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Category Archives for "weight loss"

October 11, 2021

How to shift into weight loss with Dr. Gary Foster

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On episode 507 of the 40+ Fitness Podcast, we talk to Dr. Gary Foster about his book, The Shift: 7 Powerful Mindset Changes for Lasting Weight Loss.

Transcript

Let's Say Hello

[00:00:49.580] – Allan
Hey, Raz, how are things going?

[00:00:52.190] – Rachel
Good. Allan, how are you today?

[00:00:54.220] – Allan
I'm doing well. As this goes live, I'll actually be back in Bocas. We're finishing up our trip right now as we're recording this. But by the time this goes live, in a few weeks, we'll be back in Bocas, trying to run Lula's now as a full bed breakfast. And I'm now becoming the tech guru to run the computer systems and things like that. It's not been easy. So that's been the hardest part. Just figuring out what you've got to do to run a restaurant and getting the rules for Panama

[00:01:27.400] – Allan
is one thing. But then you're like, okay, here's the booking engine. And now we have to find a credit card processor that will work out of Panama. Tammy's trying to start a bank account, but it's like, is almost impossible. The banker traveled to our island from the mainland and met with my wife, and there was all these papers that Tammy needs to fill out or needed to fill out. And so I think Tammy is going to have to take a trip to the mainland and then spend hours with them to just try to get a bank account open so we can take money in and run our credit cards.

[00:02:03.800] – Allan
So a little bit, a little missing pieces as we go about that. So it'd be really busy the first few weeks once we get back, because there's just so much to do.

[00:02:15.080] – Rachel
Yeah, sounds like a lot. It's all those little behind the scenes things that tend to eat up your time. But I hope you've had a good vacation while you've been here in the States.

[00:02:24.880] – Allan
I did. We realized because we went to Mexico first, and then we came to the States that we were just beat. And it sounds weird, but the vacation you're at different kind of tired. So it's almost like a lot of people say I need a vacation from my vacation, but, no, we put over 4000 miles on this car. And we're not even done. So it'll be abouti'm, guessing right now probably closer to 4500 miles that will put on the car total before we turn it back in.

[00:03:00.890] – Allan
And that's just a lot of time. It's a lot of driving. We broke the trips up, and we were able to see everybody we could see it was a really productive trip, but productive in vacation don't typically go together in the same Senate. So I'll probably need some time to kind of decompress when I get back. Vacation from a vacation.

[00:03:24.160] – Rachel
For sure, traveling can be very exhausting, especially all the places you've seen.

[00:03:29.980] – Allan
So how are things up there?

[00:03:32.100] – Rachel
Good. Really great. Our weather is starting to change, and here in Michigan our leaves are starting to change colors. It's just the beginning of our fall season. So it's about to be gorgeous up here. But over the weekend, Mike and I ran a half marathon, and I just want to brag on him a bit because he set a new half marathon PR. And I just want to remind everybody we just turned 50. We're not spring chickens anymore, but he just set a new PR. So this year, he has a new PR for the 5K, the 10K, and the half marathon.

[00:04:05.890] – Rachel
He has just gotten so much faster in the last couple of years, and I'm really proud and excited for him.

[00:04:12.540] – Allan
And he's in that real sweet spot of the 50 to 55 range. So he's the young and running in the group, running some of his best. He's probably winning medals and having some really good races.

[00:04:24.450] – Rachel
I think we have won some metals in our age bracket so far, but he came in 4th in his age division in this half marathon. He needed to shave nine more minutes off his time. And I want to say his time was 1 hour and 42 minutes for the half. And so I think the guy was in the 130s that just beat him off the podium. So there's some fast people in our age brackets. Seriously fast.

[00:04:53.980] – Allan
Maybe they'll age out before he does.

[00:04:56.400] – Rachel
I hope so. Yeah. Fingers crossed. We can catch up.

[00:05:01.920] – Rachel
That's so exciting.

[00:05:02.880] – Allan
All right. Well, when the weather changes, it's time for me to fly south. This year, we did the traveling to see family earlier because in September is the downtime in focus. And so this when we decided to just go ahead and try to shut down, but we actually had monthly renters in there. But this is the thing where it's like, okay, we're going to shut down and we're not going to worry about this. And we'll go. And so we're going to be traveling more during this time in September.

[00:05:31.940] – Allan
And I can just tell you going to Indiana, North Carolina and Miami. It's a much nicer time of the year. Weather wise to be there. It wasn't cold. And in fact, I think I might have put on a sweatshirt once.

[00:05:44.420] – Rachel
Oh, wow. Good.

[00:05:45.410] – Allan
I was able to wear jeans. I don't wear jeans.

[00:05:47.980] – Allan
I wore jeans a couple of times, and I was thinking when I got here I might have to buy more of it now the weather stayed nice the whole time. And so I'm still wearing shorts.

[00:05:58.210] – Rachel
Fantastic.

[00:05:59.830] – Allan
looking forward to kind of getting back to my bocas routine, starting the training for that tough Mudder in August. It's August 27th. If you're interested, you can go to 40PlusFitnesspodcast.com/Chicago and they used to call it a classic, and they made some changes to their website since last time I looked at it. So now it's a 15K. So there's a 15K and some of the children's runs on Saturday and then on Sunday they're doing a 10K and a 5K.

[00:06:30.090] – Allan
And so there are different distances in this. If you don't think you're up to the 15K, which was the classic, I think they're shortening it a little bit because it'll be closer to nine and a half miles, then the ten to twelve that it used to be, but it's still 24 25 obstacles. So it's going to be the full array of those. But if anybody's interested, go to 40PlusFitnesspodcast.com/Chicago as we get closer to the event, if you're telling me you're going to be there, I'm on the 10 to 10 45 run.

[00:07:01.290] – Allan
So if you've signed up and you're in that same run, let me know and we meet up and do some of the course together because it very much is a team style, even if you're not on a team or bring a team, everybody's helping everybody. So you're trying to climb out of a mud pit, everybody's helping you climb out of the mud pit and then you're turning around and helping them get out of the mud pit. So it's a really cool run. It's very, very personal.

[00:07:24.610] – Allan
You need a lot of people and it's tough, tough mudder, but it is a fun run. So if you're interested in doing that, then let me know if you're in the area and I'll know more as they get closer to where they're actually going to host it. It can be anywhere within 2 miles of Chicago. They're going to call it the Chicago Tough mudder, but we'll be in a general area. So if you're in the area, maybe we do something that Saturday night, have a dinner or something.

[00:07:48.790] – Allan
If anybody's in the area, we can figure it out. But again, it's on the 27th of August, the ten to 10:45 run. And if you go to the website, you can sign up for that now. I think they're gonna be well by the time this goes live, Unfortunately, they probably raise their prices a little bit. That's kind of how they run with it is the prices go up. They have early bird and then they kind of raise the prices so you might pay a little bit more than someone else paid.

[00:08:13.740] – Allan
But for what you get in all the fund, it's well worth.

[00:08:17.200] – Rachel
It sounds awesome.

[00:08:18.830] – Allan
Alright, so you want to have a conversation with Dr. Foster?

[00:08:22.880] – Rachel
Sure.

Interview

[00:08:57.920] – Allan
Dr. Foster, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:09:01.000] – Dr. Foster
Thanks, Allan. It's a pleasure to be with you.

[00:09:03.410] – Allan
So today we're here to talk about your book, The Shift: Seven Powerful Mindset Changes for Lasting Weight Loss. And it's one of the things that has really kind of hit me over the last six years of doing this, is that for most of us, any substantive change that we make in our life has to start ahead. We have to fix our mindset first and then the good things happen. It almost never ever is going to work the other way.

[00:09:30.550] – Dr. Foster
That's exactly right. And I think for most people that's a little counterintuitive when most people are starting on a weight or wellness journey, their first thoughts and often their only thoughts are, what do I eat? How do I move and really get pretty granular about that? Is it low carb, high protein, low fat? Is it strength resistance training? Is it hit? There's a lot of stuff going through people's minds and what you eat and how you move is certainly important for your wellness. I think the missing ingredient and the thing that people most underestimate over my 30 years of clinical and research experience is the most important component to a wellness journey is your mindset.

[00:10:16.630] – Dr. Foster
And simply put, your mindset is how you think about the journey. But also importantly about how you think about yourself.

[00:10:25.290] – Allan
Yeah. My path to taking care of myself. I was not healthy. I was not fit doing great my career. That was wonderful. So what I call one for three and overall realized that was probably the worst one that I should have been focusing on. But I didn't like myself quite honestly at that point in my life, I really didn't like myself. And for the next eight years effectively punished myself to try to fix me. And so it wasn't until I came to this realization that the lacking component was compassion and love.

[00:10:59.700] – Allan
And you put that as the first mindset change and kind of really the only way this is ever going to happen is you got to get this done first. Can you talk about self compassion and why it's so important?

[00:11:12.640] – Dr. Foster
Yeah. First, Congratulations on your success. I know about your success, and it's quite impressive. And I really applaud the efforts you're doing to get that message out. That it's how you think about yourself and the journey that makes a difference. And you're right. The book starts, it's about seven different shifts that have science-based, proven techniques to help you with your wellness journey. In fact, any journey in life. But to your point, self compassion is the basis of all of it. If you look at the way most people start a journey of any sort, whether to your point, it's in your professional life or a wellness journey or a weight journey or any self improvement journey, people often view it in a deficit model.

[00:12:00.130] – Dr. Foster
So what do I have to fix? What deficiencies do I have? And that just doesn't really feel that great. Right? If instead you can build from a position of strength, not weaknesses, what strengths do I have that can help me achieve my goals. And that's all predicated on self compassion. And that basically says that I'm worth taking care of that any self improvement project that I undertake, whether it's personal, professional, whatever it is, is based on my own value, as is without any change, I am worth taking care of.

[00:12:41.140] – Dr. Foster
And that's a position of strength, and that generates power for the journey. Alternatively, I hear this a lot have been a clinical health psychologist for over 30 years, working with lots of people elbow to elbow knee to knee in their weight loss journey. I hear often that they start out at a point where weak-willed, I'm undisciplined, I have terrible eating habits, and I often say that's you you're talking about, you need yourself to be successful in this journey. And that's why self compassion is so critical.

[00:13:18.400] – Allan
Yeah. And if you don't have self compassion, I think a lot of these other things we're going to talk about, we're going to end up kind of circling back to that because you can't really see these things or do anything about it. And the next one I wanted to talk about was the unhelpful thinking and the reason this one resonated with me so much was, wow, I used to do that all the time. Wow, I used to do that all the time. Three out of the four I was guilty of practically every day of my life up until maybe even still today.

[00:13:48.520] – Allan
Occasionally I find myself with some of this unhelpful thinking. Can you go over the four categories that you had? The main ones that once we do probably the most because like I said, I saw myself in most of them.

[00:14:00.040] – Dr. Foster
Yeah, I'm sure happy to. The fundamental premise is what we think influences what we do. So if you think about different, this is steeped in 60 years of research and cognitive therapy without getting into all the details. It really is how fundamental, how basic our thought patterns are driving what we feel and what we do. So accepting that science, then there are styles that I've observed over my clinical career that really get in the way of a successful wellness journey is one is all or none. And this is things are great or they're terrible.

[00:14:37.180] – Dr. Foster
I'm on a diet or I'm off a diet. It's a good food or it's a bad food. It's viewing the world and any interaction that you encounter with as all or none. Light bulb thinking, black and white thinking lots of ways to think about that. And the problem with that essentially is that the world is not like that. And the most frequent off ramps to the journey are precipitated by these kind of unhelpful thinking styles. They're thinking styles that make you just say, the heck with it.

[00:15:09.160] – Dr. Foster
One day I've blown it. Really? So anyway, that's the first one, all or none, the other is once makes always. And I hear this frequently. So somebody will have a rough day that in it as they plan. They didn't work out as they plan. In a non wait world, people can say things like, Well, this is the way it always goes. A watch out for this kind of thinking is when you hear yourself saying things like never, always. Those are signals that that's rarely true and that you're taking one event and extrapolating that to believe it will always happen and it will never change.

[00:15:47.740] – Dr. Foster
The third is negative filtering. And again, this happens both in wellness journeys and in work journeys. I'll take the work journey in the first case here, if you get feedback from your supervisor in an annual review or quarterly review that on four criteria, you're knocking out of the park on three. But there's room for development and for opportunity and for growth on a fourth. If you're a negative filter, all you think about is that fourth one and you start to worry about your job. And is it secure?

[00:16:21.420] – Dr. Foster
And it gets you down into this swirl of negative thinking and not seeing the big picture. So it's really trying to make a mountain out of a molehill, but in an overly negative way. And the fourth, which is less common. But I put it in the book because I've seen it frequently. And also it gets across this point that the key to this is not just positive thinking. It's realistic thinking and this style that's not helpful. It's called Don't Worry, Be Happy. And these are people who go through life and again in a variety of different arenas and just say, oh, it'll get better.

[00:16:59.250] – Dr. Foster
Well, how do you think it will get better? I'm not sure it'll get better. Tomorrow will be a better day. And while that initial optimism is helpful and we're not encouraging people to be overly negative, plans work better than platitudes, it's important to say, okay, if tomorrow is going to be a better day, how will it be a different day? How will it be a different day? So those are the styles that I've noticed over my 30 years in the field that can get in the way and in simple tweaks, a technique that we talk a lot in the book about is called a reality check.

[00:17:32.700] – Dr. Foster
So when you have these thoughts, ask yourself, you can do it from a couple of different ways. One is, what would a good friend say to you? And we can talk more about that, because that's also a good self compassion technique. But the other is to act those almost as if you're a lawyer. So what are the facts to support that I have no willpower or here I go again, or I'll never be able to be successful. What are the facts to support that? And that kind of reality check can help do a check on that thinking and help you develop more helpful, more realistically, more realistic thoughts.

[00:18:07.260] – Allan
And the way I like to talk to people about these realistic thoughts a lot of times in the moment, you don't know you're doing this. It's almost invisible to you because it's just second nature is that after something goes wrong, I always find it valuable to first with the self compassion, forgive yourself and then second analyze what happened. You know, you go in and you get stressed on Friday afternoon, and so you leave there you go to the bar, you have a couple of beers to calm down and relax, and then you say, okay, yeah, sure

[00:18:38.730] – Allan
I'll go ahead and get the pizza and then you eat the whole pizza. You go home and you're like, Well, I sort of blew it. I blew the day. I might as well blow the whole weekend. And so that's your all or non thinking after. And so you realize then, okay, what happened? Well, I went there and I probably would have done better to go to the park and go for a walk. So the next time I find myself really stressed out on a Friday evening, I'm gonna go to the park and I'm gonna walk around for a little while instead of going to the bar and having a couple of beers and that's kind of that way you can take that and get to the reality of it is this is not who you are.

[00:19:13.880] – Allan
This is just an action and a point in time. And if you focus on the why it happened and get to the trigger, then you can take and avoid that unhelpful thinking and take it to the next step of saying, okay, what is the plan? What is the better action for me next time this happens? That slip to success model that I like to use with my clients is really just that three steps of reality based thinking. It happened. I can't undo it. I can't uneat the pizza, I can't undrink the beer, but I can do something better next time.

[00:19:47.420] – Dr. Foster
Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. And I like the way that you think about that. At first you start with self compassion and self forgiveness. This is not a time to beat yourself up, self flagellation does not worth self improvement. It just doesn't. The other thing I liked about what you said, and we use this. One of my favorite phrases, clinically is ask how. Don't ask why, because if you can go retrospectively, as you just did in that example, about stress leads to a couple of beers, leads to ordering pizza.

[00:20:18.250] – Dr. Foster
You can look at each step in what we call behavioral chain and think about Where's the weakest link is that could you have avoided the stress? Could you have managed the stress differently? Could you have had the beers and not had the pizza? There's lots of ways. And then you're in charge of your destiny the next time. And the question is, if it didn't go well, how did it not go well? And how can it be improved in the future? And alternatively, if it did go well, how did it go well, so you can rinse and repeat on that rather than thinking that the stars and the moon were like, no, you made that happen.

[00:20:51.710] – Dr. Foster
So I like so much about the way you think about it in terms of looking back, having self for business and putting yourself in charge of, where could I do it differently the next time?

[00:21:02.720] – Allan
One of the things you did in the book that I really like, because I got the thinking through some of this. It seems like every time someone wants to change themselves, they want to improve their weaknesses. I'm going to eat healthier, so I'm going to lose some weight. I'm going to go to the gym five days a week, even though I hate the gym and I'm not really good at it. Or I'm going to go ahead and do this couch to 5K. Even though I've never really run in my life, we always seem to want to pick the weakest point of us and start working on that thinking that's going to give us the best return on our investment.

[00:21:39.140] – Allan
But the reality is quite opposite that we need to actually double down on our strengths to be successful in this journey. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:21:49.990] – Dr. Foster
Sure. Again, it's very common when people embrace a journey or embark on a journey to start thinking about what's wrong. It's sort of like a fix it model. And in some ways again, it's yourself you're talking about and treating yourself with some positive self regard and saying, what do I bring to this experience? What are my strengths just has a different feel to it. Then here's a long laundry list of things that I need to fix. I can think of a patient I worked with an extremely successful entrepreneur, had established a really robust retail experience, had been through the ups and downs of recessions and lots of industry pressures, lots of near bank foreclosures on the business, really high stress and was now on the other side of it and was trying to manage her weight and when she started on the weight journey, she was very quick to judge herself very quick for harsh characterizations of who she was as a person.

[00:23:00.040] – Dr. Foster
I can never follow this through. I'm not persistent. I don't have any discipline. And can we just stop for a second? Let's just talk about what you've done in your career. What are some character strengths that you have that you would think that helped you? And the first thing she said was perseverance is that no matter what was going on in the business, internally, externally, I was able to persevere. And just that little shift of getting her to think I am someone who perseveres changes the narrative, the self narrative, which is ultimately the most important one on how she can persevere through this journey.

[00:23:38.930] – Dr. Foster
And again, I want to be clear when we say character strengths. There's a whole science of positive psychology behind this. This isn't making judgments about this is good and this is bad. This is a weakness. This is a deficit. We all have character strengths. And helping, what we do in the book is help people identify what their character strengths are so they can leverage that. And again, at the end of the day, it's that slight shift in mindset that if I'm starting with something that feels good to me, something I'm good at.

[00:24:10.260] – Dr. Foster
I'm pretty good at this. That gives you a sense of self efficacy, of confidence, that I can leverage a skill set I have rather than going in this forever elusive pursuit of like a Whack Amole game of trying to whack down every weakness I have.

[00:24:26.980] – Allan
Yeah. You had a link to a strength profile quiz that you could do. And I took the time to go out and do that quiz, the VIA Character Strengths profile. And it was interesting because I think a lot of people would think, okay, if you're going to someone loses a lot of weight. They obviously have a lot of self control and all of that. Self regulation was 19th out of the 24. My top five were honesty, bravery, leadership, curiosity and love of learning. And so as I started thinking about, well, how did these strengths play out when I was actually doing what I was doing?

[00:25:04.890] – Allan
And the reality was, yes, self regulation really wasn't what did it for me. It was the liking, a high minded challenge. So I signed up for a tough Mudder and I told people I was going to do it. So I'm an honest person. I'm going to stand up to what I said. I actually signed up with my daughter. I said I'm going to be ready and I'm going to do this race with you. And from there, getting my certifications and things like that to learn what I needed to do, to take care of myself, to train myself.

[00:25:34.640] – Allan
I just look at that and say that right was my little roadmap that was in here in my head, but I didn't realize that that's what I was doing at the time was I was not trying to self regulate myself to healthy eating. I just knew that if I was being honest with myself and what I challenged myself to do, I had to do better. And I did lean on those so much more heavy, heavier heavily. Then I did on the ones that I was much weaker.

[00:26:02.920] – Allan
And I think that made all the difference.

[00:26:05.300] – Dr. Foster
Yeah, it really does. And it's good to put some words to it to actually realize these are inherent strengths that people have and they can leverage them in the process again instead of searching for these weaknesses or deficiencies.

[00:26:17.220] – Allan
And I think you said it in the book, and you just said it earlier to know what your basic strengths are, you can just look back on other things that you've been successful at. And hey, what got me there? That's the same thing that can make you successful in every journey that you take going forward, including losing weight, getting stronger and just getting healthier.

[00:26:35.780] – Dr. Foster
Yeah, I think one of the things because of the significant stigma that's associated with higher body weights in our culture, people often can in a negative way compartmentalized. So they forget about all these strengths they have in non weight and wellness journeys as if they don't exist when it comes to other areas of their life. So sometimes in the patient that I was talking about, it's just a general reminder about I've accomplished a lot in my life, and I've done so with a variety of different strengths.

[00:27:05.960] – Dr. Foster
And how can I use those strengths for other purposes in life? It's not just wellness. It's not just weight. It generalizes to a lot of other things, which is why I think it's so powerful.

[00:27:16.340] – Allan
I'm going to make sure there's a link in the show notes so you can go to 40PlusFitnesspodcast.com/507. And I'll have a link to that quiz so you can find out what your course strengths are. But it also is very valuable because it gives you all 24 of the strength profiles. So you literally can go through there and read it and say, Well, is that more like with me or less like me? So it's a great learning tool. And I encourage folks to go out there and check that out.

[00:27:41.610] – Dr. Foster
Yeah, the work that Via does under the leadership of Neil Myerson is really impressive, and I'm it's available so publicly, and that's why we recommended it in the book.

[00:27:50.900] – Allan
Cool. Dr. Foster, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:28:02.190] – Dr. Foster
I think if I had to pick three, I would go back to the beginning of our conversation and say, Start with self compassion, and I won't belabor it here because we've already discussed it, but really treating yourself as you would treat a friend as a friend would treat you with this kind positive self regard. It doesn't mean everything's perfect. You're perfect. But you're starting out with an assumption that you're worth taking care of. And any self improvement opportunity you have is because you're worth it not because you're deficient .2 is to set realistic goals.

[00:28:39.450] – Dr. Foster
People often mistakenly think that I've got to set these bold, audacious goals to get success. And while I'm not saying don't shoot for the stars, that's fine. The first step should be a small, reasonable one. And there's great science behind this. Bf Skinner, a famous psychologist, had this concept which has proven out time and time again called successive approximation, which is just fancy psychological jargon for take it one step at a time so that you approximate the goal by breaking it down into smaller steps. There's a story of a member in the book who talked about she had 100 pound weight loss goal, but she broke it down into five pound increments.

[00:29:26.540] – Dr. Foster
More importantly than that, she broke down. What do I need to do to reach those 5 pounds? What specifically behavioral goals rather than weight loss goals really drive the day? So these small, realistic goals give you an opportunity to be successful at each interval. Rather than saying I'm not going to congratulate myself for whatever it is. Running a marathon, why don't I just start with I walked a mile. That's a great way to start. And I think the third thing, which again might be counter intuitive, is to expect setbacks. To realize that the journey is not a straight line.

[00:30:06.700] – Dr. Foster
It has lots of ups and downs, whether it's on the scale, whether it's in your workout intensities, whether it's your work performance, whether it's how you perform as a parent, how you do in the workplace, it's never a straight line. And instead of using Setbacks as an opportunity to take the off ramp, use that as an opportunity for learning much in the way you talked about with the beer and stress beer pizza cycle, how do I go back and learn that and use that as an opportunity?

[00:30:40.330] – Dr. Foster
So self compassion, set small, realistic goals that are achievable and then importantly, expect setbacks. They happen one of the time to one of the people. It can be distressing, but it's also a great way to say, hey, setbacks happen. It's my next move that matters most.

[00:31:03.740] – Allan
Welcome to being human.

[00:31:05.010] – Dr. Foster
Exactly.

[00:31:07.670] – Allan
If someone wanted to learn more about you, Dr. Foster and the book, The Shift: Seven Powerful Mindset changes for Lasting Weight Loss. Where would you like for me to send them?

[00:31:16.700] – Dr. Foster
I go basically anywhere, any retail location where books are sold anywhere online. My bio is there and details about the book are there. I think the thing I would like people to know is that the reason I wrote this book is that after 30 years and after actually learning from the people I work with, I realized that while eating an activity are important, it's mindset that matters, and it matters enormously. And I think one of the things I hope people can get from a book like this is to get some small shifts that can lead to big results.

[00:31:54.470] – Dr. Foster
Because as you said at the outset, Allan, it's really important. If you have to start with mindset, the other things follow, they won't be effortless, but they will be much easier with the right mindset.

[00:32:08.920] – Allan
You can go to 40PlusFitnesspodcast.Com/507 and I'll be sure to have links to the book there. Dr. Foster, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:32:19.080] – Dr. Foster
My pleasure, Allan. Nice to chat with you.


Post Show/Recap

[00:32:25.490] – Allan
Welcome back, Raz.

[00:32:27.580] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, I think Dr. Foster is my new best friend. He and I have a lot in common, but what he said at the very beginning, what we eat and how we move is important. But before all that mindset, my favorite word.

[00:32:42.350] – Allan
Yeah. And we've talked about this and kind of part of this, this whole because every once in a while get into a topic set. And when I was going through the layoffs, my layoff, I started talking about stress. I started looking for books on stress, and it kind of became a big thing big theme for the show for several weeks. And if you've noticed over the last several weeks, we've talked a lot about mindset, I guess on talking about it, I've talked about it. It really is a start of all of it.

[00:33:11.720] – Allan
And if you don't take the time to get your head right, then the first stumble block that you come to, you're going to trip up. And 99% of people hit that first bump in the road and they're out. They just quit because you're like, this is too hard. This isn't happening fast enough. I'm not good at this. It's never worked before. And so we talked about some of that unhelpful thinking. But that's exactly where this all comes from is if you get your mindset right, then you're in that position to recognize when you're using words like always and never or the I screwed up.

[00:33:48.060] – Allan
So I may as well you start recognizing those tendencies to just blow everything off. I'll start back on Monday kind of mindset. And really, that's been a huge stumbling block for most people. Is that going into it without having their head on straight and I'll admit that was me, too. 37 years old. I was very unhappy with myself, and I decided I needed to do something about it. But it took me eight years before I actually really did anything substantive, and it really did come down to that.

[00:34:21.960] – Allan
I didn't have the right mindset. I wasn't committed, and I didn't have self compassion. And so those big elements that were missing then allowed me to get my head right to say, okay, don't have to be perfect yet. I just need to be really good. And the better I do, then the better I can do. And they're just seeing this as a gradual progression up the Hill. And in some cases, it feels like you're walking up a sand Dune and the Sands just shifting under your feet.

[00:34:52.690] – Allan
And you just don't feel like you're really getting anywhere because it seems like you're sliding almost as much as you're stepping. But the reality is you are moving, you are moving up and you just got to keep that pace, be comfortable with it and just keep going and don't let yourself get negatively influenced by just things that are outside your control and having the right mindset does all of that.

[00:35:13.320] – Rachel
Absolutely. And you mentioned and also Dr. Foster mentioned having self compassion. If you're coming from a place of love that you want to do something that's good for yourself, you'll get farther instead of the negative thoughts that I'm overweight. I shouldn't be here at the gym or I shouldn't be seen in public. And I see a lot of that mindset, especially with brand new runners who are running, trying to lose weight. They're embarrassed to be out in the streets, they're embarrassed to be seen. But no, you got to change that shift.

[00:35:45.290] – Rachel
And you're coming from a place of self love. Then you're working on improving your health and you deserve to be anywhere you want to be, no matter how you're feeling about yourself. So yeah, I think the self compassion is also a positive shift that people need to focus on.

[00:36:03.000] – Allan
Yeah. We talked about it a few weeks ago. I forget her name, but about being your own BFF. And is it really does come down to that? The thoughts that you're in your head were things that you would say out loud to your best friend, then they're probably okay thoughts. But if you start having thoughts and you're thinking, I would never say this to my best friend's face. Even if it was true, I wouldn't say it. I wouldn't say it. And so just kind of thinking about this thought that I'm having,

[00:36:31.460] – Allan
Is it fair? And if it's something I wouldn't say to my friend, how would I say it to my friend? I need if I really needed to. So it's the I didn't mean to have the three beers and the pizza. When I went out with friends, I was going to try to be better. And I had the three beers, and then we ordered pizza, and then we ordered more pizza. And then I blew that Friday night. So then it was like a cascade through my whole weekend.

[00:36:58.440] – Allan
Well, yeah, at some point, you tell your friend it's like, well, okay. You know, that's not how you want to do it. So what are some things that you can do next time to keep that from happening? And you see just that way that I went about is more constructive than destructive. He would never tell your friend, oh, my God, you're at that. Hell, why? And look at you blew Saturday and Sunday. You may as well just quit. And you would never, ever say that to your best friend.

[00:37:27.890] – Allan
But we're saying it to ourselves in our heads all the time.

[00:37:30.780] – Rachel
Well, just like you mentioned in that example, you go out for a night, you have all sorts of beers and pizza, you know, think about that for just a minute. You know, you spent time with your friends. You were doing something you enjoy socializing or celebrating something special. Okay. It was not the greatest night. It was not the best choice. But what could you have done? And even Dr. Foster mentioned that as you look back on these little bits of flip Ops, what could you have done better?

[00:37:56.670] – Rachel
I mean, could you have maybe not had so much pizza, or would I do a lot of cases is, I'll have my snack at home just in case I can't find anything on the menu that I would like. And then just socialize that night instead of eat and socialize. So, I mean, you can have your problem solving tips ready for the next time. And he also mentioned, too, that be prepared for slip ups. These things happen. We have holidays. We have nights out with friends. You know, things do go sideways.

[00:38:25.760] – Rachel
So just be prepared, have your bag of tricks.

[00:38:27.950] – Allan
And when you take those detours know why you're doing it, don't just go in and say, oh, I'm going to do this. We were driving here and there was a sign on the side of the road. This is Squatch Museum, and I'm like, oh, okay, you know, but no, I'm having dinner with my friends, and I need to be in the Tampa by this time. I don't have time to visit the Sasquatch Museum this trip. But now I got this little tickler in my head. This is next time you're traveling through Florida, find the Sasquatch Museum because you might want to spend it, but just not letting yourself kind of get pulled off by just every little Wim, every little thing that happens, it just kind of keeps you a little bit more focused on it.

[00:39:13.000] – Allan
And I think that's why I was really impressed with the concept of focusing on strengths rather than weakness. Almost everybody goes at this and says, okay, well, I was sweettooth. I love my desserts. I like beer. I do well during the week, but then I blow my weekends and so they're like, okay, I've got this weakness and I need to fix that weakness. And then that's gonna fix me when the reality of it is maybe you have strength like, you still are physically relatively active.

[00:39:44.460] – Allan
And it's like, okay, I bump up my activity and I would actually enjoy that. Or I know that I have some drinks, like, I want to drink more water. And so I say, okay, well, if I put a plan in place, like, I've got this gallon jug and I carry that jug with me, then I know that I'll drink that water. So it's just knowing that if I have a system, I can get it done. If I have a certain thing that I'm really good at, then I get it done.

[00:40:10.190] – Allan
If I really like cooking, then I do my batch cooking on Sunday, and I've got my meals for the whole rest of the week. So all those things are where there's a strength where you identify a strength in yourself. And then you say, based on my overall strengths, not just physical capacity, mental capacity, but saying, okay, I am better when I'm focused on this. And I did go through that strength thing that he had in there and kind of look to mine and actually self regulation was out of 24.

[00:40:41.100] – Allan
It was like 19 to most people think, oh, Allan's really disciplined, and it's not a function of discipline. It's a function of structure. If I have a structure, then everything just gets easier. So for my training for the tough Mudder, I have literally blocked out every morning, Monday through Friday and part of the morning on Saturday to train. Okay. So I have five hour windows every day, six days of the week to train. And I'll be lifting six days, five days, and basically doing some cardio, six days, and then taking Sunday off.

[00:41:16.670] – Allan
And so that's my structure.

[00:41:18.100] – Rachel
That's awesome.

[00:41:18.890] – Allan
Nothing else is on my calendar. It's just. I'm in the gym at 07:00. I'm lifting. I finished my lifting. The gym doesn't open until 8:30. So the gym is mine. And then I leave the gym and I go and do some cardio. And that might be kayaking. That might be blocking. That might be some running. But basically, each day I've allotted about three and a half hours of cardio, which is about how long the tough mudder will take me. I just know, physically, if I can keep moving for three and a half hours, I can do a tough Mudder.

[00:41:50.750] – Allan
And so that's the plan.

[00:41:52.990] – Rachel
You know, it's interesting to Allan, because your tough Mudder is your a goal for next year. That's your primary focus. And so all that time that you show up for yourself in the gym, you're focused on that as your goal. So you're not focusing on I got to improve my cardio. I got to lift heavier weights, and I got to do all these things. Those are all kind of like what's going to happen as a side effect of your focus on this main goal. And similarly, that's what I think like, too.

[00:42:23.600] – Rachel
And I'm focused on a race. I've got a race that I need to prepare for, and you'll be out there for 3 hours. I'll be out there for a couple hours running. It's not how many hours I'm going to be out there in the head. It's just that I'm out there running. And so the focus is on the fun part of running, the fun part of the tough Mudder. And it's not all on the hard sweat that we need to put out at the gym to get to that point, which makes it to me it makes it exciting and fun.

[00:42:50.420] – Allan
Yeah. I look at it like this. What can I control? And what can I not control? And what I can't control is how much body fat my body decides to shed. What I can control is the level of effort I put in at the gym and the number of days I show up and will I slip up? Yes. Will there be something? One day my body is going to sit there and my knee is not going to feel really good. And so my cardio is going to have to change or my elbows kind of not feel really good.

[00:43:18.920] – Allan
And I'm going to change my lifting program a bit. Yeah. All of that's completely possible and likely actually very highly likely. And so I'm going to go at this and say, what can I control? I can control Monday. Monday, October 4 is my first morning on schedule, and literally I'm up before 07:00 and I'm at the gym. And so if it's 6:45, I'm walking to the gym. I'm already winning.

[00:43:45.540] – Rachel
That's awesome.

[00:43:46.590] – Allan
Now what I can't, like I said, what I don't have control over are some side effects, but there will be side effects. There's gonna be positive side effects of that. I'm going to lose some weight. I'm gonna probably put on a little muscle, get stronger, get some sun because most of my training will be outdoors in the sun, and we don't have an off season. It's not like cold weather like you're gonna be dealing with where you're out there trudging through the snow. None of that's no stuff for me.

[00:44:13.520] – Allan
I might be running through some sand, right?

[00:44:16.150] – Dr. Foster
That's good for you.

[00:44:17.030] – Allan
Yeah. I might be doing sprints in the sand like, yeah, I want to get some cardio in. And really, I could actually get it in a lot faster today. If I just go and do some hit training in the deep Bluff sand. I can do that and just make it a training. But I've done my training for that day. And then if I end up saying, okay, I've had enough, I'm done. Then I'm done. And I can approach it from that perspective of focusing on activity and performance of the activity.

[00:44:47.400] – Allan
And then if I'm having a good lifting day, that's great. If I'm having a bad lifting day, then evaluate what I learn, what can I do and then just keep moving through that because like I said, my strengths are honesty, integrity and just continue to push myself. It's not self regulation. So what I have to do is actually rely on systems and processes to say, okay, I have this goal at this bigger thing in front of me, and I put 1 foot is kind of a runners thing as I put 1 foot in front of the other is like if you lift it up, I'll put it down and just get that foot forward, and then it'll take care of itself.

[00:45:28.580] – Allan
And that's really how these things work. And yes, the tough mudder is there. And It's not a goal in and of itself. It's an opportunity. And it's an obstacle. And I put this big obstacle in front of me that's going to require me to change certain behaviors for that period of time. And that's something that I have now recognized that I kind of need to have. There's something in front of me that I'm moving toward or training for to excite my training to keep me active and going, because I can go in the gym every day.

[00:46:04.210] – Allan
And then it's just a point where you're saying, okay, this is the same workout I did nine months ago. I'm doing it again. I'm about the same strength. Okay.

