Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 85: *THE* 20 minute fat-loss blueprint (7 THINGS!)

Episode Date: January 20, 2021

In this episode Danny shares the seven fundamental pillars of fat loss. They are:---1. Create a calorie deficit2.     Build and preserve muscle.3.     Ensure essential fat intake is met for your health.4.     Moderate carbohydrate intake.5.     Ensure you are getting adequate sleep6.     Manage stressors7.     Take the right supplements:+ Lots more, including the announcement of the trainer mentorship program.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!Sign up for the trainer mentorship HERE----SOCIAL LINKS:Follow Coach Danny on INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERESupport the Show.

Hey everybody, welcome in. Today's episode is going to be all about fat loss. We'll talk about pretty much every conceivable scientific underpinning required to really functionally understand how fat loss occurs. We'll talk about dieting, we'll talk about strategic ways in which you can diet to optimize fat loss or streamline the process so that you can dial things in by a certain date. But most importantly, I think we're going to approach this in a way that's highly applicable, whether you are somebody looking to lose fat or you're a coach who's already lean but wants to help their clients lose fat better or more effectively. I think it's really important to hear multiple people put a spin on something that maybe you already, at least mechanistically, understand fairly well. Before we get into it, guys, I want to remind you,

if you didn't hear already, and for many of you, you might be hearing about it for the first time, but I am launching my first ever trainer mentorship program. This has been something that you guys have asked specifically for for years now. And I've been in positions in the past where I really wanted to work on it, but didn't quite have the inspiration as to what exactly I wanted this platform to look like. But now I have really honed in on what this mentorship is going to be about, what it's going to offer. And I've created something that I think is going to be really, really helpful for a lot of coaches out there. So if you want to join the mentorship in the future and stay up to date as it develops

and gets into its kind of final round of production here, you can go to www.coachedannymatranga.com backslash, or sorry, forward slash mentorship. So again, www.coachedannymatranga.com backslash mentorship. And just sign up there to be updated as things go along. It's going to be a really incredible opportunity to learn what I think is fundamental to being a great trainer, whether that's in person, whether that's online coaching, whether that's a a great trainer, whether that's in person, whether that's online coaching, whether that's a hybrid model where you train some people in person, some people on Zoom, some people online. Whatever you want to do, I've been doing this

stuff for 10 years. And I found a way to make money every way I've done it, found a way to enjoy it every way I've done it, found a way to have freedom every way I've done it. And now I do it how I want to do it. And I really want to share that with you guys because I think as we move into the post-COVID landscape, people are going to be really, really focused on improving their health and improving their connection. And I think personal trainers are positioned to do really, really well if they have the tools

to, again, execute on some really fundamental stuff. So if you want to get in on the mentorship opportunity, go to www.coachedaniematringer.com backslash mentorship, and I promise you, you won't be disappointed when we get to the point where that's ready to roll. Now, let's talk about the scientific and practical applications of strategies and things that we can do to lose body fat. So first, let's take a deep dive into body fat itself. So the first thing I always like to touch on whenever I talk about body fat is that body fat is a tissue. Okay, we call it adipose tissue or adipose tissue. And it's something that we have in our body period all

the time. It's not something that you just eat and magically appears, right? We use the word fat to describe all of the different types of body fat, but there are a lot of different types. We have white cells, brown cells, beige cells. We have subcutaneous fat. We have visceral fat. We even have intramuscular fat. So there's all kinds of different types of body fats, whether we're talking white, beige, brown, whether we're talking about the actual location in the body, whether that be subcutaneous, whether that be visceral, which is most of the time what we're talking about. We very rarely talk about intramuscular. That's generally with regards to substrate utilization for exercise. The focus of today's discussion will be reducing visceral and subcutaneous body fat through exercise and nutrition.

