Barbell Shrugged - The Most Important Macro for Your Metabolism - Diesel Dad Episode 6

Episode Date: April 30, 2021

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How many times have you heard a friend tell you that you need to eat every two and a half to three hours, six meals a day in order to optimize your metabolism? How many times have you turned around to another friend and asked them how often they eat just so they could turn around and tell you that you need to be on a 16-8 fasting schedule or you're never going to lose weight? I'm here to tell you that both of them are right, both of them are wrong, and my name is Anders Varner and this is Diesel Dad episode six. And today we're talking about the final 10% of optimizing your metabolism and the four pieces that make up your actual metabolism, which are your BMR, your basal metabolic rate. That's all of the chemical and hormonal reactions that happen inside your body. 60% is the biggest

number and that's the thing that we want to work on the most. The next piece, we can call this the thermal effect of physical activity. It's broken down into two pieces. On the left, we have the low intensity non-exercise activity thermogenesis, and on the right, the higher intensity piece, which is our focused intentional workouts throughout the day. Now the last piece, the thermal effect of food, which is 10% of our total daily energy expenditure. That is so small. It's like an insanely small amount, especially when you start to think about you're going to eat three meals a day. You're going to eat four meals a day. What is it? Each meal is going to be somewhere around 2% of the total energy that you need to have

a strong, lean, and athletic body and reach your fitness goals. Are you really going to worry about every single tiny meal and be forcing multiple hours of meal prep every single Sunday to make sure that you have six meals lined up over the next seven days, 42 meals, so that you can optimize your metabolism by 2% or do we want to do what's really important and focus on that baseline metabolism, focus on non-exercise activity, thermogenesis, making sure we're moving consistently throughout the day and having really, really good training sessions in which we're building muscle through resistance training progressive overload I think that the 90% is

the most important part of this conversation however today we're going to talk about the final 10% we're going to talk about the thermal effect of food and the reason the thermal effect of food is important is because we just need to know it's important to know it's important to be able to have a conversation about where the food goes and how when you eat a delicious steak one day it turns into muscles if you're going to flex your biceps you better know why the steak gave you the guns i'm going to coin that right now why the steak gave you the guns is why we are having this conversation today. And what's really important about understanding the thermal effect of food is that it's a

very expensive process. We need to understand what macronutrients are most important and which ones are the most metabolically taxing so that we can eat more of those and not worry about overdoing carbohydrates, overdoing fats, overdoing protein, and wasting energy in directions that don't align with our goals. Now, if you're here, there's a very strong chance that one, you're a dad. Two, you're extremely busy. Three, you're looking for the easiest, simplest ways to implement solutions to getting strong, lean, and athletic, for the easiest, simplest ways to implement solutions to getting strong, lean, and athletic, losing body fat, optimizing your metabolism, and building a

strong, lean, and athletic body you're proud of. That's the goal of the Diesel Dad. That's why we're here. That's why you're watching this video. And for us to understand these high-level concepts, we need to understand what digestion is. And we're going to break it down into two key components. The mechanical pieces, and we're going to talk about the chemical pieces. The chemical reactions start in our mouth, right? That's the saliva. That helps break the food down. Through there, as the food travels down our esophagus,

it's going to land into a whole bunch of bile, a whole bunch of stomach acids, and a whole bunch of really complicated chemical reactions that frankly, I'm not a scientist and I don't really care about them and neither should you. What you need to know is that those mechanical or those chemical processes allow us to break food down from a solid into the components that allow us to deliver those nutrients into our muscles, into our energy, right? The mechanical pieces we're talking about in our mouth, right? Our teeth, not in our mouth. The first one starts in our mouth, in our teeth. From there, all of the musculature that pushes food down through our esophagus, into our stomach, into our intestines, mushing and mashing the entire way through, so that by the time protein is broken down into amino acids, it's transferable into the cells to create strong, healthy cells. Rebuilding tissue. When we think about carbohydrates, what are we trying to break

