 In this episode of Mind Pump, we talk all about things you can do to help yourself lose weight that don't involve counting calories or for that matter, counting macros. First off, we talk about why calories are important, why they do matter, why macros matter, but then we get into the things you can do that have nothing to do with counting calories or macros that we've found in our experience training clients for decades that has a tremendous beneficial effect. We actually came up with five things you can do. The first one talks about drinking water, the second one talks about changing how you eat, the logistics, not just, I'm not talking about what you're eating, but literally change how you eat. We talk about eating more protein and vegetables, how your sleep affects your appetite, and then we talk about heavily processed foods. Any one of those steps will probably result and weight loss for most listeners combine one or more of them together and you'll find yourself having even more success. Now this episode is also brought to you by one of our favorite sponsors, Legion. Now Legion supplements are made by our good friend, Mike Matthews. All of these supplements include scientifically backed ingredients and doses, so there isn't a single ingredient in these products that doesn't have extensive literature supporting them from studies. Full transparency, all of us products, if you look at the label, you know exactly how much of each ingredient is in there, so there's no proprietary blends. Every product is sweetened naturally. There are no artificial sweeteners. Another reason why we like Legion, honest marketing. He doesn't sell baloney. He doesn't tell you false dreams. He's very, very honest with their advertising. And of course all of his products come with a 100% money back guarantee. 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It's one of our most popular programs by far in fact. Again, it's 50% off. Here's how you get that discount. Go to mapshit.com, that's M-A-P-S-H-I-I-T dot com and use the code HIT50, H-I-I-T-5-0, no space for the discount. You know, yesterday I was approached by our staff to write an article on a subject because of the questions that we get from some of our listeners. And the question that they get is what do I do if macro counting or calorie counting doesn't work for me or is too hard? Now I remember that being an issue when I was a trainer. I remember with a lot of clients, oftentimes the first steps were not counting macros and calories because it was for, especially for people who were beginners into this whole thing, it's a difficult thing to kind of grasp and it can cause, for some people, it can actually cause bad food relationships. Yeah, even just starting with calories and knowing what your maintenance calories are. That was always like a difficult thing because you just get some generic formula that people are trying to plug their information into and it's just not very realistic. And they don't realize how much their dietary habits change on a daily basis and what the average of that really is. Well, it really depends on to who I'm talking to, right? When you're talking to a person aspiring to be a competitor one day and you're gonna have to get on stage one day and present your physique, the value of calculating calories and macros is extremely high. I mean, you're competing at the highest level and those details are extremely important. Oh, a half percent could be between first place and fifth place. Yeah, exactly. So that's a no brainer to me, but when you're it's a very small fraction of the population, exactly. It is. And the other thing to consider is that calories have been on the back of food now for decades. We've been telling people that, look at the label, look at the calories, try to eat X amount of calories. And we're only eating fatter. Yeah, and it doesn't seem to be working for people. Now, I don't wanna, I do wanna be clear. I don't want to confuse people into thinking that calories are not important. Calories are still very important. In fact, there is one rule in weight loss or weight gain or weight maintenance that you cannot get around. You absolutely can't get around this. And it's actually a law of physics, meaning it's a constant law throughout the universe as long as far as we know, but definitely here on earth, which is energy cannot be created nor destroyed. So what that means is you can't just create energy out of nothing and you can't destroy energy so that it disappears. It gets transferred. So if your body's gaining body fat, you're not gaining body fat out of nowhere, your body has to take energy from somewhere else to create that body fat. And that comes in the form of excess calories. So when you eat too much, those extra calories are stored into body fat. Now, on the flip side, your body doesn't just burn body fat for no reason. It burns body fat because it doesn't have enough calories to fuel your body. So you can't burn body fat if your calories are too high. And this matters regardless of the diet. In fact, all diets that cause weight loss. I don't care what diet it is. You can go from the reasonable, like the Mediterranean diet to the extreme and crazy, like carnivore diets or even crazier, the whatever, celery juice diet or whatever. All diets that cause weight loss, whatever diet you've ever done, if it caused weight loss, it was because you were consuming less calories than your body would be burning. Whatever form it is, you're reducing your calories at the end of the day. That's right. So that's why calories are extremely important. Now back to what I was saying before, we've had calorie counts on food for a long time. And for a lot of people, now for some people it works, but for a lot of people it just doesn't work. And in fact, for some people, just looking at calories can cause problems can cause them a little bit of obsession or they see what they can squeeze into their calorie count and then their diet becomes actually worse. I've actually seen clients do this where they'll cut their calories, but you'll look at the foods that they're eating and they're not the best choices or they'll remove food so they could drink alcohol to make up for the difference in calories. Actually that was a quite common one. Like when I'll tell somebody, hey, let's remove alcohol from your diet. I'll be like, no, I'll just eat less food. They kind of miss in the whole point of this. So calories are definitely very, very important. Macros are also very important. And if you're in the fitness space, you've probably heard of people saying count your macros or did you hit your macro target? Or our calorie isn't a calorie. Right, macros stands for macronutrients. So short for macronutrients. Macronutrients, there's three of them. There's proteins, fats and carbohydrates. Now those are important as well. So calories are important, but macronutrients are also important. By the