Measuring Calories

Combing Through The Nutritional Research

To Get a Grip On The Most Accurate Way To
Measure Calories

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From The Desk of Brad Howard

Dear Friend,

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Brad Howard
Nutrition Research: Calories Measuring Problems
Brad Howard: Welcome once again to your Adonis Lifestyle podcast. I'm Brad Howard, and I've got John
Barban on the phone once again. And in today's audio training, we're going to talk about some
nutritional methods and how people actually research nutrition and come up with claims. John has been
kind of digging into a lot of this stuff for his newest project.

Let's talk about some of the interesting things that you're coming across, because I've got a couple of
other things that are kind of interesting I wanted to talk about as well.

John Barban: Okay, so to start with, there is a big gap between what you hear in marketing claims and
what's actually written or comes out in the research where the claim comes from. In other words, a
marketer will look at a piece of research and use it to come up with a claim to sell a product or
supplement or a diet or something, but there is a huge difference between what the research actually
means versus what the marketer is implying, so there is a gap there. And the average person reading it
doesn't know that. They don't know that the research isn't really being well represented in the
marketing claim or in the product. People think that there is more meat on that bone than there is, and
there is a bunch of things going on there.

The researchers don't actually talk to the marketers to validate that their information is being
represented correctly or not being misrepresented. It can easily become a misleading claim and that was
never the intention of the research. You can't take claims that you see at face value without going back
and validating where the claim came from in the first place. I guess that is where we are going with this,
it's to try to tease out the difference between what a paper says in the context of the research paper
versus what a marketer interprets it to mean for the purpose of selling a product.

Brad Howard: Sure, and I guess we can go back to talking about understanding how many calories it
takes to gain to lose body fat or gain body fat. There is also the notion that there is a certain amount of
calories it takes to actually build muscle and whether that's true or not and how that's being teased out
with how long this research is actually being measured.

And I guess one of the bigger things that you were actually finding out is there is a lot of
misrepresentation as far as how people will actually keep track of what people are eating in these
studies as well.

John Barban: The big problem is diet records. Let's say you're in a study and I'm asking you to keep
track of what you've been eating so I can get an idea of many calories you're consuming. And this is just
standard practice in a lot of nutrition and weight loss research studies because it's difficult. You can't
just take a person out of their daily life and keep them in a lab for weeks and weeks on end. I mean,
nobody can do that. Everybody has a job, school, or something. People can't just remove themselves
from society to be studied, and that's also a non-realistic study because that's not how they're going to
be living anyways.
So the best you can do to find out how people eat is to just ask them to record what they ate. But
people are notoriously bad at remembering what they ate and notoriously underreport what they ate.
People, on purpose, won't report exactly what they ate, they'll hide a little bit of it. There are two things
going on here.

1. They forget some of what they ate

and

2. They're either embarrassed or self-conscious and won't report some of what they ate.

So you get this double error with most people always underreport what they're eating.

And an interesting thing is the heavier a person is, the more they underreport. So it's actually related to
BMI. The more weight you have to lose, the more you kind of don't admit to how much you're actually
eating, which kind of make sense. And the interesting thing is when you look at the data from some of
these weight loss studies, they use diet records. Then they show how much people are eating, and
they've tested these people's metabolic rates, and then after a year on the diet, if what these people
reported they were eating was accurate, they should have lost anywhere between 30 and 40 pounds.

So for example, in one study I was looking at, people showed their baseline calorie intake around 1,800
or 1,900 calories and when their metabolic rates are measured, that was somewhere around their
metabolic rates. So they were at weight maintenance, they weren't going up or down, they were just
stable. For the duration of the research, they reported eating between 1,500 and 1,600 calories. So
there is a significant calorie deficit there, and that's not including daily activity.

You could say they were probably burning about 2,000 calories a day and eating about 1,500 or 1,600 a
day based on the information they gave. Now, if that was true, a year later, if you just multiply that by
365 days, they should have lost between 30 and 40 pounds. But in the study's results, they had only lost,
on average, 6 pounds.

Brad Howard: Over the course of the year.

John Barban: Yes 6 pounds over the course of the year. So that means that they weren't eating 1,600
calories a day in reality they were still eating basically right up to their maintenance level.

Brad Howard: Right what you were saying was you found it really hard to believe, number one, that the
people were actually starting out at a point of only 1,900 calories a day. Like, "I just don't believe that
people are coming in these weight loss studies already claiming that they only eat, 1,800-1,900 calories
a day, the numbers just don't add up at all.”

John Barban: Oh, there is a whole field of research just for the impossibility of these numbers. The
bodybuilding fitness marketer dogma would say that all those people's metabolisms slowed down
because they're not eating enough and that is how they explain why they're not losing weight. But that
is a load of BS because those people's metabolic rates were measured in the study and proven to be
higher than what they said they were eating. Their metabolisms were proven to be 1,800 or 1,900 or
whatever their metabolic rate should be based on calculations. So they know that the subjects
metabolic rates didn’t change and they're reporting that they're eating well below metabolic rate but
they haven't lost any weight.

The truth is that they're just lying about what they're eating. They're just underreporting. It's actually so
bad that there was a research paper I read that said, "The underreporting of calories is the one of the
most significant and pervasive and robust psychological findings in all of health and medical literature."
It's the most consistent and the most obvious error and it happens all the time. There is just no way
around it. So with some researchers, their entire field of research is trying to find correction factors for
the underreporting, like that's all they do.

Brad Howard: Oh, wow.

John Barban: All they do is try to come up with formulas to fit the number of calories people say versus
how much weight loss they actually see... for example when people say they eat 1,500 calories, you can
run it through their formula and that means they’re eating 2,000 or whatever it may be. Because you
just can't trust people. You can't treat them like rats and just feed them as much as you want. People
are going to just do what they want to do.

