Pod Insights Modern Wisdom What Science Actually Says About How To Lose Body Fat - Ben Carpenter - #605 About this episode Ben Carpenter is a personal trainer, researcher, international speaker, fitness model and diet expert.
There are a million diets out there. All of them claim to work. Many of us have tried many of them, and many failed. So which diet is the best? What are the principles of fat loss that science agrees on as the most effective? How do we all get a 6-pack?
Expect to learn whether calories are a total lie, why the weight loss industry is filled with so much conflicting advice, the 4 key components to any good diet, how there can be so many approaches to the same end goal, whether diet or training is more important, how to improve your willpower, the single most important contributor to fat loss and much more...
Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(00:30) Our Identity Lags Behind Our Reality
(09:27) Ben’s Health & Fitness Background
(13:17) Why Can’t the Fitness Industry Agree on a Way to Lose Fat?
(23:15) What We Misunderstand About Fat Loss
(33:48) Finding the Right Balance for Taking Responsibility
(41:12) Fundamentals of Fat Loss
(47:13) The Science of Food Texture
(54:10) Do Calories Actually Matter?
(1:05:46) How to Navigate the Countless Diets Available
(1:12:03) Can I Lose Fat Without Exercise?
(1:15:40) How to Improve Willpower
(1:25:13) Making Boring Exercise Enjoyable
(1:32:25) Where to Find Ben
Extra Stuff:
Buy Everything Fat Loss - https://amzn.to/3YAoOA2
Follow Ben on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bdccarpenter/
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
-
Episodes You Might Enjoy:
This Is How To Master Your Life - David Goggins - #577: lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins
How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs - Dr Jordan Peterson - #712: lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson
The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain - Dr Andrew Huberman - #700: lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman
Get in touch.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast
Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript 16,193 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 If you have rodents in a cage and you change their diet, so they're still allowed to eat as much as they want, but you change their regular chow with a cafeteria diet, muffins, biscuits, cakes, et cetera, they gain weight reliably. And you don't blame the rat, you've changed their food and the rat is suddenly wanting to eat more because the foods are delicious. That's what's happening to us on a human level. I view it as people trying to diet now probably feel like they're swimming upstream more than they would have 30 years ago, when it would be easier to stay leaner.
0:30 Chris Williamson? I came up with an idea this morning that I've been thinking about for a little while. Quote from Mark Manson that says, "Identity lags reality by one to two years. There's a lot of psychological fallout from a rapid change in status." And I needed a name for it. The name that I came up to whilst having a look through your book earlier on today is identity dysmorphia.
0:51 Speaker 00 Okay.
0:52 Chris Williamson? My thinking.
0:52 Speaker 00 I like the way this is starting.
0:53 Chris Williamson? Yeah, my thinking behind this is that whether it's with fat loss, whether it's with a glow up or a glow down, or a change in the job role that you've got, or your status on social media, or if you get plucked out of obscurity and put on Love Island, people's identity, their understanding of their identity does seem to lag behind a little bit. And I think that the same must be true in terms of our body image, who we see ourselves as. I mean, there's even memes and jokes about guys that go to the gym to try and sort of hit on girls that are in the process of getting into shape in the hopes that they can sort of buy Bitcoin at five cents. What do you, what do you think about identity dysmorphia?
1:34 Speaker 00 Um, to be honest, I'm actually kind of intrigued to hear where you were going with that. I'm not used to hearing a host go off on such an interesting monologue to begin with.
1:43 Chris Williamson? What can I say? All I was thinking was that, given that we're going to be talking a lot about fat loss today, someone's body image, how they see themselves, probably largely determines their enjoyment of their health and fitness regime and drives their changes and what they want to do moving forward as well.
2:04 Speaker 00 So you posted a video, I think yesterday or the day before, depending on social media's post-timing. So you were talking about Mr. Olympia, and you said if you compete in Mr. Olympia, regardless of how your physique looks, depending on the date that you compete, you may be second in the world, you may be third in the world, and why it's important not to have those kind of external yardsticks as the things that are judging your progress, because you're not in control of all the external yardsticks. And I think that's kind of an interesting parallel to fat loss advice or muscle building advice in general, because a lot of people go into, say, a fat loss journey or a muscle building journey,
2:44 Speaker 00 using these as kind of proxy goals for health and happiness. If I lose fat, I will be healthier, which is not always necessarily true. Or if I build muscle, I will be more confident, I will be more attractive to the opposite sex, I will, my life will become complete, which again, isn't always true. And the way I like to view it is, take muscle building, for example. If you say, I'm going to be happier when I build muscle, a lot of people will attest that it's just not that straightforward. They build muscle, but they become more critical of how they look, body dysmorphia, muscle dysmorphia, especially in men. And it can almost be this kind of spiral where people think, oh, if I gain a few pounds of muscle,
3:28 Speaker 00 if I get slightly bigger arms, I'll be happier. And then they gain a few pounds of muscle, they get slightly bigger arms, but then they want slightly bigger shoulders, and they want slightly bigger arms again, then they want a more chiseled six-pack. And it can sometimes, if you're not careful, it can sometimes be a kind of spiral towards body dissatisfaction, because you're putting too much emphasis on how you look, that kind of self-objectification on how you look in the mirror and how other people perceive you. And you can chase that proxy goal of muscle growth so steadfastly, that you can inadvertently sacrifice your mental health elsewhere.
4:04 Chris Williamson? What is the antidote to that?
4:07 Speaker 00 I don't know. It's a great question. It's a great question. So one of the thing as a kind of an anecdote of something that I personally say my personal journey, research on this is kind of difficult because you can do surveys and you can ask people how they feel about their body and whether they weight train and you can identify trends, you can identify associations and discrepancies. And you can say, for example, oh, bodybuilders who compete often have higher levels of body dissatisfaction. But what you don't necessarily get are randomized control trials identifying how you fix that. You can't say one group of bodybuilders did this and it helped. Another group of bodybuilders did this and it didn't help. So some of the things that I
4:51 Speaker 00 personally think are good to consider, for example, let's say me and you both started weight training. We did exactly the same regime. We did followed exactly the same nutrition plan. But there are behaviors that you do or I do that the other one doesn't. Some of them that I suspect could cause issues are things like self-monitoring. So for example, how often you weigh yourself, how often you test your body fat, how often you look in the mirror can be another one.
5:26 Speaker 00 You call it body surveillance. People that tend to look in the mirror a lot to monitor their physique tend to have lower levels of body satisfaction, which is again seen in bodybuilders and competitive bodybuilders, more so than your average control population. So people who look in the mirror a lot to monitor their physique, that is not necessarily, I would say, a red flag, but perhaps at least a yellow flag. People that weigh themselves obsessively, or people who track their calorie intake obsessively, these are things that can be identified as risk factors for kind of disordered eating and worse body image. Another one is training just to change the way you look.
6:09 Speaker 00 So correct me if I'm wrong, but you have trained in many sports over the years. And what you may have noticed is if you find a sport that you enjoy, even if it's a sport that can modify your body composition, doing it for the enjoyment can change the outcome of how you feel about your own body. So if I go to the gym and I'm lifting weights with the sole focus of changing the way I look, I may have, I may be more critical of my own physique and have that kind of self-objectification than you would be who's lifting weights just because you enjoy it.
6:43 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I mean, that was the, the huge red pill that I saw when I started CrossFit. Because as it happens, when anybody starts to do CrossFit, they go, oh my God, this is so cool. And it's kind of like a cult and no one's wearing any clothes and Friday night lights and I get to PB and that drove me to train so much more than any desire to have a six pack ever did. And perhaps surprisingly, I ended up in the best condition that I've ever been in because of my compliance with training. So I was training incredibly hard because I wanted to train because the outcome I got from training was something inherently enjoyable in and of itself. Downstream from that, I got ripped.
7:25 Speaker 00 That's exactly it. And that, that's one of the things I feel really passionately about because I kind of went on my own journey of I'm trying to build muscle, I'm trying to probably be more attractive to the opposite sex, probably trying to make myself less insecure, which is how I felt as a teenager and adulthood probably. But you can do exactly the same thing. You can do the same thing with your program. But by approaching it differently, you can have very different mental health and body image outcomes. And I think one example of that, so one thing that I really like about, say, a typical CrossFit studio, or at least the ones that I've seen, is they tend to have far fewer mirrors. People who train there tend to train hard, they're often topless, which is the type of thing that
8:10 Speaker 00 you would expect puts more pressure on you to look a certain way. But because you don't have mirrors, there's no, everyone's standing there flexing between sets. You're going in there, you're training hard, you're doing all the things from a workout that will cause your body to adapt, grow muscle, lose fat, whatever. But I think that the mental health outcome of that is probably different to traditional bodybuilding gyms. And I've been to a fair few where it's very common for people to do one set, then take their top off and stand in front of the mirror and flex and pose from different angles. And it's that body surveillance where you're constantly looking at your body and also the critique, critiquing your body.
8:51 Speaker 00 If you're a professional bodybuilder, for example, to use a very extreme end of the spectrum, they will have often whole training cycles developed to bringing up their weak points. So if you ask a pro bodybuilder what their weak points are, they will often say, my medial deltoid isn't quite as sculpted as it could be, or like my vastus medialis isn't quite as big as I'd like it to be in relation to my vastus lateralis. And it's like an obsessive amount of body surveillance, some kind of self objectification.
9:24 Chris Williamson? Yeah, that scrutiny is hard. So we're going to get into talking about fat loss today and health and training. But before we do, what's your background for the people who don't know you? What gives you any license to talk about the subject of fat loss?
