Written by Christopher Kelly
Dec. 31, 2015
[0:00:00]
Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive Podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly and today I'm joined by Jason Seib. Hi, Jason.
Jason: Hey, how are you?
Christopher: I'm very excited. That's how I am. How are you?
Jason: Awesome. I'm very excited as well. This is going to be fun.
Christopher: Yeah. So, Jason is someone who I respect very much. He's a strength and conditioning coach. He is an author. He is a podcaster. He's one of the original podcast I've always listened to and I very much respected his philosophical viewpoint and if I'm honest, Jason, I think I might have stolen some of your stuff and I'm trying to make a living practicing it.
Jason: That's great.
Christopher: Not really so much. We're going to talk about AltShift, which is new diet that Jason has been working on but really more the stuff that was in the Fat Loss Directive. Is the Fat Loss Directive still available as an ebook?
Jason: Yes. It's totally free. Yeah, anybody that wants it can just go to 30kview.com. That's my blog. There's a little signup tab at the top. All we ask in exchange is your email address and then I send emails out seriously like twice a month. If you feel like that's too much you can go ahead and unsubscribe and you have the book for free.
Christopher: Basically, if you want to know what I'm practicing, most of it is in the Fat Loss Directive and, yeah, thank you so much for writing that. It's been extremely helpful to me.
Jason: Excellent.
Christopher: Something else I love about you is you remind me a bit of Vinnie Tortorich. You're a personal trainer. You lay your hands on people. You're expected to get results and you do get results. You see people in person in your gyms. And if what you were saying didn't work then you'd be found out pretty quick. You're not just selling ebooks without ever practicing in person. Yeah, it's a different situation.
Jason: For sure, yeah. I'm in the trenches. And I've always said I'd stay there. I mean, I train less than I used to and I imagine Vinnie probably does too. We're at places in our careers where we can be fairly selective and not -- I'm never selective by what a person needs but I am sometimes selective by, I mean, if I'm going to -- I've got a gym full of trainers that are dying to make money and if I'm going to be training people I like to train people that I can be friends with and have a good time within in an hour regardless of where they start, if they have 300 pounds to lose or they're almost ripped already. That really doesn't matter as much. But yeah, we're in there getting it done each day, trying to help people change their bodies and their lives.
Christopher: That's awesome. Maybe we should start by defining what the AltShift diet is. Why was the Fat Loss Directive not enough?
Jason: Well, I guess, the best way I can explain this is to just go back to the beginning. So I'm probably going to end up answering your first question first before I get to your second one. I had reached a point in my career where I was absolutely confident that I could get anybody fit and healthy if I could have them right in front of me and if they had the mental fortitude to put up with the constant changes I was going to put them through.
And so what I mean is somebody could come into my gym and work with me directly and I could actually see them move and look at their food logs and regularly talk to them and give them my little sound bites on a regular basis so that we're slowly changing their psychology and their perspective on this stuff because that's all a huge part of it. But what it would require from them is the ability for me to be able to completely and radically change what I'm asking of them nutritionally on a fairly regular basis as they would adapt.
So I would apply something like basic paleo when somebody walks in the door. Like what you typically see in the Fat Loss Directive. And that usually produces some fat loss and then people adapt very quickly. And then we could go to something that looks a low carb diet or carb cycling and that would produce some more results and then they would adapt usually within a couple of months.
And so we'd set up this cycle where people were regularly adapting because our bodies are amazing. They adapt to virtually anything we throw at them. Anything that doesn't kill us makes us stronger and that's very, very true when it comes to the adaptations that our bodies go through anyway. So what I had was something that wasn't duplicatable. It was something that I could write in a book the way I had it all laid out for a really long time. I just couldn't.
[0:04:59]
I was not able to create more of me. I mean, my trainers were good and close but none of them were quite able to do everything that I was doing and I certainly couldn't put it in a book. And I was getting frustrated. There were these questions, these long standing questions that AltShift is based on that had been bugging me for a long time. And there are things like why is it that virtually any diet produces results for a little while?
You doing basically what's in the Fat Loss Directive, you and I could go to vegan diet tomorrow and as long as we didn't stay on that diet long enough to have the deleterious effects from what we're missing in that diet, if it was just something like a week or two weeks, not only would we probably lose some fat, it might also actually be good for us. As long as we didn't stay there that long. And then you could go out and you could find research on fat loss diets that have produced great results that were low fat and then fat loss diets that were in the research that were low carbs.
Everything seems to work for a while and the long term data on virtually anything always seems to peter out to some degree and then you have to factor in, okay, well, when you get good results upfront and then your body adapts and the results start to come really slow, if they don't completely stop, now you've got the psychology to deal with. Is this something that somebody could even stick to? So there's all these factors. And then I had some jokes that I would make like one particular joke that I would make in my seminars where I would say, point to some guy in the front row and I'd go, "This guy here, let's say we're all a tribe and he brings down a hippo."
We're not all sitting around trying to figure out what the vegetable and wine pairing is with hippo. We're just eating hippo until it's gone. And then when that's gone or too rotten to eat then let's say this particular specie of berry comes into season like what happens for the Hadza in Tanzania. One time of the year they had this one berry and it becomes ripe and they eat a ton of this berry and for days on end it's exclusively that berry until things like palate fatigue starts to set in and they want other foods.
But thinking about this, it made me think about how we eat today and one of the things, one of the reasons that came to me, I was sitting over an omelet that had nine ingredients in it and I'm just going we're not going to change this but this isn't natural. This isn't natural to be able to eat so many various macronutrients or not even be able to eat them but to want to eat so many various macronutrients, hitting all three macronutrients in large doses in one meal if we want. That's just not how we would have, I mean, by my logic, how we would have done it nature.
