Transcript: Fat Burning Expert Alan Aragon’s Interview on DOAC Podcast

That’s right.

Common Goals and Body Composition

STEVEN BARTLETT: When people come to you and when they message you and DM you, there’s probably similar themes, similar themes as to what they’re trying to accomplish and what their goal is. If you just from the top of your head had to state the most popular themes that people are trying to accomplish, what are they?

ALAN ARAGON: How to improve body composition.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does that mean?

ALAN ARAGON: How to lose fat and or gain muscle.

The Biggest Protein Myths

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things that I’m particularly intrigued by, which kind of dovetails into both of those subjects of fat and muscle gain is the subject of protein. Because there’s been so much said about protein. You know, when I was growing up, they said you have to have protein where after you eat your meal you have to have this much protein. You have to have it before you eat your meal, it doesn’t matter when you have it.

So I want to do a bit of myth busting. On the subject of protein, what are the biggest myths that people currently believe about protein consumption?

ALAN ARAGON: The biggest myth is that they have the hierarchy of importance all screwed up. Everybody’s worried about how much protein per meal you need to have for this or that goal. When do you need to time protein relative to the training bout or waking or sleeping or all that stuff?

The main thing they need to be focused on is how much protein do they need to eat by the end of the day. Because when you hit that goal you’ve basically won the whole game. The relative placement, the distribution and the doses of the protein, the timing of it, oh man, it rarely matters. It rarely matters beyond getting that protein in, in a way that’s comfortable and convenient for you and in such a way that you can stick to in the long term.

Some people are more like grazers, some people are more like gorgers. They’re both fine as long as you hit the total by the end of the day. So the hierarchy is of utmost importance. Get your total daily protein. And then of secondary importance would be what is the distribution of the constituent doses of that protein total through the day? And then a third important down here is when specifically are you supposed to time that protein around the training bout?

So yeah, the way that I put it is like this. The daily total for protein, that is the cake, the distribution of the doses through the day, that’s the icing on the cake and it’s a very thin layer of icing.

The Science Behind Protein Timing

STEVEN BARTLETT: And how do we know that? How do we know that it doesn’t really matter what time you have the protein and that the most important thing is just making sure you get the protein?

ALAN ARAGON: That’s a great question. The reason that we know that distribution doesn’t matter as much as the total is through a couple lines of evidence that I can think of. So there’s Yasuda who compared a three meal model with a two meal model and the three meal model had superior effects for muscle gain.

But there is a study that was just published, within the last month. It was better from a methodology standpoint because they fed the subjects an abundance of protein so Yasuda and colleagues who tested the 2 versus 3, he totaled everybody out at 1.3 grams per kilogram of body weight per day. That’s total daily protein dose. And so we know now that that’s a suboptimal total if you want to push muscle growth.

So for pushing muscle growth, we know you should be at 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight, which translates to 0.7 grams per pound of body weight. That’s where you really want to be if you want to maximize muscular adaptations to resistance training like muscle size and strength gains.

So this latest study, they compared three protein feedings versus five protein feedings. And the totals of protein intake in the day in both groups were around a gram per pound. So right around 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight. So we have the optimized daily total and we’re testing 3 versus 5 protein feedings. We’re doing progressive resistance training. And this is the key, this happened in resistance trained subjects.

There were no significant differences in muscle size and strength gain between the three protein feedings a day versus five protein feedings a day. And this is the best designed study to date on the topic.

Debunking the Multiple Meals Myth

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because when I grew up and read stuff about gaining muscle, it said you had to have five or six meals a day. It said that’s what bodybuilders do.

ALAN ARAGON: Whenever we talk about any kind of physical goal, any sort of fitness goal, we have to address two main things. So who’s the population and what goal are we talking about? And maybe a third thing we need to address is what is at stake? So what level are we talking about? So population goal, what level, what’s at stake?

So with bodybuilders at elite levels, it is most of them consume five, six meals a day, some of them do even seven or eight in the off season. And these are individuals who are enhanced. And so their ceiling for muscle growth and their rates of muscle growth are significantly higher than people who are “natural.” And the amount of food that these individuals can process and use productively is significantly more.

And so with that population, I can see it being pretty standard for them to be consuming at least five, six meals a day since they tend to be eating double the amount of the average person. But the interesting thing that happens is that the guidelines from this very sort of fringe elite population, that’s what trickles down into the general public. And then they’re stuck thinking, “Okay, maybe I need to eat every 2.5 hours or some such.”

But yeah, with the general population and even recreational athletes and people who are hobbyists and stuff, you really. The impact of actual protein distribution is inconsequential compared to the total.

How Much Protein Should You Eat?

STEVEN BARTLETT: So how much protein should I be eating a day? Because I think you disagree with the recommended daily sort of allowance that they suggest we eat as. I think I’m 90 kg. How much protein should I be eating to gain muscle, lean muscle mass?

ALAN ARAGON: Okay, so we’re going to apply you to the population and the goal and the stakes questions. So what would you say your training status is? You’re obviously not a beginner, so you’re somewhere between intermediate and advanced, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

ALAN ARAGON: So what is your goal?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Just to lose fat and gain muscle. Familiar story, I’m sure.

ALAN ARAGON: Okay, the way that I do it is I go 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram of target body weight or goal body weight. So that’s the range that you would be looking at now, with you in particular, I would go more towards the upper end because you mentioned that part of your goal is to decrease body fat to a minor degree, but you’re still pushing the envelope because you’re already lean.

So there’s an interesting thing about high balling protein that facilitates that reduction in body fat.

High Protein and Fat Loss

STEVEN BARTLETT: If I have a lot of protein, it helps to reduce body fat.

ALAN ARAGON: Yeah, it does. And the way that we know this is because there have been several studies now, four trials, one case study by Joey Antonio and colleagues, and they examined the effect of very high protein intakes anywhere from about 3.3 all the way to 4.4 grams per kilogram of body weight, roughly. A gram and a half to 2 grams per pound.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that because you’re eating less carbohydrates, you’re sort of substituting it for something else essentially in terms of you feeling hungry. So if I’m having 3.3 grams of protein, I’m probably not going to be having something else which is more fatty.

ALAN ARAGON: Yeah, that’s right. So this particular line of research was done on people who are resistance training, and it was done in free living conditions. And they just gave them the assignment to essentially increase their protein intake by 50% and literally add 80 to 100 grams of protein on top of their existing habitual dietary intakes.

Personal Protein Recommendations

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what would you say to me then? You’d say push even higher. In terms of grams per kilogram of body weight, what is your goal body weight?

ALAN ARAGON: What is your goal body weight?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I don’t actually have a goal body weight. To be honest, I just have more of a goal in terms of strength.

ALAN ARAGON: How about this? Were you ever in the shape that you are wanting to be in? And what was your body weight at that time?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was around 90. I think I was just a little bit below 90 kilograms. So I think I was about 88.

ALAN ARAGON: Okay, so you know what, let’s take 90 and multiply that by 2.2.

STEVEN BARTLETT: 90 times 2.2.

ALAN ARAGON: There’s your protein target, 198 grams of protein a day.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if a protein shake gives me 20 grams of protein, I need to have basically 10 protein shakes a day. That seems like a lot of protein.

ALAN ARAGON: That is a lot of protein. I would give a little caveat here. You can probably achieve your goal with 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight. So that would be the lower end. So multiply 90 by 1.6 and that’s where you can start. So if that 198 number seems kind of far fetched or even a little bit like, “How would I even achieve that?” Then start off at the lower end.

Protein Recommendations for Women

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do women have a different prescription in this regard? Is there a different approach if you’re a woman?

ALAN ARAGON: Yeah, if you’re a woman, you would almost always start at the low end because women have a higher proportion of body fat and by default they have a lower proportion of lean mass. So with women it would almost always be, “All right, let’s start at 1.6 grams per kilogram of target body weight and see how you do with that.” And we can always ratchet it up if needed.

Is Too Much Protein Harmful?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there any such harm in eating too much protein?

ALAN ARAGON: It’s rare. You would have to have a pre existing chronic kidney disease and then it’s generally not a good thing to be high balling the protein. But even people with chronic kidney disease have to realize the trade off that they’re incurring with a low protein diet and older age, sarcopenia and stuff, how are they going to mitigate that?

But for the general healthy population, there have been many studies that have rolled out looking at effects on kidney function, liver function, bone health. And there is virtually zero threat to those organ systems that you would think might be threatened by a high protein intake. So the human organism perfectly well equipped to metabolize and handle high protein amounts.

Types of Protein

STEVEN BARTLETT: And not all protein is equal, I guess, because you’ve got these animal proteins and then plant proteins that come from things like eggs and so on. What is the best type of protein, do you think?

Protein Sources and Muscle Building

ALAN ARAGON: Is there such a thing? I think that the best thing you can do is get a mix of different types of protein. It is true that gram for gram, generally speaking, animal proteins are more “anabolic” than plant proteins, meaning that they stimulate a greater growth response at the muscle level. So they stimulate muscle protein synthesis more potently than plant proteins.

And there are, there’s maybe one exception to that that we know of, which is mycoprotein, which is a fungus based protein that actually outperformed milk protein for stimulating muscle protein synthesis. So there’s interesting exceptions like that, but generally speaking, animal proteins are better for muscle protein synthesis than plant proteins.

Now with that said, Steven, once you consume a certain amount of total daily protein, then it doesn’t appear to matter how much of your protein is animal based versus how much your protein is plant based, if we’re looking at things like muscle size and strength gain. Because this has been actually compared in controlled interventions where vegan group has been compared with an omnivore group and total daily protein was optimized at 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight per day or 0.7 grams per pound in both groups. Progressive resistance training for 12 weeks. No significant differences between groups in muscle size and strength gain, whether it was an omnivorous protein intake or whether it was a plant based protein intake. And we have two studies showing that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Now you must have so many moments where you’re working with someone through your career who’s got a goal and who feels like they just can’t accomplish it, where you find yourself saying the same thing over and over again to people about how to lose fat or to gain muscle mass. Is that same thing just to have more protein?

