I would like to say all praises due to Allah, the first and the last, the inward and the outward, the beautiful, the magnificent, the majestic, the provider, the protector, the one who guides us all. Always we start with praising Allah Jalla Jalaluhu and you know in reality no one is there permanently except Allah SWT and we will all vanish and we'll all go just like our parents and grandparents and just like our children and grandchildren will also grow. So this is beautiful, this is amazing, this feels good. How did we end up with this? Because of Allah. So love Allah for everything that you enjoy in your life and these things that you don't enjoy the source of pain, ask Allah SWT to give you meaning for that pain, to give you patience to deal with that pain and consistency, to give you reward so that pain is gone for nothing, it's rewarded and at that point that pain will become a joy, right? So brothers and sisters, we want to remember Allah and fill our hearts with the remembrance of Allah and say thank you Allah, thank you Allah, thank you for everything and thank you for the greatest ni'mah which is the ni'mah of Islam that is helping us to be positive and to be productive and to have a purpose and to have a meaning. We also thank you Ya Allah and we drive from your love the love of the Prophet SAW and this is what the Prophet said love Allah because of his blessings on you, love me for the love of Allah, right? So who sent us Prophet Muhammad SAW? Allah. Who sent us Al-Quran Al-Kareem, his word to communicate with him? Allah. Who sent us an Islam as a way of life, positive, productive, meaningful, focused, amazing way of life? Allah. Who created the heavens and the earth for us? Allah. Who gave us a body? Allah. Who made us smart, educated, make money? Who gave us that money? Allah. So fill your heart with Allah's love and always reserve a place in your heart for Allah that no one else shares. That's the essence of Tawheed, that's La ilaha illallah. From that love comes another love which is the love of the Prophet SAW. And quickly I just want to address two points. I see a lot of young people here, alhamdulillah, and the way I understand the meaning of the word young, anyone who's ready to change to become a better person, fast, quick, with agility is young. Who's young? The one who's willing to change, excited to change, want to change, want to become better? You're young even if you're 60 or 80. Very good news. Who's old? The one who said this is the way I am? Take it or leave it. I don't change. By Allah you're old even if you're 16 or 18. You know why we call old people old because they don't change. They're set in their own ways. You know what we have today? Old people, young and young people. Old so get out of it. I look in your faces, I'm sorry. I see our old aunties and uncles, their faces zero wrinkles. I look at the young 16, a thousand wrinkles. What's wrong? Change. It starts from here. So I say to all of us, inshaAllah, let's approach this and you know understand that the idea of a role model. I see the young people sometimes don't relate. Maybe we were lucky. We saw our parents. We grew up in a Muslim country. The Prophet, the Prophet, we are in love. We cry and our youngsters looking at us and they're not getting it. I'm gonna inshaAllah help you to get it. What do you like? Do you like basketball? It's natural for us human beings to have role models.  You see someone who plays basketball very well. You say, oh my god, I want to be like him. He becomes your role model or you already like basketball and then you look at someone who will play basketball very well. You say I want to become like him. Who do you like? Stephen Carey? Kobe Bryant? My generation is Michael Jordan. Carl Malone. You know the mailman? Come on, but nobody knows these people. 1995 to 2000 they were playing amazing and they're still some of the greatest players. So your generation having a role model is part of our psychology. Remember when you were a kid, you're always looking at your mom and dad.   It's part of the human psychology. You grow up a little bit up to age 13 and then suddenly you start looking at your friends.  No, no, no, like that friend. Oh, no, no, no, like he's funny. Oh, she's amazing. Oh, she's a... I want to be like this. I want to be like this naturally. This is what happens to you without you thinking. You grow up and it depends what you want to do in life. You know, in high school everybody's applying for colleges.  I'm not missing anything because you have role models around you. People in college start getting snapped by companies. You're like, I want to be snatched by a company too. I want to become a doctor too. I want to become an engineer. I want to become a lawyer. I want to become a businessman. If you want to start up a company, you start, oh my god, I need to read the life of Steve Jobs. I need to read the life of Bill Gates. I need to read the life of Elon Musk. I need to read the life of this and that. Depends who's this. This is natural. This is part of being a human. You always will have a role model, whether you know it or not. The question is, all of these role models are in their small space, in their whatever you're trying. But we human beings need an ultimate role model. You know what happened with Elon Musk? A couple weeks ago, a month ago, he lied to make people buy the stocks. They caught him. They fired him from the board of directors, but they kept him the executive director, right? He's disputing. You get it? He's an amazing startup company, but he lied. Do you want to be like that? So that's one thing that you want to get in your head. Why the Prophet SAW? Why did Allah send the messenger? Because it's part of being a human that you grow up always looking for role models. Whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not, whether you believe in it or not, this is what's happening in your life. You don't live in a vacuum.  Number one, are we clear? Are we cool? That's why we have what? A role model. Number two, who's it today? Who's it? The amazing role model. Someone who started from humble beginnings and made so much money, became very successful in the world of business, right or wrong. And these people have an amazing life. Even though they are running a big company, they still have an amazing hobbies and they do amazing things. Like what? They are mountain hikers, rock climbers, cave campers, and they do yoga. This is it today, 2018, 2019. Who's it? Oh my God, these people have time to do all of this, and they're amazing in time management, and they make it big. And still when they make it big inside their company, they act humble, like they're nobody. Oh my God, that makes people even more attracted to them. Who's it today? These people, when they eat, they eat different. They eat special. They have something called raw food diet. They have something called no calorie diet. They have something called, you know, eating one type of food diet. They have something, they go sometimes when they eat meat, they eat meat out. They're just amazing. They're just something different. They're amazing. And these people, like they're, they do different things and, and they're, and then they're, they have ideas and then when they make a lot of money, then they go and make some charity like Bill Gates and all of that. Everything I said right now is nothing but a description of Prophet Muhammad SAW. Who's the mountain hiker, rock climber, cave camper? That's the mountain of Herat right there. Today with stairs, it takes you an hour with breaks to go to Herat. Take the stairs out. Good luck reaching up there. Who's the one that his wife said from the crescent to the crescent to the crescent? We never let a fire to cook food. They still were eating, but they were not eating cooked food. You know what you call that? Raw food diet. You know what's the problem? We're not impressed by our own profits. We're impressed by everything. Any magazine, you'll pick it up. This diet, oh my god, this person, I want to try that one, but we're not impressed with our own profit. Who's the one who was doing meditation when no one else was doing meditation? The Prophet SAW said first, ibadah in Islam. Who's the one that connected with nature and nature spoke to him and he spoke to nature? You know the rock in Makkah? The Prophet is 10-12 years old. As-salamu alaikum Ya Rasulallah. He used to get scared and run away. A rock saying As-salamu alaikum. What is it? What's As-salamu alaikum? Still, Islam is not revealed, right? Who's the one that the tree covers him when he sits down? He's talking to nature and nature is talking to him. Get impressed by your own profit. Enough is enough. We're impressed by everyone else except our own Prophet SAW. Who's the one who has an amazing time management to be the leader, the military reader, the people leader, but yet have time to come to the masjid, live next to the masjid, become accessible to people and listen to them. The Prophet SAW, before he gives khutbah to Jumu'ah, someone comes and says, I want to talk to you, Rasulallah. He stops the khutbah, he sits down, he talks to the man. Before he leads Salat al-Isha, someone comes and says, Ya Rasulallah, I want to talk to you. He takes him back. He speaks to him until midnight, while people are waiting. They sat down, they were waiting. They will never rush the Prophet. They were looking, looking, looking, then they sat down. Then they were looking, looking, then they sat down, and then they fell asleep. And then they woke up. And then the Prophet leads Salat al-Isha. Who has time to talk to the old and to the young? Who has always humbled and stayed humble? And he told people, don't treat me like people treat their kings. I am not a king. I am Allah's servant and slave and prophet and a messenger. Do not stand up to me. When I come, when I find an open place, let me sit in the open place, right? Yes, sometimes people stood up to him and that happened, but he didn't want it to become a habit.  When he was coming back from Qaif, Adas, he kissed the hand of the Prophet and went down to his feet and kissed it. But he did not make that all the time, all the time, all the time, all the time. He wanted to teach people, I am one of you and you are of me. But I am the messenger of Allah and I am here as a rahmah for you. So who stayed humble to the last moment? That's the Prophet, So be impressed with your own role model because whatever is it today, who started with being a shepherd from humble beginnings and he became a businessman and made a lot of money. And here is what I want to start my topic here. He was called Asadikul Amin, the truthful, the honest and the trustworthy. They gave me the part, the truthful and the honest. Let me tell you something. Let's get this clear. If there was another one or two or three or four or five people in the market that were also truthful and trustworthy, they would have not called the Prophet that. You only call someone the truth of trustworthy, that means he is the only one because it will become confusing. The truthful and the trustworthy, which one? Muhammad or Ahmad or Khaled or Al-Waleed, which trustworthy? No, no, no. When you call someone the asadikul amin, the Arab knows when they talk what they're saying. The one. So I want you to think with me. You're surrounded by cheaters and liars. You're the only one who's telling the truth. In the world of business, is that an advantage or disadvantage? It's a disadvantage because everyone is lying and cheating. You're the one who's telling the truth.  