P:E Diet

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
PROLOGUE
INTRODUCTION
PROTEIN VERSUS ENERGY
ENERGY TOXICITY
CARBS + FAT
THE SECRET TO EVERY DIET
CARBS AND GLYCOGEN
PROTEIN:ENERGY RATIO
WHAT TO EAT
FED vs FASTED
THE THREE HUNGERS
ENERGY DENSITY AND SATIETY
THE P:E DIET SUMMARY
COOKING
RECIPES
SAMPLE MENU
EXERCISE
RESISTANCE EXERCISE
CARDIO

FOREWORD

The material in this book is for informational purposes only. It is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice. Reading the information in this book does not constitute a physician-patient relationship. The reader should always consult his or her healthcare provider to determine the appropriateness of this information for his or her own situation or if he or she has any questions regarding a medical condition or treatment plan. As with any new or changed diet or exercise regimen, the programs described in this book should be considered only after consulting with your physician to determine which might be appropriate for your individual circumstances and the current state of your health. Certain individuals, especially those with any medical conditions and those on any diabetes and blood pressure medications, are at increased risk and must consult their physician prior to making any changes to their current diet and exercise protocols. The intensive nature of some of the protocols in this book may involve a higher degree of risk for certain individuals, and your physician should help you determine if that risk is appropriate for you. The authors expressly disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects that may result from the use or application of the information contained in this book.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Ted Naiman is a board-certified Family Medicine physician in the department of Primary Care at a leading major medical center in Seattle. His research and medical practice are focused on the practical implementation of diet and exercise for health optimization. He has an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering and an addiction to Ultimate Frisbee. He is a pro-level bassist in his spare time.

William Shewfelt is an actor, host of the Will to Win podcast, and the Primalbody.com coaching community. He is known for his portrayal of Brody the Red Power Ranger on Power Rangers Ninja Steel (2017-2018). He was nominated for Favorite TV Actor at the 2018 Kids Choice Awards.

By combining carnivore-style eating, a strategic blend of cardio and explosive strength workouts, and focused goal setting, he has been celebrated by achieving a 5% body fat physique, and for guiding many others to breakthrough success on low carb diets.

William has modeled for a number of fitness apparel and men's apparel brands. He is a regular feature on health podcasts and co-hosts the Faster Stronger Better podcast with Chris Bell.

PROLOGUE

One hundred patient encounters a week, fifty weeks a year, for twenty years. About 100,000 physician/patient interactions. And I never cease to be amazed at the radical gradients in health. One moment I could be examining the healthiest professional CrossFitter you have ever seen, with a chiseled-from-granite body and absolute perfection for lab work. The next minute? A frail and weak shell of a human, struggling just to walk, with a problem list a mile long and failure of half a dozen different organ systems. It didn’t dawn on me all at once, but somewhere in there I came to a shocking realization. Most of the time, the only difference between the fittest people on earth and the most decrepit really did just come down to two things: diet, and exercise. I started paying extremely close attention. What EXACTLY were the differences between the diet and exercise of these healthy elites versus those plagued by chronic disease? Gradually I came to the realization that the principles at work were unbelievably simple, and equally simple to implement. The rules for diet were so basic that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t realized them earlier. Target nutrient density—mostly just protein and minerals—while minimizing toxins, including the energy toxicity of exceeding your carbohydrate and fat storage. Exercise? Generate the highest tension possible in all of your muscles, for as long as possible, on a regular basis.

The only reason people aren’t already doing these things? Lack of knowledge or awareness for most. For the rest, an unwillingness to experience the transient discomforts that come along with high intensity exercise and eating a species-appropriate diet. But for those who are willing to expend a small amount of effort, this book will help provide the basic knowledge you will need on your path to optimum health. In the end, health is everything. If you don’t have your health, literally nothing else on earth matters. For this reason, it should be of the utmost importance to every single person to maximize their health potential. Fortunately, it is easy to achieve optimum health once you understand a few very basic principles. The object of this book is to explain these principles as simply as possible.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. Read on, and I wish you the best health possible.

INTRODUCTION

WE SHOULD NOT BE THIS FAT AND THIS SICK.

It happened just slowly enough that we all got used to it. Hell, now we are conditioned to expect it. Like death and taxes, or your dropped piece of toast landing butter side down. Everyone expects to slowly and inexorably gain weight their entire adult life. We just naturally assume that you will have a ‘dad bod’ or be ‘full-figured’ in your young adulthood, and a few decades and a few dozen pounds later you inevitably end up as a ‘bigger’ man or woman. Sure, we cover it up fairly well— with larger clothes, larger chairs, larger everything. In fact, we blend in so well with the landscape that practically nobody even knows they are morbidly obese unless their doctor highlights it at a depressingly demotivating less-than yearly ‘physical’. Yet, even if your doctor happens to point out that your BMI, or Body Mass Index, is out of range, the notification feels blasé. After all, what could you possibly do about this? Sure, there is the perfunctory “Eat less and move more”, or perhaps the even more vague and impotent hand-wave of “Watch your calories”. But hey, it’s not like you aren’t trying. This is just the way it works.

Even if you are one of the rare lucky ones who seem to stay thinner, through no apparent fault of your own (excepting some fortuitous genetics), we just wait for the chronic diseases. You are supposed to watch your grandparents slowly decline right before your eyes, accumulating frailty and dental disease and so many orthopedic problems that eventually it seems that they have nothing else to talk about. Until cognitive decline sets in. Then they start telling you the same thing they told you yesterday, every day. This is just the way it goes. Fifty percent of 80-year-olds have enough cognitive decline to be formally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. We know this instinctively, and we see so much memory impairment in the elderly around us that ending up in a skilled nursing facility seems inevitable.

This book is designed to be as simple and practical as possible. No, it is not designed to be some sort of unabridged encyclopedia that deals with 100% of all edge cases for everyone on earth. Instead, this is going to provide the majority of diet and exercise information necessary for the majority of people. We are intentionally skipping the references and minutiae and instead providing the basic concepts you need to know in order to implement the best diet and exercise plan for yourself. Everyone is different and there will be plenty of individual customization, but the basic template is more or less the same for everyone. Our goal is to provide a book that absolutely anyone can pick up, read in an hour, and walk away with a double barreled blast of extremely easy to comprehend yet life-changing and actionable knowledge. That is, if we are lucky enough to live that long, without succumbing to cardiovascular disease or, even more terrifying, cancer. Almost half of us in the modern world are eventually diagnosed with some sort of cancer, and the subsequent sensation of inevitability and randomness is pretty much identical to what you would expect from the love child of Russian Roulette meets Sword of Damocles. Every time you hear that a food causes cancer, your anxiety ratchets up one more notch, and you make a quick mental note to avoid this terrible poison. That is, until you eventually hear that pretty much everything causes cancer, once you’ve sifted through enough epidemiological data. After that, you just try not to think about it, which works about as well as your weight loss attempts so far. Everyone knows someone with at least one chronic degenerative disease, maybe even having one themselves. This is just how it works. Your acid reflux is bad, but hey that is just what you should expect when you get older, right? We have pills for that. And thankfully your sleep apnea has a treatment, or at least that’s what they told you when they gave you that disconcertingly unsexy breathing contraption. Of course your knees should hurt at your age—after all, when was the last time you saw any old person running anywhere? Yeah, that’s what we thought. We are usually impressed if they can slowly get up out of a chair without using both arms like a drowning victim, or walk across the room without shuffling, hunched over a walker, like some sort of extra in that bad zombie apocalypse movie you saw one late night on SciFi. We expect to slowly get fatter, then sicker, then physically weaker, until we eventually succumb to cognitive decline and a nursing home—that is, if a massive heart attack, crippling stroke, or terrifying incurable cancer doesn’t take us first. We watch this happen all around us every day, and we just wait for it, like a frog in tepid water placed on the boil. An elite few seem to have somehow transcended all of this. We see them on TV or movies, or maybe, vanishingly rare, we know someone like this in real life. You see their toned, muscular physique, and you can almost feel an aura of health, as if it was exuding from their pores. Just watching them walk around feels like viewing an entirely different species at the zoo. Even at ease, they are standing impossibly straight and tall, shoulder blades firmly retracted, with so much tension in their spinal erectors that they perpetually look ready to lift an absurdly heavy object with no more effort than you might expend lifting a large bag of cool ranch Doritos. Comparing their bodies—with six-pack abs carved from solid granite—to your own decidedly fluffier corporeal vessel would be painful indeed without the usual coping strategies. “I wish I had that much time to work out”, you bitterly tell yourself. Of course these people spend almost all day in the gym, with short breaks to eat small, perfectly formulated gourmet meals six times a day, crafted by the sort of personal chef that only extravagant wealth can afford. Oh, and don’t forget the large-animal-veterinary-sized injection of testosterone daily, right? Yeah, if you were as genetically and financially lucky as these privileged people, you would look pretty good too. Or so you tell yourself, and this does make you feel 1% better, just long enough to stop thinking about it. Nobody can say you aren’t trying. In fact, losing weight and getting healthy have topped your priority list for as long as you can remember. You start the day out right with a light smoothie, so far so good. A few hours later, you fight off the hunger with a healthy snack or two, maybe some fruit and nuts—what could be healthier than that? Lunch is a salad with light dressing or a sandwich on whole wheat—hold the mayo—and you always opt for the baked chips instead of fried. When afternoon hunger strikes, you are ready with some healthy granola bars and trail mix. Dinner of pasta or rice, with a perfectly palm-sized serving of protein, usually chicken or fish because, hey, you are trying to be as healthy as possible. You are always mindful of quantity, and your meager portion does sort of look larger on those extra small dinner plates you bought recently. On paper, your whole day of eating seems perfect, except for this lingering hunger at the end of the day that inevitably leads to you standing in your pantry at 9:00 p.m. with an empty box of wheat thins, hunger pangs replaced with pangs of guilt. But hey, at least they were cholesterol-free and had plenty of whole grains, right? It’s not like you are binging on cake and candy over here. You bust your ass at the gym as well, staying on that treadmill for an entire hour no matter what. The dozens of TVs on the walls make this somewhat bearable. Sometimes you take a class, jumping around to the dance version of a pop song sped up to approximately the same beats per minute as your heart rate — hoping you don’t look like you are flailing quite as much as you suspect. The logistics of getting back and forth to the gym turn exercise into a massive time burden, and what starts out as a daily regimen slowly erodes into a couple of times a week. But that’s ok, because you still have your fitness tracker, and you have been hitting 10,000 steps a day all over the place. A standing desk, taking the stairs, these are all built into your routine. And yet, you can feel yourself getting fatter. What started out as a corner of your closet dedicated to the clothes that you would someday shed enough pounds to fit back into has now engulfed half of your wardrobe. Looking in a full-length mirror just lowers your self-esteem even further, and you haven’t stepped on the scale for months because deep inside you are more than a little afraid to see what will almost certainly be the highest number you have ever seen there before. You take some solace in those around you who are struggling even more than you are. They aren’t hard to find—try the grocery store or the food court at the mall, or now that we think about it, almost any public place. Seeing someone larger than yourself is a daily occurrence, and one that gives you a momentary feeling of relief, with a side order of pity. At least you aren’t THAT bad. Those people should probably be trying harder.

YOU are the reason we wrote this book. That’s right. You have the drive to make it happen. You really want it, and you can do what it takes. In fact, the only thing you are missing is a laser focused direction for your efforts. If you took all of your existing time and energy and dedication and melded it into a tight purposeful beam of pure intensity at exactly the right angle, you would slice through the obesity epidemic like a hot nanowire through butter. The goal of this book is to forge down all of your existing resources into the deadly fine tipped spear that will pierce the soft underbelly of obesity and chronic disease once and for all, allowing you to break free and achieve the complete mastery of your body composition that you have always wanted.

The strategies we will present here are so damn simple and common-sense that you will be asking yourself why you didn’t think of them yourself and write your own book about it. But as a necessary part of the process, you have to understand exactly why and how these strategies work. And that is going to require a pretty good-sized chunk of knowledge. And to get there, we are going to have to alternate between focusing in on some sub-micron minutiae of human physiology and zooming way way back out again to look at the entire landscape from the 50,000 foot level. But if you hang in there, you should take away from this book some extremely powerful weaponry in the war to achieve and maintain perfect body composition and health. And, almost as importantly, you will understand why it works.

Strap in and read on.

SIMPLE AND PRACTICAL

THE PARETO PRINCIPLE

Also known as the '80/20' principle. 20% of knowledge will get you 80% of what you are looking for. 20% of effort will give you 80% of your results. Think of this book, and the things recommended in this book, as the 20% of knowledge you need to get 80% of health improvements. The diet and exercise principles outlined here will require 20% of the effort it will take to get 80% of your desired results. This kind of efficiency is really what this entire book is based upon, and you will see this approach over and over here.

PROGRESSION PRINCIPLE

Progression is a crucial concept. It is probably easiest for people to understand the principle of progression when it comes to resistance exercise. In order to progress, you have to constantly and continually increase the challenge to your muscles. We will explore exactly how and why you do this later in this book. The idea of progression when it comes to diet is probably more difficult to grasp, but the Protein to Energy ratio concept introduced in this book will give you an easy framework for incrementally improving your existing diet. Optimizing diet and exercise is a life-long marathon, not a sprint. The idea here is to steadily improve yourself, little by little, in a gradual and progressive fashion. This is not a crash diet or a short-term fix. Instead, the idea is to slowly and continually improve, using small and sustainable changes as you incrementally maneuver towards your goal.

We don't like any diet or exercise program with a 'stop' date. There will be no '30 day cleanse' here. No ten day 'boot camp'. The very most important thing is SUSTAINABILITY. You want to aim towards eating and exercising now the way you are going to eat and exercise forever. And that is going to take a slow series of small incremental positive changes- PROGRESSION-to both your diet and your exercise.

S.A.I.D. PRINCIPLE

Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand. We will be utilizing the S.A.I.D. Principle throughout this book. Want to get better at burning fat instead of glucose? Eat fewer carbs, and your body will have to adapt to this demand. Want to add muscle? You have to communicate to your body that it has no choice but to add muscle-adapt or die. Humans are amazingly adaptable and we can live in any environment, on any sort of diet. Take advantage of this adaptability— this is how we improve our physical health. This usually involves some level of discomfort, so get used to pushing yourself way out of your comfort zone. Trust us, the transient discomforts you experience when you implement these changes is nothing compared to the lifelong suffering from the chronic diseases you will avoid.

THE THREE PILLARS OF THE P:E DIET APPROACH

There are three basic strategies for dietary improvement that underlie all of the advice in the diet section of this book. In the following chapters, we will explore all of these in depth, but we want to call attention to these at the very beginning, so you can see where we are headed.

1. INCREASE PROTEIN PERCENTAGE.

As you will learn in the near future, HOW MUCH you eat is completely dependent on WHAT you eat. By focusing on food choice and food selection, and intentionally eating higher protein foods, you will automatically tend to eat less.

It is ok if you don't know what we mean by this because we will be exploring all of this in depth in just a few minutes! But we want to establish this concept first so you have it in mind going forward.

2. DECREASE CARBOHYDRATE FREQUENCY.

Reducing the frequency with which you eat carbohydrates forces your body to become more "fat adapted", or able to function using only stored body fat, without a constant influx of dietary carbohydrates. The fact that this is initially quite difficult further underscores the reality that this is a form of METABOLIC EXERCISE, almost like weight lifting for your metabolism. If you strengthen this, you will reap the rewards of being much less tied to frequent eating. The stability of blood sugar and mood, as well as the ability to live your life without being a slave to mealtimes and snack times, is well worth the transient discomfort of the fat adaptation process. We will cover all of this in depth just ahead!