ALAN ARAGON: It’s a common thing with the general population, with the lay public. My protein target is at least 160 grams a day. So I just make sure that I have four meals with at least 40 grams of protein per day. And it’s so easy to do. It’s incredibly easy to do because two of my meals per day are just real whole foods. And then two of my meals per day, two to three are protein smoothies. And so it is just so incredibly easy for me to get my protein intake through like two scoops of protein. Bam. That’s almost 50 grams of protein right there. So you have two of those a day. I’ve got more than half my protein covered.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But if I have all of my protein in one meal, is that going to impact my ability to gain muscle or lose fat? If I have it all in one meal, if I just have like one massive protein shake. I put like five scoops.

ALAN ARAGON: Now, if you were telling me, “Hey, Alan, I want to place really good in the nationals this year. The NPC Nationals. Classic physique or, you know, classic bodybuilding or just any one of the physique divisions.” I would say, you know, you are not going to want to try to get all your protein in a single meal. Because what we want to do is we want to maximize the number of micro anabolic events in the course of the day. We want to maximize the amount of times you maximally stimulate muscle protein synthesis in the course of the day.

And just from a pragmatic standpoint, you could probably do that at least three or four times. And if you’re able to do that three or four times in a day versus once with that one big banger of a meal, then you might actually over time gain more muscle than you would have. And this could make the difference between placings at the end of the prep period. So. But as somebody in the general population, theoretically you could.

Rapid Weight Loss Strategies

STEVEN BARTLETT: I am going to challenge you to do something here. I asked my audience about weight loss and asked them for their 15 most popular questions that are currently unanswered for them about weight loss. The first one was how do I lose weight fast?

ALAN ARAGON: So essentially you can engage what could be classified as a protein sparing modified fast. You’re basically crash dieting. I don’t love doing that though, honestly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Listen, I’ve got a wedding. I need to lose weight fast. How do I lose weight fast?

ALAN ARAGON: Losing weight fast. So you would basically do an aggressive caloric deficit. So anywhere, I would say 20% below your maintenance needs, 20 to possibly 40 depending on the individual percent below your maintenance needs, and then keep the protein high. And this is going to default you to relatively low carbohydrates, relatively low fat, and just train regularly. Don’t hurt yourself.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Protein high, you said?

ALAN ARAGON: Yeah, protein high and calories wise. So for example, if you maintained at, we’ll just take a round number, 2,000 calories. So you would just lop off about a third of that and then just go and see if you can maintain your fat loss while maintaining strength levels relatively. It’s almost inevitable to crash diet and lose some strength in the process. But I mean, we’re talking about something that’s not an optimal process. But yeah, that’s the game basically. Aggressive caloric deficit, keep protein very high and then you just go. And the deficit could be anywhere from 500 to 1,000 calories below what you normally take in.

Weight Regain After GLP-1 Medications

STEVEN BARTLETT: The second one is why do I regain weight after stopping a Ozempic, Wegovy, etc.

ALAN ARAGON: All right, so those GLP-1RAs, the GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs like Wegovy, they have at least three different mechanisms that all converge towards almost nullifying your hunger and your appetite response. And so when you cut out the drug, then your normal appetite comes back.

And an unfortunate reality for a lot of GLP-1 users when they get off the drug is they just don’t have the habits and they don’t have the skills necessarily to maintain their weight loss. And of course, once again, they’re fighting their appetite. So I would say perhaps try a weaning off process instead of just a jumping off process. A weaning off process where you are reinforcing countermeasures to overeating, where you are reinforcing good training habits and good dietary habits, and where you’re also progressively learning how to live with and deal with sensations of hunger between meals. And just train those habits in. And it can be done. I’m not one of the people in the camp who says it’s impossible to get off of weight loss drugs successfully.

Metabolic Adaptation and “Damaged” Metabolism

STEVEN BARTLETT: So number three again is, is my metabolism damaged after dieting? And they’re asking a question here about something called adaptive thermogenesis.

ALAN ARAGON: Yeah. Okay, so this is not really a short shot here. So the process of metabolic adaptation is kind of complex and it happens in both directions, whether you try to gain weight or whether you try to lose weight. So earlier we talked about an increase in non exercise activity thermogenesis or NEAT, an increase in NEAT in response to an increase in calories. So that occurs. And across studies I gave an example that showed a 336 calorie increase in NEAT when 1,000 calories were stacked on top of people’s maintenance. But there are other studies where the caloric increase was not quite that aggressive. So on average increases in NEAT or non exercise activity thermogenesis are about 200 to 300 calories. So you increase your energy expenditure about 2 to 300 calories if you’re overeating.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. So your body will start to twitch more and move more, burning more non active calories when you’re overeating. Yeah. So that’s an adaptation.

ALAN ARAGON: That’s the adaptation in the caloric surplus side. So in the caloric deficit side, it’s just the opposite thing, just the mirror of it. So people decrease their non exercise activity thermogenesis or their NEAT, they decrease it on average like 2 to 300 calories as a result of dieting. So this is part of a metabolic adaptation that occurs with dieting.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is this why people don’t think the calories in calories out system is working for them? Sometimes because they don’t realize that if they’re in a calorie deficit, sometimes they are subconsciously moving around less, which means that they’re burning less calories. So actually they’re not in a calorie deficit.

ALAN ARAGON: Yes, that’s correct. So with the dieting side of things, which is much more of a public health issue, weight loss is much more of a necessity than the weight gain. It’s tougher for most people because in addition to the decrease in non exercise activity, that’ll cost people 2 to 300 calories that they’re no longer burning at the end of the dieting cycle. Then you’ve got what’s called adaptive thermo reduction. Okay, so you mentioned adaptive thermogenesis. Technically that is the, there’s non shivering adaptive thermogenesis and there’s shivering adaptive thermogenesis. But that all has to do with increases in energy expenditure in response to cold environments. So that’s technically that’s what adaptive thermogenesis is. It’s increase in energy expenditure. When people diet, there’s something called adaptive thermo reduction and that is part of it is a decrease in non exercise activity thermogenesis.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re basically saying that the body changes when we’re in a calorie deficit. It stops doing as much.

ALAN ARAGON: Yes, that’s the activity part, but then there’s also the metabolic part. So we’ve got a decrease in non exercise activity. Then we have adaptive thermo reduction, which has to do with a metabolic component that has to do with the sympathetic nervous system and also potentially thyroid output as well. So there’s this metabolic change that goes on. There’s behavioral or activity change that goes on.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So when people say I’ve got a slow metabolism, they might be telling the truth.

ALAN ARAGON: When people say I have a slow metabolism, what’s usually happening is they have a pretty massive drop in NEAT or non exercise activity to the order of 2 to 300 calories. Now adaptive thermo reduction is another 50 to 100 calories. Okay, so we’re looking at in the neighborhood of like possibly 3, 400 calories that they’re no longer burning as a result of the dieting process. Now if you take somebody with clinically diagnosed hypothyroidism, then their resting metabolic rate could be 7 to 10% lower than somebody without a thyroid issue. So you add another 1 to 200 calories less burned over here, then you have the potential for 5 to 600 calories of energy expenditure that this person is challenged with at the end of their dieting cycle.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I guess it is kind of true in a way that people understand it that if you overeat, your metabolism, as far as they understand what their metabolism is, is increasing and if you under eat, then your metabolism is slowing down.

ALAN ARAGON: Yes. But I have to emphasize the major component that slows down is your non exercise activity.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re not moving around as much.

ALAN ARAGON: Yes. The other components like adaptive thermo reduction and potential thyroid issues, i.e. the minor component. The major component is a drop in fidgeting, a slowing of the rate that you walk around, an increase in the amount you sit around.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you can control that?

ALAN ARAGON: Yes. It’s hard to put a finger on it, but as long as you know that stuff goes down. I’ll give you an example of physique competitors they are, as their cutting phase progresses, they’re literally lying around in between their cardio sessions and their resistance training sessions and their Tupperware meal sessions. Okay. They’re no longer tapping their heads, you know, tapping their fingers and bobbing their heads and they no longer have a pep in their step. They’re no longer doing non exercise activities. Basically.

The Best Diet for Long-Term Weight Loss

STEVEN BARTLETT: Question four, what diet actually works best for long term weight loss? Keto, low fat, Mediterranean, intermittent fasting. And you’ve got to give me an answer.

ALAN ARAGON: I’ll say it in one sentence. The diet with enough protein, enough total calories that is comprised predominantly of healthy food choices that fits the individual’s personal preferences and tolerances.

Targeting Belly Fat

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do I lose belly fat specifically? Can you target the belly?

ALAN ARAGON: Targeting belly fat specifically is a matter of targeting total body fat. You can’t necessarily spot reduce the belly fat. Now if we’re to go a layer deeper, it is possible for certain diets to be more conducive to preventing visceral fat gain or maybe even accelerating visceral fat loss. Visceral fat is the fat within the abdominal cavity around the organs. And so it is possible for certain diets to be more conducive to reductions in visceral fat. And that would be diets that have a lower proportion of saturated fat.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s an example of a saturated fat food?

ALAN ARAGON: Land fatty land animal meats. So land animal fats are going to be your saturated fats that are more conducive to visceral fat gain. So if you were to switch out, let’s say fatty cuts of meat, just trim that fat out. And if you replaced it with something like avocado nuts, olive oil, seeds on.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Menopause, why is fat loss harder and what actually works?

Menopause and Weight Management

ALAN ARAGON: Okay, during the menopausal transition, which begins at a woman’s mid-40s on average and then ends in the mid-50s, there are changes physiologically and hormonally that can challenge a fitness program. So it can challenge their ability to execute fitness program and adhere to it.

