Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Eat Stop Eat Expert Interviews
Brad Pilon discusses Eat Stop Eat with some of the best fitness personalities
online including:
Craig Ballantyne www.turbulencetraining.com
Chris Lopez www.fitandbusydad.com
Jimmy Smith www.jimmysmithtraining.com
Kevin Larrabee www.thefitcast.com
Adam Steer www.coachsteer.com
Vince Delmonte www.vincedelmontefitness.com
Interview With Craig Ballantyne from www.turbulencetraining.com
Brad and Craig discuss working out, little changes that make a big difference,
protein guilt, different eating styles from around the world and how to get
through a tough fast.
Craig Ballantyne: Let’s take a detour from Eat Stop Eat first and just tell us about what kind of
training you’re doing these days and if you’ve come across any type of
interesting ideas for fat loss training.
Brad Pilon: Right now I think the majority of my training has just been trying to figure out
what I'm doing and why I'm doing it at the gym and remembering the most
important thing about any training program is progression. So I'm just making
sure I'm tracking my workouts and progressively moving forward whether it’s
muscle building or fat loss.
That’s the advice I have for anybody. If you’re not doing that right now, take a
break, take a second to look at what you’re doing and start tracking it to see if
you are progressing. If you’re not tracking it you don’t know if you’re
progressing or not.
Craig Ballantyne: Okay cool and then anything in particular in terms of new nutrition stuff that
you’ve come across that you want to mention?
Brad Pilon: Sure, I mean, right now the other thing I'm focusing on is helping people make
small changes. We talked about this in one of our first calls back when we
talked about the bodybuilding show I did and how it was the small changes in
my day to day eating that made the biggest changes and results in the way I
looked.
For example I was just drinking my coffee right now looking over the differences
between having what we call in Canada an extra large, triple, triple which is a
really large coffee with two cream, two sugar, and I calculated it to be 420
calories. If you drink one of these per day you could easily start cutting your
calories by simply weaning yourself down to even just a large coffee, it’s one
size down, and only a double, double, but you’d already be down to 230
calories. Then if you get down to a large single, single, it’s just one sugar, one
cream, it’s only 115 calories, so you’d save yourself a total of 300 calories in a
day, over 2,000 calories in a week just by changing the type and size of coffee
you drink.
It gets back to the idea of the little things as opposed to giant drastic changes in
the way you eat can have really big effects. So that’s sort of what I'm
concentrating on right now, helping people deal with the little things.
Craig Ballantyne: Any other examples of that?
Brad Pilon: Yeah there are just tons. It all comes down to your daily rituals (which we’ve
talked about before) and addressing areas and rituals where you can get rid of
food or change food choices. One of the things I'm dealing with right now with
people who have tried Eat Stop Eat is what I like to call protein guilt. It’s that
leftover thought process from the bodybuilding days when you believe you have
to get a certain amount of protein in and so you are always aiming for a certain
number.
A common recommendation for protein consumption was something like three
grams per pound of bodyweight or something crazy like that. While we’ve
moved away from that we still hold a little bit of the guilt.
This is an example of protein guilt kicking in: Lets say you’ve gone 3‐4 or maybe
five hours and decide it’s time for a snack. You grab an apple, a banana, maybe
some almonds, and in the back of your head you are still thinking “what about
the protein?”. You kind of start feeling a little guilty you haven’t had protein so
you go out and you grab yourself a chocolate milk or even a normal milk but
what you’ve done is consume a very large amount of calories for just a few
grams of protein.
So I think it’s healthy to get over this protein guilt and always having to get
protein in and the calories that come with that. That’s one trick that a lot of
people are having problems with right now is relaxing about that one specific
macronutrient.
Craig Ballantyne: Great. Alright, well let’s talk about Eat Stop Eat here and let’s address one of
the common criticisms of it which is that you never really talk a lot about what
you should eat. So why don’t you just tell us what we should eat a little bit
more on our regular eating days?
Brad Pilon: Right, this somewhat brings us back to the example I was giving about those
Kenyan runners. If you go around the world there are dozens and dozens of
different cultures who eat in different styles. But in every one of those cultures
there are healthy people and unhealthy people. This would lead us to believe
there is not an ideal perfect diet or way of eating.
I know that people who follow diets like the paleolithic styles of eating or
vegetarians or anybody who’s really grasped onto a belief system of a way you
should eat are going get offended by this but I just don’t think there’s a perfect
way to eat. I think it’s a wonderful tribute to how adaptable the human body is.
My only guideline is to eat less while enjoying the foods you eat and try to
introduce a few more fruits and vegetables, herbs and spices. Do this and you
really accomplish a lot with minimal effort. People wanting to cut down on their
refined sugar intake could accomplish this by increasing their fruit and vegetable
intake. If you want to cut down on the amount of salt and sugar you use to
flavor your foods, you can simply replace them with some tasty herbs and
spices.
So it doesn’t have to be difficult and I don’t really have any strict guidelines
because I know some vegetarians who are extremely healthy but I also know
people as close to carnivore as you can get who are also very healthy. We’re
adaptable that way.
The number one thing is getting back to addressing your own specific food
rituals and habits and making sure they’re all the ones that are least stressful for
you and that you’re not falling into a trap of eating a certain way because
someone or some book told you that’s the way you have to eat even though
you’re comfortable with it.
Craig Ballantyne: Let’s go back to what you touched on when you were talking about protein.
You said that some people end up overeating because of their obsession with
getting enough protein. Are there any other situations, any other examples of
things like this that cause us to overeat?
Brad Pilon: Definitely, there are two. Right now, fat is sort of immune to this but everything
goes in cycles so fat might be the next cool thing to eat. But for now we look at
protein for instance and you go towards the end of a day and you only had let’s
say 80g of protein and you really wanted to have 120. So you cook yourself up a
big fat steak. Well, okay, you’ve got protein but you’ve also got a ton of fat.
