What Will Make Bert Less Fat? w/ Layne Norton | 2 Bears, 1 Cave Ep. 206
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This week on Two Bears, One Cave. You're the three fucking cool nerds. You guys are like the fit nerds. Don't masturbate in public. Right? That's a big one. Is a gallon of tequila good for your lifting? I mean, you can't argue with results. 100% Cheers. Cheers.

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Most of the time, my co-host is a mess talking about how he can get his life together and finally drop some LBs, maybe put the booze down for a second. This week, we have somebody sitting in who might be considered the polar opposite. He's doing things like winning powerlifting competitions. Give it up for Lane Norton, everybody. Let him hear it. And Mr. Bio Lane, thank you so much. Thanks for coming in. Hey, man. Thanks for having me. I'm...

Super excited. I'm super excited. I've been following your stuff for a long time. Both Bert and I have. We both have chatted with you and about you. And this is so fun because you are the guy, for people that don't know, there's no end in sight for the amount of people who will tell you what you should be doing, what you should be avoiding,

what you need to be eating, what you need to be doing for exercise. Like all these things that people are like, this is it. And they say it with complete confidence and they stare down the barrel of the camera and then you see it and people share it and they go, oh, this is the thing. And you're like the one guy, it feels like, who...

has the credibility, the credentials, who takes up this information and then goes, I am going to tell you what is bullshit about this, this person's claim, who has, they have zero hesitation in saying what they say. And then you actually go, this is bullshit.

Because your background, for people that don't know, what's your actual academic background? So I did a bachelor's in biochemistry, and then I did a PhD in nutritional sciences. And my specific area of focus was protein metabolism. But-

after I got out of grad school, kind of focused a little bit more on weight loss, fat loss, just because that's, you know, what most people are striving towards. But I got into it because I was interested in learning how to build muscle, lose fat because I was into bodybuilding. Yeah. And so, I mean, it was a completely selfish reason that I got into nutritional sciences. I just wanted to learn more because for

For the same reason, growing up, our education was muscle magazines. That's it, yeah. And you'd read one magazine, it'd say one thing. Another magazine, say another thing. And sometimes in the same magazine, contradict itself. Yeah. So I'm like, I don't know. I'm trying to figure this shit out for myself. So you basically were like a competitor who goes, well, I want to know more about the science of some of this stuff. Like, I want to be able to rely on what I'm...

Like I want to know the truth. So I'll study it. Yeah. I mean, like, um, got into lifting. We were talking in the gym. I got into lifting when I was like 15, kind of on and off. Then from 17 on to now I'm 41, I've been consistent with it. And first starting out, I was in the bodybuilding. I did my first show when I was 19 back in 2001. And just like, I won the teen division of the show and the novice division. And I was like hooked. Yeah. This is awesome. You know,

and like really got into it won a pro card and natural bodybuilding or drug tested bodybuilding they actually do have that not nearly as big as the olympia yeah um those guys are fucking so crazy it's

It's crazy. It's crazy what the human body can do. Do you look at, like, I mean, we were, we're almost the same age where you, you know, we were all fascinated by Arnold, right? Like you see Arnold and you're like, oh my God. And even now, like that physique is his, I'm telling you, his prime physique is incredible. Like you look at it and you go, oh my God. But then you look at Olympia guys now, right?

They don't even look like he actually looks like a very, an incredibly muscular, like, like a statue physique. But it's a physique that you would go. I wouldn't hate having that. I wouldn't feel. Yeah. Now the Olympia guys, I mean, it's, it's like fucking nuts, dude. And I know a lot of them, but it's, you know, it's a big burden on your system to, to be that extreme. That's the word for it. It looks extreme. It is very extreme.

um and so you know people ask me all the time like i'll get accused by some people like oh you must be cheating the test or whatever i'm like bro look at me yeah i've lifted hard for 25 years yeah and in a t-shirt i just look like an athletic dude yeah you know what i mean um people who are my height who are competing in olympia are like 70 80 pounds heavier than me you know so what do you weigh uh i'm like

anywhere from 205 to 210 when i compete in powerlifting i compete in the 205 pound class yeah so um that's why i end up competing at just cut a little bit to to make that um if i was doing bodybuilding like last time i did bodybuilding was that lean i was like 190 pounds sure like on stage so wait how long because we i jumped in but you were doing that in your late teens early 20s and then how long did you stick with bodybuilding so i did bodybuilding up to age 28

I qualified as a pro. And when I finished my PhD, did my first round of pro shows, also my last, I always joke that I got PTSD from that diet because getting that lean for a dude, like to where you have, you know, like literally looks like you have fingers in your ass cheeks, you know, because you're so lean. You just feel like shit all the time. Like it is the most, the best way I can describe it is like,

Getting up and walking over across the room can sometimes feel like a monumental task. Because of how you're living. Fatigue. Like you just have no energy. You're like in every natural body, bodybuilding case study they've done in the scientific literature, men who get ready for a bodybuilding show are hypogonadal by the time they step on stage. And so I'm somebody who like my testosterone right now, like naturally. Yeah.

has been anywhere from 800 to 1100. Um, when I'm from anywhere from when I measured it to like 20 to 40. Right. And like,

I think even recently at age 41, I was 950. I wanted to hit this. So there's notes I made. You're the only person I've ever made notes for on this show. I wanted to hit this for the – like there's things that I want to talk about for myself personally. There's things I want to address for Bert, and there's things that I think are fun. Like just talk about there's obviously like a lot of men that listen to this show, that watch the show. So one of the things that is huge –

now is that people can get testosterone. Like it's, you know, it's, it's in the zeitgeist. Like it's what it's, it's a, it's a thing, right. Where I'm on low dose testosterone, Bert's on it. And so are, I don't know, millions of probably men across the world. Sure. But one of the things I think that I wanted to point out, cause I heard you say it one time to guys who are,

maybe in their 20s or entering their 30s, is that if you take care of yourself in that decade, like you did and like I did not,

Like we're examples, we're the opposite examples is that you, the reason that yours is a great level is basically because of how you live your life. Like that you ate well, you worked out, you did strength resistance. Your testosterone didn't dip as much as many men who are your age because of how you lived your life. Yeah. And I mean, genetics obviously matter. It plays a part, of course. I don't want to discount that. But yeah, like I'll tell people like,

You know, I, for the most part, people who know me, I think you've been around me for a couple hours now. I'm kind of like the Energizer Bunny. Like I don't stop talking. I don't stop moving. You know, I do two, three hour workouts and I've still got plenty of energy. We did not, by the way. We went to the gym. We did. I did like three sets, you know. But I think a lot of that is, you know, I didn't beat my body up with drugs and alcohol when I was in my twenties. I didn't have big party years. You know, I wasn't staying out super late.

I'd go do social stuff, but I was really good about like when I was ready to go, I went, you know, and if I didn't want to drink a lot, I didn't, you know, and I just, I had good boundaries with that stuff.

And so I think a lot of that carried over, you know, it's kind of like investing, right? When you're young, I always say the sooner you can start investing, the better, the better, because I mean, the calculation, the classic one is if you invested $2,000 from age 20 to age 28 and never touched it again, versus somebody who invests $2,000 every year from age 28 to age 70, I think because of compounding interest, basically the person who started investing later will never catch up. Right.

I think health and fitness can be a little bit the same way, right? Like obviously now you are much better off than you were because of the work you put in, but you're kind of trying to play catch up now, right? Because of all the stuff that you were talking about, right? And so I think I just got really lucky in that health and fitness was probably an unhealthy obsession for me at a certain point. Uh-huh.

But at least that unhealthy obsession was something healthy-ish, if that makes sense. Sure. I took it to the extreme, but I just loved doing it. So yeah, but anyway, by the end of that prep, even my testosterone was low, like out of the normal range. So it just shows like lifestyle can make a big impact. And bodybuilding is an extreme thing. Extreme. At a high level. At a high level. So I won the heavyweight division, the first pro show I ever did. I finished top five in all my shows that year.

And the year previous to that, I had actually, because I was drug free, it takes so long to build muscle. So long. Like, so I tell people, I'm like, if I'm on drugs, I got some pretty shitty drugs. Yeah. Because from the time I won my pro card to the time I compete as a pro is four years. And I added about two and a half pounds of stage weight. So just not those drugs, you know, I probably could do better. Yeah. Yeah.

But because it was so long to keep myself engaged, I'm like, what can I do that would be like fun that would keep me engaged in training? Because training just gets boring and monotonous. So I was like, I'll do a powerlifting meet for fun because I always I'd always lifted heavy and been pretty strong. So I did a couple of powerlifting meets. I was like, oh, that was cool. And then after my pro shows, I'm like, oh, I'll do some meets again before I compete again in bodybuilding.

And I had some friends who were, I'd always competed in kind of like these smaller organizations and the big organization in powerlifting is called the IPF. Uh, they're recognized by the IOC. Uh, they're in the world games. So not an Olympic sport, but it is recognized. And I did a, a USAPL meet, which at the time the USAPL was the IPF affiliate in America. Uh,

Hit a good total one. Didn't really think much about it. It was local meat. And the head U S coach, Matt Gary messages me. And he's like, just so you know, your total at that meet last year would have put you seventh in the world. Um, and you would have won nationals. Holy shit. I'm like, Oh, and this is before powerlifting. Like it's much bigger now than it was much more competitive now.

