Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / 10 Fat Loss Myths the Fitness Industry Keeps Selling (Isaiah Mitchell) | Ep 313

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10 Fat Loss Myths the Fitness Industry Keeps Selling (Isaiah Mitchell) | Ep 313 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: Have you tried intermittent fasting?
• 0:03
  Philip Pape: Have you tried clean eating 100% of the time?
• 0:06
  Philip Pape: Have you tried cutting carbs completely because you heard they make you fat?
• 0:10
  Philip Pape: If you have, you're among the millions of people who might be struggling to lose fat, despite doing what the fitness industry says you should do, and these are among the many myths out there that could be holding you back.
• 0:23
  Philip Pape: Today, we are exposing 10 of those myths with my guest, isaiah Mitchell, who transformed his own physique by losing 100 pounds and keeping it off for nearly a decade.
• 0:33
  Philip Pape: We're going to share what works instead of what's being peddled by industry and influencers, such as why intuitive eating might be sabotaging your progress, the truth about hormones, about seed oils, and why that dream body might not solve all your problems after all.
• 0:49
  Philip Pape: We want you to stop wasting time on strategies that don't work and focusing on the pillars that do.
• 1:03
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency.
• 1:10
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, philip Pape, and today I'm bringing you a special collaboration with Isaiah Mitchell, owner of Relentless Pursuit Coaching and host of the Fat Loss Forever podcast.
• 1:21
  Philip Pape: I want you to go follow that right now, because we are doing a collaboration in both feeds.
• 1:26
  Philip Pape: Isaiah has a really powerful story because he lost 100 pounds and has maintained that loss for nearly a decade.
• 1:33
  Philip Pape: But it was only after years of losing, regaining the same 20 pounds you know the yo-yo diet cycle that he learned the real science of fat loss, the inner psychological work required for change, just like we love to talk about on this show.
• 1:51
  Philip Pape: So today we're discussing 10 fat loss myths that are being sold to you being sold to me and Isaiah by the fitness industry that you want to be aware of if you want to actually make progress and stop spinning your wheels.
• 1:59
  Philip Pape: But wait, there's more, because we're going to discuss 10 more myths over on his podcast, fat Loss Forever, where he dropped an episode and had me on to discuss some myths about broken metabolisms, fasted, cardio, body fat building, muscle over 40, among others.
• 2:15
  Philip Pape: But in today's episode you are going to learn from him about strategies like intermittent fasting, the truth about carbs and sugar, and why even achieving your dream body might not solve everything.
• 2:25
  Philip Pape: Isaiah, welcome to the show.
• 2:26
  Isaiah Mitchell: Thank you, brother.
• 2:27
  Isaiah Mitchell: Thank you, happy to be on, and it's crazy that, just with even these 20 myths that we've been able to come up with relatively quickly like me and you had our list put together so so fast and there's still so many more like we could, we could make this, you know, bi-monthly collaboration until the end of the year and we'd probably still have some, uh, some myths to sift through.
• 2:50
  Isaiah Mitchell: But, yeah, I'm excited to get into this, especially, uh, the deeper psychological stuff which is really going to be, uh, more so for our last one on the, the dream body.
• 2:59
  Philip Pape: but, yeah, I'm excited to dive in and happy to be here yeah, and I think, coming from this lens of myths and you're right, because we chatted back and forth and you came up with 10 in a minute and I said, oh, I like a lot of those.
• 3:11
  Philip Pape: You took the ones I would have come up with first, but let me just think for another minute.
• 3:14
  Philip Pape: Okay, here's 10 more.
• 3:16
  Philip Pape: No big deal.
• 3:17
  Philip Pape: It's a good lens, because the confusion and the copious amount of information on social media and the internet is often the first thing that makes people overwhelmed.
• 3:27
  Philip Pape: Right?
• 3:27
  Philip Pape: They come to us as a coach or in a Facebook group and they're like what do I do?
• 3:31
  Philip Pape: There's just this guy's saying seed oils are bad.
• 3:34
  Philip Pape: This guy says I should fast.
• 3:35
  Philip Pape: What the heck do I do?
• 3:36
  Philip Pape: So let's start with one of the biggest ones of all, man, which is intermittent fasting.
• 3:40
  Philip Pape: Is this magic pill for everything?
• 3:43
  Philip Pape: It solves everything.
• 3:44
  Philip Pape: It solves everything.
• 3:45
  Philip Pape: It gives you mental clarity, it helps you lose weight.
• 3:49
  Philip Pape: It's autophagy is going to clean up your cells.
• 3:51
  Philip Pape: You're going to live forever.
• 3:52
  Philip Pape: What's the reality, man?
• 3:54
  Isaiah Mitchell: Yeah, and what you said.
• 3:55
  Isaiah Mitchell: There is a great place to start, because I think one of the most egregious parts about intermittent fasting is all of the ridiculous claims that get attached to it, and a lot of it's true for sure, but not to the degree that it's being sold to you.
• 4:13
  Isaiah Mitchell: It's very, very largely blown out of proportion.
• 4:16
  Isaiah Mitchell: And if we could just kind of summarize the myth in a sentence, it's intermittent fasting melts fat, boosts your metabolism and bypasses the rules of calories, bypasses the laws of thermodynamics.
• 4:33
  Isaiah Mitchell: And now the reality here is intermittent fasting works because it helps you eat less.
• 4:40
  Isaiah Mitchell: It's really not any more complex than that.
• 4:42
  Isaiah Mitchell: Not because there's something magical about fasting in and of itself, and in my opinion, fasting tends to just lead to a worse relationship with food, and I really think it should be reserved for spiritual practices for you detaching from food and learning to just sit with yourself, learning how to be bored and not fill in that hole constantly with food.
• 5:08
  Isaiah Mitchell: That's where I think the magic of fasting really shines is separating ourselves from food.
• 5:14
  Isaiah Mitchell: Now to get into the bit of the evidence in 2020, we had a randomized control trial published in JAMA Internal Medicine and they found no significant weight loss benefit for the fasting group compared to the regular meal timing group, and this is just one of hundreds of studies we have showing no benefit for fat loss or even autophagy, which is another thing that gets thrown out there in the whole fasting thing.
• 5:44
  Isaiah Mitchell: The thing to understand about autophagy is it's not just an on or off switch.
• 5:50
  Isaiah Mitchell: This is something that's always happening in the background.
• 5:54
  Isaiah Mitchell: So when they equated calories and protein between the two groups group that ate all day, group that did intermittent fasting their results were exactly the same.
• 6:03
  Isaiah Mitchell: All day group that did intermittent fasting their results were exactly the same.
• 6:05
  Isaiah Mitchell: And in fact, some of the fasting participants actually lost a little bit more muscle mass, which is absolutely what we don't want.
• 6:13
  Isaiah Mitchell: So here is what intermittent fasting does.
• 6:16
  Isaiah Mitchell: This is the truth.
• 6:17
  Isaiah Mitchell: It helps some people keyword some people control their hunger by shortening their eating window.
• 6:26
  Isaiah Mitchell: So if you lock yourself into I'm only allowed to eat during this time for some people you're going to end up eating less calories and then you lose weight.
• 6:35
  Isaiah Mitchell: But secondly, it can really help you create some structure and boundaries around meals and if you're someone that's just getting started, I don't think this is an absolutely terrible idea, but it's definitely not the solution to all of your problems and for some people it may improve insulin sensitivity and digestion, especially if you're someone that's used to just kind of eating all day and just kind of nibbling and grazing here and there.
• 7:01
  Isaiah Mitchell: You establish some routine and some structure.
• 7:04
  Isaiah Mitchell: Give your body a couple hours to not be eating food and not be digesting food, and we can see some health improvements there.
• 7:12
  Isaiah Mitchell: Now what it doesn't do is override a calorie surplus.
• 7:17
  Isaiah Mitchell: It does not guarantee fat loss and it does not work for everyone, especially women.
• 7:24
  Isaiah Mitchell: It does not work for everyone, especially women, and a lot of them experience worse sleep, worse cravings and even menstrual cycle disruption.
• 7:30
  Isaiah Mitchell: So for my ladies out there, I strongly recommend eating a balanced breakfast, so kind of our TLDR here for intermittent fasting.
• 7:39
  Isaiah Mitchell: If you eat more calories than you burn, even in an eight-hour window, you will still gain weight Period, end of story.
• 7:48
  Philip Pape: Yeah, I love that you got into the nuance because I think that is a recurring theme that's going to come up as we go through each of these that we want the listener to understand we're thinking through this, looking at the data, looking at the evidence and also trying to personalize this that there are potentially benefits to everything we talk about today.
• 8:04
  Philip Pape: You have to understand the context for that.
• 8:06
  Philip Pape: Just two things real quick.