Brad Howard: So if that's the case, why wouldn't people just create a study saying they were looking at
weight loss of a specific method but in reality the true study is on how many calories people said they
ate versus how much they really ate.

John Barban: Oh, yeah, that's what I'm saying these people do. That's the new field. That's one of the
fields of research but they don't structure the study that way. They go back and look at the methods and
look at what has been reported. But then you get consistent trends, like you'll see this disparity in what's
reported versus what happened over and over again to the point where you can come up with, I guess
to some degree, a correction factor (which I don't know how scalable it is). I haven't dug into it yet. I'll
probably have to pull the research on it and start looking through it.

Brad Howard: Sure that will be really interesting if you could go through and get a ballpark number.
Let's say if people were, on average, underreporting by 30%.

John Barban: Oh, Brian Wansink sort of already did this.

Brad Howard: Okay.

John Barban: He's got 2 really good books. One is called 'Mindless Eating' and the other one is called
'Marketing Nutrition', and he's actually shown that the heavier a person is, the more they underreport
and to a larger degree. So that the error gets bigger and the more foods in front of them, the worst they
underreport. People can guess at the calories in a handful of food way better than they guess at the
calories in a bowlful of food.
Brad Howard: Sure, but does this extrapolate out to real life?

John Barban: Probably yeah, because it's not much different than just having the food sitting in front of
you... You're going to make that same guess when you're out in the restaurant vs a study. And it would
make sense that you guess better in the lab because you don't want to look like a fool in the lab.

Brad Howard: Sure.

John Barban: Whereas in public, you're telling yourself your little internal lie like: "Oh, that's not many
calories in front of me I can eat all of it a not gain weight" Because you want to eat all the food, you
don't want to believe that the food served you is way more than you need, so your little internal script is
going to run and tell you “it's about 500 calories”, when really it's 800 or 900 calories.

Brad Howard: Yeah, because there is kind of two sides with that. The first one is, wouldn't it be
beneficial to actually tell people that there is a certain amount of calories that you're underreporting for
some reason or another. Now, it could be because serving sizes are off with all these collective errors
we've talked about in the past, or it could be just what you think. That could be helpful for some people,
but I could see other people thinking, "Oh, well, this right here is really what I think is 500 calories, but
it's really less than that." Or they could really screw up the numbers and say, "I got it right. Everybody
else has it wrong. So this is going to allow me to eat more."

John Barban: No, it won't work. It's kind of like setting your alarm clock ahead just to buy yourself 10
minutes in the morning, but if you know you set your alarm clock ahead, you know you have the extra
10 minutes.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: People are going to underreport and kind of cheat their way to more food no matter
what, so the only way around that would be to lie about how many calories are actually there. So you
would have to massively over-report the calories to them to correct for their underreporting of it.

Brad Howard: So the best thing that could be done would be a plan that you have to report 20% more
calories on food labels than what's actually there.

John Barban: Yeah, exactly. If you did that, if you just bump up all the calorie counts everywhere by
20%, I think everyone will start losing weight (at least the people who are trying to pay attention to
calories).

Brad Howard: Yeah. But nobody could ever find that out. That will be the key.

John Barban: No, no one could know. Because if anyone who was conscious of calories, at the very least
for people who were bothering to count calories, they would probably stop where they needed to stop,
they're going to cheat anyways?
Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: So at least this way you've corrected for their cheating on the label itself, but that is not
going to happen. And I mean, lots of people don't eat based on reading calories or even guessing at
calories. They just eat what's in front of them, so they don't know. So even for the people who bother
doing that, that's the only way to help. In the new book I'm going to go through all the different ways we
miss on calorie counting.

Brad Howard: Right, yesterday I saw a TV show called the 'World's Strongest Toddler'. This kid was 3
years old and he could do pull-ups at 1 years old, like literally do pull-ups. He did 17 sit-ups or something
like that where another kid his age couldn't even do one. If you saw his back when he's hanging on stuff,
I mean, the kid was ripped. And basically what they were saying was they're trying to determine
whether at first if there was some myostatin gene that he was missing out on.

But I guess where I'm going to with this is not necessarily the kid or anything like that, but there was a
doctor who was up there and the first thing he said was is that, "They're going to sequence this kid's
DNA to actually find out what's causing his muscles to be 40% bigger than a normal kid his age.

But what some of these doctors were saying were like what is going to happen is that as soon as they
sequenced this kid's DNA, it's going to get out and then everybody is going to start jumping on the
bandwagon saying that they can produce this certain claim that is going to make this thing happen for
you.

John Barban: Yeah.

Brad Howard: Then all of a sudden all the black market bodybuilder stuff was starting to say that they
could somehow inhibit the myostatin gene and everybody will jump on top of it, even though it was
totally unproven. So that's kind of what I'm seeing a lot of now in nutrition where people are jumping on
a specific gene, hormone, or function to actually give you permission to eat a lot less. One of the popular
ones is leptin and the other is insulin.

John Barban: Yeah. I don't know why people think that there is a problem with eating less food. I still
don't get that. I think people are afraid of going below some kind of minimum and becoming
malnourished and then the whole starvation mode nonsense and that kind of stuff comes into it. Like
you've said, they've created a fear of eating less and then they create the solution to allow you to eat
less, which there is no need for this solution because there is nothing wrong with eating less. So I don't
really understand. I get it from a marketing standpoint, I just don't understand how people got to the
point where they are afraid of eating less.

Brad Howard: It's like people need permission to eat less nowadays.

