Lose Weight and Keep It Off With Flexible Dieting
Episode Stats
Summary
Alan Aragon is a researcher and educator, a pioneer of evidence-based nutrition, and the author of Flexible Dieting, a science-based, reality-tested method for achieving and maintaining your optimal physique, performance, and health. In this episode, he offers an introduction to his method of flexible dieting, in which, as long as you stay in a caloric deficit and hit your daily protein target, you can decide how much fat and carbs to consume according to your personal preference.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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When many people try to lose weight, they choose a specific cookie cutter diet that
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claims to be the one true way to shed pounds. My guest says that approach is bound to backfire,
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that there's a better way to lose weight and change your body composition.
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Alan Aragon is a researcher and educator, a pioneer of evidence-based nutrition,
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and the author of Flexible Dieting, a science-based reality-tested method for achieving and
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maintaining your optimal physique, performance, and health. Today on the show, Alan offers an intro
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to his method of flexible dieting, in which as long as you stay in a caloric deficit and hit
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your daily protein target, you can decide how much fat and carbs to consume according to your
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personal preference. We discuss what to keep in mind as you create your own individualized nutrition
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plan, including how much protein you need today, the minimum amount of fat to get in your diet to
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avoid a decrease in testosterone, and the minimum number of carbs to consume to maximize muscle
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gain. And because Flexible Dieting is also about not rigidly sticking with your diet 100% of the time,
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Alan shares how often you should take a break from your diet to eat what you want.
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash Flexible Dieting.
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Thank you so much for having me on, Brett. It's a pleasure to be here.
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So you have done a lot of research on nutrition, nutrition on how to lose weight, performance,
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et cetera, and you also do coaching. Tell us about your background. How did you get into this?
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Yeah. I was just like typical adolescent male. You know, you just want to look like the superheroes
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you see in the comics, and then you want to look like the bodybuilders you see on the Joe Weider
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magazine covers back when Flex and Muscle and Fitness were in circulation. And I also had a strong
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influence from my dad, who was an amateur boxer and really into fitness. And he is the one who gave us
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the archaic set of weights, basically cement filled type of plastic weights. And then you just kind of get
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hooked when you see a little bit of progress. And then the 80s kicked in when I was a young adolescent.
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And well, actually, no, no, no, the 80s kicked in when I was 10, 10-ish. And the fitness revolution
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started and the momentum just went from there. As far as the research part of my life goes,
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in college, I actually started off as an art major. And this was because a career in personal training
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didn't really formally exist. But I just decided to take the plunge and dive into this crazy non-existent
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vocation called personal training and ended up doing well with it, ended up doing it for 10 years
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and saw that there was a major research element to it. And I serendipitously got invited on to
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research projects by a gentleman named Brad Schoenfeld after he saw a bunch of my articles and a bunch of
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my writing. And I started my research review. It was a monthly subscription-based research review
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in 2008. And I've just been at that ever since. And ever since 2013, I've been joining various
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research groups and we do the science. You know, we do everything from randomized controlled trials to
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just writing narrative reviews, writing systematic reviews, doing meta-analyses, and of course,
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peer-reviewing the work of other researchers. And the whole goal is to try to positively impact the
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field by finding out, you know, what works. How can we reach these goals of improving body composition,
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improving performance, and improving health, losing fat, gaining muscle, becoming bigger, stronger,
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faster, having better endurance, and living longer. So you put out a book called Flexible Dieting. And
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what you've done with this book is you've taken the research you've done and also the peer-reviewed
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research of other nutrition scientists and put it in an easy-to-read format that even a layperson
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could understand. You take the science and make it really easy to understand. And what I also like
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about it too is you dispel a lot of myths that are out there about nutrition when it comes to body
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composition and performance because there is a ton, a ton of misinformation or just myths about
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nutrition. I know a lot of people who are listening to this podcast, they're probably trying to lose
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weight. And so they've probably tried diets, could be keto, could be whole 30, could be, you know,
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low fat, whatever. But I'm sure they found, like a lot of people have found, that losing weight and
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keeping it off is really hard. What do we know about the research? What does the research say about
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the percentage of people who regain the weight they lose?
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Yeah, it's a dismal statistic. So roughly 20% of dieters in the general public end up keeping
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their weight off in the long term. And so long term is really what that means is as long as we're
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willing and able to study feasibly. So it's long term is typically looking at people for a year's time
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and see if they keep a significant amount of weight, typically about 10% of their body weight
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lost for a minimum of one year. And only about 20% of people are able to do that. And there's several
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reasons why that is. So the big one is that people just don't know how to do it right. They don't realize
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the importance of maintaining their muscle tissue while they lose body fat. So what the typical
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person in the general public does is they go on a cookie cutter diet and they essentially crash the
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weight off of them. So they're losing a lot of lean mass along with their fat mass. And when you lose
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lean mass, that's all kinds of not good. From a physiological standpoint, from even indirectly a
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psychological standpoint, and from a metabolic standpoint, it's just it's not a good thing to
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lose muscle tissue because you're actually losing your metabolic currency. A lot of your, in quotes,
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the engine of your body that keeps things revving high, you're getting rid of that along with
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the body fat. And if you do that, then you simply cannot sustain that weight loss. You need high
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quality weight loss, which means losing the fat, keeping the muscle. And that's what the general
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public just does not do. And they don't even, they have no idea that this is what they're doing.
