>> Rich Stokely: Welcome to the Microsoft visiting speaker series. My name is Rich
Stokely. It’s my pleasure to introduce Jonathan today. As a visiting speaker
Jonathan came all the way from building number four, so he is actually at Microsoft.
He works in ASG in office.
Jonathan is a best-selling author. He has been featured on many o the most popular
national television shows. He writes his own blog and pod cast and has been
featured on many top blogs as well. And he writes on the subject of health,
nutrition, and exercise.
Anybody here ever read a book on health, nutrition, diet, and exercise? Okay, a few.
So many of those books I think you’ll find are based on theories or a very small set of
interesting research, or research that they think supports their point. When I
stumbled on Jonathan’s first book, the thing that struck me was it was 20 percent
bibliography by weight. And that really resonated with me, and as I found anything
I questioned or didn’t understand I could immediately go find out exactly what the
supporting literature was.
Now, as we look at Jonathan’s new book, I think you’ll see that that looks at even
some of the more recent literature and really lays out a nice improved blueprint for
how we can all establish and maintain fantastic health.
Now, while his books I know have had and will continue to have a positive impact on
people’s lives, knowing that he is a full-time program manager and a full-time
author and speaker, I’m looking forward to his book on time management, because
that’s unbelievable.
Please join me in welcoming Jonathan Bailor.
[applause]
>> Jonathan Bailor: Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for that lovely
introduction and thank you everyone for making a life-long dream come true. I
never actually thought this day would come where I’d get the opportunity to speak
in the context of being an author to a group such as this. So thank you very much.
This is a moment I will remember for a very long time. So thank you for making it
possible.
And today’s talk I’m not going to regurgitate what’s in the book. I’m going to go a
little bit off track and hopefully provide a little bit of entertainment and also some
science to compliment what’s in the book. But before I get to any of that I wanted to
give you guys a little bit of background on this journey, and what it’s meant to me
and what it’s meant to those in my life.
So I started out life with two very, very academic parents. Both of my parents are
college professors, and I have a much, much older brother who was very athletic.
And this matters because when I was a child I was very scrawny and geeky, and I
continue to be geeky, and this is what led me to a passion for working at an
engineering position at Microsoft. But growing up with a very academic household
and with an athletic older brother who I wanted to emulate, and being naturally thin
led me down a path of looking at the mainstream wisdom around eating and
exercise.
So going to gyms, reading muscle magazines, reading popular literature, in fact
going so far as to become a personal trainer. The way I paid my way through college
was by being a trainer at Bally Total Fitness in Columbus, Ohio.
And I experienced something very unique in that time period of my life. As I
mentioned, I was a naturally thin person. We sometimes lose sight of the fact that
there are naturally thin people in the world, you probably know and resent them,
because they just eat whatever they want and they don’t gain any weight. And I
experienced this first hand when I was training, because I was consuming literally
six thousand calories per day.
I actually have Excel spreadsheets that track this. I would do double shots of olive
oil with every meal in an effort to gain weight. I was, this was during and before
college, so I was between like 18 and 22 at the time. And the vast majority of my
clients were not like me. They were females, generally over the age of 35, who
would come to me literally in tears saying Jonathan I swear to god I’m doing what
you’re telling me, and I told them this, eat 1200 calories per day and exercise
obsessively. And they’re doing it. I’m watching them do it. I’m helping them create
the food logs enabling them to do it.
They didn’t get smaller and I wasn’t getting bigger. And look, we’re all homosapiens.
We’re all people. We’re all the same species. So how is it that we can react so
differently? And no one has really asked that question before. No one has ever said
what is it about a naturally thin person that makes them naturally thin?
And why aren’t I like that? And this becomes kind of an emotional issue for me
because I am a naturally thin person, and I remember, and I regret thinking that
people who struggled with their weight were somehow, it was a character flaw,
right?
That somehow I was doing something they weren’t. And looking back on it I wasn’t.
I was eating six thousand calories per day and not exercising as much as my clients,
yet I couldn’t gain weight and they couldn’t lose weight. And sadly that’s the way
our culture has been looking at weight issues for the past 40 years, as a character
flaw and as a moral issue.
And the reason that matters so much is because once we resign ourselves to obesity
is just a matter of gluttony and floth [phonetic] and you just need to eat fewer
calories, we stop asking questions. And we stop trying to solve the problem because
the solution is we just need to try harder. And we all just need to work harder and
eat less and exercise more. We all just need to count calories more precisely. And
we know that doesn’t work from our own personal experience.
And what blew my mind, so I’m having this experience, I’m eating six thousand
calories a day, my clients are eating 1200 calories per day. I’m not getting bigger.
They’re not getting smaller. We’re both just getting sick and sad. I retired from
being a trainer because my goal was to help people. I wasn’t helping them. I was
actively hurting them and I couldn’t even help myself.
So I stopped doing that. But my passion to try to figure out a way to change the
human body and the human mind through eating and exercise didn’t go away. And
this is when the geeky academic side came out, because I said well, where else can I
get my information? I’m already an expert, supposedly. I’m a personal trainer.
People are paying me thousands of dollars to give them advice, which is not working
and in fact making them worse.
So I said, well, where do I get my information from? I started talking to my parents,
who are again professors, and they said have you ever looked at the primary
research? Have you ever used an academic journal maybe, or looked at these, not
physicians ironically, right? Like an M.D. a general practitioner, my mother teaches
English literature, she’s a professor. If I said mom, teach my calculus, just because
she’s a professor doesn’t mean she would be an effective calculus teacher, right?
So just because someone is an MD most MD’s there is no nutrition education
requirement to get an MD. Zero. None. That doesn’t mean MDs don’t know what
they’re talking about, it just means there are entire other areas of research like
endocrinology and endocrinologists, people that study your hormones.
Gastroenterologists, people that study your gut and the role that gut bacteria plays
on your health. Neurobiologists, probably the most influential field when it comes
to weight regulation, people who study your brain and how your brain regulates
everything else about your body, so might it have a role in your weight? Absolutely.
But no one has looked at those areas. We have literally been told, think about this
for a second. Could you imagine if in any other area of our lives we use the same
technology we used 50 years ago? Like think about the way computers worked 50
years ago. They were the size of this room. We don’t use the same phones we used
five minutes ago, let alone 50 years ago, but we literally are using the same eating
and exercise information we were given 50 years ago, in the face of the worst
obesity and diabetes epidemic in history.
So it’s not as if it’s working so well we can just stop, right? The economic burden of
just type 2 diabetes, not obesity, just type 2 diabetes in this country is 50 billion
dollars greater than the economic burden of tobacco in all forms. So it’s not as if this
theory of just try harder to overcome your character flaw from 50 years ago is
working. And this is what I started to see when I dug into the primary research and
started to get my information from people who spend their lives in lab coats rather
than people who spend their lives wearing spandex or on talk shows. And it
changed my life, because I couldn’t find support for what I was taught as a trainer.
It didn’t exist. The first three years of my research were spent trying to confirm
what I believed, and I couldn’t do it. It was literally impossible. In fact, there has
never been a study, ever, ever, that has counted or looked at calories consumed and
burnt, and weight loss, and confirmed the calorie math that we’ve all been taught.
Every study that has ever looked at intake and expenditure and then the change in
weight has disproven this calorie math we hear. Where it’s like if you eat one fewer
almonds per day you’ll lose 20 pounds in 20 years because it’s as simple as calorie
math, right? Like that has been proven false in every single study that has ever
looked at it.
The challenge though is that it’s this model of eat less exercise more is intuitive.
This is why in addition to this more realistic idea of obesity as just a character
problem, which is false, it’s a disease and we can talk about that more later, in
addition to that the reason this eat less exercise more mythology, despite being
disproven in every study that’s ever looked at it lives on is because it’s intuitive.
