Ep. #1179: Stan Efferding on Making Fitness Simpler & More Sustainable

Stan Efferding: [00:00:00] I just said to a client last week and not a couple days later, I saw a popular influencer post about this that don’t fit your life into your training program and diet, fit your diet and training program into your life. It has to be something that as I, on the cover of my book says, simple, sensible, and sustainable.

Something that becomes part of a lifestyle. 

Mike Matthews: Hey there and welcome to another episode of muscle for life. I am your host Mike Matthews Thank you for joining me today for an interview another interview with Stan efforting on sustainable fitness sustainable diet sustainable training nutrition and exercise that you can successfully turn into a lifestyle that you can maintain for the long haul because The goal is not just to get into good or even great shape, it’s to stay in good or great shape for the rest of our life.

And to do that, it has to [00:01:00] be a lifestyle. It can’t be a crash diet, it can’t be a crash exercise challenge. It can’t be a regimen that requires an extraordinary amount of willpower that we have to push ourselves continually into. It mostly needs to draw us into it. It mostly needs to appeal. It needs to be enjoyable.

We need to be eating meals that we like. We need to be doing workouts that we generally like. And Stan is going to be talking about all of that in today’s episode. And if you are not familiar with Stan, he is a two time holder of all time raw world powerlifting records. He is famously called the world’s strongest bodybuilder.

He’s a sought after coach. He’s worked with many elite athletes like Hafthor Bjornsson, Ed Kohn, Ben Smith, Flex Wheeler, and more. And Stan is also the creator of the Vertical Diet. We will tackle today’s episode [00:02:00] shortly, but first, I need to tell you about creatine gummies. You probably know that you don’t need supplements to build muscle, to lose fat, to get healthy.

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Again, that’s buylegion. com slash creatine gummies. Save 20 percent with the coupon code MUSCLE. Hey, Stan, it’s nice to see you again coming from American Samoa, a place that I was checking your Instagram, looking at potential topics and so forth. And it reminded me that, that, Oh, that’s right. That actually, that is a place that you don’t hear about it much.

Stan Efferding: You don’t know. It’s a tiny little Island about four hours off the coast of Australia and New Zealand. Down here Fiji might be something somebody’s familiar with, as far as the South Pacific goes, and it’s just a beautiful little place, about four miles wide and 20 miles long, although not perfectly a rectangle, but that’s about the size of the community, maybe 50, 000 people in total reside here on the island, but my wife was born and raised here, and we visited many times over the last couple of decades, and finally, over Christmas, when we came down, we were [00:05:00] Looking at each other.

Why don’t we just come back? And so when home sold the house, here I am on a permanent vacation island time. I’m really loving it. Weather is about 75 to 85 degrees, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. If it rains, then just wait 10 minutes. The sun will come back out. It’s one of those types of environments, like Hawaii’s weather, but a little warmer.

It’s it’s been fantastic for the kids to my kids are 10 and 12 now. We put them into school here and they just they love it and they’re enjoying island life. Of course, you got the ocean every day. We got great big swimming pool down here. Just took my kid to play some golf lessons yesterday.

And as mentioned before we jumped on air, I picked up a nasty little pickleball addiction about a year ago in Las Vegas. I lived right there on Sunset Park where they have a 26 court professional facility with lighted from 5 a. m. to 11 p. m. And I got hooked on it. And so down here, they’ve got some indoor pickleball and a Pickleball group that gets together and tries to pretend like we’re good at the game.

And so I managed to blend right into the community here. I’m enjoying it. I drive around every day on my little golf [00:06:00] cart. The speed limit is 25 miles an hour. So I can actually speed on my golf cart. It goes almost 30. It’s a tough life. I’ve been enjoying 

Mike Matthews: it. It I have and I know a couple of people who live in Puerto Rico and sounds similar to.

It’s the golf cart, it’s the pickleball, it’s the ocean, it’s the lower stress good sense of community. 

Stan Efferding: Yep, all the things I used to laugh at other people for doing, and here I am, as I 

Mike Matthews: Yeah, until you experience it yourself and you’re like I actually have to admit this is nice.

Stan Efferding: Yep. I went from a life of studying PRs to now AARP. 

Mike Matthews: Is there a good gym? 

Stan Efferding: There are a few decent gyms. They’re little rust buckets. Everything here on the island rusts very quickly. And so there’s a Good little place called Evolve, where they shipped over some equipment and you can get everything done, but you definitely need to have your tetanus shot, like where Ronnie Coleman used to train all those years, and that What was that?

Was that 

Mike Matthews: Metroflex? Is that what that? 

Stan Efferding: Yeah, down in Metroflex. [00:07:00] It’s a hot box. It’s obviously somewhat humid inside these tin buildings. And so you sweat a lot. And equipment doesn’t last very long with the salty, windy air that, that pours through there. But they open the garage doors, and you always get a good breeze, and you get good workouts.

So I haven’t missed much in terms of training. Although I must admit, I train a little less now, and play pickleball a little more. Embarrassed to really talk about pickleball. How far from grace I’ve fallen 

Mike Matthews: and yeah. What does that actually look like though? What is your training now?

Yeah. Now it’s a three day a week. I was just going to say he’s a three day, three days a week, and that’s shame. 

Stan Efferding: Indeed. I found that when I started playing pickleball, there’s a lot of people find as they age, that you. Tend to lose certainly my lateral movement ability, but also my speed is something that I hadn’t utilized in many years, although I was doing a little bit of sprinting on my over speed treadmill back at my gym in Las Vegas in city iron.

But the pickleball, [00:08:00] there was a probably 6 to 9 months really for some of the nagging. aching pains that come from the ankles and the knees and the hips from starting to do all of that lateral movement. Now, mind you, people who are good at pickleball don’t have to move around very much. But when you’re crappy like me, you end up running all over the place, chasing balls.

That side to side lunging really hit me hard initially. Cause you go out there intending not to do too much, but you get caught up in the game and then next thing you know, you’re trying to win and you do things that you’re not accustomed to. It’s it’s 

Mike Matthews: way too much volume, way too fast. Cause you’re just into it.

Stan Efferding: Yeah then you might win a couple games and so you stay in, there’s these challenge courts. And so next thing you’re playing five, six, seven games. It’s two hours later, you’re still in there playing and don’t realize until the next morning how much, we talk a lot about about load management and about not training beyond your current level of fitness, but that all goes out the window when you’re competing for something however [00:09:00] trivial it may be.

Mike Matthews: Yeah. And when you’re having fun and then you don’t even realize really that you’ve been out there for two hours. 

Stan Efferding: Yeah, indeed. And I’ll say that, I’ve often said from people who have watched some of my YouTube rants on weight loss, I’ve said the, the best diet is the one you’ll follow and the best exercise is the one you’ll do.

And I hope people find something that allows them to move that they enjoy to the degree that I’ve enjoyed doing playing this pickleball because it you want to go. Yeah. If you tell somebody their workout program is battle ropes and burpees, the likelihood they’re going to attend that with any degree of frequency or longevity is pretty slim, it’s just not very fun.

And so I would say that any sports, if you like playing basketball, play basketball, if you like going to Zumba class, do that. So I’m reluctant to prescribe a specific cardio routine to my clients. I usually ask them, what do you like doing? Or any number of different activities. It doesn’t have to be a specific one.

Obviously, we’d like to get our step count up beyond that. The only thing you’re going to do consistently long term is something that you enjoy, something that’s, [00:10:00] as you said, playful 

Mike Matthews: and, I think it’s It’s a good idea to, to look at your weightlifting, look at your strength training through the same lens and try to make it as enjoyable as you can.

Like I also, I trained three days a week now versus five for a long time. I trained five days a week. And the reason I went to three a couple of reasons. One is I’m just looking to maintain my physique, maintain my health and. Three days, three hours of weightlifting per week is enough to do that.

And two, I didn’t want to spend more time in the gym because of work really. I have other things and I have a family. And so when I was doing the five days and my workouts were a bit longer and I was really pushing for progress and there was something that was enjoyable about that. But after doing that for some period of time, I just found myself.

Not really enjoying a lot of the time that I was spending in the gym and I’m a disciplined person and I can just ignore that and just keep going. But I also had to be honest and say, okay, so sure. I could do that. [00:11:00] But why keep doing that? There’s the inertia, like that’s a reason, but that’s not a very good reason.

Stan Efferding: There’s a few critical points to what you’re talking about, right? I was very important. I said this again on my obesity rant some seven years ago. He said, if you create a program, either a diet or an exercise program, That’s not sustainable. Something that you feel as though you have to do to make progress, although it is a significant departure from your regular, routine, you’re not going to comply with it.

It’s also important to recognize that I think we’ve convinced ourselves we need to do more than what’s necessary in order to get results. And we’re finding now, the maintenance required to hold on to your current level of fitness is very small. We’re talking about too heavy sets a week to maintain strength, maybe four sets a week to maintain your muscle mass.

Something as simple as 150 minutes a week, which is 20 minutes a day walking can improve, obviously health span and lifespan. That’s the recommendation by the American Heart [00:12:00] Association. Obviously we do more than that, but the idea that you’re required to do more than that just doesn’t seem to be supported by the evidence.

