Ultimate Fat Loss Guide - Gabrielle Lyon - Mike Israetel - Layne Norton - Don Saladino

Summary

The Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show

Episode: Ultimate Fat Loss Guide

Guests: Dr. Gabrielle Lyon (host), Dr. Mike Israetel, Dr. Layne Norton, Don Saladino

Date: September 1, 2025

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Episode Overview

This robust, science-driven roundtable demystifies the fundamentals of fat loss, translating the latest research into actionable, no-nonsense strategies. Dr. Lyon is joined by Dr. Mike Israetel (sports scientist), Dr. Layne Norton (nutrition scientist), and Don Saladino (elite trainer) for a deep dive into calorie balance, diet myths, the role of protein, strength training essentials, supplements, the promise and pitfalls of GLP-1 medications (Ozempic, etc.), and the social dynamics transforming the future of weight management.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Fat Loss is So Hard – The Real Problem

• Most dieters regain weight because they use unsustainable or poorly designed strategies—NOT laziness or lack of willpower.
• The desire for short-cuts is natural, but “sexy,” quick-fix diet ideas are mostly scams; scientific principles (energy balance, consistency) are non-negotiable.

"Most people don't fail because they're lazy or lack willpower. They fail because they're following the wrong strategy."
– Dr. Gabrielle Lyon [00:14]

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2. Calorie Balance: The Non-Negotiable Fundamental

• Calories matter. You don’t have to count every one, but you must understand intake versus expenditure.
• Overeating is the primary driver of weight gain. The concept of “undereating making you fat” is a myth; short-term undereating can lead to bingeing, but long-term weight gain means a calorie surplus.

"Calories as a physics concept is not so up for dispute... What is a big factor is people eat too goddamn much."
– Dr. Mike Israetel [05:29]

[00:33] – “Dieting is tough... we call that diet fatigue in the industry.”

• Discussion on the carbohydrate-insulin model: Modern evidence shows that macronutrient composition matters less than total calories and protein for fat loss.
• The key challenge for the public is sorting science from “wild exaggerations and categorical untruths” circulating online.

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3. Hierarchy & Structure for Fat Loss Nutrition

Setting Up Your Diet

• Step 1: Set clear goals (fat loss, muscle gain, maintenance).
• Step 2: Determine daily calorie needs, considering activity level.
• Step 3: Set dietary protein – 0.6 to 1 gram per pound of body weight (higher if optimizing muscle retention).
• Step 4: Choose ratio of carbs to fats based on preference and sustainability; both can work if protein and calories are right.
• Step 5: Plan your meals ahead & focus on nutrient-dense foods.

"If you weigh 200 pounds, anything at close to at or over 120 grams of protein per day is more than enough to provide a great amount of protein for almost every need that you have."
– Dr. Mike Israetel [52:07]

[65:54] Layne Norton: “Once you've got the protein number set... deduct those calories out of your total calorie goal, and then you have carbs and fat left... What kind of dietary preference do you have? ...It will distribute the carbohydrates and fats appropriately.”

Protein Intake:

• Optimization: 1 g/lb (or ideal body weight)
• Minimum for non-athletes: 0.6 g/lb
• Protein quality matters: Prefer lean meats, dairy, eggs, or smartly combined plant proteins

Carbs vs Fats:

• No "best" split; meet essential fatty acid needs (~2g/day EPA/DHA), then match to personal and lifestyle preference
• Extremely low fat can depress hormones and wellbeing in some; higher carbs may favor performance

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4. Resistance Training – Non-negotiable for Lasting Fat Loss

• Minimum effective dose: 3x/week full-body resistance training (20–30 min sessions), plus daily activity (steps, walking, movement)
• Resistance training is the key to losing fat while retaining, or even gaining, lean mass—especially during a calorie deficit.
• Cardio is optional; strength training is foundational.

"Strength training is a non-negotiable for reducing body fat and changing body composition."
– Dr. Gabrielle Lyon [17:45]

[19:33] Don Saladino: “If someone comes to me and they're like, I, for some reason at 20 minutes I lose motivation. I'll design for them the 18 minute workout.”

Practical Exercise Tips:

• Start with full-body workouts—frequency is more important than crushing yourself in long sessions.
• Essential patterns: Squat, push, pull, carry/core
• Focus on proper progression, mobility, and enjoyment for long-term adherence.

"I want them to hit it, I want them to leave there wanting more... leave there not being completely spent."
– Don Saladino [19:08]

• For beginners: Full-body, moderate sessions three times a week, plus daily movement.

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5. Diet Myths, Adherence, and the Role of Enjoyment

• Many “rigid” or “extreme” approaches (like extreme low calorie or very low carb diets) backfire because they are hard to sustain and trigger rebound eating.
• There are MANY viable dietary frameworks (plant-based, low carb, high carb, flexible, meal plans, tracking apps), but adherence is the most important driver for success.

"What works is finding something that you can adhere to."
– Dr. Layne Norton [63:02]

• Apps and tracking tools (like Carbon, RP Strength) help, but only if they fit your personality and lifestyle.

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6. Supplements: What Actually Helps?

Three Top Supplements (per Dr. Layne Norton)

• Creatine monohydrate: 5g/day for muscle and strength, possibly brain health.
• Caffeine: Effective for performance, focus, mild appetite suppression—but use responsibly; effects diminish with tolerance.
• Whey protein: High-quality, convenient; supports muscle retention during weight loss.

[“If you want to go a little bit more bougie, get the micronized version.” — Layne Norton on creatine, 38:18]

• Basic micronutrient supplements: Multivitamin, magnesium, zinc, vitamin D, possibly beneficial for insurance but “minor players”

"At the very least a multivitamin multi-mineral every day. Probably a good thing.”
– Dr. Mike Israetel [22:43]

• Stimulants (caffeine, nicotine) can suppress appetite but come with side effects and diminishing returns.

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7. Modern Fat Loss Drugs: Promise and Precautions

• GLP-1 agonists (Ozempic, semaglutide, tirzepatide):
  • Transformative for appetite suppression, significant real weight loss, and improved health markers.
  • Minimal tolerance (appetite reduction persists), but dosage must be increased slowly to avoid side effects.
  • Best results come with sensible diet (lower fat, high nutrient-density); processed/junk foods on these drugs can still override appetite signals and make you sick.

"These drugs are not mandatory... but they're definitely like a tool in the toolbox. And if you've really been struggling without them, I would say going to talk to your primary healthcare provider about them is a real smart idea."
– Dr. Mike Israetel [32:59]

[29:13] Dr. Mike Israetel: “Most people will feel an anorectic effect within several hours of administration... you put the typical amount of food on your plate, halfway through you're like, 'fuck am I doing? I don't want this anymore.' Weird, right?"

• Future drugs will likely be even more powerful and selective (Retatrutide, next-gen multi-agonists).

Social & Ethical Dynamics:

• “Food vs drug” -- as drugs get stronger, processed foods will get more hyperpalatable, leading to more extreme outcomes (super-lean and super-obese populations)

"At some point, if you just successfully show up to the doctor's office once a month and he gives you whatever 2032, you know, 8th gen drug, you will not look at food and be able to put it in your mouth past a certain point."
– Dr. Mike Israetel [92:16]

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8. Realistic Timeframes & The Importance of Maintenance Phases

• Sustainable fat loss is a multi-phase process ("ratchet-step"); 8–12 weeks of deficit, then at least ⅔ that time at maintenance.
• Psychological and physiological diet fatigue is real: breaks (“maintenance” phases) help prevent burnout and rebound.

"It should be like five weeks. I should be good, like no, no, it's going to take years. Luckily not 15 years, but it might take two or three. And you gotta hang in there and you gotta give yourself breaks."
– Dr. Mike Israetel [106:41]

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9. Muscle: The True Game-Changer for Health and Appearance

• Weight loss without resistance training = frailty, loss of functional strength, poor long-term health.
• Resistance training preserves lean mass, improves function, changes shape (“look hotter”), and supercharges metabolic health.
• You can build muscle and lose fat simultaneously if you're a beginner or returning after a layoff.

"Weight loss is cool. It's really healthy in almost all cases. But we can do better. We can do fat loss. Weight loss with conservation of muscle or an increase in muscle at the same time is a big deal."
– Dr. Mike Israetel [95:54]

• Essential movement patterns: squat, push, pull, carries/core.
• For core, offset carries and tension-focused planks (not just crunches).
• “If you don't lift weights and you start losing weight, you do lose significant amounts of muscle.” – Dr. Mike Israetel [49:29]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Dr. Mike’s Humor:
  • “I haven’t eaten to preference in a generation.” [58:44]
  • “If you want to step on stage, Mr. Olympia, you might have a different goal." [54:14]
  • "I started caffeine and work your way up to cocaine, as that happens." [26:15]
• Don on sustainable exercise:
  • “I want them to hit it, I want them to leave there wanting more...” [19:08]
• Lane on dietary dogma:
  • “If you need to debunk any of this, you just look around… all you need to do is eat red meat. And I’m like, oh well, you need to eat about seven and a half pounds of red meat.” [38:05]
• Dr. Lyon on empowerment:
  • “Health is truly a choice—and we have education and resources like your RP Strength and your app...” [95:04]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00 – 04:14: Introduction; why most fat loss attempts fail; desire for shortcuts; the science vs the “hacks”
• 05:12 — 10:43: The calorie discussion; over- vs under-eating; the myth of undereating and metabolic damage
• 13:57 – 15:57: Carbohydrate-insulin model vs calorie balance
• 15:25 -- 21:40: Strength training framework for everyone; basics of practical programming
• 22:40 – 25:57: Supplements: basics, caffeine, side effects
• 27:40 – 34:41: Modern fat loss medications (GLP-1s, etc.) — how they work, who they help, what to avoid
• 34:42 – 44:40: Supplements: Creatine, caffeine, whey protein—science and practicality
• 46:18 – 54:58: Muscle mass, lean mass, protein dosing, diet setup
• 55:01 – 65:49: Macronutrient distribution; carbs, fats, protein; practicality and preference
• 67:25 – 71:14: Carbon app approach; how to structure macros in real life
• 72:21 – 83:19: Training structure; progression; exercise selection for physique, health, longevity
• 85:01 – 95:04: Timeline for fat loss; “ratchet step” process; future of fat loss drugs; social trends
• 95:44 – 106:41: Muscle vs fat; why resistance training is transformative; psychological side of dieting

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Conclusion: Actionable Takeaways

• Calorie deficit is king for fat loss—track, estimate, or create routines that help you eat less than you burn.
• Protein and resistance training protect muscle — aim for 0.6–1 g/lb and lift 2–4x/week.
• Find an approach you can actually live with — adherence > perfection.
• Supplements can help but are minor players: Creatine, caffeine, whey, basic vitamins/minerals.
• Consider medications if you’re struggling—with medical supervision and lifestyle change.
• Cycle dieting phases with maintenance to avoid burnout and maximize results.
• You control the dial: Modern society offers more extremes (delicious food, powerful drugs) — but the power to choose, and to build a healthy body, is yours.

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For more, follow Dr. Lyon, Dr. Mike Israetel, Dr. Layne Norton, and Don Saladino.
Stay muscle-centric. Stay empowered.

Transcript

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

For every 10 people who lose weight, only one will keep it off for good. How you would think about fat loss, because that's what everybody wants.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

You don't have to count your calories, but it's really good idea to understand that calories matter.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Most people don't fail because they're lazy or lack willpower. They fail because they're following the wrong strategy. So what's the right strategy?

[Don]

Listen, we need strength training three days a week at a bare minimum.

[Lane]

The number one most important thing, get your energy intake correct. If you want to lose fat, you have to consume less energy than you expend.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Dieting is tough. A condition in which your body is not getting sufficient calories to maintain its weight almost always accrues some fatigue. And we call that diet fatigue in the industry.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

By mastering these strategies or habits, you can lose weight and keep it off. No gimmicks, no fad diets, just science backed proven methods.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

So we took care of most of the theory behind how people can lose weight. But there's a missing piece.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

The world is really confused about fat loss, about muscle. Where can we start with fat loss?