But just being intuitive doesn’t make something right. Look out the window. It
looks like the earth is flat, doesn’t it? It really is intuitive that the earth is flat. And if
it wasn’t flat wouldn’t the people on the bottom fall off? Right. But being intuitive
doesn’t make something right. And once we start to understand science and
scientific law, such as the law of gravity, we can start to understand how, no, the
earth doesn’t’ have to be flat.
And once we start understanding biological laws, for example, that the body doesn’t
work like math, it doesn’t work like algebra, it works like biology, then using
algebraic models to understand a biological organism makes about as much sense as
thinking that the earth is flat.
So anyway, that’s my personal note, and I want to mention that because I’m not
going to get too tactical on what I want you to do today. The book covers that in
detail. What I want to give you are these seeds that I believe once you plant them in
your mind, how you look at eating and exercise will be forever different, because
that’s the impact it’s had on me and I believe that’s why the book has been
successful, because it will cause you to question these things that have been shoved
down our throats as gospel for 40 years, which literally have no basis in science.
Their basis is in false appeals to authority, false appeals to intuition, and frankly
scientific laziness. So I want to confront and bust some of those myths and help
plant some of those seeds for you today.
So first of all, imagine someone who is struggling with their allergies. Right? They
breath and it makes their eyes water. Imagine telling that person the solution to
treating their allergies is to breath less. Right? Like, it’s true. Your eyes will stop
watering if you stop breathing. That’s absolutely true. It’s true, right? And if you
stop eating I guarantee you will lose weight. If you just completely stop eating,
right?
That doesn’t mean it’s a healthy or helpful approach. Right? So just because
something works, like we need to question what works means. No one has a hard
time losing weight. We’ve all lost weight. The issue is maintaining a healthy weight
and energy levels, and sex drive, and mental acuity and happiness simultaneously.
So will going on a 1000 calorie diet, injecting yourself with whatever, and spending
two hours a day exercising make the scale do down? Yes, it will. And if you can
keep that up for the rest of your life will you maintain that weight loss? Yes, you
will.
Should anybody have to do that? I would argue no. And science confirms that, and
when we start to look at this problem like a quality issue, rather than a quantity
issue, allergies are not caused by the quantity of air you are taking in. Reducing the
quantity of air you are taking in will make the symptoms of your allergies go away,
but they don’t cure the fact that you have allergies.
Now, imagine breathing in a different quality of air, air that maybe doesn’t have
pollen in it. Well, then you can breath as much as you want and your eyes will stop
watering. So we have to start looking at this as a quality problem, that’s what we’ll
talk about more today, rather than a quantity issue.
Telling someone to eat less, just eat less, is like telling someone to breath less. You
cannot be hungry for your entire life. If you leave this talk with nothing else, you
cannot have a happy life if you are hungry. You can’t. So any weight loss approach
that is predicated on you being hungry either has to fail because you will stop doing
it, or it will fail because it will compromise the quality of your life.
And if you are doing this to improve the quality of your life, why would you do that
to yourself? So once we understand that just simply taking the diet that has made us
either diabetic or struggling with our weight, or having an autoimmune disease and
just eating less of it, once we acknowledge that cannot be a viable option, then the
only thing we have left to do is to change what we are eating, rather than how much
we are eating.
This isn’t to say that calories don’t exist, or that calories don’t matter. It’s only to say
that you can’t have to count calories. And that, in fact, the body is designed or
evolved depending on your belief system to count calories for you, as we’ll talk
about today. So I want you to break free from this. I want you to start to question
everything you’ve been told for the past 40 years, because I promise you, and as
you’ll see in the book it is not rooted in science, it is rooted in theories and a
puritanical morality.
So I’ll give you four examples. Before I do that, I will talk about this slide. So it’s
important to note that really I don’t care whether it’s a diet, or a lifestyle,
vegetarianism, Mediterranean, kosher, Paleo, low-carb, and a lot of these seem like
they’re very different, like is Paleo the opposite of vegetarianism? But what’s
interesting about all of these lifestyles that have somewhat withstood the test of
time, there are hundreds and hundreds of diets, but really these are the ones that
kind of bubble to the surface. Why? Because people are often able to achieve great
results with them and to stick with them.
So what do all of these have in common? They don’t count calories. They don’t tell
you do eat less. They tell you to change what you’re eating. They’re quality-based
approaches, rather than quantity-based approaches. And that’s literally 15 years of
my life. Here it is, summarized. It’s about the quality of what you eat, and that will
take care of the quantity of what you eat.
It’s not that quantity doesn’t matter, it’s that it’s impossible to over eat the proper
quality of food. You can’t do it. As evidenced by the fact that before anyone knew
what a calorie was, let alone count them, we had sub three percent rates of obesity.
So, like, think about that for a second. The answer is just, actually the nutrition
labels just today got updated. The calorie count is now gigantic. So now, we’re
going to solve the obesity epidemic because people have a better understanding of
the number of calories they’re consuming. You can do calorie math more precisely
now. How could that possibly solve a problem when no one even knew what a
calorie was prior to the problem existing?
Right? Like this has gotten so confused. So a calorie is what? No one knew what a
calorie was, let alone count them, prior to the obesity epidemic, so we can’t be
forced to count them to solve the obesity epidemic. Now, this does not mean that
calories don’t count. Calories do count. That doesn’t mean you have to count them.
Let me explain. If you drink 10 thousand calories of melted butter per day, every
day for a year, even though that won’t release any insulin that we all hear so much
about, you will gain fat. A lot of fat. But nobody does that. And nobody will do that.
Okay? So calories do count, but you don’t have to count them.
Another way to think about this: If you had to consciously count calories, let’s just
say for a second you have to consciously count calories. One, that assumes that your
body is really, really stupid by default, that it can’t manage its energy balance on its
own, which is odd, considering that most of us, if we’re not diabetic, don’t think
about our blood sugar at all.
Our body is just somehow able to regulate our blood sugar within this very narrow
range automatically. It’s not magic. It’s homeostasis. That’s how our body works.
And isn’t it amazing how if you drink more water you don’t have to think about it,
you just go to the bathroom more? Right? Like that’s just how the body works. We
all learned back in high school biology class this term called homeostasis, which is
that the body, any living organism, seeks to maintain balance.
That life exists within a very narrow range. And our brains, specifically our
hypothalamus, does that for us with our blood pressure, our blood sugar, and also
our body composition. And the actual cause of obesity is the dysfunction of the
system. It’s not a dysfunction of your character, it’s a dysfunction of the system.
Think about obesity like diabetes, right? Because we all know that blood sugar is
homeostatically regulated. It just means that if your blood sugar goes up, you don’t
have to think about it, your body does stuff to bring it back down. And if it goes
down you don’t have to think about it, your body does stuff to bring it back up.
Now, the fact that blood sugar is automatically regulated doesn’t mean that system
can’t break down. One out of every four Americans actually have that system
broken down, or in the process of breaking down by being diabetic or being prediabetic. Diabetes is the breakdown of the auto regulation or blood sugar. And
when that system breaks down, guess what you have to start doing? Consciously
monitoring blood sugar, because the system that’s supposed to do it for you is
broken.
But again, injecting yourself with insulin will never solve diabetes. It’s taking over
the break down of the system and doing manually that which should be done
automatically if we could cure the disease. Obesity works the same way. Obesity is
a disease that takes place in the brain, your hormones, and your gut, which breaks
down your body’s automatic ability to regulate energy balance for you.
Now, one way to treat the symptoms of that disease is to take over that process
manually. But that’s not sustainable or enjoyable. Wouldn’t it be more productive
to heal the brain inflammation, or to heal the gastrointestinal disregulation, or the
hormonal disregulation that underlies the breakdown of the system itself, rather
than try to take over what should be automatic and regulated by the system itself?