[00:46:14.920] – Allan
And it's cool. And I feel good about it. But at the end of the day, I'm like, okay, but where am I moving? It's just having something that I feel like I'm moving toward. And for me, that's important for a lot of other people. It might not be it might be watching the scale, but you don't have total control over that. And maybe I don't have total control over whether I'm going to be in good enough shape to complete the tough Mudder myself. I am at this point going to be, I think, eight years, almost eight years older than I was the last time I did it.

[00:46:44.860] – Allan
and so that's not a little bit of time, but I'm going back and I'm going to do it again, and I fully expect that they'll probably be another one in my future. So particularly if I have a good time. But that's what this is all about. But it starts with the mindset as we said. And then it's really just about saying, okay, what's going to keep me engaged? What's going to keep me fired up? What's going to be fun and looking at what I'm doing from that perspective, it's a gift for me to complete

[00:47:15.650] – Allan
A tough Mudder is a gift.

[00:47:17.660] – Rachel
It is.

[00:47:18.830] – Allan
You know, and so that's the gift I want to give this person I love is that feeling of success at the end of a tough mudder.

[00:47:27.380] – Rachel
I love that. That sounds great.

[00:47:29.950] – Allan
Alright. Anything else you want to go over or we'll talk next week?

[00:47:32.910] – Rachel
No, that was great. I got to take that test, though, that Dr. Foster put out there.

[00:47:38.700] – Allan
It was quite interesting. And then after you get through with it, kind of go back and see.

[00:47:43.560] – Allan
Yeah. Now I kind of get that. They weren't all really strengths that I would have initially equated to health and fitness. But if you take a few minutes to sit down, you start realizing that the things that you are successful at are those things where you emphasize those strengths and they just push you faster. They make you do better. And it's really interesting. You do at some point need to address your weaknesses, but they become easier and easier to do when you get the snowball of all those strengths and those successes, those weakness sort of they just take care of themselves.

[00:48:21.990] – Rachel
I think so. I think that having those strengths are knowing what your strengths are your best tools in your toolbox for you to be able to attack your goal with.

[00:48:30.180] – Allan
All right. Well, you'll have to let me know how that goes.

[00:48:32.760] – Rachel
Yeah, will do.

[00:48:33.800] – Allan
All right. Well, I'll talk to you next week.

[00:48:35.670] – Rachel
Take care.

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Another episode you may enjoy

Less...

September 27, 2021

Weight loss myths that are keeping us fat with Dr. Robert Davis

Apple Google Spotify Overcast Youtube

In his book, Supersized Lies, Dr. Robert Davis shares some of the biggest weight loss myths and how they're keeping us fat and what you can do about it.

Transcript

Let's Say Hello

[00:00:52.040] – Allan
Hey, Raz. How are things?

[00:00:54.290] – Rachel
Good, Allan. How are you? How are you enjoying your vacation?

[00:00:57.890] – Allan
I'm enjoying it. It's just there's been a lot going on in the world. In our world. Someone poisoned our dog. But, yeah, we've had some criminals on the island. We caught one of them on camera stealing our hammock off our front porch. But it appears, and this is again coming from the police and others, is that there's this group of thieves on the island, and they're trying to soften up houses to come back later and do something more is the theory. So they poisoned a ton of dogs across the island just to make sure they could get in.

[00:01:31.950] – Allan
fortunately, we had people watching the place, and they were able to step in and do some wonderful things. And so Buster has recovered, he's doing okay.

[00:01:40.510] – Rachel
Oh, my gosh.

[00:01:41.170] – Allan
But it was just one of those hit and go moments where we didn't know if he was going to make it. And so our friends came to our rescue. It's just very stressful when you're over 3000 miles away and not in a position to do anything to help your dog. So we're on our way. So we're recording this, we're most of the way through with our holidays. And as this goes live, we'll be finishing up the final days and about to head back to Panama.

[00:02:11.290] – Allan
So I'm kind of like in that mood. Okay, let's just get back and get Lula's open and get that going. And it's made me kind of rethink a lot of stuff in my own life. As I look at what I'm doing and my training and those types of things. So I might be making some changes to the way I do personal training and to how I manage my own life just to make sure that I'm taking care of me and mine first. And then doing what's necessary to help others.

[00:02:45.920] – Rachel
Wow. I'm so sorry to hear about your dog, and I'm so glad he's okay. And you've got the most wonderful neighbors to help out.

[00:02:53.400] – Allan
And they didn't sign up for that. They were just we're going to house it.

[00:02:57.810] – Rachel
Who would have thought?

[00:02:59.170] – Allan
Yeah. And then you got a lot of other stuff. Someone stole someone's pizza. Yeah. So a lot going on back there good and bad, but Buster's fine and looking forward to getting back and see my puppies because I do miss them. And I did have one other thing that I wanted to talk about, as I talked about when you're driving and you have lots of time to think as your driving, I just I was kind of thinking about what I want to do and where I'm at, and I figured what I really needed was a kick in the pants to get myself re energized with what I'm doing personally, not necessarily with the podcast and not necessarily with the training, but just me, my training and everything.

[00:03:43.460] – Allan
So I have signed up for another Tough Mudder classic. This one is going to be August 27, that's in the Chicago area. I've already signed up. I'm in the 10 to 10:45 range of times. So if you're in the area and we got over eleven months to train for this thing now because I think this episode actually goes out around the 27 September, so we literally have eleven months to get ready for this. This is some yeah, it says it's August 27 of 2022. So you got eleven months.

[00:04:16.350] – Allan
If this is something you want to do, I'd love to meet you. Love to hang out with you at the Tough Mudder in Chicago. Again, I'm on the 10 to 10:45 leg. And one of the things I do like about the Tough Mudder is it's a very Comradery kind of run. It's not a competition where we're trying to beat each other. It's where we're helping each other. So if you're struggling with an obstacle, I help you. If I'm struggling with an obstacle, you help me. It's a really good spirit on this run, walk whatever you want to do.

[00:04:45.990] – Allan
But yeah, going into 10:00 time, you'd have plenty of time to finish, give your shot at all the different obstacles. There's 10 miles with 25 obstacles. And over that weekend, they do have some shorter runs. They have a 10K and a 5K. So if you're not feeling like it can get trained up to do the longer one, then at least look at the 5K or the 10K and consider that you could train for that because it's really, in my opinion, you're not just training for running because while there is running, it's not like just constant ten mile run.

[00:05:17.990] – Allan
You do run and you kind of stop and do an obstacle. With 25 obstacles, you're stopping quite a bit. Then you're doing an obstacle. And some of the obstacles are about fear, like you're jumping from a height into water, some of them you're swimming, some of them, you're going through a dark tube and there is the electricity.

[00:05:35.230] – Rachel
Oh, my gosh.

[00:05:37.280] – Allan
But it's a real character builder, and it's a lot of fun. So hopefully, if you guys are interested head on out there I did post in the Facebook group a link that will take you to the active. But if you just go into Toughmudder.com, you can go check out their events. And it's August 27 of 2022. And like I said right now, I'm in the 10 to 10:45 start times, and they just set you up about 500 at a time and send you out.

[00:06:07.660] – Allan
And so a lot of people be running. But you know, if you can sign up around that time, cool. If you can't. And I know there's enough people around, maybe we'll set some kind of meet up that night, have dinner or something. So check it out. And if you're interested, reach out to me and we'll figure something out.

[00:06:22.720] – Rachel
Wow. That sounds so awesome. It's great to have a goal. It's great to have something on the calendar to look forward to and to train for.

[00:06:30.040] – Allan
Yeah, I haven't had that. And I was like, with COVID, with everything else has really not been anything but training for the sake of training. And I'm not going to say it gets dull because I really enjoy lifting and doing some things. But it's just one of those things saying, I need something to put a little spark in there and being ready for that and making sure that I perform well there. It's important to me. So I'll get it done.

[00:06:53.440] – Rachel
Yep. And you picked a doozy. So you'll have your hands full for the next eleven months.

[00:06:57.740] – Allan
Absolutely.

[00:06:58.550] – Rachel
Good for you.

[00:06:59.390] – Allan
All right. You ready to have a conversation? Wait. We didn't ask about you. What are you doing?

[00:07:03.380] – Rachel
Oh, good. Good.

[00:07:05.500] – Rachel
Enjoying the time. Kids are back to school. It's quiet here at the house for a little while, and we just had a bunch of family time. My brother's in from California, so I got to see him and my parents and my in laws. My mother in law just is about to celebrate her 75th birthday. So we had a little to do for her. So it's been great having family time. It's been wonderful.

[00:07:29.360] – Allan
Okay, good.

[00:07:31.310] – Allan
alright. Are you ready to have a conversation with Dr. Davis?

[00:07:34.310] – Rachel
Sure.

Interview

[00:08:07.560] – Allan
Dr. Davis, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:08:10.800] – Dr. Davis
Hello, Allan. Thanks for having me.

[00:08:13.060] – Allan
Now. Your book, Supersize Lies, How Myths About Weight Loss are Keeping Us Fat and the Truth About What Really Works. As I was telling you before, if I were walking through a Barnes & Nobles, I would pick up this book just on that. And then once I got into it really even just the introduction, I was like, hooked. Like, I'm gonna read this. I'm gonna read every single line of this fit book all the way to the end, because I want to know what really works. But I also want to know what myths am I falling for?

[00:08:44.090] – Allan
So I appreciate the opportunity to kind of go through and say, okay, what's going on with what we're hearing? And why is everybody struggling so much with the information that's out there?

[00:08:55.670] – Dr. Davis
Well, thank you for that. And what I've done throughout my career is to really dissect the science behind all kinds of claims related to health. And I think that's so important because there's so much misinformation about so many health issues, certainly that's come to the four more than ever with regard to COVID. But it applies to so many of the things we hear about with regard to our health. So that's something that it's very important to me. I have a background in public health and epidemiology as well as journalism.

[00:09:22.480] – Dr. Davis
So I try to combine those training that I have to really look at the science and help people sort through the claim so they can figure out what's believable and what's not.

[00:09:31.990] – Allan
Because more than anything else, I just there's this tribalism and the Internet is fostering that Facebook is fostering that, Twitter. They're making people into tribes about everything, every single thing we do. It's like, no, you shouldn't do it that way or on those sites absolutely should be doing it that way. And so we have these pulls back and forth. This is the best way. No, this is the best way. They're all potentially a little right, and they're all potentially a little wrong. And I think that's where the problem comes is that we get stuck in our tribe, and it's really, really hard to step out of that.

[00:10:13.740] – Allan
And what I really liked about your book was that you didn't go in saying this is my tribe, and this is the way to do it. It was truly okay, this tribe says this and they're not wrong, but they're not right. This tribe says this and they're not wrong, and they're not right. So where do we meet in the middle? What is the common denominator? What's happening here? And why is this happening? And I want to start that out, only to say is one of the core ones is this concept that if you go in, there's a tribe and we call them the calories in Calories out tribe, CICO.

[00:10:49.660] – Allan
And they believe just heart of hearts. All you have to do is plug in everything you eat and plug in every bit of exercise movement you do, and you do all the formulas and you're going to lose weight. And it's true. Until it's not. Can we talk a little bit about what the problem is with calorie counting and why? Because if it were too true, then we would lose an incremental amount of weight every single day. And we would always lose weight. If we're always eating in a deficit of 500 calories a day, we would always lose a pound a week every week until we weight zero.

[00:11:28.900] – Allan
Unfortunately, that doesn't work. Can you tell us what's going on there?

[00:11:32.540] – Dr. Davis
Right. Well, first of all, I like another way to describe that philosophy is some people call it ELM eat less, exercise more. And I like to say, for many people, Elm Street is a dead end because they try that and they're told that's going to work and it doesn't work and they try it again and again and again, and it continues not to work. So one of the problems with calorie counting is seen, by the way, I'm not saying in my book, nor do I believe that calories don't matter at all.

[00:11:57.120] – Dr. Davis
There are some people that say that, and that's not what I'm saying. Calories do count. But as I say, counting them typically doesn't work. And one reason for that is fairly straightforward. And that is that calorie counting is an imprecise activity. You see those numbers the top of the nutrition label. It's a bold number that this food has 232 calories, and we're led to believe that's a precise number. But in fact, that number is often not accurate. Under law, those numbers people often don't know this, Allan, but under law, those numbers can be up to 20% off.

[00:12:32.660] – Dr. Davis
So often, In many cases, that error is an undercount. So it could be that we're getting actually the number of calories we think we're getting is not accurate. So just for starters, just the whole process of trying to count them accurately is not easy. And then never mind that for most of the foods, we don't have calorie counts, you're not getting most restaurants are not going to have calorie counts on menus. If you eat at someone's house, if you cook your own meal, you're not going to know.

[00:12:56.310] – Dr. Davis
And trying to estimate calories, it's very difficult trying to do so accurately. So that's the problem, for starters, is why calorie counting doesn't work. But there's a bigger problem, and that is that our bodies act in a way more complicated than just a number of calories we consume. There are other factors at work that are involved in weight regulation. One certainly is genetics. We know people. We all know, people that we say they're very lucky. They have great genetics, so to speak, because they can eat whatever they want.

[00:13:24.740] – Dr. Davis
They eat all kinds of foods and they never seem to gain weight. And then somebody else we know will eat very little, and then they gain a lot of weight. And so genetics we know from studies play a very large role in determining how food a given amount of food will affect somebody's weight, and that varies from person to person. We're also learning more and more about the so called microbiome that is the mix of microbes in our guts, and that can determine that can have a large influence in some cases, on how many of the calories we consume that we actually absorb, because it's not necessarily the calories that we consume that matters.

[00:14:00.900] – Dr. Davis
It's how many of those calories our body actually absorbs versus excretes. So that's an important consideration as well. And again, something that science is showing more and more about all the time. And then there's the whole issue of our metabolism. As we cut calories as we lose weight, your metabolism slows down so that it takes fewer calories. We have to eat fewer and fewer calories to continue to lose weight. And often it's sort of a cruel trick of evolution that actually is a gift.

[00:14:35.350] – Dr. Davis
It's there to protect us in case of famine. So essentially, our bodies become more fuel efficient as we lose weight in order to keep us from wasting away. But the problem, of course, today, thankfully, is we don't have to deal with famines in modern society and Western civilization. But if we're trying to lose weight, it's a big problem because our bodies are essentially fighting us. And so that's something else that's sort of lost in this conversation about. Well, it's just a linear process. If you cut calories, then you will keep losing weight. If you cut it down, if you have a certain negative energy balance.

[00:15:07.340] – Dr. Davis
But what that doesn't take into consideration is the way the body essentially fights back. And so all of these things, I think, and there are other factors as well are often lost in this discussion about calories and calories out because it's sort of simplified to this simple math equation. And it's in fact, far more complicated than that.

[00:15:25.780] – Allan
Yeah. And even on the other side of that formula, the burning because I had at any time fitness membership. And I went in there. They had two different types of treadmills, I mean ellipticals. And so if I got on one type of elliptical and worked out really hard for an hour, I would burn 850 calories. But the other elliptical, if I got on it for an hour, working out just as hard it was 750 calories. So I would always go to the 850 calorie elliptical to get a better work out.

[00:15:54.010] – Dr. Davis
Yes.

[00:15:56.180] – Allan
And so their estimates all the way across what our body is burning at any given time. It's an estimate. What in food is an estimate. And restaurants are off on. Even if they tell you what the calories are, they can be off significantly and you buy a can of something and you think, okay, I'm gonna eat this. And you're looking at the label. And if you don't pay enough attention, there's two and two third servings per can, and you're like, okay, well, now I've got to do complicated fraction math to figure out how much I'm eating and how much I'm getting.

[00:16:26.470] – Allan
So it does make it more difficult. But I think one of the core things that you did say in the book that I thought was really important is that tracking can be valuable. It's just when you're trying to get down to this meticulous math of plus and minuses that it's not going to serve you as well.

[00:16:45.360] – Dr. Davis
Yeah, that's absolutely true. There's no question. And the number of studies show this actually tracking what you eat and not only what you eat, but how much you eat when you ate it, whom you ate it with, where you ate it, how you felt when you're eating. All those things are very important. And I can talk more about why that's important in terms of tracking what we eat, what you eat. But what people often get hung up on when they're keeping these food diaries is the number of calories.

[00:17:11.250] – Dr. Davis
And so studies show that people often stop tracking what they're eating because keeping track of their calories are so difficult. They find that it's frustrating to try to deconstruct the foods they eat if they don't have a calorie count to try to take the ingredients and look up the calorie count of each ingredient, and they end up just giving up on the whole thing because they say this is too difficult. So I think that can become a real impediment to a very important activity. And that is tracking your food intake.

[00:17:40.930] – Dr. Davis
And so, as I say in the book, don't worry really as much about tracking your calories. But what you should do if you can is track what you're eating, because what tracking your food intake can do is give you a sense of your eating pattern so that you can go back and use this information to say, I didn't realize that in work I go and pick up a donut a couple of times a day. I didn't realize I was doing that or I didn't realize that when I get stressed, I go through the fast food drive through more often.

[00:18:09.330] – Dr. Davis
And so by doing this, it can help you understand patterns that you may not be aware of and then take action to address those patterns. So that's why I think keeping a food diary is crucial to successful weight management. But people should not let the mandate they often hear to track calories to bog them down.

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[00:20:35.100] – Allan
As we talk about these tribes, I got into early in this episode. One of the things that really comes out is this concept of villains or foods to avoid at all costs, and then the heroes, so these are the super foods that are going to change your life and make you lose weight a lot faster. Can you talk a little bit about villains and heroes and where this lore comes from and why it's really kind of a fiction?

[00:21:01.950] – Dr. Davis
Well, it's part of the overall tendency we have as human beings and certainly in our society to try to look for good guys and bad guys put white hats and black hats on people. And so the same thing certainly has happened with nutrition generally and with weight loss specifically. So that we have weight loss, the history of weight loss over the last 200 years is an effort to finger some kind of culprit and to boil it down to one food or one kind of food that is particularly villainous that if only if we avoid this particular food, then we can weigh less and manage our weight.

[00:21:34.710] – Dr. Davis
And likewise, we see increasingly, and this is driven in part by the food industry because the food industry has a great incentive, of course, to make us think that their food has some kind of magical quality to eat specific foods that they're either going to keep us healthy or help us manage our weight. And we see every day either claims and ads or news reports about some food, whether it's avocados or whether it's beans or whether it's salmon or whatever it is that have some kind of magical properties.

[00:22:05.100] – Dr. Davis
And as I like to say, these are all often foods that are part of a healthful diet and foods that we absolutely can and should eat. But to imbue them with some kind of magical qualities or special properties that are going to allow them in isolation, to make us healthier, to help us lose weight. It is a myth, and that the evidence that's often cited to support this is not compelling. It will be in animals or it'll be in test tubes or will be some kind of intermediate marker that really doesn't measure what we're trying to measure, which in this case is weight loss.

[00:22:37.200] – Dr. Davis
So often we're deceived about the benefits of these foods as well as the danger as it were of specific kinds of foods when it comes to our weight. And so the point here is that instead of fixating on specific foods either as villains or heroes, what we should be doing is looking at the overall quality of our diets. That is to say, what are our overall eating patterns? Are we eating in a healthful way overall and fixate and not to fixate on the specific foods in that diet?

[00:23:07.440] – Dr. Davis
And the advantage of that is that eating in that way and thinking that way about food allows us lots of leeway. We can construct a diet for ourselves with foods that we're going to enjoy and not feel we're being deprived, not feel that we can't ever eat foods that are supposedly bad for us, that we shouldn't eat and allow us to have a diet that can be sustained over time. And in the end, that's what counts, right? That's what matters is a diet that we can eat, that we can enjoy, that we're not going to feel dissatisfied or hungry on, and that we can follow over time.

[00:23:39.910] – Dr. Davis
And whether you're talking about your health or your weight, that's the absolute truth.

[00:23:44.120] – Allan
Yeah. And like I said with villains, it's like, okay, is this food really that bad? And maybe it is if that's all you're eating or you're eating a ton of it, so moderation could be an answer. Occasionally have a bit of ice cream, have a little bit of this. It's okay. And then with heroes, it's like, okay, don't think that grapefruit is this magical fruit that's going to change your life. If you enjoy eating a grapefruit here and there have some grapefruit, you get your vitamin C, and there's some value there.

[00:24:14.130] – Allan
But it's not going to make your waistline go smaller just because you're eating a lot of it.

[00:24:18.680] – Dr. Davis
Right. And I think, as we said, as I keep saying, weight management is an unbelievably, complex phenomenon, and to think that we can boil it down to a specific food, that whether it's carbs every carbs and that'll be the solution or always eat great food, that's the solution. It just defies logic and common sense.

[00:24:37.370] – Allan
So now I want to kind of shift over to it does work, because that's the other half of the big promise from your book, and you boil it down to something I love is just principles. And rather than not a set of rules that says this is what you must do. But here's a set of principles that if you follow these principles, you're going to improve your chances of losing the weight that you want to. Could you go through your weight loss principles?

[00:25:03.720] – Dr. Davis
Right. And that's a crucial point, Allan, because I think too often a lot of diets that people have involved rules, hard and fast rules that say you must do this. You must eat these foods. You must never eat these foods. Only eat these on every other Tuesday, whatever it is, and people get bogged in and rules that they have to follow. And, of course, again, those kinds of diets, maybe people can follow it for a few weeks or a few months. But over time that's not sustainable.

[00:25:28.350] – Dr. Davis
And often these rules are not science based at all. So what I try to do is outline principles that is general ideas about what people should do. And what I like to say is that these are guidelines and things that people can do that they can tailor to their own needs and their own preferences. And that's, again, so important for people to be able to do that, to be able to have something that they can follow over time. So the first principle is that I say, eat a whole food diet, and that doesn't mean going to the store whole foods necessarily.

[00:25:58.060] – Dr. Davis
It means eating a food that's rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts, seeds, lean meats, fish, eggs, dairy. If you eat dairy and trying to minimize so called highly processed foods, things like candy, chips, soda, French fries, hot dogs, things like that. Now, notice I said minimize. I did not say eliminate entirely, because again, a diet that says a food is toxic or poisonous or whatever else you should never touch it. All that tends to do is to make people want that food more, to crave that food more.

[00:26:33.960] – Dr. Davis
But what minimize means is that over time, and it's not saying do this tomorrow if you eat those foods regularly, but over time and try to eat those foods less often so that they eventually become occasional treats and things that you eat in limited portions rather than things you eat every day. And again, this is a process that takes time. But that's going to a whole foods diet, a largely plant based diet in which you can under a plant based diet, you can have any variety of foods, so you don't have to eat specific foods.

[00:27:03.310] – Dr. Davis
If you like salmon, eat salmon. If you don't eat salmon, don't eat it. If you want to eat other fish, fine, whatever whole grains you like, you can incorporate those. But the point is that you can construct a diet of foods you actually enjoy and will eat, and whatever combination of carbs, protein and fats works, various combinations can work under a whole food diet, but that's the way to think of it, rather than thinking of a specific list of foods that you should and should not eat.

[00:27:27.760] – Dr. Davis
So I think that's one principle that I think is really important, something else. And actually, I combine these things are to focus on movement and by that I mean exercise, but also other kinds of ways of moving your body. One of the things I talk about in the book and is that exercise is an overrated way to actually lose weight. And I say that as somebody who's a huge advocate of exercise, I'm an avid exerciser myself. I'm actually my last book is called Fitter Faster. It's all about the benefits of exercise, so I absolutely encourage everybody to exercise.

[00:28:00.580] – Dr. Davis
But you need to exercise for the right reason, and that is to benefit your health and to improve your overall well being. Now, exercise movement can be in part of weight management because it can help prevent weight gain, help you keep off weight that you lost. But you shouldn't look to weight to exercise necessarily as a way to lose weight. And too often people do that. So that's why movement is an important part of weight management. But I think it's important caveat there is we need to have the right expectation when we exercise so that we don't expect it to do something that usually I can't do.

[00:28:37.400] – Dr. Davis
So movement is an important part of an overall weight management strategy for that reason. For the reason, I just said. Also getting enough sleep. That's something that's often overlooked. But a number of studies show that people who get inadequate amounts of sleep are more likely to put on weight, to be obese. And there are a number of theories as to why that's true. But the studies are pretty compelling, and so I think it's all the more reason, in addition to the health benefits of getting enough sleep, as to why in paying attention to our sleep and our sleep, hygiene is very important.

[00:29:07.580] – Dr. Davis
And then Stress. Trying to Control Stress. Again, there are studies that show that people who are under more stress are more likely to eat more. And many of us know this from our own experience that we tend to engage in stress or emotional eating and to eat foods that are not good for us when we're under stress. And also there's studies having to do with the hormone cortisol. The stress releases the hormone cortisol, which make us more likely to put on to store fat, particularly abdominal fat.

[00:29:38.200] – Dr. Davis
So that's why controlling stress through meditation, relaxation, yoga, other methods can be a crucial part of a weight management program. Another element is something you and I talked about earlier and that's tracking what you eat that's so important to do. I think that's crucial. You don't have to do it all the time permanently. But I think certainly at the beginning and during periods where periods you may be struggling to track everything you eat. And again, not just what you ate, but when you ate it with whom you ate, how you felt so that again, you can over time, look at what the patterns are of your eating and make changes if necessary.

[00:30:16.360] – Dr. Davis
Sometimes people don't like to do this because they feel ashamed of how much they are or they lie to themselves. And I think when people do that they're only doing themselves with this service. This should be an exercise in putting everything down to giving yourself as much information as you can. So if you have full information, you can use that information in a way that's going to help you going forward. So I think tracking what you eat is crucial. And again, studies show that to be the case. What I call strategic planning.

[00:30:44.630] – Dr. Davis
And by that, I mean, and planning for the inevitable challenges and setbacks are going to come with weight management. We all know that anybody who's tried this, there are challenges every day to staying on track, and we fall off the wagon for all kinds of reasons because job or family or other emergencies get in the way that prevent us from staying on track. So the point with strategic planning here is to have a strategy in place to help us when those inevitable challenges do occur. One thing I like to talk about are if then statements that we have for ourselves.

[00:31:21.780] – Dr. Davis
So, for example, we know, for example, you have a temptation when you're in line at the checkout on your work to try to get foods. You know, you don't want to eat candy or chips or something you have. If then statements ready. If I am tempted to get candy bars or chips, then I will pull out the snacks I brought with me that are carrot sticks or something else. If I tend to overeat at restaurants and we know that often, they're giant portions and that people tend to eat what's in front of them.

[00:31:55.020] – Dr. Davis
If I tend to do that, then I will get a doggie bag at the beginning of the meal and put half the food and the bag to take home before I eat. So the point is that there are automatic actions that we have ready to go almost like auto technology when we veer out of a Lane, it pulls us back in automatically, so we don't have to think about it. We're ready, we're prepared for these occurrences, and we're ready to act. And likewise, when we kind of fall out of our lanes, we kind of get off track.

[00:32:25.140] – Dr. Davis
We have ways of talking to ourselves to say if I get off track and I won't blame myself, I won't say I'm a failure, I won't give up. I'll say, you know what? I'm just going to start again and keep going. And so what research shows that people that can do that kind of self talk that can have those if in statements, when they do inevitably fall off track, they can get back on track and keep going. And that's so the point is to have this kind of planning in place so that we are ready and prepared for the inevitable challenges that do occur.

[00:32:53.710] – Dr. Davis
And we can keep going. And then finally, I talk about calling the cavalry, sometimes doing all these things ourselves. We need more help. They helped a certain extent, but we need extra help. And so there are certain things we can do to get extra help. And one that I talk about, it's something called intensive behavioral therapy, and what that is basically is listening to help professionals, whether their physicians, nurse practitioners, dietitians, to offer a certain kind of therapy called intensive behavioral therapy that helps us around things such as food planning, exercise, dealing with different kinds of barriers that we may and helping us overcome those barriers.

[00:33:36.030] – Dr. Davis
So basically helping us to manage the process of weight management. And this can occur in person. It can occur online. There's certain commercial programs like NUM and others that incorporate elements of behavioral therapy so that you can get it in various ways. But that can be very helpful to people, sometimes to get help from professionals to help them get on track and stay on track. And then for some people, surgery can be an option for people who have above a certain BMI who qualify. Surgery can be very beneficial, bariatic surgery.

[00:34:07.290] – Dr. Davis
There are various forms of it. It's not for everybody. And certainly people need to carefully weigh the risks and benefits because there are risks involved. But for certain people, it can be very beneficial. It can help them lose a substantial amount of way, keep that weight off and decrease their risk of certain conditions like diabetes. Surgery can be something that's very beneficial for certain people as well. So I think people shouldn't be afraid. I guess the point there is people shouldn't see his weakness, they shouldn't see it as failure or anything else.

[00:34:36.210] – Dr. Davis
If they say, you know what? I'm trying everything I can on my own, but I need some extra help. So I need to call in some professionals to help me take the next step. And that's something people should be ready to do if they find that what they're doing on their own isn't sufficient.

[00:34:49.080] – Allan
Yes, Dr. Davis, I define wellness as being the healthiest fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:34:59.380] – Dr. Davis
well, for me, I guess I would say mine aren't necessarily Earth shattering, and they're not necessarily surprising. But for me, at least personally, the three that I would say would be the first would be movement moving your body. As I said, I'm a big advocate of exercise for all kinds of reasons. I like to say that if there were a pill that could do all the things that exercise can do, everything from reducing risk of heart disease and cancer to improving your sex life, we'd all be clamoring for it.

[00:35:26.160] – Dr. Davis
So I think finding a way to move your body regularly, and that can be any number of things, but anything, whether you're walking to hiking, to dancing, to playing pickleball, whatever it might be that you enjoy, that you can sustain that you can keep doing that's really important. It's crucial for our health. And as I say, it's important for our weight, not necessarily to help us lose weight, but to stay at a healthy weight and to prevent weight gain. So movement would be the first thing I would say.

[00:35:53.850] – Dr. Davis
The second thing would be our diet healthy eating. And again, we've talked earlier about what that means. It's not complicated. It's not following a lot of rules. It doesn't mean you have to buy designer foods. It's a fairly straightforward process. It's focusing on your overall eating pattern. And by the way, it's not just what you eat, but it's also enjoying food with other people. I think that's so important that's an important part of healthy eating to me, and often certain diets that are too restrictive. We're involved fasting to me often take away the joy of eating, take away the pleasure of enjoying our food with other people.

[00:36:29.970] – Dr. Davis
So eating healthful foods and enjoying that food with other people would be a second principle that I would say. And the third I mentioned earlier is sleep. I think too often this is overlooked sadly, in our society. It's a badge of honor for people who say I only sleep five or 6 hours a night. I only need a little bit of sleep well, I think that's unfortunate that people say that and make us think that's something admirable, because it's not. For most of us, we need seven to 9 hours of sleep and that we often don't realize the negative effects that two little sleep have on our health and our wellbeing.

[00:37:00.200] – Dr. Davis
And so I think to focus more on sleep hygiene. Putting away the tablet, putting away the iPhone getting to sleep earlier, focusing on good sleep hygiene is crucial, again, not only for our health, but also for weight management. So again, that's something that I think many of us don't focus on enough.

[00:37:17.290] – Allan
Thank you for that. If someone wanted to learn more about you and learn more about your book, SuperSized Lies, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:37:25.160] – Dr. Davis
My website, Healthyskeptic.com. I have on there more about the book. More about Me. I have a number of videos I've created so that's a good place to start.

[00:37:34.020] – Allan
Great.

[00:37:35.000] – Dr. Davis
healthyskeptic.com.

[00:37:36.010] – Allan
You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/505, and I'll be sure to have a link there in the show, notes.

[00:37:42.930] – Allan
Dr. Davis, thank you. So much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:37:46.220] – Dr. Davis
It's been a real pleasure, Allan. Thank you so much.


Post Show/Recap

[00:37:52.510] – Allan
Hey, Raz.

[00:37:54.180] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, I just have to say, I love the title of his book, Super Sized Lies and The Myths of Weight Loss and The Truth. That's a pretty heavy title. Perfect.

[00:38:07.120] – Allan
Yeah. The thing I get to is everybody wants something simple. They want a rule of thumb. Just tell me one thing. Just tell me one thing. What can I eat? What can I not? That's the one rule. And people want to give you rules. If I can give you a rule and I can make money doing it, they give you a rule. So a lot of personal trainers will say, Calories in calories out. You got to get in the gym. You got to have a gym membership.

[00:38:34.320] – Allan
You got to get in the gym. We got to work out the three times per week that you're going to train with me. But that's not enough. You got to come in here another three times a week and be doing that cardio that I told you to do and then go low fat and just eat what you want and you'll be fine. And then if you get in there and you're not losing the weight, it's like what you must be eating too much because I'm working you.

[00:38:56.330] – Allan
And you know what? You're working hard than gym. And they're like, I'm working hard in the gym and you're eating too much. It's like, Well, I'm hungry because I'm working in the gym.

[00:39:07.240] – Rachel
Yeah. Calories in Calories out is probably the most common myth that he had highlighted. And it's one I've heard. And I continue to hear to this day.

[00:39:16.360] – Allan
And the problem with it is it's a myth over the long term.

[00:39:23.020] – Rachel
Yeah.

[00:39:23.570] – Allan
It's not a myth myth because it's true.

[00:39:25.910] – Rachel
You're right.

[00:39:26.690] – Allan
It is absolutely true. If you eat more calories than you are burning, you're going to gain weight. The problem is. And if you're eating fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight. The problem is your body is not a closed system. So when you sit there and eat less, your body's going to sit there and say, you know, something's going on in Rachel's life, and she can't get enough food for us to do the things we want to do. And we want to save the brain.

[00:39:53.930] – Allan
You want to save the liver, we want to save the kidneys. And what can we get rid of? What can we reduce? And it says, oh, well, yeah, we got some of this fat here, but we want to hold on to that, because if she goes long term without food, we're going to be screaming. You're going to be struggling. So let's let go of a little muscle because it's burning more calories. So you're in the gym working and you're not putting on any muscle or anything you might be gaining weight, but it's not muscle.

[00:40:18.460] – Allan
And then it's going to say, Well, let's reduce the size of the spleen and cut out our immune system. Let's do a little bit of work here and cut off some of our reproductive strength because we have no need to bring babies into this world if there's not enough food. And so sometimes you gotta just coax your body to understand, yes, there is enough food, good high quality nutritious food for us to survive and do well and thrive. And then at that point, your body can sit there and say, you know, yeah, we could use some of this body fat when during those periods of time when we don't have enough food.

[00:40:52.630] – Allan
But we know there's plenty of food because she eats.

[00:40:57.210] – Rachel
Right. We always have plenty enough food. We don't often feel the hunger. And we go through each day. We had breakfast at a certain time, lunch at a certain time, afternoon snack, dinner at a certain time, like we got plenty of food to do what we need.

[00:41:11.820] – Allan
And here's the interesting thing is, those meal times, there's actually no magic to them. There's no reason, we eat that way because that's how the work day was scheduled. You ate before you went to work, they gave you a lunch break. You ate a lunch and then ate after you got through with work. And then along the way, just unions and what not stepped in and says we should probably let them take a 15 minutes break. So there was a morning snack and an afternoon snack.

[00:41:39.180] – Allan
And quite literally, the five six meals a day is built around a work day in an office or a factory. It has absolutely nothing to do with your metabolism and how your body was designed. In many cases, you might go the whole morning without having to eat food because you just didn't have enough the day before. And you've got to walk 9 miles to where you can get honey or roots or kill a rabbit or a bear. And that's going to take a little bit of time.

[00:42:07.540] – Allan
And then you do it. You carry it home and you can prepare it and you Cook it and then you eat it. So you might only have one big meal each day, or you might be able to nibble on berries and things along the way. And then you go fishing, you catch some fish and you eat those fish. But it was never meant for us to sit down and eat five meals a day. And the premise behind that was when you're trying to catch calories, you get hungry by having you eat more often, you feel like you're not as hungry all the time.

