Everything You Need To Know About Getting Lean - Stan Efferding (4K)

Stan Efferding is a professional bodybuilder, powerlifter, entrepreneur, author and a nutrition expert known for creating “The Vertical Diet”. Earning the title of the world’s strongest bodybuilder isn’t an overnight achievement. With 35 years of experience in bodybuilding, powerlifting, and dieting, Stan is one of the most accomplished and knowledgeable coaches on the planet, and today we get to dig into his biggest lessons. Expect to learn what the main causes of the obesity epidemic are, why diet culture is so tribal, the 3 core principles of the Vertical Diet, whether red meat is actually healthy for you, the relationship between sleep and weight loss, Stan's top 10 exercises for building muscle, why a 10-minute walk after eating will change your life, how to hack meal prep for the rest of time and much more... Sponsors: Get 2 months free from Levels on an annual membership at https://levels.link/modernwisdom (offer automatically applied) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #fitness #diet #bodybuilding - 00:00 Why Are People Getting Fatter? 06:42 The Truth About Seed Oils 13:23 What is the Vertical Diet? 26:34 Can Red Meat Kill You? 30:00 Stan’s Thoughts on Aspartame & Diet Soda 35:39 The Science Behind Intermittent Fasting 47:08 Why Do So Many Diets Fail? 51:48 The Gap Between Government Health Advice & Stan’s Advice 59:19 How Legitimate are Blue Zone Studies? 1:03:17 The Usefulness of Grounding for Health 1:07:13 How Sleep & Weight Loss Are Connected 1:10:41 Why Walking Improves Health Significantly 1:24:30 Should You Skip Breakfast? 1:29:44 Principles for a Good Sleep 1:41:52 Best Training Practices for Health 1:54:36 If Stan Could Only Keep 10 Exercises 2:04:00 What Blood-work Metrics You Should Pay Attention To 2:18:32 Life-Hacks for Successful Execution 2:24:15 Where to Find Stan - 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/ - 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?

  Stan Efferding, welcome to the show.

• 0:01Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 0:03Chris Williamson?

  What do you think are the main causes of the obesity epidemic? Why is it that the average Americans got so much fatter over the last few decades?

• 0:11Speaker 01

  I don't want to talk about what Stan thinks. I want to talk about what we see as probably what the academic community's consensus is. I'm kind of a co-later of information as a personal trainer for 30 years. And I want to deliver that information to my clients and make sure it's evidence based. And so I'll refrain from opinions. I've tried that in the past and I've been probably correctly and soundly informed of my inaccuracy. So at the core of it all, we're consuming more calories than we used to 50 years ago. We know that from all the research.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  And the majority of those calories or the cause of that seems to be hyper palatable ultra processed foods. And it seems to have interfered with our ability to become satiated. And so we're eating too much and we're in this food environment where that's really easy to do. It's hard to shut it off. And so it really is calories. And I know that sparks a whole bunch of bad feelings from folks. And it kind of gets you those straw man arguments about Kiko calories in calories out is, you know, it doesn't work and all of that. But it's a little, it's more complex than that.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  I've said move more, eat less is truthful, but not useful.

• 1:36Chris Williamson?

  Necessary, but not sufficient, perhaps?

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's just, it is what's happening and it is the solution.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  But it's, it's simple, but it's not easy. And so there's a whole host of factors I think we can dive into on that. But factor matter is, it is calories. The Kiko is an oversimplification. It's actually an energy balance equation. That accounts for all of these variables, which we may talk about, the total daily energy intake minus the total daily energy expenditure. And there's a whole host of things that go into both sides of that equation that it really accounts for just about everything that that goes into weight gain.

• 2:12Chris Williamson?

  Why is calories in, calories out and diet fads and discussions in general so emotionally charged? I would think that this would just be it's, I'm not calling you a good or a bad person. There's no reason for you to believe that you are anything. This isn't a comment on you and yet diet discussions online are some of the most virulent and aggressive that you see.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  They really are. I think part of it might just be that we want to find, I said, pin the tail on the donkey, find one single source that maybe is something that we could fix if we just got rid of it. The carbohydrate insulin model spawned from that, where if you eat a grape and your insulin goes up, that you're going to gain fat and you can't lose, you can't lose fat. Certain demonizing, certain foods became very popular. There's still a lot of that going on, whether it's fructose or seed oils or anything that might correlate with overconsumption.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  I think also that when you talk about calories in, calories out, it seems to blame the victim, the individual who's having a hard time losing weight. They become, you blame them, you're overeating, you're lazy, you're undisciplined, you know, that kind of thing without paying attention to all the other factors that go into that. It's just an oversimplification.

• 3:44Chris Williamson?

  I suppose that calories in, calories out, when you fold in how hyperpalatable these new foods are, it's not putting all of the blame at the feet of the victim. It's like, look, this is a relatively unfair battle because of how well engineered these foods are for you to overeat. Now, ultimately it's you that put it in your mouth, but it is a more difficult uphill climb.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Agreed. And another problem is, is that while, well, we have a genetic predisposition, obviously, now we're starting to see that certain people have different hunger signaling.

• 4:21Chris Williamson?

  Grelin release.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Grelin release, leptin sensitivity or lack thereof.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  And certain people, while we don't believe their basal metabolic rate is significantly different, we do see that some people are more active, what's called non-exercise activity thermogenesis than others. My son and daughter's like that. My son, you have to almost check and see if he's breathing when he's sitting there watching TV. Sometimes he's just, he's like a zombie and my daughter can't sit down and she's humming all the time and tapping her toes and bouncing around and skipping and she has to get up and two very different, you know, movement patterns and people with high non-exercise activity thermogenesis can burn over a thousand calories a day more than somebody with low non-exercise activity thermogenesis. We see that in active individuals birth versus, say, sedentary jobs versus,

• 5:12Speaker 01

  say, a construction worker, waitress as opposed to desk worker. So we see a lot of calories can be accounted for in that component of the equation, the energy balance equation. So those things all play, play into it. And then there's also a big social component to talk about. Some folks in lower socioeconomic environments are exposed to more of this hyperpalatable ultra-processed food from an earlier age. It's very affordable. It's very convenient and accessible and that, that has a huge impact.

• 5:46Chris Williamson?

  What role does the formative years of growing up have on our palate and what we enjoy? There's a, a period of life, I think it's between about 10 and 15, and the music that you listen to during that time is very formative for the kind of music that you will enjoy throughout the rest of your life. Are you aware if there's an equivalent when it comes to tastes and diets and stuff?

• 6:12Speaker 01

  I'm not sure, but I, I think that, you know, obviously children are going to migrate towards the kind of foods that taste the best, presuming they're allowed in the home and in whatever, to whatever degree. But we do see that children with obese parents who tend to gain more weight at an earlier age and have a higher likelihood of becoming obese as they get older. So it is definitely a problem that has to be addressed at a very early age.

• 6:41Chris Williamson?

  You mentioned seed oils, which is one of the four horsemen of the diet apocalypse. I'm not sure what the other three are.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:49Chris Williamson?

  Just how bad are seed oils? What's the truth about them?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Well, you know, before we jumped on here, I talked about people evolve, science evolves. You know, when you overlay a graph of seed oil consumptions against obesity, you see a very strong correlation. I mean, they would just look identical. And so one would, you know, correlation does not equal causation. One would think that that was one of the potential causes. Everything else seems to have gone down over time. Fructose and sugar consumption seems to have stabilized or gone down over time.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  But seed oils, like a lot of things, how can I best explain this? There's a, they're not all the same thing. So here's what the academic community is saying now, that we don't have any evidence that that seed oils cause inflammation in their natural form, if that can even be said about seed oils. There's nothing natural necessarily about them. But in so much as they, that they are a part of processed foods, ultra-processed foods, about 70% of seed oils are consumed as a part of ultra-processed foods and fast foods. Now, seed oils reheat it. Think french fries, you know, any of those chicken McNuggets,

• 8:13Speaker 01

  whatever, in those big vats of oil that you reheat, those do show inflammatory response and increase the cardiovascular disease risk. So that that is a problem. I did a video many years ago, it's the real poison that's killing us. So I'm certainly guilty of having put all seed oils into one bucket. But in that video, I did say, I'm biased. They are a poison to me. Seed oils, I discovered many years later, give me diarrhea. And I go into great detail, if anybody wants to know, if it's not TMI, in my video.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  It's one of those where you're running to the bathroom and you can't quite make it. You have to stop and do that kegel exercise or something bad's gonna happen before you get there. It's one of those deals and it's very unique to seed oils. And I know when I have consumed too much of them, flat iron steak cooked in a big pool of seed oil at a restaurant. Otherwise, you, you know, I wouldn't have a problem if it was grilled on a flame or when I cook it at home in a, in a ninja grill or something. Very different response. Even going to restaurants and getting, you know, I own a meal prep company and so we have to, we have to get eggs for the meal prep company. And some of those eggs come in five gallon buckets, like at, you know, some of the restaurants that you would eat

• 9:31Speaker 01

  out of Denny's or, or the like. And they just ladle the eggs and put them on the grill. And so I would ask, please no oils, because I'm allergic to these oils. Well, come to find out, a lot of those buckets of eggs, we had a hard time finding them that didn't, weren't already adulterated with seed oils, whether it was canola oil or soybean oil, partly for preservation, because it's observative, but probably partly because that's an inexpensive additive, which would, you know, increase, I guess, the profit margin on the five gallon bucket. When I would consume those, because there's already seed oil in the mixture, then I would have the same problem. And so it's been very difficult for me over the years.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  I used to love to go to some of these, where those all you can eat grills that they have with, and they just get steak and chicken and, and, you know, rice and have them grill them. But they would put a big ladle of these oils on there to cook it in, and I would have gastric distress. So as a personal matter, I've objected quite strongly. I went down the Weston A. Price rabbit hole and Nina Tykoltz rabbit hole for seed oils. And I was, you know, I was fully on that team. But the, the, the literature does not support if you're not allergic to them like I am, and you're not reheating them or over consuming them.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  It doesn't support any other adverse effect than that.

• 10:58Chris Williamson?

  Have you got any idea how common a?

• 11:02Chris Williamson?

  Adverse reaction or intolerance of CDOs?

• 11:06Speaker 01

  I don't. And I used to think it was relatively common because a lot of people would suffer from IBS and IBD. But I can't, I can't make that assessment. I just know that's how I respond. And I have, of course, in my business, come across a lot of people who maybe felt that was the same. But I just don't think there's research to support it.

• 11:23Chris Williamson?

  You had a problem with one of the great American institutions that I'm a massive fan of, Cheesecake Factory.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:30Chris Williamson?

  They didle you. They diddle you with a burger, maybe?

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now, I can get, one of my favorite meals that I've been promoting for years is the Monster Mash. I trademarked that, Monster Mash. And it's just a blend of, say, ground beef or bison with white rice and some bone broth. And I'll mash all that together. I might cook some peppers and throw it in there, a little bit of spinach, and maybe even a scrambled egg. And this is my mash. I make this and sell it, ship it all over the States to people. And I give it to all my clients that, you know, Hafthor Bjornson, and Brian Shaw, and the rest of them, Lane Johnson's favorite meal, the Monster Mash. And so I can get

• 12:13Speaker 01

  that meal at Cheesecake Factory. But they will either baste or put the burger in, sear it first in vegetable oil before they put it on the flame grill to prevent it from burning, to keep it. Same thing would be true, say, of those roasted chickens, the rotisserie chickens at Costco. They baste those with a vegetable oil because it helps prevent them from burning. They can cook there a little longer. And so those are the little things I have to watch out for. So yes, Cheesecake Factory is my one device. But because I'm so OCD, I'm a creature of habit, that ever since I've been going there, I go order my little Monster Mash from them. I get a side hamburger patty, a side of white rice,

• 12:56Speaker 01

  a side of bone broth, maybe throw in some pickles. And of course, the sourdough bread is always good. And that's my, that's my favorite meal at Cheesecake. And I don't much participate in desserts. I've never been that way. Needless to say, my wife and kids order something very different. But that's, that's my favorite spot to stop at is they're generally in every big city in the country, and I travel a lot.

• 13:18Chris Williamson?

  I'm a cheesecake guy, a big fan of Cheesecake Factory. What is, how do you explain to people, let's say that somebody hasn't been introduced to the vertical diet before, how do you conceptualize it? How do you explain it to people?

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, the vertical diet is really everything I want my clients to know and to do. It's a compilation of everything I've learned from over 30 years, from college to coaching, to competing, to being coached, collaborating with great athletes, and then partnering with Dr. Damon McKeon, who's a PhD, RDN, Director of Dietetics at UNLV. And we got together and spent a couple of years together, producing and putting science to over 250 peer-reviewed, published articles, and then of course, references to lots of

• 14:10Speaker 01

  videos. And just, I think, professionals in the industry, and they're each, in their respective fields, that help my clients navigate all the things that are important, because it's multifactorial. It's not just a diet, right? It's obviously, you know, it's nutrition, it's digestion, it's sleep, hydration, injury prevention and rehab, blood testing, blood sugar, blood pressure management. It's just a chapter after chapter after chapter of the things that I commonly, questions I've been asked and things that I want my clients to do to be successful in a program, because it's not just one thing. Poor sleep,

• 14:52Speaker 01

  your diet's not going to fix that problem. You know, if you've got a crappy diet, then, you know, everything else suffers. And so, I try and make sure that I cover all these bases for them. Of course, there's a lot of individual, inter-individual variability, so I have to, well, this feels like I'm rewriting every program when I deal with a client. I give them a detailed questionnaire and have them respond. I find out what their goals are, what their genetic predispositions are, you know, what they prefer in terms of foods that they like to eat, and when they like to eat, where they like to eat, just kind of their lifestyle, what constraints they might have, any injuries, digestive distress. I love the blood work, because then I might be able to see, you know, challenges that need to be overcome. And then...

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Try and make sure that they can improve each and every one of those areas that I think are important. And I ask them to send me on a daily basis, not weekly, because I think by then, if somebody goes off the rails for three days, they might ghost you and you lose them. On a daily basis, I ask them to send me their hours of sleep, their morning body weight, and a picture of each meal. So that it's more for their information, you know, their accountability, that which gets measured gets improved, than it is for my information necessarily, unless I see something that's significantly awry. And then weekly, we do waist measurements and progress pictures, because oftentimes, we're the last to see

• 16:21Speaker 01

  our progress. And if I get a client to take a progress picture on day one, two months later, they're like, I'm not making any progress. You put those side by side, in general, you see a significant change that they don't see. And the scale might not tell the whole story. You might get a client only loses two pounds, but they might lose four inches on their waist, and look significantly tighter, and maybe stronger, and feel better. So all of those things factor into it.

• 16:46Chris Williamson?

  From the diet side, what are the principles that you're following there? What are the what are the thermodynamics of the vertical diet?

• 16:54Speaker 01

  See if I can go down this one, two, three. Calories are king. If you want to gain weight, you have to be in a surplus. And remember, I did both bodybuilding and powerlifting throughout my career. So I bulked up to over 300 pounds, and I dieted down to single-digit body fat to compete as a bodybuilder, and then, you know, bulked back up to compete as a powerlifter. So, conservatively speaking, over a 25 year of competing, going back as far as 1988, I've gained and lost well over 1,000 pounds. And I've learned a lot of lessons along the way.

• 17:22Chris Williamson?

  That's insane.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  I did, I did a lot wrong. I always say, if I knew then what I know now, I would have saved myself a whole lot of trouble, and probably been able to perform at a much higher level at a much younger age, because I didn't reach my peak until I turned 40. So, calories are king. Surplus to gain weight, deficit to lose weight. Next would be your macros, protein being the most important of those, getting sufficient protein to fuel, or to build muscle, or at least to retain lean mass when dieting. And protein can be manipulated to either eat less of it in order to be less satiated. So you can eat more total calories. That's actually a strategy that we use for people have a hard time eating enough food.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Because it's very satiating and has a high thermic effect of food, meaning for every hundred calories you consume, you net out about 70. Just the calorie cost of digesting protein is more so than carbs and fats. Or if you're trying to lose weight, we might bump that up. Instead of a gram per pound of goal weight, we might even go up to 1.2 grams. For the very same reason, you know, flipping the script. It's more satiating and has a higher thermic effect of food. So you can, you feel like you're eating more volume of food, but you're netting out less total calories. And so, so that's macros, protein being the most important of which. You have to have sufficient fats for health, to get to sleep, for your hormones. You start getting too low on fats and you're going to have some problems with both of those things.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  But, and now we start getting into my personal preference, because fats beyond that which provides you a health benefit, don't provide you a performance benefit. And so the rest for me is carbs. About 30, 35% protein, about 30% fat. And that's actually about a two to one protein to fat ratio. If you're going to consume 200 grams of protein, you get in about 100 grams of fat. They're equivalent in terms of calories, because you've got nine calories per gram for fat and four calories per gram for protein. But it's around 30, 35% protein, around 30% fat. And that would leave about 40% carbs, which I think are important for performance. I don't, just me think that, but that's what, that's what science tells us, especially anaerobic performance, which would be, you know, strength training, sports, explosive

• 19:35Speaker 01

  sports, that those carbohydrates are very important for those bouts of training and performance. And so I leave room in there. I also find that that more closely is what's commonly consumed, although the protein's a little higher. I think people would consume more commonly around 18%. We see that, say, in the Mediterranean diet. That's about an 18% protein diet.

