's 150 calories. So I think they claim they were something like 17 grams of protein, 12 grams of carbs and three grams of fat or something like that, right? So we bought them from the company, had them shipped direct to the laboratory, paid 300 bucks of my own money to test it. Three grams of protein. Three. 45 grams of carbohydrate. 50 or 12 or 15 grams of fat. Way off. So, and I would have contacted the company and give them a chance to respond, but I actually got contacted by people who were like type one diabetics who were like, I ate one of these and look at what happened to my glucose. I'm like, you could fuck somebody up. You actually kill somebody. So I was like, nah, we're just gonna put you on blast because these people reached out to the company and the company basically ignored them. So this is my point though, okay? You're talking, so obviously Boutique, you're, they're probably way off. Well, hang on, let me tell you the funniest part of this. It gets worse. I got a cease and desist from the company threatening to sue me. And so I talked to my attorney about it and I've been through a few lawsuits. And even when you win, it's not fun and you always lose money, right? When people were like, oh, we'll just, people say this all the time. I'm like, let them sue you. I'm like, oh yeah, easy for you to say, all right? Trust me, this shit, honestly, other than the money, it's like a second job being involved in a lawsuit. So it's like, even if somebody's just posturing, it's like, do you wanna call their bluff? So they wanted me to remove the video and all this kind of stuff. And I talked to my attorney and I was like, you know what? I won't say anything more, but I'm not fucking taking the video down, kiss my ass. Like if you sue me, one thing that anybody wants to get involved in a defamation suit, if you talk to an attorney, one thing they'll tell you, if you're gonna sue somebody for defamation, your side of the street better be fucking clean, okay? Cause one thing judges don't like is people who live in glass houses and throw stones, okay? So, and also it's not defamation if it's true, right? So I'm like, okay, well, you know, if you wanna like sue the company that did the analysis too, you know, good luck. So anyways, I ended up not taking the video down and they didn't, you can find it online. So, you know, through the years of knowing you, you've definitely gone more from the, it's just like this, do it this way, to now saying, wow, our behaviors and how we interpret things and how we feel about things really has, also plays a big role. What was the process of going from here to here for you? Was it just experience? Can you work with people? Yeah, that's it right there. You work with people. Yeah. Cause you can have all the ideas. I remember when I started coaching people, like, I can solve the obesity crisis, eat these macros, you know? It's like, it worked for me, it was easy, you know? And then you realize, oh, dumb dumb, people aren't robots like you, you know? I'm my best friend, Mike, he said, he's like, I don't know if I've ever met anyone like you in that when something makes sense in your brain and it clicks, you just do it. It's not like you gotta rework a bunch of behaviors. It's like your brain just goes, okay, we're doing this now, you know? And it really is kind of like that. I'm a very black and white, and it's probably my ADHD. It's like very, when that switch flips, it's done. So this is the challenge that I've always had with our space is that the really smart people who've never worked with a lot of people, especially fitness fanatics, is fitness fanatics. They have that ability. We tend to have that personality, right? For sure. Where we just like, oh, no, just do this. Just that chord, you'll get jacked. Okay, slice it up. Yeah, just work out. What's the big deal? Get up and do it. Just add Frank's hot sauce to it. We'll get it down. But my favorite people to get advice from or get information from are people who are smart and are educated, who've also worked with a lot of people. For sure. Because then you get the full story. Otherwise, you either get the crazy weird shit over here or you get the like, everybody's a robot over here and you're like, neither one of those work. Yeah, my favorite is when like, you see all these protocols out there of like, we were talking about like self-help. If you did every self-help thing you're supposed to do, it'd be a full-time fucking job, right? So it's like same thing with nutrition stuff when people are like, well, eat organic this and do this and fresh fruits. I'm like, yeah, what about the single mom who works two jobs with three kids? Like, what's she supposed to do, numbskull, you know? Like telling her to like, just want it more badly. Okay, you know? That was a big mistake we all made when we first started training people. Same here. We give everybody all the answers and it just never worked. And then eventually we learn. And then lean into the motivation. That's it. Yeah, I try to hide them up all the time. That's why I talk way more about mindset now than I do about exes and os. I'm like, guys, I like to talk about exes and os with nutrition, but at the end of the day, like me talking about like, metabolic adaptation and this and that, it's not gonna change your life. Here's what's gonna change your life, doing the work. Yeah, you know what happened is you realized you weren't talking to yourself. You realize that there's one of you and most people are not gonna be like you. For sure. And in order to help them, you have to learn how to change the message a little bit. This takes me to a topic that you and I have met. Many discussions about, for some reason, you've been known as the guy that talks about this. I think it's just because you tend to speak out about it. Artificial sweeteners. Let's talk about artificial sweeteners. Has your position on them changed at all? Do you have a little bit of a different opinion on them or is it exactly as it was when we first met? Sorry, I gotta do that for a fact. Are you sponsored by them, by the way? No, I'm not. Why do you do that? You don't make any money. I make no money from it, none. Stop doing that. They love you for it. When people are like, you're sponsored by big sugar, I'm like, notice how it's a sugar-free monster. I literally have never touched a monster in my life or a diet drink in my life that has sugar in it. So how would I? But I mean, I wish I did get paid by them, you know? God. They're not gonna pay you, you rep them for free, man. God, exactly. So my opinion has changed slightly. So what was it before and what is it now? So my kind of crux was these are basically metabolically inert, okay? Because you don't absorb a lot of the stuff in it. Like aspartame, you do absorb, but people don't realize it's such a small amount because it's 200 times sweeter than sugar. The amount you get, like a Coke has like 40 grams of sugar. Right. I think the aspartame amount is like in the milligrams. Okay. You know, like it's a very small amount. I want to say it's like, it's less than 200 milligrams. So you're getting such a small amount of this stuff and it breaks down into, you know, phenylalanine and aspartate, which are amino acids. Like everybody's like, oh, look at the warning on the side of the bottle. I'm like, that's for people with PKU. An inborn error that trust me, you would know you have because they test for it at birth. And people, the other one is, well, phenylalanine and aspartic acid are neurotoxic. I'm like, yeah, if you take brain cells, put them on a Petri dish and just throw it on there. Yeah. But you've got this thing called the blood brain barrier, which stops that from happening. Otherwise, literally every time you ate a steak, you would die. Okay. Cause there's 20 times more phenylalanine in a steak than there is in a Diet Coke. And then you have methanol, right? And so people get, we'll get hung up on that like, oh, the methanol. You get like 10 times more or significantly more methanol in a glass of tomato juice than you ever do from something like that. None of these things are on a high enough dosage. It's all stuff your body can handle. Sure. So sucralose is something that's not really absorbed by the GI that's excreted. So all these artificial sweeteners work kind of differently, right? Now, actually funny enough, the Ruthertole, which I'm sure we'll talk about here in a second is naturally produced. And we'll talk about that in a second. But one thing I will say is based on the latest studies in the gut microbiome, it does appear that some of these artificial sweeteners, and I think there was an analysis done with like six different ones. I can't remember. I know sucralose had one. But I think Stevia actually did too, altered the gut microbiome. Now here's what I'll say. Everything affects gut microbiome. We don't know enough about the gut microbiome to know if it's a good, bad or neutral change. That's the issue. Now, if you look at some of the species of bacteria that increased with like sucralose in particular, there are actually species of bacteria that are associated with lower rates of type II diabetes, lower rates of obesity. They produce more butyrate, which if you look at studies on butyrate, and propionate, and supplementation, improves insulin sensitivity, seems to have anti-inflammatory effects. So one of the things I said is like, listen, there's actually as much data to say these things could be good for the gut microbiome as there is to say they could be bad. Now again, I hold open the possibility that there could be negative effects. But again, this is where I'm like, don't let the enemy of progress be perfection. If somebody, the research studies we have in terms of appetite and artificial sweeteners, when people sub out regular sugar drinks for artificially sweetened beverages or non-nutrients of sweeteners, cause Stevia is technically not artificial. So when they substitute out for non-nutrient of sweeteners, there is a loss of body weight. People eat less or people consume less calories. Now people have said, we'll just drink water. There was actually a recent network meta-analysis done where they compared subbing out sugary drinks with non-nutrient of sweetened drinks or water or comparing non-nutrient of sweeteners to water. So when they substituted water, there was no difference in weight loss, okay? It looks like people were compensating for those calories by seeking out a sweet taste somewhere else. Whereas when they substituted with non-nutrient of sweetened beverages, they did see a loss of body weight. And when they compared water and NNS straight up, NNS was actually significantly better than water. So what I'll say to people is, okay, we can't say that these things increase appetite, at least on the average, right? Like some individuals say, if I drink that, I get hungry, okay, well then don't do it, right? But on average, they decrease appetite. Unless you wanna say that these are fat burners because that's the only other way that you can justify this data. So what I will say is, regardless of what's happening with the gut microbiome, let's say maybe there is a negative effect that's probably modest, right? Every single time I post about artificial sweeteners, somebody, one or two or three people will comment say, all I did was sub out artificial sweeteners, diet soda, instead of regular soda, and I lost 50 pounds or 75 pounds or 100 pounds. If somebody can do that and lose that weight, to me, fuck what's happening with the gut microbiome, they're healthier, you know what I mean? But again, I'm not saying it's optimal, but when we live in the real world, if that helps somebody as a tool to lose a significant amount of body weight, I'm gonna say it's a net positive. Yeah, so I agree. If it helps somebody lose weight, then fine. The problem that I've had is if you look at people who consume the most non-nutritive sweeteners, in particular, artificial sweeteners, mainly because those I think are more available, they tend to be more obese. And I think it has more to do with their behaviors than it does with the compound itself. They actually showed, like there was a study done that showed that people who take in more diet beverages attempt fat loss more often. Meaning they're just, this is an issue of reverse causality, which is people who are obese will drink diet soda more because they're attempting weight loss. And my point with that is it's not helping a lot of people. I think it helps, it definitely helps if you're conscious of the other behaviors that you have. I mean, if you're a competitor and you're cutting calories. To me, that's the easiest way to do it. The people that track, I think it has significant difference. I mean, that's what you mean. Well, it's honestly a low-hanging fruit. Like if you get somebody who's like really obese and you look at it and say, why are you drinking five sodas a day? I mean, if we can get you to, like that's a thousand calories if we can get you to switch to that. That's a pretty easy lifestyle change. That's if you can keep them from changing anything else, which can be very challenging. But here's where I wanna go with this. So you're saying, okay, you used to think they're inert. Now you think, well, they're not inert, but we don't have enough data to know if it's good or bad. I know in medicine, one of the rules, one of the classic rules is first do no harm, right? So I'm gonna make some speculations. I know you hate speculating because you're a scientist, but we're gonna do this anyway. That's okay. Yeah, let's speculate. Let's mentally masturbate. Let's go. So both, both awesome. Pull out the lube, boys. So let's speculate for a second. It is a 100% objective that the microbiome we know very little about. This is such a complex system and how it interacts with the body and what the hell it means. And then there's individuality. We seem to have a microbiome fingerprint and there's weird studies where we do fecal transplants on animals and this one gets lean, that one gets fat, like what the hell's going on? It's super, super complex. However, this I think I can say this with pretty good