 In this episode of Mind Pump, the world's number one ranked fitness health and entertainment podcast, we talk about how to turn your body into a fat burning machine. The number one fitness goal that people have is fat loss or weight loss. There's a couple of ways you can do this. There's the wrong way which makes things very difficult and definitely not long lasting or you could do it the right way where it feels seamless and you have longevity with your fat loss. In this episode, we talk about the right way. We talk about the four ways you can turn your body into a fat burning machine so you burn more calories and more body fat at rest. We talk about automatic calorie burn. So we talk about everything from stress management and why that's important to how to lift weights properly and train properly with resistance. We talk about the proper use of cardiovascular activity. We talk about nutrition, avoiding heavily processed foods, why that's important, why you should eat a high protein diet. By the way, for some people, hitting their protein targets can be difficult. This episode is actually brought to you by one of our sponsors, Legion, and they happen to make some of the best protein powders you can find anywhere. He has weight protein powders and vegan protein powders, both of which are flavored naturally. There's no artificial sweeteners. Now, Legion also has lots of other performance enhancing supplements. The reason why we like working with Legion is all their products are third-party tested. The labels are transparent and they only put stuff in the bottles that have evidence to show that they work their science back. And because you listen to Mind Pump, you get a discount. So here's how you get your discount. Go to bylegion.com. That's B-U-Y-L-E-G-I-O-N.com forward slash Mind Pump. Then use the code Mind Pump for 20% off your first order. If you're returning customer, you get double rewards points. So keep using the code Mind Pump for those points. Also, in this episode, I did mention a couple of workout programs. Because we're talking about speedy-amplit metabolism, we do talk about lifting weights. And there's two programs in particular that we think can really help. One of them is great for beginners. It's called MAPS Starter. And the other one is great for people with a little bit of experience working out with weights. It's called MAPS Anabolic. Both programs extremely valuable at building muscle and speeding up the metabolism, adding the fat burning machinery that turns your body into a fat burning machine. But we do have a lot of other workout programs. Actually, we have quite a few. All of them fitting different people's needs and experience. If you want to find the right workout program for you that's written by real personal trainers, not by celebrity Instagram trainers who don't know much about exercise, we are real trainers. We've been training people for decades. We know what works. Go check out the workout programs. Just go to mapsfitnessproducts.com. Find the one that works for you. Sign up. Try it out for 30 days. See if it works for you. If it does, keep the program. If it doesn't return it, get a full refund. Again, all the workouts are at mapsfitnessproducts.com. Other day, I'm getting interviewed by a trainer and he's asking the question about, a lot of people want to lose body fat as fast as they possibly can. He goes, it's probably one of the most common questions that I get that I have to address. And he goes, I'd just like to hear how you explain that to somebody. And this is something I started doing. I don't remember when, but I felt it was one of the best visuals that I could give somebody. And I would draw a straight line on a piece of paper and on one end, the far left, you would have losing weight as fast as you possibly can. On the far right, you're adding weight, which is what the opposite direction you want to go. And somewhere in the dead center in the middle is where we want to be, which is the perfect sweet spot. And I said in the middle here is where your body weight doesn't change so much or we're losing body fat, but we're adding muscle at a similar rate. So you kind of stay right around the same body weight. And I said, you know, this is the most optimal place that we can be and the fastest way, believe it or not, to lose body fat. It may not feel that way because the scale isn't moving, but is the most optimal way that we can do this for not only longevity, but for it to be effective and for you to keep it off for the rest of your life. And I said, and then you have the far left, which is just get the 20 pounds off of me at them as fast as possible. And I said, then I'd say, if you want to be here, well, what here looks like on the far left, where you are losing it just as fast, weight off the scale as fast you can, well, that's easy. Just don't eat food for the next month. Come in and see me and we're going to exercise for an hour to two hours every single day. Now, of course, that's not real advice. I don't recommend anybody do that. That's not safe or healthy, whatsoever. Do that. But the truth is, you would lose that kind of weight that fast. But that's not sustainable. Now, most people get that analogy that like, I don't want to do that out. I'm not going to eat, but believe it or not, a lot of people fall somewhere between there and the middle place where I want you to be when they ask those questions. They may not be that crazy and extreme, but they're flirting more with that side of it, than they are more balanced towards the middle. And so I'm trying to always get them to understand, in the middle is where we are at the ultimate place for turning your body into a fat-burning machine. Well, yeah. And it's not that extreme example you gave is not that crazy. When you look at studies of people who just dieted to lose weight, all they did was cut calories to lose weight on the scale. When they go and test their body fat percentage and look at their body composition, which covers, you know, what that body weight is made up of, right? So you weigh 150 pounds, but what is that made up of? How much of it is muscle? How much of it is body fat? What they find with people who just diet is that more than half of the weight that's on the scale that they dropped came from muscle. They actually lost, so if they lost 10 pounds, something like six pounds of that weight loss was muscle. It's even worse when they throw too much cardio on top of it. You see even more of a muscle loss. Now, real quick explanation as to why this happens. The human body is trying to get better at whatever you do a lot of. And so if your approach to weight loss is just cut calories and then do lots of cardio, your body says, okay, here's the deal. So just imagine inside your brain or your body, there's like this group of people that are working like that one cartoon. What's that cartoon