Let's Talk Wellness Now

Joel Greene explains the truth about why we struggle with losing fat. How the body adapts to a diet and then it just stops working. Dr. Deb drops the tough question, Why do women over 50 not lose weight? Listen for the answer. 

Do not miss these highlights:

03:06 – Joel shares his story of weight gain and his struggle with weight loss that lead him onto his current path of helping others

13:39 – Bacterias involved in the establishment and maintenance of the immune system in the gut

17:57  – Your diet is the way you feed the bacteria in your gut

21:02 – The next big thing is the selective use of key strains for specific conditions

25:40 – The balance and variation in the diet negates the toxicities of certain foods

28:57 – The reason why midlife women do not lose weight but instead tend to gain

32:39 – The second law of thermodynamics in food – It’s not all about calories, it’s about the sheer bulk, sheer mass, and sheer energy density of the food

35:36 – There is no easy answer, there’s no single solution, we’re should be looking at a combination of multiple things

41:00  – The mechanisms in place that surround the fat cell get stiffer over time

44:54 – The important function of ECM or Extracellular Matrix in fat cell

51:41 – The variation in the diet and the intuitive eating are the things that must be factored in

Resources Mentioned

Whether you are recovering from an illness or just looking to maintain your current overall health, schedule a consult with us at Serenity Health Care  by calling  (262)522-8640 or visit https://www.serenityhealthcarecenter.com

About our Guest:

Joel Greene

He had his 10,000 hours already in before your guru ever began.

In the 1970’s he was interval training

In 1979 he was doing Olympic lifts for 3 hours every night.

In the 80’s he began studying MCTs.

In 1990 he began studying the Keto diet.

In the early 90’s he was doing what would be called intermittent fasting today.

In the mid 90’s he experienced the rebound from chronic starvation. You read this today for this reason.

In the late 90’s he went through his clean eating phase, his macro phase, his ancestral diet phase.

By 2001 he had his first nutrition website publishing cutting-edge research.

By 2006 he came to the end of all the above and discovered none of it worked overtime under real-life pressure.

In 2007 he authored the first article to the health and fitness community based on the new science linking gut bacteria and obesity.

in 2008 his website lookcut.com hit #2 in google for weight loss, with over 1,000 original groundbreaking articles that today represent many of the most widely copied ideas in nutrition.

In 2009 he launched the world’s first diet system based on targeting gut bacteria.

In 2010 he was implementing signal activation of the AMPK pathway. The gurus only began speaking to AMPK in 2017.

By 2013 he had the world’s largest body of anecdotal outcomes for body composition targeting the gut bacteria.

In 2013 he published the first article to the health and fitness community on the dangers of MCT oil supplementation.

Today, at 53, on 1 workout a week, eating whatever, whenever, with no drugs, sarms, prohormones, or ergogenic aids ever, he is the world leader in hacking the body. He is the real deal. He has done it longer and has always been far ahead. He looks it, he lives it. What the gurus say is impossible he was living every day before they were gurus.

He has hacked peak human…working out once per week, eating whatever, whenever, and does it all on fast food!

He is the future of real-world health and nutrition, today.

As the creator of the VEEP Nutrition System, the world’s first commercially available program based on targeting gut communities to effect biomarkers, Joel also is a featured author, speaker, and guest in top tier publications like Muscle and Fitness, 24 Hour Fitness Digital Magazine, CBS Online, Superhuman Radio. His system has also been featured on the Dr. Phil Show where it has delivered astounding life-changing results.

www.veepnutrition.com

www.instagram.com/realjoelgreene

Book here on Amazon

Transcription of Episode #146:

Debra Muth 0:02
Welcome to Let’s Talk Wellness Now, I’m your host, Dr. Deb. This is where we talk about everything wellness, and learn to defy aging, and live our lives on our own terms. So my guest today is Joel green, and he is the author of the immunity code, and he is the CEO of Veep nutrition. And Joel is talking to us today about nutrition, and fat loss, as well as what’s actually happening to the fat cell structure inside of the body when we employ these various diets that we’ve been using for decades, like low carb, high protein, keto, paleo, and why these things work in the short term. And then they ultimately just stopped working over time. And we don’t understand why and we’re frustrated. So Joel is going to unlock the key to why that’s happening, and tell you how we can make those things change. So let’s get ready for this awesome episode with Joel green. Have you seen 20 Plus medical doctors only to be told your symptoms are in your head? Or you need an antidepressant? We understand your frustrations? Are you tired of feeling sick and tired? Tired of not getting the answers you need to regain your health? Tired of not feeling listened to by your doctor at Serenity Health Care Center, we understand and we will help you find the cause of your symptoms. Together we will create a path to health. We specialize in combining the best of conventional and natural medicine to get you back to doing what you love. We have worked with the most complex chronic diseases such as chronic Lyme, COVID, long haulers, autoimmune disease, mold toxicity, and hormonal imbalances. But if you’re not sick, that’s fantastic. We will work with you to maintain your health so that you can prevent illness. give our office a call to see how we can help you regain your health and vitality at 262-522-8640. Or check us out at our website at Serenity health care. center.com. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Wellness Now I am your host, Dr. Deb and I have with me today Joel green. And we’re going to talk about nutrition immunity and of course one of our favorite topics is fat loss. So Joel, welcome to the show.

Joel Greene 2:53
Thank you, Debra, thank you for having me.

Debra Muth 2:55
So Joel, tell us your journey. How did you get into nutrition and you do something called the immunity code to get involved in that?

Joel Greene 3:07
I started when I was a kid. I was in theJack LaLanne like at an early age like five oh no it wasn’t wasn’t like a billion channels on back then.

Debra Muth 3:20
That’s true.

