Why Most Women Over 40 Struggle with Weight Loss (And the Simple Fix) with Dr. Ted Naiman

Dr. Ted Naiman, welcome to the show.

Oh wow, great to talk to you. Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Well, I was going to stalk you if I couldn't get you on the show. I would have, like, literally. I love your information so much. It is so clear and so obvious, and you've cut through so much noise. And I'll just start with kind of the thing that was so perplexing to me for years. You know, I have literally been a diet connoisseur for years and years and years. I've written diet books, and what's always amazed me about diets is that it's the war, you know, there is the plants versus animals war, which is like real, you know, wow, big religious war, right? But there's also the carbs versus fat. And when you look at most of the diets out there, that's what they were manipulating. And I just love with both your books, The Protein Energy Diet and the Satiety per Calorie Diet. I don't think you put diet after that one, but both of those books are really just so clear as to what you need to focus on. So I would love to kind of pull back a little bit and go, how did you get into all of this? Because you started out as a primary care physician, right? Now you're writing diet books. What the heck happened?

Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, I've been kind of interested in the diet side for a long time. I trained at Loma Linda University, you know, down there in Southern Cal, actually not too far, I think, from maybe where you're at.

No, I was there. I was in Palm Springs. Now I'm in Tampa, Florida.

Oh, got it, got it. Okay, you switched. East Coast. Got it. But yeah, Loma Linda, and of course they're really geeked out on diet there. It's all just plant-based. And so I kind of had an interest in diet starting out in medical school. And then I saw, you know, basically patients really transform their health with diet and exercise in ways that I could pretty much never pull off with drugs. And I just kind of got hooked. I was like, wow, there's really something here. The problem is most people haven't figured it out. They don't know how to make it practical. They don't know how to make it actionable. They don't know exactly where to focus all their energy. And so for the past, you know, 25 years, I've just been researching the heck out of diet and exercise. And basically from the standpoint of what's the most practical things you can do to really move the needle, especially in a primary care setting where everybody's overweight, everybody's insulin resistant, everybody's diabetic, and you've got 15 minutes and let's go, you know what I mean? So it's just very practical and in the trenches, and I've just been researching it for decades. And finally, I wrote The PE Diet about 5 years ago just to make my job easier because I have such little time with patients. I was just like, here, here's a free copy of this book. Just do what it says. Goodbye. And so it was really just a hack to make my day job easier. That's the only reason I wrote it.

So, you know, when you look at that table of contents in both these books, one of the big things you talk about is why are we, why are we so overweight? Why are we so over— and you actually call it what it is because it's, it's why are we overfat? If you were overweight and it was muscle, hey, good on you. That's not the problem we have. And so what did you discover in all of this study as to why you think we're so overfat?

Gotcha, gotcha. Well, so I, you know, I got an engineering degree before I went to medical school, and so I'm really into reverse engineering things, and I figured, okay, the only way to figure out what to do to fix all this stuff is to reverse engineer it and figure out how it occurred to begin with. So in both books, I go all the way back to the very beginning. I zoom out as much as you can, like, what is eating exactly? What are the nutrients we're eating? How did they get there? Where do they come from? And then what happens over time with the food supply to basically change it to the point that we all just eat to satiety like we've always done for, you know, 1.5 million years, except now we're all morbidly obese when we used to have perfect body composition. And so I basically break it all down. I started at the very, very beginning. It's actually super boring. The first couple chapters of both of these books is just—

They are not boring. It is really great stuff. I love these books. They're fantastic. So stop it.

Thank you. I mean, but it's like, it's really, it's really basic. It's like, what is eating? You know, it's like, this is This is where all of the macros actually come from and get there. And then we talk about, you know, basically what happened with, you know, first of all, agriculture, you know, 10,000 years ago. This is how we basically upped the yield of carbs and fats. And this is how we got, you know, protein dilution. And then we had the Industrial Revolution and the bulk refining and processing of, you know, refined carbs and fats and sugar and flour and oil. And boom, now everybody's overweight. And here are the exact things that happened to the food supply. And here's exactly how that worked, and here's exactly what you can do to reverse engineer that and unwind that whole spiral. So yeah, I'm just trying to really dumb it down from just first principles, and this is what happened and this is what you can do.

You know, it's interesting, you talk about dumbing it down, but the reality is most people think that, um, corn's a vegetable, that you know, eggs or dairy, that, you know, they don't know the basic foundation of what is a carbohydrate, what's a fat, what— they don't. Like, they weren't taught it. Or if they were taught it, I remember learning the Food Guide Pyramid in 5th grade, right? You know, so it's been a while unless someone actually went into this field and started to study it. So you talk about all of the shifts, which I would think the biggest shifts— I know that a lot of this started with the Industrial Revolution, but then you look at the last 50 years and it went completely haywire. So what is— what has happened? Because you talk about the fact we're now, even though we're still driven to satiety, we're overeating to do it.