John Barban: Oh, yeah. No one in North America is going to be malnourished. I don't understand how
anyone thinks that's even possible. Especially anyone who is looking to lose weight. The longest fast on
record, a medical fast for weight loss is 384 days. He was under medical supervision and obviously they
gave him some kind of mix of vitamins and minerals throughout that time. But that's over a year of not
eating. Now, if you have enough energy, and it's not like he withered away and starvation mode set in
and ate up his muscles. That's how he got rid of hundreds of pounds of fat. And that's why your body
accumulates fat in the first place; to use it as energy when you're not eating.

Fitness marketers would have you believe that it's the reverse and that your body stores fat, and then
when you don't eat it eats away at your muscle to preserve the fat. How does that make any sense at
all? So in the end of it, you would just be a lump of fat and bone and all of your muscle would be gone.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: Physiologically, the exact opposite happens. So anyone who tells you otherwise just
doesn't know their physiology at all. I mean, you aren't the fat, you are the muscle and everything else
underneath it. The fat is just your storage vessel to get you by to your next meal.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: It's just that in our society there is no food scarcity. We have food readily available and it's
cheap, and we are programmed to eat food when it's around. So we just eat a lot of food.

Brad Howard: Yeah, speaking of that, we were discussing how there is no such thing as a fat old person,
and that there is a kind of theory that you have so many calories that you can consume in your lifetime,
like a basic threshold of calories that you can consume. You can eat them all at once or you can stretch
them out or that kind of thing.

John Barban: Yeah, okay, so the way of looking at it is we're all going to die unfortunately. And well,
however long we last is just dependent on how many risks of death or premature death we can get rid
of or minimize. So that's where this whole concept of health comes from. All of this is cheating death as
long as possible.

So the oldest people on record are super-centenarians, meaning they've lived past 110, and I think the
oldest one just died. She was a 123, I think, and you can't get to that age without being really healthy all
along. Nobody makes it to 100 with metabolic syndrome and obesity and diabetes - it's impossible.

So by definition, the best definition of health is anyone who can live really long because that means
nothing has got them so far. So there is a theory that there is only so many beats your heart has and
you’re done. So doing a lot of vigorous exercises constantly uses up your beats too fast, I don't know
about that one. And then there is the concept that there are only so many breaths. So it's the same
thing, the more active you are you're using up that energy quicker, so the idea is to have some kind of
balance. Exercise when you need to, but don't overdo it. You can't just keep fixing more with more.

One of the other theories is that there is only so much food you can eat in a lifetime and once you've
kind hit your food limit, you're toast. So if you pile all of the food in the first 30 years, that could
conceivably kill you. I know that's sort of unscientific, but when you look at it in a bit of an abstract way,
if you would overeat constantly, you are going to exacerbate your risk of heart disease, diabetes and all
of the other co-morbidities that come with being overweight.
So in theory, yes, you've eaten your way to death, like you've eaten your way to a premature death by
eating too much. And we know that for life extension research, one of the key models for extending life
in animals and humans is calorie restriction, just eating less. So there is something to be said for eating
less food and lasting longer.

But the only way you last longer is by not exacerbating any diseases that might get you. So the
healthiest thing you can do is eat less, and there is no such thing as a 100-year-old person who is also
obese. You don't make it that far if you're big. Because if you're big, you are going to exacerbate some
disease state along the way.

You can piece it together. By eating less, you've at least eliminated that chance of premature death due
to any complications with eating too much. So something is going to get you. It's just that you've at least
removed the concept of anything to do with overeating getting you.

One of my buddies who does neurobiology research said no matter how healthy you are and no matter
how you avoid every other disease, if you live long enough, you will eventually just get Parkinson's
anyways.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: So I mean, there is no such thing as dying of natural causes. There is no such thing as
dying of old age. You can actually measure all the different things that kill people so far, and there are
just two lists. There is a list of things that can kill us, and there is a list of things that can't. And as science
slowly moves things off the ‘Can Kill Us list’ to the ‘Can't Kill Us list’. We just keep living longer, and that's
sort of the miracle of modern medicine. So as technology progresses, more things get removed from the
‘Can Kill Us’ list onto the ‘Can't Kill Us’ list.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: Before we had small pox vaccines, small pox was highly fatal. But now no one dies of small
pox. And cancer, 50 years ago just the word ‘cancer’ terrified people. Now when you hear it, you think,
"Oh, what kind of cancer”. Certain cancers are very treatable and it's actually rare to die of certain
cancers because we have such good ways of treating them now. You know, there are all different kinds,
but it used to be once you've got it, you're done. And now, it's like a lot of them you can survive as long
as they're detected earlier. So detection method and all of these sorts of things go into it.

And same with the way we're looking at total calories, if you just eat too much, too fast, that alone is a
huge risk factor for shortening your life.

Brad Howard: Yeah, let's talk about weight in general, because I know Brad (Pilon) made a comment
one day, talking about BMI that what if too heavy is too heavy no matter what the weight is. So no
matter if it is muscle, fat or whatever, I mean you've talked about it before how you think BMI might
actually be right on. But what if carrying too much muscle so that it will put you in the overweight is bad
as well?
John Barban: It was never distinguished in the BMI. BMI never meant fat, it just meant weight. Now
with that said and based on our calculations, our rules of 7s and how much lean mass we can actually
build, the scientists, the community that put the BMI together was most likely under the assumption
that you can't just gain massive amounts of muscle mass, which is a fair assumption, we know you can't.

But if you artificially induce that gain with drugs, you're probably in a high-risk category again. So it
doesn't matter if the weight is muscle or fat, but the only way for it to be overweight is probably fat, and
then the only way for muscle to actually put you in overweight category probably had to be drug-
induced.

Brad Howard: Sure. And then, of course, when you get the drug-induced category you got other things
that come across, too like an enlarged heart and all that stuff that kind of comes with the territory. So
that was kind of interesting, too much weight is too much weight is an overriding theory. And like you
were saying, I know you're pretty much at a 1.6 AI and you're body fat is pretty low.

