Coaching & Cocktails
Coaching & Cocktails
S4 Ep18: Unraveling the Secrets of Fitness, Metabolism, and Weight Loss
Join Tina and co-host, Dat Cao as they unravel the tangled web of the evolution of metabolism, weight loss, and the delicate balance of calories in versus out and how just exercising more doesn't result in weight loss. We dismantle common misconceptions as we discuss our thoughts on the research and book, Burn, by Herman Pontzer, PhD.
We'll chat about the surprising truths behind most gym-goers' and exercise enthusiasts transformations (or lack thereof), the psychological tug-of-war over hunger and food choices, and why nutrient-dense choices can be a game-changer for managing weight.
Of course, we don't shy away from discussing how stress, sleep, and metabolic diseases are crucial pieces of the metabolic and overall health puzzle that all too often go overlooked in the constant pursuit of aesthetic goals and weight loss.
We discuss how ALL diets work but why it's so hard to maintain, as we venture through the evolution of human metabolism, the battles of obesity, and strategies to stave off those pesky food cravings—even when the dessert tray seems to have your name on it. Oreos? Who can eat just one anyway?
Lastly, we examine why tracking both calorie quantity and quality isn't just about performance—it's about survival in the fittest sense. Tune in for an enlightening dose of fitness and nutrition that may just revolutionize your approach to health, vitality and longevity.
Check out Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy by Herman Pontzer, PhD and let us know your thoughts on our discussion.
Get in touch with Dat:
Dat Cao, PT, DPT, Certified Orthopedic SpecialistNative Physical Therapy
www.nativept.com
Don't get weird, use your head, it'll all be OK!
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Hello and welcome to Coaching and Cocktails, the podcast. This is Tina, and today I have with me Dat Cow again. Physical therapist extraordinaire. Yes, say hi, say hi Dat.
Speaker 2:They should have me back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I got a lot of good feedback on our podcast, so I don't know if you will find this as good feedback or not, but I had several people tell me I really liked him. He's so cute. I don't know if you take cute as a compliment, but apparently people thought you were cute.
Speaker 2:Well, it's a podcast, so I guess I don't know, I guess they liked your voice.
Speaker 1:they liked I think they just liked the conversation. I think they thought that the conversation was good. So what have you been up to? So you tell me about the CrossFit Open and what you're doing for some of the athletes right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's been a fun two weeks. The CrossFit Open started last, technically last Thursday evening, and it's a three-week kind of endeavor where everyone works out, has the same workout, there's office scales for each person, but last week was a ball buster. It was just like 21 reps of dumbbell thrusters and then burpees, and it was just one of those. You know you're coughing and I know all about coughing.
Speaker 2:So I go to Fairbanks CrossFit so I've been providing support for their athletes as they kind of go through this and the various aches and injuries and things that they might be dealing with. So, yeah, this last weekend was the second open workout. Everyone did much better. I think it was like a steadier, longer workout. So last workout there was like a 15-minute cap and it was all about intensity. This one was like a 20-minute workout as many rounds as possible of dead lifts, rows and jump roping. So, yeah, and then doing it myself, I think I stayed in the steady range of just getting the reps through. So, yeah, it's definitely a good transition from working with crossfitters, from working with runners, both highly competitive after care about their health and fitness.
Speaker 1:So everybody's breaking themselves down in the CrossFit open and you're helping to put them back together again.
Speaker 2:That's the nature of competition, right, Like there is a point where you kind of work out and you have to kind of peak at a certain point and then go out there and test it. Test that, so there is. Yeah, I mean, I appreciate it, and I think you always have to hit some level of intensity or have some goal. Else what are we doing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, goals are good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, goals are good.
Speaker 1:Goals are good, it keeps us moving forward. I decided that. So, talking about buying the horse which I told everybody about in last week's podcast, I don't know, I guess I felt like I needed some other. I mean, obviously I love horses anyway and I certainly didn't go into it thinking that I was like, oh, I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna compete and be competitive and do all of these things.
Speaker 1:But I sort of almost I like the challenge of just being able to get better, as I'm turning 51, I turn 51 next month and I feel like I need to always be challenging myself with something new and be as we've kind of talked about before, just being willing to fail at it, being willing like I'm willing to suck and I can say that I have sucked deeply in some rides, right, like on other horses, and even in my, my first ride on the horse that I bought, I was like this was not quite the magical unicorn ride. I thought it was going to be. We are not like is that we're not meshing? But I was like but it's a process and it's something that we get to do over time. And then I also sort of immediately was like well, maybe I will do a show one day, maybe I will compete and just see.
Speaker 1:And Brandi she actually, cause she does a lot of equestrian, so she does upper level dressage stuff. And she said I think everybody should do a horse show at some time in their lives to get outside opinions right, because it's a very subjective sport like bodybuilding and other sports, right. And just to get an outside opinion of what your riding looks like, right, cause I have a trainer and then I have myself. But why not let other people tell me how bad I suck? Right and take the feedback and decide if I want to do something with it or not, right. So yeah, misogynist. Is that? What misogyny is?
Speaker 2:No, no misogyny, it's like-.
Speaker 1:Oh, misogyny. I was like that's not what misogyny is.
Speaker 2:You choose, like your, one difficult thing you want to do that year.
Speaker 1:Oh, is that what it is?
Speaker 2:Yeah, misogyny Okay misogyny. It kind of like it impacts the rest of your years, like one thing you want to hit, like that mountain you want to climb. The idea is like you're shedding old habits and the least embrace, like a new version of yourself. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I like that. It's kind of like what a lot of people do, kind of I don't like New Year's resolutions, but I have a lot of I know a lot of people that like choose a word for the year, right. And so I think that that kind of aligns with the like, the misogyny kind of thing or having a new challenge for that year, and I think that also aligns very well with like having a really strong why, right? So if I've chosen that this is my year of whatever, to me I guess it's the year of the horse. It is, and I've heard the year of the horse for me. I don't know if it's actually the Chinese year of the horse, it probably isn't but Dragon, is it a dragon? Okay, so I'm gonna say that would be crazy, weird if it was, but yeah, so that's kind of and I actually I already forget what I said. My word was this year, clarity. My word was clarity, and that might change a little bit, but I think that I have that's still. I think that's still my word and my challenge to get clarity on what I'm gonna do when I grow up and where I'm going in my life.
Speaker 1:So so you and in the theme of now we're doing podcasts, where somebody comes to me is like hey, I have an idea, let's talk about this. You said you wanted to talk about this new book you just read, called Burn, which is by I should have it right here at my fingertips because I am currently. I started reading it immediately. It's by Herman Ponzer and it's called Burn. New research blows the lid off how we really burn calories, stay healthy and lose weight. So what did you want to talk about in terms of this book, before I give any of my own opinions on it? Sure.
