Dhru Purohit Show - The Step-By-Step Action Plan to Lose 20 Pounds of Fat in 90 Days: The Real Strategies that Create Long-term Weight Loss and The Biggest Diet Mistakes Everyone Makes with Dr. Joey Munoz

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

This episode is brought to you by Tiny Health, Bon Charge, Branch Basics, and Dose.  Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Dr. Joey Munoz to break down a practical, sustainable roadmap for losing up to 20 pounds in 90 days, without crash diets or extreme restrictions. Dr. Munoz shares his simple five-step framework for creating a calorie deficit, building muscle, staying consistent, and getting back on track when life inevitably gets in the way. He also opens up about his own journey with weight loss and emotional eating, revealing how his relationship with food shaped the coach he is today. Along the way, he details the exact strength training routine, meal structure, and nutrition strategies he recommends to clients over 40 to improve body composition and metabolic health. If you're looking for an evidence-based blueprint to lose fat, build muscle, and create lasting results, this episode is for you. Dr. Joey Munoz holds a PhD in Nutritional Sciences from Florida State University and is a published researcher specializing in nutrition and chronic disease prevention. He is the founder of Strong Standard, an online coaching company that helps adults over 40 lose fat, build muscle, and improve their metabolic health through sustainable, evidence-based strategies. He also hosts The Dr. Joey Munoz Show, has built an audience of more than 400,000 on Instagram, and has coached over 1,000 clients during the past decade. Growing up overweight in a broken household and nearly failing out of school, Joey credits fitness with changing the course of his life. Today, his mission is to help others transform their health through fundamentals—not restriction. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Munoz dive into:  (00:00) Introduction (3:46) The One Question That Determines Your Success (7:33) Why "Losing 20 Pounds Fast" Backfires (10:35) Fat Loss vs. Weight Loss: The Difference That Changes Everything (14:52) The Hidden Mindset Traps Keeping You Stuck (27:01) Should You Count Calories? The Honest Answer (35:58) How Many Calories Does Your Body Actually Need? (46:16) The Simplest Way to Create a Calorie Deficit (51:28) Why the Scale Doesn't Tell the Whole Story (57:37) The Accountability System That Actually Works (1:02:45) Easy Ways to Cut Calories Without Feeling Deprived (1:10:36) Why Weight Loss Gets Harder During Perimenopause (1:19:25) The Best Way to Train for Long-Term Fat Loss (1:37:46) The Most Underrated Fat Loss Habit (1:40:09) The Ideal Protein, Fiber & Meal Formula (1:48:45) Build a Feedback Loop That Keeps You Consistent (1:54:13) Where to Learn More from Dr. Joey Munoz (1:57:12) Final Thoughts Also mentioned in this episode: Mayo Clinic Calorie Calculator  MyFitness Pal Calorie Tracker Try This Newsletter on Sleep Consistency For more on Dr. Munoz, follow him on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or visit his Website. This episode is brought to you by Tiny Health, Bon Charge, Branch Basics, and Dose.  Right now, Tiny Health is offering my community their biggest offer yet: $50 off your first gut health test. Just head to tinyhealth.com/dhru for $50 off your first test. Your gut has a story to tell; Tiny Health helps you understand what it's saying. Right now, Bon Charge is offering my community 15% off their Red Light mask. Just go to boncharge.com/dhru and use code DHRU to save 15%. Branch Basics is now available nationwide at Target and Target.com. Shop their lineup of safer cleaning essentials including laundry detergent, surface cleaners, dishwasher tablets, and stain remover during your next Target run. And if you're grabbing the Premium Starter Kit, you can get 15% off at BranchBasics.com with my code DHRU. Support your liver with one simple daily habit. Visit dosedaily.co/DHRU and use code DHRU to get 35% off your first subscription. Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joey, welcome to the podcast. Today, we're talking about something that I think is very timely. You know, at the beginning of summer, people are always setting out these goals. I want to get into summer body shape. Sure. And the thing is, as summer progresses, a lot of times people think, oh, maybe I don't want that anymore. It's not worth it.

I've already been at the beach. I've already done in, you know, I've already been there, done that. But actually, there's a lot of reasons beyond vanity that it's important to be. in the best shape of our life. Longevity, overall health, and also just because you might want to, we're going to get into those topics and reasons why. But today's episode is all about how you can sustainably lose

up to 20 pounds in 90 days. And before we get started here, because you have a step-by-step process that you've worked with thousands of people, you and your team, taking them through, that has proven to work, before we get into it, two important things that I want to talk about. Number one, if somebody listens to this full episode,

what are they going to learn by the end of it? And what will they be able to potentially do in their life? Let's start there. What can the audience get? So first and foremost, definitely a step-by-step process that you can implement starting today after watching this video to start the path to losing 20 pounds of body fat in the next 90 days or so. I want to also add a caveat there because I don't like when people hyper-step.

fixate on a particular number, right? So whether it's 15, 20, 25 for some people, like, as long as you make progress, I think that's a big win. I know we'll talk about the mindset perspective as well, but having a clear strategy that you can implement to achieve your weight loss goals and start on the right path for the next 90 days. That'll be the first thing that people will get from the episode. I think beyond that, also having a clear understanding of why you might be struggling if you have been struggling with weight loss and fitness for a period of time. I think oftentimes it comes down to the specific methods that people use. There's a lot of confusion around what matters and what doesn't matter on social media

regarding fitness specifically. And a lot of people feel overwhelmed. One of the things that I would like to help the audience accomplish is just feel a little bit more clear around the variables and things that actually matter for sustainable progress. And then third and I would say not most importantly, but very importantly, is just a sense of confidence that achieving particular health and fitness goals doesn't have to be as difficult or confusing as it may feel. And I want the audience to feel confident

that they can actually implement this into their actual day-to-day life. Another thing I want to get into, before we get into this step-by-step plan that you have here, and there's five steps that you've outlined that we're going to break down and we're going to get into all the specifics around them. We're going to get into, you know, talking about the importance of calories,

which is always a big subject for a lot of people. We're going to talk about how to step into a caloric deficit. You're going to get into the training strategies that are important that are part of this process because it's not all diet and actually some of the movement stuff makes this process easier. We're going to get into nutrition,

which is everybody's favorite topic, what matters and what doesn't. And then you're going to get into how to create a system where you get feedback so you can auto correct if things start to veer off track and actually measure your progress and see that you're heading in the right direction.

All right? And the last thing we're going to talk about, okay, now what? Now what happens after the 90 days and some things that could help you in the process. So before we get into that five-step system, I want you to talk a little bit about two things. I want you to talk about the why. I talked at the beginning of this podcast that there's a lot of reasons beyond vanity. I don't think vanity is a bad thing, right? Give the people what they want

and also give them what they need. That's the goal of today's podcast episode. What are other reasons that you talk about with your clients when it comes to helping them understand their why and why their why is important when it comes to their weight loss journey. I think being really clear on why you're trying to pursue a particular goal really solidifies it and makes it a priority in your life as well. And I think the difficult part for a lot of people is really being clear on why being healthy and fit matters in the first place. Because Drew, if somebody has been struggling with their health and fitness the majority of their

life, they don't truly understand how good it feels to feel good. Right. And so for me, the reason why I do what I do is because, my own personal journey. So when I was a young teenager, not even a teenager, probably around 11, 12 years old, I was very overweight as a young kid. Thankfully, fitness has always been part of my life. So I grew up in the gym. My mom always had a personal trainer. My dad would come home and do push-ups at home. But being the first generation Cuban American and my family coming from a country where food wasn't really available, being in the U.S. where food is readily available everywhere,

my mom showed love through food. And so if I was sad, if I was happy, if I did something, something good if I did something. Like we always celebrated with food. And so by the time I was 11 or 12, we went to the doctor and I remember the doctor whispering to my mom and telling her that I was about 2% body fat away from being obese. And that's where my whole health and fitness journey really started because he told my mom I had to start going on diets and lose weight. And so I've done pretty much every diet under the sun and, you know, struggled with relationship with food, relationship with body image, all that stuff through all like entire teenage years. in young adulthood into my 20s as well.

For me, education has been a big catalyst to have a healthier relationship with both fitness and nutrition. I'm the type of person. I'm a very logical thinker. So when I understand the why behind what I'm doing, it helps me not feel confused and clear on what I'm doing. But I always say that fitness has been my biggest mentor. And I know that's fairly like philosophical.

But what I mean by that is I haven't really had a direct example in my life of what commitment and dedication to a goal, like what that really looks. like or what good parenting looks like or what committing your life to your career or family looks like. And I think I've learned a lot of those skills through fitness because through fitness and through getting in better shape physically, you learn about consistency, discipline, delayed gratification, a lot of skills that are transferable to other areas of your life. Right. And so a lot of the success and things that I'm proud of in my life have come as a direct byproduct of the skills that I've learned through fitness.

I think fitness has made me a better dad, a better husband, a better entrepreneur, a better friend, a better leader. Those are the things that I really care about, right? And when I talk about the things that I'm proud of, it's never about the way I look. It's about the things that fitness has helped me accomplish. And that's really what I want people to realize is really what's important about committing to living a healthier lifestyle and working on your fitness. Okay.

So I think that's big picture philosophical, why I think people should focus on health and fitness because it does improve every single aspect of not just your life, but who you are as a person. And then beyond that, you feel great. You're confident in your skin. I think a big part of it, Drew, is being able to live your highest quality life. You know, many of the clients that we work with, they tell us, yes, we want to lose 20 pounds, 30 pounds, whatever it may be, build some muscle. But when I ask them why, it's because their partner is going through cancer and they want to be able to take care of their husband or their wife. They have grandkids and they're realizing that they can't run around with their grandkids without being in pain. It's because they like to travel and they can't go hiking for more than 10 minutes without being out of breath.

It's really about living a higher quality of life. And I think that is the most important reason why people should focus on their health and fitness. Whenever people are thinking about going down a journey of losing fat, right, because that's important distinction. We don't want to lose muscle. Sure. Right? We want to preserve that muscle that's there. There's oftentimes, if they're not aware of what works and what doesn't,

one of the biggest mistakes people do is they set too aggressive of a goal. So how did you come up with this idea of losing around 20 pounds of fat? You know, for some people, it might be 10, 15, but let's say like 20 pounds and 90 days. What is sustainable about that target and goal? What can you say about that? The goal is to lose body fat, not muscle. Right. and what we want to do is lose weights in a way where we are maximizing how much fat we lose

and retaining as much muscle as possible, if not even gaining muscle. And the way we do that is really based off the strategies that we use. There are a number of different variables like how we exercise, what our diet looks like that will influence whether we lose more fat or more muscle. Okay. One of the really important variables that impacts the proportion of muscle and fat lost is the rate of weight loss itself. So in general, be faster you lose weight, the more predisposed you are to lose muscle mass.

Overall, what we see in the scientific literature is that slower weight loss is more sustainable weight loss, but also leads to more fat loss and more muscle retention. And the reason why, it's pretty simple to understand when you are in a large calorie deficit, and I know we'll talk about what a calorie deficit is and all that in a second here, but when you're losing weight quickly, your body needs energy. And so it's going to get it from all different types of sources, fat but also lean tissue. The more aggressively we pursue weight loss, fat loss, the more of that energy is going to be coming from lean mass, which is not good. What is an example of an aggressive goal that sometimes you hear people say, like, oh, I want to get ready for my wedding. It's in like two months or, you know, I have this reunion and I want to show everybody that, like, you know, I look kind of like how I did back in high school. What's an example of an aggressive goal? Yeah.

So to be transparent, the number of 20 pounds is, it's a generic number. Most people want to lose 20 to 30 pounds. But the real way to measure the rate of fat loss is based off a percentage of your total body weight. So what we see is going above maybe 1% of your total body weight per week is fairly aggressive. Somebody like myself, I weigh around 220 pounds. If I were pursuing fast weight loss and I'm losing weight at more than about two pounds a week, it's pretty aggressive. Why? Because in order to lose weight at that rate, I would need to cut my calories way low.

So probably 1,000 calories below my maintenance on a daily basis. and that would mean that I'm undernourished. I'm not getting the nutrients I need to actually recover from my training and stimulate muscle growth. And so I am at an increased risk of losing more muscle mass. So the percentage is better because somebody who is starting at 150 pounds versus 250 pounds, the rate of weight loss is going to be totally different. So just saying two pounds is really fast. It's irrelevant depending on where you're starting.

Right. So targeting more than a percent of your total body weight per week is fairly aggressive. So you know, about 75 percent of my audience is female. And so let's say that there's a woman listening today and she's in like the 165, 175 range, somewhere around there. And she's like, you know what? Like when I was in college or high school or just starting college, I was like, you know, 130, right?

I'm just making up numbers, right? There's height, there's everything else, there's how much muscle you have, but just making up numbers. You know, that's 40 pounds. And I have an event coming up. I want to lose 40 pounds in, you know, two months. Yeah. That's an example of an aggressive goal.