We're all operating by optimum foraging strategy. You've got a bigger animal to eat. You're not trying to figure out where you're going to get some starch for a side dish. And then the starch will keep. So when somebody spear misses tomorrow that's what we're going to eat. And so I started thinking about this daily template that we do and why is it that so many diets are how many carbs, fats, proteins and calories do you eat per day? And that's not logical. Nobody could have eaten like that throughout the course of our history.
And so I started thinking a bit about like which macronutrients we eat together and how they make sense. And right around that time when all of these things were really starting to bug me, like it was the stars aligned. And my wife who had been eating paleo with me for seven years at that time probably getting close to eight years -- We had three little girls in three years and seven months. It just made it really difficult for her to be able to work out, for her to get to the gym despite the fact that I own a gym and it wasn't like there was a lot of time in my day for me to take the girls from her and her to be able to run off and go work out.
And so she could really only come to the gym when there was nobody else in there and we didn't have to worry about my littlest girl running out into the floor underneath somebody's kettebell or barbell. Finally things got easier for Sheryl and she really wanted to get focused. I had this perfect test subject living right in my house with me right at the time that I was really irritated with the fact that I had become great at my career but I couldn't duplicate it very well. And all these questions were bothering me. It was like all of the stars aligned. I started toying with cycling, carbs, fats and calories in Sheryl.
[0:09:59]
And the gist of it is AltShift. It runs in two shifts, a five-shift and a three-shift we call them. And through those shifts, we cycle carbs and fats and calories in a fairly unique way that to me and apparently to our biochemistry, bio results appears to do a good job of mimicking something in a pattern form that could have happened by accident to our hunter gatherer ancestors. And Sheryl lost after all that time, we finally hit on AltShift and she lost five inches in her waist in just six weeks.
And I started testing it on 16 other people in the gym and some of them had been with me a long time, some had been working out really hard, a few people that couldn't work out at that time. We ended up with a test group of a total of 24 people and the results were just phenomenal. People were just freaking out when talking about how easy it was for them to stick to and how they weren't having cravings and weird things were happening like women's cycles were normalizing and migraines were going away and all that stuff.
And a lot of these people were -- I tried to get a lot of different people but a lot of them were already a fairly standard paleo diet or eating by like the Fat Loss Directive lays out. And we still saw those results. And so I knew I needed to write the book. We got the book out and it's been like a revolution. It's just been unbelievable. Did I answer your answer or did I ramble off?
Christopher: You did. It was a terrible rambling question and a fantastic answer. No, that's exactly what I wanted to know. Yeah, I'm wondering. So what have you been tracking with the test group? Was it just pictures or body? Because I know that you have some great philosophical viewpoints on the effect that your body has on the ground due to gravity and all that kind of stuff. So what were you tracking?
Jason: Yeah, I'm very against people weighing themselves without doing circumference measurements. I mean, that's one of the big stands I've taken in my career, is if you get on a scale and you don't also do also circumference measurements, you are not only wasting your time but you're probably giving totally false information and maybe even frustrated. What I just mentioned a second ago that Sheryl lost five inches in her waist. That was six pounds on the scale.
So like I say in the book, what if I told you I had diet that could take six pounds off of you in six weeks? You'd be like, who cares? But what if I told you I could take five inches off your waist in six weeks? You'd be like, "Where do I sign?" Then I'd tell you that that's in the exact same person. And we are seeing this over and over and over again in the test group. We're seeing people going, "Oh no, I'm down or I'm up a pound on the scale." We're like, "What did your measurements do?" "Oh, I didn't measure. I'll be back." And they go measure and they're like, "I'm down an inch."
So they're calling it voodoo and witchcraft and most of those people are coming from someplace like Weight Watchers and some place where they've been taught that the scale is what tells you whether or not you're attractive. And so we're really trying to break that. But now we've got so much proof in the AltShift Facebook group and through the test group and everything. But back to your question, we did, I did weigh and measure everybody myself in the test group and I got everybody mostly every eight days. AltShift is an eight-day cycle.
I was trying to measure them at the same place in that cycle to the best of my ability. Sometimes it would be a day off of that because I couldn't see everybody every single day of the week. So it wasn't like they would always fall in a day that we would be together but we always did circumference measurements and we always did weight. And the circumference measurements across the board for everybody were always the most impressive. So people were losing inches where they were not losing as much weight and that's why I just had to be adamant that people measure themselves.
Because what that's really saying is that not only are we preserving muscle mass but sometimes in people that weren't even working out I'm just positive that they put back on some muscle mass that may have emaciated off of them through starvation diets and things like that. So people that were doing something like Weight Watchers and Counting Calories and they're losing weight, they're not losing fat, they're losing weight.
So some of that is fat but some of it is also muscle mass. And then you give a body what it needs to be healthy, it doesn't really matter if you're working out. If you're below a level of muscle mass that your body would rather have at this particular point, even if you're not lifting weights, it's going to pull a little bit of that back on. But that makes it a really remarkable diet. I mean, it's kind of always been a standard that if you could take 15 pounds a fat off of somebody and they only lose a couple of pounds of muscle, you've got a pretty dang good diet.
[0:15:00]
But if you can take 15 pounds of fat off of somebody and they don't lose any muscle, you've got an amazing diet. If you take 15 pounds off fat off of somebody while you put muscle on them especially if they're not a beginner and in the gym, you have got something that is astonishing. And I think that's what we have here.
Christopher: Sure. Let me explain this, a phenomenon in mountain biking that we call new bike syndrome. So you get a new bicycle and you go out in the trails and you have the best ride of your life. And it's just because you're so excited about the new bike. This thing is amazing. And then you look at your power numbers afterwards, of at least if you're a geek like me, I do, then you see these incredible improvements. And I'm wondering whether that's what happened too. You give these people that you've known for a while that had been eating the paleo diet, lifting weights according to your programs and you give them this new motivation, this new excitement and suddenly they start doing everything just a little bit more carefully and maybe that's where some of the results are coming from.
