Cortisol Insulin Cardio and Fruit dont make you fat with Luke Leaman

# Cortisol Insulin Cardio and Fruit dont make you fat with Luke Leaman

**Channel:** VIP Nutrition Coach Podcast
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**Source:** podcast

The quick and dirty, easiest way to write a diet, eat lots of veggies, eat a good amount of protein, maybe one gram per pound. Make sure you're getting enough fat. And I would say, you know, for a 100 kilo guy like myself, you know, 60 to 75 grams of fat is probably good. Welcome back to the Beyond Macros podcast, a show where we teach you how to get get leaner, stronger, and perform better through nutrition training and the art of working in. You just heard today's guest, Luke Lehman. He is literally the fitness coach's coach, and your mind will be blown in this episode. Before we dive in, I just updated our free macro and calorie calculation worksheet, which you can pick up at beyondmacros.com slash macropod. You'll also find our complete guide to calculating and counting your macros there. For those of you who have already checked out this great free resource, I'd love to hear how things are going for you. So shoot me an email at matt at beyondmacros.com to tell me about your progress. Speaking of progress, our group program opens up again in just two weeks. You can get a massive discount for pre-registering at signup.beyondmacros.com slash group. Here is what group program member Alex Burge had to say about her experience. Before I started Beyond Macros, I ate very clean and was very conscious of my diet. However, I know for how much I train and also I'm on my feet all day for work. I'm a nurse, so I definitely wasn't hitting the right carbs for what I do. I know it's very much for a girl thing, but I wanted some advice and really wanted to learn more about my health and what I could do with my body. Beyond Macros really helped me reach my target macros, look at where I needed to add things, decrease things. It also really helped me hone in my portion sizes, which I often did go over at times. And it's really just given me an overall whole new way of looking at things. And I'm just something I'm going to incorporate into my life forever now. I've received so many comments since I started counting my macros properly from friends and family, just noticed a difference in My body, my strength has gotten better. My training's gotten better. I feel, yeah, toned and feel happy with what I see in the mirror. I'm sleeping better, which was also a big issue. So, yeah, it's really something that's just changed my life for the better. Thanks, Matt. Today's episode will challenge your beliefs as I talk to the coach's coach, Luke Lehman, who's a friend and mentor of mine. There are a lot of people in the fitness industry who throw around buzzwords like cortisol and insulin in order to sound like they have a grasp on endocrinology. Luke could write a book about hormones, and when fitness pros parrot BS that they read on the internet, Luke is there to provide a sober counter-perspective grounded in real science and decades of experience. Now, I will let you know, Luke is from Texas and lives in Australia, so there is no filter for cussing. If you have sensitive ears in the room or car, you might want to throw headphones on or listen later because I am not going to censor him. The first topic we dove into was just for fun. We spent two weeks together in Costa Rica, and the good old fruit makes you fat topic came up, and Luke was pissed. I wanted to get him going on this topic with a microphone in front of his face. That's a big pet peeve of mine because I still remember in the late 90s, that was a big bodybuilder thing. You couldn't eat fruit because fruit made you fat. And it was just ridiculous. And there were articles, like TMAG came out with one telling you not to eat fruit. I'm looking at it thinking this doesn't make any sense. I don't know anyone who's ever overeaten apples. It just doesn't happen. And there's a lot of things you're going to get out of fruit that you just simply can't get anywhere else. And the problem is a lot of meatheads, they read an abstract and they see fructose in the title. and they see fructose-causing fatty liver and all this other stuff, and they don't actually pull the article and read the whole research paper. When you read it, you're like, wow, this isn't really applicable to fruit. They're talking about high fructose corn syrup, and they're giving doses of it that would be far more than most humans would ever take, so using a lot of rat studies and things like that. So when you actually look at the sugar breakdown, so let's say you've got a banana. If you look at a moderate-sized banana, you're talking 25, 26 grams of carbohydrate. But when you look at it, there's only really about five to six, maybe seven grams tops of fructose. So, if you look into the research, you're going to see wildly varying amounts of fructose causing issues from 30 grams a day all the way up to 150. So they don really know at what level causes the issues And then that going to be different for everybody So if I already dieting and I eating a lot of fruit it probably not going to be a big deal But if I in a hyper diet then it might become a big deal But you still have to have a tremendous amount of fructose for that to happen. So one of the things I talk about in our seminars is if you think about it, you like bananas, right? Yes. Yes, I do. Yeah. When's the last time you sat down and ate six bananas in a row? Well, I ate 10 bananas pre-workout once because my buddy claimed when he did it, it felt like he was on PEDs. And that's the thing. Like, we do it as a joke. You know, it's like when you're with your buddies and see who can drink a gallon of milk and then you puke all over yourself, right? So it's not something that a normal person is going to do. It's sit around and eat like six bananas in every meal, you know, unless you're really the 30 bananas a day