Latest / Connor with Honor: AI, Real Estate and Real Life / We are eating People, or food that was made to be addictive by People...

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We are eating People, or food that was made to be addictive by People... · Connor with Honor: AI, Real Estate and Real Life

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: The strongest I ever felt was Saturday night.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Plan written, groceries in the house, the whole week mapped out on paper.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Sunday night, I was unstoppable, and I meant every word of it.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: I was finished by Wednesday.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: I did that for years.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: 365 pounds.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: I could start better than anyone.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: I knew I just couldn't continue.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: And for most of those years, I believed the problem was that I was weak on Wednesday.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it took me a long time to find out.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: The problem was already sitting in me on Sunday before I bought a thing.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now hold a number for me, 609.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to come back to it in just a moment.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever you happen to be tuning in, this is The Last Addiction, and everything I'm going to read you today is at thelastaddiction.com, including the studies, so you can go argue with the papers instead of with me.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now I want to talk about quitting for a moment and not the food.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: The quitting itself, because we have the whole culture built around the beginning.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: The new plan, the new app, the new Monday, the new smart device, the new January.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody sells you anything for the Wednesday.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: And the Wednesday is the entire game.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the 609.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: There was a trial that put 609 adults through a 12-month behavioral weight loss program, a full year.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: These are real people, structured support.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Researchers measured a pile of things about those people at the start.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Mood, stress, eating patterns, all of it.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Then they looked at who dropped out and who lost the least weight.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: And then they went back to see what had predicted it.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: The single strongest psychosocial predictor of both dropping out and losing less was how many symptoms of ultra-processed food addiction a person already had on the first day, day one.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't motivation.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't how much they weighed, not how badly they wanted it.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: The thing that predicted who would quit was already measurable before the program started.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now let me be careful with what that does and doesn't mean, because this is where people run off a cliff with a study.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's a prediction, not a sentence.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Those people did not all fail.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Plenty of them finished, but it means that if you walk in with a heavy relationship with this food, you're standing, starting in a harder race than the person next to you.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And you deserve to know that on Sunday instead of figuring it out on Wednesday.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it means something else that I wish somebody had told me when I was 33.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: When you quit on a Wednesday, you're not failing at willpower.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: You're running into the thing that was already there.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now that's the dropout signal.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: The information about how this is going to go is available before you start, and almost nobody looks at it.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: So what is that signal made of?
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: There's a 2026 review in the journal Addiction from Schmidt and colleagues on ultra-processed food addiction as a growing international concern.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: The picture across the research is pretty consistent.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Multinational food companies are displacing traditional whole food diets around the world with cheap convenience products that are engineered for hyper palatability.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: By combining heavily processed sugar, fat, salt, and additives and ratios that don't occur in anything that grew.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: The Lancet Commission on Ultraprocessed Food has put a spotlight on the same thing.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: And since 2019, randomized control trials casually linked ultra-processed food to significant overeating, not associated with, caused under controlled conditions, with people eating meaningfully more calories when the food is actually built that way.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's the part I'm obligated to tell you because I said you would check my work or you could check it.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Ultraprocessed food addiction is not currently classified along substance use disorders in the international classification of diseases.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's not an official diagnosis.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Serious researchers are still arguing about whether addiction is the right frame or whether it's something adjacent to it.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: So when I use the word addiction on the show or on the website, understand that I'm using the word that fits my life.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Not the science hasn't finished setting that label.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Both of those things are true at the same time, and I'm not going to hide either one to make the points land a little harder.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: There's a trial running right now called Disrupt, testing whether behavioral strategies can get adults with overweight or obesity to cut their ultra-processed food intake over two months.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: 60 people for arms.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: I am telling you about it as a study that's underway, not as a result because, well, it hasn't reported.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: But notice what those researchers thought was worth testing.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't a drug or a macro ratio.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Whether you can change what a person believes about the food and whether that belief survives contact with an open bag of chips at night at night.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that points at the part you actually control.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: The strongest move available is somebody carrying a heavy dropout signal, is not more disciplined in the kitchen at 9 p.m.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's a shorter list at the store at 5 p.m.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: when you're fed, you're calm, and that decision doesn't cost you anything.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: What's not in dispute is the engineering.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody in a lab designed that product to be difficult to stop eating.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what?
