The Health Compass Podcast
If you are interested in evidence-based information on all things health with lots of actionable take-homes, this podcast is for you..
The Health Compass Podcast
Inside the Mind of a Nutrition Expert: Alan Aragon
In this episode we spend an hour absorbing three decades of expertise in fitness and nutrition - from personal training to online coaching, and now research and education.
We kick off with the World Health Organization's definition of health and Bircher’s dynamic definition of health and disease.
Alan brings it to life with real-life examples and insights into how to maintain health amidst life's trials.
We then venture into the realm of flexible dieting, slicing through the misconceptions and stereotypes.
What's the real story behind macro counting?
And do carbs deserve their bad-boy image?
The discussion expands into the physiological aspects of health. The role of insulin, the difference between visceral and subcutaneous fat, and their implications on our health.
As we wrap up, we acknowledge the influential power of social media in shaping our world, encouraging everyone to continue the good fight for health and wellness.
Alan Aragon. Welcome to the Helcompass podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, paul. It is just really amazing to be here, especially knowing that you've been to a couple of my live seminars over the years. I'm just so stoked to hear that man, so it's really an honor actually to be here.
Speaker 1:It's listen. The honors are one. It was an absolute pleasure to hear you speak. As I said here, we spoke just before we clicked record Batty University yourself. Krieger and Schoenfeld just blew me away with the presentations that day. It was an amazing day and it really changed me outlook on the whole fitness industry Awesome man, I'm so happy to have that kind of positive influence.
Speaker 2:So yeah, it's great to hear.
Speaker 1:So, alan, the first question I always ask anyone and this podcast is generally, I didn't say just there, it's kind of a general pop and there is a few personal trainers listening to the first question I ask everyone is where, what and why. So where have you come from to get to where you're currently at, what you're actually doing at the minute and why you deal with it, why you deal with what you deal? We live a long way in the world. A short as possible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure man. The short version of my story is a three decade progression, where the first decade of my professional journey was in personal training, so in person personal training, at gyms, at homes, at corporate facilities, and then the second decade was nutritional counseling and there was online training, online coaching, mixed in with that second decade, and so the third decade of my professional journey is education and research, and that is where I'm at currently, and I try to keep a foot in the trenches by maintaining a small stable of clients, but the majority of my work right now is education and research. So the why's behind behind what why I'm doing that is I think that if you're a semi normal person, you want to make a positive impact on the world, you want to make a meaningful difference in improving people's lives, and I think that that's the most most gratifying thing is, you can use your gifts to make the world better, and so I think that's that's why I do it.
Speaker 1:Where do you think we are currently in the space? From where you're, where when you, when you're forced into this industry? Where are we now versus where we were then?
Speaker 2:I think we're at a really good spot because, having been one of the people who started the evidence based movement in the fitness and nutrition sector, it used to be the wild wild West where expertise was based on how big and shredded you you are, and a lot of times that space was dominated by folks with the best genetics or with the best drug protocols and both.
Speaker 2:And if you were a decently charming and sociable person and you knew how to kind of take the helm and step up to the podium and speak loudly enough, then well, you were just the expert. So times have changed since then, where we rely on a scientific evidence basis to start off with and try to fill in the gaps and the gray areas in our knowledge. So there's always going to be some combination of observation of clients, so field observations and sort of the non scientific side, these sort of just the observational side, and then the published research side. So so the biggest change now versus then is now we have a decently vast body of research findings to cross check with what is being claimed to be happening or to be effective in the real world. So we we can cross check the two and that's really the evidence based approach, whereas back in the day, 20 years ago, 20, 30 years ago, it was really about who had the most convincing story.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the people that know the least are usually the loudest too.
Speaker 2:So yes, they are man.
Speaker 1:Very true. So, unfortunately, like, how would you define health we? We start with, maybe, the WHO's definition of it, and then we know you're a fan of the paper I think it was, it could be Berger 2015, maybe. Yes, the dynamic definition of health and disease. Is that the one? Yeah, that's right. So maybe we can go with the World Health Organization and segue into that and kind of because we know it's multifaceted and maybe give your conclusion on that.
Speaker 2:Yes. So the WHO's definition was really a minimization of of disease. So health is the state of minimal disease. That's, in a nutshell, the WHO, and then they've evolved it through the years to make it more nuanced. But I really do like Berger's definition of health as being a dynamic balance between your, your potential and the life stressors and how how those two come together. So, for example, when people are very young in life, they have a lot of inherent potential for longevity just by virtue of chronology. And as you get older, let's say as somebody who's 99 years old, that's a lot less longevity potential, just by default of age. So but that doesn't necessarily mean that you can't have a net state of health. So Berger's definition of health would be having a net, positive state of well-being in spite of having a mix of positive elements in your life and adverse elements in your life. So as long as the positive attributes and elements that you've built up or that you've been born with outweigh the negative stressors in your life that are either providing disease or psychological stress or challenges that that really threaten to tip the scales, as long as the positives outweigh the negatives, you are in a state of health. So, giving a specific examples to that.