There’s probably nothing wrong with that fat, but you still end up consuming
more calories than you want. So that’s another example using protein but
here’s one that I was more than guilty of and I'm sure back in the day you were
too, and that is the idea of post‐workout nutrition.
After my workouts I would take a typical high sugar creatine drink that was 100
grams of sugar and some creatine. I would mix it with a meal replacement shake
which was 50g of protein and another 50g of sugar because I thought you need
all these calories after you work out. This is bodybuilding mentality, and I feel it
has been stolen from bodybuilders and is being used to sell them new food and
supplements. Back in the day I think bodybuilders knew that their workout was
the key to their progress and a properly planned workout was most important.
Then eventually food companies and supplement companies started telling
them, “You know what, any sort of workout will do. The key is what you eat
before your workout, during your workout, and after your workout.” The food
and supplement companies shifted the focus from exercise to nutrition which
creates potential for overeating.
If you’re going out of your way to eat before your workout, during your
workout, and after your workout, you just end up overeating. So protein and
sugar in terms of trying to feed the machine and feed your workout, generally, if
you get too obsessive with that, leads to some overeating in areas that you
wouldn’t consider to be overeating. I know a lot of people who consider the
hour window after a workout to be free and whatever food you get there
doesn’t matter. They think it won’t turn to fat because you just burnt it in your
workout. This is an easy way to end up overeating and not realize it.
Craig Ballantyne: Is there anything that you do when you’re having a bad fast? Is there anything
that helps you get through one a little longer?
Brad Pilon: Definitely, there are two things. 1) a workout; if it’s a bad fast and I'm feeling a
little down about it, workouts help tremendously, most likely because they’re
taking your mind off of it and also because you’re getting your body moving. 2)
If I can’t get a workout in I just do something whether it’s go for a walk or clean
the kitchen and house. Do something, do anything. Most likely you’ve gotten
yourself in a situation where you’ve got a bit of a break and you’re dwelling on
the fast. So if you remove that and you actually get moving, chances are it fixes
it almost instantly. That’s actually probably my best piece of advice if you’re
having a bad fast, just try getting up and moving, go for a walk, go for a
workout. It’s amazing how much that helps.
Craig Ballantyne: Okay thanks a lot for the chat, great information Brad.
Brad Pilon: Anytime, thanks Craig.
Interview with Chris Lopez www.fitandbusydad.com
Brad and Chris discuss common mistakes busy parents make, the myth of
‘starvation mode’, Obsessive Compulsive Eating, best tips for grocery shopping,
and encouraging your kids to live a healthy lifestyle.
Chris Lopez: What are some of the most common mistakes busy dads like you and prone to
make when trying to lose weight and how can Eat, Stop, Eat help us?
Brad Pilon: I heard a saying once that a woman becomes a mother the day she gets a
pregnant. And a man becomes a dad the day he sees the child. And that was
true for me. When I first saw Brier there was sort of an instant where I realized
how much of my life is completely out of my control now. You know. That
control is gone.
And I realized that it now comes down to a matter of time and quality of life.
Traditional diets, which are made up by fitness magazines and news reporters
and nutrition gurus and the like are made to be complex because complex
things seem more valuable and they sell. It is almost as if people want to be
confused. They want to be blinded by science and think that there’s some
miraculous scientific way to eat that’ll make them lose weight.
But as a busy father I don’t have time for that anymore. We have to cut through
this nonsense and realize, “Man, I have very limited time in my day. You know
I’m not gonna be making seven, eight meals a day. I’m not gonna make all my
food on Sunday, put it in Tupperware containers and then carry those
Tupperware containers around with me all day.” We simply just don’t have the
time. So if it’s not needed let’s not do it anymore.
Chris Lopez: Right.
Brad Pilon: And that’s the main mistake that we all make is we’re still trying to lose weight
the way we did back in university or college when we had lost of free time. I
mean in university if you had classes to go to and it’s raining you just don’t go.
But now if your baby gets up at 2am, you can’t just not go, you have to get up.
So the biggest most common mistake we make is really not appreciating our
time. And not realizing that the majority of things that we used to believe are
mostly marketing and advertising gimmicks that we don’t need to waste our
time on.
Chris Lopez: Great. Okay. Does that include the whole “starvation” mode thing?
Brad Pilon: Absolutely. With starvation mode it just goes on and on. The definition of
starvation mode is really vague. People talk about starvation mode but they
don’t actually tell you what they’re talking about. Most incorrectly you have
people who tell you that if you cut your calories down too low you’re actually
going to put on fat. And that’s ridiculous. We have good scientific studies that
show this simply does not happen.
Then we have the people who say, “Okay, well it affects your fat burning
enzymes.” Which it absolutely does. It affects it so that fat can escape from
your fat stores, move to muscle and be burnt as a fuel. So it affects them
exactly the way we want them to be affected. There’s the people who say that
your metabolism slows down if you don’t eat, you know within two to three
hours. This is completely wrong, and it’s been proven in multiple research
studies that we can go as long as 72 hours without eating and our metabolism
will stay the same or even slightly increase.
So the whole idea of starvation mode doesn’t seem to be based on science. And
when you look at what it implies, (that we should eat six meals a day). You start
to see maybe that’s a little bit of consumerism / marketing that’s creeping in
there.
Chris Lopez: Absolutely.
Brad Pilon: Yeah. I like to use the following analogy; picture yourself right now in a
boardroom for a food company. And you’re sitting around an oak table. There’s
just 10 or 15 other people in that meeting. It’s all the executives. And the chief
financial officer is standing up in front of you. And he’s saying, “We need to
improve profits. You know our shareholders are looking to us to improve
profits. Now we’re already getting our food for as cheap as possible. So we
can’t decrease our costs. And the market, you know it really dictates how much
food costs itself.” So let’s say we’re talking about yogurt. If we want to make
more money we just can’t start selling our yogurt for 4.99 if everybody else’s
yogurt’s 99 cents. Right?