with all the emotions in there? Anyway, it's really, really good, right? So imagine you got these people working in your brain. Usually I have it for you. I know. You got looked right at you. I know. I was like blank stare. Yeah, didn't even have it. Sorry. But so imagine these people working behind the scenes in your body, right? So this is the illustration. And they're like, oh, we're getting signals. Calories aren't coming in. We're not eating a lot of calories. And then the other person says, but we're also trying to burn a lot of calories by doing a lot of movement. What do we do? How do we fix this? How do we get better at this? And so they decide, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to become more efficient. We're going to get this body to burn less calories every single day so that we can survive on the fewer calories. And we can still do this activity, which is requires really just stamina, which doesn't require a lot of calorie burning machinery. So in essence, what you've done is you've actually slowed your metabolism or down or to put it in a different way, you've turned your body into a fat storing machine. You've actually increased or improved your body's ability to store body fat and not burn body fat. So this is why it's an important, this is a very important conversation. Yeah, it's interesting because, I mean, we're set up our biology set up so we're able to survive. And that's like the biggest priority that your body knows to operate off of. And so to have these types of goals where we want to almost a lot of times, especially with men, they want to gain size, but they want to reduce body fat. And so they want that, you know, to be able to have more definition with that. And also like, I know for women too, they want to lose weight, but they want to lose the body fat, not, you know, not the muscle, but that's not what your body is like hardwired to do. So we have to play this sort of trick on the body. And it takes a longer process to do that. It's not something that you could just quickly do. Much more systematic. Well, your body is not aware of your insecurities. Your body doesn't know it doesn't let you don't like your fat gut or your flabby arms. It doesn't give a shit. It's one job is to survive, keep your life and to be as good at that as it possibly can. And you have to understand that when we're exercising, any sort of exercise, even weight training, weight training, you know, high intensity training, cardio, all these things, these are all stress that you're, you're sending to the body. And so it's trying to figure out all these signals that it's getting. And it's like, okay, we need to adapt and perform and be efficient. Again, doesn't care about your personal goals, doesn't care you want six pack abs, doesn't care you want to get rid of those flabby arms, it just wants to survive. And the problem is that for such a long time, we think that we've thought that, oh, the more I throw at it, the faster I'll get to my goals and that couldn't be further from the truth. No. And there's also this misconception, especially with people who have a lot of weight to lose, is that they just, they just want to get smaller. So they don't really care. In fact, I've had this conversation with people, I said, well, you know, if you do this the wrong way, half the weight that you lose is going to be muscle. And they'll say, well, I don't care. I just want to get smaller. Here's what you can do. You can Google this and you'll find pictures of this. You can literally look up a what look up 130 pound woman lean versus 130 pound woman fat or 180 pound man lean versus 180 pound man fat. And what you'll see are pictures. People have posted these before and after pictures that look radically different, but the person weighs the same. I just got a message this morning in fact from somebody. I literally just got a message this morning. I can't say the person's name because I haven't gotten clearance from them yet, but they sent me a message and they said, you know, I followed your advice and the before pictures from July, the after pictures from this morning. And they look quite different. In one picture, she's not super overweight, but she's got a little bit of body fat or whatever. In the second picture, she's much smaller, much leaner, more developed in her body, better curves. And so I asked her, I said, how much do you weigh in each picture? She goes, I weigh the same. It's the same body weight. Except this one, I have a different composition. Part of this is because body fat takes up a lot of space. Whereas muscle doesn't take up a lot of space and muscle is shapely. Every time when you're thinking about adding shape and sculpt your body, it's healthy. It's muscle. Here's the other part. I said, what's the difference between the two pictures and nutrition? And she said, believe it or not, I eat more. I eat 300 more calories in this picture over here. And that's because she's turned her body into a fat burning machine. This is what you want to do, especially because life does not lend itself well to lots of activity all the time and eating a little bit of food all the time. It just doesn't work well with, with modern life because it's sedentary but busy. So although we don't move a lot, we're still busy. You got to, all kinds of things to do, whether you're studying for school, going to work, doing things with your kids, taking care of the house. You're busy, but you're not moving. So if you have to work out every day to burn all these calories, that means you're gonna have to schedule an hour or more every single day to exercise. But that still doesn't make up for it because you're still sedentary throughout the day. And then on top of it, you have to eat a little bit of food. But oh my gosh, food is everywhere. And it's really good and it's inexpensive. And I can door dash things to my door, and we have birthday parties and we have celebrations. That's a, that's a terrible strategy. And if in, in the context of now, if you would lose weight the wrong way, you may lose weight, but you will turn your body into a fat storing machine, which not only in the long term makes it very difficult, but even in the short term, it makes it very difficult. And here's the thing. If you think you're flabby, getting smaller means you might just get to be a smaller flabby version of yourself. So fat burning machine looks very different than fat storing machine. Well, the truth is that this is actually really difficult to do. And I think marketers try and make it seem simple, right? To advertise to you, oh, quick, do this in 30 days, or it's as easy as these three steps. But it's not, it's actually really hard. And it's been, it was a struggle for most of my clients. And for many reasons, and we're going to go over many of those, right? We're going to get into nutrition, we'll get into stress management, we'll