9:36 Speaker 00 So I have been a personal trainer since I was 2006. General personal trainer working in commercial gyms with a very diverse range of clients. So I would have clients who came to me who were fitness models wanting to diet for a show. I would have people like middle aged housewives who want to lose a few pounds because they want to feel healthier or perhaps increase their lifespan. And then I had elderly clients who were just trying to make themselves a bit more resilient should they fall, which was, you know, literally their goal. And I worked in commercial gyms for years. This was obviously approaching 20 years now.
10:19 Speaker 00 And working with a diverse range of clients, the question that always came up, it was always fat loss. Fat loss was the goal that superseded everything. Fat loss is the most common goal in the fitness industry. And it's estimated that half or around half of adults, at least in America, diet at least once per year. And the more clients that saw me about fat loss, the more I researched fat loss. And it just became this spiral of me going deeper and deeper into um reading research papers. So I have no higher academia background. I was never someone who started thinking I want to become a PhD. I was a personal trainer who was working with people one on one as my primary uh income.
11:01 Speaker 00 And then behind the scenes, I was just a kind of self-described research nerd. Where I have folders upon subfolders upon subfolders of different research studies. Just trying to communicate the best objectively current, most factually correct information to social media and my clients.
11:19 Chris Williamson? What would you describe? How how would you classify your approach to health and fitness? Like, wh- where is it that you're coming from? For me, it seems like science-based, evidence-based. Is that the camp that you identify with? Is that who you've pinned your colors to?
11:37 Speaker 00 Uh, I I would say my main goal, if you will. If you ask the average person on the street to name one scientist in the field of nutrition, weight training, aerobic training, whatever, most of them can't do it. Because scientists are working behind the scenes to write research papers. What I tend to do is communicate those research papers, research papers to a bigger audience. So I try and read many, many uh scientific papers and then simplify them into videos that go on social media. So I kind of bridge that gap by trying to simplify evidence-based information to a wider audience.
12:21 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I mean, your social media content is some of the most digestible, easily understood. It it's the equivalent for diet, I think, of what Derek from More Plates More Dates does with a number of the studies that he does. And I imagine that you must find at least a little bit of affinity with the way that he goes about things, deep dives, papers, evidence-based, et cetera.
12:40 Speaker 00 Yeah, so uh as an example, um I'm I I was editing a video today on um.
12:48 Speaker 00 Kind of bodybuilding contest prep and body image. And it will be a ninety second video. And I think I cite six research papers in that. It's it's a lot of effort, but it's trying to make it in a way that it's super easily digestible for people. So when they watch it, they learn something, but it's not boring. It's not dry, which scientific research papers tend to be. So it's it's trying to make science a little bit easier digestible uh by making it a bit more entertaining as well.
13:17 Chris Williamson? If if you can do it, why is the weight loss industry so shitty?
13:24 Speaker 00 If if I can do it as in communicate things objectively.
13:27 Chris Williamson? Correct.
13:29 Speaker 00 Uh, I think there are probably at least a bazillion reasons for this. I think one of them.
13:37 Speaker 00 One of them is always going to come down to finances. When there is an industry that is a kind of fraught with desperation, which the weight loss industry tends to be. It makes it very easy for people to sell you something. So if you look at, for example, the general trend in obesity rates. They have been going up since the nineteen seventies. So people on the whole, on a population level, are gaining weight. But more people are dieting now than they have in the past. So body weights are going up, but dieting rates are also going up. And I think when you compare those, it it kind of makes you realise that a lot of people actually trying really hard. It's not necessarily a uniform lack of willpower or laziness.
14:22 Speaker 00 It's that our environment is nudging people towards gaining weight. And people feel probably more desperate than ever to lose weight. And I think when people are more desperate than ever, it's easier to prey on them and sell them things. So for example, when if you go to Amazon top selling diet books. You will often see completely different dietary methodologies. You will see several keto books, you will see several intermittent fasting books, you will see this diet plan, this diet plan, this diet plan. And it's almost like a conveyor belt of diet plans where people are having their best punt at selling a book. Um, and that's not the solution.
15:05 Chris Williamson? That's not the solution. What is the solution?
15:07 Speaker 00 So how it tends to be communicated, to make it really simple. It is believed that one of the main drivers for obesity rates going up is the development of the obesogenic environment. So if you went back to the nineteen seventies, if you looked at the food selection that was available to you, you wouldn't have the vast array of biscuits, cakes, muffins, crisps or chips for Americans that are filled in grocery stores now. And foods tend to be cheaper, tastier, hyper palatable, extra tasty, more convenient because they're more shelf stable than they used to be.
15:48 Speaker 00 So it's easier to consume more calories than it would have been in the past when food processing wasn't as rampant as it is now. But also there are developments in technology that can drive sedentary behaviours. So for example, just to roll a few examples together. Let's say person A wakes up in the morning, they sit in their car, they drive to work. They get in an elevator, a lift or an escalator. They go up to a desk job where they work for eight, nine hours. Then they get back on the escalator in the lift, elevator, whatever, go back to their car and they drive home.
16:29 Speaker 00 And technology is advancing that acts as labour-saving devices. Even in the home, dishwashers save people washing up by hand, washing machines save people washing up by hand. Electric toothbrushes save you having to do this because you can just hold it in your mouth. Even bin lids, you can hover your hand over a bin and the lid will cut up. Things are getting easier to conserve us time and energy and convenience.
16:56 Chris Williamson? But that's making us fatter.
16:58 Speaker 00 Right. It's estimated that energy expenditure, the number of calories we burn per day trends downwards because of the advancements in technology and modernisation of the world. And when you put that along with all of the foods that we're now surrounded by. Everywhere. Think of it like this. Even if you walk through a train station, there will be vending machines. In the vending machines, typically, I know it's different depending on country and depending on train station, typically will be filled with things like chocolate bars and crisps and things like that because they are shelf stable, they are cheap, they are tasty. They're not going to perish and rot inside the vending machine. It's more convenient for us to eat these foods than it ever has been.
17:44 Speaker 00 And it's driving calorie intake up. So
17:48 Speaker 00 this trend of of body weights going up has been described in some research papers as a natural. Body weights going up is a natural consequence to the change in our environment. If you viewed a different species, say, for example, rats. Rats are easier to study for many reasons. If you have rodents in a cage and you change their diet, so they're still allowed to eat as much as they want, they're rats, you're not telling them how much to eat. But you change their regular chow with a cafeteria diet, muffins, biscuits, cakes, et cetera. They gain weight reliably. And you don't blame the rat. You've changed their food and the rat is suddenly wanting to eat more because the foods are fucking delicious.
18:33 Speaker 00 That's what's happening to us on a human level. So I view it as people trying to diet now probably feel like they're swimming upstream more than they would have thirty years ago when it would be easier to stay lean, to stay leaner.
18:49 Chris Williamson? That's very interesting and it's a much more holistic view, I think, of the weight gain epidemic problem that we've seen since the nineteen seventies. That I always see black and white photos of Venice Beach in nineteen sixty or whatever, and everyone looks like the twelve percent body fat, even the women, and everyone's in super healthy condition. And it's used to kind of cast dispersions on, look at this decadent. Modern civilization, everyone's a fat slob. Everybody just gets their like Roomba to clean up after them as they eat Cheetos laying on the couch. But the reality is that most people that are overweight don't want to be overweight.
19:34 Chris Williamson? Most of the people that I know, even the guys that are in shape, would like to be in better shape. And even if they're in fantastic shape, they want to improve their health in different ways. So it very much is massively influenced, I think, by the environment that we're in, the different types of stimulus that we have around us. I mean, you you did some studies. I heard you talk about how the placement of different foods in supermarkets and fast food places and default selections on food menus can have a huge impact as well.
20:05 Speaker 00 Yeah, so as an example, there are a few research trials that look at things like this. So it's described as a food proximity effect. If you give people a binary choice of two options and you have something like apples or popcorn, even though participants will rate popcorn as a tastier snack, if you make the popcorn sit closer to them and you place the apples two metres away on the other end of the table, people will naturally eat more popcorn. If you flip those around and the apples are close, people will just naturally eat the apples, even though they know the popcorn is tastier because you have made it more convenient. And this can affect food purchasing habits as well, not just immediate food selection.
20:47 Speaker 00 So if you spoke to anyone who's higher up in a supermarket and you ask them about shelf placement, they will say that it is strategic because they know that items placed at eye level, for example, people are more inclined to buy than items sitting at the bottom. Or items that are placed near the checkout are easier to upsell because people are there waiting. And while they're waiting and they've got 30 seconds, they just turn to the side and they see this selection of chocolate bars. Oh, yeah, I'll grab one. And these are examples of how you can kind of subconsciously influence people's food selection. So as an example of one of the research studies, if you take a cafeteria and there are vending machines in the corners,
21:30 Speaker 00 there are, sorry, fridges in the corners, not vending machines, or there's a fridge by the checkout scanner.
21:38 Speaker 00 It was shown that if you reposition sodas and waters, you can get people to buy less soda solely based off placement. So they did this as a kind of food preference thing where they had red quote unquote high sugar beverages that they want people to consume less of. Consuming few added sugars in the diet is a fairly universal recommendation for improved health and body weight. So what they did was they just made those red items less convenient by taking them out of eye level or moving them away from fridges that were more convenient. So rather than having them right at the checkout so people can grab one while they're buying, they would move them to the other side of the store and they would replace those with water to make water more convenient.
