Stan Effering, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. What do you think are the main causes of the obesity epidemic? Why is it that the average Americans got so much fatter over the last few decades?
I don't want to talk about what Stan thinks. I want to talk about what we see as probably what the academic community's consensus is. I'm kind of a co-lator of information as a personal trainer for 30 years, and I want to deliver that information to my clients and make sure it's evidence-based. So I'll refrain from opinions.
I've tried that in the past and I've been probably correctly and soundly informed of my inaccuracy. So at the core of it all, we're consuming more calories than we used to 50 years ago. We know that from all the research. And the majority of those calories are the cause of that seems to be hyper-palatable ultra-processed foods.
And it seems to have interfered with our ability to become satiated and so we're eating too much. And we're in this food environment where that's really easy to do. It's hard to shut it off. And so it really is calories.
And I know that sparks a whole bunch of bad feelings from folks. It kind of gets you those strong arguments about Kiko, calories in, calories out, it doesn't work and all of that. But it's a little bit more complex than that. I've said, move more, eat less is truthful, but not useful.
Necessary but not sufficient, perhaps. Yeah, well, it's just it is what's happening and it is the solution. It's simple, but it's not easy. So there's a whole host of factors I think we can dive into on that.
But in fact, remember, in this calories, Kiko is an oversimplification. It's actually an under-balance, energy-balanced equation that accounts for all of these variables, which we may talk about. The total daily energy intake minus the total daily energy expenditure. And there's a whole host of things that go into both sides of that equation that really accounts for just about everything that goes into the weekend.
Why is calories in, calories out, and diet, fads, and discussions in general, so emotionally charged? I would think that this would just be, I'm not calling you a good or a bad person. There's no reason for you to believe that you are anything. This isn't a comment on you and yet diet discussions online are some of the most virulent and aggressive that you see.
They really are. I think part of it might just be that we want to find, I said, in the tail of the donkey, find one single source that maybe is something that we could fix. If we just got rid of it, the carbohydrate insulin model spawned from that, where if you eat a grape and your insulin goes up, that you're going to gain fat, and you can't lose fat, you can't lose fat. Certain demonizing certain foods became very popular.
There's still a lot of that going on, whether it's fructose, or sea oils, or anything that might correlate with over-consumption. I think also that when you talk about calories and calories out, it seems to blame the victim, the individual who's having a hard time losing weight, you blame them, you're overeating, you're lazy, you're undisciplined, that kind of thing, without paying attention to all the other factors that go into that. It's just an oversimplification. I suppose that calories and calories out, when you fold in how hyper-palatable these new foods are, it's not putting all of the blame at the feet of the victim.
It's like, look, this is a relatively unfair battle because of how well-engineered these foods are for you to overeat. Now, ultimately it's you to put it in your mouth, but it is a more difficult uphill climb. Agreed. Another problem is that while we have a genetic predisposition, obviously, now we're starting to see that certain people have different hunger signaling, ghrelin release, leptin sensitivity, or lack thereof, and certain people, while we don't believe their basal metabolic rate is significantly different, we do see that some people are more active, what's called non-exercise activity thermogenesis than others.
My son and daughters like that. My son, you have to almost check and see if he's breathing when he's sitting there watching TV sometimes. It's like a zombie, and my daughter can't sit down, and she's humming all the time and tapping her toes and bouncing around and skipping, and she has to get up, and two very different movement patterns. People with high non-exercise activity thermogenesis can burn over a thousand calories a day more than somebody with low non-exercise activity thermogenesis.
We see that in active individuals versus, say, sedentary jobs versus say, a construction worker waitress is opposed to a desk worker. We see a lot of calories can be accounted for in that component of the equation, the energy balance equation. Those things all play into it, and then there's also a big social component to talk about some folks in lower socioeconomic environments are exposed to more of this hyper-palatable to process food from an earlier age. It's very affordable.
It's very convenient and accessible, and that has a huge impact. What role does the formative years of growing up have on our palate and what we enjoy? There's a period of life. I think it's between about 10 and 15, and the music that you listen to during that time is very formative for the kind of music that you will enjoy throughout the rest of your life.
Are you aware of this in equivalent when it comes to tastes and diets and stuff? I'm not sure, but I think that, obviously, children are going to migrate towards the kind of foods that taste the best, presuming they're allowed in the home to whatever degree. But we do see that children with obese parents who tend to gain more weight and earlier age and have a higher likelihood of becoming obese as they get older. So it is definitely a problem that has to be addressed at a very early age.
You mentioned seed oils, which is one of the four horsemen of the diet apocalypse. I'm not sure what the other three are. Just how about a seed oil? What's the truth about them?
Well, before we jump on here, I talked about people of all, science of all, when you overlay a graph of seed oil consumptions against obesity, you see a very strong correlation. I mean, they would just look identical. And so one would, correlation is not equal causation. One would think that that was one of the potential causes.
Everything else seems to have gone down over time for us. The sugar consumption seems to have stabilized or gone down over time. But seed oils, like a lot of things, I'll kind of best explain this. There's they're not all the same thing.
So here's what the academic community is saying now that we don't have any evidence that seed oils cause inflammation in their natural form, if that can even be said about seed oils. There's nothing natural necessarily about them. But in so much as they are a part of processed foods, ultra processed foods, about 70% of seed oils are consumed as a part of ultra processed foods and fast foods. Now, seed oils reheat it.
Think French fries, you know, any of those chicken nuggets, whatever, in those big vats of oil that you reheat, those do show inflammatory response and increase the cardiovascular disease risk. So that is a problem. I did a video many years ago. It's a real poison that's killing us.
So I'm certainly guilty of having put all seed oils into one bucket. But in that video, I did say I'm biased. They are a poison to me. Seed oils I discovered many years later give me diarrhea.
I go into great detail if anybody wants to know if it's not TMI in my video. Some of those where you're running to the bathroom and you can't quite make it, you have to stop and do that kegel exercise or something bad. It's going to happen before you get there. It's one of those deals.
And it's very unique to seed oils. And I know when I've consumed too much of them, the flat iron steak cooked in a big pool of seed oil at a restaurant. Otherwise, you know, I wouldn't have a problem if it was grilled on a flame or when I cook it at home in a ninja grill or something. Very different spots.
Even going to restaurants and getting, you know, I own a meal prep company. And so we have to we have to get eggs for the meal prep company. And some of those eggs come in five gallon buckets, like at, you know, some of the restaurants that you would eat at a denise or the like. And they just ladle the eggs and put them on the grill.