Speaker 2:Also I wanted your opinion is you transform people and you it's amazing Every type of transformation that you've put out there on social media and I am like in awe, always from where a client has started to where they end up and how that transformation goes. Because this book some things that just surprise you. They take Dr Ponzer. He's a researcher and it's coming from the point of a evolutionary anthropologist. So he's looking at hunter-gatherers and it would make sense, right, the more activity you do, the more calories you burn, and that's kind of a traditional method, but his research is, and in this book he kind of dispels it. He says the human body is made for survival. You know, someone who's a hunter-gatherer is burning, for a woman about 1,900 calories a day, for men maybe about 2,600 calories a day. Up to 3,000 is the same as like a computer programmer in New York, right?
Speaker 1:With a sedentary lifestyle, sitting on the couch doing nothing. I will say that aspect of it was I wouldn't say it's shocking. Once I started, once I got through more and more of the book, I was like, yeah, so I will say it aligns 100% with everything that I know scientifically and stuff. I think the way that he put it were concepts I just never considered right, like there were some things that I didn't consider. But then when you kind of put it all together, I'm like, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. But that analogy I was before I even read the book. I was like, oh, it's going to be talking about how hunter-gatherers burn more calories and we just need to be more active, right, like we need to be more active and then all will be well.
Speaker 2:Right, that's kind of what I would always think Like. I would say someone in a hunter-gatherer society and he studies the Hansa, which is a group in Africa that actually still lives that hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Speaker 1:Yes, the Hansa.
Speaker 2:And the metabolism and the way they do it. I mean he gets really scientific about like the evolutionary aspect of metabolism in Malibu, which for me it was interesting, but I can also see like that first half of the book being very challenging.
Speaker 1:It was. I'll say that so I do. I was fascinated by the evolutionary aspect of our metabolisms. So there was, I did. I learned quite a bit Like I think the science all fits together when it comes together in the end, but I never. It's that I had never considered it from the evolutionary perspective, like what our metabolisms are doing from an evolutionary perspective, and that was very cool.
Speaker 1:I will say he's very. There's just a lot of detail I think doesn't necessarily need to be in there. So I think we do a lot of deep diving into like this. It gets very wordy. It's an easy read, especially if you listen to it on Audible, like I do. It's a really easy read. I think he's amusing. I think that the way he presents things, I even chuckled several times like I think it's very good book. I think there's just we go a little deeper into some stuff that I was kind of like could we skip that part? Can we skip that part? Can we just like get to the stuff? But it's very good, but it was. It is fascinating to think about our metabolisms from an evolutionary perspective. Sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so from there, I mean, I was kind of fascinated about this whole idea that you know what really is causing the obesity epidemic in our country is really like the excessive amount of calories we consume, and what is it? Because it's not even. It's not even the quality of the calories. It's like you know, he does mention that guy, mark Hub, the Twinkie guy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, who did the Twinkie diet?
Speaker 2:Yeah, lost 20 something pounds in like 10 weeks, right, and the only thing he did was like just eat that little bit of a deficit for yeah, ate a Twinkie like every three hours or I don't know.
Speaker 1:It was ridiculous, but he ended up only eating I think it was like 1,100 calories a day right Worth a Twinkies. So he lost like 25 pounds or something along those lines and he did improve some of his health markers. I think that there were even some health markers that came down. But the moral of the story of the book like, I think, if we jump to the, what is the conclusion? Is that exercise alone burning more calories. Right, so doing more activity in a bubble by itself. If I just exercise and do nothing else about changing my habits to increase my calorie burn in a day, I'm not going to lose weight. Right, that was what he said. That is what a lot of the science that he put in there proves. He mentioned study after. Now I have not gone and looked at these studies or anything, because there's probably studies to say otherwise. Study after study he mentioned, and doing this deep dive into the Hodza I think there were some other tribes and the Hunter-Gatherer tribes that they looked at and stuff.
Speaker 1:The moral of the story was our bodies are designed very smartly to survive. Our bodies are hypothalamus that he talks about a lot and how. That's the manager of all the things metabolism and all the things that are happening in our bodies. It decides where calories go. It decides how to utilize calories, based on our activity levels, based on what we're doing. Just burning more calories than we take in, I'm sorry, just burning more calories through exercise is not actually going to create a deficit. Our bodies just adapt. We up-regulate or we down-regulate our metabolism in air quotes, because it's a metabolism encompasses a lot of stuff. Really, that becomes the gist.
Speaker 1:The problem is, if you think of it in terms of because everybody likes to talk about calories and versus calories out or cico or whatever calories and versus calories out, when we up-regulate our exercise and our activity, the hypothalamus goes all right, well, I'm going to make you hungrier. Okay, now I'm going to bring in more calories because our body wants to stay in balance. Always. That's the brain's job is to keep us in balance. Always, if I make myself do more exercise, I'm going to be more hungry. I can tell you every client that nearly every client that I have the more exercise they do, the hungrier they get. Right, because our body doesn't want us to be hungry. He uses starvation mode a lot. It's something we actually have tried to get out of using in the bodybuilding industry anyway, because nobody's actually starving. But this term starvation mode, it really is just the body adapting its metabolic processes to your calorie output and your calorie input.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we're not starving per se, but I didn't like the use starvation mode all the time.
Speaker 2:But so it seems like a more of a psychological effort for weight loss, when it comes down to it, instead of eating the Twinkie, which is calorie dense, I mean the same.
Speaker 1:Calorie dense, but not nutrient dense.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 1:So it's calorie dense foods that are devoid of nutrients. So we'll talk about the Holly Palatial, so we'll get into that aspect. If we're talking in a bit the Holly Palatable foods and why it's so, I actually so I don't know if you listened. So there's a really good podcast, a Huberman podcast, that I think that if you haven't listened to this one yet, it'll, it'll tag very nicely on to to this one for you, to the book I mean, and it's with Lane Dr Lane Norton, who actually is. He was somebody I competed with back in the day before he was Dr Lane Norton, so he's he's really, really big in the in research on metabolism and fat loss, right, and. And he is a power lifter and he's been a bodybuilder, so he understands it both in theory and in practice, right. So, and he's coached people to. You know, he's the coached client for years and years and years. He's super smart.
Speaker 1:It's like three and a half hour podcast, but it's really worth the listen because I think it it is calories and versus calories out. The problem is it's not as simple as our bodies are not just like I put gas in my car and my car goes, and so what goes in kind of comes out right Kind of thing. Our bodies are just not that simple. We're not simple machines. Right, there is the. It's the. The calories out process of things is more than just well, I exercise, I burned 3000 calories today, based on my Apple watch or whatever that says this is how much I burned, because that's one. Those things are inaccurate and it's not a simple equation in that respect, right. So, and I think and he he explains that, I think, in in the book and it really does come down to our calories out equation has a lot to do with what our brain is doing, what our metabolic disease status is right. So how much fat we already have on our bodies. Do we have heart disease? Do we have diabetes? Do we have inflammation? Do we manage our stress? Are we getting sleep? All of those things help to determine what calories out are right. And calories in is the easy part. We can calculate more or less what comes into our bodies. We cannot accurately calculate what, what goes out. I mean, you can use the, you know in in in his terms, there is a. What did he, what did he call it? The calorie constraint of trying to make constrained daily calorie expenditure right. So, no matter how much activity we do, we are actually constrained with the amount of calorie output we'll actually have because our body is always trying to keep us in homeostasis and we'll up and down regulate based on what we're doing.
