Ep. #396: Layne Norton on Mini-Cuts and Mini-Bulks

Mike: [00:07:22] Layne, you’re back! It’s been a couple years. Thanks for taking the time, man, I’m excited to speak with you today. 

Layne: [00:07:27] Yeah, thanks for having me, Mike, I appreciate it. When you and I have had discussions, they’ve always been pretty productive. 

Mike: [00:07:32] Yeah, and they have always been popular. You are definitely one of the more requested guests. Where, when I reach out to ask people, “Hey, who should I have on the show or have back on the show?” You’re always in the top three, so here you are!

And today’s discussion, we just kind of decided it just 10 minutes ago, something that I get asked fairly frequently about – I don’t know about you, Layne – but that is mini cuts and mini bulks. And so, specifically for people listening, if you don’t know what those things are, the idea is, generally speaking, is it better to stretch your surpluses, your calorie surpluses out for as long as possible?

Which then basically you kind of just ride it until you get too fat. And if you’re a guy, lets say it’s somewhere up around 17-18 percent or so is when most people are like, “Alright I need to lose some fucking fat.” And then you go into it, you go into a sustained deficit to get rid of the fat and retain as much of the muscle as you can that you gained and then just rinse, repeat.

Is that a better strategy for long term muscle and strength gain? Or is it better to do shorter periods of surpluses and deficits? So I thought Layne would be the perfect guy to talk to about this because he’s had a lot of experience both personally and with clients doing it both ways. So with that, Layne, here’s the microphone. 

Layne: [00:08:47] Yeah, so great question and as for people who know me, what I’m gonna to say is, it depends. So I think in general talking off air, but I agree with you that I think when you first get into lifting, especially for guys, women are a little bit different just because psychology make up and we’ll talk about that.

But for guys, you know, you want to spend a good portion of that in a surplus so you can really maximize what you can do in that first year, because that’s where you’re gonna get… people argue about how much of your overall gains you make in the first year. But I mean, it’s probably over fifty percent of the muscle you’re going to gain in your entire life from training is going to be in the first year of consistent training.

It’s an astronomical amount compared to the other years. So I think being in a deficit, because you’re going to recomposition anyway, even if you’re in a surplus, you’re going to be partitioning a lot more of those nutrients towards building muscle and lean body masses opposed to gaining fat than you will at any other time in your training career, regardless. So now we’re not saying eat like an idiot, but I think, you know, a sustained… 

Mike: [00:09:51] I was gonna say like, let’s qualify that, cause people are like, “Really?” 

Layne: [00:09:55] You know, super bulk and gain fifty pounds in a year, I don’t think that’s productive. I think a sustained several hundred calorie surplus is probably productive. Where you are gaining a solid two to four pounds per month. I think that that’s… probably what to shoot for like the average of right around two or three, if you’re new. And obviously it depends on if you’re tiny and one hundred and ten pound guy, you don’t want to be probably gaining four pounds a month.

That’s probably too rapid. So in any case, I think in those cases what I tend to see is people who get into lifting, they want to be shredded and huge at the same time. They do these things improperly because the timing’s really important. What they do is they end up chasing their tail.

They kind of half ass the bulk and then they get, you know, a few weeks into the bulk and they go, “Aw man, I want me shredded.” And then they go they do a few weeks of cutting and they kind of half ass it, “Screw this cutting up I want to be jacked! I want to be huge! I don’t care if I’m fat.” And they just go to the fat and they just go around chasing their tail and don’t make any progress.

I think if you’re doing targeted, I used to do this I’ve been lifting about three or four years consistently and I started doing, I guess, what you would call cyclical bulking. So I would do four to eight weeks in a surplus and then I would do two or three weeks in a deficit. And the reason I like that was because one, two to three weeks of cutting is not enough to really drop your metabolic rate. You have a small amount of drop in that shorter time period, but it’s not much. It’s not going to be anything that lasts for a meaningful period of time. 

Mike: [00:011:27] And you probably also not going to notice much difference in the way of training, right? 

Layne: [00:11:31] That’s right. The other benefit is you’re going to lose the most amount of fat. Anybody who’s ever done a long cut, when do you drop easiest? Right at the beginning. Right? Right after you’ve been in a surplus. It’s when you get to the end that it becomes an absolute and utter grind. You’re going to be able to cut fat more efficiently during those early weeks. So you get that – it’s kind of like, you know, you get in, get out, get some fat off, feel more comfortable.

And I found that that actually did a good job with motivating people to get back on their bulk, because they’ve cut off a little bit excess fat – they feel a little more comfortable and okay, now I’m happy to go back into this bulk and try to build some more muscle. And that’s kind of how I did it for about four or five years. Things changed a little bit because of grad school and then I was competing in powerlifting and things kind of changed.

But I thought that was a pretty viable way to do things. The other advantage you get is two to three weeks isn’t really enough to drop your testosterone that much or anything like that, but you do get some benefits for insulin sensitivity, blood lipids, and overall health as well. So again, what I would do is I would kind of space these cuts out to help fit my lifestyle. Right? So if I knew I had a trip coming up, okay, well, boom, I’m going to schedule that two to three week mini cut right before the trip to Mexico.

You know, or if I knew that I don’t have anything coming up and it’s going into winter – alright, well I’m not going to do a cut until this day or whatever. So I would still schedule them in every four to eight weeks, because that was important. But I usually allow them to fall in line with something I had that was maybe I want to look a little bit leaner for. So I always liked doing it that way.

I think I may sound misogynistic to some who are sexist, but I think they work better for men than they do for women just for a purely psychological point of view. Women have a really hard time with these because their mentality has always been lose fat, lose fat, lose fat, lose fat, lose that, lose fat! I find a lot of women I work with, honestly their metabolisms are just so slow from years of dieting that I kind of need to get them in a sustained surplus for a good period of time.

And I talked about this in my book, Fat Lost Forever, quite a bit. But every time you diet, you’re activating your body self defense system – in terms of you’re telling your body food is scarce, right? Now, if you’re like the way I grew up, I was a dude I chose putting on mass. I think you were kind of a little bit skinnier to start too is that right, Mike? 

Mike: [00:14:08] Yeah. I started at 155 pounds basically 6’1/6’2. 

