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Calling all conscious achievers who are seeking more community and connection, I ve got an invitation for you.
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Join me at this year s Summit of Greatness this September 7th through 9th in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, to unleash your true greatness.
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This is the one time a year
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that I gather the greatness community together in person for a powerful transformative weekend.
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People come from all over the world and you can expect to hear from inspiring speakers like Inky Johnson, Jaspreet Singh, Vanessa Van Edwards, Jen Cinchero, and many more.
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You ll also be able to dance your heart out to live music, get your body moving with group workouts, and connect with others at our evening socials.
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So if you re ready to learn, heal, and grow alongside other incredible individuals in the greatness community, then you can learn more at lewishouse.com slash summit 2023.
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Make sure to grab your ticket, invite your friends, and I ll see you there.
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You are biologically designed for short-term pleasure-seeking, self-indulgent behavior.
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Fasting is an effective and efficient way of reversing and normalizing blood pressure.
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Now the problem is, you can t fast forever.
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You have to feed, so you also have to learn to eat a health-promoting diet in order to sustain those results.
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Welcome to the School of Greatness.
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My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur.
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And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness.
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Thanks for spending some time with me today.
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Now let the class begin.
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Welcome to this special masterclass.
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We brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today.
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It s going to be powerful.
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So let s go ahead and dive in.
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What are the insane benefits of water-only fasting?
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Because you ve been doing this for 38 years with over 20,000 patients that have done water-only fasting.
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What are the main benefits?
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Well, you know, one of the first things that we look at is that there are certain conditions that are really common today.
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So cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, diabetes type 2, autoimmune diseases where the immune system itself is attacking the body, rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, ankylosing spondylitis, the psoriasis, the eczema, these conditions where it s your own body that s kind of working against you.
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And also certain types of cancer like lymphoma.
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Conditions that are so common now are really thought to be unmanageable.
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Because, I mean, if you go to a physician with high blood pressure, they re going to give you a medication.
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It might be a diuretic or a beta block or whatever, a combination of medications.
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And they re going to tell you right from the beginning, if you do what I tell you, you ll never get well.
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Really?
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You ll be on these meds.
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for the rest of your life.
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You ll never get off these meds, you ll be on drugs forever.
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Because they know that they re not actually dealing with the reasons that you ve developed high blood pressure.
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The root.
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You re dealing with trying to manage the consequence of the root.
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And so our approach is a little different because we re not interested in trying to come up with a pill, potion, or powder and tell you, well, that s it.
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Just take these drugs and suffer the consequences.
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Keep eating the same way, keep living the same lifestyle, keep lacking sleep, being stressed, eat all the processed foods, and you ll be on these drugs for the rest of your life.
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Well, live normally.
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Yeah, right.
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Normal the way it is today.
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Right.
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Well, two-thirds of people are now overweight or obese.
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Yeah.
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So being overweight is normal.
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If you want it, it doesn t mean it s healthy.
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You don t necessarily want to be normal if you want to be healthy, because normal or average right now is in trouble.
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And it s in trouble because people are under the influence of the pleasure trap.
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There s this hidden force that s undermining people s health and happiness, and they don t even realize it in many cases.
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Delayed gratification is the key.
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That is the way, in my opinion.
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Not living in the instant pleasures of today, but how can I
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distance myself from it as long as possible to be rewarded in other healthier, happier ways.
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The problem, I think, is though that you are biologically designed for short-term pleasure-seeking, self-indulgent behavior.
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Those hits, those dopamine hits.
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Absolutely.
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The brain rewards the body every time it engages in behavior that favors survival and reproduction.
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And those primary dominant behaviors are feeding behavior and sexual behavior.
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Because it s food and sex that are necessary for the species to survive, to get enough to eat, to not get eaten, live long enough to reproduce.
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And that dopamine-driven short-term response worked great through most of human history.
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But more recently, it s become a bit of a trap.
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And it s become a bit of a trap because we ve changed our environment from an environment of scarcity
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where it was really hard to get enough to eat.
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People struggle.
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And now we live in an environment of abundance.
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And these highly processed foods are so appealing because they play off those ancient mechanisms.
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The salt, the sugar, the processed nature of it.
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It s just delicious, but it s not good for you.
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Well, you have to override that biology if your goal is to survive long and well.
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Not survive unwell, which is what we ve trained our society to do.
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It s like how can we extend our life on machines?
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That s not a well-loved life.
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But how can we be happy healthy?
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Fulfilled and then have a quick quicker death, right?
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It s like not suffer for as long as possible but live as long happy and healthy and then
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turn all the lights.
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We talk about having a good life, hopefully a long life, but also a good death.
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The death where one night you go to sleep and you don t wake up.
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Rather than spending the last 9.6 years unable to talk or move, lying in some nursing home bed waiting for people to come and change your diaper because you ve had a stroke or you ve had other debilitating illnesses that prevent you from actually making the last decade or two perhaps the best, most enriching time of your life rather than
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the worst, dependent on others around you, unable to really function properly.
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And that s the price we pay for short-term pleasure-seeking, self-indulgent behavior that doesn t necessarily cause an immediate problem, but definitely causes longer-term problems.
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So what are these crazy benefits of water-only fasting?
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What are the main things you ve seen people transform of these 20,000-plus cases?
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One of the biggest thing that fasting does, it s an efficient way of undoing the consequences of dietary excess.
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So people spend a long time accumulating the consequence of dietary excess and they can very rapidly reverse many of those consequences.
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Such as what?
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What are the main things you see?
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So the conditions like, they re caused by dietary excess, so high blood pressure, for example.
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We did a study with 174 consecutive patients with high blood pressure, and 174 people were able to lower their pressure enough to eliminate the need for medications.
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Medications for blood pressure cause chronic cough, fatigue, impotence, and premature death, and yet they re routinely used because it s not recognized that blood pressure is a reversible and containable process.
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Fasting is an effective and efficient way of reversing and normalizing blood pressure.
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Now the problem is,
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You can t fast forever.
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You have to feed.
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So you also have to learn to eat a health-promoting diet in order to sustain those results.
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But in terms of eliminating the risk factors, eliminating the need for medication, normalizing blood pressure, you can do that very predictably with medically supervised water-only fasting.
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What does it mean medically supervised?
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When you re just drinking water,
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I mean, why do you need someone there to watch you?
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Is it like testing with your blood sample?
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Is it just making sure you re not fatigued and in starvation mode?
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We recognize that fasting can be done safely and should be done safely every day by every patient for 12 to 16 hours, depending on their goals.
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If they re trying to lose weight or gain weight, it may depend on the duration, but we recommend a period
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of 16 hours a day of fasting, eight hours a day of feeding, and by limiting the feeding window, as people like Valter Longo and others has pointed out, you may be able to induce some of the benefits that happen with long-term fasting, cumulatively, and also prevent perhaps some of the overeating and other things that contribute to dietary excess.