get into programming, all those things that I think need to be aligned really well to do this. But I think the number one thing before we even get into those is addressing the psychology of this. To me, that, that was always as a trainer. That was the hardest hurdle for me to overcome. Is that clients, just like you said, Sal, they just want to get smaller. I just want to lose weight. I don't care, Adam, just get that scale down. I don't like the fact that I'm seeing over 200 pounds. I've never seen that in my entire life. Get me below that, get me below that. And so they've ingrained this in their, in their head, that that's all they care about is the scale. But the truth is, if I'm doing a really good job as a coach, if I have this beautiful balance of nutrition and strength training and cardio and stress management, I really shouldn't see much of a fluctuation unless this person is morbidly obese. If I have somebody who's 300 plus pounds, we're going to come down on that scale. I mean, that scale is going to come down a lot when we get them to a very healthy place. But I'm talking about the average person who needs to lose 20 to 40 pounds. It's two, there's two different, there's two graphs. Imagine two graphs here. Okay, doing it the wrong way, if you're measuring weight, forget body fat percentage for a second. We've already made the case. If you do it the right way, you lose more body fat. If you do it the wrong way, you'll lose weight and less body fat. Okay, by the way, if you lose weight, if you lose 10 pounds at half of its muscle, your body fat percentage stays the same. People don't realize that. So your body fat percentage is what determines how you look, obviously. So if you have a 100 pound person who's got 20% body fat, take that body fat, put on a 200 pound person, it's 10% body fat. They look much leaner. So if you lose weight, half of its muscle, body fat percentage actually stayed the same. You're a smaller version of yourself, but you look really fluffy. Yeah, you look no different. But imagine these two graphs. If you do things the wrong way, initially you see quick weight loss, strong plateau. That's it, you're done. If you do things the wrong way, on the scale, forget the body fat percentage because that does come down right out the gates if you do it right. But on the scale, the fat loss looks more like a momentum builder. So it starts off slow, but then it starts to ramp up as your body turns into this fat burning machine. Then it really starts to come off with the example that Adam talked about of, oh my gosh, I weigh over 200 pounds or whatever. Initially, we're not looking for weight on the scale because I'm getting you to lose body fat percentage while I'm building muscle. Eventually, I can't build, I'm not going to build 30 pounds of muscle on somebody's body who needs to lose 30 pounds of body fat. I'll build some muscle. Once we've hit that limit a little bit where the muscles come up, the metabolism's up. Oh, now we're starting to plateau with muscle, which is totally normal. Then the fat really starts to come off. So rather than it being like initially quick and then plateauing starts off a little slower on the scale, but then it ramps up and it speeds up. And then if you look at it long-term, it's far more permanent. Well, you have to explain why that is, right? Because the average person doesn't understand how does that work? It doesn't make sense. How is someone eating more, building muscle and their metabolism working faster? Muscle is an expensive tissue. In other words, it costs the body a lot of calories to keep it on your body. So just simply adding, so take a person who is unhappy, they're fat, they want to lose body fat, they're unhappy with their weight, and you don't lose any fat on them at all. And you just give them five more pounds of muscle, you get them to add five more pounds of muscle, you right away speed their metabolism. That's right. You right away, their body now requires X amount more calories. And there's all kinds of places that people will debate on the exact amount of calories it is. But just for argument's sake, let's just say five pounds somewhere between 200 and 300 more calories your body needs. That's a lot. On its own. Yeah, just by itself, not doing anything. Yeah, because here's the key with the turning your body into a fat burning machine. What that means is you are literally turning, you are moving your body to a place where it burns more calories automatically. Okay, this is a superior position than burning calories manually. Manually means if I want to burn an extra, you know, Adam gave the example of gaining five pounds of muscle and burning, let's say 300 more calories, which by the way, that's a pretty good generalization. In my experience, if somebody gained five pounds of muscle, they're going to burn, especially if they do it the right way, we're burning about 300 more calories a day on average. That's just average. Some people, the less, some people a little more. So if I'm sitting around and I want to burn 300 more calories a day, I can either get up and walk for an hour and a half or two hours or do cardio, or I can teach my body to burn more calories so I can stay seated and burn an additional 300 calories a day. Which one of those scenarios is easier to maintain? Which of those scenarios is going to be more beneficial considering your life is both sedentary and the fact that there's all this food around you? Here's what you don't want to do. What you don't want to do is just cut your calories, lose muscle, now you're eating, I don't know, 1500, 1600 calories a day and you got to your goal body weight. Guess what you got to do to stay there now? You got to keep it. You're still eating 1500 calories a day. Yeah, how long do you want to live in that position? It's just not sustainable. That's one of those things I think people don't realize once you get to an end goal you have to really assess what that looks like once you get there. Once I got there, am I happy doing this now from then on or is this something that I just wanted to temporarily get here? Yeah, but now you're just going to put all this pressure on your body to maintain that level of stress and that level of cardio and reducing my calories. I have to be able to keep doing that, otherwise I'm going to go right back up. So I've done this many, many, many times with clients. One of my favorite things to do is to take somebody and really turn their body into this fat burning machine. One client in particular stands out because she was such a hardworking client. She came to me after competing in bikini competitions. So these are fitness bikini competitions, not like the, you know, Hawaiian, tropic, old school one or whatever. So they're actually going on stage, getting shredded, trying to show some muscle and that kind of stuff. So she did that a few