A Simple Formula for a Lean, Muscular Physique - Dr Mike Israetel

Dr Mike Israetel is a Professor of Exercise and Sport Science at Lehman College and the Co-Founder of Renaissance Periodization. If you’ve ever wondered “is this diet actually working” then you're probably not alone. However there are now scientifically proven optimal methods for losing fat in the most efficient way possible. And today we get a full breakdown of the optimal approach for fat loss from the best teacher on the planet. Expect to learn how the physiology of fat loss actually works, whether calories actually matter in your weight loss journey, if you need to count macros when trying to lose fat, how to actually build and keep 6-pack abs, whether there are any fat loss supplements worth your time to take, how long you should stay on a diet for before taking a break and much more... - 00:00 Fundamental Physiology of Fat Loss 09:50 Do Calories Matter? 17:30 How Often You Should Weigh Yourself 23:14 The Truth About Set Point Theory 30:16 Why Modern Society is So Fat 38:18 Managing Protein, Carbs & Fat 44:07 Are Seed Oils Actually Bad for Health? 49:46 Optimal Mealtimes for Weight Loss 57:20 Best Foods to Make Fat Loss Easier 1:10:13 How Our Body Expends Calories 1:21:50 The Facts About Cardio for Fat Loss 1:33:28 Does Resistance Training Help You Lose Weight? 1:42:56 The Key to Getting Abs 1:51:18 Supplements That Help With Fat Loss 1:55:02 Why Do So Many People Fail at Diets? 2:06:27 Mike’s Favourite Fat Loss Tactics 2:11:31 How to Lose Fat With a Sweet Tooth 2:15:15 Diet Transitions & Diet Breaks 2:21:17 Where to Find Mike - Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get 30% discount on Create’s Creatine Gummies at https://trycreate.co/modernwisdom Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/wisdom - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Look at how lean you are. Lean, tight head.

• 0:04Mike Israetel?

  I think most people, when they get lean, they become more attractive. I've become less because my grotesquity of my whatever this is, is more revealed.

• 0:11Chris Williamson?

  Someone commented on our last episode saying that watching Chris and Mike talk to each other is like seeing two alien head races meeting for the first time. I think it was a predator versus alien reference.

• 0:24Mike Israetel?

  Which one am I?

• 0:25Chris Williamson?

  I'm predator because of this ledge. I have a prominent, I have a prominent brow.

• 0:29Mike Israetel?

  Hmm. You could have been a good wrestler. That's good in wrestling.

• 0:32Chris Williamson?

  Stick it in your face. Okay. You are Mr. Science Man, Dr. Science Man of exercise and getting jacked. Our last episode is fantastic. Everyone should go and check that out. Today I want to talk about how to lose fat. People can get jacked, but if you're not that lean, getting jacked kind of isn't as good as it could be if you were a bit more lean. So today I want to do one stop shop, ultimate breakdown, fat loss. What is the fundamental physiology when it comes to fat loss?

• 1:04Mike Israetel?

  So if you download the RP Diet Coach app, it actually makes tiny little app molecules that go into your bloodstream and make you happy and lean. No, wait, the plug was supposed to be for later. The fundamental physiology of getting leaner

• 1:21Mike Israetel?

  is a question of sort of what is your body fat there to do? And your body fat there to do is there to do a few things for you. It lubricates your joints. It provides some of the architecture to your cell surfaces, et cetera. But adipose tissue is a subcategory of all of your body fat.

• 1:44Mike Israetel?

  And it's designed a little bit to protect internal organs and some other things like that. But it's mostly designed as an energy reservoir because.

• 1:53Mike Israetel?

  In our evolved ancestral timeline, everything up until modernity, food availability was predictably intermittent, which means you had some food today, maybe a lot of food, maybe the tribe killed a mammoth or something. And if you could only eat what was there and then you got full and you were like meh, and you kind of buzzed off, then the day after it's rotting mammoth and you can't eat it anymore. And if you didn't gorge yourself like crazy and have somewhere to put that mammoth stuff, then in the next maybe two weeks that you didn't get a lot of food, some fraction of the people with that particular kind of adaptation that wasn't prone to

• 2:36Mike Israetel?

  or physiologically anatomically able to store excess energy away was just gonna die. And their ancestors would not have and did not reproduce, which is why all extant humans today have the ability to store adipose tissue as a reservoir for calories, uh, energy that we can use for later because of that predictable intermittency of calorie availability. It's curious that we're talking about how to lose fat. Notice we're not talking about how to gain fat because we're really already super good at that. You've got a lot of seminars for people about how to get someone to work harder. How do I improve my diligence? Have you ever been to a laziness seminar? Would be absurd. There's some people need it for sure.

• 3:21Mike Israetel?

  You and I probably do. Yeah. But, uh, for most people, it's like, well, I just like, that's the default state. So for most people, the ability to gain body fat is default precisely because evolution has designed us to be damn good at that. Precisely because we used to be intermittently starving. So when you get a bunch of food in you, it goes to a few places. The first place once the food exits the GI tract that it goes is the bloodstream, broken down into various molecules, amino acids, which are the subcomponents of proteins, carbohydrates, typically glucose, fructose, as well as various parts of fat.

• 3:55Mike Israetel?

  And there's some places for them to go. Some of them just go through the bloodstream and get absorbed by all the various cells of your body. I mean, your brain cells need food, your liver cells need food, every cell needs food, and they just go and are used right in the cell right there. Some of those molecules of food, so to speak, are used to raise your blood sugar enough so that, you know, if you don't have food for the next 15 minutes, you're not just going to drop over dead or something like that. Still, another part can go into putting a little bit of fat into your skeletal muscle. Your skeletal muscle inside of itself has a little bit of fat reserve, which is cool. It serves some cool functions. It's not a lot of reserve. And still another part, and there's a couple of parts I'm sort

• 4:37Mike Israetel?

  of skipping for concise and conciseness to a little bit, is mostly carbohydrate gets loaded as what's called glycogen. And that's just a lot of carbohydrate and it's storing in your liver and a lot goes to your skeletal muscles, which is why when you mega cram in a bunch of carbs, the next day you kind of look beefier and you're like, what the hell is going on? Because that glycogen brings in another roughly three grams of water for every gram of carbohydrate you bring in. So it really gets you going. But that's all measured in the hundreds to several thousands of calories that you can put away into your body. If that's all you are capable of, you'd be unreal lean all the time. And in our ancestral environment,

• 5:18Mike Israetel?

  dead in a few days or emaciated from muscle loss. So all, once you fill all the calorie needs for the moment, you have to put the calories somewhere else. Once your glycogen stores are relatively full, they don't accept any more food. Your muscles, unfortunately, technically don't act as a reservoir of excess calories or amino acids. Wouldn't that be sweet? You just like eat a ton of Thanksgiving dinner and you just wake up more that much more jacked.

• 5:50Mike Israetel?

  Where it goes, for the most part, in that excess number of calories eaten that isn't attending to your, let's say, daily needs, is it goes to your adipose tissue, your subcutaneous and intra-abdominal layers and layers of body fat. Now, this tissue is specifically designed to do mostly one thing, which is take any kind of calorie, transform it, and it gets transformed in various places, including in the fat cells themselves, into very easy to store fats. So you can eat proteins. They generally don't get converted to fat super simply, but they can displace other food and then that food gets converted to fats. Carbs get converted to fats, and fats need only minimal modification for transport and storage. And now, everything basically vectors into fat. That fat gets stored into fat cells, and there it chills.

• 6:35Mike Israetel?

  It's got metabolic activity. It's got a ton of hormonal activity. But fat stores adipose tissue isn't nearly as metabolically active as most other tissue. It's like a fuel tank, more or less. There your fats is. Now, if you keep eating a lot of food over and over, your body's like, man, I know that famine's coming soon, but not today, baby. We're packing it in. And it turns out, one of the reasons why humans are able to get unbelievably fat in many cases, is because there was really no selective pressure in evolution for a top-end limit of too much fat. How you would evolve that selective pressure is you would have to have humans evolve for at least thousands of years in an insane food abundance environment. And then the people that got cardiovascular disease, or were mobile, or found unattractive

• 7:20Mike Israetel?

  by mates because they were too fat, they would win out, and eventually everyone would kind of look like, I don't know, the average Nigerian person who's just stripped to bits for no reason and just got it all, right? So, people can get unreal fat because your fat's kind of like a super welcoming giant corporate hotel. People check in, and it's like, we got room for you, no problem. More people check in, it's like, hey, build another side of the hotel, it builds another side, and it just keeps going. So the question is, I'm fat burning, how do we get the guests to check out of the hotel? And there's really only one way to do it. And that is, stop sending guests in, or send in less. Because if you have a situation where you're eating a certain amount of food, and it's fulfilling only your daily needs,

• 8:04Mike Israetel?

  what we call maintenance calories, your body fat doesn't get re-upped, and then it just stays the same. It can't possibly grow because there's no food being shuttled for it to grow. If you eat less than maintenance, let's say 250 calories, less than all of your body processes need to keep you doing whatever you're doing. That 250 calories is going to have to come from somewhere and your body's like, hey, listen, no problem. And it goes around sort of by analogy is an index. It's all the board meeting, all the, the board is together and the CEO is like, all right, nervous system, what are you doing with the calories? He's like, dude, I need to run the whole body. Are you crazy? Like, okay, we're not going to break down the nervous system for calories. That's insane. Muscular system, it's like, dude, I'm doing stuff now.

• 8:49Mike Israetel?

  We'll get to this later, but if you exercise a lot and you train with weights, the muscles like, bro, I need all of this, leave me alone. If you're sedentary and there's nowhere to go for calories, yeah, your muscle can be used for breakdown, but it's not super efficient to do it. It'll go to your organs, stomach, liver, brain, et cetera. This is important stuff. And then it goes over to body fat. Hey, body fat, what are you up to? It's nothing at all. Why, what's wrong? You got any calories? What are you doing with them? It's like, nothing. Give it up. And then so your body fat will release calories through various digestible forms of fat into your bloodstream. They will go wherever they're needed. And then that will supply that deficit. It'll fill up that deficit for you. So as measured internally in your body as a whole, you're at maintenance, but for your fat stores, you're at a severe deficit.

• 9:34Mike Israetel?

  And over hours and days and weeks and weeks and weeks, the amount of fat you're storing starts to wind out down. Your body's still operating pretty well and that's fundamentally how you lose body fat by creating a calorie deficit.

• 9:47Chris Williamson?

  So do calories matter? And if they matter, why do so many people say that they don't matter?

• 9:55Mike Israetel?

  I'm on a pre-contest right now, a few months out from some bodybuilding shows. So I'm trying to channel my kindness attitude, more difficult than usual. So calories are the thing that matters the most in fat loss. Rit large period, end of conversation. Calories always mattered among people who study physics and thermodynamics on the whole, among actual nutritionists that go to school for nutrition, physiologists, medical doctors, researchers. Do calories matter or not was never a question that was asked because it was answered in like 1910 or something like that.

• 10:39Mike Israetel?

  There are two kinds of people that say calories don't matter.

• 10:44Mike Israetel?

  One group are well-meaning people who have noticed something. They've noticed that when they started to exercise, they've noticed that when they started to eat certain types of foods and not others, that their body changed pretty rapidly. And they noticed that they weren't counting calories, but because they were eating a diet high in fibrous vegetables and lean meats, they didn't have to, they just kept losing weight. Maybe they've had hormonal trouble in the past, thyroid hormone was low. They got thyroid hormone fixed up through exogenous medication. All of a sudden, things are going great, testosterone replacement therapy and so on and so on. They didn't try to track their calories, they didn't try to lower their calories and they lost fat.

• 11:28Mike Israetel?

  So these very well-meaning people, it's totally understandable how they could think, well, cheese, I mean, calories matter, I guess, as the science book says, but I never tracked my calories and I lost a ton of fat. How do you explain that? And there's not really a mystery in the scientific community about how to explain that. Your expenditure went up, maybe a little bit. Your intake went down, maybe a little bit. The combination of those two created a net calorie deficit. And that's like 99.9% of the way that anyone ever loses fat. That's really what's going on. Does that mean you have to count your calories? No. Does that mean if you had diets before where you count calories and you really struggle to do it and it doesn't work and you're like calorie counting is stupid? You try to keep keto diet, you get a massive reduction in appetite.

• 12:11Mike Israetel?

  A bunch of your favorite cheat foods can't eat because they're not keto. You lose a bunch of weight and you're like, see, it was hormones, it was keto, it was never the calories. Well, actually it was always the calories. But the keto diet allowed you to get into a calorie deficit. So powerfully that you didn't even need to track calories. You were just never going to make it back to what you could only do with potato chips and ice cream. So that's the group one that's understandable. Group two are people that range anywhere from honestly misinformed folks that have noticed these changes in themselves and have created digital products and YouTube channels to help other folks figure things out, all the way through sociopathic charlatans that maybe know what's really going on and maybe don't, but don't care. And they'll tell you calories don't matter, calorie counting is a myth

• 12:57Mike Israetel?

  because they, some combination of truly believe that to be the case erroneously. Or they have no true beliefs, they're just a...

• 13:08Mike Israetel?

  There's no soul in there and they'll say whatever the hell they have to to get that bottom line for their corporation to go up. Um, Dr. Oz type of people. So a lot of the calorie balances and myth comes from those second groups of people that make digital content and say these things and is taken quite well by that first group of people that's like, well, yeah, that's what I've noticed in my life.

• 13:31Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 13:32Mike Israetel?

  And that's how you have that continuation of that insane, totally bonkers, upside down myth.

• 13:39Chris Williamson?

  So certain changes that people can make with the choice of foods that they have has a downstream consequence on the amount of food that they eat and also perhaps the way that they feel, the amount that they move around. Perhaps it's tied in with a more overall change of I'm going to care about health and I'm going to eat more meat and whole foods and stuff. And that means that maybe they take the stairs a little bit more. And this combination of a reduction of hyperpalatable calorie dense foods on the front end and maybe a little bit of a change on the back end means reliable weight loss over the longer term. This creates fertile ground for magic foods. This is a food that'll burn fat. This is the thing that you need to eat or shouldn't eat or whatever. And that

• 14:24Chris Williamson?

  is then sort of slotted into by that's the, the fuel is provided to a very sort of dry heap of potential grass that can then be set ablaze by.

• 14:35Mike Israetel?

  Arsonists of the human mind.

• 14:37Chris Williamson?

  Arson about.

• 14:38Mike Israetel?

  Charlotte.

• 14:38Chris Williamson?

  Arson about.

• 14:39Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, that's very well put.

• 14:41Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 14:43Chris Williamson?

  Do you have to count calories in order to be successful? If calories are the most important thing that matters, is it mandatory that everyone needs to track calories if they're going to lose body fat?

• 14:53Mike Israetel?

  Great question. It is no more mandatory to count calories in order to lose fat than it is to count your money in order to become wealthy. If your input stream on money is like the Gucci brand level, you don't have to count it. You just have to like forklift the cash into a warehouse or something. God knows what those people do with their money, right? And then of course burn it because you're that rich. You don't need them. So if you are losing weight.

• 15:22Mike Israetel?

  You look leaner, your clothes are fitting better and better and better. But you don't count calories? Don't you dare start. God bless you. Whatever you're doing, it's working. Keep it up. You feel better. Everything's awesome. Don't even worry about looking at a label or counting calories. But if you're not losing weight, you're trying a certain kind of diet. You gained a pound last month. And you want the ultimate, almost never but for weird body water issues, been defeated hack. Counting calories is going to get you there. It is unequivocal. Because if you understand what your maintenance calorie level is very well by taking a few weeks to just get to know what you're eating,

• 16:06Mike Israetel?

  like the R B Diet Coach app you can do that with, you can do it with MyFitnessPal, you can do it with Macro Factor, tons of great apps to do that with. You get a feel for your maintenance. Cause like if you eat a little bit less, you start losing weight, you a little bit more, you start gaining and after a while it looks like this just kind of like, yeah, it looks like 2,500 calories, like right around my maintenance. And you want to lose weight. You take anywhere between, and I can get on the specifics here, roughly 250 calories per day to 750 calories per day, depending on a few factors. Chunk that right up and you watch the magic happen. But if you never count calories and you're not losing weight, the mystery factor is a big deal. Uh, another quick analogy. Let's say you're Elon Musk and you're counting your billions or whatever he does in a spare time. Just kidding, he doesn't have spare time. And you have a rocket that you're launching

• 16:51Mike Israetel?

  and it takes off and shoots through the atmosphere. Do you have to calculate a thrust to weight ratio and see that it's positive? No, it's in fucking space. Of course it's positive. But if it doesn't leave the platform after a nice 30 second burn, you gotta start calculating stuff. It's like, are we off by a rounding error? Or are we off by an order of magnitude? The whole engine could be the, the problem or it could be like, oh, Bob didn't do this with the spigot. So calorie balance doesn't have to matter. It always matters under the surface, but you don't have to count calories if the times are good. If the times are confusing and you're like, what the hell? I'm trying to eat healthy and I'm not losing weight. It's time to give calorie counting a shot.