Speaker 1:So doing more activity doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to lose weight, right, which is what people think. But I can say anecdotally and I'm sure you you've seen this right, if anybody who's gone to the gym for years and years and years, right, I used to see the same people in the gym and they are. I mean, they are running and a little ellipticaling and aerobic, seeing and lifting weights Years. I'd see the same people 10 years. They never look any different. Well, it's not for lack of physical activity, right, they're in their bust and their asses in the gym, but they never look any different. So that? So why is that? Right? It's because they're not managing the calories in. That's the equation. So you could see it.
Speaker 1:Your average person could just look around in the gym. You can look at yourself, right? You're like I'm doing all the things. Oh, I get this all the time. I'm doing all the things. I'm doing all the things and I can't lose weight. I'm doing all the things, lots of exercise, so much physical activity, problems, in some cases too much. We can get to that too, right? I'm walking 10,000 steps a day and I run and I lift weights four times a week and I do yoga and I manage my stress and I'm getting sleep, whatever. Doing all the things.
Speaker 1:And then I'm like okay, well, what's your nutrition? Look like oh, it's great, I eat clean, but I don't ever track calories. All right, so until we actually get somebody to accurately track their calorie intake and humans are listen, the number of people I have that come to me they're like oh, I'm only, you're right, everybody logs their food for a week before I even consider like okay, where are you? Where are you in terms of calorie intake, 1,200 calories. Well, you don't eat 1,200 calories a day and you're 50 pounds overweight. Not a thing. It's not a thing, right? It's just because if you read this book, whether you're sitting at your literally lying at your desk all day long or you're out running a marathon, pound for pound, a person of the same body, weight, structure, size, whatever is burning the same calories. Right? The computer programmer versus the marathoner? Right, the meta, your BMR, rmr, whatever is the same. So the difference is you're not really eating 1,200 calories because you didn't gain 50 pounds of body fat, because you're only eating 1,200 calories a day. Right, that's a good thing, but humans are notorious, right?
Speaker 1:He talks about a lot of studies. I mean, there's studies upon studies and anecdotal evidence of like. We will always overestimate our daily activity and underestimate how much we eat, right? So it's that the key is and I can say with my transformation clients, my bodybuilding clients, it's always nutrition. Yes, we do add cardio and we manipulate it, we do manipulate activity levels, but it's always nutrition. If they are losing body fat or not losing body fat, it comes down to what the calories in look like. Period, and nobody wants, right, that's the hard part. It's hard.
Speaker 1:yeah, it's hard, right, everybody wants. So I love, love that, because I feel like every book, podcast or other documentary God fucking documentaries I get so excited that I'm just like, oh, we're going to see all the science in somebody. You know somebody's going to like, look at all the different diets and debunk that like this one's better than this one, and then it ends up being sponsored by vegans or it's sponsored by you know cow farmers or whatever, right, and this one he was like basically like they're all good, they all work, right, it's not high carb, low carb, high fat, low fat. Oh, and I really love because I've been saying this for years that the paleo diet is like, not even closely related to what paleo man ate. Right, they, we were what do you call us? Opportunistic omnivores, omnivores, yeah, so I have said that since the beginning of the paleo diet and I was like this is not what paleo man ate, right, they ate what was available. Right, that if you got fruits, you got that, whatever tubers, you know, whatever the case is.
Speaker 1:And then meat came along later, right, and they have the scientific evidence showing that. Right, like the fact that they didn't have paleolithic. And he got into the names of all the different, like whatever the names of the people were back then, and I'm not gonna get into that, but you know, at the beginning of time they didn't have the tools to kill an animal to eat animal meat. So it was really right, the gathering right. It was more gathering than it was hunting. And then they can start showing where animal bones started having like cut marks in them. So you could tell that a tool was used to cut them or you know. And they had the actual tools because they were saying that, like, the tools for gatherers were like a stick, that's how you're digging up a tuber or whatever kind of plant in the ground. So you couldn't prove that that's all they ate, but you could prove that they weren't eating anything else because there were no tools available to do that. And then you can see when they started eating meat.
Speaker 1:So, long story short, the paleo diet is. I mean, I'm not gonna say it's bullshit, eat it if you want, but that is not what the paleoman women, people were eating. This is the more one thing you're eating, right, opportunistic omnivores, right. So you can be vegan if that feels good to you. You can do keto, you can do intermittent fasting, you can do carnivore diet. Whatever the case is and this has been studied and repeated over and over again it comes down to you are putting yourself in a calorie deficit One way or another. You're not eating as many calories, right, right?
Speaker 1:Right and then, if you so, on the side of like low carb or keto diets. The reason why people feel so successful on those is it does give you scale weight loss very quickly, because when you take out all of your carbohydrates, you immediately deplete your glycogen stores, so water weight goes down. So you're gonna see this like five, 10 pound drop on the scale and that's really exciting, right, and there is a lot of evidence to show that if people can will stick to a diet, if they can get like cause we like immediate gratification. If I can see really quick, immediate results, then I'm gonna be excited and more motivated to continue, right? So ketogenic diets will do that really. Low carb diets will do that, because your all your carbs go away. You lose a lot of water weight very quickly, but is it sustainable? You start eating carbs again. That same weight comes back on, right?
Speaker 1:I do this in bodybuilding. We manipulate this in clients all the time, right? Cause we deplete them and then we're trying to fill them up, fill them back out for the stage so we might bring their carbs like way, way, way, way down. So they're glycogen stores, right. They look all flat and stringy and they look like little scrap crack head skeletons, right. And then and they feel really puny and they're like, oh, I'm gonna die. And then they eat like 350 grams of carbs the day before the show. Their weight goes up two or three pounds on show day.
Speaker 1:Of course, my the client. I always warn my clients cause they're like I weigh more and I'm like, yeah, that's what we want. Because your muscles are full now, right, like don't you look better? Right, and now you have full muscles that are pressing against the skin and you look leaner because the muscles are pressing in skin. You don't look like you're dying. So that's what carbs are doing when we're kind of like manipulating carbs. So, anyway, that I would say that's. The only benefit to a diet like that is that you're gonna get that really quick and immediate return. But as soon as you start eating carbs again, it's going to come back. So, any, the only diet that works in his words and I would agree the only diet that works is one that you can live on and sustain a healthy weight. Right, that's what works right, yeah, exercise.
Speaker 2:It won't necessarily make you lose more weight, but it's a great way to maintain your weight, absolutely, and exercise is essential for your health, right?
