Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 218: Eating at Night + Exercises that are a Waste of Time

Episode Date: September 6, 2022

Thanks For Listening!     LEAVE A REVIEW OF THE SHOW:There is NOTHING more valuable to a podcast than leaving a written review and 5-Star Rating. Please consider taking 1-2 minutes to do that (iTunes) HERE. You can also leave a review on SPOTIFY!OUR PARTNERS:Legion Supplements (protein, creatine, + more!), Shop (DANNY) HERE! Get comprehensive lab analysis of the most important biomarkers for your health from our partner Marek Health HERE (save using the code "corecoaching")Get Your FREE LMNT Electrolytes HERE! Care for YOUR Gut, Heart, and Skin with SEED Symbiotic (save with “DANNY15)  HERE! Take your love of sports to the next level with UNDERDOG FANTASY and play with danny HERE! (CODE: DANNY for first deposit match up to $100!)RESOURCES/COACHING:  Train with Danny on His Training AppHEREI am all about education and that is not limited to this podcast! Feel free to grab a FREE guide (Nutrition, Training, Macros, Etc!) HERE! Interested in Working With Coach Danny and His One-On-One Coaching Team? Click HERE!Want Coach Danny to Fix Your S*** (training, nutrition, lifestyle, etc) fill the form HERE for a chance to have your current approach reviewed live on the show. Want To Have YOUR Question Answered On an Upcoming Episode of DYNAMIC DIALOGUE? You Can Submit It HERE!Want to Support The Podcast AND Get in Better Shape? Grab a Program HERE!----SOCIAL LINKS:Follow Coach Danny on YOUTUBEFollow Coach Danny on INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERE! Sign up for the trainer mentorship HERESupport the Show.

Welcome, everybody, to a Monday episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matrenga. And in today's episode, we are going to be discussing exercises in futility, if you will. These are exercises that people do all the time that are quite popular and might even be popular for the wrong reasons that just don't offer the return on investment that I think I want when I'm training. Training is something that I love popular and might even be popular for the wrong reasons that just don't offer the return on investment that I think I want when I'm training. Training is something that I love to do and not everything has to be optimal, that's for sure, but I do think it helps to have high efficiency exercise selection at the front of your mind when putting together programs and when looking

through programs. So we'll go over that and answering some questions directly from you. And we will also touch on a question about how eating, particularly eating later in the day, can affect sleep and therefore body composition, kind of unpacking the commonly asked question of does eating late at night make you gain weight or disproportionately cause weight gain? Many people have been told don't eat past a certain time, so we'll unpack that a little bit. Before we do, I want to tell you about our amazing new sponsor, Underdog Fantasy. If you are like me and you like sports and most of you are athletic, you are engaged with your fitness, you either come from a sports background or you have a team or player that you are a fan of at the professional level. Well, underdog makes it really easy to take your love

of sports to the next level. Whether it's with their signature best ball fantasy drafts where you can draft a fresh lineup every week and compete in tournaments for the opportunity to win a ton of money watching your favorite football players go head-to-head or my personal favorite way to play with simple pick'ems. The NFL starts this week. My favorite sport, football, starts this week, and there are so many good prop bets over on underdog. I think my team, the Rams, are going to get in a shootout with the Buffalo Bills, so I am taking Josh Allen, the Bills quarterback, to throw over 317 yards. I'm taking Gabe Davis, the Buffalo Bills kind of up-and-coming receiver, to have over four and a half receptions. I think Matthew Stafford, the Rams quarterback, is going to have way more than 270 passing yards.

And I think that Allen Robinson, the new addition to the Rams, is going to have more than five catches. I'm throwing down a $20 bet on this game, hoping for those four props to hit. I need Allen to throw more than 318 yards, Davis to catch more than five balls, Stafford to throw for more than 270 yards, and Robinson to catch more than five balls. If I can do that, that $20 ticket will net me $200 over on Underdog Fantasy. A super fun way to play. Take your love of sports to the next level. Play with your friends, play with your family. I play all the time with my buddies, with my girlfriend. It's a really, really good way to get the most out of your sports

viewing experience. So check that out over on underdog fantasy.com. And when you sign up and deposit money, if you use the code Danny, they will match your first deposit up to $100. So really fun opportunity to get a little bit more out of the upcoming baseball playoffs, college and NFL football seasons. And of course, NBA is not far away if you are a fan of basketball. So getting into our first question here, this one was asked on Instagram. If you guys want to have your questions answered on the podcast, I would highly recommend engaging with me over on that platform. I'm on every platform, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, podcasts, of course. But Instagram is the platform on which I field the most direct user feedback and user questions.

