Written by Christopher Kelly
Jan. 29, 2015
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Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. Today I'm joined by Dan Pardi. Hi, Dan!
Daniel: Hey! How are you, Chris?
Christopher: Good, thank you!
So Dan works at the Behavioral Sciences Department at Stanford University and the Departments of Neurology and Endocrinology at Leiden University in the Netherlands and he's also the CEO of the human health behavior technology company called Dan's Plan which seeks to help people improve their health by establishing and sustaining an effective daily health practice.
So that's right. Tell me about your academic work, how did you become interested in behavior modification and all of this good stuff?
Daniel: Yes. So I've been interested in this my whole life really in some form or another but it evolved and deepened into what I want to do as my career which I'm doing and I'm very grateful for that.
The personal story that I tell is that I was doing cancer research in early 2000s from the Preventive Medicine Research Institute and it was one of my first jobs after I graduated my Master's Degree. And I had a very minimal role. I was a research assistant so I was assisting the exercise physiologist and the nutritionist and whoever kind of needed me to do some help with them in this trial that we had with prostate cancer patients. And we were looking at how lifestyle influences the progression of prostate cancer so things like stress management and diet and exercise.
And I really loved that work. We would connect with 180 patients in the trial once a week; we would get to work with them for about five different hours. Five hours a day they would go to little courses every week on stress management, interpersonal relationship, communication strategies, all sorts of cool stuff. Even I was there for just about a year, it made a very big impression on me because I liked the idea of translating science into more of a lifestyle. Instead of just looking at one thing like the selenium levels and seeing the outcomes which is really important work, it was trying to create more of a comprehensive look at how people live and how that then influences outcomes.
Christopher: That's really hard though, that's a much more difficult problem to solve or prove.
Daniel: Very, very difficult. And what you can do is you can put somebody into… you can say, "Okay, we're going to have you do this lifestyle". You can measure that and try to say to degree were they able to stick with the different aspects of the lifestyle. You can measure certain outcomes or markers, surrogate markers of the outcomes. So we were looking at prostate-specific antigens, we were looking at Gleason scores, all sorts of ways that you can monitor how the disease itself is progressing.
But what is hard to do is then say "Well, it's because they exercise this amount that there was this effect", or "Because they actually ate or didn't eat that" that there was this effect. So at the end of the day, it's difficult to pinpoint if there was an effect what it came from but it's still valuable to do it.
But at the same time, my father was diagnosed with cancer himself. He didn't have prostate cancer, he had something called carcinoid syndrome which is very rare and it affects your neuro-endocrine system. But at the same time, I'm doing cancer research and my dad has cancer so like anybody would, I tried my hardest to see if he could adapt some of these things that I thought would be beneficial for him. We would sit down and we would talk and I would regale him with the information that I was learning and he would be very proud of me but he just never changed anything.
Christopher: I know
Daniel: I think parents taking advice from their children is one thing hard. We have a phenomenal relationship but it's just tense to be… It's funny when you talk with other people that are involved in health, at some point they're like "Ah, but I can't get my mom to do this!"
Christopher: Yeah, I know. My dad too.
Daniel: Exactly. Your family's the last group of people you're actually going to influence.
Christopher: I've actually just tried some really nice success with my mom who definitely has much the same genetics as me and she adapted the Autoimmune Paleo Protocol and some of the other lifestyle stuff and lost a ton of weight and is so much healthy now, but that's kind of been my only success. My dad is like much harder.
Daniel: Yeah. Well, that's good actually. Hey, even that much. I think we influence indirectly like they won't admit it but…
Christopher: Right.
Daniel: But anyway, sadly, my father passed away with cancer and it put me into a period of thinking about that bridging the gap between knowledge and action is extremely important and that it's basically behavioral science and how do you get somebody to change their life?
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I developed something called the loop model to sustain health behaviors and it is looking at all the different things that influence what we do and don't do and trying to tether those into some sort of comprehensive package that will serve as a template for somebody to be able to make change in a durable fashion. As you know this is not the loop model to change behavior; it's the loop model to sustain health behavior because the whole idea is it's not like you change it but the change becomes permanent.
And so that was basically response to the very hard real life experience my father passing away. Then I started to work with individuals to try to help with various sorts of health issues. I started to work with individuals then I did seminars and webinars and the whole idea was to try to create something that was scalable, that could help a lot of people, and that would help and benefit from the model itself.
And so somebody named my efforts "Dan's Plan" --
Christopher: Oh, that's cool.
Daniel: Yeah. And it was funny because people just started coming up and asking me about Dan's Plan.
Christopher: And do you have a name to that?
Daniel: No.
Christopher: That's awesome.
Daniel: Yeah. So it just became. And what I liked about it is it's memorable and it puts a little bit of face behind it versus some sort of technology widget.
But now it's a thriving website that people, you can go, you can sign up, and it's less of a plan -- the name kind of suggests that you're going to get this very specific thing but it's actually tools that are aimed to keep you mindful of how you're living on a day-by-day basis, for one, which is really important. So it helps you kind of engage set goals and then engage with those goals. And the whole purpose of the website is to help somebody create an effective daily health practice.
