Join me, Dr. Mike T Nelson, on the Flex Diet Podcast as I bring you an exciting special announcement: the Flex Diet Certification Course is open now from June 17 to June 24, 2024. Discover a comprehensive system designed to optimize body composition, muscle gain, and strength without sacrificing health. This certification uniquely blends metabolic flexibility and flexible dieting, featuring eight crucial interventions: protein, fats, carbohydrates, meats, micronutrition, keto, sleep, and exercise. Each intervention is distilled into a one-hour technical lecture, balancing research-based knowledge with practical application. I also emphasize the importance of coaching leverage to ensure these interventions are effectively and client-friendly implemented. Sponsors: Flex Diet Certification open June 17 to June 24, 2024: https://flexdiet.com/ Tecton Life Ketone drink! https://tectonlife.com/ DRMIKE to save 20%
Join me, Dr. Mike T Nelson, on the Flex Diet Podcast as I bring you an exciting special announcement: the Flex Diet Certification Course is open now from June 17 to June 24, 2024. Discover a comprehensive system designed to optimize body composition, muscle gain, and strength without sacrificing health.
This certification uniquely blends metabolic flexibility and flexible dieting, featuring eight crucial interventions: protein, fats, carbohydrates, meats, micronutrition, keto, sleep, and exercise. Each intervention is distilled into a one-hour technical lecture, balancing research-based knowledge with practical application. I also emphasize the importance of coaching leverage to ensure these interventions are effectively and client-friendly implemented.
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Welcome back to the Flex Diet podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Mike T. Nelson. On this podcast, we talk about all things to improve your body composition, add muscle, increase strength, and do all of it without destroying your health in a flexible framework. And today, two big things. Number one, the Flex Diet cert is now officially open.
I don't know when it'll be open again. Probably may not be open the rest of this year, but it was open now for one week on Monday, June 17th, 2024 through Monday night at midnight, Pacific Standard Time, June 24th, 2024. You can go to the special link I have put down below here in the podcast. Or you can still go to flex diet. Dot com. It says it's on a wait list there, depending upon what time you get, but that'll put you on the newsletter and you'll still get all the information there. So either place. But if you're interested in all the details, go to the link below if you're looking for a complete system for nutrition and a lifestyle to help with body composition and improving performance at the same time in a flexible manner, like all the things we talk about here on the podcast.
Then this is for you. It is a mash up of the concept of metabolic flexibility, which we'll talk a little bit about coming up here. We had a good question about visceral fat and how it's related to all that. We're going to answer next. But like I said, the metabolic flexibility and the flexible dieting are the two key concepts of the Flex Diet Cert.
And then we also cover eight different interventions. from protein, fats, carbohydrates, meats, micronutrition, keto, sleep, exercise, and much more. And then within each one of those interventions, there's a continuation of the big picture so that you understand the context and the concepts of metabolic flexibility and flexible dieting.
And then I have distilled each one of those interventions down to only one hour of a kind of semi technical lecture. So everything you wanted to know about protein from protein synthesis, how amino acids are used, the role of exercise, nutrition, etc. All related to protein is condensed down into only one hour.
So for each one of those, that was the thing that took me by far the hardest time. I think the carbohydrate one, it does go over an hour by a little bit. I think I took me five, five chances to get that one down. So that was a big pain in the ass, but it's useful because it gives you most of the things that you need to know in a technical manner, all based on research, but, you know, communicated to you in a way you can understand it so that you understand the technical aspects.
So when someone asks about protein, you have an idea of what is beneficial for them. And then each one has five specific action items. And we teach you the system of how to apply each one of those so that it is semi customizable per client or per yourself. And what we did then is that the one through eight interventions, we didn't just randomly assign them.
They are based on coaching leverage with the highest coaching leverage being shocker position number one. So that way you are rigging the system in your client's favor. You are starting with the things that have a high amount of both physiologic and psychological leverage. And psychological here, we're talking about the client's ability to change.
So we're stacking things that are going to be easier for your client or yourself to do, and also have the physiology background to get them closer to their goals. They could be doing a whole bunch of stuff that's just not really that effective. Or like sleep, you could be having all these crazy arguments with them about something that does have a huge physiological impact.
But in my experience, and with several hundred coaches who've gone through the certification already, sleep is very difficult from a habit change thing to get people to do. Yes, you can do some things to increase their quality of sleep, and things like that. But if they're only sleeping five hours a night, no matter how high quality that five hours is, you, they're going to need to sleep more.
And that becomes a much more difficult question. So by using coaching leverage, we rank the one through eight interventions with number one, having the highest coaching leverage, therefore the thing to start with. So that way you are working on the things that are going to get them closer to their goals.