John Barban: Yeah, somewhere in the low mid-teen or something like that.

Brad Howard: Yeah, but you're toeing the line as far as being "overweight" on the BMI right?

John Barban: Yeah, I'm on the upper end of the normal BMI.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: If I have a big meal, it puts me in the overweight, and then by the next morning, I'm back
to on the top end of normal.

Brad Howard: Sure.

John Barban: Which makes sense for someone who has trained their whole life for muscle mass. I'm
still in the normal range but on the very upper end of it, which makes perfect sense. And so my question
is if the BMI is incorrect, then what am I? Underweight?

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: I don't get that. I don't get what the normal range would be then, what would it mean
then if it's wrong? I don't know. I just don't understand. The argument only works one way.

Brad Howard: Sure. It's kind of funny that as we're going now on this. I know we are talking about
nutrition, but this obviously kind of blends into this. A lot of people talk and mention the fact that there
needs to be some sort of correction factor for BMI for muscle mass, but as we're seeing, just from
personal experience, and not only personal experience, there are people in the forums and stuff like
that, the severe kind of overestimation, or actually underestimation of actually how much body fat
people are carrying. It's almost like people are wanting a correction factor for the body fat that they're
carrying, but they assume that it's muscle, which kind of goes back to what we talked about last week on
this Muscle Index.
John Barban: Well, the thing of the BMI is people aren't realizing that it's not about whether or not you
look good or any of that, it's about disease risks. So the point of the BMI is it shows that disease risks go
up. It doesn't mean you look bad. It just means they go up. And then it doesn't mean it happens for
everybody.

For those few people who are just heavily muscled and maybe are in the "overweight" category but
they're really lean, that don’t mean you're unhealthy. You are probably the exception to the rule. It
means an increased disease risk for the other 10 people who are in that category not because they have
exceptional muscle mass and work ethic, but they are just overweight. For them their disease risk is up,
that's it. It still fits for most.

The point is it's a population statistic. It's an epidemiological measurement for large groups of people.
It's not meant to drill down and be specific for one person at a time, but in general it holds. That's how
all population and epidemiologic statistics are measured. Obviously, each person is an individual case,
but on a whole when you look at a bigger population, that's where it becomes useful.

Brad Howard: Sure.

John Barban: This is the same for all statistics that try to look at large numbers of people versus a single
person. Obviously you could dissect down a single person's life. You could slice it a thousand ways
before you get your answer to exactly disease risk and things like that, but that's not the point of those
types of measurement.

Brad Howard: Interesting. I never really realized that as far as scare tactics, as far as losing muscle were
concerned when it comes to actually dieting and "preserving" muscle and things like that. All these
things, I just finally was like, "You know, screw it. I'm just going to do this. Do it the easy way and let's
see what happens." And I got the exact result I was after without of the BS and without worrying about
any of it.

And I guess we're going to touch on this in the teleseminar and kind of walk through exactly what both
of us have done to get down to where we are and we can talk, I guess, both muscle-building nutrition
and fat loss nutrition and why they're essentially pretty much the same thing and the only thing that
matters is essentially how much, whether you're maintaining or whether you're trying to decrease body
fat, so that's just been really, really interesting to me because it really provides a framework to work
within. A lot better framework, because you don't have to worry about all this other stuff, whether your
hormones are out of whack. I mean, it's seems like the more we have talked about this stuff, the more
and more I get comfortable with the fact that the lower your body fat is, the more your hormones that
may have been out of whack before become normal.

John Barban: Sure, yeah. Body fat itself causes us issues, so getting rid of it helps, like you don't need to
be contest-ready ripped all the time, but part of the problem of the disease risk increase is the fat itself
causes changes in the hormones. I mean, just getting rid of fat helps.
And then for guys who are lean and they're trying to build more muscle and putting on fat, there is no
advantage to putting on fat to build muscle. It doesn't make any sense to do that. I feel like we always
come back to the same points, but you've got to accept like where you're starting from and what you're
starting material is based on your somatotype and then just roll with it.

And it's seems like everybody who has got the one wants the other. It's the grass is always greener or
ectomorph just want to be bigger, endomorph just wants to get lean. They're always looking to what the
other guy has instead of sort of appreciating what they have.

Brad Howard: So I guess by the theories that you're proposing to others, people are now killing
themselves to build muscle.

John Barban: Well, yeah, a little bit kind of.

John Barban: You know, I'm not so sure that ‘shirt on’ big is necessarily a bad thing.

Brad Howard: Sure.

John Barban: Just admit that that is what you want.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: Like if you just want to be huge in a shirt, I know how to make you walk into a bar and just
be huge. But you take the shirt off and you're not going to look as good as other guy who is way leaner
than you, but you both have to have your shirt off to see that.

John Barban: Put the shirt back on and then you're the big guy again. And since we spend a lot of our
time with our shirts on there is the argument that who cares how lean you are, as long as you take up
more space. I mean, that's not something that I'm subscribing to, but with some people if that's what
they want, it's go ahead, eat your heart out, just get as big as possible... because even fat guys are
referred to as “a big guy”.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: You need to be really fat to be to the point where you're beyond just looking big, and
instead are just fat.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: So on the way up, you can still have a shoulder to waste taper. It's not like you're all gut,
but you still have big shoulders and chest. With the shirt on, people are like, "Wow, this is a big guy."

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: But if you take your shirt off, they're like, "Oh, that's sort of a big fat guy." So do you care?
Do you care how lean you are? Do you just literally want to take up space?
Brad Howard: I think guys have a threshold weight of 200 pounds. Then another thing that guys are
interested in, and that's being able to wear extra large shirts. I think extra large is a threshold.

John Barban: It's like a girl is wearing her size zero.

Brad Howard: Sure.

John Barban: Yeah, guys don't want to be in a large or medium.