22:22 Speaker 00 And just that can influence people's purchasing habits. So although that's a very small scale experiment, it's kind of suggestive of how the overall environment can subconsciously influence what you buy, but then also what you consume. And when you kind of zoom out and you think about your life, there'll be multiple instances of this throughout the day. If someone's working at a desk and their colleague brings in donuts and they put them on the desk, suddenly you really want donuts. You might not have even been thinking about donuts before. If your colleague said, oh, by the way, there are donuts in the kitchen, you might carry on working and think, oh, I might get to one later. But when you can see it and when you can smell it and it's visible, you're more inclined to eat it.
23:05 Speaker 00 And in today's environment, high calorie, hyper palatable
23:11 Speaker 00 foods are more convenient than ever.
23:15 Chris Williamson? What belief that is widely held either in mainstream media or amongst most people with regards to fat loss, do you wish that you could get rid of? Like, what do most people misbelieve about fat loss and how it works that you would like to try and dispense with?
23:32 Speaker 00 I think there are, I think there are a couple of big ones. Um, number one, that there is a, a best diet. I don't think people's search for what diet should I start next is a fruitful question. Because it isn't a case of picking keto or picking intermittent fasting or picking time restricted feeding or whatever. Those are all, those are all vehicles that ultimately take people to the same destination of a reduced calorie intake. Um, I also think that
24:06 Speaker 00 the more
24:09 Speaker 00 I, I want to kind of word this delicately. The more intelligent someone tends to be within the fat loss obesity research space. The less they point the finger at the individual. So obesity researchers will say typically, yes, there is obviously individual responsibility. If you go to the gym or not, no one is going to force you to do so. But obesity researchers will say that obesity rates are going up because of the interception between genetics, biology and the overall environment. And they don't look at people gaining weight as a kind of willpower deficiency.
24:50 Speaker 00 They view it as in some ways you need more willpower now to lose weight than you would have twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years ago. And to go back to the kind of rodent example. If you change the food that you give rodents, no one blames the rodents for gaining weight. It's a, a natural consequence to you changing their diet. But on a global level, our diets have been changing because of the powers that be above us. Food manufacturers, governments that implement taxes on, say, sugar sweetened beverages, for example. Governments can influence the food supply as well. Um, food subsidies can influence the food supply. In some ways, we are just pawns in the bigger game of chess.
25:35 Chris Williamson? I really, really like that. And I think the genetics component is so fascinating. I'm going to guess you'll have looked at the behavioral genetics outcomes that correlate twin studies, parents with children. You know, a lot of the time you may see two overweight parents with an overweight child that's like seven or eight years old and they're not super overweight, but you're like, you're going to be a fat adult. I can already see it. And a lot of the time you think, oh my God, you know, look at this, this family causing this child to eat too much due to their unhealthy lifestyle. And again, you're right, you do have to be delicate here because if everybody was born on an island that didn't have any unhealthy food, no one would be overweight. Everybody would be, you know,
26:16 Chris Williamson? the optimal size that they should be. So individual agency plays a massive role in what you can do. But just how much willpower and self sovereignty do we expect from people? Do you want to create a world in which it is easier for people to be healthy or more difficult for people to be healthy? And this is a conversation, again, we'll get on to seed oils and the quality of water and phthalates and stuff in a little bit. But that, that's something that doesn't really get spoken about all that much, even going past the quality of food, simply the environment and the availability of this type of food, the triggers that you see all the time, the chocolate bars next to the checkout, et cetera,
26:58 Chris Williamson? et cetera. But you see these children, I think I'd be right in saying that body weight correlates point six to point eight between children and biological parents, and it correlates basically zero with adoptive parents. So what I mean by that is that if you take two identical kids who have two healthy parents and put both of them into an overweight parents' household, the likelihood is that both of those children will correlate very highly with their healthy weight parents and not at all with their environmental adoptive parents. And the reverse is true, too, that you can have Larger parents give birth to twins that get separated into different adoptive households that are healthy, that end up being overweight despite being in this healthy environment.
27:43 Chris Williamson? Robert Ploman, the number one behavioral geneticist on the planet, is a guy who says he has a predisposition to overeating, but he gave me this really great insight, which is there are many ways to become fat, that you can become fat because you have overactive ghrelin response, perhaps, so your stomach makes you feel a little bit more hungry, or perhaps you are less prone to enjoying exercise, perhaps your sleep quality tends to just be worse, your baseline for sleep quality tends to be worse, perhaps your baseline set of happiness downstream from that, you comfort eat because of your perhaps depressive episodes, et cetera, et cetera. All of these can exist individually or together, or can combine to create some monstrous situation
28:28 Chris Williamson? in which this person very much is swimming upstream. And, you know, Jocko Willink and David Goggins have been on the show, and I'm all for taking personal responsibility, and I want to encourage people to do that, and, you know, I don't need to bang that drum yet again.
28:40 Speaker 00 Yeah.
28:42 Chris Williamson? It is a delicate line to walk, to say, we know that genetically, things may be more difficult for you with regards to your predisposition, not biologically, you don't even need to do the, I've got a metabolism and gluten makes me inflamed. It's like, your psychology is different around food, the way that you relate to food is different, the protein folding in your brain literally makes you taste food in a different way to other people, and on top of that, the environment's changed a lot. Those are two huge triggers that can cause downstream from that, a ton of people's relationships with food to be incredibly different.
29:18 Speaker 00 Firstly, your last five minutes, you have talked about something above and beyond.
29:28 Speaker 00 Almost any personal trainer or fitness professional I see talking about on social media. Why? That's a rhetorical why, but I haven't heard people summarize that facet of obesity research as eloquently as you have. And it's, in some ways, it's kind of worrying because that should be more mainstream. But the number of things you touched on there, brilliant, by the way. So as an example, let's talk about kind of biological variance. When people, if you say there is a genetic factor or predisposition to obesity, a lot of people will immediately say you're talking bullshit.
30:09 Speaker 00 And their straw man argument to this is babies are never born obese. And you would be amazed how many times I've heard people say that as if it's just this binary thing. It's like, well, no, that baby wasn't obese, so there's no kind of genetic component. But that's not what geneticists will say. Geneticists will say that they have predispositions to certain things. So like you have alluded to, there can be biological predispositions that affect appetite. Uh, there can be genetic variants that make people feel hungrier. On, um, on an emotional level, something that you touched on, for example.
30:49 Speaker 00 If you look at emotional eating studies, if you impose an emotional stimulus on people, you can influence their food intake immediately. So if you make people watch a sad video clip, a subset of people who are described as emotional eaters will immediately eat more food afterwards. Whereas people who do not score highly on an emotional eating questionnaire, their food intake kind of remains the same. And if you use that as like one example. One of the relationships that has been noted is obesity and depression are described as having a bidirectional relationship in that obesity could increase someone's risk
31:31 Speaker 00 of depression, but depression can also increase someone's risk of obesity. And most people wouldn't say that depression is something that falls solely on personal responsibility. Yes, people might say if you have depression, maybe you could improve it if you adopted these habits. I know people will say if you go outside and exercise, that might help. If you change your diet, maybe that will help. But ultimately, most people will acknowledge that if someone has severe depression, that isn't quite as easy as just telling them that they have to change their behaviours and it will fix it. It's obviously more complicated than that. But when it comes to obesity and body weight, people have a tendency to point the finger
32:16 Speaker 00 solely at the person. And like you say, this isn't eliminating individual agency, it's just saying that there are other factors that influence individual agency. And another one that you touched on, which again is great, is say for example, sleep susceptibility. If you look, sleep quality susceptibility, if you look at sleep studies, you can influence how much food someone eats just by giving them a reduced sleep opportunity. So for example, if you give someone 8.5 hours sleep opportunity per day, or you cut that down by around half, the next day, the people who have slept less will consume more food.
33:01 Speaker 00 It will skew appetite-related hormones and they tend to feel hungrier. Also, people that sleep better will find it harder to gain lean body mass, or they will be more susceptible to losing lean body mass than people who sleep for longer. But there is obviously a biological interception on how well people sleep. Yes, there are some things that you can do yourself, but there are also some biological drivers that can ruin sleep quality that are very hard for you to overcome just on your own. There's only so much that individual behaviours can do to override that biology. And that's the thing that. Not many people talk about, and you have just talked about so many facets of that better than most fitness professionals that I know.
33:47 Chris Williamson? The reason that it's not fashionable for any fitness professionals to talk about it is that it fundamentally de-agencies them, like they are uh cutting the legs out from underneath an industry that they need to make money in. Right? If you say, well, look, Ben, uh, we're gonna do our best with you, mate. But you know, the best thing that could have happened would have actually for you to have had a different set of parents who provided you with a separate genetic baseline for you to work from. And this is something I've been, an idea that I've been playing about with a lot recently, which is
34:21 Chris Williamson? the um, the danger of taking too much responsibility and the uh backlash that we are seeing against victimhood culture. So again, I've been Mr. Personal Agency Sovereignty, like since I began this show. It was the reason I began the show because I wanted to take control of my own desires, my own life, everything, right? But I do understand that this is heavily as a reaction to a what seems to be increasingly soft world in which people will blame their circumstances and systemic whatever for something which it isn't the fault of the circumstances or the system. It is because of them and they are fully in control of the decisions that they are making
35:05 Chris Williamson? and they choose to make bad decisions over and over again. However, there are many contributing elements here, including your genetic baseline, including the environment that you're around, including your level of education, I imagine, must be correlated as well with the weight that you gain or lose. A lot of these things, it's like, it's so hard to thread the needle and it's so much easier to come out and say, if you're fat, it's exclusively your fault and. Again, that's not to say that anybody who is absolutely superbly obese, if they were deposited on a desert island, they would be skinny, right? They're going to lose weight. So the point isn't that people can't do these things. It's how difficult is it going to be for them to do it?
