Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 59 - Do These 4 Things Before Reducing Calories

Episode Date: August 3, 2020

In this episode, coach Danny shares some of his favorite fat loss tips for those who are already working with lowered caloric intake. Sometimes the "eating less" part of "move less/eat more" is not ideal.Danny shares his 4 FAVORITE ways to re-ignite fat loss without reducing calories through food.---Thanks For Listening!---RESOURCES/COACHING: I 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 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 INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERE!Support the Show.

Welcome back into another episode, the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. Today's episode is going to be all about mastering fat loss essentials, mastering the fundamental concepts, the concepts that have the greatest likelihood to positively impact your fat loss journey. Now, before we get into that, I think it's really important that we lay the framework that everybody has a different fat loss goal. Some people's are greater, meaning maybe they have to lose 50 to 100 pounds. Some people's are much smaller. Maybe they're already quite lean and they just want to tone up a bit more for a photo shoot. Wherever you fall on this

continuum though, all of these tips are going to be quite useful because while many of them are going to be in the vein of energy expenditure, meaning calories in, calories out, most of them are going to be lifestyle and behaviorally related. So wherever you're at on your journey, these will be things you can implement, even if, like I said, it's a quick cut, if you will, for something like a photo shoot, or if it's a more long-term health-focused weight loss goal. All of these tips will help you. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matranga, and this is the Dynamic Dialogue Podcast, your one-stop shop for all things fitness, nutrition, and lifestyle. Everything I bring to you on this platform is brought to you with the singular goal of helping you live a healthier life that can help

you perform physically at the highest level, whether that be at the gym, whether it's running around with your grandkids. There's something here for fitness enthusiasts, hobbyists, and even coaches, really, of all levels. So without further ado, let's talk about what you should do to reduce body fat before we start manipulating caloric expenditure, or I should say caloric intake. Why this is important. So when it comes to body fat loss, everything is dictated by what we would call energy balance. I have no doubt that many of you are very familiar with this term. Energy balance effectively refers to the balance of energy that comes into the body in the form of food and energy that's expended outward, generally in the form of exercise, but also for passive things like base metabolic rate and non-exercise activity thermogenesis and even the thermic effect of food. The balance of calories is represented, as I said earlier, by calories that come in versus calories that are expended. And reliably, what we can see is people who have a higher intake of

calories than they do expenditure tend to gain tissue. If they're not resistance training, a lot of that tissue will be body fat. If the expenditure is lower, perhaps, meaning they're not moving much, you might even see a prioritization towards body fat accumulation. a prioritization towards body fat accumulation. Now, if expenditure exceeds caloric intake, the body needs to gather energy from other tissue, and body fat tissue is specifically designed to lend us energy for these instances. So if you're burning more than you're taking in, a lot of times your body will simply prioritize stored fat, and if you do that long enough, you can see a marked

change in your physique. You'll actually start to trim up. That's energy balance effectively in a nutshell. But I think the fitness industry has done us a great service and disservice all at the same time by consistently parroting the phrase calorie deficit, calorie deficit, calorie deficit. So many coaches over the last three to five years have stood from their soapbox and pounded the calorie deficit into everybody's mind. And I think that's really important because what it's done is it shifted the dialogue away from remove carbs, remove fats, remove this, remove that. This myopic view that it's specific foods that make us fat to, hey, it all comes down to calories, calories, calories, calories. And in this constant reiteration, borderline regurgitation, we've really pounded this idea home deep, deep, deep into people's minds.

pushed it a bit too far in neglecting some of the other factors that can play a role in energy balance and in adherence to the diet. So people think the first and only option they have if their fat loss stalls or if it's not going as quickly as they would like is to continue to reduce calories. That's where we get a little tricky, particularly with smaller women. And the reason I bring this up is because many of the clients that I work with are women who are between 5'2 and 5'5, between a weight of about 120 and 150 pounds, who want to lose a little bit of body fat and change the way their physique looks. But when they come to me, they've been eating about 1,100 calories or so they say. There's always margin for error. There's always accounting issues. Many times people are eating or drinking much more than they say they are,

particularly young women in their early 20s. They tend to pack on a lot of calories from alcohol that they don't even talk about. But that's neither here nor there. If somebody comes to you and they're already eating a lower number of calories, you're kind of stuck because you go, well, if we simply look at the energy balance equation to get you to lose body fat, what we need to do is reduce your calories. That is the methodological, mechanistic way in which we can make this happen. But here's the problem. methodological, mechanistic way in which we can make this happen. But here's the problem.