[00:42:35.470] – Allan
That's all that's about. So those are myths that were built out of people were getting fatter and they knew the scientists and everything looking at it, they're eating more. We eat more than we ever did. History. because food got easier and easier, got more calorie dense and less nutritionally dense. And that, to me, is the real key to all of this. The quality of your food is more important than the amount of food.

[00:43:07.510] – Rachel
Well, I love that Dr. Davis mentioned that he said he suggested that we track what we eat and not get hung up so much on the calories because he don't need to worry about the calories in calories out equation. But to track what we eat, and the real light bulb moment for me was because then you can identify patterns of what you're eating according to certain moments in your life. If you're always stressed, some people like he had mentioned may reach for a donut or a cookie after dinner at night, it becomes a habit.

[00:43:40.200] – Rachel
And if you can kind of monitor the food that you're eating and how much and when and what for.

[00:43:45.900] – Rachel
Then you might be able to get a little insight that you could then use to change or make healthier choices.

[00:43:51.520] – Allan
Because the personal trainer is selling you the calories in calories out model makes sense because that's where they sell training. As a coach, I stepped back and say, okay, why does that not work? If you sit there and I said, if you did the math and said, okay, I'm burning 2500 calories and I'm eating 2000. I should lose 1 lb per week every week for the rest of my life till I'm down to zero.

[00:44:16.450] – Allan
And we all know that doesn't work. We all know that doesn't work. It's never that straight line ever. And so the reality of it is, if you're just selling burning calories as a model, you got to keep selling it. Whereas we know a man or a woman, we get over 40 or 50. Our metabolism seems to just stop and it doesn't stop, stop. But it's kind of one of those kind of sets of the harder we work to get our metabolism up, if you will, the harder it is, and the more we seem to want to eat and that's our body trying to protect itself.

[00:44:53.850] – Allan
So taking a little bit of time to just go about this in a smart way, like you said, the logging and understanding. Okay, when I eat this pizza or hamburger or hot dog or whatever, the next day, my body weight is higher. I look in the mirror and my cheeks and neck are puffy and my skin just doesn't look as good. So I know staying hydrated, eating high quality food, making sure I'm getting an protein for me. Those are keys. If I'm going to keep myself feeling good and energized, then that's when you give your body the right foods and you have enough energy, then it's a little bit easier to just kind of poke out or net nudge your body to say, okay, it's safe to let some of this body fat go, and then it will and then it will stop.

[00:45:50.690] – Allan
You got to let it set. And then you got to start poking at it again. Give it the general nudges. And then your body. In the terms I would just say you have to coax your body to lose weight because it doesn't want to.

[00:46:02.820] – Rachel
Yeah. Well. And also, Dr. Davis mentioned the importance of sleep and stress because when we don't get enough sleep and when we are under higher stress, our body is not functioning in its optimal fashion. And stress not only somehow makes us want to eat more, we choose the foods that we probably shouldn't choose, the candies and the rich home cooked foods. But it's just a habit. And then we have a higher cortisol level as well. And so our body is not wanting to release any of that again in the same way.

[00:46:41.650] – Rachel
So just knowing your sleeping habits and your stress levels, just be aware of what you're doing during that time.

[00:46:48.520] – Allan
Yeah. Because what's happening there is when you're in that stress situation, whether it was sleep and not getting enough sleep or just really in a high stress environment is that that cortisol is basically catabolic. So it's tearing down your muscle mass. It's basically doing a lot of things that are not good. Be great if you were being chased by a bear, you want cortisol, you want all those adrenals. But you don't want that in a general sense, day to day, chronically. And what we're doing with the foods that we're choosing is we are pumping our body now with dopamine.

[00:47:22.480] – Allan
So it creates that environment of a feeling, happy, comfortable. And so those comfort foods, whatever your comfort food is, you're turning to it to get that dopamine to get that reward. And it feels good. So of course, all doesn't feel good. Dopamine does. And so you get into that cycle. Of course, all hit dopamine. Of course, all hit hit dopamine. And that's the cycle, whether it's Donuts, pizza, candies, whatever it is, it's just that cycle. And when you start to recognize it, it's like, Why did I eat those Donuts yesterday?

[00:47:59.700] – Allan
And then you realize, oh, well, my boss yelled at me and I thought I was going to get fired the day before, the kids, for one reason or another were just assholes today. They didn't want to put on their clothes. They didn't want to get ready for school. They didn't want to do anything. And now I'm late for work. And my boss is already mad at me. And so I don't have time to make breakfast. I'll just stop at the Dunkin Donuts and get a coffee, and then you buy two Donuts, and it's like, why did that happen?

[00:48:29.380] – Allan
You see the story. So the logging what you eat and paying attention to how you felt is going to give you those subtle clues to know where those breaks are and then taking the deep breath, avoiding on Donuts drive through when you're in that position because you might just well be able to pull in order your hot black coffee and move about. But if you're in a stress position and you're looking and they got the smell and at the back end of that place at the drive through, they make sure you can smell it.

[00:49:06.940] – Allan
You end up ordering a couple of them. And that's all by design.

[00:49:11.960] – Rachel
I just want to throw in exercise as an alternate way to get your dopamine hit. All of us runners. We are happy runners. We have the runners high, like they talk about, which is essentially dopamine hits. But also, people feel a whole lot better after throwing some weights around in the gym, just a little bit of movement and just makes you feel so empowered and so energized and kind of kicks out a little bit of that stress in a healthier way.

[00:49:39.490] – Allan
And it could be something as simple as going into the stairwell at work, going up and down a flight of stairs for a couple minutes, and you're going to burn off some of that cortisol because you ran from the bear, you burn some energy, so you're going to burn off some of that, and then you're going to relax. And I'm not saying work up a sweat unless you're and you're that upset.

[00:50:02.980] – Rachel
And yeah, you could.

[00:50:05.070] – Allan
But up and down the stairs a little another technique. And my boss would call me. And if you come to my office, that was never, never, ever, ever a good thing.

[00:50:14.610] – Rachel
No, never. No.

[00:50:16.770] – Allan
That come to my office call was just, ugh.

[00:50:20.490] – Rachel
It's just like being called to the principal's office when you're a kid.

[00:50:23.580] – Allan
No, I wasn't afraid of the principal. Called your boss is like, ugh, this more work. This is going to be like who did I upset today? Who didn't I upset today? And then it was like, So what I would do when I go get on the elevator, I would just start doing the box breathing. You know, I'm going up two flights and I could have walked up the stairs.

[00:50:45.470] – Allan
But I said, no, I'm going to delay it because they see me coming off the elevator. That's what they expect. They don't expect me to go up the stairs. So I'll just go up the elevator and the time it takes for the door to close, just start doing some box breathing. 4 seconds and 4 seconds hold 4 seconds out. 4 seconds hold. You do those while the elevator is going up, you get about three or four or five of those in before the elevator doors open again and you walk out and you'll notice your stress level drops a lot just from something as simple as that.

[00:51:15.820] – Allan
So just recognizing the other things that are going on in your life will help you get past a lot of this. If someone says something and it's an absolute, this is an absolute for weight loss, they don't know what they're talking about.

[00:51:32.550] – Rachel
You're right. Good point. Good point. And I also want to point out to how individualized we all are. I say this a lot, too, that we are all different ages, different sizes, different points in our lives. And so there is no one size fits all. And if what you're doing is not working, I think reach out to you, to me, to whoever can help, because sometimes you just need a little bit of expert advice to help you get through your slump or whatever you're dealing with.

[00:52:02.820] – Allan
And the other side of it is if you hire a coach or you're talking to a coach, the coach is not going to make money making you sweat and burn calories. They're going to be paying attention to the other things going on. They're going to ask questions. It's not so much that coaches that we have the answer. It's just we have this objectivity in the conversation. It's like, Well, I can't help. And I'm like, okay, can't help what? Two Donuts every morning. That's what I see.

[00:52:33.690] – Allan
You're eating two doughnuts for breakfast every morning, and then healthy the rest of the day. And I'm like, okay, well, I see pizza in here. I see tacos. I see not that some of those can be healthy, but at the same time, a lot of folks will get into the moment and lose that ability to take a step back. And what a coach gives you is kind of that opportunity to have a sounding board, and then you say it, and then they repeat it back to you out loud.

[00:53:03.580] – Allan
You're like, aahh.

[00:53:05.690] – Rachel
Yeah, it's so helpful sometimes to have another set of eyes looking at you. For sure.

[00:53:13.470] – Allan
Alright, Rachel, anything else before we call it a show?

[00:53:16.950] – Rachel
No. This is great. I hope you enjoy the rest of your trip up here.

[00:53:20.360] – Allan
I will. I will. Thank you.

[00:53:21.870] – Rachel
Take care.

[00:53:22.730] – Allan
You too. Bye.

[00:53:24.290] – Rachel
Bye.

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Another episode you may enjoy

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How to savor your way out of emotional eating with Dr. Lynn Rossy

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Emotional eating and binge eating can be very hard to overcome. On this episode of the 40+ Fitness, we talk with Dr. Lynn Rossy and identify some things you can do to change your relationship with food. We dive into her book, Savor Every Bite.

Sponsor

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Transcript

Let's Say Hello

[00:04:07.770] – Allan
Hey Raz, how are you doing?

[00:04:09.480] – Rachel
Good, Allan, how are you today?

[00:04:11.760] – Allan
I'm doing all right. Tammy has scheduled her like an open house party for Lula's on this Tuesday night, as we're recording this. So our Tuesday afternoon from like three to six. So we're going to have a bunch of people coming over the house. So she's got Lula's ready to go. And now it's just making sure that we get the health department check and then, you know, figure out how we're going to take credit cards and set up our online booking.

[00:04:37.630] – Allan
So now it's more that backoffice stuff she's got the front of house ready.

[00:04:43.620] – Rachel
Wow. How exciting. That'll be fun.

[00:04:46.330] – Allan
Yeah. Yeah. So she's had some monthly guests, you know, longer term guests come in and that's giving her some feedback on, you know, this and that. And so we picked up on a few things and found things. You know, it's like if you don't go up there, you don't know, things don't work. And so when they said, you know, the microwave works but it doesn't warm the food. And I was like, OK, well, I would classify that is not working, but basically saying if the light comes on and it twirls around, but it's not heating it up.

[00:05:16.650] – Allan
So we have a new microwave and the blender had to be redone or cleaned, and so, yeah, little tweaks and things like that we had to do up there to just get that a little nicer. And we learned it by having guests, so it was better to do that when we had the longer term guests going, so she'll be ready. We're going to take a trip back to the states in September. And then when we come back, it's like all boy, let's get these guests in here and let's open up.

[00:05:47.340] – Allan
So we'll open up in October as we get everything done. The health check and the credit cards and all of that.

[00:05:55.350] – Rachel
Sweet. That sounds awesome. How very exciting.

[00:05:58.260] – Allan
Yeah, it is.

[00:05:59.400] – Rachel
Good.

[00:06:00.000] – Allan
How are things up there?

[00:06:01.410] – Rachel
Good, good. I am exhausted today. Mike and I ran a half marathon yesterday and it was incredibly hot and even more humid and it was all hills. It was probably the trifecta of things that are just my nemesis. So I'm just chilling out today, recovering and resting and hydrating back up again. So I'm exhausted but totally satisfied. It was a wonderful, miserable day.

[00:06:30.550] – Allan
Well, do you feel like maybe you haven't completely gotten your bounce back since you did the Ultra? Because it's only been a few weeks since you did that. And like I said, I took off running every marathon I did. I pretty much didn't do any major training or any major running for about a month after. I go on walks, maybe a little jog here and there, but nothing nothing like trying to throw in a half marathon.

[00:06:55.140] – Rachel
Right. And that's kind of been the case, you know, since the 50 miler. I took a couple of days off of no running at all and then just a couple of miles here and there. So I've kind of ramped up slowly again. I did a ten miler, I think, a week or two ago, I think it was. And then this would be my first 13 miler after the 50. And so, yeah, I'm pretty sure that I'm probably still rebounding from that.

[00:07:23.070] – Rachel
And but I hadn't had any formal training. I just will go run when I feel good enough to go run, which is a lot because I run a lot, but I keep my miles short, easy. I just don't go out with any specific goal just to let the run come to me. So this was actually my first real big race since the 50 and long race, I guess since the 50 and for sure. But also I think we had probably think it was about in the eighties and the humidity was it's thick.

[00:07:54.750] – Rachel
It was like fog. It was like breathing fog. So it was just a miserable day. And then to add Hills on to that, it just made it all the more challenging. So, yeah, a little bit of both, I think tough, tough conditions, but also rebounding from the fifty.

[00:08:10.890] – Rachel
But yeah, still great.

[00:08:13.020] – Allan
Hydrate. Hydrate.

[00:08:14.160] – Rachel
Yes, yeah. I am just drinking tons of water and electrolytes as well. Just keeping it going.

[00:08:20.520] – Allan
Yeah. All right. So you want to get into the episode with Dr. Rossi.

[00:08:25.530] – Rachel
Yes, this will be great.

Interview

Text – https://amzn.to/3f7ytKu

[00:08:50.310] – Allan
Dr. Rossy, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:08:53.220] – Dr. Rossy
Thanks, Allan. Thanks for having me.

[00:08:55.380] – Allan
Now I have a Facebook Group for the podcast, and it's a really awesome group. And occasionally I will reach out and just message someone that's new to the group or someone that's been around for a while. And I'll say, hey, what's something that you want us to talk about? What's something you want me to cover? And the topic of emotional eating, binge eating came up. And so I was really happy to see your book called Savor Every Bite: Mindful Ways to Eat, Love Your Body and Live with Joy.

[00:09:26.790] – Allan
And so I'm just really excited to be able to have this conversation with you, because I think this is a topic that doesn't get talked about enough. Most of the books that are out there for health and fitness are eat less, move more. You know, here's a diet. Try this one. Try that one. Try this one. Try that one. And it doesn't really get to the real crux of what's going on is this is not about our food choices.

[00:09:52.980] – Allan
This is not about any of that. This is in our head. This is a mindset thing. And it is something that isn't won over by reading a book or trying a diet.

[00:10:05.390] – Dr. Rossy
Right, I agree with that, I'm definitely not trying a diet. Well, we know that 80 to 90 percent of diets fail. OK, that's a big number, right? It might work in the short term, sure, but in the long term, you're not going to get the kind of changes that you want. You're not going to stay with a diet because it's not really going to fit into your lifestyle. It's not going to be sustainable long term.

[00:10:32.700] – Dr. Rossy
And so I teach mindful eating. Mindful eating, it teaches you how to listen to your own internal signals about when to eat, why you're eating, how much to eat, when to stop. And we've really lost touch with those internal signals by putting all of our focus outside and hoping somebody else will give you the answer. We'll tell you what to do. We'll give you the magic pill, you know, and it isn't out there, right?

[00:11:03.300] – Dr. Rossy
I mean, the diet industry is making billions of dollars on people that keep looking outside of themselves for a way of coming into balance with their bodies in a way that's both nurturing and pleasurable and healthful and, you know, and creates well-being for you. It's all really inside you if you learn how to pay attention in a particular way, which is in the present without judgment and constantly just coming back to what's going on right now, that's a skill.

[00:11:41.580] – Dr. Rossy
That's mindfulness. That's a skill that can be learned. And it's really helpful to have somebody teach you that. It's you can't read a book and go, oh, yeah, I'm going to practice that now. I've been practicing for many, many, many years. And I practice it every day because it's not something you just say, well, I've done that. Now I go on to the next thing. It's a part of your life. Mindfulness becomes a part of your life, a way of living, a way of being so that you're constantly being aware of, for instance, what you mentioned, the emotions that are arising.

[00:12:14.790] – Dr. Rossy
So when I teach people mindful eating, I don't just teach them how to pick up a fork and take a bite of food and put it in their mouth and taste it. But I really approach the whole person who shows up at the dinner table. The whole person that shows up at the dinner table has emotions like being overwhelmed, stressed, bored, happy, sad, angry, you name it. I mean, we all have these emotions because we're human.

[00:12:41.940] – Dr. Rossy
And oftentimes people that come to my classes say that they engage in a lot of emotional eating. And those emotions then can lead to binge eating. Right. And more serious issues that people can have around food in their bodies. So why are we reaching for food when we're sad?

[00:13:02.460] – Allan
Well, that's one of the interesting things, because I spend a lot of time talking to experts like yourself. And some of the experts will talk about, you know, what our ancestors would have eaten or how they would have lived their lives. And so we know they wouldn't have had couches and chairs and wouldn't be watching Netflix. We know that if they wanted to go for binge eating, it's not the binge eating we're doing today. We have over time gotten to a point where we celebrate food, we celebrate with food So, pretty much name a holiday that you celebrate and there's going to be a food that's almost immediately hit your head.

[00:13:42.660] – Dr. Rossy
And that's fine. Right. So it's great to celebrate with food. I love to celebrate with food. I love to celebrate holidays with food. The thing is, it's like people see these times as a time to binge. Here's a deal. I celebrate with food every day. I don't have to wait to a holiday to celebrate with food. I celebrate. I just celebrated lunch, right? I made some guacamole. I had some blue corn chips.

[00:14:11.580] – Dr. Rossy
I had some fresh tomatoes from somebody's garden. That's a friend of mine. And I sat down and savored like it was a holiday because, hey, every meal that we have can be a pleasurable experience. And if we know we can have the food that we want whenever we want it, we don't have to have it all now. What we live in is a culture that is taught us to deprive ourselves. You know, it's that binge depravation cycle, our diet depravations, binge diet cycle that we get in so that if you're given permission to eat because it's a holiday, boy, I better just eat it all now because I'm not going to be able to do it afterwards.

[00:14:57.180] – Dr. Rossy
And so we've developed this really unhealthy relationship both with ourselves, our bodies and with holidays. You know, it's really a shame. It's like, well, first of all, why wait till a holiday to have some great food? But second, why then ruin the holiday with this overeating and binge eating and then feeling bad about it, when you can just simply enjoy it, you might eat a little bit more at a holiday. I might do that, but it's OK because during the rest of the year I'm not doing that.

[00:15:26.700] – Dr. Rossy
And I'm not waiting until the holiday to enjoy and celebrate with food. I mean, it's it's a way that we get together and have community and we've lost the real kind of essence of that activity by making it too much about food and not about the experience altogether, the connection with friends and the sharing of meals and sharing of love. It's become it's gotten a little distorted.

[00:15:54.150] – Allan
Yeah. I guess the challenge and this comes up all the time, particularly with sugar, but with other foods as well, is that. It's very similar to other addictions, like alcohol or drugs or things like that, because we're eating our feelings where there's an emotional response and then there's a food and then there's a guilt response, food. But we have to eat. It's not like I could say, OK, you know, I'm never going to drink another beer in my life.

[00:16:25.010] – Allan
And I could, you know, get into a program, figure that out, get through the mindset of it, get through all of that and just abstain for the rest of my life. But, yeah, there's a vending machine probably within 100 meters of you, almost every moment of your of your day. Whether It's your pantry, your freezer or at work a break room or just walking around any public building the opportunities for you to have access to foods that you really know are not serving you.

[00:16:57.340] – Allan
And but should they call to you because they're generating this desire based on how they've been set up to taste and crunch and salt and sweet and and so they've figured out what we need and so it becomes almost addictive.

[00:17:13.780] – Dr. Rossy
Yeah, so food is everywhere, without a doubt, food is everywhere. Everywhere you turn. So one of the things that we've discovered in mindful eating is that when people engage in mindfulness and increase their ability to be present without judgment and with kindness and compassion, that their preferences change for food because they're finally tasting their food, right. I have people who I talk about the basics of mindful eating in my book, which is a way of kind of bringing mindfulness to the table.

[00:17:47.110] – Dr. Rossy
And a part of that is really tasting, you know, really tasting and slowing down and savoring your food. And when you do that, you will begin to notice things about your food that you hadn't noticed before, because most of us are multitasking when we're eating. We're no tasting. We're not really even savor. Savoring requires two things. One, that you're present for it. And two, that you're actually experiencing it and noticing the pleasant sensations, a lot of food.

[00:18:17.200] – Dr. Rossy
So people come back to my class after one week of practicing. And I have people tell me I don't even like what I eat. Nothing. I think people say I don't like anything I eat. I just hadn't noticed before. I know when I first started into mindfulness, I was a big Diet Coke drinker. Loved my Diet Coke. Well, I used to do a lot of things right. I've done the drugs and I've done all of that stuff.

[00:18:40.540] – Dr. Rossy
And as I've grown in my path of mindfulness, the last thing to go kind of was the Diet Coke, because I didn't want to give up Diet Coke. I wasn't trying to give up Diet Coke, but I was on a long meditation retreat. I was about seven days, nine days. I was in silence doing meditation and walking and eating. There was no Diet Coke there, so I didn't have it for nine days. As soon as I got out of the retreat, I tasted it for the first time and I couldn't believe it.

[00:19:13.480] – Dr. Rossy
I thought, that's really bad. That doesn't even taste good. Why am I drinking this? And so I haven't really wanted it since, but I had not been able to taste it. And so our taste buds really do get accommodated to a lot of chemicals, a lot of preservatives, a lot of sugar. And when you. But while I was away from it for just nine days and I came back and I was astounded at how my taste buds began to wake up and to really go, well, that doesn't even seem good.

[00:19:48.670] – Dr. Rossy
Or maybe it takes a few extra weeks for some people. But undoubtedly by week seven or eight, I have a ten week class and people come back and go, I thought, I like this and I'm kind of grieving that I don't like it anymore because it has been such a friend. But they discover new ways of eating. So mindfulness helps us to really taste, to really be present. Mindfulness also helps us how to be with difficult emotions.

[00:20:19.420] – Dr. Rossy
So I think the number one thing mindfulness does for us is teaches us how to be with difficult emotions without needing to turn to food, alcohol, shopping over or doing whatever it is you overdo it. I just named my favorite, you know. I mean, but but you don't have to do that. Mindfulness gives you an alternative and it teaches you how to be with emotions without doing anything. It's like emotions don't need to be fixed. Who knew? Right.

[00:20:53.800] – Dr. Rossy
Emotions are actually there to tell you something, to teach you something as part of the human experience of being alive. So when you lose somebody, you grieve. That's important. You need to feel that. When you get hurt by somebody, you need to feel that. You need to explore that. You need to like, let that move through your body and your heart and your mind and accept it and acknowledge it. And then it passes through. We've not been taught.

[00:21:24.490] – Dr. Rossy
You know, I like to quote I like to quote Doctor Mister Rogers from Mister Rogers neighborhood, which may date me or many others, but Mr. Rogers had this great show on television for kids teaching them how to deal with everyday circumstances. I think when President Kennedy got shot, he talked about death with them, with kids. You know, I like how to process what was going on in the world. And we don't do that very often.

[00:21:53.740] – Dr. Rossy
We try to protect people. We protect children. And so they grow into adults that have not learned how to process their emotions or be resilient with their emotions. And then they turn to other things or to help make them feel better. That might temporarily work, but then in the long term, creates a problem all of its own. Emotions are mentionable, they're manageable and they're natural and mindfulness, it take some work, right, it's not like it's going to just be easy, but it does work.

[00:22:24.970] – Dr. Rossy
If you practice it and you learn to go, OK, this is what wants to be here right now. This is anger. This is sadness. And you label it. Most people don't know how to label their emotions. And we know from research that when you can label your emotion accurately and really just stop. It just takes a second to stop and go, well, what am I feeling right now? You know, instead of reaching for the Snickers bar, what am I feeling right now?

[00:22:52.000] – Dr. Rossy
I'm feeling disappointed. Ah, I'm feeling frustrated. And automatically, if you get the emotion right, you'll begin to feel a little bit of relief because somebody heard you. It's why we go to therapy. Right? I'm now a psychologist. You know, people come to therapy because they want somebody to hear how they feel and we can do that for ourselves.

[00:23:16.310] – Allan
Now, I want to back up just a little bit, we will get back into the emotions and feelings, because I do feel that you got to get to, if you're going to solve a problem, you've got to get to the root. And so we will get there. But back to the mindful eating and, you know, being friends with food, I think what mindful eating does for me or did for me was it gave me the opportunity to pick better friends to be around.

[00:23:40.190] – Allan
And then you have the acronym and I'm coming from a corporate background for years, so I just love acronyms. I've fallen in love with acronyms and lists, but you put those in a book and you've got me. And so you have this acronym called BASIX, which is basically an approach for how we can do mindful eating. Can you quickly walk us through what BASICS stands for?

[00:24:04.550] – Dr. Rossy
Yeah, absolutely. So basically we start with a B, so B stands for Breathe and Belly Check. It's important to do both. So let's take a deep breath right now. Maybe even take two. So when you take a deep breath, you're activating your parasympathetic nervous system. OK, there's two parts to your nervous system, sympathetic, parasympathetic. Sympathetic nervous system is your fight or flight response. It's what's happening when you're stressed. And there's a lot of stress haters out there.

[00:24:42.340] – Dr. Rossy
Right. So you want to breathe. You want to activate your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest and digest response. So if you're eating with when you're stressed, your body's not even prepared to take in food, your stomach isn't really activated. It's shut down so that you can fight or flee. Right. And so you want to take a few deep breaths. When you do that, you begin to relax. The body begins to kick in the stomach and the processes that will be needed to digest food and then belly check.

[00:25:16.930] – Dr. Rossy
Are you hungry? Are you physically hungry? If you're hungry, what is it that you'd like to eat? What would satisfy you right now? Take a moment to kind of think about that. If you're not physically hungry, explore what's going on. Because if you're not physically hungry, food is probably not the answer. So there's something else, maybe you're stressed, maybe you're bored, maybe you're wanting to take a break or whatever. And this habit is to reach for food. If you're not physically hungry,

[00:25:46.990] – Dr. Rossy
Think about what's happening and how better you can approach what's happening with something besides food, OK, on a general basis, I mean, there's going to be times we eat when we're not physically hungry. That's OK. It's not a rule. But in general, the body wants to be fed when it's hungry, not so much when it's not hungry. And then pick what you want, pick what you think is going to satisfy your taste. But allow yourself to have whatever it is that you want in the moment and then assess it.

[00:26:15.910] – Dr. Rossy
A stands for assess your food. What does it look like? What does it smell like? Where did it come from? Is it really highly processed or is it less processed? Not to be judgmental because when there's no good or bad food, but we want to be aware, we want to be conscious of what we're putting into our bodies. So we're making a conscious choice about what that is. Does it look appealing? Does it look like, oh, yum, I want that. Or, oh, yuck. I'm so sick of that. Assess your food

[00:26:44.680] – Dr. Rossy
and then S stands for Slow Down. In my many years of teaching mindful eating, I ask this all the time and about three fourths, three quarters of us eat too fast, which means that you've eaten, you're finished with the meal you're going on to the next day and you've not even registered hunger. You don't remember what you had to eat twenty minutes from from the time that you ate.

[00:27:08.620] – Dr. Rossy
And so you really want to slow down and savor. You want to put your fork down in between bites. You want to chew thoroughly, which is another one of the basics. You really want to take your time, because when you do, the body can begin to register fullness. If you eat too fast, your body doesn't have time to register that it's getting full. And that's the signal to stop eating. Not when the plate is clean, but when there's no more food anywhere in the environment. But when your body has had enough it will tell you it takes about twenty minutes to register that.

[00:27:43.390] – Dr. Rossy
And then I stands for investigate your hunger throughout the meal. So particularly halfway through I ask people to stop. Because sometimes we can start slow and then start speeding up and I'm like OK, stop halfway through, check in with your belly and see are you still hungry? How hungry are you, how satisfied are you with this food? And just do kind of a brief check in to notice what's happening as you're eating and really paying attention and being guided by those satiety signals as when to stop eating.

[00:28:17.860] – Dr. Rossy
And then C stands for chew food thoroughly. I love this one. Chewing is one of the most important things that we do when we eat. And a lot of us just take a couple of bites, gulp it down. Right. And so taking your time and chewing each bite until it's broken down will keep you from having a stomach ache. Number one, because your stomach doesn't have deep. Right? So when you chew thoroughly, your stomach is not going to have to work as hard.

[00:28:45.310] – Dr. Rossy
And I've heard of people really overcoming digestion issues just with this part of the basics. And also when you're chewing food thoroughly, you're sending signals to the brain that you're eating and that you're going to become start feeling full soon. It's great for your teeth health. It's also great and this is, I think my most important point on chewing is that when we chew thoroughly, the food is being partnered with the saliva in the mouth. It's being taken into the body as nutrition.

[00:29:19.210] – Dr. Rossy
Right. And guess what? When the body's been nutritionally fed it. Tells you it's had enough, so that's why when we eat more highly processed foods, the body isn't getting as much nutrition some of the time. And so it's not feeling like it's been fed. And that's why we want more food. If you can eat a whole meal and if you haven't eaten a meal that has any nutrition in it because there's some food that's pretty empty, then the body is probably going to tell you, I'm sorry, I'm still hungry.

[00:29:51.080] – Dr. Rossy
I don't care how much food you put into my my belly, I don't feel like I've been fed in the way that I need to be fed. And so you can begin to feel that. I feel that at family reunions because I eat pretty good. You know, I love to go. I love good food. I love whole food. I love the food that makes me feel good. Right. Which is less processed. It's just how my body reacts to food.

[00:30:18.320] – Dr. Rossy
And when I go to like a family reunion where the food might not be as up to my standards, I can eat a whole plate of food and I'm still hungry. And I notice that I'm hungry. But I'm like, when you ate a whole plate of food, I'm like, I know, but I'm still hungry. So, you know, it's something good to start paying attention to. And the more that you chew, even I get particularly if your food is more processed, make sure you chew it, make sure you chew it thoroughly so you get every little bit out of it that you can so that the body is getting the nourishment and nutrition that it needs.

[00:30:53.750] – Dr. Rossy
And then the last one is my favorite, it's savor. Savor every bite. Savor, you know, savor savor. I love food, I love to eat food and I love. So savoring is a big part of the eating process. I think it's a time that we can have every day, three times a day at least, where we can have a pleasurable experience and enjoy it and see that as an important part of our lives.

[00:31:19.250] – Allan
Absolutely, and the reason I like a lot of those is, is just as you said, the digestive process actually starts before you even put the food in your mouth. So you're talking about the assessing and just sitting there for a moment and knowing what your body needs and then sitting down, looking at it, smelling it. You're you're already digesting that food. You're teaching your body that, OK, we need to start firing off some different enzymes. Some hormones need to get to work.

[00:31:47.240] – Allan
We've got some food coming in. And then just like you said, the chewing and slowing down gives your body the time to react to what you're doing. You get the full nutrition out of that food. And you're absolutely right. When you're getting proper nutrition, you by nature eat less. It's just a magical formula. Our body was built to do it once the nutrition it wants. And if it's not getting it, it will send hunger signals.

[00:32:14.000] – Allan
It will keep you going. And the other side of it is if you're not getting the nutrition you want, then your health is impaired. And if your health is impaired, then your brain is impaired. And if your brain is impaired, then dealing with emotions and feelings and stress and all, becomes that much harder.

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[00:34:44.050] – Allan
You have another acronym and it's not yours, but you borrowed it for this book and it's called RAIN.

[00:34:52.780] – Dr. Rossy
Yes.

[00:34:53.440] – Allan
And so RAIN is a tool that we can use to kind of get an idea between the difference between emotions and feelings and understand what we're doing in our actions. Can you talk a little bit about emotions and feelings and then walk us through the rain process?

[00:35:11.320] – Dr. Rossy
Yeah, so in my book, I talk about the difference between emotions and feelings, so feelings from the Buddhist perspective. Well, OK, so I don't know which aspect of emotions and feelings you wanted me to cover, but and we use those words interchangeably, right? So we were talking about feelings and the Buddhist perspective. And I bring this into my classes a lot, is that things are experienced as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. Right. And so Buddhism breaks it down into those three categories.

[00:35:48.790] – Dr. Rossy
And it teaches us a lot about how we react to experience, because if something's pleasant, we want more of it. If something's unpleasant, we want less of it. And if it's neutral, we tend to fall asleep. Right. And so we can become aware of those patterns. Those are natural, normal patterns, but we don't have to act out on them all the time. Just because something's pleasant doesn't mean that we need to keep, I need more and more and more and more and more, because in that more is going to turn out to be something unpleasant because we've overdone it.

[00:36:19.330] – Dr. Rossy
Right. So what we want to do is just when something is pleasant, we want to enjoy it and let it go. When something is unpleasant, we want to experience it and let it go and when something's neutral. Actually, I think it's important to pay attention to neutral because I kind of see that as contentment. Right. I find a lot of contentment when I'm not being pushed and pulled by pleasant, unpleasant, pleasant, unpleasant or pushed and pulled constantly in this culture with things that are screaming at us to pay attention to them.

[00:36:48.010] – Dr. Rossy
It's like, oh, here I am. The shiny little thing over here, are the vending machine or whatever it is? Come come get me. You know, and we can know that the brain is is wired that way to do that. And with mindfulness we can step back and not be engaged in that constant being pushed and pulled by unpleasant and pleasant all the time, oK. Emotions are natural. Naturally occurring experiences are feelings that come up as a result of experiences.

[00:37:22.450] – Dr. Rossy
Right. So I have emotions that range from sad, mad, glad, angry, happy, confused. I encourage people to become very familiar with lists of emotions so that you become more familiar with what they are, because we don't have a most people don't have a very big vocabulary. We ask them how they are and they're going, fine. Like, well, OK, that's not a feeling. But there are just a lot of feelings that we can begin to explore through the practice of writing.

[00:37:53.740] – Dr. Rossy
In particular, we can explore the ones that are most difficult. Right. So rain is a meditation, but it can also be used just without being in meditation. You can work through the different steps of rain and learn a lot about the emotions that you're experiencing and getting some distance from them. So the R of RAIN stands for recognize. So you want to be able to label the emotion that you're having. Like I said earlier, when you label it, if you can label it, if you can name it and label it, you can tame it.

[00:38:32.090] – Dr. Rossy
OK, and research shows that there's all kinds of processes that go on in the brain that when you accurately label an emotion, there is the amygdala is dampened. The amygdala is the part of the brain that is reacting to emotions. And so you kind of dampen that down. So you're not as reactive. You get a little relief automatically from labeling it. A stands for accept and allow. We don't resist it. We put the welcome mat out for it.

[00:39:03.190] – Dr. Rossy
Oh, sadness. I know that sounds kind of crazy, but, you know, like you invited it and let it come in. Let yourself feel it. Let yourself acknowledge it and say the sadness is here right now, OK? This is what sadness feels like or whatever emotion it is. Allowing instead of resisting what you resist persists. What you allow fades away, and so allowing is also a really important part of the process and one that we're not very skilled at, as a whole.

[00:39:32.410] – Dr. Rossy
And then I stands for investigate. How does the sadness feel in my body? Can you just bring your attention to your body and notice. Well, I'm feeling a little sluggish, a little tired, I don't have much energy and they're all slumped over. And then what thoughts are going through your mind? What stories and beliefs are you telling yourself about the sadness? Because that's what's going to keep the story going. Oh, I have no friends. I'm never going to have any friends.

[00:40:00.460] – Dr. Rossy
You know, my life is never going to go the way I want it to be. Whatever the story is, notice the story and then begin to not buy into it as truth, because thoughts are not facts, they're just thoughts. And you can begin to ask yourself what else is true? Right. Is there some other way of looking at this? How is this impacting me to believe this particular thing? And there's parts of it that may be true.

[00:40:30.910] – Dr. Rossy
Parts of it that may not be true. Begin to kind of just investigate it and tease it apart a little bit instead of just letting it be this thing that has you gripped by, you know, in the clutches. And then once you've investigated fully, then you can move into N which is not identify and nurture. So we don't want to identify with the emotions as who we are. I am not sadness. There is sadness passing through. Right.

