Dr. Eric Westman: It is my great pleasure to have Vinnie Tortorich with me.
Vinnie Tortorich: I can’t thank you enough for having me on.
Introduction and background
Dr. Eric Westman: Please introduce yourself to the followers. Who are you and how did you get into this?”
Vinnie Tortorich: I grew up in Louisiana, and went to Tulane on a football scholarship. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I got a degree in exercise physiology and nutrition – which, in 1984, makes you the most overqualified PE teacher in the world. Before I left college I got my teaching credentials and had to do the in-classroom stuff. I was like, ‘What do you do with this degree? I guess I have to become a PE teacher.’ I did my student teaching and the whole deal and never used it. But I did go to work as the assistant strength and conditioning coach for Tulane University, my alma mater, for five minutes, knowing that I was just trying to make enough money to live. This other school, Newman School, is a high school and they are noted because that is where the Manning kids went to school: Peyton, Cooper, and Eli. I had the pleasure of coaching two of those – Cooper and Peyton. That is where I started making my bones. I started working with some of the socialites up and down St. Charles Avenue, and I became well-known as the guy to get the weight off of people.
In 1984 you couldn’t find a fat person, especially amongst the wealthy. It just didn’t exist. I was working in a world where women wanted to become thinner, they were already size 3s. I know it all sounds ridiculous, but I had a career, and I didn’t have to walk into a classroom, so that is what I did. But I noticed my students in my afternoon gig at Newman School – I was there from 3:00 to 6:00 every day – they were getting fatter and fatter. They looked the way I did a few years earlier when I graduated high school in ’81. I went off to Hollywood to try to create children’s programming to fight obesity. When I got there in the early 1990s, I got laughed out of Hollywood. They were, ‘You want to do what?’ I said, ‘I want to tell kids on television not to eat sugars and grains.’ I got laughed out of television. They were like, ‘You can’t do that – all of our sponsors are the cereal box companies and Coca-Cola and Mars, and on and on and on.’ I was stuck in Hollywood, and I became known in the Hollywood community as the quick weight loss guy because I took a heavyset celebrity and knocked 60 pounds off of her for a sitcom. That started this incredible career for me that I couldn’t reproduce now if my life depended on it. It was the right place at the right time.
Helping people lose weight
Dr. Eric Westman: What did you use? How did you help people slim down?
Vinnie Tortorich: I would take them off all carbs. I read books. I read Banting – the Letter on Corpulence back in the day. Letter on Corpulence was big for me. Then Atkins came around. By creating the New You, Atkins, and then you came along and wrote The New Atkins for a New You, and that is when you got onto my radar, even before, the internet thing was a big deal. I knew low-carb was the way to go. The only reason that Hollywood would listen to a guy like me was because actors are Type A+ personalities, and they are the hardest working human beings – they are like Olympic athletes. Whatever it takes to get the job done, that is what they are going to do. Again, the right place at the right time. If I came in and said, ‘We are taking you off of bread, potatoes, pasta, anything that looks like bread, corn, and you are going to be eating meat and bacon and fish and chicken,’ their attitude was, ‘I am getting ready for a movie role – it won’t kill me to do this for the next two or three months. Even though everyone knew, certainly, that bacon was bad for you, and red meat was going to kill you if you ate it long-term. Actors don’t think that way. “I need to slim down because I have to be naked in a movie; that is what I am going to do.”
The bigger part of that was this little nuance where some of these actresses that were in movies, when movies were still a thing, would be in shape for the movie, and then they would schedule having a child right when the movie was cut. The movie doesn’t come out for a year, so they would have a child. Part of their contract is they have to walk the red carpet and go on Jay Leno, and go on Oprah and everything else to promote it. But they have mommy weight. Well, guess what? Vinnie can come in and put them on this high-meat diet and have them walk on a treadmill and run up and down mountains, and they are going to look just fine. So, I had kind of two careers. I was able to double-dip on a lot of things, but that is how it happened.
Dr. Eric Westman: You got results. It works.
Vinnie Tortorich: Yes, as long as I got a lot of results.
Dr. Eric Westman: I suppose you weren’t in the clinic? So the person would go to the doctor next door, and the doctor would say, ‘You can’t do that because your LDL will go up.’ But actors are doers, and they are going to do it. Were you concerned about anything safety-wise? Back then if you did Atkins for a day you got in trouble. Were you already doing it?