girl. But when you look at the biochemistry of it, where fructose can be a problem is there's no rate-limiting step in it making energy. So when glucose enters the cell, it has a few different pathways it can go down. So it rate-limits it. Fructose pops in far under some of these steps. And so once fructose gets in, it rapidly gets converted into pyruvate. And then if you're overproducing this too quickly, then, yeah, then it can start to pop out as fat. but it's not likely going to happen, especially if you're eating them in training. It's only really going to be a big deal when you have somebody who's playing World of Warcraft all day and they're drinking like Red Faction Mountain Dew by the leader and they're drinking in like 200 or 300 grams of the stuff and they're not training. So in case you got lost, Luke is saying that the don't eat fruit or you'll get fat and unhealthy myth is based on some cognitive leaps. Some studies showed that high doses of fructose, such as from high fructose corn syrup in sedentary individuals, can lead to issues. The studies weren't done using fruit. What has happened is the high fructose intake findings have been extrapolated to suddenly mean that all fructose intake is bad, and because fruits contain some fructose, they are therefore bad and going to make you fat. Now here's something that will blow your mind a bit. You might feel a little defense mechanism pop up and shut out what Luke is saying. Resist that urge for a moment. To take something like a high fructose corn syrup, like saying, well, you know, we can't drink Coca-Cola. Therefore, we shouldn't have a banana. That's ridiculous. And I would even say I don't even see a problem with Coca-Cola as long as somebody stays under their calorie limit. And as long as it keeps them on track and they don't go crazy and eat a whole chocolate cake, then I'm all right with that. Wait, what? Coca-Cola is okay? I can go drink soda now? No, that's not what he was saying. Listen closely and you'll hear that the key is if someone is training and they've got the ability to handle the Coke, if having a Coke keeps them otherwise compliant with their plan, it's okay, especially if they were drinking six Cokes a day and they've cut it back to one. Compliance and progress are key when it comes to fitness and nutrition. The conversation moved towards this next pet peeve of Luke's. The idea that carbs magically and inevitably get converted into fat and that they spike insulin, which also makes you fat. The thing is that when you eat things like carbohydrates, if you're overeating carbs, they still have to be converted into fat. And there's a lot of energy that goes out during that process. So you're losing a lot of calories trying and turn it into fat. So you've got a lot of people doing the ketogenic dieting right now and you have knuckleheads telling people you can have all the fat you want. That's simply not the case. If you're over consuming calories, fat's going to make you fat fastest. And I think you don't even need to know biochemistry to understand this concept that if you're overeating calories and you're in a hypercaloric diet, you're eating more than you're expending and you're eating tons of that as fat. Well, fat doesn't have to be converted into anything. It just turns into fat and goes right on your fat ass. When it comes down to it, I love Luke's perspective because it is never reductionist. Reducing physiology and biochemistry to a soundbite is something common in the fitness industry. But if something sounds too simple, it's been oversimplified. The body is a complex system. Think about it like this. Think about it as let's talk about like muscle protein synthesis, right? You have muscle protein breakdown. You have muscle protein synthesis. And this is happening all the time. And you have to keep some type of balance. or if you want to gain size, you push it one direction, you push it, or if you want to lose size, you push it the other direction. The other hormones are not that different. You're always storing fat. You're always storing carbohydrate, and you're always releasing it. It's the balance of that which you have to worry about, and that's where a hypocaloric diet comes in. That's really, in every single metabolic ward study you see, the common denominator between them all is you have to have a hypocaloric diet but you have to find out where that maintenance portion is and then back off a little bit So with insulin it like when we were in Costa Rica and what Brian Walsh said which blew my mind is stop thinking about insulin as a storage hormone Think about it as a like an insulin, uh, as a, as a messenger, right. To tell your body to do certain things. It's going to tell the cells to accept insulin, to accept glucose, but then it's also going to tell the liver to stop pushing so much glucose into the bloodstream. So to say that insulin bad and insulin makes you fat is not right. It can make you fat, but so can cortisol if it's out of control. You know, if all this stuff's out of balance, that's what makes you fat. It's the sum of all the parts, not one single hormone here or there. Boom, another buzzword and common thing you'll hear on the internet, high cortisol makes you fat. Let's dive in and unpack this. If you look at all the hormones and what's happening during a stress response, cortisol is an innocent bystander it's it's basically the brain's telling it to move energy around in response to a fight flight uh freezer facade type moment so just as insulin because dr walsh told us you can't really look at this as a storage hormone we can't think of cortisol as only doing like moving around things right so in the scope of norepinephrine norepinephrine when it gets out of control it's going to make you like it's it's kind of your hurry worry type hormone so it's going to cause anxiety and it's going to cause your stress levels to go up which is then going to cause a more of a sympathetic response and when you you're not