And the challenge is that you'll probably end up losing a lot of muscle, which is hard to get back. And then secondarily, whatever method you use to get there is not going to be sustainable for the future, like a juice cleanse or other stuff. The caveat being that sometimes, especially with some of these new GLP1 drugs, people are looking around,

especially a lot of people who are listening to this podcast They're like, damn, it sucks because I have a friend that just went on GOPs and it might have been right for them and their situation. And they lost, you know, 20 pounds in one month, you know, a month and a half. You have any thoughts on that? Yeah, a couple of things. Weight loss is always faster initially because weight loss and fat loss aren't synonymous. So when we start dieting or whatever we're doing to lose weight, you're going to lose weight quicker initially because you're going to lose a significant amount of water weights. We see this a lot with really low-carb diets.

And it's actually one of the challenges that people experience because they don't understand what's going under, like happening underneath in their physiology. Like if you go on a low-carb diet, you don't have as much glycogen stored in your muscle. You lose a ton of water weight. You lose 10 pounds in those first two weeks. And it's like, oh my God, this low-carb thing is amazing, right? And then weight loss stalls because you can't just continuously lose more and more water weight. And then the person thinks like it's not working.

When in reality, the rate of fat loss is fairly consistent throughout. I bring that up because you'll see the same thing when people, go on GLPs or use any sort of restrictive weight loss method. It's like, yes, you lose a lot of weight really quickly, but that's not synonymous with fat loss, which is what we're talking about here. And if you had a Dexas scan before or after actually we're looking at it, you'd see that, okay, hey, yeah, you might feel thinner. And that might be the goal of some people listening.

And you hear often that women might feel in particular, not to, you know, generalize, but that it does seem to be, you'll hear that. that it's like, hey, I want to look thinner, I want to look small, I want to look like this. You could get there, but then the concern right now for a lot of people is that, okay, well, then how does that impact other things that you're also wanting to protect, like your risk

of osteopina or osteoporosis in the future, you know, other longevity metrics that could be at risk if you're losing weight that quickly. The main mental framework that I want people to ask themselves if they struggle with like wanting to lose weight quickly. If you lose weight, let's say you lose the weight that you want to lose. Let's not think about time frame right now. Do you want to lose weight in a way where when you reach your goal, it feels really hard to maintain the weight loss and you have potentially sacrificed certain

aspects of your health, like your bone health, right, and your blood sugar regulation, because muscle is really important for blood sugar regulation? Or do you want to lose weight and feel like it's easy to maintain? You are healthier and you feel strong. longer, more capable. Everybody wants the ladder, right? Nobody wants to feel like it's really hard to maintain weight loss and nobody wants to feel unhealthy after losing weight. If the ladder is what you're aiming for, then be okay with a slower rate of weight loss.

Because the goal is not to lose 20 pounds in a month. It is to lose 20 pounds of body fat and feel like you can actually keep it off for the rest of your life and feel really good. And that's always going to be a slower approach. The good thing is that we have all the time in the world. The funny thing, Drew, is that most people who want to lose a lot of weight in a short time period have been trying to lose. a lot of weight in a short time period for five or ten years. And so like they want to lose it in

two months, but they've been stuck for five years. How about you just have a mental reset and be okay with losing that weight in four months, six months, nine months, doing it a little bit slower, doing it healthier, but doing it in a way that you can confidently maintain the weight off? In addition to people setting too aggressive of a goal, something that's unsustainable, what are the other mindset things that get in the way of people embarking on a journey like this? A few weeks ago, I took my tiny health at-home gut test, and out of the 100-plus markers they screened for, the test flagged one thing as my number one priority, reducing my elevated levels of a bacteria called Klebsia. Now, I had never heard this bacteria before. When Klebsia grows out of balance, that's one of the things that my gut health was uniquely dealing with, it's been linked to all sorts of stuff, but especially a flare-up of eczema.

Now, I have no history of eczema, but about a year ago, I started noticing some. mild eczema on my right hand. This is exactly why I was motivated to take the tiny health gut test because I wanted to get to the source early before a small patch of eczema became a much bigger issue. The report also showed me that one single species, a bacteria called P. Volgatas, was taking up almost 17% of my entire microbiome. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with this bacteria. But when one species is hogging that much real estate in the gut, that starts to signal that a gut might be out of balance. Now, Tiny Health's report showed me

that they wanted to see other dominant strains come up in percentage, and that matches the research that they've done and all the historical research that's out there on Centenarians around the world whose gut microbiomes share one common thing, a healthy diversity amongst a bunch of different species that are out there.

You know, when it comes to your gut health, every functional medicine doctor that I've worked with says, test don't guess. Tiny Health was one of the tests that consistently came back as recommended from peers that I trust because of how good their technology is. Shotgun, metagenomic sequencing, built with researchers from Johns Hopkins, Mayo Clinic, Harvard, and Stanford, reading your gut bacteria down to the strain level.

My report came back with the detailed action plan matched my results. Foods to focus on, in my case, cinnamon, garlic, oregano, more mushrooms, specific fibers, probiotics I could be taking, as well as other healthy lifestyle factors that I could focus on to radically improve my gut microbiome. Now, if this sounds exciting and you want to figure out what's going on with your gut health, right now, Tiny Health is offering my community their biggest offer yet. $50 off your first gut health test. Just head over to TinyHealth.com slash Drew to claim your discount. Again, that's TinyT-I-N-Y health.com slash D-HR-U for $50 off your first test. Your gut has a story to tell.

Mine sure did. Tiny Help helps you understand what it's trying to say. Your skin is your body's largest organ. and every day it's working to repair damage from UV light, pollution, and the normal wear and tear of life. One way to support that process is with red and near-infred light therapy. That's why I've been using bond charges, red light face mask. Red and near-infred light helps support healthy mitochondrial function in skin cells, giving those cells the energy they need to power your skin's natural repair process.

A huge bonus is that it's incredibly easy to use. I'll wear for 10 to 20 minutes while taking care of baby stuff that I got to do, like washing my son's bottles, catching up on emails, or winding down before bed, that's another favorite. It's also one of those low effort habits that you can easily fit into your day and feel good about it. And if you've been thinking about trying red light therapy,

now is the perfect time. Right now, Bon Charge is offering my community 15% off. Just go to Boncharge.com slash Drew and use the code Drew, D-H-R-U to get that 15% off. Again, that's Bon, B-O-N-charge, C-H-A-R-G-E dot com slash Drew, D-H-R-U, to give your skin the recovery support it's been missing. From the mindset side, it's pretty simple. It's perfectionism.

Perfectionism. Yeah. I think perfectionism and having an all-or-nothing mindset is a double-edged sword because and maybe for a lot of the listeners, you know, a lot of successful people, entrepreneurs, people who really care about their careers, that when they focus on something they are all in, that sort of mindset or perspective, can aid in areas like professional success, but really backfire when it comes to health

because it's never going to be perfect, right? And so I bring that up because one of the challenges that I experience often when we work with clients is that when they're committed, they're fairly committed. But if they have a vacation and they slightly fall off plan, now they feel really guilty and bad and like they failed. And they allow that sense of failure to derail them, not just for like the trip that they went on for a week,

but now for weeks or months after that. And that's really the part that sets them back. It's not necessarily the fact that they ate a little bit more during a vacation. Like, hey, we all go on vacation. We want to enjoy ourselves. Like, you can have the freedom to do that. But it's really this perspective of I have to do things perfectly or I have totally screwed up. And it's this dichotomy between I'm on a plan or not on a plan.

And one of the really important skills that we work on developing with all of our clients is focusing on all or something, not all or. nothing. The thing is, Drew, if you have a busy month where you're traveling a lot for work, some people just say, well, I can't follow my diet plan and I can't work out five times a week, so I'm not going to at all. It's like, let's find a happy medium where you can still stay relatively consistent. I'm not going to sit here and say it's going to be as effective. It'll be slightly less effective, but at least you stay consistent with something so you maintain the consistency and the progress that you're making. Yeah, you're really saying that negative self-talk is the number one reason that people sabotage themselves.

Because you've worked with so many different people. And you also have kids, right, as a father. For a lot of the clients that you work with, what do you think the origin is of that negative self-talk? When did it start for them? Right? Where did it come from? For a lot of people, it's childhood.

For me, it was certainly childhood. If, I mean, we model what we see as a kid, right? And so if you grew up in an environment where, like, I'll speak from my experience, where like culturally Hispanic culture we talk a lot about people's bodies and body image so either you're too skinny or you're too overweight you're never like good with how you are

I don't think that's unique to just Hispanics Indian culture or Chinese Asian yeah yeah yeah is probably hey you're looking too fat oh you got acne you got a big pimple on your face which I'm not saying is good but a lot of those other cultures do that too yeah exactly and so if you grew up in that sort of environment you grew up in an environment where food was used as a coping mechanism. If you grew up in an environment where nobody close to you, friends, family really cared about their health and fitness.

If you struggled with body image issues throughout like your young adulthood and maybe you were bullied for those things, if maybe you tried working with a personal trainer and you were embarrassed or had a negative experience, those things stick with you. Were you bullied as a kid? Did people like call your names or other things like that? Thankfully, not so much because my mom always also in stilled in me like just being somewhat tough. And so if anybody did try bullying me or anything like out, like, I've always been a class clown and I have been quick to react and say things back.

So like, not really. So you had the gift of gab. So you take them down. Yes, yes, definitely, definitely. Yeah, yeah. But I think that's where a lot of the negative self-talk stems from, at least from a health and fitness perspective, right? It's this idea of I can't be the person that I want to be. Yeah. Because the goal isn't to try to be a healthy person. The goal is to really embody being a healthy person, which means that you live a healthy lifestyle as a byproduct of who you are, not something that you're trying to do. But how can you embody that if your entire life has shown you that you are not that type of person? I think one other thing that's worthwhile interjecting inside of here is that everybody has a different, you know, frame of reference that

they live in. And it used to be prior to social media, prior to like modern TV, magazines, etc. You just kind of knew what you saw in your community. Occasionally you had TV, you'd see stuff. nowadays with social media and the level of comparison, I think it is, you know, truthful to say, there's a really great book. It's called The Female Brain. There's a counterpart to it as well called The Male Brain by a researcher named Dr. Luann, Brisbane. And one of the important things that she says for men to understand, for women understand, for anybody that's raising a daughter understand, is that women's brains have more neurons

and neuroconnection from left to right hemisphere. This is why traditionally from a young age, women, young girls are interested in people, right? They're interested in dolls and people and, you know, they're so much more socially aware. They're like, you know, boys are like kind of lagging and it takes them a while to get there. And that's a double-edged sword,

which is that with the birth of social media, especially for young women, even older women, your brain is going to be paying attention to and seeing the world that's out there. And before that it was magazines. And listen, this is not a conversation about what's going on with women's brains. Men have a lot of problems and a lot of things that are there too.

But I think in particular for my audience, it would be a disservice to say, even my wife struggles with this, is that if you're too deep in the algorithm, that starts to with your brain. And you start to think that there's something wrong with you because everybody else out there is pursuing and achieving their goals and they look stunning. And here you are lagging behind. And that's just not the reality of the world. Social media does not help. especially and there's a lot of great things about social media too of course of course I'm here because of social media right and the all the opportunities like there's a lot of great when it cut like social media does a lot of good obviously I think when it comes to the fitness piece it's very easy to compare

yourself to what you see online especially if you don't understand what goes behind when people post pictures or videos and they look amazing funny enough drew one of the topics that I cover maybe not as often as I should but that really resonates with my audience is exactly this where I will make a video where I post a picture right after getting a workout and like having a great pump and taking electrolytes so my blood is flowing more and you look great, right? And then I'm like, this is literally an hour later and it looks like a completely different person. And it's just to show the message that what you see on social media is not real. Yes, there are people who are in amazing shape, but when people post photo shoots or, you know, swimsuit models or whatever, it's always under great

lighting. Usually after a workout, you have a great pump. The angles are great. A lot of people will edit images as well. So what you're seeing is a distorted version of reality. And it's not to say that those people don't look amazing in person. They just typically don't look like what they're actually posting online. Yeah. Or it's a snapshot in time and they go and build a business and they get out of shape, you know, comparably to how they were before. And, you know, that's all part of the process. Yeah. Right. But if we think that that's how people are living 24-7, we can start to slowly develop the mindset that without even realizing it, sometimes it's unconscious that, you're broken, right? And if you think you're broken, you're going to be looking for an excuse to

prove yourself right. I had this quote that I shared a few years ago in my newsletter, and it was like, your mind is like a detective. It's always looking for evidence to reinforce what you believe. So if deep down inside you believe, because you were sort of spoken to in a way growing up or bullied or whatever it might be, that you're broken, that one week where you don't track your protein as well in the beginning because you're still learning and it's hard for you to eyeball. You fall off the wagon because you had a really busy work schedule. You've gotten to a fight with your husband or wife or whatever might be and you just weren't as motivated.

You're going to think like, wow, I knew it. I was always broken and I just proved to myself. And that's the reason I can't achieve the things. And at least now I know, right? I know that I'm broken and that's why I'm not achieving things. And the ego loves, even if it's limiting, the ego loves to know. and have security. And sometimes that security,

that false belief that we're broken, provides us some sense of comfort because we don't actually have to go for the things that we really want in life. Yeah, our brain is definitely looking for evidence to prove the narratives that we tell ourselves without doubt. Well, this podcast is the counter to that, and it's the practical with the mindset.

