I’m always looking for the best diet to optimize health, performance, mental clarity, and body composition.
Over the years, I’ve had countless conversations with trusted nutrition experts about the best way to eat, and today’s guest, Brad Pilon, is at the top of my list.
Brad is the author of industry leading books like Eat Stop Eat and How Much Protein, and has devoted his career to helping people take a simple, effective approach to fat loss and muscle gain
It’s always an information packed conversation when Brad is around, so you won’t want to miss this two-part discussion on some of the most debated concepts in nutrition.
Today’s Podcast Topics Include:
- The truth about protein intake for muscle gain
- The one epidemic we will NEVER see in America
- How to maximally stimulate protein synthesis
- Jay’s simple approach to protein intake
- Does protein timing really matter?
- Brad and Jay’s training secrets from ’97
- One mistake that will always make you fat, and how you can avoid it
- How lean do you need to be before trying to add size?
- The physiological and psychological benefits of intermittent fasting
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Links From The Show:
- RenegadeRoastingCo.com – Check out the new limited edition Winter Blend. Use the coupon code “JFS” to get 25% off your first order
Books Mentioned In The Show:
- Eat Stop Eat – Brad Pilon
- How Much Protein – Brad Pilon
If you want to hear more from Brad you can check out his website and blog, or connect with him on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Do you have feedback from today’s show? Post them below, email podcast@JasonFerruggia.com. You can always hit me up on Twitter @JasonFerruggia
And, if you liked the show a short review on iTunes would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for listening.
Transcript
Jay: Brad Pilon is here who is the author of How Much Protein which Brad, as you know, is one of my favorite nutrition books ever. I love it. I read the new one every time you send it to me, the updated version. But let’s start with that. Let’s discuss the protein myth, get into it. How much protein does one actually need?
Brad: It’s an awesome question, one of my favorite questions. Al right, so I’m still in the camp of your average guy, your actual average, natural guy and by average I mean, you’re not sitting there and listening to us talking and you’re 6’8”, you’re around 5’10” to 6’1” to 6’2”, you’re natural, you’ve been training for a while but I’m still saying you get by on anywhere from 100 to 120 grams, maybe even 90 to 120, somewhere in that range.
I know. I’m just like you guys. I’m on Instagram. I’m flipping through the pictures. Yeah, there are dudes on there and they’re jacked and you’re like, “Whoa! Man, that guy is freaky jacked and he eats 300 grams of protein.” And if you’re just going in by laws of averages, a lot of the IFBB Pro, the fitness models guys, a lot of them could be above 200. But you’ve got to also remember that all the 130-pound wannabes at your gym are also eating that much. It’s easy to just assume that it must be more protein means more muscle relationship. But if that were true we wouldn’t have an obesity epidemic; we’d have a Schwarzenegger epidemic. If that’s all it took, I would be a tank.
Jay: Oh, totally. Me, too.
Brad: Yeah. I used to get my protein for free. I have done high protein. We used to be a joke about just double-dosing everything. So if Meso-Tech was 52 grams of protein, we did 100 for us. Give me two packs. Boom! When you go through the research, you come up with some interesting things. What really the current body of research shows is that the effective protein on your ability to build muscle from the measurements we currently use, is maximally stimulated at around 20 grams of high quality protein. Once you hit it around 20 grams, everything that you could measure that’s indicative of muscle growth, protein synthesis, mTOR phosphorylation, all that fun stuff is as peaked and jacked up as it can get at around 20 grams.
Here’s where it gets kind of cool. It stays peaked like that for about two hours and then even though the amino acids in your blood are still like at maximum levels, it comes back down. So it’s almost like a nerve impulse. When you have a nerve impulse, there’s this excitatory period where it’s jacked up and then it needs a little bit of time to recover. It needs some downtime, just like we do. It’s done some work. It’s exhausted. And it doesn’t matter what you do in between that time, it’s off. It got maximally stimulated and that’s what you get. That period seems to last for about—
Jay: I get maximally stimulated just talking to you, by the way.
Brad: Oh yeah, I’ve been excited about this for weeks. I didn’t sleep last night. It’s maximally stimulated for like four hours so hypothetically after four hours, you should be able to just dose again. Let’s round 20 up to 25 because let’s just assume we’re all working way harder than the guys in he studies. We’re all doing our Ferruggia program so our thing is bang on. So 25 grams of protein every four hours and you’re one of those weird people who get up at 6 AM or something like that. Quick math: 6 AM, 10 AM, 2PM, 6PM, 10PM, that’s 5 waking hours. 5 times 25, look, I’m not a math genius or anything but that’s 125 grams of protein if you’re perfectly timing everything.