So your profit’s kind of fixed. All of the sudden you realize, you know there’s
only two ways to make more money. More people have to eat your yogurt or
the same amount of people have to eat your yogurt more often.
Chris Lopez: Right.
Brad Pilon: And I think that’s where the message comes from. I think that the message to
eat multiple times per day comes from a need for us to continue to purchase
and buy food.
Chris Lopez: Drive consumption up and make the food company more money.
Brad Pilon: Yeah. Exactly. Think about it, the basic message from food companies has
always been; “I support you 100 percent in your attempt to lose weight. I am all
for it. In fact, I think you should try to lose weight as often as possible but just
make sure to always eat my food while you’re doing it”. And we can think of all
the different foods in the past years have gone in and out of style as being a
healthy weight loss food. Celery. Dairy. Green tea, low carb foods etc. I mean
it just goes on and on and on with things that we’re supposed to eat regularly to
lose weight.
So I think that the whole idea of starvation mode comes from a combination of
this consumer approach and some research showing that prolonged starvation
resulted in a loss of lean body mass and decreases energy expenditure. And
what happened from that research is we erroneously made the mistake of
saying, “Okay it was the decrease in calories,” as opposed to, “okay this is a side
effect of actual wasting away from real starvation.”
So those two things combined to get us this nasty confusing starvation mode
story that just will not go away. I just read an email from another sort of fitness
type person just the other day that said eating too little will decrease your fat
burning enzymes. When I read something like that this person loses all
credibility in my eyes. If you haven’t done the research, or you tried and just
couldn’t understand it, you shouldn’t be giving anyone nutrition advice. Or even
worse you did understand it and you’re just lying which means you definitely
shouldn’t be giving nutrition advice. Bottom line is the popular notion of
starvation mode doesn’t exist so don’t get caught up in the hype about it.
Chris Lopez: You came up with the term “Obsessive Compulsive Eating”. Can you tell us a
little bit about that? Like what exactly is that?
Brad Pilon: Absolutely. Obsessive compulsive eating is when people completely obsess
about what they eat to a fault. And it’s this thought that we have to record
everything we eat on some internet computer program. We have to weigh
everything. There is a magic macronutrient profile that’s optimal for our health
that we have to hit. That if you don’t hit it you should feel guilty. If you eat a
milkshake you should feel guilty. If you eat a brownie you should feel really
guilty etc. All of these anti social stressful eating habits are all obsessive
compulsive eating.
I think the psychological damage that that kind of eating could do is far worse
than any physical damage a brownie could do to you. And now the funny thing
is I just finished Michael Polands book, In Defense of Food. And apparently I’m
not as brilliant as thought because there’s actually a group of researchers
who’ve researched this and coined the same eating habits as orthorexia.
Orthorexia is an unhealthy obsession with eating healthy. As redundant and
ironic as that sounds. So I call it Obsessive Compulsive Eating, these researchers
call it Orthorexia, same thing really.
And they point out a very interesting paradox in that book called The North
American Paradox. Where we’re the population that is most obsessed with
eating healthy and we’re the population with the most food related diseases.
So this points out maybe we should just chill out and relax and stop it.
Chris Lopez: Okay. That’s great. So when we’re talking about variety here let’s touch a
little bit on grocery shopping. What are your thoughts on buying local or
buying organic or buying in season. Can you tell us a little bit on that?
Brad Pilon: Absolutely. The degree to which you can buy locally and buy in season foods
does affect the quality of that food. I’m not going so far as to say “nutritional
quality” though, because I don’t want to get into the micronutrients and
macronutrients. But let’s just go back to being a discriminating eater. An
orange is going to taste better during orange season.
Chris Lopez: Makes sense.
Brad Pilon: Interestingly our perception of taste is we developed as a way to tell good food
from bad food, and fresh ripe food from spoiled and rotten. Taste is also related
to the nutritional quality of that food. So if you eat for taste, which means
eating food that’s in season that’s typically locally grown, you end up eating
food with a higher nutritional value. So whether it’s locally grown meats, locally
grown fruits and vegetables you’re just getting a higher quality product, tastes
better, higher nutritional value. So I’m all for it.
I’m also all for organic and locally grown because what you are doing there is
essentially voting with your money. And you’re telling the people who make
foods that this is what you want. If enough people do that more food like this
will become available. So it’s more of just taking care of yourself, but also taking
care of your kids in the future by telling large food companies now that this is
what we want to see our food to look like.
Chris Lopez: Great. So hit your local farmers markets. Hit your organic food markets.
Support your organic farmers. That kind of stuff.
Brad Pilon: Absolutely. Try to support people who are trying to make a living by giving you
great tasting quality food.
Chris Lopez: Okay. So as far as family life goes, how will you guys as parents motivate and
encourage Brier to be active and eat like you guys?
Brad Pilon: Okay so the key with Brier, and I’ve put a lot into this. In fact, I could even say
I’ve lost sleep over this. I don’t want her to obsess about her food. What I want
is for my little girl to have a healthy relationship with food. To really just enjoy
the food she eats. So when it comes to teaching Brier about food I always
follow the pattern of what her great‐grandmother would have wanted her to
do. For example: I couldn’t walk into my grandmothers at 8 am in the morning
with a cupcake in one hand and a coffee in the other. She’d smack the crap out
of me and tell me that is not a good breakfast. But nowadays you can do it, and
we just call the cupcake a “muffin”. So as long as I have my grandmothers
eating style in my head when I’m teaching Brier I think she’ll be ok.
Chris Lopez: That is a great way to think about it. It’s true that our grandparents generation
didn’t have to deal with all the nutritionism confusion and marketing.