certainty, our microbiomes like us evolved over time. Okay, so it's been with us for a long time. It's evolved for a long time. Is it safe to speculate? Would this be a decent hypothesis? Not saying I know this to be true, but I think that I would lean towards this. That because our microbiomes evolved to react and to change based off of foods and things that have been around for a long time, that it's safer to say that perhaps the changes that happened to my microbiome based off of foods and other things is probably, I could probably air that that's a better change than it getting changed by chemicals that are being introduced to our body that haven't been around for a long time. So we don't know what the answer is, but if I'm gonna get my microbiome to change and I see a change and it changes because I eat sugar, which it will, or fat, which it will, or protein, which it will, or it changes because I consumed sucralose that if I'm advising people that I would say, well, look, if this is, if it's not that making that big of a deal, if you're not that personal, this is 100 pounds because you switched to artificial sweeteners, in which case I would safely say you're probably gonna get more health benefits than not, for sure. I would err on the side of, let's go with a more natural route because we don't know and we're not gonna know. We're not gonna know for a long time. So my pushback would be there, I guess, where is the time frame where everybody feels comfortable, right? Cause we do have like 50 years of studies on these so far, but I do, I get what you're saying. I think what I would say is, this is kind of venturing into the kind of optimal zone that we talked about. And I will say, we have to be careful with naturalism because for example, we do know one of the things that's actually bad for the gut, reduces microbiome diversity is actually too much saturated fat. So not because of the saturated fat, but because it caused you to secrete more bile and the bile in products in combination with the metabolism of the saturated fat, there is evidence that it reduces the incidence or the colonization of certain bacteria that seem to have health-promoting effects. So again, I'm- Seem to. Seem to, right, and that's because we just don't know enough about this stuff. But if we're, when I've talked to gut microbiome experts like Suzanne Defkota, these are the things they say. So saturated fat, you can find naturally in plenty of places. So again, I'm not trying to be pedantic to argue your point, but I think we just, I just try to be really careful when it comes to natural must be better. Yeah, I'm not that. I don't think natural is always better. I think you opened up with the right question though, is how long? I mean, if we do have 50 years of this, is it 70, is it 100? Here's the challenge with that. I'm a sweetener too. Like aspartame's been around a really long time. Long time. But here's the challenge with that, is that often, sometimes these effects are- You know, Sal and I are gonna be here at like 80 years old to argue this thing, right? Sal's gonna be like- It'll be our great-grandfather. If we only had more studies. It'll be our great-grandkids. Oh, he was right. What we seem to know, this is again, this is not for sure, but that our microbiome fingerprint diversity, it's affected generationally. We get a lot of it from our moms and their grandma, their moms give to theirs. We're noticing a general reduction in microbiome diversity. Yes. More diversity seems to be associated better. And we're noticing it's going down. We're also noticing a rise of autoimmune issues and allergies which seems to be connected. Some people say it's antibiotics. Other people say it's C-sections. It's a combination of things who knows. So we can't possibly know yet. It may take a long time. And then here's the problem. If it's something that affects your health negatively in a way that's not super perceptible, but maybe shows up 30 years later. I mean, I could have connected that to almost anything. So my point with that is, if it's not a game changer for you, which in my experience training people, it's almost never a game changer to just do artificial sweeteners versus sugar. It almost never is. But in my opinion, if it's not a game changer, well, let's just err on the side of natural because we don't know. We just don't know. What I would say is like, hey, if you wanna abstain from, as long as you're able to control your calories another way, then you're not missing out on anything. So go for it. And see, that's the big challenge. Like you mentioned something like, you would tell a client, hey, just switch this out for that. I found a lot of success by telling people, hey, don't cut anything out. Just hit your protein targets, but then they end up eating less because protein is so satiety producing. It's all about the behaviors is kind of where I'm going. Oh yeah, and I 100% agree with you. I do think like if there is a hack, these are one of the easy hacks to like get calories down. But I think we just gotta be careful with the messaging. Like you're being responsible for the messaging, but when people are like standing in a supermarket, shouting at the camera, this is worse for you than it. Well, now you've got an obese person who like by any objective standard, if they start consuming 500 to 1000 less calories per day is gonna get healthier. And maybe this could be a tool for them to use to do that. Now they're afraid to do it because it's just bad for me. So I'm just gonna keep drinking regular Coke. So that's why this messaging and I always tell people, I really try to be careful with my messaging so that it can't be misinterpreted. You know what I mean? Now I'm not always perfect with it, but I really try to provide a lot of context and nuance. So that even if I'm saying something like, if I'm talking about saturated fat being a risk factor for LDL and heart disease, I'm like, hey, I'm not saying you can't eat saturated fat. I'm just saying like, hey, if you have too much of this, there's a risk for this. And you've got to like, I'm not saying that you're unhealthy, right? Like there's plenty of people who eat a lot of saturated fat and live to be a long age. But again, this gets back into like, people not understanding the concept of risk versus absolutism, right? I'm saying on the whole, the risk is greater if you do XYZ, but I also smoke a cigar every once in a while, right? Like, I know that that raises my risk for lung cancer and this and that. Also, you said you used the word nuanced. I think this is the challenge with nutrition and health is that there's so much nuance. There's so many things that play a factor. Oh, you use this cigar for example. You smoke a cigar every once in a while. Okay, I could say objectively, tobacco bad for you causes this, this and that. However, I don't know if I could measure that your occasional cigar improves the quality of your life, decreases your stress enough to potentially negate some of those effects, especially when you consider the fact that you lift weights, you eat, right? You know, you do your cardio, you get good sleep or whatever. So, okay. So this is my point is that I think what makes what we do so challenging is that they like to go in and pick one thing. This is it. Reductionism. Yeah, like the sodium studies. Hey, lots of sodium. It looks like it causes death. Well, what they're realizing now is that people eat a lot of sodium, eat a lot of heavily processed foods, eat too many calories. Exactly. And that's also related to sugar and fats and all that stuff. For sure. So that's my point of this, is it's super, super nuanced. And so what I like to, same like you, I try to be, I try to communicate in a way to where you can play 10 years later. Yeah. And be like, okay, this still. Even if you got it wrong, it doesn't come across as bad. Right, right. If you look at like, I have like a epidemic of nutrientism. It's like, people are like, basically like, they're making it sound like you eat an, you just have an IV of nutrients. You don't eat nutrients, you eat food. Yeah. You know what I mean? And you can look at dietary patterns across the globe of different cultures who are healthy and have like longer lifespans. And it's very diverse. It's not like one food pattern. Totally. But the biggest thing is they don't over consume calories mostly because they're mostly eating minimally processed foods. Right? And... Do you think, by the way, do you, not to interrupt you, but do you, I think that if I were to pick one thing, you can't do this, but if I were to pick the biggest culprit for the obesity epidemic, not fat, not sugar, not less activity, heavily processed foods, that's where I would, if I had to pick the biggest thing. Probably. But I think, you know, it's like people like, let's ban processed food. I'm like, look, it's gonna be really hard to put the bullet back in the gun. All right? It's gonna be really hard. And again, I'm like one of those, like you're talking about smoke and scar, like I have a bowl of ice cream every night, right? Now I've got a pretty big calorie budget relative to other people, but I'm still able to hit my, I get plenty of fruits and vegetables in, I eat enough fiber, I get my protein in. That bowl of ice cream, like if it gives, if it makes like me a little, like feel good and like, I'm still fitting it into an overall healthy lifestyle, it's fine. The problem is a lot of people don't have that sort of nuance and experience, you know? And also I tell them, it's like, this is very triggering for some folks, but people say, well, I tracked my calories. No, you didn't. Here's why. Did you put it on a food scale? Yeah. Every time you did it. Now I'm not saying you gotta live that way for the rest of your life, but, and I'm sure you guys know this, weighing your food for a period of time is so educational. It's very revealing. Because you're like, holy shit. If you ever want to be depressed, go away on a serving of peanut butter or ice cream or cereal. Because you realize you were like, oh, that's cereal, 120 calories. And then you realize you're actually having four of those servings when you're filling up a bowl of cereal, right? So I have this all the time with people who either use our app or team buy-in clients. They'll say, I'm eating 1,600 calories a day, can't lose weight. Okay, we had one person who was tracking but they were doing volume measurements, right? So they're doing cups and tablespoons and whatnot. I said, just weigh it for a week. They weren't eating 1,600 calories. They were eating almost 2,700 calories. Do you know how much you could pack a scoop of something? Hell yes. And make it more dense or less dense? Have you guys seen the Instagram reel of the guy taking a single chip, putting it on the food scale and it sells zero and he's like... Yeah. I'll just keep eating. He does it again. It's eating the whole bag. Even I would hack stuff like that where I'd get down to like, one gram increments and I'm like, I'll just put one more VCP's on there, you know? Or one more like peanut butter chip or something like that. Yeah, that's not 15 and a half grams. That's 15, you know? But you know, it's like, we talked about processed foods. Banning them would be terrible too because there's real value to processed foods. They have long shelf life. You know how many people in the world would starve? If you want to end the hunger crisis because that's still a really real problem in other areas. You're not gonna do it with unprocessed foods. You can't have perishable foods. We have distribution issues and challenges with that. It's just not gonna work. This is again why we like to focus so much on behaviors because if you develop good behaviors, you're going to achieve a relatively balanced, relatively healthy, not shredded. None of that, that's being shredded and all that stuff requires much more attention to detail. But if you have the right behaviors, the right relationship with exercise and diet. Well, speaking of relationships, you brought up the blue zones and one of the biggest things I feel like they're finding out is how much that impacts your overall health. Even more so than nutrition and movement. Justin, you bring up a great point. Like one of the things I've said to people is sorry to cut you off, because you're finally speaking. I was just getting on some momentum there. I was gonna say this point and then Sal started talking too. But a lot of these people who are like worrying about every single little thing, I'm like, do you realize at a certain point the stress you're spending on this is actually probably worse for you than if you fucked this up just a little bit? Like I look at longevity in kind of six major things and I don't propose to be a longevity expert, but this is my opinion after looking at the health data out there. The six things to focus on. Don't smoke, limit your alcohol, don't do drugs, don't eat like an asshole, exercise as much as you reasonably can, get enough sleep, manage your stress. If you do that, I feel very confident in saying you're 95% of the way there. I would out throw good relationships in there. I think managing stress, I think you could break that into like eight categories. That's huge. I was reading, I saw a reel with Henry Cavill yesterday and he was reading this 50 point thing of a text message from his friend that made a big difference in his life, but the number one thing was choose your life partner carefully because that's the person you're gonna spend the most time with. And imagine if you're with somebody who's really positive and caring and whatnot versus somebody who's really negative. I was just on Tom Billu's podcast. It hasn't aired yet, but we talked about this. And he gave me this list of things and he said, list these in order of what has the biggest impact on health and obesity. And I put relationships at the top, which blew his mind. And I said, look, if you have good relationships, it's obvious that you'll have more stress or less stress. But think of all the downstream effects of having a good relationship, having a partner or friends. I agree with it. Yeah, having partners or friends