And so things like hot flashes and joint pain, changes in sexual function and poor sleep, all of those things can converge to lead to a decreased ability to stick to a program and do the necessary physical activity and dietary adherence to reach sort of the standard rate of progress for body composition change.

And so the solution to that would be simply you don’t have to rearrange a whole program because somebody’s going through menopause. You don’t have to cut out nutrients and do any special things. What has been effective is just lowering the expectation of progress. So whereas I would typically have somebody gun for a pound a week of fat loss, somebody in the menopausal transition, they have more challenges to that going on simultaneously. So we would go for about half of that protein.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do they do in terms of protein?

ALAN ARAGON: Just keep the protein high, same range. Yeah. So with protein, I have to say, there’s sort of a two tiered recommendation. So the general public with average goals will do just fine on 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight. That’s kind of like the general population average goal.

Folks, somebody like yourself, somebody like me, and folks who are oriented towards maybe pushing the envelope a little bit more than the average 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight. And you know, there’s a little margin over here for people on the fringe physique competitors who I would have no problem seeing them go higher than that 2.2 grams per kilogram cutoff.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there anything else that peri or menopausal women need to understand about gaining muscle and keeping fat off when they’re going through menopause. Is there anything else that we’ve missed?

The Reality of Midlife Stress and Menopause

ALAN ARAGON: You know, I would just emphasize the understanding that midlife presents maybe the highest point of psychological stress in people’s lives. So starting from the late 40s, going all the way into people’s 50s and 60s. It’s like that. You know, the concentrated period in the menopausal transition, mid-40s to mid-50s, is when people are dealing with ailing parents.

The stress of ailing parents, the stress of kids going through high school or college, the stress of hitting a high point in their careers, the pressures thereof, the time, the energy that is necessary to allocate for all of those things. All of those things distract from, “Oh, I’ve got a fitness program here. Oh, my coach is making me do this and this and this. And now he’s making me diet like this.” That’s the thing that I would emphasize.

There’s nothing special or different that needs to be done. And in fact, there’s a lot of mythology that’s circulating the space right now where coaches and gurus and even some physicians are telling women that they are just doomed to gain a bunch of belly fat and lose a bunch of muscle during menopause. “It just happens. You’re doomed.” Well, that’s just not true.

There is a study called the Swan study, that’s the longest and largest study of its kind. And the average amount of fat gained during the entire menopausal transition was 1.6 kilograms, which is three and a half pounds. And the average amount of muscle loss total during the menopausal transition was 0.2 kg. That’s about half a pound of muscle loss. Statistically significant, yes. Insurmountable, no. So. And are there going to be outliers who experience double the muscle loss and double the gain of that? Yes. But none of this is insurmountable.

Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT)

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you think about taking HRT? Does that help?

ALAN ARAGON: Yeah, well, it helps those who need it. So HRT should be looked at on an individual basis. One of the things that really annoys the absolute crap out of me is when I’m seeing the comment sections on social media with people telling everybody that, “Hey, you just turned 40, time to go on HRT.” That is between you and your doctor. People are trying to universalize major changes like HRT. Some people definitely benefit from it. And just the same, there are a lot of people who don’t need it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The people that benefit from it, do they find it easier to gain muscle mass and to not gain fat? Is that kind of like what…

ALAN ARAGON: That is a common result, yes. But my thing with HRT is this. So there has to be a symptomologic reason to get on it. So you have to be incurring or experiencing symptoms that are disrupting to your quality of life, regardless of what your blood labs are like.

For testosterone, for example, if you are out of range for testosterone on the lower end, let’s say, but you have no symptoms and you feel fine, you perform great in all aspects, then it’s really up to you. Whether it bugs you enough that you’re below range or on the lower end of the range to correct that, it’s up to you. And so symptomologically driven.

Now, the other thing to look at with HRT is, and a lot of people, they get a single testing point and they judge their need to get on hormonal replacement therapy based on a single test. What people need to do is see whether there is some sort of trend going on in one direction or another or not. And if that trend is going in a bad direction over time, and you can do this by just multiple time points over an extended period, it’s debatable, maybe six months, 12 months, to see what’s going on, try to correct things through lifestyle and diet, and often they are correctable.

I’ve come across many cases where a guy will be underslept, overworked, eating like crap, gets his testosterone levels tested. “Oh, you’re right at the bottom, or you’re even below range. Oh, time for HRT.” Well, hold on a second. Let’s get this guy some sleep, let’s improve his lifestyle, improve body composition, and then bang, testosterone levels double. This is not an uncommon thing.

And so I’m very much a proponent of, first, are there symptoms driving the justification for HRT? And then secondly, are we basing things on a single time point or did we actually see a trend over time?

PCOS and Dietary Interventions

STEVEN BARTLETT: The next question is about PCOS. A lot of women are struggling with PCOS and that’s causing them to have irregular menstrual cycles and fertility issues. What would you say to a woman who is struggling with PCOS in terms of dietary prescription?

ALAN ARAGON: Okay, so PCOS shares a lot of metabolic characteristics with type 2 diabetes. So there is insulin resistance going on, there is impaired glycemic control going on. And so we can pretty much justify being cautious with total amount of carbohydrate intake with PCOS.

With type 2 diabetes, there’s two tiers of importance dietarily. So of first importance, with type 2 diabetes, you have to structure the diet so that it allows body fat loss. The success of GLP1 drugs has actually proven that at the heart of type 2 diabetes is overeating an abundance of body fat. So the way that type 2 diabetes happens is in genetically predisposed individuals, they gain total body fat and then they gain visceral fat, an undue amount of visceral fat, and then this leads to insulin resistance and impairment of glycemic control.

So PCOS is very similar in this regard. There is no standard or consensus based PCOS diet protocol, but because it shares so many similar characteristics with type 2 diabetes, then we can pretty much employ the same principles of how we would intervene with type 2 diabetes, which would, number one, put a priority on total body fat reduction, and then tier number two would be, all right, do we need to restrict carbohydrates even further?

And so that would be very similar with PCOS. And at kind of a population level with type 2 diabetes, roughly 130ish grams of carbohydrates a day seems to be sort of the sweet spot below which people have an easier time controlling their blood sugar than above that total amount. But that’s just the statistical average. We still have to look at things case by case.

STEVEN BARTLETT: My girlfriend, she has PCOS and she did the ketogenic diet with me. She’s on it at the moment. We’ve been doing it for about eight weeks now. We do it intermittently throughout the years. And she said her menstrual cycle has perfectly corrected itself. I think at its maximum, it was like 60 days, her menstrual cycle. And then because she’s restricted her carbohydrates, as you were saying, in this way, using keto, it’s like she said, it’s perfect, it’s perfectly predictable.

ALAN ARAGON: Now that’s awesome.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I say that in part because I think people don’t, with PCOS who have irregular menstrual cycles don’t often consider that carbohydrates, sugar, glucose, whatever could be the perpetrator.

ALAN ARAGON: Yeah, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, because it’s framed as a disease, like you were born with it, maybe it’s heritable, maybe there’s an element of truth to that. But it’s crazy that that dietary intervention had such a profound impact on her in particular.

ALAN ARAGON: It’s glad to hear that you found something that works. That’s. Yeah, that’s, you know, that’s. Anytime you present with some sort of clinical condition, I would first tell you, hey, see an endocrinologist or see a doctor who specializes in that particular issue.

Irregular Menstrual Cycles

STEVEN BARTLETT: And in terms of menstrual cycles, generally, if you do have an irregular menstrual cycle, is there anything you should be thinking about?

ALAN ARAGON: Number one, see a doctor. Number two, consider whether or not you are over training and under eating. So what happens with female physique competitors? Menstrual disruption, menstrual cessation a few months into prep, sometimes even a few weeks into prep, depending on how aggressive the diet is. And so menstrual disruption is very common in competitive athletes and in recreational athletes who have to maintain a certain level of leanness while maintaining a high volume of exercise output.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that the body from an evolutionary perspective saying, “Listen, we don’t have the energy to have a baby here, so we’re just going to shut this down”?

ALAN ARAGON: That is right on.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you kind of do. You don’t want to be restricting your calorie consumption too much if you have an irregular menstrual cycle and you’re trying to correct that.

ALAN ARAGON: Yeah, no, no. The so called female athlete triad begins with overtraining, undereating, potential eating disorder, nurturing going on there. And then down the line the menstrual cycle gets disrupted and stops and then hormonal changes happen that are negative and then ultimately results in osteopenia, osteoporosis. And so that chain of events is unfortunately really common with women who don’t pay attention to healthy menstrual cycle.

Muscle Memory

STEVEN BARTLETT: People use this term all the time, muscle memory. I thought it was nonsense, but I spoke to someone the other day and they said to me, “Actually no, your body does have a muscle memory.” Which means that if I fall off now and I stopped going to the gym, my body is going to be able to get back to my current physique faster because I was here once upon a time. Is this true?

ALAN ARAGON: That is true. There’s some debate going on amongst the community what goes on physiologically with. When you train, you create new myonuclei, so you increase your so called myonuclear domains and those stay relatively permanent even during times of detraining.

But there’s still the so called proprioceptive or motor component to training that sticks with people. Sort of the skill aspect of it that sticks with people to be able to execute the movements and do the things to cause the adaptations. So not only do you have that muscle memory from the myonuclear domain standpoint, but you have the motor learning at the neurological component and to a degree you also have the skeletal component to be able to capacitate those that rebound in loading and muscle gain, muscle regain rather.

The Gut Microbiome and Weight Loss

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is the gut microbiome playing a role in my ability to lose weight?

ALAN ARAGON: Not a big one of course.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why did you make that sound?

ALAN ARAGON: Well, there’s some people in the space who put the microbiome as the master regulator everything, but it’s definitely a part of the axis of organ systems that manifest whatever result we’re looking at. It’s part of it, yes, but it’s not the main puppeteer of everything. Everything works in concert.