Layne: [00:14:13] Right. So dieting wasn’t something we even thought about for a long time. Right? We just wanted to not be tiny. And a lot of guys are like that so, and then when they go do their first cut, it’s actually not that hard, right? I don’t know how yours was. I don’t want to speak for you. 

Mike: [00:14:27] It is very easy. 

Layne: [00:14:28] Yeah. Right? 

Mike: [00:014:29] Someone was just like, “Hey, here, these are macros. Just eat as much protein, this much carbs, this much fat every day, I don’t really care what you eat, and do that long enough and you’ll get shredded.” And I was like, “What?!” I did that and I got pretty lean. I was like, “Huh, that’s interesting.” 

Layne: [00:14:43] Yeah, so it’s very interesting that for guys like us, because if you think about from an evolutionary perspective, we have been in a surplus so long that your body actually starts to waste more energy. For example, when you were bulking coming out from 155 pounds you probably found that eventually you had to eat just copious amounts of food just to gain more weight, right? 

Mike: [00:15:08] Yeah, upward of 4,000 calories a day or so is the last lean bulk that I did really. 

Layne: [00:07:52] Right, so I’m actually trying to gain some weight right now and I’m up around 3,900 – 4,000 calories as well, so when you do that, you’re telling your body food is plentiful. We don’t have to be efficient with our food because we’re not going to starve, right? This is the signal you’re sending to your body from an evolutionary perspective.

If you’re somebody who has – to take women, for example, a lot of female clients I know I asked them, “When did you start your first diet? I was eight. I was ten. I was seven.” It’s pretty scary and you think about it from the perspective of what you’re telling your body. If you’ve done that for ten years on and off you’re telling your body food is scarce. What happens is your body really tries to slow down your metabolic rate to keep you from starving yourself.

Which completely makes sense from an evolutionary perspective if you consider especially for females as they have to actually carry a child. Evolution cares about you surviving long enough to reproduce. That’s what it cares about at the crux of things, especially when a female is the sex that’s carrying the child. Evolution is going to do its best to conserve energy as much as possible.

If you tell your body energy scarce, energy scarce, energy scarce – well then you’re not going to waste a lot of energy. Your body is going to lower its metabolic rate and it can be really hard to lose fat in the future and so, I usually don’t do that many mini cuts with females because I find that a lot of the clientele that I work with – and it could just be because I talk about the metabolic slowing, that sort of thing, that since I talk about a lot, I get a lot of those clients.

You know what I mean? You tend to – we tend to self-select our clients by what we talk about. If I talked about teen bulking I’d probably get a lot of teen clients. You know what I mean? But I get a lot of these clientele who are females who have a long diet history from a very slow metabolic rates compared to what you would predict based on their lean body mass and whatnot.

And so, I kind of have to do a lot of – for lack of a better term, ‘metabolic repair’ where we’re trying to slowly add calories back in – to for lack of a better term, convinced their bodies that they’re not going to starve, that food isn’t scarce, so that hopefully in the future we go to diet down, they can be more effective.

But if you’ve been dieting for a really long time, you know, on and off – a lot of these girls like in, you know, six weeks in are like, “Oh, can we cut? Can we cut?” And I’m thinking you’re at 1,500 calories maintaining your body weight. No, we’re not going to cut, you know? So, I think for people who they have a healthy metabolic rate and they haven’t been doing yo-yo dieting over life, I think it can be really – cyclical bulking can be a great thing. I mean, we kind of have cyclical cutting now. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the recent research on diet breaks? 

Mike: [00:18:02] Yeah, I’ve written and spoken about it a little bit actually. 

Layne: [00:18:05] Yeah, so really interesting stuff. I’m actually on a recent review of literature with a couple others, Jackson Peos, Eric Helms, and Andy Galpin. It’s pretty interesting, it’s kind of like the same concept in reverse. When you do one to two week phases at maintenance while you’re cutting, it seems like it preserves your metabolic rate much better than if you’re just doing a straight deficit.

Whereas, in the off season, or bulking season, or whatever you call it, you’re putting in these little cuts and they do really well, because you’re metabolic rate really fast. Now you’re putting in these little periods of maintenance to kind of convince your body that, hey, I know we’ve had this deficit, but here’s some food, you know, foods not scares, you don’t have to go so aggressive with metabolic adaptation, because what happens during dieting is your body tends to overreact to your deficit.

It will slow down much more than – your metabolic rate slows down much more than you would predict just based on the amount of lean body mass you lose and fat mass. So, yeah, I think that these kind of cycles can be really helpful, but it also depends on the psychological makeup of the person. I mean, I had somebody who during cutting I was doing diet breaks with them and they were like, “I hate this. I hate feeling like I get into a rhythm and then boom, now I’ve got a week where I’ve got to eat more and I just want to do straight deficit.

I don’t want any high days and low days, I want the same every day.” And you know, for me, what I tell people was the most important thing is having a plan that you could stick to. I said, “Hey, if that’s something that’s more sustainable for you, then that’s what we’ll do.” But I think they are a useful tool as long as they’re implemented appropriately. 

Mike: [00:19:44] Yeah, I tend to be that way I tend to just stick to a straight deficit for a period and then I guess the last few times I’ve gotten pretty lean, you know, down to whatever, seven-ish percent photo shoot leaner or whatever. I would usually do one or two kind of high carb days or just feel good or, you know, take a bunch of calories, give them to carbs and maybe bump my calories up to around maintenance.

I wouldn’t do I guess formal breaks of several days, but yeah I tend to be one of those people – I’m like yea I’ll just do a straight deficit for a while until I feel and I’ll have some higher carb days here and there and just kind of play it by ear, basically. 

Layne: [00:13:02] Yeah, I mean you know, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. People have gotten lean all different kinds of ways. At the end of the day, the most important thing and I wrote about this in Fat Lost Forever, the number one most important thing is just to find something that you can stick to, because at the end of the day people don’t fail diets because they didn’t have the right macros or they didn’t do their diet break right or something.

They fail on them because they just quit. You know, they stopped doing it. They don’t do something that they can continue for a long period of time. So all this other stuff is great – diet breaks, high carb days, calorie cycling, you know getting fancy with all the stuff. At the end of the day if you can’t stick to it, you’ve got to rethink what you’re doing because it’s very clear in the literature: if you want to sustain fat loss, you have to sustain the behaviors that caused you to lose that fat and if you don’t you’ll just get it back. 