Speaker 1:So the problem is and I actually just got through the part where he's talking about you know cause? He's talking about the exercise aspect? Because he's like, yeah, now everybody's gonna, everybody's like whoa, up in arms because you can't say exercise doesn't help with weight loss, because then nobody's gonna exercise, because everybody wants to exercise for aesthetics. I want to exercise to lose weight so I can look out on the beach, so I can look hot. He even said, right, so if I'm not exercising to look hot, then just prop my ass up on the couch with a bag of potato chips and I'm gonna go on about my life, right, right.
Speaker 1:And that that is the unfortunate truth, because unfortunately, so many people look at exercise solely as a way to lose weight, even as a means of punishment for gaining weight or eating too much. Let me go exercise it off. You know, whatever the case may be, nobody is looking at exercise or how they eat, what they eat for their health. Everybody's doing it in terms of aesthetics, right? And so that even brings me to like you know how, bodybuilding aside, people have a really strong goal they're gonna lose weight and get on stage. But if you're talking about just like lifestyle clients that I work with, if somebody's coming to me and is like, yeah, I want to lose 10, 20 pounds so I can look at it in my daughter's wedding, that's not, that's a temporary diet, that's not something that's gonna really work and they're gonna be able to sustain and they're probably not gonna be able to stick to it and it's gonna suck.
Speaker 1:If somebody comes to me is like I'm prediabetic, I don't want to take drugs, I want to live a long life, I want to be able to be around for my kids, I want to do this for my health, then people are gonna be more inclined to do those things. But it's really hard to sell physical activity that is about your health. It's easy to sell it as a means to look hot right. Same with the foods that you eat. Yeah, I mean you could lose weight eating a Twinkie every three hours on 1,100 calories worth of Twinkies. Or I think somebody did a Big Mac diet. I mean it's been shown a lot and people. You can lose weight, but it's calorie restriction, no matter how you look at it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, even the exercise component of it. I mean it's so interesting where. What are those excess calories doing to your body? Like what is it if we're not burning, if it's not being part of your consumer? If your calorie constraint calculated, well, it's in there, it's doing something, and people that are more active and nexizing have less of an immune response system, but immune response to everything going on in the body. So immune response includes, like allergies, allergens, autoimmune issues. Why is it that, like third world countries, including inflammatory issues like heart disease and metabolic issues like diabetes, are more so prevalent in third world countries where we're not as active?
Speaker 1:Right, right, yes, because in his, the way he describes it, the way our bodies work, right? If we all basically have the same BMR, pound for pound, right, based on our size, where do our calories go? So if I'm not exercising, those calories are gonna get allotted to body fat for, like you said, inflammation, for other areas, right? If I'm exercising, those calories get allotted to, maybe, building muscle or maybe, if I'm strength training, or to that calorie out, right? So there are less calories available to be. If all the calories are the same, there are less calories available to make me sick, right? So there is a lot of benefit to that. Plus, exercise improves cardiovascular health and it improves metabolic health, whether it's cardiovascular or blood sugar regulation.
Speaker 1:For diabetes, I will say I guess the other potential, so the other potential for a lower carb diet would actually be somebody who's diabetic, right, and helping to regulate blood sugar. So there is that benefit, but not in a sense of. I mean that's from a health marker perspective, not anything else. But, yeah, I think that it was really interesting the way that he put that concept of like okay, well, if we all have the same basic BMR, right? So if you and I have the same BMR if we were the same size. And I'm sitting on the couch eating potato chips all day and not gaining weight but contributing to my inflammation, contributing to right, I'm building up plaque in my arteries. I'm you know. Whatever the case may be, I'm still going to be less healthy, even if I end up weighing the same.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's that autoimmune part of it that is so interesting, because you know someone that that there's a phenomenon in marathon training you know after your marathon you're more likely to get the flu or to get a cold because your immune system's a little more suppressed, because your body's you know saying, hey, I'm gonna use these calories because you did the marathon and you're wearing this calorie deficit. So we gotta rebuild those tendons, those bones, that strength, as opposed to someone who's not well, that extra calories is doing something with those weightlifts, yeah, and the same with bodybuilders, right, and you know, I think there's, you know there's an adrenaline aspect to a lot of that.
Speaker 1:Like you're just, you're, all your calories are going towards this thing, right, so you're mentally focused, right. So calories are going to your brain, your mental, the mental focus on these sports is really important to you, right, I'm thinking about it, I'm planning it, I'm you know all the food planning. There's so much calorie going towards this effort. When it's over, there's like this, like your body just goes, huh, right, and then you get sick and then all the calories go there, right, so it's just, it's inevitable. I think, like in any high stress situations, if you think of like, even if you, yeah, so if you have like some like really high stress, you just like I gotta be on it, going, going, going for this thing, I get this high stress test, or finishing this course or whatever, and immediately after you get sick, right, there's something to that and it's our, it's our, it's our brains, or hypothalamus in particular. That's like being super smart. I love that. You called it like the metabolic manager, the paleolithic that might be the wrong word. The metabolic manager, that's just like evolutionary metabolic manager. I can't forget what he called it. That is, like you know, smart enough to know exactly where all of these things have to go. It can just be a lot more efficient with people who aren't sick, making themselves sicker, bringing in too many calories and exercising right.
Speaker 1:The other thing I think was a really important point is I really love the play between okay, like our ancestral apes and chimpanzees, who are very lazy, they're very good at conserving energy, but how we as human, and so oh so they. They talk about how, like pound for pound, these apes, and they talk about like BMR and stuff. They're big but they're not fat. Like they run like eight 10% body fat right, like they stay very, very lean and they do nothing, right, they're sort of like. They're like, yeah, they're like the couch potato of the animal world, and animals are really good at like conserving energy. Like no animal purposely expends energy. We're the only ones who do that, by the way. Everybody else knows how to conserve because they don't know when they're gonna have to do it. They don't have to chase their food, right, or whatever.
Speaker 1:So, anyway, what I think is really cool is that he talks about how our metabolisms have evolved. From that sort of sloth-like. I don't do much, sit around on the couch, hang out in a tree, ape to being very active, our metabolisms to hunter-gatherers right. So the hunter-gatherers are very active. We are evolved, our metabolisms evolve to be hunter-gatherers, to be moving all the time, and then we don't, right. So our metabolisms need what our evolution says we should be moving all the time and over the course of so, why obesity is going up since even 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s right, it goes up every year is because we're getting, we're moving less and less and less.