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

People that are loudly proclaiming things that are one of two categories. Wild exaggerations or things that are just categorically untrue.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Give me an example.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Yes, yes, categorically untrue. Calorie balance is a myth. Calories don't matter. Wild exaggeration. The low carb lifestyle is great for everyone. And you hear that enough from those people and they're iconoclastic enough that come up on your social media feed, they write best selling books and all this other stuff and all of a sudden you know your idea of the thing. Like I've had people tell me like well so like diet soda is like bad for you. And I'm like no, it's just near consensus that it's totally fine. It's essentially almost inert. And they're like well I heard like well you're hearing lies. And after it's and misunderstandings from lots of people on social media that just say a lot of stuff. But I wouldn't really only point the nasty blame finger at the producers of this kind of knowledge. I think most of it comes down to a consumption problem. A lot of people are not really interested in what maybe they consider dry and boring ideas. They're interested in sexy ideas. They're interested in quick fixes. Kind of a serendipitous fix where you like, there's this really complex puzzle and, and you click one piece and goes, and it's all in place versus, like, having to do this and that.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

You know what this reminds me of? This reminds me of success.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

And the things in common between fitness success and business success are actually quite massive on a principal level. They both have that little sting at the end of, like, I got to do all this fucking principled work for years to fuck that. Give me one hack. Just one thing is so I can get successful, so I can lose fat. And here's the thing, I absolutely, at a deep level, never blame people for looking for shortcuts, because as we develop as a society, we come up with shortcuts of things. If you told someone 150 years ago, yeah, that's fair. They're like, hey, like, how do I get to 90 miles away? Will you get in a car and just do this? And it goes. And if we say this in about three or four years, you're going to be like, you just actually get in the car and just do this. And it just goes, I'm not getting. What the hell is a car? What the hell is a car? And you're like, right, so this thing that drives, it's like. It's like having 150 horses, but all in one chariot. And the horses are invisible. They could look, you're out of your mind. And they were like, yes, it's all shortcuts. In the future, you want to go get food. You don't farm. You don't know anything. You just show up to the grocery store, you just kind of weird swiping some kind of weird little card, and you just take whatever you want. You leave. They're going to be like, this is nonsense. So if people didn't want shortcuts, if they didn't want massive efficiency improvements of orders of magnitude, they would have never invented amazing things. Like, if we were all hard work, brother. Someone's trying to invent, like, the industrial revolution, like, the farming equipment. You're like, man, it's. This guy's just a book. He's just trying to get out of work. Like, dude, you're an insane person, right? So it's great to look for shortcuts. It's awesome. But you got to be able to tell what shortcuts are, cutting you right into bullshit that doesn't work, and which ones are actually effective. And there are some effective little shortcuts or hacks, but. But in the diet realm, so far, they're few and far between, and you can exploit them really well if you're good at the rest of the thing.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Give me the hierarchy, and I'm gonna give you what I would consider probably the hierarchy. And you tell me where I'm right, where I'm wrong.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Oh, you're wrong. Cause you're not me. I'm the only one that knows the hierarchy. It's called the Dr. Mike hierarchy.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

I'll take it.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Of things the Dr. Mike knows. Cause he's special and important. Oh, I'm on a podcast.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

You are, but you are special and important.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

That's what my mom.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Calories in, calories out. Well, I guess the first thing you would have to consider is what are your goals? Are you looking to lose fat, gain muscle, or maintain? Then the next thing would be you calculate that number and you determine what that number would be.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Calorie number.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Yes. You determine what that calorie number would be. And then you would set your dietary protein intake to. For me, I would set it at 1 gram per pound, ideal body weight, or 1 gram per pound. And then depending on my activity, I could choose carbohydrates or fats.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

You're well on your way, girl. I don't even. I don't even have to do the podcast. You keep going. I'll just be like, huh? Huh? I'll be like, yeah, that was Dr. Mike.

[Don]

Thank you so much.

[Lane]

See you later.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Well done.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

No, right on, right on.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Yeah, tell me where. How. How you would think about fat loss, because that's what everybody wants.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

So it turns out you don't have to count your calories. You don't have to count your calories, but it's really good idea to. That calories matter. Imagine you're in a shooter video game, and you have a certain number of bullets in your gun. You got to reload. It doesn't matter if you count the bullets one by one, but you have to understand the concept that you can run out of bullets. There's such a thing as too much shooting at an empty screen, and then the bad guy comes and goes and he eats you. So you don't have to count calorie by calories. Many ways of doing things. But calories as a physics concept is not so up for dispute. No, it can be up for dispute if you want to disprove calorie balance. You do a lot of real deep physics equations and deep experiments and bomb calorimeters, and you submit the various journals, and five or ten years later, they'd be like, it's fucking Einstein. You're a revolutionary. But good news, we don't have to do that because it's pretty well set in stone. And all calorie balance says is if you want to become larger, you have to eat more than you're used to or spend a little bit less energy. The energy spending thing I can get into considerably. But the long and short of it is energy expenditure is not a big factor in most people being overweight. I know that sounds crazy, but it's just like unambiguously true. What is a big factor is people eat too goddamn much. And I know that's crazy. We are in Houston, Texas, where everyone's so lean. I mean, it's just shredded. It's all skinny people and shredded people.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

No, I was like, I thought. I thought everything was bigger in Texas. I mean, like, really?

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Yeah. No, it's impressive here. Texas is great.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Everything is bigger.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Literally everyone. And it looks like people having a lot of fun with their food. I will say that. But the biggest thing about calorie balance is if your calorie level is here and your body weight is here, probably a big part of your journey to getting your body weight down is going to be to take your calories and put them down to some level.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Would that be a controversial statement that people are eating too much?

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

I don't know where.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Well, I mean, I think the only reason I say that is because you hear a lot of people say that individuals are undereating.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Yeah, I do hear that. So there's a nuanced caveat way that can be true. And there's a way that many people mean it. This is categorically false. So the nuanced way, if we're really going to steel man, that is, I think a lot of people who get tired of being overweight, which is a lot of people decide, you know what, I'm not going to eat a whole lot, I'm going to lose weight. And they take their calorie level and they bring it down to a level that's unsustainable.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Like 800 calories.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Sure. Energy grounds, hunger grounds, mental clarity grounds, getting fired from work because you can't make sense of things grounds, sleep goes to hell, that whole thing. And it is true that in that acute time frame that lasts days for most people, weeks for some, months for very few, they are actually undereating. So the statement is true in that sense. But because they under eat way too much, they go back around and go, fuck this. Gas me up. They go to Taco Bell late at night. You know how it starts and it doesn't stop because your boys in The Taco Bell parking lot all day. I just walk in, they already know me.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

You have a card.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

They have my.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Oh, yeah, frequent flyer card.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

That's right.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

They have your order ready.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

I'm so in line with the Taco Bell Corporation that they actually just eat for free. Oh, they just want to see how ridiculously over fat I can get at this point. It's like a science thing.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

And they probably support your YouTube.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Oh, they love us. Yeah, Taco Bell, please don't cancel us. But at some point, those people go back into like. Because if you drag your body weight down rapidly in unsustainable manner, especially if you lose skeletal muscle, the profound hunger that results is not something most people can relate to in their daily lives. It's a kind of hunger that if you're watching a TV show where a family's discussing some controversial topic and you love the show and you're like, oh my God, what's the juice? You stop paying attention to what they're saying and you're looking at the dinner rolls they haven't touched yet. You're like, why doesn't somebody fucking eat those? Oh, my God, I'm not. Well, I'm that hungry. And for most people, they get that hungry, they just, they go, this is a real trip. Unreal. Unfortunate trip. They go, this thing I just did, this crazy low calorie diet. This is what I understand fat loss dieting to be, and it's clearly just not. Doesn't work for me. I'm going to go back to doing what I usually do and I'm just going to be fat. Because it's either suffering or being fat. And being fat's a lot easier in almost all cases than suffering starving for the rest of your life. So they just go back and they look back on their diet experience and someone tells them, like, you weren't eating enough. And you're like, oh, that makes sort of sense. So on a local scale, it can be true. On a global scale, if you give me someone over the course of one year and they've gained 15 pounds, maybe they got married. Maybe the first year the marriage was fun. But then after, he just keeps. Never cleans up after himself. The guy's a slob. And you just hate and hate. But the thing that makes your hate go away is the cookies. You just keep eating cookies and you gain £15 over the course of a year. And you tell me I was under eating. False, you're overeating. It would be really dope if we figured out a way how to underfeed people and still allow them to maintain or gain weight because we would send that information to the war torn regions of the world where they would do famine control. It would be wonderful, but it's never been seen. Violates several laws of thermodynamics. It just doesn't work. So on a grand scale, if someone's like, yeah, I've just gained 40 pounds, you know, and I've had this literal conversation with like, I think I just not, I don't eat enough and I'm just like, or cough up my food. Like, no, no, that's not it.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

And I think that that's a really important point because oftentimes you, especially women, say, well, I'm just not eating enough and I have to increase my calories and I'm underfeeding. And the reality is you might go through periods of starvation and then there's a rebound hunger that seems to send people into a tailspin. I wanted to take a moment to let you know about something new we've created. It's called Forever Strong Insider and it's the premium subscription to the Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show. As a Forever Strong insider, every week you'll get ad free episodes, written summaries with key takeaways to help you retain the most important insights from the show, a community Q and a segment where you can submit your own questions for upcoming guests. We're going to call this the Strong Seed and behind the scenes content. A closer look at how I prepare, train, travel and navigate daily life. Go to foreverstrong supercast.com let's keep getting stronger together. If someone were to say, okay, calories in, calories out, we've identified that calories in is, is pretty streamlined, right? How many calories are you getting and whether metabolizable.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Okay, metabolizable.

[Lane]

So if you have more fiber, you know, that sort of thing that's, that's going to lower your metabolizable energy. So there's, there's that, that, that kind of theory. That's kind of the crux of it, right? Your metabolizable energy in and then the summation of the calories you expend on a daily basis. Now we look at the carb insulin model of obesity. This has a lot of variations. I feel like the goalposts have moved on this a lot. But I'm going to give you my closest interpretation of, of what I think is, has been popularized. Calories in, calories out kind of states that you overeat and become obese. In response to the overeating because you're consuming more calories than you expend. The carb insulin model says it's not so much that when you eat a high, when you eat high refined carbohydrate, you inhibit lipolysis, just the breakdown of fat, right? So you have, you increase insulin, you inhibit lipolysis. That traps fat and adipose. And since fat is now inaccessible or stored energy is inaccessible to the rest of the body, you overeat in response. And so the, the crux is you don't become fat because you overeat. You become fat from eating too much refined carbohydrate and you overeat in response and then become fat. So I think there's a few kind of really basic reasons that that is not viable. So the first, the first thing I will say is for a hypothesis to be robust, it needs to show up across a broad category, various populations. One of the things that I had said to people who were promoting the carb insulin model of obesity, because they seem to keep changing it and keep like, well, this study didn't quite do this. And so it's not. And I said, well, if you're hypothesis requires these extremely tight constraints to actually be true, it's not a very robust hypothesis.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Or could it be that it is efficacious for a very particular type of age population? I don't know. Potential phenotype.

[Lane]

I would say the first thing to look at is there was a meta analysis of studies looking at various levels of carbohydrate intake in the diet, but they controlled protein and calories. So there's about 20 controlled feeding studies. So this is important because the inclusion criteria for this meta analysis was the. It either had to be metabolic ward or the food had to be provided to participants. So adherence was high because when you provide food to participants, you can get adherence above 90%. When you do free living and just tell them to do whatever, that's when you get like 50, 60% adherence.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Oreos are eaten under the counter, right? Yeah, yeah.

[Lane]

So the food was provided to participants. Protein and calories were equated, which is important. Obviously we've got to equate calories. There's a lot of studies out there where they're like, well, this showed more fat loss than this. But then you see, well, they didn't control calories. Okay, might say something for satiety, but you don't really know if it like mechanistically what it's showing. So they equated calories Equated protein. Important for what we talked about because, um, originally some of the lower carb research, like out of Volek and Finney's lab was showing increased fat loss and better muscle retention, but they weren't equating protein in the studies.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

I didn't know that.

[Don]

Listen, we need strength training, right? And I think we need, you know, right around three days a week at a, at a bare minimum. Right.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Would that be enough to change, to lose body fat?

[Don]

And I think it would be. And I think that depending on your lifestyle. I'm not telling you for the other four days to go sit in the desk and not move or not be active, but if you got in and you did three days of resistance training and the other four days you were active with steps and you were trying to get outside and you're hydrating and you're focusing on sleep and you're focusing on something that we love called protein. Right.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Never heard of it.

[Don]

Never heard of it. And, and trying to. The food I consume, I want it to be powerful, right? Like I'm not going to just eat like a chicken breast and some white rice.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Maybe the old school way of, the.

[Don]

Old school way of doing things. Like, yes, we're going to have broccoli with it or we're going to mix. Like you're. The way you eat or when you look in your fridge, very interesting and I love it.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

But it's very organized.

[Don]

It's very organized. But like you had your grass fed steak, you had, you know, some shrimp, you had some chicken, you had your potatoes, you had your rice, you had your vegetables and you had other things up top, your kraut, maybe your kimchi.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

That's right. You noticed. You were looking at my face.

[Don]

Yeah. So like for fermented foods and you know, there was never, you were never short of being able to consume something that was powerful. So I think there's a way to eat that's delicious. I think it does take a little discipline and a little planning. Like if you're gonna wake up the next day and say, oh God, I slept in, my meals aren't ready and when am I gonna train?

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

I never sleep in.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Right? Yeah.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Because I have.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

I wish we do.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Little, little children who woke up and were like, where's Uncle Donnie?

[Don]

I missed that, I missed that. But yeah, I think, to answer your question, I think if you got in, started with, you know, three 20 to 30 minute sessions and the other day.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

It'S not that long.