who could tell you you're doing this a little too much or having someone to wanna live better for like having children really made me become more conscious about being healthier because now I have someone else that I have to care for. People I can step in when you're depressed or anxious. People I can influence you or hear what you have to say or work through your challenges. Like the potential downstream effects of having good people around you are almost endless. And we're such social creatures that I think that has to be one of the most important. You could add to that too. I mean, we know you love the finance analogy. It's like we tend to be like an average of the five people we spend the most time with. So think if you spend the time with all obese people that eat poorly, it's like that's a likelihood you're gonna be the person who goes away. So this just triggered something up. There was a systematic review of successful weight loss maintainers. So we get so focused on people failing weight loss. Why are we not studying the people who actually succeed? The 15 to 10% that actually keep it up. So there was a paper by a gal out of the UK here named Marish Brekley, which actually I'm gonna give myself some dap. She said she got into doing her PhD because she read my book Fat Loss Forever, which I thought that was really cool. So she did this systematic review where they looked at people who lost weight and kept it off. I think it was for at least three years. Okay, so very successful dieters. And they looked at, okay, what are the commonalities between them? And a lot of the stuff you expect, right? Self-monitoring, cognitive restraint, some form. When I say cognitive restraint, I mean like tracking calories or restricting carbohydrates or time-restricted eating, something like that. And then exercise, you know, regular exercise. They talked about relationships. Like the type of support that works for weight loss is not the type of support where you're giving instruction. It's the type of support or criticism. It's the type of support where you're going, you can do this, right? Like you're not trying to give them feedback on what they're doing or unsolicited advice. You're giving them encouragement. Do not be critical with people or tell them how to do something even if you think you like have some, that is a discouraging behavior for them, okay? And they identified this in the study. But the thing that stood out the most to me, and I talk about this now all the time, was consistently, they said they felt like they had to form a new identity. And when I read that, you know, the first person I thought of was Ethan Supley. Cause I don't know if you guys know Ethan if you ever had him on. I don't know if we had him on the record. But so Ethan was a Hollywood actor. He lost over 300 pounds. Every time he posts a picture of himself in the gym, he says, I killed my clone today. As soon as I read that systematic review, I texted Ethan and I said, is this what you meant? Is this what you mean by that? A new identity? He said, that is exactly what I mean. Because that 500 pound person still lives in me and I have to choose every day that I'm going to be somebody different. And I think, you know, you realize if you're a drug addict, you can just abstain, right? Like you just go cold turkey or if you're an alcoholic, you stop drinking. Imagine being like you're gambling at it. You go, well, you got to gamble a little bit, you know? Or you got to do just a little bit of cocaine, you know? Like you can't abstain from food. So this is why this stuff is so hard because it's so ingrained in people's lifestyles and behaviors. Well, look, if you lose 50 pounds, you're physically not the same person. Well, they even said that they lost a lot of friends. I was just going to say, you have to become a different person. The person you were is the person that ate a particular way, is the person that moved a particular way, is a person that had that particular type of relationship with their body and nutrition. In order for you to have this weight loss stick, you have to become this person where that weight loss would stick. You have to become a different person, which is why it's so challenging, but also why this journey is an incredible path for personal growth. It can be, but boy, is it hard. But you know what? You can take somebody who's an addict and you put them in rehab and they're not ready for it. No, it happened. So I listened to a, it was part of a motivational speech or motivational video, but it was an interview with Robert Downey Jr. on Oprah. And this was after he went through all of his shit. And he said, you know, it's really not that hard to fix these seemingly ghastly problems in your life. And Oprah was like, shocked he said this. And he goes, what's hard is to decide. Because even if it's a positive change, people don't like change. Because your whole life is set up a certain way. Your whole life is a summation of the choices you've made and what's around you. And now you're gonna have to blow that up. And it's why people stay in unhappy relationships, right? Because it's like, you could be, but there's a lot of work to get to the other side of that, right? And so, you know, I used the example of my brother. So my brother was a drug addict, right? My younger brother went to prison and he said one of the most powerful things I've ever heard. Because a few months ago I called him because I realized like how well he'd been doing. And I just, when he was going through all that stuff, I just got out of the habit of talking to him because it was too painful. You know what I mean? Because it was just like everything that somebody else's fault. He had a chip on his shoulder. He was just not in a good place, you know? And so I like made a point. I'm like, I need to call him more often and keep up because he's actually doing well now. I called him and I said, man, I just wanted you to know I'm really proud of you. And we got talking. I said, so what was your rock bottom? Like what was it? Like what was the thing that like just finally, because every person I've ever talked to like Ethan or whoever, somebody who was like one way and then all of a sudden a few years later they're a different human being and at some point a switch flipped and they just made a choice. Like almost every person down to the person will tell you that. So I was like, was it when you went to prison? He said, no. He said, one day I just woke up and I realized I lose everything. I get a relationship and I lose it. I get a job and I lose it. I get a little bit of money and I lose it. I just got tired of fucking losing. I was like, man, how powerful is that? You know, like he identified that and Eric Thomas has a great quote, which is, when the pain of staying the same becomes the greater than the pain of change, that's when we change. The problem with obesity is it's so slow and so insidious and it's so relatively easily managed. Right? And I think like there's a lot of compassion for obese folks now. And I think, I understand. I think it's a good thing in many ways. But it's also like, you know, Ethan Suppley was like, I wish I'd been more uncomfortable. He's like, cause he did this example. He goes, I did a rock yesterday with a 50 pound rock sack, right? It was hard. He's like, now I think, I used to have six of those strapped to me. And then I think about like, that hard hour or two of exercise I do is so much easier than living my entire life as 500 plus pounds. He's like, the amount of work it was, he's like, I never realized that I was out of it. He's like, I had to set up everything so that I could just live. What's that? He's like, when I would go to sit down in a chair, I'd have to like shake the chair to make sure it wasn't gonna break when I sat down. What's the, the Eric Thomas quote and then also what you're referring to right now, it's, it's a paradox that I forget the name of it. I every time I bring it up, I forget the damn name of this thing. But that's where we will actually walk, let's say a mile, but if it's 1.2 miles, we'll get in a car and drive because it's not quite uncomfortable enough to do that. So they've studied this and it's like, it's wild. And I guess that... That's why things are 99 cents or 9.99 or 99.99, right? I think that's the main thing. I think most people just aren't uncomfortable enough or don't dislike where they're currently out. They're in that awful paradox in the middle where they can't... It's like the story of the, you put a frog in room temperature water, you bring it to a boil and stay in there and hold it up. So you must have a strong opinion then of, I mean, you've been in this long enough to see this shift. Me have a strong opinion? Yeah, I know. Have we met? I guarantee you do. I've never seen this before and now it's happening. It's actually quite alarming where now it's fat shaming to talk about losing weight and gym culture or gyms are getting demonized as toxic and how it's... By the way, you can be overweight and healthier and be overweight and less healthy. That's true. I can adjust all of this. But it is, you know, apples to apples, being overweight is just purely unhealthy. And now you have people coming out saying, no, that's not the case. This is alarming because it's not just wrong. It's the opposite of the truth, right? Which is worse than wrong. So what are your opinions on this new messaging? I feel like it's just... I feel like there's enough obese people now to where the market is big enough to now where this becomes just alluring. Maybe that's what's happening, but it's scary. I think there's always something attractive about somebody saying it's not your fault and everything's fine. And the way you are is actually the way you should be, right? So let's take health at every size movement because that's kind of what we're talking about. Now, I think the reason that movement was founded is actually a good reason. Yeah, totally. Which is, you know, you can love your body and your weight doesn't mean that you're not a good person, right? And man, I've had, you know, I understand why it exists because I've had people say really dumb things. Like I would never hire an obese person to do a job because they're obviously lazy. I'm like, how many successful examples of obese people who are brilliant do we need before we know that it's not just a laziness issue? You know what I mean? So just stop with that dumb shit. But let's not live in fantasy land either, okay? So I think the problem is the health at every size movement got co-opted by extremists who it wasn't just good enough to say you can love your body at every size. It had to be like every size body is perfectly healthy. Right? In fact, we're actually more healthy, right? It's like you take any message and push it to the extreme. So, and I think in a way it's kind of a pushback. I say the carnivore diet and carnivore extremists are basically just a reaction to veganism. People just sick of veganism, vegan people pushing stuff. It's like, well, not only is meat not bad for you, it's actually the best thing for you. And in fact, you should only eat meat, you know? And ball sacks, just eat ball sacks, you know? Like, so. You didn't make that up, by the way. I know, that's how crazy shit is. I think it would be a really interesting study to see the politics in that, right? Like, we actually studied how many carnivores are... Right wing, left wing. Yeah, is it not? Every once in a while, you'll get like a liberal carnivore. Like, wait, did you like get lost on the way to the Democratic convention or what? So. Republican veganism? Yeah, I think that movement got co-opted. And here's some of the arguments that are made. Well, thin people actually have higher mortality rates compared to overweight people. That's true. People who are very thin have higher mortality rates. Do the control on that. But no one's saying that overt, like being very thin is healthy. No, very thin, what you have in that category are people with chronic illness, cancer, you know. Anorexia. HIV, I mean, that's, that is, it's like saying people who sleep too long too much have worse health. Well, they're depressed, they're probably sick. They're not controlling for all that. So yeah, underweight is bad too, because of what's causing it to be underweight. Correct, reverse causality. Yes. So, but the other thing is to say, well, look at these obese people who, you know, their blood markers are fine. You know, it's called like, what is it, fit and fat. Yeah. Yes, you are healthy. So if your blood markers are good as an obese person, you are healthier than somebody who has bad blood markers as an obese person. And a lot of this actually boils down to like, how many fat cells you have, because smaller fat cells are more insulin sensitive and are actually more resistant to type two diabetes. So weirdly, if you have more fat cells, it's actually more protective against type two diabetes. Interesting. All right, so that's why you can get some people, think about like a sponge, they can just sop up more nutrients. So if you have more fat cells, you have more place to, somebody can be the same body fat, but not type two diabetic because they have enough space to store the energy, whereas somebody who has less fat cells, those will fill up faster and start to have stuff backing up, back into the plasma quicker. Interesting. Which is why one of the treatments for type two diabetes is sofana ureas, which are P-par gamma agonists, which increase fat cell production. So they make more fat cells, it lowers blood glucose and blood lipids because now you have a place to put it. You've increased the capacity to store energy. So anyway, it's a little side tangent there, but so there was a meta-analysis done where they looked at, okay, people who are fat, or sorry, obese, but have like good blood markers, all the blood markers are healthy, versus people who are normal weight or lean who have good blood markers. Guess who lives longer? People who are lean or normal weight. Yeah, you gotta go apples to apples, that's the front. When you compare apples to apples, it's still an independent risk factor for