 Counting your calories, tracking your macros is a terrible long-term weight loss and fat loss approach. Whoa. I know. People get really upset with that one. I feel like you're personally attacking me. No. Okay, so. I got my six-pack bags today. No. Here's the deal. You better throw that away. No, here's the deal. Look, understanding calories and food and proteins, fats and carbohydrates is an important piece of the learning process. But as a long-term approach, it's terrible because what you don't want to do, and I've seen this countless times, is nobody wants to live, unless you're fanatic, right? Nobody wants to live a life where they're constantly counting calories, constantly tracking macros. Wayne measuring food. It's neurotic, and it's actually a pretty short, good shortcut towards dysfunctional eating habits. The long-term approach always, it's always good to, you want to know stuff. You want to be educated on food, but you have to work on your behaviors because you want your eating habits to feel natural and comfortable. And that's stressful and tracking and counting because stressful eating leads to dysfunction. So now that being said, there's a huge importance around the education piece of learning. I mean, how many times have you guys got a client who doesn't even know what a carb or a protein or a fat really is? Totally. And then is completely off when you ask them how many calories they're eating and then they actually do track it and you realize they were totally underestimating what they were eating. So since we know that, right, and we've experienced that and the only way for them to figure that out is to track. So what does that process look like? So is it, okay, we're going to track, even though I believe this is a bad idea long-term for your weight loss, but I also recognize that we've got to have an idea of what you're consuming on a regular basis. It's a foundational piece to build off of that, right? Like you need the education and the know-how of what you're putting in your body is going to affect you. And so to be able to track is crucial in the beginning in terms of just having the awareness of, like for some of my clients just having snacks and nuts, for example, like that being more calories than they even anticipated, really played a major factor in them trying to lose weight. So it's just more eye-opening to go through the process and then eventually you understand yourself and your patterns more effectively. Cause I feel like common practice in our space is when you're on and you're training and dieting, you're tracking, when you're off, you're off. And that's just this- And the off is way off. Right, off is no tracking, eating like an asshole, putting on the weight, not exercising, all the stuff. And then, okay, I'm getting started again, call up my trainer Adam, hey, what's up dude? I wanna get back in it. I fell off over the holidays, let's get going again. And then, okay, we're back to tracking. And then we do that for six months, getting some good shape. And then the cycle starts over again. So when you guys are starting with a client and you understand the value of tracking for educational purposes, but you know the long-term goal is to get them to not track again, what does that conversation look like when you first start with them? Well, it starts in the beginning. So first off, let's back up for a second. Is the obesity epidemic? So, and we have to separate getting shredded and just general health, right? Cause if you wanna get shredded, you're probably gonna have to track. Things need to be much more specific. I'm glad you said that, we're not talking to competitive people. No, no, if you're a man and you have good eating behaviors, good relationship to food and exercise, you're gonna sit around 12 to 16% body fat, right? This is kind of a healthy body fat range. You're relatively lean. You're not gonna be, unless you're genetically gifted or you exercise, you're not gonna be 7%, 6% body fat just from kind of living your life and eating relatively healthy. That comes from really being specific, really tracking. So those are two separate things. But the obesity epidemic is not the result of lack of information and lack of understanding of calories and what makes us overweight or overeating. I think it's pretty well-established. We know what caused that. Overweight people tend to know what caused that. And yet they're still 70, 80, 100 pounds overweight at times. So the real issue are the behaviors. Is the dysfunctional relationship that we have with food where it becomes a drug. We self-medicate with it. We have a bad relationship with it. We eat past the point of satiety. We don't identify bad behaviors that we have with nutrition. We hate our bodies, like all these different things. So I think it has to start in the beginning, along with tracking, because the tracking gives you the information. Like you need to know what a serving of chicken and rice or whatever it looks like for your body type. But beyond that, if you don't identify the real behaviors, here's what'll happen. You'll have these, you'll still have these dysfunctions, but now you fit the dysfunctions within this rigid box of tracking. And then eventually you break out of that box. And that's where you get the binge and you get the off the wagon and you get the weight loss and the weight gain type of deal that we see in everybody, right? So this is why the vast majority of diets fail. It's not the lack of information. It's the lack of focusing on the root cause of the problem. And so that's why we need to talk about this because I've seen, look, I'll tell you what, I've seen more than my share of people in our space, the fitness fanatics, who have such a dysfunctional relationship to eating through tracking. No, it's got to fit in my macros. It's so neurotic. It's very neurotic. And I think that as coaches, we've learned too that if we simplify the process and really just present a more effective strategy, so there's strategies that will move the needle but won't be quite as invasive in terms of them having to have this extensive education of how many pounds or ounces or whatever are in their meat and calculating out all their grams and macronutrients and calories. Like if we can kind of establish some understanding there, but really it's like, what are a better strategy? It's moving more towards whole foods and eliminating some of these behaviors. Yeah, behaviors. Yeah, no, when they do, when they show, studies will show that a therapist will get somebody long-term success more often and better than somebody that follows a tracking type diet. Now in the short term, a tracking diet's very effective because you just follow the rules and calories in versus calories out and you lose weight. Long term, it obviously fails. Why