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That's, that's wrong. And that's why they can't sustain the program. They have no idea that they need
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to get on a plan where they love the foods. Nobody talks about how crucial it is to
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actually not hate your diet. You know, anybody can lose weight. Anybody can lose 10, 20, 30, 40,
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50 pounds, but keeping it off is really kind of the trick that nobody seems to know out there.
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Yeah. So one factor you talk about that makes it really hard, that contributes to making weight loss
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being, you know, difficult to sustain is that people often take a rigid diet approach. What's a rigid diet?
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Sure. Rigid dieting is a style of what psychologists would call cognitive restraint. So it's a style of
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restraint or control. So there's rigid restraint, and then there's flexible restraint in the context of
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psychology. And, uh, this was a concept that were first put out there in the mid seventies in the
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literature. And then it wasn't until the 1990s that they applied these ideas to dieting. So researchers
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back, gosh, it would be almost 30 years now put out the idea that flexible dieting is a style of
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dietary restraint or dietary restraint or dietary control that does not look at foods and dieting
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in dichotomous or black and white terms. So it looks at foods and dieting on a gray scale and it
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doesn't look at goal reaching or progress on a dichotomous basis either, like either you're doing
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a hundred percent great or you're failing. It looks at that more on a gray scale. So if you're doing
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good, let's say 80% of the time and you're trending forward in your weight loss or your body composition
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improvements, then that's really what sort of this flexible dieting mindset is all about. If you're
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not looking at foods as good and evil, you know, I mean, there, there's a such thing as good and bad
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diets, but you can have in quotes, naughty foods or indulgent foods or bad foods in a healthy diet.
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As long as it only takes up the minority of the diet, rigid dieting is kind of the opposite of
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that, where you're looking at foods as either super duper foods or foods that will kill your
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progress or kill your health. You know, you're looking at foods on a very black and white to always
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have versus to always avoid basis. And what they found with the rigid mindset was a greater tendency
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towards eating disorders and also a lesser ability to control body weight. So it's a double whammy of
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bad when you look at rigid dieting. And I want to throw in a little caveat here because depending on the
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population and the goal, some people have very kind of extreme goals with pushing the envelope like
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physique competitors, for example, and they have a very constrained timeframe to reach these goals.
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And so the more extreme the goal and the more constrained the timeframe, then the more appropriate,
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a more rigid and scripted model of dieting is. Now, when you're looking at just sort of a general
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population type of goal of people trying to achieve lifelong good health, then the rigid model
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really begins to fall apart and fail people. So a rigid diet would be something like carnivore
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or paleo. I only eat, you know, low carb, high fat foods, or I only eat meat. And if I eat
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anything else, then I've just failed completely. Or maybe it could be also be like very strict
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calorie counting as well. Exactly. Yeah. Those are different forms of rigid dieting that you just
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mentioned. You know, you, it's essentially, here's your menu and this is what you're supposed to
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follow. Go do it. Good luck. And that's it. That's it. Yeah. And you know, even giving somebody
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a set of macronutrient targets, you're supposed to eat 150 grams of protein, 150 grams of carbs and 50
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grams of fat. That's your diet. Go to it. Even though that can be flexible in terms of food selection,
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it's still rigid in terms of you trying to micromanage these numbers every day. And so
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rigid dieting can take on different forms. Yeah. That's a good point. Cause when I,
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when I initially got, when I saw the title of the book, it was like flexible dieting. Oh,
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that's if it fits your macros, that's what I do. And if it fits your macros is basically what you
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just described there. You give yourself a certain amount of calories per macronutrient. We'll talk about
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these in here in a minute. So you might be like, well, I'm going to get 300 grams of carbs,
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190 grams of protein and 60 grams of fat a day. And then I can eat whatever I want during the day,
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as long as I hit those macro goals. So I could have, you know, I could have McDonald's if I needed
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to, or I could, but I could also have my egg whites with, you know, nonfat cheddar cheese,
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but yeah, it gives you flexibility in your food selection, but it can also become inflexible. And
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you're like, well, oh my gosh, if I, if I go over my carb count, then I'm just hosed.
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Right. Yeah. It can foster obsessive behavior. Even the, you know, macro targets there. It's not
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for everybody. Well, okay. So I think the takeaway there, rigid dieting, it's very strict, doesn't
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allow for, you know, just leeway in your nutrition. And that can lead, that typically leads to adverse
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outcomes weight gain. What is it about rigid dieting that causes us to typically gain weight? Is it just
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so cognitively demanding? We just think I can't do this and give up. It's people forcing themselves
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to eat in a way that's just uncomfortable. They just have to grit their way through it. And it causes
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a certain amount of psychological fatigue. So over time, if the diet that you're consuming is fatiguing
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to you mentally, then you are just not going to be able to sustain it for more than a few weeks
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or a few months at most. And then you just will go back to some old ways or you'll seek out
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alternative guidance from the internet or from a buddy here and there, you know, that, that one buddy
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of yours, who's always in great shape, no matter what he does. And then that's where the problems come
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in. People just sort of swap one form of bad knowledge for another form of bad knowledge.
