 In this episode of Mind Pump the World's Top Fitness Health and Entertainment podcast, we talk all about nutrition, how you should eat. If you want to burn body fat or build muscle, I mean, we break it all down for you. We talk about, you know, all the, the aspects of nutrition that are important. We talk about calories, why that's where you should probably start. And then we talk about proteins, fats and carbohydrates. Now look, we did something for you guys that we've been working on for actually a very, very long time. A lot of coaches and trainers will charge you to figure out, help you figure out how many calories you burn, how many calories you should eat, your grams of protein, fat and carbohydrates. Well, we wanted to give you that stuff for free. We think this should be available to everybody for free where you could go in, enter your information and figure out where you should start. So we put together several pages on the internet, several landing pages or pillar pages we should call them with lots of connecting information. And when you go on these, there are macro calculators. You enter in your information, you can put in your weight, your body fat percentage, it'll tell you how many calories you're burning. It'll tell you how many cows you burn with activity. It'll tell you how many calories to eat based on your goal, grams of protein, grams of carbs, grabs of fat. So you can actually go to maps macro.com and enter the information, learn all about nutrition, get more detailed information, all the stuff that will help supplement what you're going to listen to in this episode. Now, if you eat right, your macros are good, and you're still noticing issues with energy, you're still noticing maybe some hormone issues. Well, you may have some issues with your micronutrients, your vitamins and minerals, or you may have some hormone issues. There are some ways you can test for this. Now one way is to go to the doctor, get a prescription, go to a lab, get your blood drawn, or you can do a test at home. Now we work with a company called Everly Well. They produce some of the best at home tests available for very, very low prices. So you could test things like your vitamin D, or your testosterone, or your estrogen, you can even get a general idea of maybe some food intolerances that you may have with tests as well. Now because you listen to Mind Pump, you get 15% off any of their tests. Just go to everlywell.com, that's E V E R L Y W E L L dot com and then use the code Mind Pump to get 15% off any test. Now if your goal is fat loss, if you want to burn a lot of calories, one of the best ways to work out is with high intensity interval training. Okay, these are intense ways of working out but they burn a ton of calories. Now we wrote a program called maps hit that design it's it's an entire program that is very effective. It's designed to be effective. It's done with barbells and dumbbells. It's essentially a program designed to burn tons of calories, but not cause you to lose any muscle. If anything, you'll sculpt and shape your body with this program. We put it on 50% off sale. So it's half off. Here's how you get that discount. Go to maps hit.com that's M A P S H I I T dot com and use the code hit 50 that's H I I T five zero no space for the discount. And again, I want to remind everybody, if you want to figure out your calories, you want to figure out your proteins your fats and your carbs and how many calories you're burning, go to maps macro.com that's M A P S M A C R O dot com. Go check it out. Go read all the information. We think it's really going to help you out. You guys have heard people say that like 70% of your success in fitness is your diet. Yeah. How many times have you guys heard that right? What's that quote of like, you know, you make all your progress in the kitchen. Oh, you don't get your abs in the gym. You don't get your abs in the gym. Exactly. You know, there's so there's a little bit of truth. I say there's a lot of truth to that. I think that it's one of those things in the space that, you know, was probably neglected. And because it was neglected, you know, so much came out to, to prove like the importance of it. And that's where I think the numbers started coming of like 70, 80, every 90% I think with it would it would it where it's true is not necessarily the impact it has on on health because exercise and fitness and training has a very, very big impact as well. I think it's people say that 70 or 80% number because it's the amount of if you look at all the effort you put into improving your health, building muscle, burning body fat. Most of the effort tends to have to go to nutrition because it's the hardest part. Yeah, that's the reason. I mean, when you work out, you know, even if you work out five days a week, you're working out an hour, five days a week, you eat throughout the day, every single day, it's a part of who you are a constant lifestyle. It's a lifestyle you eat with other people. It's not, you know, it's a part of our culture. It's very difficult to change eating habits and to figure out what to eat long term, far more difficult than it is to figure out, you know, what kind of work out you should do, which is also hard. It just takes more effort. Well, especially when you're talking about how to burn body fat, or how to build muscle, like there is a difference between just intuitive eating and trying to be healthy, like you're alluded to right now. And then there's somebody who says, Adam, I want to build 15 pounds of muscle or Adam, I want to shed 30 pounds of fat off my body. Like when you have a very specific goal like that, and and you've struggled most of your life to get there. To me, this is where this this has a ton of weight that it is 70 80%. Because sure, I can put you on a great workout routine and make you a lot more healthy than what you are. Like if you were not working out, you weren't doing anything diet wise, you come to me and you just say I want to be healthy. You know, that person just makes a few better changes. They pay attention to their sleep. They eat a little bit better than what they were for. I get you on a good program. I can dramatically change your overall health. I can make you a much healthier person than what you were before you found me. But if you have goals where you say, I want to do that I want to build this or change my body, you know, in addition to being healthy, this I think is everything. This is where this is where the numbers really start to matter in my opinion. Totally. I know as a trainer, this used to always at first, I thought people were purposely being deceitful. You know, and I think all most early trainers think this, they think all my clients lying that they think that they would have. But the reality is we're so unaware. And this is it took me some years to figure this out. But when you would ask people, how much do you think you eat? Do you eat a lot of sugar? Do