Chris Lopez: Brad, my friend your approach is a breath of fresh air.
Brad Pilon: I’m glad you like it.
Interview with Jimmy Smith www.jimmysmithtraining.com
Jimmy and Brad discuss the effects of meal timing and muscle gain and fat loss,
the importance of breakfast, and how fasting affects insulin sensitivity.
Jimmy Smith: Without getting too much into it, it seems like everywhere we look we're told
to eat every two to three hours for both muscle size and fat loss. You're telling
us not to eat for an entire day, can you explain this in more detail?
Brad Pilon: From what I can tell, the idea of eating every three hours comes from
bodybuilding. It was an easy and effective method for guys to consume very
large amounts of calories every day, and it worked for weight loss programs
simply because the numbers worked out for big guys who needed to lose
weight.
A large man who needs to eat 2,400 calories per day to lose weight can divide
this into 6 small meals and still get to eat 400 Calories at every meal. A 400
calorie portion of food is still pretty satisfying and you get to do this 6 times per
day and still lose weight! For most guys that is a good deal.
This concept of eating 6 small meals every day completely falls apart when it is
applied to women. For example: A smaller woman who needs to eat 1,200
calories per day to lose weight only gets to eat 200 Calories at each meal if she
were to follow a 6 meal per day program. In the real world, we can all see why
this is doomed to fail. 200 calories can hardly be considered a meal, and there is
no way it would be satisfying even for a small woman.
The question I ask is since there is no metabolic benefit to eating multiple meals
per day, why bother with this style at all if you don’t enjoy it? There are easier
ways to reduce calories.
Since fasting for a 24 hour period does not decrease metabolism or increase
muscle loss, and two 24 hour fasts in a 7 day period can reduce calorie intake by
as much as 20% over the course of the week (assuming all other variables are
constant), why not just lump all of your calorie decreases into 2 easy to handle
periods, rather than 7 full days of dieting? This is exactly what flexible
Intermittent fasting allows you to do.
Just to be clear, I’m not advocating taking an entire day off of eating, rather I am
simply promoting 24 hours without food, you still get to eat every day with Eat
Stop Eat. For example you could start your 24 hour fast today at noon, and
resume eating tomorrow at 1pm.
Eat Stop Eat was designed to be as simple as possible to follow, while still
getting all the benefits of intermittent fasting.
Jimmy Smith: Breakfast is known as the most important meal of the day or so we are told,
for cognitive function and performance. Protein researcher Donald Layman
even talks about how protein synthesis is lowest in the am but with
intermittent fasting you have to skip breakfast every now and then don’t you?
Brad Pilon: I’ll be honest Jimmy, unless you are a child, I think Breakfast is the most
overrated meal. Yes I have seen the research that supports the concept that
children who eat breakfast do better in school. All of this research about
breakfast being so important only shows benefits in children. I’m hoping that
there aren’t many fourth graders reading this right now!
To be honest, I have had many people following Eat Stop Eat email to tell me
that they are the most productive and energetic during the times they are
fasting.
Getting back to the breakfast topic, I am of the opinion that no meal is any more
important than the next.
If you are following a regular training program then every single meal you eat
can be considered both post workout and pre workout (as the muscle building
effects of a single workout have been suggested to last longer than 24 hours).
I think many people get confused and misinterpret the protein synthesis
research here. They can easily get caught up with complex pre and post workout
meal timing when there really isn’t any reason to stress about this.
Remember, measures of protein synthesis using tracers or nitrogen balance
data is considered a surrogate endpoint for changes in muscle mass. In other
words muscle builds so incredibly slowly you can’t actually see any difference in
muscle mass in short term research studies. So instead of studying actual
muscle gain you have to study other things that might be indicators of muscle
gain which scientists call “markers” such as amino acid flux. It is not an actual
measurement of muscle loss or muscle gain, it is simply the researchers best
guess at a sign that muscle gain or loss might be happening.
The fact that protein synthesis is lowest in the morning has nothing to do with
your ability to lose or gain muscle. If this were the case then we would never
want to do a weight lifting workout either because muscle protein breakdown is
highest during the weight training and immediately post work out as well based
on these ‘marker’ studies. There is still intense debate in the scientific
community over what these markers of protein synthesis mean as they relate to
muscle gain or loss.
Bottom line, skipping breakfast once or twice a week is not going to make you
look like a marathon runner.
Jimmy Smith: Pro fasting people point to the stoet study where 1 meal vs 3 meals per day
were assigned and the one meal group lost more body fat and added a small
amount of muscle. So should people who want to be ripped and muscle up
stop eating all those meals?
Brad Pilon: I wouldn’t say people need to stop eating multiple meals per day because it’s
not doing them any harm, I’d just add that they are most likely not getting any
special benefit from it either, it really comes down to their personal preference
and what patterns best fit into their life.
Research has shown us time and time again that it is our workouts, and the
proper structure of our workouts that determine our ability to increase our
muscle mass. I find it so surprising that we continually let other people take
credit for our hard work. The 6 grams of BCAA’s you take every two hours did
not make your arms massive, the hard work you did in the gym did that.
Similarly, eating every 3 hours did not make you lean and muscular, you did that
all by yourself with hard work and making sure your calorie intake is where it
should be. We need to stop letting other people take credit for our hard work.
To put it another way, having more gas in your car, or toping the tank up every
couple of hours isn’t going to make your car go any faster. Same thing with your
food, you need just enough to keep you going throughout the day, your ability
to build muscle is largely determined by the number and quality of your
workouts. Nutrition is permissive in the muscle building process. Your workouts
initiate the process, and as long as certain nutritional minimums are met, your
body will adapt with growth. With that being said, setting up your nutrition in
the way that best allows you to reach these minimums without overeating and
causing you to gain body fat is the best way to allow your workouts to cause you
to get leaner and more muscular at the same time.