35:47 Chris Williamson? And there are incentives within the fitness industry to overblow the impact that personal agency can have on weight change. And again, it can be ultimate. It could be 100%. You could kill yourself with dieting, but how much willpower is it going to take? And then there are incentives on the other side with regards to the food and drinks industry for them to not necessarily do this. So I think that's a really nice primer that hopefully makes people feel
36:20 Chris Williamson? not righteously angry, but you know, like there is a battle to be waged here. And that the challenges that you face when it comes to your fat loss journey and your alterations with regards to your diet and your training. You know, if you're finding it difficult, yeah, perhaps quite rightly. This isn't the easiest environment in which to be healthy. Oh, it's never been easier to get access to food from so and so. Well, yeah, but it's also never been easier to be fat. So it is very much a set of scales.
36:53 Speaker 00 I think there's something really interesting that you said there. And when you talk about almost like a reactive, a reactive response to victimhood. I think people often fall in kind of very binary camps where if I talk about environmental reasons that one person might find it harder than another, I will get some hatred from people saying you are removing personal responsibility. And I've never said that. It isn't this binary dichotomous view where it's black or white. And as an example of this, which is maybe easier for people to understand is.
37:26 Speaker 00 You couldn't take, let's say, almost anyone. Let's not say anyone, because then people will interject with medical conditions. You can take almost anyone on the planet and you can make them lose weight. And this is seen reliably in controlled feeding studies. So in the most aggressive controlled feeding studies, people will lose huge amounts of weight. This has been seen in numerous extreme circumstances.
37:53 Chris Williamson? What is this? What's a controlled feeding study? You lock someone in a, in a building that's only got sort of a supply of food?
38:00 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, that is literally what it is. So you will have something like a described as a metabolic ward and you can precisely control.
38:07 Chris Williamson? Metabolic ward?
38:08 Speaker 00 Yeah. You can have live-in studies where people will live in a metabolic ward for, say, 50 days, and you can feed them precise amounts of certain foods to see exactly what happens. And some of these are brutal. So for example, there was a meal frequency study, which would have been, I think, say, 50 years ago now. And they would feed people who would be described as morbidly obese. I don't necessarily love the categorization, but that's how they would have been described at the time. And they were fed 600 calories per day via liquid nutrition. So it's like skimmed milk, I think cornstarch, some other things, like a not very tasty drink. But you can
38:50 Speaker 00 do that and you will see people lose ridiculous amounts of weight. And I think people will look at experiments like that and say, see, if the person wants it enough, they can do it. Because technically they can do it. But what we are saying is that, yes, someone can do it. There is always personal responsibility there. But it's harder for one person to get to the finish line than it is for another person. Some people will feel like they're swimming upstream more than other people. So for me, for example, I was always like a very active kid. I wasn't someone that ate a lot of ultra-processed foods. I grew up in a really rural area where.
39:30 Speaker 00 There were almost no convenience foods. I was over twenty years old when I ever ordered my first takeaway. Because food restaurants couldn't deliver to us. So I grew up with a loving mother who I lived with all the time. Who would home cook everything from fresh. I wasn't one of those kids that grew up sedentary. I was a child that had activity in like installed on me. When I was probably five years old, playing all different kinds of sports. And as most people will probably already know. It's very easy to continue habits versus trying to create new ones or trying to stop old ones. And for me, I was always an active kid. I was never someone who
40:14 Speaker 00 grew up loving the taste of ultra processed foods. I was never someone that scoffed every time they ate a vegetable. Even things like vegetable enjoyment, there's a genetic component there. And people know this, like coriander, some people it tastes like soap, some people don't. Uh, there are uh genetic variants where brassical vegetables can be really bitter, but other people don't have those same um kind of genetic uh um alterations. And just things like this can make it harder for someone. And no one is really saying that you can't lose weight under the right conditions. If you lock someone in a room and you take away all their food, they will lose weight.
40:55 Speaker 00 What we're saying is when left to their own devices, it's much harder for that person to reduce their food intake on their own.
41:02 Chris Williamson? Okay, we've set the uh landscape. We know the modern environment. We've pissed off everybody that wanted to blame it on personal responsibility. What are, moving on to that personal responsibility, moving on to the toolkit that people need to understand if they want to lose body fat? What are the absolute fundamentals that everybody needs to understand when it comes to fat loss?
41:25 Speaker 00 Great question. Firstly, I would kick things off by saying how much you weigh is not a behaviour. It is a consequence of some biological factors and a combination of behaviours. So fat loss itself can be achieved via various methods, some of them healthy, some of them less healthy. And I think it is easier to break it down to individual behaviours. Going back to the example you used or I used of you, where you're talking about
42:01 Speaker 00 having external rewards. If you set a goal, sometimes the goal isn't always within your control. There are other factors that influence whether you get there. But if you can break it down to behaviours, it's easier to kind of build those habits. So the most universally agreed upon recommendations, which aren't very controversial, but they're surprisingly controversial in today's day and age, is reduced calorie intake. Consuming adequate protein, consuming enough protein tends to have a mildly beneficial effect on weight loss or fat loss. It can help retain lean body mass. Lean body mass can
42:41 Speaker 00 raise energy expenditure mildly if someone's consuming, if someone's building muscle tissue. Reduced energy density diets are also a big one. So energy density is calories per gram of food. So to use an easy example, if you had an apple here, which is primarily sugar and water, no protein, no fat. And then you had jelly beans next to it, which is also primarily sugar. Because the concentration of sugar is much higher in the jelly beans, the the number of jelly beans you would eat for the same number of calories would be. Disgustingly small, like a hundred calories of jelly beans would be almost nothing versus a whole apple. And this is an example of energy density.
43:23 Speaker 00 Foods that contain a lot of calories per gram tend to be easier to overconsume. And tend to be worse for appetite regulation, which is one of the many reasons. Why prioritizing unprocessed foods is. An almost universally agreed upon recommendation for health and body weight. Eating things like um meats and fishes and vegetables and fruits. And things that are kind of more close to their natural state versus ultra processed um. Products that are engineered often to be as tasty as possible, often very high in calories, often very hard to stop eating. Those are the things that are very difficult to disagree on.
44:09 Chris Williamson? Is the reason for that because satiety, as in just how much real estate is taken up in your stomach? Is one of the key determinants in terms of making you feel full?
44:20 Speaker 00 Uh, yes, and thi- this has been tested with a series of of very weird experiments. So, for example, uh, let's say there are two milkshakes. And you have identical milkshakes, but you aerate one or you add more water, so there's more volume. So exactly the same calories as a foundation, but you put more air into one or more water to to increase the volume. By lowering the energy density of this one and having more volume for the same number of calories. This will cause people to consume fewer calories afterwards. So it is better for appetite regulation, like you say, because there is a certain amount of real estate in the stomach. And if you are eating a higher volume of food.
45:03 Speaker 00 It influences not only how much you eat at that meal, but also at your subsequent meal. So as an example, I mean, there are various examples of this. You can aerate, you know, like cheese snacks, cheese balls, cheese, whatever. If you put more air into those snacks, so it has exactly the same number of calories, but it's bigger. People will consume few of them.
45:26 Chris Williamson? Big balls is what you're prescribing, Ben.
45:28 Speaker 00 Yeah, that is an example of reduced energy density. But in the real world, a more easy way to implement it would be things like. Cooking with less fat, if you have a portion of vegetables and you cook them with a load of butter, that will increase the energy density significantly and almost su- super reliably will cause people to consume more calories without feeling more full afterwards. So reducing the amount of added fat, I'm not saying fat is bad, but if you had potatoes and then you had deep fried potatoes, it is much easier to consume more of the deep fried potatoes, both from taste perspective and a calorie perspective.
46:11 Chris Williamson? Hmm.
46:11 Speaker 00 You can also do things like food substitutions. So on a plate, if you have beef and rice and vegetables, the vegetables have the lowest energy density out of all of them. And if you increase the serving of vegetables relative to the other two um items of food, people will consume fewer calories based off that. So you can use it with food preference, like the way you cook, the foods that you're selecting, and the aerated food snacks is like an extreme example. But it's a way of testing that mechanism of food volume versus satiety.
46:46 Chris Williamson? Everybody, when they're dieting, has used those low calorie popcorns. Everybody, everyone's gone for them. And you go, how the fu- what what Harry Potter wizardry has gone on to make this bag of popcorn eighty nine calories? Like how it looks like the massive bag of popcorn and it's salted or sweet or whatever. Uh, charity popcorn in the UK is the one that I seem to remember eating when I was getting lean for Ibiza. Um, have you looked at the science of orification? So that that is the uh corner of the food industry that designs the texture of foods. And I remember reading in an evolutionary psych.
47:27 Speaker 00 I I I have read Sutton.
47:29 Chris Williamson? Cool.
47:29 Speaker 00 I'm not well versed.
47:30 Chris Williamson? It's just, it was really interesting, this Eve Psych book that I read, and it talked about how ancestrally novel it would be to have a food that was both uh uh soft and fluffy but also crunchy. So if you think about most foods naturally that we've spoken about, I mean, an apple kind of does have that, you know, it's got that kind of crunch to it, but it's got, but it's not super fluffy.