And I’ll just give you an example there. So there are certain supplements that are claimed to be able to, in quotes, “fix the gut microbiome” and cause greater weight loss. So there have been many studies looking at this sort of phenomenon. And while there is a statistically significant effect in some cases, the absolute amount that they can help for things like body fat loss or body weight loss is usually not practically significant. It’s too small to be considered meaningful. And so I wouldn’t necessarily rely on changes in the gut microbiome for impacting global changes in body fat.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Here I have 20 eggs. I heard that you eat 20 eggs per week, which is about, you know, four eggs a day potentially. Why do you eat so many eggs?

Eggs and Testosterone Protocol

ALAN ARAGON: Well, number one, I’m one of those weirdos who actually loves eggs. I love the taste of them. They’re a great source of protein, a decent source of fat. Most of the fat in there is oleic acid, by the way, which is a monounsaturate that predominates olive oil. It’s a low saturated fat thing.

Of course, the knock on eggs is their cholesterol content. But interestingly, it’s dietary saturated fat that has the greater magnitude of impact on blood lipids than dietary cholesterol. Interestingly enough, I recognize that the major health agencies would want you to stop your egg consumption to like one a day, possibly two a day if you’re an elderly person.

But I take the health agencies or even the consensus guidelines as a “Okay, that’s cool. That’s a good starting point.” I happen to like eggs. I’ll eat more than that. Check my blood, check my health. I’m doing just fine. So I’m one of those people who can do four eggs a day just fine.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is this part of your broader testosterone protocol?

ALAN ARAGON: I like the fact that eggs are conducive to testosterone production.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’re 53 years old, right?

ALAN ARAGON: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you test your testosterone levels?

ALAN ARAGON: I have not tested my testosterone levels in forever, but I’m not concerned with it because once again, it would be a symptom driven thing for me to even care. So if I was experiencing the symptoms of low testosterone, then that would give me a reason to check it out and see what’s going on.

And then I would have to take a step back and look and see what can I modify with lifestyle. What do I have available to change non drug wise. And you know what, if I ever need to take exogenous testosterone, if that day ever comes, well then so be it. I’m just not there.

Daily Supplement Protocol

STEVEN BARTLETT: What supplements do you take every day?

ALAN ARAGON: I take a multivitamin, I take two multivitamins. Actually the reason why I take two multivitamins is because really certain key nutrients in there, they have to be in such small amounts per single pill that it’s really just meaningless. And so I take two multivitamins, one of them with iron, one of them without iron.

And I also take fish oil, I take magnesium and I take vitamin D3, I take vitamin C. And by the way, I really should preface this with this is the bro science side of my personal habits because I’m taking my vitamins more on “placing your bets” basis rather than “hey man, this is just the bottom line, evidence based. I think everybody should do this.” Okay? So I want to make sure that’s clear. I also take magnesium and I also take collagen and I also take creatine.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If I told you you could only take three of those supplements, which three would you pick?

ALAN ARAGON: That’s a damn good question, man. Can I have. I’m going to count my two multis as one.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So your multivitamin, would that be the first one?

ALAN ARAGON: Yes. Okay, so multivitamin and omega 3s, fish oil, vitamin D3.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’ve sacked off the creatine.

ALAN ARAGON: You’re a genius. Those would be the top three. Can I add creatine in there? Could I squeeze it in there?

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, no, no.

ALAN ARAGON: Oh, bro.

STEVEN BARTLETT: To pick three. So you picked the multivitamin, omega 3, vitamin D3.

ALAN ARAGON: Well, it might humble me to kick the creatine out, so. Okay, fine, I’ll leave those three.

King Creatine

STEVEN BARTLETT: You call creatine “king creatine”?

ALAN ARAGON: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why’d you call it that?

ALAN ARAGON: It’s the only non pharmacological supplement that really, really has a very strong and deep and broad evidence base for enhancing the effects of resistance training. So strength gains and size gains. More strength than size.

The size gains, they come with the initial loading phase where a lot more intramuscular water happens or intracellular intramyocellular hydration. That is the big immediate part of creatine that folks feel when they go on it and when they go off of it. So you’ll lose a few pounds of lean mass if you get off of creatine.

I call it “concreatine” because it has possibly close to. I want to say it’s reached over a thousand studies and the majority of those studies show positive effects, usually with creatine. If you were to compare a group taking creatine versus a group not taking creatine, so the creatine group will have like a 20% increase in their lifting capacity, whereas the non creatine group will have like 12% increase in their lifting capacity over a typical study length, 8 to 12 weeks.

And so that is a significant strength gain advantage. And over the long term that would definitely augment muscle hypertrophy as well. And once you’re loaded with creatine, so being loaded with creatine means that you saturate your muscle creatine stores. And that requires either a loading phase of 20 to 25 grams per day for five to seven days or a maintenance phase that you engage like three, five grams a day. You’ll be loaded at about 30 days.

And so during that loading phase, it’s pretty common for people to gain roughly 2% of their body weight as lean mass.

STEVEN BARTLETT: People seem to talk about creatine like it’s this miracle thing that everybody should be taking. And it’s one of the few supplements that it seems all the experts I speak to about this stuff seem to agree upon. Obviously vitamin D, Omega 3 comes up all the time and multivitamins, but creatine seems to. Nobody seems to have much of an issue with it or be able to point to many side effects of taking with it, both for men and women.

ALAN ARAGON: Yeah, it’s got the musculoskeletal benefit, believe it or not, there’s even benefits for creatine on joint health. So not only that, not only the athletic performance and muscle hypertrophy side, but there are things like improved glucose control, improved memory.

So different domains of cognition can be enhanced by creatine. The level of creatine in the brain can increase with supplementation, and then you create a pro energy environment in the brain. And that’s how these positive effects on memory happen with creatine supplementation, especially in people with cognitive decline. So there’s almost nothing creatine can’t do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Wow, some statement.

Diet Breaks and Plateaus

STEVEN BARTLETT: Diet breaks. What’s a diet break? And why is that a useful tool?

ALAN ARAGON: Yes. So one of the big things that dieters encounter are progress plateaus. And so we can define a progress plateau as four to possibly eight weeks of no change in body composition despite good compliance to the program.

With that definition out of the way, then intervening and overcoming or managing a plateau is really sort of this individualized process that needs to be looked at case by case. Where for example, if somebody feels like they’re in the midst of a plateau and they have been on program, then there’s really only two reasons the plateau happened.

So reason number one is that their compliance was inconsistent. So poor compliance is number one or number two, they have reached energy equilibrium. So they’ve reached a genuine and bona fide new maintenance point.

But there’s something that is overarching with the plateau concept that people need to understand. So we automatically look at progress plateaus as something negative. When people need to reorganize or reframe their perception of what a plateau is. And the plateau is just the body doing its job.

When we look at the body as an adaptive survival unit, then homeostasis is a big part of that. So if the body achieves homeostasis, then hallelujah, we’re going to live, we’re going to survive. So if, for example, somebody has a lot of weight to lose, let’s say somewhere to the order of over 20 pounds, 20, 40, 60 pounds to lose, they have to understand that multiple plateaus will be encountered en route to their ultimate goal.

And the way that the body changes is always going to be this surge, slow, stop pattern. And it just continues this way. And with every progressive plateau, the surge part gets shorter and the slowing part and then the plateau part gets longer. So you can think of it as staircases and landings. So with each successive plateau, the staircase gets shorter, the landing gets longer, but it’s supposed to go like that.

And the plateaus should be getting longer, because the ultimate goal, after all, is a plateau of sorts. And when people come to realize that, then they can look at plateaus as what I call “maintenance practice.” So if they have that mental shift from seeing plateaus as this negative thing where “I need to go sniff out the next great diet or the next great product,” they can look at it as, “alright, so the plateau is a good thing. The body is doing its job. Now we have an opportunity to practice maintenance.”

And think about it this way too, Steven. Anybody can get weight off, but weight loss maintenance really is the issue. So the better you get at weight loss maintenance, then the more you can win the game.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do I get good at weight loss maintenance?

ALAN ARAGON: All right, so in order to properly maintain, you have to properly get there. So properly getting there means that you have to do your best to maintain your lean body mass while you’re losing body fat. So what happens to a lot of people when they diet is they lose a lot of lean body mass along.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The lean body mass. You mean muscle mass?

ALAN ARAGON: Yes, muscle mass. Muscle mass along with their fat mass. And so muscle tissue is something very important to keep on the body while you’re losing fat, because muscle is. We can look at it as our metabolically active. Every tissue is metabolically active, even body fat. But muscle tissue specifically is the center of our dietary fuel usage. It is the metabolic engine of the body, if you will. And so if you’re losing muscle tissue, you’re really losing metabolic leverage while you’re losing body fat.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So the way that I infer that is that muscle’s very greedy. It takes up a lot of calories. So if I lose my muscle when I drop my weight, it’s almost like the greedy guy who sucks up all my calories is no longer there. And so I’m quite likely just to rebound quite quickly.

The Collateral Fattening Phenomenon

ALAN ARAGON: That’s a great analogy, and it’s accurate, too. And in fact, there is a phenomenon that in the literature, it’s called collateral fattening. And that happens when the body senses an energy crisis at the end of a diet where you’ve lost a bunch of muscle mass, and the body senses that, “Oh, my gosh, we just lost a bunch of precious tissue. We have to do whatever we can to get it back.”

And so your hunger signals ramp up, and your body kind of behaviorally and even metabolically does what is necessary for you to feed that back as soon as possible. And this does not necessarily happen, certainly not to that kind of magnitude, if you keep your muscle mass while you’re losing body fat. You don’t experience this collateral fattening type of phenomenon where people just rebound like crazy because their appetite is out of control at the end of the diet.

