Transcript

Most Replayed Moment: The Fastest Way To Lose Fat Without Losing Muscle! - Dr Andy Galpin

0:00 Uh I've definitely grown up my whole life thinking that the way that you burn fat Is by running. Hm. I mean this is what most people think, right? They think you want to burn fat around here, the belly fat, the best way to do is go for a run.

0:16 And a lot of people have very little luck with that and end up beating themselves up. So to close off on this conversation, I'd like To hear your take on that. You need to think about fat loss. In a broader

0:31 approach than most people give it to. What's this say when you say fat loss. Let's get specific. What we're meaning is we're losing fat. And ideally we're preserving muscle.

0:42 That's what that's what we typically want. Okay. We're also talking about Losing fat so that it stays off. As long as possible.

0:51 Those are baked into that phrase, but oftentimes forgotten. So the advice I'm gonna give you is with those two assumptions in mind. You're trying to keep as much lean mass as you can and you're trying to make this a successful journey and not something you have to repeat again time and time. Totally, right? Yo yo dieting. In fact, one of the more

1:10 I probably the highest most cited paper I've ever published was on Yo yo dieting. Like a review article on that. So you can you can go read that. People love that paper.

1:21 I was just a co-author. Um Jackson wrote that paper. Um so credit goes to Jackson for that. Um But Making sure you're paying attention.

1:30 Those parameters in mind. How do I lose weight? You can look across meta analyses. uh and review articles and you will see the number one predictor of long term Successful weight loss. And by weight loss I mean fat loss.

1:44 Is always adherents. It's adherence to your workout program and it's adherents to your nutrition program. So step number one, before we worry about Any change in diet.

1:57 we sort of start arguing about which method of exercise is best before we start really going way down the line to things like genetic testing, like you're really wasting your time here. And a lot of that stuff. Especially if you're not paying attention. to what's gonna make you adhere.

2:13 the longest amount of time. In fact, if you just stopped right there. That's enough for most people. Can you put yourself in a position Where

2:22 You're able to feel abundant. With your nutrition approach. And notice I'm I'm trying not to say diet here. Should be a nutritional approach. You have a balance between living life and flexibility, but then also figuring out what triggers you and maybe you don't have a trigger, maybe you can be more flexible, maybe you need more stringent, like all the things that go into it. You gotta figure out a system.

2:40 So you're not people will not be on a diet very long. Collectively. Right. On average. Diets don't work. quote unquote for those exact reasons, right? You gotta get to a caloric deficit somehow.

2:51 But you gotta do that in a way where you still are happy and sustainable. Totally, right? And you still feel energy. And you're you're there and that it's working for you, right? And that's different for every physiology. Okay, great. And you gotta meet the exercise system the same thing, right? If you hate running

3:07 There's no reason you don't have to run a step. to lose a ton of weight. If you love running You should run. If you hate lifting weight, fine. I can work with any parameter you give me if all we're concerned about is preserving lean muscle mass and losing fat over long term.

3:21 That's really What we have to to consider the most. Okay, now within that. Does that mean every training and nutrition program is the same? No no no, not at all. There are fundamental differences. Here's the

3:31 problem to think about. If I said hey You're gonna do the same training program the rest of your life. You'd probably be like, Whoa. Yeah.

3:41 But if I told you that with nutrition People are like, Well yeah, of course. Like there's Mm. You know, magic diets that do like no.

3:51 Keto, great. Meta training, great, high carb, great, great, great. You can do'em all. They can all work for you. Some people Taking on gluten helps. Some people go great, great, great, sure. All of it is possible. Right. We come from very different backgrounds.

4:05 I if you look at any of the research, for example Like a a really interesting point. On genetic testing. If you're not taking account genetic background on that, genetic testing for Things like nutrition, precision nutrition is entirely worthless.

4:21 Because we see classic markers. Are associated with say more effective Um carbohydrate utilization or fat utilization or or body composition. And they might predict uh a decent percentage of variance in

4:35 European Caucasians. You apply those exact same things to A West African or East African and those variants go to zero. Hm. People forget that part when they start talking genetic testing.

4:46 They have not been validated across all ethnic backgrounds and the ones that have have shown they range from like forty percent variants to zero. So like really like you're way, way, way ahead of the cart here paying attention to things that just do not matter. We gotta get you on a system that works. Okay, great.