And so I would ask, please, no oils, because I'm allergic to these oils. Well, come to find out a lot of those buckets of eggs. We had a hard time finding them that didn't weren't already adulterated with seed oils, whether it was canola oil or soybean oil, partly for preservation, because there's a survey, but probably partly because that's an inexpensive additive, which would, you know, increase, I guess, the profit margin on the five gallon bucket. When I would consume those, because there's already seed oil in the mixture, then I would have the same problem.
And so it's been very difficult for me over the years. I used to love to go to some of these, for those all unique grills that they have with, and they just get steak and chicken and, you know, rice and have them grill them. But they would put a big ladle of these oils on there to cook it in. And I would have gastric distress.
So as a personal matter, I've objected quite strongly. I went down the West D.A. Price rabbit hole, and Neatichols rabbit hole for seed oils. And I was, you know, I was fully on that team, but the literature does not support if you were not allergic to them like I am, and you're not reheating them, or overconsuming them, it doesn't support any other adverse effect than that.
Have you got any idea how common a adverse reaction, a intolerance of seed oils is? I don't. And I used to think it was relatively common because a lot of people would suffer from IBS and in IBD. But I can't make that assessment.
I just know that's how I respond. And I have, of course, in my business come across a lot of people who maybe felt that was the same. But I just don't think there's research to support it. You had a problem with one of the great American institutions that I'm a massive fan of.
Cheesecake Factory. Yeah. They diddled you. They diddled you with a burger, maybe.
Yeah. Now I can get one of my favorite meals that I've been promoting for years is monster mash. I trademarked that monster mash. It's just a blend of say, ground beef or bison with white rice and some bone broth.
And I'll mash all that together. I might cook some peppers and throw it in there a little bit of spinach and maybe even scramble that. And this is my mash. I make this and sell it, ship it all over the states to people.
And I give it to all my clients that, you know, Hofthor Bjornsson and Brian Shaw and the rest of them, Lane Johnson's favorite meal in Monster Mash. And so I can get that meal at Cheesecake Factory. But they will, either based or put the burger in sear at first in vegetable oil before they put it on the flame grill to prevent it from burning, to keep it. And the same thing would be true, say, of those roasted chickens, the rotisserie chickens at Costco.
They base those with vegetable oil because it helps prevent them from burning. They can cook there a little longer. And so little little things I have to watch out for. So yes, Cheesecake Factory is my one device.
But because I'm so OCD, I'm a creature of habit that ever since I've been going there, I go order my little monster mash from them. I get a side hamburger patty, a side of white rice, a side of bone broth, maybe throw in some pickles and of course the sourdough bread is always good. And that's my favorite meal at Cheesecake. And I don't much participate in desserts.
I've never been that way. Needless to say, my wife and kids order something very different. But that's my favorite spot to stop at, because they're generally in every big city in the country and I travel a lot. I'm a Cheesecake guy, a big fan of Cheesecake Factory.
What is, how do you explain to people? Let's say that somebody hasn't been introduced to the vertical diet before. How do you conceptualize it? How do you explain it to people?
Yeah. You know, the vertical diet is really everything I want my clients to know and to do. It's a compilation of everything I've learned from over 30 years, from college to coaching to competing to being coached, collaborating with great athletes, and then partnering with Dr. Damon McCune who's a PhD, R.D.N.
Director of Dietetics at UNLV. And we got together and spent a couple of years together producing and putting science to over 250 peer-reviewed published articles and then, of course, references to lots of videos. I think professionals in the industry and they're in their respective fields that help my clients navigate all the things that are important, because it's multi-factorial. It's not just a diet.
It's nutrition, it's digestion, it's sleep, hydration, injury prevention, rehab, blood testing, blood sugar, blood pressure, management. It's just a chapter, chapter, chapter, of the things that I've commonly, questions I've been asked and things that I want my clients to do to be successful in a program, because it's not just one thing. And poor sleep, we die, it's not going to fix that problem. You know, we've got a crappy diet and everything else suffers.
And so I try and make sure that I cover all these bases for them. Of course, there's a lot of individual, inter-individual variability. So I have to, it feels like I'm rewriting every program when I deal with a client. I give them a detailed questionnaire and have them respond.
I find out what their goals are, what their genetic predispositions are, you know, what they prefer in terms of foods that they like to eat and when they like to eat, where they like to eat, just kind of their lifestyle, the constraints they might have, the injuries, the digestive distress, the blood work, because I might be able to see, you know, challenges that need to be overcome. And then try and make sure that they can improve each and every one of those areas that I think are important. And I ask them to send me on a daily basis, not weekly, because I think by then, if somebody goes off the rails for three days, they might go to a union, lose them on a daily basis. I ask them to send me their hours of sleep, their morning body weight, and a picture of each meal.
So it's more for their information, you know, their accountability, that which gets measured, gets improved, and then it is for my information necessarily unless I see something that's significantly awry. And then weekly, we do waste measurements and progress pictures, because oftentimes we're the last to see our progress. And if I get a client to take a progress picture on day one, two months later, like I'm not making any progress, you put those side by side. In general, you see a significant change that they don't see.
And the scale might not tell the whole story. You might get a client who only loses two pounds, but they might lose four inches on their waist and it looks significantly tighter and maybe stronger and feel better. So all of those things factor into it. From the diet side, what are the principles that you're following?
What are the thermodynamics of the vertical diet? Let's see if I can go down this one, two, three calories or king. If you want to gain weight, you have to be in a surplus. And remember, I did both bodybuilding and powerlifting throughout my career.
So I bulked up to over 300 pounds, and I dieted down to single digit body fat to compete as a bodybuilder, and then bulked back up to compete as a powerlifter. So conservatively speaking, over a 25 year competing, going back as far as 1988, I've gained and lost well over 1,000 pounds. And I've learned a lot of lessons along the way. I did a lot wrong.
I would say if I knew then what I know now, I would have saved myself a whole lot of trouble and probably been able to perform at a much higher level at a much younger age because I didn't reach my peak until I turned 40. So calories are king. Surplus to gain weight, deficit to lose weight. Next would be your macros, protein being the most important of those, getting sufficient proteins to fuel or to build muscle or at least to retain lean mass when dieting.
And protein can be manipulated to either eat less of it in order to be less satiated so you can eat more total calories. That's actually a strategy that we use for people of a hard time eating enough food, because it's very satiating and has a high thermic effect of food, meaning for every hundred calories you consume, you net out about 70. Just the calorie cost of digesting protein is more so than carbs and fats. Or if you're trying to lose weight, we might bump that up instead of a gram per pound of goal weight.
