797_Ted Naiman
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[00:00:00] JJ Virgin: Hey, I am JJ Virgin, PhD Dropout. Sorry, mom. Turn four time New York Times bestselling author As a certified nutrition specialist, fitness Hall of Famer and globally recognized leader in health. I’m driven to keep asking the tough questions and use my podcast to simplify the science of health into actionable strategies that help you thrive.

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[00:01:20] JJ Virgin: I am super excited about my guest today. It’s Dr. Ted Naman. And Dr. Ted Naman is a primary care physician, a board certified family medicine physician. And what happened was over the course of the last couple decades, he started to ask the question, why are my patients. Gaining so much weight, what is going on?

[00:01:39] JJ Virgin: And he looked around and realized it was everywhere. So being an engineer, he started to look at, well, what is causing this weight gain so that he could figure out reverse engineer how to fix it. And I’ll tell you, I heard an interview, shout out Vanessa Spina by Vanessa, I think last year or the year before, talking about his concept of the protein energy diet.

[00:02:03] JJ Virgin: I got the book combed through it and I was like, this is so simple. This makes so much sense. Then I found out he had a new book out, this satiety per calorie book, and I was like, okay, I gotta get this guy on the show. You are gonna love this so much because he has basically made this so simple for you to know exactly what you should be eating and even as an app, which I will link to in the show notes to make this.

[00:02:30] JJ Virgin: Something that you can put into practice in like a minute, a day. ’cause it’s all done with pictures. So lemme tell you a little bit more about Dr. Ted. He’s a clinical instructor at the University of Washington School of Medicine where he contributes to the Department of Family Medicine. And again, he’s big focus now on health optimization, equal parts exercise and diet.

[00:02:52] JJ Virgin: So we’re gonna talk about what he’s done to be so ripped because he is super ripped, as you’ll see if you buy his books, which I highly, highly recommend. Grabbing both his books, not just the new one, but both of them because they’re just like, he has a very easy way to understand everything that he is doing and the way he breaks it down.

[00:03:14] JJ Virgin: It’s just, it’s fantastic. So I’m gonna put all of his information@jjvirgin.com slash Dr. Ted and I’ll be right back with Dr. Ted Naman. Stay with me.

[00:03:36] JJ Virgin: Dr. Ted Naman, welcome to the show.

[00:03:39] Ted Naiman: Oh wow. Great to talk to you. Thank you so much Ha, for having me on. I really appreciate it.

[00:03:43] JJ Virgin: Well, I was gonna stalk you. If I couldn’t get you on the show, I would’ve like literally, I love your information so much. It is so clear and so. Obvious and you’ve cut through so much noise.

[00:03:55] JJ Virgin: And I’ll just start with kind of the thing that was so perplexing to me for years. You know, I have literally been a diet connoisseur for years and years and years. I’ve written diet books and of what’s always amazed me about diets is that it’s the war. You know, there is the plants versus animals war, which is like real, you know, wow.

[00:04:13] JJ Virgin: Big religious war, right? But there’s also the carbs versus fat. And when you look at most of the diets out there, that’s what they were manipulating. And I just love with both your books, the protein energy diet and the satiety per Calorie Diet. I don’t think you put diet after that one, but both of those books are really just so clear as to what you need to focus on.

[00:04:33] JJ Virgin: So I would love to kind of pull back a little bit and go, how did you get into all of this? Because you started out as a primary care physician, right? Right, right. Now when you’re writing diet books, what the heck happened?

[00:04:45] Ted Naiman: Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, I’ve been a kind of interested in the diet side for a long time.

[00:04:49] Ted Naiman: I trained at Loma Linda University. Um, you know, down there in Southern Cal, actually not too far, I think from maybe where you’re at.

[00:04:56] JJ Virgin: No, I was there, I was in Palm Springs, now I’m in Tampa, Florida.

[00:05:00] Ted Naiman: Oh, got it, got it. Okay. You switched, uh, you switched the coast. Yeah. Got it. But, um, yeah, l Melinda and of course, uh, they’re really geeked out on diet there.

[00:05:09] Ted Naiman: It’s all just plant-based. And so I kind of had an interest in diet, um, starting out in medical school. And then I saw, you know, basically patients really transform their health with diet and exercising ways that I could pretty much never pull off with drugs. And I just kind of got hooked. I was like, wow, there’s really something here.

[00:05:28] Ted Naiman: The problem is most people haven’t figured it out. They don’t know how to make it practical. They don’t know how to make it actionable. They don’t know exactly where to focus all their energy. And so for the past, you know, 25 years, I’ve just been researching the heck out of diet and exercise and basically from the, the standpoint of what’s the most practical things you can do to really move the needle?

[00:05:51] Ted Naiman: Especially in a primary care setting where everybody’s overweight, everybody’s insulin resistant, everybody’s diabetic, and you’ve got 15 minutes and let’s go. You know what I mean? Yeah. So it’s just very practical and in the trenches, and I’ve just been researching it for decades. And finally, I, I wrote the PE diet about five years ago, just to make my job easier because I have such little time with patients.

[00:06:12] Ted Naiman: I was just like, here, here’s a free copy of this book. Just, uh, do what it says goodbye. And so it was really just a hack to make my day job easier. That’s the only

[00:06:22] JJ Virgin: reason I wrote it. So, you know, when you look at the table of contents in both these books, one of the big things you talk about is why are we, why are we so overweight?

[00:06:31] JJ Virgin: Why are we so over? And you actually call it what it is. ’cause it’s, it’s, why are we over fat? If you were overweight and it was muscle, hey, good on you. That’s not the problem we have. And so what did you discover in all of this study as to why you think we’re so over fat?

[00:06:47] Ted Naiman: Gotcha, gotcha. Well, so I, you know, I got an engineering degree before I went to medical school, and so I’m really into reverse engineering things.

[00:06:54] Ted Naiman: And I figured, okay, the only way to figure out what to do to fix all this stuff is to reverse engineer it and figure out how it occurred to begin with. So in both books, I go all the way back to the very beginning. I assume out as much as you can, like what is eating, exactly, what are the nutrients we’re eating?

[00:07:13] Ted Naiman: How do they get there? Where do they come from? And then what happens over time with the food supply? To basically change it to the point that we all just eat to satiety like we’ve always done for, you know, 1.5 million years except now we’re all morbidly obese when we used to have perfect body composition.

[00:07:30] Ted Naiman: And so I basically break it all down. I started at the very, very beginning. It’s actually super boring. The first couple chapters of the, both of these books just, they are not

[00:07:40] JJ Virgin: boring. It is really great stuff. I love these books. They’re fantastic. So stop it.

[00:07:46] Ted Naiman: Thank you. I mean, but it’s like, I, it’s really done.

[00:07:48] Ted Naiman: It’s really basic. It’s like, what is eating? You know, it’s like, right. This is where all of the macros actually come from and get there. And then we talk about, you know, basically what happened with, um, you know, first of all agriculture, you know, 10,000 years ago, this is how we basically upped the yield of carbs and fats and this is how we got, you know, protein dilution.

[00:08:07] Ted Naiman: And then we had the industrial revolution and uh, the bulk refining and processing of. You know, I refined carbs and fats and sugar and flour and oil and boom, now everybody’s overweight and here are the exact things that happen to the food supply, and here’s exactly how that works, and here’s exactly what you can do to reverse engineer that and unwind that whole spiral.

[00:08:27] Ted Naiman: So, yeah, uh, I’m just trying to really dumb it down from just first principles and this is what happened and this is what you can do.