Jason: Certainly. There's no question that we have to consider that, that we have to consider the fact that they come in with new hope and the psychology behind that says that even that can be enough to produce a placebo effect. But the gist is that everybody in the test group is still moving in that direction and all of those people are around, I think, around the sixth-month mark and Sheryl is around the ten-month mark or something like that. I'd have to go back and look. Everybody is still moving.
Now certainly, people slow down. Cheryl went from a size 18 to an eight. That's my wife. She went from a size 18 to an eight. And obviously, she's not getting five-inch jumps in her waist in six weeks anymore because she doesn't have it to lose. So we're really only measuring Sheryl now about once a month. She looks at her clothes and she's like, "Hey, I think I made more progress." And we'll take another look at it.
So, yeah, that is certainly a factor and that is going to be a factor in any diet. There will be people that will come to AltShift that will get results and then once it's not exciting the results will stop or they'll start slipping away from the guidelines and that's when you have to go tell people, "Look, you got to go back once in a while and weight and measure your food." Not all the time. I don't want anybody like freaking out and being neurotic about weighing and measuring their food.
But once in a while you got to go back. Because everybody slips. Everybody, especially the women, will tend to -- One of the facets of AltShift is really, really a big factor is increasing the calories especially in the five shift. And so we have women saying this doesn't make any sense. I'm eating more than I've ever eaten in my entire life and I'm losing fat. What the heck is going on? But it's very crucial in that shift that calories are up and sometimes people will after just one or two cycles through they'll stop, they'll already get complacent about it and they'll stop getting those occasional snapshots and then they go back and look and they're not really hitting the guidelines anymore.
Yeah, you're right. You get on that new bike and it's super exciting and you go tearing up because you just couldn't wait to get that bike run trails. I mean, you bought it and you just want to be teleported from the bike show room out to the trails instantly so excitement is just building and you're fired up. We had everybody looking at Sheryl's results this whole time and they were just fired up. I think we are seeing people that are coming to the table. Their last ditch effort, skeptical.
They're saying, "I just didn't take -- I saw this working for everybody else. I thought I'd try it. I didn't think it was going to work for me. It is working. I'm excited." We're seeing people that are coming in kind of after the initial hype where they weren't there for all of everybody being fired up, waiting for the releases. When we released it, we crashed the designated server. There were that many people that were just dying to get a hold of it.
And so, I mean, yeah, I think that no matter what, there's going to be some of that hype that you're talking about. And it's the nature of dieting. And if we can use it to our advantage but keep people at the table, excited about what they're doing enough to keep the guidelines going, then that's what creates the success. And I think that's where the magic comes in of people saying, "Look, this is really easy." I feel like once I got into my groove, anything that I'm missing is coming back around again soon. It doesn't feel like you're binging, like a carb cycling diet does where you do something like one day or one meal or something of high carbs.
It's not like that. There's just -- You got at the end of one shift you're starting to be ready for what you've been missing those few days and then you get it again. And then a few days later you go back and it's -- So, I think that people are saying it kind of feels like a natural rhythm and there's never really a point where the diet just feels like it's really killing you or you're deprived of anything.
[0:20:03]
That's where we make up the difference when people are -- they come in excited. When the excitement is gone, it has to be doable. It has to be easy. It appears that we're doing that because the results that were showing were fairly phenomenal.
Christopher: And then it's not just a particular type of person that's responding really well. I have a feeling that I would respond really well to this sort of plan because it's extremely structured. So I'm thinking about micronutrient ratios and I'm thinking about grams of things and I'm thinking maybe a little bit about calories. And I know from prior experience that I'm the sort of person responds very well to that. Whereas I know other people especially if they have a history of eating disorders maybe that they would really not respond well to this at all. Is it for everyone or is it just a particular type of person?
Jason: Yeah, I mean, we've seen some people struggle, but when we see people struggle, it's interesting that they struggle with different things. Like the people that come from the low fat camp really struggle with five shift and the people that come from the low carb camp are struggling with the three shift, and it's different -- when we ask somebody to change something that they're adapted to.
But as far as the psychology piece goes, my experience is that when people come from eating disorders, they tend to fall into one or two camps. They are either people that over analyze and immediately they get back out on their MyFitnessPal, and every detail goes in and then they pour over that. And those are the types of people, I don't know if you've noticed, but the nutrition industry is full of people with eating disorders. And it's people that are so analytical about food that one day they wake up and they realize they're an expert. They haven't necessarily been able to fix their own problem but they start sharing what they know with other people.
That can be good and bad but lots and lots and lots of nutritionists and dietitians that have come from places of disordered eating. But there's the other group that has to pull away from that because they will relapse into disordered eating if they start tracking. So my perspective has always been that AltShift shouldn't be your hobby. Diet, like the way we use the word, is probably not even a word in anybody's language prior to maybe the last few hundred years.
Hunter gatherers don't. Everybody's job is to go acquire food. That's what you do. The very old and the very young are the only exceptions and everybody else, you get up each morning and your career is to go find food. The acquisition of food is far more important or was far more important than trying to figure out which foods are going to be better for me today. There wasn't any such thing as unhealthy food. There were edible things that were good for you and there were things that were poisonous. And that's about it.
And we had these really good gages in our taste buds that help us find nutritional value in the world. Now all those systems are broken. We've got foods like cheese cake. They're highly palatable. You get a huge dopamine response that says, "Go do that again. That's definitely good for you because it tastes so good." And yet it's not good for you. And then we have situations where we can be on the couch and get up and walk into the kitchen and walk back to the couch and be sitting down 30 seconds later with thousands of calories of ice cream.
