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Transcript
- 05:10 Introducing New Cohost Cate Beehan
- 10:14 New Book Announcement: When Diet and Exercise are not Enough: Road Blocks to Weight Loss
- 21:10 The best diet for weight loss
- 25:24 How do you increase metabolism?
- 35:31 Differences between people with fast metabolism and slow metabolism
- 37:21 How people sabotage their weight loss efforts
- 46:29 The calorie myth
- 52:03 The most pressing health issue in the world today: Edible food products
Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Live to 110 podcast. My name is Wendy Myers and I’m a certified holistic health and nutrition coach. And today I’m interviewing Jonathan Bailor of Smarterscienceofslim.com and we will be talking about science-backed facts on how to lose weight and keep it off. For over a decade Jonathan studied thousands of pages of academic research on health and weight loss and will be sharing his expertise on the show. Forget everything you’ve learned.
Please keep in mind that this show is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure any disease or health condition. The Live to 110 podcast is solely informational in nature. So please consult your healthcare practitioner before attempting any treatment you hear on the show.
I’m really excited today. I have a couple announcements. As of today I’m no longer on Blog Talk Radio where I was recording the show. It’s got really, really poor sound quality and I wanted to bring the best of sound quality to you listeners because it was really beginning to irritate me even about how badly me and the guests were sounding on the show. I’ve also got a new microphone, it’s called a Yeti microphone, it’s really, really big. It’s almost little intimidating and I just wanted to bring the best in audio quality to you guys so that you can enjoy the listening experience a little better.
And I’m also super excited to announce that I have a new co-host on the show. One of my besties Cate Beehan is a fellow health coach and IIN grad and is going to do my little partner in crime from now on.
Wendy Myers: Hello Cate. How are you doing?
Cate Beehan: Hi, Wendy. Hi, listeners.
Wendy Myers: I was so excited that you agreed to be on the show because I wanted to give the listeners a little bit of entertainment and not just my usual robot routine. “Hello. My name is Wendy Myers. I am a health coach.” It was kind of getting a little boring. So I wanted to spice it up a little bit with my little girlfriend.
Cate Beehan: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to do this with you.
Wendy Myers: So, why don’t you tell everyone a little bit about yourself? What are you doing these days? What are you all about?
Cate Beehan: Yeah sure. Well yes I am a health coach. I graduated from IIN just like you and I also am fitness professional. I teach Pilates – I actually have 3 certifications. I also teach indoor cycling called Soul Cycle and I do acting. So I am like Felix the Cat, a bag of tricks.
Wendy Myers: Haha. And you do have proof that you teach cycling because you have like a perfectly toned butt.
Cate Beehan: Yes, but I do call that basketball buns. If you like sliced a basketball in half and you just slapped it on someone’s back.
Wendy Myers: Haha. And you also got thunder thighs.
Cate Beehan: No, thunder thighs are not good.
Wendy Myers: Haha. I know some guy who did. Did he tell you you had beautiful thunder thighs?
Cate Beehan: I was like, you don’t want to tell a girl they have thunder thighs.
Wendy Myers: Yeah that’s a big no-no. Did you ever see him again?
Cate Beehan: No.
Wendy Myers: No. Yeah, I wouldn’t either. I wouldn’t do that. You don’t text a girl you just met that she has thunder thighs. HELLO?
Cate Beehan: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: So anyways, back to you. So why don’t you tell everyone our little story about how we met. You saw my little ad on Craigslist to rent a room.
Cate Beehan: Yeah it was great. I’m from New York, so I was looking for a place to live in Los Feliz. Somehow I knew that it was cool, thank God. So I was looking on Craigslist and I found your ad. I was like first of all, your house is really nice; the hot tub, the knife holder. She has this knife holder that is the shape of a man and that’s what you hold all your knives in and so it looks like this guy’s been stabbed 20 times.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Haha. It was my divorce present to myself.
Cate Beehan: And then, yeah so the house was really nice. You had the picture of Jezebel. She has a Pomeranian in a graduation gown, talking about how Jezebel graduated – puppy kindergarten or something being in school.
Wendy Myers: No. She went to K9 University!
Cate Beehan: K9 University, I’m sorry.
Wendy Myers: It’s Ivy League.
Cate Beehan: So I also have a Pomeranian. And I was like, “This girl is got to be cool because A: She has a Pomeranian, B: It’s still alive and they’re not the easiest because they’re tiny and fragile.” So I was like, this girl’s got to be fun.
Wendy Myers: I’m so glad that you did.
Cate Beehan: The rest is history, our doggies brought us together.
Wendy Myers: And it was a beginning of a beautiful friendship. And I really want to thank you because you’re the one that turn me onto IIN, which is the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. And really, I was already interested in health and nutrition and already kind of reading every single day and really personally interested in it and you were already going to IIN, you graduated before me and told me all about it and I’m so glad I took your advice and signed up because it spawned my life’s purpose and it got me focused on my life’s purpose and I just really want to thank you for that.
Cate Beehan: Yeah I knew you would like it because you have been talking so much about health stuff and I was learning so much and you already knew so much and I was like, “You got to check this out, girl.”
Wendy Myers: So did you think I would like it because I’m a big fat nerd?
Cate Beehan: Yes you’re a nerd. No you’re not big and fat.
