Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 149: *20* Advanced Nutrition Tactics From The Pros for Fat-Loss, Muscle Gain and Longevity

Episode Date: December 28, 2021

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Hey, everybody. Welcome in to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matrenga, and I wanted to thank you guys for joining me today after the Christmas holiday. I hope you had a wonderful holiday with friends and family if you celebrated. If not, hopefully you got the chance to decompress and unwind from a really hectic season and overall a pretty chaotic year. We're heading into, at the time of recording this, the final week of 2021. It's actually Monday, December 27th, 2021, the final Monday of the year. And 2020 was pretty chaotic, pretty divisive, pretty insane. 2021 was hot on its heels. And I probably much like you am hoping for a phenomenal

year ahead. But I wanted to thank every single one of you who listens, who has subscribed and who has left a review that really has helped this podcast grow. We eclipsed new download numbers last week, the highest download totals yet for the podcast, all thanks to listeners like you. And I actually wanted to highlight a couple of reviews. The first one is from Key Point Member, and it says, friend you never knew you needed. This podcast makes me feel like I have a fitness geek friend that does all the research for me, then delivers all the answers in a very accessible way. Honestly, what could be better? Everybody needs that friend. Thank you, Danny. So amazing review. Thank you so much for taking the time to write that. Another one from

Jasmine O. She says, Danny is one of the very few people I genuinely trust and take guidance from in this industry. He's incredibly smart and keeps it real with all of us. Highly recommend no matter where you're at in your journey. Jasmine, thanks so much for taking the time to leave that review. It really does mean a lot to read this. I take and kind of put myself out there for you guys to try to articulate to the best of my ability things that I think will be helpful for you, things that I see with the clients I work with every day, whether those are clients that I work with in person, clients

that myself or my coaching team at Core Coaching Method work with. I try to bring to you things that I am seeing in the trenches that seem to show up day after day, week after week. These are trends. These are commonalities. And in sharing them with you, I'm opening myself up to making mistakes, to sounding silly on the microphone. So anybody who takes the time to leave me a kind review like that, it just means a lot. And the last review is from Kimmy Whitman, and it says, Danny communicates and breaks down information so the general population can understand and apply it to their lives. I thoroughly enjoy every episode. Thank you so much, Kimmy. Now, for those of you who are not yet aware, I have partnered with one of my amazing podcast sponsors, Legion Athletics, to do a giveaway for all podcast subscribers. All you need to do to enter the giveaway is be subscribed to this podcast on iTunes and Spotify. If you do

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because I feel like I never win anything, but that's just me. And again, if not, and you're just looking to upgrade the quality of the supplements you take, and you know me if you've listened to this podcast for quite some time, I try to keep it simple. I recommend protein powder, not necessarily because you need it, but because it's nice to have around. Creatine, that's something I take every day. Omega-3 fish oil or omega-3 rich fish oil, that is something that I take every day. And it's really hard to find good, high-quality, reputable sources of supplements. reputable sources of supplements. Generally speaking, the industry is just kind of clouded and polluted with a bunch of garbage and junk and people looking to make a buck, which is why companies like Legion, who really champion labeling transparency, using the right ingredients, creating educational materials instead of promotional materials to empower rather than to kind of dupe consumers, that's why I partnered with this company. And one of the best ways that you can support me and support the show is to just get your supplements from Legion and

check out using the promo code Danny to save 20% on your first order and earn double points that you can use just like cash after that. Today's episode is about advanced nutrition tactics that I have used with clients for many years, specifically for the domains of fat loss, muscle gain, and longevity. I have a total here of about, I'd say, 20 tips. 7 specific for fat loss goals, 5 specific for muscle gain goals, and eight specific to longevity. Now, there are plenty of crossover here, and some of these can hop around in terms of whether or not they'll be applicable in one category or another, but most of the clients I work with and my company works with are coming to us to either enhance their physique by building muscle, enhance their physique through fat loss, improve performance, and or increase longevity. And I kind of lumped performance and muscle gain into one category, but those are the big things.