How to Preserve Muscle Mass During Fat Loss

So the way that you preserve muscle mass during the fat loss process is a couple things. So you have to make sure that your rate of weight loss isn’t indicative of something that’s too quick. So about a half a percent to a full percent of your body weight lost per week is as fast as you really want to go. So roughly a pound a week.

Some people who start off heavier, okay, two pounds a week is fine at the very beginning, but you generally don’t want to lose more than 1% of your total body weight per week, because then that increases the chances that you’re losing an undue amount of muscle mass along with your fat mass. And so if you can, in essence, control the weight loss rate, then you will keep your lean mass.

Now, the other two things that need to be going on at the same time are you need to be resistance training and you need to be consuming enough protein. So strength training and protein, enough protein, you got resistance training, and then you have sort of a top speed limiter on how much weight that you lose per week and 1% loss of weight. 1% loss a week is spectacular, actually, for most people, even a pound a week, even half a pound a week. You’re looking at like in two years you lost 50 pounds. Most people took like two decades to put on that 50 pounds.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you actually don’t want to lose weight too quickly or else you are susceptible to rebound.

ALAN ARAGON: It is going to come off quickly. If you have a lot of weight to lose, it’ll come off quickly at the beginning. So for example, somebody who is in a state of obesity, let’s say they weigh 250 pounds and let’s say they’re losing two, two and a half pounds a week at the beginning of the program, that’s fine. But on average, on average you would want to look at roughly a pound a week as a good benchmark. And I still would not frown upon or scoff at a half a pound a week for certain cases.

Case Study: Perimenopausal Weight Loss

And we can talk about some of those stubborn cases. Like on the topic of plateaus, for example, I had a client, I’m sure she doesn’t mind being named. She’s a great person. Pam Greshock, she’s a veteran coach in the space. She’s perimenopausal. So she’s in her 40s and she wanted to lose what we calculated out to be 8 pounds of fat. And she stored the majority of it where she didn’t want. It was around the midsection.

And I had it in mind that, okay, this is somebody who’s perimenopausal, so there’s going to be a lower rate of progress going on. This is somebody who is highly trained, so she doesn’t have a lot more muscle to put on. That would give her some extra “metabolic leverage” for the whole process of improving body composition.

So she’s highly trained, perimenopausal, wants to lose eight pounds of fat, which would represent the final eight pounds. So that, that pushing the envelope, knowing those three things, I knew that this is going to be a difficult and slow going process. So whereas I would normally have somebody expect roughly or at least gun for a pound a week loss, for Pam it was more like, “Are you going to be okay with 1 to 2 pounds per month?” Like if we can get rid of 1 to 2 pounds of body fat per month, I would be happy with it. And I think you should be happy with it. And so I convinced her of that.

And with her wanting to lose eight pounds, I think it helps to give people a visual of what a certain amount of weight loss looks like. So coincidentally, a gallon, a gallon jug, if you fill it with butter, that’s eight pounds. And so I had her visualize this eight pound jug. And I also had her do a butter visualization too. So a standard stick of butter is four ounces. So four sticks of butter is one pound. And in her case, she wanted to lose, well, she wanted to lose eight pounds. So that’s 32 sticks of butter that would be removed from her body at the end of the dieting cycle.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that what this is here? What is this?

Diet Breaks: A Crucial Tool

ALAN ARAGON: That is 10 pounds of butter. This is an amazing visual. And this is because you asked about diet breaks as a tool for people achieving long term weight loss or just breaking through plateaus or managing plateaus.

So every five to ten pounds that somebody loses in a dieting cycle is high time for a diet break. The way you can define a diet break, put some parameters on it. So it’s what I call “non YOLO maintenance.” So you take off the rules, take off the restrictions, but you’re not eating with sheer abandon. You’re just relaxing the diet.

You take a week off the diet either every four to eight weeks while you’re dieting or you take a week off of the diet every 5 to 10 pounds that you lose. And the sound of 5 to 10 pounds seems like, “Oh, that’s nothing.” But no, it’s a milestone.

STEVEN BARTLETT: This is 10 pounds.

ALAN ARAGON: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s crazy.

ALAN ARAGON: 10 pounds of butter off the body. So yeah, every time you lose ten pounds, it’s five to ten pounds. In my experience is high time to take a diet break to just alleviate the mental and the physical fatigue of dieting. And that’s one of the tactics that you can use for a long term adherence to a plan on the topic of plateaus.

When you’re dieting, you will hit a point where the plateau periods or the maintenance phases are going to be longer than the dieting phases. I think that that’s ideal to be able to hit that point for a long term weight loss goal. And so it’s a lot easier or at least a lot less intimidating for somebody to know that they’re going to be dieting for four to eight weeks at a time in between a, let’s say a two to three month maintenance phase.

The Truth About Fasting and Autophagy

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about fasting? Do you think that fasting is because a lot of people talk about this thing called autophagy where if you fast for, I don’t know, 48 hours, your body switches into the state of autophagy where it starts to heal and repair itself. Are you a fan of fasting for weight loss or for autophagy?

ALAN ARAGON: For the control of calories in fasting is legit. And it’s also legit for it actually works as one of the options for dieting. There just has been a massive accumulation of studies showing that it works great. So the intermittent fasting variants, we have one, we talked about earlier, time restricted eating, and we’ve got every other day fasting and then the other third major variant would be twice weekly fasting or the 5:2 type of model. And then you have consecutive day fasting type of models as well, which are less studied because there’s more risk involved in them. And it’s tough to incur that risk in research.

When you bring up autophagy, that’s where I kind of have to push back on. Not on your mentioning of it specifically, but just in general. People will say they’ll make claims that autophagy and we can say that we can explain autophagy as a way that the body gets rid of parts of damaged cells. It’s an important process within the body and it is a catabolic process or a breakdown process. But the thing is it happens in a caloric deficit regardless of whether fasting is involved or not.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Really?

ALAN ARAGON: Yes. You maintain hypocaloric conditions, autophagy ramps up. You can have a linear hypocaloric model or a non linear or intermittent hypocaloric model and you’ll get similar degrees of autophagy if you match the caloric deficit by the end of the week.

Now the other interesting thing about autophagy is that you can ramp up autophagy through exercise. And not only that, but both major types of exercise will increase autophagy. So resistance training increases autophagy, endurance, aerobic type training increases autophagy. So if you want to “chase autophagy,” then doing it through intermittent fasting or just going through prolonged periods of not eating can be a double edged sword. Whereas the autophagy increases through exercise, they almost don’t have a downside.

And so a lot of times with intermittent fasting, it can be a great tool for people who need to lose excess body weight. But what I’m seeing in the community is people thinking that intermittent fasting is something that is necessary to do regardless of your body fat level, that is either necessary or beneficial. And that’s not actually true per the research.

There’s one study in particular that looked at men who were already lean, and I believe this was by Templeton and colleagues where they compared a linear dieting model with an every other day fasting model.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does that mean? Every other day fasting. So they took 24 hours off?

ALAN ARAGON: Yes. Yeah. So it was. Yep, every other day. And then the same deficit by the end of the, by the end of the week between the two groups and the intermittent group actually lost more lean body mass than the linear caloric deficit group.

STEVEN BARTLETT: They lost more lean body.

ALAN ARAGON: They lost more lean body mass. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Lost more weight.

ALAN ARAGON: Lost more muscle. Yeah. And so that gives us a hint that fasting is great until it isn’t because you’ve achieved what you needed to achieve. And so then it just kind of becomes a tool. It’s always just a tool to help people control calories.

In one of the beautiful things about fasting and whether it’s time restricted eating or whether it’s some sort of variant of alternate day fasting or twice a week fasting, is that it works in research regardless of whether people are meticulously tracking things or not. And so that can be a boon for individuals who don’t necessarily like to micromanage their stuff. But for people who are trying to maximize retention of lean mass while they’re pushing the envelope of fitness, it can definitely be a double edged sword once you’re already lean.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But if I do want to maximize the benefits of autophagy, the best way to do that is fasting versus just calorie restriction.

ALAN ARAGON: I’m assuming we don’t know what the optimal level of autophagy is that would actually confer health benefits. We don’t know what that threshold is. And there’s different ways that people try to measure autophagy. It’s very hard to correlate certain levels of autophagy with certain, certain degrees of disease prevention. We’re not there yet, I don’t think.

I think, big picture wise, I think that autophagy is an algorithm running in the background that is more of a bystander type of thing than a driver, similar to insulin and glucagon. So the insulin and glucagon axis works when you feed versus when you’re fasting. So glucagon levels go up.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s glucagon?

ALAN ARAGON: Glucagon is a hormone that mobilizes fuel stores in the absence of food, in the absence of calories. And autophagy is similar in that regard. And I think that a focus on pushing autophagy is sort of missing the forest for the trees. Because if we were to push autophagy to its end, then we could go all the way to a phenomenon called autosis, which is runaway cell death, which happens in starvation in some cases.

And so I think that we need to focus on other things, like how do we maintain a certain body fat percentage while maintaining a certain physical activity level, while maintaining a certain dietary pattern. I think that it’s those things that are much more productive to target than seeing how far can we push autophagy before potentially going into runaway cell death.

The Risks and Benefits of Extended Fasting

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was looking at the benefits of this thing they call autophagy, and it says the proven likely benefits are cellular cleaner. So it repairs damaged proteins and organelles. I believe improving cell efficiency, metabolic health, improves insulin sensitivity, neuroprotection, heart and muscle quality, maintains mitochondria, helps adapt to training and oxidative stress, immune tuning and longevity.

There’s sort of strong animal evidence, I believe, around the longevity component. But they. The research that I was reading talked about how it can backfire because tumors may use autophagy to survive, and some treatments for established cancers aim to inhibit it. And if you overdo fasting, as you said in the study you cited, you can lose muscle, which is not great, and be fatigued, etc.

