Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 287: Training Toolbox (10 tips for better training)

Episode Date: May 11, 2023

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Welcome in everybody to another episode of the dynamic dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matrenga. And in this episode, I will be sharing with you five diet and nutrition myths, misinformation that has been in the ethos forever, that quite literally makes fat loss so much harder than it needs to be. Whether this be a misunderstanding of the basic physics, things we can go over that will make sense to you. Whether we can kind of eliminate the idea that there is some super secret diet, we need to unpack this. Menopause and how do hormones really affect your fat loss, the mythology around all of that, as well as discussing things like low carb diets or plant based diets and some of the misinformation that's so pervasive there. So today's all about nutrition. I think you guys will enjoy this a lot. whether you are looking to lose fat yourself, to stay lean, to have a general better understanding of nutrition and nutritional science. And I think it'll make for a great educating discussion for anybody who is specifically

looking to lose weight. All right, guys, let's enjoy. This episode is brought to you in part thanks to some of our amazing partners like LMNT. LMNT makes the best electrolyte product on the market. In fact, I've actually started drinking my LMNT each and every morning before I have coffee so as to optimize my circadian biology, make sure that I'm hydrated, and make sure that I'm getting ahead on my water intake throughout the day and not reliant on stimulants, but instead being somebody who's reliant on hydration and the proper balance of minerals and electrolytes. If you want to feel your best all day, mentally and physically, it's imperative that you stay hydrated. LMNT provides a balanced ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium to support brain and body hydration. This combination of electrolytes improves health, potassium, and magnesium to support brain and body hydration. This combination of electrolytes improves health performance, body and brain performance, mind you, helps to reduce cramps and soreness and get you more hydrated. There's no sugar. Elementia is sweetened with

stevia. It's perfect for exercise and perfect for the sauna because the flavors are natural, tasty, delicious, and not overpowering. And if you're like me, you'll use them multiple times a day across your training sessions to get hydrated early, to replenish after sauna use. And again, it's not just me. LMNT is the official sports drink of Team USA Weightlifting, and it's used by athletes in the NBA, NFL, Major League Baseball, as well as athletes like you and I looking to take your fitness to the next level. My favorite flavors are definitely the raspberry

and citrus. When I put a box together, I try to load up on raspberry and citrus. And when you put your box together, you can get a free sample pack containing all of Element's amazing flavors like mango chili, citrus, raspberry, orange, and more. To get access to this free gift with purchase, scroll down to the show notes and check out using the special link for Dynamic Dialogue listeners. Okay, so this is a newer myth overall, but for many of you, if you are newer to the fitness scene, this might be one you're only recently familiar with. Some of the stuff we're going to talk about today has a 20, 30, 40 year track record of existing in the fitness, nutrition, and kind of adjunct space. But this myth is the myth that, and it is a myth, eating too few calories can actually lead

to either fat gain or anything resembling what people often refer to as starvation mode. Meaning, there's no truth to the notion, not much truth, we'll discuss the nuance, that if you eat too little, you'll either see reduced fat loss or weight gain, or that your metabolism will break, permanently making fat loss in the future substantially more difficult. This is the bedrock on which the philosophy of reverse dieting is built. This is the bedrock on which the philosophy of needing to fix people who have quote-un have made a very good amount of money over a very long period of time profiting off of this kind of idea. And it's stuck around, in my opinion, a lot longer than it should have. And I think when you really sit down and unpack it thoughtfully, it makes a lot more sense. Okay. So here's what I want you to think about first. When we talk about eating less calories, somehow making fat loss harder or leading to weight gain.

And we discuss this seriously. We're talking about directly, obviously indirectly, it can make you really hungry and then you eat more and that makes weight loss harder. That's usually what happens when people do low, low calorie diets. They go, I went low calorie and actually gained weight. It's like, no, you went low calorie for like two days and then went on a bender and you never stuck with it for long because it's ridiculous to try to diet on the fewest calories possible and you gained all the weight you lost back very quickly. We're talking about indirect weight loss, the way in which this would indirectly make weight loss harder. Those are not first-order consequences. If you look around the world, the direct implication and the direct outcome of eating too few calories

is weight loss and starvation everywhere but America. I find it very, very interesting that people in America who are overweight will go on a low-calorie diet or insist they're on a low-calorie diet, but they can't lose weight because they are in starvation mode. they're on a low calorie diet, but they can't lose weight because they are in starvation mode. Yet everywhere else on the planet, when you starve people, they lose body fat. Very much so. Does that make sense? Does that kind of jive with everything? I think if you don't take the time to kind of square that circle and just go, okay, just at face value, the idea that eating too few calories leads to fat gain is really only true in the Western world kind of spits in the face of physiology because it is in fact, in my opinion,