And again, my goal is to meet people where they’re at, get them to do a little more than they’re currently doing if they want to make progress. But I just said to a client last week and not a couple days later, I saw a popular influencer post about this that don’t fit your life into your training program and diet, fit your diet and training program into your life 

has 

Stan Efferding: to be something that as I, on the cover of my book says, simple, sensible and sustainable something that becomes part of a lifestyle.

Mike Matthews: And interestingly as we get older my understanding of the relevant research I’ve read is if we’re looking at long term health and vitality, it becomes more important to increase the volume of cardiovascular exercise than strength training, because to your point, we can maintain. Certainly for the purpose of again, health, vitality, longevity, we can maintain plenty of muscle and strength [00:13:00] on just a couple of hours of strength training per week.

But if we want to maintain our cardiovascular fitness, if you want to maintain our metabolic health as we get older. Seems to again, my understanding of the research is it seems to take more work on those systems in particular. And we don’t want to neglect those things as we get older, because that can become problematic even if we’ve stayed relatively strong.

Stan Efferding: Yeah, certainly more frequency. We see this even in single day studies sitting versus standing. You’ve seen a lot of information posted recently. 10 minute walks for 10 years. More recently, there’s been a lot of research suggesting that just a couple of minutes out of every hour has a dramatic effect.

And three 10 minute walks a day, just getting up and moving around periodically throughout the day is superior to a 30 minute bout of exercise at the end of the day for a whole host of different health markers. So I think you’re hitting the nail on the head. It’s the frequency is important.

You just want to move your body every day. And so [00:14:00] it doesn’t necessarily have to be, you we call exercise activity it can be these little exercise snacks. The duration doesn’t have to be something that’s onerous, is the point. The idea that you’ve got to be careful not to create too many barriers to entry for people, that you got to come home, get changed, get in the car, drive to the gym, get on a treadmill or an elliptical.

You don’t have to do any of that. You can just walk for 10 minutes down the street if possible. I, even my, many of my athletes is you may have seen over the years, people like Hafthor Bjornsson and Brian Shaw and. Others now Mitchell Hooper current world’s strongest man, they just take if the weather’s bad, they have a recumbent bike or a bicycle off the, or in his garage in Iceland in the winter when I went and visited, we would, after meals, we’d go out to the garage and we’d just ride the bike for 10 minutes.

You can watch a video on YouTube, do that after each meal daily. That’s more than sufficient. And then, if you have. greater goals in terms of VO2 max and cardiovascular fitness. You could throw in, like I mentioned, a couple of two, three days a week worth of something that’s a little more challenging.

Mike Matthews: And can you [00:15:00] speak more to what you said about a few 10 minute walks being superior to one 30 minute walk that and then also if there’s something particular about the timing of after meals doing this little exercise snack. 

Stan Efferding: Yeah, interestingly enough, yeah Astrid what’s her Instagram site is Anti Diet Dietitian, and she just made a post on this within the last week or two.

I tend to follow a lot of these folks, and I watch all their posts, and it’s Keep my finger on the pulse of what the industry’s discussing, it’s currently relevant to people. And she said the same thing. Some research that I had mentioned some time ago that it seems that sitting is the new smoking and that you can’t undo the damage of a full day of sitting.

We’re talking about office workers who might spend eight or 10 hours in front of a computer during the day and something as simple as getting up for two minutes. And just doing 10 air squats or walking around briskly for a couple of minutes every hour or three, 10 minute walks again a day being superior to one 30 minute bout of exercise at the end of the day, it it has a greater effect [00:16:00] on cardiovascular fitness on cardiovascular disease risk, the whole host of other health markers for longevity and health span and lifespan.

That you just, the body needs to be moved frequently throughout the day, more important than the duration at one point at the end of the day. And we have some good evidence now to suggest that that you just want to move more often. It doesn’t have to be this grand event at the end of the day, and it certainly won’t undo a lot of sitting.

Mike Matthews: And this point of after meals in particular, is there a special benefit to, 

Stan Efferding: yeah, interestingly enough, and I used to think that you would want to wait 20 or 30 minutes to at least get some digestion done. But we now have another study showing that. The immediacy following meals imparts a better, what we call post prandial or post meal glucose regulation.

You, your peak glucose elevation and duration is reduced, what we call the area under the curve, when you walk immediately following a meal. And I’ve recommended [00:17:00] that, be the way that you, the reason I originally attached the walks to a meal is because, as we know from some of the habit research in terms of compliance, that when you attach a new behavior to an existing behavior, it’s more likely that you’ll create a new habit that it’ll become something that you’ll regularly do.

And so even when I would go to a restaurant. When I was traveling a lot and I used to travel quite a bit I was, I’ve been in 17 countries in all 50 states, performed over 200 seminars. I was almost every weekend I was on a plane there for six, seven years. And so I would do these 10 minute walks as my something that would fit into my schedule.

Whether it was going through the airport, I would just pick up my pace a little and walk a little more briskly. If I was going down to get my baggage claim while everybody’s standing there, staring at the turnstile, that’s not moving. I was actually taking laps around the baggage claim area. Of course, people would look at me funny because it was a, it’s a brisk pace.

I don’t intend it to be a jog and you’re not going to sweat and get your heart rate up too high, but it should be deliberate. Also, when I would go to restaurants, I would [00:18:00] leave the restaurant, I would set my little timer on my phone for five minutes and I would walk down the street and then when my little alarm went off, I would turn around and walk back before I got in my car.

And that was a way for me to get my 30 to 40 minutes of. And my steps in for the day, my step count, whatever I felt. That step count should be at the time, depending on my goals, I was able to achieve all of that, without having to miss a scheduled event. Of course, like you say, with kids, oftentimes the schedule gets changed and whether you’re going to pick them up for school and take them to some sort of sporting event or activity that they’re participating in, or if you’re a real estate agent working out of the trunk of your car.

Driving from place to place, meeting people and your schedule changes constantly. Sometimes it becomes really hard to plan these exercise events. But these little 10 minute walks, you get up in the morning, take a 10 minute walk, after lunch, take a 10 minute walk. Certainly after dinner at night, you should have an opportunity to do 10 minutes.

You might not have enough time, nor May you have the desire [00:19:00] after a long, hard day of work to go to the gym at night, but you can most certainly take that walk and it just really recharges your battery, especially if you do it with the family. It can be a great time to spend time with that with your family.

Mike Matthews: That’s exactly what I do at 15 minutes in the morning after I wake up. 15 minutes around lunchtime, either before or after lunch, and then 15 minutes around dinnertime, either before or after dinner. The dinner walk is basically always with my wife. So it’s a little bit of time that, we can spend together.

And then I was thinking when you were talking, so a couple of days ago, my son is doing boxing. He wanted to do boxing. So I’d take him a few days a week to boxing. And so while he’s doing his boxing class, then I was. In the parking lot across the street walking, because I was like, okay, I need to do some work calls anyway, so I’ll do, I’ll take him to boxing.

I’ll do my work calls and I’ll get steps in 

Stan Efferding: works. My kids want to play at the park after school, the [00:20:00] playground with the other kids. I use that as an opportunity. I said, great kids. I walk around that park. It’s a beautiful, it’s a perfect opportunity. So whenever I take them to do their events, whether it’s a sport or some sort of something like dance or a choir or whatever, group or organization that they’re participating in time, I use that time to do my walks and it’s very efficient and you don’t, again, it’s something that can become part of your lifestyle that you can sustain rather than having to, drop the kids off and go to the gym.

And I’m a gym rat. I grew up in the gym. I love training. But I also have like you, a lot of other things that take priority. And so it’s not necessary to go to a gym but for maybe the twice a week or three times a week that we’re discussing to get some sort of loading, unless you can do pushups and lunges and chin ups at home, that’s certainly sufficient as well.

So I’d like to meet clients where they’re at and ask them what their schedule looks like and how much time they can commit to this and then fit that. Training [00:21:00] program into 

Mike Matthews: their current lifestyle. Speaking of body weight training, if you add some bands that you can easily travel with, it actually is pretty difficult.

I’ll do that when we travel, if we’re out of the country and some, sometimes even if you’re staying in a good hotel, the hotel gym, I’m thinking of one hotel in particular, when I was in France, it was a nice hotel, but their gym was nothing basically, but I had bands. Just simple upper lower, like one day, just do 30 minutes of upper body work with the bands.

And then next day, do a 30 minutes of lower body or a couple of days later. And with, again, a little baggie of these exercise rubber bands, you can get a pretty good training stimulus, actually. Agreed. 

Stan Efferding: Yeah, I think that there’s been some influencers that, especially during COVID, I think Brett Contreras did a great job of covering a lot of banded hotel workouts.

Yeah, absolutely. Bands are, they’re amazing. 

Mike Matthews: And one other thing, just to comment on the walking after meals, that’s, it’s just interesting because again, thinking More, I’m thinking of times of being on vacation because when I’m not on vacation, I [00:22:00] tend to eat the same types of foods every day. It’s stuff I like, but I just don’t need a lot of variety in my diet.

So it’s a lot of just simple, nutritious, relatively unprocessed food fruits, vegetables, whole grains, seeds, legumes, blah, blah, blah. But then if I’m traveling, I don’t eat poorly, but I don’t pay too much attention to. Calories are macros. Generally, the food quality is going to be good, but I’m going to go out and I’m going to eat stuff that I tip.

