Lose Fat & Gain Muscle Without "Dieting" - Dr Layne Norton

Layne Norton is a Doctor of Nutritional Science, a powerlifter and an author. Choosing the right diet and training plan for health can be complicated. Science offers one view, while your trainer suggests another. Fortunately, Layne provides all the expertise you need to find the best diets, foods, and lifestyle for you to build the healthiest and best version of yourself. Expect to learn why people keep failing at their diets, if there is a best diet for overall health and wellness, Laynes thoughts on the new Ozempic craze, if the Carnivore diet is actually healthy for you, the top health foods you should be eating more of, how bad soy is for your health or if the hype is overblown, and much more... - 00:00 Why So Many Diets Fail 05:44 How to Change Your Identity 16:21 Why You Aren’t Closer to Your Goals 21:04 Importance of Celebrating Wins & Having Fun 35:10 Best Diet for Fat Loss 41:16 Why People Are Tribal About Diets 48:00 Layne’s Thoughts on Weight Loss Drugs 58:43 Would Layne Recommend the Carnivore Diet? 1:15:59 Best Sources of Dietary Fibre 1:20:29 Small Adjustments for Big Results 1:27:35 Is it Possible to Build Muscle on a Vegan Diet? 1:37:25 Current Hype Around the Microbiome 1:43:41 What Layne Thinks of Gary Brecka 1:50:16 How Big a Deal is Insulin? 1:58:40 Layne’s Favourite Diet Hacks 2:09:34 Supplements That Everybody Should Have 2:24:51 Where to Find Layne - 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 up to 32% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout). Get 10% discount on Marek Health’s comprehensive blood panels at https://marekhealth.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on your first order from Maui Nui Venison at https://www.mauinuivenison.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) AG1 - Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/wisdom 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?

  Why do diets fail so reliably over the long term?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  A lot of different reasons, but if we zoom out and take a 10,000 foot view, the main reason is because people view it as a diet instead of lifestyle change. So if we dig into the statistics, if of people who lose weight, I'm sorry, of obese people, seven out of every eight will lose a significant amount of body weight in their lifetime. So why do we have an obesity problem? The problem is they, almost all of them, put it back on. And in many cases, actually put on more than they lost. So if you look at the weight regain statistics and you go out like a year, depending on the stats you use and the inclusion criteria for regain, 50 to 70% will have regained what they lost.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  If you go two years, it gets closer to 80, 85%. And if you look at three years, I mean, you're looking at 90% plus have put it back on. And so a lot of people want to lose weight, but they only think about a diet as an endpoint. And so if you stop doing the habits and behaviors that allowed you to lose it in the first place, you're not going to sustain it. I mean, a great example is my father did a ketogenic diet like 20 years ago, and he lost 30 pounds. But slowly, he kind of reverted to his previous lifestyle, and so slowly the weight came back on. And so I tell people, it's hard to, if you're going to lose a lot of weight,

• 1:37Speaker 01

  it's hard to change your life while dragging your old habits and behaviors behind you. And for whatever reason, this doesn't seem to like click with diet and lifestyle. Because, you know, I, I looked at a systematic review of successful weight loss maintainers. So you're basically talking about the 5%, right? Like the people who lose it and keep it off. What do they have in common? And this was a review by a researcher named Maurice Breckley. And it really stood out to me because some of the stuff that you would expect is on there, which is cognitive restraint, meaning there are the tracking calories or limiting carbs or, or time restricted, some form of restraint, right? Like you have to have some form of restraint.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  But then, and then there was exercise on there, self-monitoring, meaning they were weighing themselves frequently. You know, that's obvious, like feedback. If you start going up, you change your habits again. But then there was something on there that like really kind of, it made sense, but I was like, huh, I never thought of it that way. And it was a lot of them, almost down to a person, identified that they had to form a new identity. Like they had to become someone else. And do you know Ethan Suppley?

• 2:50Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  So Ethan is a Hollywood actor who lost over 300 pounds and has kept it off. And now he, I mean, he went from being basically like your prototype fat guy in a movie to like, he looks like he'd play a Navy SEAL.

• 3:02Chris Williamson?

  He's the prototype hard guy in a movie.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. Yeah. He looks like a badass. And he always would put up something when he'd post his gym photos, which was, I killed my clone today.

• 3:15Chris Williamson?

  I've got a T-shirt with that on. He sent me a T-shirt.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I was like, I thought it was a cool saying, but it didn't really register. And then when I read this review, I texted them immediately and I was like, is this what you mean? Like forming a new identity. He said, that is exactly what I mean. And if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. If you're, I, I don't want to say that there's like food addiction because the, the actual research for that is kind of convoluted. It's more about what they call food dependence, which there are subtle differences, but regardless, if you're an alcoholic, you can't, you can't live the same lifestyle you lived. You can't just say, well, I'm going to stop drinking, but I'm still going to go to bars and I'm still going to be around a bunch of people who drink.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  I mean, I guess you can try, but it's going to be really hard for that to be successful. Right? And so one of the other things that was in this, this review was they, they pointed out that they had, they lost friends and then they gained new friends. I think a lot of people would interpret that as, well, you know, they're getting into fitness now and think they're too good for their old friends. And I don't think it's that at all. I think it's at a much more pragmatic level. That if you're just doing new stuff, you're not going to like, it's going to be hard to hang around people who just aren't into the stuff that you're into. And also a lot of times, and we see this a lot, the whole crabs in a bucket.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  You start improving yourself and people who.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Let me put that back because I might get a little, you start changing yourself and other people, it makes them feel insecure.

• 4:52Chris Williamson?

  I don't think you need to try and pull that back. I don't think that there is anybody out there that would say, I'm over 30 BMI, taking myself under BMI is anything other than improving myself. Like your moral worth as a human doesn't change.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 5:04Chris Williamson?

  But your health outcomes do. That's improvement.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  There are people who would argue that it doesn't.

• 5:09Chris Williamson?

  Well, there's people who, there's people who have got a fucking like 22.5 BMI that are told dicks. There's people who have got a 35 BMI that are fantastic people.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 5:18Chris Williamson?

  But those 35 BMI fantastic people at a 25 BMI have improved themselves. Like presuming that what we want is flourishing humans that add to the world for a longer period of time.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 5:30Chris Williamson?

  Give yourself the best chance of last. Get that in you. Go on. Shove that in your face.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, good man. You're dependent on it. Um, okay.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  No, actually give some good, you know, some good advice.

• 5:40Chris Williamson?

  Good. Yeah, thank you. Well, you've been slow so far. Um, speaking of this identity change thing, did anybody deconstruct that? Is there other tactics, strategies, mantras, component parts that people can think, I want to change my identity? What does that look like structurally?

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. So not in the study, but the way I kind of present it to people is

• 6:04Speaker 01

  retro engineer it. Okay. So think about the person you want to become and then think about what do I think that person's habits and behaviors look like? If I want to lose a hundred pounds, do I think that is a person who's going to McDonald's every day? Probably not. Now, can you theoretically go to McDonald's every day and lose a hundred pounds? Sure. There are people who have done that sort of experiment, whatever. But for the most part, that is not on average, what you would find somebody doing who does that, right? Are they drinking every day? Probably not. Are they exercising frequently? Probably. So you start thinking about what do I think this person does on a daily basis? If somebody,

• 6:46Speaker 01

  you know, comes to a Chris Williamson and says, I want to be one of the best podcasters in the game, right? Well, people all the time, they just try to emulate the end, the end result. They don't try to emulate the process, which is why you've got a bunch of $30,000 millionaires taking pictures with rental cars and, and jets they don't own, right? So the question becomes, okay, if I'm looking at the end product, what process do I think got them there? And what is the evidence-based process for getting there? And the evidence-based process for getting there is setting yourself up for success in terms of your environment, the people you're around, and the things that you do on a day-to-day basis.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  So many people, and I think it's almost like a Hollywood thing. If you watch a movie, it's like, almost always, the change in a character or the crescendo of the movie is some revolutionary thing that changes everything, and all of a sudden, it stops on a dime.

• 7:46Chris Williamson?

  180-second montage.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Right. And the reality is, it's rarely like that. Rarely does a switch flip. It is the slow, progressive accumulation of small things that you do every day that feel like nothing, that feel like they don't actually do anything. But you do that over time, and it makes a big difference. One of my favorite quotes is, "One of the problems that keeps people from being successful is people drastically overestimate what they can do in 10 weeks, but they drastically underestimate what they can do in 10 years." And if I look back, I was actually having this conversation with a friend of mine who's very successful financially and career-wise. And he's at a place right now where he's saying, "Man, I just don't feel like I'm getting any traction, and I feel stuck, and I'm not moving."

• 8:32Speaker 01

  I say, "Hey, man, like, just look at the data, okay? The data says, over the last 10 years, you progress and you are successful. But there are going to be periods of time where it feels like you're not. And even like the last 10 years, if I look at the last 10 years or even 20 years of my life, I'm like, my God, look at all the stuff I did. But if I zoom in to weeks, months, even some years, I felt like making progress was completely intractable, and it felt like I was, you know, stuck in mud. But when you keep your feet moving, when you zoom out and you kind of get through that spot, a lot of times you realize, oh, no, I was making progress. I just hadn't actualized it yet. I hadn't seen those gains yet.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  We talk about this in powerlifting, which I compete in. A lot of times, you're training under a high level of fatigue. And so you're getting stronger, but it's being masked by the fact that you have so much fatigue. And then, when you pull back, when you taper... All of a sudden you actualize those gains and I think so many people stop in that area where they're under the high fatigue and they never actualize those gains. And so what I'll, getting back to your original question, what I will say is the stuff that works is not sexy. It doesn't sell and it seems insignificant in many ways.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  But it is small, daily, repeated habits done over and over and over again. And I even put up a post today talking about how lifting changed my life. And not because I got a better physique or because I got physically stronger, but because it taught me so many things about resilience and working through setbacks and not quitting when things got hard and being patient. And I remember like I had really skinny legs when I started lifting. And even after three years of training, my legs were still really skinny. And I remember being really frustrated and wanting to quit. Except I had these great parents that were like, we're not quitters.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Norton's don't quit. And so I said to myself, you know, maybe, um, maybe I'll never have a good set of legs. And this is when I was competing in bodybuilding, but I'm going to put in 10 years of work. And if it doesn't happen, then I'll allow myself to quit and I can feel good about it because I know I did everything I could. And sure enough, funny enough, after 10 years, I didn't have the best set of legs on stage, but they were good, you know? And then 17 years after that, I actually went and set a world squat record. And I can remember my coach, uh, who had known me for like almost 20 years.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  When I came downstairs after I did my drug testing and setting that world record, he was sitting on a five gallon bucket and he was crying. He never cries. He's not an emotional guy. I was like, dude, what is it? And he goes, you were the skinny kid. You were the kid with skinny legs that everybody on the bodybuilding forums made fun of. How did you just do that? And when I, what I tell people is it was just, I just kept going day after day after day, doing the work. And again, it felt. Like it was taking forever, but when you accumulate all that stuff up, it's amazing what I could do. I mean, even you, like, look at what you've done. You know, James was telling me about how you got started in podcasting and everything. And James gives this great

• 12:02Speaker 01

  talk where basically he's talking to entrepreneurs and the crux of the talk is just freaking go. Just like be willing to fail. Like so many people are frozen by paralysis by analysis. I think that's where a lot of the, the, where I work with trying to dispel diet myths, I'm trying to simplify it for people because people hear all these conflicting myths. And a lot of times they never start because they're so afraid of getting it wrong. And it's like, no, get it wrong. It's fine. Like get it wrong, but learn, you know, and then over time you will find what works, but you can't ever do that if you don't start.

• 12:38Chris Williamson?

  The best heuristic that I've learned to help people overcome that fear of not being perfect, like I'm an optimizer, right? Tim Ferriss, I loved listening to him on the come up. We did 25 episodes of life hacks on how to make the perfect toasted sandwich or a new meditation app, or he'd screen time blocking, or this new type of crocs, or whatever, like the best bamboo cotton pants we found. So as an optimizer, and the problem with being someone that wants to do things right and does cares and does things with earnestness and stuff like that, is that there is this sort of, you allow yourself to be excused from doing a thing because I'm just finding out the information, right? I'm sort of stuck

• 13:20Chris Williamson?

  in this preparatory phase. I'm permanently, permanently writing the plan and not actually acting on the, on the plan. And the best thing, because we can throw pithy aphorisms around all day, and I'm sometimes accused of doing that. Tactically, the best thing that I've relied on for this is, is this a reversible decision? If it's a reversible decision, starting a diet is the most fucking reversible because tomorrow, guess what? You can do a different diet. Probably not a good idea, but if you say, hey, for 60 days, I'm just going to give this a crack. I'm going to see if intermittent fasting is for me, as opposed to watching all of the podcasts about it, or reading all of the articles, or, you know, arguing with people on fucking Instagram comments about it like you do, that like.

• 14:03Chris Williamson?

  Just it's it's a reversible decision.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 14:06Chris Williamson?

  Right. And if it's a reversible decision, then the net cost of you trying it is essentially zero. Right. Because all that you will have lost is some of the time that you would have lost vacillating about whether or not to make the decision in any case. So why not just have a crack? And close the loop on dude, I tried intermittent fasting. Do you know what it is? Might work for some people. I can't deal with the hunger pangs. I get to 2pm and I'm like, I gotta eat everything. And it causes me to rebound more in the night time or it might be like for me keto for me really doesn't. I don't like the way that my stomach feels on keto. I feel very hungry. A lot of the time. High fat doesn't seem to agree with me. Fine. But I closed that loop. I closed that loop like 10 years ago.

• 14:49Chris Williamson?

  I'm like, all right, I have some different dietary tools in my toolkit. Keto is not one of them. Maybe I'll give it another crack in five years. Maybe my, my, my constitution will have changed a little bit or whatever. So what you've mentioned there is that, and this is really interesting and really important, I think. Identity based change. Someone thinks about the end result type of person, not necessarily a person, but what would that type of person do? What would the best version of you tomorrow want you today to do? What sort of decisions would they make? Now presumably, the only way that you can actually work out what those decisions are. Yes, I want to be lean or I want to be healthy. I want to be fit or I want to be the sort of person that looks good with their top off or whatever it might be.

• 15:31Chris Williamson?

  But you need to actually understand what the contributing elements are of that strategy. And if you don't know what the principles are that you need to follow, you're like wishing for this outcome with no mechanism to help yourself get there.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think you need to have a strong why too. Like that's, that's the other thing I, I get. There are some people I talked to who are stuck in perpetuity of trying to lose five pounds. And I'm like, hey. Why are you trying to lose this? And a lot of times as well, you know, I just want to look, I'm like, is it really going to be that big of a difference from where you are now? You know, like you're torturing yourself over this thing. And why don't you just do it? Well, the reason you don't, you not doing it is because your why isn't strong enough. You haven't identified why that is more important than say you're going to eat the extra.

• 16:18Chris Williamson?

  Socializing with your friends or allowing yourself. Isn't that interesting that some people can kind of become, and I've got a lot of friends, I probably in many regards still am this, taking a good amount of pride in my condition, in my strength, in the way that I look, in the way that I can move and stuff like that. But I let go of at least like, I have to be the, one of the biggest leanest jactus guys in the gym thing, maybe about six or seven years ago. If you don't do that, you can basically just get stuck on that level, playing the same game for the rest of your life. Like I have this unrequited love with my physique. I have this unrequited love with the number of partners I've slept with. I have this unrequited love with the amount of money that I've made or whatever. And people just continue to play this game over and over and over again, as opposed to going,

• 17:03Chris Williamson?

  if this mattered to me that much, I would probably be closer to my goals. And that's probably an uncomfortable realization for a lot of people.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, like, um, I've had this conversation quite a bit recently of that goalpost will always move, you know, but for me, like, I'm competing in nationals this weekend, which by the way, is why my nails are painted because my daughter and I, we have a tradition, she's seven and she paints my nails before every big meet.