[00:40:57.350] – Dr. Rossy
If I can see sadness as something that's just moving through my experience, I'm not always sad. You know, sadness comes and goes. There's moments, I'm happy. Moments I'm sad. And in fact, there can be moments of happiness in the midst of sadness. It's like it's not don't allow it to become this big thing that completely encompasses you and put you into a box and then stepping back from it. You can even see the story as a movie going across the screen.

[00:41:24.730] – Dr. Rossy
I kind of like that analogy, right? It's like, so here's the story. You're watching it like a movie and I can be a witness to it and let it pass through and feel it and let it go and then bring kindness to myself. Right. Because ouch, sadness hurts. Right. And it's not to say that these things aren't going to have an impact because they do. But we can bring kindness to ourselves. I always bring my hands to my heart when I'm talking about this, because it's just this beautiful way of telling your body that you're listening, bringing your hands to your heart and saying, wow, I'm sorry.

[00:41:59.980] – Dr. Rossy
That's really difficult. It's sadness hurt. And what can I do to best take care of you right now? Do you need to go take a hot bath, light a candle, call a friend, journal, meditate, go on a walk, go into nature, take a bike ride, whatever? There's so many things that you could do after you've gone through that whole process to then engage in self care. In mindfulness practice, there's kind of two parts to right effort.

[00:42:31.870] – Dr. Rossy
And the first part is to recognize when something difficult has arisen. Right. And so we acknowledge it, but we don't want to like just like sit in it forever. We then want to cultivate what's skillfull. We want to cultivate what's going to bring joy into our life. We want to cultivate the other things that can balance the sadness, that can balance the difficulties and take care of us when the difficulties arise.

[00:42:57.340] – Allan
Yeah. You know, as I was reading through that section of the book and one of the cool things that you had in the book is at the end of each chapter is the savoring practices that help you kind of put some of this in motion. And I'll tell you, this is not something that's one and done. You're not going to say, OK, I've got this little tool now and now all my problems are going to go away and there's not going to be any more Haagen-Dazs nights for me.

[00:43:19.540] – Allan
That's not how this is going to work. This is going to take some training, some time to make this kind of a natural a more natural approach to what you do. But I would say one of your areas that you got into, I am a little bit more skilled at. And that's movement. Can you talk about how movement can help us with some of the issues we have with emotional eating and bored eating?

[00:43:43.480] – Dr. Rossy
And I love movement. In particular, I love yoga. So I do talk about yoga in the book, but any kind of movement. Right. So everybody can find a kind of movement that feels delicious to them. I would say move your body in ways that feel delicious, because if you hate it, you're probably not going to do it right. So really find some way of moving your body that doesn't injure you. Right. That's not going to injure you and that you can enjoy.

[00:44:15.550] – Dr. Rossy
And maybe there's ways to increase the enjoyment by doing it with friends are you know, there's lots of things that you can do to increase your enjoyment of movement, but it's so important your body wants to move, like if you check in with your body right now, I can guarantee you there's probably some stress. So right now, I would love to reach my arms up over my head and I will OK and take a deep breath. I feel so good.

[00:44:40.680] – Dr. Rossy
And then bring them back down again and just roll my shoulders back. Right. So I'm listening to my body. And I think if you listen to your body and learn how to respond to it, you'll notice that it's like, hey, it wants to get up and move. It wants to go outside and garden or it wants to go on a bike ride. And that try out a lot of things because the body does want to move and you will feel happier and healthy and you'll be healthier if you learn the ways to move your body that's going to be supportive.

[00:45:13.500] – Allan
Yeah, for me, it's always been lifting weights and what I found was, OK, so let's say I'm sitting in the office and my boss calls me and he tells me something I'm really not happy about. And so I'm like, OK, now I'm really stressed out. And so my afternoon workouts coming out and I already had something programed. I'm like, OK, I'm going to be doing these medium weights at a higher rep count. That's what I've been doing for the last six weeks and that's my program.

[00:45:37.860] – Allan
And I'm like, screw it. I'm going to four reps and I'm throwing a whole bunch of weights on that sled. And I'm going to do leg presses that are really heavy because that I knew at the moment that's what that was going to help me get rid of that frustration, anger, stress, all the different things that were running through me. And it would it would just the idea that, OK, I have control of my domain, I have control of this weight.

[00:46:04.860] – Allan
I have so much to be happy about is that I'm strong and I'm healthy. And nothing he says takes that away from me.

[00:46:13.800] – Dr. Rossy
Yes.

[00:46:14.790] – Allan
And so, yeah, movement for me is is really the best stress reducer you can have. And, you know, runners, runners will love because they get out, they get out in a way and they're in their own little world. Running lifters are kind of the same way. I completely turn off. I'm not someone who's going to listen to music while I'm working out. I'm not someone who's going to be having a conversation with someone. When I had a trainer, he knew, OK, we'll have a little conversation before the workout.

[00:46:42.480] – Allan
We'll have a little conversation after the workout. But during the workout, Allan let's just lift it. And then as my total head, even during my rest breaks, all I want to know is how much weight to put on the bar for the next set. And that's it. And so that was my, if you will, moving meditation. And it involves lifting weights. Others will enjoy walking in nature. Others will involve running and maybe running in nature.

[00:47:09.780] – Allan
Others yourself, yoga, Pilates, any movement practice that you enjoy that you know is benefiting you physically. Well, it's also giving you kind of this release,

[00:47:21.670] – Dr. Rossy
yeah, and I like the idea that you do pay attention to your body, because I believe that any time that we bring our attention to our body through movement and become embodied, we're getting out of our heads and we're moving into our body. We live way too much up in our head.

[00:47:38.620] – Dr. Rossy
And so anything to get out of your head, it's a dangerous place up there. OK, we want to move down into the body and just experience the sensations of the body and the breath as you move, as you lift, as you run, as you do whatever and research shows that, If you're doing other things while you move, you don't get as much benefit from it.

[00:48:01.790] – Allan
Yes, I completely agree. I'm all unfocussed, you know what, you made a very, very important statement there. Our head is a dangerous place and it's a true statement. But what is really important about that is the reason it's such a dangerous place is because we really haven't embraced being our own best friend.

[00:48:26.090] – Dr. Rossy
This is true.

[00:48:26.990] – Allan
And you said in the book that you were doing something, said something, and then your husband turned around and says you're not treating yourself like you're a friend.

[00:48:35.060] – Dr. Rossy
Well, he said, don't treat my best friend like that. What he said. And it really stopped me in my tracks because I thought if I'm his best friend, why am I not my best friend? Right. I am going to be with me 24/7 every second of my life until I die. Do I want to be with somebody who's my enemy? Do I want to be with somebody who is bad mouthing me all the time and telling me I'm not good enough and telling me I made all these mistakes and you know, you're not this and you're not bad and you know, oh, my gosh, I can't believe whatever. It's like,

[00:49:11.540] – Dr. Rossy
That's not the kind of friend I want. So it really I mean, not that I hadn't worked on this in the past already, but that particular statement from him was very eye opening. And I really make a concerted effort to be kind to myself, to forgive myself of my foibles and whatever. I am perfect in my imperfection. Right. And I'm standing by that.

[00:49:38.400] – Allan
You know, I think the thing is, is, you know, if you sit down, you really think about these really close friends. And I was interviewing someone. She's going to be on the show coming up soon. And she called it they called it being big friends, not necessarily best friends forever, that kind of thing. But just you had this friend that you share everything with. And that's got to be you, too.

[00:49:58.820] – Allan
But the core of it is this. If you thought about just a really good friend and more than likely, if you've been friends with them for a while, at some point or another, they said something. They did something that upset you. And you're still friends. And you don't sit there every day and say, well, I remember that time they did this and they always do that and they never do this. And they all those words, the words we really shouldn't use, never, always, can't, won't.

[00:50:26.660] – Allan
those things when you break it down, if you just took a moment, well, OK, this is my best friend because. He listens to me. He's my best friend because I know if I'm in trouble, I can always rely on them to look after my best interests and the best interests of my family. And so you look at those characteristics of what you love about your best friends. And then you turn to yourself and you look in the mirror and say, OK, I know you'll always have my best interests at hand.

[00:50:56.440] – Allan
I know you'll always take care of my family. I know you're always going to be there for me and you're always going to listen to me. You don't have a choice. If I want to talk to you, you're going to listen. But if we started using the right words, the way that we would talk to our friends. And those in your movies you talked about, if they were directed by our best friend, they wouldn't go as bad as they might seem to go.

[00:51:22.880] – Allan
So I just really liked the concept of taking that step back and saying, is this how I would treat a friend?

[00:51:30.310] – Dr. Rossy
Right. And when we treat ourselves well, when we have a positive relationship with ourselves, we do other things to take care of ourselves. So who wants to take care of their enemy? You know, it's like if you're treating yourself bad, it's like healthy behavior doesn't come from that. Behavior that's self care. And kindness comes from a kind relationship.

[00:51:56.070] – Allan
Yes, and I think one of the ways you kind of get there is having that honest conversation with yourself and say, OK, what are the words I'm using? What is my inner dialog? How often is it positive? How often is it negative? In some cases, I think that that rain model that you talked about earlier would be a great OK, why did I just call myself an asshole? Why did I do that? You know, why did I do that?

[00:52:22.530] – Allan
And then you say, OK, well, what was the situation? And you recognize it, you allow it and say, OK, well, OK, yeah, I made a mistake. And then you forgive yourself. And then you're in a position to move forward and nurture the relationship and say, OK, I'm not always this way, I don't always do that, I just need to do it less and I need to be kind to myself.

[00:52:43.370] – Allan
And that's what I've learned. And so, again, the emotional part of it and the feelings part of it is hard. But I think being your best friend first is actually a really good way to kind of put that into practice on a day to day basis.

[00:52:58.510] – Dr. Rossy
Absolutely.

[00:53:00.720] – Allan
I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:53:08.940] – Dr. Rossy
Well, so the first thing that I thought about when you posed that question is to connect with your values and a set intentions based on those values. Right. A lot of times we don't stop to consider what we value in life because we're so busy taking care of our to do list, you know, the next urgent thing has to be taken care of. So I'm not thinking about what's really important and what's really important to most people. I would say health is, physical

[00:53:40.740] – Dr. Rossy
Health is probably way up there. I mean, because if you don't have your physical health, you're not going to have anything else. Right. You're not going to be able to do much of anything else like physical health. So I'm going to use that as an example. Probably everybody has physical health in the top five, right? You have family, meaningful career, whatever. Get in touch with that. But let's take physical health, for instance.

[00:54:02.610] – Dr. Rossy
And then you set intentions based on that value that are non-negotiable. Right. So, for instance, doing something physically active every day is a value of mine because I value health. And that's an intention that I've set. I don't have to even think about it. I'm not waiting for my head, my mind to tell me, oh, go put on your walking shoes and go for a walk. I have a schedule in my day. I make it happen.

[00:54:32.130] – Dr. Rossy
Same thing with meditation. My body doesn't want to get out of bed in the morning, but I get my feet on the ground and I get to my meditation cushion and I and I do my meditation because I set the intention and intention, then begins to fuel me to doing the things that I decided I want to do. But you have to decide that ahead of time, because if you wait, you're going to be too tired, you're going to be too busy, you're going to be too whatever.

[00:55:02.220] – Dr. Rossy
And the mind is not exactly our friend when it comes to these kinds of activities. It's going to tell you everything about why you shouldn't. But if you set the intention, you're more likely to get it done. I believe strongly in intentions. OK, so that would be number one. And they can be whatever you want them to be. I think number two would be about movement. I do think physical activity is one of the best things that we can do for our bodies and finding something that on many different levels, it helps to you're not just your physical body, but your emotions and your thoughts.

[00:55:37.350] – Dr. Rossy
Everything is benefited through physical activity. So find what feels delicious and do it. And then lastly, I would really encourage people to relate to food as nourishment and pleasure, but not a fix. I'm going to repeat that, so relate to food as nourishment and pleasure, not a fix. Many of us have thought, I'm going to fix myself somehow with food. I'm going to fix with this diet. I'm going to fix with this food. And it's going to do this for me or that for me.

[00:56:15.320] – Dr. Rossy
And all these superfoods are going to do that. I mean, OK, that's all fine and dandy, but let's relate to it as simple nourishment and pleasure. Food is this amazing substance that we get to enjoy. But we've turned it into a chore. We've turned it into an enemy. Right. And we're very confused about it because of all of these ways that we're using it. Right. So instead of looking outside of yourself, look inside of yourself and listen to your body and what it tells you about what it wants to eat and in general eat in a way that both nourishes your body and you can enjoy and savor.

[00:56:53.480] – Allan
Thank you, Dr. Rossy. If someone would learn more about you, learn more about your book called Savor Every Bite or about the classes that you spoke about earlier, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:57:06.470] – Dr. Rossy
You can go to my Web site at lynnrossy.com and everything is there. I've got meditations. I've got yoga practices that are all free. My Eat For Life classes starting in September and there's still room in the class. So there's information on my website that tells you all about how to register. And I have varying levels of cost, depending on what your how, what your means are in terms of what you can pay for the class. And the book is on there and the book can be found wherever books are sold.

[00:57:40.910] – Allan
Great.

[00:57:41.810] – Allan
Thank you. Well, thank you, Dr. Rossy, for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:57:46.130] – Dr. Rossy
Well, it's been a pleasure to be here and I highly recommend being fit over 40.

[00:57:52.180] – Allan
That's the way to be over 40.

[00:57:53.360] – Dr. Rossy
It is. That's right. Thanks, Allan.


Post Show/Recap

[00:58:01.110] – Allan
Welcome back, Raz.

[00:58:02.570] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, what a fascinating interview. You know, I guess I don't really take the time to realize how much emotion is tied into the way we eat, what we eat, when we eat. There's a lot more to it than I think even most people would think.

[00:58:18.660] – Allan
Yeah. You know, over the years, I've had clients all the way across the spectrum, some that just really didn't like food, to be honest, didn't find foods appealing to texture, a certain taste. And as a result, they had kind of put themselves in a very small nutrient box of just a few foods that they would eat. And just getting them to try new foods was like pulling teeth, you know, but they needed that.

[00:58:45.600] – Allan
They needed the nutrition because they wanted to, you know, get a little bit stronger. They wanted to put on some muscle mass and they just weren't getting the proper nutrition to make that happen. And then I've had other clients that, you know, yeah, they're very emotional eaters, you know, get home in the afternoon and they're in the kitchen opening mail and anything that's within grabbing distance, cookies, cakes, whatever, they're eating. And even though they know they're going to have dinner and another couple hours, you know, they're just bored eating stress, eating all the above.

[00:59:19.560] – Allan
And so, yeah, I've seen it across the board. But, you know, we've tied food to celebrations and we've tied food to being a solution to emotional stress and boredom and anger and sadness and frustration. And so, yeah, I was glad I was able to find Dr. Rossy and talk about her book because, you know, she has the savoring practices in there. And if you're in any way feel like you're emotionally affected and the food kind of one of those bridge things, you know, then it's something worth looking at.

[00:59:58.690] – Rachel
Oh, yeah. You know, you discussed in there a couple of different analogies or acronyms, one of them being the rain acronym about recognizing your emotion and accepting that emotion. And I thought that was really fascinating because, you know, we don't really label the emotion in the way that we could determine how to deal with it. You know, we like the standard cliche, we grab a pint of ice cream after a hard day of work or break up with a significant other or something like that.

[01:00:35.640] – Rachel
But we don't really think, you know, why do we do that? Why do we feel the sadness and suddenly the urge to have ice cream or something to soothe that?

[01:00:46.350] – Allan
Well, one doing the rain protocol is not a walk in the park. It's hard. It is really hard to take the time to have that kind of self-awareness to really to be that objective. So sometimes you might need a little help to do that process. But, yeah, I mean, I've had guests on, you know, in many cases have lost a lot of weight, had gone and done a lot of things like I forgot Rosie, I think was her name.

[01:01:15.810] – Allan
I had Rosie on. And she, you know, she said she was an emotional eater. She was really upset about food, but it made her feel comfortable. And so it was just an escape while she was eating the food, loved her. And, you know, basically where she put her head and she was so embarrassed about so many things and so emotionally tied to food that she was hiding food and she would eat her lunch in the stall in the girls bathroom because she didn't want anyone else to see her eating.

[01:01:50.190] – Allan
And so a lot of people do have these deeper, deeper problems. And that's something that a counselor would be appropriate for. You know, as a coach, I can explain to folks, you know, hey, let's try eating this way. That's try eating that way and see how you do. But most of the time, you know, I don't have any one that I would say I've never had anyone that I would say, OK, you're disordered eater, you know, so no anorexics, no bulimics, nothing like that.

[01:02:20.190] – Allan
But yeah, I very much binge eaters, bored eaters, sad eaters, stress eaters, in a sense, I was one of the stress eater. And then I found yeah. I, you know, when I was traveling and under a lot of stress, my meal choices at dinner were not as good as they probably should have been, you know, and that but that was just a function of, you know, I'm in a hotel, I'm in a bar, I'm in another town.

[01:02:49.020] – Allan
And so, you know, it's nothing just to sit there and say, OK, I want to go up to the bar or a beer, drink the beer, order some food. But my food choices would not have been what I would have eaten if i'd really sat down and thought about what I really need, what my body really needs and giving it the food that would serve it versus, you know, just what looked good because I was in that emotional state.

[01:03:13.510] – Rachel
Sure. Well, that brings up the next point. You guys discussed, mindfulness and asking those questions or thinking about what that meal does that meal really serve? Does it really answer that craving or does it serve you in that moment? You know, some people find it easier to follow a diet, you know, if you want to be vegan. Those are easy rules to follow. Well, essentially. But on the other hand, if you can't follow a certain guideline or a way of eating, then being mindful about what you're choosing to eat might be a better alternative.

[01:03:49.510] – Allan
Yeah, but I would preface it's not it's not really a way of eating because you can screw up any way of eating. You can be a vegan and eat tons of sugar and tons of crap. And you're a vegan and you're overweight or obese as a vegan. So I wouldn't necessarily just classify any way of eating as good or bad because there's still basically the understanding of nutrition and what it's doing for you.

[01:04:21.910] – Allan
You know, nutrition is building blocks for your body. Nutrition is energy for your body and just those two things primarily. Now there should also be enjoyment and that's what Dr. Rossy is really big on, is take the time to actually enjoy your food and taste it, taste every bite, make sure you're tasting everybody and you'll typically eat less because you'll feel full in time and you'll recognize that. And so that's one of her big things. One of the first rules she had out there was to slow down. Just to slow down.

[01:04:53.360] – Allan
But unfortunately, what happens, is people don't really you don't really think that out and you don't plan, so you end up in a situation. So it's like I didn't plan on this happening. And sometimes it's true. I mean, I have a client who got called in for work, for travel, and he wasn't planning on it. And it was an additional two, three days of travel that he wasn't planning on and he didn't have the food with them.

[01:05:23.330] – Allan
He would normally have carried snacks and things like that with him, and he found himself pulled out of his element. There's additional stress on that because it was he was now out of routine and then there was just the not being prepared. And so that's going to happen. But, when you can be prepared, that's really when you want to put it together. So I'm a huge, huge fan of meal planning. And while we didn't talk about that, specifically Dr. Rossy, a meal planning is kind of a way for you to make sure you have healthy meals available to you and meal planning can go all the way to snacks, breakfasts, all of it.

[01:06:03.450] – Allan
When I'm really, really strict on what I'm eating and I want to cut more weight like I was doing when I wanted to do the Tough Mudder, I literally logged all of my food in the morning. I called it pre logging. so I would get on my fitness pal. I'd say, OK, breakfast is three eggs and some ham and that was my breakfast. And I'm like, OK, what is that? I know what that is.

[01:06:23.370] – Allan
And I say, OK, lunch and taking the salad with some tuna. This balsamic vinaigrette I just made and you know, that's my lunch. What is that? And then I would look at what my dinners were. And if it was if I'd done the pre cooking on the weekend, I would have stuff in the freezer. I could pull that out. And what I'd find is sometimes I could actually even have two portions because my macros and my calories and where I was.

[01:06:46.650] – Allan
So as long as I don't go crazy and eat all the nuts I have in my office, then I can actually have two dinners. And sometimes that would be the case, but I would see it all in front of me before I started. Now, does that mean something wouldn't come up and my boss say, I need you to stay late or, you know, friend called and say, hey, I'm really going through a tough time.

[01:07:07.920] – Allan
Can we meet for drinks after work? Of course that stuff can happen, but it doesn't happen nearly as often as you would think. And so if I just had my days planned out, it was really easy for me to just stay the course. And then the other side of it is when you're going to go to a restaurant and you know you're going to go to a restaurant. The menu is online. Almost every single restaurant has their menu online, go online, find their menu and pick out what you're going to eat before you get there, because later in the day, when you're more tired, you're more fatigued, potentially more stress, and you're around other people.

[01:07:46.920] – Allan
Maybe it's easy to sit down and say and then they start calling out specials and it's like, I'll have the special calzones and, you know, all that. Whereas before you knew you were going to have the ribeye, hold the potato and just bring me extra sauteed vegetables and I have a side salad with that. And so lots different kind of vegetables, lots of greens and everything else and meat and it's all wholefood. And I can tell them, you know, if you put anything on the steak, what is it?

[01:08:19.800] – Allan
You know, I want to know what's on it. And then I say, just don't do that. Just cook a steak, you know? And then, you know, to me, it's going to taste great. If you just cook it to medium rare, it's going to taste great and I'm going to love it. So, you know, but if I don't plan that before I get to the restaurant and you get there and they start calling out the specials and someone orders this and someone else, that looks good.

[01:08:44.970] – Allan
That sounds good. Now suddenly you're emotional and making a decision versus rational when you were sitting there looking at the menu right after you eat your lunch and you weren't hungry, OK, I'm not hungry. I just ate my lunch. I feel great. And I look at the menu and I'm like, oh, I think I'm going to have the steak and vegetables tonight.

[01:09:04.530] – Rachel
Yeah, I love that whole idea of planning. I think the best part about it for me would be that you you've made all your decisions for the day, so you're not caught unaware or by surprised by the specials, like you said. But also then you have you can devote your entire attention to the guests, to whoever you're sharing that meal with and not have to worry about what you're eating or how you just ruined your day's calories or something else.

[01:09:32.120] – Rachel
There's a lot of comfort in that thought.

[01:09:34.470] – Allan
And then just know your kryptonite. You know, there's something there that, you know, there's going to be you know, they walk out and then what they've got the little they bring out. I don't know if they do this anymore because of covid, but they'll do it again. I'm sure, they used to bring out carts or tray with all the mock desserts on it, you know. Yeah, you're looking at it and, you know, it's like, wow, that triple fudge chocolate lava cake thing looks.

[01:09:57.050] – Allan
Really, really good. Yeah, you can say no to it because, you know, that's emotional and you know that and you've already looked at what your macro plan was for the day, and if you're more mindful about your food, you're getting more satisfaction out of the food and less need for the junk. You know, because at that point, you know, you're not hungry. And, you know, I had someone else on and I wish I could remember his name, but the basic gist was this is we have hunger and we have urges.

[01:10:32.870] – Allan
Now, hunger doesn't go away. It just gets worse. Urges go away. So if you can keep yourself busy. Urges go away, so if you find yourself hungry for Girl Scout cookies and you know there's a pack in the freezer, you know, those thin mints, then it's like, hmm, I know I don't need to eat those cookies. I think I'm going to go for a short walk.

[01:10:57.130] – Allan
Yeah, yeah. It's perfect to have a plan B. You know, just walk down to the mailbox or go round the block or something and come back or get out your craft project. I like to knit in the wintertime. So, you know, if you have a plan B, if you've got an urge, there's got to be something else around the house you could do or at work or whatever. That's a great idea.

[01:11:19.750] – Allan
And then just looking for those other triggers, the things that happen, you know, like one of my clients, she would get the mail when she came in and she'd go into the kitchen to open the mail. And it was just the everything's around her. And I said, OK, well, if they have cookies and cakes, just tell them why you're on this plan, because most of the time, the people in your household are your why.

[01:11:42.130] – Allan
So you tell them, I want to be here for my grandchildren. I want to be here for you. I don't want to be diabetic and have my foot cut off and you have to push me around in a wheelchair when we go places. I want to be there for you. So I need to do this for me, but I'm doing it for you as much. And so I need you to put the cookies in the cupboard. You know, one cupboard that your cupboard put your stuff in there and, you know, whatever you've got to do, you know, put a little note on there with your why so, you know, in your vision, your commitment.

[01:12:17.340] – Allan
So you walk up that cabinet, and you're looking at that cabinet door and there's your why. Picture of your kids and your husband or whatever, sitting right there on the door. You're less likely to open that door because your wife is staring right at you.

[01:12:33.650] – Rachel
I love that. Yeah, that's nice to have that reminder about how important it is to be as healthy as you can be for your loved ones and for your own future.

[01:12:44.870] – Allan
And then, as I said earlier, if this is something deeper, if this is depression, if this is bulimia or anorexia or something worse, if there's something really going on and these binges are truly out of your control, get professional help. Oh, you know, a lot of people don't think food addiction is a big problem because we're supposed to eat. And and unfortunately, you can have problems with food just as much so with any other thing that can be abused.

[01:13:15.200] – Allan
And this is your health. And if you keep pushing yourself down the line, all the metabolic diseases are going to come your way sooner or later. And if you don't get the coping skills to deal with what you're going through, you're really going to struggle all the time. There's no diet that's going to get you out of this. There's no exercise that's going to get you out of this. There's probably not even a personal trainer, coach, even like myself, that can get you out of this if you're truly having emotional difficulties.

[01:13:45.710] – Allan
Talk to a counselor. I actually saw the other day where there's a therapist you can actually call in therapy now. You don't have to go to a therapist office. They will actually do teleservices.

[01:13:58.340] – Rachel
Wonderful. So wonderful.

[01:14:00.520] – Allan
Help is out there and it's available to you. So if you feel like you're in that type of situation, reach out.

[01:14:06.860] – Rachel
Oh, absolutely. Great advice.

[01:14:09.680] – Allan
All right, Raz. Well, I guess that's a wrap for this week. I'll talk to you next week.

[01:14:13.760] – Rachel
All right. Take care.

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Another episode you may enjoy

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June 28, 2021

The top 10 weight loss myths for people over 40

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Today we discuss the top 10 weight loss myths for people over 40. I've broken these into 3 categories/focus areas: Exercise, Nutrition, and Mindset.

Transcript

Say Hello

Hello and welcome to the 40+ Fitness Podcast. Rachel and I weren't able to get together to do our normal talk around with the show this week, she's traveling back from her ultramarathon. She did complete that. So it's going to be really cool to talk to her next week about how that went and how her recovery is going. So I'm really looking forward to that.

And then my wife was traveling back to the States for a friend's wedding and to see some family. So that kind of left me alone to manage the reconstruction work we're doing on her bed and breakfast. And it's a full time job. I'm not kidding, man. There's just so much going on with all the workers coming in, getting everybody everything they need and getting everything done. Dust everywhere. It's a real mess. Anyway, we're close to being done. I think another week or two and we should have all of the construction work done and we'll be one step closer to my wife having her bed and breakfast, Lula's bed and breakfast here in beautiful Bocas del Toro.

I hope sometime in the future you can come check her out there. It's a beautiful place in a wonderful location in the world and so really excited for her. Now, today, I'm going to be sharing the top 10 weight loss myths for people over 40. And hopefully I'll be shining a light on some of the things that might be holding you back. Mindset, nutrition and exercise, all play roles in weight loss. Unfortunately, most of us will emphasize one of these things and kind of deemphasize the other or not pay attention to the other.

And that usually is our undoing because a lot of times we're actually focused on the one thing that isn't the most effective of those three. So hopefully today I'll get you some information and get you started on doing something great. But I don't want you to stop there. If you're someone who has been stop and start dieting on your weight loss, you lose some weight, you gain some weight. You're on this roller coaster. I want you to ask yourself one question.

Haven't I done this before? It didn't work last time, so why will it work now? So if we keep doing the same things, we're going to get the same results. If you repeat old mistakes, you're not going to get a different result. You're going to get the same result you got last time, ninety-nine point nine percent of the time. I don't want you to do that. It's time to make the changes that will stick. These 10 weight loss myths for people over 40 will give you some guidance, but don't stop there.

If you're serious about weight loss, it's time to do something different, something more. It's time to hire a coach. I'd like to see if the 40+ Fitness 12-week gas program is for you. E-mail me at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com. We can set up a call so I can understand where you are and then we can put together a plan that will work for you. Don't let another day, week, month or year pass with you getting the same

You've always got get off the roller coaster. Email me at allan@40plusfitnesspodcast.com and get the guidance, accountability and support you need to lose the weight for good.

Episode

The top 10 weight loss myths for people over 40. As I went down and I was preparing for today's talk, I went through and I kind of cataloged the different myths into three basic categories, three focus areas, if you will. Exercise, nutrition and mindset. And as I go through each of these focus areas, I'm going to talk a little bit about their effectiveness in helping you with weight loss and why they're important.

And the reality of it is all three are important. If you're missing out on one of these three, you're going to slow your weight loss efforts. So let's get into it. The first category I'm gonna talk about is exercise. Now, that tends to be the one area where most people will put their effort in with regards to weight loss. You asked them why they gained the weight. And nine times out of ten, the answer is, well, I stopped exercising.

And while that probably played a little role in it, it wasn't the only reason why you're putting on weight. The lack of exercise is not a weight gain model. It's not necessary that you're going to have to put on body weight because you stopped exercising. But yes, exercise can be a helper. One of the side effects of exercising is that it can help you lose weight. It won't make you lose weight, but it can help. So exercise does play a role in weight loss. It's just not necessarily the role that a lot of us think.

1 – X is the best exercise for weight loss

The first myth associated with weight loss for exercise and when the exercise category is X is the best exercise for weight loss. And this usually comes out in the form of a question where someone will ask in a forum or they're asking you directly as a trainer, what's the best exercise I can do to lose weight? I hear that question practically every day. What exercise can I do for weight loss?

And the reality is you shouldn't be doing exercise for weight loss. You should be doing exercise to be fit for the things you like to do. If you like running, by all means, run. But if you've listened to the episode I had was with Sal DeStefano, you know that running and in that type of exercise isn't necessarily going to give you the body that you want. Yes, you probably will lose some weight running, but it's not going to give you the things you need.

And yes, lifting weights can make your body burn more calories at rest because you're carrying more muscle. We're over 40, though, so the ability for us to put on a ton of muscle isn't there. We can't put on some muscle and that will help, but it won't make you lose weight. So the best thing I can advise you is find exercises that you enjoy, find exercise that gives you the look and the feel and the ability to do the things you want to do. And do those exercises do them consistently. And yes, one of the side effects of most exercise is it helps in your weight loss journey.

2 – burning more calories will lead to weight loss

The second myth, burning more calories will lead to weight loss. And so this is sort of a corollary to the other myth we just said. Burning calories is great, but our bodies are very, very smart. They're set to balance. And so if we start trying to burn a bunch of extra calories, one of two things is going to happen.

One, we're going to get really, really hungry. Our body is going to say, hey, we need more calories. So it's going to amp up our hunger hormones. And that's not good if you're trying to lose weight. The other thing that can happen is if you're not eating. So maybe you yeah, you are hungry, but you're not eating more, your body will start shutting down systems that you're not using. So your reproductive system, your immune system, those things are going to function poorly.

You're going to notice it, and so burning more calories is not necessarily the answer for weight loss. If you're active, yes you are burning more calories. And a side effect of that can be that you're going to lose some weight, but you shouldn't be working to burn more calories so you can eat more food. That's not the model we want to go with. We want to go with the exercises that give our body what they need.

And we'll talk in nutrition later about how you should be approaching your metabolism and the amount of food you're eating and those types of things. But do exercises that give you the results you want, not weight loss. That'll just be a happy side effect.

3 – X is the best exercise for toning your butt, stomach, arms, etc.

The third one in this also tends to come in the form of a question, but is X is the best exercise for toning a certain part of your body. And so we'll hear someone will say, what is the best exercise I can do to make my waist smaller or my butt toned or my arms more toned?

First off, a toned or toned toning is a marketing term. It actually had no real meaning in the world. Now, most of us will believe what it means is that we do an exercise that means that our muscles are more fit and our arms are smaller, but is smaller. But the reality of it is to get smaller, you have to lose body fat and exercising is not going to do that. Now, if you get your body fat down below a certain threshold, you will begin to be able to see the muscle underneath.

So if you wanted a six pack abs, you're going to have to get your body fat down below 10 percent, which is not easy when we're over 40. When you do that, then, yes, it might make sense for you to do some abdominal exercises for the sake of building a little extra muscle there so that you can see it. You know, you can appreciate the what you've got there and you can make it look better, more full rounded, whatever you're trying to accomplish.

I mean, you know, with the butt it's a perfect example is people will do exercises to enhance their butt, but they're also already at a very low body fat percentage. And that makes it easier for those muscles to show. So there is no best exercise for toning a part of your body. You can't spot reduce. So it's best to just try to overall do your weight loss and try to lose body fat, do your exercises so you look and feel the way you want to.

Once you've lost the weight, then you can modify your resistance training, your running or other things to build the body. Look that you want the esthetic that you want, but you can't do an exercise to make that happen.

Sponsor

This episode of the 40+ Fitness Podcast is sponsored by Reel Paper.

A little over two years ago, my wife and I moved to Bocas del Toro, Panama. It has opened our eyes to many things that you don't get exposed to in the United States. One is how much waste we humans create, and another is how impoverished people often live in unsanitary conditions. Reel Paper is a company that's working on both of these issues. Reel Paper sells toilet paper and paper towels made from 100% bamboo, which grows faster, requires less water, creates more oxygen, a.k.a. less greenhouse gases, and doesn't require replanting after harvesting.

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I often joke that my health and fitness vision is for me to be able to wipe my own butt at 105. If I have any say about it, it'll be Reel Paper on the toilet roll. Go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/reel and use the discount code, 40plus to get 25% off your first order.

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4 – Sweat is fat leaving the body

The fourth myth, and this is also in the weight loss category is sweat is fat leaving the body. I used to believe this one. This was one that was real to me. I would do my cardio and I would take pictures of the sweat on the floor underneath the elliptical machine. And while I got really good at doing the elliptical machine and I would sweat, I wasn't really losing weight.

That's not weight. That's water. And yes, there's water weight. But as soon as I drink a glass of water after I was done, I put that weight right back on. So it really wasn't fat leaving the body. It was me burning extra calories. Fine. But that wasn't fat leaving the body. That was me getting my stamina up, which was helpful, but it was not fat loss. And it's funny because, you know, they used to sell these vinyl suits that the sweat suits that you'd run around into sweat off the weight.

And they have these wraps that you wrap around your waist. And I thought those things were relics of the past, that the Smith maybe had disappeared into the into the ether. But here in Panama the other day, I saw a guy running down the street in one of those vinyl suits, now it's 85 degrees and it's 85 percent humidity. He's already sweating. And now he's got this vinyl suit on and he's running. And I'm thinking to myself, there's, you know, this is not good.

But I didn't stop and tell him he wasn't a client. And I'm not that guy. You know, it's going to come in and tell people how to live their lives. But he looked young and fit. And so I wasn't so worried he was going to have a heat stroke or keel over for another reason. But, you know, it was not a safe way. He was dehydrating his body. He was not really helping his fat loss goals.

That comes from other things. So no sweat is not fat leaving the body. It's just a way that your body cools itself by getting rid of water, put it in the water on the surface of the skin as it then evaporates, it gives a cooling effect. But you're also losing a lot of electrolytes during that period of time and you're dehydrating yourself. So it's not beneficial to sweat more. Don't think that's a win for you. It's good to sweat every day.

It's good to get out and do some things and get yourself moving and work up a sweat. But that's not a weight loss thing. It's just you enjoy getting out, moving around, doing those things. And yeah, you happen to sweat, to cool your body off. So that's the four top myths that I have related to weight loss in the exercise category.