All of these situations are impossible. All of this stuff is abstract if you really think about it. We're not hardwired for long term goal setting and that is actually -- That was a theory of mine that was like, "Look, I can't think of any long term goals that hunter gatherers could set." And I had that theory for quite a while and then I ended up having lunch with John Medina who wrote the New York Times Bestseller Brain Rules. He's an amazing neuroscientist. I met with him and presented that theory to him and he was like, "You're absolutely right."
Humans are here today because of immediate gratification. I'm cold, get warm. I'm hot, find some shade. I'm hungry, find some food. There wasn't anything to save or lose or really to practice with a specific date in the future in mind. So when we think about dieting and exercising for the sake of exercise and long term goal setting the way we have to do it with these things, all of this stuff just doesn't -- it doesn't line up with how our brains were evolved over the millennia. We should not--
[0:25:00]
We should be like every other animal and every hunter gatherer. We should be trying to get to a place where we think about food just a little bit more than we think about breathing and going to the bathroom. Because you do have to acquire food. But between acquiring food, there shouldn't be addition and subtraction and notation. It should just be this is how I eat. And if you're a hunter gatherer, you would eat whatever you put a spear in or whatever you picked or dug up. And those things would all be good for you.
We have to make adjustments and AltShift is one of those adjustments but it's always been my goal for people to get to a place where they weigh and measure in the beginning to figure out what they need to be doing and then they figure out those grooves and then they come back once in a while. For Sheryl, it's like literally today, she started writing down what she's eating again for the first time in more than a month. And everything that she's putting on the paper we're adding it up and she's spot on. She hasn't drifted at all. But again, she's been doing this for many months now.
I think it's important that people come back and look at that stuff but I don't think it's important that you have some app some place that has six years of every bite of food you ever put in your mouth written down unless you're a professional. There's people in this industry like you and I, and I don't do that, but I know Jimmy Moore does and there's other people that write. They're always in their own little N equals one experiment in order to be able to give that information out and help other people.
But your average person needs to get to a place where they're focused on things that matter. And food doesn't. I mean, food matters as much as it fuels our body and it should invigorate us and make us feel good and allow us to live with vitality. It shouldn't be like, "Where am I going to find the next thing to put on my taste buds so I can hear a choir of angels sing when I take a bite of that?" It should be, "This is something that improves my life on this planet and I'm going to keep moving and go focus on the things that really matter like actual hobbies and actual career and loved ones, not how can I over analyze."
I mean, I don't count my breaths either and that's one of the things I think is -- one of those facetious comments that really make people mad when they feel like they need to track all the time. I'll ask them, "Do you track your breathing in a day? How many times do you breathe per hour?" And they're like, "Well, that's different." It shouldn't be. At some point, it shouldn't be. I don't think that a healthy relationship with food for the non-professional is a relationship in which every food, every bite of food is analyzed before and after.
Christopher: Yeah, I know. I agree. And I remember reading a long time ago, hearing that from you a long time ago that you should only log food once in a while. It's actually my life Julie that does all the nutrition coaching and she has a masters degree in food science and that's the way she works. She gives people a Google Docs spreadsheet and has them record what they eat just for a few days and then we do a call and go over that and she makes some helpful suggestions. But what she doesn't do is exactly what you just described. It's like, okay, you need to be on MyFitnessPal for the next six months. Here's the subscription. It's really just three days.
She's also the opposite of me in that I've never seen her weigh or measure anything. Even on somebody's birthday, she's making some cupcakes with almond flour and she's still not weighing measuring anything. Some people can do that. They're just gifted like that. She never really thinks about it's just something -- She's gifted. It just comes naturally to her.
Jason: Yeah, that's my wife too. I hate to see trainers and nutrition coaches that ask people to get on a program like MyFitnessPal and then give the trainer the log in and we're going to check this -- I mean, the message is the way we're going to make this work is by documenting everything you eat, get used to it and I'm going to be grading you on that. So, it's really, really important. What? No. No. Stop making people feel that way. Don't. There's going to be some people that are going to hate me for saying this, but I pretty much never open my mouth without making a new friend and a new enemy.
Christopher: That's why I love you so much. You're just like Vinnie. Kind of every time you open your mouth, it's like gold. Yeah, you alienate half of your audience.
Jason: I alienate half and get 15 new shares. It's crazy. I think that one of the things that's overlooked is that psychology I keep touching on that if you're just thinking by the numbers and acting like this stuff is all just Math and procedural or clinical almost, then you're leaving out the fact that there's a life beneath this. There's a person living underneath there. And life on earth has three jobs.
[0:30:01]
It's find some food, don't die and breed. And in between, because we're humans, we get to do all kinds of amazing awesome things. There's only a few of us out there for every million that are the geeks that are using food as one of those awesome things in our lives and it's not even usually our own food. It's how we can adapt other people to get them results. Guys like you and I would probably be doing this as a hobby even if it didn't pay.
But we're again not neurotic about our own bodies. We're helping people to change theirs and there are times when I'll do experiments on myself and I'll be really meticulous about everything. But to forget that the people that come to us or the people that come to any professional in nutrition have real life things that they'd rather be focusing on.
And you see it in these people that are neurotically writing everything down. It's like that's what happened to them a while back. Somebody gave them the impression, whether or not it was somebody they worked with directly or somebody that they just followed, gave them the impression that the numbers on the paper were going to be their only route to success and now their perspective is it's as broken as that woman that thinks she needs to weigh herself every day to find out whether or not she attractive when nobody can look at her and know what she weighs.
And so you get skewed enough and then it's -- Well, I mean, you probably come across people that are just absolutely positive that if they eat fat they're going to get heart disease. And you can show them a two-foot tall stack of research but it doesn't matter. It's in there. It's just ingrained. You tell some women, "Look, you're going to have to increase your calories in order to lose weight." And there's suddenly a puff of smoke in front of you where the woman was standing.
