Interview with Lyle McDonald on how women can improve fat loss

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Hello again. This is Mike Matthews with the muscle life podcast. And in this episode, I am interviewing the one and only the inimitable Lyle McDonald. Lyle is a health and fitness researcher and writer, but that doesn’t really do him justice. I have to say that he’s one of my favorite authors in this space.

He’s probably, I don’t remember if he was the best. First, or if it was Martin Burkhand, but he was one of the first people that I found in my journey, whose work really resonated with me and really helped me. So it’s pretty cool to be able to sit down and chat fitness with him. And what I like most about his work is not just that he really knows his stuff, which he really does, but that he deals with subjects very holistically.

And he also does a fantastic job breaking down dense, complex subjects in terms that anyone can understand. As you can tell, I’m a bit of a fan, but anyways, so in this interview, we talk about a subject that has consumed much of Lyle’s life for the last year and a half or so, and that’s female fat loss.

Specifically, he breaks down how things differ between men and women in the realm of losing fat. And especially when we’re talking about getting really lean. Now, as Lyle points out, the fundamentals like energy and macronutrient balance are what they are. They apply to everybody equally, but the strategies that work beautifully for men wanting to get shredded won’t necessarily work as well for women.

And this isn’t exactly surprising because women are facing some pretty unique physiological challenges when it comes to weight loss that men don’t have to deal with. So in this interview, Lyle dives into why that is, what those big differences are and what you women can do to squeeze the absolute most fat loss out of your diet and training.

So I hope you like the interview. Lyle. Thanks for coming on the show. I’m excited to have you. You’re someone I’ve been wanting to talk to for quite some time now. Thanks, Mike. Glad to be here. So this is going to be, as everybody knows from the subject matter, just clicking into this, we’re gonna be talking about women and fat loss.

And I’m glad to have you on this cause I know this has been, how long you’ve been working on this book for? It’s been a bit now, right? 

Lyle: Yeah, it’s been coming up on a year and a half this book I went the short version of a long story as I found out that someone plagiarized another of my books last year and It annoyed me and it was my original flexible dieting guide To rewrite it.

It’s a rough book. It was 2004 and I Kept adding sections and thought, you know what? I should just do a general fat loss book. 

And 

Lyle: I got most of it written and got to the section on women. I was like, I’ve been avoiding this topic for a decade. Cause I know it’s going to be a nightmare, started working.

It started expanding. So I talked about it. Of course, women on my feet were like, we need this book. And I’m like, you know what? I should just spin this off to its own project. And it took on a life That’s at one point I’ve actually had to split it up into two volumes. There’s going to be a nutrition and fat loss, which is volume one.

And then training is separate because it was pushing over 420 pages to begin. And women are simply just complicated in a way that men aren’t. 

Mike: So to that first point, by the way, if it’s a, if it’s a, The plagiarizing is egregious. There’s obviously there’s possibly for copyright infringement, but 

Lyle: Ah, you know what?

I actually talked to a lawyer years ago and he said, the problem is since I’m writing about things that are generally in the scientific literature in premise, anyone could go into that literature and use it. It’s not intellectually, it’s not like writing fiction or intellectual property. There are sections I’ve seen where it’s like the punctuation is the same, especially when it’s one of my typos, 

but 

Lyle: he said it’s just really extremely hard to prove in that case.

I know for 

Lyle: a fact that the 2 people who have done this, yeah, in premise, they could have read the science. I guarantee you they didn’t. One of them, when I called him out on it, the second version of that book, he took it out and said, I’m not going to go into the details because he still looked right.

But anyway, it’s extremely difficult to prove. And the lawyer just said, you’re probably just chased up the wrong tree. So I figure it’s better to just go write a better book. 

Mike: Makes sense. So to that point, then. Let’s just start with why focus in on women? So obviously you have the fundamentals that most of the listeners, the podcast, you’re going to know the basics of energy balance and macronutrient balance and so forth.

So what are you could, we could say physiologically speaking or experientially speaking, how are women different than men? 

Lyle: Okay, so first off, yes, of course, the fundamentals always apply like there’s not, the basics of what needs to be done in terms of training, in terms of fat loss, creating chloric acid, yada yada, women have different, some different issues in a lot of, a lot of ways one obviously is how their fat is stored.

Men tend to be central fat, visceral fat, abdominal women tend to be hip and thigh fat. I remember Duchesne writing about God in the 90s about, women’s lower body stubborn fat and women frequently have a lot of trouble mobilizing that and we know the reasons I wrote about that extensively in my stubborn fat solution.

It’s got to do with blood flow and alpha and beta adrena receptors and there are clear, evolutionary sexual dimorphic reasons, women’s hip and thigh fat exists to support childbirth and an interesting tidbit is. During the latter part of pregnancy and breastfeeding hip and thigh fat is mobilized the most easily for women 

Mike: I didn’t know that 

Lyle: you’ll actually hear women experientially, you know They’ll either they usually set calories of maintenance because breastfeeding is like 300 calories a day and the fat just drops off I’ve, 

Mike: I’ve seen much higher numbers.

I’ve seen upwards of 60, I’ll be 

Lyle: honest. One of the topics I will not be covering in this book is pregnancy and child birth, just because I don’t have the medical background and the potential to give recommendations in a situation that could harm a developing or postnatal child. It’s just not something I want to touch.

So that is one topic I’m really not getting into, but yeah, it very well may be higher, but I know women that they want to get back to their pre pregnancy way. They just keep calories at maintenance and it just drops off like crazy. So that’s one of the, the big reasons there’s also some of, just different in, in fat storage patterns, there’s differences in how women store fat.

Oh, after a meal, high fat meal, men tend to burn more fat for energy. more of it sits in the bloodstream, which is actually why men are more likely to have heart attacks. Men tend to store fat more in visceral abdominal fat, which is bad. And then it’s correlated with health risk, but it’s good. And then it’s very easy to mobilize.

And when it starts exercising, like they feel leaner, but don’t look any different. And it’s because that visceral fats coming off. 

Mike: And just to clarify for the reader. So visceral fat is you have fat under your skin, subcutaneous and visceral kind of covers your organs. And when you see the big Potbelly where it’s a hard, it’s a lot of fat under the.

Lyle: And you touch it and it’s just like really physically hard to the touch. Women can get that too. It’s interesting as women get extremely over fat and here we’re talking like 50 percent body fat. There’s some, the fat cells in the lower body kind of run out of room and they start to develop a more male like fat pattern.

In men, it’s the opposite. As men gain a lot of body fat, they tend to get hip and thigh fat. So obesity shifts women towards men and men towards women. So that’s a big part of it. There’s even some evidence of women are fed a very high fat meal. The calories go directly to the lower body fat.

There’s an old saying among women that, a minute on the hips, a minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips. And it’s actually true. A final issue with that is Surprisingly, when scientists have looked at this, women and men actually both store initially a lot of the fat in their abdominal subcutaneous fat.

And this really raised a big question. If that’s the case, why do women get hip and thigh fat in the long term? What happens is after that storage, it eventually starts to mobilize, and if it’s not burned, women repartition fat from the abdominal area into the hips and thighs. Interesting. 

Mike: So it starts there and then it shifts down.

Lyle: So as long as you burn it off and stay in energy balance, it doesn’t happen. But in the long term, women’s body, and there’s an old claim that nobody believed that women who were dieting would lean out in their upper body and their hips and thighs would get fatter. And actually, there’s some truth to that.

Because the men’s women’s bodies can pull it out of the upper body. And if he doesn’t get burned off for energy, it goes to the hips. 

Mike: Yeah. And you’re, and in many cases with workouts, probably in all cases, you’re going to mobilize more than you’re going to burn depending on what you’re doing, at least, 

Lyle: right.

Even, and even there, it’s interesting. Also, women have more fatty acids in their bloodstream at rest, not after a meal. But they burn and they actually burn more for fuel at low intensity exercise. And the question has been if this is true, why? Why aren’t they losing more fat more easily?

And it’s because women’s bodies will actually, it’s called re esterification. So the fatty acid comes out and then gets put right back in the fat cell or it gets transferred to a different fat cell through a different pathway. So that’s one of the big ones. There’s also some indication, right? We know about Body weight regulation, leptin, ghrelin, I’m not gonna, I’m assuming you’re, a basis in that and this big, this is really what controls mainly the dieting end of things, which is what I’m focusing on here.

There’s women’s systems. Seem to respond differently to leptin. This has been theorized for a long time. It drops faster in women Even in responsive if men exercise at energy balance their leptin doesn’t change if women exercise at energy balance Their leptin still goes down And there’s a lot of early data some of which has been drawn into question that women exercise alone is ineffective for women And it’s a little more nuanced than that, but there’s definitely indication that women’s Hunger and appetite will go up higher than men’s in response to exercise more than that.

There’s more variability among women I’ve 

Mike: worked with and emailed with thousands of people and I can say that anecdotally I’ve seen that much more with women than men a lot, right? 

Lyle: Yes And there’s actually one one very classic study and realize, Studies are reporting averages and when it looked at the weight loss for men All the men lost some amount of weight ranging from a lot to a little right when they plotted it for women though You About half lost, but about half gained.