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So everybody can and should fast every day.
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In fact, everybody does fast every day.
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Right, when you re sleeping, you re not eating.
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And you break it with break fast in the morning.
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It s an interesting process.
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So we re talking about maybe extending that natural period daily.
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so that you aren t necessarily eating three or four hours before you go to sleep.
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It may improve your sleep quality, may improve digestion, may improve your muscle-to-fat ratios over time, and may induce changes that are beneficial.
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The thing that we do in addition is we ll extend that period much longer.
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The problem when you start talking about long-term fasting, and we re fasting people anywhere from 2 to 40 days on water only, is that first you need to make sure that the person is an appropriate candidate for that longer-term intervention.
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People that have certain pathology, people on medications, people that have
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risk factors may be better off with a different approach than long-term water-only fasting.
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So the first thing is a history and an examination to make sure there isn t any primary issues with kidney or cardiac function or medications that would contraindicate fasting.
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What happens to the kidneys or the liver if you re water-only fasting?
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So the kidneys and liver are main detoxifying organs in the body, and particularly the kidneys.
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If kidney function isn t at least at some minimal level, in our clinic we use creatinine levels of 2.0 as an arbitrary marker.
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If kidney function isn t adequate, then the rapid detoxification that occurs during fasting, where the body mobilizes and eliminates both
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and dodges exogenous toxins into the bloodstream and then are processed by the kidneys.
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If the kidney s function isn t adequate, you could overload the kidney function and create problems there.
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Really?
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And so it s very important that people have minimal levels of clearance, and that s also the reason we make sure that people have adequate fluid intake and maintain electrolyte balance and hydration.
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So we re monitoring people s electrolytes to make sure that we don t get into problems with potassium or sodium or other things, which could become a problem, especially in these longer, faster ones we re going.
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two, three, four, five weeks or longer.
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Wow.
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What s the longest someone s been on a water fast with you?
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Well, in our clinic, we limit fasting generally to 40 days.
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We ve had a few patients we ve had to go a little bit longer than that.
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But there s evidence in the literature of patients fasting in medically controlled settings for as long as a year or more.
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So not that we would recommend that.
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Is that just someone who s so obese that they re trying to, you know, get rid of all the complications and shed the weight and all those things?
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There was a lot of work done in the 70s and 80s in treating supreme obesity.
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with long-term fasting, but even a thin male, say a 70 kilogram male, could probably fast somewhere around up to 70 days if they re resting during the process.
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Not that they should necessarily do that.
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They could survive.
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But as far as nutrient reserves and adequacy, the body s pretty amazing.
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You know, the main burner of glucose for humans is our brain.
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Is what, just thinking, or what, like?
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Cognitive activities, the brain, we have this ridiculously large brain in humans, two and a half times that, say, of a chimp.
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It s huge, and it s our main burner of glucose.
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In fact, if it wasn t for our ability to change our brain fuels from sugar to fat,
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We couldn t have survived as a species the way we have.
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Because if we had wandered away from the tropics after a week or so, if spring came late, we would have died.
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In fact, we did.
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The humans that didn t have the ability to change brain from burning sugar to burning fat weren t able to survive.
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We know that because today virtually every human being has this ability to change its brain fuel from sugar, which is the normal fuel, to burning ketones, or beta-hydroxybutyric acids in particular.
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And that would suggest a biological adaptation, such an important adaptation that the species had to have it.
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So today, humans can wander away from the tropics, spring can come late, and we can survive despite our very large brain and its huge burning of glucose because we have this ability to fast.
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All we ve done is taken this ancient biological process and applied it in a very unnatural situation, and that is a situation of dietary excess.
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No other animals maintain obesity.
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I mean even whales who you think of as kind of fat or 9% body fat Okay, really?
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Yeah, they just hold it on the outside of their Their lean meat machines like all animals do unless they get access to hyper processed foods like humans eat So if you feed human
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style, hyper-processed foods to animals, they also get fat.
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We add chemicals to our food specifically to induce dopamine stimulation in our brain.
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Those chemicals are salt, oil, and sugar.
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These are not foods.
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They re food byproducts.
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They re hyper-concentrated food byproducts.
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They re essentially chemicals we re putting in the food to stimulate more dopamine.
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Dopamine is the neurochemistry associated with pleasure.
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The more dopamine, the more pleasure, the more we like the food.
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That s what good-tasting food means, because it stimulates more dopamine production.
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And the consequence of hyper-stimulating our brain with dopamine means we overeat, and we become obese.
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And that s why two-thirds of people are overweight, is because they fooled their brain with chemicals they put in their feed.
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It works in rats, it works in mice, it works in humans.
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put the chemicals in their feed, they overeat, they get fat.
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Then they develop obesity and metabolic syndrome.
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And if you have metabolic syndrome, you re more vulnerable to dying from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and even viral infectious diseases like COVID.
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The higher your metabolic syndrome increases risk of dying from all these things, all these downstream consequences.
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What about olive oil or avocado oil?
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I hear that these good oils, these fatty oils are supposed to
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help you in certain ways, is that?
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Well, you have to be careful when we define these, quote, good oils.
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There are oils that are more harmful than, say, olive oil.
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So an oil being less harmful
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doesn t necessarily mean it s good, it s just less bad.
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So oils are all highly processed, fractionated foods with nine calories per gram and limited satiety feedback.
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So if we re talking about trying to lose or maintain optimum weight, oils would have a disadvantage compared to eating your fat from a whole food.
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So I would advocate if somebody wants avocado, eat avocado.
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Not necessarily process it down, remove the fiber, a lot of the good components and be left with the oil.
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And the same thing s true with sugar.
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You need carbohydrates as a primary fuel, but you eat whole food, whether it s fruits or vegetables or starches, not necessarily the highly processed, hyper-processed byproducts of those foods.
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If your goal is to avoid overeating, dietary excess, obesity, and the diseases of dietary excess.
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What are the three main benefits that you see with pretty much everyone that goes through water-only fasting?
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three biggest things that you see, whether it be seven or 70 days.
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Is it they look younger?
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Is it the clearer skin?
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Is it they re burning fat?
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Is it internally their cells are changing?
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What s the three main benefits you see?
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It s hard to differentiate.
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There s so many benefits.
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It d be hard to say which are the three, but I can talk about some of the benefits that we see.
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Certainly, you see weight loss.
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You can t help that.
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The laws of physics and thermodynamics say if you don t eat, you re going to lose weight.
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We know that weight loss is about a pound a day.
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Now, that pound a day, that s correct.
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Average weight loss is a pound a day.
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Now, some of that s water, some of it s protein, some of it s fiber, some of it s glycogen, and some of it s fat.
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And of that fat, some of it s adipose tissue, some of it s visceral fat.
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The visceral is what you want to burn, right?
