Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1190: 3 Ways to Transform a Skinny Fat Body

Episode Date: December 23, 2019

In this episode, Sal, Adam and Justin go into detail how to transform an unhealthy "skinny fat" body. The growing epidemic of the ‘skinny fat’ population. (1:55) What are the characteristics of a ‘skinny fat’ person? (4:50) What is visceral fat and how does it impact the body? (6:45) The different types of ‘skinny fat’ people. (12:30) What is their greatest hurdle? (15:10) Strength is an indicator of health. (17:13) 3 Ways to Transform a Skinny Fat Body. #1 – Getting stronger and building muscle through resistance training. (18:20) #2 – Eating more protein. (26:20) #3 – Sleep and stress management. (37:29) Related Links/Products Mentioned December Promotion: MAPS Aesthetic ½ off! **Code “BLACK50” at checkout** The association of grip strength from midlife onwards with all-cause and cause-specific mortality over 17 years of follow-up in the Tromsø Study The Best Form of Exercise - Mind Pump How Much Protein You REALLY Need to Build Muscle & Maximize Health The Myth of Optimal Protein Intake - Mind Pump Not All Protein Is Created Equal (PROTEIN POWDER GUIDE) Does Collagen Protein Help You Build Muscle? - FREE Hardgainer Guide BEST Tips For Getting Better Sleep Before You Try Taking Melatonin Supplements Visit Felix Gray for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! Visit ChiliPad for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Code “MPOOLER” at checkout** Mind Pump Free Resources

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. In this episode of Mind Pump, we talk all about a condition that is actually terrible for your health. It actually might be the worst condition to be in. This is the low muscle weak high body fat condition known as skinny fat. So this is when your body weight is normal or actually maybe low, but you don't have much muscle and remember muscle has protective effects on the body. And as a

result, you have a high body fat percentage. In the words, the amount of body fat that you carry is a high percentage of your body. The majority of what you do. Now, in this episode, we talk about what that looks like, what it means, what the risk factors are. And then we give you three ways to remedy this. So if this is you, we give you three concrete ways to reverse this in yourself so that you're no longer skinny fat. Now, before the episode begins, I want to remind everybody that this month, Maps aesthetic is 50% off, all month long.

Maps aesthetic is our workout program designed to help you sculpt, shape, and build your body how you see fit. It's the only Maps program where you can go and follow the workouts, but then add components specific to your body. So let's say you're somebody who wants to build more glute muscles, or maybe you want to build more chest muscles.

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One of the more difficult things to identify in terms of how healthy people are. Because it's a tough thing when you're talking about looking at the general population. We're using things like BMI. We're using things like BMI, right? People's total body weight.

But we know as trainers that that's not always accurate. In fact, sometimes people have a great BMI, but they have very, very bad or terrible health. Skinny fat people. Right, and you're starting to see skinny fat being talked about now in the medical community. They're actually finding that people who have low body weight, but high percentages of body fat

to have some of the worst health of all. I used to tell my clients that, the my clients that I would measure high body fat, and you could see they were discouraged because they're overweight by 30, 40 pounds. I used to tell them that, hey, I think you're in a better place than some of these clients that I measure

that you would think they're in good shape by the way they look because they're... It's very deceptive because they're skinny, but they have really high body fat percentage. I said, because your body expresses and shows and tells you when you're off and you're not doing well and that encourages you to make better food choices and begin exercising like you're doing here at the gym,

versus some of these people that, and the ones I'll tell you that I experienced the most of the trainer were my models and people in that industry that were always extreme dieting to fit in a category. I need to be this weight in order to have these contracts and they actually did little to no exercise. And so they looked thin,

but when I would measure their body fat, they would read really high. Yeah, and a lot of people are like, how is that possible? How can someone be skinny, but have a lot of body fat? So, when it comes to body fat, it's not necessarily the amount of body fat you have in your body. It's whether or not it makes up a large percentage of your overall body weight. So, you could be a hundred pound person, but you could have 30 pounds of body fat on your body, in which case it would be 30% body fat,

which is considered really high. So really, your body weight, to some extent makes a difference, it matters, but the percentage of your body weight that's body fat makes a bigger difference. And here's why being skinny fat oftentimes is actually worse than just being overweight. Somebody who's just overweight may have enough muscle

to help offset some of the negatives of the high amount of body fat. Somebody whose skinny fat has the dual problem of high body fat percentage in lack of muscle. So they can't make up for the metabolic effects of high body fat with some muscle. So they have the dual effect, low muscle of high body fat with some muscle. So they have the dual effect, low muscle, high body fat.

That can cause some serious problems. You see this, now oftentimes this is expressed in skinny fat people with, so let's say you don't get a body fat test. How would you know that you're skinny fat? How are you weak? You know, if you're at a low body weight, but you're also very, very weak, you can't do a single push up, or you struggle lifting grocery bags or carrying a backpack for longer than 20 to 30 yards, there's a sign right there that you may be skinny fat.