• 17:28Chris Williamson?

  Knuckle down. What about weighing yourself? How frequently should people do it? What's the way that you advise them to? Is there an app? Is there a blah, blah?

• 17:34Mike Israetel?

  Multiple times a day for your self-esteem. No way. That's just what I do. Is it good or bad? It's always bad.

• 17:42Mike Israetel?

  There are definitely many apps that can help you track your weight. RP Diet Coach app does that, a whole bunch of them do. I'm here pimping the app all the time. I just want people to know, we make a great app, super high quality product. It is not the only great app. There's tons of other awesome, awesome app.

• 17:56Mike Israetel?

  If you are maintaining and living an awesome, healthy life, you're not trying to lose weight or fat. I would say you can weigh in from somewhere between never to once every month or two weeks. Why do I say that? Because sometimes you have a, you know, like a real holiday season, not just a holiday. Pre-Thanksgiving, you go to four or five other people's Thanksgivings, you go to your own Thanksgiving. Christmas isn't like a day. We know how it works. It's like work Christmas, leisure Christmas, your buddies, blah, blah, blah. And January rolls around and you're like, I feel fine. Kind of a little, you know, that a little kind of puff. Fluffy. Fluffy.

• 18:40Mike Israetel?

  If you weigh yourself every two weeks to a month, just as a normal, healthy human, you can notice like, damn it, I gained seven pounds. And that can give you the hint to go, you know what, let me, uh, let me clean my shit up. And dial it in a bit. Yeah. And that just means like easing up on the junk food for the next two or three weeks. You're chilling with your wife at home Friday night. She's like pizza. You're like sushi. She's like, yep. So it's just an early warning system. That's it. Why do I say that? Because on unreal number of people, I mean, literally millions of people in the modern free countries of the world in which food is excessive. Almost no one just wakes up one day and they're like, 400 pounds? How the hell?

• 19:22Mike Israetel?

  It goes up by a few pounds here and there. And if they don't catch it until six months later, when they see their doctor, it's a 15 pound problem. Now you do need the RP Diet Coach app because this is a meat and potatoes problem. But if it's three to seven pounds, two or three weeks of just cleaning up your eating and making sure to get your physical activity up a little bit, you cabosh it and it's just not there. And you go back to living your best life, weigh yourself every few weeks. Two weeks later, after that, you can weigh yourself, you're even lighter than you thought. Hell yeah, pizza tonight. So it's good to keep your eye on it. Not if you're actively in a fat loss diet. Weighing yourself at least once a week is a real good idea. It's probably not the best idea because water weight fluctuations can give you a ton of air. Let's say you stuck to your macros 100%.

• 20:07Mike Israetel?

  All the proteins, carbs, fats and calories you were supposed to eat on Sunday. You always weigh yourself on Monday. But a part of those macros was you made an omelet and you sprinkled some fat free cheese on it. And you like salt, you're a salt person. Sometimes when people eat a lot of salt, it makes them thirstier. And then some people will have that salt and that water and they'll retain a little bit of that. And maybe you have an element to drink too, because they're delicious and they're good for you. You have a couple of elements and well, it's another 3,000 milligrams of salt. You wake up the next day and even though tissue wise, if you had an MRI scanner, which I own six in my home as a trillionaire. One of them is just for show, by the way, it's not even plugged in. Isn't that absurd? So that's the one I show to people. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not know about that one.

• 20:52Mike Israetel?

  So you have a situation where in reality you lost one and a half pounds of fat last week. Everything about your diet and training is set. Don't you change a thing? But because you had excess salt just randomly,

• 21:08Mike Israetel?

  it looks like you gained a pound and a half. Cause you only weigh in once and all you have is a weak point of data. So you, you have one data point, you have a whole week, you're like, all right. Did I get bloated from last night? Or what the hell is going on? And then you cut your calories even more. And well, I'm sure we'll get to this later, but if you cut your calories way more than the recommended amount for a long time, you develop an excessive amount of diet fatigue. And then that can really put a spoke in your wheels for sustainability of your fat loss. It's nothing you want to do. So our recommendation or RP is generally weigh yourself two to three times a week. Seven days a week is totally fine, but there's nothing magical about it. So if you're going up somewhere, you know, if you're a New Yorker and you go to the Hamptons for a weekend, my word. I mean, who's still, who's still poor enough to go to the Hamptons? Am I right?

• 21:53Mike Israetel?

  And you're like, oh, I'm not going to have a scale in the Hamptons. Is that a problem? Absolutely not a problem. Your five days that you were weighing are totally great. But you know, if you go a week without weighing yourself, you're kind of in the dark and it could have been a good week, could have been a bad week, never can tell. So a few times a week, all the way up to every day is totally fine.

• 22:09Chris Williamson?

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• 22:52Chris Williamson?

  Best of all, they ship to the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe and Australia. You can get $350 off the Pod4 Ultra by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to eightsleep.com/ModernWisdom using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's E I G H T S L E E P dot com slash Modern Wisdom and Modern Wisdom at checkout. What or how much truth is there in set point theory? Your body getting accustomed to a particular weight that you sit at and not liking to change too much from that one?

• 23:25Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, it's a good question. The modern interpretation I'm most familiar with is now called settling point theory. Now, because I'm a dogmatist for science, I don't like that it's called theory. Theory is reserved for interconnected frameworks of facts well supported by evidence, evolution, gravitation, et cetera. Even the standard model in theoretical physics isn't called a theory, but it's way more predictive than settling point theory by 10 orders of magnitude. So the settling point model or hypothesis.

• 23:57Mike Israetel?

  Says there's not one set point that your body is supposed to be. You weren't born to weigh 200 pounds and doesn't matter what happens. You always trend back to 200. What it says is there's a couple of inputs to how much you weigh. And given that they are of certain values, you're going to settle temporarily in a certain weight range. For example, let's say you live a lifestyle where you go out to eat twice a week. You have certain meals you prep at home. You train a certain number of times. You get a certain number of steps. If those things are rather constant, you might weigh 200 pounds. If we put you in a food environment that's way more obesogenic as the term goes. Let's see, what's the most obesogenic food environment? Cruise. America.

• 24:41Mike Israetel?

  America, the United States. Anytime I'm anywhere in the world and someone jokingly talks smack about the US, I always have the same joke back and it's old as hell, but I love overuse it. I go over, I'm like, do you see that over the horizon over there? Like I'm in Sydney. You just look over the harbor and they're like, no, I'm like, that is US aircraft carrier battle group. God damn it. It can end your country in five minutes. Woo. And then they do Texas thing, do the gunshots. So in any case, the US is the best. That's why we're here. China's biggest at least. Well, yeah, well, it's actually so funny enough. The UK just overtook us, I believe, in, in obesity rates. So. Really? Hat tip to you fine folks. Yeah, it's, it's a neck and neck battle. Now, the US is

• 25:25Mike Israetel?

  still king in a few different categories. We have the highest absolute number of fat people because we have a lot of people and fat people. We also have the highest absolute number of very, very, very fat people. Like you go to the UK, there's some fat people. A lot of people are fat, but you come to the US, especially like Southern Texas, you will regularly see four and 500 pound people. That's an American. Rascal fat. Yes. But on fractions of super fat people, we are inferior to a few of the peoples of the Pacific Islands. Folks from Tonga, folks from American Samoa, them some big peoples over there and they do two things super well.

• 26:08Mike Israetel?

  Eat amazingly tasty food, three things. Be incredibly jolly and super awesome to hang out with. And are statistically completely overrepresented of any racial group in American football pro performances.

• 26:22Chris Williamson?

  And rugby, probably as well.

• 26:23Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, that's, you know, that's a step down for them. Like, this is easy. I usually do this against way bigger people. So, um, sorry.

• 26:30Chris Williamson?

  Set point there.

• 26:32Mike Israetel?

  Settling point.

• 26:33Chris Williamson?

  Settling point.

• 26:33Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, yes. So if I get you over to a cruise ship for two weeks. I mean, cruise ship food is so good. And it's kind of 24 hours and it's always there and you leave the main restaurant and they're like, fresh baked cookies? And you're like, who the hell am I to say no to this nice young person? And all of a sudden, you're taking in 600 more calories per day, just normally. Now, your settling point, if you stayed there for weeks and weeks, would be whatever it was, but higher. You take it the other way. When you get into a time machine, you go back to the 1940s, late 40s in the United States. You're like, all right, I'm ready to eat. What are you gonna do? There's a few fast food places, but they're not that good. You gotta drive pretty far to get them. And they're not even open 24 hours. It's just quite a fence. That's why the 40s sucked.

• 27:19Mike Israetel?

  And you go, okay, how do I get some food? You go to the grocery store. It's almost completely bereft of convenience food. And you're like, the hell am I supposed to do? Cook my food? Because there's some interesting cultural stuff that just baffling in retrospect. You know, the idea of a nice Sunday dinner, like a ham dinner or a turkey dinner? That is, as far as I'm concerned, archaeology at this point. Because any person of basically any income in a modern country can just buy a turkey or a ham every single day for every meal. It's a nominal cost. So if you go back to the 1940s in the US, people say, why weren't there so many fat people? You want to be fat? You gotta cook your own food. And if you're a bad cook, it's not even tasty. So if the average tastiness and convenience of the food in your area goes down, you're settling point eight 200 anymore.

• 28:04Mike Israetel?

  It's 160 now. No, it could be 200 if you were on a cruise ship, then it could be 220. So based on those factors, your food environment, your activity level, who you hang around with, et cetera. Your settling point can move up and down, but in any one situation, yeah, settling points are a real thing. And there's some physiology to your body being a little annoyed at having to make a change. It's less annoyed if the environmental factors change. And then it's like, well, I'm just living my best life and I'm just losing weight because I just don't eat tasty food all the time. So there is something to settling points and there is a genetic factor for sure. The absolute biggest by a mile genetic factor for settling points is hunger levels and food pleasure response. I'm sure you've hung out with a lot of people in your life.

• 28:49Mike Israetel?

  Some people, are you a food guy? Do you like to eat?

• 28:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:53Mike Israetel?

  Yeah. But notice the way you said like, yeah. Some people are like, bro, are you kidding me? I can inhale food. Some other people, and I've been friends with many people like this in the past, they just like food to them is like this thing they have to remember to put in their bodies. Otherwise they're like, oh, I can't see clearly, right? So the biggest factor by a long shot on any one individual is what are their hunger levels like and what are their enjoyment of food neurochemistry like? And that goes a big way. How do you get the American obesity, the global obesity epidemic? You take hyper palatable, ultra convenient, relative to income, super cheap food. You make it insanely ubiquitously available.

• 29:36Mike Israetel?

  You vary it constantly so no one gets used to it. Like if you want a new type of crisp to eat in the UK and you go once a week to the store, you just never run out because there's always new stuff. And you pair that with a population of people. Some fraction of that population totally unaffected. They just, eh, crisps, I have a crisp, I sit down, I do nothing. I don't have another one. Some people, you give them tasty food and it's cheap and convenient. That's their hobby now is eating food and they love it. And the pounds just smack on and on and on. So for them, their settling point in that environment sometimes doesn't have a number yet because they're still working their way up to it.

• 30:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah, I think this has been the most interesting thing I've learned maybe over the last year. Orbiting a number of people talking about why is modern society so fat? There's all of these images from the 1960s of beaches in America and everyone looks lean and athletic and you see it's because of the insert your favorite food demon of choice here. It's the red 40, it's the seed oils, it's the carcinogens in the water, it's the estrogen levels, it's the whatever, whatever. But. The sort of Occam's razor of this is just food is tastier, more calorie dense, cheaper and more available than it's ever been before.

• 30:56Mike Israetel?

  Yes.

• 30:57Chris Williamson?

  What did you think was going to happen? What would it just, just from first principles, just make that, forget the constitution of it. What's the molecular, wait, wait, is it, is it artificial or is it natural? What, what do you think would happen to those people?

• 31:10Mike Israetel?

  Yes, very predictable. And in a certain sense, a little bit disappointing because it would be cool if we could have like one type of food additive or something in the water supply that we discovered was insanely obesogenic. And we managed to put in some sensible regulation and take it out of the water supply or reduce it by a factor of a thousand. And everyone, just like over the next year, had this renaissance where they leaned up. That would be awesome. It would be awesome for two reasons. One, it would solve the problem really quick. And two, it would remove any onus of actually the problem's worse than you thought. It's like, if you go to couples therapy for a while and you want your partner to change.

• 31:54Mike Israetel?

  And after like 12 sessions, you, the psychiatrist or psychologist requests you come alone. And she kind of like dances around it and she's like, you're the problem, Chris. It's kind of all on you. Nancy's great. She's been great the whole time. It's you, you're like, that's not what I went to couples therapy to hear. And so when someone's like, it's actually all the insanely tasty food you love to eat all the time that's making you super fat. You've got a tendency to be like, what, when I gotta stop eating that stuff? But wasn't it the microplast? Can I eat, can I make microplastics tasty? So at some point, it's this insanely simple reason that describes probably 90% or more of the variance in obesity from historical times to now.

• 32:37Mike Israetel?

  But it's also a bit like, ah, crap. It's like trying to make it on a JV basketball team. And you're like, coach is at heart. Is it, do I have to practice dribbling anymore? And it's like, you're just an Ashkenazi Jew, dude. You're never going to be good at this. That's what I heard from my basketball coach when I was five foot zero back in, just kidding, I'm not five feet yet. One day, Chris, I'll get up there. It's, it's something you don't want to hear, but once you process it, you're like, of course it's true. The good news is for the first time in history, we can start taking real big bites out of that, no pun intended. With modern pharmacology, which is going to save us all from everything. Begin insane rant about how drugs are great. But Ozempic and all of those drugs.

• 33:22Mike Israetel?

  And I do find it at this point comical that Ozempic gets all the attention that it gets. Because this is a third generation GLP one agonist. There's already in late stage clinical trials, a fifth generation agonist.

• 33:35Chris Williamson?

  Ozempic, tazepotide?

• 33:37Mike Israetel?

  That's gen four.

• 33:38Chris Williamson?

  Oh, Ozempic's gen three.

• 33:40Mike Israetel?

  Uh huh.

• 33:41Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay, so I think a lot of people have sort of reset the number because one and two kind of.

• 33:46Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like laraglitide and stuff, no one.

• 33:49Chris Williamson?

  And what's the the fifth gen, which is the one that's really hard to pronounce?

• 33:53Mike Israetel?

  There's a bunch of them, but I pronounce it retatrotide.

• 33:56Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 33:56Mike Israetel?

  You can also say it red a true tide if you want to say like three words instead of one.

• 34:00Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 34:01Mike Israetel?

  So like retatrotide is not a GLP one agonist technically. It's a triple agonist. It's a GLP, GIP glucagon agonist. Not only does it kibosh your appetite from two different separate pathways. But somehow, I have no idea how these guys managed to modulate the glucagon pathway to increase your resting metabolic rate.

• 34:19Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 34:20Mike Israetel?

  Retatrotide is gen five. It is was invented years ago. And what they're inventing right now in the pharmaceutical industry is going to make retatrotide look like a joke. And retatrotide uh left Ozempic behind completely in clinical trials. It beats a tazepotide no problem. And we're talking about more weight loss for less side effect.

• 34:43Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 34:44Mike Israetel?

