When many people try to lose weight, they choose a specific, cookie-cutter diet that claims to be the one true way to shed pounds. My guest says that approach is bound to backfire, and that there’s a better way to lose weight and change your body composition.
Alan Aragon is a researcher and educator, a pioneer of evidence-based nutrition, and the author of Flexible Dieting: A Science-Based, Reality-Tested Method for Achieving and Maintaining Your Optimal Physique, Performance & Health. Today on the show, Alan offers an intro to his method of flexible dieting, in which, as long as you stay in a caloric deficit and hit your daily protein target, you can decide on how much fat and carbs to consume according to personal preference. We discuss what to keep in mind as you create your own individualized nutrition plan, including how much protein you need a day, the minimum amount of fat to get in your diet to avoid a decrease in testosterone, and the minimum of carbs to consume to maximize muscle gain. And, because flexible dieting is also about not rigidly sticking with your diet 100% of the time, Alan shares how often you should take a break from your diet to eat what you want.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- Alan’s diet calculator
- AoM intro to tracking macros
- AoM Article: How I Used the AoM Podcast to Lose 20 Pounds in 3 Months
- AoM Article: Why Carbs Don’t Make You Fat
- AoM Podcast #475: How to Lose Weight, and Keep It Off Forever
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Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. When many people try to lose weight, they choose a specific cookie-cutter diet that claims to be the one true way to shed pounds. My guest says that approach is bound to backfire, that there’s a better way to lose weight and change your body composition. Alan Aragon is a researcher and educator, a pioneer of evidence-based nutrition, and the author of Flexible Dieting: A Science-Based, Reality-Tested Method for Achieving & Maintaining Your Optimal Physique, Performance, and Health. Today on the show, Alan offers an intro to his method of flexible dieting, in which, as long as you stay in a caloric deficit and hit your daily protein target, you can decide how much fat and carbs to consume according to your personal preference. We discuss what to keep in mind as you create your own individualized nutrition plan, including how much protein you need today, the minimum amount of fat to get in your diet to avoid a decrease in testosterone, and the minimum number of carbs to consume to maximize muscle gain. And because flexible dieting is also about not rigidly sticking with your diet 100% of the time, Alan shares how often you take a break from your diet to eat what you want. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/flexibledieting. All right. Alan Aragon, welcome to the show.
Alan Aragon: Thank you so much for having me on, Brett. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Brett McKay: So you have done a lot of research on nutrition, nutrition on how to lose weight, performance, et cetera. And you also do coaching. Tell us about your background. How did you get into this?
Alan Aragon: Yeah. I was just like the typical adolescent male, you know, you just want to look like the superheroes you see in the comics, and then you want to look like the bodybuilders you see on the Joe Weider magazine covers back when Flex and Muscle & Fitness were in circulation. And I also had a strong influence from my dad, who was an amateur boxer and really into fitness. And he is the one who gave us the archaic set of weights, basically, cement-filled type of plastic weights. And then you just kind of get hooked when you see a little bit of progress. And then the ’80s kicked in when I was a young adolescent. Well, actually, no, no, the ’80s kicked in when I was 10ish. And the fitness revolution started, and the momentum just went from there as far as the research part of my life goes. In college, I actually started off as an art major, and this is because a career in personal training didn’t really formally exist. But I just decided to take the plunge and dive into this crazy, non-existent vocation called personal training, and ended up doing well with it.
Ended up doing it for 10 years and saw that there was a major research element to it. And I serendipitously got invited onto research projects by a gentleman named Brad Schoenfeld, after he saw a bunch of my articles and a bunch of my writing, and I started my research review. It’s a monthly subscription-based research review in 2008, and I’ve just been at that ever since. And ever since 2013, I’ve been joining various research groups, and we do the science. We do everything from randomized controlled trials to just writing narrative reviews, writing systematic reviews, doing meta-analyses, and of course, peer reviewing the work of other researchers. And the whole goal is to try to positively impact the field by finding out, you know, what works. How can we reach these goals of improving body composition, improving performance and improving health, losing fat, gaining muscle, becoming bigger, stronger, faster, having better endurance, and living longer?
