The science of eating healthy, building muscle, and losing weight

In this post, I’d like to summarize some of the lessons I learned based on the podcast between Dr. Layne Norton and Andrew Huberman. It’s the highest podcast views among Andrew’s other podcasts, which hit 2.2M (when this post was firstly published) viewers. It covers the general principles of healthy living, building muscles, losing weight, and optimizing longevity. I find the topics insightful and actionable to most people so that you can apply them daily.

Here you go.

Photo by Anastase Maragos on Unsplash

Energy

To understand energy, first, we need to understand what ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate) is. Simply put, ATP is an energy currency that works as a shuttle, delivering energy to places within the cell where energy-consuming activities occur. ATP is an in-product of the food we consume, which then metabolizes into energy.

What does it have to do with weight loss?

Understanding weight loss, it’s such a complex topic. It’s about understanding the number of energies in and out, including the type of energies we consume.

Before we go there, let’s try to understand some components of energy-in:

1. According to Layne, most calories on the food label have a 20% margin of error, which means for every 100kcal that you find on the food label, the real numbers can be around 80 to 120kcal. Worry not. If it’s 20% off, it will be consistently off. So as long as you track every calorie, you can eventually find your right numbers.
2. Then, we must understand how much metabolizable energy we can produce from food. Not every food can create the exact size of energy. For example, insoluble fiber is harder to digest than other energy sources.

Now we continue to understanding energy-out:

1. Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR). It is energy that you spend while resting. It can take up to 50–70% of total daily energy expenditure. Energy expenditure differs from RMR since it includes other activities such as walking, lifting, fidgeting, etc.
2. The Thermic Effect of Food (TEF). You spend energy to extract energy from food by chewing, swallowing, digesting, absorbing, and storing it. Yeah, you are right. To extract more energy, we need to spend some energy to get it. TEF takes about 5–10% of total daily energy expenditure. How much TEF consumes energy depends on the type of energy sources: Fat takes about 0–3%, meaning if you consume 100 calories out of fat, your net calories will be 97. In other words, you spend 3% of your energy to get the 97 calories. Carbohydrate takes about 5–10% of TEF. Protein takes about 20–30% of TEF. Protein takes more energy to digest.
3. The Thermic Effect of Physical Activity (TEPA). It is the energy of activity (e.g., exercise, physical activity) and non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). NEAT expended for everything you do that does not include sleeping, eating, physical activity, or exercise — ranges from simple standing to fidgeting and moving about. NEAT significantly affects lean body mass, coming from an activity like fidgeting. There’s a huge correlation as you do more of NEAT. The chance your body will be leaner is more likely to happen..

In addition to NEAT, Dr. Huberman highlights a study on “Soleus Pushup,” which can increase metabolism for hours while sitting. It regulates blood sugar levels too. Read more about the study here.

How to weigh in, post-exercise, placebo effect, and appetite

How to measure weight

If you want to lose weight, you must ensure that you measure your weight progress correctly. Most people measure it sporadically instead of being intentional about when they should weigh it in. According to Layne, this is how you do it:

Do it first thing in the morning or after you go to the bathroom. Do it every day. Take the average for the week, then compare it to the weeks afterward.

The main reason for this is to avoid weight fluctuation, which can be affected by water retention in the body. So don’t be discouraged because of the weight fluctuation, as it can happen regularly depending on how much fluid you consume.

Post-exercise effect

Another point to highlight is, does post-exercise affect the metabolism rate that will eventually increase weight loss?

The answer is yes, but it doesn’t have significant results to make a difference in weight loss. The study between HIIT (High Interval Intensity Training) and Low-Intensity Cardio showed no difference in weight loss results. Still, it did affect the BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate).

The placebo effect in fitness

The placebo effect is real. It can change your physiology. Past study on creatine segmented experiments into four different groups:

1. Not supplemented in creatine, told they were
2. Not supplemented in creatine, told they weren’t
3. Supplemented in creatine, told they were
4. Supplemented in creatine, told they weren’t

The result was people believe what they are told to.

Exercise and appetite relationship

A past study on Bengali workers divided some people into four quadrants: sedentarily, lightly, moderately, and heavily active. The result was fascinating: sedentary people eat more than the rest of the three, while the other groups can compensate for how many calories they should eat. It proved that the more people exercise by being more active, they will be less likely to overeat.