So I wanted to share some of the more advanced tactics, techniques, things we like to do, things that we think really work well. And these are going to be all over the place. So this isn't something that I would recommend for everybody. These are legitimately, you know, unique individual use case things that could work for you. They might not work, but I want to share with you stuff that I have kind of deployed over the years that might be of interest to you, starting first with the category of fat loss. So first, I'd like to highlight the efficacy in our first point of fasting or intermittent fasting for creating a calorie deficit in populations that are very busy. And so, I'm not one to advocate for intermittent fasting as a means to lose fat relative to any other form of calorie deficit. intermittent fasting works really well for fat loss is because it restricts your eating window and it can make it easier to be in a calorie deficit. And what I have found is particularly for busy professionals or individuals who are in a situation where they get up very early,

maybe they get up early to train, maybe they get up really early to go to work, or they get up early and they get right into their day. Not everybody has an appetite immediately upon waking. And so while starting your day off with a good breakfast that's nutritious and loaded with all of the stuff you need is never a bad idea, there are plenty of people who have a fat loss goal who are more than comfortable getting up and starting their day with something simple like water or black coffee. Another thing you could do, and this is the second tip that we'll get to, I'll talk a little bit more and expand upon it when we get there, is start with something light and protein rich. But the theory here is to push that first meal back until you're truly hungry.

And what I found is this can work really well for people who have to get up and get right into things. Why? Anecdotally, I've heard that from many people, and I've experienced this myself, pushing back that first meal can enhance clarity. It can decrease hunger over time by kind of letting the appetite and satiety signals regulate themselves. It allows you to kind of ease into your day without focusing about food. And you can have that first meal when you're truly hungry. For a lot of people who are looking to create a deficit, this works really well.

This works really well for clients I find that are busy professionals, who are maybe traveling, who have to get kids to and from school, and it's easier for them to sit down and have that first meal three, four, five hours even after they've woken up. And if you're somebody who perhaps wants to shorten your eating window to make caloric restriction easier, but you don't like starting off your day without food, caloric restriction easier, but you don't like starting off your day without food, you can try something like a protein shake or a small first meal that will keep you satiated. So a second tip and tactic that I have found works really well, and it's another fasting analog. And again, I'm not recommending fasting because it's superior for fat loss. I'm acknowledging fasting as a means

to enhance your ability to adhere to a calorie deficit. It can help and it can work well for some people. Another form of fasting I quite like is a protein sparing modified fast. So this is just a type of fasting where you try to avoid eating things that are not rich in protein. But if something is rich in protein, then you throw it in there. And a protein sparing modified fast might work really well if you want to have a big, big meal in the evening, but still stick to your diet without being completely deprived of food across the day. So what does this look like? This might look like your first meal. Maybe you have some eggs and a little bit of water. Maybe, you know, something with protein. For lunch,

you might have a protein shake and a yogurt. And then for dinner, you have whatever you want. The term protein sparing modified fast kind of explains what it is. It's a fast where we're allowing for protein, right? And maybe preserving more muscle tissue and doing this. And I find this can work really well for individuals who are traveling or out of their element, who know they're in an environment where there's a lot of food drive and there's a lot of food availability that's just simply not aligned with their goals. And going into those environments, being extremely hungry is probably suboptimal. So they want to have something, but what is it that you can have that will allow you to be full and not massively blow out the calories? And protein is probably the first

thing that comes to mind. You could also do this with just having a little bit of vegetables too, because fiber is there that will help with satiety. But I think that for some people, playing around with various forms of fasting can help with general fullness and satiety while trying to maintain a calorie deficit. To get the health and longevity boosting benefits of fasting, you probably need to fast longer than either of these two, which is why when we talk about that or when we talk more about fasting for longevity, we'll be a little later on in the podcast when we're really focused on those things. So my third tip is don't forget the power of just replacing one single meal. I have found that for clients who are not ready to track macros, who are not ready to

make large scale nutritional changes because they just can't stomach it. It's just too stressful for where they're at. That the simple action of replacing one meal with a protein shake and a piece of fruit, right? Any meal, whether it's breakfast, whether it's your lunch, or whether it's your dinner, with a protein shake and a piece of fruit, or a protein shake and a small salad, can work wonders. I'd say that the average meal probably falls somewhere between 500 to 1500 calories, depending on where it's from, whether you made it, whether you got it from a restaurant, the size, the portions, et cetera. And so I understand that that's a very large range.