Wendy Myers: Well that’s up for debate. But you’re also a Pilates instructor?
Cate Beehan: Yes. Yeah I do.
Wendy Myers: You’re just doing all kinds of fitness stuff.
Cate Beehan: I know. I have few different studios; 3 different studios right now all over LA Montrose, Studio City, even Santa Clarita by Six flags Magic Mountain.
Wendy Myers: You’re driving all over the place. You weren’t lying when you said you were doing a lot of driving.
Cate Beehan: I spend a lot of time driving. That’s why I have Siris radio and I have a little back support thing. Whenever I have people in my car like a cute guy, I like throw the back support thing in the back like it’s a junk.
Wendy Myers: Why? Are you worried they’re going to think you’re old?
Cate Beehan: Something like a grandma because of my back support.
Wendy Myers: With your back support? [grandma voice]
Cate Beehan: Something like, “One second let me just clean a few things out here.”
Wendy Myers: All your candy bar wrappers and diet Coke cans – the contraband material. And so you teach at Soul Cycle also?
Cate Beehan: I do yeah. I teach cycling there. I’ve been there for almost a year since January. And I love it, it‘s so fun. Actually they emailed me today and they’re asking me to write for their blog – what’s in my shopping cart, etc. So I have to figure that out – what I’m going to say.
Wendy Myers: And so they want you to do a blog post on their website?
Cate Beehan: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: Great to start your writing career.
Cate Beehan: I know the same things that are in my cart.
Wendy Myers: Great. And so you’re also an actress, so how long have you been acting?
Cate Beehan: I don’t know, like a while. I’ve been acting for a while; I do commercials and mostly comedy stuff. I went to the program at UCB Upright Citizens Brigade, training ground – awesome place. And yeah I do like mostly comedy stuff, some indie movies.
Wendy Myers: Well again, thank you so much for being on the show. I’m excited to move forward and have you on the show. I think it’s just going to be so much fun and give just a little bit entertainment rather than just learning that nutrition, how to get skinny Minnie and all that stuff.
Wendy Myers: So everyone, I also have another announcement. There’s lots of announcements today. I’m about halfway finish with my first book called When Diet and Exercise are not Enough: Road Blocks to Weight Loss. It’s going to be available for sale as an ebook on my website in about spring 2014 and on your website too, right Cate?
Cate Beehan: Yes, that’s right.
Wendy Myers: Your website is Fitness-broad.com.
Cate Beehan: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: I was compelled to write this book because I had so much trouble losing weight after the birth of my child. Weight loss was just always a breeze for me. I could just boom, put my mind to it and lose 2 or 3 pounds every week, but that wasn’t happening any longer. What changed? In my own weight loss struggles, I experienced so many of the road blocks that commonly prevent weight loss, leaving millions of women frustrated, discouraged, and unable to lose weight and keep it off. You’re not going to find many of the road blocks and weight loss solutions I reveal, discussed at your doctors or Jennie Craig’s or in most weight loss books. And because of my own frustrating experience, I felt compelled to write a book. So every invaluable tidbit I discovered is all in one place. It’s difficult, I found one tidbit in one book and another in another book. You just have to read so many different books and there’s so much wrong information out there that I just really felt like I had to write this book. So I’m really excited to share what I’ve learned and help you pinpoint your roadblocks to weight loss because I believe that weight loss should not have to be that difficult. So let’s get on with the show.
Our guest Jonathan Bailor is an accomplished inventor, entrepreneur, philanthropist, researcher, author, and public speaker. He holds more than 25 US patents including the Marquee feature in Microsoft Office 2010 which we all use every day. He has started 2 successful companies and the non-profit nutrition education effort Slimissimple.org. He holds a top-ranked iTunes health and fitness podcast called Smarter Science of Slim Podcast. He has authored The Smarter Science of Slim – his book which is endorsed by top doctors at Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins, and UCLA and is now releasing the groundbreaking book, The Calorie Myth with Harper Collins in January 2014.
Wendy Myers: Hello Jonathan. How are you?
Jonathan Bailor: I’m wonderful, Wendy. Thank you so much for having me on the show.
Wendy Myers: So, how do you do all these things? I mean when do you sleep? Do you have adrenal fatigue or what?
Jonathan Bailor: Haha. What is it, I forget who is it. Maybe Ni Chi who said he or she who has strong enough ‘why’ can do any ‘how’… Some sort of, I’m trying to be… clearly I didn’t sleep enough last night, but it’s all about a compelling ‘why’ and if you can get that ‘why,’ it will be compelling enough. As you know – doing the great work with your podcast – when the ‘why’ is there, the ‘what’ and ‘how’ will become a little bit easier.
Wendy Myers: Haha. Yeah I know what you mean because when I work it almost feels like I’m not working and sometimes I work for 17 hours straight and it just doesn’t feel like it.
Jonathan Bailor: I wonder who that researcher from… totally going off on a tangent here but I know we have some time. So you know the researcher from the University of Chicago, Nihili Chicsan Nihai, the gentleman who came up with the idea of flow. That’s this whole thing. If we can just be in that state of flow, that is really a state of happiness and wellbeing. So certainly it’s all about being in flow.
Wendy Myers: Absolutely. And you are in the flow, my man. Haha. So first, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and what prompted you to go on this odyssey of poring through 10,000 pages of research papers and write The Smarter Science of Slim, your first book?