Vinnie Tortorich: Not a lot. Let’s call it ignorance, because sometimes ignorance is bliss.
Dr. Eric Westman: That is how I got into this. When someone said, ‘You are so daring,’ I said, ‘No, really, I just didn’t know what I was getting into.’
Cholesterol
Vinnie Tortorich: We grew up in an age where the word ‘cholesterol’ didn’t exist. No one cared or thought about cholesterol at all. No one knew what their numbers were. Doctors weren’t talking about it. My grandparents and great-grandparents from the old country – I am Italian on both sides – they ate fish every day, they ate red meat every day, they ate pork and chicken, and we also ate a lot of game because parts of my family were very poor, but we did a lot of hunting. So, we were eating animal protein every day. We drank whole milk; I never heard of skim milk. It did not exist. Cheese, all of this stuff was considered nutrient-dense. I never heard the word ‘cholesterol’ until I heard the word ‘cholesterol.’ Then people started going, ‘Well, aren’t you worried about cholesterol?’ And I was ‘No, why?’ And they said, ‘Well, all this stuff raises cholesterol.’ And I was, ‘But I thought cholesterol was good. Every cell in your body uses cholesterol.’ All of a sudden, they started coming up with numbers. You would know better than me, the first numbers were in the 200s. Do you remember what the early numbers were? The cut-off numbers?”
Dr. Eric Westman: “They’ve just kept going down over time. It depends if it is total cholesterol or LDL cholesterol, but those numbers were higher, and then they made them lower and lower.” That is when the medical world got into the mix here and messed everything up.
I think it is neat that you were able to have a career. It was Dr. Atkins at the time. One of the stories I heard is that he traveled to treat Imelda Marcos in the Philippines. He was on the world stage. Why Hollywood? And why films? This is not typical.
Hollywood and celebrities
Vinnie Tortorich: I never gave any thought to working with celebrities. It all happened by, I guess, happenstance. When I first got there, I knew nobody, and I knew that I would have to crank up my training business like I had done in New Orleans. Not everybody was a trainer back then. Most trainers had either a degree or some semblance of a background in fitness to some degree. Certification makes anyone a trainer. You don’t have to have a four-year degree or anything. I was there at the beginning when people were still hiring trainers and paying us crazy amounts of money. When I first got to Hollywood, I never knew a soul. I was taking meetings at Disney and Nickelodeon to try to push my child fitness thing. I looked around and went, ‘If I don’t start making money quickly, I am going to go broke.’ A friend of a friend knew the secretary who worked at Playboy Corporation. She was the secretary to the president of Playboy in Los Angeles, which was the Video World Division, and I met my first client through her. We had lunch. She had married a guy from Baton Rouge, so we felt we had something in common. We were still chatting, and I walked her back to her desk to say goodbye. One of the VPs saw me and said, “Who’s that guy?” And she replied, “He’s a trainer. He just moved to town. I know him from New Orleans. He’s got a great reputation.”
It just so happened that this woman weighed 320 lbs, and I charged her much less to train her almost every day because I needed to prove my worth. I got her eating low carb, and exercising, and she went from 320 lbs down to 140 lbs in less than a year.
I picked up a couple more VPs over at Playboy. That led to Playmates. Playmates are adjacent to real celebrities. They would tell their boyfriends, “This guy Vinnie, you should call him.” It is like I said: if I had to move back to Hollywood and try to crank up now as a young guy, I would tell everyone, “Do not do it.” I got lucky to be in the right place at the right time.
Dr. Eric Westman: I heard that theme in other places, where you go to the leadership, do low carb, keto, or whatever you are doing, and you can actually influence the whole company. That is brilliant.
How did you get involved with Fat: A Documentary? What motivates you there?
The first documentary
Vinnie Tortorich: Well, the first one, Fat: A Documentary. The podcast and my book were both juggernauts. We started podcasting when there weren’t 5 million out there. There were around 150,000 podcasts, so we were at the top of iTunes and killing it there. Then the book Fitness Confidential came out. I was aware of you because you were, at the time, started doing things, The New Atkins for a New You, and some other books came out. You were always on my radar, so I became a fan.