is a therapist work so well? Because in therapy, they kind of focus on the root and then the side effect of which is you treat yourself a little bit better, right? Because what you don't, here's a good example, okay? A terrible approach to getting better posture is to constantly have to think about your posture. Like, oh, just think about your posture all day long. Think about how good it needs to be. Like what a stressful kind of way to live, right? You want good posture naturally so you can live your life. Having a long-term healthy approach with nutrition is the same. It needs to feel more relaxed, needs to feel less stressed. Stress is a strong trigger towards bad relationships with food, overeating, under eating, restriction and binge, that kind of stuff. And tracking all the time forever for most people is a stressful endeavor. It just is. So how would you handle a client like this? I get married in August and I want to get in the best shape of my life between now and then. So like that's my specific goal that I'm asking you and you got me now today. You're on a timeline. Yes, so does the conversation change? Are you still communicating the same thing but then maybe your approach is different? Like what are you saying to that person? Because there are a lot of people, because I think what you're saying makes total sense for the person who decides, I'm gonna make a change in my life. I've been overweight for a really long time. I've got all these health markers that are going off my doctor's and I want to be around for my kids, whatever the reason is, right? They're motivated to make a change in their life and they want to get professional help from someone like one of you and they sit at you. And so that makes all sense to me this conversation, the way you're presenting it. But then you have the other part is, or people that come in and say, hey, I've got this specific goal. I've got a wedding in X amount of months. I want to be in the best shape. I can get in at a time. What do you say to that person? Yeah, well, if it's possible then to maintain integrity, I'm always very honest. Like, okay, well you want to lose 15 pounds in two and a half months. We can definitely do that. You're not working out now. You're nutrition, you don't really know how to eat in order to get to your particular goals. So here's a deal. We can do it, but it's not a long-term approach. It's not the healthiest approach. So throughout the process, that's how I'm gonna educate the person. Here's what we're gonna do. We are gonna track you. We're gonna follow those things. But here's why it's gonna fail if we don't work on these behaviors, if we don't look at the root cause. And I'll let them know the entire time that this is gonna be a failing long-term strategy. Because look, let me ask you guys, how often out of a hundred people, how many people would succeed long-term with that kind of a goal? They all fail. So that's what I was looking for from you was something like along those lines. Cause I was hoping you weren't gonna say, oh, you would not allow them to track. Cause if you want, if you have a timeframe, right? Specific that you have to try and get them. Tracking is gonna get there, right? I mean, tracking is- Sure, you have to be more specific. Right, like if there is a timeframe that I have to be in this shape, whether it be the best shape of my life or a certain amount of weight by a certain amount of time, then for sure I'm gonna have you track. But what, how I would communicate it is that, okay, that's fine, that's a goal, great, we're gonna do this, can I add to that goal? What I wanna add to that goal is, okay, after I get you in the best shape of your life for the wedding, I assume that you wanna be able to maintain that for the rest of your life, then allow me to make another goal on top of that is our goal then is to get you away from having to track food and still be able to maintain your weight or your physique the way that you would like or your health, whatever, however you wanna present it. But I wanna add to that goal. So, okay, we're gonna be super rigid, we're gonna track, we're gonna get the most results we can this time, but that's not the end of this process. I'd like to get to a place where we can not track for a while, I'll monitor you, I'll see what's going on and stuff like that and be checking in with you every week or two weeks. But the ultimate goal is, can I get you in the best shape of your life and then also give you practices that will allow you to maintain that? And coach you through that process. Because that's a coaching process, right? I think the ideal situation is to live a life, and again, I'm not talking of fitness, maniacs and fanatics, that's 1% of everybody I'm talking to. So, for most people, I think ideally what you want is you wanna kind of live for most of your life in this general range of health, right? So, relatively lean, decent mobility, decent strength and stamina, and you feel good for the most part. And that's how you live most of your life. And then from there, that's your base, right? From there, then you, oh, I wanna get shredded. Okay, now I'll track and turn up the intensity and the volume. Or, oh, I'm gonna compete in a powerlifting competition. Now, we do all the stuff to take us to the extreme level. But it's nice when the base is general health and relative leanness. Leanness, what you don't want is what happens to a lot of people where, oh, I wanna get shredded, and then there's no base, you know? It goes way the hell, like you see people post- One extreme to the other. Yeah, post bikini show. We're talking about tiny girls, 110-pound girls gaining 30 pounds in 30 days after the competition. That's what, you don't wanna do those crazy swings and we can get into all kinds of conversations to why that's terrible for your body. But what we're looking at is always have that long term. How is this gonna work for me long term? Because statistically speaking, I don't know how many times I've said this, we don't have a weight loss problem. We don't have a keep weight off problem. And the weight loss issue is easily solved, okay? You're losing weight, piece of cake. Keeping it off, that's the thing we gotta talk about. That's where stuff gets hard. We need flexibility. Life just presents you with so many different challenges and you need to be able to not have a decision one day that's really gonna affect you substantially. So to be able to pull yourself into that sort of home base where you're relatively healthy, you're relatively strong, relatively lean, you just have a lot more options in terms of which way you can go and navigate through. Totally. Hey, if you enjoyed that clip, you can find the full episode here or you can find other clips over here. And be sure to subscribe.