Forget crash diets: How to maintain a healthy weight | Alan Aragon & Prof. Sarah Berry

Most people who try to lose weight and keep it off end up failing. But what if the problem isn’t you — it’s the diet?

In this episode, we cut through the noise of weight loss fads to explore a science-backed method that’s helped countless people make real, sustainable changes. It’s called flexible dieting, and it’s built around the idea that personalised macronutrient targets, food quality, and consistency matter more than restrictive rules or trendy plans.

Our guest is Alan Aragon, a leading expert in fitness nutrition who’s spent over 30 years coaching clients and publishing research that’s reshaped how the industry thinks about fat loss. Alongside Alan is Professor Sarah Berry, ZOE’s Chief Scientist, who brings deep insight from her studies on metabolism and how our bodies respond to food.

Together, they unpack what actually works for long-term fat loss — and how you can get started with a realistic, effective approach that doesn’t require cutting out the foods you love.

Try our new plant-based wholefood supplement - Daily 30+

*Naturally high in copper which contributes to normal energy-yielding metabolism and the normal function of the immune system

Follow ZOE on Instagram.

Join the community

Be the first to know about ZOE’s breakthrough research, content from the world’s leading scientists, and more.

Transcript

Jonathan Wolf: Alan, thank you for joining me today. 

Alan Aragon: Thank you so much, Jonathan. Really, really happy to be here. 

Jonathan Wolf: And Sarah, thanks for being here, too.

Dr Sarah Berry: Excited as always. 

Jonathan Wolf: Well, Alan, we always like to kick off our show here at ZOE with a rapid-fire Q&A, with questions from our listeners. Are you up for that? 

Alan Aragon: I think I was born for that, that's what I tell myself. 

Jonathan Wolf: So we have some very strict rules: you can say yes or no, or if you have to, a one-sentence answer. 

Alan Aragon: Let's go. 

Jonathan Wolf: Alan, is there one approach to weight loss that will work for everyone? 

Alan Aragon: No. 

Jonathan Wolf: Sarah, does eating fat always make you fat? 

Dr Sarah Berry: No. 

Jonathan Wolf: Alan, is exercise more important than diet for weight loss?

Alan Aragon: No, they're both equally important. 

Jonathan Wolf: Sarah, if you have a slow metabolism, is it impossible to lose weight? 

Dr Sarah Berry: I don't really even understand what that term means. 

Alan Aragon: Spoken like a true scientist. 

Jonathan Wolf: Alan, what's the biggest mistake that people make when trying to lose weight? 

Alan Aragon: Listening to everything they hear on social media and just getting confused and just going with who's the most charismatic.

Jonathan Wolf: Weight loss is a really complex and important topic. So Alan, I'm really glad that you could join us today to try and help make sense of it. 

Listeners often get in touch with us asking for help. They want to move towards a healthier lifestyle, they want to move towards a healthier weight, but they're bewildered by exactly what you just mentioned in the quickfire questions, right?

All this conflicting and confusing advice that they find online, where, within 10 minutes, you can be told two things that are diametrically opposed to each other. 

There's obviously an enormous amount of misinformation around, you know, influencers pushing their latest weight loss supplement, dangerous health hacks. There's also this transformation of the field with these new weight loss drugs, Ozempic and Wegovy, and everything. 

Let's start at the beginning, Alan. Why are we becoming more overweight? 

Alan Aragon: It's a combination of several things. 

So the way that I see it, it is a gradual shift towards sedentary living, and this has been facilitated by labor-saving devices, even electronic and digital means to not even have to get up off the couch to prepare food. You just make a call and then wait for it to show up at the door, and that's it. 

In addition to that, there's a fundamental misunderstanding of how to maintain healthy body weight. And people simply don't know or are unaware that, fundamentally, in order to lose weight, you have to impose a net caloric deficit over a period of time.

So when people are not aware of that, then they easily believe that there are magic foods that, for example, burn belly fat or magic foods that burn fat, and then other foods that you should completely vilify or avoid. And that's where a lot of the confusion comes in. 

In addition to that, I would say that in the present time, people have a greater tendency to use food to, I guess, medicate or entertain themselves just from general work, stress, interpersonal stress, anxiety. So food ends up being kind of used as that sort of tool. 

I think that the combination of those things is at least some of the factors underlying the obesity phenomenon that has basically started in the early-ish eighties and continued on to today. 

Dr Sarah Berry: To add to what Alan said, I do think as well as the fact that we're more sedentary, as well as we're all living such different lives, and we have all of this food noise, our food landscape and the food choices that most people are making now are so, so different to 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago.

They're almost hijacking our system. We have evolved to be able to handle excursions in blood sugar, to handle fat, to handle all sorts of things that are thrown against us. But we haven't evolved to handle the food landscape that's out there, that's evolving even more quickly than science can evolve.

Alan Aragon: I knew I was missing a huge factor, being the food environment. Yes, thank you. 

Jonathan Wolf: And I think one of the things that's interesting is that for as long as I've been alive, actually, I'm aware of this constant trend of diets to deal with this new issue of all of us putting on weight.

I think we would now call those fad diets because they come and they go. I'm guessing that both of you have seen hundreds of them. 

I'd love you to both maybe share perhaps your favorite, and then I'd like to talk a bit about what helps them to take off in the first place, and then what's the reality. Do they deliver? 

Alan Aragon: Well, of course, the carnivore diet, and this is coming from somebody who… I love to eat meat. I just think that you throw the baby out with the bath water when you just fall headlong into carnivore because you heard it's optimal. 

In fairness, a lot of people who adopt the carnivore diet are seeking some alleviation to their gastrointestinal distress, whatever symptoms that they're suffering through.

And one can build a case to start off with a baseline of just meat and then reintroduce the plant foods systematically, to find out who the offending agents are. 