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: They succeeded, and they were paid for succeeding.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: You didn't lose a fair fight.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: You were never in a fair fight.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now let me take that strongest objection, all of this head on, because it gets thrown at me constantly, and it's part of the fight.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: The objection goes like this food addiction is an excuse.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Call it a disease, and now nothing is your fault.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: A guy who will not put the bag down gets to feel like a victim instead of getting to work.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what I think is right about that.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: If naming it is where you stop, then yes, you just bought yourself a comfortable word and nothing else.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: I've watched people collect diagnoses like trading cards and never change one thing they do.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's what is wrong about it.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Knowing what you're up against is not an excuse, it's reconnaissance.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody tells a guy rehabbing a torn knee that admitting the tear is weakness.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: You admit the tear so you can pick the right exercise.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Responsibility doesn't disappear when the fight turns out to be rigged.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: It changes shape.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: It stops being try harder on Wednesday and becomes a build a Sunday that doesn't require a hero on Wednesday.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well, which brings me to the fasting question.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna disappoint some of you.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: My fast, it changed my life and not 168.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, 24, 23, one, you know, three, four days, 48, 72s, 96s, 7 days every once in a while.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the evidence doesn't support me telling you that fasting beats old caloric restriction for fat loss.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: When researchers run these head to head, intermittent fasting and continuous caloric restriction come out roughly equivalent.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Similar weight loss, no significance, and fat loss or frat-free mass or waist circumference across cardiometabolic cancer, cancer and neurocognitive outcomes, they land just about in the same place.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: But there's one edge that keeps showing up, and it's not metabolic fasting.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: Studies tend to report better adherence.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: For me, it's like easier to say no all the way than moderation.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: For me, I don't deserve a cheat meal.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: I don't deserve a cheat day.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm gonna go and blow it out of the park and gorge, I understand that that comes with a lot of risks.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: And after a week of kicking my ass trying to fast and then blowing it out of the park for just a Saturday, I kind of reset that whole frickin' hard drive of those six days not eating.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: People stick to it more.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's the adherence thing.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a real edge.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just a different kind of edge, it's the one that gets sold.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not that your body burns fat better in an eight-hour window.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's that some people find one rule easier to keep than a thousand small decisions.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a mechanism worth understanding.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: Continuous restriction asks you to make a correct choice at every single eating opportunity, all day long, forever.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: And for somebody carrying a heavy dropout signal, every one of those is a coin flip with a house edge.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now, fasting window does not ask you to win those coin flips, it removes most of them from the table.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: You're not eating right now, so there's nothing to decide.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's not magic.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's just fewer decisions, not like the salad dressing aisle.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: And fewer decisions is exactly what a person with my wiring needed, which means the correct question is not which protocol is superior.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's which protocol removes the most decision from the hours when you're least able to make them.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: For me, it was in the evening.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: It was always the evening.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: If your hard hours are the morning, then that same logic points you somewhere completely different.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: And anybody who tells you there's one right window for every human being, well, they're selling a book.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: And one more thing about hunger, because it's the lie I told myself for years.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Hunger is not a fat loss meter.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Feeling hungry doesn't prove you're burning fat, and not feeling hungry does not prove you're not.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: Hunger can be an energy deficit, it can be a habit or the clock or a smell or a fact that you always eat when the show comes on.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm also not going to give you a number of days until the craving stop.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: But the number does not exist, and everybody that gives you one made it up.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the part of most of this conversation that most people slip or skip, actually, is the part that decides what you look at at the end instead of just what the scale says.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Muscle is not a side quest.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: If you lose 60 pounds and a big share of it came off your frame, you end up smaller, weaker, and with a body that needs fewer calories to run, which is the exact setup for regaining it.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's the good news from the research, and it's specific.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: In a randomized controlled trial, short-term alternate day fasting did not lower rates of muscle protein synthesis compared to continuous energy restriction or an energy balance controlled diet.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: But read the condition because the condition is the whole thing.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Protein intake was matched across those groups.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: So the protective factor in the study was not the fasting schedule, it was the protein.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Fasting didn't hurt as long as the protein was there, which gives you actual muscle retention plan.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it's three things that none of them are exotic.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Get real protein into your eating window on purpose.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Measure, not estimated.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Lift something heavy two to three times a week progressively, even if it starts at body weight.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: And sleep, because recovery is where the adaption actually gets built and you cannot overwork a five-hour night.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: And plan the landing.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody plans the landing.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: You need to know in advance what maintenance looks like, what your calories go back up to, how often you're going to start eating again, all of that stuff.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: How you're going to eat in a month after you hit your number, because the regain doesn't happen during the diet.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: It happens in a quiet part after.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I have to say the serious thing because I'm not going to soften it.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: If you're diabetic, pregnant on blood pressure medication, have a history of an eating disorder, or you're considering anything beyond a normal daily window, you need a doctor involved.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a legal disclaimer.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Extended fasting moves your blood pressure, your electrolytes, and your medication needs.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Those things put people in the hospital.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: And manning up, since the phrase gets used around here, manning up means keeping a promise you made to yourself when it stopped being fun.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: It means accepting discomfort for chose.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Accepting discomfort, you chose.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: It means protecting the version of you that's 70 years old.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean ignoring chest pain or skipping a doctor or treating recklessness like courage.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Pershing through a dangerous system is not toughness.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a bad decision with a soundtrack.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: I will admit one thing about myself here.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: I can write a six-page report about four-minute traffic stop with times, plate numbers, and what everybody said.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't tell you what I ate on Tuesday.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: I was capable of being precise.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: I just wasn't being precise about the one thing that was actually killing me.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: So here's your promise for today.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: I want it to be small enough that you actually keep it because a promise you break teaches you that your promises don't count.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: So today, write down your dropout signal before you need it.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: Three lines on paper.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: What hour of the day do you break?
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: What food breaks you?
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: And what is in your house right now that makes that break possible?
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Not a plan, not a diet, just a reconnaissance.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Written down where Sunday night, and you can hand it to yourself Wednesday night.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because Sunday night is a liar.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: He's generous and confident that he's not the one who has to do it.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: The only useful thing he can do is remove things from the house and write down the truth while he still has the clarity to see it.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: You're not going to win this on the day it gets hard.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to win this on the day it's easy because the hard day was smaller by making that hard day smaller.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Everything I read you today, the studies and the sources at thelastaddiction.com.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Connor with honor.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: Be safe.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Luck on your journey, and we'll see you tomorrow.