So while I'm not particularly good at answering my DMs, I'm working on getting better at that. I do the best I can to answer questions in the question box when I throw it up. So this question, this is a nice one. I really like it. It's from Kelly P.T. Oman. And the question is, what are some exercises that you think people do that are the least helpful? So I've narrowed this down into a list of seven exercises or exercises paired with some context so you can understand how my brain looks at the way we position exercises and what we ask exercises to do. So some of them will just be generally inefficient exercises

and some of them will be exercises that I believe to be misused. So the number one exercise that I think people do that are not particularly helpful are burpees. And that's not a very hot take. A lot of trainers and personal trainers, fitness coaches, strength and conditioning coaches are critical of the burpee for obvious reasons, right? The

burpee basically includes a pretty forceful deceleration of the body and all of its mass in a prone position as you fall downward with your wrists in extension. So you're really, really putting a lot of hyper extension force into your wrists as you come kind of crashing and barreling down into the ground. Burpees are usually used as a conditioning exercise, as a simple extender exercise in that like you can throw them onto the end of a workout or onto the end of a water, inject them into something to just generally make it harder. Because as you fall down and you absorb and decelerate the weight of your body, you then push up, throw your arms overhead, violently jump and repeat. So you get this kind of peripheral

heart action effect of going up and down, up and down from prone to literally triple extension at the jump point. And you're essentially picking an exercise that's really going to elevate your heart rate, your blood pressure, put a lot of compressive forces on your wrists. It'll get you working hard. It will get you burning calories, but it doesn't really efficiently train any of the muscles involved. It's basically just caloric expenditure that I think makes for really high impact conditioning work or low efficiency, additional kind of in between the numbers work. Like there's so many things I'd rather do if I wanted to spend a little extra time in the gym improving or enhancing my conditioning. And there's a million other things I'd rather do if I was trying to maintain movement during rest breaks or inject

other forms of movement into my workout. If I was making a numerically-based WOD, which is so popular in the CrossFit community that was like 10 toes to bars, eight box jumps, five burpees. I would just make that five, whatever that numerical number is, because in CrossFit, you see a lot of these kind of like lat numbers and ladder style sets, like 20 of this, 15 of this, 10 of this, five of this, five rounds, blah, blah, blah. That's really popular way to program. It's accessible. And I actually think it kind of breaks the mold in a not so bad way. Um, but you know, I'd rather do a million other things like five kettlebell swings or five 90, 90 hip switch. If you're just using the burpee as like filler as movement, as conditioning, all of the things that it's

conventionally used for, um, it's a pretty inefficient exercise. And if I'm being entirely honest and completely just straightforward, uh, I really can't think of a single, um, I really can't think of a single application for which the burpee is really useful. So, uh, just a generally inefficient exercise that doesn't do much at all. Okay, this is one that comes with a little more context, but it is doing plyometric work for conditioning. So you will see a lot of individuals do low-level plyo work like pogos, hops, stairs, stuff like that where there is a lot of ground contact and you do have to kind of leave and come back down a lot at the end of leg days or as a separate form of conditioning or even at the beginning of leg days because they have this notion that doing plyos is some form of muscle

building conditioning style exercise when in fact plyometric training as it's conventionally done is best utilized to develop and cultivate athletic performance, tendon stiffness, the ability to be twitchy, explosive, and fast, which is very, very valuable in athletic context specifically. The more you do your plyos with the goal of fatigue, the less efficient they become for actually developing those sports specific adaptations. You want them to be intentional, forceful, and powerful. When you do kind of hopping around bodyweight-style conditioning, there's nothing wrong with it per se,

but it's substantially more fatiguing than things like incline walking and even Stairmaster, which is a notoriously fatiguing form of cardio. We'll talk about one way that that machine has a tendency to be misused conventionally. But plyometric exercises used for conditioning I think are inefficient. I think they require a lot of additional recovery compared to say something like low intensity steady state cardio or even higher intensity cardios that have impact. So I don't like plyos for anything really other than athletic performance. If you want to move around and get some more fluid or free kind of fun flowing cardio,

