The Art of Manliness - Lose Weight and Keep It Off With Flexible Dieting

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.460 When many people try to lose weight, they choose a specific cookie cutter diet that

00:00:15.360 claims to be the one true way to shed pounds. My guest says that approach is bound to backfire,

00:00:20.620 that there's a better way to lose weight and change your body composition.

00:00:24.120 Alan Aragon is a researcher and educator, a pioneer of evidence-based nutrition,

00:00:27.800 and the author of Flexible Dieting, a science-based reality-tested method for achieving and

00:00:33.040 maintaining your optimal physique, performance, and health. Today on the show, Alan offers an intro

00:00:37.860 to his method of flexible dieting, in which as long as you stay in a caloric deficit and hit

00:00:42.020 your daily protein target, you can decide how much fat and carbs to consume according to your

00:00:46.000 personal preference. We discuss what to keep in mind as you create your own individualized nutrition

00:00:50.400 plan, including how much protein you need today, the minimum amount of fat to get in your diet to

00:00:54.880 avoid a decrease in testosterone, and the minimum number of carbs to consume to maximize muscle

00:00:59.440 gain. And because Flexible Dieting is also about not rigidly sticking with your diet 100% of the time,

00:01:05.120 Alan shares how often you should take a break from your diet to eat what you want.

00:01:08.400 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash Flexible Dieting.

00:01:12.180 All right. Alan Aragon, welcome to the show.

00:01:27.320 Thank you so much for having me on, Brett. It's a pleasure to be here.

00:01:30.120 So you have done a lot of research on nutrition, nutrition on how to lose weight, performance,

00:01:36.460 et cetera, and you also do coaching. Tell us about your background. How did you get into this?

00:01:40.060 Yeah. I was just like typical adolescent male. You know, you just want to look like the superheroes

00:01:47.980 you see in the comics, and then you want to look like the bodybuilders you see on the Joe Weider

00:01:53.800 magazine covers back when Flex and Muscle and Fitness were in circulation. And I also had a strong

00:02:00.120 influence from my dad, who was an amateur boxer and really into fitness. And he is the one who gave us

00:02:08.300 the archaic set of weights, basically cement filled type of plastic weights. And then you just kind of get

00:02:17.020 hooked when you see a little bit of progress. And then the 80s kicked in when I was a young adolescent.

00:02:23.820 And well, actually, no, no, no, the 80s kicked in when I was 10, 10-ish. And the fitness revolution

00:02:31.780 started and the momentum just went from there. As far as the research part of my life goes,

00:02:37.700 in college, I actually started off as an art major. And this was because a career in personal training

00:02:46.080 didn't really formally exist. But I just decided to take the plunge and dive into this crazy non-existent

00:02:55.100 vocation called personal training and ended up doing well with it, ended up doing it for 10 years

00:03:02.020 and saw that there was a major research element to it. And I serendipitously got invited on to

00:03:09.640 research projects by a gentleman named Brad Schoenfeld after he saw a bunch of my articles and a bunch of

00:03:16.700 my writing. And I started my research review. It was a monthly subscription-based research review

00:03:24.280 in 2008. And I've just been at that ever since. And ever since 2013, I've been joining various

00:03:34.020 research groups and we do the science. You know, we do everything from randomized controlled trials to

00:03:42.360 just writing narrative reviews, writing systematic reviews, doing meta-analyses, and of course,

00:03:48.960 peer-reviewing the work of other researchers. And the whole goal is to try to positively impact the

00:03:58.360 field by finding out, you know, what works. How can we reach these goals of improving body composition,

00:04:06.320 improving performance, and improving health, losing fat, gaining muscle, becoming bigger, stronger,

00:04:13.820 faster, having better endurance, and living longer. So you put out a book called Flexible Dieting. And

00:04:21.980 what you've done with this book is you've taken the research you've done and also the peer-reviewed

00:04:26.100 research of other nutrition scientists and put it in an easy-to-read format that even a layperson

00:04:34.380 could understand. You take the science and make it really easy to understand. And what I also like

00:04:38.900 about it too is you dispel a lot of myths that are out there about nutrition when it comes to body

00:04:44.020 composition and performance because there is a ton, a ton of misinformation or just myths about

00:04:50.260 nutrition. I know a lot of people who are listening to this podcast, they're probably trying to lose

00:04:55.440 weight. And so they've probably tried diets, could be keto, could be whole 30, could be, you know,

00:05:03.220 low fat, whatever. But I'm sure they found, like a lot of people have found, that losing weight and

00:05:10.240 keeping it off is really hard. What do we know about the research? What does the research say about

00:05:15.020 the percentage of people who regain the weight they lose?