Right, right, right, right. So there's a couple things that happen. First of all, we figured out how to suck all the carbs and fats out of foods, right? So like you've got corn, but then you can suck out all the fat and make corn oil, and you can suck out all the carbs and make cornstarch or corn syrup. And our ability to do that simultaneously, um, radically increase the caloric density, right? But also dilute out all the protein and nutrients that you're kind of eating to get in the first place. And you've got this weird combination of nutrient dilution, protein dilution, you know, you bunch, uh, you pour a bunch of carbs and fats in there and the protein percent just falls. And then you've also got this hedonic component where we're wired to seek out really high energy density carbs and fats because That's how you survive the wintertime when you're a hunter-gatherer. And so it's super tasty and hedonic and rewarding. And you've got this whole push-pull of obesity where it's driven forward by protein dilution and you eat until you get enough protein. And it's also driven forward by tastiness and hedonic factors. And you combine those together and everyone just overeats all the time, either passively because they need enough protein or actively because it's so tasty and delicious. And, uh, All of this is due to the increased yields of carbs and fats throughout the food supply, from agriculture to Industrial Revolution to the basically modern processed foods. And we've just dumped more and more and more carbs and fats in, but less and less protein, you know. So like, like for example, protein, protein leverage. I wrote the PE diet because most people don't know what protein leverage is. This is a fairly new discovery. And this is a phenomenon where basically all animals on Earth, including humans, will eat until they get, get enough protein. You're basically going to eat and eat and eat until you get enough protein, and only then are you going to stop eating. Well, you know, your grandparents, if they wanted some chicken, they would go out and they'd raise a chicken, kill a chicken, eat the whole chicken. Chicken. Uh, if you want chicken in your modern food environment, you have to go to the fast food restaurant and get chicken nuggets. And like, in order to get the same amount of protein, you would have to eat way more carbs and fats because there's a little bit of protein down in there and just like tons of breading and oil and carbs and fats. And it's, uh, basically protein dilution from the refinement of carbs and fats. And that— I just wrote that whole— the PE diet, all about this protein dilution and how every step of the way with our food environment. We've diluted out protein with refined carbs and refined fats. And so that's just an example of one of the big things that's changed throughout the obesity epidemic. We've eaten a couple hundred calories a day more of carbs and fats and no more protein. The amount of protein we eat per day is basically flat as a pancake, or God, decreased.

Yeah, I'm surprised the protein leverage hypothesis hasn't been more out there, um, because it, it really lays the foundation. Just like you said, you wrote the book on it. It's like you, you lays a foundation for, oh, okay, I get why we overeat now and what we need to do. And I think I was listening to one of your interviews where you were talking about, um, where we used to be optimally, how much protein we got, which I think was about 30% of the calories overall, that now has dropped down to what, like 12?

Right, right, exactly. Yep. Hunter-gatherers around 30 worldwide on average. Standard American diet, you know, 14, 13, 12.5. If you really look at people who are overweight and eating processed food, it could even be lower. So yeah, that's exactly right.

I'm glad now the focus is starting to get on protein. Shout out to our mutual friend, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, on getting, getting that work out there. And then also, I don't know if you've met Dr. Bill Campbell yet. He's one of my neighbors. He's such a great guy. And when we said he comes over so we can podcast in person and he said, you know, the big thing that I can tell you with physique athletes, the big differentiator is they all eat like if you ask them what they eat, all of them are eating a high amount of protein, probably higher than 30%, especially when they're getting contest ready. And it's just— it makes it a non-issue. Like when you really start to eat protein first, like all, all the struggle goes out the window, don't you think?

Absolutely. And honestly, this occurs in pretty much all mammals. You can dial up the protein percent higher or lower of their diet, and the ad-lib caloric intake just goes up and down almost in a straight line from about 10 to 40% protein. And the higher the protein percentage of your food the less calories you're going to eat, full stop. There's this incredibly linear zone there where it's just crazy. Like, you know, in lab rats and mice, we can feed them up to about 50% of their calories in protein and they'll just eat less and less and less and less and less and get thinner the whole time and basically better body composition— higher lean mass, lower fat mass. And that works on both ends of the spectrum. You look at your physique athletes, your bodybuilders, your bikini models, your fitness aesthetic people, they're just living at like 30% protein. And then you're right, if they're like Permaline, they're maybe up at 40% show prep, they might be even higher for a couple of weeks. And then down to the other end of the scale, if you look at the people who are gaining weight the fastest, you know, the peak is probably 10% protein is absolute peak fatness. And this occurs in all sorts of different animal species. It's crazy. It's powerful. Ubiquitous. Nobody's ever heard of it. And that's why I wrote the PE diet, because I'm like, people need to know about this crap. Like, nobody's ever heard of this before, including me, and I'm a freaking doctor. So that was a problem.

So it's interesting too when you think about it, because like, I don't know what the percentage is, but I'm guessing, guessing with the standard American diet, with the— I think it became MyPlate— it's somewhere in the 15% for protein. I mean, it's so low, it's, it's stupid, especially as we age and we have anabolic resistance. It makes me nuts, you know. And so what's happened, because I know what you do is you, you put— and I love this, this idea of carbohydrates and fat, they're fuel calories. So they are interchangeable fuel calories. And you talk about all these diets that either raise one or lower the other, that they're really just making lateral shifts. So I'd love you to break that down.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Right, right. And your bodybuilders know this. They're like, it really just comes down to protein and calories, you know, protein percent and calories. And that's pretty much all you have to worry about. And that's basically true. So, you know, humans have this crazy range throughout the globe. There's this massive shift in carb versus fat percentage. And it turns out that it's really just distance from the equator, like which latitude you're at. You know, hunter-gatherers at the equator eat a much higher carbohydrate percentage because they've got all these plant, you know, fruits and things year-round. People at the extremes, like at the really high and low latitudes, they're eating a much higher fat percentage, right? They're basically just, you know, half the time it's winter and they're only getting animals, eating animal fat. They don't have a lot of plant foods. So you get this crazy shift in carb versus fat percentage throughout the globe that's really just about just from the equator. And then protein percent is like the same, you know, the whole planet right now. The modern human diet is like, you know, 14-15%. It's just barely varies at all. And that's part of the reason why nobody figured protein leverage out forever. We figured, well, protein is the smallest component, so it can't be that important. It's really about the carbs and the fats. And look at these big shifts, and so many people are overweight, and then these people are thin, and what's going on with their carb-fat spectrum? It's because protein is such a tiny, very razor-fixed, extremely tightly controlled component that it does really control exactly what's going on. And, you know, we didn't figure that out for the longest time, but the carb-fat thing is very interchangeable. So when people like try to make shifts between their carb and fat percentages, that's kind of a lateral move. Like you're very capable of burning mostly carbs, not a lot of fat, mostly fat, not a lot of carbs. It might take you a week or two to completely shift over and fine-tune your whole metabolism. But that's kind of just style points. And what's really going on is you're eating till you get enough protein, and then your body is a hybrid engine that can run off carbs or fats. And so the, the protein percentage is infinitely more important than the carb-fat mixture. And I don't think people really know that.