But I was like, so I kind of talked to my coach at the time, Ben, I'm like, you want to do nationals? He's like, yeah, let's go to nationals. And we trained so differently than everybody else at the time. Like Ben, very smart guy. He was doing stuff that nobody else was doing. And so I kind of rolled into my first nationals as this bodybuilder who was trying to do powerlifting and I won. Holy shit. And there was like, like a hundred guys in my class. And like, it was kind of like one of those things where I was like, oh, that was cool.

And then after the meet, everybody's asking, are you going to go to worlds? You're going to go to worlds. I'm like, where's worlds Finland. I'm looking at Ben. I'm like, you want to go to Finland? He's like, yeah. I'm like, I don't know. Let's do it. You know? And then like, as I got more into it, I understood like, Oh, this is actually a big deal because in order, the only way you get an automatic bid to go to worlds is to win nationals. That's it. And again, there's like a hundred guys. How was worlds? Awesome. Crazy experience. So I,

I hit a 650 pound squat at that nationals in the 205 pound class, which set the American record. And then I realized, Oh shit, I'm only 11 pounds off the world record. So I'm like, that became like my, I'm like, all right, I'm going to get this. Right. And so I'm going off on a tangent, but this is kind of a funny story between me and Ben, who's actually one of my close friends now. Great dude.

We have like a really tight relationship. It's one of the reasons it works so well on meat day is he knows how to get me up emotionally. Don't cut that. Anyway, so we were going, originally I was going to do worlds, which is in June, but I was going to do the Arnold pro meat. So at the Arnold classic, they have a pro meat and you can only set a world record at a world level meat. There has to be world judges. It's like very specific criteria. Gotcha.

So they were going to have world judges at this meet. It was considered a world level meet. And Matt Gary, the head U S coach is like, Hey, this is the place to do it because you know, you don't have to travel out of the country. You can get more sleep. Like you're gonna be on your own time zone. And, um,

So the way powerlifting works is you've got three lifts, squat, bench press, and deadlift, and you get three attempts on each and they're progressively loaded. So if you miss, you can't go down and wait. You can only go up or take the same. So you have to be pretty strategic about how you do stuff. There's real strategy involved in this. Oh yeah. And when you get into like the final deadlifts, there's a lot of strategy involved actually. The strongest person doesn't always win. Right. So we get to my third, I had gone through like some back issues and had to like really work through them a week out. I actually like,

kind of really flared up my lower back from that meet. Didn't even know if I was going to be able to go. And like two days beforehand, I felt good enough. I'm like, all right, I guess we're going to give it a shot. Hit my second attempt, which was like 633. And I'm like, all right, let's load it. Like we got it. Mom, dad, you should shop Amazon for back to school and save some money. See, I'm currently obsessed with superheroes and need all the superhero stuff. Superhero launch box, superhero back,

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So I see 661 go up on the board. Which would be a world record. Which would tie the world record. Okay. And if it's tied, the person who had it before keeps it. And once you put in your attempt, you can't change it. So this was like, so I go to Ben, I'm like, hey, he's going to hate that I told this story on here. But we laugh about it now. I'm like, hey, that only ties the record. And I just see Ben's face go fucking white. Like completely white. Like he knows he screwed up.

He goes over to the scorer's table. He knows he can't change it. He asks him anyway. They don't let him. He comes back. He's like, well, he tries to put the spasms to spin on. He's like, we're going to go for the win today. You know, we're going for the win. But this is like, so this is actually one of the moments I was most proud of in my competitive career because this is still more weight than I've ever squatted before. And now I can't set the world record. So I'm dealing with like that disappointment, having to process all this in like five minutes and end up going out and hitting it and getting it.

And that was actually one of the hardest squats I've ever done because I guess the way to describe it is it's so much more easy to get amped up when you know you could do something like that. But we're only talking about a pound difference of what it could have been. Like this is still going to be hard. Anyway, so worlds, I kind of, again, like after that meet, my back acted up and I really wasn't able to start squatting and deadlifting until like six weeks out of worlds. Went over to Finland. Ben comes with me. I'm warming up.

And my training had been very up and down because we had to cram a lot. Like the, the work I did in six weeks, I mean, I was training five, six days a week for three or four hours. It was crazy. So I'm warming up and Ben was never somebody who would just give me like praise if it wasn't there. I hit my last warmup. And so the warmup area was like at this, this top level and you had to walk down into a holding area where they hold you and

where there's like chalk and all this other stuff that you know basically like you can prepare to go out and there's like a hallway when you're one or two lifters away you go to the hallway and then the official tells you when it's your turn so we're walking down the stairs and he looks at me and he goes this is yours today and i'm like okay we got this so when it gets to the third squat attempt the record is 300 kilos 661 pounds i see 303 go up and i'm like hey ben we only need 300.5

And I'm thinking, if I miss this, I'm actually, I go from a gold meddling squat to not even meddling. Yeah. And he's like, I know you're not going to miss today. Like, all right, let's go. I went out, hit it. Ended up, I got a gold meddling squat, set the world record. It's been broken a bunch of times since then. And then got a silver medal overall. And actually it was the first meet. So you have nine attempts. It was the first meet in my life I'd ever gone nine for nine at.

And I'll never forget 12 weeks before the meet, the head U.S. coach, Matt Gary, who emailed me originally, who planted the seed in my mind, this guy's forgotten more about powerlifting and powerlifting strategy than like he is the goat of powerlifting strategy. He's emailing me. He knows every single guy in my class, what their tendencies are. This guy misses his third deadlift 30% of the time, like all this stuff. Right. And at the end of the big long email, he says, you have a chance to meddle.

But you've got to be perfect. If you miss a lift, you're going to be out. Train like your life depends on it. And I was like, oh, don't tell me that. Like, and I did. Yeah. And it was cool. So like I was nominated, I think like seventh or eighth, meaning like my projected finishing place was seventh or eighth. And you ended up. In second. Wow. So it's pretty cool experience. It's a very similar story to Bert's. I don't know if you're familiar with his past, but.

Can I tell you something funny about Bert? - Yes! - That I have to, 'cause he's gonna love it 'cause I'm talking about him. - I'm sure. - And I'm giving him credit to this, but I think only somebody who lifts will actually appreciate this. And this is true. I'm always the first to make jokes, crack on him, but this is actually, I think this is very impressive.

So he's always had really great hand-eye coordination for athletic things. Great golf swing. Great tennis serve. Baseball swing. Beautiful. Yeah, I've seen some of the videos. Cracks it. I mean, goes fucking yard on that shit. I mean, you know, shoots a bow and arrow. He could throw a dart. Like, he's just had that. That's his gift. Yeah. But strength-wise, it was just like, oh, he wasn't really...

you know, into it. You know, I think he would do like more like casual stuff. Like people do, you know, pick up a couple of dumbbells. Ah, you know, that was a workout. So then we were like, it's like five, six years ago. We were in Rogan's gym at his LA studio and we had been drinking. We were fucked up. I like this story already. That's, that's, I mean, definitely something to balance, you know, balance life. So we throw two 25 on.

Right? And like I said, we were smoking, drinking. So Ari gets on there. I mean, it just pins him. It doesn't even move. So we pull it off. Bert gets on there, and he goes, and it's like here. He can't move it. Racks it. I get on there. I do one. And then Joe's like, what the fuck's going on? And he does like 10 or something. So anyway, I mean, yeah, they were drinking, but he couldn't do it. He was like 45 or something.

So yes, I have to say this so that everybody, because there are people will weigh it. He is on a low dose of tea, right? Not a bodybuilder dose of tea. Right. Like 25 units a few times a week. Dude, he fucking, he comes in here. He's telling me like he's been lifting. You know, he's telling me, I'm like, all right. And he's like, I did 225 10 times. And I was like, what? So he shows me a video and I am actually looking at the video because he's done like,

fake plate things before after jokes. I'm like, is this for real? Like, is this for real? Like to go from that to now 10 reps and he's 50, I was like, I mean, that's very impressive. But what impressed me even more was that he calls me, he's like, this is why it impressed me is because he doesn't do it. So not the bench thing, it's what I'm about to tell you. He's like, I'm trying to figure out my one rep max for a strict press.

Now, even like casual gym goers, they don't all do strict press. It's a pretty specific thing that you are like after. And it is one of the... It's a tough lift. Like there's...

There's like a baseline strength that individual to individual has. And you'll even find people who are traditionally strong who will have their own struggles with a strict press. It's almost like a pistol squat. There's some people came into a pistol. Like I can't do a pistol squat. Yeah. It's like 600 pounds, bro. So I'm like,

He goes, I was trying to figure out, and here's why it impressed me. It means that he doesn't do it regularly. Do you know what he was like when I figured out my one rep max for strict? 170. I was like, bro, that's really solid. Like that's impressive. It's good. And this is like with not...

