 In this episode of Mind Pump the World's Top Fitness, Health, and Entertainment Podcast, we tackle a subject that is very, very important for most people who work out. Now, the number one goal for people when they start exercising or changing the nutrition is they want to lose weight. Everybody wants to lose weight. Obviously, we have an obesity epidemic. It's much more common that somebody has excess weight on their body than being underweight. Now, here's the problem. It's not really weight you want to lose, it's fat. And you probably or definitely want to keep muscle. Keeping muscle keeps your metabolism fast, keeps your body firm and sculpted, and it looks a lot better. So in this episode, we talk all about how to do that. Because believe it or not, when you're eating in a way and exercising in a way to lose weight, oftentimes, you're simultaneously sending a signal to your body that says, hey, not only do we want to lose weight, but we need to burn less calories. So get rid of some muscle. Studies actually support this. Most weight loss protocols cause as much muscle to be lost as body fat. But we know how to stop that. In fact, we know how to make the reverse happen. So that's what we talk about in this episode. We talk about the right signals. How do you send the right signals? With exercise, calories, your macronutrients, which are proteins, fats, and carbs, and your lifestyle. By the way, when we talk about lifestyle, we do talk about wearing blue blocker glasses before you go to bed, because that does increase the recovery ability of sleep, gives you better sleep, helps you fall asleep faster. This episode is sponsored by Felix Gray, and they make the best blue blockers on the market. The glasses themselves don't change the color of the room. So they're not orange or red. They're clear. They look good, but they still block a significant amount of blue light so that you can get better sleep at night or just avoid eye strain from when you're working on your computer. If you want to get the Mind Pump Hookup, go to FelixGrayGlasses.com. That's F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y glasses.com forward slash mind pump. Also, we have a program called Map Starter. It's a great at home workout program. All you need are dumbbells and a physio ball. It's excellent for people who want to start with resistance training, who may not have tons of experience, want to reap the metabolism boosting muscle building effects of resistance training. This program Map Starter is 50% off. Right now, there's only four days left for this promotion. It's been going on all month. So again, four days left. Here's how you get the half off discount. Go to mapsstarter.com. That's M-A-P-S-S-T-A-R-T-E-R.com and use the code starter50. That's S-T-A-R-T-E-R-5-0. No space for the discount. And one last thing, all of our apparel is on sale right now. Massive sale. You can get stuff for as cheap as I think five bucks. Everything's on sale. This promotion's going on to the 29th Friday. You can go check that stuff out on our website, mindpumpmedia.com. Do you guys go on the forum and see what Kristen Hammond wrote? Oh yeah. What an incredible post. Amazing. Insane. I'm going to read a little bit of this for this particular episode, because I think it's perfect, but she says she starts out by saying that mind pump changed her life. She started listening when we were talking a lot about reverse dieting. So at the time, 60 plus minutes of cardio every single day, plus lifting, plus working at a physically demanding job, and only eating 800 calories a day. So it's a very, very low, low calorie diet. One of those people whose metabolisms I think had been slowed down as a result of all this. Did she list her weight? You can tell that she had a significant amount. I mean, the before and after picture is just insane. It's dramatic. Anyway, she says that she listened to what we said, bumped her calories up, cried, because that's a tough thing, because you got to trust it. Right. I mean, you're afraid, right? You got to trust the process. Right. The last thing you want to do when you're trying to lose weight is to up your calories. Yeah. She said she would eat like a quarter cup of rice and then it would make her cry because she'd be stressed out is what's going to happen. Anyway, she's now deadlifting 300 pounds, squatting almost 200 pounds, benching 145, eating, she says 4,000 calories a day. So she's eating a lot, lot, lot more than she was before, but the before and after is just insane. It's absolutely insane. Well, and I know there's going to be a lot of people that hang on the 4,000 calories, even if she is overestimating by a thousand, that's still unbelievably substantial. Well, just 800 to almost 4,000. Just to, even if you just double, even if you just doubled your caloric intake, but now have eliminated all that insane amount of activity, you're now in a more sustainable place. That's the key here. It's not, it's much more sustainable because, you know, for the average person is 60 minutes plus of cardio every day, plus all working out, plus demanding job, plus eating 800 calories a day, even if that worked for you, which it probably wouldn't, but even if it did, how sustainable is that? No, I got somebody right. You guys have seen, I don't know if you recall her, her post, she's tagged. I know you guys, and I think I've shared already her story a few times, Diane Simonic, who I've known for over 15 years, met her when she was like 20 years old. And she was like cardio bunny, like hardcore. And even all the years of knowing me and training, like she still didn't break that. She recently, she's had, had two kids and she's now following, she just went through maps of anabolic and aesthetic and is like blown away by like her body post two kids in her 30s, looks better than it's ever looked, zero cardio and just sticking away. It's like, she's constantly DMing me like, I can't thank you enough. I'm so frustrated though for so many years, I didn't listen. Yeah. Well, it's important that we really differentiate the difference between weight loss and fat loss. And I know some people think, well, that's silly. It's actually not. I've worked with a lot of clients who just tell me, I just want to lose weight and I don't care. So I have to kind of break down why it's not just weight you want to lose. It's body fat, it's body fat that you want to lose. It's not about what was an argument I had with one client that actually I had, we had to part ways. And that was the only reason was because it was just so embedded in her brain that by all means necessary, she had to just lose weight on the scale and didn't matter to her the way that we went about that, whether we were just running through these circuits and like just, you know, keep cutting calories and we can't, we can't do this. It's not sustainable. And, you know, it was a really, it was a really difficult thing that later