Now, the consequence of this is they said on average, nobody lost weight. That’s true. Some women lost a ton of weight. Some women actually gained weight with exercise. And there’s other reasons. We know that people become disinhibited. They do the, I did an aerobics class. I earned the cheeseburger thing.

Typically, that’s not a 

Mike: cheeseburger is the beginning and I ate the cheeseburger. So 

Lyle: It becomes a whole separate thing, but there is definitely a physiological basis to that. We know we’ve known for a while. Women are more likely to survive famines than men. And this makes, and this was.

Years ago in a paper by some researchers, Huyenga and Huyenga, which they must have been married, and they were looking at some early animal research, and they theorized that this is again an evolutionarily conserved behavior. Women’s bodies have to be able to support childbirth, and they have to live long enough to make sure that kids live.

In a very real way, because let’s face it, once men have done what they need to do to make a baby, They’re not really needed. It’s helpful if they’re there. Don’t mishear, but if you’re in a family, 

Mike: physiologically speaking, 

Lyle: physiological speaking, the woman is far more important to the survival of the human race.

And this isn’t me just pandering to women. This was the theory that they proposed. And if you’re in a famine situation, it’s actually better if the man does die because that leaves more food for his offspring. There’s some real logic to this. And, but what, this is an evolutionarily conserved thing.

That’s great for survival, not so great for fat loss. There, there are some practical consequences that we’ll come back to, but there are other things going on one big one that will tie some of this together. So when men do lower intensity exercise, they burn more carbs and less fat.

Women do lower intensity exercise. They burn more fat and less carbs. So it’s always really weird. Okay. So why do women have. Why is it harder for if they’re using more fat? We know, the old idea that what you burn during exercise and what you lose is not true, right? What you burn in that hour slot doesn’t compare to the other 23 hours of the day.

Sure. 

Lyle: And what happens is women’s bodies use fat during exercise. And then switch back to carbs for the other 23 hours. Men’s bodies use carbs for exercise and then use more fat for fuel. The other two and those other 23 or however long is far more important. There’s other stuff, which is more of a practical note.

The way a lot of women approach dieting, they don’t eat enough. This is getting into, but even that’s physiologically based. There are gender differences in food preferences. Men of men love protein and fat. Women love carbs and a lot of females on top of that biological preference. How do they think they should diet?

Protein is bad because protein might have fat built in bulky. Fat is bad. So they live on carbs. So that’s a very, like I said, there’s chapters of this stuff and there’s endless differences, but that’s just 

Mike: A quick overview. Yeah. That’s great. That’s very interesting. Some stuff that I have come across in my own reading, writing and some stuff that I haven’t, which is one of the reasons why I myself am looking forward to reading the book.

Lyle: And part of why this turned into such a nightmare is originally I was going to lightly reference it. And then as it went, I’m like, you know what, this is going to become another ketogenic diet protein book. I’m just going to go ahead and make it an encyclopedia. And the deeper I look, the more I find.

And it’s just I would add really quickly, usually when I do these, the podcast, like the first question is, what’s the big difference between men and women as hormones for men? We’ve got testosterone. Look at it on any day of the month, and it’s basically here. Women have the menstrual cycle, right?

We have this fluctuating set of hormones where estrogen comes up the 1st half and then goes down and back up and progesterone is low and goes up women every week of the cycle. Maybe you’re dealing with a slightly different physiology. 

That men don’t have 

Lyle: as I’ve put it repeatedly men have one long cycle of 65 years of being an asshole Women can change week to week and they use different fuel in the first half of the cycle versus the second half of the Cycle there’s hunger is different in the first versus the second half how they store fat is different in the first and the second half We’ve got PMS to deal with you get a slightly increased metabolic rate in the second half of the cycle But hunger and cravings go up to offset this there’s all these changes That are happening.

Yeah If you’re used to only working with men, both for diet and training, especially training, you can, a man, every day he comes over to the gym is the same person. A woman feels the same way. Sure, it’s easy. And if they’ve got a normal menstrual cycle, and by normal, I just mean the standard. I’m not saying this is like the norm because there’s a bunch of other stuff.

Every week you may be dealing with someone different and in training, especially you may see radical changes in performance where the final week of the cycle, women may lose their coordination. They may be what they have labile mood state, which is just to say that they’re emotionally unstable.

Essentially, I talked to a therapist about this once and he was like, yeah, with women, I don’t know who’s coming in on any given day. And if she’s crying within the first two minutes, okay nurse practitioner told me she may have to change antidepressant medications at different points in the cycle, like there’s just a, and that’s before you get into things like birth control of which there are enormous type and that took me forever to work through women can suffer from what’s called polycystic ovary syndrome, and they may have elevated testosterone, which gives them a more real physiology.

They’re finding a lot of women. Athletes have sub clinically elevated testosterone and maybe 30 percent above normal, which isn’t much, but in women it’s huge and they tend to be better as athletes. They respond better, they recover better than you get into the loss of menstrual cycle, which is this big issue.

Women are losing their menstrual cycles left and right when they diet to very low levels. Men don’t have a menstrual cycle lose, and when women do it, they can lose bone density, impair their health. It’s a really bad thing for them. And then you’ve got the changes that occur at menopause and there’s a perimenopause before it, and then there’s postmenopause, and then you’ve got to worry about.

Are they on hormone replacement or not? So writing about them, I can discuss men and when writing about women, I have to discuss five potentially distinct situations. 

Mike: Yeah, no, that’s that’s a daunting task. I’m trying 

Lyle: to cover all of them and it’s, I’m in hell. I’ll be glad when I’m done with it because most of what’s out there is either textbook related or there’s a lot of bad information.

So 

Mike: anyway, moving on. Yeah, that’s one of those, I forget who said it, there was a quote, it was a he said, he doesn’t so much like. The act of writing he likes having written. That’s going to be one of those things. 

Lyle: It’s absolutely, especially in cases like some of my little quicker books that I didn’t have to referencing stuff as a nightmare.

And this is, this was a research base that I just wasn’t familiar with. As a man, I don’t have a conception other than observationally of what’s going on in the menstrual cycle, even learning. The terms that changes all of that, like this was starting very much from scratch for me. So it’s been a very exhausting, but ultimately beneficial process.

Mike: Yeah. And what’s just out of curiosity, what are you looking to achieve? What’s your end goal with the book you want? Cause obviously the basics are the basics, but are you, is this geared more toward competitors or, bodybuilders or is this meant, is this going to be meant to be for any woman?

Lyle: It’s very general and this is another part of why it’s so exhausting like I think originally it started out as more dieting physique type stuff but let’s face it, a lot of women are far more prone to be seen in extra in diet studies or dieting, what is it, two and three or one and three or dieting at any given time, so another part of what’s so complex is I’ve tried to cover the general female who may be overweight or obese, the lean dieter who has a completely different set of hormones.

Situations like if you’ve got 40 percent body fat, a lot of this doesn’t apply at 18. That’s when you’re starting to start just like with men, 40 percent body fat male and a 12 percent or different systems. I’ve tried to at least cover some different sports. So we’ve got the physique sports, bodybuilding, physique, fitness figure.

Bikini, although there’s not much to that last one strength power sports. There are a lot of women getting involved in power lifting just as a tangent. I frequently find that those women either have over PCOS or elevated testosterone because to want to push heavyweights in the squat. You have to have a different body structure.

That’s another issue. Women have a variation. That’s the training book more. But women with wider hips are not really built for heavy power lifts and they don’t have the psychological and this isn’t meant as a criticism. It’s just right. Have you ever met a man that didn’t want to lift heavy weights unless they were 60 years old?

No, you never have. You have never met a man that didn’t want to max out. Women love high reps. They love leg training. They love doing certain things. And even taking that into account, most trainers have traditionally been male. Most coaches have traditionally been male. We’ve treated women like little men.

So I am trying to cut. So then, so do the math on that. We’ve got general fat loss, lean fat loss, Different sports, strength, power, endurance high intensity, mixed for, and then like team sports multiply that times all the hormonal modifiers I spent weeks on drawing up blinding little training and diet charts.

Mike: Yeah, every, almost like mind map out just to even know what exactly you’re supposed to be covering and. 

Lyle: Oh, I had to keep intense because I couldn’t remember what I was actually writing about. And a lot of them are very similar, but a lot of them are extremely distinct. 

Mike: Yeah. But even the ones that are similar, you have to still make that point though, because that person’s going to be wondering, Hey, what about me?

Lyle: And even there, I can provide generalities. Sure. The problem, as with studies, they present averages, and there’s huge, and women can vary. I’ve seen women across the menstrual cycle, strength was stable. I’ve seen some that went PR, moderate, strong, oh my God, could not, I had one trainee went from being able to hit PRs.

And Olympic lifts to not being able to do more than 60 percent on the leg press. It’s her coordination just went out the window, her strength dropped. And again, you just don’t see this in men. And unfortunately a lot of women are being dieted like men and it’s doing a lot of damage to them. There’s needs to be, there’s slight differences in refeed frequency, diet break frequency, things about their diet because losing the menstrual cycle or menstrual cycle to this menstrual cycle dysfunction can do a lot of permanent damage to a woman.