way, macronutrients are what make up the calories. So protein and carbohydrates, four calories per gram. So every gram of protein, every gram of carbohydrates equals four calories. Every gram of fat equals nine calories. So fat is more calorically dense per gram than protein and fat. Now those are important as well, especially protein and fat. Protein and fat are especially important because there are essential amounts of either one of those that you need to consume. Meaning if you don't eat enough protein, there's a minimum requirement. Or if you don't eat enough fat, you don't eat the minimum requirement of either one of those. Your body will fail to thrive. And in extreme cases, you might not even live. You need to eat two of those because your body can't create certain amino acids from proteins from itself. And you can't create certain fatty acids. You have to consume them. Carbohydrates, they can be important depending on your goals, but in terms of survival, you could go zero forever with carbohydrates. Only macronutrient you can do that with. You can go forever without them and you'll probably be okay. You can survive without them. You couldn't consume them, in other words. Back to the calories. One of the main reasons why it became such a popular thing to cut fat out of your diet in the past. The high calorie. That's right. If I cut 10 grams of fat out of my diet, I've cut 90 calories. If I cut 10 grams of carbs or proteins out, I've only cut 40 calories. So the strategy back in the day was, hey, look, we know calories, if we take in less calories and we burn, we'll lose weight. Why don't we just tell people to reduce fat? It's easy. It'll cut the most calories. And on paper, it makes sense. Didn't work though. Do you think that, yeah, for fat being so satiating? Yeah, exactly. Do you think that was the original strategy of why we demonized fat? Do you think it's because of the high calorie intake? Part of it. That was part of it. Then they had the seven, I think it was called the seven country study that came out. Where the cherry picked it. Was it Dr. Ansel Keyes, I believe his name was? Yeah. He just left out the other countries. Yeah, he studied a bunch. Conveniently. He just studied a bunch of countries and looked at the data, tried to figure out why heart disease was rising in developed nations, took out the two countries that didn't follow the same pattern, only included the other seven, and said, hey, it's saturated fat and it's fat. And then of course, when you look at arteries that are clogged, what clogs the arteries is fat. So it all kind of made sense. It became a big public policy by the US government, plus fat was calorically dense. Everybody cut fat, food manufacturers started making foods that were less fat. They're buying less fat. Subsidized corn. And we kept getting fat. Sugar, all that stuff. The irony of that is what Justin brought up, which anybody who's followed a ketogenic diet or a carnivore type diet would attest to this, that it's actually, it's harder than you think to over consume just on fat. Oh man. Pairing fat with carbohydrates, different stories. Sure. Right, if you're eating carbs and fat, yeah, you can overeat fat easily, but I would attribute a lot of that to the carbohydrate intake and not so much the fat intake. Anytime that I've ran a diet that's like high or unfat, like a ketogenic diet or like a carnivore type of style, the struggle I always had was actually building on it, was getting enough calories in to build muscle and sustain the amount of exercise that I was doing, because you get a couple, you know, it's for maybe a day or two, or it sounds amazing just to have steak or to eat lots of butter. To eat eggs, bacon, and avocado, and you're not gonna, you don't want to eat for another four or five hours. Yes, yes, exactly. No, it's funny. And people kept getting fatter, so then we blamed it on carbs, and then people cut carbs, and food started coming out that were low carb, and people kept getting fatter. And this goes back to the original point, which is overeating at the end of the day, regardless of what your food comes from, you're gonna gain body fat. So the big, big problem is overeating. Now, that doesn't mean that food quality doesn't matter. It definitely does. In fact, food quality contributes to overeating. We'll get to that later in the episode, I'm sure. But at the end of the day, I don't care what your diet is. If you eat too much or more than you burn, which is too much, then you're going to gain body fat. Now, it's popular to count macros in the fitness space, just to, hey, just hit your protein, fat, and carbohydrates, put the foods in that fit that, and that'll work. And that can be a good strategy. There are pitfalls to that, too. I've encountered quite a few people who become obsessed about that and get real creative at finding ways to squeeze in junk food or whatever into their diet so long as it fits their protein, fat, and carbohydrate model or whatever. You know what I find really funny is I was watching you when you were taking notes for this blog, as far as what you were gonna write, and the points that you're making for the strategies for weight loss without counting calories. It's really funny to me how many of those strategies are like these old-ass things that used to be said forever that you should do, that we kind of scoffed at as young trainers. I remember that. And I feel really like doing an episode like this when we talk like this, it kind of also always reminds me of what a terrible trainer I was back in the days because we would take some of this basic-type advice, which we'll go over today, and we used to kind of shit on it because, oh, this new study came out to show that this is more effective to do this and that what is just water or sleep, that's not a big deal. This is where we need to be focused on. And the irony of that is that these kind of really basic principles are really important. And if most people spent more time kind of focusing on that, it's funny on how many of them would kind of just fall into suit where they should be caloric. Totally, if you have to consider, you're working with humans here, you have to consider their psychology. You have to consider the human behaviors and psyche. I'll give you an example. There was a study done years ago on a small town that passed a law that told all of its restaurants that they had to post calorie counts on all their foods because the town was suffering from an obesity issue, just like most towns in America. And they thought, okay, people need more information. If we just put the calories up, then people will know to choose the salad over the burger or whatever because they'll get less calories. So they ran this study for a little while and what they ended up finding was that people were actually eating more calories because they were posting calories. Now on the surface, it doesn't make any sense. You