those indirect second order effects that happen when you eat too few calories, like binging, like not being able to stick with a diet, like not having an easy time avoiding small pockets of large snacking, grazing, and food consumption that are tightly associated with really having not enough food availability. You want to try to diet in a range or you want to try to be in a deficit that isn't like wildly below your total daily energy expenditure. You're going to make it so much harder than you have to on yourself. And you're going to make adherence really difficult. And adherence being really difficult is why most people can't consistently, difficult is why most people can't consistently reliably or for let's like try to be gentle about this. Um, even when their intentions are good, even when they have really good reasons, it's

hard for people to reliably lose body fat, like well intention. I want to get in shape for a wedding. I want to look better and get some confidence. I want to do better on my next health checkup with my doctor. It's still really hard. And part of why it's hard are the second order consequences like hunger. And being on a low calorie diet for sure, a much lower than you need to calorie diet will for sure make some of the indirect challenges or the indirect second order consequences feel much harder. But it will not.

It will not cause weight gain. It will not cause weight gain. It should not cause weight gain. And if it does cause weight gain, then you need to go to the doctor. And I'm telling you all of this as not a doctor. So please take this with a grain of salt. But in 10 years of doing this, I have found that many times what is happening when people insist they're on a low calorie diet and gaining weight is they are on a low calorie diet for a majority of the week, but a couple of days a week, oftentimes on the weekend, they eat way more than they do the other days with either these super high calorie days or borderline binge days. And what happens there is over time, the weight either

stagnates or slowly trickles up and they've identified as a low calorie eater, but in fact, they are not. So if you are somebody who insists you are a low calorie eater, you're tracking everything, you can't lose weight, and you can really say you're doing that seven days a week, 24 seven, no problems. I would definitely recommend going and seeing a physician and talking about some of the other ways you might be able to go about enhancing weight loss or getting some solutions or looking at some labs. Those are potential red flags. I've, I don't see them very often. What I see most often is clients for whom maintaining a low calorie diet seven days a week is really hard.

And they have times where they slip up and they don't account for those. Okay, but there's also another idea that's kind of born from this, the starvation mode kind of platform. And that is, of course, the idea that your metabolism can be irreparably damaged by dieting. Now, I have seen some extreme, extreme dieting done on the part and on the behalf of competitors in the bodybuilding space who take the leanness to the absolute peak. And when they try to eat a more normal diet after their show, because of how much their metabolism has aggressively constrained, they will gain a lot of that weight back. Meaning you eat a 1200 calorie diet for 12 months to get ready for a bikini competition. You get super shredded. Then you eat 2000 calories a day. But in that 12 week

cut, I'm sorry, not for 12 months, in a 12 week cut at 1200 calories, maybe you go 16, 14, 12. I've seen girls go six, eight. It's crazy what competitive athletes will do when told by coaches who aren't, how can you preserve somebody's health and prep them for a show? You can't. But you do these unhealthy diets. You see these people's metabolisms constrain and adapt to try to survive, if you will. And then, you know, when they go back to a more normal type of eating, the metabolism's constrained a bit. So they gain fat quite quickly and they think that their metabolism is damaged. And so there's this space where then, you know,

you go like, hey, we need to reverse diet. so we go up slower. And with that can come consequences too. Because oftentimes fat gain is the least problem when you diet this low of calories. You see more direct first order consequences to things like thyroid health. Like you can damage your thyroid from being too restricted. You can damage a number of tissues. You can lose hair. You can be, you know, your skin quality and endocrine tissue and health, your ability to produce certain hormones can tank. It's good to go back up, even if it

comes with a little bit of fat gain. But oftentimes what happens is people attempt to then go diet again, and they're dieting from a more constrained space because these adaptations, while not permanent, do take time to quote unquote reverse. And I don't mean you have to reverse diet, but what I do mean is you have to reverse your expectations. Like if you diet on very constrained calories, you can expect some adaptation. But if you introduce like, you know, you go back to what is your now new maintenance, not your previous maintenance, but your new maintenance, you're not going to see a wild amount of fat gain. You really won't.