Do you store body fat in abnormal amounts around your belly? Oftentimes you'll find people in the skinny fat, category where they have skinny arms, skinny legs, but they'll store kind of more around the belly area. They also tend to store more visceral body fat, which is the body fat that's around the organs. Now, from a health perspective, somebody who's skinny fat, oftentimes we'll have,

we'll display some poor health markers, just like somebody who's overweight, oftentimes they'll have high blood sugar or blood sugar issues. And people who are skinny fat get surprised about this, you know, they go to the doctor and they're 35 or 40 years old and their body weight is good, they're within BMI, maybe lower than BMI normal or whatever. They get tested and the doctor's like, oh, you're borderline. Well, I think so. I think so dangerous about it,

because I have a lot of friends like this and even like family members who, can maintain a certain body weight. And so that's their entire thought process. It's like, if I maintain this weight and I keep eating the way I'm eating and I have moderate activity, like I'm gonna be just fine

and the doctor says I'm just fine because of what they're reading off of his BMI chart. And meanwhile, like, they're not considering, you know, all these ramifications down the road because of what, you know, is going on internally and, you know, the potential risks for all these other diseases, you know, because their poor health is underneath the surface. Well, you have to talk a little bit more

about this role fat versus subcutaneous fat and how our body stores that differently, like, explain that and how that varies from people. Like, some people, I know, genetically would store more viscerally than others. And then also, I think, eating behaviors can cause that too, right? Yeah, excessive dieting, on-off dieting, low activity levels. You tend to store more visceral body fat, which is the body fat that's around organs. It's more inflammatory. It can cause more problems and health problems for the body. And visceral body fat is more, if you want to call fat good and bad, that's more on the bad side. And people who are skinny fat, low body weight, high fat, low muscle,

tend to have more of this visceral body fat. In fact, skinny fat people, people who have low BMI, but high body fat percentage, have some of the worst life expectancy numbers. A lot of people don't realize that. When you look at people who have the worst outcomes, it tends to be people who are underweight, but also weak with little muscle. So it's not like you're underweight, but you're lean, you're underweight with a high percentage of body fat,

especially as you age. In fact, body weight, low BMI is not a good thing for people as they age because of the lack of muscle. Muscle has a very protective effect on the body. And if you're just low weight, if you're a 30, 40 year old, underweight, not a lot of muscle, you're gonna be a frail and weak sick older person.

If you don't start to remedy that and start to work on that. Do you think there's any correlation with this person? And I had a handful of clients, I had like this, I even dated a couple of girls that ate like this, where they would like graze on baby carrots all day long for, and eating low calorie, 800 calories a day. But then on Friday or Saturday night,

they would go out and they would party and drink seven, eight drinks, a day, but then on Friday or Saturday night, they would go out and they would party and, you know, drink seven, eight drinks, which would contribute to, you know, 2000 calories coming from alcohol and sugar. And in that evening, do you think that that that person is someone who would more commonly have a higher this role body fat? Totally. Because what they're doing is there're people who are skinny fat live a lifestyle that encourages low body weight but also discourages muscle growth, right? So skinny fat people tend to have a diet

that's low in protein and low in calories. So they're eating, and I blame some of the low fat hysteria that we had in the 80s, 90s and even early 2000s where everything's low fat. So they're eating things like crackers and rice cakes. And like you said, Adam, you know, baby carrots here and there, calories are really low. The protein intake is extremely low, which low protein intake can definitely contribute to less muscle.

And then of course, calories from alcohol, alcohol calories have almost no positive impact on the body. You can eat nutrients there. In fact, lots of alcohol, regardless of diet and resistance training, has been shown to reduce muscle mass. In fact, what ends up happening with these people, and you know exactly, as soon as I explain this, people will know, they'll be like,

I know people who look like that. As people who are skinny fat start to age, they start to get that apple shape, where they might gain a little weight, but it's all in the midsection. Arms and legs, they stay really, really skinny. This shape in particular for women tends to be associated with really poor health.

Now is it fair to also kind of assume too? I've met a lot of this type of avatar that we're talking about where the preference being, if I'm gonna get activity, it's gonna be more cardiovascular driven. Like that's something I've known, even for instance, for my brother, like he's a tall guy, he's skinny,

but does not lift weights, is not something in his regiment where he's more prone to playing basketball, walking, running, but it's just avoids like, you know, weightlifting in general. Most skinny fat people have low activity, right? So low activity, low calories, low protein. But then you find people who, they don't, they do activity, but they navigate, or they

gravitate, I should say, towards long, steady state type cardio, long duration type cardiovascular activity. These are people who are skinny fat because they're afraid of the scale, right? They're afraid of gaining any weight at all. And they wanna do the form of exercise that they think is gonna burn the most calories and burn the most body fat. We see these people in the gym.

They would come in, they'd get on the elliptical and they'd be there for an hour and then they'd be out. And you would, when you do your free body fat table every once in a while they come by, you test their body fat, and you blow them away that their body fat percentage was 32%, like I do an hour cardio or two hours of cardio every single day.

