 What's up guys, this is mine pump. Alright, today's episode, you have a good giveaway. It's actually an exciting giveaway for me My book is out. You'll get a copy of this sent to your door hard cover. Look at that Isn't that great? There's a picture of me in there. It's kind of weird But anyway, we'll give you a copy of this book if you do the following Subscribe to this channel turn on your notifications and leave a comment in the first 24 hours And then if we pick your comment, you'll get a free copy of the resistance training revolution Written by yours truly. I know you're gonna love this episode real quick before it gets started We are running a sale this month a big sale Maps anabolic is 50% off and the shredded summer bundle is 50% off So both of them half off go learn about them or sign up at maps fitness products calm Just remember to use the code April special for that 50% off discount. All right. Enjoy this podcast I have something for the youtubers Everyone salutes to call them youtubers. Hey, don't put it on me. You did some old-ass shit Oh, that was exactly that was your thing. Was that you remember that I might have done this is for you the youtubers out there youtubers, yeah No, we have something that I think is obviously gonna ruffle some feathers when we say it like this, but meal plans Maybe making you fat. You know, it's funny. Why this is one of those things that when you first become a trainer You're this is what you're sold on like this is how you do it This is how it was the formula go do it and it's and then you reverse so hard you make a 180 With this later on in your career and there's there's a few things like that as personal trainers But this one has to be one of the one of the strongest ones like if you told me in the first two or three years I was a trainer that meal plans not only were they ineffective But they also caused people to gain weight I would have been I wouldn't believe you I would have said you're crazy. There's no way I mean, that's what we were sold on in fact my first certifications This was part of what they talked about and when I managed gyms This was the the the nutrition side of what we did was exactly this We would have people fill out a survey and then we would give them meal plans We'll also think about the hustle of that a little bit You know and how hard that they were trying to get us to push supplements and how the supplements were conveniently worked into the meal Plans the meal replacement and so yeah, I saw the business end of that for sure But it wasn't really aware of how that was actually going to affect my clients You know not necessarily positively, but negatively as a result So were you were you around at 24 when they did when apex did the meal plans that I was there when apex first Became a part of 24. So were you there afterwards were they like so we used to have to do this thing where you know I think it was God. It must have been at least three or four sheets of Questionnaires that they had to fill out. Yep, and then part of your job as a trainer was you you implemented in the computer, right? And this figure out if you had more carbs less fat Yes, and you put in all their measurements and then the software. Do you remember these meal plans? They were you hilarious like you would get like a and the computer okay the way this software worked It was definitely this was you're just trying to fill the macros by the way well trainer Yeah, but if you if you remember I wish and I bet if I go in you know finding my Storage I could probably find some of these old printouts because I printed out so many The the computer just takes their you know their weight their activity level the all the foods that they said they like or didn't like or Whatever you know because there was like four bubbles It was like you really don't like it you never will eat it or you kind of rarely never like Sometimes so it would it would kick off like a snack would be something like this Half an orange two saltine Yeah, three tablespoons of peanut butter. It was like this weird You know I had half an English muffin. Yeah, it's one of them. Yeah Oh my god and like a quarter of a chicken breast Yeah, and I remember being a really young trainer and just like this is I mean at that time My my level of education and nutrition was very very minimal And so I leaned heavily on you know the apex certification and the end this computer's algorithm to Tell my clients what to do, you know And I'm just gonna be a cheerleader and take you through your workout like I'm not a nutrition guy Save the other half of the orange for tomorrow. Well, I clients would come to me. They're like Adam What do we do? I really have to eat like this like what am I gonna do with a quarter can of tuna? Like what do I do with the rest and like and I remember going like two tablespoons of orange juice I remember having responses like Sal just said well, you know save the rest for the next day It's just like that is the dumbest now now all joking aside Of course people these days make meal plans and they make a much more I guess realistic, right? But that still doesn't change the fact that they're super not effective now the reason why this is such a So attractive is because one of the number one things people say to trainers Or at least one of the number one things people would say to me when I when they'd hire me would be Just tell me what to do. I'm gonna give you money Sal and then of course They're coming to me in this high state of this this motivated state of mind, right? They finally decided to hire a trainer probably been thinking about it for months and they just decided they're gonna spend a Thousand two thousand three thousand give you money. I literally just I'm just gonna show up Yeah, that was the mentality if you just do it I'll do exactly what you tell me and then that's it that'll solve my problem and I'll I'll get in shape And of course it doesn't work that way now Number one if you haven't guessed by now a meal plan when we're talking about meal plans what we're talking about are literally plans that tell you What to eat for breakfast snack lunch snack dinner or whatever everything is very specific It has all the calories all the macro breakdown and you have to literally follow it to a tee I know I do have I have some empathy for the trainers that are that are new that are put in this position, too Totally