on I figured out, you know, a better way to present it to clients so that way they could digest it. But it's a very hard mental thing to really wrap your brain around. Well, that's why this conversation I think is so important because I remember actually most of my clients that were, especially if they were 40, 50 plus pounds overweight. I mean, somebody who's put on that much weight over years has been staring at the scale forever. And, you know, what ends up happening is they become attached to the number on the scale. And when they finally break down and come to you as a coach or a trainer, they're like, at all costs, just get me back down to, you know, whatever the number is. And, and it's hard to convince that person that we don't just want to drop the scale as much as you. And I remember I used to use this analogy, like, listen, if all you care about is 40 pounds on the scale, then okay, well, then what I want you to do is stop eating food and come on the treadmill every day for an hour. Now, that's obvious, unhealthy piece of advice. And I would be sarcastic when I said that to them. But the point of it was to get my analogy across to them that, listen, if you just grossly reduce calories and increase movement, sure, you'll lose weight on the scale, but you don't realize how much you're shooting yourself in the foot. And, and one of the hardest things to do is to take someone like that and convince them that, listen, we want to do this really slow. And we want to hang on to as much muscle as possible while we lose body fat. Yes, body, muscle looks good. Body fat, once you're past a certain point of healthy body fat percentage, doesn't look good. So if somebody wants to lose weight to change their appearance for the better, muscle good, body fat bad, that's generally the, you know, how you want to think about it. Now, one of the most effective things I did as a manager of a gym, and I started doing this probably five years into my career, was I had female trainers that worked for me that understood this. They had lots of muscle, lower body fat, they looked phenomenal. Of course, they were natural. So they weren't like really without bodybuilders, they looked excellent, like very sculpted bodies. And what I would do when I would talk to a potential member, when I was trying to get this message across and we'd say, look, you know, weight isn't as important as body composition. I would page one of my trainers over the intercom, you know, attention staff, Lisa come to Sal's office, then up comes my trainer, my female trainer, who looks phenomenal. I'd have them stand there, and I would ask my potential member, I'd say, okay, now, how much do you think she weighs? And they were always 20 or 30 pounds off, at least 20 or 30 pounds off. Oh, she weighs like 110 pounds. I'd be like, actually, follow us to the scale. We'd walk over the scale, 140 pounds. And you see that their faces, they couldn't believe it and I'd say, well, it's because she has a lot of muscle. Now, why is that a good thing? Besides looking good, you're stronger, you're more functional. But the most important thing is your body burns more calories. This is why it's so important. Now, why is that important? Well, if we were living in pre, you know, if we were, if this was 10,000 years ago, that might not necessarily be a good thing. You don't want to be, have a body that burns tons of calories because food is hard to come by. Is food hard to come by today? Food is so, so easy to come by today and it's, it's so tasty. It's designed to be tasty. I can, I can right now walk outside the studio and have Mexican, Italian or Chinese food all within, you know, three minutes of walking distance, right? Food is so plentiful that we die from having too much of it. We throw away more food than we probably ate 10,000 years ago. That's the food that we waste, right? So it makes sense to have a body that burns a lot of calories because you're going to live in the modern world. So imagine trying to, even if you were healthy and fit, imagine trying to subsist on 800 calories a day when you're surrounded by all this food. You're surrounded by all these events and birthdays and celebrations, a lot of stuff. Now, how difficult would that be? Now imagine if you could do that on 2,500 calories a day, much, much different. So it's about that. How long can I maintain this? Is this something that's realistic? And again, most of us, we want the scale to change, but in reality, scale, nobody gives a shit what your weight is on the scale. It's really about how you're feeling, how you look. Right. He just reminded me of this. I haven't thought about this in a really long time. So I trained an NFL lineman, like maybe, I don't know, 15 years ago when I was training him. He was a lineman for the Niners, big Simone guy, like 350 pounds. And he had, and I trained his wife. And I'll never forget the first time I did an assessment with his wife. Now, I don't know about you guys, but I'm pretty good. I could look at somebody's body and see their height and everything. And I could probably guess their weight within three to five pounds, maybe 10 off. I mean, I don't think I've ever been more than 10 off until this situation happened. So she's a Samoan lady. And I could tell she's solid. So I know she's probably a little heavier than what I'm going to guesstimate, but still at a respect, you always as a trainer, you kind of like start the scale a little bit lower than what you probably think inside your head. Cause the last thing you want to do as a coach, right? It's awkward. Right. There's nothing worse than like overestimating somebody's weight, like sliding. Oh, shit. Sorry. Just kidding. What? I looked that heavy one. Right. So I remember, I'll never forget getting her on the scale. And I remember in my head looking at her going, okay, I know she's solid. She looks very solid. She's not a little woman by any means. She's probably like 160, maybe 170 or so. So I'm going to start at like 155 and like get her on there. I get her on there and that thing's fucking pinned. Doesn't even move. And I'm like, okay, slide to 160 still pinned 170 still pinned 180 still pinned one. I get to this girl was 201. Okay. Now here's the trip though. I lift her shirt up to do like her stomach to do her body fat caliper test flat stomach. Well, I never, it's just an example of like how solid and heavy and dense muscle is. She looked great. She maybe wanted to lose maybe 10 pounds on the scale, quote unquote. But she did not have all this crazy body fat. And you can tell that, you know, weight does not matter. You can have so many different body types weigh the same amount of weight. And so I'll never forget doing that with this person and being so far off, even as a trainer who looks at bodies, right? Muscle sculpted. It's firm. It's hard. It's functional. You know, fat has some function, but body fat kind of sits on your body for the most