Mike: [00:21:15] Yep and that means that really it should be enjoyable, that should be the standard. Like, yeah, sometimes you’re gonna be a little bit hungry, sometimes you’re gonna wish you can eat a bit more or you’re going to wish you could eat an entire pie, and that’s normal, but on the whole, I think you should be eating foods that you like, you should be looking forward to your meals, you should have good energy levels, you should have good workouts – it should be pretty smooth sailing if you’re doing the major things right. 

Layne: [00:22:26] I always tell people dieting and exercise is like the stock market. And they reason I say this is, if you look at the stock market, at least a few years ago when I checked it, or checked the statistic – I believe in the entire existence of the U.S. stock market there is not a 10 year period where it didn’t at least break even, right? Overall, the economy continues to grow, right? So it expands. Overall, it goes up and it goes down and there’s recessions, and you have days with there’s big spikes and you have days where there’s big falls, but overall it goes up.

Your training and your nutrition is kind of like that. We’ve all had days where we go in the gym or we feel like we could just crush any weight that was in there. We just feel good. And then next time you go in and you feel like garbage, you know, you’re just like, “What the hell happened?” That’s normal. What I tell people with that is if you’re invested in a good stock, you know it’s good – Apple, Facebook, whatever.

Are you going to sell that stock because you had one bad day or one bad week? Of course not. You’re going to keep that stock and hope that it continues to go up. So training is like that. If you’re doing the right things, you’re in there. You’re not going to feel good every day. The important thing is that you continue to do it and make it so it is fun and sustainable and have faith that if you do it right it’s not going to be bad every day its going to get better again.

When I tell all my clients when they get hungry I’m like, “I know that this is a really hard emotion to deal with, being hungry, but remember that we tend to get caught in an emotion and feel like it’s going to last forever, right?” I mean, I don’t want to go to psychology based, but if you think about what’s the worst thing that could ever happen to you it’s you die. People still take their own lives.

Again, I’m not a psychologist, but my guess is a lot of times it’s because they feel like things are never going to get better, because the emotion that they’re caught in at that moment, they feel like it’s never going to get better. I don’t want to compare suicides and nutrition, but the point being is that when you’re hungry you can’t imagine not being hungry. It’s like an all encompassing… I’m sure you’ve been very lean before. You’ve had that experience where you were just so hungry that you couldn’t even think about anything else. Have you had that feeling?

 Mike: [00:24:40] Absolutely. Where I remember one sitting at my desk, my mouth was salivating at the thought of eating. I think it was like apple pie or something. [Laughing] This is fucked up. 

Layne: [00:24:51] Yeah, exactly and that’s actually part of the evolutionary response to calorie restriction is for your body to trigger those things not just slow down your metabolic rate, but try to – so it works that, you know, calories in, calories out. Well, what it does is it it tries to reduce your calories out and tries to really jack up calories in and because it’s trying to get rid of that energy gap. The words I like to use are: more energy is desired than is required. 

Mike: [00:25:18] Yep. 

Layne: [00:25:21] When you were in that feeling you probably could never have imagined that you would ever not feel hungry. The important thing is don’t use our lizard brain or hindbrain to use our front brain, our smart brain and talk to yourself and be mindful and say, “I feel like this now, but it’s not going to last forever, it will pass.” And hunger does pass. Like if you’ve ever had intense periods of hunger, if you don’t give into it, it does pass. It just sucks for a little while.

Mike: [00:25:47] Yeah, if you do that it allows you disassociate a bit from it and not feel – to feel where something separate to you as opposed to where now that is all you can think about, it’s all you can look at, it’s all you can feel. 

Layne: [00:26:02] Yeah, and not to get too like metaphysical or whatever, but just tell yourself like, “This isn’t real.” You know, this is just my body, I’m not starving, my body is just trying to trick me. Listen, I’ve been there. I’ve been there where – it’s just all encompassing. I have friend who is a Navy SEAL, and he said that they have a term that they use called, “Embrace the Suck”. 

Mike: [00:26:27] Yeah. 

Layne: [00:26:29] When training is harder, when dieting is hard, or whatever, I always just tell myself, “Embrace the suck, because it’s probably making me better.” 

Mike: [00:26:34] Yeah, I mean something simple and practical is if you can distract yourself, if you can get your attention onto something that just takes it away from being hungry regardless of whatever it is – that can help. 

Layne: [00:26:47] Yeah, it’s very interesting. My girlfriend Holly, she tends to overeat less when she exercises more just because she’s not bored. 

Mike: [00:26:53] Yeah. 

Layne: [00:26:54] She likes to go out. We go for walks a lot, we do bike rides, we do all that. She’s like, if I’m sitting by myself in the house, then it’s like really hard for me not to overeat because now I don’t have anything to distract myself with. I think that’s really important, too.

At the end of a diet like her, if you’re going into maintenance and you want to keep more of those cuts that you’ve got, I think it’s really important when you “end your diet,” like you haven’t ended it and the next thing is you’re at an all inclusive resort with no means to exercise for the next five days and all the food you want. 

Mike: [00:27:31] Yeah, like on a cruise ship or something. 

Layne: [00:27:33] Yeah. That’s a really, really, really bad idea. Really bad idea. That’s how people gain 30 pounds in a week, you know? [Laughing] So it’s funny because people will argue about this and they’ll be like, “Oh, you can’t gain fat from just one meal.” Yeah you can, of course you can! Like what kind of stupid logic is that?

Like if you couldn’t store energy from one meal, that is a stupid – now, you might not store a ton of fat from one meal just because you require a certain level of caloric access but absolutely, you can store fat from one meal. 

Mike: [00:28:05] Well, of course I mean mechanistically speaking that’s what happens, right? So if we’re eating food, body is very energy efficient, so if the meal is substantial whatsoever it’s going to supply a lot more energy than the body needs to just stay alive and so what is it going to do with a portion of that excess?

It’s going to store it until all of that food is processed and then okay, now it needs to live on its own energy stores until you feed it again, but that’s the process, right? I mean, that’s the fat gain, fat loss process and you look at the balance over time, it tells you: are you getting fatter? Are you getting leaner? Are you staying more or less staying the same? 