Speaker 2:You can take a young person who has really great physical genetics, athletic genetics and health genetics, and then you can they injure them catastrophically, let's say. And so now they've got the great genetics, they're young, but they have an injury that impairs their way of life or threatens it, and so they can be in a state of ill health for the time being anyway. And then you can, on the other end of the spectrum, you can take somebody who's already old, let's say over 60, over 65. They don't have great genetics, they don't have great genetics for physiology, blood chemistry and cardiometabolic markers of health, but they've worked super hard through their lives to combat that, to fight their genetics, so to speak, and they're injury free and they're generally able to manage their life in a way that is not stressing them out and they're relatively injury free. And so, even though their health potential is quite a bit less than the young athletic guy, the fact that their positive attributes are outweighing their adverse qualities, they're in a state of health. So Bircher's definition of health was all about which side outweighs the other, and so I kind of like that better, because it applies to more points on the spectrum of the life cycle and it applies to people who are in a disease state.
Speaker 2:Let's say somebody has multiple sclerosis but they are managing it well enough to have a high quality of life. Arguably you can say that this person is in a better state of health than the person without multiple sclerosis. But this person, who is apparently healthy, is in a constant state of psychological stress. They're dealing with all consuming financial issues and their relationships, both business and personal, are collapsing. So you can make an argument that the person with multiple sclerosis, who is managing their life well, managing their pathology well, you can say that they're in a greater state of health than the other individual who has great physical health but then his social and psychological health is really kind of crumbling. So yeah, that's a bit of a rabbit hole.
Speaker 1:I think you explained it well. It is a rather hard one, but it's kind of like. You know, maximum is in your well-being, isn't it? That was true Various elements of health mental health, social health, physical health. So what is a healthy doya, alan and I know this is another kind of wounds, let's say, because we know that there's so much you know key out this is the healthiest doya to be on intermittent fasts, and we spoke about it. It's the healthiest doya. Whatever said method, you'll find a group of people that will tell you that this is the doya for health and to eliminate disease, and you know the story.
Speaker 2:So yeah, yeah, a healthy diet. If we're to not overcomplicate it and just try to compartmentalize the concept. It's one that is appropriate for the individual's physical goals. So everybody has different goals. There's a wide variation in what people want to accomplish physically. Some people are competitive athletes at very high levels. Other people just want to be able to chase their young children around without running out of breath.
Speaker 2:So your diet has to be compatible with your physical goals. That's part of making a healthy diet. Your diet has to be individualized to your personal preference, and it has to be individualized towards the not just the food selection that you prefer, but also the macronutrient distribution that you personally prefer. And the reason why this is a part of making a healthy diet is because you want to be able to be happy with the diet, you want to be able to look forward to your meals, and you want to be able to stick to that diet not just for the duration of the randomized controlled trial. You want to be able to stick to that diet for decades. You want to be able to stick to it for a lifetime, not just for eight to 12 weeks that we're going to put you in a study for, and so that is an essential part of a healthy diet.
Speaker 2:Now the third aspect of a healthy diet is what you would normally think of right off the bat. It has to cover essential macronutrition and essential micronutrition. And if we want to go into the weeds and nitpick, the food selection should be health promoting and disease mitigating. So, yeah, that's the kind of the framework of what makes a healthy diet. It should support physical goals, it should support personal preferences in terms of macronutrient distribution and food selection so you can adhere to the diet for a lifetime, and it should align with what we know that covers essential nutrition and with what mitigates chronic disease and promotes health.
Speaker 1:Personal preferences is key, isn't it? It?
Speaker 2:is for a lot of things, for exercise as well and the body of literature is just not comprehensive enough and the trials don't go long enough to be able to demonstrate that personal preference is important. But that's because most of the studies we run are really only four weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks. If you're lucky we'll get studies that are six months, 12 months. But you can't really build strong conclusions about the personal preference concept with the existing randomized controlled trials, because it's easy for somebody to commit and stick to anything for a few weeks or a few months. We have to see what people can stick to for, like I said, a few decades, and that's really what counts. And I don't know anybody who has been adherent to a diet for five years or 10 years who actually tells you that this is not my preference. I don't really like this, but I'm forcing myself to do it.