Jonathan Bailor: So it talks about that burning ‘why’ that drives me. It’s the story of the formation of that why. It all started way back from the very beginning. I grew up in a very academic household, so both my parents are college professors. Mom is an English professor. Father is a Philosophy and Ethics professor. So our dinner conversations were always very interesting and I also have a much older, very athletic brother. So growing up, I was in a very academic household and had a very athletic brother who I looked up to. I was a very skinny slinky child. So I wanted to be big and athletic like my brother.
I started to do everything I could to learn how to manipulate my body through food and exercise. The thing that was unique about my experience was that I was trying to gain weight. And I know that sounds a little bit odd. But it’s such a key part of my story and I’ll get to it in a moment. So I spent years and years and years doing everything you would traditionally do; like reading the magazines, becoming a personal trainer, training other people. That’s the way I paid my way through college. All throughout that time my goal was to get big and strong to be like my older brother. But I experienced something very profound during that time and that was: I was literally eating – Excel’s spreadsheets were tracking this – 6,000 calories per day in an effort to make my body bigger. And I was a football player trying to get bigger.
My clients, as a trainer over at Bally Total Fitness back in Ohio, were predominantly women above the age of 35 who were eating and exercise as they always had been but started mysteriously gaining fat. So I did what any good personal trainer would do who has been trained in the classical theories and said you need to eat less and exercise more. So you need to eat 1,200 calories per day and do at least an hour and a half of cardio, at least 5 days per week. And if you eat less and exercise more, you will get smaller and by that same logic, if I eat more and exercise less, I’ll get bigger.
Wendy, neither one of those things happened and I had to ask myself a question and that’s “We’re all homosapiens. So how do you have one homosapien who’s consuming 6,000 calories and not exercising a lot who is not getting bigger and how can you have another homosapien who’s consuming 1,200 calories per day and exercising chronically and not getting smaller? There has to be something else going on.” So then I felt like a failure as a trainer and not only could I not help myself but I couldn’t help my clients. I was actually hurting my clients. And then the geeky side of me kicked in and said, “There has to be something else going on. Like there has to be an explanation for this.” And I realized no one had ever actually asked the question “What is it about me?” Like I was a naturally thin person. What is it about naturally thin people that makes them naturally thin? And what is it about people who are not naturally thin that makes them not naturally thin and what is it about age? Why is it that literally if you can take yourself at 15 years old and take the food you ate and the exercise you did and do that when you’re 45, something very different will happen. So what is going on there? And that all got lost in these theories about calories and metabolic mass.
So Wendy, I did the only thing I had left to do and that was to really turn on my geekiness and say, “I’ve exhausted all traditional avenues for education on this subject. I’m a trainer, I’m supposedly an expert, but what I’ve been told isn’t working for me or anyone else. So I turned to the academic research and it did not take long – reading the primary research. So these are journal articles that you can’t just read, you have to have a subscription or you have to have access to an academic library. It’s very difficult. There are some you can get. Many you can get on the website called PubMed, but there’s a lot that you cannot get or cannot get easily. I mean if you get access to them, they’re incredibly hard to read. But once you actually start reading them, if you’re able to tolerate that boredom that comes along with that, you start to see that there is this massive disconnect between what the mainstream theories about eating and exercise are and what has actually been proven in the research. Wendy, it is staggering. A little bit of the first 3 years that I was doing this like any good researcher, I was trying to find data that supported what I already believed. And I literally could not find it and I remember a distinct moment of sitting in my room and saying “How could it be true that eating less and exercising more is not the key to weight loss?” And then I had this amazing light bulb go off which was, “Jonathan how could it be true?” Look at the world. Ever since we were told to start eating less and exercising more, which actually happened in 1977 when the senate select committee told us to eat less and exercise more, that’s also when calories became mainstream. That’s also when we started seeing a huge rise in obesity, diabetes and heart disease. So, if I were to sit in front of a jury and try to prove that eating less and exercise more works, all you have to do is point outside to see that it doesn’t. And then once you actually dig in to the biology and the neurobiology and the endocrinology about what actually happens – if you just take a nutritionally deficient diet and consume less of it you’re supposed to lose weight, it’s scary. So then the next 7 to 10 years were spent saying, “OK all right. I’m not just going to look for research to hopefully confirm my existing hypothesis; I’m just going to see what’s actually been proven.” And that’s what led to this odyssey which has culminated in over 1,300 studies being reviewed, collaboration with top researchers all around the world, e-mails, phone calls, just endless dialogs because I feel based in a moral mission which is very simple. We don’t use the same computers we used 40 years ago, we don’t use the same phones we used 40 years ago. In every other area of our life, Wendy, we’ve seen dramatic technological improvement over the past 40 years except the most foundational one – what we eat and how we exercise. We are being told the same things we were told 40 years ago and the same things we’ve been told during the worst health crisis the world has ever seen. Why? It’s not as if there’s been no research and been no progress. It’s just that we haven’t been told about it and that’s why I work for 17 hours a day. Long answer.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Haha. Because I know it. I’ve noticed also that the mainstream knowledge is about 15 years behind the new research. It’s just kind of Murphy’s Law or what have you.