So the thesis upon which we are basing what we're trying to do to address is that modern lifestyle does not provide the right type of stimulation, there's a mismatch between how we live and health. So normal biological functioning and kind of the daily actions that we do or don't do, this pattern of living. The good thing though is that pattern of living is under our control for the most part. So with the right knowledge and tools we can have clarity about what we should be doing and we can have feedback whether we're doing it or not, and then we can also simplify a person's health practice by then saying "Here's the recipe of the day; here's the workout of the day." Just making it easier instead of having to generate this stuff yourself, you can be like "Okay, here's what I'm going to do today; here's my score how I'm doing over this last week period." And it's really helpful. I speak from experience not from like the designer of the system but now as a user of it; a guy who really enjoy checking in on a daily basis and seeing it's a system that helps me interact with my own health practice.
So, yeah. We're going to do some other cool stuff this year, generating courses about key information of health and also about some social components to leverage even more components of our knowledge about what drives behavior. But that's what I do, then I also do some research too which I'm sure we'll talk about.
Christopher: Yeah, that's great. I think I first discovered you maybe on one of Chris Kresser's earlier podcast but didn't really take action on that, didn't really go and look at Dan's Plan. But then I saw your presentation that you gave just this summer --
Daniel: Oh, you did?
Christopher: I did, yeah, I was there. And something that really struck me at that point was… So at this point we've launched a business and we're trying to make money by improving people's health and I realized at that moment that I'm not sure of what I've been doing. In fact, all of what I've been doing was really educational. It may be through the podcast or mostly on one-on-one coaching. I was telling people what you need to understand the difference between light and dark cycles and do something about these bright lights in your environment or late at night, these kinds of stuff, very specific things. But I was just telling people or trying to educate them rather than actually giving them the tools that they might need to actually do it.
So could you say something about why that's important?
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Daniel: Yeah. So in that presentation, the idea was how we use Quantified Self Technologies to get greater adaption of the Paleo movement. And really you could apply, insert any method to become more vegan, to become more anything. But that was the ancestral health community; a lot of people do that diet.
The way that health educators in that field currently try to create change is in balance towards information provisions. We're going to talk about these issues, we're going to write books on it, we're going to write blogs on it. Undoubtedly it's very important. But what happens is people are trying to squeeze blood out of a turnip with it. Information is not the only tool at our disposal to affect behavior. Some people take it a step further, they create cookbooks, they create some programs that then say how do you then turn this knowledge into practice. But then there's a gap.
On the other hand, you've got Quantified Self Technologies, things like the bits and wireless scales, et cetera. Interestingly, these two movements kind of emerged at the same time. There is the Paleo ancestral health movement and that is looking at premodern lifestyle patterns as the basis for modern day health directives and then there's Quantified Self and this is the tracking of information about your lifestyle and kind of the creation of these behavior modification systems.
So I actually saw that there was a real benefit or there was an opportunity to kind of bridge these two disparate communities that has similar objectives. So the first thing I mentioned about the Paleo is a lot of it is information providing. And then the Quantified Self is a little bit different. A lot of that is about feedback generation. So there's a researcher, Ventura, who's one of the most-sided researchers of the 20th century, who did a lot of work in the 1960s that look at how if you give people a clear goal and then feedback on their performance to attain that goal, they're much more likely to achieve it if they have that feedback. This ended up kind of generating this idea of self-efficacy -- the clearer the goal is, the more you believe that you can do it and you have some tools and techniques to support that, you're much more likely to actually achieve kind of the desired outcome.
There are also these principles of B.F. Skinner where if you kind of have a reward in response to a behavior, then you can reinforce a behavior. Let's say somebody goes for a run and then they do something rewarding after that run, that reward in response to kind of this desired behavior will reinforce the likelihood that it will happen again.
So a lot of the technologies are kind of -- if you use a FitBit, you get 10,000 steps which is a goal that's kind of built into this system, then the device will like shoot off fireworks and kind of celebrate your accomplishment.
But you now have a modification system that doesn't have a specific objective but there's this like untethered group of behaviors out there. Like "Oh, I want to sleep well" or "I want to walk enough." And then you've got this other area that's like "Oh, I'm just going to give people a lot of information for why they should do it." But the whole ancestral health movement doesn't do a great job with again, taking it a step further with behavior modification that we know works.
And then the Quantified Self is going to be -- a lot of companies in that area are very reluctant to actually tell you why you should do something because it's kind of a risk for them to put their eggs in one basket so they want to capture people of all different sorts of philosophies about health and be basically agnostic to that.
But together, the loop model, the executive summary of it is why should you do something? So I'll describe the model that I developed. "Why should you do something?" and that's kind of the persuasive argument about why it matters and then how do you it? So okay, now that I know that this is important then what does it look like over a 24-hour period of a day or 168-hour period a week? What is this idea, what are the actionable steps?
And then next is, so "Why should I do it, how do it do it, am I doing it" is now going to get feedback on some of those actionable steps to kind of engage and let myself know am I actually living in accordance with these ideals, with these goals? And then lastly, is it working?
