 It's constantly getting hammered into us that losing weight will improve our health. Here's a deal that's not always true. There are definitely cases where losing weight will make you fatter and more unhealthy. We're here to explain how and why, and then we're going to tell you how to do it the right way. So today's episode, how losing weight can actually make things worse. I love this topic because it's probably one of the hardest things that I ever had to communicate to a client that was on a mission to lose body fat. I mean, most people struggle with weight. The average American puts on what is it a pound a year or something like that. And over time, and, you know, they get to a point where they're fed up or their doctor tells them they're unhealthy and they have to fix it. They go to do it. And then it's, they're so focused on this, I got to get this 20, 30, 40 pounds off the scale in order for me to be healthy. And the idea that they could actually lose 15 of those, say 40 or 50 pounds that they need to lose and know that they're actually digging themselves a deeper hole or going the wrong direction is just mind boggling for them. And it's so hard as a trainer to try and communicate what is going on there, especially when you recognize what that person is going through to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Right. They're like hard starving themselves. They're cutting out all their treats. They're exercising. They feel like they're being so good and disciplined. And then to be told by their trainer, we're failing, you know, or we're doing, we're doing worse or we're doing more harm than we are good is like. It becomes like, I'm going to get there in spite of whatever my body signals are telling me and you put the horse blinders on. That's such like a intense focus. And a lot of times too, it it's driven by like some of those those meetings with with their doctor where it becomes like this alarming thing. Like this is really what's, you know, something to address in my health. I have to take care of this. And so that just becomes the one and only thing that they hyper. Well, you actually addressed another reason why it makes it really challenging because we talk about like these the stages of awareness and getting people to become aware of how their body really feels. But a lot of times when you have somebody who's been eating junk food, not moving or exercising at all. And even when they start to do it the wrong way, they actually feel positive benefits. Yeah, all of a sudden they have their their energy is up. They're lighter. Pants are fitting initially, right? Yeah, they have that. And so like convincing them that you're not better. We're worse is like, that's again, that just adds to this challenge because everything in their mind is telling them that they're doing the right thing or they're heading in the right direction, yet they have no idea that they're actually making it even more challenging. Yeah, the example I used to give people to I would make it so ridiculous that they would kind of understand for a second, right? So whenever I'd have this conversation with a client or potential member, you know, I would say something like, you know, weight literally just measures mass, so I could put a table on the scale, you on the scale. It doesn't tell us what is on the scale. It just tells us the weight. And I'd say we could lose very quickly 20 pounds by cutting your leg off and they would laugh, you know, but I think it would illustrate the point that we're not looking at we don't want to just lose weight. What we're really trying to do is change body composition. That's what's important. Now, this is further clouded and confused by things like BMI. So BMI stands for Body Mass Index. And this was this was put out by the medical community. God, I would say over the last couple of decades and they showed in this BMI. So there's BMI charts you can find online and it'll show you your height and your weight and then what your BMI number is. And it'll show like green, yellow and red is what you'll see red, meaning unhealthy yellow is like borderline green is healthy. And if you're above 30 BMI for your height, well, you're unhealthy. And the data shows this. This makes it even more confusing. If you look at the data, a body mass index of 30, higher rate of heart disease, higher rate of cancer, diabetes, joint issues. So they're like, this is a great way to just generally measure someone. Categorize people and create this sort of standard without being able to kind of parse through that and see all the specifics of like, you know, what's healthy and what's not in terms of your body composition, it's only it's only slightly accurate to people that are only obese or overweight. What I was going to add is you have any sort of muscle and it's throws it off. Well, that's exactly so. That's what I'm going to add to that is that BMI is a proxy for being over fat and it's a relatively good proxy because the average person doesn't work out average person eats kind of whatever. So if their BMI is 30 or above, they probably have a lot of body fat. And that's why they use it. And remember, the medical community is always looking for very simple metrics. They're easy to apply. It doesn't require a blood test. We could just weigh you real quick. OK, here you are and we got to get this down. But I'll give you another proxy that is just the simple that is far more accurate. Grip strength. You can measure your grip strength and that'll give you a better that's a better predictor of all cause mortality than BMI. Now, how is that possible? How does that even work? Well, grip strength is a proxy for total body strength. It's more accurately going to tell a doctor or a researcher if you have enough muscle on your body because muscle is very protective. Now, neither one is perfect. You want like a lot of metrics to get it like a full complete picture. It's interesting that we actually because those those are I mean, we have a whole bunch of those. I know they're not expensive when we bought them. Those dynamometer. Yeah, those