Welcome back to the Body Pod everyone.

For our summer rerun, we are reintroducing the Alan Aragon Flexible Dieting podcast, which was one of our most popular in season one.

So if you aren't familiar with Alan Aragon, I'm going to do a quick rundown.

Alan is a nutrition researcher and educator with over thirty years of success in this field.

He is known as one of the most influential figures in the fitness industry's movement towards evidence based information.

He is the lead author of the ISSN position stand on Diets and Body Composition.

Alan is the Chief Science Officer of the Nutritional Coaching Institute and the founder and editor in chief of Alan Aragon's Research Review, the original and longest running research review publication in the fitness industry.

Alan is also the author of Flexible Dieting, which we will be covering in this podcast.

And Alan maintains a private practice designing programs for recreational and professional athletes and of course regular people striving to do their best.

So we will jump right in and learn from one of the pioneers in the fitness industry, Alan Aragon.

Hi, everyone, my name is Haley and this is Lara and welcome.

To the body Pod.

Welcome back to the body Pod everyone.

We have the Alan Aragon here.

We are so excited, the man of the hour and we are going to dig into all things nutrition.

So welcome Alan.

Hailey and Laura.

It is an absolute pleasure to be here.

Thank you so much for having me.

Well, we can't wait to dive in.

We have we've had people send in questions and we have a bunch of our own.

But as you know, you're kind of known as the pioneer and the evidence based nutrition space, and let's just start there and talk about like, well, you have this book that we already we already introed you, the Flexible Dieting, And this came out two years ago?

Was it two years ago?

Alan?

Roughly two years ago?

That's right, Yeah, Because I was promoing it, I was like as one of my twelve days stocking stufferst it was like, everyone needs to get this.

So your book Flexible Dieting, What does that?

What does that mean?

It?

In a nutshell, it means individualizing programs instead of cookie cutting programs.

And that is really the essence of what flexible dieting is.

And a lot of people mistake the term flexible dieting with They actually conflate it with counting macrograms, when nothing further from the truth.

Counting macrograms is one of many dietary approaches.

Flexible dieting is all about being flexible with the dietary approach that you take, and also not having a dichotomous view of foods and dieting, in other words, not looking at foods or diets as good or bad, black white, all or nothing type of mentality.

So that's that's really what flexible dieting is.

And and the book is actually mistitled, I think, because I think a more accurate title for the book would be evidence based nutrition or you know, evidence based non clinical nutrition.

But yes, you know, but but Brett Brett told me I have to title the book flexible Dieting in order for it to be it.

So so yeah.

Brett Coultrest knows how to make hits, so I listened to him.

Yeah, I love it well.

So different than if it fits your macros, because I know some people kind of intertwine those two.

Flexible dieting if it fits your.

Macros, absolutely, yeah, they're totally different things.

Flexible dieting is when you go back into literature in the late nineties, it is a cognitive style of dietary restraint.

So there's rigid restraint and there's flexible restraint.

And rigid restraint sees foods and dieting and the dieting process in black white, all or nothing good bad terms, whereas flexible dieting sees a gray scale.

And as long as you're doing most of your stuff right and you're trending forward in your progress, you didn't blow it if you just had a bad day or you know, a bad moment.

And so that's really what flexible dieting is, and it's rooted in a study of different types of restraint that goes back to the seventies in the psychological literature.

Has nothing to do with if it fits your macros or counting macrograms.

Yeah, it's more what ends up working for you, which I think makes the most sense because different people thrive with different like a different prescription.

I think some people really do well with the all or nothing, no wiggle room at all, and other people blow it in the first week and give up because they kind of need that great area.

I feel like, do you find that.

Oh absolutely, And I even think with a single person, their needs whether it's a rigid approach or a flexible approach, can vary across the course of a year, depending on the season of training even and so so yeah, totally agreed.

So Alan, why is like I only work with women over the age of thirty five, most are like late forties, early fifties, And I just started like this, this program that I launched a few weeks ago, and there's you know, thousands of women in this group and they're just so confused about nutrition.

So why is the general public?

Why is it so confusing?

Like it's food.

Yeah, you know, when you've been in this for as long as as as we have, it just seems easy and intuitive.

But the fact of the matter is, like we have had an extensive education that safeguards us against misinformation, and so most of people's nutrition knowledge is gained from just randomly on the internet, and it is an absolute mindfield of misinformation out there.

The majority of articles are just really poorly written, they're just very non rigorous and sometimes they're just flat out vs just trying to sell something.

Usually they are, and so the public is faced with just waves and waves of misinformation, and then I guess that would be one of the main reasons.

And then the other big reason that the public is so confused, and this is sort of a kind of an intuitive reason, is that they just don't have the critical thinking skills when it comes to nutrition.

They might have critical thinking skills when it comes to their own job, their own occupation, their own family relationships, but when it comes to nutrition, they just literally don't.

They don't have the science literacy to deal with these bits of news that float through the media.

They just have no idea what to do with it.

And if it comes from an MD, or if it comes from their favorite guru, then well, of course, oh well it's got to be true.

They just don't have the skills to critically analyze these things.

And then the third reason why everybody's so confused about what to eat is because everybody has to eat, and so therefore a lot of people just think they're an expert at this nutrition thing just because they've achieved a certain amount of success with either their own body composition or their athletic performance or both.

And when people experience personal success with something, then they form this emotional attachment to it.

And they end up preaching it through.

It's almost like me calling myself a marriage and family expert because I've had a successful marriage.

Okay, so now I'm going to go preach the universal gospel of how to how everybody needs to treat their marriage.

You know, it's like no, no, no, it doesn't work that way.

So I think those are the main reasons why everybody's so confused about what to eat.

It's misinformation, lack of science literacy.

Everybody's got to eat.

And then maybe a fourth reason is that the body is genuinely complex and it's easy to miss the big things that we consistently see as being true.

It's easy to focus on the fringes and the weeds and blow those up in bigger proportion than they deserve.

So so yeah, that might be a fourth thing is just the complexity of the body and how it's people focus on.

The wrong things.

Yes, well, and the you know social media, as you know, I love when you when you call people out.

