 In this episode of Mind Pump, we talk all about a condition that is actually terrible for your health. It actually might be the worst condition to be in. This is the low muscle, weak, high body fat condition known as skinny fat. So this is when your body weight is normal or actually maybe low, but you don't have much muscle. And remember muscle has protective effects on the body. And as a result, you have a high body fat percentage. In the words, the amount of body fat that you carry is a high percentage of your body weight. The majority of you is dope. Now, in this episode, we talk about what that looks like, what it means, what the risk factors are. And then we give you three ways to remedy this. So if this is you, we give you three concrete ways to reverse this in yourself so that you're no longer skinny fat. Now, before the episode begins, I want to remind everybody that this month, MAPS Aesthetic is 50% off all month long. MAPS Aesthetic is our workout program designed to get, help you sculpt, shape and build your body how you see fit. It's the only MAPS program where you can go and follow the workouts, but then add components specific to your body. So let's say you're somebody who wants to build more glute muscles, or maybe you want to build more chest muscles. You can actually incorporate those into your focus sessions in the program to bring up those lagging body parts. It's the one program that allows you to sculpt your body like a sculptor. Again, it's 50% off. Here's how you get the discount. Go to MAPS black.com and use the code black50, B-L-A-C-K-5-0, no space for the discount. One of the more difficult things to identify in terms of like how healthy people are, it's a tough thing when you're talking about looking at the general population. We're using things like BMI. We're using things like BMI, right? People's total body weight, but we know as trainers that that's not always accurate. In fact, sometimes people have a great BMI, but they have very, very bad or terrible health. Skinny fat people. Right. And you're starting to see skinny fat being talked about now in the medical community. They're actually finding that people who have low body weight, but high percentages of body fat to have some of the worst health of all. I used to tell my clients that. My clients that I would measure high body fat, and you could see they were discouraged because they're overweight by 30, 40 pounds. I used to tell them that, hey, I think you're in a better place than some of these clients that I measure that you would think they're in good shape by the way they look because they're very deceptive because they're skinny, but they have really high body fat percentage. I said, because your body expresses and shows and tells you when you're off and you're not doing well. And that encourages you to make better food choices and begin exercising like you're doing here at the gym versus some of these people that, and the ones I'll tell you that I experienced the most of the trainer were my models and people in that industry that were always extreme dieting to fit in a category. I need to be this weight in order to have these contracts. And they actually did little to no exercise. And so they looked thin, but when I would measure their body fat, they would read really high. Yeah. And a lot of people are like, how is that possible? How can someone be skinny, but have a have a lot of body fat? So when it comes to body fat, it's not necessarily the amount of body fat you have in your body. It's whether or not it makes up a large percentage of your overall body weight. So you could be a hundred pound person, but you could have 30 pounds of body fat on your body, in which case it would be 30% body fat, which is considered really high. So really, your body weight, you know, to some extent makes a difference. It matters, but the percentage of your body weight that's body fat makes a bigger difference. And here's why being skinny fat oftentimes is actually worse than just being overweight. Somebody who's just overweight may have enough muscle to help offset some of the negatives of the high, of the high amount of body fat. Somebody who's skinny fat has the dual problem of high body fat percentage and lack of muscle. So they can't make up for the metabolic effects of high body fat with some muscle. So they have the dual effect, low muscle, high body fat, that can cause some serious problems. You see this, now oftentimes this is expressed in skinny fat people with, so let's say you don't get a body fat test. How would you know that you're skinny fat? How are you weak? You know, if you're at a low body weight, but you're also very, very weak, you can't do a single push up or you have, you struggle, you know, lifting grocery bags or carrying a backpack for, you know, longer than, you know, 20 or 30 yards. There's a sign right there that you may be skinny fat. Do you store body fat in abnormal amounts around your belly? Oftentimes you'll find people in the skinny fat category where they have skinny arms, skinny legs, but they'll store kind of more around the belly area. They also tend to store more visceral body fat, which is the body fat that's around the organs. Now from a, you know, from a, from a health perspective, somebody who's skinny fat oftentimes will have, will display some poor health markers just like somebody who's overweight. Oftentimes they'll have high blood sugar or blood sugar issues and people who are skinny fat get surprised about this, you know, they go to the doctor and they're 35 or 40 years old and their body weight is good. They're within BMI, maybe lower than, than, than BMI normal or whatever. They get tested and the doctor's like, Oh, you're borderline. Well, I think so dangerous about it because I have a lot of friends like this and even like family members who, uh, you know, can maintain a certain body weight. And so that's, that's their entire thought process is like, if I maintain this weight and I keep eating the way I'm eating and I, you know, you have moderate activity, like I'm going to be just fine and the doctor says I'm just fine because of what they're reading off of is this BMI chart. And meanwhile, like they're not considering, uh, you know, all these ramifications down the road because of what, you know, is going on internally and, you know, all the potential risks