  The stuff they're developing right now is going to lead to a late 2020s, in my view. In which for almost everyone, if you don't want to be obese anymore. You just take the medication and you won't be. But if you do, you just don't take the medication and you will be. Why is why can just one pill or one injection do so much? Because it makes you less hungry fundamentally. And then when you're not really hungry, you stop eating as much food and all these weird other hypotheses about why we were getting fat. Ozempic kind of crushed all of them. How does it just do all that?

• 35:16Chris Williamson?

  That's so funny. I mean, there's a big, I'm going to be fascinated to observe the way that most people see the GLP one category of drugs. I've been surprised by the negativity of the pushback.

• 35:31Mike Israetel?

  I haven't.

• 35:32Chris Williamson?

  You haven't been surprised by?

• 35:33Mike Israetel?

  No, not at all. My God.

• 35:34Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 35:35Mike Israetel?

  People have a reflexive anti pharmaceutical, anti capitalist, anti corporate, anti drug attitude. Some kind of smorgasbord of those comes out anytime, all the time with tons of people.

• 35:45Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so this is like the natty or not of fat, like the fatty or not?

• 35:51Mike Israetel?

  Fatty or not? Definitely fatty. Like, I meant that in a different way.

• 35:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, okay, that's, that, that makes sense. I think some people have an issue with the fact that they feel like it's kind of cheating. You know, I had to get there.

• 36:03Mike Israetel?

  I love to tackle that one.

• 36:05Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 36:06Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, it's, um, I see where people are coming from for the respectful part of my talk, which ends now and begin with the disrespectful part of my talk. It's pure nonsense. You use air conditioning. When you break your leg, you go to the hospital when you get antibiotics. You cheating motherfucker. Aren't you supposed to be eating rocks and bashing your head into a caribou to kill it or something like that? As a matter of fact, the first, the first tool industry, millions of years ago, that proto humans made. One of them is like the old Duven tool industry. They discover these now where it's like, you know, Flint rocks that are shaped in a no longer natural pattern, widowed down into something like a little

• 36:48Mike Israetel?

  club head or a little spike that you can at least like pull an animal's guts apart easier or even kill something with. They were cheating. That's the first cheating they've ever done. Artificial. And it made them better at stuff.

• 37:02Mike Israetel?

  Your ability to lose weight can be a test of your willpower. Or you can take the pill or the injection and with no added willpower, lose all the weight you want. And then you can test your willpower on tending to your family better, being a kinder person to others, being someone of moral authority to others by how you live your life, coaching little league football and being on time for the kids instead of standing in a fucking Hardee's line getting your third cheeseburger for that day. You can start a business, you can save the world, you can clean up the atmosphere, everything. We're not running out of problems. So if we have body fat as this thing that's going to sharpen our will and we get rid

• 37:46Mike Israetel?

  of that, the set of problems remains approximately infinite still and you can sharpen your will on what's left over. If you think you're tough and proving your willpower to yourself by losing fat, you're right, but you're not getting jacked, you're not building a business because you're draining all of your willpower on that one thing. It's a good thing we have pills to help us with as much as possible so then we can have more bandwidth to do all the other good stuff that we want to do.

• 38:18Chris Williamson?

  Getting back to the fat loss and the diet, protein, carbs, fat. How should people be thinking about those? How do they contribute? What should they be eating?

• 38:27Mike Israetel?

  Yes. Proteins are essential because they compose all of the organs, all of your enzymes, all the stuff that does work is pretty much protein. It's non-negotiable. And also protein supports your skeletal muscle, which is kind of important because there's two types of getting lean. One is people think you're sick and ask you if you're okay because you lost a bunch of muscle. The other is like people compliment you or saying nice things behind your back because they're jealous and they want to have sex with you, but they can't. I'm used to that sort of thing, the jealousy part, me being jealous. So protein is a big deal for most people who are not pursuing exotic, hyper bodybuilding pursuits.

• 39:07Mike Israetel?

  As little as just over half a gram per pound of body weight per day protein is going to take care of most of your needs. So if you weigh 200 pounds and you eat something like 120 grams of protein per day, you're probably golden and you can probably lose fat and lose a very little or no muscle at all. The top end is maybe about double fat, real insurance policy type of stuff. You're doing crazy hardcore weight training, crazy amount of cardio and activity. You're already very, very lean and you're prone to losing muscle and you're a little older than average, over 40. Then it's just over one gram per pound. So if you weigh 200 grams, if you weigh 200 grams, if you weigh 200 pounds, then maybe you have 220 or 240 grams. For a very serious fitness person, gram per

• 39:50Mike Israetel?

  pound is an amazing rule. Just understand that for most people, like if your mom asks you for diet advice, just a little bit over half of that is totally solid. Often best consumed for most muscle mass retention and building through three to five meals evenly spaced per day. But if you just have like two meals for the average person, if they're eating lots of protein, they're going to get great results. Okay, carbs. I'll do carbs and fats at the same time, if you don't mind. There is a big difference between optimizing for athletic performance and muscularity and just losing some goddamn fat. So you can see Mr. Twinkie again. Well, there you are, buddy. It's been a while.

• 40:34Mike Israetel?

  Carbs and fats kind of combine into one index of extra calories after protein has been taken care of. A really great app for fat loss that you can use is called Macro Factor. And they have this turn dial where you can like turn up the carbs and turn down the fats. And it's one comes out of the other because for many people, it just doesn't matter as long as you get a minimum of both. If you're getting some fibrous veggies and maybe a few pieces of fruit per day, but you're down to very low levels of carbs, you eat no grains, no breads, no rice, none of that, but you eat plenty of healthy fats, you're golden. You're gonna lose tons of fat and be

• 41:15Mike Israetel?

  super healthy. If you have minimal fats, like you take an essential fat supplement every day and the rest of your diet has no fat in it whatsoever, you're doing starches, grains, Gatorade, the whole nine yards, but your calorie balance is set, you've generated a 250 to 750 daily calorie deficit and your protein is good, you're gonna lose fat until the cows come home. And it's gonna go super well. How you feel on each one of those, how your sport and athletic hobbies are supported, how convenient it is for your life, those are secondary discussions, but very important ones. So it's kind of two points here. One, as long as you get minimum levels of fats and carbs, which are very, very low and most people won't hit, whichever one

• 42:00Mike Israetel?

  you want higher or lower, it doesn't matter. But also, consider this, if you're more physically active, more carbohydrate generally works better. If carbs kind of make you just want more carbs, but if you get a big satiating effect from fats and you're like, oh, that's enough, maybe you can consider more fats. Some people get more energy from carbs and they prefer more carbs. Some people get a more even keeled mental clarity from lower carbs and higher fats and their go-to is to have higher fats. Most people would be served best with an even combination of them, roughly the same calories coming from fats and carbs, once your protein is taken care of, because in many cases that afford you the most flexibility in your diet, you show up to a restaurant with

• 42:42Mike Israetel?

  your friends, you're on a fat loss diet, and you look up what menu items you can eat. Obviously, you're on a fat loss diet, you're not gonna eat five of the menu items and be a pig. But a lot of real food in the real world, it's tough to get zero carb. It's also real tough to get really low fat, but most of them have a bit of carbs, bit of fats, and if you have that middle combination, it's a really, really awesome way to go to town and still hit your calorie goals. So carbs and fats, plus or minus, no big deal, as long as your calories are in check and your protein is in check, the conversation for fats versus carbs is individually based preference and very nuanced.

• 43:17Chris Williamson?

  Is there a kind of fat which is best?

• 43:21Mike Israetel?

  Well, our company started making this fat supplement. I'm just kidding. I'm just trying to shield as many. I'm shilling products I don't even have to sell. Get on the mailing list. Super fats. Generally speaking, on average, the preponderance of your fat should probably come from poly and mono unsaturated fat sources. There's a conversation that it's more poly or more mono, probably more poly than mono. But what kind of foods are we talking about here?

• 43:48Mike Israetel?

  A bunch of the oils, most of the plant oils are really, really awesome. Olive oil, canola oil. Yes, I said canola oil. Just do it. I am I M D B. Do a PubMed search for canola oil health benefits review and you'll see that it's super, super healthy. All the different kinds of oils are usually generally very good.

• 44:06Chris Williamson?

  I can't respect a doctor who proposes seed oils as part of his diet.

• 44:11Mike Israetel?

  I never asked for your respect. Nameless, faceless troll person who's in a troll farm in China. But yeah, by the way, the seed oils thing is really funny. I get smacked for that all the time, but.

• 44:22Chris Williamson?

  You did a video about why seed oils aren't bad for your health.

• 44:25Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, totally. We have that on the RP Strengths channel and like, you know, I was curious about the issue because so many people were talking about seed oils being bad. And I just did like one PubMed search and there was a few review articles that are like seed oils generally tend to be better than. So they've done multiple studies where they take people who eat a lot of saturated fats, which are totally fine, by the way, but they replace some fraction of those with seed oils. And in almost every study, the people are months later healthier. And so like the idea that seed oils are bad for you is usually concluded by folks that are like really deep into lipidology research and they're inferring that seed oil should be bad for you based on various cooking process modifications. But inference is dope and I use it all the time in decision making, but it never beats

• 45:09Mike Israetel?

  actual empirical randomized control trials because that's like what the real world actually is. It's like, well, I think Stacy likes me. Go ask her. She's like, no, you're like, okay, I was wrong. Right? Inference doesn't beat the real thing. So seed oils are super great for your health. They're totally fine. And then there's all kinds of nuts, all kinds of nut butters, avocados. Those types of fats tend to be amazing. Um, fats from fatty fish, also super awesome. Saturated fats are also just fine for your health and you can have a lot of them. But you generally want something like two thirds of your fats to come from plant fats, uh, poly and mono unsaturated. Maybe one third of your fats to come from saturated fat sources. So like eggs and beef and things like that.

• 45:52Mike Israetel?

  Where you want to maybe go easy on fats is ultra processed sources with trans fats in them. The trans fats don't just kill you when you walk in one day and you just keel over. It's trans fats, the police put up a, a, a line of like trans fats on it. Um, but they're not great in aggregate over the long term. So if, you know, like your primary source of fats is like McDonald's fry grease. It's not great. Cheesy puffs, it's not great. So if you're eating mostly minimally processed whole foods, saturated fats are totally fine. But if you're having trouble with your lipids and your doctor's like, look, you gotta change something. Replacing some of your saturated fats with poly and mono saturated fats, just from directly the literature seems to work pretty well. But it's not a crazy thing. Here's another thing.

• 46:35Mike Israetel?

  For many people that listen to this who are already eating a pretty healthy diet. Their total fat intake is so low. The composition of those fats barely matters at that point. If you have a very high fat diet, let's say you're trying to do the keto thing or the carnivore thing. Yeah, you gotta take a look at your fat sources a little more because that's a lot of fats now and it's going to matter for your blood work.

• 46:57Chris Williamson?

  I wonder, what, is there not something to do with reheating fats and oils? That's bad.

• 47:04Mike Israetel?

  Allegedly.

• 47:06Chris Williamson?

  Is it? Is that true?

• 47:08Mike Israetel?

  I haven't looked into it in great depth because the preponderance of the people that espouse that are insane people. Whose epistemological anchor is total nonsense on average. So like, I haven't looked into deep refutations of the flat earth idea, but I'm not going to anytime soon. If anyone has any compelling evidence that the reheating process is insanely deleterious for health, and they have randomized clinical trials to support this, I'm super interested in it. I'm out of my depth on that one, but after about five minutes of talking to ChatGPT, I could get back into my depth, no problem. It's one of these things that, um, where do you get reheating of oils all the time? Literally in fried grease. Stop eating McDonald's every

• 47:53Mike Israetel?

  day and you're not going to have that.

• 47:54Chris Williamson?

  So so much of this stuff, so many of the demon foods that people have got an issue with, whether it's particular colorants, whether it's artificial sweeteners, whether it's seed oils, come along for the ride with foods, food types, hyperpalatable, calorie dense, very processed, probably just not all that great for you to be having very regularly. So it's not about the components of this individual thing. It's like saying this circuit board is very dangerous. Well, it is when it's attached to a Javelin missile.

• 48:23Mike Israetel?

  Yes.

• 48:24Chris Williamson?

  Uh, and you're pointing at all of the circuit boards and saying, look at how bad these circuit boards are for everybody. And you go, well, yeah, it is because for the most part, that circuit board exists inside of that missile.

• 48:34Mike Israetel?

  Yeah. I like that you used, uh, the Javelin missile. Uh, so very pertinent to the news cycle. Maybe YouTube will pick it up.

• 48:42Chris Williamson?

  In other news, this episode is brought to you by Momentous. Two fundamental parts of recovery are proper sleep quality and proper hormone levels, which is why Momentous is sleep packs and that Tongkat Ali, yeah, there it is, have helped me recover. They contain only the most evidence-based ingredients at perfect doses to help you and your body recover. So if you've been looking to naturally improve your testosterone, Tonga Ali is a fantastic place to start. And if you've been struggling to fall asleep on a nighttime, stay asleep throughout the night, or if you're not waking up feeling rested and revitalized in the morning, these sleep packs are fantastic. They've got an evidence-based blend of magnesium, L-3-9, apigenin, and L-theanine in a perfect dose to help you get to sleep on the night. Best of all, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it, try it, and

• 49:26Chris Williamson?

  if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back. You can get a 20% discount site-wide by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernd wisdom, using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com/modernd wisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout. Meal timing. How often should people eat if they're trying to do fat loss? How much of a spread between meals do they need?

• 49:53Mike Israetel?

  For weight loss, it just doesn't matter.

• 49:58Mike Israetel?

  They've compared eating six or more meals per day regularly to what's called alternate day fasting, where one day you eat and the next day you're just really pissed at everyone because you don't eat.

• 50:11Mike Israetel?

  For weight loss, it doesn't matter over the long term. And it makes sense because the calorie balance is the same. It's calorie controlled. That day that you're eating is real fun on that diet. The day you're not eating is really extra much fun. So weight loss, not a concern. How does it become a concern with fat loss is muscle growth and muscle retention are processes that prefer multiple meals spread evenly throughout the day. So if you want to lose weight and you just don't care about muscle, let's say it's not a problem for you. You train hard anyway because you love it, but you're like, I have plenty of muscle. My doctor tells me I need to lose weight.

• 50:52Mike Israetel?

  Whatever meal frequency is something that schedule wise, culture wise, preference wise that you like, do it up. One meal a day, no problem. Meal every other day, no problem. Seven meals a day, dope. If you're trying to build and maintain muscle mass as much as possible and you're really full sending this and you're training with weights regularly, which is a big deal.

• 51:20Mike Israetel?

  Any number of meals up to you hit four per day evenly spread, each of them high in protein, marginally increases how much muscle you can grow and maintain. After four meals per day, in all of the research, we see that the, there is no more effect that we can detect. So if you're like, dude, I'm, I'm growing crazy muscle on four meals a day. Should I go to five? Hmm. Maybe it'll make some teeny difference, but maybe not. From the theoretical work, probably not. Mostly because if you eat bigger meals, they just take longer to digest. So the pulsatility of nutrients in your blood, it basically just looks like this the whole day. Cause you start eating breakfast and by the time you run out of breakfast, you get lunch and then dinner and then you're done.

• 52:02Chris Williamson?

  What about the earliest that people should eat, the latest that they should eat? Is there something to do with the parentheses of your eating window throughout the day?

• 52:11Mike Israetel?

  If you eat in a very constrained eating window, the result you can expect starts to look more and more like a very small number of meals per day. Your body doesn't really count meals. Your peripheral cellular structures count how much of a flux of nutrients they get exposed to. So if you say my eating window is from 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM at night, and I have four meals in my eating window every half hour, your body's like, I hear that, but it's just one meal. It's one big meal. Like, if you still have stomach contents not in the intestines yet, and you're eating meal number two, like, it's still the same meal. So a very constrained eating window does do that. But as far as spreading it out, long or short, again, for weight loss, none of that matters.

• 52:56Mike Israetel?