• 19:57Chris Williamson?

  No one accidentally eats more than about.

• 20:02Chris Williamson?

  Point seven or point eight grams of protein per kilo of body weight. No one accidentally, unless you go to the buffet that you mentioned earlier on, like it has to be purposeful.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  And it should be. I believe it should be. You heard Dr. Gabrielle Lyons talking about being the organ of longevity. It's a sink for glucose. I think those are great descriptors of what protein is. We also see that when you compare a 30% protein intake to an 18% in protein intake, say with the Mediterranean diet, you see improved insulin sensitivity, improved glucose numbers. Again, for a couple of reasons, protein seems to decrease post-brandial glycemia, particularly when you eat it first in a meal. After a meal, post-brandial glycemia, that would be the peak elevation and duration of of blood sugars, kind of measured as an

• 20:55Speaker 01

  area under the curve. And so when you eat protein first and you eat a large amount of protein, you have fewer fluctuations, less area under the curve of blood sugar post meal. And so that that tends to help for that reason as well. And likely because you're eating less of other foods if you're eating more protein. And you know, just less what we call glycemic load, probably fewer total carbs. So that's kind of where I put my percentages. I find that that's and then those carbs, the proteins consist of a wide variety of proteins. I like to, I like to see red meat in the diet. And we can dive into that. I like to see salmon in the diet, at least two or three times a week, obviously

• 21:35Speaker 01

  for EPA and DHA, omega threes. I like to see dairy in the diet, preferentially yogurt, fat-free Greek yogurt is one of my favorites. It's a, it's a superfood.

• 21:44Chris Williamson?

  Have you got a brand of Greek yogurt that you prefer?

• 21:46Speaker 01

  I like Costco's Kirkland Greek yogurt as fat-free because it's not chalky. It's still creamy, just as a personal preference for taste. I like to see eggs. It could be an egg, egg white blend because I want to keep the yolk in there for its all the vitamins and minerals in there, the choline and the biotin and the like. I mentioned red meat and I should have said iron, B12, zinc, all of those things, but I'll use a leaner cut because ultimately, and I probably should have started with this, it's the overall dietary pattern that matters a lot more than individual foods. I don't think you should eat too much of anything. Could potentially leave you exposed to having too little of something else possibly. And in the case of, of say, red meat, of course,

• 22:31Speaker 01

  there is maybe some concern that fatty meats or too high saturated fats intake may elevate LDL in some individuals and therefore increase cardiovascular disease risk. And that's multifactorial. I don't, you know, presume to think that that's the only thing that matters, but that is something that we do, we do pay attention to, particularly in blood work because we certainly want to keep people's LDL within the range that generally saturated fats are under 10% of total calories. It's kind of easy to do if 30% of your total calories are fats. And something like a top sirloin steak or even an egg, egg white blend, only about a

• 23:12Speaker 01

  third of that is saturated fat. So you got 30% times 30%. There's your 9% below the American Heart Association's recommendation for 10%. So you can have steak and eggs every morning for breakfast, along with, you know, monitoring the type of fats that you take in, along with, you know, say a fat-free Greek yogurt, which is cardioprotective. So you get some benefits from that, along with some fruits, which again, cardioprotective, reduces inflammation. Those citrus flavonoids are incredible. So the dietary pattern matters most. Variety of protein sources, the fats are generally in the protein, although it might be nice to get a little olive oil in there with your salad with dinner. That tends to be a lot of nice things going on with.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Uh, extra virgin olive oil. Uh, and then the carbohydrates, I start with a high potassium carbohydrates, which would be, say, a daily potato. Uh, it has a thousand milligrams of potassium, over twice that of a banana. Fruits are great for that, especially low sugar fruits, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, those kinds of things. Oranges, uh, another reason I like oranges and potatoes is, uh, which this conversation should evolve into very shortly, satiety. Uh, there is a satiety index that measures the length of time certain foods keep you full. It's a subjective measurement when they just interview people based on foods that they eat. And way at the top of that list, of course, you're going to have proteins and fibers,

• 24:38Speaker 01

  but you're also going to have foods like boiled potatoes and oranges. And so I like the dual benefit of the high potassium, relatively low sugar in those fruits, um, but also the satiety benefit because anybody who's in a calorie deficit, that's what I'm shooting for. I might do just the opposite of somebody's gain weight. I might pull the potato out and throw in white rice. I might pull the orange out and put in orange juice, uh, just to flip the script on that. And I don't mean to keep bouncing back and forth, but the, the diet isn't all things for all people. And so that, uh, once you get, you know, of course, you throw your salad in there, you can get some more, certainly some more potassium from spinach or whatever, you know, fiber, uh, some nuts, if you get a little bit of magnesium out of that, some mixed nuts. And that is pretty much the foundation of the vertical diet. If you want

• 25:21Speaker 01

  to talk specifically about the kinds of foods I recommend and the macros, it's kind of all contained in that explanation.

• 25:27Chris Williamson?

  This episode is brought to you by Levels. One of the single biggest predictors of how long you live and how good you'll feel while living is your metabolic health. The single best way to work out how your daily decisions are impacting your longevity and your vitality is by tracking your glucose. This is why I wear a continuous glucose monitor from Levels. It allows me to understand in real time how the foods that I'm eating are impacting my health and the way that I feel. The Levels app interprets your glucose data and gives you a score after each meal so that you can see how different meals are impacting you, and it will give you personalized diet recommendations that are right for your body. Glucose is a huge determinant of not only your vitality, And your longevity, but of the way that you feel day to day. Using Levels means that you take the guesswork out of this.

• 26:09Chris Williamson?

  It can help you to nudge your diet towards something which is going to be better for you right now and in the long term as well. After using Levels, I realised if I have a large carb meal and I do not go for a walk afterwards, my blood glucose goes through the roof and I don't feel so good. Head to levels.link slash modern wisdom to take advantage of an exclusive offer. Plus, get that 90 day money back guarantee. That's levels.link slash modern wisdom. Two different foods that you've touched on there, which are often demonised. Red meat.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  No.

• 26:40Chris Williamson?

  Is it killing everybody?

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Well, again, what's the dietary pattern?

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Are you eating a ton of really fatty meats? Bacon butter is usually thrown into that group, even though it's not a meat, but it's commonly.

• 26:53Chris Williamson?

  Side of a meat.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Right. Tons of rib eyes. And are you susceptible? You know, what's your body composition? What's your exercise look like? Are you consuming sufficient fibre?

• 27:05Chris Williamson?

  Well, let's say, let's say that someone is not a total renegade with this. And they realise that they shouldn't be eating super fatty cuts of meat, that they shouldn't be cooking it in tonnes and tonnes of butter, that they shouldn't be having bags and bags and bags of bacon. There is a movement at the moment, guys like Brian Johnson, who are mTOR, activating the mTOR pathway is a nightmare. I avoid meat, red meat specifically. There is concerns from the FDA. There is concerns from all manner of people who are experts in, in some circles with regards to diet. That say, red meat is something that you should have once a month at the absolute most. Why? What is it that you're seeing that they're not?

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Well, you mentioned.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  It was the first one you mentioned, oh, mTOR stimulation. Well, that, there's a difference between acute and chronic inflammation or mTOR stimulation. And the acute inflammation or stimulation of mTOR doesn't seem to be a problem. And that would be the same protein in general, wouldn't be specific to red meat. Any protein would stimulate mTOR. And the problem that you get is, is as we age, we become anabolically resistant at some point or less and less anabolically.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  What would you sensitive? And a lot of people as they age suffer from, they don't eat enough protein and they suffer from sarcopenia. And that can be a bigger problem for mortality risk than consuming red meat, or any meat there, you know, for that matter. And I think if I'm citing the right person, I think Kevin Hall has done a lot of research on that, and is the, and opposes that theory. That theory, that longevity theory, I think that comes a little bit from Sinclair, a little bit from Walter Longo, those folks, you know, it's a lot of mouse studies, you have no human evidence, no, no human outcome trials showing that that is going to limit lifespan. The problem with a lot of that research is it's usually

• 29:10Speaker 01

  influenced by the healthy user bias. People who tend to eat more red meat tend to smoke more, drink more, weigh more, exercise less. And they eat all the things that are associated with it, you know, the bacon double cheeseburgers with the bun and the soda pop and the fries. And, you know, and the dessert with that and maybe a couple of beers. That's obviously, they try and control for that in some of the epidemiology, it's imperfect. And they try and stratify the risk based on other health markers. But for the most part, again, as part of a healthy diet, keeping your, you know, watching your LDLs. I guess the only other concern would be cancer. And that you mentioned that World Health Organization,

• 29:54Speaker 01

  you may have mentioned, and IARC. I find it interesting now, we've got this, this big blowback on aspartame. IARC came out and said that aspartame was associated with cancer risk.

• 30:04Chris Williamson?

  What's your read on that?

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Well, my read is that they study, they look at mouse studies and with huge doses. And it's not their job to look at doses. And so

• 30:16Chris Williamson?

  What was the, do you know what the relative, how much you're a human, is it, would I have had to have consumed three and a half cases of Dr. Pepper?

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Something like 800 cokes or something.

• 30:25Chris Williamson?

  A day?

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, to get that level of aspartame. But the point of that story is, is that, and none of the nutrition PhDs, which is the people that I usually turn my ear towards when things like this come out, none of them consider this to be a concern. We do have plenty of human trials, randomized control trials, showing evidence that when you replace Sugar sweetened beverages with diet sodas, you see weight loss and therefore improved health outcomes.

• 30:51Chris Williamson?

  Right, let's just dig in this for one second. This is something that came up with a bunch of different stories I've heard from you. A lot of the time, people will demonize the thing which is seemingly less natural. Got a name like aspartame instead of sugar. But what they don't realize is that the weight loss from switching from sugar to aspartame is so significant that tons and tons of downstream benefits for health come from that. And it seems like the concern from aspartame has to be at dosages so insane that you would essentially be hooked up to an IV, like Warren Buffett's nightmare.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:32Chris Williamson?

  Just pumping it into your veins.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  It's nothing for anybody to worry about. You hit on an interesting point there when I talk about the importance of the overall dietary pattern and then your general physical health. Weight loss, I said this on a podcast not too long ago, and it was clipped and thrown onto the internet, just a little clip of it. And I said that 95% of health benefits are realized strictly from weight loss itself, irrespective of diet. And I referenced the McDonald's diet. We have multiple studies now, the McDonald's diet, the Twinkie diet, the 7-Eleven diet, where when people eat even a lot of quote unquote crappy food, junk food, fast food,

• 32:14Speaker 01

  when they're able to maintain a calorie deficit and lose weight, they see decreases in all of their biomarkers. They see lowered cholesterol, lowered blood sugar, lowered blood pressure, and weight loss itself, we know is associated with decreased cancer risk. So that should be the primary goal, weight loss, obviously those kinds of diets long term, particularly if they're high in saturated fats and maybe your LDL starts to go up eventually, potentially if you're not exercising or if you lose a significant amount of lean muscle mass because you're not lifting weights. So there's a whole host of problems. At the end of that, I said I would never recommend a McDonald's diet. That gets clipped out.

• 32:50Chris Williamson?

  Internet, internet, please leave that bit in.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, which we've touched on already, satiety being the key of the reason for that is that. The best diet is the one you'll follow. And hunger is the biggest reason why people will fail on a diet. That's why I keep going back to satiety.

• 33:09Chris Williamson?

  When you're looking at the highly processed, very calorie dense foods, that if you were to do the McDonald's diet, and it is possible to lose weight on it, I think it was 1800 calories, 1850, something like that.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  You'd be very hungry.

• 33:22Chris Williamson?

  Precisely. Because think about how dense those calories are. Think about how little food you get for those 1800 calories. I mean, it's probably a medium meal, maybe a large meal with a Coke, a full fat Coke would be.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  It wouldn't be a lot of food.

• 33:41Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  It'd be, like you say, maybe a cheeseburger, probably. I think he had to eat half of this, half of that to get through the day.

• 33:49Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  But nonetheless, the point is that the weight loss is the primary goal. And we see this with a lot of diets, a lot of diet tribes. We see this with keto. And my goal here isn't to shit on anybody's diet plan. There's many paths to the same destination. And I believe they're all

• 34:10Speaker 01

  very individualistic. And the best path is the one that seems the least restrictive. So you can adhere to it long term. And some people like to lower their carbs. Some people like to eliminate. I guess we should just say there's, there's three paths. There's not many paths, there's three paths to dieting. All of them result in a calorie deficit. One is calorie restriction. That's where you're counting calories and you're checking the labels on the, and you're weighing and measuring food and you're using your little, you know, your, your computer or your phone to track your calories. That's, that's one method of, of controlling calories.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  The other one is time restriction. And that's, you're just going to eat like with a 16, eight. Or maybe that doesn't work for you. You gotta go to an 18, six or a 24 until you just can't eat enough calories in your window to, to, to gain weight. And you start losing weight. Uh, the other ones would be dietary restriction. And that's where you start eliminating foods. That would be a keto, get rid of carbs. It would be a vegan, get rid of meats. Uh, that would be a paleo, get rid of everything that was, you know, created after 1960 or something like that.

• 35:12Chris Williamson?

  Gravitarian, everything that didn't fall to the ground at its own accord.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so those are your options and you pick one, uh, if you may, or, uh, you know, find something that works. Or a combination of the two, the intermittent fasting keto diet got, became real popular as a one-two punch for a while. Uh, but how sustainable are they for you? And, and different people have different long-term results, but the research shows none of them are any better than the other long-term.

• 35:38Chris Williamson?

  Is there anything special about intermittent fasting? Is there some super secret sauce that gets activated after a particular amount of time? Does the increased ghrelin release, is the hunger signal hormesis response? What does the sign say here?

• 35:57Speaker 01

  In so much as it allows you to maintain a calorie deficit and you lose weight, it can be a healthy diet plan. That's going to be very individualistic. Some people can skip breakfast or skip dinner and not feel, uh, as though that's too restrictive. And can adhere to that diet for some period of time. But we, there's been a lot of things claimed about intermittent fasting, some special autophagy benefit, or some special, uh, reduction in mTOR signaling, or some satiety benefit, which isn't consistent across the population. You see, uh, it's very individualistic. We don't see any, um, extra benefits above the calorie restriction itself. And we see in the research that continuous calorie restriction and intermittent fasting perform very much the same

• 36:41Speaker 01

  in terms of weight loss and health benefits long-term.

• 36:44Chris Williamson?

  Where is the magic fairy dust claims about intermittent fasting coming from then? If you can't find it. And there are people out there who say that it's happening. What are they reading that you're not? Or what are they seeing that's incorrect?