[Don]

It's not, it's not long. But Then the other days be active, like, like walk, take the stairs instead of the elevator, move, like maybe after your meals, go for a 10 minute walk doing these things that are really going to help you accumulate your steps. And you know, I think good things will happen. And when good things start happening, then those magic words come in. It's like, all right, I'm seeing progress, what's next? So many people don't want to keep up with, you know, with that discipline because they're not seeing progress. So when you're doing something every day and there's nothing in return, it's really difficult to want to continue to do it. So that's my thing. If we could show them a little bit of progress, we're going to get.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Them coming back a lot more and progress begins. You know, there's the physical progress, but also being able to set a standard for yourself. You set a standard, you execute on that standard. If you were to say, if you're out there listening and you've never picked up a weight, which I know some people are in that spot, or maybe they've always been doing cardio because again, cardio is easy, you jump on a piece of cardio equipment. But strength training is a non negotiable for reducing body fat and changing body composition. Don has trained every type of person under the sun, from famous people to athletes to tier one operators whom we share together. If someone starts at 20 to 30 minutes of resistance training three days a week, how should they think about it? Should be a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, what kind of it should be? How should they space it? And would these be full body exercises?

[Don]

I like full bodies because now we're repeating with some frequency and I think someone who's getting started, the big complaint is I don't want to feel too sore, right? Like I like the sore.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Is that the big complaint?

[Don]

I get a big, oh my God, am I going to get really sore doing this? And I'm like, all right. But so if you're turning around and you're training frequently, meaning like a Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, you're allowing yourself a rest day, you know, in between mentally, we might develop some motivation, which becomes a problem when most people start training. They get so excited and they get overzealous and they jump in there and the next thing you know they're there for an hour and a half and then they're sore the next day and then they come back in and they do it again. And then three, four days in they're like, I'M shot and I can't keep up with this. And I'm like, I don't have that type of time. And that motivation starts diminishing. So I want them to go in, I want them to hit it, I want them to leave there wanting more like, like leave there not being completely spent.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

And is that why you say start with 20 to 30 minutes? Because 30 minutes you could probably keep going.

[Don]

I can create any program for anybody. Like it's. If someone comes to me and they're like, I, for some reason at 20 minutes I lose motivation. I'll design for them the 18 minute workout. It's just, and I can design it in a way where we're going to check a lot of boxes. We're going to train the entire body. You're going to work, you know, you're going to work all five components of, of fitness, you know, strength, mobility, cardiorespiratory, endurance, muscular endurance, muscular muscular endurance and body composition. So you know, all those five components we're going to check those boxes with if we are, you know, training in a smart way and we're training in a very efficient ways. But if you're coming in there and frivolously pulling stuff out of the air, you're going to have a big problem and, and there's not going to be any balance to your programming and you're going to overtrain certain areas of the body or some people don't like using the term overtraining, but you're going to overload certain areas of the body and that could result in some issues in the future. I'm a fan of mobility. I am. I will feel great. It feels great. Just I call practice. So what I'll do is I will personally screen someone. I'll run them through some type of a functional movement screening or if there is red flags, I've got a team of medicals I work with where they can come in and do an SFMA or take them through their process. So once we understand how that person's moving, then I can design my practice or call what you want, warm up movement, prep, rehab, whatever you want to call it, I don't care. But like, then we could design that very simple approach based off of what it is that person needs. So if they're lacking an external rotation in the shoulder, we might work on that or thoracic extension or thoracic rotation. So it's very purposeful. Right. I'm not going to take a woman who can twist her spine like Gumby and start Working on open books, it's a useless movement for her. She doesn't need it. She might need to hang from a pull up bar and work on grip strength. I'm just making this up, right? But I think coming in and taking anywhere from three to five movements and just rolling through it to where your heart rate gets picked up. But we are practicing things that we want to get better at, that I, I think becomes very, very important. And then, you know, it's how are we structuring the workout based off of their goals?

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

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[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Supplements.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Yes, I, that was. I'm so glad you brought that up.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Yeah, there are some supplements you may be interested in taking during a weight loss journey as a little bit of an insurance policy. Magnesium, zinc, vitamin D, a multivitamin, multimineral. Maybe a greens powder, maybe not. Maybe a fruits powder, maybe not. Maybe some healthy fat supplements, maybe not. And those just make sure everything's squared away and working fine. And it probably is anyway if you're eating a mostly healthy diet. But these are things that are like super, super minor that you can do. At the very least a multivitamin multi mineral every day. Probably a good thing. As far as supplements that really like have a wallop effect, after that they don't exist. Stimulants are okay, but stimulants are kind.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Like a yohimbi ephedra.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Ephedra. Damn, girl.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Back in the 90s, is that even legal anymore?

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

I don't think so. I don't know.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Yeah. And guys, we're not saying to take It I am purely picking Dr. Mike's brain. So before you guys get excited, right to the ephedra. So I mean, you did say stimulants. I mean, okay, I probably should have went to coffee, right?

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Stimulants, I would say is kind of like a really pretty gnarly sword. Like a powerful sword, but there's no handle. You just grab the sword and bleed right into it. And some people have really calloused hands. They do just fine. Some people. Ow, that doesn't work. And they talk about it.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Tell me, what kind of, what stimulant type of thing are you talking about?

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Yeah, yeah. So some people stimulants make their brain go really well and they're productive and aware and all. They feel great. Some people just get a lot of anxiety from them, like way more than they get anything else. And they're like, I can't live like this. Some people fall asleep fine. I could do a natural experiment. You give my wife an espresso, it's 8pm you wait until 8:45, she'll pass out on the couch.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Same my husband too actually. You give him espresso at 8 and by 8:05 that guy is done.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

So if you gave me an espresso at 8, at 4 in the morning I would be like connecting the dots and conspiracy theories and checking into a psychiatric world.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Well, not that part, but yes, but you talked about caffeine. There are other ones. I mean, yes, let's say over the counter stimulants.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Caffeine's the main driver of all of them. And other stimulants are interesting, they have some interesting fat loss and health benefits, but teeny tiny. And actually caffeine's is quite teeny tiny. So if you can use caffeine to give you a bit more energy, if it doesn't interfere with your sleep much and if you can do it, to have. It's got a pretty interesting decent hunger suppressive effect.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

What about nicotine? Nicotine gum?

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

So nicotine is in that same situation. Nicotine has some health downsides that caffeine does not. So it's just not my first go to. And nicotine has substantial addiction potential. So it's just, it's not something you use on a diet and then quit. But because you're like, I need fucking more nicotine right now. Just go straight to ciggies. Not even the filtered ones. I'm talking about 1956. Like your fridge probably has in there right now.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Oh yeah, definitely.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Just full of cigarettes and shrunken heads.

[Don]

Yes.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

If you open that, you never know what's going to people that died from.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Smoking cigarettes, it's a lesson.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

But nicotine, because you hear with the fasting community, them using nicotine pouches, yeah.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

That works great for fasting, but the nicotine is a pretty hard drug. You know, it's a drug drug like capital D drug. So if you want to get addicted to nicotine, dope. Nicotine also doesn't have like great profiles on your blood pressure. From what I understand. Heart dynamics aren't great. Caffeine is a little bit of that, but they're substantially more muted from, from my understanding, not an expert area of mine.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

So if you were to pick one, it might be caffeine.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Yeah, for most people I started caffeine and work your way up to cocaine, as that happens.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

He's kidding, guys.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

He's just joking. Yes. Don't, don't go, go taking cocaine unless you're in the 80s and having a good time. So basically, stimulants are on paper sometimes really cool. And for many people they're a great kind of adjunct to this process of dieting that works pretty well. They have the downsides interfere with your sleep. When you're not on them, you get headaches and literally like physiological drug withdrawal if you're not on enough of them. And you're phase after you're done dieting, you're really hungry and it drives you insane. If you wake up in the evening or in the middle of the night or in the morning too early to take stimulants yet and you're hungry, there's no way out for you because the your anti hunger thing is also wakefulness thing. So I'd say stimulants are also in study after study. Caffeine doesn't by itself have a very good raw thermogenic effect. And so if it can control your appetite for you, that's okay. But also your body gets used to it real fast. And so coffee worked great week one and week eight, you need eight monsters and five coffees and the shit barely does anything. And it's all side effects. At that point you're like, all right, this is unsustainable. So as far as supplements that work well, I would say caffeine's a cool thing to use. Stimulants are cool in context, but they're not this panacea that everyone should have. Now this might be the time to talk about modern anorectic drugs.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Yeah, please.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Yeah, yeah. So and what does that mean? Yeah, yeah. So anorectic is means something that reduces your drive to eat food drive. And so anorectic drugs are drugs that reduce appetite. And so there are a couple of classes, there are two classes right now of anorectic drugs that work really well. It's the so technically the third generation GLP1 agonists like ozempic, aka semaglutide and then there's the fourth generation JLP GIP combined agonist and that's zap bound Tirzepatide. They work amazingly well. They're the first kinds of drugs really of their kind and mass market. They get at the problem of hunger from a pretty root perspective compared to caffeine for example. So their suite of side effects is much more minimal. Their suite of side effects that improve health is substantial. They're net health improvers. If you just give them to the random person they'll just get healthy over time.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

It's fascinating.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

That's fascinating. It's a big deal because usually you get drugs like that and they're like yeah, but it's killing you. Like nope, this is actually. Oh yeah. Well, the stimulant based drugs have suffered from a lot of the same problems. Here's another really trippy thing. There are now at least a few studies that are multiple years long that show people do not get used to GLP1s. However much hunger it made you lose in the first several weeks is exactly how much hunger it's going to make you lose in week number 92, which.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Is unreal and how fast. And they, you know, they work pretty fast. People will say oh well, it takes, I don't know, what is it, 46 or 48 weeks to reach peak or. There's multiple inflection points that an individual could be get to lose weight. But I mean we see it in practice by you know, four weeks into, I mean they're losing weight. Whether it's 24 weeks in, they've lost a substantial amount of weight. I think it's very individual whether it's 13% or 22%.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

So I can speak to that with some detail. Most people will feel an anorectic effect within several hours of administration of the drug. Much of it's subcutaneous, once weekly. So within several hours you may have an idea that you're going to eat a lot of food. You put the typical amount of food on your plate halfway through you're like, fuck am I doing? I don't want this anymore. Yeah, weird, right? And so it kind of hits right away more or less. And then these drugs have very long half lives that are measured in a week or longer. And so you take it once a week. Which means if you run the math, a lot of, for example, semaglutide reaches its peak at any given small, like any given dose, you start let's say 0.5 milligrams per week. It reaches its peak effect in your blood five weeks later. Even if you don't add anything, it's just like once a week you take 0.5mg and the dose in your blood goes up. So one of the big take home points from this is if you have an amount of semaglutide you're taking and you just started taking it and you're.

[Lane]

Like, I don't really feel a lot.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Of the hunger effects. Be easy, just stay on it for a few weeks. After a few weeks you're going to be like, holy, thank God I did not my dose. Because that would have caught up to you big time. And then it takes weeks for it to go back down.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Be sick and nauseous, throwing up. You could be the side effects definitely if you increase a dose too fast or gnarly.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

And a lot of times like people will get on social media and blame the drug. Like what didn't work for me, made me throw up. Like how much did you take Betty? And she's, I don't know, like the whole thing. Oh my God, right? This unreal powerful drug. So for most people they're not going to need that much. And then it's really kind of a turn dial for hunger. The more drug you take, the less your hunger is. And then you just like lose as much weight as not you want, but.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Pretty close, more or less as long.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

As you can tolerate the side effects. And big time, if your diet and lifestyle comport well with the drug. One of the things about these drugs is if you give yourself high palatable foods that are also high in fat, then you're able to outrun the drug at the mouth and brain and eyes level. You're like cookies. And then your stomach's like two middle fingers and up it goes. Or you feel really sick or you all sorts of both holes situation. And so it's really a big mistake to do that. So the best diet you can have for these drugs is a healthy diet, relatively low in fat but low in calories and high in healthy food so that you never have to run to this problem of tolerating the drug poorly. We have a friend that has been Taking these drugs and she's completely transformed her body. And she had what we lovingly call the macaroni and cheese incident. She's a few weeks into the drug. She was at like a family gathering and they're like, oh, Mac and cheese. And she took the right kind of portion. She a little bit of it. And she was like, no bathroom. The body's like, nope, too much fat. And so if you manage your diet properly and you take these drugs, the primary way in which they work is they're anorectics, they reduce food drive and they do all kinds of really awesome things for your health, including mental side effects. They actually make you less prone to every kind of addictive behavior they've studied so far.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

I see that all the time in practice.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Individuals that are interested in alcohol seem to be no longer interested in alcohol. Anything. Fascinating.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Yeah. And so these drugs are not mandatory. You can lose tons of weight and get super healthy without them. But I would say that in the modern context, with the evidence that we have, they're definitely like a tool on the, in the toolbox. And if you've really been struggling without them, I would say going to talk to your primary healthcare provider about them is a real small idea.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Absolutely agree. You know those people that can fall asleep anywhere? That person that gets on the airplane and before they even take off, they're asleep. I'm not one of those people. I need all the sleep help I can get. And one of the sponsors of our show, AG1 has done it again. They have created AG Z. And this is a nightly drink that helps you wind down. It's melatonin free with clinically studied herbs and adaptogens and minerals. AGZ is one of the few sleep supplements that contain both magene, which is magnesium, L threonate and saffron, two high quality ingredients at amounts supported by research. That's amazing. It has 250mg of highly bioavailable magnesium in every serving, which is providing over half your daily value. AGZ is NSF certified, the gold standard in independent quality and safety certification. It is free of melatonin, gluten, dairy added sugar, artificial sweeteners. If you're ready to turn down the stress and turn up the relaxation, then head to drink ag1.com lion to get your free frother with your first purchase of agc. Which supplements have the best evidence? Give me your top three. And I also have a. A few statements that are. I need a yes or no answer, which can be very difficult for you.