tests are not expensive to have in doctors office. It's it's strange to me that we haven't done that yet where we at least take a combination, right? Here's your BMI. Oh, it's your great strength. Oh, because that would be beautiful because it would be simple to be looking at one thing. Well, yeah, because if you had a high BMI, but your grip strength was through the roof, very easily can say. Yeah, very easily. Oh, probably got. And yeah, that's simple. Yes. So at all and or we see like incredibly weak and high BMI. Oh, this is major risk factor. Yeah, let's talk about muscle for a second. Muscle is very strongly connected to longevity, low, much lower risk of diabetes and insulin resistance, lowered risk of cancer. So muscle is extremely protective. Having little muscle is connected to degenerative disorders, brain disorders, heart disease, cancer, all those other things. So muscle is something you also want to measure. By the way, the grip strength test, the reason why they don't use it is I don't think they have a generalized metric yet that they've given the medical community. Right now it's just in research, but they're showing like, hey, this is a really accurate single metric better than almost any other. Today's program giveaway is maps performance. This is an athletic minded workout program. Here's how you can win it. Leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop it. Subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. If you win, we'll let you know in the comment section. We're also running a sale this month. Maps symmetry is half off and the RGB bundle is half off. You can find both by clicking on the link at the top of the description below. All right, here comes the show. Let's talk about body composition, because this is really what we want to talk about. It's not about weight. It's about what that weight is made up of. You could look at a picture of a man who's six foot tall, 200 pounds, who is, you know, 20 percent body fat or 20 something percent body fat versus a 200 pound man who's six foot tall at 12 percent body fat. Same weight. They look radically different. If you saw them both standing next to each other, especially with their shirts off, but even with their shirts on, you would look at them both and you could clearly see this person looks fit. This person looks fat. Very, very different. So body composition is really what you want to measure, not body weight. So this is going to bring us to the next thing, which is because obviously I said how losing weight can make you fatter. That one is even harder to wrap your mind around than the fact that you can lose weight and get more unhealthy. I think some people understand how losing weight can be unhealthy. Oh, yeah, if I'm sick or if I starve myself, I think the average person kind of get that. But if I say to somebody, did you know you could lose 20 pounds and have more body fat? You have a higher body fat percentage? People don't understand that. How's that even possible? Body fat percentage is a percentage of your overall body weight. OK, a 100 pound man with 10 pounds of body fat on his body would be 10 percent body fat, would be very lean. A 50 pound man with 10 percent body fat would have 15 percent body fat, higher body fat percentage because he's even though he's half the weight because he's half the weight. He has less body mass, same total body fat in pounds. It's now a higher body fat percentage. In other words, if you're a big person with a lot of muscle, you can carry more body fat and be lean than if you're a small person who carries the same amount of total body fat. So that means literally you could lose 20 pounds on the scale and I don't know, 15 pounds of it could be muscle. So you still lost a little bit of body fat, but most of those muscle you're worse off. Yes, your body fat percentage is now higher. By the way, this is not hard to do. This is actually far easier to do than to lose pure body fat to the point where I've done it to myself. I've had trainers do this. I've done this to clients on accident and it's super disheartening. I've done this where I've lost weight on the scale, doing all this crazy workout. Oh my God, I think I'm leaner. I get my body fat test and I realize it went up a little bit. Oh crap, I lost muscle. I mean, I think the part, this was actually one of the best things that ever happened to me as a coach and trainer. It was about midway through my career. I know Justin worked with me at that time and I used to do these challenges with my trainers, we put a bunch of money in the pot and then we'd all compete on it. We had a hydrostatic way. So we had an outside source come in really accurate way to test body fat, really, really accurate, right? Within like point, I think it's like 0.5%. It's one of the best. Yeah. It's like one of the most accurate ways you can test body fat and we would compete all the trainers like who could make the greatest body composition change in this period of time of like 12 weeks. And it was overwhelming how many people, how many trainers got smaller and thought they were much leaner and gotten great training like crazy, dieting like crazy for this 12 week period. And body fat percent didn't change or hardly changed or in some cases went up. And it was baffled so many of the trainers that all the trainers wanted to discredit the hydrostatic way. You have all of them in common. We're saying the same thing. There was like, it's broken. I was broken. There's no way I was dialed. I was doing this. And it's like, that just shows you how, uh, how, what a fine line it is of dieting, uh, cardiovascular training and then also trying to preserve muscle mass and, and understanding too, that as you get leaner and leaner, this becomes more and more challenging. And so there's this really sweet spot of how much activity that you're doing, how much your caloric deficit is, how, how much protein you're feeding the body to sustain muscle, what kind of signal you're sending to the body in regards to building muscle through weight training versus doing cardiovascular