How to Lose Weight, and Keep It Off Forever
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
193.03568
Summary
Dr. Lane Norton is a professional bodybuilder, powerlifter, and a PhD in Nutrition Sciences. In this episode, he shares research-backed advice on how to lose weight and keep it off forever, and why exercise plays a key role in helping you do so.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hey guys, it's Brett. We're taking a break from new episodes for the New Year holiday. We'll be
00:00:03.660
back Monday with a brand new episode. We already have lots of episodes planned for January. Can't
00:00:07.700
wait to share those with you until then. Here's a rebroadcast of episode number 475, How to Lose
00:00:12.520
Weight and Keep It Off Forever with Dr. Lane Norton. It's one of our most popular episodes
00:00:16.360
in 2019. Lane is a professional bodybuilder, powerlifter, and also a doctor of nutritional
00:00:20.960
science. And in this episode, he shares research back advice on how to lose weight. So if that's
00:00:25.100
a goal you have for this coming year in 2021, you're going to find this episode extremely
00:00:29.240
useful. See you Monday, and thanks for listening to the show. Have a great new year.
00:00:47.400
Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. If you're like
00:00:51.460
a lot of men listening to this podcast, you've likely made it a goal to lose some weight this
00:00:55.300
year. But if you're also like a lot of men listening to this podcast, you've made that
00:00:58.660
goal before. Maybe even have succeeded with it, but you've had to make it again because
00:01:02.180
you've gained all the weight back. My guest today argues that losing weight is actually
00:01:05.660
pretty easy. The real trick is keeping it off. His name is Lane Norton. He's a professional
00:01:09.720
bodybuilder, powerlifter, and a doctor of nutritional sciences. And today on the show, we discuss all
00:01:14.740
things fat loss. We begin our conversation discussing why losing weight is easier than keeping it off,
00:01:19.060
the mechanisms that kick into gear once we shed body fat that cause us to gain all of it
00:01:23.100
even more back, and why yo-yo dieting is so terrible for you. We then dig into whether there's
00:01:27.880
one diet that's the most effective in helping you lose fat, the tactics you need to use to
00:01:31.800
keep the weight off in the long run, and the real reason exercise plays a role in helping
00:01:35.580
you to do so, which isn't what you think it is. After the show's over, check out our show
00:01:39.380
notes at aom.is slash bio lane. All right, Lane Norton, welcome to the show.
00:01:54.240
Thanks, Brett. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
00:01:55.880
So you are a pro bodybuilder, powerlifter, but also have your PhD in nutritional sciences.
00:02:02.000
Give us a little background on that, like about not only your career as a pro bodybuilder and
00:02:06.120
powerlifter, but also when did you decide to go for the PhD in nutritional sciences?
00:02:10.800
Well, whenever I introduce myself, I always refer to myself as a meathead who likes science or a
00:02:18.000
science geek who likes lifting heavy things. So depending on my mood that day depends on which
00:02:23.500
one I swing towards. But I would say I've always had an interest in science. And when I was growing
00:02:30.420
up, I wanted to be a marine biologist. And I got picked on a lot in school. So actually like way
00:02:39.620
more than just like everybody went through, you know, getting teased or whatever that's normal.
00:02:44.220
But this was like a whole nother level, you know, in high school and middle school and elementary
00:02:49.680
school, there's like tiers of status. I would have been on that bottom rung of status. So I got pretty,
00:02:58.240
not physically, but like emotionally abused by my peers growing up. And I remembered one summer I was
00:03:04.860
like, I'm tired of doing this. I'm going to do something about it. So I started lifting weights.
00:03:10.780
And, you know, I, my, the idea was I would stop getting bullied and get more attention from girls
00:03:16.440
if I got bigger, cause I was a really skinny kid and lifting weights didn't do either of those two
00:03:20.940
things, but it did. I did fall in love with the process of lifting weights. And, you know, by the
00:03:28.320
time I was getting ready to go to college, I was really in love with bodybuilding and I was reading
00:03:32.940
like flex magazine. Like I remember I have like flex magazines in my backpack going to class. And when I was
00:03:39.780
getting bored in class, I just whip out flex magazine, start reading that. And so by the time
00:03:46.280
I was getting ready to go to college, I was kind of rethinking my idea of being marine biologist come
00:03:52.420
to find out it's very hard to get a job in that. And they pay like, which, you know, money's not
00:03:57.100
everything, but I would have liked to have made a good living, but I would also really like to have
00:04:02.220
done something I'm passionate about. I know, I knew I did not want to do what everybody else was doing.
00:04:06.920
And I came from a small, not a small town, but a modest sized town in the Midwest where
00:04:12.520
it might as well have been on an Island cause nobody left. Like you just grew up. If you went
00:04:18.860
to college, you went to university of Southern Indiana. I grew up in Evansville, Indiana. You
00:04:22.600
went to USI or you went to university of Evansville and that was it. Like if you got fancy, you went
00:04:28.020
to university of Louisville or you went to IU or Purdue or something like that, but you
00:04:33.720
didn't, you didn't leave the Midwest. That was just not something that happened that often. And I just
00:04:39.320
knew that if I didn't leave, I was going to end up like everybody else, just working a kind of, I
00:04:46.940
don't want to say average job or insult people who do that kind of thing, but just your typical nine to
00:04:51.400
five. And I didn't want that for my life. I wanted to do something different. So I decided to go to
00:04:57.320
Eckerd College and I had some really good professors who steered me down the right path. And I still
00:05:02.040
remember my general chemistry professor saying you should do biochemistry because if you still want
00:05:06.660
to do marine science in grad school, it'll be there for you. But if you decide you want to do
00:05:10.500
something different, biochemistry will really set you up for whatever you want to do in science.
00:05:15.300
And so I did that. I changed my major to biochemistry. At the same time, the summer after my first year
00:05:20.100
of college, I did my first bodybuilding show, won the teen division, won the novice division and was
00:05:24.680
completely hooked. And by the time I was a junior in college, I was really convinced that I wanted to make
00:05:31.660
a living in bodybuilding or something to do with bodybuilding. I didn't know how I was going to do
00:05:38.220
it because I didn't want to take steroids. I competed in the natural bodybuilding organization.
00:05:42.300
So I didn't want to do that. You know, no hate to anybody who does. I don't have any disrespect or
00:05:47.560
anything like that. It was more about, I just never felt called to do it. I never felt called to be Mr.
00:05:52.120
Olympia, but I love bodybuilding, but I didn't, I didn't want to take that path personally.
00:05:56.160
So I didn't know how I was going to make a living, but I got to my junior year and I'm like,
00:06:03.440
well, I don't know what I'm going to do with my life. I know I'm passionate about this thing.
00:06:06.980
I'm not sure how I'm going to make money from it. So how about going to more school?
00:06:11.140
I figured if I had a master's or a PhD, it'd probably help with whatever I wanted to do.
00:06:16.980
So I did exactly that. I applied to different PhD programs.