People started saying, “You should do a documentary.” And I was like, “Why me?” And they said, “Because you are in Hollywood.” I don’t think that qualifies me. That is like saying, “I live near a racetrack; I should be a race car driver,” Or, “I live near Cape Canaveral, let’s get in the rocket,” or “You can be an astronaut.” Everyone was toying with the idea, and some people started coming up with money for me to do stuff. Every time someone with money came around, they wanted me to do some schlocky stuff. One of the things they suggested was, “Take a pair of twins and put one on this diet and put one…” I said, “You know what? That would be doing exactly what the vegan propaganda guys are doing. I don’t want to do that. Well, “No, you could do this, and you could do that, and you could do all this other stuff,” and it is like, “Yes, it is going to look like I cooked it. I am not going to do it.” So I went away from the idea.
I was leaving The Adam Carolla Show one day, and this guy, Peter Pardini, was taking my seat for the second part of the show. He had just finished a documentary about the band Chicago called Chicago: Now More Than Ever, which was winning awards. And he goes, “It is a pleasure to meet you.” And I said, “Great.” He goes, “I read your book. I listen to your podcast.” And I said, “Yes, sure you do.” He goes, “I lost 75 pounds.” I am exaggerating, it could have been 50, could have been 80, I don’t know, but he lost a lot of weight and he looked great. So I was like, “That is very kind.” I watched his documentary, and it was wonderful. He had given me a card, so I called him to leave a message. I go, “It is Vinnie, your documentary was wonderful,” But he picked up the phone, and we started chatting, and one thing led to another. He kept going, “You should do a documentary.” And I said, “Peter, I don’t have the money for that.” And he goes, “I would do it. I would help produce it. I would do everything. I would direct it. You just have to be the guy in it.”
And I said, “Where’s the money going to come from?” He says, “We will crowdfund it.” And I said, “No one is going to give me money, so yes, let’s crowdfund it, and that’ll shut you up, and you will go home.” We asked for $150,000 on Kickstarter, and we ended up getting $250,000. We got a quarter of a million dollars.
Dr. Eric Westman: What year was this? Do you remember off the top of your head?
The production
Vinnie Tortorich: We put it out in 2018, so it was somewhere around 2016 or 2017. Now we got all this money, so we hired a film crew. We went to that hotel because 70% of the people we wanted to talk to were at that low-carb conference. I got two rooms. We went into that room like the A-Team. If the hotel knew what we did in there, they would just freak out. We literally dismantled beds that literally bolted into the wall. We removed everything from that room without the hotel knowing and moved a sound stage into that room, big lights, everything.
Gary was the first guy to come in. He thought I was going to have a cell phone set up on a tripod, and we were going to do something. He says “You built a studio in this room.” I said, “Yes, the sound guy is in the bathroom.” We had a sound guy in the bathroom, we had cables going to the next room over the balcony, and we had a video village just like any other movie set I have ever been on with my clients. That is why that film looked so good.
Then we had to do the same thing at my house. We gutted a room in my house and built a sound stage there. That is where Nina came in, and Jim Abrahams from the Charlie Foundation. He is a big producer, and he was impressed. When Jim Abrahams shows up, he goes, “You built the sound stage in your house?” I am like, “Yes.” He thought for a second, and he went, “Why didn’t we ever think of doing that?”
Dr. Eric Westman: It is less expensive than bringing all of us somewhere.
Vinnie Tortorich: I just reverse-engineered, and it worked, and everyone showed up.
Dr. Eric Westman: I know why you probably wanted to target fat, but this is one of the biggest roadblocks. What was going through your mind there?
Targeting fat
Vinnie Tortorich: I wanted to show that fat was not a villain because everything had fat and protein in it when I was growing up. As I said, I went to school on a football scholarship, so everything was about exercising and putting on lean muscle mass. The way we did that was with red meat. Red meat was not the enemy when I was growing up, and I am not sure where I was standing when it became the enemy. Was it 1985? Was it more like 1990? By the time I got to LA, if you even mentioned red meat, people thought you were crazy. It was an effort, so I thought if I did a movie showing that somehow fat was vilified, maybe I could bring people back to the 1970s when there was some sanity.
Vinnie Tortorich: Did I answer the question, or did I skirt it?
Dr. Eric Westman: It makes sense if you were in the idea of trying to help children and help the whole family. One of the major issues is the concern about fat in the food, fat in the blood, cholesterol, and all of that.