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Well, visceral fat is the one that s most associated with pathology.
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In fact, probably shouldn t be very much visceral fat.
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Visceral fat is what happens when the body has no place else to put fuel, and so you ll store some additional visceral fat.
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And the higher the visceral fat, generally the worse you are, simplistically speaking.
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And so we just did a study
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where we took a DEXA scanner that has software that allows us to do precise whole body composition.
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So not just how much fat and protein there is, but how much visceral fat there is.
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Internally and externally, right?
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Exactly.
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So visceral fat, typically you think about an apple or a string on the belly and around the organs, that internal fat.
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So a lot of visceral fat around the organs as well, right?
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That is not good for you.
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Yeah, that s not thought to be very healthy.
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I mean, the belly fat that people see is not good, obviously, but the stuff that s surrounding all the organs is, you don t want to have a lot of that fat, right?
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That s correct.
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And so the question is, what can you do to get rid of it?
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And any type of dieting will cause various types of body changes, but the approach that s shown the most effective at mobilizing visceral fat
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is actually fasting.
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Fasting is the highest ratio of visceral fat to adipose tissue mobilization.
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For example, a typical patient in this study might lose 20% of their fat, but would lose over 50% of their visceral fat during a couple weeks of fasting, even though they only lose 4% of their lean tissue.
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And what s even more exciting is we look at, okay, what happens during fasting?
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Let s say, for example, a person loses 10 pounds.
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And we know some of that is water, some of it s fiber glycogen, some of it s adipose tissue, some of it s visceral fat.
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Then what happens after fasting?
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So you lose 10 pounds, you might regain 5 pounds.
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You re going to gain about 2 pounds of glycogen because you have sugar stores in your muscles that will be depleted within a couple days of fasting.
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You re going to rehydrate because there s a little physiological dehydration during fasting.
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You re going to put fiber back into your gut because your gut s not going to have had fiber being added to it.
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You re going to pump up your muscle cells again because you will have depleted a little bit of glucose in order to maintain the glucose, the core glucose that your brain needed.
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and you re going to theoretically put back on fat.
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But after fasting, assuming a person adopts a whole plant food SOS-free diet, what we found was weight comes off, weight comes back on, but the weight that comes back on is glycogen, water, fiber, and protein, not fat.
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Fat continues to drop.
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I like that.
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So we ve been able to show, and this study will be coming out later this year, exactly what happens.
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And then we followed people at six weeks, brought them back in,
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reanalyze them, and we re able to demonstrate that not only can people lose their fat and visceral fat, but they can continue to lose their fat and visceral fat, even free-living, eating health-promoting diets.
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So the scale will go up some, but the fat will not go up.
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That s correct.
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So you ve got to trick your mind and say, well, I m not gaining all this weight.
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You re gaining the necessary weight that your body needs to be stronger so you can have an active lifestyle and all these things, but not the fat back.
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Keep in mind, it s not weight per se that s the threat, it s excess fat.
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So for example, if you work out, you might gain 10 or 20 pounds of lean tissue over time.
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That s not necessarily compromise
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your health just because you, quote, gained weight.
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Now, if you sit around on the couch and eat greasy, fatty, slimy, dead, decaying flesh and highly processed foods and put on a lot of fat, particularly visceral fat, gain that same 20 pounds, that might be a problem.
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So we want to be careful not to be thinking just in terms of weight, but in terms of body composition.
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body really exists in sort of one of two states, you re either in the fed state, or you re in the fasted state.
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Okay, so when you re in the fed state, you re eating, insulin is going up.
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And as insulin goes up, its job like its normal job is to tell your body to store those calories.
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Okay, so you can store it as glycogen, which is sugar, or it can store it as body fat.
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that s the point.
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So you eat lunch or dinner, there s way more calories in that meal than you can use right at that point.
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So you want to store that.
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So when you don t eat, which is anytime you don t eat is called fasting.
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So when you fast, that means your insulin is going to drop.
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And that s the signal for your body to now start pulling those calories out of storage.
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Right.
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And that s the reason you don t die in your sleep every single night is because we have the ability
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to hold some of those calories in storage.
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So in the fed state, insulin goes up, you re storing calories or body fat.
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In the fasted state, you re not eating, your insulin s dropping, and you re using calories.
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So you re in one or the other.
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You can t do both at the same time.
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So if now, you say, okay, I m gonna go— Dr. Justin Marchegiani What I m eating, uhm—
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I m not using calories, is that right?
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Every time I eat, I will store, I m not burning body fat.
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You re not burning body fat because you re putting in sugar, for example, and that sugar is gonna signal that, hey, sugar s coming in, use the sugar that s coming in.
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Do not use.
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Don t burn anything off my body.
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Yeah.
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Exactly.
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SPEAKER_01
Keep all that stored fat, keep it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Just keep piling it on, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
2
SPEAKER_01
So the only way that you can actually use the body fat
2
SPEAKER_01
is to let the insulin fall and not eat.
2
SPEAKER_01
So if you are now eating constantly, so the minute you get up, somebody tells you, oh, you have to eat, you can t skip breakfast, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then you have to snack all day long.
2
SPEAKER_01
So now if you look at studies, the average duration of how long people eat for is about 14 hours and 45 minutes.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s the average.
2
SPEAKER_01
So if you start eating at 8 a.m., you don t stop till 10.45 p.m.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s on average.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s the average.
2
SPEAKER_02
14 hours, you mean a 14 hour span of eating from the start to finish, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
You may not be eating every moment, but you re eating every few hours within a 14 hour window.
2
SPEAKER_01
It takes about four hours for you to switch over into the fasted state.
2
SPEAKER_01
So the point is that before where you d eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and by six o clock you re done, you know, boom, you re, you know, now you shift into using those calories and your mom would you say, oh, you need time to digest, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
That s what she sort of said.
2
SPEAKER_01
But the point was that you need to start using
2
SPEAKER_01
those calories that you stored up during your mealtimes.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that was the secret that they could stay relatively slim.
2
SPEAKER_01
And now if you re eating constantly, then you never give your body a chance to switch over into that fasted state and start using those calories.
2
SPEAKER_01
The problem, of course, is that insulin stays high, which tends to keep your body storing calories,
2
SPEAKER_01
your body.
2
SPEAKER_01
So the high insulin, for example, blocks fat burning, you can t burn your fat stores, because your body s like, the instructions that I m getting is to store energy, not use energy, I want to keep my stored energy for when there s a time that there s no food.
2
SPEAKER_01
The problem, of course, is that there s never a time there s no food, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
Every day is the same.
2
SPEAKER_01
Same thing, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
14 hours of eating and no time of not eating.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that s the point.
2
SPEAKER_01
So now if you understand the problem, you can say, well, how am I going to change this?
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, it s simple.