• 17:28Chris Williamson?

  What's the style that she's gone for here? Can you describe it?

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Usually we do red, white and blue for the USA, obviously.

• 17:35Chris Williamson?

  Red, blue and glitter.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  So, but she had some glitter and she wanted to use that, so.

• 17:40Chris Williamson?

  That's, I'm pretty sure, because you're in a tested federation.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 17:43Chris Williamson?

  I'm not sure that that's going to pass.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  This is not natty?

• 17:45Chris Williamson?

  No, that's, that's, that's the least natty thing that you can do.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Well, it is a performance enhancer for me.

• 17:50Chris Williamson?

  That's correct, that's correct. All right, so.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  But I did want to touch on, um, for me. I mean, I got second in the world in 2015 in powerlifting and at the biggest powerlifting meet at that point in history and then went through a bunch of injuries like I could write out a laundry list of stuff, multiple herniated discs, tears in muscles in my hips, adductor tears, partially torn pecs, like a laundry list of stuff.

• 18:20Chris Williamson?

  Lots of fun.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  And it took me eight years to get back and when Masters Worlds, sorry, seven years. And there were, I mean, that's a long time and there was a lot of failures to launch of me starting to come back and then going back to the beginning. I mean, that must have been at least a half dozen times. And it was very frustrating and there were times where I questioned it, but I had a very strong why of I believed deep in my soul that I could be a world champion. I believe that. And I also believed deep down that I had not been the strongest that I could have been. And like to your point of the goalpost

• 19:02Speaker 01

  moving, it wasn't about I've got to be strong in all these other guys. It was I believed it deep in my soul and it was important for me to prove that to myself, that I could get through that, that I could come back and I loved competing. So I had a really strong why and that's what allowed me to get through that. And when I did it, it I've, one of the things I'll give myself credit for is I'm good about giving myself credit. Some people have said, oh, you're cocky. I'm like, no, I've done some pretty bad motherfucker stuff and like, I'm okay with giving myself that credit because I've met so many people who are so successful in so many ways and they're miserable because they never go.

• 19:49Chris Williamson?

  That was awesome. Yeah, well done.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Like, you're allowed to do that. It's okay. You know, like, I, when I got second at Worlds in 2015 and set a world squat record, and that was after I had herniated some discs even. I was out in my boat in the Florida Keys by myself, just on vacation, and I literally took 15 minutes. I was like, damn, Lane, you did it. Like, good job. You know, because I remembered, I knew this guy in the bodybuilding message boards, and this guy had a terrible aesthetics for bodybuilding, like horrible, had no business even being a pro bodybuilder. But he worked so hard, and he got so lean that he got third at the world championships for drug-tested

• 20:31Speaker 01

  bodybuilding. Like, it was unbelievable, honestly. Like, he maxed it out. And people were congratulating him online, and he said, I'll never forget it. He said, you know, thanks, guys, but to me, anything less than an overall victory is just a complete failure. And I'm like, what a miserable existence. Like, dude, it's, and it's okay, just because you give yourself credit doesn't mean that you can't strive for more.

• 20:55Chris Williamson?

  You're selling yourself short. Yeah.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  For me, that actually helps me strive for more, because I allow myself to feel it. I allow myself to feel good.

• 21:04Chris Williamson?

  That's a positive reward. Like, if you're not, if you're not going to celebrate yourself when you get even close to your goal, what the fuck are you doing it for? Isn't it strange that we're, it's more publicly acceptable to be our own biggest critic than our own biggest fan?

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Yep, exactly. I have a friend who's a psychologist, and every once in a while, she'll like, she'll validate me. And then she noticed that when she would do that, I would kind of be like, oh, well, you know, it wasn't that.

• 21:29Chris Williamson?

  Minimize.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  And she'd go, Lane.

• 21:32Chris Williamson?

  You're doing it again.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  You, this is what you, you want this. But if you keep deferring it, you're actually, what you're telling me is you don't want it. And I'm like, you're right. I'm sorry. Thank you for validating me on that. You know? And it really is funny. I think it's, it's so weird. We can even feel bad about, like, talking about our income, or talking about something. We're supposed to minimize the stuff we did. And look, I'm not saying, like, get up on the mountaintop and shout about all the great things you've done. But I think it's important to, like, make sure you're not goalpost shifting all the time. I mean, I've talked about this stuff with, like, really, really.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  Really successful people. And I'll never forget, I had a client, I started online coaching in 2005, when I was in graduate school. And one of my first clients, I turned pro in natural bodybuilding. He was an estate planning attorney. And he pulled me aside after that show, this is like 2007. And we were at dinner, he pulled me aside and he goes, Lane, I need to, I need to talk to you about something. I've been around a lot of really successful people and I'm telling you, you've got it. You've got it. You're going to be successful.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  I have watched a lot of really successful people die. And to a person, they all say the same stuff. They say, I wish I had spent more time with my family. I wish I would have spent more time with the people I cared about. I wish I would have traveled more. I wish I would have had more experiences. I wish I wouldn't worry about the dumb shit that I worried about. None of them say, I wish I made another million dollars. I wish I'd, you know,

• 23:15Chris Williamson?

  Spent more time in Slack or on Zoom or an email.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And I had, like, that sat with me. But I think this last year, I kind of even really had an epiphany of like, I don't have to wait to enjoy my life. It's okay to enjoy it now. And I was having a conversation with somebody like, like, what's your goals? Like to build stuff up and make a hundred million dollars? And I'm like, no, not really. Because I don't want to live a life like somebody who does that. Because I want my kids to like their dad. And I want to spend time with my friends and do fun stuff. And like, compete in powerlifting and do stuff that's fun for me. Because like, what is that money even worth? If you can't do the stuff that you enjoy doing?

• 23:57Chris Williamson?

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• 24:41Chris Williamson?

  And if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back. Head to the link in the show notes below or go to livemomentous.com/modernwisdom for up to 32% of everything site wide. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom. There's nothing sadder to me than seeing somebody that's

• 25:05Chris Williamson?

  quantifiably very successful, admirable, lots of reputation, status, money, acclaim, prestige, all that shit. And you look and you go, you have no fun. Like, what's the point? Actually, what's the point? And there's some people, and I'm friends with a couple of them, for whom greatness in its sort of success metric kind of way is so important that they're prepared to sacrifice fun. And I'm like, all right, that's not necessarily the way that I'm wired. But that took me a little bit of time to realize that it's not the way that I'm wired. Because fun and your enjoyment of life does not appear on any observable metric that you can brag about to other people. It's not apparent in your Instagram followers. It's not apparent in your bank balance, but it's, all of those things are supposed to

• 25:49Chris Williamson?

  be upstream from the actual outcome you want, which is presumably a life that you enjoy and that you're proud of. And in retrospect, you're glad that you lived.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  And they're not mutually exclusive either. Like, I think.

• 26:00Chris Williamson?

  You can be successful and have fun. I don't know. Here's a question for you, and this is actually my number one question I wrote at the bottom of my end of your review, the start of this year, which was, is it possible to be world class and have fun at the same time? The reason that that's an interesting question is that when you're talking world class, you're, you know, top point, whatever, 0.01% within your chosen industry. If you are not prepared to sacrifice everything, you will be beaten by somebody that is prepared to sacrifice everything in that one domain. Now, the question is, what's the outcome you're optimizing for? Are you optimizing for sort of a well-balanced, holistic, integrated life? Are you optimizing for maximum success within this very narrow domain? If it's just that one, you're going to get beaten by the other people.

• 26:45Chris Williamson?

  But if you can sacrifice. A couple of percent in that for 50% more life enjoyment. To me, that seems like a trade that's worth making.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  I may have a different perspective on this and a couple of different angles on it. I think the first thing is I look at it, if you're talking about like, we've got a very narrow window of time. I think you're probably right.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  But I've just seen so many people burn out so fast and stuff. And here I am 20 years later in the same industry, still doing the same things I've done. And it's because I enjoy what I do and it doesn't feel super fatiguing for me. But I've seen people come in, flash in the pan, and here I am, the tortoise over here, just chugging along and I keep going, you know? And the other thing that's interesting too is

• 27:38Speaker 01

  going through all these injuries and dealing with all this pain, specifically with like, within sports and powerlifting. There honestly, with as much quackery as is around nutrition, there's just as much around pain science. We think of pain management as stretching, getting massage, surgery. If you look at the actual evidence-based stuff, some of the strongest predictors of reducing pain and recovering from injuries are psychological in nature. So stress management, there's a very high correlation between

• 28:18Speaker 01

  chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, in fact, most autoimmune diseases and high stress and psychological stress and psychiatric disorders.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  When your body is like, when you're spun up all the time, it apparently increases your sensitivity to pain is one of the things it does. It opens, they call it like kind of a Sorry. They call it kind of like opening the gate of pain. That as you get more stressed, your gate widens and allows more things in. And interesting experiment, there was a while back where I think it was, I might butcher the specifics, but the, the, the crux of it will be accurate, which they took 300 people and they, uh, applied the same amount of pressure to their skin. And it was standardized. So everybody's getting the same pressure. They asked them to rate it zero through a hundred. Zero being absolutely no pain whatsoever. A hundred being the most painful thing they ever felt.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Most of the ratings were around the 50 mark. So right in the middle. But there was somebody who rated it as low as four and somebody who rated it as high as 96. For one person, the same pressure was basically nothing. And for another person, it was one of the most painful things they'd ever felt. And so what that says is pain is an experience. It's almost like an emotion. And if you read the bio cycle, social model of pain,

• 29:39Speaker 01

  it just really opens your eyes. Another thing is sleep. So sleep deprivation, uh, will can increase your risk of injury by up to 236%. So that looking at eight hours sleep versus four hours sleep a night.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  And then actually your beliefs about pain and recovery. So people who believe they need excellent form on exercises to not get injured are actually more likely to get injured. Than people who believe their bodies are strong and resilient. People who ruminate on pain, who think about it constantly, who like check it, like if, like if I have a back niggle and I'm thinking about it all the time, if I'm like messing with it all the time. The research shows that will make it worse. Whereas the people who are more like, oh yeah, you know, I like, great example. Complete total shift in my mind frame. In 2016, I had a hip injury in training. It started out, it wasn't that, that wasn't that bad. But I kept beating on it, trying to get through it. And I kept thinking about it and ruminating on it.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  And after like 12 weeks, I couldn't even squat the bar below parallel without like nine out of 10 pain. Whereas a comparable tweak I did like six weeks ago prepping for Nationals. I was squatting 590 pounds for three reps and on the third rep, I felt my adductor kind of tweak and it was sore after that, probably like slightly strained it. And I backed off, I rested, I didn't ruminate about it. I just was like, you know what? We've been here before. This will be okay in a few weeks. We'll just take it as it comes. As it stands, three weeks, three weeks later, I couldn't even feel it. It's totally fine. And I mean, again, this is an in of one, right?

• 31:24Speaker 01

  But this is in line with the research. And so getting back to what you're saying about can you focus and sacrifice all this? So for me, my mental health became actually something I prioritized even more because it affected my training. It affected my recovery from training. So some people will say, well, you know, you post in your stories like you're having a bourbon, watching the sunset. Nothing exists in isolation, like in isolation is alcohol good for training? Hell no. But what if, and again, I don't have any data on this, but what if me really enjoying that sunset, having a bourbon? The relaxation effect of that actually is a net positive for me.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  I'm not saying other people should do that and I'm not promoting people drink alcohol. If you can relax in other ways, but for whatever reason, I have been able to recover more, having more fun and sacrificing. I'm still sacrificing because I'm in the gym, you know, two, three hours a day, pretty much. I think my weekly training load is like 12 to 13 hours. It's a lot of training and I'm still being diligent with my nutrition, that sort of thing. But I'll, and I won't go out and get like hammered or anything like that, but I'll go with my friends on the weekend and have a few drinks, you know? And I think younger Lane would have been like, you're not pushing hard enough for this. You're not.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  And now being older, I'm like, I'm trying to run the marathon. You know what I mean? And I've just seen so many people burn out. So I think the answer is yes and no. So the answer is if you're talking about it, if you've got a sprint in a very narrow sliver of time, yes, the person who sacrificed more will, will win out every single time. But if you're looking at like long success, you have to find a way to make that sustainable for you. And I think some people, and even people who maybe have that success, how many of them do we see, they look back and they go, man, I went, you know, I probably didn't have to go, do exactly what I did to get what I got. I probably could have like enjoyed it a little bit more. And so I think there is a fine balance there.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  And then the one other thing I will say is people also give them stress over, they try to do everything at the same time. And one of the things I've really embraced now is there are seasons of life. Right? So part of the reason I say I'm, I'm probably not going to make a hundred million dollars is because even though I'm an entrepreneur, I want to compete in powerlifting and I want to train two, three hours a day, but also have kids. So.

• 33:56Chris Williamson?

  If you want to be a good dad and a good athlete, you can't be a hundred millionaire at the same time.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm cool with it.

• 34:01Chris Williamson?

  Triage your priorities.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm cool with making that sacrifice because I know I've had some like epic moments that you couldn't pay me enough for, like setting that world squat record back in 2015. There's not an amount of money you could pay me to, to give that back. Because what would I go spend it on? Like to do what? And, and then so like other things I enjoy, like I used to do competition, uh, tactical pistol shooting. I used to fish a lot more, got my boat a lot more. I don't do that as much anymore, but I'm cool with it because I know the kids are going to graduate one day and I'll get to do that stuff in the future. And I think if some people could just embrace that there are seasons of life, they'd feel, they'd feel differently about things. I think a lot of people give themselves a lot of unnecessary stress because.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  They feel like I should go back to school. Um, I should start a business. I should, you know, get my nutrition or I should. Hey, if you're a single mom going back to school and you're working three jobs, maybe now is the time to like, try to drop 20 pounds, you know, like, you know, like, it's okay to embrace the seasonality of life.

• 35:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Juju Mufu wrote an article, I think, two decades ago, talking about periodization for life. And, uh, it's so fucking, it's so true, man. All right. Getting back to diet. Getting back to diet.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  I wouldn't roll meta on you.

• 35:13Chris Williamson?

  Not at all. Not at all. I think it's important. I think it's important for people to see how goals overall are sort of couched within a bigger ecosystem. That, that, that stuff's really important.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  Nothing exists in isolation.

• 35:24Chris Williamson?

  Is there such a thing as a best diet for fat loss and overall health?