You get to a point where you go, man, I don't know if we can safely go much lower than this, not just from a performance standpoint, but from a genuine physiological standpoint. I get a lot of women who've been eating at a really low caloric intake who don't have a menstrual cycle anymore. And that's your body's way of saying, hey, you're not even physically fit enough to be reproducing. We don't want your offspring. Something's wrong here. You are malnourished. Like, we got to cut this system off, this reproductive system off, because it's taking more energy than you have. And quite frankly, I don't want to waste it on offspring that might be weakened because of your nutritional deficiencies. Like, straight up, your body does not. We are an evolutionary organism. We're the prime example of what happens when you evolve. Maybe besides dogs, because they

just have such massively, they can reproduce much quicker than us. Their generations go much quicker than us. But hey, bad stuff starts to happen when you go too low. So we have to look at that energy balance equation and go, okay, that's what we want to manipulate. But is there a way that we can manipulate it without continuing to reduce food intake? And there actually are a lot of ways in which we can positively impact that energy balance equation, particularly for fat loss, because that's what we're going to talk about today, using lifestyle and behavioral techniques that won't really impact your food directly or your intake directly. The first of these things is, of course, going to be movement. As we diet down, we tend to see reductions in calorie expenditure. A lot of people for a long time

attributed this to something called metabolic damage. Now, the problem with the term damage is damage denotes that something is broken. And one of the other problems is a lot of things that are damaged are irreparably damaged. Meaning if you hear the term you have, or somebody tells you, a coach tells you, you have metabolic damage from eating too little calories for too long. People get this ideology that their metabolism is broken. The good news is the metabolism is highly elastic, plastic, if you will, very responsive to manipulation, and it's very quick to return to form if you go back to maintenance calories for long enough. If you've been absolutely starving yourself, that could take more than a year.

But if you've been dieting normally, that's where we introduce things like diet breaks or refeeds. Now, the whole reason I'm bringing up movement here, like I said, for many people, reducing calories is very tough, especially when you get low, especially when you're a smaller female. And we know that our body reduces something called NEAT as we diet longer and longer. NEAT is non-exercise activity thermogenesis. So the longer you're in a deficit, the longer that that energy balance equation is shifted in favor of fat loss, your body starts to go, hey, if we're eating 1,400 calories and I need about 1,800, and so I'm in a 400 calorie deficit and I don't love this. I'm

not a huge fan of this, okay? We're losing body fat, but that's not my priority. That's her priority. That's the client's. That's what your mind wants, okay? You want to get lean. Your body never wants that. There's no evolutionary adaptation for most people to get leaner than a certain body fat percentage, especially not stagely. So your body tends to push back a little bit. And one of the ways it does this is by reducing that non-exercise activity thermogenesis. And what that looks like, it looks like tapping your feet, right? It looks like walking around.

It looks like a little shimmy here, a little shimmy there, maybe some activity. All of that stuff gets really reduced. You start to see worsened posture. People use less expenditure. They use less calories to maintain their posture. Things like fidgeting and tapping of the feet tend to reduce and stop. People tend to generally opt to do less walking around and become a little bit more lethargic. And one of the things that's quite interesting about this is when calories are reintroduced, a lot of those things just go right back to baseline. But one of the body's primary mechanisms when you're in a deficit is to clamp down on that need. And so your options then become, hey, like I said, if your body wanted