Speaker 1:That's kind of the issue with some of the like, a lot of like, like the cage and stuff, and it's just so hard to stick to. But those work for probably a small minority of people, but genuinely it's impossible to well, it'd be impossible for me to stick with anyway. I like the carbs too much, yes. So, alan, let's touch on flexible diet and we can talk about the new book that you've just released. First of all, I'd like to talk about where the idea of flexible diet and chemo bow and now it goes back in the literature to maybe to the 70s, maybe, I think, and then kind of prominent in the mid-90s. But let's get a little deep dive into flexible diet and then segue into the book and what it's actually about.
Speaker 2:Yes, flexible dieting has its roots in the research done on restraint, and this was as early as 1975, where they looked at just levels of restraint and what the effects are, and not necessarily as it applied to dieting per se. That really started appearing in the 90s. So in the early mid 90s is when they started making comparisons, at least observationally, with diets that employed rigid restraint versus flexible restraint. So rigid dieting was an approach to perceiving foods and dieting in an all or nothing, black or white, dichotomous manner. So that's rigid restraint. Flexible restraint was kind of what the word implies. You know, if you fall off the wagon, that's okay. If you're doing good most of the time, that's okay. But you have to do good all the time in order to be successful and your diet doesn't have to be, in quotes perfect to be productive. And so they compared rigid models with flexible models and, lo and behold, the flexible models were associated with a lot more positive outcomes, and not just in terms of mitigating the risk for eating disorders and dysfunctional eating and dysfunctional relationships with food, but also they had they were associated with better body weight control outcomes, and this was a consistent finding over the years through the 90s. And so there is a an erroneous association with the word flexible dieting with counting calories or counting macros, counting grams of the macro nutrients. This is a much newer thing that was born out of the fitness culture and so the roots of flexible dieting are in different styles of cognitive restraint.
Speaker 2:So flexible dietary restraint is not a particular type of dietary approach, but rather it is a. It's an approach to dieting that says there's no single best way and you don't have to do everything to the letter and precise and there's no dichotomous way of looking at foods. So that's real, real flexible dieting is flexibility of approach and the odd part for people to grasp and it's difficult to kind of wrap your head around this. But under the umbrella of flexible dieting is the spectrum of flexible to rigid approaches. So flexible dieting encompasses degrees of rigidity and precision depending upon what the individual prefers. So real flexible dieting would say some people prefer qualitative approaches, some people would prefer to have just a very loose floating idea that they should eat more of some foods and eat less of other foods, and on the other side of the spectrum, some people really thrive and really adhere to programs. Well, by accounting for every little detail, tracking every little gram, and we shouldn't exclude those, those far ends of the spectrum. And so flexible dieting, the as a concept would say you should go with which approach clicks with you most as an individual, because everybody is different in this regard and there's every everybody along the points in between those far ends of the spectrum that might do a hybrid of those two extremes. And so that is real flexible dieting.
Speaker 2:Macro counting is macro counting, that's it. That's a bit more. It's only flexible in the sense that it allows variations in food selection, but it's actually quite rigid in the sense that you are micro managing small units of measure. Flexible dieting as a concept would say hey, if you love macro counting, good, because flexible dieting is about flexibly individualizing the approach. So hopefully that makes some kind of sense. I mainly want to separate the false conflation of macro counting with flexible dieting, when flexible dieting is something really completely different than just macro counting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's. You know, when people do think it flexible and they tend to think, you know, if a feature macros, they kind of confuse the concepts a little bit or the method of the concept.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that happened in like 2010, 2011, when people just started synonymizing that and and when they stood when they did that, I was like, well, that's incorrect, but oh well, but little did I know that it would take Did you coin, if a feature macros.
Speaker 1:Was that you're okay? Did you coin that you claim?
Speaker 2:if I enter that one, I'm not going to claim to coin it. It was my friend, eric Kohn Reich, who is ashamed of coining it. Now it's really funny. He hides his head. He, you know he doesn't want to talk about it.
Speaker 2:No, because he has nobody meant for I I f y m to become the name of a junk food diet as long as you hit your grams of carbohydrate, protein and fat. But myself and Eric and a couple of the other forum veterans, we used to just write I I f y m as a response to newbies asking if it's okay to have whole eggs instead of egg whites and things like that. You know, is it okay to have, you know, dark meat versus white meat? I f y m, I f y m. Instead of constantly writing the same long sentence over and over again if it fits your macronutrient targets, you can have that food, but just be aware of how the fat fits into the end to your fat allotment for those macronutrient targets. So instead of just, we just found a really smart ass, cheeky way of abbreviating our answer, and we had no idea that somebody was going to run off with it and call it a diet, you know.
Speaker 1:So I went from that to like people drinking for protein shakes a day and she loaded the read was an ice cream, just to hit that mark Right.