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Why should do it, how do I do it, am I doing it and then is it working and this is more periodic feedback like blood measurement or physical performance tests or mental performance tests that let me know now that I know I'm doing this, am I getting the result that I would expect?
Christopher: Okay. So what does this mean from a practical standpoint then? Say I'm a cyclist and I'm looking to lose ten pounds to be at my race weight ready for the upcoming season. How do I get started with Dan's Plan? What do I need to do, what do I need to buy, where do I sign up, how does it work?
Daniel: So what I just described is really kind of the methodology by which you can change behavior. And the question you asked is an interesting one because I have a specific goal, how does this help me?
And really you could have a variety of different types of goals and if you think about it at the center of a lot of health goals is actually kind of a core set of actions or principles that really then can translate to "Oh, I want to be healthy; I want to perform well during the day; I want to lose weight." And you might tinker with this core set of modifiable things like sleep and physical activity or diet but a lot of it is going to stay the same. If you have weight loss as a goal, you might then make more change, physical performance or just aging well in the general health.
Generally, the idea is that we want people to come sign up, Dan's Plan is free but then if you do have some specific goals like weight loss then we have a weight loss program. This has actually been created by myself and a researcher, Dr. Stephan Guyenet, who was formally at the University of Washington doing obesity research on the aspects of kind of the energy circuitry. So weight regulation is controlled in the brain, particularly in an area called the hypothalamus and Stephan is somebody who researched that directly and then also has a blog called Whole Health Source and he writes about all things that relate to both eating and weight regulation.
Christopher: Yeah. I actually had him on the podcast just a few weeks ago. We had a rather interesting conversation. Yeah, he's a quite brilliant person and the blog is amazing.
Daniel: Yeah, he really is. I started to read his blog a few weeks before the Ancestral Health Symposium in 2011 and I introduced myself. My Master's degree is in Exercise Physiology. I worked with a professor, Michael Overton, he was looking at how leptin affects blood pressure regulation. And so leptin in the mid-90s, discovered in 1994 and so this is 1997 so it was a real new hot interesting topic and it made an impression on me.
So even though I was a Master in Exercise Physiology, I think about a year or two later that the track that I was on became a neuroscience program at Florida State. But anyway, that was something that was very interesting to me so when Stephan and I met we had a shared interest and then I said "You do a lot of this writing. I've got this program that I'm working on to help take the best knowledge that we have in the space and to help people benefit from it."
So we kind of broke the program down that I developed and said okay, let's build this back up together and both contribute to the ideas and we did that. It's called the Ideal Weight Program so that's what we have now.
Christopher: Yes, let's talk about that. Going back to my cyclist example, looking to lose weight, what do I do? so I sign up for Dan's Plan, do I need to get a FitBit or any of these quantified like self-measurement devices that I attach to my body or you can do the Ideal Weight Program without any of those things?
Daniel: You don't need one but I encourage you to get one and use it. The way that we look at physical activity is we give you a physical activity score and that score is an average of your last seven days of living. And this, by the way, relates to whether you have a goal to lose weight or maintain it or a different goal, there's a daily healthy pattern and physical activity is something that we measure.
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And so we break that down into exercise, higher-intensity physical activity, and then lower-intensity physical activity or steps -- which, by the way, we use steps as the marker of lower-intensity activity. But as things like inclinometers that measure standing time are invented, we'll probably include multiple measures into the score.
The idea though is that, years ago… As I mentioned, I have a Master's in Exercise Physiology but the hot topic now in that space is clinical inactivity physiology so looking at how not necessarily how much we exercise but how much we sit and the implications of that on our health.
So to answer your question, do you need a FitBit? No, but we really do encourage you to use one. But we also integrate with certain apps that if you download them and have them on your phone, then they use your phone like a step counter and then we can integrate data from your phone and actually use that to populate the charts, et cetera, and make you more mindful of your level of activity per day.
So that's that. And then the program itself basically says, so Dan's Plan has all these free tools but how do you use them with this goal orientation of weight loss. And for sleep and physical activity, the program provides a little more context about why they matter for weight loss. I'm a researcher as well, as I mentioned I worked with departments of Neurology and Endocrinology in the Netherlands, I work with Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and my research looks at how sleep influences vigilance or alertness and how your level of alertness will influence what you choose to eat and how much you eat. Really interesting stuff.
Not to go too much into a tangent there but over the last 10, 15 years, sleep has really emerged as one of the really critical factors for weight regulation and it wasn't a part of any calculation before. It was just how much do you eat and how much physical activity, how much energy do you expend. And we now know that sleep is actually probably an equally important component to those two. I would say that sleep and physical activity are probably of equal importance and then food is the predominant factor in your success for weight regulation.
Christopher: If you had to pin it down and put some numbers on that, what would you say is the ratio, so like 80% food or 60% food? What would you think?
Daniel: It's interesting; I've never thought of it that way. And if I had to, gun to my head, how to make a statement there… these things, you can look at them separately but they're not. You only look at them separately to kind of understand them better.