Think about it a little bit like a clogged sink. What causes a sink to overflow? It’s not
a lot of water. It’s a clog in the sink. And a clog in a sink, even if you’ve got one little
drip of water coming in, will eventually cause the water level to overflow. It’s
because the sink has lost its ability to balance itself out.
Now, you could just say the answer to your clogged overflowing sink is to never
wash your hands again. Just stop. Just have less water in. But that doesn’t solve the
problem. And you could sit at the sink with a tea spoon, throw on your spandex, put
on some techno music and just bale water out with a teaspoon for like two hours per
day, and you will sweat and it will feel like you are doing something, and the water
level will go down, but the clog is still there.
The system itself is still broken. And that’s again why food quality matters so much.
By manipulating the quality of what we eat we will heal that system and we will
reregulate our body’s ability to balance calories for us.
Another thing to think about. If we needed to consciously count calories, how does
any other species on the planet avoid obesity? Because they can’t even
conceptualize what a calorie is. But yet somehow, left to their own devices, they
don’t become over weight. In fact, in university settings when they try to study
obesity they usually use rodent models, so rats or mice. And up until I think about
50 years ago, they couldn’t make rats and mice obese. I talk about many of these
studies in the book where they would literally pump excess calories into the
stomachs of rodents, and the rodents would respond by being more active
automatically or down regulating the food they eat. Somehow, miraculously.
No, it’s because we all have this thing called the hypothalamus in our brain, which
balances us out automatically. So they could not make animals become fat until they
discovered what they call affectionately in research circles, the cafeteria diet, which
is they started feeding rats and mice what we eat today. And effortlessly the rats
and the mice became obese. And this isn’t limited to rats and mice.
You’ve probably heard of grass-fed beef versus grain-fed beef. So the reason cattle
are fed corn and grain is to fatten them up because left to their own devices, a cow
eating an unlimited amount of grass, that’s all it does it just eats all day long, cannot,
does not, become over weight. It’s only when they change the quality of what the
animal is consuming that weight becomes a problem. One other point I forgot to
make on the first slide but is interesting nonetheless.
So we talk about animals. Think about also this idea that you need to consciously
regulate stuff, okay? If that premise were true, so let’s say it’s true. You do need to
consciously count calories. You must consciously count calories. That can’t just
apply to calories. What about Vitamin C? Why don’t you have to consciously
monitor the amount of Vitamin C you take in and the amount of Vitamin C you
urinate out?
Or what about phosphorus, and riboflavin, and thiamin and zinc and the 2,000
variants of Vitamin D? If you needed to consciously monitor these things, wouldn’t
you need to consciously monitor everything that’s essential for life? Like what
about the essential amino acids? Of course that can’t be true because we wouldn’t
be able to do anything else in our lives. That’s why our brain has sections of it
designed to handle these things for us, assuming they aren’t broken through the
improper quality of foods.
Everything else, oh, this was the point about vitamins and minerals. So everything
else doesn’t require a conscious regulation, so why would energy balance? All right.
Point four, there you go. Bodily function. So I’ve alluded to this already, but
seriously, think about every other thing in your body, everything else. Your heart
rate, breathing rate, hydration levels, sleep, body temperature, and blood pressure,
all of them balance themselves out.
That doesn’t mean you can’t get hypertension, right? The fact that your blood
pressure, your body tries to regulate it, doesn’t mean that system can’t break down,
but you don’t get hypertension by eating too many calories. You get hypertension
from the quality of food you’re eating. So again we have to free ourselves from this
calorie mythology, because if we’re aiming at eating fewer calories, we’re just
aiming at the wrong target. And in fact, we’ll artificially deprive ourselves of the
essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids and fatty acids that we need to heal the
system itself.
Maybe most importantly, but this is a little bit pedantic and geeky, so I generally
don’t play it up too much, but it’s impossible to count calories. It really is impossible
to count calories. Counting calories cannot be done. Let’s imagine that you tried to
actually count every calorie you consumed, okay? The way you would do this most
efficiently and most effectively is you would only eat food that has the now bold and
big font letter calorie counts on them, okay? So you would only eat those things,
because you need a precise calorie count.
Even those nutrition facts labels, studies have been done, they’re at most 90 percent
accurate. So there is a 10 percent margin of error. So assume a 10 percent margin
of error, even in the best case, most ridiculous scenario that no person would ever
do, the average person consumes about a million calories per year, okay?
A 10 percent margin of error means you could, even in this ridiculous hypothetical
situation, over eat 100 thousand calories per year. But we don’t see people gaining
thirty pounds of fat per year consistently, which is what over eating 100 thousand
calories should do. In fact, if you look at the data from our country, we are eating
more calories than we ever have. In fact, in 2006 there was a study published at the
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill that showed that, actually the study itself
wasn’t from 2006, but it showed that from the mid-70s, when we as a country were
relatively weight stable, to 2006, the average per capita consumption of calories
increased by about 570 calories per person.
So the researchers stopped and said there you go, there’s the cause of obesity, right?
We’re over consuming calories, done. Case closed. Wait a second. If in 2006 the
average American is consuming 570 more calories than they should be consuming
when we were weight-stable in the 1970s, then between 2006 and 2014, if we are
actually eating 570 more calories per person per day than we need to remain weight
stable, you can just do the math. 570 additional calories per day times 365 days in a
year, times eight years equals enough calories to say that the average American
should have gained 476 pounds of body fat since 2006.
Since the 70s the average American has gained 20 pounds of body fat. And since the
1970s we’ve consumed enough excess calories to gain about 1100 pounds of body
fat. How do you explain the fact that the average American has only gained 20
pounds of fat in the face of consuming enough calories to gain 1100 pounds of fat?
Could it be that the body is trying its damnedest to regulate the weight, but it’s just
being overwhelmed?
The answer is yes. Every single study that has ever looked at overconsumption of
calories has shown that one thing happens consistently all the time in every single
person if they’re over fed. Their metabolism speeds up. And you know what
happens consistently if you underfeed people? Their metabolism slows down. Can
there be any debate that the body is trying to balance itself out?
When you eat more you burn more. When you eat less you burn less automatically.
That’s the body trying to balance itself out. So calculating calories is impossible and
the math just doesn’t add up. Calculating calories out is even more ridiculous. So
I’m really, really sorry for anyone who this Christmas season got one of those calorie
counter bands because -- it’s all good. To be very clear we should be active. We
should exercise. It’s incredibly good for us. But chronic low-intensity exercise has
been shown repeatedly, and even the New York Times has reported this, it’s known
in the mainstream, doesn’t really help with weight regulation too much, because if
you burn more -- think about it like this.
You go for a jog. You sweat more. What’s that make you want to do? Drink more.
You go for a jog. You burn more. What’s that make you want to do? Eat more.
Yup. The body is trying to balance itself out. You have to change the system itself,
not starve the system.
So anyway, trying to calculate calories is out. About 70 percent of the calories you
burn throughout the course of the day has nothing to do with physical movement.
Nothing at all. None. Zero. Zip. In fact, the type of food you eat can drastically
change calories out. In fact, there has been some amazing research done at the
University of Illinois by a gentleman by the name of Doctor Donald Layman, this is
going to get really geeky here for a second but oh well. So imagine if you consume
protein in about 30 gram doses, you take an amino acid called leucine and you
elevate it to a certain level in your bloodstream.
This goes through a pathway in your brain, it’s called the mtor pathway, which
triggers this process known as muscle protein synthesis. So when you eat a certain
quantity and quality of protein it takes a certain amino acid up to a certain level in
your blood stream, which goes through a certain pathway in your brain to trigger
this metabolic process called muscle protein synthesis. What that is is your body
rebuilding itself.
Every day, if fueled properly, your body can regenerate about 250 grams of you.