I think it's fine that goes hand in hand because of the hysteria over the weight. I don't wanna get too much weight, so therefore yeah, like the bulkiness and all those myths that are surrounding that mentality, you tend to see that a lot more. I feel like they would be the most vulnerable too, right? I mean, you are, there's an RDA for all of our nutrients,

that our body needs on a regular basis. And if you are skinny fat, more likely than not, you're under eating and you're probably missing a lot of macro and micronutrient cargill. Yes, very undernourished. And so I would think to these people are the most susceptible to getting sick and catching disease and things like that

because they are so malnutrition. And in potentially also exercising like you're making the point of doing cardio and things like that, but then not feeding their body enough nutrients to build any sort of muscle. It probably in a worse state than that person who's carrying 30, 40 pounds of extra body fat.

In my experience, skinny fat clients had either there were two general categories of how they would present themselves. Besides the obvious high body fat percentage low body weight, one would be the low energy skinny fat person. This person just had low energy, a bit listless. We'd go start our first workout and it was like, 5, 5, 5 pounds there. And you know what I'm, I think you can picture that, right?

The other skinny fat person that I would often work with was the wired overstressed individual. Yes, overstressed, wired,-stressed individual. Yes, over-stressed, wired, and tired skinny fat person. This is the person that's high-strung, eyes usually big, hair. It's really your type A kind of person. Type A, hair doesn't look healthy, skin typically doesn't look healthy, go, go, go, maybe they're either a man

who just has no time for anything but work or whatever, or a woman the same way, or a mom, oftentimes this would be a mom who all she does is care about her kids, underheats, doesn't want to be overweight, so she underheats, but she's wired because she drinks coffee all day long and she's on stimulus to try and give herself some energy. Those are the two types of skinny fat people out to you,

the listless, low energy. Oh my God, I get to push them to do anything and the wired but tired individual. Those are generally, does that kind of resonate with you guys? Same thing. Yeah. And with the over stimulated, wired and tired type of skinny fat individual,

they were typically overtraining. If they were working out, it was too much, too often. It was like lots of cardio, lots of rose classes, lots of... Like their body could just never catch up. That's right. You know, they never like really like allowed themselves adequate amount of rest or sleep or anything to be able to kind of regenerate.

Right. And the reason why it's such an important topic to talk about is because it's harder for people to recognize within themselves. I think it's easier when you're 30 or 40 pounds overweight to say, you know, I should probably work on some stuff in regards to my health. But if you weigh yourself on the scale

and you're like, well, I'm not heavy, my body weight's good, I'm a man, I'm 150 pounds, or I'm a woman, I'm 110 pounds, you may think to yourself, everything's okay until you might go to the doctor and get high blood sugar or get symptoms of inflammation or just feel like crap when you finally say, okay, I think I need to improve something. It's more insidious, it's harder to identify.

But if this is you, if your body weight is low, but you feel your body and you're squishy, you're not strong, you don't have a lot of energy or you're wired and tired, there are some remedies. This is also most common in the people that are really afraid to put that muscle on. Like, when I think of the clients that I had that fell in this category, I feel like I really had

to convince them to let go of this stigma of, we're gonna lift weights and you're going to get bulky and masculine looking like that was the greatest challenge for and if someone's listening right now and you are potentially skinny fat or know somebody that is that to me is the greatest hurdle for those people. Totally. Most of them are avoiding weights in fear of getting this bulky muscular manly look and I'd have to spend at least a couple of months overcoming that before I could gain their trust to actually follow it.

The advice that I give these people is the same advice I get people who are overweight but obsessed with how they look. Take your scale, put it in the closet, don't weigh yourself anymore. Stop weighing yourself. We're gonna base your progress off of your performance and how you feel because that scale is going to be, it's going to be scary if you gain a couple pounds of muscle. It's going to scare you.

I wish that strength was more revered as one of the main measures of health because it just spans across. If we were to give somebody one of those grip tests, for instance, like say our doctors were now with tests, people coming in to just see, like, how much, you know, force they could generate and see what that looked like. Like, I feel like that would be such a better measure than, you know, like, looking at even just their composition or, you know, their body makeup, like a lot of other markers I would, I would revere like their strength so much, so much higher. It is, in fact, they are, there are studies now that show that that when you're a simple

grip test is a better indicator of, you know, your overall longevity and health by itself than almost any other individual measure. Now, of course, when you take lots of different tests and combine them, that's the best reading. But if you're going to compare one to one, a grip test, especially as people get older, they can tell like, oh, it's like a check engine light. It's like, everything's working. Do you think we're moving in that direction? I want to believe we are. Do you guys think so or do you feel slowly?

I could see some progress. I think it's the studies like you're mentioning that really does help. Starting to happen. I mean, I don't remember. I mean, obviously we didn't have things against the Ramma decade ago, but it wasn't that long ago that you rarely would see a girl deadlifting heavyweight and talking about her PR. Like, I just, that didn't happen a decade or two ago in training.

So I feel like it's becoming more popular and more accepted in both male and female communities. Oh, you know, strength is more revered than what it was two decades ago. It's not changing. It's changing because it's not that it's just cool to be strong. It is cool, right? It's great to be strong and be very capable. It's very empowering.