going to see norepinephrine being released without releasing epinephrine or what we call in australia they call it adrenaline so as adrenaline goes up it's going to selectively down to or down regulate insulin receptors so that as you're pushing this this glucose into the bloodstream you don't have random tissue taking it. You just want the right tissues taking it like skeletal muscle, you know, your heart, your brain and your liver and things like that. So, um, people, people like the pigeonhole certain hormones because they don't think about everything working in a matrix and everything working together. So, um, you can have a, look at a diabetic. If you, if you run labs on a diabetic, they can have high cortisol and they can have rampant insulin depending on where they are on the spectrum and depending on how much insulin they're shooting if they're shooting insulin. So shooting insulin isn't necessarily going to drop cortisol. And we've got to get out of just looking at cortisol anyways, because we need to more be looking at the nervous system and that sympathetic response and that jacked up release of norepinephrine and epinephrine as well. Now let's tie these concepts of insulin, cortisol, and the sympathetic nervous system together and get down to what the solutions are. And then you get caught into that that kind of will of stress where stress is causing the insulin resistance because it's causing free radical damage and oxidative stress in the cell and the cell stops accepting sugar, then insulin goes up and then they measure the insulin and go, well, you've got metabolic syndrome. It's obviously insulin is the reason you're getting fat, but it's not really the reason. So you can cut the carbs out and crank the fat up and then you wonder why you're still getting fat and why you're wasting muscle and you can't get any progress is because you haven't really taken care of the problem. You put a band-aid over a bullet hole instead of working on the real problem, which is your lifestyle, getting more sleep, getting more food, calming the fuck down. So if we don't take care of that autonomic nervous system, we're going to get locked into that loop. And that stress is going to cause all the downstream things like lower metabolic rate via inhibited thyroid function, leaky gut, increased immune response, then leading to decreased immune response. There's all of these things that happen just because the brain's telling the body that you're in danger and you're not doing anything to get rid of the danger. So get rid of the danger. Luke alluded to some of the lifestyle changes that need to be made, and you've heard it before, but now you're hearing it in a different light. You need to get your sleep, food, movement, and stress reduction on point. This is what Luke calls least mode. The unfortunate thing is that most people are stressed out all day and then try to go beast mode in the gym, but don't make the time for the things that will move the needle. A lot of people don't take that least mode seriously. A lot of people will go to the gym and thrash themselves an hour a day, but they won't go get a massage. And they won't do sauna work, and they won't get body work, and they won't do, there's a lot of stuff they won't do. They won't do the breathing, they won't go out and do cardio, they won't go out and do walking, They won't do any of that stuff, yet they want to bash themselves in the gym and they wonder why they're getting worse. When you start doing things like breathing work, you're doing things that try to balance out that sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system because beast mode is inherently sympathetic in nature. Like right now with us talking on this podcast, we both should be highly parasympathetic. We should be in – like a lot of people call it rest and digest. I kind of like feed and breed. And we should be in a recovery mode right now But a lot of your clients aren They sitting at their desk working not their bioenergetics their ability to make energy doesn have a good flow They making energy very inefficiently and they burning through a lot of sugar instead of burning through fat. And so when you start doing things like more aerobic work, toning down some of the weightlifting, maybe doing some higher rep work outside of the lactate ranges, when you go out for long walks and meditate and things like that, it helps to balance those branches out so that you get better energy flow. All right. I know we've done a lot of mind-blowing today, but there is just one more thing Luke advocates that is based on science, yet flies in the face of internet bro recommendations. Luke prioritizes cardiovascular training at the beginning of a training program for muscle gain. If we look at even like even with weightlifting, when you lift weights, you're depleting ATP. You replete ATP through either substrate oxidation or oxidative phosphorylation. So substrate oxidation, meaning you're using carbohydrates to make lots of ATP in the mitochondria. Oxidative phosphorylation, you're making a lot of ATP utilizing fat. If you want your weight training to get better, you get better during the rest. So if I do a set of 12 and I go all out to where my spleen is about to rupture and then I rest three minutes, it's the aerobic system that's rebuilding that ATP so that I can do another spleen busting 12 rep max. If I don't have a good aerobic base, I'm not going to replenish that ATP as fast as I could or as completely as I could. So it's not having a good aerobic base makes you a worse lifter, especially in older populations. Now, in somebody who's 21, this might not be a big deal. But when you're training people who are 45 and they haven't trained in 20 years and they're really out of shape because they've been building their family and their career for 20 years, it makes a big difference. According to Luke, aerobic training adaptations happen very fast and last a long time. When he sees people pushing too