endurance, which doesn't require that. All that shit matters. Yeah. It's very misleading because you feel like you got more stamina. You feel more energetic. You know, you've lost a bit of weight so you can move. You know, a little more effectively, but in a sense, because you haven't been putting more emphasis on weight training and actually like making sure you're preserving and building muscle, uh, you know, your composition is going to be changing. You'd be on that path. You're actually losing muscle, which then it actually like ends up changing your, your body composition towards the negative. Yeah. So I mean, really what we're talking about is you lose muscle. This is the first biggest challenge with just, uh, with weight loss and with the traditional methods of weight loss, which are cut my calories and do lots of cardio. Now the question is, why do you lose muscle? Why would my body get rid of muscle? Is it because it's burning muscle? I remember when we used to think this like, Oh, your calories are so low. Your body's burning muscle for energy. That's not what's happening. Your body rarely burns muscle for energy and nutrients unless you're super, super starving. You haven't had food for like over, you know, two weeks. It doesn't happen. What's really happening is your body, your, your body's constantly adapting its muscle mass to meet energy demands and to meet the demands of the environment that you live in. So in other words, your body will only keep as much muscle and strength as it thinks it needs. Now, why does it do that? Muscle is expensive. Muscle costs a lot of calories. Your body does not want you to burn more calories than is necessary because your primitive body is the result of thousands and thousands and thousands of years of evolution in an environment where food was scarce. So your body learned how to adapt to be efficient and thrifty. So if I'm doing a lot of exercise that just burns a lot of calories and I'm eating very little and I don't really have, my body doesn't have a good reason to keep the muscle. You mentioned cardio, cardio type training doesn't require much muscle. A lot of actually requires very little muscle. It just requires stamina. Hence why endurance runners look like the way they look. That's right. So if I do lots of cardio and I cut my calories really low, my body is going to try to meet that new environment. And the environment says, we need stamina. We're burning lots of calories through activity. We need to become machines that burn less calories. One of the most effective ways to do this is to pair muscle down. This is not a theory. Lighten overall load. That's right. This is not a theory. The studies are very clear on this. Cardio plus diet typically results on average. We're close to half the weight you lose as muscle. Half. And that's a good scenario by the way that's average is what this they show. So and we're talking about people who are not working out. They all of a sudden they work out and they cut their calories. So they even it could get even worse as they continue down this path. But you know, you lose 10 pounds, seven or eight of it comes from muscle. Oh my God. He lost muscle. You've slown your metabolism down. Here's where it gets really crappy. Your metabolism is slower, which means you got to eat even less to make to make things go down on the scale. Even more muscles protective. We lost some of it. He lost some of that protection. You lost some of the ability to become sensitive to insulin. He lost some of the ability to store carbohydrates and sugars. Cause muscles do that. The cancer fighting effects essentially through that muscle loss process. You've made yourself fatter and less healthy. And that's the most common thing that happens when people do this the wrong way. Well, this is sort of, you know, in the crazy thought is that it's actually probably more advantageous for somebody in a position where they're overweight and their bodies mainly consist of body fat to just focus on building and maybe even adding weight. Totally. You know, to build muscle. So that way, too, your body, it has a more of protective quality to it. And you're going to go ahead and also get the benefits of building up your metabolism along the way, which then later on will really help to accelerate. Imagine if you had a imagine if you had a four cylinder car and the goal was to go the same direction, build it, build the engine up or start dumping weight inside the car or just drive as much as you can. Imagine if you had a four cylinder car and the idea was to burn, you know, 100 gallons of gas as fast as possible. Well, one way to do it would be to just drive as much as you could. But let's say you had the option to throw in like a, you know, I don't know, an eight liter of V 10 engine, which one's going to get there faster? I could put that eight liter engine in there and drive down the street and I burned way more gas than I could in the four cylinder engine, you know, driving all the way down, you know, to Southern California. So that's essentially what you're doing. Essentially what you're trying to do with muscle is make the engine bigger so your body burns more calories on its own. Otherwise, your body's going to learn how to burn less calories. You don't want to deal with weight loss or fat loss with a body that's learning constantly how to burn less calories. Good luck. It's going to be very challenging. You're constantly in this battle where you need to move more. You need to eat less, I plateaued, move more, eat less, I plateaued, move more, eat less, I plateaued. Oh my God, where am I? And not only that, but it's very disheartening to lose weight on the scale and your body fat percentage hasn't changed. What the hell is going on? Now what happened is you're just, and this is just, I'm going to sell this now to people because I know people are interested in how it makes them look. You'll are smaller, same flabbiness looking version of yourself. Like congratulations, you're smaller. You look to take your clothes off. You're just as flabby as you were before because you