Jonathan Bailor: At least 15 years if not 50. Haha.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. You must have a really good book The Smarter Science of Slim because I paid $75 for it on Amazon haha because it’s out of print.
Jonathan Bailor: Yeah, Harper bought the rights to it so it is out of print and now there’s a crazy black market for it. Haha.
Wendy Myers: I had to have it. I wanted to read it before I interviewed you on the show and of course absorb the knowledge. I’m really looking forward to your new book, The Calorie Myth coming out.
Jonathan Bailor: Thank you. Yes it’s coming out on New Year’s Eve of this year – right in time for that New Year, new you time. Haha.
Wendy Myers: That’s good timing. That’s smart.
Wendy Myers: So let’s start with the basics of diet. What does the science show is the best diet for weight loss?
Jonathan Bailor: What is the best diet for weight loss? I’m going to give you a non-answer here. I hope you don’t mind. Saying what is the best diet, I know it was not what you said, you said the best diet for weight loss, but popping out a more macro point. Saying what’s the best diet is a bit like saying what’s the best outfit, at least in my mind – there is no best outfit. A cocktail dress may be lovely in one context, but if you’re going to the gym, cocktail dress is not the best outfit. So the best diet for weight loss is going to sound silly, but it’s one that enables you to lose fat, maintain muscle, boost your health and enjoy life long-term.
Now there are some common denominators that are very clear in the science. For example, to the extent that any way of eating maximizes your intake of essential nutrients, vitamins, minerals, photochemicals, essential fatty acids, essential proteins – that’s good. So maximize foods that provide the most of that stuff. Minimize foods that provide the most metabolically destructive calories – processed things. People get hung up a little bit because there’s a bunch of different ways to do that and people want to argue about, like the different ways to implement that high order bit. But the key is, it sounds a little silly, but it is very simple once you cut through all the clutter and that’s: we need to eat that which provides us with the most of what we need, the most of which is essential and the least of what we don’t need.
So I think this is like a lot of times when people get wrapped up about protein, or carbohydrate, or fat. What do we need as human beings to thrive? And what foods deliver that most effectively with the least consequences? What I’ve found is that you need to make a general recommendation. The general recommendation which then should be customized on an individual basis is first and foremost – you should be consuming non-starchy vegetables as your primary volume of food – half of your plate should be non-starchy vegetables. These are vegetables you could eat raw, you don’t have to eat them raw, but you could eat them raw. Things you put in salads, green leafy vegetables, mushrooms, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, asparagus, broccoli – things you could eat raw. You can’t eat potatoes raw, you can’t eat corn raw. Non-starchy vegetables first and foremost.
Next on your plate, so about a third of your plate would be nutrient dense proteins. So these are things like wild caught seafood, or beef that was fed that which it is meant to be fed, which is grass – not processed garbage corn feed. Same thing with a free range chicken. So nutrient dense, non-toxic sources of protein. And then the remainder of your plate is going to be whole food fats. So these are things like; nuts, seeds, avocado, chia, flax, cocoa, coconut – these delicious whole food sources of fats. Then low-fructose fruits like berries, strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, and citrus. Those foods unequivocally – and this is what we talk about a lot in the book is they’re the SANEst foods, meaning they provide you with the greatest amount of satiety per calorie. They keep you fullest the longest and require the fewest calories to fill you up. They’re unaggressive, meaning they don’t cause a bunch of hormonal chaos in your body when you eat them. They’re nutritious, meaning they provide you the most nutrients relative to calories and finally they’re the least efficient – meaning it is very difficult for your body to convert them into triglycerides – AKA body fat. So there’s much different ways to do that, but that general template is a great guide post.
Wendy Myers: Great. Clearly optimizing your metabolism is key in losing weight. So how exactly does one go about increasing their metabolism?
Jonathan Bailor: This is the sticky wicket here, Wendy, that people often ask me…I got this book called The Calorie Myth. So people see that title and then this subtitle that makes it even worse. The subtitle says, “How to eat more, exercise less, lose weight and live better.” Like this is crazy. So you’re saying like calories don’t matter and it’s magic and like no, no, no.
So calories do matter – they matter just like air matters, but that doesn’t mean you need to consciously regulate your breathing, like your body is designed to do that for you. Like nobody knew what a calorie was in the mainstream until the 1970’s and 80’s and everyone was slimmer and less sick before that. So counting calories can’t possibly be required for health. Like no animal counts calories and we’re a lot smarter than they are.
So it’s not that calories don’t matter, it’s that the rate at which your body consumes calories like your appetite is regulated by your brain, your hormones, your genetics, your gut, and the rate at which your body burns calories is regulated by the same. It’s a homeostatic system; it’s a self-regulating system – just like your blood sugar, right? Like when you eat foods that cause your blood sugar to go up, your body automatically does stuff to bring your blood sugar down, and if your blood sugar goes down, your body automatically does stuff to bring it up. If you sleep too little, your body does things to make you sleep more and if you sleep a lot, then you can stay up later.
The body tries to maintain homeostasis. We all know this. But for some reason, we’ve been told that that doesn’t apply to calories. So when you say how do we speed up our metabolism, how do we increase the rate at which our body burns calories? That’s really a function of 2 things – our genetics and our hormones. So researchers estimated that about 45 to 75% of our body composition is very much genetically predetermined and again this is in controversial.