[Lane]

Try to box me in.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

I am.

[Lane]

Listen, okay, so my Mount Rushmore of supplements is not gonna like, thrill anybody because it's gonna be stuff that everybody's aware of. Number one is creatine monohydrate. I, I, give me the dose, five grams per day.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Do you know that? Twelve for brain health there.

[Lane]

Well, so there was. So for muscle, 5 grams per day. We saturate. There was a recent study that showed an acute 30 gram dose actually improved cognitive function.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

This guy, I can never pull. Can you imagine? I would say that. Can you imagine arguing with you? You know, like, just, you know, I'm so excited.

[Lane]

I can pull up some X's.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

They can probably give me some. I'm very excited to chat with your, your current beautiful lady, but I would just not want to argue with you. It would just be like, well, that time in 2000, my brain doesn't work that way at 5, 17 and 30 seconds. PM oh, you're right. Okay, so this is, I already know this. Wait, I am going to call you out. Nobody knows this about Lane. He is a freak when it comes to scientific literature and numbers. Like, ridiculous. If I'm like, Lane. So I would love for you to come to Houston on September 22nd. We're planning on having dinner with everybody this day. In one ear and out the other. Hey, what about that event? This guy, you give him a date or something else? Anything with numbers outside of academics, education, or money, forget it.

[Lane]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Did anyone know that about you?

[Lane]

Probably not. My girl definitely knows. Okay, well, yes, of course, because she, I think it actually gave her like a hard time for a while because she was kind of like, like I would struggle with dates, times, recalling certain things in conversation.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Yes.

[Lane]

It should be like.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

It's called man.

[Lane]

Like this.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

It's called man brain.

[Lane]

Yeah. Man brain.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Yes, man. So I don't want to deter you, but yes, we have to close this out because people do not know this about you.

[Lane]

No. So, and, and I, I never actually realized like, that. I just thought, study wise, that that's how people were.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

No.

[Lane]

And layman. Last year, we were all at an event and he goes, yeah, I've never met anybody who can just.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

I just like the bane of mine. Between that and your skin, it's a bane of my. Yes.

[Lane]

So, yeah, I, I, I don't know why I got that way. I just had a photographic memory when it came to studies and, you know, it just kind of worked out.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Creatine. So 5 grams, 30 grams for muscle.

[Lane]

30 grams acutely for.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Work.

[Lane]

So I don't, so I don't actually know that. I forget. You got one, you got one. Now the question I would have is, okay, would you get the same benefits if you just like took that 5 gram maintenance dose and over time you would get there? Perhaps the 30 gram dose is just a saturating effect. Early on it would make sense, who knows? Hopefully that cognitive research is going to expand more. But I honestly have a really people like, well, do I need creatine? No, you don't need it. But I have a hard time making an argument against taking it, to be honest.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Do you know how much creatine you would get in a cooked steak? Yes, one pound. A pound.

[Lane]

A pound. You get about half a gram of bioavailable creatine.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

I mean, so that would be what, two and a half pounds of. Wait, you would have to eat five.

[Lane]

To get a half grams.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Yeah, yeah, no thanks.

[Lane]

Yeah, it's, it's a little bit more that I, I think I worked out the math because everybody wants. There was a claim from the carnivore community that all you need to do is eat red meat. And I'm like, oh well, you need to eat about seven and a half pounds of red meat.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Well, it does make cooking much easier. And menu choices. What is your next, what is your next supplement?

[Lane]

Let me finish with creatine.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

All right. I'm just trying to keep you on track.

[Lane]

You don't need a load. If you have gastrointestinal side effects from it, split it into two, two and a half gram doses that will help with the gastrointestinal discomfort. Also, any form of creatine other than monohydrate in my opinion is a waste of money. All the studies looking at different forms of creatine, creatine monohydrate performs just as well or better. And it's the cheapest version. So get that. If you want to go a little bit more bougie, get the micronized version, gets more soluble, mixes up better. Next one, caffeine, the original nootropic, the original cognitive enhancer. I'll take it very consistently. Show caffeine will. It actually increases BMR slightly, may improve fat loss just a little bit. Cognitive, like task recall stuff. People are better at performance. People get a little bit better at.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

How much, what's the kind of dose?

[Lane]

So if you want like strength and power stuff, you got to get like 3 to 6 milligrams per kilogram. So pretty high dose. If you're looking at like anti fatigue cognitive Stuff probably around like 100 to 200 milligrams of caffeine.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

So basically it's how crazy do you want to feel?

[Lane]

Yeah. So for me, as a super ADHD person, I'm kind of a caffeine junkie. You know, I, I'll have about 500 milligrams of caffeine before I train. But I'm also like, you know, if your ADHD stimulants don't affect you the same way, I just, that doesn't make me like, it just makes me very focused. So I like caffeine. Obviously there's the, you know, the, the impact on sleep. Again, no solutions, only trade offs. If you are someone who trains later in the day, the half life of caffeine is six hours. You're probably like, let's say you're going to train to like 5pm you're probably better off having your caffeine dose like maybe like three hours earlier. And that way, you know, after six hours, at least half of it's out of your system.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

And some people are fast metabolizers and some people are, yeah, there is some slow. There's some genetic variants. I think it's comt. It's just a snip. But again as one snip. So some people, you know, caffeine affects them. Other people, they're able to metabolize it very fast.

[Lane]

Yeah. And again, look again, when we do studies, we report averages. If you know that you're. Somebody gets really jittery of caffeine intake, you know, take in the amount of caffeine that you feel like you can tolerate and then whey protein. So whey protein, just why whey as.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Opposed to something else?

[Lane]

Well, one, it's, it tastes good even like unflavored whey actually has like a little bit of sweetness to it. It's easy to flavor, it mixes up well, the consistency is good, it's not super expensive. And it's very high in leucine. So. Leucine.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Oh, what's that?

[Lane]

So leucine is the amino acid responsible for triggering muscle protein synthesis. Now I would consider whey protein. Of the popular proteins out there, the highest quality protein, very bioavailable. Great. PD cause. PD cause is an amino acid score corrected for digestibility that kind of assesses like, does it supply all the essential amino acids? And whey does and it's very high in the branch chains, very high in leucine.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

What about the alpha lactalbumin and lactoferrin? Are those immunoglobulins I mean, I know that they're highly available and present in the concentrate the whole way. What about the whey isolate, does that also have alpha lactalbumin, lactoferrin, which are again immunoglobulins that are good for gastrointestinal health and immunity, so potentially good for immunity and gastrointestinal.

[Lane]

Yeah. So what I'll tell people is whey concentrate has those and it's less expensive, usually a little bit higher in carbohydrate, higher in lactose, higher in fat is a weight concentrate. But you're getting some of those other things that we're talking about that are maybe beneficial for like gut health, immunity, those sorts of things. Whey isolate, less of those, but also virtually devoid of lactose, very low in carbohydrate, very low in fat. So it really just depends. A lot of people have difficulty tolerating a straight way concentrate. Oh yeah, A lot of the most. A lot of people can tolerate like a blend. So like kind of an isolate concentrate blend.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

And do you like that over a rice pea blend? For exactly those reasons. I mean, I am biased. I do like whey isolate over that because rice p blend. I mean, yeah, there are probably other bioactive compounds that we just don't know. But I think whey we have a pretty good understanding of what's in it.

[Lane]

I, I like whey isolate and that's what my company Outwork Nutrition sells as a protein because I wanted something that most people could take in. So a isolate, it's very low carb, very low fat, it still tastes good.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

I wouldn't know because you haven't sent me any. I mean, well, he's looking over his shoulder.

[Lane]

All you gotta do, asking, you shall receive.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

I'm teasing.

[Lane]

You shall receive. So I, I like a way isolate just because I know most people are gonna be able to tolerate it. There are some people who do have are really sensitive to the lactol of humans in a whey that still don't tolerate away isolate. Very small percentage of the population for them, you can do away hydrolysate. Now they're increasing in levels of cost. Like concentrate is the cheapest whey isolate, a little more expensive way. Hydrolysate is more expensive. Hydrolysate is enzymatically digested, so those, those polypeptide chains get chopped up with enzymes. So that will almost. I can't imagine somebody not being able to tolerate away hydrolysate. The downside is it's more expensive and it doesn't taste as good as but if you want a good high quality whey and you're somebody who, you know, you get a lot of gastrointestinal discomfort with whey isolate or whey concentrate. Whey hydrolysate would be an option.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Oh, oh, sorry. It's time to record an ad for the show. Thank you to one of the sponsors of the show, Timeline. And listen, my kids still sleep with me and after 470 nighttime snack requests, bathroom breaks, my husband snoring, my cell is there like Yoji, we're tapped out. Enter mitofure. Timeline Nutrition is one of the most thoroughly researched products I have come across in over a decade. Look carried in my purse. They have peer reviewed published science and this is where it gets really interesting. So for those of you who are following the muscle centric lifestyle, when you increase bioenergetics you improve muscle function and health in adults. 40 + timeline has been shown to increase muscle strength and endurance and no change in activity. So whether you've been active resistance training your whole life or you're just getting started or you're not getting a lot of sleep and you've got a million requests, your muscles and your mitochondria need help and they have just launched their low sugar vegan non GMO gluten free gummies which by the way I am eating by the handfuls of which I shouldn't, but they taste delicious. Timeline is offering our community 20% off. Your first order. Go to timelinenutrition.com DoctorLion and use the code DoctorLion to get 20% off. I recommend trying their starter pack with all three different formats and of course their gummies, which are incredible. Can someone just lose body fat or do you think there must be some lean mass lost? Is there a way to do it?

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Under some conditions you can actually gain lean mass while you lose fat. But the the condition has to be you're pretty new to training or you're not new to training, but you're new to significant quantities of anabolic steroids. There are a few other conditions, but generally speaking, when already lean people lose weight, they use some combination of fat and muscle. When people who aren't exercised, they haven't really trained and they haven't lifted weights much and their diet is like just whatever they feel like. When they start getting a healthy diet, higher in protein and they start lifting weights, which we covered on your my last appearance here on the show, then they can actually gain muscle and lose fat at the same time for months and months and months and Months and months, if not years. But for people that are already pretty lean or people who already lift weights, yeah, there's going to be some combination of muscle and fat.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Now, how would you define pretty lean? So let's say someone was a overweight female who has now tracked . Calories for two weeks. She has determined what her maintenance calorie is. Let's say it's 1800. And she decides to decrease her calories by 350, 500. So she's eating, what is that? 1300 calories. Okay. Do you account for activity or that's the number.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

The activity question is a little bit of a different question.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Well then I, I shouldn't go there yet.

[Lane]

Sure, sure.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

We can, we can definitely handle it.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Okay.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Whenever you like. So how do we determine who's fat or not fat? Who's leaning? I'd say the easiest test in the real world is like someone's wearing clothes and you just come up to someone else, you're like, is she fat or not? This is really straightforward. If you at least look like an up and down shape, you're good. If there's stuff coming off the sides in the front and the back and the whole thing, you're fat. Now it's ruthlessly unscientific and quite discourteous to say to someone. You would never tell someone something like that. But it's one of those things. You look at documentaries in the 1950s. How many people were fat?

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

None.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

But how do you know? I mean, they're just your clothes, right?