times, extreme dieting. On top of it, she did cardio a lot. We're talking about an hour or more every single day. This was either running or she was cycling every single day. She was lifting weights a couple days a week. She was kind of new to the whole lifting weights thing. So she didn't do a whole lot of resistance training. Her calories were very low. So here's the crazy part, all that exercise, all that. But because she had done this for so long, she got to the point where if she ate anything over, I think it was like 17 or 1800 calories, she would gain body fat. And I remember she came to me and I'd give her tips and stuff like that. Finally she hired me because she said, Sal, I can't, and she wasn't like highly competitive. These were just local shows. She goes, you know, I want to do better as a bikini competitor, but the judges are telling me I need more muscle and I need to get leaner. She goes, I can't get leaner. I can't eat less food and work out more. She's like, I've got kids. I'm already doing over an hour of cardio every day plus lifting weights, but oh, she was also doing yoga and other stuff on top of it. She's like, how, what, what do I do? Move more, eat less? She's like, I don't want to do that. And I said, no, that's insane. Let's not do that. I said, let's give you, let's, let's give six to eight months, six to eight months, because we've done some damage. You've really slowed your metabolism down and we're going to reverse it a little bit. So here's what we did. We slowly reduced her cardiovascular activity. So I slowly moved her off the manual calorie burn. We increased the type of resistance training we did focused mainly on building strength. I slowly increased her calories. We did some stress management. She had to do a lot of trust and faith in me. That was a big one. I remember it was literally every day a text between us where she'd be like, are you sure I'm afraid? What's going to happen? Don't worry, trust it. Anyway, at the end of that, I think it took us about eight months. At the end of that eight month period, she was doing, I think a couple of days of cardio a week, which is like 30 minutes, which is nothing. Her and I were lifting weights three to four days a week. Traditional resistance training wasn't this crazy calorie burn type of stuff. And she was eating 800 more calories a day than she was before and leaner. And she was leaner on top of it. And now that's one example. I've done this so many times with other people. If you can turn your body into a fat burning machine, your odds of being successful and staying lean are so much, so much higher. Well, let's take that and let's break the steps down. So you just gave a great example of how most people should go after building a fat burning machine here. And I think the very first thing that I like to address before we get into the other steps, the first step for me is stress management. And that's kind of changed over time. Like that wasn't a huge focus for me. I feel like when I first started as a trainer, I just feel like stress and anxiety and, you know, with tech now and how much we're seated and people not prioritizing sleep. I just feel like stress management has become more important today than it's ever become. And I think that that's the first place I like to look. I can start to make some real, real basic changes that can make a big difference on how their metabolism is working for them, right? So right away, I'm looking at like a prioritizing sleep. I want to look at my clients' sleep and recovery and address stress management first and foremost. Yeah. And here's why it's important, by the way, why you want to manage stress. So we talked about how, you know, you can send signals to the body and it tries to get better at what it does a lot of. So let's say you have a lot of stress in your life either from too much exercise, hectic schedule, poor sleep, bad diet, you know, just generally just too much stress, too much stress all the time. What this tells the body is, it says, conserve calories and eat more. These are the two things that it sends the body. Now, why does it do this? Historically, lots of stress for humans meant I don't have shelter, don't have food. So the body says, slow down the calorie burn everybody, stressed out situation. We need to make sure we store these calories because remember, for most of human history, food was very, very tough to come by. So you actually move away from being effective at burning body fat. You actually move towards being effective at storing body fat when stress is like this. They've actually shown studies where not only does it increase the amount of fat someone will store, but it also it changes the way people store body fat to move it more to the visceral body fat where it's in around the organs or around the belly. Stress management is a very, very big one. So this is an important thing because again, if your stress is either too much or not managed properly, now you're fighting against your body to be very hard to get lean when your body's afraid to get lean. Well, this was also, you know, to your point of like readjusting sort of the strategy. I thought that this had so much more weight because like going through and doing an inventory of stress, I think people just don't realize where it's all coming from a lot of times. And if you go through and you see your situation at work, you see, you know, even your interactions with your relationships or your family, you know, you're moving, like you're just on the go constantly, you're traveling all the time, like all these things are potential stressors and that will affect your sleep too. So, you know, the recovery process gets interrupted and then you're just compiling this stress and carrying it with you. And it just, it becomes, it comes to a point where now your solution is to exercise, which, you know, may have that temporarily feeling of like, Oh, I was able to relieve some of that stress, but really at the end of the day, we're adding more to it. So it's really important to almost itemize all these things and see what you can start addressing. Oh, 100%. I feel like the analogy that Sal gave and Justin failed to help him out with was it's what comes to mind right away from me, right? So I envisioned this cartoon that you said of, you know, all these little guys that are running inside of you that are deciding, you know, to pull all these levers to burn body fat. And what stress is, it's like these alarms going off for them, like, Oh, she's not feeding us calories. Oh, she's running, running on a treadmill. Oh, she's not sleeping very well. Oh, she's fighting with her husband. Oh, it's like, those are all alarms and they're, they're, and you're pulling all those at once. It doesn't know where to prioritize in it. And it goes into like just survival. No, no, look, what are you? Okay, think about it this way. All