Don't you think that maybe The carnivore diet has helped people go, huh? You know, it's like, if anything should make people take a pause and go, huh, look at this diet that would, on the outset, to so many people, especially with this plant-based push out there in the world, which I'd love you to go the plant versus animal because I like the way you describe it. But I mean, you look at carnivore and go, but wait a minute, here's people that are eating a higher protein with fat diet and boom.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the one thing about carnivore is like, because, you know, plants make the food for everything, right? They make their own food. They make all the food for animals. All animals either eat plants or an animal that ate plants. So plants are at the base. Plants don't have as high a protein percentage inherently because animals are at a higher trophic level. They're just eating a bunch of plants. They bioaccumulate nitrogen and protein and minerals and micronutrients. And so animals pretty much always have a higher protein percentage, a higher nutrient density, because they've bioaccumulated it. Like, a cow, you know, eats a billion blades of grass. The grass has a really low protein, but the cow bioaccumulates all that nitrogen and protein, and now your steak has a ton of protein in it. So the carnivore diet is like an instant win for protein percentages, you're just automatically getting higher protein. Even if you eat like the fattiest grain-fed ribeye you can find, it's about 30% protein. So when you crank protein that high, a lot of stuff doesn't matter. The energy density is not as important, the fiber becomes almost meaningless, and all these other factors kind of like get overshadowed by this protein percentage. So yeah, a lot of people, you know, should be thinking about, hey, what is it about carnivore That's so crazy effective. And, and when I wrote The PE Diet 5 years ago, I'm like, you know, this is why carnivore is just an instant win. I mean, look at this protein percentage, you almost can't lose. Since then, I've realized, okay, there are a lot of people who are actually crushing it on much lower protein percentage diets. So that's not necessarily the entire story. It's incredibly powerful, it's incredibly important, But oh hey, you've got these, you know, Okinawans over here who eat 12% protein, but they're all really thin and doing great. Oh, and what's the reason for that? Their energy density is super low, their fiber is super high, they're pulling these other levers. And I kind of went on to write Satiety per Calorie just to explain how there are these other factors that would explain everything you see in the nutrition space that wouldn't 100% be explained by protein. And even in carnivore, like for example, if you just decide, okay, um, hot dogs are carnivore, I'm just gonna eat the cheapest hot dogs I can find in the grocery store, uh, yeah, they're so diluted with fat. You know, a super cheap hot dog might be 13% protein. And basically the— this is economics of food production, right? If you fatten the cow up as fat as you can possibly get it, you're just going to make more money because you sell it by the pound. And then if you dump even more fat in into that product, the, the more fat you add, the cheaper it is for you to make and the more profit you get. And so, you know, just saying I'm going to be carnivore and eat the cheapest hot dogs and bologna I can find, you actually might end up with just the standard American diet protein percentage except zero fiber and a pretty high energy density, and you might actually end up going nowhere. It's probably going to be a lateral move at best. And so I kind of wrote Steady Per Calorie just kind of looking at all these other case scenarios where protein does not explain absolutely everything. It's probably the biggest rock in the jar, and that's why I like to talk about it a lot. But there are other factors, you know, that are good to pay attention to as well.

Yeah, let's go through those because you do look at it like— I, I love protein, the Protein Energy Diet, because— and I love books that have the big takeaway. And the big takeaway is And this is literally what I, my mantra is just eat protein first. Just eat it first. Choose lean sources. Eat it first. You know, we love, we, we love going over. It's, it's always our goal that they will lose money on us. We love going to the Brazilian steakhouse in town. We don't eat anything but the best cuts of the leanest stuff. And, and it's like, you know, and then we're like, we could, we should probably start going to there at noon because like then you're full for 24 hours. Like you're done.

Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

It's so easy. But again, my big argument with carnivore, and I did a really great interview with Shawn Baker, so we'll link to that. He's fantastic. However, I still kept going, but your microbiome, but the polyphenols, you know, you still look at this and go, but the other things. So, so protein's the big power lever, but you've got other levers too.

So let's go. Right, right, right. Well, okay, so the two biggest levers. Protein. Number 1, protein percentage. Basically, whatever your protein percent is, that's how many calories you're going to eat. That's the biggest lever, that's the most important. And you're totally right, if you just eat a ton of extra, you just get the leanest protein you can, eat a ton of it first thing, you're pretty much set. The second one is energy density. So humans do 2 things every single day. Number 1, they eat until they get enough protein, full stop. You eat until you get enough protein. If you're just eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, you have to eat an extra 3,000 calories because, you know, bread's, you know, 11% protein and peanut butter is 9% protein. And to get enough protein, you have to massively overeat calories.

And yet everybody always goes, peanut butter is high protein. I'm like, it is not high protein, it's high fat, people.

It's an excellent fat source. Absolutely right there.

It can't be high protein if it's not at least— like, to me, high protein means you're over 50%. You know, it's like, well, maybe even 30%, but nuts and seeds are not high protein.

Not a good protein source.

You know, it's like ridiculous.

Okay.

Back to you.