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

That's it.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

But yeah, that's what I mean by generally lean. Like no one would, no one would look at you and be like, that's definitely a fat person. Right. So if we like take a little walk, no offense, Houston, Texas, the Fatometer is going to be at the grocery store, like fat, fat, fat, fat. I mean, are you sure you don't think that 600 pound lady is mostly lean body mass? No. Yes, I would, I would not say that. So people who are of generally like close enough within 15 pounds of their insurance table, adjusted body weight, you can consider them fairly lean. And without some rigorous weight training and very perfectionist diet, they're going to typically experience significant amount of muscle loss. People who are significantly more over fat may lose less muscle, but also a lot of that is because they start being more physically active as they lose the weight. So that's a big deal as well. If both groups of people start weight training, when they start losing weight, then they just build muscle and lose fat. At the same time. And that's a really, really big deal. As a matter of fact, on that note of weight loss, if you don't lift weights and you start losing weight, you do lose significant amounts of muscle.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

And it doesn't actually matter where your protein is, we think. I mean, yes, protein has a protein sparing effect, but without activity, without.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

It's tough without muscular specific training to get more jacked. It's actually protein doesn't have a terribly protein sparing effect.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

That's right.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

That you can't like eat 300 grams of protein up to like gaining jacked. If you don't lift weights, it actually just gets burned and excreted and all that whole thing. So you're totally correct about that. So it. The lifting weights thing does matter. But a little while back, one of the new anorectic drugs, Ozempic, got a little bit of hot water because people were like, oh, like it's causing people lots of muscle mass loss. And it was true, but it was no more muscle mass loss than you would expect with people who lost like 50 fucking pounds in a year. It's just going to be a lot of muscle loss. It's not especially a thing that GLP1s even do. And there's actually a new review that came out that was like exactly what we would expect if you just lost a lot of weight. Thing is, those people never lost that much muscle because they never lost that much weight because the. And I've got all sorts of great things to say about the anorectic drugs whenever they do have a big role to play in all.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

So I want to finish covering the macronutrients, how you would dose dietary protein, how you would think about dosing carbohydrates, and how you would dose fat. And if there is a particular distribution that you would use. I am coming to you, Dr. Mike, and I want to lose weight from where?

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

In any case, let's pretend you're just enormous. Like not just overweight, but like offensively enormous. Are you pretending right now?

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Oh yeah. Well, I was looking at Crystal.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Stop checking out my wife.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

I mean, she's the best. By the way, she is going to be another podcast guest here. Thank you, Andrew Coates. I now put two and two together, my man.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

So there are two ways to go about it for macros. One way is to use the expanded fitness approach, which includes macros that are not ultra specific. Because the people who are using this, they want a diet that they can easily do. It does not require a huge departure from normal eating habits. For those people, I would say take your body weight in pounds and multiply it by like.6 60%. So if you weigh 200 pounds, anything at close to at or over 120 grams of protein per day is more than enough to provide a great amount of protein for almost every need that you have.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

So wait, so say that again. So it's 60 of your body weight.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

So instead of gram per pound, it's.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

0.6 grams per pound for someone who's wanting to lose weight.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Correct. And that is more than enough protein to meet all of your needs. If you begin to resistance train. It's more than enough protein for most people's goals. It'll largely prevent muscle mass loss and actually get some accretion going. So that's really good stuff.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

And is that roughly 1.6 grams per kilogram, is that how that.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

I don't know.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Okay. Okay.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Not America.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Damn. We are. Okay, well we're in Texas, so I don't know. You never know.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

That belongs to America. Don't mess with Texas, man. So.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

0.6, 0.6 60% of your body weight.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Yeah. In pounds. Right. Which is not a lot. And so but that is the scientifically honest answer to how much protein we probably really need. Need with a capital N. Especially people that aren't like trying to optimize hardcore.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

That's an important point.

[Lane]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

If you're not necessarily fully trying to.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Optimize, want to dip your toe in and get some great results, that's totally cool because a lot of people get that gram per pound thing, which is what I use the number I'm going to say next. That's the optimization number. So if you weigh 200 pounds, it's roughly 200 grams of protein a day.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

But even if they're trying to lose, if they're trying to lose weight from 200, you would still say meet the 200 or would you say meet their goal body weight?

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

There's a few ways to go about that. One is a protein has a decent anti hunger effect. And so if you actually eat 200, even though you don't need it, it can be pretty decent. The goal body weight is totally fine. You can scale it to lean body mass, which also works just fine. Yeah. You'd have to get your body count measured. Who knows?

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Yeah. So you're saying that there are multiple ways to do something. Right?

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

For sure. But any answer between taking your body weight and multiplying it by pretty close to half. 0.6 all the way up To a gram per pound per day is a lot of really good answers in there. And it's nothing is. If someone was sitting next to me on the airplane, first of all, it would be highly inconvenienced because my arm.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

I mean, you just. I feel bad for that person. You're just kind of on their seat.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

You know, I tried. Really, I tried. I get the seatbelt going and I put my hands in it. I really try to stay out of people's ways. I did not pay for that side of the seat. But if they told me, listen, you know, like, I weigh 200 pounds and I'm really trying to get fit. I have like 160 grams of protein a day. Is that, like, too little? Absolutely not. You're doing great. Now, if you want to step on stage, Mr. Olympia, you might have a different goal. You want your optimized super physique. You're already lean and jacked. You might need more protein. If you're significantly older, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you might need more. But for most people, especially like the. Our hypothetical female audience for this podcast, 0.6 all the way to a gram is totally fine. So that's for protein.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Do you care the kind of protein.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

If you go to get your protein in a really wacky way? Yes. If you eat mostly lean meats, animal products, and lean vegan products that are complete protein sources are complementary, no big deal. But if you're counting mostly protein from bread and just peas by themselves, you're going to run into some problems. Yeah, so protein quality is a thing that's actually in a later part of the discussion of, like, where the food comes from.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

So macros first, then? Yeah, but that was a great question. For carbs and fats, there is a very distinct story for athletic performance and optimization of hypertrophy and all this stuff. And that story is kind of like, meet your needs for fats, and then the rest should probably come more from carbohydrates than fat.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

What is the need? What is the needs for fat?

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

So for. For males, probably on females as well, you generally have two class of need. One is the essential fatty acids, of which you need like a total of 2 grams per day. That's what you need. Need to, like, stay alive and well. And then there is a need that comes from hormone optimization, testosterone, etc. And that number's significantly higher. That number is measured more in the 20 to 30 to 40% of your calories per day. Many people can do a broad range of that, some people really prefer one or the other. Another consideration for how many fats you eat is this is kind of the main point of the carbs versus fats is if you're just trying to lose some goddamn weight and get a little leaner and get a little healthier, maybe a lot leaner and healthier. How much carbohydrate versus fat you have. As long as you're meeting The Technically speaking, 2 grams of EPA and DHA fats per day, the rest is down to very, very nuanced specifics and it just doesn't matter that much. So if someone says, you know, I have 20 grams total of fat per day, but I do have an essential fat supplement, I feel great. Best time of my life. All the veggies and rice I can eat. I love it, I'm losing weight. You won't hear me say a damn thing. But if someone says, look, I'm trying to. Low, low fat, high carb. Mr. Twinkie, that's what I call him as a reference to my genitals, by the way.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Oh, I had no idea.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

He doesn't work anymore. I have like totally lost interest to live. I'm depressed all the time. Like, okay, you're eating too few fats, your testosterone's in the gutter. You need to eat more fats. But a big one is preference and what works in your daily diet. So if you're the kind of person that likes salmon and steak, whole eggs, which are great healthy foods, you should probably eat a little bit fewer carbohydrates and more fats, same calories. Protein is already squared away, but more fats, fewer carbs. If you're the kind of protein, the kind of protein, the kind of person that is super cool with higher carb, you're not really into fats. Nothing in your diet really. You don't crave fats. You can dunk the fats pretty low and keep that carbs much higher. But for carbs, the low end is considered something like, oh, I don't know, 10 to 30 grams of carbs per day, predominantly from green vegetables, because they have a lot of fiber and nutrients in them. Very low, that's low. I wouldn't recommend that as a first principles thing, but there are a lot of keto people and carnivore people eating that and less. And at least in the medium term, they get lean, they're very healthy, they love their lifestyle and all as well. So there's a big broad range of carbs and fats as long as the calories are held constant, you got your protein squared away, plus or minus carbs. And fats is mostly try it, see how you feel best. Some people fats give them a lot of fullness through the day.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Are you a higher fat or higher carb?

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

I haven't, I haven't eaten to preference in a generation.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Interesting. What is your. Just out of curiosity, I'm currently on.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

About 25 grams of fat per day.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Okay, so you're a lower fat person.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

I mean I'm not because I hate it, but I have to do it for bodybuilding. But I'm not the demographic for this talk. Holy shit.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

But it's interesting you, you're right, you might not be the demographic for this talk, but I'm telling you that I've been doing this for a long time and the knowledge that, that your demographic has for body composition is second to none.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Yeah, no, like the bodybuilders kind of figured out how this all works.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Hydration isn't just about drinking Coke zero or other sugar free sweetened beverages like Red Bull. Now I'm saying this for a friend or it's not even about drinking more water. It's about keeping the right balance of electrolytes and fluids during the life's most demanding season. Like, I don't know, parenting, maybe pregnancy or postpartum. Your body is going through massive changes. Blood volume increases, hormones shift, breastfeeding demands. You know, all those things, all of these life transitions. You probably need more and better hydration. And you need electrolytes like sodium, magnesium and potassium. Element has formulated to replenish what you actually need, lose without sugar fillers and junk that you don't need. It's a clean, effective way to stay hydrated. And for men, again, it's not just about hydration. It's also about performance, recovery, mental clarity and yes, even energy. Whether you're hitting the gym, chasing kids or grinding through your workday, maybe even your teeth. Dehydration can quietly sabotage your focus and endurance. Element helps you stay sharp, sharp, strong and ready. We use Element because it works, tastes amazing and it's no nonsense, just science back hydration that actually makes a difference. And right now, Element is offering a free sample pack with any purchase. That's eight flavors to try on the house. Go to drinklmnt.com drlion to claim yours. That's drinklmnt.com Dr. Lynn Line Stay hydrated, stay strong and as Goggins would say, stay hard. In terms of weight loss, there are two things that are required for recomping body. And I'm not talking about additional anabolic agents and I'm not talking about additional GLP1 or GIP medications. It is resistance training and this is the work that Don did. You know, some of the early studies. Again, thinking ahead, resistance training and maintaining and or increasing dietary protein from the RDA of 0.8 grams per kilogram to 1.6 grams per kilogram. So doubling the RDA, that seems to be within the literature. Just the way to make it happen. If I were to ask you, how do you suggest someone think about structuring a diet? Who is a postmenopausal woman? She is, I don't know, 55. Hitting the gym, you know, we should, I want to make sure we talk about exercise. You know, what does her exercise plan look like and how is she designing a diet? Again, I do think that you should talk about carbon because you there is a way to make it extremely easy. So what are the macronutrients and how would you think about it? And then what are the practical things? Should they use an app? Should they use something like Lumen? Should they use, I just want to throw that in there. Should they use, I don't know, X, Y and Z? How do you think about it?

[Lane]

So first off, there are many paths to Rome. There's obviously people who have. And I always tell people, if you need to debunk any of this, you just look around people like, for example, well, you can't lose weight if you're eating refined carbohydrates or a high carb diet. Okay, what about Professor Mark HAUB who lost 27 pounds doing a Twinkie diet? Like he was eating 1800 calories a day, but he mostly ate stuff from 711 and protein powder. Like that's what he ate. Right? So, so again, we just have so many examples of. And people, you know, on the plant based side, you'll have people say, well, you know, if you're eating a lot of fat, it gets stored as fat. You can't lose fat. Well, how many examples of low carb diets do we have? Like it works.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Are many passed around?

[Lane]

What works is finding something that you can adhere to. Now, when it comes to the actual nuts and bolts of structuring a diet, the number one most important thing is to get your energy intake correct. Meaning if you want to lose fat, you have to consume less energy than you expend. Now let me just do a couple of quick caveats on that because I know there are people say, well, I know I was In a calorie deficit. I didn't lose weight. No, you. If you. If you ate the. So everything we eat is a carbon backbone structure, right? You ate those carbons. They have to go somewhere. Okay. And if you got. If you gained body fat, your body did not create carbons out of nowhere. They came from somewhere. Okay? So. And we're very well at accounting for those. So we have to get the energy intake right. Now, what is that? Now, there. There are variances and whatnot, but essentially, like, you're trying to find somebody's daily energy expenditure. This is. You brought up carbon. This is kind of what the app does when it's originally, like, asking you questions and whatnot. And it's usually an equation out there to kind of determine your bmr. And then we're using a questionnaire to determine your physical activity, and then it's kind of taking the stab at it, you know? Now you may get it wrong. It may be wrong. Right. Like, you might overestimate, underestimate for, I would say 60 to 70% of people, it's going to be pretty accurate. That's how, you know, bell curves work. Right. But then you adjust based on how you respond. Okay, let me back up.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Yeah, we want nuts and bolts. I want to know how many grams. How are we doing?

[Lane]

Yeah.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Are we thinking about protein in a percentage?

[Lane]

And this is exactly how the app works on the back end and the algorithm, them.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

And the reason I'm bringing up carbon is number one. I think it's amazing, and I may or may not have just recently accepted a position as director of Women's Health. Very excited about that. Shout out to Mike, who's in Hawaii right now. But also, how do we make things easy for people? And also. But before we talk about carbon, I need you to tell me how many grams of. How are we thinking about protein as a percentage?