00:06:20.200
I interviewed at the university of Illinois and Penn state and Cornell. I got accepted
00:06:26.780
and I decided on Illinois because I really vibed with the advisor there, Dr. Don Lehman. And as it
00:06:37.060
turns out, that was probably one of the best decisions I ever made in my life was to go to
00:06:40.500
university of Illinois, which is a great school, really, really strong research and science-based
00:06:47.160
school. And especially for nutrition, they're, they're like top three every year. They're really
00:06:52.280
great nutrition program. And in particular, Dr. Lehman was a fantastic advisor. So he, his specialty
00:06:59.880
was protein metabolism, which doesn't take a difficult kind of stretch to see the connection
00:07:05.300
between bodybuilding and why I want to study protein. And he was always very encouraging of
00:07:09.980
that. He was never ashamed of the fact that I was a meathead, you know, he was very encouraging
00:07:14.380
of that, which I didn't get that vibe with a lot of different professors. A lot of different
00:07:18.600
professors almost seemed like they were ashamed if you were into lifting weights or bodybuilding,
00:07:22.880
but Lehman was never that way. And so I got into that during that time in grad school. I also won
00:07:28.640
my pro card and natural bodybuilding. By the time I graduated, I did my first series of pro shows,
00:07:34.000
my only series of pro shows so far, cause I kind of, I guess I'm like semi-retired now,
00:07:38.780
but won my first pro show and then placed top five and all the other ones. So pretty successful run
00:07:44.900
there. Then during that off season, before that, that, that series, I'd gotten into powerlifting
00:07:50.580
just kind of as a way to keep myself from getting bored in the off season, because if you're doing
00:07:54.000
natural bodybuilding, like you've got to take two, three year off seasons, like you just don't build
00:07:58.580
muscle that fast. That's why I see a lot of these kids out there or, or young guys who compete
00:08:03.400
every year. And you're really like, it's a really terrible idea because you're limiting your growth.
00:08:08.560
So I took a four year off season between when I won my pro card and when I, when I did my first
00:08:12.860
pro shows and it really helped me. But in that time it was, I was finding it hard to stay motivated
00:08:17.340
for training without having something to shoot for. So I decided to start doing some powerlifting meets
00:08:22.120
and it turns out I was pretty good at it. In fact, I'm probably better at that than I was at
00:08:26.460
bodybuilding. So, you know, got really into that one nationals twice, got a silver medal at worlds,
00:08:32.240
won the Arnold set up, well, what was then a squat world record in the IPF, the biggest
00:08:37.420
powerlifting organization in the world. I'm at 668 pounds and yeah, had a pretty good run there and
00:08:43.900
gone through some injuries and kind of rehabbing those right now and trying to come back and do it
00:08:48.420
all over again. And then, yeah, you had your PhD. Right. Yeah. So I finished my PhD in 2010,
00:08:54.840
you know, and during that time, like around circa 2005, I had been writing articles for
00:09:01.720
bodybuilding.com and people had sent me a lot. I get a lot of emails. I was probably getting 20,
00:09:06.760
30 emails a day with people with questions and I loved helping people. I loved it. And I, but I
00:09:12.360
realized, man, I'm spending a lot of time doing this. I'm in grad school now. I've got to get some
00:09:17.360
kind of, you know, compensation for my time. So I started doing online coaching and was one of the
00:09:24.040
first people to kind of do that. This is in 2005. This is before Instagram, you know, before,
00:09:28.720
before you could stick your ass in the camera and call yourself a coach, uh, I was doing it.
00:09:34.020
Right. So, um, got into that by the time I was graduating grad school, I was making a full-time
00:09:40.780
living from it. But I said, well, I don't see the reason to go get a normal job. Let's do this.
00:09:46.360
So I was doing online coaching full-time and yeah, I've gone through several different iterations of my
00:09:53.120
business, tried some different things. And now I still do some coaching, but it's mostly a lot of
00:09:58.360
writing and content production. So we, I have two eBooks that are out now that have been
00:10:03.120
successful beyond what I ever could have imagined and writing and writing another one and working on
00:10:08.620
some other projects. And yeah, it's been a, it's been a good run. It's been a good life.
00:10:13.760
It's awesome. Yeah. That's really cool. And I'd like to talk about one of those books you wrote,
00:10:17.480
Fat Loss Forever. But before we get into the details of that one, I'm curious when you started doing
00:10:22.160
your, you know, your biochemistry work and your PhD work, were you surprised? Like, did, I mean,
00:10:29.000
I read like muscle and fitness growing up too, and all this, and like, there's all this advice in
00:10:33.640
there and you're like, uh, is this really true? And there's like, I mean, even then there's all the
00:10:37.560
bro science and it's proliferative even more today. Like, did you immediately like start seeing
00:10:42.600
contradictions for stuff that you saw in the bodybuilding or powerlifting world? Or were
00:10:46.600
some of the things like validated that these guys were doing that had no basis in science,
00:10:51.440
but they got right just through trial and error? That's exactly why I went and did a PhD.
00:10:56.000
Cause I got tired of reading every magazine and having it say one thing and then another magazine
00:11:02.360
say another thing or the same magazine say one thing one month and another thing another month
00:11:06.720
or the same magazine saying one thing and in the same episode contradicting itself. So I was like,
00:11:14.100
well, I'm going to go get more education. That's not going to hurt me. And I'm going to figure that
00:11:17.760
out for myself. So yeah, that was, you know, the quest for, I guess there's a couple of things that
00:11:24.900
make a good scientist. One is you're always hungry to learn the quest for knowledge. And two,
00:11:32.060
you're inherently skeptical. You don't just accept things at face value. You question even the,
00:11:40.160
things that we hold to be true. And I think that's what makes a good scientist, somebody who just
00:11:45.920
won't accept something as fact without really digging into it. But also the saying, be open-minded,
00:11:52.400
but not so open-minded that your brain falls out, which I also see a lot of, you know, that's like
00:11:57.480
when you get to the, like there's skepticism and then there's whack job conspiracy theorist
00:12:03.600
nonsense that, yeah, I, which I kind of deal with on a daily basis now.
00:12:10.300
Oh, I bet. Yeah. Going to that point about, you know, being skeptical. I mean, one of the issues
00:12:14.140
that I found with like popular health writing is that they'll, they'll, they'll talk about the
00:12:18.800
studies, the research, and then they'll look at the conclusion and say, yeah, this study says X.
00:12:24.420
But then if you actually read the study, you realize, well, the sample size wasn't that big.