because you know to your point Sal about you know clients come in and they say this like and they're paying right? You're a new trainer You're just starting to start to build your your business your portfolio of clients and like you know You're on client 12, you know You're barely getting started here and the client's like I want a meal plan, you know I pay you $80 an hour. Tell me what to eat. Yeah, tell me what to eat like You have and more than likely you haven't been taught how to navigate through that conversation The right way to get to the place where you want to get them to where you teach them Yes, how to do this. It's also compounded though with the fact that you know as a trainer If they just ate what you told them they would lose weight right now This is the hard part about this. Okay, the hard part is if you did eat the right amount of calories proteins fats and carbohydrates through eating exactly what your meal plan tells you you will lose weight you will see Results from that standpoint. Now. The problem is not what happens when you follow it perfectly the problem is what happens when you stop following it and What have you you're very likely to not follow it to begin with and this was just in our experience. It's extremely It's extremely rigid Process and it doesn't focus on working on people's the real reason why they have issues well It also echoed a lot of the frustration a lot of trainers I would talk to like my clients are just not following this and they're not coming in they're not they're eating all the wrong foods and That not realizing that it was it was weird like they like I eat this way all the time I can't understand why they won't do this well before we make the case on You know why they are making people fat. I Do want to defend where I see value in them still today So I mean I saw you said it only took you a few years. It took me probably a decade Before I moved completely away from meal plans But I do want to talk about the clientele or the type of person where I still see Value here, right and the very the first one that comes to mind obviously for me is competitors Absolutely, if you're gonna if you have 12 or 16 weeks to get down to 3% body fat to get on a stage and present yourself Then it makes sense if you're an athlete and you have a specific goal for a particular season Then it it starts to make sense because you have a goal. You know where you want to get and there's and it's very specific It's also by the way competitors and and even athletes in the sense Don't have a long-term approach because a competitor is just thinking about getting on stage now If you're listening you're not a competitor and you say well I just want to get in shape you got to think about the after you have to think about the after who wants to Get in shape only to go get back at a shape and that's again I think some people do have that mentality when they're hyper motivated and they think that I'm just gonna get through this lose the Weight do whatever I have to do and then I'll go right back You know it's the way I like to eat and and not realizing that that's completely different and and they're gonna have this crazy Rebounding if so I learned to set my clients up once I figured out how to move them away from this right so the conversation I'd have her because this is you hear this all time, you know I add on the higher you they go I want to lose 30 pounds as fast as I possibly can You know what what is it gonna take? What is it give me the meal plan? Whatever and I say, okay cool And I just I hear that and go about our conversation We move along and then when I circle back to like laying out our plan and what we're gonna be doing I would always drop this like so no you you want to lose 30 pounds as fast we can right now Do you want to put it all back on? afterwards or Do you want to actually keep it off for the rest of your life and of course what do they say to you? Yeah, nobody wants to put it back on right nobody says oh, yeah I want to lose it and then put it all back on they have this idea of I just want to get there as fast as possible Then I'll figure it out later. I'll deal with it But the truth is it's gonna come back on and that's where I would then make the case like we'll listen If we go about it with the intent of just trying to do this as fast as we possibly can It's like 90% chance. You're going to put all that weight back on if not more in fact in my experience It's almost always 100% yeah I say it never like 90 there's always exceptions the rule But every client I ever trained that just followed a meal plan and didn't learn anything along the process Always puts it back in so then you get them to commit to that part of it, but back to the competitor thing That that is a very sport specific goal and that person doesn't care about I'm not talking about 10 years later I'm talking about the show I have in three months That I have to be in the most primo shape and I have to get there as fast as I possibly can This is again where I see that I see that value there because we're not talking about law I mean sports in general are not healthy for you for longevity Well, you're literally putting your lifestyle on hold, you know, right in order to get to that goal And so it's all about discipline and so this fits right in with that like ultimate discipline, right? So short-term goals this kind of makes sense, right? All right. I have this short-term goal of Maybe figuring out why I have gout sometimes foods can be attached to that So I need to reduce this see what happens or you have a surgery coming up. That's another short-term goal Believe it or not. I I know situations where people have had to lose weight to get particular surgeries Okay, there's there's that one as well food intolerance is another one like okay I can't figure out why I have all these gut issues. I've tried all these different ways of of solving it can't figure it out I'm gonna do 12-week elimination diet. I'm gonna put together a meal plan So I know exactly what's going on my mouth and I can really start to pinpoint what's my problem But again, that's very very short-term. There is no long-term meal plan That's successful unless you're orthorexic unless you're you have dysfunction where you literally have The exact same thing that you eat every single day where all right breakfast There's a quarter cup of oatmeal and a half a