Going after it. Yeah, that coordination carries over I mean is it tequila because he has he is a is a gallon of tequila good for your lifting I mean you can't argue with results. That's what I say You know, it's funny. I think there's um, because I'm you were talking about the post I put about TRT, huh? I think people like view like oh you must be anti TRT. Yeah, because you're drug-free and I'm like, I

I think the thing I would say is look at your lifestyle first. Sure. Make modifications to that. But if somebody's low and they feel bad, if this makes them feel better, like a low dose, they're not competing in anything where they're getting tested. Sure. Why not? Yeah. And you look at the reference ranges for a lot of this stuff. A friend of mine was telling me this who works in a hormone clinic. Yeah.

a lot of it is like okay that's the reference range for a woman who's 50 sure do you want to feel like a woman who's 50 or do you want to feel like a woman who's 30 you know and so i think there's this like and even like primary care physicians there's so much stigma around this stuff you know my thing is like i really try not to be dogmatic about anything right like yes if you're taking high dose testosterone to the point where you're like you're getting like really freaking jacked yeah there's some downsides there like let's not pretend like there's not yeah but

But if you're talking about a small dose that's just getting you into like a higher level in the physiological range, you feel better and you've got better energy and better sex drive and better performance. You're staying in like a high normal range. What's wrong with that? I mean, like I get that naturally. That's what I'm saying. Like for it doesn't, one of the reasons why- I feel great. You'd be like, I don't, I'm not for it. It's like-

you don't need it. Right. So I'm like, why would I do TRT? I don't need it. You know, now people ask me like, what if it dropped when you get older? I think the thing that bothers me is people act like when you turn 30 or shit just breaks, you know? And I'm like, no, like most athletes have their best years in their thirties, you know, like, and it's, it's shifting later, but it's when you take care of yourself, you know? Right. Um, and I think there's been a lot more, uh,

Man, I put so much more, we talked about this in the car, like emphasis on stress management. You know, like I think a lot of people mistake getting older as, oh, I'm performing worse. I feel worse because there's something happening with my body. In reality, dude, you're sleeping less. You're drinking more. You have way more life stress going on because people have got kids. You've got more moving parts.

One of the things I kind of had this epiphany this last week is I, I, and I said this to a couple people. I'm like, you know what? Don't add extra chaos to your life. Like you will get chaos introduced to your life randomly without you even trying. So if you know something could be chaotic for you, just don't do it. Yeah. You know? And I think I was somebody who like, I'm such a, I was able to get away with being so energetic and so driven and just say yes to everything and just go, go, go, go. Yeah.

Until it finally caught up with me when I had some extra life stress come in and that's when I started getting injured That's when I started like having a lot of pain issues if you start reading a lot of literature on pain a lot of it is Stress if you have high stress the best way I understand I'm not a pain expert But that's why I understand it is pain is like a gate. Okay, and things like less sleep stress Open that gate. So it's not that it will cause you pain but any kind of latent stuff is

that could be there. Yeah. We'll start to get triggered. That makes sense. So, yeah, I think stress management is huge. Favorite topics and things to try to get better at is sleep. Do you prioritize sleep? I try to, um, you know, I, I do think something sleep is something that's very individual. I find that if I consistently get seven to seven and a half hours, I feel pretty good. Yeah. And I'm usually pretty protective of that. I'm usually pretty good at being able to get that. Um,

Like I find typically, so I've shared custody of my kids and I get them week on week off weeks with the kids. It's a little bit worse only because it's this weird thing. Like if I don't, I'll end up waking up within a half hour of either week.

But the difference is when I know I have to get up to get the kids ready, get lunches packed. It's just an added thing. It's like I end up like wake... I sleep lighter. Yeah. It's like my brain doesn't totally switch off. It's like when you know you have a morning flight or something, right? And you're kind of like... I always wake up like 10 minutes before my alarm. I don't know how it happens. I know that well. It's crazy. Yeah. And so I think like...

You know, just try to set yourself up for that stuff. I mean, really, somebody said a really good... I don't know if it was Peter Attia or Huberman, but they... It might not even be a lot of those two. And I like to give credit where it's due, so I apologize for whoever I'm missing on this. Yeah, they're basically the same guy. Go ahead. This summer, during the biggest sporting event of the year, Peacock turns to two broadcasting legends for the Olympics coverage you can't find anywhere else. Um, I think they mean us. Oh, s***.

With an incredible duo sure to take home the comedy gold. Olympic Highlights with Kevin Hart and Kenan Thompson. New episodes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Only on Peacock. Some super nerd. Yeah. But if you could bottle sleep up and put it in a pill and sell it, it'd be illegal because it's one of the best performance enhancers we have. It's the best. You do everything better with sleep. Think about also the days...

The mornings you wake up where you crushed sleep, like where it was the best night of sleep, that feeling, you're like, it's like the first thought you have. You're like, God, I feel so good. And then you look at how much time you slept and you're like, fuck it. It was deep. And it was like, it was like what you needed. And you feel like you can do anything that day. It's yeah. I'd buy that pill every day. And especially when you're, when you're stacking that, you know, like when it's, when it's, I find that if I'm consistently getting seven to seven and a half hours or eight hours, uh,

If I have a night or two of four or five hours, it doesn't affect me. Right. Because you're getting the good stuff all the time. Because I've accumulated, you know, like it really is an accumulation of what you're doing overall. Funny thing too is like you, it is also tied to, you have to be,

I mean, personally, act like very active to get in. Like, in other words, if I'm just like not doing other activities, I'm not going to have great sleep. The two have to be tied together. Well, think about the people that don't overthink this stuff. Kids, right? Yeah.

What gets kids to pass the hell out? You run them. You run them ragged, right? You're like, let's go to a park. You go to a water park. Do you do this? I do it. My kids, when they're, when we're out somewhere, I'm like, you see that goalpost down there. How fast do you think you can get down there and back all the time? And then they're like, and they fucking take off and they come back. I'm like, that was pretty good. You think you could do it again?

And they're like, yeah. I just have them running like laps. I just do the hack where it's like, I'm very fortunate to live in a neighborhood where there's a lot of families. And so I'll just be like, all right, who are we having over today? Let's get them in the pool. Throw the kids in the pool. There's something about the swimming and the sun. Oh, yeah, dude. That exhausts them like nothing else. Absolutely. Because there's days where they run around where I'm like, how the fuck are you not tired now? But the pool does it. Out in the sun? Yeah. Absolutely. No, I love...

You know, so my two kids could not be more opposite. So my son is 10 and he's nonverbal autistic. Great kid, like very easy in many ways. He's never like he says isolated words, but he doesn't speak in sentences. But he communicates through a like a handheld device. My daughter, seven years old, the loudest human being in existence.

And does not shut up. Yeah. And I love her to death. She's like, like a seven years old, one of the funniest people I've ever met. But she's also so slow to do anything. I'm like, you were like trying to drag a slug around. Yeah. It takes her an hour and a half to eat dinner.

Really? I'm not even kidding. Just because she's distracted. She's... Yeah. Oh, she's like... I'm ADHD, if you can't tell. And she... Like, we haven't diagnosed her yet, but I'm like, I don't need somebody to diagnose this shit. Like, I've seen it before. So...

Like when I have them out in a walk or something like that, she'll be like complaining about walking. I'm like, oh yeah, well, Robert's kicking your butt right now. You're not faster than him. And she'd be like, yes, I am. And she'll run after him, you know? Meanwhile, Robert's just being happy and skipping, not even knowing what's going on. He's like the energizer buddy. Like he, that kid never stops fidgeting. So you guys are all energy in your, in your DNA. Yeah. I don't know what it is, but we're, we're pretty ramped up. You know, we're, we're not, we're, we know how to chill.

But it's not our default setting. I want to ask you, just because I said I'm a huge fan of your page and how you approach all this stuff.

Yeah. Because like any, like we were talking about, anybody can just go out there, they make a video and immediately, here's what happens. People who wanted to hear that go, there it is. They wanted to hear the thing that somebody had to say as it relates to diet, nutrition, exercise. They're like, that's what I've been saying. Somebody says it. It's not my fault. Yeah. It's not my fault. It's this thing. So one of the big ones, and this was like, you actually understand the science behind this.

that people got really big on was they go, "Oh, you know what it turns out? Diet sodas, like they have artificial sweeteners." And the way that it was relayed to the lay person was the artificial sweetener might not be sugar, but your body believes that it's sugar.

And so when you consume it, you end up, you're tricking your body and you're getting a glucose spike like you would if you were drinking regular soda anyway. And so it turns out it's not even worth it to drink the diet stuff because it's the same as regular soda. And then that became a widely circulated thing that people would say. And the truth is... So first off, this will be...

Like of all the comments on this video, this will be the most contentious thing by far because people are like religious about anti-artificial stuff. Okay. There is like the church of anti-artificial. It's like a naturalism fallacy. We just believe anything that's manmade must be bad. Okay. So if you look at the data, the reason people start to believe this stuff, and we were talking about this, you can always take isolated studies and

and find something that supports what you want it to support. Sure. So if we look at what are called cross-sectional studies or cohort studies, where basically those are, there's no treatment. Okay. So if I do a cohort study, the advantage to a cohort study is you can do it for 10, 15, 20 years with thousands of people. Group A, or sorry, they're just observing what people do.