think to yourself, well, why would they eat more? But let's consider human psyche for a second. Consider the average person looking at a menu who's hungry, okay? Think of yourself, when you're hungry, what kind of psyche are you working with when you're hungry? Now imagine you're looking at a menu. Imagine you're not a fitness expert. You're not a fitness fanatic. You're the average person. Maybe you're listening right now and you are an average person. You're hungry, you're looking at the menu. You see the super tasty cheeseburgers, 800 calories. You look at the boring ass grilled chicken sandwich. It's 600 calories. Are you going to say, oh, I'll take the 200 calorie deficit so I can go 600? Or are you gonna say, wow, that's only 200 more calories. I'll go with the burger. I'll do the burger without the fries. That's exactly what happens. Exactly. People were making choice, the bigger choice because to them, they're looking at going, that's only a few more hundred calories. Not a big deal. And consider this, when it comes to how we eat, is our eating at all often logical? It's almost never logical. It's almost always behavior, emotion, context, who we're with, cravings, all that kind of stuff. So this is why calories and macros are important information but it's also why counting calories and counting macros has just never worked long term for most everyday people. So I think what would probably be good is if we went through, and this took me a long time to learn as a trainer, it took me, I don't know, five to 10 years, a long time where I finally sat down and said, okay, giving my clients meal plans, giving them calories, giving them all, you know, proteins, fats and carbs. It only works in the short term. It never works in the long term. It wasn't really the lack of information. And I think where we're at now, like it's all available. I think now it's really about figuring out your own behaviors and your own patterns and really like honing in on how to add something small that you're not really gonna notice right away that's gonna have massive impact. Totally. Now here's the first one. And this one was funny to me because I actually, on accident, introduced this to my client. So, you know, the listeners, if you've been listening for a while, you know that I started working out because I wanted to build muscle. So I looked up to bodybuilders in my early days of working out. And bodybuilders always talked about drinking lots of water, a gallon of water every single day because it fills out your muscles, it gives you better pumps, improves your recovery and strength. So I became an advocate for drinking a lot of water. So even in the early days when I was giving clients macro targets and all that stuff, I would always say to them, I want you to drink a half a gallon to a gallon of water every day. And what I would say is, when you go to work or whatever, take your gallon, bring it with you and use a clear container and watch it. And just, I don't care what else you do, whatever, just drink that throughout the whole day. And without all that, this naturally would happen. Very, very, on its own, people would start to report less and less calories to me. And what I noticed is, when you drink a gallon of water a day, you don't drink too much other stuff. Well, yeah, you're busy. You're busy. You're busy, this is why it's one of my, and I know that on this show, even we've razzed, I haven't, the other two guys have, razzed the bodybuilder guy who carries the gallon jug around and stuff, but I'm a huge advocate for it for this exact reason. And you know, it's another one that you don't think about that ends up happening, especially for a guy like me, who doesn't have a small bladder. I probably go to the restroom, probably 10 more times in a day when I force myself to drink a gallon. Automatically more steps. Automatically, automatically more steps. And then two, I'm also, my mouth is busy. It's busy trying to make sure I get all that water in for the day, and it's not throwing snacks and other things. And you'd be surprised how many times we think we're hungry, but we're really thirsty. That's actually a huge one. If, oftentimes, when you're dehydrated or your body wants water, you'll reach for food that has been established. Here's another one. I mean, here's the other thing about it, I said earlier. People aren't drinking juices, sodas, or flavored drinks. And you think, well, that's not that big of a deal. Actually it is. The average American consumes generally about eight to 10% of the calories from drinks. So if you're an average American, and let's say you're consuming, I don't know, 2,500 to 3,000 calories a day, right? Cut 10% off the top because you're not drinking your calories. That's 250 to 300 calories out of your day just because you're drinking too much water to worry about drinking. Yeah, I wonder too, with those flavored drinks, if that doesn't just still promote like you're craving for an actual food as a result of wanting to taste more flavors. They sure do. When they do studies on artificially flavored, because you might be listening, thinking, oh, I'll drink that, but I'll just do... My brush here. Right, like zero calorie drinks or whatever, but they still have flavor. Yeah, studies are pretty conclusive on this. Unless everything's completely controlled and the person's only given the food that they can eat, whatever, in the real world. When people substitute their sugar drinks for their artificially flavored drinks, they don't lose any weight because they naturally consume more food as a result because it stimulates your appetite. Their appetite's stimulating and they do change our cravings for more palatable food. So the key here is not to think I'm not gonna drink anything else. You didn't have to do that. Just try and drink a gallon of water every single day and watch what happens. Naturally, and that was the thing. I would see my clients just naturally drink tons of water but naturally stop drinking as many other calories from other foods. Well, haven't they linked things too to dehydration with slowing down the metabolism too? Isn't there some value to just staying hydrated for metabolic reasons too? Yeah, now that's a smaller effect, but if you were to add that up over time, it definitely would have- No, it's just one more. Again, it's just one more little thing that just continues to add value to why you do that. And again, it's this old thing that we've been saying forever that has went out of favor for me as a trainer early on and then it's something that I've now has become like a staple thing that I tell clients. By the way, here's some side effects of that. If you ever suffer from irregular bowel movements, constipation, drink a gallon of water a day, oftentimes that solves a problem. Here's the other one, your skin. The number one comment I would get from my female clients when they would start drinking a half