So let's get into the practical. You know, step one, as part of your process, is really understanding something that a lot of people have never really taken the time to do, which is understanding, hey, what amount of fuel does my body need on a daily basis just to get the job done? Can you talk about this? Yeah. So when we talk about fuel, we can use words like energy or calories, right?

And everybody has a different amount of fuel that they need. Essentially, the amount of fuel that our body needs to maintain normal, optimal physiological function is what we would call our maintenance calories. Right? The amount of calories you need to maintain your current body weight and optimal function. And I mentioned optimal function because if you cut your calories too low, it can start to affect things like hormones, reproductive function. Not good. The first thing I want to preface, Drew, because a lot of people, there's a lot of confusion around calories. And a lot of people maybe are resistant to tracking their food intake as well. Here's my general perspective.

Tracking your food is a tool. That's all it is. It can be a very useful tool. And the reason why I'm a proponent of it is because it helps you create awareness around your eating habits and behaviors. If you are somebody who has struggled with your dietary habits and eating healthy isn't part of your nature or your current habits, the first step to change your behaviors is to create awareness. The analogy I like to use with tracking calories, it's the same as budgeting. If you spend more than you make, you are in trouble, right? You have to change your spending behaviors.

But how do you spend your changing behaviors if you don't track your income and your expenditure? Yeah, it's very difficult, if not impossible. Exactly. And so the same thing with tracking, I would never tell somebody they need to track their calories forever. But if you've never done it and another caveat there, if you've never done it diligently, because people will say, oh, I tracked my calories, but they're like, I tracked a little bit and on the weekends I didn't and whatever. It's not really done diligently. If you've never tracked it diligently, I think it's one of the best practices to learn

about your eating habits, which habits that do you have in place that are bad, which ones are good, how do you make the proper food modifications within your calorie budget, how do you eat out and still stay relatively on track? And I think if somebody actually commits to tracking their food for a period of three to six months and you do it well, you'll never have to track again. Yeah, and the thing that I would say to like my audience that is, you know, a lot of individuals that are interested in like, for lack of a better term, like a natural lifestyle and really care about eating organic and Whole Foods and other stuff is we live in a world now where more than ever before. It used to be you'd go to like the organic co-op that was around you, often like a university

town, you know, even I'm talking about like pre- Whole Foods. Sure. And they had a lot, they had like a big aisle of like grains and beans and bulk stuff that you'd buy all organic to like cook at home. And they'd have like an aisle of like spices. And there was maybe one aisle of like process. And health food, right? Some of the early, early brands that were there. And the rest of it was all like produce, right? That's some of the first organic stores that I was going to when I was in college were kind of like that. And then over a period of time, like every industry, things got more sophisticated. So even in the organic space now, even in a place like Air One, if you guys have never been Air One, you know, it's known as one of the most expensive grocery stores. I love those

guys. They do a great job. I'm in there all the time, not because it's expensive because they have really good stuff. Even in a place like Air One, you have one aisle here at the Air One in Santa Monica. That's just chips, right? Like that's just straight up different types of chips primarily, right? That's taking up the aisle, potato chips, corn chips, this, that, other stuff. And so even the organic food, even the things that are supposed to be sort of like, you know, that people would traditionally think as like healthier.

It's our entire industry. and our entire food palette, especially Americans, has become more processed. And when that's out there, if a decent amount of your diet, especially if you have kids and you're getting snacks and other stuff,

you just find yourself eating a lot of those foods, you don't realize if you've never tracked calories just how quickly you can have excess calories in your diet from even things that are relatively healthy things that are out there. Yeah. So even taking a lot of experts that have come on this podcast have said, just even taking two weeks, even if you're not going towards like, you know, fat loss goal of 20 pounds and 90 days, even taking two weeks and you'll be so astonished. That bag of chips that you eat that you think is one serving, you had four servings in that one serving.

And it's actually way more fat than you realized, even for something like a bag of sioux chips that are out there. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Tracking food is a really great way to realize how small portion sizes actually are, but it's actually a really good way to create awareness around portion sizes too. You brought up a point that I really wanted to touch on because there is also this argument or back and forth, and I don't think it needs to exist because it should really be a conversation about coexisting of what matters more, food quality or calories.

I think it's a silly argument because it's not which one matters more, they both matter. It's like, yes, you have to have high dietary quality. We need to be eating healthy whole foods, of course. And if you're trying to lose body fat, the energy intake still matters. One doesn't outweigh the other. They're both very important. And they influence each other too, right? So talking about a fat loss perspective, like food quality matters a ton.

One of the big reasons why it matters is because it influences hunger and satiety signals, helps us naturally eat less. It also impacts things like the thermic effective food, which is how much energy we actually spend metabolizing the food, right? So they both matter. It's not one or the other. And I bring that up because you'll also hear people say the argument of like, I don't want to go on a calorie deficit diet.

I just want to eat healthier. And there are a lot of people that eat pretty healthy and still struggle with their inability to lose weight. And it's because we need to tailor both of those variables. When I talk about a healthy and sustainable diet, I really think it needs to meet three requirements. The first one is that we need to have a healthy diet that actually supports your nutritional needs.

that's where like the whole foods come in right like focusing on dietary quality making sure we're hitting all our macronutrient needs our micronutrient needs which people don't focus on enough making sure that we're not hungry and starving by focusing on the right habits with food but then the second variable is that it needs to be tailored to our goals and if you have a weight loss goal that's where like the caloric intake comes into play and is really important and the third variable which people rarely talk about is that you need to eat in a way that is sustainable and enjoyable for you. And that's that's one of the big reasons why I don't like cookie cutter dieting solutions, because they don't take the individual's preferences into account. We can talk about that later,

because that goes into more of the topic of long-term sustainability with diet. But I think it's a really important point to bring up to. Yeah, if you never, even if you consider yourself like a super healthy eater, if you never have any fun foods in your diet, the likelihood of you keeping this up long term. Yeah. It's just so low. And when I started incorporating that into my own life, you know, through working with like a trainer and a coach and other stuff, I also realized like, oh, wow, like last night yesterday, there's a really great restaurant or a neighborhood that just opened up a few months ago called neighborly. And on the menu is air fries, right, as one of the sort of options that they have. They have some really great like kebabs and salads

and other stuff. My wife ordered from there. 10 years ago, I'd have been like, I don't eat fries, right? And I would just, I would say, I don't have even like air fried fries. I'm just going to stay away from that. I'm only focusing on like whole organic foods or this or that. And then today with all the goals and all the things that I have, I realize like, wow, I can have a little bit, doesn't throw off, and I also don't crave to have more where also 10 years ago, I would strictly, strictly avoid things for months.

And then I would find myself really craving some of these things. Yeah. And then falling off the wagon in terms of my plan for like a week and feeling bad about, you know, overeating on like, you know, processed organic junk food. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's the nice thing is that when you can incorporate them and you understand, you're like, wow, okay, cool. Like having a budget doesn't mean you save every dollar.

Yeah. Having a budget is actually like, here's all the fun stuff that I can spend money on within the means that I have. and that has to be part of living life as well too. Yeah. We were saying that an important part of this is understanding how much you actually need in terms of calories to fuel your lifestyle. You have this sort of simple calculation that you talked about before on your content.

That's an easy way. There's these calculators and we can link to a few that are out there. I'm sure you can share a couple that people can do. But there's actually a simpler process and method that people can kind of put together to generally estimate like what? What is their base level of calories that they need based on their activity level? Can you walk us through that calculation? You might not think about your liver health a ton, but here's why you should.

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slash Drew and use the code Drew, D-H-R-U, to get 35% off your first subscription. Again, that's DOSE-D-A-I-L-Y.C-O-S-D-E-H-R-U for 35% off your first month's subscription. You might not think about your liver health a ton, but here's why you should. Your liver is one of the most underrated organs, quietly working in the background to produce and metabolize hormones, help detoxify your body, and process everything you consume while supporting your digestion, energy production, and more than 500 different functions in your body. It's a busy freaking organ. That's one of the reasons I'm paying more attention to supporting it. And one of the ways I do that is with dose. Dose is a liver health supplement that's different from most supplements,

because it's not another capsule or powder. It's simply a 2-ounce daily shot that actually tastes like fresh, squeezed orange juice. It supports your liver's daily function as it processes the unwanted elements we encounter every single day, and it has zero sugar, zero junk, and zero calories. I also love that it's backed by two double-blind placebo-controlled studies showing positive effects on liver enzyme levels. For me, it's just one of those simple habits that's easy to stick with and supports something my body's already working hard to do every single day.

If you're ready to give your liver some extra love today, head over to dosedaily.com slash drew and use the code Drew, D-H-R-U, to get 35% off your first subscription. Again, that's DOS, D-O-S-E-D-A-I-L-Y. Dot C-O-S-D-H-R-U for 35% off your first month's subscription. Yeah, and the number we'll share here is specifically for weight loss school. I want to first touch on you mentioned the word estimate. Okay, all of these methods. whether you use a calculator, whether you use the method I'm going to share with you here or any other

particular method, they are just an estimate. And I share this because oftentimes people have used the calculators or whatnot and they start there and like, oh, it wasn't working for me. Like, what's wrong with me? It's like, it's just an estimate. And then you tailor from there. Okay, so the goal of the estimate is to start in a general ballpark that will most likely be around the right range, but then you need to tailor. And I know we'll talk about tailoring later. But in general, if you take your body weight and you take your activity level, and we'll just talk about three different activity levels, being completely sedentary, which I don't recommend for anybody. Like, we should all, if we are sedentary, increase our activity so we can afford to eat more food. If you are completely sedentary, you take your body weight and you multiply it by 10, roughly.

So I'm around 220 pounds. If I didn't move at all, that would be around 2,200 calories, right, for weight loss. If I was lightly active, lightly active, maybe one or two workouts a week, better moderate intensity, 30 to 45 minutes and you walk throughout the day, but nothing excessive. You would multiply that by 12. I'm not gonna do the math on top of my head because now it starts to get a little bit trickier,

but I believe that's probably a little closer to like 2,500 calories. So now you're a woman, you're listening, or a guy, you know, it doesn't matter, but I'm just gonna just pick a round number, right? This isn't like a target weight for people, everybody has their own goals and stuff, but you're somebody that's 150 pounds

and you're a little bit more active, right? That number's 1,800. Correct. 1,800 calories is your sort of base, level based on being moderately active. Sure. Initially sedentary is 10, right? You're multiplied by 10.

So if you're completely sedentary, which again, nobody should really be. But if you find yourself completely sedentary, then that's 1,500 calories. Correct. Yeah. And then if you are moderately active, which means you're working out three or four times a week at a pretty good intensity, you're mindful about how much you walk throughout the day and you have a daily step goal. and that number would be a little bit closer to like 1.4, right? And then if we have anybody who's like very active, working on every day, over an hour, very intense, you're walking 10,000 plus steps every single day, that could get closer to 1.6 to 1.7.

Again, these are just general ballparks. Right. So we want to pick a number that most appropriately estimates how active we are, start there and then Taylor, because it's not going to be perfect. Personally, drew my favorite way, this is the simplest way. I think the most accurate way is if you just simply track your eating for two weeks, right? So if you weigh 150 pounds and you track your eating for two weeks and your weight stays stable at around 150 pounds, you know that whatever you were tracking is pretty close to your maintenance. So let's say you weigh 150 pounds, you track your food for two weeks, you're seeing that you're eating 2,000 calories on average on a given day.

That is your maintenance. And then to estimate how many calories you need for sustainable weight loss, I would just drop it 15 to 20% below that. So pretty simple there. 1,600 to 1,700 calories would be a rough range there. Got that. So that's important again because a lot of times people throw out arbitrary calorie goals. Yes. Even if they are sort of slightly calorie aware.

Yeah. Or they're not even realizing that they're doing some sort of crash diet. Yeah. That isn't fueling their basics. And so now their hormones are at risk, both men and women. Yeah. They feel super lethargic. And they also are losing weight, but they're losing.

you know, muscle in the process as well too, which isn't going to be sustainable and is going to be counterintuitive to their long-term goals. Yeah, one really common or prominent quote-unquote diet, I say quote unquote, because it's not really even a diet, specifically really marketed for women is like the 1,200 calorie diet, which like it's not, that's not a diet. That's like an amount of food that you're consuming. And you can't just assign an amount of food for everyone across the board because your level of physical activity, your size, your gender, like all of these things will influence how much you should be eating. I haven't heard too much about that diet as much recently. Maybe that was a thing more back in the day. Yeah. But I think another version of

this that's out there, especially in the wellness community, is a version of sort of, you know, there can be benefits to fasting. And in fact, there's some really interesting research that comes out of here in Los Angeles, Dr. Walter Longo, showing that fasting for cancer patients prior to chemotherapy, increases the effectiveness of chemotherapy by 25%. You know, there's some really interesting research around the fasting mimicking diet in certain instances, but some of these crash fast that people go on on a regular basis, primarily to lose weight and, you know, feel better. You know, that's another version of, you know, yo-yo dieting. 100%. Right.

instead of maybe the more long-term sustainable beneficial way to both your body and circadian rhythm, which would be just, you know, time-restricted eating within a window if you wanted to get some of those other benefits for, you know, some of the work around like Suchin Panda's circadian biology research that's there. So, you know, these crash fast, weekend fast, where people are going on bone broth diets or all this stuff. And if you look at the real reason, if you talk to people,

no shame in this, it's primarily for weight loss, right? Yeah. Sometimes it'll be some gut reset as well too, but it seems to be a big weight loss piece that's inside of that. And you will lose weight, but then you'll just end up eating more the next week anyway and gaining it back and not making it sustainable. And oftentimes people will do those things

as punishment for eating poorly the day before. That's important. Which just creates this weird sort of psychology around food that doesn't help. You need to do something extreme because you're broken and you did bad last week, so you need to be punished. Yeah, it's like for anybody listening, if you feel like you did bad on the weekend,

don't try to overcorrect. Just go back to your plan. I came across a study. We'll link to it in the show notes. It showed that, you know, sometimes people haven't been in the gym in a long time. They think, I'm going to really get into it. I used to work out hard back when I was in New York

and in finance. I'm going to hit the gym hard. Your rate of injury based on how much harder you go compared to your baseline is so much higher. So if you want to get injured, go punish yourself at the gym after not working out for a while

as a way to try to make up for lost time. It's not going to work. Injury occurs when you expose your tissues in your body to substantially more stress than it can actually maintain. So it's like if you usually do 100 pounds throwing out random numbers here and like your body can handle that well.