Joel Greene 3:22
You would you get up in the morning and you know there were cartoons and Jack LaLanne. Yeah. So do the Jack LaLanne jump up and down with him. And it just became for whatever reason just kind of became part of my life from about that age. So I got into running when the running craze hit that was in 70s and that just started running I was like fourth grade started running around the block and see how far I could go and and then I wanted to get fast and I started sprinting in fifth grade kind of every day during the summer going to the blacktop and try to get faster and that led into I was really skinny, super skinny. I was like in fourth grade and I started tying together like a hammock and doing curls with our with the bars from the hammock and and I shot up and got like really tall in one year. And I was just humiliated. I was so skinny. So I’ve always wear a long long sleeve shirts to school. And so I got into I got into weightlifting and kind of kind of like just pursued that path all through kind of High School Sports, track and field and then write about when I was in college. I started just reading more and I was I was I was going to UCI and working out and I was just kind of you know, I was reading all the fitness magazines and just try and stuff that I would find in there. So example. There was a there was a workout that said you could gain an inch on your arms and one day it just worked out 12 hours so it worked out For hours, got me chronically sore never worked. So I was kind of an early supplement user. And there was a company called champion nutrition that made that made a thing called, was actually called metal ball. And the really interesting thing about it was the label said contains MC teas, that that was fat cannot be stored as fat. And this was like 1989, I think 90. And that, so this was the era of no fat, like, everything, that no fat on it. And so the idea that fat couldn’t be stored as fat was, was like, what you know, and so yeah, just reading more trying to understand more of this stuff, but I just, I just kind of got into it, you know, from from an early age, really what happened. And long story short, I was always a consumer, and I had this journey as a consumer, that is probably very similar to what I often hear from other people. And it’s that you, you would try a lot of things, and then you would have like success. And you would think that whatever that thing was, was the thing. And, and you’d get down the road a few years. And suddenly the thing became like, like a weight around your neck, like, like it stopped working. And not only did it stop working, you had problems. That was my story. And I’ve heard that countless times from consumers. So I kind of wanted to interrupt fasting really early. And it’s great, you know, for a while, like, this was early 90s. And I got super lean. And then after about five years, I was just eating uncontrollably. And it was, it was a different source of luxury short, that led me down this road, ultimately, trying to adopt all this advice that I was, you know, reading constantly, and I, I was kind of mid career. And I was I was running a technology company. And I had been pretty fit like prior to that just as a consumer not, you know, as a professional or anything. And what happened was, I got really fat. So I just I got fat, and I was working 14 hours a day. And I just had a lot of stress. And I would get home and I just turned, you know, 40 and I was like I just don’t have the energy to work out. So I within a period of like three years, I went from 212 to 260.

Joel Greene 7:31
And yeah, I was I was like missing was big, because I was working out but I was fat. And long story short, I really kind of came to the end of that road. And it was it was that road a lot of I think consumers find themselves on of basically trying to find good advice and trying to apply it and it kind of works for a while and you think you’ve got it figured out. But time unravels that, like the farther you get down the road, you realize there’s more problems, and there are solutions. So coming out of that I had been a 30 year devotee of just doing the fifth thing as a consumer. And I for me ran into a wall that I that really bugged me, which was what does and doesn’t translate in real life. And I started to I started this website, and I wanted to just publish truth I just wanted to, there were a lot of marketers at that time that were kind of really common during the conversation about what, what was good and it was all schlock it was all like techniques and things and I kind of like I kind of was bitter. I resented the idea that these guys who’ve never done this would come in and use marketing techniques. And, you know, it just really bothered me and the public can think of it like that was like the era when this is about 2016. And probably about that time, like red meat was was still kind of really vilified at that time. And Garcinia Cambogia was big. And so I I, I came across an article by Dr. Jeffrey Borden, which was in 2006, was the very first science paper on the gut biome. And it really started the gut biome revolution. So I long story short, I wound up doing some protocols based on that, and I got shredded, like really, really fast. And it led to led to just what I would, in hindsight, say was mostly stumbling and bumbling. But it kind of looks much more cool in hindsight, but it really wasn’t it was more just kind of not knowing what to do next and doing something and not where we’re at and the created the software based on all those gut protocols. And it wound up being used in corporate wellness. So our clients were like the city of Phoenix, the city of Houston and YMCA, Technicolor like you know, some big clients, and the results were generally pretty good with it. The software itself was kind of iffy. It wasn’t that great like I didn’t And millions on it, you know, a lot of my own money. But the results were fantastic. So we had some hospitals that were using it and a lot of doctors and medical professionals using it and the the science that was in it was really good because it was based on the gut. And it was based on the gut years before anybody knew about the gut. And so what happened was, I wound up getting literally 10s of 1000s of people who used it in these corporate wellness engagements. And it allowed me to kind of quickly figure out what worked and what didn’t work. And I would just take science protocols and put them in. And if they worked, I would use them. And I just had this large user base that was using them. And this was like, you know, 2013 2014, and we’re kind of out around about this dude doing gut biome stuff. And so I wound up like doing things like, I would get called into medical clinics to teach continuing education credits for the gut biome, which was brand new, and everybody wanted to hear about it back then. And led me to quest, long story, short, Quest Nutrition, we did some stuff together. And I had this kind of basically idea that it was immune centric, that it evolved, it took me a long time to explain, and people would ask me about it. And finally, I was like, I just need to write a book because I’m sick of explaining this. So I wrote a book and then boom, there we go.

Debra Muth 11:13
Awesome. Awesome. So talk a little bit about the immune centric like, like the deep dive, or maybe not the deep dive, but how did you figure out that the gut microbiome, the immune system and keeping ourselves healthy? Like, how does that fit into where you are today?

Joel Greene 11:31
Foundation is that sort of foundation. And the interesting thing is, it’s very sciency. But I didn’t come in so much out of the sciences, it did a need for something practical. So the practical application was that over time, in the real world, time gets constrained to zero, literally, for most people who work for a living, but you just wind up in these storms of life where your job has a lot of pressure, your kids are doing dumb stuff, you know, there’s all these things going on, you have no content, it’s pretty frequent that this happens. Yeah. And so a solution that that people that we as consumers, regular people weren’t getting paid to be fit needed, was a way to have minimal inputs of time, and sort of very big results. very big, very big impact on the body. And the God was really kind of the foundation of that because, um, just by very minimal inputs, feeding certain bacteria, you can you could really make massive changes, noticeable changes and things like energy, things like body fat, things like that. So that’s kind of where it started on was necessity.

Debra Muth 12:34
Okay, so how do we fast forward immune centric and aging? Like, we all know, the the problem with aging as the immune system declines? Today, we know that, you know, 85 plus percent of our immune system is in our gut. People are hearing that gut gut microbiome, you know, gut brain barrier, all of that. But how do we actually take what we’re hearing and make it a change for us as a person as a consumer now?