You can show them all the proof in the world but this stuff is just baked into their psyche and that's what I see in that person that's like, "Oh, no, no I got to weigh and measure." "Well, how long have you been doing that?" "Ten years." "How's that working out for you?" "It doesn't matter. I got to weigh and measure." And you want to, "Come here, come here. Let me take the pen out of your hand and put it down and take this log away from you and give you a quick hug. Cool? All right. Let's take a deep breath and start thinking about what would actually make you happy when it comes to your diet."
Because this doesn't usually make people happy. So my message with AltShift in my Periscopes has been be absolutely honest with yourself. And if you can say that weighing and measuring all of your food and logging everything meticulously actually makes you happier, then keep doing it. But do not lie to yourself. Don't act like appeasing some neurosis or appeasing your desperation is happiness because that's not. What would be happy would be to get rid of the desperation and rid of the neurosis.
If you want to quit smoking really bad but you're addicted to cigarettes, going outside and having another cigarette makes you stop the shakes but it doesn't make you happier. Quitting smoking would make you happier. So if you could create a relationship with food that was much more casual and much more healthy and much less emotional, if that's the goal, then momentarily appeasing that by sitting down and writing everything down and feeling, "Okay, I'm on track, I'm on track for the next ten minutes, I'm good, I'm good." Before you need to go write down the next thing.
That's not actually happiness. It's a momentary band aid. I want people to log things if they can actually promise themselves and guarantee themselves that it is something that truly makes them happier. And that's going to be limited to people that likely people that want to do this for a living.
Christopher: That's really interesting. So maybe we should talk about some of the specifics of the diet. You already mentioned the term five shift and three shift. Do you want to explain exactly what those two mean, those two terms mean?
Jason: Yeah. I don't want to give away the whole thing because obviously the point is to use AlftShift to pay my bills.
Christopher: Yeah, I know. It's a great book. Julie was one of the people that broke your server on day one to buy it. I will, of course, link to that in the show notes. But I think we can say roughly what the five and three shift periods are.
Jason: Yeah. So the five shift and three shift are five, they are five days and three days. Without going into too much detail, in the five shift, we are increasing calories and we are controlling carbohydrates. And then in the three shift, we are controlling fat and we are allowing calories to dip a little bit with that control.
[0:35:01]
I don't know that I can say too much more without giving the process away but the idea it separates fat and starch consumption, it cycles calories in a rhythm that makes sense according to the types of foods that we probably would have been able to eat together at the same time as hunter gatherers. And it allows us the opportunity to gain metabolic flexibility. And metabolic flexibility is defined as your body's ability, the rate, I guess, at which your body can easily shift from using carbohydrates or fats as fuel.
So you eat some carbohydrates, you got glucose in your bloodstream. When glucose is gone, insulin dissipates. That signals lipoprotein lipase at the fat cell to come on duty and -- I'm sorry, hormone sensitive lipase at the fat cell to come on duty and you are using fat for energy. And then you eat more glucose and your body goes, "Okay, we've got glucose to burn," throws the switch and your fat cells close up for a while and you're using glucose now.
Those switches easily back and forth are what we would call metabolic flexibility and they're essential to fat loss. So that concept is kind of left out of diets that vilify macronutrients. If we say, I mean, we look at our standard American diet and it's ridiculously high in sugars and more importantly processed carbohydrates, mostly wheat and all the things we can make out of wheat and corn. We look at that and we go, "Yeah, this is clearly," and I fully agree, this is clearly what is dandelion share of making us fat. There's no question.
We are overweight as a society because our grocery stores largely made up of manmade processed carbohydrates. But I think it goes too far to go that's what made us fat so if you touch any carbohydrates even with the tips of your fingers you're going to burn in hell for eternity. You know what I mean? We have amylase right in our saliva which means when we bite into starch, amylase is immediately active. That's the enzyme we use to digest starch.
Starch digestion happens on the first bite. We are designed to eat these things. We are fully capable of eating healthy carbohydrates. I'm not even 100% sure that somebody could just eat -- If somebody were mainly eating meat and potatoes, I don't think that you could eat steak and white potatoes to a point where you could get fat. I mean, I don't think most of us could. Obviously, there's a genetic component there. But I think there are other things required.
Obviously, they'd have to be relatively sedentary. You'd have to probably have sugar or some other form of processed carbohydrates in there too in order to get a level of insulin resistance and lack of metabolic flexibility to get overweight. There are cultures that eat a considerable amount of starch and they are not overweight. It's these processed carbs that are doing it. I just think that it's a mistake to vilify a macronutrient that we are so clearly designed to be able to digest and we did that -- How old are you?
Christopher: I'm 39.
Jason: 39. So you were around in the '80s. You're only two years younger than me. You remember when you could eat as much sugar as you wanted as long as it doesn't make you fat? You know what I mean?
Christopher: Right.
Jason: Things that were low fat would just be loaded with sugars and literally sugars. But processed carbohydrates. And it was totally fine with everybody because it was low fat. And now we've kind of come to a place where people are, it seems to me--
Christopher: Eating ice cream.
Jason: Yeah. It seems to me like in my world more often than not now people have vilified carbohydrates and fats. That message started to come around more mainstream. But you could still go to your grocery store, walk down the aisle and just knock things into your cart. And half of them we're going to say low fat, reduced fat, fat free. And it's going to take a long time before that goes away.
But, I mean, it never really made sense to me. I had periods of time in my coaching where I bought into those things and I said this is awful, this one macronutrient is awful. It never stuck. I would eventually just be like, why in the world do we have such intricate detailed biological processes for dealing with that macronutrient? Coming back to your question, the cycles in AltShift get us back to this place where is AltShift a low carb diet?