And now you're like, I'm going to do 150 pounds because I'm just going to go as hard as I can. You're going to get injured, right? Whereas if you go from 100 to 105 to 110, that's how you build up resilience. So now that you have a general idea, again, it's an estimate for your baseline calories that are needed. Now step two is to create the right calorie deficit. Sure. Let's talk about that. Yep, the right calorie deficit.

So when you identify how many calories your body need, the next step is to determine well by how many calories should I decrease my food intake so that I am losing body fat at an appropriate rate. When we talk about an appropriate rate, I think it's two things. It's losing weight slow enough so you're not sacrificing muscle like we talked about earlier, but also slow enough so that you don't have to feel like you're starving yourself. Because another issue that people really struggle with with weight loss is just feeling ravenously hungry all day long. that is not helpful either. A little bit of hunger is to be expected if you're working on weight loss and it can be mitigated through the right habits, which we'll touch on. But you should not

feel like you're starving, right? And the amount of food that you eat is a big contributor to how you, how full you feel throughout the day. So we want a slight calorie deficit. So we're losing weight slowly. The scale is going down. We're primarily losing body fat and we're not feeling like we're starving. But we also don't want to lose fat so slowly where we're not seeing any progress. And you don't feel motivated. Exactly. Exactly. So it's a fine line. I will preface this by saying that like the numbers that I'm going to share are not based off hard data that says losing weight at this rate is the most beneficial rate because it really depends on the person. But what we've found from working with now thousands of people

is that that sweet spot seems to be between half a percent to 1% of your total body weight per week. And genuinely for most people, I recommend closer to that half percent. So me again weighing around 220 pounds, we'll call it 200 for ease of math. It would be. roughly one pound per week. Okay, that's half a percent of my total body weight. For a female who is around 150 pounds, that would be three quarters of a pound per week, right? Like, if you're losing weight at that half a percent, it is sustainable. In general, that is going to equate with a calorie deficit of about 15 to 20 percent. Okay, so if your maintenance is 2,000 calories, you've estimated it's around 2,000 calories, then that would be anywhere between 16 to 1,700 calories.

as your deficit to start. Now, as you start to lose weight, if you maintain the same calorie deficit, the weight loss will start to plateau. And then you have to tweak your food intake or tweak your expenditure. But that will be going into step five when we talk about how to measure progress and make modifications. But that would be the starting spot in terms of your overall calorie deficit. One thing I also really want to preface, Drew, for the people listening, I know we've outlined

this as five different steps, but it's not necessarily in order because I know one of the steps that we'll talk about is training, right? And I actually recommend if you're not training at all to start with that habit first because we need to move our body. We need to focus on building muscle. And I would say like that is the baseline of everything. It actually, another post that I make often that gets a lot of attention is I usually say it hurts me to admit this because my PhD is in nutritional sciences. But like if you're not exercising, it doesn't really matter. I mean, it's an exaggeration. I would say it doesn't matter how you eat. Of course it matters how you eat. but like exercise is really important.

So I want to make sure that it's not like, focus on your calories first before you exercise. All of these are important simultaneously. Yeah, and I think that, you know, we didn't touch on it yet, but I know you're a big proponent of this, is that a lot of people are looking for not even. We even think that sometimes we're looking for fat loss. And the next step of that is they're really looking for body composition.

Yes, yes. Right? And why this is so important is that, you know, we'll put in the intro we have some of you know before and afters of some of the clients that you've worked with and my trainer here uh mark uh from uh one pt you know he has a bunch of his clients that he's taken on this journey as well too i have some before and after photos of my you know my uh journey that i went on in my uh late 30s early 40s and i'll even show my wife i'll show my wife yeah because she works out with my trainer as well too mark i'll show her you know different you know women in the gym or

some of their photos or other things like that it's like can you imagine like what do you think how much this person weighs. And they look really fit. And, you know, they have the nice little booty pop that a lot of women want. And, you know, they look like tone, but also like lean and other stuff and she'll throw out a number.

And, you know, I've chatted with that person or maybe they're a trainer. And I know how much they weigh or I know their journey. And it's always higher. Yeah. Right? Often in cases, there could be times where the woman,

because I'm talking about my wife. Yes. But I've had this with my male friends as well, too. I had this with the first trainer that I worked with, right? He was so jacked and he had like a six-pack. And I asked him, you know, how much he weighed. And it was the opposite of, he weighed less than me and he looked fantastic.

And he looked so muscular. I thought, no way. He must weigh so much more than me. Yeah. And he weighed less than me. And it was all body composition. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Improved, you know, fat loss, but also building muscle.

So a lot of times people think that they, just want to weigh less. Yeah, yeah. But the body that they might be trying to get closer in the direction of, and we have to also realize that a lot of trainers, that's their full-time job. Yeah. Right?

They're in the gym multiple times a day. That's what they're focused on. You know, no different than if somebody's full-time job is just like, hey, I'm just making money. I'm focusing on optimizing that. Okay, great. That's like one metric in life. It's not the only metric that's there.

So that's an important piece is part of this, is that it goes back to why I can imagine that it totally makes sense that a lot of people like yourself, would say start with training because it's not just about losing the weight. It's about improving your body composition overall. Yeah, that's a really good point to touch on. I tell everyone across the board, and we use the word weight loss because it just resonates with everybody, and it's a simple term, everybody knows what we're talking about, right?

Even like I wrestle with saying, like, hey, improvements in body composition or fat loss or weight loss. I'll use weight loss because everybody knows what that means. People get confused about everything else. But I across the board tell everyone like, your goal is not to lose weight. Your goal is to improve your body composition. and weight loss can be part of that. But the North Star is improvements in body composition, right?

And that simply just means that the ratio of fat to muscle improves over time. Because here's the thing, if you are a 26% body fat and you lose 40 pounds, but 26% of the weight that you lost is muscle mass, your body composition has not changed. It's practically stayed neutral and you will look like a smaller version of the weight that you did before, but you won't look at any more toned or fit or any of those things. So like improving body composition is the North Star across the board for everyone. All right.

So going back to what we were saying, you know, for a lot of people, once they have their baseline, they're trying to target a calorie deficit. Are there tools, you know, there's all these different apps that are out there? You know, what do you work on with your clients? Do you use something custom? Like, are there things that make this easier or these calculations easier for individuals where they can, you know, put in their baseline and then, you know, get kind of clear and tweak a little bit of what their, you know, their calorie deficit. Like, what do you, what do you recommend?

Right now, is it just the best thing to do is just you're doing this manually? No, so we personally have a custom app, but there are a bunch of great apps out there that you can use for tracking your food and your progress. A couple things I, when we work with clients, like tracking food is one aspect of what we do. I think it's also really important to track your habits. There are a lot of great habit trackers. There's a lot of great calorie trackers. There are pros and cons to all of them. Like there is with any piece of software.

I think what's most helpful is finding a piece of software that's useful for you. Like My Fitness Pal, Chronometer are two great tools. I've had a partnership with Chronometer before. They're a really great useful free tool. I like them because they give you more insight into the micronutrient diversity of your diet as well, which is really important for overall health. but when you're tracking your food, like just being diligent with tracking for a short period of time. Again, it's not, we can make it easier by implementing certain strategies and not I'll share some here in a second.

But at the end, it's, I want people to understand like it's going to feel a little bit tedious, especially initially. And then when you build the habit of tracking food, like it gets easier. I'm assuming when you were working on your fitness goals, were you tracking your food? Yeah. Yeah. What did you find to be practical and easy for you? Or did you find it to be tedious the whole time? It was a learning curve.

Sure. It was a total learning curve. And there was many days where, you know, you fall off the wagon, you get back on, you didn't track things right, you didn't estimate, you were busy, whatever it might be. In my particular case, I initially started working with the trainer who was a little bit, even though he was very big into tracking his food and meal planning, he was more just focused on the strength training piece. And he wasn't tracking. For me, he was just like, let's just focus on eating more protein. team. Yeah. Which I think was a great first step. Yes. So after working with that trainer, I signed up with a group here in Los Angeles and they have gyms, you know, and trainers all

around the world called Ultimate Performance. And they partnered me up with both a coach and a trainer. It was like he was both my coach and trainer. And honestly, what I found most useful was being accountable to somebody, right? I'm, you know, not an endorsement of them or any sort of a specific thing. But when you have a learning curve, like, you're going to make mistakes. right? I had business mentors early on or I had a tennis coach when I was first playing tennis or whatever it might be. So having somebody that I could go to and ask questions, that honestly was the biggest thing for me. It was like being accountable to somebody and then, you know, entering it in. So at the time they were using a, you know, a custom application that was there. So it was doing my best.

And when I fell off, you know, having somebody to say, hey, what happened? No judgment. Just like, hey, what happened? Right. Like, okay, I get it. you know, empathetic, it's a tough week, you know, your son's up because he's teething or whatever else it is right now that somebody's dealing with, and then saying, all right, let's get, let's get back on the wagon, right? What's a sustainable approach? Or, oh, you don't like this type of food because it's, you know, one thing I see often, especially for a lot of women who typically are the ones in the household, again, generalizing, that are leading the grocery shopping or leading, you know, making the food. If they're trying to eat a particular way,

and, you know, their family or their kids are not trying to eat that way. It's often, how do you make this realistic so you don't have to constantly make two separate meals? Yes. Yeah. Right? That's a big one. So it's not even just that sometimes you fall off the wagon because you're not disciplined. Maybe you are disciplined, but you need practical tips on like, hey, okay, your kids like this type of food.

And what would it look like if we just added this thing in? and that's how you can make a healthier version for you. We're going to leave off this heavy dressing or this heavy cream. And you can still enjoy tacos or a burger or whatever. And it can be a much healthier version. Yes. Right? Which actually goes into,

I see you itching to jump in. So I'll let you jump in. And then we'll come back to the fact that sometimes a 500 calorie deficit or a 750 calorie deficit for somebody seems really high. But there are very practical things that people can do. on a daily basis to achieve that, and we'll talk about some of those examples. I really wanted to jump in because you brought up two really important things. You mentioned what was really helpful was having accountability and support system, where you can talk about what your challenges are and strategize how to improve your adherence

when you experience some of those situations like waking up and not having good sleep because your son is teething. There are many bad actors in the online fitness space, which, unfortunately makes the general consumer feel pretty skeptical about hiring or working with somebody. One of the biggest red flags I see is when people try to sell a unique solution to weight loss and fitness. Because there really aren't any unique solutions. Or some examples of that. Yeah, like, you know, I have these five specific foods that when you're eaten in this order, like, will help you lose fat, but I'm not going to tell you what it is unless you hire me.

Like those sorts of things tend to be just gimmicks for the most part because the information is fairly simple and straightforward. What I sell, what I think the value of coaching really is is what you mentioned. It's accountability. It's implementation. That is what people need help with because people listen to an episode like this, get a ton of great information and then struggle to implement it consistently because practicality also matters. You need accountability so that when you are not holding yourself up to the standard that you want to set for yourself, you have somebody who's going to, call you out in a kind and empathetic way and say, hey, Drew, what happened this week, man? I realized you weren't as consistent as the last week.