00:12:29.540
Yep. Um, it actually, they weren't really, you know, it wasn't conclusive, but the popular,
00:12:34.740
because, you know, these popular writers need to turn out content and get clicks. They just come
00:12:38.900
out like, well, this new study says coffee's terrible for you. But then you look at the
00:12:43.380
studies, well, it doesn't really say that. No, what it'll say is there's a component in coffee
00:12:47.960
that when they fed it to rats at a super high dose, it caused like carcinogenic effects. You know,
00:12:53.760
it wasn't actually coffee and it wasn't actually in humans. Yeah. That's,
00:12:56.640
there was a study done where they, um, the, the headline was that farts can help reduce the risk
00:13:03.680
or smelling something. Your partner's farts can help reduce the risk of breast cancer. That was,
00:13:08.660
that was the, that was the headline. No, what they did was they took short chain fatty acids,
00:13:13.840
volatile fatty acids that are some of the things that you smell when, when you fart. And they looked
00:13:19.380
at them at giving them an isolated in a high dose to rats and saw an effect on cancer. That is not
00:13:26.540
the same thing as smelling your partner's farts that you like the, the level of irresponsibility
00:13:34.920
by the media and reporting some of this stuff just to get a headline. I understand it to a certain
00:13:41.980
level because they have to, because it's so competitive. If you don't have big headlines,
00:13:46.920
I mean, it's like being on Instagram. Like I'm really proud of the fact that I've got,
00:13:51.020
you know, whatever, 240,000 followers on Instagram, because I'm not like, I'm not some dude that's
00:13:56.380
posting pictures of a shredded six pack all the time, standing in front of a Ferrari that he doesn't
00:14:00.400
own that he's leasing and, you know, with pit bulls or whatever and acting like I'm living some
00:14:06.660
lifestyle. I'm putting out educational content, you know, there's substance, but we're not a substance
00:14:11.000
based society. You know, people want that, that, that crap. So yeah, I think that the, it's, it's
00:14:19.480
difficult to parse out a lot of what's out there, but just listening to somebody and I'll tell people,
00:14:25.620
Hey, like, you know, don't take my word for it. Like, you know, I have my own biases. I try to be
00:14:30.900
honest about them and upfront about them, but everybody's biased one way or another. Like,
00:14:34.840
and that's okay. That's fine. It's the people who aren't willing to admit their biases. There's a,
00:14:39.420
there's a gal called, um, what's her name? Nina, Nina ends with a T starts with a T her last name,
00:14:46.080
but she's a, she's a low carb advocate, big time, low carb advocate. And all of her,
00:14:50.920
all of her, a lot of her criticisms of the research out there are funding based, right?
00:14:56.800
So she says, well, this study was funded by big corn or big, this or big, that you ever want to
00:15:01.800
make something sound scary. Just put big in front of it, apparently. And what she doesn't ever
00:15:06.800
disclose is the fact that she herself is funded by the meat industry, like, which is fine. That's
00:15:13.460
fine. There's nothing wrong with that. My research was funded by the dairy council and the egg nutrition
00:15:19.120
center board. That's fine. I have to disclose that, right? Like, so if she's going to criticize
00:15:25.420
all these other people, she needs to disclose what her biases are. So that's a big part of it. And,
00:15:31.360
and I think people get way too attached to ideals rather than trying to deconstruct their ego and
00:15:39.500
figure out what stuff actually says. Like, I'll tell people like, I'm not, if you're reading my
00:15:44.080
books, I'm not selling any one particular diet. I'm not, I'm selling information and I'm trying to
00:15:49.380
put it out there kind of as it is. Well, let's talk about a topic. Speaking of lots of different
00:15:56.420
competing things on Instagram is weight loss because there's so many competing ideas out there
00:16:01.320
now and it's gotten worse, I think. So you, you wrote a book, Fat Loss Forever. Yeah. It's a new
00:16:07.860
year. I think a lot of men who are listening to the show, a lot of them probably have goals to lose
00:16:11.680
some weight, but I love how you, in the book you talk about, you make this important point that
00:16:16.200
it's actually really easy to lose weight. Yeah. The problem that people have, because people do it
00:16:23.020
all the time, the problem people have is that they can't keep it off. So what's going, why,
00:16:27.180
why is it so hard to keep weight off after you lose that 10, 15 pounds? There's a multitude of
00:16:33.160
reasons. There's, there's physiological, there's sociological and there's psychological reasons.
00:16:39.200
Physiologically, if you think about what weight loss is, so we have this kind of, let's call it a
00:16:46.820
set point of body fat that your body kind of likes to stay at. It's where you've kind of settled
00:16:52.160
that during your life. And if you've been, usually it's your body defends against you getting too much
00:16:59.380
body fat. Well, the reason people get obese is they can eat past that. And we kind of, I don't
00:17:05.040
want to get way too far down the rabbit hole, but I guess there's, if you talk about losing weight,
00:17:11.860
there's very tight regulations. What will happen is you get hungrier when you start to lose weight,
00:17:16.700
you, your, your, your metabolic rate slows down all of these, uh, your, your hormones like leptin
00:17:23.600
drop your, your, you actually move less whether you believe it or not. Um, like just like little
00:17:29.760
fidgets throughout the day, but it can end up adding up to like several hundred calories less
00:17:35.180
per day that you're actually expending. So all these things start working to drive you back towards
00:17:40.920
energy balance, meaning you're, you're, you're not losing weight. Your calories in is equaling
00:17:45.940
calories out. So it's trying to drive you back towards that to protect you because you have,
00:17:52.520
if we're, if we have this kind of regulation on body weight, the set point that the body likes to
00:17:58.320
be at, that means that it's trying to keep you from getting too big or losing too much weight.
00:18:04.200
Right. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. So, and, and, you know, on the other end,
00:18:09.080
if you start to overeat, you'll have your metabolic rate goes up, your hunger goes down,
00:18:13.900
all these sorts of things. So, but on each end, there's two different, we always need to think
00:18:21.480
about like, what is, what is the evolutionary reason for this? Right. Cause everything happens
00:18:27.260
for a reason. All the systems in our body came about because of a reason you're dealing with two
00:18:32.460
different threats to your survival. Because keep in mind, the goal of you, your existence,
00:18:38.300
in terms of evolution is for you to stay alive long enough to pass on your genetic material.
00:18:43.960
That's, that's it. That's the goal. Okay. Now on one end, you have starvation, right? If you don't
00:18:51.800
eat enough, you can starve. Okay. On the other end, if you get too heavy, there, there's an increased
00:18:58.960
risk of predation, right? You can't, you can't escape a predator very well. Or the other one is you may not
00:19:05.920
be agile enough to actually catch food, but that kind of would be self-limiting because you would
00:19:11.240
be, as you weren't able to eat, you would end up losing weight, becoming more agile, able to catch
00:19:16.820
food. Well, over the last several thousand years, the risk of predation is dropped to basically zero
00:19:25.660
for most of the world. You know what I mean? That just doesn't exist. Whereas the risk of starvation,
00:19:32.140
we may not think about Western society, but even up until like even a hundred years ago in the U S,
00:19:38.620
like, you know, famine was a real problem. So not so much anymore. So it's still a real problem. So
00:19:44.540
that is still hardwired into our DNA. At least this is the hypothesis that some of these researchers,
00:19:49.520
this guy that had this particular hypothesis, his name is Speakman. So your body has much more
00:19:56.380
tightly regulated controls on you losing weight than it does on you gaining weight.
00:20:02.260
So, plus we have a very obesogenic environment. Like if you're talking about now non-processed foods,
00:20:10.700
right now, I don't want people to get really excited about this because there's nothing
00:20:15.080
inherently fattening about a processed food. There's not, it's not a hundred calories of a
00:20:21.300
processed food is not more fattening than a hundred calories of an unprocessed food per se,
00:20:26.720
but processed food takes less energy to digest. So I guess you could argue that it is a little bit
00:20:33.220
different, but more than that, it's just very highly palatable. Have you ever tried to eat
00:20:37.900
like 200 calories from a plain baked potato, like plain nothing on it?