So let’s say you’re crazy. You are just die hard and you get up in the middle of the night, go to the washroom and you pound back another 25 grams of protein. Well, you’re at 150 now. I can’t possibly still figure out where the idea of 200 or 300 grams comes from when even in the most optimistic situations, I can hit, maybe make an excuse for 150, maybe 175 if you somehow found an extra couple of hours a day.
But I can’t find the reason for the big numbers, except—you know this is coming, this except—when you’re on steroids, they can only really work one or two different ways. They throw all the hormones and the interactions they have and they can either make it so that the amount of protein you can use is let’s say higher than 20, let’s say now it’s 30 or 35, or that time frame that latency, instead of every four hours, when you’re on you are every three hours. That’s an extra feeding, maybe two. That’s probably where it comes from. Back in the day, Jay, when you and I were starting out and the internet isn’t exactly what it is today because we’re old, we got our info from magazines. When you’re taking your dietary advice from Lee Priest he’s telling you, “I swear this is what worked.”
Jay: Go with Priest reference.
Brad: The guy’s awesome. Who are we kidding? When he tells you what’s working, it’s probably good chance that he’s not lying. He might be omitting a couple of things but he ain’t lying. I think that’s a lot of what happened, especially in the early days of health and nutrition. Nutrition trends and advice, they started on the fringe. It was bodybuilding and it was anything else that was super fringe at the time. Then it slowly bleeds in the mainstream so a lot of what we think about health and fitness and how you should eat, it came from this fringe group who were trying to figure out the best way to eat given their unique circumstances. Then it just kind of bled into how the rest of us thought we should train.
From a protein point of view, I guess from a science perspective based on what we know now, regular dosing of protein but in a moderate range of 25 grams seems to make sense. In a real world application, I’m not sure how big of a deal it makes if you missed one or two of those in a given day. But it probably comes down to being a whole matter of just consistency through the months and months of eating.
Jay: I don’t eat ideally as you or I would recommend on paper which I’m sure you probably don’t either because I am a former fat boy and that’s always going to come out and my wife’s an amazing cook. So what I’ll do, I know it’s not ideal but I’ll have 25 grams of protein probably let’s say at 10 AM and then maybe 2, maybe 5, somewhere in there. But at night, I’ll probably have 75 to 80 grams because I’m going to have a bunch of meatballs, a big steak or something like that. That’s when I’m going to have my biggest meal because just from a social perspective, it works out better that way.
Brad: Totally. Okay, this is the interesting about research is we read it really blindly. If someone does a study on the effects of 25 grams of protein exactly every four hours versus a smaller breakfast, a lunch and most of your protein at dinner, let’s say the protein one turns out better. That means that the timed one, the 25 grams is better, significantly better. It doesn’t mean the other one got zero results. We’re talking a difference of like one got 92 grams of muscle build, the other one got 80. It still worked, right? And over the grand scheme of months and different—
Jay: Well, that’s the thing that I think people overlook is how much muscle can you really build naturally in the course of a year? Spreading it out versus having a bigger feeding, what’s the difference going to be at the end of a year? One pound maybe?
Brad: Yeah and at the first 25 of that big meal, we definitely know it maximally stimulated everything. Then let’s just say the rest of it didn’t. It had no response to muscle-building at all. It was still tasty and awesome. You just made damn sure you got your 25. You just went over a bit. So same thing, it’s not like was useless. You hit your 25 and you kept going. That’s just generally what I found with protein.
I view protein like training. Consistency is the key. It’s going to change. Some workouts will be longer and shorter while some meals are going to be bigger and smaller. But as long as you’re not trying to go like six or seven weeks with zero protein, you’re probably just making slow and steady gains. Now the difference might be you made 93% of the absolute maximum gains you could have made or maybe eating a special way could have gotten you to 95%. At the end of the day, what are we talking about here? We’re talking about obsessing over a quarter pound extra muscle at the expense of enjoying your food.
So I haven’t really found that bullet magic answer and to be perfectly honest, if you look at everybody who talks about health and nutrition, nobody has because some people have made some mind-blowing transformations but they do it once. I’ve never seen that guy who went from out of shape to 200 pounds and shredded and in his next transformation, he goes to 250 and shredded then he hit 300 and shredded and he’s just still going, at least not without drugs. So for the most part, we see some wicked cool transformations and then you did what you were going to do. Then it’s a slow progression from there.
Jay: And Brad, contrary to what people think, isn’t there some research saying that the greater your training age is and the longer you’ve been at it, you actually don’t even need quite as much protein? You can benefit from a lower ratio or percentage.