Why is it so hard to lose weight and maintain it?

Relationship with food is such a complex topic to be discussed. People eat not only because of hunger but also social pressure. Nowadays, society has been evolving around food to connect with friends and family. It gets harder to have a good relationship with food, not to mention that stress, lack of sleep, and boredom also drive more people to eat more than they normally do.

Furthermore, our biology is also trying to defy weight loss by driving you back to your previous weight after a weight loss. In a study done back in 2011 by MacLean, he concluded:

The body’s systems are comprehensive, redundant, and well focused on restoring any depleted energy reserves. Any attempt or strategy for weight loss that doesn’t address a broad spectrum of these things is going to fail.

Though it’s not impossible to lose weight, some people could do it with more strict rules, such as cognitive restraint, self-monitoring, and exercise. But there’s one fascinating commonality between those people: they had to develop a new identity to achieve all of this.

Losing weight is a more challenging journey than expected because the bigger challenge comes from maintaining it. Not only do you have to work against biology, as MacLean pointed out, but you need to ensure that you can live with all of the food restrictions that you have set up in the first place. This is where most people trying to lose weight get it all wrong, as they don’t put much effort into asking themselves whether they can have the current diet they do for the rest of their lives.

Every time you choose a particular diet program, whether intermittent fasting, low carb, keto diet, etc., you need to ensure that you can sustain the lifestyle for the rest of your life. Choose the kind of diet that you feel is least restrictive so you can have it long-term and sustainable.

Improving Gut Health

Gut microbiome is the foundation of your health. It helps in the digestion of the foods you eat, absorbs nutrients, and uses it to fuel and maintain your body. What you feed your microbiome may have the biggest impact on its health. According to experts on the field, there are three ways to improve your gut health:

1. Consume less calories
2. Exercise more
3. Consume more fiber / prebiotics

Dr. Layne also added that fiber is a top longevity hack that anyone can easily do. Past research concluded that for every 10-gram increase in fiber consumption, there is a 10% reduction in mortality risk, including cardiovascular disease and cancer.

The recommended amount for consuming fiber is around 15 grams in every 1.000 calorie intake.

Building muscle, protein, and impact to weight loss

Protein Synthesis during muscle building

Protein is an essential nutrient to build muscle. Numerous studies show that eating plenty of protein can help increase muscle mass and strength. On top of it, it can also reduce craving. One study in overweight men showed that increasing protein to 25% of calories reduced cravings by 60% and the desire to snack at night by half.

In a study by Layne, he wanted to understand how long the effect of protein synthesis during muscle building in response to a meal will peak and last. One of prominent amino acids to be tracked in this case is Leucine. For context, Leucine is one of branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) highly effective for stimulating skeletal muscle protein synthesis. Interestingly, leucine has much greater power to stimulate protein synthesis than any other amino acid.

The result was that protein synthesis was peaked for about 45–90 minutes then came back to baseline at 180 minutes, while shockingly, Leucine was at 3 hours and still plateaued afterwards. So he concluded that you don’t need to eat protein every 2 hours a day to boost protein synthesis more frequently because he did it back in the day to boost more muscle building.

Protein intake for muscle building

Layne suggested that you consume protein 1.6 gram per kilogram of bodyweight. If your weight is 75kg, your recommended protein consumption is about 120 grams daily. There’s no harm for going higher, but the effect will not be significant.

Does protein intake distribution matter to have lean body mass?

Most Americans get 60–70% of their daily protein during dinner, while the rest comes from breakfast and lunch. It’s unusual for most people to eat breakfast with more protein.

Again, Layne showed that distributing a different portion of protein throughout the day doesn’t make any difference to the lean body mass as long as it meets the daily requirement. But he saw a different muscle size on the hind limb, even though it was insignificant. He also added to see a bigger liver in the study group which ate a bigger portion of protein in a single meal.

Muscle building for vegan

You can still build muscle by being vegan. But, you will need more planning on this since it’s hard to get high-quality protein from plant-based sources. One benefit of animal-based isolated whey protein is it consists of more leucine, branched amino acids, and essential amino acids, which plant-based lacks.