However, for most people, a protein shake and an apple, for example, that might be, if you use one scoop of protein, 200 calories. If you use two scoops of protein, maybe 350. And that will keep you very full. And from a simplistic and reductionist standpoint, and that will keep you very full. And from a simplistic and reductionist standpoint, telling somebody who has zero nutritional literacy to just start tracking macros and see what happens might be a little bit too much. So replacing one meal a day with something that's very low calorie, right, that will help you stay in a deficit or close in, get closer to a deficit, but also is satiating in a way that protein and fruit or protein and vegetables can be,

can be a really high leverage, easy to implement behavior that can help you maintain a deficit. And so this is something that I do and have done for quite some time with extremely new clients who just the action of adding weight training or adding fitness into their routine is enough. They're not even ready to approach food yet. They're just not quite there. And so I will

often start by saying, hey, I'd like you to replace one meal a day, whichever meal you like, with a protein shake and a piece of fruit or a protein rich meal and a piece of fibrous plant matter, whatever that might look like. Okay. number four, and again, this is for fat loss specifically, and that's don't be afraid to leverage the power of carbonated beverages, even those that might be sweetened artificially or with non-nutritive sweeteners. Now, I kind of remain skeptical about the long-term implications of large-scale non-nutritive sweetener intake. I'm not somebody who's advocating for pounding back massive amounts of artificial sweeteners, but I do think here and there, it can be a fine replacement for something

that we do know is bad, which is large intakes of sugar. Additionally, carbonated beverages, because they contain CO2, when they hit the stomach, the gaseous expansion will create fullness. That's part of why it creates a lot of burping. But that fullness, that actual outward expansion of the stomach can be really, really beneficial for feeling full. We have mechanoreceptors in our stomach that detect changes in the actual size of the stomach. So as the stomach expands, the brain gets feedback that we are full and using something that's carbonated that will create gas that will fill the stomach

can be beneficial for helping you feel full. And now there's a huge range of carbonated products from carbonated water all the way to diet soda. Some of them have no artificial flavors, no artificial sweeteners. Some of them have both. And depending on where you fall on the continuum of concern with regards to non-nutritive or artificial sweeteners. Some of them have both. And depending on where you fall on the continuum

of concern with regards to non-nutritive or artificial sweeteners, that might impact whether or not you choose to use any of these products. But I have found that for people with a sweet tooth, being able to occasionally leverage a diet soda in place of a calorie-laden sugary snack or treat, that tends to work really well for dietary adherence. And for people who just want to enhance satiety, something as simple as sparkling water can really, really help. Hey guys, just wanted to take a quick second

to say thanks so much for listening to the podcast. And if you're finding value, it would mean the world to me if you would share it on your social media. Simply screenshot whatever platform you're finding value, it would mean the world to me if you would share it on your social media. Simply screenshot whatever platform you're listening to and share the episode to your Instagram story or share it to Facebook. But be sure to tag me so I can say thanks

and we can chat it up about what you liked and how I can continue to improve. Thanks so much for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. Keeping with the theme of food volume, moving on to our fifth tip. This is adding fibrous vegetables to every meal and making sure that you have them on every plate. Fibrous vegetables, of course, are good for the intestinal microbiome. And I say intestinal microbiome because it's important to acknowledge that the

microbiome is not just exclusive to the stomach. There is an oral microbiome. There is a vaginal microbiome. Your skin has a microbiome. So when you hear people talk about the microbiome and gut health, and they're acting like these things are inextricably connected and that the microbes begin and end in the gut, that's a good red flag that somebody doesn't know what they're talking about. But adding vegetables to every meal will help keep you full. It will help increase your exposure to a variety of different micronutrients, especially if you can substitute these vegetables and try different vegetables. That can be really valuable.