How smart does the Prophet have to be to double, triple and quadruple the Prophet for Khadija while he's asadikul amin in the middle of flyers? Amazing businessman. Amazing businessman. Amazing businessman. The problem is we're not impressed. And everything else impresses us. So we want to come back to our roots and we want to be impressed. So asadikul amin. I was like looking, you know, subhanallah. Today is the time for me, I, myself, individuality, this and that. Islam and the prophets and the messengers is anything but selfishness and individuality. That's why from Ibrahim, Allah tells him, ya Ibrahim, I will give you words. Ibrahim fulfilled the words, the commandments of Allah. So Allah said, I will make you to mankind, Imamah. Immediately Ibrahim said, how about my children? Allah said, the oppressors will not get my covenant.  I will, they will be honorable in my prayers. So Allah grants Ibrahim, Isma'il and Ishaq. Isma'il comes first. What is the description of Isma'il in the Quran?  This will explain it. It runs in the blood. Mention in the book, Isma'il, he used to fulfill and be truthful to his promises. And he was a messenger and a prophet. Who was called asadikul amin before asadikul amin? Isma'il, the son of Ibrahim, the father of Muhammad. It's unbelievable. This Isma'il, and Ibrahim had a vision. It's all about starting with yourself, then your family, then the spiritual family. So there is a special place for Ibrahim and his al. Who's his al? Isma'il and Ishaq. Whose children? Isma'il has 12 children. Do you know about the 12 children of Isma'il? You only know about the 12 children of Yaqub, as a matter of fact, some of the Mufassireen called al-Asbat, the children of Isma'il, not the children of Yaqub.  But whether they're the children of Yaqub or the children of Isma'il, we love them all. Whatever, we don't have this discrimination or this problem. Whether it's Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam or Musa or Isa, we love them all. We believe in them all. We don't have that problem. Oh, we don't believe in that. No, no, we actually believe in that. But I'm just giving you an understanding. The children, it's about the family. Sometimes people will not listen to you. You're left with your own family. If you're a good example, your family will listen to you. So now this Isma'il alayhi s-salam and the choices that Ibrahim made and Isma'il made and the children of Isma'il one after another made were amazing choices. You want me to give you one example of their choices? I'll tell you one example. The Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said, Allah kept on moving me from honorable backs of men to honorable women, wombs of women. There was no zina. There was no rape. There was no sifah. There was no adultery. There was no fornication. Do you know what that means? That means every father in the genealogy of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam made a choice. And we're talking about times that there was no Prophet. Before Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, the last Prophet was Jesus. Where was Jesus? Isa alayhi s-salam. In Jerusalem, not in Mecca, the last Prophet that came to these people, they say the Ambiya of the Arab are five. Isma'il alayhi s-salam, Shu'ayb alayhi s-salam. Ghud alayhi s-salam, Saleh alayhi s-salam and Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. But when was the last? But even though no Prophet in this, the fitrah is strong, the choices are right. And he's what? And they made a choice to always go for halal. One example, what difference does it make for you to make a choice today? What impact it has on you and on your children to the day of judgment? You choose halal, your children will choose halal. You choose haram, your children will choose halal. And in a sense, we're so honored. It's so honored. Do you know what Allah called us? Allah called us the children of Ibrahim. Do you know what Allah called Ibrahim? Your father. Is Ibrahim your father? He's not your biological father, but he's your spiritual father. Millatabikum Ibrahim. This Deen is the millah, the way of life, the conviction of your father Ibrahim. And this Ibrahim, he's the one who named you Muslims. Look, Ibrahim is thinking of us, who? You and I, the Muslims. The Muslims are thinking of who? Ibrahim. What's the gap? Only few thousand years. Only four, five thousand years. That's and if from Jesus, two thousand. Jesus above, probably six thousand years, the gap between us and Ibrahim. But the connection is strong as if it is your father. Your father, that's Ibrahim. So Allah Azza wa Jall gave the children of Ibrahim, special honor, the children of Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, special honor. But Allah, after giving Anul Bayt, their special honor, the blood of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, Allah said, now there is the Anul Bayt in blood and then there is the followers and the ummah and they are the family and Ibrahim is your father, Ismail is your father, Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam is your father. So be proud and be impressed. Asadik. People take the honest. What I found out is that when people say Asadik al-Amin, they're talking about how the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was honest and truthful with the others. But I'm going to tell you something. That's only a reflection of him being honest and truthful with himself. Please do not forget that honesty with others is only a reflection of honesty with yourself. So I want you to think deep, are you honest with yourself or not? Do you know what makes a person want to change when they're honest with themselves? Do you know what makes a person doesn't want to change when they think they're perfect? Do you know what's the mother of all honesty? La ilaha illallah. Do you know what you're saying? You're saying, I'm not a god. But you say, Sheikh, I never said I am god. Yeah, you never said it like that. But let me tell you something.  You think you're god, but you don't say I'm god. You have expectations from life and expectations from people and expectations from God.   You say, I am perfect. He has a problem. She has a problem. And he has a problem. He has a problem. He has a problem. But I have no problem. Who's perfect? Allah. You're valuable. You're not infallible. You're sinner. So we, the mother of all honesty is la ilaha illallah. I am not god. Allah is god and I am is abu. So if I am not god and I'm a human and I make mistakes, then now what's next? What's next is to be honest with myself. Where do I need to change? What's wrong with me? How can I transform? Brothers and sisters, Islam came to make that transformation. This siddik, to be honest with yourself, do you know what happens to people? Allah warned us in the Quran and it's the most scary thing to me at least. It's very scary. It's when you, between you and yourself, there is a veil and between you and yourself, you're lying to yourself. You say nobody can lie to himself. Yes, you can lie to yourself. And yes, you can believe your own lies. Do you know when Allah made the longest Qasam in the Quran? Only Allah to talk about your nafs. And Allah said people, the way they deal with their nafs is one of two ways. Either they find what's wrong and they start washing and cleaning and that's called honesty. Or, very interesting word that Allah used. Or people hide themselves. You know what? Why hide? Because the mother of all problems, the opposite of Tezgiya is you're looking at your heart and say, there's nothing wrong with me. There's nothing wrong with me. There's no, no, no. I'm okay. I'm okay. She's wrong. He's wrong. Then you get scared from facing yourself and your darkest places, so you never change. Now you feel at being honest and truthful with yourself. You think you're going to be honest and truthful with the people? It's not going to happen. So that's why the gist of Islam is that transformation, the gist of Islam and the gist of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. I want to mention one thing. I was mentioning it like 10, 15 years ago and then this Jewish lady from Seattle, I keep on forgetting her name. She did a TED talk and she said something like, wow, I should have been on TED talk. You know what it is? I'll just show one moment of honesty. People don't pay attention to this, but this is one of the proofs that the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam did not make up this stuff. You're going to the cave. You're writing poem. You're writing your ideas.   You come home after five years. Guess what, Khadijah? We're done. I have it. I'm ready. I'm prepared.  He wrote it and he says God give it to him. Do you know how the Prophet came back to Khadijah? Frightened, shaken, because he's honest, because he would not pretend and he would not lie about something he was not looking for. I want to become great, but you know in that humbleness, you know that in that self-honesty, you know that in that is all greatness. That's the hardest thing to you. You know, I'll tell you something. When you talk to people, at least in my experience, hello, salamu alaikum, how are you?  We're happy. The second you ask people to change, they walk away. They can't handle it. The second you give an advice and you say, brother, I think you need to change. Do you have an advice for me? Because I will take any advice, inshaAllah. But I have an advice for you. Would you change this and this and that? That's when people run away. And you know why 100 people in Makkah believed out of 10,000 people? Do you know what was the success rate of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam? One percent. Do I need to finish the sentence? I don't need to finish it. You make the calculation, what's the other percentage? Do you know why? Because people do not want to change.  Prophet is beautiful. Islam is beautiful. The Qur'an is amazing. The sunnah is great. And you are not amazing. And you're ugly.  But you keep on talking.  