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Okay. So if we look at the research, there are now two meta-analyses looking at various different diets and their effectiveness on long-term weight loss. And when I say meta-analysis, what we're talking about is essentially study of studies where they're using different inclusion criteria and they're trying to compile a bunch of similar studies to see if we can come to a consensus, right? So one meta-analysis looked at four different popular diets. Another one looked at 14 and they ranged from low carb, high fat to low fat, high carb, to everything in between. And when I say low carb, I mean ketogenic,

• 36:11Speaker 01

  up to ornish diet, which I think is like 80% carbohydrate. And what they found was over the long term, none of them were any better than the other ones for long-term weight loss. And if we look at, now, those are kind of free living studies. So people say, well, you know, maybe people weren't sticking to those. There was another meta-analysis done, that's one of my favorite studies, when we get in these arguments about low carb versus this, um, looked at.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Equating calories and protein, varying carbohydrate and fat. And it's important to equate calories and protein. Obviously calories, if we don't equate energy, we're comparing apples to oranges. And then protein is thermogenic. So diets higher in protein tend to cause more lean mass retention and tend to be more energetically expensive. So if we don't equate for that, sometimes we can see differences in fat loss even with equal calories. But when they do that and they vary carbohydrate and fat, this meta-analysis used only studies where at minimum, all the meals were provided to participants. So very controlled feeding studies where adherence is very high. Up to metabolic ward studies where they basically have them in food jail.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  And found that there was essentially no practical difference in fat loss between these diets. In fact, it actually slightly favored the low-fat diets. But it was like 16 grams of extra fat loss per day. It was clinically irrelevant, right? Like I would never tell somebody, do that diet because you might get like

• 37:44Chris Williamson?

  16 grams of

• 37:45Speaker 01

  more fat loss per day. Like do the one that you can stick to. So on a mechanistic level, we don't really see a difference in fat loss. And there doesn't appear to be like on the average differences in adherence. The only time we really see big differences in adherence in studies is when there's some kind of support. Like when they're talking to a dietitian every month or every week, that sort of thing. That does increase adherence. But overall, no real difference in adherence rates. But when they stratify for adherence, so all these different diets don't produce differences in long-term weight loss. But when they stratify for adherence, regardless of diet type, it's like a linear effect.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  And so what that says is the best diet for you as an individual is the one that you can adhere to consistently.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  And to lose weight, I like what Peter Attia says, he kind of puts weight, types of dietary strategies in three different buckets. You have a tracking restriction, kind of where you're tracking your calories, your macros, and you're restricting that way. You have dietary restriction, where you're doing low fat, low carb, clean eating, paleo, insert whatever type of diet. And then you have time restriction, so intermittent fasting, alternate day fasting, any sort of those buckets. And those are kind of your three strategies that you can, you can use. You have to do some form of restriction. All those involve some form of restriction.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  I like tracking macros and calories because I am brutally, absurdly consistent when I can kind of eat the foods I like, but just track it. Some people hate that. Some people have a lot of anxiety around tracking. It feels very cumbersome to them. For me, it's like five minutes a day and it doesn't matter. Some people like time restriction. They do it and they go, it didn't even feel like I was dieting. You tried it, you didn't like it, right? Some people, they like the dietary restriction. Well, if I just eat these foods, I lose weight. Okay, cool. As long as any of those can be sustainable for you.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  You have to practice some form of restriction, but you should choose the form of restriction that feels the least restrictive for you. And also don't assume that it will feel the same for everyone else, because this is where we get into the diet wars, right? Where you have people have a diet that worked for them, and now they're trying to evangelize everyone and get them on their team. And it's actually really, I've actually dug into the psychology of this a lot, because after I've had so many of these internet debates, I'm like, why do people get like this? Because I'm diet agnostic. I mean, I pretty much, I don't want to take credit for flexible dieting, if it fits your macros. But I would say that no one would argue that I was one of the main people who popularized it. I don't have I F Y M or flexible dieting in my bio.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Like, because I'm, I don't, like, I recognize that that wasn't for everybody, but when I first started it.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  I was in bodybuilding and I found that just I would try to eat clean. But then I was binging every time I got exposed to like pizza or my friends would have a dessert or whatever. I was like binge eating. And I was, I had this epiphany. I'm like, you know, I'm pretty sure it's not like the, if I had one slice of pizza, that's probably not what's harming me. It's probably the fact I'm eating the whole pizza, right? And so I just started allowing myself kind of what I wanted, but tracking everything. And all of a sudden I got brutally consistent and started getting results very consistently.

• 41:16Chris Williamson?

  So why do you think it is that people are so tribal about their diet of choice?

• 41:20Speaker 01

  So I foolishly believed, oh, this is the solution for everybody. This is why people can't be consistent. So it started out very innocently. And then, um, I think there's an insecure element of it. If people feel insecure about what they're doing, they're trying to get people on their team so they can feel better about it.

• 41:40Chris Williamson?

  Because there's an inherent uncertainty in any sort of diets.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:45Chris Williamson?

  Science. Yeah, okay.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  And people are tribal by nature and it's a little bit of, I think, what I like to call the Tim Tebow effect. So do you remember when Tim Tebow was getting into the NFL? So are you familiar with him at all? Okay, so Tim Tebow was a Heisman Trophy winner who played in the NFL for, I think, probably like seven, eight seasons. And the, if you listen to the critics of him, it was, he has a horrible release angle. His mechanics are terrible as a quarterback. He really should be a tight end. He doesn't belong playing quarterback. And he had low accuracy and all this kind of stuff. And the people who were on his side were like, well, he's a Heisman Trophy winner and

• 42:27Speaker 01

  he's got a bunch of heart and he works hard and very positive guy. Like, he was also very religious and he was very outspoken about his religiousness. He became very polarizing, not really for the things he said, but. I looked at this with fascination because he had, he had won a playoff game as an NFL quarterback. And he, he, he kind of had these games where he would just have horrible, horrible games. And then somehow at the end, he would will himself to victory, find a way to get to victory. And when the chips were down, it just seemed like that guy found a way to pull it out. So I kind of became a little bit of a fan. He seemed like a very positive guy. When you knew people who knew him, they're like, he's legit. He's a legitimately nice guy. And so I kind of was like, oh, I kind of like this guy.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  But then I would read the things that people would say that were negative towards him. And I would get kind of defensive about like, well, hey, you're how many, how many playoff games is your quarterback won, right? But if you were somebody who was on the other side, and maybe you're not that invested in it. You're like, yeah, I mean, this guy isn't that great. He's got good players around him like, you know, look at his arm mechanics. He's horrible. You know, it's really bad. But then you got this whole like group of people who are, he's the best quarterback of all time. He should be the NFL MVP. And you go, are you insane? And so I think we drive each other apart with the strongest, like we, we do this in politics, religion, whatever, we take the most straw man interpretation

• 43:55Speaker 01

  of the other person's argument and argue against that. And it drives us further apart. I mean, I can, I have so many examples of this when I'll put up a, just talking about what we were just talking about saying, you know, it doesn't look like fat loss is different when you equate calories. Protein and somebody will say, oh, so we can just eat Pop-Tarts all day and lose weight. And I'm like, I don't know where I ever said that like eating Pop-Tarts all day was a, a good strategy for weight loss.

• 44:20Chris Williamson?

  Nut picking, yeah. We'll get back to talking to Layne in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Marek Health. I wanted to get my blood work done in America and after I asked around, I found out that Marek Health is the most sophisticated and comprehensive service out there. I loved it so much that I actually reached out to the owner to partner with them because that's how much I believe in what they do. You might've heard that I took my testosterone from 495 to 1006 last year. And that was done with the guidance of Marek Health without putting me on TRT. Best of all, they walked me through my entire lab report and gave me actionable recommendations to improve my health. And my longevity, they give me suggestions for diet, for training, for supplementation, and if I needed them, pharmaceuticals. Basically, it's like having a super well-resourced blood expert in your corner at all times. Right now, you can get the exact same panel

• 45:05Chris Williamson?

  and medical oversight I got by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to marekhealth.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout for 10% off. That's M A R E K health.com/modernwisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. So two things that come to mind for that, there's an idea from evolutionary psychology called a failure of cross-sex mind reading. And it explains how men and women don't understand what the other is thinking from a mating perspective. So there's something called the overperception and underperception bias. On average, men seem to think that women are more interested in them than they are. And on average- It's shocking. Yeah, I know, shock horror. And on average, women seem to think that men are less interested than they are. So when in a relationship, you say, you know that your

• 45:50Chris Williamson?

  boss fancies you, right, to your wife, and the wife goes, no, you're being stupid. And he's like, fucking yes, he does, right? And I know that he does. Either of you could be wrong, but I would bet on the guy being right. The woman that says, like, you know, or your girlfriend that says something like, I don't think that Caroline's that into you. And you're like, no, you've seen the way that she like looks at me and stuff? And she's like, she's just being friendly. It's like, no, no, no, no, you don't get you like, you don't get it. I would rely on the woman with regards to that. So the way that you see the world, because of your biases, the person that you are, your unique constitution, you use that theory of mind and port it onto other people as well. Failure

• 46:32Chris Williamson?

  of cross-sex mind reading. Now, this is like a failure of cross-diet mind reading, because your diet worked for you, you assume that it is the thing that will work for everybody else. Second point, I think that one of the big reasons why diet is such a breeding ground for very vehement.

• 46:49Chris Williamson?

  Aggravating adversarial conversation is because implicit in your choice of diet is your health and downstream from your health is your longevity and downstream from that is when you're going to die. So I think that a attack on your diet is an implicit attack that you're going to die sooner. I think it reminds people, it's like a denial of death, a protection strategy, right? That, no, no, no, no, my thing is right. And if you attack that, you're saying basically I've got it wrong and I'm close at moving myself closer to death, or I could be moving myself more slowly to death if I changed it. Therefore, there's a lot of existential passion that's tied up in that. And then that kind of gets

• 47:32Chris Williamson?

  folded into a broader conversation of if you, if I think that you're getting it wrong and you're popularizing a particular approach, that this has a blast radius where other people might do your thing, which is going to kill them more, more quickly. So I think that that from a psychological standpoint, there's definitely two elements in there, failure of cross diet mind reading and this sort of denial of death approach. I think that both of those are interesting. Another interesting element, I just had a conversation with Johann Hari, who's written the book Magic Pill about the dangers of Ozempic and, and where that might end up. Give me your opinion on these new GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  I think I have a very balanced take on this. So if you look at the research data, I mean, they work, they work. They're very powerful appetite suppressants and people on average lose about 15 to 20% of their body weight. People have concerns about thyroid cancer. Those studies are in rodents. We know that less than 50% of those studies can translate to humans.

• 48:40Chris Williamson?

  I think rodents also have a very special kind of receptor on their thyroid that humans don't have. And I think that the dosages that they're being given to the rats are also

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Very high.

• 48:49Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Well, and, and, and this is, we could do a whole nother like section of how people cite studies and people have no way of knowing like whether it was even a relevant study versus something that was like a very relevant study that was done in humans. But there, so there's that. And then there's the, well, people lose more lean mass. We have to worry about that. If you look at the amount of lean mass that people lose while on Ozempic or GLP-1 memetics, it's very similar to the amount of lean mass that people lose when they just do diet with no resistance training or exercise. And so these studies so far really haven't combined those and looked at.

• 49:31Chris Williamson?

  Ozempic plus resistance training.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  There was a study looking at exercise plus Ozempic and then people getting off Ozempic that showed that exercise basically helped people maintain their weight loss from Ozempic much better than people who didn't do exercise.

• 49:50Chris Williamson?

  Because there's a rebound effect in many of the studies about Ozempic when people.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and and not probably for the reasons that people think. Exercise is good for weight loss, but not because of the calories burned. Because you really have to do a lot of exercise to get a big calorie burn. But what exercise tends to do is actually sensitize your brain to satiety signals. So there was a very classic study in Bengali workers done in 1950s. And again, I may butcher the specifics, but the the crux will be right. They looked at sedentary, lightly active, moderately active, and heavily active, like heavy labor jobs. And then looked at how much do people eat? So there was no intervention. They were just looking at how much did they eat? They found from lightly active to heavily active,

• 50:35Speaker 01

  they pretty much perfectly compensated there for increased energy expenditure by eating more. But sedentary was dysregulated. Sedentary ate more than lightly active and I think more than moderately active. And so you have this J shaped curve. So when you are sedentary, the research indicates that it may actually dysregulate your appetite signals. And so since many people are sedentary now, one of the things that GLP-1 does, if you listen anecdotally to people, is they say, it took the food noise out of my brain. I stopped thinking about food so much. And I think it may be having like kind of that effect that that, you know, sensitizing us to society signals.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  And GLP-1 is a satiety signal in and of itself in the brain, and also it slows down GI motility, which makes you feel more full.

• 51:27Chris Williamson?

  What are you worried about?

• 51:30Speaker 01

  So I think for obese people.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  I mean, honestly, for a long time, we have been waiting for this. We're like, when is the pharmaceutical industry going to come up with something that helps solve the obesity crisis? It looks like they got it and everybody's pissed off about it. I mean, I think my concerns are the following.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  It still needs to be done with lifestyle intervention as well. Especially if people don't want to be on it indefinitely. So if people, and listen, I'm not making a judgment towards people who decide that they're going to be on it indefinitely. That's, that is their choice. Uh, and honestly, like despite the cost of it, it, if it gets people to lose the weight that it's been getting people to lose in the studies, it will save us tons of money. Now, the government will probably go blow it somewhere else, but it will save us tons of money on healthcare.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  I, I'm more worried on an individual level that if we are not instituting good eating behaviors and lifestyle change facilitated along with this, that people will go from eating a lot of crappy food to eating a little crappy food.

• 52:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  And still not getting enough dietary fiber, uh, still not getting enough protein. And I think one of the things that happens is when you're not hungry, protein is probably one of the last things you're actually reaching for. And fiber is one of the last things you're reaching for. So I, I am on board with people, especially obese people, using GLP-1 memetics. Because it works and it will save us a lot of money. And everybody's, some people are like, oh, these things have all these side effects. Honestly, the side effects are pretty mild when you look at some of the other pharmaceutical drugs out there that have approval. I mean, I mean, if the thyroid thing ends up being a thing, okay. But we have no indication of that in humans yet.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  The worst thing we're worried about is some people get nausea, um, have, maybe have, um, gastroparesis. There's, there's some people who have reported that. But name me one really effective drug that doesn't have side effects. I mean, this is, they're for every gimme, there's a gotcha.

• 53:38Chris Williamson?

  One of the big pushbacks that Johan got in the episode that I did with him was, uh,

• 53:46Chris Williamson?

  Basically, this sort of like a, kind of like a naturalistic fallacy, I think, or like a naturalistic assumption. We are offering people an easy way out. Why can't they just eat less and move more? These fat fucks, like you're supplementing, sublimating willpower with this, you know, external thing which is helping them to suppress satiety and almost like, kind of almost like they don't deserve to be thin. They don't deserve to lose the weight because they're not putting the work in. What do you say to those sorts of criticisms?

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Why are you so lazy that you need a car to go to work? Just walk there. Just take longer. So I, I think, let me go back 20 years when I got to graduate school. I was very much of the opinion at that time that if you were obese, it was because you chose to be and you were lazy and obesity is a choice. I think there is personal responsibility to change if you want to change. But there is a lot more that goes into food than just this is a choice. This is, food is a pervasive theme throughout our entire society. It's not just, oh, I'm choosing this or this. It's, this is how I connect with people. When

• 55:07Speaker 01

  was the last time you went to an event that didn't have food? What was, like, do you just like go out randomly with your friends and sit around? You go out and have a meal, you know? And so, one of the other things where that breaks down as well, when people go, well, they just don't have enough willpower, is I've met some really successful, really smart people who were obese. You're telling me they don't have willpower? I mean, maybe in that one area, there's also a lot of really in shape shredded people who are in tons of debt. But what happened with the willpower? Why isn't it translating?

• 55:49Speaker 01

  Because this stuff is more complicated than just a very black and white, just want it more. And if we look like a great example where I started to kind of change my mind on things is we all cope in trauma with different ways. Some people become drug addicts. Some people become work addicts. In fact, I heard something once that I thought was interesting that that work addiction is the only thing that you can only kind of addiction you can have that you will be praised for. Right? Which actually makes it one of the most dangerous kinds of addiction because you can just justify it in perpetuity. Some people

• 56:26Chris Williamson?

