This episode is brought to you by Bioptimizers, Cozy Earth, and Levels. You might think weight loss is all about discipline, but today’s guest reveals there is more to the story. Weight loss also involves minimizing hunger, increasing satiety, and interrupting food noise. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with exercise and nutrition expert Stan Efferding. Stan shares his top strategies for minimizing hunger and takes a deep dive into the habits that drive it. He also discusses why calorie counting can be beneficial, explores various weight-loss strategies, and offers guidance on choosing the best approach. Additionally, Stan shares valuable lessons he’s learned over the years, reveals what he’s changed his mind about, and highlights the exercises he prioritizes. If you’re looking for practical tips on nutrition, exercise, and weight loss, this episode is a must-listen! Stan Efferding is an IFBB Professional bodybuilder, World Record-holding powerlifter, and one of only ten men in the world to total over 2,300 pounds raw in competition, earning him the title of the World’s Strongest Bodybuilder. With a degree in Exercise Science from the University of Oregon, Stan has over 25 years of experience training high school, collegiate, and professional athletes. He conducts seminars nationwide, sharing expertise in sports, nutrition, and training techniques, and has been featured in publications like Muscular Development, Flex Magazine, and Power Magazine. In this episode, Dhru and Stan dive into: Strategies for minimizing hunger (00:43) Types of diets (6:44) Calorie counting and awareness (13:12) Exercise and energy expenditure (18:42) Strategies for weight loss and factors to consider when choosing one (26:30) Habits that drive hunger (32:27) What Stan got wrong and the lessons he learned (37:23) The importance of food quality and testing (44:11) Exercises to prioritize and deprioritize (48:22) Stan’s principles (54:52) Reactionary versus resolve to do better (01:02:42) Final thoughts (01:07:42) Also mentioned in this episode: Stan’s Meal Prep- Vertical Diet For more on Stan, follow him on Instagram, Youtube, and on his Website. This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers, Cozy Earth, and Levels. BIOptimizers Black Friday sale on all their products lasts all November long. Just go to bioptimizers.com/dhru and use code DHRU10 to get your discount of 25% sitewide and $100 worth of free gifts today! Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com/dhru and use code DHRUP. Right now, Levels is offering my listeners an additional 2 FREE months of the Levels annual Membership when you use my link, levels.link/DHRU. Make moves on your metabolic health with Levels today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the top strategies for minimizing hunger?
Stan, welcome to the podcast. You know, I'd love to start off by talking about something that I feel is a super underrated topic and something that my community hasn't really thought about a lot of, and that's the idea of minimizing hunger. In fact, you had a quote that I pulled from a podcast that I listened to, and you said, the most important thing
To adhere to, if you're trying to stick to a diet, is to focus on minimizing hunger. If you try to just focus on willpower, you'll lose that battle each time. Talk to us about the top strategies that you share with the people who follow you, your clients over the years, when it comes to minimizing hunger.
Well, I think that's an important topic because a lot of people presume to think that weight gain or weight loss is is really a matter of discipline. And in fact, while it's your responsibility, you are, you meaning people in general, are kind of dealt a different deck of cards. And not everybody has the same hunger signaling. This is one of the biggest underlying problems with weight loss.
And I said this many years ago in a rant that I did about the Samoan population and the obesity epidemic here. Genetically speaking, some people tend to respond to like ghrelin, the hunger hormone, or leptin, the satiety hormone, leptin resistance, differently. Somebody might think it's easy for them to maintain a calorie deficit or maintain a normal body weight. Other people struggle.
With a term that's been coined recently, ghrelin, called food noise. And some people just think about food. It just overwhelms them constantly throughout the day. And if you're going to successfully diet, you can't set yourself up for failure by constantly being voraciously hungry.
There's going to be, you're going to have some level of comfort or discomfort, but that process is going to require that you understand that your client is going to need to be able to make this part of a lifestyle that's sustainable in order for them to do that. They can't constantly be thinking about food.
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Chapter 2: What types of diets are effective for weight loss?
So these satiety signals, this hunger dysregulation, I hate to bring this up right off the bat, but what has made this even more obvious is these new medications, the GLP-1 agonist, the semaglutide, Wagoviozempic, What they are very successful at doing, and this isn't an endorsement by any means, there's certainly pros and cons to any medication.
But what they're very successful at doing is interrupting food noise. They suppress hunger. And that's why people who go on these medications experience such an incredible success. Average long term weight loss, dietary adherence over two years and in multiple human studies is about two percent weight loss. Not significant. After two years, losing weight isn't that hard.
Most people go on a diet, lose weight initially, but gaining it back is the problem. The vast majority gain back. As much, if not more, over 50% for the first year and somewhere north of 80, as much as 95% within two to three years of the weight is gained back. Long-term dietary adherence, about a 2% weight loss on average over two years.
