Mark Bell's Power Project - How to Utilize Protein Leveraging to Control Hunger & Lose Weight Ft. Ted Naiman || MBPP Ep. 1047

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

In this podcast episode Mark Bell & Ted Naiman discuss different factors that can transform your eating habits and life. These factors include protein percentage, energy density, fiber & hedonic factors. Check it out and if you want to follow Ted, here's his info:   IG - @tednaiman website: https://tednaiman.com/   Official Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below!   👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶 ➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject   🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save up to 25% off your Build a Box ➢ Piedmontese Beef: https://www.CPBeef.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150   🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab!   Sleep Better and TAPE YOUR MOUTH (Comfortable Mouth Tape) 🤐 ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained:      ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ UNTAPPED Program - https://shor.by/untapped ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

All right, just wrapped up with Ted Naiman, and it was an absolute pleasure to be able to film with him today. He's somebody I've been following his information forever. The protein leveraging hypothesis is something I've been a huge fan of. I've been practicing it for a long time, and I think it's pretty easy to grasp. The main energy sources that we have are carbohydrates and fats, and that should be our concern when we're talking about being unhealthy, when we're talking about overeating, when we're talking about gaining body fat. One of the things that I always enjoyed that Ted Naiman shares is that when we drive

the amount of protein that we eat, when we have non-energy sources of protein that aren't accompanied by fat, that aren't accompanied by carbohydrates, it will help to drive down your overall hunger. And I think that that's the battle for a lot of people. I know for myself, I like to eat. And when you start to think about like, okay, what to eat, how to eat, how do I manage this? How do I handle this? Well, then you have to start to think about, well, I'm going to start to really consume a lot of protein, really lean sources of protein. I'm going to be eating maybe some vegetables, maybe some fruit as well, because those are also satiating. And those also have high fiber content and usually low sugar content. And so we want to

just kind of look at food maybe differently than we have in the past. And that's what I've learned so well from Ted Naiman. Hopefully you guys enjoy the video. I'll catch you guys later. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never a strength. See you soon. All right. So something I want to ask you for a long time, and I've been following your work forever. And that's why you might see sometimes when I make a post, you'll say, oh, that might be something I, you know, I'm thinking, or I was saying a lot of times it is from the work that you've done. A lot of times it is from the books that you put out and stuff like that. And content I've seen on podcasts and stuff like that. So kind of question number one out of the gate is people seem to be really tied to this calories in, calories out thing. They seem to be really kind of caught up in that each macronutrient has a calorie assigned to it.

But protein seems like a weird one. And I would even go a little further and say that I don't know how much we know about fats. I don't know how much we know about carbs either because sometimes carbohydrates are accompanied by fiber. And sometimes there's, just for lack of a better term, sometimes there's weird types of fat. It seems like stearic acid is a little bit different than other forms of saturated fat. It seems like the fat that's in orange roughy doesn't get digested the same way. same way. So there's some unique properties to not only the food and the calories, but within a macronutrient. But protein seems to be like almost a sacred haven. And it almost seems like a freebie. But I don't know if we can go that far and say that it doesn't count as a calorie.

What are some of your thoughts on that? Yeah, no, I totally agree with what you're saying. Protein is unique because it's these 20 amino acids. And no matter what you eat, they're all broken down to the same thing. And so there's not a lot of mystery there. There is some mystery with protein, however, because while some amino acids are essential and some are non-essential and some are conditionally essential, like sometimes they're essential, we still don't exactly know who needs what and when. Like there are times where you might need more of certain amino acids. So there are some unique settings with the different amino acids. But like you said, fat, there are so many different fatty acids, it's a little bit confusing. And I still think we're kind of in the dark ages as to, you know, which fats are extremely good

and extremely bad. I mean, it was fairly recently in terms of nutritional history that we figured out that trans fats were like, you know, pure evil. So here you've got fatty acid that's just slightly different, but it's extremely bad if you look at outcomes. And so there's a lot more mystery with fats. You know, half of our little keto carnivore crowd thinks that PUFAs are just pure evil and are about to nuke your mitochondria or whatever. And then your traditional doctors are like, oh, saturated fat is clearly the worst thing anyone could ever eat ever at all. And so there is a lot more, I would say, mystery or unknowns when it comes to fatty acids. And then carbs are pretty simple. It's basically, you know, either you digest it into glucose or fructose or some other simple sugar.

Or you've got fiber, which is a little bit more complicated because there are so many different kinds. And we don't know what the microbiome does with those. But back to the first thing you said about calories, right? So, like, I'm with you. You know, protein, because it's used structurally and functionally and not really as an energy source, I— What do you mean? Can you clarify that a little bit? What do you mean by structurally? Right, right, right. So your body is mostly comprised of protein and minerals. If you look at what is in your body, there's very little carbohydrate, right?

You have a couple hundred grams of your liver and muscle. There is a fair amount of fat, but in a lean person who has ideal body composition, your whole body, your structure is mostly protein. And then functionally, if you look at all of your hormones and your molecules and your different functional components of your body, they're mostly proteins as well. So the structure and the function of your body is mostly protein. And then if you look at what most people are burning for energy, it's very predominantly carbs and fats. Fat at lower intensities, just walking around. Carbs at super high intensities, sprinting. And then some smooth mixture of the two, depending on your activity level

and how many carbohydrates you're eating. Because if you eat more, you have to burn those first. But protein, it's weird that we give it a caloric value when your body is not really burning it for energy unless you're radically overeating it and has to because it has no place to be stored. So to me, it's weird that calories get assigned to protein at all. It's weird that fiber is really assigned to any calories at all because it's so variable as to how many calories you could extract from it, possibly zero. So in my perfect world, fat and carbs would have calories and protein and fiber would not. And that's kind of, you know, when I wrote the PE diet,

it was like, okay, try to eat more protein and fiber, less carbs and fats. And it really comes down to the satiety you get from protein and fiber is off the charts. And the actual caloric value you get is horribly low. You know, the thermic effect of protein is so high that you can't really get that many calories from it to begin with.

It's extraordinarily difficult to convert protein into fat that many calories from it to begin with. It's extraordinarily difficult to convert protein into fat to the point that it almost never happens. So basically, I would like to see carbs and fats have calories and protein and fiber have no calories. And then I'd love calories. I would be all over calories. That would be great. Yeah. Protein is a fascinating thing. And I've kind of made the statement before that I think that protein is zero calories, especially for those of us that lift, because you can kind of make an argument that we might even need it more where you're constantly breaking down, like we're breaking down protein and we're eating protein and breaking down protein. So to me, it's like a net zero, the kind of way that my smelly

science books. No, I'm with you. Yeah. Like protein should be calorically free. I totally agree. That would be, we have to watch out what it, what it accompanies, right? Like what, what comes along with the protein. Cause a lot of times in most cases, unless, uh, humans got to it and, um, we got rid of the skin and we'd, you know, have a chicken breast sitting in the, uh, grocery store. Most of the time, uh, most proteins are going to come along with some fat. And I think that maybe you and I were on a similar path as well. Maybe years ago, we're like, well, if you just don't have the carbs, you're probably okay.

But then maybe we didn't realize like, well, if you start eating like buffalo wings and hot dogs and the top of the pizza without any of the, without any of the bread and stuff like that, you can end up in a real caloric surplus and maybe even causing like a lot of damage from a cardiovascular standpoint. Yeah, no, right. It's the fat that comes along with that protein. It's like, how many fat grams did you have to eat to get that protein? A lot of people think peanut butter is a good protein source, right?