  For fat loss, you want to spread it out, not as far as possible, but you probably want to be ingesting food at something like at least a 12, maybe 14, maybe even 16-hour situation. Contest bodybuilders who've near mastered the art of losing fat while maintaining muscle, they'll eat almost as soon as they wake up, and they'll have their last meal an hour or two before bed, if not even closer. And they eat multiple times throughout the day so their body's never starving for protein. Is that excessive for most people? Yeah. What do you think sensible advice is? To wake up, again, if you want muscle mass retention, within a few hours of when you wake up,

• 53:39Mike Israetel?

  don't be like, it's like six hours later and you're working on projects at work and your stomach does one of those like angry growls or, oh shit, you exist. Better get a Twinkie. Don't do that. And if you take longer than four or five hours before you go to bed after you've eaten, that can work out great for you. But for some people, especially as the diet wears on, especially as they get more hungry, it might interfere with sleep in two ways at least. Yep. One is, if you're already hungry when you're trying to fall asleep, it's a nonstarter. You're not falling asleep. You're just counting sheep and one sheep jumps over and one, ba, two, three. It's like a sheep, but it's like sectioned into meat parts. It's like lamb, rack of lamb.

• 54:23Mike Israetel?

  You're like, oh shit, I'm thinking about food again. And then you go in the fridge and you're getting a cheeseburger. So the other way is, if you've eaten many, many hours before you went to sleep, but not so many that you can fall asleep, you might wake up in the middle of the night or very early morning starving. Your cortisol goes up, you ain't falling back asleep anymore. Sleep is so unbelievably critical to fat loss and to muscle gain and retention. It is a non-negotiable variable. So eat in such a way that gives you the best sleep is probably the best advice I can have in a meal timing perspective. So for most people, eat, you can eat as soon as you wake up, no problem. You can eat right before you go to sleep, no problem.

• 55:08Mike Israetel?

  Some people, if they eat right before bed or even an hour or two before, you know, there's digestion, the body temperature goes up and they're tossing and turning, they can't sleep. Don't do that, then back that meal up a little bit. But if you're one of these people, especially late towards the end of a diet, a higher carbohydrate and protein meal before you go to sleep knocks you the fuck out and that's perfect. So very individual, generally spread your meals out, play around with what feels best for you.

• 55:32Chris Williamson?

  Is there anything to say about prejudicing certain types of foods earlier or later in the day, backloading the carbs until the evening time, starting off with more protein first thing in the morning, does no matter?

• 55:47Mike Israetel?

  Good question. The research on that in general has been a giant like meh, not really. Every now and again, someone will pull out a single study or two in isolation and they'll see like, see, you gotta eat more of your carbs in the morning. And then someone else a couple of years later will be like, it's the nighttime carbs that are really good. On average, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. So I would say you can play around with things yourself, but as long as you have an even-ish fraction of your protein in every meal, how you do carbs and fats doesn't matter much. At RP, we like to bias carbohydrates closer to the workout. So let's say you work out in the middle of the day, we're gonna want you to eat slightly lower fats and slightly higher carbs in the meal before you go train. It's gonna give you lots of energy.

• 56:29Mike Israetel?

  Fats are more difficult to digest, not in a bad way, just take a little longer to digest. So you might like be warming up for bench and feeling kind of like burpy and like, oh, god damn it, this shit hasn't gone through yet. But if you eat low fat, you're like, all your rice is in your muscles and you're good to go. After training to set up recovery and anabolism, there's probably a slight advantage in having more carbohydrates. Your muscles are more ready to absorb it. Your fat isn't. So that's a really good thing. And so we like to push our fats towards away from the workout and push the carbs a little bit closer. But we're really splitting hairs here.

• 56:59Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 56:59Mike Israetel?

  And so it's not some kind of magic formula. If you're a contest bodybuilder, yeah, it's a little bit more magic of a formula by a small shot. But generally speaking, the spread is, I'd say this. Almost anyone that's telling you that the circadian rhythm of food and the spread of macros is very important is misunderstanding the state of the evidence.

• 57:20Chris Williamson?

  Okay. When it comes to the kinds of foods to avoid or lean into when dieting for fat loss. What are the things that you think people often overlook? What are the things that are unnecessarily demonized? Where should people be putting their attention? What's the best food groups to make fat loss easy?

• 57:42Mike Israetel?

  Yep. Raspberries are great. Blueberries will kill you and they're terrible. Next question.

• 57:50Mike Israetel?

  As far as specific foods.

• 57:54Mike Israetel?

  Short of like eating soap or poison. There are really no individual foods that are bad for you. And there are no individual foods that stall fat loss.

• 58:07Mike Israetel?

  There have been foods historically that have been demonized, not as individual foods. All of them have gone through the ring or at least once, but food groups.

• 58:16Mike Israetel?

  Sugars.

• 58:18Mike Israetel?

  People will say sugars are bad for you. It's just categorically false to say that. Sugars aren't bad for you. Sugars are no more prone to adding body fat or making body fat loss any more difficult. It's a non-starter in direct evidence, in theory, the whole game.

• 58:37Mike Israetel?

  Nowadays, it's fun to poke fun at sugar and at carbs. Back in the eighties and nineties, if you told someone you were health conscious, and then you put butter on something, they were like, listen, you're going through some psychiatric problems. We should probably get you checked into a center. Cause you were delusional. Cause everyone knew that saturated fat especially just straight up killed you where you stood. And you were never going to get lean eating a diet high in fats. They were also wrong. Calorie balance is so king that it doesn't discriminate hardly at all among food groups. Fats versus carbs, none of that. So the myths of fats are too high or carbs are too high or sugars are too high. They're just that myths.

• 59:20Mike Israetel?

  However, a very important thing to consider is the palatability of your food and the fullness factor your food gives you. Cause hunger's a real thing. So you want to choose food when you're dieting for fat loss, creating a caloric deficit that does at least two things for you. One, it's not so damn delicious that you just want to eat more and more of it. And if you don't, you're just suffering. Like if you were deep into a fat loss diet, I was like, hello, Chris, would you like a cheeto? You'd be like, don't. Why? Cause as soon as you want them, cheetos hits your lips.

• 59:59Mike Israetel?

  Paradise, you know, purple angels flying around is better than acid at that point. You just want another cheater. So if you're on a fat loss diet, something bodybuilders discovered a long time ago, and a gentleman named, I'm gonna butcher his name for sure, Stefan Ghene. Ghene, he says pronounced like DNA. I would just say Guy in it, cause I'm American. Woo. He, I believe coined the term, or at least exposed the public to it, of something called the food palatability reward hypothesis. Properly couched as a hypothesis. So he's really the fucking man.

• 1:00:32Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:00:33Mike Israetel?

  And it basically says something baffling when you think about it. It's ultra simple. And explains most of the variants we've already talked about with obesity. When food is really tasty, people tend to eat more and they get fat. And they just want more. And if you have tasty food, but you've relegated yourself willpower style, like look a good person to not eating it, you're just gonna be more miserable. You ever smell cheeseburgers being made while you're in the single digits body fat? You're like, dude, if there was an entire family of people between me and those cheeseburgers, like, I don't insert politically.

• 1:01:08Chris Williamson?

  Boom, boom, boom.

• 1:01:09Mike Israetel?

  Shoot them. I'm gonna eat my way through them to the cheeseburger.

• 1:01:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, sorry.

• 1:01:14Mike Israetel?

  So, things that get taken out in editing.

• 1:01:18Chris Williamson?

  I went, I went native, a native American there.

• 1:01:21Mike Israetel?

  My man. So, basically, if you're dieting for fat loss, try to have foods that aren't like exotically delicious. Veggies, fruits, whole grains, lean meats, not a ton of sauces, not a crazy ton of flavor. And here's the really fucked up part. It's gonna be completely counterintuitive. What do you want when your body is telling you, listen, you need to put the fat back on? You want exactly the food that you shouldn't be having. So, it's, it's kind of like abstaining from jerking it or something, where it's like, what do you really want to do? You're like, I wanna jerk it. What are you not supposed to be doing? Not supposed to jerk it. Right. But if you can eat at home, if you can clear all of your shelves at home of junk and just

• 1:02:04Mike Israetel?

  have that lower palatability food, first of all, if you're hungry enough, that shit tastes real good. Plain chicken and broccoli tastes amazing if you're actually hungry. Have that stuff? That's really, really awesome to do. And secondly, you wanna have food that keeps you fuller for longer. Food with a lot of fluid volume, food with a lot of fiber, food that takes longer to digest. Minimally processed fruits, veggies, whole grains, lean meats, and healthy fats are just kind of undefeated in that category. And so, for of the calories you're allowed to have, it's a lot of food. It's not ultra tasty, so you kind of feel like you're laboring through it. Halfway through your meal, you don't even want anymore. You're stuffing yourself, and every week you're losing weight. Paradise. You're really doing it.

• 1:02:48Chris Williamson?

  But it's not paradise because you're going through this boring diet. It doesn't taste as nice as it could be. Dr. Mike's told me that I can't, the exact thing I want to do, which is to make this tiny morsel, a scrap of food. Please, sir, can I have some more?

• 1:03:03Mike Israetel?

  So you can turn dial it to go, okay, I'm gonna make my food a little tastier and a little less volume and it's a little less filling such that I like my food. I can finish it. I look forward to it, but at the end of the meal, I'm like, oh, okay, this is tough to finish. Then it keeps me full long enough until my next meal comes around. Yeah, I can eat instead of like two hours before my next meal. I'm like, okay, where's the food? Where's the food? I'm losing it. As you progress through a diet, it's possible to start with pretty normal food and turn dial that food palatability down and that fullness factor up such that you finish your diet with quite different foods than you started. But the entire time, your perception and relation to food is basically the same. You adjust to your preferences. Now,

• 1:03:49Mike Israetel?

  that works really well.

• 1:03:50Chris Williamson?

  Can you give some tactical examples of good switches from food types that people may be cutting, cooking with at the moment, maybe using more typically and you saying more voluminous, more full of water, more insoluble fiber, et cetera. What are some of the easy switches? Let's get rid of this. Let's put some of these in.

• 1:04:11Mike Israetel?

  Yep. Couple of examples. Creamy sauces to non-creamy sauces to dry rubs to salt only when you're real miserable. Tons of rice and pasta and breads down to whole grain breads, whole grain pasta, brown rice. Like it's still, it's funny. You go to a sushi place and it's like option for brown rice sushi. And I'm like, the Japanese people did not suffer for this abomination. What the hell is that even? So you go from that to reducing your grain intake more, expanding your fruit intake and eventually expanding

• 1:04:53Mike Israetel?

  your veggie intake. If you have 50 grams of carbs to eat and it's all white rice, that's like a little bit more than a cup of white rice. At the beginning of a fat loss diet, shit, you're barely finishing that. I'll actually complete the analogy for you. You got some rice and you got some Japanese mayo on that shit. So goddamn good. I'm balls deep into a diet. So this is incredibly difficult for me to talk about.

• 1:05:15Mike Israetel?

  You go a couple more weeks. Now it's same white rice, but now you have like you've sprinkled some like, kind of like some kind of seasoned salt on it. It's tasty, but it's no more Japanese mayo time because you could just like put that IV into your blood at that point. Then, and you'll have a little bit of veggies on the side next to it. You go to taking that rice and turning it to brown rice, but now it's not that whole scoop of brown rice. It's half a scoop of brown rice and way more veggies and even a couple slices of fruit. Still weeks later, you don't have any more rice. You have a bunch of veggies and a ton of fresh fruit. I mean, you're like stuffing it in because like holy crap. Like if you get a whole thing of strawberries, that's like 30 grams of carbs. How many fucking strawberries

• 1:05:58Mike Israetel?

  do I have to get to get to this thing? Whereas like one, like you, you take a swig of sweetened condensed milk and it's like boom, that's 50 carbs. Like what? How? So eventually you might get to a point where most of your carbohydrate consumption comes from a combination of fresh fruits and green veggies. And that's going to be insanely difficult to out eat your calorie goals. Or to put another way, you're going to eat your meals and you're going to be like, I don't want any more chicken broccoli and, and orange slices. I'm good until the next meal and you have it again. And then when you end your diet and you start coming back up to maintenance, you slowly reverse that process back out again.

• 1:06:35Chris Williamson?

  So you are using a restriction in the types of foods that you are allowed to eat in an attempt to pad out the satiety that you have by making it increasingly calorie sparse per gram of food, fewer calories and

• 1:06:55Chris Williamson?

  to increase suffering to make it hurt more?

• 1:06:59Mike Israetel?

  You're trading off two different kinds of suffering. There's the suffering of having to eat food you're not amazed with. And there's the suffering of actual hunger. They don't compare in magnitude. It's a stupid analogy offhand is the annoyance of having to wear a sticky gross sweaty helmet versus taking it off in combat. Yeah, it sucks, but there's bullets flying.

• 1:07:23Chris Williamson?

  The alternative.

• 1:07:23Mike Israetel?

  Put your helmet on.

• 1:07:24Chris Williamson?

  Is what it was.

• 1:07:24Mike Israetel?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:07:25Chris Williamson?

  Uh, what about potatoes? You mentioned about vegetables there. A lot of people that's sort of starch that that is a big satiating thing. I certainly know that when I've been dieting previously, that's one of the things I miss a lot. There's no amount of. Ground beef at ninety seven, three and whatever else that I can throw on a plate with some vegetables that like I just want a little bit of starch. How can people get that if they think it's really, that's my thing. It just makes me, makes my diet easy. Why would you go to for that more starchy stuff?

• 1:07:55Mike Israetel?

  So what you have to do is you can do an experiment on yourself. For any given number of grams of carbohydrates, which starch choices for you? Do you find the tastiest? The most difficult to stop eating, the most difficult to understand that, okay, now you've run out of pasta, don't get anymore. And also the longest window after the meal of keeping you full. On average, boiled potatoes do really well in that regard. Mashed potatoes, not as well. They're tastier, you can suck them down faster. A bunch of different types of potatoes, the more, the more minimally processed, the less processed, the better, do super well.

• 1:08:39Mike Israetel?

  Typically, rice does okay, but you can put away a lot of rice. Pasta generally doesn't do that great. I can make fields of pasta disappear by just breathing it in. So not everyone's the same.

• 1:08:55Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:08:55Mike Israetel?

  So you want to try and figure out, but generally speaking, from memory, potatoes on average rank pretty high in the.

• 1:09:01Chris Williamson?

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• 1:09:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, let's go.

• 1:09:32Chris Williamson?

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• 1:10:13Chris Williamson?

  We've spoken almost exclusively so far about ways to manipulate what goes into the body. But energy balance is what goes in versus what you expend. What do we need to know when it comes to how our body actually uses calories? G flux theory, is that a thing? Is it a hypothesis?

• 1:10:36Mike Israetel?

  What's G flux?

• 1:10:38Chris Williamson?

  I think that the way that was put across was the difference between taking in 3,500 and expending 2,500 and taking in 2,500 and expending 1,500 results in a very different type of physiology.

• 1:10:53Mike Israetel?

  Yeah. Definitely hypothesis. Maybe even notion. I was in a cordial discussion with my friend, Dr. Eric's, Dr. Eric Helms. And I brought up the flux thing and he was like, Mike, shut up. That was a T Nation article and nothing more. And I was like, fuck, he just clowned me.

• 1:11:14Chris Williamson?

  Christian Tibido, what are you doing to me? God damn it.

• 1:11:18Mike Israetel?

  He usually gives great advice. We all fuck up every now and then.

• 1:11:21Chris Williamson?

  The upright roles, you need the upright roles.

• 1:11:23Mike Israetel?

  The accent alone, I'll believe anything he says. So.

• 1:11:28Mike Israetel?

  There is something to that, but let me give you kind of the grand narrative here. There's something called the Ponser paradox, named after Herman Ponser, its discoverer. And this is a gentleman that's actually, I think, trained as a maybe like an ethnographer, an anthropologist, or something like that. And he went around the world, various colleagues, and studied the physical activity levels of various peoples, peoples of India, of Africa, of China, of indigenous tribes, of modern peoples. And he found that the levels of physical activity are almost the same for everyone. This is crazy, ready? We do not have an inactivity epidemic in the modern world.

• 1:12:11Mike Israetel?