Brad: Yeah, that seems to be one of the major theories. You’ve kind of gone through your incredible hulk transformation so you’ve put on a ton of muscle and now you’re maintaining and going slow but that muscle’s primed, man. You’re working hard. You’re training. It’s not new muscle that’s kind of being kick jumpstarted in the growth so the extra protein might not matter as much and you might be getting away with the same amount of growth you normally would just with less protein.
It’s a difficult game because you’re trying to measure something so unbelievably, boringly slow. You think about your average research study, not the fluke ones we all like to talk about but the average muscle growth study and you’re arguing over between 3 pounds and 4 pounds of growth over a 12-week period. Now you imagine those weekly measurements or every other day measurements. They’re just tediously small, what we’re actually trying to accomplish. We know that no matter how mundane we think the growth was, let’s say the research study got 3 pounds in 12 weeks, I would bet they’re not getting 3 pounds the next 12 weeks then 3 pounds the next 12 weeks. It still dwindles from there. It gets even more just depressingly slow. So really what I see as the key to this whole thing is that you eat your protein and you just don’t get injured with training. That’s the key to it all.
Jay: That’s it. Do you place any emphasis on timing of protein, especially around training?
Brad: No. My general thought on that has been if you’re training with any kind of consistency, every single meal you eat is super important because it is a post-workout meal and it is a pre-workout meal. If the results of that training lasts for at least 48 hours and you’re training almost daily or every other day or something like that, you’re pretty much always pre and post-workout. I like to think of it that way.
Now most of the time, it just seems right for most people to eat at some point around a workout session. I can’t see any reason to be like, “Well, I’m working out in four hours. I better stop eating” or “I just finished working out. I can’t eat for 4 hours.” I don’t really do any of that but I don’t do the full-on 100-meter sprint to the change room to mix my drink in the change room or shower kind of thing right.
Jay: But we did back in ‘97.
Brad: Oh boy, did we ever. You know what’s really gross as I think about it? It’s like full on liter-bottles of Gatorade during your training. I have no idea how I did that.
Jay: Oh yeah, I used to do it all the time. I used to drink like one during training and then one after.
Brad: Yeah. How? I would be destroyed if I did that now.
Jay: I’d be so bloated.
Brad: I’d rather have a beer during training than do that. But we did it! There was actually a point in time where I used to do in between training not only Gatorade but a Snickers bar.
Jay: Really?
Brad: Mostly because I wanted the Snickers bar. At the time, I probably thought there was some magic. You never change, right? The amount of things I’ve eaten or done because I was convinced myself there would be some sort of magic behind it, you never change. You’re stuck as that little kid who’s convinced there’s that one little thing you can do and you’re just going to hulk out on your friends. You’re like after a set of bench press I actually grew 6 inches in height and I’m 70 pounds heavier, bring it. It doesn’t happen. I keep trying.
Jay: What about carbs around training or even during training?
Brad: I’m not low-carb so I’m just always carbed so I don’t really need to add any extra in. I’m certainly not going into a meal that’s lacking in carbs afterwards.
Jay: Have you experimented with having carbs pre- and not having carbs pre- and the timing of it? Do you notice anything? Because I do notice that some things do make a difference for me. I noticed that no carbs before is not so good but if I have them too close to training then I get zero pump. So there’s kind of a fine line I work with there.
Brad: Oh yeah. If you’re doing something more high-intensity like as you’re playing in a sport or something like that, for me I run the risk if I get some serious cramps and that just gets your mind right out of the game.
Jay: If you’re going to do what now?
Brad: Carbs too close to the activity. I’m usually okay with zero crabs. It’s either because I’m just used to it from fasting or I just really don’t work that hard. It’s one or some sort of combination that’s here. But all I know if I go too overboard right before on something like quick and very liquid, like pounding back a Gatorade or some sort of sports drink right before, it never really does me anything of a great benefit and usually it’s a bit of a hindrance. But anything in between like just sort of normal food, that tends to be kind of my sweet spot.
Jay: Got you. You mentioned fasting there a little bit. Let’s talk a little bit about the benefits of intermittent fasting and your thoughts on the whole subject.
Brad: Oh, there are zero benefits. You lose all your muscle and fat. I believe they stopped doing it because now everybody is shredded and have abs like. I liked it better when people were impressed by a two-pack ab, right? Now everybody’s got a six-pack.
No, it’s same old same old. I really don’t think much has changed in the world of fasting and I don’t much needs to change. It’s a tool that everybody has in their toolbox. Every single person has it and all you have to do is figure out how to fit it into your training and you lifestyle.
Jay: And your preferred way of doing it is what?
Brad: I’m still once or twice a week, 20 to 24 hours. I’ve got my general rules of thought. If you’re the type of person who wants to fast more often like daily, well that’s cool. Do it but don’t fast as long. So if you’re a daily faster, 12 to 16 hours. If you’re an every other day faster, I don’t know, try 16 to 20. If you’re a once or twice a week, try 20 to 24 and if you’re once a week, you could even try a 36, that kind of thing. Just play with it.
