Watch the full interview below or listen to the full episode on your iPhone HERE.
Stu: This week, I’m excited to welcome Dr David Prologo to the podcast. He is an obesity medicine physician who has spent a large part of his career researching new solutions for weight loss and is most well known for a pioneering procedure to block hunger. In this episode, we discussed the research, principles, and strategies outlined in his book, The Catching Point Transformation: A Twelve-Week Weight Loss Strategy Based in Reality.
Audio Version
Some questions asked during this episode:
- What strategies does an obesity medicine specialist use?
- What has your research uncovered as to why diets fail?
- Why are the ‘always lean population’, always lean?
Get more of Dr David Prologo:
- https://www.facebook.com/jdprologo
- https://twitter.com/jdprologo
- https://www.instagram.com/jdprologo/
- https://www.drprologo.com/
If you enjoyed this, then we think you’ll enjoy this interview:
- Robert Lustig: The Hidden Truth About Sugar, Weight Loss & Disease
- Jason Fung: The Complete Guide to Fasting (& how to burn fat)
- Michele Chevalley Hedge – The Healthy Hormone Diet
The views expressed on this podcast are the personal views of the host and guest speakers and not the views of Bega Cheese Limited or 180 Nutrition Pty Ltd. In addition, the views expressed should not be taken or relied upon as medical advice. Listeners should speak to their doctor to obtain medical advice.
Disclaimer: The transcript below has not been proofread and some words may be mis-transcribed.
Full Transcript
Stu
(00:03)
Hey, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition and welcome to another episode of the Health Sessions. It’s here that we connect with the world’s best experts in health, wellness, and human performance in an attempt to cut through the confusion around what it actually takes to achieve a long-lasting health. Now, I’m sure that’s something that we all strive to have. I certainly do. Before we get into the show today, you might not know that we make products too. That’s right. We are into whole food nutrition and have a range of superfoods and natural supplements to help support your day. If you are curious, want to find out more, just jump over to our website that is 180nutrition.com.au and take a look. Back to the show.
(00:44)
This week, I’m excited to welcome Dr. David Prologo to the podcast. Dr. Prologo is an obesity medicine physician who has spent a large part of his career researching new solutions for weight loss and is most well known for a pioneering procedure to block hunger. In this episode, we discussed the research, principles, and strategies outlined in his book, The Catching Point Transformation: A Twelve-Week Weight Loss Strategy Based in Reality. Over to Dr. Prologo.
Stu
(01:15)
Hey guys, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition and I am delighted to welcome Dr. David Prologo to the podcast. Dr. Prologo, how are you?
Dr. Prologo
(01:23)
Hello. Hi. I’m doing very well. Thank you for having me, Stuart.
Stu
(01:26)
And thank you so much for your time. I know you must be a busy man, and I’ve got a whole heap of questions that I’d love to dig in and ask you this morning. But before I do that, I would love it, for all of our listeners that may not be familiar with you or your work, if you could just tell us a little bit more about yourself, please.
Dr. Prologo
(01:44)
Sure. I’m a dual board certified physician doctor. What that means is, I have a specialty in obesity medicine and I have a specialty in something else called interventional radiology. Basically, what that means is we use image guidance like CAT scans and MRIs and so on, to guide needles into the body. During our day job, we guide those needles in for things like treating cancer or managing trauma. In combination with the obesity medicine specialty, we’ve done some things like block the hunger nerve, for example, or block some other nerves that manage blood sugar and things like that.
Stu
(02:25)
Wow. I’m going to dive in into obesity medicine because I haven’t heard that term before. I have heard of procedures like gastric band, I guess, and that’s about it. So I wondered if you could just unpack that term for our listeners and myself, please.
Dr. Prologo
(02:44)
Sure. At least in the United States, we have American Board of Medical Specialties, and what that is, is you have official certification in whatever your specialty might be, and some specialties people are familiar with surgery or medicine or family practice, things like that. One of the certification bodies we have is the American Board of Obesity Medicine. The training and certification that goes into that is understanding exactly how the body works, why obesity exists, and what sort of things are going on in a body that preclude us from treating it. What you are talking about with gastric banding and gastric bypass, that’s bariatric surgery, which is another specialty, and somewhere in the middle is what I’m doing. I’m carrying around this obesity medicine certification, some understanding in how the overweight and obese body works. And then instead of doing surgery, I’m using these needle procedures to help people lose weight.
Stu
(03:53)
Wow. You mentioned a phrase there and it was understanding why obesity exists. I’m super keen to understand a little bit more about that as well because it doesn’t look like that particular condition is going away and there are a trillion different theories as to why and how to treat it.
Dr. Prologo
(04:19)
Sorry to interrupt you, but it’s astounding though, isn’t it? It’s astounding how so many people can have a condition and the trillion different theories that you’ve mentioned aren’t having an impact. In fact, we’re going in the wrong direction. We’ve got more than half the world overweight or obese, much more than half the world. Despite all the things that we’ve tried, globally, it continues to get worse. I’ve been amazed with that and I’ve wondered to myself almost daily, if there were any other condition where we would tolerate this.
Dr. Prologo
(04:57)
How about COVID? The most recent one. How we reacted to that worldwide pandemic, but not something so dramatic as that. Anything, if it was cancer or high blood pressure or diabetes, it just kept getting worse and we just kept trying the same old thing and it kept not working. I think at some point we would say, “Man, we should try something different.” Or maybe the way we think of this isn’t right, because if we knew what we were saying and we knew what we were doing, then we’d be having an impact on this.