Mike: Cause 

Lyle: they can 

Mike: lose bone. That’s deep. It never comes back. Yeah. I’ve I touch on that in my, I have a book for women, but it’s very much the basics I’m writing to people more to women that are in the higher they’re overweight, but they don’t even know about energy balance. They’ve heard that calories don’t count and that’s an old myth.

And so I would just, I understand where you’re coming from in that. I tried to say I don’t want to go to, I don’t want to overwhelm this person. I do want to give them, okay, good. Here’s something you can do that works right now. And it isn’t going to be unhealthy. Isn’t going to harm you.

There’s a lot more you could do to make this better, but I don’t. And 

Lyle: I would almost say in the women’s realm, like there’s just, there’s almost more utter nonsense. Sometimes it’s women that do have, higher testosterone or that are projecting. But oh my God, whenever I’m at the grocery store and I want to get my blood pressure up, I look at women’s world and whatever article there that says new plant based diet, better than thyroid medication, 23 pounds in a week.

And I read this stuff and it’s just where you get, or go on 

Mike: Instagram and just look at the, Oh God. 

Lyle: You get Jesus ridiculous exercise programs. You get, then you’ve got the trainers, I forget her name. Just don’t ever lift more than three pounds or you’ll get bulky. There’s just so much utter nonsense.

And as much as anything physiological, I think just pathological dieting habits and exercise habits, right? A lot of what men do. Is right. Men wants to lose weight. What does he do? Eats more protein, gets in the weight room. What if women want to lose weight, they eat all carbs and do low and then they walk on the treadmill and that ties into the physiology, which I think is a later question.

So yeah. So 

Mike: what women should be doing. Exactly. And that’s a good segue into, again, obviously you have so many things you’re gonna be covering in the books or in the book, but if we, if you were to say, okay, here are the. The top three or five actionable tips. Women listening. Here’s what you can do to have a better experience in your weight loss efforts, better results and better experience.

Lyle: Probably the a main one, right? Cause we’ve also seen this endless times. One wants to lose weight, 

boom, 

Lyle: 800 calories, two hours of aerobics a day. Women can actually disrupt their normal menstrual cycle function within five to seven days. Of doing that kind of nonsense. Like it’s that quick. It’s related 

Mike: to the energy restriction in particular, right?

Lyle: Yeah. There’s something in the research. Like it’s been debated for a bunch of years. They used to think it was body fat percentage and all this other stuff. And that’s, it’s related and that lean women are more at risk for this, but you will find women at 12 percent with. That’s recycling. You’ll find women at 22 that have lost and a researcher named and Luke’s came around and did some really compelling studies showing that it was what she called energy availability, which is not energy balance is the key aspect and energy availability is the number of calories being eaten minus activity.

And that basically what that represents is how many calories are left to the body for everything else. And there are processes on the body. Your heart has to keep beating. Your brain has to keep working. Your kidneys have to, there, there are critical functions for life and there are non critical functions, right?

Some early, very low calorie diet studies, hair would start falling out, right? Keep keeping your hair growing. Doesn’t make it from from the body’s Correct. It wants to stay alive and it will. And if you have limited calories, that goes into what is required. The menstrual cycle happens to be one that’s really in that sense, not critical because you don’t need it to survive.

So there’s also the issue that if you’re starving to death, trying to become maintain pregnancy is not a good idea. And that’s what that whole women. So women can screw themselves up in five to seven days. And what Luke found was that there’s what she called a critical energy availability threshold.

which was 13. 6 calories per pound of lean body mass. And that’s the key. It’s mainly it’s lean body mass, not total or 30, 30 K cals per kg. And it was really interesting. You look at her studies, hormones are normal. They’re like normal, boom, and they just drop like a rock.

And one of the things they lose, luteinizing hormone, which is one of the reproductive, it drives the reproductive system. You lose what’s called luteinizing hormone pulsatility when you cross that threshold. And that’s what starts to induce that menstrual cycle dysfunction. So coupling. Enormous amounts of calorie restriction with enormous amounts of activity.

It’s a big part of it. There’s some indication. She doesn’t buy it. I’m not, that they stress in and of itself can cause problems. And if you some work shows that if women ease into exercise, they don’t overstress the system. Gradually progressing into exercise, I described something I called a pre diet phase, which is, rather than jacking your activity and dropping your calories, it’s either keep your activity, Consistent if it’s already high and bring calories down or keep calories at maintenance and gradually increase your, and again, this depends on population, overweight female, not as big of, if you’ve got a leaner female who’s already highly active, she can probably just keep her activity the same and bring her calories down.

There’s an interesting phenomenon. Actually lighter women are sometimes more, more likely to be dieting. And there is this weird subpopulation of lean women who aren’t athletes, who aren’t trainees, who want to lose weight. And they’re the ones that do the worst stuff. And they’re the ones that rebound to higher body weights because they do basically, I’m not saying that it’s through their own fault.

They have been given such terrible information of what a diet should be. So one of them is easing gradually into the diet. And you’d 

Mike: probably find that the psychological people with, where it’s a psychological problem as well. More than a fit into that 

Lyle: there, 

Mike: and there’s that 

Lyle: there are people that can psychologically stress themselves into loss of menstrual cycle.

It’s called the referring to the psychogenically stress dieters, and they’ve shown that those people, are perfectionists and they have, they’re extremely dependent on external validation about their appearance. And if that doesn’t describe 90 percent of feet physique athletes, I don’t know what does.

So you have this situation where you’ve got, what I call the psychogenically stressed diet or the woman who’s just must lose weight. They are drawn to these extreme diets and it all adds up to this huge problem. There’s also an issue I’ve written about extensively. That jacks up cortisol.

Cortisol causes water retention. This is on top of the normal menstrual cycle fluctuations. And now they’re doing everything, they’re dying so hard and they’re not losing a pound. Because they’re holding so much water. So what do they do? They double down. They add more cardio. They cut calories. Then they start binging and it just becomes a complete food bar situation.

Whereas if they diet more gradually, take a day off. I’ve joked repeatedly these kind of women, they need to take a day off, get drunk, get stoned and get laid. And the next day there’ll be five pounds lighter. It works without fail. So you’ve got this real, this combination of issues that’s relatively more common to women.

I’ve seen it happen in men. And that, there’s a certain personality of dieter that thinks more, it’s better convincing them. So that’s actionable. Point one, ease into the diet, unless you’re doing a short term diet, don’t use big deficits. I address those like if you’re a physique competitor and you immediately take 800 calories out of your diet, you may lose weight quickly, but what happens when it slows down?

Where do you go now? 

Mike: You 

Lyle: can only take calories. You 

Mike: only can push activity up so high and then what? Sure. 

Lyle: And you’ve got, you hear about this, you’ve got the women doing 800 calories a day and three hours of cardio, and if you start more gradually, you don’t, and there are better and worse ways to diet, especially for leaner dieters.

Let’s see if that’s action point number one. Number two is really, is the diet. And it’s really, it’s interesting in the physique community, you don’t see these problems, but in the general female community, you do. Physique athletes and even strength power athletes, they know the benefits of protein.

They may reduce their fat a little bit, endurance athletes typically a little too carb crazy because they don’t think protein is important, you see a lot of bad diets in that group, but sufficient dietary protein as we know is critical for all dieters, to spare lean body mass, blunts appetite, maintains blood sugar, yada, Like every study done in the last 20 years after scientists.

After scientists spent three decades crapping on bodybuilders, they did the studies and were like, huh, yes, higher protein is really better 

Mike: for everyone. Really? 

Lyle: Oh God. The study, the research is changing. They’re now thinking that the RDA is about half of what it should be for older people, especially to avoid sarcopenia.

They need more protein. They need faster protein. Like it’s everything is about protein these days. Physique competitor strength power. They’ve known this, so they don’t usually do usually their issues are more calorie activity related, but for the average female, she’s doing 80 percent carbs. She’s doing almost no protein.

She’s doing almost no fat, even low dietary fat itself can contribute to menstrual cycle dysfunction. 

Mike: And that kind of plays in, like you were saying earlier, too. A lot of women prefer to eat carbs, so it’s easy to sell ’em on it. It’s, you can eat all these, you can eat all these great carbs and you’re gonna lose, 23 pounds in a week.

Sure. 

Lyle: And getting them to eat more protein is often a real challenge. Yeah. But whenever you do I had someone very close to me and I got them on higher protein, and she was just like. This is a life changer for me, like suddenly their appetite goes down, everything gets under control. All of that.

It’s just once you get them to do it, it’s usually a need. And it is. It’s interesting watching the marketing change. Now we’re seeing, high protein foods. Now, some of them are crap, high protein Kellogg’s cereal, 10 grams of protein. If you add Six grams of protein from milk, but it’s getting into the general consciousness rather 

Mike: have that than the low fat.

Lyle: Absolutely. We’ve got quest bars that are 20 gram. We quest chips are 20 grams of protein in a bag of potato of snack chips. And they’re really like quest is doing things very right. That’s shifting. So it’s, I think it’ll be a little bit easier to sell once it’s been programmed into women’s consciousness, and even if, get them to where they need to be initially, even getting it up to appropriate, it doesn’t have to be the gram a pound or whatever it is.