But it will also feed the microbes that live in your digestive tract that are reliant on fiber. And this can be a really, really good thing for your longevity. We'll talk about that more later, but it's phenomenal for your fat loss because these things can really, really keep you full. Tip number six, this is a big one. Load up on hot sauce, salsas, and seasonings. Most of these things are calorie free. And because they come from things that are usually rich in herbs, rich in polyphenols, and rich in color, they can impart some unique nutritional benefits as well. For example, oregano is an incredibly nutrient-dense herb. It's also a potent antimicrobial. Basil is very nutrient-dense. Rosemary has a unique nutrient profile. All of these herbs have a

tremendous amount of micronutrition in them. So finding ways to work herbs and seasonings, as well as things like salsas that generally are made from tomato, low calorie vegetables that impart a lot of heat, that can keep you full. It can add a lot of flavor to otherwise bland food and help you stick to your diet. The seventh and final tip here or pro tactic for fat loss is to leverage caffeine to enhance workout quality, to enhance fatigue resistance, right? Caffeine is good for both of those things, but try not to become overly reliant on caffeine as a stimulant because over-reliance on caffeine, particularly in the form of multiple caffeinated beverages across the day, can really kneecap your sleep and make it harder to stick to your diet.

So just be aware of caffeine consumption. Moving on to muscle gain, specifically nutritional tactics that can really help with muscle gain. So I want to lay the foundation here that you can build muscle in a deficit, although it's immensely more difficult. You can build muscle at maintenance, which becomes again much harder the longer you've been training. If you've been training for north of two to three years, it's probably not much worth your time trying to build muscle in a deficit or at maintenance. It's just a massively inefficient process. So our first tip is to, of course, get yourself into a small calorie surplus between 200 to 500 calories tends to be what works best for our clients. Now, one of the things I get from a lot of clients, particularly the female clients we work with, is I'm having a really hard

time getting my carbohydrates in and I'm having a really hard time getting my calories where they need to be. I just can't eat all of this food. And so my first tip for optimizing muscle gain or laying the groundwork for muscle gain is to make sure that you're in a small calorie surplus. And if you're having a hard time doing that, use things like smoothies. Now, smoothies are generally malpractice when it comes to fat loss because they take all of the fibrous fruits, vegetables, and different things and pulverize them into what is essentially a pre-digested smoothie. So you don't have any of the chewing. You don't have a lot of the mechanical digestion. It gets assimilated much more quickly, and that can be problematic,

which is why for fat loss clients, I generally don't recommend calorie-rich drinks at all. But for people who are having a hard time getting enough food in and enough calories in, a smoothie can be an amazing opportunity to do just that. Now, moving on to tip number two, and again, this is going to be unique to the individual. If you're not a meat eater, this might not be ideal for you. But for many people, it can be hard to get your calorie intake where it needs to be if all you're eating is extremely low-fat protein options like chicken or tilapia, things that are very high in protein and thusly quite filling, but they don't include a lot of associative dietary fat. And you always

need to be careful about the amount of animal fat you eat. You don't just want to pound back massive amounts of saturated fat. But shifting occasionally to a fattier cut can help when trying to build muscle. So instead of only ever eating sirloin, maybe you add a fattier cut in on occasion like ribeye. Instead of only ever eating chicken breast, maybe you add a fattier cut in here and there like a chicken thigh. Or instead of only opting for lean fish and shellfish, maybe on occasion you add a fattier cut like salmon, which of course is loaded with omega-3 fat, which is always a good thing. So for those of you who are looking to gain muscle and really elevate your calorie intake, fattier protein options might not be a bad idea. For those of you who tend to be pretty rigid and pretty systematic about your caloric intake and about how you approach food, this is