We might even go up to 1.2 grams. For the very same reason, flipping the script, it's more satiating and has a higher thermic effect of food. So you feel like you're eating more volume of food, but you're netting out less total calories. So that's macros, protein being the most important of which, you have to have sufficient fats for health to get to sleep, for your hormones.
You start getting too low on fats and you're going to have some problems with both of those things. And now we start getting into my personal preference, because fats beyond that, which provides you a health benefit, don't provide you a performance benefit. And so the rest, for me, is carbs. About 30, 35% protein, about 30% fat, and that's actually about a two to one protein to fat ratio.
If you're going to consume 200 grams of protein, you get about 100 grams of fat. They're equivalent in terms of calories, because you've got nine calories per gram for fat and four calories per gram per protein. But it's around 35% protein, around 30% fat, and that would leave about 40% carbs, which I think are important for performance. I don't just me think that, but that's what science tells us, especially anaerobic performance, which would be strength, training, sports, explosive sports.
Those carbohydrates are very important for those bouts of training and performance. And so I leave room in there. I also find that that more closely is what's commonly consumed, although the protein is a little higher. People would consume more commonly around 18%.
We see that say in the Mediterranean diet. That's about an 18% protein diet. No one accidentally eats more than about 0.7 or 0.8 grams of protein per kilo of body weight. No one accidentally, unless you go to the buffet that you mentioned earlier on, it has to be purposeful.
And it should be. I believe it should be. You heard Dr. Gabriel Lyons talking about being the organ of longevity.
It's a sink for glucose. That goes to great descriptors of what protein is. We also see that when you compare a 30% protein intake to an 18% protein intake, say with the Mediterranean diet, you see improved insulin sensitivity, improved glucose numbers. Again, for a couple of reasons, protein seems to decrease post-prandial glycemia, particularly when you eat it first in a month.
After a meal, post-prandial, glycemia would be the peak elevation and duration of blood sugars measured as an area under the curve. And so when you eat protein first and you eat a large amount of protein, you have fewer fluctuations, less area under the curve of blood sugar, post-meal. And so that tends to help for that reason as well. And likely because you're eating less of other foods if you're eating more protein, and just less what we call glycemic load, probably fewer total carbs.
So that's kind of where I put my percentages. I find that that's, and then those carbs, the proteins consist of a wide variety of proteins. I like to see red meat in the diet, and we can dive into that. I like to see salmon in the diet, at least two or three times a week, obviously for EPA and DHA, mega threes.
I like to see dairy in the diet. Preferentially yogurt, battery Greek yogurt is one of my favorites. It's a superfood. I like Costco's Kirkland Greek yogurt as fat-free because it's not chalky, it's still creamy, just as a personal preference for taste.
I like to see eggs. It could be an egg egg white blend because I want to keep the yolk in there for all the vitamins and minerals in there, the Colleen and the Biotin and the like. I mentioned red meat. I should have said iron B12 to sink all those things, but I'll use a leaner cut because ultimately, and I probably should have started with this, it's the overall dietary pattern that matters a lot more than individual foods.
I don't think you should eat too much of anything. You could potentially leave you exposed to having too little of something else possibly. In the case of say red meat, of course, there is maybe some concern that fatty meats or too high saturated fats intake may elevate LDL in some individuals, and therefore increase cardiovascular disease risk. That's multifactorial.
I don't presume to think that that's the only thing that matters, but that is something that we do pay attention to, particularly in blood work, because we certainly want to keep people's LDL within the range that generally saturated fats are under 10% of total calories. It's kind of easy to do. If 30% of your total calories are fats, and something like a top sirloin steak or even a egg white blend, only about a third of that is saturated fat. So you've got 30% times 30% or 9% below the American Heart Association's recommendation for 10%.
So you can have steak and eggs every morning for breakfast, along with monitoring the type of fats that you take in, along with say a factory Greek yogurt, which is cardioprotective. So you get some benefits from that along with some fruits, which again, cardioprotective reduces inflammation. Those citrus laminoids are incredible. So the dietary pattern matters most.
So in variety of protein sources, the fats are generally in the protein, although it might be nice to get a little olive oil in there with your salad within, or that tends to be a lot of nice things going on with extra virgin olive oil. And then the carbohydrates, I start with high potassium carbohydrates, which would be say a daily potato, has 1000 milligrams of potassium over twice that of a banana. Fruits are great for that, especially low sugar fruits, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, those kinds of things. Orange is another reason I like oranges and potatoes is which this conversation should evolve into very shortly, satiety.
There is a satiety index that measures the length of time certain foods keep you full. It's a subjective measurement when they just interview people based on foods that they eat. And way at the top of that list, of course, you're going to have proteins and fibers, but you're also going to have foods like boiled potatoes and oranges. And so I like the dual benefit of the high potassium, relatively low sugar in those fruits, but also the satiety benefit, because anybody who's in a calorie deficit, that's what I'm shooting for.
I might do just the opposite of somebody's game weight. I might pull the potato out and throw in white rice. I might pull the orange out and put in orange juice just to flip the script on that. I don't mean to keep bouncing back and forth, but the diet isn't all things for all people.
And so that, once you get, you know, of course you throw your salad in there, you can get some more, certainly some more potassium from spinach or whatever, you know, fiber, some nuts. If you get a little bit of magnesium out of that, some mix nuts, and that is pretty much the foundation of the vertical diet. If you want to talk specifically about the kinds of foods I recommend and the macros, it's kind of all contained in that explanation. This episode is brought to you by levels.
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No. Is it killing everybody? Well, again, what's the dietary pattern? Are you eating a ton of really fatty meats?
Bacon butters usually thrown into that group even though it's not a meat but it's commonly. Side meat, right? Tons of ribeyes and are you susceptible? You know, what's your body composition?
What's your exercise look like? Are you consuming sufficient fiber? Well, let's say that someone is not a total renegade with this and they realize that they shouldn't be eating super fatty cuts of meat, that they shouldn't be cooking in tons and tons of butter, that they shouldn't be having bags and bags and bags of bacon. There is a movement at the moment, guys like Brian Johnson, who are mTOR activating the mTOR pathway as a nightmare, I avoid meat, red meat specifically, there is concerns from the FDA, there is concerns from all manner of people who are experts in some circles with regards to diet that say red meat is something that you should have once a month at the absolute most.