There’s been 3 basic body types established: Endomorph – which is a bit rounder of a body type. Ectomorph – which is a taller and lengthier body type and, Mesomorph – which is right in the middle, generally a bit more of an athletic build. Telling an endomorph that they need to eat less and exercise more to turn themselves into an ectomorph is like, it’s just not a reasonable thing. Not all of us can be 6 foot 5, not all of us can be ectomorph, it’s just not in the genetic cards for us. But, there is a great percentage of it that we can influence, and the way we influence it is by changing our hormones.
Because our hormones are what control all the things that happen in our body, our body essentially speaks hormones, so if your brain wants to talk with your gut, it’s doing it with hormones. If your heart wants to talk to your leg, it’s doing it with hormones essentially neurotransmitters. So if our hormones change, everything about our body changes and we will experience this. Any woman who’s gone through menopause, any woman who’s gotten pregnant, anyone who’s gone on antidepressants, anyone who’s tried to stop smoking, anyone who’s experienced a great deal of stress, anyone who’s gone on insulin, anyone who’s taken anabolic steroids. Any one of those things changes the hormonal balance in your body and in real life as well as in clinical studies. You can keep calories in the same and you can keep calories out the same, but weight will change because hormones have changed. And therefore what your body’s doing with the calories has changed. So the question of how do we burn more, how do we achieve that fat loss, we have to say what is the hormonal profile of a person who is slim look like? And can we make our hormonal profile look more like theirs. And the answer is absolutely yes we can. So we can take our hormonal profile that we might have at 45 and we can absolutely start it back to the hormonal profile we had when we were 16. Can we get it all the way down till when we were 16? No. Can we get it close? Absolutely.
Wendy Myers: So, why can one person be thin and eat whenever they want, but the next person has to watch every morsel and work out 5 days a week. That first person just basically universally annoying. It’s just not fair, so why is that?
Jonathan Bailor: Haha. As I mentioned we had this homeostatic regulating system. So everyone’s body works to maintain a stable weight. It’s just that different people’s bodies believe that a different level of body composition is appropriate for them. If you look at for example twins, let me just answer your question directly – some people are lucky, and actually they’re not lucky from an evolutionary perspective. From an evolutionary perspective they’re very unlucky because when they eat more, they burn more, they don’t store more. It’s very difficult for them to store more and up until recently that would have been an evolutionary disadvantage, not an evolutionary advantage. So we consider them lucky today, but feel better knowing that for the entirety of human history up until today they were unlucky. So they pay their dues. But also this is more of an anecdote.
Please do keep in mind that there are plenty of people who smoke their entire life and never get lung cancer. Do we know why? No. Like they’re just – you certainly shouldn’t smoke even though you know Billy over there can smoke and doesn’t get lung cancer. We don’t know exactly why. We kind of know why here and that’s if you look at metabolic studies, twin studies are very informative for example, just to be geek out for second. So they do studies on twins and these are really cool right? Because then you have people who have the Smith twins over here and they have the same genetics and then you have the Thomas twins over here and they have the same genetics and you would feed both the Smith twins and the Thomas twins a thousand more calories than they need per day. So as everyone would expect, that will cause a temporary weight gain.
But here’s what’s crazy Wendy, it’s like most people would think – that if you would fed everyone like the Thomas twins and the Smith twins, if you fed them all a thousand extra calories per day for 35 days, that’s 35,000 extra calories, we all hear that there’s 3,500 calories in a pound of fat, so everyone gained 10 pounds, right? Actually no one will gain 10 pounds; no one has ever gained 10 pounds in any study ever conducted. No study ever conducted has shown that the calorie math we’re taught is true – every single study ever conducted shows it to be false. So no one will gain 10 pounds.
But what you’ll see in that study is that Smith twins – they will gain the same amount of weight and the Thomas twins will gain the same amount of weight. But while the Smith twins will each gain 2 pounds, the Thomas twins will each gain 8 pounds. Like there’s going to be up to a 400% difference in the amount of weight gain between those two pairs of twins. So you see the hugely important role genetics plays in there, so there’s that genetic deck of cards we’re dealt. But we can optimize within that.
For example, if you look at the difference between men and women, it is easier for men to burn fat than it is for women. Why? Men have more testosterone than women. Testosterone is an anabolic hormone. If you take a woman and you inject her with testosterone, she will burn fat and build muscle without moving a muscle. Same thing applies to a man, if you take a man and a woman and you inject them with insulin, they will store more fat. So we have certain hormones which help us burn fat and we have certain hormones to help us to store fat at the most basic of levels. Someone who eats more and burns more just has more of those fat burning hormones and likely has less inflammation in their brain and a healthier set of bacteria in their gut than someone who eats more and then stores more as a result.