Stu
(05:27)
That’s it.
Dr. Prologo
(05:29)
It’s an amazing thing, for sure.
Stu
(05:32)
Well, I guess, ingrained in us through, I guess, childhood and adolescent and adult years is the fact that, well, you just need to eat less and exercise more. That’s the key.
Dr. Prologo
(05:47)
Right. That there really, that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, that phenomenon right there because it really is such an incredible disconnect. I could talk probably for the rest of our time about this exact topic right here. You just have to eat less and exercise more, or even you have to tip the balance and that’s how you lose weight, and that’s sort of the end of it. But it clearly is not. It’s so clearly is not. But nevertheless, most of the people who keep this thought alive, this belief alive, are people who have never had to make a change. If you had a whole bunch of people, a hundred thousand people who were overweight, 250, 280 pounds, 5’6, 5’7, and they all lost weight, got to a normal weight, a healthy weight, and kept it off, you would definitely want to listen to them because they figured it out.
Dr. Prologo
(06:46)
They would understand how to make that change and how to accomplish what all these people want to accomplish. But first of all, that group of people doesn’t exist. And so, who do we listen to? We listen to the population of people that I call the always-lean people, the people who have always been lean but for some reason have declared themselves experts on how to make that change. That is so absurd and so ridiculous. But sometimes we get philosophical and call it the last accepted prejudice where a group of people who have not experienced this and don’t know what it’s like to be like that have make all these judgements and rules and say what they would do if they were in that position and so on. That disconnect is unbelievable and I hope that we can change that.
Stu
(07:34)
Well, definitely, I want to dig deeper into this, and you mentioned always lean and I’m smiling because I have always been lean. I’m 50 years old, I’m six foot tall and I weigh 70 kilos. I’m super active and I eat really well, but I’ve always been lean and oftentimes, I would like to put on more weight because I like to get in the ocean and do lots of swimming and free diving, things like that, and I get cold because I don’t have a lot of body fat.
Dr. Prologo
(08:06)
I see.
Stu
(08:07)
I have tried, in the past, force feeding over the course of a two-week holiday and I’ve come away and lost weight. I’m probably one of those people. I fall into the always lean, I don’t have the answers. And when people say, “Well, what do you do?” I just say, “Well, it’s just clean living for me.” I reckon that’s probably a little bit of the truth, but you could probably tell us what’s going on with people.
Dr. Prologo
(08:32)
I think what’s important about that is that what you’re doing is great and it’s commendable and you’re eating clean and maintaining your health and being active, all commendable things. But that routine is not making a change. Your goal, if anything, your goal is to go in other direction, but what you’ve been doing has been fantastic. I don’t want to undervalue it. It is fantastic, but it’s not this thing over here. Let me put it this way, what you’re doing is all positive. I’m glad about all of it, but it’s not building a spaceship.
Stu
(09:12)
No.
Dr. Prologo
(09:12)
Everybody would agree, it’s just a different project. I would say the same thing here. What you’re doing is not losing weight. What you’re doing is great, but it’s a different project than losing weight. Losing weight is a totally different project that requires a totally different skill set and a totally different focus just like building a spaceship. Those are three different projects and where we got all messed up that the maintenance activities are what are necessary to lose weight, that doesn’t make any more sense than the maintenance activities of fitness or the same activities we use to build a spaceship. It’s just different things. You, obviously, are not a member of these terrible people who take this and say, “Well, I can do this. It’s easy for me. If you don’t do these same things that I do, you must be lazy.” That jump right there is what creates all of this negativity and false assignment of negative qualities and all those things.
Stu
(10:15)
It’s interesting that you say that because I would hazard a guess, a very, very large percentage of health gurus on the internet are professing a set of rules that have worked exclusively for them and out of that, they fixed their own problem and they perhaps have created a program or written a book.
Dr. Prologo
(10:37)
I would even argue that most of them haven’t fixed any problem at all. Most of them have always been lean, that’s what I would say. In fact, if I could find somebody who did make a change and sustain that change, that’s the person that I would listen to. I would argue that most of them haven’t done that at all. The other analogy I use to expound on this is that, let’s say I was a surgeon and I did surgery and you wanted to do surgery. So much like you are lean and there’s this group of people who want to be lean, right?
Stu
(11:08)
Yes.
Dr. Prologo
(11:11)
So if we said, “Okay. Well, I’m a surgeon and you’re a group of people that want to be a surgeon,” you could be, but what you cannot do, and this is what most of the weight loss folks will do, you can’t just start Monday.
Stu
(11:21)
No.
Dr. Prologo
(11:22)
You can’t pick up the list of things that I do every day and say, “On Monday, I’m going to do that,” and do surgery. And that’s exactly what we do. We find an always lean person on the internet with a big smile and white teeth and we say, “I need their program and I’m going to start at Monday.” But no prep work, no medical school in the other analogy. And so, if you did start surgery on Monday, what would happen? You would fail. The same thing happens to all these folks. They fail. But if you started surgery on Monday and failed, we would all look at that and say, “Well, of course he failed. He didn’t have any of the prep work necessary to succeed in surgery.” But when these folks fail, what we should say is, “Of course, they failed. They didn’t do the prep work necessary to succeed in that space.” We don’t say that. When they fail that we say, “They’re lazy.”
