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Hello and welcome back to the show.
My name is Patrick here with just a quick introduction.
We've got something for fun, a little bit different.
We haven't in fact done this, I think once before, but I'm gonna take a couple conversations that I've had recently on another podcast of mine called the Consistency Project Podcast that I do alongside our friend, your friend, everybody's friend, EC.
Sienkowski.
What we've got this time around is E.C.'
's take on a couple different things that either you'll know of because we've talked about it here on the show, or you'll know about it because you're alive in the year of 2025.
The first episode that we're going to listen to today is EC's five lessons from Michael Easter, say that fast, EC and Easter's. uh michael easter's the comfort crisis which is a book that ben and i have talked about before we both recommend we both love all about why modern life has made everything feel harder than it should and what we can do about it then in the second half of our episode today we're going to unpack ec's five insights from netflix recent documentary on the biggest loser revealing why weight loss maintenance is so much harder than we think if you've ever wondered why the easy path rarely leads to results you want or why lasting change seems so elusive These couple conversations will give you some frameworks to think differently about challenge, comfort, and what it really takes to create lasting transformation.
Before we jump into the first one, which is going to be all about the comfort crisis, a quick little plug for EC.
She's being kind enough to let me share these episodes with you here on Chasing Excellence.
I want to return the favor and let you know, and I'm actually going to do you a favor as well.
I'm going to let you know that she's running her last masterclass of 2025.
It's starting September 8th, so just around the corner.
If you don't know about EC's masterclass, it's a science-backed nutrition approach that sets the top 1 of fitness enthusiasts apart from everybody else.
You'll get that performance edge in just 30 days with a personalized nutrition plan.
EC calls it your forever plan.
I highly recommend it.
I've been working with EC for a long time.
If you've ever had questions about nutrition, if you've ever thought I've really got to get this thing figured out, I cannot recommend EC, her approach and her masterclass, as well as her Three Pillars Method app.
I just think she's figured it out.
And I just want more people to know that.
So I'm letting you know, check it out.
OptimizeMeNutrition.com.
Okay, let us get into the first of these two conversations that we're going to have today.
First one all about Michael Easter's The Comfort Crisis.
We're gonna do top five lessons or your top five lessons from The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter.
Yes.
Yeah, one of the coaches in my most recent kind of masterclass group was like oh my gosh, your nutrition stuff falls really in line with the comfort crisis.
And I, of course, knew of the book, but I hadn't read it.
I knew generally the premise was like, we're too comfortable.
But I actually didn't-
You're like, okay, I think I understand.
But I really thought it was going to be mostly just more like mental resilience and mental toughness.
I didn't think there was going to be as much as there was on nutrition, which was really interesting.
And even fitness.
Like, I don't know why I didn't think there'd be more.
But yeah, it was a really nice kind of almost surprise.
Like when people are asking for what's a good nutrition book.
I'm like I might actually just recommend The Comfort Crisis.
Yeah.
I remember when I read it, I think I texted you.
I asked if you had read it before, because again.
Yeah, you did.
And I didn't pick up on like, why is he asking?
Cool.
So I actually do like this book.
I think I picked up rucking from this book.
Like this book was the first one to be like, oh, maybe I should actually try that.
So rucking and some good nutrition stuff.
Anyways, I recommend it.
So shall we just dive into some lessons?
Yeah.
Okay, cool.
So lesson number one that you've got is you're too comfortable.
Kind of already teased at this one.
So I'm going to read a little bit of quotes from page 15.
The modern comforts and conveniences that now most influence our daily experience.
Cars computers television, climate control smartphones, ultra-processed foods and more have been used by our species for about 100 years or less.
That's around 0.03% of the time we've walked the earth.
Constant comfort is a radically new thing for us humans.
Okay, and then this, continuing on page 2122, problem or comfort creep, explains that as we experience fewer problems, we don't become more satisfied.
We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem.
We end up with the same number of problems, except our new problems are progressively more hollow.
And it's why many people can find an issue in nearly any situation.
I remember highlighting that section to that last bit.
So why is that a lesson?
Yeah, yeah.
And before I get started here, this one when I was like doing the notes for this, I was like, Oh my God, this is just gonna be ranty.
It's just gonna be a ranty podcast.
But I do want to just kind of caveat this with I'm aware that I'm guilty of these things, too.
This isn't like, Oh, gosh, everybody's doing everything.
Yeah, he's never been in a car before.
Yeah, I've never suffered from the comfort crisis right now.
I totally am here in the same boat.
But here we go.
But yeah, I mean I do think we consider what we have.
Problems or difficulties today would be super mild inconveniences historically.
And as tired and as stressed out as many of us are or I guess all of us are I don't think any of us would trade our lives for the paleo era.
I don't even think any of us would trade our lives for like the early 1900s, right?
Historically, I think we have a bit more kind of life and death stress.
I think a lot of our stress right now is more perceived stress or maybe even social stress, kind of keeping up with the Joneses type of social stress.
And I think what's difficult about this problem creep or comfort creep and he mentions this later in that section is that we aren't really good at noticing that it's happening to us, because it turns out that we're really adaptable creatures.
We can adapt to some very austere environments, which I know I'm gonna hammer on, but we can also adapt to becoming very, very comfortable.
And the real problem with this is that virtually everything that we want is on the opposite side of easy.
You know, a wildly successful career.
Well, you know, the running joke is it takes 10 years to become an overnight success.
You know, good relationships.
It's continual effort on both sides.
Talk to any like successful marriage, right?
A 50 year marriage.
It wasn't always easy.
Weight loss.
You got to change your habits.
You can't take a quick pill.
We talk about all the time.
So to me it's like the more and more comfortable we get, the more these really attainable goals just slip out of reach for us.
And it's kind of a bummer because it's not that we're actually physically incapable of doing them.
Instead, it's just this really wide chasm mentally for us that has become too great for us to be able to stick to.
Like we feel like it's too hard, so we don't start or we just quit too soon into the process.
And I was thinking about this.
I was like, okay, well, great.
What's the fix?
What's the fix?
I mean, that's sort of the whole premise of his book is he suggests the fix.
And I don't really have a quick fix for this.
But I do think I agree with him that doing hard things is how you can also reset your perspective on a lot of what is hard.
And I also think, besides just, you know, going out and doing rocks in the heat or going out to Alaska and doing all this stuff that he did for hunting, I think even just starting by calling yourself out a little bit, or at least recognizing this is happening, is a good first step.
And I get it.
There's a balance that if you just kind of call yourself out all the time, you tell yourself you're too weak and you're too wimpy and you just need to toughen up.
Like that's not also always super healthy.
We do have to take the time and celebrate small wins and realize that things are going to take place longer than perhaps we want.
