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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Their effects aren't as closely linked to body weight. And again, most people have them in the quite normal range. Now, if they aren't abnormal, fixing them can do a lot of good, but... Not going to be the thing that solves the obesity epidemic anytime soon. So we're left with this question of like, so what is causing people to like have more fat in their bodies than they want?
And the answer is generally just eating more calories than your body can use at any one time. And so it puts this away into fact. The number one way people eat more calories than maybe they want is food tastes really good and you just end up eating a lot of food. And the higher calorie foods just tend to taste better.
I mean, a drippy, juicy cheeseburger or some healthy pasta with a rich olive oil cream sauce and a couple of pieces of grilled asparagus and just a juicy salmon filet Doesn't that sound great? That's even healthy.
That's actually very healthy food that you can cram so many calories into dishes like that and eat a portion and a half that you just end up getting in too many calories and gaining weight. And there actually has been no documented instance of someone gaining a large degree of body fat and weight while simultaneously under eating calories.
It's thermodynamically roughly saying impossible, probably strictly impossible. And so it ends up being that, yeah, it is the excess food that we're eating and it doesn't just have to be junk food. Now, junk food is the best way to get an excessive amount of calories by a long shot, but you can do it without junk food just by eating really tasty, well-prepared food.
That's pretty healthy, but you got an appetite on you. And you eat more than you need, and you just kind of keep eating, and all the healthy snacks add up. And all of a sudden, you have an excess body weight. So the real thing to do is you don't have to count calories at all.
But if you know roughly how much food you eat through the day, and you know that's the amount that's been leading you to gain weight, Taking a chunk off of that, subtracting away some amount of food that's meaningful is almost certainly going to get you to maintain your weight.
And then if you subtract out more, going to get you to lose weight at that earlier thing we were talking about of that rate of weight loss, maybe about a pound per week. That's nice and sustainable over a 10 to 12 week period.
100%. And a lot of people who have success with ketogenic diets, carnivore diets, things like that, they see it was the hormones and not the calories. But if you look at their calories, they're eating less calories than they were before because when you cut out an entire food group like carbohydrates, it's just really difficult to stuff yourself full of proteins and fats.
You just don't feel like eating anymore. Though to your point earlier, you were successfully at a higher body fat level still eating a low carb diet. So it is possible. And for many people, we have this frustrating moment where they're like, I'm eating low carb. I'm doing all the things. Why am I not losing weight? And why am I not losing fat?
And the reality is it's almost always and almost everywhere a calorie situation. And this is something that like athletes in the space know very well. Like if you told your bodybuilding coach, like, Hey, like the fat's kind of not coming off this week. At some point, he's going to cut your food. Like he's just going to reduce your food intake. And you're going to be like, what, what are you doing?
He's going to be like, what do you mean? What am I doing? Like, this is how fat loss happens functionally. At the end of the day, the way you got fatter was eating more food than you needed. And the way you're going to get less fat is to eat less food than you need so that your fat stores are liberated and power the rest of your body functions that you just don't have enough food to power anymore.
And then your body fat will So bad news, it is a food thing. Good news, it's a food thing, so there's just no reason to suspect it's any more complicated. And I do get a little passionate about the obesogens and the seed oils and all this other stuff and the processed food because on the one hand, there's some validity to that stuff.
But on the other hand, I feel like too much, it's being used to take the onus off of the thing that really is causing it. And to some extent, taking that onus away is the easy way out because no one really wants to look at the elephant in the room. It's like if someone told you, hey, your addiction to playing video games is really kind of screwing things up at home and at work.
And you're like, no, no, it's not video games. No, I'm fine. I'm fine. It's the fact that I'm just not generous enough with my family. It's the fact that I haven't been doing all the biking trips around the neighborhood. It's the fact that my boss is just a man all the time. And it's kind of annoying.
And then at some point you go see a psychologist and they kind of just figure out what your life is doing. And they're like, it's the video games. And I know why you don't want to say it, because it's painful to remove them or curtail their influence on your life because you're really like playing them. And so how many people, Drew, don't like eating plenty of tasty food in an unrestricted manner?
I mean, can you find me one person who doesn't like, at least in some capacity, to just like eat tasty food and not have to worry about what's going in their bodies? Even people that like to concern themselves with healthy food They don't want to count individual walnuts. That's crazy. And so when people are like, Hey, you know, you're over fat and like, yeah, I wonder why.
And someone's like, it's some special thing in the environment that as soon as we get rid of, you're going to be back to normal. It's so tempting to believe that. But every piece of evidence we have so far says it's just not true. And it really is just overeating. But now that we know that overeating is a problem, we have lots of solutions to it.
One is just the willpower situation of just like making sure to organize your diet in a logical way. pre-plan what's going into your body, find a level of eating that's getting you to lose weight, stick to that until you get really diet fatigued 10 or 12 weeks later, and then coast into maintenance. But another one is we have a new class of drugs.
I call them modern anorectic drugs or modern obesity drugs. Things like semaglutide, aka ozempic, or trizapatide, aka manjaro. And the ozempic's also in one form known as wagovi. And these medicines are, and I'm going to say this, I think this is the first time I'm saying this on a podcast. I've just done a literature review myself on this.
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