lost half of that weight of muscle. The only reason why I don't like to share that, even though that's true, and the same thing that Justin made with the energy thing is because this is the part where people get deceived. They, because they are so insecure about their waist size or, and so it's, we just had a call, we just had a caller the other day that was, you know, uh, claiming to sell that she feels healthier at 13% body fat and he called her out on it. Like, you know, you don't, but that's just how people are. They're so psychologically wound up in being overweight or big that they think they feel, feel better and they think they look better at that point, but they really, from a true body point, a body composition point, they don't at all, which brings us to the next point of, you know, as you're in this cut mode, restrict, move, move more to try and burn, you also lose sight of how important all your micro and macro nutrients are in this. This is why I don't like the whole message of calories in versus calories out and we just got to eat less and move more and that's what, and the science community that likes to tout that so much is like the end all be all because what people hear from that is okay, I'm just going to cut out all these things I know aren't good for me, move to chicken breasts and salads, go to the gym and work out every single day and I should get in better shape. And initially they see weight loss and they think they're on the right path, yet they're missing all kinds of micro and macro nutrients, which you have to understand play a role in the body's overall metabolism and how it works. It's not going to function as well, you know, when you're deficient in some of these minerals and nutrients and that's just inevitably something people don't account for when they start cutting calories. Yeah, so okay, so this is uncomfortable, you know, part of the conversation because this is where people, this is where it really gets disheartening, but if you're eating a 2000 calorie diet, you are receiving, let's say 2000 calories worth of nutrients, okay, that includes macro nutrients, proteins, fats and carbs, proteins and fats are essential. You have to consume them. In fact, you have to consume a certain amount of them. Otherwise, your body will not be able to thrive or continue. And there's also micro nutrients, vitamins and minerals, which are essential that you also need. So if you took that same diet and cut in half, I ate 1000 calories now, I've now cut the amount of micro and macro nutrients. Now, why is this something important to consider? Because the average person is already almost borderline nutrient deficient anyway. Now you can just tell them to eat less. Now they get less nutrients on top of it. What's wrong with nutrient deficiencies? Why is that such a big deal? Nothing will make you feel worse than lacking a vitamin and mineral that's essential. Okay, it'll cause anxiety, depression, it'll cause bone loss, it can cause pain, it can cause hormone imbalances, your hair can fall out, skin issues, like all kinds of weird stuff can happen from a micro nutrient standpoint. And macro nutrient, if your protein is below essential or fat is below essential, all everything goes bad. Everything goes terrible. And I've seen this many times I've had clients come into me, who've gone down this path of just cutting calories and moving more. And they have all the signs of a fat intake deficiency. And I look at them and I'm like, Oh, my God, your skin, your hair, your nails, your hormones, like I look at their diet, I'm like, you're eating 15 grams of fat a day. Oh, you're you need fat in your diet, or we do a nutrient panel and we see like your vitamin D is low, you get invite you give them vitamin D. And it changes everything. So here's the uncomfortable part. Okay, heavily processed foods we we rail against because they're designed to make you overeat. Here's another part of heavily processed foods. They're often fortified with micro nutrients. And this is because there's certain standards and people like to buy things that say they have a lot of you know, certain nutrients and vitamins minerals. Believe it or not, this is sad, there's a better way to do this. But believe it or not, a lot of Americans get their micronutrients from processed foods, because they will eat their breakfast cereal. And the breakfast seal company essentially throws in the equivalent of half a multivitamin and every serving. So it's kind of patching the holes. So then the person cuts that out, then they go to like, you know, let's say lots of salad, we are oatmeal for breakfast as chicken salad for lunch. Yeah, or the thing Oh, this is healthy. This is salad like new lettuce is nutrient devoid. Okay, there's nothing in lettuce, it's like water. And there's some, you know, maybe it'll help you with the roughage and your digestion. But that's pretty much it. So a lot of people aren't even there. They're not fully informed on what is considered nutrient dense. And so they just cut everything. And so what ends up happening oftentimes with the average person, and this is the uncomfortable part, is that they cut their calories to lose weight. And then the rate of nutrient deficiencies goes up. By the way, nutrient deficiencies also can stimulate appetite, they can, you can have cravings that are so strong, right with nutrient deficiencies, that they can be borderline strange. Okay, in fact, there's studies on pregnant women who will eat paint off the walls and weird stuff because they're lacking certain nutrients. So this is a real issue. Now someone may think to themselves, I'll just throw a multivitamin at myself while going on diet. Okay, that'll help with some of the micronutrients, but it's not going to help with the proteins and fats, which are essential. And most people, when they drop their calories enough to lose weight, the average person whose metabolism is already slow, and it's slowing down because the first point, which is they're losing muscle, they're eating 12, 1400 calories. If you're not actively trying to hit protein