disease and a pretty big independent risk factor for disease. I was talking about this yesterday on, or sorry, two days ago on a Brian Calland podcast, Fighter and the Kid. You know, when you look at the independent risk factors for things, like just having good blood markers, it's not enough because when you look at obesity and the longevity data, it's so powerful. So when a lot of people get into this like, oh, and animals, if you calorically restrict by 30%, they live longer, or you do intermittent fasting, they live longer, here's the thing about those studies. I know how animal research works, because I did a lot of it. It's not really caloric restriction, and here's why. When we did a calorically restricted experiment in rats, the way we calorically restricted is we looked at how much they ate ad libitum and we just cut it by 20%. Guess what happened? They lost weight. They actually still gained weight, they just gained it slower. Oh, I see. Okay, so in monkeys, for example, which I think are the best longevity studies, because rodents are not a good model for longevity. They're a good model for protein metabolism, not for longevity, because rodents are like humans. A physiology? They grow throughout the entire course of their life. Their growth rate slows down like later in adulthood, but it never stops. Even the lean mass doesn't stop. So you can see results and effects pretty well. Right, and the other thing is like too, if you're doing an intermittent fasting experiment, where you're like, okay, we're gonna have them not eat for 16 hours in a day. 16 hours of a rat's life is like weeks. Like these things are not equivalent. So I really put a lot more stock in the primate experiments. Obviously their physiology is closer to us. They have a much similar growth curve. So the classic study was done where they restricted them by 30%. Well, what they did was, whatever those monkeys were eating ad libitum, which by the way, if you cage, if you put animals in captivity, they just give them free access to food, they eat more. It's like the drug studies. Right, so what's happening is, it's not that their caloric were restricted by 30%. They do lose weight. They had a little bit of weight loss and then it stayed stable. They're just stopping them from becoming obese. That's why they're living longer, in my opinion. So this isn't- I love that because also, boy, does it not mirror real life. If you took humans, locked them in a cage and gave them unlimited access to food, almost all of us would overeat. They've done this, there was a study in the 1950s in Bengali workers. I love this study. Is this one of those studies that you could never replicate because it was just- No, no, you could replicate this. But basically, it was just an observational study. Okay, so they looked at sedentary, lightly active, moderately active, heavily active, like heavy labor jobs. And they looked at how much people ate. And it was a J-shaped curve. So from lightly active to heavily active, people basically perfectly compensated their energy intake. But the sedentary ate more than the lightly active and I think almost more than the moderately active, right? Why? One, when they're bored or just sitting around people eating more, right? But two, there's actually really good evidence that the reason exercise is good for weight loss is not because of the calories you burn. It's because it sensitizes you to satiety signals. When you are active, your brain works better with its body's own satiety signals. Okay, when you're a sedentary, it appears there's some kind of dysregulation. I'll have a speculation on that. I mean, we've all experienced this in coaching people. You know, Monday through Friday, when they're working busy, doing some of that so much easier to add here to the diet. It's also Saturday and Sunday and then all of a sudden it's more difficult to add here. And I have another speculation on that, which is that food also produces, it could be numbing, it could be distracting, and it can produce feel-good hormones and catecholamines and chemicals. Exercise also can produce those feel-good chemicals. And if you're not active- They're not going to get it somewhere else. Right, so if you're not active, your rates of depression, low moderate depression, anxiety, bad feelings goes up. If you exercise, good feelings go up. So if you have more bad feelings, less good feelings, because you're just sedentary, you're probably gonna reach more to things that you can use as self-medicate. So I would assume in that sedentary group, you probably see more abusive behaviors across the board with things like alcohol, drugs, you know, internet, TV, whatever. Andrew Huberman approves of this discussion. Yeah. Well, hey, you know, I tell you, there was a meta analysis and they're now considering exercise. Oh, child says meta analysis. It's so sexy. Yeah, I learned that from you. They, I don't even know what it means, I just said. Just say it. Everybody believes you afterwards. I know, what they've, they're now considering exercise as a frontline or first-length treatment for low to moderate levels of depression, anxiety. Yeah. Because it's so effective at, you know, at helping those things. Or what I think it is, is our baseline is supposed to be active. And so it's not that exercise cures depression, anxiety. It's that if we don't do what we're supposed to, we're going to be depressed and anxious. Here's the crazy thing about depression, right? So this is, this is, we're talking about rates of depression going up. By any objective society standards, we are living in the best time to be alive. Yeah, you're right. There's the least like, well, COVID kind of changed things a little bit, but up until 2020, violent crime rates were the lowest. Like in this country, basically, if you're not, you know, really mentally ill or a drug addict, you're not going to like be on the street serving for food. And I'm not saying that there's not people who that doesn't happen to, but by and large. You're speaking generally by and large, yeah. Right, by and large. There's social mobility. You can, you can move up in class, you know? Like I'm a perfect example of this in terms of income. Technology. Technology. Like, I mean, like right now, if you told me you could be the richest person in the world in your 1900, or you could be middle class now. I will take middle class now because I've got air conditioning in Xbox. Yeah. You know what I mean? Antibiotics. Yeah. Yeah. Like imagine getting a sniffle back in the 1700s. You're like, oh, fuck, is this the big one? You know, like, it's like, you know, it'd be way different. I was watching a movie with my wife and they were showing like kings and queens. And I'm like, you know what sucks is that that king right there at that time, they don't have access to what poor people have today. Like if he gets an ear infection, he's gone. You scratch my cat ear. Here's the weird thing about humans. We will always go to the negative, right? So we'll try, if there's not a threat, it's like your brain, and I'm not an expert on this, but I'm guessing since there's no real threats, your brain finds something. It does. Like the immune system, if you don't have, if you're not exposed to bacteria, fungus, parasites, your rate of autoimmune issues goes up because your immune system's like, need to find something. So I always say whatever you're stressed about, whatever you're worried about, if somebody walked through that door with a handgun and started shooting, I promise you, you're not worried about it anymore, right? So think about like, if you went to the Hodgson and we're like asking questions on a depression scale, they'd be like, why are we even talking about this? I'm gonna starve if we don't get busy, you know what I mean? So I think part of it is when you're so busy, John Deloni just tried to call me. Let me put my phone on his door. Yeah, no worries. Let's go pee right now. So you wanna take a little pee break? Let me finish this off or finish your thought. So I think part of it is when you're so busy just trying to survive and meet those basic hierarchy of needs, you don't have time to think about that. I'm not saying nobody's ever been depressed before this. In this, I'm speaking out of my rear here. This is complete conjecture on my part because it's not my area. But I think a lot of it is people are kind of bored and they're having trouble finding meaning. But when you're like just fighting to survive, you have the most basic meaning there is. Yeah. Well, there's actually pretty good data on this lane and it's inactivity. Because we know how activity has such profound effects on low to moderate depression and anxiety to the point where it's as effective as medications in the short term, probably more effective in the long term because you don't adapt. You don't need more. You actually get better results as you continue to progress. So there's that. So it's inactivity. Social connections has reduced. So real social connections. Yeah. There's an epidemic of loneliness that is currently happening. And we know that to be strongly connected to our happiness and meaning. People are not getting married. People are not having children. Those also are connected to happiness or less depression, less stress, those types of things. That's what's happening. What's happening is we've given ourselves all the stuff that we want. We're not doing getting the stuff we need. You know, it's kind of like if you got everything, God forbid you got everything you wanted. You know? Pro. Five, six years ago, I mean, I don't like to use the word addicted. It was like this was attached to my, like it did not leave my hand, you know? And it took a long time. And I'm still not great at it. It took a long time for me to go. And then let's have a conversation. You know, like. But now you have a watch that tells you. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm afraid to put out a do not disturb text messages. I'm also like trying to sell my house, you know? But no, it's like, you know, I used to sit down at dinner and I'd like, you know, I'd still pull up my phone and like, and then like, now if it happens, I'm like, what are you doing, you idiot? You know? And like, I'm so much happier now because I have a group of friends who like. Call you out. Like we can, we can talk. We can chat. Like we can have deep meaningful conversations, you know? And it's not like, and I'm not, I don't want to dog social media because I think in many ways, social media is a great thing. Like I'm not somebody who's like. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for social media. Right. Exactly. Like how am I going to be mad at social media? Like if I wanted to do what I do and have like the platform I have, I'd have to spend millions of dollars in marketing to be in front of that many eyeballs or know somebody. You know what I mean? Like it used to be the good old boy system back in the day. Now it's like, you can just, if you're an artist or podcast, whatever, you can disrupt an entire market in an instant just because you catch fire, you know? And I, you know, I'm the, I know you guys say I'm a big fan of the free market. I think the internet and social media is made about a free market as you can get in some ways, you know? Because there's no barrier to entry. Yes, it's hard to get recognized because, you know, trying to find your voice in a crowded space is difficult, but you can. You know, before it's like, if you're a musician, good luck. I just think we have to create, it's happened so fast. We just have to learn how to create disciplines around. Like we've had to figure out with exercise and nutrition. It's just like fire, right? Yeah, it's amazing. John Deloni is a great example. We were talking about this. He's like, you know, he's like, I know. Like, he's like, I'm not saying social media is the worst thing. I think we were having this in the conversation of me and him. He's like, but we got to put limits on it. Like we got to control ourselves. He's like, because this is like ultra processed foods getting introduced overnight and all of a sudden, boom. And we don't know how to handle it, right? And now you've got people, it's like, you know, like I don't want to be like the freaking boomer at the gym, you know, but you got people literally at the gym for 30 minutes trying to find the right selfie. I got a rule. I'm like, if I can't, if I want to put up a selfie, if I can't take it 30 seconds, it's not going up. You know what I mean? Like I already feel like enough of a douche anyway, you know? Speaking of which, speaking of which, before we take a break here, speaking of which, you know, I was watching Pumping Iron, great movie, watched it many, many times. I'm sure you've seen it. And you watch the scenes. I don't know if you've done this. I don't know if you've seen as many times as good as coming, right? I don't know if you've seen as many times I have, but when I watch it now, I look at the background and I look at all the stuff that I didn't pay attention to. And I noticed that in those days in the gyms, there was no music. There was, nobody had headphones. Obviously Walkman weren't really popular or they didn't have them. They'd go into the gym and what you heard was weights clanging, people grunting, people yelling across the gym at each other and just working out. And I felt a sense of envy. Like, man, that would be weird. That would probably be awesome. You're totally engrossed in what you're doing. Just walking to a gym, no music, nothing. And it's just people working out. I thought that would be awesome. All right, Lane, I want to talk about Urythritol because there was a study that came out that showed that it was bad, bad for us. Talk about that study. What's the deal with it and should we avoid it? So a really interesting study, but I think, you know, this is one, maybe we're to a more broad point, is just you cannot read headlines and just take them at face value. You can't do it. Fake news. And you can't even really read study titles and take them at face value. This is like really difficult. It was one of the reasons I started a research review and