So the 3 main differences are in the… and to be clear Wendy, there are individual words of slim and that’s healthy for them and there’s individuals that are not as slim and that is healthy for them. But if someone is unhealthfully not slim, you’ll see 3 things characteristically different in those people than you would in someone who is healthfully slim. And that is they will have inflammation in their brains specifically in the hypothalamus – this is the area of the brain that controls our body composition, appetite, satiety, things like that. You’ll see characteristically different profiles of gut bacteria or their second brain will be different than a naturally thin person, and also their hormone levels will be different. For example, studies have shown that some obese individuals will have 25 times the level of leptin, the hormone leptin circulating in their blood than someone who is not as metabolically dysregulated, and that’s a function of their body trying to re-regulate their way, but because they have a leptin resistance because their brain cannot react to that hormone properly, their body keeps producing and producing and producing, it’s knocking on the door, knocking on the door, but it can’t get through.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. That’s what I was getting at, like what are some of these profound differences like the hormone differences and the gut bacteria differences. Regarding hormones, could that possibly be due to adrenal fatigue? What other kinds of hormonal differences are there between people with fast metabolism and a slow metabolism?
Jonathan Bailor: So, as I mentioned there are a myriad of hormones like estrogen, norepinephrine. The list goes on and on and on. The key thing I think is not necessarily knowing, because I actually think I have a list of this in the book where it’s like – naturally thin people generally have this kind of a hormonal profile. Naturally not so thin people have this kind of a hormonal profile. The thing that I think is most interesting is how do we change the hormonal profile to be more of one that seeks to burn fat rather than just store fat.
And that is actually very, very simple – if we avoid processed starches, processed sweets, and processed fats. If you avoid those three things, your body will naturally regulate you around the weight that is healthy for you. Now that’s going to be different from saying that your body will automatically give you a 6 pack – those are not the same thing. It’s not natural for most people to have a 6 pack, but it is natural for almost everyone to not get diabetes and to not be obese. In the early 1900’s the obesity rates were sub 5%. About a hundred years ago Wendy, 1 in every 4,000 people was diabetic. Today, 1 in 4 people are diabetic. It’s also normal for people to not get sick without thinking about it for your entire life. That is the natural state of human existence as evidenced by every single generation of people that have lived prior to the current ones.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. So tell me a little bit about some of the popular diets that people are doing that’s sabotaging their weight loss efforts?
Jonathan Bailor: So the most common dietary approach is the one that sadly I and everyone else that was schooled in the traditional theories, which is all the variants of eat less exercise more. If you just ask someone on the street, go outside ask somebody on the street, “If you want to lose weight, what are you going to do?” They’re going to say, “I’m just going to eat less of my existing diet and then I’m going to wake up early and jog.” So sadly, that person is doing exactly what they’ve been told and that’s the travesty and that’s why we have to work to fix this.
But what that person has been told literally all 3 things are counter-productive. Taking in an already nutritionally deficient, hormonally damaging diet which is what the standard Western diet is and just eating less of it is terrible for you, like you will experience nutritional deficiencies, your body will start to thrive and crave storing more fat, it will slow down, it will burn muscle tissue, it will set you up for long term fat gain. And then if you sleep less, that causes you adrenal fatigue, we get into all kinds of cortisol problems, we see suppression in sex hormones – not good.
Sleep is therapeutic, most people would be better off exercising less and sleeping more and that’s a very, very easy trade off if you just give the opportunity to do it. Not that exercise is bad, but sleep is even better for you and we live in an underslept culture, I don’t know if that’s actually a word. And then they do chronic cardio – especially if you’re a woman. Chronic cardio AKA high impact moderate intensity – things like jogging are bad for your health. Not only are they not helpful, they are bad for your health.
Now let me be very clear, if you like jogging because it makes you happy, that’s fine. But if your goal in jogging is to create a body that naturally pursues health and slimness, you will be much better off doing other forms of exercise. It’s like if I told you, “Hey Wendy, I want to get healthy. I’m going to go box.” You feel like, “Why in God’s name would you box?” Like why don’t you go do something else because boxing has all these other impacts on your health. Jogging and chronic low grade cardio like that in terms of your thyroid hormones, cortisol levels, impact on your joints – not good stuff. So in terms of these common approaches – eat less exercise more – I will go so far is the cause, like the idea that you need to do that is the cause, of the modern obesity and diabetes epidemic because it’s not sustainable. It’s like telling someone just sleep less or try to go to the bathroom less or just breathe less frequently. Like no one can be hungry – you cannot be hungry your entire life.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs told us a long time ago, food is a pretty basic human desire and that’s why statistics show that these eat less exercise more approaches have a 95.6% failure rate. Shocking then if you put that in perspective, so that’s a 4.6% success rate. I think it was the American Cancer Society that performed a study on the success rates of quitting smoking cold turkey and keeping up not smoking. And keep in mind Wendy, that nicotine is the 3rd most addictive substance in the world, trailing only heroin and cocaine. So the long term success rates of without any help of giving up something that the only substance that is more addictive than it are heroin and cocaine – that success rate? 5.5%. So it’s low, but it is still higher than that 4.6% success rate of keeping weight off our body and being healthy for the rest of our lives. I was taught this as a trainer and it’s what we hear about every single day in the media.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. That’s exactly the problems I have with my clients that come to me for weight loss. They’re all doing that exact same thing. They’re starving themselves, they’re going to bed hungry, they’re doing cardio 5 days a week, and they just are not making the connection. They do not believe me that they don’t have to work that hard to lose weight.