you eat a lot of processed foods? Are you getting adequate protein? People are so off from reality. Hey, not just people. I am. Oh, yeah, we are. Oh, everybody. That's why I'm like so passionate about talking about calculating and figuring out what your macro should be is because 20 years later, been doing this forever, very, very in tune with what I could look at a plate and give you a pretty good estimation. If someone challenged me, like, what do you think that is calorie wise and grams of protein that I can do that, right? Pretty well. And yet, if I am not tracking or if I'm not really, really diligently paying attention, every single time that I start and then I like reflect on what I thought I was doing, I'm always off. Yeah, it's just a matter of how much I was off. And luckily from years and years of experience, it's not as I'm not as gross of a fender as I was before. But that just always tells me that listen, if this is my profession, I live and breathe this shit. And I still estimate quite a bit off when I think I'm doing whatever I think I'm doing. That means that tells me all of my clients are off. What I find that's funny is that people can by the way, there's studies on this, they've done lots and lots of studies on this and people tend to on a consistent basis under estimate how many calories they eat. And it's usually by a big number. So somebody will say, I think I ate about 2000 calories a day. And it's probably around 27, 2800, maybe even 3000 calories. That's how big of a number of people are off. And overestimate on how active they are. Right. That's I was just going to say that. And then when you ask people how active they are, and they're like, Oh, I'm, I'm pretty active, you know, I do a 30 minute walk at this time and that time. And then you That's the one thing they did that day. Yeah, I remember when those body bugs first came out and I would have people track their activity levels, even on the days that they worked out, they were super inactive, because they thought of the workout as being lots of activity. But really the rest of the day, they weren't doing anything on all protein intake. They would always overestimate. Oh, I eat plenty of protein. I think I eat about 100 grams. And then we would track like you're at 30. Yeah. You know, it's one third of what you thought you were eating. Well, it was funny because most people that would come in and, you know, we talk about nutrition and they'd be like, Well, I eat healthy, I eat salads. And that's like where the conversation ended. It was just the fact that like they incorporated salads within their routine that that made them healthy. It's just it spans all the way across the board in terms of like what people know is healthy, not only just healthy, but like, you know, in terms of like how many calories they're ingesting, they have no clue. No, we don't have any clue. A big reason for this, by the way, is we just never learned how to look at food this way. We never learned how to value food for all of the different things that provides us. Most of us who are lucky enough to grow up in a modern society, we learned to value food mainly for one thing, which is how it makes me feel emotionally or how well it tastes. I mean, that's pretty about it. That's pretty much it, right? If you think about all the times you go out and eat with your friends or you choose what to eat for breakfast, lunch or dinner, be honest with yourself. And the things you tend to think about are, Hmm, what am I in the mood for? What tastes good? Yeah, you know, we're going to go eat what's going to be fun to eat or hey, this makes me feel better when I'm stressed out or sad or what tastes really good. So all of our value is placed on that. So we've never really learned how to look at food in different ways. And so it becomes when you're trying to burn body fat or build muscle or change your body. If you don't have the right information and make yourself aware first, you are going to live in the unconscious and competent stage. You are literally blind. It is you're totally guessing the entire time. And this is true for most people. Oh, and not only are you guessing and off for the reasons that we talk about over estimating your activity level underestimating because then you have outside forces that are working against you. And we've talked about this before on the show with like labels. And then I used to love to show clients like you just remember seeing those like graphs or charts that to show, you know, a burger fries and a soda in the 50s in the 70s and then the 90s. And then like today, portions just got enormous. Oh my God, the portions have just in a few decades has like tripled in the amount of calories and servings. And when that happens over the course of decades, and we just kind of let it naturally of all like that, a lot of people just don't even notice it. You don't even notice that because that's what tells you a serving, right? It just becomes the norm. I mean, I remember as a kid, you guys remember, it was in our generation that like the big gulp was invented. Yeah, like that was that wasn't like, yeah, like if you were a kid, super big goal, when soda pop was, you know, soda pop spent around forever, but it was always a little eight to 12 ounce thing. That was it. Max. Every we should call it soda pop still. Yeah. Well, some places do call it pop. Yeah, and north too. Right. Yeah. I think so. Right. But I mean, that's just one example of something that has snuck up on us over the last couple of generations. Yeah. That, you know, our parents, you know, when they would have pop, they would literally only be drinking that eight to 12 ounces. That's just how it worked. Like you would have to crush the whole six pack to get what a what a big gulp is today. Well, even in, you know, people that are going into the gym and they start this whole momentum of like trying to get back in shape and all this stuff, they think they need a protein shake to add in to what they're already doing instead of eliminating things. And then like, so there's just lots of misconceptions in terms of like, you know, what the health community is promoting. It's like there's all this excess stuff you need to be taking. And the other big one for me was always to to peer into snacks. And one of them that always snuck in was nuts. Like how calorie dense these nuts were that contributing to the overall calorie amount, people had no idea it was like that much. Oh, a serving of almonds when people have a snack, it's like 12 or 13 almonds. Who eats 12 or 13 almonds for a snack? Most of us grab a whole handful and so you having three times the serving that you think, and this and you're right, this is a big part of the problem because you grow up, you know, understanding what you think a serving is. So if you're never really fully aware of what's going on, it goes even further than what we're talking about with, you know, serving