But besides that, we're realizing that strength is an indicator of health. That's an investment. That's why we're starting to know, if you're weak, just like if you have a lot of body fat or if you have high blood pressure, if you're weak, your health is suffering. It's probably suffering. So number one, the number one way to remedy skinny fat

is to lift weights. 100% hands down bar none. Now the way that I would train people in this category was a bit unique. Oftentimes with these people, because they're skinny fat, they have low muscle mass and low strength, I am focused entirely on just getting them stronger. I'm not doing tons of exercises and tons of angles

and bodybuilding training with all these cables. I'm getting them good at the compound movements. And my best success with skinny fat people was getting them better at squatting, deadlifting, bench pressing, overhead pressing and rowing. Like I would get them good at those exercises and the results were always absolutely phenomenal. Oh, it looked very maps and a ballic-esque.

Totally. Right. I mean, you and you don't need to be training five days a week in the gym. You know, three days a week in the gym is plenty, focused on a full body routine, mainly all compound lifting, and that body's gonna respond.

In fact, three days a week for some people, if you're listening and you're not working out and you're like, wow, this is all ringing a bell with me, this is all resonating, two days a week is probably optimal. Honest to God, that's probably out and you're like, wow, this is all ringing a bell with me. This is all resonating. Two days a week is probably optimal. Honest to God, that's probably optimal for you to start. Two days a week, go to the gym, do a full body workout where you're focusing on those compound movements

and you're trying to just get stronger. As far as rep ranges are concerned, I would say focus on anything between the one to 12 rep range to get started. The higher rep ranges, we can leave until you start to get better at those. But the reason why lifting weights is the number one thing is because the main reason why your skinny fat is because you have no muscle. And the body does not build muscle unless that has a signal.

So even if you eat more protein and do all these other things that you feel like you're going to contribute to more muscle gain Not going to happen unless your body has a good signal. You may be wondering why why is that the case? Muscle is expensive tissue muscle costs a lot of energy for your body body fat Not so much body fat your body can gain body fat store It doesn't take a lot of calories to support body fat. Muscle, well the more muscle you have on your body, the more food you need in order to support that muscle. So your body's not about to make itself require more calories,

unless it absolutely thinks it needs to. And what resistance strain does it sends a signal? It says the signal because when you're in the gym lifting weights, you're causing very, very minor amounts of damage on muscle. This is why sometimes you'll get sore, although I recommend you don't train until you get really sore, try not to get too sore. That's why you might get a little sore. That damage your body aims to heal, but then past the healing point,

your body is trying to adapt so that in the future, the same insult doesn't cause the same amount of damage. Your body becomes, it has a reason to get strong. It's overcoming its environment. So, you've got to introduce that environment and your body's going to perform to that and then over that so that way you can thrive in that environment. And to that point too, I think it's really important for this person to track and track their weight, their strength, not their body weight, right? Get rid of the scale, like Sal said, throw that away,

stop paying attention to that, but really pay attention to the amount of weight that you're lifting and then trying to stretch yourself over every workout. Because again, thinking back to the person that was most common that had this, that were skinny fat or had this challenge. It's definitely that person that has that stigma around lifting weights. And if I finally got them to do a strength training program, that was the first hurdle. The next hurdle was trying to get them to increase weight. It's like, oh, it was already a big task

to get me to even convince them to go lift weight. Now I'm asking them to do five reps, you know, and let's add five pounds to the bar and let's go a little bit over. I'm glad you brought that up. You gotta challenge yourself. You're challenging yourself to lift more and more weight with good form.

So, and this is an important point. Glad you said that because I think I forget sometimes how you need to communicate this because it sounds so obvious to us. But oftentimes you get this client who falls in the category. They go to the gym and they lift weights and they would do it for six months.

And you'd say, well, tell me about your workout. Well, I always use the 10 pound dumbbells when I do rows. I always use 30 pounds when I bench press. And it's like, what do you mean you always, well, that's just the weight that I use. No, if you, if they get easy and you're stronger, add weight. Because every time you add weight in your body, if you get stronger

and you don't add weight, your body's only met the current demand. Meaning you'll build muscle and then done. Well, and too, I think a lot of these, like at home programs, like a jazz or size or a Jane Fonda or like a video that's like easy to do. Like they didn't, they weren't real big proponents of then increasing the weight

and then adding more load to, you know, the type of train, totally different mentality. So I just don't think that type of mentality is something that's common for this type of person. Yes, get stronger, that's your best measure. Go to the gym, lift weights, focus on free weights. I'll recommend that right now.

Machines are okay, there's nothing necessarily wrong with machines, they just don't do as good of a job at fitting your body, fitting the way you move depending on regardless of your shape. And they just don't build muscle or strength as effectively as free weights. And back to throwing away the scale thing. Here's what I loved about training skinny fat people. I would convince them to not weigh themselves.

I'd train them for six months. I'd get their strength to go through the roof because of course you you take someone like that and they're gonna, their potential for strength gain is incredible. It's explosive. Then I'd have them weigh themselves and they freak out. Oh my god, I gained five pounds. I'll be like, hold on a second. How do you close fit? How does it, uh, actually my clothes fit the same or a little looser. How's that possible? Well, muscle is very dense. Body fat is less dense, gaining five pounds of muscle and losing ten pounds of body fat. Fluffy and squishy. That's the thing.