And then, you know, I'm sure you're walking around, you know, 8% body fat, and you're eating like PB Fit or powdered peanut butter or low fat something, you know, mixed with water. And the average person is like, oh yeah, I got some protein today. I had like peanut butter on my toast, you know, so that's, that's protein, right? Or they had like Yoplait yogurt, which is like going to have some fat and some sugar. Yeah. Mostly more sugar than a candy bar. And then the fat's not optimal either. So yeah,

absolutely. I think there's a lot of confusion as to things people think are protein are mostly fat. Like your cheap hot dog is just predominantly fat. It might be, you know, 15, 18% protein by calories. So I think there's a lot of need for education as to, you know, what's protein, what's fat, where the spectrum is between the two. And a lot of people don't know that. fat, where the spectrum is between the two. And a lot of people don't know that. You do start to run into, when I start to think of leaner sources of meat and just leaner foods in general, you do start to get into kind of a financial pickle a little bit. Like it can cost more. Like I love Piedmontese beef, but it's not for everybody. It's not inexpensive. Grass-fed,

grass-finished beef might have a better amino acid profile. It might have a better fat profile. It might have less fat. It might have less saturated fat. It might have all these pros, but unfortunately, it might price people out of the opportunity to have it. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm a big fan of Professors Rabenheimer and Simpson, these protein leverage hypothesis guys. And they did this cool study where they basically graphed out the price of every single thing in the grocery store. And it was just linear with protein content. Like the more protein in a food and the more higher protein percent or pure protein with less carbs and fats, the more and more expensive it got. And all of your just super high protein percentage foods are extremely expensive. Your lobster and your shrimp and your skinless chicken breast and the ultra lean ground beef. And these

are just way, way, way more expensive. And I mean, the reality is every grocery store on earth, everywhere you go, the ultra lean ground beef is at least one and a half times more expensive, not twice or more expensive than the ultra cheap, the cheapest thing you can get, the like $2 a pound, 70-30, which actually has a shockingly low protein percent. It's so diluted with fat that nobody's getting closer to their goals with that. And that really screws up, I think, people who are like trying to go carnivore. They're like, okay, you know, if I just eat meat, I'll be fine. That's like if you eat really high quality meat from animals that were eating what they were supposed to be eating. And you're getting good cuts of that meat.

If you just buy the cheapest beef from an overfed cow that was too fat to be healthy. And then you artificially concentrate the fat and add it in just to make the ground beef cheaper. You're probably not going anywhere. You know what I mean? And it's tough conversation. Cause I think a lot of the influencers, a lot of people online,

a lot of people are already well off. And then, so we're sharing this message of, you know, eat yogurt and eat this and eat that. But like the yogurt that I'm having might be a lot different than the opportunity that somebody else might have for some of these foods. It's almost like what you were saying there, I start to think of like, I almost wonder if the government could step in in some way and assist with something like that.

Because, or if the companies that make these leaner sources of meat could get tax breaks or something, you know, just trying to think, you know, how do we encourage this more? How do we encourage people to eat these foods? How do we make these foods more popular? So that maybe because they're more popular, maybe the price can be driven down a bit. Right, right. We need to do something with the economics because right now all of our subsidized crops are great for making refined carbs and refined fats. Like your corn, you've got corn oil, you've got corn syrup, right? You're just basically making refined carbs and refined fats. Nobody's getting corn protein, right?

Nobody's really benefiting from most of these. And it's so cheap that it's everywhere. And economics is a massive driver of the obesity epidemic. And the reality is to eat things that are going to make you thinner and healthier is a little bit more expensive than super cheap junk food. And so there's this massive inequity and there's this massive economic driver. And I don't know how to fix that, but you're right. If we could somehow subsidize or encourage or financially adjust the economics, um, that would be great.

I'm not sure how to do it, but, uh, it's a massive problem. Economics drives obesity mercilessly. We are seeing, you know, some progress, you know, you have, uh, some food, some companies are making kind of what I would call these kind of like Franken foods. They're making some keto foods and for better or worse, they're at least there's some attempt. I realize it's still every company's trying to make money. I get it. But at least there's still some attempts at trying to make things a little healthier. There's things like legendary foods. There's all kinds of different things, quest bars and quest chips. And we're starting to see things that are like fortified with protein.

What are some of your thoughts on that? Do those foods, do they work? Or do they kind of mess with the protein leveraging theory a bit because the protein is kind of wedged into a product that is hyperpalatable. Right, right. Well, I think it's a little bit of both. I think that these foods do represent a processed food that's actually pretty good. So if you go out of your way, you can manufacture processed foods that might have artificial sweeteners and a bunch of weird ingredients, but that are still actually pretty reasonable from a satiety per calorie point of view or a ratio. Satisfying too. Right, right, right, right. And there's a reason why all of your bodybuilders and your bikini models and your aesthetic athletes and

your fitness people are buying the legendary Pop-Tarts instead of the regular ones. And for me, this is like, okay, we can't just say all processed foods are bad and all natural foods are great. Because that's not quite true. It's a little bit more subtle than that. It's a little bit more of a gradient. And I think there are some ultra-processed foods that are spectacular. And I'm not sponsored by Legendary Foods, but their Pop-Tarts are in my pantry right this second. They're great, yeah.

And the Tasty Pastry and the, what's the other one? The Sticky Bun type thing that they have.. They're great, yeah. And the tasty pastry and the, what's the other one? The like sticky bun type thing that they have. That thing's great too. Right. But I have to say, those are like order of magnitude more expensive than the cheapest Pop-Tart you could get. Yeah, for sure.

And so I think that's a great example of an all processed food can be quite reasonable, but the economics are even worse for those. And that basically even further widens the gap between the haves and the have-nots because nobody can afford the really fancy, really cool, get-you-to-your-goals ultra-processed food. I wish they could.

So now we just got to subsidize legendary foods and then we'll be set. There are some foods that may have protein in them, but as you said, it might be diluted down with kind of a lot of fat. And so in some cases, it's still easy to overeat some of these foods. And in some cases, maybe because you had a fattier breakfast. Maybe you had an omelet and it had cheese and bacon and so forth. And later in the day, you know, you have kind of more regular foods and stuff like that. Maybe it's going to be a little easier for you to overeat because you weren't on this satiety scale maybe as well as you could be.

Right, right. Yeah, no, that's definitely true. And that's, I think, a huge problem with the cheaper foods with protein dilution. You basically have to eat more of them to get to your protein target. And so the question is like, how many carbs and fats did you have to eat to get enough protein to not be hungry? And if you're, the cheaper food is, the more protein diluted is. And you talk a lot about protein per calorie. Um, what does that look like? Like, let's say, uh, we're talking about someone that weighs around 200 pounds and, um, they

want to drop down to 170 pounds, let's say. And, um, they want to try to, you know, take some of your suggestions, some of your recommendations. What should their calorie per protein kind of look like? Like, what's that ratio look like? Got it, got it, got it. So the protein energy concept, it's really just protein percent of calories, right? And over the past, you know, 60, 70 years of the obesity epidemic, the protein percent in America went from 15% down to 12.5%.

And that sounds like a tiny change, but it basically explains a lot of the extra five or six hundred calories everybody's eating a day that pretty much drove the entire obesity epidemic. So protein dilution with carbs and fats has been a huge problem. And so step one is like eating enough protein. And so everyone should be, in my opinion, targeting protein. Like every time you eat, where's the protein? You want to achieve a certain target every time you eat a meal. You want to achieve a certain target for a day. And for me, it's about a gram per pound of ideal body weight.

Like your body weight if you were super, super lean. You know, I have patients who are 500 pounds. I'm not telling them to eat 500 grams of protein a day. I'm like, okay, this is your height. This would be your absolute ideal body weight if you had perfect body composition. You're probably looking for them to have a protein amount that is just going to be something that helps with their appetite, right? Keeps them satiated throughout the day. Yeah, exactly. So it could be 200, it could be 300. Right, right, right, right, right. But yeah, based on body size, you're going to need a

certain amount of protein to not be hungry. And you just want to nail that first up. And then it's like, okay, try to achieve that protein for as few carbs and fats as you can by eating foods with a higher protein percentage. And that way you can eat to satiety and still try to sort of control your calories without having to actually count anything. And for me, that ends up being at least 20% of your calories from protein. So we have these studies that show that people who have had long-term successful weight loss and kept it off, the one thing they all have in common is that they've managed to drag protein up to close to 20% of calories. Some people maintain successful weight loss with more exercise or less exercise

or more carbs or less carbs or more fat or less fat. But the one thing that seems to be universal is dragging protein up to about 20%, which is way higher than the standard American diet. Now, if you can get people to 30%, you're going to pretty much reverse almost all prediabetes or really reverse metabolic problems because you just cannot overeat. It's very hard to overeat once you get protein that high. Not a lot of people sustain 30% protein long-term. You're probably doing that or maybe even higher. I certainly am, but that would be like a stretch goal for me. So for most people, it's a gram per pound of ideal body weight and then try to keep protein at at least 20, maybe