sizes. It even goes to traditional natural foods, right? The average chicken breast in the 1950s was half the size of the average chicken breast today. You can actually Google this, look up the average chicken size in the 50s and then look at it through the decades. Now, what we've done is we've, you know, we've bred them to be much bigger. We've bred chicken with sauce. Yeah, and they're just they're just they're like dinosaur chickens compared to their yolk. The ones we have. Same thing with sweet potato or a potato or a banana or corn. All of these things have been over time changed to become your fruit even. When you go to the grocery store and you buy fruit, and you're like, wow, this fruit is so delicious and so sweet. What you don't realize is over time, farmers have bred the fruit to contain more and more sugar because it tastes better. Now there's nothing necessarily wrong with this. But the point is that our serving sizes, how much we're eating is totally our our concept of it for the most part is totally often. So we're guessing this entire time. How hard it does that does it make losing body fat or building muscle? I got something that will blow everybody's mind if they've never done this because I have and it blew my mind. I've shared on the show about the the paradigm shattering moment I had with the sweet potato. Yeah, never forget that years went by of me just, you know, using my my calorie king book to like, estimate like back in the day. Yeah, this is a, you know, a sweet potato. That's about 180 calories or what about that? And I just, you know, every sweet potato I had for the next five years was, you know, 180 200 says medium size. This is medium size. Yeah, exactly. And then I put it on on, you know, the scale and actually weigh out what the ounces or grams was to figure out what it was. Holy shit, that was three times more than I thought you want another one that it will blow your mind because you brought up fruit, a banana, a large banana. Okay, what is in the grocery store are not large bananas. They're fucking super dinosaur bananas, like you say. You know, it's a large banana, the large banana are those like little Ron Jeremy little tiny bananas. So when you look at like what the books tell you like, oh, like a large banana is 32 grams of sugar. It's about 160 calories or what that that's like the little fucking mini banana that jumbo banana. Most people are biting into is like four X that next time you're going to eat a banana just for shits and giggles. Throw that thing on the scale, weigh it out and then take the time just to look up to get an idea it'll blow your mind. It will. Yeah. And a banana that size, they can be up to like 50, 60 grams of sugar. I know. I would tell clients to stay under 50 grams of sugar in their total for their day and a banana can just like go up beyond that right away. Now it has other health benefits to it. Yeah, there's nothing necessarily wrong with a banana, but here's the bottom line. The bottom line is if you and you cannot get around this. Okay. By the way, this is not the only thing that's important. And I think we talk about this a lot on the podcast. If you've listened to us for more than three episodes, you know, we talk about all the different values and all the important aspects that revolve around food that have that have nothing to do with calories. But at the end of the day, at the end of the day, if you want to lose weight, you have to eat less calories than you burn. And if you want to gain weight, you have to eat more calories than you burn. This is a rule. This is a law of physics. Yes, not going to change. You know, I remember a long time ago, I had a client that, you know, she we would she really want to lose weight, really want to lose body fat. And I worked with her for a while and I would always talk to her, you know, we should probably have you track, because I think you're you're you're not calculating things right and this and that. And she refused. And I said fine, I never force people. But she would she was gaining body fat. And she said, Well, this is not possible. She's like, I'm gaining body fat, but my food intake is going down and I'm moving more. And I remember it distinctly having this conversation with her and saying, okay, if you're gaining body fat, and you're eating less calories than you're burning, what we need to do is study you. We need to take you to a university you're an anomaly, because you are creating energy, you're creating tissue out of thin air. What you're doing is nothing short of a miracle, probably a breast attire. Yeah, so we need to we need to study this. And that's because again, you can if you're eating more calories and you're burning, what this means is every time you consume calories, right, this is energy calories are just a unit of energy. It's how we measure how much energy is within the food that we eat. If you're eating 2000 calories a day, and you're only burning 1000 calories a day, that extra 1000 calories doesn't just disappear. Yeah, it gets stored, it gets transferred. So one of the one of the laws of physics is that energy cannot be created, nor destroyed. So when I light a piece of paper on fire, and that paper, you know, burns and it disappears, the energy didn't disappear, the energy was converted into heat through the fire. Okay, so when you're eating extra calories, those calories regardless, you can have the healthiest diet in the world, by the way, it can be a very, very healthy diet can have lots of whole foods and, you know, fruits and vegetables and good, you know, high quality meats. But if you're eating more calories and you're burning, your body is going to store those extra calories. So you cannot lose weight unless your calories are lower than you burn and you cannot gain weight, unless your calories are higher than you're burning and just can't get around that. And this is what makes strength training and trying to build muscle such a beautiful thing is because that is exactly right. And most people are so often underestimate. And so at least some of those additional, you know, the thousand calories, we turn into muscle, we hope it'll get partitioned over into building muscle. And that is extremely beneficial for your overall metabolism, and also combating, putting on any sort of body fat. That's what makes strength training so amazing, where if it's just a calories and calories out thing, cardio helps you burn, walking around helps you burn anymore. But if you go over still that, it does nothing for you at that point. You still will get body fat if you go over where if I sent a signal to my body to build muscle because I strength train properly, there's a good chance that at least some, if not all, hopefully of those calories, get partitioned over. Now, and I'm glad you said that because it's also a little bit more complex, right? Just because you build more muscle, let's say you gain three pounds of muscle, it doesn't