Why? What is it that you're saying that they're not? Well, you mentioned, it was the first one you mentioned, oh, mTOR simulation. Well, that there's a difference between acute and chronic inflammation or mTOR stimulation and the acute inflammation or stimulation of mTOR doesn't seem to be a problem.
And that would be the same protein in general, wouldn't be specific to red meat, any protein would stimulate mTOR. And the problem that you get is as we age, we become anabolically resistant at some point or less and less anabolically or sensitive. And a lot of people as age suffer from, they don't eat enough protein and they suffer from sarcopenia. And that can be a bigger problem for mortality risk than consuming red meat or any meat there, you know, for that matter.
And I think if I'm citing the right person, I think Kevin Hall has done a lot of research on that. And it's the, and opposes that theory, that theory, that longevity theory, I think that comes a little bit from Sinclair, a little bit from Walter Longo, those folks, you know, it's a lot of mouse studies. You see, I have no human evidence, no human outcome trials showing that that is going to limit lifespan. The problem with a lot of that research is it's usually influenced by the healthy user bias.
People who tend to eat more red meats tend to smoke more drink more, drink more exercise less and eat all the things that are associated with it, you know, the bacon double cheeseburgers with the bun and the soda pop and the fries. And, you know, and dessert with that and maybe a couple of beers. That's obviously, you know, they try and control for that in some of the epidemiology. It's imperfect.
And they try and stratify the risk based on other health markers. But for the most part, again, as part of the healthy diet, keeping your, you know, watching your LDLs, I guess the only other concern would be cancer. And that you mentioned that World Health Organization, you may have mentioned in IARC. I find it interesting now we've got this, this big blowback on aspartame.
IARC came out and said that aspartame was associated with cancer risk. What's your read on that? Well, my read is that they studied, they look at mouse studies and with huge doses. And it's not their job to look at doses.
And so, what was the, do you know the relative, how much are human? Is it what I've had to have consumed three and a half cases of Dr. Pepper? Something like 800 cokes or something a day to get that level of aspartame.
But the point of that story is that, and none of the nutrition PhDs, which was the people that I usually turn my ear towards when things like this come out, none of them considered this to be a concern. We do have plenty of human trials randomized control trial showing evidence that when you replace sugar sweetened beverages with diet sodas, you see weight loss and therefore improved health outcomes. Right, let's just dig in this for one second. This is something that came up with a bunch of different stories I've heard from you.
A lot of the time, people will demonize the thing, which is seemingly less natural. It's got a name like aspartame instead of sugar. But what they don't realize is that the weight loss from switching from sugar to aspartame is so significant that turns and turns and down stream benefits for health come from that. And it seems like the concern from aspartame has to be at dosages so insane that you would essentially be hooked up to an IV, like Warren Buffett's nightmare, just pumping it into your veins.
It's nothing for anybody to worry about. You had an interesting point there when I talked about the importance of the overall dietary pattern and then your general physical health. Weight loss, I said this on a podcast not too long ago when it was clipped and thrown onto the internet, just a little clip of it. And I said that 95% of health benefits are realized strictly from weight loss itself, irrespective of diet.
And I referenced the McDonald's diet, we have multiple studies now, the McDonald's diet, the Twinkie diet, the 711 diet, where when people eat even a lot of quote unquote crappy food, junk food, fast food, when they're able to maintain a calorie deficit and lose weight, they see decreases in all of their biomarkers. They see lowered cholesterol, lowered blood sugar, lowered blood pressure, and weight loss itself, we know, is associated with decreased cancer risk. So that should be the primary goal. Weight loss, obviously, those kinds of diets long-term, particularly if they're high in saturated fat.
So maybe your LDL starts to go up eventually, potentially if you're not exercising or if you lose a significant amount of lean muscle mass, because you're not lifting weights. So there's a whole host of problems. At the end of that, I said, I would never recommend a McDonald's diet. That gets clipped down.
Internet, please leave that bit in. Yeah, which we touched on already is satiety being the key reason for that is that the best diet is the one you'll follow. And hunger is the biggest reason why people will fail on a diet. And when you're looking at the highly processed, very calorie dense foods, that if you were to do the McDonald's diet and it is possible to lose weight on it, I think it was 1800 calories, 1850, something like that.
You'd be very hungry. But precisely, because think about how dense those calories are. Do you think about how little food you get for those 1800 calories? I mean, it's probably a medium, maybe a large meal with a Coke, a full-fat Coke would be, it wouldn't be a lot of food.
It'd be, like you say, maybe a cheeseburger, probably. I think he had to eat half of this half of that to get through the day. Yeah. But nonetheless, the point is that the weight loss is the primary goal.
And we see this with a lot of diets, a lot of diet tribes. We see this with ketone. And my goal here isn't to shit on anybody's diet plan. There's many paths to the same destination.
And I believe they're all very individualistic. And the best path is the one that seems the least restrictive. So you can adhere to it long term. And some people like to lower their carbs.
Some people like to eliminate, I guess we should just say there's three paths. There's not many paths. There's three paths to dieting. All of them result in a calorie deficit.
One is calorie restriction. That's where you're counting calories and you're checking the labels on and you're weighing and measuring food and you're using your little, your computer or your phone to track your calories. That's one method of controlling calories. The other one is time restriction.
And that's you're just going to eat like with a 16-8. Or maybe that doesn't work for you. You got to go to an 18-6 or a 24. And so you just can't eat enough calories in your window to to gain weight and you start losing weight.
The other ones would be dietary restriction. And that's where you start eliminating foods. That would be a keto, get rid of carbs. That would be a vegan, get rid of meats.
That would be a paleo, get rid of everything that was created after 1960 or something like that. Gravitarian. Everything that didn't fall to the ground that did zone a core. Yeah.
So those are your options. And you pick one, if you may, or find something that works or a combination of two, the intermittent fasting and keto diet became a little popular as a one, two-punch for a while. But how sustainable are they for you? And different people have different long-term results.
But the research shows, none of them are any better than the other long-term. Is there anything special about intermittent fasting? Is there some super-secret source that gets activated after a particular amount of time? Does the increased ghrelin release?
Is the hunger signal homesis response? What does the sign say here? In so much as it allows you to maintain a calorie deficit and you lose weight, it can be a healthy diet plan. That's going to be very individualistic.
Some people can skip breakfast or skip dinner and not feel as though that's too restrictive and can adhere to that diet for some period of time. But there's been a lot of things claimed about intermittent fasting, some special autophagy benefit or some special reduction in mTOR signaling or some society benefit, which isn't consistent across the population. It's very individualistic. We don't see any extra benefits above the calorie restriction itself.