part. And you just carry it around. Muscle is functional. It helps you move. You want muscle. It feels better to have more muscle. It doesn't feel better. Again, besides the healthy body fat percentages, because obviously you can go too low on body fat, but too body fat above that doesn't even feel good. It actually starts to affect your health negatively. Now the question is why do we lose muscle when we lose weight? Why is that so common? And by the way, it's extremely common. Losing muscle when you lose weight is so common. It's actually expected oftentimes. And accepted. And accepted. When you do just a weight loss program or a diet, if people are checking composition, if you're working with like a dietitian or whatever, they kind of expect muscle to be lost. Now you ask yourself, well, why does that happen? Now in the past, they would say things like, oh, you're burning muscle. That's not what's happening. It's not because your body's trying to capture the calories from the muscle by burning it. What it's actually trying to do is it's literally trying to slow its metabolism down. Try to become efficient. Your body is trying to adapt to the lower calories. Studies are pretty good at showing this. When people diet alone, when they just cut calories, they lose about half muscle, half fat. So they do lose fat, but the body also starts to adapt by paring down muscle so that the person then, because if you're eating, let's say you ate 1500 calories a day and that was causing weight loss, your body, that means your body was burning, let's say 2000 calories a day. Well, now your body is burning body fat, but it's also thinking we need to figure out a way to operate at 1500 calories a day. I like giving the analogy or get the example of what happens is you get X amount of calories. And let's just say your body uses so much to move all day long, and we're just going to use hypothetical numbers to get this point across. So your body uses up 1200 of the calories. You eat a total of 1300 calories. So your body says it's got 100 calories left, and it's looking at all of this muscle and fat on the body, and fat only needs X amount of calories, and muscle needs exponentially more. And so the body just prioritizes says that tissue is way more expensive to keep. You're not giving me enough calories to keep that on there. So it pairs it down. It says it's too expensive. I can't afford to keep that muscle on there while you're this low a calorie. So it partitions it to other places and pairs down muscle. So what you're essentially saying, like you're eating less, you're burning more, your body's trying to figure out how can we survive at this new calories? We're burning too much. There was a very illuminating study that was done with some a modern hunter gatherer tribe called the Hadza tribe, H-A-D-Z-A, I believe, and through some very sophisticated testing, they were able to measure their caloric burn. Now the researchers went into this tribe and predicted that they would burn tons of calories because they're modern hunter gatherers. What does that mean? That means that they're moving all day long. They're hunting. They're running after prey. They're gathering. It's like they're not like modern humans. They're not sitting down watching TV or on their devices. They're not working at a sedentary job. They're moving a lot. So the researchers thought, wow, these people are probably going to burn 6,000 calories a day. This is going to be crazy. Well, when they finished the test, what they found was that these people didn't burn that much. It was like a little bit more than the average person, which blew their mind. But if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Their bodies adapted to all that activity because that's what keeps humans alive. Now some of them had faster metabolisms than others. And guess what showed that? Their lean body mass. It was their lean body mass that predicted if they'd burn more calories. It wasn't necessarily their activity. It was all about lean body mass. So when you're cutting calories and you're sending the wrong signals, which we're going to get into, what your body does is it tries to slow its metabolism down. So losing weight and keeping muscle is extremely important unless you don't mind having a slower metabolism, unless you don't mind having a metabolism that burns so much lower calories that now for the rest of your life to maintain that, you're eating a lot less. People need to understand that this is not a bad thing. The body is doing what it's supposed to do. But when you're trying to change body composition, it's a whole different game. You have to understand that. So when we get a client who comes in and says, I want to lose all this body fat, you got to understand that the body is going to do what it needs to do survival wise. And when it responds this way, it's not a negative thing. It's just part of the game. So because of that, you want to be very strategic about how you lose that body fat and you don't want to be in a hurry to get there because the faster that you try and get there by reducing calories and increasing movement, the harder you're going to make it for yourself when you eventually reach the goal if you ever reach the goal. Now you can actually lose weight and have your body fat percentage go up. I've seen this many, many, many times. The scale could show that your weight went down. But now because you've lost muscle, the body fat that you have is now a greater percentage of your total body weight. 10 pounds of body fat on a 100 pound person is 10% body fat. 10 pounds of body fat on a 200 pound person is 5% body fat. So although you could lose weight, even lose some body fat because you've lost lean body mass, your body fat percentage goes up. Now why is that important? Well, high body fat percentage is what makes you look a particular way. It's not about the fat that you have on your body. A guy my size, I'm six feet tall, about 205 pounds or so. If you took my body fat and put it on someone who's five feet tall, they would look a lot different. The body fat percentage would be high. So body fat percentage is actually what's real important now. Now, how do we do this, right? That's the question. How do we do this? How do we lose weight without losing muscle? Well, I remember, and I shared this in a recent episode when this was extremely eye opening for me as a fitness manager at the time and for all my trainers. It was about five, six years into my career before we had these. So in our area, there's a mobile dunk tank. It's a hydrostatic way. So it's one of the most accurate ways that we could measure people's body fat. And I made a relationship with a company called Fitness Wave. And what I ended up doing was setting it up every single month, they would come to my gym and then all the people that were training with my trainers would sign up for this dunk. And it would be there all day long. And it would