Transcript 

Calories In/ Calories Out: Let’s talk about it compassionately and honestly with Dr. Allan Bacon

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:00:01]:

Oh, it's already going to be a feisty one. I'm kind of jumping up and down before we even started recording. Doctor Allan Bacon, I'm so excited to have you here.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:00:09]:

Hey, Michelle, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:00:12]:

So we have already started our conversation before we started recording with probably the most controversial things we're going to end up talking about in today's episode. We are going to talk about weight loss. We're going to talk about weight loss, what works, what doesn't, what we've seen work, what we're seeing in conversation on social media, what you're getting yelled at about, what I'm getting yelled at about, and hopefully come to some solutions that we feel like really do help people.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:00:37]:

Yeah. I think that finding the practical information in this, what's essentially a sea of noise, is a really important thing because people are seeing snapshots of information, I think, and this is what I've seen throughout social media, you'll follow a specific influencer or researcher or whatever it is and they'll say, hey, look, when we look at this, you'll find this. And this is why you should do this. And I think that the big problem that we're finding overall is that we're getting these tiny snapshots and not seeing the whole thing. And I bring this up in a way. My analogy that I use is that if fitness and nutrition information is a room full of things, oftentimes it's dark when you don't really understand the full concept. And what a lot of influencers are doing is they're opening the door and they're shining a flashlight into one corner and they're saying, hey, look at this. And you're like, oh, that's what's in that room.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:01:28]:

When we do things correctly, instead of using the flashlight, we walk in and we turn on the lights to the room. You can see everything and then you can make the best choices for yourself. And I think that that's what we're attempting to get to today and hopefully we'll give you some clarity.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:01:39]:

I think that's beautiful. What are some of the things that you think influencers kind of leak out or shine the flashlight into one little corner of the room? What are some of those bigger, broader ideas that people are kind of leaking in but not fully really explaining?

 

What are some ideas that influencers are shedding light on, but not fully explaining to people?

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:01:54]:

So this, I mean, nutrition is a very complex and nuanced topic and there's certainly different ways that you're going to need to look at it. The basis understanding is that whether you want to lose or gain weight, it is guided by calories in versus calories out, energy, balance. Now, that doesn't tell the whole story about what you gain, what you lose, or total health, but it's important to understand that, because that can help us understand some of these more complex topics and some of the things that get vilified throughout the social media space. Insulin, cortisol, what are these minute changes in hormones that may be acute in nature are not necessarily as problematic as we're being led to believe, and may only be problematic under certain circumstances. And so by having a greater understanding of what's going on throughout, we can understand whether it's something that we need to worry about, or whether we just focus on those main things that we should be focusing on to begin with. This is that if you're going to fill a basket, fill it with big rocks, stop focusing on the tiny rocks. It's a waste of your time. The funny thing about nutrition, fitness and nutrition is it always tends to come back to the same things.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:03:01]:

Now, there's nuance within those things, but it's always train right sleep, eat correctly, stress relieve, repeat. How do I fix my gut microbiome, train right sleep, same foundation. Yeah. Anything that people really come out and ask these questions on. How do I, how do I fix my cortisol? How do I fix my body weight problems? How do I fix my body composition? The answer is the same. Now, getting there is not necessarily simple, but I think that broadly, people understand what they should be doing. And a lot of this noise is throwing us off from what we should be focusing on. And that's the real problem that we're seeing in social media today.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:03:38]:

I completely agree with you when you say, basically, I'm clearing my throat for this. Calories in, calories out. Right. So we're triggered. There's people who are triggered in the audience for sure right now in a joking way and a non joking way. There's gonna be people who are triggered.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:03:52]:

Sure.

 

What informed you that calories in and calories out as a very high level?

Michelle Shapiro [00:03:53]:

So I'm gonna ask a question within the question, actually over statement within the question or a question within the statement. Their entire podcast dedicated to trying to debunk calories and calories out. Okay. It's, their whole thing is to debunk that calories are even related to weight loss. It's now proposed that calories and weight loss are not related. Doctor Allen, when you are looking at. Stop smiling when you are looking, it's distracting.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:04:22]:

It's a very good and valid question.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:04:24]:

Yeah. When you're looking at the calories conversation, are you looking at mechanism? Are you looking at just the abundance of studies you've seen? Are you looking at anecdotal examples? Are you looking at all of it? And it's just a clear picture after that. Tell me what guides you in this truth? Because for you, it is definitely scientific truth. And for, I would think, many practitioners, it's scientific truth. But other people do not believe it's scientific truth. What informed you that calories in and calories out as a very high level? But we'll talk about the nitty gritty of it is real for weight loss.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:04:58]:

So if we look at what's important in a weight loss journey as a pyramid, just like you would the food pyramid, this is the base of the pyramid. Now, there are certainly other levels. And I think that this is where people really get confused about this type of thing. Because a lot of times, and this is a problem in the people that the people in my camp have, is that they'll say, sicko, calories in, calories out, and then it's almost like it's the end of the conversation. And that is entirely not healthy.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:05:25]:

Turned off when you said calories, I know people listening to this podcast, many of them turned off, and I don't.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:05:30]:

Blame them because they've probably had such bad experiences with assholes that push this type of thing, and then they suggest that there's no nuance beyond that. And so my basis for using this, the paradigm essentially, is the research. This is what it all boils down to. When you control calories and energy balance in situations that are controllable, these people are sequestered. We're actually seeing what they're eating. We're actually controlling the amount of energy output that they have. Situations like maybe the Minnesota starvation experiment and some of the other NIH studies, this is what we see. The times where calories in, calories out, doesn't work is when we start doing those free form questionnaires, when people are going home, and as an RD that there's probably a significant amount of error in tracking, there are probably people that are significantly overestimating their calorie burn or their energy burn.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:06:23]:

And so this is where we start to see some issues with this, with the theory essentially breaking down. But you can't break the laws of thermodynamics. You need energy coming into a system to be able to store something. And if there's less energy coming into a system than is being burned, you're going to lose weight. It's just factually accurate because it, you can't break those laws of thermodynamic. Now, that doesn't mean that hormones and other things can't come into play in certain situations. And I think that this is where the message gets lost, because people will say sicko. And again, this is our fault for pushing this message in this way, because it's not the entire story.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:07:01]:

In an energy deficit, when you're trying to lose weight, calories in, calories out trumps things like the actions of insulin, things like the actions of cortisol. In those situations where cortisol is problematic, those chronic situations, because the energy balance, when theres nothing in the system, you cant store it. However, if youre in a maintenance phase or potentially even worse, in a calorie surplus, well, thats where insulin really acts as a storage hormone. So it could potentially cause more fat deposition if you have issues with insulin, cortisol, in situations where it's chronic cortisol levels, chronic cortisol issues where you are in a calorie surplus can also be problematic because it increases lipoprotein sensitive lipase, which causes fat storage. But this is the other thing that people don't understand. Cortisol itself also causes an increase in hormone sensitive lipase. And hormone sensitive lipase is one of the best fat liberating things in our body. So cortisol gets vilified in all these situations when in reality, if were using it in a situation where were healthy, were at maintenance, were maybe trying to lose body fat, were in a calorie deficit, it can actually be a very big benefit.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:08:15]:

And so, rather than looking at these things as rote, good or bad, you have to understand that theres a reason that our body has these hormones. I mean, we wouldnt have just come up with these organic, natural hormones are there for a reason, and theyre typically not there to just kill you. And so, under certain circumstances, these hormones that have been universally vilified can be very, very beneficial. Insulin is a great hormone for shuttling nutrients. It's a great hormone for getting things into skeletal muscle cells when skeletal muscle is sensitized to glucose and insulin. Cortisol is a wonderful thing from the response, from training, from the response, from hormetic stresses that improve your immune system, improve your cognitive health, and all of these other benefits that it can offer. But we only tend to view these things as negatives. And hopefully, if we start looking at this as a more nuanced discussion, we can start to see when this can be beneficial for us.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:09:14]:

And we can also start to see when maybe we shouldn't be worrying about this as much as we previously have, and then focus on those big rocks, get all the way back to proper nutrition, strength training, sleep, stress relief. And if we do these things, then we're actually making our lives a lot easier. And we're not focusing on these minutiae, such as throwing a continuous glucose monitor on somebody that doesn't have a metabolic issue.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:09:37]:

Absolutely.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:09:38]:

We're really overcomplicating our lives. And I don't blame people for overcomplicating our lives because they want both sides. Well, yes. I mean, it's simple in a way, but it's not easy. And we as professionals need to do better in getting these messages across because we get so dogmatic about things. Right.