With Wegovia and Ozempic, the semaglutide suppressing hunger signaling, the average sustainable weight loss was 17%. Terzepatide was 23%. So you can see how significant the difference is, and the major signal there is suppression of hunger. And I can give you some tools that we use to help manage hunger based on our experience with randomized controlled trials.
Number one for managing hunger is probably going to be eating more whole foods and less ultra-processed foods. That's become quite obvious. We have studies now showing that people tend to eat as many as 500 extra calories a day when they're eating ultra-processed, hyper-palatable, calorie-dense foods. It's important that I make the distinction that it's all three of those things.
Whey protein isolate is ultra-processed, but it's not hyper-palatable or calorie-dense. And so the processing itself isn't really what drives weight. uh, those foods to be over consumed. It's the kind of the combination of sugars, fats, and salt calorie density, um, and hyper palatability. And those are, you know, it's not like we don't know what those are.
That's your drinking, your sugar laden sodas and your fast foods and your pastries and those kinds of things, the cakes, cookies, candies, and those kinds of things. And we're simply over consuming those foods because they don't satisfy us. They don't satisfy our hunger signaling. And so we eat more of them at one sitting and we're hungry again sooner and eat again as a result.
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Chapter 3: How important is calorie counting for weight loss?
So the first thing is we try and get our clients to move away or to eat the majority of their foods as whole foods. That's your lean proteins, your fruits and vegetables, your nuts and seeds and those kinds of things. are a lot harder to overconsume and they satisfy you longer. Higher protein diets, higher fiber diets are important.
And there's other smaller things that you can do, being mindful about your eating, taking longer to eat because there seems to be a time delay between when you start eating and when your body responds to the fullness, the rugae expansion of the stomach sending the signal for satiety. And then also one of the methods we use to kind of
help with that fullness, expanding the stomach and taking more time is we ask that they drink fluids before and during, lots of fluids before and during their meals to help with filling the stomach up. And then obviously the fibers, the salads, they're just not very calorie dense, but you can eat a lot of them and they'll fill you up and keep you full for a longer period of time. And so
That's what we try and do with our clients and understanding also that I've often said that there's many paths to the same destination and there's no one best diet and everybody responds differently. And I think this is a good thing. Although my clients say, Stan, just tell me exactly what to eat. That's their demand of me as their coach is tell me exactly what to eat or what's the best diet.
And the best diet's the one you'll follow. And exactly what to eat is going to depend on What seems the least restrictive to you? What makes you the least hungry? Clearly those tools are higher satiety foods like whole foods and protein and fiber. But now we get into all these different types of diets. We've got, which I'm going to categorize in one of three ways.
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Chapter 4: What role does exercise play in energy expenditure?
There's only three kinds of diets really for weight loss. And this is coined by Dr. Peter Atiyah. I got him credit for this. CR, DR, and TR. Those are the three paths that you can take, the three diets that people can choose. CR is calorie restriction. That's where you count calories. Look at the labels. Use an app. Weigh and measure your food. That's an option.
That's a very viable pathway that people can be successful in dieting. DR is dietary restriction. That's your eliminating food groups or macros. That's your keto folks, your vegan folks, your carnivore folks, your whole 30s. All of those diets that tell you to good food, bad food, eliminate these. That's a perfectly reasonable path. There's pros and cons, of course, with all of these avenues.
But that is a type of dietary pattern, dietary path. The other one is TR. That's time restriction. That's obviously your 16-8, your OMADs, your one meal a day, your alternate day fasting, anything that incorporates diet. limiting the window under which that you consume food. That can be a successful pathway for some people, not all.
And on all of the research on each of these different types of diets, we see inter-individual variability. We see people that are successful on these diets and we see people that are unsuccessful on these diets. In comparing them to each other, we don't see any winner amongst them. We see that long-term dietary adherence
is a challenge with all three diets and no diet rises to the top as being the best. And so you kind of have options here to choose which one feels the best to you. And people's success or failure on those diets is going to depend on whether or not they're able to adhere to those diets long term.
Yeah, that's really the key word is adherence. I want to pull another quote from a podcast that you were on on this topic. On calorie restriction, energy balance. You shared that the idea of calorie restriction is truthful, but not always useful. I might have butchered that a little bit in the paraphrasing.
That's perfect.
But can you expand on that a little bit? Because I think that's the journey that where a lot of our audience members are going on, where there's this understanding. For years, they were told by many people that even have been on our podcast that, hey, calories don't matter. It's not really about calories. Maybe even some people coming in and talking about the carbohydrate diet.