But I do think we have to kind of call ourselves out a little bit and like eating healthy really isn't that hard when our grocery store has ready-made chicken breast, bag salads, pre-cut fruit, pre-portioned nuts you know what I mean.
Like going to the gym and doing a 30-minute workout in a climate, controlled environment on a machine is really not that hard.
And again, I don't want to put down people's efforts in getting started, but I think we kind of just have to reality check ourselves about what we're considering hard and And anytime you kind of hear that chatter in your mind as oh, this is too hard or this is too difficult, almost kind of lean into it because that's going to get the results that you're actually really seeking.
That's where the results are.
Yeah.
In the book the sort of the big through line is.
He goes on what he calls this Masogi, which is, as you alluded to, like a multi-week backpacking hunting trip in the woods of Alaska.
And I think one of the easiest things to do after reading the book or reading about his particular story of a Masogi is to be like oh, I can't do that.
That's too hard.
That's too much.
I don't have six weeks to go wander through the woods in the hope of killing a caribou.
Right.
But I love your point which is like let's just start to be a little bit more aware of when things get hard and we complain about the thing getting a little bit hard, and just raising the awareness of OK well, it's not really that hard.
It's a little bit hard.
It's a little bit uncomfortable.
I maybe would prefer to be easier.
But like, let's not, let's not fully back away from this difficulty simply because it's it's putting me out of my comfort zone a little bit.
Totally.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't foresee myself going to the back country of Alaska for a caribou hunt.
So, right.
You know, I can see where that could get a little extreme.
It's not like a light switch.
Yeah, it's not like a light switch where it's like if you can't do that, well then throw the book away.
But it's actually just like, OK, what is realistic for me in my life?
Like, where is the hard, to your point, that we can lean into instead of lean away from?
And if we could just find those little areas, I think it could make a huge difference.
Mm-hmm totally yeah cool, all right.
Lesson two you're worried about things that don't matter.
He talks about the hazda tribe in tanzania, a tribe of hunter-gatherers that live similarly to our earliest ancestors, and this is from page 60 in this quote.
The has to exercise 14 times more than the average american.
They move fast and hard.
About two hours and 20 minutes a day early.
Humans would walk or run miles and miles for water and food.
We chased and tracked the animal for miles and miles until it toppled over from heat exhaustion.
And then, much later, he comes back to this notion of persistence.
Hunts of the Kalahari Bushmen in South Africa.
And this is from page 224.
Persistent hunts required the Bushmen to run an average of nine minutes 40 per mile paces across more than 20 miles of rugged sandy terrain in 107 degree Fahrenheit weather.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean just reading.
I loved all the description of kind of what our ancestors would have to do just to live.
Reading these numbers of miles and miles and I mean 20 miles of rugged, sandy terrain running in 107 degree Fahrenheit, like just to go kill an animal and i couldn't just keep pausing while reading it and think about all the focus we have on people making sure that they're hydrated.
You know, in our day-to-day life, like we're drinking electrolytes in the summer while we live in mostly climate controlled environments, you know, and we're carrying our stanley mugs or whatever the trendy mug is, that one might be out of fashion.
Something else is probably in, you know, not leaving the house without our stanley mug or whatever for an errand, because we want to make sure that we're hydrated And like, hopefully it's just a reality check that makes you step back and see that like we're just living in this really society of consumerism.
I don't even want to blame people for it.
There's so many experts out there telling you need this stuff.
And so it's more annoyance, that kind of the.
I don't know the culture of the experts around consumerism and all of that stuff.
But literally, we're coming up with problems, problems in quotes that are not problems.
The overwhelming vast majority of situations do not need intricate hydration or fueling strategies.
I mean, you think the Kalahari Bushmen were like carrying mugs of salty water?
Like, I just can't even like, you know, obviously keep a straight face with it.
And it does tie into kind of that first lesson that you know what was what once was considered easy starts to seem harder and harder as we continue to get more comfortable.
And this is something that I try to point out all the time.
I do this as well, in kind of my masterclass, that is, we were as fragile as needing all of these perfect intervals of hydration and fuel timings and eating these foods together and don't miss this fueling, and never be slightly dehydrated we never would exist on the planet today as a species.
We would have died off so long ago because of all of the austere conditions that we had to live through.
Now, two things that I kind of want to bring up.
First of all, just because we had some of our ancestors go on persistent hunts for 20 miles plus without perfect hydration and fueling and they lived, of course, to tell the tale it doesn't mean that that's optimal for performance today.
So maybe our ancestors, instead of running 940 minute miles, could have run 845 miles with ideal fueling strategies, right?
So, the point being that I still am on board with the idea that top end performance does require top end nutrition strategies.
But I think a lot of us tend to gravitate towards that stuff when we don't really need it, when the magic is going to be in, working harder than necessarily, like making sure my timing of of water is essential, especially again when we are not doing really endurance efforts, as we've talked about before.
The second point I want to bring up is just because our ancestors did these persistence hunts and lived to tell the tale, it doesn't mean that you are ready to do this tomorrow.
Yes, we are very resilient creatures, but you, me and most people listening to this would die if they actually tried to do the persistence hunt from heat exhaustion, as actually one of the guys he talked to tried to do.
So Patrick, no persistent hunts for you tomorrow, okay?
Not today, okay.
Not tomorrow.
Yes, we are highly adaptable creatures, but we need to, keyword there, adapt.
So we're not going to go from a three mile run in kind of an air conditioned, climate controlled gym to trying to do a persistence hunts 107 degree heat.
We have to kind of go through this gradually.
But yeah, I mean, the point is we can get adapted to some weather. really insane challenges.
And again, most people are regular exercisers, even pursuing very high level athleticism.
Do not need specific fueling or hydration strategies.
Don't really need any specific diets.
We don't really need any basics beyond getting enough total quantity and quality each day, which is not even what our ancestors had.
To be perfectly honest and look at what they were able to accomplish.
And so it seems as though, with all of our comforts, in some ways I feel like we've almost made it harder, And again it's.
I don't know that we have it's kind of the consumerism and the influencer kind of culture, but we have all these beliefs that this is really hard and nuanced to do, this nutrition and fitness thing.
When in reality, it's really simple and basic and you're much tougher than you think.
I always laugh because we don't send our kids anywhere without a bottle of water.
And I just laugh because one, it's just funny.
But two, I don't remember ever being handed a glass of water when I was a kid.
And now we've got this generation of kids who literally can't function without their little water bottle everywhere.
Totally.
I was thinking about that actually with phones.
I mean it's like I'll go back and get my phone and be at how many years did I live without doing that right?
It's just, it's the same thing.
I mean, and I don't think it's the end of the world, right, to send your kids with water bottles.
But I think you know, again we catch ourselves trying to do all these bajillion different things to quote optimize fitness and wellness when in reality it's like no, you just need to work harder and more consistent at it.
