Stop Making These Mistakes When Intermittent Fasting - Thomas DeLauer

the biggest benefit to me with intermittent fasting is not body composition changes it's not cognitive awareness it's the element of Mastery that comes with it and that's where people miss the boat because you cannot contest that you can sit here and you can fight every single nook and cranny of intermittent fasting based upon where you stand and your views of nutrition time restricted feeding you cannot argue with me that there is an element of Mastery that comes into place with abstaining from something for the people that don't know you what's your background what do you do it's a guy on the internet man I'm just you know for me I'm a translator of science I'm not a biochemist I don't pretend to be one I I take the research I know how to read a paper very well and I tend to get really overly excited about stuff like that and then I translate it and I try to put it into layman terms and do a decent job at articulating complex subject matter into a way that's digestible for people so that they can have a chance to really review the research and understand and Put Another Brick in the Wall for themselves towards being healthier having more vitality and just being better humans why did you get interested in that I realized not that long ago that I'm not that great at many things uh but I'm decent at a lot of things and I realize the one thing that I am really good at is articulating and communicating and for a long time I tried to fight that I always wanted to be the strongest guy in the room or the smartest guy in the room I always wanted to kind of you know face adversity and and I just wanna I wanna be that guy and then I realized that you know what it's actually really good to be a good effective communicator and I started leaning into that and the moment that I leaned into that and I fed the stallion starved the pony so to speak I realized that I can take all these things that I'm halfway decent at but really get people excited about them with my ability to communicate it talk to me about childhood for you you have a very interesting background what was that like yeah my childhood you know it's interesting I don't talk about it much and recently it's been coming up more probably because people are trying to figure out what makes me tick um I came from what looked like a pretty normal conventional childhood on the surface uh I had a loving mother and a you know very loving father I ran my first like 10K when I was like five years old right so I I was kind of got into running at a very young young age and then I ultimately I'm flashing forward I ran my first marathon when I was 11. and the reason that I'm starting with that is not to say hey I'm this amazing person look at me it's because now as an adult and as a father myself I look back at that I'm like wow that's interesting like what was my mom thinking and I love my mom and I'm close with my mom and everything I did everything with my mom like I was always Along by her side right and I realized that she did these things and I wanted to be like her I wanted to be with her and my mom would run marathon so I would run marathons too and my mom sort of had this mentality of like hey well you know what if you want to hang out with me then you're going to do the stuff that I'm gonna do and there was no real worry about it it was just the way that it is um hang on so we're talking age four in order to be able to get ready to run this I don't even think I really I mean I was running like I remember running like two three miles at age four five and it was with Mom yeah with Mom you know and I remember people because we lived really close to these wineries like we were living in Sonoma and I remember people like clapping you know like when I would go on runs I'd be like way to go like way to go mom you know waiting like it was cool I enjoyed it there was never a moment where I didn't like it like I always loved it uh that evolved into sort of loving the pain of it too which I mean you talk to endurance athletes and that's a pretty common trait they kind of almost had this masochistic type feeling with it yeah so I mean I was training at a very young age for that and that just became part of my life I was the skinny Runner kid that was made fun of because it was weird to run you know you're in elementary school and you're the kid that wants to go out for a run you're the kid that decides to like run home from school like I was a weird kid don't get me wrong I was like the hiking boots and shorts type of kid so yeah I was weird but my mom exposed me to so many different crazy experiences to the point where other kids thought it was insane like so I was the weird kid as a result of my mom always exposing us to very interesting things when I was 11 years old I backpacked the John Muir Trail from Yosemite to Mount Whitney it was 230 miles took us 16 days and no experience in backpacking and then went back again the next year to do it again and did it in 11 days and ran out of food you know ran out of food for four days we come back CPS gets called on us because I'm emaciated my mom's like no these kids wanted to do this and we're like yeah no no mom is awesome like trust me we want to do this stuff it's the childhood was just crazy but at the time nothing felt weird about it because it was normal to us and nothing was ever we were never put in a situation where we felt in danger or anything like that but we we were always subconsciously held to this very high standard like you should perform and it made me a very results oriented person that unfortunately damaged me a little bit as an adult because being a results-oriented person has resulted in me being well results oriented which I don't necessarily know is the best way for me to go through life um but yeah there's a lot of nuance a lot of detail that goes that goes on there but it's just interesting experiences that made people look at me funny were you bothered by school were you interested in school hated school hated it why I just well for one I I just always felt like I could go faster like I felt like very restricted and I don't mean that in some conceited way like oh I'm smarter than people that's not even it I just felt like ah this is not a good use of my time like I felt like this is this is terrible from what age uh oh shoot I got it uh it's a funny story I got expelled from preschool the only person in the history the only person at that time in the history of Sunshine Preschool in Sonoma California probably can fact check this to get expelled uh I just wouldn't have it I wanted to go home and it was I tried to escape I did escape and I wanted to go home I would just scream and cry and told my mom came to pick me up and said I don't want to [ __ ] be here and uh kindergarten I made it through kindergarten but it was like every day after school I would I it was like I would cry waiting for my mom to come home I'm gonna come pick me up because I wanted to go home so bad I just did not want to be there I hated it and I don't know to this day like why kids weren't particularly mean to me I actually had friends I was weird but it wasn't like I was bullied like I mean I was kind of picked on because I was the skinny Runner kid but it was more just like people Josh all the time yeah uh but I hated it I hated being confined I hated being restrained and what was home life like home life was you know it was as a young kid it was pretty normal my mom uh went to school she was a microbiology major so but she never really used it professionally she she was uh she owned a landscaping business for a while and then she became a school bus driver randomly it was very interesting she randomly decided I'm just gonna drive the school bus because it's a way for me to have Summers off with my kids and a way for me to have the same hours as my kids and that was a root of me getting made fun of a lot of Tom's mom's a school bus driver uh my dad owned a bookstore in Oakland this was very interesting because at the time Mike my kid I don't really care my dad owns a bookstore what do you do but as I grow older I realized that this bookstore Delaware's super newsstand 13th and Broadway in Oakland was the only it was the world's largest newsstand so it had newspapers and magazines from all over the world that would come there one to two days later after they were released in their respective countries so as a result my father's bookstore was like this massive cultural Melting Pot in Oakland where people from Pakistan Afghanistan Australia whatever would come there to pick up respective papers and whatever from their countries So Not only was it a cultural Melting Pot where people all came together and put aside their differences which is very interesting it was also the site of a lot of hate crime on the side of a lot of so massive thing in history so if you look up to Lauer's super newsstand uh you see that it's been around you know family business so I never realized that until I was an adult I was like wow how that's very wild uh my dad worked a lot you know but he he was still a very present father um so home life home life was good it was you know I could pick apart little things everyone can uh there were extreme situations there were situations that I probably wouldn't talk about publicly but nothing nothing that was ever dangerous or bad um what about when you get into teen years when you start to take life a little bit more seriously yeah so by the time I was about nine or ten I ended up with obsessive-compulsive disorder I was I used to have to flip light switches I was always uh I remember these I had these like hardwood floor in my uh in one like transitional area of my house and I had like these squares it kind of looked like uh uh where the Celtics play like that Courthouse has like that you know uh and I used to I could only step on the ones that had the grains facing forward if I stepped on the grains facing laterally uh it was terrible and it was almost always surrounding uh something happening to my mom like if I stepped on the wrong one my mom would die I literally took the step on a crack break your mother's back thing like literally so I was like I can't like I can't it will break my mom's back like I had this attachment to my mother um so it was so I suffered with that by the time I was in Middle School I can't remember the term for it uh I was pulling my hair out so I I had bald spots in my hair because I was pulling my hair out just from anxiety um so I was put on you know benzodiazepines at like age 13 uh but I didn't really take them they were just how common is that for a child to be prescribed benzos at that age not very common it's not not a healthy thing it was like for an emergency case situation right so it was in one of those things where like it was not like my mom was supposed to maintain control of them and things like that and I don't even ever recall taking them right so it was one of those things where with that I ran into all kinds of crazy situations I mean it was just I felt constantly anxious like my teen years were really really tough