Barbell Shrugged - The Most Effective Lifelong Nutrition Strategy - Diesel Dad Episode 26

Episode Date: July 20, 2021

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Welcome to the Diesel Dad. My name is Anders Varner. In today's episode, we're going to be going over the number one way to structure your nutrition so that you have long-term sustainable results without going absolutely crazy, going overboard, losing your mind, falling off the wagon, putting all the fat back on so you can build a strong, lean, and athletic body without sacrificing family, fatherhood, or fitness. Before we get into that, in the show description right now, if you like what you're hearing

and you want to work with me one-on-one, come and join me in the Diesel Dad Mentorship for busy dads that want to lose between 20 and 40 pounds without restrictive diets, without spending 60 to 90 minutes at the gym, crazy supplements, come and hang out with me. There's a link in the description right now where you can schedule a call.

We can talk about your goals. We'll get you hooked up, build a strong, lean, and athletic body, lose 20 to 40 pounds, no restrictive diets. It's gonna be great. And you get to work with me and Doug Larson. We're gonna get you hooked up. Get it in the description right now.

Now, getting into this episode, we have to talk about all the diets that are out there and then the perfect combination from which I have created I'm gonna say that I started this one it's not really true I'm sure many people have done this and the reason that this is the the nutrition strategy that I think that you should adopt in your life is that almost all of my fitness professional friends fall into this exact nutrition strategy. And here's why.

Because if you are like me, 38 years old, and you've been in fitness like me for 25 consecutive summers, this is my 25th year of lifting weights and eating and training with intention, building a mindset that allows me to reach my goals. And I've put a ton of work into every single diet I've ever been a part of. And what always happens, and with the dads that we work with in our mentorship, this happens to them all the time, right? It's this all or nothing approach.

You're either all in on the latest fad diet or you fall off the wagon, you feel like crap, you start to regret that you fell off, you don't know how to come back, you get depressed, then all of a sudden you put on 10 pounds, you're like, ah, I suck so much, I'm never gonna be able to do this. And the reason is because whatever nutrition strategy

you've taken, it's unsustainable in the real world. You have to figure out a way for you to be able to adopt like a hybrid method for the food that you put into your mouth so that you can have fun with your friends and family and reach your goals. And in our mentorship program, we of lay out this this broad plan and I want everyone to follow because I have only really like fitness friends when it when you look at my my inner circle of people that I communicate with about nutrition nutrition strategy how they work with their clients what works best for everybody and the clients that I'm I'm working with one-on-one, we come to this conclusion that everybody wants to have the perfect diet.

But there really isn't some overall fad diet name to a diet that's going to work the best for everybody, right? Like if you go and do the keto thing, that's cool. You're probably going to be in a bit of a caloric deficit because you've eliminated all the carbohydrates from your life and you're probably going to lose some weight. The problem with the keto diet is as soon as your kids have a birthday party, there's going to be cake in front of your face and the cake comes with sugar. And the first time your body gets a hit of sugar after you've been de-sugared for a long time, well, guess what?

You're going overboard. You're gonna eat the whole cake. As soon as you have one bite of ice cream, you're gonna eat the whole half gallon. It's just a, it's a fact. I've seen it happen so many times. And then all of a sudden, even if it's just like one scoop of ice cream turns into half a gallon. And then all of a sudden, even if it's just like one scoop of ice cream turns into half a gallon.

And then all of a sudden you've eaten 2000 calories of ice cream in an hour and you can't stop yourself. Or you go the other way and you try to stay on keto. And now you're eating a bunch of like funky processed things with a bunch of like fake sweeteners. Or you go super dirty, dirty keto and you're eating like all these like gross cheese products and it's just it's gross it's unsustainable because it doesn't doesn't allow you to like live your life you know it's kind of like the the carnivore thing like sure you're gonna lose weight if you only eat meat you're you're eliminating like multiple food groups and focusing on one of course you're gonna be on a caloric deficit,

but all you're doing is eating steak all day. That's not the smartest thing in the world. If you think you're going to have a life outside of your own household where everything is in this vacuum and in this perfect little box for you, what happens when you go out to dinner? You think there isn't some non-steak or non-chicken products that you're gonna wanna eat? Of course there are. And then as soon as your body gets a little hit of those things, boo, we lose it, right? It's gone.