  Maybe the gym too.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Some people get addicted to porn. Some people, whatever have you, right? Some people, they find comfort in food. And if you look at a study, they did a study where they looked at obese women and found that obese women were 50% more likely to have some sort of sexual assault trauma in their past.

• 56:50Chris Williamson?

  Yep. They use the food as a protection strategy. If I'm less attractive to the opposite sex, it's less likely.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Or even just bigger.

• 56:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I'm not going to be able to be as frail and fragile. Yeah, man, it's very interesting. I think very timely for Johan to release this book. There was definitely one other thing I was quite surprised about was I think some people accused him of basically doing an infomercial for a Zenpick. But he spends 12 different sections of the book, 12 different risks that he's concerned about. So I didn't, there's, I was, I've cultivated an audience of people that are very agentic and like high sort of in personal sovereignty. And I think that maybe this pushes back against a little bit of that narrative. So that it's not exactly a fully representative sample. But I was surprised by that. You know, we know that obesity is a big problem.

• 57:39Chris Williamson?

  Lots of people like, no one has no person in their life that wouldn't do from doing weight. My dad, my dad would benefit from losing, you know, like 20 pounds, 20, maybe, maybe 40 pounds, he would benefit from losing that weight. So I'm like, I don't know, I think. It's to be seen, side effects, long-term use, longitudinal studies. How can we tie this in as this dependency? It's this big pharma owning people's health. But it's the same as the artificial sweetness thing. Like, look at what you are gaining versus what you are losing. And to me, Johan's got this nice, like a taxonomy, I suppose. He says, under 27 BMI, he thinks probably no real reason to use it. 27 to 35, gray area, you need to re sort of think about it carefully.

• 58:23Chris Williamson?

  35 or over. I think on balance, I'm not your doctor, but this is probably something which will benefit your health rather than hurting it. And I was like, that seems like a really well-balanced approach.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  Well, really well-balanced means that both, both extreme sides hate you.

• 58:39Chris Williamson?

  Unfortunately.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Which is.

• 58:41Chris Williamson?

  Which he managed to do successfully. You just mentioned there about the importance of dietary fiber.

• 58:48Chris Williamson?

  What do you think about carnivore as a diet?

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Speaking of extremes that hate you. So I will give a devil's advocate argument for it. That any diet that is going to get people to eat less processed foods and more filling, satiating foods is going to be a diet that does better than the standard American diet. So I have no doubt that there are people who go on carnivore and they get healthier. The, the question really becomes, why did you need to do that? Could you do that and still have some dietary fiber and get the benefits of that?

• 59:28Speaker 01

  And so I have had carnivores, carnivores, carnists push back against me. Well, dietary fiber is just, it's just filler. You don't even absorb it. In fact, in carnivore, I don't even poop as much because, you know, I'm absorbing so many more nutrients and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I always find these really like Olympic level mental gymnastics interesting because it's not like we don't just have tons of studies in humans looking at this with actual hard human health outcomes. And what the criticism of a lot of these studies is, because one of the downsides of nutritional

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  studies is it's hard to do multi-year randomized controlled trials.

• 1:00:14Chris Williamson?

  You're gonna lock someone in diet jail for three years at a time.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think people have this misunderstanding that there's just like this random pool of people that are test subjects for different studies that just sit there waiting patiently for the researchers to come get them and that's their life's purpose. And it's like, no, there are people like you and me who see a flyer and go, oh, I'll try that. And, you know, a lot of them drop out. Why? Because the more controlled you try to make it, the less likely people are to do it. I mean, a great example is people like, why didn't they do more studies in bodybuilders? And I'm like, because they suck as test subjects. Because what happens when you're a bodybuilder who gets randomized to the low protein arm of a protein study? You're immediately dropping out, right?

• 1:00:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  Or if you've got a bias, if maybe you think a low carb diet's really good and you get randomized to a high carb diet, see ya. You know, so it's hard to do these for long periods of time and keep a level of control. So we have to rely on, a lot of times, shorter term randomized controlled trials, looking at markers of health that are hopefully predicting longer term health outcomes, and long-term cohort studies. Now cohort studies are kind of an arm of epidemiology. You have your cross-sectional studies, which are, we look at this population and this population, who has a greater rate of X disease and what differences do they have? Well, those are difficult because there's a lot of confounding variables.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Cohort studies are a little bit better because what you're doing is you're tracking the same people over, say, 20, 30 years. You're not doing any intervention, but you're seeing, okay, these people ate more fiber versus these people and had this outcome. Now, what I'll say is, The reason I became quite convinced of the healthfulness of dietary fiber is because, are you familiar with a forest plot? So a forest plot, um, this became famous because James Wilks was on Joe Rogan debating, uh, the game changers a long time ago and kept bringing up a forest plot because, uh, the person he was debating didn't know what it was. Uh, essentially, if you have a meta-analysis of studies and you have a center line, which

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  means no effect, no overall effect of treatment. And then on one side of the line, you'll have favors X treatment, other side of the line favors Y treatment. And then you plot each of the studies where they land. So if you have like this side is favors dietary fiber for decreasing cardiovascular disease, mortality, cancer, literally every study is on this side.

• 1:02:50Chris Williamson?

  Positive.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:02:51Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  You might have some that like didn't show a significant effect or not a huge effect, but they're all on this side. Um, I am not aware of any cohort study that showed fiber or fruits and vegetables did not have at least a neutral, or most of them show a very positive dose response effect on mortality, cardiovascular disease and cancer.

• 1:03:11Chris Williamson?

  What's dose response?

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  So meaning, uh, if they do what's called a meta-regression, so they look at the different, um, levels of dietary fiber intakes in these cohorts, then try to compare that to their risk of mortality, cardiovascular disease and cancer. They can basically say, for example, in one meta-analysis that was recent, I think it was with over a million subjects. For every 10 gram increase in dietary fiber, there was a corresponding 10% decrease in the relative risk of mortality, cancer and cardiovascular disease. Now, before anybody goes, well, I'm just going to eat a hundred grams of fiber a day and live forever. We are talking about relative risk and it's important to point out the difference, which a lot of people don't get when they hear these things reported on the, on the news.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  So when I say a 10% decrease in the risk of mortality, if we're looking at, say, and I'm just making up numbers here, but if we're looking at, say, a 60-year-old person and their risk of mortality in the next 10 years is 20%, right? It's probably not, it's probably different than that, but let's say it's 20%. A 10% relative risk reduction is an absolute reduction of 2%. Because 2% is 10% of 20%. So for every 10 gram increment of increased fiber, they showed a 10% decrease in the risk of these different diseases and mortality. If there are other things that there are claims about, like for example,

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  people on carnivore, it's so funny, they'll be like, why are you trying to, you know, discourage high quality animal protein consumption? I'm like, sorry, not to sound curt, but do you know who I am? Like, have you done any like background on me? My research was funded, my lab was funded by the National Dairy Council, the Egg Nutrition Center and the National Catalunya Beef Association. If anybody has a bias towards high quality animal protein, it's me. I'm just not crazy. And when we look at, say, a great example is red meat. So even the WHO has categorized red meat as probably carcinogenic. I don't necessarily believe it's carcinogenic based on the research that's out there.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  And the reason is, a lot of studies don't show that it's carcinogenic. A lot of these cohort studies don't see it.

• 1:05:31Chris Williamson?

  Why is the WHO getting it from?

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Well, I would say the, the, over half of them do, but some of them don't. And if you look at the confounding variables of people who are high red meat consumption, it's not like we're talking about bodybuilders eating sirloin, you know? Most of them are getting it from like processed sources of red meat. And, uh, red meat, one of the problems with these studies as well is if you are eating more of one thing, you're typically eating less of another thing. And actually, red meat intake is actually quite a good proxy for poor diet quality. So there was a really good study from, I think, Maximova in Canada, Alberta, Canada in 2020.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  And they looked at trying to control for diet quality. So they did, uh, basically tertile, so three different levels of red meat intake with three different levels of fruit and vegetable intake. And looking at the incidence of cancer. And what they found was that at low intakes of fruit and vegetable intake, yes, there was an association of high meat, red meat intake with cancer. But at high levels of fruit and vegetable intake and high levels of red meat consumption, the risk of cancer was actually lower than low red meat consumption with high fruit and vegetable consumption because people who are eating a lot of meat and a lot of fruit and vegetables, they're probably not eating a lot of low quality foods because you just don't have a bunch left in your diet for that.

• 1:07:01Chris Williamson?

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• 1:07:47Chris Williamson?

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• 1:08:06Chris Williamson?

  So is the primary concern or the biggest risk that you're worried about from carnivore, low dietary fiber?

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  That's one. And then a lot of them are choosing very fatty cuts of meat that are high in saturated fat. And there is a big debate amongst diet tribes about the whether saturated fat is bad for you because it raises LDL cholesterol. And there's a debate around LDL cholesterol. And I will give you the devil's advocate argument for that. And then I will give you what the research says. So in 2005, when I was in grad school, I was in the camp of LDL doesn't really matter. It's more about the ratio of HDL to LDL, the good cholesterol and bad cholesterol.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  And if you look at the research studies, there was a lot of kind of disagreement in the research literature. And a lot of the randomized control trials didn't really show an effect of lowering saturated fat on the risk of heart disease. But here's the problem with randomized control trials is they're very short. Heart disease is not something that develops in two years. It develops in 40 years. Heart disease is not the difference between you dying at age 40 and age 80. It's the difference between you dying at age 80 and age 72. And so a lot of these randomized control trials, they're using, I mean, the Minnesota coronary experiment is one that gets cited by carnivore people

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  a lot. Paul Soldino cites a lot. And it was a in the big, the strengths of it were it was inpatient, they were psychiatric patients, and they either fed them high polyunsaturated fats or high saturated fat diets, and looked at the differences in heart attack rates or heart disease. Now, what they don't tell you about that experiment is those people were not housed consecutively. The average duration of each of the subjects in that study, which was two years, and they were like, I think the average age was like mid 40s. It's not super common for people in their 40s to get heart attacks, even those who are inclined to get it. And they were in and out of these psychiatric wards. They

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  weren't consecutively there. And the polyunsaturated fat group included trans fats, which at the time now are largely out of the food supply, but back then were a big part of the food supply. So it's not really an experiment that carries a lot of weight. And again, it's only two years. It's hard to see differences. If you and I invest in a mutual fund. So with LDL cholesterol, you're looking at a lifetime exposure risk. Really, how much are courses through your arteries over the course of your life?

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  I like to compare it to investing. If you and I invest in, if you invest in a mutual fund that gets 8% and I invest in one that gets 9%, if we look out in two years, I mean, I'll have a little bit more money, but practically you'll go, it's no difference. But if we look out in 40 years, I'm gonna have a lot more money than you, right? And so, heart disease is kind of the same. It takes time to really see these differences. And people on Carnival will all say, well, I feel great. You can feel great right up until you have a heart attack. Like, heart disease is not something you feel. Now, so looking at LDL cholesterol, what really changed my mind on it, because again, I was in that camp,

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  was what were called the Mendelian randomization trials that started coming out around 2008, 2009. Now Mendelian randomization is where they look at your, your body, people's bodies naturally have like polymorphisms on genes. So you'll have people who secrete naturally more or less LDL. But these polymorphisms don't affect other areas of metabolism. So what you have essentially is a great lifelong randomized control trial of people exposed to more LDL cholesterol versus people exposed to less LDL cholesterol. And when you look at that, the exposure to lifetime LDL cholesterol, you can basically draw a straight line through it

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  between that and the incidence of heart disease. And if we look at a mechanistic level, LDL cholesterol, they have shown mechanistically penetrates the endothelium. It's actually not the LDL necessarily. It's the fact that it contains a protein called apolipoprotein B, which apolipoprotein D is what actually damages the endothelium and allows it to penetrate and then deposit the cholesterol there. Now, some people have said, well, it's not LDL. You don't have to worry about the large LDL. You gotta worry about the small oxidized LDL. I don't know if you've ever heard this, this argument. It's a very popular argument. And so, what is true is that small oxidized LDL can more easily penetrate the endothelium.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  But it deposits less total cholesterol. Large LDL does not penetrate it as easily, but it still penetrates it.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  But it deposits more LDL, or sorry, deposits more cholesterol per LDL particle. The net effect is both are equally atherogenic. And so if it's funny, I tell people when something aligns with our personal beliefs, our level of skepticism is basically nothing. When something opposes our personal beliefs, it's like this, right? Are we just are so skeptical? And so I tell carnivores all the time, if red meat had the the data that fiber has behind it to support it being a health food,

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  you all would lose your freaking minds anytime anyone even suggested that it might be bad for you. But because it doesn't align with your personal belief system, you won't hear a bar of it.

• 1:13:51Chris Williamson?

  What do you make of the meat and fruit trajectory? That seems to be Paul Saladino's new thing that he's landed on. Meat and fruit and honey is another thing that I'm seeing and hearing a lot more. What do you make of this?

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  I mean, listen, like I think fruits and vegetables are great.

• 1:14:11Chris Williamson?

  It's meat and fruit, not fruit and vegetables.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, because vegetables have toxins in them. By the way, you can find toxins in fruit, too. This is like the influencer diet fear template to find an isolated chemical in a food and scare people with it. Um, I mean, I think it's, I think it's better than just meat by itself. But I think what's interesting is when he, um, when he said he went to fruit, he said he felt better because of an electrolyte perspective. You felt better because you're eating carbohydrate now, Paul, and you have some muscle glycogen and liver glycogen and, and you're feeling better doing exercise. There's not a ton of electrolytes in fruit or honey.

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  Yes, the sodium transporter in the gut is co-transport with glucose. So yes, maybe you get a little bit more sodium transport, but like you're getting plenty of sodium, like that's not a, you're not feeling better from electrolyte perspective. So I did think it was, I applaud him for changing his view. I also find it kind of.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  After you've told people repeatedly for years that this is the optimal diet for human health while you were feeling bad. Um, so I, I struggle with giving credit for that. Um, I, you know, I've interacted with Paul quite a bit. I'm sure he's a perfectly nice guy and I think he probably is, is trying to help. I think the way he goes about it is relatively unhelpful. Um, but yeah, I think if you go from eating just meat to actually including some carbohydrate, I'm, I'm sure you'll feel better. But I just find this entire trope around toxins in food to be ridiculous.

• 1:15:58Chris Williamson?

  What is, someone's listening and says, oh, I quite like eating meat. It's something that seems to work for me. I'm bodybuilder. I struggle to hit my protein, whatever. Uh, dietary fiber sounds useful and, and, and important. What are the easiest, best sources of dietary fiber that people can add into their diet right now?

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  I mean, I mean, the data on fruits and vegetables is, is great.

• 1:16:23Chris Williamson?

  Are there some fruits and vegetables that are better?

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you know, I don't like saying better or best or things like that. But I would say like berries are much more fiber dense than say like bananas. Um, they tend to be also like lower carbohydrate berries are. Um, apple's a pretty good source, especially if you're, you know, eating the skin. Uh, that contains a lot of the, uh, I believe pectin. Um, vegetables, of course, uh, cruciferous vegetables are very fiber dense. Uh, so like broccoli, cauliflower, those sorts of things. Um, but I mean, honestly, I think the average American gets 13 grams of fiber intake per day. And I mean, if you look at the, the drop off in mortality from going from like 10 grams of fiber a day till

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  like 20 or 30 grams of fiber a day, you'd be getting your fiber up. I mean, there are some kind of sources that you wouldn't necessarily think about that are good sources of fiber. I mean, this is going to get me in trouble because people are going to say I'm just a food shill for the diet industry. Um, but, uh, I mean, whole grains, uh, they're good sources of fiber. And if you look at the data on whole grains, mortality, cardiovascular disease, um, cancer, again, you won't find any studies showing that they're negative for those things. Now,

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  People will say, well, you say people got eat Lucky Charms. No, I, I'm, you know, I'm saying like oatmeal, you know, some cereals that are like more intact sources of fiber.