to be around 18 or around 14 and you're losing fat, it might reduce need to get you closer to 14, to get you closer to saying, hey, I can survive around this 14 by reducing some of this frivolous movement. And your options then become, hey, do I reduce further and go down to 12, which I wouldn't recommend for almost anybody ever, or can I bake some movement opportunity into my day? Non-exercise related, not meaning like, hey, I'm going to add an extra hour onto my workout, but maybe you take a 10 minute walk after each meal, which accumulates to say 30 to 40 minutes of extra walking a day to offset those passive reductions in need. So that's one of the quote unquote lifestyle slash behavioral modifications that every single one of us has access to that I think is really important not

to overlook. 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 listening 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. One of the singular most overlooked things in all of this is the power that non-exercise movement has, right?

We know the power it has when our body starts to reduce need, and we need to, again, express in the same way it can work against us, it can work for us by working in small opportunities to move a bit more. Now, that would give you a greater caloric expenditure without reducing your caloric intake, which for a lot of people is a better option because after you get low enough, it becomes a battle of, man, this just sucks. And I always like to look at movement first. Can we work in more movement? I'll give you an example of how simple this can be. I've been eating ad libitum during quarantine. And that means I've been eating whatever I want, whenever I want. And I've been reliably losing body fat, which means I'm probably

eating less than my caloric expenditure, right? I'm burning a lot and I'm eating less than I'm burning. So I'm going to be losing body fat. I took up golf about three weeks ago and golf is a very low maintenance, hardly intense sport. And I've noticed my physique is tightening up even more rapidly just from playing nine holes of golf, maybe one time a week. So think about that. That's a little bit of walking around a nine-hole golf course. It's an 18-hole course, but I only have the juice to play nine. And my body is responding to that small manipulation. So small additions of movement, I think, can make a difference, not just from what the science tells us, but from what I've seen for years with both my own body and clients. Sometimes the best thing we can do before we drop

calories is say, hey, is there a way I can work some extra movement in? And if that movement's something relaxing, stress-reducing like walking or playing golf, it can be even more beneficial for indirect ways, which brings me to my second piece. It's lifestyle and behavioral again, something you can do before you reduce calories. Take a quick look at how stress is impacting your life. So a lot of times when we talk about stress in the fitness space, the C word comes up, cortisol. And everybody starts bantering back and forth about cortisol.

And cortisol is incredibly misunderstood. And I think that even diving down that rabbit hole right now does a disservice to some of the ways in which stress impacts us in a non-endocrinological way, a non-hormonal way, in a straight-up behavioral way. So when we're super stressed at work, super stressed with our friendships, relationships, all of that stuff, one of the things that we see consistently is that stress can lead to overeating in some individuals. That's been shown reliably in the evidence. There are some people who, when they become stressed, don't eat at all. I am one of those. That's not very healthy either. However, many people tend to overeat when they are stressed, or they tend to utilize food as a mechanism to buffer stress. Let's talk a little bit about cortisol. I know I said I didn't want to, but here's one of the ways in which that works. Cortisol is inversely related to the hormone insulin, meaning when cortisol jumps, insulin drops. When insulin jumps, cortisol drops. One of the ways we can raise insulin is by eating food. It's no accident that people tend to

crave insulinemic, insulogenic foods, foods that spike and make that insulin climb up when they are stressed. I think that the mechanism of action here is eat the food, raise the insulin, bring down the cortisol, bring down that perceivable hormone that really plays a role on stress. I'm not saying cortisol is good or bad here. I don't want to dive down that rabbit hole because that's a lot more nuanced than people let on. What I am saying is that I believe it's critically important that we examine and that we fully understand that some of our eating responses when we're stressed

are more aligned with preservation of homeostasis than they are with continuing to stay in this calorie deficit. So being able to manage your stress and not be a victim of stress-related eating or stress-related binge eating is really, really big. Like I mentioned earlier, one of the things that I find to be very relieving for my stress is going on a walk or going and playing about nine holes of golf. And those do me two things. They get me actually myriad of things. You count them out. Both of them get me out in the sun, which is good for my vitamin D absorption. It's good for my creativity. Both of them increase my