Oh, right. Okay. So, and then the other one. So the big one, protein percent. Second one, weight and volume of food, energy density. So basically humans eat 1.5 to 2 kilos of food a day. 3 to 4 pounds. You're going to eat 3 to 4 pounds of food every day, no matter how many calories are in it. That's just what happens. We have studies where they secretly manipulated energy density, you know, pouring in some oil, subbing it with water, making a 2x and a 1x energy density diets and just feeding them to people. And they eat exactly twice as many calories from a twice the energy density diet with the same level of satiety and enjoyment. And they enjoy it, you know, the diets are equally palatable and all that sort of stuff. But basically, you're just going to eat your 3 to 4 pounds of food a day. Now, if your food is like trail mix or some incredibly, you know, like nuts, this super high energy density thing, you're going to eat double the calories as if you're eating food. But, you know, if you're eating like a super lean steak and some carrots or something, you know, you have to eat so much more food, right? You have to eat, you know, 18 pounds of carrots to get 2,000 calories. Good luck, right? You're just That's so all of these foods that have a ton of weight and volume from fiber and water, but not that many calories are a huge cheat code. So I tell people in Satiety Per Calorie, you've got pretty much two goals every single day. Number one, hit your protein target. So you want the leanest protein you can get. You want to front load it, you want to eat it first, you want to eat it earliest in the day, earliest in the meal. You're just trying to like hit that protein. And what's the second thing is what is your target for protein?

Because I think it's hard to go off percentages. Because if you are overeating your overall calories because you have, you know, high energy density, then you would— you wouldn't make it. Like, so what would your calories per— or your grams per body weight be?

Got it. Okay, so this is the best way to think about how much protein should you get. You can't base it on your current body weight because most people are super overweight. It's like, how much would you weigh if you were completely ripped and jacked? You're on stage weight, your body, your, you know, your fighting weight. Like, what weight were you at the very thinnest in your life, or when you're a senior in high school, or if you're completely ripped and jacked, if you had perfect body composition, uh, whatever that weight is, you know, which is going to vary with your height, of course. So your ideal body weight for your height is, uh, what you want to use, and it's a gram per pound. So you want to eat 1 gram per pound per day, roughly, of your absolute ideal body weight. I'm saying like you're super thin, or you can just look up a reference weight for your height. You know, like I'm 5'10" and the ideal body weight is 160 pounds. So I want to eat 160 grams protein. And you are—

what's your body fat at? You are ripped.

Oh, well, thank you. Yeah. I mean, ever since I wrote the PE diet, I've been just under 10% body fat, but like only on an impedance scale. I haven't really done a DEXA.

You haven't done a DEXA?

I've never done one.

You'll probably read lower on a DEXA. We do a DEXA twice a year. I'm getting ready to do it again because my birthday's coming up. Um, and we— I'll digress a little bit. We went and did DEXA a couple years ago because I was like, I wanted to see where I was at because I was getting ready to turn 60 and I wanted to make sure I was in the best shape of my life at 60. My DEXA at 39 and 59 were exactly the same.

Nice.

I, I'm a very lean female. Like, my— in my 20s, I was always 10%, so I knew I could be there. I was 13.9 at 39, and I was back exactly the same, same weight at 59. Yeah, I went after it. But my husband, when we did the DEXAs— and my husband's like, you would meet him, he's athletic, he's, you know, plays volleyball, blah blah blah— 27% body fat. No, wait, was it— yeah, 25% body fat.

Wow.

And I'm like, whoa. But it wasn't me saying, whoa, being the bad wife. It was the DEXA. So it was way better because our bioimpedance had been reading him at about 17. I mean, still for an athletic guy was higher, but 25%. And then he got serious, upped his protein, stopped all that like Cheetos chips kind of garbage before dinner, you know, the eating before eating, and dropped 27 pounds of fat and put on 24 pounds of muscle.

Nice. Brilliant.

Protein was a huge thing. Tracking protein was amazing. So, but the DEXA is not quite the same as bioimpedance. I love bioimpedance at home to, to just keep a record of it. But, you know, but you look, you look, you look leaner than 10% unless that picture was totally, uh, airbrushed that you have in your book. But seeing you, I doubt it.

Yeah, I don't really know. I mean, I haven't done an actual DEXA, but, um, the impedance kind of just lets you know how you're doing. I bet you're 16.

I bet you're 6 to 8%. I want to hear about it when you do.

Oh, I don't know. I'm pretty impressed with your dex. I mean, that's like just absolutely crazy insane low. So nice job.

It's— I don't normally talk about it because it's so weird for women to be, but I just have always— that's always been my body type. So just is what it is, right? Um, all right, so back over to this. Now, where were we before I took you completely off track?

Oh yeah, I mean, basically those are the two biggest Those are the two biggest rocks in the jar, protein percent and energy density.

Oh yeah, we were talking about how much protein. So you say a pound, which I think we're all kind of— because it's so easy to figure out, no math required. All right, cool. And so the other levers is overall energy density. I would assume there it's going to be fiber and water.