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Really, I can't overemphasize the importance of finding an eating routine that you enjoy and that
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you actually can look forward to each of the meals or snacks. Okay. So for any eating plan to work,
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you have to be in a caloric deficit a lot of the time. But with flexible dieting, you don't have to
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eat healthy foods 100% of the time. You don't have to be obsessed about your diet. You don't have to
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divide foods into black and white, good and bad categories. You can actually follow strict diets
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like keto or vegetarianism, but it's not because you think the diet has only good foods and everything
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else is bad foods. It's just because you prefer it. Like you like, you like to eat that way. You enjoy
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eating that way. It'll help you stick with the caloric deficit you need to be in to lose weight.
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Yeah. A flexible model for the general population would be like, okay, be in the ballpark of your
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protein goals, but with carbohydrate and fat, you can be very flexible with that. You know,
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if you like a keto type model, then you can engage a keto type model as long as you're hitting your
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protein. And then of course, with something like keto, you have to consider food selection and your fat
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sources. Cause if you're getting your fat sources from just a bunch of butter and a bunch of lard all
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day long, you're going to have different health outcomes than if you were to engage a keto model
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that got most of its fat or a lot of its fat from things like avocado, olive oil, nuts, seeds. And of
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course you have the, you know, the incidental fats in the meats and the fish and the dairy and the eggs,
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you know, that that's, that's more of a healthy keto model than what a lot of people engage.
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Now with a high carb, low fat, the sort of the same thing applies. You can certainly do high carb,
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low fat, but you would have to pay closer attention to the food selection in terms of your carb sources.
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You can't necessarily be just slamming a bunch of, you know, refined carbohydrate foods and sugar
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sweetened beverages and then saying, Hey, great. I'm hitting my, my macronutrient targets. It's high
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carb, it's low fat and I'm hitting my protein. I mean, there's a little bit more things that we need
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to pay attention to for that. But nevertheless, as long as you're hitting your total daily protein
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and your total daily caloric intake, you can go keto or you can go high carb, low fat, or you can go
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somewhere in between all in the course of a week if you want, you know, but most people are generally
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they're, they're going to gravitate towards one type of diet paradigm versus another in terms of
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fat and carb levels. But the flexibility is in the fact that what really matters is protein and total
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daily calories. And then you can do carbs and fat proportion to your preference and still hit your
00:17:02.540
weight loss goals. Yeah. So I've used, if it fits your macros for several years now to both gain weight
00:17:08.740
and recently to lose weight. So a couple of years ago, I was really into powerlifting. And so the
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name of the game was like, I got to get bigger so I can lift more weight. Cause generally if you're
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bigger, it's easier to lift more weight. So I used, if it fits your macro. So I would just increase my
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calories and I didn't eat junk all the time. People just think, well, you just eat pop tarts. And
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I don't, I mean, I have a pop tart occasionally, but for the most part, I was trying to hit my macros
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by eating things like oatmeal, vegetables, potatoes, you know, lean meats, good fats.
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But then, you know, if I was going to go out to eat to some restaurant, I wouldn't mind having a
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cheeseburger, not a problem. And then last year I, I don't power lift anymore. So there's no reason
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for me to be super big. So I decided to lose weight. I lost 30 pounds last year. It took me like six
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months, seven months, but it was just a gradual decrease. That's a lot of weight. Yeah. But it wasn't,
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what was crazy though, was it like, it wasn't hard because, because I'd been tracking my macros
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for such a long time. I had developed a very flexible approach to my nutrition. And so I don't,
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I wasn't obsessing about, oh, I got to get this, you know, the, my weight of my oatmeal just right.
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It's like, well, okay, I got it. I know the general rough estimate of what a cup of oatmeal looks like.
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I know what, you know, 28 grams of cheddar cheese looks like, whatever. And so I was able to sustain it.
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And I just gradually reduced my calories through that, you know, that six months. And yeah, it
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worked out. I mean, it wasn't, it wasn't hard. I never felt deprived. I never felt like this is
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really hard. I was still eating the foods I enjoyed. It just was less. And I also noticed that my
00:18:45.380
approach to food wasn't obsessive. You know, there'd be times when I was, there's, I remember this
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moment I was trying to, you know, I was in this fat loss mood and I was tracking my macros for the day.
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And I had a general idea of how much I had left, but then my flag football team that I coached the,
00:19:02.300
it was like our last practice and the parents brought donuts to celebrate. And if I would
00:19:06.880
have been like obsessive, I'd have been like, oh, I can't eat that. It doesn't fit my macros. Like
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no way. I'm going to, I'm going to eat a donut with these kids I've been coaching for the past
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couple of years. I just didn't care. Like it wasn't a big deal. I didn't feel like my diet was
00:19:18.280
off track because as long as I just kept things going, you know, after that I was, I was going to be
00:19:24.520
fine. So like, I just like learning how not to obsess about it so much really helped me
00:19:29.640
sustain that weight loss for a long period of time.
