Insulin Resistance as a Protective Mechanism

Let's unpack the concept of metabolic flexibility. First of all, what that means and what the benefits downstream of that are. And is that synonymous with the keto style diet? Is that one of the pros? Yeah. Yeah. That and fasting, intermittent fasting or time constrained fasting or alternate day fasting and things like that can all do it. The easiest way to stimulate metabolic flexibility or to improve it is to lower your carbs. And, again, that doesn't mean no carbs. It means lowering carbs down so that you can increase oxidation rates of fat and carbs. So basically saying when I'm at rest, I'm going to burn primarily fat. Well, I'm going to say primarily, but it's about 70% fat, 30% carbohydrate. And when I train, we're flipping that, right? And that's what you want. When you look at the studies on it, the easiest thing to do is fasting. 24-hour fasting can do it, pulling some carbs down low. I wouldn't recommend fasting for most athletes, but chin pop, why not? You know, if they can go 18 to 24 hours without food and not have hypoglycemic episodes, and if that's the case, we can throw in some benfothiamine, throw in some carnitine, some things to re-regulate that. But if you're going hypoglycemic while you're fasting, that's telling me that you're not oxidizing fat well anyways. So you probably need to do that. Need to fast. But it's not a calorie deficit will stimulate metabolic flexibility. what i would recommend is people write your diet for maintenance and then pull your deficit off with carbs and then just do that for a few weeks and then start slowly adding carbs back in and work your way up to your carb tolerance and so we're just enhancing the the efficiency of utilization of energy correct coming through that's more so and then also getting your stress levels down start working on your stress management don't go crazy keep in mind you know if you if you do more in the gym, you need to eat more. If you do less, you don't need to eat less. Right? So if you're pulling back into a deficit, you probably need to do a little bit less training. And we would preferentially in that prepping to prep lease mode phase. Prioritize aerobics, not meaning that they're, that's all they're doing. Like they still training but we are doing pretty heavy on the aerobics upfront to stimulate that much faster Then the aerobics we dropped that out Now we start doing HIIT training interval training strongman stuff like that Now we start adding carbs until they not getting what we want out of it like they're moving in the wrong direction. Then we might pull the carbs out just a little bit, or we might pull fat back at that point, or we might just parlay some of the calories from those in the protein and work on thermic effect of food and satiety. So would least mode usually have a period of ketosis at the start of it? Not necessarily. Not necessarily. Like I said, it's lower carb, not necessarily low carb. If I have someone who's more on the endomorphic side, then, yeah, we may give them lower. They may hit ketosis. They may not. I'm not really partial. Right, so more low carb. Just more low carb. So depending, like for me, low carb is 100, 125 grams of carbs. If I go much lower than that, I don't feel right. For Isaac, he's a prototypical ectomorph, low carb for him is like fucking 500. You know, I mean, I haven't measured him, but I'm convinced he'd probably make ketones at 500 grams of carbs. If I pull him down to 300, he starts crying, right? And, you know, he needs that. And most of those, those tall, skinny, lanky guys need the carbohydrates. So do you find that doing that period of improving that metabolic flexibility will fat loss is better thereafter, like their ability to oxidize those fatty acids? Absolutely. And as well, because we're using a multifactorial approach, people discount aerobics because of bullshit that's been perpetuated in the industry. But the fact is you recover in the aerobic pathway. So if I get someone who they're doing 24 sets and they're fucking wrecked and they need a lot of rest, if they do a couple of blocks of that Leasmo training, they're able to do a hell of a lot more work in the same amount of time. And for fat loss, we know density is king. So if I can do more work in the same amount of time or the same amount of work in less time, that's best for fat loss and improving that. Not necessarily adding volume, but adding density to your workouts. And the only way to do that is if you recover between sets really well, that you recover in that aerobic pathway, not in the sympathetic and aerobic pathways. Interesting. And would the reverse be true as well where, yeah, going super low carb for extended periods, you lose the flexibility? I mean, because that's one of the things we recall Broderick talking about, those enzymatic pathways to break down carbohydrates. You know, if you go super low carb or zero carb for an extended period, you know, your ability to break down and assimilate those carbohydrates and then use them as an energy source. And even glycogen loading, you know, it's even in those latter stages of a prep, you know, or coming into a competition or whatnot, like your ability to load carbs can be compromised because you just had no carbs for the last four months. Absolutely. You know, so the reverse is true where, like you said, you want to not no carb, but you do want to have those carbs in there for that flexibility. No, absolutely. And we look at it as being, if it's not a pathological issue like epilepsy, there's really no reason to go on a long-term ketogenic diet unless you just want the kind of lifestyle. And people make up, everything's marketing, right? So, hey, we've got this fucking keto OS. You can actually achieve ketosis while eating carbohydrates, and it's good for your brain. Yeah, fuck off. Your brain likes carbs, period. Your brain loves fucking carbs. but yeah so we won't use it for long term if I have somebody that you know they're overweight or obese and all they do is fucking watch net geo and they don't actually train and maybe they're good to get some stretching and walking yeah fuck it I'll put them on ketogenic long term because they've got plenty of stored energy on their body they're not going to store carbohydrates effectively anyways so they're going to have issues with with turning sugar into energy the heavier you get the more inflammation you have you're going to start mismanaging your glucose and you're going to start mismanaging fat. So, fuck it, if I'm going to take one or the other, I'm going to take the carbs out for a little bit of time. It tends to make them more satiated. I can take carbs out, replace that with protein, which then keeps them from wanting to binge all the time. It keeps them from being hungry. And then we can work on getting them moving, getting some weight off, get that 10, 20 kilos off, and then they're going to start managing their sugar better so we can start kicking sugar back in. Absolutely. So, I guess it comes back to what you said before we kicked this off. If you love all diets and it's, I mean, if you happen to like a keto style diet and you're more coherent and compliant with that style of diet, then go for it. For me, the low carb diet works because I tend to not binge. If I start, and I fucking love carbs just like everybody else, but if I start pumping the carbs up too much, then I'm more prone to start wanting to binge all the time. And then that doesn't work for me. So I have to pull them back out a little bit. I did a three week keto, eco keto diet once, which is a ketogenic vegan diet. And I just decided to- Out, get out, vegan. But you know, hey, if I'm a sports nutritionist and I'm writing these things for people, I've got vegan clients. I need to know what they go through. And I don't give people things I haven personally done to myself But like I got vegan clients I got a vegan staff member and it like okay Zoe and I go out for lunch and I looking at the menu like fuck I can have anything I trying to so if I don put myself through that experience I can have empathy for the client and understand that like, how fucked it is for them to actually eat out. And you know, they, that's why vegan restaurants exist, because non-vegan restaurants aren't very good with their, you know, they may have one vegan thing on the menu, and it's usually fucking disgusting. Yeah, yeah. Vegetarian, yes. Vegan, probably not. I haven't caught on to that. It was actually a really fucking easy diet. I just ate beans and coconut milk and sriracha, and that was it. Boring, but it was easy. One pot of beans, I didn't have to cook. Milk prep, simple. Yeah, beautiful. Three weeks later, I was craving meat. I was going to fucking kill a small child and devour its face, but I decided to eat meat again.