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  But again, I, I'm, I'm somebody who's like, let's not let the enemy of good or better be perfection. Right. And there's so much like diet evangelism out there. Hey, if somebody eats a cereal that's fortified with fiber or some bread that's fortified with fiber. Uh, maybe not the best possible thing they could do. I'd rather them get, you know, fruits and vegetables. But if that's what they can do, then that's what they can do.

• 1:18:26Chris Williamson?

  What about beans?

• 1:18:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, legumes, great source of fiber as well. They come with some protein as well. Um, yeah, all those are great sources of fiber. I mean, one that I use that is kind of non-traditional is air pop popcorn. I love popcorn and it's actually very, very high in fiber.

• 1:18:42Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Like, um, you get a, uh, I don't want to say a cup, but like a, a serving which might have like 50 grams of carbohydrate. We'll have anywhere depending on the, the particular brand and source, like six to 10 grams of fiber in it. Uh, and it's nice in that it takes a while to eat, you know, like,

• 1:19:00Chris Williamson?

  Super high volume for low weight.

• 1:19:02Speaker 01

  You could have, you know, you could have,

• 1:19:03Chris Williamson?

  50 grams of carbs from popcorn must be a fuck ton of popcorn.

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  That's a big old bowl, right? Whereas like 50 grams of carbs from a sweet potato. I mean, you can eat that in three minutes.

• 1:19:12Chris Williamson?

  From Haribo, you can eat that in a minute.

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:15Chris Williamson?

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• 1:20:00Chris Williamson?

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• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  So, I mean, again, like I'm all for like those non traditional sources, but I would say like there's probably something to mother nature's kitchen of.

• 1:20:29Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about some of the sleeper foods that you think, you know, you like eating this. Most people listening are probably going to eat some blend of we go out for dinner or I get a combination of carbs, fats and proteins in one form or another. What are some of the things where you go? If you were able to switch this out for that on a typical sort of meal plate for someone that's remotely healthy, relatively healthy, trying to watch their diet. Here are a couple of little adjustments that you can make that I think have got a lot of bang for their buck. What are some of the top foods?

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I like, I like where this is going. The first thing is, you know, if you can ask the waiter to just use less oil when they cook, like that is one of the biggest sources of added calories. I mean, I was out at a restaurant last night that lists their calories on there. I'm like.

• 1:21:18Chris Williamson?

  Was it Cheesecake Factory?

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  No, no, but it was.

• 1:21:20Chris Williamson?

  God damn it, Lane.

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  Uh, Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks.

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  Don't go to Cheesecake Factory. Women don't like if you're taking on dates there, apparently. Have you seen that whole thing?

• 1:21:29Chris Williamson?

  Incorrect.

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  Oh, well, well, uh, there's like a whole like Tik Tok thing going around of like a woman saying it's a red flag.

• 1:21:36Chris Williamson?

  No, it's a red flag if a woman doesn't want to go to.

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  I agree with you.

• 1:21:39Chris Williamson?

  God damn it.

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  So, but like.

• 1:21:43Chris Williamson?

  Less oil.

• 1:21:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm looking at the, the menu and it's like 1,200 calories for a salad. And then you look down, well, it's got bacon, cheese, nuts. It's got oil in it and then it's got the dressing, right? So, okay.

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  Maybe say, hey, could you do a half portion of cheese? Or could you do a half portion of nuts? Could you leave off the bacon? Could you put the dressing on the side? Cause a lot of times you don't like, it gets doused in dressing, right? Like you just do a little bit.

• 1:22:13Chris Williamson?

  America.

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  I, yeah. I mean, I do that for almost anything. Like I have a burger that has like, um, I love, uh, like garlic aioli. Love that. But I always ask for it on the side, right? Cause I just need a little smear to get the taste. I don't need to be drenched in it.

• 1:22:26Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So looking at stuff like oils, dressings, reducing that. What else? What are some of the other things?

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  And then like, when you're picking your cuts of meat, you know, if you want to get a steak, I mean, things like filet, sirloin, tenderloin. Those are going to be much leaner than say your rib eye, your T-bone, uh, your strip steak, those sorts of things. Uh, and then when you're like white fish is going to be a very lean, typically if it's grilled. Chicken typically very lean unless it's fried. And again, just asking like, hey, could you use a little bit less oil?

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  And when it comes to like carbohydrate sources, this is one of the, the ones where it's. If you put rice on a plate, the, the, the view of 50 grams of carbs from rice versus a hundred grams of carbs. It's very tough to tell the difference, right? So what I tell people is. This is where eating in food order can help you. So eat your, eat your proteins and vegetables first. Leave your starches for the last so that you're a little bit more full. So then you, then you can rely a little bit more on your satiety signals, right? And when it comes to vegetables, you can ask for them steamed instead of having them cooked in oil or fried or whatever it may be.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  So you can do some simple switches and usually most restaurants, at least in America, if you go to Australia or Europe and you might not be as accommodating, but in America, they're usually pretty accommodating.

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  And so you can make those small switches and it will make a big difference. And even just like, I think being a little bit mindful, like if you're somebody who's trying to lose weight. Like if you know you're going somewhere for dinner, do a little bit of recon, look at the menu beforehand. If you're curious about like, okay, what is a fattier kind of meat? Look up those different cuts of meat and see what the, what the macros look like on it. You know, look at, okay, well, what do I think might be something I want to try here? And if you're, you know, I think a good heuristic is if you want to have an alcoholic beverage, don't have dessert. You know?

• 1:24:33Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you get to pick one of the two.

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you want, or if you want to have dessert, don't have alcohol or. The other thing I tell people is if you could just stay engaged with your own satiety signals. Are you eating because you're still hungry or are you eating because you feel like you need to finish it? Because I can promise you the, you're not paying for the food when you go out to eat. You're paying for the experience because if you were just paying for the food. I mean, you can go down to McDonald's and get some stuff that tastes great for five bucks. You know what I mean? You're paying for an experience, so value the experience. And if you're full, don't feel the need to finish everything. Like be in tune with your own satiety signals.

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  I think that is something that's really lost on a lot of people is just asking themselves. Am I eating this because I feel like I should finish it? Because I paid for it? Or am I eating this because I'm actually hungry?

• 1:25:30Chris Williamson?

  I think that's very important, and this is one of the things that. I like the evidence-based movement. I like Menno, you, Dr. Mike, you know, it's, it's a cool movement.

• 1:25:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're okay.

• 1:25:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, they're, they're all right. But one of the things that I think is really important, especially when we're talking about diet, diet mechanisms, conversations online, is how to get things tactically down.

• 1:25:54Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 1:25:54Chris Williamson?

  Like that, you know, you can throw studies at me all day about legumes and dietary fiber and fucking LDL cholesterol. But hey, okay, cool, Mr. Science Man. What do I do when I go to Cheesecake Factory? What do I do when I go to Dean's Italian downtown in Austin? Like, just tell me what, like, what's a good way to take all of this research into something that's applicable? And I like that presumably just being like, we don't need the bread this evening. We'll just start with the meal is a good idea because that bread, that bread, I don't know where it goes. Doesn't go to my stomach because it takes up no room. It just, it's like a Harry Potter's fucking closet and it just disappears out the, out somewhere.

• 1:26:34Speaker 01

  Well, another thing is like, show up not super hungry. You know, like make sure you've had some filling foods throughout the day.

• 1:26:39Chris Williamson?

  This is a good one. So um when you go shopping, if it if you go shopping in a supermarket as opposed to ordering it online, and you're absolutely starving hungry when you go, at the front of pretty much every supermarket, there will be, you know, sort of a to-go fridge sandwiches and other bits and pieces. Grab yourself a, you know, four dollar sandwich that's got a good set of macros on it and seems to be relatively well balanced. Eat that before you go shopping. Your shopping bill is now just being chopped in half. That's the best four dollar investment that you can do because you're not, you're hungry and you're walking around, of course, I want that. I want this and I'll have that. Ooh, I'll get that. You're, oh, I I just doubled all of the bullshit that I have in my cupboards and I didn't really need to.

• 1:27:25Speaker 01

  I I I'm a big fan of ordering online now just because I have like, I just go back and I just reorder the same things every week.

• 1:27:32Chris Williamson?

  Dude, it's so good. It's so, it's so good. All right. So going to the other side of the fence, we've spoken about carnivore. Is it possible to build muscle on a vegan diet?

• 1:27:41Speaker 01

  Great question. The answer is yes. Yes, you can build muscle on a vegan diet. It's, if your goal, so I always have to like, unframe it out of like my mind frame, which is I want to be the most muscular, strongest human being I possibly can. And remember that not everybody is like that. In fact, most people aren't like that. They just want to build some muscle and look a little bit better and feel stronger. Sure, you can absolutely build muscle on a vegan diet. Now, will it take a little bit more uh wherewithal? Probably. Is it the absolute best diet for muscle building? Um, it can be, but you have to be more targeted with it in terms of making sure you're getting enough total protein

• 1:28:23Speaker 01

  and probably try to pump your protein quality up a little bit. For most people who are, like if they're vegans and they're bodybuilders, I'll say you're probably going to want to use some kind of isolated source of protein. Uh, it could be vegan protein, but you're going to want to probably use an isolated source of protein. And the reason being that not only is vegan sources of protein typically lower in amino acids that are anabolic promoting like leucine, which is the amino acid that's been shown to increase muscle protein synthesis. They also in intact sources of plant protein.

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  It's not as bioavailable as an isolated source of protein, like a, like a protein powder, for example, because some of the protein is bound up in the fibrous material of the plant. Now, cooking can make it more bioavailable, but typically not nearly as much as like an animal protein or an isolated source of protein. But I mean, really, the big thing is if you're getting enough total protein, you know, say two grams per kilogram of body weight, I mean, the research says that you're going to build as much muscle. So you can, um, the, the, what I would say is it's just maybe a little bit more difficult, especially on like a calorie deficit, because the, if you're, especially if you're trying to do all intact

• 1:29:40Speaker 01

  sources of protein, like whole food sources of protein, because now you're getting the calories from protein along with calories from carbohydrates.

• 1:29:47Chris Williamson?

  Yes, because they come along for the ride. You can't isolate them as effectively as a steak or a set of eggs.

• 1:29:51Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 1:29:52Chris Williamson?

  What are your main concerns about somebody that's on a vegan diet?

• 1:29:57Speaker 01

  Uh, I think the main concern is I have about pretty much any diet is if you, if you do vegan the right way, it can be very healthy. Just like if you do keto the right way, it can be very healthy, where you're using mostly unprocessed sources of food. But when you become a diet evangelist, it can become very unhealthy because you tie the identity to the vegan portion of that. And so I remember watching The Game Changers, and they're talking about all the health promoting effects of the vegan diet. And then they're showing a scene where they're like having them eat vegan chicken wings and vegan mac and cheese. And I'm like, you're missing the point here. Uh, by the way, you can't like, why are you trying to have it both ways here? It's either health promoting or, now, I'm not

• 1:30:39Speaker 01

  saying you can never have fun foods like that or anything like that, of course, like, nobody should be worried about being 100% all the time, but.

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  Just like without any nuance to that.

• 1:30:54Chris Williamson?

  Well, if the ideology is based around whole foods from nature, natural, et cetera, et cetera, and then you try to recreate your version of the very food that you're trying to run away from or disparage.

• 1:31:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:31:10Chris Williamson?

  That seems to sort of turn the bar stool upside down.

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  Well, and keto does the same thing. Like I said, we've seen where like the ketogenic diet is not superior for fat loss if you're equating calories and protein. We have really tightly specific studies looking at that, like metabolic ward trials looking at that.

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  Now there's keto ice creams that have more calories than regular ice creams. And it's like, you're missing the point here. Like, the whole point is if you do keto, where you're eating like a lot of filling satiating foods, you're going to eat less calories and you'll you'll lose body fat. Do you really think a keto ice cream is going to help you facilitate that? Like, no. I mean, if you want a treat, but just get the regular ice cream if you want a treat, you know?

• 1:31:51Chris Williamson?

  It seems to me with the with the vegan diet that it is practically a little bit more complex to eat it well than most other diets. I have a bunch of friends who have gone vegan for a variety of reasons and were, you know, evangelists for that, but said in retrospect, after stopping, look, I'm sure that a well-balanced vegan diet can give you everything that you need, but the level of hurdles that I needed to overcome in order to be able to hit the macronutrients that I wanted to get to, it was so restrictive that I really found that quite hard. I'm not sure if the same would be said for other diets.

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think like Richard and I actually had this kind of like discussion where he was kind of like, well, couldn't you make the argument for getting the dietary fiber on say an omnivore diet? Because if you're eating more meat, maybe you're eating less fiber by default. I think any diet needs to have some mindfulness behind it. I think the thing with veganism is if you are being really strict with it.

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  There are things that might show up that are just more apparent, which like, so for example, I'm on the board diet, maybe you're not eating as much fiber, but you're not going to feel that difference really quickly. If you're not getting enough vitamin B12 or iron, you're going to feel that pretty quick. You know, well, in a few months, right? Cause you're going to have way less energy. You're not going to feel great. But again, I think one of the tropes that I've really tried to get away from with people is like, hey, you can supplement. It's okay. You know, like, just like round it out. Like if you're worried, you know, and it's like, um, it's funny because I had a carnivore kind of argue like, well, you couldn't eat just this food and get everything you get from steak. I'm like,

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  why do I need to pick one food or one food group to just eat that to justify a diet? That seems like a false dichotomy to me, right? And that's what you find with a lot of these diet tribes is they have to like force these really like black and white scenarios to make their argument work. And, you know, one of the things in science is like, uh, it's not really Occam's razor, but you know, Occam's razor is basically like all things being equal, the hypothesis that requires the least amount of assumptions is usually true, which layman translated is the simplest answer is usually true.

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

  Also, the hypothesis that requires the most stringent protocols to prove it to be true is the flimsiest hypothesis and usually not.

• 1:34:23Chris Williamson?

  Because you're making arbitrary rules that fit your particular priors, right?

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  Okay. Bingo.

• 1:34:28Chris Williamson?

  What about soy? Does soy make you soy? Should we be worried? Yeah. Should we, should we be worried about soy?

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  So there was actually like, I think two meta-analyses done now in men looking at testosterone, showing that at least with a few servings of soy per day, no effect on testosterone or estrogen. So at least in men, it doesn't appear to do much now. And I, I don't want to get this wrong. Uh, my scientific friends, if I butcher it, please feel free to comment on this. Um, in, I believe pre-menopausal women, it has been shown to have an effect on some sex hormones.

• 1:35:09Speaker 01

  But I don't know if it's a good, bad or neutral.

• 1:35:11Chris Williamson?

  So it's soy girl that we actually need to be worried about, not soy boy.

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  Apparently, but in men, doesn't seem to have an effect, at least in the, you know, two to three servings per day range.

• 1:35:22Chris Williamson?

  You've mentioned it a couple of times today. I hear this word thrown around on the internet all the time. What the fuck's bioavailability?

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  So basically, if you ingest

• 1:35:36Speaker 01

  a certain amount of a certain food, how much of that, of the nutrients from that wind up in circulation, which nutrient are you talking about?

