Answering Qs from Cambridge Professor
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the one day at a time podcast. Missed you all tonight. It's nice to be back. Nice to chat to you guys.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, it's not live, but hopefully you get something from this. And really just to remind you all, the name of the podcast is really what it comes down to one day at a time from now to bedtime, no matter how long your goal. The real magic in that mindset is that it breaks anything down to daily tasks, which is the only time you can act, by the way. You can't say I'm gonna work on Thursday today because it's not Thursday. You know?
Speaker 1:You've only got now, and you just gotta try your best. And sometimes your best isn't as good as your best a few weeks ago because you're not feeling great, blah blah blah. And sometimes you have an amazing day, but that's life. Same with anything you do in life. If you've gone to university before, if you worked on a craft before in your job, it all is ups and downs like that.
Speaker 1:But really what matters is if you stick to it, you stay with it. And it's not to stay with something that's still you because some people can be consistent in the wrong things. Right? That's for sure. But being consistent on calories, protein steps, maybe resistance training, drinking more water, there's decades of research on the benefits of this, so you're sticking to that.
Speaker 1:But if someone comes out and says, hey, there's this new thing, la la la la la, and you're consistent with that, then really are you going down something that's evidence based or are you going down something that sounds science y? Now this is like the thing now, so many companies are having a lot of funding for continuous glucose monitors and they say long term benefits are better to track your glucose. But really, there's no benefit for weight loss for tracking that because this comes under the calories, protein steps. You can have high carb, low carb, we know this, this is a fact. Metabolic world studies have proven this.
Speaker 1:So yes, some people could be doing that for years thinking that analyzing their reaction to bread and reaction to rice, reaction to meals every day is going to give them some insight. Going to change your life. But really it's not moving the needle for anything, just gives anxiety over foods. So consistency in the things that matters make all the difference. Some days are good, some days are not as great, but be grateful for all types of days.
Speaker 1:So I had a few questions from Nick Wareham from the University of Cambridge about our LeanShield protection score mechanism and stuff and I think it's interesting to cover the research. I've had to come back with him on what matters, why is it good proxy score for muscle protection, and I think guys for you to review the research and why it's important that what you're doing is backed by evidence. And I think mentioning it to you guys in many different ways is important because I've had a few messages, you know, I'm on GLP one and some days after the injection, I'm only eating 800 calories and then I can eat 1,007, that's my target. And I think it's important to realise maybe some days at low calorie is okay as long as protein is near your target, which is difficult, but as an average over the week where do you land? The average is really what matters.
Speaker 1:But yeah, it's important that if you are on low calories you do need to increase your protein and you do need to make sure you do some kind of training. Find something that works for you, whether it's a group class in the community, whether it's one once a week full of RDPT, anything like that makes a huge difference. Don't discount one workout a week. Okay. So can users maintain muscle during large GLP-one driven deficit at home?
Speaker 1:And I mentioned this yesterday, you can. You can save 80% of your lean body mass by going high protein, more than what the app suggests. So anything above what the app suggests, you're going to get benefits from that. So that's important to realize. What happens post GLP-one discontinuation and rebound?
Speaker 1:So rebound fat gain without muscle regain is gonna be bad for a sarcopenic state. Right? So this is the primary risk, preserving muscle during GLP one phase, or you can change that. Preserving muscle during any weight loss phase is the best defense. Our platform, so Parapal, has this type of baked in.
Speaker 1:So you essentially want to start building, by the way, is useful. You're moving. While steps isn't directly like, yeah, it's gonna keep hold of your muscle, you are moving, you're using your legs, you're walking around, and many of you will have felt this, you usually walk 4,000 steps a day, one day you walk 9,000 steps a day and you're like oh my hips, oh my glutes, my calves, sometimes you think wow that's like strained me a bit. And for sure going from 4,000 to 9,000 steps a day you're going to feel that for a few days and then it normalizes, you get used to it and then your muscles are used to oh you're walking 9,000 steps a day. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:So it's important that we build these habits in, especially steps, deficit is not too big and ideally one workout a week to start with and this is building what we would expect is to protect the muscle mass during the weight loss phase. When it comes to going to maintenance or especially for people on GLP-1s who come off the GLP-1s, because you haven't lost the muscle mass that usually happens, there isn't this massive appetite for your body to go back and eat loads to reclaim that lost muscle. It is far less, it's blunted a lot. But people have raging appetites after GLP-one mainly because, one, they come off the appetite suppressing effects of GLP-one, but two, once those effects have been taken away and they've lost a huge amount of muscle mass, the body is crying, Hey, get that muscle back now. Eat, eat, eat, eat, eat.