I think there's better ways to do it. Okay, number three, again, a contextual one, is using cardio as the primary tool for fat loss from an exercise standpoint. I have to use the caveat from an exercise standpoint because anybody using exercise as the primary intervention for weight loss is really selling themselves short. It's substantially easier to monitor your calorie intake and it's damn near required to know what it is that you're eating and have an idea of how many calories you should eat to reliably lose weight, at least consistently enough to get the weight off that most people are trying to get off their frame. So understand

that cardiovascular exercise or running or jogging or incline walking or being on the row or being on the bike or being on the stairmaster, all these exercises are phenomenal for your aerobic health, for your heart health, for the health of your lungs, your mitochondria, your vascular system. There's no denying that these exercises are extremely beneficial and that you should do a good amount of them. You should include both short duration cardiovascular exercise that's high output and long form cardiovascular exercise that's low output. So things like sprints and things like walks are both really, really good for having a

fit, well-developed, robust body and aerobic capacity. However, if you are trying to lose body fat, it's imperative that you maintain or attempt to build muscle or at least send the signal to your body that your muscle is important. And this is done through axial loading from like having weight on your back, on the bar, you know, weight on the machine. It doesn't have to be axial top to bottom, but you have to literally load your exterior. You have to get some weight on your body. Body weight training can be helpful, but it's a really good idea to load up your body in the weight room. That tells your body, hey, you know, the tissue that we're going to lose most preferentially or the one we're going to lean into losing here since we're in a deficit

and anytime we go into a deficit, we have to lose tissue of some type. When we talk about sleep a little later, we'll talk about how sleep can influence this. But if there's no external stimuli, if there's no input coming into the system to maintain muscle tissue, you will lose more of that than you might like while dieting. And that makes it very hard to maintain your lean physique and it will lead to more severe adaptations of the metabolism and downregulation of the metabolism, which you would like to avoid. So I like to use cardiovascular exercise generally to improve my health, fitness, get outside, go on walks. But I think it's very important to remember if your goal is body fat reduction, you need to carve out at least the same amount of time for loaded anaerobic exercise. This is

resistance training. This is weightlifting. This is bodybuilding. This kind of stuff is really, really important. And it's certainly not just for athletes. And it's certainly not just for people who want to compete. There is a reason why the people who reliably get the most lean have the majority of their program built around lifting and start implementing more and more cardio the closer they get to their shows. And that's because when you have a lot of muscle and you maintain it, you can do that cardio with a little bit less of the interference effect. And the amount of cardio you can do before you start losing muscle is actually pretty high, or the amount of cardio that you can do before it starts negatively affecting your ability to gain muscle is pretty high. Hey guys, taking a break from the action to tell you about one of our favorite new sponsors, Underdog Fantasy. If you're like me,

you love sports. Sports was actually how I got into fitness in the first place. And one of my favorite things to do when I'm not working out or working with my clients is watch and engage in love sports. Sports was actually how I got into fitness in the first place. And one of my favorite things to do when I'm not working out or working with my clients is watch and engage in sports with my friends. Underdog is the best fantasy sports app out there for best ball and for pick them. If you like football, basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer, WNBA, UFC, boxing, underdog has something exciting for you. You can bet on your favorite teams. You can bet on your favorite players in the easiest and simplest way to engage at a higher level with sports. It's so much fun to be able to do a pick them with a player from

the NBA team. I like, and from the NFL team, I like, do you think LeBron James is going to have more or less than 22 and a half points? Do you think Steph Curry is going to make more or less than four and a half threes? Whether or not you are an avid sports fan or you just like sports recreationally, underdog fantasy is an amazingly fun way to engage with sports, to take your sports watching experience to the next level. And ladies, if you like sports, but you don't love them, but your man does, make an underdog account. Have fun with him. I promise you it will bring you guys closer together. It is an absolute blast. I do it all the time with my friends and my family. It's simple. It's easy to understand. With Pick'Em, you can pick two players to three times your entry, three

players to six times your entry, four players to five times, 10 times your entry, and up to five players to 20 times your entry. and up to five players to 20 times your entry. So you pick five players on your favorite teams. You pick the stat line over or under bet five bucks, win 120 X your money. So many cool ways to play. There's also best ball as we get closer to fantasy where you can draft teams against your friends or against other people on underdog for your shot at millions of dollars in prizes this is definitely one of my favorite things to do when i am playing or watching sports i love underdog and you can go to the app store today download underdog enter the promo code danny

and they will match your first deposit up to a100. You'll have a blast playing underdog all season long. Back to the action. What's going on, guys? Taking a break from this episode to tell you a little bit about my coaching company, Core Coaching Method. More specifically, our app-based training. We partnered with Train Heroic to bring app-based training to you using the best technology and best user interface possible.