All right.
Lesson number three, it'll be hard, but worth it.
This is from page 40.
Modern humans may have an unmet need to do what's truly difficult for us.
New research shows that depression, anxiety and feeling like you don't belong can be linked to being untested.
Yeah, so I guess I should say a caveat.
I didn't go and look up all of the supporting research to verify what he's saying.
I just sort of liked some themes and I'm bringing them forward for discussion.
So I did not go and check all of the research on this.
But I do think that there's something here.
And I do think that a lot of our problems are these byproducts of modern comforts.
And it sort of ties into that first lesson, of course, that we can basically find an issue in any situation.
And that's not a good thing, because we're just creating problems instead of really conquering them.
We're just creating more objections and excuses than having any sort of progress.
Now I want to be clear.
I'm not trying to replace all therapy for mental health issues with persistence hunts.
But I do think it's pretty interesting to think about how capable we are, as I just sort of mentioned, in terms of physical prowess, how adaptable we are and even how smart we are as a species, of course, relative to other species.
And so I do think it seems very natural to understand why mental health issues arise from kind of endless scrolling on social media or a day of just only Netflix, right.
We have this incredible potential to do all these really cool things and we just sort of mindlessly give it away.
You know, when we look around too, we love the hero's journey in movies or media.
The hero leaves behind his known and takes on these considerable trials and tribulations to overcome and returns this kind of changed person right.
We love the story of the underdog.
The little guy pulls off this big, unexpected upset.
And when people think about anything that they're truly proud of, it usually is associated with some level of hard work.
It wasn't, you know, I was top of my class, but I cheated all the way through.
Type of thing.
So there does seem to be this like natural inherent drive and wanting and wiring to be tested.
And I think just knowing how capable of a species we are, it sort of makes sense that we really want that challenge.
So I do think this is highly related to that first lesson of just we're just too comfortable, but I think the silver lining here is that it's worth it.
Like we're wired for this.
We've got this incredible breadth and depth to be tested and the payoff is, while not immediate, is going to be worth it.
And it's not just worth it in the sense of I got fitter or I got healthier, but I think it also again resets our expectations around what is a problem.
And, to tie this into a little bit, remind me a lot of what Greg Glassman said about CrossFit.
And that is the greatest adaptation is between the ears.
And I think it's really true that you know doing something like CrossFit, forcing yourself to do something challenging each day, really does pay off in other areas of your life.
That yeah, maybe we don't need to have the level of fitness of i don't know, hundreds and hundreds of pull-ups and running five-minute miles, but exposing yourself to that challenge or difficulty each day starts to reset what's difficult in your life.
I mean, once you get through fran or murph, you're like okay, i can, you know, make a healthy meal for dinner and all of that stuff.
So i guess the irony here is that challenging yourself can actually reduce your problems overall.
I think Yeah.
Lesson number four, why are you eating?
Okay, cool.
We're getting into some of the nutrition stuff.
I was wondering when that was coming.
I know.
And this is discussing the difference between real hunger versus reward hunger from page 150.
Comfort food and stress eating are common American vernacular and studies show that real hunger now drives just 20 of eating.
The researchers found that when people do eat for reasons other than real hunger, they're far more likely to binge past fulfillment and into a dazed and doughy state of psychic sedation.
There's a sentence for you.
And then continuing on to page 164 rarely feeling real hunger is a strong sign that a person is suffering from the ill effects of comfort creep.
And then page 169.
We must recognize that occasionally going without food up to 24 hours is a normal and even beneficial human state.
Yeah.
And I do think Lesson two does kind of get to nutrition as well.
I mean, I know I kind of highlighted in terms of hydration, but I think our fueling concerns are just, we're worrying about things that do not matter.
But this one, I think, because I get so many questions about how do you deal with emotional eating and how do you deal with stress eating.
And I was like wow, this is like one of these big takeaways that I think is super simple and people can really adopt in their daily lives.
But I think that was a pretty crazy stat that you just sort of said there.
That real hunger, you know the physiological need to eat something, to have enough energy around to power your heartbeat and to keep breathing only drives 20 of our eating.
So in other words, most of the time that we're eating, we're not eating because we have to.
It's simply because we want to, to feel better, because it's there, because it's that time of day.
It's a distraction, whatever it is.
And so I think this is one of the reasons why weighing and measuring your food is so powerful.
It makes you stop and slow down the eating process and you'll often catch yourself eating this food for no real reason except it was there.
It was the time of day I like to eat.
I didn't want to answer that email, whatever it might be.
And so I find a lot of times and this is actually a big part of my Three Pillars Method process is we don't even start with targets.
We just start with logging once we get to weighing and measuring all of our food, because we're really looking at awareness and behavior around food.
And so I think this kind of asking yourself why are you eating is another layer to bring that besides just the logging, but just to literally stop and ask yourself, why am I eating?
And if you can really pause long enough to truly be able to answer that question beyond just oh, because I want to, you're probably going to be able to start changing the behavior, which is where kind of the magic is.
Because in those moments when you're just kind of eating to feel good, you're going to overeat, as that quote mentioned, and it's going to be more beneficial to try to find another behavior instead of just kind of trying to compensate for that feeling.
And when you think about it, like anything else that you do is going to be more productive.
Like, if you're eating because you're bored, I'm sure there's something else that you can do in your house.
That needs to be done, right.
Or if you're eating because you're procrastinating, like again, find something else.
Maybe you don't want to answer that email.
Maybe you don't want to start on that next project, but I don't know, maybe there's laundry to be done.
Maybe you're eating because you're sad, like journal go for a walk, call a friend, something like that.
All of these other behaviors that you can just start doing if you pause long enough to say why am I eating are going to be far more productive in the long term than just kind of sitting down, opening the bag of chips and then eating way too much.
You're When you do any of those things, then eating the bag of chips, it's only in that first initial moment to get that dopamine high that the eating the bag of chips feels better.
And so I think a lot of this comes down to kind of understanding delayed gratification.
And I understand that in our lifestyle, the more Amazon Prime it becomes and the more instant notifications on everything, the harder and harder it is for people to seek this.
But I do think that simple pause when you walk into the kitchen of why am I eating, can be a great place to change this behavior around food, around emotional eating, around stress eating.
And then that second part that i really liked is to actually start to feel hunger now.
Again, disclaimer just like we're not going to go on a persistent hunt tomorrow, we're also not going to just start fasting for 24 hours, even though i think many of us would be fine, like a lot of us have jobs that we have to get through, kids to take care of.
Let's not just jump into a 24-hour fast, but maybe what we can do is just start skipping an afternoon snack and just sort of see if we can eat three meals like that, because hunger is a normal and real feeling.
It's okay to be hungry.