2
SPEAKER_01
Increase the amount of time that you re not eating.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that s all intermittent fasting is.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you eat one meal a day, for example, or if you eat within an eight hour window or a four hour window or whatever,
2
SPEAKER_01
What you re doing is you re simply allowing your body to use the calories that have been stored, which is body fat predominantly.
2
SPEAKER_01
But that is precisely the reason you carry body fat.
2
SPEAKER_01
Like that body fat is not there for looks.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s there for you to use, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
And that s the whole point.
2
SPEAKER_01
What s so bad about using it?
2
SPEAKER_01
If you don t eat, you re going to burn it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, so again, go back to the 70s and everybody says, oh, you can t fast.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can t fast.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, you know, they re eating breakfast, lunch, dinner.
2
SPEAKER_01
And if you re a naughty boy, you got sent to bed without dinner.
2
SPEAKER_01
So you went from 12 o clock to 8 a.m.
2
SPEAKER_01
20 hours.
2
SPEAKER_02
You look good the next day.
2
SPEAKER_02
You re like a queen, you got a six pack, it s burning fat.
2
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
2
SPEAKER_01
And nobody died, nothing bad happens, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
There was nothing wrong with that.
2
SPEAKER_01
And hopefully you learned your lesson too, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
And that s the whole point, is that there s nothing wrong.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s a natural part of our human physiology.
2
SPEAKER_01
If we couldn t survive without eating, like we would not be here today.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because when we were cavemen and cavewomen,
2
SPEAKER_00
They didn t have food every day.
2
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
2
SPEAKER_01
They, they couldn t, they, there might be a stretch of three, four or five days where there was no food and therefore they had to survive on their own body fat, which they did.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that was the whole point.
2
SPEAKER_01
So let s let our body, you know, use it because that s the most natural thing to do.
2
SPEAKER_02
What s the process for you?
2
SPEAKER_02
So your day to day life, do you eat one meal a day, two meals a day?
2
SPEAKER_02
Do you fast every month for a day?
2
SPEAKER_02
Are you always doing intermittent fasting?
2
SPEAKER_02
Is there a downside to intermittent fasting?
2
SPEAKER_02
What s your process?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I usually do a lot of sort of, uh, I rarely eat breakfast and I ll tell you that it didn t come.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I started this in medical school and that was mostly because I really wanted to just roll out of bed and go like, you know, I d wake up literally like five minutes before I left the door.
2
SPEAKER_01
I brushed my teeth, put on some clothes and rolled out the door.
2
SPEAKER_01
I was,
2
SPEAKER_01
It s just the way I was, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
And so I don t eat breakfast now because again, people say you have to eat breakfast, you have to eat, but there s actually nothing magical about breakfast.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you don t eat breakfast, what s going to happen?
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, my body, which is now burning fat because I ve had eight hours of sleep, it s gone into sort of fat burning mode because that s the storage form of calories or it s burning sugar.
2
SPEAKER_01
it s just going to keep doing it, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
There s nothing wrong with it.
2
SPEAKER_01
So a lot of times I try and confine myself to sort of an eating window of sort of six to eight hours.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then once in a while, when I get very busy, I will do a 24 hour fast, which is a one meal a day.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then every so often I ll do a longer fast.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the longer fasts are actually not as bad as you might think, but they really disrupt your schedule sort of socially.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s a tough one because
2
SPEAKER_01
a lot of our socialization happens at meals.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I often have dinner with my family, for example, and doing those longer fasts is really, really disruptive to that sort of thing, which is why when you look at traditional societies, like if you look at say, you know, during major religions, for example, there will be a period of fasting that s sort of universal.
2
SPEAKER_01
So, you know, everyone s doing it.
2
SPEAKER_01
So no one s feeling exactly because they smell the food.
2
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
2
SPEAKER_01
So if it s like Good Friday or during Lent or during Ramadan for Muslims or, you know, during Yom Kippur for Jews or whatever, everybody s fasting.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it s actually terrifically easy because you re not disrupting the sort of social fabric of your life there.
2
SPEAKER_01
Whereas nowadays, if you fast, and I ve done this, it s just really hard to do.
2
SPEAKER_01
Physically, it s not hard, but it s hard.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I do it mostly, you know, when I ve gained a bit of weight, usually after the holidays and after a vacation, I will
2
SPEAKER_01
sort of schedule a longer fast right after because I know that I can lose that weight very quickly.
2
SPEAKER_01
But that means I can enjoy myself like a couple years ago, I went on a cruise and really ate too much.
2
SPEAKER_01
Just a lot.
2
SPEAKER_01
I had a lot and I knew it then I could feel it in my pants were tight.
2
SPEAKER_01
and stuff.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I did sort of a three or four day fast.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I ll tell you, by the next week, I was back to my normal weight.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s great, because a week and but I got to enjoy the whole week prior, where I really didn t look at what I was eating, or how often I was eating or anything.
2
SPEAKER_01
I was like, this is my vacation, I m doing this.
2
SPEAKER_01
And at the same time, I know, hey, I ve got this next, you know, after this week, the week after, you know, very little to eat.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it gives you a great tool
2
SPEAKER_01
to use if you need it, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s almost like either every day don t indulge and balance and create a schedule where you re only eating in a certain window of time, whether it be four, six, eight hours, which I m hearing is kind of the, uh, which would be a great standard to have between four and eight hours of a feeding time.
2
SPEAKER_02
Is that right?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, if you want to lose weight, you can do very well, of course, with a sort of standard 70s style, sort of 8am to 6pm, which in a 14 hour fast, every single night.
2
SPEAKER_01
Remember, they re doing a 12 to 14 hours a day, every single night without even thinking about it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Like that s a secret because they don t even think about that.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s just a period of time that they re not eating, right.
2
SPEAKER_01
But now, of course,
3
SPEAKER_00
the traditions are different.
3
SPEAKER_00
You can eat anywhere you want.
3
SPEAKER_00
You can eat in the theater, you can eat at your desk, you can eat in the car.
3
SPEAKER_00
Like in the 70s, stuff like that didn t exist.
3
SPEAKER_00
You didn t eat in a meeting in a boardroom, for example.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now you go to a meeting in a boardroom when there s food everywhere, there s donuts.
3
SPEAKER_00
Donuts and cookies, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Somebody s ordered a plate of bagels or something like that, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like, well, why?
3
SPEAKER_00
We re having a meeting here, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
So that s the thing.
3
SPEAKER_00
So you can do very well with that kind of eight hour eating window, 10 hour eating window.
3
SPEAKER_00
You can do very well with it.
3
SPEAKER_00
But if you re not doing well, then you can extend it.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that s the beauty of it.
3
SPEAKER_00
You could extend it as much as you want.
3
SPEAKER_00
So if you think about fasting, you could go three days, you could go five days, you could go 30 days.
3
SPEAKER_00
People do that all the time.