Brett McKay: So you put out a book called ‘Flexible Dieting’, and what you’ve done with this book is you’ve taken the research you’ve done and also the peer-reviewed research of other nutrition scientists and put it in an easy-to-read format that even a layperson could understand. You take the science and make it really easy to understand. And what I also like about it too, is you dispel a lot of myths that are out there about nutrition when it comes to body composition and performance, because there is a ton of misinformation or just myths about nutrition. I know a lot of people who are listening to this podcast, they’re probably trying to lose weight, and so they’ve probably tried diets, could be Keto, could be Whole30, could be, you know, low fat, whatever. But I’m sure they found, like a lot of people have found, that losing weight and keeping it off is really hard. What do we know about the research? What does the research say about the percentage of people who regain the weight they lose?
Alan Aragon: Yeah, it’s a dismal statistic. So roughly 20% of dieters in the general public end up keeping their weight off in the long term. And so long term is really… What that means, is as long as we’re willing and able to study feasibly. So “long term” is typically looking at people for a year’s time to see if they keep a significant amount of weight, typically about 10% of their body weight, lost for a minimum of one year, and only about 20% of people are able to do that, and there are several reasons why that is. So the big one is that people just don’t know how to do it right. They don’t realize the importance of maintaining their muscle tissue while they lose body fat. So what the typical person in the general public does is they go on a cookie-cutter diet, and they essentially crash the weight off of them. So they’re losing a lot of lean mass along with their fat mass. And when you lose lean mass, that’s all kinds of not good from a physiological standpoint, from even indirectly, a psychological standpoint. And from a metabolic standpoint, it’s just, it’s not a good thing to lose muscle tissue because you’re actually losing your metabolic currency.
A lot of your, “the engine of your body” that keeps things revving high, you’re getting rid of that along with the body fat. And if you do that, then you simply cannot sustain that weight loss. You need high-quality weight loss, which means losing the fat, keeping the muscle. And that’s what the general public just does not do. And they don’t even… They have no idea that this is what they’re doing that’s wrong, and that’s why they can’t sustain the program. They have no idea that they need to get on a plan where they love the foods. Nobody talks about how crucial it is to actually not hate your diet. Anybody can lose weight. Anybody can lose 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 pounds. But keeping it off is really kind of the trick that nobody seems to know out there.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So one factor you talk about that makes it really hard, that contributes to making weight loss being difficult to sustain is that people often take a rigid diet approach. What’s a rigid diet?
Alan Aragon: Sure, rigid dieting is a style of what psychologists would call “cognitive restraint”. So it’s a style of restraint or control. So there’s rigid restraint, and then there’s flexible restraint in the context of psychology. And this was concepts that were first put out there in the mid-70s in the literature, and then it wasn’t until the 1990s that they applied these ideas to dieting. So researchers back, gosh, it would be almost 30 years now, put out the idea that flexible dieting is a style of dietary restraint or dietary control that does not look at foods and dieting in dichotomous or black and white terms. So it looks at foods and dieting on a grayscale, and it doesn’t look at goal reaching or progress on a dichotomous basis either. Like either you’re doing 100% great or you’re failing. It looks at that more on a grayscale. So if you’re doing good, let’s say 80% of the time, and you’re trending forward in your weight loss or your body composition improvements, then that’s really what sort of this flexible dieting mindset is all about. If you’re not looking at foods as good and evil, you know, I mean, there’s such thing as good and bad diets, but you can have, “naughty foods” or “indulgent” foods or “bad” foods in a healthy diet, as long as it only takes up the minority of the diet.
Rigid dieting is kind of the opposite of that, where you’re looking at foods as either super duper foods or foods that will kill your progress or kill your health. You know, you’re looking at foods on a very black and white to always have versus to always avoid basis. And what they found with the rigid mindset was a greater tendency towards eating disorders and also a lesser ability to control body weight. So it’s a double whammy of bad when you look at rigid dieting. And I want to throw in a little caveat here because, depending on the population and the goal, some people have very kind of extreme goals with pushing the envelope, like physique competitors, for example, and they have a very constrained timeframe to reach these goals. And so the more extreme the goal and the more constrained the timeframe, then the more appropriate a more rigid and scripted model of dieting is. Now, when you’re looking at just sort of a general population type of goal, of people trying to achieve lifelong good health, then the rigid model really begins to fall apart and fail people.
Brett McKay: So a rigid diet would be something like carnivore or paleo. I only eat low carb, high fat foods, or I only eat meat. And if I eat anything else, then I’ve just failed completely. Or maybe it could also be like very strict calorie counting as well.