However, there is a sizable amount of the carnivore fans who hear that, vegetables, yeah, they're bad for you, they'll attack you, so therefore we just have to stick with what the ancestrally correct way to eat is, and it's just chunks of fatty meat. 

Which couldn't be further from the truth if you look at the weight of the evidence on what contributes to optimal health and longevity, lifespan healthspan. So, yeah, sorry, carnivore guys. I still think omnivore is superior. 

Jonathan Wolf: Sarah, you got a favorite fad diet? 

Dr Sarah Berry: I mean, there are ones out there like the alkaline diet. I mean, mostly, I don't even know what they are. 

I mean, the alkaline diet is eating alkaline foods. Not quite sure what alkaline foods are, strictly speaking, that then enter your stomach, that we all know is acidic. So don't know how that works. 

The blood group diet, I don’t know if you've heard of that. You eat certain foods based on your blood type. 

When you see how they pitch it, you know, it sounds really plausible, and you know, like Alan was saying at the beginning, you know, it's done in this really charismatic way, and it's made to seem like the silver bullet.

But no, they're all nonsense in my opinion. And do you know what the problem is? It does take hard work to lose weight. It takes bloody hard work to maintain weight loss. 

It can be hard work to eat a healthy, balanced diet in the food landscape we live in. And so, yes, we all want one of these quick fixes from these crazy diets. But the reality is, it's not that if it's too good to be true, it's often not true. 

Jonathan Wolf: It feels like one of the things that's in common across all of these stories is there's a very simple story that sounds quite compelling, that sort of explains everything, and then what I'm hearing you say in all of these cases is either there's an aspect of this that might be true, but it's only a small part of the total story or there's no part at all.

So why are they so successful? 

Alan Aragon: Okay, so we can start off with keto. In general, the prescription itself is very simple, very no-brainer: avoid carbs, right? 

Everybody has this idea when you think of carbs, especially when the general population thinks of carbs, they think of sweet desserts, creamy pastas, any number of highly-engineered, highly-processed snack foods, and when you kick all those things out of the diet, then you've kicked out a lot of foods that kind of enable this passive overconsumption of total energy through the day.

The issue with the ketogenic diet is very similar to what I said about the carnivore diet: a lot of people end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

So, keto works because you spontaneously eat a lot less calories by the end of the day because you've kicked out all these foods. And not only that, but you finally are eating enough protein, so you're more satiated in combination with kicking out the, in quotes, problematic foods.

But the level of restriction on carbohydrate happens to be something that is not sustainable for the majority of the general population. And this has been seen over and over and over again in research, even in vulnerable populations who would technically benefit from maintaining somewhat of a keto or carb-restricted diet, because it is not sustainable for the majority of the general public. 

There is a very vociferous minority who can sustain very low-carbohydrate diets, and they love it. And you know what, more power to them. Just the whole idea of saying, Hey, keto is optimal for everybody, that is incorrect because there are issues with food selection that can impact long-term health, especially since your diet is going to be mostly from fat.

We're talking 65% to 85% of the diet coming from fat. Then you have to really start being pretty discriminating about what kind of fat you're creating your keto diet on. 

There is a pretty stark difference between filling your fat allotment up with beef, tallow, lard, and butter, and bacon, versus filling your fat allotment up predominantly with things like nuts, avocados, extra virgin olive oil, sesame oil, seeds, chia seeds, sesame seeds. Those types of fat sources.

Dr Sarah Berry: Alan made an important point about the nutrients and being, you know, hyper-focused on the fat or the carbohydrate. We know firstly that there's hugely variable responses within individuals.

There's some work that's been done by one of our collaborators, Christopher Gardner, who put people either on a high-fat or a high-carb diet, and saw huge variability in the effectiveness for weight loss amongst each group. 

So for some people, high fat worked really well. For some people, high carbohydrate works really well.

But the really important point that I wanted to pick up on that Alan made is that you talked about all these high-carb foods that essentially, really, it's not about the carb, it's that they're all unhealthy foods, the pies, the pastries, the refined carbohydrates, et cetera, the sugar-sweetened beverages. 

I think we really need to move awaym when we are thinking about healthy diet from focusing on nutrients, apart from fiber, which I will continue to say we all need to eat more of that. We need to be thinking about it in terms of the foods. 

So Alan's just described two keto diets, one of which is undoubtedly incredibly unhealthy. The lard, the butter, et cetera. And one that could be healthy, you know, the extra virgin olive oil, the seeds, the nuts, et cetera. 

So I think anyone going on a diet needs to have a food-first approach rather than a nutrient-first approach. Based on my opinion, based on I think what the common evidence would support. 

Alan Aragon: You mentioned Chris Gardner's work, the DIETFITS study. That study had a huge impact on the way that U.S. nutrition folks have been able to look at the viability of diets across the spectrum, in terms of differences in carbohydrate and fat proportion, as long as food selection was right on.

And the really interesting thing about Gardner's study was that he and his team had the good sense to compare two diets that were equated in protein, highly disparate in carbohydrate and fat, but the food selection was all mostly wholesome stuff. 

And because protein was equated between the groups, and calories were equated between the groups, there were no significant differences in fat loss by the end of the study. 

So it really does come down to energy balance, but there's a lot of different things that influence energy balance. And one of the big things with the DIETFITS study that we were happy to see is that they actually equated protein intake between the two groups.

Jonathan Wolf: So Alan and Sarah, I feel like you sort of teed up really nicely, the fact that we're surrounded by all of this misinformation and confusion. I feel like we probably could have spent another two hours talking about different fad diets that entertained you. 

But I think we should move on from why most weight loss approaches that people are listening to have tried don't work, to what does work.

And Alan, I'd love to start with you. In a nutshell, what's your approach to helping your clients lose fat mass but sustain a healthy body composition? 

Alan Aragon: Okay, so it's a combination of a few things. 