The debunking is so good because it's like the social media is like the wild wild West, like anyone can get a big following, anyone can preach anything, and it's really confusing.

For the consumer, because you're like, do I believe this medical doctor that has a million followers or do I believe this person, you know, for whatever reason.

And so it really is like I'm always referring to people who are much smarter than me.

You you know Tony Battaji, who I partner with Stacy Simms.

I just launched a course with like people that know way more than me, and then I kind of refer off of that.

But for someone that is, do you think that there's any because the literature and the journals, if you're not in this space, it's like where do you even start?

Do you feel like there's a good place for people to go and like do the research like something that isn't overwhelming?

Yeah?

God, that is I almost can never properly answer that question other than directing people towards just a handful of professionals out there.

It's like, there really is no roadmap of where to get the good information.

And it's tempting to say, you know what, go straight to the position stands of the International Society of Sports Nutrition.

Go straight to the position stance.

In other words, the consensus papers of the Academy of Nutrition and dietetics, go straight to the position papers of the National Strength and Conditioning Association, and go straight to the position papers of the American College of Sports Medicine.

So when you think of a topic that you're confused on, like ketogenic diets, for example, the International Society of Sports Nutrition is right about to publish a position stand on ketogenic diets and how they affect strength performance and endurance performance and body compositions.

And I know this because I'm on the paper, and so we're working hard.

We're working hard to get this thing done and published.

But that is going to be a go to resource on ketogenic dieting for those purposes.

So I would say go straight to the position stance of maybe the Big four, the ISSN, the A n D, the ACSM, and the NSCA, and then you get the consensus knowledge basis for things related to nutrition and things related to exercise.

Now here's the problem with saying that you can't necessarily tell the layperson to go ahead and read a consensus paper in the peer reviewed literature and expect them to understand it.

So here we are back again with oh gosh, where does the lay person go?

So me writing my book was my attempt to take a stab at benefiting the lay audience, who you know, they don't have these technical skills and this jargon knowledge required to understand the language that we speak.

So I guess I would just want more of the evidence based professionals to write more books and like like what you guys are doing, reaching thousands in the in the lay public, in the masses, and hopefully that has a trickle down, trickle out effect in terms of making a dent in the collective knowledge of the general public.

That's the best that we can hope for, either that or all of us here just blow up in popularity and get millions of followers each and then and then people will get sweat better information en mass.

Yeah, yeah, well it's great.

I mean, your book is fantastic.

And what I love about it is it was easy for me to understand, but I'm in the industry.

It was when I know that my clients read it, like whenever they read it and they report back to me, they understand it because you really lay it out for everyone.

It's not just for people in the industry.

It really has a good broad approach to everyone can kind of understand it.

And that's what I love about it because there's very few books it's either too science y, too nerdy people are going to understand it, or it's too basic.

So this really encompasses everything.

So I appreciate that.

I'm a big fan, big fan.

So how do you feel about do you when you teach people?

Do you still train people in person as far as like nutrition helping with nutrition?

Yeah, I still maintain very small handful of clients, and I don't put it out there.

I don't advertise that I'm working with people because I would have to just continually turn people down.

But I always maintain a small stable so I can tak one one foot one pinky toe in the trenches at all times, because I think that when you stop working with people, you sort of lose it.

It's sort of like I use it or lose it type of skill thing.

Yeah, and even though we've been doing this for decades, I think it's still important to be able to work with people right now because then you get the real time feedback of the trends that are going on at the moment and the challenges that people are facing out there in the current time.

So yes, good point.

So what would you say like, percentage wise, I'm so curious because you clearly know it all.

We're all learning from you.

So I mean, what percentage of people, like would you say over your career?

What like everyone has the ability to lose weight?

Yes, yes, so, but how many people is this?

Like?

I look at it and in percentages anytime, Like Tony and I are running a fat loss course right now, and there's always about a third of the people that crush kill it, a third of the people that are pretty good, and then a third of the people that kind of drop off, and you're like, where did they go?

Do you kind of find that?

Like what do your percentages look like?

I mean, I know you have a smaller group now, so maybe it's more like streamlined, But do you find that everyone when you give someone macros and information and all of this at first, they just like take and run and everyone succeeds right off the bat.

No, definitely not.

And that's that's why our job, our profession is so incredibly difficult.

It's extremely valuable, but it's extremely difficult.

And I think, I mean, percentages wise, it's really tough to say.

I mean, I would love to say, hey, nine out of ten people I work with our spectacular success story, but that would probably be a bias to that would be a biased figure.

I think that, and this is something that we as professionals come to grips with, like you know, a little late in the game, where we come to grips with the reality that we won't be able to help everybody, like there are some people that we just won't be able to help.

And I think that that is a combination of physiological and psychological reasons, with the psychological reason being maybe the stronger one, because if you cannot help somebody change their behaviors, if there's some kind of roadblock there, then you know that.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of cases like that where the buck kind of stops at irreconcilable behaviors and the inability to change certain behaviors.

I do acknowledge the fact that some people have more in quotes stubborn metabolisms than other folks.

There is a range there of a metabolic adaptation that happens across individuals, and this is just recent data that's come out.

Vilay Eso La is the lead author who looked at what happens with resting metabolic rate in male and female physique competitors over the course of a pre contest dieting cycle, their drop in resting metabolic rate can be up into the one hundred I want to say, one hundred fifty or so calories, Like their resting metabolic rate will drop one hundred and fifty calories below what RMR drop would be associated with drops in lean body mass.

So even if we if we round up to let's say two hundred calories.

And this was a kind of a disturbing thing that was seen in the female competitors who kept their lean body mass, even though they didn't lose any lean body masks, their resting metabolic rate still dropped about one hundred and fifty calories.

That's not my.

Sucks, that really sucks.

And and yeah, so these kind of things do happen with the dieting cycle.

And when you also consider that there's a wide range of variation across individuals in their drop in non exercise activity or their spontaneous movement.

So on average with dieters, and this was a six month study that that's coming to mind, the average drop in non exercise activity thermogenesis was two to three hundred calories.

So you know, if you add those things up.