And that was one of the things that I really liked about when I was into intermittent fasting and probably should bring it back a little bit.
It wasn't that I felt like I had this secret to longevity, or it wasn't that I got this quick weight loss thing, but it was just like yeah, I'm hungry.
And guess what?
You missed that meal.
It's not a big deal.
You'll have food at the next meal and you can kind of go on.
And so it's just another one of these things that I think.
I don't know whether or not it's our experts or our creature comforts or whatever.
We've convinced ourselves that we need to like perfectly, space our protein and we're going to lose all of our muscle mass.
You know, and it's okay.
You can be hungry.
You're not going to wither away.
You'll be just fine.
And so the two kind of lessons here are like stop and ask why am I eating, and learn to be slightly hungry.
And I think those are some really great takeaways that can result in huge changes in people's weight, health and fitness goals.
Yeah.
A couple things.
One.
I think that learning to feel hungry, I think, is really valuable, because there will be times in our lives when we're just busy and the options we would maybe say like hey, I would prefer that, but it's not here, aren't there right?
You're at an airport, you can't find anything.
You're on a road trip, you'd stop at a gas station.
There's nothing there, even though both of those environments now have a lot more than certainly they did 10 years ago.
But my point is Learning to say like I don't have to make the choice between being miserable and hungry and eating six Twinkie bars, because it's the only option I've got.
If you learn that you're going to be okay when you're hungry, you can say, you know what?
I just don't have an option right now.
I'm just going to be hungry for a couple hours and I'm going to be fine.
And I'm not going to make everybody around me's lives miserable because I'm hangry for two hours.
Like I can do this.
I've done it before.
It's not a big deal.
So I do think that is really a useful lesson worth learning at least a little bit in our lives.
And then the second thing is actually a question.
The 20 stat that we started with that little quote, is that the 20 of the like literally, if we were to add up the minutes in which we are eating, only 20 of those minutes really are feeding that real hunger factor.
And all the other minutes are just like.
Whatever it is stress eating boredom eating, eating because it's there.
It's not like.
It's certainly not 20 percent of calories or 20 percent of the nutrients we're getting.
And then the rest of it is sort of boredom.
I interpret it as the number of times we eat per day.
Okay.
So let's say, somebody that ends up putting food in their mouth at nine different times, independent times during the day, that we probably only need two to three of those.
Got it.
That's how I interpret it, not based on calories.
But this is a great example of where I didn't actually go and pull the research to see what the 20 was.
But I do want to go back to your other point about getting to be hungry.
I think...
I mean, everyone probably knows that I'm not the extreme outdoor specialist.
I don't do a lot of backcountry camping.
In fact, none.
So I might have a little bit of skewed opinion here, but I think I can comfortably say for 99 of us in any sort of our day-to-day lives we have food within minutes of us.
That if you were to skip a snack, we're not really at the verge of starvation.
Like, you know what I mean?
Like in your example, maybe you...
I don't know.
You've got a tight connection in an airport.
You go to some stand.
They actually don't have anything healthy and you're just going to wait until you land.
We're really not far away from food being there.
These aren't situations where I'm really advocating risky scenarios.
There's very few times when we really need to make sure that we have a lot of food with us.
Of course, backcountry camping comes to mind.
Yes, actually bring enough calories.
But for most of the time it's like okay, worst case scenario.
I get in my car, I drive two minutes and I have no less than 10 options of where I could get calories right.
So I love that point that sometimes just learning to be hungry, it's fine.
And it's really not that risky in modern life.
We have food around us constantly.
Yep.
All right.
Lesson five, you need challenging exercise more than you need an optimized diet.
We talked about exercise previously, but this is from page 200.
It was not uncommon for hunters to run and walk more than 25 miles in a day.
They were usually carrying between five and 20 pounds on those walks, and then scrounging for food like tubers would take another 30 minutes of strenuous digging or burning about 300 calories doing so.
When they looked at the physical attributes of has the men, they averaged 112 pounds of body weight and women were 95 pounds, where americans average 179 pounds for men and 164 pounds for women.
And then, from page 223 this is a quote the arms of the average prehistoric woman, for example, were 16 stronger than those of today's olympic rowers.
I don't remember that part, but yes, That's crazy.
I mean, I can only assume that Olympic rowers have pretty dialed in nutrition in terms of calories and getting enough protein.
And I can only assume that Olympic rowers are working out with intensity and challenging themselves because they're at literally the pinnacle of their sport.
And here we have the prehistoric women are going to be much smaller.
I mean, 95 pounds for average.
Holy cats.
That's tiny.
That is tiny.
Yeah.
And their upper body, no less, is 16% stronger.
I mean, that's incredible.
So how is it possible that our ancestors had that type of performance capacity when they were certainly not eating one gram per pound of protein?
Or how is that possible when they weren't perfectly spacing their protein into 30 gram increments across the day or had this perfectly good split of how many cardio days versus resistance training, and they weren't doing weight vest walks or timing their training with their menstrual cycle or age or body type?
And the reason is because they had to.
The stressors of their day-to-day life are what drove the incredible physical adaptation.
Not optimal nutrition, just getting food, building shelter.
They had constant physical demands.
And because they had to respond to those demands are why they're stronger.
And I mean, I especially love this comparison.
And I started off with the one gram per pound of protein.
I mean, do you really think...
These populations came close to that on most days.
I mean maybe on the days that they actually killed the big, I don't know water buffalo or whatever.
Maybe on that day they got one gram per pound.
But most days they were nowhere close to that.
And here we have them, clearly physically more capable and strong, simply because of the consistency of, I'm going to say training, but it was the training of their life.
And so again, it's not about the perfect level of protein intake.
It's not about the timing of meals.
It's not about ideal food sources.
It's not about ideal food combinations.
It's not about your blood glucose spikes after.
It's not about supplements.
Heck, I even like creatine, but it's not about whether or not you're supplementing creatine.
The hack is the challenge.
You need the stressor to get better.
And ordinary people can achieve some really extraordinary things with the right stressors.
And this actually reminds me of a question I got towards the end of my recent kind of masterclass, Three Pillars Group.
And I love the question.
I've talked about the influencer Train With Joan before.
I don't know what she is now.
I think she's in her late 70s, but she started weight training at 72.
And she made this incredible transformation, losing weight, and she does barbell back squats now.
She's incredibly fit.
I always joke around.
I don't like to check in with Train With Joan, because you're going to feel like a sack of potatoes.
But anyway, the question was do I think that train with Jones results are typical, or could they be typical of most women starting to train at 72?
And I loved the question.
I think train with Jones results are typical in the sense of that is what you can do with the right stressors.
Her daughter, as it turns out is a physical trainer, I think is a bodybuilding pro.
So she has a leg up on quote, the competition, if you will, because she had a daughter who probably knew the stressors that she could do and succeed and get better at.