00:05:18.380 Yeah, it's a dismal statistic. So roughly 20% of dieters in the general public end up keeping

00:05:29.080 their weight off in the long term. And so long term is really what that means is as long as we're

00:05:37.420 willing and able to study feasibly. So it's long term is typically looking at people for a year's time

00:05:43.420 and see if they keep a significant amount of weight, typically about 10% of their body weight

00:05:49.180 lost for a minimum of one year. And only about 20% of people are able to do that. And there's several

00:05:58.040 reasons why that is. So the big one is that people just don't know how to do it right. They don't realize

00:06:06.400 the importance of maintaining their muscle tissue while they lose body fat. So what the typical

00:06:13.560 person in the general public does is they go on a cookie cutter diet and they essentially crash the

00:06:20.380 weight off of them. So they're losing a lot of lean mass along with their fat mass. And when you lose

00:06:27.600 lean mass, that's all kinds of not good. From a physiological standpoint, from even indirectly a

00:06:37.800 psychological standpoint, and from a metabolic standpoint, it's just it's not a good thing to

00:06:44.220 lose muscle tissue because you're actually losing your metabolic currency. A lot of your, in quotes,

00:06:51.700 the engine of your body that keeps things revving high, you're getting rid of that along with

00:06:57.600 the body fat. And if you do that, then you simply cannot sustain that weight loss. You need high

00:07:03.980 quality weight loss, which means losing the fat, keeping the muscle. And that's what the general

00:07:08.520 public just does not do. And they don't even, they have no idea that this is what they're doing.

00:07:14.960 That's, that's wrong. And that's why they can't sustain the program. They have no idea that they need

00:07:20.480 to get on a plan where they love the foods. Nobody talks about how crucial it is to

00:07:27.400 actually not hate your diet. You know, anybody can lose weight. Anybody can lose 10, 20, 30, 40,

00:07:36.000 50 pounds, but keeping it off is really kind of the trick that nobody seems to know out there.

00:07:42.660 Yeah. So one factor you talk about that makes it really hard, that contributes to making weight loss

00:07:48.680 being, you know, difficult to sustain is that people often take a rigid diet approach. What's a rigid diet?

00:07:57.200 Sure. Rigid dieting is a style of what psychologists would call cognitive restraint. So it's a style of

00:08:07.220 restraint or control. So there's rigid restraint, and then there's flexible restraint in the context of

00:08:14.880 psychology. And, uh, this was a concept that were first put out there in the mid seventies in the

00:08:20.280 literature. And then it wasn't until the 1990s that they applied these ideas to dieting. So researchers

00:08:29.520 back, gosh, it would be almost 30 years now put out the idea that flexible dieting is a style of

00:08:38.720 dietary restraint or dietary restraint or dietary control that does not look at foods and dieting

00:08:44.900 in dichotomous or black and white terms. So it looks at foods and dieting on a gray scale and it

00:08:53.940 doesn't look at goal reaching or progress on a dichotomous basis either, like either you're doing

00:09:03.180 a hundred percent great or you're failing. It looks at that more on a gray scale. So if you're doing

00:09:08.660 good, let's say 80% of the time and you're trending forward in your weight loss or your body composition

00:09:16.440 improvements, then that's really what sort of this flexible dieting mindset is all about. If you're

00:09:21.920 not looking at foods as good and evil, you know, I mean, there, there's a such thing as good and bad

00:09:26.540 diets, but you can have in quotes, naughty foods or indulgent foods or bad foods in a healthy diet.

00:09:32.860 As long as it only takes up the minority of the diet, rigid dieting is kind of the opposite of

00:09:40.200 that, where you're looking at foods as either super duper foods or foods that will kill your

00:09:48.960 progress or kill your health. You know, you're looking at foods on a very black and white to always

00:09:55.020 have versus to always avoid basis. And what they found with the rigid mindset was a greater tendency

00:10:04.380 towards eating disorders and also a lesser ability to control body weight. So it's a double whammy of

00:10:13.280 bad when you look at rigid dieting. And I want to throw in a little caveat here because depending on the

00:10:20.620 population and the goal, some people have very kind of extreme goals with pushing the envelope like

00:10:27.680 physique competitors, for example, and they have a very constrained timeframe to reach these goals.