00:19:35.120
Well, that's consistent with the research evidence too. And so when there is what the
00:19:41.400
researchers call planned hedonic deviations from the diet, when you know that at these regular
00:19:48.720
periods of time that you're going to essentially, uh, you know, go outside of the rules and you know,
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from the outset that this is part of the plan to go outside of the rules regularly, then people
00:20:00.500
actually are able to adhere to the diet better in the longterm. And so, yeah, so your experience
00:20:12.140
Something else I noticed too, with my experience with counting macros was that being more rigid,
00:20:18.560
at the beginning allowed me to be more flexible later on. So at the beginning, I was very meticulous
00:20:24.400
about tracking things and measuring things out. But I've noticed that by doing that, like I now have
00:20:31.040
a better idea of what a portion looks like. You know, when I'm at, when I'm at dinner with my family,
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you know, dinner served family style, right? You're going to get pasta. Like I can look and like,
00:20:40.740
ah, that's about a cup of pasta. I don't have to like measure it out on the scale anymore.
00:20:44.000
And the same goes just for my other, when I'm out and about just eating, I'm like, ah, you know,
00:20:48.920
I know that this is about this amount of calories that has this amount of protein. So it allows me
00:20:53.860
to be more flexible and not have to be so meticulous. So I think one thing that worked
00:20:57.660
for me is being maybe a little bit more rigid in the beginning so that you can develop a bit
00:21:02.040
of awareness. Cause I think a lot of people that have no clue like what the calorie content
00:21:07.540
of food is or what a portion is like peanut butter is the perfect example. And I think people have
00:21:12.680
this idea of what a serving of peanut butter is, but when you actually see what a serving of peanut
00:21:16.640
butter is, you know, two tablespoons, it's not much. And so that it vastly, uh, it really resets
00:21:23.280
how you think about your portion control. Yeah, no doubt about it. I think that going through a period
00:21:29.180
of tracking, tracking the grams and what, what app do you use by the way? I use my fitness pal.
00:21:36.080
Okay. Okay. That's a popular one. Is there one you like?
00:21:40.580
I just found out of actually from one of my, my students, she uses something called my net diary
00:21:46.500
and they, their free version. She, she enjoys that. And she said, she's gotten some good feedback
00:21:51.700
from clients. And there's another app that people like called chronometer. There's another app. This
00:21:57.360
is a bit more, I guess, more bells and whistles, but a lot of great feedback, an app called avatar.
00:22:03.140
Sure. That's almost like one of those AI type of self-adjusting types of apps, but yeah, tracking
00:22:09.820
the grams of everything for a time period, knowing that the goal is to be able to not have to depend
00:22:15.920
on that. What ends up happening is you go through this sort of bootcamp phase where you're forced
00:22:20.720
to learn, like what are the nutritive values of the various foods in the various amounts that you eat?
00:22:29.080
And I think that can be a very valuable thing. Like it was in your case.
00:22:32.480
We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
00:22:35.480
And now back to the show. Okay. So with flexible dieting, you're trying to hit a certain macro
00:22:45.440
goal with your protein intake and staying in a caloric deficit. So you lose weight, but how
00:22:50.140
you do your carbs and fat, that's completely up to you. There isn't one right diet. There
00:22:54.080
isn't one true diet. It's all about just what works for you. So you can follow the keto diet
00:22:58.660
if you want, if that helps you stay in a caloric deficit. But as you talk about the book, as you're
00:23:02.600
deciding how you want to eat and how you want to divide, what to do with your macros in your own
00:23:08.360
preferred way, there's some things to keep in mind for weight loss and health. So let's walk through
00:23:15.220
what people should know about each of these macro nutrients, starting with protein. How much protein
00:23:21.420
should we aim to get if fat loss and muscle gain are our goals?
00:23:25.920
Yeah. The old adage, the old bodybuilding adage of a gram per pound, it shoots high, but
00:23:32.980
it's beneficial both from a body composition standpoint, even a clinical standpoint, and
00:23:39.300
even a performance standpoint. So it would probably represent the upper end of what is appropriate for
00:23:46.640
most people. But it's roughly 0.7 grams per pound of target body weight would be sort of the bottom end
00:23:55.540
of optimal. I almost said optional, but yeah, optional and optimal. So 0.7 to 1.0 grams per pound of ideal
00:24:06.200
body weight or target body weight is the sweet spot for total daily protein intake.
00:24:11.700
Okay. So like you said, you said target weights, if you weigh 300 pounds, like you don't want to,
00:24:18.340
because people hear like the one gram per pound of body weight. You're like, well, if I'm 300 pounds,
00:24:22.080
I need to eat 300 grams of protein. It's like, no, no, no. Like you got to figure out what your target
00:24:25.580
body weight is. Maybe it's 250, like make that how you set your protein.
00:24:30.860
Yeah, that's right. And the whole purpose of basing stuff on target body weight is that
00:24:35.780
it's a proxy for lean body mass. You know, we're trying to feed lean body mass and not necessarily
00:24:41.540
feed your body fat mass. But the problem is it's very difficult to accurately estimate body composition
00:24:49.200
and estimate lean body mass. So the workaround is easy enough. Base it on target body weight instead of
00:24:56.960
just current body weight, unless your current body weight is your target body weight.