Speaker 1:That's what's happening. And to realize when you go to maintenance, so you've done the fat loss phase, go to maintenance, your protein requirements can come down. So you don't have to think you're gonna have to eat this protein target forever. So say now your target's 120 grams a day. Once you've lost the fat that you wanna lose and you're happy with where you're at and you've got a maintenance, your protein target could reduce to 90 grams, 100 grams roughly a day, and the reason for this is is because you're no longer in an energy deficit.
Speaker 1:Your body is getting the energy it needs to function. So the requirements for protein come down because you're in a less catabolic state. There's less muscle being utilized for energy, so you don't have to go so high in protein, which is welcoming for a lot of people because I know some of you are thinking it's really hard for me to hit my protein target. And I think, yes, it's a challenge. You have to try and work on recipes that help you, you've to try and get those snacks and include protein, you've to maybe start your day with a high protein breakfast.
Speaker 1:And I think realizing, do know what, I'm doing this to protect and then once I get to where I am, it can come down. It's probably quite nice to think about that and you can have more flexibility with your food choices then because your protein isn't so high, right? So there is that at the end of this, which is awesome. And a reminder on the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, which I've mentioned in my reply to Nick. So the Minnesota starvation experiment is a landmark study on this topic.
Speaker 1:Volunteers for six months severe calorie restriction, they lost 25% of their body weight. So in most studies on GLP ones, they lose between 15 to 20% of their body weight. So these guys without GLP ones, when extreme, lost 25% of their body weight. So if you weighed a 100, lost 70 lost 25 KGs, including significant amount of muscle and organ tissue. Right?
Speaker 1:And they monitored them during the refeeding phase, so after they stopped the starvation. And they they they noted a phenomenon called fat overshooting. So during the recovery period, the participants' appetites became huge monstrous, and they regained weight rapidly. The composition of the regained weight was disproportionately fat. So say for example, they lost 100 pounds of weight, right, during the starvation, they would have lost 60 pounds of fat, 40 pounds of lean body mass, which maybe is like 30 pounds of that is muscle.
Speaker 1:But when they regained the weight, nearly all of that weight who have been regained was fat. So you lose 60 pounds of fat, you lose 40 pounds of lean tissue, then you go from the starvation state in the sense that starvation was the topic because of the, concentration camps, and then all of the weight they were regaining was mainly fat. And then muscle mass and organ tissue was trying to be regained after the fat was regained essentially. So this left them with a higher body fat percentage and worse body composition than when they started. And I mentioned yesterday skinny fat is the term people tend to use for that.
Speaker 1:So the look on this is that essentially the body's primary instinct is to refill the emergency energy stores, which is fat, as quickly as possible. So rebuilding metabolically expensive muscle tissue is a lower priority even though after the fat is regained, there is a huge priority, and your body does scream to get that back. Modern studies have confirmed this and explained it as well. They often call it in modern studies preferential catch up fat, stuff like that. That's the reason why things like that happen.
Speaker 1:And there's something else called the P ratio of protein tissue being gained and lost and things like that, but there's a bit more detail about that. So just to be careful. And he's asking, is there evidence for post GLP-one training? And this is interesting. So there was a foundational study by Ludran, I'm hoping I'm saying that right, demonstrated an intense exercise program alone was as effective as continued liraglutide.
Speaker 1:So liraglutide is like pre Ozempic. It was an effective GLP-one, but not as effective as Ozempic, but there's some research on it. So let me just mention that again. Though the study showed that an intensive exercise program alone was as effective as continued GLP-one usage for weight maintenance one year after initial low calorie diet with the GLP one. So critically as well, in the second year after all intervention stopped, the exercise only group showed significantly better weight maintenance than the liraglutide only group, which is the GLP one, right, Proving that the durability of the exercise habit.
Speaker 1:So just to make that clear, they perform an exercise 2.4 times a week on average. Basically, what they're saying here is if you put a group of people together, some people are on the kind of like, let's call them appetite suppressant drugs, and they don't train. And then some people are on appetite suppressant drugs and training. Right? And then some people are just training.
Speaker 1:The appetite suppressant and the appetite suppressant with training, they lost weight during the phase, of course. When it came to at the end of using the drug, they looked at the groups. Obviously, the group that did just the suppressant drug just kind of cracked on with their life as normal. Like, They took this drug, reduced their appetite and then afterwards they went back to normal. But the group that started to build a habit of training during the weight loss drug and then they come off it, they would have held on to more muscle mass and they would have found it easier to maintain their lower weight because they got more metabolically active tissue and that's what happened.
