And so then go back to the point about weight loss. If I'm trying to lose weight, what are the biggest myths around weight loss that hold people back and inhibit them? One is you have to be perfect.
If I'm on my diet, I'm good. If I'm off my diet, not only am I bad, but as soon as I'm off my diet, I have sinned and there is no solace for me. A lot of people have that falling off the bandwagon thing where they'll eat clean food, whatever that means, diet food for weeks and weeks and weeks. They have one kebab, they have one cheeseburger, and they're like, back it.
That's it, man. I'm done dieting. I'm not a good person anymore.
It's like that whole dichotomizing and kind of a religious approach, that hurts a lot of people. Because in reality, if you just eat a cheeseburger, your body's like, oh, sweet. I got a little bit more carbohydrates stored in the muscle. I recovered a little bit more. My diet fatigue is actually a little lower because you fed me some food.
Tomorrow. I'm back on the diet. I'm making even better gains than if I didn't have that cheeseburger.
So I was so exhausted. And so a lot of people have that approach completely backwards and they're like, I'm either good or I'm bad. And that's really tough.
Another one is people think that the approach to lose weight is the same as the approach to maintain it. This is really, really, really nasty because so my wife is a board certified family med sports med doctor, and she does a lot of work, international Olympic teams, all that stuff. And she is looking at these formal recommendations from medical literature. And it's like, here's the kind of diet you need to get to lose weight. And then she was like, she followed up with some of the professionals.
And she's like, and so what about maintenance? And they're like, uh, yep. What do you mean? Yep. What are you talking about?
That's not the conversation. So people think, okay, I'm going to clean up my diet. No more ice cream, no more, no more crisps, no more Cheetos.
I'm going to eat super healthy. And then when I get to the weight that I want. I eat continuously super healthy.
I never have ice cream again. What kind of bizarre world is it? And so they'll flop back to the other one. Well, they'll try for a few months after they've gotten to the weight they like to just eat completely super healthy, clean, everything like that.
They lose a little bit more weight. They're exhausted. They're tired. Their food focus is driving them nuts. They'll eat some ice cream and they'll go, I'm a sinner.
And then ice cream, ice cream, cheeseburgers, cheeseburgers, up they go. And then they regain all the weight. So a huge myth is the fact that.
Yeah, when you're losing weight, you got to pay a little bit more attention to what you eat. But once you've gotten to that weight, you both need some time. Roughly every three months that you diet hard to lose weight, you should be taking about at least two months at maintenance, just maintaining it.
So if you weighed 100 kilos and ironed down to 90 after three months, for about two or three months, just stay at 90. Eat mostly the healthy stuff that you were, but throw in a little junk in there. Maintenance, again, is much easier than losing. When physiologically... And psychologically, your diet fatigue comes down after those two or three months. You're able, if you'd like, to start dieting really hard again to get to that next goal that you have, or you just live in balance for the rest.
But if we tell you like, here's your diet to make you lean and healthy, and you're like, okay, how long do I have to do this? And the doctor's like, forever? What am I supposed to do?
I'm never allowed to have tiramisu after dinner ever again? I'm like, well, probably not to. That's terrible advice.
And not only do medical people too often say that. Most people have that in their heads, and it's a very, very untenable situation. One of the big narratives that I was exposed to for most of my life about weight loss is that 80% of it's diet.
What do you think about those ratios? How much of weight loss is determined by diet versus exercise? Yeah. Diet has a bigger effect than exercise.
As a heuristic, I'm very comfortable with 80-20. There are a couple reasons for that. One is... There's the constrained energy hypothesis. It's also called Ponser's paradox based on Herman Ponser's work in physical anthropology.
And so basically they realized that the amount of physical activity that humans can do has a range. But if you try to get people to like double their physical activity, you say, look, I'm not going to change my diet. I'm going to work out twice as much as the next guy. Your body becomes so fatigued so rapidly.
And your metabolism adjusts itself, your physical activity that's not planned exercise. Like how much do you get up when someone calls you? Are you still on the couch talking to them? Or how much do you get up and walk around your kitchen a bunch? Your body makes all these adjustments.
So if you try to really outwork a bad diet, it doesn't work. And usually you just come back to the same physical activity because you're too exhausted to continue. And then you fail.
Whereas with diet, you can make some dietary changes, principle-based. Stop eating junk food every day and just eat two pieces of junk food. on Friday and two pieces of junk food on Saturday.
Just that alone is sustainable. Your body, as long as these are filling foods, a lot of veggies, fruits, whole grains, lean meats, you're not hungry. You're just like, damn it, I want a bag of chips. That's not a reason.
That is mostly psychological. It's not physiological. And thus dieting is just able to take bigger chunks out of your calorie balance equation without completely destroying it. That has limits as well.