How did you meet Gary Taubes and Nina Teicholz? Those were the ones who did the detailed investigations to show, in books, that the low-fat thing really was not grounded in science. Best I can tell, that had never been put into a movie. What convinced you that that was worth doing? I love Chicago, but it is not like that is going to help change the world.
The success of the documentary
Vinnie Tortorich: I felt like I had one shot at it, and someone had to do it. Maybe it was not going to be well received, but that movie came out the same year as the movie Free Solo. Alex Honnold, who was climbing rocks without any kind of protection, was at the top of the documentary game for most of that year. We toppled that movie on iTunes, and we stayed at the top for a couple of weeks. Then Aretha Franklin died, and a documentary came out at the same time, and she toppled us. Then we toppled her again and went to the top, and we stayed at the top of documentaries.
The president of Gravitas Ventures, who distributed the movie, called me and said, “You are now the number one movie we have ever put out.” And I went, “That is incredible, the number one documentary?” He said, “No, no, you are the number one movie.” That was shocking to me because you don’t hear that from a health documentary. It makes no sense, so obviously it struck a chord with someone.
Dr. Eric Westman: What scale are we talking about? Hundreds of thousands? A million? What kind of reach can you get with the documentary?
Vinnie Tortorich: That one got incredible reach. They put it on 65 VODs around the world. People were sending me screenshots like, “I’m on Allegiant Airlines. It’s on my screen!” This was going on Twitter and everything. “I’m on Delta going to DC. It’s on my screen!” “I’m in England on British Airways, and it’s on my screen!” All of a sudden, my face was everywhere. It was wild.
From a financial standpoint, I was told by my friend Adam Carolla and other people, “When you make a documentary, do not expect to make a dime. You will not get the money back.” I did make it, but in the end, it cost more than a quarter of a million dollars. I had to put a lot of my own money in to finish it, even with the GoFundMe. Even with the $250,000, I had to drop a lot of money, but I had so much belief in it.
All these people gave me their hard-earned money, and even though they were giving me $10, $25, $50, $100, and some people up to $2,000, I had to put in tens of thousands of dollars to complete it. I felt like it was my duty to do that. I told my wife, “Let’s consider that money gone. We will never see it again. Maybe enough people will see it that they might listen to the podcast and buy the products we recommend. Maybe the money will come back, but we’ll never know how.”
The money came back, plus all my money came back, plus. I have this weird moral issue with everything. I’m looking at all this money, thinking, “I have this money, but I don’t feel like it’s mine because other people gave me their hard-earned dollars because they believed in this movie.” Now, I have this bank account, separate from my own bank account, with all this money in it. It all came back in spades.
During the pandemic, I was feeling guilty and had time on my hands, so we did Fat 2: A Documentary. I told my wife, “We got our $40,000 or $50,000 back. We’ll keep that, but I’m putting the rest into Fat 2, and then it’ll be gone. Then, I don’t have to worry about that money ever again.” Lo and behold, it came back again, not as big as Fat 1, but it didn’t cost as much to do Fat 2.
I still have this bank account with other people’s money, and we decided, “Let’s do a third documentary. We have to lose it at some point.” We did Beyond Impossible. Have you ever seen Beyond Impossible, the third documentary?
Dr. Eric Westman: No, I haven’t. I was catching up on it today.
Vinnie Tortorich: That film will boggle your mind.
Dr. Eric Westman: Give us the synopsis if you can.
Documentary Beyond Impossible
Vinnie Tortorich: It’s about Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger. When those things came out, they said, “It’s better for you and better for the environment,” because somehow cow farts are killing us or causing some kind of CO2 problem. Ruminants have never had this problem with the atmosphere, but somehow magically, now they do. Just like everything else I do, I went down this deep rabbit hole to figure out how. By the time you get an Impossible Burger in your hand, what did it take with CO2 carbons?
The truth is, I had people like Frederic Laqua and Dr. Frank Mitloehner, all of these people from that community giving me information, going, “You don’t even know the half of it. It takes so much CO2 carbon in the atmosphere just to make one burger versus cow meat, and you’re eating something that’s probably not as healthy as an Oreo cookie.” I’m not being funny.