and of course pulling my hair out led to getting made fun of and the only thing that I really found control in was running like I can be in control when I was running so for me running became even more a part of my identity it was like this is and that carries through to me today like I don't necessarily feel whole unless running is a part of my life and I'm very self-aware of that because it goes all the way back to you know A coping mechanism for me so teen years early teen years were particularly rough for me what is happening with your sense of your own body as you're great have you got any body dysmorphia at this age not as much now because I'm very aware of it um definitely went through phases even phases of self-sabotage like when I became overweight I ultimately had an eating disorder I talked about this with Nick bear uh there was a point when I was like you know 13 14 where I used to kind of like measure my uh my wrist with my fingers and if I could have room to like rattle my wrist around in my fingers that was like a win for me like no reason I didn't want to be skinny I didn't care it was an element of control all of this is an arbitrary measure that you decided especially given the fact that like the width of your wrist growing and the length of your fingers growing between the ages of 12 and 16 aren't going to happen in sync with each other correct correct so there's nothing nothing there's an arbitrary Choice yeah it was the same kind of satisfaction that I would almost get it was the same kind of satisfaction that I'd almost get out of flipping light switches it was just something like but I also felt very in control with that I felt like I can't control when I don't eat I can't control what I don't eat I didn't really have an obsession with body composition I I suppose if I reverse engineer it I could think about it and say yeah like I wanted to be lighter for running and it made more sense so I was very skinny very frail um you know and then when I was like 13 14 I did discover the gym and I got really interested in the gym and actually the gyms I would arguably say saved my life like it was one of this because I was one of those people that had I gotten into the wrong drugs at that point in time I think it could have been very bad I've always been a very obsessive person but to come back to your question like the body dysmorphia now to a certain degree yes because my profession depends on me being lean in a lot of ways so do I have anxiety around not looking a certain way I would be lying if I said no um but it's in control what I'm self-aware of it but when I became overweight which we'll talk about in a little bit I reverse engineered that I think about it I was like it's almost a means of self-sabotage it was like it was me in a way like I was aware that I was gaining weight and like gained a bunch of weight fast and it was almost like there's a revolt against how I was before and uh it's interesting it's just a very wild thing I'm very self-aware psychoanalytical person so I try to look at these things uh but yeah didn't you say something about psychedelics when you were younger so yeah so yeah that's what's interesting so like when I was in seventh and eighth grade I tried acid like I tried and like I smoked pot like a crazy kid seventh grade seventh eighth grade it was and I know people some people judge on that but I mean I was a kid I was a lost kid right like what and I look back at that now being a father I'm just like what was I missing because I I feel like my childhood wasn't [ __ ] up like I don't like it doesn't look like a way on the surface right but there's certain things but I'm like why was I doing that stuff and I got that stuff out of my system so young by the time I was 14 I was like a total square you know like I didn't even drink were you doing that with people so generally yes I had like two close friends that I would you know and it was uh it was just it was weird and I lived in uh I lived in Italy for a semester went to school in Italy for a semester when I was I can't remember I was 12 or 13. I guess it would have been I think I think I turned 13 when I was there and that was a cool cool experience because my mom said hey we're gonna enroll you in homeschool so that you can study abroad and take college courses if we can get you approved for it so basically we did we got me approved through like aifs and I was able to get college credits to study art history as a 12 13 year old while concurrently homeschooled great experience but all the college kids that I was around thought it was really fun to like get me drunk get me [ __ ] faced pump me full or whatever the [ __ ] they wanted to and for me it was like it was kind of fun because I was the cool like 12 year old and these I mean you're taking people that are like 19 20 years old and they're just like oh cool let's [ __ ] with this kid yes and uh I look back at that I'm like I was exposed to some interesting stuff at a very young age but then you come out of that and you've almost had a like hedonistic period before you've even hit puberty and now you're going through your teen years being a little bit more how did the OCD blend with being ripped out of your hometown being taken over to Italy also all of these new experiences older kids coming in and getting you to do stuff I would have imagined that those two things would have clashed very badly dude I think it actually like was a pattern interrupt for me I think it's actually I think it's exactly what I needed and sometimes I wonder if it's like I was like did my mom know this like she my mom's philosophy when things was like when everyone goes this direction go that direction you know where everyone wanted to put me in therapy and everyone wanted to fix the problem and everyone you know hypnosis this nothing was working I was still anxious I was still dealing with Bob my mom's just like you know what maybe maybe this [ __ ] kid needs the mountains you know let's do this maybe this freaking kids needs some like different cultural experiences and that [ __ ] helped me it absolutely helped me but in certain ways it may have made it worse but I I don't think keeping me in the confined little box I hated my hometown you know as an adult now like I look back at it and I appreciate it but I hated my hometown and I just couldn't stand it I just wanted to get out all the time and I've always felt like that or I had always felt like that as a kid I felt very confined uh in any situation you put me in school My Town even my state and I would sometimes develop resentment towards it because I'm just I gotta get out of this and the only way for me to get out of it is to hate it as much as I possibly can until I finally explode and get out of it okay so you're getting toward the end of your teens now when do you start to gain weight so gain weight at the uh probably like 1920. Okay so we've got a little bit of time yeah so I mean I put on some muscle and that was a that was kind of the golden period of of my my teens like right like from like 15 to 18 I was independent study uh and a lot of the reason I did that is after my mom and dad's divorce when I was 13 uh I lived with my mother my mother was dealing with a number of different things um both you know legally mentally just a lot of struggles that I don't necessarily need to go into detail but you know she needed some help and stuff so for me it was independent study where it was like home school but I was still part of the school you can still enroll in school sports a really cool program it worked well for someone like me but then I also worked 40 or 50 hours a week to help support my mom and to help just kind of keep life going so from 14 the time I could get my my workers permit groceries so bagging groceries and then I worked for a financial services company where I would just like file stuff so I'd work as many hours as I could so when you have your workers permit I think you could I could only work like 30 hours at a select role and then I would go to like a different role and get paid under the table you know so it's it's cool plus school but I was independent honestly I was never challenged by school like independent study I could get all my work done in like two hours for the week like it wasn't a big deal and honestly I held like a 3.98 GPA like it wasn't hard for me and like school just didn't challenge me of course I wasn't trying to be challenged like I wasn't taking I was like an AP English you know I was in high English um I sucked at math so I was like Baseline math and just like you know so I kind of skated through standing by yeah just getting by but with good grades and uh but I just was not challenged and for me it was like I learned the value of a dollar really quick because I'm like okay well I know how to work and uh that was what was important to me was like how do I how do I work how do I get all this done you realize how much of an outlier situation that is right to be working between 40 and 50 hours at the age of 14 or 15 plus doing self-directed home school while supporting mum whilst trying to learn about yourself and the world around you whilst dealing with the after effects of OCD yeah probably is a lot but everything prior to that felt so normal right and it's it's it's wild it well that's one of the interesting things about anybody's life experience right you you're never going to until Elon fully dials in neural link you're never going to be able to feel what it's like to be in the texture of somebody else's mind you're never going to know what life is like to live with somebody else and with the Advent of the internet and social media which kind of does give us the view Through The Eyes of other people at least in a small dose but as a kid you know when you're relatively sheltered you're not exposed to as many people or things and you don't have that ability to use theory of mind the life that you have is the only one that you've ever known so it is normal very much is mine as well I couldn't imagine what it would be like to have siblings as an only child so I'm like well this is this is just what life is isn't it it's you and Mum and Dad and the dogs I got you know you don't know what it's like to have a house that's got cats you don't know what it's like to have a house that's got blah blah you know like I didn't know what it was like to have a house that had it we always every house that we were in Mum and Dad love baths so we always had like a bath so I'm like the first time that I lived in a house with the showers when I went to University I'm like your life experience especially if you're a little bit more sheltered or sheltered but like constrained sometimes whether by availability or or habit um can be difficult for you to sort of rip yourself out of that and work out what's going on I could never understand why my sister who's four years older when she went off to the Air Force Academy I never understood why she was so manically worried about me because I was you know 14. I'm just like Liz like everything's fine like why are you freaking out like so stressed out worried about me all the time