[00:08:35] JJ Virgin: You know, it’s interesting, you, you talk about dumbing it down, but the reality is most people think that, um, corn’s a vegetable that. You know, eggs or dairy that, you know, they don’t know the basic foundation of what is a carbohydrate, what’s a fat, what they don’t like.

[00:08:54] JJ Virgin: They, they weren’t taught it or if they were taught it. I remember learning the food guide pyramid in fifth grade. Right. You know, so it’s been a, it’s been a while unless someone actually went into this field and started to study it. So you talk about all of the shifts, which I would think the biggest shifts.

[00:09:10] JJ Virgin: I know that a lot of this started with the industrial revolution, but then you look at the last 50 years and it went completely haywire. So what is, what has happened? Because you, you talk about the fact we’re now, even though we’re still driven to satiety, were overeating to do it.

[00:09:25] Ted Naiman: Right, right, right, right, right.

[00:09:26] Ted Naiman: So there’s a couple things that haven’t. First of all, we figured out how to suck all the carbs and fats out of foods, right? So like you’ve got corn, but then you can suck out all the fat and make corn oil and you can suck out all the carbs and make corn starch or corn syrup. And our ability to do that simultaneously, um, radically increase the caloric density, right?

[00:09:49] Ted Naiman: But also dilute out all the protein and nutrients that you’re kind of eating to get in the first place. And you’ve got this weird combination of nutrient dilution, protein dilution, you know, you bunch, uh, you pour a bunch of carbs, fats in there, and the protein percent just falls. And then you’ve also got this hedonic component where we’re wired to seek out really high energy density, carbs and fats because that’s how you survive the wintertime when you’re a hundred gatherer.

[00:10:13] Ted Naiman: And so it’s super tasty and hedonic and rewarding. And you’ve got this whole push pull of obesity where it’s driven forward by protein dilution and you’re, you eat until you get enough protein and it’s also driven forward by tastiness and hedonic factors. And you combine those together and everyone just overeats all the time, either passively ’cause they need enough protein or actively because it’s so tasty and delicious.

[00:10:35] Ted Naiman: And, uh, all of this is due to the increased yields of carbs in fats throughout the food supply from agriculture to industrial revolution to, um, the basically modern processed foods. And we’ve just dumped more and more and more carbon fats in. But less and less protein, you know? So like, like for example, protein, protein leverage.

[00:10:57] Ted Naiman: I wrote the PE diet because most people don’t know what protein leverage is. This is a fairly new discovery and this is a phenomenon where basically all animals on earth and cut humans, well eat until they get, get enough protein. You’re basically gonna eat and eat and eat until you get enough protein.

[00:11:13] Ted Naiman: And only then are you gonna stop eating. Well, you know, your grandparents, if they wanted some chicken, they would go out and they’d raise the chicken, kill the chicken, eat the whole chicken, chicken, uh, if you want chicken in your modern food environment, you have to go to the fast food restaurant and get chicken nuggets and like, in order to get the same amount of protein.

[00:11:36] Ted Naiman: You would have to eat way more carbs and fats. ’cause there’s a little bit of protein down in there and just like tons of breading and oil and carb and fats. And it’s, uh, basically protein dilution from the refinement of carbs and fats. And that I just wrote that whole, the PE diet, all about this protein dilution and how every step of the way with, uh, our food environment, we’ve diluted out protein with refined carbs and refined fats.

[00:12:01] Ted Naiman: Um, and so that’s, you know, that’s just an example of like one of the big things that’s changed, uh, you know, throughout the obesity epidemic. We’ve eaten a couple hundred calories a day, more of carbs and fats and like no more protein. The amount of protein we eat per day is basically flat as a pancake

[00:12:17] JJ Virgin: or God decreased.

[00:12:18] JJ Virgin: Yeah. I’m surprised the protein leverage hypothesis hasn’t been more out there. Um, because it, it really lays the foundation. Just like you said, you wrote the book on it. It’s like you, you lays the foundation for Oh, okay. I get why we overeat now and what we need to do. And I think I was listening to one of your interviews where you were talking about, um, where we used to be optimally how much protein we got, which I think was about 30% of the calories overall that now has dropped down to what, like 12,

[00:12:46] Ted Naiman: right?

[00:12:46] Ted Naiman: Right, exactly. Yep. A hundred gatherers around 30 worldwide on average. Um, standard American diet, you know, 14, 13, 12 and a half. If you really look at people who are overweight and needing processed food, it could even be lower. So, yeah, that’s exactly right.

[00:13:03] JJ Virgin: I’m glad. Now the focus is starting to get on protein.

[00:13:06] JJ Virgin: Shout out to, uh, our mutual friend, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon on mm-hmm. Getting, getting that work out there. And then also, I don’t know if you’ve met Dr. Bill Campbell yet. He’s one of my neighbors. He’s such a great guy. And uh, when we set he, he comes over so we can podcast in person and he said, you know, the big thing that I can tell you with physique athletes, the big differentiator is.

[00:13:29] JJ Virgin: They all eat. Like if you ask ’em what they eat, all of them are eating a high amount of protein, probably higher than 30%, especially when they’re getting contests ready and they, it’s, it’s just, it makes it a non-issue. Like when you really start to eat protein first, like all, all the struggle goes out the window, don’t you think?

[00:13:47] Ted Naiman: Absolutely. And, and honestly, this occurs in pretty much all mammals. You can dial up the protein percent higher or lower of their diet, and the ad-lib calor intake just goes up and down almost in a straight line from about 10 to 40% protein. And the higher the protein percentage of your food, the less calories you’re gonna eat.

[00:14:09] Ted Naiman: Full stop. There’s this incredibly linear zone there where it’s just crazy, like, you know, in lab rats and mice, you, we can feed them up to about 50% of their calories from protein and they’ll just eat less and less and less and less and less and get thinner the whole time. And ba basically better body composition, higher lean mast, lower fat mass.

[00:14:28] Ted Naiman: And that works on both ends of the spectrum. You look at your physique athletes, your bodybuilders, your bikini models, your fitness aesthetic people. They’re just living at like 30% protein. And then you’re right, if they’re like perm, lean, they’re may be up at 40% show prep. They’re might be even higher for a couple weeks.

[00:14:48] Ted Naiman: And, uh, then down to the other end of the scale, if you look at the people who are gaining weight the fastest, you know, the peak is probably 10% Protein is absolute peak fatness. And this, uh, occurs in all sorts of different animal species. It it’s crazy. It’s powerful. It’s ubiquitous. Nobody’s ever heard of it.

[00:15:07] Ted Naiman: And that’s why I wrote the PE diet. ’cause I’m like, people need to know about this crap. Like, nobody’s ever heard of this before, including me and I’m a fricking doctor. So that was a problem.

[00:15:19] JJ Virgin: So it’s interesting too when you think about it because like, uh. I, I don’t know what the percentage is, but I’m guessing, guessing with the standard American diet, with the, I, I think it became my plate.

[00:15:29] JJ Virgin: It’s somewhere in the 15% for protein. I mean, it’s so low. It’s, it’s stupid. Especially as we age when we have anabolic resistance, it makes me nuts, you know? And so what’s happened, because I know what you do is you, you put, and I love this, this idea of carbohydrates and fat. They’re fuel calories. That’s so, they are interchangeable fuel calories.

[00:15:49] JJ Virgin: And you talk about all these diets that either raise one or lower the other that they’re really just making lateral shifts. So I’d love you to break that down.

[00:15:58] Ted Naiman: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Right, right, right. And, and your, your bodybuilders know this. They’re like, it really just comes down to protein and calories, you know, protein percent.