we review like five studies every month. So this one will be coming out, I think our next issue or the issue after that. So I started getting this study sent to me. Like, it's so funny. I don't have to look for content, thankfully. People are like, where do you find all this stuff? Bro, when a new study comes out and one influencer breathes it, it's like I get 100 DMs instantly, you know? It actually gives me a little bit of anxiety because I'm like, I wanna respond to it, but it takes time to go through these studies, you know? So I pulled up the study and I did, I wanna give a shout out to Alan Flan again. I don't know if you guys are familiar with him. He's the nutritional advocate on Instagram. He's excellent, very, very smart guy. Because the study, the way they worded some of the methods was very strange. I'm not saying it was wrong, it was just hard to follow. And so what you have to realize is firstly, erythritol, which is actually one of the sweeteners in here. So it's produced naturally by your body and it's about 70% as sweet as sugar. So what they found in this study was that people who had higher levels of erythritol in their blood were much more likely to have died from heart attacks, okay? And it was a powerful effect. Like it was like a doubling of the risk, okay? Now here's the issue. First off, this population was very sick people, like very sick. Over, I might butcher some of the baseline characteristics, but over 40% of them had already had a heart attack. Oh wow. I think like 75% of them had hypertension. Over 30% had type two diabetes. Why choose from a group like that? I think like 75% had coronary artery disease or something like that. Like just, I mean, like very, very sick people. So why do a study though and pull from those people? Unless you're just trying to prove your point, is that? Well, I think like if you're looking at a certain population, it's interesting to pull from, but here's the problem. It's fine to pull from that population, but then the media has got to be much more careful with how they present this to folks. Cause they're thinking, oh my God, I had a monster. I'm gonna have a heart attack tomorrow. When in reality, they're talking about people who are old, very sick, very high risk of death anytime. Right? Now here's the issue. Yes, there was a very high correlation between the levels of erythritol in their blood and their risk of dying from heart attack. Guess what happens when you're really sick with like, I think they call it like a syndrome X, which is these folks. You produced a lot of erythritol because it's produced by the pentose phosphate pathway and your pentose phosphate pathway becomes like kind of hyperactive. So they were looking at what's in the blood. What's in the blood? Not necessarily what they consume. They didn't look at all of their dietary consumption. And so that could technically be an indicator of poor health. The more you have. Reverse causality. So it's like HDL in the opposite direction. So for example, we thought HDL for a long time was gonna be this thing where like, oh, if we make drugs that can raise HDL. It's protective. It's gonna help people and they made these drugs and they did nothing. And the reason is that it's good to have high HDL because high HDL is an indicator of metabolic health. Usually if you have high HDL, you're insulin sensitive, you're active, it's just a good marker of being metabolically healthy. But just raising that marker in of itself doesn't change your risk, right? So in the opposite end, erythritol, at least based on what I've seen so far, I am not convinced at all that drinking, consuming for sweet beverages sweetened with erythritol is dangerous. I really appreciate you doing that. Because why wouldn't you just, if you're gonna try and extrapolate this to diet, why not do dietary recall? Why not? Yeah, so, and again, just to clarify, the sicker you are, the more natural erythritol you will produce and you will find in your blood. So if we see high levels of erythritol, it's safe to say that you probably are sicker, not that you're consuming a bunch of it. And they don't look at their consumption, they just looked at that. Wow, that's incredible. Now, warrants further investigation. Who does that study and why? I'm not sure. I think the, you know, I always am pretty, I give a lot of leeway and I try not to say bad study or bad science or anything like that because I think usually scientists are, a lot of it is one, like for example, how this can come up, I'm just guessing. I don't know if this is the case. One, they probably had access to that particular cohort. So it might've been done at a hospital or something like that that specializes in this. Two, there might have been a researcher who read a paper about erythritol or something like that was like, oh, I wonder if we measure this in the blood if we see something, right? And they find connections. And they find a connection, right? So it's not a bad study, it's just the over-interpretation of that study is what the problem is. It's just leaving. You always, when you're doing correlation studies, you always have to assume that there's just as much chance that the reverse causality is true, okay? So, I could say playing basketball makes you tall. Yeah, that's a correlation. Yeah. I mean, it's like a perfect correlation, you know, like with rare exceptions, if you're not at least six, three, you're not going to the NBA, right? Well, does that mean that playing basketball throughout the course of your life makes you tall? No. But you could vary, if you knew nothing about things, you could very easily draw that conclusion based on a study that said that, you know, this is linked with this. And somebody, I get people, hey, is this associated with this? Is this linked with this? I'm like, everything is linked with everything. Yeah. That's a great point. My PhD advisor used to say, if you torture the data enough, it will confess to what you want. That's such a great point. And there's also another point that I'd like to make, which is that sick bodies don't act like healthy bodies. And to give you some specific examples, if you give, if you increase the testosterone in a man with prostate cancer, you're going to see aggressive, more aggressive prostate cancer. If you increase the testosterone naturally in a normal healthy man, he tends to become healthier. If you stimulate mTOR in the presence of cancer, cancer grows faster. If you stimulate mTOR in the presence of no cancer and healthy body, you get more muscle, less body fat, better performance. People don't want this kind of nuance because it makes things difficult to interpret. Right. It's a great example of this. Right? So the mTOR thing. I get that all the time. Yeah. David Sinclair says- Lower mTOR, the lower cancer. I'm like, okay, well, guess what stimulates mTOR a bunch, which is also associated with better health and more longevity? Resistance training. Right. By the way, stimulates it longer and greater amplitude than you could ever get from diet. Okay? So here is, this is something I talk about a lot because even scientists, smart people, for whatever reason, totally miss this. The idea of acute versus chronic. Okay? If I said, I'm going to have you do something that's going to increase your inflammation, increase your reactive oxygen species, raise your heart rate, raise your blood pressure. I think I said inflammation as well. If I said, activate your mTOR, raise cortisol, you'd be like, oh my God, don't do that. That's horrible. That's exactly what exercise does, right? It's a controlled dose of a stressor. It's almost like a vaccine, right? Okay, no trigger warning. Trigger warning. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We weren't going to go there. The point being, you can't just look at what happens in the acute and assume that chronic is the outcome and vice versa. Okay? So we look at inflammation in the context of it being bad. It's a low level, long-term elevation in inflammatory markers. Okay? And the other thing about like inflammation in particular is people, like my knee hurts. I'm like, these are two different kinds of inflammation. That's right. One is a localized trauma response. Okay? The other like, people will be like, oh, well I cut out sugar and then my knee stopped hurting. I'm like, this is how this works. Okay? So go measure your CR, like I was like, did you have your CRP measured? Did you have your IL-6 measured? Like what are those? I'm like, that's inflammation. When we're talking about systematic inflammation, that's what we're talking about. Now you do have localized inflammation, which can cause you pain, but the stuff we're talking about with relation to health and metabolic health is systemic inflammation. Right, right. And people don't understand the differences between those two. Awesome. All right, another study I want you to go over was the study on intermittent fasting and muscle loss. Let's talk about this for a second. What did the study showed and let's get into a little deeper into how they did it? There's been a bunch of studies on them. Can you give me a little more background? Well, you actually did a post on Instagram and you covered some of them. So let's- Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, so there was a recent study, another one you were talking about. Okay. They looked at muscle protein synthesis. Okay. In response to like 16 to eight intermittent fasting versus like basically a normal meal distribution, right? And they found the title of the study was intermittent, something in the effect of intermittent fasting doesn't negatively impact muscle protein synthesis. So they didn't find a difference in 24 hour rates of muscle protein synthesis. So I had people intermittent fasting sending me this like, aha, see? And I'm like, okay, but first off, I will say based on the work of Grant Tinsley where they looked at 16, eight intermittent fasting and people who resisted strain versus regular meal distribution over 12 weeks. They've done two studies now. They didn't see a difference in lean mass. Okay. So what I'll say is like, at least in the short term, the 16, eight form of intermittent fasting seems to be okay for lean tissue. However, in this study, now they didn't resistance strain. I don't believe. Even though muscle protein synthesis wasn't different, the people intermittent fasting group lost more lean mass and less fat than the people in the regular meal group. Now it's just one study. So I'm not ready to get over the top but I do think there's a continuum here. I mean, one of the things I've said to people for 10 years now about intermittent fasting is you're gonna have a hard time arguing to me that it's somehow optimal for muscle protein synthesis or for muscle mass, right? And people make this, well, if you intermittent fast growth hormone goes up. Like first off, growth hormone is not anabolic to skeletal muscle. It's anabolic to connective tissue and increases total body water. So if you do a DEXA, somebody who takes growth hormone will have more lean mass but it's not skill in the muscle, okay? Now a lot of people get mad at me about this but my response is don't hate me, hate the data because it's pretty clear. So just, and also we're talking about physiological increase in growth hormone. Yeah, we're not talking about body, but I was just gonna say. Meaningless. We need to compare, yeah, because you got people right now like I know pro bodybuilders will take 14 IUs of, you know, GH, very different. Great. They also take insulin by the way. Where are you guys doing like, but carbs are bad. So like how do you reconcile this kind of train of thought, right? So when you cannot argue that fasting is anabolic, you just can't. There's no, and it's not anti-cathabolic either. I mean, literally if we want to induce catabolism in skeletal muscle, what do we do? We fast. Yeah, don't eat. Now, does that mean that fasting for eight hours is catabolic or 12 hours or 16 hours? We don't know, right? And like I said, there's a couple of studies from Grant Tinsley's lab where over, I think it's 12 weeks, they showed no difference in the accrual of lean tissue when people resistant is trained. Now, does that mean that intermittent fasting in a 16-8 method is just as good? By the way, they did resistance train during their feeding window, okay? And they did eat three high protein containing meals, okay? So probably a different way than most people intermittent fast, which is kind of kind of gorge themselves at one meal. It's a restrict binge. So now the other thing is 12 weeks is a relatively short period of time. Now I'm not dogging them for doing 12 weeks. It's hard to get resistance training studies in a university setting more than 12 weeks. Because guess what? You have break. You have Christmas. You have spring break. And guess what happens during those times? People leave the campus and you can't monitor the resistance training, right? So point being, I'm not sure if 16-8 is just as good as regular meal feeding when you do it over a long period of time. But if you don't care about becoming the most muscular person you possibly can be, it's probably just fine, right? I was just gonna add to that. I don't think intermittent fasting is terrible for lean body mass, the bigger and more muscular you get for this simple fact right here. You're a 200 pound guy. You're trying to eat 190 grams or 200 grams approaching a day. You're gonna do that in a short- Peter, it sure talks about that. Yeah, eating window, it's hard to do. It's probably better to spread it out just because it's just so hard. It's hard to eat over 60 grams approaching a meal. It's just your appetite's gone and it hits the tidy and then you force feeding yourself. So that's main reason why I think intermittent fasting, for lean body mass, not a great idea. And Peter Atea talks about this. So he talked about like some of their clients. He said you basically have three buckets as a way to reduce body weight. You have basically track calories, right? Dietary restriction restricts some dietary component or a time restriction. Those are basically your buckets, right? And he said