• 1:35:42Chris Williamson?

  All right. Is it as big of a deal as everyone makes out?

• 1:35:44Speaker 01

  So like, let's take protein, for example, right? So if I'm looking at protein bioavailability, and I take in 25 grams of, say, a protein source, how much of that 25 grams actually hits circulation? How much gets absorbed through the intestinal lumen? That's really what we're talking about when it comes to bioavailability. And so it does matter. I mean, again, like, we're looking at, like, if you look at certain plant sources of protein, they could be 50, 60, 70% bioavailable, the intact plant form. Like I said, cooking may make, take that up a little bit more. Whereas if you're looking at animal sources of protein, they're usually like 90% and up.

• 1:36:23Chris Williamson?

  Eggs, steak.

• 1:36:24Speaker 01

  Eggs are very absorbable when they're cooked.

• 1:36:28Speaker 01

  Whey protein, very bioavailable. I believe it's almost 100%.

• 1:36:34Chris Williamson?

  Have you looked at BLG protein? Beta-lactoglobulin, this stuff's so cool, dude. So soccer players in Europe are using this at the moment. It allows you to get 20 grams of protein in 100 mill shot. So it's

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  Must be very soluble.

• 1:36:54Chris Williamson?

  Ultra, ultra concentrated. And the reason that they're giving it to athletes that are doing, like, I guess, power endurance or like intermittent cardio work. Precisely. You are training for four hours a day, but you don't want to have to sink 400 mill of liquid to get your protein in. You can put 200 mill and get twice as much protein as you would have done. Really interesting. I think it's like, it's just an area that I'm kind of keeping an eye on a little bit. That beta-lactoglobulin stuff seems to be really interesting. So, related to bioavailability, another sort of hot buzzword that's being thrown around at the moment is the gut microbiome. How much should people be focused on it? Is it really the beginning and end of all disease?

• 1:37:38Chris Williamson?

  The gut-brain axis? Is it causing all of our autoimmune disorder? Like, what do you make of the sort of current furor around the microbiome?

• 1:37:47Speaker 01

  I think the microbiome is super interesting. We have more bacterial cells in our body than we do eukaryotic cells. But if you talk to microbiome experts and the, there was a gal in the lab where I did my PhD, who was doing her masters at the time, who's now a PhD in her specialties microbiome. She's considered one of the foremost experts on it. Her name is Suzanne Devcota. When you actually talk to gut microbiome experts, they're basically like, yeah, we got a lot of data. We don't really have a good idea of what it all means. And so basically, when you talk to them and you read the scientific research, we seem to know a few things. The first is that fiber is good for the gut microbiome.

• 1:38:32Speaker 01

  It's the main fuel for what we think the beneficial species of bacteria are. And diverse array of fibers and a diverse diet seem to be beneficial for the gut microbiome. Eating too many calories appears to be not beneficial for the gut microbiome. Now, we don't know, again, this is where is it the cart or the horse? What I think is likely, and again, I am tenuously speculating. But when you have excess adiposity and metabolic dysfunction, you know, large adipocytes secrete more adipokines, which are inflammatory cytokines secreted by the adipose tissue. They seem to screw up a lot of stuff.

• 1:39:16Speaker 01

  Perhaps that's having an effect on the gut microbiome.

• 1:39:18Chris Williamson?

  Just being fat does lots of things downstream that you don't want to do to your body.

• 1:39:22Speaker 01

  But also the diet that

• 1:39:25Speaker 01

  Makes you become obese is probably not a high quality diet. And so that may negatively impact the gut microbiome.

• 1:39:30Chris Williamson?

  How much is overeating contributing to that quicker gut motility? That you're sort of running things through the gut very quickly.

• 1:39:39Speaker 01

  I actually don't know the answer to that.

• 1:39:41Chris Williamson?

  So this is one of the things I have a friend who's on Tazepatide, which is the second gen of the GLP ones.

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:48Chris Williamson?

  Uh, and he always struggled with SIBO, with gut microbiome things. And his current working theory is that because he's basically eating less and moving food through his system less quickly, that it's giving his gut more time.

• 1:40:07Speaker 01

  Possible, hard to know. That's, um, like I said, I, I always tell people, if you want to know who like really actually knows what they're talking about, know somebody who's willing to say they don't know when it comes to something.

• 1:40:19Chris Williamson?

  What else? Microbiome? What else haven't we covered?

• 1:40:20Speaker 01

  So diverse array of fibers, uh, exercise apparently appears to be very good for the gut microbiome. So they think it has something to do with the lactate production from exercise, that that appears to have a beneficial effect on the gut microbiome. And then, uh, maybe saturated fat may have a negative effect on the gut microbiome. Not necessarily because of the saturated fat itself, but because of the end bile products that are from saturated fat, uh, consumption. Those appear to possibly be toxic to some, sorry, toxic

• 1:40:53Speaker 01

  to some species of beneficial bacteria in the gut microbiome. But that's kind of what we know. And people have run, I mean, it is so, when I see gut microbiome in someone's Instagram bio, usually my first thought is this person's full of shit.

• 1:41:11Chris Williamson?

  Vaginal health expert.

• 1:41:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:14Chris Williamson?

  Often one that that, and there was someone who I met a couple of months ago in Austin, who uses, uh, like astral tapping into the fifth dimension to inform her crypto investments. Uh, that was, that was a particularly interesting day.

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  Well, this is what people struggle, like going kind of meta real quick. This is one of the things people really struggle with online is.

• 1:41:40Speaker 01

  There's so many experts that have credentials. And I'll tell people, I'm like, usually if you go and like, okay, this person's made comments about diet. They're a chiropractor, naturopath, they're, um, you know, psychiatrist, whatever. Like, expertise does not translate across disciplines.

• 1:41:56Chris Williamson?

  I don't want to listen to your idea about how to fix the Ukraine or the border.

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, like, like, somebody was like, are you going to comment on Israel and Palestine? I'm like, absolutely not.

• 1:42:06Chris Williamson?

  Why? What are they eating?

• 1:42:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, no, this is not my.

• 1:42:09Chris Williamson?

  Are they deficient in a particular nutrient?

• 1:42:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is not my area of expertise. I know that they don't like each other and have not liked each other for a long time. That's about the extent of what I know about it. Um, you know, the, the, I think war is bad. I'll say that, you know?

• 1:42:24Chris Williamson?

  Spicy, spicy.

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  But, but all you need to do is go to. This is another question I've asked myself a lot. Why do really smart people believe really dumb shit sometimes? Because people have come to me and said, well, Lane, this person does this and look like, or Elon Musk does this. Or like, people who are intelligent, very intelligent people. Look up Google Nobel Prize Syndrome and you will find a laundry list of unequivocally some of the smartest people in the history of mankind who changed, like, one of the people who discovered DNA.

• 1:43:07Speaker 01

  And a laundry list of these people believed in things like astrology and eugenics, healing crystals.

• 1:43:15Chris Williamson?

  Know what Newton did for like the last three decades of his life?

• 1:43:19Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:43:19Chris Williamson?

  Alchemy. He was adamant that alchemy was.

• 1:43:23Speaker 01

  And we're talking about the guy who invented calculus on a dare before age 26. Like invented a whole field of mathematics because somebody was like, no, you can't prove that. And he was like, watch this bitch. Like, yeah, so some of the smartest people.

• 1:43:37Chris Williamson?

  Expertise.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  Expertise does not translate across disciplines.

• 1:43:41Chris Williamson?

  Speaking of expertise, what's your thoughts on Gary Brecker?

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  Um, I'm sure he's a perfectly nice person. Um, his claims are pretty wild.

• 1:43:55Chris Williamson?

  Which ones do you disagree with mostly?

• 1:43:56Speaker 01

  Well, I've seen him say a video of like 82% of the amino acids from whey protein are converted to carbohydrate or fat. I don't know where he got that number. I don't know where it comes from and there is nothing to back that up. It would not be, I mean, that, that you can't even make that claim without understanding somebody's diet on a holistic level because 82% in what context? Like if I give them 100 grams of whey protein, 82% is going to get converted to carbohydrate or fat? Like, how are you measuring that? Like what isotopic labeling study are you doing to support this? Cause you would need that. And over what period of time? Because that label would be recycled as amino acids are broken down and recycled between

• 1:44:41Speaker 01

  various processes in the body. So like what he's saying, it would be almost impossible to even measure that. I'm not saying it's impossible, but you would be measuring in a very specific framework of this much protein in this period of time, looking at these tissues using these isotopic labels.

• 1:45:00Chris Williamson?

  He did manage to get Dana White to lose a lot of weight though, right?

• 1:45:03Speaker 01

  Well, and I think so Dana actually commented on one of my posts and got really mad. And I, I actually like Dana, like I've watched the UFC for a long time. I think he's a smart guy.

• 1:45:13Speaker 01

  I think Dana's interpretation of what I said was that I was saying his results weren't real. That's not what I'm saying. Dana White obviously did a great job, changed his lifestyle, but he, he got healthier because he lost 30, 40 pounds. He adjusted his lifestyle, he exercised consistently, probably stopped drinking if he was drinking before. I don't, I don't know about his habits there, but like, he should be getting the credit for that, not from like. Grounding with electric rugs and red light therapy, which there may be some benefits to red light therapy.

• 1:45:53Chris Williamson?

  I didn't look at the proposed or the protocol that magicians Dana White's weight loss, what was it?

• 1:46:00Speaker 01

  Um, I, I, I'm not super familiar with the complete protocol, but I mean, I know there was like infrared light and cold plunging. And again, I think one of the, like he's, some of the cold plunge claims have been pretty extreme. Like he said, there's nothing on the surface of the earth that will burn fat faster than cold water.

• 1:46:18Chris Williamson?

  This is Gary.

• 1:46:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's simply not true. It's just demonstrably not true. Like if we look at the studies where people do cold water, they, the, the, most of them show no effect on energy expenditure. None of them show an effect on fat loss that I've seen. And the absolute best that you see is like an increase of like a hundred calories in energy expenditure in a day for like an hour or two of exposure in pretty cold water. Like, okay. Okay. And people will say, well, well, see, okay, but that's not, that's not the fastest way to burn fat. Okay. Fastest way to burn fat is to get the gym or eat less.

• 1:47:04Speaker 01

  And the other thing is actually one thing that exercise in cold water. So I know he's talking about cold plunging, but he talked about Michael Phelps and eating so many calories. First off, I don't believe that Michael Phelps was eating 10,000 calories a day. No disrespect to Michael, but he's in the pool for like eight hours. When would he have this time to eat 10,000 calories? 10,000 calories for nobody who's never done it? That is a unbelievable amount of food.

• 1:47:26Chris Williamson?

  Have you ever tried to do a 10,000 calorie challenge?

• 1:47:28Speaker 01

  No, I've gotten to like 6,000 calories in a day and that like, it was insane. I, I was insane. And, but one thing that exercise in cold water will reliably do in studies is significantly increase appetite. So there's actually quite a few studies to show that it raises appetite. So it may not be a great fat loss tool. Actually, now again, people will say, well, I like cold plunging.

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  By all means, do it. I mean, there do seem to be some benefits for inflammatory markers and some people say they feel more better, more cognitive. Cool, but like, why do, why can't we just say, I like doing this thing? Instead of like, creating this whole narrative around it. And what you're also doing is people will view this and it makes fitness feel really inaccessible to them. Because like, well, I don't have a cold plunge. I don't have a cold plunge. I don't have red light therapy. No, no, no, just like, adjust your dietary habits and lifestyle. Cause that's what caused Dana to get healthy. Like, and again, full credit to Dana. He should get full credit.

• 1:48:32Chris Williamson?

  He looks, he looks fucking.

• 1:48:34Speaker 01

  He looks great.

• 1:48:34Chris Williamson?

  Awesome.

• 1:48:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, he looks great.

• 1:48:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:36Speaker 01

  And as somebody who probably has a very, very demanding hectic lifestyle, that's not an easy thing to achieve. So my thing is, no, he deserves more of the credit than this other stuff.

• 1:48:46Chris Williamson?

  The, the magic from that.

• 1:48:47Speaker 01

  And then some of the other things he said was like, um, you know, um, you only store, you only have 20 minutes of glycogen and then you're out of energy. And, uh, you're, you're, what happens when you have no, I think he said, what happens when you have no blood glucose in your, in your, no glucose in your bloodstream? And I did a video response. I'm like, you're dead when you have no glucose in your bloodstream. I'm, I, I think he means probably like a baseline level of glucose, but still, um, there's just some things that are said that I'm like, there's no real great understanding of some of these, um, some of this biochemistry here.

• 1:49:26Chris Williamson?

  Would you debate him?

• 1:49:28Speaker 01

  For sure, for sure. I, I think like, um, the, like, another thing he said is you start to, you start to liquefy lean muscle in three minutes. So, uh,

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  I think based on nitrogen balance studies as well as actual like studies looking at loss, progressive loss of lean mass from de-training and things like that. Uh, at best, you start to see like a loss of nitrogen from the body in a day or two. Uh, but that's not necessarily like showing lean mass loss. You really need like, Days and weeks to start seeing loss of lean mass? So the idea that we're just like, you know, 20 minutes, you're through all your glycogen and now your body's just chomping away at your muscle. That's not super accurate.

• 1:50:16Chris Williamson?

  Similar to that, how big of a deal is insulin? More people, continuous glucose monitors, you know, it doesn't matter if you're a mom of three, you've got to wear out the thing and check and all the rest of it. How much of a vector for health is insulin?

• 1:50:34Speaker 01

  Baseline levels of insulin and measures of insulin sensitivity like HOMA IR and HBA1C. HBA1C is probably the, for like long-term, looking at long-term metabolic health and blood glucose regulation, HBA1C is probably one of the best metrics. And the reason is HBA1C is glycosylated hemoglobin. So certain positions of hemoglobin can be glycosylated. So a glucose molecule can get added to it. And so I think it's something like, you know, the actual percentage is like six, less than 6% is what you want and probably closer to like five. But what's nice about that is red blood cells take about 90 to 120 days to turn over.

• 1:51:19Speaker 01

  I think that's it. It's several months. And so you're, you can see like short-term changes in basal levels of blood glucose or like blood glucose responses to things. But HBA1C is going to actually give you a really good idea of what like your long-term exposure to glucose is and how sensitive you are to insulin. Because it doesn't turn over very quickly and because it's sensitive to how much concentration is in the bloodstream over time.

• 1:51:51Speaker 01

  So insulin in response to normal feeding is not something we need to be worried about, in my opinion.

• 1:52:03Speaker 01

  Long-term basal elevations in insulin are what we should be worried about.

• 1:52:09Chris Williamson?

  What would that be due to typically?

• 1:52:11Speaker 01

  Usually from insulin insensitivity that's usually caused by excess body fat and obesity.

• 1:52:20Speaker 01

  Now, people will say, well, glucose is toxic in the bloodstream and you've got to clear it out and whatnot. The problem with looking at these short-term glucose responses and trying to equate them to long-term health is if we're going to play that game, I can make a compelling argument that you shouldn't eat fat or protein. Because you don't want to eat fat because fat impedes flow-mediated dilation, which is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. So a high-fat meal will impede flow-mediated dilation. You can go look up these studies. Don't eat protein because protein stimulates mTOR and mTOR is elevated in many cancers. So what are we supposed to do? Eat ice cubes and photosynthesize?

• 1:52:56Chris Williamson?

  So you're looking at the difference between state and trait?

