#475： How to Lose Weight, and Keep It Off Forever
Episode Stats
Summary
If you ve made it a goal to lose some weight this year, my guest today argues that losing weight is actually pretty easy, but the real trick is keeping it off. His name is Lane Norton, and he s a professional bodybuilder, powerlifter, and a PhD in nutritional sciences.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast if you're like
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a lot of men listening this podcast you've likely made it a goal to lose some weight this year but
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if you're also like a lot of men listening this podcast you've made that goal before
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maybe even succeeded with it but you had to make it again because you gained all the weight back
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my guest today argues that losing weight is actually pretty easy the real trick is keeping
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it off his name is Lane Norton he's a professional bodybuilder powerlifter and a doctor of nutritional
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sciences and today on the show we discuss all things fat loss we begin our conversation discussing
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why losing weight is easier than keeping it off the mechanisms that kick into gear once we shed body
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fat that causes to gain all of it even more back and why yo-yo dieting is so terrible for you we
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then dig into whether there's one diet that's the most effective in helping you lose fat the
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tactics you need to use to keep the weight off in the long run and the real reason exercise plays a
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role in helping you to do so which isn't what you think it is after the show's over check out our
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show notes at aom.is slash bio lane all right Lane Norton welcome to the show thanks Brett thanks
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for having me I appreciate it so you are a pro bodybuilder powerlifter but also have your phd in
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nutritional sciences give us a little background on that like about not only your career as a pro
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bodybuilder and powerlifter but also when did you decide to go for the phd in nutritional sciences
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well whenever I introduce myself I always refer to myself as a meathead who likes science or a science
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geek who likes lifting heavy things so depending on my mood that day depends on which one I swing
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towards but I would say I've always had an interest in science and when I was growing up I wanted to be
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a marine biologist and I got picked on a lot in school so actually like way more than just like
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everybody went through you know getting teased or whatever that's normal but this was like a whole
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nother level you know in high school and middle school and elementary school there's like tiers of
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status I would have been on that bottom rung of status so I got pretty not physically but like
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emotionally abused by my peers growing up and I remembered one summer I was like I'm tired of
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doing this I'm didn't do something about it so I started lifting weights and you know I my idea was
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I would stop getting bullied and get more attention from girls if I got bigger because I was a really
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skinny kid and lifting weights didn't do either of those two things but it did I did fall in love
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with the process of lifting weights and you know by the time I was getting ready to go to college I
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was really in love with bodybuilding and I was reading like flex magazine like I remember I have
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like flex magazines in my backpack going to class and when I was getting bored in class I just whip out
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flex magazine start reading that and so by the time I was getting ready to go to college I was
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kind of rethinking my idea of being marine biologist come to find out it's very hard to get a job in that
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they pay like which you know money's not everything but I would have liked to have made a good living but I
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would also really like to have done something I'm passionate about I know I knew I did not want to do
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what everybody else was doing and I came from a small not a small town but a modest sized town in
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the midwest where it might as well have been an island because nobody left like you just grew up
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if you went to college you went to University of Southern Indiana I grew up in Evansville Indiana
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you went to USI or you went to University of Evansville and that was it like if you got fancy you went to
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University of Louisville or you went to IU or Purdue or something like that but you didn't
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you didn't leave the midwest that was just not something that happened that often and I just
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knew that if I didn't leave I was going to end up like everybody else just working a kind of I don't
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want to say average job or insult people who do that kind of thing but just your typical nine to five
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and I didn't want that for my life I wanted to do something different so I decided to go to
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Eckerd College I had some really good professors who steered me down the right path and I still remember
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my general chemistry professor saying you should do biochemistry because if you still want to do
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marine science in grad school it'll be there for you but if you decide you want to do something
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different biochemistry will really set you up for whatever you want to do in science and so I did
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that I changed my major to biochemistry the same time the summer after my first year of college I did
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my first bodybuilding show won the teen division won the novice division and was completely hooked
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and by the time I was a junior in college I was really convinced that I wanted to make a living
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in bodybuilding or something to do with bodybuilding I didn't know how I was going to do it because I
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didn't want to take steroids I competed in the natural bodybuilding organization so I didn't want
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to do that you know no hate to anybody who does I don't have any disrespect or anything like that
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it was more about I just never felt called to do it I never felt called to be Mr. Olympia but I love
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bodybuilding but I didn't I didn't want to take that path personally so I didn't know how I was
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going to make a living but I got to my junior year and I'm like well I don't know what I want to do
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with my life I know I'm passionate about this thing I'm not sure how I'm going to make money from it
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so how about going to more school I figured if I had a master's or a PhD it'd probably help with
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whatever I wanted to do so I did exactly that I applied to different PhD programs I interviewed at the
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University of Illinois and Penn State and Cornell I got accepted and I decided on Illinois because
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I really vibed with my the advisor there Dr. Don Lehman and as it turns out that was probably one of
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the best decisions I ever made in my life was to go to University of Illinois which is a great school
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really really strong research and science-based school and especially for nutrition they're
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they're like top three every year they're really great nutrition program and in particular Dr.