The way I think about physical activity and sleep is that they're different sides of the same coin. It's not totally accurate but it's the kind of way I perceive it. And the amount of sleep that you get is going to influence the types of foods that you choose to eat. The type of physical activity that you get is going to have an influence on the state of inflammation that's happening in the brain. If you exercise more, you get a way -- at least a certain amount. It's not "the more the better" but up to a certain amount, you can actually get away with having a poor diet for a period of time.
Christopher: Okay. I guess what I was getting at, people always focus more on the exercise part if their goal is weight loss. Like "If I could just go out and do another hour tomorrow, I think I can lose another pound this week" or something. I'm just wondering if you sat there knowing that this is not useful because actually 80% of the outcome is determined by diet and maybe a 10% by sleep. And so really you're trying to manipulate the big picture using only 10% of the equation if that makes sense.
Daniel: Yeah, it does. You're not using the most powerful lever.
I think it's a really difficult question to answer but I think just to get somebody to think about it, I'd say 70% of the effect is probably going to happen via what you eat. Some people will have more success just with exercise. Sleep has more of a longer term, more subtle impact. Fewer people are going to be like "Oh, I started to sleep a lot better and then I lost all this weight." It's more of a moderator of the effect.
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So in the Ideal Weight Program I put together, actually I have a little video describing it. But if you think about what are the main reasons why we gain fat in the first place? And it's simple as it sounds, because we overeat. Overeating doesn't mean necessarily we're gorging ourselves. What it means is that we're taking in more calories than our body eats. It's an energy surplus. There are a lot of reasons for that but from a food perspective, there are basically three primary drivers of that. We're eating more processed foods. What seems to be the case with processed foods is that it's easy to take in more calories before you're full.
So what that means is that if you're eating a bowl of oatmeal versus four saltine crackers, it's actually an equivalent amount of calories but the bowl of oatmeal is going to have you feel much, much more full than four crackers. So there's a satiety aspect which just the processed foods don't offer the same degree of satiety signals that whole foods do and if you eat a lot of them, it's easier to take in more calories before you're full. The natural pattern of eating is to eat until you're full and then you stop. You kind of lose motivation to eat more and then that feeling lasts for a certain amount of time and the motivation to eat builds back up. That's basically the natural pattern.
Well if you maintain that natural pattern with a high proportion of processed foods, then it's likely that you're going to take in 120, 150 more calories per meal before you reach fullness. And if you do that multiple times a day, then you're taking in multiple hundred calories more than you need to. So that's one aspect.
And then highly-palatable foods which also tend to be highly-processed foods but you can differentiate them and these are things like desserts, et cetera. This will make you eat more calories after you're full. So highly-processed foods make you take in more calories before you're full and highly-palatable foods make you take in more calories after you're full. The experience here is that you're really full, at a dinner you eat a big dinner and then you're stuffed and then the dessert cart comes by and you have this renewed motivation to continue to eat. And because you're not eating to satisfy hunger because you don't have any hunger, you're eating actually to kind of derive pleasure and these foods will elicit kind of a neurochemical state in the brain that will kind of reinforce eating calories even in the absence of hunger.
Christopher: Right. So one thing I was interested in was what food that you're recommending people eat, right? So the Ideal Weight Program is not technically a Paleo diet. There are two diets that you described -- the flash diet and the simple food diet. But am I right in thinking that neither of those are Paleo?
Daniel: Yeah. It's funny; I think that our diets are a lot more Paleo than a lot of Paleo diets that are out there. So what makes a Paleo diet Paleo is the exclusion of grains, legumes, and dairy -- that's what it's kind of been…
Christopher: So it's only about the ingredients.
Daniel: It's only about the ingredients but you can have your Paleo donuts and things like that.
While I'm very interested in the research on Paleolithic diets, there's a difference between what the diet that's researched and the diet in practice and what's become popularized. There's not just enough research on the diet itself but the diet, the research that is out there seems very favorable -- very, very favorable.
And so I'm really encouraged to see more research on the subject. I think if anybody adapts a Paleo diet now, what I look at it is what is the risk of excluding grains, legumes and dairy? And the risk is that you're excluding things that can serve as healthy things in your diet. So that's the risk but it's also not excluding anything that's fundamental to your health so you can probably do okay. And I think that the diet itself serves more as a heuristic that helps people make right choices versus the story, the narrative about why Paleo is interesting and good is appealing to a lot of folks and then it just helps them eat more whole foods and that's great. But the research on excluding for example, legumes, there's a lot of research that suggests legumes are very good for you. So we do include them, beans and lentils, things like that.
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So kind of the primary emphasis of our diet is to look at what foods offer the greatest amount of fullness per calorie. Now let's construct a diet out of those types of food and prepare them in the right way and then the whole idea is for you to then eat in a normal pattern. You're eating satisfying foods and so you're no longer hungry. And by doing that, because you're getting a lot of fullness per calorie, you eat less calories more naturally.
Christopher: Okay. So it's less about "Oh, you shouldn't eat this, you should eat that" -- it's more about avoiding the highly-palatable foods and keeping things simple.