The diet has to consist of mostly healthy foods that the individual either likes or loves. Because that way, when you look forward to the meals, then you can much more easily sustain the diet. 

Defining what's healthy and stuff, it's a little bit complicated. But for the most part, we're looking at minimally refined and processed foods. Exceptions here and there, especially, well, the main exception that would stick out would probably be protein powder. 

A meal routine that isn't fatiguing from a preparation standpoint, or from an accessibility standpoint, or an economic standpoint.

And then I have to mention that macro nutrition has to be individualized as well. So there are going to be some people who love low-carbing it. There are going to be people who love high-carb, low-fasting it, there are going to be people who love keto-ing it. 

All of those types of diets are viable as long as it falls within the individual's personal preference and goals.

So, in addition to that, a sound exercise or physical activity regimen has to be in play. And that's got to include a resistance training element in order for it to be optimal. 

So, that's kind of a simple way that I can put it. 

Dr Sarah Berry: Well, I think that the sustainable aspect to it is really, really critical.

We know that nearly every diet can work for people to lose weight, and we know that most diets do work in the short term for people to lose weight. But we know that nearly every diet is not sustainable in terms of weight loss over a long period of time. 

Fifty percent of weight is typically regained within two years, 70% after five years. So you've gone through all of that pain of losing weight, and then bang, it goes back up.

Losing weight by doing something that you know you can sustain. So, taking Alan's kind of approach, where it's about choosing foods that you really love or like, then you're going to sustain it. 

Again, going back to how we've evolved, we've not evolved to be able to take weight loss. We've been evolved to be able to maintain a certain level of weight. 

So as soon as you start losing weight, what happens is, is that your hunger signals going to overdrive your reward signals going to overdrive. So you are feeling even more hungry than you would have typically. But at the same calorie intake. 

Your metabolic rate changes a little bit. Not as much as we used to think, but that still changes. So actually, you burn less calories just sitting around once you've lost weight than otherwise. 

So to keep that motivation going, that might have been there in the beginning because you are dieting to fit into a wedding dress, or you are dieting because you're about to go on holiday, and everyone around you is saying, Oh, you are looking so great, Jonathan, you know.

Jonathan Wolf: That sounds nice. 

Dr Sarah Berry: You look great, Jonathan. 

Jonathan Wolf: Thanks. 

Dr Sarah Berry: But you know, I'm only going to tell you that for about six months. Then, I'm not going to be telling you that, and no one else is. 

And then, have you got then the ability and the motivation to keep going, having this diet that you are not enjoying and you're not happy with?

So if you can find a diet that Alan said is pleasurable, then you'll maintain it. 

Jonathan Wolf: And Alan, I've heard that you talk about something called the YOLO margin. What's that? 

Alan Aragon: Okay. It's basically this: so there's a concept called discretionary calories, which is a fancy way of saying your fun foods or indulgence foods or your junk. YOLO, you only live once margin. 

Jonathan Wolf: Alan, I'm glad that someone has explained to me what YOLO is because I thought I was going to be the only person left in the room, going, I'm not cool enough to know what that is. 

Dr Sarah Berry: You've got a teenager, Jonathan, you need to keep up with these things. 

Jonathan Wolf: He obviously thinks I'm beyond training, so you only live once.

Go on, Alan? 

Dr Sarah Berry: So enjoy life, basically 

Alan Aragon: The diet has to be able to accommodate our sense of fun or even rebellion, if you will. And the working practical margin for that is about 10% to 20% of total calories coming from essentially whatever on earth you want. And there's a little bit of nuance to that.

This recommendation hasn't been systematically rooted out and established in the literature. But observationally and certainly in my practice, I've seen it, kind of the 80:20 principle all the way to the 90:10 principle work very well.

So, let's say a typical 2000-calorie diet, somewhere between 200 to 400 calories can accommodate the quotes, naughty stuff, desserts, drinks, chocolate, ice cream, et cetera.

And the nuance to that, and I've been challenged on this, and I agree, if somebody is engaging in a quotes bulking phase, or they're purposely eating a sustained caloric surplus in order to grow. My bodybuilding friends regularly engage in this stuff, then you might want to go a little bit more towards the 10% YOLO margin rather than the 20%.

So you can sort of minimize your chances towards over over-consuming an inordinate amount of junk and sustaining that, and then incurring the negative health impacts that that might have over time. 

So that's where the 10 to 20% YOLO margin comes in.

Jonathan Wolf: I can tell now you're hanging out in a very particular part of LA. I don’t know about you, Sarah, but I don't hang out with a lot of people who are trying to bulk up in order to then further improve their muscles.

I'm pretty much surrounded by people at my stage in life who are only interested in maintaining or preferably taking a few pounds off. 

Alan Aragon: There's a bro in all of us. I'm going to bring it out in you at some point. 

Dr Sarah Berry: Alan's going to bring out your bro, Jonathan.

Alan Aragon: Absolutely. He's there. 

Dr Sarah Berry: The whole like 80/20 YOLO that Alan does, you know, is a real approach that we also do at ZOE, and it's a real approach that we would as a nutritionist give to anyone.

You can't be good a hundred percent of the time. That's really pretty boring. Even if being good does involve a diet that you like, you've got to let yourself have treats. You've got to fall off the wagon the odd time. 

And that's something that's really very much ingrained in how we communicate the advice at ZOE as well, have the odd treat, absolutely fine. If 80% of the time you're doing well, so what? Don't worry about the other 20% of the time. 

Jonathan Wolf: How do you avoid what is a treat becoming then a routine and overwhelming the rest of your patterns? Because I think what I find is that I'm eating the ice cream for the third day in a row, I'm realizing I'm just making this into a habit.

So how do you manage the 80/20? Because I love the idea of it. It's definitely something we believe, that nothing is off limits. How do you think about that without it, then just suddenly dominating your plate again? 