The message of the Qur'an is beautiful. Okay, I'm done. Now I can go and do my thing. They had no problem. People of Makkah had no problem with generations before the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. There was always one in a generation, two in a generation, three in a generation. They used to call him al-Ahnaf. The people who did not worship the idols, they just worshiped one God. Quraysh, it never bothered him. Muhammad believes in one God, it doesn't bother him. But when Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam moved from being sāleh to musleh, now we have a problem. From righteous to wanting righteousness for everybody and demanding change, now we're going to fight Muhammad. And you know what happened? They changed. From al-sādik, they called him qādid. Can you believe that? You know people attack the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. And Muslims go mad. Do you know the Quran preserved all the attacks on the Prophet and answered them.  Ashir makes up stuff, not only lies, he makes up stuff. Kahim, monk, sahir, magician, majnun, crazy, shā'ir, poet. You know all that, what happened? Before that, before he said, I'm a prophet and messenger, I demand change from you. They came to him. They said, okay, one God, fine. How about we worship your God, one God, one year, and you worship our God's one year. Can you just stop? Plus, can you please explain to us, and Allah mentioned this, with shuaib also, how in the world believing in one God has to do with our social status, economical status, and dealings, political status. How, what does believing in one God have to do with how I treat my wife, or how I treat my husband, or how I treat my daughter, or how I treat my slave, or how I treat my money, or how I charge interest, or how I fight. What does it have to do with? Let God be with God. God is in the house, God is in the ka'bah, separation between life and fate. The Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said, I will not take your offer. So that's why, brothers and sisters, the fact that you were born and raised Muslim shall not give you too much comfort. Because Islam, alhamdulillah, it's inherited, but it demands from you change.  Any Muslim, we can faith strongly. Do you know what's his, to meet the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam? And do whatever you want after that.  Do like the Sahabi.  I want to hurt you back. The Prophet exposes his side and he goes and kisses the side of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. He said, I heard that when someone's skin touches your skin, that skin is forbidden from inside, in the state of Iman obviously. Right? So I want you to think of this. Imagine seeing the Prophet for 13 years in Makkah and not wanting to believe in him. You know why? Because people don't want to change. They don't want to transform. They don't want to become. Change starts with honesty with yourself that will translate into honesty with others, that will translate into honesty with Allah, and that will translate into honesty with any of his creation. It is, it's unbelievable. And honest people are so rare in the world. You will be noticed that you're honest. So brothers and sisters, I love to like, masha Allah, there is so much beauty in this. The brother here has an amazing voice. Masha Allah, some people, Allah give them beautiful faces. Some people, Allah give them beautiful bodies. Some people, Allah give him beautiful voice. Some people, Allah give him beautiful minds. Some people, Allah give them beautiful knowledge. Some people, Allah give beautiful akhlaq, Allah distributes the rizq between the ibad. Everybody has his own strength. May Allah bless, there's a lot of beauty but let's be grounded again and let's say I want to start my journey of transformation. I don't want to meet the Prophet ﷺ on the day of judgment and he says you knew what I wanted from you. You knew my legacy, you knew what made me happy. Why didn't you do it?  Why? Are you ready to answer that? Or you want to keep on fooling around and beating around the bush and saying tomorrow and not me. I don't know what you're saying to yourself. I don't know what sheikh is saying to you. I don't know what your nefs is saying to you but enough is enough. The Prophet ﷺ said people will come to my base and to my lake and I want to give them a cup from my hand. If you drink from that cup you will never feel thirsty ever again. Before you enter jannah, before you enter jannah you will lose the sense of thirst. Done. And I'm ready to give it to them and some angels come and move them away from me and they say they did not follow you.  Do you want to be that one? So brothers and sisters let's mix this beauty and this knowledge with the niyah. I want to embody the Prophet ﷺ. I want to embody, I want people to say Allah is beautiful because of these people. Islam is amazing because of these people, because of you. The Prophet ﷺ is amazing because of you. Today reality check. Internet, instant messages, instant. Before that what was there? The internet. Before that what was there? TV. Before that what was there? Radio. Before that what was there? Cars. Before that what was there? Horses. So I want you to go in your mind and take instant messaging, take it out, then take internet out, no more internet anymore, then take TV out, then take radio out, then take the cars and the trains and before the industrial revolution we're ending up with what? With horses. Islam spread in 30 years from the day the Prophet ﷺ died, reached from China to Morocco.  Because they didn't speak their language, they just looked at them and they were so impressed, not by their lectures, they didn't even speak Arabic but they were impressed, taken, taken, completely taken that your grandparents became Muslim because of that. Now put back everything else with instant messaging, we cannot do one percent of what these people did without internet, without airplanes, without TV, without all of this. We keep on posting on YouTube, we keep on doing it. The world will change. The world will change when a few people will decide to change. Then Allah will make it roll me.  So brothers and sisters, I, you know, there's so many angles to As-Sadiq Al-Ameen. I want to be mindful of the time of the other speakers. But look at this, consider this. We are at the time of self-change, self-motivation. Change yourself. SubhanAllah, you are at a time where everyone demanding change from you to become better at your company, better at making money, better at this, better as a husband, better and people will pay $6,000 plus the tickets to go to Fiji to meet what's the name of the guy who has an in Fiji, Tony Robbins, $6,000 one weekend plus airfare to meet Tony Robbins, to sit with him for one week so that he tells them what, believe in yourself. I'll charge you $600 for free, for free. And what we're saying, believe in Allah, make your intention, you can do it. You can do it. You were made to do it. You have mind, heart, soul, nefs, body. You were made to do it. You are qualified to do it. This stuff is easy for you. Allah will never burden you with something that you cannot bear. But you keep on selling yourself. I cannot do it. I cannot change. Shaytan keeps on telling you, later, later, later. People tell you, come on, man. Khalas, tonight, tomorrow you change. Let's have a party right now. And between bad friends and bad nefs and bad shaytan and bad temptation of life, day after day passes and nothing is happening. So I believe our masjids are open for transformation. And I want to end with this. Alhamdulillah, I like this. We're all together, this and that. Talk, have good friends, transform, because the greatest teacher ever lived was Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. The greatest students were Aal-u Bayt-i Gil-Abhaar and the Sahaba-l Kiran. But yet, we don't refer to them as the great teacher and the great students. We don't refer to them like that. It's very interesting. We refer to them as the messenger of Allah, this is the messenger of Allah and his companions and his friendships. Do you know what's the method of learning? Don't overwhelm yourself. Find the companion, find the teacher, find someone, find the janitor, because Allah sometimes teaches you from where you do not expect teaching. Humble yourself, learn from squirrels, learn from trees, learn from stuff around you that Allah created. And step by step, slowly but truly, slowly but truly, become a friend of a cat, become a friend of a tree, become a friend of the Qur'an, become a friend of the Prophet, become a friend of Allah. It's unbelievable.  Once you get that straight in your head, Allah says, I am your sahib. I never heard that. Where do you get this tough sheikh from? I'll tell you where I get it. I got it from the dua of the Prophet ﷺ. When you travel, do you know what you say? Allahumma anta sahib of the Sahib. Ya Allah, you are my sahib in my traveling. You want a relationship with Allah? Today people impress us.  It's not a religion, it's a relationship. No, it's a religion and a relationship, both.  Allah is your sahib. Qur'an is your sahib. The Prophet ﷺ said, Read Qur'an for the Qur'an comes as an intercede on your behalf for his friends, become the friend of the Qur'an, become the friend of the Prophet ﷺ. It's not too late. We are his friends and his ahbab as you know. So, let's start your journey. The journey starts with, are you honest with yourself?  Or do you think there is nothing wrong with you? Or do you think you don't need change? Or do you think it's all right? It doesn't work like that. And the honesty will translate in your economics, in your decisions, in your family, with everyone else. And the king of, you know, Hercules was very smart. He called Abu Sufyan. Abu Sufyan was not a Muslim at that time. People, he told him, stand behind him. And if he lies, tell me, did this man, before he say he's the messenger of God, did he lie? Did he lie? They said no. Abu Sufyan said no, he didn't lie. We used to call him the truthful, the trustworthy. He looked at him and he said, do you think someone will not lie to people but will lie to God?  They have some politics. They know where's the ins and outs of things. So please, are you excited about changing? Are you excited? They feed you dinner, for God's sake. You have a thousand calorie over what you need. Are you excited about becoming saddic with yourself? Do you want to change? Ya Allah, help us to change, Ya Rabbal Ali. Make better people out of ourselves, make us leaders to ourselves, Ya Rabbal Alameen. Make us followers of your prophets, make us a copy of him, Ya Rabbal Alameen. Make us from the people who honor your name, honor the name of your messenger, and honor the name of your deen. Ya Allah, every day, make us better people, Ya Rabbal Alameen. And instill in us your love, the love of your messenger, the love of al-ubaytihil abhaar, and the love of his companions, and the love of the people who follow him to the last day. Ameen, Ya Rabbal Alameen. I'm about to collapse from tiredness. Jazakum Allah Khayr. BarakAllah Fikr. And again, I feel this, I'm not disrespecting anyone, but please allow me to go and rest. Allah is Zikr Khayr. BarakAllah Fikr. So insha Allah. As-salamu alaikum warahm. Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.