47:54 Speaker 00 It's not a Milky Way or a Snickers bar.
47:56 Chris Williamson? Or specifically fries, french fries, you know, or an Oreo. So what you have, when you actually look, and as soon as you, it's like the matrix, once you see this, you can't unsee it in food. What you're looking at, not just with regards to the combination of carbs and fat and sugar and the taste profile and the ability for it to spike this, that sensation of sugar and saltiness on the tongue that would have been very novel ancestrally, but the texture of what you're eating is unbelievably like super normal in terms of the stimulus. So an Oreo, two crunchy bits of biscuit with something sort of soft and lubricating in the middle, or french fries is exactly the same.
48:39 Chris Williamson? It's so, when you actually look at it as a, what is the sort of thing that goes on in my mouth from a texture perspective when I bite into this, it is unbelievably novel. And if you go to say, okay, please try and replicate this in something that would have been regularly available ancestrally, your liver doesn't feel like that and berries aren't really like that and apples and roots and tubers and stuff, none of these things are like that. So yeah, that's just another thing to layer on top that I always like to think about. No one ever considers the texture, the attractive texture of foods.
49:15 Speaker 00 So there's, there's like a slightly different angle on texture as well. So as you, as you have rightly explained, food manufacturers will engineer foods to have a certain reward value that we can't access elsewhere. So typically in nature, you will find things that are high in sugar, such as fruit or higher in sugar. You will find things that are higher in protein and fat like fish and meat, but it's very rare that you will find things that are both high in sugar and high in fat, which is what things like ice cream and
49:44 Chris Williamson? Cheese cake.
49:45 Speaker 00 Chocolate and cheesecake, all of those tend to have this combination that you don't really find in nature and texture can also influence appetite. So. There was one experiment where they took, um, they took food, like I think it was beef and potatoes and vegetables. And they they mashed it and cut it into smaller parts to make it easier to consume. And what they found was that because it was faster to consume, people naturally ate more food. So there is, uh, the simplified version is when you start your meal, there is perhaps a certain amount of time before your appetite signals kick in. And so you know what, I've probably had enough food. So the faster you can consume food within that.
50:29 Speaker 00 If you watch anyone that's in like an eating contest, they will tend to eat quick to try and race against those signals. And if you modify the texture of foods to make it easier to consume quickly, people tend to consume more. That, uh, the extreme example of that is if you have a very high calorie milkshake and you're drinking it with a straw. You can consume sugar faster than you would tend to when you're chewing it.
50:54 Chris Williamson? Uh, have you seen the ice cream competitive eating competitions? Have you seen what they eat to help them eat more ice cream?
51:03 Speaker 00 No.
51:03 Chris Williamson? They've got a bucket of french fries next to them. So if you're in an ice cream keep eating competition, you'll, the guys will go down and grab a handful of salty french fries. And conversely, you would think I want every square cent cubic centimeter of my stomach real estate to be used for the ice cream.
51:22 Speaker 00 The theory.
51:23 Chris Williamson? That, um, one of the main reasons that you are struggling to eat more ice cream as a competitive eater.
51:30 Speaker 00 Brain freeze.
51:31 Chris Williamson? Uh, apart from the brain freeze, actually, how the fuck do they get around that?
51:35 Speaker 00 That's when you said fries, I thought you meant like something hot to try it.
51:38 Chris Williamson? They've got a little hat on. They've got a heated, one of those heated hats. Uh, no, it's, it's to do with, uh, I think, again, mixing up this texture that's going into the mouth, which must make uh, more ice cream eating, less disgusting to them. Uh, but it's just hilarious to see a competitive ice cream eating competition and then someone, yeah, exactly, dunk in and eat fries.
52:00 Speaker 00 Have you, have you ever heard of the term sensory specific satiety, which is what you've already been discussing, I just don't know. So sensory specific satiety is, um, simplified is almost like you get bored of the same thing, basically. And you also talk about it, uh, with taste. So for example, if you feed someone sandwiches and they have one filling.
52:24 Speaker 00 Or you feed someone else sandwiches with multiple fillings. The person who served multiple fillings will consume more food. And the idea is you can get bored of consuming the same thing. And the the easiest example of this in everyday life, perhaps, is if you went to a food buffet. If I served you your regular dinner on its own, à la carte, you eat it. If you go to a food buffet and that first plate is your regular dinner. You don't stop afterwards because you see all of these very tasty foods and you see all of that. I want to try a bit of that. I want to try a bit of that. And it, there is supposedly a possible kind of evolutionary basis for this. In that in times of food scarcity.
53:08 Speaker 00 If you found another type of food, it is beneficial for you to keep eating because you you now have more food than you are used to. And supposedly it's almost like overriding your um typical appetite signals. Because you have multiple sources of food, this is a good time for you to consume more. So if you've hunted a an animal and you've eaten it, but then you find another source of food, you could eat that now. And the theory behind sensory specific satiety is you will get bored of a certain taste or texture. But if you that is complemented with a different taste or texture.
53:44 Chris Williamson? French fries.
53:45 Speaker 00 It's easier for you to keep eating. So for example, if you had a bowl of french fries. Or you had a bowl of french fries and ice cream. It is sometimes easier to keep going, or even things like if you have french fries, but then you have um. Ketchup or sauce or something on the side. It's often easier to keep going because you don't get bored of that same thing.
54:07 Chris Williamson? Okay, so important things to know, calories. You've said that calories matter, but I said I saw Dr Giles Yeal. And he said that.
54:20 Speaker 00 Great guy, by the way.
54:21 Chris Williamson? Calories tell you absolutely nothing. Is that right?
54:24 Speaker 00 Um. So Giles Yeo, Professor of Genetics at Cambridge, I think, he's, he's, he's an incredible guy. And I think he got some backlash on social media recently. In my opinion, without casting too much shade, I think people threw shade at him without realising who he is. Because the way people talk to him, like, who's this guy that doesn't know what he's talking about is like-
54:45 Chris Williamson? Dude with a stellar academic career for decades and decades.
54:49 Speaker 00 Very, very much chill the fuck out, pause, research and then come back. So Giles Yeo, he's a fantastic guy and I actually listened to his podcast in full, his recent one. And I feel like the video that went on social media and what he said in the podcast didn't match, but it was a hell of a trailer. And I understand why it riled people up. So what Giles Yeo will say, like the simplified version, and this is echoed with, with other people who are also, some of which are very intelligent, is calories matter, yes, but there are limitations within that. So for example, it is very difficult to accurately quantify how many calories you're consuming.
55:32 Speaker 00 Uh, it doesn't matter how meticulous someone is with calorie counting. Calorie counting is impossible, nearly impossible to get perfectly accurately. And often that's for reasons outside of your control. Labels, the nutritional information is allowed a natural variance. So just because something says it's a hundred calories doesn't mean it's a hundred. It might be a hundred and ten, it might be ninety. Um, also the way you prepare food, for example, can change the calorie content of that food or the energy content of that food. Just like if you juice vegetables, you can remove fibre. You may put the vegetables in and then you juice it, but if it removes the fibre, you have changed the qualities of that food.
56:16 Speaker 00 Even though the food itself is the same. So the way you prepare food can influence the uh calorie values of that food. But one of the things that he um has explained, which is really important, is the caloric availability of food or something referred to um as metabolisable energy of that food. So for example, say nuts, if you have one hundred grams of nuts.
56:42 Speaker 00 Or say a hundred calories of nuts. When you consume them, some of those nuts will go through you. If you checked in the toilet afterwards, you would probably see fragments of nuts. So you have not absorbed all of the calorie content from those nuts. Now, if you break the nuts down so they're easier to digest by making them into peanut butter. So let's say you have peanuts, peanut butter, or even peanut oil, which is obviously refined right down. It's changed the food matrix completely. The caloric availability goes up. So you will can, you will absorb and utilise a higher percentage of those calories.
57:22 Speaker 00 So just because you're consuming a hundred calories on paper, doesn't mean that the end result is the same. And I think that's one of the big things that trips people up because you have people that keep saying all calories are the same. And then you have other people that go, well, actually, no, because we know that calories, certain foods can behave differently in the body. We know that the calories you eat from foods isn't necessarily the same as the number of calories you absorb from food. And you almost get two camps arguing past each other. So in a general, like mixed diet, let's not use outlier examples of sweet corn or nuts, or how you blend vegetables or whatever.
58:02 Speaker 00 If you take a mixed diet and you change the quantity of that mixed diet, so you're consuming more calories or fewer calories, that can predict body weight gain or body weight reduction. But when you compare calorie values between foods, things get a little bit more complicated. Because foods that are higher in fibre can decrease the metabolisable energy value of that food. Foods that are higher in protein, your body will burn a little bit more energy digesting those foods. So what Giles is saying is calories matter, but they don't tell you about food quality.
58:40 Speaker 00 Which is important. People can focus so much on calories that they overlook the kind of health aspect of food.
58:48 Chris Williamson? Dude, well, in back in 2010, 2011, when If It Fits Your Macros first came out and carb backloading.
58:56 Speaker 00 Great example, by the way. Keep going.
58:58 Chris Williamson? Yeah, the and skip loading. Did you ever do skip loading?
59:02 Speaker 00 No, what's that?