Jonathan Bailor: And Wendy, the thing that’s such a challenge for individuals like me and like you and a lot, like how can this continue to live on? How can this Biggest Loser approach to weight loss continue to live on? And the reason it continues to live on is because if we think our goal is short-term weight loss – it does cause short-term weight loss – but I don’t actually think that’s our goal. That’s like telling someone with a fever the goal isn’t actually just to get rid of their fever because that was their goal. You can just submerge them in an ice bath and their body temperature would drop. Like if you just want to get weeds out of your garden, you can splatter your garden with gasoline, it will get rid of the weeds but it will kill everything else. And if you keep your body in an ice bath for long enough, it will make your fever much worse. So that’s the problem here, if you eat less and you exercise more, your body will burn off everything, but it will set you up for a long-term fat gain. So we see people could go half success but what they’re having success with is this temporary weight loss where our real goal is long-term fitness and health and that different goal requires a different approach because it’s a different goal.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I absolutely stress to all my clients they have to think long-term and stop thinking short-term. And long-term can take a little bit longer to lose weight, but in the long-term though you’ll keep the weight off.
Jonathan Bailor: Exactly and they will set themselves up. And Wendy that’s such a key point, too. It’s not weight loss that’s the issue. We’ve all lost weight; it’s very hard to find an American who has not lost weight at some point. However it’s much harder to find an American who has effortlessly kept that weight off and that’s what we’re really after. But Wendy, here’s what’s so promising and this is what the modern research shows – is effortless fitness health is the natural state. It has to be. That’s how everyone existed prior to the modern generation. We talk about all these different things and it’s so complicated. It’s just like everyone didn’t know what a calorie was, gyms didn’t exist and we don’t need to go back to hunter-gatherers.
That’s a super interesting conversation to have, but that’s not even necessary. Just go back a few generations. I mean look at the research, Wendy. The research, the medical research as early or as late, however you want to think of it as the 50’s and 60’s said that exercise was bad for women. So not only… how could too little of something we did even less of before we have a problem be the cause? Like it’s not hard to not get lung cancer, just don’t smoke. We now know the cause of the metabolic dysregulation which underlies obesity because it’s the dysregulation of the body’s ability to keep you at a slim and healthy way naturally. Instead your body fights to keep you at a heavier weight naturally. We know the cause. It’s not controversial – it’s processed starch, processed sweets and process fats. It’s that simple. Find one person anywhere who eats no processed starch, no processed sweets, no processed fats and is struggling with their weight – you can’t.
Wendy Myers: Let’s talk a little bit about calories. A colleague today was mentioning how Harvard came out with this study that said that the calories in calories out theory is in fact true. And you have a new book coming out called The Calorie Myth and this prevailing theory in nutrition is something that scientists – they just can’t seem to shake it. Can you explain what’s wrong with this theory and why scientists are still holding on to this myth?
Jonathan Bailor: Wendy, the struggle with this is it’s not so much that it’s false and this is by the author of the book The Calorie Myth. It’s the way it’s presented to us is false. So yes, fundamentally calories in minus calories out is relevant and it exists but the body automatically regulates that. So calories do matter, but a healthy person will become full and will no longer desire food when they consumed enough calories to be at energy balance. And when they expend enough calories to get out of energy balance, they’ll get tired and they’ll want to sit down or they’ll want to go to sleep. So calories in and calories out is a relevant equation, but what is irrelevant is the fictitious need to consciously control it. Breaths in and breaths out matters, water in water out matters, vitamin C in vitamin C out matters, the amino acid leucine in and the excretion of it matters, but we don’t have to consciously monitor any of that other stuff – the body does it automatically. So it’s not that calories don’t matter, it’s the idea that you need to consciously count them has to be false. If for no other reason because not only has it been impossible until the past 40 years but it continues to be impossible. Because even if you did attempt to count all your calories; 1 – your measurements will be horribly inaccurate; 2 – it’s literally impossible to measure calories out. Because for example, 30% of the calories you burn in a day if you eat sufficient protein can be spent simply synthesizing new tissue in your body. Your body can build up to 250 grams of new tissue per day; your body is constantly regenerating itself. No cardio machine is going to tell you about those calories being burned. Like how many calories did your brain burn? The liver burns about 600 calories per day. How do you account for that? You can’t. So that’s the myth – the myth is that we need to consciously control calories in calories out whereas we don’t need to consciously control any other mission critical function in the body. Does the distinction make sense?
Wendy Myers: Yeah and I knew this was the case because so many days I spent contemplating how a pound of fat has 3,500 calories. So I’d be calculating, so if I go for an hour walk, I’ll burn 100 calories, so I have to go on 35 one hour walks to burn a pound of fat. How was that even possible? It makes no sense at all. I knew I was right! Haha.