  Hmm, sedentaryness is not the big problem. No, and if you actually live with indigenous tribes, unless they have to, they fucking sit around as long as they kind of do diddly dick. Cause you gotta conserve calories. You go out to get calories when you're hungry, when there's an opportunity. Otherwise, why the fuck are you going out and walking around? There are absolutely variation there. Between individuals in any one culture, there are huge variations in physical activity. But on average, physical activity is neither the cause of the obesity epidemic, nor the likely solution to the obesity epidemic. However, if you want your best tools brought to the game of your personal fat loss,

• 1:12:56Mike Israetel?

  what I would say is this, we can have three options for you in physical activity terms. Option one, and this is a little bit to the G flux situation. You eat very little, but you're very physically inactive. You're gonna generate the same caloric net deficit as all the other two groups of people. I'll talk about two ways of doing things. It'll work for some people. It works great. I code all day. I don't want to have to fucking exercise for five hours. Get out of my face. I don't, not really a hungry person. I can just drink a Soylent shake when I'm coding and I'm golden. No problem. The second group are people that have a moderate to high level of physical activity,

• 1:13:41Mike Israetel?

  something typified by, oh, 10,000 ish steps per day. For example, group one would be like 2 to 4,000 steps per day, AKA the average American.

• 1:13:52Mike Israetel?

  And that group of people ends up having a situation where they can eat more food and plenty of food and that helps them stay more full. But they're so active that they burn lots of fat and lose the same amount of weight and the physical activity is additive to their health outcomes because physical activity is independently important for health, regardless of how skinny or fat you are. So that's a really good option for most people, probably better than option number one. Then there's a third option, what I like to nickname the grand illusion. And that is you continue to eat like the giant swine that you are. Taco Bell employees know you by name. They have your order ready for you every three hours.

• 1:14:35Mike Israetel?

  But you tell yourself, I'm just gonna out exercise this thing. I'm gonna go to Kenya. I'm gonna sign up for their marathon team. I'm gonna hang out with those homies and we're gonna do the thing. The problem with that is this has been researched by Ponzer's group and associated colleagues. This has been researched in athletics for a long time. When you ask consistently, and I mean weeks on end, for your body to have a very high throughput of activity, calories, something like north of 15,000 to 20,000 steps per day, every day on average.

• 1:15:11Mike Israetel?

  Your body doesn't like to do that. It makes you very tired. It's making you tired so that you sit the hell down and stop bothering it as much.

• 1:15:21Mike Israetel?

  And it works. If you got through it, you've just chosen a way that is a way to lose fat that works exactly as well as option number two, which is just a moderately high physical activity, a little crazy, consistent and a decent amount of food.

• 1:15:39Mike Israetel?

  But it's just way harder and you suck up way more of your time exercising where you could And eating and cooking. And eating. Now, eating's fun, right? And who the hell cooks anymore, right? Trying to steal man, the argument here. But there's plural. I don't have one butler. I'm not poor, my God.

• 1:15:57Mike Israetel?

  If you don't want to change your eating habits and you think you're gonna out exercise your diet, we run into two problems. Problem one is what I just said, you're gonna be so drained on energy, your life's gonna suck and you'll quit 99% of the time.

• 1:16:13Mike Israetel?

  Problem number two is it is easy to say as what economist and philosopher Tom Soul has coined the term notion is beyond is a below hypothesis in its intellectual seriousness. Just a high idea you had at a party, not even couched to be tested like a hypothesis would be. And the notion is that, um, I'll just like exercise so much, I'll eat whatever I want and I'll still lose weight. The thing is though, if you do the math on that and it's frightening math, you can take a mile run, throw back like one twinkie and goodbye

• 1:16:55Mike Israetel?

  calorie balance. Half a donut nukes like half a mile run or some crazy shit like that. And so it's perfectly fine to say out loud, well, I'm just gonna eat whatever, but you can eat with a healthy appetite. And if really you mean whatever, and you like fast food and junk food and chips and crisps and all that, you can put down four or five K calories a day, no problem. You ever see the average fast food meal? Like if you just go and have the number two or supersize it, it's like 2100 calories, but you have that three times a day. You've seen supersize me or whatever. It's like, holy shit. How do you out exercise that? Well, no, it's not just marathon runner pace. It's like two marathons a day. You're

• 1:17:38Mike Israetel?

  not gonna do that. So because of that situation, option two is the preferred option. For some folks, option one works. Eating very little, exercising very little, totally cool. Exercise is good for you should probably get more of it, but it works. Option two, moderate high levels of physical activity, weight train a few times a week, get an average of 10,000 ish daily steps or so, and eat a little bit less than you normally would. You're golden. Option three, where you eat a ton of food, you don't change your ways, but you try to exercise a ton all the time. It just doesn't work in the real world for almost anyone.

• 1:18:12Chris Williamson?

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• 1:18:57Chris Williamson?

  So you can try it right now, risk free. Try AG1 and get a free one year supply of vitamin D3 and K2 plus five free AG1 travel packs with your first purchase by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to drinkag1.com/wisdom. That's drinkag1.com/wisdom. There is asymmetric warfare between what you can put into your mouth and what you can burn in your body. And that's what the example about running half a mile to burn off half of a donut. Running half a mile is not easy, it sucks.

• 1:19:28Mike Israetel?

  Unless it's to the donut shop. No, wait, it also sucks.

• 1:19:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, I guess you could run there half a mile, run back half a mile, burn it off.

• 1:19:35Mike Israetel?

  Terrible.

• 1:19:36Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:19:36Mike Israetel?

  No one's gonna do that.

• 1:19:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, running back would hurt, but yeah, I, you know, as someone who's tried to find a way to defeat thermodynamics, to get lean, uh, just thinking like that, oh God, I hate being hungry. I hate this restrictive diet. I can't have any sauce on anything. God, you know, this really, really sucks. I'll just exercise more. And the net outcome has usually been, I can't, I can't keep it up. I'm fatigued already. I'm still not actually eating what I want in any case. If you were to create some sort of pie chart of what contributes to fat loss, what would be the components and what would come from nutrition, calorie intake, exercise, whatever the hell's?

• 1:20:24Mike Israetel?

  If it's just your diet versus your physical activity, I'd say it's seventy thirty or eighty twenty diet versus physical activity, measured as real world explaining the variance of why people are lean. You take a thousand people, some are really lean, some are really fat. I mean, try to see what is it that the lean people are doing more than the fat people? Other than obviating genetics aside, it's gonna be like, yes, lean people are like a bit more physically active, a bit. And other than the morbidly obese, most people are plenty physically active. Here's another thing. If you weigh two hundred and forty pounds, and you take six thousand steps a day, just because your parking lot's always full when you come to work, you know how much you burn walking when you weigh two forty?

• 1:21:08Chris Williamson?

  Probably, probably the same as ten thousand from someone who weighs one eighty.

• 1:21:11Mike Israetel?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Hundred percent. Maybe, maybe even more than that. And so you look at who's really getting leanest, and it's mostly those people eat differently. So diet is just, it's a bigger lever.

• 1:21:24Chris Williamson?

  It's more direct.

• 1:21:26Mike Israetel?

  A hundred percent. It's like, it's like if you were, you know, trying to support a country's military to beat another country, and you're like, you get to pick one weapon system, and we'll give you the top of the line, we'll give you logistics, we'll give you support, we'll give you maintenance. Do you want the newest rifle? Or do you want the newest air superiority fighter? You're like, I'll take the jet, please. The rifle matters, but moot point.

• 1:21:46Chris Williamson?

  Okay, getting on to energy expenditure, cardio. What do people need to know about cardio for fat loss?

• 1:21:53Mike Israetel?

  It sucks. Next question. So cardio is best seen in most cases, outside of a sport context, because then it's cardio for sports, totally different. You do what you have to do. Cardio is best seen as, I need to burn a certain number of calories to get me to that moderate high level. And I have a couple of considerations. One is preference, one is convenience, one is time cost, and a few others. And so if you think there's something magical to the step mill or to driving to the gym and getting on the cycle ergometer or incline walking or something, you're going to be in for a rude awakening because none of that shit matters. Just your step count

• 1:22:36Mike Israetel?

  can get you as lean as your dietary adherence and genetics are capable of getting you. Cardio is a way to burn calories. Any kind of physical activity is roughly equivalent for it. You just measure the amount of time that you're doing it. To me, the two big factors that stand out, maybe three, sustainability, enjoyment, and time cost competing with other activities through the day. On these three, step tracker and step counting is like a huge deal. I don't want to oversell it, but it kind of wins on all counts. Why?

• 1:23:18Mike Israetel?

  If you have to get 11,000 calories every day is part of your plan. That's what my current amount.

• 1:23:22Chris Williamson?

  11,000 calories?

• 1:23:23Mike Israetel?

  Good God, 11,000. That's right. Where's the KFC? 11,000 steps a day. What ends up happening is can I get on the treadmill and do 11,000 steps? Sure. But also, I can talk to Mr. Nick Shaw, CEO of RP, and do a business meeting while I'm hands-free on my phone and walk around my backyard. I can take a walk with my wife. I can walk the dog. I can go to the grocery store. I can pace around. I can do every activity of daily living that actually accomplishes something else, and it's always adding to my step count.

• 1:23:56Chris Williamson?

  Right. So the advantage of steps, walking, is that it is not constraining as many other things that you can do as sitting on a assault bike.

• 1:24:09Mike Israetel?

  And doing nothing but that.

• 1:24:10Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:24:11Mike Israetel?

  Yeah. And it can actually empower those things. Take two scenarios. One is a person is doing only pre-planned cardio. They're on the elliptical for 30 minutes a day to burn whatever number of calories, and they don't track anything else. They do the elliptical, their husband comes home late from work and he goes, hey, um, I gotta run to the store. Do you want to come? Wife's tired. You go, honey. It's okay. Husband's alone at the store. He sees a woman that's marginally more attractive. You know, the rest. That's it. Divorce, postnup.

• 1:24:39Chris Williamson?

  The elliptical caused my break.

• 1:24:41Mike Israetel?

  That's it. The alternative view is if you're doing step tracking, you can go to the store and not have to worry about how tired you're going to be from cardio. Because once people checkbox their cardio, the human body, when it's under caloric constraint for long, is really, really finicky and cheap and it wants to make sure you don't spend anything else. So once you've done your cardio for the day, you just sit on the couch and you do this. Not ideal, but if you have a step tracker, everything counts. So if your kids are like, mommy, mommy, play with us. You're like, oh shit, I'll just go over my steps today and tomorrow I can take a bigger break. Everything you do.

• 1:25:18Chris Williamson?

  Is that how you see your steps in the same ways you would see calories across a week?

• 1:25:23Mike Israetel?

  Yes, absolutely. Some days you step a bit more, some days a bit less, some days eat a bit more, some days a bit less.

• 1:25:29Chris Williamson?

  Aggregating that across.

• 1:25:30Mike Israetel?

  Totally. That's the thing that matters in the end. Now, you don't want to get too crazy where you don't move at all. And then you have a day of 40,000 steps. It's unsustainable.

• 1:25:38Chris Williamson?

  It's the same as the alternate day fasting thing in some ways.

• 1:25:41Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, which some people love apparently, but if you catch me at 8:00 PM of the day I'm fasting, don't catch me.

• 1:25:46Chris Williamson?

  Because. What about the different impact that intensity of cardio has on the body? I've heard about the, the afterburn effect.

• 1:25:57Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:57Chris Williamson?

  Well, surely you're not going to get that if you're just lollygagging in zone two as you saunter down the road for 11,000 steps. Plodding.

• 1:26:07Mike Israetel?

  You walk to a chair from your living room couch. You sit down like afterburn. So, great question.

• 1:26:15Mike Israetel?

  The afterburn effect, or EPOC as it's known, excess post-exercise oxygen consumption, is colloquially one of the most overrated things in exercise science. It's just not that big of a deal. It adds up a little over time, but the way you get crazy EPOC is you do like repeat hill sprints, or insanely highly damaging whole-body lifting workouts. Then you see, you know, a couple dozen, maybe a hundred or two extra calories burned over a 24-hour period, but over a hundred extra calories burned is already a real big deal, very unlikely. And so the intensity of the exercise, as far as aggregate ability to burn fat and lose

• 1:26:59Mike Israetel?

  weight, basically doesn't matter. What's much more of a concern is sustainability. If you think you have to run, jog for cardio because it's intense and it's going to burn that fat in a super special way, and your knees start to hurt, you stop jogging. There goes your diet plan. But you probably aren't going to injure yourself walking, or swimming, or doing an elliptical. And if you like to do those things, even though they don't occur at 5,000 miles an hour, not dunking a basketball for reps or some kind of crazy high-intensity shit, it's going to burn the same number of calories because the afterburn effect is so small. And if you're lifting weights, you get that anyway. It's not a thing. So, you know, you made kind of a great point earlier where the sort of diet versus activity, one of those is really much more responsible.

• 1:27:44Mike Israetel?

  How many calories your physical activity burns is so much grander scheme of a thing than how much afterburn it causes. Then I just wouldn't really worry about the afterburn much. I would worry about like, is this kind of physical activity schedule something I can do today, tomorrow, next week, next month? If that's the case, that's your shit. And to that end, I would encourage some people who get bored of just walking to do a couple of different things. You can do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, you can do Thai boxing, you can do regular boxing, you do the Zumba class at your gym, you can do swimming, you can do cycling, you can do running, you can do the elliptical, you can walk some days, as long as you're getting the calories going some way. It can be as monotonous as you like. Some people, they do a podcast, they walk around the block 18 times, they love it, they want Nothing else. That's me. Other people, they need some different stuff. Different is great.

• 1:28:29Mike Israetel?

  What you don't want to do is do the same thing over and over that you hate, especially if it's high impact and high intensity. Like every time your feet hit the concrete, your knees are like, I hate you. What the are you doing to me? And you're like, well, my knees are gone, but I'm leaner. Not sustainable, not good. But if running twice a week is fine, as long as you swim and bike and maybe walk the other days and your total aggregate calories are the same, then you're really in a winning formula.

• 1:28:55Chris Williamson?

  It's got to be slightly difficult for some people to work out, okay, I did 10,000 steps. Dr. Mike said, do 10,000 steps and do 10,000 steps, but I just did pickleball for an hour. What's that? Am I counting my steps in pickleball? I ran. Presumably running 10,000 steps burns more calories than walking 10,000 steps. Do I count my steps there? How do you think about factoring in cardio output to compare it or comparatively to your 11,000 steps?

• 1:29:24Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, there's two ways to do it. I think are good. I'm sure there are others. One is you go onto the one of five trillion free online counters that adjust for all these things. And you can just get the calories and adjust for almost everything. There are hilarious pictures of back in the seventies and eighties. They did a lot of measurement of calorie expenditure and real world activities. So you got this guy with a full on gas mask with tubes into an oxygen pack and carbon collection pack. And he's golfing like, how many calories do you burn golfing? Holy shit, you golfing in space?

• 1:29:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:53Mike Israetel?

  So they've done all that work. So you can get all those formulas. No, you don't need the formulas. Just type it in an online calculator.

• 1:29:59Chris Williamson?

  I golfed for four hours. How many calories did I burn?

• 1:30:02Mike Israetel?

  They'll tell you that's body weight, blah, blah, blah. You're good to go.

• 1:30:07Mike Israetel?

  That gets annoying a little bit. So a better alternative probably is to give yourself average daily step goal. And if you know you're a person that also likes to do pickleball, I don't know what the that is. Shut up. What is it? I actually don't know what it is.

• 1:30:26Chris Williamson?

  It's like tennis for old people or paddle for poor people.

• 1:30:30Mike Israetel?

  Right. My Wimbledon ranked tennis instructor tells me I don't need to worry about things like that. He only works for me. He stopped playing. He also, no, the massage guy does that. Chris, we run a professional organization here. I was going to say a bunch of jokes that were all going to get us canceled. In any case.

• 1:30:54Mike Israetel?

  Let's say you're pretty physically active. You do some pick up this, you do some pick up that, you walk more, you do this and that.

• 1:31:01Mike Israetel?