Alan Aragon: Okay. So I'm going to give you a two to three-part answer, if you're ready. 

So, the first part would be: I think it's perfectly fine if you are one of these 99:1 folks. And that's how you enjoy your food, and that's how you love it. And you would much rather have, let's say, a fresh fruit versus a piece of chocolate that is more power to you. 

Then part two would be, in order to accommodate this sort of 10% to 20% YOLO margin, it requires a little bit of, I guess, cognitive priming, or conditioning your mind to view these types of foods as somewhat powerless. It's just food, it's just a cookie, or it's just a scoop of ice cream. 

Take the power away from the food and put the power back in your hands, and just know that you can have it every day if you want it, or you can leave it. 

If you had it in your mind that I'm never supposed to have this food, then that is actually one of the aspects that underlie the bingeing phenomenon. Because when people allow themselves to have what they perceive as an off-limits food, then they'll go, Okay, I'm going to eat this whole pint, or I'm going to eat this whole bag right now, and I'm never going to do this again till at least next year, let's say.

Then if they didn't have that attitude, if they thought, Oh, it's just food, I can have some, I can have this every day, or I can't. Then it just takes the power completely away from the food. So, that's number two. 

The research is interesting in that if you avoid a given junk food or if you avoid any given food, your cravings for it eventually disappear. And when I went over that research, I was like, Oh, does that really kind of invalidate the encouragement even of this margin of junk food? 

Well, not really, because when people regain their body weight, it's usually consisting of these foods that they were avoiding.

So weight cycling and you know, this whole regaining phenomenon is potentially driven by the idea, or at least in part, driven by the idea that there's this dichotomy of foods totally forbidden and totally, health halo, we put these foods on a pedestal. 

So the third part of my answer would be, you can eat healthy versions of these dessert foods. People just are not necessarily adventurous enough or willing to break out of their bubble, their routine, to try certain foods in certain contexts and just see how delicious they are. 

Dr Sarah Berry: And there's an enormous amount of these kinds of recipes out there on Instagram if you're following.

There's certain people who are giving these healthy alternatives to what would be considered these no-go sweet treats. 

We have a lot in the ZOE Cookbook as well, where we've recreated healthy versions of what would have been kind of no-go sweet trees as well. And so I think we are quite lucky that there are all of these options now.

Alan Aragon: Yep, absolutely. 

Jonathan Wolf: Alan, I know one of the things that you focus probably more than we do at, tend to do at ZOE around macros. Why do you think that's important for fat loss? And I heard you particularly talk about protein within that. 

Alan Aragon: As far as the macros thing goes, I've tracked them, and I've done the whole micromanage the protein, carbs, and fats thing.

But one of the ways that we, in the coaching community, have sort of piloted and it's worked, is just having people be aware of their protein intake. 

And sometimes that, in and of itself, by default, takes care of everything else. It sort of auto-regulates everything else. But protein and total calories are, at least from a baseline programming standpoint, the most important as far as structuring the diet.

So with protein intake, the importance of getting enough protein is, in the context of body composition, to just maintain your lean body mass, your skeletal muscle tissue in particular. 

Jonathan Wolf: And could you explain for a minute why you're saying that? 

Alan Aragon: Yeah, so our muscle tissue is essentially the major controllable metabolic engine of the body, if you will.

So our muscle, it doesn't just move the joints and enable us to overcome the physics of life, but it also acts as a metabolic processing unit. So it processes our nutrients, our calories, and allows us to remain healthy. 

There's a phenomenon called nutrient-partitioning, where you can favorably partition calories and nutrients towards the lean tissue, or you can have this excess going in towards the fat tissue.

If you're training muscle properly and you're maintaining a body composition that respects the need for a minimum amount of muscle tissue through the life stages, then you stand to have just better overall functioning of the bodily systems when you can maintain your muscle mass. 

So that is one of the big reasons to keep protein sufficient.

Dr Sarah Berry: And Alan, something I'm curious about related to protein, because we've been doing quite a bit of work on it recently at ZOE, and we often get asked, How should I take my protein? 

Should I be having a certain amount with every meal? What's the best way to plan it throughout the day? 

Alan Aragon: That's a great question. And there's a hierarchy of importance with protein intake. 

So of first importance is your total for the day. So if you get enough protein by the end of the day, then the other details are just distant, secondary importance. The distribution of protein, the timing of it, the spread, the individual dosing, size, all that stuff is just pretty trivial.

Secondary importance is the timing and distribution of the constituent doses. There's a whole science to that. 

Jonathan Wolf: And Alan, could you help me to understand, in really simple words, why you're saying that that protein is important if I'm following this program you're describing to help me to lose fat.

Because I think a lot of people listening to this are like, Well, don't I just have to eat less food overall? I'm increasing the quality of it, but I'm just eating less food, so why do I need to worry about how much protein I have while I'm doing this?

Alan Aragon: Okay. So protein is crucial for supporting your lean body mass. So your lean mass is all the tissues in your body that are not fat mass. 

If you do not consume enough protein, then over time, and especially over the life stages, you incur conditions like sarcopenia. And then the umbrella over sarcopenia being frailty.

This is one of the unfortunate fates of the general population who's not involved with any sort of training or any sort of awareness about eating enough protein. 

Those are the big reasons, and protein has other aspects to it that help with the fat loss process, including keeping people satiated.

So, of all the macronutrients, protein appears to be the one with the most potent effect on hunger control. So there's a bunch of research out of Jose Antonio's lab, where he had the subjects just literally stack lean sources of protein on top of their habitual diets. 

This is five studies running now, and there's no gain in body fat over time. And this is in free living conditions, in participants who are engaged in training, so resistance training, so they're recreationally athletic subjects.

So protein has a very interesting effect on appetite regulation and the prevention of fat gain, even if you stack it on top of your existing diet. So there are some very interesting effects of protein.