just dunk all the people that have been on the program. And I remember the first couple of times we did this, it was really rough. I mean, all my trainers are coming back to me and being like, Oh my God, this can't be right. And this is bullshit. And I've got this client who lost all this weight and it's saying that they got fatter percentage wise, like this just doesn't add up. And the number of trainers that were frustrated was very obvious to me that a lot of us were doing we're doing all of our clients disservice by restricting calories and pushing them. And this was back in the day when all the all the trainers would circuit train clients and just reduce calories right to the extremes. Yeah, we were trying to take them to their goal in the quickest, most efficient way possible that we thought would, you know, would get them there. And that was definitely reducing calories and, you know, up in their cardiovascular, you know, alongside their training programs, thinking that that was like just, it was a calorie gain. Right. Right. So again, you have to understand your body. So you know, those glasses that they sell now, where if you go out in the sun, they, they get tinted, then you go indoors and they become clear. So those are adaptive glasses, meaning that they change based on the environment. If it's bright, they get darker so that it's easier for you to see if you're in a darker room, they become more clear. Okay. Well, your body is kind of like that, except way more complicated. And it adapts to a lot of different things, not just the light that you're, you're, you're getting on your skin, which would be like tanning, but it, your body adapts to everything. So why does your body want to lose muscle? It tries to lose muscle to become more efficient at burning calories. It's like, it's like driving in a V eight truck and all of a sudden gasoline is $50 a gallon. If your truck could adapt itself, if it was some kind of AI machine, it would adapt and become a one cylinder engine to help you, you know, become more efficient with gasoline. Your body does the same thing. Well, we have trucks that do that already. I believe your truck does that. My truck does that. Right. So it shuts off some valves. It goes, you know, it goes between four and eight cylinders. If it, if it realizes that you're not running the RPMs really high, you're driving around and you're driving lower three way mostly. Yeah. It'll, it'll, the truck will drop down to a four cylinder and then when you romp on it and you need more demand from it and you throttle down on it, it jumps up to eight cylinders. Well, so your body does that. And it, again, it's trying to become more efficient. And so it does, it looks at itself and it says, okay, reduce energy demands. What's an easy way to do that? Now it's not going to get rid of your, your organs. It's not going to get rid of your brain power. That's all essential. So it says, well, you don't need all this muscle. Let's bring some of this muscle down because it's going to help us burn less calories. So that's why your body wants to lose muscle. It's literally responding to the signals that you're sending it. It's not, again, it's not a bad thing. It's doing exactly what he'd evolve to do. So the key to losing weight without losing muscle is to send signals that tell your body to burn body fat and keep or build muscle. You have to send that kind of a signal. Otherwise, it will not happen. Now the first way you can do this is with exercise. You have to send the right signal for fat loss and muscle preservation with exercise. It's funny. A meta analysis study just came out last week. In fact, Arthur Brooks sent it to me. He thought I would be very interested in it. I definitely am very interested in it. Yeah. The study highlighted the metabolic effects of exercise. And what it showed was that cardiovascular activity caused no increase in metabolic rate. And it was a short, in some of those studies, by the way that it analyzed, you saw a slow down, but the consensus, because most of these studies have done short term show zero positive effect, what we would consider positive effect on metabolism, no speed up. Resistance training sped up the metabolism predictably, predictably sped up the metabolism. Why? Let's talk about this for a second. They're both exercise. They're both activity. They both require muscle. Cardio still needs muscle. They both burn calories. Yeah, they both. Cardio still needs muscle. If I'm on a bike or running, it's not like I'm not using muscle. Why the hell does cardio not speed up my metabolism? Why the hell can cardio sometimes cause my body to lose muscle? Cardiovascular activity doesn't require a lot of strength in comparison to resistance training. I mean, cardio versus doing nothing might require a little bit more strength, but cardio in comparison to resistance training doesn't require much strength at all. Now muscles don't need to be big to have stamina and endurance. In fact, big muscles require way more energy to burn, to have stamina and endurance. Now you can tell by looking at athletes, look at endurance athletes, compare them to strength athletes. What's the difference in how they look? Very, very different. You don't need a lot of muscle to have a lot of stamina. So if I did lots of cardio, I'm going to be burning a lot of calories and my body's going to say, hey, we're burning lots of calories and we don't need a lot of muscle to do this. In fact, too much muscle makes this person heavy, reduces their stamina, pair muscle down. So cardio, actually too much cardio in particular, sends the opposite signal. If you're trying to keep muscle, too much cardio sends the opposite signal. Resistance training sends exactly the signal you want because resistance training requires strength and bigger muscles are stronger. So your body says, hold on a second, we need this muscle. We need muscle. There's something important to point out though about what's the right resistance training signal. So what it's definitely not, it's definitely not circuit training where you're bouncing from set to set to set with no rest periods. Now we're flirting with being more like cardio than resistance training. The other thing that's really important too is maybe you have a good weight training program that you'll be doing and it's, and it's a muscle building type of a program, but you've been doing it for months or years already. This is something that would, I would always do when transitioning a client or starting a client, right? With a program is when we make the transition from, you know, building muscle or like, you know, focused on gaining or building our metabolism to switching over to, okay, now we're trying to lean out or lose body fat. I would also simultaneously change their programming because you got to remember too, even if it's weight training and sitting a signal to build muscle, if you've been sending the same