Layne: [00:28:36] That’s right. So, yeah, I think having some of those strategies of – you know, it’s really interesting, not just the activity to keep yourself occupied, but also I talk to a lot of this research when I was writing, Fat Lost Forever, and we hear a lot that exercise – you’ve probably heard this – exercise really isn’t a means for fat loss, right?

And it is true from the perspective of if you just have people do exercise, they don’t really lose a lot of fat. They get healthier. They get much healthier. So I don’t want to – people get this twisted, but exercise is like the only thing you can do where you don’t have to lose weight and you’ll get substantially healthier. You can be fat and actually in shape if you exercise. It’s pretty incredible.

But what exercise does that really contributes strongly for weight loss is one, yes it helps you maintain your lean body mass when you’re dieting, which is important. But more important than that, it actually sensitize you to satiety signals and we live in a society where we have what’s called an obesogenic environment. We have readily accessible, extremely high calorie, highly palatable, minimal satiating foods that are cheap.

For less than a buck you can go grab a Snickers bar that packs, you know, 250 calories in a really small piece of food. Which again, I’ve talked about this, I’m a flexible dieter, that’s not inherently fattening. Those 250 calories aren’t magic compared to the 250 calories from rice and peanut butter. It’s not magic. It’s just that rice and butter is probably a lot more satiating than 250 calories from a Snickers because it’s more volume.

So when you have all this access to this obesogenic environment, it’s so easy to eat through normal satiety signals. It really is and if you don’t exercise, it’s even easier. There was actually a study done in Bangali workers in the 1950’s and they had people who were either sedentary, lightly active job, moderately active job, or heavily active job, like heavy labor, and they looked at how much food they eat.

They didn’t tell them any instructions or anything. They just wanted to see what they did. What they found was that people who were from lightly active to heavily active, pretty much linearly increase their calories to match their activity, right? The people who were sedentary actually ate more than both the likely active and moderately active groups. 

Mike: [00:31:04] Interesting. 

Layne: [00:31:05] So that’s why I say that exercise sensitizes you to satiety signals and they’ve actually seen this in animal studies as well, where if they give rats free access to a treadmill and the rats exercise, the amount of calories they burned was pretty insignificant compared to their total daily energy expenditure.

It was like three percent or something, because the other thing people don’t realize is when you exercise, yeah you burn more calories when you exercise, but your body actually is very smart and compensates by lowering its BMR or you just move less throughout the day. Your need goes down, because again, the body is trying to conserve.

But again, what it does do is it sensitize you to those satiety signals and you actually end up eating less and that’s what the rats did in this study was they – the rats that were exercised actually ate less than the rats that were sedentary. 

Mike: [00:31:55] And so practically speaking for people then, really what it is, is it helps your body, regulates its appetite better, right? 

Layne: [00:32:02] Yeah, correct. So, you know, everybody tries to make the obesity crisis out to be kind of – well this thing caused it, well that thing caused it, fat caused it, carbs caused it, sugar caused it. It’s not one thing. It’s a bunch of stuff. Yes, there’s more added fats in the diet, there’s also more added sugar, and there’s just more calories in general. 

Mike: [00:32:25] People are less active generally now than they were decades ago, right? 

Layne: [00:32:29] And that’s a huge part of it. That’s absolutely a huge part of it. So people are less active, more calories. There’s also how food has become part of our society since it becomes so readily available. You know, back in the Great Depression, if you wanted to have a get together, you might not be able to have a bunch of food there, you know, to interact with your friends.

Can you remember ever going to a get together with friends, even if it was just, “Hey, come over watch the game on Sunday,” where there wasn’t food. 

Mike: [00:32:58] Yeah, it’s always – it ranges from semi maybe “diet friendly” to thousands and thousands of calories laid out that look and smell delicious. 

Layne: [00:33:10] Right, not only that, but like our dinner plates are like 50 percent bigger than they were back in the 1800’s. So there’s all kinds of – there’s physical reasons, physiological reasons, psychological reasons, sociological reasons, there’s a lot of reasons why people are getting fatter. 

Mike: [00:33:28] Do you think that the nutritional value of food is playing into that? Because as we know, it has been generally declining over time due to soil erosion and other things. It’s not to be alarmist about that, but there was a book that, The Dorito Effect, and I was reading the book’s summary of it cause I do that first before I dive into any book just to see if it is going to be worth the time investment, really.

And they were talking about – and I have a note to look at the research because I’m not going to take it at face value – but that basically, okay, so you’re eating food – what’s really the reason biologically to eat food? It’s to give our body the nutrients it needs to stay alive, okay And if you’re eating food that is less nutritionally dense, then if that’s what you’re primarily eating, would be more highly processed.

Even if the foods have been fortified, it’s still not going to be the same as eating like some fruits and vegetables and grains and stuff. So if you’re eating a lot of nutritionally bankrupt food let’s say, you’re getting calories, but have you come across – and I’m actually genuinely asking, this is on my list of questions to answer myself – have you come across good evidence that that alone can increase the desire for more food, where the body’s like, “Yeah, the calories are nice, but I’m not getting enough actual essential nutrients. Give me more food and please make it nutritional.” 

Layne: [00:34:45] I want to make sure I understand clearly, nutritional density, they mean like vitamins and minerals? 

Mike: [00:34:53] Yeah. The natural nutrients that you find in foods that you have to make yourself and mostly plant based obviously – fruits, vegetables, grains, seeds, legumes, blah blah blah. 

Layne: [00:35:03] This is kind of similar to the protein stat theory. I don’t know if you have ever heard of that? 

Mike: [00:35:06] No. 

Layne: [00:35:07] Basically, what it says is that even though our protein intake has remained the same, we’ve had to eat more calories to get the same amount of protein and the body wants a certain amount of protein. Before you can get the amount of protein you needed from, say, 2,000 calories, now you have to eat 2,700. That’s kind of the argument that’s being made just with vitamins and minerals, correct?

Mike: [00:35:29] Yeah. Same concept although the protein one sounds odd. What they’re saying chicken breast has fundamentally changed a lot? 

Layne: [00:35:36] No, I think what they’re saying is the food selection has shifted so that in order to get the same amount of protein, you’re going to be over eating calories. 

Mike: [00:35:45] Right, because of how the diet on the whole has changed. 

Layne: [00:35:48] I haven’t looked into the vitamin and mineral stuff. What I will say is, if you look at organic food versus non-organic food, you don’t see differences in vitamin and mineral content. 