00:20:43.760
It's hard. It's really hard. Have you ever tried to eat 200 calories from Snickers bar?
00:20:49.880
Yeah, exactly. So we, we have what's called an obesogenic environment where we have free access
00:20:57.860
to extremely hyper palatable, high calorie foods, and we don't move as much as we used to.
00:21:04.720
So we can very easily eat past that set point, but it's hard to get under the set point because
00:21:12.160
that's still a hardwired into our DNA. This is the body treats dieting like controlled starvation.
00:21:19.440
So your metabolic rate drops, your hunger goes up, these hormonal, these hormonal signals to your
00:21:26.100
brain. They really, there was an interesting study back in the 1940s. They took conscientious objectors
00:21:33.940
to World War II and basically starved them for six months and then looked at the physiological changes.
00:21:40.680
Well, just to show you how powerful dieting is on motivation to not be dieting, there was originally
00:21:47.360
15 subjects in the study. It ended with 12 because one of them cut his thumb off in order to get out of
00:21:53.280
the study. You can believe that. And then the other two literally stormed and assaulted the kitchen for
00:21:58.940
food. And of the people who completed the study, half of them went on to work in the food industry or
00:22:04.760
become professional chefs. So, um, but if you've ever dieted, like some people like they diet and
00:22:11.440
they end up watching the food, food network all the time, it becomes an all encompassing
00:22:15.140
like thing for your brain. So, but the real, the major problem is that people look at dieting and
00:22:22.680
weight loss as something with a set start and end date. They go, well, I'm, I'm doing, I want to lose 20
00:22:28.720
pounds. So what do they do? They lose the 20 pounds and then they go right back to doing the same that
00:22:34.580
they were doing before they lost the 20 pounds. Well, what do you think is going to happen when you do
00:22:39.720
that? Whatever behaviors you had to incorporate in order to lose the weight, you will need to incorporate
00:22:46.080
those same behaviors to keep the weight off. That's why I say we don't really have a knowledge problem
00:22:51.660
because any diet will work. I mean, low carb, low fat, intermittent fasting, whatever, anything that allows you
00:22:58.560
to create a calorie deficit will work. This, we shouldn't even spending time arguing about this.
00:23:04.520
It's stupid. Like maybe like higher protein diets tend to work a little bit better because they're
00:23:10.420
more satiating and you spare lean body mass and they, they have a little bit more of a energy
00:23:15.460
expenditure. That's great. But if somebody can't stick to a high protein diet or they can't see
00:23:22.440
themselves doing that for the rest of their life, then it's not going to work for them, right?
00:23:25.760
Any diet can work even like a super high carb, super low fat, low protein, as long as they're
00:23:32.380
in a calorie deficit will work for weight loss. It's been shown in many studies. And before I know
00:23:38.380
some of the listeners are probably saying, well, what about insulin sensitivity? 95 to 99% of the
00:23:45.020
health benefits of dieting are strictly due to weight loss and have nothing to do with the type of diet
00:23:51.720
you're on. That, that was done. There was two meta-analyses done on this and they looked at
00:23:56.900
equating calories and looking at different ratios of carbohydrates and fats and their effects on
00:24:03.600
blood markers of health and found that basically weight loss explained 95 to 99% of it. So if that's
00:24:11.000
the case, if it's weight loss that makes the biggest difference for health, then the best diet is probably
00:24:16.320
the one you can stick to and see yourself doing for life because I'm going to go on keto. That's
00:24:22.440
great, bro. If you're never going to eat carbs again in your life, then that can work for you.
00:24:26.580
But if you can't see yourself doing that six months or 12 months from now, you got to rethink your plan
00:24:30.660
because it's going to fail. It's, it's behaviors that make the difference. It's the same reason like
00:24:35.680
that people are broke. It's the exact same reason people are broke. How do you not be broke?
00:24:41.420
Earn more money than you spend. And there are people who make $30,000 a year who can, who can
00:24:48.220
save money. It's happened. I've done it. I've made $30,000 a year before and saved money. It's hard.
00:24:55.580
It sucks, but it can be done. There's also people who make a million dollars a year and don't save money.
00:25:02.760
Right? So is it a knowledge problem? Because hopefully everyone knows that in order to save money,
00:25:09.500
you need to make more than you spend. And we have that knowledge, that knowledge is there,
00:25:15.380
but what do people get caught up in instead of focusing on, uh, the things that actually,
00:25:21.280
um, help with wealth accrual people focus on, Oh, uh, they get into this pyramid schemes and they,
00:25:28.800
they, Oh, this one neat trick. It's the same. You see in the fitness industry for fat loss,
00:25:32.740
you know, Oh, these three neat tricks to burn belly fat. No, that's crap. Like if you want to
00:25:39.200
lose fat and you want to keep it off, it's going to be really, really hard because only 5% of people
00:25:43.640
are able to do it. That's the statistics. Right. Yeah. Like 95% of people. Yeah.
00:25:48.680
Five percent, only 5% are able to keep it off. We're going to take a quick break for your word
00:25:52.260
from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So let's kind of recap what you said. There's a lot
00:25:58.680
to unpack there and I want to go some, some different directions with some of the stuff you were
00:26:01.700
talking about. So the reason why body fat is hard to lose, cause your body is basically saying
00:26:06.860
we're now in starvation mode, fat loss, we're losing body fat, but it's like, I don't want to
00:26:12.040
lose that body fat because we need that for, to keep ourselves going in case the starvation goes
00:26:18.120
even further. So it just gets harder and harder. That's your body's, you gotta always think about
00:26:23.240
your body fat, your body's, uh, adipose stores as your energy reserve. Cause that's exactly what it is.
00:26:29.400
Right. So your body's like, no, leave this alone. This is ours. You're taking that away. We're not
00:26:33.600
going to let you do that. But also besides, you know, when you stop the diet, you gain the weight
00:26:38.340
back, but also there's a tendency to gain more body fat or more weight than you were before you
00:26:42.820
started the diet. Yeah. That's a phenomenon called body fat overshooting. And it really happens a lot
00:26:47.600
in people who do what we call weight cycle or yo-yo diet. And, um, really interesting study. We
00:26:53.160
included this in the book. It was in rats. So some people will get their, their hands up in the air,
00:26:58.840
but rats actually pretty metabolically similar to a human now. And there is some human data to
00:27:05.100
support this as well. But what they did was they took them through two different diet cycles. So they
00:27:09.560
had them diet down to a, they had them kind of eat up to a certain weight and then they died them down
00:27:14.940
and they observed what rate it took for them to reach that weight to sort of diet down to that
00:27:23.080
weight. Then they had them relapse to the previous weight. They just gave them food and let them say,
00:27:28.120
Hey, go, go for it. Go crazy. Eat whatever you want. Right. They regained the weight in half the
00:27:35.080
time that it took for them to take it off. Then once they reached their, their previous high weight,
00:27:40.440
they had them diet back down again to the weight that they achieved previously. Right. They lost
00:27:47.180
weight twice as slow the second time. Right. Right. And that's what the, at the same calorie level.