something that I find works really well. We've worked with a number of clients over the years who really, really need to stick to a routine. That's where they thrive. They eat the same thing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and they don't they thrive. They eat the same thing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and they don't deviate. And I'm not necessarily one to, you know, they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And so if somebody is in a rhythm and that's how they do things, that's fine. And for people who are really dialed to the macros, but their weight is maybe staying the same, or they're not quite getting the rate of weight gain that they like, but they've got something good going, they're dialed in, they're hitting all those macros, adding something in like a free meal or even a second free meal each week can be really powerful. And what this is,

is it's one to two feedings to incorporate a food you really love to strategically and systematically increase your caloric intake. And we don't call them cheat meals. We call them free meals because I don't think you're cheating if you're following the plan. Cheating has such a negative connotation attached to it that it's kind of a dangerous word to just throw around. So I don't use it too much in my coaching practice. So having a free meal here and there, or maybe you have a hamburger, maybe you have some sushi, that stuff can be really, really beneficial. maybe you have some sushi, that stuff can be really, really beneficial. Okay, tip number four is space out your protein. Try not to eat massive amounts of protein all at once. Space it out. When your protein feedings are spaced out, it will help you keep muscle protein synthesis elevated,

which is not necessarily a deal breaker if it's not, but it's not a bad thing if you're looking to gain muscle. And it also spaces out that satiating protein. And so for the same reason, you might want it spaced out to stay fuller, it's also beneficial to space it out so you don't get too stuffed. And again, all of that's dose dependent, but spacing out your protein always a good ideal. And the fifth and final tip for anybody looking to build muscle, build strength, add strength, and change body composition is supplement with two to five grams of creatine monohydrate every single day. If you guys are new here, you might not know this, but I'm a huge advocate for creatine supplementation for performance enhancement and cognitive health and mood.

It's an unbelievable supplement that we're only beginning to understand with regards to its impact on our neurology, but we've studied it for quite some time with regards to performance and body composition, and it's one of the best supplements out there. Moving on to the final category of tactics and tips, this is for longevity. So you can borrow these practices and apply them to your fat loss plans, your performance plans, or your muscle gain plans. And obviously there's going to be some contradictions here with regards to behaviors, but some of these are universally applicable with specifically this first one, which is to eat the rainbow when it comes to fruits and vegetables. And so try to diversify your micronutrient intake through getting vegetables and fruits of different colors, different textures that are in season,

if you can, that, you know, don't just default to broccoli every single time, right? There's nothing wrong with eating large amounts of broccoli. It's very nutritious, but each fruit, each vegetable has a unique polyphenol micronutrient, you know, composition. And if you spread the love out and you get different colors of vegetables, you get different types of vegetables, you'll get a much more diversified exposure to these different micronutrients. And that's good for your health. That's good for a variety of different biological processes. It's good for the microbiome that occupies your stomach and small intestine and your intestinal tract because they get to kind of munch on various different things. And that can be really, really valuable. Moving on to tip number two, sticking with things that can help the microbiome,

that is to occasionally include resistant starch. So resistant starches can be things like rices and potatoes that are cooked and then refrigerated. After you refrigerate a cooked starchy carb, that starchy carb becomes somewhat resistant, resistant to full digestion. And that can get into those bugs, those things that occupy the lower regions of the small intestine or large intestine or colon even. And resistant starches are particularly beneficial for feeding that microbial population that occupies our gut. So occasionally

include resistant starch. You know, you don't have to do it every day. Absolutely not. But it can be a really, really valuable tool for taking care of that microbiome, which is really important for your long-term health and wellness. Now, tip number three, this would obviously be beneficial for fat loss, but probably quite deleterious for muscle gain if you did it too often, and that is to experiment with 24 to 36 hour fasting. Fasting can be beneficial for health and longevity. It's certainly cutting edge. If you are new to it, I don't recommend starting with a 24 to 36 hour fast, but the occasional fast of longer than 24 hours can have a variety of benefits on things like blood sugar, on things like satiety. It can help with reducing things like inflammation.

