Why You're Not Losing Fat & Building Muscle (Avoid These Mistakes) | Dr. Andy Galpin PT 2

Summary

Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu

Episode: Why You're Not Losing Fat & Building Muscle (Avoid These Mistakes) | Dr. Andy Galpin PT 2
Date: July 10, 2023
Guest: Dr. Andy Galpin

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Episode Overview

In this deep-dive conversation, Tom Bilyeu welcomes back Dr. Andy Galpin for part two of their discussion on nutrition and body composition. The episode focuses on dispelling common myths surrounding fat loss, muscle gain, and macronutrient roles. Dr. Galpin explains the fundamental biochemistry behind weight regulation, the actual functions of carbs, fats, and protein, and provides actionable strategies for optimizing diet and training. Throughout, they challenge common assumptions, offer memorable analogies, and clarify the nuanced relationship between science and practical application.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Can You Build Muscle and Lose Fat at the Same Time?

• [01:44] Dr. Andy Galpin:
  • Untrained or sedentary individuals can experience simultaneous muscle gain and fat loss; it becomes nearly impossible (or extremely challenging) for intermediate and advanced trainees.
  • “If you are fairly untrained…more possible, you get to moderate to decently fit, then that becomes basically fundamentally impossible, if not physiologically, practically pretty impossible.”

2. The Biochemistry of Macros: Carbon, Nitrogen, and Energy

• [02:17]–[07:00] Dr. Andy Galpin:
  • Carbohydrates and fats are fundamentally chains of carbon; protein is mostly about nitrogen.
  • Fat loss = more carbon leaves your body than enters (primarily via breath as CO₂).
  • Protein is a poor fuel source—think of it as structural (like metal in a shed) rather than fuel (wood/paper analogy).
  • “When we're talking about manipulating weight, what we're talking about is more carbon going out than carbon coming in.” [04:05]
  • “Protein is the metal. It's hard to break down, hard to rebuild…But when you do it correctly, you can get an awesome structure.” [06:30]

3. Fuel Source for Muscle Building: Carbs Are Key

• [11:45]–[15:00]
  • Muscle synthesis and contraction rely primarily on carbohydrates as fuel due to their immediate availability and storage in muscle tissue.
  • Fat oxidation is aerobic-only and has rate-limiting steps for use.
  • “If you want to optimize growth, that’s a different story…are you optimizing growth? Well, that's a different story entirely. So differences there between possible versus optimal.” [20:38]

4. Carb vs. Fat for Fat Loss: Myth Busting

• [27:16]–[35:00]
  • Weight loss success is dictated by calorie balance, not by the specific ratio of carbs to fats (if protein is sufficient).
  • Adherence to the diet is the top predictor of long-term success.
  • “You're not going to see any difference in successful weight loss by manipulating carbohydrates more or fat more if protein is held consistent… adherence will be the number one predictor of success.” [27:16]
  • Highly processed foods’ issues come not only from excess calories but from what they displace in the diet (fiber, micronutrients).

5. Mechanisms of Losing Fat & Gaining Muscle

• [36:32]–[43:00]
  • Most body fat leaves the body as carbon dioxide (exhaled breath), not through sweat, urine, or feces.
  • Burning dietary fat does not necessarily translate to burning body fat.
  • The process of storing excess glucose as fat (de novo lipogenesis) is inefficient (~5–10%).
  • “You are losing fat by exhaling.” [39:36]

6. Why “Burning Fat” ≠ Losing Body Fat

• [40:38]
  • The body flexibly adjusts which substrate (fat/carb) it burns based on intake; burning more fat due to a high-fat diet mainly reflects what’s being consumed rather than fat from your body.
  • “I can be burning more fat, but that doesn't mean I'm losing more fat.” [58:22]

7. Carbs, Fat, and Getting Obese: More Carbon, More Problems

• [65:30]–[67:42]
  • Overconsuming either carbs or fat will lead to weight gain if calories exceed expenditure; neither macronutrient is uniquely “fattening” at calorie balance.
  • Real-world dietary problems are typically an excess intake of both, with most people consuming insufficient protein.
  • “If their carbohydrates are in check and they're eating more fat, gonna be a problem. If their fat is in check and they're eating too much carb, gonna be a problem.” [63:02]

8. Muscle Gain: It’s Not Just About Lifting

• [68:11]–[80:42]
  • You can gain some muscle just by eating a surplus—examples: sumo wrestlers, obese sedentary people (due to carrying more mass).
  • Maximum lean muscle gain still requires a combination of surplus calories, high protein, and progressive overload/resistance.
  • Excessive “bulking” leads to high fat gain; a moderate caloric surplus (~10–20%) is best.
  • Animal vs. plant protein quality differences matter most when total protein intake is low.

9. Protein Recommendations and Dietary Composition

• [80:43]–[84:12]
  • Aim for at least 1 gram of protein per lb of body weight; going higher has little downside, especially for “hard-gainers.”
  • Quality differences between animal and plant protein diminish at higher total intakes.
  • Whey protein is practical and effective; total daily protein is what matters most—not specific timing, as long as daily totals are met.
  • "If your total protein intake throughout the day is equivalent, then your protein timing doesn't matter that much." [84:12]

10. Carb and Fat Guidelines for Muscle Gain

• [84:12]–[89:53]
  • Carbs: 3–6g per kg BW for active individuals (higher for elite athletes); less if physical demand is lower.
  • Fat: Fill up remaining calories after protein and carbohydrate needs; ensure not too low as it’s essential for health and hormone function.

11. Keto and Low-Carb Diets for Performance

• [87:00]–[89:53]
  • There’s little evidence that ketogenic diets enhance performance in most athletes; more suited for personal preference or special health circumstances.

12. Injury, Recovery, and Diagnostics

• [92:16]–[98:33]
  • Most routine injuries are due to movement or overload problems, not mysterious internal factors.
  • Dr. Galpin recommends first looking at movement patterns and compensation, then going up the chain (mobility, neurological patterns, sleep).

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Protein as Metal, Fat/Carbs as Fuel:

  • “Protein is the metal. It's hard to break down, hard to rebuild…But when you do it correctly, you can get an awesome structure.” (Dr. Andy Galpin, [06:30])

• Fat Loss as Carbon Out:

  • “All that's happening in your body is input in, input out. So fat... has to come out of your body either in your feces, your urine, your sweat, your saliva, or your hair... [but] the overwhelming majority is coming out of your breath.” (Dr. Andy Galpin, [38:36])

• On Sustainability of Diets:

  • “Adherence will be the number one predictor of success. So you're not wrong in that charge… a diet not done is irrelevant.” (Dr. Andy Galpin, [27:16])

• Tom’s Anecdote on Protein-Only Diet:

  • “It was basically just boiled chicken breast and steamed broccoli for two years. Look, it wasn't... I was taking in occasional fat, but... My wife pulled me aside and was like, you, you are not fun to be around anymore.” (Tom Bilyeu, [22:45])

• On Mechanistic Explanations:

  • “Don't let people trick you with these molecular numbers because they don't scale to human existence… whole outcomes are always more important than molecular mechanism.” (Dr. Andy Galpin, [72:15])

• Muscle Mass through Overeating:

  • “If you eat more and you don't exercise at all, you're gonna add some muscle… Are you adding some muscle? Yeah. Are you adding mostly fat? Yes. This is not a good way.” (Dr. Andy Galpin, [78:19])

• Protein Quantity and Quality:

  • “Where [protein type] matters the most is when you're below or not at sufficient protein intake. When you're at that 1g per pound or higher, those things start to matter a lot less.” (Dr. Andy Galpin, [80:43])

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Important Timestamps

• 01:44 – Can you build muscle & lose fat at the same time?
• 06:30 – Protein “metal vs wood” analogy
• 11:45 – Why carbs, not fat, are the primary fuel for muscle building
• 27:16 – Adherence and practical diet success
• 36:32 – Fat loss: how fat actually leaves your body (CO₂ exhalation)
• 39:36 – “We are losing fat by exhaling.”
• 58:22 – Burning fat does NOT mean losing fat
• 68:11 – You can gain muscle by overeating, even with no training
• 80:43 – Animal vs. plant protein, and protein requirements
• 84:12 – Protein timing (total daily protein)
• 84:45 – Carb and fat recommendations (grams/kg for body weight)
• 92:16 – Approach to recurrent injury prevention/diagnosis

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Actionable Takeaways

• Calorie balance is fundamental—fat loss comes down to consistently spending more energy than you consume, regardless of whether the surplus/deficit is from fat or carbs, as long as protein remains sufficient.
• Protein intake should be high (≥1g/lb BW). The quality of protein matters more when intake is low; at higher intake, type is less important.
• Carbohydrate and fat intake can be flexible. Both can be used to create a calorie deficit/surplus. Personal preferences and what you can adhere to matter greatly.
• Don’t chase “fat burning” exercise as a magic bullet. It’s the total energy equation that determines fat loss, not substrate burned during workouts.
• Overeating alone can produce muscle gain, but most will be fat—optimize with a moderate surplus and resistance training.
• Individualization and adherence are key: The best “diet” is the one you can stick to, fits your life, and helps you achieve a consistent calorie deficit (for fat loss) or appropriate surplus (for muscle gain).
• Injury prevention: Focus first on fixing movements/loads and identifying compensation, rather than seeking obscure causes.

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Further Resources

• Follow Dr. Andy Galpin on Instagram & Twitter: @DrAndyGalpin
• Website: andygalpin.com
• **Listen to previous Impact Theory episodes with Dr. Galpin for part 1 and related science dives.

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This episode stands out for its clear, science-based explanations of often-misunderstood body composition topics and its practical, adherence-focused approach to fat loss, muscle gain, and nutrition.