• 8:07
  Philip Pape: You mentioned, for the weight loss, for the calorie thing, I saw a post by I think it was the bodybuilding dieticians on Instagram today where they had a table and it had all the diets right Keto, carnivore, et cetera, et cetera and it had all the things that were unique with these check boxes.
• 8:21
  Philip Pape: The last column was calorie deficit and every single one was checked, including the row that said energy balance, right, like a normal, flexible diet.
• 8:28
  Philip Pape: So it's important people understand that's the main driver here.
• 8:31
  Philip Pape: The thing you mentioned about spirituality and sitting with your hunger is a really good one, man, because I literally just got off a call with a client who's more of an advanced guy.
• 8:41
  Philip Pape: He likes to experiment with different protocols and I actually suggested to him hey, have you ever tried fasting for a day to see what it feels like for your hunger.
• 8:50
  Isaiah Mitchell: Yes.
• 8:50
  Philip Pape: Because we were talking about psychological and physical and I used to fast.
• 8:54
  Philip Pape: I don't anymore.
• 8:55
  Philip Pape: But when I'm in a fat loss phase now, hunger is no big deal.
• 8:59
  Philip Pape: When it happens I can kind of sit with it.
• 9:01
  Philip Pape: You know, move on.
• 9:03
  Philip Pape: So just maybe pulling that thread a tiny bit and then we'll move on to the next one, because we got, we got to tend to move, to get through, oh, this hunger thing isn't really that much of a challenge.
• 9:31
  Isaiah Mitchell: It really doesn't have that much power and control over me, outside of the power and control that I'm giving to it and you know anyone that's done a 24 hour fast.
• 9:35
  Isaiah Mitchell: You know there comes a point pretty early on in the day, maybe around like noon 2 pm, where it's just gone.
• 9:42
  Isaiah Mitchell: The hunger is gone, the desire to eat is gone and the mental clarity just comes in and the presence with you and your environment, your ability to just show up for people around you.
• 9:54
  Isaiah Mitchell: Better.
• 9:54
  Isaiah Mitchell: That day, like everything just gets better.
• 9:56
  Isaiah Mitchell: So I think that's probably the best way to use.
• 10:00
  Isaiah Mitchell: Fasting is some sort of, you know, spiritual religious practice, whatever it is, but as a end-all, be-all solution to your weight loss problems from now until the rest of your life?
• 10:10
  Isaiah Mitchell: Probably not, and it's it's kind of the same thing with keto.
• 10:14
  Isaiah Mitchell: We want to ask ourselves what am I actually going to learn from this if I actually end up at my goal?
• 10:22
  Isaiah Mitchell: So, for example, if you do keto and you lose 100 pounds, what did you learn?
• 10:27
  Isaiah Mitchell: To avoid carbs, that's it.
• 10:31
  Isaiah Mitchell: You got nothing else out of that and now here you are, 100 pounds down, wondering how you're going to avoid carbs for the rest of your life.
• 10:38
  Isaiah Mitchell: Same thing with fasting.
• 10:39
  Isaiah Mitchell: If you lose 100 pounds fasting for 16 hours a day, what did you learn To not eat between this time and that time?
• 10:46
  Isaiah Mitchell: Nothing about portion sizes, meal building, macros.
• 10:50
  Isaiah Mitchell: What's in your food?
• 10:51
  Isaiah Mitchell: How do certain foods make you feel?
• 10:53
  Isaiah Mitchell: So we want to get curious and actually ask ourselves am I going to learn something I can keep forever from this tool?
• 11:00
  Isaiah Mitchell: And then also, can I do this for 10 years?
• 11:01
  Isaiah Mitchell: Yeah, because if I can't, I probably shouldn't even do this for 10 years.
• 11:04
  Isaiah Mitchell: Yeah, because if I can't, I probably shouldn't even do it for 10 days, let alone 10 minutes, because come day 11, the inputs gone, so the output is gone, and this really is a game of inputs and outputs.
• 11:17
  Isaiah Mitchell: We take away that input, we take away the output.
• 11:21
  Philip Pape: Yeah, agree, and so you want that input to be sustainable, which is actually a perfect segue into the next myth, which is about intuitive eating.
• 11:28
  Philip Pape: That it's a great weight loss or fat loss strategy for beginners Listening to your bodies, eating when you're hungry, stopping when full.
• 11:37
  Philip Pape: However it's defined.
• 11:38
  Philip Pape: Why is that a myth?
• 11:40
  Isaiah Mitchell: Yeah, yeah.
• 11:41
  Isaiah Mitchell: So this is a really a really good one, and one that's been around for a long time and, just like the one we got into and the rest of them, there's a lot of good stuff here and there's a lot of truth, but the problem is people don't realize that intuitive eating is a final destination.
• 11:58
  Isaiah Mitchell: It is not a great tool in the beginning, because most people's intuition tells them to eat pizza and ice cream.
• 12:06
  Isaiah Mitchell: That's what most people's intuition is telling them.
• 12:09
  Isaiah Mitchell: So in the beginning of most people's weight loss journey, we can't yet trust our intuition, and that's okay.
• 12:17
  Isaiah Mitchell: So the myth is that all you need to do is listen to your body and you'll lose weight.
• 12:22
  Isaiah Mitchell: But for most of us, listening to our body is kind of what got us in this position in the first place, and of course, there's probably a lot of deeper stuff underlying their trauma.
• 12:33
  Isaiah Mitchell: How food was talked about and interacted with in your house as a child All of that plays a very significant role.
• 12:41
  Isaiah Mitchell: But the reality is, this only works if your internal cues are calibrated, and for most people they're just not.
• 12:49
  Isaiah Mitchell: So if you have spent years or even decades dieting, binging, skipping meals, emotional eating, your hunger and fullness signals are probably way off.
• 13:01
  Isaiah Mitchell: You're probably always hungry and never really satisfied.
• 13:05
  Isaiah Mitchell: So telling someone To just intuitively eat Under those conditions Is like handing them a compass that's been spinning for years.
• 13:15
  Isaiah Mitchell: It's just not going to get you anywhere.
• 13:17
  Isaiah Mitchell: So what most beginners need First Is a basic understanding Of energy balance.
• 13:24
  Isaiah Mitchell: They need a consistent Meal structure structure and they need at least an awareness of protein, fiber and calorie intake.
• 13:33
  Isaiah Mitchell: And then after that we can layer in those intuitive eating skills on top of that.
• 13:39
  Isaiah Mitchell: And in fact my clients that are working on this stuff tracking their calories, getting an understanding of energy balance, bringing some awareness to protein, fiber, calorie intake Every time we are presented with an opportunity where we're in a social eating environment, we're outside of our house, we're at a restaurant, we're at a barbecue these are opportunities to sharpen that intuitive eating sword while still laying down the foundation of what we actually need.
• 14:08
  Isaiah Mitchell: So in those moments restaurant, birthday, whatever it is I'll advise my clients to not even track that day.
• 14:15
  Isaiah Mitchell: Let's just use the day to listen to our body and get better at that skill.
• 14:19
  Isaiah Mitchell: So intuition is only helpful when it's been trained and most people need to get some reps in with structure before they can actually trust their instincts.
• 14:32
  Philip Pape: Yeah, framing it as a skill is exactly the way to go.
• 14:34
  Philip Pape: Right, and people often don't want to put in the time, the work, put in the patience to do that.
• 14:39
  Philip Pape: It's kind of like with strength training, right?
• 14:41
  Philip Pape: You don't just go into the gym and say do what you feel, man.
• 14:43
  Philip Pape: Just you know you're going to be fine.
• 14:45
  Philip Pape: Just do what you feel.
• 14:46
  Philip Pape: Pick whatever machine, do what you want.
• 14:47
  Max: That's what I did in the beginning, you know, yeah.
• 14:50
  Philip Pape: Or, hey, I'm going to give you a paycheck with your job.
• 15:00
  Philip Pape: I want you to just you know, spend and save, don't track it, don't don't have a budget.
• 15:03
  Philip Pape: Skill is great.
• 15:04
  Philip Pape: And then, especially, what you said about practicing pulling away from the support mechanisms of tracking, for example, when you go on a vacation, having used the tracking long enough, that you've honed that skill and I'll tell you, people have been doing this for years and years still aren't going to be perfect at it and like, oh, I love to use tracking just to know that I can be precise, and then I can come off of it for a while and kind of go back and forth.
• 15:26
  Philip Pape: So yeah, guys, you just intuitive eating, you can get there, but you have to start somewhere else before you can get there.
• 15:32
  Max: So that's a good one All right man.
• 15:34
  Philip Pape: Myth number three always love this one.
• 15:37
  Philip Pape: Cardio for fat loss.