necessarily mean the only extra calories you're burning are the calories that are needed to support that muscle. That's true, but there's also more. Your body actually can become more or less efficient with calories. Part of that is through how it takes these calories and also turns them into heat and people with more muscle or if your body is trying to build muscle, your body becomes less efficient with calories, doesn't try to hold onto them as much and burn some of them in the form of heat, which is what you could consider to be less efficiency. But again, at the end of the day, if you don't know how many calories you're burning and you don't know how many calories you're consuming, you are walking around in a dark room blindfolded. You have no idea where you're going. You go at best, what you do is you could look at the scale, look at your body, try to adjust your food here and there, but it is a very, very big guessing game. And here's the big problem with that. And I used to run into this all the time with clients is that they would do that and not realize that during the week they would do very, very good with the nutrition in terms of, you know, caloric intake. Saturday and Sunday, according to them, they'd be like, well, I just, I went off a little bit. Wasn't that big of a deal? Breakfast and lunch I did like I normally do. And then dinner, I went out with my friends and had a little bit. What isn't that much more? But when we would go there and calculate it all, we would find very consistently, this is a super common thing that the extra calories they had in the weekend made up for all the the calorie deficit they had during the week. So they would end up breaking even or sometimes even eating a little extra because of that weekend and really screwing themselves over. So this is something you cannot get around. And again, we are the biggest proponents of eating healthy the behaviors around food, how food affects your energy levels, your health, your muscles, your hormones, bone, all that different stuff. But you cannot get around the fact that your calories ultimately will determine weight gain or weight loss. And so this is something you need to know. It's an important thing to know. And so one of the first steps that, you know, I tell clients to do one of the most consistent steps, if they're ready, is to learn how to figure that out. Let's start to track your food. Let's start to track and figure that out. Now calories being the big important thing. Now that we've got that out of the way, what makes up those calories largely determines how you feel. So think about it this way, right? You're eating the right amount of calories to accomplish your goal. But what your calories are made up of are not balanced, proteins, fats and carbs. Your your the foods are making you feel either low energy or or irritable or getting more cravings. Is this a good long term strategy? No, it's not a good long term. So when I hear people comparing like, oh, you know, as long as I'm on my calorie deficit, but most I have tons of sugar, that's OK, because I'm still going to lose body fat. Yeah, how do you feel? Right. Eating all that sugar? How do you feel eating in that unbalanced way? Is that something that's going to benefit you long term? No. So again, step number one, figure out your calories, figure out what is known as your BMR, your basal metabolic rate or figure out your total daily energy expenditure. It's otherwise known as TDEE. Now TDEE takes into account how many calories you burn actively on top of your basal metabolic rate, which is your metabolism. So BMR, how many calories you burn just being alive at rest? TDEE counts how many calories you're burning being active on top of that. So that's the best number. And to that point, like this was another one of those paradigm shattering moments for myself. You brought up earlier when the body bug came out. That was like the first, like, like, you know, pretty accurate wearable tool and something that I was floored by was, you know, when you first log in, they like they have they have you fill out all this stuff, like, you know, your weight, your measurements and everything like that. And then ask you your activity level, you know, and I'm like, I'm a fitness professional. I work, you know, I'm working out seven days a week, hard for an hour and so like that. Like I'm highly active, you know, so I'm going to push it all the way over to highly active. Well, after wearing this thing for months on months and even years, what I started to piece together really quick is like, holy shit, based off of what I'm burning for my size and even with my workouts for an hour every single day, I'm still considered somebody sentent. And that was like another one of those holy shit moments for me because in my brain, you know, I, man, I broke a heart sweat today. I trained hard today. I've got to be considered a highly active person. But the problem is if the rest of our day, we aren't very mobile. We're sitting down at a desk and working all day or sitting in a chair and couch and talking on a mic or whatever it may be. You actually have a very sedentary lifestyle, even with that same realization because I factored in that I trained really intense. And so, you know, that had to to plain to the fact that I was very active and to see actually like the trends throughout my day of like how inactive I wasn't sitting in sedentary. It was just very eyeopening and it was shocking to me to think that like, OK, yeah, I do have, you know, this crazy amount of activity just in this one little short window throughout the day. That's not going to carry me the whole rest of the day. And, you know, I have to factor my calories accordingly. No, unless you have a job that is very active. And what I mean by that is like you work construction, blue collar. You're a mail carrier. So you're walking miles and miles every single day. The vast majority of the people listening to the podcast right now, 90 percent or more of you are at most, you know, light activity. Most of us are not very active throughout the day, even if you work out for an hour and a half every single day. If your job is at a desk in your car, if you're maybe just standing but you're not really doing tons of activity, most of us are pretty sedentary. I remember vividly when this all came full circle for me. What client I was training, how it all came to be. And I was training client. Her name was Tony. She'd been with me for a really long time. And she had I had her before the body bug tool came out and then I had her afterwards and she was one of those great clients that like did everything you told them to like your favorite client to train because then you could really really get to challenge yourself and your knowledge of how you could help somebody when somebody does such a good job of giving you the real good feedback. Right. And I remember sitting down with her after it was on a