Alan Aragon: Exactly, yeah. Those are different forms of rigid dieting that you just mentioned. It’s essentially, “Here’s your menu, and this is what you’re supposed to follow. Go do it. Good luck.” And that’s it. That’s it. And even giving somebody a set of macronutrient targets, like, you are supposed to eat 150 grams of protein, 150 grams of carbs and 50 grams of fat. That is your diet, go to it. Even though that can be flexible in terms of food selection, it is still rigid in terms of you trying to micromanage these numbers everyday. And so rigid dieting can take on different forms.
Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s a good point, because when I saw the title of the book, I was like, “Flexible Dieting, oh, that’s if it fits your macros. That’s what I do.” And if it fits your macros is basically, which you just described there. You give yourself a certain amount of calories per macronutrient. We’ll talk about these here in a minute. So you might be like, “Well, I’m going to get 300 grams of carbs, 190 grams of protein, and 60 grams of fat a day, and then I can eat whatever I want during the day as long as I hit those macro goals. So I could add McDonald’s if I needed to, but I could also have my egg whites with nonfat cheddar cheese.” But yeah, it gives you flexibility in your food selection, but it can also become inflexible. And then you’re like, “Well, oh, my gosh, if I go over my carb count, then I’m just hosed.”
Alan Aragon: Right. Yeah. It can foster obsessive behavior. Even the macro targets, it’s not for everybody.
Brett McKay: Well, okay, so I think there is a takeaway there, rigid dieting, it’s very strict, doesn’t allow for… Just leeway in your nutrition. And that typically leads to adverse outcomes, weight gain. What is it about rigid dieting that causes us to typically gain weight? Is it just so cognitively demanding? We just think, “I can’t do this and give up?”
Alan Aragon: It’s people forcing themselves to eat in a way that’s just uncomfortable. They just have to grit their way through it, and it causes a certain amount of psychological fatigue. So over time, if the diet that you’re consuming is fatiguing to you mentally, then you are just not going to be able to sustain it for more than a few weeks or a few months at most. And then you just will go back to some old ways, or you’ll seek out alternative guidance from the internet or from a buddy here and there, that one buddy of yours who’s always in great shape no matter what he does. And then that’s where the problems come in. People just sort of swap one form of bad knowledge for another form of bad knowledge. And really, I can’t overemphasize the importance of finding an eating routine that you enjoy and that you actually can look forward to each of the meals or snacks.
Brett McKay: Okay. So for any eating plan to work, you have to be in a caloric deficit a lot of the time. But with flexible dieting, you don’t have to eat healthy foods 100% of the time. You don’t have to be obsessive about your diet. You don’t have to divide foods into black and white, good and bad categories. You can actually follow strict diets like keto or vegetarianism. But it’s not because you think the diet has only good foods and everything else is bad foods. It’s just because you prefer it like you like to eat that way, you enjoy eating that way, and it’ll help you stick with the caloric deficit you need to be in to lose weight.
Alan Aragon: Yeah. A flexible model for the general population would be like, “Okay. Be in the ballpark of your protein goals, but with carbohydrate and fat, you can be very flexible with that.” If you like a keto type model, then you can engage a keto type model as long as you’re hitting your protein. And then, of course, with something like keto, you have to consider food selection and your fat sources. Because if you’re getting your fat sources from just a bunch of butter and a bunch of lard all day long, you’re going to have different health outcomes than if you were to engage a keto model that got most of its fat or a lot of its fat, from things like avocado, olive oil, nuts, seeds, and of course, you have the incidental fats in the meats and the fish and the dairy and the eggs. That’s more of a healthy keto model than what a lot of people engage. Now, with a high carb, low fat, sort of the same thing applies. You can certainly do high carb, low fat, but you would have to pay closer attention to the food selection in terms of your carb sources.
You can’t necessarily be just slamming a bunch of refined carbohydrate foods and sugar sweetened beverages and then saying, “Hey, great, I’m hitting my macronutrient targets, and it’s high carb, it’s low fat, and I’m hitting my protein.” I mean, there’s a little bit more things that we need to pay attention to for that. But nevertheless, as long as you’re hitting your total daily protein and your total daily caloric intake, you can go keto, or you can go high carb, low fat, or you can go somewhere in between, all in the course of a week if you want. But most people are generally, they’re going to gravitate towards one type of diet paradigm versus another in terms of fat and carb levels. But the flexibility is in the fact that what really matters is protein and total daily calories. And then you can do carbs and fat proportion to your preference and still hit your weight loss goals.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So I’ve used if it fits your macros for several years now to both gain weight and recently to lose weight. So a couple years ago, I was really into powerlifting. And so the name of the game was like, “I got to get bigger, so I can lift more weight, because generally, if you’re bigger, it’s easier to lift more weight.” So I used if it fits your macros, so I would just increase my calories. And I didn’t eat junk all the time. People just think, “Well, you just eat Pop Tarts.” And I don’t. I mean, I have a Pop Tart occasionally, but for the most part, I was trying to hit my macros by eating things like oatmeal, vegetables, potatoes, lean meats, good fats. But then if I was going to go out to eat at some restaurant, I wouldn’t mind having a cheeseburger. Not a problem. And then last year, I don’t power lift anymore, so there’s no reason for me to be super big. So I decided to lose weight. I lost 30 pounds last year. It took me, like, six months, seven months, but it was just a gradual decrease.