That's the thing. When your skinny fat, your weight on the scale might not even change or it may go up as you get leaner. As your body fat percentage goes down, the scale might actually go up because you're gaining some muscle. And as you gain muscle, of course, the overall body fat on your body makes up a smaller percentage of your body weight. So lift weights, focus on compound movements, two to three days a week of full body working out and get stronger. Well, to that point, also, I think you actually have to get this person's focus on actually, I don't want you to lose anyway.

Even if your goal was coming to me and you have a high body fat percentage and you're like, oh, we obviously need to lose body fat, I don't want the scale to ever go down. It's, our goal is either maintaining or increasing because I know if we're maintaining and we're lifting weights, then you have a beautiful exchange, which that's the perfect world, right? Can I keep this client's scale weight,

which is completely fine, we know already, but we know their body fat percentages off. Can I keep their weight about the same, but build a bunch of muscle? That's a perfect world. That means I'm adding a pound of muscle, I'm losing a pound of body fat. I'm adding a pound of muscle, I'm losing a pound of body fat, and they're kind of hovering the same. That's the most, the perfect scenario.

The next best scenario is we add, we add three to five pounds of scale, but they added four or five pounds of muscle and but they added four or five pounds of muscle and they've lost two pounds of fat. That's a great ratio still. I'm still getting leaner and they're adding more lean body mass to their frame. The scale went up a little bit, but that's okay. That's the second baseman. The worst scenario is to see the scale drop down.

That's another thing that I remember having this client, having to communicate that. Yes, I know that we just did your body fat. Yes, I know it said that you were at 30 something percent and you want to be leaner, but what I'm telling you is we don't want to see that scale go down. So get excited about that most of the time. A lot of times they do.

And so you have to communicate that. Our goal is either to maintain the scale or actually increase it because our main objective is to building body mass. Yeah, and in fact, if they did weigh themselves, I would weigh them and I wouldn't let them look just so I can monitor the weight with the percentage, but again, don't weigh yourself.

If you're getting stronger in the gym consistently, you're moving in the right direction as far as your workouts are concerned. The second thing you can do to remedy being skinny fat is to eat more protein. It was like time and time again when I would get a client that was in this category and I would have them track their food, they would eat ridiculously low amounts of protein. Like they would have like 30 grams for the whole day and it was like one meal they had protein. The rest of the meals were all carbohydrates and maybe fat. There was no protein.

Protein is connected to muscle mass. Higher amounts of protein tend to equate to more muscle, especially in combination with resistance training. When you are lifting weights, a higher protein diet means you're going to build more muscle. Now, how much is a decent amount of protein for this? Anywhere between half a gram to one gram per pound of body weight, okay?

So within that range, you're eating a good amount of protein. So if you're a 130 pound individual, 75 to 130 grams of protein are gonna be adequate to build muscle. Any more than that, probably not necessarily. Which I wanna stress how difficult that is. You wanna talk about what that looks like. It is, and so something that a lot of people don't know,

when you go out and you eat a chicken salad or you go through Chipotle or you order a meal that is considered a protein meal, right? Has a meat involved it. Most places, the serving size is four ounces. Four ounces. So how many grams of protein? Like 18 grams.

Okay. So even if you ate out three times in the day, and all of them you had chicken salad or a steak ball or you and you ordered out like that, and you think, oh man, I'm eating protein every meal, I'm doing good, do that, four ounces, four ounces, four ounces. You're not getting, you're getting 12 ounces of protein. Do the math on what that is.

You're talking about 50 grams, 60 grams of protein. That's, and that, that is a good. If that's three meals, all of them that have a meat involve it. Most people would think that they're eating, and they're eating enough protein to get by and be healthy. Like you can be, you can be considered, quote unquote, healthy and eating that amount of protein. But you can be considered, quote unquote, healthy

and eating that amount of protein. But if you're trying to build muscle, which is what we need to do for this person who is skinny fat, you definitely are gonna be needing more protein in that. And so, and Danny did a really good video on our YouTube channel recently about this. And I really liked how he presented it

because it does remind me when I was training clients on how I'd communicate this. And the first thing that we would focus on is obviously a goal of calorie target. I need your calories to be somewhere in this range. And that's the easiest place to start. The next place that we would go as far as in teaching and educating them is protein. It would be like, okay, make sure you hit your calorie intake and then make sure you get this protein.

That would be the thing that I would have to communicate first. We'll get to the carbs, we'll get to the fat and I'll educate around that and we'll work on that. But if you could at least hit where you need to hit calorie wise and hit your protein and take, I need you to do that in itself. We'll do wonders for us in the pursuit of building muscle. Yeah, when Adam just mentioned with four ounces of meat, three times a day 60 grams roughly

56 to 60 grams of protein that would be good for a 100 pound person literally that's about a half a gram That's between the range I gave you about half a gram to gram of protein Yeah, so if you're listening you're a hundred pounds in your skinny fat then that's it then you're good with that But if you're a hundred and thirty pounds a hundred and're good with that. But if you're 130 pounds, 150 pounds, 160 pounds, if you're 160 pound skinny fat male, you should probably be aiming for between, like I said, 80 at the low end to about 160 grams of protein every single day.