Monday and we had our, you know, a good week of training. And then she had her weekend and then I seen her and we're going over her body bug results like what she'd burned and Cali and everything like that. And I'm looking at the days that I trained her and I know I was I was kicking her ass. She'd been with me for a while now. She was advanced. We had ramped up our intensity, our training. And so even as a coach, I was, you know, guesstimating about OK, when we do this, this is about where we should be. And then she had this like Saturday where she was like double the calories burned. Then what I on the training session I had with her on Wednesday and I was like, what did you do? Are you cheating on me with another trainer? Did you train or did you go for a run forever? She's like, no. She goes and then she starts listening up. Well, you know, I was doing some stuff in the garden and then I actually cleaned the house. It was a beautiful day. And you know, then I had to get some groceries. I had to go to Costco and I forgot something. So I'd go back and she's like starts telling me all. And then she goes, but I didn't get a chance to work out. And I was like, whoa, like her calorie expenditure on a non-workout day in in just this one example was 2X of what it was on an extremely hard training day. And so that really enlightened me like what the discrepancy of people trying to figure out the calories they're burning and intaking can be because she may in her head, those are all like not hard activities for her. That's part of her lifestyle. Now she doesn't do that every single day. But in her brain, just like the way mine would be operating is I would think because I didn't train hard that day. This was a not a high calorie burn day. So those things have got to be figured out and factored in and the tracking piece and figuring it out, you know, and at least following it for a while. So you start to learn your behaviors. I think is extremely essential to somebody who has goals. If you have goals to really move and change your body. You just want to be healthy. You want to make better decisions. You can strength train, make some adjustments in your diet and you could be a pretty quote unquote healthy person. But if you have goals, I want to lose body fat and you're serious about that and you want to change that or you want to build certain amount of muscle. This is, this is tantamount. And to that point too, we, this is why we bring up neat as well. Like in terms of like just like focusing more on your overall activity, like just non-exercise type of activity that you're doing. It's such a more effective approach, you know, to get that change because it's not invasive. It's not something like, I think a lot of people think of when they need to change their body has to be this hard push and this constant hard push where I need to do cardio. I need to do crazy cardio for like an hour, an hour and a half and really rigorous cardio. No, it's so much more effective to that point. Like I've seen the same thing in terms of the activities and trends of people just being up and moving and washing dishes and, you know, going for like light walks and things that are just very reasonable but it's frequent throughout your day. You're gonna have much better success. Yeah, and so, you know, we're talking about basically knowing these, your numbers, figuring out your calories burn that way you can figure out what to eat. And here's the thing, this isn't something that you need to necessarily follow and track forever, okay? I talked earlier about walking in a dark room being blindfolded and knowing your calories, figuring out those estimates, figuring out how much you need to eat. That's like turning the light on, taking off the blindfold. Now you can see where you need to go. But if you walk that room enough times just like in my bedroom at my house, okay? If you turn the lights off in my bedroom, I could find my bed, I could find the bathroom, I could find where my socks are, my underwear, all in the dark. When you do this enough times, you start to learn these things about yourself. But this is a very essential first step. This is a good first step. Now, what if you've been doing this for a long time and you think you know your numbers, but it's been five years since you calculated and figured out your calories burn? It might be a good time to pick it up again. Might be a good time to figure it out again. I know my body pretty well, but every two years or so, maybe even every year, I start to calculate things out a little bit because my lifestyle changes, my workouts change a little bit and I start to reset where I need to go. Now, you can figure out things like TDEE and BMR. There are calculators online. We put one up specifically. We put one up online because a lot of the ones we see online are not super accurate. They're very, very general. We put one up that's a little bit more accurate. It's at maps macro.com. So that way you can go and kind of figure that out. But there's a little more to that. You also want to figure out what those calories should be made up of because it's not just about calories. There's also what those calories are made up of. The next block to figure out are known as macronutrients. The first one we'll start with is protein. Now, protein's very important for anybody who wants to change the way their body looks. Now, besides being an essential macronutrient, meaning you have to consume a certain amount of protein every single day or your body will fail to thrive. Okay, that means that your body, because your body can make certain amino acids. That's what proteins are made up of. It can make some of them, but some of them it just can't make. You have to consume them. Their note is essential amino acids. And if you don't eat them, your body will literally cease to function. So protein is so important. You have to eat some. Doesn't matter who you are. But the reason why it's so important for weight loss and muscle gain is because for weight loss, it's muscle sparing. So if you eat a high protein diet and you're eating low calories, you're gonna lose less muscle. Or if you're lifting weights, you may keep or maybe even build a little bit of muscle. It also is satiating. It helps with appetite control. And if for anybody who's ever cut their calories, they know that the biggest enemy is getting hungry. Well, a high protein diet tends to satisfy that more than fat and carbohydrates. And then for muscle building, for muscle building it's very important because proteins are what your body turns into muscle. And this is what I make clients always focus on first because of that. One, it is essential. You made the case for that already. But most people, if you are trying to lose body fat or build muscle, it plays such a huge role in the success of that for the reasons that you just said right now. You do not just build muscle out of thin air. You need the building blocks