Well, parents going to mass each Sunday often face the challenge of how to keep small children and even big children focused on the mystery in front of them and quiet and reverend as well. And if you attend a Latin mass parish, the pin drop quiet can often be another challenge to overcome. Well, parents have a new resource for the Sundays that they're taking their children to mass. And that is the Sanctus Sanctus Sanctus and introductory Latin missile for children. It's a brilliant and beautiful work by illustrator Adelie Hewd, and we're grateful for Adelie for joining us today. Welcome, Adelie. Thank you so much, Mary. I'm so blessed to be here. Oh, blessed to have you. Adelie, I'm sure you didn't start your career in art planning to do a religious missile for children to take to mass. I think you had a career in secular art before that. Tell us a little bit about what you did before you got to this project. I did. Yeah. I studied art in college, though I've been drawing since I could hold the crayon. And my emphasis was sculpture. I learned most of what I did from a mentor sculpting and casting ceramic courses. That was my thing for 15 years, and I was very passionate about it. Until just one day the fire went out, and I entered a painting contest for a sacred art image, and I enjoyed that so much. And after a few months, I started talking to my husband, hey, would you mind if I just scrapped the horse thing and started all over and just did sacred art? Because I feel like God was calling me to do art for him. And my husband was 100% supportive, and ever since then I've been doing sacred art and illustrating now, and I love it, and I'm so grateful. Wow. So Adelie, as you continued in this career of art and coming over to the religious side of doing artwork for the Lord, at what point in that did you begin attending a Latin mass parish? Fairly recently, actually. I was on fire Catholic since my adult reversion when I was about 24, 25, and very interested in the mass, learning all I could. I tended to think the Latin mass, I'd heard a little bit about it here and there, but I thought it was a particular charism for people. But about a little over a year and a half ago, my husband was reading up more and more on it, and he said, hey, you know, we should check this out. They have it, you know, a little ways from our house, but not too far, and we could drive there. And so finally he breathed the bullet and did it. We were very involved in our parish that was a mile away from here. So I was a little more resistant, and I think he was too, just because of that fact. But he went and he said, I cried, you need to go. So I went the next week because we had a very young son at that point. And, you know, it was amazing. I was confused, but it was amazing. And yeah, after that, we just began attending more and more often until it became our home. You hear those stories a lot with people that they are drawn to the Latin mass, but they're not necessarily comfortable in the Latin mass, but they want to be there. And there is an adjustment time to where it feels both right and comfortable to be sitting in that. Yes, definitely. Yeah, when you're holding a squirming little one, it might take a little bit longer, but... So how did this project of Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, how did that begin, and were you thinking about your son and about keeping him engaged in the mass as you were working on it? That was definitely a thought. It actually began oddly enough in 2006 when I read Scott Pahn's book, The Supper of the Lamb. Oh, the Lamb Supper. And I was introduced to the fact that heaven actually meets earth during the mass. I had no idea. And I thought more people need to know about this, and I thought an animated short would be a good way to do it. And so I wrote out a script for that that I worked on for a few years and shared with people. But after working on that for a while, that animation is a big project for one person. So I was inspired to do a children's book. So I did a children's book and it was based on the Nobu Sordo because that's what I knew. And after we fell in love with the Latin mass, I knew there was a conflict in my heart and my husband said, why don't you just do it on the Latin mass? So I scrapped everything I had done and started afresh. And Sanktus, Sanktus, Sanktus is what we have now. Amazing. And I think we can put up some of the illustrations from Sanktus. There's one that I particularly thought was so striking that is actually the view from the altar. There it is, looking back towards the choir loft, which I thought, why is this so striking? Well, it's because it's the opposite of what we see during mass, but it's also the view of our Lord from the tabernacle looking at us during mass. Was it, were you struck in your creative process for this about the different ways that you can see the mass, both from the Lord's perspective, the priests, the altar servers, and even those babies you've illustrated in the pews? Well, I guess because it started as an animated project, I was kind of looking at it in a 3D way from different angles. And so just trying to capture all of it, capture the essence of it was important to me. But you know, that's actually beautiful. I had not thought about it as being that from God's perspective, but it definitely is. I loved how many families you drew into the pews in those illustrations. That's great! Right? It is. The babies in arms, the kids of all sizes, were you thinking about them as you were doing this project about what it's like to be a child, especially for kids that maybe weren't raised necessarily with the Latin mass from the beginning, but are just coming to it? It can be very quiet. It can be very quiet. It's an odd mixture of silence and reverence and prayer and occasional wailing and fussing.  They can see what's happening because little kids want to know what's happening. And I was thinking about them a lot, thinking about my son, thinking about my God's son and all our friends, kids, and really wanting to help them along, help introduce them to not only what is going on in front of them that they can see at the altar, but also that heavenly reality, what is going on behind the scenes. Adelie, since you are somewhat of a convert, you would say almost to the Latin mass. Yes. What are some of the misconceptions that you have faced either maybe with your family or friends or people that you used to attend mass with, that you have to answer the question of, well, this is where we go now to worship the Lord. What are some misconceptions that you think people have about attending the Latin mass that maybe this missile even would help dispel? Well, let's see. I have heard quite often that, oh, well, you know, it's good enough that you're receiving the Lord, the Lord's present in both masses, and so why take the time to go farther away and to attend a longer liturgy just because this isn't Latin. Sure, it's lovely, it's reverent, but what we have is good enough and it's got our community, so why would you want to leave our community? And the leaving the community is hard, but also there's still my friends. We still get together, we still do things together, and I still attend functions at the parish near my home, and so it's not really leaving the community, and occasionally I can pull one or two of them over with me to come see and say, hey, come experience this, bring your kids. And I did say, you know, bring a book, and now I can say, bring this book, it'll help. So it's wonderful. Adelie, you dedicate sanctu, sanctu, sanctus to all those who love and are learning to love the traditional Roman right, and I love that that was your dedication because it really is a relearning of people who are going to it. It's another opportunity to almost put yourself in like a catechism class every Sunday of learning. How long did it take you to really love the traditional right, not just want to be there, but to love the essence of it? Not very long actually, maybe a couple months. I think once I got over my own pride, because I was a canter at our old parish, so I knew the Nobu Sordo back and forth, and I kept getting lost in the traditional Latin mass. So I realized, this mass, it's less about me, and that's a good thing because it's all about worshipping God that's really brought to the forefront, I think. And so once I just let go of my own pride and my own expectations, I was really able to better enter into the flow of it and really appreciate the work that this particular mass was doing in my soul and bringing me closer to Jesus, because that's ultimately the goal of anything. Adelie, for the illustrations for Sanktus, you have a wonderful level of, I would say, both simplicity and detail. The colors are somewhat muted, there's not extravagant interpretations of what's happening, but lovely details on the vestments, on the altar piece. So were you drawing inspiration from your own parish, or what was in your mind as you were coming up with this church setting for this mass in Sanktus? Well, I love looking at church architecture, and I loved seeing all the different vestments and just the details that are used in the traditional Latin mass, and from other older churches. I've been to Europe a couple of times, so I had some beautiful reference photos from like the proto-cathedral in Ireland, and I did look at our own parish a little bit for inspiration and just tried to combine as much as that as I could, what I felt the Lord was calling me to draw and to use real models for people so I could get details right, and it all came together by the grace of God. I mean, it's stunning looking at those images, it's just stunning. I can't wait to get copies for my kids, for my God children, all of them that attend the Roman right. Lastly for you, Adelie, so we've talked about what inspires you about the Latin mass, but your faith in general, your Catholic faith, what do you draw from in your own faith or which feast days or devotions are most special to you in working on projects? Well, I have lots of different devotions. Our Blessed Lady, our Mother Mary, she has been a great influence in my life, and making a consecration to her a few years back has tremendously helped, and also learning about, I've learned so many new traditions, like the Brown Scapular and being dedicated to St. Michael and all these things, following the old calendar, they have been wonderful inspirations to me to help live that daily Catholic life. It's wonderful. Well, again, the book is Sanctus Sanctus Sanctus, an introductory Latin missile for children. You can find it online here at tanbooks.com. Also at tanbooks.com, you can see a sneak peek of many of the images that we've showed today of Adelie's beautiful work. It would make a wonderful gift for First Communions or a baptism gift for families, just simply a beautiful thing to have in your home. Available here, tanbooks.com or at your local Catholic bookstore. Adelie, thanks so much for being with us. You're very welcome. Thank you again for having me.