Speaker 2:And then calling it flexible dieting. Good God people. So because I I kind of grew up being aware of the flexible dieting research in the literature and it had exactly zero to do with accounting macronutrient grants, nothing to do with it. There is a recent study by conlon and colleagues where they called it flexible dieting and I read that and I was like, well, I follow as a peer reviewer on this stuff because it's a good study and I'm actually going to get a chance to meet Lauren conlon in a conference and I may give her a hard time about that, who knows. But if I was a peer reviewer on that study, I would mention that flexible dieting is a that, as used in the that study, is a bit more of a slang term for macro counting, when in fact flexible dieting, per the literature origins, is a cognitive style of dietary restraint. It's a particular cognitive style. It's not macro counting, it's it's a flexible way of looking at foods and dieting as not absolute in black and white terms.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what led you to the book?
Speaker 2:to this one. That's an easy actually an easy question to answer, because one of my friends, whose name is Brett Contreras, who some of you might know as the glued guy he's the guy who invented the barbell hip thrust he gave me a call and let me know that the folks at victory belt publishing Glenn Cordoza and their team they wanted me to write the book on flexible dieting. So they had a conversation amongst themselves and they said we need to publish the book on flexible dieting and we need Alan Aragon to write the book on flexible dieting. So I was honored to know that they handpicked me to write the book on flexible dieting. And so Brett said okay, Alan, are you going to turn this down and be really stupid? Are you going to? Are you going to write the book on flexible dieting? Because if you don't write the book on flexible dieting, somebody they're going to recruit somebody else to do it and it's going to be one of your students who's just going to regurgitate what you've actually are the guy who pioneered it.
Speaker 2:And so Brett convinced me to write it and when you put it that way. And so I used the opportunity to write the update of my 2007 self published book called the Earth control. I just use the opportunity to attempt to write the end all be all book on evidence based nutrition for body composition improvement and athletic performance, because there are great clinical nutrition books out there, but that's not my, that's not my world. You know I'm not writing about renal nutrition, enteral and parental nutrition for hospital patients and stuff. So I wanted to write the, the nutrition book for healthy individuals.
Speaker 1:It could probably be a certification itself.
Speaker 2:the book oh, thank you. Thank you, I would like to think it could. That was really the goal. I wanted the book to be a single volume manual for knowing exactly what to do in terms of building diets for for the aforementioned goals.
Speaker 1:And tell me this, alan the research. Let's touch on the research review, because this is something that's been a game changer for me and if anyone's listening that doesn't know and one is one of the original, if not the original, research review websites where you get a monthly newsletter breaking down some of the most recent research and it's just the resource itself is just an unbelievable resource for the price, like it's criminal it is. They are giving us this information from you but that price. I was sure that the owner was putting on a balaclava, but yeah, the information is unbelievable. Let's talk about that a little bit. What made you start it and how's it going at the minute?
Speaker 2:The research review, or Alan Aragón's research review. That's my baby. I started in 2008. What gave me the inspiration to start it was spending six to eight hours a day answering questions on the forums, debating with people on the forums, writing just these enormously long manifestos during internet debates and even referencing them with numbered references in these answers, in these debates. And I got the idea to do the research review from an existing monthly research review for physical therapists and that didn't last. That no longer exists.
Speaker 2:But I said to myself gosh, if there's a research, a monthly subscription based research review for physical therapists and here I am, spending six to eight hours a day answering questions with a highly engaged audience on the bodybuildingcom forums of all places Then there's got to be a demand for answers to questions about nutrition and exercise and supplementation Just the general fitness umbrella. There's got to be a demand for a monthly magazine, so to speak, or a monthly journal, monthly technical journal for people in the real world to learn from and benefit from, whether they're enthusiasts or whether they're fitness and nutrition professionals. So that was my goal. To just write that, because I had been sub to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the Journal of Strength and Conditioning and, just you know, various publications in the scientific realm and I thought, gosh, instead of just spending my day just doing this in a very kind of unorganized and suboptimal way, I can really put in the effort to create well organized, well referenced information that can actually help people in the industry.
Speaker 2:So that was the idea, and so in 2007, I got the idea and I didn't release it until 2008, because it took me a whole year to get work up the courage to release the research review idea, because I was afraid of it failing, you know. But lo and behold, it's been around since 2008. And it's been copied by several brilliant individuals now, and all of these guys who copied it are my students anyway. So it's all good material and so, yeah, the rest is history, man, it's been. It's going to be 15 years that the research review has been running and it is the least expensive research review. Ironically, as the largest archive, it's the least expensive. But what happens is when my followers or students make their own research reviews, they want to one up me, so they make it longer, they put more information in it and then they make it triple the price. Good and bad, I mean.
Speaker 1:There's different strokes for different folks, I like the way yours is now. I'm not just saying that because you're on the podcast, but I like it's short and sweet. You can read a book. You can read a while I sit on the jacks having a showy.