Alan Aragon: That is a lot of weight.
Brett McKay: Yeah. But what was crazy though was, it wasn’t hard because I’d been tracking my macros for such a long time, I had developed a very flexible approach to my nutrition. And so I wasn’t obsessing about, “Oh, I got to get my weight of my oatmeal just right.” It’s like, “Well, okay, I know the general rough estimate of what a cup of oatmeal looks like. I know what 28 grams of cheddar cheese looks like, whatever.” And so I was able to sustain it. I just gradually reduced my calories through that six months. And, yeah, it worked out. I mean, it wasn’t hard. I never felt deprived. I never felt like, “This is really hard.” I was still eating the foods I enjoyed. It just was less. And I also noticed that my approach to food wasn’t obsessive. There’d be times when I was… I remember this one moment, I was trying to… I was in this fat loss mode, and I was tracking my macros for the day, and I had a general idea of how much I had left.
But then my flag football team that I coached, it was like our last practice, and the parents brought donuts to celebrate. And if I would have been obsessive, I’d been like, “I can’t eat that, it doesn’t fit my macros.” I was like, “No way, I’m gonna eat a donut with these kids I’ve been coaching for the past couple of years.” I just didn’t care. It wasn’t a big deal. I didn’t feel like my diet was off track. ‘Cause as long as I just kept things going after that, I was gonna be fine. So I just… Learning how not to obsess about it so much really helped me sustain that weight loss for a long period of time.
Alan Aragon: Well, that’s consistent with the research evidence too. And so when there is what the researchers call “planned hedonic deviations” from the diet, when you know that at these regular periods of time that you’re going to essentially, go outside of the rules, and you know from the outset that this is part of the plan, to go outside of the rules regularly, then people actually are able to adhere to the diet better in the long term. And so, yeah, so your experience actually does reflect the literature.
Brett McKay: Something also I noticed too, with my experience with counting macros was that being more rigid at the beginning allowed me to be more flexible later on. So at the beginning, I was very meticulous about tracking things and measuring things out. But I’ve noticed that by doing that, like, I now have a better idea of what a portion looks like. When I’m at dinner with my family, you know, dinner served family style. Right? You’re gonna get pasta. I can look and go, “Ah, that’s about a cup of pasta.” I don’t have to measure it out on the scale anymore. And the same goes just for my other… When I’m out and about just eating, I’m like, “Ah, you know, I know that this is about this amount of calories. It has this amount of protein.” So it allows me to be more flexible and not have to be so meticulous. So I think one thing that worked for me is being maybe a little bit more rigid in the beginning so that you can develop a bit of awareness. ‘Cause I think a lot of people have no clue what the calorie content of food is or what a portion is.
Like peanut butter is the perfect example. And I think people have this idea of what a serving of peanut butter is. But when you actually see what a serving of peanut butter is, two tablespoons, it’s not much. And so that vastly, it really resets how you think about your portion control.
Alan Aragon: Yeah. No doubt about it. I think that going through a period of tracking, tracking the grams and… What app do you use, by the way?
Brett McKay: I use MyFitnessPal.
Alan Aragon: Okay. Okay. That’s a popular one.
Brett McKay: Is there one you like?
Alan Aragon: I just found out, actually, from one of my students. She uses something called MyNetDiary, and their free version, she enjoys that. And she said she’s gotten some good feedback from clients. There’s another app that people like called Cronometer. There’s another app, this is a bit more, I guess, more bells and whistles, but a lot of great feedback. An app called Avatar. That’s almost like one of those AI type of self-adjusting types of apps, but yeah, tracking the grams of everything for a time period, knowing that the goal is to be able to not have to depend on that, what ends up happening is you go through this sort of bootcamp phase where you’re forced to learn what are the nutritive values of the various foods in the various amounts that you eat? And I think that can be a very valuable thing, like it was in your case.
Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay. So with flexible dieting, you’re trying to hit a certain macro goal with your protein intake and staying in a caloric deficit, so you lose weight. But how you do your carbs and fat, that’s completely up to you. There isn’t one right diet. There isn’t one true diet. It’s all about just what works for you. So you can follow the keto diet if you want, if that helps you stay in a caloric deficit. But as you talk about in the book, as you’re deciding how you want to eat and how you want to divide… What to do with your macros in your own preferred way, there’s some things to keep in mind for weight loss and health. So let’s walk through what people should know about each of these macronutrients, starting with protein. How much protein should we aim to get if fat loss and muscle gain are our goals?
Alan Aragon: Yeah, the old adage, the old bodybuilding adage of a gram per pound, it shoots high, but it’s beneficial both from a body composition standpoint, even a clinical standpoint, and even a performance standpoint. So it would probably represent the upper end of what is appropriate for most people. But it’s roughly 0.7 grams per pound of target body weight would be sort of the bottom end of optimal. I almost said optional, but yeah, optional and optimal. So 0.7 to 1.0 gram per pound of ideal body weight, or target body weight is the sweet spot for total daily protein intake.
Brett McKay: Okay. So I like that you said target weight, because if you weigh 300 pounds, like you don’t want to… Because people hear like the 1 gram per pound of body weight, you’re like, well, if I’m 300 pounds, I need to eat 300 grams of proteins. No, no, no. Like you gotta figure out what your target body weight is. Maybe it’s 250, make that how you set your protein.
Alan Aragon: Yeah, that’s right. And the whole purpose of basing stuff on target body weight is that it’s a proxy for lean body mass. We’re trying to feed lean body mass and not necessarily feed your body fat mass, but the problem is, it’s very difficult to accurately estimate body composition and estimate lean body mass. So the workaround is easy enough; base it on target body weight instead of just current body weight, unless your current body weight is your target body weight.
Brett McKay: What does the research say about the best sources of protein?
Alan Aragon: Man, this is a big question. You know, animal sources are still, as a group, they’re still going to be the highest quality. The lower digestibility of plant protein sources is always going to put them lower than animal foods in terms of what’s called the anabolic response, or muscle protein synthesis. So you’re kind of the classics on the animal side of the fence. Meat, fish, poultry, dairy, eggs, and dairy-based protein powders. Those guys are kind of going to be the king. However, there are some honorable mentions on the plant side of things. So legumes, beans, peas, and even pea-based protein powders and soy, those are still high-quality proteins, and they still have performed quite well in head-to-head comparisons with animal proteins. Soy, for example, it gets bashed a lot, but it is almost on par when it has head-to-head comparisons with dairy proteins for its anabolic response. It’s only slightly inferior. So…
Brett McKay: But soy protein, a lot of people say, well, don’t eat soy because it increases estrogen. Is that true?
Alan Aragon: Yeah. Yeah. I’m glad you brought that caveat up. Typically, the dosing threshold for concern with getting your protein from soy isolate. So it can be a little bit different if you get your soy proteins from the full food matrix of, let’s say, those edamame bean pods. It’s a different game with soy when you’re just, you know, chugging down soy protein isolate in the powdered form. That can pose a certain degree of threat of hormonal impacts, negative hormonal impacts. But that’s only been seen in the literature in specific case studies where they breached about 60-ish grams per day, in a small handful of case studies. So if somebody is eating soy in the form of regular soy foods like tempeh, tofu, edamame, kind of what Asian folks do, in the typical amounts in the course of the day, you’re not going to have these theoretical feminizing effects and these estrogen-raising effects. But if you have this over-reliance on soy protein supplementation, soy protein isolate to get your total daily protein intake to where it needs to be, I personally wouldn’t have more than about 60-ish grams of that stuff in the course of the day.
Brett McKay: Gotcha. Okay. So animal source protein is going to be your best bet for muscle protein synthesis. But you can get your protein from vegetable sources or non-animal sources and you can still build muscle that way.
Alan Aragon: When I was writing the book, I really began the writing of it about five-ish years ago. And it was right during that time, within that time period that a couple of key pieces of literature rolled out. So, there’s two consecutive studies that came out comparing a vegan group with an omnivore group. And they put both groups through a resistance training program. And similar muscle size, and strength gains were made in both groups in both studies. And like I said, they compared a fully vegan group with an omnivorous group. And in one of the studies, they used soy protein isolate to boost the protein intake up to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight, or 0.7 grams per pound of body weight, which is entering the realm of optimal. And in the other study, they used some real odd, interesting stuff called mycoprotein. So it’s a fungus-based protein and the brand name is Quorn, Q-U-O-R-N, and it’s like double the price of meat. [laughter] So you’re looking at this fantastic product, it’s just too freaking damn expensive. But nevertheless, on one of the studies by Heavier Lorraine and colleagues, they used soy to make sure that the vegan group was on par with the omnivore group in terms of total daily protein.