You'll see some, but that's normal. The idea that you can just slowly and methodically raise your calories back to your old maintenance through a reverse diet perfectly and never gain a pound of fat is something that is very rare to see in practice. And I don't know how practical fat is something that is very rare to see in practice. And I don't know how practical it is for that to be how we attempt to find off-ramps for our diet. I think that it's much better to just say, I'm going to calculate or guess what my new maintenance might be,

and I'm going to go you know, how am I really going to be able to diet again? Like I just can't lose on 1600 calories anymore. And it's like, well, yeah, because, you know, you constrain your metabolism long enough at 1200 that maybe a deficit for you looks more like 1550, Um, you know, and you didn't give yourself enough time to chill at actual maintenance. Um, these things, they're not, they, they happen, right there. They exist. These situations are out there. Um, but the idea that if you diet, you will like permanently damage your metabolism. It frames the human body as being less resilient than it is. And for me, that's really frustrating because what we need to be doing as an industry is promoting all of the

ways in which the body is resilient. We want to be encouraging as many people as we possibly, possibly can to exercise, to be active, and to take steps to improve their health. And if you scare them off with silly myths, like they're going to actually damage their metabolism forever by dieting, like, come on, folks, we're framing us as fragile. It's not the way to do it. Okay. The second myth is that there is some magic diet out there that you just have not tried. I know a lot of you think like this because, quite frankly, even after 10 years in the fitness industry, I still am occasionally pulled into a direction nutritionally that really gets me excited because it seems new and cutting edge.

And maybe this is going to be the thing that helps solve the obesity epidemic, or this is going to be the thing that really changes body composition. Now, these are at the nuanced and more finite levels because I've been in the game a long time. But if you're new to this, what this looks like is chasing intermittent fasting and then trying veganism and then trying keto and then trying Whole30 and bouncing around because each one of these, let's call them what they are, products or kind of oftentimes families of products, these diet books, these diet fads. Now, obviously, veganism is less of a diet fad, more of a way of living. The ketogenic diet has medical applications. Intermittent fasting has medical

applications. I'm specifically talking about the books, the products, the courses, the apps, the products that exist in this shiny object space of chasing rabbits around that are diets. You're trying to catch the perfect one, the one that is going to help you finally lose the weight that you've been looking to lose. And I have just found over the years, these diets have the ability to work for different people more on a basis of situation than they do on a basis of efficacy. Meaning like these diets that work, like when intermittent fasting works, uh, after some, somebody's tried keto didn't work. Vegan didn't work. Macros didn't

work. Intermittent fasting worked. Okay. Intermittent fasting is magic. They're going to go tell everybody now. No, what happened was intermittent fasting in all likelihood worked best for your situation, your personality. And you you remember that dieting and adhering to a diet and being successful with weight loss or muscle gain or strength acquisition, anything that you might be looking to accomplish physically, all of that is built on the back of consistency, like ruthlessly showing up week after week after week after week. None of the, you cannot manifest any of these adaptations that we're after in a week, right? So, you know, when a diet worked for somebody, it worked because they were able to be consistent. And the longer you study this, the more you realize that's really

what people are discovering when they find something that works for them. It's something they can be consistent with. And then they will share that it is magical. And here's all the ways that it's magical. And people will try to make sense of it. Like intermittent fasting, maybe it works because it reduces our insulin levels and it increases our blood sugar sensitivity and our cell turnover is increased. We have more autophagy. You know, wonderful things are happening at the level of the microbiome. It's like, yep, maybe, possibly, probably all of those things are true to some degree. But from a weight loss perspective, it's coming from an energy deficit. You can say that for plant-based dieting. Oh, you know, I'm eating less red meat. I'm having less oxidative stress. I'm eating more fiber. My

microbiome is happy. I'm very insulin sensitive. Well, guess what? Plants are high in fiber. It's hard to overeat them. If you're eating plant-based, it's much easier to be in a deficit than if you're eating a traditional diet. Boom. Okay. Same thing with keto. You can do this dance for every diet. They all work because they help people reliably and consistently maintain an energy deficit, which is much easier said than done. So when these diets do turn out to be successful, oftentimes they proliferate. And on social media, you find advocates who literally have usernames that are like Carnivore Kevin, people who are tenants and followers of the carnivore diet or follow the tenants of carnivore dieting.