And again, I don't want to speak on it too much because I'm not an expert, but occasionally incorporating things like a fast can really be beneficial. Tip number four for longevity is load up on foods that are dense in vitamins and minerals. A good example are actually things like organ meats. Organ meats can be really full and really loaded, chock full of a variety of different minerals as well as vitamins. So adding the occasional, we'll just use organ foods or organs, organ meats here as an example. These aren't the only foods, but organ meats. You don't have to have them every day, but maybe include chicken liver once or twice a week to get the unique hyper-available nutrients that come from whole food sources. And yeah, they don't taste the best, but if you cook them well and

you enjoy them on occasion, you can really, really get some benefits. The fifth tip is for longevity specifically, is to do your best to eat in alignment with your circadian biology. So this is something that I learned from Dr. Sachin Panda's book, but think about eating from the morning when the light is out till the evening within like maybe three or four hours of going to bed and trying to keep your caloric intake aligned with your circadian biology. Don't eat super late into the night, not because it's going to incur any additional fat gain. If the calories are lined up, then it's going to be fine.

But the spiking of the insulin, the adjustment of our hormonal profile by eating really late at night can impair our sleep, which is never a good idea for longevity. So try to eat in alignment with that circadian biology, maybe starting a little bit later and maybe stopping a little bit earlier and clustering your food through your daytime hours. Number six is start hydration early so you're never, ever playing catch up. is start hydration early so you're never ever playing catch-up. One of the things that blows my mind is the number of people who live their life in a chronic state of dehydration. I feel like this is the lowest hanging fruit and it's borderline inexcusable for people who care about their health and wellness. Your body is north of 70% water, so being dehydrated all day is obviously not optimal. So start your day out with water.

If you know me, you know I like to add my LMNT electrolytes to my water to enhance the rate at which I'm hydrated and get magnesium and potassium into my system quickly for my morning training. If you're a morning trainee, this is a non-negotiable and I've got you hooked up. You can actually head right down into the show notes of this episode and you can grab a free sample packet of LMNT's electrolytes in all their most popular flavors. All you have to do is pay the shipping, but start hydrating earlier in the day. Stop playing ketchup. There's really no excuse for this, particularly if you care about your well-being. Number seven is supplement with electrolytes when training. Fasted supplement with electrolytes when using the sauna or supplement with electrolytes when you have a high sweat rate. Depleting valuable minerals like sodium, magnesium,

and potassium is fairly common amongst fitness fanatics who do not replace them. A lot of fitness fanatics follow a low-salt diet, which might be ideal if you're dealing with something like hypertension, but it's probably not ideal if you sweat a lot, if you train hard, if you train early in the morning, or if you do things like sauna, which I always recommend. So be sure that you're mindful of your electrolyte status and you are replacing those things. And the final tip for longevity is reduce or eliminate alcohol consumption entirely. I just did a podcast guest appearance on Jordan Lips podcast where we talked a lot about alcohol and you guys know that it's no secret. I'm not a huge fan of drinking, but it's genuinely not very good for you and it's bad for you, quite frankly, in

any amount. So finding that sweet spot where you can enjoy it without overdoing it can be really challenging. So something I recommend for people who care about their longevity or who want to enhance the rate at which they lose fat is to eliminate alcohol consumption altogether. All right, guys, those were some advanced kind of habits, behaviors, and nutritional tactics you can implement as early as today. You can start with this stuff right away if you feel the itch. And that's what I'm trying to bring you on this podcast is actionable stuff I've seen and done with clients over the years. And I appreciate every single one of you for listening. If you have not yet hit that subscribe button, leave me a five-star rating and review on iTunes. Spotify

is now allowing for reviews. So if you are a Spotify listener, please leave me ratings and reviews on that platform. It makes a world of difference. Thank you so much for tuning in and I will catch you on the next one.