30% of your calories. Kind of depends on how much energy you're spending with exercise as well. If you're running, you know, ultra marathons or Ironmans or something, you're going to need a lower protein percent because you have to eat just so many energy calories. But for somebody who's super sedentary, maybe they need 35% of their calories from protein because they're just not burning those extra calories off. So yeah, it's basically target protein, gram per pound of ideal body weight, and then try to keep the carbs and fats lower so you're getting protein at a higher percent of your calories. Your carbs and your fats are basically our energy source, and protein is really not. What about something like protein turning into glucose in the body? You hear people talk about that all the time. If we eat too much protein, it's just going to magically turn into sugar. Is that sort of how it works,

or does it work differently than that? Well, so basically, you can't store protein. You have no storage for protein, which is why every single day, the most important thing to eat is protein. You can live without any carbs. You have tons of stored fat. But if you don't eat protein every day, some of it is coming out of your lean mass. You will be losing some. So protein is most important to eat daily. And you also can't really store it. Like the only place it's stored is in your lean tissue that you kind of don't want to lose. So for that reason, if you do overeat protein, you do have to burn it off because you can't store it anywhere. Your body rips the nitrogen off of it, deaminates it, and then you've got this carbon skeleton that you basically cobble all the carbons together and you can make, some of them you can turn into a fat, some of them you can turn into a

glucose essentially. But eventually you'll take the carbon skeleton of the amino acids and burn it as you would a carb or a fat in your mitochondria. And so it's not true, though, that it's just turned into glucose. Like, you can put on your continuous glucose monitor and eat Thanksgiving dinner and have two pounds of turkey, and your blood sugar is not going to go through the roof. You know what I'm saying? But you are burning those carbon skeletons from the amino acids because you can't really store them. One thing I really respect about you and I think is a little different than maybe other people that people might be following is that you are at a hospital and you are dealing with people that are, you mentioned to me, sometimes I have a copay of just like 10 bucks. with people that are, you mentioned to me, sometimes I have a copay of just like 10 bucks.

You're dealing with people that don't always have the economics behind them, and you're trying to arm them with the tools that don't cost a lot. And I think when you break down a lot of what you've been talking about over the last couple of years of, look, let's just figure out how to get through each day without a crazy amount of fat, a crazy amount of carbs, but let's nail the protein down. I think that's such a simple message. I think if people could start to try to do that, even just for one meal, like even if they can just start with one meal a day and then maybe trickle that down into like, oh, I can, that actually worked pretty good. It felt pretty good. Let me try to kind of get momentum with that and work on that for, you know, the future. What are some things like, it sounds like you're not demonizing any foods. It sounds like you're not saying like, Hey, you need to, you know, get rid of these

things. But in my opinion, a lot of times, especially with people that are heavier and some people that I've helped over the years that have been sick and compromised, it has been easier to tell them like, no, man, like you just, we need a departure from some of these, some of these things are just shitty for us. Right, right, right. And there's kind of two ways of doing it. You can just be like extreme and you're going to be like, okay, I'm cutting out all these food groups and you're just going to eat nothing but red meat and water. And sometimes that works for people being black and white, right? Absolutely. No gray area. Right. And then for other people, it's like

progressive overload. It's just like, you know, it's like bench pressing. You wouldn't just like, you know, just dump the 800 pounds you're benching on the average person who's never benched before. You just start with the bar, you put some plates and micro load it, you know what I mean? And so you can do that with your diet as well. Like you said, maybe one meal at a time. Let's start with breakfast. Let's say, okay, today for breakfast, you're going to try to get some protein. You might just drink a protein shake. That's it. You might just throw some egg whites in your scramble or your omelet or something. You might just do some little thing like that. But we have studies that show that people who eat an extra, you know, 30 grams at breakfast automatically eat 200 calories

less over the day. I mean, it's pretty magical. You replace one meal with a protein shake and you automatically eat several hundred calories less per day. If you do a protein shake as a preload for a meal, you're going to eat 110 calories less than that meal. We have these crazy studies on just making these little tiny tweaks and then you can progressively overload it. So like you said, you can just start with one meal and either substitute something out that has higher protein or add something in that's a protein source and then kind of go from there. You know what I mean? So I never know exactly which approach is going to be the best for people. And so I try to stay open-minded, like, would you prefer to just do some extreme cleanse-style thing, even if it's not sustainable,

because it will motivate you and jumpstart you and you'll get excited about the changes? Or is that going to be, you know, you're going to just flame out so hard from that that it would be better for you to just gradually iterate towards your goal, even if it's going to take you several years a constant thing that's been beneficial for all of our health has been intaking enough protein but also in taking quality protein and that's why we've been partnering with good life proteins for years now good life not only sells piedmontese beef which is our favorite beef and the main reason why it's our favorite is because they have cuts of meat that have higher fat content like their rib eyes and's our favorite is because they have cuts of meat that have higher fat content, like their ribeyes and their chuck eyes, but they also have cuts of meat like their flat iron. Andrew, what's the macros on the flat iron? Yeah, dude. So the flat iron has

23 grams of protein, only two grams of fat, but check this out. Their grass-fed sirloin essentially has no fat and 27 grams of protein. There we go. So whether you're dieting and you want lower fat cuts or higher fat cuts, that's there. But you can also get yourself chicken. You can get yourself fish. You can get yourself scallops. You can get yourself all types of different meats. And I really suggest going to Good Life and venturing in

and maybe playing around with your proteins. I mean, going back to the red meat, there's picanha. All kinds of stuff. There's chorizo sausage, there's maple bacon. That stuff's incredible. The maple bacon is so good. My girl put those in these bell peppers with steak and chicken and oh my God, it was so good. But either way, guys, protein is essential and the Good Life is the place where you can get all of your high quality proteins. So Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, you can head over to goodlifeproteins.com and enter promo code POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your entire order. Links in the description, as well as the podcast show notes. And I think, honestly, some people need a little bit of both. So a lot of my

patients, everything they eat is 10 out of 10 delicious, right? They just, they will only eat the Haagen-Dazs and they will only eat the Lucky Charms and they will only eat the Snickers bar. And everything they eat is like 10 out of 10 ultra hedonic, super tasty, addictive, rewarding junk food. And for some of these people, it's like, okay, why don't you do like a, like a little bit of a cleanse? I don't like cleanses or like crazy, you know, diets with a stop date, but some people need like a hedonic reset. And I'm like, Hey, why don't you just eat, you know, like, you know, you can have lean meat, you can have green vegetables, but you can't have this super hedonic stuff that you're just like every meal is like a 10 out of 10. You know what I mean? And I think that works for some

people to kind of reset their palate and their expectations. And you're like, okay, this is seven out of 10, but I can actually live with that. And then you can like just go back to your diet, but make little changes along the way. It's like every protein source you've got, swap it out for a leaner one. Anything that was carbs, swap it out for a low carb version. Anything that was fat, swap it out for a low carb version. Anything that was fat, swap it out for a low fat version. And you're trying to be a little bit high protein and a little bit low carb and a little bit low fat all at the same time. And if you can just slowly progress and iterate on that over time, most people will just like get used to it and just gradually lose weight. So I think there's a really good role for both of those. But you have to be aware of the fact

that nobody's going to do the crazy thing forever. Like that is just not going to happen. But then some people need a little bit of a jumpstart. So it's always somewhere in between, I think, for most people. What have you seen? I have a niece that has type 1 diabetes. She's like nine years old. What are some things that you've seen that are very helpful for type 1 diabetes? I know type 2 is a little different story. It's definitely like an energy overload thing. We can get to that in a moment. But what have you seen for type 1?

seen for type 1. Right. Okay. So two things. First of all, the same things I tell my type 2s, I'm telling my type 1s. Because if you take a type 1 who's just eating the standard American diet with just tons of addictive, low protein, protein dilute, ultra hedonic, super high energy density, carb and fat junk food, they're going to gain a billion pounds and they're actually going to have type 1 and type 2 diabetes. You could have both. Oh, well, so we shouldn't even call it type 1 and type 2. There's pure insulin deficiency where you don't have enough insulin to live. That's type 1.

That's like juvenile type 1 diabetes. Autoimmune disease that kills off the beta cells in your pancreas. You might produce absolutely zero insulin. You might die in a few days without an insulin shot. That's insulin deficiency. And everyone's on a gradient of insulin deficiency where you might have killed off half of your pancreas with an autoimmune disease or 90% of it or only 30% of it. So there's this super variable insulin deficiency gradient. Then there's insulin resistance. The more over fat you get, the more resistant you are to insulin and the higher and higher and higher doses you have to use.