cup of milk and a tablespoon of peanut butter Like this is exactly how I live and obviously this is not a very healthy way to be as well And to your point about short-term I know there's a bunch of people that are listening right now and they're like oh shaking their head I disagree when I followed X meal plan I was in the best shape of my life. And so then I would challenge you where the fuck are you at right now, right? It wasn't a long-term solution in that short window when you were following something to a tee, right? You've got in good shape, but then you fell out of shape again And that's what we see here because again, it's focusing on the short term isn't a long-term solution for most the population Now the main reason why it's not a long-term solution is because it does zero to focus on a person's behaviors Now the reason why and I'm gonna challenge people right now, okay? Because I remember this was confusing for me early on as a trainer I used to actually have this conversation with people where someone would hire me and they're 60 pounds overweight or someone would hire me and they they can barely sit in a chair without hurting or whatever and I remember thinking to myself like that didn't happen overnight the person who needs to lose 60 pounds at One point was 20 pounds overweight at another point was 30 pounds overweight And another point was 40 and 50 pounds overweight Were they not aware of what was happening during this whole period of time and the truth is You kind of are you kind of are aware of what's going on. You just don't you don't care and now why is this? Important why is it's important to know because the information's out there. It's not a problem that's solved with Information it isn't anymore. It's not a problem. That's like oh, I know why you're obese You just you just don't you need to eat less calories Everybody knows they eat less calories or oh, you know why you're obese? You just don't know that you need to eat less and that you need to exercise Everybody knows those things now their approaches may be wrong, but the main reason why they're wrong is it's not focusing on the behaviors Why do I overeat? Why do I have this relationship with food? Why do I have this relationship with movement that is caught that makes me not want to move if you don't address those No no approach in the world is gonna work Well, you don't learn anything. You're giving them as a trainer as a coach. You're giving them the answers to the test Imagine if that's how you went to school. No really don't Justin. I mean They they the client comes to you they hire you to lose 30 pounds Your job as a coach and a trainer is to teach them how to lose 30 pounds not to just lose their 30 pounds Otherwise, that's exactly what you're doing You're just giving them the answers to the test then when they're done They have no clue on really what got them there other than oh if I hire a coach and follow a meal plan That's the answer and that is not an answer for long-term solution for anybody No, and even if you're let's say you're this billionaire and you have a trainer all the time and you have a chef that cooks you food All the time so everything is totally planned for you and that sounds great Some people listening right now may be like I would be in shape with a relief that would totally get me in shape No, it wouldn't because you still have to eat the food You still have to not eat certain foods. You still have to do the workouts So although people are telling you what to do you still have to participate and this is why we still have see overweight Rich people in fact here's the funny thing people that tend to hire personal trainers tend to be wealthier personal training is Relatively expensive and yet these are the people that are running into these problems So they have the resources to do this kind of stuff It's still not working and that's because the answer to this problem is not the Give me the meal plan answer But rather we got to figure out a way to teach we got to lead you in a way to get you to a point where these are the decisions You may never really own the experience, you know, it's it's sort of like this Insurance like I bought this and so, you know It's something that they can always lean back on like well I have a trainer to kind of take care of this and so when they're out in a situation where they have to navigate Certain types of foods like, you know certain types of behaviors where they're not moving quite as much Well, I'll just kind of bring all this back and they'll take care of it. Well, okay So we've seen now the so many diet since the time that all of us have been in the fitness space, right? So you're talking about two decades. I mean, I've seen so many diets hit the market. I've seen the Atkins diet hit the market I've seen the paleo diet. I've seen Mediterranean diet. I've seen low fat diet. That was one of the first ones, right? Just eating low fat I've seen, you know vegan diet I've seen all these diets that have come out and been promoted as the best and next greatest thing and if you just follow it Here's the numbers obviously if you just eat, you know, like you're supposed to with the paleo or whatever You're going to see good health numbers and it's going to work and all that stuff But none of them Made a dent not even the dent in the in the obesity epidemic not only made a dent in getting people Really in long term ways and one of the main reasons besides what we said earlier, which was the behaviors aren't addressed One of the main reasons is because besides that is because they're all restrictive, right? So they all tell you don't eat this segment of food Don't eat carbs don't eat fat don't eat foods that are brown or white or that are gluten or whatever They're very restrictive now. Here's the funny thing and everybody agrees by the way everybody watching listening will be like Oh, yeah, he's right restrictive that What's more restrictive than a meal plan? Not only am I telling you you can't eat carbs, but I'm telling you This is all you're gonna eat food for this specific meal. Yes, you know, it's funny about that you talk about restrictive diets Like so let's just talk about keto and let's talk about how like limited you are in terms of like what your options are And so this brings in other companies to try and market now. There's like keto fudge, you know, there's keto brownies Like