Are you stressed? Is something going on? Let's have a conversation so I can support you. And then the practicality component is, yes, I know I need to eat these healthy foods, but I'm making a different dinner for myself than my family because I can't be eating the same thing they're eating. Well, let's talk about how to have a happy medium and talk about small modifications that you can make for your diet so that your family also enjoys the healthy food and you can enjoy

it without having to cook to dinners, which reduces friction and stress. Right. So like I really think that is what coaching is all about. It's helping somebody stay accountable. It's supporting them and helping them implement practical tips so that we can reduce friction with this whole health and fitness thing because a big challenge that people experience is that what they're trying to do is just causing too much friction. It's too difficult. Like you mentioned, I can't tell you how many women I've spoken to that tell me they make a different dinner for themselves than they do for their family. And I'm like, do you want to keep doing that? And they're like, no, it's so much work. I'm like, all right, let's address that one thing so it's easier to stay. consistent. The second thing you brought up of when you initially work with your trainer, you weren't even tracking calories, you focus on protein as the first step. This is why I said like these steps aren't necessarily in order because for somebody who was starting, I don't think calorie tracking is the first step. Calorie tracking is important if you objectively want to lose 20 pounds in the next 90 days. Yeah, if you want to do 20 pounds and 90 days, you got to do some sort of level of calorie auditing tracking. But the first thing that we work on with a client is we actually go through what we call a

foundational phase. And what we do is, Drew, if I'm going to be working with you, the first thing I want to understand is what are your current habits right now? What does your diet look like right now? And identify the gaps in the behaviors that we need to improve. And then over the next 8 to 12 weeks, all we are going to focus on is consistency with the right habits. It might be protein at each meal if you struggle with protein. It might be bumping up your fruit and vegetable intake if you're not eating enough there. It might be increasing your step count. Identifying what the gaps are and only focusing on the behaviors because we need to have the foundation of a sustainable and healthy lifestyle first. And then we layer calorie tracking on top of that. If we work with somebody and they already have a good foundation of healthy habits, we might start with calorie tracking, but it's rarely the first thing we focus on it.

Yeah, that's an important thing to mention because I think that it can feel so daunting to somebody. Yes. It's like, okay, I get it. If you want me to lose 20 pounds and 90 days, I got to watch every single thing that I'm eating. Yeah. And that can feel like, I was like, I'm not going to do that. It's actually a lot simpler. And, you know, in most instances, unless have I've sort of found myself in a very unique situation,

where I've had months of sort of being a little bit off, you know, not even so much having fun. In my case, it's like, in particular, like, I have a bad habit of, like, not eating enough food in certain instances, but then your body will always make up for that. And so you're eating more, I might be eating the same amount of calories, but I'm under eating on protein. Luckily, I'm still training through the process.

I'm eating a higher percentage of fat, and so now my body composition is being thrown off a little bit, right? I'm not even really eating that many, like, fun foods and things, and it's just a byproduct of, okay, time in place, you know, a new baby in the mix. And so, awesome. Things are stable now. He's sleeping really well. It's a good time to, like, you know, double down, which is obviously why, you know,

I was also excited to do this episode. That's how I've been feeling these past three days here in L.A. Yesterday I didn't eat until about 3 p.m. Because I was just back to back. And then I had a massive burger at some place on Sunset Boulevard. And I'm like, man, this is delicious, but I just don't feel good. Yeah, yeah, totally. As part of this idea of people imagining, and again, it's not necessarily the first step,

but because we are talking about this process of how you could lose 20 pounds and 90 days, you have some specific examples that you put together in your content of how people, you know, if you think eating 500 calories less seems kind of, you know, daunting, there are simple things that people can do. Yeah. And women, human beings, everybody can do that are actually. very easy ways on a daily basis to achieve that calorie deficit. Yeah.

Can you talk about some of those? So simple recommendations. Oftentimes if we tell ourselves we have to create a 500 calorie deficit, or if we're going to be really exact, if you want to lose 20 pounds in 90 days, 750 calories per day, the math essentially there lets you lose 20 pounds of body fat in 20 days. We usually think that means I have to eat 750 calories less per day. Yeah. That's a lot.

The good thing is that we can also increase our energy burn. So it doesn't just have to be through diet. It's easier through diet because it's objective. It's measurable. But in general, most people who are also working on weight loss goals tend to not have the most active lifestyle. So there's a lot of room for improvement through more physical activity. What I generally recommend is creating about two thirds of the calorie deficit through your diet

and then about a third through more movement. Again, these are rough estimates because the numbers are not exact. depends on your size and your starting point. But in general, three to 400 calorie deficit from diet, and then two to 300 increase in terms of calories burn through movement is good. Yeah, if you find yourself on either of those extremes where you're trying to do it only through diet, extremely tough. Yeah.

And then the worst one is trying to do it only through activity. And then now you're like the biggest loser. Yeah. And people are losing crazy amounts of weight very quickly. And then are, you know, so to speak, fatter than ever. you know, a year later on. Yep. And like an hour of walking at a pretty moderate pace, moderate pace, like, well,

I was going to say you breaking a light sweat. I live in Florida. So I'm always breaking a light sweat, even if I'm not walking. But if you're walking for about an hour for most people, you'll burn anywhere between 250 to about 400 calories, again, depending on your size. So if you can be intentional about moving an extra 30 to 45 minutes per day, it's going to be so helpful to create that calorie deficit. you know, if you can move an extra 60 minutes, amazing.

It doesn't have to be done all at once. Actually, a really cool area of research is this thing called exercise snacks. I'm sure you probably have heard about it. But like, if you can walk for 10 minutes during your lunch break, if you can walk for 15 minutes before you start your day, just wake up 15 minutes earlier, if you can walk for one of my favorite habits to instill healthier habits with my kids is when I'm done with work, probably three or four times a week,

my son and I will go for a 30-minute walk. It's so fun, right? So making sure you create or implement movement like with your family and your daily habits is another easy way to increase your movement. And if you work at a desk, which I do, I just have a walking pad under my desk. I bought a standing desk every morning my first 45 minutes of work, which is usually me getting my my thoughts together, writing out my daily task, checking my email. I'm just on the walking pad. If I ever take a phone call or I'm on a meeting with a business partner or somebody I'm talking to, I just. literally walk around my desk, right?

So it doesn't even have to be like intentional exercise where you are setting time aside to go work out. It's just finding ways to move more throughout the day. Huge benefit. If you can increase that by 30 to 60 minutes per day, it's going to be so much easier to hit that calorie deficit through increasing energy expenditure. Yeah, and you have some great examples.

So again, two thirds through diet. Sure. And then one third through activity. You have some great examples on the dietary side, which is simply eating more home-cooked meals. You know, typically when things are coming from Uber, eats, they're coming from restaurants, you're eating out. There's more butter,

there's more fat, there's more other things that can take actually something that's quite healthy and now all of a sudden you're blowing through your calories simply because restaurants to get repeat customers want to make things taste great. There's a lot of ways to make things taste great at home,

but they take a little bit more attention. Intentionality. Intentionality. So eating more home-cooked meals. You know, for those that are big on sort of alcohol and nighttime snacking, reducing alcohol and nighttime snacking. And then another one, which is slightly smaller portions. You know, one of the big aha moments I had when I started tracking my calories, I realized like, wow, for somebody who has been eating, quote, unquote, healthy for a really long time

and didn't really get the idea, yeah, okay, I always understood, you know, that fat, is more calories than, let's say, you know, carbohydrates and, you know, protein. But on a practical level, when I really saw when I was tracking my calories that, oh, awesome, I'm using this organic olive oil every day. And I add it to my salad. And I'm making a home-cooked meal. But I give it a long pour. Well, actually, let me weigh that long pour.

Wow, that long pour compared to a slightly actual, like a tablespoon of olive oil, which was perfectly fine and a little bit of sea salt and, you know, some spices on top still tastes great. But that long pour was almost like, you know, 30 to 40 percent of the total fat that I was trying to have in the day, right? Just because I wasn't really looking at it. The beautiful thing that happened is that when I started auditing my calories, I actually saw that by not overeating on certain foods, you know, I didn't stop eating, you know, let's say like tortilla chips or something. But I'd have a portion that I'd track. Okay, great.

I got that out of the way. I wanted some chips. I ate some. Now I have all this other room in my calorie budget. And it actually felt like I was getting a chance to eat more. Yes. When you audit your calories and you track them, you actually don't feel like you're eating less often.

You actually feel like you're able to eat so much more. And I love those visuals that so many people, you know, put together on Instagram where they're like, hey, do you want this Starbucks coffee with the Frappuccino inside of there and the pumps of this and the calories? Or it's an entire breakfast of eggs. Yes. And, you know, a lean cut of, you know, like maybe like a lean cut of steak or cod or whatever. And then vegetables and this and oatmeal. And it looks like a massive breakfast.

And then they're both the same amount of calories. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Yeah, food choices matter a ton.

You know, that's such a good point that you brought up, Drew. People think that eating less calories means eating less. It doesn't. I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make when dieting is just telling themselves they have to just eat less. In fact, we should be eating more of the right foods that help us feel satiated and naturally reduce our caloric intake. And a lot of that time, a lot of the times it comes from creating awareness like, hey, olive oil, is it healthy? Of course. It's probably the healthiest fat source we can consume, a ton of polyphenols, ton of health benefits.

But it's so easy to get 500 calories from olive oil, right? Especially because it's so delicious. You can just pour it over your food. When you reduce that, now you have a budget of an additional 300 calories that you can get from a lower caloric, calorically dense food, let's say fruits or vegetables or beans or sweet potatoes, which are all really healthy foods and their low caloric density. And you can eat way more food for less calories. that is how you put fat loss on easy mode.

It's by choosing the right foods that supports helping you feel full and satiated while on a calorie deficit. All right, we've got to pause for one second and address something that a lot of people might chime in. Okay. And they feel like, well, but, but, but, but, right? And we've had different people on the podcast to talk about this, but I think it's important to talk about it over here as well too.

Sometimes people will see a video from an influencer or health expert online. and we'll say, yeah, but you're a woman in a different stage of life. You're going through perimenopause and menopause, and now things are completely different. And cortisol and this thing and that thing. What have you seen, not just from the research, and you have your PhD again in, you said, nutritional sciences,

but also from your clients. What's real? What's there? And what is just, getting a little distracted when it comes to the personalization of weight loss in particular for women that are going through these different stages of life.

I would never tell a woman who's going through menopause that the things that they're experiencing aren't real or that the difficulties that they are perceiving with weight loss and fitness aren't real. What I always say, Drew, is that the principles stay the same, the application of those principles changes based off the person, who they are, their lifestyle, the stage of life they're in. So it's the application that can slightly change. But the good thing is that the principles stay the same. The part that is not true is that your body's broken.

And I say that very explicitly because that is a big message that is prevalent in the health and wellness space. The unfortunate truth, Drew, is that when somebody experiences a lot of pain or frustration around something, whether that's health and fitness or any other particular goal, people can exploit that for monetary gain. Right. Like, if I tell you, hey, Drew, let's say you are a perimenopausal woman. The reason you can't lose weight or you can't make progress towards your goals is because there is something in your. inherently wrong with you, and it's because of menopause. And I have this unique solution or this unique method that's going to balance whatever's going on, and it's going to solve all your problems. And it's a very simple solution to the pain that you're experiencing. It's very easy to market and sell that.

And so women who are going through that transition in life feel frustrated because there are changes in hormones that influence the way they feel influence energy levels, influence sleep, and influence the way your body holds on to body fat as well, which is very true. When women stop producing estrogen, you don't inherently gain more body fat, but your body does change how it distributes body fat. You'll hear women often say, like, my weight hasn't changed much, but I have more belly fat now. It's because estrogen does play a role in terms of how your body stores body fat. So all of those changes are true.

And all of the principles of what we're talking about still apply. Yeah. You still need to be in a deficit to lose weight. Yeah. Now here's the point. Like a lot of women will also have issues with their thyroid, right? and thyroid hormones T3 specifically influence your metabolism. So it's true that a lot of women are eating very few calories and they can't see weight loss.

That doesn't mean they're in a calorie deficit. It just means that their maintenance is really low. And so for that person, the answer might not be restrict food more at this moment. It might be, let's work with your doctor and get some blood work done and see if you need something like HRT. What does your lifestyle look like? How much alcohol are you drinking? How much stress are you under? What's your sleep habits like?

Are you under muscle? Let's focus on training. That's why I say like the principles are. still the same, but the way they're applied depend on the person and the order they're applied in depends on the person's situation as well. Because if a woman has such low energy expenditure, because they have issues with their thyroid, they're not strength training. They have low amounts of muscle mass. I would never tell that person, hey, cut your calories by four or 500 calories. It would be practically impossible for that person to do that. I would say first, let's see what

lifestyle habits we can improve. Let's focus on the next six months to just get really strong and build muscle and then we can see where our energy expenditure is after that and see if we have wiggle room to reduce our caloric intake or should we focus more on increasing energy expenditure through physical activity so the principles matter the application is different based off the person what i have experienced the majority of our clients are women in their 50s that is like the biggest demographic of clientele that we work with is that a lot of women in that age range grew up in the late 70s or the 80s where the main mainstream message was eat less move more be as skinny as possible and that has done a lot of psychological damage to women.

So one of the things that I mainly do when we work with a woman who is going through perimenopause or is postmenopausal is, and this might be counterintuitive because we're talking about weight loss, is let's not focus on weight loss at all. Let's focus on improving dietary habits, improving lifestyle habits, and getting as strong as possible and building muscle. I can't tell you the number of women that we've worked with where their weight doesn't change much or might only change five pounds when they said they wanted to lose 20. but their bodies look completely different because that muscle piece is so important. That's important. You know, what I'm hearing from you is that when you step out of the sort of extremes that can be seen on social media that are out there, is that, yes, when a woman feels, you know, and shout out to my, you know, my older sister who else made this podcast, we talk a lot about, you know, these subjects and she's in the early stages of her, you know, journey perimenopause.

when a woman feels that, hey, something is different. It was so easy for me to feel and be thin with my level of activity or my diet previously, and I didn't change anything. And now all of a sudden, you know, I'm gaining more weight or something that's there. It's like, hey, look, what you're feeling, there's something that's there. Of course. There's known science that's there that estrogen piece, the redistribution of belly fat, there are pieces that are there.