3. AVOID HIGH CARB + HIGH FAT.

Foods that are simultaneously high in carbohydrates and fat, with a high energy density, are rarely found in nature and they are highly palatable and addictive. These foods completely hijack our satiety and mercilessly drive overeating. We will explore how this works and go in depth on which foods to minimize and why! Read on.

THIS ENTIRE BOOK ON ONE SHEET OF PAPER:

Plants store solar energy as the high energy carbon bonds in carbs and fats.

Plants absorb nitrogen for protein, as well as other minerals, from soil.

Animals have to ingest other living organisms in order to receive both this chemical energy and these proteins and minerals.

Problems arise when we extract pure energy from plants; this is most egregious in the form of refined carbs and fats such as sugar, flour, and oil.

First of all, this energy is now cheap and profitable. This dilutes protein and minerals throughout the human food supply, leading to a protein and mineral nutrient hunger- we literally HAVE to eat more energy just to satisfy our nutrient needs.

Second, we really enjoy eating pure concentrated fat and carb energy, because doing so produces a drug-like reward in our brains-this kept us alive back when energy was scarce. High energy density carbs and fats together, a combination rarely found in nature, produces the greatest brain reward of all and can be quite addictive-so we WANT to eat more.

As a result of all of this, we now have a global epidemic of energy toxicity. Almost 90% of us have ingested too much energy and we are no longer metabolically healthy. This puts us at risk for obesity and chronic disease.

You can combat energy toxicity by going out of your way to target protein and minerals, allowing yourself to reach nutrient satiety at a lower energy intake. You can also use caution with the highly addictive trifecta of foods that are high carb, high fat, and high energy density all at the same time. In addition, a lowered carbohydrate frequency can improve fat adaptation, allowing you to function properly in lower energy food environments.

Finally, for optimum healthspan, your goal should be achieving the highest lean mass (muscle and bone) at the lowest fat mass- this allows for the greatest insulin sensitivity and metabolic flexibility. However you will only maximize lean mass if you DEMAND it of your body-by placing the highest amount of tension in your muscles possible, for the longest amount of time possible. Luckily this can be accomplished with only three basic human movements: pushing, pulling, and using the legs against gravity. By targeting these three movements in a specific fashion on a regular basis, and by placing maximum tension in the involved muscles for a maximum amount of time, you can achieve optimum lean mass in the most efficient manner possible.

THE P:E DIET

PROTEIN VERSUS ENERGY

The title of this book, The P:E Diet, refers to the amount of protein in your diet versus the amount of non-protein energy: carbs and fat. We know this is a foreign concept to almost everyone on the planet, so we will start out with some background on what the heck we are talking about here!

Time to introduce you to the dietary concept of Protein versus Non-Protein Energy. In order to set the stage, we are going to have to zoom out a little and start at the very beginning. We are going to assume that most everyone is at least a little familiar with the three basic macronutrients: protein, fat, and carbohydrates. But if you aren't totally familiar, don't worry-you will get up to speed pretty fast.

WHAT IS EATING?

Let's start as basic as it gets. Plants are 'autotrophs'. That means they make their own food. They use carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, the three major elements of all life on earth (from air and water), plus the energy from sunlight, to make all of the food they need. They get nitrogen, required for protein-along with a few dozen other necessary elements—from the soil (in mineral form).

Animals, on the other hand, are 'heterotrophs'. That means that all animals on earth are only alive because they constantly eat other living organisms. Humans, of course, are animals-like all animals, we are also only alive because we eat other living things. This is just the way the system works, and if you were hoping to get by without constantly killing other living organisms to survive, well then we would suggest looking into Breatharianism (Google it). We didn't create the system, so don't blame us!

Because they can make food, plants are at the base of all animal nutrition on earth. Make no mistake - they don’t want to be. Plants want to live as much as any of us, and in fact they have a host of complicated chemical defense systems to avoid being eaten. But herbivores are essentially predators of plants, and carnivores are predators of herbivores. Plants just happen to be at the bottom rung of the ladder.

Animals are divided into herbivores (eating plants), carnivores (eating animals), and omnivores (eating everything). The reality is that all animals are omnivores if they are hungry enough -they just have a preference for one thing or the other. All carnivores will eventually eat some plant matter and all herbivores will eventually eat some animal matter—they just have a stronger preference for one or the other. This is in contrast to a true omnivore, like a human, who will happily eat plants AND animals. In all scenarios, plants are at the base of the food pyramid, and all animals are eating other living things to survive.

Plants store energy. They use carbon-from the carbon dioxide in air-to store solar energy as high-energy bonds between carbon molecules. These chains of carbons, with high-energy carbon-carbon (and carbon-hydrogen) bonds, are either CARBOHYDRATES or HYDROCARBONS (also known as fats). Carbohydrates would include things like glucose, and they are water- soluble (dissolves in water). Hydrocarbons are really just fats, and fats are NOT water- soluble (sort of how oil and water don't mix).

Anything on earth that is capable of 'burning' is, at some very basic level, either a carbohydrate or a hydrocarbon, which has been created by a plant. 'Burning' is just another term for oxidation - you add oxygen to any carbohydrate or hydrocarbon and you release energy from the carbon-carbon bonds, and the byproducts are carbon dioxide and water. So all dietary energy on earth is either a carbohydrate or a fat that contains chains of carbons with high-energy bonds, made by plants, using sunlight plus air and water (for the carbons and hydrogens). And all animals break apart these bonds in our mitochondria - the little energy power plants in all your cells- using oxygen to 'oxidize' or 'burn' the carbs and fats to release energy (plus leftover carbon dioxide and water). You eat carbs and fats, then break apart the carbon-carbon bonds in your mitochondria (using oxygen that you breathe in)-this gives you energy, plus the leftover carbon dioxide and water (which you exhale).

So this is what carbs and fats actually are. Carbon-carbon energy bonds, created by plants, as a way to store solar energy. We 'burn' these in our cells to run our entire bodies, 100% of the time. All animal life on earth is constantly burning carbs and fats created by plants.

But it takes more than just energy to build an animal—you need a ton of protein, plus some minerals. Once again, plants provide the building blocks for all of these. But this time, plants are getting nitrogen-essential for all amino acids, the building blocks of protein-from soil. Plants absorb nitrogen in mineral form from the soil, along with a few dozen other minerals that are essential for plant and animal life. Plants then build amino acids out of nitrogen and use these to create all the protein in their structures.

Plants draw nitrogen and other minerals up from the nitrogen and mineral nutrient pool in topsoil, and they are also storing solar energy as the carbon-carbon bonds in carbs and fats.

Herbivores come along and eat the plants, and all of these carbs, fats, and proteins get passed up to the herbivores. Then carnivores eat the herbivores, and everything is passed up one more rung of the food chain. Finally, when anything. dies-plant or animal-it is decomposed by the fungi and bacteria in the topsoil and all of the nitrogen and minerals go back into the nutrient pool of topsoil.

Pretty neat system, eh?

So plants have a certain amount of PROTEIN (nitrogen), and a certain amount of non-protein ENERGY (carbon). Similarly, animals also have a certain amount of PROTEIN and a certain amount of non-protein ENERGY. Your body, as well, has a protein quantity and an energy quantity. Your basic body composition goal should be to achieve the HIGHEST lean mass at the LOWEST fat mass, so the protein to energy ratio of your body is going to be an important concept going forward.

EVOLUTIONARY LENS

Humans have been hunter-gatherers for at least 2.5 million years, but believe it or not, agriculture was only invented about 10,000 years ago. The potato only hit Europe about 400 years ago and kale arrived on our continent maybe 200 years ago. So domesticating plants and animals for food is pretty much a hypermodern technology in the scope of the evolution of homo sapiens. Prior to the domestication of plants and animals, we only ate that which we could hunt and gather. Imagine we dump you off at a random location on the globe, at a random time of year, with nothing but a spear and a loincloth. Believe it or not, more than 98% of all plants on earth are inedible and toxic to humans. If you don’t believe us, just go outside right now and try to eat some of the landscaping. We’ll wait. So needless to say, preagricultural humans were eating mostly animals. As a result, we had a VERY high protein diet. The average animal carcass yields more protein than energy (fat). So hunter-gatherers in the Paleolithic (time-period just prior to the invention of agriculture) had plenty of protein but were often energy-constrained, or limited by dietary energy availability. Humans have always used technology to feed ourselves—this is our superpower. We don’t have particularly powerful teeth or jaws. We aren’t particularly good at outrunning animals or out-climbing them. We don’t have specialized body parts to directly hunt or kill anything. We can’t digest cellulose like a herbivore, or dig up tubers like some omnivores. But what we DO have is intelligence, the ability to plan and work in groups cooperatively, and the ability to make tools. We also excel at throwing things—including weapons— with better strength and accuracy than any animal on earth. We invented spears and other weapons to allow us to kill animals for food. We invented stone tools so we could eat fatter parts of animals, such as bone marrow and brains. We also sought out energy anywhere possible, even if it meant digging up tubers for starch, or braving bee stings to collect honey. Eventually we invented agriculture and the domestication of plants and animals for food. With the invention of agriculture, we figured out how to grow starch, in the form of things like grains. These foods are very low in protein and very high in carbohydrate—starch is just chains of glucose molecules. Agriculture significantly diluted the protein in our diets, and the result was a decline in the health of our species. Anthropologists can immediately tell if human remains came from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers (more than 10,000 years ago) or more modern humans. Postagricultural humans had shorter stature, smaller brains, and poorer bone and dental health compared to huntergatherers. This was a direct result of the drop in dietary quality with the advent of agriculture: more energy, but less protein and minerals. One of the problems with agriculture is that we humans like to eat the parts of plants that have the very most energy. Things like fruit, tubers, nuts, and seeds. These are the places where plants store energy, and we have carefully cultivated all our plants to have the very highest energy yield possible. Take corn for example. Corn used to be the tiny seed head of grasses, maybe the size of modern wheat today. We crossbred this until corn is a huge carbon-laden monstrosity—such a highenergy food that you can simply squeeze it and make both corn syrup and corn oil. Eventually, we humans took things one step too far. We invented the Industrial Revolution, with the bulk refining and transport of SUGAR, FLOUR, and OIL. Dumping these foods into the food supply resulted in a HUGE amount of protein dilution. The protein to energy ratio of our diets dropped enormously. As a result, the protein to energy ratios of our bodies has also dropped by an enormous amount.

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING

If you look at a graph of obesity over the past fifty years of the obesity epidemic, you can see that somewhere in the 70’s, something happened—and obesity took off. If we zoom in on the macronutrients that Americans have been eating, it is quite obvious what happened. Carbs and fats both went up equally and significantly—but not protein. Absolute protein rose slightly, but protein PERCENTAGE actually dropped—from around 14% of calories, which is pretty close to global average, down to a current 12.5% in America. Talk about protein dilution! What happens when the food you eat drops in protein percentage? You have to eat significantly more non-protein energy (carbs and fats) in order to get the amount of protein you absolutely have to eat. This protein dilution fully explains much of our modern obesity epidemic. It turns out that humans and many other animal species exhibit protein prioritization, meaning that they will eat and eat until they have eaten an adequate absolute quantity of protein— even if they have to significantly overeat carb and fat non-protein energy in order to get there. Meta-analysis of human feeding studies have shown that humans tightly prioritize protein, and the lower the protein percentage of their food, the more energy they will eat in order to get adequate protein. The opposite is also true, and the higher the protein percentage of the diet, the less energy humans will consistently eat. This is the very first—and most important—rule of our book: prioritize protein, and keep the protein percentage of your diet high. If the protein percentage of your diet is high, you will tend to automatically eat less energy.

INTRODUCTION TO P:E RATIO [PROTEIN TO ENERGY RATIO]

All free-living animals on earth have to combine foods in a complementary fashion in order to achieve optimum function. Nutritional ecology is the science that looks at what animals NEED to eat versus what they actually GET to eat. Imagine that an animal has access to two foods, one that is higher in protein, and one that is higher in energy. The animal is going to have a fitness target where it functions optimally and is best able to thrive and reproduce. The fitness target could be variable depending on the animal’s activity level and a bunch of other factors. This animal will have to combine these two foods in a complementary fashion in order to get as close to its fitness target as possible. Now imagine that the animal only has access to the low protein high energy food. This poor animal will have to make a choice. It could overeat energy in order to get enough protein—likely leading to obesity. Or it could eat a normal amount of energy but insufficient protein, risking its ability to function properly. Not a great place to be, but that is where Americans find themselves in the current food environment. All species are somewhat different as to their ‘rule of compromise’, or how they deal with suboptimal food environments. But in the case of humans, it is quite clear that we will overeat energy in order to get enough protein—every single time. We are going to use the concept of nutritional ecology and dietary protein to energy ratios to evaluate individual foods and our overall diets a little bit later on— this is just background information so you will understand where this Protein to Energy approach comes from!

ENERGY STORAGE AND METABOLISM

So far, we have lumped all carbs and fats together as just ‘non-protein energy’. In a way, this is perfectly fair: both are simply chains of high-energy carbon bonds, made by plants as a way to store solar energy as chemical energy. But carbs and fats are radically different, and are treated in radically different ways by your body. It is ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL to understand the basic differences between these two, so let’s dive in! First of all, carbohydrates are water-soluble. Think of a spoonful of sugar in your coffee. Fats, on the other hand, are absolutely NOT water-soluble—oil and water don’t mix. So your body absorbs and transports and stores these two different energy sources in COMPLETELY different ways— and they have completely different effects on your metabolism. All food is broken down into smaller units in your digestive tract before it is even absorbed in your small intestine. Proteins are broken down into amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, prior to absorption. Non-fiber carbohydrates are all broken down into simple sugars like glucose and fructose before they are absorbed (fiber carbs are not absorbed at all and continue their way through the digestive tract, exiting out the other side). Dietary fats are eaten as triglycerides (three fatty acids packaged together) and are broken down into individual fatty acids prior to being absorbed.

TWO COMPARTMENT SYSTEM

So you have two completely separate energy storage compartments in your body. Glucose (carbohydrate), which is water-soluble, is stored as glycogen (just chains of glucose) in your liver and your muscles. Fat, which is NOT watersoluble, is stored in your adipocytes. Fat storage is MUCH larger, and your body prefers to carry only about 1% of your energy as glycogen. What gives? It turns out that glucose, from glycogen, is FAST. You can convert glucose into energy SIX TIMES faster compared to fat. So why don’t we only use glycogen to store energy? Because glycogen is HEAVY! Glycogen is ‘fully hydrated’ (this is why we call them carboHYDRATES), which means it has a lot of water attached to it. And that water weighs a lot! So glycogen is about six times heavier than the same amount of energy stored as fat. Glycogen, which is just chains of glucose molecules, is a sort of ‘human starch’ and is identical to the starch in potatoes. The fat in the lipid droplets of your adipocytes is very similar to olive oil. Note the photo below of the same amount of stored energy as olive oil versus potatoes. At six times the size and weight, you can see why your body doesn’t want to carry around all your energy as glycogen. In fact, because of the weight efficiency, your body carries 100 times more fat than glycogen. But you always HAVE to have glycogen around for emergency use. In a fasted state, when we are sedentary or only lightly exercising, like walking, we are burning mostly fat. But at high intensities of exercise, we are burning mostly glucose. And in fact, at the VERY highest intensity, like sprinting for your life, you are always burning 100% pure glucose. Because it is so helpful for emergency use, your body will ALWAYS keep glycogen in your muscles, so you can run for your life at a moment’s notice. This is an essential safety feature! Glycogen storage is quite tiny. You can only hold about 4 grams of glucose in your bloodstream, and maybe 100 grams of glucose in your liver. Your muscles can hold around 300 grams of glucose on average, but this glucose is only for emergency use and remains untouched UNLESS you are doing very high intensity exercise—in which case you can actually burn a ton of glucose quite rapidly, if you get the intensity all the way up to maximum. This is why people who are doing a ton of super high intensity exercise can pretty much get away with carbs. But the average American is doing an average of zero minutes per day of high intensity exercise (seriously), so for most of us, we should probably stay under 100 grams. More about this later! Time for a super important concept: CARBS AND FATS ARE OXIDIZED RECIPROCALLY! And it is GLUCOSE, not fat, that controls which fuel is oxidized at all times. This is an absolute requirement because glucose storage (glycogen) is so tiny. We have very little space for glucose storage as glycogen, so the minute we start eating more glucose we immediately have to burn more glucose. Conversely, as soon as we stop eating glucose, we immediately start burning more fat. Understanding this interplay between carbs and fats is absolutely essential if you want to understand what is required to increase fat oxidation. High carb diets can increase carbohydrate oxidation 10x and decrease fat oxidation 10x at the same time. If you want to get better at burning fat for fuel, the simplest and most direct strategy is to eat fewer carbohydrates. Here we are going to invoke the S.A.I.D. Principle —Specific Adaptation To Imposed Demand—for the first time. If you want your body to be better at burning fat, you only have to do one thing: eat fewer carbohydrates. More on this later!