[0:40:00]
Yeah. Yes and no. is it low fat diet? Yeah, yes and no. It's kind of both. And we're doing this in ways that seemed to make the best and certainly logically make the best sense. I say right in the book we don't have perfect examples in the research of everything that I'm recommending because all of the questions haven't quite been asked in just the right way yet. So the book was written based on a lot of science and also a lot of anecdotal experience. But we're doing our best to not vilify specific foods that should be natural to us while we are also trying to consume them in an order or a fashion that our bodies understand.
So the shifts are how we get through that. And there are also how -- They seem to be what's making the psychology part really easy too is that when we look at overall what we're really asking people to give up like grains and sugar, we don't want to be eating a lot of wheat and a lot of actual refined sugar or even things like honey or the sugar replacements. But outside of those things, there isn't really anything we're taking away from you. Whereas when people would go really low carb paleo, for example, they would miss white rice, white potatoes, even sweet potatoes. They'd hardly be eating at all if they were low carb or ketogenic.
And the low fat people miss things like butter and bacon and you hear them saying like, "Oh my god, I can't believe I get to eat bacon again and yet my pants are falling off of me." It's sad that we made these things evil just by going to extremes. Does that make sense?
Christopher: It does make sense. I'm laughing because I'm one of those low carb people now, I guess. I have a history of insulin resistance and I'm getting great results both on the bike and off of the bike by eating a low carbohydrate diet. And I think I've probably been guilty once or twice. My two-year old daughter is on my lap and she's trying to push her raspberry into my mouth and I'm like, "No, I won't eat this." It's so ridiculous. It's ridiculous because I've already been stung once by this before.
I used to eat a very low fat diet. In fact, everything was cooked on Teflon. Everything was steamed. There wasn't a drop of fat anywhere in my house. And that got me into trouble. So I should probably be careful of doing that again with carbohydrate but how do you find people like me coping with the three shift? So the three shift is the low fat cycle of this diet. I'm always having a little bit of anxiety of the idea of eating that little fat. Are you finding people coping with it okay?
Jason: No, not the first shift or two. No. Psychologically they definitely have a hard time if they've already got ideas. Like if there's somebody like you that has a pretty good concept of how you believe you should be eating, yeah, it's a push. But I think the results that everybody is having is what's pushing them over. They're going, "Hey." A lot of these people are sitting here going, "I've been ketogenic for four years and initially I lost 30 pounds but I gained back 20 and I've been at that same place for two years."
And so my perspective is with that same Vinnie type bluntness is you can't really logically justify sticking to something that clearly isn't still working for you. So you're going to have to make some changes. No, you're not 20 pounds overweight because God hates you and you're supposed to be fat. Something is wrong. You've got to go figure out what this is. And so the psychology of it could be tough but I think that's where things like the Facebook group really help.
Actually, you know what, I think the group is exactly two months old as we record this. I don't know when this is going to air. As we record this, the group is exactly two months old and there's well over 3,000 people in it. And so people are getting in that group each day, that Facebook group, and posting their results so the people there are going, "I just can't. How am I going to make myself eat fat or starch," or whatever they're struggling with? All they really got to do is look around and they're going, "I guess I'm going to have to because I want the results these people are talking about."
Christopher: You're not having people -- So you already mentioned Jimmy More. What do you think of someone severely insulin resistant like Jimmy Moore were to try this diet?
Jason: One of the people that we got on it really early wasn't technically in the test group but he started before we released the book because his wife was in my test group was a type II diabetic that I had been working on with strictly low carb paleo for about, I guess, three years. The lowest I think we ever got his blood sugar numbers were down to in the 120s but he was typically in the high 100s even low 200s. I mean, it was bad. The guy has got a lot of stress in his life and he was taking Metformin and Metformin was the only thing that was keeping him going.
[0:45:04]
I mean, without it, his glucose numbers would shoot to the roof. And he started doing strict AltShift with his wife and his glucose hit 72 one day. And so he's been typically right around 100 or just below so he's not all the way healed yet. But the bottom line is we have plenty of time for that control. And if you've got insulin resistance there's nothing saying that when you come to your three shift, you have to gorge on starch.
What we're saying is that you need to take your fat down and eat some starch. And so these -- and I felt like we're pretty much given away the program here but these guys are able to under in that, in the five shift, there's lots of time in there for regaining glucose control without so much time that their body adapts and then goes, "Oh, this is the way we eat now." So the whole point of AltShift is for there to never be a point where your body can go, "Oh, this is how we eat now."
As soon as you start to say that, you change again. So you can come in to the higher carbohydrates more delicately. There is no like number that you need to hit in that shift. What we're controlling is fat. So it's really a concept of you know coming in what your limitations have been and AltShift lays down guidelines but it doesn't say anything about you having to go out and gorge yourself on carbohydrates in such a fashion that you send your glucose through the roof and you feel like crap.
I would expect to feel -- If you'd been really low carb for a long time, it's the same thing as when you were eating a standard American diet and you went too low or to high fat low carb and you got that low carb flu. We're seeing that kind on the other side of the equation too and I don't really know what to call it. I mean, I guess, we could call it low fat flu. But whatever you're adapted to, if you make a dramatic enough shift you're going to get some push back.
So you really got to look at like two or three or four cycles through the diet if you know you've got some extenuating circumstance like that. Like don't go overboard if you're insulin resistant or type II diabetic. Don't go overboard on those carbohydrates but cycle them back in in that healthy fashion that allows you to maintain good sleep patterns and control hormones we see.
Over time people go ketogenic for a really long time and sometimes weird stuff happens to people. And usually it starts with things like broken sleep. I've seen women with thyroid issues and ketogenic diet should really be the last thing they needed and they're trying really hard to stay ketogenic and their body temperature is just dumping. I think a little bit of delicate touches you come in and ramping things up as you go is worthwhile but the guidelines of the diet don't make any requirements of anything that should just spin you out. It's more about trying to get you back to something natural.