3
SPEAKER_00
But- No food.
3
SPEAKER_00
No food, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
So if you think about fasting, so the amount of energy that you need, so a pound of fat has 3,500 calories roughly.
3
SPEAKER_00
If you need about 1,800 calories, so that s for like a regular person, not like an athlete or somebody who s working out a lot.
3
SPEAKER_00
It takes about half a pound of fat per day.
3
SPEAKER_00
So if you re dealing with a lot of obese people, like 100 pounds overweight, you could go 200 days.
3
SPEAKER_00
If you want to lose 100 pounds, you could go 200 days without eating before you get- And survive.
3
SPEAKER_00
And survive, exactly.
3
SPEAKER_00
And be okay.
3
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
3
SPEAKER_00
Be perfectly fine because this is a very efficient, fat is an efficient store of calories, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
It s very efficient.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s why we developed this.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s to keep you alive when there s no food around.
3
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
3
SPEAKER_01
So use it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Does it affect your digestive system?
3
SPEAKER_01
Does it mess with your metabolism if you don t eat after a certain amount of time?
3
SPEAKER_01
And what happens when you start eating again?
3
SPEAKER_01
Does that affect your, again, your stomach, your intestines, your
3
SPEAKER_01
your metabolism, what s affected there?
3
SPEAKER_00
And this is the interesting part is that everybody thinks that fasting is like the worst thing you can do when you actually look at the science of what happens during fasting is actually one of the best things you can do for yourself from both a mental standpoint and a physiologic standpoint.
3
SPEAKER_00
Assuming of course, you re not malnourished, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I m assuming if you re the average American who s, you know, 10, 20, 30 pounds overweight,
3
SPEAKER_00
then this is something that actually has a lot of benefits.
3
SPEAKER_00
So there s a lot of sort of myths around it.
3
SPEAKER_00
One is that you re going to burn a lot of muscle.
3
SPEAKER_00
And the truth is that you don t.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, when you, you know, if your body, your body stores energy as body fat, so people say, oh, you re going to burn muscle.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like, well, you ve got to think that our body is so stupid that it stores energy as fat.
3
SPEAKER_00
But the minute you need it, it starts burning muscle, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Like, why would our body be so stupid?
3
SPEAKER_00
And if it were so stupid, how did we survive, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s like, you know, if you save firewood for the winter, and then as soon as it gets cold, you chop up your sofa and throw it into the fire.
3
SPEAKER_00
Like, why would you be so stupid, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Our body s just the same.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s not that.
3
SPEAKER_00
So you know, and I know, and everybody knows that the way that you build muscle is that you exercise, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
So if you have, you know, lift heavy weights,
3
SPEAKER_00
then your muscles become stronger.
3
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t become stronger because you eat, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
That thing does nothing for building muscle.
3
SPEAKER_00
Like otherwise we d be, you know, the strongest nation on earth, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
But we re not, we re the fattest nation on earth.
3
SPEAKER_00
So that s the whole problem, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you re confusing two completely different things.
3
SPEAKER_00
There is a point during fasting where there is a little bit of protein breakdown.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that s where people get very confused and say, well, you re burning muscle, but you re not protein is not the same as muscle.
3
SPEAKER_00
So our body has all kinds of protein, including all the connective tissue, like the skin and stuff that holds stuff in place.
3
SPEAKER_00
And some of that is often burned off.
3
SPEAKER_00
So for example, when you look at those shows where people get surgery and they lose 150 pounds, they get all this flappy skin, that s not excess fat, that s excess protein.
3
SPEAKER_00
So that s, you know, it s functional tissue that you ve never used up.
3
SPEAKER_00
So we actually see very little of that problem when people fast because there s a small period of time where they re actually using up the protein, your body will maintain its musculature based on what exercises stuff you re using.
3
SPEAKER_00
So another big myth, muscle burning is one thing.
3
SPEAKER_00
The other big, big myth is people talk about
3
SPEAKER_00
as starvation mode or metabolic rate.
3
SPEAKER_00
So metabolic rate is the amount of energy that your body uses in a day, the number of calories you burn in a day.
3
SPEAKER_00
And this is what we see if you simply cut calories.
3
SPEAKER_00
So this is a standard medical advice, cut 500 calories a day, and you ll lose a pound of fat a week.
3
SPEAKER_00
What happens, of course, is that you cut 500 calories a day, and then your body quickly reduces the amount of calories it uses by about 500 calories.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now, you re actually not losing any weight.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s what happens all the time.
3
SPEAKER_00
Why does it stop burning those calories?
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, it stops burning the calories by reducing its metabolic rate.
3
SPEAKER_00
So the metabolic rate is the energy that your body uses to say generate body heat, your liver, your kidney, your heart, and so on.
3
SPEAKER_00
We ve known this for 100 years, that if you simply restrict the number of calories, but keep the foods very similar, what happens is that your body is going to start using less.
3
SPEAKER_00
So because it doesn t like running a deficit, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
It s just like
3
SPEAKER_00
If you normally make $100,000 a year and you spend $100,000 a year, now you make $50,000, you don t keep spending $100,000, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
You re going to get thrown into jail.
3
SPEAKER_00
So you reduce your expenditure.
3
SPEAKER_00
Same as a body.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it s getting less, so it s going to use less.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that s the natural reaction.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s important because it s a survival response.
3
SPEAKER_00
It cannot do anything different.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it s almost like you need to be extreme in your use in order for it to burn and kill off these cells that might be harmful to you.
3
SPEAKER_01
But if you just do a little bit, I m gonna eat a little bit less today, it s not gonna be that much.
3
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t work.
3
SPEAKER_00
And people assume that if you go to zero, which is fasting, say you fast for a full day, you have zero calories, you don t die, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Because what happens is completely different.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now you ve lowered your insulin, so you re changing the hormonal profile of the body.
3
SPEAKER_00
And as you do that, you re now switching fuel sources.
3
SPEAKER_00
So instead of using food as your fuel, you re switching it into your body fat, just like those hybrid cars where you go from gas to electric, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
So it s using food,
3
SPEAKER_00
And then boom, it goes, Okay, I have no food coming in, I need to switch over now into body fat.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then it goes, Whoa, I have like 500,000 calories of body fat here.
3
SPEAKER_00
So why do I need to cut cut it down?
3
SPEAKER_00
And the point is that it doesn t because assuming if you have no body fat, of course, it s a problem.
3
SPEAKER_00
But for people who have adequate stores of body fat, which is most of us, and truthfully, most people do it for weight loss.
3
SPEAKER_00
too much body fat, then what happens is that there s so much there, why wouldn t you use it?
3
SPEAKER_00
Because it s a fuel source.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s all it is.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s the way you have to look at the body fat.
3
SPEAKER_00
If you re eating all the time, you can never use your body fat.