And then they look at, okay, who consumed more of this and less of this? They do it with animal meat. They do it with vegetables. They do it with a bunch of different stuff and look at incidents of disease or whatever. And what they found in a lot of these studies is people who drink more diet soda tend to be more obese and tend to have worse glucose regulation. People go, ah, see? There it is. There it is. Yeah. But you have to realize the way studies are designed is,

makes a difference. And it's not that these are bad studies. You have to understand how to interpret them. So if diet soda is causing that, then we should see it show up in the human randomized control trials. And here's why RCTs are important. Because when you do things in a cohort, people's behaviors are never occurring in isolation. So if we look at people who consume more diet soda, they're also more likely to have been obese than

They're more likely to attempt more dieting phases. This could very well, when you're looking at trying to make an association, reverse causality is always a possibility, which is it's not that diet soda made these people fat. It's that people who are overweight are more likely to consume diet soda because they're more likely to make more diet attempts. Right.

Because you're not considering when you're studying that these are the people who have the diet soda, you have to take into effect everything else that they consume. Correct. They're consuming a lot of other things. And then this is maybe their attempt to be like, I got to be good when it comes to soda. Right. And so this is why correlation data is so you can be so careful with how you interpret it because you can find crazy correlations out there. Like I think-

There's a website called Spurious Correlations where they look at stuff that's really tightly associated that there's no way it actually caused it. I think there was like margarine production in Maine is like a 99% correlation with divorce rates or something of that. Like some crazy stuff like that, right? Oh yeah, here we go. Yeah. Suicides by hanging, strangulation, suffocation and look how closely it's associated with US spending on space, science and technology. What? What?

Do we think that the spending on space and technology is causing people to hang themselves? And the number of people who drown by falling into a pool and films Nicolas Cage appeared in? Right. So this is why... So Nick is trying to get people to drown? Or, I don't know how the reverse calls out, but people who drown in pools are causing filmmakers to put Nicolas Cage in movies.

So this is why random randomized control trials are important because what you do with randomization is you have group A and group B, right? And you, you randomize them. Yeah. And when you randomize, what you're doing is you're taking out a lot of this bias because if you allow people to self select what group they'll be in, then people may select based on a lot of different things. Yeah. Right. Based on all these behaviors that are wound up together.

But if you randomize and then you do two different treatments, you can be relatively confident that whatever like weird behaviors or other things are associated with it are spread evenly across those groups, that they're randomly spread. And so if you see a difference in your treatments or if you see a difference in the outcomes, you can be relatively confident that was your treatment that you made, the one change that you made.

That's what was producing this. So when we look at the human randomized control trials and people who watch my videos know, I always like stop and go human randomized control trials, because of what you're saying is true. We will see it happen. This is with regard to artificial sweeteners. So in the human randomized control trials where they give people diet soda in place of regular soda, people lose weight and they actually lose quite a bit.

Like, and even compared to water. So seriously. Yeah. So there was a study, it was called a network meta-analysis where they're looking at, okay, if people replace drinking sugar sweetened beverages with water versus replacing them with not necessarily diet soda, but they called it no calorie sweetened beverages because there's more stuff than just diet soda. But essentially that's what a lot of it is. They see that actually water,

water didn't tend to cause weight loss whereas the the no calorie sweeteners did now it's not that the artificial sweeteners have something metabolically that's making people lose more weight it's what's likely happening is if you tell people to hey stop they weren't controlling calories in these studies they were just like hey replace this and let's see what happens people who replace with water what it suggests is they're seeking out that sweet taste somewhere else

And so they're compensating for those calories somewhere else. But people who are drinking diet soda, they're not compensating as much for it. And so they're actually getting into a calorie deficit and losing weight. And on every single post I do about this, a lot of people will come on and say, all I did was replace soda with diet soda and I lost 50 pounds. Right. Because if you're like a regular Mountain Dew Coke drinker and you're drinking the regular stuff and like, you know, the people, because there are people who really pound like 10 pounds

of those cans a day. And you're like, holy shit. And you cut that out. That's tons of sugar and calories that you're not getting. And people will go, well, it can't be better than water. And I don't think it's better than water. I think there, again, it's just replacing a sweet taste that people like, well, that's just weight loss. They actually show that like glycemia gets a little bit better too. Like your glycemic control. So again, like these claims people are making about it, it's just not supported by the human data. Yeah. And again,

I think Ron White had a line where he's like, shoot the out, shoot the alligator closest to the boat. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Okay. So let's assume like, I think there's really weak evidence that there's anything bad about these artificial sweeteners. Yeah. But let's say there is shoot the alligator closest to the boat, which is if somebody uses that and enables them to lose 50 pounds, you're going to have a hard time convincing me that they'd be better off keeping the 50 pounds than

And not consuming diet soda. Right. So at the end of the day, I just look at it like it's a tool. I think it's a useful tool for a lot of people. Hey, if you can just consume water. Good for you. Go for it. Right. And but if you like this. Is there anything to like the people saying or like the chatter that artificial sweeteners are?

really tricking your body into thinking it's sugar so this is mostly based on like i think there were some fmri studies done where they were looking at like what parts of the brain light up all that kind of stuff um this is going to sound flippant but i don't really care about any of that stuff sure because i'm looking at okay when they give it to people and they and because what is the outcome we care about and for me i'm focusing on outcomes i don't like

You have outcomes and you have mechanisms. So like, oh, this part of their brain lit up and that means that that's a mechanism. But what actually happens? Like if it's tricking their body, it's like some people will be like, oh, it's going to make you hungrier and you're going to eat more. Then these people in these studies are going to lose weight.

Right. Unless you're saying, okay, if it's making you eat more and they're losing weight, that means that these things are the best fat burners known to man. Sure. So which one is it? Like you got to pick because you can't explain this outcome based on that. Yeah. So again, I'm like one of those people who like, I think mechanisms are cool and I know a lot of mechanisms because I did biochemistry and when I, before I'd had nutritional science as a biochemist, I,

I'd be all in the weeds like, oh yeah, if we just tweak this thing and do this. And what you don't realize is all these individual mechanisms, these pathways, they do matter, but it's like the economy. Okay. So the economy could be going down, even though a big stock is going up. Right. That, that one stock is a mechanism, right? Same thing.

The outcome of weight loss or glycemia or whatever it is, that is the summation of thousands of mechanisms. And so, okay, you tweak this thing over there, over here, that would be positive towards maybe weight gain, right? But then if that same thing tweaks eight other things that are negative towards weight gain,

Your outcome is weight loss. Right. And so I think a lot of people get so hung up on the mechanisms because they sound sexy. It's like, Oh, do this. And this triggers this pathway. And then you're going to do this. And it's like, you're going from a, to B, to C, to Z. And you're not considering like the downstream effects of all this other stuff. And I think, you know, I talked about my PhD advisor a lot when we were training. Yeah. I was just really fortunate to have a great PhD advisor who challenged me a lot. Cause I would say some of this stuff, but,

And he'd be like, oh yeah. Well then why'd they see this in this, in these studies? You know, like, so I just got very skeptical about stuff. And so now when, even when studies come out, I'm not saying like data gets fabricated or anything like that. It does happen, but I think far less than people think. I just, I tell people, I don't really care about one study. Wake me up when there's 10. Cause I've just seen so many times. So I'm leaving this though, thinking that diet sodas are okay for people.

If we look at the consensus of the high quality data, I think the biggest concern I have right now is some of these, they seem to be very safe. Some of these seem to change the gut microbiome. Now people have, you know, gone crazy with that's going to destroy your microbiome. No, no. It changes some of the species of bacteria that are emphasized and

But we don't know enough about, and I'm like one of the gals who did her master's in the same lab as me is now one of the world's foremost experts on the gut microbiome. Her name is Suzanne Defkota. We talk here and there and I always like run stuff by her because I'm not a gut microbiome expert. And she's like, yeah, on the list of things that are going to harm the gut, diet soda is pretty low on my list. You know? In fact, whenever she came and did my podcast I had years ago, she was like, yeah, I'll take a Coke Zero. Thanks.

You know, once you wanted something to drink. Here's what I want to know. Why does regular Coke settle the stomach so well? It probably has to do with the carbonation is my guess. But it's different carbonation? Because regular Coke. No, yeah. If your stomach is upset and you have a regular Coke, like full of sugar.

Oh, you know what I mean? It like, it is a stomach. Like people have been doing that for years and it does. It also strips paint off a concrete. So I don't know, but, but it fucking, I've had times where I'm like, oh fuck. And you have a Coke and you're like, I feel good. I feel fine now. Thanks. I actually don't know if I had to speculate, um, you know, the, the,

I have no idea. I mean, it could be, it could be the digestive like milieu for digesting simple carbohydrates is more like basic compared to acidic. Like that could be it. But I have, I really have no idea. I have another one for you. Probably the hottest topic of the last several years when it comes to nutrition diet and my regular cohost, Bertrude Kirshner, who's usually sits there is currently a

He's been making countless posts about this in ketosis. And of course, like, you know, like when you look over like the history of like the last 25 years, you get into these fads, right? Like when we were like high school going into college, it was Atkins diet. And then, and there was all these, you know, over the, there's always like a cycle of the newest thing, the thing to do.

Keto came on, it was like all the way, it's still a thing that people talk about. Sometimes people talk about strictly being in ketosis. Sometimes people talk about the carnivore diet, like where you're not necessarily being in ketosis, but you're doing all meat, maybe some fruits and stuff. Bert, to his credit, and this is like from him, he's been doing it now, I want to say a month, something like that, maybe a little over a month.