Stu
(12:12)
Totally. Absolutely. I guess I’d love to know then from your perspective, why diets fail. I have a theory as to why lots of them fail. I’ll run that by you and then I want to obviously hear the experts take on it, but my theory is that oftentimes diets, whether they’re celebrity high street, they work on caloric restriction. We’re making ourselves hungry and we’re pulling back the foods that we want. And over time, the body has a signal that, “Boy, you’re hungry, you’re starving, you haven’t got the calories that you need to sustain life so I’m going to slow things down inside. You’re going to be a little more tired. We’re going to slow down your metabolism and we’re just not going to burn so many calories because we haven’t got them coming in. We need to help you survive.”
Dr. Prologo
(13:08)
That is absolutely 100% correct. And not only does the body perceive that calorie restriction as starvation and then slow basal metabolism offset whatever you tried to do, it has other things it will do to contribute to your survival. You’re right about slowing down metabolism, but that’s not the only thing. The other big thing the body will do is it will spill a hunger hormone into your blood and it will fire a hunger signal up the back of your esophagus through the vagus nerve to your brain to send you on food-seeking missions. Because if you stop eating, for example right now, you’ll be okay. We’ll finish through this. You’ll be okay maybe even until tonight and even tomorrow morning. But let it go one more day and all of a sudden, you were thinking about nothing but food. Now, why is that? That’s because your body is spilling more and more hunger hormone into your system that goes to your brain, that tells you to forget about everything else and eat.
Dr. Prologo
(14:06)
And it tightens you in a bite until you do eat. It’s just like going under water. You could go underwater for a while and you be okay for a while and you can white knuckle it for however long, but eventually your body will send signals that will overwhelm you and you will burst to the surface because the body needs air. Not only will it slow down its metabolism and store all of the food that you eat, in the name of survival, but it will also literally send you on food-seeking missions that you can’t resist any more than you could stay underwater and resist the need for air.
Stu
(14:40)
I love that analogy as well because I do a lot of free diving and I can train myself to hold my breath for longer, but I can’t stay under the water indefinitely.
Dr. Prologo
(14:51)
That’s right, and neither can 99% of these people who are trying to make a change, they likewise cannot resist these survival signals. And so, we need to attend to the survival signals, attend to the resistance that you are talking about, because if we can do that, then we can change people’s adherence. And what we know for sure from the medical literature is that if we can change adherence, if we can get people to stay engaged for longer periods of time, then they’ll pass a critical point after which the body will say, “Okay, I’m on board with this now. I see that this is the new way of eating and this is the new way of calorie expenditure through exercise,” and the body adapts and gets on board because although the body initially will respond to you with this overwhelming survival signal, the body also has an amazing ability to adapt.
Dr. Prologo
(15:47)
If you think about, you and I are fairly fair skinned, if we go out into the sun and then we go out into the sun the next day, eventually our body will start to tan our skin to protect us from the sun. So the body will adapt. But what happens if we go out into the sun tomorrow immediately, just stay out there tomorrow all day, we get burned, we do damage. We can’t tolerate that. It’s the same thing here. So you’re right, and I have to tell you, I talked to a lot of people and with a lot of different theories about why these things don’t work, and you’re the first person, in my opinion, comes right down on it. Importantly, I’m not just saying, “Well, you agree with me.” I’m saying that based on the literature and what we know from science, that is what happens. That is what happens. People cannot adhere to these things for exactly that reason.
Stu
(16:37)
Would the foods then, the food choices that we make contribute to this hijacking of our health, because just everything that are disposable in the supermarkets these days, the majority of which are highly processed and hyper palatable, and they’re specifically engineered to make us want to eat more. They hit the bliss points and there are, whatever it may be, we’re watching a movie and we’ve got a giant family bag of chips, and before we know it, your hands at the bottom, things like that. And sending, I guess, a whole myriad of different signals to our brain to say, “This stuff is just delicious, you need to have it.”
Dr Prologo
(17:22)
It is delicious, and you’re right, it is engineered to make us want more. There are chemicals that go to our cells and take up this molecule of food, drop our blood sugar, make us hungry again, and crave the same food and come back and it’s all engineered because the people who are making those foods aren’t interested in your health; they’re interested in selling you something. That is a cause of obesity and overweight. And I try to divide all of my discussions into, here are the things that contribute to why there’s an epidemic of obesity, and then over here is how do we treat it? How do we change this? How do we get all these people who want to cross back over into the lean population? How can we help them. Two different things, so certainly that contributes to the prevalence of obesity and why there are so many people who are overweight and obese to begin with. That contributes to it.
Stu
(18:28)
We’ve got a whole bunch of people out there, and they think, “I’ve been overweight for so long now. I want to do something about this. I’ve tried everything, tried all the diets, listen to the health gurus on the internet, nothing has worked.” So what would we do? What are your recommendations then to take us in the right step and hopefully the final step to take us where we want to be?
Dr. Prologo
(18:47)
Great question. The first thing that I would say to those folks is, all your failures in the past are not to be internalized. They’re not your fault. They’re not a weakness of character, they’re not a lack of willpower. All those times, most of these people, what you described, have felt the body’s resistance to this, but they don’t know how to articulate it. So they come to our office and they say, “I must have the thyroid, or I must have genetic problem.” They don’t know how to articulate the fact that they’re following your directions but their body is fighting them all along. That’s the first thing I would say is that, what you were feeling and trying to explain to us, that is real, and you were right that your body was fighting you and it’s not your fault that you haven’t succeeded in the past.