for all these other diseases, you know, because they're a poor health is underneath the surface. Well, you have to talk a little bit more about visceral fat versus subcutaneous fat and how, how our body stores that differently. Like explain that and, and how that varies from, from people like, uh, some people, uh, I know genetically, uh, would store more, uh, viscerally than others. And then also I think, uh, eating behaviors can cause that too, right? Yeah, excessive dieting, um, on-off dieting, uh, low activity levels. Yeah. Uh, you tend to store more visceral body fat, which is the body fat that's around organs. It's more inflammatory. It can cause more problems and health problems, um, for the body. Um, and visceral body fat is more as the, as if you want to call fat good and bad, that's more on the bad side. And people who are skinny fat, low body weight, high fat, low muscle tend to have more of this visceral body fat. In fact, skinny fat people, uh, people who have low BMI, but high body fat percentage have some of the worst life expectancy numbers. A lot of people don't realize that when you look at people who have the worst outcomes, it tends to be people who are underweight, but also weak with a little muscle. So it's not like you're underweight, but you're lean. You're underweight with a high percentage of body fat, especially as you age. In fact, body weight, low BMI is not a good thing for people as they age because of the lack of muscle. Muscle has a very protective effect on the body. And if you're just low weight, you know, if you're a 30, 40 year old underweight, not a lot of muscle, you're going to be a frail and weak, sick, older person. If you don't start to remedy that and start to work on that. Do you think there's any correlation with this person? And I had a handful of clients. I had like this. I even dated a couple of girls that ate like this, where they would like grays on, you know, baby carrots, you know, all day long for we and eating low calories, 800 calories a day. But then on Friday or Saturday night, they would go out and they would party and, you know, drink seven, eight drinks, which would contribute to, you know, 2000 calories coming from alcohol and sugar. And in that evening, do you think that that person is someone who would more commonly have a higher visceral body fat? Totally. Because what they're doing is there are people who are skinny fat, live a lifestyle that encourages low body weight, but also discourages muscle growth, right? So skinny fat people tend to have a diet that's low in protein and low in calories. So they're eating and, you know, I blame some of the low fat hysteria that we had in the 80s, 90s and even early 2000s where everything's low fat. So they're eating things like crackers and rice cakes. And like you said, Adam, you know, baby carrots here and there, calories really low, their protein intake is extremely low, which low protein intake can definitely contribute to less muscle. And then of course, calories from alcohol, alcohol calories have almost no positive impact on the body nutrients there. In fact, lots of alcohol, regardless of diet and resistance training has been shown to reduce muscle mass. In fact, what ends up happening with these people, and you probably, you know, exactly what, as soon as I explain this, people will know, they'll be like, Oh, I know people who look like that. As people who are skinny fat start to age, they start to get that apple shape where they might gain a little weight, but it's all in the midsection, arms and legs stay really, really skinny. This shape, in particular for women, tends to be associated with really poor health. Now, is it fair to also kind of assume to, I've met a lot of, you know, this, this type of avatar that we're talking about, where the preference being, if I'm going to get activity, it's going to be more cardiovascular driven. Like that's something I've known, even like, for instance, for my brother, like he's a, he's a tall guy, he's skinny, but does not lift weights, is not, you know, something in his regiment where he's more prone to playing basketball, walking, running, but it's just avoids like, you know, weightlifting in general. Yeah. Most skinny fat people have low activity, right? So low activity, low calories, low protein, but then you find people who they do activity, but they navigate or they gravitate, I should say, towards long, steady state type cardio, long duration type cardiovascular activity. These are people who are skinny fat because they're afraid of the scale, right? They're afraid of gaining any weight at all. And they want to do the form of exercise that they think is going to burn the most calories and burn the most body fat. We see these people in the gym, they would come in, they'd get on the elliptical and they'd be there for an hour and then they'd be out. And you would, and you would, you know, when you do your free body fat table every once in a while, they come by, you test their body fat and you blow them away that their body fat percentage was, you know, 32%. Like I do an hour of cardio or two hours of cardio every single day. I just find that goes hand in hand because of the hysteria over the weight. Like I don't want to get too much weight. So therefore, yeah, like the bulkiness and all those myths that are surrounding that, you know, that mentality, you tend to see that a lot more. I feel like they would be the most vulnerable too, right? I mean, you are, they're, you know, there's an RDA for all of our nutrients, right, that our body needs on a regular basis. And if you are skinny fat, more likely than not, you're, you're under eating and you're probably missing a lot of macro and micronutrient targets. Undernourished. Yeah, very undernourished. And so I would think too, these people are the most susceptible to getting, you know, sick and catching disease and things like that because they are so malnutrition. And in potentially also exercising, like you're making the point of doing cardio and things like that, but then not feeding their body enough nutrients to build any sort of muscle, probably in a worse state than that person who's carrying 30, 40 pounds of extra body fat. In my, in my experience, skinny fat clients had either, either, there were two general categories of how they would present themselves besides the