And there’s also women do have slightly lower protein requirements and so it’s. It’s not as hard. And it’s funny when you give women the numbers, you’re like, okay, you need 120 grams of protein per day. They’re like, oh my God, that’s so much. Look, a cup of Greek yogurt, a can of tuna fish, 32 grams, that much meat, that, that’s 28 grams of protein and throw 

Mike: in one or two scoops of powder.

And there you go. And you’re done. 

Lyle: Exactly. Once they realize just how, it’s fine, get your salad. That’s get them to put a chicken breast on top of it. Exactly. And that’s One third to one fourth of your protein for the day and it’s not that hard but getting them to Scoop protein powder stuff like that So getting sufficient protein and moderating carbs and that really brings me to that I think the third and the most potentially actionable the most important point is The exercise component like I said men do it right by Intuition men hate cardio.

They love lifting weights whether they do it right or not Different issue. They love eating protein. Men love the Atkins diet. And so women, and they’ve done the work on this, right? So like I said earlier, if all you do, woman does is low intensity cardio. Burns fat for fuel and I realize women are not burning 

Mike: that much energy.

Yeah. It’s 

Lyle: That’s the other issue. Like even when they do the studies and they’re like, yeah, women may be burning 20 percent more fat for fuel when you’re burning 300 calories an hour. Great. You bought, you burn six more grams, right? You burn one 60th of a pound of fat, the calorie. And there’s also indication women burn more of what’s called intramuscular triglycerides, the fat within their muscle cells.

And that’s great. Great. If you’re trying to lean out your muscle and not women’s bodies, spare body fat, subcutaneous body fat, but they’ve done so, so men who use carbs, right? So I said, women use fat during low intensity and use more carbs for fuel later in the day, men burn carbs during exercise and use more.

And that’s very illustrative because we know very well that. How much glycogen, the carbohydrate and muscle, how high of muscle glycogen really determines how much fat you use for fuel. If muscle glycogen is always topped off, you use carbohydrates. And it turns out, by using more carbohydrate during fuel, that depletes muscle glycogen a little bit for men.

That’s why they use more fat for fuel. So right away, this point. And so what have we seen online? You get the woman who’s been doing, which is a 

Mike: good point to just call out because I get people right in now and then, and they’ll be asking about that. Oh, so it’s burned this burning carbs concept that I guess that how does that even help with fat loss as the whole, obviously these are even aside from energy balance, but just that point that it’s not worthless in that sense is that, okay, correct.

You are that’s true. You’re burning a lot of glycogen in that workout, but what are the downstream effects and correct those health, 

Lyle: right? And they’d shown like even in both lean and obese individuals, if you deplete muscle glycogen with high intensity exercise, that, it, it fixes the metabolic and flexibility in the obese.

And it has the same effect. And then I use that in my ultimate diet too, using depletion circuits. And so what do you see online all the time? Some woman who did the two hours of cardio, the high carbs, and finally she starts lifting weights and cuts her cardio down, which automatically that takes that low energy availability out of the equation.

And it takes the stress, it takes the cortisol and invariably when women get into proper weight training, they always change their diet. They eat more protein, they eat more fat, they eat less carbs. And what happens six months later, they’re like, magic, magic is what happens. I really cannot emphasize that enough.

And it’s really that combination, which often but not always comes hand in hand. You still see a lot of women doing goofy stuff in the weight room and eating. Bad diets, but when you get those women, same thing with I think part of why intervals got so popular, even more so among women is because the benefits that have had the hormonal response to intervals, the glycogen depletion, when you start doing that and moderate your carbs, you start maintaining muscle glycogen at a lower level, you turn your body into, and I use this phrase in the book and I hate to use it now, but I’m going to, you turn your body into a fat burning machine.

In a very, in a physiological cell that sell the sizzle, but it’s true. It is out, and they’ve done that work. If you deplete muscle, if women who do interval training will burn more fat, more like men throughout the rest of the day, unless they refill it, if they put all the carbs back in, that effect goes away.

But combined with those changes in diet, moving to more moderate, and clearly there’s women, if you’re a marathon, if you’re endurance athlete and you’re doing 30, you need a lot of carbs, but you’re also. Alternately depleting and refilling them in your energy expenditure is enormous. But the reality of weight training doesn’t burn a lot of calories.

It certainly doesn’t use a lot of carbs for fuel. You have to do it unless you just do a ton of volume, exactly, especially 

Mike: if you’re doing it right, which means you’re doing, you’re really focusing on heavier. Correct. It’s shorter. Shorter workouts. 

Lyle: Yes. And again, women, a lot of women aren’t built for it and don’t have that.

Women love high reps. 

Sure. 

Lyle: And that gets into the training physiology. They don’t generate as much lactate. They’re more efficient at higher repetitions. Women love training lower body. But Watch a guy do a heavy set of 10, heavy ish set of 10 squats. He needs a five minute rest.

Watch a minute, watch a woman do a set of 10, 15 seconds later. She’s going again, women recover. So the, and a lot of that is they think they need to maintain this pace. They’re not going. And when you start to get them to gradually go heavier and get them to work higher quality, instead of just. Basically pissing around for two hours.

So that’s the number two and number three go together, which is do sufficient, but not, women who got in the interval thing, started doing it six days a week and they blew themselves out. It’s a matter of. Of balance is if all you do is two hours on the treadmill a day, you’re not doing yourself any favors.

If you’re walking at four and a half miles an hour, do two or three days of intervals, some low intensity cardio to burn, to burn calories in general, and then add some proper weight training. Change your diet up a little bit and likes it. That’s when the magic absolutely happens for women. I can, I 

Mike: can attest to that.

Just, yeah, just in working for a lot of people, that’s my general advice for women is lift weights. I like, I, I don’t do more than maybe an hour and a half of interval work per week when cutting, and I do some walking in addition to that. And that’s what I recommend. And it works.

It works. And it works. They don’t get over stress. That’s it. 

Lyle: Yeah. So that’s the, so that’s a big one. The next really the big issue is, like the whole refeed thing in terms of, most general definition of a refeed is you’re either deliberately jacking up carbohydrate intake or even if you just return calories to maintenance.

And what’s interesting, I talked about the energy availability work, and so three to five days of very low calories can start to tank the menstrual cycle. Luke’s did a study where she did one day of just massive overfeeding. It was like 6, 400 calories. It was some ridiculous amount. 

Mike: That is, that’s hard for guys to do.

It’s not like they’re going to throw 

Lyle: up. It might not have been that big, but it was a stupid Calories and no hormonal effect, quite surprisingly, another study accidentally, they did three days of fasting, saw the same effects and they just brought him to maintenance for two days and happened to remeasure them.

Boom, the system had reversed itself, so that really again, it indirectly is very telling is for women. I think almost more so than them doing, even if it’s just bringing calories to maintenance, it doesn’t even have to be like that forced high carb or you feed. But even bringing calories to maintenance with a sufficient frequency, and that depends on how lean they are, how long they’ve been dieting, there’s a bunch of variables that go into that.

Helms, who actually contributed a section of this book, and who’s been invaluable for giving me feedback, it’s funny because he like you, he’s found out. Observationally a lot of what’s working and so like he might start at the beginning of a diet. He might be using one refeed day, athletes also have the issue if you’re depleting glycogen, that’s great for fat loss.

Eventually your performance tanks, you have to find that eventually you do have to refill muscle glycogen to get through your weight training workouts again. It’s not nearly as important for weightlifting as it is for an endurance athlete doing 2 hours a day. You’re just You’re rotating body parts.

It’s, Alan Aragon wrote that great article on is the post workout anabolic window relevant. And for most people, it’s not. If you’re an athlete doing 2 days within 6 hours, it’s hugely important. Physique athletes typically not. So he might use 1 refeed. For the first block of dieting, take a break and the full diet break, I wrote about so many years ago, he might be 2 days of maintenance and then towards the end, it might be 3 and he adjusts the deficit days to keep the weight loss for me, but it’s just a very logical approach to it.

He’s coupled that with, I don’t know if you’ve ever talked to written about this, intermittent caloric restriction. It’s this new model of dieting. That they’re using the obese individuals. It’s an out it’s related to intermittent fasting. And what they’re doing is rather than just straight calorie restriction, minus 30 percent every day, they’re using big deficits, three to four days a week, and then letting people come back to maintenance every so often and the variations they’ve done on 11 and three cycle, they’ve done kind of random, so see, you might do three days of very hardcore deficit and then a day of maintenance and they find that the maintenance day doesn’t really go off the rails.

And even if it goes up by 10 percent and they use just 

Mike: eating intuitively, 

Lyle: yes, just eating ad lib. And so in what they’re doing, they’re using, they call it fasting in the literature, and this is for obese individuals, but they’re giving them 25 percent of maintenance, mostly protein. But do the math.

That’s a 75 percent deficit for three days. Even if you’re at 110 percent and you’re 10 percent above maintenance on day four, your effective deficit is still about 30 or 40%. That’s huge. It’s huge. And it’s much less psychologically stressful. If I tell you, you got to die at 30%, you got to be restricted every day versus, Hey, every fourth day you could eat normally.

It breaks diet. It’s what I wrote about inflexible dieting so many years ago. Psychologically the stress is enormously different. It may be better for lean body mass retention. Debatable. The adherence is better. It’s at least the same, if not slightly better fat loss, right? They’ve done alternate day fasting every other day is super low calories, maintenance, super low.