those foods down into? We need to break them down into monosaccharides. Those are really cool terms. All you need to know is that that means single sugar and that's how carbohydrates get into our body. When we talk about fats, we're talking about breaking them into fatty acids so that they are usable. Now, a really oversimplified way to think about how much energy is needed to break down proteins, fats, and carbs is when you're cooking. How many times have you put a cookie into the oven and seen sugar just melt immediately? Sugar's so easy. It's like kindling on a fire, just goes up. It's so simple, right? How many times you put a stick of butter onto a pan when you're cooking eggs or, or really anything, but if you put a stick of butter onto a pan and what happens? It pretty

much immediately starts melting. These things are very simple to break down protein. On the other hand, if you put a piece of chicken onto a pan, how long is it going to take for the chemical reactions for that to start cooking? It's going to take a while and it's going to have to be hot your metabolism is the exact same way when it comes to breaking down food protein is the most metabolically expensive and we can use that energy or that information in order to help you reach your goals a little bit faster and we do that by focusing all of our nutrition strategies around protein and the reason we focus on protein is because one it's the most important one for us to build a strong lean and athletic body in that

i mean when we are resistance training it's going to help us build muscle repair muscle and make sure we're maintaining muscle when we are digesting food it is the most metabolically expensive to actually digest therefore the more protein you eat the more we're going to be revving up our metabolism and it's going to help us reach our goals of burning fat faster. We also don't want to just eliminate the total number of carbohydrates and fats we're doing, but we can think about these as a simple energy source where we're switching back and forth depending upon what activities we're using. If we need short, fast energy, we're going to go to carbohydrate.

We've got plenty of those. If we're going to be going on longer, sustained, long burning fuel sources, we're using. If we need short, fast energy, we're going to go to carbohydrate. We've got plenty of those. If we're going to be going on longer sustained, long burning fuel sources, we're going to be going towards fat. Now, when we talk about the digestion though, and where the food goes, the focus needs to always just be on protein. We need to be getting at least 0.7 grams of protein per pound of body weight. And if you are doing consistent resistance training, the closer we get to one gram of protein per pound of body weight is going to be essential for us to reach our goals. One, your body's going to be burning fat faster throughout the day. It's going, it takes a lot of work to get that done to rebuilding, repairing and maintaining

muscle mass while you're searching your goals. It's not just enough to just lose weight. We can lose weight, but if we lose all the muscle, you're just going to look like a smaller version of your already same soft self. And that's not what we want. You want to create a strong, lean and athletic body. That's why we're here. In addition to that, we also want to think about how often we're eating and overcome all of the insecurities you may have about why we eat a specific way or how many times we are eating throughout a day to reach a specific goal.

And most importantly, you don't have to eat six times a day. You don't need to eat a 16-eat fasting window. Are these strategies that can help? Sure, if that fits your life. When you think about the frequency that you're going to be eating at, I just want you to answer one question. What's easiest for you? What is the strategy that aligns most with your family, your goals,

and mainly your work, leisure life, because all of those pieces, if you cannot align your meal frequency with your lifestyle, it's going to be impossible to have a long-term sustainable approach to nutrition. If you fast and this is one of the reasons why intermittent fasting is so easy is because you do not need to eat for the first two-thirds of the day you can basically just say i'm not worried about food and then once two o'clock in the afternoon comes around get after it do is eat whole foods high quality nutrient dense foods consistently throughout the day so that your body is getting the protein the fats

and the carbohydrates from high quality sources that are going to allow you to burn body fat reach your goals and do it in a healthy long-term sustainable manner because we don't want to put in all the work and then just have it go away once we reach our goal this is Diesel Dad episode 6 in the show description you can get into the show notes below right now there's a free Facebook group that we put up weekly trainings on how busy dads can optimize their metabolism, lose body fat, build muscle, and build a strong, lean, and athletic body they are proud of. We are here to serve busy dads.

I'm a busy dad. You likely are a busy dad if you are watching and listening to this. I can't wait to help you reach your goals. Build a strong, lean, and athletic body that you're proud of. Diesel Dad Dojo, that's our free Facebook group where we are doing weekly trainings and helping busy dads get strong, Diesel Dad Dojo. That's our free Facebook group where we are doing weekly trainings

and helping busy dads get strong, lean, and athletic. And there's also a link in the description if you would like to set up a call with me and discuss your fitness goals. Fat loss, build muscle, optimize your metabolism. That's what we're doing here at the Diesel Dad. This is episode six, and we will see you guys next week.