Now let me address the Stoet study you mentioned. When you state that the 1
meal per day group lost more fat and gained a small amount of ‘muscle’ more
than the 3 meal per day group. There is no mention of ‘muscle mass gain’ in this
study, rather they measured ‘fat free mass’ via bioelectrical impedance. There
are two issues with this I’d like to point out, first of all ‘fat free mass’ does not
equal ‘muscle mass’ as fat free mass includes organs, and bones, blood and
water volume, basically everything in your body that’s not fat, even including
undigested food in your GIT.
Second, any scientist in this field will tell you that bioelectrical impedance is a
notoriously inaccurate way of measuring body composition. They also use
bioelectrical impedance to measure fat mass so I would be very skeptical of any
body composition measurements that came from this paper. The amount of fat
free mass gained was not significant, in other words no different than a matter
of chance.
The third and most important point about this study is that the researchers
weighed the subjects every day and adjusted their calorie consumption up or
down on a daily basis in an effort to make sure the subjects maintained the
same bodyweight throughout the study. Therefore calorie content was not
controlled from 1 meal per day vs 3 meal per day and because of this there is no
way to make any accurate assumption about the difference 1 vs 3 meals per day
has on body fat or muscle mass because total calories were not controlled, all of
the differences noticed in this study could very easily and I suspect accurately be
explained simply by a difference in number of calories consumed per day
regardless of how many meals they were consumed over.
It’s also worth noting that this was a crossover design which means the same
subjects completed the 1 meal per day diet as well as the 3 meal per day diet,
with an 11 week break in between.
What I would like to point out is that we should never base our opinions of what
to do on the results of one single study, as I have shown you how easy it is to
misinterpret the results. While I would love to simply review the abstract of any
study that proves meal timing isn’t important, it’s very important that as a
scientist we carefully critique every study, even the ones that support our
theories. We should always try to look at all the available research in a given
field never just one study. This way we will get a more accurate picture of what
is really happening. At this point we can make a much better educated decision
on what is best for our own muscle gaining and fat burning mission without
wasting time and effort doing the wrong things.
The bottom line is 1 meal per day isn’t going to make your muscles grow any
better than 3 meals or 6 meals, but it may allow you to control your calorie
intake in such a way that you can stay lean while putting on muscle.
Jimmy Smith: My next questions is about fasting and working out. Now I was with you when
someone emailed you and said that they would try your program, but if they
lost muscle mass they would punch you. Intermittent Fasting flies in the face
of every piece of training ad literature that's out there so what's the deal?
Brad Pilon: He actually didn't say he was going to punch me, he said he would track me
down and kill me...you meet all sorts of interesting people on the internet!
It doesn’t actually fly in the face of the majority of training research. While it
may fly in the face of a lot of nutrition marketing, there are several different
research paradigms that see tremendous muscle growth without any special
meal frequency or timing, or the use of post workout supplementation.
Research on anabolic steroids and on creatine supplementation both
consistently show measurable increases in muscle weight without the use of a
calorie containing post workout meal. This brings us right back to nutrition being
permissive to the muscle building process. As long your workouts are
stimulating muscle growth, and your nutritional needs are being met, and your
recovery is adequate, you will grow. Just because your daily life works on a 24
hour clock, doesn’t mean that your nutrition does. When you go to bed at night
nutrition does not “start over”. It is an on‐going continuous process, just like
muscle growth. So your nutritional needs are a chronic thing (getting back to my
point that every meal can be considered both post workout and pre workout).
If over the course of several days, (if not weeks) your nutrition is adequate to
maintain muscle growth and yet low enough to not allow any appreciable
increases in fat mass, you will gain muscle without gaining fat mass. The
research also shows a host of hormonal changes that happen during fasting that
favor the preservation of lean muscle mass.
This is why I am so confident that using Eat Stop Eat (which by the way is not to
be confused with traditional IF), people will not lose muscle, and will still be able
to gain muscle mass. With Eat Stop Eat, the fasting is flexible. You only fast for a
24 hour period once or twice a week. On the days you are not fasting, you can
eat in any manner you want, 3 meal, 6 meals or 13 meals if you like. It doesn't
make a difference with Eat Stop Eat. So I encourage people to look at nutrition
over the course of a 7 day period. Even if you were to fast twice in a 7 day
period it is still very easy to hit the nutritional requirements needed to gain
muscle.
Jimmy Smith: Intermittent Fasting studies show increased insulin sensitivity but I'd think we
can get those same benefits from metabolic training and proper low carb
diets, is that correct?
Brad Pilon: Yes, I believe you are correct Jimmy. Also for the record let me say again that
Eat Stop Eat is not the same as intermittent fasting per se. I say this because
even I question the ability of someone to follow traditional Intermittent Fasting
long term. The lack of flexibility in the traditional Intermittent Fasting paradigm
will most likely set a lot of people up for failure.
With that said I agree with you that fasting is definitely not the only way to
improve insulin sensitivity. In fact I believe that the combination of fasting with
weight training and reduced sugar intake would actually have a long term
additive effect on insulin sensitivity. This is why the exercise component of Eat
Stop Eat is so important. I have told many people that just because they are
fasting once or twice a week does not mean they are doing Eat Stop Eat
properly.
You are not following Eat Stop Eat properly unless you are also following a
resistance training program. In my opinion exercise is needed to ensure the
optimal benefits of fasting, and we could all benefit from eating a little less
sugar, so the combination of fasting, resistance training and a slightly reduced
sugar intake would be my best suggestion for improving insulin sensitivity.
Jimmy Smith: Great info, thanks Brad.
Brad Pilon: My pleasure any time Jimmy.
Interview with Kevin Larrabee www.thefitcast.com
Kevin and Brad discuss Brad’s former life as a research and development
professional in the supplement industry, how he researched Eat Stop Eat,
recommended supplements, and how to use Eat Stop Eat with bodybuilding and
powerlifting.
