Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 43: What supplements do I use?
Transcript
- Cameron Cummings: Welcome to the Cameron's Conversations podcast. So in today's episode, I wanted to touch on supplements and the supplements that I use and why I quite like them. So I've been asked this a few times, a couple of times on Instagram if there's any supplements I'd recommend and what do I use with clients and obviously clients have asked as well. So I'm gonna touch a little bit on that. Now, everybody's a little bit different in terms of what their needs are, but there's some really basic ones that I think are worthwhile for just about anyone. Creatine monohydrate is one of those. So creatine monohydrate is basically the, I think it's the second most researched supplement of all time. And the reason it's so heavily researched in part is because of its effect on kind of like sports performance or if you like physical performance. So there's a lot to creatine in terms of like, and there's some stuff around cognition which I'm gonna talk a little bit about in a second. But basically with creatine, what creatine in essence does is we actually get creatine through our diet, but our main source of creatine in the diet would typically be red meat. So if you are vegan, vegetarian, it is very unlikely you're getting sufficient creatine. So it's just really kind of giving us sufficient creatine, more than we would get typically from our diet, and then we get a bit of a performance improvement from that. So it's not magic, it's not something that's. you know, wild and wonderful. It's actually something we would naturally find in our diet, but because of a lot of us tend to eat a little bit less red meat than we previously would, or vegan, vegetarian, it's just really common right now that you would not typically get enough red meat in to get enough creatine, and actually, practically speaking, you'd be eating slabs of steaks all the bloody time if you were to try and get it all through your diet, so it doesn't make a ton of sense. So for most people, having sort of five grams per day is going to be about bang on. and it is a supplement that is taken daily, which I am pretty woeful, to be honest, at remembering, but I do tend to remember about four times, probably a week. I'm gonna be generous, we'll say four times. So I'm not perfect with it, but in an ideal world, we would take it daily. It doesn't need to be, there used to be this big thing about creatine loading. Basically, if you imagine there's a saturation level with creatine, a lot of the time, what we're trying to achieve with a creatine loading protocol is just to have... lots of it in a short period of time so that you reach saturation quicker and you get the full benefits of it. Now, you will reach saturation no matter what you do. So whether you have that 20 grams a day for three, four days was very typical kind of protocol, or whether you just stick to the normal kind of five grams per day and do that, you will, in both instances, absolutely reach the same place. The reason I'm not such a fan of that kind of loading style approach to it is, A, if you are on a weight loss journey, and this is one of the key things we're gonna talk about, that will cause a significant and rapid weight spike. Now, that will stop and it will plateau out when your weight, sorry, when your creatine levels are saturated, so when your creatine levels on your muscle mass are all saturated, you will find that that weight gain tends to level out, right? So. That's one part of it because a lot of people will lose the plot if they see their weight spiking up by kilo, kilo and a half and often it's not. There is quite a significant sort of spike in weight. Now, the level of spike in weight might vary a little bit based on the amount of creatine in your diet already. Obviously if you've previously been taking it even irregularly, that would have an influence too. But one of the things that we kind of want to be mindful of is that if you are someone who has a very low level of creatine in their diet in the first place, you are likely to have a higher response in terms of a body weight increase. Now, the great thing about that is what's actually happening is water is being drawn into cells in our muscle tissue. The reality is, so that's what's causing the weight spike, the reality is is that has no bearing in a negative way in how you look. So when people say, ⁓ but if you take creatine, you look. watery, it's absolute nonsense. It doesn't work that way because it's drawn into the muscle cell itself. It just doesn't work that way. That's not how it doesn't make a visual difference like that. If anything, if you are quite lean, sometimes your muscles have a little bit of a kind of fuller look to them. How much of a difference that practically makes, I don't really know. I don't think it's that obvious for most people. But the point is this, is that for most people, five grams per day is a really sensible amount. The big benefits are this, that In essence, creatine is primarily used in kind of things like explosive efforts or high intensity efforts. So if you are in the gym and pushing really, really hard for a rep or you're doing something kind of fairly explosive or fairly fast, you're going to get some benefit from it. The way I try and simplify this down is what you might predict is that if you take creatine and you see a bit of a benefit from it, you might be able to squeeze out the odd extra rep. The addition of being able to do the odd extra rep then means that you. over time build a little bit more muscle because you obviously are getting more reps in, which then correlates to building a little bit more muscle, and