to a gallon of water a day is they'd come and tell me how much better their skin looked. It looked younger. Well, it was just dehydrated before. Which causes more wrinkles and it gives it that different look. Now, when should you be concerned about adding electrolytes in terms of your activity and seeing that in terms of your loss of fluid? If you're drinking distilled water, not a good idea. Definitely not. Yeah, distilled water has no minerals. Yeah, drink regular water, mineral water, if you don't need to add electrolytes if you're doing that. If you're drinking distilled water, not a good idea. Drink a gallon of distilled water a day, you might cause yourself some problems, some big health problems. So I'd stick to mineral water, regular water. And if you season your food normally, you're probably fine. The only people I would ever have add electrolytes are endurance athletes or people who really sweat, like construction workers. Serious activity like this, yeah. Yeah, I would have clients who were in construction, I'd tell them to put like a pinch of sea salt. Or you're down like in that serious humidity and heat and you're just constantly losing, sweating it out. Totally, totally. Now, here's another one, changing how people eat. Now I don't mean changing the foods you eat, I mean the logistics of how you eat. This one cracked me up as an early trainer. I would have laughed at this for at least the first 10 years, I was a personal trainer. But telling, here's a big one, this one, I learned this myself not that long ago. Don't drink any fluids while you eat. Not drinking fluids while you eat actually makes you eat less. And the reason, you gotta chew your food more. It's really annoying at first. I'm gonna go ahead and say that firsthand. I think there's one that's, we're watching accelerate before eyes that's extremely important, that one I also probably scoffed at years ago that I think is really, and I catch myself doing it all the time is watching television or being on my phone while I eat. Such a simple thing that if you were to discipline yourself that eating time is for eating time, separate that from your social scrolling or even if you're justifying as work that you're doing or entertaining yourself and just eat, what a difference that is. It's really easy for me to be sitting on the couch, watching my favorite show or something and watching myself just kind of at a habit, picking into something and continuing to eat and shovel food into my mouth. And so not allowing yourself to eat while watching TV or be on your phone while you're sitting down there and eating. Yeah, even training clients, I would find myself in between like going from one gym to the other because I used to drive across town, not having much time. So just like trying to cram it in as I'm driving and just getting caught in that sort of pickle where later on I figured out, like if I don't have the time for it, I just, I probably shouldn't eat and eat later and like really concentrate on the quality and slow down so I can eat my meal. Right, so the brain, the body receives signals when you're eating that tell it you're eating, we're getting enough food. Okay, now let's send out the hormones and chemicals that say we don't wanna eat anymore, okay? Part of that is chewing your food, chewing your food sends a signal. Saliva production sends a signal. Obviously the food that you swallow, that goes in your gut sends a signal, but so does observing the food. The fact that you're watching yourself eat it is part of that signaling process. There was a report that was published in 2013 of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and they looked at a bunch of different studies on distracted eating and they found that being distracted tended to make people eat more at every meal. It also was linked to paying attention to the food and excuse me, was linked to eating less later on. So when people paid attention to eating, they ate less while they ate and they also ate less later on. When people were distracted, they ate more both times. So it actually makes a significant difference and what's cool about this is it's, just like the first one, you're not necessarily taking foods out and getting complicated. You're not weighing, you're not measuring, you're not counting anything, you're not making a big, you're not telling yourself I can't have something. All you're saying is be fucking present when you eat. That's it, don't turn on the TV, don't turn on the phone, sit down, don't drink any water and eat. Now, there's another way and this one's really funny but it's got several studies to back it up and I've tested it and it for sure works. Eat a little Vanity Mirror. No, watch yourself. It's food, look at you. Yeah. This one works actually exceptionally well and I think it's because it causes us to again have to become aware and pay attention and that is to eat your food with your non-dominant hand. Oh, this is like the tip I gave you the other day about the switch hand, right? Switching back and forth. It's again, it just makes you hyper aware, right? You could, because you could technically be sitting down eating, not having a phone and not having a TV in front of you. It'd be lost in thought. Right, be lost in thought, be distracted doing something else but try eating with your non-dominant hand or switching between bites every single time and it just makes you hyper present. Yeah, I've had, I've actually tracked clients use these techniques of eating differently, not having fluids, eating with a non-dominant hand, not being distracted and usually on average, that alone would equate to about one to 200 calories a day less, which people are like, that's not a lot of, no, that's significant. Do that throughout the whole year. You're talking about pounds and pounds and pounds of body fat from a very, very simple thing and these were people that didn't tell them to change what they were eating. I didn't say changing anything else. I literally said, let's change how you eat, the logistics of it. And the reason why all these things that I think are so important is because more than anything else, it makes us become aware. Even if it's not something you, like I don't eat right now, like some of these tips we're gonna give, like it's not like every single time I eat, I switch hands. But because I've done techniques like this, because I've taught these things, it's made me extremely aware on my habits and my behaviors and what I'm capable of. Like I brought up the other day, like, man, it really easily, pay attention when the next time you eat, if you're not someone who's ever tried any of these things, how often you are already cutting and the next bite is shoveling in before you finish swallowing the last one? Even just putting the food on my plate, I know for, this is such a like a duh kind of a thing. Like I used to eat with these huge plates and just like that behavior of