And let's also make sure we understand from the many men and women who've gone down the journey of fat loss sustainably and kept it off is that the principles that we're covering today are also part of the equation. Yes. And if we don't honor them or at least acknowledge them, you could find yourself looking for short-term fixes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. That temporarily have you lose a lot of weight. But then can you actually keep it off long term? because they're not sustainable, they're not enjoyable, and they can be another frustration that's there that's added in.

So the fundamentals of weight loss are still there, and there's nuances to the pieces. The other important factor that I didn't bring up, it's not a byproduct of menopause specifically, but it is a byproduct of aging is that after the age of 30, we're losing about 3 to 8% of our muscle mass per decade of life if we're not strength training and optimizing our diet and our lifestyle. So by the time you're 50,

if you're not doing all of the right things, you could have lost 15 to 20% of your muscle mass, whether you're a man or a woman. And that itself makes it way harder to lose body fat sustainably because muscles is an important part of our metabolism. Right? So oftentimes people are like, my metabolism is slower because I'm getting older.

It's like kind of, but indirectly. Yeah. It's because you're losing muscle mass. Yeah, that's an important piece, is that there's truth to these different things that people are seeing. Yes. But if we jump to the conclusion that,

hey, we're broken, or it's just because of our hormones that things are this way, man or woman, or it's just because it's one particular thing, we can lose the plot a little bit and we can find ourselves in a situation where we're still not able to make progress. Yeah, and lose our agency as well. Yeah, lose our agency.

You know, the law of responsibility says that if I was part of the problem, doesn't mean that I created the whole thing. That's actually a good thing. If I was part of the problem, that's good because that means that I can be part of the solution. If it's not my fault, if it's somebody else's fault, if it's my body's broken, it's my hormones fault,

if it's only pesticides, obesity, these other things, which I am actually very, you know, concerned about in society, especially their impact on young people, young kids and things like that. But if it's only these things that are causing me to, in this particular conversation, gain weight, then you have no control anyway, which means that you shouldn't worry about in the first place

and just move on with your life, right? Yeah. But if we have a part of, If we're part of the problem, even in a tiny way, that means we have agency. We can do something about it. Certainly. Again, these steps, these five steps that you've outlined that you've talked about in your content, they're not linear.

They're just important parts of the process of somebody who wants to go on the journey of losing 20 pounds in 90 days or any amount of fat loss in a period of time. So you've touched on this through different sorts of things, but the next one is training. And you often said that if somebody was just starting and they weren't that active and they didn't have a history of sort of, you know, strength training and maybe they're just doing some cycling or occasional sort of walking that's there. For a lot of your clients, you do start with training. When it comes to training as part of a strategy of body composition and fat loss, what is important for people to know and to shoot for? I believe that the base of

anybody's exercise strategy should be resistance training. In other words, lifting weights in a way that's going to stimulate improvements in muscle mass and strength. Okay, because of everything we've talked about in terms of the importance of muscle mass. I also think it's just one of those one of those things that you can do that's going to have kind of like a trickling effect on everything else that you do. Like if you are exercising and exhausting your body, you'll probably sleep a little bit better, right? Also, if you are taking time to exercise, you're probably going to naturally want to eat a little bit better, right?

So you're like supporting the effort that you're putting in in the gym. So aside from the fact that you're taking it in the gym, it helps you build muscle and get stronger. I just think it has a trickle effect on your other habits. It's going to improve your mood. Yes. Increase in BDNF. Exactly.

You're going to have a better outlook on stuff. There's so much research on this, you know, this area. Stress management. How many people eat because of stress? Yeah. Right. And finding other ways to cope with stress is really helpful. Strength training is a great way to do that as well.

So in terms of what to do, we can get extremely nuanced here. We can keep it pretty basic. People really focus on the workout program. like what is the best workout program? What's the best split? Should I do three days a week or four days a week? Or is it upper or lower or is it full body? The truth is it doesn't really matter.

What matters is that you're hitting the underlying principles that will actually stimulate muscle mass and strength. It's the same as nutrition. Is it like, do I do a low carb diet or is it Mediterranean or this diet? Or do I fast for 16 hours or do I fast for 18? Like it doesn't matter. We just need to hit the underlying principles. The application can vary based off your preferences.

right? But for most people who are busy professionals who have a family, I think starting with a baseline of three strength training sessions per week is a really good start. If you're extremely busy, maybe even starting with two days. Okay, but two or three full body training sessions is a really good starting place. The reason why I emphasize full body is because one of the variables that's really important is to ensure that you're training each muscle, each muscle, each major muscle at least twice a week. It's substantially better than doing it just once a week. So traditionally, most of the strength training advice that we would get was kind of from

like the bodybuilding space. And the traditional like bodybuilding split was doing each muscle once a week. Like Monday you train your chest, Tuesday you train your back, Wednesday you train your legs, right? The issue there is that when we exercise, when we train, we stimulate something called muscle protein synthesis, which is the process by which our body grows new muscle tissue. The issue is that when we train, we elevate muscle protein synthesis, and then that muscle protein synthesis respond kind of comes back to baseline within 72 hours, three or four days. So if we want to optimize muscle growth, it makes sense to train each muscle every three or four days, which comes out to roughly twice a week.

So if you do a ton of work for your chest and you do it all in one day, you will get measurably better results if you take the same amount of work and just split it up into two workouts. Okay, now if we're training three days a week, you'll train each muscle three times three full body workouts pretty simple. So if we're doing three full body sessions, then we need to talk about, well, what are we actually doing in each session? What exercises are we doing? Again, this could get really complicated, but to keep it as simple as possible, we want to do one major exercise per major muscle group or per major movement pattern, I will say. Okay, major muscle groups will include like the quads, the hamstrings, and the glutes and the calves for the lower body. and for the upper body, we've got the abdominal muscles, chest, shoulders, back musculature, and your arms, right? Those are like the major muscle groups for the body. And then obviously,

your forearms, which will just get stronger as a byproduct holding weight in your hands when you are lifting weights. And we target those major muscle groups through major movement patterns. For the lower body, we want to do two major movement patterns. One is a squatting movement. That does not mean you have to squat with a barbell on your back. And I'll talk about exercise selection a second, but anything that mimics a squatting movement, right? So, a lot of squatting movement. Right. So, a leg press could do that. It could be a barbell back squat. It could be a squat with a dumbbell. It could be a smith machine. But somewhere where you are pushing weight away from you with your lower body. We also want to do a hiphinging movement. This is a movement where we where we just bend across the hip, right? So something

like a deadlift. Why? Because this is going to train your hamstrings. Anybody who's listening, especially in the beginning part of their journey. Yeah. The one thing that I've seen just consistently in my own family, even with my mom now who started like resistance training is if you're listening, this and you're like, well, this feels like foreign to me. Like, you know, you're speaking Chinese right now, even though I know all these words. Yeah. Is the shortcut that a lot of people take is generally speaking.

Like, if you're listening to a podcast right now, that means you have some level of time, disposable time, probably some level of a little bit of wiggle room in your budget. And, you know, there are very affordable trainers. in your area locally at different gyms that are there. And if you find somebody, if you're listening to this and you're like,

hey, okay, this is a good reminder and I'm very motivated, self-motivated personally to do this, amazing. And if you're early, I think you would probably agree that even a lot of your clients, find a great trainer. And if you're in the basics,

and they can walk you through a lot of this stuff. Like you don't have to do everything here on your own, especially if you're not used to resistance training. Yeah. And it can still be something that can fit inside of your budget. And it can be one of the best returns on investment in your health. We personally walk our clients through all this stuff. Oh, great.

You walk people through. Yeah, so we help with nutrition and training. And the way we do it is through video and feedback. So, like, first off, we have a huge exercise library that will teach you how to do everything step by step. And then we actually, like, meet with our clients virtually and walk them through that. Oh, that's awesome. So they record themselves.

A recording or live. Live on Zoom. I will say this too because a lot of people who are starting off feel really shy to do stuff like that specifically in the gym. We have a lot of people just do it at home because you can learn the movement pattern with your body weight and then do it correctly in the gym with weight if you feel uncomfortable doing it's great. But yeah, I completely agree. I think, you know, can people figure this stuff out on their own? Of course. Another thing you're accomplishing if you hire a good trainer or a coach or whatever may be, it's just expediting the learning curve.

Because there's a big learning curve, right? Like programming how to do things correctly, nutrition, like there's a big learning curve and you can expedite expedite that by just hiring a professional. But going back to the movement patterns. So a squatting movement for the lower body, a hinging movement for the lower body. And if you have time, I would add a third movement there, which is some sort of hamstring curl, a seated hamstring curl, a lying hamstring curl. Because the only movement or the only, yeah, the only joint that we're not really training when we do a squat or a hinge is knee flexion, which is what you do when you have a hamstring curl, right? So like adding that as a third movement for the lower body would be great. And then for the

upper body pretty simple. We want to do two pushing movements and two pulling movements. One in the horizontal plane and one in the vertical plane. So pushing, you are literally pushing anything away from you either overhead, vertical plane, or away from your chest, horizontal plane. And then pulling is the opposite of that, pulling towards your chest or pulling from overhead, like a pull up. Again, any variation of that movement will work. People talk about like a free weight movement versus a machine or a barbell versus dumbbell. Within the context of improving muscle mass and strength, it does not matter. It really does not matter. It can all be equally effective if done correctly. So I bring that up because some of these movements can be quite intimidating for people

who are getting started. And you can do a machine row instead of like grabbing a barbell and doing a row. You can do a leg press instead of putting a bar in your back and squatting. They're all equally effective for muscle growth if you are training hard, if you train with good technique, with good range of motion, all that good stuff. So to recap the exercise, a squat and a hinge for the lower body, add a hamstring exercise if you have the time, two pulling and two pushing movements in the horizontal and vertical planes. Now for each of the workouts, if we're doing three workouts, Drew, what I do is pick a different movement for each of the days. So day one, my squatting movement might be a leg press. Day two, my squating movement might be a squat with a dumbbell. And day three, my squatting

movement might be a lunch. Like a lunch still counts as a squatting movement. It's a single leg kind of squatting movement. And I will pick one different variation for each of the movement patterns just for variation. And another thing I do, the last part here would be that I vary the order of the exercise across the days. So if today I start with the squat, the next workout, I might start with the push and then the next workout I'll start with the pull. The reason I do that is because you are always going to feel freshest on that first exercise and that's what you're going to perform best on. So if we always start with the same movement, you're kind of going to just really be prioritizing that and everything else is just not going to get as much energy. So I just

rotate it for that reason. So that covers exercise selection, how we vary the exercises throughout the day and how we rotate the order. Three full body sessions talked about exercises and how we rotate them. Now let's talk about like the number of sets and the reps and all that good stuff, right? In general, I always like talking about how to get max results for like minimal effort, especially if you're tied on time. And I bring that up because in general with strength training, like more is better given that you can recover. Okay, that's an important caveat given that you can recover. But if we want to hit the sweet spot of getting the best return for the least amount of time, we want to do at least about 10 sets per major muscle group per week.

Okay, so if we're talking about a squat, that would be three sets of a leg press, three sets of the dumbbell squat, and then like four sets of the lunch. That would be 10 total, right? So typically what I'll do is about four sets on that first movement and then three sets on the subsequent movement. So about 10 sets total for the week, how you split it up doesn't really matter that much. Just make sure you split it out, split it up evenly. Okay. So that covers a number of sets. One thing I will add there, specifically for beginners, because people will say like 10 sets. doesn't seem like a lot. It's 10 working sets, 10 hard sets. One thing I see often when people are starting off, let's say they're going to be doing a squat with 50 pounds. They will do set 1, 40 pounds for 10 reps, set 2, 50 pounds for 10 reps, and then set 3, 60 pounds for 10 reps. And that third set set felt really hard. Set 1 and set 2 do not count as one of the 10 sets. So it's 10 sets where you are feeling like you're really pushing your limits. Anything before that, if you're working your way up is simply part of your warm up, which you should do because you should warm up properly.