for that and protein is essential for that. So it's essential to live and then it's also essential to build muscle. You're not, if you don't eat any protein and you think you're gonna go build muscle, it ain't gonna happen. So that is something that you have to do for that. And most people that I train, and we're not talking about my body building clients, most average people that I've trained are grossly under eating this macronutrient. So when I first get somebody to like work on a macro calculate like this and then we start to figure out where their calories are, the next first thing I focus on is, okay, let's just really focus on you targeting that number that you need for protein and then we'll get to the carbs. Totally. I would say eight or nine out of every 10 clients that I ever trained did well on a high, did better on a high protein diet, eight or nine. Now the one or maybe two, probably one out of 10 that wouldn't do as well on a high protein diet, just because they would start to get some digestive issues in which case we would lower the protein until their digestion felt good. But the vast majority, a high, I don't care if their goal was to lose weight or their goal was to gain weight. I don't care if it was to build strength or get shredded and burn body fat. A high protein diet, nine out of 10 times helped in all those ways we talked about, helped with appetite, helped with building or keeping muscle, helped keep the metabolism fast. Here's one of the problems with cutting your calories when you're trying to burn body fat. As you lower calories, your body tries to learn how to burn less calories because it tries to match the calories coming in. One of the beautiful, amazing things about your body is that it evolved to be moldable. It evolved to be, to adapt. So when your calories are low coming in, your body tries to slow its metabolism burn down to try to match that. Well, a high protein diet along with resistance training on a calorie deficit diet, meaning low calories, when you combine high protein with resistance training and low calories, the metabolism slow down is greatly reduced. It's greatly reduced. It's a much lower impact. And in my experience when I've trained, especially beginners, when I've done it this way, sometimes I even get their metabolism speed up a little bit. Sometimes they cut their calories and then they have to bring their calories up a little bit because the diet and the resistance training actually sped their metabolism up. Now the best sources of protein are animal sources. I don't care what the vegan documentary say. Yes, you can get protein from vegan sources. Yes, you'll be fine with vegan sources of protein, but if you wanna pick the best sources of protein in terms of amino acid profile and ability of your body to assimilate and use them, the studies are pretty conclusive. Animal sources are the best, meaning that 30 grams of animal protein tends to be superior to 30 grams of vegan protein. Now you can definitely get decent vegan sources, especially when they're blended, especially when you have different vegan sources because they complement each other. But typically if you want to reap the benefits of a high protein diet and you're not eating animal sources, you probably need a little bit more protein just to make up the difference. Best sources of protein, red meat, chicken, eggs, if you can tolerate them, have some of the best amino acid profiles, meaning they have the best constituents that make up the proteins, the best balance. Dairy is an excellent also source of protein. And if you are somebody that struggles with getting enough protein, protein powders can help a lot. Now what is high protein? High protein is about 0.7 to one gram per pound of body weight. I like to tell people this, aim for one gram of protein per pound of lean body mass. So in other words, get your body fat percentage, subtract your body fat, now eat one gram per pound of that. So I might, for example, for me, my lean body mass, I might be sitting at 185 pounds of lean body mass. I'm gonna aim for 185 grams of protein every day, regardless of whether or not I wanna gain or lose weight. And what makes this actually, it sounds a little complicated, like you've never done this before, but this is why, and by the way, we've been talking about this for a while, of all the projects that Mind Pump has worked on, this has to be the largest year to date, right? Or since we've started Mind Pump, is building out this pillar page. So it's got a plethora of information that we're talking about. So if there's things that we're saying right now and you want deeper, more information, not only when you go to the calculator page that Sal already mentioned, but there's also all kinds of links and more free content around these topics so you can learn about it. And when you go and you enter in your body fat percentage and your weight, it will figure this out for you. So it'll tell you your lean body mass, and then you just plug in the amount of grams of protein. There's a little- It'll tell you how many calories to eat based on your goal. It's got a nice little slider on there and everything so you can manipulate it a little bit if you wanna be a little lower, a little bit higher, and it does all the math for you. So it makes it very, very easy and user-friendly. Yeah, we have calculators on there that'll give you a good estimate of your basal metabolic rate and will give you an estimate of your total daily energy expenditure so you can kind of figure out how many calories you're burning every single day and then figure out how many grams of proteins, fats and carbs and calories. Speaking of which, we talked about proteins. The next, I would say, most important macronutrient are fats. Like protein, fats are essential. There are essential fatty acids that you have to consume in food. Otherwise, your body will also fail to thrive. So that means you cannot go on a zero fat diet. You can't do that. You saw, have you guys ever seen that show alone? Yeah, okay. So this guy, he killed a moose, which that's a ton of me. That could last you like an entire year, but he stripped it down of all this fat and a Wolverine came and took all the fat and he ended up basically starving while he had all this excess of meat. So it is an essential thing your body needs to, as a building block for everything. Oh yeah, hunters in the old days in the Midwest, they would go crazy, lose their mind, sometimes die because all they would be able to hunt and kill sometimes were lean jackrabbits. So they weren't able to get enough fat in their diet. All they had was protein and some of them, you literally starve to death. You have to have fat in your diet just to survive. Well, the analogies you guys just brought up are extreme analogies, but I remember this was especially in the first five years of my career because we were still right in the thick of the low fat thing. Oh yeah. I