If you add up the drop that metabolic adaptation, that drop and resting metabolic rate, let's say it can be up to two hundred calories in you know, extreme circumstances, and then you add the two to three hundred calorie drop in non exercise activity, then you're looking at burning four to five hundred calories less than you once did and at the end of the dieting cycle.

And then add together whatever other calories less you're burning as a result of having a lower total body mass just to move around through the course of the day, and it adds up.

You can add up to I want to say four four to six hundred calories that you're screwed out of at the end of the dieting cycle.

So that happens with some people.

And when you combine that.

With just the psychological aspect of how people respond to dieting emotionally and how some people will not consciously or purposely, but they will misreport calorie intake, they'll misestimate, they'll misreport, and or they will not tell you about binging or mirar binging episodes.

So you have a lot of variables you're working with their You've got to keep an eye on the physical, the physiological, the psychological, and that's why our job is just so incredibly incredibly difficult.

Yeah.

So, if somebody were to come to you and they had been dieting pretty much their whole life, Like I have women that are like, I can't remember the last time I wasn't trying to drop calories and diet.

Would you start them?

Would you say, okay, cool, we can start tomorrow and we're going to take you in a deficit or would you make them wait for a few weeks and like eat at maintenance and kind of see what that looks like.

That's a really darning good question.

It kind of varies with the individual.

But what is really an interesting exercise that you can do is just have the person commit to reporting exactly what they eat.

And sometimes people prefer to do it with pictures.

And if you do the picture method, and make sure that you have them put you know, keys or something that you know the actual size of next to the meal, just for accurate scale, so you know they're not having this tremendously.

Huge bowl versus little bowl.

With no with no point of reference.

Have them put some damn keys next to it or something it's smart, and then just say, eat how you would love to eat.

For the next two to four weeks, eat how you would absolutely feel happy and satisfied with your life eating.

Just do that, but I want to see every little bit, every little drink, every little piece of food, everything.

And then you know, surprisingly, like nine times out of ten when you do this, they freaking love it.

They're enjoying it.

They're not restricting that and their weight barely budgets.

And so you both learn something.

You both learned that A well, most importantly, they learned that A they can eat how they ideally want to eat and not just throw pounds on their body.

And then B you learn exactly what their preferences are, what their patterns are, what their proclivities are.

And then at the end of the four weeks that they're just having this commitment to be accountable.

And you know what, sometimes they lose weight because people automatically eat better, a little bit.

More more diligent.

You know, like they feel like they're being judged in a way, but you have to assure them, I'm not going to judge you.

I want to see how you would eat if you were to eat how you want to eat, and sometimes they lose weight, and so it can be this big epiphany by the end of the two to four weeks, depending on how big of a risk you want to take with this method.

But a lot of the times, you know, you have to find these things out with people when they come to you and say, I've been dieting my whole life, I've been this, and I just haven't lost weight and all this stuff.

Okay, let's take a good look at how you eat, and not only that, but how you would love to eat, and how and eat the way that you think you would be able to eat for the rest of your life.

And you know what, when they either maintain weight or lose weight, which is a common thing after this exercise, then it's a huge bonus for both of you, guys, because then you can start from there and individualize their program from there and tweak things and adjust them from there without imposing too much of your references and values on what they kind of know and love.

And so it's a pretty cool exercise if you're willing to take the two to four week if they have that time, you know, if they're not gunning for a family reunion in six weeks.

You can do this kind of thing.

So yeah, that's something that more people should try.

Well.

I love in your book when you say you use the you know, teach people how to fish instead of just handing them a fish.

And literally, I mean, like I said, I only run courses for women the second part of their life, and they all are just like, just tell me what to eat, Haley.

Just this includes a mill plan, right, And I'm like, nope, don't do mill plans a out of my lane, Like I'm not a registered dietitian can't prescribe a mill plan like technically, and then you don't learn anything, and it's really hard.

It's fun to see how someone is at the start of the course because it is questions and emails and frustration and I'm failing all over the board.

But then by the end they're like these butterflies that they're like, Okay, well, you know I might not be perfect, but like, wow, am I different than I was ten weeks ago?

And if you hadn't had to struggle, I'm like, you have to know what makes up the food on your plate, because if you don't, you know, of course, you're not going to lose weight because you have no idea what even is in that food.

So do you like, do you prescribe?

Do you believe in a magic macro number?

No?

No, no, no, And I gotta say it, it depends on the individual and the population and the situation.

So if somebody will take an extreme example, which you know you've dealt with and I've dealt with, of an entertainer who has to look a certain way for either a photo shoot or a movie shoot at a certain time that is fast approaching, then maybe you can justify this is what you eat, lock in and let's make sure that this is nailed.

So there are those scenarios.

But for somebody who wants to make lifestyle changes and they have kind of the rest of their life to get it together, I think it's super important to explain to people that I can't just hand you a diet and I hand you a script and expect you to follow this thing from here on out.

Yeah, it's just things have to be sustainable.

It's got to be sustainable.

And once again, one of the reasons why the statistic is eighty percent of dieters gain their weight back.

Only twenty percent of dieters in the general public are able to keep their weight off for more than a year.

Okay, so, so long term weight loss is defined as keeping five to ten percent of your body weight loss that weight loss keeping it off for a year or more, and eighty percent of the people who try that they fail.

And one of the big reasons for that failure is because of cookie cutter plans that are not individualized to what the person can sustain.

I firmly believe that to be successful in the long term, you have to almost look forward to the meals that you have in your day.

You have to there has to be a very positive outlook on what am I eating today?

Oh, I'm looking forward to meal one.

I'm looking forward to meal two.

I love meal three.

Oh I just love my pre bed you know, whatever it might be, and it can it.

Really the goal really should be to be able to look forward to your meals, hey, because if you're not, you won't be able to sustain the program.

I agree that sounds terrible, No, I mean I love food so much like I would hate it if I didn't like the food that I.

Was eating or deciding to eat every day.

So in your book you talk about obviously anyone listening to this podcast, they're hearing about protein and strength training all the time, so most of them are like, oh, okay, I get it, I get it.

I get it.