me just like grabbing some rice or putting, making sure like I'm filling the plate up like just subconsciously, I wanted it wanted it to feel like the plate was filled and so just having like a smaller version of that and just like replacing my huge plates was just something a bit smaller, tended to help a little bit with the portion size. They actually did a study on that and they showed that people consistently ate less because the plate was smaller. Yeah, so simply, yeah, just like shrink it down. What a great business idea, the weight loss plate. We'll look at what the average dish plates are, we'll make it one inch smaller, Doug. Yeah, this is brilliant. Fill your plate up, you can eat whatever you want. It just has to fit right there. People get creative and they'll start stacking stuff up. Yeah, yeah, all vertically on top. Here's another one that I like and this one, Adam is a big, huge advocate. It's actually one of the ones you typically will bring up when we talk about this topic, Adam. And this is that to rather than take away from your diet because the psychology that happens when you're restricting, when you're taking away, it tends to cause you to want to rebel. Anything that gets taken away or anytime you deny, if it feels like you're denying yourself something, you want to come back and rebel, you want to overdo it the next time. And so diets tend to contribute to that, right? I'm cutting everything out and then when you go off the diet you binge and go in the complete opposite direction. But rather than cutting away, why not start by adding? It's total counterintuitive, right? You want to lose weight, rather than cutting food out, let's start by adding healthy foods, namely protein, and I like lean proteins for this particular one, proteins and vegetables. Now, why would adding more chicken breast and lean steak and vegetables, why would that be a good, how would that help people when they're trying to get leaner? Well, what ends up happening, which is so great, is that's why it's, I mean, I don't remember what point in my career that I figured this out, but it was a game, we talked about game changer, pivotal moments, paradigm shattering moments. This is for sure one of those as a coach trainer that I pieced together way later in my career, that when I stopped telling clients they can't do something and I just started to give them, and what's great is they don't even know you're doing it to them. Like, so like right now I'm helping somebody with their diet and I'm all, same process with everybody, I start them off with, I tell them, listen, and she's like tripping out because she's like, well, I can go have all that, you said I can have, I said, yeah, whatever you want, eat normal. Whatever normal looks like for you, don't restrict anything, and then I'm like, we're almost on her seventh day of food, right? And I can see what her average calories is, I can see kind of where she's at, and the very first thing that she's gonna get from me is, and I already know, so she's challenged on Saturday and Sunday, which is super common, right? She had a big old bowl of chips and salsa, she had a drink on Sunday fun day with her girlfriends, and then she had some sweets on the other day. So instead of me saying you can't have any of those things, I'm gonna give her this goal. On Saturdays and Sundays, I'm gonna tell her I want you to have a giant chicken salad and then I want you to have a bowl of your favorite vegetables, Brussels sprouts, spinach, whatever you want, and that's all I want you to do for now. And I know she's gonna trip out, she hasn't even got this from me yet, but what I know is that when you do that, all of a sudden it leaves less room for that other shit, but she won't be focused on Adam said I can't have chips, Adam said I can't have this, I can't, she'll be focused on oh, I just need to make sure I get what he said in the day and what I know naturally ends up happening is it ends up replacing something else, which is normally less likely. It starts altering their palate a bit too, so it's like you start to naturally crave these types of nutrients through these types of foods and it brings that to attention in your diet and I think people start to seek those out a lot more. Well and then to that point, then the follow up as a coach for me is I get her to do those things and then I follow up with questions like, how do you feel? How do you feel today? Like the next day and stuff like that and I start making the connect, like oh man I felt really good, I slept really great or I have lots of energy today. It's like, see you are missing, we weren't getting enough fiber or we weren't getting enough lean protein in your diet. See what happens when you feed the body, how much better and more productive you are. Now she makes that connection not to like, oh when I say no to these bad things, this is why I'm skinnier or feel better, no it's when I make you eat the things that your body needs and wants, look at what it makes you feel like and then what that does is it switches their thought process into this like, I can't or can't thing and like, oh I want these things in my diet. Oh shit. It's sort of the punishment sort of attitude towards it. And then they start seeking after more of that in their diet, it changes the psychology of everything. Well protein, well foods also have what's called a thermic effect and now what that means is that in order to take food, turn it into calories or excuse me, turn those calories into energy, actually cost energy to do that in the body and the body's pretty efficient at doing this but not all foods and macronutrients are created equal in this regard. Protein has the highest thermic effect. I think the thermic effect is something like 20 or 30% higher for protein than it is for fat or non-fibrous carbohydrates meaning if you eat the theoretically and some studies have actually shown this, theoretically if you eat the same amount of calories with two diets but one was very high protein and the others were made up of let's say more carbs and more fats, the high protein diet people tend to lose more weight because the body burns more calories processing and turning that protein into energy. So it's just also, it's a- A small effect but over time may add up. Yes, yes and same thing with fibers why I said vegetables, fibers also have a high thermic effect. They actually burn more calories to turn into energy than other types of foods. These are also two things that are grossly under consumed by the average person. Not when I'm talking about the hardcore gym goer, bodybuilder, competitor person but the average client is normally lacking in lean protein and veggies which is and I know this whole episode is geared around things to do without tracking calories but I've had tons of success with actually just telling clients to only track that. Only track protein. Protein, that's all I want you to