obvious high body fat percentage, low body weight. One would be the low energy skinny fat person. This person just said low energy, a bit listless. We'd go start our first workout and it was like fatigue immediately. Fatigue, five pounds there. And just, you know, I think you can picture that, right? The other skinny fat person that I would often work with was the wired overstressed individual. Yes. Overstressed, wired and tired, skinny fat person. This is the person that's high strung, eyes usually big, hair typically your type A kind of person type A hair doesn't look healthy. Skin typically doesn't look healthy. Go, go, go. Maybe they're, uh, you know, either, uh, a man who's just, you know, has no time for anything but work or whatever, or a woman the same way or a mom. Oftentimes, this would be a mom who all she does is care about her kids, under eats, doesn't want to be overweight. So she under eats, but, but she's wired because she drinks coffee all day long and she's on stimulus to try and give, give herself some energy. Those are the two types of skinny fat people out to either the listless, low energy. Oh my God, it's like, I have to like push them to do anything. And the wired, but tired individual, those are generally, does that kind of resonate with you guys? Same thing. 100%. Yeah. And with the overstimulated, you know, wired and tired type of skinny fat individual, they were typically, uh, overtraining. If they were working out, it was too much too often. It was like lots of cardio, lots of rose classes, lots of, like their body could just never catch up. That's right. You know, they never like really like allowed themselves adequate amount of rest or sleep or anything to be able to kind of regenerate. Right. And the reason why this is such an important topic to talk about is because it's harder for people to recognize within themselves. I think it's easier when you're 30 or 40 pounds overweight to say, you know, I should probably, you know, work on some stuff, uh, in regards to my health. But if you weigh yourself on the scale and you're like, well, I'm, I'm not, I'm not heavy. My body weight's good. I'm a man. I'm 150 pounds or I'm a woman. I'm a hundred and 10 pounds. You know, it's, you may think to yourself, everything's okay until you might go to the doctor and get, you know, high blood sugar or get symptoms of inflammation or just feel like crap when you finally say, okay, I think I need to improve something. It's, it's more insidious. It's harder to, to identify, but you know, if this is you, if your body weight is low, but you feel your body and you're squishy, you're not strong. You don't have a lot of energy or you're wired and tired. Um, there are some remedies. This is also most, most common in the, in the people that are really afraid to put that muscle on. Like these, I, when I think of the clients that I had that, that fell in this category, I feel like I really had to convince them to let go of this stigma of we're going to lift weights and you're going to get bulky and masculine looking. Like that was the greatest challenge for, and if someone's listening right now and you are potentially skinny fat or know somebody that is, that to me is the greatest hurdle for those people. Totally. Most of them are avoiding weights in, in fear of getting this bulky muscular manly look. And I'd have to spend at least a couple months overcoming that before I could gain their trust to actually follow. The advice that I give these people is the same advice. I get people who are overweight, but obsessed with the, with, you know, how they look, take your scale, put it in the closet, don't weigh yourself anymore, stop weighing yourself. We're going to base your progress off of your performance and how you feel, because that scale is going to be, it's going to scare you if you gain a couple pounds of muscle. It's going to scare you. I wish that strength was, was more revered as one of the main, you know, measures of health, because I mean, it just spans across. If we were to give somebody a, one of those grip tests, for instance, like say our doctors were now would test people coming in to just see like how much, you know, force they could generate and see what that looked like. Like I feel like that'd be such a better measure than, you know, like looking at even just their composition or, you know, their body makeup, like a lot of other markers I would, I would revere like their strength so much, so much higher. It is. In fact, they are, there are studies now that show that that when you're a simple grip test is a better indicator of, you know, your overall longevity and health by itself than almost any other individual measure. Now, of course, when you take lots of different tests and combine them, that's the best reading. But if you're going to compare one to one, a grip test, especially as people get older, they can tell like, oh, it's like a check engine lights. Like everything's working. Do you think we're moving in that direction? I want to believe we are. Do you guys think so? Or do you feel slowly, I could see some progress. I think it's the studies like you're mentioning that really does help. It's starting to happen. I mean, I don't remember. I mean, obviously we didn't have things like Instagram a decade ago, but it wasn't that long ago that you rarely would see a girl deadlifting heavyweight and talking about her PR. Like I just, that didn't happen a decade or two ago in training. So I feel like it's becoming more popular and more accepted in both male and female communities that, you know, strength is more revered than what it was two decades ago. I think it's changing. It's changing because it's not that it's just cool to be strong. It is cool, right? It's great to be strong and be very capable. It's very empowering. But besides that, we're realizing that strength is an indicator of health. It's an investment. That's why we're starting to know if you're weak, just like if you have a lot of body fat or if you have high blood pressure, if you're weak, your health is suffering. It's probably suffering. So number one, the number one way to remedy skinny fat is to lift weights 100% hands down, bar none. Now, the way that I would train people in this category was a bit unique. Oftentimes with these people, because they're skinny fat, they have low muscle mass and