It’s not a normal dinner or a normal lunch or breakfast and I had developed a habit of going for walks, especially after the larger meals which, you go and you meet a good dinner that could easily be 1500 2000 calories, if you’re eating, an appetizer and entree and a dessert. And I would, I developed a habit of going for walks, particularly after the larger meals, because I would just feel better than if I didn’t go on the walks.

And again, it was maybe. Anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes after eating those meals, and I hadn’t really thought much or looked [00:23:00] into the mechanisms. It was just something that I noticed. And so it just developed that habit. But I just thought of that when you were talking about the post postprandial response.

Stan Efferding: Yeah, we see improved digestion as well in the studies where the taking the walk immediately following a meal, just from the muscular contraction and the enzymatic action we just see less bloating, less Frequency of things like GERD acid reflux. So there’s a host of benefits that go beyond just the glycemia control.

And I don’t really do them for calorie burning purposes. I’ve spoken before and I constantly get people. 

Mike Matthews: What are we going to burn a hundred calories from the 2000? I just ate. That wasn’t it. Yeah. 

Stan Efferding: Yeah. I get a lot of folks that will strawman my comments on, 30 second or 60 second clips on Instagram.

But the research shows that the exercise is not the best way to lose weight, but you can, you get some benefit, but The vast majority of your weight loss effort should be invested into controlling [00:24:00] how much you eat. Exercise is great for your health, but more exercise might not equal more weight loss.

We see a, a phenomenon called compensation take place, where if you go to the gym and bust your ass doing battle ropes and burpees, that it tends to cause you to sit more and eat more, and then you, Have a bit of a balancing of the equation where non exercise activity is reduced and that’s a greater chunk of change the non exercise activity, just staying on your feet and being active throughout the day.

I see folks that do these aggressive workouts and they end up sitting quite a bit. And then they get hungry and then they end up in the fridge foraging on stuff they shouldn’t be eating. And so be cautious, I ask people to be cautious that if you invest that much energy into your training, you’re going to find that you’re going to be more tired and more hungry.

You’re going to sit more anymore. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah, what I’ve seen people miss on that point is that what you explained is not refuting anything. Regarding energy balance. Yes, it’s true that if you burned a thousand calories per day exercising and were very regimented in your eating and [00:25:00] basically stuck exactly to your meal plan to maintain some large calorie deficit.

Yes, you are going to lose weight faster than if your deficit were half of that number through less exercise, but. The point is compliance and the point is what actually happens in reality. Are you going to have the energy and the will to do those tough workouts and then not just sit around more than you would otherwise take the stairs instead of taking the elevator parking, not trying to find the closest parking spot to the entrance of the grocery store.

And then also not randomly snack. So that’s. Really, the crux of it, right? Yeah, 

Stan Efferding: I might mention. We’re just closely on this topic. I’ve people associate me with training lots of great athletes over the years, of course, have worked with many professionals and more recently, john jones, who just won the UFC heavyweight championships.

Congratulations to him. But earlier I mentioned some of the strong men and CrossFit national champions, certainly bodybuilding [00:26:00] figure physique bikini competitors for sure. Over 25 years. But the vast majority of people I work are dad bods and soccer moms. They’re just folks trying to lose weight and feel great.

But when I get, sometimes a bikini competitor will come to me and they’re 30 days out from a competition and they’ll say that they have hit a plateau. They haven’t lost any weight in two weeks. And they’re already eating just way too few calories. I’m talking sometimes as low as 1, 400 calories a day.

They’re already doing two hours of cardio a day. Just going to the gym for an hour in the morning, an hour in the evening, just walking in a treadmill. So I can’t reduce calories and I can’t increase their cardio. So the one thing I ask them to do is to stay on their feet all day. Continue doing what they’re doing.

Can’t change that. You’re 30 days out. I’ve often said that if you want to be healthy, don’t compete. And just one of the things that you’re going to suffer through at some point, you’re going to end up in the gray area of health and fitness aren’t the same thing. And oftentimes people pursuing fitness goals will do it either modest or severe sacrifice to their short [00:27:00] term health.

So I’ll tell them to stay on their feet just don’t sit down all day and sure enough, they’ll lose two pounds that week. It’s a, it’s an incredibly underutilized tool and I don’t think we appreciate that sitting versus standing even in and of itself absolutely will provide some benefit to you.

So those are rare circumstances, extreme condition. I certainly wouldn’t put one of my clients in that position. in that situation. I would never have them on that low of calories or that much cardio to begin with. When I trained Nadia Wyatt, who took third in the Miss Olympia and second in the Arnold Classic for figure competition, she would do mostly lifting.

I also worked, I work with a lot of female athletes who we just, they enjoy lifting. And I’m not saying that’s the situation with everybody, but we had her do two a day lifting rather than two a day cardio. And another reason for that is, is that Retaining lean mass, particularly if you’re competing in one of those, bodybuilding figure physique bikini, if you’re competing, that’s your primary focus is to retain lean mass.

But even if you’re not [00:28:00] competing, we’ve talked a lot about this recently with the introduction of the GLP Zempik, and the like that people are losing a lot of muscle and there’s the biggest concern with that is, is that at least my biggest concern with that is that the appetite signaling when you lose weight, you get hungrier, the more muscle you lose, the hungrier you get, and then the bigger the rebound becomes because you’re hungrier longer until you get that muscle back.

But what you first gain back is more fat. That’s the problem with the yo dieting. You lose a lot of muscle on the diet, you gain back more fat when you regain the weight. Body decomposition and every time you go through this oscillation, this yo dieting, you end up losing more muscle and then gaining back more fat.

That’s what happens in the immediate sense. And so obviously the recommendation is that you lose weight slower, you eat more protein and you lift weights to retain that lean mass. And then you find that when you get, then you’re losing mostly fat, there’s less appetite signaling because, hunger [00:29:00] is the biggest problem with long term dietary adherence.

And if you’re setting yourself up to be hungry and then your body, that hunger signaling can last well beyond the regaining of all of your weight because you haven’t gained your muscle back yet. in many cases for people who don’t track that and don’t lift. And so that’s why I spend so much time focusing on muscle, even if it starts with a DEXA scan at the beginning of a program when I’m working with a client.

And then, I really want them to, as I said before, the best exercises when you’ll do, I can’t offer any alternative than some kind of loading that helps gives the sufficient stimulus for your muscles. And I push that pretty hard. It doesn’t mean you have to squat. Do free weight squats or whatever.

There’s a machine that you can just move the pin and, do it like extension or a leg press. I do try and take clients through a number of exercises till I find one that they enjoy because there’s no best exercise. They all tend to impart the same stimulus as long as they’re loaded. 

Mike Matthews: Let’s talk about tailoring [00:30:00] macronutrients based on training goals.

How do you approach that with different types of people? Who have different goals, different body compositions. 

Stan Efferding: Yeah obviously there’s a broad range of things to cover, whether it’s gen pop or athletes, generally speaking, if you’re, there’s two sides to the spectrum, and that’s either if you want to gain more muscle or lose that.

There’s different recommendations, calories are king. So if you want to gain muscle, generally you want to be in a calorie surplus, particularly if you don’t have a significant amount of body fat and you’re an experienced lifter, it’s hard to recomp, to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time that becomes easier if you’re a beginner.

Mike Matthews: Or even gain muscle and just stay really lean which is what many people try to do because I get it. You like your abs. You don’t want to give them up. 

Stan Efferding: Yeah. And you may have to compromise. You will should you’ll get your best gains. I should say, if you’re a lean [00:31:00] individual who has who’s at least an intermediate or advanced degree of training, it’ll be very hard for you to gain muscle.

At the rate at which you’d which is always slow to begin with. Gaining muscles is a challenge. And if you’re already an experienced lifter that’s very lean, you’re going to need to increase your calories and you may compromise some degree of body fat percentage. The goal is to gain as little fat as possible and gain as much muscle as possible.

And the way to do that is to keep your calorie surplus small. We used to do the dirty bulks back in the eighties and nineties when I was getting trying to gain all my weight for power lifting. And you learn a lot of lessons from doing that is that you learn that you get fat. And then when you try and diet down for a bodybuilding show, you have to, Lose so much weight that you end up losing more muscle than you should and you end up where you started and it’s frustrating, yo for those guys too.

Gain the weight a little slower, gain the muscle a little slower, hold on to it a little longer and then lose it a little slower. You’re just going to have to give yourself more time, more months of growth and more months of [00:32:00] dieting slowly. In order to hold on to more muscle and reach the level of fitness that you want to compete.

For the general population, obviously, I mentioned calories are king. So for fat loss, you have to create a deficit and that’s obvious. So calories are king. Protein is very important for as we mentioned, retaining lean mass, but also because it it’s satiating and has a higher thermic effect of food, which means you net out fewer calories eating protein than you would eating the same number of calories in carbs and fat.

If you eat a hundred calories of protein, your thermogenesis, your body burns calories digesting that protein. So you might only net out 70 grams. That’s part of your energy balance equation, your thermic effect of food. So that’s one of the reasons why then you can eat more food, more quantity of food, but net out fewer total calories for your calorie balance.

So you can lose weight. So we like to. Keep our protein high for the satiety benefit, for the thermic effect of food, for the retention of lean mass. Although I will say that protein is a much [00:33:00] smaller contributor to retention of lean mass than the training stimulus. Training stimulus is far and away more important than your protein intake.