When we saw the truth, I thought people were going to think I’m making this up. We even tried to downplay some of it. I tried to get Dr. Walter Willett, from Harvard, to do it. I tried to get Greger. I tried to get McDougall. I tried to get all of them, and on the screen, I put my letter to them and their replies back to me. That’s worth the price of admission.
Dr. Eric Westman: I’m going to watch it tonight. I promise.
Vinnie Tortorich: You will. Dr. Walter Willett said, “I’m busy that day.” I wrote back and said, “We didn’t give you a date; we just asked you to be in the movie.”
Dr. Eric Westman: Dr. McDougall passed away, sadly, the last month or two ago, and I’m resisting the hoopla everyone made about that. The ad hominem about who comes up with the diet is overblown and oversold.
I’m primed and ready to watch Beyond Impossible because so many people are coming in with ‘red meat is bad,’ and ‘the environment,’ and so people today are eating under the thought that it is saving the planet even when they become harmed by what they eat. This makes no sense to me.
Vinnie Tortorich: It is a bizarro world. I don’t know if you know this, but I just put out a fourth documentary.
The fourth documentary
Dr Eric Westman: No. This is why I am talking to you. Update me.
Vinnie Tortorich: It has finally come out. It was the first time I did not go through Gravitas. I decided to release it myself, only on Amazon. It was supposed to be released on May 30th. That day came and went. Amazon wouldn’t give us a reason; they wouldn’t get back to me. Thirty days passed, and they got back to me and said, “We just haven’t had a chance to review it yet.”
I had gone on about 20 podcasts to promote this, and they just didn’t put it out. They are causing this big flop. After 45 days, they wrote to me and said, “We will put it out, but we have to put a PG-13 rating on it.”
My friend Mike Rowe, the Dirty Jobs guy, I did his podcast. His hasn’t come out yet. Mike said to me, “I watched the whole documentary. Why would they put a PG-13 on it?” The answer is, I don’t know, you tell me. That is when you know you are ruffling feathers out in the world when they don’t put it out. It is like, it should have been out, it was not out, now they give me an excuse, tell me it is a PG-13 rating, and then when it came out, it came out three days ago, they put it under documentaries, but they didn’t put it under Health, they put it under Special Interest. They have hidden my documentary from anyone who would want to see a health documentary.
Dr. Eric Westman: What is the name of it? And the topic?
Vinnie Tortorich: It is Dirty Keto, and I am going after you and me. I have gone after us this time. So you are not safe, Eric, and I am not safe when it comes to me. I am always looking for the truth. There is your truth, my truth, and then there is a universal truth. Dirty Keto deals with this incredible industry that has cropped up from people like you, me, Gary, Nina, and everyone else. All we did was say, “This is how you eat, this is how you lose weight, this is how you get healthy.” Big food went, “Hold my beer.” You need to have keto cakes, keto ice cream, keto bread, keto, keto, keto, pasta and pizza. So I went after that.
If you think my other movies seemed strange, you are going to look at this and scrape the rest of the hair off of your head because you are going to go, “I didn’t even think of this, I didn’t think of that.”
Dirty Keto
Dr. Eric Westman: I look forward to watching it. Even sight unseen, I recommend that everyone take a look at your latest two documentaries. I have always tried to push the science that we have done. Now I am getting into debunking some of the other things out there. If someone says keto kills you, I am reviewing their video and saying, “Let’s look at the science in this.”
I teach dirty keto in my clinic in a way, in that I don’t insist upon grass-fed beef, locally grown, or having your own chickens. I have had people go to McDonald’s and they lose weight by just not eating the carbs.
Dirty keto, meaning junk food keto, we call it “internet keto” now. It is the difference between what you read on the internet and see in the store, or over-the-counter keto, versus prescription-strength keto, which is what we teach in the clinic. It is what’s been studied for so long. If it says “keto” on the product, I say be very careful and always look at the total carbs. It is a way for people to enter into the concept of low-carb and keto. But it stalls people, it makes people think that low-carb won’t work for them because they are eating so many carbs from these non-low-carb keto products. I wish a hamburger or sirloin or steak could say, “Great for keto” on it. Why aren’t they marked? Oh, right, they are walking on eggshells too, probably.