Literally rebuilding itself. If you do that, so if you eat, researchers are estimating,
these 30 gram doses of protein getting this amino acid up to the certain level three
times per day, you will trigger this muscle protein synthesis. That process burns
between 500 and 700 calories per day.
Think about a growing child. There’s a reason children can eat and eat and eat and
eat, they’re growing. We can be growing too. We don’t have to just be slowly dying.
We can grow as well, but that growth process burns 700 calories per day. You
would have to jog for three and a half hours to burn 700 calories. So simply
manipulating your diet can cause you to burn more or less calories than you ever
would unless you’re Lance Armstrong through exercise.
And nothing you wear on your wrist will ever tell you how many calories you’re
burning through muscle protein synthesis. At least not yet. Or how much your liver
is burning per day, which is about 5-600 calories. So again just free yourself from
this calorie counting mythology. It literally is like thinking the earth is flat. You
shouldn’t beat yourself up about it because it is extremely intuitive and it’s what
we’ve all been told, but it’s wrong. It’s intuitive, but it’s wrong. And again, this isn’t
to say that starvation won’t make you lose weight. It will. But that doesn’t mean
you should do it.
Cutting off your left leg will cause you to lose between 30 and 80 pounds in an
instant and you will keep it off for the rest of your life! Permanent weight loss! But
that doesn’t mean it’s a healthy or sustainable approach. Right? And that’s the
question here. We need to revisit our goals. Our goal is healthy, sustainable,
enjoyable fat loss, not weight loss. And robust health and robust energy.
All right. So just how ineffective is this calorie counting mythology? So there was a
three-year study done in the international journal of obesity and related metabolic
disorders, and I like this study because there’s a fairly large sample size and a fairly
diverse group of people. This study showed that less than one in twenty people, or
specifically 4.6 percent of individuals are able to have success through this
traditional calorie counting methodology.
So it doesn’t mean it can’t work, it just means it works very infrequently. Now, to
put into perspective how infrequently it works. The American cancer society
performed a study on the long-term success of quitting smoking cold turkey and
maintaining that habit of not smoking. That didn’t come out right, but okay. The
results of the study were shocking, and they were especially shocking because
tobacco is the third most addictive substance in the world, trailing only heroin and
cocaine, and if you’re up on the most modern research, sugar is going to come up on
that list pretty quickly, because rodent studies are repeatedly now showing that
sugar is more addictive in rodent models than cocaine.
So sugar is going to come on this list here pretty soon. But I digress. So for now
tobacco I the third most addictive substance in the world. So the third most
addictive substance in the world, what is the long-term success rate of individuals
who try to quit it cold turkey? No help. No nicotine patches, no gum, no support
group. Just stop. No more cigarettes. 5.5 percent, which is low, but it’s not as low as
the success rate of just trying to eat less. Right? And actually think about this for a
second.
Say we have a person, Tom. Tom has 100 pounds of excess fat on his body. Say 120
pounds of excess fat on his body. And let’s assume that a pound of fat is 3500
calories, let’s assume that that’s true. So that means Tom has about a half a million
calories in his body just waiting. I’m already here. I’m ready. I’m your calories, half
a million. Yet Tom still gets hungry. Tom’s brain still says to Tom, Tom you need to
eat some more calories. It’s not because Tom is lacking will power. How is a brain
that is drowning in calories that are already in the body demanding more?
And we start to see this again as a medical problem, as a scientific problem that we
can investigate. These questions just become undeniable and they cause us to
revisit these models, which can’t possibly be true. But of course the question is then
like what about these things? Right? What about we see this on television, the
newest one where the girl is like -- this is being recorded so I can’t say what I really
believe, but yeah. So we see this a lot.
The reason this happens, and the reason we all have friends, and maybe even us as
individuals said you know, I count calories and I exercise a lot and it works for me.
First of all, if it does that’s awesome. It works for 4.6 percent of the population, and
if you are one of those 4.6 percent that’s awesome. You’ve achieved your success
and I’m delighted. I’m absolutely delighted for you. And I’m not saying that
sarcastically, like if this works for you please continue. What I am explaining is that
the other 95 percent shouldn’t lose hope.
There is an alternate approach. So how do we explain things like this? It’s the law of
large numbers. It’s very simple. At any point in time in this country there is about
100 million people trying to count calories. You take a number that big and you take
a 4.6 percent success rate, you’re still going to get bout five million people per year
who are like dee-dee-dee! You need to eat less and you need to exercise more
because you’re lazy and you’re a glutton!
But that’s false. It works for them, that doesn’t mean it will work for everyone. So
don’t let the law of large numbers fool you. And also, don’t think that this is too
good to be true, because it’s actually not and it’s actually the model that has been
supported in science. This other model simply hasn’t.
One of my favorite studies because it literally pitted this smarter approach of
focusing on the quality of what you’re eating, specifically eating foods that provide
you the most of what you do need, vitamins, minerals, essential amino acids and
essential fatty acids. Those are the things that are essential for life. Things that are
not essential for life are things like sugar and starch and transfats. Those are not
essential for life.
So all we’re talking about here is focusing on the foods that provide you with the
most of that, which is essential for life, and the least of which is non essential for life
and not worrying about calories. It’s just focus on central nutrients and let calories
bounce themselves out as they have for the entirety of human history up until the
previous or the current three generations, and as they do for every other species on
the planet.
So take this approach. So you have the traditional group that just said work harder.
They ate about a 60 percent carb 15 percent protein and 25 percent diet, which is
about comparable to what most Americans eat. And then they did this traditional
low quality exercise. We don’t have time to talk about exercise today, but again
exercise is much like eating. It’s as much about quality not quantity, and it’s about
hormonal healing, not burning calories. I talk about it a lot more in the book.
But they took the old approach to exercise where exercise is just another way to
starve yourself. It’s just about reducing calories. So they exercised for 40 minutes a
day six days per week. So healthy, and this is clean like quinoa, oats, all the sexy
carbs nowadays, and then they exercised for 40 minutes a day six days per week.
The smarter group at a bit of a more balanced diet, focused on getting their
carbohydrates more from fruits and vegetables, more protein and actually a little bit
less fat, and they exercised significantly less. About 40 percent less.
At the end of the study this harder group ate less and they exercised for nearly
twenty hours more than the smarter group. So they ate less and they exercised
more.
Here’s what the study showed. The eat more exercise less but smarter group lost
over 100 percent more body fat. They gained lean muscle, which is one of the single
strongest predictors of mortality, meaning that as your muscle wastes away it’s a
condition known as Sarcopenia, it’s like osteoporosis but for your bones, that
correlates with early mortality much more strongly than excess body weight does.
So we do not want to burn off our muscle tissue. So these individuals gained muscle
while the individuals who starved themselves lost muscle, as we would expect.
Specific to belly fat: Individuals who ate more and exercised less but smarter,
doesn’t mean they’re pounding back butter, it just means they are focused on food
quality and exercise quality rather than focusing on quantity shrunk their bellies by
100 percent more, and in fact they lowered their LDL cholesterol by more than 100
percent. And cholesterol is a whole other topic. But the point is they still lowered
the LDL cholesterol more than 100 percent than individuals doing what we’ve all
been taught and what I was taught as a trainer. So not getting too deep into the how
to do this and what I’ve been alluding to by manipulating food quality but I just want
to scratch the surface and encourage you to dig deep in the book, and also we have a
syndicated radio show, which is totally free you can find on itunes and youtube. The
quality of the food you eat is determined by four things.
This isn’t the Jonathan scale of quality. These are the four factors that have been
studied rigorously in clinical settings, right? Not observations but in clinical
settings. There is a big difference between observing a population and being in a
controlled environment. The four factors are satiety, how quickly a calorie fills you
up and how long it keeps you full. For example, there is a popular brand of potato
chip that tell s us that once we pop we can’t stop. It’s telling you when you eat these
calories they will make you hungrier. Right?