This is where protein powders can actually make a big difference. If you're not used to eating that, but now for me, it's not that big of a deal. I love protein. I've been aiming for a high protein diet for a long time. I started lifting weights when I was 14. Most of my meals contain a decent amount of protein. But if you're the kind of person that doesn't eat

barely any protein most of the time, your skinny fat, going from eating 30 grams of protein a day to now, you've got to eat 80 grams of protein a day. It's going to be daunting and difficult and it's going to require some planning. This is where protein powders can actually become very beneficial. With somebody like that,

there's two directions you can go. Now, one direction is better than the other, but they're both okay. Option one, increase your protein intake. Just eat more food that has protein, track it. So instead of eating 30 grams of protein a day, I want you to eat 80 grams of protein a day, that means you're gonna need to eat an additional,

maybe 16 ounces or more of lean meats or like steak or chicken. The other option is to eat as you've been eating, but take two or three servings of protein powder to make up the difference. Now it's always ideal to have food. We always recommend real food, it's the best ever. But if that's difficult for you,

because if you're going from a grand total of three or four ounces of meat a day to 20 plus ounces of meat a day, that's a lot for some people. And it's hard to get used to for some people. Proteins also very satiating. So you start eating and you start finding like, oh, I can't do it, I gotta use to it.

Protein powders can be extremely valuable, in this case, in fact, now that I think about it, the clients that I recommended protein powders to the most were my skinny fat clients. Yes. Because there's a massive deficiency there. Yep, even more so than my hard gainer clients, like hard gainers would be just skinny skinny.

Not skinny fat, but just skinny skinny in particular males. Typically for them, it wasn't hard to get them to eat more protein, like, okay, I'll do whatever I'll eat it. Skinny fats, like, oh, I don't like me. I don't like to taste the protein. It doesn't feel good. I've only, you know, I'm not used to this or whatever. And it's okay. Here is what we're going to do, you know, in the morning, have a protein shake with your breakfast at lunch, have another one, and then see what we're at, and maybe add a third one. Well, this was a little area of contention for us when we first started the podcast.

I remember we used to have these debates back and forth, and I kind of sided with the protein powder more often. And not because I'm pro protein powder was because I found it really difficult personally and with a lot of clients that I had to get the protein intake that they needed. It's just, and I don't know if that's because you come from a family that centered a lot of the meals around me,

and I come from a family that ate a lot of processed and sugar and carbs. And so for me, it's been a behavioral thing that I've had to try and change my entire life, but I've always struggled with hitting enough. I mean, I'm a 220 pound guy, so I'm wanting to be minimum 180 to 200 grams of protein. And when you figure out a six-ounce chicken breast, it's only 35 grams of protein, do the math. You know, how many people can honestly say they consistently eat five to six chicken

breasts a day if you're my size, right? If you're my, it's obviously it's all relative to your size, but that's a, that's a, that was a lot for me. And then even for my clients that were 130 or 150 pounds or 180 pounds, you know, so they're not eating five or six chicken. Must they need three or four, but how many people really do that every day? Most people, dinner maybe, or maybe at their lunch meal, they get one or two, like really good protein heavy meals.

The rest, I mean, breakfast is like a total carb heavy meal period. Most people are gravitating towards the quick carbs for breakfast time. If they do have proteins, two eggs. Right. And exactly, right? Which is nothing.

And then lunch time, you're going deli meats and sandwiches, which I told you guys, if you're eating out any, you know, togos, sandwich place, it's four ounces. That's how much four ounces are less. Sometimes it's two ounces. If it's a sandwich and it's like Eric's deli or like a regular sandwich, two ounces, if it's a big massive sub, it's normally four ounces.

So you're gonna ask for double meat just to even be able to get a decent protein intake. It takes a lot of planning. Yeah. And I mean, I think to initially we were just like trying to, you know, pull back the reins a little bit from the magical idea that protein solves everything. But we were speaking more towards the bodybuilding community. And so that was one where we see it, it's pervaded and distorted a bit in that direction. But, you know, your average person, you're right. I think that it is a good point to point out that it's very challenging for your average person

to incorporate as much adequate protein as they need. Well, there's been this misconception too around, like my clients that don't have a lot of education around protein powders, think that protein powders build muscle. It's not protein powders don't build muscle. They supplement something that you're lacking potentially in. And so, of course, the idea- If I need to be healthy to build muscle.

Obviously, the ideal place is Whole Foods, always. If I have a client that can get their 150 grams to 200 grams of protein from all Whole Foods every day, I am fucking winning. But when I'm honest with myself, that's probably less than 10% of my clientele could ever do that. Most of them had to use tools like protein powders to try and supplement it to hit that target. Unless, again, like your point, Justin,

we're talking to the bodybuilding community. If we're talking to the bodybuilding community, which is no longer the majority of our audience, to me, that's a very small percentage of our audience. And they're not the skinny fat. audience. To me, that's a very small percentage of our audience. And they're not the skinny fat. Right, exactly. The bodybuilding community needs to lay off the protein powders and bars. They're fucking overdo it.