Back to the two compartment storage system for energy in your body. There are really four basic permutations for dietary energy. Let’s list them all here, on the following pages:

HIGH CARB LOW FAT

This is your typical weight loss diet. Fat has the most “calories”, so from a caloric point of view it made the most sense to eliminate those. Plus we used to think that dietary fat immediately clogged your arteries, just like bacon grease in your sink drain. Turns out that calories aren’t the best way of thinking about your diet, and eating fat doesn’t clog your arteries after all. More on all of that later. But in any case, if you are eating a high carb low fat diet, you will be burning a higher amount of glucose for energy, and less fat. A person on this diet can be lean and healthy, but you probably have to eat more frequently as you will be less ‘fat-adapted’, or able to run your whole metabolism from stored body fat. Frequently somewhat ‘glucose-dependent’, with blood sugar highs and lows. As liver glycogen falls, blood sugar falls as well, and falling blood sugar equals hunger. More on this later!

LOW CARB HIGH FAT

This would be your standard Atkins-type diet. You are eating a lot of fat, but that’s ok because carbs and glucose and glycogen are low, so you are reciprocally burning a lot of fat. Very good for ‘fatadaptation’, or the ability to run your entire metabolism from stored body fat. Definitely superior to high carb low fat for overweight and obese people, and in fact there are dozens of studies comparing low fat to low carb and low carb is simply more effective for losing weight. Low carb haters will argue that low fat and low carb are the same “when calories are matched”, meaning studies where participants were given a fixed amount of calories to eat. This is true—but in the real world, low carb is better for overweight persons.

LOW CARB LOW FAT

What is left to eat? Pretty much just protein and fiber. This is the diet of your typical bodybuilder or figure competitor. Extremely restrictive but gets you the very best results. These people have the lowest fat mass and unfortunately the highest HUNGER. Probably not sustainable long-term. This is however the ultimate fat loss diet, and we will talk about this in upcoming chapters! Eating less non-fiber carbs (carbs that break down to glucose) and less added fat is pretty much the general idea behind the Protein to Energy strategy in this book. Extremely basic concept, once you get the idea!

HIGH CARB HIGH FAT

This is the “Standard American Diet”, or highly appropriate acronym: S.A.D. This is the worst. This is also the way everyone around you is eating. Carbs and glucose and glycogen are high, and fat oxidation is lower as a result. Because you are displacing fat oxidation with glucose, all the fat you eat gets stored and not burned. You would probably be fine if you were eating less of either carbs OR fat, but because both are high, the result is a slow and gradual weight accumulation. On average, Americans are currently gaining three pounds of fat per year. And as a result, everyone is just slowly and inexorably getting fatter and fatter until we are all obese.

OBESITY: A ‘SETTLING POINT’

Obesity is currently a massive out-ofcontrol global epidemic, with no signs of slowing down. As it turns out, obesity is a ‘settling point’ where your fat oxidation finally equals your fat intake, despite your chronically high carbohydrate diet. You can reverse obesity with either a low carb or a low fat diet, and of course the most powerful strategy is to reduce BOTH carbs and fats, while increasing the percentage of protein in the diet for satiety.

ENERGY TOXICITY

Alzheimer’s disease. Asthma. Osteoarthritis. Rheumatoid arthritis. Cancer (especially breast, colorectal, esophageal, uterine, renal, prostate, and pancreatic cancers). Depression. Type 2 diabetes. Fatty liver. Acid reflux. Fibromyalgia. Gout. Sleep apnea. High cholesterol. High blood pressure. Osteoporosis. Stroke. Coronary artery disease and atherosclerosis. Heart failure. Erectile dysfunction. Polycystic ovarian syndrome. Acne. Low testosterone. Enlarged prostate. Gynecomastia. Baldness. Psoriasis. Lupus. Peripheral neuropathy. Glaucoma. Near-sightedness. Vertigo. Tinnitus. Inflammatory bowel disease. Sarcopenia. Tendinopathy. Carpal tunnel syndrome. Hearing loss. Macular degeneration. We are facing an epidemic of chronic disease. And believe it or not, every one of the chronic ailments mentioned above are associated with one thing: chronically high insulin levels—also known as ‘insulin resistance’, or ‘hyperinsulinemia’.

You may have heard of ‘Metabolic Syndrome’, another name for insulin resistance—defined by the five following things:

1. Abdominal obesity (abdominal fat storage, or increased waist circumference).

2. High triglycerides.

3. Low HDL (or “good”) cholesterol.

4. High blood pressure.

5. High fasting glucose.

At the moment, over 80% of adult Americans have one or more of these findings. In fact, a recent study showed that only 12% of adult Americans are metabolically healthy (with no sign of insulin resistance). Persons with hyperinsulinemia have abnormally high fasting insulin levels, and also abnormally high insulin secretion after eating. What is the cause of Metabolic Syndrome? The answer is simple. Overfilling your energy storage capacity. As the adipocytes fill up with fat, they start refusing glucose and triglycerides (fat in the bloodstream). If you continue to eat more energy, it builds up in the circulation. Then insulin— which is a storage hormone—attempts to signal cells to take up more energy but this signal is in vain, since the cells are already full. The result? High insulin all the time, and overflowing energy stores.

Fat cells can expand dramatically in size —but they all have a maximum size limit. Your body first stores fat as harmless subcutaneous fat, just under your skin. Some of this is perfectly great, and not a problem. Some people have the ability to grow new fat cells, and as long as they can sprout new fat cells that have plenty of room for fat storage, then they will remain insulin sensitive and metabolically healthy.

The trouble starts when your subcutaneous cells have reached their maximum size, and you have exceeded your genetically inherited capacity for growing new cells. Once this happens, excess energy “spills over” into your visceral, or abdominal, fat. This increases your waist size and contributes to the dreaded ‘apple’ body shape that we all know is a killer. As you gain more and more visceral fat, often evidenced by increasing abdominal circumference, you get more and more insulin resistant. Eventually even these visceral fat cells fill up entirely and then your body starts shoving fat anywhere it can, including your organs (fatty liver, for example), and even your blood vessels (not good). By this point, you have reached your personal fat threshold, which is the genetic ceiling for how fat you are capable of getting. Once you have exceeded this, the result is full-blown type 2 diabetes—a condition where the bloodstream is flooded with energy at all times (both glucose and also fat energy in the form of triglycerides).

Your ability to grow new fat cells and get fatter prior to developing insulin resistance is a genetically determined trait, just like height or eye color. Some people are capable of gaining hundreds of pounds prior to becoming significantly insulin resistant and diabetic. Others, however, might have an incredibly low personal fat threshold, and certain genetic groups of people might develop severe insulin resistance and even type 2 diabetes after only gaining a few pounds of abdominal fat. These people are often ‘skinny fat’: they look rather lean, maybe with almost no subcutaneous fat, and you might not even notice the abdominal fat storage unless you look very carefully at the waist circumference right at the belly button. How do you know if you have insulin resistance? Well, waist circumference is an excellent proxy for overfilled abdominal

fat cells. Therefore we can use waist circumference as a lowbudget estimate of what is going on inside. The easiest way to evaluate your status is measuring your waist-toheight ratio. Divide your waist circumference (measured at the belly button) by your height. Anything under 0.5 is probably fine—and the lower the better. As this number increases, so does the likelihood that you have hyperinsulinemia. It is also helpful to look for the other markers of Metabolic Syndrome by checking blood pressure plus a fasting lipid panel as well as fasting glucose. Blood pressure should be less than 120/80. Normal fasting glucose is under 100, and 100 or higher is a problem (we diagnose diabetes if it hits 126). Fasting triglycerides should be less than 150 (ideally well under 100, and elite is under 70). HDL (‘H’ for ‘healthy’) cholesterol should be 40 or higher in men and 50 or higher in women—the higher the better. Typically, your goal is to have the LOWEST triglycerides and the HIGHEST HDL. Both of them are excellent predictors of insulin sensitivity, and in fact you can combine the two together in a ‘triglyceride/HDL ratio’, which dramatically increases their predictive value. You really want triglycerides divided by HDL (triglyceride/HDL ratio) to be 2.0 or lower, and elite would be 1.0 or lower—the lower the better. Anything over 3.0 is a huge problem, and the amount of concern should go up proportionately with this number! Type 2 diabetes is the end stage of insulin resistance, which is the end stage of being ‘overfat’—exceeding your fat storage capabilities. Along this entire spectrum, the primary problem is storing too much energy in your body.

And how does this occur? You guessed it: eating too much energy. Type 2 diabetes is entirely preventable. Protein is an essential nutrient. Minerals are an essential nutrient, and they tend to follow protein. Certain fats are essential, and these follow protein as well. But there are two things that are completely non-essential in the human diet: refined carbs and refined fats. These exist only to provide extra—and perhaps excessive —ENERGY to your diet. So how do you prevent the entire spectrum of diseases downstream of being ‘overfat’? Target protein and avoid added energy. On a practical level, this looks like constantly being either low carb, low fat, high protein, or some combination of all three. More on this later!

CARBS + FAT

Ok, so far we have established that we are eating way more energy than we should. And we have established that a big driver of this phenomenon is the dilution of protein in our food supply due to a massive influx of sugar, flour, and oil —the cheap and plentiful agricultural energy sources that comprise the majority of the modern diet. But there is more to this story than pure protein dilution with carbs and fat. We humans are hard-wired to seek out nutrients. We have a hunger for protein and minerals. Studies show that humans on a low protein diet have an increased craving for savory snacks, and salt restriction increases a craving for salty foods. Our nutrient hunger will drive us to eat and eat until we get the protein and minerals that we need to survive. Similarly, we are driven to seek out energy in our diets as well. If eating wasn’t somewhat pleasurable, it would be a huge chore. Like brushing your teeth. We would all forget to eat or just procrastinate to the point of almost dying from starvation. Mother Nature understands this. As a result, everything we have evolved to require for success as a species brings some intrinsic reward along with it. Most would agree that the act of procreation, for example, can be quite rewarding—this reward helps to perpetuate our species. Similarly, we have a certain amount of reward when we eat energy. Carbs can be rewarding. Fat can be rewarding. But the most rewarding? Carbs and fats together. And the most rewarding food on earth? High carb, high fat, AND high energy density. These foods are EXTREMELY rewarding! And by rewarding, we are talking about the pure addictive chemistry of spiking dopamine in your brain, not unlike a drug. Studies show that you can feed a high carb, high fat, and high energy density diet (picture a candy bar) to any omnivore mammal (human, rat, etc) and the majority of them will immediately overeat by around 30-40% of calories. A small number of humans and animals will spontaneously increase energy expenditure to successfully avoid weight gain, but the majority will immediately become overfat. The combination of carbs and fats together is uniquely addictive, and drives overeating like nothing else. If you ask people which foods they find problematic when it comes to overeating, the responses are all foods that are high in carbs and fat and energy density. You know the list. Doughnuts. Pizza. Ice cream. Chocolate. Cake. French fries. Potato chips. Candy bars. Few people would just crave a stick of butter by itself. And we don’t know anyone who would just eat a pound of flour and then a pound of sugar. But combine sugar, flour, and butter together and you have SHORTBREAD, which is so amazingly rewarding that we’re pretty sure you could eat your body weight in shortbread right now. No matter how full you are, there is always more room for these foods. Imagine you just ate a large and satisfying meal with a huge delicious ribeye and a salad. You are completely full and feeling good. At this point, you have certainly achieved NUTRITIONAL satiety. But then out comes some ice cream. Pure energy in the form of pure carbs and fats together, with an incredibly high energy density. Are you going to eat this too, even though you are ‘full’? Because you have experienced the reward this food has to offer, the answer is frequently ‘HELL YES’! The combination of carbs and fats together is unique in how incredibly rewarding it can be. But it is also unique in one other way: this combination rarely occurs in nature! Wait, what?? Yup. Think about it. What foods in nature are high in both carbs AND fat at the same time? Plenty of foods are high in carbs. And plenty of foods are high in fat. But very few are high in both at the same time. There are two notable exceptions. The first one is mammalian milk. Milk is VERY high in energy—both carbs, in the form of lactose, and milkfat. All mammalian milk is high in both carb and fat energy for very good reasons. This food is designed to drive as much overeating as possible, because you really want to turn a small baby mammal into a larger mammal as fast as possible to ensure its viability. The second food in nature that is high in carbs and fat at the same time? Certain nuts, like acorns. Yup. This autumnal food (which is sort of the plant version of milk, now that we think about it) helps drive fat storage in squirrels and bears and other animals that need to store enough fat to survive the wintertime. Because all food energy—carbs and fats—is solar energy which has been converted to chemical energy by plants, we see the very highest levels of dietary energy at the end of summertime. Plant carbohydrates are at their peak, and animals are at their fattest. So herbivores get the highest amount of carbohydrate energy from plants, and carnivores also get the highest amount of energy (animal fat from fatter animals). Omnivores get the best of both worlds, and your bear who is eating berries and acorns and fattier fish et cetera is going to gain plenty of extra fat energy on its body to help it survive the winter. In the winter, plant carbohydrates are scarce to non-existent. Similarly, animals are much leaner because they too are trying to find enough dietary energy to survive. As a result, the energy content of all plants and animals falls considerably. It is this wintertime diet—high in protein percentage but lower in carbs and fats—that we are trying to emulate with the Protein:Energy concept when our goal is fat loss. So now we know that obesity is contributed to by carbs and fats in two ways. First of all, this non-protein energy dilutes the protein and minerals in our diet to the point that we have to eat more energy just to satisfy our NUTRIENT HUNGER, or need for protein and minerals. Secondly, the rarelyfound-in-nature-butfound-in-all-junk-food combination of carbs and fats together is uniquely rewarding and addictive and drives overeating in a way that was helpful during most of our human evolution—but has now turned against us in the modern food environment. How do we fight back? Target protein and minerals, and simultaneously try to be either low fat or low carb at all times. The Protein:Energy approach just so happens to check both of these boxes, which is why it is so darn effective. Eating whole foods is a pretty easy way to avoid the carbs+fat combo, as long as you avoid nuts and dairy (or at least MILK—fermented dairy seems to be better as the carbohydrates are mostly gone). Learn to recognize the fake man-made foods that surround us that use the deadly combination of carbs plus fat, as well as low protein and minerals.