Daniel: You do want to avoid some of the real highly-palatable foods but it's focusing you on a higher protein diet because protein offers a higher degree of satiety out of the different macronutrient classes, carbs and fats. And it also seems a longer-term impact on the energy balance system in the hypothalamus. Whatever reason that is, protein it has… one way to phrase it is it might tell the body I know you're trying to regulate body fat like a thermostat regulates temperature within a home. The system is then designed to kind of react to deviations from that set point. If it gets too cold in the house, it initiates the heater; if it ever gets too warm, it initiates the air conditioning.
Similarly, the brain orchestrates body fat regulation in a similar way. So there is a program that will enact to increase calorie intake and decrease calorie expenditure kind of a fat increase program and then there's a fat decrease program. And this balance is orchestrated in the hypothalamus amongst the variety of different cell groups but primarily in something called the arcuate nucleus. For one reason or another, protein seems to have an influence by telling that the brain to lower that set point. A lot of the common experience with people is that they gain body fat and they have a hard time losing it because when they do, the body tries to drive that weight right back up.
We're going to try to say how do we get the body to feel comfortable at a reduced body fat level and that's part of the diet as well. So constructing it off of those principles -- high satiety and aiming to lower that set point.
Christopher: Tell me about how much protein? This is something that's interested me a lot lately. So say if you've got someone that weighs 150 pounds and is fairly active, how much protein would they be eating on the Ideal Weight Program?
Daniel: It's diminishing returns to go over a certain amount of protein. We have a calculation for protein units in the program. So when you sign up for Dan's Plan, it collects information about your height, weight, some other factors and then it spits out a daily protein unit. And the units are designed to be really simple to [0:33:46] [Indiscernible] -- so one unit is one ounce of protein. And there's a reason why we just went with units versus grams just because several grams of like for example, lentils, is going to be different than meat.
Christopher: Did you say that right? So once unit is one ounce of meat, right, not one ounce of protein. Is that correct?
Daniel: Right, yeah. We think of protein as steak but steak has a higher percentage of protein but there's fats, there's even carbohydrates in it. So it does the calculation for you and then says, "Okay, here's your daily protein unit" and then you construct meals around that are appropriate for your size.
Christopher: Okay. Can you give me a rough ballpark then? I'm just really curious about exactly how much protein -- it's something I've toyed with…
So I've been eating a ketogenic diet for the last year or so and so I find this to be a really crucial part of the equation. Like if I eat too much glucose, it seems to raise my blood glucose although there's some debate over that. I'm kind of almost wondering about protein, like exactly how much.
[0:34:54]
Daniel: I actually can't do the calculation in my head, it's kind of these charts that we developed and discussed. But it's about 30% of your total calorie intake but it depends on the flash diet or the simple food diet.
Now a ketogenic diet, there isn't one protein level that is going to necessarily be right for every occasion. Ketogenic diets do aim to lower protein intake because the whole goal of the ketogenic diet is to be in a state where you produce ketones which are modified fatty acids which there's a lot of reasons that are offered for why this is beneficial similar to the Paleo diet. There is some really interesting research that shows that these ketones might have a favorable effect on our hypothalamus to actually lower the set point.
Christopher: Oh, interesting.
Daniel: And that's why I think some of the benefits come from -- or maybe all of the benefits, in fact.
In that case, people know more about the subject than I do but the aim is to eat I think around 15% or lower of protein because when you eat more than that in the absence of adequate carbohydrates in the diet, the body starts to take protein and undergoes a process called gluconeogenesis or new glucose formation. So it turns proteins into carbohydrates and then the carbohydrates suppress the production of ketones. And when you're in a sort of a diet and you're not producing enough ketones, you can feel really terrible.
So it's a different context. Because our diet uses a higher percentage of protein doesn't mean that one is better than the other. It's just in the application of the strategy that we've developed; this is a validated level of protein intake that offers this higher satiety.
Christopher: Okay. And then tell me about the flash diet then. What's it for and what does it consist of?
Daniel: To do that, I'll just do kind of a quick summary of the simple food diet. That's really what I just described and that's the cardinal diet of the program. It is a diet that is constructed on whole foods that offer a greater degree of fullness per calorie that is fairly high in protein and also for satiety and also to address set point issues. And so the goal is to actually help create a healthy gut flora which is the bacteria that are in our intestinal tract that we're now seeing some major connections between the quality of our intestinal microbiota and kind of metabolic energy regulation in our body.
So the diet is high fiber, it's… Investigation is still ongoing even though there are now a lot of connections that show that these changes in our microbiota seem to influence both positively and negatively things like energy regulation and metabolism, how much you can change that through diet is also under investigation but we want to provide our intestinal microbiota with kind of the healthiest environment that we can promote.
Additionally, there's something called leptin resistance and leptin -- I know this is a long-winded answer but I think it's important. Leptin is released from fat tissue; it's a hormone. So we now know that fat is not just this inert substance that keeps our body warm and provides energy substrates but it is also an exocrine gland; it releases hormones. And one of those hormones is called leptin and leptin will travel to the brain and it is the signal that tells the brain how much body fat we're carrying.