  Maybe set your goal at 8,000 steps. Every day on average, you get 8,000 steps. I give an example with my wife. My wife trains multiple times a week in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu hardcore. She's an addict now. It's scary because she's going to kill me sooner or later. If I ever turn up dead, she's suspect number one. I want this official in public. And some days she'll just do her 10,000 steps. Other days she'll do 8,000 steps, which is like maybe a minimum for her. And then she'll do Jiu Jitsu for an hour live rolling with psychotic and sane people. That burns way more calories than the just the steps alone. But because she always hits 10,000 a week on average,

• 1:31:44Mike Israetel?

  any extra Jiu Jitsu is extra and she loses weight a little faster. If she's tired, she'll ease up on the Jiu Jitsu and do more technique stuff and not as much live rolling. So if you're a person that knows you're pretty physically active outside of walking, I'd still do walking and do a tracker and just peg it at 8K or 7K. That's my average and I know I work on top of that. But if you are a person who does nothing else, yeah, peg your steps at 10 or 11K a day. And like, there is no pickleball anywhere because that's not a real sport. I swear to God, I made that up.

• 1:32:12Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to guess as well that having a more consistent number of steps that you take every single day means that you don't need to reset that habit. How many did I do? I did that thing to, you know, carry the three, sort of cross this over. I certainly found that with any diets that were inconsistent, any training plans that were inconsistent, even any productivity days, like sometimes on a Monday, coming back after a weekend feels really great because I've taken a little bit of time. Then sometimes I'm like, I gotta restart the beast a little bit after I had a couple of days where I was chilling out. So I think maintaining consistency in the things that don't fatigue you or ideally rejuvenate you at least a little bit, that seems to make sense to me.

• 1:32:55Mike Israetel?

  It makes a hundred percent sense. Consistency is an enormous superpower in a fat loss diet. Because consistency means honoring the plan you chose. And when you lose weight for long enough and get lean enough, every fiber of your being starts to tell you do anything but this. Train less, eat more, reconsider. Maybe you can stop your diet today. You can pick it up next week, no big deal. If the consistency is there and you do more or less similar things every day, every week, just do the thing and the results will happen.

• 1:33:28Chris Williamson?

  What about the role of resistance training during a fat loss protocol?

• 1:33:33Mike Israetel?

  Super. Resistance training doesn't really help you lose weight. Uh, it does in the sense that it burns calories, but it doesn't burn a crazy amount of calories. It's a good amount, but nothing too insane. Resistance training builds and preserves your muscle tissue. So if I have someone lose 15 pounds over the course of 12 weeks, reasonable for a larger sized person. They don't resistance train at all. Many of the Ozempic studies showed something like this. They'll lose like, eh, you know, half of that will be muscle, maybe five pounds will be muscle, 10 pounds will be fat if you're lucky.

• 1:34:14Mike Israetel?

  You're healthier, you look better, your blood work is better, you feel better. It's not amazing. If you resistance train and you've been resistance training consistently already, almost all of that weight loss will be fat. Maybe like 13 pounds of it. And only two pounds of lost muscle. And because you keep resistance training after you regain that two pounds back like three weeks later. And then so measured at three weeks after you finished that 12 week diet, you lost, well, 13 ish pounds of fat and no muscle. Visually, health wise, feeling wise, night and day.

• 1:34:55Mike Israetel?

  Here's a real kicker. If it's your first time losing fat and you don't train with weights, starting to train with weights while you start to kind of clean up your diet and lose a little fat, you can gain pounds of muscle while losing pounds of fat.

• 1:35:11Chris Williamson?

  I thought it was impossible to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time.

• 1:35:14Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, a lot of people misinterpret more difficult than average to mean impossible. It's like saying flight is impossible and then a helicopter goes by like bullshit.

• 1:35:25Chris Williamson?

  Fuck you guys.

• 1:35:27Mike Israetel?

  So a really good example of this recently in the media was UFC president Dana White. Dana White had an unreal transformation. His health markers just through the roof. And I think he lost something like a total of maybe thirty five pounds on the scale. But because he started taking weight training very seriously during that time, he must have gained anywhere from five to fifteen pounds of muscle. I mean, fifteen is a bit extreme, but I'm willing to go five to ten for sure, just guessing.

• 1:36:01Mike Israetel?

  And that means he actually lost maybe forty five pounds of fat while gaining muscle. So he didn't go from, with all total respect, looking like, geez, Dana gonna be okay? I'm not really. Geez, Dana's really enjoying his wealth kind of look.

• 1:36:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he was an opulent weight.

• 1:36:25Mike Israetel?

  My man, that Caesar type of shit. Other people feed me.

• 1:36:28Chris Williamson?

  The biggest concern is gout.

• 1:36:30Mike Israetel?

  Exactly. Again.

• 1:36:35Mike Israetel?

  So is this something wine can cure? He went, he could have gone from that with no resistance training to like, oh, Dana White lost weight and that's nice to hear. But he went from that to like, yo, what the fuck? Dana is Superman. When the hell is he getting on the octagon? You feel me? That's a big deal. It's a big deal at deep health markers. It's a big deal at how you feel. Some people feel weaker after a diet because they are. They lost a bunch of muscle. You gain muscle or maintain it through a diet. You feel stronger after a diet. And the look, and since I'm on the Modern Wisdom Podcast, I can say this and it's fit for purpose.

• 1:37:16Mike Israetel?

  How attractive you are to yourself, fuck everybody else, matters. And if you lose exclusively or mostly fat, shit, even gain some muscle during that time, you transform your attractiveness in most cases up a bunch of notches.

• 1:37:35Chris Williamson?

  It's a positive feedback cycle for yourself as well, as opposed to going from, God, I was overweight to, oh, well, I'm not overweight anymore, but I'm not.

• 1:37:44Mike Israetel?

  It looks sick.

• 1:37:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Emaciated.

• 1:37:46Mike Israetel?

  And, and look, most people prefer bodies that are smaller and slimmer. That's just, just a statistical fact. But even more people prefer fit bodies for themselves and definitely for other people. So if you resistance train when you're losing weight, and yes, this is a message to almost all modern women that are in their 40s and 50s, get in the weight room, lift weights hard, get a good personal trainer, download the RPI periphery app link in bio. What was I, did I just say something? And while you clean up your diet, while you lose fat, what you can do is see a completely transformative effect and know you will not turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger by accident overnight.

• 1:38:31Mike Israetel?

  I mean, I used to be biologically female and 120 pounds body weight yesterday and it took one day for me to do this.

• 1:38:40Chris Williamson?

  Dude, that's the, my favorite psyop is the one that women give to themselves, which is if I lift weights, I will become too jacked. Meanwhile, those of us that have desperately been lifting weights for approaching two decades now, in the hopes that one day I might look remotely like I do.

• 1:38:59Mike Israetel?

  Someone will be able to tell I work out at the store.

• 1:39:03Chris Williamson?

  I'm like, the chance that you're going to wake up one day and become Arnie, given how hard me and all of my friends have worked at doing that and still not achieved it is zero.

• 1:39:13Mike Israetel?

  It's

• 1:39:14Chris Williamson?

  You don't need to worry.

• 1:39:14Mike Israetel?

  It's real close to zero. It's one of these things where they're doing it at like two orders of magnitude less serum testosterone as well. All women are hypogonadal. If you're a female and you show up the doc and you're like, hey, my testicles don't produce testosterone. He's going to do blood work. He's like, oh, my God, you're right. You have almost no testosterone. You're not the candidate for rabid muscle growth. What's gonna happen is you're gonna diet down and you're gonna look less like you're sick at the end and more like you look healthy and vital. And like a little young bebopper, like, you know, when younger women almost don't walk, they kind of just bounce around that like shit they have. You can have that. It's called muscle mass. It changes the shape of your body.

• 1:39:58Mike Israetel?

  It does this to your ass. It makes your legs look awesome. It does everything wonderful and it does not turn you into Arnold Schwarzenegger overnight. It's a huge deal.

• 1:40:07Chris Williamson?

  Are there any specifics when it comes to training during a fat loss phase? Resistance wise? We did a great breakdown that everyone can go and watch on how to train for muscle growth. Are there any adjustments when you're in a deficit?

• 1:40:23Mike Israetel?

  For most people, no. If you are at the very end of an insane fat loss phase, if you're a competition bodybuilder, you might want to try to reduce the amount of load you're lifting by a little and increase the repetitions. Just because it's the same hypertrophic drive on average, but you're marginally reducing the risk of injury by a tiny little bit. It's also through some biochemical mechanisms easier to maintain your muscular endurance and improve it as you're dieting down than it is to maintain or increase your strength. And so that is a very exotic concern for almost everyone is just kind of the same resistance training as we talked about in our earlier video all the time.

• 1:41:01Chris Williamson?

  Should people be trying to increase the weight and the reps that they're doing as they go through fat loss? Should they have it in the back of their mind? I might get a bit tired, you know, I'm four weeks in, I'm eight weeks in, I'm 12 weeks in. What about dealing with the mental pain of maybe not being the progress of strength, not going in quite the direction?

• 1:41:21Mike Israetel?

  Great question. The hypertriphia app does that for you. Mike seriously shut the hell up about your stupid app.

• 1:41:29Mike Israetel?

  You should anticipate that the rate of progression is going to decline. Maybe you've been really gunning it for a while and adding five pounds to the bar and everything every week. And when you're not adding weight, you might be able to add two reps to the exercise. Especially at the tail end of a fat loss phase. Try to aim for adding two and a half pounds to the bar every week. And maybe adding a rep every week, or if you're pretty advanced and things really slow down. Every other week, go up by two and a half pounds or a rep. And every other week, just maintain. And so instead of trying to gain at a fast rate. You're trying to either gain at a very slow rate. And in the end, you win some, you lose some, and you end up maintaining. But you still gotta try to push it.

• 1:42:14Mike Israetel?

  What you don't want to do is start trying less hard to really take it to the teeth when you're in a fat loss phase. Because the total catabolic muscle destroying muscle burning stimulus is high as fuck now. You gotta fight against it by keeping your training volume up. Of course, within the ability to recover, which is gonna decline. You still have to test your limits a little bit. Because if you train easy and your diet really hard for fat loss, you might lose some muscle still. If you train as hard as you're capable of, you might lose no muscle and maybe gain a little. If you train or try to train as hard as you were when you were massing, you'll just overreach and have to deload every third week. And that might not be a fun experience.

• 1:42:56Chris Williamson?

  Abs. How do people get abs?

• 1:42:58Mike Israetel?

  Something you download at the Google Play Store. Oh, abs.

• 1:43:04Mike Israetel?

  I wouldn't know anything about that. No personal experience. Next question. Abs are one of those 80 20 things. But in this case, it's bike 95 5.

• 1:43:17Mike Israetel?

  Every single human has abdominal muscles. Except for people that are involved in tragic accidents or something like that.

• 1:43:27Mike Israetel?

  And almost always and almost ever, the reason you can't see yours is because your layer of fat on top of them is too much. And there's this term from bodybuilding that's really great. It's abs are made in the kitchen, not the weight room and not on the cardio machine. And it's fucking true. If you just impose a caloric deficit through moderate activity, good resistance training, you can train your abs or you cannot, it doesn't really matter. And your body fat winnows down to a small amount, you're gonna have whatever kind of abs you have shaped down there. Many people have six packs, some even have eight packs. I have like a two and a half pack or some shit like that. No, God. But it's almost all that calorie deficit, just straight up getting lean. I would love to dispel a mega myth.

• 1:44:11Mike Israetel?

  People who have a high level of body fat, who wanna find out how to do some exercise or eat some food that's gonna give them abs. Ain't them for you. It doesn't exist. It's just the layer of fat that's keeping us from seeing your abs. Now, if you do get lean enough and find that instead of those like, you know, like hunk romance novel abs, where the woman's like grading her face on the guy's abs and he has like a unicorn or whatever, I don't read too many romance novels. You've been featured on a few covers, haven't you?

• 1:44:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:42Mike Israetel?

  Against your will, still in a copyright dispute, nasty legal paddle. You may find that instead of having those ravioli abs, you've just kind of like semblance of abs, but they're real flat. The cool thing about that is you have a really small waist, which is sweet aesthetically, universally considered attractive. Near universally, there's a community of gay folks that are in the hairy bear culture that if you have a gut with abs, you're the fuck.

• 1:45:10Chris Williamson?

  Now we're talking about your market.

• 1:45:12Mike Israetel?

  Yes, yes. Bow to your leader, folks. When I grow my hair out, I can't go around the gay club because I just get pulled in.

• 1:45:20Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:45:20Mike Israetel?

  In any case, um, it's cool. It's a cool look to have just kind of like, no crazy, crazy abs. But some people are like, damn it, I wanted abs, abs. For those folks, training abs works exactly the same way as any other hypertrophy training. We covered that in last video. Two to four times a week training, multiple sets, close to failure, full range of motion, big stretch. Increasing loads and reps over time, the same. The planks, the supermans, all that bullshit, the twists. It does stuff, but if you want big abs, you just go about it like you would get big calves, big forearms, big shoulders, big anything, consistent resistance training. That's the way to get it. And then don't just train abs during your fat loss plan.

• 1:46:05Mike Israetel?

  If in a year from now, you want thick abs, start training them now. The last 12 weeks of that year, you're going to diet away the fat. Then your abs will be eaten good, they'll get real thick and then they're going to reveal themselves as meaty. But if you just train abs during the fat loss phase, they'll grow a little bit because they're new to the shit. But it's not going to be super impressive.

• 1:46:26Chris Williamson?

  Does training abs make them more visible at higher body fat percentages?

• 1:46:31Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 1:46:33Chris Williamson?

  That seems good. That seems like a reason to train them.

• 1:46:35Mike Israetel?

  If you're interested in being at a high body fat percentage.

• 1:46:37Chris Williamson?

  A higher body fat.

• 1:46:39Mike Israetel?

  Kidding, I'm being a dick. Totally. But it also gives you like more of a pooch kind of look, which you may or may not be into.

• 1:46:48Mike Israetel?

  It's a concern for folks that are, no offense, men on kind of the smaller side of things. For them, maybe that's a cool thing. For folks that train with weights at your level, below your level, quite a bit through your level and above.

• 1:47:05Mike Israetel?

  The compound exercises, kind of stuff, makes your abs so goddamn big to begin with. It's like a drop in the puddle for extra app training. Like right now, I have ravioli abs. I have abs right now, if I'm relaxed and I have like, I just genetically have like a gut. My gut has fucking abs. I have a six pack when I'm relaxed now with a veins in it. And so people are like, what do you do for abs? I mean, I don't train abs. They're like, why not? No, absolutely not. When I transition away from bodybuilding in a few years to try and become really, really good at jiu jitsu. Good for my purposes, not anyone else's. I suck in general. I'm going to start training abs not for the purpose of having abs, but for the purpose

• 1:47:47Mike Israetel?

  of developing a much stronger anterior chain, the ability to do this because of jujitsu, that's a big deal. Yeah. Then I'm going to be training abs, but for now, abs are just a waste of time for me because they're absolutely big enough for contest bodybuilding, which is my current pursuit. And I would just be wasting literal time and recovery energy on training abs.

• 1:48:06Chris Williamson?

  I suppose just to try and sort of speak to the layperson, you are, you've got what, four shows this year, four or five shows?

• 1:48:12Mike Israetel?

  The plan is to do about four shows.

• 1:48:13Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so you have four individual days this year with which you're going to be very, very lean and your abs will be displayed unbelievably well, given the low level of body fat. I'm going to guess that most people like the idea. I know that for most of my twenties, what I wanted was to have abs. I didn't care about being lean. I don't hold that much weight in my face. I look sort of relatively lean in my arms. In any case, it didn't really matter. So I wanted abs. So if training abs allows me to have abs, visible abs at a slightly higher body fat percentage, I achieve my leanness goal, which was visible abs without having to diet myself down quite so hard.

• 1:48:54Mike Israetel?

  Brilliant. I'm going to say right now, first of all, that works and I encourage people to do it. Second of all, they should do it conventional resistance training approaches.

• 1:49:03Mike Israetel?