like what's happening Thomas what's going on Thomas and all I could think I was like oh you're dealing with some serious issues there girl and then I'm like man I talk with her now she's like you see why maybe maybe I was one of the potential issues okay so you're now working full-time whilst doing your self-directed stuff for school going to the gym gaining a look but you're saying that this is also the golden period Well I felt great there was nothing like it was a period of time where I felt in complete control like I've got Infinite Energy I'm in my teens tired like whatever like I could work I was making money helping support mom but I was also making my own money and so by the time I was you know 15 16 things started to kind of mellow out a little bit I didn't need to work as much I was still working probably 30 40 hours um and then at that rate I was still running cross-country in the fall so I was I was obviously I was a runner of course I'd run cross-country uh I discovered rugby my junior year so so I played rugby I was a Winger I really enjoyed rugby it was a way for me to connect I didn't really on the surface I didn't have any issues socially like I had an what would look like a normal social Dynamic but deep down it was a struggle for me deep down it was really hard for me to uh I had to work to maintain friendships uh because I felt like it's just uh it just didn't come natural it was very introverted person and the probably just came over I think that was a a nurture versus nature thing I think that was something that like was manufactured as a result of working and just probably non-typical upbringing yeah just not having the time and my mom also did kind of like make it seem growing up as though anything conventional was not okay uh she used to pull us out of school my sister and I pull us out of school sometimes to like you know Screw school like we're gonna go hike we're gonna go do you know pull us out of school like no parents would do that like but my mom really wanted to be around us did she want she wanted to be around us was she wanted to groom us I don't understand you know right um but I enjoyed it because any opportunity to not be in school I was all about so for me the fact that I could independent study didn't have to spend time at wasting my time at school could work and actually do kind of something constructive um so yeah I was still running not as much running but I was starting to lift and you know I got in pretty good shape in high school I was I and then I met my wife when I was 16 and she was 14. and that's when things just got really good like things felt great like I had met ultimately what I felt was the woman of my dreams and is the woman of my dreams and then married her and have two kids with her never been with another woman in my life and talk about coping mechanisms right like talking about like my wife had a similar background uh not the same of course but her family Dynamic was very twisted and we found each other and we just like locked onto each other man like our messed up family Dynamics and you know two divorced families and we're just like we got each other you know and I was like finally this chick understands me someone understands me someone loves me for me short shorts and hiking boots and uh it's awesome so like that sounds like a blessing dude it's [ __ ] amazing do you think about where you would be if you hadn't met your wife dude I honestly think uh I I think I'd probably be dealing with addiction and things like that I really do because like she is the Jane to my Tarzan you know like without that I'm just [ __ ] crazy like I would fly off the handle because like I'm just so high energy so like I need a little bit of that guard rail like I need that and I think now I you know I've developed traits and I'm mature enough that heaven forbid something ever happened to her like I don't think I'd spiral off but I think during those fundamental years it was so unbelievably like critical what happens with the weight gain so the weight gain came I always joke about this because I never out there in the internet it makes it seem like I was this obese slob that was always that way and I struggled with my weight the struggle was real but what people don't understand is the mental issues that came from that and stemmed that so a lot of it started as somewhat of a bulk gone wrong it started out as I'm gonna put on some weight for muscle right I'm gonna I'm gonna try to gain some muscle and then over time I just kind of stopped working out got obsessed with uh you know I ended up going into a commission only a healthcare recruiting job you know all this high stress stuff where I was just trying to make money so in the same stuff I was doing earlier except now I am completely on my own and I've got responsibilities and my body just wasn't working the same way that it used to so it was very easy for me to put on muscle but then I also put on a bunch of fat with it too so I always kind of joke I was like this was a classic example of a bulk gone wrong but it wasn't like I was bulking on six cups of brown rice per day I was eating Jack-in-the-Box tacos I was eating everything under the sun I remember my wife's brother being like looking at this uh baking sheet that I had full of tater tots like just an entire giant baking sheet I remember him being like that's healthy and I just remember that such a snide little comment and I was like convince myself like this is healthy I'm bulking I was totally like [ __ ] Eric Cartman in Beefcake like that I was like ah weight gain five thousand like as long so fortunately I wasn't overweight for a long period of time it was like two and a half years where I was but I tipped the scales close to 300 pounds at one point and the fact that I gained the weight that fast at the time I didn't think of it but now I think about it now I'm like what the [ __ ] was mentally going on with me this was like some weird element of self-sabotage it was like almost I'm not a stupid guy smart enough to know and self-aware enough to know that like if you eat 10 000 calories it was like I was stuffing my face trying to gain weight I remember my wife even making comments like being like you know I love you anyway I don't know what you're doing but it was it's crazy like you see those my 600 pound life you see that stuff where these people are laying in bed and they they know what they're doing and they're doing it to themselves and I was walking down that path and then I think about like oh my gosh my sort of disordered eating past with being somewhat anorexic this was like the opposite of it I'm like holy crap I've got like some serious eating disorder stuff that I gotta work with fortunately I was able to get a grasp on it I always joke about the moment when I saw someone that was an acquaintance of mine they were driving down the road and they saw me eating Jack-in-the-Box tacos and maybe you've heard the story because it's floating around the internet all the time but I I went through Jack in the Box pulled into a stall afterwards and was eating my translucent Jack-in-the-Box tacos because they're so full of grease you can see through them and this person Drives By and he's not a close friend he's an acquaintance but he just waves at me nonchalantly and it was the fact that it was such a nonchalant wave that I'm like this dude like he wasn't shocked by the fact that I'm sitting here stuffing my face this was status quo normal to him this is how people see me the fact that he didn't wasn't like oh my God the fact that he looked at me and was like oh what's up Tom I was like oh [ __ ] I'm caught I'm not guy I'm that guy and that was it that was the moment people like what was your call to action did someone say you're gonna die no but I did make myself type 2 diabetic I did give myself hypertension I clinically made myself type 2 diabetic so in a two year period of time and that let that be a testament to how a [ __ ] up diet can really mess you up right it can mess you up quick and it took me like seven years to get that [ __ ] normal again but anyway that all that aside that's uh you know so this happens by the time I'm like you know 22-23 you know given my background and kind of what I was doing I mean there's a lot of stuff that's kind of happening in the background there with my healthcare career healthcare administration going into ancillary lab services in the private Equity world for a short period of time I really developed a really strong knack for biochemistry because I was essentially in medical sales so I knew I had to be able to sell to Physicians and be able to explain uh various Lab Services salivary cortisol testing explain these things and I'm like I knew I was a really good salesperson with that because I was able to I knew so much about the body just because I was so in tune of myself and I got super into biochemistry just super into it to the point where I'm like I want to go back to school for biochemistry I dropped out I dropped out of college you know and I want to go to school for for biochemistry I want to go back and then I realized like you know what like I'm actually making good money doing what I'm doing without that and I'm really good at what I do and Physicians respect me and the community respects me and the scientific Community was respecting me then so anyway the point is is that I had a good breadth of knowledge so all it took was like that Catalyst for me to be like I gotta get my life in order and uh you know then there's this kind of whole interstitial period between when I launched my brand and everything like that which is kind of there was some downtime and um what did you do to take yourself from like what's what's the type of Diabetes that you gave yourself and what does that mean a lot of attention all that [ __ ] and then how do you go from where you were to even anything approaching Health yeah so well type 2 diabetes I mean clinically if you're over 125 uh younger guys per deciliter glucose you're technically clinically diabetic and you're fasting glucose um or pre-diabetic and then once you start clamming over like 140 then you're kind of in that clinical range so I remember my glucose being like 144 fasting repeatedly bad really bad knowing what I know now I know why that happened knowing what I know now I know how I was corrected all I knew was that I needed to reverse it and I needed to fix this issue because I looked at my wife and I'm like this is stupid like all this happened in a pursuit of building muscle [ __ ] up my body in a pursuit of building muscle but also then losing sight of that and [ __ ] up my body in a pursuit of making money so these two vanity things muscle and money like could have completely [ __ ] up my life I did [ __ ] up a lot of my life because it took me years to get my health back and there's certain things I still struggle with to this day as a result of just like massive basic binging for a couple of years but like well I mean for example like it's still like my testosterone levels are still pretty tanked right I think that I did that damage at a very critical age I think at a