So there's insulin deficiency, insulin resistance, and a Venn diagram where they overlap, maybe not completely, maybe not at all. And so for example, I might have a type one diabetic who developed diabetes as a child and they killed off their whole pancreas. They can't make any insulin. They're very dependent on it to live. But they're eating the standard American diet, and they're just as overfat as everybody else. So their insulin dose has to go up and up and up and up and up. I have patients coming in with type 1 diabetes.

They're injecting hundreds of units of insulin a day. I mean, you know, 300 units, 400 units, 500 units. There's this special insulin you can get that's 5X concentrated. It's, you know, usually it's 100 units per cc, and this is 500 units per cc. And people are injecting these massive doses of insulin because they're so insulin resistant. And they actually have type 1 and type 2 diabetes. They have, like like dual diabetes. But then I have type ones who get on this like high proteins, it's high per calorie, high fiber sort of thing. And they're just eating lean meat

and green vegetables and they're totally ripped and jacked. And these people's insulin requirement gets lower and lower and lower and lower and lower. The average human might need 24 units a day of insulin from their pancreas. And while I've got the super overweight type ones injecting hundreds of units a day because they're that insulin resistant, I've got these ultra lean ripped and jacked type ones who maybe inject 20 units a day for a whole 24-hour day because they're super insulin sensitive. So the diet really can have a huge impact. I think maybe in the past, we haven't heard people say that that often when it comes to type one. Absolutely. It's massive. It gets your doses lower and lower and lower and lower and lower. Eating right and being super thin gets your insulin requirement

really, really low because you're super insulin sensitive. Also, the more cardio you do and just burning glycogen and glucose from your muscles, you can lower your blood sugar without insulin with exercise. So your type one who's just doing tons of cardio has even lower insulin requirement. So I have marathoner type ones who would have flawless body composition, doing absurd amounts of cardio, and might be literally living off 20 units of insulin a day, which is unheard of for a standard American diet, an overweight type one, who's usually using 100, know, 100, 200 units of insulin a day there. And it's the law of small numbers. So like Dr. Bernstein, he's that famous super low carb diabetician who has type one himself. And he has this law of small numbers

where if your carbohydrate inputs are really low and your insulin inputs are really low, your fluctuations are really low. And so all these type ones following Bernstein's plan, which is just very high protein, very low carb, lots of- Sounds a lot less dangerous. Oh yeah, it's like you're just super flat all the time. You don't get the highs, you don't get the lows.

But man, I got these people on these crazy mega doses. They'll just eat hundreds of grams of carbs and inject hundreds of units of insulin. And they're on this roller coaster that's super dangerous. I mean, at the lows, you could literally die. At the highs, you know, I have people, I'll draw their blood in lab calls and it's like, oh, critical blood, you know, I have blood sugar 600, 700, 800. Usually if it hits about 900, you're going to slip into a coma and then die unless somebody does something about it. And then on the flip side, some people are just super low

because they injected hundreds of units of insulin. So there's this crazy roller coaster of insulin deficiency, insulin resistance, and tons of carbohydrates and junk food in the diet where you just have all sorts of chaos. The more junk food carbs you eat, the higher your spike after you eat. But then the more excess fat you eat, the longer it stays elevated. So it might be super high like 12 hours later or the next morning or something. So the goal with diabetes is to be as thin as you can, as insulin sensitive as you can, have more muscle and less fat. And that's the same thing I tell my type twos. That's the same thing I tell someone who doesn't have diabetes. I was going to say, maybe everyone should kind of eat as if they

have diabetes already. It all just fades away. And you want the same damn thing for everyone who walks in the door. You want perfect body composition. Everybody who walks in the door needs more muscle and less fat, period. Whether they're type 1, type 2, insulin-efficient, insulin-resistant, just your average person trying to optimize. It's this constant Sisyphean struggle to have more muscle and less fat. And you do that by eating more protein, doing more exercise, and eating pure carbs and fats by targeting satiety per calorie and eating lower energy density carbs and fats that are more filling for fewer actual grams of carbs and fats. Trying to figure out ways of keeping yourself full so you're not overeating.

Mm-hmm. What are some, for the carb lovers out there, what are some top carbohydrates that have a good satiety rating? Got it, got it. So there are tons of carbs that are awesome. So, like, look at, okay, sugar, for example. 100 grams of sugar is 100 grams of actual carbohydrate, right? You have to store it somewhere. You might not even have room for it.

store it somewhere you might not even have room for it um but something like raspberries which is like this amazing super elite carb which has tons of weight and volume and fiber and water um a hundred grams of carbohydrate is five grams of carbohydrate right of actual glucose that you 100 grams of raspberries right right 100 grams of raspberries is five grams of carbs wow versus 100 grams of sugar is 100 grams of carbs. So, like, when it comes to storing all that, which you have to do, there's a radical difference there. So, like, you know, something like a strawberry is, you know, 100 grams of strawberries is maybe 8, 10 grams of carbs. So, you could eat 20 cups of strawberries, and that's 100 grams of net carbohydrate. So, that's's absurd 20 cups of

strawberries you're not hungry for the rest of your life i don't even think i could do that if i tried so berries are at the just absolute pinnacle for me for um like good carbs like highest satiety per calorie carbs absolutely love berries honestly most of your fruit is pretty damn good i like uh uh berries are great like apples, a lot of soluble fiber. I'm not too worried about like this nonsense about fructose. So fructose is only bad in overfeeding, right? Anyone who's eating at calorie maintenance or below can eat quite a bit of fructose without it doing anything bad to them. Now, the second you're overfeeding someone with fructose, it's very bad. Saturated fat and overfeeding is terrible.

Fructose and overfeeding is terrible. Saturated fat and fructose together and overfeeding is super ultra mega terrible. But if you're hypocaloric, if you're under your calories, you can eat fructose. It's no problem. Now, fructose is pure empty calories, right? You don't need any fructose in your diet. It's just calories you have to burn off. But if you're adequately getting protein and micronutrients and you filled in the calories you need to just do stuff, then fructose is perfectly fine in a isocaloric or hypocaloric state. It's only bad in overfeeding.

So you got fruit, you mentioned earlier vegetables. Those are kind of a freebie as well, right? Right, right, right. Now, some of your vegetables are a little bit carbier, but as long as you don't add any fat to them, they have a pretty good satiety per calorie. That's always the trick. It's like bread or something like that might not be that bad for you,

but like, what are you going to put on the bread? Right. A potato could be great for you, but like, what are you going to put on that potato? Exactly. So potatoes, like personally, I cut potatoes into discs or french fry shape and I put it, throw them in the air fryer

with basically no fat at all. And they're spectacular. I mean, they're really, really good. Crazy high satiety per calorie. If you just boil them, it's even higher because you have all that water. So boiled potatoes, you cook and cool boiled potatoes. You've got resistant starch. You've got a ton of extra water.

The satiety per calorie is actually quite good. Now there's no protein. There's very little protein in potatoes. So it would have to be a side dish to a protein source. But for like an energy source, potatoes are just fine. I like tubers. Carrots are spectacular, right? You have to eat 18 pounds of carrots to get 2,400 calories. Like for your average person, caloric intake, 18 pounds. Good luck. I mean, you're literally going to turn orange. Like a horse.

Yeah. You just can't do it if you try. So I like tubers. I just don't recommend adding a bunch of fat to it. Because like you said, you make a baked potato, a loaded baked potato with your sour cream and your butter and your bacon. And by the time you're done, this is like a trillion calories. And you're going to eat way more of it, too. You're going to eat way more loaded baked potato than just your air-fried potato.

It's pretty boring. But yeah, for carb sources, fruit is my favorite. Berries are at the very top, but any kind of fruit is great. I also like low-sugar fruits that most people think are vegetables, but that's botanically fruit like cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, olives, avocados. These are all great. So yeah, I like fruit. I like these low sugar fruits that are vegetables. I like tubers, all really good sources of carbohydrate. We had Alan Aragon on our show, maybe like about a year or so ago. And, uh, when we asked him about protein, he said that there's some studies where it just seems like the protein just like disappears. Like

there's no, there's no explanation. You know, they have the, uh, uh, people are always talking about the, the energy, right. The energy that comes from like protein. And he's like, in some cases they added 500 calories from protein and it didn't yield uh any extra body fat and this same thing with i think he set up to a thousand calories and uh he said from some of the uh conversation around these studies was the scientists don't know sort of what happened to that energy what do you think is going on with stuff like that? Right, right. Have you heard of some of these studies?