3
SPEAKER_00
Because your insulin s here, your insulin s high, you re using food, then you get hungry, so you eat some more, right, you have a snack, you have a low fat muffin.
3
SPEAKER_00
You stay here.
3
SPEAKER_00
You can only burn food.
3
SPEAKER_00
All that stuff over there, those 500,000 calories of body fat are completely inaccessible for your body.
3
SPEAKER_00
So if you simply dial it down like this and say, okay, instead of 2000 calories, I m going to eat 1500, but I m going to eat 10 times a day, keeping myself here.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now you only have 1500 coming in, you can only burn 1500.
3
SPEAKER_00
You can t access that.
3
SPEAKER_00
If you go to zero, you go boom, and then your body burns the full 2000.
3
SPEAKER_00
So they did a study, for example, where they took people and fasted them for four days and measured how many calories they re using.
3
SPEAKER_00
They also measure their vo2, which, as you know, is something that it s a measure of how much cellular work your body is doing.
3
SPEAKER_00
And what they found, so they measured the metabolic rate at time zero, then they measured it at four days of zero food.
3
SPEAKER_00
And they were burning 10% more calories than they were per day than they were when they were eating.
3
SPEAKER_00
The vo2 was 10% higher, you re doing more work.
3
SPEAKER_00
body is actually not shutting down is revving itself up.
3
SPEAKER_00
And again, there s a good physiologic reason for that.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we know that when insulin goes down, when you switch yourself into this sort of, you know, mode that you re burning fat, other hormones go up, including your sympathetic nervous system, which is your noradrenaline.
3
SPEAKER_00
So you re actually pumping your body up.
3
SPEAKER_00
The reason for that is sort of again, it s a survival response.
3
SPEAKER_00
So imagine again, we re caveman, and it s winter, and there s no food.
3
SPEAKER_00
So if you don t eat for two days, and you get weaker, you re never dying again, you re gonna die because every day is gonna be harder, you re gonna circle the drain.
3
SPEAKER_00
So our body s just not that stupid, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
So what they do is that your body says, okay, there s no food coming in, boom, I m gonna switch you over to body fat and then I m gonna pump you up so that you have energy, you go out there, you go kill that woolly mammoth.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re focused, you re clear, you re in the zone, everything.
3
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that s the reason that we actually pump ourselves up.
3
SPEAKER_00
And the mental aspects is actually fascinating because people also say, well, I have to eat because I have to concentrate
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like your concentration is actually much higher when you don t eat.
4
SPEAKER_00
Think about when you had a huge Thanksgiving meal.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, were you really sharp?
4
SPEAKER_00
Or did you really want to just lie down on the sofa and watch some football?
4
SPEAKER_00
Right?
4
SPEAKER_00
You don t have any sort of focus.
4
SPEAKER_00
But if you think about animals, it s the same thing.
4
SPEAKER_00
Lions, they just eat, they just like lounging around.
4
SPEAKER_00
But if you re the hungry wolf,
4
SPEAKER_00
that is not that is a very dangerous animal, because he s focused, he s ready to kill you.
4
SPEAKER_00
Same thing for us, our level of concentration, our mental ability, mental agility goes up significantly when we re hungry.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like if you think, oh, you re hungry for this, hungry for that, that doesn t mean you re falling down lethargic, it means you re focused.
4
SPEAKER_00
so it s interesting because there is this book a few years ago called unbroken which is a biography of this fellow who got he went to a prisoner of war camp in world war ii japan and he s talking about starvation and he they were literally starving like there s they eat like almost nothing for the full day
4
SPEAKER_00
And he s talking about how his other prisoners were doing these incredible mental feats.
4
SPEAKER_00
So one guy was reading a book entirely from memory.
4
SPEAKER_00
Another guy learned all of Norwegian in a week.
4
SPEAKER_00
So the guy says this is simply the mental clarity of starvation.
4
SPEAKER_00
So it was incredible.
4
SPEAKER_00
It was so widespread.
4
SPEAKER_00
Everybody was starving and they d see these incredible feats that nobody else in the world could do all the time because your mental ability is ramped up to such a high degree.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then, you know, in the ancient Greece, the ancient mathematician Pythagoras, he would require his students to fast.
4
SPEAKER_01
How many calories should we be eating a day?
4
SPEAKER_01
What s like a healthy range?
4
SPEAKER_02
You know what s funny about this?
4
SPEAKER_02
Your body is actually pretty good at telling you how much to eat.
4
SPEAKER_02
The problem is, I know people watching right now are probably like, what are you talking about?
4
SPEAKER_02
That s not true.
4
SPEAKER_02
It is.
4
SPEAKER_02
The problem is we eat foods, about 70% of our diets are made up of foods that have been engineered carefully,
4
SPEAKER_02
Engineered to make us overeat and there s a lot of money in science that goes into doing this ultra processed foods are Very powerful at making us overeat snack foods with salt and sugar and yeah just a combination of things that I mean everything from the texture to the mouth feel and
4
SPEAKER_02
They re so good.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_02
Just how it affects your body.
4
SPEAKER_02
So they ve done some really good studies on this.
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They ve done studies where they ll take groups of people and not too many controlled studies in diet.
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So these are really good.
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They actually put them in a lab and they say, you guys over here, eat as much as you want.
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You guys over here, eat as much as you want.
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This group over here has whole natural foods.
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This group over here has ultra-processed foods.
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And they even control for the macro.
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So proteins, fats, and carbs are pretty similar.
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Then they take the groups and they switch them.
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Okay on average and now we have multiple studies to show this People will eat about 600 more calories a day for meeting ultra processed foods.
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So to give another example if I were to put Five or six plain boiled potatoes.
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No salt.
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No butter.
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Nothing just plain boiled potatoes in front of you And I told you to eat them in 30 minutes be really hard for you after the second or third potato You d be gagging you d hit power potatoes.
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Yes, just plain right, but if they gave you a family-sized bag of potato chips Oh, yeah
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which has... Crushed the whole bag with like 2,000 calories or something.
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Which has similar amounts of food in it, actually more calories because of the oil, you d be able to eat them.
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That s the power of ultra-processed foods and how palatable they are.
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So I used to do this with my clients, simply telling people the following, eat as much as you want, just avoid ultra-processed foods.
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You would typically see a 10 to 15 pound weight loss.
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Wow.
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Just from that.
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If you re eating whole foods, there s only so much you can eat.
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You hit palate fatigue faster.
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It s far more satiating.
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You just eat more appropriately.
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Our bodies, there s this myth that we re wired to overeat.
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We re just wired to just eat like crazy and just become obese.
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That s not true.
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We re not wired to do that.
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Overeating was just as bad for us thousands of years ago as it was today.
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I mean, you could have digestive issues.
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You could have died from that.
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Our bodies are pretty good at regulating.
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This is more complex than what I m saying, but these particular foods make you overeat.