Joel Greene 13:04
The simple idea is to replicate in your body the same, what’s called an intero type. I’m sure you’re familiar, but listeners, and intertype is a distinct profile of bacteria in the gut. And so the basic idea is to replicate the same profile intellitype that you see in the healthiest, longest live Linus people in the world. And on to make it really simple, it comes down to kind of the presence of two bacteria. And I want to qualify that nothing is simple with the body, nothing’s ever simple. It’s, it’s crazy complex. But in terms of making something simple, that people can grab onto, it’s really, it’s really kind of putting your energy into two bacteria, which is April Mansa Musa NOFA and Bifidobacterium the family of bacteria is what you find is that there is when you look at those two bacteria, number one, they’re both intimately involved in the establishment and maintenance of the human immune system, particularly the guy. So, when we’re babies, and we’re first getting our load of bacteria from mom and mom’s breast milk, we get our first dose of bacteria which is bacteria, and we get agar Matsya and the carbohydrates and mother’s milk feed acre lancea and they help immunity to get established in the gut. And, and then an ongoing basis. The the species of bacteria that we had when we were young and energetic, those species those key species of bacteria, they are one one involved in the immune system in the gut, they participate in for example, sensing antigens, so you need certain species of bacteria to basically get certain cells in the gut are called dendrites to really do their job and to kind of pull into the lumen of the gut and sample different antigens and and so what you see is these two bacteria They’re intimately involved in the immune system. They’re also very much involved in metabolism. So when you look at, you look at insulin sensitivity, what you find is that there are all of these different ways in which bifidobacteria impacts how well insulin works in the body. It does it through bile acids, it does it through a lot of different mechanisms. And both of these bacteria kind of converge on some key proteins that basically make it very much easier to be lean. One of those I talked about quite a bit, it’s an NGO protein called fasting induced adipose factor. It’s a protein that humans make when they’re fasting. And it turns out these bacteria, they make it all the time, and they both make. So they are very much at the center of metabolic health and immunity. And they’re easy to focus on that’s kind of the the really cool thing is is you can, you can have little inputs that can produce very large, measurable, very specific things with respect to what these bacteria are having more than do. So

Debra Muth 16:13
There’s a lot of probiotics on the market these days that are trying to replicate a good gut microbiome. How do we target these very specific good bacteria to replicate this ability to shred and get fat loss? And all of that? How can we? Can we take them in a capsule? Can we put them in a powder? Do they survive through the stomach? How do we do that?

Joel Greene 16:44
The short answer is not with probiotics. Okay, and it’s not to say that there isn’t a place for probiotics, and that they cannot add in certain times, in certain ways have massive benefit. But it’s to say that, um, we are today in the jet wash of the adoption of a probiotic boom. And what I see a lot of like, every single day, I get a long letter in, you know, our email, can you help me with someone who’s got SIBO, short, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, or they’ve got gut issues? And there’s, there’s a lot of causes. But what what’s interesting is that, number one, it’s the incidents that you see today, it is, it’s an every, I’m sure you see it in your practice, it’s an everyday thing now. And part of the reason is for the overuse of probiotics, too much of a good thing. And it’s not an exact science, we don’t know exactly for sure where they open up in the guide, and all this stuff. So I want to say is that food is a much better way to do this much better way. So what I put forth in the end code was sort of a different idea, which is that we don’t think of diets as you know, a diet is something that you to feed me, but a different way to think about it is eating to feed the bacteria in your gut, it’s kind of a little bit different way to think about it. And what I put forth in the medical was different ways that you could feed those bacteria through combinations of different types of patterns of fibers and fasting and different things that feed both akkermansia and Bifidobacteria. But what I would offer is, that’s the right way to do it. Because food kinda has this way of making sure that the right things go in the right place in the right amounts. And humans tend to think that, you know, we think we’re really smart, but we’re never as smart as we think we are when it comes to the body. Right? There’s always the promise of the next great thing. And then there’s always the jump wash 510 years later of everybody to jump on that bandwagon is kind of like, huh, yeah, problems, and we didn’t see this. So food, food is really the way to go after that. But that’s what I would offer.

Debra Muth 18:52
Yeah, I remember 20 years ago when I started out, and probiotics were kind of newer at that point. And we thought, Oh, we just have to give enough probiotic to get it into the small intestine and everything will be better. And now here we are fast forward. We’re like, Oh, gee, CMOs, because we have the wrong good bacteria in that small intestine. And yet, we still see people promoting a lot of probiotics and the wrong probiotics. And I still see clients that come in on four different probiotics. And I had one last week, she was literally taking, like 500 billion probiotics from four different companies. And I’m like, This isn’t working. It’s not like let’s throw more at something that’s not already working. But we’ve been kind of programmed as consumers that this is the cure, just take a probiotic and oh, wait, if that doesn’t work, we’ll just use a prebiotic and that’ll work and, and you watch it over the years and it’s really unfortunate because I think part of the problem is as a consumer and as our country as people We’ve been taught that we can just take a pill and it’ll fix everything. You know, if you’re overweight, we’ll just take a stimulant if we’re, you know, if we have this headache, we’ll take that. And you know, it, it really negates the whole idea that what we put in our body is what we get out of our body. And I know people don’t want to hear us say that, but 90% of our health is all related to what we feed it. And that’s a really difficult concept for people to wrap their head around sometimes.

Joel Greene 20:32
Yeah, you know, I love pills. I mean, I’m the first guy to jump one kill bang. Oh, great. I love that. Yeah. But um, you know, the thing is, like, with probiotics, I’ve been kind of, somewhat deservedly, maybe I don’t know, labeled is that oh, that anti probiotic guy? And that’s, that’s not true on? So first of all, what I would say is that the next big thing, the next big, big thing is the selective use of key strains for specific conditions. Yeah, and that is a practitioner thing. That’s looking that I think in the hands of a really competent practitioner, you can see miraculous things, miraculous things from, um, that’s not generally something that I think consumers should be trying to do. Because, you know, it kind of takes a practitioner to kind of, you know, diagnose and take a look and say, Oh, well, I think you I think we could use this strain and that strain selectively? And that’s going to do this, you know, and I think that is bigger than the, than the peptide boom, I really do. I think that, you know, there’s these really great strains out there that really ameliorate very specific things and selectively using them at the right time and the right way, right amount of time. Right. cofactors? That is, that’s a new thing. I think that’s going to explode. And that I think, the proper place is kind of patient, you know, practitioner looking for that logs. And in that in that realm, I think probiotics could be fantastic.