00:10:35.760 And so the more extreme the goal and the more constrained the timeframe, then the more appropriate,

00:10:41.200 a more rigid and scripted model of dieting is. Now, when you're looking at just sort of a general

00:10:50.060 population type of goal of people trying to achieve lifelong good health, then the rigid model

00:10:56.220 really begins to fall apart and fail people. So a rigid diet would be something like carnivore

00:11:02.000 or paleo. I only eat, you know, low carb, high fat foods, or I only eat meat. And if I eat

00:11:07.700 anything else, then I've just failed completely. Or maybe it could be also be like very strict

00:11:12.960 calorie counting as well. Exactly. Yeah. Those are different forms of rigid dieting that you just

00:11:19.940 mentioned. You know, you, it's essentially, here's your menu and this is what you're supposed to

00:11:25.860 follow. Go do it. Good luck. And that's it. That's it. Yeah. And you know, even giving somebody

00:11:34.160 a set of macronutrient targets, you're supposed to eat 150 grams of protein, 150 grams of carbs and 50

00:11:42.280 grams of fat. That's your diet. Go to it. Even though that can be flexible in terms of food selection,

00:11:49.100 it's still rigid in terms of you trying to micromanage these numbers every day. And so

00:11:54.940 rigid dieting can take on different forms. Yeah. That's a good point. Cause when I,

00:11:59.820 when I initially got, when I saw the title of the book, it was like flexible dieting. Oh,

00:12:02.820 that's if it fits your macros, that's what I do. And if it fits your macros is basically what you

00:12:08.400 just described there. You give yourself a certain amount of calories per macronutrient. We'll talk about

00:12:13.420 these in here in a minute. So you might be like, well, I'm going to get 300 grams of carbs,

00:12:16.660 190 grams of protein and 60 grams of fat a day. And then I can eat whatever I want during the day,

00:12:24.320 as long as I hit those macro goals. So I could have, you know, I could have McDonald's if I needed

00:12:28.580 to, or I could, but I could also have my egg whites with, you know, nonfat cheddar cheese,

00:12:35.240 but yeah, it gives you flexibility in your food selection, but it can also become inflexible. And

00:12:40.360 you're like, well, oh my gosh, if I, if I go over my carb count, then I'm just hosed.

00:12:46.200 Right. Yeah. It can foster obsessive behavior. Even the, you know, macro targets there. It's not

00:12:54.440 for everybody. Well, okay. So I think the takeaway there, rigid dieting, it's very strict, doesn't

00:12:59.540 allow for, you know, just leeway in your nutrition. And that can lead, that typically leads to adverse

00:13:04.660 outcomes weight gain. What is it about rigid dieting that causes us to typically gain weight? Is it just

00:13:10.840 so cognitively demanding? We just think I can't do this and give up. It's people forcing themselves

00:13:16.660 to eat in a way that's just uncomfortable. They just have to grit their way through it. And it causes

00:13:24.520 a certain amount of psychological fatigue. So over time, if the diet that you're consuming is fatiguing

00:13:33.160 to you mentally, then you are just not going to be able to sustain it for more than a few weeks

00:13:40.820 or a few months at most. And then you just will go back to some old ways or you'll seek out

00:13:47.140 alternative guidance from the internet or from a buddy here and there, you know, that, that one buddy

00:13:54.440 of yours, who's always in great shape, no matter what he does. And then that's where the problems come

00:13:59.400 in. People just sort of swap one form of bad knowledge for another form of bad knowledge.

00:14:06.780 Really, I can't overemphasize the importance of finding an eating routine that you enjoy and that

00:14:14.380 you actually can look forward to each of the meals or snacks. Okay. So for any eating plan to work,

00:14:21.200 you have to be in a caloric deficit a lot of the time. But with flexible dieting, you don't have to

00:14:26.640 eat healthy foods 100% of the time. You don't have to be obsessed about your diet. You don't have to

00:14:30.600 divide foods into black and white, good and bad categories. You can actually follow strict diets

00:14:37.440 like keto or vegetarianism, but it's not because you think the diet has only good foods and everything

00:14:44.360 else is bad foods. It's just because you prefer it. Like you like, you like to eat that way. You enjoy

00:14:49.660 eating that way. It'll help you stick with the caloric deficit you need to be in to lose weight.