Speaker 1:It's about 15,000 steps, that yeah that's why he said, evolutionary-wise we should be the hot stuff right, or doing like 15,000 steps a day. That's how much movement we should be getting at a minimum right. So it's also why our bodies are storing more fat more easily, because our metabolisms are expecting more calorie expenditure and we don't have it, and so then we're storing fat for because we're in starvation mode or what have you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean even the animal kingdom. It takes like one calorie to get 40 calories For people. It's like 10 calories for 40 calories. So we're working and really the only way evolution worked is that we worked together. It took a village to gather food together for the whole collective, for everyone to see, and that's what kind of set us apart, and that's kind of what said Homo erectus or Homo sapiens, away from the animal kingdom. So you go back to it now. Sometimes we go back to calorie-dense food. I mean, it's like a psychological trick, right, like the brownie, the twinkie, the availability of this food, the easy calories, even the economic cost of it.
Speaker 1:it's cheaper, well, that's why there is so much more obesity in underserved communities, food deserts, more urban areas, because there is more poverty. Cheap food is shitty food, right. There's a lot more stress, there's a lot more all of these things and that's where we end up having more heart disease and obesity. So the highly-allotable foods that are available to us and what people need to understand and I know I've talked about this on the podcast before. I think we talked about it in one of the documentary ones. I think food is designed. If people don't hear anything else. Food is designed. Highly-allotable foods Oreos, doritos, twinkies, the shit that can sit on a shelf for 50 years and still be edible quote unquote. There are very smart people in the food industry who are designing these foods are literally designed with a chemical structure to make us want more. It has an impact on the brain. There's a dopamine hit. There's a lot of other things that will. So there isn't a. I mean, yeah, it's cool to say can you have just one? Well, they're designed for you to not be able to have just one, right?
Speaker 1:So you talked about having food cravings and how the hypothalamus kind of controls these things and the sort of the premise that we can go out to a meal and I think everybody's probably experienced this.
Speaker 1:Let's take Thanksgiving, for example. Right, so Thanksgiving dinner and we're all stuffed to the gills after dinner, right, we'd be in the turkey and the stuffing and the mash potatoes, and we're all like ooh, lean back in the chair and like man, I'm stuffed, I couldn't eat another bite. And then somebody brings out the pumpkin pie and suddenly You're craving the pumpkin pie because that is how our brain is designed. It's the reward pathways. It's going to be that reward pathway hit, that dopamine hit that sugar gives some people, not all. We're not all designed exactly the same. Then suddenly you're eating pie when you couldn't possibly have eaten another bite of the savory. It's why we can go out to dinner and be stuffed and still, suddenly the dessert comes out, you get the reward pathway and the hypothalamus lights up and it's like, yeah, here we go, I'm going to eat some more. I mean, who hasn't done that?
Speaker 2:100%.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we did talk about how there is a genetic variation to why some people are more, have a propensity towards obesity. There is genetics involved in that, which is why you tend to see obesity run in families. There's also eating habits that run in families, based on rates. If the parents are obese and need a certain way, the kids are probably going to also eat a certain way and be obese. There is a genetic, there's a lot of genetic to that, but it's not what do you say? But that's not your destiny. My genetics are not my destiny. I actually have the ability.
Speaker 1:So epigenetics show that environmentally, I can actually decide what parts of my DNA are turned on and turned off right, how my DNA is expressed, based on my. That's what epigenetics is. So, just because my genes say I can, actually I can use my lupus as an example, because it works in very much the same way. I was genetically predisposed to having lupus, but I didn't get sick until later in life when those when that the genes were turned on right. So there was something that triggered that gene expression and then I got sick, but it was always there right, like I didn't magically get it out of the blue. So the same thing is true for obesity, heart disease, things along those lines. So we have control over that to a point, because we can control our environment.
Speaker 1:So the people you know when I tell my clients all the time so if we talk about like calorie, so if you're in a calorie deficit, your body's going to work real hard to tell you, hey, demi, stop, we need to be in homeostasis because our body doesn't like that. Tell my clients all the time our bodies are not designed to look good. Our bodies are designed to survive period. Your body gives no fucks about how you look in your bikini. It wants you to stay a certain weight. It wants to keep your calories kind of coming in and going out at the same rate, right. It wants things to kind of stay in this happy middle ground, wherever that is, even if you're overweight, it wants it will try to make you overweight. If you've spent most of your life overweight, it's going to try to keep you overweight because that is homeostasis for your body. So what I tell clients is you don't get through a diet, you don't get to lose weight without being hungry. Some people are going to be hungry, other than others. Right, there is, you know, some people can seemingly eat next to nothing and never be hungry. So, again, there's a lot of genetic variation in that, but you're going to be hungry.
Speaker 1:The problem is, people who exercise like maniacs and don't track their nutritional intake at all right, are going to naturally eat more. Our bodies are going to tell us to eat more, right? So we're going to. So the only way around it is some type of nutritional tracking, right? So, whether you're using my fitness pal and weighing and measuring everything you do which my bodybuilders have to right, like they're very they're meticulous about it. Even that's not exact science, but at least there's consistency in, like, I'm weighing and measuring, I'm eating this amount and we're slowly reducing the amounts of foods that they eat.
Speaker 1:So, whether you're doing it that way, or portion size or hand portion size control, or taking pictures of your meals or your restraining calories because you're using intermittent fasting or low carb, whatever the case may be, you have to track your calories in some way, because your body will tell you to eat more to keep your balance right and you're going to be hungry.
Speaker 1:So I tell my clients, like, you're just going to have to accept that hunger is part of the process. In fact, embrace it, right, Like if you're hungry. It means you're in a deficit, it means your body's like all right, they're not bringing in as many calories as we're expecting, so we're going to have to start, you know, turning down some calorie you know where I'm putting calories over here and get into fat burning, right. So where's my body going to get the energy that it needs? Well, it'll go to fat stores first, depending on the type of calories you're expending, right. But if you're doing things correctly, it's going to start reaching into fat stores for its energy, right? Because if I'm not bringing the energy in and my body needs to stay in homeostasis, it's got to get the energy from somewhere, yeah?
Speaker 2:I love seeing this because I'm getting a peek into the actual process right the coaching, the feedback, the like what does it take to create these transformations? And it does a lot of like, feedback and measuring and guidance and, like you know, to go in alone sometimes even like my wife and I, we're using Noom as like food trackers as a way to see where we're at and are we really eating enough, because you know, part of it is like I don't think I was eating enough and so why am I tired all the time? And, yeah, you know.
Speaker 2:I should be getting, like I should be getting my level, like they're like 2,600 calories and I'm at like 19 on most days. Yeah, Like you know, bumping up a little bit, I feel better. My muscles are getting bigger. Yeah, yeah, Performing better and, like you know, CrossFit workouts. So you know it's just, if you don't do it, you don't track it. I mean, you're just kind of guessing.