And again, if you math it out, the deficit ends up being, if you do four days of fasting and three, you actually had a bit of a 40 percent weekly average deficit. That’s bigger than doing 30 percent every day, and it’s easier anyway, so he’s using a variation of that. So in the 1st, 

Mike: This, the standard where people like that’s the point of cheat meals.

That’s the same kind of concept. 

Lyle: Yes. Once a week, 

Mike: you’re going to go. Essentially, you’re going to, say you can get down 2000 calories or 1500 calories a meal. You add that on top of that. What you ate for the day and 

Lyle: bring things to maintenance. So so early in the diet, Eric might, would be using like one, one ad lib.

So you got six dieting days. You’re still breaking it up. You know that there’s never more than four or five days before you get a mental and physiological break later. It might be two. It might be Wednesday, Saturday or whatever. Later on, it might be a Tuesday, Wednesday, and then two days in a row, right?

At that point, you’re getting into some of the cyclical dieting structures and what he’s found is better performance, maintenance, less lean body mass lost. And women are not losing their menstrual cycle as early. And that’s huge. Realistically, women will experience some degree of menstrual cycle dysfunction.

If there’s, especially 

Mike: if they’re trying to get really lean for sure. If they’re trying to 

Lyle: get 10%, it’s a matter of it’s a matter of when it’s going to happen rather than if it’s going to happen. But the longer you can stave it off, the better off you are, the less, the, for a number of reasons.

I discussed menstrual cycle dysfunction for pages and pages because it’s such an important issue for women. So that’s another big one. And given that their systems do adapt a little bit quicker and more differently they may need refeeds or full diet breaks that two week period between dieting blocks, which also will basically reset all the hormones and then we’ll do a lot of good.

If you’ve got time, they may need them a little bit more frequently than men. And I’ve math those out back of the envelope. So that’s another big one. To that, I would probably add, we all know about flexible dieting. We know that it’s a fantastic tool. We know that all the studies show that flexible restraint is better than rigid restraint.

Rigid restraint causes people can be, can cause eating disorders. People go off the rails, they become disinhibited. You can find endless stories of women that are just like If it’s not a perfect day of clean eating, if they put a tablespoon of milk, you know what, you might as well go eat four blizzards.

And what’s funny is, then they have the nerve is the wrong word, audacity is probably a better word to say that the, if it fits your macros, people doing a treat every couple of days. Are eating a less healthy diet. Okay, look, you’re binge day and it is a binge day. It’s not a cheat day. It is a deliberately trying to put as much crap down the pile.

You were eating more junk food in a week than any intermittent, any IIF wham or if it fits your macros person 

Mike: and within the flexible diet, there’s people that know what they’re doing there. It’s not like they’re just eating pop tarts and hot dogs every day because they can’t. 

Lyle: And believe it or not, I mean I address this one too because you’ve got a few very vocal YouTube celebrities going, I’m eating Pop Tarts and protein powder.

A full day, a 

Mike: full day of eating, look at this shit. Correct, 

Lyle: and people are like I’ve had, I’ve seen people ask, do I have to eat pop tarts? If I like it’s been, it’s done a real, it’s done a real disservice to what the concept actually is. And if you look at most people using it, if it fits your macros, you they’re eating 80 percent clean diet, they’re not even doing a treat every day they may be doing, it’s just whenever they need it to stave off the cravings and keep themselves saying, even there, there’s some differences, right?

A women do show more dietary restraint than men. They often show higher levels of rigid restraint, which is also and the difference, rigid restraint, rigid dieting is, if your listeners aren’t, it’s that very black and white, good food, bad food, diet food, bad food, eat this, don’t 

Mike: eat that, clean, unclean, 

Lyle: correct.

And if you eat a little bit of the wrong food, you’ve blown your diet for the day. You become disinhibited and you overeat flexible restraint, right? Cause dieting is still, you have to restrain your food. Sure. That’s what diet is, but there’s flexible straight where you realize that, a little bit. It doesn’t blow the diet.

I can compensate tomorrow. Flexible dieting in the literature is actually very different than how it’s being applied in the physique community. And I address that a little bit. And we’ve got different, we’ve got free meals, we’ve got refeeds, we’ve got diet breaks and we’ve got the newest one if it fits your macros.

And. I wrote, I think I didn’t invent these. I think I was one of the people to really first formalize them in 2000. My guide to flexible dieting, I left the time people like, what is this guy? Now everybody has flexible dieting books. Some of them even give me, some of them even credit me.

One of them stole it completely, neither here nor there. 

Mike: I credit you in my book. Thank you. You’re mentioned. And 

Lyle: So the, I just, a lot of people to tell them, learning flexible dieting behaviors does take time taking someone who’s a rigid dieter and going be flexible is like telling a cat to be a dog.

They can’t change their mental thing overnight at the same time. There are draw. There are issues with flexible dieting that I think the really rabid people and have lost sight of. And this is something, like I said, part of the reason I wanted to update my older book. I’m 12 years older. I know a lot more for a lot of overweight people, right?

They’re trying to change longstanding eating habits, bad eating habits. They’ve got a lot of issues in their brains in terms of how they respond to highly palatable foods for a lot of folks. I think introducing those approaches as strongly as I believe in them too early might be a mistake because I think it’s one thing to say, just eat normally.

And so they’re to say, I need you to put down. 5 grams per kg of carbs. And I it’s funny. I’ve done that 

Mike: with people is just okay. Let’s start simple. It’s let’s think all the sodas. Let’s drop those out. Let’s let’s add some protein in these meals. 

Lyle: So in for certain people, I think it may be better to wait a little bit if they’re overweight or having, I think what a lot of the really rapid flexible dieters forget, especially the, if it fits your macros people, right?

Every single one of them comes from a decade or five years of very rigid dieting. They counted, they measured, they ate every three hours, they had extremely good food control. I don’t give a damn how much there’s one particular individual who I will not name who’s big on like intuitive eating. Just eat normally.

Okay. If I ate normally, I’d be 300 pounds, right? There is no such thing in the modern environment. What she what this person’s too much delicious food everywhere, always. But what this person forgets is they had 10 years. And if you look at what this person is eating as an eat normally, it’s half a bowl of cereal.

Okay. Even I’ve spent so much time dieting and measuring it. Even when I go to the buffet. I know exactly how much I’m eating. I am completely aware of it on every level. So are these people. When they say, Oh, I’m just eating normally. Bullshit. You know exactly how many calories is in this. You may not be measuring it or being rigid about it, 

Mike: but do not tell you, your range, you did not eat 6, 000 calories yesterday, it was like 2, 500.

Sure. 

Lyle: Exactly. And you have a level of food control that a lot of people may not have. There’s even a very interesting study that lean and obese people’s, their frontal cortex, that part of the brain that makes us aware, if you feed them, lean people’s frontal cortex turns on earlier. They know what they’re eating.

The obese person does not. They’re just blah. So to tell people this and that’s part of why I did this structured in my first book. Those structured, it’s look, I would love to tell you to just, And be okay with it, but maybe we need to put some, it’s like structured flexible dieting, which is a screwy way of thinking about it.

But it’s here’s a way to ease into it. You get a meal, you’ve got an hour go eat out at a restaurant because you’re not going to get 3 desserts. Start with this. You need to put some sort of, because God, we saw it before people did cheat meals and it’s 4000 calories. People will cheat days about body for life.

I literally heard of people setting an alarm. 12 to 1 a. m. and they would eat till 11 59 p. m. 

Mike: I’ve never come across that in all that’s I like that. This is you know, that’s dedicated 

Lyle: It’s a day And they’ll eat as much crap as they can It’s not 

Mike: i’m saying 20 000 

Lyle: calories in the day I’m, not saying it’s common, but there are ways to game that system, and still pretend and then things go wrong The biggest thing relative to women is AKA they are, they tend to be more restrained.

They are often more easily disinhibited where they lose control of their diet. In that sense, the flexible dieting strategies are fantastic. I think you’ve probably found most of the really rabbit, if it fits your macros, people are bigger males. This is something that gets forgotten constantly. Men get to eat more.

Men burn more calories during exercise, right? It’s fantastic to tell, to say no one should have to do two hours of aerobics a day. I got news for you. If you’re 120 pound female and already on 1400 calories, And you have nowhere else to go without starving to death. You have no choice. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it right off the bat, but many smaller women, they just don’t have the calories to 180 pound guys got tons of calories.

He could earn a lot more calories during the 

Mike: exercise. And the really egregious IFM wires are usually big bodybuilders. These are guys that, so then people, they don’t even understand really what is when people just are looking through their Instagram, they have no idea what’s really going on behind the scenes.

Yeah. In terms of drugs and whatever, 

Lyle: there’s another really informative study, right? This one group having seen the literature that women may not lose weight with exercise. It’s been addressed. There’s a lot of reasons that doesn’t happen, but they took obese men and women. And what they did is they equated the, usually the studies are like we had men and women do 30 minutes at the same intensity.

Guess what? That means women are generating 75 percent of the energy deficit. Of course they lose less weight. A lot of the reason women lose less weight part of it is they’re lighter if you normalize weight loss for their starting body weight. It’s very similar, but if you give them reduce your calories by 20 percent for men, that might be 600 for women.