Ah, we freak out. Oh my God, this isn't steak. This isn't chicken. This isn't, it's not carnivore. Ah, now I'm off the wagon. Check it out, that doesn't work. The other thing that you can do is go like super strict. I'm gonna go back to my paleo days. Like we've all probably tried this or heard of this paleo diet

if you even wanted to go even like further down the rabbit hole and you wanted to go like hole 30 where you just cut everything negative out of your life like paleo in theory is likely the healthiest option however it's also completely unsustainable. You just, there's moments in life in being a parent and being a real human being in which those diets just don't work. And then as soon as they don't work, you start to feel guilty

and you start to have shame on the fact that you broke your diet. And if you're not very resilient in your brain and you're really pushing for your goals and you're trying to transform your life and lose the weight, it's really hard to come back from those pitfalls, right? You just feel bad about your decisions. On top of that, your body feels bad because it's holding all this ice cream now

and like birthday cake and all this, like you've had a couple too many beers and then you go home and you just hammer like those those diets that are so strict they don't actually work over a long period of time and this is the key to sustainable weight loss is longevity you have to be in a place where you can choose a strategy that allows you to do it, as scary as this may sound, for the rest of your life. And that's like a 40-year window. If you're 30 years old and that gets you to 70, maybe you plan on living to 120 like I do. I got to pick a diet, a nutrition strategy that's going to allow me to have an adventurous fun life where i get to be around people and experience new things experience new foods try the cool new ipa that shows up at the store have have a beer on july 4th with friends like we have to be able to go and explore these things and

have fun and and also not get overweight and not feel bad about our decisions and those are probably like the most strict ones. If you go to the other end of the spectrum where there's just like the wild west of whatever the hell you want to put in your body. And we go to this, if it fits your macros, I-I-F-Y-M, if it fits your macros. Yeah. If we go all the way to that, those people are saying like, all you got to do is drink protein shakes. If you want to get your carbohydrates go ahead eat ice cream only as long as it fits in this perfect category of your macros it works let me tell you something that shit's broken too because guess what you're not getting when you go the if it fits your macros route you're not getting the micronutrients that are associated

with really healthy food right you're gonna act like ice cream just because it fits your macros is better than eating like a tomato and an onion and some peppers and some really high quality meats no you're you're old enough to realize that's a that's a short-term solution that's going to kick you in the ass one day right you can only stop yourself from eating ice cream so many days in a row before your willpower breaks and you think you're like hacking the system and you're all of a sudden like cooler than your biology. All of a sudden, you're going to just like magically, magically make it happen that I'm going to eat ice cream and it fits in this box. It doesn't work like that.

But what we can do is meld some of these cool parts together and have some overriding principles on exactly how to live your life in a nutrition strategy that you can actually use for a long period of time. And this is what I've discovered. All of my friends do this that have been doing fitness and caring about nutrition for a very long time. This is what they do. This is what they do.

This is what I do. This is what people that have really successful, long-term, sustainable, healthy habits do. And it starts with understanding your macronutrient goals. Okay? You have to understand. Macro sometimes gets this really bad rap. And the reason is because at first it's kind of meticulous. You have to go in and learn that four ounces of chicken

equals 25 grams of protein. And you have to understand what four ounces of chicken looks like. That's like the basic premise of understanding your macros. If you get eight ounces of ground beef, that's 90, 10, 90% lean, 10% fat. You cook that down. It turns into about 93, seven. And guess what? If you put eight ounces of that on your plate, you're going to get about 50 grams of protein. If you're a 200 pound male, you likely need to eat that four times and that's going to get you to your 200 grams of protein goal.

Cool, right? When you start to measure your carbohydrates, you want to stay pretty clean. You want to have these like low fibrous vegetables. You want to be eating starchy carbohydrates. And what does that sound a lot like? Well, it sounds like you're eating a paleo diet, and I'm all about that. I think paleo, like I said earlier, is one of the healthiest habits that you can start to adopt. The problem is that when you're eating just those foods and you're tracking just those foods,

you start to get into a place where you go, this is boring. I'm tired of eating sweet potatoes. I'm tired of eating all these vegetables. I can only eat so many Brussels sprouts in my life. Why do I have to eat this boring ass chicken breast again? I'm so sick of it. I'm pouring mustard all over it just so I can swallow it. I'm like, three bites, drink half a gallon of water just so I can chug chicken breast like it's a pill.