That's the bulk of what we focus on. If you want to have a better understanding of the different types of fats, white fat, brown fat, and beige fat, there's plenty of great resources online. And if you want to understand the differences between dietary fats, which is very different from what we're talking about, we talk about essential dietary fats. We're talking about omega-3s, omega-6s, omega-9s. We talk about saturated versus unsaturated fats, PUFAs, right? That's a different discussion. So I always like to start by drawing a line and kind of making a circle and saying, we're going to talk about everything inside this circle today. And that's

going to be body fat with regards to affecting visceral body fat, subcutaneous body fat through exercise and nutrition. We're not going to talk about dietary fat. We're not going to talk about the differences between different types of adipose tissue. We're really going to dive into the nuts and bolts of what I think is the most important. So we go about filling up these fat cells by over-consuming calories. Now, calories are an energy currency, meaning the more you eat, the more energy you can expend. However, if you're not expending that energy, that currency needs to go somewhere. And our bodies have evolved over 200,000 years to become very, very good at storing excess energy, whether it's

from carbohydrate or fat or protein even, even though there is research that protein is not nearly as easily converted into adipose tissue. We have 200,000 years of machinery working in favor of, hey, if you have too much energy, we know exactly where to put it. Because it wasn't until very recently that being super, super lean was advantageous at all, right? If you think about it now, being lean might help you get a date, might help you get laid, might even help you make a baby. There's some benefits to that. But back in the day, being too lean was no bueno. Food wasn't necessarily always something that we were able to come by. We often ate less frequently. And being able to conserve energy in the form of body fat was really advantageous to our survival. So these mechanisms

are still in place with regards to how we are drawn to food, our tendencies to overeat, but also how we store fat. Human beings aren't supposed to be super duper ripped all the time. And we didn't evolve to be super duper ripped all the time. A lot of us want to be super ripped and we have to approach that strategically. And that's kind of what we're going to talk about today. And taking in too much energy, storing it as body fat means that our first approach should be, and again, you can use your intuitive mind here. If we're taking in too much of something and we're storing a lot of it, in all likelihood, the remedy for that is the exact opposite application or the exact opposite behavior. Meaning we take in less and we do a little bit more to expend what we already have. And that's basically what you'll hear everybody

parrot in the fitness space. Eat less, move more. Calorie deficit, calorie deficit, calorie deficit. But that doesn't get people very far. And the reason I told you everything I've told you up until this point is because I think it's really, really important to be able to approach this and look at this in a way that might better help your clients, or maybe it's a way that might make more sense to you. So I think that there's a lot here to unpack, but let's first start with the obvious. If we want to lose body fat, we need to first create a caloric deficit. If we want to lose body fat, we need to first create a caloric deficit. This can be done most easily one of two ways. Reducing your food intake, specifically your caloric intake,

and adding in more exercise to expend more calories. That will lower your overall caloric intake. Reducing what you eat, expending more, will lower that net caloric intake across the day. Now, here's the thing. Most people are gonna do both. What I wouldn't recommend doing is jacking up your exercise super duper high and dropping your calories super duper low.

That is quite reckless. I can't say that I'd recommend that for almost anyone. I think a modest deficit and some pretty rigorous exercise several days a week is probably the best place to start. Now, that brings us to a question that a lot of people will have, which is, well, hey, if it's just calories in and we're just talking about calories out with exercise and calories in with diet, how do we explain how people lose so much weight doing something like keto or the vegan diet? Well, let's break it down. When you really think about it, carbohydrate, right, particularly carbohydrate, we'll talk about vegan first,

represents a lot of the traditional Western diet. So when you go on a vegan diet, you're going to end up removing a lot of carbohydrates and a lot of calories from your diet. That's going to create a caloric deficit. Imagine if every time you went to the grocery store for 20 years, you came home and half of your cart contained carbohydrates or foods that were not friendly for keto. But now that you're on this keto diet, you got to go to the store and buy a bunch of different crap. And while yes, there are a million and one high calorie high fat foods that can make you balloon up and gain body fat on keto. What most people buy is satiating protein and satiating vegetables paired with some, you know, butter and bacon and whatever the weird

keto people want to buy. But in general, they've reduced a lot of their caloric intake by simply not bringing as much shit home. 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 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. And that's pretty obvious. We could talk a little bit more about, you know, weight reduction through the loss of potentially loss of glycogen or loss of water

weight that's associated with low carbohydrate diets. But again, the big thing here is you were eating one way for 20 years and you had to flip it on its head. And all that you know for sure that's keto safe at any given moment is like protein and vegetables. That'll create a deficit for most people. Same thing with veganism. If everything you ate, you know, contained eggs or butter or different animal products, and you have to toss that all out and all the stuff that you know you can eat for sure is like whole grains and vegetables, that's going to help you create a caloric deficit. So these fad diets, by and large, work by, you know, creating a caloric deficit. But they do it in a way that's quite difficult,

and they often do it from just completely upending the way people have approached nutrition for decades. And when you really break it down mechanistically, it makes a ton of sense. And the reason those things are really hard is because we only have so much motivation and willpower to follow through on stuff, especially in the hectic society that we live in. And people are going to find themselves surrounded by those foods. And given that they don't have any functional understanding of kind of how that fat loss works, they've just been told, hey, if you cut this stuff out, you'll lose weight. When they're surrounded by that stuff, again, they don't really understand the calorie standpoint.