low strength. I am focused entirely on just getting them stronger. I'm not doing tons of exercises and tons of angles and bodybuilding training with all these cables. I'm getting them good at the compound movements. And my best success with skinny fat people was getting them better at squatting, deadlifting, bench pressing, overhead pressing, and rowing. I would get them good at those exercises and the results were always absolutely phenomenal. Oh, it looked very maps anabolic-esque. Totally. And you don't need to be training five days a week in the gym. Three days a week in the gym is plenty, focused on a full body routine, mainly all compound lifting, and that body is going to respond. In fact, three days a week for some people, if you're listening and you're not working out and you're like, wow, this is all ringing a bell with me. This is all resonating. Two days a week is probably optimal. Honest to God, that's probably optimal for you to start. Two days a week, go to the gym, do a full body workout where you're focusing on those compound movements and you're trying to just get stronger. As far as rep ranges are concerned, I would say focus on anything between the one to 12 rep range to get started. The higher rep ranges, we can leave until you start to get better at those. But the reason why lifting weights is the number one thing is because the main reason why you're skinny fat is because you have no muscle and the body does not build muscle unless that has a signal. So even if you eat more protein and do all these other things that you feel like are going to contribute to more muscle gain, not going to happen unless your body has a good signal. You may be wondering why? Why is that the case? Muscle is expensive tissue. Muscle costs a lot of energy for your body. Body fat, not so much. Body fat, your body can gain body fat, store it, doesn't take a lot of calories to support body fat. Muscle, well, the more muscle you have on your body, the more food you need in order to support that muscle. So your body's not about to make itself require more calories unless it absolutely thinks it needs to. And what resistance strain does is it sends a signal. It says the signal because when you're in the gym lifting weights, you're causing very, very minor amounts of damage on muscle. This is why sometimes you'll get sore, although I recommend you don't train until you get really sore, try not to get too sore. That's why you might get a little sore. That damage your body aims to heal, but then past the healing point, your body's trying to adapt so that in the future, the same insult doesn't cause the same amount of damage. Your body becomes, it has a reason to get stronger. It's overcoming its environment. So you got to introduce that environment and your body's going to perform to that and then over that so that way you can thrive in that environment. Totally. And to that point too, I think it's really important for this person to track and track their weight, their strength, not their body weight, right? Get rid of the scale, like Sal said, throw that away. Stop paying attention to that, but really pay attention to the amount of weight that you're lifting and then trying to stretch yourself over every workout. Because again, thinking back to the person that was most common that had this, that had, that were skinny fat or had this challenge, it's definitely that person that has that stigma around lifting weights. And if I finally got them to do a strength training program, that was the first hurdle. The next hurdle was trying to get them to increase weight. You know, it's like, Oh, it was already a big, a big task to get me to even convince them to go lift weight. Now I'm asking them to do five reps, you know, and let's add five pounds to the bar and let's go a little bit. I'm glad you brought that up. You got to challenge yourself. You're challenging yourself to lift more and more weight with good form. So, and this is an important point. I'm glad you said that because I think I forget sometimes how you need to communicate this because it sounds so obvious to us. But oftentimes you get this client who falls in this category, they'd go to the gym and they lift weights and they would do it for six months and you'd say, well, tell me about your workout. Well, I always use, I always use the 10 pound dumbbells when I do rows. I always use 30 pounds when I bench press. And it's like, what do you mean you always, well, that's just the weight that I use. No. If you, if it gets easy and you're stronger, add weight because every time you add weight in your body, if you, if you get stronger and you don't add weight, your bodies only met the current demand, meaning you'll build muscle and then done. Well, and too, I think a lot of these like at home programs, like, you know, a Jazzercise or Jane Fonda or like a video that's like easy to do. Like they didn't, they weren't real big proponents of then increasing the weight and then adding more load to, you know, the type of train, totally different mentality. So I just don't think, you know, that, that type of mentality is, is something that's common for this type of person. Yes. Get stronger. That's your best measure. Go to the gym, lift weights, focus on free weights. I'll recommend that right now. Machines are okay. There's nothing necessarily wrong with machines. They just don't do as good of a job at fitting your body, fitting the way you bought your, the way you move, depending on, you know, regardless of your shape. And they just don't build muscle or strength as effectively as free weights. And, you know, back to throwing away the scale thing, here's what I loved about training skinny fat people. I would, I would convince them to not weigh themselves. Right. I'd train them for six months. I'd get their strength to go through the roof. Cause of course you take someone like that and they're gonna, their potential for strength gain is incredible. It's explosive. Then I'd have them weigh themselves and they freak out. Oh my God, I gained five pounds. Hold on a second. How do your clothes fit? How does it, uh, actually my clothes fit the same or a little looser. How's that possible? Well, muscle is very dense. Body fat is less dense, gaining five pounds of muscle and losing 10 pounds of body fat fluffy and squishy. That's the thing that way. When you're