You can have a pretty broad range of protein intake from, The dietary recommendations, which we all think are pretty low of 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight or about 0.4 grams per pound all the way up to a gram per pound of protein. That range is all sufficient. And we see this in some Stu Phillips work up at McMaster University where he would take people on about half a gram per pound of body weight versus a gram a pound of protein per pound of body weight.

And if they both train intensely, they both retain their lean body mass to the same degree. But the training is intense it’s consistent and they’re working hard. They’re getting to with, within a rep or two of failure. We did see a slight increase in lean mass. In hypertrophy on the higher protein group, but it was slight.

And I guess the point there being is that as stated, the training stimulus is more important than the amount of protein, [00:34:00] but with all the other benefits that’s the macronutrient that we think is the most beneficial. So I generally try and recommend for weight loss, get about a gram of protein per pound of goal weight.

And that kind of accounts for the huge variation in where people are currently at over the year, 15 percent body fat or 35 percent body fat. I can’t. Base your protein recommendations on your current weight. So we do it based on goal weight. And then you’ve got carbs and and fat. And we saw from the Stanford trials, the diet fit trial out of Stanford that when you control for calories and protein, your percentage of carbohydrate and fat intake doesn’t matter.

The total calories matters, the protein matters, but whether you want to go high carb, low carb, high fat, low fat, DietFit studied this on over 600 participants for more than a year and they found that it didn’t matter. People had equivalent weight loss and so that becomes a matter of personal preference.

The caveat to that would be that you need a minimum amount of fats for your general health to help with sleep to help with hormone optimization, to [00:35:00] help with fat soluble vitamin absorption. So there is a minimum amount of fat that you do need to get for your general health. But beyond that any additional fat doesn’t contribute to performance.

Some people might find a higher fat diet is more satiating to them and that they can lose weight and adhere better to that diet. And that’s a matter of personal preference. And I’m, I always. Ask the clients, give me feedback on, 

Mike Matthews: in my experience, that seems to be the exception rather than the rule in the people I’ve heard from and just worked virtually with and kept in touch with many people over the years.

And I’m comfortable saying that from my observations, the rule seems to be higher protein, higher carb with moderate. Fat seems to work best for most people. That’s the best starting point. Exactly. At least unless they know. No, I really do that low carb, high fat 

Stan Efferding: even if you said low fat, higher carb.

Mike Matthews: Yeah. I find that with the high protein just seems to work best for most people. It fits their preferences, keeps them full, 

Stan Efferding: even if you disagree with that. [00:36:00] You have to recognize the research suggests that’s where people tend to go back to anyhow, then you watch when they go ad libitum when you’re controlling everything they eat and tracking it, whether you’re giving them their food or they’re tracking everything and you keep them on a low carb diet as stated, they can get equivalent results to many people on a high carb diet.

But over time, we see, generally speaking, people trend to go back to more of a 30 30 30 watch. They would trend to even eat lower protein. And so that’s something that you have to keep reinforcing, is for them to eat, keep their protein up to 25 30 percent of total calories. But the trend is to reincorporate the carbohydrates and the challenge is that a lot of the carbohydrates that people eat, people talk about these highly palatable ultra processed foods and they start blaming sugar, but those highly palatable ultra processed foods are a combination of sugar, fats and salt.

It’s the combination that’s causing people to consume more. And that was those [00:37:00] are those Kevin Hall studies where they compared processed foods to whole foods and found that people just, it just bypassed their satiety signals and they tended to eat more at each sitting and throughout each day.

But to the tune of about 500 calories a day, which is hugely significant, that’s 50 pounds a year. If you were to just map that out, although we understand there’s a lot of variables there. I say get the minimum amount of fat in and I think there’s a minimum amount of carbs too. I think it’s 130 grams, I think that we see that from what the brain uses and I know the immediate feedback from the Keto community is that you can make carbs.

The problem is it’s not the most efficient method for performance. As we’ve got You know, different fuel sources that we use for performance, obviously your creatine phosphate system is your first 10 to 15 seconds and then you’ve got, carbohydrates, your glycogen starts to be utilized, especially for resistance training at a higher rate, a higher percentage of carbohydrates than fats initially, and then your fats have the that can be used for longer duration exercise, but carbohydrates are certainly Make [00:38:00] the training effect more enjoyable and more effective.

You might get one more rep, be able to do one more set. You just find that people aren’t as tired and that would include, things like just rolling in jujitsu. If you’re sufficiently glycogen loaded, that workout, you just seem to have more energy for performing that workout. And in terms of performance, and we have lots of research on this I like to keep the carbohydrates in, plus there’s, and this isn’t sugar, people tend to, in that argument as well, it’s lots of fruits, it’s a foundation of lots of fruits and vegetables and whole grains, like you mentioned.

For those people who can tolerate them, we’ll probably end up talking to some about that as well. But generally speaking, you can get a lot of micronutrient value from which we should talk about as well. But now that we’re on macros, I just, I think that those carbohydrates, particularly a broad range of fruits and vegetables are hugely beneficial for just a healthy dietary pattern that also is consistent with people’s lifestyle and [00:39:00] provides performance benefits.

We 

Mike Matthews: will get back to today’s episode shortly, but first I need to tell you about my best selling flexible dieting cookbook for eating delicious and fitness friendly meals without having to spend hours in the kitchen struggling with expensive and hard to prepare recipes. Now, this book is called The Shredded Chef and while it’s not a Cookbook full of fat burning and craving killing recipes that will give you a sculpted physique in 30 days flat.

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And so if you want to see if it can [00:42:00] help you reach your fitness goals faster, just head over to Amazon, pick up a copy, and enjoy. Let’s talk about micronutrients and let’s just take an argument that you’ll find all over social media, which is that if you just eat enough of the right animal foods, and so there’s a lot of emphasis on meat, on eggs, maybe it’s there, there seems to be some weird session now with, or there has been with honey and certain select fruits.

And so again, the argument is That well, if you just eat mostly these animal foods, maybe with one or two other kind of more exotic type of foods you wouldn’t typically eat, you don’t need to, you don’t need to eat any fruits and vegetables and actually the fruits and vegetables are inferior for providing all these key nutrients.

Can you speak to your thoughts on that? And then just more broadly, your thoughts on meeting micronutrient needs and the most effective and efficient [00:43:00] and enjoyable ways of doing that. Doing that for people who will need to personalize their food choices to some degree to make their diet sustainable.

Stan Efferding: Yeah, that kind of introduces people’s individual health. Their current circumstance with their health, because there are, where these, what term to put on them, but where these alternative diets, the ones that aren’t necessarily balanced per se, if you were to measure the the Mediterranean diet, you were to call that a balanced diet, have a dietary pattern that included lean proteins, like you mentioned earlier, fish, fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, whole grains.

Yeah. 

Mike Matthews: That, that’s really just a healthy diet if according to the large body of evidence, right? 

Stan Efferding: Yeah. Yeah. The Mediterranean diet certainly consistently has shown better lifespan and healthspan. And there’s caveat stuff. There’s exceptions to that. Not everybody can eat all of those foods.

Can you get all of your nutrients from a more restrictive diet? Yes. Now. [00:44:00] To what extreme the restriction would obviously make it more and more likely that you’d find some deficiency somewhere if you’re just eating a single food, good luck, 

Mike Matthews: which seems like is this has the carnivore. They has it evolved from all you need is stakes to okay, fine.

Now it’s stakes because I don’t pay too much attention because I just hate it so much. And I’ve. 

Stan Efferding: Yeah you’re describing Paul Saladino has certainly migrated into that area. Sean Baker has stayed mostly carnivore. He tried to introduce some fruit, but as I think he made the mistake of introducing a bunch of apples, which are a high FODMAP food, and it’s hard to digest.

So he might have gone. I might have suggested he use lower amounts of fruits that were easier to digest in order to add those. But nonetheless, I was on Paul Saladino’s podcast a number of years ago, and I brought this same information to him. The same information that I’ve, I talked to a lot of the female athletes that I’ve trained over the years, they get on these guru diets and they start demonizing whole food, whether it’s just carbohydrates and entire macro [00:45:00] group or specific foods, they’ll demonize red meat, they’ll demonize egg yolks, they’ll demonize.

Dairy, they’ll demonize fruit, they’ll demonize salt, and then they end up on these highly restrictive diets and succumb to nutrient deficiencies. Oftentimes obviously the female triad from chronic calorie restriction and insufficient iron, suffering from anemia, insufficient calcium.

Biotin and choline, things for skin hair and nails and for your liver, all those things are found in the foods I just mentioned, obviously iron and red meat and biotin and choline and egg yolks and calcium and dairy, fruit for potassium and polyphenols, a whole host of benefits from all those foods and insufficient sodium, obviously for them to be able to train and be sufficiently hydrated.

And those guru diets consisted of, Protein powder, egg whites, broccoli, maybe a tablespoon of peanut butter, which turned into an entire jar of peanut butter. And maybe a little bit of olive oil, they [00:46:00] were very restrictive. And that’s the competitive, that’s oftentimes I hate answering these questions.

Just speaking to fit fluencers or people on extreme diets, and I think it’s restrictive. I won’t say extreme, but restrictive in some sense. But generally speaking with the overall population, we do see some vitamin deficiencies that occur. Nutrients that are under consumed. The top four or five would be your vitamin E.