the problem with time restriction and he said he fell into this too was just naturally they decreased their protein intake when you restrict it from time. So now if you're getting enough protein which in Grant's Tinsley studies, they were, they were equating protein between groups. You don't see a difference, at least in that time period. Could it be some small difference over time? I think it's likely. But again, if your goal is just to be like in shape and like more muscular, you can obviously build muscle on 16, eight intermittent fasting. Plenty of people have done it, right? Like I'm not saying that. Again, this is more like the optimal bro sort of thing. That's right. If you're asking me like, is it optimal for muscle mass? I think probably not, right? Now I will say when you start looking at some of the more extreme forms of fasting where it's like one meal a day or alternate day fasting, there are studies on those which do show loss of lean tissue, okay? So like there was a study done alternate day fasting where they equated calories and they equated protein. Oh, they did equate, they controlled them. I'm pretty sure, yeah. So one group, they're both in calorie restriction. One group would do 150% of maintenance calories one day and then zero the next day, right? So alternate day fasting. The other group just did straight across the board 75%, right? And they found that the group that was doing alternate day fasting, I think it was over 12 weeks lost like around a kilo of lean mass, maybe just a little bit less. Now, one other thing that I have to point out is lean mass is not the same thing as skeletal muscle. Yeah, it could be water. A lot of it can be water. But that being said, a lot of skeletal muscle is water, right? In fact, 70% of skeletal muscle tissue is water. So, and then you also have like all other tissues like your splinic tissues, gut, liver, those all tend to get smaller when you diet. Skeletal muscle is pretty resilient in terms of like once you've built it, once you've fused those satellite cells, it takes very little to maintain. But again, if we're talking about, you know, people getting into older age, you know, getting enough protein in, and I start to think about like, you know, are you gonna function well, you know, alternate day doing that? Again, I'm not saying you should never do it. If somebody finds that's the easiest way for them to control their calories, then it's better than becoming obese, right? What about as a coach though for you, do you ever find as a coach and trainer a time where you would recommend any sort of fasting to somebody? I think like small women, for example, like if you're trying to get them to eat like four meals a day, I mean, they're gonna be eating really small meals, you know, to get leaner or sorry, people with low amounts of lean tissue, right? So like people will be like, man, that person can eat so much food. And I'm like, well, I also train two, three hours a day and I'm like, I have like 185 pounds of lean mass, like that's a lot of metabolically active tissue, you know? So I can get away with that, you know, you've got like less than a hundred pounds of lean tissue, you're like, you're just not, you're not turning that much over, you know? So for that person, so they can actually have like decent sized meals. Oh, interesting, it's a behavior-based approach. Yeah, yeah, so I think for that, and it's not even like, okay, like do a certain form of intermittent fasting, I'm like, just don't snack a lot, you know? Like even if you're eating three meals- Or just don't eat till after two o'clock or something like that, it's so basic. Or like for me, like I don't intermittent fast, but I definitely eat more calories later in the day because I'm hungrier later in the day. I know all the optimal bro stuff of like, well, you should have the biggest breakfast because you're most insulin sensitive. By the way, I think a lot of that data is skewed and I'll tell you why, okay? When it comes to measuring insulin sensitivity, because when you're measuring after a fasted state, the longer you fast, the more insulin sensitive you are. Sure. So a lot of times they'll say, well, like this intermittent fasting studies show that it was better for insulin sensitivity. I'm like, yeah, that's cause they fasted them later in the day. Like so they did late, time-restricted eating, which everybody says, like the new data coming out seems to suggest that if you time-restrict, you're actually better off doing it late in the day, so you eat early in the day and you fast the rest of the day. Look at the difference on insulin sensitivity because they've been fasting for an extra eight hours. Because of the sleep. Well, the sleep and then they cut off their feeding window earlier. If you want to measure apples to apples, when you do the actual analysis, when you're looking at insulin sensitivity or Homa IR or whatever, you guys seem to clamp, have them fast an equal amount of time before you do the analysis. Because if you're having them fast difference amounts of time, you're actually not comparing apples to apples. Let's talk about insulin because there's this segment of our space that talks about this insulin model of fat, right? It's insulin we need to control, it's insulin that causes fat gain. Now, I think- To the cognitively dissonant out there, get ready. So now, I will say this, my opinion. I think some of these movements are, they're hard to go away or they stick around because there's a certain element of truth to them. Like hormones do influence where you put calories. Whether you're going to build muscle or burn body fat with the same amount of calories. This is why athletes use performance enhancing drugs. So there's some truth to what they're saying, but what's the big problem? What's wrong with the insulin model? Okay. So if you look at the carbohydrate model of obesity, it was first kind of popularized by Gary Taubes. And I think the primary guy is David Ludwig, okay? He's a researcher at Harvard. Now, I'm going to try and lay it out as best I can because this model keeps changing. Every time a new study comes out and debunks it and they move the goalpost, okay? Oh, interesting. So the crux of the model is, goes something like this. We don't overeat, we don't get fat because we overeat. We overeat because we get fat. Here's why. When you eat carbohydrates or process, they've changed it now to processed carbs because I guess they couldn't hang their head on the carbohydrate thing anymore. When you eat processed carbs, you increase insulin. Insulin drives and inhibits lipolysis and drives fat into adipose tissue. And since insulin is high, you can't liberate fatty acids from adipose because you're inhibiting lipolysis. So your energy stores are not accessible to the rest of your body. Your body thinks it's starving and you overeat in response, okay? Sounds like a plausible mechanism. Sure. Here's the problem. It's been disproved at every single step. So for example, at the basic level, let's just look at when we equate calories and protein between different diets, who loses more body fat? People eat low carb or low fat? Right. Basically, there's no difference. There was a meta-analysis of, when you actually look at the loss of body fat, there was a meta-analysis by Kevin Hall back in 2017 and the reason this meta-analysis was so good was, one, they looked at actual loss of body fat, not energy expenditure, not some of these surrogate markers, actual loss of body fat. Yeah, not like fatty acid oxidation, whatever. Yes, exactly. The actual loss of body fat, a hard end outcome, all right? And these were studies where either they were in a metabolic ward or the meals were provided to the participants. So it's a very high adherence. And calories and protein were equated, which is very important because protein is thermogenic, okay? And it has an effect on lean mass retention. So when they basically did the force plot of those studies, there was essentially no difference. In fact, the low fat diets had a small advantage, but it was like 16 grams extra fat loss per day. So practically meaningless, right? So right there, I mean, if your stuff's legit, I mean, you would see differences, right? Now, as part of that meta-analysis, they also looked at energy expenditure, right? And they showed no difference in energy expenditure. Now, David Ludwig came out years later and re-analyzed that meta-analysis. And this time he said, well, the problem is they weren't fat adapted, which is my favorite term, because it's like just the term to move the goalpost. It was a six-month study, oh, they weren't fat adapted. So he said, well, let's look at the studies that are beyond 17 days versus before 17 days and found that there was a greater and not loss of body fat, energy expenditure, okay? So basically said, well, these people were burning like an extra 150, 200 calories a day on low carb after 17 days. First off, we don't have any other process in the body we know of where suddenly it just flips after like a certain period of time, okay? Now, maybe it is, but here's the real problem with that study. So there's two ways to measure energy expenditure, essentially there's direct measurement, which is metabolic chamber and there's doubly labeled water, which is how you do it if you're gonna do free living. So doubly labeled water is a water that's labeled with a stable isotope at the hydrogen and the oxygen, and because the in-products of metabolism are water and CO2, you can basically come up using an equation with an estimate of their energy expenditure when you collect their urine and CO2. I didn't know that. Oh yeah. So now the important thing to remember is if I do calipers and dexa, which one is validated against which? Calipers have to be validated against dexa, right? Cause it's the gold standard, right? Doubly labeled water is validated against metabolic chamber cause that's the direct measurement, right? Now here's what was weird about the meta-analysis. When they had both doubly labeled water data and metabolic chamber data available, guess which ones they used? Yeah. Doubly labeled water. And Kevin Hall showed that at least in one of his studies, doubly labeled water in low carb overestimated energy expenditure because it's part of like, basically you, cause CO2 production is part of the equation. And I believe when you're on a low carb diet, you actually expire more CO2 than is- Just through the process of what? Burning ketones? Yeah, yeah. So it overestimates like, or underestimates how much CO2- So it becomes even less accurate. Right. So the R, you're familiar with like an R correlation. So like an R of 0.8 is typically what mixed diets will have with doubly labeled water versus metabolic chamber. That's a good, that's a good reasonable association. Drops to a 0.5 in low carb. So again, why are you, if you have the direct measurement, why are you using the indirect measurement? Also, when you're looking at long-term energy expenditure studies versus short-term, you're basically looking at metabolic chamber versus doubly labeled water. So it's a difference in methodology. It's not, cause if it was a real, and I went through the individual studies that he looked at and every single study where they looked at body composition, guess what? They didn't see a difference. Yeah, cause that makes- And isn't that what matters? Yeah, cause that makes sense. Cause oh, they're burning more calories, but why didn't they lose more weight? Exactly. It's gotta be an error and- And he published a study back in 2018 where they showed that a low carb diet, like 20% carbohydrate, burned like 300 or 400 calories more per day based on doubly labeled water compared to like a mixed diet or a high carb diet. So I went through the data. You know how much it costs to do stable isotope research with that many people? It's hundreds of thousands of dollars. How much does it cost for somebody to stand on a scale? Yeah. They didn't report body weight data. They just went off that. Why would you not rep- But it was in their preregistration. It was in the preregistration of data they collected. So they saw this difference in total energy expenditure, but there was no difference in basal metabolic rate cause they measured it. There was no difference in physical activity because they had them wear accelerometers. So where is this difference in energy expenditure coming from? Are you gonna say it's TEF? Cause there's no evidence that TEF makes that, like TEF as a total of the day is like 200 calories. It's not that much. So like, where are you proposing they're getting this energy expenditure difference from? Right? So now getting back. So that's the big, that's my big kind of criticism of Ludwig's work. And I'm not saying he's not a smart guy. He's a smart guy, but some of this stuff just doesn't add up. And again, I just go back to the actual data on fat loss, like the actual body composition data, right? That's what we care about. Who gives a shit about energy expenditure? I mean, like apparently, all right, if he's correct, then that means the laws of thermodynamics don't work, you know? So then if we go back to the model itself, they've done, first off, based on that model, overweight people should have lower levels of circulating fatty acids and glucose, or sorry, fatty acids, right? Because it should be inaccessible, right? Based on that theory. They have higher levels of free fatty acids. Then they've given drugs, there was a study where they gave, I think it was, April max or something like that. I can't remember the name of the drug, but it basically inhibits lipolysis, all right? But both groups from a calorie deficit, guess what? Lost weight. Both groups lost same amount of weight, right? Okay, so that's another strike, right? And then what is the most successful weight loss drug in the history of mankind? Simiglutide. Oh, okay. People lose 15% of their body weight on average. Guess what simiglutide is? It's a GLP-1 memetic. Guess what GLP-1 does? It raises your insulin, your meal-secreted insulin, okay? So this is a direct refutation, one, because you have high insulin, but it destroys these people's