hard on the sprint work and intense lifting, but constantly hitting a wall, he will usually take a step back and do some aerobic work. Adaptations to aerobics, they last a long time. I think one of the papers I read, you only get about a 2% per week drop in aerobics. So you can do a six-week block in January and halfway through February, and that's going to carry you almost all the way through the end of the year, as long as you're doing some other conditioning work. So what we'll do is we'll start people with the aerobic stuff. And then when they complete those adaptations that we're looking for, which is a drop in blood pressure, a drop in heart rate, and maybe even an increase in HRV, then we start the lactate work. And then they find that they're able to recover in between those anaerobic cycles really, really fast. Before we get off the topic, there are two more important messages Luke wanted to share. first that cardio isn't just a tool for fat burning and second that doing a lot of cardio won't make you fat roderick chavez who is a biologist from delaware and he was over here in australia giving a seminar and he's a he's a like a world champion power lifter and he got up on stage he goes oh let's talk about the cardio word i hate that fucking word and we were like i was like oh shit he's gonna bash cardio and he goes stop calling it cardio because when you when you take cardiovascular and turn it to cardio, you lose all the meaning of the actual word. So whereas most trainers will think about cardio as just burning fat or burning calories, we need to really look at it as what it is. It's a tool to increase your cardiovascular system, which is kind of important for results because dying is really not good for results. So here is how Luke approaches cardiovascular work and all the benefits it provides. If we talk about it as being cardiovascular or cardiorespiratory, we look at two branches. You have aerobic or pure cardio work, which would be under 70 VO2 max or over. So when I first get somebody, we're doing aerobic work, which is going to be a lot of the protocols we use is from Joel Jamison at 8weeksout.com. And we'll use 130 to 150 beats per minute, depending on where they're at. We want to stay under lactate threshold, so we don't want to be building up any lactate while we do this. We are just working on global conditioning and working on the heart, the vein system, and the lungs. That allows you to transport more oxygen, pull out more carbon dioxide. You get better gas exchange. Your mitochondria love that oxygen. It's going to build mitochondrial networks, which makes you lose body fat faster and enables you to create more things faster, like hydrochloric acid to break your food down, pancreatic enzymes and insulin and everything else, and even testosterone. If you don't have good mitochondrial health, you're not going to have good testosterone. And so cardio, if it's done correctly and programmed correctly, increases testosterone, not decreases it, and it helps you to recover and it helps you to grow and lift harder and faster. It's all about balance.

right? We're going to balance out the aerobic and anaerobic system. It doesn't mean you need to go run marathons, but you need to have a good aerobic base. The positive of that is it's going to increase your anaerobic performance. Luke started talking about this stuff four to five years ago, and people thought he was crazy. Everyone knows that cardio makes your cortisol go up and cardio makes you fat. And that's fucking ridiculous. And people are like, well, look at marathon runners. They're all fat. No, if you look at elite level marathon runners, They're like 5% body fat. Now, they're tiny because all of that running, yes, that's going to create a situation where it's going to break your muscle tissue down. But you're not going to see an elite level marathon runner who's fat. That's fucking ridiculous. And it is kind of ridiculous. There are quite a few fitness personalities I used to follow who are constantly alluding to the overweight, carb-fueled marathon runner. Go watch Breaking 2 documentary by National Geographic and tell me those guys have poor body composition. Luke and I continued to chat, but this conversation was dense, so I'm going to break it up and we'll do a round two. I'll certainly be having Luke back on again because I love talking to the guy. I learn something new and end up deep down an unexpected rabbit hole of research every time that I talk to him, and I want to share that with you. Luke is a very active knowledge dropper on Facebook both personally and through his business Muscle Nerds you can go follow them on Facebook and their Instagram is MuscleNerds underscore health and their website is MuscleNerds If you are a coach definitely check out Luke company, Muscle Nerds, if you want to dive deeper into the underlying physiology of training and nutrition. Muscle Nerds also has online programs, including semi-personalized and group training. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Next week, I will be bringing you another solo episode about yet another supplement, beta-alanine. Beta-alanine is a fun one because it's highly effective, so much so that you can feel it, sometimes in a bad way. So I'll make sure to teach you exactly how to use it so that you maximize the benefits and you don't really have those crazy, tingly, skin-crawling feelings. To make sure you get that episode delivered directly when it's released, make sure you are subscribed to the Beyond Macros podcast. And if you've been listening for a while and you haven't yet, I would be super grateful if you'd take the two minutes to leave a review for the show on iTunes. And just a reminder that if you wanted to download our free calorie and macro calculator worksheet and to see our complete guide to calculating and counting your macros, go to beyondmacros.com slash macropod. Thanks so much for listening, and I look forward to seeing you again next week.