00:27:53.840
Right. That's pretty nuts. Then they regained it when they let them regain it again. They regained
00:27:59.720
it three times as fast. Wow. Every time they went through one of these diet cycles, their metabolism
00:28:05.300
got slower and they got more efficient at putting on body fat. And every time you diet,
00:28:10.440
you activate your body's self-defense system. Okay. And I, again, this is one of the things I talk
00:28:15.620
about in the book, your body has a self-defense system in place to keep you from starving yourself.
00:28:21.120
And basically what it does is I, I, I kind of, this isn't in the scientific literature. This is
00:28:26.660
just kind of my description. I call it a three-pronged attack. You have a metabolic adaptation,
00:28:32.380
which when you start dieting or when you're dieting, your body slows your metabolic rate by,
00:28:37.440
by the way, slows it disproportionately more than you would predict by the amount of weight you lose.
00:28:43.160
Because if you lose weight, you have less metabolically active tissue, you know, your
00:28:47.220
metabolism is going to slow down some anyway, but you, your metabolism slows about 15 to 20%
00:28:53.120
more than you would predict from just from the weight loss. Then while you're dieting,
00:29:01.320
your body is already ramping up systems that will increase your ability to store body fat.
00:29:09.380
Okay. Why would it do that? Well, let's think about from an evolutionary perspective,
00:29:14.240
if you had gone through a long famine and then all of a sudden, boom, you find a, I mean,
00:29:18.940
let's just do the stereotype. You find a big old woolly mammoth and it's dead and you can eat it.
00:29:23.380
Right. And you can just kind of gorge yourself. Well, you couldn't really keep meat for very long
00:29:27.860
back in the day. Right. And you couldn't keep a lot of foods for very long. So they're going to
00:29:32.620
get as much out of it as they can. Well, you would not want to be wasteful with that energy.
00:29:37.140
You would want to capture as much of it as possible. You'd want to be very efficient at
00:29:41.500
storing that energy and not wasting it. So that's why the body's going to ramp up those systems that
00:29:46.780
help you store fat. Because if you're in a deficit, if you're in an energy energy, if there's a body
00:29:54.680
since it's an energy gap, it is going to make it easier for you to store fat. Because if you come
00:30:01.280
across the food stores, your body's going to want to be able to capture it. Does that make sense?
00:30:04.780
That makes perfect sense. Yeah. Yeah. So, and then the third phase is they've actually observed in
00:30:10.860
people who diet or people who diet pretty aggressively, if they then regain the weight
00:30:17.200
really, really quickly, there actually is some evidence that they may actually be able
00:30:23.120
to manufacture new fat cells. So we usually, if you, if you diet or you lose, if you lose or gain
00:30:30.980
weight, usually what happens is your fat cells just shrink or expand. Okay. But there, you can eat
00:30:39.520
past that. There is a maximum threshold for your adipocytes. It's about a hundred micrometers,
00:30:45.280
I think. And so once they get across that bigger than that, we can have what's called pre-adipocyte
00:30:50.840
differentiation. And these pre-adipocytes are like these little tiny nascent inactive potential fat
00:30:58.540
cells that are in the adipose tissue that can differentiate to fully form fat cells if your
00:31:05.580
body needs them. So that's how people can get really, like really obese because they can start
00:31:10.540
triggering this fat cell differentiation. But there seems to be, even if you don't approach that,
00:31:16.820
that maximum size, if you've been in a deficit and then you, you just kind of start massively
00:31:23.860
overeating after that, like put a lot of weight really quickly, you're, they've actually, they
00:31:29.320
actually showed in rats that they could increase their, their fat cell number by 50%, which is a real
00:31:34.000
problem because now your set point's going to change because since you have more fat cells,
00:31:38.620
the size of each individual cell is now smaller. So it would still, your theoretically, your body
00:31:45.940
would still sense a deficit, even if you'd gotten back up to your original body fat. And that's why
00:31:51.500
I think a lot of people, when they weight cycle, they end up at a higher body fat and then have
00:31:57.240
trouble losing body fat from that level of body fat, because that's now their set point because
00:32:01.760
they have more fat cells. That's my theory anyway. And yeah, it's pretty scary. Actually,
00:32:07.040
if you read my, if you read Fat Loss Forever, the chapters one and chapters three will scare the
00:32:11.760
crap out of you. No, yeah, they did. So it makes it sound like, man, losing weight is impossible,
00:32:16.320
but it's not. It's not. We'll talk about what you can do to make it sustainable. But you know,
00:32:20.660
you do, you mentioned a lot of the sort of diets that are really popular with people,
00:32:24.600
particularly online. There's the low carb diet, keto, there's now the carnivore diet that I'm
00:32:29.640
seeing a lot about. And what's between all these different diets, they all claim that there's
00:32:34.140
something special about these specific diets that allow people to lose weight, right? By not eating
00:32:39.160
carbs, you reduce the amount of insulin pumping through your system. So like, you know, insulin
00:32:43.440
can't shuttle glucose into fat cells or whatever. But I mean, it sounds like you're saying like,
00:32:48.100
no, it's not really that. It's just that these diets allow you to eat fewer calories and that's why
00:32:52.900
you lose weight. Is that what's going on? That's exactly right. So for example,
00:32:57.360
let's take the carnivore diet, for example, it's really hard to overeat on meat. Like it's really
00:33:05.080
hard to overeat. You can do it. You can do it, especially if you're eating really fatty meat.
00:33:09.440
But for the most part, meat's tough to overeat on. If you look at something like, you know,
00:33:14.740
I was talking about this the other day, everybody's got something that kind of,
00:33:17.860
I call it tripping their algorithm, right? So people like with keto, I'll hear this a lot. People say,
00:33:24.120
man, I tried everything out there and keto, I just, I wasn't hungry on it. And it's just easy
00:33:28.980
for me. Or they'll say that about intermittent fasting. For me, it was flexible dieting. You know,
00:33:33.940
like flexible dieting where I'm just, I have my protein, carbon, fat targets, and I hit those,
00:33:38.920
but I can eat whatever I want to hit those. That tripped my algorithm because that felt not
00:33:43.800
restrictive to me. I didn't mind. For some people, they hate tracking. For me, it doesn't bother me
00:33:48.200
at all. If I know I can have what I want, if I track, but all these can work. I mean, like,
00:33:52.900
for example, just a great example I was talking about was there was a professor at the University
00:33:56.440
of Kansas State named Dr. Mark Halb. I actually interviewed him a while back when I had a podcast.