appetites. Your model, this is incongruent with your model. This cannot be, these two things cannot coexist based on your model, which is if insulin is higher, appetite has to be higher. Now Gary Talbs tried to spin this and say, well, that's just the short-term insulin. If you look at their long-term insulin, it goes down, their basal levels of insulin go down. Yeah, that's because they lose a bunch of weight. Like they lost a bunch of weight, that's why their insulin went down, but their meal-secreted insulin, and plus, again, just still completely contradictory with your model, because you're saying at a meal when insulin goes up, it's trapping fat in fat cells, making you hungry, which is why you overeat. Well, by that logic, these simiglutide, these GOP1 metrics should be making people eat more, but they eat drastically less. Yeah, it reduces their appetite significantly, which is probably where the weight loss is coming from. So to me, that's like the real nail in the coffin, the carbohydrate insulin model of obesity. Now, and again, there is definitely truth in the effect that hormones have on the body and how it can direct calories and all that stuff, but you can have all the directions you want. If you don't have the building blocks for fat or muscle, it ain't gonna happen. My thing is, when people start talking about hormones, I'm like, okay, let's be specific, because details matter, which ones, you know? And how they interact with each other. Right, and then what I find, though, is a lot of people will say, well, my, I can't, like, ladies, I'm gonna pick on you. I hear a lot of people like, well, I'm premenopausal. I'm perimenopausal, I'm postmenopausal. I'm not saying that those hormones can't have an effect. Now, the sex hormones like estrogen, progesterone, they seem to have an effect because people feel worse, so they just move less spontaneously, okay? It doesn't appear to have an effect on, like, basal level, basal metabolic rate. Here's the thing, though. So many of these people who have said this to me, I'm like, oh yeah, what are your levels? Oh, I haven't had a look at. What? Why not? And I'll tell you why. It's because if they got looked at, one of two things will happen, both are which are unfavorable for a lot of these people. One, there might be nothing wrong and now you don't have an excuse. And two, there might be something wrong, which you can get a script for and now you don't have an excuse. Yeah, I think it's more like your hormones can affect how you feel, how you feel affects your behaviors, that's what causes the changes more than anything. But the point is, like, you can address this stuff. Yes. But a lot of people, they wanna, they don't wanna have that personal responsibility. It's like self-sabotage. It's like, God forbid everything go right. You know what I mean? We've seen this with pro athletes too, like guys who have all this talent and it's like, why does this person keep fucking up? And it's like, because they're petrified that if everything lined up for them and they still failed, that now it would be their fault, you know? Yeah, by the way, one of the most effective ways to positively influence your hormones is just become healthier. Exercise, eat right, whatever. And then you'll see a profound change in hormones across the board. And that's it. This doesn't fix everything, but it does help a good majority of people. And things like thyroid hormone absolutely make a difference. Like they've shown that if you're a hypothyroid, that can lower your BMR by like 25%. I think that's the greatest they've seen. But when people say, we'll see calorie deficit doesn't work for those. No, it'll still work. It just means you're a threshold for what a calorie deficit is, is now lower. It just changes the calories out. Right. You brought up a semi-glutide also known as Ozympic, right? That's the brand name. What's your thoughts on that? It's early. So I, there's been some concern about thyroid cancer but that's been in lab rats with high doses. There's been some concern about lean mass loss. So I think there was a study done where they looked at people who do GLP1 memetics and they lost like 68% from fat and 32% from lean. Sounds bad, but if you look at how much lean mass is lost from people who don't resistance train when they diet, it's about the same. Yeah, they just ate less. They probably ate less protein. They didn't lift weights. I agree. They ate less. I think I'm overall generally positive about them right now. I think where I'm a little bit concerned is the people who are like using it to lose five pounds or 10 pounds. Like just come on, you know? But I think for people who are obese, who have really like tried different things and really have trouble controlling their appetite, this can be good. Now my concern is they're gonna have to keep taking them basically indefinitely, right? Yeah, in my opinion, I think this is part of a formula. I think in the past supplements would have maybe made a 1% effect. Now we have drugs that have a 10% effect but still 90% is your lifestyle. I think in culmination with exercise, diet, and working on this. And to be fair, sometimes people who are really obese, when they start to see some results, they buy in. That's right. I mean, the buy in isn't on the front end. It's as they get going. That's right. It's not a miracle and it's not gonna fix everything for you. You have to add it to everything else otherwise it just becomes a temporary kind of small bandaid. That's my strong opinion. But I mean, compared to every other thing that's come before it, it actually does something. Yeah, and I think the thing is, I think they're focusing on the right area now. I think we're so focused on how do we boost metabolism? How do we boost metabolism? And all that stuff has been very disappointing. And the stuff that boosts metabolism is dangerous as hell. Right? Like when we talk about- And you adapt very quickly to- Hey, D and P. Oh my God. Great metabolism booster. Also, if you wanna die, you know, like- A utero. Yeah, exactly. So I think they're focusing on the right area now, which is the appetite side of things. That seems to have much stronger. And even with things like leptin, everybody thought, oh, leptin is gonna boost metabolic rate. And there's some evidence it might, but it's a strong regulator of appetite. That's where most of the benefit comes from. So I do think that these, right now, I would say I'm much more bullish on them than I am. Like, I think a lot of people in the fitness industry just don't like the idea of like, it has to be all willpower and effortness and that. And I'm like, all right, well let me go find an area in your life where you're not perfect, you know, where you suck. Like, oh, you're broke? No, where's your willpower, you know? So I think I used to be like more on that side of things. So I'm like, oh, I don't want a pill, like you should do it yourself and this and that. And now I'm like, listen, this thing is such a burden on the healthcare system. And it's obviously not just laziness. Like I just, I don't think that position is tenable. I don't think any of you guys hold that position more after you coach people, you know? Yeah, exactly. And that's the thing I tell people, like some of these people, you just haven't worked with people. It's a complex, challenging issue. Absolutely. That requires a multi-pronged, approach, which includes behavior, discipline, structure, appropriate exercise. And the approach that works is gonna be different from person to person. Maybe not drastically different, but different because we're all different and we're all individuals. I love what you said just there. You said multifaceted. And when people say, well, obesity is just this. I'm like, thank you for proving that you're an idiot. Thank you. Thank you. I'm glad because I was. I don't like people don't like you. When you were quiet, I wasn't sure, but then you said that. And now I'm very sure that you're a fucking moron. I love the feel of your song. You said something, I'm curious. I hadn't thought about this because you made a comment about, you know, probably better serve for like obese people and not the person who's trying to lose five or 10 pounds. But I wonder if this, the, you know, the selling out and how crazy it is right now and seeing it in our space so much, do you think that it is mostly obese people taking it or do you think it's a lot of like fitness junkies that are running out? I have no idea. I hope it's mostly like being reserved for those folks. You know, I think where you get into being sticky is like who pays for it, right? Like is insurance going to cover it? It's expensive. To the taxpayer cover it. You know, it's like, because there is some, I do still believe there is a personal responsibility component to obesity. I'm not saying it's all the person's fault, right? I'm just saying that there is a personal responsibility component to it. So those questions are, you know, well, there's a huge market. There's a huge market demand for it right now. So that's positive because when there's a huge market demand, market tends to fill that demand. So we're going to see more of these compound. Yeah, it's going to get cheaper. It's going to get cheaper, more accessible and more available to people. But it's not, it's not going to fix all your problems. So that's for sure. And I, you know, what's funny is I had somebody go, you know, my metabolism is broken. I need to take some of these. I'm like, well, then it's not going to work for you because it actually doesn't do anything to your metabolism. It just makes you eat less. And they were like, what? I'm like, yeah. Oh, well, I think I still like to try it. I'm like, that's because you're eating too many calories. But I got no problem with you trying something that will help you eat less, you know? But I think, yeah, I just thought of a quote. I know it's not very popular right now, but Will Smith had a quote that I really liked. Wow. All right, everybody just chill, all right, chill. Get your wife's name out of my way, Mary. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, all right? He said, talking about people tied together fault and responsibility. Okay, so everybody is getting so concerned over whose fault was the obesity crisis. Process foods, start your carb, or sorry, process carbohydrates. Pick your, pick your, pick your villain. It doesn't matter whose fault it was. It's still going to be your responsibility to fix it. Right. No matter what happened to you in your life, no matter like whatever, nobody's coming to save you. It's going to be, the impetus is on you to make the change, right? So Ethan Supley, I really liked what he said. Again, I'm going to go back to him. He said, if the house is on fire, don't like sit in the fire and try to figure out how it started. Just get out of the house. You can figure out how the fire started later, but just get out of the house. And so I think like one of the things I've done recently is I give a motivational talk and it's basically the crux is about how planning has killed more dreams than failure ever could, you know? Because so many people are so paralyzed by all this information that's out there. They're like, well, I don't want to start because I could be doing the wrong thing. No, no, go do the wrong thing. Just go do, you know, like, like, you know generally what to get more active and just start controlling what you eat. What's that quote you said, Adam? The winners and losers one. That's exactly what I was just thinking right now. I heard something not that long ago. I wish I remember who I heard it from talking about winners and losers. And there's this idea that, you know, winners are lucky or whatever with that or winners always win and losers always lose. The truth is winners actually lose more than losers. They just learn to become more comfortable with losing and getting back up. Staying up, man. Yeah, and it's such a, it was such a powerful thing I heard of them. That's so true, you know? That's what it's not like winners always win. It's like, no, I bet you you talk to any winner but you have plenty of them more times. If I write down everything that I ever fucked up, man, we're gonna be here a while, right? Let me look at like powerlifting. Like last year, I finally got my gold medal, right? Took me seven years to get back to IPF worlds dealing with back injuries and stuff, you know? Like it'd be so easy to look at the end product and be like, wow, look how great you did, you know? And it's like, how many of you out there watching this saying, great job. Would have stayed in it for seven years where like there'd be months and even like years of time where I'm like, this isn't gonna happen. Like where I'm like in pain all the time, it gets better, then it comes back, gets better, then it comes back, then it gets better. Oh, and then there's something new. Now it's my hip, you know, like, but I just, I was like, I'm gonna keep coming and just keep, you know, putting the work in. And if it doesn't work out, at least I know I did everything I could. But it's like, you know, I don't know. I don't, I'm not a real spiritual person, but I will say there's something to be like, if you want something really bad, universe is gonna test the fuck out of you to get it, you know? But that's the thing, it's the great dichotomy of life. If you got it easy, you wouldn't even value it. That's right. It's why most lottery winners and even pro athletes go broke very, anybody who makes money quickly, they go broke. Why? Because it wasn't real. It was easy. But when you had to claw and scrape for it, I know I came, I wasn't poor growing up, like, you know, I never had to worry about food or clothing or anything, but I didn't, we didn't go to movies. We didn't eat out. I never had a car when I turned 16. You know, it was lower middle class, right? So I always remember that no matter like how well I've done, there's part of me that's like, you can go back to that. And it could happen at any time, right? And I could go back to that, but I don't want to. You know, so it's like, that keeps me sharp because I had to do this and I've said