and fat, and hit those essentials, it's almost impossible. You're gonna miss out. It's almost impossible to hit. I mean, let's just hit some of the common ones to the audience knows like, I mean, I see lack of fiber in this person's diet, I see lack of B vitamins, I see lack of iron, I see low protein, I see low healthy fats, when you just cut calories. And if you're missing on all those things, all those things have these like vital signs, like my skin is off, my digestion is off, my sleep is off, magnesium is another one that's low vitamin D is another one that's low. All those things are off. And so to think that your body is going to do what you want it to do burn body fat and keep muscle is ridiculous. It's it's fighting and trying to figure out all these other things. It's not getting. Meanwhile, you're trying to go going back to your your car analogy. It's literally like trying to race this car with the timing belt off, no oil in the engine, no gas, two flat tires, running on diesel now. And you're and you're frustrated wondering like, why am I getting my ass whooped? And why am I why is this car so slow? It's like, well, all you're focusing on is putting the gas pedal down when it's like, what you need to do is fix all these things that are deficient and get that running, right? And then watch how much faster the car is just by fixing that issue. Right. Now, the next point is is in my opinion, one of the most important ones, because when you look at the data on this, and this is also based on our experience, remember, we ran gyms and trained clients and trained trainers for two and a half decades. The most important aspect of losing weight the wrong way and becoming more unhealthy is that people do it in a way that's unsustainable. People lose weight all the time. In fact, everybody listening to this show right now, we have millions of listeners, everybody has lost weight and gained it back. Okay, the hard thing is to keep it off. It's not losing the weight. Everybody thinks losing weights hard. If you look at the data, you would look at the day and you'd say, wow, losing weights easy, everybody loses weight. What's really hard is keeping it off. It's like a 90% fail rate, meaning the vast majority of people that lose weight, gain it all back. By the way, typically when they gain the weight back, they don't gain the muscle back that they lost, they just gain it all back and body fat. So you lost 20 pounds, eight of it was muscle, then you go off the diet, you gain back 20 pounds, but you didn't get bam, you didn't get back those eight pounds of muscle. Now it's all body fat, and now it makes it even harder down the road. So what what makes this unsustainable? Well, if you're burning calories through movement, and that's your primary method of, you know, trying to burn calories is just me move as much as possible. And you're cutting your calories on top of it, and then your body pairs muscle down to slow your metabolism down. Well, then you hit a plateau, and then you got to repeat that cycle. Got to cut my calories again, got to increase my movement again to make more things happen. The plateau this time comes faster. So this is what it looks like. And I like to paint the picture to people, because then they know that I know what I'm talking about. Typically what happens is the initial, I don't know, 10 pounds of weight loss happens pretty quick. Then you plateau real hard. And then you cut your calories more, and you end up exercising more to make the next five pounds come off and then you plateau again. What? Now it's only five pounds. Let's apply that again. I'm going to move more. I'm going to eat less. Now I'm going to lose a few pounds in plateau again. And at some point, you're like, I don't want to exercise more. And I'm eating so little life sucks. I'm not I can't maintain this. I don't want to I don't want to keep doing this. This sucks. This sucks so bad that and here's my favorite line. I just want to enjoy my life. I'm going to go off the diet. I'm going to stop exercising. And we're back at square one. Yeah. And I think the general consensus still is that it's like an equal math problem and it's linear. And this is always going to be true. You know, that first 10 pounds, maybe I'm just not working hard enough. Maybe I'm just not cutting my calories enough to the point where they don't realize a body. I mean, it's it's adapting. It's trying to make things more efficient for you. So you're telling your body like we, you know, we need to pare down. We need to make sure that we're using this energy most effectively in this environment. So that just that math problem doesn't doesn't add up that whole time. It changes and you have to account for that along the lines of sustainability too. This is why I always follow up a question with a question with my clients asked me about their diet when they bring me their diet and say, what do you think about this? And I always ask them, well, how much do you love it? Because not only is the the exercise of cutting cow, the way of cutting calories and exercise a unsustainable way for most people long term. So our diets that are super restrictive. So if I got somebody who comes to me and they're like, Oh, I'm falling the carver diet. I've lost 15 pounds. And I go, they're like, what do you think of it? And I go, well, what do you think? Do you love it? Do you love eating that way? Do you see yourself eating that way for the rest of your life? Because if you don't, then it's a terrible diet for you. So it's so important that not only when the way people decide to cut calories and move more as their way of training to lose body fat, but also the diet that they choose to follow. That's more important than anything like it's we get in these camps of this one's better for this reason. That's like the number one reason is a number one factor of if it's a successful diet is if it's something that you can sustain for the rest of your life. Because you can't just go on carnivore diet, lose your 50 pounds and then go back to eating a regular diet and think that you're going