Speaker 1:You know that's with everything, that's with life, right, Right, Having goals, even but, and if you and listen, if you're, if you're fine where you are and you're not trying, you're just trying to live a healthy life and you're at a healthy weight, you feel good, you feel good in the gym, you feel you know you have energy, all of those things you don't. You don't have to track everything that you eat Like it's, it's, it's not necessary. But if you have a goal, especially if you have a weight loss goal or a fat loss goal or a physique goal or an even an athletic goal, tracking is important, right, tracking how you feel, tracking your weight, if, if that's part of the process, right, so you may be tracking your, your strength, right, or your run times, or, like I have a, I have a client, my client Kara, who's podcasted with me. She's a hybrid athlete, so she does bodybuilding and she's an endurance athlete right, she does that. God bless her soul. She just added a swimming. So she was a bi athlete and now she's a tri athlete and I was like, can you like? Why do you add more to this equation, with me trying to figure out, like, how to keep you from falling apart? But anyway, but she is.
Speaker 1:I think we're like 20 pounds up from where she was. When she was on stage she was like 120 pounds and she was very, very lean on stage. Now she's like actually, no, she's almost, she has 20, 25 pounds up, I think, from stage. But she's in her endurance training and she said so many people like, try to get smaller, which might make sense, right, if you're carrying less weight around and you're running and biking and swimming, like, does that make you faster? She says for me, like being at this weight, so actually having more weight on her, she said my endurance is so much better. She's strong as an ox, so like she's killing it in the gym and she's killing like these VO2, like all our VO2 tests and like all of these things. And you know she's 20, 30 pounds heavier than she was on stage. Now, stage weight is not a healthy weight, so we shouldn't be comparing that to anything other than being on a bodybuilding stage. She's at a very healthy weight right now. She's by no means right. She's at a very healthy body fat, but she has because she tracks these things right. She's tracking her performance and she's tracking her nutritional intake. She knows and we know what we can adjust. If she starts to tank, then we know we have to upregulate her calories, right, we have to bring the calories up a little bit more. And that's kind of what was happening, like she was really starting to tank and I was like, well, you need more calories, right, regardless of where your scale weight is, we just need to bring more calories in because your body can only do so much. But yeah, there has.
Speaker 1:If you have a goal right, so any goal should. You should always, you know set. You have to have some measurement process to get there right. If your goal is to get your bachelor's degree, like aren't you, don't you have some measure of success in your grades, your test taking, like, do you have the knowledge right? So it's a different kind of measurement, but you're still measuring. If you have a performance goal, you have to measure those things. You don't just go run willy nilly and be like I don't know, am I getting better, am I not getting better? I don't know you're tracking that shit right.
Speaker 1:If you want to lose weight sorry people, there is no all right. There is a magic pill. I don't want to get into that. That pill's got all sorts of other problems.
Speaker 1:But if you think about this book in terms of the weight loss drugs? Right, those weight loss drugs work on the brain. They work on the reward and hunger system, so they're working on the hypothalamus. That is that, right? So, if you think, if you think about the book in terms of what these drugs do, yeah, they make you not hungry. So they are telling your brain to turn off its ability to manage your metabolism, right? So is there a benefit to people getting healthier because they're losing weight? Yes, but what's the downside of that? Right? Like, are you going to be on these drugs forever? Are you going to cause a shlough of other issues? Because they already know the side effects and they don't know the long-term effects, because we got a million people on them now, what's it going to look like a couple of years from now? It's like when Fin Fin came out, right, like it was great.
Speaker 1:Look, I did it. I did it in my 20s. I mean, you want to talk about me? You might as well have given me crack, because it was like there was no hunger ago. I can tell you, I literally was not hungry, I wouldn't eat, I had no hunger, none. So it clearly was operating in very much the same way. And then I got really, really sick because I didn't eat for like a month because these drugs were so strong, right. So, and then they found out that they were killing people and giving everybody heart arrhythmias and you know which I also ended up with, right. So you know, there's always, there's always a downside, so you know, right. So there's no shortcut.
Speaker 1:If you want a long-term solution to your health and wellness and fitness right, and weight loss is part of that if you're at an unhealthy weight, so you have to track you simply have to control your calorie intake some way. Period, it's the only way. Then, right. So you have the like okay, well, I'm hungry, I'm hungry all the time. So there is a big difference in the quality of food. So it's not just the quantity of food you eat, right, so it, yes, in the sense of calories in versus calories out, the quantity of food you eat matters very much. The quantity of calories you eat, the quality of food, is what's going to determine how hungry you are, how stimulated your reward system is, right. So how much of that brain of yours is like you better go eat all Oreos right now, right, because I need all the Oreos, right.
Speaker 1:So the more you eat satiating foods, healthy foods, as our hunter-gatherer brethren have been doing for years, right? So high protein diets? There is zero downside to a high protein diet, none, right. You have to have sufficient protein, you know. High carb, low carb, high fat, low fat, whatever. But eat whole foods, right? High fiber, high protein fruits, vegetables, lean meats. Less processed food, right? Less highly palatable processed food, because one. So there's two reasons.
Speaker 1:They're chemically engineered to make you want more. It is a fact. The food industry I mean there is a bazillion dollar industry behind Doritos and Oreos, and I'm not demonizing Doritos and Oreos because they're amazing, but they will make you want more. They will make you hungry hungry or you will be less satiated eating those things and then you will overeat them. They are designed so you will overeat and then you've overshot your calories and then that's why you're not losing weight. Period. When you eat high fiber, high protein, you're satiated longer. You're going to stimulate that. You know your hypothalamus isn't going to be lighting up like a Christmas tree because you just ate an Oreo that is literally chemically designed for everything and your brain to go off and make you eat more. You're going to eat it. You're going to feel satisfied.
Speaker 2:You're going to go on about your day right, it's like two Oreos or 10 cups of spinach. Right Like calories the same.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I'd rather have the Oreos, but and look if you so the other benefit to tracking calories, right? So my clients know, yeah, I mean 95% of their diet. Really. I mean, listen, you got to be in this for your health, right? So, even so, the bodybuilders they get on poverty macros, you know, got a lot of room for an Oreo. So you do kind of have to choose. Like, well, if I eat this Oreo, I mean let us for dinner, right, because I got no calories left. Right, it doesn't mean you can't ever have it, but you do have to limit it, right? So, yeah, have two Oreos, but then just have two Oreos and make sure you account for those calories, right.
Speaker 1:And then you go on about the rest of your day and eat your chicken and your, you know high fiber carbs and your potatoes and your you know all of all those glorious carbohydrates, because carbohydrates are amazing and but really that that's what it comes down to. So can you control it? Some people have better control over their food cravings than others because everybody's reward system in their brain, everybody's brains are different, so it does you know to say you have more or less willpower. Yeah, I guess that's true if you want to call it willpower, but there some people simply have stronger brain signals that trigger these. You know reward systems more strongly than others, but you can manipulate that based on the nutrient density of your foods, right? Right, I mean that that's what it comes down to.
Speaker 1:There's no easy way around it. You don't, but I always tell people you can't out exercise a bad diet. It's true, and that's exactly what this book says. It could have been called you can't out exercise a bad diet, right? I mean, you can't just exercise and more is not better, better is better.