We see probably three quarters of the population doesn’t have sufficient vitamin E. Potassium. Is a big one, getting sufficient potassium in vitamin C, magnesium, calcium, as mentioned vitamin D might be up there. Those are the top ones. Vitamin A, it’s probably nearly half of the population doesn’t get sufficient vitamin A.

Mike Matthews: K, K can be tricky as well. 

Stan Efferding: Yes. Vitamin K, probably almost 50 percent of the population doesn’t get sufficient vitamin K. Significant deficiencies out there in the general population, which can mostly most of these can be remedied with food consumption. There’s some that are a little harder. Magnesium and vitamin D are [00:47:00] pretty difficult to get from food.

And so there may be times at which people need to supplement. But we have to be cautious. The R. D. A. Something like accounts for about 97 or more percent, the RDA recommendations, but of the general population, the RDAs, if you get a sufficient amount based on the RDA, most people will be covered.

But active individuals tend to use more of these micronutrients, in which case you may need to go above the RDA. Having said that, Consistently seen that mega dosing has never provided the outcomes that has been desired. And we see, from Linus Pauling’s work on mega dosing vitamins that we see negative outcomes.

And so we don’t see an improvement in performance. And we also see actually poor health outcomes from mega dosing. So I want to be very cautious that people don’t start mega dosing particular vitamins thinking they’re going to cure something. If you have a deficiency and you remedy the deficiency of that vitamin, you can see a significant improvement in, you may see a significant improvement in your health particularly something that’s specific to that vitamin.

But [00:48:00] trying to take a whole bunch of vitamins to solve some other problems is has never panned out well. So I don’t want to be. Recommending that people have to make a dose, even a multivitamin in many studies has not shown definitive improvement in people’s health outcomes. So it’s hard to make these recommendations, but we do see some deficiencies.

I mentioned vitamin E was really high. And, there’s some things like sunflower seeds or almonds. It could be very beneficial for vitamin E. That might be something you have to supplement just a small amount. If you I think the best thing to do is get. Is download chronometer, chronometer app and put all of your food intake, just log it in there for the day and it’ll tell you what your micronutrients are and you can see what your exposure is to deficiencies.

Potassium is another one I said that’s this is huge with my athletes in particular and you can get a lot of potassium just from eating like a potato. It has twice the potassium of banana, so I’ll throw a daily potato in there and probably a sweet potato, because it’s really high in vitamin A.[00:49:00] 

Fruits, yogurt, those are all great. Lentils, apricots, but those are things that, I’m cautious, I can tell you what has the most potassium in it, but now we have to figure out, is this the food that you’re regularly going to eat? And so I have to give them a whole list and let them pick from that list potatoes or generally.

Most people are pretty amenable to consuming a potato daily. I would, I’m a big rice guy for athletes for performance who need to get a lot of calories in, but the foundation of the diet that I recommend would have a potato in there long before I would throw in some sort of something like rice or bread that certainly a a starchy carb that was refined would take a back seat.

They might utilize those for people who need to consume a lot of calories, but the foundation would be potassium rich food, which is potato, it’s fruit and yogurt, vitamin C, red peppers are twice the vitamin C is an orange. So you could, and I often recommend dicing up some peppers with a meal.

Generally try and get people to cook those in [00:50:00] steam them in a bone broth as opposed to cooking them in a bunch of oil. And that’s simply for a calorie. It’s not a good food, bad food conversation, but how do we reduce the total number of calories? And that would be to reduce the amount of oil that we’re pouring into our food that can just add a ton of calories.

Magnesium. I mentioned, there’s not a lot of foods, but a lot of magnesium that people generally eat. Pumpkin seeds, chia seeds, how many people are consuming, a lot of those things. And so I oftentimes vitamin D and magnesium. I make some substitutions for, but calcium need a thousand milligrams a day of calcium, especially for women.

But even for men for performance, I don’t know if you saw the posts recently from Dr. Stu Phillips. Again, he stated that calcium or the dairy has an independent effect on improving BMI and performance. That’s independent of the protein, independent of the calcium. Dairy has an independent effect on BMI, we see that in a lot of research.

So I throw a lot of dairy in, and I know immediately it sparks people’s concern about either an allergy if you have a whey allergy or [00:51:00] a casein allergy, then don’t eat it. If you have a peanut allergy, don’t eat peanuts. But if you have an intolerance, that’s a range. And some dairy has higher or lower, Amounts of lactose.

Usually it’s a lactose intolerance that causes people to avoid dairy for the gas. A few things here. One, a yogurt, particularly a Greek yogurt, is going to be much lower in lactose and may be tolerated. And then the dose matters. Maybe you just have a few ounces rather than having a, two cups of a particular food.

And, There is a process by which your lactase enzyme down regulates when you don’t consume dairy for a long period of time. And that lactase enzyme can up regulate when you reintroduce dairy, but you reintroduce it slowly. And then you find what your tolerance level is to which dairy, and, or you can use a lactose free product that allows you to get that calcium in.

Orange juice is oftentimes is has calcium. Fortified, but I prefer dairy for all the extra benefits that it that it provides to get your calcium in. [00:52:00] And then I mentioned vitamin A and I know the community your carnivore community loves their liver but I’m real cautious about the iron content in liver, especially for men because the men don’t shed iron the way that women do with their menstrual cycle each month.

And I often see high iron in, in men. So just if you’re going to do iron an ounce or two, maybe three ounces at the most a week. Sweet potato has plenty of vitamin A and maybe some spinach and again, we’re back to pumpkin, carrots. So those are all things you can include in the diet, but that sums up, I think, the most common deficiencies and the best or most commonly consumed foods that have That provide those different vitamins 

Mike Matthews: and you had mentioned a multivitamin.

What are your thoughts on including a well formulated multivitamin that and that’s a loaded phrase because if you look at multivitamin research, it’s fine when the media runs with something and says, hey, the study shows that multivitamins don’t do [00:53:00] anything. Okay, but let’s look at the details.

What exactly was this product? And you find that it’s a very poorly formulated. Multivitamin, maybe a stamped tab. It’s questionable how much it’s even being absorbed. And then you look at even to the forms of the vitamins and minerals. In some cases, one form is very poorly absorbed. And then, so if you have a well formulated multivitamin, this has been my opinion for some time is I totally agree on optimizing your food choices to, you got to make sure you enjoy your diet.

Don’t force yourself to eat weird things that you don’t like to eat, but think about your food choices to try to. meet as much of your nutritional needs as you can with food. And if you want to consider adding a well formulated multivitamin that can act as a, an insurance policy, you could say, or maybe it could help plug strategically nutritional, not deficiencies.

Maybe you never get to a deficiency, but maybe it’s an insufficiency, or maybe you could benefit from a bit more of what you can get from 

Stan Efferding: food alone. Yeah. I [00:54:00] can’t improve on that. You hit all of the high points. I would just say that men should watch. How much iron they take in a supplement. But other than that everything you said was right on point.

Mike Matthews: A well formulated for men would probably not have iron. I would agree. I would agree. Yep. No, you said that 

Stan Efferding: perfectly. 

Mike Matthews: You had mentioned choosing foods that are easy to digest. You’ve put a lot of emphasis on this and avoiding certain foods that can cause digestive issues. And, Often these can be foods that people wouldn’t think these are quote unquote healthy foods, right?

Garlic, onions, cruciferous vegetables. Can you talk a bit about that? And in your experience working with people, how common are these types of issues that, that can be very confusing if you’ve never heard of this, because you think I’m eating all these nutritious foods and why do I not feel good after I eat?

Stan Efferding: Yeah. Limiting foods that may cause you digestive distress. [00:55:00] We have there’s a number of different conditions that people suffer from. IBS, IBD, Crohn’s, and there’s a whole host of different digestive issues. Obviously we’re familiar with a lot of people suffering from these that there’s certain foods they can’t eat.

And so I’m, I just create awareness for that. I, this isn’t a good food, bad food conversation. This is listening to your body, maybe going in and visiting a gastroenterologist if the, if your digestion is so bad that you’re having, all sorts of painful bloating diarrhea any of those things, blood in the stool.

I talk about these things in the vertical diet. I do see more of these in athletes, particularly the, again, bodybuilding figure for the bikini industry, chronic dieters, people who are in these heavy calorie deficits for extended periods of time, they compromise their digestion. And they have eliminated, as we mentioned earlier, demonized so many foods that their body has become resistant to being able to process those [00:56:00] foods.

And then when they reintroduce them at such a high quantity that they react poorly. Remember these types of digestive distress issues are individualistic. They’re dose dependent. How the foods prepared matters, and they can be cumulative in nature. Some people individualistic, some people have IBS, other people don’t.

Those who have IBS, the best remedy for that currently, the one that’s the most successful is the low FODMAP diet. It’s fermentable oligo di monosaccharides and polyols. That’s from Monash University out of Australia. It’s not a hundred percent solution, but we see somewhere in 40 to 70 people realizes significant decrease in symptoms of painful gas and bloating when they reduce high FODMAP foods and the high FODMAP foods.

There’s a, you can just Google this and see a list of these IBS foods that may cause more gas for these people who suffer from IBS. And [00:57:00] garlic and onions and cursus rose vegetables are on that list. Again, not bad foods, but some people can’t digest them. Grains, legumes. There’s a lot of, I know there’s a lot of bad information going on.