to maintain the physique that you just busted your ass for. In fact, it's harder than that. And you normally put on even more weight. So sustainability is super important, which is also why when we talk about exercise, like less is more finding a way to get a client. And this is definitely one of the things that has changed for me as a as a trainer from my early careers to the early time part of my career to the later part of my career is I found myself early on calling people out if they couldn't commit to three or four or five days of training or mocking walking is like, oh, that's not real exercise where now I someone will tell me what they can do. And I always try and convince them to do less. Not because it's necessarily always a better choice because it's going to burn more calories or be better for them. It's that I want them to be able to sustain this. So it's like, if you're telling me you can commit to four days a week of training, let's start with two and let's commit to that and then build on that and build on that because I'm always thinking of sustainability over what is the fastest or best thing that I can do right now. Look, it's a fact if you can make your metabolism faster. In other words, you burn more calories all the time, not doing anything extra. That's more sustainable than you having to get up and having to move all the time to burn those calories. It's a much more sustainable approach. The build muscle method, building muscle path is a much more sustainable way of keeping fat off your body. Plus, it's healthier like we talked about earlier. So you want to build muscle, speed up the metabolism. It does start off slower on the scale. Okay, I'm going to be very clear. You're not going to lose that initial 10 pounds as fast, but you're not going to plateau. And the way you do lose is pure body fat. It's not muscle. In fact, you'll probably gain some muscle, but the body fat will start to snowball off your body. You'll start to get this accelerating path of fat loss where at the end of this journey, you're eating as much or more than you did before. So you have to ask yourself, again, what's more sustainable, eating a lot of calories and being lean or eating a little bit of calories and being lean. Obviously, eating more calories, you want to be able to eat more. It's a bigger buffer that allows you to do that. By the way, when people say, you know, yeah, I know this is an unsustainable way, but I'll figure it out when I get there. When I get there, then I'll try to fix it. It's exponentially harder once you're there. That's literally no different than someone saying, drop me off in the middle of that massive lake. I'll figure out how to get to the shore once you drop me in. You're like, you probably should figure that out before we throw your legs in. You should have built a boat. Yeah, because you're going to drown and that's 100 percent of what will happen. All right. Next is just the fact that people can do this through dysfunctional behaviors. What does this mean? Even if you do everything right, you follow the steps according to what we say, but you do it through this. I hate my body. I'm gross. I'm going to beat myself up. I'm disgusting. You know, no, I can't eat those foods because I'm so bad. I'm so indisciplined. If you approach this through that way, you will develop dysfunctional behaviors, which either A, you maintain these dysfunctional behaviors, in which case this is an unhealthy way of doing it, or B, what eventually happens is somebody gets sick and tired of doing this in a way that doesn't feel good and then they stop. This has to be, you have to do this in a way or it improves the quality of life and you find it enjoyable. You find it valuable. By the way, I didn't say easy. Okay. People confuse enjoyment with easy. That's actually not true at all. Easy is not the same as enjoyable. Enjoyable means you know where you're going. You've got some meaning and purpose behind it and you, and it's something that you want to do. That's enjoyable. Okay. So this has to be a process where you see what's going on. It feels good in the sense that this is pro-growth. I'm taking care of myself. I feel good about this because then you're going to want to keep doing this. If you develop dysfunctional behaviors around diet and exercise and body image through this process, regardless of what you're doing, at some point, you're going to want to escape that. And that's when things go back to where they were before. Which by the way, I don't know, I would say north of 75, 80% of people come from this place. Totally. Including myself, including everybody that's in this room. The things that drive us most of the time are our insecurities. That's what got us off the couch to get into the gym to start doing this, which coming from a place of insecure feelings or hating yourself will always lead to dysfunctional behaviors. You'll take you'll take shortcuts, whether that be, you know, steroids and drugs to do it. You'll do extreme diets to get to it. You'll overtrain intensity because your body signals. Yeah, you're beating up yourself. Ignore the body signals. And so this is a tough one. This is the one that this is where really good trainers and coaches separate themselves from their peers is the ability to break through with a client that is training this way is to be able to get them to recognize the root cause of these behaviors and understand that what the way that they're training is unsustainable and that there is a better approach. And we first have to fix the root cause. We had the first come from a place of loving ourselves, as you would say, Sal on the podcast, like finding finding a way to do that first so that it doesn't result in all this dysfunctional training. By the way, loving yourself is not the warm fuzzy feeling. You know, it's not romantic love or any, you know, that kind of stuff. Loving yourself is this is an action. Okay, it's the actions you take. In other words, you're trying to care for yourself, not that you have these warm fuzzy. That's impossible. You're never going to have, we're