there's all these like manufactured ways of like trying to give you something that resembles like what you used to eat But now it's like that what do you think they're gonna grab the most of versus like, you know, what they should be Well, the other thing you have to understand is human behavior. We are rebellious by nature Like that's just in our nature to be need to feel free. Yes We need to feel free and and you have to know this about yourself And you're and by doing that even though you're choosing to follow this meal plan You're putting yourself in this restriction and then you have that mental game of oh, I can't have that We just did an episode not that long ago about Changing the way you you speak about your relationship with food and like it's not I can't have I don't want it No, thank you, right? It's isn't but if you keep saying that you can't oh, I can't it's not on my meal plan Like you are just setting yourself up for an explosion later on and you were talking about companies meeting demand by the way Meal plans have been around forever. In fact, it's probably one of the first Ways people dieted and it's some of the largest and longest running you know marketers or or You know companies in this space are based around this like Weight watchers used to make all their money with frozen meals So that so there's your meal plan just eat our frozen meals. Jenny craig was another one Now they have lean cuisine or whatever. Hey, here's our diet and they make it even easier for you You don't even need to cook in fact just buy our meals Put in the microwave or warm it up and you have everything perfect and those again They fail and you go it. Yeah, and those also fail on a long term basis number and again It's it's literally nothing like real life. Let's talk about real life for a second You live in a modern society You have an almost infinite Number of things you can eat any given moment like the variety is incredible And by the way, you don't just eat for taste Or just for sustenance you eat for lots of different reasons. There's social reasons. There's emotional reasons. Of course, there's taste and enjoyment reasons So you have to navigate all of this in the real world and a meal plan does nothing to teach you that a meal plan Literally just says stay on this road. Oh and by the way, real life involves all these other twists and turns But you're just going to stay on this particular That's almost impossible And I remember when I would try following meal plans What a pain in the ass that would be when you'd be out with a friend or not even going out You'd rather just stay home. Yeah, or even just with your family. Hey, honey. Let's go to the beach today And oh, fuck. I got my meal plan. What am I gonna do and whatever? I can see competitors do it for 12 weeks, but I can't see anybody doing it forever Can you explain to sal first like, you know Justin mentioned like the keto diet for example And I I've seen this happen like why is it when someone follows like the ketogenic diet for an extended period of time? And then they come off and they like rapidly put on weight when they start consuming carbohydrates again, right? Well, one of the main reasons is because it creates this psychological phenomenon where If I stay in this parameter, I'm good. Anything outside of it is a fail, right? So it's not like if I have one thing off my meal plan, then I'm still okay It's not on my meal plan at all. So now that I've gone off Once you've gone off. You're done. You're off. I already, you know, and how many times have you said I already you know what? I already ate bad today. So let's what's let's have dinner too. Let's let's do dessert too. And it's it's an interesting Well, what obviously it's not logic. That's the psychological part Well, what about the physiological part the part that like your body is now adapted to not really assimilating carbohydrates the same way that it would assimilate it when you're on a high a high fat diet feast and famine mentality Now or you're introducing it now the body's like wants to store. Well, you remember when we interviewed What was the the ultramarathon runner like how he utilized that that exact what I'm talking about his favor In fact, uh people who go super super low carb and then introduce carbs later They actually if they test them can look like they're having a crazy sugar response because their body's so hyper That's what I'm talking about. Yeah, because their body's so hypersensitive to those things and this can By the way, you can actually if you eat the same thing over and over again This can actually set the stage for developing food intolerances or immune reactions to food Because if you have any inflammation at all You could potentially be having these foods do what's called leaky gut syndrome where it travels through the gut lining And if if every day you eat oatmeal every single day because it's on your meal plan Oatmeal is getting introduced in that way over and over and over again You increase your odds of developing, you know, and I use the random food But you develop an intolerance to oatmeal. So eating the same foods all the time Probably not necessarily good for you as well from that particular standpoint, but yeah, the big one is it's it's just it's nothing like real life You know workouts are different right because Although I will say just if you're just trying to be more active the more Successful approaches to figure out how to make your life more active. We know that But if you're gonna do your resistance training workout, right? I get that you got to go in You follow a plan. It's the most effective thing, but here's the difference If you're the average person trying to get in shape Your resistance training workout that's structured is two to three days a week If you're really hardcore find five days a week, but that's what five hours Maybe at the most you're looking at 14 hours a week of exercise How many hours a day are we eating food or contemplating to eat food? It's a completely different ballgame. In fact as a trainer It was very easy in comparison to get my clients to work out It's very hard to get them to eat a particular way because that's what they're dealing with all the time The other problem I have with them is how grossly inaccurate they can be So you can you can go get I mean you could go use like our macro calculator and put in like your activity