00:14:55.360 Yeah. A flexible model for the general population would be like, okay, be in the ballpark of your

00:15:01.960 protein goals, but with carbohydrate and fat, you can be very flexible with that. You know,

00:15:10.300 if you like a keto type model, then you can engage a keto type model as long as you're hitting your

00:15:16.020 protein. And then of course, with something like keto, you have to consider food selection and your fat

00:15:22.280 sources. Cause if you're getting your fat sources from just a bunch of butter and a bunch of lard all

00:15:28.080 day long, you're going to have different health outcomes than if you were to engage a keto model

00:15:33.780 that got most of its fat or a lot of its fat from things like avocado, olive oil, nuts, seeds. And of

00:15:43.200 course you have the, you know, the incidental fats in the meats and the fish and the dairy and the eggs,

00:15:48.880 you know, that that's, that's more of a healthy keto model than what a lot of people engage.

00:15:55.540 Now with a high carb, low fat, the sort of the same thing applies. You can certainly do high carb,

00:16:00.780 low fat, but you would have to pay closer attention to the food selection in terms of your carb sources.

00:16:07.860 You can't necessarily be just slamming a bunch of, you know, refined carbohydrate foods and sugar

00:16:15.780 sweetened beverages and then saying, Hey, great. I'm hitting my, my macronutrient targets. It's high

00:16:22.880 carb, it's low fat and I'm hitting my protein. I mean, there's a little bit more things that we need

00:16:28.040 to pay attention to for that. But nevertheless, as long as you're hitting your total daily protein

00:16:33.020 and your total daily caloric intake, you can go keto or you can go high carb, low fat, or you can go

00:16:39.620 somewhere in between all in the course of a week if you want, you know, but most people are generally

00:16:46.060 they're, they're going to gravitate towards one type of diet paradigm versus another in terms of

00:16:51.420 fat and carb levels. But the flexibility is in the fact that what really matters is protein and total

00:16:57.640 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

00:17:13.000 name of the game was like, I got to get bigger so I can lift more weight. Cause generally if you're

00:17:17.460 bigger, it's easier to lift more weight. So I used, if it fits your macro. So I would just increase my

00:17:22.180 calories and I didn't eat junk all the time. People just think, well, you just eat pop tarts. And

00:17:27.700 I don't, I mean, I have a pop tart occasionally, but for the most part, I was trying to hit my macros

00:17:32.820 by eating things like oatmeal, vegetables, potatoes, you know, lean meats, good fats.

00:17:38.480 But then, you know, if I was going to go out to eat to some restaurant, I wouldn't mind having a

00:17:42.560 cheeseburger, not a problem. And then last year I, I don't power lift anymore. So there's no reason

00:17:48.880 for me to be super big. So I decided to lose weight. I lost 30 pounds last year. It took me like six

00:17:54.620 months, seven months, but it was just a gradual decrease. That's a lot of weight. Yeah. But it wasn't,

00:18:00.180 what was crazy though, was it like, it wasn't hard because, because I'd been tracking my macros

00:18:05.220 for such a long time. I had developed a very flexible approach to my nutrition. And so I don't,

00:18:11.580 I wasn't obsessing about, oh, I got to get this, you know, the, my weight of my oatmeal just right.

00:18:16.500 It's like, well, okay, I got it. I know the general rough estimate of what a cup of oatmeal looks like.

00:18:22.260 I know what, you know, 28 grams of cheddar cheese looks like, whatever. And so I was able to sustain it.

00:18:29.360 And I just gradually reduced my calories through that, you know, that six months. And yeah, it

00:18:34.580 worked out. I mean, it wasn't, it wasn't hard. I never felt deprived. I never felt like this is

00:18:38.920 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

00:18:50.660 moment I was trying to, you know, I was in this fat loss mood and I was tracking my macros for the day.

00:18:56.580 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

00:19:09.920 no way. I'm going to, I'm going to eat a donut with these kids I've been coaching for the past

00:19:14.180 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,

00:19:55.420 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

00:20:08.840 actually does reflect the literature.

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,

00:20:36.900 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 1.00

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

00:27:54.560 the day.

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

00:28:07.920 muscle that way.

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 0.63

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. 0.81

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

00:43:42.820 will preach to you.

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 over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven't done so already,

00:48:20.380 I'd appreciate it. Take one minute to give us a review on the podcast or Spotify. It helps that a lot.

00:48:23.880 And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend

00:48:27.280 or family member who you think brings something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued

00:48:31.040 support. Until next time, I'm Brett McKay. Remind you to not listen to the AOM podcast or put

00:48:34.880 what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - August 05, 2024

Lose Weight and Keep It Off With Flexible Dieting

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