signal to build muscle for months or years at a time, the body's gotten fairly adapted to that also. So even if you're sending a signal to build muscle, but it's the same signal you've been sending for years at a time because it's the same routine. One of the best things that you can do is send a new signal that's weight training. So changing your programming up at the same time that you're also trying to reduce. Right, right. So here's another thing about resistance training. You want to train in a way that promotes strength. You want to send the strength signal, meaning you need to train the strength energy systems. Okay, so let me explain. Endurance energy systems use lots of oxygen and they burn continuously. So running, you know, cycling, swimming, circuit training, I'm going, going, going, going, going. And that becomes more of an aerobic activity. It doesn't require the lots of strength and it doesn't use the fast burning energy as well as the heavy strength. It does use the fast burning energy, but then it burns out very quickly and now you're just burning the long form of energy. So what does this mean? That means take rest in between sets. You want to train for strength, meaning you want to do your set for your 10 reps, rest one to two minutes, then do another set. This was a very hard thing to talk to clients about when they all they want to do is lose weight. We would do a set, then we would, I'd tell them to rest and be like, why are we resting? I can do another set. Let's keep going. I want to burn more calories. Right. And again, this comes back to like the competing signal of like, am I telling my body to be more efficient because it's more cardiovascular? Or am I really trying to like replenish this, this amplitude and be able to provide enough force output to then get the strength I can to move this weight. And so it's all about the environment you're creating. You have to create the environment where you need these muscles to be able to resist this type of load. Yeah. Your body will only ever be as strong or have as much muscle as it thinks it needs. Okay. That's the bottom line. It will never have more than it thinks it needs. It doesn't make any sense for your body to increase its caloric demands unless there was a good reason. So you have to, if you want to maintain muscle or build muscle while burning body fat, but definitely even at least just to keep it, your body has to think that it needs it. It needs this muscle. Lots of cardiovascular activity. You don't need lots of muscle for it. Again, in fact, lots of muscle makes it more difficult for you to have lots of stamina. This is why you don't see too many body builder endurance athletes or body builder long distance runners just doesn't need it. Now for strength, you need it. If you want to bench press and overhead press and row and curl and lunge and squat with heavy weight for eight to 12 reps or sometimes five reps or even 15 reps with that kind of resistance, your body's like, okay, we need to have this muscle. This is why every study that has people lift weights and diet shows a better effect on the metabolism and a less, at least less of a loss and many times no loss of muscle mass than when they compare to the same types of diets without resistance training. Resistance training is the most important part of this puzzle in terms of sending the right signal. Well, we also had to talk about rest too, because I think one of the things I touched on avoiding the circuit training, but you see this with the f 45s, the orange theories, these, these classes that they know the importance of resistance training. And so they've incorporated it into these classes, but they do it while they're also jumping rope or running on a treadmill or rowing and their heart rates are, you know, most of the people in there are 150 plus and then they go over and they do strength training and they're doing set after set after set after set, it's still endurance signal. Right. So you have, you have the endurance signal being sent while you're resting. Then you have the other side who also, you know, you get them convinced that, okay, I don't need to be doing lots of cardio resistance training is what I need to do. And so they're training seven days a week of lifting weights. There is the right dose. Right. And if we're trying to speed the metabolism up, beating your body up seven days a week, even with weights is not ideal either. And that was a hard thing for me. I remember to really comprehend because I always wanted the thinking more is better, more is better. And when I'm trying to build somebody's metabolism, that's why I lean towards more programming like the Maps Anabolic program where it's only three foundational days a week, which is really hard for somebody who has a big goal like fat loss of 30, 50, 100 pounds, they need to lose to get that through their head that you only want them doing three foundational days. Because they're thinking to themselves that I want to burn more calories. And look, moving more does burn more calories. But why not have your body burn more calories on its own? Like think about that for a second, right? Do you want to always have to manually burn calories as much as possible? Or would you rather have your body on automatic burn more calories? Which one is more sustainable for the rest of your life? Which one is probably going to keep you leaner forever more, you know, which ones gives you better odds of that? It's the one with the faster metabolism. Now resistors training sends a signal to get stronger, done properly to get stronger, which tells the body, hey, we need this muscle. But you send other signals with other things that you do. One of them is with your calories. Okay. If you cut your calories too low, too fast, your body will also, even if you lift weights, will try to reduce its metabolic requirements by slowing your metabolism down too much of a cut. If you're a man who's burning 3000 calories a day with good muscle, good metabolism, you're lifting weights and you're like, hey, I want to get lean for summer. And you go from 3000 calories to 1500 calories and you keep it there consistently, even if you keep lifting weights, even if you keep doing everything. Now the weights will prevent as much muscle loss as might have happened, but you're still going to lose muscle, too big of a cut, far too big of a cut, too loud of a signal to the body that says, hey, calories have been reduced by half. I know you need strength, but it looks like food is scarce. That's more important. Let's just become more efficient. So cutting calories too much, and I see this all the time with people when they figure out their maintenance, they're like, oh, cool, if I go 1200 calories below maintenance, I'll burn all those body fat so fast. Well, I mean, having clients go through that and really doing these massive cut and restricting calories, just their performance and their energy