caloric expenditure through movement. Both of them, I don't really eat much while I do them. So like when I'm walking, I'm not eating. When I'm playing golf, I'm not eating a ton. I do bring a little cooler out there with some snacks. Somebody told me that Tiger Woods said you should eat a snack every two holes. I don't know if that's true or not. But anyway, I digress. I'm not eating. I'm walking. I'm burning calories. I'm getting vitamin D and I'm reducing, I should say, a lot of that allostatic load of stress, particularly that perceived mental stress. You get to get away. And I think that that becomes really valuable because stress is one of the things that really, really can hold people back

because it leads to behaviors that aren't aligned with the main goal. Sticking with lifestyle, though, let's take a look at sleep. So we know that sleep directly impacts body composition. We've seen it in a couple studies now. Effectively, what they do is they split these groups into two groups. They have a meet the same diet, and they have one group sleep less than the other. The group that sleeps less loses more weight from muscle. The group that sleeps more loses more weight from fat. Both groups lose about the same amount of weight because they're in the same place on that energy balance continuum. They're in about the same deficit. But how much sleep you do or don't get dictates how much of that oh-so-precious muscle we preserve

and how much of that pesky fat we reduce. So there's some direct ways sleep can enhance our calorie deficit. But here's some other stuff that people don't really talk about. And this is what's so interesting about sleep is it influences our decision-making in a way that we really never thought possible before. So sleep can actually directly influence decision-making. Lack of sleep has been associated with poor decision-making. Lack of sleep has been associated with over-consumption of calories for direct and indirect reasons. Indirectly, in that it influences

decision-making negatively. It literally lowers something like willpower. And then directly in that, hey, if you're staying up late, that's a greater opportunity of time that you now have to sneak in some extra calories. Nobody's eating while they're sleeping. So extra sleep can be beneficial in, like I said, direct and indirect ways, which is really, really good when we talk about, hey, what are some things that we can do to help with body fat reduction that don't mean I have to continue to reduce calories, right? And so those are really the big three. But there's a few more that I really, really like. One of them is just diving down back into the importance of tracking calories.

And so a lot of times what happens, and this is something that happens a lot in the coaching space, is you get a client and they tell you they're eating 1,200 calories and they're not losing weight. And you go, well, there's probably some physiological disruption here. Something's not working right. We should give you more calories so you can return to homeostasis. And maybe you do a mini reverse diet for a while. You just, you give them a little bit of calories so you can get them back to a healthier place. And then you reintroduce the deficit. And something that's happened with some degree of reliability and consistency for me, especially with women, they're on about 1,200 to 1,500 calories from their previous coach. They come to me. I put them at 1,700. They're

freaked out. They go, 1,700? I was eating 1,200 and gaining weight. And I go, look, okay, I need you to trust me. We want to get you back to a homeostatic base where we know you're physiologically healthy. Maybe we're looking to get that period back. Perhaps we're looking to increase those KPIs like strength, endurance, hypertrophy. We're looking to pull on a few different levers, fine-tune a few things before we put them back onto a lower calorie eating platform, right? We want to make sure they're healthy first. So we start with a reverse diet. And because there's so much baked in frustration and so much baked in misconception around increasing calories, what these women do is they go, oh my God, I'm going to listen to coach Danny because I'm paying him this money. He's my coach, but I'm going to track my freaking

calories so damn meticulously, so perfectly, because I don't want to go over 1700. I don't want to gain any fat. I want to just reverse diet and then we can get back to the deficit because my goal is fat loss. And so these girls, they start tracking calories perfectly because again, they don't want to gain any body fat. I don't blame them. If you went to a coach and you said, hey, I want to lose fat. And they say, hey, we need to add a little bit more calories in first. We need to get you healthy before we lose fat. A lot of people would be like, dude, that's not why I came to you, but I trust you, so I'll do it. But there's always pushback, and there's always a little bit of enhanced focus on calorie intake. And so what's really interesting is these ladies