Jonathan Bailor: Haha. That math is so fun and that’s how I started to free my mind from these myths. Because if you just, you know chewing gum burns calories. So if something like chewing gum burns 7 calories an hour, let’s say it’s 10 calories an hour ‘cause you’re doing vigorous chewing. So let’s say you chew gum for 3 hours a day, let’s make the math easy, you do it for 5 hours a day – that’s 50 calories per day, so per week that’s 350 calories, so in 10 weeks, you should burn a pound, OK so in 100 weeks… so eventually because you chew gum, you should weigh nothing.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Jonathan Bailor: And obviously that’s not true, people will be like, “No that’s absurd.” Of course the body won’t let you do that. But Wendy, here’s what’s so empowering about making that argument, so why is it that it won’t make you weigh nothing? Why is that absurd? But the idea that it can make you 10 pounds less isn’t absurd. Whatever mechanism exists in the body to prevent chewing gum from making you weight zero pounds is the exact same mechanism that prevents it from making you lose 10 pounds, it’s the homeostatic regulation of weight – it’s your hypothalamus and your gut saying, “Oh you took the stairs? That’s fine; I’m just going to make you hungrier.” Or “You jogged over an hour? That’s fine I’m just going to make you hungrier.” Or “You jogged for an hour? That’s fine, I’m just going to make you more tired so you’re less active throughout the day.” Or “You didn’t go for a jog today? That’s OK I’m going to use non-exercise activity thermogenesis to involuntarily move your muscles for you so that you burn basically the same number of calories per day.” The body is really, really smart and it doesn’t want to starve and it doesn’t want to be overfed in less we break it. Like you can break your respiratory system and then you need a respirator and you can break your pancreas and then you need to manually regulate blood sugar, and you can break your metabolism and then you do need to consciously count calories. But we can avoid breaking it in the first place and then we can repair it without ever counting calories by just giving it the foods that heal – the foods that we started the interview talking about.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I love that analogy….. I’m sorry I lost my train of thought. Sorry I haven’t had enough coffee today. So, I want to ask you the last question that I like to ask all of my guests. What do you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today?
Jonathan Bailor: That we have redefined food. The definition of food today is not the same as any other time in the human history and is the cause of this modern deadly epidemic. We now define, the average American gets between 40 to 60% of their calories from products that happened to be edible. I define food as something you find directly in nature, like a moose exists in nature – it’s edible, moose is food. Tomatoes exist in nature. Cheerios don’t exist in nature. Bread also does not exist in nature. Things that are found nature are food and have been food for the entirety of human history up until recently. And as soon as we start – as soon as any other culture starts eating edible products rather than food, even if the amount of calories they eat stays the same, it breaks down metabolism. It breaks their biology and they become heavy and sick just like what happens in any system. If you put kerosene in your car’s gas tank, eventually your car will break down. If you flush paper towels down your toilet, it’s going to get clogged. If you put things in a system it was not designed to handle, eventually it will break. And then just putting less of that stuff in will not fix it, it might slow the rate of which it breaks – this is why calorie restriction sometimes works. If you smoke one cigarette a day versus two, it will take longer to develop lung cancer, but the issue is not smoking few cigarettes, it’s just breathe clean air and that’s all we need to do. Wendy, we just need to eat food instead of eating edible products.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I love it – you call it edible products. I was appalled this morning. I went to my physical therapist’s office and there’s a lady at the front desk that runs the whole show and it’s 8:30 AM and she is eating a Lunchables pizza and a Coke.
Jonathan Bailor: Oh no.
Wendy Myers: At 8:00 AM, I was completely floored that an adult would be eating these foods, but this is what a lot of people are eating. It’s frightening, it has frightening impacts on our health. So thank you so much for being on the show Jonathan. Why don’t you tell the listeners a little about where they can find you and what you’re up to these days?
Jonathan Bailor: So there’s two new websites in development. They’ll probably be up when this show goes live. But in case they’re not, start at Smarterscienceofslim.com. You’ll find not only a free 28-day program which is neat. Sign up for that, it’s totally free. It points you to a bunch of great resources, gives you interactive guides, recipes, all kinds of fun stuff. You’ll also find our podcast where I’m joined by my lovely co-host Carrie Brown who’s a former English pastry chef. People say, “Jonathan you talk about a SANE lifestyle. What do you eat on a SANE lifestyle?” I answered all this people, “What did you eat today?” Because for any food that you eat, there is a SANE substitute; so you got SANE ice cream, SANE pasta substitutes, we got all kinds of SANE goodness – so you’ll learn about that. So we got the podcast, we got the website. Of course you can preorder the book now. It’s called The Calorie Myth. It’s available on preorder on Amazon and pretty soon, the book’s website Caloriemythbook.com will be online. And then if you want to learn more about the broader efforts we have going on, you can check our Bailorgroup.com, but just go to Smarterscienceofslim.com, check out The Calorie Myth on Amazon and you’ll be good.
Wendy Myers: You have an empire going there, I love it. Jonathan, thank you for being on the show and thank you for bringing all these scientifically-backed facts to demystify this very important topic. It’s so hard to wade through all the information out there when you’re just kind of learning how to lose weight and thinking you’re going to get results. There’s so much wrong info and people are just so confused. So it’s not surprising why so many people have problems losing weight. I can’t wait for your new book to come out. I actually already preordered it on Barnes and Noble and I’m really excited to read it. Thank you.
Jonathan Bailor: Thank you, Wendy. I would love to come back on when the book comes out. We could chitchat about it and hopefully it’ll be fun.
Wendy Myers: Absolutely. I’d love to have you back on. Thank you.
Jonathan Bailor: Thank you, Wendy.
Wendy Myers: Everyone one out there, if you want to find me, you can go to myersdetox.com™. I started the site to educate you about Paleo nutrition and the importance of detoxification and how to treat your health conditions naturally without medication and all kinds of good stuff to help you live a long healthy life. And thank you all listeners out there for tuning in to the Live to 110 podcast. Go leave a review on iTunes.