And we see in the research that continuous calorie restriction and intermittent fasting perform very much the same in terms of weight loss and health benefits long-term. Where is the magic fairy dust claims about intermittent fasting coming from then? If you can't find it and there are people out there who say that it's happening, what are they reading that you're not? Or what are they seeing that's incorrect?
That's the problem with the research. There's peer-reviewed published research to support just about any position on any nutrient or diet. There's an evidence hierarchy that you're familiar with, wait down at the bottom is those mouse studies and petri dishes and anecdotes. Then you step up one step maybe and you've got expert advice, which even that one's challenging because expert at what, you get somebody who's a chiropractor talking about nutrition that's not necessarily within their domain-specific expertise.
We see a lot of that. The nutrition PhDs take particular offense to that just because somebody has an MD or a PhD after their name doesn't mean it's it's a nutrition. Next up from that you're going to look at probably epidemiology research on large populations of people and then randomized controlled trials above that, particularly ones that are performed on humans where you can adjust certain variables. And then you get up to systematic reviews or meta-analyses where they take a cluster together, the body of evidence that qualifies for the criterion and they try and come up with something that is a little more representative of what all of the research suggests, not a cherry-picked study.
And then beyond that even we've got professionals that will review all of that and make, you know, have a position paper, like the Society of Sports Nutrition. Yeah, because those people are probably more qualified to review those systematic reviews. And there's, you know, obviously there's the Cochrane Collaboration. I think there are 51 countries with thousands of scientists that kind of recognize as the gold standard for being the least influenced potentially by maybe biases, etc.
So there's different quality of information. I mean, go too far off the rails, but some people will find, you know, cherry-picked is the word we use, a particular study that acted to their benefit. Sometimes, I'll just use keto as an example. When you control for calories and protein, you see equivalent outcomes amongst people who do high-carbon low-carb.
You know, we saw that in the diet-fits trial out of Stanford, there was over 600 people that were over a year long, and they did low-carbon high-carbon, didn't find any significant difference in satiety, weight loss, glycemia. They didn't see any difference in any of those things. And interestingly enough, Gary Taub's research arm was part of that study. So over and over again, when you look at the body of evidence, randomized control trials in humans in particular, and the systematic reviews of those, you just don't see any difference.
You see that the trends are that it's very individualistic. And even within a particular study, when you show some sort of measurable result, you've got a lot of internal division there. You've got people who didn't have any result, or you know, got people who lost a lot of weight, got people who gained a lot of weight. And what the average is might not appeal or apply to you as an individual.
So, and I hate saying all this, well, I'm on both sides of the fence on this. I like that the individual now knows they have options, and there isn't a best diet, and they're not required to go keto or if they want to get results. It's unnecessary. Even if they have type two diabetes, the weight loss itself is the driver of insulin sensitivity, not the fact that they eliminated carbs.
And we've had studies done where people type two diabetes did a high carb and low carb diet had equivalent outcomes. So I want people to have as many options as possible. That gets us to now their eyes have lost over and I'm like, well, what do I do? And that's where I come in with specific recommendations, which, you know, then I got to get feedback and make those adjustments because the general audience, the general population, they don't have all this, this isn't their business.
They have a different business, they have a different field of expertise, they have a family, they have kids, they have a career, they have, you know, they just, at the end of the day, they just need to tell me exactly what to eat. And so I give them a very specific diet plan. I told them exactly what to eat, how many ounces of this, I mean, based on the feedback that they give me from my questionnaire. But then we have to, you know, tune in and listen, you know, how do you feel?
Do you feel satiated? There is a weight control, what's it called, registry that has tracked successful dieters, over 10,000 dieters going back a couple of decades, who have lost over 66 pounds and maintained the weight loss for over five years. And there were some key things, some common things, it's kind of like a millionaire next door, what are things that these people do consistently, success leaves clues. And we saw that 98% of these people went on a diet, they had a plan, okay, and it doesn't matter which diet, these people went on many different diets.
I have vegan clients, I have carnivore clients, I have keto clients, I have vertical diet clients, it's their personal preference. 98% of one on a diet they had a plan, so that is important. 95% of increase their activity level, walking being the number one activity level. I mean, get into how important and effective that is.
78% of them eat breakfast every morning, and that's not to say you have to eat breakfast, but it's certainly not to say that intermittent fasting, skipping breakfast is required to lose weight when the vast majority of the people in the largest, longest, most successful study demonstrates a 78% breakfast, and I don't care if you do or don't, my daughter doesn't like breakfast, she's never hungry in the morning, my son eats breakfast, it's very personal, it's very individualistic. We can talk about some where breakfast might be important, but for now we'll go on to the next one, 75% of people weigh themselves regularly, again, that which gets measured, gets improved. I come across clients that said they have an uncomfortable relationship with the scale, and that's generally because they let the daily fluctuations influence their mood when you should be adding up the week, weigh in every day, add up to seven days, divide it by seven to get a weekly average, and then compare that weekly average to the other weekly averages throughout the month, that's a better way to manage the scale. Well, that sounds good in theory, but in practice, my wife's been dieting for years, and when she steps on that scale it will determine her mood.
And on that note, I said that I coined a term some years ago, compliance is the science, that the best diet is the one you'll follow, so I try and create a diet program that people comply with, something to become, it's you want to cover the book here, simple, sensible, and sustainable, okay, something becomes part of the lifestyle. And so one of the things that the research shows us is that meal prep, not shilling for my meal prep company, but prepping meals, whether I prep or you prep, we see this in the bodybuilding figure physique bikini industry going back decades, as long as that industry has been in existence. Those people, those people me, that's my brethren, that's my home bodybuilding came up in this industry. We pack our meals into Tupperwares, and we throw them in our six pack bag, and we got everything we need for the day.
Meal prepping is one of the number one behaviors that leads to long-term success. And if you prep your meals, whether twice a week or every morning for the day, and you know exactly, and it's measured in weight exactly what you're supposed to eat, even weight watchers, very successful. As long as you adhere to it and consistently eat the meals that they recommend, any meal prep provides a greater opportunity for success, because then you're not randomly opening your refrigerator when you're hungry, and grabbing what you're hungry for, call that food reward, and end up overconsuming it. Or it's lunchtime, oh my gosh, you get the car, you drive to your favorites, whatever you're hungry for, fast food place, possibly at that moment, you tend to over-consume those foods.