Debra Muth 22:04
I think so too. And I think hopefully, the companies that are manufacturing, probiotics will come along with that. And instead of having 10 15 strains together, we will have single strain products, micro dosing, so that we can be very specific with it.

Joel Greene 22:05
Yeah. And that’s, that’s very, very cool. Like, I have a coaches course right now, and I have 100 plus coaches in it, you know, they’re, we’ve been going over this stuff. And, you know, when you get into some of the single strains, you know, BB 536, and BGN, four, and all these different strains and the things they do. And the biggest problem you run into number one, well, twofold. Number one, is just dissemination of you know, the knowledge set, but then the second is just, just like being at work, how do you get, you know, like, that we have to go to these extremes of like, Oh, why don’t you call the manufacturer and have them send you samples of just that one, because they’re very hard to get, because they’re still into that, you know, like, let’s just throw everything in here. And then, you know, shotgun approach. So the scalpel approach, I think, is very practitioner centric. And a lot of really great things are gonna come from that. But generally speaking, what I think most people have never, probably, and I’m sure you’ve seen this many, many times. But most people never really had a chance to see his power food never had a chance to see. Like when you really, really get food working really right, what can happen. And I’ve seen that many, many times, I’ve seen people who, you know, had very like, condition, like 100 pounds overweight, and on 20 meds and all the stuff and I’ve seen in like a month or two, they go off all the meds and you know, drop 100 pounds. So food is capable of really incredible things when done correctly. What I would offer,

Debra Muth 23:43
How do we get around? Because I know people that are listening to us are thinking, well, it’s all about food. But I don’t have time to cook and I can’t afford healthy food. And the reality is our foods all toxic anyway, it’s sprayed with chemicals. It’s sprayed with this, it’s done with that. How do we get past that argument that yes, healthy food is healthy, but healthy food isn’t 100% healthy, but it can still make a difference in your body? And how do we get past that thought that it’s it’s too expensive to eat

Joel Greene 24:14
healthy? For you, you really nailed it with this question. I mean, because this is a real question for real people in the real world. I mean, everything I’ve done since 2006, was around this question, because that’s exactly like, what you read my bio in certain places, and it says, you know, he doesn’t all have to go with healthy fast food, and people are like, you’re full of crap. And I’m saying that as the 100% 100% truth, and the reason is, it’s absolutely essential. It is absolutely essential to figure out how to eat really, really healthy and do it on the go with no meal prep. And if you can’t do that, you’re probably not going to be able to sustain it over time. And that was my experience. That’s a lot of the people that I’ve worked with. That’s what they had to do. So what I would say is that number one, I mean, gosh, it’s such a great question. First of all food is toxic. Yeah, like I don’t care what you’re talking about in some way, it’s toxic, like, like, let’s say that you’re on the carnivore train. And meat is the solution. No meat highly toxic, very toxic in a lot of respects. And I’m a big meat eater. I love nothing better than a big robot. But there are a number of aspects to meet that are toxic. It’s the way that we ferment certain bacteria use a bacteria, it’s the byproducts, oh, six, two methyl deoxy guanosine. It’s all the DNA adducts plants, most of the plants you take in some way are a little bit toxic, okay? Just about everything, just about everything. Even healthy foods that we take in are going to be in some small way toxic. So and that is why the variation and balance in the diet is so absolutely essential, because it is the balance and variation in the diet that negates the toxicities of certain foods. A good example is the toxicities of meat can be negated to a very large extent through the inclusion of a little bit of fiber in the diet. It changes the way that gut fermented changes, the end products, the DNA products don’t form. And so by having variety in the diet, you negate a lot of the toxicities and food. So very often I’ll run into, I’m sure you’ve run into it all the time yourself is people that are just kind of, you know, you’re so down on the purist road like, well, I don’t want to have that because it’s got this thing in it, you know? And my answer to that is, there’s something wrong with absolutely everything, everything’s got something wrong with it. And the way you overcome that is through variability and variety and balancing the diet. And when you have that in the diet, you’re going to, you’re going to have a net positive versus a net negative, that’s that’s the answer that and then the second piece of it is, in Altai, this isn’t true, because I’ve lived it for 15 years, more than 16-17, it is 100% possible to eat, at the highest level of health, completely on the go out of convenience stores, and out of like Starbucks and things like that, and I’ve had to do it. So I know that’s 110 doable. And it gets into one consideration is you know, there’s the food itself. And there’s an idea that we could call grades of food, like when all food comes in grades, so good examples know, like, at the worst level, you have your, you know, pasteurized homogenized milk from, you know, corn fed cows, and you’re radiated, and all that stuff. And at the highest level, you have grass fed unpasteurized milk, you know, from New Zealand, you know, piemontese, cows, whatever you want to, you know, so food always comes in grades. That’s one piece of the equation. But a piece of equation that never gets talked about is the way you sequence foods. And the way you combine foods, and the sequencing and the timing, and the way you combine them has a whole lot to do with everything. And you can that’s a whole area that’s really not tapped into. And it’s a valid area of research. For example, one of the things that readers in the immunity could kind of learn is that you can employ the power of what’s called a preload meal. And that’s a meal that you have prior to a larger meal about 2030 minutes prior. And the way you structure that preload will have varying effects on the next meal and subsequent meals. So you can do things like increase fat oxidation, improve insulin sensitivity, improve the the area under the curve, improve glucose clearance, delay, gastric emptying, do all these things, create create, move back the hunger point or the fullness point in the meal, 20 minutes, eat less at your next meal. The next steps go to do all these things to the way your timing combined a sequence boots. And once you understand how to do that, it becomes very doable to do all this on the go. And so sorry, long winded answer the same topic.

Debra Muth 24:23
So that’s great. I love that. And I love that you’re tapping into this because you know so many of my female patients that I see, I work with a lot of midlife women heading into menopause. And one of their biggest concerns is I work out, I haven’t changed my diet, I eat the same way. I’m gaining weight, it’s all fat, no matter what I do at the gym, it doesn’t work. And so they just keep cutting back calories like i It is not uncommon for me to have women say I’m eating 600 to 800 calories a day, and I’m still gaining weight. And they’re still doing all their things. And you talk about starvation and all of this. But nonetheless, no matter what they do doesn’t change. So how do we deal with that part of of our life changes? And I kind of know the answer you’re going to say but I would love to hear your answer on that one.