like suffers dramatically. And I mean, some people can handle a little bit better than others, but the majority of people that I've trained, that's a struggle. Now it's a struggle to maintain a positive outlook towards their programming when they're coming into the gym super low energy, super unmotivated, but just kind of grinding their way through when it doesn't really need to be that dramatic if we can be smarter about it. I actually don't want to see any of the scale move at the beginning, especially the first couple of months. And that is really, really difficult for somebody who's been staring at a scale that says it's 30 plus pounds more than what they would like. And then they come in and they hire me and they say, okay, I want to Adam, I want to lose this 30 pounds. And I say, okay, but you know, for the first few months, I actually don't want to see the scale move at all. That's a really, really tough thing one to communicate and two to get through to a client so they understand that this is the process that we're trying to communicate right now that we want to do and it's tough. And I get it because the mental part we are your mind place tricks on you. And when you're following a perfect routine where I okay, I'm sitting the right signal, I'm reducing I know I'm reducing calories, it's not a lot, but I'm reducing calories, your body is probably changing even if the scale week over week is saying the same. If you know you're you're following a plan, you're reducing calories, even say it's only 100 calories and you're lifting weights, it's a new program. For sure, good stuff is happening. And in fact, if the weight on the scale is staying about the same, we have a nice exchange, we're probably seeing one or two pounds of fat come off and one or two pounds or so or muscle give or take that are that are adding and that is a perfect ratio, it just takes more time for you to see a major difference. This is also why encourage people to do like a Friday morning, you know, anybody that was coached with me in the last decade knows that every Friday morning, you take a photo of yourself before you eat or anything. And it's really, it's there to help them mentally get through this because if you're staring at yourself every day, multiple times a day in the mirror, and you don't see the scale moving and you're trying to have blind faith in what mind pumps talking about on the show, really, really tough for you to go. So one of the things I love to do is like take a photo of yourself or measurements to I know, Sal, you're big on the circumference measurements because that's another great way. Both those are excellent. And then start to look at like two week shots at a time and go, you'll see a difference even if the scale isn't moving. Yeah, you know what I really like? I really like it when studies start to back up what people in fitness have been noticing for a long time. So I'm going to give you an example of one. And this was pretty awesome. For a long time, bodybuilders in particular, but people who were very experienced with getting leaner without losing muscle, notice that when they would, and they would call it a cheat day, or they'd say, oh, when I, when I bump my calories while I'm cutting my calories, I'll bump it every once in a while, I keep more muscle, I have more energy, it seems to be better. And there weren't really any studies to support this. In fact, it got a lot of criticisms like, oh, the body doesn't work that way or whatever. Well, we have studies actually have tested this and know what they find diet breaks is what they call it. Diet breaks actually help prevent the muscle loss that happens with diets. And we've also shown that it maintains the metabolism. It reduces the amount of slowdown that happens with the metabolism when you cut calories. So what does this look like? Well, rather than being at a calorie deficit, meaning you're eating less calories and you're burning all the time, every once in a while, bring your calories up to maintenance or even slightly above how many calories you're burning just every once in a while. This is called cal, we call it undulating your calories. Now, what I've noticed with clients is it keeps more muscle, keeps them stronger. Psychologically, there's some benefits as well. They know that, you know, there's a couple days a week where, you know, this whole week, I'm eating 1500 calories a day, which is keeping me below my how many calories I'm burning. But Saturday and Sunday, I get to eat 2000 calories, which brings me at maintenance, undulating your calories helps do this. Now, why? Because it sends the right signal. Remember, the body's trying to become more efficient when your calories are low, right? What if you throw in a couple days with the calories are a little higher? Now your body thinks food isn't as scarce. Maybe it's not that scarce. It's scarce, but it's not that scarce. So we don't need to become quite so efficient. In fact, we had a couple days where calories are a little higher. I still have this loud muscle building signal that's been being sent to me. So why don't we just not slow down as much? Why don't we build a little bit more muscle? This is called undulating your calories. And it's a far more effective way of cutting your calories and just going straight to a cut and keeping it that way far more effective. So here's another example, right? Let's say your total calories for the week in terms of how much your body naturally burns is 14,000 calories for the week. So that's 2000 calories a day, right? So you're going to cut about 500 calories a day on average, which is about 3,500 calories for the whole week. So you're thinking, okay, I'm going to eat 3,500 less calories than I'm burning for the whole week. Now here's what you do. Rather than doing 500 calories less a day, fluctuate it one day at 750 below. The next day it's 250. The next day it's at the maintenance. And the next day it's slightly over. And then it's way below again, move it around that way. And what studies show is that actually prevents a lot of metabolic adaptation. So undulate your calories and actually throw in some days, you know, maybe not super frequently, of course, because this will mess you up, but throw in some days where you're just a little bit above how many calories you're burning and watch what happens. You'll end up with a faster metabolism again, because it sends the right signals. But again, now we're talking about calories. Let's break it down even more, right? What makes up calories, your macronutrients, your proteins, your fats and your carbohydrates? How do we send the wrong signal with macronutrients? Well, I'll tell you right now, low protein, a low protein diet or too low a fat diet or too a low carb diet. All three of those, especially the low protein one, can cause more muscle loss, even if you're sending the right signals with your calories and your resistance training, especially