Episode 581: Dr. Joey Munoz: Nutrition Myths, Muscle Loss, and Sustainable Fat Loss

Habits and Hustle - Jen Cohen

In this episode of Habits & Hustle, host Jen Cohen sits down with Dr. Joey Munoz, a nutrition expert and coach with a PhD in nutrition, to debunk common nutrition myths

Key takeaways

• Focusing excessively on small dietary details (like mixing bananas and blueberries) distracts from more impactful health behaviors.
• Intermittent fasting and popular diets often lack sustainability and can lead to yo-yo dieting and long-term harm.

Main topics

• Debunking nutrition myths (e.g., banana-blueberry interaction)
• Sustainable fat loss and muscle building

Notable quotes

"We're majoring in the minors. We're worrying about a banana, versus the fact that we're going to have an In-N-Out Burger and not exercising for two weeks."

Conclusion

Dr. Joey Munoz emphasizes that long-term success in health and fitness comes not from perfection or extreme

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:01) Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits & Hustle. Crush it! Speaker 1 (0:06) Welcome to Habits & Hustle, where I sit down with the world's biggest thinkers, entrepreneurs, and experts to uncover the habits and strategies that actually move the needle in your health, happiness, and success. And today, I'm sitting down with Dr. Joey Munez, who is a nutrition expert and full-time coach who helps people lose fat. build muscle, and create sustainable habits without falling for every new diet, supplement, or wellness trend. He has a PhD in nutrition and has built his work around evidence-based fitness and practical behavioral change, and cutting through all the misinformation that keeps people confused. In this episode, we get into all of it, why intermittent fasting may be overrated, understanding GLP-1 medications before you take them, and why focusing on the number on the scale can actually create bigger problems later. We talk about all of it and how trying to find the perfect diet can actually turn healthy habits into an unhealthy obsession. This conversation will make you rethink weight loss, nutrition, supplements, strength training, and the fitness rules you have been told you need to follow. What Dr. Munez shares in this episode will really stop you from majoring in the minors, in what I call, anyway, building habits that can maintain you for your life and preserve muscle as you age. So let's dive in. And please, guys, don't forget, if you have not subscribed, please press that button, subscribe, and enjoy the episode. Speaker 1 (1:47) All right, welcome to another episode of Habits & Hustle, where I'm joined with Dr. Joey Munoz. Perfect. I said it right? Yes. Okay, good, good, good. Okay. And he's up my alley, and hopefully he'll be up your alley too. He has a PhD in nutrition. So I guess you can guess what we're going to be talking about today. Health, fitness, wellness, and all the best practices around that. Actually, you are a full-time coach, right? Yes. Right? And what I love about you, he focuses on evidence-based fat loss, muscle building, sustainable habits, which I love, and cutting through nutrition misinformation, which by the way, and all these, you know, chasing trends nonsense, which I'm very against as well. So thank you for being here. Speaker 2 (2:36) Thank you for having me. I was just listening to your episode where you were talking about how do you know who to trust or who to listen to. And I resonated with everything you said on there. Speaker 1 (2:45) Really? Thank you. Well, because I think it's become like it is the wild, wild west out there. And now everybody and their dog has an opinion. And the problem is if you have a following, people will listen and think it's gospel. And what's happening is people are just pushing affiliate codes all day, all night. And if someone doesn't know and doesn't have the wherewithal, they are falling victim to this, which is a really big problem. Discernment is something that needs to be activated, in my opinion, right away. Speaker 2 (3:19) It's hard for somebody who doesn't have an educational background to be able to discern sometimes. Yeah. Because you mentioned this in your episode, some of the people that are spewing the most horrendous advice sound the most convincing as well. Speaker 1 (3:32) Yes, they sound the most convincing. Because they have the gift of the gab. They have the rhetoric. They have the right verbiage. And so just because you're good in sales and speaking doesn't necessarily mean you're speaking with the most valid information. Speaker 2 (3:50) Yeah. Did Speaker 1 (3:51) you see this whole thing that