But if I were to boil it down to why is it so important? It's because it supports our lean body mass. And our lean body mass is really important for supporting what people know as our metabolism, or our resting metabolic rate, or resting energy expenditure.

So when you can support that, then you can support the fat loss process. If you can retain your muscle tissue over time while reducing body fat, then that is the ideal scenario. And that's where getting enough protein comes in, plus resistance training. 

Dr Sarah Berry: And we see with our own data from the studies that we've done as part of the ZOE Predict research, if you are adding protein to your carbohydrate-rich meals, then you are having a smoother metabolic response, so to say. 

So that you are preventing that dip in blood glucose that I talked about earlier, that means that you go on to feel hungrier more quickly. You go on to consume more calories more quickly. 

Adding in fiber, adding in fat, will also have the same effect, but protein is even more potent. So, as well as the fact that it stimulates these hormones that make you feel fuller, it also has this lovely effect in kind of smoothing out, so to say,  your post-meal metabolic responses.

Jonathan Wolf: Before we move on and talk about practical tips, one thing that hasn't really come up in this episode so far feels a bit like the elephant in the room, which is all of these GLP-1 agonist drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy and all the rest of it, which are obviously everywhere at the moment. 

I think a lot of people listening are like, Oh, I mean, come on, guys, if I wanted to lose some fat, I would just take these injections and then surely I don't need to worry about the rest of this. 

What are your thoughts on them, Alan? 

Alan Aragon: Okay, so I'm coming from a bias of nearly 30 years of helping people transform their bodies and never having, in quotes, needed to implement these types of drugs.

So I almost want to see them fail, but the evidence is in favor of them. And so, you know, as much as it hurts our ego, sometimes we just have to give credit where it's due. And the GLP-1 drugs have been quite the significant positive in certain populations, and some people genuinely need them.

They were originally were developed to control diabetes, which they're very good at. I think they have the potential to be abused by folks who want to lose the last 10 pounds or something to that effect. 

I think that they have the potential for being knee-jerk prescribed to people who are too young, and also knee-jerk prescribed as this first-line defense, even without first making lifestyle changes.

However, I would concede that they do make a good life jacket, in the sense that if somebody has a lot of excess body fat and their biomarkers are off the charts and they're in a really bad spot. 

Health-wise, I do think that they make for a good life jacket. For example, you wouldn't have somebody jump out of the boat and tell them to come swim to shore. Let's go. The GLP-1 drugs serve as a good life jacket. 

But I think, and this is my bias, I would prefer for people to see it as that rather than something that they are going to commit to from here on out. I think that the GLP-1 drugs, I mean, they're a good tool, but I would like to see them placed more in the light of being a sort of triage situation that should be weaned off of, rather than just sort of this convenient Band-Aid. 

Jonathan Wolf: And if someone was on GLP-1s and is listening to this, and there will be lots of people like that, does your advice change significantly? 

Alan Aragon: I think that in all of those cases, we need to just assess the individual situation. Some people need them and will benefit from them depending on their circumstances.

Some of them, it is more of the scenario that I described, where, let's use this as a last resort, and then let's also focus on weaning off. 

I think it's really tough to universalize a yes or no type of prescription with GLP-1 drugs. 

Dr Sarah Berry: When you have people that are morbidly obese, this is their life jacket, it's their way to get out of that rut.

I know a few individuals that have now reached a stage where they can hardly leave their house because of how obese they are, that they can't walk downstairs because they're so out of breath. 

They're desperate to get GLP agonists. This is a perfect candidate that could transform their entire life. They have tried everything, but unfortunately, they've reached a stage where they are so obese that it is too big a hurdle to overcome now, despite trying.

They're not in the position that they can physically exercise. And so I do think that in that situation that yes, we should embrace it. But yeah, absolutely for someone that's got maybe one inch of fat to lose around their waist to look amazing in their bikini? No.

But I think something that we have to be really mindful of is that for people who are on these drugs, and there's a growing number of people on these drugs, we have to be really, really mindful about the diet that they are then eating.

Because they're a hunger suppressor, they get rid of all the food noise. It means that you are not eating the same amount of food, you're not eating the same amount of calories. So you've got to make every calorie count. 

I think this is something that we need to be really, really cautious about, that people who are on these GLP agonists suddenly think, okay, that's it, it's all fixed. Or, well, my meal today, or my one meal, I'm hungry. I'll go and have a McDonald's because the weight's coming off. 

No, this is the time where you've really got to think about your diet. You have to get enough protein in. That's critical to keep the lean mass. You have to still get enough fiber in, you have to still get enough diversity of different bioactives, different micronutrients.

And so it is a very, very critical time to think about your diet as well as being on these drugs. 

Jonathan Wolf: Thank you both. I think we have this great background story to where we are, a sort of grounding, I think, Alan, in your approach. 

So if I was going to summarize quickly: food quality is really important, getting enough protein is really important, and resistance exercise has an important role. 

I'd love to now make it really actionable for our listeners so they could begin their journey as if you were there, taking them through this. Maybe we can imagine a new client, Alan. So let's say they're in midlife, they want to lose, say, 10 pounds.

Where do you start? And could you take us through the journey with them, sort of step-by-step? 

Alan Aragon: Okay. So not everybody is ready to go on a program where they transform their body. Let's say somebody thinks they're ready. 

I would start with, let's see your sleeping cycle. How much sleep are you getting? Do you feel it's enough? And what is your history with regard to that? Because sleep is the X factor for a lot of the success or failure in programs.

Because when you don't get enough sleep, not only does it kind of affect the obvious stuff, meaning your energy to be physically active and certainly your energy to engage in any kind of progressive training program, but it also increases your appetite in your cravings, your hunger levels, and increases your cravings for calorie-dense, hyper-palatable foods. That's what sleep-deprived people mostly reach for almost instinctively. 