Transcript

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Dr. Andy Galpin]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

We are back with part two of our enlightening conversation with the one and only Dr. Andy Galpin. If you found our first discussion informative, today's episode promises to delve even deeper. We're going to be touching on the topic of optimal nutrition and delving into the role and timing of carbohydrates in our diets. It's far more nuanced than you might think, and we'll be discussing the essential role that protein plays in our bodies, which I was pretty shocked by Andy's stance on this, so you're definitely not going to want to miss that. It has changed my behavior literally immediately that day I started doing things differently based on what he told me about protein. So if you were keen to further your understanding of nutrition and refine your dietary approach, you are in the right place, my friends, for this engaging conversation. Music if you are not already for all of our insightful episodes, just like this one. Buckle up everybody, and let's get started. I'm Tom Bilyeu and welcome to Impact Theory. Can you add muscle and lose fat at the same time?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

You can. It depends on how specific you want to be. If you are fairly untrained or lowly trained or sedentary, however you want to call that more possible, you get to moderate to decently fit, then that becomes basically fundamentally impossible, if not physiologically, practically pretty impossible. So a challenge to do for sure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, so what are the environments that you need to create in your body in order to add muscle? What's the environment you need to create to lose fat, and why do they collide?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Well, you're going the opposite direction. It's basic physics or basic chemistry, right so fundamentally, we are all organic compounds.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What does that mean?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

We're all made of carbon. That's what organic chemistry is. Carbon based, all life. When we go looking for signs of life, effectively we're looking for carbon. Carbon based life forms is what we're after and why that matters. Everything in your body that we use for substrates, for energy are big carbon chains. So your carbohydrates, that's what they are. It is a carbon that has been hydrated. So one carbon molecule attached to one water molecule. That's the chemical formula for like glucose is C6H12O6, meaning it is one carbon attached to 1H2O. Glucose is six of those carbons. So six C6, double the hydrogen and six oxygen. Other forms of carbohydrate are smaller chains, like fructose. Starches are longer chains, smash them all together. But fundamentally, all carbon, all carbohydrates are just carbon chains attached to water. Fat is the same thing. Fat is also just big long chains of carbon, whether you're a free fatty acid. Now, in fact, that's what we call different fatty acids. Depends on how many carbons they have. So if it has six carbons or eight carbons, or 12 or 18, then it has a different name, steric acid or whatever else, right? If it has any breaks in the bonds between the carbons, we either call them polyunsaturated or unsaturated, or monounsaturated or saturated. If they're all, all the bonds are perfectly saturated. We call it a saturated fat. There's one break, it's a monounsaturated. If there's more than one break, it's a polyunsaturated. If it's stored as a triglyceride, you have three. That's why we call it a tri, right? One, two, three fatty acid chains. And you have a three carbon glycerol backbone. So it's a triglyceride. So it is 1, 3 carbon glycerol backbone and 3 fatty acids coming up. Big chains of carbon is all we are, right? So when we're talking about manipulating weight, what we're talking about is more carbon going out than carbon coming in. You can split hairs and talk about how much fat versus how much carbohydrate or whatever you want, but it doesn't matter fundamentally, because it's all just carbon. And when you take a breath in, that's oxygen coming in. Basically, when you take a breath out, that is carbon dioxide going out. The difference between O2 and CO2 is the carbon. Where'd that carbon come from? It came from you. Whether that carbon came from fat that was stored behind your neck and a triglyceride, fine. Whether that came from glucose that was in your blood, fine. It doesn't really matter. Carbons are going out. Carbons are only coming in, in humans when we then consume foods. So we eat carbohydrate, we got carbons, we eat fat, we got carbons, we eat animals, we got like you haven't

[Tom Bilyeu]

mentioned protein is there.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Protein's not a very effective fuel.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So you want to think about still carbon.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Not really.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting. So give me. I know nothing about organic chemistry.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

You're looking at nitrogen. That's really what you're looking at, right? So you, you're basically consuming a whole host of, of nitrogen and amino acids for protein. So you can technically take those, convert those into carbohydrate molecules, gluconeogenesis in the liver, or different, different ways like that. But fundamentally, protein is a very poor fuel source. If you wanna look at your metabolic process, you're looking at maybe 5% of your calories or energy is gonna come from protein. If you're using protein as a fuel, you're probably in a pretty bad spot. Like something is going wrong for that to happen. It's kind of like a little bit of a backup system. But you wanna think about this. If you're going to build a shelter, and I said, okay, great, I've got some metal pipes and things like that, and then I've got some paper and I've got some wood and things like that and great, go ahead and build a shed. You would almost certainly say the structure of this shed is going to be made out of metal. Can you technically melt metal and make a fire? Yeah. But if you're, if you're goal to stay alive is melting metal to make a fire, you're not in a good spot, Right. Something really bad has happened. What you want to do is say, hey, we have tons of wood. This lights on fire very quickly. It's easy to manage. We're going to use that as our fuel to make our fire. And then we're going to use the fire to melt down some of that metal and reshape it and reform it into the exact structure we want. The analogy here is the protein is the metal. It's hard to break down, hard to rebuild. And you don't want to do it very often. But when you do it correctly, you can get an awesome structure that should stay there for a very, very Long time. Wood is very easy to manipulate back and forth. Now, what is wood made of? Carbon. Right. If you were to take a log and you were slice off a very thin slice of a log, you would use that and you could write on it. And you could call that papyrus or now we would call that paper, right? Amazing. Well, if I take that thing and I sliddle down a tiny little sliver of that and I put a little bit of stuff on the end of it, I can make a match out of it. It's all carbon, it's all coming from wood. In this analogy, a match is great. I can light that thing really quickly and I can get a few seconds of usable energy. Fire, that's phosphocreatine, that's the role of creatine in your body. Very, very quick. But burns out in however long it takes a match to burn out. I don't know, seconds, 30 seconds, something like that. Great. If you were to take that thing though, and get the paper going, if you ever made a fire in the woods and you've used paper, you realize, well, that's great, it'll last a lot longer than the match will. But it's not a, a permanent fuel source either. That's carbohydrates, right? If you were to then throw the wood on the fire and you said, hey, look, if you want a sustainable fire, use the match, get it going, light the paper, take the paper, light the logs on fire. It takes forever to get the logs going, but they're going to stay there for a very long time. That's fat. Okay, now obviously I made a bunch of physiology and chemistry errors there on purpose. It's an analogy, folks, right? Just getting to a rough idea here that you have different ways to create fuel. And the point is, like we talked about earlier, it's not bad or good. It is simply giving you options, right? So we can have faster fuel sources, we can have more sustainable fuel sources. There are pros and cons to both sides, right? If you are maximizing carbohydrate only metabolism, you're going to have major limitations. If you're maximizing fat metabolism, you're going to have major limitations. This is just the nature of, of our world, right? Pros and cons saying that ideal scenario for either one of your cases, fat burning or muscle growth, is we have the proper fuel from those sources, fat and carbohydrates, to then reform and rebuild the protein into the shapes that we want it to be in. We used our metal for that and we don't keep ripping off our siding to put it in the fire when we should have just got more wood. Right. That's a bad spot to be in. So the conditions that you need to have to have both of those goals are fairly similar. If you want to lose fat, you have got to be in a negative caloric balance. That's just simply going to have to happen. More carbon has to be coming out of you than carbon coming in you. Now, how do you make that happen? You have two options. You consume less carbon. Option two, you expel more carbon. Option three, I guess you do a little bit of both. So if you want to reduce the amount of carbon you're eating, great. You want to increase the amount of carbon you're expelling, I. E. More work, more energy, more movement, great. Fundamentally, that's all you have to do. If you can do that while holding on to enough of your protein, then you're not going to lose as much muscle mass, but you'll lose fat. Okay? That's the key trick there. And this is why people will say, hold your protein fairly high, keep that around, but then reduce your calories from fat or carbs or both or some different way, which, it's almost irrelevant which one you choose or what combination for this goal alone. Then you're gonna be able to lose mostly fat and not lose a ton of muscle along for the ride. You're gonna lose some muscle. That's just the nature of being in a caloric deficit. But you can try to lose as much fat as possible. If you wanna gain muscle, then you go the inverse direction, which is to say I need to have the cellular energy to power the workout, to drive the stimulus we talked about earlier. I need to have the cellular energy to go through protein synthesis. Remember, when you break a chemical bond, right. So these carbons are attached in a chemical bond. You break that bond, that's either going to give off energy or acquire energy. In the case of humans, that's going to give off energy. So you broke a bond and that gave off energy. Well, now you want to reform a new bond that doesn't exist. You want to put two amino acids together, you want to synthesize them. That's protein synthesis. That synthesis process requires cellular energy. Not just the energy for the workout, but you actually have to have the fuel, mostly in the form of carbohydrates, to power that connection process. You have to have the supply the amino acids, and you have to have the fuel to form that connection. That's we're really going after.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So sorry, I'm going to pause you there because there's something broken in the way that I'm tracking this. So that sound, if I need fat or glucose.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Fat, fat or carbs.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So I need one of those to make the muscle.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yes, primarily carbohydrate for that. Yep.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so then maybe you just answered it. So what I was thinking is, if I need the fat in order to build the muscle, why do I not naturally get leaner as I'm building muscle? Because it uses carbohydrate as a preferred fuel source for that.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Why?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Just because it burns faster. It's just like a quicker thing.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

A couple of things. It's faster and it is immediate. So you store your carbohydrates in the actual muscle tissue. You don't store much fat in the actual muscle tissue.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting. Is that why you store. Wait, so you're using carbohydrate both to build the muscle and to work out. So there's something in the contractile process that it needs carbohydrate for?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yeah. So effectively, the way that muscles contract is you have two major filaments. Is what they're called myosin and actin. And just think about this is the. Is the myosin reaches up and grabs the actin and it squeezes the actin together. So in the actin molecules, if you're watching on the video, sorry, audio friends, I'll try to describe this, but you have two. I'm pointing two of my hands at each other, pointing my fingers. So my middle fingers are touching each other. My thumbs are pointed in the sky. Okay. That's the direction. Now, if I were to slide my fingers past each other and stack them on top of each other, you see how the height of the bottom of my pinky to the top of my pointer fingers increases because I'm stacking them on top of each other. That's the actin molecule. So if I flex my bicep and I pull the actin over top of each other, the height gets larger. I'm stacking the molecules. Rather than being end to end, they're

[Tom Bilyeu]

now right gets shorter, but they stack up exactly.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Right now, for that process to occur, that requires ATP, which is cellular energy. Right now, if I want to, if I have all the time in the world, I can break down that triglyceride stored behind my neck. I can go through what's called my

[Tom Bilyeu]

pulse, that example all the time. Why always behind your neck?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

This is the one that, like, I think I want to make it differentiated from the exercising muscle.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Got it.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Right. It's not coming from when. If you use this analogy and you talk about it just like a different part of the bicep, it doesn't make. I don't think it sticks out in people's head as much that it's coming from all parts of the body basically equally. Right. So there's no targeting a fat loss specifically in the exercising muscle that much relative to carbohydrate burning.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So if I'm using my bicep, I'm going to burn the carbohydrate in the bicep. But if I'm using fat for some part of this process, it'll come from.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

It's mostly coming from everywhere else in the body, which is why when people lose fat, they don't just lose it in the area that they were working out. They lose it equally in their face and their jaw, their fingers and their toes and all these places.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Very upsetting that I lose it in my face. But, yeah, I feel your pain.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yeah, yeah. So if you wanted to use fat to power that protein synthesis process, you'd have to go through that delay. You have to liberate it. You have to put it in tissue, or you have to put it in

[Tom Bilyeu]

muscle and it burns more slowly. Right.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Kind of.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So it's only getting it available in the body that makes you call it a slow fuel.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Right. So think about it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's a storage mechanism thing, not an actual burn.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Hundred percent. If you want to think about this from the bigger perspective, it's not exactly right. But carbohydrate is your immediate fuel source. Fat is your backup. This is why I can only store so much carbohydrate. The capacity is very limited with how much? It's limited by physical size of my muscle and my liver and my blood. Right. The only other. If my muscle's full, three places, it's stored, period. Three places.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Give me ratios. I'm guessing the vast majority is in my muscles, unless I'm really small.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