So we have to figure out ways that we can have fun and be flexible inside a system. So we have to understand macros. That's the highest level. And when we have those macros, we need to be getting at least 0.7. You can pull out a pen right now. If you're on the side of the road, pull over, pull over into the emergency lane because this is an emergency situation in which you need to learn how to eat for the rest of your life. If you get a ticket because you didn't turn on your turn signal, tell the cop right now that you are listening to Anders Varner from the Diesel Dad Mentorship Program telling you the greatest, most sustainable way that you are going to eat for the rest of your life to maintain a strong,

lean, and athletic frame. The cop will let you off. He eat for the rest of your life to maintain a strong, lean, and athletic frame. The cop will let you walk. He will understand the importance of this. Check it out. You need to understand your macros. And the easiest way to do that is to take your body weight, your lean body mass. You can roughly guess that and or go to an online resource say how go into the google machine and you say estimate my body fat and it'll pull up some pictures and likely you're somewhere around 20 to 30 percent body fat and then you can take your total weight multiply it times 0.7 and that's

going to get you your lean body mass that number that you have at the end of that calculation is going to be the exact number of grams of protein that you need to be eating every single day, right? So say it's 200, say it's 150, whatever it is, eat that number, that's going to be lean meats, maybe some protein powders, things like that. You gotta get to that protein number. Let's call the carbohydrate grams the exact same.

Let's also say that your fat needs to be about half that. So for a 200 pound human being that has a relatively low body fat, somewhere between 10 to say 17%, that's like a healthy human, you need to be getting 200 grams of protein, 200 grams of carbs, and about 100 grams of fat. Cool? Now we get to break into the quality of that food. So that's the quantity that we need to be eating. Now we can break into the quantity of that food or quality of that food. And this is where sustainability comes in. Sustainability is your ability to actually live a life, have fun, not hate yourself and reach your goals at the same time. And the method that we need to be understanding in this is that 90% of your decisions,

90% of the calories that go into your mouth need to be roughly aligned with the paleo model. Lean meats, starchy root vegetables, and fibrous vegetables. That's really like, that's so important because it's it's more than just food we're getting all the micronutrients that we're getting when we get into that II FYM model if it fits your macros the reason you can't turn off the hunger signals that your body puts out is because if you eat a bowl of ice cream, a lot of calories are coming in, but they have no vitamins and minerals in them. So

if you have no vitamins and minerals, your body is going to go, hey dude, I know we ate a lot of food. Like there's a lot of calories here. However, we didn't get what we needed. We needed vitamins and minerals. You gave us trash. So we need to eat more food so that we can get the vitamins and minerals that are actually going to allow all the systems in our body to run. So we adopt this model. We understand what our macronutrients needs are. 90% of those needs are going to be met by a very close paleo model, right? Lean meats, starchy carbs, or root vegetables, starchy carbs, and fibrous carbohydrates or fibrous vegetables, right? The other 10% is the slop.

That's where we get to have fun, but we got to be careful with the slop. This is another critical point. We need to also have a very good idea of what makes up the total caloric intake. So one gram of carbohydrate is four calories. One gram of fat is nine calories. Let me put nine on the screen. That's five in one hand, four on the other. It's like, it's over double, right? Nine calories per gram of fat. So if you like to have a little sweet treat

at the end of the night, calorically, if we can stay inside that carbohydrate number, hitting that macro that we need every day, if you are able to choose sweet, delicious products that are higher in carbohydrate and lower in fat, we're going to be able to increase the food volume. Like a Popsicle, for example, is going to be basically like frozen fruit juice. It may have like 10 grams of sugar in it

or something like that. Well, guess what? That's like, that's not a big deal. And you're getting your hit. You're getting your hit. You get to enjoy your life. However, if you like to sit down and have a cookie, well, now you're probably getting roughly 30 grams of carbohydrates and about 15 grams of fat and calorically that one cookie although it may provide the same amount of value to you in getting that that hit that iifym hit in the last 10 of your macros it's calorically going to push you further and further above your goals because or above your macro goals because it's just higher on the radar of calories so it's more optimal to choose sweet snacks that

are more carbohydrate and sugar driven than fat plus sugar and when you start to break down what a cookie is this is is what a cookie is. Cookies are a big chunk of butter with sugar mixed into them, melted and then hardened as they cool. You're basically every time you eat like a couple cookies, you're getting basically like a you're eating like a stick of butter with sugar mixed in it, but it comes out with chocolate chips on it. So you think it's different. If I just said, hey, can you take a tablespoon hit of this sugar cane and eat a stick of butter?

You'd be like, dude, you're disgusting. But guess what? When you mix those two together, it's delicious. And they call them cookies, and they put chocolate chips on them, and it makes it even sweeter, which is even more amazing. But you can make better decisions by choosing sweeter things that have more sugar content and lower fat content so you're still getting your hit

check it out one really really cool way to do this that i like to do when i need some additional carbohydrates or i just need a little fix something cool something that like spices my life up i can go get some oatmeal, put like a tablespoon of sugar, like a little spoon of white sugar, like the trashiest white sugar on top, right? And guess what? You can macro those out and it's a pretty decent sized bowl of sugar with one little extra thing to sweeten the, or of oatmeal, and then one thing of sugar to sweeten it up a little bit. Now all of a sudden, you have a very high volume, moderately heavy carbohydrate meal that just tastes delicious and it makes your life better. You can also reserve that extra 10% for maybe a beer with