not going to have warm fuzzy feelings about yourself all the time, you know yourself better than anybody, you know how imperfect you are. And if you're looking for that, that's not going to happen. It's an action. Okay, it's an action. And look, it's the difference between exercise. So here's the difference. Doing this functional versus dysfunctional looks like this. Exercising in a dysfunctional way is punishment. I'm going to beat myself up. It's cathartic when I get real sore. I feel amazing because I almost killed myself because that's you feels good when you hate yourself to do that to yourself. Versus I'm exercising to care for myself. This is self care. I want to feel better. I deserve to be fit with diet. dysfunction looks like this. This is restrictive. This is I can't I can't have that. I can't do that. I have to be this way versus I want to be this way. And no, I don't want to eat that. I actually don't want to eat that way. By the way, it's not you recognize that cookies and cake and pizza taste good. But you recognize that that's not really caring for yourself. Most of the time sometimes it is. But most of the time it's not. So you want to care for yourself. It's very different. Now imagine a world for yourself where you go, you want to exercise because you want to care for yourself. You want to eat right because you want to care for yourself. What a wonderful place to be. And by the way, balance is baked into that. There's a natural balance when you're caring for yourself. Because sometimes it does mean I'm going to go to a birthday and have some cake with my family. Usually it doesn't. But sometimes it does. Sometimes it means I am going to skip the gym because I didn't get good sleep last night. And I feel really crappy and my knee hurts. So I'm going to take some time off. That's also caring for yourself. Balance is baked in when it's from a self hate standpoint. It's always extreme. It's always in the wrong direction. And at some point, you'll rebel against it. And this is why when people stop working out, they don't stop for a couple of days. They stop for months or years. Or when they go off their diet, it's not one or two things are not supposed to be. It's like they binge. They have a whole day of binge. This is a hard one because it's really like it has, you have to change the conversation in your own mind, in your own decisions and the way that you, like you said, you talk about things about yourself, the way you look at yourself, one, being more slightly parallel to victim or empowered. And what do I choose to do in that situation? What am I telling myself? Am I empowering myself? Or am I just loathing and, and, and, and dredging my way through it as a victim? And these are, these are just conversations you need to have about like, I choose not to have this kind of food. I want to empower myself to be healthier. Yeah. Yeah, I'm trying to search for the words for this one, because this is definitely one of the hardest for sure to communicate on a podcast of the masses and not have the specific individual in front of me that I could point out these things. And so how do you help somebody who's listening to this right now recognize that they potentially have dysfunctional behaviors and they don't even know it? Like the level of self awareness that that takes, like how many times have you guys had people tell you how much they love something that they're doing and it's very dysfunctional, you know, or think that it's what it's really good from it, not recognizing what they're the place it's coming from. The best, the best is hard. That's super hard, Adam. The best way that I found for myself and for clients, but this helps me too, because I struggle with this. Everybody struggles with this. Okay, this is a human challenge is to separate myself and imagine that I'm caring for someone that I really care about. So I'm a father. So it's really easy for me because I can think about one of my kids. Would I treat my kid this way? Would I force my kid to do this workout, even though they're sore and tired? Or would I make them eat this particular way? Or in a different way? When I separate myself and say, would I treat someone to care about in this way? Would I force them to do these things in this particular way? Because you know, when you take care of your kids, there's things you do that they want. And there's things you do that they don't want, right? It's like sometimes you got to make your kids do the things they don't want to do because you love them. You care for. So if I let my kids pick whatever food they want to eat, especially my little ones, it ain't gonna look too good, right? So that's the best way I can think about it. I can't. I can't. I don't have a better example. But if you, if there's somebody in your life that really care about, like truly, truly care about, ask yourself, would I do this to so and so? And if the answer is no, then don't do it to yourself or if the answer is yes, then do that. And that, I think would help with what you're saying, because you're right. Some people have bad habits or behaviors like drinking alcohol or drugs or overeating or gambling or whatever. And if you yeah, a lot of times they can't even see it. Yeah. And if they put another person they cared about in that place and they were honest with themselves, they're like, no, I wouldn't want my kid to have these behaviors. Yeah, that's probably the best. I mean, we just, like I said, I'm referred to the lady that we had as a live caller recently who made the comment about her feeling better at 13 percent body fat and you having to go, it's like, man, you know, how do you get that person to recognize that what they're doing is dysfunctional? It's like, obviously, we have pictures of the person and we see body composition. We know what they're doing, how extreme their dieting and training. So as professionals, we can point that out to that specific person. But how many people it's a spectrum and how many people are on that side of the spectrum as she is, but maybe not as extreme that are hearing this right