There is a bit of a trend, I think, with people doing a lot of water fasts and stuff like that quite periodically. I think it’s rising, even sort of juice fasts and stuff like that. What’s your take on those types of fasts?

The Ketogenic Diet: Effectiveness and Limitations

ALAN ARAGON: I’m not a big fan, Steven. I think that the cycle that people go through, at least in the developed world, is that they go through the year, then November comes around and then the holidays hit. They overdo it from November through December, all the way up to the end of the year, and they’re like, “Oh boy, I have 10 to 20 pounds that I want to lose.”

And then they just use these sort of fasts and these detoxes to crash off the bad decisions of the previous few months, and then the cycle repeats annually. So I think that it’s a much healthier approach for people to secure and reinforce the right habits through the entirety of the year. Instead of jumping on the fast to get rid of the holiday binges.

STEVEN BARTLETT: This sort of brings me to the ketogenic diet. My dad used the ketogenic diet and I think actually my brother as well, but also a few of my friends in my life used it as a way to drop their fat quite quickly, to sort of recomposite their body very, very quickly.

And the results of seeing someone on the ketogenic diet, quite astounding because my friend the other day sent me the chart of his weighing scales at home. And it’s this sort of gradual increase upwards. And then he did the ketogenic diet where he cut out carbohydrates and sugars basically almost entirely. And it’s just straight line down. And his body weight.

What is your perspective on the ketogenic diet? What is it good for? What is it not good for? Is it good at all?

ALAN ARAGON: It is a very effective way to lose weight and fat. And that’s for a few big reasons. First of all, if somebody goes from their typical western dietary pattern to the ketogenic diet, then they’re automatically cutting out a lot of highly processed, hyper palatable carb fat combo junk foods and snacks that are just energy dense, easy to over consume mindlessly. That’s the good thing about the ketogenic diet.

In addition to, well, they’re finally eating enough protein now. And so along with the increase in protein comes an increase in satiety and a better hunger control.

Now the negatives of the ketogenic diet, the big one is that the majority of people who engage a ketogenic diet, they don’t do it permanently for one reason or another, they’re no longer on the keto diet. And this is reflected in research as well, even in vulnerable populations who would stand to benefit from that level of restriction.

So usually what happens in research is you take a group, two groups of subjects, and one is on the high carb, low fat controlled diet and one of them is on a ketogenic diet, which can be achieved by a maximum of 50 grams of carbohydrate in the day or less than you’re on the keto diet.

So what happens at the 12 month point in the diet and sometimes at the six month point, the keto group is now consuming about two to three times more carbohydrates than the original 50 gram assignment. So they rebound, they just insidiously creep up the carb intake. There’s something about the ketogenic diet that the majority of people who engage it just can’t stick to. It’s too restrictive for people, they can’t stick to it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But by what you’re saying, they also end up rebounding above where they were before.

ALAN ARAGON: They end up rebounding. I’ll give you a specific example. There was one study, well, there was the A to Z study where the individuals on the Atkins diet ended up consuming what looked a lot like the zone diet.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The zone diet?

ALAN ARAGON: Yes. The zone diet is a 40% carbohydrate, 30% protein, 30% fat.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it’s the keto diet, roughly.

ALAN ARAGON: The keto diet is more like 60 to 80% fat and then 15 to 20% protein and then the carbohydrates are the remainder, the minor percentage. So what happens is the people who started off at 50 grams of carbohydrate at the beginning of the study, the keto group at the 12 month point they crept that carbohydrate intake up to around 150 grams of carbohydrate, whereas their assignment was 50 grams of carbohydrate a day.

This is a common theme in long term keto studies. This up creep in carbohydrate intake over time because people can’t maintain the 50 grams of carbohydrate max required to stay in ketosis. And I’m not saying that there aren’t a lot of people out there who are just living the keto life permanently. They’re out there, but they are in the minority.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I see them in the comments section whenever I talk about keto I see people say I’ve been on the keto diet for five years, for seven years, for 10 years.

ALAN ARAGON: There’s entire, there’s huge communities of folks who’ve been on keto for five, 10 years or longer. And that’s great, more power to these folks. But claiming that this is a universal solution ignores the reality that some people, most people, per the research, the majority can’t stick to it. So that’s the caveat.

One of the caveats of the keto diet, the other one would be for those who can stick to the keto diet for long enough. You really have to look at the quality of the diet in order for it to be cardiovascularly healthy. If you’re going to engage, let’s say an 80, 85% fat diet for the rest of your life, there’s going to be very different effects. If that 80 to 85% are from land animal fats versus from nuts, avocados, olive oil, very different cardiovascular effects going on there.

And so that’s the other caveat with the keto diet. There’s a Mediterranean type of keto diet that is healthy and that has, it is one of these cardiovascularly protective types of diets that you can engage. Whereas if you just do beef, bacon and butter from here on out, then you don’t have the best cardiovascular risk trajectory.

Muscle Building on Ketogenic Diets

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about gaining muscle on the ketogenic diet? If I’m restricting carbohydrates is it more difficult to gain muscle mass?

ALAN ARAGON: The short answer is yes. And the nuanced answer is you still can gain muscle on keto. The body is really resilient and quite genius at manufacturing the carbohydrate endogenously or from within the body. So your body can make carbohydrate out of lactate and fill at least partially your muscle glycogen stores.

And so going on a zero carbohydrate diet doesn’t necessarily end up with the type of results that you might imagine somebody who’s completely avoiding carbohydrates. And in the research comparing strength gains from a high carbohydrate low fat diet versus a keto diet, the keto folks, as long as they’re equated with protein and total calories, with the control diet, they’ve got similar strength gains. It’s quite an interesting phenomenon.

Muscle size gains is different story. Interestingly, almost always there’s some advantage to the high carb, low fat control group compared with the ketogenic diet group when it comes to both gains in lean mass as well as retention of lean mass during dieting.

And one of those things is more or less obvious. It’s you simply carry more muscle glycogen when you’re on a high carbohydrate low fat diet. And muscle glycogen is the stored form of carbohydrate within the muscle and then minor amount in the liver. And for every gram of carbohydrate that you store as glycogen, there’s 3 grams of water stuck to it. And so just sitting there, you’re carrying more muscle mass, more fullness on a non ketogenic diet.

The Carnivore Diet

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about the carnivore diet? A lot of people have talked about that recently, which is just a diet where you just eat meat. What’s your point of view on that?

ALAN ARAGON: Well, okay, it’s a little silly and it’s a little extreme, but it has some merit to it. So the carnivore diet, when you get on it, it’s similar to how when people go on a keto diet after they’ve been doing the standard western diet since forever.

So the standard western diet has too much of everything. It’s got too much total calories, too much refined carbohydrate, it’s got too much of this type of fat and too much. It’s got a moderate amount of protein, but you’re also eating everything under the sun, from burgers to fries to cakes. To ice creams, to cookies in addition to pasta and everything else.

So when you go from that excess of everything to the carnivore diet, you automatically and spontaneously eat far fewer calories than you used to on your standard western diet. So the carnivore diet is actually the lesser of the evils when we’re comparing it to the standard western diet.

And you can even try to optimize the carnivore diet some people engage a carnivore diet that is just extreme, beef and salt. Okay, so that is very appealing to people who have a tendency to jump on the carnivore diet because it’s even more extreme. And people with tendencies towards the extremes, they’ll. A lot of them are ex vegans, actually carnivores, because they can only be on one extreme side or the other. It’s tough for them to be in the grayscale here.

But the carnivore diet is the lesser of the evils. It can be optimized, if that’s even possible. If people had more variety within their carnivore model, within their plant free diet model. For example, if somebody went carnivore, instead of doing beef and salt, he had a rotation of fatty fish, poultry, beef, eggs, dairy, and who knows, maybe he might even justify protein powder in there for a dessert. Who knows, it’s still animal based.

Vegans, Vegetarians, and Muscle Building

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you find that vegans and vegetarians struggle more to gain muscle mass?

ALAN ARAGON: Typically vegans and vegetarians in the general population do because they’re not aware of how to structure the diet and the training program to achieve that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what are they missing?

ALAN ARAGON: They’re just not eating enough total calories and they’re not eating enough protein, generally speaking. Now there are some vegans who will drink a bunch of Mountain Dew and have potato chips and things like that and still stay vegan. And Oreo cookies are vegan I believe as well. But vegans can still gain muscle on par with omnivores if they structure it right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are most people that you encounter and have worked with over the years not getting enough protein the average person on the street?

ALAN ARAGON: Yes, almost everybody who has been overweight or obese or just had some degree of an issue with their body fat levels. Almost all of them under consume protein.

The Hard Gainer Phenomenon

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about people that are very skinny? Because I’ve got lots of friends that would be in the skinny fat category where they, they’re kind of, they look very, very, very skinny, but they’ve got a little bit of a role here. And they often say to me that they just can’t gain weight. I’ve heard this a lot from friends, I just can’t gain weight. I’ve heard I need to have more protein but I’m just not gaining any weight.

ALAN ARAGON: Yeah, that is the “hard gainer” phenomenon. And people will have different degrees of body fat in that category. But these folks, what they actually have an issue with is a spontaneous increase in what we call non exercise activity thermogenesis. So basically it’s an increase in spontaneous movement, just an increase in fidgeting, tapping, moving around, just being more hyperkinetic in response to increasing their caloric intake.

In 24 hours you and I expend x amount of calories. So total daily energy expenditure is composed of various components. So there is a resting energy expenditure component. So our so called resting metabolic rate, or it’s also called resting energy expenditure or basal metabolic rate, those are all interchangeable. That is the amount of calories that your body burns in a 24 hour period just to stay alive. Okay. So if you are bedridden, the amount of calories you burn just through your vital organs and your systems working, that’s your resting energy expenditure.