do. Here's how many grams of protein I want every day and just make sure you hit that and I would tell them like, okay, our goal is to make sure we have a nice balance of chicken, fish, steak and eggs. So I'd say you try and mix that up and I'd watch that but as far as just tracking grams of protein, I've seen clients have tons of success just from following that macronutrient because it's such an under consuming. Yeah and it's the most satiating. In other words, it satisfies you and it blunts hunger more than any other macronutrient. In fact, the number one comment I would get from clients when I would do exactly that Adam, I'd tell them, okay, I want you to hit, you know, let's say I have a female client's 170 pounds and I'd say I want you to 140 grams of protein and it has to come from food where I'm not gonna let you cheat and drink protein powders but it's gotta come from food. They would always come to me and be like, I can't eat that much. I can't eat 140. How does anybody eat that much? I'll say, look, eat that first, get that out of the way and then see what else you can. And inevitably their calories would drop because that much protein or and vegetables would result in a much lower appetite. Now they're eating less of the other garbage and their calories went down. Not to mention a high protein diet, if you're working out and lifting weights contributes to muscle gain at the very least muscle preservation. So when you're dieting and you're trying to lose weight or lose body fat, inevitably your body's gonna lose muscle. It wants to lose muscle. It wants to make you more efficient with calories. A high protein diet, especially in combination with resistance training stops that from happening. In some cases actually reverses it even on a low calorie diet. So you don't get the metabolic slowdown that you would get from other low calorie diets. So high protein in a diet, regardless, has lots and lots of different benefits, of course, those individual variances. But yeah, if you're aiming for protein and veggies and don't worry about anything else, naturally your caloric intake will probably drop. Well, and again, back to circle back to what I was talking about, most people under eat this. This is sometimes why people struggle with building muscles because they're just not getting adequate protein to build that, which in turn ends up speeding up everybody's metabolism. So your ultimate goal may be weight loss or body fat reduction, but when you're under consuming protein and you're also lifting weights, and that's part of what, because you've heard from Mind Pump or whatever, it's one of the best ways for you to do that. Well, it's important that you're getting the protein intake to support that so that you can build muscle, which then in turn can help speed your metabolism up. So the benefits of targeting protein like that, and I also highly recommend doing it early. Early and often it's hard. You gotta prioritize it. Yeah, prioritize it early, early in the day, especially since breakfast foods are built around carbohydrates, really try and focus on getting some good protein in early in the day and you'll see huge benefits. Well, just to give you an example, let's say you have a 130 pound female, not obese, maybe a little overweight, but not obese, 130, 140 pounds, and I tell her, I want you to eat 120 grams approaching a day. And if you're listening right now, the target should be anywhere between about maybe 0.6 to one gram of protein per pound of body weight. If you're not obese, if you're obese, then you might want to go more towards the lower end. If you're not obese, then you go more towards the higher end. But 120 grams of protein, how many chicken, how many four ounce or three ounce chicken breasts would someone need to eat to get about 120 grams of protein? Well, you're getting about 32 in a six ounce. In a six ounce, right. So you'd have to eat a lot. You'd have to eat quite a bit. Three and four, four of those chicken breasts a day. So now- And how many 130 pound girls do that? Right, so now think about it this way. You're eating that, you're prioritizing it. It's naturally gonna make you eat less food. So this is why it's such a great first step. Okay, here's another one. And this one is actually much more impactful than you realize. Improve the quality of your sleep and get adequate sleep. This one is actually a huge one. I was looking up studies earlier on the impact of lack of sleep. And researchers find that people will consume, on average, up to 300 more calories a day when they're not getting good quality sleep. I think it was Justin who brought it up a while back. I don't know what we were talking about, but it just had fallen on some days where I mean, we're up with the baby and had some like long days of no sleep and running them back to back. And I remember I had this like junk food craving that I hadn't felt in a long time. And it like dawned on me, like, oh, shit, you know, I'm running on like no sleep the last couple of days. Pay attention to that if you're listening right now on days when you know you didn't get adequate sleep or you've been stressed at work all day long or up late hours. And pay attention to your eating habits from that time almost always that's when like those worst cravings come in when you haven't got good sleep. Now there's two hormones that help regulate hunger, ghrelin and leptin. And so ghrelin stimulates appetite, makes you hungry or leptin decreases it. But when the body is sleep deprived, the levels of ghrelin spikes while the level of leptin falls leading to an increase in hunger. Now, why would that happen? You might be asking yourself like why would a lack of sleep? Why would that send a signal to my body to raise the hormone that makes me hungry and lower the one that controls my appetite? So giving me a kind of a, you know, one, two punch. Well, lack of sleep for most of human history, well, it's a stress on the body, but for most of human history- Your survival mode. You probably were looking for food, you didn't have enough food. So you're not sleeping because you're looking, you're foraging, you're trying to feed yourself. And so your body's saying, driving you to get that food so you can get that rest. So lack of sleep just plain and simple makes you hungry. Then there's this other simple effect from losing sleep. When you look at, so years ago, I learned this tip from another trainer and I saw that it was remarkably successful, but it was counter to what I had learned in the early nutrition certifications I had gotten. And the advice was this, don't eat past 6 p.m. So he would say don't eat past 6 p.m. and clients were getting leaner. Now I had learned in my nutrition certification that didn't matter what time you ate, it was all about the calories in versus calories out. So I was like, that's weird. Why would the time that you eat make any difference? Now the studies do show that