went, I feel like it went viral like the last few days. Bananas. Yeah, the bananas. Yeah. Did you see this? Was it Rhonda Patrick? Because Dr. Rhonda Patrick said this whole thing on Mel Robbins' podcast about like, if just for those, I'm just kind of, this is me just giving you guys some background, that like. There's polyphenols in the banana. In the blueberry. There's polyphenol Speaker 2 (4:13) oxidase in the banana and it degrades the polyphenols, which are healthy compounds in blueberries. There is some truth to that. There's more nuance as well. I want to back up really quick because claims like that blow up all the time. And a lot of my content is explaining why those claims are not true. And the reason why I do that is because of my personal journey. I have gone through all the diets. Speaker 1 (4:37) Yeah. Starting Speaker 2 (4:38) at a very young age. Yeah. So when I was probably like 11, 12 years old, I was really overweight as a young kid. So I'm a first generation Cuban-American. And so my parents came from Cuba and my mom in the early 90s. And coming from a country where they had nothing and then being in the States and having like ample access to food, the way they showed love was through food. Speaker 1 (4:58) Yeah. Specifically my mom. Speaker 2 (5:00) So I've always been really active, always into sports. I grew up in the gym because my mom cared about working out. So did my dad. But I was very overweight as a young kid. And then my mom started putting me on all sorts of diets and I started going on YouTube and I was doing the fasting in the morning, taking a ton of caffeine and doing cardio and the keto diets and every fad under the sun I've tried. And every time I did a fad, like most people, it usually backfires. It works for a period of time, if at all. And then it's usually unsustainable. It's really restrictive. And so I would kind of be in this yo-yo dieting cycle for... the vast majority of my teenage years and my early adulthood as well. And for me, education has been what has helped me cut through that noise. And it's why I'm so passionate about talking about that stuff on social media. And it gives me, there are ample topics to talk about because Speaker 1 (5:48) there's a lot of that, right? To keep it Speaker 2 (5:50) professional. But the claim was that if you mix bananas with blueberries in a smoothie, it... ruins the health benefits of the blueberry and that's not nuanced enough because so polyphenols are compounds in blueberries and not just in blueberries in plant-based foods that have positive health impacts so like anti-inflammatory effects antioxidative benefits and there's this thing called polyphenol oxidase which oxidizes them which essentially means they just don't work the same way but that reaction takes time it's not like you make a smoothie and immediately it's all gone it also takes time and The other important point is that there are a ton of other very health-promoting compounds in blueberries and other fruits that you still get even if you mix it with bananas, right? Right, right. My main issue, Jen, is I've been at fault of this as well, is that social media has turned into just taking clips of stuff and taking it out of context as well. That's Speaker 1 (6:47) exactly what happens. But what was taken out of context with that? Because I did see the whole... Yeah, Speaker 2 (6:54) I didn't see the whole thing. Oh, you didn't see the Speaker 1 (6:55) whole... Speaker 2 (6:55) I saw the whole clip. The clip was incorrect, for sure. Yeah, the clip Speaker 1 (6:58) was incorrect. I did a thing with Gary Brucka many years ago on my podcast about a banana that... A different claim was made, though, and I got torched, right? As if it's my fault. But he said a claim, or he was talking about how when you blend a banana... you're the the bananas composition changes and so much sugar is being released and it's Basically saying something similar. Not that, but like basically don't put a banana in your smoothies. I've Speaker 2 (7:30) also debunked that one. Speaker 1 (7:31) Did you debunk the one on my show? Could Speaker 2 (7:35) have been. Speaker 1 (7:35) I think you probably did. Probably. Okay, so what was the reason with that? And then what happened? I think he kind of retracted it, right? I don't remember. I Speaker 2 (7:43) don't remember. Speaker 1 (7:43) It was like three years ago. Speaker 2 (7:44) I can't remember the specific claim, but it was something about like the sugar content just being way higher. Way higher. That was what it was. Which Speaker 1 (7:51) is also Speaker 2 (7:51) just not true. Because typically, okay, so when you blend something, it's kind