• 15:38
  Philip Pape: Just so you know, we've talked about this a lot in the podcast recently.
• 15:41
  Philip Pape: I'm a big fan of anaerobic sprinting and not chronic cardio and doing lots of walking and lifting, so people listening to the show are on board with that.
• 15:50
  Philip Pape: But there's a lot that still say, hey, I'm doing the Peloton, I'm doing all the cardio, I'm running whatever.
• 15:55
  Philip Pape: Why is that a problem for fat loss?
• 15:58
  Philip Pape: Aren't you burning a ton more calories?
• 16:00
  Philip Pape: Isn't it great for that?
• 16:02
  Isaiah Mitchell: Right, for sure, for sure.
• 16:03
  Isaiah Mitchell: And this is where right what you said there is where a lot of the confusion happens, and this kind of goes back to having a basic understanding of energy balance, but also having some semblance of understanding of how the metabolism works, as well as adaptation and survival.
• 16:22
  Isaiah Mitchell: So if we take an hour of cardio and compare that to an hour of strength training, is that hour of cardio going to burn more calories?
• 16:32
  Isaiah Mitchell: Absolutely, but not for long.
• 16:34
  Isaiah Mitchell: So if you run a mile and that mile, you are burning 300 calories in that first week.
• 16:42
  Isaiah Mitchell: Burning 300 calories in that first week.
• 16:48
  Isaiah Mitchell: Not very long after that, the total caloric burn is going to significantly decrease, and this is because your body is getting better at that thing you keep making it do.
• 16:55
  Isaiah Mitchell: And in the case of cardio, your body is becoming more efficient with calories, meaning it doesn't have to use as much energy as it used to to do that same amount of cardio.
• 17:07
  Isaiah Mitchell: Now, in the context of survival, this is great.
• 17:10
  Isaiah Mitchell: It'd be absolute disaster if we were hunter gatherers and burning four or five, six thousand calories a day.
• 17:17
  Isaiah Mitchell: We wouldn't be here today.
• 17:19
  Isaiah Mitchell: So thank goodness our metabolism adapts in both directions.
• 17:24
  Isaiah Mitchell: Now the myth here is if you want to burn fat, just do more cardio.
• 17:30
  Isaiah Mitchell: Now, by no means am I anti-cardio or saying cardio doesn't have a place in people's fitness regimes.
• 17:37
  Isaiah Mitchell: It absolutely does, specifically for cardiovascular health and, like every exercise, cardio is just a tool, not necessarily a body sculpting strategy.
• 17:50
  Isaiah Mitchell: So, yes, cardio absolutely burns calories, but it does not build muscle, it does not build your metabolism long term and it does not reshape your body in the way that you're after in that tone, lean, defined, athletic look.
• 18:09
  Isaiah Mitchell: That's just not going to get you that and in fact, a 2012 meta analysis in obesity reviews showed that diet plus resistance training diet so calorie deficit plus strength training consistently outperform cardio for fat loss and body composition.
• 18:29
  Isaiah Mitchell: So long low intensity cardio, minimal calorie burn, high intensity cardio going to be very tough to recover from and can also spike your hunger no-transcript.
• 19:07
  Philip Pape: What are we trying to get here?
• 19:08
  Philip Pape: A strong, muscular, lean, healthy, functional body that only get there by lifting weights and, by the way, that supports fat loss, because we're not just trying to lose weight, right, we're trying to lose fat and get the better look and feel that we're going for.
• 19:20
  Philip Pape: But you also mentioned the side effects of cardio, like your hunger signals, and that is a real phenomenon.
• 19:26
  Philip Pape: It's, it's been studied, it's been supported and we all know it.
• 19:29
  Philip Pape: Come on, we know it.
• 19:30
  Philip Pape: If I go out for a short couple of sprints, you know.
• 19:34
  Philip Pape: Or if I lift weights, uh, I feel great, but I don't feel I'm not starving, you know.
• 19:38
  Philip Pape: I'm not going to go and crave carbs, sugar, fats, whatever, yeah, but if I run, you know, a 5k, it's like where I don't care, give me a beer, it doesn't matter, just give me some source of energy right now that I need to gobble down, to make make up for it.
• 19:52
  Philip Pape: Um, yeah, so those are good points, man.
• 19:53
  Philip Pape: I don't know if you want to say anything else about it.
• 19:55
  Philip Pape: We could, we could get going.
• 19:56
  Philip Pape: I know it's kind of like a list we have here.
• 20:01
  Isaiah Mitchell: I guess what I want to leave the audience with here is just ensuring that cardio isn't the only thing that you're doing Now.
• 20:10
  Isaiah Mitchell: If you're like a triathlete, if like cardio is your entire life, you're a cyclist, you're a marathon runner, whatever that makes sense, and this is very goal specific.
• 20:19
  Isaiah Mitchell: But for most of you, you want that lean, toned athletic body and you want it to last forever in a way that doesn't make your life suck and had I lost that hundred pounds.
• 20:35
  Isaiah Mitchell: Without strength loss, I would have been in a very, very difficult position to maintain that weight loss.
• 20:41
  Isaiah Mitchell: Because when we strength train, when we go through a reverse dieting process, we're able to reset our baseline or our maintenance calories, and this is the first thing I do with every single client is we rebuild their baseline so we actually have room to cut from without making you absolutely hate your life.
• 21:10
  Isaiah Mitchell: So to kind of put this in perspective, a lot of women come to me needing to lose 20, 30, 40, 50 plus pounds and they're eating 1500 calories or less and nothing's moving.
• 21:22
  Isaiah Mitchell: The scale isn't moving, inches aren't dropping.
• 21:25
  Isaiah Mitchell: And I'll always ask them you know, are we strength training?
• 21:28
  Isaiah Mitchell: No, we get protein intake back.
• 21:30
  Isaiah Mitchell: They're eating like 40 grams a day.
• 21:32
  Isaiah Mitchell: And then also, the most important question is have you ever gone through a dedicated muscle building phase?
• 21:40
  Isaiah Mitchell: And the answer is always no.
• 21:42
  Isaiah Mitchell: Flip it around.
• 21:44
  Isaiah Mitchell: Have you ever gone through a dedicated fat loss phase?
• 21:45
  Isaiah Mitchell: And the answer is always no.
• 21:45
  Isaiah Mitchell: Flip it around.
• 21:45
  Isaiah Mitchell: Have you ever gone through a dedicated fat loss phase my entire life?
• 21:48
  Isaiah Mitchell: 10, 20, 30 times.
• 21:49
  Isaiah Mitchell: And this is the problem Every time we go through that cycle we lose a bit of body fat, but we also lose muscle and then we gain the body fat back and we don't gain back the muscle and year after year, decade after decade, metabolism gets slower and slower and slower and you're just left feeling like your body is broken.
• 22:11
  Isaiah Mitchell: So TLDR here is make sure strength training is at the center of your routine and cardio supplements around it in a way that you enjoy.
• 22:21
  Isaiah Mitchell: So if you hate 5Ks, don't do 5Ks.
• 22:24
  Isaiah Mitchell: If you love the rower, do the rower and you'll be more consistent.
• 22:28
  Philip Pape: Cool man.
• 22:28
  Philip Pape: I mean.
• 22:29
  Philip Pape: That's why I wanted to have you on the show, and vice versa, because these are exactly the points of trying to get into, drill into people's heads, especially the one you mentioned about spending time in a muscle building phase.
• 22:38
  Philip Pape: Many times, that's the thing that's missing from fat loss, because you've pushed, pushed in one direction and you haven't, uh, built up the boulder that can be sculpted versus the pebble you are right now exactly so no, it's good, and I stole that from someone else.
• 22:52
  Philip Pape: Man, that's where I hear all these great metaphors from.
• 22:54
  Philip Pape: So, um, so we talked about nutrition, we talked a little bit about dieting.
• 22:59
  Philip Pape: The big boogeyman of course, besides seed oils, it's a different boogeyman.
• 23:03
  Philip Pape: Of course, besides seed oils, it's a different boogeyman is carbs right.
• 23:06
  Philip Pape: Carbs, not just carbohydrates in general, but the fact that they have some unique propensity to make you even fatter.
• 23:11
  Philip Pape: And there's an entire school of, I'll say, belief out there, the Gary Tobes of the world, who still push this lipid hypothesis.
• 23:20
  Philip Pape: Or is it the lipid hypothesis, the fat you know what I'm saying?
• 23:22
  Philip Pape: The carb fat storage hypothesis that has been debunked.
• 23:25
  Philip Pape: Where do we go with this now?
• 23:26
  Philip Pape: To just let people know they, they can eat carbs.
• 23:29
  Philip Pape: Carbs actually may be great in certain contexts and they may not make you fat for the reasons you think, at least.
• 23:35
  Philip Pape: What's the story?