mean, that when everything was being marketed to us was low fat, low fat, low fat. And now I saw this both in male and female, but I saw it really bad in my female clients and this was before I knew all of this and I was still bought into the low fat type of diet too. And I had a lot of clients, I had a lot of female clients that had hormone issues. And it was because they were eating such a low fat diet that they had all these problems going on. And I just assumed like, man, I just keep getting these ladies that have got hormone issues. That's so weird. Is that just that common? I didn't know that what was causing it for so many of these women that I was training was that they were grossly under consuming fats. And that was one of the first like game changers for me was piecing that all together. And then after I figured out protein, just like you said, this is the next place I go is okay, now let's look at your fat and make sure you're getting adequate grams of fat per day because of the hormonal benefits. And what I would notice right away, I mean, they would see things in their hair, their skin, their mood would be better. So they would energy would come up right away. They'd be sleeping better, strength we'd be putting on. All these things started to happen just by me like hitting a client and going like, oh, let's just boost your 20 more grams of fat. As it would be almost double of what they're used to. And if you'd be eating 25 grams, 30 grams of fat in a day, me giving them 50 would be like a huge game changer. In my experience, most people do best if their fat as a percentage of their calories doesn't go below 20%, 15% at the lowest. Okay, so if you're looking at your total calories, try not to eat less than maybe 20, 15% at the lowest. If you're somebody that tends to thrive off of higher carbs, wants a little bit less fat, 15% would be the lowest I'd say, but about 20%, for most of my clients is what they did best. Now, if you're having trouble figuring this out again, you can go to our site maps macro.com and then what you do is when it figures out your calories, you can slide the percentage so you can say, okay, 20% fat from my calories, that's what my fat grams are gonna be. But remember, fat, very important for hormone production and health, nerve production health. Your brain, your brain thrives off of fats. It's built off of fats. They're very, very important. Good sources of fat, healthy animal sources of fat are perfectly fine. Eggs are perfectly fine, dairy is perfectly fine, but you also have great vegan sources of fat, avocados, coconut, oil, nuts and seeds, olive oil, also excellent, excellent sources of healthy fat. The best sources of fat, in my opinion, come from fish. Fish have some amazing fatty acid profiles. I had so much success with increasing my clients' fat intake early on and it was such a game changer for me that what I started to do was, okay, still, we made protein, the number one macro. First, we focused on it and we nailed that down and that was roughly 20% of their intake. Then what I would do is I would actually play with the remaining percentage, the other 80% and I would divide it with carbs and fat and let them play. Sometimes I'd say, hey, let's have more carbs today and see how you feel and then let's get feedback. So let's let you have 60% of the intake come from carbohydrates and only 20% come from fat. And then the next day I'd say, hey, let's do 60% fat and only 20% carbs and I would ask for my client to give me feedback. How did you feel? How was your workout? How was your sleep? And like trying to help them connect that. And what I found was a lot of my clients actually thrived in a nice more even split and did really, really well. Like unless they were like an athlete where they needed a lot of that quick sugar from carbohydrates, most of my clients actually did really well by dividing the percentage up between fats and carbs for the rest of the makeup of their calories. And that's what's cool about this calculator is you can slide that, right? You can slide it, but it makes it really easy for you to say, okay, look, let's today, let's try me having a higher percentage of fat and you just slide it up five or 10%. It'll take it away from the other one. It'll take it away from the carbs and then it'll naturally give you the count. It's super cool how this works and it really helps you by yourself. If you don't have a coach, if you don't have a trainer who's doing your diet for you, it'll teach you how you can manage and manipulate that. And I, and personally, I do this all the time where I notice that on days when I'm not training, I like to have higher fat days. And I do that because it satiates me more and it doesn't kick and I don't need the quick fuel because I'm not exercising, right? And I'm more sedentary on the days you're not training. Right, I actually like, which is seems counter, right? Cause most people would think, oh God, you're not moving around very much, maybe lower fat that day. No, not at all. I actually like more fat on the days that I'm not moving as much. I'm not exercising in lower carbohydrates. On my days when I'm training hard or I'm going for a big hike or something like that, that's when I allow more carbohydrates because I want that quick fuel because I'm gonna be exercising and I feel better that way. So that's what's neat about this calculator is you guys have the ability to manipulate that up and down to figure out what your body feels best. Totally. Now we talked about carbs, let's get into carbs here. Carbohydrates are not essential, okay? That means you could go the rest of your life without eating a single carbohydrate. It wouldn't be ideal, but you'd be fine. Your body would function just fine. It could produce all of the glucose that it needs through the amino acids and fats that you'll be consuming. It'll produce energy through the fats, through something known as ketones. So you don't have to eat carbs at all in order to survive. But does that mean that you shouldn't? And I'm gonna say no. I'm gonna say, sure, some people do well. I'm very, very low carbohydrate diets, but most people don't. Carbohydrates- Not long-term. No, not long-term. Most people perform best when they have some carbohydrates. If you wanna build muscle, very hard to do. In my experience, again, this is with training lots of people, and I'm not saying this is true for everybody, but for most of the people I've worked with, it's very hard to build muscle and strength on a very, very low carbohydrate diet. Very, very low carbohydrate diets can also cause hormone problems in some people. It can cause cortisol issues in women. It can, believe it or not, cause insulin issues. You think, oh, insulin will be good on low carbohydrates, but sometimes being too low all the time causes you to become so sensitive that you eat the slightest bit of carbohydrate and it looks like you have diabetes. So every once in a