In number three we're going to continue to find the volume of a pyramid, but this one is a hexagonal pyramid. So that means that we're going to have to use the area of a regular polygon. So let's start with writing out volume is equal to one-third times the area of the base times the height. You should always start with writing out your formula. You want to make sure you pay attention to if you're doing pyramids or prisms and this one we're doing a pyramid. I'm going to take it to the next step and I'm going to say, okay, what is the area formula for my base? Since this base is a hexagon, we're going to use the area formula that is one-half times a pothem times perimeter and then we'll multiply that times the height of the pyramid. Now the height of the pyramid, that's simple. They tell us it's eight. So a little tricky is figuring out the area of the hexagon. So we are told that the base edge length is ten. So what I'm going to do on my picture is I'm just going to label that's ten. Well that leads us to be able to find the perimeter pretty easily. There are six sides in a hexagon, so ten times six is sixty. The problem is we need to find the apothem. So I'm going to, in my picture, draw the center of the hexagon. Here's the apothem and I'm going to make my right triangle just like we did in chapter 11. Label that A, the apothem, and because the side length is ten, I know that that side of the triangle is five. The triangle angle, 360 divided by six, and then divide that by two will give you the angle of this triangle, which is thirty degrees. So we know we're dealing with a thirty-sixty-ninety triangle. Therefore if this side of the triangle is five, then the apothem would have to equal five root three. So now I'm going to plug all of this into the formula, one-third times one-half times five root three times sixty times eight. Notice back in the directions that we want to keep it exact. When I multiply one-third times one-half, multiply fractions, it is one over six. And if I multiply five times sixty times eighty, we get twenty-four hundred root three. And so then if I do twenty-four hundred divided by six, I get four hundred root three. And that is cubic units. Number four is a regular triangular pyramid. When it is a regular triangle, that means that it's equilateral. So when I do the volume for this pyramid, it's going to be one-third times the area of the base times the height.  And this turns into a fairly straightforward problem. We know that the base edge of the triangle is twelve and we know the height is ten. So if I plug those values in, one-third times one-fourth times twelve to the second power root three times ten. We know that twelve to the second power is a hundred and forty-four. So if we take the fractions, one-third times one-fourth is one-twelfth times a hundred and forty-four root three times ten. And then in your calculator, one-hundred and forty-four times ten is one-thousand four-hundred and forty. Divide that by twelve and it turns out you just get one-hundred and twenty. Don't forget to attach the root three and your cubic units. Now by the way, this one didn't ask us to give exact. I would just go ahead and leave it as exact. But if you wanted to enter this into your calculator and give the approximate answer, that would be okay because in this problem they don't tell you to either give exact or approximate. Number five is a little bit tricky so let's take a look at number five. Find the approximate volume of a regular pentagonal pyramid given an opothem of three and a slant height of five. So again I'm going to start my problem by writing out the volume formula, one-third times the area of the base times the height. In this case because we are working with a base that's a pentagon, we're going to have to do one-half times the opothem times perimeter. And then we're going to have to multiply by the height of the pyramid, which leads to our first issue. The first issue is we don't know the height. We know the slant height but we don't know the height. So take your picture and draw in the slant height and then also draw where your height would be and what you should see as a result is a right triangle. And if I know that this is five and if you can recognize that this right here is the same as the opothem, which is three, they told us the opothem is three, then we can use Pythagorean Theorem to find the height of this pyramid. So h squared plus three squared equals five squared and if you solve for h you should get a height of four. So we've got the height of the pyramid. The next problem we run into is we know the opothem but we don't know the perimeter of the pentagon. And so what we're going to do is we're going to draw, just like we would if we were finding the area of a pentagon, I am going to draw another right triangle but this time I'm going to draw from the center of the pentagon to the base and my opothem I know is three and what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to find this piece of the triangle. So we're going to have to involve the central angle. The central angle remember is 360 divided by 5 which is 72 degrees and then you have to take that in half, 72 divided by 2 to get this angle right here which is 36 degrees. So if I have a right triangle with an angle of 36 degrees in order to find x I'm going to have to use Sokotoa. So because I have x and 3 that's going to involve tangent so the tan of 36 equals opposite which is x over adjacent which is 3 and if I put that in my calculator 3 times the tangent of 36 degrees should be about 2.2. Now remember in the directions we are approximating so it's fine to round. Now if x is 2.2 I need to multiply that by 2 to get the side length so 2.2 times 2 is 4.4 and the whole reason for doing this is we had to figure out the perimeter of the pentagon so 5 sides times 4.4 is 22. So now I have the perimeter, I have the epithome of 3 and we have found the height which is 4 then we can finish the problem. One third times one half times the epithome of 3 times the perimeter of 22 times the height of 4. And if we plug this into our calculator it is going to give us an approximate answer of 44 cubic units.


