Question is from Laura Ashley. Do you think diet breaks are helpful for someone who has cut calories multiple times in life? I think diet breaks are helpful if they're not diet breaks. It depends how you use them, right? So if you're using, and this is just based off of working with lots and lots of people. So the studies will show that having a break in your diet, in other words, rather than always being, let's say you wanna lose weight, right? So you're at a calorie deficit.   So let's say you're doing that for three weeks and then every three weeks you do one to three days where you bring the calories up so that it's at maintenance. So you're eating as much as you're burning or maybe even a little bit above that. So you're eating a little bit more than you're burning.  Studies show that you'll burn more body fat and lose less muscle or no muscle if you do it that way. It seems to have a better effect on the metabolism because the metabolism tends to wanna slow down when you cut your calories. So less of that happens when you do diet breaks. Now, my experience as a trainer tells me this, when they're scheduled diet breaks, they encourage binging when the break comes around. So I'm restricting for two weeks and I know, oh my God, in 10 days I got my diet break. Uh-oh, in five days I got my diet break. Two days I got my diet break. Boom, I get to the diet break and it becomes, I tend to lose control. This is more speaking to like cheat day mentality. Exactly, that's exactly what the diet break is. I was reading it more like they've been, in a restricted calorie deficit for a long period of time. And at that point I would say yes. A longer. Yeah, if it was like in a long gated period of time where you need to interrupt that by bumping up your calories, I would see a lot of benefits. No, that's a good point. Yeah, it's a little bit of a loaded question because of that. Because I don't know exactly who I'm talking to when I answer this. I would be very careful answering it because I wouldn't want to encourage somebody to, yeah, you should take a week off and they plan that when they go to Cabo or Hawaii and then they drink and eat like crazy and like, yeah, I'm on my diet break because my pumps is it's good for me. Like, no, I don't think that's a good step. But what we talk about on the show a lot, I feel like, is the benefits of running mini cuts and mini bulks. And if your main goal is to lose body fat and to reduce, you would spend more of the time in cuts and less time in bulks, but no matter what your goal is, you should weave in and out of them and more frequent than not. Like the biggest mistake I think I see with people that are trying to lose body fat is they go on these six, eight, 12, 24, week long diets where they're in a calorie restriction. And yeah, it doesn't take very long and in fact the studies show that it takes about two to four weeks before the body really starts to adapt and slow down to this new calorie maintenance. So to keep that from happening, one of the best things that you could do is to go back to like what Sal said, as you move back into a maintenance to a surplus for a little while and then move back. And we could sit here and talk all day long about what is the most ideal? Like how long should I be dieting for? How long should I be bulking? Well, there's gonna be an individual variance with everybody, but typically if I have a client who wants to lose body fat, I'll never let them really run longer than four to six weeks tops. That's a long time of a pure calorie restricted diet before I at least give them one week of surplus. And when we do that, it's a very calculated surplus. It's not, I tell a client, oh, you've been good for four to six weeks dieting.   I want you to run a surplus for this week. What does that look like? Well, instead of 1500, I want you at 17 or 1800 calories every single day for a week long. So, and we do that for a week and then we go back. And so I'll intermittently do that. And you can do that as frequent as every two weeks or so for somebody's trying to do that. I probably wouldn't stretch longer, like I said, than about four or six weeks consistently in a diet, before I at least give you some surplus days in there.  It promotes bad behaviors. It does, it promotes bad behaviors, which is the most important thing you want to consider when you're trying to eat healthy. Here's the other thing too, I see people doing these cheat days or diet breaks and that's the way I'm interpreting it, right? I see people doing that. The same people that do that are the same people that eat the same amount of calories every single day. Whenever you're trying to eat healthier and you're counting macros and calories, one strategy that I've used in the past that makes it more long-term effective is to try to mimic real life a little bit more closely. And real life rarely looks like 1,500 calories every single day. Typically it looks more like 1,700 calories this day, 1,300 calories this day. Right, fluctuates. Yeah, so you might want to do that if you are tracking your food or whatever.  You wanna know how to weather the storm. That's it.