Kevin Larrabee: First I just want to talk a little bit about your past. I mean you seem to have
somewhat of an interesting past. So I think we should talk about it.
Brad Pilon: Absolutely. In the supplement industry I landed in the R&D side of things. So I
never did any sales. I wasn’t overly involved in marketing. My job was really
the clinical research that’s involved in some of the larger supplement companies
that actually do research. And so my job was sort of overseeing the research
and product development side of things.
So it’s a very unique view of the supplement industry and the fitness industry as
a whole being on that side. I was responsible for flying from site to site and
meeting with the primary researchers who were doing our research and talking
with them about the latest and greatest and everything to do with muscle
building or fat loss. When you work in the sport supplement industry it’s five
days a week, 12 hours a day muscle building and fat loss. The whole industry
revolves around those two things.
So it was pretty cool. The problem is that as a scientist you love science because
of formulating questions and the process of discovering the answer. Science is
the forming and answering of questions. So it’s amazing when your questions
revolve around things that can help make you a 100 million dollar a year
product. Everybody loves you. But when your questions start sort of deviating
from that it starts becoming really difficult.
So Kevin imagine you were to design a supplement and you’re funding the
research and I’m setting the research up for you. And a year later I come back
to you and say, “Kevin, I got good news, bad news. Bad news is the research
didn’t turn out the way you wanted. The product didn’t really work. The good
news is it’s a really cool reason why it didn’t work, and I want a couple more
million for me to find out why it didn’t work.” You’d probably look at me like
I’m crazy. And then that research would never really be completed, even
though it would help further our understanding of muscle building and fat loss.
So that’s sort of the double edged sword of doing research for the purpose of
marketing a product. When you’re really into the science and you really love it
a lot of the questions you want answered probably aren’t going to be funded
unless it results in the development of product.
So I ended up leaving the supplement industry after about seven or eight years
of doing R&D. And went back to school because the best way to answer the
questions I wanted to answer is to do it on my own dime and my own time.
Kevin Larrabee: Can you talk about what the research said? Or what you found when you
started researching fasting and fat loss.
Brad Pilon: I was completely biased when I started my research. I fully expected to read that
fasting was probably the worst thing you can do for your body. And then from
there I’d figure out why eating is amazing and the best thing you could do would
be to eat multiple times per day. It seemed simple. You could say I had my mind
made up before I even started researching it.
So I started reviewing the research looking for all the evidence that would
confirm my assumption that if you don’t eat every three or four hours your
metabolism would just come screeching to a halt. And I couldn’t find it. And in
fact I kept finding research that said that you could fast from 12 hours up to 72
hours without your metabolic rate slowing down. These are called short term
fasts.
So I thought, “Okay, well fine. Maybe your metabolic rate doesn’t slow down.
You’re still losing tons of muscle.” And then when I researched fasting and
muscle loss I realized that you don’t really lose muscle during a short term fast
either. In that short of a timeframe there isn’t a measurable loss in muscle size
or mass. Then I realized the reason you’re not losing muscle is because you’re
burning fat, which makes sense. But it’s counter to what we’ve been told in the
popular fitness industry media. Which is that if you don’t eat every three or
four hours metabolism slows down, you start losing muscle and you hold on to
all your fat.
So the research doesn’t support what we’re hearing in the media, you can find
this evidence as far back as the early 1900’s. The interesting thing is that if you
look at your metabolism between a 12 or 72 hour fast it’s remarkably similar to
the metabolism you have during exercise. In fact it’s almost identical. And that’s
where the whole idea of Eat Stop Eat came from.
Kevin Larrabee: Who is this program for? Is this program for people who are trying to get
super lean? Could this also be adapted for body building, could it be for
people who are looking to get into a competitive state as well?
Brad Pilon: I think you could very easily get into a men’s health cover ready look just by use
of flexible intermittent fasting.
Kevin Larrabee: So how long can people use fasting, is there a maximum length? Is there an
upper limit to each fast?
Brad Pilon: I can make the bold statement that you could probably do it for your entire life.
And the evidence I take from that is there’s dozens of cultures and hundreds of
millions of people who use short periods of fasting as part of their cultural
traditions. Anywhere from people who fast for one day a week to people who
fast twice a week to people who do segments of fasting all throughout a year.
They’ve been doing so for thousands of years without any negative health
effects.
So I think the real question would be how long can we continue to eat the way
we’re eating without a negative effect on our body or our metabolism?
Apparently we can fast for our entire adult life without any ill effects but I’m not
so sure the same thing will be said about the way north America eats right now.
Kevin Larrabee: What kind of role would fasting play in a power lifting program? I would be
afraid it might affect my maximum effort lifts. You stated time and again that
one doesn’t lose muscle while fasting, what about lifting at and above
maximum lifts?
Brad Pilon: That’s a really good question. We know from just general research that there is
a direct linear relationship between the size of a muscle and its strength. And
since we know that fasting does not affect the size of a muscle, we generally
should say that it doesn’t affect strength.
However, when you get to an elite person like a power lifter, and I’m sure
everybody who’s ever competed in power lifting would agree that it’s not just a
physical thing. There is neurological and psychological components to a
maximum lift.
So I don’t really know the true answer to that because it depends first on
psychologically how you would feel about fasting. I have problems lifting on a
full stomach. I get kind of nauseous and I prefer to do my heavy lifts on an
empty stomach and that’s my personal sort of psychology when it comes to
heavy lifting.
But there is not a lot of research on the neurological side or the psychological
side of being fasted while lifting. But it would be something I’d be open to
experimenting on. I just wouldn’t do it on the day of a contest, instead I would
try it out maybe during my regular rotation of training and see how it goes.