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Lehman was a fantastic advisor so he his specialty was protein metabolism which doesn't take a difficult
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kind of stretch to see the connection between bodybuilding and why I want to study protein
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and he was always very encouraging of that he was never ashamed of the fact that I was a meathead
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you know he was very encouraging of that which I didn't get that vibe with a lot of different
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professors a lot of different professors almost seemed like they were ashamed if you were
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into lifting weights or bodybuilding but Lehman was never that way and so I got into that during
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that time in grad school I also won my pro card in natural bodybuilding by the time I graduated I did
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my first series of pro shows my only series of pro shows so far because I kind of I guess I'm like
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semi-retired now but won my first pro show and then placed top five and all the other ones
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so pretty successful run there then during that off season before that the that series I'd gotten
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into powerlifting just kind of as a way to keep myself from getting bored in the off season because
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if you're doing natural bodybuilding like you've got to take two three-year off seasons like you just
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don't build muscle that fast that's why I see a lot of these kids out there or or young guys who
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compete every year and you're really like it's a really terrible idea because you're limiting your
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growth so I took a four-year off season between when I won my pro card and when I won when I did my
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first pro shows and it really helped me but in that time it was I was finding it hard to stay
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motivated for training without having something to shoot for so I decided to start doing some
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powerlifting meets and it turns out I was pretty good at it in fact I'm probably better at that than
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I was at bodybuilding so you know got really into that won nationals twice got a silver medal at
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worlds won the Arnold set a well what was then a squat world record in the IPF the biggest powerlifting
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organization in the world I'm at 668 pounds and yeah had a pretty good run there and gone through
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some injuries and kind of rehabbing those right now and trying to come back and do it all over again
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and then yeah you had your PhD right yeah so I finished my PhD in 2010 you know and during that time
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like around circa 2005 I had been writing articles for bodybuilding.com and people had sent me a lot I get a lot of
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emails I was probably getting 20 30 emails a day with people with questions and I loved helping
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people I loved it and I but I realized man I'm spending a lot of time doing this I'm in grad school
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now I've got to get some kind of you know compensation for my time so I started doing online coaching and was
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one of the first people to kind of do that this is in 2005 this is before Instagram you know before
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before you could stick your ass in the camera and call yourself a coach I was doing it right so
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got into that by the time I was graduating grad school I was making a full-time living from it
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but I said well I don't see the reason to go get a normal job let's do this so I was doing online
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coaching full-time and yeah I've gone through several different iterations of my business tried
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some different things and now I still do some coaching but it's mostly a lot of writing and
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content production so we I have two ebooks that are out now that have been successful beyond what
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I ever could have imagined and writing and writing another one and working on some other projects and
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yeah it's been a it's been a good run it's been a good life it's awesome yeah that's really cool and
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I'd like to talk about one of those books you wrote fat loss forever but before we get into the
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details of that one I'm curious when you started doing your you know your biochemistry work and
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your PhD work were you surprised like did I mean I read like muscle and fitness growing up too and
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all this and like there's all this advice in there and you're like uh is this really true and there's
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like I mean even then there's all the bro science and it's peripherally even more today like did you
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immediately like start seeing contradictions for stuff that you saw in the bodybuilding or powerlifting
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world or were some of the things like validated that these guys were doing that had no basis in
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science but they got right just through trial and error that's exactly why I wouldn't get a PhD
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because I got tired of reading every magazine and having it say one thing and then another magazine
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say another thing or the same magazine say one thing one month and another thing another month
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or the same magazine saying one thing and in the same episode contradicting itself so I was like well
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I'm gonna go get more education that's not gonna hurt me and I'm gonna figure that out for myself
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so yeah that was you know the quest for I guess there's a couple things that make a good scientist
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one is you're always hungry to learn the quest for knowledge and two you're inherently skeptical
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you don't just accept things at face value you question even the the things that we hold to be true
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and I think that's what makes a good scientist somebody who just won't accept something as
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fact without really digging into it but also the saying be open-minded but not so open-minded that
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your brain falls out which I also see a lot of you know that's like when you get to the like there's
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skepticism and then there's whack job conspiracy theorist nonsense that yeah I which I kind of deal with
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on a daily basis now no I bet yeah going to that point about you know being skeptical I mean one of
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the issues that I found with like popular health writing is that they'll they'll they'll talk about
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the studies the research and then they'll look at the conclusion and say yeah this study says x but