Vinnie Tortorich: They are. Someone asked me, “Why don’t you open a keto restaurant?” I was like, “Because it is already there; it’s called the steakhouse. Just go there.” I am glad you brought it up, people ask me, “Do I have to have heritage pork and grass-fed beef?” I am like, “I am an empty nester, and we do okay financially, and I can’t afford that stuff. I buy the regular stuff just like everyone else, and it is fine.” If you can afford that stuff that is great. The only kind of grass-fed stuff I eat is if I kill a deer. I tell people to do the best they can.
I remember in your clinic, and people have asked me about that, they’ll say, “Eric Westman says I can use sweeteners,” and then I said, “Yes, you can use sweeteners, but that is the methadone clinic.” At some point, I bet Eric weans you off that. They go, “Yes, he does.” I am like, “You can do the ramp if you want, or you can rip the Band-Aid off. Both ways work.”
Dr. Eric Westman: The internet doesn’t tell you, “This is for people who have diabetes, and this is for people who are in the clinic, and this is for people who are young and already fit.” You have to watch who the influencer is. My typical patient, there is no way they are going to exercise or afford all that stuff. You have to be careful consuming all that information, seeing if it applies to you.
Why exercise
Dr. Eric Westman: I want to switch gears a little bit and pick your brain about exercise and the importance of it. I say this because a lot of my patients will be watching, and they know that I have been emphasizing diet. In fact, I say it is 100% diet at first. People come to me in wheelchairs, and I can get them to lose weight. Eventually, exercise is critical to health and wellness, flexibility, and longevity. How would you help? Put your personal trainer hat on for the person who just gained a lot of weight, they are pregnant, now they have a new movie coming up, and they have to lose weight and exercise too. How would you start, and then motivate and convince someone that in the long run, you really need to exercise?
Vinnie Tortorich: Every time I walk on stage to give a talk, and I say it a lot on my podcast, the first words out of my mouth are, “Exercise is an extremely poor way to try to lose weight.” They look at me like, “Oh, wait, he’s an exercise guy?” I make my living off telling people to exercise. The fact is, I have seen people from the couch saying, “In the next year, I am going to run a marathon,” which means they run a 5K, and then they run a 10K, and then they run a half, and then they train for months and months. It takes about another 20 weeks to get ready for a full marathon. You can accomplish that in one year. I have seen those same people get to the starting line of that race heavier than they were when they started training.
My good friend Timothy Noakes – have you ever had Tim on the show?
Dr. Eric Westman: Not yet, but I would like to interview Tim.
Vinnie Tortorich: You have to make that happen. He’s probably the foremost authority in the world. You know me as an exercise physiologist; he’s the God. He is who we all bow down to because he’s done a lot of research, and he’s even admitted that as he got older, he couldn’t outrun the fork. So, what does this mean?
I am going to use a marathon as an example. Someone thinks, “I am going to start running. I am going to look lean and skinny, just like the guy from Zimbabwe.” But genetically, you are never going to look like that guy, so forget it. That is number one.
Number two, you got to the line heavier than when you started because the first thing you did when you started running was you went to a running store. The running store sells two products: they sell running shoes, which is probably a good idea, and number two, they have what I call the wall of sugar. After you buy the running shoes, they have every product on that wall, you name it, Honey this, hammer that, every bar. It comes in powders, bars, and goos; it is nothing but maltodextrin from end to end. When you get to the cash register, there is Runner’s World magazine and Running magazine. Every ad in that magazine is either from a running shoe company or one of these sugar companies. They are writing articles telling you the only way you can run is you have to have all of these carbs all the time.
When I was a child, people would run 10Ks, and the only thing they would do somewhere around 5K, they would pass by a table, grab a plastic cup of water, throw it in their face, throw the cup aside, and continue running. People ran marathons and never had one drop of carbohydrates for the entire 26.2 miles. Now, we have something you can buy called a fuel belt. This is a belt where you can put all of the maltodextrin on your waist so you can grab it, do a couple of slugs, get it in your mouth, and just keep the sugar rolling.