[00:16:06] Ted Naiman: And calories. And that’s pretty much all you have to worry about. And that’s basically true. So, you know, humans have this crazy range, um, throughout the globe. There’s this massive shift in carb versus fat percentage. And it turns out that it’s really just distance from the equator, like which latitude you’re at, at, you know, a hundred gatherers at the equator eat a much higher carbohydrate percentage.

[00:16:29] Ted Naiman: ’cause they’ve got all these plant, you know, fruits and things year round. People at the, uh, extremes, like at the really high and low latitudes, they’re eating a much higher fat percentage, right? They’re basically just, you know, half the time it’s winter and they’re only getting, animals need animal fat.

[00:16:45] Ted Naiman: They don’t have a lot of plant foods. So you get this crazy shift in carb versus fat percentage throughout the globe. That’s really just about, just from that, um, from the equator. And then protein percent is like the same, you know, the whole planet right now. The modern human diet is like, you know, 14, 15%.

[00:17:04] Ted Naiman: It’s just barely varies at all. And that’s part of the reason why nobody figured protein leverage out forever. We, we figured, well, protein’s the smallest component, so it can’t be that important. It’s really about the carbs and the fats and look at these big shifts and so many people are overweight and then these people are thin and what’s going on with their carb fat spectrum?

[00:17:21] Ted Naiman: It’s because protein is such a tiny, very razor fixed, um, extremely tightly controlled, um, component that it does really control exactly what’s going on. And, uh, you know, we didn’t figure out that out for the longest time, but the carb fat thing is very interchangeable. So when people like try to make shifts between their carb and fat percentages, that’s kind of a lateral move.

[00:17:45] Ted Naiman: Like you’re, you’re very capable of burning mostly carbs, not a lot of fat, mostly fat, not a lot of carbs. It might take you a week or two to completely shift over and fine tune your whole metabolism. But that’s kind of just style points. And what’s really going on is you’re eating until you get enough protein and then your body is a hybrid engine that can run off carbs or fats.

[00:18:06] Ted Naiman: And so the, the protein percentage is infinitely more important than the carb fat mixture. And I don’t think people really know that. Don’t you

[00:18:16] JJ Virgin: think that maybe the carnivore diet has helped people go, huh? You know, it’s like if anything should make people take a pause and go, huh, look at this diet that would, on the outset to so many people, especially with this plant-based push out there in the world, which I’d love you to go the plant versus animal.

[00:18:36] JJ Virgin: ’cause I like the way you describe it, but I mean, you look at carnivore and go, but wait a minute, here’s people that are eating a higher protein with fat diet and boom.

[00:18:47] Ted Naiman: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the one thing about carnivore is like, because you know, plants make the food for everything, right? They make their own food.

[00:18:55] Ted Naiman: They make all the food for animals. All animals either eat plants or an animal that ate plants. So plants are at the base. Plants don’t have as high a protein percentage inherently because animals are at a higher trophic level, they’re just eating a bunch of plants. They bioaccumulate nitrogen and protein and minerals and micronutrients.

[00:19:14] Ted Naiman: And so animals pretty much always have a higher protein percentage, a higher nutrient density. Because they’ve bioaccumulate it like a cow, you know, eats a billion blades of grass. The grass has a really low protein, but the cow bioaccumulates all that nitrogen and protein and now your steak has a ton of protein in it.

[00:19:32] Ted Naiman: So the carnivore uh, diet is like an instant win for protein percentage. You’re just automatically getting higher protein percent. Even if you eat like the fattiest grain fed rib eye, you can find it’s about 30% protein. So when you crank protein that high, a lot of stuff doesn’t matter. The energy density’s not as important, the fiber, it becomes almost meaningless and all of these other factors kind of like get overshadowed by this protein percentage.

[00:19:58] Ted Naiman: So yeah, a lot of people, you know, should be thinking about, Hey, what is it about carnivore that’s so crazy effective? And, and when I read the PE diet five years ago, I’m like, you know, this is why carnivore is just an instant win. I mean, look at this protein percentage, you almost can’t lose. Since then, I’ve realized, okay, there are a lot of people.

[00:20:18] Ted Naiman: Who are actually crushing it on much lower protein percentage diets. So that’s not necessarily the entire story. It’s incredibly powerful. It’s incredibly important. But oh, hey, you’ve got these, you know, Okinawa ones over here who eat 12% protein, but they’re all really thin and doing great. Oh, and what’s the reason for that?

[00:20:38] Ted Naiman: Their energy density is super low. Their fiber’s super high. They’re pulling these other levers. And I kind of went on to write satiety per calorie, just to explain how there are these other factors that would explain everything you see in the nutrition space that wouldn’t 100% be explained by protein.

[00:20:55] Ted Naiman: And even in carnivore, like for example, if you just decide, okay, um, hot dogs are carnivore, I’m just gonna eat the cheapest hot dogs I can find in the grocery store. Uh, yeah, they’re so diluted with fat. You know, a super cheap hot dog might be 13% protein. And basically the, this is economics of food production, right?

[00:21:14] Ted Naiman: If you fatten the cow up as fat as you can possibly get it, you’re just gonna make more money because you sell it by the pound and then if you dump even more fat in into that product, the, the more value add, the cheaper it is for you to make and the more profit you get. And so, you know, just saying, I’m gonna be carnivore the cheapest hot dogs and bologna I can find, you actually might end up with just the standard American diet protein percentage except the zero fiber and a pretty high energy density.

[00:21:44] Ted Naiman: And you might actually end up going nowhere. It’s probably gonna be a lateral move at best. And so I kind of wrote society per calorie, just kind of looking at all these other case scenarios where protein does not explain absolutely everything. It’s probably the biggest rock in the jar and. That’s why I like to talk about it a lot.

[00:22:03] Ted Naiman: But there are other factors, you know, that are good to pay attention to as well.

[00:22:06] JJ Virgin: Yeah, let’s go through those. ’cause you do look at it like, I, I love protein. The protein energy diet ’cause, and I love books that have the big takeaway. And the big takeaway is, and this is literally what I, my mantra is just eat protein first.

[00:22:19] JJ Virgin: Just eat it first. Choose lean sources, boom, eat it first. Mm-hmm. You know, we love, we, we love going over it’s, it’s al always our goal that they will lose money on us. We love going to the Brazilian steakhouse in town. We don’t eat anything but the best cuts of the leanest stuff. Mm-hmm. And it’s like, you know, and then we’re like.

[00:22:39] JJ Virgin: We could, we should probably start going to there at noon, because like then you’re full for 24 hours, like you’re done.

[00:22:44] Ted Naiman: Oh yeah.

[00:22:45] JJ Virgin: You know? Absolutely. It’s so easy. But again, my big argument with, uh, carnivore and I did a really great interview with Sean Baker, so we’ll link to that. He’s fantastic. However, I still kept going, but your microbiome, but the polyphenols, you know, you still look at this and go, but the other things, so, so protein’s the big power lever, but you’ve got other levers too, so let’s

[00:23:08] Ted Naiman: go

[00:23:08] JJ Virgin: through, right, right, right.

[00:23:08] JJ Virgin: Well,

[00:23:08] Ted Naiman: okay, so the two biggest levers, protein number one, protein percentage, basically whatever your protein percent is, that’s how many calories you’re gonna eat. That’s the biggest lever, that’s the most important. And you’re totally right. If you just eat a ton of extra, you know, you just get the leanest protein you can, you eat a ton of it.

[00:23:25] Ted Naiman: First thing, you’re pretty much said. The second one is energy density. So humans do two things every single day. Number one, they eat until they get enough protein. Full stop. You eat until you get enough protein. If you’re just eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, you have to eat an extra 3000 calories because, you know, bread’s, you know, 11% protein and peanut butter’s, 9% protein.