skinny fat, your, your, your weight on the scale might not even change or it may go up as you get leaner. As your body fat percentage goes down, the scale might actually go up because you're gaining some muscle. And as you gain muscle, of course, the overall body fat on your body makes up a smaller percentage of your body weight. So lift weights, focus on compound movements, two to three days a week, a full body working out and get stronger. Well, to that point also, I think you actually have to get this person's focus on actually, I don't want you to lose anyway, even if your goal was coming to me and you have a high body fat percentage and you're like, Oh, we obviously need to lose body fat. I don't want the scale to ever go down. It's our goal is either maintaining or increasing because I know if we're maintaining and we're lifting weights and you have a beautiful exchange, which that's the perfect world, right? Can I keep this client's scale weight, which is completely fine. We know already, but we know their body fat percentage is off. Can I keep their weight about the same, but build a bunch of muscle? That's a perfect world. That means I'm adding a pound of muscle, I'm losing a pound of body fat, I'm adding a pound of muscle, I'm losing a pound of body fat, and they're kind of hovering the same. That's the most, the perfect scenario. The next best scenario is we add, we add three to five pounds of scale, but they added four or five pounds of muscle and they've lost two, two pounds of fat. That's a great ratio still. I'm still getting leaner and they're adding more lean body mass to their frame. The scale went up a little bit, but that's okay. That's the second base one. The worst scenario is to see the scale drop down. And that's another thing that I remember having this client, having to communicate that. Yes, I know that we just did your body fat. Yes, I know it said that you were at 30 something percent and you want to be leaner. But what I'm telling you is we don't want to see that scale go down. I'll get excited about that most of the time. A lot of times they do. And so you have to communicate that our goal is either to maintain the scale or actually increase it because that our main objective is to building body mass. Yeah. And in fact, if they did weigh themselves, I would weigh them and I wouldn't let them look just so I can monitor the weight with the percentage. But again, don't weigh yourself. If you're getting stronger in the gym consistently, you're moving in the right direction as far as your workouts are concerned. The second thing you can do to remedy being skinny fat is to eat more protein. It was like time and time again, when I would get a client that was in this category and I would have them track their food, they would eat ridiculously low amounts of protein. Like they would have like 30 grams for the whole day and it was like one meal that had protein. The rest of the meals were all carbohydrates and maybe fat. There was no protein. Protein is connected to muscle mass. Higher amounts of protein tend to equate to more muscle, especially in combination with resistance training. When you are lifting weights, a higher protein diet means you're going to build more muscle. Now, how much is a decent amount of protein for this? Anywhere between half a gram to one gram per pound of body weight. So within that range, you're eating a good amount of protein. So if you're a 130 pound individual, 75 to 130 grams of protein are going to be adequate to build muscle. Any more than that, probably not necessary. Which I want to stress how difficult that is. Let's talk about what that looks like. Something that a lot of people don't know, when you go out and you eat a chicken salad or you go through Chipotle or you order a meal that is considered a protein meal or it has a meat involved in it, most places the serving size is four ounces. Four ounces. So how many grams of protein? Like 18 grams. So even if you ate out three times in the day and all of them you had chicken salad or a steak ball and you ordered out like that and you think, oh man, I'm eating protein every meal. I'm doing good. Do that. Four ounces, four ounces, four ounces. You're not getting 12 ounces of protein. Do the math on what that is. You're talking about 50 grams, 60 grams of protein. That is good. If that's three meals, all of them that have a meat involved, most people would think that they're eating and they're eating enough protein to get by and be healthy. You can be considered quote-unquote healthy and eating that amount of protein, but if you're trying to build muscle, which is what we need to do for this person who is skinny fat, you definitely are going to be needing more protein in that. And Danny did a really good video on our YouTube channel recently about this and I really liked how he presented it because it does remind me when I was training clients on how I'd communicate this. And the first thing that we would focus on is obviously a goal of calorie target. I need your calories to be somewhere in this range and that's the easiest place to start. The next place that we would go as far as in teaching and educating is protein. It would be like, okay, make sure you get your calorie intake and then make sure you get this protein. That would be the thing that I would have to communicate first. We'll get to the carbs, we'll get to the fat and I'll educate around that and we'll work on that, but if you can at least hit where you need to hit calorie wise and hit your protein intake, I need you to, that in itself will do wonders for us in the pursuit of building muscle. What Adam just mentioned with four ounces of meat three times a day, 60 grams, roughly 56 to 60 grams of protein, that would be good for a 100 pound person. Literally, that's about a half a gram. That's between the range I gave you about half a gram to protein. So if you're listening, you're 100 pounds in your skinny fat, then that's it, then you're good with that. But if you're 130 pounds, 150 pounds, 160 pounds, if you're 160 pound skinny fat male, you should probably be aiming for between, like I said, 80 at the low end to about 160 grams of protein every single day. This is where protein powders can actually make a big difference. If you're not used to eating that, but now for me, it's not that big of a deal. I love