5 – You have to cut carbs to lose weight

We'll move into the nutrition category now. So the fifth myth for weight loss for people over 40 is you have to cut out carbs to lose weight. This is a myth. Do not. Now, I know I probably should pause here and let you catch your breath. What, Allan? You believe in Keto, you follow Keto and it works for you. Yes, absolutely. So you must go low carb. You must think carbs make you fat. And the reality is, no, not all carbs. And I think that's where we lose the discussion because we want to simplify the rule.

And the reality is it's not all carbs. Fiber does not get you fat. Vegetables do not get you fat. In fact, I have never seen anyone who was fat because they ate vegetables. We get fat because we eat sugar. And refined carbs, and it's the refined carbs that are the problem. So if you can move to a more wholefood diet. So if it comes in a box, a bag, a jar or a can avoid it as much as possible. Look on the labels, the primary ingredients for anything you are eating should be food.

You know, if you buy a can of sauce, tomato sauce, the number one ingredient should be tomatoes. They don't need to add sugar. They don't need to add anything else. Just can the sugars. I mean, can the tomatoes and let that be it and you're fine. So, you know, some things in bags like you go to the frozen section and there's some vegetables that have been quick, free, frozen. There's fruits that have been quick frozen.

Those are awesome. Those are great. But sometimes you just look and for one reason or another, they had to add something else. And it's those processed, the highly processed we find carbs that are causing the weight gain. And yes, if you cut refined carbs and sugar, you will lose weight. Almost always. Everyone I've ever worked with, they cut the sugar, they cut the refined carbs, they lose weight. So, no, you don't have to cut carbs to lose weight.

You have to cut refined carbs. You have to start eating whole food. OK, so not all carbs are the same.

6 – Fat makes you fat

The second myth in the nutrition category and our sixth myth overall is fat makes you fat. Now, this comes from the camp of people who are calories in, calories out. And the reason they like to say this is a gram of fat has nine calories, a gram of carbs and an anagram of protein each have four calories.

So basically they're looking at fat and saying the easiest way to cut calories is to cut the fat out of food. Now, there's just one fundamental problem when they cut fat out of food, it tastes horrible. So they add sugar. Yeah, they add sugar and when they add you're going to make it taste better. And when they do that, what do they do? They make you fat. So the low fat stuff that you see, the low fat yogurts, walking through yogurt section, all of them are low fat.

That is very hard to find full fat yogurt these days because everybody wants to lose fat, they want to cut fat. And fat is so important for your body. Your brain is 60 percent fat. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean, it is constructed of fat. Your cells, every cell in your body is manufactured using some fat. So you need fat in your diet. In fact, there are some fats that are called essential fats, essential oils.

These essential fats are fats your body cannot make and you need to have them. So avoiding fat can actually be a problem because you're not giving your body the nutrition it needs to build itself, which kind of takes me to my next thought. OK, our food is our body. Our food is our energy. Our food is everything. If you're eating low quality food, you're making your body out of low quality stuff. And that's not how you want to go through life, if you're wondering why your joints are hurting, you're wondering why you're putting on weight.

It's the food. It's almost always the food. Go for nutritionally dense food, and that's going to be meat, eggs, fish and plants. And that's why I have no problem bringing on vegans and vegetarians, because one of the things that makes their way of eating good or great is it typically involves a lot of whole foods. And the better the quality of your diet, the better the quality of food you're eating, the more nutritionally dense it is, the better it is.

So that doesn't make you fat, fat in combination with refined carbs, makes you fat. So, yes, the fat in the pizza, combined with the refined carbs, makes you overeat the pizza. You're getting too many calories in a short period of time. And it's not nutritionally dense if it has vegetables on it at all, if it has meat on it at all. Those are processed meats. They're very little vegetables. In fact, you almost have to eat an entire pizza to get a serving of vegetables.

And that's not the way to go through life. Yes, occasionally have a piece of pizza, but recognize that it is should not be the staple, it should not be the go to source for nutrition. It's just not there and so it is fat in combination with refined carbs, that's the problem.

7 – Fat burners can help you lose weight

The third nutrition myth, and this will be our seventh overall weight loss myth for people over 40. Is these fat burners. And these ranged from benign to ridiculous to dangerous.

I was talking to a potential client the other day and she said, you know, she had gone low carb and it worked pretty well, but she plateaued. So now she was going to take this product. And I go look at the product. It's a multilevel marketing scheme where people are showing how much weight they've lost with this thing. But here's the trick. All the people photographed are in the multilevel marketing thing. They're all selling this stuff.

So, of course, they want to testimony the great people that are doing this, these people are trying to sell this stuff to. Now, did that product help them lose the weight? I don't know. But they definitely had a before and after picture that they could show you and they could show you that product. I have a before and after picture to show you, too.

Coach Allan - Before and After

You can also find it on the website. I didn't take any fat burners for that weight loss. I ate wholefood, I got nutritionally dense foods, I had gone paleo, I started lowering the carbs, I started pulling out the refined carbs and I got down to a point where I was eating meats and vegetables. And I lost that weight, I didn't need a fat burner to raise my metabolism, and in fact, many of these things have been found to be dangerous.

They can harm your heart. They can do a lot of those things. They get pulled, you know, the things that were approved by the FDA for weight loss, they later on find out cause problems and they get pulled off the market. There's a bunch of cases of different things over the years that have done that. And so rather than trying to ramp up your metabolism by either exercising yourself like crazy or taking one of these crazy fat burners, focus on getting nutritionally dense food, and by nature, you will eat fewer calories because your body's getting the nutrition it needs at a lower calorie level.

And then that's when exercise is beneficial because it kind of pushes this a little faster. So it really is it really does come down to the nutrition being the primary lever that's going to help you lose weight and all these fat burners and all these other things. I even, you know, at one time took that stuff that pulls the fat out of your food and leaves a nice little orange ring in the toilet. Yeah, I did that for a while, not for when I figured it out.

But during all those years when I was doing things wrong and starting and stopping, I was like, oh, well, I'll take this product here. I can buy it in a Wal-Mart. And I take it. And now, yeah, I'm leaving little orange rings in my toilet every time I go to the bathroom. Whereas all I really needed to do was focus on the quality of my food, eat whole food, stay away from the junk and you'll lose the weight.

8 – I'm genetically destined to be fat

So that kind of wraps up nutrition and now we'll jump into the mindset category. Now, this is the area within weight loss that almost always gets neglected, people will jump in and they will immediately say, OK, I'm going to go on this strict diet and I'm going to start exercising every day. And that usually lasts about three weeks. And then they quit. OK. And sometimes it's only because of the stories that they're telling themselves, their actual mindset.

So I have three more myths and they're all going to fall in this mindset category. So myth number eight of the top 10 weight loss myths for people over 40 is I'm genetically destined to be fat. The nice way people will say it is, well, we're a big boned family. You know, what you are is you're used to eating the way the rest of your family eats. And that's why we're all overweight. Family units tend to learn food habits from each other, and those food habits then become a part of our lifestyles.

And we all get fat. And so if your mother and father are fat, yes, you're more likely to be overweight. The reason is not because of genetics. None of us were genetically predisposed to be fat. There are some very rare, very, very rare genetic diseases that do cause people metabolic problems sometimes, yes, your your thyroid isn't functioning the way it needs to or some other things are going on in your body that are causing some of this weight gain.

But overall, the vast majority of people are not genetically flawed to be overweight. What we have, though, is a great system in our body that knows when we have excess of calories, it's good to store that is fat. That's a safety mechanism. So that if we get into a point in time when we don't have access to food, we have this energy store so we can have the energy to keep looking for food, to keep hunting and keep gathering.

So when we were hunters and gatherers, this was a survival mechanism. This was huge. This is really important. In a day where we have abundance of food, we can get it wherever we want. Quite literally, I don't know that I can walk more than 100 feet from where I am right now and not find three or four restaurants that will serve me all the crap I want. I can find three or four grocery stores all within 100 feet of where I'm sitting right now.

And so we have this abundance of food. So we don't ever have to go through those famines unless they're self-induced, so our body doesn't know how to jettison that fat that fast because it's never had to do it. It wants to hold on to it. It genetically wants to hold on to that fat and hormones are going to do what it needs to do to cause our body to stabilize so you can lose some weight and then you're probably going to plateau a bit.

And then it's time to shift and change, to slowly coax your body to understand it's OK to let go of the weight. So you do have to have the mindset that you can do this and that you stick with it, you have the patience to stick with it so that you're giving your body the right signals, the right coaxing to do the right thing. The body is going to fight you because the body needs to hold wants to hold on that fat for safety reasons, just like our blood pressure stays within a given range.

When we're healthy. Our blood stays within a certain range. Our body temperature stays within a certain range. Our body has weight set points that it doesn't want to go below for safety reasons. So we need to coax our body to go ahead and shed some of that fat and we need to stay persistent. And that's all about mindset.

9 – I lack the willpower to keep the weight off

The second one in the mindset cateogry is kind of related to that, so this is the ninth myth, I lacked the willpower to keep the weight off.

And as I mentioned before, you get really excited. You get in there and you do that first three weeks and then something happens to get you off or you plateau or something. And suddenly now it's really, really hard to stick to it. OK, willpower is not the problem. Commitment is the problem. If you didn't really dive deep into your mindset to understand why you're doing this and why it's really important to do it now. Then you're yes, you're never going to have the willpower to say no to the donuts.

I know I didn't. It wasn't till I was sitting there and I said, I have to do this. I don't have another choice. It's now or it's never. And I made the commitment to myself, to my family, to everything that I held dear, that I was going to change. It was a commitment and at that point, willpower didn't matter anymore. Because I had no desire to do anything but what was healthy and good for myself.

And I did. And I got myself where I needed to be. So this is not about willpower. This is about commitment. So I strongly encourage you to just jettison words like willpower, jettison words like resolution or even the word diet, and start looking at more positive ways to view this. I am committed to being different. I'm committed to making a change in my life. And then the other thing is lose some words like can't, I can't do this.

You know, if you can't do it, you won't. But if you're relying on willpower, well, maybe you can't, but if you've got that commitment and you're doing the right things, willpower becomes non-negotiable. It's just there it's not a willpower. My wife even says it to me. She said, I don't believe you have such great willpower. And the reality is, no, I just have a commitment. When I make a commitment, I keep it. And I know you can, too.

10 – I'll be happy when I lose X pounds

The tenth of the top 10 weight loss myths for people over 40 and the final one also in the mindset category is I'll be happy when I lose X pounds. So for some people, it's just five more pounds, not last five pounds. For some people, it's 10, 30, 50, maybe even more than 100. But you're telling yourself you'll be happy when that happens. And the reality is, no, you actually won't be any happier than you are right now.

You might be a little bit excited about the fact that you've done it. You'll have more energy because you're carrying around less weight. But that's not what's going to make you happy. I would encourage you to get happy now to do the things that bring you joy, to spend time with the people that bring you joy. So happiness is something you're working on with independent of the weight loss, but you're working on both. So if you're working to make yourself a happier person, you're going to be happy whether you lose that weight or not, because once you lose the weight, you may feel like you've reached some destination.

But the reality is that's not your reward. Weighing 50 pounds less is not a reward. The things you can do are reward. The things that you have in your life that are bringing you joy is the reward. So I would encourage you to focus on happiness, just like you do any other important thing in your life, set some goals, get some rules, go and get some things going. Build some habits that bring more joy into your life and get rid of some things. It can be a social media, you know, reading the news sometimes just get rid of some things that aren't bringing you joy, that aren't serving you, and you'll be happier.

Then when you lose the weight, you'll be a happier person at a lower weight. Not the other way around.

Summary

To recap, the top 10 weight loss myths for people over 40. In the exercise category, there are four, so number one is X is the best exercise for weight loss. The second myth, burning more calories will lead to weight loss. The third myth, x is the best exercise for toning some part of your body and four sweat is fat leaving the body.

Exercise should not be a part of your weight loss plan. It should just be an add on where you're building fitness, much like we talked about building happiness earlier, build fitness for the things you want to be able to do. Then the exercise will give you more, a lot more. And yes, as a side effect, most people that are active in exercising do see some benefits in the weight loss area, but it's minor and they have to be eating right to make that happen.

Which leads us to the next category, nutrition, and there are three myths in the nutrition category. Number five, you have to cut carbs to lose weight. Number six, fat makes you fat. And then number seven, fat burners will help you lose the weight, the reality of all this is a good nutrition plan, just where you're eating Whole Foods and staying away from the process crap, avoiding things, most things in a box bag, can or jar, knowing what you're putting in your mouth, getting the most nutritionally dense foods you can is going to help you lose weight.

And that might mean cutting carbs for most people it will because you're cutting out the refined carbs. For some people that might be eating less fat, you know, particularly if the fat you're getting is from those refined, high, processed foods. So you might actually end up cutting fat and you might actually end up cutting carbs. That's fine. You're going to find your calorie spot. You're going to be in that spot. You're going to be nourished because you're eating whole foods, you're eating nutritionally dense foods and you're going to feel better.

So those are the three that fit in the nutrition category. Now, we're going to move into the mindset category. And as I mentioned before, this is an area where most people don't spend much time and they should because it's a very, very important aspect to weight loss and more so to keeping the weight off. So number eight in the top 10, weight loss myths for people over 40. I'm genetically destined to be fat. Number nine, I lacked the willpower to keep off the weight, and then number 10, I'll be happy when I lose X pounds.

OK, the reality is mindset and the way you feel about yourself and all those things are things that you should be working on independent of your weight loss goals. Yes, you should want to lose weight if you need to lose weight, but if you think you can't because you're genetically predisposition for something or you think you can't because you just don't, you lack the willpower, the capacity to do it. You won't do it. You've given yourself too many obstacles.

If you have to beat your own genetics, you're not going to if you have to rely on willpower all the time, you're not going to. Commit to change. Whole Foods avoid the process crap, nutritionally dense foods exercise for the things that you enjoy doing, make exercise enjoyable when you're able to do the things you enjoy doing. You can exercise and now you can do those things. You're going to have more joy in your life. You're going to be a happier, healthier person.

So those are the top 10 weight loss myths for people over 40. I hope you take something valuable out of this. If you have some other myths that maybe I didn't cover that you'd like to discuss or at least share with us, come to the Facebook group at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group. It's a wonderful group of people. Share your myths there. I'd love to hear what yours are. If there's some other ones that you'd like to add or you have some questions about these that we talked about today, there'd be a great place for us to dive in a little bit deeper, go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group and join the 40+ Fitness Group today.

Patreons

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– Anne Lynch– Eric More– Leigh Tanner
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Another episode you may enjoy

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Intuitive fasting with Dr. Will Cole

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On episode 484 of the 40+ Fitness Podcast, we welcome back Dr. Will Cole and discuss his new book, Intuitive Fasting.

Transcript

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Let's Say Hello

[00:03:29.260] – Allan
Raz, how are things?

[00:03:30.490] – Rachel
Good. And how are you today?

[00:03:32.530] – Allan
Well, good and bad.

[00:03:34.510]
I was pretty excited spending the time with my family. That's been really cool. And I also wanted to kind of make a short little announcement. I'm launching a challenge and I actually am planning this went ahead because I actually had a challenge and I didn't get a chance to announce it on the podcast because I just decided to do it sort of like on the spot jump on things and just really didn't have time to give preannouncement. But I've got another one in the works.

[00:03:58.570] – Allan
I'm going to be launching a 7-day mindset challenge.

[00:04:01.880] – Rachel
Oh, that's a good one.

[00:04:05.770] – Allan
Over seven days there will be a topic for each day and a little recorded video for each day that you get an email and all that. Go to 40plusfitnesspodcasts.com/challenge, you can sign up for the free 7-day mindset challenge.

[00:04:21.190] – Rachel
Awesome. That sounds fun.

[00:04:23.230] – Allan
So again it's 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/challenge and we've got it there. Now if you missed the functional fitness challenge which was the one I did kind of on the spur of the moment, the reason you didn't hear about it is you're probably not a part of our Facebook group. And that's where a lot of this stuff gets announced, like at the last minute, those types of things. So I would go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group and request to join the 40+ Fitness Group.

[00:04:49.240] – Allan
And that's where it's easier for me to communicate these kind of little one off things that are going on really quickly. So you'll keep up with us. Rachel's on there. I'm on there. We'll answer your questions. We have fun. We have weekly challenges. If I were across something cool, like a 90-year old woman doing deadlifts, I'm going to publish that stuff and we're going to we can talk about it. So it's a really cool place to be.

[00:05:11.110] – Allan
And, you know, my favorite group for sure. But yeah, you can go there, you'll learn about things. 40plusfitnesspodcasts/group if you want to join the group. And then if you want to check out that Mindset Challenge go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/challenge. So that's the good news.

[00:05:28.450] – Allan
The bad news is one of my staff actually has contracted covid and she's the one who works most of the shifts. So, she pulls every shift that she can possibly work and so she pretty much mans the gym. 80%, 90% of the time and my other employees over Panama City, so he's not available. And so what it means is the week that I'm visiting with my family is also a week that I'm pulling complete full day doubles at the gym.

[00:05:57.320] – Rachel
Oh no!

[00:05:57.940] – Allan
Not so much fun, but it is what it is. That is what it is. I'm just right now just hoping that my employee gets through this without any complications. She's young and healthy. So I had the strongest thoughts that she is going to get through this so easily. But it's just kind of one of those things that it's that close. It's right here.

[00:06:20.100] – Allan
Someone that was working in the gym on Saturday is now at home with covid, and she can't come back for a couple of weeks. So she's going to be tough a couple of weeks for me. I'm going to try to go ahead and see if I can't hire someone to come in and work some shifts. We'll see.

[00:06:36.390] – Allan
By the time I get them and get them trained by two weeks will be over.

[00:06:40.380] – Rachel
Right?

[00:06:41.050] – Allan
Yeah. But anyway, it is what it is.

[00:06:43.380] – Allan
But so, yeah. A little bit of sad news on this side, but I am going still going to try to make the most spending time with my daughters while they're here and it is what it is. So, you know, I can't change what I can't change. I will keep charging on.

[00:06:59.160] – Rachel
That's right. Well, I hope your employee feels better soon, and I hope you get to squeeze in some time with your family. It sounds sounds like a tricky balance, but I'm sure you'll figure it out.

[00:07:09.090] – Allan
How are things for you?

[00:07:10.460] – Rachel
Good, good. Just crushing some miles up here. Weather's been great. I did a couple of long runs last weekend testing my fueling and and hydration and feeling pretty good. So things are good. All right.

[00:07:23.970] – Rachel
So you want to go ahead and have that conversation with Dr. Cole?

[00:07:27.030] – Allan
Yes. Let's do this.

Interview

[00:08:04.680] – Allan
Dr. Cole, welcome back to 40+ Fitness.

[00:08:07.440] – Dr. Cole
Thank you so much for having me.

[00:08:09.150] – Allan
This is number three. Lucky number three.

[00:08:12.120] – Dr. Cole
Yeah! My goal is to be the top guest. The most visited guest.

[00:08:21.870] – Allan
I will say I did a thing with Jimmy Moore where I interviewed him one time. He had three books that I wanted to talk about when I was early, early on. It was one interview, but it was broken into three shows. So I think you're ahead of him by now or tied with him for a number of interviews. But he's going to have you beat for shows for a while. So sorry about that.

[00:08:43.980] – Dr. Cole
I'm just kidding. I'm not that competitive.

[00:08:46.350] – Allan
I know. Anyway, your book is called Intuitive Fasting: The Flexible Four-Week Intermittent Fasting Plan to Recharge Your Metabolism and Renew Your Health. And the thing I liked about this was there's so much information out there about fasting now, it's sort of the hot topic, if you will, and as people are looking at ways to get healthy and lose weight, and so they say, okay, have you tried fasting?

[00:09:11.630] – Allan
Have you tried intermittent fasting? Have you tried water fasting? And one guy was promoting air fasting, where you don't even drink water for 24 hours. How, I don't even understand.

[00:09:21.620] – Allan
But fasting is becoming kind of this thing that is out there. And it's a good thing. It's an important thing. It's something that's been a part of our culture forever. But with all the information that is out there, it's really difficult for someone to discern what is a healthy fast and what is just a fad/scary thing like the cleanses and the fast and things like that.

[00:09:48.710] – Allan
You're talking about intuitive fasting. Can you give us just a little bit of what that's about?

[00:09:55.310] – Dr. Cole
The book is as anything that I write the last two books before this. They're just outpourings of my clinical practice. So even right now, I'm in between consulting patients. Ten plus hour days. I started one of the first telehealth functional medicine centers in the world over a decade ago. So that's my main focus. Like, that's the context of where I'm coming from, is I get to see labs and tons of different types of people all around the world get healthy with different tools within the functional medicine toolbox.

[00:10:23.420] – Dr. Cole
So this concept of intuitive fasting is something that I've been really working on with patients for a long time. And it's paradoxical on purpose, right? That's why I called it intuitive fasting, because to the modern Western metabolism, fasting will be anything but intuitive. And it's really a conversation about two things metabolic flexibility, which is physical, physiological infrastructure, if you will, or a foundation for authentic, mindful eating because you're building satiety signaling and blood sugar balance and lowered inflammation levels and proper gut brain axis signaling.

[00:11:00.650] – Dr. Cole
But it's also from a mental, emotional, or even spiritual perspective, what's our relationship with these things? And can we bring a more mindful approach to fasting? Because you have these two worlds, you have this intuitive eating world or mindful eating world on one end, and then you have fasting, which is typically the biohacking in the alpha. The more is better and these extreme sports of wellness, if you will, that I think the fasting community really focuses.

[00:11:33.290] – Dr. Cole
But I think that the context of this is somewhere in the middle, just like what I try to do with Ketotarian, a plant-based keto. How can you make something that works for the average person? How can you really make something sustainable that leverages the amazing benefits of fasting, but in a way that's accessible for people and sustainable for people and it's a healthy approach for people. So those are the conversations that I'm having with intuitive fasting.

[00:11:57.650] – Dr. Cole
It's a mindful approach to intermittent fasting, but it's also building metabolic flexibility so you can have authentic, intuitive fasting and authentic mindful eating, meaning that fasting and eating will be more intuitive as you gain metabolic flexibility. Not because it's some restrictive, obsessive thing. You can just go longer without eating because your blood sugar is more stable, because you have more agency over your health and you can eat food because you enjoy it. Food doesn't control you. Your cravings don't control you. Your insatiable hangriness doesn't control you.

[00:12:33.260] – Dr. Cole
And that's that what but the other aspect of intuitive fasting has, what it's about.

[00:12:38.570] – Allan
Okay, let's dive a little bit deeper into metabolic flexibility. Exactly what does that mean and why is that going to make intuitive fasting easier for us?

[00:12:49.220] – Dr. Cole
So most people in the West are metabolically inflexible or metabolically rigid, so they're stuck in this sugar burning mode, right? And we're all born when we are born. We're all born metabolically flexible. It's our birthright. Babies are producing ketones for proper neurological development and they're burning sugar as well, obviously. And over time, we lose that birthright.

[00:13:13.160] – Dr. Cole
We lose that ability to burn both sugar and fat. And that flexibility is lost. And we are stuck in metabolic rigidity or metabolic inflexibility. Many people have different various degrees of this, but it's some form of insatiable cravings and hungriness and fatigue and weight loss resistance and different inflammatory problems. So that's a hallmark of the modern Western living. Right.

[00:13:40.580] – Dr. Cole
And that's what researchers are really looking at, this epigenetic-genetic mismatch that our genetics haven't changed in ten thousand years. But, yeah, our world has changed very dramatically in a very short period of time. So we're looking at this evolutionary mismatch at the heart of what's driving a lot of these chronic health problems, different inflammatory problems, autoimmune issues.

[00:14:02.900] – Dr. Cole
So those are the people that I talk with 11, 12 hours a day where we can when we start to gain metabolic flexibility again, we start to reclaim our birthright and start to get more in alignment with our genetics and decrease that chasm between genetics and epigenetics. That's when you start feeling great again.

[00:14:22.100] – Dr. Cole
That's when you start regaining energy, when you start feeling like there's a congruency between how you feel on the inside and the body that you live in. And that's what metabolic flexibility is. It's being fat adapted. It's been keto adapted. But as its name implies, metabolic flexibility. It doesn't mean being in ketosis all the time. It's ability to tip, to dip into sugar burning mode when you want to or when you need to.

[00:14:52.850] – Dr. Cole
And that's really another layer of the conversation that I'm having with intuitive fasting. It's the name of the game as far as I'm concerned for most people isn't to be in ketosis all day, every day? But it is to use it as a tool to have the flexibility to burn both. And I think that is part of the context of the conversation that I tried to have with Ketotarian that I just wanted to have in a deeper way with this book beyond just Ketotarian way of eating, but just how to use all these amazing tools and intermittent fasting and the ketogenic diet really two sides of the same coin because they're both supporting beta-hydroxybutyrate. There's two different ways to produce this amazing signaling molecule to lower inflammation and improve brain function and become a fat burner if we need to.

[00:15:37.580] – Dr. Cole
But it's something that I get so excited about clinically that I wanted to share with everybody else.

[00:15:43.100] – Allan
I know for me, I do something I call seasonal ketosis. So I have a season where I go into ketosis and I have a season that I come out of ketosis. And that used to have a lot to do with college football season and then Christmas, Thanksgiving and my birthday. So I just OK, from August, the end of August until the middle of February, I get to get past the Super Bowl. I'll not worry about ketosis.

[00:16:06.530] – Allan
I still generally eat the same foods. So I just want to throw a beer in there, here and there. Someone's offering me something pretty cool at a tailgate. I'm not I'm a chow down on it. And I had that metabolic flexibility. So I know that's one benefit that you get from being flexible. But as far as intuitive fasting goes, what are some of the benefits that we could expect to get by incorporating something like this into our lives?

[00:16:31.790] – Dr. Cole
So both a ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting, as I mentioned, they both support beta-hydroxybutyrate, which for people that aren't maybe fully aware, it's known as the fourth macronutrient in the research area of protein, fats, carbs and ketone bodies. So they both support this fourth macronutrient. And that's why when you look at the research of the ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting, you'll see a lot of the similar pathways because they're both supporting ketogenic diet as fasting, mimicking in many ways, it's mimicking the state of fasting and then fasting, obviously fasting.

[00:17:07.370] – Dr. Cole
So I'm pairing both of those with an intuitive fasting I'm pairing as a therapeutic tool, Ketotarian, which is a clean, sort of Mediterranean ketogenic way of eating, pairing that with it flexible intermittent fasting. So when talking about intuitive fasting, I put together a four week protocol in the book that is used as a way to gain metabolic flexibility.

[00:17:33.720] – Dr. Cole
So some people may scoff at that, like he's talking about intuitive fasting and he's giving us a protocol. But the goal of it is actually to train your body, to become more flexible and to learn about your body, too. The analogy that I use in the book is this proverbial yoga class for your metabolism, if someone's inflexible, meaning their hamstrings are tight, their musculoskeletal systems inflexible, they go to yoga class and they are going to think yoga is completely unnatural. Yoga is not for them. There's something wrong with this. It's not yoga's fault. It's the person's inflexibility. Most people's metabolisms aren't flexible. So by using this flexible fasting plan in the book or gaining metabolic flexibility just like yoga classes improves musculoskeletal flexibility.

[00:18:25.920] – Dr. Cole
And we're vacillating. It's ebbing and flowing. It's not doing the same thing. Each week is a different intermittent fasting window to start to train the metabolism, train the mitochondria, train the body itself to become more flexible.

[00:18:43.620] – Dr. Cole
What I also wanted to integrate into the book is the fact that fasting can be a medicine right therapeutic tool to support this fourth macronutrients become more metabolically flexible. But we're also using fasting as a meditation, too. So how can we learn more about our body?

[00:19:05.610] – Dr. Cole
How can we learn more introspectively on our relationship with our bodies, our relationship with food and how we use food in our life and growing that mindfulness muscle when it comes to food and fasting?

[00:19:18.690] – Dr. Cole
Because in my clinical experience, when you gain physiological metabolic flexibility, but you pair that with the mental, emotional, spiritual mindfulness of using food and fasting as a mindfulness tool. Those are all the ingredients of what you need for what I call in the book food peace, the sort of inner stillness on what serves you and what doesn't serve you.

[00:19:43.020] – Dr. Cole
And you have this agency over your body and agency over food and not in a controlling way, not in a restrictive, obsessive way, but in a very resolute knowing way. This food makes me feel great. I want to have that. I can go longer without eating because it makes me feel great and I'm more metabolically flexible. And I know what foods don't make me feel good. I know what things don't make me feel good to have the discernment to see that, too.

[00:20:08.190] – Dr. Cole
And food, you're not bound by that next craving and insatiable hungriness. And I think that's really the goal of this, is having that food peace, having that inner stillness that I think most people want because most people feel out of control. Their bodies feel out of control when it comes their relationship with food. There's so much inflammation and things going on in people's bodies that they physiologically are out of control, actually.

[00:20:31.800] – Dr. Cole
And all of that stuff is proverbial noise on a physiological level. That way, when we start calming that noise, you can have that that inner discernment on what your body needs and having that intuition when it comes to food.

[00:20:48.120] – Allan
Yeah, the way I kind of experienced it was that one one. It gives you just an intense freedom. You're working eleven hour days and if something comes up and you can't eat your lunch when you thought you were going to be eating your lunch because you're metabolically flexible, you just say, fine, I'll eat during my next break, which is two hours away. And that won't upset you, though, emotionally affect you. You'll be able to do that.

[00:21:13.290] – Allan
And then the other thing that I gain out of fasting when I do it is that it actually kind of, like you said, clears up the noise. So I actually can go back and remember what actually being hungry feels like. And I can actually be in that moment and say, okay, yeah, this is this is not me wanting a Snickers bar. This is me legitimately needing nutrition for my body. And then I can honor that and have a good meal and then I can actually because there's no noise, listen to what my body is telling me about that meal. And and actually response. So I was like, yeah, instead of running on get the Snickers bar and know I'm going to feel like crap. Two hours later when I go on the sugar crash. Now I'm going to go have something more wholesome, something better for me. And then two hours later, I'm not actually even necessarily thinking about that meal anymore because I feel great.

[00:22:07.710] – Allan
And but you've kind of cleared up that noise and you have the freedom to decide, okay I'm not going to go for what's convenient and eat that Snicker bar. I'm going to go ahead wait the two hours. And I'll be fine.

[00:22:22.350] – Dr. Cole
Yeah, well said, and I think that when you start feeling so great and you start having that agency over your body and over your health in a healthy way, it's really cool to see that when you create a firm foundation and a center and you centered yourself physiologically and mentally, emotionally as well, you can pivot from that space, but you have that awareness of what your center is. And it's really cool to see.

[00:22:47.070] – Dr. Cole
Whereas maybe you maybe people, you know, have something that they know something won't make them feel great, but they will even then most for most people and they have that center, they'll be able to go there and know I can I won't have as much of this room because I love feeling great more than I think I missed something that didn't make me feel good and that can go back there.

[00:23:08.700] – Dr. Cole
Or most of the time they actually won't go towards those other things, not because it's restrictive and that they can't have it. They know they can have whatever they want, but they just love feeling great more than they miss something or they thought they missed something that didn't. That's a complete paradigm shift. So it's not about this list of do's and don'ts. It's complete free will, but it's a bad tradeoff to go towards something that makes you feel really lousy.

[00:23:32.520] – Allan
I agree.

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[00:25:19.010] – Allan
Now, one of the things I think that will turn some people off about fasting is they're like, well, I'm on this exercise program or I'm training for this this 5K and I need I need that Guu. I need that that stuff. Can you talk a little bit about exercising during intuitive fasting?

[00:25:39.510] – Dr. Cole
Sure. So I talk about this at length in the book because that's a common question. So we all come in at this point of trying a tool like this at different points of our health journey. We all have different levels of metabolic inflexibility or metabolic rigidity. And it's one of the reasons why I started the book out with a quiz. And the quiz is adapted from questions that I asked patients. And I wanted people to kind of get a subjective metric for them to see more or less like how is their metabolic flexibility.

[00:26:11.090] – Dr. Cole
So if someone is severely or significantly metabolically inflexible they may want to take it easier at the start, right? And not work out as much whenever they're learning their bodies, learning to burn fat for fuel and their bodies being trained to be more become more flexible. Now, keep in mind, the specific subset of intermittent fasting that I'm exploring with. And intuitive fasting is not caloric restriction. It's time compressed feeding or time restricted feeding. You're getting all the calories that you need just in specific windows.

[00:26:48.490] – Dr. Cole
So from most of these lighter to moderate, flexible, intermittent fasting windows, it's actually not that difficult to work out. Week three in the protocol could be probably be the one that people have to make a personal decision on, that some people still will be fine. It's an almost OMAD week in week three. But it's nonconsecutive, so meaning you're doing it every other day, not every day. And OMAD is an acronym that stands for One Meal A Day. But it's almost-OMAD because I reference some studies in there, but basically making it a little bit more flexible to give you more windows to eat and not trying to get all your calories in in a one hour window, which is the more traditional OMAD, 23 to 1 fasting/eating window.

[00:27:31.870] – Dr. Cole
So an almost-OMAD approach is a little bit more flexible. So you could work out within that two to four hour window if you wanted to not be doing a Farstad workout. But regardless, that's the deepest fast that's there. So I'm not doing any multiple day long fast, which is a bit of a different thing.

[00:27:47.920] – Dr. Cole
I think one of the reasons why this type of intermittent fasting that I'm exploring in the book is so accessible is because people can live their lives. They don't have to make an overhaul of everything in their life or feel like they can't live and engage with activities like exercise. They can still do it. It may take some planning and it may take some leaning in at the beginning. I go into detail in the book, but my basic advice is if you have a certain level of activity level that you're used to still do it, you don't have to stop doing that. But I wouldn't start cross fit and intermittent fasting at the same time either.

[00:28:26.194] – Allan
New Year's resolution happening right here.

[00:28:32.020] – Dr. Cole
So many people, right? With the best of intentions. But it's not that you can't do that either, but like become a little bit more, not a master at it. But just at least you are used to doing this and then lean into it. Because we want these to be sustainable changes. This should not be a fad crash thing. I love that people get excited for this stuff. I don't want to rain on the parade, but we want this to be sustainable and ultimately to what's the paradigm shift here, right? It's about how could I love my body enough to do things that make me feel great.

[00:29:07.060] – Dr. Cole
And sometimes it's not excitement that's fueling someone to do all the things at once. And more is better. It's actually shame and obsession that they think, I just feel so low about myself that I manage to do everything. And I would rather someone start one thing than lean into it so it can be sustainable because as I talked about so much throughout the book and with my patients is you can't heal a body you hate. You can't obsess your way into health. So start the cross fit maybe a little bit later and just start the intermittent fasting and the food for now.

[00:29:40.450] – Allan
One of the cool things about your program that I really like is, as you say, you might be into week two and you're looking at week three and saying I don't know that I'm ready. I'm not feeling the energy. I'm not where I'm supposed to be. You just repeat week two. Kind of get yourself based. And once you feel like, Okay, I've mastered this level, if you will, then then I can go in attack week three and now you leave this program with kind of a tool chest to say I felt the best during week three and so I'm just going to do that or I felt the best during week four.

[00:30:13.150] – Allan
And so I'm just going to keep doing that. Or I just know that I have this tool chest of a four week program that I can dust the book off in three months and run through it again. And see where I am. I like that it's flexible. I like that it's something that's accessible and you really do a good job, in my opinion, of walking them week by week to get them to a point where they've learned those tools, learn those skills and as you said, kind of reconnected with who they are.

[00:30:43.310] – Dr. Cole
Thank you for recognizing that. I agree. It's like you're learning about your body because you've sampled all these different ways of fasting. So you will know. And that's bio-individuality. That's what I'm talking about with authentic, intuitive fasting, is you'll be able to evolve the protocol to suit you because we are all different. But on the other note, like, it doesn't have to be four weeks. I mentioned in the book, like if you want to repeat week two for two weeks, make it a five week protocol. That's OK. And these are all therapies and tools.