00:34:01.640
And he did, as an effort to prove that calories matter and matter more than anything, he did what
00:34:08.460
was called the Twinkie diet. So he literally ate all junk food. Now he only ate 1800 calories a day,
00:34:14.740
but it was all from junk food. And, but he also took a protein shake and a fiber supplement just
00:34:21.600
to make sure he was getting all that stuff. And he lost like 30 pounds. And now what's funny is
00:34:28.500
people say, well, yeah, well, what about his health though? Actually, they, they, he kept track of all
00:34:33.180
his blood markers and every single blood marker improved like drastically. That's because when fat
00:34:40.180
cells expand, they secrete all kinds of hormones that can disrupt metabolism and decrease insulin
00:34:50.400
sensitivity. When you lose weight, fat cells shrink, they become extremely insulin sensitive and they
00:34:57.020
stop secreting or they, they reduce their secretion of these hormones. So, or, and they increase
00:35:02.660
secretion of things like adiponectin, which increases insulin sensitivity. So yeah, just losing the
00:35:09.320
weight is the biggest part of it. Now I'm not suggesting that somebody, if you talk to Mark,
00:35:14.960
he said he actually didn't really care for the diet because even though it was junk food, like
00:35:18.920
1800 calories of junk food doesn't go very far. You know, that's like seven Snickers bars.
00:35:25.880
You can over, you can eat seven Snickers bars pretty easily throughout the course of a day and not feel
00:35:30.360
that satisfied. So yeah, he didn't like it because he seems like, you know, I'd rather had a big
00:35:35.540
salad or something like that. So I could have felt, you know, fuller. So I think the point is that,
00:35:42.000
you know, anything can work. Keto can work. Intermittent fasting can work. Any diet can work.
00:35:48.560
You can, you can look at any diet and they can find testimonials of people who have lost weight.
00:35:52.800
So therefore any diet can work if it creates a caloric deficit. The question then is which diets
00:36:00.280
lend themselves to being sustainable so that people can continue them and continue to keep the weight
00:36:06.420
off. You know, for some people, keto works for them and they feel satisfied. They do not feel
00:36:11.880
like they need to go out and, and, and eat junk food or anything like that. It works for them.
00:36:17.200
It doesn't work for everybody. I know people who put on 30 pounds during keto because they overate
00:36:20.800
butter and bacon, you know? So I think if somebody, you know, I did a debate on Mark Bell's podcast with
00:36:29.220
Sean Baker, who's the biggest proponent of the carnivore diet. And, um, you know, I said,
00:36:35.400
I don't think the carnivore diet is the healthiest thing you can do. I mean, you know,
00:36:40.540
saturated fat isn't the great evil we thought it was, but it certainly doesn't have a protective
00:36:44.080
effect on heart disease like polyunsaturated fat does. And you're also like, if you're only eating
00:36:49.120
meat, you're, you're like, you're not eating fiber, which is a big problem. And actually Sean admitted
00:36:55.460
that you probably should be eating vegetables. He just doesn't. But, um, I did say, Hey,
00:37:03.440
you know, if somebody told me, if somebody was obese and they told me this is the only diet
00:37:07.800
that works for me, like everything else, I feel like I just can't stick to it. But this
00:37:11.960
meat only diet I can stick to. Chris Bell says that Mark Bell's brother, Chris Bell says that
00:37:15.680
he's lost like, I want to say like 40 pounds on the carnivore diet and his blood markers have
00:37:20.880
improved because he's lost weight. So if somebody says, Hey, this is the only thing I can do and keep
00:37:24.440
the weight off, then that's probably the best diet for you to be honest. So yeah, I think we need to
00:37:29.520
start, stop looking at like this debate over which diet is best because it's going to be for the
00:37:35.360
individual. And you said you, you've read the book. So you know that I don't advocate for any one diet.
00:37:41.320
I spend a whole chapter debunking claims from fad diets, but I don't suggest any one diet. I just
00:37:49.680
kind of say, Hey, here's different diets. People will try. I mean, you should try some,
00:37:54.760
but here's, here are the series of behaviors you're going to have to have in order to lose weight and
00:38:00.200
keep it off. And those are self-monitoring, cognitive restraint, exercise. Exercise is a huge
00:38:06.640
one. People, people who generally, people who lose weight and keep it off, they exercise. If you're
00:38:12.200
not exercising most, the vast majority of people don't keep that weight off. And also they don't snack,
00:38:17.420
like they really don't snack very much. And they usually weigh themselves daily and they form,
00:38:23.960
they do some form of cognitive restraint. For example, whether it's calorie tracking,
00:38:28.800
macro tracking, they're not eating carbs, time restricted eating. You're going to have to do
00:38:34.940
some sort of restriction. If you want to lose weight and keep it off, like there's going to be
00:38:38.660
a restriction on your lifestyle, but you can pick the restriction you want. So for me, the restriction
00:38:43.380
on my lifestyle is I have to track my intake, but I'm not restricted from any foods I want to eat
00:38:49.140
because I just, I practice flexible dieting. If you don't want to track your food intake, well,
00:38:54.600
maybe you could do something like keto and maybe that will work for you or time restricted eating,
00:38:59.340
intermittent fasting, carnivore, whatever you want to call it. For me, flexible dieting works best,
00:39:05.180
but I'm not arrogant enough to think that it's going to work best for everybody.
00:39:07.820
So I think we really need to focus on giving people choices and focus on behaviors rather than
00:39:15.660
bickering over which diet is better than another diet.
00:39:21.240
So that's, that's why people who get into nutrition now are like, they would have been
00:39:30.880
It's just ridiculous how entrenched people get in their beliefs. Like I have the thing about being
00:39:39.320
a scientist and like publishing literature is you have had yourself absolutely crushed your ideas,
00:39:49.200
crushed your theories, crushed so many times that if you're doing it right, you just don't get that
00:39:57.940
married to any one idea. You don't because you know that you could be wrong. Like I'd like to think
00:40:04.620
I get it right more than I get it wrong, but that's why I'm not selling any one particular diet in the
00:40:09.780
book because I can't very well say, well, Hey, the keto diet doesn't work when there's thousands of
00:40:15.180
people who are losing weight on keto. So how can I say that? Right. So I think that, that people,
00:40:22.060
they just want to feel like what they're doing is better than everybody else. And you know,
00:40:26.020
this is the vegans, keto warriors, carnivore, you know, if it works for you, fine, just don't tell
00:40:33.460
me it's magic. That's the only thing I tell people. You know, I, I actually posted a study a while back
00:40:38.700
that basically showed that low carb diets did not cause more fat loss than high carb, low fat diets
00:40:47.660
when calories and protein were equated. And I had an interesting response on Twitter. So I posted that
00:40:54.080
and somebody said, well, that's not true. I lost 50 pounds on the ketogenic diet.
00:40:58.880
So this is an example of what I say and what a zealot hears are two different things.
00:41:04.620
So I said, it was not better. What that person heard was he's insulting my religion and said,
00:41:10.680
I lost 50 pounds on this. And I said, well, I'm sure you did. It's just not magic.
00:41:15.260
Right. Yeah. We, we published an article like, uh, do carbs make you fat? And we highlighted that
00:41:18.700
research is basically it's just, it's calories. It's not the carbs, it's calories. And the same,
00:41:23.380
same response. People are like, well, I lost weight on keto. I'm saying, well, yeah,
00:41:26.380
you could lose weight on that. I'm not saying you can't just saying there's nothing special about
00:41:30.860
it except you're eating fewer calories. Well, here's another interesting. So, okay. Losing weight
00:41:35.240
to be sustainable, pick whatever thing works for you in the long run. You're going to have to exercise
00:41:39.920
some sort of a constraint. You need to exercise actually physical exercise that will increase
00:41:44.700
lean muscle mass, which also helps increase your metabolism.