Now the other part of energy expenditure is your active energy expenditure. So active energy expenditure consists of, we can subdivide it into your exercise activity and your non exercise activity.

With hardgainers, it’s their non exercise activity that spontaneously goes up when they try to eat more to gain weight. There’s an interesting study done in the late 1990s by Levine and colleagues where he took a group of normal weight subjects, it was a mostly male sample of subjects and he fed them 1,000 calories above and beyond their maintenance requirements. And I believe was for 10 weeks.

What happened during the study and as a result of eating 1,000 calories above their maintenance needs, they ended up burning on average 336 calories through an increase in non exercise activity. So that is a very interesting phenomenon. One of the subjects in that study actually ended up burning almost 700 calories as an increase in their non exercise activity thermogenesis.

And so what happens to this archetype, this hard gainer person is they just start fidgeting more, they just start walking faster, they just start sitting less, they start bobbing their head more and they can even just subconsciously train harder, train more and their energy expenditure side just ramps up spontaneously in response to an increase in calories.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if someone is a hard gainer. And they struggle to gain weight because of this sort of spontaneous energy usage. What advice would you give them to stop moving?

The Solution for Underweight Individuals

ALAN ARAGON: Eat more. Okay, so the principle would be to eat more. The practice would be eat more in a way that you get those calories in easily and conveniently. And so you can structure liquid meals two in a day. They rarely need three shakes to have between their meals at any point in the day where it’s convenient. And then you just literally add nutrition and calories that way and that. So that’s the solution. Just literally eat more.

The Psychology of Motivation and Discipline

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think the thing that sits underneath everything we’re talking about is motivation, whatever that means, which is like having the motivation to stick to something, discipline, whatever you want to call it. When you look back through the last 30 years of your career, are there any similarities in the thing or the catalyst moment that made somebody finally stick to it? Stick to the diet, stick to the exercise regime, stick to the whatever. Are there any themes of a person going from struggling to disciplined?

ALAN ARAGON: So the first thing that comes to my mind is they finally arrive at the point where their physical goals become priority number one. Changing the body. So losing body fat, gaining muscle, achieving your ideal body composition. That is a colossally difficult goal whenever I work with somebody who’s preparing for a contest of some sort, whether it is in the more elite line of physique contests or whether they’re just joining a transformation challenge.

But they’re both very, very serious, and they both are putting their program at the top of their priority list. So when I say top of your priority, I mean you do what you need to do to stay alive and keep breathing as a top priority. And right there is your physical goals. Okay?

So the big problem with people who find that they can’t hit their goals or they can’t stay consistent, or they’re just having a struggle losing X amount of body fat, or even a struggle gaining X amount of muscle, is that they simply have five other things that are prioritized in their day above and beyond their program. So they have five universes of excuses that can come in the way of sticking to the program.

So somebody has to be at the point in their lives where they’re going to make it a top priority, because there’s nothing metabolically different from these physique competitors and these people who join these challenges versus somebody in the general population who’s just struggling. The people in the physique contests will always hit their goal within 1% at the end of the prep period, they’ll always hit their goal. And so they’re not a different species, they’re not a different animal, they don’t have special metabolisms, they just have different priorities. And so that is the difference. You have to hit a point where your physical goal becomes priority one.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And is there anything that one can do, in your opinion or that you try and do when you were a trainer back in the day, to make this someone’s priority?

ALAN ARAGON: You can sit somebody down and review with them the, what are the reasons why you’re doing this? Name me three. Three. Three good things that you think will come out of this. Or three drivers that you can think about and then you can just have them write that down and then they can be reminded that way.

But fundamentally, Steven, they have to arrive at that point sort of on a self initiated way. You can’t really make the horse drink. You know, you can pull them towards the pond, but, you know, they almost have to get there themselves. And you’re kind of. You can facilitate it only to a certain degree.

And after you ask them, okay, what are the reasons, then you can also have them put in their face, okay, what are the barriers? So to have them write down your three biggest stumbling blocks. And so then you can give them two sets of things to think about that will keep them on task and motivated.

A Personal Transformation Story

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re 53 years old.

ALAN ARAGON: 53.

STEVEN BARTLETT: 53 years old. You looked very different at 40 years old.

ALAN ARAGON: Yes, sir, I did, yeah. Whoa, buddy. Yep, yep. I remember that guy. Whoo. That’s an amazing shot.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, you look younger now.

ALAN ARAGON: I do, actually. Thank God. Thank God. Yeah, yeah. That, that always gets me, man. That, that picture always gets me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?

ALAN ARAGON: It was when my, my first son was 7ish and my younger baby was about 4. And so parents with young children are very stressed out, bad habits. I used to drink heavily. I started drinking heavily at that point and I drank heavily from when I was 40 till I was about 46.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Were you an alcoholic at 40 years old?

ALAN ARAGON: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What did that look like?

ALAN ARAGON: It was. It got really bad towards the final couple years. I’m talking a bottle, bottle and a half of wine a night by myself.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Seven days a week.

ALAN ARAGON: Seven days a week. And the bottle and a half. That’s almost a thousand calories of. Thousand calories of regret is what it was. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you know what caused that?

ALAN ARAGON: The various stress vectors in life. You know, being a dad trying to be the best husband, becoming successful in terms of coming into demand with projects and people approaching me with business partnerships, and me thinking, geez, I worked like two decades for this, for this stuff to happen. How can I turn anything down? You know?

So I said, yes, I’ll do that. Yes, I’ll do that. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And then pretty soon your yeses just stack up and your work pile stacks up like this. All of those things, you know, they kind of converge into this mix of stress and anxiety. And alcohol is a very convenient and very available and very acceptable means to engage in a substance that acts as an anxiety Band aid. My alcohol addiction was a very real thing, and I’m really glad I overcame it.

The Rock Bottom Moment

STEVEN BARTLETT: Through this period from 40 to 46, 47, who were you and what is it that you. You did that made you realize something had to change?

ALAN ARAGON: So during that time period, I was just very reactive to my environment. I was just going with the flow. I honestly was not as ambitious as I should have been and focused on my goals. I was comfortable. I was comfortable.

And the unfortunate thing about the drink and fortunate thing too, is it. It hit a rock bottom point where I knew that it wasn’t a matter of, all right, I got to pull back or how am I going to moderate and this and that. It was more like, I just need to stop. I just need to stop. And I need to redirect this tendency towards routine, this tendency, this sort of obsessive compulsive thing of needing to do the same thing daily, just redirect it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How did you know you needed to stop?

ALAN ARAGON: Oh, I knew that I needed to stop because my professional and personal life basically imploded. I’ll. Because of my. My own actions.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Now, for you, was it just a case of, right, I’m going to stop doing this, or did you have to. Did you go somewhere, did you get support, did you seek some counseling or anything like that?

The Power of Visualization in Recovery

ALAN ARAGON: So I have been able to just make the hardcore commitment to stop and keep that commitment. And I’ve been able to redirect my ritualistic tendencies towards training and good nutrition. And I get a lot of questions, like every year I do a post on Instagram about how, okay, it’s year six now, not a single drink. Here’s what I’ve learned during that time. And then next month, actually on the 25th of August, that’s going to be year seven, so I’m going to do the same thing.

And so the question I always get is, so how do you stay abstinent? Like, what. What do you do to not slip up? And what I do is if I get kind of a craving or a nagging or a feeling like oh my God, I got to have some alcohol. Then I just sit back and I think through the scenario in my mind of me drinking to my degree of satisfaction, degree of, you know, satisfaction.

And then I kind of picture that and then I picture how it might last for an hour or two. And then after that hour or two I may have made some really bad impressions on one or more people. After that hour or two I may have plowed through the hot wings at 2 3am and then after that feel like hell the next morning. Definitely can’t work out that day. And then where did that get me?

And so I just go through that scenario in my mind and then when I’m done going through that scenario it takes like a minute and I’m right back at where I need to be, mind frame wise.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think the same could also apply. That sort of visualization that pre mortem where you kind of play out the scenario and see what the consequence would be can also be applied to many of the things we’re talking about today around diet and workouts and stuff like that, like playing it forward to see how you’ll feel about it in the future and sort of visualizing those consequences. Thank you for sharing that. I think it’s somewhat dovetailed into how what we’re talking about, about changing your life and motivation and discipline, like how does change occur in people? And as you said, it’s when it becomes a priority and quite clearly in your life it became a priority for numbers reasons.

The Truth About Artificial Sweeteners

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do you feel about artificial sweeteners? Are they, is there any, any watch outs that we should be aware of?

ALAN ARAGON: Generally speaking, they’re a nothing burger and there’s a lot of scaremongering around artificial sweeteners. But there is one artificial sweetener that has a kind of a crappy track record for both impairing glucose control and also weight gain, and that’s saccharin. So saccharin is the one artificial sweetener that’s kind of bombed out at the bomb shelter there as far as the literature is concerned. But the good news about saccharin, by the way, it’s the little pink packet things, it’s not really commercially pervasive, so.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s not that popular anyway.

ALAN ARAGON: No, it’s almost commercially extinct. So the other sweeteners like sucralose, aspartame, stevia, or some people call it stevia, they’re all fair game, they’re all in the same boat, all pretty dang innocuous. And you’d have to consume impossible amounts of those things to incur negative health effects in a lifetime. Really?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because some people have thought that their potentially carcinogenic, these sort of artificial sweeteners that you find in certain diet beverages.

ALAN ARAGON: Yeah, now that’s, that’s definitely a leap. That’s definitely a leap. Based on animal data and completely unrealistic doses and conditions that are irrelevant to human physiology. It’s more dangerous stepping out and breathing in the city air.

The Most Important Things People Get Wrong About Diet

STEVEN BARTLETT: Basically, what is the most important thing we haven’t talked about that we should have talked about? Alan, for the people that are sat home listening to this really damn good question.