It’s 400. No shit. They lose less weight. So anyway, they set up a study and they took overweight men and women. And they very gradually increase their energy expenditure took them like six months. They were doing like 400 or 600 calories per day of hard exercise. Guess what? The women and men lost identical amounts of fats.

However, the women had to do about 25 percent longer because they’re burning less calories. Exactly. That’s the reality of it on top of the adaptations that are, that’s a good 

Mike: point. Even what you said earlier, because I’ll hear from women now and then that aren’t new to all this and there’ll be surprised to hear that, to lose weight.

So let’s say a girl’s at 160 pounds and she’s surprised to hear that to lose weight with doing some exercise, nothing crazy on the exercise, but doing a moderate amount of exercise that she has to eat maybe. 15 or 1600 calories a day. And they, and so they’ll write me thinking, not necessarily attacking me but as if that’s a starvation diet because of how they’re used to eating.

So it comes back to that point of yeah, I’m sorry. You don’t get to eat that much food. I know that your boyfriend gets to eat. But you’re talking about a totally different situation. 

Lyle: I’ve also seen the other extreme women who think that a diet is 800 calories. You’re like, Oh my God, I can’t possibly eat that much and lose weight.

You’re like, trust me. Of course they think they’re eating 800. They’re really eating 2000. Then when you put, cause they’re binging and not talking about it. But the other thing, the other point I was gonna make about if it fits your macros, as great a strategy as it is, right? The current term in the physique community is poverty macros.

It’s women who are on like 1, 400 calories or less per day. Again, if you’re a 115 pound female, you don’t get to eat very much. Okay, it’s great for a 180 pound male with 2, 000 calories to spend 200 of them on a cookie or popcorn, whatever they’re eating. That’s not very filling. That’s tasty. Cause guess what?

They’ve still got 1800 calories from a practical standpoint. Women on poverty macros don’t have that option. They’re already fighting Gnawing hunger and if they eat anything that calorie downs forget it. They’re just not make it happen. I’m going 

Mike: to make it through the day It’s just not going to 

Lyle: happen So I find that there’s that it cuts across everything from training to diet to everything else what larger male athletes think You Should be done or what they can get away with and I don’t mean get away with by that They’re cheating the system or whatever Just what is possible for them to be the deficit they can create the amount of calories they burn an exercise what they can Do with their diet will not work for 120 pound female.

It just won’t they don’t have the calorie burn they like I said, these are all great concepts to not Do two hours and I wish it didn’t have to be even with that energy availability thing. When that first came out, a lot of people get became very extreme about it. You can’t ever go below that value.

Yeah, you do have to, or you won’t lose any more fat. It is a reality of being that lean and that small. At some point, you will cross that threshold. You will have to if you’re trying to get temper 10 percent body fat, you have no choice. 

Mike: Yeah, just to specify for the listeners that these guys are 

Lyle: talking 

Mike: about the general female 

Lyle: and the general female.

The only time they’ve even seen menstrual cycle loss in obese weight when obese women was with gastric bypass because their calories went from high to effectively zero. But this is something that unless 24 percent body fat, none of this is an issue. But if you’re a female with 15%, 14 percent trying to get to 12.

You will eventually have to cross that threshold. There is no getting around it. All you can do at that point is bring calories to maintenance at a sufficient frequency. Take a diet break. But what I was, what we’re getting at, if it fits your macros, may not be an option. But as long as you’re having the maintenance day guess what?

That encapsulates if it fits your macros. Because if that’s a day where your calories may go from 1, 200 to 2, 000. 1800 or 2000. You can afford the chocolate now or the whatever. On that day, exactly. So there’s a lot of things just, and I, of course, being who I am, I have to think about all of this and discuss it ad nauseum and some of the other, some of the other silly criticisms, if it fits your macros on both.

But I find a lot of the, if it fits your macros crowd is becoming as much of zealots as the clean eaters. And I find that Australia, they are becoming this is the only way anyone should die. No. And some people have trigger foods. I have even found people. They don’t, even if they do that free meal is beneficial.

They’re just like, it’s just psychologically. There’s a switch. A lot of people turn when they’re dying from people, exact 

Mike: same thing. Yep. They don’t, they actually don’t like to have cheat meals or free meals or whatever, because they know psychologically. It’s better for them just maybe to eat a bit more of the foods they’re used to eating and not go there.

Lyle: And that’s perfectly fine. And that’s something that, like I said, I’ve with 12 more years of experience. These are things that I have changed, have written about in this book and another book I’m working on. It will be there as well. And it’s like dieting to a great degree is a skill. 

Yeah, 

Lyle: and it’s something there are variations even for the intermittent caloric restriction.

I think it’s a great model, but if people find that on that ad lib day, they’re going nuts. Straight calorie restriction may be better for them. 

Right. 

Lyle: One of the things I suggest if you’re going to try any of these flexible dieting strategies, try it and it fails. Try it again and change something.

And if you fail two or three times, Stop like it’s just that simple learn from the experience so one thing I got involved very deep into there’s actually some really good stuff in the addiction literature that can carry over to diving and there’s something they talk about it’s called the abstinence violation effect what happens when you fall off the wagon right the alcoholic doesn’t has a drink shit happens the drug user shit happens we’re all human you can either take that as a failure of will or And just drive yourself and go on a binge or you can learn from it.

Go. Okay. I can’t go into a bar with a front. I cannot be around these people. Like I thought I could. You learn from that experience. And over time you learn what’s going to be most, and of course, inflexible dieting is me is powerful. Bodybuilders got in shape without it for years.

There’s no, I won’t debate that. And that’s one of the silly, the critters. Clean eating works. Yeah, but this works because here’s what you don’t see. You see the people on stage. By definition, the people who made it to stage ready were the people that made it to stage. You don’t hear about the 90 percent that cracked and who failed and who blew up.

It selects for people who succeed often also have advantages that the others don’t. I’m not even just talking about The secret drug use nobody talks about. I’m just talking differences in physiology. Some women’s systems are more robust. They don’t lose their menstrual cycle. Others lose it in a heartbeat.

There’s so much individual various testosterone and men varies threefold. A guy with 900 testosterone, very different situation. The dude started 300 and I find that We assume that the success stories are how things should be done. Maybe not. Also, there’s a lot of line that goes on. I saw a recent story.

So as a pro level physique or bodybuilding, female competitor, one of the magazines wanted her to write up her diet. She wanted to write that she used flexible dieting. They wouldn’t let her, they refused to run the piece because it goes against their narrative, which is all women. Successful people eat clean and use our supplements.

There’s a lot of disinformation as much as 

Mike: they even cared enough about. I’m surprised they even have a narrative. It seems like they just, it’s, they’ll contradict themselves one month. 

Lyle: They will. But if you’re, if you’ve written a magazine and your entire concept is, cleaning, you really can’t allow someone to say, you know what I not, but anyone I was going to say is even the success stories, right?

We see them in their pinnacle of physique, perfection. Let’s talk about what happens the next month. Let’s talk about the 40, 20 pound weight regain. Let’s talk about how they quit training for a month because they’re so over trained and exhausted. You don’t hear that talked about. And what I found is that people who use refeeds, flexible dieting strategies, they don’t have.

If you do six months of complete restriction, of course, you’re going to blow up. And I prepped someone years ago with body Elvis and everyone urging that’ll never work. How can you eat pancakes every week and lose fat and low carb high and yada. And after the contest, they all blew up and she’d never felt that restrictive.

So it wasn’t that big of a deal. So it’s one thing to focus on the purely short term. That’s that type a rigid and the short term that works great. And in the longterm you blow up eventually. Are there people that can probably do it? Sure. Do I actually think they’re doing it all the time? No, 

I 

Lyle: think they’re not telling you about the binges.

They’re not talking about 

Mike: it, especially if that type of person, because they want to project themselves as the, the invincible robot. 

Lyle: Of course. If they lie about their training, they lie about how hard they’re working, all of that, then you don’t. We know that people misreport food intake and what’s interesting is most people do it for lack of awareness.

They don’t even know, but there’s even there’s some indication leaner, more athletic people. They’re the ones deliberately lying because they don’t want to talk about the cheeseburger. They don’t want 

Mike: to talk 

Lyle: about, 

Mike: If they don’t, if they don’t acknowledge it happened, then it didn’t have it. So 

Lyle: sure.

They don’t want the researcher to think that the less healthy than they are. So there’s any group that is being deliberately deceptive. It’s them. The obese people just don’t know any better. They don’t know what calorie portions are. Anyway, so flexible dieting is great, but if it doesn’t work for either psychological or physiological reasons, drop it.

It’s just really that simple. You, even with if it fits your macros, if you find a food that you cannot eat in moderation, don’t eat that food. And to show you the zealotry of that orthorexia, which is this new eating disorder, which is being very concerned with the moral healthiness, clean eating is a very orthorexic behavior, the early, the food hygiene, even that suggests food is clean, because the body is clean, and they have decided that if you have a trigger food that you cannot personally eat.

You are, that is orthorexic, because in their mind, if you don’t include, it’s not that you even can include a given food. If you don’t include every food, you’re orthorexic, and that is not what the word means. 

If 

Lyle: I choose not to drink because I don’t want to, I am not a moralist. If I choose not to drink because I think it is a sin, I am a moralist.