Mike: [00:35:59] I think in some cases there are, right? Like certain fruits and vegetables are a bit more nutritious in certain ways, even though it’s not all that… 

Layne: [00:36:05] I haven’t seen it. I don’t pretend to have seen every single study on them either. The ones I have seen have not been able to show a difference in vitamin and mineral content, but maybe some have. I haven’t looked into this, so I’m just going to give you my perspective and my tenuous opinion. So I guess my pushback against that would be: well if everybody just took a multivitamin, that would solve all our problems.

I don’t know, but I inherently don’t think that that’s true. I don’t want to completely dismissed the idea that vitamins and minerals may have an impact on satiety. I’m not sure of any that do or at least documented, I think more of this may come into play is that the fiber people are eating less fiber than ever relative to their calorie intake and fiber certainly does seem to have an effect on satiety. 

Mike: [00:36:53] Yeah, that was a note that I made as well. I wonder if they’re just mixing up causation here. It’s not the vitamins minerals per say but… 

Layne: [00:36:59] I think that that’s probably more likely Mike, is that, you’re right, that they’re mistaking the reduction in vitamin mineral content. What’s actually happening is due to processed food versus unprocessed food. Again, I’m not an alarmist and I sit here I eat some processed foods.

I don’t think they’re inherently dangerous or bad for you, but I think that it’s hard to get enough dietary fiber if you’re eating just processed foods and dietary fiber has some great benefits in terms of satiety, G.I. regularity, as well as a short chain fatty acid production from fermentation, and that that has seems to have some effects on mineral grade as well.

So I would speculate that it’s probably more likely that the foods that are being chosen in the diet are lower in fiber and that might be a bigger reason why you’re seeing some over eating. But again, I really haven’t looked into that in depth. So, you know, I could be wrong. 

Mike: [00:38:03] Yeah. And the takeaway there is it’s soluble fiber in particular, right? Which is particularly beneficial to your gut health with the short chain fatty acids. So I think the takeaway there is: make sure you’re getting enough fiber and really the easiest way to do that is eat several servings of vegetables every day. You can have a serving of fruit, eat some whole grains, if you do that.. 

Layne: [00:38:22] Careful now, the carnivore people will tell you that, you know, fibers are actually bad for you. [Laughing] 

Mike: [00:38:26] I wrote about that recently and then recorded a podcast on it and when I first heard of that, I was like, “Come on! Is that actually a thing?” And oh yes. Oh, yes. It’s a thing. 

Layne: [00:38:37] I think what we have is we have reactionary culture now, so I remember when I first started talking about bad coaching in the industry and I talked about like some of the things that people did. And people started saying, well, I had a person come to me and they’re like, “Well, this coach put me on a 1,100 calories a day, so they were a bad coach, right?”

And I kind of looked at what they did and I looked at what their data was, I said, “Not really. Not really. I mean, they were trying to get you lean for a show. They didn’t start you at 1,100 calories. You got down to that by the end. And, you know, that’s not a bad coach. That’s just, you know, if you’re a female and you’re small…”

Mike: [00:39:20] You’re a small human! I’m sorry! I’ve had that discussion too, where, you know, “oh poverty macros and poverty calories,” I’m like you’re 110 pounds! [Laughing] And you want to be super lean and exactly that, you’ve been dieting for a while, I mean, I hate to say it, but that’s the price that you’re gonna have to pay.

You will never be eating 1,600-1,700 calories a day, getting down to 10, 11, 12 percent body fat I’m sorry it’s just not going to happen. Unless all you do is, like, I don’t know sit in the gym all day, every day, but then your body’s fall apart, so something’s got to give. 

Layne: [00:39:54] Yes. I think that’s kind of like an example of that, right? So I was talking about how, you know, all these coaches starving their clients and bad coaching. Then it went to, “If you ever take some of these calories under 1,500 calories, you’re a bad coach!” Whoa, hey, hey, whoa, let’s pump the brakes on this, you know what I mean?

Like, context is important. And same thing here, it’s like, there’s this big vegan movement that demonizes anybody who eats meat and is trying to convince you that vegan blood can cure cancer and all this other nonsensical crap and so what’s the reaction to that?

Well, fuck you. We’re going to only eat meat. And it’s just stupid. I was on a podcast, I did the Mark Bells podcast, and I was debating Sean Baker, one of the big proponents of the carnivore diet. Who to his credit, said that people probably should eat vegetables, but it’s weird because he kind of promotes not eating vegetables, but in any case… 

Mike: [00:40:48] [Laughing] You got to admit that much, wow! 

Layne: [00:40:51] Yeah, I did. But it’s like I’m a protein guy. I did my PHD in protein metabolism. I was funded by the egg and dairy industry and here I am on this podcast defending vegetables. Of all the things I never thought would happen, I never thought I would say, “Hey, eating that much meat is probably not a great idea and maybe you should have some vegetables.”

I never thought in a million years I would be having that conversation because usually by battle ground had been vegans, you know, who’ve been saying that, you know, eating meat is the same thing as smoking, you know, whatever it is. You know, I’m like, “You know guys, maybe meat has some health benefits and maybe vegetables have some health benefits, and maybe, just maybe, an extremist diet is not the best way to do things.” 

Mike: [00:41:39] The thing is, that’s not very sexy from a marketing perspective, right? If you can take an extreme position, it just generates more buzz and especially if you can then position yourself against something like veganism, which is hot. It’s controversial. So, I mean, I understand it from a marketing perspective, but from a physiological perspective, the carnivore diet makes absolutely no sense. 

Layne: [00:42:03] Yeah. I mean, I think that… 

Mike: [00:42:05] Unless it’s an extreme elimination diet, right? So if you have someone who has real problems and they’re like, “Fuck, I don’t know what foods are doing this to me. I have to strip my diet down to nothing basically. Rebuild it piece by piece so I can discover what is actually causing these issues.” Then I think that makes sense. 

Layne: [00:42:23] Yeah, and a lot of people have been getting benefits by, you know, again, it’s correlation versus causation. Eat only meat, some other autoimmune stuff dies down and their digestive issues die down, they go, “Oh! See! Eating meat is the best thing!” Well no. That’s like somebody with a lactose intolerance who drinks milk, they stop drinking milk and they feel better, and they say everybody should not drink milk. It’s like, no! 