The internet about avoiding those foods there, but there is a small percentage of the population. You have celiac, 1 percent of the population or less suffers from celiac. Those people should avoid some of these foods, but that doesn’t mean everyone should. Some people are allergic to shellfish.

Some people are allergic to eggs. Some people are allergic to peanuts, as mentioned earlier. This doesn’t mean everyone. This doesn’t mean it’s bad food or everybody should avoid them, but you should pay attention to how you personally are affected by these foods. And I should also mention that the FODMAP diet, if you have IBS and you utilize the FODMAP diet to reduce symptoms, the goal is that’s a temporary intervention and that you should then slowly reintroduce foods over time and keep track of that.

It’s a very challenging process because if you, so much as go out to a restaurant and they include something in a meal that you are unaware of you can [00:58:00] have a reaction and not know food item caused the reaction or it can be dose. If you reintroduce it to large of a, like I mentioned earlier with the milk in terms of lactose intolerance it may take your body a while to, Tolerate that.

Cooking, the more you cook your cruciferous vegetables, the less lower in FODMAPs they become until they’re soft as opposed to eating them raw or just lightly cooked. And then I already touched on dose dependent. Maybe you can have half a cup of oatmeal and not have a problem.

But if you eat it, three days in a row, all of a sudden you have a problem and you’re like it didn’t cause any problem on Monday or Tuesday, but all of a sudden here on Wednesday, and that may be that your body your microbiota that is adapting to the intake of that particular nutrient has expanded to the point where now it’s causing you some problems.

Yeah, I wish there were better answers that, you go to, you speak to some of the people who have been doing this who are PhDs and have been studying these problems for [00:59:00] decades. And it’s still a trial and error process, utilizing multiple different disciplines. And so I’m hesitant to make any grand claims, but it’s mostly just to create awareness about some options that are out there and to get, to seek professional help if necessary.

And I, I also mentioned in there. I talked about vegetable oils at one time. I even had a video. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah, I was gonna, I was gonna ask quickly just to comment. I’ve seen it firsthand because I have a steel trap stomach, it just I eat well, but I don’t, Really experience any sort of GI issues basically ever, but my wife doesn’t have problems, but she just has a, her body’s more finicky.

Like I just see it where she will for periods of time, she will not react well to something random, like ground turkey or peas or or eggs. And then, so for periods of time, there just will be things that just upset her stomach. So she just leaves them out and eat other things. And then sometimes as she eats consistently eats.

[01:00:00] Other foods that then there’ll something will some switch will flip and that, that can upset her stomach and then she’ll leave that out and go to something else. And so just wanted to share that for anybody who if you’re experiencing anything like that, like Stan said, there is a bit of just quote unquote, listening to your body, as they say and not trying to read too much into it and just go, this isn’t working for me at this moment in time. So I’m going to try something else. 

Stan Efferding: We say that in training too, everything works, nothing works forever. But in diet, I’ve said, I said, I don’t eat foods. I like, I eat foods that like me. And I make that decision about an hour after I eat and I pay attention to it.

And I’ll avoid foods that, that I generally, I can’t eat ginger for some reason, and I can’t even describe the feeling, but it seems to penetrate my blood brain barrier. I don’t do well with coffee either for the same reason. I just get lightheaded and I can’t eat garlic for the life of me.

Garlic and onions will just tear my gut apart. It’s also could possibly be what the food is cooked in. And I did a video on this. I said the real poison [01:01:00] that’s killing us. Right now, of course, there’s a lot of information on the internet about seed oils. And I said in that video that 

Mike Matthews: It’s the the demonized 

Stan Efferding: food du jour.

It’s yes, it’s the current demonized food du jour. And there’s some context to this because I said in the video that I am biased. They are a poison to me when I eat food that’s cooked in seed oils, it gives me diarrhea and it’s the kind of feeling to where you don’t think you’re going to make it to the bathroom.

It’s like you had a a suppository or something, it’s just, it’s it’s terrible and I could never figure it out 

Mike Matthews: or an enema and it’s about to come out. 

Stan Efferding: Exactly. And that’s what it is. And if you try and, if you try and resist, it’s extremely painful. You’re doing the Kegel maneuver and it’s just extremely painful to try and resist.

And I could never figure that out. And I’ve had that problem ever since I was a kid my mom had the same problem. Sometimes she actually would relieve herself because she couldn’t make it to the [01:02:00] bathroom because it was so painful to try and hold. And. I could never figure out what it was. As a bodybuilder, of course, you end up controlling your foods, you cook everything yourself at home, and I never use seed oils.

But if I would go out and eat, even at Denny’s or something, just for eggs, I would just get eggs. And I would have the problem, and I wouldn’t realize why I can’t eat eggs at Denny’s, because they cook it in seed oils. And I just found that I have an allergic reaction to them. I would, I used to love to go to the Mongolian grill.

You’re talking, fruits and vegetables and sliced meats and you give them all to the guy at the, up at the grill and he puts them on that grill, but he pours a huge, a whole bunch of oil on that grill first. Usually canola oil, something, that they cook it in and I would always have the same response within 30, 40 minutes, even a steak.

I can do a grilled steak. A flame grilled steak, but if you cook that steak in seed oil, like a pan seared, I would have that reaction to it. And so I spoke about this in the video and I’ve demonized vegetable [01:03:00] oils as a result. Plus they’re largely consumed as part of ultra processed foods.

That’s the bigger issue. 

Mike Matthews: People are not putting their canola oils on their salads that they’re making. That’s not, if you’re eating a high refined oil, seed oil, vegetable oil diet it’s not because you are eating great food. 

Stan Efferding: You took the words right out of my mouth. Yeah. How are you consuming them?

Now we do see in the literature that or I said, we do not see inflammation as a result of consuming oils in the way that you just mentioned. We also see that if you remove saturated fats, say butter primarily, or palm oil, and you put, and you replace it with a seed oil canola, cotton seed, that we see a reduction in LDL cholesterol.

And a reduction in inflammation. And so you would suggest, hey, these are healthy foods but that’s not how they’re consumed. Like you said, it’s not like you’re drizzling it onto a nice hearty salad. 70 percent of the seed oils that are consumed as part of ultra [01:04:00] processed foods, whether as part of packaged foods or processed foods.

Now, where they are toxic is in reheated oils, your deep fried foods and those fryers. I spoke about that in the video as well, when you drop those fries or those chicken wings into those oils at the, at your at your fast food place. Now those do have, I don’t hate to use the word toxic, but they do have Adverse health effects associated with them and that’s how the vast majority of their consumed.

And you’ll even hear staunch advocates. 

Mike Matthews: Some of these oils are even further processed for like partially hydrogenated. 

Stan Efferding: Yes. Yeah. And you will hear the PhDs in nutrition. Some of the people who are most outspoken about not demonizing seed oils in general, as you said, putting them on a salad, such as Alan Flanagan mainland nutrition is an extraordinary brilliant mind in the space.

Lane Norton. Joey Munoz, there’s a whole host of PhDs in nutrition that, that are defending seed oils based on the fact that that what you just said, cold pressed drizzle on a salad, replacing saturated fats, [01:05:00] we see benefit but that’s not how they’re consumed. 

Mike Matthews: And really any use case, like what you just mentioned that, that would be health promoting probably would prefer olive oil.

I know I would because a good olive oil tastes better than any sort of seed oil. 

Stan Efferding: And even then, the omega 3s become even more important. And I don’t know, I don’t want to put too much stock in the omega 6 to 3 ratio, but just getting sufficient omega 3 is important. And, of course, two servings, two 5 ounce servings of salmon a week satisfy that requirement.

I would lastly say on the seed oil argument that in a diet, as you and I have been describing and discussing here, whether it’s the vertical diet or whether it’s the Mediterranean diet, a generally healthy whole food diet, There isn’t anything I would take out of that diet and replace with a seed oil because we’re already have our fats below 30 percent of total calories.

We have our saturated fats below 10 percent of total calories, which is important for those people who are hyper responders and, or hyper suffer from hypercholesterolemia. If your LDL is significantly [01:06:00] elevated, a large contributor to that is saturated fat is butter. bacon and fatty meats that will raise your ApoB and LDL and increase your cardiovascular disease risk.

And that’s a whole nother podcast because I know there’s a whole bunch of, I’m just going to say it, a whole bunch of quacks out there who are arguing against that that very agreed upon science using a host of stupid straw man arguments. 

Mike Matthews: And I was even trying to say that the exact opposite is true.

Actually, you want high LDL. 

Stan Efferding: Yeah. And it’s just, it’s painful to listen to how uneducated or how blind they are. Even to Dr. Baker’s defense, he said, look, he said, I don’t think you should let your LDL run out of control. And I don’t think this diet’s for everyone. I like Sean Baker, and I think he’s been reasonably sensible about a lot of his recommendations.

But he, he’s a staunch advocate of the carnivore diet. And there are other, here’s the thing that people forget, is that LDL is ApoB in particular is an independent risk [01:07:00] factor for cardiovascular disease. There are other risk factors. Both can be true. High blood sugar, high blood pressure, anything that damages the endothelial lining with inflammation both can be true that you can have an even more increased risk.

I LDL didn’t matter and I said it certainly does, just because you wear your seatbelt doesn’t mean you can text while you’re driving. They’re both true, and if you want to lower your cardiovascular disease risk as much as possible, you want to manage all of those things.