00:41:48.620
Well, actually, you know what? The, the, the research on that is really underwhelming.
00:41:52.940
Okay. For, for like the, the amount of increase, cause muscle mass is actually way less metabolically
00:41:59.720
active than things like liver or intestine, like those lean muscles. So the question is,
00:42:06.520
why would we exercise? Right? Because lean body mass doesn't, the exercise itself seems to actually be
00:42:12.480
the interesting thing about your body's so good at self-regulating. So if you exercise more,
00:42:18.760
what tends to happen is your body, you just move less throughout the rest of the day,
00:42:21.980
right? Like you don't realize it, but your body just actually like you do less fidgeting and you
00:42:26.400
move less. So your body's conserving energy because it knows you're exercising, right? So you're not
00:42:31.700
getting as big of a calorie burn as you might think. Then like if actually just an example of that,
00:42:37.760
when I was prepping for my, my pro shows and bodybuilding, you can, like I have, I had a DVD out the time.
00:42:42.620
I, I, I've watched it the years later. I talk slower and I even blink slower. I'm not kidding
00:42:50.000
you. Like, and I talk way less. I'm a very talkative person. I'm a very extroverted person,
00:42:55.520
but like I was just like my whole personality changed when I dieted because my body was so
00:43:01.980
hell bent on conserving energy. So, so why exercise then? Why is it so associated with,
00:43:08.320
with keeping weight off? Cause it doesn't really add to your total daily calorie burn.
00:43:12.040
The lean muscle you add, sure. You burn a few more calories, but it's not super significant.
00:43:17.460
The biggest reason that exercise helps is one. Well, two reasons. I think the major one is that
00:43:26.860
it sensitizes you to satiety signals. Okay. They did a study in the 1950s looking at Bengali workers
00:43:34.320
and they looked at sedentary people, people with a lightly active job, a moderately active job and a
00:43:39.640
heavy labor job. And what they found was from the lightly active to heavily active jobs, people pretty
00:43:45.940
much match their, match their intake. So without even trying, they just ate more calories, right? And
00:43:51.520
they remained in calorie balance. What they found was the sedentary people actually ate more than every
00:43:57.420
other group except for the heavy labor jobs. So when you don't exercise, you have much lower
00:44:05.320
sensitivity to the satiety signals in your brain. So you're, it's easy for you to overeat. Whereas
00:44:12.280
when you exercise, you get more sensitive to those satiety signals, pretty cool stuff.
00:44:17.920
That is really interesting. That's very, very interesting.
00:44:19.960
And then the other thing is exercise increases, uh, oxidation, fat oxidation in fat cells. It increases
00:44:25.880
fat, fat metabolism turnover, which seems to have a benefit for limiting fat regain.
00:44:31.580
Gotcha. Okay. So that all makes sense. But here's another thing you talk about in the book. And I think
00:44:36.100
a lot of people have problems with is whenever they do decide to start losing weight, they'll lose weight
00:44:42.120
really fast. That's probably not a good thing to do, correct?
00:44:47.040
Well, so this is where I gotta, I gotta give the whole story. The research shows that people who lose
00:44:53.560
more weight initially tend to keep more, tend to, tend to be the ones to keep it off.
00:44:59.260
However, it has to be with the caveat that, so, so they found that people who maintain weight loss,
00:45:05.640
they usually lost a good amount of weight at the beginning. That's, I think losing a good amount
00:45:10.620
of weight at the beginning is okay because it helps you with motivation. But what you're not seeing,
00:45:15.320
that statistic's a little bit deceiving because they're not asking the 95% who failed,
00:45:19.740
right? Like how much did they lose initially? So there'd be a lot of people in that, in that sample
00:45:25.160
size of the 95% who failed to keep it off, who also lost weight really quickly at the beginning
00:45:29.880
and didn't sustain it. So I think it's okay to lose some weight quickly at the beginning,
00:45:34.620
so long as it's something that is still sustainable for you. But if you're doing something like 800 calories
00:45:41.840
a day, you know, how long can you keep that up for? Not probably not very long. Now I will say there
00:45:48.640
was a case study of a guy who did not eat for a year. Did you hear about this?
00:45:53.580
Yeah. So he was very obese. He didn't eat for a year and he lost, I think it was like something
00:45:58.220
like 150 pounds in a year. But obviously like that, that can't keep going. And I would like to
00:46:04.220
see where he's at today because the metabolic adaptation to that would have been enormous.
00:46:09.340
But it also goes to show that that, you know, fat is your body's energy reserve. So, you know,
00:46:14.980
I think that whenever you're looking at any plan, it's okay to lose weight quickly at
00:46:20.520
the onset, as long as whatever you're doing at the onset, you can see yourself continuing
00:46:26.260
Gotcha. And then like, I mean, as you lose weight, I imagine you have to make adjustments.
00:46:31.160
Like, so if you want to lose more weight, do you have to like reduce calories more?
00:46:34.200
For example, say like you, you lose, you know, the 50 pounds, right? And then like what you've
00:46:38.420
been eating, say it's like 20, 2000 calories a day, whatever. Like, is that, is that, say
00:46:45.680
you're doing that at a point you stop losing weight. Are you going to have to drop calories
00:46:49.100
a bit more to keep, to keep the weight loss going?
00:46:52.520
Right. So your, your stalls are inevitable during weight loss. Anybody who's lost weight
00:46:56.840
for a long period of time, I'm assuming you've probably done this before where you went on
00:47:01.240
a diet and after whatever, four, six, eight, 10 weeks, you stopped losing weight, right?
00:47:06.280
Yeah. Right. So that is your body's metabolic rate slowing down to the point where eventually
00:47:12.280
it matches your intake, right? So that's the, that's your, that's the first prong of the
00:47:16.280
body's self-defense system. So what has happened is you have come back to energy balance. So this
00:47:22.920
is also why people get confused about a calorie deficit. They'll say, well, I was eating in a
00:47:26.260
calorie deficit. I didn't lose weight. Well, no, you were eating in what might be predicted
00:47:30.820
to be a calorie deficit, or maybe it was a calorie deficit for a little while, but it isn't
00:47:34.420
now. See, people get confused because they think calories in and calories out are like
00:47:38.540
two independent variables, but they aren't, they're tied together because calories in
00:47:42.900
affects calories out. So what has to happen is when you hit one of these plateaus, you
00:47:48.720
either, you need to recreate that deficit, whether it's with consuming less calories, increasing
00:47:57.180
Gotcha. So this is going to, it's a process. And you also talk about it, you know, one, one
00:48:00.300
option too, as if you're trying to lose a lot of weight, like take breaks every now and
00:48:04.120
then just for the psychological rest. So you say you lose 20 pounds. All right, we'll
00:48:09.040
just kind of maintenance that for a month and then go at it again.