And so leptin resistance, you can imagine, is where the amount of that signal in the blood is not reaching kind of the receiver of that signal. And that's problematic, right? So the body is orchestrating its responses to the amount of body fat that is contained and it's not getting that signal. Then what happens is it promotes a state where the body wants to continue to overeat. So what causes leptin resistance, well it seems to be inflammation occurring within the hypothalamus. And so if you can try to limit inflammation, then that should have a positive effect.
[0:39:58]
Again, this is an area that we can't say hey, we lower the set point but anybody that successfully loses weight and is able to comfortably sustain it if they maintain good health practice, like they're getting good enough sleep and continue to eat well and they get enough physical activity, they're probably experiencing a lowered set point. Their body now feels comfortable around that new weight. Anybody who loses 50, 60 pounds and they're miserable until their body is back to where it started, 50, 60 pounds heavier again, then they probably did not lower that set point when they lost weight.
And so weight loss without lowering the set point might just be futile. There's a huge degree of weight recidivism which means weight regain after weight loss. Some people have estimated it's more than 90% of people that lose weight. And so I think all efforts for weight loss should try to get the circuitry that's regulating this as healthy as they can. So that us a big emphasis of the simple food diet as well.
Christopher: Okay.
Daniel: So then the flash diet is a whole food protein-sparing modified fast. Now that is a type of diet that's been tested in all literature that has had great results. And you have a very high percentage of protein and you're basically eating all the protein that your body would if you were eating a higher-protein normal calorie diet but then you really or significantly restrict carbohydrates and fat and so it's mostly just protein.
And a lot of medically-assisted weight loss programs that use packaged foods will leverage this dietary technique and have really great results. It's an excellent tool to shave fat off of the body but it also doesn't necessarily teach somebody how to eat. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.
There's not enough of luxury to forsake ideas that are effective because this is such an area of need so we need to look at all of them. But we decided to include this as well because some people we know will benefit from more rapid weight loss because it will provide that experience that "Hey, this is working" and that can provide enough motivation to then stick with something.
Christopher: Right.
Daniel: Where the simple food diet I think is very, very close to a diet that you can then stick with forever. You can probably relax. Include newer food groups once you achieve your ideal weight but it's the type of diet where you might lose 35, 40 pounds over eight months. It's not a huge amount on a week-by-week basis but it's significant long-term and it's also the type -- would you rather lose 15 pounds or 20 pounds in 2 months and by 4 months you're back to where you started or you rather be 40 pounds lower than you are now at 8 months? It's a slower loss but it's a more permanent gain.
This is I think, when people experience weight loss with Paleo -- one of the reasons why the Paleo diet is effective is because when done right, it includes a lot of high satiety foods and it's also a fairly protein-rich diet. And our diet is similar to that but it's based off of different principles and therefore it includes and excludes different types of foods. But also one of the reasons why some people have this spontaneous weight loss when they try it, they're like "Oh, I lost 80 pounds last year and a half and not even trying" and that's because the Paleo diet when done well incorporates a lot of these principles but it's still not optimized and that's why we developed the simple food diet.
Christopher: Okay. So it still whole food sources of protein? It's not like whey protein in a shake that's a meal replacement or anything like that?
Daniel: It's entirely whole foods, yeah.
Now I think that there can be a place for protein shakes and things like that but I also don't think that they're necessary at all. It just become -- we try to productize just about everything in this world and so if protein is good for you then we're going to create protein juice and protein shakes and protein bars. And then it becomes more about this kind of surrogate versus something that's really direct and because you're emphasizing protein but it's not a whole food source, you might be missing other aspects of diet designed around a whole food meal.
[0:45:02]
And so we really try to then get people to focus on the things that are -- one thing I mentioned about the protein-sparing modified fast is that it's an effective tool to cut body fat but then you have to learn to eat some active fat and that's okay. The simple food diet is I think very close to a diet that you can sustain forever meaning that it looks to lose weight is very similar to the weight loss program called the Lean Maintenance Program that we created for kind of permanent weight maintenance.
Christopher: Okay. So tell me how's this been working in practice? How many people have signed up and what kind of results have you been getting?
Daniel: To answer that question well, I would really need to look at the data and do a kind of a non-biased assessment of it and we've not done that yet. I think the typical response for a creator of a program is "Oh, it's incredible. We get reports of people saying that this is the best diet they've ever tried" and I do. But we also get people that say "I want a refund", often times they didn't really try it.
Christopher: Yeah. You weren't doing it. The reason the program didn't work is because you weren't doing the program.
Daniel: Yeah. We offer a 30-day money back guarantee because we don't want anybody to try the diet and then feel like -- or just somehow sign up and then feel like "Oh, I spent this money and now I don't want to buy it. It's just not for me" for whatever reason.
We really want people to do it and you have to understand the diet really well before you feel especially motivated to necessarily try it. I want people to do it well. We want to just offer that so they felt like lower risk for people to get in there, get their hands dirty and see if they can do it. And like I said, I get people writing in on a daily basis that sing our praises but there's also people that said they weren't able to do it for one reason or another.