300 grams of proteins ridiculous for most people. Your way overdoing it. It's not magical like that. And you're already probably prepping meal prepping and carrying your six pack bags around and hitting your protein intake. It's a total fucking waste of money. And you're also probably eating BCAs,

which is another waste of money. So those people, yes, but the majority, my average, Jane or Joe, that, you know, they're not big into lifting weights. They're here to come, hey, Adam, I'm, oh, my doctor told me I need to get in here and start working out. Where do I start? What do I do? And we started dressing nutrition almost always those clients, you know, grossly under-eat protein. And I had to find ways if I couldn't get them to eat it all naturally to supplement if we- Right, right. And you combine it with weight training, with resistance training. It's a beautiful, perfect storm for muscle building, which will help reverse this skinny fat condition

that you may be finding yourself in. Now, that brings me to the other macros, fats and carbohydrates. Now here's a deal, they're not directly related to muscle growth like protein is. However, if your carbohydrates are low, too low, or your fats are too low, they will also inhibit your body's ability to build muscle.

Oh, mess with your hormones. They can mess with your hormones. Fat is an essential macronutrient. If that's too low, you're just not going to be healthy. Yeah. You can get away with having zero carbs, but zero carbs is not an optimal state to build muscle. This has been proven time and time and time. Yeah, it's not the greatest for strength. It's not the so you want to have all of them. So what I mean by that and the reason why I'm saying this is if you're like if you're skinny fat because you're worried about being overweight

What you may find yourself doing is increasing your protein and cutting carbs way down. Okay, well, I'm bumping up my proteins, but I'm going to cut my carbs way down. No, no, no. You want to eat an adequate amount of calories and make sure you get all of the macronutrients. I'm just saying, we're just saying aim for about half to one gram of protein per pound of body weight. The other two, not as important that you hit particular numbers, but you still want them to be relatively balanced.

The third way you can help remedy skinny fat, and this is just, I found this to be super common with, remember how I categorized skinny fat, the, my skinny fat clients into the super list list, tired, and the high strong, I'm too busy. The high strong, too busy type of individual really did a terrible job with this next one, which is sleep and stress management.

Lack of sleep and poor stress management is a wonderful recipe for muscle loss and fat gain. Because if you, when you lack lots of sleep, which lack of sleep is a stress on the body, lack of sleep, your body thinks we're not in a good situation. Stress sends the same signal. We're not in a good situation. When your body feels like it's in a not good situation, it ramps up its ability to store

body fat. Remember, stored body fat is a safety mechanism. It's stored energy. And it tries to reduce muscle because it wants to reduce the amount of energy that you need to stay alive. So it makes you low a lower calorie, fatter machine is essentially what it does not to mention being malnourished is a stress not feeding your body What it needs is a stress to so if you're somebody who's already not giving your body the nutrients it needs and then in an addition of that You lack sleep and you have a high stressful job.

And again, that's the common, this person that fits in this category tends to be that. I'm afraid of lifting weights. I don't want to get all big and bulky. I eat very low calories, so my body's not getting very, very much nutrients. I have a high stressful job. I don't sleep very well. It's like the perfect storm for that person. And I think we forget that just because exercise feels good,

that it also can be a stress. And these are also the people that tend to like to, when they do exercise, hammer the shit out of their body or do long and long. Or the benefits of exercise come after the recovery process. If you're eliminating out the recovery process, or you're getting in the way of that by introducing, you're not getting enough sleep,

you're keeping introducing all these other activities in between, your body's just gonna keep spinning the wheels and it's just never gonna really reap the benefits of what you set out for. Poor sleep promotes fat storage through and muscle loss through a couple different ways. One, it promotes it through the hormonal changes that happen in the body. Poor sleep and poor stress management elevates stress hormones and it lowers

anabolic or muscle building hormones. Now why does it do that? Stress hormones provide you with a short term amount of energy. So it's like cortisol, for example. Cortisol is known as a stress hormone, right? Nothing inherently wrong with cortisol, you need it. In fact, if you had no cortisol, you wouldn't be very healthy.

But when cortisol is up and high, it gives you more energy to do what you need to do. So if you're lacking sleep, you're about to try to make up for that by pumping up and boosting up these stress hormones. But these stress hormones are also terrible for muscle building, they tend to not want to allow your body to build muscle. And your anabolic muscle building hormones, but these stress hormones are also terrible for muscle building. They tend to not want to allow your body to build muscle. Your anabolic muscle building hormones, like in man testosterone, start to drop growth

hormone, which is also considered a part of the anabolic hormone category, starts to lower as well. The other way that it promotes body fat gain is through behavioral change. When you're stressed out and not getting good sleep, craving those bad foods. You're craving start to change. Now either because you're trying to self-medicate because you feel bad, so you wanna eat the food

that makes you feel good, which tends to be the candies and the cookies and the hyper-palatable types foods. And or it may also be the serotonin boosting effects of certain sugary type of foods. Now that one, I believe a little lessen, although some scientists have made some cases for that. I tend to believe it's the former. It's the, I don't feel good.