Yeah, Jose Antonio, Dr. Antonio did one of these studies. They just took a bunch of people and dumped a thousand extra calories of protein on top of their existing diets. It was like keep eating what you're eating and then just drink a thousand calories away on top of it. away on top of it. And what ends up happening is the thermic effect of the protein is so high that you use at least a third of it just processing it all, right? And then as for the rest of it, you have other thermic things that happen. Your non-exercise activity thermogenesis, because people fidget more. They're warmer they're warmer they're literally hotter they feel warmer some people in the study and you work out a little harder right right i believe some people in the study felt warmer as one of the side effects if you want to call it uh they have more spontaneous movement they're just burning those calories by moving around

because it's very difficult to store that as fat and And so I think that you could theoretically design a study where you're just gavaging a rodent in the lab, just infusing them with protein to such an extent that they could actually make a little bit of fat out of it. But you're just never going to get a free-living human or really any animal to ever overeat protein to the point that they're going to get fat from it. So ad lib diet, you just cannot add enough protein to it to make people fat. That's just not happening. Yeah, it's so fascinating because so much of our food has gone in the opposite direction. You know, food is hyper palatable. It's super easy. Pizza, ice cream, sandwiches. And again, a lot of these things, they don't have to be bad, but even like pizza and ice cream, those combinations are so easy to overeat and they're not going to

make you full. And I guess if you can learn some self-control, maybe those things are options for people as they're losing weight. But from what I've seen, that seems to be tough. And one of the things I always thought was very useful from what you teach is sometimes you'll say, I don't think it's a great idea to try to lose weight with these foods that made you fat in the first place. Yeah, there's a huge addictive component that we don't really talk about. So yes, protein dilution has driven a lot of the obesity epidemic. And yes, increasing energy density and decreasing fiber and processing has played a role. But I think that personally, the biggest driver of all is this hedonic reward dopamine spiking stuff that really drives overeating forward.

It's 8 p.m. and you're pairing up the TV with your favorite thing to eat, your favorite show and your favorite thing to eat. And your favorite thing to eat is not going to be a chicken breast and broccoli, most likely. Right, right. And some people get such a massive brain reward from that that the rest of us can't even relate. And I think if you watch something like My 600-lb Life and you see people just absolutely overeating these junk foods, it really feels like pure addiction to me. Honestly, I do a lot of addiction medicine. I've been a Suboxone provider since it came out. I've been a Suboxone provider since it came out.

So I do tons and tons of opioid dependence and substance abuse and alcohol use disorders and dependency. And to me, a lot of my patients who have severely uncontrolled diabetes, even though they know what to do at this point, it just feels like a pure addiction to me. And so for a lot of these people, they do have to be ultra careful with these hedonic foods, almost like an alcoholic with alcohol. You know what I mean? It's so much harder because an alcoholic can just never buy alcohol, never order alcohol, never drink alcohol, but everybody has to eat. You have to eat all day, every day. And so it's, if you get this massive brain reward from these hedonic foods, that's really, really tricky. And for me, it does actually come down to harm reduction. Just like I might be giving Suboxone to somebody who has opioid dependence, I'm thinking the legendary Pop-Tarts are like the way to go for some of these people. It's harm reduction, right? the legendary pop tarts are like, like the way to go for some of these people. Um, they, uh,

it's harm reduction, right? You're, you're like, okay, I am going to be eating these delicious foods, but I'm just going to pick one that's a little bit less delicious and dopamine spiking, but, uh, it's going to get me closer to my goals. You know what I mean? But then again, you have two approaches. You can go the, I will just never eat these foods again, and I'm just going to eat non-hedonic, boring, bland foods forever. And just, I will never eat a donut. I will never eat pizza. A little bit unrealistic. And then you've got the harm reduction model, which is like, okay, I'm going to eat the legendary Pop-Tarts instead of the real Pop-Tarts.

And I tend to favor the harm reduction reality method a little bit more, where you, okay, you are going to eat these sometimes, and now you just got to pick your battles. I also like to front load people with enough protein and fiber and low-energy anti-carbon fats that they have a fighting chance when the hedonic foods come around. Do you know what I mean? If you ate like a 10 egg white scramble and a pound of asparagus and a whey shake and a legendary pop tart, you are going to be able to get a dozen Krispy Kremes and just eat two of them instead of all 12. Because if you didn't eat all the other stuff, you're eating the whole freaking box. You know what I mean? So I like front-loading with protein and fiber and low-energy density,

carbon fats and less refined foods and healthier stuff and higher-safety per-calorie stuff. And then I like being realistic about the hedonics. You probably are going to eat some of those. You probably, at some point, it's a little unrealistic to say, oh, just never eat junk food. So then you want to pick your battles. You want to be really careful with it. You always want to eat it last as like a dessert, end of the meal, end of the day,

because first of all, you have less far to fall once you've eaten the first donut. And secondly, you've preloaded with all the protein and fiber and micronutrients and things you have to eat, you need to eat. And then you're just not going to be quite as hungry hungry and it's not quite as bad. That's a good point. I mean, if it's midday on a weekend and you have a donut, a lot of people will just say, oh, screw it. Right. And then they just kind of keep going downhill from there. Absolutely. You want to say that to very, very last. There's a reason why dessert is at the end of a meal or maybe in the end of the day when your grandparents were onto something with that. You get to reset the next day.

Yeah, exactly. You get to reset the next day. So the later in the day you do that, the farther you have to fall. What are some of your thoughts around some of the diet drugs that are out, like Ozempic and things like that? Right. So I'm prescribing these all day, every day. I've been using liraglutide, which is Victoza, for what, you know.

Well, I started prescribing Bietta, the very first GLP ones that came out for 20 years ago. And I've been prescribing Victoza for, you know, well over a decade. And, you know, every day I am using drugs like semaglutide, ozabic. They were, right? Right. Weegevee, trizepatide, moonjaro, zepro Is that beyond the latest greatest one? So I'm prescribing these all the time I'm having I'm literally working ten feet down the hall from Bariatric surgeons who are doing gastric sleeves gastric bypass. And so I'm seeing everything I'm seeing like severe cases I'm seeing extremely treatment resistant stuff. I'm seeing people who've severe cases. I'm seeing extremely treatment-resistant stuff. I'm seeing people who've

eaten their way back from a lap band and a gastric sleeve, and everything else has failed. And so this is like a Hail Mary, right? Like, this is not, for me, this is not like, oh, just hit the cheat button, and we give you drugs. This is like, okay, you know everything to do with diet and exercise, And for some reason, it's still not working for you. And then we throw in the drugs. And to be honest, these have been great. I have patients who both their parents are morbidly obese. They were obese as an infant, as a toddler. I mean, they just started out so far behind the eight ball.

They've been just obese their whole lives. They've been over obese their whole lives. They've been over 50% body fat. When they get down to like 40% body fat, they're just as hungry as I am when I'm cutting down to like 5% body fat. It'd be like me walking around stage lean all the time. And for those people, these drugs are like an absolute miracle. I mean, it's like literally very, very effective. And I think most people, I think you're better off if you learn how to do it without the drugs, with the diet and the exercise. And there's certain people who are just genetically screwed for whatever reason. And these drugs are a big deal for those people. And I've had some crazy, crazy success stories

from them. And to me, it's, I think it's a mistake to say these drugs are always bad. Now I'm the diet and exercise guy. So I always like not taking drugs. You know what I mean? But you better believe I'm going to throw the drugs at somebody if they just have horrific. I have patients who's, you know, A1C, it's just always over 14 because the lab can't go any higher. And they're, you know, they're just, they have so much diabetic eye damage and kidney damage and nerve damage that they're going to be on dialysis or something. And then we get them on these drugs and it really does start moving the needle. So the drugs have a role. The drugs are powerful. No, they're not optimal. Yes, you're better off without them. But man, for some people who just really have it rough, it's not a bad thing to have. Power Project Family Foot Health is something that we talk about

all the time on the podcast. And that's why we love Vivo barefoot shoes, but we love them not just because they are flat, flexible and wide, but also they don't look bad. They look actually really, really good. These are the new boots. These are their modus trainers for in the gym. These are some of their casual shoes. But when you look at a lot of barefoot shoes, some people get turned off because they don't want to wear those shoes outside. And that's understandable. That's very understandable. But with Vivo, these shoes look so good and they're so good for your feet that they're almost a no-brainer.