Brad Howard: Yeah. We got a question in the forums about shirt on versus shirt off, and I kind of got
thinking that whether you're shirt on big or shirt off big, it really depends on what size shirt you're
wearing.

John Barban: Yeah, totally.

Brad Howard: I mean, because if I put on this median that you sent me. I mean, it's like a tighter shirt
on me because my body fat is lower and I'm close to 1.6 AI. I get comments on being big. You know, if I
wear one of my other tee-shirts, it's like an XL, and it’s just like a sheet on me. Then I don't look big, I
look thin and waify. So if you start to kind of plan on AI, it just means you've got to go shopping and get
some stuff that would actually make you look good.

John Barban: Yeah, I'm the same way. I used to wear XL. Now, I wear mediums.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: I look way bigger in mediums than I do if I'm wearing a large or an XL because like you said
it's just draped on me. And then there is the psychology of being like, "Oh, man. I can't fill an XL shirt
anymore."

Brad Howard: Yeah.

John Barban: But who said you should have?

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: It's almost like guys need vanity sizing the same as girls. The girls have various women's
clothing lines that change the size of the clothes so women feel small again. So like they keep adjusting
what a size 4 is bigger and bigger. So bigger heavier women can still say they're size 4. And then it makes
the small girls a double zero, so no woman has to admit that she's wearing a 12.

Brad Howard: Sure.

John Barban: So I almost think guys need that, like guys need recalibrated clothing. That should be the
Adonis clothing line.

Brad Howard: Yeah.

John Barban: We need a shirt; like if that guy is medium, that's an Adonis XL.
Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: Or calibrated for a height. Literally we should have shirts for 6-foot tall guys.

Brad Howard: Sure.

John Barban: A 1.6 AI 6-foot tall shirt. This is the one area where guys are a little bit behind girls or we
react the same, but we haven't admitted it where we've got a size we think we need to fit into, and
we're terrible at picking clothes.

Brad Howard: Oh, I'll tell you, and just thinking about it now, there are three things that guys want.
Number one, guys want to weigh 200 pounds. They want to fit in an extra large tee shirt, and they all
want to go and buy Magnum condoms.

John Barban: [Laughs]. Yeah.

Brad Howard: No guy wants to walk out of the drugstore with a regular pack of condoms.

John Barban: Yeah.

Brad Howard: He wants to walk out of there with the big dogs, even if it's going to roll off of him and
he's going to end up potentially getting her pregnant. He didn't care. He bought Magnums, damn it.

John Barban: Yeah, so it's the same thing. Girls want to be smaller. Guys want to be bigger. It's
completely a basic thing. I guess it's where the whole muscle building industry comes from and the fat
loss for women. I think guys have it even worse because they’re trying to be bigger and lean.

Brad Howard: Yeah.

John Barban: So they're trying to be 200 pounds and ripped whereas girls don't have to worry of trying
to build muscle and be leaner. They're just trying to be smaller.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: Whereas with guys, smaller is not the goal, it's big and ripped.

Brad Howard: Yeah, I want to be 5% body fat and 200 pounds and wearing extra large tee shirt and
walking around with Magnum condoms, that's my goal.

John Barban: Yeah, think of how stupid of a goal that is to pick a body weight and the leanness at that
body weight, like what makes you think you can do that? What makes any guys think he can just say,
"Well, I'd like to be 205 pounds at 5% body fat?

Brad Howard: Well, that's because everybody else lies about where they are.

John Barban: Oh, yeah.

John Barban: But I mean pro bodybuilders who are on tons of drugs can barely do that.
Brad Howard: Sure.

John Barban: Like Dexter Jackson who won the Mr. Olympia, and he was 215-ish or something like that,
and he's gargantuan. What makes another guy think he can do that?

Brad Howard: Yeah my buddy is on copious amounts of (juice), and he's a cool guy. I mean, it's really
weird with the amount of stuff he's on. You would think by all rumors that he'd be just a really
aggressive guy, but he's a really cool guy. He's probably 5'8" or 5'9". He's massive. His arms are way
bigger than mine. His legs are way bigger than mine, and his contest weight was like 170, like high 170s.
But he's just a bulldog.

But I was asking what his diet was and this is including everything that he is on. When he's on, when he's
"growing", his bulking diet is 4,000 calories. So I'm going to say only 4,000 calories because you've got a
lot of people that aren't on that amount of drugs that are trying to eat 5,000 or 6,000 calories a day.

John Barban: Right.

Brad Howard: And so if he doesn't eat 5,000 or 6,000 calories a day on superhuman doses of rocket
fuel, why would anybody else?

John Barban: Well, that's what they do. People try to replace the drugs with food. That's all the
supplement and eat-to-get-big industry is.

Brad Howard: Yeah.

John Barban: It's like we know you're scared to use drugs, use this instead.

Brad Howard: Right, but on the other hand, when he's cutting down, he said his diet was roughly like
2,200 calories and this guy is really meticulous about this type of stuff. You know, he had a guy actually
plan his stuff out, so he's probably pretty close to being on as far as what the actual caloric amount is,
closer than most people, I would say.

John Barban: Yeah.

Brad Howard: So let's say give or take 100 calories a day, but he's also taking all of this other stuff, too,
and doing an hour or 2 of cardio a day, so he's at 2,200 calories plus taking T3 and Clenbuterol and all of
this other stuff.

John Barban: Does he really get all that fat when he's bulking?

Brad Howard: I've never seen him that huge.

John Barban: So when he's coming down, he doesn't have that far down to coming either.

Brad Howard: I think he gets up to like 240.

John Barban: Oh, that's pretty big.

Brad Howard: Yeah, but it's not like shirt on like fat noticeable. I mean, he still got veins coming out of
his arms and stuff like that.