protein. I've been aiming for a high protein diet for, you know, a long time. I started lifting weights when I was 14. Most of my meals contain a decent amount of protein. But if you're, if you're, if you're the kind of person that doesn't eat barely any protein most of the time, your skinny fat, going from eating 30 grams of protein a day to now you're going to eat 80 grams of protein a day, it's going to be daunting and difficult and it's going to require some planning. This is where protein powders can actually become very beneficial. With somebody like that, there's two directions you can go. Now one direction is better than the other, but they're both okay. Option one, increase your protein intake. Just eat more food that has protein. Track it. So instead of eating 30 grams of protein a day, I want you to eat 80 grams of protein a day. That means you're going to need to eat an additional maybe 16 ounces or more of lean meats or, or like steak or, or chicken. The other option is to eat as you've been eating, but take two or three servings of protein powder to make up the difference. Now it's always ideal to have food. We always recommend real food. It's the best, uh, ever. But if that's difficult for you, because if you're going from, you know, a grand total of three or four ounces of meat a day to 20 plus ounces of meat a day, that's a lot for some people. And it's hard to get used to for some people. Protein is also very satiating. So you start eating and you start finding like, Oh, I can't do it. I got to use to it. Protein powders can be extremely valuable. In this case, in fact, now that I think about it, the clients that I recommended protein powders to the most were my skinny fat clients. Cause there's a massive deficiency there. Yep. Even more so than my hard gainer clients, like hard gainers would be just skinny, skinny, not skinny fat, but just skinny, skinny in particular males. Typically for them, it wasn't hard to get them to eat more protein. Like, okay, I'll do whatever I'll eat it. Skinny fats. Like, Oh, I don't like me. I don't like to taste the protein. Uh, it doesn't feel good. I've only, you know, I'm not used to this or whatever. And I'd say, okay, here's what we're going to do. You know, uh, in the morning, have a protein shake with your breakfast at lunch, have another one and then see where we're at and maybe add a third one. Well, this was a little area of contention for us when we first started the podcast. I remember we used to have these debates back and forth and I kind of sided with the, the, the protein powder more often. And not because I'm pro protein powder was because I found it really difficult personally and with a lot of clients that I had to get the protein intake that they, they needed. It just, and I, I don't know if that's because you come from a family that centered a lot of the meals around me and I come from a family that ate a lot of processed and sugar and carbs. And so for me, it's been a behavioral thing that I've had to try and change my entire life, but I've always struggled with hitting enough. I mean, I'm a 220 pound guy. So I'm, I'm wanting to be minimum 180 to 200 grams of protein. And when you figure out a, a six ounce chicken breast is only 35 grams of protein. Do the math, you know, how many people can honestly say they consistently eat five to six chicken breasts a day if you're my size, right? If you're mine, that's obviously it's all relative to your size, but that's, that's a, that was a lot for me. And then even for my clients that were 130 or 150 pounds or 180 pounds, you know, so they're not eating five or six chicken breasts. They need three or four, but how many people really do that every day? Most people, dinner, maybe, or maybe at their lunch meal, they get one or two, like really good protein, heavy meals. The rest, I mean, breakfast is like a total carb, heavy meal period. Most people are gravitating towards the quick carbs for breakfast. They do have proteins, two eggs, right? And then, and exactly, right? Which is nothing. And then lunchtime, you're going deli meats and sandwiches, which I told you guys, if you're eating out any, you know, Togo's sandwich place, it's four ounces. That's how much, four ounces or less. Sometimes it's two ounces. If it's a sandwich and it's like a Eric's deli or like a regular sandwich, two ounces. If it's a big, massive sub, it's normally four ounces. So you got to ask for double meat just to even be able to get a decent protein intake. It takes a lot of planning. Yeah. And I mean, I, and I think too, initially we were just like trying to, you know, pull back the reins a little bit from the magical idea that protein solves everything, but we were speaking more towards the bodybuilding community. And so that was one where we see it pervaded and distorted a bit in that direction. But you know, as your average person, you're right. I think that it is a good point to point out that it's very challenging for your average person to incorporate as much adequate protein as they need. Well, there's been this misconception too around, like my clients that don't have a lot of education around protein powders think that protein powders build muscle. It's not, protein powders don't build muscle. They supplement something that you're lacking potentially in. And so of course, the, the I need to be healthy to build obviously the ideal place is whole foods always. If I had a, if I have a client that can get their 150 grams to 200 grams of protein from all whole foods every day, I am fucking winning. But when I'm honest with myself, that's probably less than 10% of my clientele could ever do that. Most of them had to use tools like protein powders to try and supplement to hit that target. Unless again, like your point, Justin, we're talking to the bodybuilding community. If we're talking to the bodybuilding community, which is no longer the majority of our audience, to me, that's a very small percentage of our audience. And they're not the skinny fat. Right. Exactly. The bodybuilding community needs to lay off the protein powders and bars. They fucking overdo it 300 grams of proteins. Ridiculous for most people. You're way overdoing it. It's not magical like that. And you're already probably prepping meal prepping and carrying your six pack bags around and hitting your protein intake. It's a total