• 23:36
  Isaiah Mitchell: for sure.
• 23:37
  Isaiah Mitchell: So this is one I have talked about agnosium I never get tired of writing about, uh, this, and I'm honestly.
• 23:44
  Isaiah Mitchell: I'm honestly kind of surprised it's still as prevalent of an issue as it is in 2025.
• 23:48
  Isaiah Mitchell: But we just continue to do the good work.
• 23:52
  Isaiah Mitchell: So, of course, the myth here is that carbs equal storing body fat equals avoid at all costs.
• 24:00
  Isaiah Mitchell: And the reality is carbohydrates are actually the body's preferred fuel source.
• 24:06
  Isaiah Mitchell: The body, every single one of your organs and even your brain rely on glucose, which comes from carbohydrates.
• 24:15
  Isaiah Mitchell: Now, weight gain, fat gain, happens when you eat more calories than you burn from any source, any source carbohydrates, dietary fats, protein although it's going to be very, very unlikely, you know, we see in like metabolic tracer studies.
• 24:33
  Isaiah Mitchell: If any of them has a higher propensity to be turned into actual body fat, it's fat.
• 24:39
  Isaiah Mitchell: Because it's already fat, it's really easy to turn fat into just stored fat.
• 24:45
  Isaiah Mitchell: So low carb diets can work because they often reduce your calorie intake and also suppress appetite, but carbs themselves are not the issue.
• 25:00
  Isaiah Mitchell: 15 review in the Lancet compared low carb and low fat diets and found no significant difference in fat loss when the calories and protein were matched.
• 25:11
  Isaiah Mitchell: And this, once again, as we talked about earlier is one of hundreds of thousands of studies.
• 25:18
  Isaiah Mitchell: I can't even tell you how many low carb versus this, low carb versus that, low carb versus that, and every single time when the calories and protein are equal, the results are exactly the same.
• 25:30
  Isaiah Mitchell: So what comes down to?
• 25:32
  Isaiah Mitchell: What do you prefer, what makes you feel the best and what can you actually stick to?
• 25:39
  Isaiah Mitchell: And for most people, the answer is definitely not going to be keto, but maybe somewhere in the middle.
• 25:46
  Isaiah Mitchell: You know, not everybody is, you know, high performing athlete that needs three to four hundred grams of carbohydrates a day.
• 25:54
  Isaiah Mitchell: But the TLDR is it's not the carbs, it's about context and calories, calories.
• 26:02
  Isaiah Mitchell: So 100 grams of sweet potato isn't necessarily the same thing as 100 grams of donuts in terms of like, how you're going to feel nutrient content, how that's going to influence your food choices the rest of the day, and also, you know, pro differences in protein content, differences in fiber content, can vary differently between certain carb sources.
• 26:23
  Isaiah Mitchell: But I think a lot of people just have an immediate reaction when they hear the word carbs and they instantly think of stuff like french fries and donuts and the cookies and the chips and not realizing broccoli is a carb source.
• 26:39
  Isaiah Mitchell: All vegetables are a carb source.
• 26:41
  Isaiah Mitchell: Fruit is a carb source quinoa, white rice, sweet potatoes, all of this different kind of stuff and not only do they have carbs, they also nutrients, and this is the.
• 26:52
  Isaiah Mitchell: This is the context that gets ignored so often when grifters and gurus want to hone in and demonize a single ingredient in a food, be that, you know, like oxalates in sweet potatoes or something, or like the lectins and beans you know goitrogens and broccoli yes, yes, ignoring the fact that the dose makes the poison, and these things are dosed to be harmful for insects, not a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty pound human and also all of the other nutrients that come with it that counteract that.
• 27:29
  Isaiah Mitchell: One little thing in there, and even in, you know, meat there's like the, the, any GU seven or something that's like potentially carcinogenic, like there's something in everything that we could hone down and be like oh look, that's bad for you, we can't eat that anymore.
• 27:44
  Isaiah Mitchell: But if you go down this path long enough, if you read enough diet books that are written for my, you know physicians, you will be left with ice cubes and that's it.
• 27:54
  Philip Pape: So you won't need anything.
• 27:56
  Philip Pape: Exactly, exactly.
• 27:57
  Philip Pape: Plants will kill you, meat will kill you, fats will kill you.
• 28:00
  Philip Pape: You're done.
• 28:01
  Philip Pape: You're done, you're done, you're dead and you're just suffering through life and you don't get to enjoy your next meal.
• 28:06
  Philip Pape: Yeah, no, I mean, there's a lot there.
• 28:08
  Philip Pape: Obviously, this is one of those that could be an entire episode itself.
• 28:11
  Philip Pape: What I think you've been doing throughout this conversation is focusing on also the positives, though, both what we lack when we avoid these things, such as the nutrients, but also the positives of hey, your brain needs this as an energy source.
• 28:23
  Philip Pape: Hey, energy balance is determined by the totality of your dietary pattern and your calories.
• 28:29
  Philip Pape: It has nothing to do with the macros.
• 28:30
  Philip Pape: These give people the permission that many folks don't think they have from having been conditioned, I think, through this industry.
• 28:37
  Philip Pape: To say something is just so nefariously terrible for them, so I think that's good.
• 28:41
  Philip Pape: What about just real quick carbs for people who are building muscle?
• 28:56
  Isaiah Mitchell: What's the benefit there?
• 28:57
  Isaiah Mitchell: Yeah, yeah, so, truly one of the best ideas because, as we just covered, it's your body's preferred fuel source and it's also its most efficient way to turn that food into actual usable energy.
• 29:04
  Isaiah Mitchell: And when we talk about using fats as fuel, on average it's about two to four times slower.
• 29:11
  Isaiah Mitchell: So absolutely not what we want.
• 29:13
  Isaiah Mitchell: So when you have adequate carbohydrates and your resistance training and you're trying to build muscle, you're just going to have better workouts, you're going to have better pumps, you're going to feel better, You're going to be able to push yourself harder and then also recover better on the back end, which is where everything hinges on, because you only get the gains that you can recover from and then, not to mention, we're going to sleep better.
• 29:37
  Isaiah Mitchell: Carbohydrates, of course, raise insulin, which they're supposed to.
• 29:40
  Isaiah Mitchell: It's a normal physiological process, but insulin and cortisol work counter regulatory to each other.
• 29:48
  Isaiah Mitchell: So this is why I encourage all of my clients make sure they get in some post post workout carbohydrates, and I typically recommend shifting their carbohydrate intake to have most of it in the back half of the day, when cortisol is usually going to be the highest.
• 30:05
  Isaiah Mitchell: You're getting off work.
• 30:06
  Isaiah Mitchell: You're already stressed from that.
• 30:08
  Isaiah Mitchell: You got cut off in traffic.
• 30:09
  Isaiah Mitchell: You get home, your kids are running all over the place.
• 30:12
  Isaiah Mitchell: Let's bring down that cortisol with some carbohydrates.
• 30:16
  Isaiah Mitchell: So net benefit really no negatives there for anyone wanting to build muscle.
• 30:21
  Isaiah Mitchell: Now can you build muscle on a ketogenic diet?
• 30:23
  Isaiah Mitchell: Absolutely.
• 30:24
  Isaiah Mitchell: There's plenty of people that are living proof of that.
• 30:26
  Isaiah Mitchell: It's just not the most efficient way.
• 30:29
  Philip Pape: It's going to be slower.
• 30:30
  Isaiah Mitchell: And you're not going to have a pump like say goodbye to your pumps, for sure yeah, no, it's great.
• 30:35
  Philip Pape: I mean we we did a whole episode on the um, the anti-catabolic effects of carbs but this idea of carbs for cortisol and hormone support and everything is also under um rated or not talked about enough, so I think I might do another episode on that.
• 30:48
  Philip Pape: Thanks for the thanks for the inspiration with that answer.
• 30:50
  Isaiah Mitchell: Yeah, um, yeah and another quick little blurb here before we move on to the the next one.
• 30:56
  Isaiah Mitchell: I know a lot of anti-carb people will bring up the fact that carbs are not essential, and they're not.
• 31:03
  Isaiah Mitchell: Neither is fiber.
• 31:04
  Isaiah Mitchell: Right, and that's exactly what I'm about to get into, because that actually does make carbohydrates essential.
• 31:12
  Isaiah Mitchell: Are they essential for survival?
• 31:14
  Isaiah Mitchell: For you?
• 31:14
  Isaiah Mitchell: Just stay alive?
• 31:15
  Isaiah Mitchell: No, you can eat zero carbs and stay alive, just fine.
• 31:19
  Isaiah Mitchell: But we're not talking about just staying alive.
• 31:21
  Isaiah Mitchell: We're talking about optimizing and thriving.