And you're making it easier for both you and them at the same time. And at the end, there's going to be 40 action items, and we'll show you exactly how to implement all of them. So the cool part is, you'll understand context, you'll know the details of what it is about each intervention, and you'll know exactly what to do with the client who's in front of you.
When I looked around at other systems, there's some great systems that were, you know, pretty good on the research and pretty good on the information. But you were kind of on your own to implement it. And there was no system of how do you actually work with clients. There's some other stuff that, you know, the, what do you do with clients was maybe pretty good, but if anything fell outside of that, and a lot of times the reason and the rationale they gave for why they were doing it was just completely wrong.
And so then you got kind of lost. You might get some right action items, but if you deviate anywhere outside of that system, you're going to be completely lost and probably going in the wrong direction because the reasons they gave you were not correct. So I wanted something where you understood the context, you knew the details, and you knew exactly what to do for each one of the next steps.
Hence, that's why I developed the FlexDyed certification. It is open now. As of this recording, Monday, June 17th, 2024, until midnight Pacific Standard Time, Monday, June 24th. So it's going to be open for one week exactly. Go to the link below here to get all of the details on that. And the question I had, which is actually a text question I got from my buddy Aram at 4 Weeks to the Beach, Bye.
Make sure to check out his conference he has every year in Vegas. Really enjoyed it, the Real Coaches Summit. We will most likely be there next year, depending upon what time it is. We were there the past two years, got to present the first year, was awesome. Make sure to check out all of his stuff. But his question was, Do you believe visceral and subcutaneous fat behave the same way with regards to caloric intake?
Meaning both types of fat increase and decrease based on energy inputs. Lots of chatter surrounding how visceral fat isn't a byproduct of caloric intake, and doesn't respond to caloric restriction, but rather is a byproduct of inflammation and hormonal changes. So I'll cite some different references and stuff here but the short takeaway is, Like most things in physiology, the answer is probably a little bit of both.
Now again, do calories in, calories out work? Yep, you're not really violating the laws of thermodynamics. It's actually more related to the second law of thermodynamics. And yes, I actually did take thermodynamics as part of my master's in mechanical engineering. And my master's work, all my class work, was actually in the area of biomechanics And then I had to go back and do additional work in heat transfer, thermodynamics, all that kind of stuff for my thesis.
So I have a pretty good idea of how that stuff works, at least at a, at a basic level. It's obviously much more advanced stuff there. But, calories in, calories out works. When we take people, we lock them in metabolic wards. You can look up a lot of the studies from Dr. Kevin Hall has done this. What we find is You equate for all the calories that come in, all the energy that is expended, they monitor the air in there, they look at movement, heat, everything.
It works. Now the issue is that that is a closed system. So somebody else is in charge of controlling all the variables as much as they can. And then crazy humans live in what's called an open system. So at any one point you can get up and walk to your fridge and eat more food or decide to exercise or not decide to exercise.
So yes, calories in calories out still works. However, it's an open system so it becomes a lot more complex. And what you find is that the amount of calories you eat affects the amount of calories you expend, and vice versa. So a real simple example is if you dramatically lower your calories, and you keep them low, the main thing, and we talk about this in the Flex Diet Cert, that will down regulate massively, is your NEAT.
So Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. how much you walk around, move, twitch, etc. That will drop very, very fast because your body is saying, Hey, you just dropped a whole bunch of calories. I don't want to be expending any more calories here. That's crazy. The hard part is a lot of that is very unconscious.
Most people don't realize that they are doing that. And yes, you can consciously override that, which is why coaching systems, et cetera, are extremely beneficial for people trying to improve body composition. So step one, calories in calories out, definitely still works. But they are related to each other and they both affect each other.
And we have other examples Cert of what happens when you eat more calories. Yes, you do burn more calories via neat again. But there's some gotchas where it is pretty variable. So calories in calories out works. Humans live, however, in an open system and both calories in and calories out affect each other, which makes it a little bit more complex.
So to the first part of their question, for visceral fat, if you scale up and you put someone in a caloric excess for a long enough period of time, At some point you are definitely going to see an increase in visceral fat. Now I would argue that that's because you are making the system much more unhealthy.
You are loading it with more calories than it is able to deal with. We'll give you some examples here coming up. And that a byproduct of that is some of it is going to go off to form visceral fat. We do know that visceral fat around the midsection is is associated with many negative health complications.