Dr. Prologo
(19:32)
That’s the first thing I would say. Then people want to know, “Well, that’s great, Dr. Prologo. Now tell me what to do so that I can take a different path.” And the different path is divided really into two big options. Option A is the things that you can get inside the medical establishment, like the hunger-attenuating procedure that we do, or bariatric surgery or available weight loss medications. There is an inside the institution bucket of options, and then there’s the outside of the institution bucket of options and the outside of the institution is, these are all the things that you need to do to quiet your body’s response. You need to change your focus to, “How can I quiet my body’s response to this so that I can engage longer and make a real change so I can actually get somewhere?” That’s what the book is about. I wrote a book called The Catching Point Transformation, and this is exactly what the book is about. The answer to that question is, there is a critical point beyond which… This, I think, is the most important thing I’m going to say.
Stu
(20:49)
I’m going to be quiet.
Dr. Prologo
(20:49)
This critical point- No.
Stu
(20:49)
No, I want to hear.
Dr. Prologo
(20:54)
The critical point beyond which it’s no longer difficult. So when overweight and obese people embark on this thing that is undoable for them on Monday, they oftentimes feel like crap and they have overwhelming hunger. And as you described, fatigue, depression, anxiety, a whole soreness, a whole host of terrible feelings. That person, when they look at the always lean folks who are just smiling and carrying their yoga mats, they think to themselves, “I hate this. I don’t want to do this. This is a terrible experience for me. I could never do this for a lifetime or even for a year.” What I want to tell those folks is, there is a critical point, we’ve named it the catching point. We’ve even put a number on it in terms of exercise capacity. Beyond which, it’s no longer difficult.
(21:46)
And when you get beyond that point, you become one of these people, you join them, you are the one taking selfies. You are the one who’s waking up in the morning thinking about what it is that you want to do today with regard to cleaning and working out. You change how you feel when you’re undergoing this whole thing and it’s no longer miserable. And when we see people through that catching point and beyond, they don’t even need help anymore, they’re gone because they’re on their own. They’re doing something they want to do.
Stu
(22:14)
That’s fascinating. Can you loosely outline some of the steps or strategies that you would recommend to get somebody to the catching point transformation and take them to the place that they want to be?
Dr. Prologo
(22:27)
Sure. Without getting too far, as you said, without getting too far into the weeds, the things that you have to focus on are easy and we can really spell them out one, two, three, four, five. One of the things that we discourage right out of the… Well, first of all, understand that the goal is getting to the catching point.
Stu
(22:47)
Yes.
Dr. Prologo
(22:47)
We’re not talking about losing weight right now. If we go back to the surgeon analogy, we’re talking about going to medical school first. At the end of that medical school experience, you might not have done any actual surgery, but you will now succeed as a surgeon. The same thing’s going on here. At the end of this transformation period, you might not have lost a pound, but you will succeed with your diet and weight loss attempts after this.
Dr. Prologo
(23:14)
Now, right there is where I lose half the people, because they don’t want to hear that. “Don’t tell me I’m going to put in time and not lose weight. I need this 90 pounds in 90 days.” The 90 pounds in 90 days is not real. It’s fake. You keep trying it and buying it, it never works. It’s fake, I’m telling you. The first thing is you have to change your way of thinking. Say, “Okay, I’m going to put in a time,” whatever it might be, 12 weeks, 16 weeks, 18 weeks, “to get to this critical point because after that, it’s going to be easy for me and I’m going to succeed.” That’s the big overarching thing. How do you get to that point? You will get to that point by changing your focus and thinking about things that most people, most lay people, you probably know about everything I’m about to say, but most regular people, lay people, who aren’t professionals have never thought about these things.
(24:03)
Example number one, you’re going to have to focus on recovery. Recovery, as you well know, I’m preaching to the choir, but for your audience, recovery is that time in between these exercise bouts when your body is changing. Because remember, the body you have now is never going to be successful. You’ve already failed 10 times. You’ve already proven this. It won’t be. You need a different body to be successful. So the change that you want to become this person who will be successful happens in between workouts. And the most counterintuitive way to augment that process, to embrace that process, and accelerate it is what? To eat. You have to eat in between. You have to focus on the things that are coming in, not restriction. That’s the dual of doom, exercise and then restriction right off the bat. You’re not going to last 10 days on that. You have to eat in between because your body says, “Look, I got exposed to this exercise bout if I’m going to have to do this again, I’m going to have to restructure.”
Literally, you’re going to restructure and become a different person than you are now, and your body will do it just like you go out into the sun and your body says, “If I’m going to have to go out into the sun again, we’re going to have to change our body structure so we can protect ourselves.” And then we become tan, this is the same kind of response, and you’ve got to augment that. There’s three chapters in the book about how to augment recovery and how to have active and passive recovery strategies and what to eat and what role protein plays in restructuring your body so that you can become a new person and you can be successful. It’s things like that. We go through other examples, but I think recovery is the best illustration of how most people will hear that and go, “Wait, what’s what?”
(25:55)
And you see, yes, it is what what, because this is a different way of thinking. And then unfortunately, what has been the frustration for me is that at this juncture where you’re saying, “Look, here’s a different way to a different outcome,” but the allure, it’s almost like a drug addiction or something. The allure to the other way, “But this guy says I can lose 90 pounds in 90 days.” But come on, that guy has lied to you over and over and over again, like almost unfaithful boyfriend or something. And you just keep going back. I’m telling you about a different way. But you have to resist the allure of the undoable guy.
Stu
(26:41)
Well, that’s right. And the trouble is he has a six pack and he looks good.