You want to keep your LDL down, you want to keep your blood pressure under control. You want to make sure you don’t have insulin resistance, all of those things are important. Not too high iron can damage the endothelial lining, there’s a whole host of different things that can do that and so I’m not sure why they try and etch out an exclusion to that one independent risk factor.

But in the absence of high LDL, you have no, there’s no atheroma. There’s no atherogenic disease. So 

Mike Matthews: I think part of the problem is that people, and this is not everyone, but a lot of people who are [01:08:00] drawn to the more carnivore style of dieting they like the idea of just eating ribeye steaks every day with sticks of butter and bacon and.

Cheeseburgers and they don’t really want to eat vegetables because they just don’t really like vegetables. And again, the steaks are more delicious than the fruit or a lot of the stuff you’ve been talking about. And so we have, some motivated reasoning in place and just cognitive biases in play where.

People want to believe it, so that’s where they’re starting. And then you hear some science y explanation that quote unquote makes sense, and that’s enough. 

Stan Efferding: And also, it’s hard to deny, you can’t deny, because there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence out there that we see all over the internet that some people who, we just got done talking about people who have food allergies FODMAP diets, and for the IBS, etc.

When you Lose weight. Yeah, when you eliminate the source of the problem, you’re going to, your health is going to [01:09:00] improve. And that’s great. And I think that’s certainly a reason for people to eat that diet. I would like to see them gradually reintroduce. So they’re not so restricted, but if they don’t want to, they don’t have to.

But that doesn’t mean that the adverse effects don’t still exist, but they you, it’s a cost benefit analysis. You get to decide whether or not. The long term risk of potentially increasing your cardiovascular disease risk outweighs how you feel now about the diet. Same could be said for weight loss.

We know that research shows us and I’ve talked about the McDonald’s diet, the 7 Eleven diet and the Twinkie diet, it shows us that 95 percent of health benefits are realized simply from weight loss itself, irrespective of diet, that the McDonald’s, the professor that conducted the McDonald’s diet with his students.

Mike Matthews: How right? Oh no, sorry, that was how was that? He was that was the Twinkies. He 

Stan Efferding: ate in the calorie deficit, but he ate at McDonald’s every day. And his he lost 40 pounds. Everything improved, including his cholesterol. And that initially that is certainly the [01:10:00] response when you lose weight on any diet. And that can make people become start prostheticizing.

there. their specific diet, it becomes their new religion that’s the reason why and they’re healthy is because they ate that way. They lost weight. That’s the reason why. And if they had lost weight utilizing a different diet, they’d probably be singing the praises of that diet as well. We see that in the pain industry, not to get too far off the track here with pain, but I’m certain I’m certain you’ve studied much of the the relevant information regarding Pain and rehabilitation, and we see that the vast majority, something 95 plus percent of pain resolves itself spontaneously within four to six weeks.

And so any intervention that an individual undergoes, whether it’s chiropractics or physical therapy or dry needling or gouache or you name the intervention, wearing a copper bracelet on your wrist, whatever you were doing during that time that your pain spontaneously [01:11:00] improved, you’re going to attribute the improvement to that intervention.

And we know now that, most people’s pain just goes away. And any type of movement far exceeds the specific interventions that are currently that people go out and spend their time and money on as a large psychological component to it as well. But circling that back to dieting. If you get a result from whatever diet intervention that you’re currently employing and we see the same kind of testimonials for vegan, we see I’ve got thousands of testimonials for the vertical diet, but I’m, I can’t make claims about it for the general population.

I have to be careful to talk about what’s actually evidence based everybody has their own testimonials of their own people singing the praises of their diet because they’ve gotten results from utilizing that diet. But the results, the weight loss occurred because of the calorie deficit and the health benefits occurred as a result of the weight loss for most people.

And again, there’s some specific nuances to that with respect to [01:12:00] the fact that if you have eliminated a particular food that was causing you problems and you reintroduce it, too soon or too much then you may have that problem again, and it’s gonna even further bolster your your feeling that the, what you’re doing is it’s not the only way it could be the right way for you.

And we said that earlier in terms of dietary adherence, whether you’re low carb, high carb, you have to go with a diet that feels the least restrictive to you and makes you feel the best. 

Mike Matthews: And one final comment on seed oils. It’s also part of part of the appeal of this popular narrative right now.

It seems to also be that yeah, there’s that, which I actually understand because if, you mentioned sugar, salt, fat, there’s a book by Michael Moss. I might have mixed up the might be. Salt, sugar, fat, or I don’t remember the title is it has those words in it, right? And I read his book and I had him on the podcast.

And so when you actually look into the history of big food, you have a [01:13:00] reason to be skeptical. You have a reason to assume that these big. Conglomerates do not have your best interests in mind because they factually do not even you just look at the history of what they’ve done in the history of food science and what it’s been driving at, which is how do we get people to consume as much of our low quality food as possible as much per sitting as much per day per week?

How do we get these people just completely hooked on our cheetos or whatever nonsense that we’re making? And I understand and I think they deserve skepticism and actually they do not deserve the benefit of the doubt and because they’ve proven that again, they’re in it for the shareholder value.

And that seems to be about it. Further than that, it would be outright malice. I don’t know, but we can just stick with shareholder value and you can apply that same large logic to big pharma, totally valid. And there are many examples, a lot of evidence of malfeasance [01:14:00] that rightfully earns skepticism.

So I actually do understand that there’s also though this factor of you have a person who let’s say they’re overweight, they have health problems, and. They’re being told that it’s this one thing it’s just, it’s the seed oil and this is the toxin that it’s the red dye 40. Yeah. Yeah.

Correct. Correct. As opposed to a number of things that are not helping. But if we’re talking about. Body composition and health. A lot of it, of course, just comes back to the lifestyle and how is the person choosing to eat? How is the person choosing to use their body? Of course, these are the things that most people don’t want to hear.

They want to hear that it’s big. It’s big food, putting seed oil and everything. That’s why. 

Stan Efferding: Yeah, no, you’re right. It’s not the red die 40. It’s not the not the seed oil necessarily. It’s not any one food item. 

Mike Matthews: The chemicals in the receipts, I saw whatever the who is it was that the carnivore guy, [01:15:00] like getting his receipt with his with his shirt and talking about how these are endocrine disrupting chemicals like, okay, fine.

If you were maybe eating receipt paper, like a pile of it every day, that might not be good for you, but. You don’t have to grab your receipt with your shirt. 

Stan Efferding: Yeah, it could very well be the food that the Red Dye 40 is in because it could be a highly palatable, ultra processed, generally micronutrient deficient food.

I always have to say ultra processed, highly palatable. There’s a lot of processed foods that aren’t over consumed. Protein powder is a processed food. A lot of foods that are processed. 

Mike Matthews: A lot of nutritious foods are processed to some degree. 

Stan Efferding: A lot of nutritious foods. Yep. And including some of those ones that have preservatives in them so that they have better shelf lives and make it more convenient for us.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that’s a bad food or one that you might be likely to over consume. And so you have to be cautious than when you talk about these foods, which ones cause you to over consume and eat too many calories. And [01:16:00] that’s those, the ones in the Kevin Hall study where he talked about ultra processed, highly palatable foods.

Food. It’s hard for me to say again, if you’ve got somebody that wants to go in there food babe is saying, we got to get rid of red dye 40. That will do fuck all for our dieting for our obesity epidemic. It will do nothing. If you take that ingredient out, it does absolutely nothing. 

Mike Matthews: Or replacing seed oil with any other kind of oil if the foods, what are we accomplishing exactly?

Stan Efferding: If it’s calorie for calorie, if you eliminate seed, if you eliminate seed oils and maybe you’re eliminating some of these foods but there’s, like you say, there’s other ways, whether you dip the fries in seed oil, you dip the fries in beef tallow, it’s the same number of calories. They’re highly palatable.

They’re a combination of carbohydrates, sugar, and salt. People are going to over consume them more so than they would a whole food that So now how do we employ that intervention? I did a video called ironically enough, now that I live here, it was about this, the population here in Samoa called what can we learn from the fattest people in the world?

I’m not intending to be rude. I just spoke about that in the [01:17:00] video. I talked about how my wife grew up here and they used to grow all their own food. They raised pigs and they had they grew taro and they had fruits and they would go out in the ocean and harvest. Different sea life, etc. And they would they would eat everything that they raised themselves and grew themselves.

And they would take a lot of it to the marketplace. And they had a vibrant marketplace with 4 generations of family there bartering, exchanging and buying and selling food items. And they didn’t have any obesity in her family when she was a little girl and then food stamps were introduced to the island sometime later and people stopped growing their own food.

Now the marketplace doesn’t even exist. It’s a bunch of trinkets for the carnival cruise line that comes in and they just don’t have the same grow a lot of food on the island, but it’s, spruits and stuff. But the families don’t usually it’s people just doing it for the stores and little fruit.

Stan’s on the side of the road, but people don’t raise their own food to eat very much here anymore. Certainly not a significant portion. The vast majority of the food they eat now [01:18:00] is the three things that we just talked about. They bags. I see down at the cost you left is the Costco affiliate here on the island.

And they have aisles and aisles of these highly processed ultra processed hyper palatal foods, big bags of white flour, big bags of sugar and can after can, after jar, after bucket of seed oils. And they combine those three very inexpensive items. And that’s the bulk of what they eat.