And lo and behold, over the time period of the study, which I believe was 12 weeks, very similar muscle size and strength gains in the groups, despite the vegan group essentially having lower overall protein quality in terms of essential amino acid proportion even. And so it looks like people on a completely plant-based diet can gain similar amounts of muscle size and strength as omnivores, at least within the limits of the research. So when I say that, I mean the subject profile. So we’re looking at subjects who are not necessarily high-level or advanced lifters or advanced trainees or necessarily athletic. So general populations can still maintain a plant-based diet and gain muscle, but whether or not they can take it to levels that are competitive and highly above average, well, that’s still open to investigation.
Brett McKay: Okay. So protein, 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of target body weight. Well, let’s talk about carbs. So, I’d say about 20, 15 years ago, carbs were like evil. Everyone was like, don’t eat carbs, gonna make you fat. I think you’re starting to see people go away from that a bit. There’s still some people who are very adamant about don’t eat carbs, but I think you’re seeing people in general embracing the idea, oh, carbs can play a role in your diet. What does the research say about a good carb goal to hit if your goal is to lose weight, gain muscle, and just feel good?
Alan Aragon: Yeah. Carbs are a highly individual type of thing. Let me first establish that the directive to just avoid carbs is really effective for weight loss. But the question is how long can somebody realistically sustain that? Number one. And number two, what is the opportunity cost of that? In other words, what are the long-term health impacts of somebody avoiding all of the carb-containing foods, including the ones that consistently have been shown to prevent chronic diseases, like, especially cardiovascular disease, which is the number one non-infectious disease killer in the world? And so just because cutting out carbs completely is a really great fat loss tactic and weight loss tactic, at least in the temporary term, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to win in the long-term. So with that out of the way, there’s really a super wide range, Brett, of carb intakes that are appropriate. If somebody has no desire necessarily to put on an above-average amount of muscle, then they don’t really need a whole lot more than, let’s say, a bottom end of 30 to 50 grams of carbs a day.
Brett McKay: Okay.
Alan Aragon: With just classic keto model. However, as shown in the scientific literature, consistently, the majority of people who engage keto cannot sustain it for more than six months to a year. So when they put these subjects… They assign the subjects a ketogenic diet where they have a maximum of 50 grams of carbs a day to consume. By the six-month mark, this amount is typically doubled. And by the 12-month mark, their 50 grams carb assignment at the beginning of the study ends up being about 150 grams of carbs by the 12-month mark. So it just creeps up. People can’t seem to sustain that level of carbohydrate restriction. Now, there is a subsection of people who really love it and are really vocal about it, but they’re in the minority of the people who actually can sustain like keto for life. Like these carnivore communities who have been obviously doing keto and carnivore for years now.
There are those people out there and more power to them if their intake is healthier than their former standard western diet, which was just too much of everything. But for people who are concerned with long-term health, then having a highly restrictive approach toward carbs can, like I said, have some opportunity cost. For example, if people are avoiding fruits and avoiding healthy carb sources, healthy starch sources like ground vegetables, root vegetables, tubers, and even a lot of the grain foods, and certainly legumes. Legumes are like, you know, they’re still a majority carb food that happen to have consistent benefits to many aspects of health, consistently in the literature that shows this. If somebody wants to gain muscle, then it’s very inefficient to do that without a certain amount of carbohydrate intake. So I would say that if you want to maximize muscle gain, it’s tough to do that with a keto intake and a low carb intake. So the bottom end carb intake for maximizing muscle gain might be right around a gram, gram and a half per pound as far as carb intake goes. But like I said, if fat loss is the main goal, man, really no strict minimum of carbs for that.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Yeah. That was interesting about muscle. If you want to gain muscle, you need carbs because it allows you to work out harder, it allows you to train harder and lift harder, which allows you to stimulate that muscle protein synthesis from lifting weights. And if you’re carb-depleted, you can’t do that as much. So it’s going to be harder. I’ve noticed that there’s periods when I did like low carb, high fat. And whenever I went to the gym, I could definitely feel the difference between being on a high fat, low carb diet versus a high carb, low fat diet.