You can join either my home heroes team, or you can train from home with bands and dumbbells or elite physique, which is a female bodybuilding focused program where you can train at the gym with equipments designed specifically to help you develop strength as well as the glutes, hamstrings, quads, and back. I have more teams coming planned for a variety of different fitness levels. But what's cool about this is when you join these programs, you get programming that's updated every single week, the sets to do, the reps to do, exercise tutorials filmed by me with me and my team. So you'll get my exact coaching expertise as to how to perform the movement, whether you're training at home or

you're training in the gym. And again, these teams are somewhat specific. So you'll find other members of those communities looking to pursue similar goals at similar fitness levels. You can chat, ask questions, upload form for form review, ask for substitutions. It's a really cool training community and you can try it completely free for seven days. Just click the link in the podcast description below. Can't wait to see you in the Core Coaching Collective, my app-based training community. Back to the show. Hey guys, taking a break from the show to tell you about our amazing sports nutrition partner, Legion. Legion makes the best evidence-based formulas for sports performance, sports nutrition, recovery, and fat loss. I don't recommend many supplements. In fact,

I think you can get the majority of the nutrition you need from a whole foods diet. But let's be honest, many of us are either on the go and need assistance, or quite frankly, we're not going to settle for average and we want to get the absolute most we can out of our training. So Legion is the company I go to for all of my supplement staples, whether it's creatine, which I get from their product Recharge, my protein that I get from either Whey Plus or Plant Plus, two of the best tasting proteins on the market. They come in a variety of flavors and they don't have a ton of fillers and gum. Just Whey made from grass-fed cows from Ireland and a plant protein blend with a fully comprehensive dose of amino acids. I like to

take a pre-workout. Sometimes I like it with caffeine. Sometimes I like to enjoy coffee in the morning and have my pre-workout later without caffeine. Legion makes both. Both the pre-workout with caffeine and without come with a full dosage of clinically effective ingredients like beta alanine, betaine anhydrous, and l-citrulline to help you perform your best. They also make a phenomenal greens powder loaded with one of my favorite things, reishi mushroom, and a men's and women's multivitamin that contain a few different things that men and women might need for their unique physiology. So when you think of your vitamins, your fish oil, your pre-workout, your protein, all of the things that many of you take every single day, I'd encourage you to check out Legion. They have an amazing line, wonderful products, wonderful flavors, naturally sweetened, no dyes and colors. You can't go wrong. You can shop

using the show notes below or by going to legionathletics.com and checking out using the promo code Danny. That will save you 20% and it will actually help you get two times points towards future orders, which you can use the same as cash. Pretty cool guys. So head over to legionathletics.com and check out using the promo code Danny to save on all your sports supplement needs. Back to the show. But when people come out of the gate, a lot of them are heavy hitters with the cardio. Some people do an hour a day, six hours a week. And you know, that's an awful lot if you're not doing any lifting and you're really restricting your nutrition and your protein intake's not particularly high, you might lose some muscle, which is never a good idea. So moving on to number four, and this one's kind of nitpicky

because I do think it can be helpful, but it's deadlifting as a catch-all for back development. You'll hear a lot of people discuss the deadlift as being kind of this king of all back development exercises. And I think it's a good exercise for back development indirectly, and that it makes you super strong. There's a lot of isometric components for like the lats and the erectors and, you know, even secondary shoulder extensors when you're pulling the bar into your body and extending your hips into the body. The bar obviously works your glutes and hamstrings, which are, you know, they're not part of your back, but they're part of your posterior chain.

And I think just generally having power, strength, stability, and being able to create a high amount of output whenever you're in hip flexion and your back is kind of parallel with the floor, that can be a skill that deadlifting really enhances and really helps with. But the lack of eccentric and concentric contraction of the big players in the back, like the rhomboids and the lats and the upper traps and the mid traps, paired with the fact that deadlifting is very, very fatiguing and requires a lot of central nervous system output, especially when done at higher loads, I think that there's better primary exercises and that you might look at deadlifting more as a strength developer. Now, I think the