right. Imagine, okay, let's just pretend money is like body fat, right? For us, right? So what happens when the economy gets really crazy? Things get really stressful out there. What do people tend to do? Store money? Yeah. Oh, honey, listen, we're not going out to dinner for a little while. Oh, but we got, but we got money in the bank account. Yeah. But the economy is looking kind of scary. I don't know if I'm going to keep my job. Let's just store this money. I know we got money already saved, but let's not spend any, we don't know what the future is going to look like. It's really crazy. This is what these, these, this is what your body is doing when there's a lot of stress. It's saying, Oh, things are looking bad. We're really stressed out. I know we got this body fat already that's stored energy, but let's just add more to it. Let's just add more. Let's try to slow down the metabolism, stop burn as much. We don't know what the future holds. And usually, you know, again, historically, lots of stress meant we ran out of food. So let's just store as much body fat as possible. That's a great analogy because then the building muscle part is just adding more money to your bank. That's what that is. Oh, building muscle is burning more money. You mean burning more money, right? Adding muscle is like, imagine the economy goes, goes bad. And instead of saving your money, like, let's go buy a boat, you know, let's go buy it like, you know, a cash pit or whatever. That's what muscle is to your body. Your muscle is expensive. It costs a lot of calories. And if you're stressed out, your body doesn't want muscle. It's not going to want any muscle. It just costs too much. It wants to stay safe. I remember the first time I had a client, this blew me away the first time it happened. Then every time after that, it was just became commonplace. But I remember the first time I had a client exercise or burn less calories through exercise and actually get leaner. I remember the first time it happened. I had this type A woman. She was an executive, insane activity levels. She did all the group X classes and running and, you know, hit, you know, classes and boot camps. And then she came and hired me as a personal trainer. This is before I really understood this, by the way. And it was all about calorie balance, right? Energy balance for me. So I'm like, oh, you're burning this many calories. You're eating this many calories. You want to get leaner. We got to cut your calories even more. And then we got to cut your calories. Well, I got to a point where she's like, I don't want to eat any less. Why am I not getting leaner? You know, and I'm looking at her thing. I'm like, my God, you're working out like crazy. And so I remember I had this conversation with a veteran trainer. And they said, you know, I talked to him about like, she's just too much. Bring it back down. I'm like, yeah, but then she's going to get fatter. If she stops doing all this calorie burn, she's going to gain body fat. And they said, no, no, no, watch what happens. So I said, okay. So I convinced this client to swap out two of her hard workout days with slow yoga classes. Like this was like yin yoga style, where you're literally sitting in a stretch for 30 seconds. You're burning no calories. Okay. Compared to what she was doing before, she's burning no class. So we took her from classes that were probably burning five to 600 calories that were intense to classes that were burning like 100 calories. And I convinced her and I said, let's just, this will get your body to burn more body fat. So she does it. At first, nothing happened, which blew both of us away. I'm like, look, you gained no weight. This is so far, so good. You haven't gained more weight. And then magically her body got leaner. And I remember we were both like shocked at it. And she was like, this is crazy. I'm like, well, you're, you're telling your body it's okay to burn more body fat because we're balancing out your stress. Same with me. I had a clear example of that of a, you know, a VP of a massive company that every night would worry that there'd be some kind of fire that she needed to put out around the world somewhere. Like there would be a call, you have to just wake up and answer the call. And just that alone was something that just that interruption, it was like we were always in this hamster wheel just trying to spin just to keep whatever weight that we could sustainable. And once, once, you know, barriers were set up to where that wasn't the case, like that she could actually sleep through the night. It was like an immediate loss of like 10 pounds of good weight, you know, just off. And just just the body's innate tendency to just hold on to that, you know, like you said, like it's just it's survival. It's something that your body, you know, wants to help you with. So an easy takeaway, I think we should, you know, the first thing that I would tell client is to, you know, prioritize sleep, right? Because I think that's the number one. That's the biggest one, right? Like just, just simply putting in like talking about Justin's client, like, you know, that that type of client is also the client that keeps their phone right by their bed. And so then at one o'clock, when it goes off, they reach to it and they can't help but look like, you know, if you're that person, this, this matters the most, right? Like get the phone out of the room, get the room dark, Sal talks all up, turning the lights off when you get when the sun goes down. If you got blue blockers, if you got there's lots of great tools to help assist this. But at the bottom line, even if you don't have any of these tools, just prioritize sleep, just make it a priority to pay attention to how you get ready for bed the same way that you get up. Actually, if there's any, if there's the one thing that you can do that will do the have the greatest impact, there's a lot of things you could do for stress, you can meditate, you could exercise appropriately, breathing techniques, you know, breathing techniques, you can, you know, work on your relationships with people around you. There's a lot of things you could do, but the single most impactful thing, if you just want to do one thing is prioritize sleep. Just do that. That's it. Every night, get seven to nine hours of quality sleep, go to bed at the same time, wake up the same time every morning. Just do that by itself. And that by itself has the biggest impact for stress. The second thing that we should focus on is building muscle. This is your fat burning engine. This is the engine. Think about it this way. This is the engine that's always on. It's always burning calories. And then when you move, it's really revving up and burning a lot of calories. If you, if you make the cornerstone of your workouts towards building muscle, you will, the odds that you'll build a fat burning