You've got a couple of tablespoons in your blood total. This is it. Right. So if you run through the actual math, you probably have gone, wait a minute, I've got some blood done. And they said it was like 80. Okay. What that really means is the equivalent of a couple of tablespoons of total glucose in your body, in your blood. If you think about your liver, kind of this right side there, and you just, you know, if you ever had a whole liver, you pull it out, it's Kind of like the size of a hand, you know, little, maybe a flattened softball or something like that in humans, you know, a little bit bigger, it's pretty big, but muscles everywhere. So it's physical, dimensions wise. If you just take the ratio of physical size, that'll explain to you exactly. Myself, you said, okay, my liver is about the size of my right gluten. Well, every other part of your muscle then is storing glycogen all over the place. Right. So we can store way more in skeletal muscle. And the more muscle I have, the more I can store, the more trained I am endurance trained, the more I can store. So it scales that way. This is one of the reasons why you mentioned Peter earlier, Atia. But, you know, in the podcast I've done with him, we talked a lot about the importance of muscle for health. And one of the major factors there is it is your primary glucose storage block place. People don't realize, like this is the biggest place to store glucose and, and carb. So if you're worried about blood glucose levels or things like that, if you don't have enough muscle, you're just adding to the challenge of being able to handle and manage your glucose. So you want to put it there. Going kind of back earlier when we were talking about you have to mobilize and liberate the fat, it's got to go into blood, it's got to go into blood, then it's got to get into the tissue, then it's got to go through tissue into the cell, it's got to get in the cell, then it's got to get into the mitochondria. And there are rate limiting steps, specifically on the cell wall of the mitochondria, to be able to get it into that thing and then actually use it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now, is fat slower at the mitochondrial cellular level than.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

So the beauty of it is once you get into mitochondria, aerobic metabolism between carbohydrates and fat is identical.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But what about getting into the mitochondria?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Is that so it's already in the cell tissue for carbohydrate, so you can stay outside of the cell, not have to worry. Using fat as a fuel source is 100% aerobic, meaning it requires oxygen. Carbohydrate is both anaerobic and aerobic, so you have way more flexibility. So not only is it stored in the actual tissue, but if you don't have the time to even wait for oxygen and you can't, don't want to wait for it to get into the mitochondria. To go through the aerobic side of the equation, you just go anaerobically, you go right now, now it is a lot less efficient. So this is what we call anaerobic glycolysis. Splitting lysis being splitting glycan being glycogen or glucose, it doesn't really matter. You're splitting glycogen or glucose, Boom. You're getting a couple of ATP, like two to four ATP total very small. When you take that molecule though, and you put it through the aerobic side of the equation, so the second half now you're going to get like 25, 28, 30 ATP. You take one molecule of fat through that entire equation, you're getting 300.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Jesus.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

So you're going, it's, it is getting you way more packed. Because think about it this way. Glucose is six carbons. But if you had a triglyceride, that was three fatty acids that had 15, 16 carbons each, you got 16, 16, 16 plus you got the three glycerol backbone. Well, you have so many more carbons to deal with. Every time you break the carbon, ATP, ATP, atpc, you just have way more carbon to break. So you're gonna get a lot more pack for it. But it requires oxygen and requires that mobilization and movement process. Anaerobic glycolysis can happen immediately. It happens right now to round the story out, have to have a signal, have to have gene expression and then you're gonna go through protein synthesis, right? There's an actual time component here. That signaling process happens within seconds. Okay? And it is over. You stretch a muscle, then that cascade happens immediately. You go through a workout, you go through some sensor receptor is attached, signal happens and that thing, that process is over in seconds to minutes. So if I were to biopsy you 25 minutes post exercise, those signaling cascades are probably back to baseline. They're done already. That signal's over with. The gene cascade kicks on and that is elevated, depending on which marker, something like three to four hours post exercise. Now the protein synthesis part is elevated, still up to 48 hours post. So my point is saying I don't necessarily have the time to wait because the genes are expressed almost immediately and the signal is already dead after a few seconds. So if I have to wait to mobilize and use fatigue, I'm going to slow down that process when it is ready to go and it is trying to get going. Such to say, it doesn't mean you cannot grow muscle in a low carbohydrate. State. And I'm certainly not making any claims about low carbohydrate diets. This is not what we're referring to at all. But are you optimizing growth? Well, that's a different story entirely. So differences there between possible versus optimal.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, you have made a very bold assertion in terms of my layman's understanding of carbohydrates versus fat. Your. The implications of what you just said is that me putting on fat doesn't really matter. If my diet consists of high carb or high fat doesn't matter. It's just total intake of carbon. So what you just said makes some predictions. Let me go through them. That I'm gonna have a very hard time getting obese on a high protein diet if I'm not intaking fat and carbs. True or false?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

I would say true.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so something called rabbit starvation. I tested this when I got my leanest. I was basically eating protein, only it was miserable by the way, and I was inflamed just an unimaginable amount. It really sucked. But I got lean. Okay, so that's interesting. I mean that's just an anecdote, but it's interesting. Certainly in keeping with what you just said predicts.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

But it also, I would say by the way, on that point, that would be a pretty common finding that that will hold.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yeah, yeah. We, we have seen a ton of problems. Inflammatory markers with folks that are tend to be very, very, very low on a particular, either nutrient, either macro or micro. So when you, when you pull things away like that, some people can be fine with it apparently. But the folks we've seen, they don't do well on things like that. They may feel okay initially, but their biology is pointing the wrong direction pretty quickly. So I'd say what you experienced going on, it was basically like a protein but very low carbohydrate, very low fat diet. Is that what you're saying?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, so it's. It was basically just boiled chicken breast and steamed broccoli for two years. Look, it wasn't. It obviously I was taking in occasional fat, but it, it really was pretty rare. And it was.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

That'll that'll mess you up.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. My wife pulled me aside and was like, you, you are not fun to be around anymore. Like you need to change strategies. And before I went on the, the. Because I really wanted to get lean and before I went on it, I said, look, I am, I'm hyper disciplined. So if I set my mind to something, it does not matter the amount of suffering. I'm going to keep going. And so I said, that means you have to be in control. If it gets to the point where it's gone too far, then just signal me and I will change. And so she did and ultimately had

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

to find oh man, this is like, you crack me up because you do things the hard way.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I do things the hard way. That is a very astute.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

We call that the road, the robot mode.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

I like going in a robot mode. That's great. But if you're going to do that, you better make sure that that robot is pointing in the right direction.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, that's a really good point. I don't want to derail us and I will bring us back. But as a quick no, no, no. It's very interesting, at least to me. My wife has said we I finally had to decode her language and the more I go into robot mode, the more she's like, I want my husband back.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But because I value robot mode and virtually everything except my relationships get way better the more time I spend in robot mode, I can't help but value my ability to stay in robot mode.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

But anyway, my wife keeps you just need somebody, somebody who's guiding that ship.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, from don't go too far. That would definitely be my wife.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

I wouldn't say not go too far, but I would say let's make sure we're getting there in the right path.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. In terms of what's your goal? Is the strategy the best way to get there?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

The tactics?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Like we can get people extremely lean and not have to eat like that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so that, that's where we're headed right now. Because the other prediction that what you just walked through made is that calories being equal, it will not matter if I'm on a high fat diet or a high carb diet. That one breaks several of my assumptions. This is anecdotal, but let this be the jumping off point for your dismantling of my assumptions. If you give me somebody and say, tom, you can either control this person's diet or their exercise, and they are going to do exactly what you say. But you have to improve their body composition. So I have to reduce their fat and I need to positively impact, um, biomarkers that would lead one to longevity. So things that occlude the arteries, for instance, that's gonna be bad mojo, I would say. I don't care about exercise whatsoever. Just let me control their diet. And I'm only gonna need to pay attention to one variable. And 80% of people, I will get 80% of the way there through one variable, and that will just be blood sugar. And if I keep their blood Sugar, call it 85 or less, they are going to stay a reasonable body comp. Just period, end of story. Like, I, I'm not even asking how many calories are eating. Could they stuff their face full of fat? Yes, but they probably won't. So it's really, in my, my assumption is it's really only when you start elevating your blood sugar that you run into a cascade of problems. But that means the carbohydrates matter a lot.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Okay, So I would say a couple of things. What you're, what you're talking about is a question of practicality versus physiology.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

So the, a lot of things you put on, there are issues of, well, this would be more practical. More people will do this, they'll execute it better, they'll get better results because they're, they're adhering more. Right. And if you look at any intervention for nutrition, adherence will be the number one predictor of success. So you're not wrong in that charge, right? To say if I can set somebody up for more adherence, I'm more likely to have success. That is absolutely the number one starting criteria. A diet not done is irrelevant, right? You can talk all the theory you want, but if they don't do it, it's completely irrelevant. That is separate from physiology. And I would say physiologically is very, very, very clear. You can manipulate either one of these things and have success. If you want to look at Chemical signaling. If you want to look at randomized control trials of outcomes, you're not going to see any difference in successful weight loss by manipulating carbohydrates more or fat more if protein is, is held consistent. Right. That, that's very, very clear scientifically. Again though, what you feel like is more realistic for people who will execute higher and more success. That's a separate question. And it again, as I argued a second ago, may be more important. I'll, I'll give you that. Whether or not you can fundamentally basis exclusively on blood glucose. I think if you want to put this across 30,000 people, I think the mission you laid out there would probably be pretty successful actually. I, I'd say it's probably really successful at the individual person. I'd say that's also something that's not really that important. So you can see tremendous progress in folks by not worrying about blood glucose at all. I've, I've actually encountered. We go back and forth in this. We'll use things like a CGM sometimes and sometimes not. Some people, it, it is really, really helpful in a lot of ways. And then other folks, it's just an utter disaster with, with what happens to them when they see that. They get so fixated on it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I was gonna say orthorexia.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Is that the only that that can be it. It. They just freak out. There's a lot of assumptions built into CGMs that are false. So the assumption that you should just never be over a certain number and like things like that, we certainly go into that. But those things are all really wrong. So people will make all kinds of weird things and do things because their number went to a certain level one time. And, and so we're very cautious when we use CGMs. Other folks, it's, it's a game changer. It's a complete game changer. You throw that on them and you just walk away. And then they're like holy cow. And they just stop eating Doritos all day and stuff. And you're like, you know, sorry if Doritos is sponsored.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is the problem or not? Is the problem with Doritos just that people overeat calorically?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