Speaker 2:I mean, that was my mindset, right Like I'm running today, so I'm going to have ice cream, you know, and it was just an unhealthy way to approach it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because you're rewarding yourself. Now, listen, that's not, it's not necessarily a bad thing, right, like, all right. So you know, as an example, again, I use a lot of, obviously, use a lot of bodybuilding as as examples. But you know, I have some athletes who get up in the 3000 calorie range in their growth season. Right, they're because they, they've got a lot of muscle. The way that they're training their metabolism is just, they can, they can maintain themselves on a lot of calories.
Speaker 1:It can get really hard to eat nutrient 3000 calories worth of nutrient dense food. It's hard because you feel so full, right, like at some point you got to, you got to eat dirty a little bit, right, because, or you know, find a kind of a liquid way for your, your cows rates in some form, because your nutrient dense foods are filling for a reason and 3000 calories worth of them can get kind of tough, so right. So, if you know, if you have 2000, if you know that you should be eating 2600 calories a day, yeah, I have a cup of ice cream. Yeah, right, it's, it's, it's a fantastic way to feel, probably not pre pre run because of the dairy, but you know, a post post run or even like a post workout. You know a really good like briars ice cream. That's like all natural ingredients. I mean you got some sugar, you got some fat, you got carbs in there. It's probably a little protein. If it's like a real ice cream, nothing wrong with that, right, you refill your glycogen, your depleted glycogen stores, stores, stores, stores. Right, nothing wrong with that. You know there's a lot of body butters that are like deadlifts and donuts Great, it's probably a great way to. You know, pre workout for deadlift day Right, you got a lot of sugar and fat going in there and you have a great deadlift day. Because you know you ate five Krispy Kreme's beforehand or after, whatever. Right.
Speaker 1:So you know what I, what I tell my clients, like when you're the time to eat quote, unquote, dirty calories and they don't work for everybody Like if you're going to really eat some simple junkie kind of food. It's pre and post workout, because that's when your body is going to uptake. You know the glycogen really quickly. You're either going to have it readily available in your bloodstream for energy in your workout or right, right, your, your replenishing depleted glycogen stores post workout Right. So you have something that's kind of like real quick digesting a real simple protein, less less fiber, less fat, pre and post workout, you know.
Speaker 1:So, if that's when you want to raise Krispy, tweet either rice Krispy Tweet, right. Like if that's when you want to have your lucky charm cereal, these are just kind of your sour patch kids. These are the popular ones, right, your pop tart, whatever. Whatever the case is, that's when you have it, and then the rest of your day is lean proteins, veggies, fruits, right. The hunter gatherer foods, the things that were not available or the things that are available to the, to our hunter gatherer people.
Speaker 2:Yeah right, that's so interesting it's. You know it's definitely helpful advice, you know.
Speaker 1:Right, you think about it too, like you know not only were you know again so like our metabolism were designed for us to be moving right, like we should be moving a lot more than we are. We've gotten very sedentary outside of the gym. We're very sedentary and highly palatable foods are just readily available. Right, it's, it's quick, it's easy. Fast food on every corner. You know foods in the gas stations. It's harder, it's harder to eat healthy. It just is right. It takes more work. I'm not gonna say it's harder, it just takes more work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my biggest takeaway is like the you know what are those excess calories doing for someone who's not as active? You know, and it's making you sick. There are, yeah, yeah, fewer calories that you're not using, you know because of, say, the budgets by 2500 calories, and actually a couple of hundred calories are spandex on cortisol. Even like the house men, they have roughly about 30% less testosterone than men in industrialized worlds.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I actually. I found that really interesting, you know, when you compare the HADSA men. So we're talking about the hormones, right, we think more is better. Right, more testosterone would be better, more estrogen, more progesterone which is, which is not, which is not the case, right, we want homeostasis, we want, we want it to be balanced. And so if our testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, whatever is is through the roof and we're not doing like the calories are going towards that and we're not doing anything to it for it, you know from it, it too can make us sick, right?
Speaker 2:Right Breast cancer prostate cancer. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that's where those calories are going. So you know the other thing to. So if we kind of circle back to doing more to burn more calories because our metabolisms are so adaptive, right? So I have this problem with clients a lot who are already. So I mean, they are like doing hours and hours of cardio, right, Like you know, there's just a lot of calorie expenditure so to get their their, their metabolisms are so adaptive, not broken. Nobody's got a broken metabolism because everybody's like my metabolism is broken because I dieted too hard and I did too much cardio. No, it's not broken, it's just adapted. It's just it's it's what our bodies do because they're very, very smart. That's how we don't die in a calorie deficit, right? We don't die because we just shift the calories to somewhere else, right?
Speaker 1:Anyway, it's very, very hard for them to lose body fat without going to very extreme low levels of calories, because if you really are only eating 1200 calories and you're expending 3000 calories a day in exercise and you're not, and that's where you're balanced so the only way to lose more weight is, you know, 100 calories a day, right? So you know, we do a lot of end up doing a lot of like reverse dieting and, and I mean, but again, this is a very meticulous and hard and very slow process of very slowly adding calories back into a diet. We do this after a competition and we have to right, Otherwise they're going to gain back all their body fat all at once. So we we start to very slowly add calories back in while we're very slowly bringing down the, the cardio output right, or the calorie output, so that we can get them back to homeostasis, where calories are at a higher level and cardio is at a lower level. So you know, if they keep doing cardio right, they will probably still. If they started increasing their calories and kept doing cardio, they'd still see their body fat go up, yeah Right. But they're keeping their metabolism adapted so that all those calories are going out the window in cardio expenditure, main calorie expenditure. So you have to bring those those you know not the walking and getting your steps in per day and stuff, but you've got to. If these excessive activity levels just create these very adaptive metabolisms, that may get harder and harder and harder for us to ever lose weight, right. So we have to kind of get back to this other place.
Speaker 1:The other thing I'll mention you know I feel like I hopefully I'm not rambling is this concept of like body fat set point. So again, so we talk about that a lot in bodybuilding circles. You know where your body's happy Again homeostasis. If you have spent the majority of your life at 140 pounds and you dieted down to 110 pounds for the stage, your body's gonna real quick try to get you back to 140, no matter what you do, that is where it's going to try to go very, very quickly. So it'll make you really, really hungry. Your left end and grayling get really dysregulated during a fat loss process.
Speaker 1:Where did that little thumbs up come from? I don't know. There's this like little weird thumbs up bubble that just came up. That was happening in when I was podcasting with Carol last week too. I was like is she sending me thumbs up? I don't know what that is. Oh my God, do you think somebody could be listening in? I don't think so. I just gave us a thumbs up. That was weird. So yeah, so again, our body's, being way smarter than we are, are going to do everything it can to kind of like rev itself right up to its previous body fat levels or its previous scale weight or whatever the case may be, it takes. It can kind of be reset, but it takes an excruciating amount of work to, like you know, be much more slow and much more meticulous about how you add calories back in, and all of that, but nine times out of 10, you're going to end up right back where you were.