Another telltale sign of the fact that you're not training hard enough is if you're doing three or four sets and you're able to do the same number of repetitions with the same weight for all of the sets, right? 50 pounds for 10, 50 pounds for 10, 50 pounds for 10. Naturally, the number of repetitions that you perform should go down from set to set. So like if I do 50 pounds and I do 10 reps and it was really deep. difficult, the next set I will not be able to do 10. I might be able to do 8 or 9. And then the third set, I might do 7 or 8. That is good. That is a natural indication that you are pushing your

limits. And I bring that up because people hyper fixate on the number of reps. So like, but I had to do three sets of 10. Your workout program should never say three sets of 10. It should give you a range because your reps should naturally decrease. And the number of reps that you perform really doesn't matter. What matters is how hard you pushed a set. So if you did a set and you did six reps and it was really, really hard, and you did a set and you did 15 reps and it was equally as difficult, both of those are equally stimulating for muscle growth. So it's really the proximity to what we call failure, meaning like you wouldn't be able to do another one even if you wanted to because your muscle is fatigued. Three to four sets per exercise per workout gives us a good

10 to 12 sets for the week. In terms of rep range, like I just mentioned, the reps you do don't really matter, but I think there are some practical ranges. Meaning, like, if you're just doing one or two reps on a set, it's really, really, really heavy, and it's just not enough volume, aka total amount of work to really stimulate muscle growth. On the flip side of that, if you're doing 30 or 40 reps, you're going to be out of breath before your muscles give up. I think the sweet spot for most people is between 6 to 12 or 6 to 15 reps. Okay? my personal preference, and I mentioned my personal preference because there's no right or wrong here, is if I'm doing four exercises for a workout, my first exercise will be my heaviest,

because that's where I'm freshest. So I might do like six to eight reps. My second exercise will be like eight to ten reps. My third exercise will be like 10 to 12 reps. And then my last exercise will be 12 to 15 reps. So I like doing different rep ranges for the exercises. And then since we are rotating the order. of the exercises, each movement pattern is going to work through each of the rep ranges throughout

the weeks. The third variable, which is the most important, is to make sure that you're training close to failure. When it comes to improving muscle mass and strength, what really matters is the number of effective reps, not total reps. Okay, so the effective reps are the repetitions that are actually stimulating muscle growth. And the effective reps are the ones that are nearest the end of the set because you're tired and you're fatigued. It's those reps that are near failure. Anywhere between four to five reps out from failure are what we consider effective reps. So those four or five reps closest to failure are what we consider effective reps to actually stimulate muscle growth. So let's say you can do a 50 pound squat for 15 reps. That 15th one is

absolute failure, meaning even if you had a gun to your head, you could not do a 16th wrap. Like that is failure, okay? It's reps number 11 through 15 that are actually causing muscle growth. So if you stop at 10 reps, like yes, it's still exercise. It's good for your health, but it's not really stimulating muscle growth. So what matters when you train is if you are going to do a set, do it until you are really close to failure. You don't have to fail on every rep. Actually, I never fail on a set, but I get within one or two reps shy of failure on all of my sets. The easiest way to determine whether you're getting close to failure practically is one, are your reps decreasing from set to set? Because if they are, that means that you're pushing yourself.

And two, very practically, is record yourself. Okay, record yourself. Look at all of the reps that you do. This is an audit that I do with all of our clients. Visually, your last couple of reps should be significantly slower, Drew, than your first couple of reps. I'll see somebody do a squat and they did 10 reps and like it felt really hard because it burns. It's hard. But the 10th rep, they come up just as quickly as their first rep, which tells me that no fatigue has really been incurred.

right so that those last couple of reps should be about half as slow as your first couple reps that's a really easy visual sign that you're training hard enough and lastly probably most importantly is that we implement what's called progressive overload progressive overload fancy term all it means is that your workouts are objectively getting more difficult over time the data really matters here if three months from now or six months from now you are using the same weight and the same number of reps i don't care if you feel like you have built muscle, you probably have not built much muscle because you have not continued to challenge yourself over time. If you do 50 pounds for 10 reps today and it's really difficult and you keep doing that in a couple of weeks, it's not going to be as difficult. So the goal is that you track your workouts. Okay, so write your workouts down and every workout either to try to do an extra rep or slightly more weight. And it doesn't have to be on every set or every exercise either. For me personally, Drew, when I track my workouts, if I'm doing three exercises, example, I try to do at least one more rep on one set on each of the exercises.

Pretty simple. So if this week I did three sets of squats with 50 pounds and I did 10 reps, nine reps, and eight reps. Next week I will just try to do 10 reps, nine reps and nine reps. And then 10 reps and 10 reps and nine reps, right? And then when I increase the rep significantly, I will add just another five pounds and start that whole thing over. That is all progressive overload is.

It's just be intentional about doing a little bit better. and you did last week. And if you do that consistently, you will build significant amounts of muscle mass. Also, if you don't know how to push yourself near failure, if you simply ensure that you push a little bit harder every week, you will find that failure point within a couple of weeks or a couple of months pretty quickly. That pretty much covers the strength training piece. Three times a week, full body is a great starting point.

I will add here if you can do four times a week, I really like two upper body workouts, two lower body workouts. That's personally what I do at the moment. Three full body sessions, a pushing movement, a pulling movement, a hinging movement, a squatting movement, add a hamstring curl if you have the time there. Rotate the movement so that you are prioritizing a different movement pattern on each workout. At least 10 total sets for the week, which can be broken down to three to four sets per movement pattern per workout. Rep ranges of 6 to 12 or 6 to 15. I like starting heavy and then going lighter. You don't have to do that.

Train near failure and make sure that you are progressing over time. Now beyond that, I like setting the resistance training as the base and then having daily movement targets outside of that. Yeah, going back to like your recommendations of walking, you know, if you walk at like a brisk pace for like an hour, you know, you're trying to incorporate just more movement overall. I love setting the goal of 8 to 10,000 steps per day for most people. Also add the caveat that if somebody's super sedentary and they only walk 2,000 steps per day, Drew and telling them tomorrow you're doing 10,000, very difficult. So I'm also a big

fan of like meeting somebody where they're at and slowly getting up to where it's pushing their limits but it still feels sustainable. But if you can walk 8 to 10,000 steps per day, it's going to make fat loss so much easier. Actually, one of the main things that I do, Drew, when I go, so I tend to fluctuate within a 10-pound range, 210 to about 220. When I get to 220 to 20, I feel a little bit uncomfortable, so I dial in a little bit more and get back down to 210. One of the main things I do before I even make changes to my diet is just move more, be

intentional about it. If you walk 10,000 steps per day, 12,000 steps per day, it just has such a positive impact on your energy expenditure and it makes fat loss so much easier, right? If you go from three or four thousand steps to 10,000, you're going to be burning those extra three or 400 calories that we said we should get through movement. It's going to make the whole process so much easier. You're going to feel better. And often you're walking outside. You're going to get sunlight.

There's all the benefits of that. Exactly. You know, you're less hungry. Yep. Right? When you're, uh, and there's a bunch of, we've done a bunch of, uh, walking episodes with, uh, Mike Mutzel talking about the latest research in science, some stuff out of University of Austin, Texas showing that like that magic number of like eight to 10,000. thousand steps, even though 10,000 steps came from this Japanese pedometer company.

There's actually something there there. And when it comes to especially maintaining your weight once you've lost it, like it's so important to keep those steps in that range. And then there's some interesting science around lipid clearance and how being more, moving more through the day for people that are like thinking about dying in their lipids, cholesterol, APOB, other things like that, LDL. One of the best things you could do for blood sugar regulation. Yeah.

Because when you walk, the lower body musculature is contracting, which is helping your cardiovascular system work more effectively as well. Helps with circulation, blood flow, oxygen delivery to the tissues. It's one of the best things you can do for general health. It's one of the best things you can also do for recovery and muscle sickness. Practical ways you can have a morning walk, a walk with the family, take walking meetings, take, you know, eat your lunch a little bit quicker and then walk. If you're somebody that's working in an office, there's a lot of different ways. to incorporate that in and of course walking pads too for people that can do that with like standing desk.

We've found a lot of episodes on nutrition. We've talked a lot about protein. We've done whole episodes, multiple episodes on fiber. But in the context of today's conversation around fat loss and this goal of 20 pounds in 90 days for those people that are interested in that as a structure, there can be different goals, what are the important big picture things that you want to touch on around protein?

fiber and meal structure. Yeah. We'll keep this extremely simple because I also think about like, again, the whole theme of this episode is like what gives us the biggest return on investment? Yeah. So step one, which actually I didn't even highlight here, is just eat more whole foods. Let's start there, right? Because the thing is also we were mentioned this earlier, a lot of people go on diet, on

a diet and they start to eat a lot of diet foods, which are still highly processed diet foods. Sure. protein and everything now, but like is a 400 calorie cookie that has 10 grams of protein, a good food to consume, not on a regular basis, right? So focus more on whole foods. Try to make sure at least 80 to 85% of your diet is whole unprocessed foods. Beyond that, let's focus on protein and fiber as the main nutrients that we should really be dialing in. Okay? So protein, there's a ton of argument. One gram, 0.8 grams, ideal body weight, current body weight, general ballpark consume 0.8 grams of protein per pound of ideal body weight.

I mentioned ideal body weight because if you have a lot of weight to lose, you don't want to set your protein targets based off your current body weight because it's just going to be way too high. So if you're 250 and you want to weigh 200 pounds, take 200, multiply it by 0.8, 160 grams of protein at least. Okay? You can go above that if you want. Not necessary though. Proteins, I will quickly rapid fire here because people then ask protein source, plant protein versus animal protein, can I have it all at once or can I have more than 30 grams as your body absorb it in the morning and night? None of that matters that much. The truth is that if you get enough total protein, it kind of covers the basis for all of those variables. What I will say primarily is get your total protein intake in and try to space it out as evenly as you can throughout the day.

So if you eat three times, make sure it's like a third at each meal roughly. The reason why we want to focus on protein is because protein obviously helps with muscle recovery and muscle growth. Proteins are the building blocks of muscle. But beyond that, protein is the most satiating nutrient means it keeps you the fullest on a per calorie basis. And it also has the highest thermic effect. Okay, the thermic effect simply just means how many calories we burn, digesting and metabolizing specific nutrients or foods. So like when we take proteins or carbs, we need to break them down into individual amino acids or into individual carbohydrates so we can actually absorb it and our cells can use it.

That process of breaking it down and absorbing it is what we call metabolism and digestion, right? And we actually burn calories throughout that process. It's about 30% of the calories that we consume through protein that we actually burn metabolizing the protein. So way higher. I think carbohydrates are around 10 to 20% depending on the carbohydrate source and fats are pretty close to like 0% to 5%. Okay, so protein, dial out in. Secondarily, fiber. I am so happy that fiber is becoming more mainstream because people talk so much about protein,

obviously very important. Fiber equally as important. Fiber helps control hunger, but it also feeds the healthy bacteria in your gut microbiome. We know that the gut microbiome is linked to a number of different health benefits. So, like, we need to be focusing on fiber. Simple recommendation, 25 to 35 grams of fiber per day. Good sources there. Berries are amazing sources.

Avocados are great sources, but avocados are also really high in dietary fats. There are a ton of foods now that are reinforced with fiber. Again, slightly more processed. But if you really struggle with your fiber intake, they can be helpful. Fiber similarly to protein really helps with hunger and satiety regulation. What fiber does, specifically soluble fiber, is slow down what we call transit time, which just means how much time it takes for your food to go through your intestines and then obviously releasing it through feces, right? So when you slow it down, it also creates more bulk.

There's more stretch in the intestine, which signals to your brain that you are fuller for longer. And then I really like talking about meal structure and timing. It's a variable that I would say is not as important as making sure you're covering your bases around your food choices and protein and fiber, but it can have a pretty important, a pretty big impact on hunger regulation and energy expenditure. So the big ones we want to focus on, first and foremost, front-loading your calories. I am not against intermittent fasting at all. I think it's a very useful tool for a lot of people to regulate their food intake,

but what I don't like is like intentionally not eating till 1 or 2 p.m. if you struggle with cravings later in the day. Here's why. The research is pretty clear that when you frontload your food intake, you have more food at breakfast and lunch compared to a really small breakfast and a big lunch and a huge dinner. Frontloading your calories helps with hunger regulation. People report feeling less hungry and they eat fewer calories

when they start off the day with a well-balanced breakfast. And then on the other side of the coin, it also helps with energy expenditure. People tend to have slightly higher energy expenditure throughout the day when they eat a well-balanced breakfast. I think the logic there is fairly simple. You eat a good meal. You have energy.

You move a little bit more, right? A well-balanced breakfast just means make sure you get a decent portion of protein and a decent portion of your fiber with your breakfast. I like personally, my breakfast is pretty much the same every day. I'll have about four whole eggs, some Greek yogurt, and a serving or two of fruit, bananas, apples, whatever you like. Whole foods, getting my fiber in, getting my protein in. That one habit is a big game changer for a lot of people, especially if they don't prioritize their breakfast.

It doesn't have to take a ton of time. Smoothies are great as well. They take like five minutes, right? So front loading your food. And then beyond that, consistency with your eating schedule, we see that consistency in terms of when you eat, to like breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or if you have two meals or five meals, the number of meals doesn't really matter as long as you eat consistently really helps regulate your hunger signals because your body adapts to your eating schedule. We also see that consistency with meal size

helps with hunger regulation too. Meal size doesn't mean that your breakfast, lunch, and dinner are the same size. It means that your breakfasts across days are consistent in terms of size. Your lunches across days are similar. It's just about consistency. Yeah, the inconsistency is what sort of messes things up. Exactly. Exactly. There's actually, a strong correlation between eating schedule consistency and meal size consistency across days and healthy body weight regulation. Just something like free living adults, like not people who like intentionally losing weight. Yeah. Which is a cool variable.