the time you eat, you know, has an impact on your health but when it comes to weight, calories do matter. So why is it that when people stop eating at 6 that they end up losing weight and people who don't lose weight? Better sleep, they're better digestion, like all that kind of stuff. It's not just that, it's that people who don't stop at 6 or whatever eat more meals. And so they find that the extra bad calories that people tend to eat tend to be late at night. Well, it's gonna happen late at night. A lot of those, I think it's a combination of everything. I mean, even what Justin's saying, I think it's true also because I've seen huge benefits by simply just walking at it. Yeah, it's made a massive impact on me. Yeah, if you eat, if you eat, try this if someone hasn't done this before, eat a massive meal over-consume when you know it and then lie on your couch or go straight to bed. And you've now do that exact same thing over-consume, whatever, but then go for a 45 minute hour walk. And you'll see, you'll feel the digestive process happening, but it definitely takes that if you over-ate that much, you can feel it happening and taking that entire time. So imagine you not doing that and going straight to bed. Like, of course it's going to affect sleep. But besides that, because that's for sleep quality, just staying up late, you stay, let's say you should be in bed by 10, you stay up till midnight. That's two more hours you're awake, watching TV, bored, whatever. The odds that you're gonna eat are far higher than if you were sleeping. Well, it's part of the reason why there's such great results for intermittent fasting for fat loss results is because it's just a shortened window. You're shortening the window up, you're not eating past six o'clock, which again, like to you, a tip that I used to scoff at because the research came out later on to prove that it didn't matter when you ate the calories, calories or calories and your body will either gain or lose based off of where your maintenance level is, has nothing to do with if I eat it at midnight or eat it at 10. And so this was something I scoffed at and would tell clients not to worry about, but later on, again, circled back to, it's just a good habit for most people. Most people, like you said, they are either one, you're pretty sedentary then and you're not gonna be moving around to help the digestive process. You're sitting down, you're lying down, or you're doing things like watching TV, which can turn into mindless type of eating. So there's a lot of behavioral things that happen from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. that probably shouldn't be coupled with also eating more food. Yeah, and also around dinner, that's always my hearty meal. That's the one where I got the protein, the fast, the stuff that's very satiating versus the start of my day. If I was to include more carbohydrates, I'm gonna wanna eat them more towards the beginning of the day, so I'm more likely to expend energy and get through that throughout the day. Yeah, but if you look at, if let's say we would take 100 random people and track all their food and look at what they ate throughout the whole day, I can almost, I would bet a lot of money that the vast majority of the quote unquote bad foods were done in the late evening. That's when the food choices tend to get a little bit worse throughout the day. Part of it is the psychology, part of it is your willpower actually starts to wing down. So if you've had good control, good willpower, you're at work, you gotta deal with this stress, that stress, whatever, by the end of the night, as you get tired, that starts to wane. So if you don't get good sleep and go to bed on time, the odds of eating food and more food and crappy food, go up to bed. If you don't go to bed when you're tired, then yeah, and you're prolonging that, you're gonna wanna end up eating something. Well, evenings and weekends, right? And we talked about this in just a recent episode that it's how important it is to try and attach new behaviors with old behaviors. And we do really good with stuff like that. Humans do really well with, oh, it's the new year, I'm starting a new diet. During the work week, I'm really good because I'm on a regimen schedule. I gotta be at work by eight a.m., then I take a lunch break or a snack, whatever, a 15 minute break at 11 o'clock, and like, oh, so I'll just, I'll pair this meal with that time, I'll pair this meal with that time, and they're all good. Then come past off of work, six p.m. or the weekend, that's where shit goes awry. So a lot of that has to do with just, again, the psychological piece of behavior. Now, here's a good strategy if you wanna improve your sleep. Set yourself up a sleep routine. So give yourself seven to nine hours of sleep at night so you know yourself. So if you only need less, that's fine. If you need more, that's great. And in other words, okay, I need to wake up at this time, that means I need to be in bed by this time. So let's say you've decided you need to be in bed and you need to be falling asleep at 10 p.m. Okay, two hours before that, you stop eating. So 10 p.m. is bedtime, 8 p.m. is the absolute latest I'll eat. I even recommend more than that, but two would be the minimum. At that two hour before bedtime minimum mark, also turn your lights off in your house or wear blue blocking glasses, get off electronics, start to wind down, prepare your body for sleep. Studies are very conclusive on this, makes a difference. You actually produce more melatonin, you get better sleep. And then when you go to bed, here's what happens. When you go to bed, you just fall asleep faster, so you do get that seven or eight hours. Because I think sometimes people are so wired in jazz before they go to bed, electronics, lights on bright, they're eating right before they go to bed. Then they go to bed expecting to get eight hours of sleep, but the problem is that they don't fall asleep or they don't get good sleep. So now they're in bed for eight hours, but they're not getting the quality of sleep for eight hours. All right, the last one, this one's the biggest one by far. In fact, I will confidently say that this is the biggest contributor to the obesity epidemic in modern societies. It wasn't fats, it wasn't carbs, it wasn't sugars. It was heavily processed, hyper-palatable foods. As the market grew for food, as more and more people were buying food at the grocery store, two things became very apparent to food manufacturers. If they made food tasty, they made it really, really enjoyable to eat. So palatability refers to the hedonistic value of food. So when you eat it, how good it makes you feel. That includes the flavor, the smell, the feel, everything, right? Food manufacturers figured out if I can make it hyper-palatable, I'll outsell everybody. And if you don't believe me, look at every food category, even look at the health food