Light beer is you give me money and I will give you calories that don’t fill you up.
That’s what light beer is marketed as. So light beer and Pringles have low satiety.
Whole foods found directly in nature, such as vegetables, fish, meat, nuts, seeds, low
sugar fruits, have higher satiety. Aggression, this is how likely calories are to be
stored as body fat based on how quickly they’re released into our bloodstream and
the hormonal response they cause. 500 calories slowly trickling in to your
bloodstream that doesn’t jack up your insulin levels will be treated much differently
by your body than 500 calories that dumps straight into your bloodstream.
Nutrition, this is the one we’re most familiar with but we have to think about
nutrition from a quality perspective, or how many essential vitamins, minerals,
amino acids, and fatty acids we get relative to nonsense such as sugar.
The best example of this is juice. Well actually, yeah, let’s use juice. So juice has
more vitamins and minerals than soda does. It does, absolutely. But it also has 30
grams of sugar per serving. Actually an 8-ounce glass of grape juice has 50 percent
more sugar in it than an 8-ounce glass of coca cola. So yes, it has more vitamins and
minerals, but taking a vitamin pill and dropping it in that 8 ounce glass of coca cola
doesn’t make the coca cola nutritious because we can’t just look at the good stuff the
food provides, we have to also look at the bad stuff.
This is also why if I were to come to you and you see me eating a donut and you’re
like Jesus, Jonathan, I thought you were about nutrition! You’re eating a donut!
What’s going on? And I say okay, let me fix this. I got you. And then you see me
eating ten donuts. And I’m like well I’m getting ten times the nutrition if I eat ten
donuts, right?
No! Because we all intuitively know you’re getting 10 times as much garbage as
well. So you have to look at the good relative to the bad, not just the good. Finally
efficiency. This is the one that’s least well known in the main stream, and this has to
do with how easily our body can store calories as fat. For example, fat, when you eat
fat, can be stored as fat quite easily by your body. That doesn’t mean it makes you
fat. In fact, one of the biggest myths in the world other than you have to count
calories is that eating fat makes you fat. Eating natural fat doesn’t make you fat, it
makes you full, but we can talk about that later.
Efficiency, but protein for example, protein is not a source of energy for your body.
Carbohydrates and fat are the primary sources of energy for your body. Protein is a
structural component. Because of that, protein calories can’t really be stored as fat
very efficiently. Not to spend too much time, but if you do eat a lot of protein and
you have excess protein more than you need to trigger muscle protein synthesis or
repair tissue, things like that, you eat the protein, it goes into your stomach, leaves
your stomach as amino acids. If you have more amino acids than you need it will go
into your liver.
There’s a process called gluconeogenesis. Gluco glucose, neo new, genesis creation,
aka the creation of new glucose. It will take amino acids and convert them into
glucose, which is blood sugar. If you then have more glucose in your bloodstream
than you need, then you body has to do this other process that takes glucose and
turns it into triglyceride, aka body fat. Every single one of those processes burns a
hell of a lot of calories because it’s a chemical reaction, and it takes energy to
perform chemical reactions.
So eating protein, for example, even if you were able to eat 300 calories of protein
and you didn’t need it, the most protein that could be stored as body fat in a 300calorie dose of protein is about 100 calories because the other 200 would be burnt
off turning it into body fat. It’s like metabolic alchemy and it’s a very inefficient
process. This is why studies which isocalorically increase protein aka take a group
of people, feed them 2000 calories, take another group of people feed them 2000
calories, give these people 30 percent of their calories from protein and give these
people 15 percent of these calories from protein, the group that eats more protein
will consistently burn more body fat.
Why? Because they are burning more calories simply through these metabolic
processes.
Anyway, that doesn’t mean you should eat 100 percent protein, it just explains why
diets higher in protein work so well. One of the reasons. Now, to simplify this you
want to eat satisfying, unaggressive, nutritious, and inefficient calories, which you
don’t need to remember. All you need to remember is water fiber protein because
saying healthy foods are high in water, fiber, and protein. Water, fiber protein,
water fiber protein. Unhealthy foods, low quality foods, are dry, low in fiber, and
low in protein.
So think way more of these foods that provide us what’s essential, way less of what’s
not essential, and those foods are in order of volume, if you do nothing else -- I’m not
saying you should stop exercising. Continue to exercise. But literally just for 21
days just try this. Willing suspension of disbelief just try this. Eat way, way more
non-starchy vegetables. Way more, I’m talking double-digit servings per day. Try to
find a way breakfast lunch and dinner to get three servings of vegetables in at each
meal. That’ll get you to nine, and then eat a snack. That’ll get you to 10. And we
describe how to do that very efficiently and cost effectively in the book. And when I
say non-starchy vegetables I mean vegetables you could eat raw.
You don’t have to eat them raw, in fact I would encourage you not to eat them raw
initially because you’ll find them disgusting and then you’ll stop doing it. I would
encourage you to sauté them in healthy fats such as coconut oil or even bacon
grease. Generally speaking, you want to cook in saturated fats because they don’t
oxidize under heat. We can talk about that later, but don’t feel like you need to eat
vegetables raw. Focus on green, leafy vegetables. Sauté them in a delicious healthy
fat, and put them on half of your plate.
And of course you can eat raw vegetables. Raw vegetables are fabulous for you. I
just don’t want that to deter you from eating vegetables in general. But again,
vegetables that could be eaten raw. A potato can’t be eaten raw. Corn can’t be eaten
raw. Those aren’t vegetables, they’re starches. Way more non-starchy vegetables.
All right, so that’s half of your plate conceptually. That’s the vast majority of the
volume of food you’re putting into your body. The vast majority should be nonstarchy vegetables, especially green leafy vegetables. And you get bonus points for
things like kale, for things like shard, for things like bok choy, spinach, romaine,
brussel sprouts, deep green leafy vegetables are literally therapeutic. They unclog
your sink. They cure your allergies to tie back all the crazy analogies I’ve given in
this presentation so far.
Next on your plate and next in terms of volume should be nutrient-dense protein.
So these are foods that get the majority of their calories form protein. That’s a really
important point, the majority of their calories from protein. An egg is a very healthy
food, but it gets 64 percent of its calories from fat, and 35 percent from protein. It’s
a good source of fat. It’s not a good source of protein. Nuts get about 80 percent of
their calories from fat.
If you want to get 30 grams of protein from nuts, you are going to over eat because
they are not a good source of protein. They are a good source of fat. So when I say
nutrient-dense protein I mean foods that provide you the majority of their calories
from protein, contain minimal toxins, and contain a bunch of essential vitamins and
minerals.
These are primarily, I know we’ve got vegetarians in the audience so we an talk
about this afterwards, but just primarily these are found in seafood of any form,
ideally wild cod and humanely raised animals. So grass-fed beef, free range
chickens. Generally eating sick animals will cause you to be become sick as well. So
it’s better to eat humanely raised, non-sick animals, so any kind of seafood. Eat a lot
more seafood and focus on eating nutrient-dense proteins such as animals that were
raised humanely.
More whole food fats. Right now, chances are if you’re like most Americans, you’re
getting the vast majority of your calories from starch or sugar. And it’s not that
carbs are bad. It’s just that carbs are like fats and proteins. There are high-quality
sources and there are low-quality sources. I want you to focus on high-quality
sources and that’s why the primary focus of this way of living is non-starchy
vegetables, which are carbohydrates. Just the highest quality sources.
But if you’re not eating all the sugar and starch, where are you getting your energy
from? You’re getting your energy from whole food fats. These are foods that get the
most of their calories from fat and are found directly in nature, such as eggs, nuts,
and seeds. Some of my favorite, and some of the best for you, are things like
macadamia nuts, coco, coconut, chia seeds, flax seeds, fatty fish, eggs, olives, and
avocados.