• 37:03Speaker 01

  That's the problem with the research. You can, there's peer reviewed published research to support just about any position on any nutrient or diet. There's a evidence hierarchy that you're familiar with. Way down at the bottom is those mouse studies and Petri dishes and anecdotes. And then you step up one step, maybe, and you've got expert advice, which even that one's challenging because expert at what? You get somebody who's a chiropractor talking about nutrition that's not necessarily within their domain-specific expertise. We see a lot of that. The nutrition PhDs take particular offense to that. Just because somebody has an MD or a PhD after their name

• 37:48Speaker 01

  doesn't mean it's in nutrition. Next up from that, you're going to look at probably epidemiology, research on large populations of people, and then randomized controlled trials above that, particularly ones that are performed on humans where you can adjust certain variables. And then you get up to systematic reviews or meta-analyses where they take, you know, they cluster together the body of evidence that qualifies for the criterion, and they try and come up with something that is a little more representative of what all of the research suggests, not a cherry picked study. And then beyond that even, we've got professionals that will review all of that and

• 38:30Speaker 01

  make, you know, have a position paper, like the International Society of Sports Nutrition, or, yeah. Because those people are probably more qualified to review those systematic reviews. And there's, you know, obviously, there's the Cochrane Collaboration. I think they're in 51 countries with thousands of scientists that, and they're kind of recognizes the gold standard for being the least influenced potentially by maybe biases, etc. So there's different quality of information. I mean, go too far off the rails, but some people will find, you know, cherry pick is the word we use, a particular study that acted to their benefit. Sometimes,

• 39:11Speaker 01

  I'll just use keto as an example. When you control for calories and protein, You see equivalent outcomes amongst people who do high carb or low carb. You know, we saw that in the Diet Fitz trial out of Stanford. There was over 600 people that were over a year long. And they did low carb and high carb and didn't find any significant difference in satiety, weight loss, glycemia. They didn't see any difference in any of those things. And interestingly enough, Gary Taubes research arm was part of that, that study. So over and over again, when you look at the body of evidence, randomized controlled trials in humans in particular, and the systematic reviews of those, you just, you don't see any difference.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  You see that the trends are that it's very individualistic. And even within a particular study, when you show some sort of measurable result, you've got a lot of inter-individual variation. You've got people who didn't have any result or, you know, you've got people who lost a lot of weight, you've got people who gained a lot of weight. And what the average is might not appeal or apply to you as an individual. So, and I hate saying all this, well, I'm on both sides of the fence on this. I like that the individual now knows they have options and there, and there isn't a best diet and they're not required to go keto or if they want to get results. It's unnecessary, even if they have type 2 diabetes. The weight loss itself is the driver of insulin sensitivity, not the fact that they

• 40:41Speaker 01

  eliminated carbs. And we've had studies done where people with type 2 diabetes did a high carb and a low carb diet, they had equivalent outcomes. So I want people to have as many options as possible. That gets us to, now their eyes have glossed over and like, well, what do I do? And that's where I come in with some very specific recommendations, which, you know, then I got to get feedback and make those adjustments because the general audience, the general population, they don't have all this, this isn't their business. They have, they have a different business. They have a different field of expertise. They have a family, they have kids, they have a career, they have, they just, at the end of the day, just say, just tell me exactly what to eat. And so I give them a very specific diet plan. I told them exactly what to eat, how many ounces

• 41:25Speaker 01

  of this, how many, based on the feedback that they give me from my questionnaire. Uh, but then we have to, you know, tune in and listen, you know, how do you feel? Do you feel satiated? Um, there is a, um, weight control, uh, what's it called? Uh, registry that has tracked, uh, successful dieters, over 10,000 dieters, uh, going back a couple of decades who have lost over 66 pounds and maintained the weight loss for over five years. And there were some key things, uh, some common things. It's kind of like the millionaire next door. What are, what are things that, that these people do consistently? Success leaves clues. And we saw

• 42:09Speaker 01

  that 98% of these people went on a diet. They had a plan. Okay. And it doesn't matter which diet. These people went on many different diets. I have vegan clients. I have carnivore clients. I have keto clients. I have vertical diet clients. It's their personal preference. Uh, 98% went on a diet. They had a plan. So that does, that is important. Um, 95% of them increased their activity level, walking being the number one activity level. Uh, and we can get into how important and effective that is. Uh, 78% of them ate breakfast every morning. And that's not to say you have to eat breakfast, but it's certainly not to say that intermittent fasting skipping breakfast is required to lose weight when the vast majority of the people in, in the largest,

• 42:52Speaker 01

  longest, most successful study demonstrates that 78% ate breakfast. And I don't care if you do or don't. My daughter doesn't like breakfast. She's never hungry in the morning. My son eats breakfast. It's very personal. It's very individualistic. We can talk about some, where breakfast might be important. Uh, but for now, we'll, we'll go on to the next one with 75% of people, um, weigh themselves regularly. Again, that which gets measured gets improved. And I have come across clients that said they have a uncomfortable relationship with the scale. And that's generally because they let the daily fluctuations influence their mood. When you should be adding up the week, weigh in every day, add up to seven days, divide it by seven to get a weekly average.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  And then compare that weekly average to the other weekly averages throughout the month. That's a better way to to manage the scale. That sounds good in theory, but in practice, uh, my wife's been dieting for years. Uh, and when she steps on that scale, it will determine her mood. Uh, and on that note, I said that that I coined a term some years ago, compliance is the science. The best diet's the one you'll follow. So I try and create a diet program that people comply with, something that become it's. You want to cover the book here. It's simple, sensible and sustainable. Okay. Something becomes part of a lifestyle.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  And so one of the things that, uh, uh, one of the things that the research shows us is that meal prep, not shilling for my meal prep company. But prepping meals, uh, whether I prep or you prep, uh, we see this in the bodybuilding, figure physique bikini industry going back decades. As long as, as that industry has been in existence, uh, those people, uh, those people, me, we, uh, that's my, that's my brethren. That's my home bodybuilding. So I came up in this industry. We pack our meals into Tupperwares and we throw them in our six pack bag and we, you know, that's, we've got everything we need for the day. Meal prepping is one of the number one behaviors that leads to long-term success.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  And if you prep your meals, whether twice a week or, you know, every morning for the day. And you know exactly, and it's measured and weighed exactly what you're supposed to eat, even Weight Watchers, very successful. Uh, as long as you adhere to it and consistently eat the meals that they recommend. Any meal prep, uh, provides, uh, a greater opportunity for success because then you're not randomly opening their refrigerator when you're hungry.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  And grabbing what you're hungry for, we call that food reward and end up over consuming it. Or it's lunchtime. Oh my God, I'm famished. You get in the car, you drive to your favorite, you know, whatever you're hungry for. Fast food place possibly at that, at that moment, you tend to over consume those foods. So what I try and do is is instill behaviors. The meal prep is a is a big one. We talked about satiety and we have a toolbox that we can use to help us improve our satiety. So we're not hungry all the time. And it's somewhat effective. It's things like increasing protein intake, increasing fiber intake, eating more whole foods and fewer ultra-processed foods, drinking more fluids with meals, which is where diet soda

• 46:08Speaker 01

  and iced tea can come in very handy as well as water. Helps fill the stomach up and it, you know, the the ruge of the stomach expands and sends the signal that you're that you're full and that satiety feeling is very desirable in a meal, whether it's acquired through a massive amount of calories or just a hard large volume of food that may not yield as many calories, including fluids.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  Beyond that, mindful eating, you know, not sitting there in front of a TV or an iPhone and and and shoveling in food until all of a sudden the the plate's gone.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Eating more protein and eating protein first in the meal tends to help with satiety. And there may be a few in there I forgot, but but that's kind of our toolbox that we like to utilize, encourage our clients to, because as soon as they get hungry, you're going to start losing that battle. Willpower is not a good strategy to overcome hunger. You'll lose that battle every time.

• 47:08Chris Williamson?

  Why is it the case, given this many thousand person, very successful trial study?

• 47:18Chris Williamson?

  Why is it the case that diets fail then? And what's the percentage success of a typical diet?

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Great. Well, it's interesting. Something like six out of seven diars lose weight. Losing weight isn't isn't hard. Keeping it off is hard. So long-term dietary adherence is what we like to measure. And the main reason that people regain the weight, as I mentioned, is hunger. They just stop adhering to the diet. They go back to their old habits. They start over-consuming and generally that food is the ultra-processed, hyper-palatable foods.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  And that is where.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  None of us are any more successful than the other. This is a whole conversation unto itself, really, that all of us in our diet tribes, you know, I have a named diet, the vertical diet, you know, there's a whole host of people out there that claim that they're, whether it's intermittent fasting or keto, or you name it. None of us are any more successful than the other long term. There's been tons of studies on thousands of people for a year, two years.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  None of us can claim to have the answer to this problem. It's much bigger than all of us. And I think some of these ultra-processed, hyper-palatable food manufacturers are probably just laughing because we're all sitting around the table. There was an old Warner Brothers, was it Warner Brothers? It was a cartoon when I was a kid. The ants were fighting over a cake, and there was a cherry on top, and you had the red ants and the black ants were up there, and they were drawing around the cherry to see who was going to keep the cherry, and they'd erase it, and the other guy'd erase it, and they got in this great big fight. And then the picnickers came back, picked up their cake, and walked away while these guys were all fighting. I feel like those ants in this war on obesity.

• 49:08Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, do you feel like there is a battle going on between the designers of food and the people who want to remain healthy?

• 49:17Speaker 01

  That battle is for money. That battle is for investors. That battle is to sell more food. That's what their job is as a corporation. And they'll design and sell and market and in the most effective way to, for their business to profit, not in the most effective way to help people with their long-term health and to, you know, stave off obesity. So that, I can't speak to that. I'm just saying that while we're arguing about the best diet...

• 49:48Speaker 01

  It doesn't seem to matter. We all have our own list of testimonials. You know, I'll say something about the carbohydrate insulin model, but I'll go on to Jason Fung's YouTube, and there's a whole bunch of people talking about how when they cut out carbs, they lost weight and they feel great. But in fact, everybody has testimonials. The vegan community has testimonials. The carnivore community has testimonials. I post testimonials all the time. Doesn't seem to matter. That hasn't had an impact on our obesity crisis. The cause of our, none of us are solving the cause of our obesity crisis, which is access to Jeep affordable ultra-processed, hyper-palatable foods. So it's bigger than all of us, because

• 50:32Speaker 01

  none of us have any influence on that whatsoever. That, that, those companies that are manufacturing and distributing this food, that's going to take a larger intervention like it did with smoking.

• 50:43Chris Williamson?

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• 51:28Chris Williamson?

  investment for your health, try AG1 today by going to drinkag1.com/modernd wisdom. You'll get a year's free supply of vitamin D, five free AG1 travel packs, plus that 90-day money-back guarantee. That's drinkag1.com/modernd wisdom. So why is it the case, if what you've said with regards to the vertical diet is accurate, why is it not the case that the World Health Organization and the FDA are in alignment with this? Like, why hasn't the FDA or the government updated or changed their recommendations in line with this?

• 52:04Speaker 01

  I don't know what recommendations you're necessarily specifically talking about. If you're talking about the dietary guidelines, those dietary guidelines are pretty good. Uh, they are, I think people bastardized them when they went low fat. These uh, food companies came in and made these high sugar uh foods, but it's not the sugar. It's not the fat. It's the combination of all of those sugar, fat, salt. It it it's a combination. That's where your pastries and and cakes and all these things come from. They're not, it's not just sugar. Nobody's mainlining bags of sugar. It's not how this works.

• 52:36Chris Williamson?

  There's someone, there is someone out there that's doing that. Sorry. Have you seen the videos of these uncontacted tribesmen and they give them cheesecake for the first time? Have you ever seen this?

• 52:48Speaker 01

  I haven't seen it.

• 52:48Chris Williamson?

  People should, people, after this episode has finished, not now, uh, go and check out videos of uncontacted tribesmen.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:57Chris Williamson?

  Eating cheesecake and obviously.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Their eyes just.

• 53:00Chris Williamson?

  Oh, from an orification. So the design of the texture of food, the the the combination of the carbs and the fat. And if you think about it, I learned about orification a few years ago and it blew my mind. Um.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  I learned about it in high school. I'm not sure exactly what you're.

• 53:15Chris Williamson?

  I I didn't, I look, I'm I'm British. We have a lot of fish and chips that.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  I was teasing.

• 53:21Chris Williamson?

  Poor orification.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Sounds like something to me. Sounds something else other than.

• 53:24Chris Williamson?

  It's, come on, it's a professional conversation. Legitimate scientific information about diet.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 53:29Chris Williamson?

  Dragging us into the gutter. Orification, the design of the texture of food. Think about ancestrally what you'd have typically been able to have if you were eating anything. It would have been.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:38Chris Williamson?

  One texture. It's slimy meat. It is uh berries, which kind of, if you get them at the right ripeness, can kind of have a couple of textures, a little bit of crunch on the outside. But if you actually think about some of the most hyper palatable foods, it's not just the flavor. It's not just the actual content. It's the texture in your mouth. And this combination of crispy or crunchy with smooth is unbelievably novel.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:03Chris Williamson?

  Oreos, got the crunch on the outside and that sort of smooth on the inside. French fries, sort of fluffy potato inside and the crunch that's well cooked on the outside. Cheesecake, exactly the same.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:15Chris Williamson?

  It's so novel. And then when you layer on top, it's not just that. It's the spike of the sugar as it hits your tongue. And then after that, it's the fat as well on top of this. And yes, sure enough, you have these guys who've just been eating. Macaques or whatever they've been having for the last

• 54:30Speaker 01

  You know what I immediately think of when you say that they tried it for the first time and they were just like wow. I immediately think of the fact that that's what children experience. At their initial consumption and they no longer, we no longer experience that. It's normal to us. When we eat those foods, it's almost expected. That's, that's what we're drawn to and we don't have that same response, but we just, we keep going back. To those foods, it's, you can't win that battle. We aren't winning that battle. We're losing that battle. And I guess that kind of. Brings us back to, you know, why isn't the World Health Organization's other folks. They make some minor. Inroads, I think they got.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Cereal companies to reduce the sugar, you know, where respect to kids, they got soda pops out of high schools and things like that. Very small.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Places like Mexico, they, they started taxing sugar laden beverages, but then they just, they go to an alternate source is what happens. They tend to, you know, they might just go to Kool-Aid instead of Coca-Cola. And that's generally what happens. It's, I'm not suggesting that I have a solution. I'm just saying, I know what the problem is. We all know what the problem is. It's no secret. Even people who suffer from obesity or overweight, it's not like they're confused about the fact that the foods that they're eating. Are causing that problem. It's just the fact that it's just, it's too good. Too affordable, too available.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  My wife grew up in, in Samoa. She was born and raised in, in Western Samoa, which is British Samoa. Time she was born, since the time she's about six years old. She's got 12 brothers and sisters, all older than her. And they grew all of their own food. They raised goats and chickens. They would go out in the ocean and harvest whatever they could get from the sea. They grew taro root. They had pineapple. And they would sell a lot of that at the marketplace, a very vibrant marketplace in Western Samoa. Every week, you see three generations of family, from the kids to the parents to the grandparents. At marketplace, selling whatever it is they were able to, to grow and, and put together for the weeks to, to make money.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  They didn't have any obesity in their family. Grew all their own food, ate all their own whole foods. At some point, when she was about six years old, their whole family moved to American Samoa. And in American Samoa, they had food stamps. And they had big, huge stores with white flour, sugar, seed oils, salt. And those were the most affordable things to buy, obviously. There's cheapest to make and ship over there. And that became the foundation of their diet. They stopped growing their own food. The marketplace in American Samoa is laughable in comparison. Nobody cooks and raises and cooks their own food. They became what I said, food rich instead of food poor. They had food stamps and they had availability.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  And they started consuming all of those ultra-processed, hyper-palatable foods. All of her family, the vast majority of them, ended up gaining a significant amount of weight. And her father ultimately died from complications of diabetes, the black feet and the whole nine yards. So it's, I'm not suggesting I have a solution. It's pretty obvious what happened, what has happened. We just didn't have access to these, these kinds of foods in as conveniently as this back in the 1950s. Because people always show those beach pictures in the 50s. Yeah, these are super popular at the moment. Yeah. Yeah, really exciting, really popular. And none of those people are fat. Or they show them in the, the 40s, walking, you know,

• 58:03Speaker 01

  bustling up and down the streets of New York and there's no fat people. And it just didn't have access to this food environment that we have today. It's a calorie problem and it's the ultra-processed foods that we're over-consuming. So I don't, I mean, we're doing the best we can. I, I don't, anymore, I don't claim to be able to solve anything other than the clients that I'm working with. You know, I try and put out good information, but we're all losing this battle miserably. Obesity has, you know, our weight has continued to climb, insulin resistance has continued to climb, type 2 diabetes. I don't, and I don't see a solution in the horizon because nobody's working on the actual problem.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  There's a lot of money involved in that. It probably would take some sort of governmental intervention on a big scale. And I got a lot of blowback from this when I brought this up at a podcast previous. I got a tag saying, "Oh, it's personal responsibility." And I'm like, "Well, yes, it is, but how's that working out?" You know? At some point, we're gonna have to find a better solution. And I yield to people who are, you know, a lot smarter and a lot more connected than me to try and drive that agenda. But that's where we're at.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  How legit are the Blue Zone studies? A lot of problems with the Blue Zone studies. One in particular is the lack of verifiable birth certificates. A lot of these, a lot of these people would assume their parents- It's a registry issue. It's not a diet issue. It's a registry issue. And there was a study done, I forget the name of the individual, but I actually included a reference to that in my, I have an ebook, a vertical diet ebook, where I've updated that periodically because I can, I can add, it's on version 3.0 currently and soon to be 4.0 on my website. But those are the kinds of links to research that I supply in there and people ask me, what about Blue Zones? I've gotten this question. I've probably answered over 100,000 DMs in the last six or seven years.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  And a lot of those questions are the same, which is kind of what creates the foundation of, of, of the information that I provide. I know that this is what people want to know. This is what they ask. And so I pool those into most common questions and I endeavor to answer those so that, that they're covered. And then I refer people to those answers. But one thing, yeah, we have a lack of verifiable. There is a little cherry picking going on with those studies. I think that some of the places that were left out, Iceland, even in California, the difference between, say, Seventh Day Adventists, is that the group that, that's vegan, that's in the,

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  that's in the Blue Zones? And I think right up the street, we've got Mormons who consume significantly more meat, but have the other lifestyle characteristics. They don't smoke, they don't drink, they exercise a lot, they're not overweight, have similar lifespans. And so the Blue Zones are tough. I think they make solid recommendations in terms of overall dietary patterns. But the idea that we can put a lot of weight in, and those diets vary quite a bit. There's meat consumption in the, in the Mediterranean diet. There's meat, meat consumption in the Okinawans, ham in particular. The Blue Zones was, I think, kind of an effort to go, to point more towards vegan.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  And in fact, a lot of those, those, those areas aren't vegan. A lot of meat, some meats in their diet, which again gets us back to dietary pattern. Fruits and vegetables are very important. I think it's-

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Hong Kong, the highest red meat consumers in the world have some of the longest lifespan. But they eat a ton of fruits and vegetables and they eat pretty lean meats and they don't suck down cubes of butter. So, you know, all of that matters.