Speaker 2:No, I mean Love it man, yeah, yeah, I really feel like my research review, whether people are willing to admit it or not, it raised the bar of the industry and it had quite the ripple effect.
Speaker 2:When you look at you know that, like when you look at the, the progeny of my research review, such as examinecom, weightology mass, and then you have Lane Norton's thing, reps, what else is there? I don't know I'm I'm losing track. Now when you look at the progeny of my research review, you really have to just sit back and go. This is really great. You know, this is the whole point of being, of impacting and having a positive impact on the industry. When you strive to become a leader, the ultimate success marker is to not just create follows but create other leaders and perpetuate the cycle of excellence, and so I'm really happy to see that that occurred over the decades since I I well, since my colleagues and I started the evidence based fitness movement and, of course, over the over the last 15 years since the research review was started, it's been great to see the different incarnations of it really have an amazing impact on the industry.
Speaker 1:I think what you said there was was was great.
Speaker 1:You know, even other people details to go and be leaders within their own communities or businesses or whatever. You know, the likes of me, for instance, are running our business. When we brought up you were. What I've learned from you plays an integral part. In the end. I walk into the gym, you know so, and then you get the information to the client, who may give the information to the kids, and it's just a. It's a ripple effect of just quality information and evidence based information, with no bullshit and no kind of wishing washy shit. You know.
Speaker 2:Mm. Hmm, yeah, I was really happy to hear that you you've taken on a really successful training model in your own business and with you know, with the small group training I mean I think that's fantastic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's calm.
Speaker 2:Yeah, pause, call over what kind of getting back to where we were, mm hmm, the world is is ever evolving, right, we just got past the, the valley of the shadow of death. That's great.
Speaker 1:You just have to fucking roll over down here and just find a way and that's, that's the way it goes. We'll move on and I'm not going to keep it too much longer. But we'll touch on a few things, and some of that's kind of being asked recently I think it's cropping its head back up a few times online as well, I've seen is it is the whole and the insulin resistance. I mean now a lot of diets use this term, met its sort of say, you know, and let's talk about what it is forced and foremost and how it happens.
Speaker 2:Sure, just, the basic explanation of insulin resistance is that the target tissues are we thinking of the lean tissues that receive nutrients and are meant to use those nutrients and so if they're less receptive to the driving of nutrients within them by insulin, and so if they're less sensitive and less receptive to it, then it takes more and more insulin to do that job, to shuttle nutrients into the tissues. But when you have high levels of circulating insulin, where, when there's this disproportionate amount of insulin presence and production to get the job done, then that's what's called the state of insulin resistance. So insulin sensitivity would be a lower amount of insulin required to taxi the nutrients into the target tissues that use those nutrients. So that's insulin sensitivity versus insulin resistance.
Speaker 2:And what a lot of people get mixed up and actually just completely switched around is what happened first, the chicken or the egg. And when I say that I'm specifically talking about excess body fat buildup or overweightness or obesity and insulin resistance. And when they have it completely reversed, where they have the idea that insulin resistance causes fat gain, when it is exactly the opposite of that fat gain, or excess fat gain in the visceral space specifically, and that's what causes insulin resistance in the peripheral tissues. And once you get that straight, everything else makes sense, because in order to alleviate insulin resistance, the primary intervention would be to reduce body fat. And once you get that straight, everything is relatively simple.
Speaker 1:So that people tend, when you think of insulin resistance, they tend to think right, they tend to play in carbohydrates. Of course, it's actually the increase in body fat that's causing. You mentioned subcutaneous so, uh, visceral, so you can tell. Just explain to the listeners the difference between this real fat and subcutaneous fat.
Speaker 2:And visceral fat is fat around the internal organs, around the vital organs, so fat surrounding the vital organs the heart, the liver, etc. And within the liver and within the heart as well. And subcutaneous fat in a simplistic way, you can think of it as fat under the skin, the subcutaneous layer. Subcutaneous fat would concentrate less around the organs and so the majority of fat that people gain is in the subcutaneous space that has the most potential for fat storage. But depending on your genetics, you may have a predisposition to store a disproportionate amount in the visceral space, and that's when things get dangerous for chronic disease. So when individuals have a predisposition for visceral fat gain, then this predisposes them to things like type two diabetes and the insulin resistance associated with type two diabetes. And insulin resistance is also associated with cardiovascular disease. A lot of people will have a small faction of clever. People have called cardiovascular disease and diabetes two sides of the same coin, and so visceral fat gain is the more dangerous fat gain than subcutaneous fat gain.
Speaker 1:So do you think much about say met, like let's say, for instance, let's say we have an overweight individual and we have, they are clinically, they're in ill health and they have been prescribed. Say this, let's say, just a random diet.