So what I try and do is instill behaviors. The meal prep is a big one. We talked about satiety, and we have a toolbox that we can use to help us improve our satiety, so we're not hungry all the time. And it's somewhat effective.
It's things like increasing protein intake, increasing fiber intake, eating more whole foods and fewer ultra-processed foods, drinking more fluids with meals, which is where diet soda and iced tea can come in very handy as well as water, helps fill the stomach up, and you know, the rouge of the stomach expands and sends the signal that you're full, and that satiety feeling is very desirable in a meal, whether it's acquired through a massive amount of calories, or just a hard, large volume of food that may not yield as many calories, including fluids. Beyond that, mindful eating, you know, not sitting in front of a TV or an iPhone and shoveling in food until all of a sudden the plate's gone, eating more protein, and eating protein first in a meal tends to help with satiety. And there may be a few in there, I forgot, but that's kind of our toolbox that we like to utilize, encourage our clients to, because as soon as they get hungry, you're going to start losing that battle. Will power is not a good strategy to overcome hunger.
You'll lose that battle every time. Why is it the case? Given this many thousand person, very successful trial study, why is it the case that diets fail then? And what's the percentage success of a typical diet?
Great. Well, it's interesting. Something like six out of seven diars lose weight. So losing weight isn't hard.
Keeping it off is hard. So long-term dietary adherence is what we like to measure. And the main reason that people regain the weight, as I mentioned, is hunger. They just stop adhering to the diet.
They go back to their old habits. They start over consuming and generally that food is the ultra-processed, hyper-palatable foods. And that is where none of us are any more successful than the other. This is the whole conversation unto itself, really, that all of us in our diet tribes, you know, I have a named diet, the vertical diet, you know, there's a whole host of people out there that claim that they're whether it's in fasting or keto or you name it.
None of us are any more successful than the other long-term. There's been tons of studies on thousands of people for a year or two years. None of us can claim to have the answer to this problem. It's much bigger than all of us.
And I think some of these ultra-processed, hyper-palatable food manufacturers are probably just laughing because we're all sitting around the table. There was an old Warner Brothers. It was a cartoon. When I was a kid, the ants were fighting over a cake and there was a cherry on top and the red ants and the black ants were up there and they were drawing around the cherry to see who was going to keep the cherry and race it and the other guy to race it.
They got this great big fight and then the the picnickers came back, picked up their cake and walked away while these guys were all fighting. I feel like those ants in this war on obesity. What's going to say, do you feel like there is a a battle going on between the designers of food and the people who want to remain healthy? That battle is for money.
That battle is for investors. That battle is to sell more food. That's what their job is as a corporation and they'll design and sell and market in the most effective way for their business to profit. Not in the most effective way to help people with their long-term health and to stave off obesity.
I can't speak to that. I'm just saying that while we're arguing about the best diet, it doesn't seem to matter. We all have our own list of testimonials. I'll say something about the carbohydrate insulin model, but I'll go on to Jason Fung's YouTube and there's a whole bunch of people talking about how they cut out carbs.
They lost weight and they feel great. But in fact, everybody has testimonials. The vegan community has testimonials. The carnivore community has testimonials.
I post testimonials all the time. It doesn't seem to matter that hasn't had an impact on our obesity crisis. The cause of our none of us are solving the cause of our obesity crisis, which is access to a cheap, affordable, ultra-processed, hyper-palatable foods. So it's bigger than all of us because none of us have any influence on that whatsoever.
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If what you've said with regards to the vertical diet is accurate, why is it not the case that the World Health Organization and the FDA are in alignment with this? Why hasn't the FDA or the government updated or changed their recommendations in line with this? I don't know what recognition is necessarily specifically talking about the dietary guidelines. The dietary guidelines are pretty good.
I think people bastardized them when they went low fat. These food companies came in and made these high sugar foods. It's not the sugar. It's not the fat.
It's the combination of all of those, sugar, fat, salt. It's a combination. That's where your pastry cakes and all these things come from. They're not just sugar.
Nobody's mainlining bags of sugar. That's not how this works. There is someone out there that's doing that. I'm sorry.
Have you seen the videos of these uncontacted tribesmen and they give them cheesecake for the first time? Have you ever seen this? I haven't seen it. People should after this episode to finish, not now.
Go and check out videos of uncontacted tribesmen eating cheesecake and obviously their eyes just... Oh, from an orification, so the design of the texture of food, the combination of the carbs and the fat. If you think about it, I learned about orification a few years ago and blew my mind. I learned about it in high school.
I'm not sure exactly what you're... I didn't... Look, I'm British. We have a lot of fish and chips.
I'm teasing. Poor orification sounds like something to me. Sounds like something else other than... It's a professional conversation.
Legitimate scientific information about diet, dragging us into the gutter, orification, the design of the texture of food. Think about ancestry, what you'd have typically been able to have if you were eating anything. It would have been one texture. It's slimy meat.
It is berries, which kind of, if you get them at the right ripeness, can kind of have a couple of textures, a little bit of crunch on the outside. But if you actually think about some of the most hyper-palatable foods, it's not just the flavor. It's not just the actual content. It's the text during your mouth.
And this combination of crispy or crunchy with smooth is unbelievably novel. Oreos got the crunch on the outside and that's sort of smooth on the inside. French fries, sort of fluffy potato inside and the crunch that's well cooked on the outside. Cheesecake.
Exactly the same. It's so novel. And then when you layer on top, it's not just that. It's the spike of the sugar as it hits your tongue.
And then after that, it's the fat as well on top of this. And yeah, sure enough, you have these guys who've just been eating macaques or whatever they've been having for the last. You know, immediately think of when you say that they tried it for the first time and they were just like, wow, I immediately think of the fact that that's what children experience at their initial consumption. And they no longer, we no longer experience that.
It's normal to us. When we eat those foods, it's almost expected. That's what we're drawn to. And we don't have that same response, but we just, we keep going back to those foods.
You can't win that battle. We aren't winning that battle. We're losing that battle. And I guess that kind of brings us back to, you know, why isn't the World Health Organization's other folks?
They make some minor inroads. I think they got cereal companies to reduce the sugar, you know, respect to kids. They got soda pops out of high schools and things like that. Very small places like Mexico.
They started taxing sugar laden beverages, but then they just, they go to an alternate source. This is what happens. They tend to, you know, they might just go to Kool-Aid instead of Coca-Cola. That's generally what happens.