You can't diet forever, so you have to take it in chunks. Another thing is this, in order to burn a lot of calories to lose a lot of weight, you got to do some serious work. The average person will burn something like 100 to 150 calories per mile run.
Oh my God, you start thinking about it like a donut has 300 calories. How fast, Stephen, can you eat a donut if I time you? Five seconds.
No problem. Boom. You're going to run three miles after you eat each donut? No. It's insane.
So taking your diet, cleaning it up, reducing the junk, reducing the calories is not that hard. But if you try to fight off the nasty extra junk food calories you're taking in with exercise, it's kind of like a three-to-one fight. You eat two donuts at your work function after work, you have six miles to run that day.
Nobody doing that. And that's why diet is such a huge factor. It's so easy to do, quote-unquote, damage with it.
And it's much easier to take control of it versus with exercise. The boundary layers are just smaller. And what you would have to do to fight the bad diet is just grotesquely large and outside of those boundary layers.
I think this a lot because I think people typically assume that the way to lose weight is to go do a run. Yeah. That's typically, you know, you'll see people in the gym and if you ask someone why they're on the running machine, they'll probably say, I'm trying to lose some weight. Yeah. It helps a little bit.
But if you run and you burn 200 calories extra per day. three days per week, that is 600 extra calories you're burning through the week. That's good stuff.
You can lose some decent weight like that. Are you just going to be more hungry though afterwards? Typically, exercise does not dependably increase your hunger in most people.
So depending on the context and the individual, it's not a dependable thing to say that doing more exercise necessarily makes you more hungry, which is kind of cool because usually you're not really any more hungry. And if you stick consistently exercise, but you control your diet, you get to go. However, is there a psychological component to that where because I've done the run, I now feel like I deserve it?
Oh, yeah, that's huge. And some people do have a hunger response. But what you put in your body after that could be really healthy stuff that doesn't have a ton of calories is really filling.
Or it could be like, we're done running pizza and beer. And then that's really bad news. But real quick. So let's say you're burning 600 calories extra per week by running two miles at a time or whatever or whatever.
You run an extra four miles per week, right? 600 calories per week. What is that?
Well, to burn a pound of body fat, you need to get 3,500 calories per week out of your diet or do 3,500 extra calories of activity per week. 600 is a drop in the bucket to that. You'll never notice.
I mean, yeah, after a year, you'll lose like two or three pounds or five pounds or whatever. Nobody thinks in terms like that. But if they were to simply alter their diet and keep training to keep the calorie burn at a moderate to high level, but take food out of their diet, especially through junk food, the total calorie sink deficit they can make for themselves is now in the hundreds of calories per day.
Now you're losing a pound of fat every week. Now you're having big results. Is there a preference between doing cardio or strength as it relates to long-term weight loss? Because I'm thinking if I've got more muscles, then surely my body's going to need more.
It's going to burn more calories. Just by a small margin. Oh, really? Almost unnoticeable. So you'll...
body versus my body you're not burning more calories how much do you weigh um 90 i don't even know in pounds it's about 92 kilograms okay solid so i currently weigh which is about 98 kilograms 202 pounds 202 so i weigh like 216 to 220 right now so we're not too far off not too far off so even though i have considerably more muscle in your opinion in my very biased um No dysmorphia here. I would be burning a teeny bit more fat or more calories per day because of my higher muscle mass, but it's mostly my absolutely higher weight. So for example, the people in the world that burn the most calories and need the most calories to sustain their body weight are the fattest people in the world.
That lady that weighs 800, 900, 1,000 pounds, just to keep her the same size, it's 15,000 calories a day. And if it was all muscle and no fat, somehow she was a thousand pounds of muscle, which would be sweet to look at. She would be burning like maybe. 16,000 calories per day instead of 15. And probably even that's an exaggeration. Muscle mass doesn't help you burn tons of calories.
That's not what it's there for. It is incredibly good for your health. It is incredibly good for how you look.
Those things by itself make muscle mass an awesome thing to do, but it is neither true to say that cardio reliably over the longterm burns lots of weight off. And it is not true to say that gaining lots of muscle burns lots of weight off. What is really, really critical is do you have a well-controlled nutritious diet and do you have an average moderate to high level of daily physical activity, dancing and swimming and running and having fun and chasing your kids? If you're on the higher end of activity, not psychotically high to where you get super tired, just not being a total like slouch and making sure you're aware of your body when you're diet, that's what really pays these massive dividends in long-term weight control.
It's not like, well, if I put on a ton of muscle. that's great for everything else it makes you super healthy it makes you look really awesome it gives you the ability to like i don't know like do real world stuff uh defend yourself things like that that's what muscle is there for it's not the greatest like calorie sink in the world i wish it was i'd be cheeseburger right now if you love the driver ceo brand and you watch this channel please do me a huge favor become part of the 15 of the viewers on this channel that have hit the subscribe button it helps us tremendously and the bigger the channel gets the bigger the guests