machine are much higher. In fact, whether you want to build muscle like a bodybuilder and get big arms and whatever, or you just want to get as lean as possible, just want to lose body fat, both those people should train similarly. You should be training to build muscle. This was always a great conversation with clients because when they came to me for losing weight, I'd basically talk them into not what we're going to train like we're trying to build muscle. I don't want to gain muscle. I'm trying to lose weight. It's like, okay, and I have this conversation, but that's the way you should train. Lift weights like you're trying to build muscle and get stronger. Don't lift weights like you're just trying to sweat and burn as many calories as possible. Now that being said, remember to, and I like following this after talking about stress first because some people just hear that and they go, okay, wait every day. I'm going to train hard every single day, try and build muscle, try and build strength, five days, seven days a week. Remember that too is a stress. That also is sending those, those guys running around in your body, those alarms going off and pulling levers. You've got to think you want to have a nice balance. So that's why I love the analogy that you guys gave both with clients of reducing their training actually resulted in more body fat. You don't need to be training every single day inside the gym. Two to three days a week of good strength building, okay, or focusing on building muscle is plenty. So maybe you're going to the gym four or five times, but those other two times are mobility work or yoga or working inward because that's also helping the stress management side. In addition to you also focusing on recovery and building muscle. I would say the two best programs in this category for building muscle for the average person, one would be is ideal for a beginner. That's map starter. So that'll get you building some good muscle. The other one is ideal for someone who has some experience working on the gym and that's maps anabolic. Both those programs are very effective at building muscle and boosting the metabolism, which is a side effect. This is the wonderful thing about building a fat burning machine for a body is that the side effect of that is natural fat loss, which is really, really cool. I mean, your body wants to burn body fat makes things a whole lot easier. Now there's a couple components to both those programs. Actually, there's a couple components that should be in all muscle building programs. Number one, strength is your greatest objective measure as to whether or not it's working. Okay, so if you're in the gym and you're getting stronger, you added a rep to your squat, you added five pounds to your overhead press, you're able to do a little bit more with your curls. That is the best objective measure that's telling you you're moving in the right direction. In fact, that's the best measure. Now it's all, it's not a hundred percent because you can change technique and all that stuff to get stronger. But if you have good form, good control, and you're getting stronger, you can essentially guarantee yourself that you're moving in the right direction of building muscle and boosting your metabolism. Well, it's a way better measure than us watching the scale. Oh, way better. Right. So when, so, and this is when I gave the first, you know, analogy, the visual of the line in the spectrum, this is where I want to be with a client. I want to be right in the middle where we're not seeing much fluctuation on the scale, but we're getting stronger. If that's the case, I'm letting him or her know like we're winning right now. We are doing a beautiful exchange. You're getting stronger in the gym. Your scale isn't going down, which tells me we're probably adding some muscle on your body, and you're also probably leaning out. And that's why we're hovering around the same way. Yeah. And back to your, your point of like the dose matters, right? So that's, that's something to consider to whether or not, like, and your strength will kind of indicate whether or not you might be a little bit over doing it or, you know, under doing it. And so that's something to always keep in mind while adding the proper amount of recovery. But, you know, there's a way to do it where it's not always more is better. And I think that's the, the message that everybody's always heard about burning body fat is like, you know, you can't do enough. And, you know, that's just not true. Once you do an inventory of all the stress, you're already accumulating. No, look at your strength, you know, look maps and a ball like, which I said was for people who have some experience, you can do that program two days a week, two days a week, but it's effective, right? You're in there, you're doing the compound movements, you're phasing your reps, there's different cycles in the program, but it's two days a week. And if you're getting stronger, okay, here's the thing. This is the, this is the big challenge. People will get stronger and they think that they'll get stronger faster if they add more. Right. When you're getting stronger, that's, you're doing it. Leave it alone. Yeah, it's working. You're doing a good job. Don't mess with it. If you're not getting stronger, and you're working out, you know, four days a week, believe it or not, for a lot of people, reduce a day. If you're working out one day a week, you're not getting stronger. Sometimes that means adding an extra day. But that's what we mean by balance. You want to find the balance that improves that strength. And when you're getting stronger, you can pretty much guarantee you're boosting your body's ability to burn body fat automatically. Now, the next one, this is one that people jump to automatically. Way too, way too soon. Way too soon. This is cardio. This is all the categories of cardio. Now, cardiovascular activity definitely has some performance benefits. So if you're somebody that wants to build endurance and stamina, you want to get good at cycling, good at swimming, good at running, then that makes plenty of sense to make cardio vascular training the cornerstone of your routine. But if your goal is to build a fat burning machine, cardiovascular activity should play not the starting role, it should be a supporting role. The cornerstone is resistance training, because that directly speeds up the metabolism. Cardio does not directly speed up the metabolism. So cardio should be as a supportive role. Now, when we look at cardio, we want to consider quite a few different things. Which one's going to be the most effective at burning calories? Cardio is a manual calorie burn. But here's the second one. This one's actually more important. Which style and form of cardiovascular activity is going to be most easiest for me to maintain forever? Okay. For most people, this does not look like structured 30 minutes of cardio X amount days a week. You already got your structured resistance training because that's the cornerstone. So let's say you're doing two or three days a week of structured resistance training. There's your scheduled workouts. You want to add an additional two or three structured workouts to your schedule or an additional 30 minutes to those workouts. It's going to make it much more difficult to stick to. Here's my favorite way to add cardiovascular activity, to increase the manual calorie burn, build it into your life, make it something that works around your current behavior. Here's an easy way to do it and it works very, very well for a lot of people. Add a 10 minute walk after every meal. That's it. 10 minute walk after breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You're already eating those meals anyway. You're already having breakfast. You're already having lunch, already having dinner. It feels good to walk for 10 minutes. 