And then the last one is to limit a large amount of like don't eat a large meal two to three hours before bed. Because when you have a large meal, a lot of energy goes towards metabolism and digestion. and that can negatively impact sleep quality. I'm sure you have probably covered the importance of sleep for help on the podcast number of times, but sleep is so important, right? We talk a lot about hunger regulation. We're talking about food choices to regulate your hunger. Good sleep has a very potent impact on your hunger regulation.

If you are sleep deprived, you just have more cravings you want crappier food. So making sure you're not messing up your sleep by eating too much right before bed is something that you should definitely focus on. Now I'll also add a caveat like a small snack a scoop of protein powder a small piece of fruit before bed is not going to have a measurable impact right I'm talking about like having a massive dinner a couple hours before bed not good So those would be the main things with nutrition all great reminders you know on the sleep side there's a study that we're writing about on this week's newsletter We'll link to in the show notes One hour of lack of sleep every night Over a control it was a small small but it was a controlled study I think it was like 90

people that were part of it, but one hour consistently of losing out on sleep, and obviously like eating late is part of that equation. It doesn't immediately mean you're losing out on sleep, but it often can lead to lower quality sleep, was enough that consistently over a six week period, people were gaining on average a pound a week. Yeah, I believe it. Yeah. Obviously, there's a whole host of things. You're more hungry the next day. You know, your hormones are in a little bit of a different position. So maintaining great sleep is super important. All right, as we are, Joey, winding down on today's episode, you know, I think two important things to touch on briefly. How do we create a feedback system? And after the 90 days, what should we be thinking about?

Yeah. So this point is really important because pretty much everything we've talked about to this point is the starting point. It's like, what do you do? What are the foundational pieces that lead to the structure of this fat loss? Yeah. And then what I've realized people should struggle with is like having feedback systems to know what to modify when progress slows down. Because progress will slow down, right? Or not just even slow down. Sometimes people don't even know how to push themselves with their training because they're not tracking anything. So we need to create feedback feedback systems.

And we create those systems by tracking. Okay. So we're going to track certain behaviors here. First and foremost, again, let's say this person is dialed in. They're trying to lose the 20 pounds in 90 days. Okay. And I say that because like how much we track really depends on the person, how comfortable we feel we're tracking everything.

Let's say you're all in. We want to track weight. We want to track our food intake. We want to track our habits. I'll put a pin on that one in a second for just I'll explain why. We want to track our workouts and we want to track our steps. Okay. Here's what I like to do.

Let's say you're tracking your food. 2,000 calories for ease of math. And you're tracking your weight. The big mistake people make when they track their weight is that they focus too much on the daily fluctuations in body weight. I did everything right today and I woke up tomorrow a pound heavier. Right. And then they freak out. The truth is that your weight fluctuates for a number of reasons.

The funny thing is, Drew, like oftentimes if you implement healthier dietary habits, initially you might see a bump up in weight because you're eating more fiber, you're retaining a little bit more water. So your body weight changes based off of how much water it's holding on to, not necessarily just body fat. Right. So if you have a really big salad before bed with a ton of fiber, you're going to be heavier tomorrow because you're going to hold on to water.

if you have a little bit more sodium, you're going to hold on a little bit to water. Right. So your weight will fluctuate from day to day, even if you do everything perfectly. What I like to do with clients is we measure weights at least three times a week. And we take the average for the week. And that is what we look at. And then what we try to do is make sure that we are progressing, like that average body weight is dropping at least 0.5% per average from week to week. So I found 200 pounds.

This week my average was 200. So like, let's say I weighed 201, 199, 200. The average is 200. Next week, I'm going to do the same thing. I don't care about the fluctuations. I just care that the average is 199. That's a pound loss. Next week, the average should be around 198, right?

So if you're doing that and you're progressing at the rate that you want to progress at, no changes are necessary. As soon as progress starts to slow down, let's say two weeks in a number, row, you're seeing that the rate of weight loss is below that 0.5%. I also don't freak out after just one week of not seeing the correct amount of progress because weight will fluctuate. So let's say this week I weighed 200 average. Next week I'm 199. The next week I'm 198.5. So only half a pound. I'll make no changes because then you might see a big drop the week before. But let's say there's two weeks of slower progress than expected. Then it's what do we change? Good thing now that we're

measuring our inputs because we make changes to the inputs. whenever you start to see weight stall or weight loss slow down, you can either decrease calories by 5 or 10%. It's just a small tweak, right? So if I'm at 2,000 calories, I might drop another 100 to 200 calories. Or my preferred method would be to increase activity a little bit. This is where the stepwise function for steps is really helpful. Like if you're walking four or 5,000 steps, bump that up to 6 or 7 and then bump it up to 8 or 9. 10, 9 or 10, right? But that's how we start to tweak the variables. We haven't talked about cardio, which is really beneficial for health as well.

This is where we might start to implement a little bit of cardio as well. Just to supplement the movement from the fat loss. Side of the equation. So that would be kind of the main framework around how we create those systems and how we start to monitor these variables. And when you start to see progress at a slower rate than you would like to, again, as long as we're staying with that sustainable range, We either make a slight decrease to our caloric intake or an improvement to our energy expenditure and energy expenditure through physical activity. Another thing I also like to do is audit your behaviors because oftentimes, like we think we're doing things correctly, but we're not. That's why I said we'll put a pin on tracking the habits because sometimes we think we're getting enough protein and we're getting enough fiber.

And maybe we track it for a period of time and then we stopped and we think we're doing it to the same level of consistency, but we're not. Yeah, we've reverted back to the baseline, which was maybe not getting enough protein, not getting enough fiber, or whatever it might be. Exactly. And so if you're in a position where you feel like progress is stalling and it's hard to reduce your calories because they're already pretty low. It's hard to increase your energy expenditure because it's already pretty high and you don't have time. I would really encourage you to audit your consistency with your habits. Like your protein intake, look at your fiber intake, audit your calorie tracking. audit your daily steps if you're not tracking them very consistently.

And make sure you're being diligent around your actual tracking because more times than not, there's just a certain margin of error there that needs to be corrected as all. Yeah, super, super important. Just pausing here for one second, you know, you've talked about you, your team a little bit, how you guys work with hundreds, thousands of clients that are out there, just a little bit of mention, like, where do people go?

What's the typical program look like? How would somebody sign up if they're interested in, you know, getting some accountability working through a program like this or a personalized program. First and foremost, I share this not to toot my own horn, but I say it because there are so many people who do this online coaching thing and aren't credentialed in any way, specifically in the fitness space. Everybody on my team has either their master's degree or PhD level education in nutrition or exercise science and over five years of experience working with people. So like truly a team of experts. If you want to inquire to see if we are a good fit, you just head over to our website at strongstander.com. and submit an application, a team member will reach out and we'll have a conversation to see if we're a good fit to actually help you.

I genuinely mean this. We never want to tell somebody, hey, join our program if we don't feel like they are a good fit. What does it mean to be a good fit? You have goals we can actually help with, right? Like you have goals around fat loss, building muscle, improving body composition. You are a coachable person, which means that you are open to trying new things and you welcome feedback and you communicate. right one of the things that breaks my heart most drew is when we work with a client and they have setbacks and they feel embarrassed to communicate those things and they go m ia that is not being coachable

the voice of sabotage exactly so being coachable being open to communicate like you are not going to be perfect you are going to experience setbacks the only thing we ask for is that when you experience those setbacks you communicate with us so we can support you through them our whole perspective there are a lot of coaches that take a very top down approach where it's like i am telling you what to do and you have to follow my instruction we are not like that if you're not like that if you're you're looking for a drill sergeant, that is not us. We are with you on the same playing field, right? We are a thought partner. We want to talk to you about what we can do and strategize together, not tell you what to do. And then the last thing that really makes somebody a good fit is like,

is your health and fitness a priority? And I bring that up, you know, to bring it full circle when we talked about our why initially, a lot of people say they want something and their actions don't show it. It's like, we need to make sure that this health and fitness thing, is a priority and you're going to be the time and effort necessary to prioritize it because it requires time and effort. All right. Like hiring your coach doesn't guarantee results. But as long as you like tick those boxes, we're a good fit to help you out.

That would be the main place where you can see or apply to work with us beyond that, just Dr. Joey Munoz or Strong Standard on all major social media platforms. That's great. We'll link to all that in the show notes below. Joey, as we're winding down on today's episode, you think about the promise that we said in the beginning and you know you diligently walking our audience through these steps of how fat loss actually works whether their goal is losing 20 pounds in 90 days doesn't matter it could be 10 pounds over a year it could be 10 pounds over 90 days it doesn't matter but these are the core principles

are there any final words that you want to leave our audience with in the context of today's conversation yes specifically for the type of person that might hear something like this and feel overwhelmed or specifically for the type of person that feels like they've been trying really hard and like haven't been able to succeed or they feel like they'll never succeed with health and fitness as you mentioned earlier it nobody's broken right and unfortunately this space is so filled with contradicting and confusing information and I know it's also easy to listen to a episode like this and feel like okay this is a lot of good information but it's also really overwhelming what I want to leave the audience with is two things

belief that the goals that you want to achieve are possible to be kind to yourself and start slow because we didn't talk at all about like the science of habit formation but if you try to do all of this at once you're not going to succeed especially if you just start to start slow focus on one or two things and actually I'll leave the person with a third thing too that the goals that you want to achieve are completely worth it it's like man, bringing it full circle, like, if fitness wasn't part of my life, I would not be who I am today.

And if maybe, you know, you have this inkling of desire to feel better in your skin and feel more confident and be a role model for health specifically for your kids or your family and be able to play with your grandkids, the effort is totally worth it. And it's also just way harder when you start, right? So if you have had a hard time started, have had a hard time. starting and it feels really difficult. Just know that that is what accountability and support is for because when you get through those first couple of months and you actually start seeing results, the difficulty with fitness drew is that it takes a lot of work initially and you don't see the results until three or six months in. But when you start to see those results, it starts to become

addicting and that's when it starts to become part of who you are. Yeah, that's so well said. And if you're working with the right team, you find trainers or coaches like your team or somebody locally, they'll also help you focus on what are the wins you're making along the way, because if you're just judging it on, like, looking in an ideal way, you're not focusing on the fact that, hey, you started off, you couldn't even do one pull-up, and now you're doing, you know, three pull-ups on assisted, which is huge and is exciting for somebody. And then on top of that, they're going to tell you that even though your weight is the same, you're actually, you know, if there's different ways to do it,

people do caliber testing or a Dexter or this or in-body scan, whatever the metrics are, they're like, hey, look, it looks like you have more muscle mass and less fat. You know, it's important to have somebody to kind of guide you along because if you don't know what to look for, you'll miss these things which are actually the pieces of momentum. Nobody would expect when you start a business that it's going to go, you know, zero to a million overnight, right?

It seems like that sometimes when you're on social media. but if you're seeing like, wow, we have the right team and our marketing's better and we're doing this and we're doing that and our product and people are reviewing it and this is exciting. You're seeing all the little bits and pieces that are showing that, hey, you're on your way to hitting this goal.

And by the way, even when you hit that goal, it doesn't necessarily mean that your life is going to change, right? It's just one of those things that is taking in the right direction of how you want to feel, but you can feel like that today if you know what momentum to focus on. This is one of the big reasons

I said earlier that coaching is so much, it's so like the information, that's not what it's about. Like I share all the information for free on shows like this, social media. It's really about implementation and support. And you brought up a really important point. You had also talked about a lot of negative self-talk, right? And people being really hard on themselves. And we started the episode discussing like, where does that even come from? Working through that mindset and improving that is so important for long-term success.

and one step in the right direction is being intentional about celebrating the wins. Anytime we start a coaching call or we check in with the client, we start with like, let's share a big win for this week. And we do that not because, like, it sounds cheesy, right? But I can't tell you how many times Drew, I'll ask a client like, what is your win for the week? And they're like, oh, nothing. I didn't lose.

And I'm like, no, no, no. We are starting off with a positive mindset. What is one thing that went well this week? because as humans, we naturally are so hard on ourselves and we just focus on the things we didn't do well or the fact that we didn't lose a pound this week. And we rarely take time to create an intentional space to reflect on the things that we're doing well. And I think when we do that intentionally, it allows us to enjoy the process that much more, which makes it easier to stay consistent. Well said, these are all the little things that help us celebrate ourself, step away from that

mindset that we're broken. Yep. Step away from that self-sabotage that so many of us have embodied because we saw it around other people that, you know, when we were growing up, you know, from that teacher, that coach, that uncle, whatever, our parent, they meant well, but they sort of inherited this voice of broken or this voice of this. And it wasn't their fault. You know, we have to have empathy for them, but we can break out of that pattern and step into a different place and look good while we're doing it. Yeah, yeah. Looking good is the cherry on top. Who doesn't want to look good? Joey, this has been great. Thank you for your work. Thank you for all your great content over the years. You're doing some really great stuff. And it was a pleasure to meet you in

person and have you on the podcast. Thank you for having me, my friend. I appreciate it. Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend, share it with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter and it's called try this every friday yes every friday 52 weeks a year i send out an easy to digest

protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health we cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health sleep community longevity and so much more if you want to get on this email list which is by the way free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This or just go to Drew Perot.com. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-O-H-I-T dot com and click on the tab that says, try this.