59:02 Chris Williamson? Skip loading was like carb night, but it was on a Sunday and the only goal each Sunday. So you went completely carb free. You went like keto slash carb free throughout the week. And then on a Sunday, the goal was to eat as many carbs as possible, disregard everything else. So the advice was to eat an entire box of children's cereal upon waking. And this was it's offsetting the metabolism going through the floor. And, you know, the day you had to track the day that your body weight went back to the baseline that it was on the Saturday. And this was also used by competitive bodybuilders to see where they were at.
59:37 Speaker 00 With a different name.
59:38 Chris Williamson? Okay, cool. Nice. It was rebranded. But so when you've got, especially if it fits your macros, my guys from Propane Fitness, one of their most viewed videos is, we got a six pack, we got a six pack eating Haribo and cheesecake. And, you know, what you're doing is you're sticking a middle finger up at food quality, at satiety, at all of these things. And personally, for me, I actually think I timed it quite badly because a lot of what I learned, some of the inherited wisdom that I learned during a very formative period of me starting to understand dieting was the If It Fits Your Macros phase. And the problem that I had there was I really didn't think about food quality all that
1:00:20 Chris Williamson? much. I didn't think about satiety. I didn't think about energy density. I didn't think about where has this come from? What has this been washed in? Could I, why am I not buying for an extra 70 pence? Why am I not buying a kilo of organic chicken breasts instead of a kilo of god knows where they're from chicken breasts? Not that those are bad, but my point being that I disregarded exclusively anything which wasn't kaiko. It's like, look, if it's not calories, I don't care, bro. And I got lean and I was like, whatever, 23 or something. So I was made out of rubber and magic. So it didn't really matter.
1:00:59 Chris Williamson? But yeah, I feel like this sort of insight, the kind of insights that you're putting across here, although they're a lot less sexy, sorry, but
1:01:09 Speaker 00 Yeah, they are, unfortunately.
1:01:11 Chris Williamson? They, I think, should set somebody up for a much better long-term relationship with food, which is significantly more sustainable.
1:01:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, so your kind of if it fits your macros example, I think is a really good extreme end of the spectrum to why someone like Gerald Yo will say calories don't matter. They're not the be all and end all. So traditionally in bodybuilding culture, people used to diet on a very restrictive list of foods. There are top bodybuilders that will say they only ate five foods for 16 weeks going into their show. And it's like chicken breasts, sweet potatoes, oats, rice and vegetables or whatever. So people were dieting on very restrictive lists
1:02:01 Speaker 00 of foods. And if it fits your macros spawned from the idea of food substitution. So on bodybuilding forums, if someone said, hey, I'm supposed to eat rice, but can I eat potatoes instead? They would say, sure, if it fits your macros, that's fine. And the idea was that you can interchange foods with similar properties. If your meal plan says chicken, you are allowed to eat fish if you want. You are allowed to eat turkey if you want. That's how like neurotic and obsessive bodybuilding that's used to be. And then if it fits your macros kind of spiral to the point where people were saying, food quality doesn't matter as long as you are consuming the same number of calories. And whilst technically it's
1:02:43 Speaker 00 it's kind of true in some ways, if you ate nothing but ultra-processed junk food and you consumed it within a calorie deficit, you would lose body fat and body weight, which you already know. But it's not saying that all the other properties of food aren't important. So you can have two diets that are 2000 calories. But if this one is more nutrient dense, it is less processed, it has a lower energy density, it is higher protein, it is higher fibre. Although they start as 2000 calories each, the end result in their body is starkly different.
1:03:16 Chris Williamson? What's the difference in their bodies going to be?
1:03:19 Speaker 00 Okay, so from an energy density perspective, appetite regulation would be superior on the unprocessed diet. If a diet is higher in fibre, it reduces the metabolisable energy within that diet. So basically, higher fibre diets, you excrete a little bit more energy than you will on a lower fibre diet. Higher protein diets, you will burn more energy digesting. That because protein has a higher energy cost of utilisation, something called the thermic effect of food.
1:03:52 Speaker 00 Or diet-induced thermogenesis.
1:03:55 Speaker 00 Where else have I got to? Protein, fibre, food quality, appetite, health. For example, ultra-processed foods, I know health, like, very unsexy topic, ultra-processed foods. The higher percentage of your diet that comes from ultra-processed foods, there is a link with an increased risk of various non-communicable diseases and all-cause mortality. And it's not necessarily saying that it's purely from the ultra-processed foods, it might be that unprocessed foods are being displaced out of your diet. So if two people are consuming 2000 calories, but one of them is consuming a lot of vegetables and the other one is consuming a lot of jelly beans, obviously the health effect of the diet is different.
1:04:37 Chris Williamson? It's not that the jelly beans contain some carcinogen, it's that the replacement of some other food that would have been neuroprotective, physiologically protective, et cetera, et cetera.
1:04:49 Speaker 00 Possibly, so yeah, it could be that the beneficial compounds that are found in diverse unprocessed nutrient-dense diets are removed when consuming a diet that's high in ultra-processed foods, that are nutrient sparse. It is possible that certain foods are more fattening than others for various reasons. But it's very hard to isolate those without looking at very long-term studies. It gets, it's very difficult to say, is this one compound additive E-number that we use in this doughnut going to cause people to gain more weight over the next 20 years? It's not a study that you tend to engineer. But generally speaking, diets that are high in ultra-processed foods are worse for health, obviously.
1:05:32 Speaker 00 So although the two diets are the same, the actual health impact and the body composition impact can be different despite the same number of calories when first ingested.
1:05:44 Chris Williamson? Okay, someone's listening to this and they say, I understand that the environment that we're in is more difficult now to lose weight. I understand that I have genetic predispositions and biological set points that are different to other people. I also understand that there are some principles that I need to look at when I'm designing a diet.
1:06:02 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:06:03 Chris Williamson? What do I do, Ben? There's all of these different diets out here. There's intermittent fasting, time restricted eating, keto, carnivore, veganism. Is it your suggestion that you should find the diet which allows you to remain in a calorie deficit with as many whole unprocessed foods as possible, sustainably for as long as possible whilst feeling good about yourself? Is that the rough heuristic?
1:06:28 Speaker 00 Done, completed it. Like, it's a great explanation. And so the kind of slightly more long-winded explanation for anyone that's curious is dietary trials that look at weight loss interventions tend to be short. So for example, low carb versus low fat, which is better for fat loss. One group consumes a low carb diet, the other group consumes a low fat diet for six months. And they might notice that the low carb group lost a little bit more body weight at the end, or a little bit more fat at the end. But when you extend these trials for longer periods of time, most of the differences wash away. And they wash away for biological reasons that make weight loss harder in the long term, but also adherence tends to decrease
1:07:10 Speaker 00 over time. So if someone watching this is like, you know what, my friend got great results on keto, so I'm going to try keto. But ultimately, unless someone can stick to keto for X number of months slash years, it's almost knowing that you're going to get into a yo-yo cycle of, I'm doing keto now. Oh, no, keto has sapped my will to live. I'm going to stop doing keto.
1:07:35 Chris Williamson? I fucking hate keto. I tried it. I tried it. And it just, I'm so hungry. My stomach doesn't enjoy it. I can't do it.
1:07:43 Speaker 00 And, and this is a perfect example, because some people watching this will be like, I love keto. When I am on a keto diet, I find my appetite is way better. My hunger levels are down. My mental clarity is improved. I feel better. And whether that's keto or low carb, which are kind of under the same umbrella. When you look at long term trials, most, the differences between named diets wash away. There is no best weight loss diet. Anyone that's telling you there's a best weight loss diet normally has something to sell you. But when you look at what's described as the inter-individual data, some people get better results than others. So just because diet X might not be better than diet Y on paper, doesn't mean that one person gets better results on diet X.
1:08:27 Speaker 00 One person out there loves keto, someone else out there like yourself hates keto. And it's important to be aware of those because some people will find that their appetite is better on diet X. Or they feel better on diet X. And if that allows them to adhere to a calorie deficit for an extended period of time, then that's important.
1:08:49 Chris Williamson? Are you saying that adherence or dietary compliance is the biggest lever or the most important factor when it comes to weight loss?
1:08:56 Speaker 00 100%, 100%. So diets are more important than exercise for pure weight loss in general, for multiple reasons. But it's very difficult for exercise to trump the importance of dietary changes.
1:09:11 Chris Williamson? Why?
1:09:13 Speaker 00 Multiple reasons. Number one, it's quite hard to burn a lot of energy purely through exercise. So you do CrossFit, which means that you work harder than your average person. And let's say you burned, just for round figures, 500 calories per workout, which is again above the average for most people's gym program. If you did that four times per week, which is again above the average of most gym programs, that's 2,000 calories. But in the grand scheme of it, across the week, it's not a huge amount of energy when you think someone like yourself. Let's say you were burning 3,000 calories per day. That's 21,000 calories over the course of the week. So it's, it's kind of like the icing on top. On top of that, exercise routines.
1:09:59 Speaker 00 Tends to make people feel hungrier. Some people feel hungrier, not universally. But if you get a hundred people to start running and you don't tell them what to do with their diet. Some of them will lose a lot of weight, but some of them will not only not lose weight, but they will gain weight. And some people will, say, for example, there are people out there who start training for a marathon. And by the end of it, they've gained weight. And it's a biological response to the increase in exercise volume where they suddenly feel hungrier.
1:10:32 Chris Williamson? We should interject there that that's not necessarily bad weight, though. You know, someone starts going to the gym and they start doing a push pull leg split and they gain weight. Well, I mean, that's, that's what you were hoping for presumably. This isn't people training for weight loss. This is people training for performance.
