- What is the healthiest way to approach a kind of rapid weight loss? And here, what I think is happening is somebody has an event coming up, or they're just tired of being the weight they are, carrying the amount of adipose tissue they are, and they wanted to know whether or not it is safe to, for instance, lose three pounds a week for a few weeks in anticipation of a wedding or some other event, and whether or not straight caloric restriction and increasing activity is the best way to approach that.

With the understanding that they may gain back a little afterwards, they might make, I think ideally they'd like to maintain it afterwards, but what do you think of that sort of approach? You know, cutting caloric intake in half, for instance, and then doubling and also doubling your physical output.

- So it's interesting because the, you might be surprised by what I'm gonna say, which is the research data actually tends to suggest that people who are like obese, who lose a lot more weight early, are more likely to keep it off. Which seems a little bit kind of contradictory, right?

Like, well, that doesn't seem very sustainable. But again, you're weighing competing things. So there's sustainability aspect, but then there's also like buy-in is huge for sustainability, right? So for a lot of overweight or obese people, if they start a diet and they don't see something quickly, they kind of bail on it because it's, you know, it's not working.

Whereas if they see some rapid results pretty quickly, they buy in even harder, right? And so I think the conversation, especially for if there's any coaches or trainers out there, is just presenting that as the, you know, one of my favorite lines is there are no solutions. There's only trade-offs.

I think Thomas Sowell said that. So you're having a trade-off here. It is, yes, you're going to lose fat faster. You might lose lean mass a little bit faster too, which can be a problem. But I will say the more adipose tissue you have, the more aggressively you can diet without negative consequences.

Somebody like me doing a really aggressive diet is not going to be good for my lean mass. One, I have a higher lean mass than normal. Two, I have a lower body fat than normal. As your body fat goes down, the percentage of weight loss from lean mass goes up.

So people who are very obese, because they have so much adipose tissue to pull from, there's very little reason for the body to catabolize lean tissue. Now, that being said, if you go on a, people misinterpret like, they're like, well, I got an in-body done and, or a dexa done and I've lost, you know, two pounds of lean mass and they've, you know, they've lost 20 pounds overall.

Well, keep in mind, adipose tissue itself is 13% lean mass. So there's actually like, you know, protein component to like the structural component of the adipose tissue and it does have some water. So it's about 87% lipid, but the other part is lean. So at minimum, you should expect a 13% reduction in lean mass when you diet.

And then when you consider like you lose body water overall, which is registers as lean mass and you lose, your splint neck tissues can shrink a little bit. So it's normal to lose, you know, for the average person to lose like 25% or 30% of the weight that they lose from lean mass.

But that doesn't mean skeletal muscle tissue. And again, the, the more adipose you have, the more aggressively you can approach the diet without really negative long-term consequences to lean mass or your overall health. But balance that with, okay, if I'm going to do this, I need to understand that I'm not going to be dieting this way forever.

I'm doing this to give myself a boost at the beginning. And I have to be okay at some point with transitioning to something that's a little bit more sustainable. Based on what you just said, it reminds me of the satiety signal effect of exercise. You mentioned earlier that exercising can improve our sense of when we've had enough to eat.

I just want to briefly mention that when Allie Crum was on the podcast, she mentioned that they'd been doing a study that I, I have to pair you to and have a, hear the conversation as a fly on the wall, because what she was telling me was that if people believe that a food is nutritious for them, then eating less of it registers as more satiating.

Whereas if people view dieting as a deprivation system, you know, like, oh, you know, dieting is hard and the food, it sucks and it's terrible. Well, then they crave all sorts of other things. Whereas they could, they actually observe in their studies where people report reduced craving. If they are told, for instance, a chicken breast and broccoli and some olive oil and rice is actually quite nourishing.

It's actually really good for you. Then people eat that and they feel like they've actually eaten more. The satiety signaling goes up. So it's just a, just a point that Allie made of those aren't my data. The satiety is so impressive because even the rate at which you eat and right down to the size of the plate and the color of the plate.

Like the contrast in color really, they, they see, I can't remember exactly. I think it's if the plate is a similar color to the food, I think people eat more. Whereas if it's a bigger contrast, they eat less. So even like plate color can make a difference on how much you eat.

So again, human brain, very amazing, but also very dumb in some ways, right? Not an optimized algorithm. I always, I always joke with people. I'm like, just look at how stupid humans are. You put some water in front of them, like, you know, the ocean, they're like, oh yeah, I'll pay 10 times more for this.

You know, like, but it's just, we're kind of wired that way. The, um, the reward signaling pathways in the brain run one chemical, mainly dopamine. There are others of course, but, and very few algorithms. It's sort of like a intermittent reinforcement is one random reinforcement, but in the end that there aren't many algorithms and we are probably not optimized, certainly not optimized for our own health because people will eat themselves to death, drug themselves to death, et cetera.

Simply because something felt good at one point, it's, it proves your point. One of the, one of the things I tell people, I said this on, um, Andy for solo's podcast was interestingly, the dichotomy of life is if you do what's easy in the short term, your life will be hard.

If you do what's hard in the short term, your life will get easier. It's very strange. And actually Ethan Supley had a great example of this when he was over 500 pounds. He said, the amount of work I had to do to construct my life that I could just live was so much more work than just going to the gym for a couple hours a day.

He's like, the gym work is hard. He's like, but when I look back at how much work I had to do to sustain that lifestyle versus just going to the gym and like, you know, restricting calories, he's like to maintain the lifestyle of being 500 pounds was infinitely more difficult than what I do now.

And so again, again, a great example, short term, hard going to the gym, calorie restriction, long-term life's easier. Thank you.