time when testosterone levels should have been peaking I was ruining them right uh so you know things like that I deal with that the mental repercussions of it so there's a lot of attributes where you know maybe it's more difficult for my body to produce hormones naturally because at that point you know obviously I stay in shape obviously I'm lean it doesn't affect me too much like on the surface but maybe there's stuff deeper down to I take years off my life possibly was it a massive hormetic stressor that's gonna make me live to be 130 maybe I don't know that would be great if the secret was Jack in the Box tacos for you too the whole time centenarian yeah it was staring Us in the face the whole time so what you've mentioned there is these two things around money and vanity but as you said earlier on you have this sense of obligation to be in shape now because your business relies on the condition that you're in at least in part you know um so that Dynamic is maybe much more integrated maybe much more under your control maybe much more holistic transcended and included but it's definitely still there it's definitely still there and if it wasn't for having my first my first kid my son I think I might have been chasing this for all the wrong reasons you know I I thoroughly enjoy helping people but I was starting to notice that I enjoyed the validation of helping people I didn't just enjoy helping people and it was it wasn't like I'm doing this for me but at the same time I was like I'm doing this for once again a dopamine hit like this dopamine hit that I get out of this was you know five seven years ago creating content and I was like before my son was born I'm just like I'm good at this the brand is growing but felt so [ __ ] empty it felt so good I or felt felt so wrong right like nothing felt good and when I had my son you know five and a half years ago or at least when I found out we were pregnant so six years ago six and a half years ago things changed man like life just has to change and all of a sudden like when my son came into this world and actually you know right before my son we found out we were pregnant a few days later my dad passed away so there was a lot of very interesting stuff that happened that sort of shifted mine like rocked my world man and what probably needs to be said to be able to explain the full story is you know you notice I haven't said much about my dad and I realized that like my mom in an effort to like keep us with her all the time sort of kept us away from our dad and I don't think she was meaning to do it maybe she was I don't know I never want to speak ill of my mom I love my mom so much and but it's weird because I felt like I didn't really establish a relationship with my dad until I was an adult and then pretty much as soon as I established a relationship with him he got a cancer diagnosis and I didn't get it so I never got the relationship with my dad and like to this age day now with like my age I crave a dad so [ __ ] much right like I missed like and we found out we were pregnant on Valentine's Day uh 2017. and my wife gives me a Valentine's Day card and it's got the pregnancy test in it and she had just found out that day too so like we're like this is I almost passed down like I you know I think my wife videoed it The sneaky bastard like she videoed it I turned [ __ ] pale and I kind of like put a fake smile on you know for a second um and then you know 30 seconds a minute goes by and I'm like wow okay this is gonna be cool like him there's no turning back so like this is gonna be awesome and uh then we get my dad was in hospice but then like the next day we get the call that uh okay like he's going down like this is you got to come up to the Bay Area and come see him and like four days prior to this we lose our dog that had been with my wife and I since we were together in high school you know right so I was like lost the dog found out we're pregnant and then we gotta okay let's make a b line up to see my dad so go see my dad hold my dad's hand and uh tell him he's totally incoherent you know he's out and uh so dad you know uh you're gonna be a grandpa and like he hadn't had made any Signs of Life whatsoever like he was just breathing like and cracked a smile and hour and a half later he died you know what I was like he waited and it was like so just talk about just powerful stuff all happening at once where it was like I got this like a little bit of closure but also this sense of like I don't want to go super deep but like right before the night before my son was born I had a dream where my son was born I was walking down my childhood hallway my brother who's 50 years old or half brother uh was there and just giving me like a nod of approval I walked past like the bathroom my sister's sitting there giving me a knot of approval and then I walk and I turn the corner in my hallway and my dad I just remember his big Italian hands of this dream that's like reached out I didn't see his face I could just see his hands and like handed the baby over to him and then I woke up from the dream and my wife was going into labor is the weirdest crazy thing man and like with all of that like dude something just clicked man it was like I gotta like change like something needs to change and I don't I can't tell you what actually changed man but like how I looked how I created content how I looked how I wanted to help people how I looked at how I wanted to like make the world a better place for my son how I wanted to be a father that was present for my son that my dad didn't unfortunately have the ability to really do for me yeah long-winded explanation given the fact that you'll know a father of two you have the opportunity to reflect on your experience both with Mom and Dad has this given you a new insight that you didn't see before has it thrown into harsh lights some things that you thought that were totally normal has it uh motivated you to be a particular way as a father Yes a million percent yes it's uh I try to look at things there's things that are maybe unconventional but not necessarily bad that I look out in my childhood I try to I do try to look at the world through Rose Colored Glasses as much as I can like I try to find the positive and things you know so all these things have made me who I am today but the fact you know I see a lot of times especially in divorced families where parents pit children against one another and it happened to my wife's family and unfortunately I think it happened in mine and I don't think that it was necessarily intentional I think sometimes it's human nature to kind of like take you know like oh I want to reach I want to grab I want to hold this uh and those are the kinds of things where my wife and I talk about all the time like if we ever go our separate ways like if something ever happened like we can't be like that don't use the kids like never ever uh that happened a lot and I think that I look back at when I was dealing with most anxiety when I was pulling the hair out I was right at the peak of the divorce you know and I'm like what was I feeling as a kid so like for me it's like man just to be able to shower my children with love but be able to just make them feel like they can they can do anything in the world as long as they put in the work and that they're always going to have a safe place whereas I grew up thinking that like no like you wore only really loved if you perform and I'm like up until having children I kind of thought that was the way it was supposed to be supposed to give this tough love like you perform you perform you perform and you equals love let's keep a spreadsheet you know where it's now it's like [ __ ] man you can do whatever you want Kiddo like if you are sincerely happy and you are accomplishing and you are doing good in the world I got your back and uh that is definitely Transcendent into how I create content because now I'm like I used to live in this Echo chamber with what works for me intermittent fasting worked for me I lost a lot of weight with it it [ __ ] worked for me 100 keto worked for me so that means it's gonna work for you man and here's why and let me give you all the justification as to why and let me create all this content surrounding why why justifying justifying justifying suddenly I'm like holy crap I'm using my gift for all the wrong [ __ ] like I'm using my gift to justify what worked for me and a motivated to inspire a lot of people but I'm like man I can reach Millions more people if I stop leaning into my gift as being my transformation and being my gift as my ability to articulate complex subject matter that gets people passionate and excited to be the best they can be sincerely less dogmatic less rigid with the way we're talking about 100 yeah I mean dude I talk about this so much the fact that you cannot understand the price that certain people pay to be in a position that you think you want to be in you know so from the outside the three and a half million person YouTube channel and respected by scientists all over the world and walking around at five to six percent body fat and jacked and wife and kids and money and so on and so forth we go okay let's just take a small inventory of all of the things that have had to happen in order to contribute to this right you know the entire childhood the working from the age of 14 the pulling the hair out the social awkwardness like all of that all of that um that is the price that you need to pay to be Thomas de Lauer and it is I think it's very important for people to see the human behind the success I think it's one of the most important things it's one of the most useful things about having conversations like this because all of the people that I respect who have achieved success have done it in spite of a thing not because of a thing and you know for all that success looks fantastic from the outside a lot of the time people are running away from something that they fear as well as running towards something that they want and the vast majority of people Michael Juve the guy that does uh is seeking greatness I think or chasing Elite Performance the podcast um I asked him he's worked with like every High performer on the planet he helped Felix Baumgartner jump from the edge of space for the Red Bull Stratos Mission and I said on average do you think that high performers are happier or more miserable than the normal person it's like by a million miles more miserable it's like people that perform people that are successful on average are more more miserable you go okay well what does it mean that the people that are the most successful are the ones with the least admirable internal States like what does that mean what do how should we frame success how should we consider what we think of as being admirable desirable uh it's very difficult it's very difficult to work out what you want the outward success but do you really want to go through the pain and the mental texture that comes along with it 100 man it's it's a Lewis Howes asked me what's your level of self-love on a scale of one to ten and I was like dude maybe like a six five six I was like