No. You're never going to find things being a single explainer. So probably issues of overeating calorically. Sure. Probably compromising. Reducing other items that they should be eating that are now not coming in. So now you have fiber deficiencies or you have micronutrient deficiency or other issues there. So it's not just what they're eating. It's what they're now not eating instead.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's coming in because this isn't tracking with my understanding of what you were saying. So when you say the difference between carbohydrate and fat for fat loss doesn't matter, does that assume that you're not eating highly processed carbohydrates?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Okay, when I say it doesn't matter, what I mean is not that it's irrelevant. I'm saying you have options either way. That's really what I mean.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You can lose weight on a high carb diet, Definitely.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Absolutely. You can lose weight very successfully on a high carb diet. You can lose weight very successfully on a high fat diet. I would say that there's so many studies on this. Again, whether you want to look at the mechanistic data, whether you want to look at the randomized control trials, and they basically are all showing the exact same thing, does that mean it's irrelevant and there's nothing else to consider? Absolutely not. There's thousands of things to consider. Methods are many concepts, are few, very basic fundamental concept calories are going to have to be accounted for one way or the other. If you have a different method, you like to get to that calorie thing, you showed your method, great. You want to track and weigh all your food, great. You want to give another simple heuristic, just do this, just don't do that. Great. Those are just different methods to get to fundamentally the same concept of calorie balance. Right. Whether you're saying, yeah, I ate this more food, so I'm more satiated, so I'm less likely to, okay, fine, like, those are just different systems to all get to the same spot. So I apologize if I said this earlier. I didn't clarify, but it's not irrelevant. There's a ton of relevance to all those variables. It's just fundamentally, you're going to have to get to the same place. And if you get to the same place, you'll have the same net result. But there's a lot of different ways to get there, and some are more successful than others, and certainly many are more successful than others at the individual human level. There's no question some people respond better to different macronutrient switches. Absolutely. Whether that is actual physiological, whether that is now behavioral, of course, all those options are on the table. If the strategy you like to employ to help people regulate is to simply monitor blood glucose, great, sure, that could be effective. If you're taking another approach and saying, I don't care at all about measuring blood glucose. But I'm gonna have them weigh their food and we're gonna have a great. That works too. All that stuff will work. It just depends on. Now we're at the level of, well, what other factors are we considering? Are we considering how their digestion feels? Are we considering how their food preferences? Are we considering their cultural aspects? Are we considering their income and their costs? Like now, those are all just different levels of nuance that we want to get into. I'll give you an example. We just recently completed a study on intermittent fasting and we actually wanted to look at whether or not it did anything for muscle growth. And so people are really interested in this topic from a perspective of fat loss. But we were like, well, what about somebody who's trying to maximize muscle growth? Does the 16:8 intermittent fasting approach help muscle growth? Does it harm it or is it irrelevant? I can't share the exact results right now because it's in review. But what we. What was very important to me is exactly what I'm saying. I don't want to just know the answer at the muscle up, but I want to ask them about their fatigue, I want to ask them about their digestion, I want to ask them about how hard they felt it was and all these things. And I can tell you this much, there's no clear cut winner here. There's never going to be. It is, well, okay, maybe this adds in muscle growth or doesn't, but it was harder to do or it, you know, gave them, made them more bloated or there's always just going to be pros and cons to these approaches. Right. So it comes down to you saying which ones you want to optimize for and which of the downsides do you not care about or less important to you or don't affect you as much. That's the game you're constantly going to play. So when you talk about dietary stuff, when I kind of say laissez faire, like it doesn't really matter what you do, what I just mean is fundamentally you just got to get to the same kind of place and you'll get there. And then from there you got to coach your people.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Describe the same kind of place.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Is that just in this particular instance. Yeah. Would be calorie balance for fat loss. Like you just have to get to a negative position. That's just gonna have to be how, how it goes. There is no other way to go about that. Again, different systems to get to negative calorie balance. But you're gonna have to get there. That's like, it's kind of circular argument, cuz one is actually just the definition like for the other. So there's no really way outside that matrix.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, I wanna talk about if it fits your macros and the idea that you can eat whatever macros as long as your. You have a target, you're worrying about calorie balance, all that. But before we get there, I think we have to understand the mechanism by which you add muscle and the mechanism by which you lose fat. When I started researching you for this episode, you really changed my understanding of how fat is actually liberated. And even in this interview, the idea of the glycogen being stored in the muscle so it's really readily available versus fat, which is a backup mechanism which has to be liberated first, make its way through the blood. All that is really helping me understand the sort of hows and whys of this all. But walk us through the fundamental nature of. I don't know which you think is right to start with, but walk me through the building blocks of building a muscle. Walk me through the building blocks of losing fat and just to re anchor everybody, because this is. I had never thought about it before that carbs and fat have more in common than protein has to carbs and fat. That's very interesting. That being more about nitrogen, the other two being carbon. I had never put two and two together, even though I knew, oh, if you're building muscle like you, you can check the nitrogen levels in your urine. I just never stopped to ask why. So, yeah, mechanisms, please.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Sure. We've laid a lot of the foundation here, so this shouldn't be too difficult for us to get through. But really you're breathing in O2, you're breathing out CO2, right? That carbon is coming again, either from carbohydrate or from fat. And so really, to answer your question, one of the ways we set up how we analyze our folks is I want to know four fundamental things. Number one, I want to know everything that goes in your body. So I want to know what you eat, what time you ate it, how much you ate it, where you got it from. I want to know where you get your drinking water from. I want to know what kind of toothpaste you use. I want to know how you're cleaning your tiles and your floor. If it goes on or in your body, I want to know about it. Number two, I want to know everything comes out of your body. I want to take. We take saliva, we take Urine. We take blood and blood and blood. We take stool, we take hair if needed. We take every single thing that comes out your body. Sweat, hair, all of it. There are different markers that are better and different biological samples. So in, in my world, we don't treat, we don't. I don't treat anything. I'm not a doctor, medical doctor, but I'm not going to develop you plans and protocols based on labs, we do it based on humans. Right. So how you feel is most important. Right. And then for how you perform, so how you functioning. I take all those things and now I know exactly what's happening and I can create and find those performance anchors, find those constructs or constraints, and then I can actually set you your very specific plan and go, why that matters here is all that's happening in your body is input in, input out. Okay, so fat then, when you're losing fat, has to come out of your body in one of a few places. It either has to come out in your feces, your urine, your sweat, your saliva, or your hair, but it's none of those places. The only thing I left off that equation is your breath. And so you use lose a very minimal amount of fat through your urine, some through your feces, you pee fat, fat, you can pee anything. Right. But we, we're basically. You might as well count that as zero. Interesting little comes out in your stool. The overwhelming majority is coming out of your breath.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you remember those chips that they put some weird thing in it that made you not digest fat? And so it was like, beware may cause anal leakage. I was mortified by that. I never even tried them.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

The anal leakage thing is historic.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh God. Anyway, so yes, it can certainly. Hopefully not a lot is coming out in your stool, but it can happen.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Man. I wonder. It's been so many years since I thought about that. I would love to know what actually was in there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I will also tell you. Bad things happen if you take too much fish oil.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Oh, it can. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Woof.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Or mcts or any kinds of things.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Depends on how high you want on your fish oil. There's a part of medical physiology you go through in med school and they'll teach you all about what happens with excessive fat intake and especially in the form of oil.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I found the upper limits. I'll just say that. Yeah.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Amazing. So it's mostly coming out through your breath. And if that makes no sense.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So we, we are losing fat by exhaling.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

That's right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's crazy.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

It's nuts. Right. But it is exactly what I explained earlier. You're breathing in O2 and breathing out CO2. The C is coming from carbs and protein. You cannot burn fat alone. It's just not possible. Right. So you're. You're sorry it comes out as carbohydrate or fat. I think I said protein a second ago. What I meant is those two. You can't burn fat alone. So it's coming from a combination of those two things. And the fundamental answer is it doesn't even really matter which one is being used for exercise. It doesn't matter which one is being used for exercise in terms of your fat loss. So people will really be worried about do doing the types of exercise that burn the highest percentage of fat versus carbohydrate. Because I think that's going to aid in fat loss.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It doesn't matter if they had just called the. The molecule in food something different than the molecule on your body. And I get why they didn't, because they are the same.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

They are.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But it gets really confusing when you mean dietary fat versus stored body fat.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Okay, but when you say it's not.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It doesn't matter what you use. What do you mean it doesn't matter what I use when I eat?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

It's not. Because your dietary fat is just another animal stored fat.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Correct.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

It's the same thing.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes, but when I'm trying to lose fat.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The fat that I eat has implications in terms of priming my body as to what to use for a fuel source. So when you're talking about this, because I've heard you describe this mechanism before and literally, thankfully, you stopped and said, but that doesn't. Burning fat does not mean you're losing fat. And I was like, what? Because I can be burning the dietary fat.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yeah. Well, you can even be burning your own endogenous fat.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes, but when people hear you say burn fat, I think if they're anything like me, they just assume you mean off my love handles.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

You would think so.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's not necessarily what.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

No, it's definitely not the case. So you have a difference in terms. One of them would be called oxidize. So are you oxidizing the fat? Okay, great. That's what means you're using it. Using that oxygen to burn the fat as fuel. That's great.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm oxidizing. Does oxidizing imply that I am burning my own body fat or that's what I do to fat I have.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

It actually doesn't matter whether you're using the Dietary fat or your own endogenous fat. So you could eat a high fatty meal and then you were go train. Right. Then. Then your rate of fat oxidation would go up. But you've also increased fat intake. So, yeah, you're burning more fat, but you ate more fat.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Does the. Does the fat have to make it out of the food into my bloodstream before I can burn it? It must.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yeah. Yeah, of course.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so I have eaten the fat. It's then not in the shape that I would recognize it from the animal. I'm assuming it's broken down in something triglyceride.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

It's free fatty acids. And then that crosses in your blood. It's gonna be free fatty acid floating around. Yep. So you ate it. You ate that wonderful, delicious fat however it came. And it was in the stored form. Cause it was in an animal stored form or a plant. Doesn't matter. Right. It's gonna get into your belly. Your belly is then gonna break down into the free fatty acids. Put it into your bloodstream as the free fatty acids. The exact way that you take it from your storage and put it in your bloodstream. Mystery fatty acids.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, that. I was going to ask. I didn't want to interrupt, but if you took my blood, could you tell whether I was releasing fat into my bloodstream from stored fat or whether I had just eaten it? Is there any difference or. It is identical. Once it hits the.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Well, we would be able to, depending on the marker you look at. If you're looking at some particular markets, it'd be identical. We wouldn't be able to differentiate. But if we looked at other food particle stuff, you'd be like, oh, you just ate food. So it's kind of a cheat answer.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But. So there are other things going on in the blood. If I've just eaten. So you can presume.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Totally got it. Yeah. But fundamentally.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But the fat itself is the same.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