AVOID THE TRIFECTA

Foods that are simultaneously high in carbs, fat, and energy density are the very worst. Avoid. Try not to eat high density carbs (sugar, etc). Try not to eat high density fats (oils, etc). And especially try not to eat these two together! Almost all successful diet strategies use this same technique, and avoiding this triple combination is one of the cornerstones of The P:E Diet. What do we mean by ‘energy density’? This is typically a refined carb or fat that has a high amount of energy per weight of food. For example, a steak and a potato would be carbs and fats together. But the energy density is low, thanks to protein in the steak and water in the potato. Ice cream, on the other hand, is just fat plus sugar with very little protein or fiber or water—thus very high energy density.

THE SECRET TO EVERY DIET

Every diet that offers long-term success will somehow allow for increased satiety when eating intuitively. This always involves a higher nutrient density, and always involves a higher protein to energy ratio. However, while every diet can be properly formulated to yield success, it is also possible to formulate a diet POORLY and fail to get results. Paying attention to protein to energy ratio allows success with almost every approach. All successful diets either reduce carbohydrate quantity, reduce fat quantity, increase protein percentage, or some combination of all three. In other words, all successful diets are following the Protein:Energy approach, even if they are unaware of it. Most successful diets are also somehow reducing the combination of carbs and fat together.

LOW FAT

CORRECT: Fat is calorically dense and reducing fat will generally increase the protein to energy ratio. INCORRECT: In natural foods, fat tends to ‘come along’ with protein. If your quest for reduction in fat leads to a lower protein diet, the result could be increased hunger and decreased satiety. Example: breakfast cereal and low-fat milk.

LOW CARB

CORRECT: Carbs are massively overeaten in our society and lead to a ton of protein dilution. Reducing carbs will almost always increase protein to energy ratio. INCORRECT: Going out of your way to eat fat instead could fail to increase protein percentage. Example: ‘butter-chugging’ keto dieters.

LOW CALORIE

CORRECT: Reducing calories almost always involves a reduction in both carbs and fats. If well-formulated, the result is a higher protein to energy ratio and successful weight loss. INCORRECT: If you mistakenly restrict protein and increase carbohydrate, the result could be increased hunger and diet failure. Example: rice cakes and other ‘diet’ foods

PALEO

CORRECT: Paleolithic eating skips a lot of the refined and added carbs and fats that came along with both agriculture and the industrial revolution. Typically just skipping the sugar and flour in the modern diet yields a huge upgrade in protein:energy ratio. INCORRECT: A smoothie with dates and honey and bananas would be ‘paleo’ and would also contain about 100 grams of straight sugar with almost no protein.

PLANT-BASED

CORRECT: Eating more legumes such as lentils and soy, plus more green vegetables, is a massive upgrade in terms of protein to energy ratio. Tofu, textured vegetable protein, gluten, and all of the plant protein fake meats that vegans eat, while far from optimal, actually have an extremely high protein to energy ratio, especially compared to the Standard American Diet. If you ditch the refined carbs in a ‘junk food vegan’ diet, you will get some pretty amazing results with this highly restrictive plan. INCORRECT: See the phrase ‘junk food vegan diet’ above. Highly processed fake vegan foods can be some of the worst protein:energy foods on the planet.

CARNIVORE

CORRECT: Because animal foods are, in general, always higher in protein:energy ratio compared to plant foods, this is pretty much an instant win for the average person. INCORRECT: Processed meat such as bacon and hot dogs and sausage can have much higher fat grams than protein grams, and it is possible to actually gain weight on such a diet. If you go so far as to use high-fat dairy (butter and heavy cream) as ‘carnivore’ foods, you’re probably going nowhere.

BODYBUILDING

CORRECT: All bodybuilders are really combining low carb AND low fat AND high protein, typically to the very highest level of success. INCORRECT: If you ignore diet quality and nutrient density and simply use IIFYM (‘If It Fits Your Macros’) and basically eat toaster pastries but force yourself to greatly limit quantity, you will be STARVING and your body will fight back HARD.

THE ENDLESS LOW CARB VERSUS LOW FAT WAR

Low fat! Low carb! These two camps have been fighting for as long as anyone can remember. What is going on here? Obviously someone here is right and someone is wrong, so who should we listen to? If you really dive into the low fat rabbit hole, you will find all kinds of success stories. There are countless persons who have lost a ton of weight, reversed their type 2 diabetes, and transformed their health with very low fat diets. The majority of bodybuilders are following low fat diets, and have some extremely impressive results to show for it. Sometimes these low fat fans naturally gravitate towards plant-based diets, as plants tend to store their non-protein energy as carbohydrates—in stark contrast to animal-based diets, as animals tend to store their non-protein energy as fat. Therefore it is quite natural that LOW FAT diets go hand in hand with PLANT-BASED diets, as they have a lot of overlap. So you will find countless amazing stories of positive health transformations from those who have adopted low fat diets (plant-based or not). BUT WAIT. Over on the low carb side, you will also find literally countless stories of amazing effortless weight loss and jaw-dropping body and health transformations. These diets tend, for reasons mentioned above, to be predominately animal-based, but this is only because stored carbohydrates mostly exist in the plant world. The low carb fans absolutely swear by low carb diets, and they have the results to back it up. Most of them are low carb converts for life. All of this has left us with an enormous problem: NOBODY HAS ANY CLUE WHAT THE HELL THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO EAT. You already know the answer. It is hidden deep inside your unconsciousness, you just haven’t accepted it yet. You instinctively know that there is only one way on earth that you could have these two diametrically opposed camps of people who are rabidly devoted to either very low carb diets or very low fat diets. And the answer is: THEY ARE BOTH RIGHT. At first, it is a painful revelation. We humans want to belong to some sort of group, because this provides a lot of safety. In our evolutionary past, belonging to a group was literally quite often the difference between life or death. So we very much want to sign up for either the low fat or the low carb camp—how else can we be safe from dietary danger? So we naturally want to pick sides. But slowly and gradually, your new-found knowledge turns into POWER. You realize that as long as protein percentage is high and you are well fat-adapted, you can frequently trade some of your fat energy calories in for carb calories, or vice versa. You realize that both low carb and low fat are accomplishing the same two primary goals: 1. Higher protein percentage. 2. Avoidance of carbs+fat together. So by increasing your protein prioritization and eating meals centered around protein, and keeping meals either higher in carbs but not fat (or fat but not carbs), you have a lot more freedom. Eating a fattier protein? No problem — keep the carbs lower at that meal. Eating a ‘carbier’ [may not actually be a word] protein? Also no problem — keep the fats lower at that meal. So now you can have a meal of fatty ribeye and eggs cooked in butter, as long as the carbs are low. And then later, you could have a meal of chicken breast and potatoes, as long as the fat is kept low. Protein is dominant at both meals, and you are avoiding carbs and fats together, so mission accomplished! At this point, you are pretty much like Neo in ‘The Matrix’, because you can see the big picture. And this allows you to appreciate the benefits of being low fat and also the benefits of being low carb. And of course, you could always be somewhat low fat AND low carb at the same time, as this will give you the fastest and most powerful results. Congratulations, you have unlocked both diets.

*WHAT* TO EAT VERSUS *HOW MUCH* TO EAT

There are two basic approaches to dieting: WHAT to eat, and HOW MUCH to eat. The ‘how much’ approach has dominated most of popular culture your entire life. Counting calories. Energy balance. Calories in, calories out. But this approach is inherently flawed. Why? Because we are surrounded by food-like GARBAGE that masquerades as real food. And if you choose that crap, not only will you be constantly hungry—you will probably gain weight, and, if taken to extremes, literally destroy your health. The reality is that every mammal on earth has a specific diet that it is adapted to eat. A lion eats meat and a giraffe eats acacia leaves, and if you try to swap diets, both of them are doomed. Humans are a bit different. One of our superpowers is our adaptability. We can live in almost any environment, eating almost any diet. This is why you will find people who eat nothing but plants, nothing but animals, and everything in between. In a way this has led to some confusion: we have no clue what we are really supposed to eat. But, just like all mammals, humans DO have a diet that we are adapted to eat. Humans are hunter-gatherers. If we dumped you out in the wilderness with nothing but a spear, believe us when we say that you would never have to worry about ‘calorie balance’ in order to avoid obesity. When humans eat wild, uncultivated plants and animals, we are typically eating a diet that is about three times higher in protein than the standard American diet—and HOW MUCH to eat ceases to be a factor entirely. You hunt animals, kill an animal, and eat until you are full. Or you gather some plant foods and eat them. Your body tells you how much to eat. You eat when you are hungry, and you stop when you are full. Everything works the way it is supposed to. There are no addictive foods that are high in both carbs and fats. There are no empty calorie refined fats and carbs adding energy without protein or minerals. All food is in a CELLULAR form, so you automatically get a nice balance of cell wall membrane fats, proteins from cellular organelles, and minerals—in direct contrast to ACELLULAR foods like sugar and oil. This is why no wild animal on earth, eating the foods it is SUPPOSED to eat, has to worry about HOW MUCH to eat. The entire diet section of this book is centered around the fact that for both body composition and overall health, it makes far more sense to focus on WHAT you eat rather than HOW MUCH. Why are domesticated animals, fed by humans, often just as fat as their human owners? Because of WHAT we are feeding them. No wild dog or cat is going to overeat the foods they are SUPPOSED to eat. But when humans get involved, everything goes to hell. We try to profit on dog and cat food by replacing expensive high-quality animal protein with cheap plant carbs and fats, like grain flour and seed oil. Much of the obesity epidemic is purely economic. If you graph out the price of all of the foods in the grocery store versus macronutrients, you will find that it is all about the protein. The more protein in a food, the more expensive it is. In fact, if you are trying to get pure protein with less carbs and fats, this is most expensive of all. Adding carbs and fats to a food is never more expensive, and frequently foods are even LESS expensive with more carbs and fats. This is why you can go almost anywhere on earth and draw a map of poverty and a map of obesity and they will typically overlap completely. Cheap plant carbs and fats are everywhere. In America, the farmers who produce these are often subsidized by the government. The shelf life of these empty calories is astronomically higher than protein. The profit margin is dramatically higher than protein. It costs more money to make a cereal BOX than it does to make the cereal IN the box. Protein is more expensive because it suffers from more logistical challenges. Protein requires more refrigeration. Transport is more difficult. Cooking is more of a factor. Shelf life is radically shorter compared to cereal grains and seed oils. All of these economic factors are driving obesity forward, and it is important to recognize this and understand the forces at work here.

CARBS AND GLYCOGEN

As we discussed previously, GLYCEMIC carbs—non-fiber digestible carbs that break down to monosaccharides like glucose—exert a very powerful leverage on your entire metabolism. In this chapter, we are going to explore the powerful nature of dietary glucose. Your body requires a continuous supply of glucose. You have cells in your body, such as red blood cells, that have no mitochondria—and without mitochondria, these cells cannot burn fat for energy. So these cells rely on glucose. Luckily, your liver is completely responsible for managing glucose, and your liver produces all the glucose you ever need through a process known as ‘gluconeogenesis’. The liver primarily uses either amino acids (protein) or the glycerol backbones of triglycerides (fat) to create new glucose. This process is always occurring, and as a result, you really never have to eat any carbohydrates at all. Your bloodstream can only hold about four grams—one teaspoon—of glucose. High blood glucose can be toxic, as evidenced by the diabetic complications seen in uncontrolled diabetics. Working muscles can immediately absorb and store some dietary glucose as glycogen (starch-like chains of glucose in storage form). But if your muscles are already full of glycogen—and this is their default state when you are not exercising— your liver is designed to absorb and store all of the extra glucose coming in from your diet. Or at least your liver TRIES to do this. Most people can only hold about 100 grams of glucose in their liver at any given time. As your liver approaches capacity, you start converting some of this glucose into fat. Your body HAS to do this, because you have a pretty rigid ceiling on how much glucose you can store, while most of us have plenty of room for additional fat storage.

Liver glycogen and muscle glycogen have some very different properties. Muscle glycogen is there for emergency use. Because you can convert glucose from muscle glycogen into energy six times faster compared to fat, you always need this glycogen on board in case of emergency. Anytime you are running or fighting for your life, or performing any exercise at the highest intensity, your muscles are burning 100% glucose from glycogen. The glycogen in your muscles also STAYS in your muscles—the cells keep this glycogen for themselves and it cannot be shared with other parts of your body. So really the entire point of muscle glycogen is to STAY FULL and your body will do whatever it has to do in order to keep your muscles supplied with glycogen. This is a basic safety system for your body. Liver glycogen is different. The job of the liver is to buffer any potentially toxic glucose load out of the bloodstream, in order to keep blood glucose in a narrow and tightly controlled range. When you eat dietary glucose, your liver sucks this glucose out of your bloodstream and stores it as glycogen. Your liver then immediately starts slowly releasing this glucose gradually over a period of hours, to be used by the rest of the entire body. Liver glycogen empties significantly (although never 100%) and, unlike muscles, the default state of the liver is to maintain a LOW level of glycogen so there is plenty of headroom to absorb more dietary glucose in the future. As liver glycogen falls back down to baseline, your entire metabolism slowly transitions from the carbohydrate fed state to the fasted state. Blood glucose and insulin levels gradually go down, while at the same time the fasted state hormone glucagon rises, as well as free fatty acids. As liver glycogen dwindles and your body relies more and more on fat to run its metabolism, the liver starts generating ketones, which are really just watersoluble bits of fat that the brain can use instead of glucose for fuel. By now, pretty much everyone has heard about ketogenic diets. Ketosis is really just the metabolic state that results when hepatic glycogen is low and your body is running on fat instead of glucose for fuel. This really is as simple as not eating carbs for 12 to 24 hours, depending on how packed with glycogen your liver and muscles were before you stopped eating glucose. You can speed up ketosis with high-intensity exercise, which burns glucose (from both muscle and liver) quite rapidly. Contrary to the belief of many a butterchugging keto dieter, you do not have to eat any fat at all to be ‘in ketosis’. Ketosis is naturally occurring in anyone who isn’t eating enough dietary glucose to fill liver glycogen. The average American is eating EIGHT times a day, pretty much every two hours for sixteen hours out of every twenty-four hour day. During this time, we manage to consume about 300 grams of carbs, on average. As a result, we are in the ‘fed’ state more often than not, and the average person almost never allows liver glycogen to get low enough to allow for significant ketosis. Because elevated glucose displaces fat oxidation, we are all burning mostly glucose at the expense of fat oxidation for a good portion of our lives. This is not without several major consequences.

First of all, our metabolism will gradually up-regulate the machinery it takes to burn a particular fuel, and down-regulate the machinery we aren’t using. This makes a ton of sense, and we would fully expect our bodies to adapt to the environment. So if you are eating a lot of carbs then you will be up-regulating the pathways for dealing with carbohydrate, at the expense of fat oxidation. And similarly, if you are NOT eating carbs, your body has to up-regulate the ability to run everything off of fat. There seems to be a sort of inertia to your metabolism, and what we have learned from studies where participants were switched from high carb to low carb diets, there seems to be a 1-2 week adaptation period. A lot of keto dieters refer to this as the process of ‘fat adaptation’, and it is a very real thing. Becoming ‘fat adapted’ is a bit vague, and the exact biochemistry of this phenomenon has not been fully elucidated. However, pretty much everyone who has gone on an extended low carbohydrate diet can describe this to you. On a high carb diet, you are more tied to food. Because your liver glycogen, your main source of energy, is constantly falling, you have to eat much more frequently and you experience hunger quite a bit more frequently. Fat adaptation—the ability to live comfortably off stored body fat—allows for much less frequent meals, and a lower sense of urgency to eat when mealtime finally arrives.