fucking waste of money. And you're also probably eating BCAs, which is another waste of money. So those people, yes. But the majority, my average Jane or Joe that, you know, they're not big into lifting weights. They're here to come. Hey, Adam, I'm, oh, my doctor told me I need to get in here and start working out. Where do I start? What do I do? And we started dressing nutrition almost always those clients, you know, grossly under eat protein. And I had to find ways if I couldn't get them to eat it all naturally to supplement if we. Right, right. And you combine it with weight training with resistance training. It's a beautiful, perfect storm for muscle building, what's will help reverse this skinny fat condition that you may be finding yourself in. Now that brings me to the other macros, fats and carbohydrates. Now here's the deal. They're not directly related to muscle growth, like protein is. However, if your carbohydrates are low, too low, or your fats are too low, they will also inhibit your body's ability to build muscle. Oh, mess with your hormones. They can both, they can mess with your hormones. Fat is an essential macronutrient. If that's too low, you're just not going to be healthy. Yeah. You can get away with having zero carbs, but zero carbs is not an optimal state to build muscle. This has been proven. It's not the greatest for performance. Time and time. Yeah. It's not the greatest for strength. It's not the, so you want to have all of them. So what I mean by that, and the reason why I'm saying this is if you're like, if you're skinny fat, cause you're worried about being overweight, what you may find yourself doing is increasing your protein and cutting everything, cutting carbs way down. Like, okay, well, I'm bumping up my proteins, but I'm going to cut my carbs way down. No, no, no. You want to eat an adequate amount of calories and make sure you get all of the macro nutrients. I'm just saying, we're just saying aim for about half to one gram of protein per pound of body weight. The other two, not as important that you hit particular numbers, but you still want them to be relatively balanced. The third way you can help remedy skinny fat, and this is just, I found this to be super common with, remember how I categorized skinny fat, my skinny fat clients into the super listless, tired, and the high strong, I'm too busy. The high strong too busy type of individual really did a terrible job with this next one, which is sleep and stress management. Lack of sleep and poor stress management is a, is a wonderful recipe for muscle loss and fat gain. Because if you, when you lack lots of sleep, which lack, lack of sleep is a, is a stress on the body lack of sleep. Your body thinks we're not in a good situation. Stress sends the same signal. We're not in a good situation. When your body feels like it's in a not good situation, it ramps up its ability to store body fat. Cause remember stored body fat is a safety mechanism. It's stored energy and it tries to reduce muscle because it wants to reduce the amount of energy that you need to stay alive. So it makes you low, a lower calorie, fatter machine is essentially what it does. Not to mention being malnourished is a stress. Not feeding your body what it needs is a stress too. So if you're somebody who's already not giving your body the nutrients it needs, and then in addition to that, you lack sleep and you have a high stressful job. And I, again, that's the common, this person that fits in this category tends to be that I'm afraid of lifting weights. I don't want to get all big and bulky. I eat very low calories. So my body's not getting very, very much nutrients. I have a high stressful job. I don't sleep very well. It's like the perfect storm for that person. And I think we forget that just cause exercise feels good, that it also can be a stress. And these are also the people that tend to like to, when they do exercise, hammer the shit out of their body or do long endurance. Well, all the benefits of exercise come after the recovery process. And if you're eliminating out the recovery process or you're getting in the way of that by like introducing, you know, you're not getting enough sleep or you keep introducing all these other activities in between, you know, your body is just going to keep spinning the wheels and it's just never going to really reap the benefits of what you set out for. Poor sleep promotes fat storage through and muscle loss through a couple different ways. One, it promotes it through the hormonal changes that happen in the body. Poor sleep and poor stress management elevates stress hormones and it lowers anabolic or muscle building hormones. Now, why does it do that? Stress hormones provide you with a short term amount of energy. So it's not like cortisol, for example, cortisol is known as a stress hormone, right? Nothing inherently wrong with cortisol. You need it. In fact, if you had no cortisol, you wouldn't be very healthy. But when cortisol is up and high, it gives you more energy to do what you need to do. So if you're lacking sleep, your body's trying to make up for that by pumping up and boosting up these stress hormones. But these stress hormones are also terrible for muscle building. They tend to not want to allow your body to build muscle. And your anabolic muscle building hormones, like in men testosterone, start to drop growth hormone, which is also considered a, you know, part of the anabolic hormone category starts to lower as well. The other way that it promotes body fat gain is through behavioral change. So when you're stressed out and not getting good sleep, Craving those bad foods, you're craving start to change now, either because you're trying to self-medicate because you feel bad. So you want to eat the food that makes you feel good, which tends to be the candies and the cookies and the hyper palatable types of foods. And, or it may also be the serotonin boosting effects of certain sugary type of foods. Now that one, I believe a little less in, although some scientists have made some cases for that. I tend to believe it's the, it's the former. It's the, I don't feel good. And you know how we, you know what we do, we don't feel good. We tend to want to remedy that with a substance and often tends to be food. This is why people eat when they're sad or stressed out while they eat certain