1:10:48 Speaker 00 Yeah, so we, uh, weight is an easier metric to measure. And because getting accurate body composition, um, measurements is, is difficult when you're looking at kind of population studies. But if you look at aerobic training interventions for weight loss. Rather than bringing in resistance training, which, which tends to increase lean body mass, as you rightly pointed out. Even aerobic training interventions, which are supposedly the best interventions for weight loss. Some people, when they exercise, their weight will stay stagnant, despite the fact they've increased their exercise volume. And some people's appetite ratings, their subjective appetite ratings go up.
1:11:28 Speaker 00 So let's say your typical person wants to lose weight, so they start going to the gym for the first time ever. They go three times a week, they burn two or three hundred calories while they're there. But what they don't necessarily realise is when they leave the gym, they feel a little bit hungrier than they were before they went in. So without realising it, they can slowly creep up their calorie intake. And the weight loss effects of exercise interventions in isolation.
1:11:55 Speaker 00 Are underwhelming, which is why dietary interventions need to be paired.
1:12:01 Chris Williamson? What would you say to the people that are listening to this and say, well, fuck, why do I even need to bother to train? I evidently don't need to exercise if I want to lose weight. I can just lose weight on the couch.
1:12:14 Speaker 00 Yeah, so the the kind of important, the the important thing to point out is technically that is correct. You can, of course, I mean, you can lose weight by smoking more cigarettes and doing methamphetamine and cocaine and Ibiza if you want. And that is why I say how much you weigh is not a behaviour. Because just because someone weighs less doesn't mean that their health is equally improved, regardless of the vehicle that took them there. So we know that health, we know that the health benefits of exercise are profound and diverse. So
1:12:50 Speaker 00 people who are more sedentary, there are associations with increased risk of noncommutable, noncommunicable diseases and all cause mortality. And people who exercise more, there is a decrease of noncommunicable disease risk and all cause mortality. So whether exercise helps you lose weight or not is it's almost looking at exercise at the thing that that's not its main job.
1:13:16 Chris Williamson? Hmm. Yeah, that's a very good way to put it. The only, the the sole goal of exercise is not to help you lose weight. It's a byproduct that it can help you with.
1:13:25 Speaker 00 Exactly. And like you said, if someone started doing CrossFit, like something that you have done, just because the the number on the scale changes firstly, doesn't mean that your body composition hasn't changed. You may lose body fat and gain lean body mass and your weight might remain static.
1:13:42 Speaker 00 But perhaps more importantly, it doesn't necessarily mean your health hasn't changed. And this has actually been seen in a few research papers where people's attitudes towards exercise.
1:13:54 Speaker 00 There a lot of people's main motivation to exercise is to lose weight. And when they're not losing weight, their external reward has been removed and they no longer know how to judge the effectiveness of their exercise training regime. So when they go into the gym with the goal of losing weight, at some point they will hit a weight plateau, which is inevitable because if you lost weight forever, you would die, which is suboptimal. And when you hit that weight plateau, they're like, well, what's the point? And it's because they're only in their head, their only way of judging how effective their exercise program is, is the number on the scale. And that is a problem because unless they have other metrics to judge the effectiveness by,
1:14:38 Speaker 00 or like you said earlier, enjoyment that makes you want to go to the gym in the first place. As soon as the number on the scale stops moving, what's the point?
1:14:48 Chris Williamson? Okay, so to recap.
1:14:50 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:14:51 Chris Williamson? The best diet is the one that you can adhere to the most.
1:14:56 Speaker 00 For weight loss, correct.
1:14:57 Chris Williamson? For weight loss. The principles that you need to be looking at are that calories do matter an awful lot and that they are the fundamental thermodynamics that underpin what's going on. That you should be prioritizing protein intake. That you should be aiming for whole foods that are as satiety inducing as you can and as, what's the opposite of energy dense?
1:15:27 Chris Williamson? Low in energy density.
1:15:28 Speaker 00 Yeah, energy density is almost a spectrum. It's like high or low energy density.
1:15:31 Chris Williamson? Okay, a low in energy density.
1:15:34 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:15:34 Chris Williamson? You can trial through a number of different diets. You find one that both tastes good and feels good and that you think that you can stick to.
1:15:41 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:15:42 Chris Williamson? Adherence now, it seems, comes down to a number of things, but one of the key levers will be willpower. How can people improve their willpower when it comes to dieting?
1:15:55 Speaker 00 That is a hell of a question, and I don't have any firm answers for that.
1:16:02 Chris Williamson? You're the science guy, Ben. Come on, science us.
1:16:05 Speaker 00 The, I personally, so the thing with willpower is I feel like, I feel like it, it does that thing where it points the finger at the person, which is, is fine to a degree. But I think that there are factors that influence willpower that people aren't necessarily aware of.
1:16:27 Chris Williamson? Like genetics?
1:16:28 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:16:29 Chris Williamson? Like conscientiousness is massively, and industriousness, both massively heritable.
1:16:33 Speaker 00 Genetics and environment, for example. So like, as an example of that, and it's an extreme, it's, it's an extreme example, but most people won't try and refute it. If your only gym was 30 minutes away from you, and you had to go there on your lunch break, and you had to jump in the car and drive 30 minutes away, or you had a gym that was literally within your office, most people would train more when the gym is more accessible to them. And although you can say, well, going to the gym is just about willpower, it takes far less willpower to override the, I don't fancy working out today, when the gym is literally right there. And I say that as someone who has a garage gym. It is far
1:17:12 Speaker 00 easier for me to, to make that kind of conscious willpower decision to exercise when I can be in and out in 30 minutes without having to jump in the car and get changed and shower at the gym, et cetera, et cetera. Um, I don't know. I don't, I don't have an answer for how someone can unlock more willpower to make their weight loss journey easier.
1:17:35 Chris Williamson? Well, what you've identified there is that environment is a key cue. And given the fact that a lot of the people that are listening to this will have a, they're not at Guantanamo. I don't think this is being piped through the speakers there, although it might be. And given that, there are ways that you can set up your environment that will engender.
1:17:56 Speaker 00 That is where I look at things. So when you say, how can someone kind of increase their willpower for it, that is actually how I would answer it. So if you can, if you can make the hard decisions easier. I don't think that's necessarily a willpower perspective as such, but if you can engineer your environment to make it easier, that is where I would focus my intention. So as one kind of example of this, if I put a donut right in front of the person listening and say, don't eat this donut, assuming they like donuts, they will have to kind of recruit
1:18:38 Speaker 00 some willpower to override their natural inclination to eat the donut. But when the donut's not there, it doesn't require the same amount of willpower. So it's not necessarily about how can people recruit more willpower. It's about how to make their journey easier to engage in the behaviors that will take them to the goal. And that is how I would approach things. So as an example of this, going back to kind of individual adherence, what factors, and this can be an open question, what factors will make someone more inclined to exercise that don't just depend on willpower?
1:19:20 Speaker 00 Let's say for a moment that you can never influence someone's genetic level of willpower. You can still influence how easy it is for them to exercise. What factors could you change so the listeners to this podcast will say, oh, I could do that?
1:19:36 Chris Williamson? I would, I would say making the gym, choosing a gym which is not only one that you enjoy, but one which is very convenient for you to get to in between your commute to and from work. The gym that I trained at in Gosforth in Newcastle for a very long time, I had to drive past on my way home. So it made me feel like an extra piece of shit if I didn't go in because I was already going past. Other things like the ease of parking, removing extra steps from going to the gym. If you've got to pay a dollar or a pound every time that you need to park up outside, there's always going to be something there that's like, oh, I don't want to pay that pound today. And it's just justification. So finding something that's nice and frictionless like that, something which has got in terms of training, good open times.
1:20:19 Chris Williamson? If you are looking to move to a different Apartment, the place that I'm staying now, I'm right next to a park in Austin, which means I have a twelve minute forty five second loop, I've timed it an awful lot that I can do. And that means that for me, getting ten thousand steps in a day is super easy because the second that my phone rings, whether it's a prank call or someone that I need to speak to, immediately my trainers are on, I'm out of the door, trainers at the back door or flip flops at the back door and just going for little walks here and there, leaving mobility, resistance bands and kettlebells just strewn around the house, I find is great. Because if I'm just bored and I'm waiting for the steak to finish cooking or whatever, I'll just pick a kettlebell up five times or I'll do some overhead presses with a
1:21:05 Chris Williamson? resistance band. That's another thing. When it comes to diet, for me, I remember seeing, and this will be in your wheelhouse, people who bought a fruit bowl for the house had massive increases in the amount of consumption of fruit. You've got this beautiful display of all of this stuff that you know that you should be eating more of and that you're not eating enough of.
1:21:26 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:21:27 Chris Williamson? Buy a fruit bowl. Don't have confectionery out, have none of the food that you ever want to eat anywhere within arm's reach. Put them in a pantry, put them in a really awkward cupboards to get to. Ideally, don't have them in the house at all. You know, you can't eat the foods that aren't there.
1:21:43 Chris Williamson? Those would be some environment design things.
1:21:46 Speaker 00 I think these, I think these are really good examples of how it isn't necessarily about willpower deficiency. That's why I said I don't know how someone would increase their willpower because I think often it's not necessarily about willpower, it's about changing the decisions so they require less willpower in the first place. So as an example of that, when I was traveling a lot, I, at one point I was staying in London and it's very easy to look at a different person and say that person's lazy. But when you look at individual circumstances, it's harder to do that. So I train a lot. I do some form of exercise every day, even if it's small. And I went to this apartment in London and I did my work. This was on a Sunday and I walked to the nearest gym, which at the time was ten minutes away.