00:25:02.020
What does the research say about the best sources of protein?
00:25:08.580
This is a, man, this is a big question. You know, animal sources are still as a group,
00:25:16.100
they're still going to be the highest quality. The lower digestibility of plant protein sources is
00:25:22.420
always going to put them lower than animal foods in terms of what's called the anabolic response or
00:25:29.960
muscle protein synthesis. So you're, you're kind of the classics on the animal side of the fence,
00:25:38.140
meat, fish, poultry, dairy, eggs, and dairy-based protein powders. Those guys are kind of going to be
00:25:46.080
the king. However, there are some honorable mentions on the plant side of things. So legumes, beans,
00:25:53.880
peas, and even pea-based protein powders, and soy, those are still high quality proteins and they still
00:26:03.600
have performed quite well in head-to-head comparisons with animal proteins. Soy, for example, it gets
00:26:11.420
bashed a lot, but it is almost on par when it has head-to-head comparisons with dairy proteins for
00:26:19.700
its anabolic response. It's only slightly inferior. So there has been-
00:26:26.280
Soy protein, a lot of people say, well, don't eat soy because it increases estrogen. Is that true?
00:26:30.920
Yeah. Yeah. That's, I'm glad you brought that caveat up. Typically, the dosing threshold for concern with
00:26:39.600
getting your protein from soy isolate, so it can be a little bit different if you get your soy proteins
00:26:45.320
from the full food matrix of, let's say, those edamame bean pods. It's a different game with soy when
00:26:51.740
you're just, you know, chugging down soy protein isolate in the powdered form. That can pose a certain
00:27:00.760
degree of threat of hormonal impacts, negative hormonal impacts, but that's only been seen in the
00:27:10.960
literature and specific case studies where they breached about 60-ish grams per day in a small handful of
00:27:19.080
case studies. So if somebody is eating soy in the form of regular soy foods like tempeh, tofu, edamame, like
00:27:29.040
kind of what Asian folks do, in the typical amounts in the course of the day, you're not going to have these
00:27:34.820
theoretical feminizing effects and these estrogen raising effects. But if you have this over-reliance
00:27:41.940
on soy protein supplementation, soy protein isolate to get your total daily protein intake to where it
00:27:48.600
needs to be, I personally wouldn't have more than about 60-ish grams of that stuff in the course of
00:27:55.940
Gotcha. Okay. So animal source protein is going to be your best bet for muscle protein synthesis,
00:28:00.320
but you can get your protein from vegetable sources or non-animal sources, and you can still build
00:28:09.240
When I was writing the book, I really began the writing of it about five-ish years ago,
00:28:14.140
and it was right during that time, within that time period, that a couple of key pieces of literature
00:28:20.780
rolled out. So there's two consecutive studies that came out comparing a vegan group with an omnivore
00:28:28.460
group, and they put both groups through a resistance training program, and similar size, muscle size
00:28:35.300
and strength gains were made in both groups, in both studies. And like I said, they compared a fully
00:28:42.340
vegan group with an omnivorous group. And in one of the studies, they used soy protein to boost the
00:28:49.540
protein intake, soy protein isolate, to boost the protein intake up to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body
00:28:56.160
weight, or 0.7 grams per pound of body weight, which is entering the realm of optimal. And in the
00:29:03.460
other study, they used some real odd, interesting stuff called mycoprotein. So it's a fungus-based
00:29:10.440
protein. And the brand name is KORN, Q-U-O-R-N, and it's like double the price of meat.
00:29:16.440
So you're looking at these fantastic products. It's just too freaking damn expensive. But
00:29:23.980
nevertheless, you know, on one of the studies by Hevea, Laudrain, and colleagues, they used soy
00:29:31.060
to make sure that the vegan group was on par with the omnivore group in terms of total daily protein.
00:29:37.960
And lo and behold, over the time period of the study, which I believe was 12 weeks,
00:29:44.540
very similar muscle size and strength gains in the groups, despite the vegan group essentially
00:29:52.140
having lower overall protein quality in terms of essential amino acid proportion even. And so
00:29:58.500
it looks like people on a completely plant-based diet can gain similar amounts of muscle size and
00:30:06.760
strength as omnivores, at least within the limits of the research. So when I say that, I mean
00:30:14.420
the subject profile. So we're looking at subjects who are not necessarily high level or advanced
00:30:21.880
lifters or advanced trainees or necessarily athletic. So general populations can still maintain a plant-based
00:30:31.500
diet and gain muscle. But whether or not they can take it to levels that are competitive and highly
00:30:38.860
above average, well, that's still open to investigation.
00:30:43.100
Okay. So protein 0.7 to 1 grams per pound of target body weight. Well, let's talk about carbs. So I'd say
00:30:50.180
about, you know, 20, 15 years ago, carbs were like evil. Everyone was like, don't eat carbs. Can I make you fat?