• 1:01:54Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the commonalities, either in terms of lifestyle, movement, diet, social life, that you do think the blue zones do get right?

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think they get all of that right, other than than trying to demonize a particular food item. I think they get all of that right. I think that they have better sleep, they have better body mass index, BMI, which is not the most accurate measure. Obviously, over muscled people will look to be fat on BMI, but they have, they move more in terms of the number of steps that they accumulate every day. And you hit the nail on the head there, too. They have better, I think, social interaction with family, all of those things. What's interesting is that a lot of these zones were very poor, which lent itself well, of course, not being

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  very well documented and acquiring their parents' information so that they could continue to receive any governmental assistance that was associated with that.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  But usually, lower socioeconomic populations have less access to medical care and therefore maybe a shorter lifespan. But that amongst all those other characteristics, that's probably less important.

• 1:03:17Chris Williamson?

  What do you make of grounding and the usefulness of that in general overall health?

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know that it's meaningful. There's a lot of things. I try and stick with the big rocks and I'm cautious about.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  So a lot of folks more recently, and I don't mention any names, but they're popular folks that'll get into a lot of, they might dive into plausible or possible reasons, biomechanical, you know, and the biochemistry, and try and explain why something should work or could work, but they take these giant logical leaps and make these outcome oriented claims about things that they just aren't meaningful when compared to the things that really matter. The sleep, maintaining the weight, exercising regularly, you know, you said the social, stress reduction, those kinds of things, a healthy diet. Everything else, I kind of put it into like a 99% and then the 1%, everything else kind

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  of goes into that little 1%. A lot of it's placebo. This happens a lot in the, in pain and pain rehabilitation. I talk a lot about this in my book. A lot of that stuff, I say generally speaking, things that are done to you or for you are never as effective as things you do for yourself. Active recovery, movement, right? Actually getting your heart rate up, exercising, lifting weights. As opposed to massage. As opposed to massage. I'm not saying massage is not beneficial, I'm just saying that in comparison, this isn't me, this is what the research suggests. To quote Greg Knuckles on it, he said that for, this is a study on lower back pain, 95%

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  of which resolves itself spontaneously within six to eight weeks. So any intervention that somebody with pain submits themselves to chiropractics, physical therapy, electric stem, gua sha, dry needling, I mean, the list goes on and on and on. Inversion table. Anything, wearing a copper bracelet. It's coming along for the ride. Anything is coming along for the ride. They will attribute their spontaneous recovery to whatever intervention they're participating in at the time. Oh my God, that worked for me, it was fantastic, it's worked for thousands of other people. Greg's words were, to quote, he said, "Maybe it's better than nothing."

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  But it pales in comparison to any kind of movement. It's not an indictment on physical therapists or chiropractors. It's that they should be facilitators of movement. A good physical therapist, Professor Michael Ray, the folks at Barbell Medicine, who talk about the BioPsychoSocial Method, which I think came from Laura Marmosely's work, Explain Pain, out of Australia. They're on the front lines of this, where manual therapy, not as effective as movement. It's a facilitator of movement. If someone by touching you can distract you from that pain signal, from the

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  brain to the location that you're experiencing pain, call it placebo, call it distraction therapy, and that then allows you to move with less inhibition. Greg calls it kinesophobic. When people have pain, they stop moving, which is exactly the opposite of what you want to do. You want to begin moving as early as possible and as much as possible with as little pain as possible, and that's what's going to help facilitate the recovery. So I didn't mean to get too far off track there, but that's where I always end up when people talk about, this could be true of ice baths, contrast showers, and I'm like, great, if it makes you feel good, do it by all means. If those things, you know, give you an emotional, or

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  there's just no evidence that they provide a significant physiologically measurable benefit.

• 1:07:11Chris Williamson?

  One of the other big movers, sleep. What is the relationship between sleep and weight loss?

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, a few things. One, when you don't get sufficient sleep, you have increased ghrelin release, which makes you hungry or makes you want to eat more. You also have compromised insulin sensitivity, which makes it a little easier for you to gain weight.

• 1:07:34Chris Williamson?

  Sorry, you've mentioned insulin sensitivity a couple of times today, like just high level.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, we would say, say prediabetic or diabetic. It's that when you eat foods, your blood sugars elevate and there's no place to store them because you're... Over fat, your fat stores are full and so you you can't put those there. Your muscles maybe don't have sufficient muscle mass to store that there and then that stays elevated for an extended period of time.

• 1:07:59Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay, understood. So, sleep, weight loss.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Sleep does affect insulin levels as well. We also find that people who don't get sufficient sleep, when they start losing weight, they might lose a disproportionate amount of muscle as opposed to fat. The body becomes stingy at preserving the fat. And so those are all things that can happen. Other, other, just being awake more hours in the day gives you another opportunity to get hungry and eat. Sleep through one meal and you're probably better off.

• 1:08:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, wow.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  Whole host of benefits from getting sufficient sleep.

• 1:08:39Chris Williamson?

  Would you say that sleep is more important than cardio for fat loss?

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  Well, I did put it this way once. I said, if you're waking up at 4 a.m. to do your fasted cardio after only five hours of sleep, you're stepping over $100 bills to pick up nickels. And that's been something I've said for many years. If somebody had, to me, I would, I would do the cardio later. Or I don't even really recommend cardio at all to most of my clients because it's a pretty significant departure from their standard lifestyle and it might not be something they enjoy. It might not be very sustainable and we see it has diminishing returns over time as your body kind of adapts to that stimulus and reduce, becomes more efficient and reduces the calorie it burns. I focus on non-exercise. And another thing is, is that too much exercise activity, particularly aggressive exercise

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  activity, not shitting on any of these forums, if the best exercise is the one you'll do, if you enjoy doing it, do it. But if somebody goes, starts crushing themselves, I call it battle ropes and burpees, thinking that they're going to burn calories just, you know, for fat loss, a phenomenon called compensation takes over where you just go home and sit more and eat more because you're hungry. You know, you're tired.

• 1:09:48Chris Williamson?

  And you earned it. You just trained well.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  Hey, and you can burn 300 calories in one of those battle rope and burpee episodes and you can go home and have one piece of bread and negate all of your, all of your gains or losses, we should say. But I'm cautious about prescribing cardio for weight loss for all of those reasons.

• 1:10:08Chris Williamson?

  Prescribe an extra hour's sleep instead?

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  I'd prescribe an extra hour's sleep and more non-exercise activity. I just think that the barriers to entry. Having to come home, get in your car, drive to the gym, do your cardio and we're too busy. Especially if you've got a family and a career, that's the first thing that gets sacrificed in that scenario. That's why I love the 10 minute walks because they're more convenient, more sustainable. I can attach them to an existing behavior, which as we know increases the likelihood that that new behavior will become a habit. They can be done anywhere at any time.

• 1:10:39Chris Williamson?

  Let's say it's the first time that somebody is hearing about walking as a significant performance enhancer.

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:47Chris Williamson?

  What do we need to know? Frequency, structure, why is it working? What's the best way that you found to integrate it? How do you stick to it?

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Well, we see dramatic improvements in health span simply from going from 2,000 steps a day to 5,000 steps a day. We see a significant decline in, in blood pressure, improvement in heart rate, all the health markers. It also improves satiety of all things, just walking somewhere in that, I want to say about five or 6,000 steps a day. You can get about 1,300 steps from a 10 minute walk. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that moving periodically throughout the day, say 10 minutes, three times a day, is more effective than 30 minutes once a day on, on all cause mortality as well.

• 1:11:34Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  Well, it seems that the sitting for an extended period of time actually does some damage and moving more frequently throughout the day, getting your heart rate up, and even if it's five minutes out of every hour while you're at work, you know, they've got those standing desks or the bike desks and those kinds of things and just movement in general and then getting sufficient steps in. Now, we do see differences in the intensity of that. You should, they should be deliberate. The heart rate should elevate a bit. I mean, we're not jogging. You don't necessarily have to, to be out of breath. But we see the folks that can get their heart rate elevated just a little bit. You stay in, you know, zone two, I think everybody's talking about now is not such that you can't still talk while you're doing it.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  So it should be deliberate.

• 1:12:22Chris Williamson?

  It's tough to get to zone two walking, zone two whilst walking.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  Like a 4.0.

• 1:12:26Chris Williamson?

  It's a quick pace.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  It's a decent pace. It's deliberate and it should be. You're going to get better benefits from it.

• 1:12:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I don't, I mean, I'm not cardiovascularly even. Even remotely competent, but for me, and I were a whoop, I absolutely love it. I would need to be weight vested or I would need to be moving at one hell of a clin.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:49Chris Williamson?

  For me, like speed walking, I would look silly to get to properly get into.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  That's the neat thing about exercise in general and improving your health span is that when you go from what's described as the bottom quartile into say the 50% or above, that's where you see the majority of your health benefits.

• 1:13:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  So I think something is better than nothing. And then I try and make that something into something that's sustainable and easy to do.

• 1:13:19Chris Williamson?

  On the walk, this is something that I realized while I was talking to a friend, friend moved into this gorgeous new apartment in Austin on West 7th Street. It's on the 23rd floor. He's got view on three sides. He can see the sunrise and the sunset. It's amazing. If he wants to go for a walk, it takes him seven minutes to get downstairs because there's only three elevators for 1500 people that live in this apartment block and so on and so forth. And I was like, dude, like I love this place. And then where I live, I am, as soon as I put my Crocs on, I am about 15 seconds from a park.

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:58Chris Williamson?

  And it's the first time I live, parents' house is like that back home. My house in Newcastle is kind of similar. And then this one's by far the closest. And it's such a hack and it's an unseen cost.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:10Chris Williamson?

  Of vertical living, I think. I mean, you know, I can go up and down the stairs and you could take the stairs for 23 flights.

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  You could, you could do 10 minutes of stairs.

• 1:14:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, which would be great, but I mean, you're seeing a gray brick, dry stone.

• 1:14:25Speaker 01

  Another thing, getting exposed to sunlight, that's a whole nother psychological benefit, of course, of course. As far as the walk goes, you know, I've traveled, I've been in. Twelve countries and all fifty states and over two hundred seminars in the last five years. And so I was in hotel to hotel, airport to airport. I use the opportunity to walk from security to the gate as a ten minute walk. I use the opportunity at baggage claim. I'm walking around circles while people are standing there waiting for the baggage thing to go.

• 1:14:50Chris Williamson?

  Such a good hack.

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  They're looking at me like I'm an idiot.

• 1:14:52Chris Williamson?

  My favorite thing, especially in airports, is get to the gate, even if I'm an hour early, which I'm not usually.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  And walk.

• 1:14:59Chris Williamson?

  But have a look. Okay, is it, is it gonna leave early? Is it gonna leave? This is the actual gate. The gate's not down. Some secret escalator. There's a bunch of these in London Heathrow.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:08Chris Williamson?

  Okay, right. I know where I need to go. And I'll just, if you do laps, if you do laps that are ten minutes, you're never gonna miss your flight because every, you know, you're never more than five minutes away from the gate.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  And sitting before you're gonna be sitting seems like an awful waste of time because you're gonna get on that plane, you're gonna be sitting for two, three, five, seven hours.

• 1:15:26Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  A few more things about walks.

• 1:15:29Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  I like to describe them post meal. They're twice as effective as metformin for preventing or reversing type two diabetes because of their impact on postprandial glycemia, the after meal blood sugar elevation and duration. Your muscles will uptake the glucose from that meal into glycogen in the absence of need of insulin. So you get less sustained elevated insulin. Additionally, it helps your digestion, just the, yep, just the musculature, the enzymatic action and the muscular contraction. All of those things are of great benefit. I also find that it helps a lot with people that are trying to recover from things like

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  hips or knees, just to get lots of movement. It's a.

• 1:16:16Chris Williamson?

  But it's also a cue, right? You're gonna have at least two meals a day, sometimes three. Okay, so if you manage to get a morning walk upon waking, which I absolutely adore, it's the most reliable part of a morning routine that's waxed and waned as my workload has changed. That has not changed. So for me, wake up element in water because I really enjoy the way that that makes me feel, then walk 10, 15 minutes, get back. Okay. If I walk after the next two meals, there's my three. And if I actually end up having three meals a day, okay, that's four. Something else that I noticed when wearing a continuous glucose

• 1:16:53Chris Williamson?

  monitor was that I could see in the data what was happening to my blood glucose.

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:17:02Chris Williamson?

  Whilst going on that walk.

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Here's something. Well, last thing on 10 minute walks is that we find that when you do them after meals, again, they become a habit. Sometimes I'll go to a restaurant at night. I took my daughter to dance class last night. There was a sushi place right, right next door. I went and ate the sushi place. I walked out the door and I set my timer for 10 minutes. I started walking.

• 1:17:29Chris Williamson?

  Your feet had taken you before you'd even planned to do it almost.

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. You, you can leave any restaurant, set your clock for five minutes, walk down the street when the alarm goes off, walk back, then get in your car. So these are really easy bite sized, you know, what they call exercise snacks, I think.

• 1:17:42Chris Williamson?

  And what sort of an impact are you seeing? So we extol the virtues of it and I live next to a park and I can be the kind of a dog pervert as well because there's quite a lot of dogs there and I love dogs. What are the outcomes that you see between somebody that that doesn't do this and then does, even for a normal moderately healthy person?

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. All the research suggests the satiety benefit, the blood sugar control, just like recharging your battery, you know, if you're at work and you've sitting there for an extended period of time, you start to get tired. A lot of people think that posture contributes to soreness, back tightness, neck tightness. Well, they've studied people that use quote unquote, good posture and poor posture. They have similar outcomes. Some of the good posture people had worse outcomes in terms of pain. It was really the duration of time that you stayed in any one position. It wasn't the position itself. And so the movement becomes pretty critical.

• 1:18:35Chris Williamson?

  We'll get back to talking to Stan in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Gymshark. Gymshark make the best sportswear that I've ever found. I absolutely. Love this fluoro colour, which is cheating and making me look a lot more tanned than I actually am. Also, these studio shorts that I'm wearing here are the best menswear shorts that I have ever found. They're literally unbelievably comfortable. They last forever. They're sweat wicking. They're super lightweight. They wash and dry brilliantly. The length is perfect. Also, if you saw me on the Sebum vlog, you would have noticed I was wearing a graphic tee, which Gymshark is starting to get into, and I absolutely love. The guy's stuff is phenomenal. The girl's stuff is amazing, even though I don't wear it that much. Best of all, there is a 30 day money back guarantee with free returns worldwide. Plus, they've just updated my product page with a brand new collection of stuff that I bought last week.

• 1:19:20Chris Williamson?

