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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Hello, everyone. Good morning. Welcome back to the one day at a time podcast. And for God's sake, take it seriously because you've had a weekend. It's summertime.
Speaker 1:You've had too many mimosas, too many mojitos. Maybe you've had a takeaway, maybe eaten too much chocolate, maybe you've been fine. Maybe you haven't moved all weekend and maybe you've had 40,000 steps. It can vary. But at the end of the day, it's a new day today.
Speaker 1:Well, that's gold wisdom, guys. Of course, it's a new day at the end of the day. Sound like someone off Love Island, but every every scene is that. But take it seriously, honestly, because there's one of my favorite poems is If by Ruqar Kippling, and it says, treat triumph and disaster as two impostors, they're just the same. So you can be on a high and have an amazing weekend, you smash there and you can have a super low weekend, think you've got miles away.
Speaker 1:None of them are strictly true in a sense like you're not accelerating everything at a crazy high level because you've had an amazing weekend and because you've had a weekend you're not at the basement low when it's game over. That's not true. You're somewhere in the middle. And as long as you turn up today and try and get close to your targets, it's roll on happy days because it's not one day that makes a success of things, it's the accumulation of things, your weekly averages over time, over months and all that stuff. So please, one day at a time, fresh leaf today.
Speaker 1:But two studies I want to talk about today, and they've come up in the community a lot and these type of topics, I want to cover them more just in a sense of helping you guys understand there, making sure you folks are most important and all that stuff. So there's a recent study, it's an interesting one, because it looked at how exercise improves your fat quality. Now what the hell does that mean? Fat quality, I don't want any fat, get it off me. That's what people might think.
Speaker 1:But there is some in the change in exercise. So there's a study, they recruited healthy but sedentary female participants in their 20s and 30s. The average BMI was twenty seven with 41% body fat. And the experiment started with single exercise sessions, sixty minutes of stationary cycling at 60% of VO2 max. A day later they would look at the biopsy of the subcutaneous abdominal fat.
Speaker 1:They do three weeks, they did steady state, and three weeks they do high intensity interval training. So they trained a lot, six times a week. Yeah, so twenty years ago it would have been shocking to read that if you train six times a week it wouldn't do anything for your fat mass, and people would go, No way, cardio is king, you lose loads of fat if you do cardio. But today we can't we we we were probably surprised the same because there weren't any changes in fat or lean tissue in the in the study's duration. So six x six sessions a week of decent volume.
Speaker 1:Three of them were high intensity interval training, three were LISS, as it's called, but there was no fat loss in this study because that is determined by a deficit. So you can do all the cardio you want, doesn't mean you're going to be burning more energy at the end of the week because we've got something called energy compensation, which means hello, you do a workout, then you're on a couch all day because you're not good, that is compensating for what you've just did, and at the end of the day then your average calorie intake or average energy expenditure is the same as if you didn't do it because maybe you would have been out and about more for three or four hours but the training has knocked that out of your day and you've been on the couch for three hours. Does that make sense? Or you just move less fidgety. So we're not saying exercise is the answer to phallos.
Speaker 1:Exercise is amazing for loads of other things, but don't be surprised if you do start training six times a week and you haven't tracked your calories and your protein and stuff like that and your steps and you go, Why am I not losing weight? Don't be surprised if you don't because it doesn't happen that way. Anyway, that's not the purpose of this study. What they wanted to find was the positives of doing exercise without fat loss. What happens to the fat cells even if you did exercise but you didn't lose fat?
Speaker 1:So there were significant improvements in their maximum aerobic power, which is good, with an increase in their muscle creatine recovery rate, improved ability to generate energy to cellular level. And the most novel interesting finding was that exercise induced changes in fifteen twenty seven genes. About 40% of those genes were upregulated while the rest were downregulated. And some of the downregulated genes are involved in inflammation. Now we know that doing exercise helps reduce inflammation and we know that having excess body fat increases inflammation.