FALLING GLUCOSE → HUNGER

In addition to the simple displacement of fat oxidation by dietary glucose, and the up-regulation of carb oxidation plus down-regulation of fat oxidation seen with chronically high carbohydrate diets, there is one other major factor at play here: • Falling glucose makes you hungry. • About 3-4 hours after eating a large amount of glycemic carbohydrates, we see a significant drop in glucose, and a significant rise in the hunger hormone ghrelin. What does this mean on a practical level? You get hungry. And specifically, you get hungry for more carbohydrates. In studies, participants who eat a high carbohydrate breakfast have significantly higher hunger scores a few hours later than those eating fewer carbohydrates. Many of us can relate to this on a personal level. You remember the time you only had juice and toast for breakfast, and three hours later you felt like you had to eat something or you were going to die of starvation.

Carbs offer a lot of satiety acutely, for a couple of hours, but unlike protein and fat, that satiety wears off with a vengeance, followed by an increase in hunger that is often worse than if you had never eaten in the first place. You can see how we gradually got to the point where we eat the quantity and frequency of carbs that we do in modern society. As the direct result of our carbohydrate intakes, we have developed a state of relative dependence on dietary glucose, to the point that we have snack breaks at work and school that are perfectly timed to raise blood sugar just when the glycogen from our ridiculously high-carb breakfast cereal has worn off. Time to reach for the S.A.I.D. (Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand) principle again. If we decrease our carbohydrate intake, we force our bodies to adapt. We automatically up-regulate our fat oxidation pathways and slowly and gradually become less dependent on dietary glucose. This is almost like a form of metabolic exercise, and the reward is quite amazing. Those who endure the discomfort of eating less glucose will tell you that becoming ‘fat adapted’ eventually starts to feel like a superpower. You are much less ‘tied’ to food and eating. Missing a meal goes from being a full-scale ‘hangry’ disaster to pretty much a non-event. Exercise no longer requires carb-loading before, during, and after. Because they are buffered by the liver and then slowly released until they are metabolized, eating dietary carbohydrate is a time-based event. For this reason, it makes sense to pay attention not only to the QUANTITY of carbohydrate we are eating, but also to the FREQUENCY with which we eat them.

CARBOHYDRATE QUANTITY

Muscle glycogen is only depleted with high-intensity exercise. So if you haven’t exercised with a high intensity recently, you are going to have to rely on your liver to dispose of your dietary glucose— either stored as glycogen, or in the case of overflowing glycogen stores, converted to fat—a liver process called ‘lipogenesis’. Obviously if you are trying to lose fat you probably don’t want a whole lot of this lipogenesis going on. Nor do you want the fat displacement, or ‘fat-sparing’, effect of a lot of carbohydrates. As the average person has room for about 100 grams of glycogen in their liver, it makes a lot of sense to recommend that a sedentary person, especially one who is trying to lose fat, might want to stay under 100 grams of carbohydrates a day. In fact, staying under 100 grams of carbs a day is probably one of the simplest fat loss plans on earth, and we highly recommend this for almost anyone who is trying to lose fat.

CARBOHYDRATE FREQUENCY

Because it takes 12 to 24 hours to fully deplete liver glycogen and enter the fullblown fat-burning state of ketosis, it makes a ton of sense to shrink down your carbohydrate frequency as much as possible. If you only ate carbs once a day, you will trigger the fasted state of ketosis daily even if you eat a fairly large quantity of carbohydrates at your single carbohydrate event. Therefore you can have almost as much fat-adaptation by limiting carbohydrate FREQUENCY as you will by limiting carbohydrate quantity. Of course, you can always combine the two—our personal favorite—and eat a limited amount of glycemic carbs once a day. It is quite likely that most of the benefits of intermittent fasting are due to the reduced frequency of eating carbohydrates and the expanded period of the day during which your body is forced to oxidize fat instead.

METABOLIC FLEXIBILITY

The holy grail of metabolism is metabolic flexibility. What is metabolic flexibility? The ability to easily dispose of dietary fuels and easily switch from one fuel to the other without difficulty. For optimum metabolic flexibility, you need several things in place. First of all, you need some room in your adipocytes so you can easily store incoming dietary fat. If your fat cells are full and overflowing and there is increased fat energy in your circulation, you are not going to be metabolically flexible. Second, it helps to have plenty of disposal room for carbohydrates as well in your liver and your muscles. Regularly depleting liver glycogen with a decreased carbohydrate eating frequency is fantastic. Having more muscle tissue, and regularly depleting muscle glycogen, is also fantastic for glucose disposal headroom. Both of these, of course, require high-intensity exercise—resistance exercise to add muscle, and cardio to deplete glycogen (more on these later). So metabolic flexibility improves with leanness, high-intensity exercise (both resistance and cardio), and the fat adaptation of periods of time without carbohydrate.

THE CASE FOR CARBS

The ultimate strategy for maximally up-regulating fat oxidation? Never eat any carbs to begin with. This is certainly the strategy of those who go on a pure carnivore diet—and to be honest, this works pretty damn well for a growing number of people. But there are some reasons why you might want to include some carbs in your diet. When your liver glycogen is completely empty, your sympathetic nervous system is more active. This is sort of your ‘fight or flight’ mode. People are usually more alert and more focused when they are low on liver glycogen. This is where some of the mental benefits of ketosis come from. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective to be more alert and active when you have the highest need to look for food.

After a large carbohydrate meal, however, with lots of liver glycogen storage, our parasympathetic nervous system is activated—this is ‘rest and digest’ time. This is why we feel so tired and sluggish after a giant lunch of pasta or some other carbohydrate bomb. Once you understand how these two states operate, you can manipulate them at will. For example, if you have difficulty sleeping on a very low carbohydrate diet, you could eat carbs once a day (maybe 100 grams or so) and time this in the evening. Timing carbs in the evening has a few benefits. First of all, your sleep might benefit from the parasympathetic dominance of the carb fed state. And of course you will be more alert during the day, when your glycogen is low after your overnight fast. Secondly, by eating carbs in the evening, you are possibly less likely to be affected by the downstream hunger that can occur 3-4 hours after eating carbohydrate (although this can backfire on some who wake up hungry in the middle of the night so your milage may vary). High-intensity exercise of extended duration will definitely require carbohydrates during the event. Even the most fat-adapted elite athletes can only participate in maximum intensity exercise for 2 hours at the very most before completely running out of muscle and liver glycogen and ‘hitting the wall’—a state of hypoglycemia where your body pretty much stops doing what you have been asking it to do. Typically anyone who is engaging in very high intensity exercise for anything over an hour will benefit from some carbohydrate during the event. Carbs may offer a significant satiety benefit for some people. For example, if you are hungry and you are in a low glycogen state, it might take hundreds of calories of fat and/ or protein for you to feel even slightly less hungry. But at that moment, some people might feel far more satiety from just a small quantity of carbohydrate, as it is really that liver glycogen they are looking for rather than more fat and protein calories. When using carbohydrates for satiety, you really want to choose foods with the very lowest energy density. In other words, pick foods with as much water, fiber, and protein as possible. These foods will provide the highest satiety for the lowest actual carbohydrate content. If eating zero carbohydrates ever was the ultimate secret to leanness, every single bodybuilder would be on a zero carbohydrate pure carnivore diet. But that is not the case. Instead, physique athletes choose the foods that provide the highest satiety for the lowest amount of energy. In practice, these foods are usually very high in protein, fiber, water, and micronutrients—with very judicious and strategic use of carbohydrates and fats. If you want to maintain maximal metabolic flexibility, it really doesn’t make much sense to never eat any carbohydrates ever. But it DOES make sense to have very clear periods of time when you are in a carb-depleted state of maximal fat oxidation (read: ketosis), as well as times when you do have incoming dietary carbohydrate to deal with (instead of fat). Probably the easiest way to implement this is intermittent fasting, and limiting glycemic carbohydrate frequency. Our favorite way of accomplishing this in real life? Stay very low carb during the day and then have one higher carb meal at the end of the day—keeping protein percentage as high as possible, of course. Finally, remember that in order to be successful long-term, your dietary strategy has to be sustainable indefinitely. You really want to be on the least restrictive diet possible, to help out with long-term adherence. Being low carb most of the time with occasional carbups sounds a lot less restrictive versus swearing off all carbs forever—an unlikely scenario to begin with. Focus on the things you can realistically achieve. Can you permanently increase the overall protein percentage of your diet? Probably yes—and this will help you succeed at your body composition goals. Can you reduce your carbohydrate frequency on a long-term basis? I’m sure you could, and this is going to improve your metabolic flexibility. WHAT SHOULD YOU ACTUALLY DO? Consider a lower carbohydrate eating frequency, such as eating carbs once a day. This probably works best in the evening, at the end of your eating window, and after eating protein and fibrous veggies. Try to keep net carbs under 100 grams a day if you are not regularly engaging in high-intensity exercise. Choose carbs with maximal protein, fiber, and water content for satiety. 100 grams would be roughly equivalent to two potatoes, two cups of rice, or four apples.

PROTEIN:ENERGY RATIO

Humans eat until they have reached an adequate quantity of protein and minerals. Minerals track very well with protein (which makes sense, as plants absorb nitrogen from topsoil along with other minerals). Therefore, in The P:E Diet, we target protein and foods with a high protein percentage, in order to increase the protein percentage of our diet. Protein offers both short-term and long-term satiety. Fat offers lower satiety. Carbs are unique in that they offer an initial satiety for a few hours, followed by a literal increase in hunger as blood sugar falls. More on this later! But for now, the goal is targeting protein first and foremost. That is the primary goal of the Protein:Energy approach.

NUTRITIONAL INFORMATION

In order to calculate the Protein to Energy Ratio, we need to know the four basic mass quantities (in grams) printed on all nutritional labels for:

1. Protein

2. Fat

3. Carbohydrate

4. Fiber

Because fiber is indigestible and does not contribute directly to energy calories, we subtract fiber grams from total carbohydrate grams to yield 'net carbs' (carbs minus fiber). This gives us the total amount of carbohydrate energy.

So the equation is PROTEIN divided by FAT and CARBS minus FIBER. This could also be written as PROTEIN divided by FAT plus NET CARBS.

If you are eating a food without a label-and let's face it, this is always the healthiest choice - you can usually just 'google' the food and the word 'nutrition' and you will be given the USDA nutrition facts for the chosen food. You can also go directly to the USDA website.

Several other apps and web services are very helpful for providing nutritional information. Our favorites are:

cronometer.com and myfitnesspal.com

Once you have the nutritional information, you can use it to calculate your P:E ratio. Feel free to try our free P:E calculator at:

PtoER.com

PRACTICAL IMPLEMENTATION

Below we will provide some examples of using the P:E calculation for actual foods. When you use the Protein to Energy system, protein and fiber are essentially ‘good’, and carbs and fats are ‘bad’. Of course you have to eat SOME energy and you can’t live on nothing but whey powder and egg whites (100% protein). The idea here is not to get the highest score and eat pure protein— instead you want to INCREASE your current protein to energy ratio in order to increase the protein to energy ratio of your body. A good target might be 1.0, which is roughly equal grams of protein and non-protein energy. As this is near the average for worldwide huntergatherers, this is probably a good place to start. You will need MORE energy if you are highly active and LESS energy if you are sedentary; ideally if you eat the RIGHT foods your body should let you know HOW MUCH to eat. When you start to evaluate foods this way, you quickly come to a few realizations. First of all, meat is awesome. For example, shown below is GROUND BEEF at various fat percentages. Leaner ground beef is a slightly higher score than higher fat percentages, but all of them are EXCELLENT. And guess what: ground beef is in fact an amazing food. Grains, however, are an entirely different story. Here are all of your grains shown below. Oats seem to be the ‘best’, but are still pretty much terrible. Rice, unsurprisingly, scores terribly here. Your average ANIMAL food is scoring higher than your average PLANT food. And let’s remember that 84% of all human calories on earth are currently coming from PLANTS—a statistic made far more terrible because 60% of all plant calories come from wheat, rice, and corn—some rather suboptimal grains.

HOW TO USE THE P:E RATIO

Ok, so you have done some rough P:E calculations on a few different foods, and now you are starting to get the point. Meat, eggs, and green vegetables are good; grains are bad. Fish is the greatest thing ever, and sugar and oil are the worst things ever. But now how do you incorporate this into everyday life? The P:E Diet is all about *FOOD CHOICE*. You are specifically CHOOSING one food, over other possible food options, because it is going to provide you with a higher level of nutrient satiety—allowing you to eat less energy overall. So what you want to do is make small and sustainable substitutions, in a gradual and progressive fashion, to slowly and surely improve your diet quality in a way that will lead you to naturally eat less energy. In the example pictured here, we have eggs at a P:E of about 1.0 (equal grams of protein and fat), bacon at about 0.7 (higher fat grams than protein grams), and buttered toast way down near 0.1 (way more grams of carbs and fat than grams of protein). So your general approach would be choosing eggs over bacon and toast if possible. Now if your breakfast was always toast, you would actually be progressing your diet if you switched entirely to bacon for breakfast. But eggs would be an upgrade from bacon as well! The goal is NOT to eat 100% protein at all times. In fact, a P:E of 1.0 (pretty much steak and eggs) would be an excellent maintenance ratio for most people—and if you are highly active and need a ton of energy calories, you might even be very lean and healthy at a P:E of 0.5. But since the Standard American Diet is way down around a 0.25, we know that most people have a lot of room for improvement. And that is the goal—slow, steady, gradual improvement of your diet, one food substitution at a time. Switching from a doughnut for breakfast to oatmeal would significantly raise the P:E of that meal. And then switching to bacon would be another improvement. And then steak and eggs would be even higher. You could even go for a much leaner meat— our favorites for breakfast are Canadian bacon and turkey bacon, both of which are quite lean and have a P:E way up around 5.0 or so! We don’t expect anyone to use this system to track every single food, or their entire day, or their entire lives—that is the exact opposite of what we are suggesting. Instead, we recommend familiarizing yourself with the general P:E ratio of the foods you eat most often. Then, armed with this knowledge, you can look for ways of substituting out certain foods for other choices that are a little bit higher on the P:E scale. Maybe there is a version of the food you are eating that has higher fiber? Or lower fat. Or fewer carbs. Or more protein. Or maybe you decide to skip that food entirely, based on its low P:E score, and replace it with an entirely different food. You don’t have to walk around the grocery store with a slide rule or a calculator. But get into the habit of looking at labels and doing a quick mental calculation. Look for grams of protein. Then look for grams of fat as well as net carbs (total carbs minus fiber). If the energy grams (fat plus net carbs) are dramatically higher than the protein grams, you might want to keep looking. But if protein grams are equal to energy grams, or even higher? Perfect! Focus on small, steady, gradual, and most importantly SUSTAINABLE changes. You want a diet that you enjoy, and than you can stick to for life. So maybe in the example above, you choose to eat a few more eggs and a few less pieces of toast? Or you trade in your bacon for turkey bacon? Or you make toast out of some low carb bread? Any of these small swaps would be pretty easy and likely sustainable—and would help you get closer to your goals. Every food you eat is either moving you closer to your goals, or farther away— keep this in mind. Luckily, you have the power to make these choices every single day! Choose wisely!