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Simply avoiding them and even telling yourself, I ll eat as much as I want of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, meats, you know, foods that have one or two ingredients, right?
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You ll find that your average calorie intake will probably decrease by about five to six hundred, some people even more.
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A day?
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A day.
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Wow.
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On average.
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And that equals weight.
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That s it.
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Yeah.
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That s it.
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And then if you want to take it even a step further, if you add to that, here s a couple behavioral things that you could do that make that even more effective.
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Whole natural foods, I m not going to limit myself.
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And I like saying this because when we re in the mindset of limiting ourselves, it plays a lot of tricks on us and it s really hard.
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So don t limit yourself to eat all natural foods.
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And then here s a second one.
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Don t eat while distracted.
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In other words when you eat don t be on your phone Don t watch TV.
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Just sit down and eat your meal Why that results in about 10% reduction in caloric intake just from doing that alone.
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Why is that?
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We re not in tune with our bodies signals of satiety.
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We re not focused and present on the food, right?
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So we re distracted and we just keep eating and eating and eating
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Yes, we actually eat faster doing it that way as well.
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So what happens is the signal of satiety doesn t get registered quite as quickly when we re distracted.
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Also, being distracted could cause emotional changes, stress, anxiety, whatever, which also can create bad relationships with nutrition.
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One of the worst things you could do is eat while watching stressful news or something like that.
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If you eat more, you ll be stressed out.
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Absolutely, right?
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So that s the second one.
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And they sound so simple, but they make such a huge impact on people.
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A third one you could do even, and this was another really easy one, is when you eat your meals, eat the protein first.
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Over the vegetables?
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Everything.
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Just eat the protein first, then eat everything else.
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Why is that?
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Protein is, in comparison to carbohydrates and fats, very satiating.
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So it produces a lot of satiety, right?
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It satisfies you.
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And the second reason is...and we now have what are called CGMs, right?
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Continual Glucose Monitors.
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The data on them is coming back and it s pretty clear that if you eat protein first, the spike in blood sugar... Yeah, it s blunted.
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Now why is that important?
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A spike and then subsequent drop in blood sugar tends to promote cravings.
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It tends to make us want to eat more to get that blood sugar back up.
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So eating the protein first tends to result in, through the satiety and through the blunting effects of blood sugar, tends to produce better satiety and make us eat less.
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So those are three things right there, Lewis, that if people just did those three things and didn t say to themselves, I gotta restrict, I gotta cut, I gotta whatever, they would find over time that they would just start to lose weight and they would eat more appropriately.
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That s not working out more, that s not moving your body more, that s just through nutritional eating.
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Yes, and to speak about moving more,
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The burning calories approach to weight loss is a losing... Really?
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Total losing strategy.
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Oh, yeah, the data on that is very clear.
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Burning calories manually, our bodies do a terrific job of adapting and of... Storing fat, you re saying.
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And slowing down its calorie burn.
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We have a range within our current lean body mass, okay?
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We have a range of calories our bodies can burn.
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So there s like more efficient, less efficient.
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And burning calories manually, at first, your body s burning more calories.
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But eventually, your body knows how to make up for that and make you burn less calories.
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So the studies on tons of exercise for weight loss are pretty clear.
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It s a terrible approach.
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Now, it s not to say you don t get health benefits from moving more.
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You still get health benefits.
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But from a weight loss perspective, it s a terrible strategy.
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Now, there are some forms of exercise, one in particular.
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that can boost metabolic rate.
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What s that?
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Strength training.
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Lifting, yeah.
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Strength training is very effective.
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There was a study done with modern hunter-gatherers, the Hadza tribe of northern Tanzania.
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So they live the way that humans lived thousands of years ago, right?
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So they don t have electronics.
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They hunt, they gather.
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In comparison to the average Westerner, they re very active.
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Scientists went studied them and through some pretty sophisticated testing tested their metabolic rates How many calories are they burning every single day?
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And what they found was they were burning Generally same amount of calories as the average Western couch potato.
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Really?
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Yeah, and now you think at first well, that s crazy They re moving so much, but actually it makes sense our bodies would not have if we burned 6,000 calories a day as hunter-gatherers We wouldn t be here
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Six thousand calories in a hunter-gatherer society is hard to come by.
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So our bodies learn to adapt.
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Now strength training, on the other hand, tends to have a different effect.
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The main adaptation with strength training is to build muscle, the side effect of which is, and if you fuel it, you have to also feed your body appropriately to do this.
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But if you feed your body properly and strength train, the tendency is for the metabolism to boost or to go up.
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So you can see through this process and I ve done this many, many times with people where they ll come and hire me, we ll lose 30 pounds and we can eat more.
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At the end of this process than we did before the process more calories or just more food all of it.
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Yeah, which May lose fat.
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Oh, yeah, they re leaner.
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They re leaner.
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They have a little bit more lean body mass five to ten pounds depending on male or female
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but they re burning more calories than they went into.
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Now, why is this important?
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Well, it s a great buffer.
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If you have a fast metabolism today, this is a wonderful buffer against the challenges of modern living, which is sedentary and food everywhere, super accessible.
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So fast metabolism today is an asset whereas 10,000 years ago it might have been a liability.
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So strength training does that.
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Now strength training doesn t burn as many calories as like running, but remember I said that really doesn t make a big difference because your body learns to adapt to that anyway.
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But the strength training does contribute to a faster metabolism over time or at the very least
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help prevent or mitigate the metabolic adaptation or slowdown that tends to happen when we reduce calories to lose weight.
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And then there s more to that.
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Because of the muscle-building process, you see the balancing of hormones that we re all kind of looking for.
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Like in men, you see more testosterone.
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Higher androgen receptor density.
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This is what testosterone attaches to you see more appropriate levels of cortisol a balancing of estrogen progesterone in women growth hormone tends to be more youthful because When I tell my body to build muscle my body organizes its hormones in a way to do so and the hormone profile that contributes to muscle building is
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Just so happens to be the youthful hormone profile sure that we re looking for interesting So I tend to when I recommend exercise to people average person who I know like, okay Maybe we ll get them to do this two days a week, you know, if we do a good job I tell them if you re gonna pick just one form do strength training It s gonna be the most effective one And then if you add something else then it d be great if you added some cardiovascular and some mobility or flexibility training Wow
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So if you can only choose one, strength training or cardio, you re saying strength training all day.
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100%.
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100%.
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Building muscle.
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Yeah.
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It s far more protective.
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It s going to boost your metabolism, which will make being obese harder.
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It balances out your hormones better.
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Muscle sticks around longer than the calorie burning effects of whatever you re getting from the form of exercise.
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Once you stop your workout, there s the calorie burn, which like I said earlier, your body adapts to anyway.
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But when you build muscle, it sticks around for a little while before you start to lose it.
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And you develop something called muscle memory, which I know you understand as an athlete, right?