Mike: [00:42:50] Yeah, or they start drinking pineapple juice instead of milk and they’re like, “Pineapple juice is amazing, it cured my GI distress.” 

Layne: [00:42:57] Right, exactly. So it’s like you said, it’s hard to make something sexy when you’re promoting kind of moderation. You know, I always said, you know, I went to grad school. I wanted to find Magic Foods. And if I’d found some magic foods, I’d be sitting on a yacht in the middle of the Pacific getting fanned by five super models on either side, right?

Because I’ll be worth like a hundred billion dollars. Can you imagine if you found like just foods that sold everything? You know? And that’s just not going to happen. Another thing people don’t want to admit is that there probably isn’t one best diet for everything.

You know, if you have autoimmune issues, then maybe some kind of elimination diet is going to be best for you where you’re eating a little more meat less or whatever, depending on your situation. But that’s probably not best for cancer. And what’s best for cancer probably won’t be best for heart disease. And was best for heart disease might not be best for Alzheimer’s. I don’t know for sure, but I’m just putting this out there. 

Mike: [00:43:53] Sure, sure. 

Layne: [00:43:54] It’s going to be completely… 

Mike: [00:43:55] And all of that may not be best for just your average everyday healthy person that exercises and just wants to look good and feel good. 

Layne: [00:44:03] Here’s what we know with very high confidence. If you’re not obese, and you’re exercising, and you’re not smoking, and you’re not drinking too much, you’re 95% of the way there. And any bad thing that happens is some kind of genetic anomaly. I actually was at a longevity clinic this weekend with my best friend from college, who is now the medical director of a longevity clinic.

Really fascinating stuff what they do. They can do genetics. So it’s expensive, it’s like five grand. But you come in, they take a sample, they sequence your DNA and everything. Not these bull crap kits that you buy online that you do a saliva test, like they actually sequence your entire genome, they look for these different mutations that are known to cause disease and they put together a risk profile for you.

So they show you what your predisposition is. Then they do a complete whole body scan with magnetic residents looking for anything. So that shows you where you are. And then they give you advice, like lifestyle modifications you can make to minimize your risk. So, for example, you know, maybe you go in and they found 2.5% of people had aneurysms that were undocumented.

So they had this technology that they could go in and basically find stuff that other doctors wouldn’t be able to find. So they found like, I think they said, they found like 14 percent of the people they put through this service had immediately actionable things, but were otherwise, they were diagnosed as healthy by their normal doctor, because normal docs wouldn’t have this technology. But it was pretty cool, you know, to see that. 

Mike: [00:45:40] But that kind of stuff, that’s gonna be the future of medicine, right? Highly personalized, preventative. That’s cool. 

Layne: [00:45:44] Exactly. I think they said that when the first genome was sequenced it cost $100 billion to do or something insane, you know, or a $100 million dollars. Maybe it was. And now it’s, you know, a few thousand dollars and by 2020, it’s going to be like a thousand dollars, you know? So this is going to get into the realm of doable for most people pretty quick.

Wouldn’t anybody like to know, “Hey, you know what? You’re high risk for Alzheimer’s, but if you make these lifestyle modifications, you can knock that risk way down.” The reason I bring this up is, it’s like I said, if you’re exercising, you’re not obese, you’re not drinking too much, and you’re not smoking, man, you’ve knocked out 95% of the biggest risk factors. And yes, you can be healthy, you can exercise regularly, you can eat right, and you may still drop dead of a heart attack at 35.

But you got a much lower chance of dropping dead of a heart attack at 35 if you do that stuff. And in that case, some of these genetic things, like for example, BRCA1 gene. If you have the BRCA1, I think there’s a couple different variants, but in general if you’ve got BRCA1 and you’re a female, 99.9 percent chance you’re getting breast cancer. You might as well just get a mastectomy now.

It’s extremely, extremely powerful. So you could have a person who exercises their entire life to eat the healthiest diet, all that kind of stuff and there still going to get a breast cancer, right? Just because of that mutation. So I think we have this misconception that if we do everything right, you know, our risk goes to zero. There’s never a zero risk. You know, there is no such thing.

But we can do as much as we can to minimize this risks. And I think that a lot of people screw up and they get so caught up in the devil of the details, like I know people who, like, don’t even try to eat right because they just feel so frustrated, because they’re like, “Well, this TV show said carbs are bad. This one says fats are bad. I’m just frustrated, I don’t even care.” It’s like, man I feel so bad, because it’s like, no, it doesn’t matter if you just lost some weight. 

Mike: [00:47:43] Yep. Truly a matter of missing the forest for the trees, right? 

Layne: [00:47:46] Yeah. It’s so frustrating and I know a lot of what I do is I try to, again, not to pimp my book too much, but in Fat Lost Forever, I try to lower the barrier of entry for people who want to diet, you know, and say, “Hey, you can do this any way you want mostly, because – hey, guess what?

Let’s say you love the carnivore diet. I don’t think it’s probably the best diet for your health. However, if you’re overweight and it allows you to get to normal and lose 30 pounds, then it was better than nothing, than anything else.” 

Mike: [00:48:16] Yeah. It’s going to improve your health a lot. I’ve cited a few of these examples, there was one guy, Professor Mark Haub, I believe, who lost, you know, 30 pounds eating like protein shakes and Twinkies and cookies and shit, and his health had improved by the end of it in a number of ways.

His cholesterol was better. His doctor didn’t believe it. No way you ate like shit basically, but losing 30 pounds, 27 pounds or whatever it was – that alone was enough to improve your health and pretty much every way that we could quantify it was like, wow. 

Layne: [00:48:49] Yeah, so there was actually a meta analysis done by the authors names was Naub. He did two, or there was two done, and they basically determined that 95 to 99 percent of the health effects that we can measure from dieting are completely due to the weight loss.

Basically it didn’t matter how you lost it. It didn’t matter if it was high carb, low carb, whatever. It was 95 to 99 percent were completely explained by the weight loss. So if that’s the case, the best diet is probably the one you can stick to. 

Mike: [00:49:22] And that’s for getting there, right? And then it’s for, in terms of maintaining a healthy body weight, yeah, then it’s figuring out what’s really going to work for the long term and for some people, I’m sure you’ve had the same experience I have – those are not always one in the same.