Dr. Prologo
(26:44)
Yes. So why not listen to him? Because he must know, right?
Stu
(26:48)
That’s right.
Dr. Prologo
(26:49)
And so the allure, another analogy, if you can tolerate all these analogies, is getting rich. I often think that this process and what we’re talking about right now is very much like getting rich. Most people will admit that the process from not being rich to being rich is going to be a slow and up and down process. Over the long run, you’re going to get there. But you have to resist the allure along the way of the guy who comes and says, “No, no, no. Give me all your money. I’ll make you rich tomorrow.” Most people know that’s not true, even though it’s kind of, “Maybe this guy will make me rich.” And then you can’t resist and then boom, you ruin everything. Same thing over here. It’s going to be a longer process. It’s going to be ups and downs. It’s not going to go perfectly. And you have to resist the allure of the six pack guy because that six pack guy isn’t trying to make you better, isn’t trying to make you more healthy, isn’t even trying to help you. The six pack guy is trying to sell you something, right?
Stu
(27:58)
Of course.
Dr. Prologo
(27:58)
So have to see, just like the guy who says, “I’m going to make you rich tomorrow.” He’s trying to sell you a product, he’s trying to trick you. It’s not the real way. Where me, I tell people, “Look, I’m busy. I have a busy day job.” I’m not trying to sell you anything. I’m just trying to explain to you that there’s a different way that A, explains why you’ve struggled so far and so you shouldn’t feel bad about it, and B, is the way home.
Stu
(28:31)
Everything that you’ve said just rings true, because we often say in our communications as well, that all of the magic happens from your workouts in the recovery period, that doesn’t happen in the gym, in the recovery period. And oftentimes if you want to lose weight, it’s quite likely that you have to eat more, but you have to eat more of the right foods. I heard an interesting quote the other day on the internet, of all places, that was essentially saying that we are comprised of what we eat. So if we are putting in good quality proteins and veggies and things like that, then our body can utilize the proteins, amino acids, and all of the other essential minerals to create new cells. But what if we’re just snacking on pretzels and chips and cookies and sodas and things like that? I mean, what type of a body will be built from a foundation of foods like that?
Dr. Prologo
(29:23)
The same body that continues to fail. The same person who doesn’t go to medical school but keeps trying to do surgery. You have to do that prep work first. You have to change your body first, and you have to eat. As you mentioned in the beginning about the body slowing its metabolism as one of the reasons why people can’t sustain the calorie restrictions. As you well know, again, I’m preaching to the choir, but as you well know, that’s how you beat that. You change your body into one that is an efficient calorie burning metabolism machine. You become that person. Now, the 12, 14, 18, even six months, it takes you to become that person, you might not lose one pound.
Dr. Prologo
(30:08)
Boom, everybody hangs up right there. “I’m going to go back and get…” But really, people shouldn’t hang up or not want to hear that because of course, yes, 90 pounds in 90 days make a more attractive option, but A, it’s not real. And B, one in a thousand people who somehow make that work, they don’t maintain it anyway. The whole thing is just smoke and mirrors. But if you can change yourself, your body, into a new body that A, has a greater exercise capacity and B, has a greater basal metabolic rate or greater metabolism that will resist that slowdown when you restrict your calories, then all of a sudden you’ve changed things.
Wait, can I give one more analogy? What if instead of trying to lose weight, our goal was to race in a car race, one of these a hundred mile car races. If you showed up in your car that you have now, that you drive to work, you probably are not going to be successful.
Stu
(31:13)
No.
Dr. Prologo
(31:14)
But if you spend six months building yourself the kind of car that you need for that race, then your odds of being successful go way up.
Stu
(31:25)
Yes.
Dr.Prologo
(31:25)
That’s all I’m saying.
Stu
(31:27)
Just a perfect analogy. And again, similarly on this side, we use the analogy of wanting to climb Mount Everest, and you’ve got this guy, you want to climb Mount Everest, you’ve seen everybody do it. It looks super exciting. The first thing you would do, having never been a mountain climber, would probably not be to attempt to climb Mount Everest. You might start by walking around the block.
Dr. Prologo
(31:50)
That’s right. It’s funny you say that because in the book, I use that same exact analogy. I don’t say Mount Everest, but I say a Mountain. And the way I word it is that you wouldn’t start sprinting up the mountain, basically the same thing you said.
Stu
(32:06)
That’s it.
Dr. Prologo
(32:07)
And to relate it to what we are saying about body change, after you walk around a block and so forth, you would have to get up Mount Everest a little while and then stop, because your body has to acclimate to the altitude. You really need your body to change and that change occurs during rest, which most people don’t understand that process. And that’s why we took so much time in a book to try and explain this in plain language. People don’t understand that if you pick up this program that says, “Do this on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday,” and you try to follow that, you have to listen to your body. Your body will tell you, “Hey, I needed some downtime to restructure.” But if you don’t listen to that, or you’re unaware of that and you try to follow this static schedule, you are absolutely doomed to fail.
Stu
(33:00)
No, absolutely. Small steps and you’ll get there. Just in terms of then the book, The Catching Point Transformation, does that move into the recommendations on perhaps the type of foods, the type of diet that you would be hoping to eat for-
Dr. Prologo
(33:22)
Only to get to the catching point, not what diet is going to bring you the change that you want. Because this is an education exercise, the reason I did this, the reason I’m spending time talking with you now is because I wanted to get the word out there to people that these facts exist. You don’t know about them because the only people you hear from are the people that have multimillion dollar advertising budgets who are trying to sell you stuff. The reason I wrote the book was to inform people of these things. I don’t endorse any particular diet. What I say is that, if you spend this time getting to the catching point, you can do any diet you want. There was a New England Journal of Medicine article in April that compared intermittent fasting to standard calorie restrictions, showed they were the same.