So, well, they are a no-brainer. Andrew, how can they get some of these kicks? Yes, you guys got to head over to vivobarefoot.com slash powerproject and you guys will receive 15% off your order. Again, vivobarefoot.com slash powerproject. Links in the description, as well as the podcast show notes. What about just people utilizing it from a cosmetic standpoint?

Right. Your thoughts there? Yeah. So I have a lot of fitness people who are just abusing everything you can, you know, I have, I literally have bikini models buying compounded triseptide off the internet. They're taking, you're taking a bunch of other peptides. They're on melanotan. Why not just throw in some Zetban with it? And they're taking a double handful of T3s every day. There's a lot of side effects. There's a lot of things you don't want from them. But these are people

that are already signing up for side effects of other things. So I don't really recommend it. i think it's kind of bad um i would never recommend i'm i basically don't prescribe these for anyone with a bmi under 30. so if you're just trying to lose the last couple vanity pounds i do not think it's worth it from a risk standpoint where are these drugs going like what are you seeing like you mentioned there's like a newer one. And I've heard that like Ozampic 2.0 or something is like gene editing or something. I don't know if you've heard of that. Oh, right.

Well, not really. None of them are gene editing at this point. I don't know what that means. Right. So basically, when we started out, we had GLP-1, glucose-like peptide 1 receptor agonists. And those were the first ones that came out. And they were originally synthesized from like the poison in the Gila monster saliva that paralyzed your stomach or something like that. It was like really fringy how we developed these like 30 years ago.

So the GLP-1s were first. Now we've got the dual GLP-1 and GIP drugs. And that's your Moonjaro and Zetbound, both of which are triseptide. They're just two different brands. One for Moonjaro is for diabetes. Zetbound is for obesity. They're both triseptide. And it's a dual agent. So it's hitting two receptors, GLP-1 and GIP. Now they're working on triple receptor agonists, and that's going to be GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon. And this stuff is crazy. So this is identical to bariatric surgery. People took it for 48 weeks and lost 20% of their body weight.

Boom. And honestly, I'm a little scared for bariatric surgeons because the bariatric surgeons are going to, you know, I have friends who are bariatric surgeons, so I hate to say this, but these drugs are getting real good. So they should be scared. They should be nervous. You know, like AI is going to take over my job. These drugs are going to take over the bariatric surgeon's jobs. But that's what's next. That'll probably be out in a few years.

And I don't even know where it's going to go from there. We talked a little bit earlier about type 1 diabetes. Have you seen complete reversals of type 2 diabetes when somebody starts to follow your plan? Oh, yeah. Just absolutely just crazy, crazy stories. I have so many patients. They'll lose 50 pounds, 100 pounds, 150 pounds, completely cure their diabetes. I mean, I'm talking A1Cs, you know, in the low fives or even fours. And basically, if you get your A1C down to the normal range, which is 5.6% or lower, you know, normal is 4.0 to 5.6. Prediabetes is 5.7 to 6.4. We

diagnose you with diabetes if you're 6.5 or higher. If you get all the way down below the prediabetes range to normal 5.6% and leave it there without any meds for over a year, we just crossed type 2 diabetes off your chart because you really don't have it anymore. And I have a bazillion people who've just completely cured their type 2 diabetes. Now, a lot of people are like, well, you can never cure it. You're just in remission. That's really not true. If you radically change your body composition. So like if I have someone come in and they're horribly diabetic, but they have sarcopenic obesity, so they have no muscle at all. They've never exercised tons of fat, um, and just so insulin resistant that their blood sugar is high

all the time. When they do this massive recomp, this massive body transformation where you just instantly get way more, well, it's not instant, but if I could like touch someone with a magic wand of body recount comp, basically bodybuilding, where you get way more muscle and way less fat. You get so much better glucose disposal and so much more insulin sensitive that you're a whole new phenotype. You're just not diabetic anymore. So you can absolutely cure type 2 diabetes by improving body composition. And it's the same thing that every bodybuilder does, more muscle, less fat. And it's, again, the same thing that every bodybuilder does more muscle less fat and it's again the same thing that everyone who walks in the door needs more muscle less fat pre-comp that will

that is what it takes now some people have damaged their pancreas so much that their half their beta cells are gone and they'll always have blood sugar issues for life and then they're just in remission okay i admit it but especially people who haven't had diabetes very long, maybe less than a decade, you can completely cure that with diet and exercise. And it's just straight up bodybuilding. And the actual activity of bodybuilding would probably be useful, right? Like hypertrophy, going in and doing three sets of 10 to 12 reps, getting that muscle tension, because that's all stuff that's going to burn up glucose, right? Yep, absolutely.

It's basically the same thing everybody else needs to be doing. Full body, push full legs, resistive training, optimal form, optimal intensity, at least twice a week, maybe three times. Cardio is also good. You do want to deplete the muscle of fuels, like the glycogen and the intramuscular triglycerides. And you don't really get a glycogen depletion workout from just lifting. Well, most of us don't. Some people are. So it's kind of nice to do both resistance and cardio.

What kind of cardio are you thinking? Like how long, how many times a week? Right, right, right. So I think there's really health really health promoting benefits to glycogen depletion right and you doing higher end cardio you're going to basically improve insulin sensitivity at the muscle level you're going to clean the muscle out of all these storage fuels the intramuscular triglycerides and the glucose and i think it's really beneficial and then then cardio, the couple of reasons why everyone should be doing cardio. First of all, you get these positive adaptations that are amazing for general health. So if you're doing high-end cardio and a lot of it, you're raising your VO2 max. And that is the single number that is the most associated

with longevity in humans. Your VO2 max tells more, statistically speaking, about how long you'll live than literally any other number anyone can measure on you at all, period. So raising your VO2 max is amazing for health. You're only going to drive that adaptation if you demand it by doing just a ton of high-end cardio um i think cardio is just like resistance training where you want to do the run the full rep range where like you're doing super high end for 10 minutes a week but then you're doing ultra low zone two for you know maybe an hour a week and you're getting some endurance you're getting some high end you're getting some high end, you're getting some fat burning, some carb burning, the whole, it's just like the rep range where you want to do some, you know, singles, doubles, triples, sets of five to get strength.

And then you want to do like your 30 rep burnout isolation stuff. And so cardio is the same way. I think everyone should be kind of running the whole range. And I would say your average person should be doing about a half an hour of moderate intensity cardio a day. That would be great. I mean, more is probably better. Nobody's doing more than about an hour for any length of time, long term, statistically speaking, if you look at studies. But yeah, half an hour cardio, lifting failure at least twice twice a week that would be a really good place for most people what are some of your thoughts on blood work because you know i've gotten you know a lot of blood work done over

the years and um i was digging through all different kinds of stuff and then i would improve one marker you know via like this supplement And then this other marker would be messed up. And then I, and what it kind of felt like I was doing, it kind of felt like I was almost just like shoveling some dirt on that part of the, on that part of the test and like covering it up via the supplement. But I don't know if I, I personally never have, I personally haven't noticed anything from that. And just the basics for me coming down from 330 to where I am now, which is more like 230, losing weight, staying lean, like those things I've noticed huge impact on my health.

But I haven't really noticed, you know, some huge changes in terms of blood work. What are some of your thoughts with blood work? So when I first started out, I was just ordering tons of labs. I've had all this advanced functional medicine training with all sorts of crazy lab testing. And the longer I do this, the less and less lab testing I order. And it's just really, most of it is just not evidence-based, doesn't really change outcomes. most of it is just not evidence-based, doesn't really change outcomes. It's just, I mean, at the end of the day, everybody needs to be eating more protein, eating more micronutrients, doing more cardio, doing more resistance training, getting more muscle. And supplements are very, very unhelpful for most people. Like your average person is not going to benefit from most supplements.

They're not evidence-based most of the time. You're not going to run into an actual deficiency state where benefit has been shown for most people most of the time. So I'm not really sponsored by like any lab companies or any supplement companies because I'm not a huge fan. Like I really honestly don't take any supplements myself. There's a very tiny handful that are really going to be helpful for the average person. I'm not doing a bunch of weird obscure lab tests because it's just not that helpful. You probably have taken a lot of supplements over the years, though, too, just to try them and to kind of see, right? I mean, I have taken some, yeah. But I haven't really found any of them to be beneficial for me, so I haven't taken any supplements long term.