this. I'm like, I'm so glad my success was so slow and over time because I have really learned to value it at every single step. Like I remember after IPF Worlds in 2015 when I set the world squat record back then, like a week later, I was out in my boat by myself fishing and I just sat and I like gushed over myself for like 10 minutes. I was like, damn Lane, you did a good fucking job. Like I was the best you could have done and you did it, you know, on the biggest stage. But it was like, I could like really soak that in because I knew how much work went into it. So it's like, if you want something, like don't be upset that it's uncomfortable or it sucks. And like, listen, like I say that and I'm going through like kind of a hard time in my life right now. And yeah, there are days where I'm like, let's just get this shit over with, you know? But I also know, like part of that is like, I'm going to come out of this such a better and changed person, you know? And even like I'm having to sell my house which was going to be my dream home, right? But part, there's like a sick part of me that's like, now we get to do it again. We get to do it again, you know? So I think if you can just, and that's why I talk about mentality now way more than X's and O's. Because I always say, if all you got from lifting weights was a good physique, man, you missed so many lessons that was there buried under the surface. Like it taught me so many things about life and it gave me so much confidence to go out and do other hard things. And that's the thing, like you don't have to start with trying to climb Mount Everest. Like just start with something small. Like I tell people, I'm like, people talk about confidence. And like there's nothing that gets me more pissed off than people talk about self-help and confidence books. You cannot read about confidence. If you have not done anything in your life, why would you be confident? That one of my favorite quotes is true confidence is being able to wade into uncertainty, right? It's built. You put it all in and you have no promise of an outcome and you do it anyway, right? And then you come up against setbacks and you push through those and you get through the, like when you've gone through all those, that's what builds true confidence. And I always say like, you guys remember the first time I ever did a podcast where I was going through like the hardest time of my life where I was going through a divorce. I got kicked out of a company. I helped start. I was getting sued by them frivolously. I had more than two attorneys that I could write a check for. And one thing else I will give myself credit for amongst other things because I like giving myself credit is when I was in that bad state, that's when I wrote my first book. I wrote my first book. It's 300 pages. I wrote it in eight weeks because I had no other option. My back was up against a wall. We sold about $50,000 on a presale for that book and that enabled me to have enough money to fight my old business partners in court. One more month, kick their ass into hearing, get them to settle, right? And so what I always tell people is like, I've been to the edge. I stared into the abyss and I didn't blink, you know? And it's like, when you have that kind of mentality where you know you could go back to zero, somebody could take everything from you, but it doesn't matter because you're still who you are, you know? I think that's true confidence, but that starts small. I was the most unconf... David Goggins talks about this. I was the most unconfident kid, you know? But what happened? I started lifting weights and then I was like, oh, I got stronger. I bench pressed 300 pounds. I never thought I would do that. Let's do a bodybuilding show. Did a bodybuilding show. Everybody was like, Lane, you're crazy. Like all my friends from high school, like you can't win, I won. And it's like, oh, I can do something else. And then it was, let's try a PhD. Let's do that, right? This is like progressive overload for life. The more hard shit you do, the more hard shit you can do, right? And so I love what Goggins said. It didn't really resonate at the time, but now I understand. He said, I'm not here running 100 miles to be like the most in shape person. I'm doing this so when I get a call at 3 a.m. in the morning, finding out my mom died, I don't fall apart. You know, like, of course you're gonna be sad, but it's like, you have people like, the minute one traumatic thing touches them, their entire life falls apart because they can't handle it because they've never done anything hard. And I think that's the, I know I'm going to a long monologue here, so I apologize. But I think one thing about having kids that's the hardest thing about having kids is knowing that they have to fail. They have to experience pain. They have to experience trauma because if they don't have a little bit of that when they're young, God forbid the first time something bad happens to them, they'd be in their 20s. Jordan Peterson says it's the single worst thing that we can do to our kids is to do something for them that they can do themselves. That thing you build confidence in children is you let them fail and let them figure it out. They don't build confidence by, you're so great, you're so awesome, you never had to fail. Just the other day, my daughter, she wanted to go work out with me. First time she asked to work out with me, right? This is the first time? Daddy's heart melted. First time, she's six years old. So I'm like, okay, you know, I'm like, I just want to encourage her to have fun, right? Yeah, you got to build a relationship. I'm not going to go in there and do it, like you got to get your hips neutral and do all, like, no, let's just let her move, you know? So I set up like a rack pole basically, you know, to where, you know, it's kind of mid-shin for her. And we started with the bar and I'm like, you know, pick it up, she's like, it's hard, you know, she got halfway up, put it down. I'm like, honey, I know you can do this, okay? Just keep pulling, right? So then she did 45 pounds and she's like, I did it. I'm like, yeah, you did it. I'm like, you want to try more? She's like, yeah, let's try more. So we did 50 and she got that. And then we did 55 and she got that, right? And then the next day she goes, can we go do that again? I'm like, yeah, sure, let's go do it again. And she got, she ended up getting 65 pounds. And she's stepping up to the bar and I'm like, she's like, it's heavy. I'm like, I know, but you can do it. And she goes, I know, it's such a cute video. And she went and did it, but it's like, that's, at first it was hard and she wasn't able to do it. And then the other thing was she watched me when I was coming back to, I love this story. You guys are, you guys are dead, so you're going to love this. She had seen me like go through injuries and I'd kind of told her about it because she asked me about it. And I said, you know, your dad was really good at this. I almost won a world championship, you know? And then I had all these issues and pain and you know, and she would come and just watch me train in the garage. And then one day I was talking to her about this and she goes, are you going to try and be a champion again? Like my chest grew like three inches immediately. And I'm like, well, I'm fucking right now I am, you know? Like, so when I was getting ready for nationals last year, she got to come to nationals, so to my son. And the day before, she's like, I'm scared for you. And I'm like, what do you mean? She's like, well, what if you don't win? Cause I, she's like, if you win, you're a world champion. I'm like, no, I have to win this. And then I get to go to the world championships and I'd have to win that, you know? She's like, I'm scared for you. What if you don't win? I said, you know, honey, that might happen. But you know what's important is I never gave up. Like I was really frustrated. I was really upset. I felt like there was times when I couldn't do it, but I didn't give up, you know, tearing up talking about this. And so like when I won the next day at nationals, first off, this kid is screaming so loud in the audience. It's so cute, you know? And then the last deadlift, I pull it, I turn around to go back. She rushes the platform. You know, you're not supposed to do this. She rushes the platform, comes up, hugs me, you know? And then I like, after I asked if I could take her out in the metal stand. So she gets to walk. I've got so many great pictures of me like holding their hand, walking out to the metal stand with me. They put the metal around my neck and I put it around her neck. And she's like looking at like, you know, like so excited. So then I went to Canada, won the world championship. I was FaceTiming whether she's so excited. So I get back literally now every single person, like every person that we meet, she's like, my daddy's a world champion. Like we're out at a restaurant and the waiter comes over, she's like, my daddy's a world champion. You know, like it's so cool. But I'm like, that, again, I don't want to like overemphasize why I wasn't doing it for my kids. You know, I was doing it for me. But what a great lesson they got to see. You know, like, and my, like I said, my best friend, Mike, he was at, he was at nationals and he was actually at Worlds too. And he said, dude, your daughter is going to remember that for the rest of her life. Oh yeah, 100%. He's like, you know, she got to see her dad struggle and get through it. And you know what? Kids, you can say whatever you want. It's about what you do. 100%. And you said the right thing though when she asked you, what if you lose? I might, honey. Yeah, you might. I might, that happens in life. Sometimes we put a lot of work in and we do it and we don't win. So the biggest powerlifting meet in history is this weekend. It's called Sheffield. It's invite only and it's different than any other powerlifting meet in history in that you have to, the winner is determined by who breaks the world record by the greatest amount. Wow. Okay. In their weight class. Wow. So you're not, so you're going to see people going for broke and taking lifts that they usually wouldn't take because it's all about who can break the records, right? And so my old coach, Ben, so my current coach is a guy named Zach Robinson with data-driven strength. I used to be coached by Ben Escro. Zach was not able to come to Canada for Worlds because he was doing his PhD data collection. So Ben came with me because Ben's handled me in a bunch of different meets. We have a great relationship. And you know, I was texting with him yesterday because his girlfriend, Leah, is the French national champion and has a good shot to like basically win this whole thing. Like she is a beast. This girl's like, competes in the 63 kilo class and has squatted like 460 pounds. Dead lifts over 500 pounds. Like it's crazy, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Ben's over there handling her and we're just like talking about the meet and stuff. And I said, you know, I think one thing I've always had is confidence. And confidence doesn't necessarily mean you have the confidence that you're going to win. It's just that you know, like no matter what happens, you're not going to get rattled, you know? Like when, when loser draw, like when I got to worlds, I was, I told everybody, I'm like, I'm the happiest fucking person to be here. You're not going to see anything but a smile on my face this entire week, you know? And then when it got down to it, the Mexican national champ, he'd won three years in a row in my weight class and he's, I would have the bigger deadlift. He had the bigger squatting bench. So we got to deadlift. I was down by 33 pounds. And I remember Mike went up to Ben and he was like, dude, like his mic doesn't really know how powerful that was. I was like, dude, like, how's he doing? Like, and I was, Ben thought I was out at your shop and I had my earphones turned off and Ben goes, he's going to win. And even before that, speaking of the confidence thing, I was just having such a good time. I went up to the Mexican national champ. I fist bump, I said, let's give him a show. We smiled at him. So it's like, cause I'm like, man, I'm not even supposed to be here. You know, like how cool of an experience to actually be at IPF worlds and just be in the mix and have a shot. You know? So like, you cannot get that like level of experience and confidence without doing. You can read all about it. I mean, Brian Callan said this, right? You can read every book about boxing. You can shadow box, you can watch guys, you can analyze fights, but if you've never been punched in the face, you're not going to be able to handle it the first time it happens, right? You have to expose yourself to suck. It's the great dichotomy of life. Whatever makes it easier in the short term will make it harder in the long term. Whatever makes it harder in the short term makes it easier in the long term. 100% well said. Lane, always a pleasure, my friend. It's a great one, yeah. It's a good mic drop, right? Thanks for coming. Guys, I always have such a great time with you all. You guys are great dudes. I was telling people, you know, every time I get to get a chance to go out to mine pump, you know, we don't always agree on everything, but one thing I'll say is those guys met me like at the worst part of my life, and you guys were like so supportive. Sal, you were texting me so much. Like, is there anything we can do? And, you know, like, I just appreciate good people in this space, and I'll always be excited to do y'all shit. Oh, thanks. Awesome. Same, same, appreciate it. Thank you, bro. Appreciate it. Today we're going to teach you everything you need to know to build a strong, well-developed chest. When I think of weak points and areas that I struggled with developing for a really long time, chess was up there with the world. Yeah, it was for me. It was for me, for sure. I got more caught up in the weight I could lift versus how I was developing my body. I think it's one of the most challenging muscles to develop for most people because the form and technique.