But what I find really interesting is that people get stuck. They’re going to do one style. “I am now fasting for 24 hours twice a week.” I’m like how’s it going? “Dude, the last two hours are the worst two hours of my entire life.” I’m like well then do 22; what the hell? If you fast for 12 hours, you’ve fasted more than 98% of the population does in any given year so you’re doing well. And then it’s just finding the sweet spot for you and the sweet spot changes depending on the week. I know for me if I kind of get in that really bad habit of to getting to bed on time, I’m binge-watching Arrow or something like that.
Jay: And you’re always hungry.
Brad: Yeah, and not only hungry but you’re tired. Being tired affects everything. Well, then a 24-hour fast sucks. So what do you do? You either go A) go to bed on time, especially because you’re binge-watching something you’ve recorded or on NetFlix and you don’t have to be up late; and then B) you just cut down on the amount of time you’re fasting. The difference between a 20-hour fast and a 24-hour fast is 4 hours. You’ve still done a lot of really amazing things for your body so just roll with it. That’s kind of where I am with fasting. It doesn’t need to be so structured. In fact, you’re going to get the best results when you’re kind of tailoring it for yourself. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution but it’s a pretty damn good solution.
Jay: And for those who don’t know, you’re always in great shape. I see you posting your little pics there on Instagram with your long hair.
Brad: The humble brag on Instagram. Well look, there has to be a picture of me with a cute monkey, never mind the fact my chest is jacked in the pic. What I want you to think of is the monkey. I’ve found over the years, what’s happened is that I found a sweet spot at about 175 at 5’10” and then it’s just through fasting and figuring out what works for you.
Jay: Wait, I think we need to pause and reiterate that fact because 175 at 5’10”, you are jacked. You see you in person and people will probably guess you’re 195 and there’s a lot of people on the internet who are obsessed with weighing over 200 pounds, which is just not going to happen. For the average guy—we started this talking about the average guy—is not going to get over 200 pounds, lean and muscular. It’s very rare that’s going to happen unless you’ve got incredible genetics. If you’re playing on Sundays, during the fall, you have the genetics to be over 200 pounds.
Brad: But you already know that.
Jay: So you never read about training and don’t give a shit anyway.
Brad: No, you have a great rule of thumb for people. Exactly, you wouldn’t need to worry about training because you’d look trained already. But for your average 5’10” who is in his mid to late 20s who doesn’t train at all, your lean mass is going to be some way around 140 pounds. It’s just going to fall in that range just by normal distribution. So if you’ve managed to get yourself up and go 150 or 160 pounds of lean mass, you’re like 20 pounds more than the average person and you’re probably at least 15 pounds higher than what you started with. It’s not like you gained liver size or lung size. Even naked lungs are like two pounds. Most of that was muscle. You’ve done awesome stuff and then if you do some quick math, if you’re even remotely lean that’s going to land you to the 170 to low 180’s range.
If you’re higher than that then you’re a freak and you already know it. Let’s not pretend. If you’re lower than that just don’t expect to turn into a random, crazy, freaky giant guy. So 175 is what works really well on my body and it’s what I’ve learned to really hone into. So if I go on vacation and I go up because you know I’m human and I go up when I’m on vacation, it’s mostly alcohol weight but we’ll leave that alone, I know how to get it back down.
Jay: What’s your go-to drink, scotch?
Brad: I’m a scotch, rum, Guinness type of guy. Those are my kind of babies. They keep me going. It’s your dream vacation. Sometimes especially when you go to some tropical spot, you’re not getting your normal Guinness or you’re not thinking and you don’t realize the Guinness they have down in the Caribbean is like 7.4% alcohol so you’re getting destroyed often and you don’t know why. Different story but yeah, your weight goes up. But I know how to get it back down. What I’ve learned and what I want everybody to know is you kind of figure out what’s worth the effort to get it back down and what really didn’t make a difference.
So honestly for me it’s going back to fasting twice a week instead of once or twice a week. It’s getting it back up to 24 hours until it’s kind of time to bring it back down below and it’s just being aware of what I’m eating. I never go into 180’s but let’s say from 178 to 179, it gets me back down to 175 and then I’m photoshoot-ish at 171 to 171. So you see there’s a 10-pound range you can play with. That’s what fasting has done for me. It’s just made to kind of keep me in that range and I think it’s what it’s all about. You start on this game and you can have these like 15 to 20 pounds swings and your whole goal is to make those swings smaller and smaller so you’ve just got more and more control over it.