 

How is cortisol related to fat storage?

Michelle Shapiro [00:09:57]:

And also so not compassionate, so indifferent to people. When you shout, you say, whatever Cico sicko in people's faces, just eat less and move more. Yeah, it's just, I mean, which is also right. So I want to talk about the cortisol piece really specifically. So I'm not using this as a weight loss example. I'm using this as just an understanding of how we are aware that in times of extreme stress, weight loss can still happen. So as you're saying, like in the case of starvation or war or something like that, we are aware that weight will correlate with food intake and muscle loss and health outcomes overall, obviously, too. Do you find that people who are chronically stressed, which is most of us, I mean, if you run people like, people's cortisol patterns are totally wacky.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:10:51]:

We're looking at them. Do you find it's just that they end up unconsciously intaking more? Is there any fluid retention component to this? Is there the fact that cortisol tends more towards fat storage, so maybe they're losing muscle, gaining fat while eating the same amount? Or would you say if the deficit is maintained, that will not prevent weight loss? It's a very absolute question. So you can obviously have gray area, and your answer, of course.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:11:19]:

So the absolute answer is pretty black and white, but there's a shade of gray here. And what you're getting at is a great question. If you maintain the calorie deficit, you will lose weight flat out. That's what thermodynamics shows us. In the situation that you described, it is much harder to maintain that calorie deficit. So what you were doing before probably wont work. And it probably wont work because adherence to nutrition tends to take a little bit of a dive when youre completely stressed because your willpower takes a hit, your sleep tends to go down, which causes problems with body composition. I dont know if youve looked at the research with body composition and sleep, but if youre an athlete and youre getting more than 8 hours of sleep, you're probably getting optimal sleep.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:12:05]:

People are sad to learn that even 7 hours of sleep probably isn't optimal. But once you start to get into 6.5 and below, you will lose the same amount of weight given the same calorie deficit. But a significantly larger proportion of that will be lean muscle rather than body fat. And so in these situations that you're talking about with cortisol, if you're overeating and that's causing you to go into maintenance or a calorie surplus, yeah, you're gonna start to add some more fat than you probably would otherwise, you're probably going to have your neat levels drop from stress. If you're super stressed out, it's going to be harder to motivate yourself to do things. You're probably going to sit on the couch, you're probably going to procrastinate more. You're going to run into this whole host of problems. And this is why people experience that, well, it's not just calories in, calories out because I'm doing what I was doing before, but okay, how consistent were you with this adherence? Have you been monitoring your step count to see what's been going on with your neat, since step count is a proxy of that non exercise activity, thermogenesis, that all the movements that we do outside of dedicated exercise, which accounts for a massive amount of calories in our daily day, but what's happening with your sleep and what's that going to do to your body composition? And all of these things add up together to yield a really bad time.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:13:22]:

And this convinces a lot of people that calories and calories out doesn't work because their body composition is getting worse. Maybe they're adding more body fat. Maybe they're taking things like a Dexa scan and they're seeing their lean muscle go down. And if your lean muscle is going down faster than your body fat levels going down, even if you're losing weight, you can see that body fat level going up comparison to the LBF. And so all of these things kind of cloud that idea of energy balance as being the main predictor. Even though it is, it's not the whole story. And so we have to be aware of these other factors that are affecting us because that's going to make a massive difference, particularly if you have physique goals.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:14:05]:

Have you worked with people who were, I'm assuming you've worked with many clients who were extremely stressed and maybe they were eating in a calorie deficit, but you actually noticed, hey, you're losing lean muscle mass, even though you're doing, quote unquote, everything. Right? Like, are those differences something you've noticed in any significant way?

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:14:25]:

I have in very significant stress cases and cases that I can think of usually involve divorce, loss of a parent. And these are situations that we see, hopefully in most of the cases, short term, a few months, and then things start to rebound. And I think that a lot of that has to do with that loss of sleep, that constant worrying. It's amazing how effective that is on people, and particularly men. It's even worse than men because men compared to, if you do an 8.5 hours of sleep study versus 6.5, their testosterone can be down as much as.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:15:02]:

50%, which is also going to very deeply correlate to body composition and everything like that, too. Sleep also, like, I really, if we want to take our body back to one of its most basic functions, which is that, like, if you're doing a bomb calorimeter, right, you're literally looking at CO2 and oxygen consumed. Right? So if you're doing that and in sleep, again, you have something like sleep apnea, you're literally, the rate at which you are expelling CO2 and consuming oxygen is going to be less, and that is going to directly impact, I'm assuming you would assume, the thermodynamics as well.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:15:34]:

So sicko itself isn't affected, but all those things that we talked about directly tend to get affected. So the ability to get good sleep and then those shifts in body composition and then those issues with, you're going to start to binge more, you're going to start to take in some more calories than what you did before. And it could affect sicko from the stance of active energy expenditure.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:15:55]:

There you go. Yeah.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:15:56]:

To your point, it could affect it in that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It could affect it that way. It's not going to affect non resting energy expenditure and it's not going to affect energy input directly. Outside of the fact that your willpower is probably going to go down and you're going to eat a little bit, but it will likely affect the amount of calories that you burn throughout the day. It will probably lower. Neat, because you're less rested when in combination with, say, that you've been losing weight for a while, and you've lost a significant amount of weight. I mean, metabolic adaptation itself is going to ramp up hunger cues and drop meat as a response to the loss of weight in an attempt to make you maintain weight and prevent further weight loss.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:16:32]:

So you're essentially giving yourself this double whammy of, well, my body's already fighting back against this from one of its natural mechanisms to prevent weight loss. And now I couldn't give a shit because I'm so tired that I'm just going to eat whatever I want, and my gym sessions are going to crap, and I'm not moving as much as I used to. This is the issue with looking at this as completely black and white.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:16:56]:

Exactly.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:16:56]:

And everything that you're pointing out is wonderful because it is starting to show a little bit more of that room of what's actually going on, rather than pointing a flashlight and saying, look, it's just sicko. And you're like, okay, well, at its core, it kind of is, but, like, in practicality, is it?

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:17:13]:

Yeah, exactly.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:17:14]:

And in practicality, it may not be, but as long as you understand what's going on, you can reconcile those two ideas to be like, okay, well, if I didn't fully believe in sicko before, maybe I'm starting to believe in it a little bit more, but maybe I'm understanding why I didn't believe in it before. And I do understand that the concerns that I had prior are valid.

 

How other components impact weight loss, not just calories.

Michelle Shapiro [00:17:34]:

Yeah. So I've had this visual before that the body, if the body's kind of like a car, essentially, then our fuel tank is like the sicko tank, okay? It's like the calories in, calories out the fuel tank. I don't know much about cars, but I'm gonna use as many of references I have where, like, many people are focused on how is the whole car running when it comes to weight loss, which is also really valid. Like, what is your cortisol? What is your sleep? Like, what all these things. What I think people are not getting in general is that you are still only talking about the fuel tank. But those other things can affect what goes in or comes out of the fuel tank still.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:18:13]:

It can affect the performance.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:18:14]:

Yeah, yeah. It can affect the performance of the fuel tank. What I think half of the world sees is you're only caring about the fuel tank, but you aren't only caring about the fuel tank, you're caring about every single factor that influences the fuel tank, too. But knowing that ultimately, yes, it's going to come down to the fuel tank. But you still have to know what affects the fuel tank to understand what's going to affect the weight loss.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:18:35]:

It's going to come down to the fuel tank, but there are influencers on the fuel tank for sure.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:18:39]:

Direct influencers that we've talked about.