  Exercises that work, full range of motion, lengthened exercises. For example, one of the best ab exercises, and there's tons of them, is the ab wheel, the rollout, fucking brutal. And it really tenses your abs at long lengths, which grows them like crazy. Isometric work for the abs generally isn't that great. So I'd say if you want that, train abs, train them two to four times a week, essentially train them right. Don't train them as a special group. Because people say about like, how do I get my biceps bigger? Like, how do I get my abs bigger? Like, same shit, motherfucker. But lastly, what I would say is the effect on how visible your abs are versus your body fat is very small. So you're not going to see your abs at 22% body fat. I don't give a shit how big they are. Realistically, they just don't get that big.

• 1:49:46Mike Israetel?

  One, two, maybe three percent body fat difference. Could there be a visual difference there? Yeah, potentially, but you need years of training your abs to get to that kind of look.

• 1:49:54Chris Williamson?

  Understood. It's the first time that I've trained as consistently as I have over the last, so far this year, like five months, and not done any direct ab work and also not, to be honest, been tracking calories all that much, although I've been on like a hardcore fucking FODMAP, CBO thing. So that's kind of just been built in.

• 1:50:14Mike Israetel?

  Auto diet.

• 1:50:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, precisely. Just boring diet. But I always presumed that lower ab vascularity, like waistband vascularity, was something that came about due to the dieting that I was doing and the ab work that I was doing. It's like I'm adamant that that's the case. Right now, I've got a shit ton of lower ab vascularity and I'm like, I'm not dieting that hard. My weight's dropped a little bit, but it's not dropped that much. Where the fuck is this coming from? And I was like, oh, I've been training legs, like very aggressively with quite amount, quite a long eccentric pause on everything for five months. And I think that that kind of shows, at least as an N of one.

• 1:50:56Mike Israetel?

  Sure.

• 1:50:56Chris Williamson?

  What you were saying.

• 1:50:57Mike Israetel?

  You're bearing down, deep the inter脏部 pressure. That's a lot of ab work right there and it adds up. Any one squat or set of squats is not that much ab work. It's an isometric. It's like a Superman hold. It's kind of a fucking waste of time. But if you do that bracing for almost every exercise, five times that you go to the gym, you're training your abs for like five hours every week. That adds up.

• 1:51:18Chris Williamson?

  Are there any supplements that offer an edge for fat loss?

• 1:51:23Mike Israetel?

  The modern anorectics like Ozempic and Juz appetite, absolutely. And you know, for some people, various stimulants, caffeine, couple of other ones, yohimbine, et cetera. They have a marginal effect on reducing appetite, improving mental clarity and focus. If they don't interfere with your sleep, you can take them. The problem with stimulants is that you develop a tolerance to them quite quickly. When you're ending the diet, which I'd love to talk about as far as how to transition out because that's super important. When you're ending a diet and you have to manage your stimulant use again and you maybe come off of them, you get radical rebound hunger and just, you know, stimulants are just Oh, because it's suppressing your appetite artificially.

• 1:52:05Mike Israetel?

  And so you don't want five monsters every day anymore. You're like, pull out the monsters and you're like, do brownies instead. It's tough. Caffeine is like, you know, you have like a circuit board with a little nail and you're like giant hammer. That's like, oh, hit all the other stuff. So as far as real supplements that just straight up work for fat loss, they kind of don't exist. If you have the yohimbines and the other things, they can kind of add a little bit to the thing. Yohimbine? It's like a, it's a, it's like a stimulant derivative sort of thing. And it has some cool health effects. It burns a little bit of body fat, but this is something that you just don't write home about. It's this teeny little thing. So bodybuilders will take it, they'll take Afedra, they'll take other stuff and it all works. It just works a bit and

• 1:52:50Mike Israetel?

  has quite a few side effects. And the stuff that doesn't have a ton of side effects generally just doesn't tend to work that much.

• 1:52:59Mike Israetel?

  Big Pharma won this one. The ultimate supplement, quote unquote, to a fat loss diet are the modern, what they're called really is anorectics. I like to take people away from terming them GLP agonists or GLP-1s because it's already not true for trisepotide. It's GLP-1 plus GIP and for retataritide is glucagon as well. And so anoreptic is the general term for drugs that make you less hungry and that's how they work. Anoreptic. Correct. Yeah. And so modern anorectics, because there used to be some back in the day that were also stimulant based, like Fenfen. Fenfen, subutrimine. That, that. They fucked up. A lot of people, subutrimine was quite healthy, but the regulatory agencies didn't think it was quite as safe as they wanted. Probably was, but they got wigged

• 1:53:44Mike Israetel?

  out about it. It's also, it's a stimulant derivative, so it's got some side effects, dry mouth, et cetera. The trade name for the drug was Meridia. It was a cool drug, not approved for use in the United States. I don't believe it's approved for use in Europe. Of course, you cavalier Europeans like, oh, we'll take anything. But the modern day anorectics, currently the GLP and et cetera, group of drugs, they're just.

• 1:54:06Mike Israetel?

  Fucking good. Now, do they have side effects? Yes. Can they be managed with with how you do your diet? Almost, almost completely. Are they not for some people? Totally. Do they have really tiny downside risks in some cases? Uh, yeah, they do. Uh, every drug has that. But are they just as a general rule insanely effective and make dieting fifty trillion times easier? Yeah.

• 1:54:30Chris Williamson?

  So do fat burners not work?

• 1:54:33Mike Israetel?

  Fat burners work, but they burn these little bunch of fat and they just make you super anxious and awake at night. Most fat burners are stimulant based. Non-stimulant fat burners are kind of a joke at the current time. And so, yeah, it's just like, how much caffeine can you cram in an energy drink is most of the question with fat burners. A pill you can take that doesn't wig you out, that burns fat in enough of a margin that you can tell in a realistic diet is just not around.

• 1:55:01Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Given this relatively easy to follow format that you've explained about how much food you're putting in your face, about why you should portion this, prioritizing protein, looking at how much exercise that you're doing, tracking steps, trying to keep it consistent. Why do so many people fail at diets?

• 1:55:23Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, it's a good question. Geez. I think as we've seen with the anoreactic drug trials,

• 1:55:35Mike Israetel?

  semaglutide, trisepotide, retatrotide, other drugs, when you take away, or better put, reduce substantially hunger drive, almost everyone loses a bunch of weight.

• 1:55:51Mike Israetel?

  It's also precisely the reason that we've seen obesity trend up is because there's tons of super palatable, super tasty food. Uh, over historical time, if you reverse that, like people in the 1950s probably didn't have any more average willpower than people today. We like to romanticize and think they did, probably didn't. And so most people fail diets because evolution designed most of us to fail diets. It's a similar question to if you take a bunch of 22 year old dudes and you put them into a controlled facility, I don't wanna say prison, but a scientific research facility. And you tell them no wanking, that's what you guys call it in the UK.

• 1:56:36Mike Israetel?

  Mm hmm. And you stretch it out for 60 days, you're gonna ask a real weird question. How come everyone started wanking after a while? They failed. Cause evolution designed you that at some level, your sex drive is just gonna turn you fucking wild and you're gonna do the thing. Same idea for diets. I don't think there's a necessary extra level of causal inference we have to make. I think most of the reason people screw up on diets is because food tastes really goddamn good and they get fucking hungry and they're like, fuck this. Now, you can architect your preparation for a diet to try to minimize that. Being around people in your family and friends group that are at least neutral and hopefully supportive of your diet versus actively

• 1:57:18Mike Israetel?

  trying to be like, come on, have a french fry. That's terrible. Getting rid of the junk food in your home and eat out less or have places you eat out where you know exactly what to order and it works part of your diet. A big one is not having Napoleonic goals. If I say to myself, in one month, I'm gonna lose 30 pounds of fat, I'm almost certainly gonna fail. And it wasn't any crazy explanation other than the fact that like, I should have made it 15 pounds and made the goal three months. The magnitude of depravity and hunger per any day is now like six times less. And then I can, every day is sustainable. I'm not trying to crash and burn. So a ton of people crash and burn. Another reason, and it all threads into eventually they just eat junk

• 1:58:01Mike Israetel?

  food and stop. So it's all the core reasons, still the tasty food. Another reason is a lot of people simply, a lot of people actually do well with diets. The vast majority of people will lose weight on diets. The vast majority of those people will regain it back. Why? Because most people don't have a habitual reference intake pattern, a diet they do that allows them to stay healthy and lean and isn't radically different from what they do normally. For example, a lot of the folks that have used RP, like the RP Diet Coach app, it is you eat three to six meals a day, then it portions it out into proteins and healthy carbs and healthy fats. People will eat it and be like, this is the diet I'm losing to lose fat.

• 1:58:46Mike Israetel?

  Like, I'm just gonna do it. I don't give a shit how hard it is. But after they're done with it, and this happens even more in our private coaching, they're like, wait, if I just add a bit of junk food to this every now and again, this is a maintenance plan. I know how to eat now. I know how to put together meals of protein and carbs and, and healthy fats. I know what I'm doing at the grocery store. I can even eat out and I know how to make core good meals. There are a lot of people who fail diets. Their idea of a diet is cabbage soup and protein shakes. And then when the diet ends, they go back to what? What are their habits? The same shit they used to do. What gets you the same results you used to have? Same shit you used to do. They go back into the world, they start doing Taco Bell again, they blow up, do the diet, diet works. Stop the diet, diet reverts.

• 1:59:31Mike Israetel?

  If you can, from the diet, take some healthy habits that aren't just psychotic things you only do on a diet, knowing how to build a meal of a core of protein, healthy protein, veggies, knowing how to time it, getting into the habit of eating every four to six hours, knowing how to shop at the store, knowing what to order at a restaurant, practicing saying, you know what, I don't want 18 trillion pounds of french fries. If you do that on a diet, all you need to do is layer in a bit of bullshit and junk food every now and again, and now that's your maintenance. You constrict it a little bit if you're gaining weight again. You loosen it up if you lose weight again. And then you can for years indefinitely maintain that new healthy lean you. But many people who do diets, they never build the habits to begin with, which is one of the reasons why fad dieting is so terrible.

• 2:00:14Mike Israetel?

  This new weird stuff, you're never gonna sustain. Listen, here's the thing, keto, carnivore, great ways to diet. And for many people like Joe Rogan, a lifestyle, awesome. But for many people, they're like, I'm doing keto to lose weight. Okay, so you're just never gonna eat a lot of breads? Any, because if you told Joe Rogan, for example, like, hey man, so you're really good with just like having an occasional bread and pasta every few months when you're on business trips with people? And otherwise, you just like stick to your alka whatever? He's like, yep, I love it. Frank down the street, he's gonna be like, well, no, I do the keto diet, then I lose weight. What are you gonna do after that, Frank? Alk all the time. He's like, oh, fuck that. I'm going to Olive Garden. Guess who's gonna come back then? Old fat Frank again.

• 2:00:54Mike Israetel?

  It's the lack of those core abilities to have that habit of good eating. And the fad diets do not help that at all.

• 2:01:02Chris Williamson?

  If appetite and hunger are primarily to blame, is there anything that you can do to mitigate or help reduce hunger?

• 2:01:12Mike Israetel?

  Yes, anoreactic drugs.

• 2:01:14Chris Williamson?

  Apart from those?

• 2:01:16Mike Israetel?

  There's a bunch of stuff. Eating a diet higher in protein tends to work well. Not going a very long time without food until you're psychotically hungry. You show up to Whole Foods to buy your groceries for that day or a few days. And you're like, you eat two hours ago, you'll buy all the stuff you need to. You go to Whole Foods after six hours not eating, you're going right to the vegan junk food section and putting whatever the fuck in your cart. So a meal schedule is a really good thing. Having a diet high in fibrous vegetables and really filling foods, tons of veggies, tons of fruits, reducing the overall palatability. I don't mean eating total shit like space gruel. Then you go to space jail to give you the gruel and the slug always wants more, but you're like, fuck, take mine. This is awful.

• 2:01:58Mike Israetel?

  Hopefully he's not your roommate, you know, but you're jail celli, right? And so sometimes just not trying to make your food taste as the best it's ever gonna taste. Cause some people do this and this is really common. They'll go, okay, I'm on a diet. I know my macros, I know my calories, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna take these minimal macros I have in this meal. I'm gonna try to make it taste as good as possible. I can't use mayo, but I'm gonna sprinkle all this fucking shit on it. That meal just leaves you really hungry afterwards. You look forward to eating it so much, it screws up your day entirely.

• 2:02:26Chris Williamson?

  It's kind of counterintuitive.

• 2:02:28Mike Israetel?

  Very countered. Chris, it's not kind of counterintuitive. It's completely cut, completely counterintuitive. Intuition is literally designed for ancestral evolutionary environment where like tasty shit is a good thing to eat. Cause you're gonna die. Nothing in this world that the ancestral peoples from whom we evolved had. Ever fucks with a double cheeseburger from McDonald's. Paradise. It doesn't taste like anything they've ever seen because it's engineered to be the best tasting thing anyone's ever tried. It's an unstoppable thing. Real. You ever see those like survival wilderness shows where they kill an animal and they like throw it on the grill and like, yep, tastes pretty good. No, it doesn't. You don't have salt on it. Are you out of your mind? It can only be grilled meat for so long until like, ugh, is there anything else?

• 2:03:11Mike Israetel?

  So ultra super tasty food. Back away from it a little bit. Another one is make sure you're nice and hydrated. Have a little bit of fluid before you start a meal and it fills up your stomach a bit. It's a huge hack. It can help some people a little bit. Another one is if you tell yourself, look, I'm at a party and I'm going to be eating normal people food. Try to fill up on proteins and veggies first and then maybe have a cookie or two. But if you go fucking right for the cookies and you know, I mean, yeah, sure. Well, if it depends on what game you're playing. If you're, if you're gold coins or calories, shit, you just broke all the level records, right? So, uh, stuff like that, these kinds of pieces of advice, they're not revolutionary. But when you're hungry and you're dieting, all of them can help to a considerable degree.

• 2:03:55Chris Williamson?

  I like the sort of strategic tactical stuff because those are the things I think that people keep in the back of their mind. And also their small behaviors that you anchor your sense of your new sense of identity to. Don't forget, I've got to have the, I must drink my 300 milliliters of water before I sit down to have this meal. Yeah. Why am I doing this? It's the same reason I have a, a book of, uh, poems, uh, Tim Burton's The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy. It sits on the desk next to where I record my podcast.

• 2:04:23Mike Israetel?

  Okay.

• 2:04:24Chris Williamson?

  And just by having that there, it was given to me by my speech coach and I read a couple of poems before I start the episode because it's whimsical and it's good for vocal diction and precision and stuff like that. But the main reason is that that is a physical representation of I care about precision in speech. And by having it there, every time that I go into the room, I go, I must remember to be precise when I speak.

• 2:04:45Mike Israetel?

  Yes. When you're at a business dinner and everyone's ordering lobster bisque dipped in french fries or some shit. You're like, hey, like, what does your filet look like? Can I get some grilled veggies to the table? Because you give a shit and you have that plan and eventually you combine giving a shit with having a plan for at least a few weeks. You have habits. You just had another few weeks. You have the beginning of. Not identity with a capital I, but a lowercase i. I'm a person who gives a shit about my health. I care about what goes into my body. And here's the thing, one of the funny pieces of feedback I get every now and again from like business people and stuff is like, well, you know, I do a lot of client dinners.

• 2:05:24Mike Israetel?

  And I'm like, yes, like, well, you know, like I'm drinking alcohol, I'm eating all this stuff. I'm like, if you tell the CEO of Nvidia, who's you're sitting across from a business dinner. He's like, are you going to have any of the crazy fries or whatever? You're like, actually, I'm trying to clean up my weight and stuff like that. I'm just going to order a steak and have some veggies. There's no way Jensen Wong is going to be like pathetic, guys, clean this up. We're not doing a deal with this guy. Unreal. Keep, take your data center and shove it. And he walks off. He's going to be like, amazing. Good for you. You don't mind.

• 2:05:53Chris Williamson?

  Sort of man that I want to be in business with.

• 2:05:55Mike Israetel?

  It like, at the very least, it's neutral. If it's a negative, you don't want to be in business with that person.

• 2:06:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's not the sort of person.

• 2:06:01Mike Israetel?

  But it's usually like, like a cool positive. Now, usually I like to say like, but please order anything you want. Temptation's not a factor by all, because most people be like, oh God, I was going to get the pizza, but I don't want to make you, and they'll do that because they're super nice.