And because she had the right stressors, she's achieved these extraordinary things.
But I don't think Train with Joan has necessarily above and beyond genetics per se.
I think she's amazing because of the consistency of the effort that she's put in, but a great demonstration of this idea that ordinary people can achieve extraordinary things with the right inputs.
Love that.
Okay, that was five lessons from Michael Easter's book, The Comfort Crisis.
It seems like you like the book that you would recommend folks read it.
Yeah, I mean, there's some really interesting stuff in there.
I'm glad I actually, you know, came to a lot of my nutrition conclusions before reading the book.
Because I mean, there's so many parallels in there that it's almost like wow okay, I say that all the time.
Wow, I say that all the time.
But I'm glad I kind of came to my conclusions before reading it.
But yeah, I mean, I definitely do recommend it.
Of course, it's got some non-nutrition stuff in it.
And I think it can be quite beneficial.
But if people are really like I just want a nutrition book, I guess that's what would be my hesitancy.
But I think overall, it's great.
And the principles about nutrition are great.
Love that.
I do also recommend it.
Michael Easter also has a great sub stack.
I think it's called the 2% or the 2% club, something like that.
Okay.
And a number of times, actually, I've read something and meant to send it to you.
I don't know.
I never do.
But so I do think you would like that, especially if you like the comfort crisis.
Look up Michael Easter on sub stack.
And that is really good as well.
I think the 2.
I think it's a reference to a stat where Only 2 of people, when given the choice, will take the stairs versus the escalator or elevator.
I'm pretty sure where that stat comes from.
So that gives a little bit more insight into Mike Leister and what he does and what he focuses on.
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All right.
That was our conversation about Michael Easter's The Comfort Crisis.
Now let us move into what Netflix recent documentary on The Biggest Loser I think it's called Fit for TV reveals about the real challenges of weight loss maintenance.
And similarly to The Comfort Crisis conversation, EC is going to break down five crucial lessons that explain why so many folks struggle to keep weight off and what actually works for long-term success.
So let us jump right in.
We're going to talk about, we're going to be timely this week.
Sometimes we joke about this, where we talk about things that came out three years ago, but we're going to be timely this time.
Why do you get popular?
Actually, in some ways we are going to do that.
We're going to talk about The Biggest Loser today.
Specifically, we're going to talk about the new Netflix documentary series called Fit for TV, which is about the show The Biggest Loser.
Like I said, it's out on Netflix now.
It just came out recently, as to when we're recording this, at least.
So give us some background why we're gonna talk about this, what we're gonna try to do.
Yeah, relative to when we're recording this, the netflix documentary came out three days ago, so we were so on it, we're on it.
But yeah, the biggest loser ran on nbc from 2004 to 2016 for 17 seasons, so the math doesn't really add up there.
I'm guessing there's a couple seasons, but they kind of had two.
I think they probably did celebrity ones, if i i don't know for sure, but that's what i was thinking is like there must be some like this sort of that.
Yeah exactly, Some twist.
Yeah.
So I think people know.
But contestants competed to see who could lose the highest percentage of their initial weight.
So they would be, quote, the biggest loser over these 30 weeks.
And the prize was to win $250,000.
And they had trainers, Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels, who a lot of people know in media today.
And they were there to compete.
I guess help contestants lose weight, but we're gonna come back to their level of help.
And the show is wildly successful.
We were talking about before we kicked off.
We both were obviously aware it existed, but it was kind of out of the realm of what we were paying attention to.
I never watched a single episode of it, but it really was during kind of the heyday of reality TV.
And so again, fast forward.
Now Netflix has this documentary called Fit for TV, and it's kind of this truth, or pulling back the curtain a little bit on on how the show worked and what was really going on.
And, I think, ultimately the documentary.
Again, you don't know how much of the documentary is true, because they also need clicks and views.
But I think ultimately the documentary does a better job than what was shown during its heyday of like OK, what was really going on and how some, how appalling some of the practices were.
It's interesting.
I think a couple of things just as as context.
One, like you talk about, you know, the heyday of reality TV.
I think this was all in the era of like Survivor, American Idol and The Biggest Loser.
Like when we think about reality TV, like those were the big tentpoles.
So that's sort of the era we're thinking about.
And then to your last point there about the current documentary, in terms of like, how sensational, et cetera like, there's obviously some of that right.
There's three episodes.
One of the episode ends in a cliffhanger where is this person going to die?
Like they're clearly playing the game.
But honestly, when you say that, I think about like I actually don't know, Having watched it was the goal of the producers of the documentary to say look, how terrible this was.
Or was it, hey, here's both sides of this argument of pro and con?
And actually, I think that's a testament to the documentary series where I don't... as we've talked about with other documentaries on Netflix, sometimes it's like, okay, well, clearly this is a, this is an opinion piece masquerading as science.
Right.
As it relates to this biggest loser doc, like I think they did a pretty good job of saying here's how, here's what it looked like from this perspective.
Here's what it looked like from this perspective.
It definitely skewed, perhaps more anti show than pro, but But there was enough of a balance that I actually kind of do appreciate that it wasn't demonizing it fully.
It was trying to say OK, given everything we know now about it.
However, many years later, here's what it looks like today.
Right.
And I think that that's actually makes the the I think it makes it worth watching.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, I think we're gonna get into it a little bit.
But like I actually spent most of my time just thinking about oh my gosh, that was a show, versus trying to critique the documentary.
But I do think the documentary tries to present both sides.
But I think, especially in hindsight and where we are now culturally, I think it's impossible for it to come out as like it was a positive thing or it was a net neutral thing.
Okay.
So let's get into.
I think we're going to do lessons from.
We've been doing this for a couple of books recently which I really like.
So we're gonna do kind of your five big lessons, having watched again this documentary series, and we'll see where we go.
Yeah.
Okay, cool.
So you sent over the five to me, so I knew what we were talking about.
I'm just going to give them to folks.
Here they are.
Number one, social norms have shifted for the better.
Lesson two, sustainable weight loss is not interesting nor entertaining.
Number three, figure out why you are eating before you try to lose weight.
Number four, even when you lose the weight, your work is never done.
And then lesson five that we're going to talk about is physical activity is the hack for weight loss maintenance.
So let us just jump into the first one, which is actually kind of a positive one, I think, which is societal norms have shifted for the better.
Yeah, so I watched this in the morning one day and honestly, like the rest of the day, I wasn't even thinking about the documentary.
I was just sort of kept bringing back to that concept that we just sort of mentioned, like this was a thing, like this was actually a show.
And even now, just talking about it, it's like just constant disbelief.
And it wasn't just this one-off show that happened one time.
It was... mainstream, wildly popular, main network, 17 seasons.