Joel Greene 29:46
Yeah, gosh, this is the nether another fantastic question. I mean, we could spend five podcasts on this one. Yeah, I mean, it’s such a big topic and an important topic. So first of all, so much For the calories in calories out idea, exactly. Because if that was if that was if that was the pure linear thing that that some people like us to think it is no problem down to 500 calories and you should lose weight. And you and I both seen there are when you get into the real world and people who are not fit for a living, and women who are you know, kind of post 50 and all that calories till the cows come home and they will not rock a pound now doesn’t work does not work. Yeah. So and and, and just just to kind of belabor that point a little bit. That’s something that really confuses the heck out of the consumer, because they see a lot of people that look really fit, telling them that any really what they’re doing is they’re, they’re doing a form of it’s not science, but they want you to think that unless somebody is talking calories in calories out that they’re charlatan, and it’s not science, well, they don’t know what they’re talking about. What they are doing is a form of debate exclusion, where essentially it’s Overton Window, it’s like, well, unless it’s calories in calories out, it’s not a legitimate discussion. And I can just tell you time after time, what I’ve seen without is, let me guess you’re fit for living, you’re generally on steroids. And your life revolves around working out everybody you help is fit for a living, you’ve never ever dealt ever dealt with real populations of like, for example, women in their 50s You know, that worked for a living never dealt with them. Because if you had wouldn’t be saying that, no. So what’s interesting too, is a this ongoing calories and I don’t mean to turn this into calories in calories out thing but it just kind of a personal pet people will get to the solution, certain snacks. But, um, there’s this long, ongoing debate in the pure science between a group of scientists led by one guy Kevin Hall, and I believe the guy’s Stegman, who’s on on the the food, food is function thing. And a lot of influencers in the fitness space have jumped on to the Kevin Hall side. And, you know, they’re kind of in this like, well, if it’s not, if it’s not laws of thermodynamics, then it’s just complete charlatan, it’s not real, they just got stumped. There’s a new paper that came out in 2021. That showed pretty convincingly like, you know, as far as we know, now, we’re working through some really big equations, that the laws of thermodynamics, as they apply to food, there’s been this ongoing belief that calories in calories out was all about the first law of thermodynamics and the conversion of you know, heat to energy, this guy was able to really show quite convincingly they’re completely wrong. It’s not that at all, it’s actually the second law of thermodynamics. It’s about mass. And I have personally found that to be very true over and over and over. And that when you get people eating, the mass of the food they eat, it’s very, very huge. And the energy density gets very, very low. Now they’re getting into probabilities where they can start to drop body fat. And so mass is a function seems to be this quality about food that’s been completely missed. It’s not all about calories, it’s about the sheer bulk sheer mass, your energy density of the food. And this whole calories, calories in calories out thing. It’s it’s not what some people want you to think that it’s just all calories in calories out. Sorry, that was a rant, because I’ve just been waiting to get that one off.

Debra Muth 33:21
That’s, that’s okay. Because I’ve had people on my podcast that have said, it’s calories in calories out, as long as you’re, you know, tracking macros, it doesn’t matter if you have a doughnut or a beef, as long as it fits in your macros. You’re good. And I’ve been around a long time, it does matter the quality of the food that you put in. But I could eat 1200 calories of nothing but shit. And I’m still going to gain weight. Because when at the end of the day, when I look at it, if it’s all carbs and fat, and there’s nothing to rebuild. Even though I’ve met my calorie and I’ve stayed within those macros, I’m still not going to lose that fat. And it bothers me too, because I’ve seen it with people over and over again where it is they’ll they’ll hang on to somebody an expert that says it’s calories in calories out and we know it’s not calories in calories out. It just can’t possibly be.

Joel Greene 34:14
No, it’s It’s and it’s not to say that what gets lost in there is it’s like a lot of debates in nutrition and health. You grab on to something that has truth to it. But then in order to be novel and stand out and get followers, you sort of try to delegitimize every other conversation other than that one. And I just know when someone is hanging on to that I know they’ve never worked with real populations I’ve never worked with like, you know, you’ve never worked with like a corporate wellness thing or people like no like a lot of women in their 50s who have a lot of weight and stuff and they’re on 800 calories a day and you move to 300 and they can’t drop weight and all you’re doing is setting them up for weight gain.

Debra Muth 34:53
Right exactly they do they just gain more weight. And, and not to interrupt you. I’m sorry but even As a regular woman, like if you’re an executive, you don’t have time to spend five hours at the gym, you need something that’s going to be quick, dirty, and you can get moving because you’re busy stuff is moving back and forth across the office 50,000 times a day. And and they’re having dinner meetings and lunch meetings and this meeting and that meeting, and how do you put that into that real world then?

Joel Greene 35:24
Yeah, so to get on this, sorry, sorry, I just the calories in calories out thing, I got sugar too much on the rabbit hole. But I know.

Debra Muth 35:33
That’s okay. That’s how it goes here.