10 minutes is a very small commitment. It's nothing. It's easy to get up after eating lunch and be like, I'm going to go for a stroll around the block for 10 minutes. But you add up all those 10 minute walks and what do you have? 30 minutes of cardio every single day. You have increased activity, increased calorie burn, just from adding it to behaviors that you already have. I love that so much. I love focusing more on activities that promote productivity as well. So things around your house that you know, I've been waiting to get to it. The thing about these pursuits about, I want to get into fitness. I want to burn body fat. I want to do all these things in this direction. Why not incorporate that around things too that help your everyday lifestyle? Things that if just cleaning my house or doing things around outside that need trimming or going and taking the dogs for more walks and things like that that are just very reasonable and things that benefit everything else around you. It's so much more of a lifestyle way to approach it that I feel has more sustainability. Here's the thing about cardio that's awesome is that it has no form. Unless you're training specifically for a sport, like I said earlier, swimming, cycling, running, cardio is just from this standpoint from burning fat with a quarter stone of resistance training to boost your metabolism. Cardio is just calorie burn. So in other words, anything that is movement can be considered cardio. So what Justin's saying is absolutely brilliant. It's literally I might as well rake the leaves. I might as well clean the kitchen. I might as well stand and fold clothes while I watch TV. That is also manual calorie burn. And in fact, back to Justin's point, it's a much easier way of staying consistent. Not only that, you have to address the adaptation process when it comes to cardio too. The body adapts to that very fast. So not only is it just a manual calorie burn, it's a manual calorie burn that gets less and less each time you do it. So maybe the first time you got on that treadmill and you got after it, you know, for a half hour or hour, you burned X amount of calories. The next time it burns a little less, the next time a little less and the next time a little less before or eventually what ends up happening is your body gets so adapted to it, it burns very, very little calories. So I like to like Justin saying, make it more into lifestyle or what Sal's saying, adding it to, you know, adding walking to after your meals, something that is sustainable forever that you're never going to stop doing. And then using cardio as a tool because I've got something in a week or two. I've got, you know, I've been doing this. I've been training with Adam for the last year or two. And oh, I've got this bachelor party or I've got this Vegas trip or I've got this thing I'm going to be on the beach in two or three weeks. And hey, you know what, I want to turn it up a little bit right before I go out on a bikini or whatever. And so if that that's a great time to pull this cardio card out, because then when you do it, your body will really respond because your body's not used to doing it all the time. And it'll give you some great results for a couple weeks. But if you go to this as your main method of burning fat right out the gates, you'll see an initial fall, you'll see an initial reduction in body fat, then the body gets adapted to it. And then where do you go from there? That's why it's like the last place I want to go. It is. Now, you can choose a couple of different forms of structured cardio. You have your ready, you know, your kind of steady state traditional form of cardio. This is hiking or cycling or long distance running and that kind of stuff. The benefits of that is it builds endurance, and it doesn't require as much skill and control typically, right? Then you have your hit forms of cardio where you're training far higher intensity for short periods of time. The benefit of that is it doesn't take as much time, burns almost as many calories in a shorter period of time. The detriment requires more skill because you're going so much harder. In fact, if you want to do short term hit training, one of the best ways to do it is with weights, because you're less likely to lose muscle doing it that way. Don't recommend doing it for long periods of time. But if you did it for like a month, you could see like a short term fat loss, you know, start to happen. We have a program called Maps Hit that actually does that. And if you follow that for short periods of time, you'll see those short bouts of fat loss. But long term, if you want to have a good just kind of fat burning lifestyle with the fast metabolism, the most effective way to implement cardio is to implement it in your life and not have it be structured and just to be active throughout the day naturally. Now, the last thing we should definitely talk about is nutrition. And this is important because although you do speed up your metabolism, although you get your body to burn more calories, it's always easier to eat calories than it is to burn them. It always is. I mean, if you speed up your metabolism to burn 800 more calories a day, which is awesome. That's a lot of calories that you can burn naturally every single day. It's still pretty easy to eat A&R calories. I could do that in about 15 minutes. I could drink that. Yeah. No problem. So you have to pay attention to nutrition if you want fat loss. If you didn't pay any attention to nutrition, you'd still get the strength and the health benefits, but the fat loss would be very, very difficult. So nutrition is just, it's something you need to look at. Number one, this is something you can't get around. You have to eat less calories and you're burning to cause fat loss. But there are some strategies that make that very easy rather than counting calories, which is fine. You can do