 

What are the myths about metabolic rate in weight loss?

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:18:40]:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that's where the real issues start to come into play, where people don't, don't appreciate that as much. Now, one of the things that we do want to clear up, though, is that the biggest misconception that I see that really needs to be cleared up, and this can be challenging for people to accept, and I'm okay with sharing the research if people want to see it. When people lose weight, the biggest concern that a lot of people have is my resting metabolic rate is going to go down. They'll usually just say their metabolic rate. They'll say my metabolic rate is going to go down. It's going to be harder for me to lose weight. What I really want to point out is the resting metabolic rate doesn't really drop that much.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:19:19]:

It doesn't drop that much when you take weight loss into account. And what I mean by that is, if we look at all the research that looks at this, it's actually working in our benefit, and it's wonderful to know this. So say that you are 185 pounds and you lose weight and you get down to 155 pounds. If we use predictive equations to compare your resting metabolic rate to somebody that had never lost weight, that has always been 155 pounds, you are probably only off between five and 25 calories per day. In resting metabolic, it's next to nothing. It's like a quarter of a fun size snickers bar. So when people tell me, well, my metabolism is damaged, and that's why I'm not losing weight, it's like, well, is a quarter of a fun size Snickers bar really going to throw you off? And you don't mean this in an aggressive way. You mean this in a.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:20:04]:

We need to educate ourselves about what's actually going on. This goes back to that metabolic adaptation where if neat levels are dropping significantly, that can feel like a massive drop in your metabolism, because that energy side of the equation is dropping that active energy side. But you can do something about that. And that's the wonderful thing about using step count as a proxy for neat, because you can monitor your step count and you can say, okay, well, when I was 185 pounds, I was getting 9500 steps per day. And now that I'm 155 pounds, I'm only getting 6000.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:20:38]:

I actually heard you talking about this. I want to touch on this on Doctor Gabrielle Lyons podcast, too. You said that that will happen, actually in weight loss, where people will naturally kind of do less activity or slow it down as they continue on. Tell me what your theory is behind that.

 

What is non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT)?

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:20:55]:

It happens because there's less energy availability in the system. And historically, our bodies have fought against weight loss far harder than it fights against weight loss.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:21:04]:

The body hates weight loss. Hates weight loss.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:21:06]:

It does because we, we, I mean, through all of our history, when you start to get leaner and leaner, that's probably a bad sign for survivability. And I think that you probably heard this on Gabrielle's podcast. But when we're living in a society where calories are not very hard to come by, we're fighting against that excess calories. We're fighting against these high indulgent foods that make us kind of want to eat more and more than what we would typically eat if we were eating whole foods. And so as we're dropping weight, our body says, whoa, whoa, whoa. Are we in a time period where food is scarce? Maybe we should stop this loss. And so your body does two main things. It ups that hunger drive, and it lowers the amount of movement that you do.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:21:52]:

And these two things in combination will really lead to those stalls. Now, that doesn't change the energy balance part of the equation, but it does make it a lot harder. Absolutely. And especially with neat, it's such a subconscious thing that it's very hard to monitor. It's difficult for people to notice that this is even going on. But knowing that your resting metabolic rate doesn't change that much, and knowing that these other things potentially change significantly, you can actually do things to counterbalance this and give yourself the best possible chance moving forward. Now, certainly, as you lose weight, a smaller body is going to require less calories. That doesn't mean that your metabolism is broken.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:22:30]:

That just means that your 155 pound friend had never needed to eat as much as you at 185 pounds to maintain their weight. You're now dipping closer to what they had to do to maintain that weight. And if we can keep an eye on neat levels and we can make some active choices to counterbalance those drops, then we can give ourselves the best chance to continue to be in a calorie deficit. We can adjust the food to where we need to be, and we can technically eat a lot more because we've got some more calorie burn in the system from increased neat levels. And the neat level difference is people underestimate this because it is far more than energy that you burn in active exercise. And in a relatively sedentary person, it could be four or 500 calories per day. And a very, very active person, it could be 2000 calories per day.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:23:20]:

That's eating for a whole day again.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:23:22]:

Yes, exactly. But that's active meat levels that have been shown in people. So these 2000 calorie meat levels are typically agricultural jobs, people that work on farms.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:23:34]:

So cool. That's amazing.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:23:35]:

So we know that this can be a very large thing, but for even the majority of people, I mean, you can probably get it up to a thousand extra calories per day.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:23:45]:

We're going to talk about meat. I have a counter to the adaptive thermogenesis conversation, but I actually just want, I'm never countering. I want to actually understand what you think about this. One study that always stood out to me and fascinated me was the biggest loser, right? They did that follow up study in 2016 and they were shocked to find that their metabolisms had overcompensated so much more than what they had intended, because they thought, hey, if the person's 300 pounds, their resting metabolic rate is going to be three. Let's just arbitrarily say 3000 calories. And if they're 150 pounds, their resting metabolic rate is going to be 1500 calories. And for each person, they were shocked to see how much those resting metabolic rates dropped. Is that potentially because the weight loss was so drastic that the compensation just lasted longer or something? Do you have any insight on that?

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:24:35]:

I do, and that's the reason I'm looking away from the camera.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:24:38]:

Yeah.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:24:38]:

Kuchnia 2016. Put out an entire paper on it. The metabolic adaptation to the biggest loser was overstated. They used the wrong equations.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:24:49]:

So the whole study was just throw it out the window.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:24:52]:

Yeah, I mean, there's an entire counter paper to that study.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:24:55]:

So you're. I want to read that too, by the way. Yeah, I was real. Yeah, I'd love to see it. I was really devastated by that study, honestly, because I was like, wow, these people, there was no informed consent here, and these people had no freaking chance. I think that the amount of verbal abuse and distress that was experienced on the show, that probably when they got home did have effects. And again, something we're going to talk about too, is that like, to engage in a calorie deficit, you need to be in a very specific type of mindset, and you need to be in a very safe psychological place, because it is, again, against kind of what the body wants from us. So if you are already in a state of mental distress or physical or physical illness, it might not be the time to prioritize something like a calorie deficit.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:25:47]:

I 100% agree with you.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:25:48]:

You know, there's a right time to lose weight. So. And I'm going to give a nice. You'll have heard if you're listening to this episode, I'll give a nice prequel to this conversation, too. That this conversation may not be for many of my clients, by the way, because they're people who are. Usually have several different chronic illnesses at the same time that are not weight related. So weight loss might not be their priority at the time, but there are people who weight loss and body comp changes are a massive priority for them, and they deserve to have this information, too. So I'm nothing withholding the information, because it's not for some.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:26:20]:

It's just that we need to know when it's the right time to have that information.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:26:24]:

Yeah, and there's. There's a multiple situations that could be like that. Emotional and mental situations where maybe you're just not ready. Um, I mean, those situations that we were talking about with losing a loved one or something like that. Maybe it's not the right time to try to lose weight. Maybe we say, hey, let's go to maintenance. Let us. Because the more calories that you have in your system, the more adept you'll be at handling stress, both physical and emotional.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:26:45]:

Maybe youre sick, maybe you have an injury, maybe you had surgery. These are times where in your life you can add in some calories and its going to be okay. And look at it as, look, maybe my ultimate goal is to lose body fat, but this isnt the right season for that. So im going to work on something else. Maybe we start to switch to having a routine based goals, which people should be using anyways. Maybe we say, hey, look, I'm going to focus on becoming more consistent and adherent with my nutrition. I'm going to start getting more sleep as much as I possibly can, potentially in emotionally charged situations. I'm going to focus on getting more water into my life because I only drink 40oz a day or whatever it is.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:27:25]:

But there are certain things that you can choose that you have almost, if not complete control over what you put in your mouth. Step count, water intake. Sleep is kind of on that boom line, depending on what it is.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:27:38]:

Exactly. Not for my people. Exactly. Sleep. It doesn't feel like it's in their control at all. We get it.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:27:44]:

In a perfect world that's under our control. In the realistic world, it's like, well, I got two kids and two jobs, and this is more difficult than what it should be. And you do the best you can, but then you start to set those habit or routine based goals based off of a realistic outcome. So, if your realistic outcome is 6.5 hours, and that's the best that you can do, then you set it at 6.5 hours, and you hit that number as best you can. So you will always be making these adjustments, and the same thing happens with nutrition as happens with fitness. You auto regulate according to what's going on in the situation at hand, and then you adjust based on what you can do.

 

The myth that you need to focus and control your metabolic rate and hormones, rather than the lifestyle routines themselves.

Michelle Shapiro [00:28:18]:

I love that you focus a lot on the foundations, obviously, because it's most of the conversations that I have, too. And also what I want to emphasize is that if you do focus on those foundations, the other components of the car that everyone's so obsessed with, talking about, the hormones, cortisol, thyroid function, those are what actually make those hormones shift in the first place. So you actually still have to go the same direction. There's never a fancy supplement that makes an impact. And it's really interesting because my brain's kind of going as we're talking about how the reason why something like caffeine pills would help someone to lose weight is not probably the reason that people think. It's not like it's stimulating on such substantial level, your basal metabolic rate, but more so because it kind of directly impacts the fact that you might not want to eat or something like that after. So it's a lot of times we're thinking about, how do we raise our baseline metabolism, but it's more so about leaving that equation alone and then within the broader equation of what we're eating and what we're burning, making adjustments and things. You're not trying to change your metabolic rate so much, because that's a not really possible, or to a very small degree, possible.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:29:32]:

You're more so trying to live within the confines of what your metabolic rate is, because that is what's undeniable, in truth. And what you're saying, Evan, that's perf.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:29:40]:

That's perfectly stated, and that's a. I'm 100% on the same page as you. I think that the people that are trying to manipulate the thing, the same thing with most hormones happens with RMR. People try to micromanage their hormones, and they try to micromanage their RMR, and there are these things that they largely don't have control over when they could be focusing on some of the routines that they do that will actually improve these things as best as possible. And so again, we're losing sight of the forest for the trees because we're in this mindset that we need to find the trick or the secret, because if it's something that's kind of boring and easy, then we have to take a little bit of culpability for where we are. And there's nothing wrong with that. I actually think that that's the first step in succeeding where you haven't succeeded before. When you say I'm where I am because of the things that I've done, that is not something to be ashamed of.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:30:32]:

It should not give you any guilt. It should say, hey, look, if I'm not honest with myself, and I don't categorize and catalog what's been going on in my routines and my actions, then I can't do anything to fix them.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:30:44]:

Totally.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:30:45]:

And that's what you need to do to be able to overcome these types of things. And so your idea of, hey, look, maybe we should start to move away from trying to actually boost our RMR or our BMR. I mean, that's probably, probably very smart because you don't have much control over it. And even the things like the caffeine. Caffeine will initially, for at least two weeks or so, give you a nice little bump to energy burn. But then what happens? Central adenosine receptors upregulate. They're oriented at inactivating the effects of caffeine. And this is why people tend to have to take more and more and more caffeine over time to feel something because your body's turning it off, because it's not a natural substance in your body.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:31:23]:

And I'm not saying that this is not a natural versus unnatural conversation, but there is a reason that this doesn't act as this massive benefit to your metabolism, like some studies show. Because if the study looks at it and they're only looking at like a week or maybe two weeks can be very impressive data, but then take that out farther and how much are you going to continue to increase your caffeine dose to chase this high? And technically, if you really want to get these benefits to caffeine to be able to do this, you would be cycling two weeks on, two weeks off, two weeks on, two weeks off to allow these adenosine receptors to upregulate and down regulate. But the difference in focusing on this over focusing on eat right strength train.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:32:07]:

So this accountability piece, this is really the meat and potatoes in my head of the weight loss conversation. The first thing I just want to say is I think it's totally not fair, like, women's bodies versus men's bodies in ways of the weight loss piece of the conversation, I almost am like to mention, I don't even want to hear you complain about it because women have to, like, literally, you know what I'm saying? It is literally not fair in some ways. And you are going to have circumstances where you may be at a disadvantage, but that is also the unfortunate reality of life. I'll give an example for myself. Right? Like, I was an obese child and or lived in an occupied in a larger body if the word obese feels not safe for someone listening. But by the time I was in 6th grade, I was like 250 pounds. And I kind of, like, maintained my weight until I started losing it, like, junior year of high school to when I lost 100 pounds junior year of high school for myself. I was a very large kid because I had a lot of trauma and I had a lot of fast food and all this stuff going on.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:33:08]:

And then I just kind of like, gained ten pounds a year. And then that just turned into, like, me having this, what felt like, huger problem later. That's not really fair. I'm a kid. I don't pick what I eat. It's my parents fault. Love them, but it is their fault. You don't pick what you eat when you're four years old.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:33:25]:

You know what I mean? And that's when I started gaining weight like that. So it wasn't a victim game for myself because I'm like, first of all, there's so many people who have so many more things stacked against them than I do. I also how whatever role genetics plays in it. What's funny, 23 andme is like, you're predisposed to be larger than average. I'm like, thanks, 23 andme. Whatever those minutiae of things are, if we choose, and this is a choice to be in kind of that victim mentality around weight, specifically, you'll stay in that victim mentality around weight. So there is a part of grasping it's not right. Maybe it's not fair, but it is what it is a little bit.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:34:03]:

And I know that that's not, like, comforting, but it is also empowering if you choose to take fate into your own hands in whatever way that is. And I don't mean that about weight loss. I mean that about your health.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:34:14]:

Obviously, we need to, we need, you had actually mentioned this earlier. We need to come at this from an angle of empathy, but also an angle of truth.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:34:22]:

Yeah.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:34:23]:

And I don't think that there's anything wrong with telling people that are obese. Hey, look, this is not healthy, because it's not. But that doesn't talk about your values as a person, that doesn't talk about your feelings of self worth. And I think it's important to tell people that if you feel like you're overweight and you want to lose body fat for whatever reason, whether it's health, whether it's, I just want to look good naked, all of these things are valid reasons. There is nothing wrong with that. That's not saying, oh, I don't love myself as a person. You can love yourself as a person, and you can expect better of yourself.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:34:57]:

Totally.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:34:58]:

And that is completely okay. And if you have anybody that puts you down for getting into the gym, any person that is a real gym rat will see an overweight person and think, good for them. Yeah, that's 100%. The only people that don't think that are those assholes that have just been doing it for like a year, and they have that, that fitness dunning Kruger effect where they think that they know.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:35:17]:

Everything with you completely and very aware that in our society, weight is something that is, is a moral standard. It is. Yeah. It is something that can prohibit people from getting jobs. It's something that can prohibit people from having a community. And separately, if we take only the data from the conversation and we just say, well, that kind of sucks, but all right, that's kind of where to start from, I think, is to say, like, you know what? Have these conversations and confusion until we're blue in the face about you say, I say cyiko or sicko, whichever one you want to say, cico. Calories in, calories out. Or we can just say, hey, I can change something here and I can move the needle a little bit, or it's just totally not my right time to lose weight.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:36:04]:

I'm in freaking. Let's call it, let's say someone's in trauma therapy right now. Like you said, they're going through a severe loss or something like that. It's just that it's not the time to impose, even if it's stress that ultimately ends up being positive. It is a stressor on the body. It is. First, weight loss is a stressor. Your body doesn't want to do that.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:36:20]:

It wants to not do that. It doesn't. It wants the end results of weight loss, but it doesn't like it in the meantime. And I do see people going on drastic low carb diets, very low calorie diets, and their anxiety and panic attacks immediately start increasing. So it's really about, is it your right time? And then at some point, we have to accept that things are not fair, and it does suck. It just does suck. And it is what it is. I don't know what to say.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:36:42]:

That whole thing about it's not fair. I want to touch on two points, and I want you to remind me when I start to go on one, to come back to the other.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:36:48]:

Yes, sir.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:36:49]:

There's two topics that I want to touch on, because I think that when you talked about being a child that was overweight, when you talk about people with obesity that face challenges that other people don't face, that's 100% true. Yes, it is. Yes, it still is sicko. And that sounds terrible. It's still, eat less, move more. And that sounds so awful to say to a person.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:37:11]:

It's compassion.

 

Is there a study about emotional eating habits?

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:37:11]:

Yeah, it does. It does. Now, it is important to understand that, because you need to understand that to be able to fix things. But there are two things that I think that people really need to understand to overcome these hurdles to get to that point. And one is the causes of emotional eating, and the other is discrepancy and hunger cues. So when I forget to say, to talk about discrepancy in hunger cues, let me know in a little bit. So, for emotional eating, there was a study done by Hurl and colleagues in 2018, and I love the study. I bring it up because I think that it is one of the most important studies that has ever been run to help people that deal with cravings and emotional eating.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:37:48]:

And this tends to be one of the main causes of obesity in my mind, because a lot of times, people have weight problems because their coping mechanisms involve food, when they probably should. If you get upset, you reach for food, you dead pint of ice cream or whatever it is. And people that don't have weight problems don't tend to reach for that type of thing quite as much. And that's one of the reasons that they don't have the calorie surpluses that some of the other people have. So this study took a large twin cohort, so genetics, exactly the same, and they looked at them and their responses to stress and their emotional eating responses, and they found that nearly all of the response was due to lifestyle factors and the situation that they were in. The social factor rather than genetics itself. Now, this is extremely powerful because this shows that you're not doomed by your genetics. Like you said, with your test, you might have a predilection to holding on to some more weight than somebody else, but with the right habits and routines, you will do just fine.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:38:58]:

You can lose weight just like everybody else, assuming you don't have pathology at the same time that needs to be treated. The issue is you have a harder time doing it because you've had 30, 40, 50 years of learning to eat in a certain manner. And maybe the way that you seek comfort stress situation is to reach for food. And this even happens in positive situations every time you have something good. I'm going to reward myself with a donut. Right? Well, maybe we shouldn't do that as frequently as we did before. And that doesn't mean that there isn't room for donuts, but it means that we have an issue with the way that we deal with foods, with the way that we deal with celebrations sometimes. Football Sunday is a big thing for a lot of my clients.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:39:39]:

They'll be like, I have to, I have to eat, I have to, I have to drink. Because it's football Sunday and it's like, do you have to? And it's not to say that you can't. It's to say that football season, there's like three games a week. And so this is a frequency that could be really problematic for you during this time period. So rather than saying, oh, I have to do this, and this is just the way that I celebrate, why don't we start to put in some routines that will minimize the amount this affects you? And so we start to move in the right direction for you and it's all about doing better than what you did before. And so I think that if you start to look at it as anytime I screw up and you will screw up, that's okay. A challenge that you're presented is something that you have to learn to work through. And you're not going to be perfect.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:40:24]:

As long as you look at that as a learning experience, you're going to do just fine, because that's where the successful people start to make their changes. Successful people aren't. Aren't people that have never screwed up. Everybody screws up, including your registered dietitian. So the people that succeed are the ones that look at it as, okay, well, I can do better. And they'll write down what they would have done differently if they were put in that same situation again. And they put it forward in the future. And understanding that you can do better is a very powerful thing.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:40:49]:

And I think the people that grow up with obesity have less feelings of that. They've got less confidence in these situations, particularly around food. I mean, people with obesity might trust.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:41:00]:

Right, then you don't have the trust that you can influence change. It feels like your body's out of your hands. It can feel really scary. I know. I experienced that as a child, for sure.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:41:08]:

Yeah, absolutely. And for the, for the, I mean, this isn't something that you would really tell a kid, but for the adults that are listening in the audience, some of the best tactics that you can use are the literal dumbest things, and they're the best tactics that you can use, because the simpler that something is and the more readily available that you can do it, the more likely that you're going to do it and the more that you can relate to it. And in situations like this, I always tell my clients to ask themselves, what would a healthy person do in my situation? And I say that because most of the time, you guys are pretty smart, and youll know what a healthy person will do. You might not know all the exact nuances, but if youre sitting there in front of a barbecue and you just drank the night before or you had another celebration, and, okay, so today is not as important to me. And I say, okay, youre making food choices. What would a healthy person do? Well, most people would say, okay, well, maybe I get some more lean proteins. Maybe I go for the chicken. I get some of the fruits, maybe I get some of the green beans.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:42:06]:

And then I just enjoy my time with friends there, because a lot of times, you'll know what you should be doing by asking yourself, what would a healthy person do in my situation? You cut through the bullshit. You will often know a guideline of what you should do, even if it's not the exact things. But asking yourself that question is taking those incremental steps to starting to, one, think in the way that you should be thinking if you're trying to make these changes, and two, start to put forward actions, because when you ask yourself that, it cuts a lot of the decision making process out, and it makes your life a lot easier. And I've talked about this with Gabrielle, that fitness personalities get dogmatic. This is another situation where I feel we're very dogmatic. Fitness personalities will say, either you just need to toughen up and get it done, or they'll say, hey, power doesn't have anything to do with it. You're in a bad situation, and that's bullshit, too. Willpower certainly has something to do with it, but by setting up the right habits and routines in the background, you use less of your willpower.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:43:08]:

So when you see your friend Stacy, who's 155 pounds and things aren't as hard for her because she can make better choices, well, she's not trying to raw dog her willpower throughout these situations. She was asking herself, what would a healthy person do? Shes trained herself to eat in this manner through either being taught by her parents, through life experiences, whatever it was, you just dont have that in place. Youre going to have to actively work at it. But thats okay, because you do have the willpower to do this. You just need to make it so it doesnt require 100% willpower all the time. Once you start to put some things on autopilot, by using some of these tips and tactics, thats when youll really start to succeed. And then youll realize, hey, I can take control of this. And so, yes, willpower is part of it.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:43:50]:

It's not all of it. And you are certainly facing things that other people don't face. And the second one was hunger cues.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:43:56]:

Hunger cues.

 

Why are hunger cues an issue for people who were obese and who have lost weight?

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:43:57]:

Yeah. So discordant hunger cues are a very real issue for people who were obese and who have lost weight. And this is one of the problems that we see with a massive recidivism rates, them being, I lost weight and then I regained it, regain it or maybe it and more. And the reason, one of the reasons that this happens is there are discordant hunger cues in people that have lost weight. And Kevin hall did research on this out of the NIH. And it's very interesting. It can be up to an extra drive for 100 calories per kilogram of weight loss. Now, it doesn't mean that you're going to experience this, but it can be as high as that.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:44:39]:

And so if youve lost pounds, whats that 2000 extra calories that you might want to eat compared to somebody that hadnt lost that weight. So if youre going from 170 to 150 pounds, you want to eat that much more than the person thats 150 pounds that had never lost the weight, potentially. And this is a hurdle. And if you dont know, I mean, thats profound.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:45:02]:

That would be fighting instincts for a time. Would you say that at some point, your body at 150 pounds becomes like a person's body who's 150 pounds, who had never lost weight?