There's some very interesting research showing that. Subjects who are sleep-deprived, consume across studies, on average, about 200 to 300 calories more per day while they're sleep deprived. 

Dr Sarah Berry: There are studies where they actually take people into these kind of chambers and they monitor them for weeks and they actually sleep-deprive them.

They say, right, you're going to become a short sleeper, so less than six hours, and they see anywhere between 150-300 calories per day increase in how many calories they're having. I mean, it's a pretty cool study that these guys do. 

Alan Aragon: Yeah, and the interesting thing is, it went the other way, too.

They took a group of habitual, less than six and a half-hour sleepers, and they put them through a coaching and training, sort of this education program on how to improve their sleep hygiene. And the goal was to add two hours of sleep a night. 

So they wanted to bring them up to, I believe, eight and a half hours or so. Seven hours of sleep appears to be this sort of threshold where, you know, below that, the outcomes are somewhat adverse. 

So they trained these folks to bring their sleep average from less than six and a half hours up to eight and a half. And they ended up eating about 260-270-ish calories less per day, which is pretty dang significant in the scheme of things, especially when you consider that while they were sleep-deprived, they probably had some sort of compromise in the amount of energy output that they had through either the exercise pathways or the non-exercise pathways.

Just lower spontaneous physical activity and less capacity for purposeful physical activity. So that's the sort of the basis for everything. Get the sleep right. 

Dr Sarah Berry: And also, by changing the sleep, it changes the types of foods that you're having. We did a study at King's called the Slumber Study.

Which was one of those sleep extension studies where people who were short sleepers, less than six hours of sleep, were asked to increase by two hours. Exactly similar to the study you are saying. 

And what we saw was that by people increasing their sleep, they had no advice about what food to have at all. All they were told was, here's good sleep hygiene, we want you to increase your sleep. And we happen as part of this to be measuring the kind of foods you're having. 

They significantly reduced by quite a large amount the amount of sugar intake that they had. So this deficit in calories is coming from the bad foods as well.

Jonathan Wolf: So we are in this sort of perfect storm where we're surrounded by all this terrible processed food, and we've got these incredibly addictive phones, with TikTok and Instagram, whatever, keeping us up late at night. So we sleep less, and then we need to eat more processed food. 

So there's this sort of, we are surrounded by this environment that is attacking us, aren't we?

Alan Aragon: Oh yeah. Bidirectional badness basically. Yes. 

Jonathan Wolf: And so you fixed my sleep. What happens next? 

Alan Aragon: So fix the sleep. And then the other elements we're to try to simplify this is, so you have a goal of fat loss. You have to make the individual understand that this is about fat loss. And the scale is just a very, very vague proxy of what's going on.

So the usefulness of what the bathroom scale is telling you will get progressively less. So it'll get more and more useless the more fit that you become and the closer you come to your goal. 

Because some people can actually gain lean mass or muscle mass while they're losing fat mass and so they're losing inches. Their body fat percent is coming down, but the scale won't necessarily register that.

So people have to understand it's not a hundred percent about the scale telling you what's going on. I'll give you an example. 

So if you were to take somebody who is completely untrained, they're fresh off the couch, and their goal is to reduce their body fat in half. In that process, they may gain, depending on the time period, let's say it's a six-month period, they may gain up to six, probably more pounds of muscle mass during that period.

And I would rather people look, when they engage a program, I would rather them look at the six to 12 month overview rather than the popular, okay, I want this in six weeks, type of thing.

So if they understand that they're going to gain a certain amount of muscle mass, just by virtue of engaging the right training program and getting their diet correct, then this is going to offset, who knows, six to 10 pounds of weight loss that they would have wanted.

In that case, that's where it becomes important for people to take note of how clothing is fitting. Take note of how that might reflect circumference measurements. If you have more fancy devices for guesstimating body fat percent, like the InBody or Dexa, any number of these devices, then that gives you a little bigger picture than what the scale is saying.

But let's imagine that somebody, they don't want to wrap tape around themselves and they don't have necessarily access, or they don't want to go over to get their body comp done at some facility. 

Well, then you would want to limit your weekly weight loss to, I'd say a maximum of 1% of your total body weight per week at max.

So if you lose more than that, then there's this tendency that you're sacrificing too much lean mass while you're losing fat mass. And so that would be the other sort of simple thing.

We got the sleep, we got the rate of weight loss you want, you want to limit it to half a percent, to a full percent, and really the one pound per week benchmark is fair. It's fair, and it's realistic. 

Now with that said, I don't think people should be discouraged if they're losing even half of that. So if you're losing half a pound a week, two pounds a month, you know, heck, that's still 24 or 25 pounds in, in a year. And most people have spent the last 10, 20 years putting on that 25 pounds.

So people have to have these realistic expectations of weight loss. So I would say half a pound to a pound a week is a good rate of expectation. if you lose more than that, then that's a bonus. 

Then finally, from just a sort of a programming standpoint, okay, we got the sleep, we've got the rate of weight loss, and we've got protein. Most of the focus that my colleagues and I have been on research-wise has been on protein. So I have certainly a biased interest in protein. 

So the amount of protein that people consume per day that is optimal has been a matter of debate. Without overcomplicating it. In the general public, 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight is a fair and realistic protein target for the general population.

But I think that that is just kind of a good starting point. I really think you start getting into optimal, and helpful for fat loss, and lean mass preservation, once you get to the 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight in imperial terms, that's 0.7 grams per pound. 

If you fall somewhere between 1.2 on the low end, I'd rather see people do 1.6. All the way up to 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight. So about 0.7 to one whole gram per pound of body weight is really sort of the sweet spot for the goal of weight loss or fat loss. 

Jonathan Wolf: You're saying you like people who eat a lot of protein, but you're also talking about the ways in which you want to make sure that they're getting all the benefits of whole food and not too much processed.