Joel Greene 35:36
First thing to say is that there is no easy answer. That’s the first thing to say. And there’s no single solution, we’re going to be looking at a combination of multiple things, what we’re looking at is a combination of things that ultimately, we’re looking for the things that have the least amount of effort and the biggest reward. Okay, and even then, it’s still hard. It’s still hard. But when we when we begin to kind of look at it, okay, first thing is, first thing is just hormones, and estrogen is the very first thing. And that’s tricky, because, you know, I know, I’ve dealt with practitioners who, even when you get those things, right, people still can’t prop that can’t that, okay? So it’s a piece of the equation. But it’s not everything, and you have to look at things like, is there a family history of breast cancer, you have that in every really careful there. But the first thing to look at is really look at the body as a series of dials, you know, 10, different levers, and we want to get them all to pen. So the first thing I look at is the God, we want to get that to a pen. And so that’s a series of steps we’re going to take, the next thing is your, your sleep and your in particular your oxygenation when you sleep, so sleeping and not properly oxygenating, you’re getting hypoxia and you’re going to be inflamed, and then inflamed fat, essentially, as fat that is not going to go away, it’s very difficult to lose and flame. The next piece of the equation is working on the body’s essentially metabolism and bioenergetics, and finding ways to get you to expend a little bit more energy. But what that really takes us to is, ultimately, when we’re getting into a place of of like trying to make a push down the road to get body fat going. A lot of it, a lot of the success will have to do with the types of foods the way we sequence them. And so using certain types of foods and using them in sometimes massively crazy amounts, and the way we time them and sequence them that that starts to move the needle, a good example would be sometimes what I’ll do is I will put people on like these very large breakfasts that are Mungus. But but it’s things like mixture of cabbages, and, you know, massive amount of like protein depends, but it’s very, very, very big volume, and then have them wait about four or five hours until their next meal and in the middle there by about, you know, two, three o’clock or two to three hours into that they’re going crazy, like, oh, my gosh, I’m starving, what happened? Yeah, and then count some tricks you have to do to get them not starving. But a lot of it gets to the sequence and timing of foods. And sometimes you have to try a lot of things because what’s not generally spoken up with the body is that everything works great up front, and then overtime doesn’t work as well. And so you’ll you’ll do a lot of things that work the first time and they work really, really well. But then they don’t work the second and third time as well. And so, you know, all those things just kind of come into play to make it work. And I would say, you know, just in my experience, more often than not, you know, you tend to have success when you throw a lot of things like that, but not always, not always, sometimes there’s there are cases that just confound anybody. And I’ve seen that. So, but the really important thing, the most important thing out of all, by far, which is the genesis of the problem long term is that there’s an unrecognized problem. And the unrecognized problem is the very act of shrinking a fat cell is inherently reloading weekend, the very act mechanically of when a fat soul contracts and shrinks, that that is setting up waking. And that has to be overcome. And it’s never been talked about, but it makes total sense to me just think about it. Um, if we just use the word starvation and feasting, historically,

Joel Greene 39:32
that’s all shrinking meant that there wasn’t any food. But, you know, like 1000 years ago, nobody was going oh, yeah, I need to go on the on the keto diet or do this diet, I need to lose some weight. You know, it was not it was it was like, well, you’re you’re skinny, that means you’re poor. Yeah, they’re the only people that are fat or rich. So what happens is our bodies have a number of mechanisms that that have always existed. that are designed to keep us alive. And basically, the way it works is, our bodies see diet and weight loss, as starvation, that’s it doesn’t see it any other way, because that’s just starvation. So in vessel train, you’re triggering all of these ancient defences to keep you alive. And basically, the net of those things is post fat loss, the body is driven to feast, it’s good, it’s driven to refill those fat cells. And that problem overcoming that problem used to have a solution in the ancestral world it was, once you got some food again, to get more food, you had to really expend a lot of energy, you had to keep working out, had to go home and go on hikes and do all kinds of things or chocolate, or, you know, you had to do a lot of physical energy. That’s all. We don’t have that now. So what you have now is post diet, life gets busy, and you just don’t have time to keep up with it. And so the body’s survival mechanisms kick in, and you’re eating the weight. And the very, the hardest part of the whole equation, and this is what, literally the entire proposition of body weight turns on, is that the mechanisms in place that surround the fat cell, the extracellular matrix, it gets stiffer over time. And it gets stiffer, because when you begin to look at what’s actually happening, when fat cells shrink, you’re calling the immune system into play, okay? Because if you could just plot a microscope and look at your fat cells and see what’s happening, what you’d see is that there’s these there’s a, there’s a scaffolding structure in place looks like spider man’s wedding, you know, imagine a bunch of balls hung in space by Spider Man’s webbing. And then when you shrink the balls, the webbing tenses up. And then if you shrink them too much snacks, and that’s what happens when you lose fat, you’re creating all these little micro injuries from the extracellular matrix snapping off from the fat cells. And the fat cell itself shrinking has a high likelihood of getting injured. And so what happens is, what we now know is all these immune mechanisms come into play. So so things like heat shock proteins, and different immune proteins and macrophage counts, and things like that, that come into play, the immune system goes to work. And it’s the same as any injury. Think about, like if you kept cutting your knee all the time, you would develop scar tissue. And that scar tissue after a while, would get really thick, and get to get like really dense, right? Well, multiple trips to the fat loss, well does something similar. And so what’s been going on all these years since the 50s, with dieting is there was no knowledge of this. And so you go down this road, you do your diet, you think you solve the problem, your body, which has, you know, ancient programming, and it was going, Oh, starvation, oh, let’s fix that. And so it’s kicking in all these mechanisms that work to refill your fat cells. And then the more you do this, what we call yo yo dieting thing, the more you do that, essentially, you’re creating scar tissue within the fat cells, and after a while they will shrink. So that’s a lot of what we run into is you get down the road, because what, tell me if I’m wrong, but what you hear is, yeah, you know, I did the I did the grapefruit diet in the 80s. And it worked and but then I came back and then I did the body for life. And you know, that really worked. But then I got busy again back and and then I do the Keto for a while and they work and then fasting and it worked. But now I can’t talk yesterday, the story you hear it’s like, oh, you know, these things may work. I got in shape. And I took pictures. And everybody said you look great. And now I can’t drop weight. What’s happening?

Debra Muth 43:46
Yes, I hear that so much from people, especially with keto, like I dropped 50 pounds with keto. As soon as I brought carbs back in, I started gaining it. I’m doing keto again. And now I can’t lose anything. Not right, or I’m gaining weight on keto. And they’re frustrated because it works so well before and they weren’t hungry. And they felt great. And so I love that you’re speaking to this because it is such a problem for us. And, and so many people feel like they’re the failure. It’s them that failed. Like they can’t stick to it. They can’t do something, there must be something wrong with them. But that’s not what I’m hearing you say in all of this. It isn’t them. It’s what’s happening to their bodies as a result of what we did.