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:45:14]:

It's not guaranteed, but it tends to get a lot better, and it also tends to get a lot better because you tend to make better food choices, too, whereas when you're 100, I don't want to say 180, because that's not like morbidly obese or anything, but when you're at higher levels, you tend to choose more energy dense foods, more hyper palatable foods. And when you start to get on that weight loss journey, you start to switch to more whole, minimally processed foods. You're getting more fiber, you're getting more fruits and veggies, you're getting more lean proteins. And all of these things will help with this hunger drive because you're adding in more higher volume foods. And so secondarily, you're moving towards a more healthy lifestyle anyways. And it's helping with satiety, and I.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:45:51]:

Think there's a lap. There's a leptin piece to that, too, by the way. I think that it's effects on inflammation and eating foods that have the potential to perpetuate inflammation. I'm not calling them inflammatory foods. I won't do that today. But does that have the potential to perpetuate inflammation? More of those can blunt leptin sensitivity. So I think that that also has something to do with the amount of cravings you end up having, or the amount of how your body's regulating should push you back up to that weight that you were before, too. I'm a huge believer in leptin, in its role in this conversation as well, by the way.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:46:23]:

I really think there's a profound peace there, too.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:46:26]:

It's huge. And that's actually that part of metabolic adaptation that we were talking about with hunger cues driving up.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:46:31]:

Exactly.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:46:32]:

It's an alteration. It's your body's alteration of the leptin ghrelin balance.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:46:36]:

Exactly.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:46:37]:

And that's how it drives those hunger cues up.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:46:39]:

I've had a feeling in my heart of why I have this question a lot where people have asked me, how did you lose 100 pounds and keep it off? Like, maybe I've gained from my lowest point ever. I think I'm ten pounds, maybe more. And I fluctuated within those ten pounds for the past 15 years. Let's call it. I'm always right there, essentially. I have a feeling that it's because I am a person who, like, a very hardcore black and white, like, I just need to do something type person. I also really hate foods with a lot of flavor, so I really think it helps me from a leptin perspective, because bland, simple foods seem to help with leptin sensitivity quite a bit. So I have a feeling that my natural preference for that really benefited me.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:47:19]:

I think that just, I lucked out a little bit on that, too.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:47:22]:

There is research, theres a bunch of research that shows that there are three things in common with people that lose weight and actually maintain it really well.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:47:31]:

Tell us, please.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:47:32]:

One is that there is less food variety, and this is getting at what youre talking about. Theres less food variety. Thats what brought this up in my mind.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:47:39]:

Its horrible. Its such a bad life.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:47:41]:

Shes 100% hitting on the things that really matter, food variety. That doesnt mean that you cant have some variety in your day. There's a thing called the buffet effect. And if you're given unlimited choices, then it's really problematic because it really drives those craving cues up. And it could be mediated through leptin. Or if that was shown in the studies that I looked at for these, because I don't think that they looked at that specifically, but they did look at what are the characteristics of people that have the ability to maintain weight more than others. Another one was, they're typically lower fat diets. Now, that doesn't mean that that's necessary interesting for weight maintenance, but that's just what they show with who tends to succeed.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:48:19]:

And then third, we tend to eat out very little. They're cooking their own food.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:48:23]:

It's very, very interesting. I'm pitching that. I think the low food variety is the cravings piece. And I think there's a leptin piece. I've always felt that, because I know that bland foods are one of the most helpful things for leptin. I really, that was lucky that I have, like, terrible taste in food. I really think so. It's so funny.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:48:41]:

My sister always says to me, and she will be laughing when she listens to this. She always jokes. She's like, if I literally had to live a day in your life, like, the amount of things, because I also, I have Ehlers Danlos syndrome. I have all these things. She's like, if I had to do the things you had to do and eat the way you ate, I would, like, not want to keep going. She's like, it wouldn't be worth it for me at all, even though she's healthy and beautiful and amazing herself. But she's like, it just wouldn't, it's just not a worth it exchange. And I'm like, it is also, at some point, it just becomes like you're saying how you've lived.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:49:10]:

If you've lived that way for a very long time. And I'm not saying I have the most exciting diet. I have, like, the least exciting diet in the world, but it's, it's so thoughtless for me, which is very. That that helps me a lot because there's a lot of other things I want to focus on in life. So I think it's also about when it comes to weight loss, how do you really create a situation where you actually aren't putting so much focus and effort and fear into it, and it becomes this, like, kind of background thing in your life? I think that helps so much.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:49:38]:

You're putting it on autopilot, then you have willpower to do other things.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:49:41]:

Right, exactly.

 

Finding the willpower with foods to eat, planning what to eat, and adjusting your lifestyle

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:49:42]:

I mean, again, a lot of this is interconnected, and it goes back to that type of thing. And I think that people need to start looking at food. Not every meal has to be a celebration, but at the same time, not every meal has to taste like crap. I mean, we don't need to eat boiled chicken and broccoli to succeed. We can spice up some foods and we can be just fine. But I think that people try to look at often try to look at food as a, as a celebration every time. And it doesn't have to be that way. I mean, maybe sometimes you just eat because it's the right thing to do and it's gonna fuel your body, and you can get on with your life, and then you can save the special eating for those celebratory times in your life that tend to come rather organically pretty often.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:50:21]:

And so when I talk to clients about this type of thing, I'm like, okay, well, look at what you've got going on over the next two, three, four weeks, and then figure out what events you have and rate them in order of importance. Is there a very important event to you? Okay, well, then you're probably going to want to be a little bit more off plant, indulge a little bit more on that time, but then you can look at some of the other ones that you're like, okay, well, it's my daughter's birthday, and I really want to have cake with her and enjoy the day. Wonderful. And then I have a work party. Well, I don't really like those people anyway, so I can probably moderate a little bit more there. And you make these decisions, and it's better to look at a few weeks ahead. So you're knowledgeable about this type of thing, because if you can make those conscious choices ahead of time, it does two things. It.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:51:10]:

One makes it easier to moderate more in those days that you've deemed less important to you. And two, it cuts the guilt out on those days that you felt like you wanted to indulge more because you made that choice beforehand. And both of these are wonderful things. It's improving your relationship with food, and it also makes it okay to eat a little bit more mundane on the mundane days because you know that you've got all of these events coming up where you're going to be able to indulge a little bit more, make your life easier, be conscious of what's happening in your life, and you can save yourself a lot of stress.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:51:43]:

I think people will hear that and say, if I had to pre plan what I'm going to eat weeks in advance, it would horrendously hurt my relationship with food if they have a disordered relationship with food. Just so you know, that's feedback. I already know that people are going to be making. But what I'll say is, quite literally, I love every single person listening to this. You cannot literally have your cake and eat it, too. So I have clients who come to me and people will say in their forms, well, I'd like to improve these symptoms with my gut. And then I know that wanting to lose weight is bad and I'm not supposed to want to lose weight, but I kind of. I'd love to lose weight.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:52:19]:

And then I'll get on the phone with them on a discovery call and they'll say, losing 100 pounds is the most important thing in my life, I can't. I won't even let myself go on a date. I won't let myself go to social events without, like, this is the only thing I care about in my life, but we're, like, so afraid to own it. So if the question is if losing weight for the time being, for better or for worse, is the most important thing in your life, and you're approaching it in a way where you're nourishing your body. We're not talking about drastically starving yourself and hurting yourself or cutting out all carbs or cutting out any food group or cut. But quite literally, for you to achieve the goals that you want to do, you will have to sometimes eat cake and sometimes not, because it is literally not going to work. And that is the. I've often talked about the difference between compassion and coddling, and I'm very compassionate with my clients.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:53:06]:

But if a client comes to me and says, I want to lose weight more than anything in the world, and it's debilitating me, and I can't even Michelle. I won't even go on a date until I'm this weight. And I'm like, is there anything I could do to convince you that you're worthy now and can go on the date? They're like, I just don't want to show up if it's getting in the way of you being connected to other people and feeling safe and connected and you're doing all the work outside of it and this is just still important to you, like, I'm not going to let that cake get in the way of these people, whoever it is. My client, friend, colleague, anyone in the way of the things that they want most in their lives. Because it can be very impactful on your life to be living in a larger body when you're not wanting to it. Regardless, if you do all the trauma work and you do all the work, if you're still living in that body, it's still an issue for you. It's okay that you feel that way. It's just you can't do harmful things or torture yourself to get there.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:53:57]:

That's when you start to focus on those incremental steps to get where you want to be.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:54:00]:

Totally.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:54:01]:

And I think that people that are in that situation when they're first starting out, they feel overwhelmed by how much, one, how much they need to learn, and two, how much they need to do to get where they need to be. And that's where you start to focus on that week to week. Week. Now, when I was talking about looking three, four weeks ahead, I just wanted to clarify one thing. I'm not saying that you have to have a menu for every day of your mundane day eating. What I am saying is that when you see these special, indulgent occasions, you could say, hey, look, I'm going to indulge on those days and then I'm going to do the more whole, minimally processed foods cooking at home on the other days. And that's. That's the extent that you need to do so, rather than feeling overwhelmed with, oh God, I really need to plan all of these days beforehand.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:54:40]:

It's more a general idea of I can look at these days beforehand and I can make decisions understanding that these other days are coming up on whether or not I want to moderate more, stay more on plan, or then have those more indulgent days. And sometimes you might have a situation crop up where you're like, I just need to have it is because it'll help me stay more adherent or consistent otherwise. And that's perfectly fine. But the idea that you have these special occasions coming up can make it easier to stick more to those whole, minimally processed foods, the traditional healthy foods during these mundane days, because you know that you're going to get a little bit of it, of not brave, but what's going on coming up. And that can make it easier. I think the big issue is that people will look at this and they'll be like, well, if. If I don't think about it, then I start to have these more indulgent days more frequently because it almost always feels like you're doing just the whole minimally processed foods. Whereas if you've got these ideas in your mind of, okay, when this next event comes up, it's not really that far away, and it breaks those chunks down into manageable chunks of time.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:55:44]:

And it can make it easier for you to make that choice to stay on plan.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:55:47]:

Absolutely. As opposed to looking at it. I have to elite this the rest of my entire life. Like, it's unmanned.

 

Can your palatate change when you start to eat different foods?

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:55:51]:

Yeah. Which could feel very overwhelming, particularly in the beginning before. I mean, I don't have any, any research to point this out, but I really do believe in the fact that people's palates change when you start to eat different foods. And the only thing that I can.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:56:04]:

Point out is there is research on that, by the way, I haven't looked into that. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:56:09]:

It's like when you start to eat more whole fresh fruits and vegetables, lean protein, drinking water all the time. Three, four months go by and then you have a coke for the first time and you're like, oh, God, that's very. It's kind of overpowering in a way.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:56:20]:

Like acidic, by the way. I always am so shocked by that. Even have a little bit of diet Coke. What's like. Yeah, yeah. It's your actual sugar cravings and palate can change in as little as 72 hours, by the way. So like that, you're literally, that's how. How immediate the change can be is in 72 hours, your cravings can change based on palate, based on like sugar receptors and taste to sugar in your mouth.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:56:45]:

Yeah.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:56:46]:

Now were talking about timeframes. Heres a good point. When were all these things that weve talked about, new habits and routines, starting to ownership over your health and working towards these things. You will often hear people say, oh, its 30 days to form a habit or 90 days to form a habit. Ive seen different variances in whatever people say to this type of, of thing. For this habit and routine work, I find that it's important to let people know this, because then they can feel like they're taking more control and not. Not being failures. Research suggests that it takes between 18 and 256 days for 95% of habit formation.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:57:22]:

That's a massive.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:57:24]:

Yeah, it's a huge differential there. What do you got?

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:57:26]:

Right. And it's because it's different per person. It's different depending on what you're attempting to change, how ingrained that change is, what you're like yourself. And there could be a situation like you where maybe it's a little bit faster because you kind of liked less ingredients in your food and you're starting to do the things that you would have been doing anyways. Maybe there's somebody else who's completely different. Now. The great thing about knowing this is you don't start to get down on yourself at 30 days or whenever that saying has taught you that you should have had your habit formed. But the other benefit of that research suggests that if you face a situation where you are thrown off track, habit formation is not impacted as long as you get back on track at the very next instance.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:58:11]:

So when you have situations like, man, Deborah from the cul de sac brought donuts over to my house and I ate three of them without even realizing it. I was going to have half of one, and then I ate three of them, and now I feel like shit. Well, the fuck it mentality is not going to work very well there. You don't all of a sudden just finish the rest of the box of donuts. You look at this research and you say, hey, look, Michelle, we're talking about the fact that mistakes are okay. Look back on it, figure out what I would have done differently in the past to change this. And now I know that if I just get back on track with the next meal, I'm not going to throw off this habit formation that I've been working on for two or three months, really set myself back. And just like a single salad's not going to make you healthy, a couple donuts aren't going to make you fat.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [00:58:59]:

So get your ass back on track and you're going to be just fine.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:59:01]:

Exactly. I wrote a book and I never got it published or published it. And there was like chapters in the book on the screw it mentality and all about how to overcome the screw it mentality, which I have the same advice then that I would, which is literally be like, okay, that happened. Use it as a data point, move on. Do not assign value to it. The most candid way I can say this. For the few years I've worked with clients who come to me after going to many practitioners with symptoms that are extreme and scary. And staff dietitian Nikki works a lot with binge and weight loss clients, shorter clients, Nikki's.

 

Michelle Shapiro [00:59:32]:

And Nikki's also a personal trainer. She's the coolest person ever. Unrelated to that, a lot of what I was working on in 2017 around weight loss, and for the first half of my career, I was working on with weight loss of people. They started working with a lot of clients on the other symptoms first because they were extreme symptoms. Vomiting several times a day, can't leave their house. Like, serious, serious medical things going on. My nutrition principles, too, and kind of like put a lot of those weight loss principles kind of by the wayside because we had other nutritional priorities. And Nikki and I joke a lot about this, and we've talked about this in a lot of episodes where we're like, are we bodybuilding bros again? Because a lot of the, for our weight loss clients, a lot of those principles that I was talking about in 2013, the screw up mentality, all these things still really relevant and real for people if weight loss is their I top nutritional priority.

 

Michelle Shapiro [01:00:19]:

But I think for years, honestly, Allan, and this is the truth, I so focused on creating, I still am focused on creating the safest space for my clients that I lost that, like, drill sergeant role in their head a little bit. And I think that I'm fat with the chronic illness piece for my clients where I'm like, no, we have, we have to keep pushing, and no matter what, we don't talk to ourselves like that. And because of so much weight stigma that people have experienced and so many issues, I think I got a little cuddly. And that shows in my work. And in the past few years, I've really circled back around to those same principles I was talking about in 2017. But I definitely, and I admit this, as a practitioner, I definitely was like, we can't talk about. We talk about habits in a way that's. And I was so tiptoeing to make sure that I wasn't triggering people, and so tiptoeing.