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then if you actually read the study you realize well the sample size wasn't that big yep um it actually
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they weren't really you know it wasn't conclusive but the popular because you know these popular writers
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need to turn out content and get clicks they just come out like well this new study says
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coffee's terrible for you but then you look at the studies well it doesn't really say that no what
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it'll say is there's a component in coffee that when they fed it to rats at a super high dose it caused
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like carcinogenic effects you know it wasn't actually coffee and it wasn't actually in humans yeah that's
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there was a study done where they um the the headline was that farts can help reduce the risk or
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smelling something your partner's farts can help reduce the risk of breast cancer that was that
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was that was the headline no what they did was they took short chain fatty acids volatile fatty acids
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that are some of the things that you smell when when you fart and they looked at them at giving them
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an isolated in a high dose to rats and saw an effect on cancer that is not the same thing as
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smelling your partner's farts that like the the level of irresponsibility by the media and reporting
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some of this stuff just to get a headline i understand it to a certain level because they
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have to because it's so competitive if you don't have big headlines i mean it's like being on instagram
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like i'm really proud of the fact that i've got you know whatever 240 000 followers on instagram because
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i'm not like i'm not some dude that's posting pictures of a shredded six-pack all the time
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standing in front of a ferrari that he doesn't own that he's leasing and you know with pitbulls or
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whatever and acting like i'm living some lifestyle i'm putting out educational content you know there's
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substance but we're not a substance-based society you know people want that that that crap so
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yeah i think that the it's it's difficult to parse out a lot of what's out there but
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just listening to somebody and i'll tell people hey like you know don't take my word for it like
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you know i have my own biases i try to be honest about them and upfront about them but everybody's
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biased one way or another like and that's okay that's fine it's the people who aren't willing to
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admit their biases there's a there's a gal called um what's her name nina nina ends with the t starts
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with a t her last name but she's a she's a low-carb advocate big-time low-carb advocate and all of her
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all of her a lot of her criticisms of the research out there are funding-based right so she says well
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this study was funded by big corn or big this or big that you ever want to make something sound
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scary just put big in front of it apparently and what she doesn't ever disclose is the fact that she
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herself is funded by the meat industry like which is fine that's fine there's nothing wrong with that
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my research was funded by the dairy council and the egg nutrition center board that's fine i have
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to disclose that right like so if she's going to criticize all these other people she needs to
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disclose what her biases are so that's a big part of it and and i think people get way too attached to
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ideals rather than trying to deconstruct their ego and figure out what stuff actually says like i'll
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tell people like i'm not if you're reading my books i'm not selling any one particular diet
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i'm not i'm selling information and i'm trying to put it out there kind of as it is well let's talk
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about a topic speaking of lots of different competing things on instagram is weight loss because there's so
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many competing ideas out there now and it's gotten worse i think so you you wrote a book fat loss forever
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yeah it's a new year i think a lot of men who are listening to the show a lot of them probably have
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goals to lose some weight but i love how in the book you talk about you make this important point
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that it's actually really easy to lose weight yeah the problem that people have because people do it
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all the time yeah the problem people have is that they can't keep it off so what's going why why is it
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so hard to keep weight off after you lose that 10 15 pounds there's a multitude of reasons there's
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there's physiological there's sociological and there's psychological reasons physiologically
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if you think about what weight loss is so we have this kind of let's call it a set point
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of body fat that your body kind of likes to stay at it's where you've kind of settled that during your
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life and if you've been usually it's your body defends against you getting too much body fat well the
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reason people get obese is they can eat past that and we kind of i don't want to get way too far down
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the rabbit hole but i guess there's if you talk about losing weight there's very tight regulations
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what will happen is you get hungrier when you start to lose weight you your metabolic rate slows down
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all these uh your your hormones like leptin drop your your you actually move less whether you believe it
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or not um like just like little fidgets throughout the day but it can end up adding up to like several
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hundred calories less per day that you're actually expending so all these things start working to
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drive you back towards energy balance meaning you're you're you're not losing weight your calories in is
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equaling calories out so it's trying to drive you back towards that to protect you because you have
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if we're if we have this kind of regulation on body weight the set point that the body likes to be at
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that means that it's trying to keep you from getting too big or losing too much weight right does that
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make sense yeah that makes sense so so and and you know on the other end if you start to overeat