ALAN ARAGON: Okay, so if we look at the things people care about that don’t matter in terms of diet, they fixate on weird buzzwords. Like they fixate on not even, they don’t even have to be weird words, but like sugar for example, sugar. There has been such scaremongering around sugar to the point that people don’t delineate between added sugars to the diet versus sugar that is intrinsic or naturally occurring in foods.

Things like fruit, fresh fruit, and even milk has naturally occurring sugar in it. Lactose can be problematic for some of the population. But look at fresh fruit. I’ve actually heard people vilify fruit because it has sugar. And it’s one thing to take an idea and put out a plausible claim. Okay, so yeah, it’s got sugar. And then, you know, we all know that you add a ton of sugar to the diet, you lower the quality of the diet, and then you can push your bets towards negative health consequences down the line. Okay, that’s fine, that’s reasonable.

But even though fruit has sugar, it also has a ton of other beneficial components to it. And it’s in this low calorie, high water, high micronutrient density package that is satiating and displaces stomach space for otherwise junky foods that you may, a lot of people would have consumed instead of that fruit.

But beyond all that, forget about all the reasoning and stuff, let’s look at the literature. Does fruit cause negative health consequences? Does it cause things like impaired blood glucose control? Does it cause obesity? Does it cause weight gain? It does the opposite of all those things. Fresh fruit actually has been shown to improve glycemic control, improve body weight, improve body composition, and improve the protection against a range of cardiometabolic diseases and cancer. So it doesn’t really matter what anybody says. We just have to face the evidence.

There’s something called the glycemic index. That was big in the 80s and 90s and people were, it’s kind of come back around again. Glycemic index. Got to avoid the high glycemic index foods and things like that. And there’s a couple of fruits that are actually have a high glycemic index. That would be pineapples and watermelons. Watermelons, yeah, high on the GI scale. But the way that glycemic index is determined is you get 50 grams of carbohydrate from a given food, regardless of the amount that you have to eat, 50 grams of it, and then you measure its effect on your blood sugar levels for two hours after ingestion.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was going to say because watermelon’s seen as keto friendly, which is.

ALAN ARAGON: Watermelons have what’s called a low glycemic load. So they have a very low amount of carbohydrate per serving.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, per serving.

ALAN ARAGON: Even though the carbohydrate itself, if you were to gather 50 grams of it, would have a more pronounced effect on blood sugar elevations. And so even though those fruits have a high GI and certain foods have a high GI, they have a low glycemic load. And ultimately people need to stop and think about things like the longest living populations on the planet do not avoid fruit. The fruit is a regular part of their intake.

The Problem with Added Sugar

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about the white stuff, the white sort of added sugar? Is it called refined sugar?

ALAN ARAGON: Yeah, refined. We can call it added sugar.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about the added sugar?

ALAN ARAGON: Added sugar is problematic in two different ways, at least. So the first way is it’s diluting the nutrient density of the diet. It’s a phenomenon called micronutrient dilution when you have just a bunch of junk, micronutrient free calories in the diet.

The other way that it poses a problem is because it is usually packaged with highly processed and engineered refined carbohydrate and fat combination foods. So your classic desserts, pastries, cookies, cakes, things like that. And so the sugar itself, if you were to, if I were to just put up a jar of sugar in front of you and say, “Hey, I challenge you to not just spoon that in.” You’ll go, “Oh, no problem.” You know, people paint sugar out to be this inherently evil thing, but the way that it gets into trouble is when it is a part of these hyper palatable, highly processed, highly engineered dessert and snack foods. And so that is the main issue with added sugar.

And the various health organizations I mentioned, the Institute of Medicine or now, the National Academy of Medicine saying, “Hey, we need to cut off our added sugars at 25% of the diet.” There’s the World Health Organization, who presents the sort of the absolutely terrified version of that, where they want people to max out their added sugar to 5% of the calories in the diet. But that’s usually not realistic, and it gets a little bit extreme to the point of being pathological.

So what would you say about 10% of total calories max with added sugar? And that would fall kind of right into this discretionary caloric allotment of 10 to 20% of calories, kind of from whatever you want. And I would want to qualify that 10 to 20% margin by saying that if you’re hypercaloric, in other words, if you’re consuming more calories than you’re taking and you’re trying to gain weight or something like that, you probably want to keep your discretionary calorie allotment to 10% or your indulgence food to 10% rather than 20%.

Training Frequency and Recovery

STEVEN BARTLETT: How many days a week do you go to the gym?

ALAN ARAGON: Four to five?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m just trying to confront this question mark in my head about if you go to the gym seven days a week, for example, is that not giving your body enough time to rest? But I guess it depends what you’re doing there and how hard you’re working.

ALAN ARAGON: Yeah. And a great example of that is total sets per week you can cram. Let’s imagine for a given muscle group, you do like nine sets a week or ten sets a week. You could probably get those in in a single session, but it’s more productive to probably spread it out over at least two days.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How long does it take for me to start to lose muscle?

ALAN ARAGON: Oh, man. Okay, that is a good question and a tough one. So muscle loss happens very rapidly in bedridden individuals. So lean mass, just especially critically ill folks. Oh, man. Goes really fast. Contrast that with you taking a week off or even two weeks off, but it’s more of like an active rest where you’re not just merely sitting around. You could probably go a couple weeks before you start noticing material drops in strength and fitness. Three weeks. Yeah, you’ll definitely. I think you’ll definitely feel that.

Training to Failure

STEVEN BARTLETT: And do I need to work out till failure in terms of resistance training and like, you know, bicep curls or whatever in order to get gains? Do I need to be going all the way until I can’t curl it anymore?

ALAN ARAGON: It depends on the goal. You mentioned that your goal was to gain muscle.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

ALAN ARAGON: So in reality, and this question is surprisingly more complex than you might hope it’s going to be. But okay. When people try to train to failure, and this has been tested out in the research literature, they usually automatically leave 1 to 2 reps in the tank, even 3 reps in the tank. And even trained, even resistance trained subjects, when you tell them to train a failure or leave one rep in reserve, they’ll routinely leave actually two to three reps in reserve. So people underestimate their abilities to push. They usually as almost an automatic margin there that the body sort of regulates and governs and sort of automatically prevents you from going.

So with that said, I think that most people can train to failure without worrying about whether they’re violating the golden guidelines seen in the literature. It’s very common for the consensus in the exercise science community, even in the hypertrophy folks, to say, “Yeah, leave one to two reps in reserve.” I think that depends on the exercise.

So you’d be kind of a fool to be doing lateral raises to think that you can’t do partials for lateral raises and still get some benefit out of it. And you’d be kind of a fool to think, “I’m going to do concentration curls here, I’m going to leave one to two reps in reserve.” No, that’s different. On the other hand, deadlifting, benching, squatting, these sort of free weight barbell, multi joint types of movements, oh, they’re more conducive to leaving one to two reps in the tank. But for single joint isolation exercises and even machine exercises and lighter loads, where it’s safe. Take it to failure, man.

The Impact of Nature on Health

STEVEN BARTLETT: We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question left for you is how does nature impact on your life?

ALAN ARAGON: It has quite a big impact. Yeah, it has an impact and obviously the environment is important.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m wondering through the lens of what you do in terms of mindset and health insight, these kinds of things. If you think much about being outside versus being inside. You know, I’ve even read some interesting studies around people that run outside versus on a treadmill have more sort of have cognitive benefits because the brain is stimulated more.

ALAN ARAGON: I think that there’s a good amount of literature on the psychological benefits of just being in nature or even getting some sun. And I think that there’s epidemiological like population based data showing that marine communities tend to be the longevity champs.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Marine. What does that mean?

ALAN ARAGON: Communities that live by the ocean are close to the ocean.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And probably that or that omega 3, they’re eating the fish.

ALAN ARAGON: And that factors in as well, for sure. But that just the kind of almost the metaphysical effect of going to the beach, you know, that’s got to play in. And so, yeah, I think it definitely has an effect. And I think that there are data that we can point to that says it does.

Where to Find Alan Aragon

STEVEN BARTLETT: Alan, where should people go right now if they want to learn more from you? Where is the best place to follow you for more information as you continue to investigate and educate on the science of all of the things we’ve talked about today?

ALAN ARAGON: My website is allenaragon.com that’s the hub of everything. And maybe my most active social media platform is Instagram. So that is healenarragon.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And this book I have in front of me. When did you write this book?

ALAN ARAGON: I wrote that thing from. Well, it includes the 30 years of experience that I was talking about earlier. So I’ve just crammed the 30 years into there. But the actual writing of that took from about 2020 all the way to 2022. Yeah, took about two years.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So first published in 2022. And it’s really like a bible. That’s kind of the way I describe it. And it has everything in it from. What I love about it is you have all these pictures as well.

ALAN ARAGON: I’m glad you like it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, I mean, it’s like, it’s. Dare I say, it’s quite like a nice accessible textbook.

ALAN ARAGON: Well, there’s been a couple of professors who’ve adopted it and made it a part of their curriculum.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Doesn’t surprise me.

ALAN ARAGON: Yeah. Hunter Waldman is one of them. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you so much, Alan. Thank you for doing what you do. People love your message because it’s so demystifying in a world that is increasingly mystified by lots of information from lots of different people. So please do continue to do what you’re doing and I’m rooting for you in this new season of life where you’re going to get even closer to patients once again and clients once again and be even more hands on with your community.

So I highly recommend everybody goes and follows you on Instagram to keep track of how they can join your community and be one of those people that you directly impact with your work. And yeah, I’m going to subscribe to your reviews so that I can stay ahead of all of the scientific literature as and when it comes out. Because for me, it is quite demystifying, but you’re one of the great voices in this space of simplification and understanding, so I applaud you for that.

ALAN ARAGON: I think it’s all learnable, it’s all teachable. But thank you so much for the opportunity to be on the show. This is huge. And thank you all for tuning in.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you. We’re done.

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