And I have very few supplements that I recommend for most patients because they're just not that evidence-based. If you really compare it with placebo and look at the statistics, most supplements are pretty much worthless. So there are edge cases. Would you include vitamins and minerals in that category as well? Right, right, right. I would include vitamins and minerals. There are edge cases. And even there, you're probably better off getting the micronutrient the way you're supposed to.

Like, you know, vitamin D. Most people with low vitamin D actually just have insulin resistance. Insulin resistance chews up your vitamin D. So, you're going to have low D when you're insulin resistant. And we haven't proven that just taking pills helps that. Do you know what the mechanism is behind that? I actually don't. I don't know. But insulin resistance and low D are associated together.

And there's some sort of causality there. And it's actually reverse causality in that insulin resistance gives you low D. It's not that your D is low and now you're insulin resistant and you need to take more vitamin D. Basically, everyone with insulin resistance is going to have low vitamin D. Not everyone, but most people. Yeah, the vitamin D thing is kind of messy because it's called vitamin D. But what it is in the body, it's different. I don't think you can just take vitamin D and then magically have that number

be elevated and notice the same health benefits as somebody that's just getting sunlight and getting more natural forms of vitamin D through their food and so forth. Right, right, right. So people with normal D have good body composition. They're getting sunlight. They're eating a nutrient-dense diet. And low D could be a problem with any one of those, and taking the pill is not going to fix it. And that's pretty typical of most supplementation. You'd be better off just getting whatever it is from your food. Now, there are some edge cases. I have patients with pernicious anemia, and they have low B12 all the time because they can't make the intrinsic factor that your stomach

releases to actually bind B12 and absorb it. And then they really do need a sublingual B12 or B12 shots. And so there's definitely edge cases where I am prescribing supplements, recommending supplements, checking things out. But I've usually detected that from just some basic, boring labs, you know, complete blood count, comprehensive metabolic panel. So I'm not doing a ton of fancy lab testing. It's just not that value-added most of the time. And I've found that the less people really understand it, the more labs they order.

So, like, I hate to throw your fresh naturopath right out of school under the bus but like these people just shotgun every obscure lab out there and it's thousands of dollars of testing that is basically not that helpful or maybe even like completely worthless sometimes sub worthless because they'll see little things that are borderline high or low and they have you do something to react to that that was never really a problem to begin with and then people are just chasing their tail and then like you said you're doing one thing to cover up something else and then you do your labs again and it's different and so like honestly you just get so many weird um findings that you you almost be better off not knowing to begin with you know what i'm saying yeah and you just

get worried about stuff that probably just is sort of irrelevant. You see people do this with their sleep, too. You know, like, someone's like, oh, man, I suck at sleeping. And it's like, well, what's your, you know, you have symptoms. It's like, well, no, I only sleep like six or seven hours a night. But if you feel okay from that, then you're just basically, you're comparing your sleep to somebody else's sleep, which we know is always a problem. Right, right, right.

And there's like eight hours for an adult. That's very unrealistic. Like almost no one is sleeping that much. And in fact, if you look at it associationally, that's actually kind of bad. You don't want to be sleeping too much because that's associated with Alzheimer's, dementia, and all sorts of things. So, you know, if you feel good and you're only getting six hours a night,

that's probably okay. There are a lot of people who only, you know, the average adult in a first world country is sleeping, you know, maybe six, six and a half hours a night. And if you feel okay, that's probably all right. And trying to overdrive that somehow might not be that helpful. What do you think is like the place for people to start? You know, like what, like you're mentioning protein a lot. Where do you usually start when you have somebody that

maybe doesn't have much of an understanding of health, nutrition, fitness. Yeah. So on the diet side, protein's always first and it starts with protein awareness. I'm like, okay, just for one day, I want you to count up how many grams of protein you ate. Just look at all, just look at your label, count the grams of protein. And people are just absolutely shocked. I mean, breakfast is the worst. Like people will eat breakfast and they have like one gram of protein for breakfast. It's just disgusting. Yeah. Breakfast is absolutely the worst. Most people are doing okay for dinner, really bad for lunch and absolutely criminally horrible for breakfast. That's the typical pattern. But it starts with protein awareness. It's like, hey, count your grams of protein. And people are like, oh, wow, I really am only eating, you know, 48 grams of protein a day. And I'm like, okay, do you think

that's going to give you, you know, the body composition you're looking for? And so it's protein awareness first, just by counting your grams of protein. Then it's like, okay, now try to get 30 grams of protein with each meal. Maybe 40 or 50 grams if you're a bigger male. If you're a big dude, you're going to want to eat even more. So that's how it starts. Step two is then like, okay, now try to pick carbs and fats that have a lower energy density. You know what I mean? It's like instead of just pouring oil on everything, eat an avocado.

on everything, eat an avocado or, you know, instead of just mainlining Wonder Bread, let's get the Ezekiel bread or the low-carb tortilla wrap or something, you know. So, and then, of course, the whole time you're avoiding the super hedonic high-energy Nancy carbs and fats together, the donuts and the pizza and the junk food. But yeah, that's how it's done on the diet side. It starts with protein, protein awareness, then you target the protein, then you try to dial back the carb and fat density. And the whole time you're just steering clear of the hedonic, ultra addictive, you know, potato chips and pop tarts, non-legendary food pop tarts. We're sponsored by Legendary, right?

Exactly. We should be. And you kind of came to a lot of these conclusions by, maybe we could say failing or not having success with other diets. You have done a vegan style diet. I think you were in a low carb camp. You've tried a lot of different things and you kind of, maybe you started to recognize the answers maybe somewhere more in the middle. Right, right, right. And so I started out, you know, religiously vegetarian. So I was raised Seventh-day Adventist.

And this is like a sort of weird religion where this prophetess for the church was having—she got hit in the head by a rock and had a seizure disorder, but she was having visions. And in one of the visions, God came down from heaven and told her that humans shouldn't eat meat. It was like the Garden of Eden. You should just, it was wrong. It was evil. So vegetarians. I've never even heard of this. Yeah. Vegetarians never eat meat. And I was raised vegetarian and I went to, I was a vegetarian for a very long time, decades, you know? And so what I learned is that just not eating meat didn't really give anyone optimal health automatically. In fact, a lot of the non-meat foods are just some of the junkiest junk foods you've ever seen. So I was surrounded by people who weren't any healthier than anybody else,

even though on paper they had this super healthy diet that was, you know, vegetarian, plant-based. So that does not necessarily work for people. So, like, I've also tried to be religious about other diets. I was religiously paleo and low-car carb and keto and carnivore and you name it. And then what I realized is that just blindly dogmatically being religious about any one of these is maybe not as optimal as just realizing what's driving the success from all of these and then mixing them all together. And then just being a little bit higher protein, lower carb, lower fat, um, lower energy density. And, uh, so yeah, I I've,

I've been there, tried that. I've fell down the same paleo keto carnivore, whatever, you know, thing that we all, that we're all in. And, uh, on the other side of that, I'm like, oh, wow, you don't have to be in one camp. You don't have to be dogmatic. You can kind of like rise above all the diet religions and be, um, a centrist. You can be agnostic. You can kind of like pick and choose. You can do a little bit of everything. Um, and I think that's a better place to be than just like, okay, we'll never eat carbs again. I will never eat a plant food again. I'm just going to eat like just nothing but, you know, the fattiest meat I can get, which I think is, you know, not realistic for most people. I think something that's been beneficial for me is to sometimes be like, to use like situational dieting. So like, for example,

if I go on vacation or go on a trip or something, I might utilize keto strategy or I might utilize a carnivore strategy because what I found was that when you go out to eat, it's just very, very difficult to, that you can protein leverage at some places, but it's really hard to get your, it's, it's, it's hard to get a good score, you know, uh, protein leveraging wise, um, because there's so much fat in everything. And then good luck trying to find good carb sources at restaurants. It's very difficult. You're not going to get usually a regular potato.