John Barban: Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of that is water bloat, too, like that's part of what steroids do is
they hyperhydrate your muscle.

Brad Howard: I'll try to ask him tomorrow and I want to see if he'd be willing to do it, just to kind of give
me a listing of like everything he's on going through each stage, and then along with the amount of
calories he's eaten and all of that stuff, and then kind of put it up and see like, "All right. Well, if you are
on this type of stuff, this is what you can get away with. But if you're not, then..."

John Barban: Yeah, that's the disclaimer as far as calories in and out and all of that stuff. We don't really
know what exactly is going on in a drug-induced bodybuilder body, so they may be able to handle more
calories than we think.

Brad Howard: Sure.

John Barban: Because we don't have any good scientific data to really know, and like you said most of
those guys will take 2 or 3 different kinds of stimulants to try to cut down, so they will take things that
do alter their metabolism, but we're not talking about using that stuff. So when we talk about calories
for everybody else, we're not talking about using T3 and then eating. We're talking about eating with no
extra hormones and just eating.

Brad Howard: Yeah, I mean, we're talking about things that actually raise people's body temperatures.

John Barban: Yeah you don't want to raise your metabolism, like I don't think people realize how
dangerous that is. If you're metabolism goes up just like a bit it's a fever. If it goes up a bit more, you're
dead.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: So you can't really afford to have your body temperature just kind of going all over the
place. The debate is whether or not even tiny, tiny fluctuations in it result in big-time fat burning, which I
don't think it does. But it may, maybe there is slight differences between you and the next guy over who
seems to be able to eat just a bit more than you and get away with it. So maybe his temperature is a
fraction of a degree higher and that's the difference between him having just one extra meal a day than
you, and not a big meal like 200-300 calories.

Brad Howard: Sure.

John Barban: And it's another reason why you shouldn't compare yourself to anybody else because if
there is the small differences, so I mean, when people say, "Oh, he has a fast metabolism." I don't think
that could account for thousands of calories of difference, but it may account for a little difference.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: And on the lines of, you know, he can get away with another small 300-400 calorie meal
that you can't, that sort of thing, but I don't think it means somebody can just hammer back like 2 or 3
extra meals a day and still not gain weight. I don't think there is that much fluctuation if there is,
because I would guess that would suggest you would have to have a significantly higher temperature,
which means now you're in a clinical situation where you basically have a fever.

Brad Howard: Right, yeah, because that is one of the things I don't think people understand is that
byproduct of burning calories is heat.

John Barban: Well we know clinically and medically that there is a range of what the human
temperature is and it's a very tight range. You can't be too far with that range. As soon as you start
moving up a few degrees Fahrenheit, that's a problem. The clinician knows to start looking for some kind
of physiological problem when you're temperature is up a couple of degrees, and then a couple of
degrees past, you're in big trouble. So you can't be that much different than anybody else.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: Otherwise, you're sick, like something is wrong with you. So that's why I'm saying my
metabolism isn’t much faster than yours, it doesn't make any sense because if it was, my temperature
would be drastically different than yours, which means I would be dead, like it can't be that much
different.

Brad Howard: Sure.

John Barban: To the point where someone is crushing 2,000 calories more than the next person.

Brad Howard: Right, yeah maybe you can talk about where there are certain people that are just a lot
more fidgety throughout the day.

John Barban: Oh, yeah, the non-exercise activity thermogenesis. The other thing that no one is
accounting for is movement, and they have measured this in laboratory settings. People don't act
exactly how they would in a lab or when they're being monitored. But what they do, people eat a test
meal, and the room itself is a calorimeter testing how much energy they're burning. And they're looking
at just how active they are after eating. There is a distinct category of people. Some people become
more active when they eat. It's like literally a response to eating is to become active. And other people
don't.

So one of the things that may make certain people resistant to weight gain is the idea that they just
react to food by moving more. You know, people in your life, there are some people that are
busybodies. They just kind of go, go, go, and there are other people who are more like relaxed and
they're not always up and about. I'm sure part of it is nature and part of it is nurture, but in general,
you've got those two categories and the people that are always on the go typically are leaner.

Brad Howard: Which makes sense. I mean, instead of exercise being done in one hour a day, other
people are getting little bits over 15 hours a day, and not to mention the hour you exercise. I mean,
you've got 15 hours a day roughly of increased activity over another person that's just the natural order
of the way you live.

John Barban: Yeah, and if it's just little bits, and this thing is if you were observing this, it would seem
indistinguishable, like if over the course of 15 hours, if I would spend 5 or 6 more minutes per hour
sitting than you do, it doesn't seem like much, but when you add that up, it's like another hour and a
half of activity on your side that I didn't get.

Brad Howard: Sure.

John Barban: And if that's an extra 20 calories per hour, then 10 hours later, you're 200 or 300 calories
ahead of me, there is your pound of fat loss by the end of the month that you got that I didn't or
resistant to weight gain or the reason why you can eat more than me.

So it's really hard to measure all of this stuff and we tend to want to measure things in little discreet
chunks like a 45-minute workout, like how many calories can I possibly burn through in these 45
minutes. But we don't think about how many calories you'll burn through in the next 15 hours
throughout your day.

Brad Howard: You know, I was going to say, but then what happens is that people try to account for
this stuff in their calculations in trying to figure out how many calories you can eat, which again is
another permission-based thing. If this is going to give you permission to eat this many calories and
people always overestimate the amount of other types of activities they do all across the board. So it
kind of goes back to the whole thing of, if we were to try to figure out some correction factor of what
people are actually underestimating and we could apply it, well, then people would take that and try to
apply to themselves in the reversed direction to give themselves permission to eat 30% more calories
because they're sure they weren't accounting for that 30% before.