Speaker 2:Let's say they even go for the flexible diet and approach.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, if it take, how do we count? Even if they're doing everything right so that they're doing the flexible diet and approach, and then success when it comes to losing body fat, but then we have this diet for take. I still have been compliant. How do we alleviate that if it take?
Speaker 2:Diet fatigue. It typically comes from dealing with hunger and dealing with a lack of satisfaction and enjoyment of your food selection and your meals. And before I go into that, I want to mention one extra little thing about insulin resistance and that you mentioned everybody's blaming it on carbs. You can't blame body fat gain on carbs, because that is an oversimplistic way of looking at it. You can put anybody that you and I know on a diet of six slices of bread a day. That's your diet almost all carbs. They will lose a pound of fat a day while they're on that diet. Of course they're going to lose lean mass as well. They're going to lose muscle. But just driving the point, fat gain is not about carbs. It's about a net excess, a net surplus of unused calories towards the building of lean tissue, where you spill over and you store into the body fat depots. And so gaining body fat is all about running a caloric surplus over time. It's not about carbs for crying all that. Everything contributes, okay, all right.
Speaker 2:So going back to diet fatigue and I just had to get that out of the way because I know that the carbs thing is really huge amongst the general public there are huge swaths of people who are just like. I got to be keto because I'm addicted to carbs. I'm addicted to sugar also. All I can eat is just protein and fat, otherwise everything falls apart.
Speaker 2:Well, I don't know anybody who has an apple problem. I don't know anybody who has a problem with whole fruits, vegetables, tubers and legumes. People are not overeating that stuff. But, yeah, some people do have a pizza problem, an ice cream problem, a cake problem, and so carbs are not this singular monolithic species. It's a highly diverse set of foods that we need to take a closer look at. Like what's really the problem here? It's not carbs per se. That's really the problem. It's the combination of refined carbs, fat, sugar and salt in these highly palatable, energy dense units that are easy to over consume, which leads to an over consumption of total calories by the end of the day and the end of the week. It's not carbs.
Speaker 1:That's just a good stuff out of there. It's that combination. As you said, it's specifically designed to be highly palatable, so you continue to eat without reading, realizing that you're full. That's the issue for most people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right man. And it just think of something like okay, an extreme example about the concept of sugar addiction. Without talking about magnitude of effects and withdrawal and classifications of addiction, let's just take a scenario where you put a jar of table sugar in front of somebody who claims to be sugar addicted and you just drop a spoon in there and put it in front of the person and say, hey, how about it? Let's see how many spoons you can have of that. They'll tap out after three spoons of it. It's not about sugar. It's about the very specialized combinations of sugar and fat and salt. In some case, you can create hyper palatable combinations of protein and fat, actually, if you look at things like bacon and cheese, for example.
Speaker 2:However, yeah, when people blame carbs or sugar in isolation, it paints a completely wrong picture of what we're really talking about. When people think that carbs are the enemy, then in some cases, and when people say sugar is the enemy, it will make a lot of the general public avoid healthy foods that are actually satiating, that happen to be just sugar, like fruit, Okay, so fresh fruit. What you're getting is sugar and mostly water, a little bit of fiber and some micronutrition, but lo and behold, these foods actually contribute to net positives in overall health and net increases in hunger control and increases in satiety within the diet. They prevent chronic disease as well. Talking about carbs as an agent of insulin resistance is just so incredibly oversimplified and wrong. If you gain body fat, then you can create insulin resistance and you can gain body fat with any number and any combination of the macronutrients. Even though there are hypothetical scenarios that are pretty much impossible, like eating an all protein diet, that's just a hypothetical thing. That just never happens. Back to diet fatigue after my divergence here.
Speaker 1:We'll keep going down the field. Robert Hall's Island, don't we?
Speaker 2:Diet fatigue, a combination of the intolerance to constant hunger and craving combined with a dissatisfaction with food selection. Diet fatigue can be alleviated by improving the enjoyment of the diet, like re-looking at the meals and seeing okay, are you really eating what you enjoy, or are you just eating broccoli and sweet potatoes and boiled chicken breasts because somebody said that you need to eat like that? We can re-examine the meals and just reselect food choices that the individual enjoys and looks forward to when you enjoy your meals. Now it is possible for meals to be, in quotes, too enjoyable to the point where you can passively over consume calories For the most part. When we're talking about whole and minimally refined foods that you enjoy and you actually love the taste of, or at least like the taste of, then there is greater satisfaction and satiety in those meals versus forcing down or choking down foods and meals that you really don't like. This is something that a lot of bodybuilders in contest prep do. They do it happily, but they don't necessarily enjoy the meals In the real world. When you're trying to maintain a lifestyle that is supposed to be permanent, then you have to re-examine your meals and ask yourself how can I improve the food selection? I actually like this meal and I actually enjoy it, because that enjoyment will actually lead to greater satiety and satisfaction and you won't feel like, okay, I barely ate anything or I really didn't enjoy that. Now I'm craving what I really like, which I want to have right now. That's one thing.