Romanian deadlift is a great example of a deadlift that's awesome for hypertrophy or muscle growth because the muscles that we're trying to use it to develop, the glutes and hamstrings, they actually go through a full lengthening and full shortening in that contraction. They stay completely lengthened at the bottom, or they get completely lengthened as the bar comes down. And then without the bar touching the ground, you come back up by contracting the glutes and the hamstrings. So they're basically doing like a curl or any exercise where you lengthen and you shorten. Whereas during a deadlift, if we're looking at the conventional deadlift

and we're trying to use it as a back developer, I mean, theoretically, we'd like some of those back muscles to lengthen and contract under load, but we just don't get that there. We get a lot of isometric constant tension, just muscles holding tight without that contractile element. And we're going to miss out on something there. So if you're doing a boatload of deadlifts, it's a very good chance you'll build a respectable back. Many bodybuilders have done this. There just might be a more efficient way to do this depending also, and this is a huge one, on your kind of body's natural preponderance for deadlift safety. Not everybody can deadlift with the same safety profile. It's certainly not a dangerous exercise, but when we're talking about, okay, you need to train fairly close to

failure to optimize for muscle growth in any given set, not to failure, but really close. Do you want to do that with a deadlift for something like your back? And I would say more often than not, there's better options. Still deadlift. I'm not saying don't deadlift. I'm just saying don't, you know, be like, it's back day. I'm going to start by blasting myself into fatigue with deadlifts and then try to get to the contractile work. You might miss out on something. Okay. So number five is using the Stairmaster with a band on to try to develop the glutes. You might've seen this before, particularly with women where they get on the Stairmaster with a glute band around their hips, usually mid-thigh, and they push out against the

band, pushing their heel towards the wall behind them, extending the hips, which is great. That's a great way to train the gluteus maximus. It extends the hip, but not against a whole lot of load with a band, and you've got a really strong muscle like the glute, so you need a lot more stimulation. And even with getting a rep per leg every other step, meaning you get one leg on one step, then you get one leg on the next step, you keep alternating back and forth. The stimulus that's actually happening at the level of the glute is going to be pretty limited because you're pushing off of one leg, holding onto a Stairmaster, battling fatigue and building up basically just mechanical tension. If you were to just say practice single leg hip extension in a more stable environment, like a single leg bridge or a single

leg hip thrust with a band on even, you weren't on a stair master and you did the same number of reps, I think you'd develop more muscle in a more stable setting where your aerobic system is not being challenged by the demands of the stairs. So not a great option there. Speaking of banded glute work in general, we're going to just talk about banded glute work being misused as a glute hypertrophy kind of form of work. I think banded glute work is great for opening up the hips, for developing kind of a good mind muscle connection with the glutes and adding some penalty free volume as Brett Contreras, kind of the popularizer of this stuff would say to the glutes. I think that's awesome. I really do. I wouldn't, if you told me you wanted to get the biggest butt possible,

and it was really important to you, we're going to have band work in there. I just know a lot of girls who have really, really big dreams and really, really want big glutes that follow maybe more genetically blessed influencers. This would be, of course, women on the internet who maybe have a genetic predisposition for full round glutes who have been able to maintain and develop them with a little bit of band work. And most women cannot expect that kind of return on investment when working with bands that somebody who's maybe more genetically gifted might get your better off lifting weights. So I think that using the band work sparingly in between sessions to help recover, to help warm up, to get you prepped, ready to go is fine, but definitely don't do

more of that than you do the weightlifting. Okay. And the number seven kind of mistake or let's say exercise that I don't think is as helpful as people would like it to be is the barbell bench press for chest growth. As is the case with the deadlift, I think it's phenomenal for developing strength and you do get an eccentric and concentric contraction of the chest or the target tissue usually when training the bench. But you can never get as much range of motion as you can get with dumbbells. You don't get that bi-articular thing going on where, I guess I shouldn't use the term bi-articular because that often describes a muscle, what each side of the body gets to articulate independently. It gets to move independently unilaterally

would technically be the right way to say that. While they each hold the dumbbell, the dumbbell allows for greater range of motion and it allows for better positioning of the humerus. Or basically you can move your elbows around and get into a position where you can get a better stretch on the pec. So that's an exercise that I think is a lot less helpful

than people would think because it's phenomenal for building strength. And if you have some really, really good shoulders and really, really happy elbows, you can bench your way to an incredible chest. I actually have developed a lot of the meat on my chest from doing a lot of benching, but I'll also be the first person to tell you I probably could have done better if I had biased even more towards dumbbell bench pressing. I was doing a lot of both early in my training career, and I still, to this day, have a strong chest relative to the rest of my muscle groups, but I think that's one that's a little overrated.