• 31:24
  Isaiah Mitchell: So if we're talking about optimizing and thriving, no carbs means no fiber.
• 31:30
  Isaiah Mitchell: Therefore, carbohydrates are essential for optimal health, in my opinion.
• 31:37
  Isaiah Mitchell: Yep, I agree.
• 31:39
  Philip Pape: I agree, man.
• 31:39
  Philip Pape: All right, no argument here.
• 31:41
  Philip Pape: We're just going to agree the whole time here, but I guess that's okay, since we're trying to help people break the myths and have some clarity.
• 31:48
  Philip Pape: So myth number five, one of my favorites I've had a lot of women trainers and bodybuildersers on lately too, including Holly Baxter was on recently, and we're always hitting on this myth that lifting weights makes women bulky.
• 32:00
  Philip Pape: I'm not even going to explain the myth I think people have heard it was like 30 women had done one workout and they woke up looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
• 32:07
  Isaiah Mitchell: That's right, man.
• 32:07
  Isaiah Mitchell: When I got my driver's license, the very next week, nascar was calling me and trying to sign me onto their team, so hopefully you guys can realize that.
• 32:24
  Philip Pape: I know man I'm totally joking.
• 32:25
  Philip Pape: And all the jacked women at the grocery store yesterday.
• 32:28
  Philip Pape: They're just everywhere.
• 32:29
  Philip Pape: They're just everywhere.
• 32:33
  Isaiah Mitchell: So the myth here here, of course, is strength training is going to make you look manly, it's going to make you look too muscular, it's going to make you look like a football player.
• 32:39
  Isaiah Mitchell: And the truth is there are men with more advantageous genetics than you, more natural testosterone than you, a more anabolic internal environment in their body, that have been trying to get that body you're afraid you're going to get for decades and they're still not there.
• 32:59
  Isaiah Mitchell: After meticulously training, dialing in their sleep, dialing in the nutrition, they're still not there and they're trying to get there.
• 33:07
  Isaiah Mitchell: So you not trying to get there without the inner workings of a man?
• 33:13
  Isaiah Mitchell: That's absolutely not going to happen.
• 33:16
  Isaiah Mitchell: So building visible muscle takes years, even with optimal training, eating, sleep, genetics, and women typically have 10 to 30 times less testosterone than men 30 times less testosterone than men.
• 33:34
  Isaiah Mitchell: So most of the bulk that women feel when they start lifting is muscle being built underneath body fat inflammation and water retention.
• 33:43
  Isaiah Mitchell: From being new to training changes in like glycogen stores as well.
• 33:48
  Isaiah Mitchell: If we're building new muscle, that's just more storage.
• 33:51
  Isaiah Mitchell: You now have to store those carbohydrates.
• 33:54
  Isaiah Mitchell: So when we eat, carbohydrates comes in as glucose and then we store it as glycogen in skeletal muscle and also in the liver.
• 34:02
  Isaiah Mitchell: It's actually pretty cool.
• 34:03
  Isaiah Mitchell: You can store somewhere around like 2000 calories of carbohydrates just in the body to be used whenever it's absolutely crazy.
• 34:11
  Isaiah Mitchell: And then also, what could also be happening is not adjusting nutrition to reduce body fat while you're building that muscle.
• 34:19
  Isaiah Mitchell: So what most people call toned is just showing the muscle that you've built through lower body fat.
• 34:28
  Isaiah Mitchell: So if you want curves, what you actually want is muscle.
• 34:32
  Philip Pape: Yep, totally agree.
• 34:33
  Philip Pape: And the way I like to illustrate that as well, isaiah right, is, you know, asking a woman to show me a physique that she admires from an athlete or someone you know, someone out there that looks lean in tone.
• 34:44
  Philip Pape: Guess their weight.
• 34:45
  Philip Pape: Look up their actual body weight and it's usually 20 to 40 pounds heavier than they think.
• 34:49
  Philip Pape: That's the bulk you don't want.
• 34:51
  Philip Pape: I doubt it.
• 34:52
  Philip Pape: That's the bulk you don't want.
• 34:53
  Philip Pape: I doubt it.
• 34:54
  Philip Pape: That's exactly what you want.
• 34:55
  Philip Pape: So let's just put that to bed.
• 34:59
  Philip Pape: And if it's a fat gain, fat loss situation, it has nothing to do with the muscle.
• 35:01
  Philip Pape: It has to do with the cross-sectional area of the fat, with the muscle or the fact you haven't revealed the muscle yet.
• 35:06
  Philip Pape: So really good points.
• 35:08
  Isaiah Mitchell: And it only stands to benefit you from a metabolism perspective, from a sustainability perspective, from being able to eat more while still losing body fat perspective.
• 35:17
  Isaiah Mitchell: It's, it's everything you want, yep all right, man, let's keep going.
• 35:22
  Philip Pape: Uh, you got to eat clean 100 of the time, don't you like clean eating it's, it's a religion for some people I used to be there, man, I did paleo, I did uh, you know, quote unquote clean, whatever that means.
• 35:32
  Philip Pape: Um, I love whole foods, I love nutritious foods.
• 35:34
  Philip Pape: Why don't we just eat 100 of those?
• 35:37
  Isaiah Mitchell: for sure, for sure.
• 35:38
  Isaiah Mitchell: So I I saw a post yesterday by um steve craft coaching.
• 35:42
  Isaiah Mitchell: If you know him, he's a he's a guy from the uk, absolutely hilarious.
• 35:46
  Isaiah Mitchell: But he made a post on kind of how the fitness industry goes through this cycle.
• 35:50
  Isaiah Mitchell: You know, every couple decades of like, oh it's, everything has to be clean.
• 35:55
  Isaiah Mitchell: 100 percent of the time, calories don't matter.
• 35:57
  Isaiah Mitchell: Then we go on to the next thing and ultimately we land back at.
• 36:00
  Isaiah Mitchell: You know, it's calories in, calories out at the end of the day.
• 36:04
  Isaiah Mitchell: And you should probably leave a little flexibility to enjoy the short time you have on this earth, because life is a lot more than your body.
• 36:13
  Isaiah Mitchell: Life is a lot more than food.
• 36:15
  Isaiah Mitchell: So the myth here is that results require rigid perfection, and I am living proof that's not true, because I absolutely was not rigidly perfect on my journey of losing 100 pounds.
• 36:30
  Isaiah Mitchell: And here I am, almost 10 years later, and it ain't coming back.
• 36:33
  Isaiah Mitchell: And I have a mini bag of Doritos Almost every day.
• 36:37
  Isaiah Mitchell: I'm drinking a diet soda right here and it's showing no signs of coming back.
• 36:41
  Isaiah Mitchell: On top of that, the over 400 clients I've worked with and I can show everyone their consistency trackers None of them were perfect.
• 36:52
  Isaiah Mitchell: None of them have a From start to the end of our time, working together 100% across the board.
• 36:59
  Isaiah Mitchell: They had some perfect weeks, maybe they had a couple perfect weeks in a row, but progress does not demand perfection, and consistency always, always, always beats perfection.
• 37:13
  Isaiah Mitchell: And here's the kicker you can eat clean 100% of the time and still gain fat, and then, on the flip side, you can eat only cupcakes, only cupcakes, and lose fat steadily.
• 37:28
  Isaiah Mitchell: Are you going to feel different on one versus the other?
• 37:31
  Isaiah Mitchell: For sure, are you going to feel different on one versus the other?
• 37:55
  Isaiah Mitchell: For sure, and of course, those are two extremes, which is I did that on purpose, because I boxes, it's probably good to eat, and then the remaining 20 percent goes to the things that make you happy, even if they're providing absolutely no nutritional content.
• 38:03
  Isaiah Mitchell: We have to make room for these things, because the vast majority of you listening to this are not david goggins and do not want to live that life and really just don't read.
• 38:15
  Isaiah Mitchell: And I honestly, I think the, the internet as a whole, is kind of getting tired of the whole red pill, super hardcore discipline, no days off, just keep grinding like.
• 38:25
  Isaiah Mitchell: I think we're kind of getting tired of it.
• 38:27
  Philip Pape: So we are man, yeah and yeah, I and I've, and I've never resonated with that.
• 38:33
  Philip Pape: I love doing hard things, but, man, when somebody says I'm doing 75 hard or doing this extreme approach, I'm just like why?
• 38:41
  Philip Pape: My first question is why?
• 38:42
  Philip Pape: Because are you doing it?
• 38:43
  Philip Pape: Because you think it's going to instill some sense of discipline you didn't have before.
• 38:46
  Philip Pape: That's fine, you want to try to do that, but good luck doing that the rest of your life and happiness and enjoyment from food.
• 38:53
  Philip Pape: There's nothing to be guilty of regarding that.
