Mike Israetel
speaker
1,094 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Mike Israetel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And the diet's going to be responsible for, if I had to guess, 80% of the total magnitude of this transformation. And the diet really is this. Eat enough protein. Eat mostly or only healthy foods. and make sure that your calorie level for your whole diet is such that you're losing, you know, whatever amount of weight per week on average that's on track to meet your goal.
We have a RP Diet Coach app that we make that just does all this calculating for you. It just tells you when to increase calories or decrease. It does that for you also. Keeps track of where you are in your plan. But you can do this just with Microsoft Excel or just a little mental math in your head. You say, okay, I need to lose like, you know, 10 pounds and I have 12 weeks to do it.
So like about a pound per week, I'm on, I'm on, I'm in the clear. And so you just dial back your calories until you're getting reliably week on week, roughly a pound lost. If it's a lot more, you need to increase your calories because you're going to burn out and have all those bad things happen that I talked about earlier from rushing the diet.
If you're not losing hardly anything or it's just half a pound, you need to cut the calories substantially. But fundamentally, eating higher protein, healthy foods is the way to do that. And meal timing and specific foods and all that matters almost not at all for most people's results. And I can absolutely get into what I mean by healthy food.
and what I mean by high protein diet, if you're curious.
To the extent that I'm aware from the current scientific literature, obesogens are some combination of poorly or undefined and account charitably for no more than 10% of the reason that people overfat and rigorously close to 0%. There's actually no need to suppose the existence of obesogens as unique chemical compounds that make you fatter.
There's a real cool chemical compound making fat are called a double cheeseburger. They discovered that a long time ago and there's no magic involved. Nobody's being poisoned. So obesogens I can talk to for you at hours length, if you'd like about the technical details and the assumptions, but they're just not a factor that almost anyone has to consider beyond that 10%.
You're saying, I mean, probably not even 10%. If I had to bet my money, I would say there's probably no robust obesogen that exists in our diets today. Like,
just not a thing i don't know i would uh it would be a curious metabolic effect indeed if something like that were discovered i'm sure there's something like that that functions in such a way but its effect is generally so small that when you account for the caloric load of a diet this doesn't leave anything left to be explained as far as why aren't people losing weight um So that's one.
Seed oils, in every meta review of the literature, let's take all the studies that have been done, and they analyze them, and then they parse them, and then they say, okay, what conclusions are they coming to, and try to draw commonalities. Almost every review like that, as a matter of fact, every review that I've ever seen,
shows that seed oils are usually healthier on average than saturated fats and are some of the healthiest sources of fat that you can have and are no more deleterious or bad for your health or likely to promote body fat than any other kinds of oils or any other kind of fats. So the seed oils myth is a myth. It's actually one of those things that borders. I don't want to sound curt when I say this.
I sound curt, but I promise I mean it with all the best. It borders on a mass delusion where there never was much convincing evidence about seed oils being bad. And then everyone got on the bandwagon for them being bad. And the study after study shows that seed oils are really healthy. It costs fat loss, improved blood lipids, markers of quality of life and longevity go up.
And I just, it strains the imagination. How is it that seed oils are bad? So the reason that you're struggling with fat loss is almost certainly nothing to do with seed oils either. I'd love to take, tackle some followup questions before we get into the whole, uh, hormones and all the other stuff. But, uh,
like if i if i go to let's say a restaurant where i know doesn't count because restaurants have a ton more calories and fats in their food than you are remotely aware of and if i showed you the real numbers of what they're putting in your food it would baffle you that they could stick that many actual calories and fats into your meal we're talking about most commercial kitchens
Start a fettuccine Alfredo with one stick of butter. That's for one person. That's 900 calories only from fat. That's insane. And so it's usually the load. So the real study is if you buy a high quality canola oil and you put it in your kitchen and you mix it with pasta and brown rice and ground beef and veggies, do you feel worse eating normal amounts of that? that's a seed oil.
How do you know how many calories are in that Korean beef?
Genetics is the answer to that question, by the way.
No, that's great. That makes total sense. Sometimes food just doesn't vibe. And I have plenty of foods that I eat. And after I'm like, I feel like I'm just not going to do that. And so a lot of times it's a very personal thing. So it's not obesogens, it's not seed oils. Let's talk about hormones.
If your thyroid hormones are insufficiently being secreted and you can get blood work to confirm this or find out if this is the case, then it's going to put a big, big damper in your ability to lose fat, 100%. But it's also true to say that the vast majority of people, 95 plus percent, and I'm being charitable, just do not have an underactive thyroid. It's actually quite rare.
And so if you suspect you have an underactive thyroid, it's absolutely great to go to your doctor and get the testing. But it sure does not explain the vast majority of people overweight do not have underactive thyroids by a long shot. It's possible, but unlikely. Other hormones are more complex. Estrogen, testosterone, they exert their effects more subtly.
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