He cut out booze. Yeah, it's hard to drink and stay in ketosis. So he cut out booze completely. And he's got the sticks, so he's checking to see. I forget what he's down now, but he's down. He's down at least 25 pounds, maybe more. I mean, I know you get asked about it a lot, I'm sure. But what's your take on keto slash carnivore? So...

I'll take it from a weight loss perspective and then I'll move into more general health. Okay. So a lot of people have said, well, if you're on a keto diet, you know, you're burning so much fat and that's how it works, right? Like that's why it's better. You're burning so much fat. So again, I go back to like, what are the human RCTs say? Like if we straight up compare ketogenic diet or low carb diets versus diets that are equal in calories, right?

and protein, which is important caveat because in the late 90s, there were some studies that came out that showed that people lost a little bit more body fat on a keto diet compared to a high carb diet, but they didn't equate protein. And we know that protein is important. They had more protein in the keto diet. And can I ask you this though, that like in a true keto diet, like if you're going, I'm doing strictly keto,

From my understanding and like what I read, you actually, some people kind of were misinformed that it's actually supposed to be much higher fat and you actually are not supposed to go crazy with the protein.

it just depends on what you're doing ketosis for and like how deep into ketosis you want to get. So one of my good friends is Dom D'Agostino, who's a professor who like researches a lot of this stuff. Like, you know, typical ketosis is like 0.5 millimolar concentration of ketones in the blood. And if you get your carbohydrate low enough and your moderate protein, you can, you can get to that level. Oh,

But it's hard to get to like one or two millimolar unless you're doing really high fat, very low carb, and keeping your protein pretty moderate. Yeah, that's the point I was making. If you really want to be in it, you're supposed to actually not go crazy with like, oh, I have steaks and chicken. You actually have to really have that fat up high, right? Yeah, and that's because 60% of amino acids in protein are gluconeogenic. So basically-

gluconeogenesis is the production of glucose by the liver from non-glucose substrates and a lot of those are amino acids so if you get protein too high gluconeogenesis can ramp up and you can actually produce enough glucose i don't it depends on the individual like if you're somebody who's like an endurance runner and you're doing ketosis you could have your protein probably pretty high because you're cycling through so much glucose um but in general

Kind of like at least Dom's recommendation is you don't really want to go above like 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight if you're really trying to get like a good level of ketosis. But these early studies kind of had a little bit higher protein in the ketogenic diet, a little bit lower protein in the high carb diets. And they saw that, okay, the keto diet, people lost more weight and a little bit more fat. Mm-hmm.

And then people started like saying, okay, well, protein is thermogenic, meaning it increases your energy expenditure. So there's what's called the thermic effect of food, which is basically your body's kind of like an internal combustion engine, right? So you put gas in your car, it doesn't just turn on, right? Like you have to start it, use a starter and a battery. So you got to put energy in to get energy out of the fuel you have.

body's kind of the same way. You eat fats, you eat carbohydrates, you eat protein. Your body has to put in some energy to get the energy out of the food that you ate. Now you always get out more than you put in, but it's not the same. So for fats and I'm speaking generally, this isn't always true. The individual nutrient matters, but for fats in general, um,

your TEF is about 0 to 3%. Meaning if you eat 100 calories from fat, you're netting about 97 to 100 calories. Carbohydrate, 5 to 10%. So if you eat 100 calories of carbohydrate, you're netting 90 to 95 calories. Protein is like 15 to 30%. So you're netting, you know, 70 to 85 calories.

So there's like some wastefulness that goes on with, with eating protein. Now, you know, even if you do a crazy high protein diet, it ends up being, you know, at most a couple hundred calories a day difference, but it's still meaningful. And over a 12 week study can impact weight loss and protein helps with retention of lean mass. So, and if you retain more lean mass, there is some evidence that can help with fat loss and actually keeping the body fat you lose off. So again,

I think the best study examining this was a study from Kevin Hall back in 2018. It was actually what's called a meta-analysis, which is basically they have certain inclusion criteria for a bunch of different studies, and then they basically compound all the data together to see what the overall, like what's the consensus, right? Yeah, yeah.

So the inclusion criteria I thought was very smart, which was one, they're looking at outcome of fat loss. So a hard outcome, what we actually care about. And they said, we're making sure these diets had to be equal in calories. They had to be equal in protein. And they either had to be in a metabolic ward, which is basically food jail where everything's controlled to what the participants eat or all the meals had to be provided to the participants. Right.

So basically like very highly controlled. Okay. Because if you do free living stuff, it's people are horrible at adherence. And what they found was basically no difference in fat loss between these diets. Really? Yep. So, and in fact, it actually, the higher carb, lower fat diet was actually had like a slight favoring for more fat loss. It wasn't a, it wasn't a, it wasn't a big difference at all.

But people go, well, how can that be? Because on a ketogenic diet, you burn so much more fat. Yeah. And people equate fat burning with fat loss, but they're not the same things. So fat burning or fat oxidation is a mechanism. Okay. But the actual loss or gain of body fat, that's only one side of the equation. So you're always burning fat and storing fat at the same time. So you think about your fat mass. Okay. You have fat.

Fat fluxing into it and fat fluxing out of it, right? So how much you store versus how much you burn is going to determine what your net fat balance or like how much fat you lose, right? So on a high-fat diet, high-fat, low-carb diet, you burn a lot of fat because you're low insulin, you're eating a lot of fat, your body's relying on that. But...

when we look at what is stored in fat, so what nutrients get stored, in order for carbohydrate to be stored in fat, it has to undergo a process called de novo lipogenesis. And so when they do these- That's the name of my first album, by the way. Sick. I like that. Yeah. I like that. West side. West side. So when they give these metabolic tracer feeding studies, where basically they're giving people food or nutrients that are labeled-

that they can see where it winds up. Okay? Okay. When they label carbohydrate versus fat, of the fat that winds up in your actual adipose tissue, your fat tissue, in a normal diet, over 98% of it originates as fat. Less than 2% comes from carbohydrate. Oh. So what that says is, I'm going to bring this all back, I promise. What that says is you don't really store dietary carbohydrate. When you eat dietary carbohydrate, your body either has to store it as glycogen or burn it.

Now, that, since you're burning carbohydrate, you're burning less fat, right? So on a high-fat keto diet, you're burning a lot of fat, but you're also storing a lot of fat. It's the relative rate of eats that's going to determine if you lose fat. On a high-carb, low-fat diet, you're not burning much fat, but you're also not storing much fat.

And what ends up being the determinant of how much fat you're going to lose is what we call energy balance, which is how many calories are you taking in versus how many you're expending. And people have tried to chop this up. They've tried to, you know, make logical fallacies about energy balance, calories in versus calories out. And it just, we have a lot of research to show that it holds true. So what is that at the end of the day, it's like, you want to lose weight. You just got to be at a deficit. Yeah. And now people will misunderstand what that means because a lot of people don't

They hear that and they go, why in the calorie deficit? I didn't lose weight. And I go, well, okay. So you probably thought you were in a deficit. Maybe it should have been a deficit based off of normal calculations, but I promise you you're not violating the laws of thermodynamics. Right. Okay. Right. Like, oh yeah, it's just you. Right. So some of the, I'll go through some of the confusion of this stuff. Yeah. First off, your metabolism isn't static. Okay. So we know that like, for example, if I lose weight, right.

So like if I go from 200 pounds down to 180, let's say 10% loss of body weight, one, my, my basal metabolic rate, my BMR will adjust. So first off it'll go down because I'm carrying around less mass. Yeah. Doesn't, doesn't need as much to support it. But also there's what's called metabolic adaptation where you have a reduction in metabolic rate beyond what you'd predict just based on the amount of mass you lose. Okay. It's usually about 15% kind of average.

But then you also see in people who lose about 10% of their body weight, you can have a reduction in what's called NEAT, which is non-exercise activity thermogenesis. Name me your second album. That's right. And some people have like a really high, like their NEAT is just naturally. Fidgety. Yeah. And they're fidgety people and they're burning shit up all the time. People really don't understand like how, how big of a deal this is. Yeah.

You're fidgeting and like I tend to be somebody who's like this. Like if I talk on the phone, I'm pacing back and forth. You're not thinking about doing that. That's not exercise. Right. But you're burning. So in people who lose 10% of their body weight, it can reduce their NEAT up to like 400 or 500 calories per day. Damn. Okay. Yeah.

So let's couple that together, right? Like my BMR is around 2000 calories a day. Let's say I lost, you know, 10% of my body weight. If there's a 15% reduction in my BMR, that's about 300 calories, right? So 15% of 2000. And then if I reduce my NEAT by 400 calories, that's a 700 calorie reduction. Okay. So if I started right, like in my, my mate, when I maintain my, my,

Weight on. I know this very well because in our app tracks, your kind of maintenance calories is like 3,350, like pretty much straight down the line. 3,350 is what you're. I'll maintain. You're maintained. So if I drop to say 2,700 initially, that's a good deficit for me. But by the end of this, I'm not in a deficit anymore.