If you want to give the. Because you said the same answer for blood glucose. I. I wouldn't know necessarily. If we. You get your blood drawn. I wouldn't know if you just necessarily had, you know, some carbohydrate meal right before it, or if this is just your normal blood glucose. We wouldn't be able to from that marker alone. If I just looked at blood glucose levels, I wouldn't be able to see.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. But I have. God, this is fascinating. I had never thought about this before. But what you're saying is when I. Because there's only two ways for me to get glucose in my blood If I understand this correctly, I eat, and then the carbohydrate is broken down, or I break down my own protein through gluconeogenesis. You're shaking your head for those who are listening. Okay, so how do I get Gl. What are the ways that I can get glucose into my bloodstream?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Certainly, number one, you can eat it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yep.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Any form of carbohydrate, whether that's in the form. So let me give you this real fast. I'll try not to take a tangent. When you have glucose in your blood, we call it glucose or blood sugar. Okay. When we store that glucose, we call it glycogen. Okay? So the glucose is a six carbon molecule. If I stack a bunch of those six carbon molecules together and store them, then we call that glycogen.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, sorry, I should have been more clear. So does it take a different form when I eat it and it gets stored in the muscle? Or is it literally because, for instance, when you say I store glucose, I always think about it as being stored as fat.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. So this is. Let me. Let me just hit with a little bit more chemistry here. So in your muscle, it is stored as glycogen. And in your liver, is that a

[Tom Bilyeu]

different thing than glucose?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

It is the. It is the exact, like. Imagine if we made this, like, physical thing. So imagine you.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So can I say it's parked in the muscle? Because when I think of storage, I think of it transforming.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

No, no, no. Storage is not transformation. Storage is not transformational. It is literally storage. If it was. Let's imagine this is Legos. So you gave me one LEGO block, and there was, you know, six notches on that one LEGO block. Each notch is a carbon. I have one LEGO block, and that LEGO block is glucose floating around, right? And he said, okay, store that. Put that away. Put your Legos away. And you took it in the next Lego and you attached it onto it, and the next LEGO attached it onto it. You could call that entire structure your LEGO block, but each individual one is still its own block. It's just being stored more efficiently. So if your kid is putting away their Legos in their box and they just took all the Legos and dumped them in there, you wouldn't be maximizing the efficiency. If you store them and stack them on top of each other exactly the way they're built, you could get way more in that same box area. Does that make sense?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes. I'm still waiting for.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

That's glycogen. It is saying, yo, rather than Just dumping a bunch of LEGO blocks in our space. Let's stack it together perfectly. Each one is still its own individual unit, but it is all perfectly stacked together. So if you want to break out and open up your. Your storage area and pull one LEGO block out, you can. There's nothing different that's only in the

[Tom Bilyeu]

blood, liver or muscle.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Only in the muscle and the liver.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. And the blood is just.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

It is only. It is never going to be packed together in the blood. It is only in that free forwarding.

[Tom Bilyeu]

My bad.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yes. So in nature, though, we have another word. So if we take muscle glycogen, if it's in an animal, we call it muscle glycogen. If it's in our liver, we call it liver glycogen. If it's in the blood, we call it glucose. In a plant, though, we don't call it glycogen. We have a different term for it. You know what that is?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Carbohydrate starch. Oh, okay. Yep. Makes sense.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

That's what a starch is.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So biologists, same thing in a plant, different name.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Don't go nuts here, but I'm gonna give you. I'm gonna violate some stuff. But just as a framework here, we typically use what we call those shorter forms of carbohydrate. So monosaccharides is. Is the. For glucose, fructose, galactose, things like that, you take polysaccharides, starch, glycogen, things like that. Right. Stored forms, there's monosaccharides, polysaccharides, disaccharides, and all the way down. Okay. Transportation and immediate utilization is done in the monosaccharide form. So you're going to use fructose, glucose as fuel sources for the most part, plants and animals. Right. You're going to use glycogen as a storage vehicle. That's the point. So in a plant, it'll say, yo, we're going to collect a bunch of sunlight and then we're going to breathe in carbon dioxide. The sunlight is where we get the energy from, and we're going to collect the material. The food they're eating is the air. So they're breathing in CO2, breathing out O2. They're collecting their carbons through the air. We can't go through that process. That's called photosynthesis. So our only way to get carbon is to eat the plant who just took all the carbon out of the air and stored it. Or the animal. Yeah, right. We have to eat the thing that did it, right. So now it's going to bring in those carbons one at a time. It's going to stack them together and make the glucose molecule. Then that glucose molecule is going to be running around that plant and it's going to say, great, we brought in more carbon. We have enough to now store that current glucose that's floating around it. So go store that. As a starch, they tend to go down, which means I'm going to store it in the ground, which is tend to be things like root vegetables. So a potato is a starch. Tubers are starches because they're putting all those glucose molecules together and they're burying it underground. If it wants to fruit then or flower, it's going to start breaking down that stored starch back into its monosaccharide. Just like you take down your broken down storage or your storage of in the liver glycogen and you need a little bit of it. You pull one LEGO block out at a time, put it in your blood. It pulls one LEGO block out at a time of its starch, puts it in the plant, sends it back up the tree, goes all the way up to the branches and gets in the flower or the fruit in the form of a monosaccharide. Which is why most of your fruits are actually fructose and glucose. That's the carbon cycle. Right. If the plant wants to store it, it puts it in the root. That's why most root vegetables are starches. If it wants to put it in a more immediate access use, it turns it back into a monosaccharide. That's why if you eat a banana or an apple that's not ripe yet, it tastes terrible because it is mostly still starchy. It tastes sweeter when it has converted those starches into fructose and is now a sweeter flavored monosaccharide.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, hold on, this is so interesting. So I get the root thing. That's their storage mechanism for energy. The fruit will, and, and so they will use the energy stored in the root occasionally. Will they reuse the energy that they store in the fruit?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

I would say no, because the fruit's gone. So it gets even more fun.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So wait, isn't then fruit, because you said they stored in the fruit, if it's available for immediate energy, I assume the fruit is a way for them to pass their seeds.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

There you go.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yep. So the idea is we're, we're exiting, we're, we're letting that thing go.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But, but when it's a root. They are use. They are storing it for its own flowering purposes.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

To make more fruit. Yeah, exactly. And on the way up the chain, by the way.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So same idea. Wow.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

It goes from a polysaccharide to a monosaccharide at the end, Right. But on the way up, it goes to a disaccharide. And in some particular plants, you can stick a needle halfway through them and you can collect that and we call that syrup. So that's why those are.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This is so interesting, right?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

This is why you're like, why the hell do some trees make this unbelievably sweet little thing that we can get out of it? Cannot all plants do all this? It's different. But you're getting the point here, right? So polysaccharide in the bottom stored, convert it into disaccharides, move it up the tree, get it all the way to the end, convert that into monosaccharides, make that a sweet, delicious tasting thing that then other animals will come eat to spread our seeds, put it in their digestive tract, excrete it later throughout the forest and get our seeds out there. Right. We do the same thing. We say store our starch, our glycogen in our liver and our muscle. Keep the optimal amount in blood so that we can power brain activity and transport it back and forth where we want. Don't go too high, don't go too low. Right. You need more. Great. We're just going to kick it either out of muscle in the blood or out of the liver and into the blood. And so the way that you keep your blood sugar optimized is muscle and the liver constantly sort of dripping out glycogen or you eating your own food source to put it back in there. So those are the three ways that you can keep your blood sugar elevated or more consistent. So this is why, again, we say the more high functioning skeletal muscle you have, the little bit better blood glucose control you have is because it's that storage depot that can say, give or take. You have some extra? Give it to me. Great, we'll take it. You need some extra. We can technically give it back. The liver is probably doing most of the giving rather than muscle. Muscle's probably doing most of the taking. But that's really where we're at now when it comes to fat. This is the backup supply.

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, sorry. Before you do that, I need to understand when glucose becomes fat. Because if I overeat glucose, it is going to become fat. And it's my understanding, perhaps erroneous, but it's my understanding that the way that the body pulls the glucose out of my bloodstream so preferentially the muscle will grab it if it needs it, brain will grab it if it needs it, liver will grab it if it needs it. But if none of them need it and it's in the blood, the blood's like got or the body knows. I got to get this out of the bloodstream. And it's going to store it as fat?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

No, not really.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Really? What the hell? My whole world is cumbering. It's all been a lie, Andy.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

It has.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What are you talking about?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

So that process you're describing is called de novo lipogenesis. So this is the formation of new fat out of non fat sources. Conversion from carbohydrate, despite the fact that they're big, long carbon chains. It's not efficient. Not as efficient as it needs to be. You're talking in the order of 5 to 10% is what's going to happen there. What's going to mostly happen is partitioning. Here's what that means. If you were to be in that exact scenario, we have excess blood glucose. You could convert some of that to fat and storage.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Hard to do though, right? What's easier to do is just change the amount of fat that you're burning and shift your metabolic energy demands more towards carbohydrate and lower on fat. So think about that. Now, if you say, look, making up a scenario at rest, you're burning half of your energy from fat, half of it's coming from carbohydrate.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Now you have too much carbohydrate. Body says, yo, yo, yo. We have excess carbohydrates. It's a pain in the ass to store it. It's full pain in the ass to convert it into new fat. Just burn more carbohydrates and start burning less fat. So shift my bias towards more carb burning.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And there's really that much flex in the system.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

That way easier than converting an entire molecule.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Live off of 5,000 calories of Pixie sticks. There's no fat. But I thought that person would get.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Oh, that person will get fat. But how they're shutting down fat burning. They're not necessarily as.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's what I mean. So there is that much flux in the system.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Oh, definitely.

[Tom Bilyeu]

There's so much going on that if I just start cramming my weight. But. Okay, so if they stop burning fat, fair enough. But if they're only intaking sugar, there's. There is no. Okay, so you're. This makes everything. Makes a prediction. If I understand what you're saying correctly, which I may very well not, but if I understand what you're saying correctly, the person that eats only Pixie sticks, they are. Are they gonna get fat?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

How are they gonna get fat? They stop. They stop burning fat, but they're not intaking anything other than glucose.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Sure. But they're not getting rid of anything else. So their fat fat reduction is going nowhere. Right. They have no fat burning. There is some de novo lipogenesis. You can do that process, start sweating at some point.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Like at some point something has to give.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do they just die? Like what? Because you're, you're, you've. You've talked about this.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The body will regulate the life out of blood sugar. It doesn't. It can't have the blood sugar. It's.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Does not want.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't know what word to use, but it will, it will gum up, literally gum up your system. The blood cells start sticking together.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

It's inflammatory at that high of a level. Yeah. It's not good for sure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So, man, I always thought that, that you pulled the glucose out of the bloodstream and put it into fat. Wow.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Again, that can happen. Right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

So there is very hard, super inefficient. So we're probably not the best way of doing that. Yeah.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

So the best way is to simply flex up and down as. As you called it. Where are we getting our fuel sources from?