[00:31:12.320] – Dr. Cole
And sometimes people need to rest in a certain phase a little bit longer. It should be partially self-paced as long as you're progressing, even if it's incremental progression for any wellness tool. This is a good principle is that as long as you're progressing, even if it's incremental, sometimes it's okay to rest in one area and not feel like you need to lean into it too fast, too soon. Because that can make you feel like, oh, this is a fit, you're a failure at it and it's not. You just rushede through something or your body wasn't ready for it yet.

[00:31:43.260] – Allan
Dr. Cole, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:31:52.460] – Dr. Cole
Number one, it's I think that kind of in my earlier statement, I think that I know it's a little bit more abstract and ethereal, but I really think it's important with this conversation about wellness when you're talking about food as nutrition and fasting as a tool for to heal the body, is that we have to realize why we're doing these things. It's not a way to punish yourself. It's a way to shame yourself into wellness.

[00:32:18.170] – Dr. Cole
It's a way to I love feeling great so much, I value and respect my health so much in my body, so much that I want to be good steward to that and do things that make me feel good to have that paradigm shift, because avoiding foods that make you feel like crap isn't restriction. It's self respect. I think that that's a core like genesis of sustainable wellness.

[00:32:43.800] – Dr. Cole
Number two, I would say experiment with intermittent fasting. One of the blurbs of the book is. It's from Alejandro Younger, who is a cardiologist, brilliant friend and mentor of mine. I'll paraphrase what he said, but I thought it was an eloquent way of summarizing my thoughts on this is that, like, our world is in desperate need of a pause.

[00:33:05.100] – Dr. Cole
And I think that we're always like more, more and more like do this even healthy things like more is always better and take more supplements, do more of this, do more of that. And it's all the consumerism, too, and all that stuff. And I think that on many levels and a macro and micro level, I think that the world needs a little bit of stillness and introspection and simplicity and paring down.

[00:33:31.830] – Dr. Cole
We were talking about this before we started recording, just even like on a like moving to something simpler and living a simpler life. I think that that fasting is that on a physiological level, too. How do we create just some stillness and simplicity in our life to allow our body to actually do things that will naturally do if we give it the chance to do so? So I think that that's another way to support wellness.

[00:33:54.810] – Dr. Cole
And three, I think foods that will be nourishing and are really nutrient dense, and that's what I tried to really advocate for, an intuitive fasting is not try to fast your way out of a poor diet. This should not be this disordered eating disguised as a wellness practice. I really want people to use food as medicine and use fasting as a medicine tool, a therapeutic tool, and they should go together. There are two sides of the same coin.

[00:34:22.790] – Dr. Cole
And then I would say this, too, like I'm more than three, but that many people have really impaired GI issues and they have underlying gut problems on the spectrum, this larger spectrum of these problems. And I would say focus on soups and stews, cooked foods. In the book I call them Break the Fast Meals, where they're just gentle on the gut, good transition meals out of the fast. But honestly, those break the fast meal sections I think could be way more. They could be used way more than just as a transition out of a deeper fast. They can just be used as just nourishing, gentle on the gut foods that I think would benefit most of society today, because I see it rampant as these underlying GI issues that are that's driving inflammation levels systemically, these these gut centric components to inflammation.

[00:35:14.870] – Allan
Thank you for that. I want to take one step back and I want to paraphrase what you said, because it's brilliant. I'm going to go back and listen to it again and probably write it down. And it was the moving away from foods that are not good for you is not restriction it's self self-respect. I love that. Thank you.

[00:35:33.380] – Dr. Cole
It is a paradigm shift because people are like, oh my gosh, I can't have that. No, you can have whatever you want. But do you love feeling better or do you like that food that doesn't. Like that's the freewill that I want people to have. I always say and I don't want to pick on Starbucks, right? Because I go to Starbucks. I have no problem with it. But you go in Starbucks and I had a patient tell me years ago they were like, how do you look at all the pastries and stuff in the glass thing and and not go for that stuff. And to me, I had to be like I knew that there were desserts in that, but I honestly couldn't even tell you what's in there. There's not even a thing that I even look at because it's why would I want to go for something that's not going to make me feel great?

[00:36:17.840] – Dr. Cole
And that's what I want people to get to that place of consciousness and awareness for themselves. It's not like you can't have it. It's just like that's really not going to make me feel good. Why would I want to go to something that's not in alignment with how I want to feel?

[00:36:30.620] – Allan
Yeah, it's like when you're walking through the grocery store and you walk down the aisle and you see cans and bags and they would have food in them and they're colorful labels and they say healthy. And they say all the words that our food says grass-fed beef all the things that we would want in our food. But we don't see it as food because we know it's not food. And that's kind of how I look at when I go into Starbucks and I'm looking at the pastries, I'm like, okay, that's not that's not food, in my head because I don't even equate it as food anymore. So I think that's where I'm coming from.

[00:36:59.750] – Allan
Dr. Cole, if someone wanted to learn more about you, more about the book Intuitive Fasting, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:37:06.890] – Dr. Cole
They would go to drwillcole.com. On Instagram at Dr. Will Cole, all the places that people go on social media. But yeah, there's the links to the books, the tele-health clinic there. Everything's at drwillcole.com.

[00:37:23.060] – Allan
Cool. You can also go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/484 and I'll be sure to have the link there. Dr. Cole, thank you so much again for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:37:33.680] – Dr. Cole
Thank you, my friend.


Post Show/Recap

[00:37:39.380] – Allan
Raz, welcome back.

[00:37:40.880] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, that was a really interesting interview, I am interested in the fasting that he was talking about and and how that helps. Fasting is a really hot topic these days, too, and sometimes it's hard to sort out the fact and fiction around fasting. So that was a really interesting interview.

[00:38:03.410] – Allan
I think the core of it with fasting is we've got to get past this this belief system that we have to eat every waking moment. We are not cows out in the field. We were we were not meant to graze. We were meant to hunt and and gather and feast and then stop eating. That was our natural course of things. And now that there's convenience stores and fast food restaurants and a freezer full of food, a refrigerator full of food and a cabinet full of food, some of which is not actually really food is available. That nutrition, calories are just so readily available to quite literally I bet you can. You're right now probably within, I'd say, 18 steps of all the foods your body would need for a month.

[00:38:56.030] – Allan
And that's never existed in the history of man. And so having these intentional fasts. And teaching your body what it actually feels like to be hungry. Mm hmm. And what it feels like when you're doing okay. You know, that's you just you need to get used to that. That's something. Being hungry is a normal state, you know, and we just don't. We don't. And so that's one of the cool things about kind of going through something like this intuitive fasting program.

[00:39:26.810] – Allan
It's a four week intermittent fasting is that he pushes those buttons and he gets you to try a new thing. And some of it will work very well for you. Some of it might not. But you can find where you belong on that spectrum of eating all the time versus not eating often at all. Whether it's you go all the way to OMAD or you're having two meals a day. We talked with Brad Kernes not long ago about two meals a day or just some other eating strategy.

[00:39:58.610] – Allan
These are these are strategies that you can try that will improve your health, potentially help you lose weight. And there's just a lot of other health benefits to doing this just and just getting in touch with your body, being a lot more mindful about the food that you do put in your body. So you just don't say I'm starving. So I'm going to go ahead and pull into the McDonald's while I'm starving. They tell you not to go grocery shopping when you're hungry. Don't go to McDonald's when you're hungry either.

[00:40:28.790] – Rachel
Good point! Yeah. I'm Keto, like I've mentioned before on your podcast. And so when I get up in the morning, I'm rarely hungry. I don't feel hunger. And so I work out fasted and when I get home from a run, I might feel a twinge of hunger, but usually I'm more thirsty than hungry. So I usually will wait until about noon, maybe even one before I eat anything.

[00:41:00.020] – Rachel
And that's just kind of been my M.O. But sometimes I have the old habits come back where I'm like, I've got to go run an errand at ten or eleven. I better eat something before I leave, you know, it's like it's that old habit. I really should have breakfast, I really should have lunch. It's that time of day maybe. You know, I don't know what it is always. But sometimes I get that that old habit will come back like I need to eat something before I go run my errands. It's kind of a weird thing.

[00:41:31.230] – Allan
It may not entirely be habit, and it's just something listening. Like I said, once you get comfortable listening to your body, it can be one of those things of saying, well, what you don't want to be is you don't want to be in a hunger state making decisions. And so if you're out and about doing your errands and you're really hungry, what food choices are you going to have available to you?

[00:41:54.380] – Allan
And if you know that, you're just not going to or let's say, your work schedule and you really only get at a lunch hour and you really don't get breaks beyond that, despite what the regulations require. But let's just say you just get your lunch break. You need to eat during your lunch. If you know that you're not going to be able to make it to dinner, skipping that lunch, you need to go ahead and eat your lunch.

[00:42:16.040] – Allan
You may not be entirely hungry, but if you don't have another option in your schedule bound, then then eat. There's nothing wrong with that. That's one of the the cool things about getting comfortable with fasting is you can figure out where your hunger is. You can figure out what your limits are. I'm not a huge fan of the extended fast that run more than twenty-four hours. And predominantly, if you're going to do something like that, you need to be working with a health care professional that understands fasting because it's a very different animal.

[00:42:50.870] – Allan
But when you start getting to those extended fasts and some people will get into them and fast for days and weeks and I know I know I couldn't do that entirely. I probably. I could physically do it. I've got enough, you know, got enough energy mass around my my body that I would not run out of energy, but it would just be one of those things are saying, at some point my body's probably going to tell me, okay, now you're being stupid.

[00:43:19.850] – Allan
So I am metabolically flexible in a sense, you know, in that I can kind of go back and forth. And if I'm really working hard, I can eat a lot of carbs if I want to. But at the same time, I choose not to most of the time because, I don't always want to be go, go, go, go, go to burn off those extra carbs. But you can. If you're an endurance athlete, you probably could come back off that run and handle carbs, not just the leafy green carbs, but the carbs, because you you've burned through glycogen in your muscles ad your liver and what insulin is going to do when it does spike, because it still will spike when you eat that, you know, that high carb food, it's going to put it where it needs to be first and it needs to be in your liver and it needs to be in your muscle.

[00:44:14.220] – Allan
Now, if you're not active or you eat more than your activity level earns you, then, yeah, the next place for it is fat. We filled up the muscles, filled up the liver. Not here we go, it's fat. And so if you do that consistently over time, you will put on some body fat. But putting on a little fat during a day. This is not a tremendous problem for most of us. In fact, we want we want that capacity to to be able to store low fat when we need to and to pull a little fat off. So it's just really about finding the balance. And that's why I'm not someone who's going to eat keto all the time.

[00:44:53.760] – Allan
I feel fine when I'm in keto, but I also feel fine eating carbs. As long as I don't go completely berserk and do go completely berserk for months. That's that's just me. And everybody's going to be a little different.

[00:45:11.520] – Rachel
Yeah, it is. Dr. Cole mentioned bio-individuality. And we are so very different with the types of food and quantities of food that we can consume. I mean, we are very different, metabolically speaking.

[00:45:28.790] – Allan
Oh, yeah. There was a there was a study in Israel, what they did was they basically put those glucose monitors, those those constant ones, you know, the ones that constantly and they're just on them. We want you to log everything you put in your mouth, including the time that you do it.

[00:45:48.690] – Rachel
Wow!

[00:45:49.140] – Allan
So people would eat a banana. They pull the data and they say everybody that logged that they ate a banana, what was their glucose response? They were looking at the foods and one of the ways that we like to talk about foods is we'll talk about glycemic index and we'll talk about glycemic load. And so they were looking at those relationships to glycemic index and glycemic load and they were looking at people's response.

[00:46:17.540] – Allan
And what they found was all over the charts. People who were eating the banana. Some of them, their blood sugar shot up way up, and some of them, the blood sugar barely peaked at all. They they just they came to realize that we all have an individual response to food. You see it in a lot of other places where someone sensitive to gluten, they may not be a celiac, but they are still sensitive to gluten. And there's other people who are sensitive to milk because they have a lactose intolerance. So we all have these little unique caveats. And as I mentioned before, as we go through this, you need to be doing an experiment of one, you try a food and that's why I am a big fan of things like this, like fasting.

[00:47:07.480] – Allan
But I'm also a big fan of doing these elimination diets. And so one of Dr. Cole's other books is Eliminate, I think it's called eliminate (Inflammation Spectrum). But basically it's an elimination-style diet. And he has eight foods that you eliminate for eight weeks. And it's just basically an opportunity for you to learn how your body reacts to food when you reintroduce it. So you take it away and see if you feel better, which most people do when you're just eating meat and vegetables.

[00:47:42.400] – Allan
So real food, that's what it does. Elimination diets just they take you back to the essence of what we're supposed to eat, real food, meat and vegetables. Get back to meat and vegetables. Nobody got fat eating meat and vegetables. If you're overweight, you didn't get there eating meat and vegetables.

[00:48:00.520] – Rachel
Yeah, good point.

[00:48:01.520] – Allan
So you get down to that point, you start losing weight, the inflammation starts going down, you start feeling a lot better. And then maybe you can add back in the legumes, maybe you can add back in the dairy and see how that how that affects you. And so those elimination diets. And then he has Intuitive Fasting. I wouldn't try to do both at the same time, but doing an experiment like that is going to teach you a lot about how your body responds to food.

[00:48:28.480] – Allan
Everybody I've ever interviewed, whether they are vegan or carnivore or raw paleo or whatever, it all comes down to the quality of your food and it being real food. Those two those two factors, they'll say ours is better because people are eating more vegetables. Can't someone who's keto eat more vegetables. Yeah, they could.

[00:48:50.370] – Allan
It's like that's not what they do. They eat bacon. They eat all this other stuff. I'm like, not all of us. Not all of us make bacon a staple of every meal as a part of going keto. Some of us actually just have real food as a part of going keto and you know, so to break it all down, if you're eating real food, intuitive fasting can be a really good way for you to manage your food, to manage your health.

[00:49:17.140] – Rachel
Yeah, that sounds really interesting. Sounds like a really great book.

[00:49:21.850] – Allan
It was and it was kind of interesting because, you know, I just interviewed Dr. Cole not not really even I think a year ago. And it was like already have another book out. And it's like, well, it's one of the advantages of covid.

[00:49:34.120] – Allan
He's like, I wasn't seeing anybody on the weekends that we weren't doing anything. And he's like, so on the weekends I sat down and wrote a book and I'm like, I got it. Yeah. If I hadthat that kind of spare time and I actually thought to use it that way, I could have probably written a book, too. I didn't but he did.

[00:49:53.410] – Allan
And I say this very good book, Dr. Cole is really, really smart. He you know, he practices what he preaches and so he uses this with his patients. These are things that strategies that are not just founded in science because they are it's also stuff that he's doing with his patients and seeing great results. So, yeah, that's that's the other side of this is this is not pie in the sky. I looked up a couple studies that confirm what I think, and that's what I'm writing about. This is someone who actually practices medicine with people, getting them healthy, using food as a primary source of that. And yeah, his books are really good.

[00:50:35.050] – Rachel
Awesome. Well, it's nice to see this put into practice and real results coming out of it. That's pretty awesome.

[00:50:40.960] – Allan
All right. Well, Rachel, I guess we'll go ahead and give it a go and I'll talk to you next week.

[00:50:45.590] – Rachel
All right. Take care.

[00:50:46.900] – Allan
OK, bye.

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Another episode you may enjoy

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How we really burn calories and lose weight with Dr. Herman Pontzer

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We have always thought that the more active we are the more calories we burn each day. Dr. Pontzer has discovered that that is not the case. We discuss how we really burn calories and lose weight and more as we go through his book, Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy.

Transcript

Let's Say Hello

[00:02:09.900] – Allan
Raz, how are you?

[00:02:11.220] – Rachel
Great. Allan, how are you today?

[00:02:13.290] – Allan
I'm doing ok, I'm doing okay. I went out for a good long walk this morning and I think my electrolytes are a little low so I'm going to have to start working on that and make sure that I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. And so I think in a few minutes here, when we get off this call, I'm going to fix myself some of that Ucan Hydrate, their electrolyte product. And I might do a little Facebook video, a little video of that so people can see what it is.

[00:02:48.480] – Allan
I forget the flavor I have in my pocket right now, but yeah, I think I'm going to do that because I just feel like my electrolytes are low. So my energy might be a little low today. And I apologize if that's the case. But…

[00:03:00.510] – Rachel
Nice. I like Ucan. It's a really tasty product. Is that too sugary sweets and flavor. And it sits well in my stomach too.

[00:03:09.630] – Allan
Well it actually has no sugar in it. That's the other side of their hydrate product. And even their other products. It's a super starch. The energy. It's a super starch. So it doesn't spike the blood sugar. And it's not a lot of calories either. That's side of it. You know, the standard you can powder was like eighty calories. But it's enough that it kind of feels like it is, you feel that energy going into a workout and then with the electrolytes, it's just a good tasting flavor.

[00:03:39.090] – Allan
I love the lemon lime. I think I've got a different flavor here today. But anyway, it's. Yeah. So it's real good. It just gives me what I need. Really easy. Just put it in my little shaker bottle. Go and nice. There we go.

[00:03:52.650] – Rachel
That sounds awesome.

[00:03:54.270] – Allan
All right. Are you ready to get into today's episode?

[00:03:57.420] – Rachel
Yes, that sounds great.

Interview

[00:04:40.140] – Allan
Dr. Pontzer, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:04:43.080] – Dr. Pontzer
Thanks for having me.

[00:04:45.330] – Allan
I was reading your book and I looked over at my wife and she was sitting on a couch and I said, “I love reading books by anthropologists.”

[00:04:57.180] – Dr. Pontzer
Yeah.

[00:05:00.230] – Allan
Even if you didn't tell some of the stories about lions and fires and all the other things that are in this book. So I'm not going to let the dog out of the bag right now. You guys need to get this book to read those stories. But if you even if you didn't have those Indiana Jones moments, if you will, this was just a fascinating book.

[00:05:22.630] – Dr. Pontzer
Thank you so much. It was really fun to write.

[00:05:24.880] – Allan
I read a lot of books. I just got into this and I'm like, OK, OK, OK. And now I get why he says that. OK. And I'm like, wow, I didn't know that. And holy crap!

[00:05:42.530] – Dr. Pontzer
That's great. That's really great.

[00:05:44.410] – Allan
When you said blows the lid off of how we really burn calories because the little book rack is actually going to talk about is called Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off of How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight and Stay Healthy. And you did. You blew my lid off anyway.

[00:05:59.680] – Dr. Pontzer
Cool. Thanks, man. Thank you.

[00:06:01.540] – Allan
OK, so let's dive into this because I, I will go on to My Fitness Pal and I'll go in there and key in I'm 55 years old and I'm five foot 11 almost and I weigh about two hundred and five pounds and I'd like to weigh 190. And so it'll spit back a bunch of numbers at me and say, OK, you need to eat twenty-one hundred calories per day in these proportions. And then I go in, I do my thing and I'm like I got on an elliptical machine and elliptical machine I like because it says 750 calories per hour versus the one that said six hundred calories per hour.

[00:06:39.610] – Dr. Pontzer
That's right.

[00:06:40.160] – Allan
And then I eat what I eat and I put it in the app. I'm like, OK, yeah, I had this, I had that. And I have one serving of nuts. I had one serving of that. And then it tells me in six weeks you'll reach your goal, because you're eating this way.

[00:06:57.310] – Allan
And somehow every day it's like chasing the end of a rainbow. It's just. It's on the next horizon, it's on the next horizon. Can we talk a little bit about these things like the Basal metabolic rate, BMR, our activity level, and why that math? What's going on there when we're trying to figure out our expenditures, trying to figure out how we can burn calories to lose weight, why that's not quite working out for us.

[00:07:26.170] – Dr. Pontzer
Yeah. Gosh, where to start. So, you know, I think it boils down to the way that we think about our metabolism. Right? So the way we've been taught to think about our metabolism, it's nobody's fault unless you're in this line of work, in which case it is your fault, I suppose. My line of work, I should say. But we've been taught to think about our bodies like simple engines engineered and built to be a rational and easy to understand.

[00:07:53.200] – Dr. Pontzer
And you can rev your engine higher with exercise and burn off more fuel. And, you know, that kind of really simplistic I like to call like an armchair engineer's version of how your body ought to work. Yeah, but by that logic, by those assumptions then everything you just said is totally sensible, totally within its own logic. Totally true. And you can't fault the internal logic of it because it's the story that's been told for decades.

[00:08:18.280] – Dr. Pontzer
And so, of course it kind of holds together. The problem is that our bodies aren't engineered. Right. They're evolved. And your metabolic engine is not some simple thing that you can just you can step on the accelerator or step on the brakes. You don't have a lot of control over it, actually. Instead, your metabolism hasn't been evolved to help you fit into your bathing suit better.

[00:08:45.010] – Dr. Pontzer
It's been evolved to make sure that you survive and reproduce. And so, your body is doing your metabolism is doing all the sort of sleight of hand behind the scenes that you're completely unaware of. Right? From how well you can take how you track the food you eat to how well you can get a handle on the energy you burn off. And so all of those complications that are mostly unseen to you because your metabolism isn't really about just diet and exercise, about everything makes the story that you told just totally fall apart.

[00:09:16.570] – Dr. Pontzer
And I think that's that's the experience that people had. Like you say, oh, I'm going to do this. I'm going to expect these results and gosh, why isn't it happening? And it is because the the the way you thought it was going to work to begin with was not accurate.

[00:09:32.290] – Allan
So there was this like really smart guy called Isaac Newton that wrote these laws and to the day they stand. And so there's the law of conservation of energy. And so the thoughts are whatever you put into the system has to come out of the system where it stays in the system. And then I guess to some extent, my math anyway was then, of course, you've got Einstein saying energy equals mass. So if you're putting extra energy in your body, then it becomes mass at some level until it becomes energy again.

[00:10:07.660] – Allan
So, it's not that we're broken. Yeah, and I think the way you kind of put it in the book and you got into this concept of constrained daily energy expenditure.

[00:10:20.940] – Dr. Pontzer
Right.

[00:10:22.010] – Allan
And that's really what's holding us up. Right? Because we are burning the energy or at least we feel like we are because, the machine said seven hundred fifty. But even if I say, OK, then I'll just I'll go with the lower number. Six hundred. Yeah. Which again might not be the right number, but it's a number I burn that I did that I got on there and I pushed myself. I know I had to burn calories to do it because I couldn't do it without burning calories. Where's the math going. Wonky.

[00:10:50.810] – Dr. Pontzer
Yeah, right. So what you're describing is the way that people even in the field of metabolism have been thinking about this for over half a century. And it's based on this idea that the all the the tasks you do every day we can to add them all up together. And that's going to give us like your bill at the end of a shopping trip, going to give us the total calories that you burn that day. But what it doesn't tell you, right, because it's completely missing from that equation is the fact that the more exercise you do, your body's response to that and goes, oh, OK, so we've got we spent this much on exercise or it's not really a day to day kind of adjustments, more like over weeks or months, kind of just, oh, I'm going I've changed my lifestyle now.

[00:11:33.200] – Dr. Pontzer
I'm exercising this much now I'm spending this much energy on activity. I'm going to spend less on all the other tasks. So most of what your body does every day, even if you're an active person, is not exercise. Most of what your body does every day is immune function and brain function and reproductive function and digestion and all these sort of unseen tasks. And so you reduce those a little bit and you basically make room for the six hundred calories you just spent on on your elliptical.

[00:12:01.010] – Dr. Pontzer
And so it doesn't actually bump up the total number of calories you spend every day instead of your body's working to keep the total calorie you spend every day within a narrow range, kind of like in the same way that, you know, your body keeps body temperature within a narrow range. If you go out on a cold day, you don't know. You're not a reptile. You don't drop to 20 degrees Fahrenheit. No, your body works hard to keep you warm.

[00:12:22.700] – Dr. Pontzer
And if you just keep it right at ninety-eight point six or thirty-seven degrees Celsius, whatever you prefer, your blood sugar levels are kind of the same way. They can fluctuate up and down. But they're kept in a narrow range, unless you're unless you have diabetes. And so, you know, that that kind of homeostatic we call it maintenance of your daily energy expenditure within an area. And that's one of the really kind of exciting things that's come out of the work over the last ten or so years I've been doing and some other folks as well.

[00:12:52.970] – Allan
Yeah, we used to measure calories when we wanted to kind of do it scientifically. You either had to be in a room where they could they pretty much could measure all your breathing or at least some level have an apparatus on your face. So you're breathing into it so that they can measure the cardio, the carbon dioxide. And that's another little tidbit you had in the book that I actually knew beforehand. But when we lose fat, we're losing most of it through our breath.

[00:13:20.810] – Dr. Pontzer
from carbon that you ate. You lose, you lose it all through your breath. Mostly breathing it out as carbon dioxide.

[00:13:26.000] – Allan
But they've updated the science. And that's where you were a big part of actually executing that in some really remarkable situations of how we actually burn, how our actual metabolism works. Can you talk a little bit about this? Got double you call it double,

[00:13:41.600] – Dr. Pontzer
Doubly labeled water.

[00:13:42.770] – Allan
Doubly labeled water. Okay it sounds like Evian almost got a challenger.

[00:13:47.830] – Dr. Pontzer
I wish it was as cheap as Evian. That's actually super expensive. But yes, as you said, I'm an anthropologist. I'm trained in the field of human evolution and how our bodies evolved. And, of course, know humans have been evolving for two million years since before we Homo Sapiens as hunter-gatherers. And so from my perspective, if you want to really understand how the body works and you want to understand how humans are in a lifestyle that's similar to the ones that we used to live, of course, we don't have a time machine, but you want to find a culture that hold on to those some of those same traditions.

[00:14:20.240] – Dr. Pontzer
Right? And so we wanted to go and look at energy metabolism in a hunting and gathering population. This is back about 2007 or 2008 that we were putting this together first. And we were sure that we were going to find exactly what, you know, what you were saying before, that if they're more active, they're going to burn more calories. And we just we're trying to document how much more. But nobody had at that point.

[00:14:43.370] – Dr. Pontzer
Nobody had ever measured total energy expenditures, total daily energy expenditures in a hunter-gatherer group. For exactly the reason you described. You have to have somebody typically have somebody in a laboratory to do that. But what the study labeled water measurement, you can use this really cool isotope tracking technique. Some of the hydrogen to replace the deuterium. Some of the oxygen is replaced with this isotope called Oxygen 18. And you can use those to sort of trace your body's flow of water through your body, as well as the production of carbon dioxide that you breathe out because some of the oxygen that flow through your body actually come in as water and leave as the Os in the CO2 that you breathe, that we actually track that over about a week or 10 days of time. So it's a really cool technique. It's been around for a couple of decades, but it's expensive. There aren't many labs that do it. And nobody had ever done it for hunter gatherer group before.

[00:15:34.070] – Dr. Pontzer
So we were so excited when my colleague Dave Raichlen and Brian Wood and I went to northern Tanzania to do this with the Hadza community there. And they're a modern community like any other group on Earth right now. But they are hunter-gatherers. And so they cut a whole lot of these old traditions that are way to to sort of see what that lifestyle is like, how it affects our bodies.

[00:15:54.260] – Dr. Pontzer
And, you know, we know they're super active and they get about five times our physical activity every day than a typical American or typical European or anybody in an industrialized, urbanized setting. And we were so sure that we were going to see really high energy expenditures with them, with this doubly labeled water technique. We just kind of wanted to document how much higher it was. And in fact, when we got the samples home without them analyzed, it turns out that even though there's really, really physically active, they're burning the same number of calories every day as folks in the US and Europe and other industrialized countries.

[00:16:27.590] – Dr. Pontzer
So that was a total totally mind-blowing to me and has sort of shaped my research over the last 10 years trying to ollow that weird finding and find out. Actually, it's not so weird that you see other places. Do we see it throughout and just try to understand what that means and how your body can possibly adapt to lifestyle like that and to keep energy expenditure the same.

[00:16:51.200] – Allan
I would tell you as a personal trainer, I would say 99.9% percent of my colleagues love the calories in calories out model because we sell exercise. You know, for the most part, someone says, I want to lose weight, I'll exercise you. And so it's an easy sell because they believe they need to exercise more to lose weight, but the body is going to adjust because of it.

[00:17:11.450] – Dr. Pontzer
Mm hmm.

[00:17:11.960] – Allan
And so you've actually proven that scientifically now that that's what happens to our immune function, maybe down regulates our reproductive system down, regulates maybe even the size of some of our organs go down as a result. That's not something necessarily measurable in weight, but it kind of is what it is. Our body adapts to what it needs to eat to stay alive, just to be here tomorrow when when food is scarce or when you're overworking, it needs to be able to keep you moving long enough to get that next kudzu or next to antelope or whatever. Or chase off some lions so you can have what they just killed.

[00:17:53.660] – Allan
So you brought up a term in the book that I thought was really important because the other side of the argument, I'll get a lot of people, doctors and nutritionists and everything and and I've seen it work. I was I mean, at some level is they'll say, we could be a carnivore, we could be a vegetarian, we could be a vegan, we could be whatever. And people will tribalize on those on those terms, on those ways of eating.

[00:18:17.990] – Allan
What you found with the Hadza is that they are effectively operating opportunistic omnivores. They're going to eat what they're able to get because, you know, it's not like they go open up a fridge and say, we got some zebra in here. I think I'll cook that up tonight.

[00:18:37.670] – Allan
It might be it's going to be easier for us to go get some honey today and we're going to eat a meal of honey. Which anyone who's keto would say, oh my God, you're going to die. You're going to have diabetes. They don't have diabetes. They don't have heart disease

[00:18:53.170] – Dr. Pontzer
They're incredibly healthy. I mean, wonderful models of health. You wake up in the morning and you get you're out there getting food out of the wild landscape. They don't have any, I should say. They don't have any crops, any machines, any domesticated animals or plants. So any way to store their food or electricity. Right. So they're off every morning to get plants or animals to eat. And, you know, women rack up like twelve thousand steps a day. Men get like nineteen thousand steps a day. It's an incredible amount of physical activity. But yeah, the diet is sort of what they are not, they are not tribal in their diet. The way that sort of you know, it's become fashionable to be here in the industrialized world where you have this, you're spoiled for choice, you know, and you have the opportunity to be tribal if you like to. They don't have that opportunity. There was ever is available.

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[00:21:21.780] – Allan
And so it's like then and they're not walking nineteen thousand steps just to get to the 7-Eleven, right? They got to do something. When they get there, they climb a tree or they got to dig up some roots. They eat a lot of tubulars. They eat honey. They eat animals that they kill or that they can scavenge off of other people and other kills. So it's just kind of fascinating that they eat what's there and they still stay relatively healthy because, I imagine zebras are red meat. It's a leaner meat than a cow. Yeah. Because they don't fatten zebras up for any particular reason.

[00:21:57.180] – Dr. Pontzer
Right. The Hadza diet is great because you get to make everybody upset when you talk about their diet. They're not vegans for sure. They love to eat meat and they eat it when they can get it. And they like fat for that matter. They can eat it, but they eat a ton of plants, too, and eat sugar. Right. We've done the analysis. The sugar is that, honey. It's just water and sugar, like it is like when you buy it at the store here. So it's a real mix and it changes day to day and it changes month to month.

[00:22:26.310] – Dr. Pontzer
And there they are. Not the exception that we look in the ethnographic record at other hunter-gatherer groups, too, that most of them, of course, sadly now are in villages, that kind of stuff. But we have the historical records of what these people were eating. And it's no surprise it's just like cuisine around the world is diverse today. Cuisine around the world is diverse for these traditional folks as well. You know, paleo folks love to point out Arctic populations, the Inuit and yeah, that's right. If you live up where no plants grow. That's right. You make a living without eating any plants. And if you live in places that are warm and temperate and have lots of plants to grow and honey, you eat that, so everybody can you can cherry pick anything if you want to say, oh, this is my model of a paleo diet and just tell me, well, that's fine. You do that.

[00:23:16.020] – Dr. Pontzer
I can find you a group that eats all plants, you know, and that's what they do. And they're all equally healthy. So the idea that they're sort of just one paleo diet or one natural diet just drives me crazy. As an anthropologist, one of the things I love about studying people all over the globe is this sort of the yin and yang, the sweet and salty of the differences and the similarities. Right?

[00:23:40.200] – Dr. Pontzer
We're all the same. We're all humans, we have all the same motivations going on. And yet the way that we meet all those needs is so different and the cultures are so different. So to have to kind of rewrite some history of us that says, oh, it was only one way or only this way or it just doesn't, just such a disservice to how cool humans are, I think. And how diverse we are.

[00:24:00.720] – Allan
Yeah. But we wouldn't have survived if we didn't have that capacity at some level.

[00:24:06.300] – Dr. Pontzer
Absolutely!

[00:24:06.810] – Allan
To go for periods of time without food and not die. To not have a blood sugar crash and go into a coma because we went two days without actually being able to find food. We have to be able to go without food for a period of time and still function. Yeah. And we have to be able to go ahead. And when it's time and we find the food, we eat what we got, we eat what's there. So if you're climbing up a tree and your lunch is made, it's just honey and honeycombs.

[00:24:33.930] – Allan
I mean, that's that's your lunch. You know, it took a lot of work. It took time. It took effort and a lot of calories getting there. And then you're there and then you enjoy the honey and. Yeah, then I guess you take some home so, you can trade or do something with it, but and someone's going to come home. And that's another thing I really kind of liked about their culture. One of the reasons they're probably so healthy is just their attitude and the social bonds they have with their kinfolk and the people around them in their tribe. And so they're just there and they're they're taking care of themselves or taking care of each other. And they recognize where they are in the world, at least from the perspective of if they don't help each other, they're screwed.

[00:25:18.870] – Dr. Pontzer
Yeah, sharing that community ethos is so strong. And, you know, and it's one of those things that make us uniquely human. Right? I mean, no other species. You can't find any other species where half of the animals get one kind of food and half the same animals get another kind of food and they come together at the end of the day and share it doesn't happen. Doesn't exist at all. So hunting and gathering, which was what now that is the human strategy for millions of years, is so interesting and so key.

[00:25:46.500] – Dr. Pontzer
And it at its core is that we're going to be these socially connected people. Right. I think that's what's so hard about Covid. For example, konbit is just such a killer because it says you can't be a social as you'd like to be in it just now. It's really hard.

[00:26:00.660] – Allan
And I've said this many, many times. I wish, I wish, I wish. And I know it's a scientific term that came up with and they're using it. But socially distancing was not what we need to do. We need to physically distance.

[00:26:13.170] – Dr. Pontzer
Yes. Yeah. And a really good point.

[00:26:15.420] – Allan
And so I know, but I actually went back and I saw where they had started. Using the term social distancing as a strategy many, many decades ago, this is not new. I mean, it's been in the books. That term has been in the books for a long, long, long, long, long before anyone thought of Facebook or anything like that. But we don't need to socially distance. We need to physically distance when it's appropriate and hopefully now with the things that are going on, we're going to move past all that. But we've got to keep our immune system healthy and we've got to do the other things that are necessary for us to thrive as humans. One of the things that's going to come up is like, OK, if my personal trainer making me exercise these do this stupid HIIT workout or the stupid, he's going to say, OK, I need you to do I want you to do 30 minutes of cardio, four days a week.

[00:27:06.310] – Allan
There's other benefits to that. And we can get into that for sure. But if it won't help me do what I want to do, which 90 percent of the people approaching a personal trainer, the first thing on their head is I want to lose weight, or at least I want to lose body fat, don't necessarily want to lose weight, but I call it weight because that's what everybody calls it and that's what the scale calls it. And that's the easiest measurement tool I have available to me, the most cost effective tool I have. So we'll just say I want to lose weight. Why should I still do exercise?

[00:27:36.370] – Dr. Pontzer
Yeah. So all those adjustments your body makes to exercise, to take, to spend less energy on everything else, to keep your energy expenditure the same. Turns out that those changes are we think and this is really this is kind of bleeding edge science right now. I don't think we're working on right now to know exactly how this all works out. But it seems like those changes that down regulation of other stuff is the one of the big reasons exercise is so good for you.