level and your your age and how much you're exercising How much your body fat percentage your goals you can enter all this this data to get a good idea Of what a meal plan or where you should be at for your goal But the problem with that it goes back to your point about not mimicking real life is that Have you guys ever had a client that burns the same amount of calories? Day in and day out for weeks on in the metabolism doesn't even work that way. No, it's it's so different The I mean I remember remember when this came together I remember this was when body bug came out like in the early 2000s When I realized like and this was for myself, right? So for the longest time I had this this massive plateau like I couldn't get leaner than about 9% body fat and I was a trainer. I understood macros really well I was training really well and I was extremely disciplined Monday through Friday and then on on saturday and sunday I would you know I would I wouldn't eat like an asshole, but I would let myself Off the diet wouldn't be following a meal plan per se, right? And or that might be a day that I might take off of training I was so Clueless to the difference in my calorie expenditure Now looking back and then probably listeners are going like duh, you know when I tell the story here because I'm a trainer working 10 hours plus a day Okay, which means I'm walking around picking weights up training clients 10 hours in a day and also training on that day. So I'm burning 5000 plus calories Then I could be the guy on saturday is like man. I worked hard all week. I'm sleeping in till 10 or 11 Mafia, yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna games on yeah I'm gonna watch football for all the way till six o'clock You know and then my first bit of activity is to go to the refrigerator whatever and then also I look and I see that I'm burning 2500 calories now I had a tool eventually to like clue me in on this, but it was enough I was doing enough damage on saturday or sunday or both To counteract all the great work that I was doing during the week And so you you have to in order to figure this out You've got to learn your own patterns and behaviors like that So you can adjust the way you're eating accordingly and to take it even a step further, right? Your food just like your workouts, by the way, if you really want them to succeed for you long term They should be used like tools and they should be manipulated modified To improve your quality you got to individualize it Yeah, so it makes no sense that I'd have the same food or meal plan Week in and week out whether I'm stressed Whether my sleep is good or not whether or not my workouts are more intense because I feel better or not Whether my activity is changing or not if I have any potential nutrient deficiencies or Illness am I sick should I eat the same? This doesn't make any sense And it's also teaching a really meal plans. I hate this that they do this But they teach you to not listen to your body, right? They teach you to follow directions, which is terrible. We're so disconnected from our bodies anyway What if you have digestive issues like and you're still like your meal plan says this I have to keep cramming this in my face Because my coach will get mad But you know Meanwhile like your stomach is giving you a lot of information that you know This is something that we need to slow down. We need to you know, adjust our diet and pick a different Food I've actually had people I'll tell people that and they'll say yeah, but then I'll just change my meal plan It's like, okay. What's the point like what do you mean changing meal plan every day? That's called eating normally and figuring out how to listen to your body Again, we're so disconnected any way from our body and now what we're telling people is Hey, don't worry about any other signals your body's telling besides hunger, which you know, that's that's like Just don't listen to anything else. Follow this meal plan. Doesn't matter how you feel What's going on? This is what you're eating because we're looking for this particular result Not all you not only are you not going to get long-term success But if you do this as your approach, you're probably taking steps back Now you may be listening thinking But if I lose 20 pounds, I'm I taking two steps back because you're going backwards away From the root the real way to solve this problem. So then yeah, you lose 20 pounds You gain it back you gain some and then and then some and now you're in a position where You just you've wasted so much time not listening to your body In fact, you've learned how to ignore it even more. Well, you also you miss out on the The best part is actually the journey you may not think so And and and but you realize that once you finally get to the destination when you've gone through the journey, right? It's kind of like your analogy your Mount Everest analogy always talk about or how we talk about the lottery winners And why they end up broke all the time it's because you didn't build the behaviors To get there right and that's the part of the process when you're when you're learning about your body How your body responds to foods what food you like what food you don't like what mirrors your lifestyle That's all part of the journey and it's and even if it may take you a little longer to get to the goal It's necessary for you valuable for the yeah for the whole fulfillment part Otherwise you do just get in shape and then it's like, uh, I don't know what to do from here You end up falling out of shape. It's a total different experience Yeah, and really meal plans encourage this this thought as well, which is This is the plan i'm going to follow until I get to this goal And what does that mean then I get off right so unless you stay on that meal plan forever Which even then I can argue it's not going to work for you long term because the points we said earlier Where your body changing and stuff, but let's just pretend everything stays the same It and you followed it exactly the same for the rest of your life Sure, you'd lose your weight and you'd keep it off, but nobody really thinks of it that way right Do you want to follow this meal plan forever? No, no just until I get to my goal And then what do you do afterwards? Well, here's what ends up when you when you when you do when you go off of it The way that it looks is in the opposite direction. There's