John Barban: Oh, yeah. I mean, there is a girl I know who trains at the gym 3 or 4 times a week and
runs. She runs probably 10K per training session. And this girl is realistic; she knows what she's doing as
far as calorie counting. She knows that whatever the machine said, she guesses 20% lower than what
the machine said, if not more. And same with eating, whatever she eats she knows it's probably more
than that.

And then her friend, during an hour workout believes she’s burned 1000 calories, and I'm like "What?
Are you crazy? No, it's impossible. You’d need to be sprinting for the whole hour."

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: But she thinks she burned 1000 calories, and then she goes and eats as if she has created
a 1,000-calorie deficit, and then she wonders why she's gaining weight. And then that's where the “my
metabolism is broken” argument comes in. And really, there is nothing wrong with people, they just
have made gross errors in their estimation of how many calories they've burned.
Brad Howard: Well, let's post this as a question, why do you think it is that people try to get by on the
least amount of money possible, right? Well, how come that's not cool with eating as well? You only try
to get by with the least amount of food possible.

John Barban: I think we're built to eat, we’re at the very least, programmed to try to eat to our BMR.
Our hunger and satiety feelings seem to be calibrated more or less to BMR.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: BMR plus however much activity, total energy expenditure. Obviously if we went out and
we're in a football tournament and played 3 games of flag football today, we would be hungry and we’d
crush a bunch a food tonight. So we are calibrated. Our hunger and satiety is calibrated to energy
expenditure, which is pretty good it makes sense. Because even people who are gaining weight, they
don't gain weight forever, right? People gain weight in bursts and then level off, and then gain weight
and then level off. Otherwise, everyone who is overeating would just constantly gain and gain and gain
until they're dead.

That means for most of the year, most people eating at BMR and then intermittently they're overeating,
but they never have an intermittent under eat. So it seems that our baseline is to eat to our energy
expenditure and then you add in the fun factor of food, the celebration of food, high caloric density
foods, like things that are high in sugar and fat. Add all those things together and the celebration of
eating, then that's how you end up slowly gaining weight over time because you never have the under
day. You're only ever at maintenance or above maintenance.

But for every 100 calories above maintenance, you need to go 100 calories below on some other day to
not knock out that weight gain.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: And that is just to stay where you were. To actually drop weight, you need to go even
lower. But since we're pre-programmed to at least eat up to energy expenditure it feels so hard to eat
below it because we have this drive to eat to it. So you have to consciously fight it, that's why it's so
hard.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: Because without thinking about it, you're going to eat to energy expenditure just about
everyday, if you don't think about it. Overeat another couple of hundred calories and do that every day
there is your extra pound a month and then by the end of the year, there is your extra 12 pounds and
that's how people gain. But you don't have to think, you don't have to force yourself to overeat the way
you have to force yourself to under eat.

Brad Howard: Right, yeah, I guess where I was going with that is people exercise to basically give
themself permission to eat more, but I guess what you're saying is it's not really they're giving
themselves permission to eat more, but they're just kind of naturally filling in the gap of what they
burned.

John Barban: Yeah.

Brad Howard: It's kind of unconscious type of a basis instead of being very cognizant of what's going on.

John Barban: Yeah, that's why even if you exercise to lose weight, you still have to consciously control
your calories. You see, what everyone is trying to do with diet is trying to come to a way that you can
unconsciously eat less from not actively controlling it, which, I think, is impossible because that's like
trying to tell someone who smokes cigarettes to go and stand with a bunch of people who are smoking
and don't think about not having one.

Brad Howard: Sure.

John Barban: Put the heroine addict back in the alley where the heroine is and tell him not to have any.
But tell him not to think about it. Just say, "You know, just go about your business. Just ignore it." It's
impossible. It's going to be a conscious effort to not do it. It's the same as smoking. It's going to be a
conscious effort to stop. So with eating, we unconsciously eat to basically energy expenditure and we
can easily unconsciously overeat just to do the social nature of food when other people are around.

Now, not everyone does that. Some people just stop, even if there is lots of food around, a lot of people
are just like, "You know, I'm not hungry anymore." They just don't want anymore. And then other
people will indulge a bit more, but for almost everybody, it's a conscious effort to under eat.

Brad Howard: Sure.

John Barban: Like you actually have to go out of your way and direct mental energy to eating less, and
that's because your instinct or your kind of built-in genetics is trying to drive you to eat to energy
expenditure.

Brad Howard: It's almost like you need to maximize your efforts when the stimulus is not around when
it comes to weight loss. So you know how we talked about kind of coming in and accounting for the
different social events or whatever eating events that you have during your week and accounting for
that, instead of trying to go through and will power your way through it.

John Barban: No, just go ahead. Go ahead and eat more at Thanksgiving, just eat less the next day.

John Barban: Become flexible somewhere else. And now, this brings us back to an even more
interesting point, what's to define what energy expenditure is? What time frame? let's say we just eat a
lot today. Well, why do we define calories in and out in a day? We can just say, "Well, we've eaten
enough for the next 36 hours."

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: So there is no reason to eat again for 36 more hours. It's the social norms of eating
everyday on a fixed schedule that ends up making a lot of people overeat, like you kind of do that to an
animal. If you get a domesticated animal on a eating schedule, it's one of the ways to make it fat. It gets
used to eating on a schedule, instead of just eating just what it needs.

Brad Howard: Yeah, I just want to say it's kind of the concept of people talking about your daily caloric
needs. That's pretty much all you hear. What are your daily caloric needs? And nobody ever says what
are your weekly caloric needs or what your yearly caloric needs? It's all about daily.

John Barban: What about hourly? Why not just go hourly? It would be like, "Well, my hourly caloric
need is roughly 80 calories." I mean, that's really what it is. Nobody eats hourly, but if I know my hourly
caloric need is 80 calories, but I never eat just an 80-calorie meal every hour. I eat a chunk of food and
then I don't eat for a while. Well, then if the chunk of food is bigger, the time you spend between eating
just has to get longer.