Dr. Prologo
(34:22)
This created all this like, “Oh my gosh, intermittent fasting is no different than calorie restriction.” Did anyone really think it was? I mean, what makes intermittent fasting successful is if people can adhere to it. And so if you get to the catching point first, that’s going to allow you to adhere to whatever. You can pick intermittent fasting, you can pick keto. The joke I make in a book is, you can pick ninja abs in 90 days. You can pick anyone you want once you get to the catching point and have fun with it, and that’s what the always lean people do. Because at the end of the day, far on this side, there’s overweight and obese people and far on this side are the happy, smiling, always lean people who are enjoying all of these things.
Dr. Prologo
(35:12)
And at the end of the day, the overweight and obese people, they want to join this other side. We don’t want to make any sort of philosophical claims that they wouldn’t be able to lose weight or whatever. We don’t really care about that. We just want to be like that. We want to smile and enjoy these things. And that is really the purpose of once you’re in that population, you’re not going to do the same thing for the rest of your life so that’s why you pick up this and that and this and that, and it becomes an enjoyable thing. So I don’t want to endorse just one thing or the other. What I endorse is getting to this critical point so then you can pick whatever you want.
Stu
(35:45)
Yes. I think that’s the key, isn’t it? Because ultimately you don’t want to be locked into this meticulous but laborious and miserable regime of counting calories is the ultimate goal to your success because-
Dr. Prologo
(36:00)
Right. And no one lives like that.
Stu
(36:04)
No.
Dr. Prologo
(36:04)
I mean, no one who can follow this and be successful in the long run actually lives like that. If we go back to the being rich analogy, nobody lives in complete abject poverty deliberately all the time for the rest of their life. They get to a point where it’s enjoyable, and that’s what I want people to do. I want people to get there and really switch teams so they can wake up and want to do this stuff as opposed to being drugged through this undoable thing.
Stu
(36:36)
From the book, what was the duration that you spoke about that took you from, “I’ve picked up the book, I’ve opened page one,” to the catching point transformation, to that tipping point where you now know what to do.
Dr. Prologo (36:53):
I gave it 12 weeks and 12 weeks sort of falls in the middle. I was really in an ironic situation, and that situation was this, I’m professing, as you can see, to everyone who will listen, that a static schedule is a recipe for a failure. On the other hand, in a written book, one can only put a static schedule.
Stu
(37:21)
That’s it.
Dr. Prologo
(37:22)
It’s not possible to write 100 million individual schedules, which is what you need. You need each individual to listen to their own body, to deal with their own nuances and stresses of their own lives and react accordingly. But that’s difficult thing to write into a, “Do this Monday, do this Tuesday.” So we did say, “For 12 weeks, I want you to follow these principles.” Because that’s the time period after which I think people will wake up and say, “This is not bad. I think I could do this. I’m kind of feeling that momentum shift and I don’t feel as crappy as I usually do,” and then be off on their own. So 12 weeks is what I picked, but every person is different.
Stu
(38:08)
I think that that kind of falls into the acceptable and specified timeframes to be able to create a new sustainable habit as well. I think a lot of this, as you probably know, will be based upon shifting of habits, creating new healthy habits.
Dr. Prologo
(38:24)
That’s exactly right and you have an amazing amount of insight and wisdom, which I appreciate very much. That’s almost like a hidden thing, that’s the time it takes for the body and the mind to adjust to a new set of habits. That’s kind of woven in there secretly, but you’re absolutely correct.
Stu
(38:42)
I just think that there are just a handful of things that could be so powerful and a healthy habits and oftentimes, you’ll find that a lot of the more successful people are dear to the same set rule book, as you will, of these healthy habits that just steer them in the right direction and keep them on the road going forward.
Dr. Prologo
(39:03)
Right. And keep it fun. Don’t swim against the current.
Stu
(39:10)
No, exactly. Just a quick word on exercise, because I know that exercise can be so pivotal to most people’s perceptions of what it takes to reach their goal. And oftentimes, we think of just jogging and running and you see lots of people just running. And more often than not, a lot of the people that I see running don’t really look that toned and trim, almost seems like they’re battling and they’re running to battle the weight. What are your thoughts on resistance training versus cardio?
Dr. Prologo
(39:50)
I would say that the lack of resistance training is the primary mistake that every new person makes. When we talk about changing the body into a body that will succeed, one of the primary things that we stress is resistance training to build muscle. There goes a whole bunch of more people hang up.
Stu
(40:12)
I’m out of here.
Dr. Prologo
(40:13)
There’s a reason for this. We’re not building body builder muscle or trying to go overboard with it. But the reason for building muscle, as you know, is to change your resting metabolic rate and change your body composition and change your exercise capacity. Because another truth that is sometimes hard to listen to about this situation is that the majority of folks who are over in the camp with the overweight, obese, 280, 5’6, 5’7, or 240, 5’7, they don’t have exercise capacity that is useful. They do not have the ability to burn enough calories to make any difference at all. But the analogy I use for this is if the job was, instead of weight loss, emptying of all the water in the pool, all have right now is the Dixie cup. The chances of you going down there and emptying that pool with your exercise capacity now again, are zero.