WHAT TO EAT

SPECIES-APPROPRIATE DIET

Humans are hunter-gatherers, and we do have a SPECIES-APPROPRIATE diet. We prefer to start with a basic Paleo-ish template as a starting point, although there are tons of modern processed foods that are just fine on the P:E scale (plain Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, and whey protein would be excellent examples). You’ll want to base your meal around protein. Any high quality protein is fine— including beef, lamb, pork, poultry, fish, seafood, and fermented dairy like greek yogurt or cottage cheese. Aim to consume grass-fed beef, wild caught fish, and pastured chickens and eggs when possible for the optimal nutrition. Properly raised animals eating their species appropriate diet (like cows eating grass) means more omega 3s in your protein! This will help reduce inflammation in the body. Start with one or two protein sources in your meal (e.g. beef and eggs) and then include some veggies. Simple as that! Animal foods are inherently higher in protein and minerals compared to vegetarian options, as they are at a higher trophic level. However if one chose to be a vegetarian for ethical reasons, good choices would include eggs and fermented dairy (cottage cheese and yogurt). An ethical vegan could also make this work using legumes (with soy and lentils at the top of the list) and plant proteins (tofu, textured vegetable protein, wheat gluten, and plant protein concentrates).

PROTEINS

Best options include:

• Ruminants (beef, lamb, bison)

• Poultry

• Fish

• Seafood

• Eggs

• Wild game

• Pork

• Legumes

• Fermented dairy (plain greek yogurt and cottage cheese)

Always choose animals that are eating what THEY are supposed to be eating. Opt for grass-fed meats, free range organic chicken, and pastured pork when possible. Opt for pasture-raised, organic eggs when possible. Opt for wild-caught fish and seafood when possible. Always buy the highest quality that you can afford.

FATS

Remember, you want to keep dietary fat moderate. This isn’t popular Keto where you’re dousing everything in butter and MCT oil. It’s best to simply consume whole food fats— meaning the fats you’re already getting from your meat, eggs, and seafood sources. We recommend minimizing nuts, cheeses, butter, dark chocolate, avocados, and other high fat foods—these extra fat calories can add up fast! Rather, prioritize protein-dense foods like beef and eggs while incorporating fibrous leafy greens and other high protein and mineral foods. For cooking, use just enough fat to grease the pan or whatever surface you’re working with.

Best Cooking Fats:

• Avocado oil

• Ghee

• Grass-fed butter

• Beef tallow

• Lard

• Coconut oil

• Olive oil

High Fat Snacks to be consumed sparingly:

• Avocados

• Low sugar dark chocolate

• Hard cheeses

• Salami

• Nut butters

• Any nuts or seeds (macadamia, pumpkin seeds, almonds, etc.)

CARBS

Keep carbs as low as possible if you haven’t reached your goal weight yet! If you’re still in a weight loss or fat burning stage, limit your carbs to non-starchy vegetables like spinach, broccoli, kale, and asparagus. Also include some low sugar fruit, such as tomatoes, avocados, berries, etc. If you are at your goal weight and/ or perform lots of high intensity, glycolytic exercise like CrossFit, sprinting, mountain biking, soccer or football—you can probably get away with small amounts of fruit and starchy tubers. The best time to consume these is often around exercise (before or after intense exercise). You can trade in some of your fat calories for carbs if that’s the case. If consuming some occasional carbs, try to avoid eating fat at the same meals. Fruit and tubers are excellent choices.

DESSERTS

Since we’re focused on nutrient dense whole foods—there aren’t too many dessert options! If your goal is fat loss, limit these and just eat more protein-rich food and veggies at your meals!

Some good dessert options:

• Berries.

• Dark chocolate (70% or higher).

• Greek yogurt mixed with stevia and cocoa powder.

KNOW YOUR BIOLOGY

We are specifically hard-wired to seek out foods with the very highest energy density, while using the very least energy expenditure in the process. This kept us alive for millions of years. Unfortunately we now have to intentionally head in the opposite direction. Knowing exactly how this works and what to do is half the battle, and that’s where this book comes in. Be sure to set yourself up for success with an environment that offers plenty of tasty high protein whole foods that are low in either carbs or fats (or both), and try to avoid subjecting yourself to a lot of junk food. Willpower is a finite resource, and if you have junk food in your pantry you are GOING to eat it at some point. Exercise is similar. We are actually hard-wired to AVOID exercise completely, in an attempt to conserve as much energy as possible. Prior to the industrial era, we all had to do tons of manual labor just to stay alive, so lack of exercise was unheard of. Now however, it is a constant threat to the majority of persons in first-world society. Again, understanding what your natural inclinations are towards exercise is very helpful when it comes to a strategy for dealing with these inclinations. This is one of the main reasons that the exercise VOLUME we will recommend in upcoming chapters is, by most standards, quite tiny! Read on for more.

FED VS FASTED

Your body is designed to smoothly transition between two different and opposing states: ‘Fed’, and ‘Fasted’. In the fed state, insulin is elevated, and this signals your body to store excess calories in your fat cells. In the presence of insulin, the burning of fat is reduced, while the body burns glucose (from your last meal) instead. As we mentioned before, the primary signal of the ‘fed’ state is glucose entering the body from the diet and being stored in the liver as glycogen. In the ‘fasted’ state, liver glycogen has gradually drifted down to baseline, and with it declines blood glucose and insulin. In the fed state, insulin and glucose and glucose oxidation (burning) are all increased, while in the fasted state, insulin is low—while glucagon and fat oxidation are elevated. When you are in the fasted state, the body ramps up its mobilization of stored body fat from your fat cells and is actively burning this fat for energy (instead of glucose). The practical importance of all this? You are more likely to burn stored body fat while in the fasted state, and you are more likely to store body fat while in the fed state. Unfortunately, over time we seem to be spending less and less of our time in the fasted state and more and more time in the fed state. As a result, our bodies and our cells spend less and less time mobilizing and burning stored body fat for energy, and the glucose-burning pathways are overused. Right now, the average American is eating something with carbohydrate in it an average of EIGHT times a day, spread out over a SIXTEEN hour eating window, for a total of about 300 grams of carbs per day. If we never ate any fat we could probably get away with this, like some sort of crazy “30 bananas a day” vegan YouTuber. Sadly however, we tend to overeat carbs and fats together, and of course now you know why—this combo is irresistibly tasty and addictive. Over time, this overeating leads to excessive fat gain and the subsequent energy toxicity of insulin resistance, or ‘metabolic syndrome’: abdominal fat storage, high triglycerides, low HDL or “good” cholesterol, and elevated glucose with eventual type 2 diabetes (1 in 12 humans on earth currently have full blown type 2 diabetes, while 35% of adults and 50% of older adults have Metabolic Syndrome, or pre-diabetes). Most people with insulin resistance are disproportionately burning glucose on the cellular level, and they often displace burning body fat due to the amount of dietary glucose coming in from carbohydrates. When these people run out of glucose from their last meal, instead of easily transitioning over to the fasted state to burn fat, they become hungry for more glucose (from carbohydrates) as their bodies and cells have decreased capacity for mobilizing and burning fat for energy. Let’s put it this way. Why would a highly obese person EVER be hungry? They have enough fat stores to last a very long time. The world record for fasting went to a 456 pound man who fasted for 382 days, consuming only water and vitamins and losing 276 pounds with no ill effects. But the average overweight person is used to being in the fed state, has very little practice in the fasted state, and is continually burning glucose rather than fat at the cellular level. They have changes in their cellular metabolism. The cells can burn either glucose (sugar) or fat for fuel, and over time they will have a preference for one over the other; “sugar burners” have increased the cellular pathways that burn glucose and decreased, or down-regulated, the underused pathways for burning fat. So what happens to the overweight “sugar burner” who stops eating for a few hours? As they run out of glucose from their last meal, instead of seamlessly transitioning to the fasted state and mobilizing and burning stored body fat, they become HUNGRY for MORE GLUCOSE, from carbohydrates! They will spend most of the day trapped in a cycle of eating every few hours, spiking glucose, and then becoming hungry when blood sugar drops. A good analogy is that of a tanker truck on the freeway filled with oil. If the tanker truck runs out of gas it stops moving, despite the fact that it has 10,000 gallons of potential fuel on board. Why? Because it prefers to run on refined gas and is incapable of burning oil for fuel.

FAT ADAPTATION

Humans have the ability to become ‘fat-adapted’ and improve their ability to fuel themselves with stored body fat instead of glucose. However, this takes time and practice, and your body has to do a number of things to slowly up-regulate (or increase) your fat-burning pathways. This includes improving insulin sensitivity to lower insulin and promote fat mobilization into free fatty acids from the adipocytes (fat cells) as well as upregulating the fat-burning pathways at the cellular level. There are several ways to improve ‘fat adaptation’ or the ability to successfully burn stored body fat for energy, and these include the following: • Low carbohydrate diets. Eating a low carb diet improves the body’s ability to utilize fat for energy rather than glucose. • Exercise. High-intensity exercise depletes glucose and glycogen rapidly, forcing the body to switch over and utilize more fat for fuel. Exercise also improves insulin sensitivity. • Caloric restriction. Eating fewer calories also equals less glucose available for fuel, so the body is more frequently forced to rely on stored body fat for fuel. You will always naturally eat the lowest calories when you are maximizing nutrient density by eating whole, natural, unprocessed, real foods found in nature (avoid processed foods). Once again, we see that satiety is CRUCIAL, and that means targeting a high nutrient density diet. • Intermittent fasting, and spending more time in the fasted state, which gives the body more ‘practice’ at burning fat.

METABOLIC EXERCISE

The purpose of this section of our book is to highlight INTERMITTENT FASTING as a strategy for exercising and strengthening the body’s ability to exist in the fasted state, burning fat instead of continually burning sugar (glucose) from the fed state. Just like anything else, this ability can be strengthened over time with practice.

But this ability also atrophies or shrinks over time with lack of use, just like your muscles atrophy when you break your arm and have to wear a cast for a few weeks.

Spending time in the fasted state is actually a form of exercise—a METABOLIC WORKOUT.

In fact, there are a lot of parallels between exercise and fasting.

Exercise does all of the following great things:

• Decreases blood glucose.

• Decreases insulin level.

• Increases insulin sensitivity.

• Increases lipolysis and free fatty acid mobilization.

• Increases cellular fat oxidation.

• Increases glucagon (the opposite of insulin).

• Increases growth hormone (the opposite of insulin).

BUT did you know you can also accomplish all of the above by doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING? The secret is *FASTING*. Extending the amount of time that you spend during your day in the FASTED state (as opposed to the FED state) accomplishes all of these, very similar to exercise. Extending your time in the fasted state is actually a form of metabolic 'exercise', in which you train your body to rapidly and efficiently mobilize free fatty acids from your adipose stores (fat tissue), something you absolutely can get better and better at with the metabolic 'practice' of fasting. Just as overweight and out of shape people struggle to jog or lift weights or participate in other forms of physical exercise, they are also generally out of practice when it comes to rapidly and efficiently mobilizing and burning and living off of stored fat for fuel. Intermittent fasting and spending more of your day in the 'fasted' state (and less time in the 'fed' state) is a great form of metabolic 'exercise' which has many health benefits, including fat loss! Less Feeding, More Fasting One of the best ways to achieve effortless and long-lasting fat loss? Train yourself to eat two meals a day (and eliminate snacking). The easiest and best way to accomplish this? Leverage your natural overnight fast by skipping breakfast (drinking coffee makes this easier and more enjoyable, plus coffee has numerous health benefits). No breakfast, lighter lunch, and larger dinner also maximizes the body's natural shifts between sympathetic (“fight or flight”) and parasympathetic (“rest and digest”) nervous system tone, with higher alertness and activation from sympathetic tone during the day while under-eating, and higher parasympathetic resting tone in the evening during the fed state. Typically, the fed state starts when you begin eating and for the next three to five hours your body digests and absorbs the food you just ate. Insulin rises significantly, to some degree shutting off fat-burning and also triggering excess calories to be stored as fat. After the first few hours mentioned above, your body goes into what is known as the post–absorptive state, during which the components of the last meal are still in the circulation. The post–absorptive state lasts until 8 to 12 hours after your last meal, which is when you enter the fasted state. It typically takes 12 hours after your last meal to fully enter the fasted state.

When you’re in the fasted state your body can burn fat that has been inaccessible during the fed state. Because we don’t completely enter the fasted state until around 12 hours after our last meal, it’s rare that our bodies are in this fat burning state in the modern food environment. This is one of the reasons why many people who start intermittent fasting will lose fat without changing what they eat, how much they eat, or how often they exercise. Fasting puts your body in a fat burning state that you rarely get to enter during a normal eating schedule. Minimize carb frequency Eating carbohydrates, especially refined carbohydrates with no fiber, overdrives the 'fed' state, as carbohydrates raise both glucose and insulin higher than other macronutrients. In general, when you eat a meal, your body spends a few hours processing that food and burning what it can from what you just consumed. Because it has all of this readily available, easy to burn energy in its blood stream (thanks to the food you ate), your body will choose to use that as energy rather than the fat you have stored. This is ESPECIALLY true if you just consumed carbohydrates, because these are rapidly converted to glucose and your body has to burn sugar as energy before any other source (you have limited glucose storage, and high glucose is toxic; your body burns extra glucose preferentially to get rid of it, much in the same way that the body burns alcohol consumed for energy prior to other energy calories--alcohol therefore also sabotages fat loss). Exercise Helps Exercise helps greatly with fat adaptation. Your glycogen (the storage form of glucose in your muscles and liver that your body can burn as fuel when necessary) is depleted during sleep and fasting, and will be depleted even further during training, which can further increase insulin sensitivity. This means that a meal immediately following your workout will be stored most efficiently— mostly as glycogen for muscle stores or burned as energy immediately to help with the recovery process, with minimal amounts stored as fat. Compare this to a regular day (no intermittent fasting): the overeaten carbs from foods consumed will see full glycogen stores, and thus be more likely to be stored as fat. Fasting Myths There are many myths about fasting: “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day!” We have all been told to eat breakfast. Unfortunately this is terrible advice. When you first wake up in the morning, your insulin level is quite low and most people are just starting to enter the fasted state, 12 hours after eating the last meal of the previous day. The worst thing you could do is to eat a ton of food, spiking insulin and glucose and immediately shutting off fat-burning. A much better choice would be to push the first meal of your day out at least a few hours, during which you can fully enter the fasted state and burn stored body fat. The VERY WORST would be to eat a high carbohydrate breakfast, spiking insulin and glucose as high as possible; in addition to reducing fat-burning for as many as 12 hours, this will drive as many calories as possible into fat stores as well as providing further reinforcement of the burning of glucose rather than fat. Also, high spikes of insulin and glucose always lead to large drops in glucose a few hours later, which triggers HUNGER (if you want to have hypoglycemia or low blood sugar and ravenous hunger, just eat a breakfast of pure carbohydrates and then wait 2-3 hours to see how you feel). Interestingly, many properly fat-adapted people aren't very hungry in the morning and have no problem skipping breakfast. This is appropriate, as throughout our evolution humans have always been hunter- gatherers and rather than eating a large breakfast first thing in the morning we would hunt and gather throughout the day, having a larger meal later in the day. We highly recommend mimicking this pattern by skipping breakfast and eating most of your calories later in the day (referred to as a 'reverse taper' of calories, with none in the morning and most in the evening). Some individualization is present here, however. Some people do find that they have higher satiety and they function better by eating breakfast and eating earlier in the day-this is of course fine if it works for you! But for many, skipping breakfast is both the easiest and most convenient way to intermittently fast.

"Eat small frequent meals."

There has been plenty of worthless advice here. We have been told to eat frequently to "keep your metabolism going” and “don't let your body enter starvation mode". This is all the exact opposite of the truth: in order to burn fat, you want to spend more time in the fasted state and get very very efficient at living on stored body fat rather than caloric intake from constant eating.