But in your book you talk about protein overloading, like on if we were look at a week and we have X amount of protein to get every day, and that's kind of what we're shooting for.

And I have a question about that in a second, But do you like what is protein overloading?

Is that what you called it in the book, or.

I call it protein hyper feeds.

I love it.

Yeah, it's sort of taking the concept of carb ups or carb reefeeds and just making it protein.

And I did this on just sort of an experimental basis with one of my one of my clients.

This was back in two thousand and nine.

She was a marine at one point, and she was actually a semi pro football player, so she was just a really athletic person who wanted to gain muscle and wanted to lose fat and was open to trying some crazy stuff.

So back in two thousand and nine, we didn't have the wonderful research by Jose Antonio and his colleagues looking at very high protein intakes and what happens there.

So I kind of I off the record, did.

Some experiments with my client, her name was Carla Fisher, and some really interesting stuff happened because what I did was I had her eat about two to three times or her bodyweight and pounds in protein grams.

Wow.

Yeah, And this is.

Kind of what you what you would do with a carbohydrate, except you would carve up a little bit more if it were carbohydrate.

But it's protein.

So in any case, she would consume about two to three times her bodyweight and pounds in protein grams.

And we would do this two to three times a week and just see what happens.

And kind of miraculously, what happened was she recomped.

In other words, she gained lean mass while losing fat mass.

And none of us really yeah, she got the Holy Grail, and none of us really knew how or why it happened.

But fifteen years later in the research, Joey Antonio and his colleagues are protein hyper feeding folks, not really in the cyclical way that I did, but on a linear daily way, and they're seeing the exact same thing.

They're seeing body fat loss with lean mass gain.

And even if they and technically some of those studies don't show major differences in body fat loss and lean gain.

They basically show that the extra protein you're throwing at people kind of disappears somewhere.

And there's a number of mechanisms, a number of speculations we can make as to where that extra protein is going.

But the bottom line is it seems to be a good tactic for dieters who don't necessarily want to continue restrict So it can be a tactic for adding food to the diet without any adverse consequences to the goal of fat loss.

And so that's been an interesting thing to see across the literature and then many years ago with clients, and so I think that it's one of the tools that you can use for people who are just tired of restricting.

You just give them a protein day or two in the week and just say, yeah, go for it.

Well, and you were so ahead of the time, like you called this out fifteen years thirteen, whatever it was ever many years ago.

So can you prescribe protein on ideal body weight, lean mass or just body like one grand per pound?

Since we're America.

Yeah, yeah, we don't need those kill grouns out, where's the freedom and kill grounds?

I typically do goal body weight, or if you want, there's ways to calculate ideal body weight.

But all this stuff is really just a proxy for lean body mass.

It's just hard to accurately estimate lean body mass.

So I tend to use goal body weight or ideal body weight.

And this is congruent with what's done in the literature because most of the protein research in the literature is on people who are of a normal body weight.

So yeah, that's sort of the easy way to do it.

Yeah, well, then you get too high when you look at someone that might be obese and you give them the number if you're doing one ground per pound, you're like, here, go have your you know, eight hundred grams or galleries in whatever it is, I mean, a super high number.

But then they're they're the carbs and fats are like, well, something takes a hit.

But so we obviously we know the protein.

Okay, we go off of that, But does do carbs and fats change the body composition all that much?

Depending on if your high carb, high fat or vice versa.

The disappointing answer, which I'm sure you're familiar with is no, and we know that through a couple dozen well controlled studies at minimum, and even within the past couple of years, there was this great study involving Jeff Volek that looked at a ketogenic diet versus a high carb low fat diet, and the high carb low fat diet was the carbohydrates in the diet were fifty percent of them were from sugar, and they since they equated the protein intakes between the groups and they equated total calories between the groups, there were no significant difference in fat loss between the groups at the end of the diet, which is pretty extraordinary from number one, because Jeff Bullock was a part of that and he's been touting ketogenic diets for the last twenty years.

And secondly, you know, you, at least theoretically, you think, oh, sugar is bad or whatever, but half of the carbs coming from sugar did not negatively impact fat loss.

So that tells us that the carb fat proportion of the diet should be individualized according to the person's personal preference or according to their athleticals if it calls for a certain amount of carbohydrate in order for them to perform an endurance or performance type capacity, and so yeah, it's actually a good thing that the carb fat proportion can be individualized since we as practitioners can tailor programs better.

So there's no I mean because again I'm just using my experience, but I guess it's just the fixation on Hayley tell me exactly what macros to eat, and I'm like, it doesn't work that way.

I can give you a guide, but like, do you have food sensitivities?

What do you prefer to eat?

You know, and not get so dialed in on a specific I mean there's ranges, absolutely, but not a you know, two hundred and thirty two grams for this or you know, whatever it is.

It's really the whole flexity flexible dieting approach is just giving people permission to be like, you get to tailor this to your life.

You get ownership instead of just being told exactly what's going to work or what's gonna you know, what's this going to do for you?

And you get to figure it out.

Yep.

So, Laura, what was the alcohol question.

Let's go to the good stuff.

I know all of our questions how do you feel about alcohol?

And how do you track it?

Okay, So alcohol, How I feel about it?

Oh man, it's a It's something that people have to take really seriously, mainly because of its addictive potential.

That's probably that's probably the most important aspect of alcohol, because you never know whether you're somebody who can develop an addiction to it, and people really downplay that negative potential of it.

And among the general public, about one in ten one in ten individuals develops some sort of addiction some level of addiction to alcohol, so one intent people have some degree of alcohol use disorder in the general public, and that's kind of an alarming statistic.

I didn't know that.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

When I read that statistic, I was like, oh man, that's pretty nighly knowing that one in ten people in a given rooms has a problem with alcohol.

And certainly the pandemic did not help that, with people self medicating and people, you know, trying to drink away the stresses of life, and it's become a growing problem.

But if you're one of the nine out of ten people who do not have an addiction to alcohol, and you're able to consume it on a responsible and moderate basis, then the literature converges on a one to two a day being not harmful and in some cases possibly helpful depending on the source of alcohol, with red wine having the richest body of data.

On its benefits.