Dr. Prologo
(41:15)
Again, these are the reasons people fail. During that time where you’re getting to the catching point, you are changing your exercise capacity primarily through resistance exercise, so that when you get there, you A, have a changed metabolism, which is so critical, and we’ve said many times, but B, you want to be able to burn enough calories to matter. How many of the people who know what I’m talking about, who are stuck in this obese and overweight cycle, how many of them have ever been to a point in their life where they really could burn a significant amount of calories to make a difference? They really could go out and put down 400 calories or 500 calories, no one, none of them. Because if they would get to that point and they did have that exercise capacity, they would then switch teams.
Stu
(42:06)
That’s a really an interesting point. I’ve never thought about it like that way. And almost thinking about your analogies of the race car, it’s like turning up to an Indianapolis 500 in a Honda Civic, and you’re-
Dr. Prologo
(42:18)
That’s exactly what it is.
Stu
(42:19)
You don’t have the engine to be able to enter the race.
Dr. Prologo
(42:24)
But here’s the problem, though. Here’s the problem with translating this to reality and to the large scale people, people don’t want it. It’s not even that they don’t want to take the time to change the engine. Like we said before, there’s a better fake option, “So why am I going to listen to Dr. Prologo, buy this book, follow this way to get to the catching point, when at the end of that 12 weeks or 14 weeks, I’m going to be the same weight? Why would I do that when this guy says I can lose 90 pounds?” The reason you would do that is because at the end of this time, when you got to the catching point, now you’ve got a race car. Now you have a chance to succeed. And I would argue that most people have six months or even 12 weeks, because what are you going to do with that time otherwise? You’re going to try these diets and fail. So at the end of the 12 weeks or six months, you’re going to be right where you are now.
Dr. Prologo
(43:18)
Whereas if you take a different idea, then you trade in your Honda Civic for a race car, you’re going to have a much better chance of succeeding. And it will be much easier also.
Stu
(43:33)
I’m kicking myself. I’ve never actually really thought about that. But you’re absolutely right. It’s just you don’t have what it takes to do what you want to achieve right now.
Dr. Prologo
(43:43)
And that is the honest to God truth. I mean, you definitely do not… Again, back to the surgery analogy, it’s not that you can’t become a surgeon, you could if you put in the prep time. What you cannot do is become a successful surgeon on Monday just by following the same steps that I follow.
Stu
(44:04)
No, exactly right.
Dr. Prologo
(44:06)
You need to do something in between.
Stu
(44:08)
And those 12 weeks for people that are time poor or supposedly time poor, and I put myself in that camp as well, I’d probably watch 12 weeks of Netflix over the course of a year.
Dr. Prologo
(44:19)
And anyway, most of this is rest. Most of this is active and passive recovery. Most of this time is changing your exercise capacity by eating, not by starving yourself, but by choosing the right nutrients to help you change your body internally into a different sort of metabolism burning exercise machine. And I would add that, if you don’t mind, that one of the reasons exercise is so unpopular, people don’t want us to hear that. Many people don’t want to hear. “I don’t need exercise.” And even the people who are trying to sell you stuff, they will say, “It’s all diet.” Well, listen, the National Weight Registry, they track successful people over many, many, many years and many thousands of people who were successful making this change, and then they want to know what correlates with the people who were successful. Exercise was in 97% of the people who were successful. The reason people say, “I don’t need exercise, or I don’t want to deal with exercise,” is because you suck at it now.
Stu
(45:25)
That’s true.
Dr. Prologo
(45:26)
It’s like we just said, but you don’t have to. If you would change that and you didn’t stink at it and you didn’t feel crappy when you did it, then all of a sudden you would embrace exercise, you would understand the value. And anybody who tells you that you couldn’t do it without exercise, you can’t do it now because you don’t have the exercise capacity. And anybody who says that you can do it over the long run without exercise is just trying to sell you something.
Stu
(46:00)
No, perfect. I like it.
Dr. Prologo
(46:03)
Not the amount of exercise you can do now, a different body that can do a different amount of exercise.
Stu
(46:09)
Well, that’s right.
Dr. Prologo
(46:10)
Let me get you there.
Stu
(46:11)
Because you wouldn’t turn up to the monthly NASCAR meeting in the same car and expect to win. You have to make some modifications. You have to.
Dr. Prologo
(46:21)
But in this space, we wake up overweight, obese, and out of shape, and we say that we’re going to enter to race Monday. It’s totally unreasonable.
Stu
(46:30)
It’s never going to work. That’s brilliant. What a great conversation. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this. This has been good. We’re kind of coming up on time and I’d love it just to, if we could just talk about some of your non-negotiables, because you are the expert, you know all of these things. And no doubt, you have built up a whole barrage of healthy habits that you just work through each day on autopilot. I’m just keen to hear about some of the non-negotiables that you do each and every day to ensure that you crush that day. And it may be things like, “You know what? I get up in the morning, I hydrate myself, and I stare at the sun for five minutes just to wake myself up.” Things like that.
Dr. Prologo
(47:17)
Well, I will tell you. I’ll give you number one and number two. The number one non-negotiable that I have, and we explain this in the book as well, is called the no restart principle. What I mean by the no restart principle is that life is going to throw things at you all the time. Your kid is going to get sick, they’re going to be mean to you at work, or you’re just not feeling good a certain day or whatever. There’s a no restart clause in my life. What that means is I’m always on this. Because what we see with the folks who don’t succeed is this idea that it has to be perfect, and so they start to follow a certain healthy living, and then the day they decide to go to the hamburger place because they had a bad day at work, they quit and they go back to the beginning.