Jay: And I think this brings up another good point to reiterate is that you and I and I know I’ve gone through it a million times myself where I’ve done the high protein, the high carbs or whatever just in the effort to try and get bigger and all that ever happens is you get fatter.
Brad: Yup. If you diet, down to the same size.
Jay: Exactly.
Brad: No matter what and no matter what dieting style you follow, and I don’t care which one it is, there’s a little bit of it that sucks because you’re just going to be always eating a little bit less than you want to. That’s what dieting is. It’s a little bit less than you want to. So why bulk yourself up and get fat to go through 8 to 12 weeks of, “Eh, this kind of sucks” just to get back to where you were. It just doesn’t make sense. I’ve been 216 and 216 is really cool on a t-shirt. As a guy, being that—
Jay: In the winter.
Brad: Yeah in the winter, where your trainings, you carry a lot of it across your chest and your back and you kind of get that thick tricep-y you look in the t-shirt and then you take the shirt off and everything falls apart and then everybody knew. I noticed that I was just in a Disney with the family right and it’s just funny because you’ll see guys walking around and I’m in this industry so I do what every guy does and I compare. I’m like gosh, the dude’s got big arms. Then I see him at the pool, I’m like because he’s Beluga whale. I get it. It just goes away and the magic clothing is awesome, the right golf shirt that’s just nicely structured.
Jay: Oh, I was going to say it’s got to be the perfect shirt.
Brad: Yeah and then you can be 30 pounds overweight and it just looks like you have fisters and your brawny arms and that’s it. But when the shirt’s off, that’s just what matters. So I found that just all the trying, relentlessly to build muscle by getting fat just results in getting fat. It’s kind of obvious that’s where the food has gone because you can visually see it in the mirror so I don’t know why we think that it does anything other than that. Again, right back to the point of overeating and training made you just giant, we’d have a Schwarzenegger epidemic because a lot of people work out and a lot of people who work out are overweight because they overeat. They’re not massively bigger than anyone or getting massively bigger than everybody.
Jay: So do you have a set body fat percentage you think someone should get down to before they start trying to get bigger?
Brad: Yeah. You just have to look trained. This is a really weird thing because it’s different for everybody but it should be that point where people are like, “You work out.” So you should be kind of training. You shouldn’t be in a diet and don’t train and then start training. But once you get down like for guy, you’re looking at something in the, I’m pretty liberal with it so even though like the 10% to 15% which is a lot higher than a lot of people recommend. It just gives you the ability to look at the mirror and judge really quickly what’s going on.
Jay: Yeah because when you’re that low, you can kind of notice fat gain whereas if you get a little higher, you almost don’t notice it quite as much.
Brad: Yeah, at 170 and 172 I have abs. I have abs that show up in pictures. Whether the lighting is good or not, they’re there. At 177, they’re gone. I have to have the right lighting and I’ve got to be flexing. That’s the only way they show up. So it’s very easy for me to tell. I’ve got all these cues. Your vascularity in a gym is a great cue.
Jay: So the difference between 170 and 173 is more noticeable than 177 and 180 probably.
Brad: Exactly. That’s the thing because I still fall for the bulking game every once in a while. I’ll be honest, for me the fat is softer. I’m not going to go the soft phase because you all rip on me. Yeah, Pilon goes through a soft phase. Between about 10% and 11% for me, that bottom roll, that money belt roll that a lot of guys have right, it just gets kind of soft and it’s just there and it’s obvious because everything else is lean. The stomach is flat, flat, flat, belly button, little paunch. It’s like that’s just this worst period then it’s gone. But once you hit about 177, your stomach’s flat again and it’s just not ab-y and farther out. Then it’s like I look in the mirror straight on, I look pretty good right now. As long as I don’t let anybody take a side picture of me, this is going well. You can kind of trick yourself from the fact that you’re up three or four pounds but it’s basically the same thing.
That’s why I’m likely to be at a level of leanness, the gaining weight is obvious, where you’re gaining it. Otherwise, you’re just kind of gaining weight and telling yourself it’s something that it’s not. If you’re going to be heavy and you want to try gaining weight, fine. Do it but get a DEXA before and a DEXA after it. Then you’ll know.
Jay: Do you have any formulas for calorie calculations on maintenance, loss, gain?
Brad: Yeah. My general rules are usually based off of your circumferences. I just found that they are the easiest, best way to quickly assess a person, your waist circumference, your shoulder circumference. Then if you want to get really technical, you do neck and arms and legs, that kind of thing. But what I found so far is that the beginning of any diet and you’re heavy, you can go low. You can go and you handle low calories for a brief period of time. Then you taper them back up. You want to get to a point where you’re kind of maintaining.