5:05 For some people that might be more nutritionally based. Right, you can lose And preserve muscle mass really well by just going Decently high on protein. And then regulating your calories. The example I gave you earlier.

5:17 You wanna go more carbs, less fat, great, you wanna the opposite? Like we can play those levers. No problem. Okay. What's your problem though? Oh, I struggle with um car cravings. Okay, great. Oh, I struggle with hunger pangs. Okay, great. I struggle with

5:31 Okay. Well then we're gonna make those decisions based on more this, more than that, based on like where's your pain point? Where's your problem? I struggle with the f okay, great. I have to Now we're personalizing, now we're individualizing it based on things that are gonna matter. orders of magnitude. More than other things.

5:46 that I've just talked about, right? That stuff will trompet. Exercise is the same thing. Maybe you l you hate exercise. Okay, great. Maybe we can get you to walk a few times a day and we'll get most of our fat loss through nutrition. Maybe the opposite. You love training but poof man, you just struggle to eat

6:02 Whatever, or not eat something. All right, great. Maybe we'll play the game more with you know, willpower will push the pace on our exercise. High intensity. Fine, low intensity, fine, weights.

6:12 Great. Cardio's great. Surfing. Great. Like I I I don't zone six t I don't care. All of it can be done.

6:20 Okay, some of the foundational things that tend to be consistent. For those two things. On most people is You need to make sure protein is adequate. Hard to maintain muscle mass.

6:32 With lower protein. Especially if we're going hypochloric. So keep Protein high. You wanna do something revolving strength training?

6:41 Least once a week. For the same exact reasons. Something that makes you burn a lot of calories? Long duration, high intensity either way. That's all you really have to do. If you can do that stuff consistently.

6:53 Over time you're gonna get there. you're gonna be just fine. Um where we see problems are people that Put themselves in a positions of scarcity. What do you mean by scarcity for anyone that doesn't know that? Depriving themselves of the pri you feel like you're never good to do the thing you want to do.

7:10 Totally. Which causes the the problem of consistency and inherentness over time. Right. So making sure you do that. I personally Have some go to standards. I Like to do, I'll happily share that with you.

7:24 Um, I tend to like to have a decent balance between kind of our anaerobic Strength training. High heart rate stuff and our um more steady state longer duration. So so if someone's gonna be able to work out three times per week.

7:37 I'm probably doing one thing where we're going long duration. call it a hike, call it a swim, call it a run, whatever we can do. And then the other two days I'm probably doing a combination of lifting And then probably finishing with some high heart rate. Thing, right? So we'll do like a little bit of strength and hypertrophy muscle growth work.

7:54 And then we'll do a circuit. or an aerosol bike or some sprints or like what what can we get you into is like really, really hard. If I can get you in an environment where you're working out with some other human I love that. Is there any reason why you do the strength first and then Absolutely.

8:10 That's a great question. If you do strength training before Endurance work. Your strength training will not compromise your endurance. In fact, sometimes it

8:20 Exacerbates. If you do your endurance First. You're gonna be more fatigued. You're gonna lose strength.

8:27 This will have worse performance in your strength training. What's the most important thing we haven't spoken about? You know, if there was one more thing you could add of all the things you know that would allow Jennifer, who's a thirty four year old single mother or Dave who's a

8:42 Black cab driver in London, the average person. I think It is exciting. What's coming in the world. of human health.

8:53 And I think it's helpful for people to know that. stuff because a lot of the challenges we're facing Any worse? We have things that are Going to be possible pretty soon at

9:06 Kinda the stuff I'm talking about. This idea of precision exercise. Precision nutrition. It's not really available to many people. Too expensive.

9:16 Excellent. We're gonna cross those barriers pretty soon. We are working on a project right now called the Human Digital Twin. So this is a combination of you know, a couple of my companies, so the sleep company absolute rest.

9:29 Um our blood work company Vitality Blueprint. Springbok. Um there's another company called Axial Force. That actually has four sensors in your shoe. And we can see early changes. Potentially in gate.

9:43 So how you're walking? Which could potentially and and research is needed here, but potentially be early signs of Parkinson's development? Neurological disorder, so we'll see this in gate before we'll see this in symptoms. companies that are involved in this entire thing.