I'm not suggesting that I have a solution. I'm just saying, I know what the problem is. We all know what the problem is. It's no secret.
And even people who suffer from obesity or overweight, it's not like they're confused about the fact that the foods that they're eating are causing that problem. It's just the fact that it's just too good, too affordable, too available. My wife grew up in Samoa. She was born and raised in Western Samoa, which is British Samoa.
Sometimes she was born sometimes she's about six years old. She's got 12 brothers and sisters all older than her. And they grew all of their own food. They raised goats and chickens.
They would go out in the ocean and harvest whatever they could get from the sea. They grew tarot root. They had pineapple. And they would sell a lot of that at the marketplace, at a very vibrant marketplace in Western Samoa.
Every week, you see three generations of family from the kids to the parents to the grandparents at marketplace selling whatever it is they were able to grow and put together for the weeks to make money. They didn't have any obesity in their family. Grew all their own food, ate all their own whole foods. At some point when she was about six years old, their whole family moved to American Samoa.
And in American Samoa, they had food stamps. And they had big, huge stores with white flour, sugar, seed oils, salt. And those were the most affordable things to buy, obviously. There was the cheapest to make and ship over there.
And that became the foundation of their diet. They stopped growing their own food. The marketplace in American Samoa is laughable in comparison. Nobody erases and cooks their own food.
They became what I said food rich instead of food poor. They had food stamps and they had availability. They started consuming all of those ultra-processed, hyper-palatable foods. All of her family, the vast majority of them, ended up gaining a significant amount of weight.
Her father ultimately died from complications of diabetes, the black feet and the whole nine years. So it's, I'm not suggesting I have a solution. It's pretty obvious what happened, what has happened. We just didn't have access to these kinds of foods as conveniently as this back in the 1950s, because people always show those beach pictures in the 50s.
Yeah, really popular. And none of those people are fat, or they show them in the 40s, you know, bustling up and down the streets of New York and there's no fat people. And it didn't have access to this food environment that we have today. It's a calorie problem and it's the ultra-processed foods that we're over-consuming.
So we're doing the best we can. I don't anymore. I don't claim to be able to solve anything other than the clients that I'm working with. You know, I try and put out good information, but we're all losing this battle miserably.
Obesity has, you know, our weight has continued to climb, insulin resistance has continued to climb, type 2 diabetes. I don't see a solution in the horizon, because nobody's working on the actual problem. There's a lot of money involved in that. It probably would take some sort of governmental intervention on a big scale.
And I got a lot of blowback from this when I brought this up at a podcast, previous says, I got a tag saying, oh, it's personal responsibility. I'm like, well, yes, it is. But how's that working out? You know, we're at some point we're going to have to find a better solution.
And I yield to people who are, you know, a lot smarter and a lot more connected than me to try and drive that agenda. But that's where we're at. How did you do the blue zone studies? A lot of problems with blue zone studies.
One in particular is the lack of verifiable birth certificates. A lot of these people would assume their parents- It's a registry issue. It's not a diet issue. It's a registry issue.
And there was a study done, I forget the name of the individual, but I actually included a reference to that in my book, a vertical diet ebook, where I've updated that periodically, because I can add some version 3.0 currently and soon to be 4.0 on my website. But those are the kinds of links to research that I supply. And there are people asking, what about blue zones? I've gotten this question.
I've probably answered over 100,000 DMs in the last six or seven years. And a lot of those questions are the same, which is kind of what creates the foundation of the information that I provide. I know that this is what people want to know. This is what they ask.
And so I pull those into most common questions and never to answer those so that they're covered. And I refer people to those answers. But one thing, yeah, we'd have a lack of verifiable. There is a little cherry picking going on with those studies.
I think that some of the places that were left out, Iceland, even in California, the difference between, say, Seventh-day Adventists, is that the group that's vegan, that's in the blue zones. And I think right up the street, we've got Mormons who consume significantly more meat, but have the other lifestyle characteristics. They don't smoke, they don't drink, they exercise a lot, they're not overweight, have similar lifespans. And so the blue zones are tough.
I think they make solid recommendations in terms of overall dietary patterns. But the idea that we can put a lot of weight in those diets vary quite a bit. There's meat consumption in the Mediterranean diet, there's meat consumption in the Okinawan's ham in particular. The blue zones was, I think, kind of an effort to go to point more towards vegan.
In fact, a lot of those those areas aren't vegan. A lot of meat, some meats in their diet, which again gets us back to dietary pattern fruits and vegetables are very important. I think it's Hong Kong, the highest red meat consumers in the world, have some of the longest lifespan. But they eat a ton of fruits and vegetables and they eat pretty lean meats and they don't suck down cubes of butter.
So all of that matters. What are some of the commonalities either in terms of lifestyle, movement, diet, and social life that you do think the blue zones do get right? Yeah, I think they get all of that right, other than trying to demonize a particular food item. I think they get all of that right.
I think that they have better sleep, they have better body mass index BMI, which is not the most accurate measure. Obviously, over muscle people will look to be fat on BMI, but they move more in terms of the number of steps that they accumulate every day. And you hit the nail head there, too. They have a better, I think, social interaction with family, all of those things.
It was interesting is that a lot of these zones were very poor, which lent itself well, of course, not being very well documented and acquiring their parents' information so that they could continue to receive any governmental assistance that was associated with that. But usually lower socioeconomic populations have less access to medical care and therefore maybe a shorter lifespan. But that amongst all those other characteristics, that's probably less important. What do you make of grounding and the usefulness of that in general overall health?
Yeah, I don't know that it's meaningful. There's a lot of things. I try and stick with the big rocks, and I'm cautious about a lot of folks, more recently, and I don't mention any names, but they're popular folks that'll get into a lot of, they might dive into plausible or possible reasons, bio-mechanical, in the biochemistry, and try and explain why something should work or could work. But they take these giant, logical leaps and make these outcome-oriented claims about things that just aren't meaningful when compared to the things that really matter.
The sleep, maintaining the weight, exercising regularly, you know, you said the social stress reduction, those kinds of things, healthy diet. Everything else, I kind of put it into like a 99% and then the 1%. Everything else kind of goes into that little 1%. A lot of it's placebo.
This happens a lot in pain and pain rehabilitation. I talk a lot about this in my book. A lot of that stuff, I say generally speaking, things that are done to you or for you are never as effective as things you do for yourself. Active recovery, movements, right?