So if you start going beyond one to two drinks a day, let's say two to three drinks a day, then you better be a larger person who can metabolize that that kind of does.

If you start going above two to three drinks a day four plus, most people are going to experience negative impacts on both their training as well as their appetite.

And both of these negative effects are typically going to be rooted in the way that alcohol or excessive alcohol negatively impacts sleep quality.

And so a lot of times what we see in the literature with alcohol intake is that people spontaneously eat more when they lack sleep.

They just eat a significant amount more calories just because the body is sensing some sort of crisis.

It's some sort of energy crisis that is governed by this lack of sleep, lack of good sleep, and alcohol can do that.

Not to mention, if you drink enough and you have a hangover the next day, then there goes your training session.

Yeah, yeah, it's a it's alcohol is something to be highly cautious about and highly respected.

Yeah, no, I agree with absolutely I And okay, my next question is about intermittent fasting.

What are your thoughts on intermittent fasting.

It is a viable tool for some individuals and the main thing it's good for is controlling energy intake over the course of a day or over the course of the week.

So if we look at the umbrella of intermittent fasting, then there's three main sub types of intermitt and fasting.

There's time restricted eating, where you squish your intake into a narrowed feeding window within the course of the day, typically eight hours or less.

And then there's another model of fasting called the five to two method or twice weekly fasting, where two days out of the week you're not eating anything or you're only eating very little, just a few hundred calories and you're netting a net CLOrk deficit by the end of the week.

And then the other main model would be alternate day fasting, which can be either ero calorie alternate day fasting, or it can be a modified alternate day fasting where on the fasting days you're having about five hundred calories, so it's not technically a full blown fast.

So with those three subtypes of mind, and of course there are the dangerous type of fasts that people do, you know, and record it on YouTube, where they're going to be like I'm going to go on at forty day water fast and I'm going to film myself passing out.

Oh man, oh boy.

Yeah, there's always that.

But the viable models of fasting are out there.

And the interesting thing about these models of fasting are that they can be done the feeding phases of the fasting and feeding cycles, they can be done on an unrestricted basis, So you can restrict somebody to let's say a six to eight hour eating window in a day, and they don't have to restrict.

And what ends up happening is they end up netting a either eucloric balance or hyppo caloric balance, so in other words, they end up either maintaining or they end up losing body weight.

So that would probably be the biggest pro of intermittent fasting is that it allows the feeding phases to be unrestricted, and this freeze people up if they don't like to be meticulous about tracking.

It kind of absolves people from having to track, which is kind of a cool thing for some people.

So, you know, something that I don't like about intermittent fasting is there's a lot of mythology around it.

A lot of people who have become emotionally attached to their special IF through their pet IF protocol will claim that this is the way everybody needs to diet because it's the best way for whatever reasons they give, when that is simply not true.

When you look at the literature on intermittent fasting versus daily caloric restriction, you look at the body of research as a whole, they're both on par with each other in terms of their effectiveness for weight loss and fat loss.

And you know, there's even caveats to be said about alternate day fasting.

There was a study done looking at lean subjects and putting them through either daily clerk restriction or alternate day fasting.

This was lean men, and they actually lost more lean body mass on the alternate day fasting regimen than they did on the daily coloric restriction regimen, even though the net CLOrk deficit by the end of the week was equated.

So there is a.

Point of diminishing returns for people who think that they can just fast, you know, indiscriminately.

And the other bit of mythology that really kind of bugs me with fasting is when people read these speculations by these gurus who will either insinuate or explicitly say that we have to put ourselves through periods of fasting in order to regenerate or rejuvenate our immune system and avoid cancer and you know, promote longevity.

None of that has been demonstrated, none of that has been in quotes proven.

Frankly, I doubt any of it is true.

It's like, yeah, and what the body of research on this area, looking at changes in clinical parameters between intermittent fasting models and daily cleric restriction models.

The magic really happens because the person lost weight, because the subjects lost body weight, because the subjects were able to control energy intake.

And so it's impossible to disentangle the clinical benefits of intermittent fasting or fasting period time restrictive feeding included.

It's it's almost impossible to separate the clinical benefits from the weight loss that happens, from the fat loss that happens.

And now kind of getting into the weeds a little bit here, there are a handful of studies that show superior glucose control benefits with moving the feeding window to the earlier part of the day instead of having this conventional pattern of intake where you eat from morning tonight.

Okay, and there is some literature showing that if you were to compare two time restricted feeding models and early time restricted feeding and a delayed time restricted feeding, so in other words, either skipping breakfast versus skipping dinner, then the skipping dinner model tends to show better glucose control.

But this is all short term research.

So there's a particular study that stands out by lou Liu and colleagues where they looked at the twelve month effect where they compared a conventional eating pattern of eight am to eight pm with an early time restricted feeding pattern of eight am to four pm.

No significant differences in body composition improvements, and improvements in clinical parameters like blood lippets and blood glucose.

And so once.

Again that tells us, oh, it's this really unsexy null effect at the end of the rainbow.

But hey, this is great in the sense that you can tell people that, hey, we can do this according to your personal preference if you like to restrict your feeding window and you find that helpful.

Great, If you don't, great, let's go with what you can sustain.

Because there's no meaningful difference in health improvements body weight and body fat loss improvements between these two models.

So that's sort of the long minding story.

Because what about if you pick one of these intermittent fasting models and you make sure to have your correct protein intake?

Is their effect on building muscle as long as you get the correct protein intake.

See, this is a damn good question.

And we can really only look at Grant Tinsley's work.

He's done most of the work on time restricted feeding combined with resistance training, and he's largely seen positive favorable effects with the time restricted feeding plus resistance training because restricting the feeding window tends to corner people into eating less overall, and it's been pretty effective at that, and the resistance training enables people to keep their lean body mass while they're doing that.

But just kind of panning backward and looking at the big picture, if somebody's main goal is to gain muscle and not necessarily just retain it a diet, then all of the intermittent fasting models are suboptimal for that goal, because when you think of how muscle is built, it's just net gains in muscle protein synthesis over time.

So muscle proteins, the synthesis side of muscle protein turnover, has to outpace the muscle protein breakdown side of that cycle over a period of weeks and months, and of course throughout the day too.