some days I wake up and I'm an eight but other days I wake up and I'm a four it's like so maybe it averages out to like five or six and he was like really and then I flipped around and I asked him sort of the same thing I was like you come on dad you talk to a lot of successful people and he's like yeah they all kind of fall around the same as you yeah you know there's a level of like I don't I don't loathe myself but I don't love myself uh but as I try to get a grasp on this you know being self-aware of what drives me forward what makes me what makes me tick I really I try to be aware of that and I try to be aware of like okay just because my self-love is a six that's doesn't mean it's actualized into me performing at a six so I still try to say like I'm still gonna perform like a 10. I'm still gonna eat like a 10. I'm still gonna like live my life like a 10. and maybe it'll fake it till it makes it a little bit but so far it's not I think that that's the way to do it man I I believe that we lead with action uh and I think that small steps uh much more difficult for your psyche to deny even if you are a glass half empty kind of person if you continue to show up if you continue to do the things that are good for you if you continue to succeed in spite of your uh absolute certainty that you're not going to succeed after a while you just have this crushing weight of evidence that shows you that you are able to do this thing or you can achieve in the way that you are that you're intending so one of the things that you mentioned there was that intermittent fasting was like a a bit of a godsend for you uh it has been highly contested on the internet what is in your opinion as someone that has spent a lot of time researching practicing and coaching intermittent fasting what is the optimal structure and the most important foundations to understand about intermittent fasting the best structure is the structure that works best for you as the individual it's not the sexiest answer but it comes with practice and it comes with determining am I someone that likes to eat in an eight hour window by someone that likes to eat in a four-hour window or six hour window the best form of intermittent fasting is the one that you don't get addicted to the one that you can still use as an effective tool without using as a crutch the best form of interwritten fasting for the individual is going to be the one that you feel the best on the one that you get the heightened mental alertness that Clarity that you seek out the moment that you start to do it because of an arbitrary number is the moment that you've already lost the battle the biggest benefit to me with intermittent fasting is not body composition changes it's not cognitive awareness it's not this it's the element of Mastery that comes with it and that's where people miss the boat because you cannot contest that you can sit here and you can fight every single nook and cranny of intermittent fasting based upon where you stand and your views of nutrition time restricted feeding say oh well caloric restrictions just as good well yeah intermittent fasting is kind of caloric restriction this that whatever you cannot argue with me that there is an element of Mastery that comes into place with abstaining from something we talk about this with caffeine we talked about this with alcohol food is a drug that we are constantly exposed to which means that it's incredibly difficult to abstain from it in a proper way and we are bombarded with social cues to tell us that it's okay to eat whenever we want is that the truth like should we eat whenever we want should we eat ad libertine I don't know I mean it's certainly real world because that's the world we live in today but is it accurate is it is it fair to assume that that's how we should eat regardless of your beliefs there being able to abstain from food and having the control to do so seemingly gives me control in much much many other or gives me control in a lot of other elements in my life and maybe that reflects back to my childhood and wanting to have some control but there are a hell of a lot of people that respond in a very similar fashion that I do that's very interesting the fact that it's about the story that you tell yourself to do with the intimate fast as much as it is to do with some magic that comes along for the ride yeah I had uh Peter it's here on the show yesterday and he said the exact same thing every study that he has found so far hasn't suggested that there is any Secret Sauce hiding in time-restricted eating Beyond caloric restriction that there is no um I it just doesn't seem it seems to be a very easy to follow root for caloric restriction is that your reading of the literature as well yeah yeah and I think I think there is a little bit of nuance there I think that people that are severely metabolic I think the people that are severely metabolically deranged and have severe metabolic disorder uh probably get different benefits slightly different benefit because there's something that needs to be unraveled there and I think Peter's actually even talked about that it's like people that when you're in a severe situation where you are very very unhealthy then abstaining from food in particular time Fashions could have other advantages uh the autophagy well autophagy is one of these things like it's a word that's thrown around right it's it's is it [ __ ] it's autophagy [ __ ] it's not [ __ ] but it's definitely not this magic like it's happening all the time right it's ha if I go into a caloric deficit or if I take some time in between meals or you know what the biggest driver of autophagy is is exercise right nobody talks about that that's not sexy you can't say like oh like exercise is going to induce autophagy it's gonna induce it three times more than fasting will now there are different types of autophagy there's macro autophagy microautophagy there's lipophagy which is where you're actually uh sort of recycling fat cells all different varying forms that happen at varying levels based upon what someone is doing fasting exercise General caloric restriction and autophagy is dictated a lot of times by many things but at the very simple level ampk phosphorylation which is a dimmer switch not a light switch so yes the more aggressive the caloric restriction the more aggressive the exercise induced deficit the more aggressive the autophagic flux now with that being said it's like you can turn that to a certain degree and it's probably going to reach a maximum before you start like degrading tissue and having a negative outcome so it's not a light switch where it's like as soon as you go into a deficit you flip a switch and you're you have maximum autophagy the argument with that is like okay well intermittent fasting you're abstaining from food you're ending up in that caloric restriction phase significantly faster because you're just not eating so one could argue that you flip that dimmer switch a little bit faster and if you combine that with exercise maybe you get more autophagy that's certainly a valid argument but it does not does not warrant us to say that like intermittent fasting is the best way to get autophagy not by any means okay what about building muscle while fasting so I think it sounds almost insane to say like while you're literally fasting you're going to build muscle uh it's funny enough I think Peter attia had actually mentioned some point in the past like muscle protein breakdown and muscle protein synthesis are always a balance of each other and when you are in a fasted State you have a high degree of muscle protein breakdown that does not mean that you're necessarily catabolizing muscle what it implies is that you could be breaking down tissue from one area of your body and then after the fast is complete when muscle protein synthesis increases you re-establish formation in another area of your body or in that same area right so as long as basic protein needs are met within your eating period you absolutely can build muscle with intermittent fasting but I think there's a line I usually kind of draw an arbitrary line at like 24 hours I feel like if you're doing consistent 24-hour fast like every other day perhaps it's harder to build muscle but if someone's doing like an 18 6 three or four days per week of course you can build muscle I talked about this recently look at your calories over the course of a seven day period not daily like if you want to be in a surplus be in a slight Surplus at the end of the week if you want to be in a deficit be in a slight deficit at the end of the week maybe Monday you eat 4 000 calories maybe Tuesday you eat a thousand maybe Wednesday you eat four thousand maybe Thursday you eat 1500 it's like that constant undulation might be good for the human metabolism because it doesn't reset every night at midnight to zero what about looking at a fat loss plan overall if you were to design the non-negotiables that should go into it regardless of time restricted regardless of how someone is coming into this what are the non-negotiables for a fat loss plan yeah for me I still have to side with just about everybody and say thermodynamics are probably the most important thing are we going to discover that to possibly be different later in the life we might who knows we always have to be open to that but I think right now the evidence is just too strong to ignore that that thermodynamics matter too many camps trying to like oppose that so let's just all agree on that that's when you say that you mean kaiko right you mean calories in calories yeah which is a very complicated matter it's not as simple as people think but people try to make it simple for the sake of content but it is very complex because there's all kinds of influential factors that determine that right how much calories we're actually burning how much we're actually consuming uh did you juice this fiber et cetera yeah all kinds of stuff that comes into play the other piece that I think is a non-negotiable is having adequate breaks between meals I feel for me at least that's a non-negotiable and the reason that that comes Under Fire a lot is because that implies that you're suggesting that insulin has to always be low not at all I'm suggesting that we have have periods of time between meals that we do allow insulin to be low maybe that's an 18 hour fast maybe it's just having adequate three hours between meals I think for maximum what what would be the problem with just grazing every hour and a half personally well even an hour and a half as long as you were just like taking that adequate break because you have this spike in insulin and that insulin level needs to come down for glucagon the counter-regulatory hormones to release which are ultimately going to allow fat loss to occur like lipolysis as far as I know cannot occur in the presence of insulin like if insulin is elevated at that particular moment lipolysis cannot occur at that moment you cannot be utilizing fat while insulin is elevated that doesn't mean that you never Spike insulin that means you keep track of when things go up and down your fat burning mode isn't right