They are fabulous for you. And in fact, by eating more fat rather than making you fat
will help condition your body to burn stored fat. Here’s the very quick version of
how this works. You hear people talk about this on the Internet, like being fat
adapted. Here’s what this really means, very quickly because we’re running short
on time. Right now chances are if you’re eating 50+ percent of your calories from
carbohydrate your body is sugar adapted, meaning it likes to run on sugar.
You are giving it mostly sugar, so it’s used to burning sugar. Okay? You can’t really
store sugar in your body. Yu have a teeny-tiny bit stored in your muscles called
glycogen, but it’s not a lot and it’s used for burst training and emergencies it’s like
kindling. It’s not your savings. It’s not what fuels you throughout the day.
So you can’t store energy as sugar. So let’s say you eat a lot of sugar. You’re body is
used to burning sugar, it wants to burn sugar. You eat a bunch of sugar for breakfast
like most Americans do, and then your body burns through that sugar and it’s
hungry. You eat breakfast at 7 a.m. it’s hungry at 9 a.m. Why is it hungry?
Why is it hungry two hours later, especially if you have some excess fat on your
body. It’s hungry because you feed it sugar. It’s used to burning sugar. It wants to
burn sugar. What’s stored on your body? Not sugar! So by eating sugar you are
training your body to eat sugar, which makes you want to eat sugar because the only
way your body can eat sugar is if you eat sugar.
For example, if you eat mostly fat, most of your calories from fat, here’s what
happens: So you eat breakfast. Breakfast is egg-based with a bunch of vegetables in
it. You’re going to get the majority of your calories from fat. You’re going to get
some wonderful protein as well. Nine o’clock comes around your body has burned
through those calories, what does it do?
It says I need some more calories. And I like to burn fat. Hmmm, there’s some fat
over here. There’s some fat over here! Just because fat didn’t pass through your lips
doesn’t mean it then can’t burn it off your hips.
So ironically while we’ve been told that eating fat makes us fat, eating fat in place of
garbage carbohydrate enables your body to fuel itself using your stored fat, and this
is really, really transformational because what people then start to experience is
when they start eating this way they experience what the research community calls
a spontaneous reduction of caloric intake, which just means that unconsciously get
full on an appropriate number of calories.
They’re not trying to eat less. They just spontaneously do because ironically they’re
not eating less. They’re just supplementing the food that passes through their lips
from the food that’s already stored on their hips because their body has regained its
ability to burn its stored body fat.
So eat more whole food fats. This doesn’t mean eat more spam. This doesn’t mean
eat more canola oil. This means eat more whole food fats. This also doesn’t mean,
this might ruffle some feathers -- eat more coconut oil. Coconut oil manufactures
will tell you take two tablespoons of coconut oil per day. Coconut oil is a processed
food.
It doesn’t mean you can’t cook with it, but it means that I’d rather you eat coconut or
olives in place of olive oil. Eat the whole food. Absolutely you can cook with oils,
but focus on getting the vast majority of your calories from whole food fats.
Finally, more low fructose fruits. This is going to make some people in the audience
sad, but the fruits that we mostly eat in this country as one would expect based on
the health and fitness outcomes we have in this country are the very fruits that are
highest in fructose and the lowest in vitamins and minerals, such as bananas, grapes,
and apples.
What you really want to focus on eating more of are berries and citrus fruits,
blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, as well as oranges, lemons, limes and
grapefruits. These are the fruits that maximize essential vitamins, minerals, and
amino acids and minimize sugars, especially things like fructose, which cause al
kinds of crazy neurological dysfunction in the brain when taken in excess.
So you do that in place of processed fats, such as transfats, seed oils, vegetable oil,
spam, and in place of sugar and starch. So you actually eat more because these
water, fiber, protein rich foods are packed. The volume of spinach you would need
to eat to consume 300 calories is huge! But I want you -- like, you’ll know you’re
doing this correctly when you eat between two and four pounds of food per day,
which I know sounds silly, but if you actually look at our ancestral records, that’s
what people ate back in the day.
Because when you don’t have calories jammed down into these sugar, starch,
transfat bites of death, then the food you are eating is big and your shopping cart
will be big and your refrigerator will be overflowing and your freezer will be
overflowing, but your cupboards will be relatively sparse because foods high in
water, fiber, and protein often need to be refrigerated or frozen.
You will also find these on the perimeter of your grocery store, rather than the
middle of your grocery store. You will also find them in nature, which all of these
science is crazy, because you look at this science and it just gets back to like, doesn’t
it make sense that the things you find directly in nature are the things that we run
best on, considering that they were the only things available to us when we evolved?
Or even if you don’t believe in evolution, wouldn’t intelligent design dictate that it’s
much more intelligent to design a creature that can live vest off he things that are
available to it, rather than things that have only been available for the past 15 years?
Like it just makes sense. So things look like this. It’s delicious. We all do this, like
we’ve all eaten eggs for breakfast unless you’re a vegetarian, we’ll talk about that
later. But we’ve all eaten eggs for breakfast and that’s what I’d encourage, eggs with
vegetables for breakfast, omelets. You can make smoothies using things like Chia
seeds and flax seeds and coco and coconut. You can throw some green vegetables in
the smoothie with some strawberries and some citrus and it’s yummy.
And for lunch it’s just like what you’re already eating except you take the sandwich
off the bread or you get the Thai food without putting it on top of rice, and you eat
all of the main dish instead of half of the main dish and half rice. And for dinner you
can eat lasagna, just make it with eggplant noodles instead of regular noodles, or use
spaghetti squash instead of spaghetti. Just eat more of the non-starchy vegetables
and more of the chicken or steak, rather than using things like rice and pasta and
rolls as filler.
I have not ever met anyone who has left a restaurant and just been like, oh my god,
that rice was so good! Right? It’s used as filler. We all work at Microsoft. We all
have the means. We can do this. We can enjoy the most delicious, healthy,
nutritious foods on the planet, and it’s wonderful. If you just eat more of it, you’ll be
healthier as a result.
It’s not about being perfect. This isn’t a diet. This isn’t like, I have to do this all the
time! And if you fall off the wagon you’re dead! No, not at all. Like, think about your
sink again. If you get a little bit of hair in your sink every once-in-a-while it doesn’t
cause a clog. It’s the continuous just like, ah get all the hair in the sink. That’s when
it gets clogged, right?
So it’s okay. You want to have a birthday cake? Yeah, it’s your birthday that’s totally
fine. Eventually what you’ll find is that when you eat this way, which I call a SANE
lifestyle, because it’s satisfying, unaggressive, nutritious, and efficient, that it will
make you feel and look so good that you’ll start to be like no, I bet I could make that
birthday cake with coconut flour and xylitol and still have birthday cake, and in fact,
you know I’m going to put some eggs in there and that’s actually healthier for me
than the dinner I used to eat. So I’m going to have birthday cake for dinner tonight.
And that would be okay.
It’s about making smart substitutions, not depriving yourself. The thing that’s so
brilliant about this lifestyle in addition to never needing to count calories and never
needing to be hungry, is there’s not flavor that’s off limit. Sweet, salty, bitter, fatty,
they’re all possible, you just use smart sweeteners like stevia and [inaudible] and
xylitol or erythritol. Fat we’ve already talked about you can join in abundance.
Meaty you can enjoy in abundance. Bitterness, vegetables are pretty bitter. But
you’ll get used to it so it’s all right and you’re going to sauté them in butter so it’s
okay. And sweet? Fruit is fine.
So you’ll get back to normal by getting back to normal. This seems like oh my god,
this is crazy! But again, this is how people ate prior to the obesity epidemic. The
solution to ending the obesity epidemic is not to count calories more precisely, as
evidenced by the fact that no one knew what a calorie was, let alone count them,
prior to the obesity epidemic.