Joel Greene 44:34
Yes, it’s the methodology wasn’t as crazy as it sounds. The methodology was never based in what was actually true. It wasn’t based on how the cell works. It wasn’t based on it. Like when I say this stuff, well, people like oh gosh, you know, you’re full of that. And it’s like, Okay, well let’s let’s break this down. Let’s break it down. So you have the adipocyte the fat cell and you have the extracellular matrix, the ECM and In order for this thing to shrink, for fat to be liberated, fixed, the problem is you’re going to create these gaps between the ECM and the fat cell. And the ECM is a protective scaffolding. Because the fat cells are easy to damage that the nucleus is not in the center. It’s it’s on the side right next to the cell wall. So you have to protect them, they need it, they need protective layer. And what happens is that the the ECM has two choices to resolve the problem, it can remodel itself. Well, in reading my book, I spent a half a year, a half a year on just studying this one thing, which is ECM remodeling. And suffice to say, I barely came up with a way to explain it. It’s so complex. I mean, it is so ridiculously complex. What goes on. We think of collagen fibers is just Oh collagen, that’s just this thing you drink, right? collagen fibers are essentially akin to solid computer programs, okay. And you have different kinds of them. And they are made from the fat cell in response to mechanical forces, mechanical stimulation, coming into the fat cell reprograms the cell to make different kinds of fibers. And these new fibers are loaded into the ECM, and these new fibers output computer programs, and they reprogram everything. So post fat loss, you’re gonna have more stress fibers, more specific types of collagen, it’s called collagen 682. And that, that it’s an inflammatory collagen looks like a beacon, and it just sort of sends out signals. And what those signals do is they attract inflammatory immune cells. And it stiffens up the ECM as a injury response. And the more you study this, what you come away with is we’ve never dealt with this when Whoa, whoa, there’s this biological response to starvation. That makes perfect sense when we think of survival. And because we’ve been using all these diet industry terms, like, you know, weight loss and all these words, we were just not thinking about what’s really happening. And so people have this thing of like, oh, you know, I tried on my Instagram, if you go, look, it’s real Joel green, and Instagram, there’s a post there about maybe coordinate way down the called the map of how everything works. And it’s a sine wave. So at the top of the wave, it goes up, and at the bottom, it goes down, okay. And what that’s describing is the first year or two of anything. So that first year in the keto diet, it was crazy, I lost all this weight or fasting, you know, it just came yesterday. It’s like, um, yeah, I did fasting, I lost 40 pounds, it’s great. But then I came back and now and fasting, again, I can’t lose any weight. And that’s the downside. And that’s how everything works. Because what you’ll find is that with most things, they work once really well. And then the body builds an adaption to it and then later on don’t work at all. And the double whammy is that as you’re looking to get your weight under control across a lifetime in this world, unknowingly, because no one ever told you this, you’re doing all these different programs that don’t account for what’s going to happen when you drop the weight. They don’t account for the ECM adaptions of fat loss adaptions, there’s a period now, I can’t believe this. There was finally a conference this last year on the weight reduced state, okay. And this was a bunch of scientists getting together. And finally recognizing that there is a distinct physiological period for six months that goes on after your body fat has been reduced. We’re very specific genes are turned on during that period, very specific proteins for a specific collagens very specific hormones. And it’s unique. It’s a unique, distinct biological phase that determines whether or not you’re going to keep the weight off. And nobody’s talking about it. Yeah. So. So we decided to adapt it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it’s, it’s, it’s not the consumers fault in that sense. Because that if they had the right information, that would be different,

Debra Muth 49:01
Right? And we’re still learning this, this is all new to us. In this world, I’m looking at weight loss and maintenance. So it’s going to take time to have somebody figure this out. And it’s what I’m hearing you say, the most important thing is that you’re constantly having to adapt your diet to change these these chemical things that are happening in our body. It’s not a one and done and you’re gonna be able to follow this diet plan for the rest of your life. And it’s always going to work exactly the way it did the first six months of it.

Joel Greene 49:31
Oh, um, I would say Okay, I think I’ve kind of I’ve been putting a lot of energy and time into this for the past 10 years. And so I’ve come out with a fat loss course that addresses this. And at my book, there is a diet is meant to address this stuff. So it’s meant to address these things. But I have a book coming out early next year that’s purely on the diet part and talk about basically like all the elements in it and all the suffice to say that There’s a whole lot of think through that was this never really been done, and that you have to factor things in, you have to factor in number one, you have to factor in hedonic eating, or ad libitum, eating, or just eating whatever the heck I want to eat, you have to factor that in, you have to put that in the equation and just say that this is something human beings are always going to do, they’ve always done it, they’re never not going to do it. So once put that in the equation, you have to factor in a time going to zero, you have to factor in being able to do this on the go, if I had to do this out of a convenience store, it’s got to work, you have to factor in the gut, you have to factor in fasting, because fasting is very beneficial. But the problem with it is if you do it too much, and a bunch of other factors, you have to factor in aging slower, you have to factor in insulin production. And what you see when you look at like what I call these pre 2020 diets is they’ve never really factored insulin in the equation like we will see like when you do intermittent fasting, or keto is that short term, you might see a little improvement in insulin sensitivity, but the longer you do them, your insulin sensitivity goes in the toilet. And so then you’ll hear the story of I did keto. And then it came off, and I had carbs and I just immediately gained fat. Well, it’s because you wrecked your insulin sensitivity on that diet, or I get a low carb high protein diet, yet, you’re gonna wreck your insulin sensitivity, you can even get diabetes. And so what’s missing is we’re in this age of extremes where something that’s not true has been, is now believed to be true. And it’s that the way you get healthy is to imbalance go extreme on one group of nutrients or one one group of macros. That’s how you get healthy. And it’s the opposite. Because over the long term, the variation in the diet and variability in the diet and intuitive eating are things that must be factored in intuition is a big part of eating, like your body kind of knows what it wants. And so we all need a framework that keeps us healthy, but needs to allow for intuition. Like, what do I feel like eating today? I feel like it’s okay. And there’s a way to offset that. So yeah, along with the answer, but that variability variations a lot. But it’s just to think through like like the think through the underlying think through of what has to go in to make something that people can use as a way to eat over time, it’s going to check all these boxes, it’s going to help them stay lean in the real world. It’s going to work when time is zero. So all that has to go in the equation.

Debra Muth 52:25
Gotcha. So one last question for you. We’ve heard a rumor that you look the way you do, and you only work out once a week.

Joel Greene 52:34
Oh, yeah, that’s true.

Debra Muth 52:37
Tell us how that works?