00:30:56.080
I think you're starting to see people go away from that a bit. There's still some people who are very
00:31:00.360
adamant about don't eat carbs, but I think you're seeing people in general embracing the idea, oh,
00:31:05.540
carbs can play a role in your diet. What does the research say about, you know, a good carb goal to
00:31:12.500
hit if your goal is to lose weight, gain muscle, and just feel good?
00:31:16.780
Yeah. Carbs are highly individual type of thing. Let me first establish that the directive to just
00:31:27.580
avoid carbs is really effective for weight loss. But the question is how long can somebody realistically
00:31:35.400
sustain that? Number one. And number two, what is the opportunity cost of that? In other words,
00:31:43.080
what are the long-term health impacts of somebody avoiding all of the carb-containing foods, including
00:31:50.100
the ones that consistently have been shown to prevent chronic diseases, like especially
00:31:56.720
cardiovascular disease, which is the number one non-infectious disease killer in the world.
00:32:02.920
And so just because cutting out carbs completely is a really great fat loss tactic and weight loss
00:32:09.220
tactic, at least in the temporary term, that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to win
00:32:13.960
in the long term. So with that out of the way, there's really a super wide range, Brett, of carb
00:32:22.100
intakes that are appropriate. If somebody has no desire necessarily to put on an above average amount
00:32:29.820
of muscle, then they don't really need a whole lot more than let's say a bottom end of 30 to 50 grams
00:32:36.240
of carbs a day. Okay. With, you know, just classic keto model. However, as shown in the scientific
00:32:45.240
literature consistently, the majority of people who engage keto cannot sustain it for more than six
00:32:52.880
months to a year. So when they put these subjects, they assign the subjects a ketogenic diet where they
00:33:00.740
have a maximum of 50 grams of carbs a day to consume. By the six month mark, this amount is
00:33:06.400
typically doubled. And by the 12 month mark, their 50 gram carb assignment at the beginning of the study ends up
00:33:13.740
being about 150 grams of carbs by the 12 month mark. So it just creeps up. People can't seem to sustain that
00:33:21.800
level of carbohydrate restriction. Now, there is a subsection of people who really love it and are really vocal about it,
00:33:30.520
but they're in the minority of the people who actually can sustain like keto for life. Like these carnivore
00:33:36.280
communities who have been obviously doing keto and carnivore for years now. There are those people out there.
00:33:43.880
And, you know, more power to them if their intake is healthier than their former standard Western diet, which was just
00:33:52.320
too much of everything. But for people who are concerned with long term health, then having a highly restrictive
00:34:01.580
approach toward carbs can, like I said, have some opportunity costs. For example, if people are avoiding fruits and
00:34:08.760
avoiding healthy carb sources, healthy starch sources like ground vegetables, root vegetables, tubers, and even a lot of the
00:34:17.100
grain foods and certainly legumes. Legumes are like, you know, they're still a majority carb food that
00:34:23.600
happen to have consistent benefits to many aspects of health consistently in the literature that shows
00:34:31.500
this. If somebody wants to gain muscle, then it's very inefficient to do that without a certain amount of
00:34:40.240
carbohydrate intake. So I would say that if you want to maximize muscle gain, it's tough to do that with
00:34:47.140
a keto intake and a low carb intake. So the bottom end carb intake for maximizing muscle gain might be
00:34:54.640
right around a gram, gram and a half per pound as far as carb intake goes. But like I said, if fat loss is the
00:35:03.640
main goal, man, really no strict minimum of carbs for that.
00:35:08.780
Yeah. Yeah. That was interesting about muscle. If you want to gain muscle, you need carbs because like it allows you to
00:35:13.440
work out harder. It allows you to train harder and lift harder, which allows you to get that, stimulate that muscle
00:35:19.900
protein synthesis from lifting weights. And if you're carb depleted, you can't do that as much. So it's going to be
00:35:26.260
harder. I've noticed that there's periods when I did, you know, like low carb, high fat. And whenever I went to the gym, I could
00:35:33.540
definitely feel the difference between being on a high fat, low carb diet versus a high carb, low fat diet.
00:35:41.120
Yeah, that's right. And so with the goal of muscle gain comes this programming where you have these
00:35:46.820
escalations in training volume. So sets, reps, load, all of that stuff has to progressively increase over
00:35:54.940
time. And on a low carb diet, that lifting capacity, the demands of the resistance training that are
00:36:02.080
escalating. They're just not supported by a ketogenic level of carb intake. They're not supported
00:36:08.780
optimally. So somebody can still gain muscle on a ketogenic diet. It's still possible. It's just not
00:36:17.300
optimal and it's just not an efficient way to do it. And progress is not happening maximally as you've
00:36:23.980
experienced and as is observed consistently in the field and in the research literature as well.
00:36:30.600
And so not only that, but the difference in resting glycogen levels between somebody on a ketogenic
00:36:37.140
diet and somebody on a high carb diet is very substantial. Like somebody on a keto diet can
00:36:43.480
carry about half the amount of muscle glycogen at the resting state than somebody on a high carb diet.
