The Science of Losing Fat and Keeping Muscle | Dr. Mike Israetel

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:00)
Welcome to The Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show. In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Mike Israetel. He's a PhD in Sports Physiology, and why did I have Dr. Mike on? Because nobody does better body composition and health and wellness. In this episode, we talk about a lot of things, but most importantly, we make fat loss easy. He covers the future of drugs like Ozempic and how to get the fundamentals of weight loss right. As always, this is free content. Please take a moment to subscribe, pay it forward. And if you like things like this related to health and weight loss, take a moment and subscribe to my completely free newsletter that you can find on my website. I will say there is some explicit language in this episode, but don't let that deter you. Now, on to the show. You're a very special guest. No, you are, Dr. Mike Israetel. Thank you. We have a part one, and part one was so good, and then all of a sudden that I heard you and your lovely wife were going to be in Houston, and now here you are.

**Dr. Mike Israetel** (1:17)
Thank you for having us.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:20)
Really, thank you for coming because I would like to say the world is really confused about fat loss, about muscle, and especially women. Again, we don't have to gear this all towards women, but most 16-year-old guys, they read muscle fitness, they knew how important it was, maybe it helped them get girls, and no, didn't.

**Dr. Mike Israetel** (1:47)
Well, not for me.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:48)
Well, I mean.

**Dr. Mike Israetel** (1:49)
I had other struggles.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:53)
Where can we start with fat loss?

**Dr. Mike Israetel** (1:56)
Yeah, great question. I think the principles are probably a good place to start, kind of just general theoretical guidelines, because I think it really helps to ground yourself in a pretty well-understood reality, and though it can seem really confusing in social media and media in general about, like, there's so many competing voices about how fat loss is best done, and the mainstream science on how the basics work just hasn't been contested in, I don't know, probably 60 years, if not more than that. So you can lay down a lot of fundamental understanding, and then after that, we can have a lot of, well, how do you do this in practice kind of things. But the fundamental understanding takes you three quarters of the way to practice anyway.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:38)
Why do you think it's so confusing for people?

**Dr. Mike Israetel** (2:42)
That's a really good question. I think there's a couple of reasons. One, a lot of people are operating on inadequate knowledge to even begin to understand the problem. So if I hear an economist on TV say that the nominal GNP is falling, I actually don't know what nominal means or GNP. So when someone's like, make sense of the economy for me. I heard that G something or other is good. So if you know like calories are a thing, carbs are bad maybe, but maybe it's fats, and you know like junk food's probably not good, but maybe some of it's okay. You really start to, you know, piece out the fact in your brain that you don't really know anything about the subject. Like if you ask me to describe like, Mike, like how does a car work? Somewhere between the engine connecting to the wheels is where you lose me. And so that's definitely a big deal because maybe this is too meta of a statement to be true, but I think people, when they swipe a lot, you know, the TikTok stream, they get these little bites of information. They really like them. You know, the science pages, like, doctors discovered a new molecule or whatever. Oh, cool, like, and you swipe, send to your friends. They feel like they're getting an understanding, but they're not. They're getting a couple of sprinkles, another off-color analogy. I can tell when Vietnamese is being spoken around me. I can tell when Tagalog, the main Philippine dialect, is spoken around me. I can't understand a word those people are saying. I can differentiate between Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese Chinese. I can hear it every time. But I can't speak and understand it. So when you talk to people, they're like, calories, fat loss, dieting, right? Tell me in a principled manner what you know about that. They're like, well, I just hear things. And so that's a big part of it, because you hear a lot of stuff, but you might not have ever put it together. And no one ever wants to look like they haven't put it together. So when you say like, well, you know, like health and fat loss, they're like, oh yeah. And it turns out, no, it really was not the case.