And so I don't have an objective answer to that question which I plan to do. And it'd probably take a little bit of time but I'm working with the group that I work with in the Netherlands as people come into the clinic that either would benefit from losing weight or have the desire to do so, they're putting them on to this diet and we're collecting data on that. And then we're going to apply statistical formulation to see hey, is there a significance here between --are they losing weight?
Yeah. To answer that question well, I'm not prepared to do that because I don't have the answer but I think it's of course really important to be able to provide a definitive, kind of to say "Hey, this is the data that we have and this is what we see."
Christopher: Yeah. I mean this is kind of the question everybody is going to be asking. I'm not exactly sure how useful it is in the same way that it's not particularly useful to know what the average shoe size. It's like what does really tell me, I don't know how it applies to me exactly. But what types of people have been signing up?
So I'll tell you the type of people that we've been working with and they're quite specific so…. I've talked on Robb Wolf's podcast and Ben Greenfield and so I've ended up working with people that have been doing the Paleo diet usually for over a year, sometimes much longer than I've been doing it so like five years or something. And they got to a point where they got stuck and we've done some lab testing on them and it's revealed some things that are probably holding them back and they usually turn out to be right.
But I think there's people who are quite special and I'm just wondering are you getting lots of people that are already eating the Paleo diet or are they just completely like grab a guy off the street near the local shopping mall type people?
Daniel: It's a mixture. A lot of people come to Dan's Plan because they hear me talk about sleep in my sleep research so that's their first introduction. Also people come and use the site because they're interested in extending the value of their FitBit or their Jawbone or one of the devices that they use. They're just interested in tracking in the first place. So that's a whole different world.
Then we have people that come to that site that are very specifically interested in weight loss and they hear us talk about, other staff or myself talk about weight loss specifically and they haven't really tried Paleo. So we do have a lot of roads back to the site and we haven't done any surveying of who the people are yet but we intend to. And so it's hard to say, so the information that we have which is the last time I did this it was a couple of months ago so it's a lot of data but it's men versus women, things like that, average age and typically the average age is around 35 to 45 and we have a fairly decent split between men and women. It's like 60-40 men versus women who are doing it.
[0:50:23]
Christopher: Interesting.
Daniel: Yeah.
Christopher: That's great. I'm quite excited about it. I just signed up for Dan's Plan and I think you're faster. I was a bit slow and I think I am going to --
The real problem for me is as a cyclist is just moving enough. So I spend a bunch of time on a computer and then a bunch of time on a bicycle and neither of those things are really working. I know from talking to Katy Bowman who was on the show just before you, I know that walking is important. So I really would like to walk more and yeah, I think this could be a really useful tool to help me achieve that. So I will be into it.
Do you think it's like a good idea even if I don't really have a weight loss goal to be on the Ideal Weight Program? Do you think I'm going to stand a better chance of staying at my ideal weight?
Daniel: Well, the Lean Maintenance Program is what I do now and a lot of the orientation of the program is about factors that influence body fat. So let's say you kind of have an interest in the science and you have an interest on basically staying in a certain weight, even at the weight that you're at now, forever. There certainly are some things you can benefit from. I have. I lost 35 pounds in 2007. I was an obese kid and my weight has kind of fluctuated my whole life until I basically adopted this set of rules that are really fundamental to the Ideal Weight Program.
Christopher: Oh, you should have said that at the beginning. I don't care about all these Department of Neurology and Endocrinology stuff. Just tell me how much weight you lost and how you did it and I'm in.
Daniel: Right, yeah. That ends up being, it kind of like the armchair quarterback or the Ivory Tower, "Have you ever tried this?" It's one of the reasons that I feel really good about endorsing it, and it's not too complicated. There's actually one other thing that I want to bring up but I'll finish my thought. The fact that I lost 35 pounds is really not that remarkable; a lot of people have lost more than that. The fact that I've sustained it now for seven years is. That actually is less usual.
I'm writing an article about my year in review now, I'll probably publish it the next couple of days so it will probably be out by the time this podcast is published. And I'm looking at what has basically been my daily health pattern? And I use my FitBit to measure steps and sleep and I have an exercise tracker that is separate from the steps and it is looking at the amount of physical activity that you maintain over a seven-day period and it's comparing that to the Department of Health and Human Services weekly exercise recommendations.
So it's saying, okay, over the last seven days are you basically within this healthy zone? And that is extremely reinforcing for me because I look at the scores, and "My God, I've been doing the lectures today, I'm kind of falling shy here." And so that's actually what I check in on most at Dan's Plan. My weight has now been -- you'll see in the publication, I show what my weight graph looks like for the last year and it oscillates every day and there's some kind of within year fluctuations but basically it's the same thing. If you draw a trajectory line, it's the exact same weight.
Anyway, I think that is remarkable and I feel like a lot of people, losing weight is one problem but sustaining it is another. And even if I've lost weight in my past because there are times when I gain 20 pounds and I lost it again, I always felt like I was just on the verge of regaining that all over again. It felt like it was a struggle. Now I describe it is it's more effortless, like I'm not surprised that my weight is what it is. It's just staying even and that's because the pattern of activity that I maintain and the food that I eat makes it almost effortless but it's not effortless. It feels stable and I don't feel kind of deprived or that I'm like struggling but at the same time I have to do these things that are part of the efficaciousness of my weight maintenance and there's the part of my life now so I do it easily.