00:48:11.860
Yeah, absolutely. I think, I think the grind of long periods of dieting can just like wear
00:48:17.440
you down. So like giving yourself like saying, okay, I'm going to lose 20. Like, let's say
00:48:21.940
somebody had a hundred pounds to lose saying I'm going to lose 20. And then I'm gonna give
00:48:26.140
myself a month where I'm just eating at maintenance and just trying to maintain that weight
00:48:29.340
loss. And that can be helpful for two reasons. One, it's a mental break. And two, whenever
00:48:35.260
you go on that maintenance phase, it will help you maintain your metabolic rate a little
00:48:39.920
bit better. So there's actually research on diet breaks that shows that if you use a diet
00:48:46.080
break where you're eating at maintenance for a period of like a week or two, it can actually
00:48:50.980
prevent metabolic slowing a little bit better than if you're just straight dieting. So there's
00:48:57.140
a double effect. You get the benefit of you can maintain your metabolic rate a little
00:49:01.720
bit better and you have a mental break from the diet. So I think that's actually a really
00:49:06.620
good way to construct things for people who are trying to lose lots of weight. Or even
00:49:11.340
with my regular clients, I'll do like a lot of times I'll do two weeks dieting and then
00:49:15.680
one week break or three weeks dieting, one week break or three weeks dieting, two week
00:49:19.280
break, you know, those sorts of things or four weeks dieting, two week break. So I'll use
00:49:23.700
different iterations of that in order to kind of help keep things going.
00:49:28.120
Right. It's like a deload week with barbell training.
00:49:32.540
Let's say you want to, you know, you want to get into running, but you're also trying
00:49:35.520
to lose weight. Or let's say you want to get into barbell, you know, power lifting or
00:49:38.440
whatever. It's like increasing performance in those, you know, athletic domains and losing
00:49:43.640
weight. Are those like diametrically opposed goals? Like these should go for one or the
00:49:49.160
You can do both at the same time. I think the thing to keep in mind, especially like running,
00:49:53.280
because you're, as you get lower weight, you're going to be more efficient. I think the thing
00:49:57.820
to keep in mind is that if you're, if you're doing something like power lifting or bodybuilding
00:50:04.280
or something like that, you're not going to build as much muscle and strength as you
00:50:08.860
would as if you weren't restricted. But that doesn't mean you can't get stronger. And that
00:50:13.200
doesn't mean you can't build muscle. You absolutely can. Especially if you're somebody who has a lot
00:50:17.860
of body fat, you can still build muscle when you're, when you're dieting, because you have
00:50:22.060
that, even though you're in a calorie deficit, you have so much adipose tissue that your body
00:50:28.020
can kind of use that as a cushion to spare protein for building muscle. But as you get
00:50:34.800
leaner and leaner, it'll become more and more difficult to do that. But no, I don't think
00:50:39.360
they're necessarily diametrically opposed. I just think you have to be honest that, okay,
00:50:42.520
if I'm going to diet and I want to lose weight, I'm probably not going to get as strong as I
00:50:46.680
possibly could is if I was not dieting. But keep in mind in power lifting, you might actually get
00:50:54.780
relatively stronger for your body weight because we do have body weight correctional scores, right?
00:50:59.820
So even though you may, you may not get as strong as you possibly could have, absolutely. Your
00:51:06.040
relative strength may actually be higher. Does that, does that make sense?
00:51:09.200
Yeah, that makes sense. Like that's like the Wilkes score.
00:51:11.300
Exactly. Well, I actually just recently changed it to something else, but yes, it was your Wilkes
00:51:14.680
score for about 50 years. Right. Well, Lane, this has been a great conversation. Is there
00:51:19.400
someplace people can go to learn more about your work? Yeah. Biolane.com is my website. All my
00:51:24.520
stuff's on there. You can, there's, we've got a bunch of free articles. We also have a member's
00:51:28.420
site. I think you said that you were on the site. Yeah, I'm a member of the site. Awesome. So we have
00:51:33.940
content, but I think a lot of people, they use it for the workout builder, which is basically we have
00:51:38.800
about 30 plus training templates on there for anyone from beginner to advanced.
00:51:44.680
for people who want to build muscle, get stronger. And we also have female specific routines,
00:51:51.580
although that's probably not my demographic on this podcast, but, um, and that's for, you can,
00:51:57.600
you can get access to that workout builder for a 12 99 a month. And I always say, well, you know,
00:52:02.840
that's about what you'd pay for the price of a cup of coffee, uh, at a Starbucks every week,
00:52:07.560
if you just went once a week. So I think it's a pretty good deal to get, you know, customizable
00:52:11.880
programming for that. And then if you guys want to check out my eBooks, you can go to the
00:52:16.920
biolane store.com and click on the accessories tab or the direct links to each eBook. I have the
00:52:23.560
complete contest prep guide, which is, you know, if you're interested in doing a bodybuilding show,
00:52:27.960
it'll show you everything to do from point A to point Z and that you can get that at contestprepbook.com
00:52:33.960
and then fat loss forever, which we've been kind of discussing, I mean, really a fat loss
00:52:38.920
manifesto. It's almost 400 pages and basically we'll show you everything from, from how to lose
00:52:47.860
weight, how to keep it off. What are the behaviors you're going to need? What about the diet after
00:52:52.860
the diet? I mean, we really spent a lot of time on it. We've already sold like 5,000 copies in just
00:52:57.620
a few weeks and people are raving about it. And if you want to get that, the direct link is
00:53:02.340
howtolosefatforever.com and check those out. And then I'm on social media as biolane on pretty
00:53:08.300
much every platform. Fantastic. Well, Lane Norton, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:53:12.180
Thank you, Brett. Appreciate the time, man. My guest today was Lane Norton. He's the author
00:53:16.300
of the book Fat Loss Forever. You can find it on his website, biolane.com. Also check out our website,
00:53:21.580
aom.is slash biolane, where you find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:53:32.340
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast and it wraps up another year of podcasts.
00:53:38.620
Putting out two podcasts week after week for 52 weeks out of the year isn't just me. It's a team
00:53:43.180
effort. So I want to take this time to thank those involved in making the Art of Manliness podcast
00:53:47.140
happen. First off, we have Kate McKay, our podcast editor. She listens to each episode over and over
00:53:51.780
again, makes cuts, makes sure things flow right. It's snappy. So thank you, Kate, for all the work you do.
00:53:56.620
Also have Jeremy Annenberg, our podcast producer. He just oversees the whole podcast process. He lines up our
00:54:01.800
guest. He makes sure guest has mics. He does sound checks with guests, you know, uploads the podcast,
00:54:06.080
makes sure everything goes out on time. It just oversees the process. So thank you, Jeremy,
00:54:09.280
for doing that. They also have Creative Audio Lab. There are sound engineers based out of Broken
00:54:13.060
Arrow, Oklahoma. We give them the podcast. They clean it up, make sure it sounds as the best that
00:54:17.400
we can. So thank you to them. And finally, thank you to all who listen to the AOM podcast. Your
00:54:22.520
support is what make this happen. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing. We're looking forward
00:54:26.300
to another year, 2021 of Art of Manliness podcast. So until next time, this is Brett McKay.
00:54:31.800
Reminding you, not only listen to AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.