Now, again, most of those studies are association studies where they take people who are generally not athletes, not really moving around a lot, not doing high levels of exercise. They put them in a dexa or sometimes an MRI. They see how much visceral fat they have, and then they can equate it to potentially blood markers.
like CRP levels or C peptide, we're looking at insulin or other factors related to metabolism and maybe even insulin sensitivity. We do see that as visceral fat goes up, your odds of being metabolically unhealthy also go up. Now, where that breaks down is on an individual level, there's a huge amount of variability.
So the example I like to use, which I got from my buddy Dr. Tommy Wood, is when you look at sumo wrestlers, even though they have a massive amount of extra fat, they generally are metabolically pretty healthy. And I found a study here this is from, looks like 1996, Karam. Looking at they had a little statement here, let's see if I can find it, oh maybe I can't find it right now here we go quote the visceral fat relates to much more than insulin resistance syndrome than does subcutaneous body fat, which we just talked about.
So, insulin resistance, negative metabolic effects is much more related. to visceral fat than subcutaneous fat. They said, quote, Moreover, exercise as performed by active sumo wrestlers is associated with low visceral fat, absent hyperglycemia and absent dyslipidemia, despite massive subcutaneous obesity.
It remains to be seen whether exercise programs more moderate than sumo wrestling will mobilize visceral fat. They go on to talk about different pathways of increasing flux of glucose and fat into the muscle. What's interesting is because sumo wrestlers have such a high amount of exercise, it does seem to protect them to a large extent from many of the metabolic issues that we see.
Now the second they stop doing that high volume of exercise, everything kind of goes to shit real fast. You see this in some NFL linemen also, or very large mammals who play sports that have a high output of exercise. They tend to be relatively healthy while they're playing, excluding, you know, contact and everything else that takes its toll from playing their sport.
But just from a metabolic standpoint, they seem to be okay, but if they keep eating the same way and then retire, thus they dramatically drop their exercise volume. They run into a lot of issues very fast. So again, this is showing that exercise is extremely protective, that there are cases where despite having a high body weight and even body fat of subcutaneous fat, you may not necessarily have a high amount of visceral fat.
Again, we look at most population studies, we don't see this, because those people are definitely outliers. Take away, if you do a lot of exercise, you can reduce your risk of having a high amount of visceral fat. Now, this also goes hand in hand by greatly reducing your risk of having other metabolic issues, and there is a fair amount of variability in terms of just population studies, of how much extra weight people can gain or how much extra body fat people can gain before they start to see metabolic issues.
At some point, you are going to run into metabolic issues. You can look up a lot of Stephen Blair's work looking at, can you be very fat and still fit? And does that protect you against some metabolism issues? It appears that it does. But at some point in a population based outlook, if you add enough body fat, you are going to run into metabolic issues, unless you are doing just a crazy amount of exercise, like sumo wrestlers, NFL players, et cetera, most people are not doing that.
Thus, at some point, you look at those graphs long enough people do run into metabolic issues once they accumulate more body fat. The argument here is that that probably is more related to visceral fat and then also subcutaneous fat. So visceral fat being the main one. What also is related to this that people don't realize is that the accumulation of fat next to the muscle fibers can also muck up insulin sensitivity.
This is probably not what most people would expect. So this is something that's been referred to as Lipotoxicity. Again, I discussed this in the flex Diet cert. Here's another quote. This is back from the same paper, 1996 quote. Lipotoxicity has been previously been implicated in the insulin resistance by its inhibitory effect on glucose, uptake by muscle because of the r fatty acid cycle.
Recently the role of elevated fatty acids in producing hepatic. So, related to the liver, resistance to insulin, and has also been documented, but the site of insulin resistance may be the fat cell rather than the hepatocyte. This is talking about the liver. So again, we know that fat cells are very, very active, and when they become dysfunctional, they screw up everything around them.
So if they're dysfunctional in the muscle tissue, they start screwing up insulin. Sensitivity, if they're dysfunctional in the liver tissue, you start increasing your accumulation of fat around your liver, or what's called Nafld, non alcoholic fatty liver disease, and that screws up the function of the liver.
Remember, the liver does a whole bunch of functions, but one of its main functions is regulating blood glucose also. So, having a high amount of fat locally is not a good thing. But, if there's a lot of fat floating around in the bloodstream, your body wants to get it out of the bloodstream and it has to secure those excess calories somewhere.
And the best place to put them is actually going to be subcutaneous body fat. In terms of all the places it could put them, that is a quote, quote, safer place metabolically to store fat. This gets into something called like a personal fat threshold. Probably the only genetic gift I have related in metabolism or anything is that I do have the potential to be quite fat and not really see much metabolic issues.