[00:28:03.830] – Dr. Pontzer
And so it helps actually put together a bunch of phenomena that people have noticed over the years and it kind of knits it all together. So we know, for example, that if you exercise a lot, people who exercise a lot tend to have lower levels of inflammation. But what is inflammation? Inflammation is your innate immune response to an attack, to a pathogen or to a cut or something like that. And you need some of it.

[00:28:25.480] – Dr. Pontzer
You need some immune response or you'll do very well. But too much is too much. Right. You want to you want the fire department to come when you call them, but you don't want it at your house all the time. So that's what inflammation, chronic inflammation is like. Stress reactivity. You need some stress reactivity to be normal and healthy. You don't want to have big surges of cortisol and adrenaline every time you know something happens.

[00:28:52.720] – Dr. Pontzer
Reproductive hormones. Yes. You want to have met a healthy level. Nobody wants any kind of dysfunction, of course. But it turns out that the levels that we typically have of testosterone and estrogen in places like the US and Europe in industrialized societies are much, much higher than they are in groups like the Hadza that are physically active. And by the way, they had to have just a fine time having getting pregnant, having families. That isn't an issue. So we're not talking about where you supposed to where there are issues. We're talking about just having it at a healthy level.

[00:29:24.880] – Dr. Pontzer
All of those individual phenomena have been noticed before. And what I think the constraint energy expenditure does nicely is say, oh, OK, this is the framework. Right. It's an energy framework because I'm spending more on activity, on exercise, because I'm doing the HIIT workout, I'm getting stronger. My heart's getting stronger. That's all great. I don't maybe see the number on the bathroom scale change very much. But what I also don't notice. But what is really good for me is all the other amazing stuff is doing for me because of that adjustment. Right. So this isn't a don't bother exercise in story. This is a here's why you have to keep exercise story even if you're not getting the weight change you wish you had.

[00:30:02.080] – Allan
Yeah. And I think that's just really, really hard for people to wrap their head around is, I want this thing and yet those other things sound great, but I think

[00:30:14.230] – Dr. Pontzer
It sounds great. But I'd really like to look.

[00:30:16.330] – Allan
I'd like to look better in my casket. Again, it's just one of those things of saying this. And the other thing I found is really interesting is the people who exercise are healthier.

[00:30:32.800] – Dr. Pontzer
Yeah.

[00:30:33.760] – Allan
Not necessarily that they've lost the weight, but it's sort of that kind of that backwards to the energy model is they never really had a need to store extra energy anyway. And so when we get on the other side of that, then this is kind of one of my takeaways. And I may be reading a little bit too much into it, but is if it if it took me three decades or even two decades to put on that extra 30 pounds.

[00:31:01.150] – Allan
And I try to say, OK, I'm just going to just kind to bless that elliptical every day of the week. And I'm going to you know, I want to keep seeing those 750s just plop, plop, plop. And initially it works. You know, I'm eating better and I'm seeing some some things or at least I'm eating less. But then I get three weeks and I'm hungry. And I'm like, OK, so now I'm hungry and I'm fighting hunger and hunger, it wins. So that's always it always wins that argument.

[00:31:31.360] – Allan
So for the folks that are fighting that struggle, to me, it seems the solution that you've kind of based on what you are finding, we really need to ratchet up the patients with our body.

[00:31:43.390] – Dr. Pontzer
Yeah. Yeah.

[00:31:44.620] – Allan
To let it do the things it needs to do. And if we're eating natural things like because they're not calling a Pizza Hut now at ten o'clock at night and saying, you know, deliver two pizzas there, they're eating real food.

[00:32:00.430] – Dr. Pontzer
Yeah, that's right. I mean, you know, the stuff that gets us into trouble and this is some really cool work by a guy named Kevin Hall and other groups have worked on this, in the lab, when you can control people are eating and really watch what they're doing. What are the foods that get you into trouble? It's it doesn't seem like there's any particular nutrient that's the villain, okay, eating too many carbs.

[00:32:20.080] – Dr. Pontzer
Yeah, sure. Too many of anything's bad. Too much fat is also bad. So what we did eat too much. Well it seems to lead people to eat too much is when they eat these really ultra-processed over-engineered foods. Right? That are literally built in the laboratory, in focus group tested to make sure that you eat too much. Right. That's how they make their money. And actually, that's a pretty cynical take on it. I'm not trying to vilify food industry, for that matter.

[00:32:44.950] – Allan
We should now. It's more than the model. They're blatantly telling you this now. I mean, I remember a Super Bowl commercial. And it was a Pringles commercial, which is just processed potato flour. I mean, it's just… Anyway, so they had one that was pizza flavor, OK? And then the guy says he had another one.

[00:33:05.440] – Allan
His friend had chicken. Yeah. So they put the chicken one on the pizza one and they ate both of them at the same time. And the chicken pizza and barbecue had barbecue and they put all three of them. And so they've gone beyond the you can't eat just one, bet you can just one to eat three, stack them up, find multiple flavors that you like paired together or triple together. They're not even hiding. They're not even hiding them.

[00:33:34.270] – Dr. Pontzer
Yeah. And I mean it is delicious but it gets into trouble because you know what we're finding is that, that and I should say we, I mean we literally there this is people who are looking specifically at diet. But your brain does an amazing job regulating how many calories come in and how many calories go out, even if you're gaining a couple of pounds a year, which is the kind of that is the American obesity epidemic is a couple of pounds a year.

[00:34:03.700] – Dr. Pontzer
Even if you're doing that, you're still matching your brain is still matching (think about this) intake to expenditure to within like point zero five percent. I mean, an incredibly amazing amount of precision there. So then how does it get even a little bit off track, because that's what obesity is. Your brain's going a little bit out of whack matching intake and expenditure. And, you know, it looks like it's these ultra-processed foods that completely blow up your reward system. Right? And your brain is like, oh my God, this is amazing. They don't have fiber. They don't have protein because that's expensive. So they just are full of sugars and fats, oils usually. And and so they don't have any of the of the indicators that your brain usually uses to tell you that your full like fiber and protein, they reward you like crazy. And so you want to bring in more. And so guess what?

[00:34:56.860] – Dr. Pontzer
Your brain is just a little bit just a little small error all the time, more and more and more. If you're eating that. Those are the big killers. And what I love about this is one of the best pieces of evidence that that's what's going on here, is that if you look at the hundreds of genes that have been associated with high BMI, with obesity, nearly every one of them is active in your brain. Right?

[00:35:22.060] – Dr. Pontzer
So it isn't your your fat cells that are out of whack or your liver cells that are out of whack or your stomach. It's your brain cells that are not out of whack. They're poorly, they're a poor fit to this weird modern food environment we've made, so that's the crux right there. Like you're saying, how do you lose the weight? Well, if you just crash diet, your body's going to respond.

[00:35:44.270] – Dr. Pontzer
If you hit the gym like crazy, your body response, you basically had to take these foods, engineered them back out of your life. And that's pretty much how you have to do it.

[00:35:52.400] – Allan
And then have the patience to let that play out. Because, again, like you said, that fractional difference is your brain and your body start to recollect and say, hey, I got way too much me here. This is actually not good for me to keep going. I need to get rid of some of this. Your brain will originally eventually turn on and say, okay we're getting what we need, we're full, and in your body will then respond. But it's going to be that gradual, have patience with the process.

[00:36:22.820] – Dr. Pontzer
Yeah. And some folks are going to find know the trick is, can you find a diet that you're eating healthily, you're getting all your micronutrients, your weight is either where you want it to be or go in the direction you want it to be. And you feel full because you say hunger is always going to win. So if you're feeling hungry, it's not going to work. And so, it's not a diet book. I don't feel to get the impression this is the next diet to eat.

[00:36:48.200] – Dr. Pontzer
You know, that's not the idea here. The idea is what are the principles? How does your body work? What's the owner's manual look like? So you can take charge of this thing? And, the principles seem to be if you eat more fiber, eat more protein, you know, those are ways to feel full on less. And some people are going to find that in a Carnivore diet where a lot of the protein is what saves you. Some are going to find that a plant based diet where the fibers let's say you you know, I mean, there's lots of ways to do it.

[00:37:11.570] – Allan
Yeah, well, I think it could be a diet book. So go to Africa, make your own make your own bow and arrow. Make your own stick. They've got roots and tubulars. And and then. Yeah. Walk nineteen hundred steps per day to go kill. I don't know a giraffe.

[00:37:29.080] – Dr. Pontzer
Yeah. Right, right.

[00:37:31.310] – Allan
That'll do.

[00:37:33.250] – Dr. Pontzer
Yeah. Or cook your food with no seasoning. That's another thing. Right? I mean have they got a little bit of salt. That's it. You know they don't really they're food sadly their food is not delicious. I kind of wish it were. Honey is delicious. The honey. How much honey can you eat my lord. You know. Anyway.

[00:37:51.470] – Allan
Oh perfect. So Dr. Pontzer, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well.

[00:38:02.810] – Dr. Pontzer
That's a great question. I would say get outside because if you're outside, you're probably moving. You're probably breathing clean air. It lifts your mood. So get outside, stay connected. Because I think that's the social aspect of this. The social connections are really important and then don't trade diet for exercise or vice versa. Those are two different tools or two different jobs. And so you got to kind of do both. So I got a squeeze in for I did.

[00:38:30.800] – Allan
That's perfect.

[00:38:32.150] – Dr. Pontzer
That's what I'd say.

[00:38:33.200] – Allan
OK, if someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book Burn, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:38:39.920] – Dr. Pontzer
Well, the book is a good place to start. You could also check out what we're doing in the sponsor lab here at Duke. Look us up on the Duke website, or if you want to find out more about the Hadza and for that matter, if you want to help the Hadza, because one of the things that we really try to do with our work is to give back is check out the Hadzafund.org, you can find out more about their culture, more about our work and ways you can donate and help give back if you like.

[00:39:08.120] – Allan
You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/478 and I'll be sure to have those links there. Dr. Pontzer, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:39:17.660] – Dr. Pontzer
It was so much fun. Thanks a lot.


Post Show/Recap

[00:39:24.330] – Allan
Welcome back, Raz.

[00:39:26.160] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, what a fascinating interview. I have to say that this whole theory about calorie expenditure kind of blew my mind a little bit.

[00:39:36.330] – Allan
Yeah. I just love anthropologist's. I just do. The ones that go out there, the Indiana Jones kind, because he had some really cool stories and in the book about his adventures, particularly in Africa with the Hadza tribe. But he just saw some things there that, you know, you wouldn't you wouldn't see anywhere else and you would experience someone else. And so just to really cool experiences.

[00:40:02.220] – Allan
And then, yeah, when he sat down with them, they went in with the hypothesis and he did real science, which is crazy, real science, where you have a hypothesis. And when your hypothesis is wrong, they acknowledge it and say, hey, we were wrong, this is what's actually going on. So, yeah, the hypothesis was that these guys were burning thousands and thousands and thousands of calories every day. And as a result, that's why they were so freaking skinny. But the reality of it was, no, no, they're not. Their body is is finding equilibrium at a lower overall BMI. I mean, I'm starting at BMI, but basal metabolic rate BMR.

[00:40:48.630] – Allan
And so basically what happens is that your body slows down other functions, eliminate some of it needs to for periods of time. And so, we've seen this someone who starved for a long period of time, they start losing muscle mass. But you see it, if a female athlete, particularly one who does endurance running, gets her body fat too low, keeps her energy levels too low, she stops menstruating.

[00:41:15.180] – Rachel
Yeah.

[00:41:16.200] – Allan
And one of the fascinating things that he talked about in the book was that the size of a person's spleen will go down. So you're quite literally using energy from your spleen and that's your immune system. And so therefore, you're not your immune system isn't functioning as well as it should. So your reproductive system can slow down and stop your your immune system can slow down and stop. And all because it wants to keep your brain alive, your heart alive, your liver alive, and you alive. And so it's a requirement. It's necessary if you can't get enough calories. No matter how hard you need to work, your body is going to find balance.

[00:41:58.030] – Rachel
Yeah, that is incredible. It's amazing to think that a hunter-gatherer tribe like the Hadza that he studied and people here in the United States even have similar caloric expenditure where you can only go so far. You can like he said, you can't crash diet and you can't hit the gym hard enough. I mean, there's a point where it doesn't make sense.

[00:42:22.510] – Allan
Yeah, but but one of the core points to take away from that is not so much just what our bodies are doing, but to understand that the calories that we're burning are not for the right reason our immune systems are overactive. Our systems are over. We have many systems that are overactive because of how we treat our bodies, what we put in them, and so, we are burning a lot and we were burning more calories, but we're burning it being sedentary.

[00:42:54.900] – Allan
So it's not that we're exercising to have those extra calories burned. That's not where his average is coming from. It's just coming from the fact that our body is going to burn about the same, whether it's doing it for the right reasons or the wrong reasons.

[00:43:10.260] – Rachel
It's just an incredible experiment.

[00:43:12.930] – Allan
And so for me, the core takeaway and, we've talked about this a lot lately is that you. Yes. You can't lose weight relatively quickly. If you go on on a diet, the diet's probably going to work for a period of time and then it might not. And when it doesn't, then there's the frustration. Usually there's the retaliation. So, oh, that didn't work. Well, I'm go ahead and just have that bottle of wine I didn't have last weekend because my diet stopped working.

[00:43:42.630] – Allan
And then there's the other part of this is just the dealing with hunger. And we just we don't deal with hunger very well because food's just everywhere. And, you know, I think one of the core things for me, and you see it you see in the commercials is they have the Snickers commercial where, you know, someone's starting to get what they call hangry. And as a result, they're kind of angry and hungry and it all comes together.

[00:44:12.250] – Allan
And what's the solution? The solution is to throw sugar at it, throw throw a Snickers bar at it, and that's going to solve your your hangry problem. But, that's not how this works. And as a result, I think one of the core takeaways for me was that if we really want to do weight loss responsibly, we've got to look at weight loss as a slow, long process and so slowly whittling away by eating whole foods, nutritious food, being hungry sometimes and maybe not eating as often as we do, those are all going to be strategies that will help us lose the weight we want to lose.

[00:44:53.130] – Allan
But it's going to take time. You just have to be patient. If you if you want to lose weight, you can't out exercise a bad diet. And it's really also not in your best interest to under eat what your body requires.

[00:45:06.780] – Rachel
Absolutely. There's a point where you need a fuel for…

[00:45:11.340] – Allan
All right. Well, it looks like Rachel has some connectivity problems today, so she's dropped off. But I'll talk to you next week, Rachel.

Patreons

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Another episode you may enjoy

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Lose weight and feel great on two meals per day with Brad Kerns

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Brad Kerns is the co-author with Mark Sisson of the book, Two Meals a Day: The Simple, Sustainable Strategy to Lose Fat, Reverse Aging, and Break Free from Diet Frustration Forever.

Transcript

Let's Say Hello

[00:00:48.630] – Allan
Hey Raz! How are things going?

[00:00:50.850] – Rachel
Good. How are you today, Allan?

[00:00:52.980] – Allan
I'm doing OK. You know, it's been some busy times. The 12-week program is going on, and I'm just loving that. I just I draw so much energy from those guys. I can't tell you enough how much fun it is to just be working with people and then, the gym open. And it's been a slow growth. But, I was sitting there on Sunday and just thinking about the month (we record a couple of weeks in advance) and accounting stuff. This was not a bad month.

[00:01:34.050] – Rachel
Oh, good.

[00:01:35.370] – Allan
In February we reopened on the first. This was not a bad month. Tt's not a great month because we don't have the tourists, so the drop-ins were about one-seventh of what we would normally see for drop-in revenue. But the the membership was strong. And we've got a lot of new members and faces that we didn't have last year before we closed. So I feel pretty good about where the gym's going and how that's growing. And I was thinking it kind of a blessing for this slow growth because it happened and it was still generally a good month. And it wasn't overwhelming at the gym. I think that was kind of the cool thing.

[00:02:18.450] – Allan
But, like everything else, we've got to be careful with Covid as we start getting bigger. I had one night I was working a shift and we had seven people and they were all in the free weight section. And so it was just a little crowded back there. And I was like, okay I can't let anybody else on this side of the building. If someone wants to go and do some some of the cardio equipment or on the other side than they're more than welcome to go in there. If someone comes in and they want to lift weights, I'm going to make them sit on the bench and wait. Just to make sure we didn't get things too crowded in there.

[00:02:50.520] – Allan
We don't really have a capacity limit. But I kind of learned that we kind of do have a capacity, just everybody being two meters apart.

[00:02:58.560] – Rachel
Right.

[00:02:58.950] – Allan
We just have to be responsible about that. So, if you are going to the gym now, the gyms have reopened. Just be cognizant of the two meters. Wipe down your machines before and after you use them and just use good hygiene around this. And for the most part, you're probably going to be successful at not getting it.

[00:03:18.690] – Rachel
So for sure. Absolutely. That's great. Good to hear that.

[00:03:22.380] – Allan
How are things up north?

[00:03:24.120] – Rachel
Good. We actually had a break in the weather, which was nice. And over the weekend I had a little win myself. I actually surprised myself. I did a 10K, which is not a huge thing for me, but I was challenged in the month of February to set, in FKT, a Fastest Known Time within this community I participate with online. And so I chose my normal 10K route to do my time. My FKT and my prior time for this route has been about an hour, four minutes and hour, six minutes or so, and we've had snow. So that kind of is a difficult thing to get through. But we had this break in the weather and the sidewalks are clear.

[00:04:10.200] – Rachel
So I set out to do my 10k and I thought, okay, I don't know if I can do this, but I'm going to pretend it's a race day. And I set out and I ran smoothly and the downhills. I ran relaxed on the uphills. And when I got home and turned off my watch, I had a fifty-eight minute forty-seven second 10k. So I actually beatmy proposed time of a su-hour 10k. So it was a win.

[00:04:38.550] – Allan
Awesome!

[00:04:38.850] – Rachel
Thank you. I was really surprised. So it was a good day.

[00:04:44.010] – Allan
Awesome. That, that has to feel really, really good.

[00:04:47.100] – Rachel
It does. I've been really focused on training for my fifty miler that's coming up this summer and so that means a lot of slow miles. So I'm not used to running fast. So again, that's another reason why it was kind of a surprise for me.

[00:05:01.350] – Allan
And, you know, sometimes that's kind of the way these things work is you're not expecting it and you just have a really good run.

[00:05:08.790] – Rachel
It was.

[00:05:09.000] – Allan
But you've got to be out there running to have a really good run.

[00:05:12.000] – Rachel
That's right. You got to do it.

[00:05:14.040] – Allan
Good on you.

[00:05:14.370] – Rachel
Thank you.

[00:05:15.450] – Allan
Not letting the Michigan weather keep you indoors.

[00:05:18.330] – Rachel
That's right.

[00:05:19.540] – Allan
So you're trained and that's. And then show. So good job.

[00:05:22.910] – Rachel
Thank you.

[00:05:23.570] – Allan
All right, are you guys ready to talk to Brad?

[00:05:25.790] – Rachel
Yes, let's do this.

Interview

[00:06:21.080] – Allan
Brad, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:06:23.700] – Brad
Allan, I'm so happy to be here. And I have to say that was one of the best warm chats of any podcast. We are on fire right now. The listeners have no idea what's coming. So brace yourselves, everyone. If you're listening at 1.7 speed like me, turn it down to 1.0 because we're going to hit this stuff hard, man.

[00:06:43.010] – Allan
Yeah, we I guess Brad and I kind of have a lot in common with the kind of people that we like to talk to. And so with his podcast and my podcast where we're talking, it's maybe even talking to some of the same people. We just we just realize we're both going to be talking to the same guy. And it's a pretty fascinating book. So stay tuned to this podcast for a while. Go check out Brad's podcast, because we're going to be bringing on Dr. Pontzer. It's going to be an awesome conversation, but this is also going to be a tremendous conversation.

[00:07:12.380] – Allan
Brad, you and Mark wrote the book Two Meals a Day: The Simple, Sustainable Strategy to Lose Fat, Reverse Aging and Break Free From Diet Frustration Forever. And I have to say, I had followed a OMAD, I've known about OMAD for a while and I've known about time-restricted eating. And so you guys are approaching this from a perspective of being told we have to have six meals a day to lose weight is fundamentally flawed.

[00:07:42.140] – Allan
We should give our body time to not eat, to not feed. And two meals a day is one of those sustainable ways. When I look at OMAD, I don't think I could do, OMAD because I don't think I could eat enough calories in one meal. But looking at two meals a day and thinking of it as an eating window, whether it's six hours or eight hours, I quite easily could have a moderate-sized meal and then a big meal, get all the nutrition I need and do that and allow my body 16 to 18 hours to kind of do all the other cool stuff that the human body can do for itself.

[00:08:22.460] – Brad
Yeah, well said. I think we've been programmed since we were kids to be dependent on dietary carbohydrates as our primary source of energy. And anyone can reference this. If you've ever felt terrible after skipping a single meal and then you have the afternoon blues and you're tired and cranky and you finally go and binge on way too much junk food when you get your hands on something and when you go to the supermarket and go shopping. So the idea here is that we want to continue to honor this evolutionary model of how humans are meant to operate.

[00:09:00.560] – Brad
And we're meant to have stored body fat as our primary source of energy. And that's why we store so much of it and are so good at storing it. And this is going back for millions of years where the human never had regular meals until recent times, recent generations. And so by sitting down to these regular meals like clockwork, we've transitioned away from being fat burners to being carbohydrate dependent.

[00:09:27.350] – Brad
And it's really easy to reprogram the genes. It doesn't take that long. Your body's ready and willing to become better and more competent at burning body fat and being able to skip meals. And I think most listeners who are into this health awareness know all this and can nod their heads. And they've heard that fasting is great and intermittent fasting is the latest buzzword. It just passed keto on the Google search terms as the the most popular diet search term. But here's the thing, we take the trouble to go in the book and say, look, you can't just jump into this and expect all these wonderful benefits if you don't engage in fasting properly.

[00:10:06.350] – Brad
And so if you try to go and skip breakfast because you read this book two meals a day and it says, hey, I'll only eat two meals a day, it's way better than eating three, you're going to have what we might call a stress hormone bath, because if you're dependent on carbs for your energy source. And then all of a sudden you restrict them because you heard about the keto diet or you want to skip meals and lose weight in this ill-advised manner, what's going to happen is you're going to get your glucose, your sugar, no matter what, because that's what you're used to burning.

[00:10:36.740] – Brad
And so you'll do it through this stress response that we call gluconogenesis, which is converting lean muscle mass into glucose to fuel that ravenous brain that needs to burn glucose primarily throughout the day. And so the approach here is to transition in a smooth and comfortable manner. So there's no more struggling or suffering or all these deprivation, mindset, and physical symptoms that we associate with dieting, because that is the failed approach that we can all agree is it doesn't work.

[00:11:10.820] – Brad
And so now we have an agreeable, doable, and sustainable strategy that's not painful. It's just about making good choices and understanding what the body's meant to burn as a preference.

[00:11:25.520] – Allan
Yeah. As humans, we love simple. Everybody loves a simple rule. If this then that. We like the ability to wrap your mind around things that are simple. What a lot of us don't understand is that the human body is extremely complex. And that our body developed strategies to accomplish things outside of norms. So there would be a normal way, things would be. Normally I would like to be able to walk around and there's a fruit tree. I grab some fruit and I eat it. Oh, and there's a little woodland creature. And I bash it in the head. Now I've got some meat or I go catch some fish and I eat some fish and that's my day. I'm moving about a good bit of maybe probably walking around a little bit of a fast action because that critter is not going to just stand there and the fish is definitely not going to just hang out and say, here, grab me.

[00:12:23.580] – Allan
So there's a lot of work involved in getting my food. We don't have that today. So, where we had these simple ways of things were working for us. We've developed other ways. And so what I'm kind of getting at is you bring up a concept in the book that I think it's really important for people to understand is that we have metabolic flexibility. Our bodies develop this capacity to look at fuel in different ways, depending on what our circumstances are and when we're feeding ourselves carbohydrates all the time. It's basically energy in and then what a little bit of energy we can put out is great, but the rest of it's becoming excess body fat. And we're maybe not even tapping into that body fat because we never really gave our body an opportunity to even consider that because we fed more carbohydrates before that ever happened. Can you talk a little bit about metabolic flexibility and how that closed-loop system actually helps us maintain a really good, just basic health?

[00:13:30.840] – Brad
Yeah, thanks. So what I described at the outset is really metabolic inflexibility, where you are dependent upon these regular doses of carbohydrate and other food as your energy source. So metabolic flexibility implies that you can really take or leave a meal at a certain time because body fat is always there and able to be burned for energy and keeping your focus and your mood and your appetite all stabilized throughout the day.

[00:14:01.440] – Brad
And people who are a little bit familiar with the ketogenic diet, the goal there is to restrict carbs to the extent that your body starts making this alternative internal fuel source called ketones, the liver makes ketones as a byproduct of fat metabolism when carbohydrate intake is really low and liver glycogen is really low. So you're prompted to make this wonderful fuel source that burns more cleanly than glucose and your brain preferentially burns ketones. So you're in this kind of heightened state of alertness and you feel great and you have less inflammation and you get all these benefits from the ketogenic diet.

[00:14:37.020] – Brad
It takes a lot of structure to do so because once you start consuming a little bit of carbs, you stop making ketones. But just as you teed this up, we have so many different ways that we can burn energy and sustain ourselves and even function at peak levels without having these super-duper, nutrient bomber drink juices that you need to drink in the morning to get your antioxidants. The body manufactures antioxidants internally, and the internal antioxidant response is possibly more powerful than anything you can consume in a bowl or in a smoothie.

[00:15:13.800] – Brad
So just by fasting, we get all these health benefits. We have a great anti-inflammatory response. The immune system works better. Our cellular repair processes work better when we're not eating because we can devote the energy to these other things. That's why animals fast when they're sick and humans should, too. So, this metabolic flexibility concept goes to not only getting good at burning body fat, but also if it's time for your child's 12th birthday at Chuck E. Cheese and you decide to throw down some breadsticks and a hot fudge sundae afterward, that your body can process that load of unhealthy junk food and you'll live to see another day and you'll wake up the next day and let's say engage in a fasting period to get back to your baseline of fat burning so that you can handle not only dietary imperfections, but also be skipping meals. So that's the flexibility part of the equation there.

[00:16:11.520] – Allan
We're not recommending Chuck E. Cheese, but by all means,

[00:16:14.670] – Brad
This show is not sponsored by Chuck E. Cheese.

[00:16:17.040] – Allan
Not at all. I understand you go there with your kid. It's there. It smells what it smells like.

[00:16:25.740] – Allan
One of the things you get into the book that I think is really important, and this is where I'll be having a conversation with the new client and they'll be like, okay, I want to lose some weight. And this is kind of my go-to (I haven't looked at it from this direction). I always just talk about eat whole food, just whole food, and that solves 99.9% of the problems. In fact, whether I'm talking to a vegan or a carnivore or anybody in between, the one thing they all agree with is eat whole food. You know, they may disagree on whether it needs to be all plant-based or needs to be all animal-based. But in the end, that's what they're after.

[00:17:06.480] – Allan
In the book you looked at from another perspective, you called them the three big toxic modern foods. Could you talk a little bit about those?

[00:17:13.500] – Brad
Yeah, you just remind me now that there is something we all agree on, because for years before the emergence of this carnivore movement, which I'm really fascinated by and have seen some amazing healing stories from people eliminating plant toxins. But previously we all agreed that the wonderful, colorful fruits and vegetables are the basis of a healthy diet, even if you're a vegan, even if you're a paleo person. And now even that's called into dispute. So it's like, oh, yeah, we still agree that whole foods are better than processed foods.

[00:17:42.990] – Brad
I guess unless you're pitching your energy bar or your powders and potions and things like that. But yeah, good point. So whole food would be a great starting point. And then I forgot your question now.

[00:17:57.120] – Allan
Oh, it was the three toxic modern foods.

[00:17:59.820] – Brad
Yeah, the three toxic modern foods. I think it is a great place to start because a lot of the research now is revealing that the magical, wondrous benefits of the various diets are mostly what the person is eliminating rather than the amazing transformational powers of going on a vegan plant-based diet.

[00:18:21.930] – Brad
In fact, we pretty much trying to be polite and not cross into the boundaries of the faction building and all that. It's a high-risk diet because you're eliminating a whole bunch of nutrient-dense foods. Same with carnivore. People have all kinds of criticism for that, saying that it's unbalanced and you're going to drop dead of colon cancer and a heart attack.

[00:18:46.050] – Brad
All those challenges aside for a moment, if you just get rid of junk food, you're probably going to experience an incredible health transformation. And that's where a lot of these leaders of whatever it is that they're touting can kind of attribute this amazing success stories. Is that any transition away from the standard American diet, which Dr. Loren Cordain cites research that 71% of the calories that we consume today in the traditional diet are completely absent from our evolutionary experience.

[00:19:22.260] – Brad
So they're processed modern foods that are nutrient deficient and calorie-dense things like grains, things like sugars, and refined industrial seed oils. So those are the big three right there. And I probably should put it up at number one, the refined industrial seed oils, because those are sometimes overlooked. People all know that sugar is overconsumed. And we got to cut back on our sugar. The paleo ancestral movement knows that we call refined grains sort of in the same category as sugar because they're quickly converted to glucose as soon as you ingest them. They don't have many nutritional benefits whatsoever. And so we have grains, sugars, and the industrial seed oils, which are the bottled manufactured oils like canola, corn, soybeans, sunflower, safflower, etc. and then the prevalence of these oils in processed foods of all kinds, frozen, packaged. You can look on the box of anything that's pretty much of a manufactured product and you'll see these oils included in there, even salad dressings, condiments, things that seem innocent. The oils are thrown in left and right.

[00:20:31.800] – Brad
And then, unfortunately, almost all restaurant food starting from junky, fast food, of course, where you're getting your fries in your burger and what have you or getting stopping at the gas station and getting some quick fare off the shelf. But even at medium to fine restaurants, they are most likely cooking these wonderful meals. You're paying a good money for the entree in the refined industrial seed oils. A lot of people call them vegetable oils.

[00:20:58.740] – Brad
That's a challenge because when you're out there, you can't go back in the kitchen and see. But you can ask and inquire, can you please cook my omelet and butter or something besides vegetable oil? And if you don't succeed there, you might want to find a different restaurant because this stuff is the most toxic thing that's in the food supply. As soon as we consume them, we experience an immediate disturbance in healthy cellular function, especially in the cardiovascular system.

[00:21:24.030] – Brad
So the big problem here, too, is that the ingestion or the inclusion of these oils in the diet renders your fat burning capabilities dysfunctional because the the agents are integrated into healthy fat cells. And so they become difficult to burn because you have this chemically altered component into your body.

[00:21:46.050] – Brad
If you have trouble burning stored body fat, guess what's going to happen when you try to cut back on dietary carbohydrates? It's going to be difficult, if not impossible, because you're going to be dragging ass in the afternoon and you're going to need some quick energy because you're not kicking into fat burning.

[00:22:03.450] – Brad
And that's, I think, where a lot of people have suffered and failed with devoted dietary restriction. I mean, we interact with these people for the past decade where you we'll be putting on a live event or retreat. And I see people coming up to Mark Sisson with tears in their eyes saying, Mark, I got your book three years ago. I've done everything you've said to the letter and I can't succeed. And I feel terrible. And a lot of it's because of the chemical ingestion that's throwing off your your metabolism.

[00:22:30.630] – Brad
And then you don't have this wonderous gateway to the fat-burning lifestyle where you can fast you can enjoy meals, you can get up from the table, you feel alert and energized and all these wonderful things. So the seed oils would be the number one thing to really scrutinize and get rid of immediately. And then with the grains and the sugars, we know that these agents have addictive properties. The great work of Gary Taubes, Dr William Davis, best selling book, Wheat Belly, talking about the addictive properties of the gliadin and protein in modern-day wheat and gluten.

[00:23:04.950] – Brad
And so this stuff is also nasty because when you try (and I'm making air quotes here on the video), when you try to cut back on sugar, you have a very difficult time. So what we advocate is, look, take a few weeks. Twenty-one days would be a great benchmark to have a complete restriction of grains, sugars, and industrial coils from your diet.

[00:23:26.520] – Brad
And that will help you up regulate. The fat burning gene, so that you can manufacture energy internally and feel okay without slamming down meals and snacks all day long, and so this kind of devoted, cold turkey approach seems to be the way to go because these foods are so addictive.

[00:23:49.280] – Brad
Now, is that going to be difficult? Yeah, it's going to be tough for many people. But a lot of times we hear people saying, stick it out, hang in there. Yeah. The keto or the low carb flu is really tough and you feel terrible. But don't worry. Three weeks from now, you'll feel okay. And I strongly reject that ideal, because if people are struggling and suffering with a dietary transformation, something is flawed with the approach. And so instead, if you agree to ditch these big three toxic modern foods, what you can then do is transition over to beautiful, delicious, lavish meals that sustain you and nourish you.

[00:24:29.340] – Brad
In my own personal example, 13 years ago, when I switched over to a primal ancestral style eating, I traded in this giant bowl of cereal that I'd had every single day of my life. I used to be an endurance athlete. I was burning many, many calories every day. So I'd have this giant horse trough bowl of cereal with five different kinds, of course, all the healthy kinds of cereals. But I'd have nonfat yogurt on there and sliced bananas and berries and a ton of calories.

[00:24:56.210] – Brad
So I traded that for a gigantic omelet that I made every morning. And I would use five or six eggs and saute the vegetables and have sliced avocado and salsa and cheese and bacon. And it was incredibly delicious and it sustained me for many hours, but it wasn't giving me that carbohydrate bomb. But that made my transition smooth and easy and enjoyable rather than, let's say, trading in that cereal bowl for a fasting period of four hours. I honestly couldn't have couldn't have done it.

[00:25:25.010] – Brad
And that was a healthy person without metabolic damage that a lot of people are bringing to the table. So if you can replace the processed food with nutrient-dense foods, it's in most cases you're going to feel great. There's not going to be any suffering involved and you'll be looking forward to your next nutritious meal and then build that momentum to where at a certain point in a natural and graceful manner, you'll probably be able to skip. Like I was finally able to skip that omelet every single morning because six months later I felt great and I wasn't super hungry as soon as I woke up.

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[00:27:37.590] – Allan
Yeah, I think the kind of the worst part of this is the food that's good for us doesn't have a marketing department, but the food that's bad for us does. And so you're going to see things on labels like heart-healthy, like you would with cereal. And then, of course, you're going to see this salad dressing you just bought… Not Mark's brand, Mark's brand is avocado oil. It's good stuff. But other brands, you'll see that they'll say they've got olive oil or they've got that.

[00:28:04.620] – Allan
You'll look at the actual label. And they do have that in there, but they've also got the seed oils in there. So it's in there. It's insidious. It's in everything. So the challenge becomes now I'm asking someone to go into their kitchen and throw all that stuff out. And for, I would say the vast majority of people in the United States, particularly, you're asking them to pretty much throw out their entire pantry, clean out their entire fridge, and in many cases go through their freezer and go through all of that stuff and that you start to realize how much… It's like 71% of our total calories is coming from this stuff.

[00:28:48.720] – Allan
So when the kitchen purge to me is one of the probably you know, as I talk to people, that's one of their most intimidating events. How does someone wrap their mind around I'm throwing away all this food?

[00:29:02.520] – Brad
Yeah, I like how you framed that.

[00:29:03.240] – Allan
And I can do the food in air quotes.

[00:29:07.080] – Brad
Yeah. Michael Pollan calls it, quote, edible food like substances rather than food. This processed 71% junk. But I like how you frame that question because maybe we should do it backwards. So, first we go shopping to the natural foods supermarket and we get the sustainably raised eggs and meat and seafood and then whatever fresh produce you like or things that are on the approved list. And so you have that like, let's say waiting in the wings in your in the back of your car, and then you go throw everything away into the garbage can in a five minute binge of of cleaning out that house.