I mean, you got insulin resistance and/or type II diabetes from eating an abundance of processed carbohydrates. But again, that doesn't mean that carbohydrates are the devil. It means that processed carbohydrates are the devil and you need to control all carbohydrates while you get back to healthy.
Christopher: Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree. So one of the doctors I work with, Tommy Wood, talks about this that one over the treatment is not equal to the cause. So just because restricting carbohydrates was useful in managing the problems it doesn't mean that carbohydrates was necessarily the cause of the issue in the first place. It's something that you need to keep in mind.
Jason: Yeah. That's one of the things we talked about in the book. It was one of the mistakes in the paleo community. We tend to say what should healthy humans eat and then assume that that is a prescription for getting people back to healthy. And that's oftentimes really wrong. Fruit is one of those examples that I use in the book where I've seen time and time again: Is fruit healthy? Of course, it's healthy. Super healthy. People should eat fruit. I don't think it's bad for anybody. That is really metabolically healthy.
But I've seen overweight people lots and lots of times have fruit be the thing that completely stalls them out. And they can't -- they're otherwise eating a healthy paleo diet of no grains and sugar but lots of vegetables and fruits and meats and nuts and seeds and things like that. The fruit is the one thing that's keeping them from getting healthy. So there's an example of something that healthy people can -- Fruit doesn't make kids fat. You don't see kids getting obese because they're eating bananas.
[0:50:00]
Yet as adults, we go, "I need to completely limit fruit forever in order to lose the weight and then never put it back in," or we go, "Fruit is obviously healthy. It won't inhibit my fat loss." Because we don't realize that those are different questions. What do healthy humans eat and what does it take to get an unhealthy human back to health can in some situations be very different questions.
Christopher: And then what about the food quality? I didn't notice as much emphasis on food quality in the book as I've been used to hearing you talk about. So do you think there is some prerequisite reading before people get into AltShift?
Jason: I'm going to surprise some people here but the problem that I'm having with it is that the science keeps falling off from underneath me. For example, a few years ago, I would have said that you have to eat grass fed beef because it is way better for you and the factory farm stuff is very bad for you. And what I could only say now is we know that the factory farm stuff is not as good for you and the grass fed stuff is definitely more healthy and the fatty acid profiles and everything is better.
But we don't have a bunch of data saying that traditional conventional beef is killing people. Chris Kresser was actually the first person that brought that up. And then we've got things like -- He was another person that brought up that we have very little data showing that GMOs are killing people, that they're harmful or any more harmful than hybrids. This stuff all sounds like blasphemy to guys like you and me but I can't keep talking about it if I don't have the research at home to back it up.
Christopher: You can because you're the coach and you talked about this in the book that you're constantly having to marry your knowledge of what's working on the grounds with what -- I mean, just because there's no study showing that -- So, I've just been listening to Dominic D'Agostino talk with Tim Ferriss. I always pronounce his surname wrong. Sorry if I just did it again. And he's talking about how difficult it is to get studies published because there's funding problems and there's ethical problems.
That doesn't mean that he hasn't seen it in the lab. He talks about stuff that he's seen underneath the microscope but at the same time not all of the information is published. So that's kind of -- It tells you something. And you've seen it on the ground too, that these changes could make a difference even though the evidence is not there.
Jason: Well, I can't say that I've seen it with the meat. I can say that I've seen people with -- what I see is people stop eating carbohydrates and eating meat and then they tend to get better. Another thing that Chris Kresser first brought up was we were all just a few years ago vilifying dairy because in the laboratory dairy looks horrible. There's IGF1 in milk and IGF1 is very strongly correlated to breast cancer. And then there's casein in it which is hard to digest and the vegetarians like to use that in massive quantities to, like in forks or knives in the China study, feed shovel loads to rodents and show that it causes cancer.
And then you've got lactose which to some degree is difficult for a lot of people to digest. But then we go look at the Maasai, the men are drinking something like seven liters of milk a day and the women are drinking something like five liters of milk a day and the breast cancer is virtually absent. So when we take out all of the other lifestyle factors, put them in something that generally looks like paleo, and then drop dairy on top of that, we don't see any of the problems. So the long term data isn't supporting it.
So, yes, I want people to go get as much as grass fed beef as they can. I mean, we mostly eat grass fed beef. I want people to get pastured chicken and pork. But my reasons these days are more about the fact that I think that the industries are badly broken and what they're doing to the planet are horrifying and things that used to be called fertilizer are now toxic waste and things like that. But I think that it's another really big problem that paleo made and it's one of the things that everybody is making fun of them for is that it was -- We want you to eat these specific foods but then we also need to turn it into a cult.
So you're going to eat beef but it has to be grass fed from your local farmer. What if I can't do that? Okay, well them, go ahead and eat the stuff from your store but just understand that you're not one of us. You're not really cool until -- I mean, when you don't sit in chairs anymore, you only squat, everything you drink is bone broth and you only wear Vibram FiveFingers, then we can talk about being friends.
[0:55:01]
I will not do that dogma BS. I just won't. It's an emotional thing for me. It's like one of those things where we have alienated a bunch of people by being this stupid sub-culture. And if I'm pissing anybody off, those people can all unfollow me. You've got a whole group of people out there 50, 60 pounds overweight struggling through Weight Watchers and listening to Dr. Oz and Jillian Michaels and your answer for them is to tell them what to eat on such a fine level that they need to drive out in their country and find a local farmer. Cut these people some slack.
Christopher: Yeah, I know, I agree.