while, throwing in carbohydrates is a good idea there as well. And that's, you have to keep this into consideration because I know it's, and I'm glad you went this direction, Sal, because the ketogenic diet and the carnivore diet is so popular right now and there's people that are raving all about it. And hey, you know what, if it works for you and that's a lifestyle you like to live long-term, that's fine, but you gotta be careful because if you get used to that, you teach your body to actually utilize different sources of fuel, and then if all of a sudden you have a weekend or a birthday come up. It's gonna tip the scale like crazy. Yes, and you splurge on carbohydrates just this one day, but because you've been so consistent with having little to none, and then all of a sudden you have a day to go over. Now your body ends up piling that on more than it would had you been used to being able to metabolize carbohydrates. Oh, the biggest swings I've ever seen in my entire life with clients were the ones that went from no carb or low carb diets to then trying to eat a more balanced diet and then just going so way off. And you see their weight go in the opposite direction because those carbs triggered such a strong hunger response. They started holding water and their bodies didn't respond very well to it because it was all at once. So yeah, it's a little extreme to go low or no carb long term. There's even some studies that show that sometimes women can have thyroid issues from going low carb for too long. So there are some cases where low or no carb is perfectly fine. I know there are people with gut health issues that do well with this, some autoimmune issues that do well. Aging populations, they get cognitive performance boost when their carbs are real low and their fats are real high. So I'm not saying this is true for everyone, but for the most people, you want to have some carbohydrates in your diet. Well, I think too, that's where you need to do some detective work personally and kind of like cycle through like the different variations of carbohydrates, which ones are best for you to digest. And I know that that's a big factor in performance as well is like how well I can digest this food and if I have like any reaction, if I have any bloat, anything else that I sort of get as a byproduct of that. So carbs themselves, they're not the demons that, a lot of these other methods are promoting. It's just a matter of like how your individual body is gonna respond. Right, now carbs can, for me they are, they're a trigger for hunger. So I know when I'm trying to get leaner, I don't tend to go zero carb, but I'll go lower carb mainly because it helps control my appetite. Carbohydrates should increase, they tend to make me hunger. But if I'm trying to build muscle, I use that to my advantage and I eat a little bit more carbs to boost my appetite and of course I said earlier, I do notice strength gains. Now the best sources of carbs are the unprocessed sources of carbohydrates. The ones that don't come in a box or a bag or a wrapper. Fruits are fine, starchy vegetables, fine. White rice is my favorite source of carbohydrate. It's very, very easy for me to digest. It's gluten containing carbs sometimes cause people problems. I know they do for me. So I tend to stay away from breads and cereals and pastas that contain gluten. But for other people, those are perfectly fine. In my experience, training clients, rice and potato and sweet potato tend to be the easiest digesting kind of best sources of carbohydrates. Fruits are good too, but in my experience you can overdo fruit and I don't mean it in the sense that they're bad for your health. I mean in terms of digestion. You ever eat a ton of fruit all at once? You know exactly what I'm talking about. So the hack for fruit for me was learning about the different types of fruits, the benefits that come from them and figuring out how to recommend that client. So I would tell clients that really enjoy fruit, want it in their diet, I like it in their diet, it's good. I like berries. I would tell them- Oh, high fiber. Yes, it's high fiber, high antioxidants, low calorie. So it's like the triple threat for you. Like when you dabble in things like apples, bananas, pears, all these things are great watermelons but you don't get nowhere near the bang for your buck when you consume those fruits. And so I'm not gonna demonize or say those ones aren't good. They're good, they're fine. But you get way more value from going after berries. And so I would typically push clients towards the berries when they're eating fruits and maybe we have the occasional apple pear, things like that, as I like to treat for them. But their staple fruit in their diet will be all the different types of berries that I found the most value. Right, so quick recap. Figure out your goal. You wanna gain or you wanna lose. Determine what your calories burned are so you know how many calories to consume. Figure out your protein. High protein works best for most people. And then fats and carbs you can mess with those a little bit. There are essential amount of fats that you need to eat but aside from that, you can play around with it a little bit. Now if you go to mapsmacro.com we have different macro calculators. We have calculators that can tell you your BMR, your total daily energy expenditure. Then we have ones that'll just tell you here's the calories you need to eat, here's what your proteins need to be at, here's what your fats need to be at, here's where your carbohydrates are at. Set the protein to one gram of protein per pound of lean body mass and then have fun messing with the carbs and the fats and see how you feel, see how you respond. And then here's my next piece of advice. Follow those numbers and based on how your body responds tweak them to make them as individualized as possible because there's always an individual variance. The most accurate calculators in the world and I believe the ones that we have on our site are some of the best ones. We really did our due diligence in figuring out the best algorithms. No matter how accurate they are there's always an individual variance. So as you're following the guidelines and you're watching your weight on the scale change and your body change, if things are happening too fast bump your calories up or change things around based on how you feel because at the end of the day nutrition is extremely, extremely individualized. And look, mind pump is audio and video recorded. So you may be listening to us through your headphones or in your car but you can actually watch us on YouTube as well. Go to YouTube, Mind Pump Podcast, go check it out. I mentioned the macro calculators we have that's at mapsmacro.com and then if you wanna check us out on Instagram you can find all of us. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin you can find me at Mind Pump Sal Adam at Mind Pump Adam and Doug at Mind Pump Doug.