Fiber and water, right, right. In the book, we talk about like you're trying to get a higher weight and higher volume of food. The weight is from water, the volume is from fiber. And so you're basically trying to eat more protein, fiber, and water. It's basically like these heavy, wet vegetable type things and a bunch of protein. So, and then there's a fourth component. So like, you know, like we have this HAVA app that basically calculates satiety score on a 0 to 100 scale. And it uses 4 things to do that. Number 1, protein percent. Biggest rock in the jar. Number 2, energy density, second biggest. Um, the energy density is mostly looking at water. So about 80-90% of energy density is explained by this fat versus water spectrum. If there's more fat and less water, or more water and less fat, that kind of gives you energy density. So, uh, pretty much energy density, which is water. Fiber fraction, like how, how much fiber is there per 1,000 calories, and that's volume, more or less. And then the fourth thing is hedonics. And hedonics is basically a food that's a high energy density, carbon, fat together, like donuts and pizza and cakes and cookies and pies and muffins and crackers and all these like super tasty addictive hedonic foods. And so in the book I have this sort of infographic, and protein's at the top, right? You want to hit this protein percentage, like the protein versus non-protein energy biggest rock of the jar. And then on the carb and fat sides, you want lower energy density carbs and fats. You want as much fiber in your carbs as you can get and as much water in your fats as you can get. So for example, like on the fat spectrum, like, uh, 100 grams of oil is 100 grams of fat. You have to store it all in your fat cells. But 100 grams of avocado is only, you know, 15 grams of fat. And so you're getting a lot more weight from the avocado without as much actual calories and fat. And then on the carb side, you know, you've got fiber, which basically explains like your Wonder Bread has, you know, 50 grams of carbs and it's, you know, 1 gram of fiber. But you're like sprouted Ezekiel, whatever, whole grain thing bread, you know, might be 25 grams of carbs and, you know, 8 grams of fiber or something like that. So it's protein at the top, reducing energy density of carbs and fats. And then at the very bottom is the hedonic high energy density carbs and fats together, the sugar and the oil and the cookies and the hedonic, you know, tasty— I call it the trifecta. It's high carb, high fat, and high energy density all at once. It's basically like refined carb and refined fat together, like ice cream or, you know, cookies. And that's what you're trying to eat last, and only after you've achieved adequacy with protein and fiber and water and weight and volume, then you can have like some cookies. But if you start out with those foods, you're kind of screwed.

You're sunk.

It's downhill from there.

Yes, yes, go to the Brazilian steakhouse and then If you want the dessert, go ahead. You're going to be just too full to do it. Right. What's great about all of this is it just takes all the diet wars and fighting out of the equation. And there's just like, because there's so much emotion. I'm like, why are we so emotional? I grew up, my background's exercise science, but it used to be the same. It was like the fights between the marathoners and the resistance trainers and the yoga people. This is like not religion. This is just like, what's the best prescription?

Mm-hmm.

And same with the diet, but this takes a lot of that out. But we, I do wanna just address the animal versus plant part of the spectrum here for people who are, you know, wanna make that choice still that they wanna eat more plant-based. How does this fit into that?

Right, right. Okay. So, so in the book we talk about what makes a good protein source. So in order to be a good protein source, you really have to have at least 20% of the calories from protein, right? So that's like bare minimum. And that's why your nuts don't— like, you know, grains are horrible. Your highest protein grain is maybe oats at about 13%. Wheat's like 11 or 12%. Corn's like 11%. Rice is 11%. These grains suck for protein. So you've got protein percent has to be 20 or higher for it to be a good protein source. But that's not it. It's not just how high the protein percent of calories is, it's what protein density does the food have, like what amount of the mass is actually protein. Because like kale is 40% protein, but kale is not a good protein source because the absolute— you know, there's no calories and there's no absolute protein. You'd have to eat, you know, like your whole body weight in kale to get enough protein to be alive. So to be a good protein source, not only high protein percentage calories, but also a high protein percent of weight, so that the weight of the food is mostly protein. And there's only 3 things on earth that have this much protein in it. This is it. These are the only foods that are good protein sources. Number 1, animals. Just eating an animal, right? Animal flesh. That could be beef or pork or chicken or fish or seafood. You basically eat an animal, a super high percentage of the animal's body is going to be, uh, protein, and you're going to get a high protein percent of calories. You're getting a high protein percent mass, high protein density. So boom, animals, that's number one. The second one is animal reproductive products, and I'm talking eggs and dairy. So like basically eggs and milk. If you take animal reproductive products that are specifically designed to like help out the next generation, so they're very, very high in protein percent and micronutrients. And most of your eggs and dairy— like, an egg is 30% protein, uh, by mass. It's also a very high percentage of protein. And, uh, milk is a little bit of mix because you can have high-fat dairy, which is a terrible protein source, like, like your heavy cream and your cream cheese and your sour cream and your butter and your— all your high-fat cheese. Not good. Not a high protein percent of calories. Ormaz. But all of your low-fat dairy is awesome, like your ultra-filtered milk that's low-carb and low-fat, your Greek yogurt, especially your nonfat Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, your low-fat cheese. All of these things are a great protein source. So on the animal side, you've got eating animals— awesome, great protein source— animal reproductive products, eggs, and lower-fat dairy. Awesome. On the plant side, there's just one category, and that is plant reproductive products. Only seeds— and a seed is a general plant term for legumes and, uh, nuts and all these things— only a seed of some sort has, uh, the qualities that make a good protein source. That's a high protein percentage of calories and a high protein mass by weight. And legumes are the very, very best. Legumes are the pinnacle of the seeds. There are other seeds that are pretty good, but legumes are pretty much at the top. You've got soybeans or edamame, crazy high protein percent, you know, 40% protein. Uh, all of your lima beans and your fava beans and all of these different legumes are like— lentils are crazy high, 30% protein, really high protein density by mass, high protein percent of calories. And so in the plant world, anything that's a good protein source is some sort of, uh, plant reproductive product. That could be tofu or something made out of soybeans or textured vegetable protein. That could also be wheat gluten, which basically comes from the wheat seeds. They're sucking out all the protein. And honestly, when you look at the plant versus animal world, it kind of starts to look a little bit more similar because like, like look at whey powder, right? I'm taking an animal reproductive product, which is milk. I'm taking up— I'm making cheese out of it. I'm sucking out all the whey. I'm basically just siphoning out all the protein. Well, on the plant side, you've got wheat gluten, right? You take the wheat kernels, the seed, the reproductive product, you just suck out all the protein and you get pure protein like wheat gluten. You can do that from soybeans with, uh, you know, there's tempeh and seitan and all of these tofu-type things that are basically kind of like the plant version of whey powder and casein powder and Cottage cheese and nonfat Greek yogurt, you've kind of got a plant equivalent. Now the animal version is always a little bit better because the spectrum of amino acids that you need to make an animal are all right there in the exact right ratios, and in the plant side is not quite as good. So like soy is a lower leucine percentage than whey. Egg and whey are kind of gold standard, higher leucine percentage, probably better. For anabolism and building muscle and all this stuff. But on the plant side, if you do get these refined plant proteins that are kind of analogous to whey and casein, like, you know, soy powder and things like that, they're actually pretty good. You might have to eat, you know, 10 or 20% more just to get the same amount of leucine. So it's, it's slightly inferior, but it's also like totally adequate. Uh, people are killing it and crushing it on purely plant-based diets. They just have to go way out of their way to get these crazy high protein foods, usually a protein concentrate, some sort of refined plant product that's refined out all the protein, like a soy powder or a tofu, which honestly, how is that different than taking dairy, sucking out all the protein as like low-fat cottage cheese, low-fat Greek yogurt whey powder, kind of a lot of analogous similarities there. And so you can totally get it done on the plant side. You just have to have a little bit more of it to make up for the lower leucine percent and the spread of aminos. That's not quite as good.