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you'll have your metabolic rate goes up your hunger goes down all these sorts of things
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so but on each end there's two different we always need to think about like what is
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what is the evolutionary reason for this right because everything happens for a reason all the
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systems in our body came about because of a reason you're dealing with two different threats
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to your survival because keep in mind the goal of you your existence in terms of evolution is for you to
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stay alive long enough to pass on your genetic material that's that's it that's the goal okay
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now on one end you have starvation right if you don't eat enough you can starve okay on the other end
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if you get too heavy there in there's an increased risk of predation right you can't you can't escape a
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predator very well or the other one is you may not be agile enough to actually catch food but that kind
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of would be self-limiting because you would be as you weren't able to eat you would end up losing
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weight becoming more agile able to catch food well over the last several thousand years the risk of
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predation is dropped to basically zero for most of the world or you know what i mean that just doesn't
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exist whereas the risk of starvation we may not think about in western society but even up until
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like even a hundred years ago in in the u.s like you know famine was a real problem so not so much
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anymore so it's still a real problem so that is still hardwired into our dna at least this is the
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hypothesis that some of these researchers this guy that had this particular hypothesis his name is
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speakman so your body has much more tightly regulated controls on you losing weight than it does on you
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gaining weight so plus we have a very obesogenic environment like if you're talking about now
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non-processed foods right now i don't want people to get really excited about this because
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there's nothing inherently fattening fattening about a processed food there's not it's not 100 calories of
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a processed food is not more fattening than 100 calories of an unprocessed food per se but processed
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food takes less energy to digest so i guess you could argue that it is a little bit different
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but more than that it's just very highly palatable have you ever tried to eat like 200 calories from a
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plain baked potato like plain nothing on it yeah it's hard it's hard it's really hard right have
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you ever tried to eat 200 calories from snickers bar easy you just eat a snickers bar done yeah exactly
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so we we have a what's called an obesogenic environment where we have free access to extremely hyperpalatable
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high calorie foods and we don't move as much as we used to so we can very easily eat past that set point
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but it's hard to get under the set point because that's still a hardwired into our dna
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this is the body treats dieting like controlled starvation so your metabolic rate drops your hunger
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goes up these hormonal these hormonal signals to your brain they really there was an interesting study
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back in the 1940s they took conscientious objectors to world war ii and basically starved them for six
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months and then looked at the physiological changes well just to show you how powerful dieting is on
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motivation to not be dieting there was originally 15 subjects in the study it ended with 12 because
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one of them cut his thumb off in order to get out of the study we believe that and then the other two
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literally stormed and assaulted the kitchen for food and of the people who completed the study
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half of them went on to work in the food industry or become professional chefs wow so um but if you've
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ever dieted like some people like they die and they end up watching the food food network all the time it
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becomes an all-encompassing like thing for your brain so but the real the major problem is that
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people look at dieting and weight loss as something with a set start and end date they go well i'm i'm
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doing i want to lose 20 pounds so what do they do they lose the 20 pounds and then they go right back
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to doing the same that they were doing before they lost the 20 pounds well what do you think is going to
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happen when you do that whatever behaviors you had to incorporate in order to lose the weight
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you will need to incorporate those same behaviors to keep the weight off that's why i say we don't
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really have a knowledge problem because any diet will work i mean low carb low fat intermittent fasting
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whatever anything that allows you to create a calorie deficit will work this we shouldn't even
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spending time arguing about this it's stupid like maybe like higher protein diets tend to work a
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little bit better because they're more satiating and you spare lean body mass and they they have a
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little bit more of energy expenditure that's great but if somebody can't stick to a high protein diet
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or they can't see themselves doing that for the rest of their life then it's not going to work for them
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right any diet can work even like a super high carb super low fat low protein as long as they're in a
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calorie deficit will work for weight loss it's been shown in many studies and before i know some of
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the listeners are probably saying well what about insulin sensitivity 95 to 99 percent of the health
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benefits of of dieting are strictly due to weight loss and have nothing to do with the type of diet
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you're on that that was done there was two meta-analyses done on this and they looked at equating calories
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and looking at different ratios of carbohydrates and fats and their effects on blood markers of
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health and found that basically weight loss explained 95 to 99 percent of it so if that's the
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case if it's weight loss that makes the biggest difference for health then the best diet is probably