of like pre-digested kind of. But not really because like cells are really, really tiny. They're microscopic. And when you blend something, you're not bursting all the cells open. And digestion actually begins in the mouth. So saliva is what starts breaking down carbohydrates. This level of complexity, the main point I want to make is I think one of the reasons why people feel really confused. Speaker 1 (8:15) Yeah, tell us. Speaker 2 (8:16) Because it's unnecessary. Like whether... Let's say you blend a banana and it does spike your blood sugar a little bit more. Speaker 1 (8:23) It just doesn't matter. Speaker 2 (8:25) It just doesn't matter for overall health, for nutritional value. Speaker 1 (8:29) Not really. Speaker 2 (8:30) Like, let's say it spikes it another 5 or 10 percent. It really does not matter in the grand scheme of things. I think we put too much emphasis and focus on these small things that don't move the needle. Yeah, Speaker 1 (8:40) 100%. We're majoring in the minors. Yeah, Speaker 2 (8:42) exactly. Speaker 1 (8:42) Right? We're all majoring in the minors. Like, we're worrying about a banana, how it's broken down, versus the fact that we're, like, then going to have, like, you know, In-N-Out Burger, right? And not exercising for two weeks at a time. You know, it's like this whole thing also, like Diet Coke, right? Like, I have a Diet Coke and people, like, lose their mind. Like, I'm, like, the antichrist, right? Like, don't make, like, you're allowed to have a Diet Coke once in a while, people. Like, I feel like people are focusing on the wrong thing to kind of feel like either they have the control or, like, the wrong, like, to me, if you do the basics and major in the majors, you can do a lot of minor stuff. Does that make sense? Speaker 2 (9:22) A hundred percent. Right? What you just said is, like, everything I preach. Speaker 1 (9:25) Right. Like I just think that I also feel that when you try to be too perfect and too extreme, that's what backfires. Speaker 2 (9:35) That's another really great point. Sometimes people sacrifice their psychological health for physical health. Psychological health is equal is equally as important, if not more important. More Speaker 1 (9:43) important. Speaker 2 (9:44) Like Speaker 1 (9:44) the people like if you're like not going out. And you're like staying home for every meal because you're nervous about every calorie that's going to be consumed. Like if you're not in like a bikini competition tomorrow or most people are not going to be or like, you know, like I think there is something to be said for like actually living and being like happy and social and, you know, like having friends and going out and enjoying yourself. Like there has to be some of that too, because otherwise you're just like you're what are you doing it for? Yeah. One of the things Speaker 2 (10:14) I always like to say is that. And I see this often working with people who just start focusing on their health and start improving their health and they become so obsessive over it that it impacts their quality of life negatively. Yeah, exactly. And I also think, Jen, like for people who are potentially getting started or have just recently started their health and fitness journey, for lack of a better term, you Speaker 1 (10:33) kind of have Speaker 2 (10:33) to go through some of those trials and tribulations to learn. Speaker 1 (10:36) Right. But Speaker 2 (10:37) my whole philosophy. Yeah, exactly. My whole philosophy is that health and fitness should enrich your life, every aspect of it. right? Socially, health. And if you are doing things in a way where you stress out about having a freaking piece of cake at your kid's birthday party, like, is that really contributing to your health? I would argue it's not. Not Speaker 1 (10:57) to your mental health. Yeah. Speaker 2 (10:58) But Speaker 1 (10:59) I think there's also people do need and like, you know, there has to be like, you need to put guard. Some people need the guardrails to keep themselves, you know, intact, right? Like, I think that once A lot of times people don't like cheat days because then once, you know, the train has left the building, it's not great either, right? So people do have to have, knowing who you are and like what kind of guardrails, I would call it, like kind of parameters that you need to kind of keep on point, important. But I just think as we keep on going, it's just becoming, everyone's becoming more and more extreme, more and more severe, like to the point where it's like, what's enough is enough, right? Like people's routines. are like they're now becoming prisoners in their own lives because they won't