• 1:53:01Speaker 01

  So this is something that a lot of scientists don't even distinguish between. There is a massive difference between acute truncated, short-term, normal responses versus long-term dysregulation. Let's just take an example of exercise. If I told you, if you didn't know about exercise, let's say exercise didn't exist. You have all the other, you have all the other knowledge that you have about the body, but you don't know anything about exercise. And I said, Chris, I'm going to make you do something that is going to raise your heart rate, raise your blood pressure, raise your inflammatory markers, raise your reactive oxygen species, and raise your cortisol. What would you tell me?

• 1:53:46Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:53:47Speaker 01

  Exactly. Exercise does all those things in the short term. What happens in the long term? The opposite actually happens. So that means we can't use short-term measures to predict long-term outcomes. We have to look at long-term outcomes and see what the difference is. So when we look at insulin, okay? I'm thinking of a few different studies here. First of all, let's just take fat loss, right? Some people will say the low carb trope is, well, you can't lose body fat if insulin's high. Um, this is usually the, the, they've like read one page out of a biochemistry book and closed it and said, nope, got, got all I need, which is insulin inhibits lipolysis and decreases

• 1:54:32Speaker 01

  fat oxidation. So lipolysis is the process of liberating stored body fat from adipose so that it can be available for fat oxidation. Insulin inhibits both those processes because when carbohydrate is high, you have to burn carbohydrate. This is part of the Randall cycle and that's, you're going to be preferably oxidizing carbohydrate and not dietary fat. When insulin is low, you're going to be not oxidizing a lot of dietary carbohydrate because it's not available, you'd be oxidizing a lot of dietary fat. So shouldn't that mean that low carb diets cause more fat loss? And I just talked about how they didn't. Well, how's that possible? Because you're only looking at one side of the equation.

• 1:55:13Speaker 01

  So much like protein metabolism, the net gain or loss of prot- of, of lean mass is the balance between protein synthesis and degradation. So you have to have synthesis running at a greater rate, relative rate than degradation to accumulate lean mass. Body fat loss or gain is the balance between the amount of fat you store versus the amount of fat you burn. So let's look at these different diets. On a high carb, low fat diet, you will not burn much fat, but you also don't store much

• 1:55:55Speaker 01

  fat because if we look at metabolic tracer studies where they give labeled carbohydrate and look at where that label winds up, less than 2% of dietary carbohydrate is stored in adipose tissue as body fat. Over 98% comes from fat. So if you were eating a low fat, high carb diet, you're not burning much fat, but you're also not storing much fat. If you're eating a low carb, high fat diet, you are burning a lot of fat, but you're also storing a lot of fat. What is going to determine the net deposition in either case will be energy balance, good old calories in versus calories out.

• 1:56:39Chris Williamson?

  That sounds like an argument for low carb, low fat, high protein.

• 1:56:45Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, but that's just, that's just typically called low calorie, right? Because like it's hard to overconsume a lot of protein. But then the downsides are for fat loss. Okay. If you're not eating much carbohydrate or fat, you are going to have a lot of protein oxidation and you don't want to lose weight probably too quickly because it could tap into your fat store, your, um, your lean mass stores. And we also know that the benefits of protein kind of tap out at a certain level. So you're also, if you're resistance training for your own performance benefits, you probably want some carbohydrate as well. And carbohydrate is protein sparing as well. But again, it really boils down to like, which do you prefer and can execute on a long-term basis?

• 1:57:27Speaker 01

  Now, in terms of overall health, there have been a few studies looking at, um, you know, kind of lower carb versus lower fat, whatnot. And essentially they, in the long-term, they show that if you lose similar amounts of weight, similar, if you lose similar amount of weight on low carb versus low fat, your improvements of metabolic health are very similar. They showed this, the diet fit study, um, they showed this in meta-analysis, uh, in 2014. I believe the citation is now at all, where they looked at like cardio metabolic, um, risk factors in basically balanced diets versus low carb diets that were equated in calories.

• 1:58:12Speaker 01

  And basically saw that they were equally good, um, at improving metabolic health. So I, I'm not really worried about insulin and even on a more granular level, they have done studies looking at where they've actually measured insulin or like C peptide, which is a proxy for 24 hour insulin, and seen like even 50% greater overall insulin and still lose the same amount of fat when calories are equated.

• 1:58:40Chris Williamson?

  I want to get tactical for a second. We mentioned a few things and I'd like tangible, tacit takeaways that people can have for stuff like this. Are there any things, small additions to lifestyle, uh, the way that people eat, uh, the way that they, uh, heat or store food, any of these different bits and pieces? Where you think these have a lot of bang for their buck? What are the best nutrition size sort of diet hacks that you think this has been a high return for me?

• 1:59:13Speaker 01

  Okay, so life, can I say lifestyle hacks?

• 1:59:16Chris Williamson?

  Whatever you want.

• 1:59:17Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 1:59:19Speaker 01

  Activity, even like. If people knew the disgustingly small amount of exercise you needed to get health benefits from it, they would not be so worried about starting. I think a lot of people will look at somebody like me and you and think, I don't want to go to the gym for an hour or two hours every day. You don't have to. There was actually a study done where they looked at four minutes of vigorous activity per day. Okay. And it didn't even have to be consecutive. It could be broken up into like little bits. Four minutes decreased the risk of cancer incidence by 20%. And I think when they got up to like 10 minutes, it was something like 30 or 40% decrease in the risk of cancer.

• 1:59:58Chris Williamson?

  What's vigorous exercise?

• 1:59:59Speaker 01

  Um, basically like. I actually don't recall the actual specific of that study, but I think it was like getting your heart rate above like 150 for like that period of time.

• 2:00:09Chris Williamson?

  Pretty high.

• 2:00:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty high. Um. Steps, like if you look at, like when you're doing stuff, like if you're listening to a podcast or watching a show, just walk or get a, like if you don't have a treadmill, like if you can go outside, go outside. Um, one, we've already talked about activity sensitizes your satiety signal. So your diet's going to work better if you're active. Okay. And steps are so easy to get in through a lot of dick fit mechanisms. Now, if you're somebody who sits at a desk job and you really can't move, okay. Then maybe you're somebody who needs to incorporate some of that more short bursts of physical activity when you're off work to get the benefits from it. But for a lot of us, you know, we work from home.

• 2:00:55Speaker 01

  You can get a standing treadmill where you're just kind of like walking at a half mile per hour per day. Or just like while you're listening to something or like what I do, for example, like when I go do my social media content for the day. Today I went out, went down by the river. Walked for an hour while I'm posting my social media content. I'm getting work done and I'm getting some activity in. And the drop off in mortality from going from like 2,000, which is like sedentary steps per day to 8,000, it is like a linear reduction in the risk of mortality. I don't think there's anything magic to steps. I think it's just a proxy for activity, right?

• 2:01:32Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so get more steps in and also

• 2:01:36Speaker 01

  Get active.

• 2:01:37Chris Williamson?

  Get active in terms of vigorous exercise.

• 2:01:38Speaker 01

  Because of the benefits of it and the effects on satiety. Now, diet wise, one big one, I shall give you two. One big one, stop snacking. In the, the studies where people lose weight and keep it off, one thing that commonly pops up is they do not snack. And it's one of the reasons that in dietary recall studies, people routinely under-report their nutritional intake because people remember their meals. They don't remember their snacks and they've shown that snacking has less impact on satiety than meals, even calorie per calorie. And, and a lot of it is around mindfulness because when you're sitting down to a meal, you're sitting and you're more engaged with that meal.

• 2:02:23Speaker 01

  They've shown that people who think about the food they're eating and enjoying each bite, that they get a greater level of satiety from that food.

• 2:02:33Speaker 01

  This might sound weird, but like smaller dinner plates, people eat less with smaller dinner plates because it looks bigger. Chopsticks, eat with chopsticks, you'll slow down, you'll feel more satiated because a lot of times

• 2:02:47Chris Williamson?

  I wonder if a smaller fork would work?

• 2:02:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I, I don't know the study specifically, but I bet it would. But you know, a lot of times it just takes time for our satiety signals to catch up with what we're actually doing. But if you're shoveling down a bunch of food in five minutes, I mean, do you really think your satiety signals have had a chance to hit you to let you know, hey, we're full?

• 2:03:07Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's what competitive eaters actually try and do, right?

• 2:03:09Speaker 01

  They override that.

• 2:03:10Chris Williamson?

  Put the food in so quickly that it hasn't got to the point where, whoa, what the fuck are you doing?

• 2:03:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, and again, like snacks are typically something we're doing when we're like watching TV or we're like grabbing something as we're walking out the door or being unmindful. I mean,

• 2:03:28Speaker 01

  And the other thing is, if you've never done it, just for one week, I'm not saying do this again for the rest of your life, for one week, weigh out every single thing you put in your mouth. Just weigh it out and track the calories. And I think for a lot of people, it'd be like the first time you did your budget and look where your expenses are going. You're like, wait, what the, I'm spending how much on eating out every week?

• 2:03:52Chris Williamson?

  It's the same as when you track your sleep for the first time.

• 2:03:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:56Chris Williamson?

  It's the exact same.

• 2:03:57Speaker 01

  And what's crazy is a lot of times, this happens on a particle level. If we monitor something, it changes behavior, right? The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. We found that when we monitor particles, they change their behavior. When you monitor people, guess what happens? They change their behavior. But a very, a very classic study in nutrition, because you'll, everybody says, well, I eat low calories and I can't lose weight. I, I think a lot of people think they eat low calories and really believe it. A classic study in nutrition from 1992, they had people who were self-reported weight loss resistant,

• 2:04:38Speaker 01

  who were reportedly eating 1,200 calories a day, go into a metabolic ward, and they gave them a doubly labeled water, I believe, which basically the researchers were going to be able to track how much energy they were expending and how much they were consuming. And I think they even told the participants, we'll, we'll know if you're, if you're not telling the truth. And I think I heard a story somewhere from one of the researchers, I, I could have butchered it, but I think they actually said some of the people argued with them afterwards about what they're eating, even though they were monitored. And the, they reported they were eating 1,200 calories a day. The average under-reporting in the

• 2:05:19Speaker 01

  study was 50%. They under-reported by over 50% their calories they were consuming. And they over-reported their physical activity by 47%.

• 2:05:29Speaker 01

  And I think a lot of people will interpret that as an attack and saying that people are lying. I don't think that people are necessarily lying. I think that most people have a very poor understanding of what a true serving size looks like. And if you ever want to be depressed, go weigh out a serving size of peanut butter, or a serving size of ice cream, or a serving size of cereal. And you will realize that, oh, I wa- I was having a bowl of ice cream, which is actually four servings. I was having a scoop of peanut butter, that's three servings. I was having a bowl of cereal, that was three and a half, four servings. And so you re- you, you think you're eating low calories.

• 2:06:15Speaker 01

  When in reality, you're not. And so I think that could be really instructive for people. Again, I'm not saying, like, listen, I still weigh my food. I like, I have a food scale at home. It's not a big deal for me. I'm used to doing it. I do it when I have access to it. I don't have access to it. I don't really worry about it. And the one thing it did by doing that for so long is I know serving sizes.

• 2:06:39Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:06:39Speaker 01

  You know, for the most part, I can eyeball stuff. I have essentially maintained my body weight, which I, I walk around about 208 pounds. Um, and I compete at 205 in powerlifting and we have two hour weigh-ins. So you gotta weigh in and then you're lifting in two hours. So you can't really cut a bunch of weight and maintain your performance. I'm pretty lean at this body weight and it does require like some, some work for me to maintain it, but I've maintained it for almost like over four years now.

• 2:07:09Speaker 01

  And it's not difficult for me and I would say I'm only weighing probably half the time because a lot of times I travel. I'm not taking my food.

• 2:07:17Chris Williamson?

  Well, what you've done is you've, you've spent so much time being specific with the weighing that that's now become your new baseline for intuitive.

• 2:07:24Speaker 01

  Well, and, and also I stayed with, uh, some friends who were influencers a while back and she was, um, doing her degree in psychology. And she was very focused on food behaviors. And she was like, I thought it was, she's like, Lane's really interesting. Because when he was in control of his meals, like at breakfast, she's like, he ate egg whites. You know, it was ve- very low calorie, but when we went out and people got dessert, he still ate dessert with everybody. He like, you know, had some fun foods, whatever. And just through, I didn't even realize I was doing it, but just through sheer kind of force of habit.

• 2:08:04Speaker 01

  I've gotten to the point where, especially when I'm traveling, the meals I can control, by default, I make them low calorie and high protein. Because it's more satiating and it gives me room that like when I go out to dinner tonight.

• 2:08:17Chris Williamson?

  Have a bit of bread.

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, or I can have a burger or I can have something that's a little bit more and I have room in my budget for that. But a lot of people wake up and they have, you know, pastries. And then for lunch, they have a big foot long sandwich that's, you know, another thousand calories. And then for dinner, they're having, you know, whatever else they're having that's usually loaded in oil and starchy carbohydrate. And, you know, I, I put this up one time. I was like, you know, the average amount of physical activity in this country is less than 20 minutes per day. And the average caloric intake is 3,500 calories. And we think we're worried about seed oils and artificial sweeteners.

• 2:09:02Speaker 01

  Like, you guys are focused on some pebbles when we need to be worried about the really big rocks. You know what I mean? Like, so many people get hung up on little stuff and don't even think about the really large rocks that they need to be paying attention to.

• 2:09:19Chris Williamson?

  I saw a study last week that says, American adults spend on average eight hours and 15 minutes a day on screens and six hours and 30 minutes of sleep.

• 2:09:30Speaker 01

  I, I saw that. I saw your post about that.

• 2:09:32Chris Williamson?

  Wild. Okay. Final, final element of the tactical stuff. What are supplements that everybody should have in their stack on average, do you think? What are the supplements that really work?

• 2:09:44Speaker 01

  Okay. So I kind of like branch these into like tiers, right? So my Mount Rushmore of supplements would be, uh, creative model hydrate will be number one.

• 2:09:57Chris Williamson?

  Dosage, frequency?

• 2:09:58Speaker 01

  Five grams a day. There, there may be evidence that like 10 or even maybe a little bit more has cognitive benefits.

• 2:10:04Chris Williamson?

  Tim Ferriss has been talking about that.

• 2:10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. So. It's very safe. I mean, there are people who have been hand wringing about creatine for a long time. And the worst thing that you can say about is people say, well, it causes hair loss. No, there was a single study in 2009 that showed creatine supplementation increased DHT. That is not the same thing as showing hair loss. DHT is a marker and that is a mechanism. Now, that's never been replicated, and they didn't show a viable mechanism by which it does it. Because the, the, their testosterone levels didn't change, which is the precursor. And then the, the, the product after DHT didn't change. So either

• 2:10:49Speaker 01

  creatine is having some direct effect on this enzyme, or this is a data artifact that has not been replicated. I tend to lean towards the latter. So creatine monohydrate increases lean mass, improves strength, improves performance, improves cognitive performance. It has been shown to have a similar effect on depression as SSRIs. I'm not saying for people to do use creatine.

• 2:11:18Chris Williamson?

  Come off your SSRIs and switch it out for creatine.

• 2:11:20Speaker 01

  I'm just saying that this seems to have some really ubiquitous benefits. So, and even like some of the more disease states, we're starting to see some benefits for creatine supplementation. So I'm not saying everybody should be on it. But it is a low cost, high yield supplement that is very safe. And we're not talking about a couple of studies. We are talking about thousands of studies done over decades in labs all over the world. I am very confident. Now, caffeine. Caffeine is the original nootropic. It is the original performance enhancer. And if you look at the benefits of caffeine, increases cognitive

• 2:12:01Speaker 01

  performance, increases exercise performance. Downsides, negatively impacts sleep. So if you're gonna take it, do it early in the day, preferably, unless you've got a podcast.