Fat-adapted
Vinnie Tortorich: If you think you are burning all that sugar while running, you have another thought coming. It doesn’t work that way. You are getting the bad effects of sugar and not the good effects. If you are a sugar burner, yes, you are going to bonk at some point because as soon as your blood sugar drops from you being on a spike. You need to cram more sugar in your mouth or you can’t finish it, those people will tell me, “You don’t know what you are talking about. You need sugar to finish a race.” If I can get you fat-adapted, I have climbed Mount Whitney, which is a 14-hour round trip; I have climbed Mont Blanc over in France, which took me longer than 14 hours; I have done both of those fat-adapted, also Grand Paradiso, which took me about 10-12 hours, that is a glacier in Italy. All of these things are fat-adapted, not one ounce of sugar.
Now, I bring sugar with me, and what I take is a roll of Life Savers. If you end up having a blizzard come in, or you fall into a crevasse and you have to work hard to come out, and you go into Zone 4 to work yourself out, you are going to burn up some of your glycogen. You can be below the level, and guess what will get you there? It is in the name, it is called a lifesaver. It brings you right back, and you can continue. You don’t need the big glob of sugar that they are telling you you need. That is number one.
Exercise – use it or lose it
Vinnie Tortorich: Exercise is a poor way to lose weight. I have had people lose, just like you, in wheelchairs, lose 100, 150, 200 lbs. They couldn’t exercise other than using their arms. The question becomes, “If you don’t need exercise to lose weight, why exercise at all?” Well, good question, but I have an answer. Exercise is the fountain of youth. You use it, or you lose it. That is it. It is the fountain of youth.
What does that mean? If you are not using your heart every day above what you would normally use it to walk around, or you are just sitting with your basal metabolic rate trying to keep you going, if you are not using it, things begin to atrophy. Your heart is a muscle, just like any other muscle. Your lungs work the same way. You want your alveoli to stay strong. You want your lungs to stay strong, so you want to work these things.
Do you have to go into Zone 4, meaning 90 to 100% of your aerobic capacity? Absolutely not. You can be in High Zone 1, that would be a walk. Or a slow jog. Or if you have an exercise bike, you can just move along. Being in Zone 2, which is between 70 and 80% of your aerobic capacity, is all you need aerobically to stay in shape. People say, “How much and how long?” A little bit every day, like the old commercial, “A little dab’ll do ya,” You just have to spark that every day.
Then people say, “What about weightlifting?” Again, great idea. Now we are introducing two things: the anaerobic engine and the aerobic engine. How much weightlifting? How often? Every study I have ever looked at, and I have looked at a lot, says that if you do weightlifting once a week, meaning if you did a whole body thing if you went in and just did one set of the bench to failure, pushing away, one set of shoulder press, pushing up to failure, pulling down one set to failure, pushing with your legs, compound movement, meaning a leg press or a squat, if you did anything like that once a week, you can maintain.
Once you hit your late 40s or early 50s, you are going to have a different problem because sarcopenia is going to kick in, and to maintain it, you need to do almost twice that much. You would probably have to do it twice a week. So, twice a week is a good idea. You don’t have to look like a bodybuilder, but you should want to keep what you have.
Eric, as a doctor, you know that when you look at all-cause mortality, they’ll tell you that people with the weaker grips are the ones who die first. Because they couldn’t grip something, they fell, broke their hip, and the next thing you know, we are like horses, you might as well shoot us. Falls are the one thing, falling downstairs, falling off a chair, it doesn’t take much.
Dr. Eric Westman: The point here is, that some is better than none. Nobody knows the exact amount but do something. That and often, that is what I am finding. As Gary Taubes said years ago, he said, there are different kinds of people, like different kinds of dogs. You won’t turn a basset hound or a beagle into a greyhound by putting it on a treadmill. I think there are different styles of humans, but some exercise is better than none.
What about worldwide? Maybe there is another documentary here about exercise. When I was in college in 1980 in France, I used to go out and jog, and everyone looked at me like, “Who is this American?” Even today, jogging is kind of an American thing. Even then, in the Blue Zones, you are going to see Tai Chi and yoga worldwide. What’s your take on the global view of exercise? People are doing things, but it is not always the gym.
Global view on exercise
Vinnie Tortorich: It is weird when I go to England, and my sister-in-law lives in France, most of the time, and her kids speak more French than they do English, even though my sister-in-law is British. She has this beautiful place on some farmland in the middle of France. When I am out there, I look at that and think, “Time to go for a jog.” The looks you get, people will actually stop and offer you a ride, they think your car broke down, and you are trying to get somewhere. They don’t get it. We are talking about 2024 and they still don’t get it.