Joel Greene 52:39
Um, well, first of all, um, I do something every day. But the things that I do every day are a typical. So example, as I have my Instagram yesterday, I did a post about working from the ground. And so every day, I’ll spend two, three hours where I like a kid I work on the floor. And you what you’ll notice if you try that is that you work every muscle in the body. By doing that, like like when you get off the couch, or when you get off a chair, and you spend time in the ground, suddenly, your muscles go to work because you got to support your weight, you have to You’re always stretching you’re always you know, it’s a workout to work from the ground is a workout. I’m so like I’m incorporating into my day, things that don’t take time. But in one way or another tax the body. And another element is something I call the integrated interval, which is the basic equation is when you look at people who really do well over the long term, it’s not that they go to the gym, it’s usually that their field workers. Like you can go to Southeast Asia and find someone in their 80s working in the fields. And they’re tons of energy and lifting barrels and stuff like that you see all the time? And the answer is that every day, they’re doing something. So what you see in the modern world is we’ve, we’ve come up with this idea of working out. And it doesn’t really have a historical precedent. Like if you go into history, what always happened was every day you had to do something like you had to go to the river every day and form a bucket with water. And so the trick is really it is to get the body into doing stuff every single day. And when you do that, you kind of get the body to a level of that. Um, one of the ways that aging works is you go you’re going to the gym and you know you get injured you take six months off and you come back and you realize you just ah five years and six months. Um, whereas if you’re forcing the body to do something every day like I try and get the body to do some sprints every day or just some handstands for like it’s no warmup. Like I literally just on my computer, I get off. I go over the wall. I do a handstand for 30 seconds to a minute and I’m done to go back. But when that stuff is integrated into your day, every day, what you’ll find is that the body gets really really strong really, really fast. In fact on I have a gone coaches course he’s an MD. And he’s in his 60s. And he never didn’t pull up in his life. But I was just like, well, let’s just pick one exercise. And let’s do it. So he just said, Okay, pull up, that’s my thing. So it took him a month to do one because he’d never done one in his whole life. And now he, he reached a place where he was reliably doing five or six a day. Is it a 60s, it’s, as he stays with it, he’ll probably get the 10 or 15 a day. And it’s just because our bodies are adapted very well to doing stuff every single day. But what we see in our society is, we just get so busy, that we, we reserve working out for these renewal commitments, like, now I’m going to really do it, I’m gonna get back into it. Now. This is Yeah. And our renewal commitments don’t last. But what does work is taking 1015 seconds out of your day, 30 seconds out of your day, and you know, just doing doing a wall squat for 30 seconds, and then going back to work and just doing it every single day. That’s what really works. And it keeps you at a high level, we’re working from the ground are doing things. So I do stuff every day. That’s the That’s the trick.

Debra Muth 56:12
That’s awesome. I love that. It reminds me of something I learned about called elastic habits. And in elastic habits, one of the things that they talked about is you can create a habit if you do things every single day in small increments. And one of their one of their examples was doing push ups. And this guy would just do push ups every time he’d get up to go to the bathroom, he’d do a push up, whether it was a wall push up or a ground push up. And before you knew it, like how many pushups you’re doing 1000 Subs a day, you know, because you’re doing five every time you know. And it’s like those little things that we don’t think about that we can implement into our day. So when we say we don’t have time, we do we just think in the way of time we have to have an hour set aside and then the other half hour to get there and back in an hour to do it. Versus we can incorporate this into our day throughout the whole day. And before you know it, you’ve got a great workout done.

Joel Greene 57:05
Yeah, one of the things that stuck with me my entire life was on when I was in tracking field. I was injured and I really couldn’t train the volume I trained. And so my coach was like, like, what’s the workout to the coach and he’s like, you’re going to one one all out for? Like, that’s it. He’s like, one all our port. Okay. So you know, I ran all Porterhouse wiped out from doing it. And think about it, you know, back then, like a quarter times a lot faster than would be now. But the point is that in 60 seconds, you can, with no warm up, you can do something that will tax the body for the entire day. Like, like done, it doesn’t have to be a four mile sprint, it can literally be like for a lot of people. It could be a plank, if you did a plank for 60 seconds. A lot of people. Yeah, you’re done. You’re done. There’s a lot of power in 60 seconds.

Debra Muth 57:54
Yeah, you bet there is. So this has been great conversation. If people are listening to you, Joel, and they resonate with what you’re doing, how can they find the work that you’re doing?

Joel Greene 58:05
So go to veepnutrition.com. V is spelled V like Victor E, like Edward II, like a repeat like Paul veepnutrition. And you can check out the immune centric fat loss course there, which covers what we’re talking about. And then the book is the book is the immunity code that’s on Amazon. And then my Instagram is real Joel green. And we’ve got other goodies coming out here very soon. So yeah, that’s kind of the basics right now.

Debra Muth 58:31
Well, that’s awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Joel Greene 58:35
Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Debrah. This is uh, this was fun. Thanks for letting me rant.

Debra Muth 58:40
Absolutely, no problem. Wow, what a powerful delivery today. Um, you know, one of the things that I have as a takeaway here with Joel is that we are not to blame 100% for what’s happening in our bodies, right? I mean, what we don’t know is what we don’t know. And we’re always learning new things. And this weight and fat loss is such an incredibly complex situation. For decades now, we’ve said calories in calories out more protein. Fat doesn’t make you fat. Carbs are the, you know, holy grail of making us fat. And, and listening to Joel and his explanations of what’s happening really tells me that that is not true. All those things that we knew to be true or thought to be true or not. And we do have mechanisms to change things, but it’s very much an individualized approach. And no matter how hard we work, and how hard we try, there are going to be some cases that are going to stump us and we have to just keep going back and forth and putting great minds together to help find the answers that we’re all looking for, which is to stay healthy and strong and vibrant, and look the best that we can through this age related process that we’re we’re taking on today. So please check out his information. I think it’s going to be an amazing new discovery for you. If you’re struggling with weight, you’re struggling with fat loss. Or you just want to maintain what you have going into your your older years. I think having these tools are going to be so powerful for us. Hey, it has been really great sharing this time with you guys on the let’s talk wellness now podcast. If this episode has helped you, or you feel as though this episode would help someone else we’d love for you to leave us a review, share this podcast. And if you don’t want to miss the most exciting episodes we have coming. We’d love for you to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or Google Play. Until next time, live every day to the fullest