Speaker 2:The other thing is genuine hunger, persistent hunger from a prolonged, linear, hypochloric state. That can cause diet fatigue as well. It can cause energy just low energy availability in general. It can make you feel like crap and can make you perform suboptimally in terms of exercise performance and even activities of daily living. So with a long process of dieting, there's going to be some diet fatigue involved, especially if somebody has a substantial amount of body weight to lose.
Speaker 2:Let's say they want to lose 10% or more of their starting body weight Chances are they are going to experience some diet fatigue if they just try to diet linearly all the way through that.
Speaker 2:Let's say 15 to 30 pounds that they're trying to lose. So in the case where there is a substantial amount of body weight to lose, it can help to institute a nonlinear dieting pattern that is either nonlinear through the course of the week or includes discretionary calories, even daily, and so you have to individualize this, and when I say discretionary calories, I'm talking about the fun foods, the junk foods or the indulgence foods. That can amount to 200, 250, all the way up to 400, 500 calories a day, depending on what your total energy allotment is. But 10 to 20% of your total calories per day can really, for the vast majority of the population, can be from whatever the hell you want, whether you're someone who enjoys a one or two glasses of wine, or whether you're somebody who enjoys one or two big, big ass cookies or whatever it is, one or two scoops of ice cream.
Speaker 1:There you go, man so rotate each day.
Speaker 2:Right, so you can rotate these things. And as long as 80 to 90% of your diet is in quotes wholesome, then you're still running a healthy diet in spite of this minority of the calories coming from the yolo, the naughty foods right, so that can alleviate diet fatigue on a daily basis. The other thing that can alleviate diet fatigue, in addition to those factors, is taking full blown diet breaks or taking a break from that hypochloric grind. So you can auto. In practice this can be auto regulated one week, every one to two months, and with some people they just love their routine so much they don't feel diet fatigue for a whole three months, and so by the end of the third month they may take a week off from their hypochloric dieting. But generally speaking, you can alleviate diet fatigue with a seven day long diet break, auto regulated depending on your fatigue levels, once every four to eight weeks. You just take a week off from consciously restricting, and this diet break wouldn't be something where you're going hog wild every meal and you're just eating and drinking everything in sight. But you are just not consciously trying to restrict and stay hypochloric and you're not consciously thinking I got to hit this fabulous amount of protein and this certain amount of carbs and this certain amount of fat.
Speaker 2:You are just kind of loosening up the reins and perhaps eating at maintenance levels or even pre dieting levels for the week, with the understanding that you may gain 1% of your body fat 1.5% of your body fat in the course of the week, and it's really no big deal, because the amount of body weight some people need to lose can take six months to a year, depending on how much they need to lose and gosh how much over consumption and excess and abuse they've put their bodies through over the last decade or two.
Speaker 2:And it's really it pales in comparison, the time commitment of a year to get in shape and get healthy versus the 10 or 20 years you took to get yourself into a state of ill health. So I think it's a pretty good deal, a pretty good bargain that most people, no matter where you're at, no matter how much body fat you put on and no matter how deconditioned you become, for most people you can pull it all back together within six months to a year and so. But that six months to a year can be the perfect grounds to facilitate that psychological fatigue of changing your lifestyle and dieting. So those are some of the strategies to mitigate diet fatigue.
Speaker 1:What do you think about? Like focus, and let's say, what was it talking about? The same person who's been told to you know, decrease their body fat, focus on their performance, say, let's say, from an activity standpoint, and not doing any, like no measurements whatsoever in terms of, like you know, trying to quantify success from a body standpoint. So they instead on, let's say, the magical 10,000 steps are. They go to the gym three days a week and they solely focus on performance. Have you seen anything in the literature that suggests that that approach can help too?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a study that really stands out. It's by Clark and colleagues. I think it's 2015 or 2017. Do you happen to remember it's around that era? It's around that era where some really good movies came out in that era too.
Speaker 2:But Clark and colleagues ran a two year long study on obese subjects and they lost 15 to 30% of their body weight. They have their starting body weight I think it was closer to 30% which is substantial, substantial and they specifically told the subjects to not concentrate on their body weight. Just don't weigh yourself. Take the attention completely off of the scale and put your attention on increases in exercise performance and this was in both the aerobic performance as well as the lifting performance. And even a classic example, not necessarily in this study, but if somebody concentrates on increasing the amount of pullups or chin ups they can do, if you just concentrate on that, then that's going to require either an increase in strength or a decrease in body weight, or both. Any way you slice it, those are both good things, and you know what. It's usually both.