That counts.

And so when people are going through fasting periods, they're simply compromising the amount of muscle protein synthesis that can occur on a short, mid and long term basis, and so they're ultimately compromising their rate and potential of muscle growth.

If you're going to engage in any of these fasting.

Regimes, is there a certain how much protein do you need to get to turn on muscle protein synthesis?

Somebody it's five grams in the morning.

Is it the same as forty grams?

Yeah?

Yeah.

Muscle protein synthesis related to protein dosing is more of a dimmer switch than it is an on off switch.

So you can see measurable degrees of muscle protein synthesis with as little as ten grams of protein, but it just happens to be higher with higher doses and there happens to be a ceiling of muscle protein synthesis at about forty to fifty ish grams of protein.

So that yeah, yeah, FANTASTICO.

NPS is an interesting story.

It's an interesting story with NPS, and it varies with the population, varies with what's going on in the protocol too.

Mm hmm.

Okay.

So I have a series of questions here about number one is there?

What do you think?

And I know this there's not a specific answer here, but what is like the because I get asked this all the time too, what's the ideal body fat percentage for someone that's just like, I don't want to live like I'm getting on a physique stage, but I also want to be fairly lean year round and feel good.

You know, Is there an average percentage?

Because everyone wants to know the exact percentage of what is ideal?

Okay, So there are some interesting recent research that looked at body fat percentage and mortality.

So how does okay, body fat percent relate to when you're going to die?

And in the general population these percentages are pretty high and women it averaged about thirty five percent and that was like the lowest mortality was seen at about thirty five percent body fat, and with men it was high as well, so it was about twenty two percent body fat for men with the lowest more brutality.

So but you know, this research is observational and there's a lot of other factors going on with this, and you also have to look at other bits of literature as well, and so I kind of weigh this against previous literature showing that normal healthy populations men that body fat percentage range from about ten to about twenty and then in women it was about twenty to about thirty.

So, you know, just because this is this new research rolled out showing that mortality is lowest at thirty five percent men twenty two percent women, you kind of have to look at it a little bit skeptically, a little bit critically, And there's other literature that's been repeated showing that roughly ten to twenty percent men, roughly twenty to thirty percent women.

Hedges your bets towards living a long, healthy life, you know, just generally speaking, at the population level, certainly there are people above thirty percent women above thirty percent who will live you know, right long, vigorous lives, and there are women below twenty percent who are going to be very healthy as well.

But just speaking in general terms, it is a twenty ish to thirty ish thing for women and a ten ish to twenty ish thing for men, and this can vary throughout the lifestyle and what athletic pursuits people are involved in as well.

I mean, you know, I'm looking at Haley, She's probably in the you know, high teens, maybe mid teens, you know, body fat percent and doing just fine.

But that's that's her as an individual, and people just people differ in that.

So it's important to keep those ranges in mind, and it's important to emphasize that I'm talking in general, not at the individual level.

Yeah, so is there because this is second question, is there a specific amount of lean body mass?

Now, obviously this is going to change based on height and weight and age, but like a good number should someone in the one hundred and I don't know, fifty ish range, maybe one forty to one eighty Is that how much lean mass?

Would you say, five pounds someone should have?

Obviously the higher the better for a lot of reasons.

Yeah, it's like.

That whole question relates to fat free mass index and fat free mass index is sort of like body mass index, but you're looking at a fat free mass to height ratio instead of a total body weight to height ratio.

And frankly, I mean, there's not a lot of good data telling us how high should our fat free mass index be in order to maximize health and maximize health span and lifespan, because it's going to vary with the individual's goals.

There's going to be let's take one extreme end competitive bodybuilders.

Let's look at the drug free competitive bodybuilders, whose fat free mass index can be anywhere from twenty three to twenty five.

Okay, so the way that you would calculate fat free mass indexes you would take, well, you'd probably want to find a calculator online and run the numbers.

Through there instead of doing your finance.

But their fat free mass index is about twenty three to twenty five.

The average untrained male their fat free mass index is about nineteen.

So you kind of get to pick across that range.

If you're totally on train adult male FFMI of nineteen, probably that's probably not ideal.

You don't have to get all the way up to twenty four or twenty five, because then you'd be a competitive bodybuilder.

But yeah, the answer to this question is a little bit more philosophical than anything.

You know, how functional do you want to be, How strong do you want to be?

What kind of activities do you want to be able to execute at a given age.

You know, as.

People hit their golden years, most people are happy to be able to get up and sit down and do some gardening and not fall and break their hip.

Whereas earlier in the life cycle, when people are like twenty to let's say, twenty to forty to fifty years old, they still want to push some weights around, they still want to do some sports, and you know, it's you know, it really kind of depends on the life cycle.

I personally, when I hit sixty and seventy, stuff, I want to be throwing some weights around.

I want to be able to be stuff.

I'm doing that, and so.

Therefore there's always going to be in my case, there's always going to be a push for an above average amount of muscle that I want to carry.

Yeah.

Yeah, so I love wonder how helpful that answer was.

But yeah, I mean it's really hard because that's why I'm always like, there's not it and they're like, well, so also said on the podcast, I'm like, well, I'm not as black and white as just like throwing out a number.

But I love when doctor Gabrielle Lyon says we're not over fat, we're under muscled.

And that usually falls into a lot of the women later on in life that just didn't get the memo to strength train, and so they just carry a higher percentage.

But if we're talking about this is the last part of my series Muscle, So if we're talking about someone new to strength training, maybe around age forty, what is realistic that some how much muscle of female best case because in your book you talk about best case scenario and then more realistic case scenario that a female can gain that's new to strength training in a calendar year.

Okay, okay, And I just looked up the average fat free mass of an untrained woman and it ranges from sixteen point seven to nineteen Well, I'm sorry, fourteen point six to sixteen point eight that's the average FFMI in untrained women.

And in men.

It was about nineteen ish.

It's like no, like, yeah, about nineteen Okay.

So you're asking a really good question because if you consider.

Let's so we're gonna start kind of at the top and then work our way down.