Yeah, that's what I do. I— if someone wants to do plant-based, they're gonna, gonna likely need to supplement with some things like Protein P protein powder, but I just say push it up. So that you get the leucine levels, you know. I think some of them are low in methionine, so, you know, so you get what you need. And of course supplement with creatine, right?

Right, right. Yeah. And a couple other micronutrients. All my pure vegans are— tend to be a little low in zinc and definitely iron for sure. B12, um, selenium, zinc, iron, B12. There's a couple, uh, you know, maybe an omega-3. There's a few supplements, a handful of supplements you might want to take that you're probably not going to need on the animal side. Well, that's not entirely true. My pure carnivores tend to be a little low on folate, a little low on magnesium, a little low on thiamine. Uh, there's, uh, it turns out like, okay, so like animal, uh, animals are based around this hemoglobin molecule that has a ton of iron but not as much magnesium. And then you've got like chlorophyll, which is over here on the plant side, tons of magnesium Uh, but not a lot of iron. And oh wait, if you're an omnivore, which humans are scientifically— hello— and you eat both, you're like awesome, right? But anytime you go to one extreme or the other, it's possible but it's not optimal. And I talk a lot about that in Type O Calorie, like possible versus optimal. It's possible to be pure carnivore, it's possible to be pure vegan. Is that optimal? Definitely not. Objectively, no. And like, the answer is always Somewhere in between. And when you see these extremes where like somebody's doing amazing on a pure this and someone's on a pure that, uh, you can really just like split it right down the middle because the optimal is always going to be somewhere in the middle and not at the extreme ends.

I am so with you on that. It's like eat animals with plants. Yeah, it's just easier. I also look at something and go, if there's a diet that in order for you to stay on that diet you have to supplement or you're deficient this is a problem, right? Right. I mean, this wouldn't have worked in the wild. Well, we can't, we can't end this without talking about exercise. And I love the fact that you place like equal importance on both. I was in graduate school in exercise science and there was no, no nutrition talk whatsoever. And I was like, this is ridiculous. I finally found a PhD program that had nutrition, was nutrition, aging, and exercise. I'm like, come on, we've got to know the nutrition side of things. They're both, they're both important. Um, so what is your take? Cause I, you have a very minimalist approach to exercise that I think is fantastic because it takes the excuses out of, I don't have equipment. I don't know, like all the reasons people say they can't do something. So what's your, what's your thought process on exercise?

Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you know, like, like you said, it's, it's right down the middle, yin and yang, diet versus exercise. You cannot focus on one or the other. Exercise is fully 50% of the story. And then also when it comes to exercise, you've got all these like cardio versus resistance people. And again, it's pretty much right down the center. Like, you absolutely have to do both. You'd be crazy not to pull both of those levers. So when it comes to exercise, uh, there are 3 basic forms of exercise that everybody should be getting, right? The first one is just general movement. That could be like step count, like If you're not doing— if you're not walking 8,000 steps a day, you're going to have dysregulated appetite and automatically overeat. So like full stop, anyone who's not— anyone who's not walking 8,000 steps a day, you're wasting your time trying to work on your diet more and trim down more calories. You're just going to automatically— everyone eats the calories of a light to medium active version of themselves. And if you're not at least lightly active, you're screwed, like you'll never get anywhere. So number 1 for exercise, general movement, step count, 8,000. This, uh, this is basically— this number came up from a meta-analysis that looked at dysregulated appetite. So as people get more and more and more sedentary, they paradoxically just eat more food for no good reason. And they figured out like at what activity level is the breakpoint where below that you're kind of screwed, you're just going to overeat no matter what. No matter what your food is. And it is about 8,000 steps a day. So number 1, general movement, 8,000. Yeah, 10,000 or 12,000 is even better. But like, you know, that should be a bare minimum. Then on like higher-end cardio and resistance, you're doing this to get a positive adaptation, a specific adaptation to imposed demand. You're putting a stress on your body because you want your body to be better. And you have to communicate to your body that it's going to die unless it adapts. It's like adapt or die, right? You have to get stronger. So you want to lift weights to failure because only then do you send this message to your body, uh, we almost died, and if you're not stronger tomorrow, we are going to die. And so you lift weights to failure. And then on the cardio side, same thing, you're trying to get positive adaptations, you're trying to stress the system, progressively overload it, and get like higher VO2 max and higher cardiac output and better capillaries in your muscles and better oxygen and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You're only going to get that if you demand it from your body. So I talk in the book about demand training where you're, you're making your body do something it can't quite do right now, and that's the progressive overload. You really want some of both. You want some cardio, progressive overload, you get positive adaptations. You want resistance, progressive overload, positive adaptations. On the resistance side, I just break it down as simple as possible. There's basically push and pull movements for upper and lower body. And so, you know, you could do a whole workout that's like an upper body push and pull, like push-ups and pull-ups. You can do a lower body push and pull, which is basically like a deadlift, which is like hamstring posterior chain pulling type exercise, and then like a squat or a split squat or something, which is a pushing exercise. So, you know, you got these like 4 movements, you know, pull-ups, push-ups, Romanian deadlifts, Bulgarian split squats, You could do these 4 movements and just basically get all kinds of muscular strength and hypertrophy. And honestly, in the book, I pretty much come right out and say that I could have gotten 80 or 90% of all of my muscular size and strength and gains my whole resistance training career with basically just 3 exercises. It's like weighted dips, progressively overload in a 5 to 15 rep range. You know, some sort of like pulling exercise, rows or pull-ups, and then some sort of like compound leg movement like a split squat, right? I'm like, you could do these 3 movements, right? A Bulgarian split squat, a weighted dip, a weighted pull-up, 5 to 15 rep range, maybe 3 times a week, single set to failure. Just keep going up on the weights, and eventually you're going to get 80 to 90% of every single size and strength gain you'd ever get, even with a much more complicated regimen, way larger exercise selection, way more time in the gym. And I'm just like cutting through all the noise and just dumbing down resistance training to the absolute bare minimum. Like, you need a really solid push exercise, a really solid pull, 1 or 2 really solid leg exercises, and that's all you need. As long as you're progressively overloading it, as long as you have a, you know, a movement pattern that fits your body, you're progressively overloading it, you're keeping the reps in reserve really low, you're keeping the intensity perceived exertion really high, you're going all the way to failure. People could actually get this done with just a couple sets of week. It's crazy. If you did like 2 sets a week, you'd basically not get weaker. If you did 3 sets a week, you would just steadily gain strength and size. If you, you know, did 4 sets a week, okay, now you know you're doing even better. But you can kind of like— I'm all about the minimum effective dose. You want to get this all the way down to minimum effective dose. Even if you just did 1 hard set a week all the way to failure of push-ups and pull-ups and squats, you're going to have infinite return on investment from someone who never ever puts that maximum tension in all their muscles. And then the same thing is true on the cardio side. Like, if you never redline your heart rate and max out your intensity, you will get infinite return on investment just doing that even once a week for a couple of minutes. The, uh, you can raise your VO2 max with like 60 seconds of just maximum exercise a week. And so the amount of time it takes is so microscopic. You could literally do these exercises in your living room for a few minutes a week and get an essentially infinite return on investment if you're never doing them right now.

Yeah, I love that because if you look online, it looks like you have to do this crazy amount of exercise. And I hear that from people, you must work out all the time. I go, no. I just go hard. Yep. Like, I go hard when I'm doing it and that's it, you know? And so it's really doing these hard compound movements that are— I like to say you train to get better at life. You don't go train to get better at CrossFit, right? You're training so that you can do that squat and get out of chairs later on in life. So we're right there in sync. And, you know, I like push, pull, hinge. And I think that the whole core thing is ridiculous because core is when you're doing everything else.

Right, right. I never do core exercise. I'm basically just—

and you've got to completely, like, you know, when, when people get satiety per calorie, you will see your abs and you're completely ripped. So you don't need to do all of these, all these sit-ups. I've never done them. Right, I don't do any of that stuff because in life I never lie down on the floor and then need to do a curl-up to touch my nose to my knees ever.

Yeah, never useful. I— and but I might do maybe 90 seconds of exercise the whole day, but that's a set of weighted dips all the way to failure, like soul-crushing, I'm going to die, and I still do one more and then I collapse on the ground. So but, uh, but you're right, you don't need a lot of exercise variability. You don't need a lot of periodization. You don't need some elaborate— uh, and I just like, in the book, I just go on a massive rant about, um, you know, perfect— uh, you know, everyone waits till they have the perfect routine, right? I'll start exercising when I have this perfection routine. I need this certain trainer and this certain gym, this certain exercise, and this certain shoes, and this outfit, and blah blah. Hell no. You just get on the floor and do the hardest set of push-ups you've ever done in your life. All the way to failure, and then you still do one more. And then you just do that once a day for the next 3 years and come back and tell me about your pushing strength, and it's going to be crazy. So like—

and your core strength for that matter.

And your core strength without doing a single set of abs. Freaking Lutely. So I'm just like, you know, do not look for the perfect. Perfect does not exist. You need to just get out there and do it. Like, the universe is going to reward action, not thinking about it or coming up with some perfect blah, blah, blah, whatever, bullshit. Um, yeah, so I just went off in the book about that. It's, it's pretty embarrassing.

I like ranting. Well, to put a bow on this, so if you eat protein first, focus on protein, that will help with satiety. Then make sure that you're eating plants with water and fiber, uh, that will help dramatically as well. So that makes it super simple. And that you're not eating foods that have got major energy energy density, like pouring on oils and flowers. And then get moving, make sure you got your steps. And as you were talking, I was like, where are my steps already today? Because I am— I last year was like, all right, that's it, I'm going to make sure I'm getting at least— now it's at least 12,000 a day. But you know, if someone just starts with 8,000 steps a day, I'm amazed how many people— I heard that the average person in the US is getting about 3,000 to 4,000 steps. And as I started to look, I was like, oh, That's crazy.