Alan Aragon: Yeah, that’s right. And so with the goal of muscle gain comes this programming where you have these escalations in training volume, so sets, reps, load, all of that stuff has to progressively increase over time. And on a low carb diet, that lifting capacity, the demands of the resistance training that are escalating, they’re just not supported by a ketogenic level of carb intake. They’re not supported optimally. So somebody can still gain muscle on a ketogenic diet, it’s still possible. It’s just not optimal and it’s just not an efficient way to do it. And progress is not happening maximally, as you’ve experienced and as is observed consistently in the field and in the research literature as well.
And so not only that, but the difference in resting glycogen levels between somebody on a ketogenic diet and somebody on a high carb diet is very substantial. Like somebody on a keto diet can carry about half the amount of muscle glycogen at the resting state than somebody on a high carb diet. And this can be visible for people who are in the physique competitor realm. And it can just be visible, period, if the whole point is to carry around more muscle mass. And people need to know that for every gram of carbohydrate you store in the muscle tissue, or in other words, for every gram of glycogen that you store, there’s almost four parts of water that are attached to that glycogen molecule within the muscle. And so the less glycogen that you carry, then the less full and massive your muscles are going to be.
Brett McKay: This idea that in order to lose weight, you have to go low carb, that’s not… When I was losing my weight last year, I had higher carbs than fat. Yeah, you can lose weight as long as you’re in a caloric deficit. You can lose weight and still eat plenty of carbs. Let’s talk about fat. What role does fat play in our health?
Alan Aragon: It plays a number of roles, I think, the main ones would be the building of hormones, the maintenance of body fat, the maintenance of the types of fatty acids that are circulating in the blood and either contributing or detracting from cardiovascular health. And as far as our conversation is concerned, the preservation of testosterone level, healthy testosterone production. So it’s possible to consume a diet so low in fat that your body has a tough time with hormone production.
Brett McKay: How low do you have to get with your fat consumption for that to start happening?
Alan Aragon: There’s a series of studies that have compared various fat levels, but the most frequent comparison is 20% of total calories from dietary fat versus 40% of calories from dietary fat. And the 40% groups always end up with a higher testosterone production. And so when you switch them over to a 20%, then their testosterone levels significantly decrease. So somewhere in that range between 40 and 20, something is happening to where testosterone is lowered. Now, these diets are probably not ideal. It’s just a regular old research diet, probably not optimized in protein. And these are sedentary subjects. They’re not on a balanced training program, and they’re not on a training program, period, let alone one that involves resistance training. So you have to kind of take that research for what it is. But it appears that 20% of total calories is something that you really don’t want to go below if you want to preserve testosterone levels.
If you want to maximize testosterone levels, well, then we’re probably looking at somewhere above 20%. We just haven’t systematically figured out what that was and tried different forms of fat to see what can rescue a low overall fat intake. Types of fat matter. Saturated fat seems to be a lot better for testosterone production than unsaturated fat. But then the trade-off is cardiovascular disease. [laughter] So maybe we weren’t necessarily meant to maximize testosterone and maximize health all at the same time, although, you pick your battles. So yeah, it’s a little bit of a complicated story with fat. I personally wouldn’t go below 20% of total calories from fat, and I personally wouldn’t go below about, on the very, very low end, 0.3 grams per pound of target body weight with dietary fat.
Brett McKay: Gotcha.
Alan Aragon: I would probably start off at a sweeter spot, like half a gram per pound of fat, and then just go up from there.
Brett McKay: Let’s bring this all together. So people can kind of have an idea and they can start creating their own individualized nutrition plan, because you talk about this in detail in your book, but just kind of give listeners a taste of this. Let’s say someone’s goal is to lose fat and gain some muscle, how do you figure out the ballpark number of calories you need to consume daily to reach that goal? So if fat loss is your goal, you need to be in a caloric deficit. So how do you figure out what a caloric deficit is for you?
Alan Aragon: Yeah. The first step is either knowing the total calories that maintain you, and if you have no freaking clue what that is, then you have to at least get a handle on… You have one or two things to do. Track what you eat for two to four weeks without changing your habits. If you happen to have been maintaining your body weight, then just literally track everything that you eat for at least two weeks, and that will give you your maintenance calories. Now, if you’re unwilling to do that, and you just want to know, hypothetically, what is my maintenance calories, then you can pop your numbers into an online calculator, and it’ll spit something out. I tend to think my calculator is more methodical, at least than a lot of calculators out there. It’s on alanaragon.com/calculator. But yeah, you need to find out what your maintenance levels are, what maintains you. And for most men out there, it’s going to be somewhere between 2000-3000 calories, depending on your body size. You just have to figure that out. And in order to lose body weight, in order to lose body fat, the most efficient way to do that is to impose a caloric deficit.