So, soy is a good protein source for plant-based food. The reason is it has enough amino acids that can trigger protein synthesis. Additionally, isolated potato protein is similar to whey protein but harder to find. Lastly, you can add leucine to one of your protein sources, corn, wheat, pea, soy, etc., mainly because it can drive protein response at the same rate as whey and egg.

Processed food impact to long term health

Generally speaking, Layne recommended that we should consume less processed food because it’s easy to overeat it. But it depends on your goal, whether to build muscle or lose weight. Layne took an example for NBA players as it’s more making sense for them to eat processed food because they need to work out and perform daily.

Imagine that you have an income of $1M yearly, then you want to spend $100k to buy a sports car. Assuming you can still pay your mortgage and fulfill your daily needs, it’s a win. So, returning to the energy intake, as long as you have managed your macronutrient need and do not overeat, it’s a good lifestyle.

Sugar, obesity, and fiber

One of the biggest hypotheses between sugar and obesity is sugar makes people overeat. Still, Layne realized something different based on his experience and past study. He initially thought that sugar was independently bad until a study proved otherwise.

Let’s look at epidemiology first before going deeper into sugar. Generally, people who eat a higher amount of sugar tend to be more obese because they tend to eat more. But, if we look at people who eat more sugar from fruit, obesity is not there. Mainly it’s because fruit has more fiber than other sugary foods.

So, it raises a new question, is sugar a problem if it comes with more fiber?

Based on the study by Surwit in 1997, they looked at 1,100-calorie diets. One group ate 110-gram sugar a day. The other one was eating 10 grams a day. Both groups have the same amount of calories, fat, and protein. The result was both groups lost the same amount of body fat. The only difference they noticed was the improved LDL, which came from the lower sugar intake group. We know that lower LDL was driven by more fiber intake by the group.

Layne concluded that even though sugar doesn’t have any positive health effects, if you focus more on fiber intake instead of sugar, you should be generally fine. Layne would be more worried if you take more sugar but less fiber.

On rapid weight loss

People who are obese and able to lose weight early are more likely to keep it off for the long term. It might be a contradictory take to digest because it seems not a sustainable way to lose weight. The simple reason is that people who lose weight early can see the result sooner than later. Hence they get the buy-in and are more likely to keep doing it.

But there’s a trade-off. Even though it is guaranteed that you will lose your fat faster, so does your lean mass, which is not good for you. So it’s important to be noted down that as long as you have more adipose tissue (body fat) to lose, you won’t have any negative consequences of having rapid weight loss.

The negative impact will be higher for people who already have a higher lean mass and lower body fat than normal because as your body fat goes down, the percentage of your lean mass weight loss goes up, meaning you will be more likely to lose lean mass faster.

Eventually, Layne recommends that once you have a rapid weight loss, continue it more sustainably to build healthier body weight.

Supplements and creatine monohydrate

Creatine is one of the most well-researched supplements in the world. It is a naturally occurring amino-acid compound and has been shown in the research to:

1. Improve body/muscle composition.
2. Enhance athletic performance and output.
3. Speed up the recovery.
4. Enhance cognitive function.

How to consume creatine?

The classic way of doing it is by having a loading phase where you take a higher amount of creatine 25–30 grams for the first 5–7 days, then continue with only 5 grams daily. Layne added loading phase could saturate phosphocreatine stores faster, usually within a week. Alternatively, you can consume it with the same amount of 5 grams daily, which will take effect for about 2–4 weeks, but you will get to the same place as the loading phase.

Embracing hard things

Ultimately, what’s important is doing hard things: going to the gym and training hard to achieve the physique you want. One commonality between bodybuilders and athletes is they train hard. All the healthy lifestyle guides we have explained will be useless without putting any effort into real training. You can’t out-science hard training.

So, learn to enjoy the struggle, challenge, and hard things by putting yourself out there. Layne added that the most rewarding things in his life come out from the most challenging and worst thing that has happened. He would only arrive where he is right now with weight lifting. It taught him much about perseverance, delayed gratification, and overcoming obstacles. Challenge is an absolute builder.

P.S. This post was originally published on Fitgeist.