Yeah, most women, from the being adult and from an untrained state, they have they have the potential to put on as much as twenty to twenty five pounds of muscle on the high end.

On the high end, we're talking if you do everything right.

Yeah, and over the course of a lifetime, the course of a lifetime, the course of a lifetime, yeah, let's say five Let's say over the course of a five to ten year training career, that they can focus on that goal.

They have twenty to twenty five pounds of muscle available to them if they have great genetics and great focus, and all the factors in their life converge towards allowing them to pursue this goal.

So when you think about that, when you think, let's take the upper end, Let's take twenty five pounds of meat that you can put above and beyond your untrained state.

If you're looking at a five year period, you're looking at five a gain of five pounds of muscle a year on average.

And so.

I mean, that's really pretty minuscule, especially when you consider that it'll happen more quickly at the beginning, and then it'll start diminishing as you reach that potential.

So the first year, who knows, maybe you can actually put on eight eight pounds, maybe even ten pounds of lean mass if everything goes right.

But then it just starts decreasing with the consecutive years to where at the fourth and fifth year you're lucky to put on under two two to three pounds in those in those final years, and it is kind of I mean, it is kind of depressing.

But when you think about it this way, this way, gaining ten pounds of muscle as a woman is spectacular.

It's freaking spectacular.

Okay, so gaining those twenty pounds is just stratospherically incredible of muscle above and beyond the average untrained person.

So it's a slow grind.

People have to understand that there's no gaining muscle too fast phenomenon.

There's no oh my gosh, muscle is just flying on my body exactly.

I mean what we've been talking about this all.

Week on the.

Yeah, and with men, it's about double like men can expect a ultimate muscular potential drug free anyway.

I mean, when we talk about you know, anabolic androgenic steroids and stuff that just blows the whole that's a whole different conversation.

But drug free men can put on at max from compared to an untrained male, untrained adult male, about forty to forty five pounds of muscle in the course of a training career.

So you're looking about double the amount of muscle that that women can put on.

And some some women can come, you know, not necessarily close to that, but there might be.

There's more, like, you know, a thirty thirty percent difference between women, women who have good genetics and men as far as the muscle gain potential goes.

But yeah, even with men, when you think about like a five to ten year training career, you're looking at very small amounts of muscle on average per year.

And yeah, and there are special cases we're talking about, like like Phil Heath.

He's been in the in the media a lot, so he's at the top of my mind.

He took about two years to turn pro when he started bodybuilding after his college college basketball career.

It took like two to three years to win the nationals.

So he would represent the upper end of genetic gifts to be able to put on muscle mass with enhancement going on.

So I mean, in theory, if you have great genetics, then you can fulfill your muscular potential.

And he even went to put on even more muscle than that.

But let's talk about like the regular mer mortals.

In theory, you can reach your potential for muscle mass in a lot less than five to ten years if everything in your life goes well and you have great genetics.

But most people will not be able to do that.

So you're not going to be able to see these gains of what you know can consistent gains across the years of one to two pounds of muscle a month type of thing.

It just doesn't happen like that.

Yeah, well, and it just gets really hard for women once once they're post amount of puzzle and they don't have that estrogen.

It's I think that the overall theme that you said, you nailed it when you said it is a slow grind.

Weight loss done the right way is a slow grind.

Muscle building is a slow grind.

And living in the I want this now life that we have access to really anything we want, most things that we want really quickly.

It's it's hard to step back and just be like patience, longevity, play the long game, like no secret sauce here, Like that's hard work, consistency and staying in the game.

Then just like, yeah, this doesn't.

Work, it's years.

It's it's years of consistency.

See, Like it's hard for people to hear that.

They want to they want weeks of consistency to work, but it's not.

You know, it is a years of consistency thing.

Because even if you're able to hit a certain goal within a matter of weeks or a matter of months, who cares if you can't sustain that for the next decade or two or three depending on you know, how much time you have left on the planet, Really, who cares?

So it is a matter of the long game.

I totally agree.

It's like committing to your health for your lifetime, Like I'm in it forever.

Yeah, you never stop.

You don't like get to be to a point where you're like, Okay, well now I can chill.

It's going to chill in life.

It's gonna stay with me.

Wait, the only way you can hold the clock back is just by you know, making sure you're it's trying to adapt yeah.

Yes, Okay, I'm going to ask you one last quick question and you can give a quick answer.

It's for it's not for Haley.

What do you think?

Actually that was a joke.

What do you think?

What are your thoughts on diet soda and is it a death sentence or not?

Oh man, Well, just just.

You can say I don't.

Whoever has uh, you know, Haley's physique can just appeal to their own authority.

Basically, That's what I would recommend.

That is a good answer.

Okay, So well, with a question like this, the only thing you can appeal to is the weight of the research evidence and diet sodas the only caveat to them is not their artificial sweetener content, because across the majority of experimental studies, it shows that they actually help with body weight control, weight loss, they actually help with sustaining a clerk deficit.

All of these fear mongering threats about diet soda leading to you know, either weight gain or diabetes, or heart disease or cancer, all that stuff that's all speculative and it's all based on very weak in quotes evidence.

So we can pretty much toss out the idea that that diet sodas are a threat to health if anything, they're kind of like a they're a key code to making your your your health health good and sustaining the health.

I mean that you would have to drink literal gallons upon gallons of the stuff to even theoretically incur the dangers that that that people wave around in the media.

So now with all of that said, there are some some energy drinks or diet diet drinks that contain like one to two to three hundred milligrams of caffeine per can, and so people have to be mindful of that that they're not drinking, you know, three four cans of those things a day if they contain caffeine.

Because at the general population level, the upper end of caffeine intake that is still healthy or still not harmful is right around four hundred milligrams a day.

We look at if we just look at population averages and what the threshold of risk is in non pregnant individuals.

With pregnant individuals, it's it's a little bit lower, but for non pregnant adults, we're looking at four hundred milligrams on average is the most that you really should kind of start thinking of cutting things off at Yeah, that's.

Okay, I'm nowhere near close to I know we're clear over here.

Good good, Oh my gosh, okay, Well, last question then we're going to let you get off.