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Chapter 5: What factors should you consider when choosing a weight loss strategy?
insulin model, which there are some really interesting things inside of that. Even maybe I primarily believe that model in my own understanding, but now this is understanding that, Hey, listen, if you're going to ultimately lose weight, there's gotta be some reduction in calories that are there. And that doesn't mean that the quality of the food that you're eating isn't incredibly important.
So can you expand on your original statement? One of my favorite supplement companies is having a huge Black Friday sale, and you're going to want to hear all about it. BuyOptimizer's Black Friday deal starts right now, and they're giving away free gifts with every purchase. That's right. I have an exclusive advance invite to the BuyOptimizer's Black Friday deal for the entire month of November.
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Chapter 6: What habits drive hunger and overeating?
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Chapter 7: What lessons has Stan learned about dieting?
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People like to demonize calories in, calories out. I think it's a straw man argument. They try and simplify it as meaning that 100 calories of carrots is the same as 100 calories of cookies, and nobody's ever said that. It's a oversimplified term for really the energy balance equation. And that's total daily energy intake. That's all of the calories you consume. And total daily energy expenditure.
And that's all of the activity and energy, the calories that you burn. It's a more complex equation. It accounts for things like fiber, like hormones and satiety, which can drive overconsumption of food, which would affect your energy intake side of the equation. And it accounts for how hormones affect Things like your energy, your ability to exercise and burn calories.
So all of those things are accounted for in that energy balance equation. At the end of the day, if you want to lose weight, you have to get into a calorie deficit. Calories do count, whether you're doing keto or whether you're doing intermittent fasting or whether you're counting calories. If you're going to lose weight or if you're losing weight, you are in a calorie deficit just by definition.
And that's not to say that you have to count calories. Those are other methods or ways that you can put yourself in a calorie deficit by eliminating food groups or by eliminating the amount of time that you eat in a day. The end result of that is that if you lose weight, you created a calorie deficit, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
But whether or not you can maintain that type of diet long term becomes still the most important. Like you said, adherence is important. I coined the term compliance is the science. And ultimately, whichever diet path that you choose, being able to adhere to it long term, make it part of a lifestyle that you can sustain is going to be the most important thing. But calories do count.
And it's important to learn about calories, just like you learn about budgeting your money. If you spend more than you earn, you're going to be in a deficit. And if you earn more than you spend, you're going to have a surplus. which with money is a good thing. With calories might be a bad thing. The surplus can lead to weight gain.
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Chapter 8: Why is food quality significant in a diet?
A lot of people just aren't aware of how many calories are in foods that they eat. I've been training clients since college. I studied exercise science in the University of Oregon, and I worked at a box gym and worked at many gyms. I've owned three different gyms over the years, and I've been training people since I was a young man, since the late 80s. And I still train people.
I still have clients. I still work with not just famous athletes as many people are familiar with me for, but I work with dad bods and soccer moms and Jen pop on, on simple weight loss. And as you mentioned now, a lot of women, as they get into their forties and fifties, you're struggling with weight to largely because of either PCOS or some sort of paramenopausal or postmenopausal symptoms.
things start to change for them very aggressively. I want them to be educated as to the kind of foods they eat. So I think it's a good idea, just like you'd learn to budget your money. It's a good idea. Balance your checkbook. It's a good idea to use an app for a little while. So you familiarize yourself with some of the quote unquote hidden calories that are in some foods.
A vanilla latte at Starbucks can have 700 calories. And you might not know that. It seems like a coffee. You know, it tastes good. It's got a little vanilla in it. Uh, things like, uh, but a Cheney Alfredo, it's at a cheesecake factory is 2200 calories.
And we should probably be pretty aware that that's going to be a calorie bomb, but even things like little sauces, um, salad dressings, things with, uh, Very calorie-dense oils, generally speaking. That's not to speak specifically to what type of oil, but just fats in general. They're nine calories per gram.
They take up a little space, just a pad of butter or a tablespoon of olive oil, even a healthy olive oil in preparation of your food. One tablespoon becomes two. That's 200 calories. Do that three times a day. That's 600. And it just accumulates very quickly, and so you have to be kind of careful about
about understanding how many calories are in your food, because if you're over consuming, even a healthy diet, even a healthy Mediterranean diet, I said, eating too much cheese and nuts, you know, they're very fatty and that while quite healthy, certainly quantity matters. And so I do want people to become aware of the foods that they're eating.
My clients send me a picture of each meal that they eat every day. It takes them five seconds. And that gives me an opportunity to see exactly what they're eating, make recommendations based on that.
Yeah. So just to recap a little bit what you're saying, calories do matter. And it's important to have calorie awareness because even with really incredible food in this hyper palatable world, which even... A lot of wellness foods, quote unquote, companies that I'm an investor in, the foods are super tasty.
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