Yeah. They cannot see that nuance. So if you eat a particular food, if you’re like, I want to have a couple Pop Tarts, and you eat the box, that is not a good choice for you. Sometimes, again, from the addiction stuff, set up bright line, what are called bright line boundaries. These are boundaries that you don’t even consider.

An alcoholic says, I do not go, not, I cannot go into bars, I cannot means that I can, I do not means I don’t. They do not go into bars. I recommend people doing it if it fits your macros. It’s a pain in the ass. Go to the store and buy what you’re going to eat. And don’t, if you think you can have a bag of cookies and that you can stop it too, don’t.

You’re either a liar or you’re a better person than I am. Go get exactly what you intend to eat and no more. And even that, I even, 

Mike: I even do that. And I would say that I’m probably one of the stronger willed people when it comes to food, but I just figure that why, only have, why deplete willpower on stupid things like that.

When I can just avoid the situation altogether, 

Lyle: correct. And then, so there’s, I find there’s, I think there’s a lot of good stuff that hasn’t really been applied out of that literature that can, that has just as much of an effect for dieting. There’s another book 

Mike: you’re going to have to write.

Lyle: The other book, the book that this derived from has a huge section on behavior change and adherence. And that’s when I really got into that literature. And I talk about a lot of the social psychology work and, willpower and it’s not pre motivation. It’s what, I can’t remember the term right now.

I’m like implementation intention, implementations and mental contrasting. There’s a lot of good work because clearly what we’re doing is not working, getting way off topic, telling people you need to eat less and exercise doesn’t work. Motivational interviewing, what are, The hesitations what are the blocks you’re having people do it’s called mental contrasting is a strategy where they list what they want to do and then they list a roadblock while you identify the potential problem and that way you can just reading about this recently.

Yeah and it’s really powerful stuff for such a simple approach and you set up having identified the potential problem you then come up with a strategy for one because it’s going to work harder. Right now let me physique you mean physique competitor and become a social pariah who never leaves the house Not terribly psychologically, but athletes do it all the time.

That’s neither here nor there. For the average person, that’s not an effective strategy. Look, you’re gonna have to go to a social event with food. You’re gonna be around it unless you want to have a really unhappy life. Those strategies, and they’re better, I think, flexible dieting too, it puts the dieter in control of the diet, right?

Most people who have a binge, who eat the cookie, go I failed, I’m a loser, I wasn’t perfect, yadda, and it sets off whatever, shame spiral, whatever pop psychology you want to use. I think with the flexible dieting, if it fits your macros, the full diet breaks, it puts them in control of the diet.

It’s not, I went off the rails. It wasn’t today, it was a 

Mike: diet break. 

Lyle: I’m choosing to do this and it changes the psychology immensely. So anyway, so I would say those are really the kind of the big four is, one, don’t jump into extremes right off the bat. There are exceptions. I’ve written a crash dieting book for lean people.

It’s two weeks, right? If you’re doing a quick, what do they call it? A mini cut. Fantastic. You can get away with that. If you’re gonna, if you’re trying to diet long term, it doesn’t, Really work in that for leaner people, these people can use that to start things off, get that good, quick, good, quick change so ease into things you may have to progressively increase it as you go, right?

And I think if you look at really successful competitors, especially when they have a few contents under their belt, they’re adjusting things a little bit every week, they start very moderate and then, every week, they’ll add 5 minutes cardio and they’ll cut out a little bit more stark or whatever they’re doing.

And they’ve learned to make. Micro adjustments, so it’s never abrupt, right? We know that no metabolic rate is coming You’re getting smaller and they’re just like, okay. I want to stay on the bottom of this curve So I’ll cut out maybe 50 calories a day here I’ll do that extra five minutes of aerobics and it’s very gradual now that may end up at the extreme But there’s a difference over 16 weeks doing this and in week one doing that and that’s what most people do So ease into things Moderate your diet, get sufficient protein, moderate amounts of dietary fat.

And I know some people like keto diets. I address all this stuff. Don’t have time to get into it. There’s even, I even write about there is the potential for synchronizing the diet with the phase of the menstrual cycle. I was going to ask about that, but I figured that’s a whole nother. It is. It’s too deep.

And it’s funny. I’d written that chapter. A year ago, I put it together with all the physiology and that study that I’m sure you’ve read came out the menstrual lean study that actually did basically what I’d written about. And I’m just like, yeah, PubMed reads me anyway, online internet joke. But yeah, and they basically showed exactly the same thing where they adjusted the macronutrient balance.

They raised calories a little bit in the luteal phase, right? That’s when we’d have their cravings. They deliberately allowed them a small block. of dark chocolate, which is not only brilliant, but is if it fits your macros in a nutshell. So yeah, so adjust your diet in general terms, moderated carbs, unless your activity is super high.

It’s still a balance issue, but physique athletes, you just don’t need that many carbs. I got news for you. Even strength and power, especially they’ve known they eat even higher protein because they feel better. So couple that with a mix of protein. Proper heavy ish way training. It doesn’t have to be heavy fives.

You’re not built for it. But if you’re doing 12 and you can do 25 reps, you can put some damn weight on the bar. I see women like pressing with a quarter on each side and I just want to go. You lift more weight than that. When you climb stairs, just lifting your body weight is more than that. What are you doing?

There’s a funny study or something from years ago and they asked male and female athletes to estimate their 10 rep max men were about 50 percent over women were 50 percent under women vastly underestimate how much they can lift and they’re told to tone and rep and all that heavy ish weight training little bit of intervals to deplete some muscle glycogen and increase fat burning.

Moderate cardio. So you’re not over, overdriving, overstressing the system within one context, another, whether it’s the occasional full diet break, which could be seven to 14 days of maintenance, eating the occasional maintenance slash refeed day, depending on how you want to approach it. If it fits your macros, if you can make it work for smaller females, it may simply be an unworkable approach.

Freemails crapshoot on that one. Some people like them. Some people think it does more harm than good. That one is probably the least required. It’s purely psychological. It has no physiological effects. If it helps do it, if you hate it. Don’t worry about it. Again, a refeed maintenance day both encapsulates if it fits your macros and a free meal because you’ve got enough calories to eat something to eat that tree and you can just put them together.

So those are really, the big four players on this. I guess if I wanted to add a fifth one, it’s that all the research is great. All the generalities are great. All that stuff is fantastic. I think women. As much if not more so than men are going to have to be their own or their coaches have to be their own scientists.

You are going to have to track your own responses. Again, the variation among women I think is larger than in men. The menstrual cycle, and we know the average is 28 days. Almost no woman has a 28 day cycle. They say they do. They think they do, but it’s 25 to 32 days. It can vary between women. It can vary.

In the same woman for month to month, if some women, if they find that their hunger and appetite is off the rails, I’ve said like in the luteal phase, right? So calorie expenditure goes up about 300 calories in premise. You could use that to create a larger deficit. By just keeping your calories where you are, or you could technically raise your calories a couple hundred, add the dark chocolate, whatever, to offset the cravings.

The net result is the same, but that’s going to be an individual thing, or you can, when you have that super craving, get your dark chocolate, have a couple pieces, buy, go buy the little single pieces from Lint or whoever it is, and don’t buy it. The bar and don’t buy the bag of the lint truffles and get it out of your system and get on with your life.

From a training standpoint, there’s a whole other to do another podcast. Physique doesn’t have to worry about this. It’s not a performance training in the strictest sense. We work in higher repetition ranges. Changes in strength aren’t big variables, right? If you’re training at 70 percent and your max is 10 percent down, fine.

It’s a little bit harder. You just. You can grind it out. If your strength power athlete trying to do triples at 90 percent and your max is down 15%, guess what? You can’t make that lift. You can’t. Your coordination changes. Injury risks changes throughout the cycle. And this is something that, powerlifting, if you may already be doing that heavy day, light day, medium, Heavy week, medium week, light week, PMS, if that’s the week, if the late, the final week of the cycle, if that’s when your strength and coordination go to crap, guess what?

Great light active recovery week. And when women start menstruating, usually within a couple of days, their strength is off. I had one trainee, she was doing two a days and had been consistently. So I knew what her pattern was. We went in the morning, crap, just crap. She couldn’t lift for squat. Her coordination was off.

She started menstruating at one o’clock that afternoon. We’ll be back later that day. And she said a personal rep, personal best. Like it is, it’s not universal, but it, for her, it was a damn switch. I could predict that once I got a hold of the pattern, I could predict it like the tides I knew exactly, which is actually, it’s a horrible choice of words.

No, I really am. That wasn’t deliberate, but it is like clockwork for her. I know that for seven, I need it for seven days. I had to just give her light machine work because it’s all she could do coordinatively and physiologically. And I knew that as soon as she started her cycle, a couple of days to get heavier, and then I could just punish her and then a little bit lighter the next week, a little bit heavier after ovulation because of the testosterone spike.

And then we’d be right back in the cycle. And once I started programming, according to her personal cycle, now I’m not saying that’s universal for all women. Her results were far more effective because we’d go in and I’d be like here’s what the card says. Why can’t you lift this? I could do it. I can lift the same every damn day.

Yeah. 