Since I really don’t see a strong relationship between fat gain and muscle gain despite what everybody likes to say, so you eat absolutely as much as you can without getting fat and measure your waist. And if your waist is going up by an inch or two, that’s on a guy, again sort of average guy, average height, every inch of your waist expansion is about four or five pounds of fat. It just seems to kind of work out that way. So if you’ve gone up by two inches and you’ve gone up by seven or eight pounds in weight, that’s just fat. If you’ve gone up by two inches and you’ve gone up 20 pounds, I’m like okay, you might have done something special there, especially if like your arm or leg measurements have increased. You just keep going if that’s what you want.
But for most of us what will happen is you go up by seven pounds, your arms are the same, your neck is the same, your shoulders is the same and your waist is up two inches. Not cool. Not what you’re going for right. If you’re kind of into shape that’s not the shape you want, if you’re kind of into athletics, you know that’s extra weight you’re carrying. It’s not doing anything. So no matter which way you try to look at that problem, chances are it’s not ideal. So I go by that simple rule. You really eat as much as you can while you’re not gaining fat if you’re trying to gain muscle and then you just let your circumferences guide you along the way.
You can even build in a buffer. Let’s say you’re like I don’t care if I put on a little bit of fat so give yourself an inch or two. But if your waist goes up by three inches, you’re doing something not right. As a natural guy, that’s a lot of fat you just gained you’re eventually going to have to lose. I just hope you found the extra two or three pounds of muscle you’re looking for, for all that trouble.
Jay: And Brad, what about body fat distribution? Do you pay much attention to that in terms of recommending if someone should go higher or lower carb or higher and lower fat, where they store their body fat?
Brad: No. What I’ve watched is, especially from the days when we used to really track athletes is that the exact way they lose it is the exact way they put it back on, just reversed. It’s always kind of the same areas. Rarely do you get some sort of odd transformation. It just seems to be the same person to person.
Jay: So you don’t really believe in the theory that if they store fat in a certain area, its insulin resistance and they should lower their carbs. If they store it here, they should crank up their carbs.
Brad: I like the theory but then what I would be looking for is if that’s the case then if you fix the problem and gain weight, wouldn’t it go back different? If you were insulin resistant and that’s why you had let’s say subcutaneous belly fat and then you fix that but you kind of gained some weight but it was still fixed because you’re eating differently, it shouldn’t gain back there.
So I like the theory. I’m just caught on a couple of parts of it. So I’m not saying it’s wrong. I might be looking at the evidence in the wrong way but that’s generally how I’ve seen it. So since I haven’t seen anything remarkably cool on that, I still go with the kind of eat in whatever way allows you to lose weight. If you want to play with stuff as a guy and let’s say you’re 10% and your goal is to hit 8%, I’m going to go sub 10, that’s when you play because that’s when you know there’s a difference.
When you’re at 22% and like to get down to the point where I look kind of good and would like to hit 15%, dude, just get rid of the fat first. And then you start tweaking. I’m all for crazy experimentation in that final phase of fat loss. Do whatever it takes because every little bit you can tell. But if you’re coming down from 40% and trying to get down to 20%, I don’t think stressing over that stuff is as big of deal as getting your mind right.
Jay: And do you have any kind of general percentages you like for both fat loss and muscle gain? Where do you stand on carbs as a general ratio?
Brad: They just taste too good not to have them. I don’t track them. I track protein and then calories. Realistically, the carb to fat ratio in my diet is probably directly related to the carb to fat ratio in ice cream. That’s kind of how it plays out and then it’s augmented by whatever protein source I’m on till that week. That’s just what works for me. With the combination of fasting and then just making sure I get my protein in and then everything in the carbs and fats just comes from carbs and fats. Then I eat my vegetables and I have my broccoli and I like my coconut oil but there’s no spreadsheet anywhere in my house over what I ate or didn’t eat.
Again, that’s the same thing as I know I can get down to sub 10, 8 or 9. I’m not like a 6% shredded guy kicking around because I don’t have any need for that but I can get there eating any combo I like. I don’t really see a need to do anything different for me. Then a lot of people we work with can do similar. Again if someone is stuck, if you’re not getting the results you think you should be getting then play with stuff. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. There’s no need for that kind of intervention, this kind of approach where you’re always trying to fix something. Generally, your body knows how to lose fat. You just kind of got to get out of its way for a bit to do it. So that’s the approach I’d take.
Jay: And Brad, to back-track one second, we covered intermittent fasting but just give me maybe three to five bullet points on the benefits for those who don’t really know or haven’t read much about it?
Brad: Give me physiological or psychological? Go. Which one? Let’s start.
Jay: Let’s go physiological.