[00:23:47] Ted Naiman: And, uh, to get enough protein, you have to massively overeat calories.

[00:23:50] JJ Virgin: And yet everybody always goes, peanut butter’s high protein. I’m like, it’s not high protein, it’s high fat people come. It’s an excellent

[00:23:55] Ted Naiman: fat source. Absolutely right there with you. It

[00:23:58] JJ Virgin: can’t be high protein if it’s not. At least like, to me, high protein means you’re over 50%.

[00:24:04] JJ Virgin: You know, it’s like, well, maybe even 30%. But nuts and seeds are not high protein, not a good protein source, you know, it’s like ridiculous. Okay. Mm-hmm. Back to you.

[00:24:12] Ted Naiman: Oh, right. Okay. So the, and then the other one. So the big one, priority percent, second one. Um, weight and volume of food energy density. So basically humans eat, uh, 1.52 kilos of food a day.

[00:24:23] Ted Naiman: Uh, three to four pound. You’re gonna eat three to four pounds of food every day, no matter how many calories are in it. That’s just what happens. You, we have studies where they, um, secretly manipulated energy density, you know, pouring in some oil, uh, subbing it with water, making a two x and a one x energy density diets and just feeding ’em to people.

[00:24:42] Ted Naiman: And they eat exactly twice as many calories from a, twice the energy density diet, uh, with the same level of satiety and enjoyment. And they enjoy, you know, the diets are equally palatable. And all of that sort of stuff. But basically you’re just going to eat your three to four pounds of food a day. Now, if your food is like trail mix or some incredibly, you know, like nuts, this super high energy density thing, you’re gonna eat double the calories as if you’re eating food.

[00:25:09] Ted Naiman: But lo, you know, if you’re eating like, uh, uh, of a super lean steak and some carrots or something, you know, you have to eat so much more food, right? You, you have to eat, you know, 18 pounds of carrots to get 2000 calories. Good luck, right? You’re just, that’s so all of these foods that have a ton of weight and volume from a fiber and water, but not that many calories are a huge cheat code.

[00:25:33] Ted Naiman: So I tell people in satiety per calorie, you’ve got pretty much two goals every single day. Number one. Hit your protein target. So you want the leanest protein you can get, you wanna front load it, you want to eat it first, you want to eat it earliest in the day, earliest in the meal. You’re just trying to like hit that protein.

[00:25:47] Ted Naiman: The second thing is, and

[00:25:48] JJ Virgin: what your, what is your target for protein? ’cause I think it’s hard to go off percentages because if you are overeating your overall calories because you have, you know, high energy density, then you would, you wouldn’t make it like, so what would your calories per or your grams per body weight be?

[00:26:06] Ted Naiman: Got it. Got it. Okay. So this is the best way to think about how much protein should you get. You can’t base it on your current body weight ’cause most people are super. It’s like how much would you weigh if you were completely ripped and jacked, you’re on stage weight, your body, your, you know, your fighting weight.

[00:26:25] Ted Naiman: Like what weight were you at The very thinnest in your life or when you were a senior in high school? Or if you’re completely ripped and jacked, if you had perfect body composition, uh, whatever that weight is, you know, which is going to vary with your height of course. So your ideal body weight for your height is, uh, what you wanna use.

[00:26:42] Ted Naiman: And it’s a gram per pound. So you wanna use one gram per pound per day, roughly of your absolute ideal body weight. I’m saying like your super thin. Um, or you can just look up a reference weight for your height. You know, like I’m five 10 and the ideal body weight is 160 pounds. So I want to eat 160 grams of protein every day and gram per pound.

[00:27:02] Ted Naiman: And you are your

[00:27:02] JJ Virgin: body fat at you are ripped.

[00:27:05] Ted Naiman: Oh well. Well, thank you. Yeah, I mean, ever since I rode the PE diet, I’ve been just under 10% body fat, but like only on an impedance scale. I haven’t really done a DEXA. You

[00:27:14] JJ Virgin: haven’t done a DEXA?

[00:27:16] Ted Naiman: I’ve never done one.

[00:27:17] JJ Virgin: You’ll probably read lower on a DEXA. We do a DEXA twice a year.

[00:27:23] JJ Virgin: I’m getting ready to do it again ’cause my birthday’s coming up. Um, and we, I’ll digress a little bit. We went and did decks a couple years ago ’cause I was like, I wanted to see where I was at ’cause I was getting ready to turn 60 and I wanted to make sure I was in the best shape of my life. At 60, my decks at 39 and 59 we’re exactly the same.

[00:27:41] JJ Virgin: Nice. I I am a very lean female. Like my, in my twenties I was always 10%. So I knew I could be there. I was 13.9 at 39 and I was back exactly the same, same weight at 59. Yeah. I went after it. But my husband, when we did the deck says, and my husband’s like, you would meet him, he’s athletic, he’s, you know, plays volleyball, blah, blah, blah.

[00:28:04] JJ Virgin: 27% body fat. No wait, was it? Yeah. 25% body fat. Wow. And I’m like, whoa. But it wasn’t me saying whoa, being the bad wife, it was the DEXA. So it was way better ’cause our bio-impedance had been reading him at about, hmm 17. I mean, still for an athletic guy was higher, but 25%. And then he got serious upped his protein stopped all that.

[00:28:27] JJ Virgin: Like STE chips kind of garbage before dinner, you know, the eating before eating, uh, and dropped 27 pounds of fat and put on 24 pounds of muscle.

[00:28:37] Ted Naiman: Nice. Brilliant. Yeah,

[00:28:39] JJ Virgin: protein beautiful. A huge thing. Tracking protein was amazing. So, but the d is not quite the same as Edes. I love Edes at home to, to just keep a record of it, but mm-hmm.

[00:28:49] JJ Virgin: You know, but you look, you look, you look leaner than 10%. Unless that picture was totally, uh, airbrushed that you have in your book. But seeing you, I doubt it.

[00:28:59] Ted Naiman: Yeah. I don’t really know. I mean, I haven’t done an actual DEXA, but, um, the impedance kind of just lets you know how you’re doing over time. I bet you’re six

[00:29:06] JJ Virgin: to, I bet you’re six to 8%.

[00:29:08] JJ Virgin: I want hear about it when you do it. Oh,

[00:29:10] Ted Naiman: I don’t know. I’m pretty impressed with your DEXA. I mean, that’s like, just, I absolutely. Crazy in saying low. So, nice job.

[00:29:17] JJ Virgin: It’s, I don’t normally talk about it ’cause it’s so weird for women to be. Mm-hmm. But I just have always, that’s always been my body type, so. Just is what it is, right?

[00:29:27] JJ Virgin: Yeah. Um, all right, so back over to this. Now, where were we before I took you completely off track?

[00:29:33] Ted Naiman: Oh, yeah. I mean, basically those are the two biggest, those are the two biggest rocks in the jars. Protein percent and energy density. Oh yeah,

[00:29:39] JJ Virgin: we were talking about how much protein. Mm-hmm. So you play a pound, um, which I think we’re all kind of, ’cause it’s so easy to figure out, right.

[00:29:46] JJ Virgin: No math required. All right. Cool. And so the other levers of is overall energy density, I would assume there it’s gonna be fiber and water.

[00:29:55] Ted Naiman: Fiber and water. Right? Right. And in the bug it talk, we talk about like you’re trying to get a higher weight and a higher volume of food. The weight is from water, the volume is from fiber.

[00:30:05] Ted Naiman: And so you’re basically trying to eat more protein, fiber, and water. It’s basically like these heavy wet vegetable type things. Uh, and a bunch of protein, uh. So, and, and then, and then there’s a, there’s a fourth component. So like, you know, like I, we have this Hava app that basically calculates satiety score on a zero to 100 scale.