categories and the top sellers at the top are the top because they're the most palatable. So that's number one. The second thing they realized was convenience. If I can make it taste really good and make it super convenient, that's what people want. So more and more of our food was turned into hyper-palatable food and more and more of us started eating more of this. Now, why is this bad? This food is literally designed to make you eat more. And the recent studies, this is by far the biggest single step you can take. Recent studies show that when people are given unlimited access to heavily processed food and they compare them to other groups who have unlimited access to whole natural foods, they eat on average five to 600 more calories every single day. That's incredible. Five to 600 more calories a day, that's roughly could equate to about a pound of body fat, give or take a little bit per week. Per week, just from that. Well, this is the one of the five that you've listed. This is the one by itself, if you ignored everything else and only did this that most people would have probably tremendous success. Just from simply from doing that. And this is something that, again, later on, pieced this together where, I mean, I could tell a client eat whatever and as much as you want, as long as it's not processed. If it was whole foods, I'd say. That became my go-to. Yeah. It was my favorite thing to tell the clients that used to kind of bitch and whine about diets or having to restrict and you know, I want to get in shape but I really don't want to follow some stupid dieters. Okay, I got something for you. You can eat all the foods you want, just make sure they're all whole and natural. Stay away from all the heavily processed foods and that's go-to-town. Eat as many potatoes as you want and sweet potatoes as you have. Eat as much chicken breast and steaks as you can get. Like go for it. I always just, I immediately think of chips. Like chips, that is like the most fantastically processed food item that they just created where you just, you can't eat just one of those things. It's crunchy, it's light, it's salty, it's novel. It's got like every texture and thing that like sparks this desire to keep going. And like if you add that, if somebody just ate a big-ass meal and you put chips out there, they'll still eat the chips. It's totally true. And then they'll go right back to eating, you know, another meal after they ate the chips because now it just stimulates a whole new thing. Here, I'll give you, on that note, I'm gonna give you guys a great example. This is phenomenal, right? I just found this right now. So a large bag of Lay's potato chips, okay? If you're listening right now, be honest with yourself. Could you sit down in front of the TV by yourself and eat a large bag of Lay's potato chips? Probably yes. I could blow through three of those, no problem. Inside, every Lay's, a large bag of Lay's potato chips is about five potatoes. Could you sit down in front of the TV and eat five plain, plain baked potatoes? No way. No way. There's no possible way. You say yes, you're lying. Most people, good luck with two. Yeah, you would gag by itself. No butter, no salt, nothing, just plain white baked potatoes right in front of you. You got five of them, you gotta eat them. It would be a challenge, most people would fail. Didn't they run a diet? Wasn't there a popular diet for a while there? Potato diet. Is it a thing? Is it a potato diet? No, it's a thing, right? Maybe choke, gets emotional. My people. The Irish should have got some energy. No, they did, that's like a thing that they've done before I've seen people do that challenge where they just, hey, I'm gonna try and eat potatoes. You wanna know what the irony of this is? Five plain white baked potatoes has less calories than a bag of Lay's potato chips. Think about that. So the Lay's chips has more calories, yet far easier to blow through and eat than five plain baked potatoes. Now that's because of the palatability factor. And your body naturally evolved this kind of, this limit that you'll hit when you eat certain foods. You feel it when you eat steak or potato or vegetables. When you eat normal whole foods. Now when you eat processed foods, it hijacks that. It goes haywire, and so you consume way more calories. This is why avoiding, simply avoiding, heavily processed foods by itself. Now you're not gonna get shredded like a bodybuilder, but most people listening, if you just did that, you would probably get all natural, all by yourself, into a far more normal, average body weight. You find yourself losing body fat. It's a double edged sort of science. Totally. I mean, it's, and I don't think actually a lot of people. These chips are delicious. I don't think a lot of people realize that your body was created with these things built in. That if you were just roaming the earth and growing your own food and raising your own food, and that's the way you ate always, it actually would be way more challenging than you think to over consume because of all the body's natural signals that tell you, okay, I'm full, that's enough. But because so much of the American diet is these heavily processed foods, it hijacks that. Totally. And it's this mentality. We have this idea that we're just, because humans evolved, we're food was scarce, that we've turned into these eating machines, and all we need is food in front of us. Over eating in the past was just as bad as it is today. And so we do have these natural breaks that we turn on that tell us to stop eating. In fact, you've probably experienced this at a friend's house when you've had dinner, where you eat a meal and you're stuffed, and then you yourself hijacked your own satiety signals. By reaching for dessert, a change in flavor, oftentimes we'll get that palatability signal that what's called palette fatigue to go away. Now, processed foods are foods that come in bags, wrappers, boxes, sometimes they're frozen. They have ingredients. This is what makes processed foods, processed foods. They have lots of ingredients. So if you look at the back of a box, if it just says broccoli, it's not processed. If it just says meat, it's not processed. But if you look at the back and there's, you know, 10, 15, 20, 30 different ingredients, most of those ingredients were not put in there to add nutritional value or to give you really any of the benefit other than increasing the hedonistic value of that food. And be aware, be aware of that. Eliminate your heavily processed foods and watch your calories naturally drop. And with that, go to mindpumpfree.com and download our guides. They cost nothing. They're all totally free. We have books and resources there for free. You can also find the three of your favorite hosts here at Mind Pump on Instagram. The three megos. All of us. You can find Justin at Mind Pump, Justin. Adam at Mind Pump, Adam. And you can find me at Mind Pump, Sal.