  So if you want to see all of the products that I use and recommend from Gymshark, head to bit.ly/sharkwisdom and use the code MW10 at checkout. That's B I T dot L Y slash shark wisdom and MW10 at checkout. The other thing that I really found was especially if I'm eating a large meal during the middle of the day. And sometimes I'll forget to eat or just have not had time to eat until maybe one or two P M. And that big dump of food often causes my thoughts to be muddy. And I don't like that. I don't like the way that I feel when I don't have access. I'm not as nimble. It's one of the things we didn't mention it earlier on, but certainly, you know, on the pro intermittent fasting side,

• 1:20:05Chris Williamson?

  even if the autophagy and some of the claims and blah, blah, you're pretty sharp. Mentally, I do feel quite sharp when I do that, or at least I feel sharp if I avoid spiking my blood sugar too early in the day. But if I do have this large meal, I'm like, I'm muddy and maybe I've got to record in a little bit and I got to be on my game because Stan Efferding's coming or whatever. That walk really brings that back. I've got some fresh air. I've got a ton of sunlight in my eyes. I, you know, I'm looking at my, the ocular focus is changing too. I'm looking at stuff in the distance. I'm looking at stuff up close, getting out of my head. I'm reflecting. Don't take your phone. Don't listen to the AirPods.

• 1:20:46Chris Williamson?

  I don't know what sort of concerns we have around Wi Fi signals and non-ionizing radiation from AirPods. I am a, if that's the case and my AirPods, AirPods are a danger, I will be the first one to die because they are essentially glued to my ears.

• 1:21:03Chris Williamson?

  But That opportunity, a single decision downstream from it, there are so many things that happen. And I noticed as well, this was something that you may have heard, Huberman has talked about this, and I noticed it on my morning walks that I was doing before Andrew Huberman said to do them, and then he backed me up.

• 1:21:25Chris Williamson?

  I found ambient anxiety, if I woke up and I did a bad night's sleep, or there was something playing on my mind, decreased during the walk. And he talked about the lateral movement of the eyes whilst walking, whilst locomoting, being something that down-regulates amygdala response. No idea if you've come across this, but I knew that my felt sense was, huh, I feel a bit more, hmm, I'm kind of, I kind of, everything's not quite as shit and terrifying as I thought it was. And after doing the morning walk and you're looking, go across the road, there's a cat, whatever, I helped.

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm a pretty simple guy, you know, if it, if it works, it works. I've had extraordinary results personally. And of course, I've been talking about this for, I can't remember the first time Mark Bell and I discussed this, probably seven, eight years ago on his podcast. And the feedback I've gotten from it is extraordinary. I mentioned it, you know, recharges your battery. You mentioned a couple of things. First, we were talking about blood sugars after, and you mentioned you ate a big lunch. There seems to be more of this post-meal sleepies associated with the size of the meal than necessarily the blood sugar or the glycemic load, depending on the individual's insulin sensitivity.

• 1:22:44Chris Williamson?

  What's that you do? Stomach being full?

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you just.

• 1:22:48Chris Williamson?

  You should lie down?

• 1:22:49Speaker 01

  The amount of work, the amount of blood that gets shunted to your stomach to handle all that food. It seems that the side, when they, when they were studying the carbohydrate load as compared to just the calorie load, it seemed that the calories is what made you most tired. But moving after meals has a significant impact on that. Type 1 diabetics, we've had extraordinary results. These are insulin dependent type 1 diabetics who avoid carbohydrates for obvious reasons. And their workouts suffer. These are people who want to lift weights or do CrossFit and have a high anaerobic requirement.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  They'll ask what they can do to be able to improve their performance without compromising their diabetes. And what we'll do is have them train after they eat. So now we can include carbohydrates in that meal. And then have them do, if it's weightlifting in particular, this has been the most successful for us. They'll just do 15 minutes or so of weightlifting, whether it's chest after breakfast, shoulders after lunch, triceps after dinner.

• 1:23:57Chris Williamson?

  That sounds like my ideal day, actually.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I got that from a diabetes doctor, actually, that was on, I think he was talking, Dr. Peter Attia some years ago. And he was discussing, the research showed that doing treadmill or step mill for 20 minutes after a meal, cut their insulin dependency in half. They were able to reduce the total amount of insulin they used in half. And we started seeing that as well, when we started doing that with our clients.

• 1:24:23Chris Williamson?

  Even from a financial standpoint, let alone the health standpoint, just look at how they cost.

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  And then you also mentioned, sometimes you skip breakfast. We talked a little bit about dieting. I mentioned 78% of successful dieters eat breakfast. There is some evidence that eating breakfast and skipping dinner would be the better of the options if you were going to intermittent fast and wanted to skip a particular meal for a host of reasons. One of which is, of course, when you wake up in the morning, your cortisol's high, your muscles haven't been fed in a long time. And so getting them protein is pretty important to start that muscle protein synthesis and the rebuilding process. Certainly more important for athletes or people who are concerned about building or maintaining the body mass. Another one is circadian rhythms. It seems there's some benefit when eating breakfast and how it helps you in getting to sleep that night.

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  Another one is satiety. It seems that when you eat a larger breakfast, you're likely to be less hungry in subsequent meals. Another one is blood sugar. Postbrandioglycemia, again, is reduced, measurably reduced in subsequent meals. And so the old, what was the old saying, eat like a king for breakfast, a prince for lunch, and a pauper for dinner, seems to have some science behind it now for what we refer to as chrono nutrition.

• 1:25:40Chris Williamson?

  One of the things that...

• 1:25:44Chris Williamson?

  Is a counter to that that I struggle with is my willpower is highest at sticking to my diet in the morning and the lowest in the evening. Very few people wake up and eat a chocolate bar upon waking.

• 1:25:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:25:54Chris Williamson?

  So I think back, you know, and carb backloading and skip loading was in.

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:00Chris Williamson?

  One of the reasons that carb night, one of the reasons that all of this stuff appealed to me was it allowed me to do the sacrifice reward mentality boxed within a like a 16 hour period.

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:13Chris Williamson?

  Right. Willpower is high in the morning. I'm not going to cheat on my diet. I'm going to get after this. I get to the evening and I've still got 1,200 calories, 1,400 calories to go. And there is some cookies, but I have so much other food still to go in and the cookies aren't so nice anymore. If I did the reverse, I did sometimes struggle with that.

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:31Chris Williamson?

  He was the second order challenge. One of the most reliable ways for me to give myself a shit night's sleep is to eat late.

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:26:39Chris Williamson?

  I really struggle with being horizontal with a full stomach. Some people eat loads of food and go, I gotta lie down to digest this.

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:48Chris Williamson?

  I require gravity. I need it to be pulled down from here down into my stomach and I don't enjoy lying down. And the time that I have, my old business partner would happily eat a meal, a full meal, a full dinner that we would go for 30 minutes before he was going to go to bed and wash it down with a coffee. Because the guy, I don't know what he's made of. He's a father, a father of three with two dogs.

• 1:27:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:16Chris Williamson?

  So I think he's built different to me. I can't do that. So I have two things going on. I have the willpower and I have the, the late night disruption of my sleep.

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:29Chris Williamson?

  Due to being too full.

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  In general terms, two meals a day or six meals a day, if you control for calories and protein, you get equivalent weight loss outcomes. In general terms, if you eat a huge meal before bed and no breakfast, same calories, same protein, you get similar outcomes. And so it's not necessarily a bad thing if that's your personal preference to eat a big dinner. I was just suggesting there are some other reasons why breakfast might be good. One of the things I left off of that list of satiety toolbox, the tools that we have in our toolbox was the fact that it makes a lot of sense to get as many of those snacks, those hyper palatable foods out of the house, the ice creams, whatever your kind of go to is.

• 1:28:08Chris Williamson?

  Environment design.

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now, there's some evidence to suggest that you shouldn't abstain from things that you enjoy because you might binge and go off your diet, but you should make them harder to obtain. If you can't, I've had clients that, you know, what's the, what's the Pringles, once you pop, you can't stop. I've had clients who said they can't keep certain foods in their diet because they'll overeat them.

• 1:28:32Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, there's no way that I can eat this in a moderate amount.

• 1:28:36Speaker 01

  Can't eat just one. So that's one strategy is to get all that stuff out of the house. But really important piece of that is, is you have to replace it with something else.

• 1:28:46Chris Williamson?

  Fruit bowl. I'm a massive fan of a fruit bowl.

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  Fat-free Greek yogurt with strawberries. A pound of strawberries, I think, is only 120 calories.

• 1:28:57Chris Williamson?

  Fruit bowl, as in that's lots of fruit. Also buy a bowl that you put fruit in. That being visual, it being somewhere that is almost borderline inconvenient. But you gotta get past that to get to the whatever. For me has been in everywhere that I've lived has made a massive difference. And it's always, I always forget about it for six months and I don't buy it. And then I do, and there's always pears, or there's always bananas, or there's always whatever.

• 1:29:24Chris Williamson?

  The same thing with the fridge, even like little things, putting the berries at the front of the fridge.

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  Within reach, that's another one of those strategies, the food that's furthest away and as opposed to closer to you. These have all been studied to show that that's our behavior. I talked about barriers to entry. This would be a barrier to access.

• 1:29:43Chris Williamson?

  A lot of people have taken sleep very seriously over the last few years. Given that that is one of the long levers, what are the principles that you rely on when it comes to good sleep, optimizing sleep, preparing for it, doing it on the night?

• 1:29:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a list of things that, well, the big one is, if you suffer from sleep apnea, which a lot of my large clients do, and I certainly have since over the years when I got up to 300 pounds and the like, if you suffer some sleep apnea, that's a killer. That'll raise your blood pressure, thicken your blood, it'll make it very hard to recover from workouts. There's a whole host of potentially deadly signs of, or problems associated with sleep apnea. I was shocked when I worked with Hafthor Bjornst and Brian Shaw, Lane Johnson, Dan Green. The list goes on and on of people who were not wearing their CPAP, who

• 1:30:36Chris Williamson?

  That they've been prescribed it?

• 1:30:38Speaker 01

  They had been prescribed in many cases, or others just who just hadn't done it. And you, one quick question to their wife or significant other, does he snore? And it's like, oh, God. If you snore and wake up tired, there's a, uh, there's a questionnaire that you can just Google. It's called Stop Bang, S T O P, Stop Bang questionnaire. That you can, a little quiz you can take to show what the likelihood is that you suffer from some degree of sleep apnea. Obviously, getting a sleep study is, is ideal. Uh, it could be very expensive and time consuming, especially internationally. It could take many, many, many months to get into a doctor, uh, for a sleep study internationally. And more like I get from Canada and Australia, my clients from the UK. And then when you do go in, if you don't have severe sleep apnea, they'll just tell you to lose weight.

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  Because obviously it's very expensive to, to, you know, outfit you with a CPAP. Here in the States, uh, if you snore and wake up tired, there's a good chance, particularly if you have significant neck, neck girth. And that could be from being overweight, or it could be from- Neck girth, what a great word. I always reference, uh, Dr. Jordan Faganbaum from Barbell Medicine. Great name. He's 198 pounds and he wears a CPAP. He's got a thick neck, squats a lot. So, uh, it, it's related to, to neck girth and, uh, the, uh, the closing of the airway at night when you sleep. If you have some degree of sleep apnea, the CPAP, uh, first and foremost, needs to be the first thing that you do. And if, uh, if you don't have a doctor, you're not insured, you can't afford the expense of that. They actually do resell these on, on Craigslist.

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  And I have a, a provider that, uh, that refurbishes them and, and, uh, and I provide my clients with them. It's that important, uh, particularly if there's a, a cost is an issue. Now, there's good sleep hygiene, all the stuff most people have heard about. First and foremost, give yourself an opportunity to be successful. You know, people are burning the candle at both ends. They go to bed late and then they're scrolling through their feed. And then it's midnight, one o'clock in the morning and they gotta get up at 6:00 AM. You just haven't even given yourself an opportunity to be successful. I set my alarm to go to bed, not to wake up in the morning. So that about an hour before I'm supposed to sleep, I know to start shutting things down. Uh, you want to wake up at the same time every morning, get exposed to sunlight. And that helps start your circadian rhythms for the day and your melatonin and all that, and start building up sleep pressure.

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  Cool room, quiet room, dark room. All those things, whether it's blackout blinds, a separate air conditioning units, all of those things. If you have a dog that sleeps in the bed, or you know, somebody that comes in later and just disrupts you, that's all going to interfere with the quality of your sleep. Blue light, that would be TV and phone, obviously, electronics are huge. After that, there's, you know, some smaller things, like you mentioned, not, uh, not eating too close to bed, not drinking too much, or having too much caffeine, uh, as you get close to bedtime.

• 1:33:25Speaker 01

  Another one might be, uh, just kind of trying to run down all the things that are associated with good sleep. They'll come to me, but it, it, that's kind of the main checklist. I have a, I have a sleep hygiene, uh, chapter in my book, of course, and I, I send that to my, that's the biggest thing. And that's why I have them send me the hours of sleep every morning. And I ask them, how are their energy levels? Because that, that's usually the reason why.

• 1:33:51Chris Williamson?

  A lot of people, I think, are struggling to fall asleep, even the ones who've taken the red pill of you need to sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom.

• 1:33:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:00Chris Williamson?

  Um, but there is a, there's a difficulty that I, I hear from a lot of people that they wish that they could fall asleep more easily and that, you know, they go to bed maybe even early and they're tossing and turning. Temperature's good, the room is black and cool.

• 1:34:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:18Chris Williamson?

  And I'm just tossing and turning and tossing and turning and I can't go to sleep. What would your advice be to someone that's struggling to fall asleep on a night time?

• 1:34:23Speaker 01

  Now, it might be somewhat individualistic. Uh, now it might be that some people, some keto people find that they have a hard time sleeping. There might be some benefit to having a little bit of carbohydrates before bed, uh, for some folks, or with your dinner might help you sleep. Uh, we find oftentimes that as cortisol elevates throughout the night from a low carb diet, um, that's usually because it's stimulating the liver to release glucose. You see high fasting glucose in the morning, uh, on keto diets sometimes and high cortisol in the morning. So it could be influenced by your diet. Uh, there's some evidence that maybe taking glycine, uh, and again, it's very individualistic and it's not.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  It's not really well, it's not really universal in the literature. So at that point, we're kind of, you know, we're spitballing, trying to, trying to pinpoint some problem.

• 1:35:17Chris Williamson?

  I had throughout almost all of my twenties, a very inconsistent sleep and wake pattern. In fact, COVID was the first time as an adult that I ever went to bed and woke up at the same time.

• 1:35:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:27Chris Williamson?

  Ever.

• 1:35:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:28Chris Williamson?

  Because we were running these nightclubs and it would mean that one night I'd try to go to bed at 11 and another night I wouldn't get in from work until 5am because I was in Manchester and I had to drive back and it was two and a half hours and like doing this intense thing, trying not to crash and die. And then especially since being in Austin and since having the show, which allows me to lean my workload even further this way. I've dialed in my wake time and my body knows to raise me at 6:59 and I can turn over and look at the clock at 6:58 and see it turn and the radio will come on.

• 1:36:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:02Chris Williamson?

  The problem is we're on Pacific time.

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:36:06Chris Williamson?

  So yesterday morning I was in Vegas recording a big episode. I fly in, the flight's delayed, we haven't eaten, I'm tired, stressed, get to bed. Midnight, one in the morning, 5am, 4:59, 4:59 up.

• 1:36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:26Chris Williamson?

  This morning, same thing again. So I don't disagree that, you know, the beauty of waking up, knowing that this is the time to wake up feels kind of freewheeling to be able to do it. That rigidity, your body unfortunately doesn't have the adjustment clock when you've got to get yourself into a new time zone.

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  It might move an hour a day. And so it could take you like 50 flight out, when I flew to Australia, I was exhausted for the whole week. And when I flew to Kuwait, I was exhausted for the whole week. I was a walking zombie during the day.

• 1:36:57Chris Williamson?

  I had a debate in Qatar at the start of this year, which isn't out yet, but it will be eventually. And the guy that I was debating my other side was, he didn't sleep at all the night before. And I think I'd managed to get, I'd fluked. Four hours or five hours of sleep.

• 1:37:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:22Chris Williamson?

  And I thought, oh God, this is going to be really, really difficult. And then he came in, he was like, dude, I didn't sleep last night. And I was like, ah, I feel brilliant. This is unfair advantage.

• 1:37:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:30Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, I departed LA at 4pm and arrived in Qatar 6pm the next day.

• 1:37:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:39Chris Williamson?