now and going like, I don't have dysfunction. Yeah. So, well, OK, that takes us to the next point actually, which is this. And I wish I said this to her too when we had her on the phone. Do you feel better or do you feel healthier? Because there is a difference. I can make myself feel better by numbing myself. Yeah. Psychologically, you feel better. I could feel better by doing behaviors that aren't good for me or unhealthy because I'm avoiding, I don't know, challenge or I'm avoiding struggle that I know I should, right? So are you getting praised by other people and peers? Yeah. So or am I feeling healthier? Ask yourself that. Do I feel healthier or do I feel less healthy? Not. Do I look healthier? Do I look less healthy? Do I look better? Do I look less better? No, no, no. Do you feel healthier? And you have to be honest with yourself. So you're like, yeah, I lost weight, but my God, my sleep is crap. Or yeah, I lost all this weight, but I'm irritable with my husband or my wife or my libido went to the floor. A lot of times that will happen to people when they do this the wrong way that I do. Yeah, I lost weight, but my God, I have no sex drive or I have less energy. I'm working out like crazy. I cut my calories, but man, I'm dragging ass. I need more caffeine, you know, to keep myself up throughout the day. Or I feel less sharp. Ask yourself that. Do you feel healthier through this process or do you feel less healthy through this process? If you feel less healthy, then there's something wrong. You should feel healthier through this process the entire time. That doesn't mean it should feel easier. That doesn't mean there won't be struggle and challenge. It just means you're going to feel better. And this is an honest conversation you have to have. Yeah, you have to take the reflection in the mirror and the scale out of this equation because they're irrelevant. Yeah. And that's really tough to do because again, most of the time you're driven by those two things to get you into the gym. People sacrifice health. Yeah, they sacrifice health for that all the time. Right. And so when you're asking somebody how they feel, they have to automatically carve that out that that doesn't matter what the scale says and what I see in the reflection right now. I mean all the other things you're listing off the stool, the digestion, the sleep, the mood, the energy, the skin, the hair, like those are the things that I want to measure and I want to be honest with myself and say, OK, before I started doing all those things, let me check in with all that. How did all those things feel? Lobito, you also mentioned. How did all those things feel before I started this diet exercise plan? OK, I've been doing it now for three months. I've lost 15, 20 pounds on the scale. Let's check back in on all those things. And if I if I've been doing this right, all of those markers should improve. Yes, all of them. Some of them more than others, but all of them should go in the right direction. None should go in the wrong direction. If any of them go in the wrong direction, then the the the diet and exercise plan is off. Yeah, not the because diet and exercise done the right way improves all of those things, improves skin, skin, hair, mood, sleep, sex, all that. All those things should go in the positive direction. And if any of them, certainly if multiple of them are off or negatively impacted, something needs to be adjusted. It's not a trade. I'm so glad you said that, Adam. That's such a so clear because what people will often do is is they may even notice. Right. Right. Well, my sleep's off, but I feel great. But I look better. So they think it's a trade like, well, I lost weight. My sleep is worse and my libido is gone. But hey, I'm losing weight. So it's all good. No, no, something's off because you're 100 percent right. If you apply those things properly, there isn't a single thing in your life that will not improve physiologically and even psychologically. Everything gets better when you apply those properly. And I said psychologically because anxiety, depression, you know, you know, just your positivity, all those things improve if you do those things right. So if you feel worse in any of those metrics of health, then something is off and that's something. And by the way, saying that I don't want to shame somebody there. This is I use this to still to this day. Check back in. Totally. Like it and it's a constant process of getting better and better at figuring these things out. Like, and that's how you need to be is like, it's OK to like list all those things and go like, man, you know what? I am doing this does still happen where I think I'm dialed the way I should be. And I'm like, man, but you know what? My sleep has been off. I'm not getting good sleep at all or or I notice my libidos down a little bit or I notice something in my skin or hair. It's like it's not like I go like I throw the whole thing out like, oh, well, I just got to stop exercising and then then what I do is I go investigate. That's it. I go, oh, something is off here. Maybe I'm not getting enough calories or oh, maybe I'm missing my protein targets or oh, maybe I actually need a little bit of rest and recovery. Maybe I've been pushing the intensity too much. You're not using it to judge yourself and then throw the whole exercise and diet thing out the window. It's you're always checking in with that list. It should always be moving in the positive direction. When it's not something is off. Bottom line, this is a learning process. And as you go through this journey, you iterate it constantly to match your life, the context of your life and to make sure that it's working for you. This is something that should improve the quality of your life entirely, not take quality away. Look, if you love the show, head over to mindpumpfree.com and check out some of our fitness guides. They're free. They're all totally free. There's a bunch there. Go check them out. You can also find us on Instagram. Justin is at Mind Pump. Justin, I'm at Mind Pump to Stefano. And Adam is at Mind Pump, Adam.