Yep, it's crazy.

I'm sure that that's why we had— one of the reasons we had the big weight gain during the pandemic is people just lost every bit of extra activity they had because they were staying home. Yep. So move, do hard things, do hard things for your muscles, and then go out and do some HIIT training for cardio. And that's it. It's pretty simple stuff.

It's super, super basic. It's dumbed down is like X amount of protein, X amount of pounds of low energy density food, uh, X hard sets of push-ups, pull-ups, squats, uh, step count, and a couple minutes of some high-end cardio done. And everything else is just a distraction.

I love it. So you have the app, and the app— tell us about the app.

All right, so there's an app called HAVA.

So, so the book is Satiety for Calorie, and it's all about all this stuff that you've got Satiety Per Calorie, uh, Protein Energy Diet, is that your website?

Oh yeah, yeah. So I wrote the PE diet. It's, uh, you can buy it anywhere books are sold, or you can go to thepediet.com or tednaiman.com, or just, and just Google it. It's everywhere. Uh, Satiety Per Calorie, also you can buy it anywhere books are sold. You can go to satietypercalorie.com or tednaiman.com, buy it there, or just find it anywhere or just Google it. Um, my website is tednamen.com and it has some of this stuff listed on it. And, but I teamed up with Andreas Einfeldt, uh, the Diet Doctor dude, right? He's like, we're both primary care doctors and, uh, we came up with the satiety scoring system, right? So, uh, we— satiety per calorie is all about this food's going to have higher protein, higher fiber, higher water, lower energy density, lower hedonics, it's going to be better for eating less calories. You're just going to automatically eat less calories. We developed this whole score from a 0 to 100 scale where like an Oreo cookie is a 0 and celery is 100, and you really want to be around a 50, which is like steak and eggs. And you're trying to increase your satiety per calorie. You know, the standard American diet's like 27, 28. You want to be up around 50. All your bikini models are living maybe around 60. And we have this app that you can download, HAVA, and it's on the App Store. You know, it's like Google, Apple, whatever. And you just take a picture of all your food, anything you're going to eat. You just take a picture of it, automatically tracks all your macros, you know, protein and calories.

And so just a picture.

Yeah, you just take a pic. It takes about 10 seconds to log your whole day of eating.

I just wonder, like, so for lunch today I had cauliflower rice, mushrooms, grass-fed, 93% fat ground beef and drained. And then, uh, one other thing in there— what did I have? Oh, a little bit of lentils. Like, how the heck would it have known what that was?

Well, so you just take a picture of the food, AI figures it all out. It figures out basically quantities. Now, I have to admit that sometimes if you have a very specific food it might not know it's exactly that. Like, like if I take a picture of just some, you know, Greek yogurt, it might think it's full-fat Greek yogurt, but I really have the Oikos Triple Zero nonfat artificially sweetened that has like even lower carbs, even lower fats. And then if so, it'll take a picture of it, list all the ingredients and the quantities. And if you know for sure something was very special that wasn't mainstream, you can just instantly easily type it in and you just substitute it. There's a giant database of every food in there. You can, you know, barcode scanner, uh, search, you know, you can sub out anything that it got wrong that you're sure it got wrong. But the accuracy is crazy. It's absolutely mind-blowing. And, um, yeah, uh, you— and like, hit me up on email and I'll get you some free lifetime access to that. But It's totally amazing. You can literally track all your macros in 10 seconds a day. There's a widget on your lock screen where you just press it and the camera pops up, take a picture of your food, and everything gets tracked. But it also tracks your satiety per calorie. There's two goals in the app. Number one, protein. There's this circle you have to close to get enough protein. And then number two, the satiety score of your diet overall. And you're trying to be like a 50 or higher, and you can see where you were, you can slowly increase it, and you can progressively overload. The higher you go, the more— less calories you eat.

What's your average, um, score each day?

It's like 55. I'm like about a 55, um, on average. Like, you know, sometimes if I'm doing tons of exercise, I might be a little lower because I need more calories. And if I'm really cutting and not moving around as much, I might be a little higher. But that's basically average. And now we have like 100,000 user day data points, and we've done all this statistics, and we've tracked— we basically graphed out average daily caloric intake with satiety per calorie score, and it's this perfectly straight line. Like, it's just incredibly linear. And the more— the higher score, less calories you eat.

I mean, all these people— curious. I can't wait to do this.

Very cool. You have to download it and check it out. Like, definitely. I will Just tell me what email you used to sign up and I'll hook you up with free lifetime access. But you have to get on board.

Perfect. I'm going to put all of, all of your stuff because your name's a little bit wonky to spell. So I'll put everything at jjvirgin.com/DrTed so that it's easy peasy for everybody. So they don't have to figure out where the I goes in your name because it looks like Ted Naiman. I'm sure you hear that all the time.

But yeah, it's confusing.

Anyway, it's, it's a little confusing. So I'll have link all the books, link the app. The books are amazing. They are great resources. They're fantastic. So I highly recommend these books. And I got to tell you, I get sent books— like, I'm looking over here— every day I get books in the mail, every day. So most books I never read, and I maybe skim this. I'm actually like, first one I read completely, Before I Knew You or anything else. And then this next one, I've been— I went— I didn't get all of it before the interview, but I got through a decent amount of it. So it's— they're fantastic.

Oh, wow. Thank you so much.

I just want the audiobook versions.

Oh, yeah.

I was trying to figure out how to feed it into AI, but we want the audiobook version, Ted.

That's got you.

Gotcha. Because then I can listen while I'm lifting heavy things. Okay. All right. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate you. I appreciate everything that you're doing and anything I can do to help you get it out in the world. I'm all in.

Awesome. Thank you so much.