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Which.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

No, we are probably thinking about it in terms of grams. I know where you come from. I know the school of thought. Are we thinking about a baseline number? So if the current RDA is 130 grams of carbohydrates, does everybody get that off the bat, or do they have to earn that increase in carbon? You know, I think about Shane, my husband, who's running Chicago Marathon.

[Lane]

Right.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

If we, you know, we have to account for that, and then the fat. Where do you. How someone listening at home who doesn't have carbon yet. What are they gonna do?

[Lane]

So, again, depending on your goal, if your goal's fat loss.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Yeah, we'll just call Fat loss, fat loss while muscle, muscle maintenance.

[Lane]

So you get your, you get your, let's just say you get your calories right. Okay. So you have to get the right amount of energy to lose fat and energy deficit. The next step when I construct a diet and this is how the app works as well on the back end is okay, we have the amount of calories that we think is going to be reasonable for somebody to lose fat. Then we set.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

What is the deficit do you think? Is it a 10 deficit? How do you begin to think about it?

[Lane]

It just depends on like again, it just depends on how quickly somebody wants to try and lose weight or fat.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

This is somewhat of an experiment. It's interesting because you are an evidence based scientist and even in evidence based practices we still have to adjust and, and kind of go with, I mean there is individuality no matter how you look at it. And the randomized control trials are, you know, broadly speaking, hopefully through populations.

[Lane]

Yeah, I think people, again, I think everybody should have to take a basic statistics course because I think people have a, a hard time understanding like the concept of variants and whatnot. So if we have calories said, the next thing we're going to set is protein because it's the most important macronutrient for the reasons we talked about, thermic effect to food satiety, body composition. And so I said that as a gram per kilo or gram per pound of lean mass.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

See, you and I are different here. Yeah, I don't know my lean mass well.

[Lane]

So again, this is Matt Producer.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

What's your lean mass? Why are you trying to get your something out of your man bag?

[Lane]

So the reason I, the reason I say lean mass is because if you have somebody who's very obese, it's really going to overestimate protein if you're giving it based on their, their actual body mass. But again, a lot of people don't know their lean mass like you said, which is why in carbon when they're signing up, there's questions. If you don't have like an actual body fat measurement, then there's some questions about waist circumference and whatnot. We, we make a, we make an estimation of what your, your body fat is and from your body fat and your total weight we can determine your approximate le. People get so hung up on this. It's, it's not a big deal if we're slightly off. Right.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

So we're, could they be like ideal body weight?

[Lane]

Ideal body weight, Somebody could do as well. So we're looking at, like, around 2 grams per kilo of lean mass. Up to 3 grams per kilo of lean mass is what the app will end up recommending, and that's typically what I recommended as well. Now, 3 grams per kilo lean mass might sound like a lot, but when you consider if you. If you're not doing total body mass, it winds up around probably 2.2 to 2.4 grams per kilogram of total body mass for somebody with an average body fat, you know, on average. So that's on the upper end. But again, I like protein. But again, in the app, you can adjust within a certain range if you want to. So once you've got calories set, once you've got protein set, again, I like around 2 grams per kilogram of lean mass.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Of lean mass, which is interesting. I'm trying to think about what that would be. So if someone was. So if someone was 52kg and that's their total body weight, you think, is.

[Lane]

This someone's name Gabrielle Lyon?

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

No, I'm smaller than that. Yeah, kind of, but I think I'm actually smaller than 52 kilograms. You know, how much if I'm 100? I don't know, maybe buck 10 if I'm lucky. How many grams of protein would that be?

[Lane]

Right around 100 to 110, you know.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Okay, so I probably eat that.

[Lane]

If you're 110 and you're pretty darn lean, my guess is your body fat is somewhere around 12, 13. Body fat, probably not that high, but should be 10.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Just kidding.

[Lane]

You know, you're looking at about 100 pounds of lean mass. That's about 45 kilos. You double that 99. About 100 grams of protein. Right?

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Yep.

[Lane]

Um, so our app would put you anywhere from like 100 to 150 grams of protein, depending on your personal preference. Right. And so once you've got the protein number set, we have to deduct those calories out of your total calorie goal. And then you have carbs and fat left. And so what I did as a coach and what the app does is kind of say, what do you. What kind of dietary preference do you have? Do you prefer a little more fat? Do you prefer a little more carb? Do you like a balanced diet? Are you plant based? Are you ketogenic? And you can pick any of those things and it will put you. It will, you know, distribute the carbohydrates and fats appropriately.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Is there a minimum amount of carbohydrates that you Seem to like for an athletic person.

[Lane]

I mean it depends on the athletic event. If we're talking about somebody doing like actual anaerobic stuff for a lifter, let's.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Say for someone who is lifting, doing resistance training for hypertrophy three days a week, but they're just doing it to maintain skeletal muscle mass. What are you thinking? Do you care?

[Lane]

I'll give you the straight down the line scientific answer and then I'll give you the.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Yeah, I'm trying to pin him here, guys. I like, I guess yes, yes.

[Lane]

So the straight down the line scientific answer is it doesn't seem to matter that much.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

It doesn't.

[Lane]

Carbohydrate to fat. There are some individual studies that showed less lean mass accrual on a ketogenic diet versus a non ketogenic diet equated in protein. But there was also a recent meta analysis showing that there really wasn't a difference between high carb, low carb with protein equated. I think if you inject me with true serum, I think a little bit of carbohydrate is probably better. Just because even though carbohydrate insulin is not anabolic in the physiological range, it is anti catabolic, it does inhibit protein degradation. And there was actually a study from Tipton showing that post exercise when they gave carbohydrate with protein or it might have been with amino acids that the net protein balance was more positive when they gave it with carbohydrate.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

You can still make body composition improvements by just being consistent. And again, you can change it for if someone is moderately trained or more advanced, you would increase the either volume or intensity. Which would you think is more important for body composition changes, specifically fat loss?

[Don]

Yeah, you know what, I would have to look at training age first. So if someone is new to training, if I'm coming in with an intensity approach, in my opinion, most people are not going to be able to stabilize and maintain. I mean if I had my wish out of it, I mean I would balance out between some volume work and dropping down volume and raising intensity. I think it is, it's been my approach my entire career. I will set my training up into different blocks. Blocks of like two months. Right.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Where is that how any, everyone should do it?

[Don]

This is just, this is just how I, this is how I do it. So I'll set up like January and February will be the same program, but I'll have progressions every two weeks and the exercises will change in February and in March will come. You have hockey yeah, yeah. I mean, listen, I got to pay attention like during I'm a hack hockey player, let me be clear. But if you're playing three, four days a week, you know, you want to be careful about how you load the spine. You want to be careful about specific movements that you're doing. Like your body is. Could potentially, you know, it could take a toll on your, on your body. So I think exercise selection is important and I think isn't intensity is important when you're playing that much. And then when you scale off, I think it's a time to put your foot on the gas in certain areas and maybe start focusing on a little more strength and power and you can get a little bit more aggressive with certain things. But all throughout the year, for, for me, it's like those workouts start with that practice portion and that's what allows me to feel very lost. I like that term. I don't like. It's just, it's a fun term to use and it's not, it's not a scientific term, let's be very clear here. But it just feel more, feel more flossed and feel more loose and feel more recovered.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

The pull for the beginner, what are the best pull movements? That again, you know, you and I talk, we're really training for longevity even. And everybody should, whether they're a military operator or an actor. It's your body's your tool.

[Don]

Resiliency.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Yeah, exactly. What are some of the key pulling exercises that you like?

[Don]

Yeah, I'll break it down from like a vertical pull or a horizontal pull. So it's no different than the pressing. Right. Vertical pull can be your pull up, chin up, neutral grip pull up, up, lap pull down. Right. Like that's your vertical pulling. Right. You're pulling high down. And then your horizontal pull could be like your one arm dumbbell row, your chest supported row, your face pull. Right. Some with equipment, some, some with dumbbells, some with machines. It's, it's, you know, if you have access to that equipment, I'm all for you. You know, have fun with your training. Also, like, if you're getting in and you're training at home all the time and you're bored and you're just like, oh, you know, Don and Gabrielle wrote me the stumble wrote this dumbbell program and I'm just getting bored of it. Like, go to a gym, get some variability. Like, have fun with your training. Like, go in there and you know, don't make it miserable. Like, I want you to enjoy it.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

I Have a question that I don't know the answer to. And you might not know the answer to this.

[Don]

Probably not.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

But this is so fun having you on the podcast. Where did these exercises come from? I mean, who invent? I mean, just think about it. We create these programs and then we continue them. A squat makes sense because that's something that my kid could do. But where do we. Where did one determine that a pull is important? I mean, a pull up would make sense, but some of these exercises. Have you ever thought about who developed them or why?

[Don]

Yeah, I mean, I think we have a few names for a few of the movements out there. Right. But I mean, people are inventing crap today. They're just like throwing a name on it. And you say to yourself, well, obviously through social media and through the reach that we have, I think these things are so much more visible and fitness now is so much more accepted than it was. You know, even back in the 60s and 70s, like that was fit people who are fit. Jack Lane, I'll never forget it. Like, I was, I trained with him once. Yeah. So he was, he came into Gold Gym. I want to say it was either his 90th birthday or Gold's Gym's like 100th or 90th anniversary. And they had Jacqueline kind of walking into the gym and he looked at me, I was in a sleeveless shirt. And he's like, let's get me on camera with that kid. So I ended up working out with him and, you know, he was 90 years old, he was inclined, pressing 55 pound dumbbells. And I got to sit with him and hear his story a bit. And when he passed, I, I was invited by his wife, Elaine. Her name was Elaine lalanne. Right. And dad, we went down to the Tribeca, one of the Tribeca theaters. And I sat through this, this documentary. I gotta be honest, I was teary eyed most of the time because this guy, people, he was like, you know, back in the day, he's like, you know, I've been mixing all these fruits and vegetables in this blender and blending them together. People are like, this guy's crazy and he's, you know, pulling a barge. He's swimming and he's pulling this humongous barge and he's doing all these feats. And he is really one of the people that kind of set the standard. And I think kind of he. Yeah, in a way normalized, like what it is we all go do now, moving weights and moving. And I think it's such a beautiful thing but when you turn around, you look at these exercises. Some of these exercises have been around for centuries. I mean, thousands of years. Like, there have been people doing some of these movements. And, you know, once in a while, you'll be able to find a picture of a physique from 100 years ago. And you're like, oh, my God. Like, he's obviously natty. Like, he looks amazing. Like, but it's cool to see that. It's cool for me to see it. But nowadays, like, yeah, like, you look at the rdl, like, it's a hinge. Like, people have been hinging forever, and suddenly someone's like, oh, we're going to call this the Romanian deadlift. Or, you know, it's like movements that.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Again, have been around for a really long time.

[Don]

The pull up. Like, oh, wow, that's a real scientific name. Like, someone's hanging from a bar, like, pull yourself up. Like, we're calling that the pull up. Like, it's probably how it literally happened. And then we just hung with these things. And then now you see all these sports scientists now researching and trying to find out other ways to do things more efficiently. But I also. It's interesting about a lot of this research is we've all seen research that have been published, and, you know, you've seen it then contradicted, you know, decades later. And yeah, some. There's certain research papers that we'll. And you even explain. Yeah. That you'll look at, and you're like, oh, this is solid. But, you know, I also look at specific experts in our field that have been doing this stuff for 20, 25, 30, 35 years, and they're some of the best research experts without having things published.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Right.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Exactly who you're referencing.

[Don]

Yeah. So for me, that's. For me, that's impressive. Like, just because a paper might come out and it might say, well, there's no evidence that mobility is helpful. Well, this guy's been doing it for 30 years. And this guy now is 70 years old, and he moves beautifully. My evidence is gonna push myself in that direction.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Or sometimes it takes time for evidence to catch up with what we know or hypothesis. We talked about squat, push, pull, core exercises.

[Don]

Yes.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Tell me how important those are for a beginner and what we should be doing. Because I remember I went on a Good Morning America, and I called you. I'm like, don, they want me to do exercise. I'm like, do you remember this?

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Yes.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

And I was like, here's what I'm thinking for the core exercises. I went, blah, blah, blah, sit up. And you're like, no. Yep, we're not doing sit ups. So explain to us good core exercises and why.

[Don]

Yeah, I mean, I want to be clear. The sit up's been around for a long time and there are plenty of people that can do sit ups and never have back issues. I'm just when I.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

But maybe it's not the best. I mean.

[Don]

Yeah. So the reason why I don't program it is because, you know, statistically, a lot of people have sore backs and a lot of people are sitting in this position. They're in this kyphotic position all day and just adding. I think that flexion under strain can be detrimental. Right. So I'm a huge fan of one arm carries or some type of as.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

A core exercise, because always core exercises, we think that we're going to be laying on our back doing sit ups or Matt over there doing flutter kicks.

