Episode 328: Layne Norton: Are Your Fitness Trackers Telling You the Truth?
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Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits & Hustle. Crush it! Welcome to my brand new series of Fitness Fridays on the Habits & Hustle podcast. In this bonus episode, you'll hear a segment from my interview with Lane Norton on whether or not fitness trackers are telling you the truth, the research behind step count, and whether or not 10,000 steps actually make a difference. And if fasted cardio is better than fed cardio for fat loss.

To listen to the full episode, you can find the link in the show notes below. Enjoy.

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What I'm like working out like a fiend, which is a lot, I'm starving after. I know you don't, you think it's like satiates, like exercise has a satiety thing. It does, in my opinion, for the first hour,

hour, but then you're starving. Let me say this again, then you, then you can, cause I have a whole thing. So I have to watch how intensely I would work out because if I work out too hard, I'm so hungry, then I'm going to eat so many calories. I'll end up gaining weight versus if I like worked out at a moderate pace versus a low intensity, I'm not going to be as hungry. And maybe that's when the satiety can like come into play.

So there's a few things with that. First off, everybody's experience is different. So when we talk about, when I'm talking about data in scientific studies, I'm always talking about averages. Yeah. Right? There's always anomalies. Somebody's experience may be different. If you take any treatment in science,

Usually, it gets what's called a Gaussian distribution, which is a bell curve of a treatment. Right. So you have 60% to 70% falls in this about what you expect. Yeah. And then you have outliers on each side. So totally possible that that actually does make you more hungry. Right.

Does it make you hungry, more hungry? And the harder you work out, the more hungry you get? Past a certain point, yes. And I definitely think that there's something to that where it's probably like a J-shaped curve. You get a little bit of exercise or a certain amount. It does help with satiety. And then obviously, once you're burning so many calories, you're going to increase your energy intake. Now, what I'll say is when we look at the scientific literature,

Typically, you would think that if you're expending more calories, your body's going to compensate by having you eat more. In most studies, there is some of that, but the compensation is not complete. And what I mean by that is if you, let's say you burn 300 calories from exercise, you might compensate by eating 200 more than you normally did, but you're still getting like that 100 calorie benefit. Does that make sense? Yeah, of course. Yeah.

So now I'm not saying that's the same for everybody. How is that possible though? Cause if they, cause you always overestimate, like let's say I'm a runner and I run, I am a, but let's say I run and I burn 400 calories. That's bullshit. Probably I'm only burning 200 calories, but the machine, my watch says 400. It's always overestimates. Then I go eat a thousand calories cause I think, oh, I deserve it. Right. But really, and then I'm really eating a thousand calories. I'm not an, I'm actually in not a deficit. Right. Correct.

So I think like when we look at these studies, they're using very sophisticated things to actually be able to measure energy expenditure, like metabolic wards. So they actually are able to find this stuff. And on average, like I said, people don't compensate. But the problem is, is like, this is where the psychology comes in. And you talked about with the watch, these watches are not accurate. This is another popular, I ate the calorie deficit and didn't lose weight. I burned a thousand calories as on my Apple watch. And I'm like, what?

What do you think is more likely? That that wrist device is not measuring energy expenditure correctly or that you're violating the first law of thermodynamics? Yes. So do you tell me what you think is more likely? Yeah, there was a meta-analysis done of wrist-worn devices in 2000,

I want to say. And everybody asked me, has it improved? No, it hasn't. Right. No, they're just, it's operating off an algorithm based on heart rate. Yes. There's a tie into how many calories you burn, but it's hard to get particular. So, but yeah, we're both wearing it still. Right. So I'll tell you why.

So when we look at how much does it overestimate, the study I looked at showed that I believe it was like anywhere from like 25 to 95% overestimation of calories burned from exercise. So if it says you burned a thousand, you probably burned more like 500 to 800. Wow. Right?

So again, people will misinterpret that. Now, the reason I wear one, one, because I like to get text messages on my watch and be able to respond via voice and all that kind of stuff. It's just convenient. Like the Batman thing, yeah. Right. But while it's not accurate, it probably has a relatively decent precision. Here's what I mean by that. I know that if I go in and train resistance training for two hours, I'll burn, as according to this, I'll burn around 1,000 calories. Now, if I go in one day and I burn 1,500 calories,

as assessed by this. It's not 1,500. It's not 1,000. But I probably can be relatively confident that I did burn more than I did my previous session, right? Yeah. So I think it can be useful in terms of that. And the step tracker is actually quite accurate as well. That's what I like too. So steps can be a nice way to account for neat. It's not perfect.

But I'll tell people like a lot of times we become spontaneously less active when we're on a diet. And so what I'll say is we'll track your steps before you start your diet and then just try to maintain that during your diet. Right. And we did have a case, one of our team bioling clients that she went into a deficit and after four weeks she was having trouble losing weight. And we will look back at her step data because she was wearing her watch, but never really looked at it. She had her steps had gone in half.

Really? So we had her take her steps back up to what they were and she started losing weight again. Really? By the way, I heard like 10,000 steps is completely arbitrary. Is that true? Kind of arbitrary. If you look at the longevity data, I mean, it's like from 2,000 to 8,000 steps, it's like a linear reduction in mortality rate. Like it's very, very powerful.