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the one you can stick to and see yourself doing for life because i'm going to go on keto that's great
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bro if you're never going to eat carbs again in your life then that can work for you but if you can't see
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yourself doing that six months or 12 months from now you got to rethink your plan because it's going
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to fail it's it's behaviors that make the difference it's the same reason like that people are broke
00:24:04.600
it's the exact same reason people are broke how do you not be broke earn more money than you spend
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and there are people who make thirty thousand dollars a year who can who can save money it's happened i've
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done it i've made thirty thousand dollars a year before and saved money it's hard it sucks but it
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can be done there's also people who make a million dollars a year and don't save money right so is it a
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knowledge problem because hopefully everyone knows that in order to save money you need to make more than
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you spend and we have that knowledge that knowledge is there but what do people get caught up in
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instead of focusing on uh the things that actually um help with wealth accrual people focus on oh uh
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they get into pyramid schemes and they they oh this one neat trick it's the same you see in the fitness
00:24:58.880
industry for fat loss you know oh these three neat tricks to burn belly fat no that's crap like if you
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want to lose fat you want to keep it off it's going to be really really hard because only five percent of
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people are able to do it that's the statistics right yeah like 95 of people yeah five percent
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only five percent are able to keep it off we're gonna take a quick break for your word from our
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sponsors and now back to the show so let's kind of recap what you said there's a lot to unpack there
00:25:26.480
and i want to go some some different directions with some of the stuff you were talking about
00:25:29.680
so the reason why body fat is hard to lose because your body is basically saying i'm we're now in
00:25:35.600
starvation mode fat we're losing body fat but it's like i don't want to lose that body fat because we
00:25:40.780
need that for to keep ourselves going in case the starvation goes even further so it just gets harder
00:25:47.680
that's your body's you gotta always think about your body fat your body's uh adipose stores as your
00:25:54.680
energy reserve because that's exactly what it is right so your body's like no leave this alone this is
00:25:58.800
ours you're taking that away we're not gonna let you do that but also besides you know when you stop the
00:26:04.400
diet you gain the weight back but also there's a tendency to gain more body fat or more weight than
00:26:09.360
you were before you started the diet yeah that's a phenomenon called body fat overshooting and it
00:26:14.120
really happens a lot in people who do what we call weight cycle or yo-yo diet and um really interesting
00:26:20.020
study we included this in the book it was in rats so some people will get their their hands up in the
00:26:25.980
air but rats actually pretty metabolically similar to a human now and there is some human data to
00:26:32.480
support this as well but what they did was they took them through two different diet cycles so
00:26:36.780
they had them diet down to they had them kind of eat up to a certain weight and then they died them
00:26:42.040
down and they observed what rate it took for them to reach that weight to sort of diet down to that
00:26:50.460
weight then they had them relapse to the previous weight they just gave them food and let them say hey go
00:26:55.860
go for it go crazy eat whatever you want right they regained the weight in half the time that it took
00:27:03.120
for them to take it off then once they reached their their previous high weight they had them diet back
00:27:08.880
down again to the weight that they achieved previously right they lost weight twice as slow
00:27:16.000
the second time right and that's what at the same calorie level right that's pretty nuts then they
00:27:23.660
regained it when they let them regain it again they regained it three times as fast wow every time
00:27:30.340
they went through one of these diet cycles their metabolism got slower and they got more efficient
00:27:34.760
at putting on body fat and every time you diet you activate your body's self-defense system okay and i
00:27:41.760
again this is one of the things i talk about in the book your body has a self-defense system in place
00:27:46.660
to keep you from starving yourself and basically what it does is i i i kind of this isn't in the
00:27:52.920
scientific literature this is just kind of my description i call it a three-pronged attack
00:27:56.360
you have a metabolic adaptation which when you start dieting or when you're dieting your body
00:28:02.920
slows your metabolic rate by by the way slows it disproportionately more than you would predict
00:28:09.200
by the amount of weight you lose because if you lose weight you have less metabolically active tissue
00:28:13.140
you know you know your metabolism is going to slow down some anyway but you your metabolism slows about
00:28:19.420
15 to 20 percent more than you would predict from just from the weight loss then while you're dieting
00:28:28.700
your body is already ramping up systems that will increase your ability to store body fat okay why would
00:28:38.260
it do that well let's think about from an evolutionary perspective if you had gone through a long famine
00:28:43.200
and then all of a sudden boom you find out i mean let's just do the stereotype you find a big old
00:28:48.900
woolly mammoth and it's dead and you can eat it right and you can just kind of gorge yourself well you
00:28:53.540
couldn't really keep meat for very long back in the day right and you couldn't keep a lot of foods for
00:28:58.160
very long so they're going to get as much out of it as they can well you would not want to be wasteful
00:29:03.480
with that energy you would want to capture as much of it as possible you'd want to be very efficient
00:29:08.580
at storing that energy and not wasting it so that's why the body's going to ramp up those systems that
00:29:14.160
help you store fat because if you're in a deficit if you're in an energy energy if there's a body
00:29:22.040
senses an energy gap it is going to make it easier for you to store fat because if you come across the
00:29:29.100
food stores your body's going to want to be able to capture it does that make sense that makes perfect
00:29:33.020
yeah so and then the third phase is they've actually observed in people who who diet or people
00:29:40.380
who diet pretty aggressively if they then regain the weight really really quickly there actually
00:29:48.160
is some evidence that they may actually be able to manufacture new fat cells so we usually if you if
00:29:55.100
you diet or you lose if you lose or gain weight usually what happens is your fat cells just shrink or
00:30:03.000
expand okay but there you can eat past that there is a maximum threshold for your adipocytes it's about
00:30:10.940
100 micrometers i think and so once they get across that bigger than that we can have what's called
00:30:17.400
pre-adipocyte differentiation and these pre-adipocytes are like these little tiny nascent inactive
00:30:24.460
potential fat cells that are in the adipose tissue that can differentiate to fully form fat cells if
00:30:32.820
your body needs them so that's how people can get really like really obese because they can start
00:30:37.900
triggering this fat cell differentiation but there seems to be even if you don't approach that that
00:30:44.820
maximum size if you've been in a deficit and then you you just kind of start massively overeating after
00:30:52.240
that like put a lot of weight really quickly you're they've actually they actually showed in rats that
00:30:57.780
they could increase their their fat cell number by 50 which is a real problem because now your set
00:31:03.300