[Tom Bilyeu]

How are they going to keep getting fat?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Well, they're going to continue to add to that mass. Right. So any extra calories going to go somewhere. And so if, if you're really going to that extreme where literally fat intake is sort of zero. Right. Every energy, every amount of energy they're expelling is coming directly from that carbohydrate, right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

That's all coming in. Any extra small amount of lipogenesis that can occur is just going to add to that total sum. So even if that is a small amount, if you're literally taking this to the extra, the reduction absurdum here, and that is zero, Zero fat burning a small amount of de novo lipogenesis is going to result in a lot of fat gain over enough time.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Wow. But it really does have to go like that.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Now, I'm not aware of any studies that have taken it to like an incredible extreme like that. So perhaps when you get to certain levels, that percentage increases from like 5 or 10%, but in most normal circumstances, people aren't that extreme. Yeah, no.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And look, I get that, and I understand that this is very much just a thought exercise, but it's helping me map the realities of the biology.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yeah. It goes the other direction too, by the way. If you were to go on a very low carbohydrate diet and go on a very high fat diet, that doesn't mean you store extra fat, Right? Because the opposite equation will. Wait a minute. Like we, we tried that game 40 years ago, right? I think that wall's over. Eating more fat again, if calories are balanced, does not result in additional fat mass gain for this exact same reason. What? You're just simply burning fat. You switch over. And this is also why some of the marketing behind that side of the equation is confusing. Give it the most charitable term because I can be burning more fat, but that doesn't mean I'm losing more fat. All I've done is I've shifted my metabolic balance from carbohydrate oxidation to fat oxidation. Great. Fine. Doesn't mean necessarily you're going to lose more fat. Doesn't mean necessarily anything else about performance either. Folks can perform at a very high level physically, even on a moderate amount of carbohydrates or low amount of carbohydrates if their calories are high enough. So you won't, won't necessarily even lose performance by going on a small to low amount of carbohydrates, depending on the exact sport. Some sports are maybe more influenced. But just because you're not eating enough carbs doesn't mean your brain won't function Right. Or things like that. It's like, oh, I need carbs for, you know, or I'll have no blood. Gl. That, that's not true either. Right. So we've seen this equation play out on both sides. You have the flexibility, but it wouldn't work. It wouldn't work only one way. Right. So it wouldn't work just high fat or just high carbohydrates. If it's true on one side, it's. It's gotta be true in the reciprocal as well.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Would it not be easier to get fat, eating fat? Because at least I know that can be stored as fat. So even if I'm in burn mode, if, if I'm in, okay, I'm intaking way too many carbohydrates, so I'm just eating pixie sticks. Again. I, I get that that's an absurd thought experiment, but if I'm just eating Pixie sticks and I'm not intaking fat, very little fat will be created from the carbohydrate itself from the glucose. But some will. Okay, that stacks up. But other than that, like, I'm just burning. So it just becomes that every little bit adds to my body. Still feels like something is going to break down there if you overeat. But setting that aside on the fat side, if I am, I. I'm only intaking fat. So now I switch over and my body's like, okay, I'm just going to burn this because it's all I'm getting. But I, I assume that there's an easy path from dietary fat to stored fat. Is that not true?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Is there an easier path from dietary fat to stored fat? Yeah, it's. It's a direct route there, but it's still not going to matter if total caloric expenditure is balanced.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, no, that I understand. So what I'm holding in my head is a morbidly obese person.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yep.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And I, I would have predicted that that morbidly obese person is closer and closer to eating pure pixie sticks. But what I hear you saying is, actually, that's probably not true. What they're doing is they're obviously over consuming calories, but the calorie that they're having the easier time storing is fat. And so what's going on for them, I think, is what your hypothesis predicts, or your theory, because I'm sure it's well tested predicts, is that they are eating so much carbohydrate that their body switches over to just burning carbohydrates. So Every bit of fat that they get, and they're probably getting a lot is stored as fat. Cool. That that sequence makes sense to me. The sequence that now I'm having a bit of a hard time wrapping my mind around is they're not eating carbohydrates. The body starts burning fat, but they're still over consuming calorically. And so it seems like it would be easy to shuttle the excess fat into fat cells. No?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yeah. So if you want to look at folks who are excessively fat, okay. You'll see actually problems on the carbohydrate side of the equation. You'll see problems on fat equation. If you look at a standard American diet, they are going to be very hypercaloric on both of those. And what typically happens, and we do this in my nutrition class, I've been doing this for 12 years where I have all the folks track their nutrition. What is obnoxiously clear. It's very rare, very rare for any of my college students to ever hit even close to the minimum RDA recommendations for protein intake. Never even come close to it. It would be one or two people per 40 person class that even hits the minimum RDA numbers, which I think are way too low. They're eating way too much of fat and carbohydrate. That's, that's the issue here. So could you find folks who are eating too much fat? Yes. That's easy to come by. Right. If you are looking at any of the accessible food things, they tend to be very, very high in fat. Right. So fast food, any of these things, carbohydrates are even more accessible. You go to any vending machine, it's going to be mostly carbohydrate based things. Right. You're not going to find any protein there. You know, and maybe, maybe they have some high quality protein bars, but that's the best you're gonna hope for. Right. And so you have accessibility problems on both side of that equation. I, you would be, I think, irresponsible to blame it, which is not what you did. But just to clarify, to blame it on either one of those as the primary cause for excess calorie intake. So if their carbohydrates are in check and they're eating more fat, gonna be a problem. If their fat is in check and they're eating too much carb, gonna be a problem. You're gonna find people across our 350 million Americans that are violating that in the droves across all of that spectrum. So I don't know Like, I'm not sure what the. It's. I guess they'll say, this is kind of why I'm generally like, I'll just say laissez faire again because I'm like, if you're eating too much, I don't like. For 350 million of you, there's a hundred of you doing it this way, 100 of you doing it that way, 100 million, you're both doing it wrong. They got big problems on both sides of the equation if you want a solution. Okay, great. Now we're talking tactics. We know where we have to get to. I think it's generally best to flag yourself against protein for all the reasons we talked about. And then whatever other system helps you personally, there will be hundreds of millions of people who function better on this system or that system or anything else because there's so many of us. And now it's coming down to things like practicality, execution, adherence. And if you want to make arguments that some systems are more or less effective than others, great, we can do that. But fundamentally, like at this level of physiology, it's not super important at the global scale, if that makes sense.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It does, because they're all making a fundamental mistake. But for my own understanding of biology, I have another question, which is who. Who's going to get fatter? The person that, and let's assume calories are the same in either scenario. The person that eats a all carbohydrate and the person that eats all fat. Who's going to get fatter. If they're both eating 10,000 calories a day, let's say, and they're sedentary, if

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

you're gonna lock in calories and you're locking protein, I would say you're gonna have very minimal differences between the two groups.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

And we have evidence on that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Understand?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yeah. Because again, if you look at whether you want to pull these randomized control trials or they take people through this and they put them on very high carb or very low, they get to the same place.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. So the mechanism by which the glucose over consuming person gets fat, is that the little bit of lipogolysis, I forget what you call that. The, the turning glucose into fat, that. What is it called again?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

De novo lipogenesis.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, I'm never gonna remember that.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Lipo, lipo, like lipolysis, like fat, like lipid. Genesis is making of creation, so it's creation of fat.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If it was lipogenesis, I could get behind it. But you throw another de novo.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

De novo new of new. So you're making new fat. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, that just seems like it would be a much slower process. But you're saying, no, I'm gonna let go of this.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

I don't know. I think this is pretty fun stuff to talk about personally. To hell with them. They don't like, I can't wrap my head around it. Depends on what you mean by time. Right. So are we looking at this at the end of a 16 week trial or six month trial or a six year trial? So yeah, with six years down the road, like is a little bit of speed difference not gonna matter, right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Really?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yeah, it's just like, that's fast enough. If you want to look at like a six week change, you might pick something up. Six day change for sure. But what you're talking about generally is years of work here. And so by that point, subtle differences in speed are going to be equated for.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Very, very interesting. Okay, so I legitimately feel like my understanding of fat just leapt forward. Give me the same breakdown now on muscle. So unlike fat, which does not require a stressor to force my body to. Well, you're going to say with adding muscle, it's unique and then I have to go work my ass off in the gym. I am never going to. I can't just eat a bunch of protein and add a bunch of muscle. I wish.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Not true.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Really? What?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Totally not true.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So Arnold Schwarzenegger could get to his size just by cramming chicken breasts.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

No, no, no, no, no. I didn't say maximize. I didn't say optimize. You said you can't add muscle by just my protein. 100.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Really?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

100?

[Tom Bilyeu]

How much? Give me a percentage. 2%, 15%.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Oh, you mean she was a total muscle mass? Yes. Well, it would be an asymptote. So whether.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't know what that means.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Meaning the first minute you do it, it's going to be much higher by day five, that'll be lower by month five returns total? Well, yeah, of course, that's what asymptote means. Well, it's. Asymptote is a, is a line that goes sharper, more vertical as you get

[Tom Bilyeu]

closer to the end over time is how they summed it up.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Anyway, Got it. Yep.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Diminishing returns is, Is another way to. That's an asymptote.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Right, understood.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

So this is classic, classic data from probably the mid-1990s looking at protein synthesis. And what you'll see is some cool things if you simply do a bout of resistance. Okay, we'll back up at all times. You are actually going through protein synthesis, so you're making new proteins right now you're also going through protein degradation. So anabolic is when the net result, the protein balance is positive. Catabolic is when the protein balance is net negative. Right. So right now, I could biopsy you. You would be going through some protein synthesis and you would be going through some protein breakdown. At rest, though, most likely you're going through more breakdown than you are synthesis. So your protein balance is probably net negative, which means you are technically catabolic right now. If it was the opposite, you'd be anabolic. Okay, great. So one of the things that happens is when you go through a bout of exercise, strength training, you go from a net balance of negative to a net balance of positive. Now, it's not much, but it is technically positive. The exact same thing happens by just eating protein that is enough alone. Eating a bolus of protein right now would take you from a net negative to a net positive in this next few minutes to hours, without question. If you then do a bout of exercise and eat the protein, the effects are additive. So you take the exact amount of benefit you got from protein, the exact amount of benefit they stack on top of each other, and you get a double bump there. If you add in carbohydrates to that meal, it is another additive effect. So you get up there right now, that's acute. That is like literally right now we go do it. We biopsy you. You go do that intervention, and I biopsy you after that. The protein synthesis process is not necessarily 100% predictive of net muscle gain eventually. Right? There's. Science is not perfect. So just because I can measure the rate of incorporation of new amino acids in you, that's not the exact same number. So you asked for a percentage number. If I told you it increased protein synthesis by 25%, that would not mean you gain muscle 25%. It is a. It is a small number. And there is no actual good relationship between that protein synthesis number and the resulting amount of whole muscle. You'll have eight weeks later. There's no number to give on that one. Um, it wouldn't equate. In fact, the protein synthesis N numbers are gonna be greatly exaggerated. Um, I'm gonna go so far off track here, but it's your job to hold. Pull me back in a second. This is a really good another. This is a psa. It's my turn to give a psa. When you start going into to molecular biology, folks, Those numbers do not translate into whole human existence. And what I mean is, if you go to protein synthesis, I. I just gave you the example. A 25% increase in protein synthesis may result in a 3% increase in muscle growth. Eight weeks later, you go back up the chain and you would go to cell signaling. If I was measuring the gene expression and I saw a 20% increase in gene expression, I would say that basically nothing happened. Some molecules need to go up 3 or 4, 100% before it's actually physiologically relevant. So you can see a paper, somebody can post something or share something and tell you, oh, this mechanism, this gene, this signaling activity increased by 80%. And that could be total bullshit. The science could be great, but it could mean absolutely nothing, because we know that that actual marker needs to be up 300% before it's clinically meaningful. And so this is why when we say things like be very careful of mechanism and don't let mechanism be more important than whole outcomes. If we have whole outcomes. If we don't have whole outcomes, meaning how much stronger do they actually get? How much longer do they actually live? How much more muscle? When we measure the actual muscle mass, those are always more important than molecular mechanism. If we don't have those, we can look towards mechanism. That's great. That's insightful. If I'm creating a drug, fine, look towards mechanism. I don't have whole body data. But don't let people trick you with these molecular numbers because they don't scale to human existence. If that whole little tangent sort of makes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It does. It makes a lot of sense. So, okay, the punchline is that I'm gonna have a hard time eating my way there. It does. At a cellular level, it really does have. It does a response. But I'm still gonna have to go get the additive benefit of. You don't have to actually lifting.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