a reason why the term binge exists It's not having one cookie. It's having a whole sleeve of cookies. It's not just going off the meal plan to something similar It's I'm off now Now let's go and go crazy and this is the behavior that it trains It's actually training this specific behavior There's also the danger of this and we didn't even list this when we were first talking about this episode is that Of slowing your metabolism down I I've seen this a bunch of times with trainers that work for me Where they assess a client. They put them on a meal plan They they see that it's still not working. And so what all they do is they go to the Just keep shaving the calories. They keep shaving the calories down calories down before long They've got you know, one of our clients on a 800 calorie diet and they're telling them they got to stick to this And then they're the clients doing as they're told because that's what they pay them for and they follow that diet for Months on in at 800 calories Literally just completely destroying this person's metabolism and setting them up for absolute tremendous failure lately Yeah, in fact in in my experience People do better when their calories fluctuate a little bit throughout the week And even on a weekly basis. So and they actually have done studies on this They've shown where they'll compare two types of people two groups of people This group over here is a calorie deficit the whole eight weeks or whatever This group over here does a calorie deficit for three weeks and then throws in two or three days of maintenance or above And then it goes back down to the cut and when they compare the two The people that fluctuate their calories, of course trending downward still Result in more fat loss and more muscle maintained The other group tends to not lose as much body fat and actually loses a little bit more muscle Now real life in the real world, even if you go back to how we evolved There's no way in hell you ate the exact same thing every single day. It just wasn't I mean Unless you were literally the most successful hunter of whole time Yeah, you and you were also very disciplined. It was very different. Some new world problems Yes, some some days are very high calories some days were very low calorie So our bodies evolved probably doing best with and we've talked about this on other episodes This mini cut mini bulk and our behaviors Work around this as well a meal plan is so unnatural It's so anti human nature and it so teaches us to ignore our bodies that you actually develop behaviors without realizing it Just unintentionally Do you develop behaviors that make fat loss or make fitness? Harder for you in the future because you ignore your body. I'm not listening to my body right now I'm just following this damn meal plan You are extremely restricted Which leads to a rebound in the opposite direction So you combine those three things and what you have is a perfect storm for a worse Problem in the future and I've seen that I've seen that with my own eyes. So now that we've shit all over meal plans Let's Let's give the audience An idea of what it looks like. So if you guys are coaching somebody right now And we're talking about nutrition. We don't need to worry about exercise. That's all we're going to talk about is meal plan type stuff right now How do you get your clients to Have better behaviors around food and what is that maybe let's just say the first couple weeks to a month Process start to look like now, of course This is very specific from person to person right, but we're talking to a big audience So we're going to be a little bit more general So if I have and this has to be appropriate for the person But if I have a person in front of me in they they want to lose weight They're you know motivated, but they have some good discipline as well So I I see this all right and I say, okay, there's I can definitely restrict with this person By the way, this is not super common, but if I could I would just Work by restricting the foods that encourage the behaviors that get them to overeat So these could be trigger foods These could be foods that they eat at certain periods of time when they're in front of the tv Or it can become a category of foods like heavily processed foods which tend to definitely Yeah, I think the first step out of all steps is really the awareness piece where it's it's really about like Catalogging and I know like Adam voices us a lot in terms of like, uh, you know writing everything down and having a log and You know, it's a bit of a a pain in the ass and it's work for the clients But that you have to bring it to light a lot of times people are just unaware They're unaware that they're consuming a bag of chips in their cars or driving They're unaware that they're drinking Certain drinks that actually have calories in them, you know, we have to bring it back to a very very basic level To to to start educating that you are introducing a lot more calories and even realize 100% This is step one for me And it is exactly that is just bringing awareness to these people and with no restriction And so you gotta you gotta make sure you're clear with that if you're a coach and you're helping your clients like listen I when I tell them, okay, I want you to track food for the next week I like a week to two weeks right at least a week with a week I can still do a lot two weeks is even better just more information for me right more data I can look at and it's long enough that they don't try to fake it Well and and I make that clear I say listen I want you just to log your food now when I say I want you to log your food This isn't like good version of you. This is whatever the fuck you want eat like you normally Yeah, eat like this was two weeks ago before you hired me eat what you want to eat when you want to eat it All I want to do is track it and I tell them what I'm looking for is I'm looking for patterns in your behavior That's it. So I'm not judging you. I'm not saying you can or can't do anything This is going to give me insight on where I'm going to take us from there So you tell them go for go to town on what you would normally do And from there you can pick up on the things that sal was kind of alluding to before of like what are some of their Their big offenders. Oh wow, she drinks three coax every single day or oh wow She hasn't had a single vegetable in five days or