start tracking everything so perfectly, they lose weight. And how is that possible? Well, here's what I'll tell you. When they were eating, big time air quotes here, 1200 calories, they weren't tracking shit. They thought they were eating 1200 calories. Maybe they were eating three meals a day that they pre-prepared out that were 1200 calories, but they were snacking all over the place. There were tons of calories sneaking in. And so then you have these coaches that are like, yeah, when I gave her more food, she started losing weight. I'm literally a god. Like, I just understand the human body. No, asshole. They started tracking accurately because they were scared as fuck of gaining weight. And when they thought they were eating 1,200, they were really eating closer to 2,000. And when you put them on 1,600, 1,700, and they actually tracked 1,600, 1,700, they actually reduced weight. 16, 1700, they actually reduced weight. And it's a remarkable thing to see because it happens, at least to me, all the time. And so one of the things I tell clients as we do this is, hey,

what I would like to do is bring your calories up closer to what I think your maintenance might be. Notice I didn't say into a surplus. I said closer to what I think your maintenance might be. And for a lot of these people, I bring them up to approximately where their maintenance is. But because they're eating a little bit more, that NEAT goes back up. So that expenditure knob gets turned up a little bit. So they actually end up in a mini deficit, but they're tracking so damn accurately around 16, 17. There's none of those frivolous extra calories and that little bump in need, right? Which may or may not have happened because maybe they're actually eating less, right? This little bump in enthusiasm tends to push them a little harder in the gym.

They tend to feel a little bit better because they have a little bit more agency about what's going on sometimes. So good things can happen from this. But it is quite interesting because, again, it all goes back to, hey, before you just blatantly drop calories, ask yourself, how accurately have I been tracking? And if the answer isn't very accurately, you're going to run into problems because what you'll do is you'll just keep reducing, keep reducing, keep reducing. And I haven't met a whole lot of human beings that can't lose a massive amount of body fat eating less than 1,200 calories. I would go so far as to say,

if you can't lose weight eating less than 1,200 calories, all right, you need to go see some type of medical doctor. You need to go talk to somebody because something ain't working. doctor. You need to go talk to somebody because something ain't working. Something's off. And that's not like me trying to say or fear monger. It's just me saying, man, like that's a really serious issue because most people who aren't losing weight on 1,200 calories aren't really eating 1,200 calories. So guys, there you have it. There are a few things that I would recommend checking those boxes before we reduce calories if we're already eating on a, what we would call, limited calorie budget. I would take a look at your stress and say, hey, what can I do to manage the stress? I would take a look at your movement and say, hey, is there any way I could work in additional movement to enhance my caloric expenditure? A lot of times, the answer is yes. I would take a look and say, hey, is there anything I can do to enhance my sleep so that one, I optimize my muscle preservation and I minimize the likelihood of muscle loss. I maximize the likelihood of fat loss. I minimize the likelihood of having reduced willpower and I shorten the window in which

I can eat because I'm actively sleeping for more of the day. And I would look at, hey, how is my accounting? In the same way, if you were really pressed and you had to budget your finances, you would check your bank account a little bit more with a greater amount of attention to detail. And so I think all this stuff matters because reducing calories and managing calories is the name of the game, 100%. I'm never going to refute that. I really lean into science with regards to body fat loss. I think that leaning into emotion and making appeals to anecdote and being myopic and demonizing certain things is really, really harmful. So I do lean into that calorie equation, that mechanistic side of things. But that's not the only lever we can pull. We can influence energy balance with one big lever that's eating more, eating less. But then

we have all these small levers that I just mentioned that can influence it as well and oftentimes influence it more gently. So guys, do me a favor. If you're working with clients and you're a coach, put these tools into practice. If you're looking to lose weight, examine all of the things I put in front of you today before you reduce calories further. Don't be afraid to get a little creative and think outside the box. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. I know I enjoy making them. You guys are awesome. You leave the best reviews. I so appreciate when you share these on Instagram and be sure to tag me so I can thank you if you do so.

Thank you again for listening and stay tuned. Got more episodes coming your way. you