[Don]

But no, some of the strongest people I've worked with, they have, you know, we have assigned, you know, carry variations into their training diet and they've had an incredible level of success with it. I mean, there's so much benefit, there's so much bang for their buck out of that movement. And you know what, like I've seen as a rehab tool, I've seen Dr. Charlie Weingroth, you know, post surgery, bring someone in and it's a very. Whether it's shoulder surgery or whatever it might be, you know, starting them with a weight down low is. Is going to be a lot safer than getting them up in this position here. So, you know, I have seen this used as a rehab tool from medical professionals. Very successful. I've seen it used.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

And a core stability, your number one exercise is a. Is it. Would it be called an offset carry? It's just a one arm.

[Don]

Yeah, I mean, I mean, some form of a carry depending on, you know, what they're capable of doing. But I love one arm carries. Planks are, I think, I think a great introductory movement. I think get teaching someone to get into a plank position and create tension, these tension techniques, getting into position and say, listen, we're not going to hang out in this extended position. Squeeze your glutes, squeeze your legs, squeeze your lats.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

You teach them something yesterday about a plank. It was. It's not about the length of time that you can hold a plank because an individual could.

[Don]

Like how much tension.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Yeah, but you said that it was about creating tension and being able to hold the quality of the plank under tension.

[Don]

Right.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

And that I thought was a really good learning tip.

[Don]

I think it's a great way to kind of supercharge your plank a bit. Right. Where most people. I can hold a plank for eight minutes, like, great. Like, there's, trust me, there's, there's plenty of strength carryover from that. But when I see most people holding in those positions, they're in a bad position and they might be loading themselves in a way that I don't think is that I believe, in my opinion, isn't the safest thing for, for them. So I think teaching them how to do a hard style tension technique plank for 10 to 20 seconds, where I'm literally like telling them, envision a tornado is blowing over you right now as you're in this plank position. What are you going to do? How are you going to stabilize? They're like, well, I'm going to try and rip the floor apart to stabilize. I'm like, exactly. Are your glutes going to be tight? They're like, yeah. Is your chin position going to be packed? Yeah, it's like I'm moving around them, trying to like, palpate their body, trying to move them a little bit, and they're just literally shaking within 10 to 20.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

An isometric. Isometric hold.

[Don]

Exactly.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

And how many reps would they. Or how many. Yeah. Would it be considered a repair? Yeah, yeah.

[Don]

I mean, I, I would put them maybe under time, like, so I would start someone off with like, hey, listen, let's, let's see if you can hold that position. Because I put people in the positions and they're like, I can't hold a plank. And I'm like, okay, we're gonna work up to that. And then there's other things, like, yeah, like if they can't hold a plank, which I've seen, we can hold a light dumbbell with two hands.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

How light are we talking?

[Don]

As light as we have to go to where we're adding external resistance to the equation.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

We want people to.

[Don]

Want them to get under load.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Yes, we want them to get under load. And I think that that's probably one of the biggest misconceptions for people is they'll say, well, you know, I can't lift that. That's too heavy. And it might be a 10 or.

[Don]

15 pound weight, but that's a problem in my opinion.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

But I think it's just a thought process.

[Don]

Right.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Because you could go lift your child or a suitcase and it's going to.

[Don]

Be bag of groceries.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

That's right. It's going to be Much heavier than bag of groceries.

[Don]

How about this? I'm traveling this afternoon. We got a suitcase that we're carrying. That suitcase is going to weigh a lot more than two pounds. Like, you better make sure you're able to carry this stuff. You know, I'll quote, recently I was listening to a physical therapist talk about the one arm carry and how he likes loading it so heavy that he's like, if you can do a shrug with it, like it's too light type of thing. Right. So I thought that was a really good indicator. But I also understand I am not taking a newbie into the gym on day one when they're feeling vulnerable or they don't have that foundation. And I'm turning Like, hey, Mrs. Smith, like, you haven't trained in 40 years or ever. Like, like, let's go over and grab that 24 kilogram kettlebell and go for a walk. Don't worry if it's heavy. Like, God forbid something happens. Like, we have to develop that confidence. Whether she can do it or not, we have to develop that confidence. I want them to turn to me and I want people to feel empowered when they come in to exercise and when they go and they play with their kids, I want them to feel empowered. We saw a woman that, you know, the other day, in her 60s, she was killing it in the gym.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Killing it, killing it.

[Don]

And you know what? Most 20, 25 year old guys, she's stronger than me.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

She's my size. She's. She's stronger than me.

[Don]

Sled pulling, sled pushing, sweating, out of breath, walks by me, gives me like a fist. I'm like, oh my God, who is this, like superwoman over here?

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

She runs ultras.

[Don]

Yeah, it's impressive.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

And now we've just.

[Don]

And she moves well. There's not too many people who run ultras where I'm like, wow, they move really well. Oh, yeah, she moves really well. Yeah.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

It's interesting. I was on a podcast and I said, okay, well, how long does it take to see these results? Could it be 24 weeks? And yeah, it could be. It all depends.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

That's a funny question.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

It is, yes.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

It's like saying, you know, how long is it going to take me to get to Cleveland, Ohio, if I drive from Detroit, we can answer that. But the question of how long am I going to really, like, is my car really going to be going pretty fast? Like, ooh, I don't know, like within 30 seconds of you getting out of.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Your driveway, bathroom stops?

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Right. 100%. And so when people say like how long until I see these results? It's like, well like every week you're going to be losing a pound and a half for as many weeks as you keep cranking until you need a psychological break that could be 12 weeks easy. It's like just keep doing it. And what I would say psychologically a really good advice I think is don't worry about that end goal too much the process. Eat your healthy foods, get your 10,000 steps, take your zap bound, just let it cook. It'll do its thing, don't you worry. And if it's not, you adjust your food, you go to the doctor, they adjust your medication dosage and the cycle repeats itself. Another quick public service announcement because this doesn't get said enough. I don't think a lot of people have all sorts of interesting ideas and opinions about Ozempic and all that whole craze. And most people, many people come from some place of either kind of a reflexive anti drug ideology which is nonsense to begin with. You can steel man it but it's really tough. And other people come from kind of an iconoclasm like well I'm not into these, these drugs have, is a problem and it's mostly just people's feelings, it's not really based in ideas. But it's true that some of these drugs are, can be improved upon. But it's not a hypothetical because I can tell you two true things. One is there are already drugs in late stage clinical trials. That blows MPIC out of the water. If you're at home, Google Retatra, Tide, Reta, True Tide, all one word triple agonist hits the glp. Oh my gosh, GIP and glucagon and I don't know how the fuck they did it but the glucagon pathway, non stimulant increases your resting metabolic rate. You just burn more calories, it doesn't wig you out. No psychotropic effects, you just burn more calories and you're less hungry. And whatever the GIP does, I don't even know triple agonist retatrutide is going to be on the market probably in a year. And ozempic is going to be like super discount cheap drug because this ain't, if you look at the studies how much weight people are losing. It was like Ozempic was a big deal, Tirzepatide was a bigger deal. Retatratite is that same step. And major pharmaceutical companies around the world though, so retatratide would be generation five in this drug scale they're working on, six is in early testing, seven is in development.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

I have to ask you a question. I don't want to go down a conspiracy rabbit hole, but I love those. Now we have a highly palatable processed food, massive food industry.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

I love that industry, by the way. Yes, I will sit here and defend it.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Okay. Now we have a drug that is severely limiting people's challenges with obesity. I mean, people are losing weight. Food addiction from some of these highly palatable foods are going away. Do you think that some of the influx of anti obesity narrative drugs, do you think that potentially that is influenced at all by the food industry or where do you think the division is going to be, if at all?

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

That's a great question. So you have the situation where the food industry is just trying to get you to spend as much money as possible. They're not such big fans of you dying because you don't spend money anymore. They're also not big fans of you getting out of shape because then you don't like your life and you blame them. And that sucks. There's not like a Hershey's CEO that when they see morbidly obese people barely getting out of a car, like, perfect, they don't like that at all. They would ideally like to see people eat Hershey's candy bars in a state of caloric balance and enjoying their lives. That's how they were meant to be eaten. That's how they were eaten in the 50s and 60s, et cetera, et cetera. So the vast majority of the food industry wants you to have the tasty food you want and have a great time and not die. The problem is they had no idea how to do those last two things because most people were like buttered popcorn. I'll take 50. They blow up. The food industry is like, sure hope we could help these people, but we don't even know how the fuck. A food executive has no idea how to lose weight. In fact, it's not his job. His job is just get people to buy tasty food. And it's not a job. He chose to be like, this is what we're going to make Americans do. There is no conspiracy. The reason the food industry exists and it's massive and makes all these foods that kill you is because you want it, motherfucker. Not you, but the royal you you get me to get stop people from pulling up to Taco Bell every fucking hour of the day. I'll start to believe there's a food conspiracy. If they're still pulling up. Talk to those people. Be like, who? Where did you see this? Where's the advertising? They're like, I just fucking like Taco Bell. Get out of my face. Wait, wait, don't, don't, don't get up. Hold up. Watch this. Awkward beater crunch. Now go. People want the stuff. So that's the food industry. Then you have the anorectic drug industry. Very nascent, very just getting born. That's going to combat a part of that, the excess part. There are two ways for the food industry to respond to this primarily. One is to change their advertising. Go, hey, you're on these drugs. Amazing. You do you. But you can still have a Snickers bar every now and again. And they're completely correct. Healthy balance. I love dope because, like, I don't know about you, but I'm not interested in living in a society where the government's like, no more, no more Baby Ruth bars or whatever. No more KitKats. They're illegal because people are too fat. What the fuck? I moved from the Soviet Union to get the away from that kind of stuff, so that would be great. Another other idea they could have, there will be a combination of these ideas employed over the next several years is they're going to try to outrun the drugs. It's competition. They're going to try to make their food even tastier so that it used to be something you could resist on some amount of semaglutide. And you need retractor tide to resist that now. And that competition is going to heat up very likely over the course of the late 2000 and twenties and 2000 and thirties. I think it's entirely reasonable to expect this will either age very well or very poorly. That in the mid-2030s, at some point, most of us, maybe all will have at home universal robots cooking all of our meals for us. And they'll be able to source recipes from all over the Internet, make you the tastiest you've ever seen in your life. So if you want to get fat, the2030s will be dope. Time to get fat. But the degree of drug advancement at that point will also be really gnarly. So what we're leading to is a world, and this has been increasingly true for the world, the developed world, for as long as we can measure, you can get more of anything you want. In the United States, which is one of the freest countries in the world. Most developed capitalist, One of the most developed capitalist countries, people observe time and Time again. If you want to get fat and lazy, best place in the world to do it. You want to get lean and fit and shredded. Best place in the world to do it. It's options. You can take the anorectic drugs and here's a really cool idea to try. Is this crazy? I know when you go to the grocery store to fucking buy the junk food, the food corporation isn't lying to you. It's not like broccoli is really chocolate on the inside. They fucked with you. It's really broccoli.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

I can attest to that.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

And it is. Listen to me, the food industry does not care what they sell you fundamentally as long as you buy it. So if a lot of people are like, dude, I want healthy shit, oh my God, they're healthy right away. McDonald's had a thing where they tried like some salads and shit for a while, a couple of different sandwiches, they were healthier. And it turns out there just wasn't enough market demand so they pulled them off. That's not a McDonald's problem, that's an US problem. And so there's going to be tastier and tastier junk foods guaranteed. You don't even need an anorectics battle for that. People just want to taste your junk food and there's going to be an anorectic situation. In the end, the anorectics will win because the at some point, if you just successfully show up to the doctor's office once a month and he gives you whatever 2032, you know, 8th gen drug, you will not look at food and be able to put it in your mouth past a certain point.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Fascinating. It's fascinating where we're going and if.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Anyone wants to understand how that feels in an intuitive level, they've never taken the drugs. Take all of the malaise away. It's a little tough from a foodborne illness, stomach flu. And just remember how hungry you weren't. Like you sit with someone who has stomach flu and they're like, oh, you're like, hey, juicy cheeseburger. But I can think about it. You can get that not hungry on 2 1/2mgs of Ozempic for six weeks straight. Someone talks about food. Don't, don't, don't, don't. I'm going to throw up. There's so much upside on that. And the drugs are slowly reducing side effects, increasing primary effects. They're going to win against the food industry. But those people who don't take the drugs, those and just, well, say it exactly as I mean it. Randomly buy food at the grocery store, they're going to get real fat because the food's just fucking delicious and getting cheaper all the time. It's getting great. At some point an individual has to say, I want something out of my body to go a certain way. If you just show up to the store and eat buck all. But many of those people aren't even compliant with medications. You're a practicing doctor. You know how it is. You're like, take your shot every week and they show up. You got great patience. I do know that's atypical. Most of the folks that are severely obese, they're not your most compliant patients. They forget to take all kinds of drugs because they fundamentally just like maybe give a little bit less of a shit than most other people. Which first of all is kind of dope because you're like, it. Yolo, Taco Bell. It's great. I watch fat people eat food and I'm like, dude, they're really getting out of that something. I don't. That's just amazing. But on the other hand, it's going to lead to some side effects you're going to have to deal with sooner or later. So the whole conspiracy thing. There is no conspiracy. You can try to find one to be a great New York Times piece.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

I, I really like this answer.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Yeah, but so it's more of like, I think the world's a little bit more libertarian than people like to think. Which is great because we have so much freedom, but it's also kind of meh because like, yeah, freedom means you can make terrible fucking choices and there's no one conspiring to make you do it. You're the one that pulled up to Taco Bell at 2:30 morning.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

So what you're saying is you can tank your health or you can actually be an incredible. Health is truly a choice. And we have education and resources like your RP strength and your, the app, which you should probably sign me up for free because I'd like to try it.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Oh, free, huh?