[00:29:43.530] – Brad
But yeah, I can see that we're locked into routines and have difficulty with big change. But I think the restocking of the pantry with nutritious foods and maybe browsing the 40 recipes in the back of our book. And if you just flip through it and in a minute's time you'll see, wow, this stuff looks great. It's delicious. It's varied. And so there's so much you can do. And there's so many cookbooks now that are honoring the low carb or the ancestral approach.

[00:30:13.260] – Brad
And so there's no shortage of ideas. And for Gourmet's, that's great. They can go and look at the thirty-one ingredients and prepare a recipe that takes two hours. But for busy people or a lot of times, I encounter like my male peers aren't so gourmet in many cases. We wrote a couple of cookbooks called Keto Cooking for Cool Dudes and Carnivore Cooking for Cool Dudes, and we purposely made it not precise. You just throw in a little bit of this little bit of that, put some sardines in the skillet, crack a couple egg yolks, mix it up and you know, you can get these superfood meals without much time or energy or scrutiny.

[00:30:53.370] – Brad
And so that's the big one, is nourishing yourself with wonderful, delicious foods and doing it immediately so that there's not this lull where you don't know what to eat. You're fidgeting around and then you kind of reach for a really bad choice because your body's commanding you to consume calories. And that's no joke. I mean, a lot of people are starting out with a lot of discipline, motivation, willpower. And then it cracks because as we talked about offline, the human brain and the hypothalamus when it's hungry, there's nothing that can I mean, you're going to be pushing people out of the way to get something to sustain you.

[00:31:31.020] – Brad
So we have to do this in a strategic manner. And setting up those good meal habits is the big one, like I discussed with my omelet or whatever you want to put as the example.

[00:31:40.930] – Allan
And I think that's one of the keys. You know, when we talk about two meals a day or time-restricted eating, this is not like you immediately just jump in and say, okay, I had dinner tonight at seven o'clock and I'm not going to eat again until two o'clock tomorrow. That's typically not how this works. There's a transition period to doing time-restricted eating. And I like one of the things that you guys use used an acronym called WHEN which is When Hunger Ensues Naturally.

[00:32:12.090] – Allan
So it's kind of listening to your brain because invariably your brain's right. If it's telling you you're hungry, you're actually probably hungry. And if we try to not listen to it, then it's just too easy to fall back on old habits. And there's McDonald's. I'm driving by my windows down on a beautiful day. And I could smell it. If you're not answering yourself when you have control, now, you're in a situation where you probably don't.

[00:32:42.310] – Allan
And so how does someone go through? Because I know you guys have a plan in the book. You also have the recipes, which thanks for mentioning that, by the way, because I did want to make sure those are in there, too. How does someone go about approaching getting to two meals a day?

[00:32:58.510] – Brad
Yeah, good question. And I think when it's a really easy strategy to get your mind around and it's not intimidating or fearful. So when hunger ensues, naturally, we have to make sure that we really are talking about hunger.

[00:33:13.360] – Brad
And I think what we have today is boredom, prolonged periods of stillness with our lifestyles, especially working on the screen. And a lot of these things can mess up our metabolic function to the extent that we think we're hungry. But we might just benefit from going out and running two flights of stairs and returning to that default fat burning state that requires a little bit of movement throughout the day. There's research showing that if you sit still for as little as 20 minutes, you will experience a noticeable decrease in glucose tolerance and insulin resistance.

[00:33:52.090] – Brad
So in other words, you stop burning fat really well and you start to lose a little bit of cognitive function. The oxygen delivery, the blood circulation, everything kind of goes down because the body does not like to sit still for long periods of time. And so when you feel that decline in energy, we associate that with hunger perhaps. And then we go get an energy bar out of the drawer and we get a little boost for however long and then another drop and we go on this roller coaster all day long.

[00:34:22.390] – Brad
I'm kind of jumping without answering the question fully, but we do have to include those lifestyle elements into this picture. It's not just about your food choices, because if you're sitting there all day long in a chair not trying out this wonderful stand-up desk craze or thinking that you're too busy to take a one or two-minute break every 20 or 30 minutes, you're going to have real trouble adhering to a dietary transformation, especially getting rid of those carbohydrate foods that provide quick energy.

[00:34:56.590] – Brad
So back to trying to answer that question and integrating this concept of when hunger ensues, naturally, this implies that whatever fasting periods you're going to engage in, you're going to feel comfortable. You're going to have stable cognitive and even physical function in the absence of that meal. And that includes perhaps a workout some days where you can wake up in the morning, go through, even if it's a light workout, like a cardiovascular session at fat-burning heart rates, you want to feel good and strong .And that you're not needing, desperately needing calories to complete a 20 or 30-minute workout, maybe an hour workout or maybe a 20-minute high intensity workout where, of course, you have the energy stored in your body to complete it. But we have to kind of play it out in a natural and comfortable way.

[00:35:49.900] – Brad
Once you clean up the diet and get rid of those three toxic modern foods, we don't want to talk about anything. You can drop off this podcast right now or you can close the book at page seventy-one or whatever if you're unwilling or you haven't accomplished that goal. Because that's the gateway to a fat burning lifestyle. So once those foods are out of the picture, you're making good choices and you're having these nutrient-dense meals, then you can kind of tiptoe in this direction to say, okay how about if I wake up and wait around until hunger ensues naturally?

[00:36:26.920] – Brad
And that will be kind of a checkpoint as you do this exercise and see how long you can comfortably last before your meal, which is the exact opposite of the cavalier approach that you just mentioned, to say, okay tomorrow I'm going to suck it up and I'm going to wait till 2:00 p.m. and that's going to be a 16 hour or an 18 hour.

[00:36:47.230] – Brad
We want everything. We want you to kind of back into everything. So if you are keeping a food journal and you like that accountability, you write down when you eat after the fact because that's when you were hungry and you decided to eat, as opposed to saying, I have to make it till a certain time, otherwise I'm going to drop off the A-list on my plan here. So simple, sustainable, like we say, and doing it at the right time when you really feel you're ready.

[00:37:15.940] – Brad
And so let's say you wake up and at eight thirty in the morning your stomach is growling. And the reason your stomach is growling is because the prominent hunger hormone ghrelin is making it growling. So growling is an actual it's not just fun and games, it's an actual biological response, triggering hunger. And a lot of times the circadian rhythm is a strong influencer of this. So if you start skipping breakfast as part of this lifestyle transformation, you may experience these spikes in hunger in the morning because your body's used to eating at a certain time of day.

[00:37:52.120] – Brad
Maybe it's 2:00 in the afternoon when you always have your energy bar and soda break in the break room. And so you might experience hunger spikes, even though it's more circadian than that you're actually out of energy and you need food. So we have to learn to be more nuanced and more intuitive and see what our body is capable of. And you'll probably find that you're way more metabolically flexible than you even dreamed of, even right now. And then after three weeks of dietary restriction, getting rid of the junk. Oh, man. It's going to open up an amazing world of possibilities.

[00:38:25.370] – Brad
You and I know about these extreme enthusiasts where people will go on five-day fasts every quarter and twenty-four hour fasts once a week. And it seems like unimaginable to the average person. But when you get down to it, we're all pretty good at this stuff. We're all humans. If you have the ability to be patient and, you know, keep those junk foods out of the diet, you can really awaken some good fat-burning potential.

[00:38:56.420] – Allan
Yeah, there was this time and I've told this story on the podcast a couple of times, but I was I had some property and I went out there to do some work and just got up in the morning. I wasn't hungry. So I eat when I'm hungry. I don't even think about it unless I'm hungry. Then I'll eat for the most part. I might have a meal in the evening because only because I know if I don't, then I'm going to want to eat much later. And from a timing it doesn't make sense. But for everything else in my life, I'll just eat when I'm hungry. So I went through and I went out to my property and I finished the work. So I drive my tractor back onto the trailer and I'm going to leave the property and my truck got stuck. So I call AAA to come pull me out when he comes out there about an hour later, you know, which is what they've kind of promised. He was on time.

[00:39:41.290] – Allan
He went to pull me out and his truck broke. So, he had to call for a part. And so I just went ahead and grabbed. The reason I had this property was I had some fishing ponds. I'll just go do some fishing catch and release stuff. So I'm out there fishing. And it took him like four hours to get his truck fixed. He finally gets me out and then I'm driving back and I'm thinking to myself, it's six o'clock already. And I had a pretty tough morning work doing the work I was doing. It was not easy work. And I wasn't even thinking about food.

[00:40:15.020] – Allan
Before I got into what I'm doing with keto and fasting and just paying attention to the food I'm putting in my mouth versus eating what is there, I would have been chewing off my arm. But I had that flexibility we were talking about, I had the freedom that provides to basically say, I know when I'm actually hungry and I know what I'm not.

[00:40:41.900] – Allan
And it's it for a lot of people, it's kind of an interesting feeling because they think they're always hungry and then they actually feel full when they eat because they're eating, like you said, the highly-nutritious, high-quality foods. And they know what it feels like to actually be hungry because they let themselves actually get hungry before they eat again.

[00:41:04.910] – Brad
Right. And it's it is a wonderful feeling to experience hunger and then go satisfy that hunger with a great meal. And a lot of us are hugely disconnected from that because we just sit down because it's lunchtime and we're going to go have a business lunch. And then when we get home, of course, we're going to honor the the the dinner time and the family gathering. And all that stuff's great. And when we wake up in the morning, of course, we got to get some food before we rush off to our busy day.

[00:41:34.610] – Brad
But to rethink this and kind of open up the floodgates to a different alternative lifestyle and different choices like that. And then to realize that missing a meal is a positive checkmark in the direction of metabolic flexibility. So we can kind of relax, especially I know a lot of health-conscious people, they're trying to cover their nutritional bases every day and make sure that they eat enough protein and make sure that they get their superfood, antioxidant smoothies and all this stuff.

[00:42:04.730] – Brad
So to kind of recalibrate that a bit and realize that fasting is probably the biggest thing you can do for an immediate health boost, it beats any superfood ever known to mankind. And so skipping a meal is no big deal. It's a positive step in the direction of health. And then you can kind of turn eating into one of the great pleasures of life as it's intended to be, rather than another stop at the gas station, as if you were a race car and just need to refuel all day long, which is basically the story for most people that it's just fuel and calories, a lot of times empty calories, but you need them otherwise you're going to feel like crap at three p.m. at work and you're not going to get all your work done before five.

[00:42:54.050] – Allan
Yeah, we leave a second breakfast away. We don't need a second breakfast. You might not even need the first one.

[00:43:00.320] – Allan
There was another concept in the book that I thought was really important that I wanted to bring up because a lot of people, we're busy, we've got a lot going on in our lives and we're looking at the clock and we're thinking, you know, I wanted to get out of here and go get my workout in, but I just don't have that hour.

[00:43:16.940] – Allan
I need to stay in the office for another half hour to get some work done. And then, yeah, I got to go pick up the kids and we got to go do this. And my life is just this out of control kind of thing. But you have this concept. We talk about micro workouts. And I think so many people are stuck on the I have to work out for thirty minutes every day or an hour every day, or I might as well not do it. Can you kind of talk about micro workouts and how we can make those are part of a healthy lifestyle.

[00:43:46.160] – Brad
Yeah. Thanks, Allan. This is I got a big smile on my face because this is, I think, one of the greatest breakthroughs that we've seen in fitness in this century. I know the century's young. We got a lot ahead of us.

[00:44:00.710] – Brad
But really, the fitness industry as a whole has been stuck. It's been mired in this no pain, no gain, struggle and suffer mentality. And most of the programing is based on this idea that if we crush you hard enough, you can high-five your workout partner at the end. We can put you on the commercial and you'll order this expensive indoor bicycle or join the gym or continue with the package with your trainer who's urging you for more reps. And so for the people that are really into fitness, it works fine.

[00:44:33.510] – Brad
I used to be a professional triathlete, I trained all day long for a decade of my life and I loved it and I traveled around the world and I mixed with other athletes who also loved riding our bicycles one hundred miles through the mountains. And that was all fun and games and great stuff for us. But so many people have been marginalized by the traditional approach to fitness. And you walk in the gym, you know, 63% of people are intimidated when they look over to the free weight room. And another 27% are intimidated when they look in the window at the bootcamp class where the lady is screaming and urging you for more and more jumping up and down. And you're like, wow, I'm not even in shape enough to conceive of doing something like that to my body.

[00:45:13.880] – Brad
It's true. It's catering to the fitness extremist already. So for the average person who just as you described, is busy, might not be a fitness freak, maybe they didn't feel like an athlete when they were a kid and they're just on the outside looking in. This concept of micro workouts can appeal to everyone who wants to be healthier, not necessarily a fitness freak. Just have that baseline level of physical competency to get through life with more enjoyment and less risk of injury, especially as we get older. Falling is the number one cause of injury and death in Americans over age 65. Falling. Not, pick something else. I mean, come on falling? You're kidding me?

[00:46:05.680] – Brad
But that's what happens when we go into steady and prolonged demise. And so the micro workout conveys this idea that in a minute's time or two minutes' time, you can do a miniature little burst of explosive physical effort wherever you are. You don't need a lot of implements or contraptions you can do right now in your work cubicle drop for a set of 20 deep squats or however deep you can take them.

[00:46:32.590] – Brad
And even if you're a fit person, when you get to 17, 18, 19, your legs are going to feel it. So in one minute's time, you can get a nice miniature little workout and the benefits are tremendous. One of them is it breaks up these prolonged periods of stillness that are so harmful to our metabolic and cognitive function. So even a minute's bursts of running up a couple of flights of stairs, like I said before, or doing a set of deep squats.

[00:46:57.970] – Brad
I have a rule. I have a pull up bar over my closet door and it's like a supply closet. So every time I go in there to get a another Post-it pad or whatever it is, I do a set of pull-ups that might happen once a day. Big deal. It's not going to mess up my big workout that's planned for tomorrow. Maybe I'm recovering from something and I don't want to push myself too hard today, but a single set of pull-ups is nothing to write home about.

[00:47:25.750] – Brad
I don't have to write it in my fitness workout log or anything, but if you talk to me 365 days from now and I say, yeah, this is my daily pattern and oh by the way, when I throw the garbage out, I have to go through the side yard and sitting there in the side yard is a hexagonal deadlift bar with a moderate amount of weight on it. Nothing to write home about again to the muscle heads. But let's say there's two hundred pounds on that bar. And my rule is every time I throw the garbage away, I do at least one set of deadlifts and then I go about my busy day. Maybe sometimes I'll get into it. I have some free time and I might do three or four sets and make it something that's a little bit more significant.

[00:48:05.740] – Brad
But this very low bar to jump over, to enter the world of a fit, healthy, active person is what we need to progress within the overall approach to fitness. And I think the micro workouts are so fun. It can be something that you enjoy. If you have core competency, or technique, you do something as simple as possible, like doing a squat or running up your flight of stairs, walking back down, running up again.

[00:48:32.200] – Brad
And of course, we're so busy we can't devote any more than that. That's fine right now. But as it becomes part of a daily habit and you start sprinkling these things in over time, the amazing thing happens is that, I call it like flying under the radar, but building your fitness, but without that huge risk of breakdown, burnout, illness, and injury that occurs when you immerse yourself into the mainstream approach to fitness.

[00:49:00.550] – Brad
That's the person that signs up for the personal trainer package on January 1st. And by April Fool's Day, their shoulders aching and they're going to go get an MRI and they've finished their package and they're burnt out and they're fried and they don't like it anymore because it was too physically grueling. So this is a way to kind of tiptoe to even really fit. Just from sprinkling in these little sessions that don't bother you, so they're arguably safer and less downside risk than a devoted fitness regimen. And furthermore, the emerging science in exercise, physiology and general health study is that the obligation to just move more in daily life is ranking above adherence to a devoted fitness regimen for all manner of health and disease protection.

[00:49:52.140] – Brad
Because we're so still and sedentary that even the fitness freaks, there's this idea called the compensation theory of exercise. So it's a scientifically validated phenomenon where they've studied people that do adhere to a devoted fitness regimen. So let's say that's that neighbor of yours that rolls out of there before it gets light to go to their spin class every morning at six a.m. and they're really, really into it. But then they go on the subway, they commute, they sit at a desk all day, they come home and they binge on digital programming. So they're still in sedentary for hours and hours every day.

[00:50:35.760]
They showed that this population of devoted fitness enthusiasts who are otherwise sedentary had the same level of metabolic disease risk factors as people who didn't exercise. And you can think, look, even extreme fitness person who's training an hour every single day, that's seven hours a week. There's one hundred and sixty eight hours in a week. So if those other 100 plus hours, of course, we need to sleep.

[00:51:00.660]
So we got to take a third of that and be still. But if you're engaging in all these sedentary lifestyle patterns, the exercise is not going to help you. And instead we just have to move more. Mark Sisson coined this term JFW it stands for just effing walk and that would be the centerpiece of a more active lifestyle. And you can get more health and even fitness benefit from walking more versus going and punching your gym ticket even more and pushing yourself really hard once in a while or an hour a day.

[00:51:34.620] – Allan
What I like about those is that it's something you can fit around your normal workday. So you're sitting at your desk and you want to get up to go to the restroom or go get some water or something. And so you just sit there and say, I'm a pop out 5, 10 squats, bodyweight squats. And the other cool thing about him is because these are these are things that you're adding to your day. You can really put a little bit of forethought, forethought to them and say, I want these to be functional exercises, not just something like a spin class where I know I'm burning calories, but quite frankly, you're saying squats, fundamental movement. You talked about deadlifts with the hex bar, fundamental movement to build strength in your legs, strengthen your core. You know, all of these things that even pull ups, there's some function to being able to climb going upstairs.

[00:52:26.820] – Allan
All of those are functional movements that you're building into your day that might otherwise not include any workout at all. So I just like how that can be a part of every day. You can just have those triggers. You can be doing squats while you're brushing your teeth, so there's so many opportunities for you to to do these types of things in your day and not having to think that you have to dedicate an hour or it's wasted. I just like that concept.

[00:52:56.370] – Brad
Yeah, I was just talking to someone the other day about this and they're expressing a bit of interest. How do I throw this in? I spend a lot of time at night watching my TV shows, he said. I said, well, make a rule then. If you're going to binge watch, at least in between every episode drop for a set of twenty pushups or squats or whatever. Put some rules in place because I think, hey, I listen to a lot of podcasts. I fill my mind with these great ideas. Do I execute on every single one of them? No, I don't, because I'm just too busy or whatever my excuse is.

[00:53:27.690] – Brad
So in this case, what worked for me really well, Allan was I wanted to kind of raise the fitness platform from which I launched my formal workouts because I've been a long-time fan of sprinting. I'm obsessed with high jumping. Now I compete in the old man's Masters high jump track and field.

[00:53:46.800] – Allan
Now, 55 to 59 is not old man. I refuse to accept that.

[00:53:50.630] – Brad
I'm slotted in that division, whatever you want to call it, man. So I go out and do these awesome workouts, let's say once a week and they're pretty tough. And when I get to the track I'm all pumped up and I'm competitive and I feel great. But of course I learn over the next 36 to 48 hours and I kind of pushed it too hard there. And my calves are screaming and I'm in pain now and I'm really tired. And so what was happening was I wasn't approximating that big challenge very frequently because I couldn't I had to rest and recover and the go hit it once a week again.

[00:54:23.860] – Brad
And so what I designed was this morning, routine of flexibility, mobility, core strengthening, just a fun little thing that's predicated to help me with the muscle strength and mobility I need for sprinting and jumping, I'd say. But I threw this in and decided to do it every single morning. Again, not that strenuous, but it chips away at my fitness without interrupting my busy day. I'm on a streak now of over four years, where I have not missed a single day of this wonderful morning flexibility, mobility, strengthening routine. And it started out as something really modest because I wanted to have that low bar to jump over to tell myself I'm going to commit to doing this. I'm not going to miss a day. And again, it's not too much trouble. I'm not dripping in sweat at the end, but to have it as part of my lifestyle, where I don't even have to think about it now and I get through this, it used to be a 12-minute routine and now it's a minimum of thirty five minutes.

[00:55:25.390] – Brad
I know that's not doable for many people, but whatever you have to commit to. So if you can say, hey, I'm going to give the first five minutes of my day and I'm going to do the yoga sun salutation sequence, you can see that on YouTube. It's the foundation of a yoga class where you stretch and then you compress and then you sweep and you do these movements. But if you can say that you do that every single day, we'll count that in this micro workout category and then everything else flows from there because now you've built into place this rule that this is now part of your lifestyle. It's not negotiable. It's going to become a habit.

[00:55:59.500] – Brad
And then you'll set yourself up for more success doing these little these little tidbits that we described about, you know, lifting the deadlift bar when you go through the garbage can. So I want to make sure the listener can take away something that's so simple that they might even scoff at how easy it is to implement this new commitment of five minutes a day or let's say you put a sticky note on your computer or your office door and say 40 squats before you leave the office every day. And if it's 4:57 p.m. and you're clocking out at five, I don't know if it's a home office or you're leaving whatever and you haven't done it, then you've got to do 40 right there. No big deal.

[00:56:40.090] – Brad
But if you do 10, you know, on the on the 90 minute break, you set your little timer, then it's nothing. And so we have to put rules in place because it's easy to let these things slide. And if the goal is really modest, boy, that's when I think we can build that momentum. And that's what's happened in my life with my morning routine.

[00:57:02.080] – Allan
Brad, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:57:09.850] – Brad
Whoo! Number one is to implement that morning routine and make it five minutes. Don't even go beyond that until you get into a good groove. So that one I'm really strong. It's been a life-changing thing for me, especially because I'm not a template, regimented guy. I answer to myself, I work for myself, I work from home. And so I can do whatever I want every day. But this thing is really anchored my day. And the fact that I can do that and tell the public about it, I believe it helps me become a more focused and disciplined person in every other way for the rest of my day and all the distractions that I face. So the morning routine, number one.

[00:57:54.970] – Brad
Number two is ditch those big three toxic modern foods, do it for twenty-one days. And what you'll discover is you'll habituate away from this nibbling on sugar and grain-based, high-calorie snacks. Your body will actually feel better, even though you're giving up what you think are these precious things that you can't do without and that you deserve so much. After working that hard day, of course you deserve a pint of processed ice cream with chemicals in there. Even hippie trippy Ben and Jerry's products have vegetable industrial seed oils and some of the flavors. I couldn't believe it when I saw it on the side of the box. So ditch the big three.

[00:58:36.460] – Brad
And then you asked for three, right?

[00:58:38.080] – Allan
Yes.

[00:58:39.130] – Brad
Number three is don't take on too much, so just do the first two.

[00:58:43.890] – Allan
Oh, I like that. All right, Brad if someone wanted to learn more about you and Mark Sisson and your book, Two Meals a Day, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:58:53.650]
Oh, thanks. We have this cool landing page called TwoMealsaDayBook.com, and you can get, it's called preorder bonus items. But even as the book has been released just before the show came out, you can still get our cool preorder bonuses. There's an audio summary, a recipe PDF, and a discount coupon to go shopping for healthy condiments at Primal Kitchen. And then if you go over and visit BradKerns.com, you will be regaled by wild and crazy videos like my morning routine, you can learn what I do and watch me break the world record and speed golf, don't worry if you only have a minute and thirty-eight seconds, that's all it took for me to play the fastest hole of golf ever played.

[00:59:33.240] – Brad
And I'm trying to promote all these healthy lifestyle practices that we live and breathe every day. But I also think it's important to put in a vote for having fun and having a lighthearted approach. So you'll see me kind of being silly. Same without my BRad podcast. I like to inject that sense of humor and not taking ourselves too seriously as we try to improve our lives and optimize in so many different ways.

[00:59:58.050] – Allan
You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/477 and I'll be sure to have all the links there. Brad, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[01:00:08.010] – Brad
Thank you, Allan. Great show. Keep up the good work.

[01:00:10.710] – Allan
Thank you.


Post Show/Recap

[01:00:16.090] – Allan
Welcome back, Raz.

[01:00:17.830] – Rachel
Oh, Allan, what a neat conversation, Brad seems like a really energetic guy.

[01:00:22.990] – Allan
He is a very energetic guy. And for those of you that don't know what speed golf is, that I went right over your head. But basically, speed golf is a sport where you hit the golf ball off the tee and then you run to the ball and they basically add your strokes to your time of the run. And so the secret is to run it really, really quickly, to quickly hit the ball again, but be generally accurate because you don't want to be running all over the golf course and then get the ball in the hole. And he managed on a par five basically to get a par four, a birdie. And he did it in just over a minute and a half. I don't know that I could even just run from the tee to the hole in that amount of time. But I just know when I played golf the walking, because I'd be on one side and then I'd be on the other side, then I'd overshoot the hole and then I'd be over here and then I'd be over there. By the time I got through the hole of golf, I'd already walked the whole golf course.

[01:01:23.800] – Allan
And so so that probably not the sport for me. I'm not a sprinter. I'll be the slow go. But yeah, basically that's that's one of the sports he participates in now. And he's a hoot. It's fun to watch people do crazy stuff like that. But just yo actually meet someone who's got the world record at it. It's kind of awesome.

[01:01:48.490] – Rachel
That is a riot. What a funny sport. I just love it.

[01:01:53.350] – Allan
We got into a couple of important things. I mean, obviously with the two meals a day concept is something that I feel a little bit more confident I could do rather than the one meal a day. And it's only because I don't know that I could eat enough calories at one sitting comfortably and to make sure that I'm still getting all the nutrition. The second meal would… I'm going to have to do that so effectively when I eat, I intuitively end up eating two, sometimes I have three meals in my eight hour, six hour window, but easily two meals would work out very well for me.

[01:02:29.920] – Rachel
Sure. Yeah. It seems a lot more doable and easy to plan out too. I like that concept.

[01:02:36.370] – Allan
And then we got into the toxic food stuff. And yes, we've talked about sugar on this podcast. Actually, I think maybe even my second episode, episode number two was about sugar. We know what sugar is doing to us. We know for the most part what bread is usually doing to almost all of us. And then the seed oils is an area where I probably don't talk about enough. And in the worst part of it is, the labeling on foods, all the seed oils are going to have heart-healthy on their label, because they're not saturated fat and unfortunately they're still horrible, horrible food for you to be putting in your body.

[01:03:24.950] – Allan
But they managed to get to a point where they're marketing, the healthy thing, it just breaks my heart. Eat healthy canola oil. And I'm like, no.

[01:03:38.840] – Rachel
It is really confusing. And that was hard for me too when I started keto, because you think of an oil that's derived from a plant or a seed, I mean, that sounds perfectly healthy. What could possibly be wrong? And then when you add the label on to it that says that it's heart-healthy, what could be wrong? The government said that it's healthy. So how do you weed that out? It's taken a long time to unlearn some of these habits.

[01:04:06.160] – Allan
Yeah. It does it just that that kind of stuff just drives me nuts. If you want to eat heart healthy, you're going to eat a lot of grains. You're going to eat a lot of those seed oils. And then the worst part of it is if you're going to try to go low fat otherwise and what are they going to do? They're going to put sugar in the food to make it palatable. So you're getting the trifecta of the bad toxic foods, just trying to follow the guidelines that our government is so kind to put out there for us.

[01:04:38.540] – Rachel
It's so crazy. Now, what kind of oils do you like to use when you're cooking? We've we found good success with coconut oil. It's easy and it cooks well. And it's got a good flavor.

[01:04:50.090] – Allan
I use I use avocado oil. Some I like to use I like to use coconut oil, particularly like if I'm going to make something that's more of an Asian style restaurant. So like, let's say I'm going to stir fry some chicken and some vegetables and then I want maybe I'm going to try to make it into more of an Oriental flavor or I'm going to put some coconut and curry. I'll use the coconut oil in that. If I'm going to make something that's going to be more of like a meat sauce or something like that, I'll use I'll just use the hamburger and I don't drain it.

[01:05:22.940] – Rachel
Right.

[01:05:23.600] – Allan
Those recipes are like drain the oil.

[01:05:25.584] – Rachel
No.

[01:05:27.680] – Allan
Throw away half your food.

[01:05:30.110] – Rachel
Yeah. Don't don't replace that with more oil. That's good stuff.

[01:05:33.350] – Allan
We're going to throw away half the egg because we don't want to eat the yolk. We're going to throw away the fat because we don't want fat. And I'm like, no, put that in there. It's delicious. It's what makes hamburger taste good. When you take all that oil out, it tastes like dirt. So I'll do that. And then, like, if I'm going to use like an olive oil, I'll use it as a dressing. Or I will sometimes, like if I've cooked a sauce once I'm done cooking the sauce and now it's just kind of warm, heat it ready to go. I'll slather in some olive oil at that point to give us a little bit more umph.

[01:06:09.780] – Allan
And then I, I love cooking with butter. I love cooking with butter. I'll get the Kerry Gold or good quality butter. We've got two or three brands down here that are grass fed cows from Panama and I assume they speak Spanish. They make butter and that's it's a good butter. I'll cook eggs with that.

[01:06:34.250] – Allan
Sometimes when we're going to have bacon and I cook the bacon in the pan, I might use the grease, some of the grease and bacon and just cook it with that. I'm not afraid of saturated fat because what I have found is saturated fat makes my HDL go up. And the ratio of total cholesterol, the HDL improves when I'm eating saturated fat. If I take out the saturated fat, my HDL plummets, my LDL goes down maybe a little bit, but not enough to matter as far as the doctors are concerned. And my HDL is still relatively high. So my ratio of high total to HDL is terrible. So, I want to have the best markers I can have. I'm not worried about the total because I could eliminate all of my HDL and still be over the number. And even when I did statins, my cholesterol was still over 250.

[01:07:42.320] – Allan
And I can't get any lower. So, it is what it is. I just accept that so. I'll use I'll use saturated fat, you know, I eat fish regularly, so I'm getting some omega three oils from the fish.

[01:08:02.270] – Rachel
Good.

[01:08:02.660]
Sometimes I will take krill oil. If I'm not getting enough fish, I'll go ahead and take some krill. Well, and get some more in there. Most of what I'm eating are grass-fed beef. So there's some good fats as far as I'm concerned. Good fats in there because it's grass-fed, grass-finished. So that saturated fat is actually not bad for me. Eggs and pastured eggs. That fat I don't think is bad for me. And then cooking wise avocado oil, olive oil once it's already cooked because I'm not going to cook with olive oil and then just plain old butter.

[01:08:36.560] – Rachel
That sounds great. That's about what we use in the at our house as well. The coconut oil, avocado, occasionally olive, but not often. And of course we also have butter. And I also have a little can of ghee, which I use that on occasion as well. So that was that sounds good. Yeah. The other thing Brad mentioned, which I have to say I kind of geeked out about, was micro workouts. I really liked his idea of well, he mentioned doing a minute here, a minute there, push ups or squats and and lifts and whatnot.

[01:09:09.110] – Rachel
I tell all my friends that if you're struggling with motivation, you're not feeling it. Do half a workout or go out for one mile. You don't have to spend two hours at the gym. If you just take five or ten minutes and get a little fresh air, do something that gets your heart rate up. I mean, that's enough to move for that day.

[01:09:28.010] – Allan
Yeah, there used to be this kind of mantra that you needed to have your heart rate up in the cardio zone for at least twenty-four minutes. And apparently there was a study, but the doctors, now they've done the science and they're kind of like now you're going to get the same benefit doing five 5-minute workouts, as you would, doing a 24 or 25 minute workout. So just anything that's going to get your heart rate up for just even five minutes is going to be beneficial.

[01:10:02.440] – Allan
And actually, one of the other things I really like about microworkouts is that there's something that you can spread movement throughout the day. If you go to work and you think I'm going to sit at the desk for a solid four hours, then I'm going to have lunch and then I'll sit at the desk for another five hours and not move during that period of time other than an occasional toilet break or get some coffee. You're sitting still and, you know, whereas if you when you got up to get that coffee, just did some jumping jacks or, you know, some bodyweight squats or a couple of push-ups and then move around, your energy level is going to go up and you might find you don't actually need that coffee,

[01:10:50.410] – Rachel
Right? Yeah. Just get your blood pumping, get a little fresh air. And that might be enough to energize you for the rest of the afternoon.

[01:10:58.300] – Allan
And there's another part of the micro workout theme that I like. So sometimes we wake up in the morning and we're lik I really don't feel like running. I don't feel like it. Then we put we force ourselves to do it. But I got to do it. I got to have my streak intact. That got to do it. And we get out there. And this very unfortunate thing happens is that our bodies were actually fatigued.

[01:11:21.710] – Allan
We had not recovered properly from our workouts and because maybe because we weren't feeling right, maybe because we weren't sleeping right, maybe because just doing too much, too soon. We're not recovered. And because we didn't listen to our body, we're doing more harm than good. So, looking at it from a micro workout, you get there and say, I really don't want to do this, but then you say, I'll do it for five minutes.

[01:11:47.780] – Rachel
Yes.

[01:11:48.650] – Allan
And if after that five minutes you're not feeling it, stop. Please stop. Your body was talking to you and you were ignoring it or trying to override it with reason. Please do this when the body really did need recovery time so that if you get out there for five minutes, you've got the benefit of that five minutes and you're not overtraining. And then a lot of people, you just start it like I started my route and I ran out two minutes and I agree that I'm going to turn my back two minutes or sometimes you just realize I want to keep running. I don't actually want to stop now and you get your full workout in because that's what you needed to do.

[01:12:32.630] – Allan
So microworkouts kind of have two functions. One is that you're breaking up the work into smaller portions, which sometimes makes it easier to fit into a busy day.

[01:12:41.060] – Rachel
Right.

[01:12:41.600] – Allan
And then the other thing is micro workouts can kind of be that strategy to get you started. I'm at least going to do five minutes and then if I'm done, I'm done. And you can listen to your body, as you put it, through the paces. And I just know when I ran a lot, I hated the first two or three minutes of running. I hate it. You start going and it's like man, this sucks. Then something clicks on when your body warms up and then it feels good.

[01:13:15.140] – Rachel
That's true. Some of us like to say the first mile is a liar and that you feel that this isn't right. I got to shake out the cobwebs. I'm not feeling it today. But then once you get that first mile under your belt, sometimes the to the second and third or however long you're out there, they just fly right by. So, yeah, for sometimes the first miles is a liar. Sometimes it's the first five minutes of a workout that's a liar.

[01:13:38.960] – Rachel
But yeah, if you could just do something it's better than nothing. And like Brad mentioned if you're sitting there watching TV at night, do some pushups during the commercials and then do some sit-ups during the next commercial. I mean, just these little movements throughout the day, it's always better than nothing at all.

[01:13:57.350] – Allan
Absolutely. And with the commercials the way they are today, I mean, the 30-minute program has eight minutes of commercials.

[01:14:05.810] – Rachel
Just about, yes. Pretty much.

[01:14:08.840] – Allan
You don't have to watch too much TV and you've got an hour of workouts done yet. Half an hour anyway, watching a couple hours of TV. You got half an hour right there, just watching two hours of TV. So if it's a popular program, because when they first start out, they don't. And I see this because I watch stuff on Netflix and I'll see a show the first year it came out. And, they have basically five to six minutes of commercials.

[01:14:38.390] – Allan
And then by the time they get to their fifth or sixth season, that's it's up to over eight minutes of commercials now because I'm flipping through these this shows, I'm like, how could I just watch five shows on Netflix and an hour and all those damn commercials that I'm not having to watch.

[01:14:55.130] – Rachel
Right? For sure.

[01:14:56.750] – Allan
Netflix is a little different as far as if you're going to be doing them because they don't have the advertisements, the commercials. But, okay, you know, you watch half the show or watch the show and then do the work before you start that next episode.

[01:15:13.760] – Rachel
That's right.

[01:15:17.810] – Allan
Alright, Rachel, anything else you want to go over before we cut out?

[01:15:20.390] – Rachel
No, that was great. Great conversation.

[01:15:22.700] – Allan
All right. Well, let's we'll talk next week.

[01:15:24.800] – Rachel
You bet. Take care.

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