that. You want to count calories. That's one way to do it. But here's another way that you could do it. That seems to just have the side effect be I eat less, eat mostly whole foods, avoid heavily processed foods. Naturally, people tend to eat about five to 600 calories less a day when they stick to whole natural foods. And with that, you don't have to necessarily restrict yourself. You're just eliminating heavily processed foods. Naturally, what you see is a reduction in calories. I'm going to go on a limb and say, you don't have to restrict at all. That's, if you have somebody who is eating heavily processed foods, they are overweight. And the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to switch them off of processed foods to eating just whole foods. But I'm not going to limit them at all. If you tell me you're hungry, I want to feed you because even if you do over consume a little bit, if we're doing a good job of stress management and strength training, those extra calories should get partitioned into building muscle. Yeah, you're going to end up using it. And I'd much rather take you there when we're first starting off on our fat loss journey than to also reduce calories. I think of it very similar as cardio. Cardio, I say, is the last thing that I pull out to really speed up the fat loss process. So is reducing calories. That's the second to last thing. Before I start cutting calories and restricting you hard, I'd much rather just say, hey, listen, let's just get rid of the processed foods. But I'm not going to tell you you can't eat. If you're hungry, go eat. Just choose from these whole foods. And then what I know as a trainer and coach is, you know what, they might eat the same amount of calories. They might even eat a little bit more than what they were eating before. But if they switch over to whole foods, it's going to be really tough for them to eat a lot more calories than what they were doing with processed foods. And even if they do, the little bit of those extra calories more likely are going to get partitioned over into building muscle. In my experience, when they avoid heavily processed foods, they just they lose body fat because they eat less. And studies show it's about five to 600 calories consistently, consistently, naturally. I like it because it's natural. You know what I'm saying? It's not like I'm sitting there counting everything I'm eating. And oh my gosh, this is stressful. I'm literally just saying to myself, I'm going to stick to these whole natural foods and eat when I'm hungry. And then the side effect of that is I'm eating less and not even realizing it. And this makes the fat loss much more sustainable. Well, a lot of these processed foods, they trick that feeling of satiety. So like, you don't really, you're not really responsive to that anymore to where when you jump over to whole foods, it's like, I feel satisfied. I feel sustained. I feel like I'm full again. And that's just something that again, that feeds into a reduction in calories. You just don't your body doesn't feel like it needs to keep going. Now, there is one macronutrient that I will track or I will ask them to track. And that's protein. Yes. And that's mainly because most people that were in this category of trying to lose body fat were grossly under overeating, probably carbohydrates and processed foods, sugars, things like that. And they were under consuming protein. And plus, I like the psychology of that, right? I'm telling a client, listen, I'm not going to tell you, no, you can't eat anything. In fact, not only am I going to allow you to eat as much as you want as long as you're hungry and it's whole foods. I'm also going to tell you, make sure you get as enough protein, make sure we're targeting that. So that's the main focus. The main focus is, okay, eat when you're hungry, whole foods, but then also target your number for protein, go after that each meal. So every time I prepare a whole, a whole food meal, I'm looking at the protein that's in it. And I want to try and get my protein in my daily protein intake every day. Think of protein. And I hate to say this because it sounds so like, you know, marketing and, you know, click baity. So I'll clarify. But protein is your fat burning macronutrient. Okay, let me explain. Okay, not that you'll take protein and magically burns body fat. But here's what I mean by that. Protein most strongly contributes to muscle gain. So when you're eating your high protein diet, this is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, you build more muscle, building more muscle speeds up the metabolism further, making fat loss easier. So that's number one. Number two, protein is, produces the most satiety. So when they do studies on proteins, fats and carbs, which ones fills you up the most, which one prevents you from overeating the most. Protein always wins. It produces the most satiety. So when people eat a high protein diet, it also encourages them to eat less. So that's great. And then number three, protein also costs the most calories to utilize. So your body actually burns energy, using energy, it has to process it. And protein is more thermogenic. That's the word that's used than fats and carbs. So here's the three reasons why protein is the fat burning macronutrient builds muscle, thus speeding up the metabolism. It makes you eat less because it produces the most satiety and it's the most thermogenic. So you definitely want to hit your protein targets. So if you hit your protein targets and you aim for all whole foods, you should naturally eat in a way, and this is for most people in my experience, most people as happens, you will eat in a way that naturally produces fat loss. And then if you combine it with a good strength training, metabolism boosting routine, like map starter, if you're a beginner or maps anabolic, if you have some experience, you do the extra activity throughout the day. You don't need to do any structured cardio necessarily unless you want to burn some extra body fat in a short period of time, just like a week or two. But otherwise just be more active, manage your stress. Mainly by getting good sleep, you will turn your body into a much more effective fat burning machine. Look, Mind Pump is recorded on video as well as audio. Come check us out on YouTube Mind Pump podcast. You can also find your favorite podcast hosts on Instagram and the producer. You can find Doug there too. Look for Doug at Mind Pump Doug. Find Justin at Mind Pump Justin. You can find me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam. And so I'm just like, oh God, really? And so that turned into a whole night. It worked? Yeah. Wow. Yeah, but like she's sitting on a gold mine this whole time. She's like, wait a minute, I don't like, I don't want to like it. You know, she kept saying I don't want to like it, but you know, keep those on for a while.