when you eat contrary to the whole thermic effect of food thing like that's such a negligible amount the fat burning occurs after the insulin levels have come back down to Baseline and lipolysis and made oxidation can occur so I think maybe it's not a non-negotiable as far as the general world is concerned because you could effectively eat like a pea every five minutes and be eating 800 calories yeah yeah but I think for adequate muscle preservation and for maximum fat loss I think just keeping a Keen Eye to that is very beneficial um other non-negotiables I think G flux is a very important thing that's not talked about enough uh that's energy flux I subscribe to this man yeah I realize this as soon as I started doing CrossFit yeah right it's it's you know you know what's crazy is uh I've had you know Alan Aragon no uh he's great you should have him on he's he's uh just he's basically the person that takes a lot of these major research papers and like writes the summaries for them like he's like that well versed so he basically writes the condensed summary so he's so good at articulating in fact I literally like I did a number of videos with him just because he's so well spoken on this stuff and he and I were talking about it it's like have you ever been in the presence of like an athlete that is just crazy intense athlete with a lot of energy it's like you're around them and you can like literally feel their energy compare that to someone that's on their deathbed there's like a completely different like it's they're literally fluxing at a different capacity and people don't realize that there's like a mobilization cost or fee associated with more energy and using more energy so if you eat 2 000 calories per day and burn 2 000 calories per day and I eat 5 000 calories per day and burn 5000 calories per day you'd say hey you guys are both at net zero right wrong I'm actually burning more because there is more energy cost and G flux energy flux involved at a higher rate of metabolism it's almost like the mobilization fee it costs it costs money it costs currency to mobilize that much energy it's like if you call someone over to replace your windshield they're going to charge you a mobilization fee because it costs them money to get there so every time you have an energy exchange it costs currency the more you eat and the more you move the more you burn overall this is what I realized when starting CrossFit that I'd always up until that point because I was doing bro split bodybuilding which means that really unless you're doing incredibly intense sessions how are you losing you're not going to put yourself into a caloric deficit through training you're going to do it through food right so it's always this sort of race chasing your tail of like fewer calories to get fewer calories to get lower metabolism to get fewer calories now start doing CrossFit I'm like okay my I need to eat three and a half thousand calories just to not be hungry when doing this and I got leaner and I thought oh that's strange and then I started training more and getting heavier and getting fitter and Lena I was like I'm I keep on eating more and more food and yet I'm getting leaner because I couldn't put enough food away in order to be able to compensate for the deficit that the training was putting me in and I understand I understand that you have much more control over the food that goes in your mouth than the calories that you expend through your output I Ben Carpenter came on the show and gave me a really beautiful framework that helped me to understand why losing fat for most people through caloric restriction rather than the increase of exercise is at least something that they have a greater degree of control over I think that that seems to make a good bit of sense to me but for the people that do have it in the tank to be able to go and do high intensity training with Progressive overload with some loading multiple times maybe per day or at least every day G flux theory for me which is the three thousand and three three thousand and three thousand out versus two thousand and two thousand out that seemed to make a massive difference as far as I could see dude it's huge I love Ben by the way dude that guy is great like he's fantastic he does a really good job of uh just distilling things and just uh humanizing it like he just like so there's not not a lot of people that I really like and he's kind of come on the scene recently for me like I've just and uh yeah just I mean just he's crushing it kudos to him he's doing good what else anything else so while kind of dovetailing off the g-flux thing I think the non-negotiable that also comes to play is adequate diet breaks like so that comes with the G Flex like it if you just continually restrict calories you're going to end up in that that Cesspool of just and that happens so much with intermittent fasting it's relevant right because people say I'm going to do 16 a fasting so they restrict calories and then next thing they know like they think they're fasting but all they're doing is restricting calories like sure they're eating in a certain time block but that doesn't absolve them of thermodynamics right so at the same time there's like restrict calories and then they have to restrict calories more and then they're like oh well I'm eating 1800 calories a day or 1500 calories a day because I'm inter fasting but I'm fasting every day why isn't this working anymore well because you're doing the same damn thing as just restricting calories right now re-entry now reintroducing calories and being able to actually get the metabolism back up to an adequate State involves applying G flux with proper diet breaks so what I mean by that is you can't just say I'm going to have a diet break and start eating a bunch of [ __ ] if you do that things are going to go cattywampus you're going to have compensatory mechanisms that come into play that make you gain fat very fast probably because you've driven it yeah so people make the mistake of going back to eating like they used to eat no you have to increase the calories to where you are at maintenance now which is very difficult for people to understand because back up gently yeah well people don't most people aren't going to figure that out they're not going to say like okay I've lost 30 pounds of lean mass 20 pounds of fat mass that means I need to adjust my calories to Baseline at this for maintenance so the easiest way to do that is when you get to those stages if it's possible increase your intensity of training to allow for increase in calories that way you're increasing that flux while taking a diet break in a very conservative fashion that limits the risk of fat regain but still allows for metabolic rate to increase in your RMR to come back up right because that thing going to allow you to increase metabolic rate without gaining too much more weight which then allows you to re-begin another diet from the top with this higher base metabolic right okay how do you square the circle of one of the biggest predictors of longevity being caloric restriction with G flux Theory yeah so I this has come the battle right like I've seen this popped up in the comments for me multiple times it's like okay where do you draw the line and this is where I almost feel like is this where fractal eating and kind of breaking up how we eat could be beneficial like because where do you draw the line of caloric restriction like is caloric restriction daily is it weekly is it monthly is it yearly who's counting how do we know is it protein restriction we don't really know is it mtor phosphorylation like where where do you really draw this line so that is a use case where I could say okay maybe fractal leading makes sense maybe you eaten a surplus or slight Surplus with a lot of activity one day and then lower activity lower intake another day so that your net over the course of the week maybe is a slight deficit but you have adequate muscle stimulus so still preserve muscle the problem that you have if you if you choose to do that is that it's not very routinized life right you know so in a sandbox perhaps or a petri dish or a spreadsheet that makes sense but when it comes to humans want to do the same thing most days I want to train five days a week and have weekends off I want to do three days on one day off I want to do whatever right like a more the more complex and fractal that you make the routine the more poor the adherence and compliance is going to be could people possibly just periodize quarterly I mean is that yes is that too much to ask that would be that would be easier say hey let's say let's look at this globally over the course of a year yeah let's say this quarter I want you to be in a slight Surplus this quarter I want you to be in a slight deficit and just keep on going back and forth quarterly you know no one knows the answers to this obviously otherwise we'd all be living to be a thousand years old uh but then you know brings up the equation of uh of the protein thing too right like methionine and all this stuff like protein is it aging us what's your read at the moment I asked Peter this yesterday so I can compare and contrast your answers there's interesting arguments on both sides um I do think that the methionine research makes sense I do think that there's a a large plant-based kind of skew to it that sort of distorts how we look at that data I try to look at that data objectively without sort of the plant-based SKU and say how do we apply this methionine discussion and protein contributing to aging independent of any plant-based discussion can this apply for the Mediterranean diet where there's still moderate meat consumption uh and I think the answer is yes I do think that being able to have adequate mtor phosphorylation is very important for adequate recovery I think that we are this means eating meat eating meat yes yes sorry so I think it's very important for Recovery I think it's very important for cellular signaling I think insulin is one of the most important hormones for longevity too and you know as a peptide hormone it comes Under Fire as this demonized thing but I think insulin is also a catalyst for repair so it is a balance but do you balance at 51 towards the mtor phosphorylation side or 51 more towards the ampk side where you're trying to be like I'm going to restrict um and with that I lean slightly in the camp of being on the mtor side being protein being more important than restriction of protein I think adequate amounts of protein with caloric restriction might be somewhat of the answer this is an area that I find quite confusing because I've got on one side friends like Michaela Peterson Mark Bell uh and also my own felt sense that when I do lean more heavily into me that I think I perform better I feel better my body is better um the feedback that I got from Maric Health after I did my blood panel was the same let's we need to get some organ Meats in there let's eat some more red meats and then I see the other side of the world especially the longevity biohacking side the sort of demonizes a lot of this I don't know whether you've seen Brian