If you.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What do you mean by that?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Think about a sumo wrestler. Do you think they have more or less or the same amount of muscle mass as you and I?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I think they have a lot more, but I don't think they would ever get that just from eating. I think they have to train. Now, it may not be with weights.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Sumo wrestlers are not really traditionally lifting weights. Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Fighting.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

They're in there like, okay, I'll give you. I'll give you a better example. Pick the random person on the street that weighs 300 pounds.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yep.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

More or less muscle than you and I. More, no doubt. Not doing a single thing of exercise,

[Tom Bilyeu]

carrying all that fat.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Okay. They're walking, right? You get a little bit of there. But mostly they're sedentary. So is the amount of walking. You spent 20 minutes trying to convince me you have to train your ass off to lift to gain muscle. And now you're also making the argument that just walking around.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Damn you anti Calvin.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

It's not stacking up right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's really interesting, man.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

So it's both, right? You're correct. You walk around with a 150 pound backpack on. That's going to stimulate some muscle growth eventually.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Right. But you're saying that the their muscle mass is more attributable to just the massive amount of calories.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

I'm not saying necessarily more has to be protein. Protein. I'm saying it is some part. Is some part.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Actually people looked at this. Are there numbers to give on this in terms of what number the amount of muscle that an obese person ads?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Okay, all right, so check this out. I'm trying to decide how much I can tell you on this one or not. Because we have a.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Because this is like secret.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Is this like aliens nice to science. You're not supposed to talk about results while they're in review.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So you're just gonna say you're not supposed to talk about results. The first rule of science. You don't talk about science.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yeah, got it. Here's what I can say. So my colleagues and I have. I'm sorry, I'm just gonna apologize my co authors right now. It's impact theory. I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to go above and beyond. Right. So if you look at the national databases, so whether there's a thing called the UK Biobank, there's one here in America called NHANES. And these are these national databases, these are 10 to 20, 30 year studies where they collect people every single year and they put them in and they make these data openly available. And if you look at things like that, you will see that muscle mass has kind of an inverted U regarding mortality risk. Such that if you are under muscled and you add muscle mass, your mortality risk goes down. And then if you add too much muscle, it is detrimental. There. That does not stack up to me at all. Doesn't make any sense. Right. There's just no way adding muscle mass is deleterious outside of very rare bodybuilders and things like that. But these are the not the folks in these national databases, right? These are Mayo Clinic folks and things like that. And so my colleague Tommy Wood and I and Dan Garner and some other Guys dove in and said, I don't know if this is true. So we ran some modeling against these things, and one of our papers is in review right now. And one of the things that we found was if you look at the association between strength and muscle mass in these databases, you will basically see none. You will also see that these folks have almost no connection between their muscle mass and their physical activity. Meaning the folks in these groups added their muscle mass not through physical activity, which says they added it somewhere else. Food. By being larger, you tended to have more muscle, which made you at a higher risk of dying. It had nothing to do with the muscle mass. We did, though, see an association, a direct association between the strength training and brain health, which is the first finding really, ever to find a direct causal link between strength training and brain health. Not mental health, physical brain health. In addition, what's called the strength residual. And so if I take your muscle mass and I look at how strong you should be just based on your muscle mass, again, big database stuff, and then I actually measure your muscle mass, the residual is the difference between your predicted strength at that given muscle mass and your actual strength. The farther you are off that line, then the higher your risk of. Of death becomes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Hmm. So there's a standard for the amount of strength you would expect with muscle. Muscle mass. And are you saying that people that gain their muscle mass through just massive caloric intake, they get the mass, but they don't get the strength? And that.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

So they. These people are not. The way that we phrase it scientifically is they're not accruing their muscle mass from training. That's what's happening. I don't know how they're doing it, but there's not a lot of options left. So that. Going back to your original question, I don't know what number that is. I don't know what protein these folks like. We could go back and I guess probably we run that pretty quickly. But the point is, if you eat more and even if you don't exercise at all, you're gonna add some muscle. It's gonna be there. Now, are you adding all lean muscle? No, no, no, no, no. Are you adding some muscle, though? Yeah. Are you adding mostly fat? Yes. This is not a good way. Similar note, if you're trying to gain muscle and you want to gain lean muscle, which means you want to gain as much muscle as you can with the least amount of fat gain, what you don't want to do is eat excessive calories. And so the typical number we'll say is like maybe 10 to 20% calorie increase. Don't do the whole thing of like, oh, my standard calories are 2,000 a day, but I'm trying to bulk up, so I'm going to eat 6,000 calories. Great. If you're willing to have a whole bunch of fat come along for the ride, like, go for it. If you wanna add as much lean muscle, like, you're probably looking at a 500 calorie increase, maybe making sure protein's super high, training that height, that's probably gonna put you. Now there's actually a couple of studies that are being run right now trying to figure out like what that exact percentage is, but those data are not out yet. But it's probably something in that neighborhood of 20 or so percent caloric increase, um, rather than like what some folks will do, which is actually like a doubling or even tripling of their calories. So all that to come back to the original point of, yeah, just eating protein probably does add to a lot of muscle growth. Um, it's also adding protein alone is not gonna bring a lot of fat along for the ride either. So it's, it's a pretty fail, like, easy way to go about it. A 1 gram per pound of body weight is a starting place. You would have no issue going way higher than that though. So I, I would typically say if you are a hard gainer, one of my first stops would be we're going way up in protein. We're gonna do some other stuff. Timing wise, nutrition and just other things. Training wise, of course. But going way up in protein is like, there's a very low risk potential for reward.

[Tom Bilyeu]

From a protein perspective, does animal versus plant protein matter at all?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yes, everything matters. Where it starts to matter is when you are below or not at sufficient. Where it matters the most is when you're below or not at sufficient protein intake. When you're at that 1 gram per pound or higher, those things start to matter a lot less. Uh, in fact, there's a, a, a study came out very recently in the last few months directly comparing this. And once you hit that number, they saw virtually no difference in amount of muscle gained over the animal versus plant protein. Which is to say you have options. If you are like my students and you're eating, you know, 60 grams of protein a day, 80 grams of protein a day, the protein quality and the protein type starts to matter a lot more. So my general recommendation is if you want to be very diligent and pay attention to your food Intake and really plan things out, then a plant based approach can be fine. If you want to just not worry about it though, just eat a ton of plant based protein and you're going to be fine. Most likely. As much as we can tell if that's the strategy you're trying to take is plant based man.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So fascinating. Okay, talk to me now about I want to be optimal. I want to add like real quality muscle. I want to get strong. We talked earlier about some of the protocols in terms of 20 to 25 sets per muscle group per week. That'll make sense. Give me a little bit more information about the protocol especially as it relates to diet.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yep. Great. So setting that protein as a minimum

[Tom Bilyeu]

number there probably even going higher on on that again. So I eat a lot of eggs.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yep.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Egg whites, whole eggs only, chicken breast. Like if I'm. If I'm open to animal protein. So assume I'm not trying to do if plant is better for adding muscle, definitely let me know. But I'll eat whatever source of protein you tell me I should whey protein, casein, whatever. I'll do it. But what's that optimal like thing?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Sure. We actually ran that study the egg white versus whole eggs. Ran through that thing in general many similar findings. This was only one study by the way. We'll probably need this to be repeated with different circumstances. There's just very limited things you can ever glean from one paper. But in that particular case, the whole eggs outperformed the egg whites.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting. Even though I'm gonna intake a lot more calories per gram of protein because of the fat.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yeah. But you also now have a lot of the nutrients coming along for the ride. You also have fat soluble vitamins that are needed and you're having the fat just more calories. You're trying to go up in scale. So if you wanted to go egg white only, that's fine. It could totally be done. But I don't worry about that too much. I mean if you want to do a thing where you have a handful of whole eggs and then add some egg white to that to just increase there while keeping calories under control, that's a strategy as well. I typically am just mostly a whole egg sort of person. And then I will keep my fat a little bit lower in other places so that my protein can stay high to not go to again too excessively high and calories. So what you're gonna wanna do is to set that protein marker as set number one. Then you need to make sure that your micronutrients are under control. So if we have any blood work to go off, we're gonna get all that stuff dialed in, whether that is from Whole Foods and or supplementation stuff, ideally mostly from Whole Foods. That's the target, right? Let physiology do what it does.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Magic about protein powders.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Totally fine with them. Love them. Absolutely love whey. It tends to be very digestible, it is very practical, it is very transportable. So we can use it on the road when have other limitations and things like that. It tends to make it easier for people to hit their protein targets and it's, it's very, very effective for, for muscle growth. It's also not required. If you hate it, you don't have to use it at all. We will use it pretty often unless somebody requests not to for all those practical reasons. It is no more magical outside of the fact that it's very easily digested and absorbable. But Whole Foods can get you there as well, no problem. If your total protein intake throughout the day is equivalent, then your protein timing doesn't matter that much. So it doesn't matter that you have your protein immediately post workout or things like that. As long as by the end of the 24 hour period you get to the same total amount of protein, you're good. And so that's when I say like it's easily digestible, fast absorbing, things like that, great. But if you don't like it or have some reason why you don't want to use it, no problem. We can get there through Whole Foods just as easy. Or the inverse if you're just like yo, like I love it, great. I certainly have seen people that are, you know, five to six servings a day of that easily like you can get there. Like I don't think you necessarily need to, but um, we also deal with some professional athletes that are 300 pounds so that the numbers are a little bit different for them. But that's even for moderate people, 185 pound, 200 pound sort of folks. So I just see it as a viable option. We consider it to be powdered food basically and nothing really more than that. So highly effective protein and total calories there. Micronutrients, getting where it needs to be for your unique physiology is where we would go. We need to have enough carbohydrate to support training and then to support and maximize recovery. Because if we're gonna be training harder, we wanna not just do the bare minimum, we wanna maximize recovery. So what you're looking at there in terms of numbers probably something in the ballpark of 3 to 6 grams per kilogram of body weight. Roughly. It would be a carbohydrate number. So if you weigh, you know, 180 pounds, um, you're probably in looking at the neighborhood of 350 grams carbohydrates a day, like plus or minus, something like that. Um, if you're training really, really hard. Some of our, like our, our competitive UFC fighters we're training multiple times a day. 6, 700 calories or 6, 700 grams of carbide a day is totally normal.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Jesus. Just because the, the amount of other training, high intensity workout that they're doing.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yep.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We also have, folks have keto athletes.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