Okay, this question comes from Mark L1, and we're going to talk specifically about sleep and eating, but he asks, why does eating late at night impact sleep? And this is a really good question and it's worth unpacking. So basically when you eat at any point of the day, you can expect some changes to your physiology. But when you eat late at night specifically, and you get that effect where blood goes to the stomach and the muscles that work to digest and metabolize your food have to keep working when they kind of should be helping you rest and, you know, pass out. Usually you don't want that right next to bed. Eating can put you in that

parasympathetic rest and digest state, but you usually want to be through the digest portion. Meaning if you're about to go to bed, you don't want to eat a huge meal, right? And eating super late at night and having lots of snacks and meals can throw your body out of syncs from a circadian rhythm perspective too, because when you eat, you're going to see a blood pressure increase, a blood sugar increase. You're going to see some metabolic changes unique to eating. And those things are going to kind of tell your body, wait, are we out and about? Are we trying to get ready to go? You know, if you're eating two to three hours before bed, you're probably fine. And you probably

will sleep quite well if you do that because eating late at night, obviously you're going to have that physiological response. But once it settles down, you might be perfectly in that nice parasympathetic zone, ready for a nice nap. Oftentimes, you'll see this like one hour or so after Thanksgiving dinner, after you've all sitting down, you've had this big meal, you talk, and then you get to about the 90-minute mark in the meal, and you're like, whoa, I'm feeling very relaxed. Well, a lot of the blood has shifted to your stomach, sure, but also you're probably very much in a parasympathetic state. It's important to note that a lot of the blood has shifted to your stomach, sure, but also you're probably very much in a parasympathetic state. It's important to note that a lot of times when people ask about eating late at night, there's a question as to whether or not that can help you or hurt you when

it comes to fat loss. And the truth is when it comes to fat loss from a caloric standpoint, your body doesn't really care when it gets those calories. But here's the truth. If you're eating so late at night that you're causing disruptions in your blood sugar and in digestive distress to the point where it does affect your sleep, that might indirectly affect your fat loss because what you're going to see happen is you're not going to sleep as well. You might miss out on some REM sleep. We know that this particularly affects late night eaters. This is this kind of commonplace reduction in REM sleep that we see when you eat way, way, way too close to bed. Now, does that mean that you can't eat close to bed at all if you want to get good sleep? No, it doesn't. But one study that surveyed 52 adults ages 19 to 45, these were healthy,

non-obese, non-smoking adults who did not have any pre-existing sleep disorders. The study was from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. They found that men who consumed higher amounts of fat in the evening hours had lower sleep efficiency scores and spent less time in REM sleep. Women's sleep patterns experienced disruption linked to both high evening fat consumption and overall calorie consumption. So we can make the inference based on that study

and based on what we know generally happens when we eat that eating big, particularly high calorie fatty meals can disrupt your REM sleep. That might mean you get the same amount of sleep, but the sleep isn't as high quality. And if you do that too many nights in a row, it will affect things like your willpower, your blood sugar, and that will make it a lot harder to stick to your diet, which might be why in addition to ob the obvious, which is when somebody says, don't eat after six if you want to lose weight, you're cutting off the period of the day where people tend to snack, eat hyperpalatable desserts. They tend to consume

foods whilst simultaneously consuming things like cannabis or alcohol that might excite the pleasure centers enough to make you want to eat more or reduce the inhibitions enough to make you want to eat more. So when you give yourself that hard cut off, not only would it maybe help with your sleep and thus your willpower and your ability to better stick to your diet, but it would obviously also remove a huge amount of calories. So if your goals are fat loss, I would say you're totally fine eating at night, even late at night, but try to keep that last meal maybe one and a half to two hours from your desired fall sleep time so as to not too much affect your REM sleep by kind of disrupting your circadian rhythm with huge portion-sized meals that oftentimes contain things that can interact

with your blood sugar. All right, guys, that does it for today's episode, and I want to thank you all for leaving your questions. Again, follow me over on Instagram at Danny Matranga. I'm happy to answer any of your fitness questions on there or even bring them over to the podcast if I think they're worth talking about. Please be safe if you are listening to this bad boy on. Well, I'm going to wait to drop this until after the holiday. I want to give you guys the opportunity to kind of get the day off and relax. But if I decide to drop it on Monday and you hear it on Monday, just be careful out there, be safe and don't do anything crazy. Catch you on the next one.