Johnson have you seen that guy what do you think of him what do you think of his approach to the world so he sort of uh got the approach of I mean moderately low protein right yeah so it's you know other than kind of the surface level stuff with the moderate low protein I don't follow or subscribe to his way of thinking so I can't comment aggressively but I think that the more that we can thoughtfully acknowledge both sides that's that's really important because again like we have to ask ourselves the question like are we looking at this through a wide angle lens or not so like what is happening globally like what is your protein intake like are you in a net positive protein balance is I don't know this I mean you might be able to answer it is like as Brian suggesting that you be in a like a net negative protein balance I have no idea uh he's coming on the show in a few weeks I'm going to ask him yeah I mean I still think a net like a net neutral protein balance would be optimal that means your muscle protein synthesis is matching that exactly of your muscle protein breakdown but who's going to be able to figure that out right so that would be the ideal situation so until we have a way to measure that we're always going to be in a slight Surplus which could be more you know methionine could be more issues uh facing as far as longevity is concerned or you're slightly on the opposite so for me like how do we attenuate certain things and activate ampk and activate these markers that are associated with longevity and caloric restriction while also maintaining protein levels because I don't think protein is the problem I think it's one of many different elements and if you look at the blue zones which people talk smack on the blue zones um and understandably so what's the Blue zone for the people that don't know blue zones are the uh areas of the world that have the people that live the longest you've got like Costa Rica you've got Sardinia you've got Greece you've got you know so Okinawa and I did a video on this because I was so interested I was like we focus so much on the common denominators of these regions we say oh well all of them eat in a 10 to 15 caloric restriction all of them eat low meat well that's not necessarily true all of them eat ex-fat all of them do this all of them do that it's like you guys are trying to find the common denominators I want to find the outliers what makes these unique what makes the Okinawan diet so unique and different from the other blue zones what makes the Costa Rican diet so different from Sardinia let's look at the outliers and take those outliers and craft the ultimate longevity diet and that video crushed like I think it just like got people thinking there was no scientific rigor to it whatsoever other than what were the main takeaways now the main takeaways of it were like okay uh Highway High omega-3 content uh moderate polyunsaturated fat content uh fruit polyphenols uh fiber and diversity of diet so you've got things like that okinawans eat a crapload of like purple sweet potatoes you know things like that right and looking at that still being in somewhat of a deficit with that deficit being more from like one percent to eight percent versus a universal 15 so a slight deficit no scientific rigor to that whatsoever it's just looking and pulling out liars and being like what are the benefits of these outliers and if we combine that is that doing something and I just encourage people to look at things like that because we're so quick to look for patterns that we forget about the power of an outlier pulling an average so you mentioned thermic effect of food earlier on somebody that you're a little bit more familiar with than Brian Johnson BV shred I am V shred what is your reading of V shred and his work in the world of diet and fitness I don't give two crabs what V shredders does I just don't want people to confuse me with them anymore do you see why people confuse you with v Shrine well we're both charlatan total dude it's you're significantly bigger and leaner than him but well that's a plus naked if if it was a dark foggy night I could see why people could confuse you for him well isn't that the most most of social media like I mean it's a dark foggy night for most people that's if you put in the filters on it is yeah interesting I mean you'll speak to Z later on about this but um he did a a series of adverts because you can go on I didn't know you could do this but if you go find out someone's add manager account or something or you can press on a particular page and see all of the adverts that they're running on Facebook um and they went on and had a look at all of the different adverts that vshred was doing and in one of them they'd set him up in a studio kind of like this that had the same red curtain the same mic arm the same mic the same uh like Muffler top the same desk the same lighting as Rogan's Studio but he wasn't on Rogan and it was him giving doing basically an ad read fake on a podcast I'm like yo we don't need chat GPT and AI to CGI like horse [ __ ] down our brains like people can do this in person at the moment that I mean brings V shred up to Zach later on because he's got very strong opinions on the guy um I mean it's it's uh I I saw that months ago and I actually screenshot it into my team house look at this guy like like he's literally faking me on Rogan and now no I noticed that it's a couple months later it's like circulating around um but I mean like if my shirt's off and my hair is styled the way it normally is like it's it's it's ridiculous I did a video on it like uh I don't know three four five months ago and dude I mean hundreds of comments being like I thought you were him like I'm sorry like I was really confused I wait you're not have you ever have you ever considered that you might be like cleaning up V shreds uh Public Image v-shred really got his mind deep into the data here he's reading the white papers it really sounds like he's been educating himself well it's it comes up because he holds on to the coattails of your paperwork the like the best comment I saw was like you know oh well like I thought that you had all this really good content going organically so that you could afford the ability to be more aggressive in your ad campaigns uh you know and be very superficial and simple in your ad campaigns be more aggressive because people are you know they're not subscribed they're watching your other content where it's very deep and very uh scientifically backed yeah it's it's becoming an actual battle that I have to deal with where consider maybe a really aggressive uh like design change like a gender reassignment perhaps or like a pink hair like grow it out I just think one interview needs to change and it might as well be you well dude I had an idea what if I what if I reached out to them and I said hey do what you want with this ad it's all good but I want to film an ad with v shred and yeah actually like have both of us standing there be like I'm Tom stellauer I'm V shred we have opposing views stop confusing us and then just let him go upon his merry way that would be fun that would it would probably convert really well for them yeah because it's just different it would they spend millions of dollars on ad spend a month so it would get it out there and it would sanitize you from him very nice very nice you need to do like a you need to identify I have a freckle on this side you'll notice that his ears are a little bit or like whatever you need to identify those they're getting back to Fat Loss one of the other so the the other side of it we've spoken a lot about diet high intensity infill training is something that people focus on an awful lot specifically for fat loss I remember being at University 13 years ago my first Blood holiday was coming up try getting into the gym to do fasted cardio first thing in the morning if somebody is thinking I want to use high intensity interval training or zone two to improve my fat loss what are the principles the most important principles that they need to know okay yeah with high intensity interval training I am a very firm believer that the magic is in the intensity of the interval itself far too many people go into hit training with like I'm gonna do one minute on one minute off one minute on one minute off that's not really hit training if you ask me that's more just high intensity training that's not high intensity interval training the magic of the high intensity interval training comes from the fact that your interval should be as close to maximal as possible and if you are able to hold maximum intensity for one minute you're insane that's that's not going to happen you've got 15 maybe 20 seconds in you so my idea of high intensity interval training is like 15 to 25 seconds maximum intensity and then however long it takes me to recover to be able to adequately go at that intensity again maybe it's two minutes maybe it's a minute maybe it's five minutes probably not five minutes it's probably realistically somewhere in the realm of like two minutes that is to me high intensity interval training other forms of training where you're going one minute on one and off that's more like various forms of Tabata really which has its place it's very good for calorie burning but it's not the same as interval training is that something is there some Secret Sauce in maximal output for fat loss I mean a lot of central nervous system stimulation so that definitely has uh an afterburn effect uh there's definitely more glycogen depletion because you're very very very glycolytic when you're using that intensity so if you're trying to deplete and you're trying to get in a carb deprived State there's certainly evidence there for sure uh arguably you won't even burn as many calories so is it the most effective not necessarily but it's certainly good for the metabolism what would you prescribe if somebody was going to introduce training overall they want to add maybe two or three sessions in per week so I really want to add on top of an existing exercise protocol where would you go to we might not go to the high intensity interval training would you suggest something more like a Tabata I love I love Tabata training I love I love Imam style training you know for me it's like every minute on the minute whether it's cardio based whether it's resistance training dude it keeps me honest a clock always keeps me honest and it keeps me moving keeps my heart rate elevated but with an Imam I can fluctuate it every minute on the minute if I wanted to go relatively if I want to do sets of five on bench press I could do that in Imam fashion and taper and drops it accordingly like you could do so much with an Imam I know Marcus Philly is a big fan of that too and he and I both are are just big on imams it's such a way to combine cardio and resistance training but also such a unique way to just do cardio like you could do I'm gonna do 20 minutes of every minute on the minute and I'm gonna have five different cardio things that I'm gonna do I'm gonna do 10 burpees for one minute you know or for however many I can do 10 burpees in