1:22:32 Speaker 00 And what I didn't realise is that gym shut at four P M. I think on a Sunday. And I was like, shit, where do I go? The next gym was, I think, a mile and a half away. So immediately for me to train at that specific time of that specific day, which for a lot of people is maybe when they finish work. If their gym shuts at eight P M. And they can only go to the gym after eight P M. If they have to drive further to get to that gym, it's harder to do. On top of that, the gym that I went to was expensive. I, when I got there for a guest pass, I had to pay ten pounds, but I, their monthly membership.
1:23:13 Speaker 00 I was like, a lot of people just couldn't afford this. And for me to get there, I had to jump on the tube to get there or I would have to walk. So it's either more time, it's more kind of, um, it requires more time or it requires more expense to get the same result. So for me, I personally love convenience. I love the idea that if someone is struggling to get to the gym, can you make exercise or physical activity more convenient? So an example that I know you'll love, uh, pickleball, great game.
1:23:45 Chris Williamson? Fantastic. Best sport in the world. Yep.
1:23:47 Speaker 00 Me and my wife have just moved, uh, we moved like a year ago. And in our neighbourhood, there are communal tennis courts that are free for us to go on and they have pickleball there. I have never played a sport on a court for the last probably like twenty years, not tennis, I used to play badminton. But since we moved here, because that court is three minutes to walk to. We're playing pickleball multiple times per week. And we would never have done that before, because if you said, oh, John's going to play tennis or John's going to play pickleball, we're like, okay, where's the nearest court? Twenty minutes away. You know what? Can't be bothered. It's going to be two hours by the time we go there for an hour and then come back and find parking wherever. So this is how I prefer to engineer things where you look at ways to make the hard easier.
1:24:32 Speaker 00 So going back to food proximity studies is not necessarily will. You rely on willpower to make small conscious decisions of I am not going to eat that donut, for example, but you can decrease the amount of willpower required to do that. If healthier food is more convenient for you, hence the fruit bowl example. If I came to your house and emptied it from ultra processed foods and I made the fruit bowl look exquisite, the tastiest fruit you've ever looked, even to people that don't like fruit. All of a sudden, you're like, yeah, I could have one of those exotic papayas. Why not?
1:25:08 Chris Williamson? Yeah. Uh, have you, do you wear a tracker? Do you wear a whoop or anything similar?
1:25:12 Speaker 00 Uh, no, I wear an Apple watch, but.
1:25:16 Chris Williamson? Do you wear it during pickleball?
1:25:19 Speaker 00 Uh, yes, but I never look at the stats.
1:25:22 Chris Williamson? Dude, if you get, it depends if you're playing doubles or singles, but if you get a good, hard game, a competitive game of singles in for about ninety minutes, uh, it's two hours is like the real sweet spot. For me, I average a thousand calories in two hours. It's fucking insane.
1:25:37 Speaker 00 So I, I actually use this as an example. Um, I am traditionally, I've never played tennis. I used to play badminton. So if you told me to play tennis, I'd be shit at it and I would go on the court. I would keep hitting it out and I'd be like, oh, you know what? I'm probably not enjoying this. The fact that pickleball is easier, it's like a mini tennis to anyone who doesn't know it. Because it was easier, it was easier for me to play with a couple of friends, even if they've never played before. And it was a more accessible version for the beginner that doesn't know what they're doing. But because it was more accessible, I enjoyed it more from day one. So rather than trying to pick a complicated sport and being like, you know what? I suck at this. We went in and we're like, God, that's really fun.
1:26:18 Speaker 00 And I am someone who is admittedly not someone who tends to love traditional cardio. If you said, if we were doing this podcast in person and you said, you know what? Let's go for an hour jog afterwards. Uh, I can't think of fewer ways I would rather spend my time. But if you said, do you want to go and play pickleball? I would still jog for an hour. I would run for an hour doing these sprints on the court.
1:26:42 Chris Williamson? Yeah, faster. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:26:44 Speaker 00 Because I enjoy it, that time would pass. So it's not necessarily about, I need more willpower to go running. I need better decisions to decrease my need for willpower.
1:26:54 Chris Williamson? A better incentive around that. Yeah. I mean, dude, the.
1:27:01 Chris Williamson? Secret cardio that it sneaks in is, and the difference between monostuctural work, you know, sitting on a bike, sitting on a rower, doing ski erg or whatever, and playing a game that you're not focused on the discomfort of the cardio, you're focused on the game that you're playing and trying to win and distracted by high-fiving your teammate and shit talking the opposition and stuff. One thing that I would say, I've spoken about this on the podcast before, I bought a bike desk. So it's a recumbent cycling desk.
1:27:32 Speaker 00 I know the one.
1:27:33 Chris Williamson? Yep. And this thing has been an absolute game changer for me getting zone two in. So zone two is something that I made myself a promise at the beginning of the year that I would stick to. I wanted to increase my HRV. I wanted to decrease my resting heart rate. I wanted to decrease my breath rate. And I just heard a lot, an awful lot from, you know, your Brian Mackenzie's of the world and your Huberman's of the world about 180 minutes of zone two a week would be really good for you if you could get it in. But if you actually realise what zone two is, it's the shittest of the heart rates because it's quicker than a walk, but for me, it's slower than a run. So I'm like, okay, well, how am I going to find myself at zone two? And then if I do do it, I'm going to be sat on a bike in Gold's
1:28:16 Chris Williamson? Gym, South Central Austin, hating myself, hating, hating every second of it. Whereas now I can sit and do all of the emails that I didn't really want to do in any case whilst doing the zone two that I didn't really want to do in any case, put some good music on. And both of those things have made each other a lot more enjoyable. Like, oh, I get to do emails. But if I, if I do the emails, I can, you know, get a good bit of training in and that's going to make me feel good after. And it's a bit of a treat for me because I can get to put my music on. And that's, that's my, that's my hack. That's my zone two hack.
1:28:49 Speaker 00 I love this. And I love that yours is a perfect example of if I came to you as a personal trainer, let's say I'm one of those cliche wanky personal trainers. And I said, you need to do more zone two training as an example. And you said, I don't really enjoy it. And I'm like, you need more willpower. You're lazy. You need to suck it up. That is what a lot of personal trainers would do when they approach your problem. They'll say, go to the gym, go for a jog, sit on the bike in the gym. And you're like, but I fucking hate that. Whereas you're looking at it from the perspective of how can I make that more convenient? So you buy a recumbent desk bike and you use that. And my wife did something similar where she bought one of those treadmill desks.
1:29:29 Speaker 00 And she has to walk at admittedly a pretty slow pace without distracting her emails because bobbing up and down while you're typing is difficult. But because she works from home on her laptop and has a remote career, she realized that on a, on a bad day, she would walk uh about six hundred steps because she's just on her laptop from the morning till the evening. She would get up for lunch and she stays in the house. But then she got a treadmill desk and suddenly she is walking a lot. But it doesn't feel like effort because she's doing it in her own environment. She's not having to drive to the gym. She's not having to stand on the treadmill surrounded by people that she doesn't necessarily like. It's not an inconvenient time of the day. She's not
1:30:14 Speaker 00 having to find a place to park. It's reducing the need for willpower by doing that. And it's important to point out that in both of these instances, it's, it does, it has cost money. There has been an investment into that. Like her treadmill desk is more expensive than a lot of people would be able to afford. And I'm not kind of dismissing that. But this is just an example of how when faced with a difficult decision, telling someone just to do it perhaps isn't quite as effective as finding different solutions that take that person from A to B.
1:30:51 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I mean, my bike desk is three hundred and fifty bucks. And I think you can get it in the UK for about three hundred pounds. It's called an Exoputic Exawork two point O with Bluetooth. That's the one that you're actually after.
1:31:05 Speaker 00 That sounds like a, that sounds like a bike name for a man.
1:31:08 Chris Williamson? It's a, it's a real, it's a real fucking piece of kit. Uh, final thing. What have we not spoken about so far with regards to the world of eating, with regards to personal impacts of eating? And with regards to the uh fundamentals that people need to understand?
1:31:27 Speaker 00 I think that on the whole, we have discussed the most important fundamentals that
1:31:34 Speaker 00 people would need to adopt. I think breaking weight loss goals down into individual habits is important, focusing on the things that are more within your control, such as the type of exercise you're doing, how much physical activity you're doing, what foods you are consuming. These are all kind of individual habits that are easier to isolate and focus on and check off versus I want to lose X number of kilograms. From a fundamentals perspective, I would say you have been an incredible host and I wouldn't say there's anything that we really needed sandwich in here. There are lots of other side conversations that we could have. We could talk about body image or muscle growth or other tenets of
1:32:17 Speaker 00 fat loss. But I think the questions that you've asked and the conversations that you've put forward, I would say you've done an incredible job.
1:32:24 Chris Williamson? If I've got your seal of approval, that's good enough for me. Why should people go if they want to check out the book and everything else that you do?
1:32:30 Speaker 00 Finding me on social media is fine. I'm on Instagram, TikTok, etc. Under the handles BDC Carpenter.
1:32:38 Chris Williamson? Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you.
1:32:39 Speaker 00 Thank you very much for having me on. Thank you for everyone listening.
Previous The Evolutionary Psychology Of Human Friendship - Robin Dunbar Next The Rise And Fall Of The Girlboss Meme - Katherine Dee Page updated September 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