[00:30:24] Ted Naiman: And it uses four things to do that. Number one, protein percent biggest rock of the jar. Number two, energy density, second biggest, um, the, and energy density is mostly looking at water. So about 80 to 90% of energy density is explained by this fat versus water spectrum. If there’s more fat and less water, or more water and less fat, that kind of gives you energy density.

[00:30:47] Ted Naiman: So, uh, pretty percent energy density, which is water fiber fraction, like how, how much fiber is there per a thousand calories. And that’s, um, volume more or less. And then the fourth thing is hedonics. And hedonics is basically a food that’s a high energy density, carbon fat together like donuts and pizza and cakes and cookies and pies and muffins and crackers and all these like super tasty.

[00:31:12] Ted Naiman: Addictive hedonic foods. And so in the book I have this sort of infographic and proteins at the top right. You wanna hit this protein percentage, like the protein versus non-pro energy, biggest rock the jar. And then on the carbon fat sides, you want lower energy, density, carbs and fats. You want as much fiber in your carbs as you can get, and as much water in your fats as you can get.

[00:31:34] Ted Naiman: So for example, like on the fat spectrum, like uh, a hundred grams of oil is a hundred grams of fat. You have to store it all in your fat cells. But a hundred grams of avocado is only, you know, 15 grams of fat. And so you’re getting a lot more weight from the avocado without as much actual calories in fat.

[00:31:52] Ted Naiman: And then on the carb side, you know, you’ve got fiber, which basically explains like your wonder bread has, you know, 50 grams of carbs and it’s uh, you know, one gram of fiber, but you’re like sprouted Ezekiel, whatever, whole grain thing, bread. You know, it might be 25 grams of carbs and you know, eight grams of fiber or something like that.

[00:32:12] Ted Naiman: So it’s a protein at the top, producing energy density of carbs and fats. And then at the very bottom is the hedonic high energy density, carbs and fats together, the sugar and the oil, and the um, cookies and the hedonic, you know, tasty. I call it the trifecta. It’s high carb, high fat, and high energy density all at once.

[00:32:29] Ted Naiman: It’s basically like a refined carbon, refined fat together like ice cream or you know, cookies and that’s your what you’re trying to eat last and only after you’ve achieved adequacy with protein and fiber and water and weight and volume, then you can have like some cookies. But if you start out with those foods, you’re kind of screwed.

[00:32:46] Ted Naiman: You’re sunk. Yeah. It’s downhill from there.

[00:32:49] JJ Virgin: Yes, yes. Go to the Brazilian steakhouse and then mm-hmm. If you want want a dessert, go ahead. You’re gonna be just too full to do it. Right. What’s great about all of this is it just takes all the diet wars and fighting out of the equation and there’s just like, ’cause there’s so much emotion, I’m like, why are we so emotional?

[00:33:09] JJ Virgin: It, I grew up, my background’s exercise. Science, but, and it used to be the same, it was like the fights between the marathoners and the resistance trainers and the yoga people, like this is like, not religion. This is just like what’s the best prescription. Mm-hmm. And same with the diet, but this takes a lot of that out.

[00:33:25] JJ Virgin: But we, I do want to just address the animal versus plant part of the spectrum here. For people who are, you know, wanna make that choice still, that they want to eat more plant-based. How does this fit into that?

[00:33:38] Ted Naiman: Right. Right. Okay. So, so in the book we talk about what makes a good protein source. So in order to be a good protein source, you really have to have at least 20% of the calories from protein.

[00:33:49] Ted Naiman: Right? So that’s like. Bare minimum, and that’s why your nuts don’t like, you know, grains are horrible. Uh, your, your highest protein grain is maybe oats at about 13%. Wheat’s, like 11 or 12%. Corn’s like 11%. Rice is at 11%. These grains suck for protein. Um, so you’ve got protein percent has to be 20 or higher for it to be a good protein source, but that’s not it.

[00:34:15] Ted Naiman: Uh, it’s not just how high the protein percent of calories is. It’s what, what protein density does the food have? Like what amount of the mast is actually protein? Because like, uh, kale is 40% protein, but kale is not a good protein source because the absolute, you know, there’s no calories and there’s no absolute protein.

[00:34:35] Ted Naiman: You’d have to eat, you know, like your whole body weight and kale to get enough protein to be alive. So to be a good protein source, not only high protein, percentage of calories, but also a high, uh, protein, percent of weight so that the weight of the food is mostly protein. And there’s only three things on earth that have this much protein in it.

[00:34:55] Ted Naiman: This is it. These are the only foods that are good protein sources. Number one, animals just eating an animal, right? Animal flesh, that could be beef or pork, or chicken or fish or seafood. You basically, you eat an animal, uh, super high percentage of the animal’s body is going to be, uh, protein. And you’re gonna get a high protein, percent of calories.

[00:35:15] Ted Naiman: You’re getting a high protein, percent of mass high protein density. So boom animals, that’s number one. The second one is animal reproductive products. And I’m talking eggs and dairy. So like basically eggs and milk. If you, um, take animal reproductive products that are specifically designed to like help out the next generation.

[00:35:33] Ted Naiman: So they’re very, very high in protein percent and micronutrients and most of your eggs and dairy, like an egg is 30% protein. Uh, by mass it’s also a very high percentage of protein. And, uh, milk is a little bit of mix because you can have high fat dairy, which is a terrible protein source, like, like your heavy cream and your, uh, cream cheese and your sour cream and your butter and your, all your high fat cheese.

[00:35:58] Ted Naiman: Not good, not a high protein percent of calories or ma but all of your low fat dairy is awesome. Like your ultra filtered milk that’s low carbon, low fat, your, um, Greek yogurt, uh, especially your non-fat Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, your low fat cheese. All of these things are great protein source. So on the animal side, you’ve got eating animals.

[00:36:17] Ted Naiman: Awesome, great protein source. Animal reproductive products, eggs, and lower fat dairy. Awesome. On the plant side, there’s just one category, and that is plant reproductive products only seeds. And a seed is a general plant term for legumes and, uh, nuts and all these things. Only a seed of some sort has, uh, the qualities that make a good protein source.

[00:36:41] Ted Naiman: That’s a high protein percentage of calories and a high protein mass by weight. And legumes are the very, very best. Legumes are the pinnacle of the seeds. There are other seeds that are pretty good, but um, legumes are pretty much at the top. You’ve got soybeans or at aama, crazy high protein percent, you know, 40% protein.

[00:36:59] Ted Naiman: Uh, all of your lima beans and your fava beans, and all of these different legumes are like lentils are crazy. High thirties percent protein, really high protein density by mass, high protein percent of calories. And so in the plant world, anything that’s a good protein source is some sort of pr, uh, plant reproductive product that could be tofu or something made out of soybeans or textured vegetable protein.

[00:37:23] Ted Naiman: That could also be wheat. Gluten, which is basically comes from the wheat seeds. They’re sucking out all the protein. And honestly, when you look at the plant versus animal world, it kind of starts to look a little bit more similar because like, like look at whey powder, right? I’m taking a animal reproductive product, which is milk.

[00:37:42] Ted Naiman: I am taking a, uh, I’m making cheese out of it. I’m sucking out all the whey. I’m basically just siphoning out all the protein. Well, on the plant side you’ve got wheat, gluten, right? You take the wheat kernels, the seed, the reproductive product, you just suck out all the protein and you get pure protein like wheat, gluten.