point is going to change because since you have more fat cells the size of each individual cell is
00:31:08.760
now smaller so it would still your theoretically your body would still sense a deficit even if you've
00:31:16.260
gotten back up to your original body fat and that's why i think a lot of people when they weight cycle
00:31:21.240
they end up at a higher body fat and then have trouble losing body fat from that level of body fat
00:31:27.200
because that's now their set point because they have more fat cells that's my theory anyway
00:31:31.800
and yeah it's pretty scary actually if you read my if you read fat loss forever the chapters one and
00:31:38.080
chapters three will scare the crap out of you no yeah they did so it makes it sound like man losing weight
00:31:42.940
is impossible but it's not it's not we'll talk about what you can do to make it sustainable
00:31:47.140
but you know you mentioned a lot of the the sort of diets that are really popular with people
00:31:51.860
particularly online there's the low carb diet keto there's now the carnivore diet that i'm seeing a lot
00:31:57.520
about yeah and with all these these different diets they all claim that there's something special
00:32:02.380
about these specific diets that allow people to lose weight right by not eating carbs you reduce
00:32:07.300
the amount of insulin pumping through your system so like you know insulin can't shuttle glucose
00:32:12.200
into fat cells or whatever but i mean it sounds like you're saying like no it's not really that
00:32:16.260
it's just that these diets allow you to eat fewer calories and that's why you lose weight is that
00:32:21.240
what's going on that's exactly right so for example let's take the carnivore diet for example
00:32:28.360
it's really hard to overeat on meat like it's really hard to overeat you can do it you can do it
00:32:34.960
especially if you're eating really fatty meat but for the most part meat's tough to overeat on if you
00:32:40.380
look at something like you know i was talking about this the other day everybody's got something that
00:32:44.360
kind of i call it tripping their algorithm right so people like with keto i'll hear this a lot people
00:32:51.200
say man i tried everything out there and keto i just i wasn't hungry on it and it's just easy for
00:32:56.580
me or they'll say that about intermittent fasting for me it was flexible dieting you know like flexible
00:33:01.760
dieting where i'm just i have my protein carbon fat targets and i hit those but i can eat whatever i
00:33:07.040
want to hit those that tripped my algorithm because that that felt not restrictive to me i didn't mind
00:33:12.960
for some people they hate tracking for me it doesn't bother me at all if i know i can have
00:33:16.800
what i want if i track but all these can work i mean like for example just a great example i was
00:33:21.760
talking about was there was a professor at the university of kansas state named dr mark haub
00:33:25.820
i actually interviewed him a while back when i had a podcast and he did as an effort to to prove that
00:33:32.300
calories matter and matter more than anything he did what was called the twinkie diet so he literally
00:33:37.860
ate all junk food now he only ate 1800 calories a day but it was all from junk food and but he also
00:33:45.840
took a protein shake and a fiber supplement just to make sure he was getting all that stuff and he
00:33:51.320
lost like 30 pounds and now what's funny is people say well yeah well what about his health though
00:33:58.040
uh actually they they he kept track of all his blood markers and every single blood marker improved
00:34:03.080
like drastically that's because when fat cells expand they secrete all kinds of hormones that
00:34:12.920
can disrupt metabolism and decrease insulin sensitivity when you lose weight fat cells shrink
00:34:21.500
they become extremely insulin sensitive and they stop secreting or they they reduce their secretion of
00:34:27.220
these hormones so and they increase secretion of things like adiponectin which increases insulin
00:34:32.960
sensitivity so yeah just losing the weight is the biggest part of it now i'm not suggesting that
00:34:40.100
somebody now if you talk to mark he said he actually didn't really care for the diet because even though
00:34:45.480
it was junk food like 1800 calories of junk food doesn't go very far you know that's like seven
00:34:51.020
snickers bars you could over you could eat seven snickers bars pretty easily throughout the course of a day
00:34:56.980
and not feel that satisfied so yeah he didn't like it because he seems like you know i'd rather had a big
00:35:02.900
salad or something like that so i could have felt you know fuller so i think the point is that you
00:35:09.600
know anything can work keto can work intermittent fasting can work any diet can work you can you can
00:35:16.480
look at any diet and they can find testimonials of people who have lost weight so therefore any diet
00:35:21.380
can work if it creates a caloric deficit the question then is which diets lend themselves to being
00:35:29.980
sustainable so that people can continue them and continue to keep the weight off you know for
00:35:35.860
some people keto works for them and they feel satisfied they do not feel uh like they need to
00:35:40.840
go out and and and eat junk food or anything like that it works for them it doesn't work for everybody
00:35:45.480
i know people who put on 30 pounds during keto because they overate butter and bacon you know so i think
00:35:51.540
if somebody you know i i did a debate on mark bell's podcast with sean baker who's the biggest
00:35:57.700
proponent of the carnivore diet and um you know i said i don't think the carnivore diet is the
00:36:05.660
healthiest thing you can do i mean you know saturated fat isn't the great evil we thought it was but it
00:36:10.340
certainly doesn't have a protective effect on heart disease like polyunsaturated fat does
00:36:13.960
and you're also like if you're only eating meat you're you're like you're not eating fiber which is a big
00:36:21.200
problem and actually sean admitted that you probably should be eating vegetables he just doesn't but um
00:36:28.460
i did say hey you know if somebody told me if somebody was obese and they told me this is the
00:36:34.780
only diet that works for me like everything else i feel like i just can't stick to it but this meat
00:36:39.540
only diet i can stick to chris bell says that mark bell's brother chris bell says that he's lost like
00:36:43.720
i want to say like 40 pounds on the carnivore diet and his blood markers have improved because he's
00:36:48.980
lost weight so if somebody says hey this is the only thing i can do and keep the weight off then
00:36:52.640
that's probably the best diet for you to be honest so yeah i think we need to start stop looking at
00:36:58.740
like this debate over which diet is best because it's going to be for the individual and you said
00:37:04.120
you you've read the book so you know that i don't advocate for any one diet i spend a whole chapter
00:37:10.520
debunking claims from fad diets but i don't suggest any one diet i just kind of say hey here's
00:37:18.860
different diets people will try i mean you should try some but here's here are the series of
00:37:24.060
behaviors you're going to have to have in order to lose weight and keep it off and those are
00:37:28.680
self-monitoring cognitive restraint exercise exercise is a huge one people people who generally
00:37:36.200
people who lose weight and keep it off they exercise if you're not exercising most the vast
00:37:41.580
majority of people don't keep that weight off and also they don't snack like they really don't snack
00:37:46.520
very much and they usually weigh themselves daily and they form they do some form of cognitive
00:37:52.860
restraint for example whether it's calorie tracking macro tracking they're not eating carbs time
00:37:59.940
restricted eating you're going to have to do some sort of restriction if you want to lose weight and
00:38:04.640
keep it off like there's going to be a restriction on your lifestyle but you can pick the restriction you
00:38:08.880
want so for me the restriction on my lifestyle is i have to track my intake but i'm not restricted
00:38:15.400
from any foods i want to eat because i just i practice flexible dieting if you don't want to
00:38:20.940
track your food intake well maybe you could do something like keto and maybe that will work for
00:38:25.000
you or time-restricted eating intermittent fasting carnivore whatever you want to call it for me
00:38:30.800