Lyle: Men can do that. They don’t have those shifts. It, but it took me a while to wrap my head around it. But then again, some women, flat. PCOS women can be trained more like men. Because they have elevated testosterone, typically have a different body structure. That doesn’t even get into the psychology, right?

Most sports like, if you want to motivate a man, what do you do? What are you a girl? Did you leave your purse at home? , I have these for you. That doesn’t work well with female athletes. It can, I’m sure you, but you’ll find women. I’ve had some really combative power lifting females that are just, they’ll compete just as hard as women.

Women in team sports, totally different. Psychology. If you pit them against one another, they’ll hate you because women are raised to be in what they call the web, which is it’s about facilitating group dynamics, telling you, tell a male basketball player, I want you to go out and dominate. He’ll do it in a heartbeat because he’ll dominate the other team like his teammates respect him 

until female 

Lyle: athlete in a team sport that it goes against her.

You have to tell, and it’s not my area of expertise, but female coaches, which are becoming more prevalent, thankfully, are realizing you have to handle female athletes frequently differently. I’m not saying it’s universal team sports psychology. The women who are drawn to powerlifting and physique, I think, do tend to be a little bit different because otherwise a woman doesn’t want to.

Do a max deadlift without a very specific hormonal and psychological profile and men, and I’m not saying that men don’t vary as well. I find that men are more constant. So there’s a lot of factors that go into that with training, but this was mainly about diet. So that’s probably a 

Mike: good place to wrap up.

Yeah, no, that’s great. A lot of really good information. I know everyone’s going to like, because whenever I had do something specifically for women, it always received very well. Because there’s just not that much out. Exactly. There’s not that much. So that’s why I was excited to get you on and talk about something that is a legitimate difference.

That’s worth discussing as opposed to fake differences that are used to just sell bullshit. Basically, 

Lyle: correct. And unfortunately, just getting way off topic, there’s a big push right now. And this has to do with sort of some extremist feminist idea ideology, and I do not want to get into that, but there’s this idea that there are no differences and we should.

And I personally, and I seriously, I had to make so many. Caveats in the first chapter of this book, right? What’s happened back in the day, it was men writing about sport and men writing about everything. Men took differences and turned it into better and worse, right? Men and women are physiologically different.

Men are typically stronger. Women typically have more endurance. Men have strengths and weaknesses and women have strengths and weaknesses relative to each other. And there’s been very much a backlash against that, that to suggest differences. Goes back to this patriarchal inferior and superior. And I’m not, you have to make a comparison, but, and there’s this general idea, you see the same thing in a lot of ethnically based medicine that to make a distinction in physiology, to make a distinction that just harkens back to some really ugly times in the past.

This is my own bias because I’m writing a book about it, but you’ve got a group that’s saying men and women are identical. They can, you should just treat them the same. That’s clearly untrue. Little boys and little girls are about the same at puberty. Everything changes to, to deny the physiology is to deny reality and there’s too much damage being done to treat women just like little men, which is what has happened for decades, I think, is far more damaging than the possibility that, masculine assholes are going to turn this into see, women don’t have as much upper body strength.

Who cares? You know when the food supply dwindles your ass is dead. Exactly. So who won the battle? So 

Mike: I can’t really try to it’s just reframing it you’re talking more about you know They’re talking there are quantitative factual type things that have yes labeled with these qualitative negative 

Lyle: Correct.

And that was very much men writing about it, which, for the same reason that white sports writers in the 30s, black athletes couldn’t get a break, right? And teens to boo book, right? About that. And it’s not, and that’s it was if a black athlete 1, he was more animal than man. And if he lost, it’s because he was lazy.

Black athletes couldn’t. Everyone on their own merits and that’s so when nt wrote his book called taboo, why, why blacks dominate sports were afraid to talk about it had a lot of flashback because it harkens back to a very ugly time. It harkens back to the bell curve, which suggests ethnic differences, intelligence, which is a whole separate thing, even brain structure, men’s and women’s brain structure is different men’s men and women parse things differently and I’m very clearly using the word differently.

Women. There’s differences in how we observe spatial differences and things like that. Ask a man, the typical man and woman to give you directions. A woman will use landmarks and you see this in other species. A man will give you distances. Man will go a quarter mile down there, take a right, go a mile down.

A woman will go down there, turn right at the Walgreens and the H E B is up there. And I’m not saying one is better or worse because they’re not, they’re simply a different way of parsing things. So yeah, I find that ignoring those. So just look at the menstrual cycle stuff. The bone men start with higher bone density.

Part of the reason men don’t get osteoporotic fractures is they die sooner. Cheery. They die, they lose bone density slower and they die seven years earlier than women. So they don’t, they die before they get into problems. A woman who’s sacrificing bone density by banishing the estrogen and deliberately avoiding losing her menstrual cycle.

And this is hard to convince a 23 year old female. In 50 years, you’re putting yourself at enormous risk for osteoporosis because that bonus, you’ve got till about 30 to develop bone density, you don’t do it now. And if you’re actually losing bone density, you’re going to be in trouble 60 years. But try telling that to a young female athlete.

Something else that’s actually is in the book. I talk about bone density the best way because even a lot of exercise modalities don’t really effectively build bone density. Okay. Low intensity walking is one of them. It does crap. Cycling, you can lose bone density. Swimming, you can lose bone density.

Weight training is good. Explosive work is better. Stuff that puts a very high strain rate on bone repetitively. So even light jumping. Plus weight training plus and that gets into the diet thing too, which we didn’t touch on. Women often make food choices that are very detrimental. They cut out red meat and they end up anemic.

They cut out dairy. They end up calcium deficient. They cut out, they also end up zinc deficient, magnesium, a lot of it through their food choices. Many of which are just considered de facto how you diet. Physique competitors living on tilapia dairy makes is unclean for some reason, they’re living on 

Mike: Even potatoes are unclean, right?

Lyle: Yeah, that’s a whole separate issue But there’s a lot of specific nutrient deficiencies that can cause women a lot of problems and their food choices 

Mike: contribute to that So fascinating stuff. There’s so much to talk about. Yeah So where can people find you? So that, your work and the books that you have already put out and then maybe get on a list for, cause I’m sure a lot of people listening, I don’t want to, I want your book when it’s available.

Is there an email list? Yeah. 

Lyle: I don’t do that. I’m too lazy. I really don’t. But trust me when it’s out, people will know that this thing has been being hyped for so long. I don’t think there’s any follow you on Facebook or something. Yeah. Okay. So my website is, you can either go to body recomposition.

com it’s all one word or lylemcdonald. com will get you there. That’s my website. Okay. I’ve got like over 500 articles. My store is all there. I’m on Facebook. I’ve got a personal feed. I have a page that I don’t do much with. I do have a very active Facebook group and if you just put body recomposition, it’ll turn up.

Also got, I’d also got, if you want a fun group, I’ve got the butthurt over wild group that I created. There’s people that are mad at me and are butthurt over me. And that’s just I’ll go troll them and they’ll troll me. And it’s all good. Keeps it out of the main group. And I’ve got. A support forum, forums.

lyallmcdonald. com. I’ll be honest. It’s not very active. I think Facebook has really updated the need for forums at this point. So probably the best place to find me personally would be in the Facebook group. 

And then if you want 

Lyle: to read my endless. Writings about 

Mike: stuff. That would be the website. Great.

Awesome. I highly recommend everybody go check out Lyle. Follow him. Read his stuff. You’re one of the first people whose work I came across when I decided to really educate myself in my little journey or whatever. And I’ve stuck around since. 

Lyle: To show like I realize I’m getting old now because I was really I got out of school in 95 I got on the internet very early I was certainly one of the first people to really be pushing sort of science based research against a lot of the BS Of course, nobody listened and now we’re all about evidence based that was 20 years ago, and I’ve got people coming up now that are, we’ve got a lot of really smart people who have PhDs.

Brad Schoenfeld is doing phenomenal re very practical research. Eric Helms is both the research and the the coaching realm. And I’ve had a couple of them go. Yeah, when I was an undergrad, it was your stuff that really plan. I’m just like, I’m so old. But yeah, there’s people that are coming up and it’s really interesting watching it changing very significantly at least among a percentage, right?

There’s still the majority. That’s going to go to bodybuilding. com and that’s fine. But we’re there. I think there is an increasing number of people, especially coaches that are getting away from the very six meal per day, this, that, and the other type of approach to the mythologies 

Mike: of the past. 

Lyle: To what I think are going to be far more effective approaches going forward.

So it’s always good to hear people doing that. 

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s why I try to just do my part in spreading the word of God, of the work of guys like Schoenfeld and then you and so forth. So yes, very good. Awesome. Thanks again for taking the time. I really appreciate it. And maybe we can line up another one sometime for the training side of things.

Sounds like plan. Mike. Cool. Hey, it’s Mike again. Hope you liked the podcast. If you did go ahead and subscribe. I put out new episodes every week or two. Where I talk about all kinds of things related to health and fitness and general wellness. Also head over to my website at www dot muscle for life.

com where you’ll find not only past episodes of the podcast, but you’ll also find a bunch of different articles that I’ve written. I release a new one almost every day. Actually I release four to six new articles a week. And you can also find my books and everything else that I’m involved in over at muscle for life.

com. All right. Thanks again. Bye.