Some people do actually prefer, let’s say, for example, when they’re cutting they prefer a more restrictive diet because they find that they understand flexible dieting and they totally get it, but for them, a certain foods are like trigger foods so to speak and they would rather just cut them out of their diet completely because they know they tend to overeat them. So they go: pretty restrictive to lose the weight, but then they loosen up for maintenance. And for some people, that works. 

Layne: [00:50:03] Yeah. And, you know, again, it’s just very individually dependent. One of the things I tell people, again, is try different things and don’t dismiss what works for you. You know, because as cliches as it sounds, what some people are going to find easy for a diet, you know, some will swear by low carb and they say, “Oh my god, I don’t feel hungry, everything’s great.” And other people hate low carb, “I’m always hungry,” this and that. Well then if you hate low carb, it doesn’t matter what the study that came out said, you probably shouldn’t do low carb. 

Mike: [00:50:35] I’ve made this point with training as well that, you know, I hear from a lot of people fairly often who are concerned that whatever kind of program they’re following is not the “best program”. It’s not the most scientifically optimized program and I remind people of this that, “Hey, so long as you’re programming is following – there are some principles that it should be based on and there are some boundaries, but there are a lot of the things are negotiable, not non-negotiable.

So, so long as it’s not absurd and ridiculous, if you enjoy it and you are making progress with it, even if it is not “scientifically optimal,” or the best possible training programming out there – if it’s working and you enjoy it, that’s good.” And if someone were to give you – here is, this dude has five PHD’s or this chick has five PHD’s and he or she knows everything about training. Here’s the absolute best possible training program that anyone can create based on the current state of the literature. If you don’t like it and you can’t stick to it, it’s not for you. 

Layne: [00:51:37] That’s exactly right. And that’s why they’ve shown flexible periodization is actually better than rigid periodization because people have more freedom to make choices. That’s a whole another discussion. But yeah, typically flexibility increases adherence. Usually, but that’s not always the case. Like I said, some people prefer a little bit more rigidity in their diet for certain periods of time.

Just give some context to Mark Helm, we call him – his nickname is the Twinkie Diet Professor. He bet his students that – I had it on my podcast years ago – he bet his students that he could lose weight eating just Twinkies. Basically Twinkies, protein shakes, and a multivitamin. I think he took a fiber supplement too. As long as he essentially hit his macros, right?

He did the extreme form of IFYM. I get this all the time, people say, “Well do you think you could just eat Pop-Tarts and protein shakes and take a fiber supplement and a multivitamin and you’d be healthy?” And I’m like, well, yeah. Mostly, [Laughter] like I wouldn’t necessarily advise it, but… 

Mike: [00:52:32] Yeah, I don’t know, I wouldn’t stand by that over the long term. But if we’re talking about a… 

Layne: [00:52:46] Well I don’t think it’s sustainable for most people to be honest. 

Mike: [00:52:49] Yeah. [Laughter] 

Layne: [00:52:50] So to put it in context, Helm was only eating 1,800 calories a day and he said he actually didn’t really enjoy it that much because it really wasn’t that much food. If your 1,800 calories is coming from mostly Twinkies, that’s not a lot of food volume. He said he would have preferred, you know, like a salad or something – something filling.

He used to start his speeches off or his slides off when he would present this data. He would put up a slide of his nutrition intake, so his protein, carbs, fats, vitamins, minerals, fiber, and he would ask the audience, “Does this look like a healthy diet?” And most them, you know, he’s like if I was in a room of professors, somebody might say, “Oh, you’re a little bit low in Vitamin K, but yeah, everything looks good,” and then he’d say, “Okay, is this a healthy diet?

And he would show pictures of the foods he ate and everybody go, “No, no.” And he goes, “What if I told you these were the same thing?” And then everybody’s minds proceed to explode. The other thing was, he also documented, because people would say – I think he lost something like 27 pounds, I want to say, over twelve weeks – and people will say, “Well, that’s fine, he lost weight, but did he get healthier?” or “Do you think he’s really healthy?

Well what was going on in the inside?” I always hear that. Well yeah, like his cholesterol and all his measurable health markers improved drastically. So what that says is that, again, it’s mostly from the weight loss is what causes these health benefits. So if you can just lose weight and keep it off, that’s 90 to 99 percent of the fight right there and whatever allows you to do that should come first and all the other argument about, “Well saturated fat versus polyunsaturated fat or carbohydrates versus fats or how much sugar…”

All that shit should come way second to what is sustainable for you and what can you take in to lose weight and keep it off? Because that is the vast majority chunk are the health benefits come in, but that’s not sexy. That’s not sexy to sell. It’s not sexy. When you can say, “Well, just have my celery juice and it’ll take the mucus out of your gut and it’ll do everything.

It’ll make your dick bigger and your asshole tighter. You know [laughter], like just some of the claims you see are just ridiculous, but people buy into them because they want to believe that there are these magic solutions. Yeah, there’s just not. 

Mike: [00:55:17] Totally agree. And I know you have to run in a minute, I have one last question for you on the mini bulk. It’ll be quick, but I know there are gonna be people out there who are wondering, because I got asked it.

Alright, so you have someone, it could be a guy or girl, and they’re starting with a relatively high body fat percentage. Let’s say it’s a dude at 20 or 25 percent, or a girl at 25, 30 plus. What are your thoughts there? And they’re just getting into weight lifting. They’re going, “Okay, should I…” 

Layne: [00:55:42] They’re just getting into it? 

Mike: [00:55:43] Yeah. 

Layne: [00:55:44] I think I’m probably gonna have them cut first and here’s my reasoning with that: since they’re new, they’re still going to gain muscle regardless, because one, they have a big surplus of energy -their body fat stores – so they can do some body recompositioning.

And the drive to adapt to the stimulus is going to be so great at the onset of training that they are going to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time for the most part. So, yes. And the other thing is too, it’s like, if you take somebody who’s not comfortable in their diet and they say, “You know what? We’re going to put you on a bulk,” or not comfortable with their body, “We’re going to put you on a bulk. You need to be the calorie surplus.”

Their inherence is going to be pretty shit because they’re going to be like, “Well, why am I doing this? I feel like I’m looking worse and worse or not getting to my goal.” Whereas if you can get them to drop, you know, 20, 15, 20 pounds or something like that. They look better, they feel better, they feel better about themselves, and they’re probably more encouraged and are going to be more adherent moving forward, and being consistent – now they’ve got some progress.