Speaker 2:Right, I see a lot of injuries happen, most of the time in teenagers with calorie deficits. You know they're growing, the metabolism is growing and they're doing a lot more running, particularly cross country female cross country runners, I mean and you look at what they're eating, they're you know they're skipping lunch, breakfast and a quick snack before the workout, but not enough, you know, and they're chronically coming back with an injury or a re-agorated stress fracture.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's always a conversation I try to have with my athletes when I when I start kind of diving into their number of injuries, number of issues and it's it's not a comfortable conversation. You know, like they have like a peer group that that will kind of stress them into not eating enough because they're trying to have this body image that society tells them that they have to be, but yet you know they're in this like high growth stage of adulthood.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the you know the disordered eating and eating disorders and young girls and boys I mean, and you know young athletes I mean, and even in adult men and women, under eating is so prevalent. And you know, I think you're in a, you're in a really cool position. That's actually just. I think it's really cool that you just said that because, as a physical therapist, I am certain it's not something most physical therapists are going to discuss with their patients, right? Or their clients. Do you call them clients or patients? Clients, clients, clients, yeah, wait, are you eating enough for your body to recover from what you're putting it through in your athletic endeavor, right? So if you think about it in those terms and getting people to understand that, like, okay, well, you're, you take the information in this book and you can use it in a sense of, like that recovery and rebuild, not and and athletic performance, right.
Speaker 1:But if you're looking at people with injuries, chronic injuries, are you eating enough for your body to put those calories towards? Right, that inflammation in your tendon to heal it? Right? Or are all your calories going out the window because you're not eating enough or not eating enough of the right things? Right? Anti-inflammatory diets and all of that. Are, you know, really critical too to their? You know there is recovery based nutrition, right, it's a thing. And are there enough calories coming in? That's a really hard conversation to have, but what a cool opportunity you have that. I don't think anybody is talking about right Like is is most. I mean, I've never met a physical therapist?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, have not, it's not your.
Speaker 1:It's not your. It's not your realm, right? So even doctors don't ask. You know the amount of doctors that people go and see and they, you know they've got heart palpitations or they're overweight or they're this and they're that. Nobody at here's a here's a weight loss drug Did they ask you if you're sleeping? Did they ask you what your hydration levels are? Did they ask you what your stress is like? Did they you know, or you know? Is anybody asking these questions? And that's a big part of the problem with our, with our obesity problem, with our medical, with our medical industry, with with the whole big circle of things. So you're in a really unique position to be able to introduce that from a different perspective, right? So you could help them with like sort of a injury recovery based you know, nutrition protocol. Are you eating enough for your body to recover? It's a thing, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's a hard place for PTs to kind of get into because they always feel like you know where is my place to talk about nutrition, but it's a hundred percent, you know like it's. You know, if we're looking at someone getting back from an injury, yeah, you got to talk about sleep. You got to talk about that stress management. If you're not, you know you're leaving a lot on the table. As far as, like the recovery time, you know you do have to go out there and get the education, read the books, learn for yourself, cause even medical doctors like their education on nutrition. It's maybe like one semester, you know.
Speaker 1:Every doctor I've talked about. It's not even that. It's like a class. They're like yeah, I got about 30 minutes of like, a nutrition, like or whatever right, like the basis of nutrition. Doctors are not there, and they're also not in the business of preventative medicine. That's just not what doctors do. They treat disease. So you know, if you come in with symptoms, they're going to treat the symptoms and not understand the underlying cause of the symptoms, right, which there is always an underlying cause. So so what? So was that was my opinion on the book what you expected.
Speaker 2:Yeah, great. So I know Tina is not someone to not have strong opinions, and this is definitely a topic that piqued my interest. Always when it comes to like human evolution, you know what's the standard out there and then you know learning about how what your process looks like is eye-opening. You know it's definitely you got it down to like a science and you have ways to coach people and kind of get them from point A to B, and then you know explain to them as well the science behind it, which you have a great grass on, to figure out how to distill that in like a small, you know, conversation. It's great. You know, that's definitely what I was looking for.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, but it was. I highly recommend the book. It's very good. I really did, aside from it being a little lengthy in some areas where I'm just like, can we, can we skip over some of the anecdotal, like you drinking wine with the Hadza or you know when you're. You know what I mean. I'm just like some of it's just there's a lot of filler, but the information is good. It really is a very good book. I actually can't wait to finish this.
Speaker 1:I got about an hour and a half left of it on my Audible and he mentioned another book, so I think the next one I'm gonna read. So we actually mentioned one. I just added it to my library. That what's it called? Oh, shoot, I put it in my where is my oh my. Wish list. I didn't order it yet. It's called the Hungry Brain. So he mentioned the scientist Steven G-U-Y-E-T. I don't know how to pronounce that, but that goes into more detail outsmarting the instincts that make us overeat, right? So it's going more detail into. Whereas Byrne talks more about the evolution of our metabolism, this is gonna get into more detail about how the brain actually works. So all the getting more into the detail of the neuroscience of it, which I love. So I'm gonna read that one next and see yeah, outsmarting, yeah, the instincts that make us overeat.
Speaker 2:Nice.
Speaker 1:Which is probably going to be. I don't think I'm gonna learn anything new. It's probably going to be the same things we just discussed right, like don't eat a lot of highly palatable foods. You have to sort of embrace that you're gonna be hungry, you know. Eat nutrient dense foods and you gotta check. If weight loss is your goal, you gotta check your calories. It just it is what it is. I'm sorry people, there are no magic diets.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that'd be great. I mean that'd be great. You know segue, so you know, got the book too, check it out.
Speaker 1:We'll discuss that one next.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We'll start doing book reviews.
Speaker 2:Tina does book club.
Speaker 1:She does book club. Yes, I like it All. Right, this was good information, but yeah, I think it's good and hopefully people got something out of this that maybe they didn't know before. Right, so you know, I think that just is just exercising. Exercise alone if weight loss is your goal, not gonna happen right, there's a lot more to it. Yeah, stop making yourself sick with shitty food.
Speaker 2:Do the work.
Speaker 1:Everybody just gotta do the fucking work and keep moving, because exercise is essential for your health. It does help determine where those calories go. It doesn't make you burn more calories so that you get smaller. Exercise helps determine where those calories get to go. Do they go to bad stuff or do they go to good stuff, like exercise? Right, if you're not exercising, those calories go to bad stuff. Same calories go to bad stuff they make you sick. If you are exercising, those calories go to good stuff and they make you better. That's pretty simple, right, pretty simple. Okay. Good, all right, okay, well, I think that that will be it for today. Do you remember our sign off? Don't get weird.
Speaker 2:Don't get weird.
Speaker 1:Use your head, it will all be okay.
Speaker 2:Nice.
Speaker 1:All right, bye, bye.