types of foods. This happens with lack of sleep as well. Lack of sleep has been tied to excessive fat gain or high body fat percentages in numerous studies. I also think that this is the reason too, why we recommend training protocol of only two to three times a week full body. Cause this person too, who's dealing with a ton of stress, you've got to be careful. Again, the workout part is also stress. And if you're trying to reduce that, one of the better ways of doing is, you know, pick the two days of the week when you're the most rested, you know, don't, don't train me. Take the day off when you're up at four o'clock in the morning and you know, it's a long day at work for 12 hours and you're, and you've been stressed. Don't make that day to be the day that you go in the gym and, and hammer it out, pick a day when you're well rested to go in there and actually train. And so learning to know how to navigate your week like that and understand that, okay, how much stress did I take on today? Is this a day that I go to the gym? Okay, it's not tomorrow. I'll go when I have a lot less stress and get better sleep. Yep. Now, number one, I would say reduce and then eventually eliminate your intake of stimulant type products. Caffeine in particular. Caffeine is a strong stimulant, skinny fat people who fall in this category of not getting enough sleep tend to have and a lot of caffeine for obvious reasons. You're tired. You want to get through your day. You're going to have more caffeine, which then makes it harder for you sleep or at least reduces the quality of your sleep, which then makes you tired and kind of perpetuates itself. So strongly recommend reducing caffeine and taking eventually eliminating both to help you sleep more, but also caffeine. When you throw caffeine on a body that is low muscle, high body fat, low body weight, undernourished, too much stress, caffeine actually becomes a muscle burner. Caffeine can actually reduce your body's ability to build muscle. So slowly reduce your caffeine. You don't want to go through the withdrawal of caffeine, which can be pretty nasty. If you've ever, anybody who's ever had caffeine on a daily basis and cut it out cold turkey knows what I'm talking about. I recommend cutting your caffeine intake by a quarter every week. So at the end of four weeks, you should be down to zero. So if you have two cups of coffee a day, then the, you know, first week, it's cut it down by a quarter. Then following week, cut it down by a quarter. By the end of the fourth week, you should be down to zero and allow your body to acclimate. That will also improve your sleep quality. The second thing I would say is to make sure the place, the place that you're sleeping is cool and dark. That makes a big difference and allocate seven to nine hours of sleep. So make sure you give yourself that amount of time. So say to your very few people do this. They say, okay, I wake up every morning at six AM. They don't go back and think, okay, how many hours? What time do I need to go to bed? Set your bedtime and be solid about it. So if you're waking up at, you know, five AM, that probably means you need to be in bed by nine PM or 10 PM, make it a solid time, and then treat that time seriously by creating a sleep routine, which this is something that I started incorporating later on in my life. And I find this to be totally invaluable. Now sleep routine is just kind of like a warm-up before my workout, right? It's kind of like your morning routine. We all have those, you know, we all brush our teeth, shower, make the bed. It's so funny that we have this crazy morning routine. And, but ironically, you'll benefit more from having a evening routine than you probably ever will from having a morning routine. Oh, totally. It's like we expect ourselves to just jump into bed and go to sleep. You know what I mean? You're with the kids, the TV's on, you're on your computer, your, your, your iPhone or whatever, shut your eyes. Yeah. And then you just, oh, I'm, oh, time to go to bed, turn everything, I'll turn all the bright lights off and let's just go straight to bed. Doesn't work that way. The way our bodies evolved was by, by the sun slowly setting. So our brain perceives less and less light. It starts to prepare itself for sleep. We're probably doing less of the stressful stuff at night. Humans, we're not nocturnal animals. We don't see very well at night. So for most of human history, when it got dark, we stopped roaming around. We stopped running around and hunting and stuff. We kind of hung around the, the fire and then we got ready for sleep. So a sleep routine is extremely important for modern times. So what I like to tell people to do is about one to two hours before it's time for you to go to bed, shut off your lights, use candlelight or use dim lights or, or wear blue blight blocking glasses. Blue light blocking glasses prevent the type of light that comes from electronics that tends to tell the brain the most, more than other forms of light to that the sun is out. So you need to be really awake. Do that about one to two hours before you go to bed. Don't be on electronics. That makes such a big difference. It sounds so silly, but it makes a tremendous difference to the point now where I do, if I miss that, if I miss that sleep routine, I could tell dramatically the difference in the, in the quality of my sleep and studies show the melatonin production explodes when people wear, just wear blue light blocking glasses. Don't even turn off electronics. They just put on glasses that block this light, but I recommend turning off electronics. That seems to be the best for me. You know, in, in, in those sense. I said cool dark room. There are products you can use to make sure that your mattress stays cool, or I recommend opening a window or using air conditioning. Temperature of your body makes a massive difference on your sleep quality. And the hours that you need to sleep is about seven to nine. Some people are okay with seven. Most people do better with eight to nine hours of sleep. So do those things and watch your body change. And with that, go to mine pump free.com and download our guides and resources. They're all totally free. You can also find the three of us on Instagram. You can find Justin at mine pump Justin. You can find me at mine pump Sal and Adam at mine pump Adam.