And then when you go from 8,000 to like 16,000, there's a pretty big drop off. It still does reduce mortality, but the improvement is at a much lower rate. Right. And then once you get past 16,000, it kind of flatlines. It's a little bit of improvement. It's kind of a, for my math nerds out there, you could look at it as like an asymptote is what it would be referred to as. Yeah.

But I would say like for most people, you know, 8,000 steps a day is probably a good target. If you can do 10, great. I think 10 is a nice round number that people like to get. Yeah. I think 10 is a relatively active person, you know, but you don't necessarily need to get 10,000. I mean, if you're getting 2,000 steps a day, but you're biking for two hours, am I worried about it? No, there's nothing magical about steps.

It's just a marker of activity. Right, exactly. Okay, so the exercise piece to this whole thing. So you're saying then, because I've seen you talk about the satiety thing. So do you think that we're just eating our biggest meal after we work out or do you think it's more psychological? We think we're hungry because we should be hungry.

Yes. That's what you think. So when people are kind of left to their own devices and exercise and they don't think about how many calories they're burning and they don't, like I said, we don't see that compensation. One of the most, one of the most compelling, I wouldn't say that exercise has a satiety effect. I think,

One, when you're exercising, you're not eating during that time because you're not bored. Right. So it's taking up some boredom space. You're distracted. Right. Yeah. Two, there's evidence that exercise sensitizes you to satiety signals, that your satiety signals work better when you're exercising.

So let me give you an example. There was a study done in the 1950s, very classic study looking at Bengali workers. And they looked at – they didn't have any intervention. They just wanted to see, okay, what is their calorie intake versus their activity? And so they had sedentary, lightly active, moderately active, and basically heavy labor jobs, right? Right. What they found was from the lightly active – Excuse me. That's all right. Thank you.

What they found was from the lightly active group to the heavily active group, they basically linearly increased their caloric intake to coincide with their activity. So they basically perfectly compensated for it. Oh, wow. But the sedentary group ate more than the lightly active group. And I believe they might have eaten as much or a little bit more than the moderately active group.

So that suggests there's some kind of – Oh, I see what you mean. One, it could be a boredom thing. But there's some kind of dysregulation that appears to occur when you're sedentary. Human bodies are made to move. They're not made to be stationary. Oh, I see what you mean. Okay, hold on. I understand this now better because it's true. Because when I'm not doing anything, I end up eating more than I would otherwise if I was exercising. You might eat less total –

but you're eating more relative to your activity level. Totally. So that's what you mean more than, so you mean more than like over, over time when you're exercising, you're not eating as much.

As much as you would if you were sedentary and not eating. So let me give an example. Your daily energy expenditure if you're sedentary might be, say, 1,700 calories, right? When you're sedentary, maybe you're eating 1,900. Right. I see what you're saying. When you start exercising, maybe now it's 2,200 and you're eating 2,000. So you're eating more total than you were when you were sedentary, but you're actually in a deficit now.

Right? Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes perfect sense. So as an absolute number, it probably does go up. But as a relative number, it actually goes down. What do you think of fasted cardio? Or do you hate cardio, I should ask you? No, I think cardio is fine. But you don't think cardio, like you don't love cardio. Like what's your like overall...

I think it's good. I think it's, I think cardio is good to get your body moving. I think as a fat loss tool, it's decent. But if you look at how much you have to do compared to just eating less, it's,

you kind of have to decide for yourself whether or not the juice is worth the squeeze. How much do you have to do, you think, to lose fat? I mean, you can also break down your, you know, if you're doing an hour or two hours a day, I mean, you'll definitely lose some fat, but like, you know, if you're doing 20 minutes, is it burning calories? Yeah. Is it a ton? Not really. And you could easily, like if you burn 300 calories,

Think about how much you have to do to burn 300 calories. Now think about how little you have to do to eat 300 calories. Exactly. So it is usually easier to lose weight through – again, I recommend people do both. Be active, exercise, but mostly for the effects on satiety and because it's just good for you in general. Could you overtrain and then –

like do the reverse. Like if you can work out too much, no, you can over train to the point where you can increase your injury risk and feel horrible when you're training. But,

but like to decrease your energy expenditure, probably not. But, you know, I think it's just, you know, what do you value? Do you have the time and would you prefer to eat a little bit more? Then you can do more cardio. As far as fasting cardio goes, the idea was, well, you're not eating, so you're going to burn more fat while you're doing it. And the research does show that you burn more fat during the exercise. Really? But remember, fat burning is just one part of it. I know. And so if you look at,

Fat loss, like the actual loss of body fat, when they equate work between groups doing fed versus fasted cardio, you don't see a difference in fat loss. And that's because since you're burning more fat during your workout and you're abstaining from food,

you're eating more food in the feeding window, right? Whereas if you're eating beforehand, you're burning less fat during the workout, but eating less the rest of the day, so you're burning more the rest of the day. - Exactly. - So your body's smarter than, you know, body's smarter than we are. - It really is though.