00:36:51.640
And this can be visible for people who are in the physique competitor realm. And it can just be
00:36:59.720
visible period. If the whole point is to carry around more muscle mass and people need to know
00:37:04.500
that every gram of carbohydrate you store in the muscle tissue, or in other words, every gram of
00:37:09.780
glycogen that you store, there's almost four parts of water that are attached to that glycogen molecule
00:37:15.900
within the muscle. And so the less glycogen that you carry, then the less full and mass of your
00:37:22.780
muscles are going to be. And this idea that in order to lose weight, you have to go low carb.
00:37:27.480
When I was losing my weight last year, I had higher carbs than fat. Yeah, you can lose weight. As long
00:37:34.980
as you're in a caloric deficit, you can lose weight and still eat plenty of carbs. Let's talk about fat.
00:37:40.280
What role does fat play in our health? It plays a number of roles. Maybe the main ones would be
00:37:46.500
the building of hormones, the maintenance of body fat, the maintenance of the types of fatty acids that
00:37:55.500
are circulating in the blood and either contributing or detracting from cardiovascular health.
00:38:02.620
And as far as our conversation is concerned, the preservation of testosterone level, healthy
00:38:09.220
testosterone production. So it's possible to consume a diet so low in fat that your body has
00:38:14.460
a tough time with hormone production. How low do you have to get with your fat consumption
00:38:19.120
for that to start happening? You know, there's a series of studies that have compared various fat
00:38:25.760
levels, but the most frequent comparison is 20% of total calories from dietary fat versus 40%
00:38:33.200
of calories from dietary fat. And the 40% groups always end up with a higher testosterone production.
00:38:41.340
And so when you switch them over to a 20%, then their testosterone levels significantly decrease.
00:38:48.140
So somewhere in that range between 40 and 20, something is happening to where testosterone is lowered.
00:38:56.220
Now, these diets are probably not ideal. It's just a regular old research diet, probably not
00:39:02.780
optimized in protein. And these are sedentary subjects. They're not on a balanced training
00:39:08.200
program and they're not on a training program period, let alone one that involves resistance training.
00:39:13.600
So you have to kind of take that research for what it is, but it appears that 20% of total calories
00:39:21.240
is something that you really don't want to go below. If you want to preserve testosterone levels,
00:39:26.460
if you want to maximize testosterone levels, well, then, you know, we're probably looking at
00:39:30.720
somewhere above 20%. We just haven't systematically figured out, you know, what that was and tried
00:39:38.600
different forms of fat to see what can kind of rescue a low overall fat intake. Types of fat matter.
00:39:46.140
Saturated fat seems to be a lot better for testosterone production than unsaturated fat,
00:39:52.240
but then the trade-off is cardiovascular disease. So, you know, maybe we weren't necessarily meant to
00:40:01.140
maximize testosterone and maximize health all at the same time, although, you know, you pick your battles.
00:40:08.480
So, yeah, it's a little bit of a complicated story with fat. I personally wouldn't go below 20% of total
00:40:14.000
calories from fat, and I personally wouldn't go below about, on the very, very low end, 0.3 grams
00:40:20.660
per pound of target body weight with dietary fat. I would probably start off at a sweeter spot of like
00:40:29.180
half a gram per pound, you know, of fat, and then just go up from there.
00:40:35.180
Well, let's bring this all together so people kind of have an idea that they can start creating their
00:40:38.840
own individualized nutrition plan. Because you talk about this in detail in your book, but just kind of
00:40:42.980
give listeners a taste of this. Let's say someone's goal is to lose fat and gain some muscle.
00:40:47.760
How do you figure out the ballpark number of calories you need to consume daily to reach that
00:40:53.500
goal? So, if fat loss is your goal, you need to be in a caloric deficit. So, how do you figure out
00:40:58.140
what a caloric deficit is for you? Yeah, the first step is either knowing the total calories that
00:41:05.660
maintains you. And if you have no freaking clue what that is, then you have to at least get a handle
00:41:13.260
on, you have one or two things to do. Track what you eat for two to four weeks without changing your
00:41:21.620
habits. If you happen to have been maintaining your body weight, then just literally track everything
00:41:28.160
that you eat for at least two weeks. And that will give you your maintenance calories. If you're
00:41:35.880
unwilling to do that, and you just want to know hypothetically, what is my maintenance calories,
00:41:40.740
then you can pop your numbers into an online calculator and it'll spit something out.
00:41:47.580
I tend to think my calculator is more methodical, at least, than a lot of calculators out there.
00:41:53.280
It's on alanaragon.com slash calculator. But yeah, you need to find out what your maintenance levels
00:41:59.060
are, what maintains you. And for most men out there, it's going to be somewhere between two to
00:42:05.180
3,000 calories, depending on your body size. You just have to figure that out. And in order to lose
00:42:12.240
body weight, in order to lose body fat, the most efficient way to do that is to impose a caloric
00:42:18.920
deficit. And the safest caloric deficit to target is right around 10 to 20% below maintenance.
00:42:27.080
So if somebody's maintenance caloric intake, we'll just choose some really round numbers here.