Speaker 1:But this has given us an unknown pathway in the study basically, like a mechanism that exercise changes the behavior of inflammation related genes and by extension improves your health. So upregulated genes in the study were included with some stuff like an increase in fat turnover, so both storing fat and actually breaking it down and actually using it for energy and then fat coming back into being stored. So this turnover was increased. So think of it as like you've got fat cells there for months and years that are stale and they're just rotting away and it's not nice when you do any exercise. But if you did exercise, yeah, you're not going to lose total fat cells, but they're moving more, they're in and out, and they come in fresh and they come in with more mitochondria, and they come in in a really more of a healthy fat cell state, they're fresh, new arrivals, do know what mean?
Speaker 1:Or they've gone on holiday and come back and feel better. It just makes everything a bit better. So fat cells aren't just about like, let's lose them. Like, do an exercise, move in, exercise doesn't have to be cardio on the bike or high intensity interval training. We know that exercise in general, can do fast walking, slow to fast walking, or just general walking with a bit of pace behind it, like whatever exercise you enjoy doing is gonna help this turnover.
Speaker 1:So there's good news here where you feel like, okay, maybe I haven't lost any fat, and that could be down to water retention most of the time, but doing some movement helps things move around. We all know this deep down, being still, sleeping on the couch for months on end, you will become the couch, you will be rotting away. If you get up, move about all day, come around, go around outside, back to the shop, up, things are moving. Moving is good. Nature moves.
Speaker 1:Do know what I mean? Let's move along, and I think it's bad for us. So, yeah, there's, you know, the old saying, you know, about eating tasty food. They say ten seconds on the lips, lifetime on the hips. Know, it's nonsense.
Speaker 1:Obviously, nonsense. But it doesn't really concern us so much for like, I'm maintaining my body fat. Maintenance, for example, with Power Power System obviously we say calorie deficit, we've the protein and we've the steps, and steps is activity, then exercise is more of a time slot of activity, like I've done thirty to forty minutes of exercise, and I suggest resistance training frequently on this podcast, whether that's lifting weights, using your body weight to do squats, push off a wall, whatever, any resistance against muscle is resistance training backed by law research. And then I spoke about once this Japanese walking method, you do three minutes normal walking, three minutes push the pace, bit fast walking, again that's a good exercise to do. Even if you're at maintenance guys, even if you're like to know us Scott, I got so many social plans every weekend and I can't get out of them and I'm drinking and I enjoy myself and my weight is stable but I want to lose fat.
Speaker 1:Sometimes we don't need to be doing fat loss to improve our health because all of those behaviors are improving our health. Now we know with this new study that this kind of turnover of fat cells, even though we're not losing them, getting them moving, being active, is going to help us. We know being active helps our mental health. We know that doing stuff to maintain muscle mass and we don't lose muscle mass in the long term means your cognition is going to be better place. You're going to have better performance there.
Speaker 1:So all of this stuff is super important. So your goal is not to always be losing fat. The goal is total health so you can live the life you want to have one. Like what are you doing this for? We're not on this journey to be losing fat every single week because life is not that way.
Speaker 1:At the end of the year you can look back and say I lost fat mass twenty five weeks of the year, I maintained fat mass for twenty weeks of the year and then the last ten weeks if I've added up properly, whatever, I actually gained a bit. Wow, that is life, bamboo. You're not rigid like an oak tree, you are flexible like a bamboo and sometimes we make some gains in our fat, can't even say the word. See, this will happen when you learn Welsh first in English. Repository.
Speaker 1:Repo. Repository. Can't say it. You know what I mean. We look at it totally, you know, like flexible.
Speaker 1:We're not there's a lot of wins we can have without fat loss, please. We have to understand this. We have to get out of the diet culture conditioning because it's not good for us. It's not good. Insane fat loss with insane fat gain, rinse, repeat with muscle loss.
Speaker 1:No way, Jose, stop doing that stuff. Let's gradually improve our health over time while enjoying our lives and really getting your life back because a lot of you are still listening to people like Stephen Bartlett talking nonsense to other people going on his podcasts, and he brings on sensationalists who have built careers on one specific thing and they don't let go of it even in the face of so many studies and the consensus is against them, but because it sounds right in places, it's easier to sell, sell the books, and people believe them, and then they go down the wrong rabbit hole. You say, well, Scott, maybe you're all the same as him. You know, saying the same shit. He's saying shit.