Dr. Prologo
(48:16)
Which for me, I’m always on. Even if I go to the hamburger joint tonight because I ended up working late today and I’m hungry and I’m tired. I’m not off whereby I have to start a whole new project some other day. I’m going to wake up tomorrow and still be on. Because it went poorly the day before, that doesn’t throw me off my goal. And if you think of being successful in any other space, if you were going to be a coin collector and you started collecting coins, you wanted to have this great collection, and then one day you had a problem, you got distracted from coin collecting, you couldn’t do it. You went to the hamburger joint and then you forgot about it. You wouldn’t come back, throw all your progress out and start over. You would say, “I’m still on this coin collecting thing. I just was off for a couple days,” and come back in where you left off.
Dr. Prologo
(49:07)
Don’t start over like it’s a video game. Come right back in where you left off. So even if I have a bad day or two bad days with regard to eating, exercise, whatever, I’m always on the same continuous journey, the no restart principle.
Stu
(49:22)
I like that.
Dr. Prologo
(49:24)
That’s my non-negotiable. That’s my big one.
Stu
(49:27)
No, I like that. On a similar vein, one hamburger isn’t going to make you fat and one salad isn’t going to make you thin.
Dr. Prologo
(49:38)
Of course not. Right. So where did that come from too? We talked about so many things that exist in this space and we don’t know where they came from. That’s the other one. Nothing else is like that. You started college or you started a business or a podcast, right?
Stu
(49:55)
Yes.
Dr. Prologo
(49:56)
And you face a struggle or you have a bad day, or you have a guest who talks too much like me or something. You don’t just scroll the whole thing down.
Stu
(50:05)
It’s over.
Dr. Prologo
(50:05)
And start a whole different project another day. There’s no restart. There’s no starting over.
Stu
(50:10)
No, exactly right. I love it. You mentioned you were going to give me two. What’s the second one?
Dr. Prologo
(50:16)
The second one is to listen to your body. And this is one that again, you’ll understand, but I think people need to be taught this principle. Each body is different, each life is different. And when you’re undergoing this transformation, this change, your body will let you know if it’s time for an exercise bout or it’s time for rest. One of the mistakes that we see people make over and over and over again, because they don’t understand this idea of overdoing it, is they take on more than they can bear, more than their body is ready for. It’s like throwing dynamite on a rickety bridge. It’s just a recipe for failure. So when you listen to your body, your body’s going to let you know, and it works in both directions. Today, maybe not the day, maybe my program says to go to CrossFit today, but it’s been a long day and I’m tired. I can just tell it’s not right.
Dr. Prologo
(51:17)
But it works the other way too. I wake up and I’m not scheduled for a workout, but I feel great. Because each body is different, each life is different, then you have to tune into yourself, listen to your body’s feedback. Your body will tell you when it’s ready for rest and when it’s ready for exercise and when it’s ready for calorie restriction and when it needs a break. And tuning into those signals is important for sustainability.
Stu
(51:44)
That’s super important. And as we are continually changing as well, and like you said before, Mondays maybe our workout day and that’s just what we do and it’s appropriate for us and convenient. But sometimes if you don’t feel right on a Monday, don’t do it. Listen to what your body has to say.
Dr. Prologo
(51:59)
That’s exactly right. Be fluid.
Stu
(52:01)
Exactly right. Fantastic. So what’s next? What’s on the pipeline for you? So you’ve written the book, obviously, you’re a hyper busy person. Have you got anything in the pipeline for the rest of the year?
Dr. Prologo
(52:15)
Underneath all of this is a larger project, which is, I’m trying to advocate for people who are on the other end of this kind of thing. We are explaining to each other and to your audience the principles that these people need to be successful and the sort of empathy and changing in the way of thinking. But unfortunately in the world, we still need to advocate for these folks because what happens that’s ugly out there, is they get judged and they get told that they are this way because they’re bad and they can’t lose weight because they’re worthless and so on and so forth. And so for those folks, and also for many other people with similar medical disorders like mental illness, there’s a lot of snap judgment that goes on by people who have never felt it. People who have never felt anxiety or depression. People who have never felt this inability to lose weight. People who have never felt chronic pain, they are quick to judge. And so, the word for that is humanism in medicine, and that’s my thing for hopefully the rest of my career.
Stu
(53:25)
Fantastic. Well, we’ll watch what you’re doing with keen interest for sure because it sounds like something much needed.
Dr. Prologo
(53:34)
Well, I greatly appreciate the opportunity to come on today because no matter how good we think our ideas are, if we don’t have a way to get them out to the people, we’ll just die with them. So what you’re doing is very important and I appreciate the opportunity.
Stu
(53:49)
Well thank you very much. Well, just on that note then, for everybody then that loves what they’ve heard today, wants to find out more about you, order the book, follow you on social media, where can we send them?
Dr. Prologo
(54:00)
I think that the best place is drprologo.com. It’s just D-R P-R-O-L-O-G-O, drprologo.com. And that links out to everything that we’re trying to do.
Stu
(54:11)
Awesome. We’ll put that in the show notes and share it to all of our audience. But Dr. Prologo, been a fantastic conversation, really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. Hope to catch up with you at some stage soon. Thank you.
Dr. Prologo
(54:23)
Of course. Thank you.
Stu
(54:23)
Bye-Bye.