your friends on Friday night. So we have an understanding. At the very highest level, you have to know your macronutrients. Then from there, we can draw a line to, well, how do we get those macronutrients? Well, we want to follow a 90% paleo diet. The 10% is the fun part, right? Now, how much are we going to eat of those things? Well, now we need to get into the idea

that all of the food that we're going to be eating needs to be aligned with our social life. And what I mean by that is, Monday through, or Sunday through Thursday, those are the days that we likely have the most control over our nutrition, right? So check it out. When I see my Friday afternoon,

most likely my friends and I in the neighborhood, we're all gonna get together, the kids are all gonna get together, it's the end of the week, we probably lifted weights in the afternoon, and then we were like, yo, let's get the kids together. We'll have a drink out in the front yard. It'll be great.

That's awesome, right? That's like likely what you do as well. It's a little bit looser of a night. Everybody wants to just kind of hit the slow down button because the weekend's about to start, the work week's over. You might have a drink. It might be a good time for you to have that brand new IPA that you've been waiting to have. It's a good time to be with friends and relax and enjoy a social scene without

stress and worrying about you hit your diet. On Sunday, I pretty much own Sunday. Sunday is like as much as it's a weekend day, I'm also like mentally preparing myself for the week and making sure everything is like aligned and it's a very, it's like a mellow day. Saturdays are usually kind of hardcore on like working and not work, work, but like a housework and cutting the grass and just things, you know, like it's a house, it's a house day. It's a, it's a family day. So if you start to look at your total caloric intake, I want you to take your body weight and multiply, or your goal body weight, not your current body weight, your goal body weight, and multiply that number times 11.

Those are going to be the five low caloric days. Those are going to help you lower your total caloric intake, keep you in a caloric deficit so that you're losing fat. And at the same time, because you're eating enough protein in that paleo diet format, you're getting enough protein so you don't have to worry about losing all the muscle. So you're actually building a frame, not just like a slower, softer, smaller version of this body that you already don't like. So we're going to have a caloric deficit from Sunday to Thursday. Now, what we change in this situation is that on Friday and Saturday, you take that goal body weight and you're going to eat to goal body weight times 13 calories. You can create a spreadsheet very easily to do this eat to goal body weight times 13 calories.

You can create a spreadsheet very easily to do this. Goal body weight times 13. Now, that's going to be slightly above your maintenance, which is likely goal body weight times 12. However, because we are at five days in a deficit, we are at two days in a deficit, we are at two days in a slight surplus, overall, we are going to be creating a seven-day rolling average of you being in a caloric deficit, so you do not have to worry about putting weight on. There's three main points that we'll want to go over before we wrap this show up. At the highest level, we have to understand the total caloric intake and the macronutrients that we need to reach our goals.

Underneath that, I want 90% of the food that you eat to be super high quality, super, super loaded with all the micronutrients and perfectly dialed in food. We all know what those are, right? Lean meats, vegetables, starchy root vegetables, right? We can agree to that. 10% of those calories can be fun calories, right? And when we get into those fun calories, higher sugar content, lower fat content, make sure you can maintain a volume of food

that keeps you happy, but don't eat all the cookies because they're loaded with fat. It's not something that's gonna serve you. And when you start to look at a seven-day rolling average, we're going to go Sunday through Thursday, goal body weight times 11 in total calories, putting you in a five-day deficit. Friday and Saturday, those are going to be in a slight surplus. However, because we are going five days in a deficit, two days in a surplus, those numbers are going to balance out to an overall seven-day

rolling average of you being in a caloric deficit, making a long-term strategy for long-term sustainable results in your nutrition to reach your goals of building a strong, lean, and athletic body you're proud of, possible, sustainable, without you going crazy. My name is Anders Warner. This is the Diesel Dad. If you are not in the Diesel Dad mentorship, I don't know what you're doing. You've been listening to this podcast. You've been hearing me spit these hot facts at you. I'm making people out here just super, super happy with their bodies. We're losing body fat in the mentorship. We're helping people all over the place. What are you waiting for?

Get into the description right now. Get in there. Get on a call with me. I'm going to change your life. It's going to be so radical. You've never seen a program and you're going to work directly with me and I'm going to change your life. That 20 to 40 pounds that makes you miserable right now, I'm going to change it. We're going

to do it in a long-term, sustainable, healthy way. And I just outlined it for you. Get in there, click the description, come rage with me. My name is Andrew Farner. This is Diesel Dad. We'll see you guys next week.