Speaker 2:That happens in programs like that, where the goal is to increase the amount of pullups that you can do, and so these subjects were put on that program.
Speaker 2:They didn't weigh themselves, they didn't even think about weighing themselves. All they cared about was improving fitness levels and strength and endurance to a degree as well, and they lost a spectacular amount of body weight over the course of the two-year study. And, diet-wise, they were given a protein assignment, which was actually pretty good. They were given 1.5 grams per kilogram of body weight and they were told to limit their carbohydrate intake to 90 grams a day, so that's almost double the amount that would be considered a ketogenic carbohydrate level, and so everything was relatively reasonable and doable. But they just didn't concentrate. They lifted the focus off of body weight and it was a great success. So I think we can take those that example from the published literature and run our own variations on that, especially with clients who are sick of dieting, sick of stepping on the scale all the time and need a bit of diversion from the normal protocol, because sometimes that's what is required is shifting the goals.
Speaker 1:Gosh, it's kind of what we do in the gym. We're kind of, you know we're general health and fitness. You know we tend to trigger people to focus on the performance. You know the fitness levels and obviously they're well-being in general and take the focus away from.
Speaker 1:you know that they probably tried every single diet under the sun by the time they get to us. That's the kind of demographic you know. It's 25 to 55 year old females and most of them would have tried everything you know and on the walls. We tried to install some good, healthy habits and all the time, of course, and really put the emphasis on fitness and strength, and I've seen an anecdote like that. It's not for everybody, you know, but generally it goes in the right direction. Yep, alan, I'm not going to take up too much more of your time. No problem, man, one more question. So if you were to recommend tree books, just health, they can be based. They can be health like nutrition, training, anything within the health sphere, let's say, something that's going to improve your health. We know health can be subjective I mean now it's multifaceted. So tree books that you recommend?
Speaker 1:I like of course, yeah, yeah, flexible dieting. Not trade your own books now. I'll let you put one year on books in right.
Speaker 2:If I had three books, it would be real easy, right? So yeah, absolutely my book. Flexible dieting for sure, that'd be the first priority. And I gosh, this is actually a hard question, man. What audience are we talking about?
Speaker 1:Just general pop, the average gym goer, I suppose some non-gym goer. It's a mix. It's a mixed match of people that listen to this podcast. Build 50 people in total, I think.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, about 50 people, Okay, so good. So if I recommend the wrong thing, it's not going to have a very bad ripple effect back on me, okay. So I really like. I really think that Brad's textbook is very valuable the science and development of muscle hypertrophy and I really like Brett Contreras' book called Glute Lab, and so I think those are very valuable books, brad showing Fowle's book being mainly a text book, a reference book for muscle gain, and it's got a lot of muscle physiology in there. Yeah, and Brett's book, glute Lab, is like a very practical type of manual for exercise programming and it's not just all glutes stuff, although there's a lot of glute stuff, and so, yeah, people who want to be able to bring up the old haunches, they'll benefit quite a bit from Brett Contreras' stuff. Yeah, I think that's it with the books that I would recommend. Well, let me you know what. Hold on, let me think here. Oh man, I think that's all I got for now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I haven't read Brett's one, but I've read Brad's. I've used it actually, and it's actually a great reference. Even when I was in college I used it for assignments. You know. It was so much information and it's ridiculous.
Speaker 2:It's really yeah, it's really awesome. A lot of the great feedback that Brett's book gets is from women. So yeah, it's. Maybe it's a bit more of a female oriented book, but you know, both men and women can benefit from Brett's book as well.
Speaker 1:Nice one, alan. I appreciate you giving up your time to come on and I know you're a busy man, and I mean with the book coming out recently and stuff. I know you've been dealing with the rounds on the podcast, so thank you for coming on this evening, or this morning in your case.
Speaker 2:Well, I tell you what, man I could, just if I close my eyes, I feel like I'm talking to Conor McGregor. So it adds that element, you know, of a celebrity here.
Speaker 1:Just point out there and just tell them that was Conor McGregor, that I interviewed you. We'll get a few million hits on it.
Speaker 2:Yeah Right, what a superstar he is you know he can just tweet out like a two word thing and be really idiotic and just lights up the whole internet. Man, he's a really special individual.
Speaker 1:So I wish I had his money, but I'm not going to do. Here we are, I know right.
Speaker 2:Well, I really appreciate you having me on, paul, and thanks for the really provocative questions, different set of questions, and I really enjoyed the talk, man, and for all 50 of you tuning in. Thank you so much. I keep up the good work, keep fighting the good fight.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Adam, All right brother.