Right? - Oh, because you've reduced your weight. - Because I've reduced my weight. So a lot of people will be like, oh, I was in a, like this, I'm eating in a calorie deficit. - Because your metabolism changed. - Right. I'm eating in a calorie deficit and I'm not losing weight anymore. So this means that thermodynamics doesn't work, this is all BS. No, what happened was, if you have calories in and calories out, your calories outside changed.

Right. So if you had this, if you think about like a balance, right, it's moving you back to maintenance. And the other side of that is I talk about this in my book quite a bit is you get hungrier and you know, there's been on a diet, right? You get hungrier and all these things are trying to drive you back to your original weight, right? Yeah, they are. So that's, that's one aspect of it. Then the other aspect is people will look on their watch and they'll go, Oh, I burned a thousand calories.

When I tell people, like people don't, there's so many things that come out and people don't second guess it at all. Yeah. It was like, oh yeah, this is definitely a thousand calories. Right, right. What's that validated against? Like, do you think that these things are that advanced? So in our study back in a couple of years ago, they looked at wrist worn devices, like 20 different ones. Yeah.

They all, none of them were accurate. Yeah. At best, they overestimate your energy expenditure from exercise by 23-ish percent. Damn. Or 28. At worst, 93%. Yeah. So if you think you burned a thousand calories, it's probably more like 550 to 800. I've had a wrist device where I have that on, a chest strap.

and hands on like an elliptical, you know, like the palm reader. - Give you a bunch of different numbers. - They're all completely different, and sometimes dramatically different. And you can tell too, it's like, I wanna say the time that I did that,

The elliptical was the one that it was like, you're like, this just said I burn like 1200 calories doing this thing. And you're like, that's not accurate. And so what I'll tell people is like, okay, so you probably thought you were in a deficit. Right. Or maybe because you've been dieting for so long, it should be a deficit based on these online calculators. But again, I'll kind of go, what do you think is more likely?

that that online calculator might not be completely accurate for you or that you are that you're the one exception person who is breaking the laws of thermo right and same thing with these watches i'm like hey what do you think's more likely you know that this might not be as accurate as you'd like yeah but people don't question that and they don't understand that and so they'll say things i'm burning you know a thousand calories in my workouts this online calculator says what my bmr is

I'm eating less than that. I'm not losing weight. So this is all BS. And it's like, no, no, you just, you're not like, you're not, if you eat something, something has to happen with those carbons. Yeah. You're not just flitting them off into oblivion. And if you're creating mass tissue mass, yeah, it's coming from somewhere. Right. You're not like, we're not wizards creating atoms out of nothing, you know? So I think, but energy balance, that idea of,

I think is very unpalatable for a lot of people because there is an inherent, like you understand there is an inherent self responsibility component to that. Yeah. And that's really unattractive for some people. We were talking about this, that a lot of these charlatans, the way it's pitched is this wasn't your fault. That's the biggest thing that we all want to know. None of this is my fault. This wasn't your fault. Yeah. It's they've made processed food is addictive and all this stuff.

Listen, one of the things I have kind of come back to center on is when I went to grad school, I was like, I can solve the obesity crisis and just give people these macros and they eat them and they lose weight. And you realize people aren't robots, you know? And I used to think, oh, somebody's overweight just because they're lazy. And then I'm like, but you have all these people who are overweight who are like so successful in some areas of their lives. And I'm like, okay, it can't be that, right? Like somebody one time was like, oh, I'd never hire an obese person for a job. I'm like, that's stupid.

Like, like just because somebody is bad at one thing or bad at managing one thing doesn't mean another thing. Sure. And when you might not be fun to look at, but they can still do a great job. When you start to look at like characteristics of people who are obese, you see that on average, they get a greater reward from food than the average person.

They're also like there was a this was kind of not cool, but very telling. There was a study in obese women versus non obese women looking at the incidence of sexual assault. And they found that women who were obese were 50 percent more likely, I think, was the statistic to have endured some sort of sexual assault in their past versus those who were not. And then when they talked about it to them.

A lot of them were like, well, I hated myself. And so I, you know, overeat or I use food as a comfort. Sure. That's a big thing for a lot of people. Common thing too, is that if you were violated in that way, you do this so that you're not appealing. You don't want to keep people away from you. Exactly what was said. Yeah. And so then you start to go, okay, maybe this isn't like just a hundred percent everybody's individual fault. Sure. Right. And I think when it comes to calories in calories out,

that can feel like really attacking for people oh you just you ate too much you lazy person or whatever but i like to use financial examples i'm like we all agree that like if you want to save money you have to earn more than you spend like i don't think anybody's like sure nobody's going to challenge me on that right yeah yeah so why is everybody why are so many people broke why can like i think it's like 70 of americans can't write a check for more than five thousand dollars or something like that why is everybody broke you have this information just go

you know, go action. It's like, cause it's not that easy. It's not that easy. Cause it's all, and there's plenty of people who make over $250,000 a year who are broke. Right. So it's not just the income side of things, people's habits and behaviors really get in their way. And I think we, as a, as people, you have so many decisions you have to make on a daily basis. You never realize how much stuff you do just on fucking autopilot. You know what I mean? Because it's a survival mechanism.

And so like, I remember I had this, um, this thought I was in line at the seven 11 at like 8am. I just dropped my kids off at school. I was just grabbing, um, like a, I think an energy drink cause I was going to go train and in line in front of me is an obese woman and she has like three slices of pizza. And my initial thought was, of course you do, you know? Right. But then I started thinking, you know, I bet you don't even think about it that way. I bet it's just like, it's Tuesday, it's eight.

I always go to the 7-Eleven and this is what I do. Yeah. You know? Sure. Maybe not. But like, I think for a lot of people it's like that. Or it's like, oh, I just. It's like, I got to eat something. Or yeah. Or if you're a comedian, well, I just finished the show and now it's time to have a beer or whatever it is. Right? Yeah. Like you just get, there's so many, when you look at all the things that go into why people eat, there's so much focus on hunger. And I think it's important.

But people eat for a lot more reasons than just being hungry. Celebration is a big one, right? Celebration. Think about the last time you went to a social event where there wasn't food. Like if you go to a social event and there's not food, you're like, what are we doing here? And also in all those like celebrations, social events, you don't,

very unusual that the food would be like, hey, we found the most nutritious food you can have for this moment. Better taste good. Yeah, it's like this is going to be the richest high butter, high fat. That's the food that people present at those places. Food is a big part of our culture. And I think it's like when people talk about alcohol too, just abstain, just abstain. You can. Food you can't really abstain from. And I'm like,

I think a lot of people are like, we just need to get rid of processed foods. Good luck. All right. We're not putting the bullet back in the gun. Like the bullet's been shot. We're not going to put it back in the gun. We need to teach people.

how to live in this world exactly this is like the i know this is going to be like a far reach for some people this is like when people go like just take everyone's guns away it's like yeah that's not going to happen like if you if you're if your whole thing is like how do we resolve gun but it's like your idea of just take like they're here to happen yeah they're here exactly they're here so you have to deal with it with another approach and the same way it's like

obesity, you know, people's misinformation about nutrition. Actually, like you just have to deal with the fact that like, yes, people are going to eat all types of things. Like how do you best manage the situation that's already here? Well, information is the problem. The internet showed that. Yeah. Like, oh, you know, all these problems are just information based. Yeah. Nope.

I know, like, I felt really bad because I never, I can say that I never fell for it, but I can see how somebody would find it so, like, attractive and appealing. Was being, like, is being seduced by, like, the...

The guy who's like, check out the six pack. You want to know how to do it? And I mean, you know, I, and then you see the stories about how this person got tons of testimonials. So many people to like sign up and they're like, I want the six pack. It's got to work. And yeah. And that's just such a bummer that you realize, oh, that's definitely, this person was just

You're selling bullshit. Like they weren't even actually giving any real information out. And I think a lot of it, again, it's like, it's not you. It's, you know. Yeah, yeah. Here's the thing you didn't know, man. It's all about almonds. The one secret nobody wants you to know. You just got to get these special almonds that I have. And you're like, oh, cool. Yeah. Pay for them. I think that's, you know, I've said like, I think this is a people problem. Yeah. People want to believe in bullshit. Yeah. It's much more palatable than like, well, you're going to have to be consistent and change your lifestyle and do these things, you know.

I think the one thing I come back to, and it's a, I think it's a quote from Will Smith. So I know not the most popular person. No, no, no. I mean, he said, no matter what's happened to you, we always want to equate fault and responsibility together. Yeah. This person hurts you. It's their responsibility to fix it. Yeah. Nobody can fix it.

No matter who hurts you, what happened, the responsibility is going to be on you to heal yourself. Now we're talking about more like emotional stuff, but the same thing is true with nutrition. You grew up in an abusive household or you had an overbearing mom or like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. Like we can understand why something happened. It doesn't change the fact that you fundamentally have to make a decision. And, you know, I don't, I, we haven't talked about your experience, but I, I,

Um, I'm sure there was a certain point, a tipping point. And I, I talked to Ethan Suplee about this. Yeah. I talked to him on the podcast too. He was, he was awesome. Yeah. Awesome. It's like, he's like, man, I just got, I like got sick of it and just decided to start doing like, yeah, stop chasing all these fads and just start going to work, you know? And, uh, he has a quote, which I love. And he said, if your house is on fire,

Just get out of the house. Yeah. We can figure out why the fire started later. Later. Yeah. After you're out of the house. I think so many people get stuck in paralysis by analysis of, and that's like with all this like different information coming in. What do I do? Yeah. And it's almost like this perfectionist or paralysis by analysis way of like never doing anything.