Christopher: That's awesome, congratulations!
Daniel: Oh, thank you!
The thought that I kind of wanted to bring up actually that was in my mind is that one thing that we get from people, so a couple of people that have asked for a refund say "We know there is nothing new here." And these people tend to be folks on the internet that read a lot, that they are familiar with the drivers of palatability and food intake, satiety -- they have more than average interest in the subject matter, they read a lot. And I always want to reply to them and say "Okay, so are you looking for new or are you looking for effective?"
[0:55:29]
Because I think what happens is we get really turned on by this new idea and I understand that. We have novelty-seeking mechanisms in our brain that just kind of motivate us when there's like this renewal of like "Oh, this could be it! This could be the solution!" But I call that silver bulleting. You're looking for something that explains, "Oh, that's why! It was gluten. Gluten is the reason." Meanwhile you're missing half-an-hour sleep per night and you are eating other foods that are not good for you and you are not walking enough. And so a lot of what we do is focus on the mundane but meaningful.
Christopher: Right. It's interesting that you say that. Sorry to interrupt you but we do that actually. I get it all the time. We do some GI testing and we quite often find kind of low-grade smoldering infections so to give you an example C-diff is one I see sometimes. It's quite a serious infection and it can definitely mess with you. We talked about the microbiome and how that can affect your weight and people look at that and they're like "Oh, that's what it was. It was the C-diff all along."
I don't think that's true. It's like they were doing something, like they were engaging in some practices that were not healthy and at that point they became an excellent host for a C-diff infection. And so focusing just on the infection is not good enough. It's not going to stop it from happening again.
Daniel: I totally agree. Now sometimes this is not to say that people cannot benefit from -- some people that have sensitivity to gluten or that are fighting from an infection. It's not that nothing else matters but even in the event that there's other factors that influence you, none of those replace the need for you to maintain the fundamentals.
Christopher: Right, it's prerequisite.
Daniel: It's prerequisite. It's so easy to -- not only is it prerequisite but it actually, like you said, not doing the fundamentals might then lead to a condition where you are more reactive to gluten or you have now created an environment for C-diff to actually take root and have more impact on your health.
For example with sleep; we didn't even really talk about that and that's a whole other conversation. But these things are, I call them the mundane but meaningful because they're easy to overlook and the problem is like right under our nose. The solution isn't a rare herb from the South American rainforest, you know.
Christopher: Although it might get rid of the C-diff.
Daniel: Maybe, probably.
So that's why what I would love for people to do is to say, "Okay. I'm going to use Dan's Plan and I'm going to get feedback on all -- I'm going to walk enough, I'm going to get enough physical activity and I'm going to maintain good sleep, both timing and duration, and I'm going to march my weight. I'm going to have really objective insight to the fundamentals of my health practice. And then I want to explore some other aspects -- do I feel better on a gluten-free diet, do I feel better on X, Y, and z?" That is complementary to the fundamentals but it's never in replace of them.
Christopher: That's awesome. So where do you go to find you? dansplan.com is the place to get started?
Daniel: Yeah! Anybody can sign up for free. I wanted to provide a lot of value for free and my personal objective and purpose is to try to create high-value low-cost tools that affect health of an individual.
You can probably glean from the conversation, I'm not trying to create this like random patchwork of things but there's a philosophy that's being enacted here. and over the course of this year, I'm going to be developing courses that are going to talk about different aspects of health whether it's anything from deadlift form to Vitamin D levels -- all these things that are interesting that do influence how healthy we are but then also teach it in a way where it's not just about infotainment but it's about knowledge acquisition of the most important prioritized list of things that you should know in order for them to be actionable for you to benefit from them.
[1:00:07]
Christopher: That's brilliant. And we're going to have to get you back on. There are so many other things like all the stuff -- I'm reading your bio here. Like Dan works with the Naval Warfare Elite Fighters. He's a Division 1 Strength and Conditioning Coach. This is the guy I need to get back on and talk about some other things. Of course we didn't even touch on the sleep and the photo period and all that kind of stuff. So it would be wonderful if you would come back on.
Daniel: I'd love that. It has been a pleasure. I hope I didn't talk your ear off, Chris. I really enjoyed it.
Christopher: No, no, I loved it. This is what I do. I get experts on and I mop up all this information and I try and repackage it and sell it as my own and so far we could get great results that way. So yeah, I'm grateful for it. Thank you.
Daniel: Yeah, of course. It's really nice. Part of this mission is to get good information to people that are interested in this stuff. I think oftentimes the dialogue is that "Oh! People are lazy and stupid and fat and they don't care." And I'm like, I don't buy into that at all. There are many, many people that the sense of self-preservation is strong within them and they want good information that they can believe in so that they can basically take control of their own health. And so that's my audience. And yours, too, I can hear it. And so, anytime.
Christopher: Brilliant. Thanks very much. I'll speak to you soon. Bye-bye.
Daniel: Okay. Bye-bye.
[1:01:25] End of Audio
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