Apparently they were getting up to $100 million per season in ad revenue because it was so popular.
And I just keep thinking like, wait a minute, this was a thing?
This was acceptable?
And it not only was pushing these unsafe, unsustainable rates of weight loss and, of course, it was for profit.
I mean, it gets worse than that.
They're doing it in this way that's really dehumanizing to the contestants.
And so this is where the trainers, Bob and Jillian, You know again, I didn't watch the show, so I'm seeing just the clips that they're pulling.
But even the clips they're pulling are pretty bad.
It's not just this like, oh, you got to toughen up type attitude.
It's this over the top, like berating, embarrassing the contestants.
And so I don't I wouldn't put them kind of in the trainer realm then.
You know, it's definitely this more of the shock entertainment that was part of the reality TV approach at the time.
And they would do these things with the participants.
Apparently they'd have challenges besides, just kind of the diet and exercise thing, where they would try to tempt them with processed food and they would, i guess, make games out of them, even you know, having to eat the food but not really eating the food.
And they would do things with the camera to, you know, make the camera shake if a participant fell, or something like that.
And just this really gross I don't know how else to describe it gross spectacle of the participants.
And so I just kind of kept thinking this was popular, like 17 seasons popular.
I mean, I think the silver lining that you kind of started off with, I think the general consensus now is just sort of this horror of it, all right.
That social norms have shifted, not only just to not have this as a thing, but enough for people to be like yeah, this was gross.
This is disgusting.
And I just think it's totally crazy that it was even in existence as 2016.
I mean, that wasn't that long ago.
I don't even think I was that critical of the documentary while it was happening, because I was just kind of being like this was a thing.
And I can comfortably say now, I think, that it just would not be a show at all.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I think the producers...
Yeah, we're just out of their league understanding the challenges that people who are trying to lose a good amount of weight really face.
And it was just like, oh, you just have to say no to a muffin or something like that.
And it's like, no, that's not, that's not it.
If that was it, we wouldn't have the epidemic that we have.
So I think, I mean, I think it's a combination of a lot of things.
I think it's kind of the money aspect that we're going to get into.
I think it's the entertainment aspect that helps the money that we're going to get into.
And I think it was also just people who don't really understand obesity as a complex disease, trying to solve it in this.
Oh, you just say no to muffins, which again it's just sort of in hindsight.
It's like how is this a thing?
I think you're hinting at the second one.
So let's jump into it.
Sustainable weight loss is not interesting nor entertaining.
That is definitely something we've talked about before.
Yeah, yeah, this one's not going to be new to our audience.
I mean, I think this might be the best kind of lesson that the documentary brings up.
And, you know, again, a couple of the producers are in it.
Bob Harper's in it.
Jillian, I guess, declined to be in it.
And there's these moments again where I think the documentary is trying to show both sides, which I guess is good for the documentary.
But what they're doing in these moments is the producers, and even Bob, I think.
I don't want to get confused or misquote, but I think they all sort of hint at the fact that they were trying to help people and that this was a show to really shed light on the obesity epidemic.
And that this is something that the contestants really wanted.
And so they were there because they wanted to lose the weight, and wanted to lose the weight desperately.
And so they kind of try to be like, this was to help people.
And it's sort of like, well, No, no, no.
The main goal was to produce a popular TV show.
The main goal was to produce a lot of ad revenue.
It just sort of happened that a byproduct of doing that was that some people were going to potentially lose weight.
And you see that come through, because the producers and Bob also then sort of make these decisions statements about how there was pressure for every season to make it bigger and better and top the last one, because how else are you going to keep drawing the audience and the interest right?
And so that was really the goal.
And I think in hindsight, to make it appear more socially acceptable or to kind of justify it in your own mind.
It's sort of like no no, we were there to help people.
It's like, I don't think so.
But I do think again from the documentary point of view it does bring up this very good point especially in a mainstream thing like being on Netflix, is this idea that what is right or what works is not particularly interesting to watch?
Yeah.
Like all of the crazy clips on social media about nutrition that we debunk and we talk about.
They have more likes on them than I do followers.
And it's all this stuff that just drives attention.
And the more something is interesting, or I guess, the more attention getting something is, the more that we should sort of be kind of very questionable about it and be like maybe this actually isn't for my well-being or good for me.
And I think you know, if you think about what this would have looked like in reality.
I mean okay, a pound or two a week of weight loss instead of I don't know, sometimes they were hitting like 15 pounds a week would have been reality.
One to two pounds a week, they would have hit plateaus.
Some of them would have slid back, some of them would just be eating kind of normal basic whole foods in the right quantities.
They'd be doing, you know, an hour of exercise a day.
The change that we would see in 30 weeks would be Not much.
It would actually need years to accomplish what they did.
It'd be sort of like watching a tree grow in the sense, right?
Like reality TV isn't reality.
Reality, what's true and what's real and what works is too boring.
And so reality isn't what people want when they're watching TV or, let's even say, being entertained with scrolling on social media.
They want to escape reality.
And so they want this excitement.
And so that's really where it comes from.
And so I think that point was well made here in the documentary.
To try to show people Hey guys, this is more about attention and views and clicks, not about helping people.
And so the same thing we can apply at any time that we're getting pulled into something that's shocking or dramatic.
Okay.
You want to first ask yourself, is this really just for my reaction?
Is this just really for my attention?
Is this just really for the clicks before thinking, okay, this person's really telling me the truth.
Do you have a sense of why something like this show again the original The Biggest Loser Show, not the documentary was so popular?
Did you think about that at all while you were watching, while the light bulb went off like wow, first of all wow, this is a show, but more than that wow, this is a wildly successful show.
Have you spent any time thinking since watching it like what?
Yes, it's attention yes, it's sort of in some way gratifying, I guess.
But what is it that people in your mind were responding to that made it so popular?
I think there is the very real want to lose weight.
I mean, the diet industry is, I think, now over $60 billion a year in the US, something like that.
There's a huge interest to lose weight and there's lots of good reasons to want to lose weight from quality of life to better health and all of that stuff.
So I certainly think the problem is there.
And the idea that you could be successful, especially because, as we've talked about before, so many people diet after diet after diet are not successful.
To show people that people can relate to, because obesity is such a common problem, and to see them succeed.
In some ways it's quote inspirational.
The problem is, we would want to show the truth of how to actually get there, and that's what was missing, right?
So the outcome is... interesting and transformational.
And I don't like the word inspiring, because we all know how they got there.
But I think ultimately, there is interest, there is a need for that.
It's just not it would need to be done in a real way.
I couldn't help, but as I was watching it or after watching it, I couldn't help but think that it was so popular, at least on some level, because I agree with everything you just said.
But I think there's also the element of it was satisfying to watch and popular, not because of the transformations, but because of the implicit excuse that you could have after watching it that I can't do that.