9:57 We can take all those data. We're actually doing this right now. Uh put them together and make what's called a digital twin. This allows us to make your physiology and so from our perspective at vital vitality, we've got all your blood work and molecular biomarkers.

10:12 From absolute rest, we've got your sleep. We've got your movement patterns. We can actually work with another company to watch you physically move and do those stuff. We can take your physiology and upload it. Then from there we can run endless simulations. of combinations of nutrition and training and supplementation. Medicine.

10:27 Movement. Daytime Patterns, sunlight, water. All those things and figure out really quickly how you're going to respond the best for whatever outcome we want.

10:39 It's not ready at all right now. But we're actually again running it right now, we'll have our first Cohort done. Probably in the next week or so. Yeah, really, really soon.

10:49 I don't know how well the model's gonna be the first time through it. I don't know if our group's gonna be the best at it. It doesn't matter. But this is clearly gonna be something the world is capable of. Uh, as we get better at being Human sensors.

11:03 And we can bring those data in, uh we're gonna be able to deploy things like this and say, Hey, yo This is most likely to work for you. The digital twin is already being used for like the heart. Uh it's it's in place. We have the digital twin of the the kidneys is is as well, uh the lungs are coming soon, the heart is coming pretty soon. There's lots of groups. I'm I'm not involved in any of those projects.

11:22 But that's it's coming on board. So the ability to not have to guess anymore? And most importantly, try. I tried this for six weeks, it didn't work. I tried this for nine. That's gonna go away really fast. Great.

11:35 You still have to go do all the work. The technology won't work out for you. Well we have some stuff that'll do that too. Um What's the cost though? Like when you were saying all of that, I go Do you know what I mean? We spent the entire length of human history with one Maybe arguably two singular goals.

11:58 One of them at the core. With stress reduction. That was what we were after, right? You create communities so you're safer. You create homes, so you're environmental and you create agriculture.

12:09 So our food and we all wanted to reduce the stress thing, right? Didn't call that, but that's what it was. And then we got to the year two thousand or so, we realized, oh fuck. Maybe that was the wrong target. I saw in your bookshelf.

12:23 At home, there's a book called The Comfort Crisis. Oh yeah. And that just flashed in front of me as you were saying that. Yeah, shout out. Uh Michael, these it's a great book. Um When we have astronauts come back.

12:35 From the National Space Station. Um getting people to live on Mars. Mm. It's a bit of a rocket problem. But it's a bigger physiology problem. Uh and but this

12:46 H T T project, Romani is part of the people we're working with is Cody Burkhardt runs human works at NASA. Figuring out that line of going, hey You don't want to release stress. If you do

13:01 Like what happens when we send people up to Space. Because there's no gravity. your physiology tanks really quickly. Right. Uh they come back, oftentimes astronauts come back and they like they can't physically walk for a few days.

13:13 Because In that case, that aspect now other aspects of stress are way up. We've lost some of the core tenets that it means to be human. And we are not ready for that. We are not ready at

13:24 Mm. To be able to be told, Oh yeah, run this scan. And here's the exact culmination of life. You need to run. Not even counting the ethics.

13:33 behind on that. Like the ethics of genetic testing alone are really, really interesting. To say the least. The ethics of doing something like That We have not thought through this stuff.

13:50 Right, and collectively we. There is more in our world than our human experience. Than just straight answers. Right. This is one of the beauties. Of this ride we get to take.

14:05 I don't know if we have good answers. I think we've clearly shown We're not very good at asking those questions before. Never. Because the incentives in the short term are so tempting. We're seeing this with AI at the moment. It's just so tempting.

14:19 Yeah. And then we we figure we get the results back in twenty years. And by then it's just too late. I mean look at the current health position that we're in, right? We went after that entire idea of minimizing as many stressors as we possibly could. And oh we

14:36 W it worked. Yeah. Oops. Now we have to go back and do this weird thing when we re en re engineer stress back into our lives. You have to be very

14:47 Careful. And judicious. When you pull things out of a natural state. I'm being very choosy with my words there. If you're not directing stress

15:00 You're letting something else direct that that stress is still coming one way or the other. Which means adaptation is coming. So you can be intentional. And point that ship in one direction? Or you can cover your eyes.