protein, got to keep the protein high. Studies support this quite consistently. Well, this is why too, I think we, for the most part, recommend a balanced diet where you're not cutting out completely a macronutrient. I'm not a fan of somebody who's coming in who's, you know, a herd of the ketogenic diet or they want to go vegan and just because they have a friend who had success with that and now they want to do that, you're far better off as long as you don't have any other issues where you need to be on a diet like that to be in a more balanced type of a diet. So that's one of the things for sure is recommending that people stick with a more balanced macro profile and probably one of the most common things I see more so with my female clients that want to lose weight is not getting adequate protein. And we talk about on the show that the benefits are 0.7 to 1. I want at least 1 to 1 is what I'm shooting for in a cut. If I'm in a cut, I want to make sure you're getting 1 to 1 throughout the cut to make sure that we're getting adequate. Yeah, so a high protein diet builds more muscle when you work out and it also helps preserve muscle when you're reducing body weight. Studies are quite consistent with this. Adam said 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight. That's a really, really good range unless your BMI is really high, unless you're really overweight, in which case I would say use your lean body mass. Obviously a 300 pound man who's obese probably shouldn't be eating 300 grams of protein, but use more like your lean body mass. But for most people, if you're trying to lose, you know, 20 pounds, 30 pounds, something like that, you can aim for your body weight about 0.7 to 1 gram protein, high protein just helps with that. Now what about carbs and fats? Well, let's start with fats. Fats are essential. Okay, just like proteins, you need to have a certain amount of fat in your diet. Otherwise, your body can't, it can't survive. It can't thrive. You can't your body can't produce certain fatty acids. You need to have them in food. If your fat intake is too low, you'll notice changes, negative changes in your hormones, which then can result in muscle loss as well. And then you just won't feel as good. So you need to have adequate fat. Now what about carbs? Carbs are not essential. Okay, so that means that you don't need to eat them. You can survive without ever eating another carbohydrate ever in your whole life. Now, so a lot of people say low carb is the best way to get lean. It's easier for me. I get that there's individuals that that works well with. Here's my experience with going too low carb though. Too low of carb does result in drop in performance in the gym. You tend to not be as strong. Studies are pretty consistent with this. Carbohydrates produce more strength. Now what happens when your strength goes down? Am I sending as loud of a muscle building signal? In my opinion, I don't think so. I think going too low carb can actually promote maybe some muscle loss. I think it's better to have some carbs in there. So I think the balance approach is best. And then also the rebound effect with that. If you go too far down with the low carb training, you reintroduce them. A lot of times like a lot of clients I've noticed have gone super low carb. We'll come back in excess and they'll just make their way in because the body just starts to really crave that feeling again of this high energy and performance in the gym. And so it just becomes one of those battles where it becomes like a yo-yo effect. Well, that's a great point, Justin. One of the things that you have to be careful of if you follow something like a ketogenic diet, you become fat adaptive and then your body uses that becomes used to using that as a source. Then all of a sudden you fall off the diet and then you reintroduce carbs. And if you reintroduce to what you were used to eating before, the body just piles on the body fact because it's not used to that anymore. And your appetite goes through the roof? I remember when we went ketogenic for that a couple of months that we did way back when we first started talking about it. And right before that, it was right in the heat of when I was competing and I was up to like, you know, 500 grams of carbs a day. Then we went keto where I'm cutting it out completely. When I came back, I mean, I couldn't eat over 250, 300 grams of carbs, anything over that. And I was adding body fat rapidly and I was totally bloated. So you got to be careful if you do run a diet that restricts carbohydrates and then know that if you do something like that and then when you come out of it, you got to be very careful on how you reintroduce the carb diet. And I know some people are like, oh, I'll never, I'll just stay on this super low carb diet forever. Yeah, sure. Look at statistically speaking, never works. Now there are some people that medically need to go on certain types of diets. They have a totally different story. Totally different. They have a very strong incentive, right? I got to eat this way, otherwise I get sick or whatever. But for the average person going too extreme low and any macronutrient almost always results in a rebound effect. All it takes is one birthday out the other end. Exactly. Now, now what about lifestyle? Can your lifestyle send a signal to your body that tells it to reduce muscle? Yes. A lifestyle that is too high in stress can actually do this. You know, if you have poor sleep, too high in stress, your body will also try to slow down its metabolism. Now, why does it do this? Well, lots of stress for most of human, lots of consistent stress, I should say, for most of the time humans have been on earth, probably meant that we were struggling to find food. Because the types of stress that we suffered from, you know, again, for most of human, because remember humans have been on earth for so many thousands of years, 99 points, like 8% of that time, we were hunter-gatherers. What kinds of stress would we encounter? Oh, dangerous lion. I got away. Stress is gone. Oh, I'm in a war or whatever. Now, I survived. Stress is gone. But what about consistent stress? What kind of consistent stress would we be under for long periods of time? Probably when it was long periods of time without food. Couldn't find food. So your body perceives consistent levels of stress as food may be scarce. We need to become more efficient. Study support this. Study support that these low levels or moderate levels of consistent stress promotes fat gain. And it definitely reduces your body's ability to build muscle. That's a 100%. Your body does not want to become more expensive when it comes to calories if you're in this kind of stress situation. So managing stress is really important. Then now people always ask how do I do that? And you always hear the common, you know, meditate, relax, you know, reframe things. Besides all that, which can be kind