progressively over time, you end up building more muscle than someone who doesn't supplement it. Now there's been, there's loads of studies on this. The amounts will vary in studies, quite a cool kind of framework for this is for people that respond relatively well to it, sometimes they can build up to 10 % more muscle mass than they would have otherwise built in a year. Now. to clarify, they're not going to increase their current muscle mass in their body by 10 % because they take it. That's not how it works. It's simply that if I was going to add two kilos in a year, I would add 0.2 to that. So I'd add 2.2 kilos, right, 200 grams more. That's the type of difference it makes. Now you might think, well, that's not very much. But then when you take a step back, you think, well, actually, 10 % more, it's equivalent to potentially like four or five weeks worth of training, if that makes sense, because you're kind of thinking, well, that's 10 % of a year, so if over those weeks I would have gained 200 grams anyway. That's not, it's not nothing, it's not insignificant. So when you think about being able to build that little bit more muscle because of it, yeah, it's a pretty cool thing to have in there. So it's well worth it in that context. There's also... Some, and so that's the first reason that basically you would take creatine is you would take it from a performance point of view. It's likely to have a beneficial effect on any kind of sprinting type work. It's going to have a beneficial effect on training in the gym. So when you're kind of pushing hard, when you're doing kind of slightly faster reps, et cetera, there's a whole host of reasons in there. But for anyone doing sports and kind of gym work, it's likely to make sense to supplement. The big drawback is that your weight will go up. Usually when you supplement it, it varies for everyone. My weight tends to sit about a kilo and a half heavier when I'm supplementing creatine. So it does tend to spike up quite a wee bit. It is all water weight. It's not in any way a negative in that sense. And obviously there's no kind of health impact from that, right? It's not gonna impact your health because it's not body fat that we're adding. But of course, for some people in a weight loss phase, it wouldn't make a ton of sense to start supplementing it when you're halfway through a weight loss phase. because, and I have a client doing this right now, where we are doing that because he's obviously got this kind of muscle gain goal. He does want to lose fat too, but he also wants to gain muscle. So we've actually brought Creighton into the mix when he just started with one-to-one coaching with me. But in the first two weeks, it masked, in fact, three weeks, it masked just about all of his fat loss. The scales did drop, but they dropped quite marginally compared to kind of the rate that we're now seeing, which is a good bit faster. and we've changed nothing. The only difference is his creatine levels have now saturated. So he's got enough creatine. He's obviously been supplementing really, really regularly, so almost every day. So he's at that point where it's saturated. So the water weight that he's gained is kind of flattened out. And from now, his weight loss is just as normal. Nothing else changes, right? It's only temporary, but it does have a short-term influence. But that's something to be aware of. There are some other cool studies and showing ⁓ kind of potential. protective effect in kind of older populations and with cognition. There's also some interesting stuff about some research about when people are sleep deprived that if they're supplementing creatine that actually they see less of a decrease in kind of like cognitive performance that would be caused by the sleep deprivation. There's also quite a lot of anecdotal type stuff coming up about. you know, brain fog, menopause, et cetera. I have had a few clients say themselves when they've taken it that that's made a big difference. However, I want to really quickly caveat that. One of the things I try to be very direct and honest about on the podcast is anecdotal stuff isn't necessarily research, it's not the same. Just because I have three clients that say, actually, I think I've noticed a difference doesn't mean they actually necessarily did. It could be placebo or all sorts of other effects. So let's caveat that. And a lot of the research on cognition is a little bit more infancy. Now the importance of me saying that is that when we were talking about it being one of the most researched supplements of all time, that is absolutely the case. But the research on, and in terms of sports performance, the cognition perform, sorry, related stuff, that's a little bit more new, if you like. I think in the next 10, 15 years we'll be pretty clear on its kind of impacts, are certainly much more clear. I think at this stage it's a little bit premature to think that it's a definite must have for those things. However, it's cheap. It has a sports performance slash gym performance slash muscle gain benefit. It might have a benefit in terms of some cognitive things as well. And it's as chips. And there's not many downsides other than a slight increase in water weight, so it's probably worth having. So that was the first one. The second one's really simple. I am Scottish, as you can probably tell by my accent. I live in Scotland. and therefore I get the grand total of bugger all vitamin D. So vitamin D is one that I also supplement and have supplemented for years. I quite like vitamin D as well because it is a fat soluble vitamin as well which means that instead of if you forget on a given day you can just take it back to the next day and that's absolutely fine. So