[00:37:58] Ted Naiman: You can do that from soybeans with, uh, you know, there’s Tempe and uh, Sitan and all of these. Tofu type things that are basically kind of like the plant version of whey powder and casing powder and cottage cheese and not that Greek go, you’ve kind of got a plant equivalent. Now the animal version is always a little bit better because the spectrum of amino acids that you need to make an animal are all right there in the exact right ratios and in the plant side is not quite as good.

[00:38:32] Ted Naiman: So like soy is a lower leucine percentage than whey egg and whey are kind of gold standard, higher leucine percentage, probably better for anabolism and building muscle and all this stuff. But on the plant side, if you do get these refined pro uh, plant proteins that are kind of analogous to weigh encasing, like, you know, soy powder and things like that, they’re actually pretty good.

[00:38:56] Ted Naiman: You might have to eat, you know, 10 or 20% more. Just to get the same amount of leucine. So it’s, it’s slightly inferior, but it’s also like totally adequate. Uh, people are killing it and crushing it on purely plant-based diets. They just have to go way out of their way to get these crazy high protein foods.

[00:39:15] Ted Naiman: Usually, uh, protein concentrate, some sort of refined, uh, plant product that’s refined out all the protein, like a soy powder or a tofu, which honestly how is that different than taking dairy, sucking out all the protein as like low-fat cottage cheese, low-fat Greek yogurt, um, whey powder, kind of a lot of analogous, uh, similarities there.

[00:39:38] Ted Naiman: And so you can totally get it done on the plant side. You just have to have a little bit more of it to make up for the lower leucine percent and the spread of aminos, that’s not quite as good.

[00:39:49] JJ Virgin: Yeah, that’s what I do. I, if someone wants to do plant-based, they’re going to, gonna likely need to supplement with some things like.

[00:39:57] JJ Virgin: Protein P protein powder, but I just say push it up so that you get the leucine levels, you know, I think some of ’em are low in methionine, so, you know, so you get what you need. Mm-hmm. And of course, supplement with creatine.

[00:40:10] Ted Naiman: Right, right, right. Yeah. And a couple other micronutrients, all my pure vegans are, tend to be a little low in zinc and definitely iron for sure.

[00:40:17] Ted Naiman: B12, um, selenium, zinc iron, B12. There’s a couple, uh, you know, me, maybe an Omega-3. There’s a few supplements, a handful of supplements you might wanna take that you’re probably not gonna need on the animal side. Um, well that’s not entirely true. My pure carnivores tend to be a little low on folate, a little low on magnesium, a little low on thiamin.

[00:40:38] Ted Naiman: Uh, there’s, uh, it, it turns out like, okay, so like animal, uh, animals are based around this hemoglobin molecule that has a ton of iron. But not as much magnesium. And then you’ve got like chlorophyll, which is over here on the plant side, tons of magnesium, uh, but not a lot of iron. And oh wait, if you’re a omnivore, which humans are scientifically hello and you eat both, you’re like awesome, right?

[00:41:03] Ted Naiman: But anytime you go to one extreme or the other, it’s possible, but it’s not optimal. And I talk a lot about that in type or calorie, like possible versus optimal. It’s possible to be pure carnivore, it’s possible to be pure vegan. Is that optimal? Definitely not. Objectively, no. And like the answer’s always somewhere in between.

[00:41:24] Ted Naiman: And when you see these extremes where like somebody’s doing amazing on a pure this and someone’s on a pure that, uh, you can really just like split it right down the middle. ’cause the optimal is always going to be somewhere in the middle and not at the extreme

[00:41:38] JJ Virgin: end. I am so with you on that, it’s like eat animals with plants.

[00:41:42] JJ Virgin: Mm-hmm. You know? Yeah. It’s just easier. I also look at something and go, if there’s a diet that in order for you to stay on that diet, you have to supplement or you’re deficient, this is a problem. Right. Right. I mean, this wouldn’t have worked in the wild. Well, we can’t, we can’t end this without talking about exercise.

[00:42:00] JJ Virgin: And I love the fact that you place like equal importance on both. I was in graduate school in exercise science and there was no, no nutrition talk whatsoever. And I was like, this is ridiculous. I, I finally found a PhD program that had nutrition was nutrition, aging and exercise, because they’re like, come on, we gotta know the nutrition side of things.

[00:42:22] JJ Virgin: They’re both, they’re both important. Um. So what is your take? ’cause I you have a very minimalist approach to exercise, I think is fantastic. ’cause it takes the excuses out of I don’t have equipment, I don’t like all the reasons people say they can’t do something. So what’s your, what’s your thought process on exercise?

[00:42:40] Ted Naiman: Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, and you know, like, like you said, it is, it is right down the middle yin and yang at diet versus exercise. You cannot focus on one or the other exercises fully 50% of the story. And then also when it comes to exercise, you’ve got all these like cardio versus resistance people.

[00:42:58] Ted Naiman: And again, it’s pretty much right down the center. Like you absolutely have to do both. You’d be crazy not to pull both of those levers. So when it comes to exercise, uh, there are three basic forms of exercise that everybody should be getting, right. The first one is just general movement. That could be like step count.

[00:43:16] Ted Naiman: Like if you’re not doing, if you’re not walking 8,000 steps a day. You’re gonna have dysregulated appetite and automatically overeat. So like, full stop. Anyone who’s not, anyone who’s not walking 8,000 steps a day, uh, you’re wasting your time trying to work on your diet more and trim down more calories.

[00:43:35] Ted Naiman: You’re just gonna automat everyone eats the calories of a light to medium active version of themselves. And if you’re not at least lightly active, you’re screwed, like you’ll never get anywhere. So number one, for exercise, general movement, step count 8,000. This, uh, this is basically this number came up from a meta-analysis that looked at dysregulated appetite.

[00:43:57] Ted Naiman: So as people get more and more and more sedentary, they’re, they paradoxically just eat more food for no good reason. And they figured out like at what activity level is the break point where below that you’re kind of screwed. You’re just gonna overeat no matter what, no matter what your food is. And it is about 8,000 steps a day.

[00:44:13] Ted Naiman: So number one, general movement, 8,000, you know, 10 or 12 is even better, but like, you know, that should be a bare minimum. Then on like higher end cardio and resistance, you’re doing this to get a positive adaptation, a specific adaptation to impose demand. You’re putting a stress on your body ’cause you want your body to be better and you have to communicate to your body that it’s gonna die unless it adapts.

[00:44:37] Ted Naiman: It’s like adapt or die, right? You have to get stronger. So you want to lift weights to failure because only then do you send this message to your body. Uh, we almost died. And if you’re not stronger tomorrow, we are going to die. And so you lift weights to failure. And then on the cardio side, same thing.

[00:44:56] Ted Naiman: You’re trying to get positive adaptations, you’re trying to stress the system, progressively overload it and get like higher vo O2 max and higher cardiac output and better capillaries in your muscles and better oxygenation and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You’re only gonna get that if you demand it from your body.

[00:45:11] Ted Naiman: So I talk in the book about demand training, where you’re, you’re making your body do something you can’t quite do right now. And that’s the progressive overload. You really want some of both. You want some cardio progressive overload. You get positive adaptations, you want resistance, progressive overload, positive adaptations.

[00:45:26] Ted Naiman: On the resistance side, I just break it down as simple as possible. There’s basically push and pull movements for upper and lower body. And so, you know, you could do a whole workout that’s like an upper body push and pull, like pushups and pullups. You can do a lower body push and pull, which is basically like a dead lift.

[00:45:45] Ted Naiman: Uh, which is like hamstring, posterior chain pulling type exercise. And then like a squat or a split squat or something, which is a pushing exercise. So, you know, you got these like four movements, you know, pull-ups, pushups, Romanian, dead lifts, Bulgarian split squats. You could do these four movements and just basically you get all kinds of muscular strength and hypertrophy.