  Having been on a plane for 15 hours or something. And I also did a, in November last year, Johannesburg to Atlanta.

• 1:37:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:48Chris Williamson?

  Uh, which was one hell of a, where, what year is this? Where have, where have I been?

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, travels, travel's an interesting one, especially when you've got sleep dialed in. It's actually in some ways less flexible, it's more rigid.

• 1:38:02Speaker 01

  I did a video called, uh, Why I'm a Hypocrite. Because when I was competing at a very high level, uh, I had the time and the resources and the coaches. I didn't have a job, I didn't have a mortgage, I didn't have kids. And it's all I did was eat, sleep and train. And then as I travel around and I talk to people, whether it's, uh, you know, online or what have you. And you've got nurses and doctors and police, fire and ambulance, and people working shift work and the like. It's very easy for me to, to sit here and talk about good sleep hygiene, but those are challenging. Newborns, you know, a couple of kids. Those are all conditions that are hardly controllable.

• 1:38:41Chris Williamson?

  There's a very visceral response that I see reliably online from parents that have got young kids. And I, I really do understand, I can't, I don't fully understand, but I, I can tell that, um, it's not resentment of the child, it's not, but it's a, it's a wistfulness for a bliss of sleep that feels like a bygone era. And you know, if you end up having two kids or three kids and they're one or two years apart, it's like, guess what? You're locked in for the best part of the next decade.

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:13Chris Williamson?

  With this suboptimal sleep. And then when you finally train this child to be able to go to bed, another one arrives.

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:20Chris Williamson?

  And it was your fault and you love it. And it's reckless sleep all over again. So I, you know, I really do, I really do, um, I feel for parents. I mean, the Well Health Organisation class is any type of shift work as a health risk.

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:34Chris Williamson?

  That's petrol pump, station attendant, checkout cashiers.

• 1:39:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:39Chris Williamson?

  That work night shift, that's firefighters, that's nurses.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:44Chris Williamson?

  Dude, it's, you know, it's rough. And that was me. That was me for 15 years. That was my video guy. My video guy taking, um, doing nightclub photography and then we expect the album to be up the next day by midday. So guess what? He's getting in staring at a screen.

• 1:39:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:59Chris Williamson?

  So that he can make sure that photos of 18 year olds drinking Budweiser available for us the next morning is.

• 1:40:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, tragic. Some of the feedback I get from firemen, like I mentioned, please fire an ambulance, nurses and the like who work those long hours and those long shifts, doctors. I mean, how is that even safe?

• 1:40:22Chris Williamson?

  Did you see, was it Matthew Walker's book? The percentage of doctors or surgeons who work particularly extended shifts and then get in their car to drive home and then arrive back at the same hospital, having just been in an accident. It's like a non insignificant.

• 1:40:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:40:39Chris Williamson?

  Number of doctors and surgeons.

• 1:40:41Speaker 01

  It was, uh, Matthew Walker also talked about how they were able to predict win-loss percentages in basketball games based on, uh, looking at the sleep schedule, not knowing the teams.

• 1:40:52Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:40:53Speaker 01

  Just looking at when they were doing back to back, east coast, west coast travel and just looking at who was going to lose the most sleep. They had like a 78% uh, win-loss accurate guess. Uh, and I think that, at least as I understand it from the study is that that prompted, uh, maybe it was LeBron at the time to go into the, um, uh, players' union and say, look, we need to fix this.

• 1:41:16Chris Williamson?

  Sort this out.

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  It was like four games in five days and they were east coast, west coast and stuff like that. It was increasing injury risk.

• 1:41:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Hell. I mean, I think I ruptured an Achilles three years ago playing cricket, gentleman's way to do it. And, uh, I

• 1:41:34Chris Williamson?

  can't remember how good my night's sleep was leading up to it. And I wish I could, I actually could probably maybe even go into the, maybe I'll have my whip data, maybe go in and have a look, but I bet it was shit.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:43Chris Williamson?

  I bet it wasn't on point. It was the back end of coming out of COVID. I was probably doing things and seeing friends again and stuff. It was all over the place. Okay. So the, the sort of the third pillar, we've spoken about diet, we've spoken about sleep, training.

• 1:41:58Chris Williamson?

  Having done every different modality known to man, when it comes to training for muscle growth, training for lean, lean body, looking good, with a balance in health, what are the principles that the best training programs rely on? Reps, duration, rest, intensity, frequency, all that stuff?

• 1:42:18Speaker 01

  Well, there's a lot of it and you're, there's a list. Just as you mentioned, obviously you'd like to do some cardiovascular work and some resistance training for the muscles. I think they complement each other in many ways. The 10 minute walks could probably satisfy a lot of that, maybe doing a couple of HIIT sessions. I actually do a brief HIIT session before leg day just because it really helps warm me up and gets my, I'll do it on a bike. I'll do it on one of those aerodyne bikes or assault bikes.

• 1:42:45Chris Williamson?

  Torture machine.

• 1:42:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that, that enables me to get my hips and knees to a range of motion. As we age, we lose a little bit of our explosiveness, our power, our speed. That helps me keep stimulating that, that, that particular

• 1:43:03Speaker 01

  training stimulus. So now we're down to weight training and again, the best exercise is the one you'll do. I want people to consistently do some sort of exercise, but loading becomes really important as you've seen in a lot of the longevity folks. I think Peter T has been real prominent in, in that, of course, Dr. Gabriel Lyons talking a lot about the importance of muscle. And you know, we as bodybuilders and powerlifters, of course, we're just kind of, I think soaking it all in because we've loved lifting weights for all this time. I don't presume to think that everybody loves lifting weights. And so one of my first challenges is, is to find exercises that they enjoy doing so they'll do them consistently.

• 1:43:43Speaker 01

  And that, that can be a challenge, you know, depending on who the individual is, what their experience is with lifting. Because I love, you know, exerting that effort and getting the pump. And some people might find that to be almost physically painful to the point where they just, they just don't want to do it. But. You can do reasonably little, you know, it's kind of like a 10 minute walks as opposed to 40 minute cardio sessions on a treadmill. You can do reasonably little and make significant progress, particularly as a beginner. And by that, I mean, if you could get to the gym twice a week. And you wouldn't even necessarily have to go to the gym as a beginner. You could do some pushups. You could do some kind of modified chinups, maybe not on a bar above,

• 1:44:26Speaker 01

  but just kind of laying in a plank position, doing some chinups and some air squats. So it'd be a heck of a start. And if you could start to use your body resistance, twice a week, full body, be fine. Now, eventually, you're going to graduate to the point where hopefully you enjoy it enough and you actually want to build some muscle.

• 1:44:44Chris Williamson?

  I think that's most of the people here. The training age will be at least moderately mature. They'll be good amateur at understanding how to be a bro.

• 1:44:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. In my book, I supply what's called an evidence-based guidelines for hypertrophy that I shoplifted from Brett Contreras, PhD. I put his name on it. I'm happy to give credit. But he does an excellent job of summarizing a lot of the research that comes out of Brad Schoenfeld's organization. Brad's probably one of the most prolific researchers in hypertrophy. And there is a list. There's a pretty significant list. One people always ask about is frequency. How often do I need to train? And generally speaking, twice. Train a body part about twice a week. So you could go in on Monday or Friday, or you go on Wednesday or Saturday.

• 1:45:35Speaker 01

  You know, for busy folks who work all week, I might have them do a small session on one evening of the week and then have them do a longer session on the weekend. Or you could go Saturday, Sunday. Skip Monday through Friday. It doesn't seem to matter all that much. But you want to train every body part twice a week. Try and get at least 10 to 20 sets per body part per week.

• 1:45:56Chris Williamson?

  That's working sets, not including warmup?

• 1:45:58Speaker 01

  That would be working sets. And so that's five sets of chest on Monday, five sets of chest on Friday. Let's just assume we're setting up a full body workout. And then five sets of, say, some back exercise, push pole legs, five sets of chest, five sets of back, five sets of legs. Do that twice a week. You could make gains on that. Eventually, if you needed to increase your volume and there was a time constraint for how long you could spend in the gym in that given hour, maybe you add an extra session that week. Currently, I train upper body day off, lower body day off, and I repeat that. So I'm on an eight day split. So I work everything every eight days. So I'm not training things on the same day every week. It changes. But that suits me because at my age and with the intensity that I still lift, I need a little more recovery.

• 1:46:41Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about intensity.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  That would be kind of next on the list. So we now know we know how many times a week to train and we know about how many sets to do. Let's hit reps real quick. Reps is going to be, it doesn't seem to matter anywhere from five to 30. As long as you lift it within a rep or two a failure, you can get hypertrophy, equivalent hypertrophy outcomes.

• 1:47:03Chris Williamson?

  Phil Heath sat in that seat yesterday.

• 1:47:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:06Chris Williamson?

  And he was saying regularly, he would go to 20 reps.

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:11Chris Williamson?

  And I said, dude, I've been told that anything over 14 is cardio.

• 1:47:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:15Chris Williamson?

  It's like, who's telling you that?

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  In our industry, Phil actually got picked on a little bit because, you know, Ronnie Coleman was the was the one who lifted really, really heavy weights. And Phil always lifted lighter weights. And Phil had equivalent hypertrophy outcomes. Phil was extraordinary Mr. Olympia, and he did not do a ton of super heavy stuff. Dorian lifted reasonably heavy, but he still lifted in the 10 to 12 rep range. And he found that in his younger years, when he was trying to lift heavy, like with squats, he actually started getting injured. And so there is a greater injury potential. There is more fatigue accumulated at the five rep range. You also get stronger, but strength is not the primary driver of hypertrophy. They're two very different things. I found throughout my career, competing in both bodybuilding

• 1:48:00Speaker 01

  and powerlifting, that powerlifting didn't necessarily help bodybuilding very much. Those those big, single rep exercises recruiting multiple muscles.

• 1:48:08Chris Williamson?

  There's something else to say about the difference between a one RM and an 85% RM.

• 1:48:13Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 1:48:14Chris Williamson?

  To which some people's strength curves are that their two rep max and their three rep max aren't that far off where their one rep max is. That's me.

• 1:48:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:26Chris Williamson?

  Other people, I have a number of friends in the UK, Johnny is one of them, who's Two rep max is like not even in the same universe.

• 1:48:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:35Chris Williamson?

  As is one rep max.

• 1:48:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:36Chris Williamson?

  So trying to work off of percentages, which is why the RPE revolution was, I think, very useful.

• 1:48:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:44Chris Williamson?

  That going off, how difficult does this feel?

• 1:48:50Chris Williamson?

  Level the playing field for precisely this problem.

• 1:48:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if you lift a really heavy weight, say 85% of your one rep max for five reps, and you might have been able to get six, that's going to give you equivalent hypertrophy outcome. If you lift 50% of your one rep max for 30 reps, and you probably couldn't have gotten 32.

• 1:49:07Chris Williamson?

  Is that any difference?

• 1:49:09Speaker 01

  There isn't really any difference, other than the strength component. You'll get stronger at the five. You probably accumulate more fatigue at the five.

• 1:49:15Chris Williamson?

  CNS.

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

  CNS. And that's important, though, because in terms of strength, part of that is specific. Part of that is nervous system's ability to handle the load. So.

• 1:49:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:25Speaker 01

  So that is, that kind of handles reps and intensity, because the intensity is get within a rep or two of failure. If you do 10 reps and you could have done 20, likely not a sufficient stimulus to give you a hypertrophy result.

• 1:49:39Chris Williamson?

  Why not go to failure all the time? Why not do, get to 12, drop down, rest, pause, myo reps?

• 1:49:47Speaker 01

  Doesn't appear to give you any more benefit. Might even in terms of powerlifting be a deficit, be a decline in, in performance. Increases fatigue, which will reduce, which will increase DOMS, delayed onset muscle soreness, which might impair your volume and frequency.

• 1:50:08Chris Williamson?

  Over time, because in three days' time, when you've got to come back.

• 1:50:11Speaker 01

  Both in that single workout and when you'll be able to train, how soon you'll be able to train again. So it doesn't seem to be necessary, can be detrimental. If you're a little more patient, leave a rep or two in the tank. It's not what you do in any one workout. You've probably seen the videos on Instagram. I can't remember who started them and said, if you go to the gym and work out and you come home and look in the mirror, you'll see, nothing. You know, and he goes on to say, you know, do it the next day, you'll see nothing. It's the cumulative effect of being consistent and progressing this training over time. It's going to start to, you'll start to see small gains. And so be cautious how much you invest into any one workout. And at the same time, be cautious of junk volume. I mentioned if you're doing 10 reps and you put it on 20, that's not a sufficient stimulus.

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  That would be considered be junk volume, not getting any return on that investment.

• 1:51:00Chris Williamson?

  Rest.

• 1:51:00Speaker 01

  Exercise.

• 1:51:01Chris Williamson?

  What about rest?

• 1:51:02Speaker 01

  Rest periods are interesting. It seems that you get better hypertrophy from longer rests. And the comparison here was again Schoenfeld study between one minute and two to three minutes. It seems there's some substrates that are depleted and then replenish after you do a hard set.

• 1:51:20Chris Williamson?

  ATP or something else?

• 1:51:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, creatine phosphate, you know, the creatine phosphate system, getting those creatine phosphate stores replenished, getting the acid to dissipate. There's the lactate buildup and causing the hydrogen ion, getting that. And then the nervous system to be able to adapt and come back and do another set. The goal would be that you could, that you wouldn't have such a significant decline in repetitions, set after set after set, because it might be more, it might be less related to mechanical tension and more a matter of those substrate depletions. Or it could be cardiovascular insufficiency. Maybe you just aren't able to recover fast enough because you're cardiovascularly stressed.

• 1:52:06Chris Williamson?

  Now the real moneymaker, tempo, time under tension. Is it bullshit or is it legit?

• 1:52:12Speaker 01

  Uh, yes and no.

• 1:52:14Chris Williamson?

  That's.

• 1:52:15Speaker 01

  It's always yes and no. You can go too fast and you can go too slow.

• 1:52:18Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:52:18Speaker 01

  Seems two to five seconds is a pretty good range of time. You want to control the negative.

• 1:52:24Chris Williamson?

  Two to five seconds from rep to rep, two to five second.

• 1:52:28Speaker 01

  Two seconds down.

• 1:52:29Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:52:30Speaker 01

  And then, and then.

• 1:52:31Chris Williamson?

  Understood.

• 1:52:32Speaker 01

  Do the concentric portion of the movement.

• 1:52:34Chris Williamson?

  Five seconds down is brutal.

• 1:52:35Speaker 01

  Five seconds down is relatively slow, but we seem to get the same result in that range. You start getting north of five seconds and you see probably a more of a fatigue to stimulus ratio. It's 10 seconds doesn't give you any more benefit than five. So control the negative would be what would be important there.

• 1:52:49Chris Williamson?

  What is it? Cause the eccentric portion of the movement is the one that is supposed to grow the most muscle. Is that scientifically backed?

• 1:52:57Speaker 01

  They're both important. There is some benefit to it. I'm not sure if you could. You could say it does potentially create the most damage. It's an essential part of of the movement, obviously. But it seems that damage is not a driver of hypertrophy. It's kind of a passenger. The mechanical tension is important. It seems that it's just associated, if you're training hard, you're probably going to have some soreness.

• 1:53:24Chris Williamson?

  Understood. So I've asked this question of Ryan Terry.

• 1:53:27Speaker 01

  Real quickly, you can get sore running a 5K. You're not going to build any muscle.

• 1:53:32Speaker 01

  So, and you can get sore doing new exercises all the time, right?

• 1:53:37Chris Williamson?

  Ah, because you're not adapting.

• 1:53:39Speaker 01

  That's what I'm saying. Soreness doesn't necessarily provide a sufficient, is indicative of having performed a sufficient hypertrophy exercise. Because again, you go run a 5K, your legs aren't going to get any bigger. You're not going to grow from hypertrophy. And if you do a bunch of different exercises every time you come in, the whole P90X thing.

• 1:53:58Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:53:58Speaker 01

  Just from what we call a novel stimulus, you're going to be sore. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to improve hypertrophy outcome.

• 1:54:05Chris Williamson?

  How many times have you taken a break from training, extended break?

• 1:54:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:11Chris Williamson?

  You come back.

• 1:54:12Speaker 01

  Do the same thing you did before.

• 1:54:13Chris Williamson?

  And you can't straighten your arms?

• 1:54:15Speaker 01

  No. Yeah.

• 1:54:15Chris Williamson?

  For a week?

• 1:54:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:16Chris Williamson?