And they use food stamps now. And the obesity epidemic here is one of the worst in the world. The highest up there with Tonga and here’s Samoa. It’s horrific. And I don’t know, I don’t have the answer on how to solve that problem. I know it’s not red dye 40. 

Mike Matthews: It’s not the seed oil per se.

It’s a bigger problem. 

Stan Efferding: Yeah, it’s those foods. Now, we’ve speculated that education is probably, I don’t know what other intervention you can do. I spoke about this in that video as well, where they’re in New York, they imposed some restriction on the size of the Big Gulps, and then people started just buying two.

We saw that in Mexico as well, where they were, they put taxes on [01:19:00] soda. Then they just go drink Kool Aid. And it’s find an alternative, that’s equally contributes equally to the problem. 

Mike Matthews: Behavioral economics explains like those things should have who actually thought those interventions were going to work?

Like any, anyone even just going to college to study behavioral economics could have said, Hey you realize this is what people are going to do, right? Real people. This is almost like game theory that they’re going to respond to your strategy with their own to get what they want. 

Stan Efferding: Yeah, it’s hard to see that you could employ the same beneficial efforts that we employed with cigarettes.

That was huge taxes. And that was also labeling and getting rid of. Advertising and certainly to kids, food. It’s going to be it’s hard to see how you can. You could do some labeling. You could. We already have the nutrition facts and calories right on there. You certainly shouldn’t market and we’ve already adjusted the sugar intake on cereals.

I don’t think we should be marketing. [01:20:00] There certainly shouldn’t be sugar laden sodas in schools. There’s just no way. But then they’re drinking apple juice and Kool Aid and I’m not suggesting apple juice is the same. There are some polyphenol benefits to juices, but just the idea of kids drinking calories is challenging to me and not just kids, but adults too, but they can make their own decisions.

But I have a hard time seeing that beyond education, there’s a whole lot that we can do. Legislatively, and then that gets you into politicians. That’s a dirty business to announce. It’s what’s going on now. Anyhow, they’re getting so much money from these companies. I have a hard time seeing how we can make significant inroads without.

Aggressive marketing education, but certainly banning a couple items like we discussed is it’s an absolute waste of time. It seems like it’s just people, just waving their arms trying to act like they’re making a difference. And they’re really not. I can’t put my finger on the solution to be honest with you.

Mike Matthews: Yeah, I think you’re right in that education alone obviously has not been enough [01:21:00] but there has. There is a lot of institutional capture, regulatory capture, and so there are very perverse incentives at work, and if that could be addressed, and if there were economic incentives in getting people to eat better and be healthier, Yeah, 

Stan Efferding: you hit.

Yes. Yes. I had forgotten about that. That is that’s getting in front of the problem right now. We’re subsidizing a lot of these foods, the corn, et cetera. Why wouldn’t we stop subsidizing those foods? They would obviously get more expensive as a result, but then we would need to provide for people with food insecurity and lower income folks.

We need to provide them an alternative, more affordable. We need to subsidize the kinds of foods that they should be eating. And that’s a boy, that’s a tough term should be eating if boy, if that could happen, yeah, that could happen if they could go in and be able to in the most affordable foods, although a lot of them are still pretty darn affordable, your legumes and rices [01:22:00] and and then you got many Abu crapping on rice and you’ve got some of the healthiest communities in the world, Japan and China and others eating 10 times as much rice as we do.

And but they eat a lot more fruits and vegetables. They don’t eat as much total calories. They have less, more and more as they’re starting to become more Americanized. But, Japan’s obesity is 3%. Although they largely use shame but they have they have A much healthier food program in their schools.

It’s a great place to start to get your kids to start eating healthier foods. But in, in the, because of time and convenience, we tend to, we send them to school and they’re, I ask my kids every day, what do you have for lunch? Hot dog? Pizza? It’s just, Oh, I just shake my head. I’m like, here, I take this to school today.

But I can control what they eat at home. In Japan they eat very healthy food. The kids prepare it oftentimes and they lots of fruits and vegetables. They have very healthy food that we don’t have. 

Mike Matthews: I agree. It starts at home. And as a parent [01:23:00] modeling that behavior, I’ve seen many parents over the years struggle because they ate one way, they ate a lot of, relatively non nutritious food and then they would try to get their kids to eat another way.

And, but especially as the kids get a little bit older and they see that it basically just comes across as hypocrisy. 

Stan Efferding: Yeah. The kid’s menu at the restaurant. What the hell is that? It’s always a corn dog. It’s 

Mike Matthews: terrible. Yeah. But if you can, as the parent eat well, and if you can, Sure. If that’s, I’m speaking personally my kids have always seen my wife and I eat well.

And so for them, it’s normal to eat vegetables. They don’t like all vegetables, but there’s a variety that they’re willing to eat and it’s normal for them to have whole grains. There again they’re still kids and they can be picky. But their version of picky is they like cauliflower more than broccoli.

Okay. They like white rice more than brown rice. Okay, cool. And that and then balanced [01:24:00] with letting them have little amounts of sugar and little indulgences and not being too restrictive, unnecessarily restrictive 

Stan Efferding: with foods. Not keeping it in the house for them to help themselves to it in the refrigerator at all times.

I push proteins. 

Mike Matthews: We even do it. They just don’t really they just never we have these little Yasso bars they like or whatever. I let them, they don’t know this, but I’m thinking with, I have a 12 year old and a seven year old. So I’m thinking, a hundred calories or so of whatever, whatever’s tasty.

And that’s their dessert. And maybe for the 12 year old, a little bit more, if he wants a little bit more. And there have been times where they’ve eaten more than that, but typically that’s good for them. Like they, they have their little ice cream bar or their little, whatever, and they’re satisfied and they wouldn’t even want more if I offered it.

Stan Efferding: And the basics are all there. You’ve always got the healthy foods and the lean proteins. And we start with those. Any time my kids ever ask me for something that I think is more of a treat, I’m [01:25:00] always like, have you had your protein yet? And so now they know. They don’t even ask unless they, have protein with it or before it.

So I’ve got them, I’ve got them trained at least in that respect. 

Mike Matthews: Nice. Nice. We’ve been going for an hour and a half. I originally asked her, I asked for an hour of your time and so on to make sure that it didn’t take way more than I asked for, but this was a great discussion.

I enjoyed it per usual. And why don’t we just wrap up quickly with where people can find you can find your work. You’ve mentioned the vertical diet, anything else you want them to know about? 

Stan Efferding: Yeah, everything’s at Stan Efferding. I have a website stanefferding. com and on there’s links to my meal prep company, The Vertical Diet.

We provide meals nationwide, delivered to your door. I also have an ebook, it’s 250 pages now, it’s in version 4, anybody who bought a previous version gets the updates for free. And it covers everything we discussed today and much, much more in terms of blood testing and training, et cetera. And that’s on there.

It’s the Vertical Diet 4. 0 ebook. I do still take clients. I’ve had more time since being down here in Samoa, so you have online coaching available on [01:26:00] there. Next week I’m releasing my world’s strongest bar. It’s a protein bar, carbs, fats, like a meal replacement bar with a whey isolate and the MCT oil and some rice syrup solids and it’s just something you can use for convenience and for travel.

But everything’s at StanEfforting. com and my Instagram is at StanEfforting and my YouTube is also StanEfforting. I’ve got some great rhino’s rants. They’re a little dated, but they’re still just as relevant and fun to watch. Awesome. Thanks again for taking your time, Stan. Thanks for having me, brother.

Mike Matthews: We will conclude today’s episode shortly, but first I need to tell you about creatine gummies. You probably know that you don’t need supplements to build muscle, to lose fat, to get healthy. But the white ones can help, like creatine, for example, which is the most studied molecule in all of sports nutrition.

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And that’s why my sports nutrition company, Legion, just released creatine gummies, which sounds like a gimmick, but many people actually prefer gummies over powders and pills for a few reasons. One, there’s no dosing and mixing with liquid, so there’s nothing to clean up. Two, gummies are portable, so that means they’re great for on the go, they’re great for traveling and so forth.

So And three, they are a deliciously different, and I hate to say the word, I’m groaning inside, vibe. They’re like creatine candies. Now, creatine is not going to help you pack on brain shrinking amounts of muscle in 30 days flat. It’s [01:28:00] not gonna add another plate or two to the bar. But, it will help you train harder, it will help you recover better.

It will help you gain muscle and strength. Both a bit faster and it will do those things without any of the unwanted side effects associated with other performance enhancing compounds. And so yeah, you should buy my creatine gummies because you’ll love him because it’s science and you can get them over at biolegion.

com. That’s b u y l e g i o n. com slash creatine gummies. And, because you are a valued podcast listener, you can save 20 percent on your podcast. on your first order with the coupon code muscle. Again, that’s buylegion. com slash creatine gummies. Save 20 percent with the coupon code muscle. I hope you liked this episode.

I hope you found it helpful. And if you did subscribe to the show, because it makes sure that you don’t miss new episodes. And it also helps me [01:29:00] because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people who may like it just as much as you.

And if you didn’t like something about this episode or about the show in general, or if you have. Ideas or suggestions, or just feedback to share, shoot me an email. Mike at muscle for life. com muscle F O R life. com. And let me know what I could do better, or just what your thoughts are about maybe what you’d like to see me do in the future.

I read everything myself. I’m always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.