00:42:32.520
If somebody's maintenance caloric intake is 2,500 calories, then they're going to want to
00:42:38.280
decrease that by 10 to 20%. And that would mean decreasing it by 250 to 500 calories, depending on
00:42:47.320
how careful you want to be about preserving muscle or even leaving the chance open to gain muscle while
00:42:55.500
you're losing fat, which is a possibility in people who are not advanced trainees. And so impose that
00:43:02.980
caloric deficit, keep protein at about a gram per pound of your target body weight. And then you can be
00:43:11.120
flexible about the remainder of the calories that you fill in with carbohydrate and fat. And once again,
00:43:16.760
if you want to get cute, then I wouldn't do, I wouldn't do less than 20% of total calories from
00:43:24.260
fat. I would hover probably around more like the 30, 40 ish percent. And frankly, you know,
00:43:30.780
if you want to go full keto, that's fine. Just know that you're courting some risks down the line.
00:43:36.400
If your fat sources are not in quotes, heart healthy, then no matter how much your carnivore friends
00:43:45.040
And then once you have that, just maintain that flexible approach to your diet. Like don't get,
00:43:51.700
don't freak out if you eat more carbs than you're supposed to, or you had a donut because,
00:43:57.100
you know, they brought it to work. You know, someone brought it to work. Like don't get so upset about
00:44:01.000
that because you can, as long as you stay consistent in the long run, you're going to lose weight.
00:44:05.700
Like how, how do you measure progress? Like what should like people's expectations? Like you said
00:44:10.040
about a pound of a pound a week. Right. Right. And then I think also one thing I learned is that
00:44:14.700
I had that I was going about a pound a week, but there were some weeks where I, I gained weight
00:44:19.320
and I'm like, what the heck happened there? But like, I just stuck with the plan. And eventually
00:44:23.880
like the next week I lost three pounds. Like it was just, sometimes there's just these random
00:44:27.080
fluctuations. As long as the trend was downward, I was okay with that.
00:44:31.600
Yeah. There's going to be a lot of environmental influences and internal influences that are going
00:44:37.840
to make the road very windy and very sort of jagged. If you were to plot the progress line
00:44:43.440
and you just have to accept that's just kind of the nature of the beast. And, um, you know,
00:44:49.960
while you're allowing for this pound a week, maybe sometimes faster at the initial weeks,
00:44:57.380
you have to realize that every caloric deficit that you impose is a march towards equilibrium.
00:45:05.380
So it's a march towards maintenance, towards a, a maintenance point. And you may reach several
00:45:13.180
maintenance points before you reach the ultimate goal. And so it's important to know that it's
00:45:19.040
important to know that progress plateaus are a part of the weight loss process. If somebody has a
00:45:24.240
substantial amount of weight to lose, like say anything more than 10 pounds, it's going to be
00:45:28.920
quite a journey. And so every five to 10 pounds, somebody loses probably going to take like, you
00:45:36.180
know, at least a couple of months to lose that amount of weight. I think it can be important to
00:45:41.700
take a week off of the diet every four to eight weeks. I mean, it keeps people from accumulating that
00:45:49.220
psychological fatigue of dieting, or you can look at it this way for every five to 10 pounds, you lose
00:45:55.300
take a week off the diet. Don't just, you know, completely abandon all reason and judgment and go
00:46:02.280
on a two handed diet, but you can just, you know, lift your foot off the gas pedal for a week and eat
00:46:08.020
unrestricted, but don't purposely try to binge. It's okay to gain one to two pounds during your week
00:46:13.520
long diet break. You don't have to adhere to strict macronutrient targets, and then just kind of take
00:46:21.240
a mental break from the diet and then get back on it. So if you take a week long diet break after
00:46:26.980
losing every five to 10 pounds, then it can make the process easier. And sometimes you'll find that
00:46:33.580
when you're taking the diet break, you'll be able to use that time to also take, take a deloading
00:46:40.100
phase off of training. And some people go the opposite, which is fine because they have more
00:46:43.520
energy to hit some PRs with their training as well. So really that part is not crucial. What,
00:46:49.400
what goes on with training, but as long as you find a way to avoid the psychological fatigue of dieting,
00:46:55.940
then taking a diet break with every five to 10 pounds losses, I've seen good results with that.
00:47:03.320
Well, Alan, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book in your
00:47:06.500
work? You can go to alanaragon.com. That's where you can find my book. It's where you can find my
00:47:14.220
research review and my social media handle on Instagram and, and X and where else do I hang out?
00:47:24.660
Facebook. Well, on Instagram, which is my biggest platform, it's the Alan Aragon, same thing on X.
00:47:31.920
And, uh, yeah, that's where you can find me. That's where you can find my stuff. And I really
00:47:38.040
appreciate you, Brett, for doing what you do and having me on. And thank you for the listeners for
00:47:43.180
tuning in. Well, Alan Aragon, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure. You got it. My guest here is
00:47:48.880
Alan Aragon. He's the author of the book, Flexible Dieting. It's available on amazon.com. You can find
00:47:53.340
more information about his work at his website, alanaragon.com. Also check out our show notes at
00:47:57.300
aom.is slash Flexible Dieting. We can find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.
00:48:09.280
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at
00:48:13.080
artofmanly.com. We find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we've written
00:48:17.060
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00:48:20.380
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00:48:23.880
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00:48:31.040
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