  You go, oh, I guess like this is my life now. Like this is just me for the next seven days.

• 1:54:22Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, that'll happen. That's a de-training effect. And when you get, when you come back. And of course, if you do that again in three days and again three days later, the same exercises with the same amount of sets and reps and weight, you're going to have a lot less soreness. Your body will adapt to that.

• 1:54:35Chris Williamson?

  So I've asked this question of Ryan Terry, Phil Heath, and Chris Bumstead. If you only had 10 exercises for the rest of time to build and maintain as much muscle as possible, what would you choose?

• 1:54:50Speaker 01

  I'd have to choose a push pull in the legs. And I'd probably throw a hamstring in there. So that's going to be four. And I maybe get two of each. So I'm looking at

• 1:54:58Chris Williamson?

  Let's get specific. What would it be?

• 1:54:59Speaker 01

  I'm looking at a squat movement.

• 1:55:02Chris Williamson?

  Barbell, back squat, front squat, smith machine.

• 1:55:05Speaker 01

  All of them.

• 1:55:05Chris Williamson?

  You can only have one, Stan. I'm limiting.

• 1:55:08Speaker 01

  If I've got a barbell, I can back squat.

• 1:55:09Chris Williamson?

  This is my game. These are my rules.

• 1:55:12Speaker 01

  Front squat.

• 1:55:12Chris Williamson?

  No, these are my rules. This is, stop breaking the game.

• 1:55:17Speaker 01

  Well, I'll tell you for me personally, because I use a lot, because of my anthropometry, my, uh, my long femur length as compared to, I would probably need to do a high bar squat to, to effectively train my quads. My glutes are preferentially developed from a low bar squat. So high bar squat would be a big one for me.

• 1:55:37Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:55:38Speaker 01

  My favorite hamstring exercise is, uh, I love the, uh, the cambered bar good morning. It's one of my favorites. You go on Instagram, uh, crushing the good morning. And that's where you put the weight up here and you, you bend forward and try and keep your legs relatively straight. It's for hamstrings.

• 1:55:51Chris Williamson?

  Why the cambered bar?

• 1:55:53Speaker 01

  For me, I just find that it puts more of the stress on the hamstrings as opposed to the lumbar.

• 1:55:59Chris Williamson?

  By bringing that moment arm a little bit lower down.

• 1:56:01Speaker 01

  Able to pull the, the camber back just a little bit here rather than having it, the further the bar sits, we call the moment arm from, the, the glutes, uh, you know, from where your, where your body's trying to,

• 1:56:17Speaker 01

  your back and is trying to adjust the movement, uh, the more stress that's going to put on.

• 1:56:23Chris Williamson?

  A little bit less axial load. Dr. Stu McGill will be happy. Okay. So we've got a high bar back squat.

• 1:56:29Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:56:29Chris Williamson?

  Cambered bar. Yep. And we've got that. So we've got, like, legs are pretty smoked.

• 1:56:34Speaker 01

  Yep. Legs are pretty smoked. I would put in one more quad exercise and, and it would probably be a unilateral movement. So it'd probably be, which could be either a single leg leg press, a walking lunge, or Bulgarian split squat. I kind of like the Bulgarian split squat the best because I can do repeat repetitions with the same leg. I like that.

• 1:56:50Chris Williamson?

  I hate Bulgarian splits.

• 1:56:51Speaker 01

  And that's why I like them.

• 1:56:54Speaker 01

  Because there's.

• 1:56:55Chris Williamson?

  You're a psychopath.

• 1:56:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. The things, the hard shit always works better than the easy shit. That's, that's why I'm picking these exercises.

• 1:57:02Chris Williamson?

  With that, have you got a preference for how you would do that? Were you holding dumbbells? Would you have barbell on back?

• 1:57:09Chris Williamson?

  The loading?

• 1:57:10Speaker 01

  I would probably hold dumbbells with those. Yeah. Barbell on the back is kind of an awkward setup. Uh, now we're going to move to a chest exercise. Uh, I like the incline dumbbell press, just a slight incline dumbbell press. Uh, I did a lot of heavy benching in my career and I'd never built my pecs as well as when I trained with Flex Wheeler using incline dumbbell presses. Uh, they allow more depth and they allow independent rotation of the shoulders. So I get less potential shoulder injury.

• 1:57:39Chris Williamson?

  What are the cues that you're thinking of or that you're telling your clients when you're looking at the incline dumbbell press?

• 1:57:45Speaker 01

  This is the 45 degree angle of the elbow.

• 1:57:47Chris Williamson?

  This is the one exercise so far that every single person has had in and no one's had flat bench dumbbell press. Uh, so it's something that a lot of people seem to be using.

• 1:57:58Speaker 01

  Trying to get up here a little more.

• 1:58:00Chris Williamson?

  Yep. 45 degree angle on the arms.

• 1:58:02Speaker 01

  Deep elbow. Try and wrap that peck around the rib cage as best you can. I don't want to be out here. It's going to hit the shoulder. I want to be in here. So it's the peck. I want to use that rib cage. In order to do that, I'm going to actually lift my sternum up and expand the rib cage. And then the deeper I can get my elbow, use that because you want to have as much lengthening of the, of the chest muscle or any muscle that you train as possible. Uh, it's going to grow better in the lengthened position, full range of motion.

• 1:58:31Chris Williamson?

  Okay, that's five.

• 1:58:36Speaker 01

  Is that where we're at? I think that's four. I think I had a, I had a high bar back squat.

• 1:58:42Chris Williamson?

  Good morning.

• 1:58:42Speaker 01

  Good morning.

• 1:58:44Chris Williamson?

  You're right. The quad you had the, uh, Romanian, no, you didn't. You had the, uh,

• 1:58:50Speaker 01

  Bulgarian split.

• 1:58:51Chris Williamson?

  Bulgarian split squat. Incline.

• 1:58:53Speaker 01

  And then we jumped on to incline for the chest.

• 1:58:56Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:58:59Speaker 01

  Next one on chest, I would probably do, uh,

• 1:59:04Speaker 01

  boy, I just love that incline barbell, incline dumbbell so much. Uh, some people like to flies. I'm not a big fan of flies. Uh, might throw a dip in there because I'm going to hit some triceps at the same time too. So I get a nice deep.

• 1:59:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What are you thinking cues for dips?

• 1:59:18Speaker 01

  Work on the dip. Uh, I'm trying to, uh, if I'm working triceps, I'm trying to keep my feet underneath me. If I'm working chest, I'm trying to keep my chest forward. And again, again, trying to wrap that, that peck around the.

• 1:59:31Chris Williamson?

  Weight belt if you need to increase resistance.

• 1:59:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, just hang weights on if you need to increase resistance. Uh, I'd throw another one for hamstrings. I had a hip hinge. I have to have a knee hinge. And so I'm going to do any standing, lying, seated. I like seated preferentially because, uh, Usually on the standing curl and on the lying curl, the weight stack bottoms out before you get full extension, before the hamstring really gets stretched.

• 1:59:53Chris Williamson?

  Yes, because if you're lying down, it's going to like rip you up off the machine.

• 1:59:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, when you bring the weights down, the stack usually bottoms out.

• 2:00:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:02Speaker 01

  And so on the seated curl.

• 2:00:04Chris Williamson?

  You've locked yourself in and you've lifted those feet up.

• 2:00:06Speaker 01

  If you lean forward on it, you can, you can get a full extension and not bottom the weight stack out.

• 2:00:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:12Speaker 01

  So give you your best lengthened position.

• 2:00:14Chris Williamson?

  First time that I ever had the lean forward cue was Alex Hormozi in Vegas. And his training blog is about to be released at some point on the internet. And you will see him take me through, okay, so sit back. Okay, now flex feet. Okay, now sit forward, now push toes. And the difference is, that's why I was in pain flying home the next day.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:36Chris Williamson?

  Because of the doms.

• 2:00:37Speaker 01

  Yep. Uh, that's going to take us to a back exercise. I'm going to do a chin.

• 2:00:43Speaker 01

  Chin up and I don't care. Do I have to pick one?

• 2:00:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, underhand, overhand, let's get specific.

• 2:00:48Speaker 01

  I've got to be specific about it. I would probably do reverse grip mainly because I could get more bicep out of it. So I'm getting a little extra benefit. And then I'm going to do, I like the chest supported row. I used to do a lot of T-bar row, which really helped my deadlift. But it was, it's a lot of cheating, the range of motion's not as good, meaning the extending the weight isn't nearly as good. You're pulling on your lumbar by the time you get that weight extended.

• 2:01:12Chris Williamson?

  So chest supported, but not seal row? Not, or not a completely flat? Would you be?

• 2:01:18Speaker 01

  It could be. I mean, some of the chest supported rows are angled and some of the chest supported rows are flat.

• 2:01:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:22Speaker 01

  But I like those. They're lower fatigue. I can do more volume there. Generally back, you can train with a lot of volume.

• 2:01:27Chris Williamson?

  And you've usually got a number of handles that you can mess around with on one of those?

• 2:01:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the one we have currently is, has an adjustable handle. So you can, the width and it spins. So those are, those are, any, any chest supported row is going to give you the advantage of not having to stress your lumbar, doing bent rows or T-bar rows, which. I think

• 2:01:51Chris Williamson?

  What are we working here?

• 2:01:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's my point. And one of the best things, of course, for all the muscle groups is to get a full extension. When you're doing that with a bent row or a T-bar row, you're gonna get, you're gonna put a lot of stress on the lumbar spine.

• 2:02:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:05Speaker 01

  So I found.

• 2:02:05Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:02:06Speaker 01

  It was great when I was powerlifting, you know, and it, that kind of thing transfers over well to a strong deadlift, but just for back training. So we had two back exercises.

• 2:02:17Speaker 01

  I like a Viking press and a side lateral.

• 2:02:19Chris Williamson?

  What's a Viking press?

• 2:02:21Speaker 01

  Uh, that's a standing shoulder press. I can't shoulder a bar.

• 2:02:25Chris Williamson?

  It's pivoted on the thing in front of you?

• 2:02:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:02:27Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:02:27Speaker 01

  I can't shoulder a bar. I don't have the flexibility. And so by the time I get all back here, now I've got my, you know, my back all bent.

• 2:02:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:34Speaker 01

  And so this becomes

• 2:02:35Chris Williamson?

  Uh, so you wouldn't want to do a standing barbell press from a rack or whatever. You would rather go neutral with this Viking press?

• 2:02:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, the handle doesn't concern me. It could be, it could be a normal grip or neutral. Uh, would be that one.

• 2:02:47Chris Williamson?

  And then side lateral?

• 2:02:48Speaker 01

  Side lateral raise would be a good one. I think I topped out at 10. I didn't even hit arms yet. I got, but I got my biceps in my curl and I got my triceps in my

• 2:02:56Chris Williamson?

  Dips and

• 2:02:57Speaker 01

  In my dips. Now, the only one that leaves is calves. I've always struggled with calves. I'm actually looking to start a class action lawsuit against the manufacturers of calf machines because they clearly don't work. I think it's false advertising. I've been using those things for 30 years. And I'm still part of the no calf crew. And so, yeah, but if, if you had to, you know, if I was given the option, I would throw in a seated calf in particular for the soleus.

• 2:03:22Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Is there any truth in the, uh, the size of your calves is more determined by your genetics than any of the part of the body?

• 2:03:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's true of all muscles, though.

• 2:03:36Speaker 01

  It really is. Yeah, I'll see, uh, you know, my wife's Samoan, so a lot of, a lot of the, uh, men in her community and women, by the way, have great calves and they never train them. Uh, a lot of it's just kind of how much weight you put on them and then how you walk. Um, I see some people with some pretty big calves that never trained them. It's frustrating.

• 2:03:59Chris Williamson?

  You're a partner with Merrick Health.

• 2:04:01Speaker 01

  Yes, indeed.

• 2:04:01Chris Williamson?

  So am I.

• 2:04:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:03Chris Williamson?

  First time that I've ever had consistent blood work done.

• 2:04:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:07Chris Williamson?

  What are the lead markers, not just from Merrick, in terms of blood work?

• 2:04:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:13Chris Williamson?

  Sat down with Dr. Peter Attia and he's talking about, there is no single metric more important or more predictive of longevity than your VO2 max. I was like, where did this come from? And VO2 max, I'm hearing everything about zone two, you know, slow and long training.

• 2:04:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:31Chris Williamson?

  Generally, what do you think of some of the metrics that people are? I think everyone's optimizing because of wearables. Everybody's optimizing for HRV now. Everybody's optimizing for breath rate and for resting heart rate.

• 2:04:44Chris Williamson?

  What would you, if you could say, these are some things that you should watch out for a little bit more than you do, whether it be blood profile or other markers? What should people focus on?

• 2:04:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the blood profile is different, obviously, than the VO2 max. I think Dr. Peter Attia is right about that, that your cardiovascular fitness is going to be a pretty good predictor of lifespan and health span. I think it has more to do with it demonstrates just how active you've been throughout your life. You say the same thing about strength. Remember, they were doing all those grip strength studies showing that those with the higher grip strength, that everybody was running around doing grippers and static.

• 2:05:18Chris Williamson?

  It's the wrong correlation. It's not working in the right way.

• 2:05:21Speaker 01

  It's a proxy for general strength. And even that general strength is a proxy for just having lifted for many years. Heavyweights or maybe your job was such that it required you to.

• 2:05:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:36Speaker 01

  That it's a byproduct. It's a byproduct, as is cardiovascular. If you're, you know, participate in any exercise consistently for an extended period of time, you're going to have good lifespan.

• 2:05:48Chris Williamson?

  You know, he said that no one flukes one gram per kilo of body weight. That no one flukes a high VO2 max. No one flukes high hand grip.

• 2:05:57Speaker 01

  You can't hack it.

• 2:05:58Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 2:05:59Speaker 01

  You know, some, something you could take in a pill or a potion or a powder. It's something you have to earn. And that's, it's kind of the frustrating part when people. Come to you for some advice on longevity and it's like, well, you just gotta work harder.

• 2:06:12Chris Williamson?

  No, I didn't mean that. I meant, what do I take?

• 2:06:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:15Chris Williamson?

  Uh, okay. What else? Any other things that stand out?

• 2:06:17Speaker 01

  Those are the big ones. Now you got into blood work. Now I've had over a hundred blood tests throughout my career. Uh, I started when I was 20 years old. I was hypogonadal as a result of Verica Seal. I had been training in the gym for two years. I only gained about 14 pounds in two years of hard training.

• 2:06:34Speaker 01

  You know, I finally went to the doctor and found out I had about 120 test. I had the Verica Seal, which doesn't cause uh, hypogonadism in everybody who has it, but it is a, is a side effect in a, you know, in a significant percentage of those people. Um, and so blood testing is important. It can tell you a lot. If you've got a client that's unable to lose weight and they've, uh, and they, you're pretty sure that they haven't been overeating, you know, sip snacks, bites, licks, uh, you know, just cheating on their diet in general. Uh, there may be at some point a need to get a blood test and see if they're low thyroid. Uh, which, uh, has some impact on their basal metabolic rate, not as significant as people think, but it has a significant impact on their energy and their non-exercise activity thermogenesis.

• 2:07:17Speaker 01

  Got a client that's lifting weights, can't gain muscle, it's not getting any bigger, it's, uh, not getting, gaining any strength. Uh, and you've been working hard, you've tried all the lifestyle, you know, things that you can do, better sleep and uh, better diet, uh, regular weight training. Go and get a blood test. Maybe they're hypogonadal. Uh, maybe they got low T. That's going to have a significant impact on their ability to, to gain muscle. So I throughout my career, uh, have utilized blood tests, uh, sometimes on a monthly basis, particularly when I got heavy. Uh, I do it with all my clients. I see things like metabolic syndrome, high blood sugars, fatty liver, uh, which would be high triglycerides, hyper, uh, hyperinsulinemia.

• 2:07:56Speaker 01

  Uh, might see blood thickness. I might see, uh, with performance enhancing drug usage, elevated, uh, liver enzymes and kidney enzymes. It'd be AST, ALT and, uh, your kidney markers are creatinine and BUN and EGFR. And so uh, I take a look at all these. I get a really comprehensive test and I used to do that, um, online. Uh, and I'd pay almost $400 for this test. And then Merrick Health comes along and they've got the same test for around 160 bucks. And so cost became a lot. More affordable, so more of my clients were able to get this test. And I've had parents ask me at what age should kids start getting a test? And you know, obviously me as early as 20, but I also, I worked with a high school softball team

• 2:08:40Speaker 01

  in Arizona, a girls team summer before last. And a couple of the parents had told me that their kids were suffering from, they seemed to be a lot really tired lately and their performance had declined. We were measuring their 40 times. And as it turns out, I asked them to get a blood test and both of them had anemia. They were both low iron, very common in high school and collegiate, especially female athletes. I worked with the University of Oregon, track runners and football players way back in the early 90s. And the women in particular, we saw this more recently with the Nike scandal. They would, they would suffer from what's called the female triad. It's a chronic calorie restriction, amenorrhea, the cessation of the menstrual period.