quite often what I actually do is because I'm quite lazy with it as I just have it once a week because I'm much more likely to remember. So I just have seven days worth in one day which is absolutely fine to do. ⁓ to kind of like we call a bolus dose or a higher dose ⁓ in that kind of sense as well because it's a fat soluble vitamin. Obviously, you wouldn't want to take a year's supply in a day, not suggesting that, but if you forget for a couple of days, it's not gonna make any odds if you do have like three days worth rather than one day's worth as well. So I supplement vitamin D. I'm not getting enough sunlight year round. I know some people say, but in summer you don't need it. Well, actually the latitude you're at, if you're in the UK, that's unlikely. If you are very lucky to weather wise in a summer where you are getting sun exposure a lot and you've got a lot of your skin showing to the sun, then you are more likely to be able to produce a good amount of vitamin D. So sure that happens, but when you look at the reality of most people working in nine to five, commuting either side, missing out on the heavy kind of sunshine hours anyway, just getting a few hours sunshine on the Saturday is not going to be sufficient. in the long term and it's just not practical. And again, it also matters how much skin is exposed to the sun as well. So of course, the other thing too is being in Scotland, temperature's often not super, super hot. if you are somewhere like Spain, for example, even if the sun hours weren't as much more than they are here, what you would find is because it's much warmer ambient temperature, you're more likely to have more of your skin on show, so you're more likely to get sufficient vitamin D. the darker your skin is as well, typically ⁓ the more vitamin D you need. So if you are on my side of the equation, which is pasty pasty as could be, bordering on translucent, then you probably need a little bit less vitamin D, but we know that people with darker pigmentation tend to need more vitamin D as well. So that's something that's also worth considering as well. So it's always something that is worth thinking about in a very practical sense. But if you are not in a country that is particularly sunny, and if you are, slightly jealous, but we'll... gloss over that, then vitamin D is something that again, cheap as chips. You can get probably a year's supply for 15 quid, 20 quid, it's not expensive. ⁓ And I would recommend that for most people as well. I certainly use it for most of my clients and I use it myself. So that's another one. Another one I have ⁓ is I have like ⁓ fish oils or omega threes if you like that kind of classic thing. like fish oils is kind of what I would have. You can get vegan variations of that as well. So if you kind of have a quick Google, you'll see that. but I take those simply because I don't like oily fish. I don't actually like fish at all as a meat. I can eat it, I can tolerate it, but I don't particularly like it, so I don't eat it day to day. That therefore means that I am going to potentially be deficient on some of the essential fatty acids, so it makes sense for me to supplement that as well. But vitamin D, creatine, and the essential fatty acids or fish oils kind of type thing is what I can supplement. What I don't... tend to do is supplement much more than that. So there are a few things that I definitely utilise in different contexts. So you could say something like electrolytes. I don't have electrolytes day to day. I don't think for most people that's necessary. And it might not necessarily be the best kind of from a health perspective to do that if you don't need them. So, you know, we can get too much of things. That's why it's important we don't supplement the things that we don't need. Something that I do periodically supplement is ZMA, which is like zinc and magnesium complex as well. So it's zinc magnesium acetate. So I tend to have to supplement that as well. I actually have some in my kitchen right now. I've just not used it in a while. I'm slightly conscious that sometimes I don't know if I get enough zinc and magnesium in my diet. There is a little bit of a link towards sleep. If your zinc and magnesium levels were insufficient, so it can improve sleep quality, but. As with many supplements, if you are deficient, it will tend to have a positive effect up to the kind of optimal dose, wherever that is, right? So the same applies with vitamin D. There's a healthy range, then there's probably a range just that sits a little bit above that healthy range in terms of optimal, and then I think above and beyond that may potentially not be useful. And then after a certain level, harmful. Thankfully in things like vitamin D, you have to take a pretty large dose for vitamin D to be harmful. know, if someone has... they take their Monday and Tuesdays together rather than just Mondays, that's not going to do it for you, right? That's not gonna happen. But if we had the whole hundreds of tablets of it, but it's not really an issue. But more broadly, when we're thinking about supplements, we want to have that in mind that when we are sort of deficient on something, it will have a positive impact. If we're not deficient, it probably won't. And in certain things, we don't want too much of it. Things like iron are a perfect example. You shouldn't really supplement iron unless you need to supplement iron. So if your iron levels, if your ferric levels are low, then that's something and you can get a blood test done by your GP that'll establish that or they're kind of a low, low end of healthy. You might want to note that up a bit, but we want to be sensible about that. Having a high kind of iron dosage