Kevin Larrabee: Now let’s talk a little bit more about working out. When people think about
not eating for periods at a time they’re thinking about their workout being
affected. What kind of training do you tend to recommend when you’re in
this state?
Brad Pilon: Well the most important part about Eat Stop Eat is that the flexible intermittent
fasting is half of the program and the other half is a weight training program.
The fact that I can say so confidently that you’re not going to lose muscle mass
is because you should be following a weight training program while you are on
Eat Stop Eat or any diet for that matter. To get the best results from a diet you
should be weight training.
I like any workout program that’s simple and easy that you enjoy but that’s also
challenging. I don’t like the idea of people being in a gym for overly long
amounts of time following a ‘more is better’ routine.
The whole idea of Eat Stop Eat is flexibility and simplicity – being able to fit your
diet into your life as opposed to trying to fit your life around a diet. And I think
your weight training program should be the same. It should be something that
gets you the results you’re looking for in the least amount of time in a way
that’s still enjoyable.
I don’t really think, from my personal experience you have to plan your fasting
around your workouts or your workouts around your fasting. Again, with Eat,
Stop, Eat we’re only talking about a 24 hour fast. So you should be able to do a
very, very effective weight training program right in the middle of a fast without
any ill effects. Similarly, obviously on the days you’re not fasting you should be
able to do it too.
So a simple program that’ll maintain muscle mass that you enjoy doing. That’s
perfect.
Kevin Larrabee: So let’s talk a little bit more about supplements. You have a really interesting
history in the supplement industry. Do you have any interesting stories you
can share with us?
Brad Pilon: The two sides of supplements, the marketing, sales and promotion side and the
research side get together kind of at the end to put a product together and I
was fairly sheltered I think to the marketing and advertising side of it as I was in
research and development.
Right before I was leaving industry I spent a lot of time traveling. I mean I was in
England and Scotland and China and all throughout the states meeting really
cool people. So I have fun stories. But I don’t really have the scary stories as
some people do. The research is phenomenal. Meeting with the people who do
supplement research is also very interesting because you tend to think that
everybody thinks like us. And especially if you’re stuck in the body building
industry for a long period of time, you end up with a distorted view that
everybody wants to be 240 pounds and shredded.
But then when I went overseas in Scotland and England and started to realize
that that’s not actually what they want in any way. I started realizing that body
building and having an ideal body or low body fat means so many different
things to different people. And that was sort of the best part of it see different
people’s ideas of what a supplement would be and different regulations around
the world. For example there are things we can easily sell in North America that
we absolutely cannot sell in Italy. I found that amazing too.
So it was an experience I can’t really replace. I don’t think I could just stay in
school and do a Ph.D. and then a post doc and get that kind of experience or
that amount of exposure to things that were going on. Obviously hanging out
with body builders, not people working in the industry but actual true body
builders, you see some pretty freaky things. So it’s stuff you’d never see in a
lab. Most of these people you’d never get into a study. And that’s the cool
part. Is being able to meet with people who are, (and I’m not saying this in a
negative sense at all), but true freaks of nature. When you get a Ronnie
Coleman or a Jay Cutler walking through the door it’s amazing. It’s a true
testament to the absolute variability in the human body.
You have me at 5 10‐ish, 180 pounds, standing beside a Ronnie Coleman or a Jay
Cutler who’s probably the same height, same body fat and 280 pounds. It’s an
amazing thing to see. So I loved my time in the industry. It really sort of opened
my eyes to a wide variety of different styles of training and eating and
approaches to research.
Kevin Larrabee: What are you suggestions for supplements, best bang for the buck and that
sort of thing?
Brad Pilon: For me being in the industry and then out of it, I see the value in a supplement
is it’s convenience. For instance a protein powder is much more convenient
than carrying around Tupperware containers of chicken for people who feel
they need to take more protein. So the key to supplements is really the
convenience they provide.
I would say meal replacements and the protein powder that if it’s something
you want in your life that makes it easier for you then I have absolutely no
problems and would feel comfortable recommending those for those types of
people. Me I love cooking and I love my time in the kitchen so I’d never replace
food with a supplement. But if I was on a hectic sales job where I’m on the go
for 14 hours a day and I had to choose between a meal replacement or fast food
every day of the week I could see meal replacements being very useful.
Kevin Larrabee: Thanks again, Brad.
Brad Pilon: Alright thanks, Kevin.
Interview with Adam Steer www.coachsteer.com
Adam and Brad discuss where the idea of meal timing comes from, and the
difference between health physique change and physical performance.
Adam Steer: It seems even fairly knowledgeable trainers and athletes are still very
dogmatic about the concept of eating five to six meals a day. And don’t seem
very open‐minded to any kind of other option.
Brad Pilon: Right. Let’s say I all of the sudden decided to stop the Eat Stop Eat style of
fasting. Then maybe I would actually consider a bunch of small meals a day.
The interesting thing about that paradigm is that it works really well for really
active and fairly muscular guys. You know you can divide up all the meals in a
day and you’re still hitting four or five hundred calories each meal, that’s not a
bad deal.
Where that paradigm I think falls short is if you’re a smaller statured woman
who is, trying to lose weight. So you do all your calculations and find out you’re
supposed to be eating fourteen or fifteen hundred calories. And you divide that
by six and then you realize each one of your six meals is only going to be around
250 calories. That is impossible to sustain for very long.
Adam Steer: Sure. Actually that kind of leads me to a question which I’ll try to frame here.
You know a lot of people talk about a kind of continuum between health and
the physique performance side, which maybe could be represented by body
building. And then some proponents will be on the caloric restriction or
fasting side saying, “Well let’s bring down our metabolism. And that’s going
to promote longevity and long term health.”
And then the other end is saying, “Well, you know you need five to six meals a
day. You need the thermogenic effect of food to bring up your metabolism so
that we can constantly be burning more calories and putting more through the
system.” And then you have people on the total health end saying, “Well, all
you’re doing is burning yourself out.” Do you have any opinion on this
obvious lack of consensus?