• 2:09:23Speaker 01

  And low calcium. And end up having problems with bone mineral density. And they would get shin splits and they would put casts on and keep running. It was outrageous. They would get low iron, obviously that would cause a significant amount of fatigue. A lot of them because of their food choices. They would get hypothyroidism, start seeing some hair loss and a host of other problems associated with the female triad. So these blood tests helped us identify

• 2:09:59Speaker 01

  low iron in these anemia in these girls. And so, you know, obviously you want to supplement or you take a look at their diet. And what you find out is these high school girls, as we discussed earlier in particular, they tend to demonize certain foods, red meat being one of them. They get rid of the egg yolk. They stop, they get rid of dairy. They stop eating fruit of all things, people, you know, with the whole carbohydrate, the carbohydrate insulin model, I'll tell you what they're eating, they're eating the guru diets, the bikini girl diet that was so popular for. Seems like decades now. It's maddening. They'll eat egg whites, tilapia, boneless, skinless chicken breast, um, some broccoli, uh, maybe a scoop of peanut butter or almond

• 2:10:44Speaker 01

  butter, and maybe a scoop of protein powder if, uh, if that fits their diet. And that has very commonly been a pre-contest diet for a lot of these bikini girls. And it was confined to the industry for the longest time. And so I would obviously see all the side effects from that, all of these same health problems. And, um, especially, uh, when they were competing and post-competition, when they would rebound from that, you know, again, the hair loss and all the fatigue and the B vitamin deficiencies, and they would end up going to the doctor and getting injections for all of those things. They would get, uh, iron, B12, vitamin D, and all those, all those things. Uh, and then they would have these massive weight regains and rebounds and edema, I mean, to the point

• 2:11:28Speaker 01

  where it's dangerous, water retention from avoiding sodium as well. So that's the guru diet. And that's why, uh, it's kind of what spawned the vertical diet for me was to, that you could get the same results, the same stage presence, uh, with the same caloric intake, but, uh, suffer a lot less of those problems. When it was confined to the bikini industry, uh, and it was relatively, you know, small, uh, it was tragic enough. But when that industry became popularized by social media, and now you've got Gen Pop, you've got soccer moms copying these same diets, going to these same guru coaches and being prescribed these same diets, uh, and suffering all of these same problems, they're not even competing,

• 2:12:12Speaker 01

  and they're just exhausted, anemia, hypothyroidism. One of the big challenges with that is, is the dirty little secret, uh, in the competitive, uh, fitness industry, bikini girls, figure, physique, and all of that, um, performance enhancing drugs are utilized to compensate for some of those problems. They'll typically take thyroid. They'll typically take clenbuterol because, uh, to, to burn fat, uh, what they think is going to burn fat because their metabolism is so sluggish. And they'll typically take Anovar, uh, to prevent the muscle loss. Well, the soccer mom's not utilizing all of those. So she's, she's getting hit two times over on that deal. Uh, she's losing muscle in a big way.

• 2:12:57Speaker 01

  And suffering from all those other problems and ending up at the doctor getting prescriptions for medication. So this is what's tragic about that that path that I saw so clearly for decades is that it became mainstream. And so that's why I preach about, you know, keep a yolk in. It's got the biotin for skin, hair and nails, you know, keep the fruit in. Obviously, we know all the benefits of fruit. Keep the red meat in, particularly for women, the iron and the B12 and the zinc. You know, keep the dairy in. It's huge for calcium. I've got, you know, women suffering from shin splints and bone mineral density loss and keep the calcium in. You need a thousand milligrams a day. And of course, the weight training stimulus is required as well. So these girls, the high school

• 2:13:38Speaker 01

  girls, we designed a diet to do just that. If you suffer from anemia and you want to improve your iron intake, red meat is a great foundation, a heem iron source, add a non-heem iron source like spinach to that. They have a complementary benefit and add vitamin C. And that would be peppers is twice the vitamin C is an orange or you can use orange juice or whatever. And then avoid calcium in that meal. This calcium combines to iron. And so we'll set up a four meal day. One's a high iron meal with high iron absorption with no calcium in it. And the next meal would be your dairy, be your yogurts and eggs, whatever. And we would have two high iron meals and two calcium meals.

• 2:14:18Chris Williamson?

  How concerned are you of, I've seen this a little bit online, people ODing on spinach folates? Is folates a thing? Is that a problem with spinach?

• 2:14:28Speaker 01

  Oxalates.

• 2:14:29Chris Williamson?

  Oxalates, that's what I mean?

• 2:14:30Speaker 01

  People in, and this is usually helped by cooking it or getting sufficient calcium in the diet. Some people who are predisposed to suffering from kidney stones, the oxalates may increase their, their likelihood of getting kidney stones. But if you cook the spinach and you eat sufficient calcium, it's very, very low likelihood of that. But that is something that some people need to pay attention to. And I'm not talking about overdosing on, on spinach either. You know, again.

• 2:15:03Chris Williamson?

  If there's one, one food that I could overdose on, I think it might be spinach.

• 2:15:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:08Chris Williamson?

  That goes with, there's very few meals that it doesn't go with.

• 2:15:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, we, to finish off on, on the, on the men's side of iron, men tend to be high iron. Uh, because they don't have the menstrual period. Women do, and that's where they lose a lot of their iron. And so you can do a couple of things. You can reduce your red meat intake. Uh, you can donate blood. You can increase calcium consumption during your red meat meals. I keep a normal iron, even though I eat a significant amount of red meat by eating a lot of yogurt throughout the day. Uh, and then a lot of fruit as well, which decreases any inflammation. Um, also avoid, um, um, one of those, uh, those cast

• 2:15:52Speaker 01

  iron pans. Uh, I've had some episodes over the years where I've eaten a lot. I would get onto a cast iron pan steak kick for a while. And I would, because of my getting blood tests on a regular basis, I would start to see my iron levels.

• 2:16:05Chris Williamson?

  Literally bleeding from the pan into the food.

• 2:16:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:16:09Chris Williamson?

  So what, what are your cooking utensils of choice? Are you an air fryer guy? Are you a slow cooker guy?

• 2:16:14Speaker 01

  To the, to the ninja air fryer. I mentioned them by name because that thing's magical. There's like little chefs in there cooking your food for you. I don't know how they do it.

• 2:16:22Chris Williamson?

  Advice for people, the specific one that Michaela Peterson got me to get is the XL Max. So the XL is the size and then it goes 450.

• 2:16:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:31Chris Williamson?

  And from frozen.

• 2:16:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:34Chris Williamson?

  A steak, 11 minutes on one side.

• 2:16:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:37Chris Williamson?

  11 minutes on the other. If you've salted the living shit out of it.

• 2:16:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:40Chris Williamson?

  You, you, your food never spoils. You, you never spoil food because it goes from being preserved for the rest of time to being edible in 25 minutes.

• 2:16:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:16:51Chris Williamson?

  Game changer.

• 2:16:52Speaker 01

  Uh, I, I'm going to stay on that because, um, and I'm going to come back. Uh, let me just say it real quick. High iron for men, donating blood, not a good idea to over donate. Be very careful about trying to keep, especially men on performance enhancing drugs or testosterone, uh, replacement therapy. They'll notice their hemoglobin, hemorrhagic and red blood cells will start to elevate. It's a condition called erythrocytosis, not to be confused with polycythemia. Polycythemia is a condition where you will need to donate because you've got thick blood. Erythrocytosis can happen in elevation and with testosterone use. And it doesn't necessarily indicate a thick blood or a dangerous situation that needs donating. Dr. Neil Rouzier has some great information on this.

• 2:17:37Speaker 01

  The problem is, is when people start chasing, normalizing those numbers, the hemoglobin and hematocrit red blood cells into the normal range. And they start donating on a monthly basis, but drive their iron down. Next thing you know, they're ferritin tanks and they start giving themselves anemia.

• 2:17:51Chris Williamson?

  So what's a, if somebody does have high ferritin, high iron, once every, once every two months, once every six months?

• 2:17:59Speaker 01

  Donate, yeah, you want to keep iron down. Donate, you know, reduce red meat, increase calcium intake. Some people are high iron genetically. Dr. Chris Masterjohn, PhD, nutrition. But he still eats red meat and just donates periodically because he likes all of the benefits of the red meat. He would hate to, you know, forego all those things that he could just donate periodically. So, you know, these are decisions that individuals can make based on their blood work, which is why I like having access to it. Just a quick trip back to the, the air fryer. And this is, a lot of times, you know, diet success is, is, you know, we've said, like in sports, it's 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.

• 2:18:44Speaker 01

  When I'm talking diets, sometimes I feel it's unfortunate. I spend so much time on the information because, you know, this can be boiled down to a three by five card in about less than a minute, you could give somebody a diet plan that, that, you know, but, and it's really 99% execution. And so a lot of what I focus on when I say compliance is the science is these little things that make, make it easier to administer the diet. And something like that grill, you know, your hands off. It's just so convenient. The food tastes good. That's really important. If you get on one of these diets where you don't enjoy the food, then it's a temporary thing. So it's important I do that.

• 2:19:26Speaker 01

  Other things I call life changing, and I don't say this about a lot of things because I've been in the business for 30 years. I just got done shitting all over everybody's everything because it wasn't meaningful, right?

• 2:19:36Speaker 01

  Uh, but there's things that make a big difference. I talked about toting Tupperwares around in your six pack bag. Some years ago, for some reason, I don't know why I came across the thermos, a little 24 ounce double insulated thermos that I would put hot food in. And it would stay hot for 10, 12 plus hours, depending on how hot it was.

• 2:19:53Chris Williamson?

  Hang on, so you've got a cylinder of food?

• 2:19:55Speaker 01

  I ate one when I landed at the airport. I've got one in my bag.

• 2:19:59Chris Williamson?

  A cylinder of food?

• 2:20:00Speaker 01

  A cylinder of food that stays hot. So I make my monster mash, right? And I put it in there.

• 2:20:06Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 2:20:07Speaker 01

  And you need a $1 can jarring funnel. These are the things that I do for my clients that they really appreciate. It's not the diet and the macros and all other stuff. When I tell them to get the $1 jarring funnel so they can easily, you know, spoon their food into a thermos that keeps it hot for 10 hours.

• 2:20:24Chris Williamson?

  Is there a specific brand of thermos?

• 2:20:25Speaker 01

  Thermos.

• 2:20:26Chris Williamson?

  Straight up thermos and what?

• 2:20:28Speaker 01

  Any double insulated steel wall.

• 2:20:30Chris Williamson?

  Liter, liter and a half, two liter?

• 2:20:31Speaker 01

  24 ounce for me gives me a good meal. I got one for my kids. It's a little smaller.

• 2:20:35Chris Williamson?

  Around about a liter, I think that?

• 2:20:36Speaker 01

  A half a liter, I think 24 ounces. Yeah, yeah. Um, little things like that. I mean, I took five thermos to Moscow with me. That's a 22 hour day, as you know, the time you you stop over and land and go through security and then, uh, you know, customs and end up at your hotel. I had five of these thermos when I left my house in my carry bag that I rolled in here today that slides under the seat. So every three or four hours as needed, as I desire, I'm eating a nice, hot, full meal. I'll have a couple of oranges in my bag, maybe a little baggie of carrots. The only thing I can't take on the plane with me that I wished I could to finish this off would be some yogurt.

• 2:21:17Chris Williamson?

  Have you ever been pulled to one side with?

• 2:21:20Speaker 01

  All the time, every time.

• 2:21:21Chris Williamson?

  Five thermos flasks filled with?

• 2:21:24Speaker 01

  They make you open up and chew it. Yeah.

• 2:21:26Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 2:21:27Speaker 01

  It's part of, you gotta get there 10 minutes early, but it's well worth it.

• 2:21:29Chris Williamson?

  Right. Okay. So you you account for additional TSA checking time?

• 2:21:33Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:21:34Chris Williamson?

  Because of this?

• 2:21:35Speaker 01

  And that way I don't have to forage for food at the at the airports or at room service.

• 2:21:40Chris Williamson?

  How do you get to the bottom? Can a fork get to the bottom of a thermos flask?

• 2:21:44Speaker 01

  It does pretty well.

• 2:21:45Chris Williamson?

  Do you end up?

• 2:21:46Speaker 01

  You can reach, if you extend the fingers, you can get to the bottom.

• 2:21:49Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay. Okay, so ninja air fryer.

• 2:21:52Speaker 01

  Ninja air fryer is pretty important. The thermos and the jarring funnel is pretty good. The monster mash tool, this is something that's, I get these tips from my, from my fans and followers and friends. Somebody sent me a picture of this monster mash tool. It's like on the bottom, it's like X shaped. And so you can mash your food all together. I was using a fork for the longest time.

• 2:22:15Chris Williamson?

  Oh, right. Okay. Yeah, that's primitive. Come on.

• 2:22:17Speaker 01

  It's primitive. Yeah. And so little things like that. The CPAP, of course, is one that's life changing for me and for my clients. These are the kinds of things that when somebody gets done getting a diet from me, they're like, oh my God, this tastes so good. And my wife's eating it.

• 2:22:32Chris Williamson?

  Macros were fantastic, but that thermos thing.

• 2:22:34Speaker 01

  It's, it's amazing. Yep. So now your compliance is improved because you don't, you know, and that's, if you're a real estate agent, you know, working out of the trunk of your car during the day, you know, what are your options? You know, fast food? Or do you have all your meals ready for you? And in the absence of a microwave, you know, you can just, and you got a nice hot meal with an orange and carrots.

• 2:22:52Chris Williamson?

  Someone is listening to this right now that should make a clippable, stackable, thermos equivalent, hold heat in for a food prep.

• 2:23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:05Chris Williamson?

  Like an upgraded six pack bag type thing.

• 2:23:08Speaker 01

  It'll probably happen.

• 2:23:10Chris Williamson?

  There's a business, there's a million dollar business idea just for free. You know what I mean?

• 2:23:15Speaker 01

  Those are the things that excite me.

• 2:23:17Chris Williamson?

  Hell, yeah.

• 2:23:18Speaker 01

  You can see how animated I get when I talk about these things.

• 2:23:20Chris Williamson?

  We did an entire series on this podcast, 20, 20 plus episodes called Life Hacks. How to make the perfect toasted sandwich off the best carry on luggage that we'd found. The place that you can lie down in Amsterdam airport and sleep because it's the one set of settees that doesn't have arm bars between them to stop you from, like just we'd accumulated this stuff over, over years and years. And you're right, you know, that ultimately, if compliance is the science and one of the biggest impediments to complying is the friction around doing the thing and the enjoyment of doing the thing. You're right. A slow cooker and an air fryer is a chef inside of a box. One of them works very quickly. One of them works unbelievably slowly.

• 2:24:04Speaker 01

  Put it in, you and your kids, you walk, you go about your morning.

• 2:24:06Chris Williamson?

  And then food appears.

• 2:24:07Speaker 01

  In that 10, 15 minutes.

• 2:24:08Chris Williamson?

  And then food appears.

• 2:24:09Speaker 01

  It just comes out. Yeah. It was cooked for you.

• 2:24:11Chris Williamson?

  Stan Efforting, ladies and gentlemen. Stan, I love you. I think that your work is fantastic. It's a brilliant redress, very balanced. Where should people go? They want to check out the book? They want to check out your courses.

• 2:24:21Speaker 01

  Everything's at Stan Efforting. StanEfforting.com will get you access to the Meal Prep Company and access to my Vertical Diet 3.0 ebook, soon to be 4.0. I update it and I give future copies for free to anybody who bought a previous copy.

• 2:24:32Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow. So you get it and it's always updated?

• 2:24:34Speaker 01

  It's a living document. I keep updating it all the time. So @StanEfforting is my Instagram. And then The Rhino's Rants are on YouTube. It's Stan Efforting and there's some of them are old, but they're fun. They're it's a whole bunch of good stuff. People really enjoy those.

• 2:24:49Chris Williamson?

  Stan, I appreciate you. Thank you.

• 2:24:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you.