that and then the rest of the time I have that break next time I'm gonna do 20 calories on the Echo Bike or whatever yep so it keeps it fresh it keeps exciting keeps the mind going so you're not bored uh it's not repetitive on the joints it's awesome it's external accountability as well for the people that on uh like CrossFit build yet introducing imams into your training especially if it's starting to run out of motivation it's just like having a coach in the room with you but the coach is just your watch because even trying to do timed dress periods when doing bodybuilding you pick up your phone you like if you've got 25 seconds or 30 seconds of rest you don't have enough time to go over and Dick about on your phone you go look it's a 20 minute or 30 minute for 30 minutes I'm doing this thing as opposed to saying I'm going to do like four by twelve on this exercise and 4x12 on that exercise and 4x12 on the third exercise and there will be a one minute break in between you go uh it's not the same it's not the same because you're not accountable to the clock I'll give you two of my favorite workouts that I do the first one is a descending pyramid of wraps for any gymnastics movement so handstand press-up this is great for push-ups this is great for pull-ups particularly so those are the three movements I like to do this with most so you warm up on the movement however long you need to do that and then you do a single set of Max reps on that movement strict so be strict pull-ups strict handstand push-ups strict push-ups two minute rest then you take 50 of what that number was you do that one minute rest fifty percent one minute rest and then you do 25 with 30 seconds rest four times so you do it 100 with two minutes fifty percent with one minute twice and then 25 with 30 seconds four times the reason that I love that workout is that it's over and done with in usually about eight minutes you have worked maximally each time pretty much you are basically creating an rpe for the day that everything else then gets percentaged off so if you go in and you're feeling [ __ ] hot you've slapped great you've fed great you're hydrated your energy is good you're going you go oh holy [ __ ] my first set on strict polyps was 16 reps there I'm now looking at eights and fours for the rest of the day like this is gonna hurt but well yeah but your 100 was that big for a reason because you came in and you felt great or one day you're going and it's 11 you go okay I'm looking at like sixes and threes fine okay well we'll work we'll work with that um I really love it for that reason uh and it's just it's over and done with so quickly and you can always continue okay what did I get last time on the first one right I'll keep on pushing that so that's my favorite for that and then when it comes to cardio this is an exercise I did on a concept two biker ages ago but it would work just as well in a row it worked just as well in a ski you do a pretty high intensity as much as you can uh two minutes off uh two minutes on one minute off six rounds one minute on 30 seconds off eight rounds 30 seconds on 15 seconds off 10 Rounds that's it that's done in about 40 minutes or so and that's a really nice recovery workout and again it's the same starting off big getting down to small those are my two favorites yeah man I love any kind of like ascending or descending ladder like they're just they do something with my brain they just work like it's just like it clicks well you're always motivated right because there's always something coming next we're always excited about oh you're like yeah so I've got uh one more of the twos left and then that's okay I'm nearly halfway done and then you end up doing this complex arithmetic in your mind to be able to work out right well I'm actually in terms of working time I'm really halfway done when I get to you know the second set of the whatever whatever um when it comes to dieting and a lot of people as me included with my Coke Zero have a sweet tooth and don't want to absolutely wreck our diet when it comes to satisfying that what are your favorite personal hacks or best pieces of advice for how people can satiate their sweet tooth without pumping a [ __ ] ton of calories and and bad stuff into them I'm gonna give you one that's really interesting and if you clip this make sure you add this note that this is mechanistic data okay but it's interesting and anecdotally it seems to work we have what are called NSD neurons in our hindbrain and a lot of times when we're craving something sweet we're starting to see some research that we could actually be craving something salty and it's kind of a gustatory response with the vagus nerve and what happens with the hindbrain and what I have found and again it could just purely be anecdotal or placebo having some salt actually kills that craving and it does for me like every time I'm really craving something sweet if I have something salty or just some electrolytes or something like that it feels like that just scratches that itch so quick it's somewhat temporary like it goes away fast but there's enough small scale data for me to say hey this might actually work but not enough you know observational data to say 100 works okay so first thing is potentially look at throwing some element perhaps in water exactly knocking that back because you'll get a little bit of sweetness in that too see if that blunts it if the gravity force field pull of our desire for sweet stuff what are some suggestions on foods that people could go to that you're okay with dude I'm still a fan of like going for like 90 dark chocolate that still has a little bit of sugar in it like don't be afraid it's not gonna kill you but the endorphins that you get out of the chocolate like endorphins is kind of a colloquial way of putting it but there are basically flavonols in it that do have an impact on neurotransmitter function and that's been demonstrated in quite a few studies that people feel really good after they have chocolate so that way you're getting that dopamine itch scratched but it's not from the sugar it's more so from the fact that the chocolate and the theobromine is kind of having that impact so that's a that's a nice hack the only downside is you know if you do too much of it it's still pretty caloric right okay another concern that I'm starting to see people talk about more on in my corner of the internet is bloating after people have food someone hasn't done a FODMAP diet they haven't you know gone and done restrictions on on the foods that they're doing what are the most likely culprits do you think that people should be looking at if they do suffer with bloating I think I mean dysbiosis is a huge one I think that's just a lack of diversity of food within your diet a lack of diversity of fibers so you're looking at very simple gut imbalance okay if you imagine a forest with wolves and squirrels and you have one wolf and you have 30 squirrels and you throw a bunch of food into a bunch of you know corn or something out there and the squirrels all eat that corn the wolf might eat that corn but the squirrels are gonna eat that corn and their population is going to proliferate right that's going to grow suddenly you've got this crazy imbalance and that's dysbiosis but if you were to have wolves and you were to have squirrels and you were to have some possums and you were to have like a nice delicate ecosystem with lots of different animals and you threw that food in there they'd all compete for that food and they'd all grow at you know somewhat proportional rates and that's what we're really lacking a lot of times in the diet and I know it has a little bit of a skew that people don't necessarily agree with sometimes but it's not suggesting that everyone goes out eats a bunch of fiber one of the things that we do see across the board is that it's pretty well demonstrated that healthy guts are associated with a diverse diet and having diversity of different fibers diversity of different foods in general whether it's proteins whether it's fibers even fats and this all has an impact so I think in this day and age we get really used to eating the same kind of things over and over if you talk to people like they don't yeah maybe I go to this restaurant One Night in this restaurant another night but they're not diversifying their gut microbiome the way that I think they should like I really do try my best to like rotate different vegetables that rotate different sources of fiber all of chia some days and then I'll have sweet potatoes another day I really do try to rotate that up and that helps my bloating issues my wife dealt with sibo with small intestinal bacterial overgrowth for a number of years for her kind of going back down to Baseline with a Keto a diet helped her a lot but probably just because it's eliminating so much of those fibers it's eliminating so much that it just brought her back down to Baseline that when she reintroduced everything sort of recalibrated and I know a lot of people preach that it's just not necessarily validated with research I have a friend uh called the meet Mafia podcast to be heard of that yeah yeah so that both of those guys same thing you know like really really bad uh stomach issues you are going to be on medication for the rest of your life and they just went on a really aggressive elimination got themselves to the stage where it seemed like their stomach had been given enough time to get rid of inflammation calm down rebalance itself and then they slowly reintroduced foods and it seemed like what the stomach needed it wasn't chronic it was acute and consistent and once you gave that acute problem a little bit of time to calm down there wasn't necessarily an underlying chronic problem under that and it just allowed them to they can relatively eat whatever they want um it's fascinating man I I think that you know the work that you do ban Peter Andrew everybody uh is really helping to educate people it's a very I've been someone that's been training for 15 years and I find it still now I'm like is sugar in or out this month like am I allowed it should I do I have to should I have berries after I have meat is meat and fruit cool now or should I do I need to you know it's it's the trends that come and go the um murkiness of not only what is being communicated but even the studies that this is coming out of and all of the perverse incentives I think the work that you do is very impressive for the people that are listening that want to check out more that you do where should they go yeah uh vshred.com yeah YouTube is just Thomas the Lauer just type in my name Instagram Thomas delauer thompsonlauer.com but I don't do much there unfortunately um yeah and that's that's it I mean I'm just going to try to keep on fighting the good fight and just letting people do what they want with the information just arm themselves with the tools and how about it from there Thomas I appreciate you I appreciate you being very open and vulnerable today I think there's lots that people can take away from it brother thank you what's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe peace foreign