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Have you ever broken a bone or anything like that?
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Okay.
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You know, you take the cast off, muscle super, or your arms.
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But very quickly it bounces back.
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There s something called muscle memory.
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So if you build muscle,
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and let s say you stop for whatever reason exercising, and then you go back to working out, you ll gain that muscle back in a small fraction of the time.
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So it s a more, for lack of a better term, because there s no permanence when it comes to this, but it s a more permanent form of results or fitness, which just so happens to fit perfectly with the challenges of modern life.
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When you look at the average person and you re saying, okay, what are the challenges that are preventing them from being healthier?
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I m surrounded by tons of food.
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I m inactive.
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Is there something that can protect me against inactivity, which muscle does very well?
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Hormone imbalances now are rampant.
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And there s going to be times when even the most
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Consistent average person not fitness fanatic is gonna not work out for a month or two Is there something that ll help them bounce back faster strength training?
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Just just it just tends to do that What about training where it s half strength training and half cardio?
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It s like, you know, I can orange theory or I guess we re doing like 20 30 minutes of lifting kind of like in between different sets maybe not to failure or fatigue, but
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Intense, you know lifting and then some three miles of running with intervals.
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What does that do for the body for weight loss for?
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Metabolism.
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Yeah, so I want to be clear all forms of exercise so long as they re applied appropriately are gonna benefit you So all forms of exercise have benefit so long as they re not overdone or inappropriate for the individual so that being said
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Strength training needs to be in order to reap the real benefits of strength training.
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It has to be applied in a particular way Otherwise it ends up becoming cardio with weights.
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Mm-hmm.
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So if I did it like a bunch of circuits
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Even though I m doing curls and presses and rows, really what I m doing is just a lot of cardio.
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I m just using weights.
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If you really want to reap the benefits of strength training, you want to train in the way that builds strength and muscle.
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Now, I do want to be careful because I m probably invoking images of bodybuilders with veins coming out of their neck.
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You mentioned it, right?
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Intensity, failure, lifting, whatever.
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what most people need to do, okay?
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Most people would derive tremendous benefits if they went to the gym and strength trained and they did traditional do a set, rest for a minute, do a set, rest for a minute, but the way that they did their set was practice.
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So, the exercise as a skill, that s what we re going to look at.
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So, rather than I m going to go in here to beat up my legs, I m going to go practice squats.
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rather than I m gonna go hammer my shoulders, I m gonna practice overhead presses.
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This tends to lead to more appropriate applications of exercise, and you see a more consistent strength gains, more consistent muscle gains, and far less risk injury.
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So intensity, although it s an important factor to manipulate, people over-apply it.
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They think that- You have a failure on everything.
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Yeah, no, no, no, no, that s not the case.
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Like I said earlier, you need to have more energy at the end of your workout.
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And you probably shouldn t feel sore or if you do feel a little sore the day after.
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And so for most people that s just like go in and get really good and practice these exercises that we know to be very effective.
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You re squatting, you re dead lifting, you re rowing, you re pressing, maybe some kind of a split stance exercise like a lunge, some kind of rotation.
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And just practice them and get good at them.
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And naturally over time people will apply more intensity, add more load,
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They ll see the results that come from that but that s a very very It s a much more effective long-term approach versus the go-to-the-gym-beat-myself-up right attitude.
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Yeah, what about I m sure you ve answered this I don t know a thousand times but you know belly fat seems to be the thing a lot of people want to eliminate, right?
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Is there a formula for eliminating belly fat?
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Yeah, so or can you do it lots of different ways or what s what s the best approach to doing it?
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Yeah, so for the most part where we store or lose body fat is determined by our genetics.
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So a good rule of thumb is The first place that I store it is probably going to be the last place that I lose it now that being said
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Hormonal changes can change the distribution of body fat on your body.
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So if you see women with very, very high cortisol, estrogen, progesterone imbalances, they ll start to notice more belly fat than they normally would.
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Men whose, let s say, testosterone is low, estrogen level s maybe too high, they ll see more body fat level, more body fat storage in maybe the upper body, back of the arms, maybe in the lower body.
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So you ll start to see different patterns.
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But that s really a small percentage of where we tend to store body fat.
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It s largely determined by genetics.
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So the question is how do I get rid of body fat?
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Well, it s the same way that you get rid of any body fat.
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You have to create an energy imbalance.
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Which to put it simply, and again, it s more complex than this, but to put it simply, you have to be able to burn more calories than you take in.
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And we already talked about some of the effective ways of that.
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But if you can burn more than you take in, then you ll see body fat loss as a result.
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And building muscle is a great way to make that formula work for you.
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Because if you don t, what ends up happening is
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You cut calories.
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You do tons and tons of cardio.
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You cut calories.
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You lose 15 pounds.
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You re stuck.
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Okay, I guess I got to cut calories more.
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And you lose muscle too.
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Well, that s what happens, right?
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Your body s adapting.
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So you end up losing some muscle.
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So now you got to cut even more to lose that next 10 pounds.
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And then at the end of it, it s like, okay, I m eating 1,300 calories a day to maintain this 25-pound weight loss.
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This is unsustainable.
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And then you gain it back.
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So what you want to do is you want to say, okay,
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I definitely want to eat healthier, but not so little that I can t fuel muscle growth, and I want to strength train so that I can get my metabolism to learn how to burn more calories on its own, and then the process looks more like a snowball effect rather than this quick weight loss with plateau.
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So you start to see the scale move a little bit, and then it happens faster and faster and faster, and then you feel better.
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I like to communicate this as well, which is, especially to women, muscle is a lot more dense than body fat, so don t get too obsessed.
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with the scale, you know, if I could have everybody watching this lose 10 pounds of body fat and gain 10 pounds of muscle, their weight on the scale wouldn t change, but everybody would be smaller.
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And their body composition would look a lot better too.
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Oh, you re gonna look different, but you re gonna be smaller because body fat just takes up more space.
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I used to have this trainer that worked for me.
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I used to love this.
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This was a great sales technique when I was a general manager.
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I d have, if I had a new member, especially a woman who, you know, was apprehensive to lifting weights,
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I would invite this trainer that worked for me, and I d say, if you could guess her body weight within 10 pounds,
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I ll give you a free membership for a month. 
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And she was very petite.
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She was like 5 1 or whatever.
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And they would always guess like, oh, she s 100 pounds.
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She s 110 pounds.
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And I d get her on the scale and she was 130 pounds.
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And it would prove my point.
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Like, she has a lot of muscle, but she s small because muscle is very dense.
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I hope you enjoyed today s episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness.
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Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today s episode with all the important links.
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And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel exclusively on Apple podcasts.
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Share this with a friend on social media, and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well.
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Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review.
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I really love hearing feedback from you, and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward.
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And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately, that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.
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And now, it s time to go out there and do something great.