And so therefore...
That's satisfying to me because now I can't fix the thing that I say I want to fix.
I can't lose 100 pounds because I can't go there and do that thing.
I can't work out eight hours a day.
I can't have somebody scream at me in the gym all the time.
So in some ways, like again, I couldn't help but think it was satisfying because I could watch it, and then I could say that was one more reason I couldn't do the slow, boring work that you and I talk about all the time.
Yeah, I hadn't really thought about that.
I really do think.
I think one of the producers says that it came about because he saw somebody post basically on a bulletin board outside the gym they were desperate to lose weight.
And I think that's the reality is that people are desperate to lose weight for the quality of life, for just how they feel about themselves.
There's a lot of shame for the improvements in their health, all of that stuff.
And so to me in my mind, i do think there's a huge popularity for it, because that's a goal for a lot of people and they want to get there and they want to see that somebody else can do it.
But i hadn't thought about that way.
Lesson three figure out why you are eating before you try to lose weight.
What does that mean?
Yeah, i mean i think i know they highlight at least one.
I only watched it once, so i don't know.
It might have been two of the contestants that had emotional trauma issues that You know they didn't really have anybody on the show to deal with.
It's sort of just left in the hands of Jillian and Bob to be sort of their support people.
It's just not the right tool.
Like a personal trainer, even if they aren't yelling at you, even if they're the best personal trainer, they're not the professionals for emotional trauma.
And emotional trauma is a risk factor for developing obesity.
I mean eating is a coping mechanism in many ways, which plays out in different ranges of severity in terms of weight gain.
But you know again, they kind of mentioned that they selected people that were really desperate for this weight loss.
And so again, it's like okay, if you're really interested in helping people, I think you would have been screening for this.
Like any coping mechanism, is about figuring out what are you coping from and are there better ways to cope?
And so I thought one of the good lessons here we actually talked about it from the Michael Easter's book Comfort Crisis that we chatted about a few weeks ago.
I certainly cannot solve emotional eating here on this podcast alone, but just starting to think about and starting to be able to answer like why am I eating?
And oftentimes use professional health to help answer that.
But what role is eating filling for you before trying to diet, right?
Because it's just kind of the wrong tool for the wrong job.
If you're eating for this coping mechanism and you go on a diet, it's one of the reasons it won't be sustainable is because you haven't kind of addressed that underlying need.
And, you know, and again, not everybody gains weight because of emotional trauma.
It could be.
Some injury took somebody out of their regular diet and exercise routines.
Pregnancy fall on hard times with work, whatever it is.
But nevertheless I don't care if it's, you know, a smaller amount of weight loss that somebody wants to lose or a larger amount of pounds.
It's just sort of.
Before you start cutting the calories, it's worth asking like why am I eating, besides true hunger?
What role is it filming?
What is more productive use of that time?
And then, once you're able to kind of start to change those behaviors around that, that's when you can start thinking about okay, let me start adding the fruits and veggies, or let me start looking at the diet log versus jumping to that as the solution.
Because, yeah, those contestants were just not in the right hands for those type of issues.
Right.
Is it just people don't understand that it's not always just hey, you ate too much food and now you're now you're overweight that there are so many factors that could lead to a person being in a position where, even going on, the biggest loser is a is an idea that they're worth, that they're considering?
Yeah, for sure.
I was sort of thinking about well, the fact that this thing ran through 2016 as like a popular cultural show.
I don't think we really had the awareness of what really were the problems within obesity as a chronic disease versus just again like don't have a muffin at work.
Like it's much bigger than that.
Like we have to start addressing the environment.
We have to start addressing education, socioeconomic factors, genetics.
Like I think there's that quote from that famous obesity researcher.
Oh, God. gosh, I wish I could remember his name right now.
But it's something along the lines of obesity isn't rocket science.
It's much more difficult than that.
And because there's so many factors at play.
And so I'm thinking just the fact that this show is a popular thing we didn't really have a good handle on obesity and obesity treatment, and not necessarily that we have all of the answers now.
But I think at least now we appreciate it's much more complicated than that.
And probably was a very limited view of what really needed to be done.
Lesson number four, even when you lose the weight, your work is never done.
So this is definitely engaging or interesting way to start the documentary.
I think it's his name's Danny Cahill, season eight winner.
He went from 430 pounds down to 191 pounds.
And so they're opening the show and you can hear him narrating it.
And you see the transformation.
You see him at the stage, at the end winning, and then it immediately cuts to him today.
And he's clearly gained all of the weight back.
And that's true for a lot of the contestants.
Now it's important to note not all, and they gain the weight back to varying degrees, but most of them gain a lot of it back.
And so the key point here is that the majority have not maintained the results, or close to the results, that they achieved on the show.
And I think the one quote that Bob Harper says that is actually useful in the whole thing is something along the lines of like, losing weight is the easiest part.
Keeping it off is the hard part.
And then if you've struggled with your weight, you're never going to get that monkey off your back.
It'll be part of you for the rest of your life.
And I'm sure that's disheartening to hear, but that's what the statistics show us.
That time and time again about weight loss, and especially with really big weight loss, is that it's more likely that people will gain it back.
It's really the minority of people who can maintain the results.
And so we start to have to ask ourselves, A, why?
And then B, what are the practices of the people who are successful?
Now, as for the why it happens, for a combination of factors, some of which we just were kind of talking about.
One, of course, could be emotional.
Two, also could be maybe they don't actually upkeep with the diet and lifestyle habits.
And that was interesting, too.
I think all of the contestants that they interviewed very quickly blamed themselves for for not keeping up the routine.
But i mean, that was interesting too.
There was no sort of reality check for them, like how were you expected to keep that up?
I mean, i'm sure you have a job.
How could you work out three hours a day?
Um, the fact that they had no post care for the participants, like any sort of this, is how you're going to continue to do this thing.
Post show is also sort of mind-boggling.
But anyway, one of the reasons that is at play potentially for people who regain the weight back is this issue of metabolic adaptation.
And we've talked about this before, but because it's so relevant to the show and there's been specific studies about it.
This is when you eat fewer calories, your body becomes more efficient in energy production, such that it defends against fat loss.
It basically is trying to have you not lose fat, because from an evolutionary perspective that's not a good thing.
Now, this doesn't mean you can't lose weight, as we've discussed, but what it does mean is you are going to have to create a bigger deficit than 3500 calories to lose one pound.
And so this is why weight loss takes longer than we think and also takes longer than we would like.
Now studies on metabolic adaptation show that even with pretty severe caloric deficits the effects are not lasting.
That once somebody kind of goes back to normal eating, they get the number of calories that we would expect.
It's only during this period of dieting where they kind of have to accumulate more calories than 3500 to lose a pound.