And you know how we do, we don't feel good. We tend to want to remedy that with a substance and often tends to be food. This is why people eat when they're sad or stressed out, why they eat certain types of foods. This happens with lack of sleep as well. Lack of sleep has been tied to excessive fat gain or high body fat percentages in numerous studies. I also think that this is the reason too, why we recommend training protocol of only two to three times a week full body, because this person too who's dealing with a ton of stress,

you've got to be careful, again, the workout part is also stress. And if you're trying to reduce that, one of the better ways of doing is, pick the two days of the week when you're the most rested. Don't take the day off when you're up at four o'clock in the morning and you know, it's a long day at work for 12 hours and you've been stressed. Don't make that day, there'd be the day that you go in the gym and hammer it out. Pick a long day at work for 12 hours and you've been stressed a lot. Don't make that day.

There'd be the day that you go in the gym and hammer it out. Pick a day when you're well rested to go in there and actually train. And so learning to know how to navigate your week like that and understand that, okay, how much stress that I take on today is this a day that I go to the gym? Okay, it's not tomorrow. I'll go when I have a lot less stress and get better sleep. Yep. Now, number one, I would say reduce and then eventually eliminate your intake of stimulant type

products. Caffeine in particular, caffeine is a strong stimulant. Skinny fat people who fall in this category of not getting enough sleep tend to have and a lot of caffeine. For obvious reasons, you're tired. You want to get through your day, you're gonna have more caffeine, which then makes it harder for you to sleep,

or at least reduces the quality of your sleep, which then makes you tired and kind of perpetuates itself. So strongly recommend reducing caffeine and taking eventually eliminating, both to help you sleep more, but also caffeine. When you throw caffeine on a body that is low muscle, high body fat, low body weight, undernourished, too much stress, caffeine actually becomes a muscle burner.

Caffeine can actually reduce your body's ability to build muscle. So slowly reduce your caffeine, you don't want to go through the withdrawal of caffeine, which can be pretty nasty. If you've ever had, anybody's ever had caffeine on a daily basis and cut it out cold turkey nose that I'm talking about. Steerable. I recommend cutting your caffeine and take by a quarter every week. So at the end of four weeks, you should be down to zero. So if you have two cups of coffee a day, then the, you know, first week, it's cut it down

by a quarter, then following week, cut it down by a quarter. By the end of the fourth week, you should be down to zero and allow your body to acclimate. That will also improve your sleep quality. The second thing I would say is to make sure the place that you're sleeping is cool and dark. That makes a big difference. And allocate seven to nine hours of sleep. So make sure you give yourself that amount of time.

So say to your very few people do this, they say, okay, I wake up every morning at 6 a.m. They don't go back and think, okay, how many hours, what time do I need to go to bed? Set your bedtime and be solid about it. So if you're waking up at, you know, 5 a.m. that probably means you need to be in bed by 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. make it a solid time. And then treat that time seriously by creating a sleep routine, which is something that I started incorporating later on in my life and I find this to be totally invaluable. Now, sleep routine is just kind of like a warm up before my workout, right? It's kind of like your morning routine. We all have those. We all brush our teeth, shower, make the bed. It's so funny that we have this crazy morning routine. But ironically, you'll benefit more from having a evening routine than you probably ever

will from having a morning routine. Oh, totally. It's like we expect ourselves to just jump into bed and go to sleep. You know what I mean? You're with the kids, the TV's on, you're on your computer, your iPhone or whatever. You're gonna shut your eyes. Yeah, and then just, oh, I'm, oh, time to go to bed. Turn over the, turn all the bright lights off and let's just go straight to bed.

It doesn't work that way though the way our bodies evolved was white by the sun Slowly setting so our brain perceives less and less light Search to persist prepare itself For sleep we're probably doing less of the stressful stuff at night humans were not Nocturnal animals. We don't see very well at at night so for most of human history when it got dark We stopped roaming around we stopped running around and hunting and stuff We kind of hung around the the fire and then we got ready for sleep So a sleep routine is extremely important for modern time

So what I like to tell people to do is about one to two hours before It's time for you to go to bed shut off your lights Use candlelight or use dim lights, or wear blue-blight blocking glasses. Blue-blight blocking glasses prevent the type of light that comes from electronics that tends to tell the brain the most, more than other forms of light, to that the sun is out, so you need to be really awake.

Do that about one to two hours before you go to bed. Don't be on electronics. That makes such a big difference. It sounds so silly, but it makes a tremendous difference to the point where I do, if I miss that, if I miss that sleep routine, I could tell dramatically the difference in the call of my sleep.

And studies show the melatonin production explodes when people wear just where blue light blocking glasses, don't even turn off electronics. They just put on glasses that block this light. But I recommend turning off electronics. That seems to be the best for me, you know, in those. I said cool dark room.

There are products you can use to make sure that your mattress stays cool, or I recommend opening a window or using air conditioning. Temperature of your body makes a massive difference on your sleep quality. And the hours that you need to sleep is about seven to nine. Some people are okay with seven. Most people do better with eight to nine hours of sleep. So do those things and watch your body change. And with that, go to mindpumpfree.com and download our guides and resources. They're all totally free.

You can also find the three of us on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin. You can find me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at MindPumpMedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a poly, maps performance and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased, expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs.

With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having foul, adamant, justin as your own personal trainer's butt at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money back guarantee and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at MindPumpMedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating interview on iTunes and by introducing MindPump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support, and until next time,

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