Actually getting your heart rate up, exercising, lifting ways, sometimes massage. As opposed to massage, I'm not saying massage is not beneficial. I'm just saying that in comparison, this doesn't mean it's what the research suggests. To quote Greg Knuckles on it, he said that this is a study on lower back pain, 95% of which resolves itself spontaneously within six to eight weeks.
So any intervention that somebody with pain, uh, submits themselves to chiropractic physical therapy, electric STEM, gouache, uh, dry needling. I mean, this goes on inversion table. Anything wearing a copper bracelet. It's coming along for the ride.
Any is coming along for the ride. They will attribute their spontaneous recovery to whatever intervention they're participating in at the time. Oh my God, that works for me. It was fantastic.
It's worked for thousands of other people. Uh, Greg's words were to quote, he said, maybe it's better than nothing, but it pales in comparison to any kind of movement. It's not an indictment on physical therapists or chiropractors. It's that they should be facilitators of movement of good physical therapists.
Professor Michael Ray, the folks at barbell medicine, um, who talked about the bio-psychosocial method, which I think came from Laramar Mosley's work, Explained Pain out of Australia. They're on the front lines of this where manual therapy, uh, not as effective as, as movement. It's, it's a facilitator of movement. If someone by touching you can, uh, distract you from that pain signal from the brain to the location that you're experiencing pain, uh, call it placebo, call it distraction therapy.
And that then allows you to move with less inhibition. Greg calls it to kinesaphobic. When people have pain, they, they stop moving, which is exactly the opposite of what you want to do. You want to begin moving as early as possible.
And as much as possible with as little pain as possible. And that's what's going to help facilitate the recovery. So I didn't mean to get too far off track there, but that's, uh, that's where I always end up when people talk about, this could be true of, of ice baths and contract showers and I'm like, great, you know, if it makes you feel good. Uh, do it by all means, you know, those things, you know, give you an emotional or a, uh, there's just no evidence that they provide a significant physiologically measurable benefit.
One of the other big move is sleep. What is the relationship between sleep and weight loss? Yeah, a few things. One, when you don't get sufficient sleep, you have increased, uh, ghrelin release, which makes you hunger, makes you monitor, eat more.
You also have compromised insulin sensitivity, uh, which makes it a little easier for you to gain weight. So you mentioned insulin sensitivity a couple of times today, like just to highlight what's up. Yeah, we would say say pre diabetic or diabetic is that when you eat foods, your blood sugars elevate and there's no place to store them because you're over fat. Your fat stores are full.
And so you, you can't put those there. Your muscles, uh, you maybe don't have sufficient muscle mass to store that there. And then that stays elevated for an extended time. Okay.
Understood. So sleep, weight loss. Sleep does affect, uh, insulin levels as well. We also find that, uh, people who don't get sufficient sleep when they start losing weight, they might lose, uh, a disproportionate amount of muscle as opposed to fat.
The body becomes stingy at preserving the fat. Uh, and so those are all things that can happen. Uh, other, uh, just being awake more hours in the day gives you another opportunity to get hungry and eat, you know, sleep through one meal and you're probably better off. Yeah.
Yeah. Wow. Whole host of benefits from, uh, getting sufficient sleep. Would you say that sleep is more important than cardio for fat loss?
Well, I did put it this way once. I said, if you're waking up at four AM to do your fasted cardio after only five hours of sleep, you're stepping over a hundred dollar bills to pick up nickels. And that's been something I've said for many years. If somebody had, to me, I would, I would do the cardio later.
Or I don't even really recommend cardio at all to most of my clients because it's a pretty significant departure from their standard lifestyle. It might not be something they enjoy. It might not be very sustainable. And we see it has diminishing returns over time as your body kind of adapts to that stimulus and reduce, becomes more efficient and reduces the calorie burns.
I focus on non-exercise, and another thing is, is that too much exercise activity, particularly aggressive exercise activity. I'm not shitting on any of these forms of the best exercises the one you'll do if you enjoy doing it. Do it. Uh, but if somebody goes, starts crushing themselves, I call it battle ropes and burpees, thinking that they're going to burn calories just, you know, for fat loss, uh, a phenomenon called compensation takes over where you just go home and sit more and eat more because you're hungry.
You know, you're tired. You just trained well. Hey, and you can burn 300 calories in one of those battle rope and burpee episodes and you can go home and have one piece of bread and then the gate, all of your, all of your gains or losses, we should say, but I'm cautious about prescribing cardio for weight loss. Uh, for all of those reasons, prescribing extra, I was sleeping, I was sleeping, I was sleeping more non-exercise activity.
I just think that the barriers to entry, having to come home, get your car drive to the gym, your cardio, I mean, we're too busy. So we've got a family and a career. That's the first thing that gets sacrificed in that scenario. That's why I love the 10 minute walks, because they're more convenient, more sustainable.
I can attach them to an existing behavior, which as we know, increases the likelihood that that new behavior will become a habit. They can be done anywhere at any time. Let's say it's the first time that somebody is hearing about walking as a significant performance enhancer. What do we need to know?
Frequency, structure, why is it working? What's the best way that you found to integrate it? How do you stick to it? Well, we see dramatic improvements in health span simply from going from 2000 steps a day to 5000 steps a day.
We see a significant decline in blood pressure, improvement in heart rate, all the health markers. It also improves satiety of all things. Just walking somewhere in that, I want to say about five or six thousand steps a day. You can get about 1300 steps from a 10 minute walk.
There is plenty about it to suggest that moving periodically throughout the day, say 10 minutes, three times a day, is more effective than 30 minutes once a day on all-cause mortality as well. Why? Well, it seems that the sitting for an extended period of time actually does some damage and moving more frequently throughout the day, getting your heart rate up. Even if it's five minutes at a hour while you're at work, you know, the other standing desks or the bike desks and those kinds of things and just movement in general, and then getting sufficient steps in.
Now, we do see differences in the intensity of that. They should be deliberate. The heart rate should elevate a bit. I mean, I'm not jogging.
You don't necessarily have to be out of breath. But we see the folks that can get their heart rate elevated just a little bit. You stay in zone two, I think everybody's talking about now. It's not such that you can't still talk while you're doing it.
So it should be deliberate. It's tough to get to zone two walking. Zone two whilst walking a 4.0. It's a quick pace.
It's a decent pace. It's deliberate. And it should be. You're going to get better benefits from it.
Yeah, I'm not cardiovascular. Even even remotely competent. But for me and I wear a woop, I absolutely love it. I would need to be weight busted or I would need to be moving at one hell of a clean for me, like speed walking.