15:11 And think it's not happening at all. And realise you're getting pointed Somewhere else. It's better. To least Have the acknowledgement.

15:20 This is why the word consciousness is in the title of Of my book. This is part of The process, right? You can be

15:29 aware of it or you can not From there you can choose whatever you want. That's entirely up to you and On that. I just want people to realize you're making a choice. One way or the other.

15:40 So when you involve technology In the picture AI is is Another really, really challenging thing. In a lot of ways. And I'll reiterate, we've seen this already play out and we know the answer is this gets worse.

15:56 In terms of We're not gonna make very good choices right away. How does that manifest itself in the end? I don't know. Nobody knows? But to date.

16:07 Or not particularly good. And making that decision. So there's lots of consequences there. Um I think that we have there um The la one of the last thing I'll say on this is If if you break down

16:20 Okay. The way that we structure it is there's four pieces, okay. In order for you to have more success at Your performance and health. You number one have to have assessment.

16:30 Once you have all this data, you have to go to step number two. Which is in you have to qualify. Good. Bad. Great.

16:36 Worst ever, best in world history, okay. We're struggling on that. We don't know what healthy looks like. I know what clinically deficient Rickets looks like. I know when obesity and type two diabetes we know

16:48 Disease. We don't know what good versus great means. There are no databases I can pull from. There is no metric I can look at and say, what what is a great comp what's a great vertical jump number. What does somebody need to be able to jump in their forties to be healthy? Like we don't know these things, and I don't know it by ethnicity.

17:06 And I and I mentioned that before, that's a critical component because it is clearly different, right? There are some markers in basic blood chemistry that are Not different. in Southeast Asians or that are different in Southeast Asians versus um northern Europeans. Like we don't have that fully fleshed out.

17:21 And we if we do, it's four disease markers. We don't have the so I don't even know what I'm judging. Okay. No. Assessment great. Where are we gonna get these databases of super healthy people as the world continues to get Less healthy.

17:34 I'm losing my population to pull from. Really, really quickly. Okay. Then the next piece is Okay, great. You've told me that this marker should be here.

17:44 Pick your marker. Whatever you want. How do I get it there? And that's really where we're struggling. So the second problem is what I call Polaris. Like we have no North Star. We don't know where this thing should go. The third one is, okay, how do I get there?

17:58 What is the intervention? What is the thing? That's where I actually think People in my field Not only in

18:05 maintain but increase their value. Such as like Personal coaches. Physical therapists. Athletic trainers, people that are gonna nurses.

18:14 Because you might have an AI that can come in and and run something and say Great, your numbers are here and our metrics say you should be here and then you should go do X. I want somebody there with me. I want a human taking me through X. That's gonna feel better because we don't know.

18:31 There's almost no data on okay, great. Well what is the optimal training for that marker. What is the optimal nutrition or that is really, really limited. So we have to rely on experts. We have to rely on people that go, I know the evidence base.

18:46 But then also my experience, I'm thinking about this this way. If you were an NFL quarterback and you tore your A C L. And we ran all that stuff on you, you would still come back and go Oh great. There's a coach over there? Who's actually

18:59 run people through ACL recoveries on fifteen starting NFL quarterbacks? Like What's it gonna cost? You're hiring that person, right?'Cause like you've done it before. Fantastic. It the budget doesn't matter at that point because the person's actually done it.

19:14 And they will be there. Fantastic. I really feel like our field is gonna increase um in the value because of that. They're gonna want to say, Okay, awesome. The numbers came out on this, the AI told me this is there.

19:25 You've done it before, yeah? Tell the what? Great, I trust you the most. I want you by my side. I want that companionship. As we lose More and more connection. To other people.

19:38 It's my biased opinion and my field that like this is a great place where people want. Someone there. Um, online coaching is great. That's fine and all that. But you're seeing actually already a premium coming on like, you know, I wanna hire an in person trainer. Can you give me that person? Where like the boom was the opposite for a while. And now it's already swinging back where people would rather have somebody there in person.

19:57 For all those reasons. So Uh that is I think an incredibly interesting challenge. But that's that's the way to think about it. That top one's gonna get better. Lots of problems. But what are we comparing against?

20:11 And then what do we do about it? That's gonna be the real trick. What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you. Uh