he doesn't get enough protein or to even even go deeper like wow I notice when you have your glass of wine You tend to really overeat that looks like it's a trigger for you So let's see if we could separate the two you can have your wine, but don't eat any food So, you know those types of behaviors Or and this is more common by the way more often than not the first place you started by adding By adding something now the reason why you add something is this actually encourages better behaviors to give you an example Studies show relatively consistently that when people start exercising They also start to watch what they eat and they start to naturally eat healthier Well, it also just it automatically pushes something else out Right like if you add if somebody you looked at and they they don't like make sure you eat this many grams of protein Right exactly just by telling them it's such a it's was one of my favorite hacks when I piece this together because It's so when you do when you play the whole you can't thing with people It's just it's a terrible rabbit hole to go down So start and reversing that on somebody who needs to lose like 40 or 50 pounds or they come lose 40 50 pounds They already think like oh, he's gonna tell me I can't do this can't do that What a way to flip it on ahead as a coach and be like listen I'm not gonna tell you can't have anything but I do notice that when you do your week looks like this So I want you to do this right and that could be Adding a chicken breast or two every single day and what's beautiful is they don't even realize what you're doing Is but you're adding something in their diet, which will naturally push something else out in now You don't just leave it that right when it happens and they see the weight loss you tell them This is what happened right? Are you wow? Why did I lose weight when I didn't eat heavily processed foods? I was full all the time. Well, the reason why that happened is those foods actually encouraged you to overeat Why did I lose weight when I added protein to my diet? Well because protein is very satiating You also were aiming for good foods, which crowded out the bad foods oftentimes Here's one. This was a funny one for me and I remember when I first saw this I thought there was something magical about about what I told people to do But the reality was it just encouraged better behaviors. I would tell people all right Here's what we're going to start with I tracked your stuff You brought me your you know you've tracked yourself for the past couple weeks Let's start with this for now. Just drink a gallon of water every day. I was gonna say drink Yeah, just drink a gallon of water and and people would lose weight and the funny thing is people kind of like I didn't know water sped up your metabolism This is energy. Yeah, and then I would educate. I was okay. No actually here's what happened I mean that happens a little bit. It's definitely good for you But here's what actually happened Did you notice what you weren't drinking as much when you started drinking a gallon of water? Or did you notice your calories naturally dropped because sometimes we eat when we're thirsty and or The fact that drinking water makes you not it also gives them something to focus on and a lot of times people eat Just because they're bored Because they're mindlessly eating and they're bored where if you'd give them like a goal If they're like watching this gallon where they're like marking it off like I have clients mark it off At what time it was at so they know where they need to be and they're like they're focused on that And they're thinking about that and they're probably peeing like five times more than what they're used to Those two things alone already gives them gives them something to do so they're not munching on stuff Yes, now the other thing I like to do is I like to help people develop behaviors around especially foods You you can call them trigger foods or these are challenge foods for people Everybody knows what they are for themselves for me. It's salty starches like potato chips or french fries like those for me Are just so so triggering right? I go crazy with them And so what else what I'll do with them is we'll identify some of these things and I'll say, okay Here's what we're gonna do you can have them. Let's just create a barrier between you and that food So what does that mean? Okay, so potato chips. That's a challenge for you Don't have them in the house now if you want them You can drive to the store and grab yourself a single serving of potato chips and you can do that every single day I didn't it doesn't matter to me. It's all good But don't have it in the house now I didn't have to say anything else, but I knew when I would create this barrier This gave them the opportunity to become a little bit more aware You do this for you drive to the grocery store four or five times you start to think to yourself like do I really want these Why do I want these I have something else on out You know I try to wrap in these snacks with your actual meals So you don't actually eat in between the meals you're eating the meal And so you know and in two of the I remember you talked to us a long time with kids It's like, you know Presenting certain foods in the beginning So it's like if you have your protein at a time you have your fibers and then yeah now we're we have some chips But you know look at look at how much more How much less I should say that you're going to eat as a result I also like to go back and address like awareness thing too and not allowing you to be distracted So another easy rule again not putting restrictions on them not saying you can or can't have these foods But all I'm asking you to do is anytime you eat you cannot be in front of a computer on a phone And just you be or maybe you yeah in any sort of like any sort of tool like that You need to be at your at a dinner table right or sitting at your counter eating with no distractions Yeah, not even a magazine or book I would have people I said no no nothing Yeah, just focusing on your food. This is your time to eat. It's amazing How much if you're just focused on that how much you don't overeat just by simply not being distracted by the things Now again, what are we talking about we're talking about things that modify your behaviors Naturally, right? So if I'm eating and I know I can eat whatever I want, you