Thank you for inviting me, it's a pleasure to be here. Caveat, this is a first time talk, so if it's lousy, I apologize. So, past year there have been a lot, one of the hardest things I have in this business is to seem to get across this idea of what we mean or I mean when I talk about, you know, not being about calories. And so I wanted to present that, sort of see if I could clarify that in the talk and at the end of the talk, half the talk, we'll be presenting some tests that could be done that would demonstrate whether or not it's calories or carbohydrates that are driving obesity. So the conventional wisdom, we know the fundamental cause of obesity is an energy imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended. There's virtually no way to get around this whenever I talk about it. You know, someone accuses me of being a quack if I argue otherwise. The first idea is obesity is an energy balance disorder. You see this line in a lot of the technical papers on the subject. It's just, you know, what we're worried about ultimately is that too much food, too little physical activity causes this thing called overeating, energy ingraded and energy out, and the result is obesity and the obesity epidemic. So the alternative hypothesis, the argument that I've been making in my books that comes originally from pre-World War II researchers in Europe is that obesity is a fat accumulation disorder. Okay, to me this seems like the simplest possible thing you could say about the subject, right?  And what we want to know in that circumstance is what regulates fat accumulation. So in this hypothesis what we end up with is this idea that grains, starches, sugars, carb rich foods, disturb insulin signaling, and we end up with excess fat accumulation, obesity, and the obesity epidemic, so we have a different cause and the different, the same result just by changing how we think of the disorder. The challenge is how do we tell which is right and how do we tell them apart? Are we dealing with an energy balance disorder? Are we dealing with the fat accumulation disorder? Because if somebody's getting fatter, they're going to be taking in more calories than they expend. This is a given, this is what we know for sure. We have the energy balance equation, the first law of thermodynamics. It's always true. It's always true that it's a law of physics, that's why we call it a law. And it's basically changing energy stored in the system is equal to the energy in minus the energy out. Delta E store equals E in minus E out. And this is what we're going to start from in both these equations, both these hypotheses. And in the energy balance disorder version of this equation, E in minus E out are causal. So you change energy in and you change energy out or you change energy out and you end up with the change in energy storage. So if we increase E in or we decrease E out, we're going to increase the amount of energy stored in the fat tissue, you're going to get fatter. So this is what it looks like. Now if obesity is energy balance disorder and carbohydrates make us fat, which is something that I've been arguing, the reason they make us fat is because they just eat too much of them, right? We increase E in because of the carbohydrates and that increases the amount of Delta E stored. We also eat too much of everything because the calories are calorie, but carbohydrates are particularly easy to overeat. Now if obesity is energy balance and then carbohydrate disorder and then carbohydrate diets work possibly because they increase satiety and so we eat less. So you get rid of the carbs in the diet, you eat more protein and fat, these satiate you, they decrease E in, that's the cause, and the effect is they decrease the E stored. Now another way to look at this is maybe these things work because they provide a metabolic advantage. So we decrease the carbs in the diet, we eat more protein, which generates more dietary induced thermogenesis. Now the second law of thermodynamics gets involved and we expend more energy for calorie consumed, breaking down the protein and metabolizing it. So in this scenario we increase E out by eating more protein and decrease E storage as a result and we're still working in this energy balance disorder paradigm. Now the alternative, oh okay let me one more slide, if obesity and energy balance disorder, what you end up realizing is that it's the brain that regulates body fat mass. I read my book Why We Get Fat, I have a whole chapter where I go off on the idea that gluttony and sloth are involved and when you're talking about overeating and you're talking about sedentary behavior, you're talking about behaviors causing a physiological problem, too much fat and I don't think this is a behavioral defect. But you could see even when you get to sort of the kind of state of the art in the energy balance hypothesis, you have a lot of factors that determine their genetic developmental factors, inflammation, environmental factors and diet. They all determine ultimately in the red circle expenditure and intake and the central nervous system regulates body fat mass in this paradigm by coordinated adjustments of intake and expenditure. The actual fat mass itself isn't involved.  So what we worry about is full body energy balance. This is why it becomes a brain thing. We worry about how much energy we take in the whole body and how much energy we expend and it's what comes in here and what goes out here and the fat cells themselves, the fat masses are kind of passive players and all this and when I use this metaphor in the book it says though we want to know why this room is so crowded and what we're thinking about is well it's crowded because we took in more people than we expended and we let out and that's why it got crowded so there's positive people balance but it's even worse than that. It's as though we're saying more people came into Cambridge than left Cambridge and that's why the room is crowded and what we want to know is why did people actually walk through these doors and maybe they walked through the doors because there was a compelling speaker in here or there were free drinks in here or there was somebody who thought was going to be a compelling speaker who was less compelling. Maybe there's free food, maybe the fire extinguishing system broke out there so it's pouring outside so everybody ran into this room because that's the only way they'd get wet outside. Maybe we put huge people standing at the doors, bouncers, and every time somebody walked by they told them and threw them in and so the argument would be instead of caring about how many people came into Cambridge and left what we care about is what the factors inside this room, what are the variables that might have pulled people in or drawn them in here or not let them left or what are the factors outside that might have forced them to flee the outside to come in or even what are the factors at the room membrane, the bouncers who pulled people in or pushed people out and then we start to get a real explanation for why the room is so crowded. So we don't care about full energy balance. What we care about is fat cell energy balance. Here's where that hypothesis matters.  And the fatty acids involved, there's permeability of the cell membrane involved, there's enzymes on the cell membrane that could pull fatty acids in, there's enzymes inside the fat cell that'll break down fat and allow it to exit. And so what we really want to know, what I think we want to know is not how much energy goes into or out of the body, into or out of Cambridge but what are the factors that regulate how much energy goes into or out of the fat cell, into or out of this room. So a brief argument favor this to me is just puberty.  So they're both taking in more energy than they expend because they're getting bigger, they're getting heavier. That's what that first law of thermodynamics tells us. But why does it turn into muscle in boys and why does it turn into fat in girls?  And why does the fat go to specific places? So if we just look at the girls now, and we think of this girl getting fatter and turning into a woman, she's developing breasts, her hips are filling out. Let's say she's getting fatter also, so she's getting a gut. But she's taking in more energy than they expend. How does the fuel know whether to go to the fat and the gut, which is the excess fat, whether to go to her hips or her breasts, which is becoming a woman, which is regulated by sex hormones, or just, you know, we're building muscle, she's getting bigger, we're building bone, we're building connective tissue, and we're somehow, ultimately, there has to be something determining the cells themselves are getting the excess energy. The cells have to be making the decision on some point in cohort with the hormones that are being secreted.  So there has to be some interaction between the hormonal milieu and the cells themselves to make sure they get what they want, irrespective of the fact that there's just too much fuel around anyway because this person's getting bigger. So a good way to phrase it, this was actually, and I'm from an article written in Science Magazine, on cancer, and it struck me, actually the two, Lou Candley and Craig Thompson are both people who actually believe that sugar and carbohydrates could be causes of cancer, and in science, they said multi-cellular organisms, most cells are exposed to a constant supply of nutrients. Survival of the organism requires console systems that prevent the barren individual cell proliferation when nutrient availability exceeds the levels needed to support cell division. Uncontrolled proliferation is prevented because mammalian cells do not normally take up nutrients from their environment unless stimulated to do so by growth factors. There's always enough or an excessive amount of fuel available to the cells. If there wasn't, your cells would always be in danger of starvation. So why do some of them take up more energy? That is irrespective of what's happening on this full body level. And the answer in fat cells, as this is a 1990 paper put it, you know, in humans, adipose tissue is the main site of energy storage. So the balance between inflow and outflow of free fatty acids and adipocytes is finally regulated by a number of hormones and neurotransmitters which elicit the appropriate response to the metabolic state of the individual. That's how it's very well regulated. And among these extracellular signaling, insulin is thought to be the most powerful inhibitor of free fatty acid release. Many studies have documented this. So if we look at it, this is from a 2010 textbook by Keith Frane, sort of the leading expert in the world on fat metabolism.  We have fat storage. It's insulin, insulin, insulin, insulin, insulin. Other hormones play a role. We know sex hormones play a role. But in response to the nutrient content of the diet, pretty much we're talking about insulin. It's been known since early 1960s. Same with hormonal suppression of fat mobilization. It's insulin. Okay, release of fatty acids from fat cells. Okay, so here's the hormonal defect, the fat accumulation version of the energy balance equation. This guy, Delta E, lives in a hormonal enzymatic central nervous system soup of regulators. Okay? It is regulated very tightly. And anything that lowers the regulation to reduce Delta E is going to cause a change in E in and out E out. So cause and effect are reversed. Here what we're interested is this hormonal regulation of the fat storage. Okay, and in this world, if obesity is a hormonal enzymatic disorder, if it's a fat accumulation disorder, then you could argue that carbostricted diets work because they reduce insulin, which reduces fat storage. So the cause is a reduction in insulin.  