Aloha, I'm Marcia Joiner, and this is Cannabis Chronicles. And we are honored to co-host the film, Weed the People, with Senator Mike Gabbard and the Hawaii Health Center. And the film is Weed the People, and it is a documentary film, and it will show at the Hawaii State Capitol Auditorium, and at 7 p.m. Let me tell you, well, let's show the trailer, and the trailer and the movie are a gift to us from Ricky Lake and the company to show, so that we learn about the horrors that these little children went through and what their families had to go to get cannabis for their healing. So let's take a look. They found over 20 tumors in his chest. They said your daughter will not live to see her second birthday. When your kids got cancer, the rulebook goes out the window, really. I wouldn't feel right if I didn't explore everything that there was. When we found out about Sophie's brain tumor, I had no idea this would be the gift from God to her. Would you let a first or second grader or any child use medical marijuana? It's the same as every other drug. There are chemical compounds in the plant that interact with the cells in our bodies and have certain reactions. The different ways that cannabis and cannabinoids seem to suppress cancer is quite impressive. It's life and death. As a mom myself, I would do it in a heartbeat knowing what I know. The federal government is telling us there's not enough research on cannabis to deschedule it from Schedule 1, and then they're saying you can't do research because it's Schedule 1. In 1937, the American Medical Association told Congress you should not ban the substance because there's things that we are already using this for that we don't have substitutes for. He'd had to have dilauded to manage the pain, and that had created an opiate dependency, so they put him on to methadone. Because it originates from our pharmaceutical industry, it's accepted by society. I started reading about the anti-tumor properties of cannabis oil. It's all about supporting side effects and helping the chemo to do its job. One of the main reasons I want it legal is so that we can start having standards and not have it be the wild west. We're in unturtered waters. We're lab rats. There's enough research for me to know, one, it happens to be a very safe medication, and two, it works. Oh my God. That's where the cyst used to be. It's working. I just find it staggering to accept that the billions of dollars that are spent on cancer research, that the medicine that we were relying on has made somebody's kitchen. It's gorgeous. The whole drug policy reform issue is a human rights issue at its core. Why as a society are we denying people the use of something that I have seen over and over and over again? Be helpful. What kind of medicine are we giving her? And we do invite you to see the film. It's a must-see. You will love it. You will cry. You will tear. Please join us at the Hawaii State Capitol on the 11th at 7 p.m. And it is open to the public. It is free. Parking is free. So join us, won't you? Thank you so much.


It's a good time for Japanese Nintendo games with a vaguely British setting. First, there was Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition. Now, Pokémon fans can travel to the Isle of Armour, continuing their quest in the expansion to the extremely British Pokémon Sword and Shield. While plenty of previous Pokémon games have been loosely based on particular countries or regions of the world, the level of accuracy in Sword and Shield takes things a step further. The game overflows with small artistic touches that perfectly reflect the British countryside. Sword and Shield are also filled with UK predominantly English slang, although there's a mixed approach here, with some Americanisms making the whole experience a bit confusing. So why are Sword and Shield, and by extension the Isle of Armour, so quintessentially English? Well, it's all thanks to the game's art director, James Turner. While James has been living in Japan for decades now, he grew up in the English countryside. In his quest to become a professional artist, he found his way to genius sonority, a Japanese developer that has made several Pokémon spin-off games over the years. Game Freak was therefore already familiar with James's work when he applied as an artist at the company. Even so, they didn't make things easy for him, making him go through the standard interview process, which involved making up new Pokémon designs on the fly. James racked his brain and drew out a tree Pokémon which would later serve as the basic inspiration for Phantom. James was one of the very first Westerners to work at Game Freak, a feat which impressed a lot of Nintendo staff. Satoru Uwata once told him, You're Japanese is excellent. I'd love to be able to speak English that fluently. While James worked on many Pokémon titles at Game Freak, he also worked on a lot of their unrelated games. Suddenly though, he found himself being inundated with requests for help on the early stages of a new Pokémon game. He said, I was working on a different project and they were beginning development on what would become Sword and Shield, and I would hear from people working on it. We have some things we want to ask you about. We need your opinion on something, and I'd be pulled away from what I was doing. It became pretty clear they were thinking about England, and they wanted my opinion about the English countryside or the culture and stuff like that. With James constantly being asked to help, eventually it made sense to make him the games art director. This was a big honour. James had served as art director on some spin-off Pokémon games while at Genius Sonority, but he'd never been given such an important role on a Pokémon game at Game Freak before. James wanted to make sure that Sword and Shield accurately portrayed life in the British countryside. Just as Red and Blue were based on Satoshi Tajiri's childhood, and Ruby and Sapphire were based on Yonichi Masuda's childhood, James hoped that Sword and Shield would reflect what it really felt like to grow up in a small rural English village. James feels that people in Britain often don't appreciate how beautiful our country really is. Whenever he travels back to his hometown from Japan, he's struck by the colour of nature all around him. He said, the greenery of the countryside, the patchwork farmlands, that's a really beautiful aspect. The pretty small towns and the big cities as well. They can be really impressive. I wanted to get that across in the game. The aim was to convey the true nature of the UK as well, not just the postcard. It's good to have those landmarks and get a feeling of similarity, but I also wanted to convey the small details that people who come from the UK or people who visit the UK a lot, they can look at them and feel familiar. And it doesn't feel like a rough interpretation, but something that is really true to the details. Case in point, one time an artist sent James a design for signposts that had a distinct medieval fantasy feel. James rejected the design entirely, instead providing the artist with an alternative design that looked more like the actual road signs in the UK. James didn't want Sword and Shield to feel like a fairytale caricature of British culture. He wanted it to look like his childhood home. But of course, for games literally named after medieval weapons, Sword and Shield weren't going to be completely grounded in reality. Where would be the fun in that? James hopes though that the finished game is true to the feel of Britain, even if elements of its design are exaggerated for effect. He said, It is based on the UK, but there are more colourful locations as well within the game to create a sense of adventure. So if you've ever wondered why Pokémon Sword and Shield and then your expansions, the Isle of Armour and the Crown Tundra, are so steeped in British culture, you have James Turner to thank for it. The moral of the story is that your personal experiences in life can be invaluable in helping others to learn more about the world. No matter who you are, you have insight that nobody else has, and you can make a big difference by sharing that with others.