know, Adam's my trainer He said I could eat whatever I want. All I got to do is not have anything else in front of me while I'm eating Here's what naturally happens. You naturally eat less or You naturally start to become more connected to your body. This makes me feel this way or I you know Maybe I am full. I don't want to eat as much and you end up finding you eat less as a result So the next step after you're doing that with behaviors is to now start to Connect the dots Right so on how these foods make you feel so now it's starting to change the relationship that you have with different foods, right? So I hated vegetables They were tasteless for me It didn't have a did not have a good relationship with them for most of my life And then I started to really pay attention to how I felt when I introduced these foods into my diet And a lot of clients just aren't unaware of this. They they eat it They don't realize or they eat bad food and they don't they don't connect the dots that the reason why they were Shitting themselves on the toilet all night long had anything to do with their dinner or their choices They made in the last 24 hours So the next step for a coach is to start to give them Ways or ways to help them make the connection that this is making you feel build new power with You know associations and that's that's the thing with the whole popcorn at the movie theater the whole You know, you got to build these new associations with foods that are good for you and what they're actually promoting They actually make it actually and by the way marketers do this already If you do this well enough, you'll start to want these foods naturally your natural behaviors will be to I crave vegetables now From a person a decade ago that would say I hate them and rarely eat them To now somebody where there's times where I tell Katrina like let's just do our our brussel sprout recipe tonight Like I want that for a whole dinner sometimes That's how much I crave them because I've made that connection of how good my gut how good my gut feels At first it was it was a very like I'm here aware connection Oh, it makes me feel good. But then now it's an unaware. I want one Yes, I want to have a bowl of broccoli or whatever because it makes me feel good Yeah, or what I notice now is like if like so part of what made me say this is all of actually just from this last weekend Last weekend we had uh Katrina's mom's birthday I had a big old slice of cake and enjoyed myself and paid for it for the next day And I said and I knew it knowing and going into it going like I haven't had cake in a while I'm gonna enjoy this whatever and then the next day just oh just did not feel myself That that feeling now makes me crave the foods that I know give me the opposite result And it wasn't like I didn't actively think about it. I wasn't like oh that made me feel But it was all subconsciously it was like that was the reason I wasn't feeling very good I know in my head like oh when I eat these foods my body feels this way and you naturally just gravitate It does I remember when I was a kid. I hated uh the taste of cooked spinach I mean spinach is it's bitter no no kid likes it and then I watched Popeye Now for people don't know Popeye was this cartoon back in the day where he would eat the spinach He'd get these big muscles and he'd be super strong and he'd beat up the bad guy So then I wanted to eat spinach. I still didn't like the taste but because I associated it with strength I started to want it until this day. I like spinach, but the truth is it's the association So what you're doing is you're connecting the dots both negative and positive man You know, I notice when I eat, you know, uh cookies that uh, it affects my skin I start to break out a little bit. I've actually seen this with with certain foods chocolate in fact For some people will cause them to break out. I know dermatologists say that that doesn't happen But I think it's full of shit. I've seen it with my own eyes, right? And so they connected my dermatologist never said that sugar was affecting my psoriasis for years either so Yeah, and you see it So people will eat this thing notice that oh my digestion's off my sleep is off I feel irritable afterwards my energy crashes and you're just being aware you're connecting the dots What you'll find is over time. You'll stop craving those foods as much same thing with the positive associations I notice when I eat beef, I feel energized. You know, maybe you're you're lacking some nutrients or whatever Maybe you're lacking iron. So you eat beef and you feel energized Maybe when you eat vegetables your digestion improves and you notice this and over time you start to want those foods This is how you start to mold and shape your behavior in a way that allows you to find success Long term because up until now our behaviors have been directed around, uh, you know hyper palatability How ever taste the best whatever taste of ah, this makes this taste the best the most enjoyable to eat Completely ignoring so I talked said earlier in the podcast about being disconnected from our bodies Do you know how many people don't even realize that they're bloated that they're sluggish that they whatever This is just how they feel. I know people I used to have clients that would take, uh, you know antacids just every single day Oh, I just I have I have heartburn Like did you know that you're not supposed to have that and maybe what you're eating is is causing that kind of stuff So meal plans are the most restrictive diet They train the wrong behaviors And in our experience people not only fall off the wagon and gain the weight back But they actually gained weight on top of it making it much worse Look, if you like our content head over to mind pump free dot com and check out all of our guides We got a lot of great free information there things that can help you burn body fat build muscle and become more fit You can also find all of us on instagram You can find justin at mind pump justin me at mind pump salad adam at mind pump adam Imagine if the goal was to be the best Soccer player on the field or the best baseball player on the field or the best basketball player on the court You would not go and practice your techniques with full intensity all the time That wouldn't make you the best you would practice that technique and then occasionally you'd go hard you play a game