Another effect is intake gets lower or energy out gets smaller because we know if Delta E gets smaller, then this person has to be under-eating. He has to expend more energy than the end. So this is a cause. This is an effect lowering fat accumulation, lowering hunger, increasing expenditure. Okay, so the question, one question is, hasn't this issue been settled?  And we recently did a very comprehensive review of the literature going back to, I think the first study was in 1932. There have been 80-some years of studies, 80-plus in total. They include over 4,000 subjects, 1.2 million subjects days. And I can tell you beyond a shadow of it there are no definitive answers to this, okay? The primary problem with virtually all these studies, whenever we think about this, is that total calories include carbohydrate calories. Okay, carbohydrate calories represent about 50-55% typically of the amount of calories we eat. So if somebody does a study where they say, I'm going to restrict intake, E in, and I'm going to lower calories, they lower carbohydrates as well. And as a result, they change insulin signaling, even though they think of this diet as working. And under these circumstances, the two hypotheses, the two paradigms can look identical. Okay, so here's a good example. This is the Israeli Atkins Mediterranean Diet, low-fat diet trial, shy it out, came out in the New England Journal. And you could see that there was a, you know, here's the very low-carb diet, the Mediterranean diet. And at least in here, when people are complying with the diet, definitely you get a significant difference in weight. If you actually look at what these people were eating, what do you see on the low-fat diet? This is the low-fat diet. So they're eating after two years, 570 calories less than they were when they started. But of those 570 calories, 330 less are carbohydrates. So even in the low-fat arm of this study, the greatest reduction in calories is in carbohydrates. So now when you see an effect, and when you ever hear people say, look, some people do better on low-fat diets, some people do better on low-carb, the question you have to ask yourself is the difference could be that a low-carb diet restricts carbohydrates more than a low-fat diet. So some people get better on a moderate dose of the drug, carbohydrate restriction, and some people get better only on a, you know, serious dose of the drug. But the question is, how do you tell the difference? When we looked over these 80-some studies, there were a lot of recurring problems. You know, a lot of them are just free-living studies. So we give people an Atkins book, an Ornish book, American Heart Association recommendations. We counsel them, we send them off into the world, and we don't actually study the effect of changing the macronutrient composition. We study the effect of telling people to change the macronutrient composition. And those are two entirely different things, as we all know. A lot of them were small samples, like half a dozen patients, three patients. They lasted for a week or two, three weeks. Some of them calorie restrict both diets. A lot of them do this. A lot of these studies tell people to eat, say, 1,200 calories of the low-fat diet and 1,200 calories of the low-carb diet.  So you've built into the study one of the hypotheses you want to test. And because, as we said, if you restrict calories, you're going to restrict carbs, so both diets are going to be carbohydrate restricted. And you might be studying a diet that's restricted by 600 calories to a diet that's restricted by, say, 8 or 900 calories. And now you have to have carbohydrate calories, and now you have to ask yourself, would I expect to see an effect? Instead of thinking this is a low-fat diet, this is a low-carb diet, you ask yourself, would I expect to see an effect if I restrict by 600 calories of carbs versus 900? And the answer is probably not. Often, they included low carbohydrate diets that are still relatively high in carbs.  And sometimes they use naturally lean subjects to study fat accumulation, which boggles my mind. The most famous one of these studies is this 1992 study by Live One Hersh. Energy intake required to maintain body weight is not affected by wide variation in diet composition. Even with extreme change in the fat carb ratio, there was no detectable evidence of significant variation in energy need. But there was a caveat. They used lean people, minnowage lean people, who are arguably tolerant, have already proven if they're lean by their 40s and 50s that they can tolerate a high-carb diet, because that's what they're eating. So the caveats are similar results might not have been obtained in a group of obese individuals or lean individuals predisposed to obese today. Aren't those the people we want to study? The ones who actually get fat?  Okay, so how do we test it? This was one test that came out a month ago. If you guys, I wrote about this, I did an op-ed on The New York Times, David Ludwig and his colleagues from Harvard Medical School. This was an interesting test. Many people can lose weight for a few months, but most have difficulty maintaining clinically significant weight loss. One explanation relates to behavior and that motivation to adhere to restrictive regimes, typically diminishes with time, which means they fall off the diet. An alternative explanation is that weight loss elicits biological adaptation, specifically a decline in energy expenditure in an increase in hunger that promote weight gain. Okay, this is a very well-accepted finding in the field.  There was a whole New York Times magazine article written about this last January. So this is what they do. They take 21 obese or overweight patients. They semi-starved them, so they lose 10 to 15% of their body weight. And then they put them on three different diets, what it's called a crossover design.  Energy expenditure. So they know they use this technique, a doubly labeled water. They say these people are like, Joe here is expending 2,600 calories in his weight-reduced state. We're going to give him 2,600 calories a day. So our energy balance hypothesis says it's not going to gain weight, but we're going to do it in a low-fat diet with 60% fat. Whoa, that should be 60% carbs, 20% fat.  So that's 50% fat, 40% carbs with their low glycemic index. 100% energy expenditure in a ketogenic diet, although it probably wasn't ketogenic, actually we know it wasn't ketogenic, 60% fat, 30% protein. And they go through these, they cycle through these in random order. And so here's our intervention. You could think of it as our intervention lowers insulin in different levels. The glycemic index a little bit, low carb diet a little more. We fix energy in because we're going to feed them exactly what they were expending when the study started. And what we want to know is what is the effect on delta E stored and the effect on E out? Okay? So our predictions, our energy balance equations says all three groups maintain weight and energy expenditure remains constant because we're feeding them exactly as much as they're expending. We're making E in equal to E out. Our fat accumulation disorder says the greater the carb restriction, the greater the decrease in insulin, the greater the energy expenditure, and the greater the weight loss. Okay? And what you see, this is hard to make out, but here is total energy expenditure. So they measure their energy expenditure prior to the weight and prior to losing weight it's around 3200 calories on average.  And the low glycemic index, they expend around 2900 calories, 120-odd calories more. And on the very low carbohydrate diet they expend 300 calories more. Okay? What's fascinating, if you look at this chart, told us, oh, here's low fat, low glycemic index. So this is high carb, lower carb, lowest carb. And here's the energy at weight maintenance. Okay? You know, that they start at. And about half the subjects actually, excuse me, this is the energy they're expending before they lose the weight. So before their weight reduced and about half the subjects on the very low carbohydrate diet actually increase their expenditure above that which they were expending before they lost the weight to begin with. The funny thing is, they did the studies for 28 days. So e-out, they decrease insulin, e-out shoots up. The less carbs, the greater the increase in energy expenditure. We spoke to the researcher who did the study, David Ludwig, we had dinner with him last night. They saw a reduction in delta E. They had to if e-out went up. And this stayed the same. But it wasn't significant enough to report and what they want to do is do the study for instead of 28 days, do it for six months or nine months, and then you'll be able to see whether or not you get a change in what you have to do. So there are other tests as well. Okay? The Ludwig test started off just by weight reducing people. Okay, so you semi-starved people so they lose 10 to 15 percent and then you fix their energy expenditure and the assumption was which diet is better for weight maintenance. This is in part, I think, because the researchers didn't believe that you could lose weight on a diet without decreasing energy expenditure, so you can start with obese and overweight men, reduce their insulin, fix their calories at whatever they're eating when they're obese or overweight. So let's say I'm an obese guy and I eat 3,000 calories a day. I'm going to keep my diet at 3,000 calories but I'm going to change the macronutrient composition. So I'm in a lower insulin. Delta E should go down if we lower insulin. That's what our theory says. An e-out should go up independent because this isn't a caloric issue. So we should be able to take n obese or overweight men, let's say four dozen, and randomize them into two groups with a high calorie diet so we measure their energy expenditure and we give them a nice balanced diet 35 percent fat, 15 percent protein 35, well it should be 50 percent carbs lean meat, whole grains, fruits and vegetables exactly what we're told to eat but exactly the amount of energy they were expending or a high calorie ketogenic diet 100 percent energy expenditure less than 40 grams a day sort of Atkins induction. We've got to do it for longer than four weeks because over four weeks you're going to get a lot of water loss so ideally 2, 3, 4 months the longer the better and the reason we go for a ketogenic diet is because of this graph which I find could be the most important graph in this field and if you plot this came out of a study the Defranzo study in 1990 Defranzo was the inventor of the technique to measure insulin levels this insulin clamp and if you plot fatty acid mobilization by insulin levels you see as insulin comes down the amount of fatty acid turn over in oxidation you get is relatively stable and then you get below a certain number and it shoots up insulin regulation of plasma free fatty acid is maximally manifested low physiological research is a refer to and this is being like the fat tissue being extraordinarily sensitive to insulin you get below a certain level and suddenly boom it's dumping fatty acid the bloodstream and your lean tissue is oxidizing and if we go to a ketogenic diet if we lower insulin levels as low as we can get them we can be confident that we're beneath that level and that we're going to be