• 38:56
  Philip Pape: I've seen people comment, uh, to say, hey, if you think food's for enjoyment, you've got a problem.
• 39:00
  Philip Pape: I'm like that's a problem with you, buddy.
• 39:02
  Philip Pape: There's emotional eating.
• 39:04
  Philip Pape: There's, you know, trigger-based, you know, things that we try to find from food.
• 39:08
  Philip Pape: That's a different situation.
• 39:10
  Philip Pape: You're not doing it because you're happy, you know.
• 39:12
  Philip Pape: In that sense, I'm having my wife's birthday cake all week, you know, because it was her birthday and I'm in a fat loss phase, man, so on.
• 39:18
  Philip Pape: You know 1,800, 2,000 calories.
• 39:20
  Philip Pape: That's slightly more challenging, but I am going to enjoy it and it's going to work and I'm going to lose the fat, just like you did, and I always have a box of Pop-Tarts in the cabinet for when I'm in the fat, when I'm in the muscle building phase, they do not look how they used to do.
• 39:36
  Isaiah Mitchell: It's disrespectful at this point.
• 39:38
  Philip Pape: And they're tiny too.
• 39:39
  Philip Pape: They're smaller.
• 39:40
  Philip Pape: Yeah, not having it, everything shrinks.
• 39:41
  Philip Pape: Not having it, but what?
• 39:43
  Isaiah Mitchell: you got into there is, more often than not, that emotional eating, the trigger-based eating, the binge eating, aiming for 100% clean all the time.
• 39:55
  Isaiah Mitchell: That is where this will lead to, exactly Because we go back to something called the forbidden fruit effect, in that humans only want what we tell ourselves we can't have is bad for us is off-limits.
• 40:11
  Isaiah Mitchell: So quick thought experiment for everybody here anyone that's ever struggled with binging I will bet everything I have that none of you are binging on chicken salads.
• 40:24
  Isaiah Mitchell: It's just not happening.
• 40:26
  Isaiah Mitchell: It's the cake, it's the candies, it's the cookies, it's the pizza, it's the things you told yourself you're not allowed to have for xyz reason, because you think it's fat and because you think it's going to kill you, because you think it's poison, uh, because susan down the street told you, uh, to stop eating them.
• 40:42
  Isaiah Mitchell: But this strict eating very often leads to an all or nothing mindset, the binge restrict cycle, which is absolutely nasty and very difficult to get out of, and then also nutritional deficiencies due to limited food variety.
• 41:01
  Isaiah Mitchell: So I would rather you, the listener, eat 80 whole foods and 20 for your soul instead of burning out on 100 and quitting by week three, which is what happens every single time.
• 41:15
  Philip Pape: That's the way to put it.
• 41:16
  Philip Pape: So I'm wondering if we can segue into myth seven and nine, which is sugar and seed oils, based on this conversation, because it's effectively saying okay, you guys are talking about pop tarts and Doritos and I've heard that there's just sugar is toxic and seed oils are toxic and plants are toxic.
• 41:32
  Philip Pape: We talked about it.
• 41:33
  Philip Pape: So I think there's going to be some similarities, even though there's unique aspects to each.
• 41:36
  Philip Pape: But sugar being inflammatory, unhealthy, fattening, seed oils being just terrible for you in every respect whatsoever, that we're trying to ban them.
• 41:44
  Philip Pape: What's the reality?
• 41:46
  Isaiah Mitchell: Yeah, this is where we definitely get into the weeds and into the nuance.
• 41:52
  Isaiah Mitchell: We definitely get into the weeds and into the nuance.
• 41:54
  Isaiah Mitchell: So even early on in my coaching career, I was taught there are good fats and bad fats.
• 42:03
  Isaiah Mitchell: Omega-3s good black and white, on-off switch.
• 42:04
  Isaiah Mitchell: Omega-6s bad inflammatory, on-off switch.
• 42:08
  Isaiah Mitchell: And nothing in nutrition is black and white.
• 42:14
  Isaiah Mitchell: So let's start with sugar and the myth being that all sugar is bad and any amount is toxic.
• 42:21
  Isaiah Mitchell: And the reality is sugar in excess, especially when it's combined with ultra processed foods and a sedentary lifestyle.
• 42:30
  Isaiah Mitchell: That is what contributes to inflammation and disease, and it's actually from the surplus of calories.
• 42:38
  Isaiah Mitchell: So if you kept your energy intake in check, if you were eating excess sugar but you were at a maintenance level of calories, it's ultra processed foods and you have a sedentary lifestyle.
• 42:49
  Isaiah Mitchell: You are better off than the person that's ultra processed foods and you have a sedentary lifestyle.
• 42:53
  Isaiah Mitchell: You are better off than the person that's simply eating more calories than you.
• 42:58
  Isaiah Mitchell: So just being in a caloric surplus is one of the biggest culprits and drivers of inflammation and disease, regardless of the composition of your diet.
• 43:08
  Isaiah Mitchell: If I follow a Mediterranean diet and, for the next year, eat more calories than I burn, I'm going to be in a worse place as far as my health.
• 43:18
  Isaiah Mitchell: But a small amount of sugar in a nutrient dense diet is not a problem, especially when we control calories.
• 43:26
  Isaiah Mitchell: 18 review in nutrients very, very reputable journal, found that moderate sugar intake did not independently increase any inflammatory markers when total calorie intake and other nutrients were managed.
• 43:44
  Isaiah Mitchell: And then, on top of that, the who recommends keeping your added sugars under 10% of total calories, and this is typically my recommendation for clients.
• 43:56
  Isaiah Mitchell: Same with saturated fats, both that and sugar.
• 44:00
  Isaiah Mitchell: Keep it between 10% to 20% of your calories and you're going to be good to go, which does not mean elimination.
• 44:08
  Isaiah Mitchell: So the poison is in the dose and in you know what else you're eating with it.
• 44:15
  Philip Pape: But I can promise you fruit is not the enemy of anyone, but the 3 pm vending machine might be yeah, especially since the high levels of these things, especially added sugars or potentially seed oils, are generally correlated with high processed food consumption, ultra processed food consumption, which leads to, ad libitum, generally more calorie intake.
• 44:38
  Philip Pape: If you're not tracking Now, if you are tracking, if you're following it, you can easily moderate those things.
• 44:43
  Philip Pape: And if they're only part of a 10, 20%, as you recommend, again even easier to flexibly moderate and include them.
• 44:51
  Max: Shout out to Philly Pay.
• 44:52
  Max: I know Philippe for a long time.
• 44:53
  Max: I know how passionate he is about healthy eating and body strength and that's why I choose him to be my coach.
• 44:59
  Max: I was no stranger to dieting and body training, but I always struggled to do it sustainably.
• 45:05
  Max: Philippe helped me prioritize my goals with evidence-based recommendations while not overstressing my body and not feeling like I'm starving.
• 45:14
  Max: In six months, I lost 45 pounds without drastically changing the foods I enjoy, but now I have a more balanced diet.
• 45:22
  Max: I weight train consistently but, most importantly, I do it sustainably, If a scientifically sound, healthy diet and a lean, strong body is what you're looking.
• 45:31
  Max: So we briefly touched on seed oils.
• 45:38
  Philip Pape: Again, I'm just flipping two of these myths around.
• 45:40
  Philip Pape: To continue on that line, seed oils have another unique concern in that people talk about the processing, which that really gets to me, because my philosophy is like I almost don't care how it's processed.
• 45:52
  Philip Pape: If the outcome shows better health than something else, it's worst health that's.
• 45:57
  Philip Pape: That's seems logical to me to think that way, but of course people have concerns.
• 46:01
  Philip Pape: What's wrong with seed oils?
• 46:02
  Philip Pape: Why are they getting such a bad rap and what's the reality?
• 46:05
  Isaiah Mitchell: Yeah, so A little bit into like the conspiracy theory here, but I think one of the biggest reasons they're getting vilified and most things go back to money at the end of the day, they're very, very cheap.
• 46:20
  Isaiah Mitchell: They're very, very cheap and inexpensive.
• 46:23
  Isaiah Mitchell: So we're talking about like canola oil, soybean oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil.
• 46:28
  Isaiah Mitchell: They're toxic, they cause inflammation, they're going to kill you, they destroy your metabolism, which isn't even really possible, and the data just doesn't support any of these claims.
• 46:39
  Isaiah Mitchell: And I've talked to so many people on the Internet, back and forth, in comments on different podcasts, talking about seed oils and you can't find me any research to support their claims.
• 46:51
  Isaiah Mitchell: And then, of course, we get into it's all.
• 46:52
  Isaiah Mitchell: It's all bought and paid for.
• 46:54
  Isaiah Mitchell: All the researchers are corrupt.