My friend John Deloney actually had a great post about this. He's like, how many self-help books are you going to read? How many seminars are you going to go to? Before you act? How many podcasts are you going to listen to before you just do the dang thing? And I think so many people are afraid of like screwing up. You're afraid of failure. You're afraid of failure. And it's like, I'm sure during this journey, you screwed up. Yeah, of course. But it's like, do you...

everyone's going to screw up. God, like I think about like entrepreneurship and stuff, like how many things I've screwed up or like personal relationships and stuff. Like it's, if you like start worrying about that stuff, like you'll get, anybody will get crushed, right? Like comedians, I don't know about your journey, but I'm sure there were times that you bombed tons, right? Yes. And you just kind of, kind of,

Put your feelings aside and be like, well, we're just going to keep slogging through this and hope it works out. You just, you have to deal. You just, you have to just get back on stage. That's the thing. It's like when you fuck up with a, to, you know, using that, like when you fuck up with a diet, you're like,

I was eating so clean and then I just had like pizza and ice cream or whatever. It's like, you can then, yeah, you can just sit there and be like, Oh, I'm a loser. And, or you just go, I got to just get back to it. Right. And the case of what, like I, so I have a coaching team that like I've trained to coach people and whatnot. And one of the things we do is we'll always go, okay, let's examine. All right. You had this thing happen. Okay. Let's break down why it happened. Let's think about,

things we could do in the future to avoid this or mitigate it. Right. Like I don't really take on many clients now. It's one of the reasons I worked on building an app because it's like, you know, one-on-one coaching, like how many people can you help? Yeah. But you're the, the app does a lot of what you could do for somebody individually. Right. I thought about like, okay, if I wrote an algorithm to basically turn what I do into

into an app on someone's phone, what would it look like? I mean, we spent like two years developing this. Damn. Called Carbon Diet Coach is the app. Shout out. Yeah, yeah. For sure. No, I mean, yeah. But, you know, we have, like, it's crazy to read our Facebook group and the number of people who've had great results with it. But one of the things we do, yes, it's an app.

But we have a Facebook group. We have our support team is awesome. And they have like a lot of like we kind of teach them the coaching background as well. Yeah. So it's like because it's not just OK, hit these macros like it's how do you get people to do that? Like it's not just save money. How do you get people to do that? Yeah. Right. Like what changes can you make to their lifestyle?

So when we have somebody who screws up or whatever, I always say coaching is so important. You want empathy with accountability, right?

If you have one or the other, it doesn't work very well. Because if it's just accountability and somebody's just a drill sergeant... And I love me some David Goggins. Yeah. But for most people... It's a lot. It's a lot. It's a lot. They're just going to go, yeah, I am a piece of shit. They're just going to quit. You know what I mean? Yeah. The fuck are you made of, motherfucker? Yeah. Like, that does work on me, you know? But most people, it doesn't. I'm kind of a robot. I like a tough coach. Yeah. Yeah. But I think also...

somebody like I said earlier, firm but fair, right? Like, so that's that accountability, empathy. So somebody who can say, okay, I understand why this happened. Let's talk about it. How do we stop this from happening in the future? And you have to understand that this is not going to be conducive to hitting the goal that you stated you want. A lot of times, one of the ways I help, I try to help people is I will like,

reflect back the goals they've said to me. That's a powerful tool. I bet. And I'm like, do you think that your, what your actions are right now are in alignment with those, you know, and not in a judgmental way because I'm like, shit, I've been there too. You know, where I'm like looking at what I'm doing, not necessarily nutrition, but other stuff. I'm like, I can't say that's a priority because I'm not prioritizing it. Yeah. And so just that those components are so helpful for people, but it really like it's,

When you want to make a big change, it really is the summation of small decisions that you make on a day-to-day basis. That make it, right? That make it. Like, it's not like the movies where there's just this one, like, light bulb moment and everything flips for you. It's... That can be the impetus for change. But true change comes through boring, consistent habits that we change. And I always say...

It's kind of like progressive overload, like in the gym. Right. So you can't, Bert, first time you tried 225, couldn't do it. Yeah. Now he does it 10 times. He didn't just walk in the gym one day and do it. Yeah. He built up to it over time. Sure. Right. And habits and behaviors are like that. And that's why when people like say, oh, I'm just going to change everything. I'm like, well, that's not going to work. Like, like at the same time, like usually it's not going to work.

Because if you just try to like completely flip your lifestyle upside down, it's going to be so fatiguing, you know, like emotionally and physically. So you start to make, ideally you start to make small changes and have a big impact and you do that consistently, get somebody more confident. I feel like I, I mean, everything you're saying completely obviously makes a lot of sense. I want to ask before we wrap up on our behalf, because I,

I mean, Bert and I probably should just get your app and just do that. But since you're here, I should ask. So like, he's going back on tour. I know this. And he's like, so, you know, he's been sober and probably eating better or actually start eating keto, I should say. So that's what he's eating. But he's gonna go back on tour. So he's gonna be out of ketosis. He's going to be drinking again. What advice, I mean,

can you give to somebody who you know is going to be city to city? Like he needs to make some change. So he doesn't balloon up. Is it mitigate the drinking or is it, you know, he's going to be drinking. So everything else, because I know somebody else who I won't mention who drinks a good bit, but like pretty, you wouldn't necessarily know that. Yeah. But he's pretty disciplined about what he eats outside of his drinking. Yeah.

So that's the thing is, so alcohol itself is calorie dense. A lot of people don't realize it. Well, I had seven shots of vodka. It doesn't have any calories. Yeah, it does. It has seven calories per gram. So like a shot has like anywhere from 60 to 80 calories. Oh. So you do like seven shots, you're talking over 500 calories, you know? Notable. Right. So what I would say is one, so I don't know Burt real well. I know what I've seen on social media and what he's talked about.

He loves him some alcohol. And so I think the idea that he's going to be able to cut that out completely for the rest of his life is probably low. Yeah. So if he wants to be able to consume that, then that means one, probably choosing drinks that are as low calorie as you can. Right. Would that be because it's tequila, isn't it? Or is that tequila? Like straight liquor is going to be lower calorie. Right. Right.

like light beer, all that kind of stuff. Like if you're consuming like IPAs and daiquiris or whatever, like you're having so much extra calories other than just the alcohol, right? Like it's easy to really start to pack it in. And then you've got to look at your food choices as well. I mean, basically you're down to, okay, I'm going to pretty much eat like lean meats and, you know, like a filling other foods because alcohol isn't filling.

you know, like fruits, vegetables. If you are going to eat some junk food, you really want to like isolate it and then try to be, you know, I look at everything like a budget, right? Like a food budget. Okay, if I'm going to have this stuff here, this fun stuff, I better have stuff nailed down over here, right? And like, I'll tell people like, I've got a big food budget, right? Because I train hard multiple hours a day. So I can eat 3,400 calories and maintain my body weight

So I can get in all my requirements, my protein, my vegetables, fruits, all that kind of stuff. And I've still got a lot of space left over to play. You know what I mean? And that's kind of like if somebody makes, you know, a million bucks a year and they can take care of all their, you know, their mortgage, save for retirement, all that kind of stuff, kids, and then they want to blow some money on a car. Yeah. Okay. Nobody's going to say you can't do that. Right. It's a bad investment, but if they like it, you know,

But if somebody's got a small budget, is it good idea to go buy that car? If it means you can't pay your mortgage. No, you don't want to. Right. Nutrition is very similar. Right. So if you've got a small budget or if you're not, you have like, it's a low calorie maintenance level for you. You just got to understand that you'd be more constrained with the stuff that you can do. Yeah. So like the other thing is like I saw the, I think it was the video of him like drinking Kool-Aid. Right.

I'm like, that probably wouldn't be high on the list of things I think are a good idea only because calorie dense, not filling. Yeah. Right. Maybe get some diet Kool-Aid instead. Right. I mean, he loves some Kool-Aid. Right. So it's, I think for, for people like that and what I would say also preparation goes a big way. Yeah. So if you know that it's going to be hard to find food while you're on tour, I mean, I hate telling people how to spend their money, you know, but yeah,

There are people who meal prep and every single place you can think of, right. That they do meal prep. And usually like you can find some people who actually do like some, some pretty good stuff. Yeah. Like that's actually tasty. I think maybe that's what, for me, this is like my, my thing now is like, I, I want to lean out more. So I know I need to dial it in more with diet specifically, like exercise, you know,

I train usually three to four days a week. I'm doing, um, I'm usually like riding a Peloton bike, honestly, for cardio. And then I just started, I just started running outside. Yeah. So like, you know, I feel like, I mean, obviously you can, you can always train harder and more. Right. But it becomes for guys like you, it's a time thing. Yeah. And I feel like, you know, I'm not like unmotivated to train. Sure. Um,

And I'm not, I don't resist. Like, it makes me feel better. I like training. Oh, yeah. But I feel like I just need to dial in the diet more. Well, and it's all, you know, it's ramping up that progressive overload like I talk about, right? Like, so you're, now you're probably used to, okay, it's not that hard for me to make some of these nutritional decisions that are more conducive. Now I can ramp it up another notch. Yeah. A little bit more preparation. Right. Like that sort of stuff. And I do...