So they might eat it or they might binge. They might not be aware that, hey, I can have these foods and still maintain my weight, but I have to limit how many of them I have or how much of them I have so I can keep an eye on my calories. So that's always worth diving into. Again, this is probably stuff that up until this point, you guys are already very, very familiar with, but it's worth talking about. So point two, in terms of making fat loss easy, we need to preserve that precious metabolically active muscle tissue. That is very, very important. As you lose weight from being in a caloric deficit you don't just lose body fat you'll actually lose muscle mass and even bone mass after a certain amount of time both of which like fat are metabolically active tissue the smaller you get the less calories you

burn whether you're losing fat muscle bone whatever you lose all three considerably more fat hopefully than the other two that would make the most sense after all. But we want to preserve that muscle. That's critically important. It will make sustaining a caloric deficit easier. It will make your efforts more fruitful because your total daily energy expenditure will be higher by virtue of having more muscle. But how can we do that? How can we reliably ensure that we're keeping as much muscle as possible while being in a caloric deficit? Well, the first thing we have to do is elevate our protein intake above the recommended dietary intake levels. We probably need to be somewhere between 0.7 and 1 grams per pound of body weight. That's a level of protein intake that more closely

coincides with maintaining or building muscle tissue. 0.3 to 5, which what you might see for RDI or general recommendations, that might be okay for general health, but it's probably not best for maintaining and cultivating muscle mass. Another thing that we want to do, again, because increasing our dietary protein intake when we're on a limited caloric intake will be good for maintaining muscle, we want to send a stimulus to build muscle. And the best way to do that is to regularly partake in resistance training. Anywhere

from two to six days a week is probably a great place to be. You want to make sure that you can recover from this. If you're eating less, you don't want to train so insane that you, you know, lose it. But a good resistance training stimulus is important. And I think it's much better to have the bulk of your exercise come from a weightlifting than from cardiovascular exercise if your goal is long-term weight loss. If your goal is short-term weight loss, doing a lot of cardio and cutting your calories will certainly help, but you won't preserve that metabolically precious muscle tissue, the stuff that you want to show off anyway when you lose all the weight, if I'm being pretentious enough to guess. But I think it's really, really important

that you preserve that muscle tissue. And the best way to do that is by eating adequate protein, hopefully spaced out across your day into multiple meals, training with some weights, and focusing on getting strong. Okay, while we're on the topic of macros, it's really important to keep your dietary fat intake at an adequate level. I know that we've talked a little bit about earlier in the podcast not diving too much into your dietary fats, and we won't. But when you're creating that caloric deficit, be sure to include enough fat that you can cover your basic needs. You should never be below 20% of your total calories from dietary fat. I think my sweet spot's around 30% of my total calories from dietary fat. Everybody's different, but make sure that you're getting adequate dietary

fat. You need that for cellular health, for brain health, and for hormone production. And while that stuff doesn't seem all that important if we're talking about weight loss, I'll tell you what, tanking your libido is no way to lose a bunch of weight. You want to keep the libido going. Losing weight but having crap skin and crap hair because you don't eat any dietary fat, probably not ideal either. You want to take a balanced approach. So even if you want to try a lower fat diet, be sure that you're getting enough to cover your basis. And you can figure out how to do that really, really easily. You can download the nutrition guide on my website. You can work with a registered dietitian, probably even better. But really focus on getting enough dietary fat. Don't throw it to the wind just because it is higher in calories than dietary carbohydrate and protein. carbohydrate and protein. Speaking of carbohydrate, as we circled the wagons here talking about substrates and macronutrients, carbohydrates are really important for performance. They're also important for recovery. They're not essential, meaning you can technically live without having a lot of them, but doing that wouldn't be anywhere near what I would consider optimal. I would focus