• 46:56
  Isaiah Mitchell: We can't even trust science, and that's just a lazy argument in my opinion.
• 47:00
  Isaiah Mitchell: And they never have issues with the study layout, the methods that were used.
• 47:05
  Isaiah Mitchell: Maybe they want to attack, attack the funding, but we flip that around on them.
• 47:09
  Isaiah Mitchell: Have you ever funded research?
• 47:11
  Isaiah Mitchell: Noble, someone's got to like, someone's got to pay these, pay these researchers.
• 47:17
  Isaiah Mitchell: But even just to get into some of the evidence 2017, there was a systematic review of 30 plus clinical trials, so a systematic review for anyone that doesn't know is basically a study of studies, so there were over 30 clinical trials included in this review published in circulation found that increasing linoleic acid, the main omega six in seed oils, did not increase inflammatory markers, and that finding this is the important part has gone on to be repeated and replicated year after year.
• 47:54
  Isaiah Mitchell: Every time a new study comes out on seed oils, we find inflammation actually getting better.
• 48:00
  Isaiah Mitchell: Especially with canola oil, we see improvements in inflammatory markers, improvements in lipids, improvements in insulin sensitivity in lipids, improvements in uh insulin sensitivity.
• 48:17
  Isaiah Mitchell: So most of the fear comes from one charlatans and grifters on social media so quick, you know little breakdown of what to look for.
• 48:21
  Isaiah Mitchell: If they're filming content shirtless in a grocery store, just hit that block button.
• 48:25
  Isaiah Mitchell: If they're wearing blue light blocking glasses while not even looking at a screen, probably a good idea to just block them.
• 48:33
  Isaiah Mitchell: And if their content is mostly based on fear, making you afraid of certain foods and vilifying specific chemicals, specific ingredients, probably not someone that's actually worth their salt.
• 48:48
  Isaiah Mitchell: And most of the fear comes from rodent studies using absolutely absurd amounts of seed oils that you and I as humans could not feasibly obtain, especially on a regular basis.
• 49:02
  Isaiah Mitchell: Or it comes from data of oil being reused over and over and over again at high frying temperatures.
• 49:10
  Isaiah Mitchell: Now that, I will say, absolutely has some, you know, negative stuff that can come with it, but for most people cooking at home with canola oil, you use the oil once and you're done.
• 49:21
  Isaiah Mitchell: You know, at a fast food place might be a little bit different, but when used in moderation, especially cold or lightly cooked, seed oils could actually support your heart health and even lower LDL cholesterol when replacing saturated fats, which is what people should actually be afraid of.
• 49:41
  Isaiah Mitchell: If we're going to be afraid of anything, it's moderating our saturated fat intake.
• 49:47
  Isaiah Mitchell: And the crazy part is the people that are the most vocal about villainizing.
• 49:51
  Isaiah Mitchell: The crazy part is the people that are the most vocal about villainizing seed oils glorify saturated fat and deny the science we have.
• 49:58
  Philip Pape: Yeah, cherry pick studies to death.
• 50:00
  Isaiah Mitchell: Yep.
• 50:00
  Isaiah Mitchell: It is directly linked directly linked to LDL cholesterol increasing, which is an independent, independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease.
• 50:14
  Isaiah Mitchell: So if you're stressing over the seed oil in your salad dressing, but eating ultra processed snacks five times a day and walking around with a little carcinogen every single day, you're missing the forest for the trees.
• 50:26
  Philip Pape: Smartphone.
• 50:26
  Philip Pape: He's holding a smartphone, guys.
• 50:30
  Philip Pape: So, yeah, I mean I couldn't have said it better, especially when you compare saturated fat.
• 50:35
  Philip Pape: One other thing that has come up over the years that I think has been debunked is the omega three to six ratio.
• 50:40
  Philip Pape: I think the general consensus is that adding in more omega three is beneficial, and that's really where it came down from.
• 50:48
  Philip Pape: It wasn't even the ratio itself.
• 50:50
  Philip Pape: And, like you said, omega six, like linoleic acid, is, especially when compared to saturated fat, an improvement in your health.
• 50:55
  Philip Pape: So just look at the data, guys.
• 50:57
  Philip Pape: It's all out there.
• 50:58
  Philip Pape: And don't follow the people.
• 50:59
  Philip Pape: Block all the people.
• 51:00
  Philip Pape: Isaiah said to block, so grocery store.
• 51:04
  Isaiah Mitchell: Once a quarter I'll repost my list of people to unfollow people lying to you on social media.
• 51:11
  Isaiah Mitchell: That's good.
• 51:12
  Philip Pape: All right, we got a couple to get through here.
• 51:14
  Philip Pape: Um, the second one or the ninth myth year.
• 51:17
  Philip Pape: Now it's number nine.
• 51:18
  Philip Pape: Uh, hormones, where do we start?
• 51:20
  Philip Pape: Because everything gets blamed on hormones.
• 51:23
  Philip Pape: Everything gets sold as a hormone balancing or hormone fixing remedy.
• 51:27
  Philip Pape: So just maybe keep.
• 51:29
  Philip Pape: Let's keep this somewhat concise, cause I know it can go off into a crazy level of detail, for sure.
• 51:34
  Philip Pape: But yeah, it's your hormones, right right, absolutely not your.
• 51:39
  Isaiah Mitchell: Not your habits, not your lifestyle, not the lack of muscle, not the chronic yo-yo dieting.
• 51:44
  Philip Pape: So that's it, you just, you just answered it, those other things are the reason, exactly, exactly.
• 51:50
  Isaiah Mitchell: But that comes back to what I've noticed the majority of the population seems to be allergic to in 2025, which is personal responsibility and accountability.
• 52:03
  Isaiah Mitchell: The more we can point the finger to something else, the better we feel.
• 52:08
  Isaiah Mitchell: But what we don't understand is when we point that finger, we are choosing where the power goes, where the control goes, and the day that you finally flip that around and realize it's me, you can finally start moving forward.
• 52:23
  Isaiah Mitchell: So hormones like insulin, cortisol, estrogen, thyroid hormones absolutely play a role in metabolism and, most importantly, in appetite a very, very big role in appetite.
• 52:38
  Isaiah Mitchell: But in most people, the real issue is not their hormones, it's chronic stress, it's poor sleep, it's low protein, it's low fiber, it's inconsistent or no habits and it's no or inconsistent resistance training.
• 52:54
  Isaiah Mitchell: And now getting into some of the research back in 2020, we've got a meta analysis from endocrine reviews and they found that why, while hormonal imbalances can contribute to weight regulation, they rarely cause significant weight gain on their own without lifestyle factors.
• 53:16
  Isaiah Mitchell: So that was their actual conclusion from that meta analysis.
• 53:20
  Isaiah Mitchell: So we have to fix the basics first, then check our hormones.
• 53:25
  Isaiah Mitchell: But blaming them too early is often just a distraction from what we can actually control.
• 53:31
  Isaiah Mitchell: And I always tell people go test them, go test them, because one of two things is going to happen Everything's fine and now we have to point the finger back at you, or everything's jacked up and we still have to point the finger back at you because they're jacked up because of you, because of our lifestyle, because of our habits.
• 53:52
  Isaiah Mitchell: So, either way, it goes back to us and refocusing on the basics and what we can control.
• 53:59
  Philip Pape: And I think that's powerful, like once people realize that you're not calling people victims.
• 54:04
  Philip Pape: I mean, people might make themselves victims but you're saying look, you've got the say in this and the way that you take responsibility and accountability may require getting support, may require pharmacology, we don't know, but it's probably going to require starting with the pillars of lifestyle, like you mentioned, and honestly, you can expand that and generalize it to any boogeyman, any outside, like you said, external locus of control that you're pointing at Start with yourself, do it first and then check what's left.
• 54:30
  Philip Pape: I love that approach.
• 54:31
  Philip Pape: See what's left?
• 54:32
  Philip Pape: You don't know until you've eliminated those variables first.
• 54:35
  Philip Pape: So 100% awesome.
• 54:37
  Philip Pape: And so the final myth today is if you woke up tomorrow in your dream body, all your problems would go away, life would be perfect, it's sailing to the sunset.
• 54:48
  Philip Pape: You die a happy person.
• 54:49
  Philip Pape: You never have to worry about anything again.
• 54:50
  Philip Pape: True right.
• 54:54
  Isaiah Mitchell: I wish sunset, you die, a happy person, you never have to worry about anything again.
• 54:56
  Isaiah Mitchell: True, right, I wish, I sure, I sure wish it was the case, and a lot of people seem to seem to think that's the case, and they tend to put off a lot of the uh, what I like to call inner work until they reach their destination.
• 55:06
  Isaiah Mitchell: They're like oh, I'll just worry about that when I get there.