Speaker 1:So I think it's important to realize here guys if you are doing parapali or if you're on GLP or whatever, this is your chance to build habits to last, build a lifestyle that works for you, that's why we try and get steps higher, that's why we try and do stuff that doesn't require huge cognitive load because you have to be doing something that builds into your life. It's really, really important that you do stuff you can manage. It's way better to do one workout a week for fifty two weeks than train three times a week for three weeks and then take five weeks off, six weeks off, then go back for a week, go back for maybe two weeks. That's stressful. But just saying to yourself, one day a week, it might be a Sunday where Sunday is the quietest day for you, Sundays I'm gonna do some exercise, I mean resistance exercise, weights, resistance band, class, whatever.
Speaker 1:And then the rest of the days I'm gonna be walking a lot. And that's a perfectly reasonable, awesome plan for your activity and I think most people need to realize that the guidance for what you need to do per week exercise wise is low. And if you want to up the ante, essentially you can do interval walking like the Japanese method of one minute fast, one minute slow, or you can do two minutes fast, two minutes slow, just to show some additional benefits for strength in the legs doing that. And that's it. That's amazing news for you all.
Speaker 1:You should be super motivated by this. Like, I'm not asking you to do a CrossFit six times a week. If they said to me, Scott, you know, the only way to hold on to muscle is CrossFit six times a week, I'd say, take my muscle. Goodbye. I am not doing that.
Speaker 1:Sorry, buddy. I am staying away. You know what I mean? We are in a very lucky state. It's a very minimal dose we have to actually do.
Speaker 1:That should super motivate you. Super, super motivate you. And I think from this is really there's more questions and answers and and stuff here like, is the gym required? Absolutely not. You can do stuff at home and you don't have to train straight away.
Speaker 1:Do people understand this? Is it trial? Are we going to do a clinical study? Yes, yes, yes. But yeah, that's it for today.
Speaker 1:I want you to just get motivated by the fact, guys, that what you're doing is something that is achievable. I'm not asking you to do crazy amount of things. I'm telling you what the decades of research has said and I think it's important that if you are feeling overwhelmed, look at just doing one of the core things. Just do your calories today or just do your protein or just do your steps. You don't have to do all three every single day.
Speaker 1:But in our own data analysis of users since the start of Powerball to now, there is an additional benefit for adding each one. So for example, people who hit the calorie target, they do have better results than people who track and don't hit the targets we give. So we see that they've lost more weight than we know it's going to be mostly fat. But then when we look at people who do the calorie target and the steps target we provide, we see an additional boost, even more success. And then people who do the protein, calories and steps, there's even an additional boost again, it's like it keeps building on each other.
Speaker 1:And we looked at people's lean yield scores because we do ask you whether you do weights or not on the questionnaire, now we're starting to pull in exercise from Apple Health or you can add them manually to the app. It's not about calories, it's really to be ready for lean shield. We look back at our users and we said what's their lean shield score? People that follow the calorie targets we give and the protein, LeanShield scores are way better, way better than the people that don't hit the targets because the protein is too low, people think the targets are too high, so they decide to go lower calories without realising that puts them in a worse state to maintain muscle mass, their lean cheese scores are less, so they put them at risk or moderate protection. The people that follow our scores looking back are in a good protection state and that's a really good place to be.
Speaker 1:So yeah, we've done this analysis, so guys, you can do one and get great results, but doing two and three on top is amazing, but work towards it. Today just do it from now till bedtime. Voice note, text into the app, do the brand search if you want, which means you can manually search, Backward scan, we've got an update coming in the next few days where we've improved barcode scan and matching by 35%. So basically we could get a match seven out of 10 times on average and now it's up to 9.5 times out of 10. There's a few more things to to do.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, super amazing. We're improving the barcode scan and efficiency because, you know, about a quarter of you barcode scan every day as your preferential tracking. But use all the tools. Don't be perfectionist because you're not gonna get anywhere doing that, and just focus on what I've mentioned today, and you'll be in a super good place. Ignore the marketing of all these amazing ish sounding products on social media, taking you down left, right, center.
Speaker 1:You're spending hundreds of pounds of supplements. Get this right first. You can do the the little details later, but get this stuff right first, and I promise you, you'll be in a much better place. Have a good day. Speak to soon.