[00:46:08] Ted Naiman: And honestly, in the book, I pretty much come right out and say that I could have gotten 80 or 90% of all of my muscular size and strength and gains my whole resistant training career with basically just three exercises. It’s like weighted dips, progressively overload in a, in a, in five to 15 rep range.

[00:46:31] Ted Naiman: Uh, you know, some sort of like pulling exercise rows or pull ups, and then some sort of like compound leg movement, like a split squat, right? I’m like, you could do these three movements, right? A Bulgarian split squad. A weighted dip, a weighted pull up, a five to 15 rep range, maybe three times a week, uh, single set of failure.

[00:46:53] Ted Naiman: Just keep going up on the weights. And eventually you’re gonna get 80 to 90% of every single size and strength gain you’d ever get, even with a much more complicated regimen, way larger exercise selection, way more time in the gym. And I’m just like cutting through all the noise and just dumbing down resistance training to the absolute bare minimum.

[00:47:16] Ted Naiman: Like you need a really solid push exercise, a really solid pull, uh, one or two really solid leg exercises. And that’s all you need. As long as you’re progressively overloading it. As long as you have a, you know, a movement pattern that fits your body, you’re progressively overloading it. You’re, um, keeping the reps in reserve really low.

[00:47:36] Ted Naiman: You’re keeping the intensity, um, perceived exertion really high. You’re going all the way to failure. Um, people could actually get this done with just a couple sets a week. It’s crazy. If you did like two sets a week, you’d basically not get weaker. If you did three sets a week, you would just steadily gain strength in size.

[00:47:57] Ted Naiman: If you, you know, I did four sets a week. Okay, now you know, you, you’re doing even better. But you can kind of like, I’m all about the minimum effective dose. You wanna get this all the way down to minimum effective dose. Even if you just did one hard set a week, all the way to failure of pushups and pull-ups and squats, you’re gonna have infinite return on investment from someone who never, ever puts that maximum tension in all their muscles.

[00:48:22] Ted Naiman: And then the same thing’s true on the cardio side. Like if you never red line your heart rate and max out your intensity. You will, uh, get infinite return on investment just doing that even once a week for a couple of minutes. The, uh, you can raise your VO two max with like 60 seconds of just maximum odd exercise a week.

[00:48:42] Ted Naiman: And so the, uh, amount of time it takes is so microscopic. You could literally do these exercises in your living room for a few minutes a week and get a, a essentially infinite return on investment if you’re never doing them right now.

[00:48:58] JJ Virgin: Yeah, I love that because if you look online, it looks like you have to do a crazy amount of exercise, and I hear that from people.

[00:49:06] JJ Virgin: You must work out all the time. I go, no, I just go hard. Yep. Like I go hard when I’m doing it and that’s it, you know? And so it’s really doing these hard compound movements that are, I like to say, you train to get better at life. You don’t go train to get better at CrossFit. Right? You’re training so that you can do that squat and get out of, out of chairs later on in life.

[00:49:30] JJ Virgin: So, uh, we’re right there in sync and uh, you know, I like push pull, hinge and I think that the whole core thing is ridiculous. ’cause core is when you’re doing everything else right? Right. I never do core exercise. I’m basically just, and you’ve gotta completely like, uh, you know when when people get satiety per calorie, you will see your abs and you’re completely ripped.

[00:49:56] JJ Virgin: So. You don’t need to do all of these, all these sit-ups, I’ve never done them.

[00:50:03] Ted Naiman: Right. I don’t do any of that stuff

[00:50:04] JJ Virgin: because on in life, I never lie down on the floor and then need to do a curl up to touch my nose to my knees. Ever.

[00:50:10] Ted Naiman: Yeah. Never mu i i and, but I might do maybe 90 seconds of exercise the whole day.

[00:50:17] Ted Naiman: But that’s a set of weighted dips all the way to failure. Like soul crushing, I’m going to die and I still do one more and then I collapse in the ground. So, but uh, but you’re right. You don’t need a lot of exercise variability. You don’t need a lot of periodization. You don’t need some elaborate. Uh, and I just, like in the book, I just go on a massive rant about, um, you know, perfect, uh, you know, everyone waits till they have the perfect routine, right?

[00:50:44] Ted Naiman: I’ll start exercising when I have this perfection routine. I need this certain trainer and this certain gym, this certain exercise and this certain shoes and this outfit, and blah, blah. Hell no. You just get on the floor and do the hardest set of pushups you’ve ever done in your life. All the way to failure, and then you still do one more, and then you just do that once a day for the next three years and come back and tell me about your pushing strength and it’s gonna be crazy.

[00:51:07] Ted Naiman: So like, and your core strengths for that matter, and your core strength without doing a single setup. Abso freaking. Yep. So I’m just like, you know, do not. Look for the perfect, perfect does not exist. You need to just get out there and do a, like the universe is going to reward action, not thinking about it or coming up with some perfect blah, blah, blah, whatever.

[00:51:28] Ted Naiman: Bullshit. Um, yeah. So I just went off in the book about that. It’s, it’s pretty embarrassing.

[00:51:36] JJ Virgin: I like ranting. Well, to put a bow on this, so if you eat protein first, focus on protein that will help with satiety. Then make sure that you’re eating plants with water and fiber. Uh, that will help dramatically as well.

[00:51:49] JJ Virgin: So that makes it super simple and that you’re not eating foods that have got major energy, energy density, like. Pouring on oils and flowers and then get moving. Make sure you got your steps. And as you were talking, I was like, where are my steps already today? ’cause I am, I, last year was like, all right, that’s it.

[00:52:07] JJ Virgin: I’m gonna make sure I’m getting, at least now it’s at least 12,000 a day. But, you know, if, if someone just starts with 8,000 steps a day, I’m amazed how many people I heard that the average person in the US is getting about three, three to 4,000 steps. And as I started to look, I was like, oh. Mm-hmm. That’s crazy.

[00:52:24] JJ Virgin: Yep. It’s crazy. I’m sure that, that’s why we had, one of the reasons we had the big weight gain during the pandemic is people just. Lost every bit of extra activity they had ’cause they were staying home.

[00:52:35] Ted Naiman: Yep.

[00:52:35] JJ Virgin: So move, do hard things, do hard things for your muscles, and then go out and do some HIIT training for cardio and mm-hmm.

[00:52:44] JJ Virgin: That’s it. It’s

[00:52:45] Ted Naiman: pretty

[00:52:45] JJ Virgin: simple stuff.

[00:52:46] Ted Naiman: It’s super, super basic. It is just dumb down. It’s like X amount of protein, X amount of pounds of low energy density food, uh, x hard sets of pushups, full squads, uh, step count and a couple minutes of some high end cardio done. And everything else is just a distraction.

[00:53:04] JJ Virgin: Love it. So you have the app and the app. Tell us about the app. What, oh, right. So there’s

[00:53:11] Ted Naiman: an app called Hava. So, so the book is satiety for calorie and it’s all about where,

[00:53:15] JJ Virgin: where’s all this stuff at? You’ve got satiety for calorie, uh. Protein, energy diet. Is that at your website?

[00:53:22] Ted Naiman: Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I wrote the PE diet.

[00:53:24] Ted Naiman: It’s, uh, uh, you can buy it anywhere. Books are sold, or you can go to the pe diet.com or ted naman.com or just, just Google it. It’s everywhere. Uh, satiety per calorie. Also, you can buy it anywhere. Books are sold. You can go to satie per calorie.com or ted nam.com. Buy it there or just find it anywhere or just Google it.