I usually tell people, “When in doubt, cut.” is usually what I say. People say, “Well, should I cut or should I bulk?” I usually say, “When in doubt, cut.” Only from the perspective that for me and clients I work with if they’re not real comfortable with their body heading into a bulk or a muscle gaining phase, they don’t stick with it very long, because they start looking in the mirror and they go…

I mean, look at me, I’ve been doing this for 20 years, I’d like to think I’m pretty successful, and still I’m at about 225 right now, which is big for me – and I look in the mirror and I’m having to tell myself, “You’re not fat. You’re just comparing yourself to what your best was. You know, body fat wise, you’re not fat, you’re still lean by most people’s standards…” you know? But even my mind plays tricks on me, you know?

If I was 16, I wouldn’t be able to do this. Maybe gaining phase when I didn’t feel real comfortable with myself, because I would just fall back into cutting, you know? So I think if it’s a cut with the focus that you’re going to get comfortable enough to where you can then get back into a caloric surplus, build some muscle, that sort of thing – I think that’s okay. But I’ve just found that people have pretty terrible adherence to gaining phases when they already don’t feel comfortable with their body fat level. 

Mike: [00:58:03] Yep. Yep. I totally agree. Alright, well, this was a great discussion, man. I really appreciate you taking the time. I’ve touched on a lot of things. I think my peeps will really enjoy. Why don’t we wrap up with you just letting everybody know where can they find you and your work, and you’ve mentioned, obviously, you have a new book that you’ve released, and anything else that you want to tell anybody about. Now’s your chance. 

Layne: [00:58:25] Cool. Pimp-ology 101. So, yeah, you can find it with me at biolayne.com. All my social media is biolayne. And I do a lot of education stuff now, so I have two ebooks now, The Complete Contest Prep Guide, which is for bodybuilders, it’s 320 pages. It’s actually for body builders physique, bikini, whoever can literally take you and show you step-by-step how to get ready for a contest right down to even the most nitty gritty details. And then my new one… 

Mike: [00:58:57] Be your own coach, right? 

Layne: [00:58:59] Pretty much, yeah. For 50 bucks, you can coach yourself with this book, or this ebook. It’s pretty awesome. We’ve had a lot of great testimonials from people who have really enjoy. And even if you are – I know a lot of coaches who have got it, they just kind of keep it on hand as a reference guide. It’s it’s written like a textbook, but funnier and more engaging. And then Fat Lost Forever is the new ebook we just did and that’s kind of like my fat loss manifesto. It’s nearly 400 pages long and that’s on eight by eleven. If it was six by nine, it’d be well over 500 pages long. 

Mike: [00:59:30] That’s intense. So what? It’s 160,000 words or something. 150? Probably around there. 

Layne: [00:59:34] I don’t even know the word count is. No idea, but it’s up there. It’s up there. It’s kind of half guide, half theory, but it teaches you what you need to know about fat loss. What are the real important things when you’re talking about fat loss and not just fat loss, but how to keep it off. So we go through: here’s the problem with most diets right now, here’s where people fail, here are the characteristics of people who succeed, here’s how you can apply this information to yourself so that you can succeed.

And then we give you a blueprint of how to do that. So there’s really – I don’t think there’s any other book out there – there’s plenty of fat lost books, but one, most of them just talk about it from a theory perspective, “Oh, don’t eat carbs, or don’t eat this…” or they give you some cookie cutter meal plan. We teach you the process of how to do this.

We also teach you how to do this over a long period of time. Like, if you have a lot of weight to lose, how can you period as your nutrition strategy to do this correctly. And not only that, but how do you then keep it off, which nobody covers. I’ve never heard of a book, at least that’s focused on fat loss, that really spends – we spend just as much time talking about how to keep it off as we do about how to lose it.

So I’m really proud of those two they’ve sold – we’re getting close to 20,000 copies total of our ebook sold between myself and my girlfriend Holly. She has two recipe ebooks that kind of accompany those two that I’ve written. So she’s kind of the chef, so she puts together recipe ideas for people who need that, who have difficulty making foods that are tasty, but that are also low calorie.

So she has one book called Foods That Fit Your Macros and she has another you ebook called The Contest Prep Recipe Guide. So people have love those, so they’re great accompaniments to each other. And then the one other thing we do is we have what’s called a workout build on my site, biolayne.com.

And the workout builder is basically customizable templates for training. Basically, they are the way I train. We customize them for, you know, female or male, beginner, intermediate, advanced, bodybuilding, powerlifting, bikini, those sorts of things. They are awesome!

We have several thousand members to the workout builder and people love it. You can get it for $12.99 a month and it also comes with all of our premium content on the site, a lot of other cool stuff, and you get it for basically the price of buying a coffee each week at Starbucks, it’s pretty much a no brainer. 

Mike: [01:02:13] Awesome. Awesome. Well, I’ve gone through both of the books and I think I blurbed one of them and I can vouch for the information, it’s fantastic. And like Layne said, it’s very thorough. I mean, I don’t know what else, I have never competed, it answered all the questions that I would have at least as I was looking through it, and then the fat loss book also is just kind of all in, everything you could want to know to not only be able to lose the fat, but like Layne said, keep it off, which can be more difficult for some people than losing it. 

Layne: [01:02:45] Funny, I sent a copy of that to Sophie Lee. Do you know Sophie Lee? 

Mike: [01:02:48] Yep. Yep. I’ve had her on the show. It’s been a bit, but yeah. 

Layne: [01:02:51] She’s awesome. I sent it to her and her exact response – she sent me a testimonial, in the email with the testimonial, her first line says, “Holy shit! You put everything in here!” [Laughter] If you guys are interested in those we have them at biolaynestore.com, or the direct links are, for Fat Loss Forever, it’s howtolosefatforever.com. For Conscious Prep Guide, it’s consciousprepguide.com. 

Mike: [01:03:16] Awesome. All right, well thanks again, Layne, for taking the time, I look forward to doing it again. We can come up with something new to talk about, if you are willing. 

Layne: [01:03:25] Yeah, I don’t think we’ll run out of topics to talk about. Thanks for having me on, Mike, I really appreciate it. We always have good discussions.