Speaker 1:Well, who do I know to trust? And here's the thing. If you look at the research and you look at actually the randomized controlled trials and you look at all of our stuff, the conclusion is obvious. There is no, is it still the carbohydrate model of obesity that works or is it actually the energy balance model? Which one is actually true?
Speaker 1:Look at the research, look at it. It's all energy balance it comes down to. There's so much studies done on this. Energy deficit with the same protein, no matter what mix carbs and fats, same fat loss results. Metabolic ward studies, literally people stuck in a metabolic ward, eating exactly what the scientists have given them, and they're tracking every piece of energy expenditure coming out of them.
Speaker 1:They tried to do it, increase their carbohydrate intake to huge levels, but kept them in a deficit. They still lost fat. If the carbohydrate model of obesity was true, there would always be fat gain even in a deficit with a huge amount of carbohydrate intake. That would be shown in these studies, but it's not. So then they go, ah, no, these studies come on, there's too much now.
Speaker 1:There's too much. Go back one hundred years ago, you could have fooled us. But even one hundred years ago, 1918, Lulu Peters came up with a book, one of the first on calorie deficits, and was like, listen, grow up like. You've had 350 calories of pie, no problem. You can eat pie, you can eat sausages, whatever, but just understand the energy you're putting in.
Speaker 1:You need to eat less energy than you burn, and you will lose fat. And it was a revolution. So two, three million copies, off we went. It was correct. And then in between then and now, it has been complete nonsense in people's years and in the through video format, and these people are trying to sell you something that sounds right.
Speaker 1:What's the difference between what I'm saying here? I'm saying it's based on the research, but it's based on all of it. And also what I'm saying is there's nothing on top of the calories protein steps, I'm just making it easy for you to actually track those key things, that's it. There's no fancy system on top. When we launch our LeanShield score for example, LeanShield score is a way to be able to determine how much muscle you're going to be losing over the next six months based on your calories, protein steps and resistance training.
Speaker 1:Again, it's grounded on the principles and it's going give you a score based on what the research says you're likely to lose in terms of fat and muscle if you carried on with the same week as you just had. And that's as far as we go and we want to make it simpler for you to understand. The goal is fat loss, not weight loss, so no celebration party for losing 100 pounds when 40 pounds is muscle only in tissue, there's no celebration there in my view, that is a disaster. So let's be careful. Anyway, I don't want to keep you going for longer, just want to cover one study quick and it's basically how much protein do you need when losing fat, They looked at laws of strength training journals and all that stuff and basically they came to the conclusion there's a linear dose response relationship, which means the more protein you consume in a deficit, the higher the chance you're going to lose more just fat, not muscle.
Speaker 1:In these studies they've shown that you have to eat a proper high amount, like three grams of protein per kilogram, which is higher than what you're on in the app, but I think the diminishing returns happen from the protein requirements you're given in the app up until this, so there's a few different studies in terms of the right zone, but if you want to make absolute certainty that you're not losing muscle in a deficit, make sure that protein target is hit in the app and you can go over your protein target by as much as you want. You want to make sure you're coming close to your calorie target because if your deficit is too large, there's a higher risk of you losing muscle, so the deficit you're given is safe, right, is what's safe zone. And then if you can add resistance training once or twice a week, you are doing what is needed to maintain your muscle whilst losing fat. So hope that was an interesting podcast. Covered a few key things again.
Speaker 1:Might get boring listening to it, but I think it's a good reminder. But another important reminder, again, is one day at a time. So have a good day. Stay off the big bad web. Spend your precious mental energy on just having a good day, being a good person, eating in moderation, getting your steps in, taking the sun in.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, if it's there, just appreciating all the small stuff, and trust me, you will be a far better place than stressing out three hours a night watching YouTube videos and podcasts on God knows what rabbit hole they'll take you down based on junk, opinions, basically. So that's it. Have a good day. Speak to you all tomorrow.