Brad Pilon: Is when it comes to health and nutrition I’m really beginning to believe that
metabolism is actually a dirty word. And I think it’s used more in scare
mongering tactics to try to convince you want to buy something. And what I
think people need to realize is that regardless of whether your metabolism is
slightly up or slightly down, we’re talking about small, small changes. I mean no
one’s metabolism cuts in half. The difference is roughly, in caloric equivalents, a
cup of coffee. You know you’re looking at 80 to 100 calories up, 80 to 100
calories down. It’s largely mostly influenced by your body weight.
So it kind of gets all caught together because if you’re a very light person, your
cost of living in terms of energy is going to be slightly lower. And if you’re a
large heavy person it’s going to cost a bit more energy to move around. An
example I like to often use is I live in southern Ontario. And northern Ontario is
sort of a beautiful cottage country where we all like to go up and hide during
the summers.
And every summer when you drive up along the highway you see trailers with
boats at the side of the highway. People will fill up their car with gas, the typical
amount of gas they know it takes to get to the cottage. Then they’ll hitch on a
huge weight in the form of a boat on to the back of their car. And they end up
about halfway to the cottage going, “oh man, we’re going to run out of gas
because we’re using up gas really quickly” because of the extra weight of the
boat.
So the main determinant of your metabolism will always be your lean mass.
And then the rest of your body mass because that’s what you have to carry
around and move around during the rest of the day. I think that people are
getting far too caught up in their metabolism and boosting metabolism, and
lowering their metabolism ideas when really you’re dealing with very small
changes. So I don’t really have a thought in terms of your metabolism being
involved in longevity. I see the benefits in a reduced caloric intake being just
your total body weight. I don’t think it needs to be in the extreme highs of what
the body is capable of. I think that moving around 280, 300 pounds of body
weight every day is taxing on not only your energy systems but ankles and
knees. You name it, you’re whole body has to deal with your size.
And I think that having a lower body weight and being able to intake less food
has benefits in terms of free radical production, and increased stress resistance.
Things like that. And you don’t have to eat incredibly low amounts of food. And
you don’t have to be incredibly, incredibly light. These are just things that
happen just sort of by eating just slightly less than you’d like to. And for most of
us the amount we’d like to is gross over consumption anyways.
So I think it’s just more of a matter of keeping things in balance. Not worrying
too much about what people are saying about metabolism or thermogenesis.
And just kind of going with, “Okay, if I’m a little bit lighter, especially if this is
body fat we’re talking about. You know I’m physically healthier. I’m
psychologically healthier because I wanted to be lighter, I’m there, I’m happy
with my body. I think that has a huge thing to do with longevity is your
psychological frame of mind.
Interview with Vince Delmonte www.vincedelmontefitness.com
Vince and Brad discuss how fasting can help you build muscle and lose body fat,
and whether or not it can be considered a detox plan.
Vince Delmonte: What are you suggestions for supplements, best bang for the buck and that
sort of thing?
Brad Pilon: Fasting has many health benefits from increasing growth hormone and
fat burning to lowering your insulin levels, it also helps to reduce chronic
inflammation. In a way it’s a good strategy for giving your system a break
and letting it reset and refresh.
I actually went back to university to study the effects of short term
intermittent fasting on the human body with a specific eye towards fat
loss. I can honestly say when done correctly I can’t really find any risk
involved with short term fasting, and there is a host of beneficial effects.
On that note I would like to point out that all the research I reviewed was
in healthy people at varying body weights (normal to obese) with normal
blood sugar regulation. So I cannot technically recommend this program
to diabetics or people with a diagnosed blood sugar problem, in these
cases I always recommend you check with your physician or health care
provider before starting any new diet or exercise programs. However
with that said I have received emails from diabetics who have used Eat
Stop Eat with good success.
Vince Delmonte: Are you sure fasting will not cause me to lose muscle mass?
Brad Pilon: Positive, short term flexible intermittent fasting like the kind I recommend in Eat
Stop Eat will not cause any muscle loss for two reasons. First the fasts are very
short and aren’t long enough cause any muscle loss. Second, I always
recommend some form of weight training that will ensure you never lose
muscle. As a matter of fact you can build muscle while fasting if you are
following a good muscle building program like Vince’s.
Vince Delmonte: Can you reassure my skinny guys that you can’t lose muscle? I know that
people are so afraid to “lose muscle” so share the truth on how to avoid losing
muscle.
Brad Pilon: Your body burns muscle when you are inactive so if your arm were put in a cast,
then you would lose muscle in your arm. Similarly if you were to be in a
situation like a famine where you have had so little food for so long you can
barely walk or stand, that’s when you start losing muscle because the lack of
food has forced you to become inactive.
It’s all dependent on your activity levels. So it’s exactly the opposite of what
most people think ‐ being active while dieting is how you save your muscle,
doing nothing is how you lose muscle.
Vince Delmonte: Why is fasting such a powerful way to lose body fat?
Brad Pilon: When you don’t have any food in your system to burn as fuel then your body
shifts to burning fat as its primary fuel source, this is the whole reason your
body stores fat in the first place. When you eat your body prefers to burn the
fuel you ate first, but if you don’t have any food in your system your body still
has to burn something, and it chooses to burn fat first.
Vince Delmonte: Is this a detox plan or fat loss plan?
Brad Pilon: If detox can be taken as a simple statement for helping balance the system and
rejuvenate your body, then I would say it does have some benefits like that.
However it is first and foremost a plan for losing weight with minimal rules that
still allows you to eat all the foods you like without feeling guilty. So I think you
can call it a simple effective weight loss program that also promotes overall
health benefits.
Vince Delmonte: Thanks Brad, that was very enlightening.
Brad Pilon: Thanks Vince.