 

Michelle Shapiro [01:01:07]:

And now I'm just like, if weight loss is the most important thing in the world to someone, and for whatever reason it is, if it's a valid, again, reason for them, because if it's from an eating disorder, I mean, that has to be addressed. Obviously, if it's not, they're entitled to lose weight. And some of those 2017 tricks are valid as anything and I just want to say, I just had to say my part in that because I want to take accountability for my part in. There's some times that I feel like looking back, I'm like, oh, you know what, maybe, maybe my approach from more, from a speaking perspective, one on one clients we always push, but from a speaking perspective, I felt myself pulling back too much into a coddling role as opposed to a compassionate role because of how intense the messaging is right now.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [01:01:51]:

Well, where I'm seeing a lot of people go is actually where I want to see people go. You're becoming a little bit more bro ish, and I'm becoming a little bit more empathetic. My side's becoming a little bit more empathetic better. But I like this. I like this because that, just like Gabrielle points out, I think that women will really benefit from starting to build a little bit more lean muscle. I mean, it's a metabolic sink, number one thing that you can do to prevent injury risk as you age. It's going to help women with osteoporosis because you're strength training all these types of things. And so the RD side needed a little bit more bro, and the fitness side needed the empathy.

 

Michelle Shapiro [01:02:28]:

Totally.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [01:02:28]:

And we're moving in a good direction, at least the people that are making personal strides. And I think that that's part of your personal journey, and I think that that's wonderful to see. And this nuance is, it's difficult because, like you said, there's so much to talk about and there's a lot of defensiveness around. These topics will tell you the hormones don't matter. All of a sudden, everybody kind of shuts down. If people tell you that sick is the only thing that matters, people shut down, and it's understandable why. And so hopefully, we have some information that can kind of bridge that gap.

 

Michelle Shapiro [01:03:02]:

I think so, too.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [01:03:04]:

And show what's important from one side and what's important from the other side because I think both sides were kind of pushing people away from what they should have been looking at. And I think that we're making some good choices here with what we're talking about.

 

Michelle Shapiro [01:03:16]:

I agree. Also, I just want to say we really do need both, but we need everyone to be compassionate. And compassionate also means if someone's dire goal is to lose weight because it's preventing them from health and happiness, and you don't acknowledge that's important to them and you don't help them to achieve that goal with your nutrition degree, that's not being compassionate either. That's your own agenda and what you want too. So I don't feel that there's, I think there's, there's no, I don't even believe in the presence of evil. But there's misguidedness on both sides. At the core of what the misguidedness is, is not understanding human beings and honestly not having enough experience and examples of what you've seen.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [01:03:55]:

Well, we need to be working towards total health.

 

Michelle Shapiro [01:03:57]:

Exactly.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [01:03:58]:

And total health can certainly involve fat loss, muscle gain and all those types of things we get focused on, like the scale and those before and afters and the emotional side of it seems to get pushed in the back. And you know, that create eating disorders to begin with.

 

Michelle Shapiro [01:04:15]:

Yes, there is danger in that too. And I will say this, if a person is going from being in a lean body their entire life and then they decide to start picking up fitness, like where I started from to where I'm going, like I'm never going to have the muscle definition in the exact same way. I'm going to have looser skin and stretch marks. I lost 100 pounds, period. Like you have to know where people have been to know where they're going also. And there's no acknowledgement of that as we know. And it's just silly because you're, and you, you have to kind of know that for yourself too. That's another sucky part, by the way, too, just so you know, and an unfair part.

 

Michelle Shapiro [01:04:47]:

You are going to have the odds stacked against you to lose weight. It's harder to lose weight than it is to be at a starting point. That's, it's just, it's a harder starting point. It just is. And you can do it. I believe people are more capable than they ever could dream, but it is not whatever, its not easy.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [01:05:02]:

Kit, when we look at people with pcos have the exact same ability to lose body fat. If youve got a person with similar body composition, weight, that kind of thing, they lose the same amount as, or similar amounts as people that dont have pcos, but they have challenges that other people dont face. Theyve got poor body image, theyve got more depression, theyve got anxiety, theyve got all these other things that are adding into play. I would be willing to say that we can probably carry this over to people with significant obesity, same types of things. And when we look at pcos, this is just a reference point, but there is a 50% dropout rate from a nutrition program with pcos versus only a 30% for someone that doesnt have pcos. Its not that these things dont work, its that you're facing a challenge that someone else may not be facing. And again, that's the entire point of a podcast like this is to point out what is actually going on so you can finally take both accountability and control over the situation. And when you do that, I mean, shit, the sky's the limit for you.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [01:06:11]:

It's going to be an amazing, amazing couple of years moving forward as you progress. But remember, keep pushing forward that habit and routine work is going to work itself out. You're facing things that other people don't face, whether that's stigma, whether that's anxiety and depression, whether that's increased hunger cues. But knowing all of these things allows you to put those other base type of things into play. Like this is what allows you to reach that calories in, calories out. This is what allows you to increase your activity levels.

 

Michelle Shapiro [01:06:42]:

It's funny, all my practitioner friends who work with PCOS, either they work with them with weight loss and they're like great, but what it is is basically like a moderately low carb and calorie restricted plan. Or most of my friends who are practitioners are like, I work with pcos. Don't even come here thinking that you're going to lose weight because we have so much other work to do right now and ways of like ding the hormonal picture before weight loss becomes a part of this puzzle. Because it's very interesting that you mentioned pcos though too, because I see that there's like two distinct camps there too. You also, I just think I want to hammer on one of the most important points. I think one of your like if there is any hack to weight loss, the one that I've heard you mention consistently is also like neat. I think focusing on like not the gym activity you're doing, but the activity you're doing throughout the day. Silly little getting steps in things like that.

 

Michelle Shapiro [01:07:32]:

I also feel like neat is very contagious. Like the more you move, the more your body craves. It puts you into momentum, I feel like. And that is really, there's a huge key there.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [01:07:41]:

Well, they're called exercise snacks, right? You take little bits of time throughout your day and when you start to do that, it really adds up big time. And for people that have issues getting step, I mean there are certain people that don't have issues. Like nurses tend to get a lot of steps, tend to get a lot of steps, but there are a lot of people that are desk bound for the majority of the day, set an alarm, get up every hour at the end of every hour for five minutes, walk around. Exactly when I was getting my doctorate, I would actually set that and I would go run stairs in the library. Now that might be a little bit neurotic for a lot of people, but for me, it helps energize myself. It oxygenated the brain. And for people who are doing work or people who are studying or people who are deskbound for whatever reason, it actually does make you more productive because it breaks that cycle of just kind of being down and blah. It oxygenates your brain, it gets you moving.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [01:08:32]:

And it comes with a host of health benefits on top of that energy burn benefit that you're likely going for. And this is the type of thing that is extremely important long term because you're going to have to instill these things as second nature when you start to make these things autopilot. That's how you get to where you want to be while eating a little bit more food and then stay there. Because if you don't start to instill these as secondary habits, you're never going to be able to maintain that weight loss that you achieve. And so to prevent this recidivism of weight regain down the road, start to work on these things now. And by the time you really need them to maintain that weight, it'll be on autopilot.

 

How can people find and work with Dr. Allan Bacon?

Michelle Shapiro [01:09:13]:

I love that. I knew I was going to be obsessed with this episode, but I could not have anticipated how obsessed I am with this and your amazing work. Doctor Allan Bacon. Thank you so, so freaking much for coming on today. How do people find you if they want to work with you? How do people get information from you? Tell us. And we're going to put all the links in the show notes below. How do we find you? Reformed fitness, bro.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [01:09:34]:

You can check out mauiathletics.com comma that has the links to all my social media down at the bottom in the footer. Or you can reach out to me at Instagram. Er, Allen Bacon, that's Allan and I'm happy to help wherever I can.

 

Michelle Shapiro [01:09:47]:

You are the freaking bomb. Thank you so, so much and I'm sure we'll talk again soon.

 

Dr. Allan Bacon [01:09:52]:

Thank you, Michelle, I really appreciate it.