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 plan 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. One thing that's crazy is Twitter is a particularly interesting space to

study human behavior around nutrition. Nutrition is a science in the same way that way that statistics is a mathematical subject. Nutrition is open to ideology, sure, much more so than something like statistics. But interestingly, when you boil it down, it's a pretty hard science. So we know a lot about how these things affect weight loss, affect systems in the body. And we can learn more, but we're pretty damn clear that an energy deficit is what is driving weight loss in almost every situation. And, you know, if you want to make claims that it has to do with insulin sensitivity with regards to, you know, our ability to lose weight, many people are advocates for the idea that blood sugar and insulin sensitivity, um, and just keeping insulin low by virtue of removing carbs or not

eating a lot of food during the day, fasting and keto tenants, right? These things are fundamentally built on the idea that insulin causes fat gain. And when you look at these incredibly effective weight loss drugs, these GLP-1 agonists, these new crazy ones that everybody's super stoked about, like Ozempic and stuff, they all increase insulin, but they're better for fat loss than literally any fat burner or diet's ever been. They work like crazy. So that's another kind of spit in the face of like, oh, insulin is the godfather, so to speak, the puppeteer, the regulator of weight loss. It's not. It plays a role in diet and appetite and performance and storage of different nutrients and partitioning of different nutrients, so many

things. But it's not dictating weight loss. That comes down to an energy deficit. So anytime you hear a diet selling any rationale for weight loss other than being full, keeping muscle on the body and losing body fat, you know, like AKA high protein, low calorie diet. Don't, you know, you need to be skeptical and dubious because weight loss can be a lot simpler and the productization of these diets is making it more complicated. The third thing I'd like to touch on is hormones and specifically menopause. So there is a myth that menopause makes weight loss measurably harder. And I think, again, this comes back to discussing first-order or second-order consequences. So the first-order consequences of menopause are a loss of the primary hormones

responsible for sex and reproduction. And they are oftentimes hormones associated with femininity, things like estrogen and progesterone. And the gradual and slow reduction of these across the lifespan that typically dips precipitously around middle age. So you have premenopause, perimenopause, and postmenopause. And so these are essentially like just before menopause, during menopause, and then after menopause. And there's some pretty considerable hormone changes that go along with each of these stages, essentially going from drops in hormones to flatlining of the drops to no hormones at all. And you see oftentimes weight gain associated with this time period. And I think in this case, the weight gain is definitely correlated to a certain degree with

the change in hormones. I think that the hormonal environment that's optimal for weight loss is as many androgens and estrogens as you can handle without having negative side effects for men and women. So for women, you'll probably take a fair amount of estrogen, a fair amount of testosterone, a fair amount of progesterone. For men, you probably want as much testosterone as you can handle, as much estrogen as you can handle. They tend to be helpful hormones for performance, as long as you don't have so many of them that you see a, let's call it, dysregulated effect. I don't think you like... Men, estrogen has benefits in men. Testosterone has benefits. Um, I don't think you like, you know, men, estrogen has benefits in men. Testosterone has benefits in women. You don't want the feminizing effects

as a man. You don't really want the masculinizing effects as a woman, unless you're in like a gender transition phase or something to that effect. I don't know. I'm when most people engage with these hormones exogenously, they're wanting to maximize the benefit while minimizing the effects of the usually opposite sex side effects. So we know that the hormonal impact of losing a lot of those hormones would probably make weight loss harder, but I don't think it makes it a ton harder. What makes it harder are oftentimes the second order effects that also seem to kick up around middle age, such as sitting more, typically eating more, typically drinking more, typically moving less. People tend to work out more when they're younger through organized sport and activity. And as your hormones

change and your behavior around food changes, perhaps the most dominant change we see as women go through menopause is challenges with sleeping. And sleeping plays a huge role. So I think the challenges that happen with menopause are more directly correlated with a lack of sleep, a change in lifestyle, and a hormonal change that can make weight loss harder. But it will not make weight loss impossible. I think you just need to look at it through a different lens and say, okay, I have less things aligned in favor of optimizing weight loss, but if I'm diligent, it's still very much possible. And this is something that I think, again, it really defeats people and it makes them not want to attempt to change their

life, their habits, their behavior, because they're being told that it is not easy. It is not possible. It's going to be hard. I've even heard people say that it is going to be impossible. But I see women who are in that pre and perimenopause window, lose weight, build muscle, maintain their weight, lose body fat, build strength all the time in my studio. I have trained clients for 10 years. I have PTs in the studio. I have trainers in the studio working with people who are pre, peri, and post menopause who are in fabulous shape and seeing improvement. And when I see stuff like that, it makes me go, hmm, when you incorporate lifestyle coaching, when you incorporate training, when you incorporate physical therapy when needed

because injuries can occur, and you take care of the whole body and the mind and you have some accountability, menopause seems to maybe slow this down like 15 to 25%. But we don't ever see people who can't get results. It's not an on or off switch on your results just because you've entered into menopause. Okay. Here's one that's extremely pervasive and it's kind of funny, but it is the, you should not eat bread or I should stop eating bread. A lot of people will say that when it comes to fat loss. And the truth is with bread, I think it's simple. Like a lot of bread and bread products are refined, hyper palatable, low-fiber forms of bread. White breads, cookies, most cereals that are bready, cakey, soft, very hyperpalatable,