flexible dieting works best but i'm not arrogant enough to think that it's going to work best for
00:38:34.860
everybody so i think we really need to focus on giving people choices and focus on behaviors rather
00:38:42.600
than bickering over which diet is better than another diet right we like we like to feel righteous
00:38:48.240
so that's oh that's that's why people who get into nutrition now are like they would have been
00:38:56.400
religious zealots right it's just ridiculous how entrenched people get in their beliefs like i have
00:39:04.880
the thing about being a scientist and like publishing literature is you have had yourself absolutely
00:39:12.760
crushed your ideas crushed your theories crushed so many times that if you're doing it right
00:39:23.260
you just don't get that married to any one idea you don't because you know that you could be wrong
00:39:30.240
like i'd like to think i get it right more than i get it wrong but that's why i'm not selling any one
00:39:36.340
particular diet in the book because i can't very well say well hey the keto diet doesn't work when
00:39:41.460
there's thousands of people who are losing weight on keto so how can i say that right so i think that
00:39:48.400
that people they just want to feel like what they're doing is better than everybody else yeah and
00:39:53.060
you know this is with vegans keto warriors carnivore you know if it works for you fine just don't tell me
00:40:00.960
it's magic that's the only thing i tell people well you know i i actually uh posted a study a while back
00:40:06.080
that basically um showed that low carb diets did not cause more fat loss than high carb low fat diets
00:40:15.040
when calories and protein were equated and i had an interesting response on twitter so i posted that
00:40:21.440
and somebody said well that's not true i lost 50 pounds on the ketogenic diet
00:40:24.700
so this is an example of what i say and what a zealot hears are two different things so i said it was not
00:40:33.660
better what that person heard was he's insulting my religion and said i lost 50 pounds on this and i said
00:40:39.700
well i'm sure you did it's just not magic right yeah we published an article like do carbs make
00:40:44.980
you fat and we highlighted that research it's basically it's just it's calories it's not the
00:40:48.160
carbs it's calories me yeah the same same response people like well i lost weight on keto i'm saying
00:40:53.540
yeah you could lose weight on that i'm not saying you can't just saying there's nothing special about
00:40:58.220
it except you're eating fewer calories well here's another interesting so okay losing weight to be
00:41:03.060
sustainable pick whatever thing works for you in the long run you're gonna have to exercise some sort
00:41:07.840
of constraint you need to exercise actually physical exercise that will increase lean muscle mass
00:41:13.140
which also helps increase your metabolism well actually you know what the the the research on
00:41:18.680
that is really underwhelming okay for for like the the amount of increase because muscle mass is
00:41:25.480
actually way less metabolically active than things like liver or intestine like those lean muscles
00:41:31.140
so the question is why would we exercise right because lean body mass doesn't the exercise itself
00:41:38.440
seems to actually be the interesting thing about your body's so good at self-regulating so if you
00:41:45.340
exercise more what tends to happen is your body you just move less throughout the rest of the day
00:41:49.340
right like you don't realize it but your body just actually like you do less fidgeting and you move less
00:41:54.280
so your body's conserving energy because it knows you're exercising right so you're not getting as big of a
00:42:00.180
calorie burn as you might think then like if actually just an example of that when i was prepping for my
00:42:06.360
my pro shows and bodybuilding you like i had a dvd out the time i i've watched it the years later
00:42:12.580
i talk slower and i even blink slower i'm not kidding you like and i talk way less i'm a very
00:42:20.620
talkative person i'm a very extroverted person but like i was just like my whole personality changed
00:42:27.420
when i dieted because my body was so hell-bent on conserving energy so so why exercise then why is it so
00:42:34.980
associated with with keeping weight off because it doesn't really add to your total daily calorie burn
00:42:38.920
the lean muscle you add sure you burn a few more calories but it's not super significant the biggest
00:42:45.680
reason that exercise helps is one well two reasons i think the major one is that it sensitizes you to
00:42:55.520
satiety signals okay they did a study in the 1950s looking at bengali workers and they looked at sedentary
00:43:02.940
people people with a lightly active job a moderately active job and a heavy labor job and what they
00:43:09.100
found was from the lightly active to heavily active jobs people pretty much match their match their
00:43:15.220
intake so without even trying they just ate more calories right and they remained in calorie balance
00:43:20.260
what they found was the sedentary people actually ate more than every other group except for the heavy
00:43:26.080
labor jobs so when you don't exercise you have much lower sensitivity to the satiety signals in your
00:43:35.920
brain so you're it's easy for you to overeat whereas when you exercise you get more sensitive to those
00:43:42.700
satiety signals pretty cool stuff that is really interesting that's very very interesting and then the
00:43:47.580
other thing is exercise increases uh oxidation fat oxidation in fat cells it increases fat fat metabolism
00:43:54.400
turnover which seems to have a benefit for limiting fat regain gotcha okay so that all makes sense
00:44:01.320
well here's another thing you talk about in the book and i think a lot of people have problems with
00:44:04.680
is whenever they do decide to start losing weight they'll lose weight really fast that's probably not a
00:44:12.220
good thing to do correct well so this is where i gotta i gotta give the whole story the research shows
00:44:19.900
that people who lose more weight initially tend to keep more tend to tend to be the ones to keep it
00:44:25.960
off well however it has to be with the caveat that so so they found that people who maintain weight loss
00:44:32.880
they usually lost a good amount of weight at the beginning that's i think losing a good amount of
00:44:38.080
weight at the beginning is okay because it helps you with motivation but what you're not seeing that
00:44:42.780
statistics a little bit deceiving because they're not asking the 95 who failed right like how much did they
00:44:48.540
lose initially so there'd be a lot of people in that in that sample size of the 95 who failed to keep
00:44:54.580
it off who also lost weight really quickly at the beginning and didn't sustain it so i think it's
00:45:00.280
okay to lose some weight quickly at the beginning so long as it's something that is still sustainable
00:45:06.540
for you but if you're doing something like 800 calories a day you know how long can you keep that
00:45:11.600
up for not probably not very long now i will say there was a case study of a guy who did not eat for a
00:45:18.480
year did you hear about this i have not heard about this yeah so he was very obese he didn't
00:45:23.140
eat for a year and he lost i think it was like something like 150 pounds in a year but obviously
00:45:28.220
like that that can't keep going uh and i would like to see where he's at today because the metabolic
00:45:34.020
adaptation to that would have been enormous but it also goes to show that that you know fat is your
00:45:39.420
body's energy reserve so you know i think that whenever you're looking at any plan it's okay to lose
00:45:46.820
weight quickly at the onset as long as whatever you're doing at the onset you can see yourself
00:45:52.180
continuing to do gotcha and then like i mean as you lose weight i imagine you have to make
00:45:57.360
adjustments like so if you want to lose more weight do you have to like reduce calories more
00:46:01.300
for example say like you you lose you know the 50 pounds right and then like what you've been
00:46:05.900
eating say it's like 20 2 000 calories a day whatever i'm gonna say right like is that is that
00:46:12.560
say you're doing that at a point you stop losing weight are you gonna have to drop calories a bit
00:46:16.800
more to keep to keep the weight loss going right so your your stalls are inevitable during weight loss
00:46:23.340
anybody who's lost weight for a long period of time i'm assuming you've probably done this before