I'm sure if I kept pushing it at some point that it will go off the rails but everyone has a little bit of a different threshold with that. And you'll see some people can be rather obese and for a period of time their blood markers might be okay. Again, if we carry that out long enough, almost all those people still suffer issues.
But there is a big difference between how much fat somebody can carry before it starts to cause metabolic issues. We can look up some of the early studies done with the Pima Indians showing that this probably is related to insulin sensitivity. So what do we do about any of this? High levels of exercise are protective, which is great.
I would make the argument, although it is very theoretical at this point, but I think there's pretty good data showing that if you increase your body's ability to use fat as a fuel source, you are going to be more protected against this, because if you can burn off more of those excess calories that come in from fat, you're going to be in a metabolically better place.
Now, of course, you can out eat, out eat that. You can dramatically increase. Calories coming in and drop your calories out and you're going to be in a world of hurt. So your caloric excess is still probably the number one factor. But I would argue that increasing your body's ability to use fats as a fuel is going to be a better hedge against some of those metabolic issues.
This VO2 max, which is just having a much bigger aerobic engine. Doing things to shift the balance more towards fat use. I am a fan of fasted cardio for this, which is a whole different podcast on that, but with metabolic flexibility, with lower to moderate intensity exercise, you want the ability to use fat as a fuel.
Plus you don't need carbohydrates to fuel that you want to save carbohydrates for higher intensity exercise and exercise output. So back to Aram's original question. Do you believe visceral fat and subcutaneous fat behave the same way in regards to caloric intake? So yes, at some point if you start going down and you get lean enough, you will start reducing visceral fat.
So again, at some point, do calories in calories out and body comp matter? Of course they do. Now along the way, I do think you can hedge your bets by becoming more metabolically healthy, metabolically flexible. Doing more higher volumes of exercise. Again, this could be walking. This could be recreation. I'm a fan of fasted cardio, lifting weights.
There's a very cool study. Here you can look up something called the resolve trial. It said different modalities of exercise to reduce visceral fat mass and cardiovascular risk and metabolic syndrome. What they stated was, looks like they had a hundred participants, age 50 to 70. They underwent diet restriction with high volumes of exercise.
They randomized them to three groups moderate resistance endurance training, a high resistance, moderate endurance training, or a moderate resistance, high exercise endurance training. This was done as a one year follow up program. Differences, visceral fat loss, et cetera. So what they showed was, yeah, exercise is extremely beneficial, but if you had to pick one, it's a quote, increased intensity and high volume training is efficient in improving visceral fat loss and carotid intima media thickness CIMT, and is realistically in a community dwelling, moderately obese individuals.
High intensity resistance training induced a faster visceral fat loss, and thus potential resistance training should not be undervalued. Now again, the key part here is that they did not only do resistance training. So again, should you do some resistance training in your program? Yes, I agree. I would like the template Cert.
Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Do some lifting. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. Do some cardio. Sunday, take the day off, do some walking, get all your food ready for the week. I've used that template a lot and it seems to work really well. So, back to our question, calories in, calories out do matter, but if we do want to hedge our bets and reduce visceral fat, things that make you more healthy are, I think, going to be beneficial along the way.
It is hard to completely disentangle these from each other. I think the example of the sumo wrestlers is one that's been well documented showing that they have substantially less visceral fat. The theory is there, the high volumes of exercise that you're doing are more protective in that area. And that makes sense for what we know about insulin sensitivity, that muscle contraction, putting tension on the muscle is probably one of the main things to help improve improve that.
And in the flex diet, sir, we go into the difference between non insulin mediated uptake and insulin mediated uptake and why they are different and some pretty cool studies showing the effects of just movement of muscle tissue, any type of contraction. It really is able to pull glucose and even fats out of the bloodstream to be used for fuels in healthy individuals.
So if you are more metabolically flexible, my argument is your risk of visceral fat is going to be less. So there you go. Good question. I'll put some other relevant research that I didn't necessarily talk about here down below if you want to check that out. Thank you to Aram for the great question.
Really appreciate it. And then the flex diet cert is open! Now through Monday, June 24th, 2024. Go to the link below to get all of the details. If you have any questions on it, you can send me a note. I've got some fast action bonus items there also. And I will be at the ISSN sports meeting, International Society of Sports Nutrition this week in, I don't know, it's in Florida somewhere.
I think I fly into Fort Myers. I can't remember. Where I'm going after that. Bonita Springs, I believe. It's a different location this year. So, if you were down at the ISSM meeting, please come up and say hi. I would love to chat with you and hope to see you in the Flex Diet Certification. Thank you so much for listening.
I really appreciate it, and we'll talk to all of you next week.