Jason: Seriously. Like if they go to their store and they buy some steak instead of some cocoa puffs, they need a high five, not a B rating. And so AltShift is there because if I can convince these people to follow my work and then I can guide them the rest of the way and make them live an extra 30 years, cool. But if they only live an extra ten or 15, I've done a pretty damn good job for them. So I want to get that message to everybody but I also will not smash all of my opportunities to reach them by turning this into church. This is the church of AltShift or the church of paleo. I think that's been really problematic. I'm on board with what Vinnie -- we keep going back to him. I think his big push is -- I'm not super, super familiar with his work but his big pushes are grains and sugar as well.
Christopher: Yeah, no sugar, no grains. It's that simple.
Jason: Yeah. And when you get those two things out, you probably right there extended your life by more than you could by changing anything else other than adding some exercise in. Yeah, I mean, we'll get him on the fine details because I'm so active in the communities that I've created. We'll get them down the road on all that as long as they're paying attention. But I want people to be able to start. And I think we're starting them with far more than 50% of what they need. Does that make sense?
Christopher: It does. Yeah, absolutely. It's very difficult. It's very easy for me to fall into the trap of thinking all of this stuff is easy because I only talk to people that are already paleo. I'm preaching to the choir all of the time. But when you step outside of that tiny bubble as I did last weekend, we went down to the steam trains which are in the repertory not far from my house and it was the Thomas the Tank Engine weekend. It was unbelievable. I thought, "Crap, I should have brought some business cards." Because every single person was morbidly obese. Even some of the kids as young as two have got that distinctive gait where the legs won't pass each other properly because there's so much fat in between. For those people, they don't need to do all of the fine details on day one. They can make a lot of progress with some quite small changes.
Jason: Yeah. Just two years ago, quick story for you, just two years ago, Sarah Fragoso and I were down doing, we were going to do a talk, I think it was two years ago, it might have been a little longer, going to do a talk in Augusta, Georgia. And we went into a restaurant. Anybody that lives down there is probably going to get mad at me but I'm not making fun. I'm just trying to make a point. But we went into this restaurant and it was kind of an upscale restaurant/bar. We went and sat in the bar because it was immediate seating available. And a waitress came out and she was probably in her 40s and probably been waitressing for a really long time.
And this is anecdotal. It might have been a rare situation even down there. But we both asked for burgers without buns. But first off, she asked us what we wanted to drink and I said I'll take some tea and then I was like, "Can I get that unsweetened?" And she was like, "Yeah." And all of a sudden she was shocked. She was like, "You all don't want those sweet tea?" Didn't understand that I didn't want my tea sweetened. Do you have tea that isn't sweetened? And she's like, "Okay. I'll go see."
They ended up having that. And we asked her for burgers with no buns and she was like, "Just a burger like on a plate but no bun?" And this is two years ago. And so those kinds of stories make me realize that we can sometimes, like you just said, get in our little bubble and think that the whole world understands what we're saying. What I would say the vast majority of people on this planet have never even considered, vast majority of people in the US have never even considered the idea of eating a burger without a bun on it. That's how far removed.
I mean, most of them probably know that that's a thing and this waitress in this particular situation, I think, is probably little bit worse in the south where obesity tends to hit earlier and people were very, very into their food.
[1:00:00]
But those situations are still super common at least to the degree that nobody has taken that step and never even tried to eat that way. We're talking about people that don't even understand. They're still shocked when you suggest that they remove grains from their diet. The idea of switching from grains to meat to more meat is a gigantic step in their head. I think it goes way too far to ask that person to start immediately right out of the gate thinking about the quality of their meat as a priority as well. I mean, you obviously don't want to be getting nothing but processed daily meats, but I think we got to be careful what we run these people over with right out of the gate.
Christopher: Yeah, I know. You gave me lots to think about. It's fantastic as always. AltShift is the key word that you're looking to find the book. Is there anything else that people should know about, Jason?
Jason: Well, we've got Sarah Fragoso, my partner in so many other things, we've got the JASSA Podcast and the AltShift podcast, which was actually at number one on iTunes for about 30 hours.
Christopher: It's great. You two together are great. I thought you were married for the longest time but I realize now you're not.
Jason: No, no, no. Yeah, just one of my best friends. So the AltShift podcast and the JASSA podcast. It's a play on our names, Jason and Sarah. Those are both available on iTunes. My website is 30kview.com and the book can be purchased at altshiftdiet.com. And then if you're on Facebook by all means come find us, search for the Facebook group on Facebook and we're accepting everybody in the group. It's been hugely awesome and very supportive and I am on there multiple times a day.
And then you can also find me on Periscope. Anybody that is on Periscope, if you're not, it's really cool. You can go download the app and come find me and basically I'm doing pretty much every day. I do every week day. I do these Periscopes where they're like little live webinars and you'll hear your phone whistle at you and you can click on the notifications and you'll instantly be in the Periscope watching me talk live and you can type questions right on to the Periscope and it will pop up on my screen.
I usually have a topic but I also do try to answer questions. And if you don't catch them live then we post them on 30kview.com in Periscopes under the blog tab. So they're like little mini ten-minute, ten-ish minute webinars every single day. So I think I am a highly available author.
Christopher: I was going to say that's incredibly generous of you to do all that.
Jason: Yeah. And I've got -- I don't know when is this going to air, but I'm starting to try to do the equivalent of book signing since AltShift is just an ebook. We're doing here in the Pacific Northwest, we're doing a couple of AltShift Q&A sessions that are totally free. So keep an eye out for those two because if these are successful and a lot of people show up then I'm going to start moving them around the country and maybe across the pond eventually, just depending on how many people are interested in coming. And I will always make those free.
Christopher: Excellent. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate of your time. It's very generous of you. Thank you.
Jason: This has been a blast. I really appreciate it.
Christopher: Thank you, Jason.
Jason: Thanks.
[1:03:31] End of Audio
© 2013-2024 nourishbalancethrive