And the safest caloric deficit to target is right around 10% to 20% below maintenance. So if somebody’s maintenance caloric intake, we’ll just choose some really round numbers here. If somebody’s maintenance caloric intake is 2,500 calories, then they’re going to want to decrease that by 10% to 20%. And that would mean decreasing it by 250 to 500 calories, depending on how careful you want to be about preserving muscle or even leaving the chance open to gain muscle while you’re losing fat, which is a possibility in people who are not advanced trainees. And so impose that caloric deficit, keep protein at about a gram per pound of your target body weight, and then you can be flexible about the remainder of the calories that you fill in with carbohydrate and fat. And once again, if you want to get cute, then I wouldn’t do less than 20% of total calories from fat. I would hover probably around more like the 30-40-ish percent. And frankly, you know, if you want to go full keto, that’s fine. Just know that you’re courting some risks down the line if your fat sources are not “heart healthy”, no matter how much your carnivore friends will preach to you.
Brett McKay: And then once you have that, just maintain that flexible approach to your diet. Don’t freak out if you eat more carbs than you’re supposed to or you had a doughnut because someone brought it to work. Don’t get so upset about that because as long as you stay consistent in the long run, you’re going to lose weight. How do you measure progress? What should people’s expectations be? You said about a pound a week?
Alan Aragon: Yeah. Right. Right.
Brett McKay: And I think one thing I learned is that I was going about a pound a week, but there are some weeks where I gained weight and I’m like, “What the heck happened there?” But I just stuck with the plan, and eventually, the next week, I lost 3 pounds. Sometimes there’s just these random fluctuations. As long as the trend was downward, I was okay with that.
Alan Aragon: Yeah. There’s going to be a lot of environmental influences and internal influences that are going to make the road very windy and very sort of jagged if you were to plot the progress line. And you just have to accept that’s just kind of the nature of the beast. And while you’re allowing for this pound a week, maybe sometimes faster at the initial weeks, you have to realize that every caloric deficit that you impose is a march towards equilibrium. So it’s a march towards a maintenance point. And you may reach several maintenance points before you reach the ultimate goal. And so it’s important to know that. It’s important to know that progress plateaus are a part of the weight loss process. If somebody has a substantial amount of weight to lose, like, say anything more than 10 pounds, it’s going to be quite a journey. And so every 5 to 10 pounds somebody loses will probably take at least a couple of months to lose that amount of weight. I think it can be important to take a week off of the diet every four to eight weeks. I mean, it keeps people from accumulating that psychological fatigue of dieting.
Or you can look at it this way: For every 5 to 10 pounds you lose, take a week off the diet. Don’t just completely abandon all reason and judgment and go on a two-handed diet, but you can just lift your foot off the gas pedal for a week and eat unrestricted, but don’t purposely try to binge. It’s okay to gain one to two pounds during your week-long diet break. You don’t have to adhere to strict macronutrient targets and then just kind of take a mental break from the diet and then get back on it. So if you take a week-long diet break after losing every 5 to 10 pounds, it can make the process easier. And sometimes you’ll find that when you’re taking the diet break, you’ll be able to use that time to also take a deloading phase off of training. And some people go the opposite, which is fine because they have more energy to hit some PRs with their training as well. So really, that part is not crucial, what goes on with training. But as long as you find a way to avoid the psychological fatigue of dieting, then taking a diet break with every 5 to 10 pounds loss, I’ve seen good results with that.
Brett McKay: Well, Alan, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Alan Aragon: You can go to alanaragon.com. That’s where you can find my book. It’s where you can find my research review and my social media handle on Instagram and X. And where else do I hang out? Facebook? Well, on Instagram, which is my biggest platform, it’s the Alan Aragon, the same thing on X. And yeah, that’s where you can find me. That’s where you can find my stuff. And I really appreciate you, Brett, for doing what you do and having me on. And thank you for the listeners for tuning in.
Brett McKay: Well, Alan Aragon, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Alan Aragon: You got it.
Brett McKay: My guest here is Alan Aragon, he’s the author of the book ‘Flexible Dieting’. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, alanaragon.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/flexibledieting, where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you’ll find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