quite a lot on making sure that you get your carbohydrates in. But as you lose weight, as you increase the caloric deficit, you might want to be a little bit more conscientious of when you eat your carbohydrates. Perhaps you want to eat less of them in general so you can increase the deficit. That makes a lot of sense. But maybe if you're training hard, you want to make sure that you straddle your workouts with some carbohydrates. You have a little bit before and you have a little bit after. Maybe you have the largest carbohydrate feedings of your day around your workouts. I think that's a really good approach, right? We're not cutting carbohydrates out. When you create a caloric

deficit of any type and for any person, you have to make some sacrifices. And given that protein is so integral for muscle gain, and given that fat is essential, carbohydrate unfortunately is usually the largest sacrifice in terms of overall macro adjustment that most people are going to make. But just because we're reducing carbohydrate in most instances doesn't mean we have to do so haphazardly. One of the things I've had a lot of luck with with clients is reducing daily caloric intake from carbohydrate, but really positioning those carbohydrates across the day in a strategic manner so they have more going into training and more immediately after to give them the fuel they need to perform and also enhancing recovery. So we can reduce carbs probably more so

than any other macronutrient if weight loss is our goal, given, again, that they're not as essential for our survival. But removing them all together is never something that I deploy with my clients. I'm not a fan of that. I'm not a fan of ketogenic diets for weight loss. I don't think throwing carbs out the window in general is a great plan for people who aren't already metabolically ill or dealing with some metabolic syndrome related stuff. So next piece, moving away from nutrition and biochemistry into lifestyle. And this is perhaps the most important non-exercise related lifestyle adjustment you can implement to improve your fat loss. And that is to enhance your sleep.

you can implement to improve your fat loss. And that is to enhance your sleep. They've done studies comparing groups who slept six hours to groups who slept eight hours, giving these people the same amount of calories. And while they do lose similar amount of weight, one thing we've seen in these studies is that the people who sleep less lose preferentially higher amounts of muscle, and the people who sleep more lose much more weight from body fat. And that type of stuff is really, really important in the long run when we talk about sustainability. It's also important for recovery. There's also been links to increased amount of sleep and having more willpower and better decision making. And sticking to diets is hard. So having everything lined up in your favor is a really,

really good idea. Here's a few actionable tips to improve your sleep. Turn the lights off two hours before bed or put on blue blocking glasses. Try to do more nasal breathing with elevation and depression coming from your belly rather than your abdomen. Supplement with things like vitamin D, zinc, magnesium, and melatonin if you have a hard time with it. And just generally try to wind down in the evenings instead of amping up. Take your sleep seriously. Go into it with the right mentality and approach it like it's just as important a part of your fat loss journey as your nutrition and your training. And you will be rewarded heavily for doing that. The last thing I like to talk about with regards to lifestyle is managing stressors. Just be aware that being exceptionally stressed will likely increase your potential for overeating and it will probably interfere with your training and sleep. So if you can lower your stress, eliminate stressful people or stressful situations from your life when you're trying to lose fat, that's probably a better idea than just being super duper stressed all of the time.

And then the last thing with regards to supplements, I think it's really important to remember, guys, that less tends to be more. And if I could recommend five supplements very, very quickly for anybody looking to lose fat, it would be this. Whey protein or plant protein supplements to increase your protein intake and cover you if you're in a pinch. Because again, we reviewed the importance of dietary protein. Creatine to help with muscular recovery and repair, as well as strength production in a deficit. Caffeine to help manage fatigue and give you the energy to train. There's also some research

that caffeine can help with fatty acid mobilization. A multivitamin to cover your bases. While I do think eating a ton of vegetables during a diet is really important due to their food volume and satiating properties, having a vitamin in the backup can be a good idea. And the last one is an omega-3, whether that's fish oil or algae-based omega-3. Omega-3 fatty acids are fantastic for overall health. So there you guys go. That is my fat loss blueprint in under 20 minutes. I hope you guys enjoy it.

If you can deploy this stuff with your clients or even in your own journey, I think that's going to be a great, great opportunity. If you guys have any more questions or you want to engage with me on any of my other platforms, do feel free to check me out on Instagram or Twitter, or give me a visit over to the website at www.coachdaintymetrenga.com. I've got lots of free guides there. We've also got programs. And again, you can sign up for the mentorship over there as well. Thanks so much again, you guys for visiting and listening. Have a good one.