Brad: Physiological. The cool thing right away is what you do is you re-enter a fasted state metabolism which is a metabolism that’s dominated by using fat as your primary source of fuel. What happens when you’re fasted is that you have insulin going down, you have growth hormone coming up and you have free fatty acids being released from your body fat. There are no fuel sources coming in from your food because you’re done eating so the free fatty acids are released. What they do is they do two things. They spare your muscle from being used as a fuel because you have a fuel source. There’s no reason to break down one fuel source when you have another. It also preserves the glucose coming out of your liver glycogen for any area of your body that prefers to use glucose or because you all of a sudden ran up a flight of stairs or something. So it’s a metabolism based around using the fat you have on your body as a fuel source.
Then you finish fasting. The fat is still there. You’ve got to get rid of it, the taste a little bit and you get right back into sort of normal metabolism. What you’ve done is spent a considerable amount of time, more than you would in sort of any other state, just burning fat as a fuel to do your everyday normal stuff. You’re going grocery shopping, you’re burning fat. You’re sleeping, you’re burning fat. That’s what you’re doing. The sort of main benefit is you get that all out of the way in one time.
But while you’re burning fat, some other really cool things are happening. Mainly you’re not eating and digesting food. You’re taking a break from that whole process. Now as that’s happening, some of the things that happen when you eat are obviously kind of just cooling off. They’re hot when you’re eating. They’re busy. They’re doing work and that work sometimes causes inflammation and it sometimes causes sort of other issues going on. So you’re giving all of that mechanism a break or a rest. That’s happening.
Then at the same time, there is still the massive flux that happens in your body because your body is incredibly dynamic. Things are just always moving. The amino acid in my left bicep will eventually make it to my right thigh. Things just move around. So things are being broken down and they’re being built back up constantly, only now some of the stuff that’s being broken down is going to be used as fuel or just going to be gotten rid of. Well, we take things and then what your body does that’s really cool is it kind of looks at its inventory and it’s like that’s good, that’s good, that’s good, that thing’s broken. Let’s tear it down. Guys, let’s get this thing, tear it down and we’ll recycle the pieces that are good and get rid of the rest. That’s another thing happens while you’re fasting. It’s kind of maintenance recycling, that sort of thing.
In general, you have the fat burning which is what most people are interested in but then you have that kind of general health maintenance that tends to help out a lot people and is kind of the leading theory behind “Can fasting help you be healthier longer?” That’s sort of where that avenue comes from. Those are the main benefits I see from a physiological point of view.
Jay: Well, that was so good that now I’m going to have to ask you for the psychological.
Brad: Okay. This is my favorite part. Honestly, we focus on all the physical stuff because let’s face it, talking about hormones is cool. But I think the majority of the benefit from a lot of good fasting and proper diets comes psychologically. We eat. We all eat. We eat every day. We eat all day and we eat not really because we’re hungry but because we want food. It’s ingrained and we have habits. You take 24 hours off of those habits and you become really aware of what they are really quickly. So you know when you eat, why you eat, where you eat and who you eat with. You start realizing that every time I get in my car, I have to go get a coffee. If I’m just driving down the street to pick up my kid from a play date, I have to get a coffee and a donut. That’s weird. I don’t need that. You start to realize you have certain friends who are, “Dude, every time I go and hang out with Ferruggia, we to go with cheesecake. It’s ridiculous. He expects me to overeat.” Or you’ve got that one relative—
Jay: That’s true.
Brad: Yeah, it’s good times though. Good times. But yeah, you have that one relative that’s always kind of expecting you to be the big eater and you become really aware of why you eat and that’s really good because that’s something that even if you try fasting once or twice and you’re like, “Screw Pilon. This sucks. I’m never doing it again,” you can take that with you. You’d know. At least you’ve sort of realized that you’ve got some habits that are really ingrained you barely even know you’re doing it. It’s like walking to the kitchen and walking out with a handful of Cheerios even though you didn’t even know you had Cheerios. That happens to a lot of people. That’s one of the main benefits of fasting.
The other thing is there’s a very interesting carryover from, “Oh, if I don’t eat every two hours, I get hungry, irritable and grumpy.” Most people when I tell them about Eat. Stop. Eat. intermittent fasting, it’s always, “I could never do that. I have to eat every two hours or I get faint or I get hungry.”
Jay: Then you see me.