Even in England, when Serena and I go there every year for Christmas and want to go for jogs, they’ll go for walks. They’ll take walks, and they have sticks in their hands for some reason. I am still not sure why everyone has a stick, but it looks awfully British, so I carry a stick too. It is always muddy, and they are wearing what they call Wellies, their Wellington boots, and the whole thing. You have to, or you will have mud up to your ass. They look at exercise way differently than we do. They say, “Why would you expend the energy?” And they tell you that while they are smoking a cigarette. It is an interesting thing that I think exercise is an American thing more so than anywhere else.
Dr. Eric Westman: The formality of turning it into a business with treadmills and all that is an American thing, but you can be fit and do exercise in lots of different ways.
Did you know Jack LaLanne? I read his bio. He lived until his late 90s, and he gave up sugar when he was young, but I believe he also gave up red meat.
I was thinking that if you weren’t in the health world, you weren’t a doctor, and you hear people saying things, you’d think, “I’ll give up both of these.” Some people say red meat is bad, some people say sugar is bad. With the exercise, the best I can tell you is Jack was fit until his late 90s. Everyone in our age group knows him from the black and white TV, being the fitness guy, jumping jacks, and all that. He paid attention to his diet, is what I can tell.
Vinnie Tortorich: He did give up sugar very early. He and Vince Gironda and some of those old guys, I didn’t know Jack, to answer your question, but Vince Gironda was around at the same time, and also, I did know Mickey Hargitay. Mickey was married to Jayne Mansfield, and he was the first Mr. Olympia before they started using steroids. Steve Reeves, I didn’t know, but Mickey knew Steve Reeves, none of these guys used steroids. They weren’t invented yet. You can see what the human body could look like if you look at Hargitay, Steve Reeves, Vince Gironda, and all these guys, and also Jack, who took all of it and brought it to the world by being on television.
I wrote about Jack in my book, Fitness Confidential, and his wife Elaine, she’s still alive, she’s in her 90s, and she still skateboards! Elaine invited me to the house to see Jack’s equipment and all the stuff because they have a museum in the house. I never made it to the house, and I regret it. I moved away from Los Angeles at some point. But I am a big fan of Jack.
My understanding from people who knew him is, yes, he cut out sugars and processed carbohydrates very early. He kept meat, fish, and eggs in his diet, but towards the end, maybe he cut red meat out, but he didn’t cut out eggs or dairy. He was not a vegan. It was around the time he started promoting his Vitamix, blending up all your vegetables and drinking them down with all the fiber and everything else. But he was still eating eggs and everything else. If you look at all of those guys, that is how they looked the way they looked. Right now, guys have to take drugs to look like those guys. I don’t think he gave up animal proteins altogether.
Dr. Eric Westman: I get a lot of mileage with people my children’s age. I am in North Carolina, and I don’t have connections in the film or TV world, but Raven-Symoné of The Cosby Show and That’s So Raven, the Disney star, has been vocal about her keto journey to lose weight and has been on prime time. When I go to the clinic and I see someone in their 30s, and I say, “Raven-Symoné is doing keto,” someone says, “Why didn’t you tell me that at the beginning?” There is no question of the celebrity influence, the testimonials. We need more of those to demonstrate that you can be healthy and thrive.
I look forward to watching all of your documentaries. Where can people find what you are into lately?
Where to find Vinnie Tortorich
Vinnie Tortorich: Right now, the easiest way is to go to Vinnietortorich.com. We put everything there that we are doing. I am on X and Instagram every day, being shadowbanned, but I am there doing what I can. Just go find me there.
Go to Amazon to watch the new movie Dirty Keto. Work it backward: watch Dirty Keto. If you like what you see there, go backward and watch Beyond Impossible. Eventually, you will get to the juggernaut that started it all, FAT: A Documentary, and you will see Eric in that movie. Also the sequel, FAT: A Documentary 2, in which you actually see more of Eric, I think, than in the first one.
Dr. Eric Westman: Yes, that is true.
Vinnie Tortorich: I also want to invite you back to my show. I like to get all the regulars back on once a year, and I think it is been about a year, so it is time for you to come back on.
Dr. Eric Westman: Fair enough, thank you. Keep up the great work. you are saving lives.
Vinnie Tortorich: You too.
You can watch the full video here.