The solution to the obesity epidemic is to stop doing the things that cause the
obesity epidemic, which is eating non-food, processed products. Any culture
anywhere in the world always when they shift from their traditional diet that kept
them healthy and slim without knowing what a gym was or knowing what a calorie
was, and they start eating pop tarts for breakfast, lunchables for lunch, and
microwave pizza for dinner becomes sick and diabetic. It’s not because they’re
eating more meat or this or that or the other thing, it’s because they’re not eating
food. They’re eating edible products.
I don’t care how hard you count calories. Eating edible products you will struggle
until you shift from thinking about food quantity and calorie quantity to food
quality. And it can’t be complex. It can’t. How could we have survived as a species
this long if not dying was hard? Right? This can’t require these Hollywood secret
pills, take this root of some sort. It cannot require that because no one had this
problem prior to those things existing.
So anyway, hopefully that was helpful. There’s a lot more research in the book, and
of course if you check out caloriemythbook.com there’s a lot more. We’re just
scratching the surface here, and I hope that was helpful.
[applause]
Do we have time for questions? Cool. How much time do we have for questions?
>>: About 15.
>> Jonathan Bailor: 15 minutes? Okay, cool. Sure. And do we have mics for the
questions? No mic. Okay. And I’ll repeat the question. To be fair do you guys mind
lining up in the isle and I’ll go in order? Because otherwise it’s hard for me to pick
who’s first. Never mind. You can stay seated; because you burn more calories if you
stand up. I’m just kidding.
Go ahead, brother.
>>: [inaudible]
>> Jonathan Bailor: Yeah. The question is what about dairy? So dairy is much like
other food groups. I would focus on -- oh thank you. Dairy you want to focus on
sources of dairy. One, you need to evaluate whether you are personally do well with
dairy. Some people don’t have the enzyme lactase, and if you don’t have lactase
produced by your body you’re not going to do well with dairy. So just test with
yourself.
That said, there are sources of dairy that provide you more of like and essential
amino acid, such as like, Greek yogurt or cottage, as compared to a traditional yogurt
that’s going to provide you with way more sugar. So if you are going to eat dairy I
would recommend focusing on dairy that provides you with the most protein and
the least sugar. So things like Greek yogurt and cottage cheese.
And then there are things like whey protein and casein protein supplements, which
are dairy-based, which a lot of people can do well with. Is that cool?
>>: What’s your take on [inaudible]?
>> Jonathan Bailor: The question is what do I think about cleanses? I think if the -so popping up a level. Anything you do that actually helps you is good. And
anything you do that makes you feel worse is bad. I know that sounds stupid, but I
get a lot of questions like what do you think about this? And if you do a cleanse and
it makes you feel great and it makes you want to, then after seven days eat this way I
would say absolutely do it. If a cleanse makes you think I can eat like garbage 21
days out of a month and then for seven days cleanse my body out, that would be a
bad approach to cleanses.
So if a cleanse uses a kick-start to eating this way, yes. But you can’t cleanse forever,
so I would just focus on what is the cleanse doing to help you achieve long-term
lifestyle change, and if it helps you achieve long-term lifestyle change then I would
recommend it. If it doesn’t, or if it’s used as like, an excuse to eat processed starches
and sweets and transfats, then I would recommend against it.
>>: The cleanse would be would be mental then? Is that what you’re implying?
>> Jonathan Bailor: There is not a lot of peer-reviewed scientific research that says
that cleansing and then eating this way would yield dramatically better results than
just eating this way. Make sense?
I don’t know who’s next. You go ahead.
>>: What about what you’re saying makes a lot of sense to me, what about the role
of genetics? Like I have this in my family, we’re really different lives but we look
almost identical with weight problems and other problems.
>> Jonathan Bailor: Thank you for bringing that up because it’s very important, very
important. Research is actually quite clear in the area of genetics, and that genetics
are about 45-75 percent of your body composition. That’s relatively cutting edge.
What’s not as cutting edge and is more common sense in the medical community is
that there are three basic body types, ectomorph, which is generally taller and
skinnier, mesomorph, which is right in the middle, and endomorph, which is a little
bit heavier.
Think about this like a football team. If you’re not big into American football you
can usually empathize with this analogy. There are those people that are like very
skinny and fast. They’re called wide receivers. And then there are people who go
like this right before the play starts and they are gigantic, those are called linemen.
Like, if you look at a high school football team, they all eat basically the same and
they all exercise the same, yet somehow there is nothing this 300 pound guy can do
to make himself look like the sprinter over here, right?
So about 45-75 percent of this is genetically predetermined. That doesn’t mean we
can’t become the optimal version of ourselves. It just means that, for example, like a
lot of the people that we see in the media that have six pack abs, have a strong
genetic predisposition to be able to visibly display their abs. And just like no matter
how hard I try, I cannot be 6’3. I can’t. I can’t just try harder to be taller. That
doesn’t mean I can’t nourish my body appropriately when I’m growing up so that
my bones will grow as large as they can grow, but the key distinction here is that
yes, there is a strong genetic component and we need to hold ourselves relative to
ourselves.
So think back to when you were at your fittest. Usually it’s the end of high school,
early college, and fortunately we are the generation that can remember this, because
today’s kids won’t even remember be able to remember this because they are over
weight under the age of five, which is a whole other thing that is heart breaking. But
whatever, think about when you were your fittest. Try to get back to that, and what
you’ll actually find is you will get back to that without trying if you just eat this way.
But don’t think about how do I look like Joe Smith extreme exercise DVD guy? Don’t
think about that.
I’m going to go to this side of the room next. Sure.
>>: All right. So I’ve moved away from cooking and flavoring stuff with butter to
olive oil. Which way would you recommend? Frying eggs with butter versus ->> Jonathan Bailor: Yeah. It depends on if you’re using it hot or cold. So if you’re
cooking, if you’re heating it you should use a healthy saturated fats such as butter,
coconut oil, beef tallow, bacon drippings. The reason for this is those saturated fats
are more stable under heat. If you take something like an olive oil or a fat that’s
liquid at room temperature and you heat it, what you essentially do is you turn it
into a transfat.
So olive oil, which is healthy when you -- olives are healthier, but olive oil, which can
be a healthy salad dressing, for example, when heated turns into a transfat. So you
don’t want to cook with olive oil. You want to cook with saturated fats and if you
want to put dressing on a salad using an olive oil and vinegar rather than trying to
take coconut oil and rubbing it on the leaves is probably a fine approach.
Cool?
Yeah.
>>: How many types of people come back to you and say Jonathan, I’ve done
everything you said to do in your book and it doesn’t work for me?
>> Jonathan Bailor: You would be the first.
>>: I’m just asking a question.
>> Jonathan Bailor: What I experience most often is people will say Jonathan, I’ve
done everything you’re saying and it hasn’t worked. And I say to them how many
servings of vegetables have you eaten today? And they’ll say two or zero. Because
what most people find is eating more protein is easy. It’s delicious. Eating more fat
is easy. But until someone can take a week and consume 12-15 servings of nonstarchy vegetables, at least six of which are green for a week consistently -- like,
that’s not an easy thing to do when you first get started. It’s like trying to become a
vegetarian. It’s not easy to begin with.
But if you can do that, I have never had someone come up to me that actually eats
double-digit servings of non-starchy vegetables, protein in 30 gram doses about
three times a day, and whole food fats and occasionally low fructose fruits in place
of these other things and doesn’t achieve the results we’re describing here.
>>: [inaudible]
>> Jonathan Bailor: Does that answer your question?
>>: Yes, it does.
>> Jonathan Bailor: Cool.