able to see an effect okay so here are the predictions of this other experiment the energy balance disorder weight and energy expenditure remains constant remember measuring the people's energy expenditure and we're giving them an intake exactly equal to that so e n equals e out there's no change in weight the fat accumulation disorder the carbostricted groups lose weight and increase energy expenditure despite e n equaling e out because we're lowering insulin lowering fat storage increasing fatty acid mobilization they're going to lose weight and expend more energy it's an easy experiment to do the caveat is when you're done with it if you've shown that you can feed someone exactly what they're eating and get them to lose weight then you write up the paper and you send it to the reviewers and the reviewers say obviously they didn't eat what you gave them right because we know that the only way to lose weight is to eat less and you're saying they didn't eat less so you got to put them in a metabolic ward you got to isolate them and be able to prove that they ate everything you gave them and now the experiment gets difficult expensive you got to be rigorous you got to be meticulous it can be done and we're hoping to get people to do it but it'll take time here's another example remember calories actually this is what I mean by calories being irrelevant as long as we decrease insulin we should decrease delta e this fat stored in the fat tissue even if we increase intake so we could do an experiment where we give you more food let's say we measure your expenditure my expenditure I was eating 3,000 calories a day and I was weight stable now I'm going to give me 3,600 calories a day 120% of the energy I was expending okay but it's going to be a ketogenic diet so it's going to lower insulin now I actually I put 2 arrows here in a question mark because we don't actually know if I'll be able to eat that diet and that's a little technical to get into right now but I may be too satiated because I'm burning too many fatty acids but if I can eat it and it lowers insulin then we have to have e-out go up and it's got to go up more than e-in so for feeding you 120% of your expenditure of your expenditure and you start losing weight then you have to be expending more than 20% more than what you're expending to begin with a very large effect and it should be measurable so here's a study, an obese or overweight man you get a high calorie balanced diet 120% energy expenditure exactly what we're told to you but 20% more than you're eating today and you study it against a ketogenic diet again you have to monitor and isolate the study because if these people actually lose weight well then they need what you gave them predictions, the energy balance disorder people are going to say both groups are going to gain weight because we're feeding them more than they were expending e-in is bigger than e-out they get fatter this is what you want in an experiment you want an experiment that compares in which the two different hypotheses give you two different answers the fat accumulation disorder is going to say if you decrease insulin those people are going to lose weight and their energy expenditure will have to go up and we can measure that as well I actually presented this experiment at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center about three years ago trying to get them to do it because they have the facilities and the director of the center Claude Bouchard spent his whole life doing what are called overfeeding experiments and he said I've done overfeeding experiments my whole life he's French-Canadian and I predict both groups are going to gain weight because they always gain weight and Eric Raveson was a science director the institute was sitting in the audience and I asked him what he thought because I had asked him that morning and he had studied nutrition and metabolism very carefully and he had told me that morning that the ketogenic diet group would lose weight it doesn't matter if you overfeed them if you lower insulin and lower fat accumulation they're going to lose weight if you lower insulin they're going to lose fat and burn it but I had to ask him four times to say it loud enough so that people could see that he disagreed with the director of the institute okay there are other tests you could do and they're all based on questions we can ask okay so if a beneficial effect of calorie restriction intervention we semi-starve someone that's attributed in a paper either the calorie restriction or the weight loss often you see they'll semi-starve people they say look diabetes went away that means losing weight resolves diabetes but if the losing weight was caused by the restriction in carbohydrates when they restricted calories which is possible then it's possible that some or all of the effect that they saw was due to the restriction of carbohydrates not due to the restriction in calories or the weight loss here is the most extreme example of this I ever found this was a paper that came out about three years ago in science they wanted to see if calorie restriction makes primates live longer primates live a long time these monkeys live about 27 years on average so they started this study in the late 70's and they calorie restricted them here's a calorie restricted animal versus a normal animal at 27 years of age you can see how healthy this one looks here's the first occurrence of age related disease charts so here's the control diet here's the calorie restricted diet if you think it's 30% less calories and they wanted it this is great if you calorie restrict someone they live longer so here's what they were eating this is the primate diet 30% cornstarch almost 30% sugar 10% corn oil I said to the research who did this study Rick Weindrich, I said Rick what are the possibility the reason they live longer is because in the 30 calorie restricted they live by 30% and cornstarch for 30% and he said that's probably the reason I agree with you the problem is in order to get their study funded they had to propose to use this diet which is a diet recommended by this group the AIN for feeding primates in captivity and so you don't know you have no idea but I would argue that you restrict the sugar from a natural diet they might live who knows how long these monkeys will live here's another example reversal of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease hepatic insulin resistance so they semi-starved people with the 1200 calorie diet in conclusion these days to support the hypothesis that moderate weight loss normalizes fasting blood sugar in patients with poorly controlled type 2 diabetes and it gets rid of their hepatic their fatty liver disease but in restricting calories to 1200 calories which is what they fed them they've restricted carbohydrates in half also so maybe it's the carbs so how would you test it that's pretty simple you take your obese overweight diabetics so here's this diet they put them on which is 1200 calories about 600 from carbs so you do one arm with that diet and then you do one arm at 100% of energy expenditure so let's say they were expending 2500 calories originally or you let them eat as much as they want or you let them eat as much as they want but you match the carbohydrates so if these two studies get the same effect it suggests that the reduction in carbohydrates was the beneficial factor and then you could also do an ad libenum or a ketogenic diet where you drop the carbs all the way down and see if you get even a better result but you start doing multiple arms where you acknowledge that when you reduce calories you also restrict carbs so let's do an arm where we restrict carbs but not calories and see if the carbs are the problem the other question is if you see a study that shows a deleterious effect of calorie restriction so now we semi-starved people when something bad happens and then you do that in an obese subject so they attribute it to either calorie restriction or the attendant fat loss and you ask the question is it possible that the same thing would happen in a lean subject so you do these studies where they restrict obese subjects so you find out that they expend less energy and you would say well obviously there's something about the obese state that people want to stick to their set point is high but you can do the same thing in a lean subject and see if they also show the same results I know these actually in this case they do because those studies were done in 1917 in other words is the effect caused by an obese individual losing weight or is it caused by the semi-starvation that you use to make the subject lean what happens if the subjects lose weight without semi-starvation remember we don't have to starve them we just have to lower their insulin levels in this alternative universe so here's a classic example of this study this is Rudolibu where they semi-starved people and low and behold energy expenditure drops and this is why we think it's so hard to maintain weight loss but you could do the same study very similar to the other study you could do obese or overweight subjects and lean subjects so we could see if the effect we saw holds if we semi-starved lean people they too will have their energy expenditure dropped literally five or close to five and again we just we manipulate the carbohydrate content and the calorie content for the diet so when we actually get our results we could see what caused the effect was it the semi-starvation was it the fat loss in these cases this is how you would do it so you basically lower insulin you fix energy in it's effectively the same study that Ludwig did that I talked about earlier but you got to do it for longer than a month and then there are a whole host of these studies and I'm going to wrap up with this there are studies that show that if you semi-starve obese subjects and do MRIs of their brain to look at the neural activity their brain levels their brain activity changes when they look at good tasting food and people assume this is because they're obese and they're leptin resistant and we give them leptin and it fixes it but we could do the same thing with lean subjects who aren't obese and see if they have the same brain functions because if they do then we can argue that the reason these people are doing this is because they're semi-starved not because they've been lost weight at some level of semi-starvation to maintain the weight loss so this is how you do that study I'm going to wrap it up here you get the point there's specific experiments all this can be settled with good science the problem so far is the research community because they haven't believed they've believed that this energy balance idea was so firmly set like it was passed down from Mount I'm going to forget the name of the mountain this is what happens when you're lecturing on tablets and so they never thought to ask the question and if you don't think that a low-fat diet is also a low-carb diet you don't think to ask the question and our job in this business my job, one of the things I'm dedicating myself to is to get these people to understand that these questions have to be asked but it's not good enough to just say oh yeah that's possible that part of the job of science is to see if the possible is real or not and unfortunately we can't do these experiments journalists can't do them bloggers can't do them but the research community can and so we hope that in the next five years we'll get them to do it and then these issues will all be settled anyway thank you very much