do anything because they're so scared that their longevity protocol will be screwed up. Speaker 2 (11:50) Yeah. And I think it depends on the person too, right? Because some people definitely take it to an extreme. What you were mentioning about guardrails, it's a really interesting topic. And this is why, like, even for people listening, there are general rules and then we break those rules depending on the individual, right? What I mean by that is... Some people do need to be stricter with their diet than other people. Right. Some people do need to do things that may be, quote unquote, not sustainable long term, at least for a period of time to develop certain habits. But my general perspective with nutrition and diet and fitness overall is if you can't see yourself doing it for the rest of your life, then it's probably not the right thing to be doing. Right. Speaker 1 (12:29) It's like when I say to people, like, what's the best exercise? People say, what's the best exercise to do? The one that you're actually going to do is the best exercise to do. Speaker 2 (12:36) And I will add a caveat there and say the type of exercise that will help you build muscle as well. Speaker 1 (12:41) Because that's so important. Speaker 2 (12:42) You know, when you see somebody who's really fit, people who aren't as fit will say that person's really lucky. They can afford to eat a lot and they still stay pretty lean. Well, that person who's really fit has a lot of muscle on their body. And muscle in many ways is so beneficial for our metabolism. And people throw around the terms fast metabolism, slow metabolism. Most people don't even know what that means. But in general, your metabolism is how many calories you'll burn at rest. If you have more muscle, you burn more. So one of the things that I always try to do when I work with somebody is optimize for muscle mass first. I think one of the things that people struggle with too, Jen, is that they just focus too much on weight loss. And yes, losing weight. is important depending on the person, right? If you have excess body fat, it's unhealthy and losing weight will be helpful, but we don't want to lose weight in a way where we sacrifice muscle mass. Right. And the funny thing is, not funny, like objectively, if you spend two, three years really focusing on building muscle mass, you have so much more flexibility with your diet because you can just afford to eat more food and maybe get away with foods that are a little bit less healthy on a more frequent basis and it won't have the same impact. Speaker 1 (13:43) Also, you can be focusing on fat loss, not weight loss. Correct. Speaker 2 (13:47) Right? Because Speaker 1 (13:47) weight loss can mean muscle, right? Yes, exactly. Which is becoming the problem with all these GLP-1s. Correct. Right? Correct. Now, the baseline, I mean, to me, that's where you really get yourself in trouble. Because when you do gain your weight back, Speaker 2 (14:00) right, Speaker 1 (14:01) you're going to gain more weight because now your muscle is usually depleted. What happens, I have a question, if someone's taking a GLP-1, Speaker 2 (14:08) but Speaker 1 (14:09) they're also doing weight training, like strength training, Does it counteract each other? Speaker 2 (14:14) 100%. So this is another really nuanced subject. One thing I want to say, because when you were talking about your episode where you were talking about like who to trust and who not to trust, at least in the nutrition and fitness space, anybody who presents anything as just black and white, it's usually wrong. Like there's usually some gray in the middle and nuance with anything related to nutrition. By the Speaker 1 (14:35) way, anything related to life. Nothing is ever, everything is nuanced. That's why you keep on saying the word nuance. It's like my favorite word because life is nuanced. Relationships are nuanced. Like business is nuanced. God, Speaker 2 (14:47) that would be a great name for a podcast, nuanced. And just having in-depth conversations. Anyways. It's Speaker 1 (14:51) true though. Yeah. Because nothing is ever black and white. No, Speaker 2 (14:54) no. And Speaker 1 (14:55) when people start thinking black and white, they're getting themselves into a lot of trouble. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Sorry, go ahead. Speaker 2 (15:00) No, you're good. The GLPs. I like, I can go on tangents all day. Me too. We're going Speaker 1 (15:05) to be here until tomorrow night then. Speaker 2 (15:08) So interestingly, so if you take a GLP-1 and you lose weight rapidly and you're not strength training and you're not focusing on protein and adequate nutrition, you lose a ton of muscle. Speaker 1 (15:17) The Speaker 2 (15:18) data do show, though, that the amount of muscle lost is no different than if you just crash dieted, didn't do any exercise, didn't focus on your diet. So the amount of muscle mass is actually pretty similar on a GLP-1 or not on a GLP-1 if you're not doing things correctly. Meaning GLP-1s do not inherently exacerbate muscle loss. Now, here is an interesting point, though. You mentioned we need to focus on fat loss. One of the variables that determines whether you lose more fat or more lean mass, aka muscle, is the rate of weight loss itself. Meaning if you lose weight really quickly, a bigger proportion of that will be muscle mass. Why is that? Because we can go in a couple different directions here. Essentially, there seems to be a rate-limiting... process with fat loss. You can only lose body fat at a certain rate and then your body still needs energy if you're in a big deficit and you're losing weight quickly so it pulls from lean mass. It's like, hey, I can get some energy from the body fat. I can get some energy from the lean mass. And so in general, slower weight loss tends to be more sustainable weight loss. Now, we don't want to do it so slowly to where like you're not seeing any progress itself because the progress itself is motivating, but you want to lose weight at a rate where you're not starving yourself, right? You're not just crash dieting. Anyways, I bring this back to the GLP-1s because what happens on a GLP is that they are such potent appetite suppressants that you naturally eat way less and you lose weight really quickly. So you might be exacerbating muscle loss because of that. But, I mean, we work with a number of clients who are on GLPs and they want to transition off of them by focusing on the lifestyle stuff. If you strength train, if you focus on proper nutrition, you'll have really great outcomes. When it comes to GLPs, it's like a lot of people like to demonize them and a lot of people like to say they're the best drugs in the world. Think the true answer lies somewhere in the middle. It's about evaluating the pros and cons for yourself. I have worked with clients who have struggled with food noise and obesity their whole life. And when they use the GLP-1s, they genuinely tell me it's the first time in their life that they can focus on healthier habits without having a ton of food noise. It's the cape for that person. Pretty helpful. But there's people taking it to lose five or 10 pounds of body fat. It's like there are side effects. It's just not necessary. So I think it really depends on the person and the context. Speaker 1 (17:23) So if someone's taking it, because let's talk to the people who are taking these GLP-1s to lose the five or 10 pounds. Because to me now, it's like the majority of people I know. I can't throw a stone and not find somebody who's on a GLP-1, especially in LA. Speaker 2 (17:38) Yeah. I was Speaker 1 (17:39) going Speaker 2 (17:39) to say it's because you're in LA. Is it just Speaker 1 (17:41) because I'm in LA? Because I mean, it's like everyone's skinny now. It's like... Very strange. It's like a pseudo life and reality here. Does that mean everything is a pendulum going to swing eventually? Because do people acclimate to it? And do you have to continually increase the dosage to keep being thin on there? And like, does your appetite come back slowly if you're not increasing the dosage? Like what happens to people if they're just taking it for the five or 10 pounds? Do they gain it right back when they get off of it again? Speaker 2 (18:13) Yeah. So super transparently, I don't know if your body acclimates to the impacts of it and whether higher doses are required over time to have the same appetite suppressing effect. I don't know the answer to that question, but it's a really good question. What I do know though, is that independent of whether it's your five or 10 pounds or more weight loss, the data do show that when people stop taking the GLP-1s, you go back to your previous habits, the hunger does come back and you start to gain weight. Fast. Speaker 1 (18:36) Yeah. By the way, very fast. I have a girlfriend. Well, she's not a girlfriend. She's a friend of mine that I know. She lost like 50 pounds on this thing. And I didn't think she had 50 pounds to lose, quite honestly. When she went off of it, not only did she gain the 50, she gained another 20. Speaker 2 (18:51) And Speaker 1 (18:52) fast. It was like in a month. It was fast. Speaker 2 (18:55) Yeah, that's tough. Speaker 1 (18:56) That's scary to me. That's Speaker 2 (18:58) tough, Speaker 1 (18:58) yeah. Speaker 2 (18:58) Right? Speaker 