• 2:12:13Chris Williamson?

  Yep. You know what? One of the wildest things is Whoop release a aggregated set of their data at the end of each year. And on Whoop, you can track behaviors and it will correlate those behaviors with outcomes that you get, HRV, resting heart rate, sleep, sleep quality duration, blah, blah, blah. One of the best predictors of good recovery in sleep. Was caffeine.

• 2:12:37Speaker 01

  Interesting. Yeah. So that's interesting.

• 2:12:41Chris Williamson?

  Tens of thousands of people.

• 2:12:43Speaker 01

  That's interesting. So this could be a case where, you know, there's confounding variables of perhaps people who are taking in more caffeine or exercising harder and that's helping them get better sleep.

• 2:12:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 2:12:54Speaker 01

  So there's obviously like, I mean, we know based on the mechanistic human randomized control trials that caffeine negatively impacts sleep.

• 2:13:00Chris Williamson?

  I wonder what about, is there a potential that you've got kind of like a healthy user bias here with people that are doing whoop? They probably know that you've got a nine hour half life for caffeine. So maybe they're pumping a couple in the morning. And then by the time that they get to an evening time, that adenosine is.

• 2:13:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think, um, what's probably the most likely outcome is some sort of healthy user bias with people who are using wearables, also taking a lot of caffeine, probably more likely to exercise and have other healthy lifestyle behaviors.

• 2:13:30Chris Williamson?

  But why would all of the people that are using whoop are using whoop? Like, it's interesting. It's something I might try and reach out to the guys and get a little bit more data. I could send that to you. All right. So creatine, caffeine for caffeine.

• 2:13:44Chris Williamson?

  Couple of questions. First off, there's no real like optimal dosage, but what do you think about when it comes to dosage? What do you think about when it comes to timing? And what do you think about when it comes to dependency?

• 2:13:53Speaker 01

  So obviously earlier in the day is going to be better for sleep based on what we know. As far as dosage, I mean, you get some anti fatigue benefits, like 50, 100 milligrams. You get, start to get the performance benefits. Once you get around two, 300 milligrams of caffeine, like for exercise. Strength benefits, like acute strength benefits are more like three to 600 milligrams of caffeine. So, I mean, I'm, I'm a pretty big fan of caffeine and before the meet on Saturday, I'll probably have about a nice five, 600 milligram shot right at the beginning and I'll probably have a 200 milligram boost, which I'm lifting in prime time at 6:00 PM. So I probably won't be sleeping real great that night, but that's okay. It's just one night.

• 2:14:39Speaker 01

  So yeah, for the, for the more like standout kind of performance benefits, you know, you gotta get a little bit higher dosage.

• 2:14:47Chris Williamson?

  Dependency?

• 2:14:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you can definitely get, I mean, there are absolutely caffeine withdrawal symptoms. I go through them whenever I start tapering off for a meat because I'll usually taper down to, I used to completely cut it cold turkey and I just found that that was intolerable. So I go down to about a hundred milligrams a day. Because actually, the other thing people don't realize, and I found, I'm like, when I cut out caffeine completely, I started like, feel like aches and pains and stuff. It's actually a slight analgesic. It has a slight analgesic effect. And I started getting all these like, like feeling, why am I like having like back pain that I haven't had before? There's other things. And when I just went down to kind of like a hundred milligrams a day to kind of like just maintain, I noticed that that stuff went away.

• 2:15:31Chris Williamson?

  All right. Creatine, caffeine?

• 2:15:35Speaker 01

  One other thing to add, you can completely reset your caffeine tolerance in about a week if you go cold turkey, but you're gonna feel pretty miserable for a couple of days. It's, it's, I mean, I thought, I thought it was a placebo thing and then I did it and I was like, why does my head hurt and why am I so freaking tired? And then my ex was like, you haven't had caffeine in two days. Duh. I'm like, oh yeah, duh. Creatine, caffeine, whey protein, whey protein, tasty, relatively cheap, soluble, been shown to improve body composition numerous times. It's not magic. It's just a very tasty kind of ubiquitous form of protein that's highly bioavailable. So I put it on my Mount Rush.

• 2:16:16Chris Williamson?

  Isolate, concentrate.

• 2:16:18Speaker 01

  Concentrate's perfectly fine. In fact, there may be some benefits to concentrate in that it has some of the, some of the components that positively influence glutathione and antioxidant status. But a lot of people don't tolerate a pure concentrate well, because there's lacto, there's quite a bit of lactose in it. And some people have sensitivities to lactobulans in way. A whey isolate is gonna basically eliminate the lactose. So if you have any kind of lactose sensitivity, most people tolerate whey isolate. Like, my company Outward Nutrition, the protein we sell is a whey isolate. People are like, is that because it's more anabolic than concentrate? I'm like, no, we just wanted to make sure that almost anybody could use

• 2:17:03Speaker 01

  our protein. It is more expensive, typically mixes better too. So there's just, there's trade offs. Whey concentrate's cheaper, but there's more carbs and fats and more lactose. Uh, if you don't tolerate either of those well, then a way hydrolyzate will probably work for you, which is basically predigested way. So they've chopped up the lactalbumines.

• 2:17:23Chris Williamson?

  Tastes interesting.

• 2:17:24Speaker 01

  It does not taste very good and it's expensive, but it, it will work well for somebody who can't tolerate the lactalbumines in a way. And then we go down to like my tier two, which is stuff that I feel strongly is beneficial. Uh, but I just want to see like more research done over a greater period of time. And those would be things like, uh, rhodiola rosacea, um, uh, things like beta alanine, citrulline malate, um, ginseng actually has quite a bit of good research on it.

• 2:17:52Chris Williamson?

  Just naming the ingredient profile of new tonic here.

• 2:17:55Speaker 01

  I'm just.

• 2:17:56Chris Williamson?

  There we are. Yeah, there it is. That's what we're here for, baby. That's what we're here for. Uh, uh, beta alanine.

• 2:18:02Speaker 01

  Ashwagandha, ashwagandha, another one.

• 2:18:04Chris Williamson?

  So, uh, beta alanine, uh, everyone went crazy for that when Matt Fraser said on Rogan that that was, uh, maybe it was Rogan or something else. He basically retired from CrossFit and said that I think he was taking like some absurd amount of beta alanine and attributed a lot of his sort of increased work capacity acutely to that. Um, was citrulline malate in there? Was that one of the ones you just said?

• 2:18:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:18:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, why?

• 2:18:25Speaker 01

  Uh, fatigue resistance. It also seems to, there's some studies suggesting it may stimulate mTORs. There may be a small anabolic effect. We don't know if that's like independent of other things that stimulate mTOR, but it seems to increase, improve performance, uh, and improve fatigue resistance.

• 2:18:43Chris Williamson?

  Just going through what we went through there, the, uh, rhodiola, the ginseng, the, uh, citrulline, beta alanine, and the ashwagandha. Have you got, uh, dosages that you prefer for yourself with those?

• 2:18:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. So rhodiola, it seems like anywhere from like a hundred and 50 milligrams to 450 milligrams. And then after that, it actually seems to be like a, a kind of

• 2:19:05Chris Williamson?

  U-shaped curve.

• 2:19:06Speaker 01

  tapering off of it.

• 2:19:06Chris Williamson?

  N-shaped curve.

• 2:19:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, you know, we, um, eh, actually even as low as 50 milligrams, there might be some benefits as well. But if you want like the, like there's, uh, some studies that show like, uh, actual decreased fatigue and actually decreased perception of fatigue as well, as well as like, uh, cognition benefits. And it seems to be like a very, um, what we call an adaptogen. Ashwagandha is kind of like that as well. So it kind of, um,

• 2:19:33Speaker 01

  It puts you back to center for lack of a better term. Um, but yeah, some good data on fatigue resistance for that. Uh, ashwagandha. Oh, man, dosage. Why did it escape my mind just now? I think that's actually, uh, about 150 to 300 milligrams or sorry, 300 to 600 milligrams for ashwagandha.

• 2:19:52Speaker 01

  That's in our recovery product and downside to that is doesn't mix super well. When you, when you mix up our recovery product, it tastes great, but it kind of looks like, uh, beach water a little bit. Because of the sediment, but ashwagandha. It's interesting because. I'm convinced, pretty convinced because there've been quite a few studies now showing reliably. It increases strength, lean mass. And decreases cortisol and modestly elevates testosterone. But the effects on cortisol and testosterone would not be enough to show those lean mass benefits. So my one hesitation is I kind of want to know.

• 2:20:32Chris Williamson?

  What the fucking mechanism is.

• 2:20:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, what the mechanism is for that. Cause whenever I see an outcome, but we don't know the mechanism, I kind of get the heebie jeebies.

• 2:20:41Speaker 01

  But it seems to do that. There's been several labs that have tested it, you know, across diff, you know? That's why I tell people is, you know, science is, is self correcting, right? Like.

• 2:20:51Speaker 01

  People will say, well, I don't trust science. They, they speak about it like this very. I don't know, like, science is what is. People are the ones that screwed up, like people, imperfect humans are doing. Science is perfect and the scientific method is about as close to perfect as you can get. But since people are doing it, we screw it up. Now where it's the reason that I don't. Go crazy over individual studies. Is because I, the reason that creatine is on my Mount Rushmore. Because there are thousands of studies over decades of research across thousands of different labs. If this was all a hoax, it is a very elaborate hoax. You know what I mean?

• 2:21:34Speaker 01

  But can one study be faked or, you know, done in a way where the participants and the way it's set up or massaged in such a way to get certain? Of course.

• 2:21:45Chris Williamson?

  Not a thousand times though.

• 2:21:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's hard to do over decades and across a bunch of different labs in a bunch of different countries.

• 2:21:52Chris Williamson?

  Jin Sang.

• 2:21:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, ginseng, I have to go back. I think it depends on the extraction method. But I think somewhere in that like 100 to 500 milligram dosage, I have to go back and look at the specifics. I could have butchered that a little bit.

• 2:22:06Chris Williamson?

  And you know the citrulline number as well?

• 2:22:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the minimum appears to be about six grams. And then up to like eight grams. And so actually, that's one thing to look for in pre workouts if they don't list, if it's a proprietary blend that has citrulline. I mean, you can almost be assured that you're not getting enough.

• 2:22:25Chris Williamson?

  It's expensive.

• 2:22:26Speaker 01

  So of our pre workout, which has citrulline malate in it, as well as rhodiola and caffeine.

• 2:22:34Speaker 01

  Well, there's five ingredients. Citrulline is, I think, 40% of the cost of our pre workout.

• 2:22:39Chris Williamson?

  Rhodiola is 10% of the cost of new tonic.

• 2:22:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:43Chris Williamson?

  It's fucking painful.

• 2:22:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So it's, um, those things are. You know, I, I feel pretty confident about them. And then there's other thing like fish oil, melatonin, I think would be on that list.

• 2:22:58Chris Williamson?

  You're not concerned about long term use of melatonin?

• 2:23:02Speaker 01

  I mean, I think we, it would show up in the human outcome data. I mean, I just, I mean, I think the, the, the worry is like with caffeine, the dependence, right?

• 2:23:11Chris Williamson?

  You know, the best thing that for that, uh, which I found for me, when there is something that has a risk of behavioral or maybe even like whatever pharmacological dependence on, on usage, just never take it two days in a row. If you set yourself that rule of, uh, if I took it yesterday, I can't take it today. And if I take it today, I can't take it tomorrow. You become so much more mindful about your use of these things, especially caffeine. And you're like, right, okay, I didn't have caffeine yesterday, so I could have it today. How much do I need it today? Well, tomorrow I've got legs, first thing in the morning, and I've got dinner on the evening time. Fuck, I really think I might need, all right, you've just gone two days without caffeine. That how spectacular. And I think.

• 2:23:56Chris Williamson?

  That for me was the, I did 500 days without caffeine. So.

• 2:24:00Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:24:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:01Speaker 01

  I'm sure after the first couple of weeks it got easier though.

• 2:24:04Chris Williamson?

  I did, to be honest dude, I never felt the withdrawal thing. I know people get absolutely brutalized by it, but I never felt it. And yet my reintroduction of caffeine was just, let's just not do it two days in a row. Cause I wanted to hold on to those sort of realized resensitivities, even though according to you and Mino, like between three days and seven days, I could have done it in that time at all. But I, it was more like a, can I do it thing? And yeah, just don't do it two days in a row. And this, I think the same for melatonin too.

• 2:24:31Speaker 01

  You're definitely an optimizer because I've, I have another friend who actually lives in Austin, who's very much an optimizer. And whenever we talk, I go, okay, what kick are we on this time? Cause whenever I come to visit him, it's always, there's always something he's doing where he's, he's doing this every day, or he's not doing this at all for a period of time. And I'm always like, what, what kick are we on now?

• 2:24:50Chris Williamson?

  It's the way it works. Layne Norton, ladies and gentlemen. Lane, I appreciate the hell out of you. I love your nails. Good luck with the meet this weekend. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with the things you do.

• 2:24:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, uh, I mean, Instagram is kind of my digital business card now, which is at BioLane. And my website's BioLane.com. And I've created a whole host of stuff to try and help people from every different level, from, you know, our, our team of coaches that do one-on-one coaching to our app, Carbon Diet Coach, which is less than $10 a month. That's an algorithm-based coaching app that, you know, basically, you know, it tracks like MyFitnessPal, but then it actually adjusts your nutrition based on your individual metabolism, based on how you're responding, based on your goals. Um, it works extremely well. We've had, you know, tens of thousands of users and like a 4.8 rating in the app store. And so that's been nice because I've always felt like,

• 2:25:43Speaker 01

  you know, one-on-one coaching can only help so many people. And so that has been something that's allowed to reach a lot more people. And then the supplement company we talked about, Outwork Nutrition. I have a research review where I try to simplify research. We kind of break down studies every single month. It's called reps and that's on my website, biolane.com. And then I also like, really what I was thinking about, how do I affect the largest amount of change? I also feel like it was mentoring coaches. And so I started something with Professor Bill Campbell called Physique Coaching Academy, where anybody who has a goal of basically helping people transform their bodies, who wants to be a coach, this is essentially like we set out to make it the equivalent of a college level education

• 2:26:25Speaker 01

  in physique transformations. So like, if you want to get deep into the science behind how to like, build muscle, lose fat on a biochemical level, but then also like relate it to actual practical coaching, we do a great job of that.

• 2:26:40Chris Williamson?

  I didn't know you had all of this stuff going on.

• 2:26:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got a lot of stuff rattling around. You know what I mean?

• 2:26:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, this week you've got to lift some heavy weights. That's the only thing you need to do.

• 2:26:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm, I'm very excited. I think I might be set up to have, I got a chance at possibly hitting my biggest total of all time, which after every, all the injuries I've been through and everything, that would, that would, you'd probably see me lose my mind if I did. I would be.

• 2:27:05Chris Williamson?

  Because you always seem so calm when you're lifting, typically when I see you on Instagram.

• 2:27:08Speaker 01

  Well, I tell people, I'm like, when you see me on Instagram and you think I'm fired up, that's like 70, 80% lane. When you get meat day lane, that's 100%, which is basically a berserker. But it allows me to, I get to do my, my Superman and Clark Kent thing. You know what I mean? I get to be the nerdy Clark Kent kind of guy. And then I get to go out and, and rage and, you know, do some crazy stuff.

• 2:27:30Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah. I appreciate you, man. Thank you for coming.

• 2:27:32Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, man.

• 2:27:33Speaker 02

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