How do you balance a diet if you don't want to be eating really large amounts of meat, because you really want to be getting other foods onto your plate, right, which have all of this other benefits and you don't really want to eat some sort of like ultra-processed protein powder, because you look at all the stuff on the back and you're like, I don't want really want to put this in my diet.

This seems like a challenging combination to pull off. What's your thoughts and what's your advice there? 

Alan Aragon: So protein powder makes hitting protein targets very easy. Two scoops of protein, bam, that's 40 grams of protein that could be a third of your intake for the day, pretty easily for a lot of people.

So if you're already consuming a mix of high-quality animal-based proteins in the diet, then it can be of benefit to do a plant-based protein powder if you wanted to sort of bias towards this higher diversity of protein sources. 

Or you could just go with a standard way of which the ingredients don't offend or that you're okay with the ingredients list.

And short of engaging the protein powder tactic, getting protein from the diet is pretty easy when you've got the kind of the food lists and the resources in front of you. 

I personally have at least two protein shakes a day, and I get a good 80 grams of protein from those two shakes a day. So the rest of my protein requirement for the day is pretty smooth sailing.

I have a lot of control over how I make these protein smoothies. And they always have fresh fruit and sometimes they have chia seeds. There's various, recipes I engage in, in the direction of protein smoothies. And they're really like delightful desserts for me twice a day and one of them has a lot of peanut butter in it.

So that's a bonus. 

Jonathan Wolf: I would love to go on to what's next. You’ve sold me sleep, you sold me protein. I have a feeling you're going to start to talk about some of this exercise you were talking about before. 

Alan Aragon: Exercise is similar to food in the sense that you have to find the type of exercise that you actually enjoy, and even look forward to. That's the way to get compliance. 

And so with some people, it'll be going to the gym, with some people it'll be going to the park. In either case, what a lot of people don't understand is that it has to contain a resistance training element. 

When I say resistance training, a lot of people automatically think of bench, squat, and deadlift and stuff. But any resistant joint movement is going to qualify as resistance training. 

Calisthenics, and, you know, even various forms of group exercise are beginning to engage resistance training-type movements as well. As long as people can find what they enjoy and sustain that, then they're going to be ahead of the curve.

So, yeah, it's a whole big role with exercise, but I think people miss the fact that they need to actually enjoy it. 

Jonathan Wolf: And you talked about resistance training. So I think a lot of people listening, and I think we see this even more so with women who are listening, have never done any sort of resistance training.

So it doesn't fit in really into the category maybe of things that they're used to and they think about naturally. But I know you said earlier that you thought that was a really critical part of this program. 

Alan Aragon: Yeah. So as we get older, we just lose our functional capability muscularly because we just sit around and barely move.

For people who have really no clue as to how to engage, like any sort of resistance training program, then you can just think of three basic movements in any variation of the planes: push, pull, squat, those three movements. 

Gutsy by nature. Smart by science.

Get the deliciously crunchy gut* supplement.

Try Daily30+

If you can engage those, through a progressive amount of volume over time, and you become familiar with how to apply effort to various movements within a simple pull, push, and squat type of thing, then there are ways to do full-body training sessions. 

There are ways to do split sessions where you might do upper body one day. The next day you do lower body, and then you repeat that cycle again through the week. And then you have other splits yet where you're doing some variation of either the three-times full body or the upper-lower split, plus some specialization on a lagging body part. 

So that's some of the basics of it. 

Dr Sarah Berry: I think there's ways you can fit it into your lifestyle without it feeling daunting as well.

 I'm someone that's never liked exercise. I've never been to a gym. I play a bit of tennis, but other than that, the thought of doing any kind of exercise class fills me with horror. So I'm just not going to do it. 

So I've started doing what I call exercise snacks. Because I am sitting at my desk all day. I am now 48, I do need to be thinking of not how I look, but my muscles. The fact that I know I'm at that age, they're all going downhill. 

So I have by my desk one of those exercise bands. So I do what Alan says, every now and then, you might see me on calls going like this, you know, just when I remember pulling. Squats: every time I boil a kettle, I do squats. I can get 20 squats in. I have about eight cups of tea a day. That's 80 squats without even thinking about it. 

Jonathan Wolf: How do you keep people motivated, Alan?

So you've got this brilliant program all laid out, but I think we all know that the hard thing is you go in really motivated and your motivation declines. 

Alan Aragon: Wow, that is a huge question. As a general statement, most people get motivated most powerfully, by health scares in their middle age. Aside from that general statement, motivation is just going to be different with everybody.

How to keep them motivated while we, as coaches just try to maintain a certain accountability with clients. Midweek check-ins, even daily reports from clients, individuals, even in coaching groups, that seems to work a lot better than just sending them off on their own untethered for a week.

That's a tough one, the motivational thing. I would like to think that results are self-motivating. So the pressure is on the practitioner to help the client get results. 

I don't think that everybody needs to constantly chase body composition goals. You can take a break from them because it can be very psychologically fatiguing to be dieting for weeks and weeks and months and months.

So you can diverge from that goal, just by focusing on performance goals or building a skill and also taking regular diet breaks and maintenance phases through the journey. And so there's a way you can systematize that. 

Dr Sarah Berry: I wonder that Jonathan, as well, whether another way to motivate people is to give them more kind of tools in their toolbox.

There's some really interesting work we've been doing, Alan, at ZOE, where we've been looking at how you eat impacts your energy intake, your healthfulness.

So, looking at factors like time-restricted eating, which I know you've done a lot of research in, but also looking at other factors such as eating rate.

We know that if you can get people to eat more slowly, i.e. if you just say slow down the rate at which you eat your food by 20%, so that's having your breakfast in 10 minutes instead of eight minutes, without them even thinking about it, that results in a 15% calorie deficit just from slowing down the rate that they're eating.

Timing of eating, again, I know you've done work on this as well, but eating earlier in the day, trying to avoid late night eating, trying to avoid late night snacking. 