of difficult. Here's something that's super easy, super, super easy that anybody can do that will definitely reduce the stress load on your body. Prioritize sleep. That's it. Even if the rest of your day is stressed out and crazy, if your sleep is good, it makes a huge, huge difference. It's like one of those big rocks. Well, along those, I mean, today, today are the commercial for today's episode is Felix Gray, which is Blue Blockers. And I remember the first time that I invested in something like this. And I thought it was a little ridiculous. But just by me simply having a practice of, okay, the sun goes down, I'm going to take these, I'm going to throw them on. And then regardless if I'm on my computer, on my TV, the difference that that makes in my ability to fall asleep, you're talking about an additional 30 minutes to an hour minimum that I'm getting extra of quality sleep every single night. That should adds up. It does. And again, this is again supported by studies. If you can turn the lights down in your house when the sun goes down, kind of mimicking the sun setting, because that sends a signal to your brain that says it's time to, you know, chill out. If you cannot eat something right before you go to bed, because your organs, your stomach can actually tell your body that it's light outside if you're eating. So try to eat about an hour, two hours is ideal before bed, draw the lights down or, you know, wear blue block or glasses very easy and studies show that it's quite consistent. It helps your fall asleep faster. You get deeper sleep and you get more melatonin production. Melatonin is a hormone. And when your melatonin production is off, there's a downstream effect on things like testosterone, estrogen and progesterone over long periods of time. So good sleep is one of the easiest ways you can manage stress. And it's very objective. Again, here's what you do. Two hours before bed, start preparing for sleep. You don't got to go to bed, but put your blue blockers on, dim the lights a little bit, maybe don't eat any food, have a nice sleep area that's dark, that's blacked out, watch what happens. I also think it's important when we're talking about lifestyle that people recognize the other types of stress that happens throughout their day. And knowing that training and working out is another stress and learning how to have a nice balance with that. And what I mean by that is it would be really common that I would get like a type A personality, high performing CEO, college student that's like slammed in law school and has got finals. And they have like all this crazy other stress that's happening all day long. And then they go to the gym and they're looking for that cortisol high. So they pound the shit out of themselves inside the gym. And then they're wondering, I don't understand like, you know, I've been moving like crazy. I'm not even sleeping very much. I'm like, stress to my max, I'm training five days a week as hard as I can, I'm busting my and then my weight is staying the same. And it's amazing how sometimes that client by simply taking a day off of the gym and focus more on the, you know, meditating or mobility or stretching yoga, what that could do. I've had many clients were simply just doing that all sudden started to get them to lose body fat again. So learning to understand what a really high stressful day or lack of sleep the night before looks like and then learning to manipulate your training program that next day. This is also why all of our programs, we always talk about the, the moldability of it and being able to change it based off of your lifestyle and what's going on day to day, even if it's a hard foundational day that you have scheduled because you're following a maps program and you, but if you just had the night before three hours of sleep, you're stressed out because of what's going on with COVID. That's not the day I want you to go in the gym and hammer the fuck out of that. I want you to back off. Well, I think this is the, the second hardest thing for some people to, to register because the, the common sentiment is more is always better, more is always better. So if I'm in the gym, that means I'm always progressing and regardless of whatever stress I'm in and everything else I'm carrying with me, if I didn't get proper sleep, if I haven't been really vesting myself in the recovery process, I'm just going to, I'm going to still get gains regardless. And, you know, in your body, just you have to realize what kind of state you're placing your body in and really the recovery process is where you get all the benefits. So if you're going to cut that part out, you know, you're really going to do yourself a detriment. Right, right. So, so here's something else you can do with your lifestyle that's not only benefits your health, but can help a lot with this process of burning body fat and, and keeping or building muscle, which is increase your, your leisure activity. And what I mean, what I mean by that is, you know, we, we've referred to it as neat. That's non-exercise activity, thermogenesis. Earlier in the episode, we talked about how doing too much cardio can send the wrong signal. Does that mean you should never go for walks outside and, you know, do that kind of stuff? Absolutely not. In fact, those are great ways to manage stress. There's a big difference in stress between going for a nice stroll, a 30 minute stroll outside and getting on a elliptical sprinting on the assault bike. Yeah. And just going for it, you know, listening to music, whatever. The nice walk outside or, you know, parking a little further from your work or taking the stairs instead of the elevator, that does burn more calories on its own, but it also is anti-stress. It actually helps rejuvenate the body. And when you promote recovery too, it promotes recovery too. It actually complements resistance training. Cause I think sometimes people get the wrong message and think only lift weights and then don't move it all. Don't want to send the wrong signal. That's not true at all. I like walking. Walking is excellent, especially if it's rejuvenating to you. So if you finish your walk and you feel like you had a workout, you probably went too fast or too hard. But if you finish your walk and you're like, wow, that was really good. My mind is calm. I feel great. That's excellent. That's the kind of activity you want to do and compliment to compliment your resistance training. So again, all of this is about sending the right signals. If you send the right signals to your body, you will lose fat and not muscle. By the way, we record our podcast on video, not just on audio. You can actually go to YouTube, uh, mind pump podcast. You could see what we look like. You could see the faces that we make. You could find out why Justin is considered the handsomest person in the room. Right now again, it's mind pump podcast. Go make sure you watch this on video.