I think it's important to bring something up because people ask me like, what's the best diet? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. So I think if I like listeners are going to leave with one thing here to take away, it's, if you want to lose weight, you got to restrict some way. Like you're not going to get something for nothing. Right. Like you're going to like, for me, I kind of eat whatever I want, but I track my calories and I track my protein, all that kind of stuff. So my restriction is calories. Right.

But also like, okay, I have to log my food, right? And I do that in my app and whatnot. To me, that's not a big deal. I'm used to doing it. It doesn't feel fatiguing. And if you tell me I can, if I do that and I can eat some of the foods that I love,

I'm so consistent. Other people, logging and stuff, give them so much anxiety. They hate the idea of it. Most of them actually end up, after they do it for a while and they realize it's not going to take them hours a day, they go, oh, this is cool because I can eat some of the foods I love and still fit it in. But there was a recent meta-analysis, again, so a compilation of studies, where they looked at 14 popular diets. And these ranged from

Low carb, ketogenic, all the way up to like Ornish style, plant-based, high carb, right? And what they found is over the long term, none of them were better than others for fat loss. They were equally bad, basically, because people don't adhere to them over the long run. Right. But they took people and then they stratified them based on their adherence, regardless of diet. So basically like least adherent to most adherent. Linear effect on weight loss.

So, so what that tells me, my take home from all this stuff, and this is kind of like the five minute condensed version of what my room, my book fat loss forever on is the, the best diet is going to be the one that you as an individual can stick to can be consistent with any diet will work if it, if you consume less calories than you burn.

But so many people approach things from, I'm just doing a diet. And so they'll do keto for however long. Dude, I did it. I did it in 2017. Yeah.

You lost weight. And then I gained weight. And you gained it back. And also, I feel like I knew during it, just to speak to what you're talking about, there was a part of me during it where I was like, I had heard people say like, yeah, this is like, you can do this for life. And I was just, I remember going like, yeah, but I can't. Right, right, right. I was like, I don't think I could do this for life. Or like, you know, pasta's cool. Yeah. I was like, I don't want to do this for life. So the way I eat now, which I weigh less now than I did when I was doing that,

is just more balanced, right? Balanced, but healthier. And I feel like that's, I mean, look, if you want to do keto for life, do it. Absolutely. But I think what you're, what you're saying is the most true. It's like, if you cannot keep doing it, you know? Yeah. You've got to, you've got to kind of look. So I say you have to do some form of restriction, but probably pick the form of restriction that feels the least restrictive for you. Right.

And for me, that's just tracking and being consistent that way. For some people, they say, you know, I did intermittent fasting, never felt hungry, felt easy, didn't even feel like I was dieting. Doesn't even appeal to me in the least. Me either. Ketogenic, same thing. I've had people say, oh, I was never hungry on keto. You have people do plant-based that say that. All of it's perfectly viable. And listen, there's trade-offs, upsides and downsides to every different approach you can imagine. Yeah. All right.

But overall, I think people overcomplicate this stuff way too much when it comes to health and stuff. And like, I love me some, you know, Peter T is a close personal friend of mine. Andrew Huberman, love the guy. And we love to geek out over little stuff. Sure. Because that's where the disagreements are in science. Right. But really, in my opinion, 95% of longevity and health, you can boil down to kind of six buckets. Yeah.

Don't eat like an asshole. And by that, I mean, just don't eat too much. Yeah. Right. I say that just for funsies. Yeah. Yeah. Don't masturbate in public. Right. That's a big one. That's a big one. Yeah. You know, exercise. Don't smoke or, you know, really limit smoking because it is, it is a big, big, big problem. Don't over consume alcohol or drugs. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

get enough sleep and manage your stress. And if you do those six things, I'm not saying you can never smoke. I'm not saying you can never drink. I'm saying over the course of your life, make it a very small part of it. Yeah. Right. But if you do those six things, that's man, there's not a lot of people who do those six things. Yeah. You know, especially the stress component of it. We're talking about that, but yeah. And then, so I'll leave with one other thing because I think this is important because when you're watching social media,

And I'm known as a BS debunker. People go, man, I don't know. Like, what do I, like this person says this person, this, and they're a doctor. And this person says that, and they're a doctor. And one, understand that you can always find a study to support what you want to be true. So all you smoking, thinking about this, gave me this example. There was a meta-analysis of the risk of smoking on a, sorry, of smoking and the risk of adenocarcinoma, right? Adenocarcinoma.

We all know smoking causes cancer. Yeah. Very clear. Right. And if you look at the meta-analysis, the end outcome is I think people who smoked heavy smokers were like seven times more likely to get this. Right. But if you looked, you could actually find two studies that were to the other side of that. So there's like 50 studies in here and there's the center line, which is basically the center line of force plot is there's no effect on

In this study, to the right side, it was increased risk. And to the left side, it was decreased risk. There were two studies in there that actually showed like a... It wasn't significant, but a slight decreased risk. If I want to show that smoking is good for you... You could... Yeah. I can pull one of those studies and be like, oh, see, look at this study where it's decreased risk. It's like... But what's more important, that one isolated study or all those other studies? Right. Right? So just understand...

Anybody can create a narrative to seem like they know what they're talking about. What you want to look for is the way people talk. People who are real experts...

They very rarely use words like best, worst, always, never. It's like we were talking, like if I come to you at a comedian, I'm like, hey, what's the best joke? Yeah, yeah, of course. Okay. You know, okay. You go to a financial advisor, what's the best investment? Yeah. Hopefully, they're going to ask you a bunch of questions back. That's how it should be. The same thing would apply over the joke. It'd be like, I mean, I got to know more about you and your sense of humor for like what's going to, what you'll find the funniest. Exactly. Exactly. So,

Like, I just think people don't understand. So when you're looking for people who are experts, it's actually weird. You want to look for people who sound uncertain. They say that maybe we think...

They're not using superlatives. It's actually the people who sound confident are usually the most ignorant. That's so funny. And I always say that on social media, the dumbest people are the loudest. That's usually who will fill up your comments with certainty is somebody who doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about. It happens all the time. I mean, I just had...

Something that I was like, oh, why am I even engaging this nonsense? All the time. But yeah, they're so dumb. There's a quote, one of my favorite quotes by Bertrand Russell. It says,

The whole problem with the world is only fools and zealots are sure of themselves and wise people are filled with doubts. And yeah, I mean, that's what like people ask me all the time. How do I know? It's one of the reasons. It's so true. One of my businesses, I have a research review where like every month I break down different scientific studies. I try to make it in a way that's palatable for people because I understand not everybody is going to go out and get a PhD. Yeah. But when you're looking for people to follow, you're,

listen to less of what they say and more of how they say it. Do they allow for nuance? Do they give you the devil's advocate argument? Like those are some of the things I try to do. Well, you're a great, I always said, if you're interested in this kind of thing, you know,

If you don't yet follow him on Instagram, it's BioLane on Instagram. It's a great follow because you're basically, you'll highlight somebody who's making a claim. Oh, caffeine causes your cortisol to spike and you'll get a big fat belly. Like what the fuck? And it's the guy saying it with complete certainty. Call that mental gymnastics. And then the cool thing is that you play it and then you're like, oh, here's actually...

What's up? You know, I try to realize how big this shirt is. It's really, really big. It's not inside out. I know people are going to say that. I try to like, you know, educate, bothering me, entertain, you know, bring, bring something different. Cause I think most scientists, uh,

It's like, oh, God, snooze fest. Of course. And so it's like, yeah, I talk some mad shit. But you, Peter and Huberman, you're the three fucking cool nerds. You guys are like the fit nerds. But I'm the coolest. For sure. They'll tell you that. And also, congrats. Why not? I just want to tell people, you're 41. You recently won the powerlifting nationals in Scottsdale. First place in your class with a squat of 606 pounds.

Bench of 369 pounds. Deadlift of 694 pounds for a total of 1670. That's amazing. It's almost as good as any. There's no way you could beat him. He's in our booth. He's very, very strong. I saw him. Very jacked. I'm one of those that breaks the laws of thermodynamics, but everybody else. Oh, he's a special snowflake. He's very special. Nice. We like special snowflakes. And he can't lose. He likes to say, I can't lose. That reminds me, I was watching Deadpool the other night, and the gal was...

Oh, is it domino? He's like, what's your superpower? She's like, I'm lucky. That's not a superpower. She's like, yes, it is. Oh, that part was great. I can't wait for you two to go at it, man. I'll set up a contest. Okay.

Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. I like it. Thank you very much for coming in. Yeah, man. It's a real joy to talk to you. It's fun to work out with you this morning. And yeah, I mean, I could do this for hours, but we got to wrap up. And thanks, man. I appreciate you. Yeah, I appreciate having me on. And I love doing this stuff. It's a lot of fun. Love educating. Thanks, brother. See you guys next time.

Bert and Tom, Tom and Bert. One goes top to swat, the other wears a shirt. Tom tells stories and Bert's the machine. There's not a chance in hell that they'll keep it clean. Here's what we call Two Bears, One Cave.