There's all of those kind of things I think as well that we can make sure we communicate with people so that they've got a few different tools to choose from.

Alan Aragon: Yeah, there there are some interesting non-quantitative tactics that people can employ that do work. 

Dr Sarah Berry: I think the evidence around time-restricted eating is really strong, and especially if it's what we call early time-restricted eating. So having your first meal maybe at nine in the morning, but finishing your last meal no later than seven or six in the evening.

It doesn't have to be excessive. It doesn't have to be limiting it to six hours and be really restrictive. 

Even giving yourself a 14-hour rest period overnight, so you've only got a 10-hour eating window, that can result in a calorie deficit, it can result in weight loss. We've seen this, and the studies overall show that on average, obviously, it depends on the regime that there's about a 200 to 300 calorie deficit from practicing time-restricted eating, even if people aren't told reduce your energy intake. 

Alan Aragon: I agree, there's consistent, positive results from time-restricted eating, whether it's early shifted or late shifted. The early shifted regimes show more favorable outcomes. 

I would like to see more long-term research to see if it still bears out that the early time-restricted feeding is the optimal version of that. But as far as biomarkers, especially glucose control, and things that it appears to be so. 

There's one long-term study I know of by Liu and colleagues, which you might be familiar with, where they dragged out an early time-restricted feeding regime versus an 8 to 8 regime. And they actually didn't see any advantage to the early time-restricted feeding model.

But in the short term it usually wins. So I tend to think that the better we can individualize these things, then maybe the wider range of individuals that we can help. 

Some people, like in Spain, for example, hate the idea of eating dinner earlier than nine o'clock. So I think that maybe with folks in that direction, we can counsel them on how to position exercise so that they can kind of get the best of best of both worlds. 

Jonathan Wolf: Alan, final question. If you could combine all that you've learned about fat loss and maintaining this healthy body composition into one short motivational message, what would you say?

Dr Sarah Berry: That's a hard one, Jonathan. 

Alan Aragon: It is super hard and I want people to run with this in the right way. 

Don't immediately believe everything you hear on the internet, don't just take it on faith. Okay. Be skeptical. most of the information dished out on the internet, people can't support it with any real evidence or data. Much less the weight of the research evidence. 

Just be more skeptical. Don't believe stuff so quickly. 

Jonathan Wolf: I love it. 

Alan and Sarah, I'd like to do a quick summary. We covered lots of things and I'm going to going to try and stick to the core, Alan, of what you were sharing. 

The thing that really sticks in my mind is that my diet has to support Yolo, you only live once. I had no idea what that was until an hour ago. And so you're saying 10% to 20% of the diet that you are designing for somebody who's looking for this fat loss can be just the things that they really enjoy. So if you like an ice cream, you can have an ice cream. 

But importantly, you want to encourage your clients to change their mindset. It's just food, it doesn't have power over them, so it's not off limits. That also means if you have some, you don't suddenly have to sort of binge on it because it doesn't mean you can never have it tomorrow. It doesn't mean you're a failure. 

Then in terms of your core approach, interestingly, you spend a lot of time talking about things that weren't food before you went to food.

So the first thing you said is you need to be ready, but also you need to have a six to 12 months mindset and you need to be like ready to make change. 

Then interestingly, you went straight to sleep, which was a big surprise for me. So you were saying, you know, if you're a bad sleeper, you're going to eat two to 300 calories. Sarah's talking about all this research about how it changes what you want to eat. So you've got to address that first. You can't just go to to diet. 

You then said, you've also got to learn to ignore the bathroom scales. So the opposite of everything I was taught growing up, that is literally just about changing this. I mean, there was a whole company called Weight Watchers, right? Which is like literally looking at the bathroom scale. 

So this is a big change and that's because you're saying you want to increase people's muscle. So actually that's going to make them heavier. But with this wonderful muscle, with all of these great benefits. 

Alan Aragon: Good to put in the bank, muscle on the bones is like money in the bank, especially as you get old and sarcopenia looms.

Jonathan Wolf: So, I love that. And I think by Sarah and I, have got very sold on that over the last few years.

Which means then you say sound physical exercise program and really making sure there's resistance training within that for the reasons you described. And only when you've gone through all of that, interestingly, do you then start talking about actually the food that you eat, which I think for most listeners, is really surprising.

The crunch your gut’s* been craving.

Support gut health* and energy* and enhance the flavor and crunch of your meals.

Try Daily30+

I think much of what you described is not going to be very surprising to people who listen to these podcasts often. 

So you talk a lot about healthy, minimally processed foods, really focused on what the individual likes or loves. So saying again, like if you can find the things that you enjoy, then you're much more likely to stick with that, which I think is the complete opposite of eating the watermelon diet or the alkaline diet. All these things you're describing, which is sort of picking this very narrow set of things that you know are magic but weren't necessarily what you wanted.

Similarly, find a meal routine that's sustainable, and that you can do also in terms of your time and your money. Again, personalized to what people like, right? So if they like a food, a diet that's quite low carb, that's good. If they like a diet that's got lots of fat and it's good, you can find a way to solve around that.

And then finally,the big thing I think that you are adding on top here that's really striking, is try and eat enough protein when you're in this fat loss phase. So you want to maintain your lean tissue and protein is also helping with less hunger. So you're really trying to push that up alongside all the rest of these things.

Alan Aragon: Yes, higher protein is more important and useful in people sustaining, hypocaloric conditions or dieting conditions than it is for people just maintaining. 

Jonathan Wolf: If you found this episode with Alan and Sarah useful, I know you’ll really enjoy this conversation with Dr. Suzanne Devkota and Professor Tim Spector.

Suzanne shares groundbreaking findings on how gut bacteria interacts with belly fat and shares practical tips for supporting your gut health. 

As ever, thanks for watching and see you next time.