Brad: Yeah. Me, too. My girlfriend at the time used to carry around protein bars in her purse. Otherwise, I’d get pissy. So we’d go to a movie theater. Halfway through a movie, I’d have to get more M &Ms. It’s like I can’t make it. But once you’ve done a 24-hour fast you’re like I could have killed that. I nailed it. I can do this. It frees you up. So now you get rid of that feeling in the back of your head like okay, you’re a little bit hungry but lunch is late today; it’s not till three. Maybe I should grab a muffin to tide myself over because everybody knows that if I don’t eat from 1 to 3, if I don’t have this muffin, I may pass out. You get rid of that and use a bit more freedom to kind of wait for the good meals. I think that helps a lot, too. The final major benefit that I like about intermittent fasting– I’m going on my whole advocacy routine here.
Jay: No, I love it. I love it.
Brad: We’ve all dieted, right? The thing about a diet for a lot of people is it’s a slow march to inevitable failure. You’re going to mess that thing up eventually and when you do, it’s not like you’re like, “Oh, I messed up a bit today. Well, tomorrow I’ll be back on track.” You’re like, “Oh, it’s over. Screw it. I’m calling Domino’s. I am going to town.” You get that weird mentality like you’ve actually failed a year of school and you just found out you have to repeat. So you’re like screw it, I’m not a bender.
Whereas fasting, the thing I like about it is that if you accomplish it, whether the time was 12 hours, 16 or 24, whatever the case be, when you’re done, you’re done. You did it. Positive reinforcement. You’re like I can do this. I don’t have to do it anymore. I’ve got a couple of days off but when I have to do this again, I just did it before so I know I can do it again. You get a couple of those in a row and you’re like this is pretty cool.
Then you’re going to get that one day where you’re fasting and it sucks. You’ve got a headache or just work sucks, you’re stuck in traffic but if you’ve got three or four days of positive reinforcement, you’re like I can make it through this. The fasting didn’t give me a headache. The fact that I’m just pissed off today is what’s giving me a headache and I’ve got a couple more hours to go. I can do this. So it kind of gives you that positive reinforcement to keep going as opposed to the, “Oh Pilon, here you go again, screwing on a diet. Let’s go get that Boston cream pie and just destroy it.” You get in that mindset where you’ve failed a couple of times so that’s what’s going to happen next. I like that positive reinforcement better.
Jay: And Brad, on the flipside, is there any situation which let’s say someone has super high cortisol, their stress hormones are out of control, they can’t sleep, maybe their resting body temperature is 95.6, is there a situation you wouldn’t recommend it?
Brad: All of those. Don’t fast at all of those. The thing is it’s transient. It’s not like you wake up one day and you’re like I’m exhausted. I’ve just been going a little too hard now. I guess I can never fast ever again.
Jay: Well but no, I’m saying how about this? Someone comes to you and they’ve never even heard of intermittent fasting. They’re eating breakfast, lunch and dinner but they come to you with that whole scenario.
Brad: That’s a bit tricky because you have a couple of things in. For instance if they’re in that scenario but they’re just very overweight, those things may just be indicators of the fact their body is just not cool with how overweight they are. But if they’re not, typically that kind of reminds you of the year your fitness to average person who has just got way too much else going on in their life and that’s kind of when you’re like fasting is the stress, like everything else. Training is a stress. Fasting is a stress. That’s why it works. If it wasn’t a stress, it would be inert and wouldn’t be doing anything.
So there are a lot of people out there where what you do not need right now is adding more stress into your life. You can tell. There’s a difference between being tired and being exhausted, being just angry because you hate your job or being truly exhausted, and being lazy because that exists too and just being exhausted. When you look at someone, you’re like, no, dude, there’s nothing left. That’s when you don’t do that.
It’s the same thing if you saw the exact same person, you’re not like, “Okay, what you need to do is race me in a five-mile race and just give it your all. Let’s just go.” You don’t do that to people. You’ve got to work with people. So Eat. Stop. Eat. is written as a kind of a book for the internet where I don’t get to really work with anybody one-on-one. But yeah, you can certainly think of hundreds of reasons why there are certain times when certain people shouldn’t fast. Even people who have been fasting for years, you look at them and be like wow. You’re going through a divorce and someone’s foreclosing on your house and you’re crazy stressed out and maybe this should be when you take some time off. Or at the same time though, if they’re handling the fasting and it’s what’s keeping them going, maybe they shouldn’t. So you really do have to play by ear for lack of better terms but yeah, absolutely, there are always going to be reasons why, circumstances that you shouldn’t fast.
Jay: Hey guys, please be sure to check out RenegadeRoastingCo.com and use the coupon code JFS at checkout to save 25% off your first order. That’s JFS as in The Jay Ferruggia Show. At Renegade Roasting Co., we use the highest quality beans to fuel your performance in the weight room and in the boardroom and maybe even in the bedroom. I don’t know, maybe. It depends on how you guys get down. Anyway that is the end of Part 1 with Brad Pilon. I hope you guys liked it and we’re going to be back on Friday with Part 2. I will talk to you then.