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Well, I mean, how dare you.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

I, I didn't become a trillionaire by giving away things.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

But what you're saying is powerful is that actually there are choices and we here have the opportunity to leverage those, whatever those choices are in an extreme way.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

100%.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Oh, you have more. Tell me.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

I do.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Yeah.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

I wanted to make sure we hit up your. The muscle factor.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

That's what my next question was. Because I still cannot get over the fact that you are Dieting and talking to me.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

So we took care of most of the theory behind how people can lose weight, but there's a missing piece. Weight loss is cool. It's really healthy in almost all cases. But we can do better. We can do fat loss. Weight loss with conservation of muscle or an increase in muscle at the same time is a big deal because not only do you get even healthier, but you take on a shape that, I'll just say it become so much beating around the bush on this shit, but it's not 2019 anymore. It just makes you look hotter to most people. That shape, shape. You're like, I want to look like JLo. And then you show them someone dying of anorexia and they're like, that's not what I had in mind. Like, you know, shit. J. Lo's got curves. What you think? Curves made of either fat or muscle. And if you get lean enough and have enough muscle, everyone's got awesome looking curves. Now you may not be into muscular people. I find them grotesque, to be completely honest. Just kidding.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

But I was like, is that a joke?

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Is that. I can't tell. Never can tell.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

I can't tell. That's my whole shtick. Yeah, Yeah.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

I can't even tell if it's a joke coming out. I have to like hear it again and be like, oh, I guess I was joking. And then I don't remember. So basically gaining muscle or keeping your muscle while you lose fat has a completely transformative effect on your health in the best possible way. Like, if you just lose 50 pounds and the doctor gets the blood work done, they're gonna be like, a lot of stuff is going good. We're a little bit worried about your muscle mass level. A little sarcopenia here and blah, blah, blah, your bone mass. But if you do the kind of thing we're talking about where you spare muscle, your doctor's gonna be like, I don't know what the fuck you're doing, but I want some of it. Do you have like a website? And what is. Who's your coach? So it's all great stuff and it makes you physically stronger. So when you lose weight, a lot of times when people are pretty overweight, I'm currently technically on paper, quite overweight. It's just a lot of body to carry around. It's annoying. It's just, it just sits there. You gotta like, get up to go to the fridge. Like you gotta lean on stuff. If you lose, just lose weight, you feel better and healthier and cleaner. You don't feel that. You can still kind of feel a little bit frail. If you lose weight while keeping your muscle or increasing it, you just get more or less superpowers. People talk about how they felt when they were in their 20s, generally have almost no idea what they're talking about. Because I crush my 20 year old self like with one hand, like Matrix style Keanu Reeves.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

What do you mean you crushed yourself?

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

I can, I can crush my 20 year old self because that he's a little bitch compared to what I am now. Mostly because my skeletal muscle mass is much higher. But if it was comparable and my fat was lower, you see like that fucking like shining golden 55 year old man at the gym who still has hair somehow and like the fucker how. And he's got that like Florida, Texas sort of tan that's just gorgeous. And he still has like a trim waistline and he's like pretty lean. You could talk to him. You're like, hey, like 55, huh? You must be feeling it. He's like, I feel this. I'm in the time of my life. My dad is just a person that's genetically pretty good shape and he's very physically active and eats really healthy. He's like damn near 70 years old. He's like, things are great. That's how you're going to feel if you lose weight without losing muscle and gaining it. You're just going to be like all this, I can do things. If you lose a lot of weight and you lose a lot of muscle, you might be feeling a little bit frail, a little bit tired. Walking up the stairs is tough. Picking up groceries is tough. How do we lose fat without losing muscle? One of the things of protein intake. But 0.6 to a gram per pound makes very little difference for most people. In that, the biggest thing is resistance training. And if you want to know about that, tune into our last episode. Yeah, yeah, but resistance training, training with weights two to four times a week is enough for most people. Whole body, et cetera. We cover that in the other podcast. It is a huge stimulus to your body that when you have a caloric deficit, your body points metaphorically at various things. It goes organs, brain, and we still need you don't siphon off any of your resources. Body fat, what are you up to? But if it's, I'm busy, I got meetings. You start losing yourself. Oh, crap. Throws parts of itself off right when it goes muscle, what are you up to? And if you're not training muscles like, oh, meetings all day. Shut up. Give up some of your muscle, start losing it, because we need you. But if you're resistance training, that still happens. But then the muscle, when you're in your off hours recovering from training, goes, hey, I'm going to take some of those amino acids and carbs and fats from the blood, and I'm going to put them back in me and grow. And guess where all those nutrients don't go? Your fat. So your fat's doubly starving. Not only is it starving from the deficit, but the fat's like, finally, food comes into the blood. The fat's like, oh, oh, come to me. And it's. No muscle takes it. And then it gets smaller and small and smaller. And so that effective resistance training is massive and is transformative, because a great example of that effect recently was Dana White, UFC person I made a video about. I'm not a big fan of the gentleman he worked with. I said all sorts of mean things about that in that video. But huge, huge fan of Dana White, huge fan of what he's doing and a big fan of what he did, which is he lost something like, I think 35 pounds ish of weight, but he must have gained 10 or 15 pounds of muscle at the same time. So the metabolic effect is something you would see in someone who's lost maybe 60 pounds of fat. But the muscle came up. He looks amazing. His blood work is amazing. That's the ticket. And he trained with weights multiple times a week with Mila Sarchev, who's one of the best to ever do it. I mean, we can't all be trillionaires like Dana and get the best guy ever to do it to be our personal trainer. But everyone go to the gym more or less. Well, almost everyone. Planet Fitness is like $10 a month, which is. If you can't afford that, I don't believe you. I'll say that everyone has access to it, and the resistance training is that big of a deal. But one thing that really starts to be important with resistance training, it is important in its own right, is, let's say, like the periodization of. Because people say, okay, I've got all the tools to do fat loss. The big thing is dieting is tough. A condition in which your body is not getting sufficient calories to maintain its weight almost always accrues some fatigue, and we call that diet fatigue in the industry. Diet fatigue expresses itself in a couple of different ways. One is your energy levels decline, your sleep quality declines, your brain power doesn't do anything good, and you're like, sounds.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Like being a parent.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Don't get me started. I'm. I'm like, what did. My. My. My wife did most of the dog raising at our house, so at one point she was talking to a friend on the phone. She's like, yeah, I'm a single dog mom. Like, I'm right here. But she's like, you don't do anything. I'm like, okay. What? You were correct. So the dog's hard enough. Kids are totally different level.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

But yes. And you have met mine, so.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Yes. They are adorable, by the way. They could just be terrible monsters. And you're like, why did I have them? So you're not in that.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

And they're so cute. Cute.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

See? Yeah. I can even tell it's a real emotion you're sharing. They're wonderful. There was a.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

They're complicated.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Yeah, yeah. The. I forgot. Wanda Sykes. Do you know who that is? She's a comedian. Comedian. She wrote for like all the big guys, like Chris Rock and stuff. She had a stand up once where she was like, yeah, people with kids, man. Anytime you're like, yeah, like, do. Do you like your kids? Was it worth it? And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's worth it. Like, do you mean that? So in any case, diet fatigue, the biggest problem you run into with it, outside of all the other problems already listed, which are kind of gnarly, is increased food focus. Now, food focus has hunger within it, but it has all kinds of other stuff. Like that story I told earlier where you're watching your favorite show and you're just looking at the dinner rolls and the glass of milk. Why isn't anyone going to. Are those just props? Are those cold? Was this shot number five is. No.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Yeah, that's really hungry.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

And there's a thing where you've just eaten, you're no longer hungry, but you're still food focused. If you do the diet too long.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Yes.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

And your diet fatigue gets too crazy. So at rp, we've. We've probably diet coached several hundred thousand real humans at this point. Tens of thousands of them with an intimate personal coaching relationship. Because we have a team of psychotic PhD coaches that are like, they look like we made up their certifications, but they're real. I'm not good enough to work on that team, so I don't bother. And we have app suite that helps. Templates and apps. Tons and tons of people. And what we found is somewhere between eight weeks of consistent caloric deficit, fat loss dieting, and 12 weeks is where most people shine. Eight weeks is like, enough to really make a visual difference. So if you do a diet for four weeks, the scales down maybe five pounds, but you order Chinese and then it's up a pound because of the salt, and you don't even know what's going on. You can't really tell. The one lady from your work said you look better, but she always says nice things down here and she just assumes she's a liar. And so, and so it's not. You're not going to get motivated by the process and you might quit and be like, I don't know, what is it? There's an amazing. One of my friends had a. His mom had a sticker on the fridge, fridge magnet. And it's like 1950s woman. And she's doing this and it said, I. I dieted for one month and lost 30 days. So, like, that's how it can feel. If you don't go long enough, you don't have anything to show for it. But after about eight weeks, most people with a good deficit, they're going to feel different, they're going to look different, people are going to say stuff, their clothes are going to fit differently. Okay, this is great. But their diet fatigue isn't crazy yet in most cases, after about 12 weeks, not all, but many people, they're getting amazing results. But this shit is starting to wear on them. It wears on them in a bunch of different ways. There's entire books written about this. But one of them is your type of social interaction that you can have is limited. It has to be limited. Someone, maybe you and your husband go to the movies. Maybe it's a thing you've been doing for a long time, it's just a tradition. You're on diet for nine weeks, you go to the movie still you smell that goddamn popcorn everywhere. And your husband's like, those zombies were scary. Like, what, what?

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Can I get some fucking popcorn?

[Lane]

It's all.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

It's off. And so if you're hard as nails, you can just eat that shit. Not literally, just can't. Whatever, yeah, no worries. You just get it done. But it strains you and it strains you and it strains you. And here's a really cool revelation. If you go back up to roughly your maintenance calories, you still exercise, you still train with weight, you still eat mostly healthy, but a bit of junk, you can lose a bunch of weight, go to maintenance, chill for. We recommend roughly at least two thirds of a time you're dieting. So if you've been Guided.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Did that come from any kind of literature? Just experience.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

Plenty of literature, but lots of experience.

[Dr. Gabrielle Lyon]

Got it.

[Dr. Mike Israetel]

And what you end up having is you diet for 12 weeks. It's probably good for at least eight weeks for you to be at least at maintenance, maybe even a little tiny surplus if you want to get a little born jack, but at least maintenance that brings you back to normal, it gives you breathing room and then you can hit it again if you want to lose more weight. One of the biggest problems in weight loss is people, whatever number they are. Let's say you weigh 231 pounds and you're like, I want to women 70. And you're like, okay, great. You get your zap bound, you get your diet and you just go. It doesn't work like that because you're going to accumulate so much diet fatigue that by the time you get below 190 you're going to be like, oh, I'm going to eat my own eyeballs today. And if you have to take enough anorectic drug for that to go away, you still, they don't take away all the food. Focus. You still look at cheeseburgers on TV and you're like, and this is, you're missing something. And you are missing something because you, you go to the family reunion, everyone's eating amazing hot dogs, you're not eating them, you got your own little bullshit. That's not a way to live life, that's a way to accomplish a task. It's not a way to live. So understanding. It's a multi phase process that has times of destitution, times of deficit and then times of getting back to normal. That is a big deal. And that 8 to 12 week period coupled with another 8 to 12 weeks of chilling, you get to your little ratchet step like effect that works wonders. And empowered by anorex and really good diet advice, people can get a couple ratchets down that thing nowadays completely transform their bodies. It's going to take a couple of years. But again, to, to paraphrase one of my friends, Broderick Chavez, it's baffling that people think that something that took them years to do, like gain 80 pounds, they're just going to get off in weeks. Yeah, it should be like five weeks. I should be good, like no, no, it's going to take years. Luckily not 15 years, but it might take two or three. And you got to hang in there and you got to give yourself breaks. So you talk to successful people, you're writing all your notes you're scribbling. Let's say you just happened to, like, the CEO of Apple just happened to fly next to you on a plane. He's like, yeah, my private plane broke down, so could you scoot over? And he's like, just sharing ideas about how to be successful. At some point, you're like, okay, so work straight up, 12 hours a day, no breaks. Right? No vacations, no weekends. He'd be like, no, no, you need a lot of that because you need the creative process. That doesn't happen unless you do the just. The same thing is true with dieting. You got to go hard for a little while until your diet fatigue is like, bro, this is tough. You go to maintenance and you repeat that process.