I don't think we have any at

[Tom Bilyeu]

the current moment because it's not very effective.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

I can't ever remember a circumstance where I told somebody who's not on a ketogenic diet that they needed to go on one. And we certainly had plenty that came in and said, this is what I want to do, help me do it better. Which we have. No problem. I'm not going to talk them out of that. That's what they want to do. But I, I have not ever seen that. And I can't honestly envision myself ever taking an athlete and saying you need to go on a ketogenic diet because

[Tom Bilyeu]

the rate at which you can liberate fat.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And spark it.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Well, even just from a performance perspective, there's no evidence whatsoever that is performance enhancing. So now I'm changing your diet even for endurance? No, I've never seen data to support that. Um, if somebody said that they feel like they perform or had data, I'd believe them. But physiology is physiology. Um, we don't also work with endurance like ultra endurance runners or anything like that. Um, just candidly we don't. Not that I wouldn't, I just haven't had a lot of those come across our desk. Probably handful maybe. Um, in that case, I would think about it more seriously. But for the sports we typically work in, the NHL, the NFL, Major League Baseball, things like that, it's not going to be a great fit for those folks unless they again came in really hell bent on doing it. We'd help them get better. But I'm not going to change. It's a very hard thing to change to. There's going to be an adaptive phase. I'm going to miss six weeks, six months of high, higher quality training to just get them right back to the same performance. We doesn't make any sense to do that so for non athletes though, boy, there's a ton of potential sense to do that if that's any easier system for you on the carbohydrate thing as well. We also have people that do very well on much lower amount of carbohydrates. 200 grams, 150. I personally I don't see any drop in performance with my own training and in my own ability to add muscle mass. Even at like 100 grams a day. I'm totally fine there. I don't feel any drop in performance. I'm not obviously training as hard or as much as our pro athletes are, but I have no issue putting on muscle at that low of a number. So it can be anywhere up and down and then basically you fill in fat behind all those things. So once you set protein, once you set carbohydrates, you can fill in fat. You do want to make sure you don't go too low. That can be a problem. So if you're getting that area of concern like we'll, we'll step in for sure being too low will be problematic. Um, being too high is only really an issue of just gaining weight too fast. But there's really no harm to having extra fat. Um, there's lots of many important benefits of having fat in the diet for muscle growth.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Hmm. For sure. Have you seen people on a hard, a high carb diet, regardless of exertion, have inflammatory issues?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Depend. Define high

[Tom Bilyeu]

north of 300 grams.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Not necessarily in general. I wouldn't say that if you're, if you're looking at more of like if you're north of 5 to 7 grams per kilogram body weight and you don't have any physical activity, then there, I would be much more likely to see an association with that. Um, that is also to say I don't think many people have reason to be that high. They're not training very hard. Whether or not it's causing additional inflammation or not, it's certainly not necessarily needed.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Hmm.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

So I, I would not even for our folks that like in our executive program that they don't exercise much. Um, I'm, I'm not putting them at 600 grams carbohydrate and I'm, if they are, I'm probably trying to talk em outta that. Um, even if their inflammatory markers look fine, like I'm probably pulling them down in that pretty good.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why would you wanna pull them down? What's the knock on effect you're worried about?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

It is very easy to over consume carbohydrates. Because of availability. So my concern would be in that direction. We're also going to be checking for other markers of dysfunction. If they're totally fine, as I said earlier, we don't coach labs. We coach people if they feel great, if their performance is great. And by performance, I mean their physical performance, their cognition, their focus, their energy, their ambition, all that is exact. Their sex drive is all where they want it to be. And they feel amazing. And they're at 600 grams carbs a day, like, totally fine. I have no issue with that. If they don't feel great, though, or have something going on and the other things we tried aren't working, then I might say, all right, let's pull the carbohydrates down a little bit, because you don't have that energy demand, so why be there? Lastly, if they're at that number and they're not hypercaloric, that probably means something else is very, very, very, very low. And that would be more my concern. Not that the carbohydrates are evil, but the fact that it's taking the place of something. Either fat is way too low or hopefully not protein.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Makes sense. Earlier you mentioned that weightlifting was good for brain health. Why?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

So I could spit out to you some different mechanisms. But why it's actually mechanistically improving brain health, I don't necessarily know.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Very intriguing. Okay, I have to ask this question. The thing that has held me back in developing my own physique, nothing has slowed me down more than injuries. I know it's going to be impossible for you to diagnose, but when you see people that have routine injuries, what is your sort of go to checklist for figuring out what's causing the problem.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

So, number one, you want to start actually, Occam's razor here. If your shoulder hurts, you're probably doing something with your shoulder it doesn't want to do right now. What is that case? Look, I would love to tell you. Well, there's this, like, secret hidden stressor in your immune system. The reality is you're probably doing some shit with your shoulder that it doesn't like. That's going to solve the overwhelming majority of people's problems. Now we have a quest. Now we're going on a little a game going. Okay, why now? Is the pain localized? Is it there? Is the injury in the same spot of the pain? Yes or no? Okay, we're going to find that out. What's causing the pain? I can just like earlier in our practice, like, we. We don't resolve symptoms I don't really go after symptoms. We go after, if we can, what's causing the symptoms. Sometimes you have to remove symptoms to allow you to then work backwards. So no problem. But the reality of it is I'm not just gonna say, put an injection in there, not that I can. Again, I'm not a medical doctor, but I wouldn't advise just resolving the pain. Don't just take Advil, blah, blah, blah if you need to right now because you can't work, you can't sleep, cool, no problem. But that's not your long term solution. You're just masking the pain. We need to work backwards and figure out why. Is the pain there? Is it actually there in the thing? Let's just say your shoulder, or is it actually an injury you had to your neck? Is it an injury you had to your foot? What happened that caused some sort of altering of positioning or movement or stress load that then resulted in a net chain up into your shoulder? That's almost certainly the cause of dysfunction. Right? It typically is an acute injury or something like that that leads to some sort of compensation pattern that then results in wear and tear somewhere else.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Right?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

It's four tires on a car and if you have 80% of your weight in the back left one, it just wears down. But the problem is not the tire. You can keep replacing the tire all you want, but until you figure out the car is off balanced, you're going to keep wearing something down there, right? And then the left tire blows, so you put another one on and then that one hurts, and then you put more stress in the front left and that one, you get it, you get it. You just keep running the circles. And so we would need to step back and look and say, okay, like what is the actual pain? Is it soft tissue, is it joint, is it muscle, is it a sharp pain? Is something damaged in there or is it actually movement based? Is it only happening when you're doing a certain activity or is it all day long? So this is a whole evaluation you would go through, much like a physical therapist would take you through to figure out what's causing it. And then from there, once we can identify what we think is actually the core problem, then we go on a mission to actually solve that with things like, hey, my shoulder just started aching. It tends to be a pattern, a groove pattern. So what I mean by that is this, there can be an injury there that can also be an injury that's long gone. But pain is sensory and so that can be a learned signal. And so what we need to do is desensitize the signal and teach the brain we're not in pain. Stop protecting. That's all you're doing. The brain signal is telling you you're in potent, you're in pain, protect. Because it thinks something's injured, but sometimes even when the injury is gone, it continues to send that signal. Not typically the case in the shoulder, though it could be. That is very common in things like the low back. Like low back pain, low back pain, despite nothing being wrong. It is a learned signal that you need to desensitize, and you see a lot of the chronic pain going away for forever. One if they are in a bad position, but the other one would be, again, the pain signaling one. So for the shoulder, there was no, like, acute injury there, you said. Right. It was just more of like a.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I've had trap problems. That's been my chronic thing. So this is the first time I'm having a problem with my shoulder. Historically, it's been my traps, specifically my left trap.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Okay. Left trap, right shoulder and right shoulder for sure. Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Like, that's.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

This is how it goes. Right. So then we would walk backwards to figure out what's the dysfunction in the left trap? Why is that happening? Is it simply motor control? Okay, great. Then we fixed that, and that problem's there. Is it actually something else going on? So is the left trap dysfunctional? Because actually it's the lower trap that's off. Is it maybe the rhomboid or infraspinatus? Is something else happening there that's pulling the rectum, and you feel the pain in your left trap, and you're getting that work done and massaged and rolled out. But the dysfunction is actually happening in the shoulder girdle. That's the problem. Right. I'll give you an example. One of the professional athletes I worked with, Tatiana Suarez, UFC fighter, undefeated. Neck pain. Neck pain. Neck pain. Right. Well, we started having all kinds of back problems because she actually had an acute injury to the neck. The shoulder blades are being protective, so they are pulled way down and tight. And so she's constantly right here, which is straining the neck, which is straining low back. Right. So having to work back through the chain, starting with the low back, resolving that pain to let the traps or the shoulder blades relax a little bit, to let the traps relax a little bit, to let the neck finally go through its healing process. Right. So you have to kind of come backwards and figure out, is there a starting place that I can get to my guess is with your left trap, it would be like, probably wasn't something injured in there, but you probably had some sort of again, what we'll globally call dysfunction. This could be weakness, could be a firing sequence. It just could be neural activation not on at the right time. Um, lastly, it could be a compensatory pattern because of some activity. So every time you go to lift weights or do something like that, something else is pulling in the wrong direction with the shoulder specifically. Also, the very last thing we would evaluate is sleep. So the sleeping position you're in, obviously when you if you're a side sleeper and you're rolling in that position, not necessarily bad. But the mattress may not be fitting perfectly for your shoulder and that may be contributing to it as well. So lots of things we could tinker around with there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Brother. This has been so fascinating. Where can people follow you and learn more?

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Sure, my social media, Twitter and Instagram, Dr. Andy Galpin. Those are pretty much exclusively science communication. So, like, I don't do anything else on that. But if you like to hear about science and this kind of science, that's what I use those for. And then any links to any of the companies that I have the our sleep company, Absolute Rest or Rapid Health and Performance and all that stuff, you can Google it or I think it's all on my personal website, andygalpin.com, but it's not really what I do with my time mostly. So it's probably all there if you Google it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I love it. All right, everybody, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.

[Dr. Andy Galpin]

Peace.

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