Except for what we found in the biggest loser participants.
So Kevin Hall, the studies in the show notes, he's a famous obesity researcher.
He looked at 14 biggest loser participants six years after the show.
And basically they found that on average they got 500 calories less per day than what we would expect of somebody of their size and activity level.
So let's take somebody who went from 400 pounds down to 200 pounds in the show, and then they got back up to close to 400 pounds six years later.
They get 500 calories less each day to maintain that 400 pounds six years later.
So it seems like they are worse off.
But what's really kind of interesting here, while a lot of them gained most of the weight back, they still averaged an overall weight loss of about 12, which is better than what we see on average for most diet and lifestyle programs, which is only about 5.
So I guess this is a small silver lining of the Biggest Loser that, like on average, they're doing better than participants on typical diet and lifestyle interventions in terms of their weight loss maintenance, which is helping out their overall health risk and potentially, quality of life.
But it's just that, calorie wise, they're not getting as many calories as we'd expect, which of course leads into diet enjoyment.
And the reason that we think that this Biggest Loser effect might be going on is because how severe the caloric reduction was and how severe the exercise volume was, and that it just created this kind of permanent lasting effect that we really don't recreate in other diet and lifestyle interventions.
And, you know, the documentary points this out, and it is true.
You know, of course, this was a small study.
It's only 14 individuals, so there's limitations there.
Thankfully I don't think we're going to be having more of these types of shows, to be doing this type of kind of follow-up research on.
But I do think one of the takeaways that we do have from that type of research is okay, let's not do super extreme diet and lifestyle changes like those on The Biggest Loser, because it could have some sort of lasting effect that ultimately leads to a harder diet to sustain because of the decreased calories that you get.
There was one question I wanted to ask you and I think maybe now's the time to do it which is in the documentary.
There wasn't a lot as it relates to this, but there were.
Towards the end of it, there were a few people who they were interviewing former contestants who had clearly lost and kept off a decent amount of the weight.
And there was sort of an aside to GLP-1 drugs.
And I put those two together because it turned out that I think two of the participants who had been interviewing and who had been very critical of their experience on The Biggest Loser had then sort of very, very quickly mentioned I've started using GLP-1 drugs and that's why it's working.
So I just bring that up because we are talking about this idea of maintenance and weight regain.
What did you think about it when you saw that when they brought in the GLP-1 drugs, even though it was pretty quick and they didn't spend too much time on it?
I'm just curious what your reaction to that was.
One of the reasons that GLP-1 drugs are.
I guess the main reason why the GLP-1 drugs are so successful is because they quiet out that food noise which we've talked about.
And I think that's a really big driver for the weight regain.
It's these neurochemical drive hormonal drive for people to want to eat.
And especially in our modern food environment, that's very hard to turn off.
And so again, when we look at how unsuccessful diet and lifestyle is in the long term, that it seems like, especially for these participants, that GLP-1s might be one of their ways, that they can kind of start to sustain the results or even improve the results if they've gained the weight back.
So it's not surprising.
And to me, it makes sense why it would be occurring.
Yeah.
Got it.
Okay, last lesson that we've got physical activity is the hack for weight loss maintenance.
Yeah, so those same 14 participants, Kevin Hall did a second study on them.
And he looked at the volume of exercise in comparison to weight regain.
And they divided these 14 contestants, participants, into kind of two camps.
Those who maintained more than a 13 weight loss and those who maintained less than a 13 weight loss.
Turns out, on average, it was 12% weight loss.
They... they had overall, but they made the cut point at 13% because that was the median.
So kind of the middle value.
And so the question was in this study is what are the people doing who have the greater weight loss maintenance?
And it turns out it was more exercise.
Basically those who maintained a more significant percentage of of the weight loss.
They were exercising upwards of 80 minutes a day of moderate effort aerobic exercise or 35 minutes of vigorous activity per day.
And what's really crazy was between the two groups, the diet intake wasn't that different.
So it's not like the people who regain the weight back all of a sudden started eating a lot more calories.
It's just that they let the exercise sort of fall away.
And this paper then goes on to cite all this other research that has shown exercises associated with weight loss maintenance, and even talks about the National Weight Control Registry, which we've talked about before.
And it's this database of I think it's more than 10,000 people.
Now, granted, it's self-reporting, but nevertheless...
People on average in that database have kept off about 66 pounds for more than five years.
So very interesting group to look at in terms of, okay, what are the successful people doing?
And 90 of those people in the database report that they're exercising for at least an hour a day, which is very much within the realm of what they found here in terms of the volume of exercise.
Now it's unknown exactly what the exercise is doing, but it might be that exercise is helping with appetite control, which kind of feeds into what you were saying with the GLP-1 drugs.
That's really what we have to figure out, especially in a modern food environment, to be able to control that.
Some people might end up using GLP-1 drugs for it.
Some people might end up doing this pretty high volume of exercise for it.
But yeah, I mean, exercise really does look to be an essential component for people that lose a drastic amount of weight.
How are they going to keep it off?
It's going to be a pretty high exercise volume has to be part of the equation.
When the show started, the American obesity rate was, I think, 25%.
And in 2025, it's 45%.
I think it's interesting that they finished with that.
It's as if saying hey, despite this being such a wildly successful show for 17 seasons, It didn't do the thing it was claiming it was trying to do, which is to help people, to show people that these transformations are possible, and to inspire them to do what they needed to do to create those transformations for themselves.
In fact, it in some ways failed miserably.
Despite its popularity.
Yeah, I mean, I think overall it was kind of a failure of the show outside of ad revenue.
Yeah, and I think this is one of the things I keep coming back to, as much as I love diet and exercise.
I mean, I've spent one or two podcasts talking about it, and I think it's really important.
I think on a collective front, until we address the food environment, this is it, this is it.
It's kind of shocking to me that we're not addressing the food environment.
I get it, it's a tough problem to solve.
We're not just gonna say nobody can eat cake.
I mean, like we all like sugar, it can be part of a healthy diet.
But this just ubiquitous nature of it It makes the default decision so easy to have people gain weight and to have people just put on lots of weight without even kind of realizing it before they can almost pull themselves out of it.
So I really feel like until we address that, these stats are going to keep getting worse.
Any big picture kind of walkaway thoughts on this?
Again, I said at the top, I think this is actually the series is worth watching.
I think it's interesting.
I think they do a pretty good job of it.
But any last words on the documentary series before we wrap up?
Yeah, I mean, I think it does a pretty good job in showing how crazy it was.
And thankfully, we've moved away from that.
So...
I don't know.
If you already have that opinion about the show, you might not need to watch it.
You know, if you're already like, okay, that was nuts.
But yeah, I mean, I do think it really does show how poor of a job this does, from like helping people and weight loss maintenance point of view.
Yeah.
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