1 (18:58) It's not like it just kind of like, you know, comes back like kind of slowly. And after a year, you're like, holy shit. It's like, boom. So like what is scary to me and like all these peptides and all these other. things is number one, what's really in these things? That's the first thing. Secondly, like what is the ramification afterwards? I know you don't know. I mean, we all, to be honest, I don't think anybody knows. No, Speaker 2 (19:23) I think a lot of people extrapolate and just act like they know. I don't really know. Exactly. Yeah. You Speaker 1 (19:27) can't know about something that hasn't been studied yet. You know what I mean? It's like, how do you know yet? Everyone's, it's in real time. Exactly. Speaker 2 (19:35) You Speaker 1 (19:35) know, it's IRL. IRL. Exactly. In real life. So I think that it's yet to be determined. Speaker 2 (19:41) Do Speaker 1 (19:42) you remember Fen-Phen back when? I Speaker 2 (19:44) don't. It sounds familiar. How Speaker 1 (19:46) old are you? Speaker 2 (19:46) 32. Oh Speaker 1 (19:47) my God. You're a baby. Okay. Fen-Phen was a big deal when I was like 25. I never took it. Speaker 2 (19:54) Okay. It Speaker 1 (19:55) was like a diet drug. Everybody was on it because everyone was losing weight so fast. And what that was like the panacea, kind of like this GLP-1. And then they realized it was like... giving people heart attacks and heart murmurs, but like it took them a while. Yeah, yeah. And then they banned it from the problem. They banned it so people weren't able to get it anymore. But everyone was skinny walking around. But what I was going to say is I'm curious later on what's going to happen. Does that mean like in 10 years from now, like, because GLP-1s are on the market actually for diabetes. Sure. And now they're saying, oh, they have inflammation and all these other things. I don't know if it's true or not. Well, Speaker 2 (20:32) here's the, that's a really good point. A lot of the benefits are driven because of the weight loss, because body fat itself negatively impacts your health. One of the main ways is that it really drives inflammation. So if somebody is significantly overweight or obese and they lose 50 pounds, yeah, their inflammation is going to go way down. Is it directly because of the GLP-1s? No, but indirectly, definitely. My hope would be that 10 years pass and there are no negative impacts. I don't wish anything... negative on anybody. But the truth is, as you mentioned, we just don't know. We Speaker 1 (21:05) don't know. Can I ask you a funny question? How has Ozempic or those GLP-1s affected the nutrition, coaching, fitness, coaching business? Has everyone's numbers really down because everyone now is just thin because they're doing that? Speaker 2 (21:23) So interesting question. I think because of my message and what I talk about. Many of our clients that come to us tell us they want coaching because they don't want to go on a GLP. So a lot of them are like, hey, I want to learn how to do this naturally. I want to learn how to still improve my habits and strength train because I know it's important for longevity because I talk about that often. Speaker 1 (21:44) Yeah, I'm just curious more of a macro level. It definitely has impacted. We Speaker 2 (21:48) should Speaker 1 (21:48) chat GPT and find out, right? Well, Speaker 2 (21:50) I'll tell you anecdotally, people will tell me like, why should I do this? Or should I just take a GLP-1? I'm like, they're not the same thing. Right, right, exactly. A simple question, do you want to be on it forever? No. And then. You Speaker 1 (22:01) don't Speaker 2 (22:01) need to get toned from it, I'll tell you that much. Even aside from the weight loss. Like, most people Speaker 1 (22:04) want Speaker 2 (22:05) to do what? They want to be able to get on the floor and get up and play with their kids or their grandkids without pain. Of course. Like, the GLP ones are not going to do that. You need to build muscle. You need to get stronger, right? Right. So, it's like the weight loss is just part of the equation. Speaker 1 (22:16) Woody's K, let's, like, take a pivot or a turn here. Sure. Because I could talk about this all day, the social aspect of the socialization aspect of the GLP ones. Let's talk about, like, nutrition, because that's your specialty. and the myths around it. Is intermittent fasting overrated? Speaker 2 (22:34) Yes, it's overrated in the sense that it's positioned as a unique solution that has unique health benefits. And it doesn't when you compare it to just traditional caloric restriction. Like if you restrict your calories by just eating less or you intermittent fast and