>>: Back to the, when you were talking about protein being transformed into
glucose. Is it possible to eat more than that 30 gram serving and have your body,
even though you’re eating a lot of protein still run off of that sugar that’s being
transformed?
>> Jonathan Bailor: Yes. Protein so -- sorry, the question is, and I didn’t repeat your
question. The last question was has anyone ever done this and it hasn’t work? The
question here is essentially can you cause your blood sugar to go up, can you get
weight gain by over eating protein?
The answer is yes. It is very hard to do though. It is very hard to do. The only way
to really do it would be through protein supplementation, because for example, if
you were to try to do this with even the most concentrated sources of protein like a
can of tuna fish is one of the most concentrated sources of protein in the world. It’s
like 91 percent protein. You would have to eat like three cans of tuna in one sitting
to eat enough protein to go through gluconeogenesis to actually have an impact on
your blood sugar.
If you were very -- like, if you were a diabetic and you were looking at your blood
sugar, it’s important to note this is getting really geeky, but different sources of
protein have different levels of an insulimic response. So dairy protein, especially
things like whey, has a huge insulin response. This is why body builders use it a lot,
or athletes use it a lot. Insulin isn’t bad. Excess insulin is bad. In fact, if you don’t
have enough insulin you die. It’s called type-1 diabetes.
So insulin isn’t bad. It’s excess insulin that’s bad. So dairy forms of protein
generally have a higher insulimic [phonetic] response. Over eating protein is very,
very difficult, especially if you are eating vegetables, but it can be done.
Yes.
>>: I just [inaudible]. Obviously since I burn more I eat more, but do I need to
rebalance that 40-40-20 or just keep it 40-40-20, just eat more of it?
>> Jonathan Bailor: I would, especially for an endurance athlete I would
recommend two things. I would recommend reading the book The Art and Science
of Low Carbohydrate Performance by Jeff Volek and Steve Phinney. They’re doing
some very cutting edge research at Duke University Medical Center and other
places, which is to - traditionally endurance athletes have been told to take glucose
packets and carb up, but remember you can only store about 1800 calories of
glucose on your body.
>>: Like two hours worth.
>> Jonathan Bailor: Exactly. Whereas you can store lots of fat on your body. So if
you really want to be an ultra endurance athlete I would highly recommend going
out of your way to consume more concentrated sources of healthy fats, such as
macadamia nuts, coco, and coconut. And the great news is if you are going on a long
run you can put 1000 calories of macadamia nuts in your pocket.
And sorry, the question was I’m an endurance athlete, what do I do? And that was
my answer.
Yes?
>>: One more question.
>> Jonathan Bailor: One more question. Oh, no! Oh, man. Okay whoever stands up
next gets the next question.
Two more questions, okay. You go first.
>>: Okay. I listen to your pod cast so I know that you have lots of friends in the
Paleo community [inaudible], eating things like raw spinach and raw kale, peanuts,
whey concentrate, and like even eggs. So what [inaudible] your food choices and
recommendations and how do we make sense -- complementary approaches and
lifestyle choices.
>> Jonathan Bailor: So the question is basically how does what I’m saying jive or not
jive with the Paleo type lifestyle? Is that fair? And how do I -- another way to think
of the question is a Paleo lifestyle is guided by a principle. The principle is by eating
the way our ancestors ate you will be healthy. That is the underlying principle of the
Paleo lifestyle. And it is by and large true.
The principle that underlies what I’m recommending is eat foods that provide you
with the most of that which is essential, and the least of that which is non essential,
and that will maximize your health. And those two circles overlap immensely, but
there are some exceptions. Like, the Paleo diet, also the Paleo diet is predicated on
helping people to heal autoimmune diseases, whereas this lifestyle is not -- that
happens, but it’s not the goal. It was not designed to do that.
The biggest outliers, the biggest differences you’ll see in between the two lifestyles
is Paleo lifestyle will say it is okay to eat certain forms of starch as long as they are
found in nature, as well as sweeteners such as honey, because they are found in
nature.
Now, the Paleo to me, if you wanted to just pick a diet, the Paleo diet is the diet I
would recommend without question. That said, the barometer that if our ancestors
ate is or if it’s found in nature that we can stop there is an inadequate bar because
tobacco is found directly in nature. Sugar cane is found directly in nature. There are
a lot of things. Snake venom is found directly in nature.
So what I like to do is start with the baseline of, like, the default hypothesis is if it
exists in nature cool. Check. Now, is it satisfying? Is it unaggressive? Is it
nutritious? Is it inefficient? AKA it is higher in water, fiber, and protein than some
other options I could be eating? If the answer is yes, then I would be like yeah, that’s
a good choice. And of course there’s this other track here where it’s not found
directly in nature, but it still is sane. And this is just kind of a job and I’m speaking at
Paleo FX in a few weeks, so again, all respect to the Paleo community, but we didn’t
have blogs back in the day. But Paleo people blog all the time. So just because it’s
modern also doesn’t mean it’s bad.
And the real hardcore Paleo folks like Rob Wolf, Chris Kresser, they all say the same
thing. It’s like Chris says dairy works for some people. His whole book is about
those customizations. So does that answer your question?
Kind of?
>>: Kind of. But I just was more specific like, you know, okay. Do I keep my raw
spinach casein smoothie or whey smoothie in the morning, is it going to spike my
blood sugar and cause me hypothyroid problems or something? [inaudible]
>> Jonathan Bailor: So my personal -- I believe the Paleo diet is a therapeutic diet
for people with autoimmune disorders. People spent a lot less time thinking about
what they were eating. In fact, my great grandmother, back in the time when we
had sub three percent rates of obesity ate cookies, cakes, pies, and dairy. They ate
all that stuff and they had dramatically lower levels of disease than we do today. So
I personally believe it’s very easy to become what’s called orthorexic [phonetic],
which is you start to spend so much time thinking about what you’re eating that the
pursuit of health becomes unhealthy.
So that’s why I like really non-starchy vegetables, nutrient dense protein, whole
food fats, low fructose fruits, in that order, and you will be fine. Cool?
I believe there was a -- right there.
>>: [inaudible]
>> Jonathan Bailor: Yes. Great question. I’m glad we got to cover it. So the question
is for a vegetarian diet where do I get my nutrient dense protein sources from? So a
vegetarian diet can be a more challenging diet to eat this way on. That doesn’t mean
it’s impossible. What I would highly, highly, highly recommend is, and this is going
to sound bad, but you’re going to have to almost write off getting your protein from
what you’ve been told to get it from -- beans, soy, rice, things like that, because soy is
70 percent carbohydrate by weight, beans are 70 percent carbohydrate by weight,
nuts are 80 percent fat by weight. So if you try to get a 30-gram dose of protein
from those sources it’s literally, you can’t eat that much food.
So what I would recommend for most vegetarians is focus a couple things. Get pea,
hemp, or rice protein supplement. Just straight out of the gate. I would also get an
amino acid supplement. And then I would say that’s step one and that covers your
protein. Then with your meals I would highly recommend shifting more vegetables,
more fruit, and more plant fats like nuts and seeds, I mean most the healthy fats I
mentioned were all plants and that can be the bulk of your calories rather than
getting the bulk of your calories from soy, corn, wheat, a lot of things that a lot of
plant-based products are made out of are some of the least nutritious foods and
have now been so genetically modified and hybridized that they are really, really
bad.
So in three steps: one is use a hemp, pea, or rice protein supplementation, as well as
an amino acid supplement to take care of the protein requirements, and then focus
on getting the bulk of your calories from whole food plant fats, rather than starches.
Does that help?
Okay. Cool. And I will personally stay around to answer more questions, it’s just
that we can’t video tape them or what? Can I answer more questions?
>>: [inaudible] and sign books.
>> Jonathan Bailor: Okay, cool. Thank you so much everyone!
[applause]