A lot of times it's going to be a mashed potato or you're getting French fries. So carbohydrate sources usually aren't great. Sometimes you might be able to get rice. You might be able to get fruit. You might be able to get fruit. You might be able to get a halfway decent carbohydrate source. But from mostly what I found, it's not great. And so that's why a lot of times I'll choose just to, even just for a meal, I'm like, okay, well, this meal is going to have higher fat, but I am out for dinner and just enjoying

it sometimes. So I'm probably going to overeat my calories. I kind of understand that. And I sort of, I'll kind of preface the whole day sort of around that situation or maybe even the day after like, oh, let's get a little more activity and let's keep the steps up a little higher. Just little things like that have been really helpful. And knowing like keto or knowing carnivore or knowing some of these things has been helpful in those particular situations rather than just being absolutely tied and tethered to the diet all the time. This is brilliant.

This is super intelligent. I mean, I love that. You're reacting to your food environment. You're like, okay, I'm in a place with really really fatty proteins so maybe i just keep the carbs ultra low brilliant absolutely love it or i've got super lean proteins and tons of carbs everywhere in my food environment so i'm just going to do the ultra low fat thing eat like a bodybuilder at that point right exactly um or if all you've got is junk food maybe you're going to plan for that by fasting the whole

day until then. So your caloric total ends up not being that bad or just doing more cardio. And I think that these are all brilliant strategies for adjusting to your environment and basically getting by on anything. And that's awesome. That's why humans are so adaptable and we can live anywhere on earth and eating anything, which confuses people because then they're like, well, what the hell are we supposed to eat? But like you pointed out with this example is you can adapt and actually be successful in all sorts of different environments. You know, if you were like locked in prison, you'd be fine because you'd eat all the proteins you could get. And then if you had to overeat carbs or fats, you'd just do more burpees in your cell or whatever. You know what I mean? You just like

burn it off with cardio. And so you'd somehow find a way to get by in any food environment by manipulating these variables, which I think is great and brilliant and awesome. I love the fact that you've shed light on the protein leveraging hypothesis. I think it's been great to hear more information about that. And now you're involved in an app that is highlighting like a satiety rating. How does some of that work? Right, right, right. So, yeah, I started out with protein leverage.

Very powerful driver. Super awesome. The guys who invented it, Rabenheimer and Simpson, needed a Nobel Prize there. I'm big fans of theirs. Such a cool name. I know. Protein leveraging hypothesis. It sounds like, wait, what is this about? It's very cool. Yeah, it should be a household term and nobody's really heard of it. So it needs way more airtime. And that's the whole reason I wrote that book is just

to give them more airtime. But then I did realize, okay, it is possible to be successful even on low protein percent diets. You know, if you look at like the Samane and the Hadza and you look at the, all these different hunter-gatherer groups, some of them had very low, okinawans you know it's like 12 protein but they're eating this super tough gnarly high fiber natural uncultivated sweet potato that has a crazy satiety per calorie like you just couldn't overeat if you tried so they're actually doing fine because they're super leveraging this fiber high fiber low density. Potato that's not cooked, that'd be brutal. And so like I realized, okay, there are other levers you can pull besides just protein. There's a fiber, there's energy density.

There's just staying away from the hedonic, high carb, high fat combos together. And so the approach I'm on now is this satiety per calorie approach. It basically means how much satiety are you going to get for the calories that were in your food? And I'm working with Dr. Andrea Seinfeld of Diet Doctor fame on this little spinoff called HAVA. And we built this app. It's HAVA Eat. It's an app for the iPhone, Android. It's basically you enter your food, you take a picture of your food, it tells you what all the macros and the protein and the carbs and fats are. And it tells you two things.

Number one, how close you are to a protein target, because we're trying to get everybody eating a protein. But then it also tells you what the overall satiety score is, with zero being like just cookies and donuts, and 100 being like celery and egg whites. And the goal is to not be too low or too high, but be somewhere right in the middle around a 50. So you take a picture of your food. It's like, oh, great. This was, you know, 40 grams of protein and a satiety score of 50. That's perfect, right? And you're going to hit your protein target for the day and you're going to stay under your calories, not by counting calories or restricting calories, but by just eating food with a reasonable satiety per calorie.

We're not suggesting anybody track calories because we don't know how many calories you're going to burn every day. Maybe you just sit immobile on the couch all day long and you never move and you need 1800 calories. Maybe you're just like just doing tons of iron man triathlon training and you burn thousands of calories a day we're not going to actually tell anybody how many calories eat it's just pick a food that's going to be as a type of calorie range where you're going to automatically stop eating when you're full and not get too many calories so it's just like okay target protein look at this type calorie of your food, which relates to energy density, fiber, weight and volume, net carbs, you know, how many grams of fat, how hedonic it was, like high sugar, salt, fat, carbs and fats together are going to be super hedonic and give you a lower satiety per calorie score. But that's what we're working on.

And it's really pretty cool. It's very agnostic. It kind of rises above all the diet camps and the tribes. And it's like picking and choosing a little bit from all the diet camps that write about something. And we've just combined it all into something that's agnostic and neutral and centrist and works. And you can actually pull one lever more than the other just depending on your preferences. Your book, Protein vs. Energy, I believe that's the name of it, right? Oh yeah. It's called the PE Diet. PE Diet. So the PE Diet I found to be super useful because it had, I'm not one to like sit there and like read page after page after page. And so this was really helpful for me because it's a picture book. Right. It's

a lot of infographics, but the infographics really get the point across. And I want to touch upon a couple things that you said in there, but one of them being that if you want to burn fat, don't eat carbohydrates. But if you want to burn body fat, don't eat carbohydrates and don't eat dietary fat. Exactly. So that's a really interesting statement. And obviously, you're not saying don't eat any carbs and don't eat any fat, because that would not be great. Because we know what can happen if you mainly just eat protein. And if you're trying to get 100 as your score for satiety, just with protein all the time, that could be to your detriment, right? Yeah, you'd be starving out

of your mind. So yeah, yeah. So in the book, the PE diet, I'm looking at the ratio of protein to non protein energy in your diet. And there's definitely a too low where you're going to overeat, but there's definitely a too high where you're just starving out of your mind. And every bodybuilder, you know, the week before, you know, on your show prep, and you're just eating like egg whites and cucumbers, right? White fish or something. Right. It's just so, you're just so hungry for energy calories, like carbs or fats. You know, you just rip somebody's head off if there was donut inside. You cannot live that way. It's absolutely terrible. So there's definitely a sweet spot on this protein to energy ratio. And yeah, the book is basically just looking at this ratio and trying to really just have one goal higher than before. Like you look at where you were and you just try to be a little bit higher. You know what I mean?

Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Where can people find you? Where can they find out more information? Oh, great. Well, thank you so much for having me. It's great to talk to you. You can find me on the socials at Ted Naiman, X and Instagram. And you can check out the book I wrote, The PE Diet, just pretty much anywhere

books are sold. It is mostly a picture book. People are like, are you going to put out an audio book? And I'm like, no, the word counts like a hundred. It's like just pictures. Come on. So there's no audio book for The PE Diet. I'm working on a new book satiety per calorie i don't it'll be uh hopefully sometime this year but you can check out the app if you go to hava.co um and this app is on the google play store it's in the iphone app store and it's just pretty cool to play around with you can get a free seven days and just like take pictures of your food see what the satiety score is and you're like, oh, hey, donuts are zero. And my egg white scramble is 100, you know?

And so it's just, I think like somebody like you doesn't need it because you already, you know this stuff. Like you can just walk in the grocery store and it's like ones and zeros, like the matrix, like you know exactly what's in all your food. But like the average person. But it has been helpful though. Like that kind of stuff's been helpful. Even just hearing you talk about like energy toxicity, you know, like, oh, well it's still really easy to over-consume food. Even like for

me, like I've been on keto diets and stuff before, but then I would like have like a cheat day and I would like way overdo it and stuff like that. And I'm like, well, that's not healthy either. And then, so then you start to bring together different ideas. And when you bring together different ideas and you're on a diet that's more well-balanced, then you don't feel the need to have that day where you massively overeat. And so things, a lot of the work you've done has been super helpful. Oh, well, yeah. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. But yeah, you can just check me out on the socials or the PE Diet. And thank you for all your contributions.

Love the podcast. I'm a regular viewer. And so it's just great to talk to you and be on again. I really appreciate it. Great. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.

Bye. If you enjoyed this episode, which I know you did because you got this far, then click this one right here because you'll enjoy this one just as much. And if you're choosing to still listen to me currently as I'm telling you to go over here and watch this video, well, hey, that just means you like the sound of my voice. And, well, I'll just keep seducing you right here. Hello.