Brad Howard: Sure.

John Barban: And that's it. I mean, there is nothing else to it, that's it.

Brad Howard: Right, but I guess there is a breakdown point that if you don't get this many calories per
day, then your body is going to go out of whack, and it's calibrated per day and all the marketing and
what people talk about is on a daily basis.

John Barban: Yeah, but that's how marketers frame it, but none of the science is set up that way.

Brad Howard: Sure.

John Barban: And none of our recommendations are even set up that way. When you see the RDA for a
vitamin or a mineral or calories, even though the RDA is a daily "allowance", they stress in the research
that this is meant to be taken as a weekly or monthly average.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: And they just expressed it as a daily thing because they don't know how else to say it to
people. You're not going to frontload all your calories in the week, like eat them all in the first 2 days
and don't eat for 5 more. So to people it makes sense to average it out on a daily basis, but that's not
written in stone, or I guess the other way of saying it is nothing bad happens if you don't happen to get
it all in one day.

Brad Howard: Right, yeah. Like there are just too many statistical fluctuations in a day that don't wash
out.

John Barban: Listen, it's actually almost impossible to get everything that they say in one day. That's
why the food pyramid is a joke. Nobody actually follows that. I bet you nobody in any industrialized
country has ever once actually tried to follow their respective food guide because it's a colossal waste of
money. Because who is actually going to look through that thing, calibrate all the servings and actually
feed themselves that way, like that would take all of your day's energy and effort just to do that.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: And for what reason? If you actually look at it that extremely, every meal would be an
identical portioned meal, like you couldn't have one meal that has a bit more meat because then the
next meal would have too much bread. Like you'd end up with this exact proportioned meal every time,
which nobody eats that way. That's just ridiculous. Some meals do have more carbs, some meals do
have more protein, some meals have more fat, and who cares? There is nothing wrong with getting
them in various ratios. You don't need them all the same every meal. Otherwise, you're talking about
doing some scientifically engineered paste that has the exact ratio of carbs, fat, protein, vitamins and
minerals, and then you just eat this uniformed paste constantly, and then that would be the best kind of
way of eating. That's the sort of the absurd end to looking at it from the balanced nutrient ratio timing
spectrum.

It's like, well, if you're going to try to balance every meal and you're going to try to get the right nutrient
ratio on every meal, then why wouldn't you just balance every bite of that meal?

Brad Howard: Right, exactly.

John Barban: Whereas realistically, some meals are higher in fats, some meals are higher in carbs, some
meals are higher in protein and none of it matters.

John Barban: That's what the supplements are. They just put more and more stuff in them until the
point where meal replacement and shake has just got everything in it.

Brad Howard: Right imagine as a bodybuilder you’d get bulking paste and just buy a big bucket of
bulking paste and that's all you eat, it's just this big bucket of paste, and then you can get artificial
flavors to dump on it to make it taste better. Almost like space food, and then if you're trying to lean
out, then all you do is you get your little serving cup to dig out your paste, you level it off with a knife so
you could see exactly how much is in there, and then that's what you eat.

John Barban: Oh, that's all the supplement industry is with their meal replacement shakes and bars.
They're literally trying to get you an all-in-one powder or bar.

Brad Howard: But it has come way to the extreme.

John Barban: Yeah, but people do. It's a miserable way of eating. That's terrible, I don't know why
anyone will want to do that, but some people think that is how they have to eat.

Brad Howard: Yeah.

John Barban: It's impossible to eat that way. In that diet study I was talking about, the one that
compares Atkins to Zone to Ornish to Weight Watchers. The compliance rate on all these diet is terrible,
like halfway through 50% of the people have dropped out, and by the end of a year, a huge chunk of the
people have given up, and they're just like, "Oh, it's just too hard. I just can't do it. I can't follow all those
rules."

Brad Howard: Sure.

John Barban: And all the diets are the same. Everyone just gives up on them because there are too
many rules.

Brad Howard: Right. So the answer is eat how you want to eat, but less of it.

John Barban: And that's it.

Brad Howard: And that's how you live. That's all we did. It's kind of funny.

John Barban: It's amazing that I have to write an entire book about that.

Brad Howard: Yeah, and people are going to buy it.

John Barban: Yeah. Well like you said the book is permission, the book is permission to eat what you
want, but less of it.

Brad Howard: Right. and the one thing people will get will be the fact that you've taken all the
information out there and disseminated into bite-sized chunks that people can actually understand, and
instead of trying to piece it out for themselves, it will be right there as handy guide already filtered with
everything that you need to know and everything you don't need to know removed, all in one spot, and
the end goal will be that you will never have to buy another diet and nutrition book again.

John Barban: No, you can if you want to and just kind of view it through the lens of what I'm sort of
giving you.

Brad Howard: Sure.

John Barban: So I guess, we're good. I think we can wrap up here.

Brad Howard: Yeah, well, guys we're going to do a teleseminar on nutrition, basically the ins and out of
muscle building and fat loss and nutrition. John is going on a couple of more things that he's been
teasing out on some of the research. I think you would be really interested in. This is coming up on
Thursday, so I think you will really enjoy that. There will actually be a link up under this or actually on the
sub-blog post or in the transcription that you will be able to click and register for, so you want to do
that. It's going to be really cool stuff.

Brad Howard: Nice. All right, guys. Well, thanks for listening, and for John Barban, I'm Brad Howard,
and this is your Adonis Lifestyle podcast.
Here are a few links for you to check out:
1. Adonis Lifestyle Podcast (iTunes subscription link)

2. Listen to the audio version or comment on “Measuring Calories”

3. Get the body you deserve and invest in the Adonis Index Systems today!