"Fasting leads to burning muscle instead of fat."

Many people are concerned that if they start fasting they will either stop making muscle or maybe even burn muscle. While this is certainly true of starvation (days without food), it is definitely not true of intermittent fasting (hours, rather than days, without food). If this were true, humans would not be here today. In fact, growth hormone is increased during fasted states (both during sleep and after a period of fasting). Growth hormone might as well be called "fasting hormone", as it rises by as much as 2,000% after 24 hours of fasting. Growth hormone prevents muscle breakdown, and is used in combination with testosterone by bodybuilders who want to simultaneously build as much muscle and burn as much fat as possible. Growth hormone elevates in fasting to help preserve muscle in times of fasting, and this makes sense. In our hunter- gatherer ancestors, if fasting for short periods of time and going for a few hours or even a few days without food made you weaker and slower you would never catch or find any food and you would die and humans would become extinct. In fact the opposite is true; while fasting for short periods (less than 24 hours), muscle is preserved or can even grow if you are doing resistance training (highly recommended). Also, people experience an increased level of focus and alertness during intermittent fasting thanks to the release of epinephrine and norepinephrine (earlier in our evolution, this increased energy and alertness helped us catch prey when necessary).

“Your metabolism slows down when you are fasting.” While this is true of starvation (days or weeks without food), in the short term this is completely false. A number of studies have proven that in fasting up to 72 hours, metabolism does not slow down at all and in fact might speed up slightly thanks to the release of catecholamines (epinephrine or adrenaline, norepinephrine, and dopamine) and activation of the sympathetic nervous system (sympathetic nervous system is often considered the “fight or flight” system, while the opposite is the parasympathetic nervous system or the “rest and digest” system). It makes sense that this fight or flight sympathetic nervous system would be activated during the daytime, when hunter-gatherer humans are most active and in the fasted state (looking for food), followed by parasympathetic “rest and digest” mode in the evening after eating a large meal. “If I don’t eat I will get low blood sugar [hypoglycemia].” Studies have shown that healthy persons who have no underlying medical conditions, who are not taking any diabetes medications, can fast for extremely long periods of time without suffering from any hypoglycemia. In fact, almost all sensations of hypoglycemia or low blood sugar (in non-diabetics) results from eating a very high glycemic index carbohydrate food a few hours prior (blood sugar spikes, then insulin spikes, then blood sugar drops rapidly). However if you are a diabetic, especially if you are on any diabetes medications, you definitely need to check with your doctor before starting a fasting protocol. Some diabetes medications can lead to severe hypoglycemia when fasting (mostly insulin and sulfonylurea drugs like glipizide, glimepiride, and glyburide). [Be sure to check with your doctor prior to starting a fasting protocol if you have any medical problems, diabetes or otherwise.] How To Fast Intermittently There are a number of ways to actually perform intermittent fasting, but the easiest and most popular varieties involve taking advantage of your natural overnight fast by skipping breakfast and pushing the first meal of the day forward a number of hours. Once you have passed the 12 hour mark from dinner the night before, you are truly in a fasted state and you begin to rely on stored body fat for fuel. The longer you stay in the fasted state, the more metabolic practice you will get at burning stored body fat and the deeper your fat adaptation will get. In fact, if you can maintain this intermittent fast for 20 to 24 hours you will achieve a very high rate of lipolysis (breakdown of stored body fat into free fatty acids, available for burning in the cells) and fat oxidation (burning of fat in the mitochondria). When you first start out with intermittent fasting, you can have quite a bit of hunger and low energy and other symptoms. In this case we recommend starting out with “baby steps”, by just pushing breakfast out an hour or two at first, then slowly increasing the fasting interval. As time goes by and you become more “fat adapted”, it is easier and easier to fast. This is identical to exercise in those who are sedentary: it is painful and extremely difficult at first, and then once you are adapted it gets easy and even enjoyable. Low carbohydrate diet It is much easier to fast if you are already on a low carb diet, as these diets naturally lead to quite a bit of fat adaptation and are naturally lower in the secretion of insulin as well as the utilization of glucose as a fuel. In fact, we HIGHLY recommend the combination of a very low carb diet with intermittent fasting. The closer you get to a ketogenic diet (extremely low in carbohydrates) the easier it is to go for hours and hours without eating, thanks to the fat adaptation that these diets lead to. For those who do incorporate carbohydrates in the diet, we would recommend that these contain a lot of FIBER, which is indigestible and does not contribute to the elevation of glucose and insulin. If you do decide to eat digestible carbohydrates, we would recommend that you consider avoiding these early in the day, as this might sabotage the fat adaptation process, as well as setting you up for a blood sugar and hunger roller coaster for the rest of the day. Instead, we would recommend eating digestible (non-fiber) carbohydrates in the evening, and ideally only after either intermittent fasting to deplete liver glycogen and/or exercising with a high level of intensity to deplete muscle glycogen (eating digestible carbohydrates when your muscle and liver glycogen are already full is more likely to lead to fat storage and worsening insulin sensitivity, the exact opposite of what you are looking for). Intermittent Fasting protocols There are several popular ways to accomplish intermittent fasting and we will discuss the three most popular varieties next. All of these involve lengthening the overnight fast by skipping breakfast and postponing the first meal of the day. All of these also involve eating no calories at the beginning of the day and the majority of your calories very late in the day, a concept called a caloric ‘reverse taper’. Keep in mind that for the purpose of these discussions we will consider the baseline standard diet to involve 12 hours of fasting (overnight) plus 12 hours of an eating window during the day consisting of three meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The sad reality however is that most people are actually eating first thing in the morning until late at night, with lots of snacking, so the eating window for the average American is actually closer to 16 hours!

LEANGAINS

Leangains, as popularized by bodybuilder Martin Berkhan, is by far the most popular method of fasting intermittently. This form of fasting consists of skipping breakfast every morning and pushing the first meal of the day to lunch. Basically you skip breakfast and then eat a normal lunch and dinner in an eight hour window. The idea is to fast for 16 hours (overnight plus the first ~6 hours of your day), then eat all your calories in an 8 hour window. For example, let’s say you get up at 6:00 a.m. You would skip breakfast and eat nothing for six hours, then lunch at noon and dinner at 8:00 p.m. Snacking inside your eating window is allowed (although we will say that generally speaking you want to try to consolidate calories into larger meals rather than snacking). This 16:8 split (16 hours fasting and 8 hours eating) is recommended every single day. If you had one day off from this protocol and followed this the other six days of the week, that would amount to an additional 4 hours of fasting per day compared to the standard 12:12 split that we are assuming to be baseline (12 hours fasting and 12 hours eating). Four hours per day times six days per week equals about 24 hours of total additional fasting per week. [4 hours fasting per day times 6 days per week = 24 hours]

WARRIOR DIET

The Warrior Diet, as popularized by Ori Hofmekler, consists of fasting during the majority of the day, then eating all of your calories in the evening. The goal is to skip breakfast and lunch, then eat a huge dinner in a four hour window at the end of the day. This is a 20:4 hour split (20 hours of fasting and then a 4 hour eating window at the end of the day). This method of fasting does allow you to eat very large very satisfying meals at the end of the day, and might be perfect for someone who was going out to dinner to eat in a social setting, where a ton of calories and food might be involved. Fasting this long during the day is more difficult but does lead to a deeper level of fat adaptation and low insulin (which helps improve insulin sensitivity). If one followed this protocol roughly every other day (let’s say three days a week), that would equate to eight hours of fasting compared to the 12:12 baseline standard diet, times three days per week would also equal about 24 hours of total additional fasting per week. [8 hours fasting per day times 3 days per week = 24 hours] Eat Stop Eat Eat Stop Eat, as popularized by bodybuilder Brad Pilon, involves fasting for an entire 24 hours, two days per week. Let’s say you eat your last meal of the day at 8:00 p.m. the day before. You fast overnight and then all the following day, skipping breakfast and lunch, and then pushing dinner out to 8:00 p.m. (for a full 24 hours with no calories). This is quite difficult and is only recommended two days per week (nonconsecutive). While this is quite difficult, by the end of the 24 hours you do reach a very deep level of lipolysis and fat oxidation, with very low insulin levels, and this is quite desirable. Many people think that the following day they will binge on so much food that the benefits of the fasting on the previous day will be negated, but this is not true. Studies have repeatedly shown that persons will overeat by hundreds of calories the next day, but still not come anywhere close to eating as much as they would have by eating normally both days (in other words, you are still left with a large net caloric deficit even after eating more food the day after your fast). Each day that you fast in this fashion adds 12 hours of fasting compared to the standard 12:12 split we are calling baseline, and two days per week of this again equals about 24 hours of total additional fasting per week. [12 hours fasting per day times 2 days per week = 24 hours]

It’s All Good With all of these fasting methods, the goal is to skip breakfast, avoid snacking, and consolidate calories near the end of the day. All of these methods are quite effective, and you can in fact mix and match these as much as you would like. We would highly recommend keeping it flexible. Fast for as long as is convenient on any given day, and break your fast whenever you need to or want to. Anything beyond a 12 hour window is going to be at least somewhat beneficial towards anyone’s goals. If you planned on fasting 16 hours but only make it 13, that’s ok and you are still much better off than if you had eaten all day long with early and late calories plus lots of snacking. We think a good goal would be 24 hours per week of additional fasting (additional to the standard 12:12 baseline). This could be 2 days of 12 extra hours (Eat Stop Eat), 3 days of 8 extra hours (Warrior Diet), or 6 days of 4 extra hours (Leangains). You could also mix and match as desired. Keep it flexible and go with whatever best suits your schedule and your lifestyle and your current level of fat adaptation. Coffee = Awesome During the fasts feel free to drink ANY noncaloric beverage you want, including but not limited to: water, coffee (with or without noncaloric sweetener such as stevia), tea (hot or iced, sweetened with stevia if desired), diet soda with no calories, or any other beverage with no calories. However you really don’t want anything with lots of calories here. Fat is the macronutrient that spikes insulin the very least, which is why so many people are using Bulletproof coffee or some other method of adding fat (butter, coconut oil, etc) to coffee in the morning. However, we would NOT recommend this or any other source of calories while fasting, as this will be detrimental to what you are trying to accomplish with fasting.

If you will absolutely die without at least a tiny splash of cream in your coffee well then do it, you will be better off with it than if this prohibition against cream in your coffee keeps you from trying to fast intermittently at all (95% fasting much better than 0% fasting)! However we would try to keep the cream in your coffee to an absolute MINIMUM quantity, and you should also use this opportunity to learn to drink coffee black (this is something anyone can learn over time, believe it or not). We *HIGHLY* recommend the use of black coffee or tea in the morning to make your fast easier and more enjoyable. Both coffee and tea have numerous health benefits, and they both contain compounds that help with fat burning, energy, and alertness. Enjoy Your Newfound Freedom From Food Once you are properly fat adapted, intermittent fasting is actually easy, fun, enjoyable, and liberating—while making you leaner and healthier in the process! Let’s say you are following the Leangains protocol. Breakfast every day during the work week is now JUST BLACK COFFEE, how easy is that? No more worrying about what you are going to grab for breakfast as you rush around in the morning and struggle to get to work on time. This saves you a ton of time and work and effort and is literally a form of metabolic exercise in the meantime, improving your insulin sensitivity and strengthening your fat adaptation. This is a win in many ways. It also frees you to eat very large and satisfying meals in the evening, without feeling the deprivation of watching calories or restricting yourself. And on days where you skip breakfast and lunch, you will be amazed at how much extra time you will have when you don’t have to worry about what to eat, where to get it, and when to find time to eat it. Your productivity will be higher as concentration and focus is higher in the fasted state (thanks to the sympathetic nervous system activation and catecholamines), and you will have more free time. Some Pointers Of course you are going to check with your doctor before you do ANYTHING in this book. But you REALLY want to check with your doctor before initiating intermittent fasting if you are diabetic and on diabetes medications. You can generally take any vitamins or supplements you want while fasting as long as they don’t have calories, but you don’t need any supplements as you will be eating plenty of nutrient-dense foods every day. You don’t have to worry about losing muscle from lack of protein during your fast, as long as you eat adequate protein at the meals before and after fasting. You will not lose muscle while fasting as long as you are exercising regularly, and we specifically recommend resistance training such as lifting weights or doing bodyweight calisthenics—more on this coming up! Following a low carb diet pairs nicely with intermittent fasting, as both improve fat adaptation a great deal. However it is not at all necessary, and in fact the REAL power of intermittent fasting probably lies in the way it decreases CARBOHYDRATE FREQUENCY. So even those on a high carbohydrate diet will see the ‘fat adaptation’ benefits of intermittent fasting. In fact, those on a high carbohydrate diet might have the highest benefit of all. It is certainly ok to eat more carbohydrates and utilize intermittent fasting! It is perfectly fine to exercise while fasting, either cardio or lifting weights (lifting weights is better for fat loss and body composition and we highly recommend resistance exercise for everyone, as this will further your goals considerably). Drink plenty of water and non-caloric beverages while fasting; coffee and tea in the morning make fasting considerably more enjoyable in addition to health and fat-burning benefits and are therefore highly recommended. Don’t use intermittent fasting as an excuse to eat tons of junk food when you are eating—continue to eat responsibly, sticking with whole natural foods with high nutrient density and avoiding processed foods as much as possible.

THE THREE HUNGERS

Hunger and satiety are extremely complicated. We typically eat for some combination of three reasons. First of all, we need nutrients. Secondly, we need energy. And finally, eating is enjoyable! Let’s unpack each of these a little bit here, and explore how we can manipulate these for optimum success!

The three hungers

1. Nutrient hunger.

2. Energy hunger.

3. Hedonic hunger.

NUTRIENT HUNGER

Your body is the most complicated chemistry lab in the entire universe. Every second, there are trillions of chemical reactions taking place in your body. In order for all of this to function, you need a lot of STUFF. And except for air and water and sunlight, all of this ‘stuff’ comes directly from your diet. You need dozens of vitamins and minerals and essential amino acids and essential fats from your diet, and if you don’t get these, things are going to stop working properly. Thankfully, your body gives you some hints when you are low on raw materials —but the main signal of hunger is a bit non-specific. We know from human and animal studies that if you have a specific dietary deficiency—protein or minerals, for example—you will be hungrier and more driven to eat. What your poor body doesn’t know is that most of the food in your environment is food-like garbage. So you eat and eat, but you might not get what your body is looking for. Nonprotein ENERGY is everywhere—but protein and minerals are few and far between. So we are getting fatter in our ill-fated attempts to supply our bodies with the things they really need.

ENERGY HUNGER

The primary goal of your body is to keep your DNA alive long enough to pass it on to the next generation. In order to do this, it is imperative that you have plenty of extra energy around, just in case. Not so much that you can’t escape from a predator, but enough so you don’t die during the wintertime when plant foods are nonexistent and all of the animals you hunt for food are low on energy themselves. So your body is constantly trying to conserve the energy it has, while also looking to acquire more. In today’s food environment, we are drowning in energy. In fact, our biggest current threat is the energy overload and energy toxicity that leads to obesity and the entire spectrum of chronic degenerative diseases. Sometimes we have difficulty distinguishing nutrient hunger from energy hunger. For this reason, your very best strategy is targeting NUTRIENTS first, by eating protein and other nutrient-dense foods first and foremost. Once you can be sure that you have consumed adequate protein and minerals, and your nutrient hunger is satisfied, then you will be in a much better position to properly interpret energy hunger. Often times, if someone has plenty of extra fat to burn, they find that after eating protein and minerals they really don’t have any energy hunger. Sometimes we also struggle to differentiate LOW GLYCOGEN hunger (lack of ‘fat adaptation’) from a true global low energy hunger. This is yet another reason to reduce your carbohydrate frequency, to improve fat adaptation. If you are properly ‘fat adapted’, and you target protein and minerals first, you find that you can get by with the very smallest amounts of non-protein energy (carbs and fats). In practical terms, every meal should start with lean protein and low carb vegetables if possible. Energy can be added in if you still have leftover ‘energy hunger’. Don’t worry if you don’t have a really good idea of how this actually looks or feels! Many people are unfamiliar with these concepts and it takes some time to get used to them. Intermittent fasting and reduced carbohydrate frequency can be very helpful when it comes to getting in touch with all of the forms of hunger and fullness.