easy to overconsume bread. The direct effect of eating it has no impact on your fat loss, whether it's that, multigrain, or Ezekiel bread. It's the indirect effect. When it's hyperpalatable, you will eat more indirect. When it is like, okay, let's say a very fibrous bread, you will probably eat less to reach a point of satiety. The primary order effect of eating the calories from the bread, it's not going to make you fat, no matter the type of bread. It's the secondary effects of certain things like hyperpalatable, super processed, squishy, doughy, cakey bread, bread lathered in butter, bread lathered in oil, bread lathered in syrup, bread lathered in jam. People will incorporate these products, pastries, cupcakes, muffins,

very frequently into their diet. And when they remove them, and a lot of times you hear this with just carbs writ large, all carbs, got to cut carbs. When people remove huge swaths of food that are very nutrient dense, meaning they are, I should say calorie dense, they're very high in calories and they're very easy to over consume. They will usually lose weight because most of the calories in people's diets oftentimes are coming from products that are bread or bread based, but some breads can be health promoting, can help with fat loss, can be a very good tool. I recommend to clients all the time. Yeah. Hey, just toast up a couple

of pieces of your favorite multigrain bread, preferably bread that is whole wheat or the entire wheat is intact. It's not super refined or something like a sprouted grain bread, breads that typically are more fibrous, breads that typically are more nutritious. And you might want to use butter or olive oil or jam, depending on your goals and how seriously you take your fitness. But overall, you will eat less, even if you do add things that make them more hyperpalatable because of the presence of fiber. And so a lot of people look at bread as being bad, but if you can find bread that actually contains fiber, it's going to probably be a

health-promoting food to eat that could make fat loss easier. Okay, the fifth and final myth and piece of misinformation is that the vegan or a plant-based diet is a great fat loss diet. So, I am not a vegan dieter. I am not somebody who has ever tried a vegan diet. I don't necessarily recommend them, but I do have a lot of respect for people who are compelled to follow a vegan diet. Let's just say reasons that are bigger than themselves. They're thinking about animals. I think that's kind of cool. And so one thing I've noticed is that people who follow a vegan diet for these reasons, and they're consistent with it and they stick with it, they tend to lose some body fat because most people are overweight. So I'm going to assume most

people when they change their habits, they're probably going to be on average overweight. And a healthy plant-based diet that contains a lot of fiber is going to probably be a lot lower in calories than the average American diet. So you typically see weight loss. But then you see people who exclusively do the diet, not for the benefit of the animals, but for fat loss. Because they know a friend who, when they followed a plant-based diet, they lost body fat. And what typically will happen when people follow a plant-specific diet is they eat more carbohydrate, a little less fat, a little less protein, less calories overall.

What I think is cool is just saying, what can we learn from that? And do we have to be that restrictive? And I think if you're just looking for a diet for weight loss, you should include a lot of plants, but you should also include a lot of protein. And that can come from animal sources if ethically that doesn't misalign with your value system. I'm not telling you how to think about that. Instead, I'm telling you, you should eat some vegetables, you should eat some protein. And that will definitely make your weight loss easier because you want to hold on to as much muscle as possible. And you want to get some of the valuable nutrients from certain animal foods

that are easier than getting them from plant foods. I think an omnivorous diet is going to work. And so this isn't a bash on a plant-based diet. I think it can be very nutritious. And I think you can get all your protein from plant-based sources. The more I learn about it, the more I think like this probably works. If you just take a couple supplements and you're smart about a few different things, you can spend this in a way that works. I don't know enough about it in the longterm. Um, I feel like I trusted a lot more than like these all meat diets, but I don't think it is the best diet for weight loss. And I don't think it's super practical if you want to maintain a certain amount of muscle or muscularity across the

lifespan, if you're not going to be super diligent about your protein. And that can be very hard. So I might instead do a more vegetarian diet if, in fact, body composition is something that you're thinking about. All right, folks, that does it for this episode. I want to thank you so much for tuning in and remind you to leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts as well as Spotify. Both of them accept reviews. And when you write one, it makes a huge difference. And please do me a favor, share this and tag me. If you tag me on your Instagram story, when you share the podcast, I will happily repost you and say, thank you personally. It means so much to get this out there. We're crushing our all time downloads each and every week, guys. And I want to keep this thing growing in 2023. I really want to help more people live healthier lives. So each and every one of you sharing and reviewing makes the biggest difference.

Thanks so much for listening and I'll catch you on the next one.