• 55:09
  Isaiah Mitchell: Or even like how are we going to keep it off for the rest of your life?
• 55:12
  Isaiah Mitchell: I'll worry about that when I get there.
• 55:14
  Isaiah Mitchell: Or even like how are we going to keep it off for the rest of your life?
• 55:16
  Isaiah Mitchell: I'll worry about that when I get there.
• 55:17
  Isaiah Mitchell: Right now, I just want to get there so I can be happy, which is a whole other conversation.
• 55:20
  Isaiah Mitchell: It's like wait, why are we putting our happiness on hold for this thing that we don't even know if it's going to make you happy for more than five minutes or a week?
• 55:27
  Isaiah Mitchell: But if you woke up tomorrow and you had your dream body, the excitement would last for all about five minutes, because you would very quickly get the reality check that you have no idea how to maintain it, because you're still a binger, you're still a stress eater, you're still an emotional eater, you still don't do your workouts, you still don't have a step goal set for yourself, you still don't have a wind down and sleep routine.
• 55:55
  Isaiah Mitchell: So you've got the destination, but you don't have.
• 55:58
  Isaiah Mitchell: You don't even know how you got there and you haven't become the person that can stay there.
• 56:04
  Isaiah Mitchell: So the myth here is that weight loss is going to fix all your problems and fix your self worth.
• 56:11
  Isaiah Mitchell: But the reality is losing weight can and usually does, boost your confidence, but it doesn't automatically erase insecurity, body image issues or emotional eating patterns.
• 56:25
  Isaiah Mitchell: And in fact, research from the Journal of Health Psychology shows that body dissatisfaction often persists even after weight loss, unless deeper mindset and identity work is done.
• 56:41
  Isaiah Mitchell: And this is 99% of my program and what I work on my clients with is the reason you became overweight in the first place, fixing that root cause deeper mindset and identity rooted issues, because nobody, myself included, becomes 100 pounds overweight because you felt like it, because it was fun, because it made life better.
• 57:03
  Isaiah Mitchell: It doesn't.
• 57:04
  Isaiah Mitchell: It makes everything about life worse.
• 57:07
  Isaiah Mitchell: You are running from something, you are suppressing something.
• 57:09
  Isaiah Mitchell: You are suppressing something or you are distracting yourself from something and the outer work losing weight, seeing the scale go down the inches, your clothes fitting differently.
• 57:21
  Isaiah Mitchell: The outer work without the inner work does not work, and I don't want any of the listeners here to have to go through what I did because I made this mistake.
• 57:34
  Isaiah Mitchell: I lost 100 pounds without doing the inner work.
• 57:37
  Isaiah Mitchell: There I was 100 pounds down, no idea where to go from there.
• 57:42
  Isaiah Mitchell: I had no idea what reverse dieting was.
• 57:44
  Isaiah Mitchell: I knew very little about metabolism.
• 57:46
  Isaiah Mitchell: I sure as heck wasn't going on a bulk because that scared the crap out of me.
• 57:50
  Isaiah Mitchell: So there I was, 21, eating 1500 calories, no sex drive, no libido.
• 57:57
  Isaiah Mitchell: My hair was falling out and for the next four years I battled an eating disorder of that binge and restrict cycle because I never did the inner work.
• 58:08
  Isaiah Mitchell: So trust me when I say the outer work without the inner work does not work, and if you hate yourself on the way down, you will find something new to hate when you get there.
• 58:21
  Isaiah Mitchell: So you have to work on who you are becoming, not just on how much you weigh.
• 58:27
  Philip Pape: Yeah, and that's an interesting one, because people are seeking the outward manifestation of what it takes to get there with the inner work.
• 58:35
  Philip Pape: But you can get there with superficial outer work in some way, and that can be highly misleading.
• 58:42
  Philip Pape: Going back to our early discussion about intuitive eating, of building the skills and the proactive systems and habits underneath, that gets you there, how do people then?
• 58:51
  Philip Pape: What should people be striving for?
• 58:54
  Philip Pape: They come to you and they say I want to lose weight.
• 58:56
  Philip Pape: That's their number one top thing.
• 58:58
  Philip Pape: You then have to drill that down.
• 59:00
  Philip Pape: I've definitely seen people's mindset evolve as you work through these and they discover oh man, this is really not about my physique, this is really not about even my health, so to speak.
• 59:13
  Philip Pape: It's perhaps what those things get me, but it's also getting there in the right way with the right process.
• 59:20
  Philip Pape: So, just to kind of tie it off in a bow.
• 59:22
  Philip Pape: How does someone listening?
• 59:23
  Philip Pape: What should they ask themselves now about what they really want to drive them to start the proper process?
• 59:30
  Isaiah Mitchell: Yeah, yeah, and I'm sure you ask this question a lot too.
• 59:33
  Isaiah Mitchell: But one of the the first questions I'll ask people when they, when we get clear on the goal you know I want to lose 50 pounds, I want to lose a hundred pounds, why, why and what do you think that is going to do for you?
• 59:47
  Isaiah Mitchell: And then we just keep going deeper and deeper from there.
• 59:50
  Isaiah Mitchell: You could follow that up with asking why?
• 59:52
  Isaiah Mitchell: Five more times that eventually we'll get to the actual, uh, the actual route.
• 59:57
  Isaiah Mitchell: But what I definitely want to leave people with on this one is just kind of a brief understanding of identity and why it's so important, especially in the game of weight loss.
• 1:00:10
  Isaiah Mitchell: So, for the easiest way for me to help people conceptualize identity in this context is think of a thermostat.
• 1:00:18
  Isaiah Mitchell: So I set my thermostat to 70 degrees and it's 90 degrees outside, starts to heat up the inside of the house.
• 1:00:26
  Isaiah Mitchell: Thermostat goes up, it realizes that, kicks in and cools the house back off to its set point at 70.
• 1:00:35
  Isaiah Mitchell: The same is true for your identity in the game of weight loss.
• 1:00:39
  Isaiah Mitchell: So if you label yourself, if your identity is a binger, someone who's never motivated, someone who can't be consistent, someone who always gains the weight back.
• 1:00:49
  Isaiah Mitchell: Someone who starts over every Monday and then you lose 5, 10, 15, 20 pounds.
• 1:00:55
  Isaiah Mitchell: That's a threat to the system.
• 1:00:56
  Isaiah Mitchell: Thermostat kicks in, brings you back to your set point.
• 1:01:00
  Isaiah Mitchell: I knew you'd gain the weight back.
• 1:01:01
  Isaiah Mitchell: You're not motivated again, you're self-sabotaging again.
• 1:01:04
  Isaiah Mitchell: That is the very thing that we have to fix, or you will struggle with weight loss for the rest of your life.
• 1:01:11
  Isaiah Mitchell: There is no sugar code in it.
• 1:01:14
  Isaiah Mitchell: There is no way around it.
• 1:01:15
  Isaiah Mitchell: You have to fix the root.
• 1:01:17
  Isaiah Mitchell: It's just like you know getting into like the functional medicine side of things, like we have to get to the actual root cause of what's causing these symptoms to manifest.
• 1:01:26
  Isaiah Mitchell: Same thing here perfect usually a lot man.
• 1:01:30
  Isaiah Mitchell: A lot of that usually comes back from childhood.
• 1:01:34
  Philip Pape: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:01:35
  Philip Pape: So every single one of these myths can spawn lots of discussion, lots of learning, lots of education.
• 1:01:40
  Philip Pape: Guys, if you're listening to this, this is just 10 of 20 myths we're covering, because we're going to cover 10 more.
• 1:01:46
  Philip Pape: On Fat Loss Forever Isaiah's podcast it should be in your feed right now.
• 1:01:50
  Philip Pape: But each one of these, if anything, piqued your interest, if anything sound like a low-hanging fruit, an opportunity, something you're curious or skeptical about, please reach out to us but also dig into it further.
• 1:02:01
  Philip Pape: Check out Isaiah's podcast, check out mine.
• 1:02:03
  Philip Pape: We'll have links in the show notes.
• 1:02:04
  Philip Pape: But, man, thank you so much for doing this, isaiah, we really covered a lot of ground, just you know, with those 10 minutes.
• 1:02:10
  Philip Pape: So thank you, man.
• 1:02:12
  Isaiah Mitchell: Absolutely, it was a pleasure.
• 1:02:13
  Isaiah Mitchell: It was a pleasure.
• 1:02:14
  Isaiah Mitchell: Hopefully the audience got something out of it.
• 1:02:16
  Isaiah Mitchell: That's what we're here for.
• 1:02:17
  Philip Pape: All right, man, so I'm going to include the link in the show notes to check out Isaiah's podcast and go check out the other 10 myths that we talked about there, and I'll see you next time, man, peace out.