[00:53:44] Ted Naiman: Um, uh, my website is ted nam.com and it has some of this stuff listed on it. And, but I teamed up with Andreas Einfeld, uh, the diet doctor, dude, right? He’s like, we’re both primary care doctors and, uh, we came up with the satiety scoring system, right? So, uh, we, the satiety per calories is all about this.

[00:54:03] Ted Naiman: Food’s gonna have higher protein, higher fiber, higher water, lower energy density, lower hedonics. It’s gonna be better for eating less calories. You’re just gonna automatically eat less calories. We developed this whole score from a zero to 100 scale. Or like a Oreo cookies, a zero and celery’s a hundred, and you really want to be around a 50, which is like steak and eggs, and you’re trying to increase your satiety per calorie.

[00:54:27] Ted Naiman: You know, the standard American diet’s like 27, 28, you wanna be up at around 50. All your bikini models are living maybe at around 60. And it, we have this app that you can download Hava, and it’s on the app store, you know, it’s like Google, uh, apple, whatever. And you just take a picture of all your food, anything you’re gonna eat, you just take a picture of it automatically tracks all your macros, you know, protein and calories and stuff.

[00:54:54] Ted Naiman: So just a picture. Yeah, you just take a pic. It takes about 10 seconds to log your whole day of eating. I, I

[00:54:58] JJ Virgin: just wonder, like, so for lunch day, I had cauliflower, rice, mushrooms, uh, grass fed, 93% fat, ground beef and drained. And then, uh, what a thing in there. What did I have? Oh, a little bit of lentils. Like, how the heck would it have known what that was?

[00:55:18] Ted Naiman: Well, so you just take a picture of the food. AI figures it all out. It figures out basically quantities. Now I have to admit that sometimes if you have a very specific food, it might not know it’s exactly that. Like, like if I take a picture of just some, you know, Greek yogurt, it might think it’s full fat Greek yogurt.

[00:55:39] Ted Naiman: But I really have the oco, triple zero, non-fat, artificially sweetened that has like even lower carbs, even lower fats. And I then if so, it’ll take a picture of it, list all the ingredients and the quantities. And if you know for sure something was very special that wasn’t mainstream, you can just instantly, easily type it in.

[00:55:57] Ted Naiman: And uh, you just substitute, there’s a giant database of every food in there. You can, you know, barcode scanner, uh, search, you know, you can sub out anything that it got wrong that you’re sure it got wrong, but the accuracy is crazy. Wow. It’s absolutely mind blowing. And um. Yeah. Uh, you, and like it hit me up on email and I’ll get you some free lifetime access to that, right?

[00:56:21] Ted Naiman: But it’s totally amazing. You can literally track all your macros In 10 seconds a day, there’s a widget on your lock screen where you just press it. Wow. And the camera pops up, take a picture of your food and everything gets tracked. But it also tracks your toti upper calorie. There. There’s two goals in the app.

[00:56:35] Ted Naiman: Number one protein, there’s this circle you have to close to get enough protein. And then number two, the satiety score of your diet overall. And you’re trying to be like a 50 or higher and you can see where you were and you can slowly increase it and you can progressively overload. The higher you go, the more, less calories you eat.

[00:56:51] Ted Naiman: What, what’s

[00:56:51] JJ Virgin: your average, um, score each day?

[00:56:54] Ted Naiman: It’s like 55. I’m like about a 55. Um, on average, like, you know, sometimes if I’m doing tons of exercise, I might be a little lower ’cause I need more calories. And if I’m. Really cutting and not moving around as much. I might be a little higher, but that’s basically average.

[00:57:09] Ted Naiman: And now we have like a hundred thousand user day data points, and we’ve done all this statistics and, um, uh, we’ve tracked, we basically graphed out average daily caloric intake with satiety per calorie score. And it’s this perfectly straight line, like it’s just incredibly linear and the more, the higher score, less calories you eat.

[00:57:32] Ted Naiman: Full. I mean all these people, I’m so curious. I can’t wait to do this. Very cool. You have to download it and check it out. Yeah, like definitely. I will just tell me what email you use to sign up and I’ll hook you up with free lifetime access, but you have to get on

[00:57:44] JJ Virgin: board. Perfect. I’m gonna put all of all of your stuff, ’cause your name’s a little bit wonky to spell, so I’ll put everything@jjvirgin.com slash dr.

[00:57:53] JJ Virgin: Ted so that it’s easy peasy for everybody so they don’t wanna figure out where the I goes in your name. Uh, ’cause it looks like Ted Nyman. I’m sure you hear that all the time,

[00:58:03] Ted Naiman: but Oh yeah, it’s, ah, it’s confusing. Anyway,

[00:58:06] JJ Virgin: it’s, uh, it’s a little confusing. So I’ll have link all the books. Link the app. The books are amazing.

[00:58:12] JJ Virgin: They are great resources. They’re fantastic. So I highly recommend these books. Oh, thank. And I tell you, I get sent books like I’m looking over here every day. I get books in the mail every day. So most books I never read and I’m, maybe I skim this. I’m actually like first one I read completely. Before I knew you or anything else.

[00:58:32] JJ Virgin: And then this next one I’ve been, I went, I didn’t get all of it before the interview, but I got through a, a decent amount of it. So it’s, they’re fantastic.

[00:58:39] Ted Naiman: Oh wow. Thank you so much. I mean, all

[00:58:41] JJ Virgin: of it. I just want the audio book versions. Oh yeah. I was trying to figure out how to feed it into ai, but we want the audio book version, Ted.

[00:58:49] JJ Virgin: That’s gotcha. Gotcha. ’cause then I can listen while I’m lifting heavy things. Mm-hmm. Okay. All right. Well thank you so much. I appreciate you. I appreciate everything that you’re doing and uh, anything I can do to help you get it out in the world, I’m all in. Awesome. Thank you so much. All righty. Well, I clearly need to have Dr.

[00:59:09] JJ Virgin: Ted back on the show, but I wanted to throw out a couple ideas for you. Now, we are obviously very, very in sync. However, this is a great new way to really look at food. Now, action. Step number one is one I hope you’re already doing, which is eating protein first. But the next one is to start to look at the other parts of your diet.

[00:59:28] JJ Virgin: And that’s why I love adding non-surgery vegetables next because you’ve got that high satiety with the fiber and water. But I’m gonna challenge you ’cause I know that this is something I’m excited about doing is taking this Hava app, HABA. And we will link to all of this of course, in the show notes at dr ted jj virgin.com/dr.

[00:59:46] JJ Virgin: Ted. But give yourself a little trial on that. You know, I love tracking. I use the Chronometer app. This is a new way to start to look at food that can be super helpful. So eat protein first, non-starchy vegetables and high satiety foods. Come in second and then grab that Hava app and see where you land.

[01:00:05] JJ Virgin: All right, I’ll see you next time.

[01:00:11] JJ Virgin: Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can use to look and feel your best and be built to last. Also, I’d love to connect with you and hear your thoughts on the podcast. Here’s how first, subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest review. Second, take a screenshot of your review and third text at 2 8 1 3 5 6 5 2 6 2 7.

[01:00:39] JJ Virgin: That’s 8 1 3 5 6 5 2 6. When you do, I’ll reply using my brand new virtual jj, it’s my on demand virtual self built from my books, talks, and years of experience so I can interact with you directly. You’ll make my day and I can’t wait to hear from you. Thanks for tuning in and I’ll catch you on the next episode.

[01:01:06] JJ Virgin: Hey, JJ here, and just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information that’s designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

[01:01:23] JJ Virgin: If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid, or delay obtaining medical or health related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes, the use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.

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