What is this has been such a fantastic hour, allan, what what is something that as a scientist that you are, just you in general, that have been on all of like tons of these research papers and all of that.

What have you changed your mind on that was shocking or surprising to you that you were like, hard fast rule, this is what is true.

And then all of a sudden later, you know, years down, months down, whatever, you're like, oh, well now I'm changing my tune because the research has changed.

M okay.

So there's three things that immediately come to mind, starting from the most recent not epiphany, but like, okay, I might I might change my opinion on this is the concept that plant based proteins suck compared to animal based proteins.

We always believe that, We've always wanted to believe that, because we all love our we all love our recent research, and just sort of a mounting kind of pile of evidence, short term evidence, and then now two studies comparing vegan completely vegan group with against an omnivore group, both groups consuming sufficient protein like one point six grams per kilogram of body weight or ero point seven grams per pound of body weight in both groups who are resistance training.

No significant difference in muscle size and strength gains between the vegan.

Group and the omnivore group.

And the vegan.

Group in this one particular study I'm thinking about, they used soy protein powder to boost the protein intake of the vegan group to allow them to hit that one point six grams per kilogram.

Body and that was surprising.

I mean, well, maybe not too surprising, But the reason that it is surprising is because there was a lower amount of essential amino acid intake in the vegan group compared to the omnivore group, even though they used a high quality plant based protein to boost the total daily intake in the vegan group.

Now there's still I'm still skeptical about things.

You could still look at things critically and say, Okay, well, they used untrained subjects for that study, and so pretty much anything is going to work as far as gains go for untrained subjects.

Okay, But you also have to face the possibility that okay, well, differences in protein type might not matter nearly as much as the fact that there is a progressive resistance training program in place, and so vegans still, I mean, they're not necessarily doomed to these major compromises and being able to gain muscle size and strength that we kind of assumed that they were, you know, traditionally.

That was one one thing that was a recent thing.

And then another thing I changed my mind on was the fact that intermittent fasting is going to really mess up your gains, and it's going to make you lose a bunch of lean body mass, and nobody should go more than four or five hours without eating something.

So, you know, having kind of come up during the fitness era of the eighties and nineties, everybody was eating every like three.

Hours with their tupperware.

You know, they're like bringing their damn TopWare around to not only keep muscle from falling off your body, but keep your metabolism stoked, stoked the metabolic fires with small, frequent meals that act as kindling on this raging metabolic fire.

This was sort of the you know, the metaphors that we were taught that happens to be not true.

The human body is perfectly adept at apparently not eating all day and still hanging on to muscle tissue as long as the resistance training program is in place.

And then another thing that I've changed my mind on.

I used to really believe in the post exercise anabolic window.

And this was about twenty years ago when a bunch of media was put out and a book was put out by John Ivy and Robert Portman, a book called Nutrient Timing, where they hypothesized, actually they claimed that if you don't take advantage of this magic thirty to sixty minutes post exercise where you have to consume a quickly absorbed protein and carbohydrate, then you're going to compromise your gains.

You're you're kind of like you're not doing all you can optimize recovery and growth.

And they focused on the post exercise anabolic window.

And over the subsequent I want to say, fifteen years or so, there was a pile up of studies that showed that, hey, as long as total daily protein is sufficient, then exactly where we place those protein doses relative to the training about timing wise doesn't seem to matter wow, and so and so, you know, you don't have to have this way protein shake waiting for you in the locker room, because way in dextros protein shake waiting for you and in the locker room in order to make the same amount of gains as the guy who just drives home in traffic and has his you know, steak and potatoes when he gets home.

And then my colleagues and I we did a meta analysis and that can you know, confirmed this suspicion.

A meta analysis for the listeners is a pooled analysis of multiple studies and sort of seeing what where the evidence leans on that.

And then we did a primary study, a randomized control trial comparing immediately immediate pre exercise protein dosing with immediate post exercise protein dosing, and there was no significant difference between those two protocols in lifters.

So that was the third thing that comes to mind that I've sort of let goal of this whole post exercise anabolic window.

Now this isn't to say that there is some benefit and some merit to eating some protein and or protein and carbs after training.

It's an opportunity to feed.

It's never going to hurt.

But I think that for the goal of muscle growth, people need to focus a little bit more on well.

Number one, total daily protein intake.

That's going to take care of most of you most of your goal.

And if you want a nitpick at the icing on the cake, then make sure that you are eating protein and at least at least three points spread through the day.

That's pretty much everything we know that can maximize muscle growth.

And if you really want to get technical and nitpicky, Brad and I Brad Showinfeld and I we review the literature and came to the conclusion that if you want to maximize muscle growth, then the distribution of protein intake through the day should be at least four feedings dosed at about point four two point six grams per kilogram of body weight, and that would that would amount to this sort of golden total of one point six to two point two grams per kilogram of body weight for the total.

So yeah, I just kind of threw that little thing in there.

Bill, that was lovely.

This is the perfect way to end.

First of all, Alan, you're just incredible and you're you're so easy to talk to and have the general population, which is what our audience is be a to understand so many of the these issues that can be so complex and overwhelming for someone to just kind of start and not, you know, want to just quit after day one because there's so much information.

So I love your book and Flexible Dieting, which is the name again for anyone listening.

You can get that at any bookstore Amazon, I think I got mine on Amazon anywhere that you can buy books.

Correct.

Yeah, it's all over, it's all over the place.

It was even in uh was it Walmart at one point?

I don't know.

Oh, then you made a big time.

You made it big time exactly well perfect, And you have your website which is.

Is Alanarragon dot com Allanarragon dot com.

And I'm really proud of my baby, which is my research review, which I've been doing every month since two thousand and eight.

And so I would encourage people who are in really into the details of stuff and the science and this stuff, then that would be a good resource.

And yeah, I want to thank you both.

I want to see you both again.

That it's great meeting you and you guys are both really great and I'm just happy to know that such good folks like yourselves are doing such good things for the industry.

So thank you so much.

Thanks Allen.

We look forward to talking to you again.

Oh yeah, we will do it again for sure.

Thanks for listening everyone.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a five star rating and sharing the body Pod with your friends.

Until next time,