HEDONIC HUNGER

As we established, eating high energy density carbs and fats together is extremely rewarding and, for many, extremely addictive. Your best strategy is understanding what is going on with your biology when it comes to these foods. Lower energy carbs and fats together aren’t nearly as problematic. For example, imagine eating a steak and a salad. The steak has some fat, and the salad has some carbs. But the energy density of the steak is low thanks to protein, and the energy density of the salad is low thanks to fiber. As long as protein and fiber are present, you are probably fine. But mix together a high energy density carbohydrate, like a potato, with a high energy density fat, like oil? Now you have french fries or potato chips — these are extremely hyperpalatable and you can overeat the hell out of these! Anything with high energy density carbs and fats together is going to be extremely tasty. You are definitely going to eat these foods, but treat them with the caution and respect they deserve. How do you deal with these foods? Our favorite is eating these AFTER a nutritious meal of protein and veggies, so your nutrient hunger is taken care of and the danger factor is lower. Eat these foods with a lot of INTENTION and MINDFULNESS. Try not to buy these foods and have them in your house, but rather only eat these at social outings, and only buy one serving. Enjoy these cheats and don’t deprive yourself of these foods on occasion — but try to make these the exceptions to an otherwise nutrient dense baseline diet. Most of all, be hyperaware of what these foods are doing to you and how they are affecting your behavior. Some highly addicted people find it best to avoid these completely, almost like an alcoholic who avoids alcohol 100% of the time. This is a legitimate strategy, and the only person who knows what works best for you is YOU.

PRACTICAL APPLICATION:

Now that you know about the three hungers, you can strategize: 1. EAT LEAN PROTEIN AND VEGGIES FIRST. Targeting protein and minerals allows you to achieve NUTRIENT satiety first. This allows you to be more in touch with ENERGY hunger and fullness. 2. MINIMIZE CARBOHYDRATE FREQUENCY TO ALLOW FOR FAT ADAPTATION. Once you are ‘fat adapted’, or more comfortable living in a low carb/glycogen state, you are FAR better equipped to be in touch with your overall energy hunger and fullness. 3. EAT ADDED ENERGY (CARBS AND FATS) LAST AND ONLY IF NECESSARY. If you have a lot of available energy already in your body, you might be surprised to find just how little additional energy (added carbs and fats) you need to eat. 4. BE EXTREMELY CAUTIOUS WITH HIGH ENERGY DENSITY CARBS AND FATS TOGETHER. You probably don’t have to deprive yourself of these foods forever, but they need to be treated with extreme respect and caution, as they can drive a lot of overeating!

PROGRESSING ‘FAT ADAPTATION’

It is a scientific fact: there is ZERO requirement for carbohydrate in the human diet. But the reality is that you DO need glucose, at all times, just to stay alive. Your liver can make all the glucose you need out of protein, but this is a little more difficult than just eating all your glucose (especially eating glycemic carbs 8 times a day, for 16 hours out of every 24, like the average American). In theory, shrinking down your carbohydrate frequency SOUNDS great —but it can be VERY difficult, especially to the uninitiated! Trying to meet all of your energy needs in a low glycogen state, running solely off of stored body fat and some glucose created by your liver out of protein, is the metabolic equivalent of jogging or any other type of exercise. And just like exercise, it is a LOT OF WORK when you first start out. Neophytes often notice low energy levels, decreased exercise tolerance, and general fatigue and brain fog.

You have two options when you embark on a reduction in glycemic quantity and frequency. The first option is just diving in headfirst, embracing the suck, and powering through for the one or two weeks it takes to get through the majority of the discomfort—with the caveat that it could be MONTHS before you have the same athletic capacity that you had before in a carb-loaded state. The second option is to gradually progress your reduced carbohydrate frequency, little by little. If you do choose to slowly progress this ability, we highly recommend you start with BREAKFAST. Try to see if you can eliminate carbohydrates from breakfast, by replacing them with protein-rich foods such as eggs, meat, or plain Greek yogurt. At this point, you would continue eating carbohydrates for lunch and dinner. Once you are comfortable with this, start whittling away at lunchtime carbs. Take the bread off your sandwich and wrap it in lettuce. Be sure to double your meat and cheese, increasing the protein, so you aren’t hungry. Last to go? Dinnertime carbs. And in fact, if you NEVER got rid of those, and only ate significant net carbohydrates once per day, you would probably be fine. Most people could reach adequate fat adaptation with this degree of carbohydrate restriction. In fact, many people struggle to achieve energy satiety every day unless they eat at least around 100 grams of net carbohydrates. Evening is usually the largest craving for these glycemic carbs, which makes sense, as they do trigger the parasympathetic state (“rest and digest”). If you are going to continue to eat these carbohydrates, please feel free to do so—but be sure to keep protein high at this meal, and in fact we recommend eating PROTEIN FIRST. There are a number of studies, mostly performed in Japan, looking at the timing of protein, vegetables, and carbohydrate (rice) with mealtimes. These studies show that eating protein and vegetables first, and rice last, at the same meal, leads to higher satiety and improved outcomes. The reasons for this are likely due to satiety hormones from the small intestine which are beyond the scope of this book, but let’s just say that your grandparents, who told you to eat dessert AFTER dinner, were really on to something. A few final notes about fat adaptation. Exercise is phenomenal for improving fat adaptation. If you are performing a ton of glycolytic exercise (exercise of a very high intensity that burns mostly glucose), you might not have to worry about reducing carbohydrate frequency. There are also genetic factors here, and some persons are perfectly well fat-adapted despite a high carbohydrate diet. We are happy for these people, and most of the advice here is for the REST of us. As with everything else when it comes to diet, the only person who really knows what works best for you is YOU, so don’t be afraid to try things and see what happens.

SUPERFOODS?

No, we’re not going to go on a rant about some rare and all-powerful berry from the Amazon or something. But there are a few high nutrient density foods that are so amazing that they deserve a place in everyone’s ‘baseline’ diet. Try to make these staples and you will up your chances for success! • Grass-fed beef • Pastured eggs • Wild-caught salmon • Plain Greek yogurt • Low sugar fruit • Shellfish

YOUR ‘BASELINE’ DIET

You should have a basic diet template that you follow on a regular basis. You should have a few staple protein sources that you are extremely familiar with. Maybe these are pastured eggs, wild-caught salmon, and grass-fed beef. You should know how to buy and cook these foods. You should at least be vaguely familiar with the macronutrients in these foods and their P:E ratios. You should have them on hand most of the time. You can deviate from this ‘baseline’ diet as much as you want, but this always gives you something to fall back on when you aren’t sure what to eat. We have foods like ground beef, Greek yogurt, canned sardines, canned salmon, pastured eggs, and chicken breasts around almost all of the time. Set yourself up for success by having these foods available as often as possible. Keep emergency protein sources nearby—our favorites are hard-boiled eggs and individually packaged grass-fed beef sticks (without sugar). If you are eating carbohydrates, make sure you have some low energy density high satiety choices available, like apples, carrots, berries, and potatoes. If you need something super convenient, consider some whey powder and a shaker bottle for the times when you are starving but you have no time at all. Having all of this in place makes you far less likely to fall off the wagon and end up in the drive-through of your favorite fast food place.

What Is Exercise?

Exercise has a singular purpose: self improvement. If done correctly, exercise provides a stimulus to your body that leads to positive adaptation. The adaptations to exercise are numerous, and can include increased muscular strength and size, improved stamina, improved cardiovascular fitness, an increase in metabolic rate, improvements in glucose metabolism, and increased fat oxidation. Diet is important, but you will never reach your health and body composition goals without proper exercise! So you might as well dive right in.

Intro to ‘demand training’

Your body is the most amazing survival machine ever imagined. Humans will adapt to endure their environmental conditions in a near-infinite number of ways. Your brain and body are constantly remodeling to best conform to the highly unique set of circumstances that you are exposed to. Your genetics demand of your body only one thing: stay alive in order to reproduce. Some of these environmental adaptations we are quite familiar with, because they are visible and everyone has experienced them. If you never go outside and then you lay in the sun all day, get ready for a painful and damaging sunburn. But spend an hour in the sun every day all summer, and your body will respond by increasing the pigmentation of your skin, protecting you from burning. Dig ditches all day and expect some horrific blisters on your hands. But dig one ditch per day for a few months, and you will be protected by some worldclass callouses on your hands. The reality is that your body is constantly adapting to your surroundings in an attempt to maximize your survival. Thankfully this is almost always to your benefit. But occasionally, things don’t go exactly the way you would want. Take, for example, lack of exercise. Imagine for a moment that you were accidentally hit in the head with a stale croissant in some sort of freak bakery aisle accident and you spent the next few weeks or months in a coma. Your body responds to the disuse of your muscles and bone. Lean mass, like bone and muscle, is metabolically quite expensive, and a large portion of your basal metabolic rate, or the amount of calories it takes just to stay alive, is partitioned to the maintenance of your lean mass. A crucial survival tactic employed by your body is maximum energy efficiency— because from an evolutionary point of view, your body never knows when your next meal is going to turn up. So your body assumes it is doing you a huge favor by reabsorbing the protein and minerals from chronically unused lean mass, lowering your caloric requirements in the most miserly fashion possible, and hopefully keeping you from dying of starvation in the process. In a way, we are all ‘bodybuilders’, and our bodies are constantly responding to our activity or LACK of activity in a precise fashion that is designed to maximize our survival. If you have more or less muscle mass than you used to, we can almost always trace that back to an environmental response of some sort. Lean mass equals strength and longevity. The more lean mass you have, the better. Your entire goal, for both aesthetics and health, should be achieving the highest lean mass you can—while maintaining the lowest fat mass possible (without starving yourself). The question is, how exactly do we accomplish this?

Muscle, like callouses on your hands, is a functional tissue that responds to the environment in an adaptive way. And because it is metabolically quite expensive and your body is some sort of caloric Ebenezer Scrooge, you have to CONVINCE your body that extra muscle tissue is one hundred percent mission critical to your survival. But your muscles don’t speak English, so there is only one way to deliver the message: Demand Training™ [ok not actually trademarked haha]. Imagine that you decide that you need more exercise, so from now on, you are going to walk three hours every single day. Yeah we know, that’s dumb—but work with us here for a second. As a result of walking three hours every day, your body will never be convinced that it has to be any stronger, or any larger, or have any more muscle mass. Your body WILL adapt, however, in order to keep you alive. You will get VERY efficient with your gait and you will be able to walk in a way that you use the very least amount of energy possible. You will also get some really good callouses on your feet to protect your skin from all that friction. And you will probably lose lean mass on your [unused] upper body in an attempt to conserve energy to ensure your survival. You will get to the point where you can walk 3 hours and only burn 100 calories. If these are the things you want, then by all means, go hit the treadmill. Now imagine instead for a moment that you suddenly decide to sprint up a mountain at your highest possible speed. After about 30 to 60 seconds of this, your heart rate will be the highest it has ever been and you will be sucking so much wind that you will feel like you’re about to die. Eventually you will pretty much collapse on the ground and it will take you 10 minutes just to recover. But guess what: you just sent a message to your body. What was the message? HOLY S*** WE ALMOST DIED. Your body has no idea what happened. For all your body knows, you were being chased by a polar bear and you narrowly escaped with your life. The only thing your body understands is that it gave you EVERY SINGLE BIT of muscular and cardiovascular output that it had, and it STILL WASN’T GOOD ENOUGH TO KEEP YOU ALIVE. You demanded so much energy output from your body that it completely failed. And in this case, failure means you don’t get to pass on your genetic code. This kind of failure is COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE to your body. And so right there and then, your body makes a solemn vow: we have to be BETTER, or next time we really are going to die. The adaptations to exercise are so slow that they really are imperceptible—to both you and everyone else. But believe us, they ARE happening. Every day you go outside and attempt to run up the same mountain, with the highest possible speed, for as long as you possibly can, until you hit failure. And slowly, after days and weeks and months, things start changing. Your leg muscles get larger and stronger. Your cardiovascular fitness improves. Your speed and distance both gradually increase. Pretty soon you are running halfway up the mountain before you collapse. And eventually, maybe even years down the road, you finally run all the way up to the top. At that point, you are an amazing sprinter, and the difference between your initial sprinting capacity and your current ability is mindboggling.

Demand Training is a way of communicating to your body. You are DEMANDING an adaptation, in order to ensure your survival. But the communication signal needs to be loud and clear. And you can only send this signal by maximizing the INTENSITY and EFFORT of your activity. The goal is to produce the HIGHEST amount of muscular force for the LONGEST amount of time possible, until you reach the highest level of failure discomfort that you can tolerate. Built in to Demand Training is the concept of ‘progressive overload’. What is progressive overload? Allow us to explain. Imagine that you decide that you are going to do 20 push-ups every day for the rest of your life. At first, you struggle to even do 10 push-ups. But after a month or so you gradually work up to 20 per day without too much trouble. You feel yourself getting slightly stronger, and you even notice a bit more muscle when you look in the mirror. After a few months however, 20 push-ups feels like nothing. Keep doing this for a couple of decades, and half a million push-ups later you are absolutely no stronger or more muscular whatsoever—you are just really efficient at 20 push-ups and can do these while only expending maybe 5 calories or something like that. Now imagine for a moment that you decide that instead of picking an arbitrary number, like 20, you are going to do one set of push-ups every day ALL THE WAY TO FAILURE. At first you struggle to get to 20, but then every day you push yourself all the way to failure and beyond. On the 21st rep you are struggling with 10/10 exertion, sweating, short of breath, and pushing for your life, but you still go all the way to absolute failure. As weeks and months go by, something amazing happens. You go from 20 push-ups a day to 30, then 40, then 50. You add a lot of visible muscle, and you feel strong as hell. This is progressive overload— every time, you are pushing yourself as far as you possibly can, and your body continues to respond to the signal of failure. Pushing your muscles to the point of NOT BEING ABLE TO MOVE sends the biggest message to your body of all. From the evolutionary place your body comes from, the inability to move means certain instantaneous death. Maybe you are being crushed by a boulder, or eaten by a sabertooth tiger, but either way you’re toast. So working your muscles all the way to complete failure—to the point of not even being able to move a single millimeter—is like grabbing a bullhorn and screaming at your body “WE ARE GOING TO DIE BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT STRONG ENOUGH!!!” Afterwards, your body completely freaks out and responds by adding MORE MUSCLE and LARGER MUSCLE, so that next time you can not only create larger tension in your muscles (strength), but you can also sustain this tension for a longer period of time. The secret to Demand Training is carefully and deliberately placing the VERY HIGHEST TENSION you can possibly generate in your muscles, and sustaining this tension for the VERY LONGEST AMOUNT OF TIME you possibly can, all the way to failure. Maximizing time under tension, with maximum effort and intensity, sends the very loudest signal to your body that it needs to adapt—you are DEMANDING it. In response, your muscles will gradually become larger—providing you with the muscular strength and endurance to survive what your body perceives as an environmental threat to your very survival.