00:46:28.120
where you went on a diet and after whatever four six eight ten weeks you stopped losing yeah right
00:46:33.660
yeah right so that is your body's metabolic rate slowing down to the point where eventually it
00:46:39.940
matches your intake right so that's the that's your that's the first prong of the body's self-defense
00:46:44.300
system so what has happened is you have come back to energy balance so this is also why people get
00:46:51.160
confused about a calorie deficit they'll say well i was eating in a calorie deficit i didn't lose weight
00:46:54.960
well no you were eating in what might be predicted to be a calorie deficit or maybe it was a calorie
00:47:00.360
deficit for a little while but it isn't now see people get confused because they think calories in and
00:47:05.040
calories out are like two independent variables but they aren't they're tied together because
00:47:09.560
calories in affects calories out so what has to happen is when you hit one of these plateaus you
00:47:16.080
either you need to recreate that deficit whether it's with consuming less calories increasing your
00:47:22.280
activity or a little bit of both gotcha so this is gonna it's a process and you also talk about it
00:47:27.020
you know one one option too as if you're trying to lose a lot of weight like take breaks every now
00:47:31.360
and then just for the psychological rest so you say you lose 20 pounds all right we'll just kind
00:47:36.800
of maintenance that for a month and then go at it again yeah absolutely i think i think the grind of
00:47:41.940
long periods of dieting can just like wear you down so like giving yourself like saying okay i'm gonna
00:47:47.980
lose 20 like let's say somebody had 100 pounds to lose saying i'm gonna lose 20 and then i'm gonna
00:47:53.400
give myself a month where i'm just eating at maintenance and just trying to maintain that weight loss
00:47:57.080
and that can be helpful for two reasons one it's a mental break and two whatever you go on that
00:48:03.520
maintenance phase it will help you maintain your metabolic rate a little bit better so there's
00:48:09.100
actually research on diet breaks that shows that if you use a diet break where you're eating at
00:48:15.300
maintenance for a period of like a week or two it can actually prevent metabolic slowing a little bit
00:48:20.640
better than if you're just straight dieting so you there's a double effect you get uh the benefit of
00:48:27.400
you can maintain your metabolic rate a little bit better and you have a mental break from the diet so
00:48:33.140
i think that's actually a really good way to construct things for people who are trying to
00:48:36.960
trying to lose lots of weight or even with my regular clients i'll do like a lot of times i'll do
00:48:41.360
two weeks dieting and then one week break or three weeks dieting one week break or three weeks
00:48:45.960
dieting two week break you know that those sorts of things or four weeks dieting two week break
00:48:49.920
so i'll use different iterations of that in order to kind of help keep things going right it's like
00:48:55.780
a deload week with barbell yeah kind of yeah exactly let's say you want to you know you want to get
00:49:01.560
into running but you're also trying to lose weight or let's say you want to get into barbell you know
00:49:05.120
power lifting or whatever is like increasing performance in those you know athletic domains
00:49:09.900
and losing weight are those like diametrically opposed goals like these should go for one or the
00:49:14.500
other or can you do both at the same time you can do both at the same time i think the thing to
00:49:19.180
keep in mind especially like running because you're as you get lower weight you're going to
00:49:23.380
be more efficient i think the thing to keep in mind is that if you're if you're doing something
00:49:29.880
like power lifting or bodybuilding or something like that you're not going to build as much muscle
00:49:35.240
and strength as you would as if you weren't restricted but that doesn't mean you can't get
00:49:39.600
stronger and that doesn't mean you can't build muscle you absolutely can especially if you're somebody
00:49:44.320
who's has a lot of body fat you can still build muscle when you're when you're dieting because you
00:49:49.160
have that even though you're in a calorie deficit you have so much adipose tissue that your body can
00:49:55.600
kind of use that as a cushion to spare protein for building muscle but as you get leaner and leaner
00:50:02.820
it'll become more and more difficult to do that but no i don't think they're necessarily
00:50:07.120
diametrically opposed i just think you have to be honest that okay if i'm going to diet and i want
00:50:11.560
to lose weight i'm probably not going to get as strong as i possibly could as if i was not dieting
00:50:17.460
but keep in mind in powerlifting you might actually get relatively stronger for your body weight because
00:50:24.580
we do have body weight correctional scores right so even though you may you may not get as strong as
00:50:30.540
you possibly could have absolutely your relative strength may actually be higher is that does that
00:50:35.980
make sense yeah that makes sense like that's like the wilkes score exactly well i actually just
00:50:39.780
recently changed it to something else but yes it was your wilkes score for about 50 years
00:50:43.380
right well lane this has been a great conversation is there some place people can go to learn more
00:50:47.980
about your work yeah biolane.com is my website all my stuff's on there you can there's we got a bunch
00:50:53.920
of free articles we also have a member site i think you said that you were on the site yeah i'm a member
00:50:58.820
of the site awesome so we have content but i think a lot of people they use it for the workout builder
00:51:04.180
which is basically we have about 30 plus training templates on there for anyone from beginner to
00:51:11.200
advanced for people who want to build muscle get stronger or and we also have female specific
00:51:18.120
routines although that's probably not my demographic on this podcast but um and that's for you can you can
00:51:25.240
get access to that workout builder for uh 12.99 a month and i always say well you know that's about what
00:51:30.820
you'd pay for the price of a cup of coffee uh at a starbucks every week if you just went once a week
00:51:36.060
so i think it's a pretty good deal to get you know customizable programming for that and then if you
00:51:41.920
guys want to check out my ebooks you can go to the biolane store.com and click on the accessories tab
00:51:47.040
or the direct links to each ebook i have the complete contest prep guide which is you know if you're
00:51:53.860
interested in doing a modeling show it'll show you everything to do from point a to point z
00:51:57.980
and that you can get that at contest prep book.com and then fat loss forever which we've been kind of
00:52:03.380
discussing i mean really a fat loss manifesto it's almost 400 pages and basically we'll show you
00:52:11.800
everything from from how to lose weight how to keep it off what are the behaviors you're going to need
00:52:18.720
what about the diet after the diet we really spent a lot of time on it we've already sold like 5 000
00:52:24.260
copies in just a few weeks and people are raving about it and if you want to get that the direct
00:52:29.220
link is how to lose fat forever.com and check those out then i'm on social media as biolane on pretty
00:52:35.680
much every platform fantastic well lane norton thanks for your time it's been a pleasure thank
00:52:39.700
you brett appreciate the time man my guest today was lane norton he's the author of the book fat loss
00:52:44.760
forever you can find out his website biolane.com also check out our website aom.is
00:52:49.940
slash biolane where you find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic
00:52:53.900
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast check out our website
00:53:09.440
artofmanliness.com where you can find thousands of well-researched thorough articles on just about
00:53:13.420
anything personal finances how to be a better dad fitness you name it we've got it if you haven't done
00:53:18.260
so already i'd appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on itunes or stitcher it helps
00:53:21.780
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00:53:25.540
or family member you think would get something out of it till next time this is brett mckay
00:53:29.400
encourage you to not only listen to the aom podcast but put what you've learned into action