supplement when you don't need it probably isn't a clever thing to do because of the long-term potential impact. So I think it's important to consider things like that as well as that, you know, some things like water soluble vitamins like vitamin C, if you have too much vitamin C, you just pee it out, vitamin D you store it. So anything that's fat soluble vitamin, you can have too much of, but again, thankfully in the context of vitamin D, you'd have to be bluntly a bit of a dafty to overdo it on that. You'd really have to get your doses wrong and some to manage to do that. So I think within reason. You know with these things we don't need to be too concerned like vitamin D It's very unlikely you would end up with too high a level of that and iron one to kind of watch out a little bit more for but that's something I just wanted to mention that I do have and Magnesium acetate do I notice a difference? I can't really tell I try to have it occasionally but I often bloody forget and it does so I thought before in previous instances where I've taken it that it helps I'm more likely to take it during a kind of weight loss phase because I'm conscious that I'm just eating less food and therefore less likely to get sufficient micronutrients in through my diet. And that's something to be mindful of is that for a lot of people actually, in a kind of weight loss phase, you are somewhat more likely to be deficient in something or become deficient in something simply because you ⁓ are obviously eating less food overall, et cetera, et cetera, and potentially less food variety. An interesting one on multivitamins. So I've always kind of subscribed, this is the classic thing that I always got talked about in biophysiology. physiology lecturer that all stuck with me is you know you're in trouble when you say the word surely. So when it comes to multivitamins you would surely think that by having that that would be a good catch all in if you're deficient it would have a bit of an impact. The problem is is there's not very much research that's compelling that multivitamins actually seem to do anything. Like we seem to when we kind of look at the research we don't see a particularly strong correlation with positive health outcomes with multivitamins. It's not saying there's negative ones because there isn't really in that regard. but it doesn't seem to make that much difference. I think sometimes there's this peace of mind where people will kind of like have it as cheap and completely have it, and I've definitely done that. But actually, if I was being purely research based, I don't know that there is enough evidence to really support multivitamin usage that's particularly compelling. I've not seen anything come out recently that's made me change my view on that. I'm not saying I wouldn't, because I often read research and kind of try and challenge views that I have, but. That's quite an interesting one. So those are some of the supplements I take. So as I say, creatine, vitamin D, and sort of fish oils are essential fatty acids that I get through those. That's kind of why I have those. But other than that, I don't tend to take much. Are there any other supplements I sometimes recommend for our clients? Well, beta-alanine can be useful from a performance point of view if you're an endurance runner, endurance cyclist, but for most people that's pretty specific. And even that one you have to watch because some people tolerate it better than others, but it can be useful for endurance sports. Other than that, there's not really anything I recommend. There are some supplements which I think are quite popular that there's a little bit research for, so things like ashwagandha, and that might have a potential benefit on stress levels and things like that. There's sort of, think, when I looked at the research, last kind of like a fairly weak to moderate link in that regard. But there's not really anything I actually recommend. And there are plenty of things that clients will sort swear by and try. Collagen's an interesting one. The research on collagen doesn't compel me. I've not seen enough strong evidence to not think that actually for a lot of the time it's a bit of a marketing ploy. And if you're getting sufficient protein in your diet anyway, there's maybe an argument that you probably don't need it. And for a lot of people, they might be getting the benefit of supplementing collagen. because they are getting more protein in the diet. So that's an interesting thought process as well. Although I'll probably do a separate episode on that because there's so much you could go into. But in general, I think that there's an element of you can probably save your pennies and not buy a lot of things. don't think that a lot of things do work or are quite cheap. So we can kind of stick to those as well. And if you are currently struggling with weight loss or you are supplemented up to the eyeballs and you're making no bloody progress, because as it happens, unfortunately from a weight loss perspective, supplements don't do very much for you. They can be useful from a health perspective, even from a performance perspective, but sadly for weight loss you are quote unquote shit out of luck on that one. So the big thing that you can do is obviously look after your nutrition. And if you are struggling to do that and you're struggling to shift the weight that you need to shift to get into the kind of shape that you want to. and you feel like you're needing a bit of a hand, then that is exactly what one-to-one coaching is for. The link to that is in the show notes. You can follow the link, book a call, and we will have a very relaxed chat about what coaching involves and how it can help you.