• 2:06:15Chris Williamson?

  His diet is not my diet somehow.

• 2:06:16Mike Israetel?

  Exactly. They start feeling guilty. You don't want that kind of energy. So be like, hey, like you guys order whatever you want. I'm just going to do me. I promise I'm having fun. And you say it in a way that hopefully can.

• 2:06:25Chris Williamson?

  Looks like you're having fun. That's great. Is there anything else that we haven't spoken about from a strategic hack tactical style perspective where you think, you know, if I actually rely on that quite a lot, I like that idea of if you're having dinner with somebody else and say, I'm a on a diet at the moment, working quite hard at this, I'm going to get myself some, some meat and veggies, but you're free to get whatever you'd like. I'm temptation. May show on my face, but don't worry. You're not going to, you're not going to break me type thing. Like, that's a charming way to go about delivering a diet.

• 2:06:57Mike Israetel?

  Yes.

• 2:06:57Chris Williamson?

  Uh, the water beforehand, I think is great. Uh, actually dialing back the. Tastiness of your meals and continuing to push that. Is there anything else from the toolkit? That we haven't touched on?

• 2:07:08Mike Israetel?

  There's tons of other stuff, but one thing that I would bring attention to that's really helpful. And this happens with time is have an arsenal of ideas about what to eat. You don't want to go to the grocery store balls deep into a diet or a business dinner balls deep into a diet and look at either the groceries in front of you, the aisles and aisles, or the menu as like a child looks at something for the first time because you're just going to end up ordering chicken nuggets or just buying pounds of cheese sauce and drinking it in the back crying. My last Tuesday, my coach Jared knows about this. It was a rough conversation. Um, you want to have go to's. When I go to the store, I know where the veggies

• 2:07:50Mike Israetel?

  are. I know where the lean meats are. I know where the grains are. I know what I'm buying. My wife and I, when we go to the store, we go with a shopping list, mostly because we're the kind of anal people that don't do anything without a list, but also on a hardcore diet we know are getting.

• 2:08:05Chris Williamson?

  I guess online shopping for this would be the ultimate hack.

• 2:08:08Mike Israetel?

  Amazon just sends you all the you need and none of the you don't. The grocery store stuff because man, it looks so good. Our Kroger in our city in which we live has precisely three full, separate, American mega size aisles just of chips. Menno Henselmann's was visiting me because they're I R L friends. And I was like, you gotta see this. He's like, man, he sees it. He's like, holy shit. So like, if I go there without a plan and I'm starving, it's game over. You go to a restaurant, it's over. One of our RP coaches, Dr. Jen Case, she has a whole list of how to read restaurant foods. And if it's like

• 2:08:50Mike Israetel?

  breaded glazed blah blah, she's like, stay away from this steak, you know, broiled, baked, et cetera. If you go to a restaurant, you can even go so far as to look at their menu beforehand and be like, what would, what would I choose? If you go to Japanese food, sashimi is good, teriyaki is good, maybe the ponzu mayo super roll isn't the best. If you show up in a normal state of you're just living your best life to a restaurant, it's a beautiful life thing to just look at a menu and being like, what do we have? You're on a mission when you're on a diet. Don't forget that. You show up, you're looking for specific things and that's a big tip because if you show up and go, oh, I wonder what I should eat. Uh, man, you might order some good stuff. You might not.

• 2:09:34Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah. I, uh, I've been surprised by how many restaurants will let you kind of just go off piece from it's, well, I don't actually see this on here, but is it possible to get that without the other thing on that? And can we sub such and such for such and such?

• 2:09:48Mike Israetel?

  There are two things to say about that. One is oftentimes the better the restaurant, the more likely they are to accommodate. And some people be like, well, I'm going to Michelin star place. Those people will do whatever the fuck you tell them. They'll be like, oh yeah, that guy like owns Nvidia. Don't, don't modify the caviar. Like you give him whatever the hell he wants. The other thing is real chefs look at contest bodybuilding food or diet food and they laugh at how easy it is to make. This is not.

• 2:10:18Chris Williamson?

  You've just made his job half as hard.

• 2:10:20Mike Israetel?

  He's not like, he's not interested in making that super Alfredo carbonara for the 50th time that day. Sure. He likes it. You're like, hey, like no sauce, just noodles, some grilled chicken. He's like, did I get this right? You're like, uh, he's like, done. No problem. See oftentimes you're not inconveniencing people. Another thing is choosing restaurants to go to that are conducive to selection. Subway, burrito places like Chipotle, you can make a bowl or a sandwich with mostly just meats and veggies and a little bit of rice and beans and you're fucking golden. They ask you, do you want the cheese sauce? You don't have to say yes. Versus if you go to like McDonald's, yeah, there's a grilled chicken sandwich, but like, there's just not a lot of mix and match

• 2:11:02Mike Israetel?

  and make your own good stuff. So even the places you go out to eat, another one is like a lot of people in California have those like, that's a call like fast casual Asian dining, like the broiler, uh, with flame broiler, Panda Express. A lot of those have like just grilled meats and rice and veggies. Yeah, they got other tasty or shit, but if you know they have that, you know what you want. You got a plan. You show up, you get it done. You eat it in the corner. You cry yourself, uh, back to your car and then you're mean.

• 2:11:30Chris Williamson?

  What about people who have a sweet tooth? They're deep into a diet and they they're used to finishing off a meal with something that's a little bit of a treat. What would you say to those people? What are some of the hacks that people who have a sweet tooth can use to keep satiated during a fat loss diet?

• 2:11:49Mike Israetel?

  Yes, one of your recent guests, Menno Henselmann, just shared an excellent study. Artificial sweetened beverages beat water in a weight loss trial. So that means if you have a diet Sprite or five, sweet tooth problem solved. All of your food comes from irregular food. You have a couple of Sprites with the meal or after, you're golden. Mission accomplished. So artificial sweeteners, or as they're technically called, non nutritive sweeteners, because some of them are natural, like stevia, stevia, stevia, just like a guy named Steve at the office, you kind of, we want to know, but not know, know, you know? And there's monk fruit and other stuff that's totally fine, very low calorie or no calorie. So non nutritive sweeteners, those are totally great. They're safe, they're effective, they're awesome.

• 2:12:34Mike Israetel?

  No, in aggregate, they don't fuck up your gut microbiome. The people who don't like artificial sweeteners at this point is just the argument from nature fallacy, or AKA the naturalistic fallacy, just writ large, like you are an example. There's a picture of your face in the dictionary about that shit at this point. It's just a dumb deal. So it's totally fine to have those in very high amounts. The testing limits are just absurd. Like you can feed rats half their body weight in Aspartame and they're like, I still got it, baby. So they talk, though, that's kind of weird.

• 2:13:00Chris Williamson?

  What, is there anything else?

• 2:13:02Mike Israetel?

  Yes, yes. There are many ways to make tasty things that are sweet, that are insanely high in calories. You can plan your diet. One of them is fresh fruit. I mean, fresh fruit, peaches, apples, pears, berries. You can have a bunch of them and realize like, oh my God, I actually need double this to get my carbs for the day, or just a handful of berries after a meal if you put it on the food scale. It takes care of the sweet tooth and it's awesome. Now, look, I'm all about like giving people real talk, science shit, trying to motivate a little bit, but I'm not even going to bullshit anyone, or at least try. Are the fucking handful of berries going to taste like fudge brownie? Fuck, no, they're not, man. Nothing beats real ice cream. I will say, though, two companies come to mind. Enlightened Ice Cream and Halo Top.

• 2:13:47Mike Israetel?

  Enlighten was actually started by a friend of Mr. Nick Shawan's. He's great. Uh, Halo Top, I know no human at that place, but I eat Halo Top Ice Cream all the damn time. Because it's like a third of the typical calories of a Ben and Jerry's pint. And when you're deep into a fat loss time, that shit tastes good. And it used to taste not so great. They're getting real good.

• 2:14:08Chris Williamson?

  Have you tried Legendary Foods? Have you tried that?

• 2:14:10Mike Israetel?

  Um.

• 2:14:11Chris Williamson?

  They do sort of protein pastries, cinnamon rolls.

• 2:14:15Mike Israetel?

  Their pastries are great. And it's one of those like, here's my big thing. If you're expecting diet foods to taste like real foods, stop. They're not gonna. But if you expect them to taste like some kind of chemical, artificial, the aliens in the simulation are like, this is real food. And you're like, bullshit. I can taste the difference. If you expect it to taste like that, it's actually quite good nowadays. And here's another thing. If it tastes too icky, you don't really have a sweet tooth, mother. Just skip it and eat your normal food. If you're hungry enough, that shit'll taste amazing. Give that a try.

• 2:14:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think anything that's got 20 grams of protein in and resembles a cinnamon roll and tastes pretty nice and you can put it in the microwave for 15 seconds. It's a fucking game changer. I've been really, really impressed with what they've done. That's the absolute wizardry of some kind that they've done to make 20 grams of protein and four net grams of carbs. Go fuck yourself.

• 2:15:03Mike Israetel?

  I don't, I don't know what's in it and I don't want to know. I know it's going in my mouth.

• 2:15:08Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Like everything.

• 2:15:10Mike Israetel?

  Most things, male things, huh? I have a wife. Diet transitions and diet breaks. Can we cover that?

• 2:15:19Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 2:15:19Mike Israetel?

  Or am I skipping ahead?

• 2:15:20Chris Williamson?

  No, no, no, that's good.

• 2:15:22Mike Israetel?

  Dieting is dope.

• 2:15:25Mike Israetel?

  Constricting your caloric intake to generate a deficit is the critical way in which you transform your body. But as I said earlier, the vast fraction of people that do diets regain the weight because there's no diet afterwards. After you're done dieting, you have to prepare for the fact

• 2:15:47Mike Israetel?

  that as soon as the diet is over, the next day, your body is still screaming at you that you're starving to death. It's not like finishing a marathon and you get your gold medal and you're like, we're done. And the next day you just go to work. Your body has a memory and it hates you.

• 2:16:09Mike Israetel?

  That Like an abused child. That's right. He'll remember even when he's older. Yeah. So what you have to do is understand that the diet doesn't end when the diet ends. The diet ends when you have finished the weight loss phase and slowly reintegrated back into maintenance. A few weeks later, maybe a few months later, if the diet was hardcore enough, you'll feel normal again. So what does that mean practically? After your diet is over, you already have a rough idea of what your maintenance intake is.

• 2:16:48Mike Israetel?

  Go back up that next week to your maintenance intake, but do it exclusively in the same kinds of foods that you had on the diet. You were eating brown rice and broccoli and chicken. That's an example meal you were eating. The day after the diet is not brownies with honey glaze on top. It's more chicken and, and, and rice and broccoli or whatever.

• 2:17:12Mike Israetel?

  You're going to gain a little bit of body water. Don't freak out. It will come back down in a few days. Stay on that same diet. Can you have a cheat meal or two? Sure. Some people think it's great. Some people are just, their eyes get really big and they just want to keep cheating. So I would say save your cheat meal, your pizza with friends for two to three weeks after. So what you have is you finish the diet and then for two to three weeks, you eat at your new maintenance, which is way more food than you're eating at the diet. But it's still clean food, quote unquote. It's that healthy food. It's that low palatability food. After a few weeks, you're going to physically have a hard time eating that food. You're going to look at your fifth meal and you're like, fuck this. Can someone eat this for me?

• 2:17:54Mike Israetel?

  Now you're not freaking out anymore. Your diet fatigue is way lower. And now, hey shit, you can go with your friends to have pizza. You'll have four slices. It'll be baller. You don't want anymore. You leave the next day, healthy food again, blah, blah, blah. And you're back to having a few junky items a week. Everything in balance, you're golden. Keep weight training, keep your activity nice and high, keep most of your food nice and healthy. And if you get a little too heavy, dial back the junk. If you get a little too light, dial up the junk or eat more of that healthy food. Don't just fall off the face of the earth at the end of the diet and just go back to whatever. That's a big problem and. If you want to diet again to lose more fat, let's say you weigh 200 pounds, you get down to 185,

• 2:18:36Mike Israetel?

  but your real goal weight is like you want to weigh 165. That's where you're going to look your best. For any given length of time you diet, say it's 12 weeks. At RP, based on our examination of the evidence and are working with hundreds and thousands of clients at this point. We've determined that something like two thirds to one times the length of the previous diet is how long your maintenance phase or slow bulk should be after. If you want to get a little thicker, if not just maintenance phase. So what does that mean? You diet it for 12 weeks. Your next eight weeks should be a diligent attempt at maintenance. Being aware of the fact that you could regain. Eating tons of that healthy, not so great palatability food and slowly threading in a bit more high palatability food.

• 2:19:17Mike Israetel?

  This is where desserts that are way outside what you would eat on a diet, but still way below what you would normally eat come in really handy. For example. Halitop is great. Legendary foods is great. Another one is a frozen yogurt. You want to do ice cream, ice cream, bro, that fat level is just going to blow you out. But frozen yogurt, it's actually not a ton. If it's plenty of calories, but not a ton, it fills you up a lot. Froyo is super dope. In that after two or three weeks of healthy food, get some Froyo.

• 2:19:42Chris Williamson?

  That's a treat.

• 2:19:43Mike Israetel?

  Amazing. Um, tons of veggies, sorry, tons of veggies, tons of fresh fruit mixed with regular yogurt, stuff like that goes a long way. Eight weeks later, if you feel good and you could honestly tell yourself. I can do another several months of dieting. I want to do it. Try that thought on for size. It fits. Do it. You could try that thought on for size and be like. Pizza. Like if your brain's a GPT, you're like, hey, do I want a diet? It just returns pizza. You're like shit. Then just maintain for longer until the diet fatigue drops. The huge problem people run into is two things. One, they'll finish the diet and they'll just jump off a cliff and eat pizza on the way down and then they get fat.

• 2:20:26Mike Israetel?

  And the other one is they'll maintain diligently. I didn't mean the scare quotes for a few weeks. And they'd be like, I feel pretty good. Time for another hardcore diet. They do three weeks of that. They try to eat their own hand. They fall off the wagon, they reek in all the way. So dieting is a phasic process. It is by definition unsustainable. You diet down for eight to 12 weeks, even six to 12 weeks, and there's no bonus points for 12. If you're getting kind of crazy at nine weeks, stop the diet. Maintain for at least six weeks. Then diet for seven or eight weeks, maintain for six to eight weeks. You've got some trips coming up. Keep maintaining for three months, four months, five months. Who cares? You already won. And then later you can take another stab at

• 2:21:08Mike Israetel?

  it. The idea that you have to try to lose all of your weight at once is a nonsense and is going to set you up for failure.

• 2:21:17Chris Williamson?

  Dr. Mike Israetel, ladies and gentlemen. Mike, I appreciate you. It's very, very nice to have this evidence-based community coming to the forefront yourself, Mano Lane, these guys. It's good. I really, really like it. And I think that you're doing great work. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the things that you need to shill.

• 2:21:32Mike Israetel?

  They should continue to watch your podcast because it's fucking amazing, man. Thank you so much for having me on. If you guys want to learn more about stuff than RP Strength YouTube channel, we blab about this incessantly. There's tons of other great creators in the space, the 3MJ folks, Stronger by Science, Mano Hanselman, Dr. Pack, Dr. Milo. These are awesome people. I've left out a ton. Jeff Nippert, of course, the king of the evidence-based community. Just get on the internet, type in evidence-based fitness, evidence-based dieting, and you're going to get much more good stuff than bad stuff. And if you want to buy stuff, a lot of funnels at the RP YouTube should do their job. But we have the RP Diet Coach app. You can download it. You can use it. It's super great. The RP Iper trophy app to get jacked. And I come to Instagram and be my friend. I'm on there

• 2:22:16Mike Israetel?

  and you'll notice that I have a giant ugly head. That's the real me.

• 2:22:20Chris Williamson?

  I appreciate you, man. Thank you so much.

• 2:22:21Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 2:22:38Mike Israetel?

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You stop, you freeze to death. That's what. With great power comes great deniability.

• 2:22:45Speaker 02

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 2:22:47Mike Israetel?

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only appears October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9 to middle without parent.