Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1207: Five Ways to Lose Weight Without Counting Calories

Episode Date: January 16, 2020

In this episode, Sal, Adam and Justin go over five ways to lose weight without having to track or count calories. What to do if macro counting is too hard? (3:23) Energy cannot be created or destroyed. Why calories are important. (5:20) What are macros and why they are important? (7:54) Why do we demonize fat? (9:28) Analyzing the human psyche while hungry. (12:00) The Five Strategies to Weight Loss without Counting Calories. (15:58) #1 - Drinking more water. (16:36) #2 - Changing HOW you eat. (22:07) #3 – ADDING more protein and vegetables. (28:23) #4 – Improving the quality of your sleep to control appetite. (37:38) #5 – Eliminating heavily processed foods from your diet. (45:31) Related Links/Products Mentioned January Promotion: MAPS HIIT ½ off! **Code “HIIT50” at checkout** Visit Legion Athletics for the exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Code “mindpump” at checkout** Seven Countries Study The influence of calorie labeling on food orders and consumption: A review of the literature1 A shocking number of all the calories you consume in a day come from sugary drinks Eating attentively: a systematic review and meta-analysis of the effect of food intake memory and awareness on eating The Pull of the Past: When Do Habits Persist Despite Conflict With Motives? The Myth of Optimal Protein Intake – Mind Pump Blog Sleep deprivation may cause people to eat more calories Mind Pump 1202: Why New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Work (& What to Do About It) Ultra-Processed Diet Leads to Extra Calories, Weight Gain 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 things you can do to help yourself lose weight that don't involve counting calories or, for that matter, counting macros. First off, we talk about why calories are important, why they do matter, why macros matter. But then we get into the things you can do that have nothing to do with counting calories or macros that we've found in our experience training clients for decades that has a

tremendous beneficial effect. We actually came up with five things you can do. The first one talks about drinking water. The second one talks about changing how you eat, the logistics. I'm not talking about what you're eating, but literally change how you eat. We talk about eating more protein and vegetables, how your sleep affects your appetite, and then we talk about heavily processed foods. Any one of those steps will probably result

and weight loss for most listeners, combine one or more of them together and you'll find yourself having even more success. Now this episode is also brought to you by one of our favorite sponsors, Legion. Now, Legion supplements are made by our good friend Mike Matthews. All of these supplements include scientifically backed

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and use the code hit50, H-I-I-T50, no space for the discount. Yesterday, I was approached by our staff to write an article on a subject because of the questions that we get from some of our listeners. And the question that they get is what do I do if macro-counting

or calorie-counting doesn't work for me or is too hard? Now, I remember that being an issue when I was a trainer. I remember it with a lot of clients. Oftentimes, the first steps were not counting macros and calories because it was for, especially for people who were beginners into this whole thing. It's a difficult thing to kind of grasp,

and it can cause, for some people, I can actually cause bad food relationships. Yeah, even just starting with calories and knowing what your maintenance calories are. That was always a difficult thing because you know, you just get some generic formula that people are trying to plug their information into, and it's just not very realistic. And they don't realize how much their their like dietary habits change on a daily basis And how like what the average of that really is well it really depends on to who I'm talking to right like You know when you're when you're talking to a person aspiring to be a competitor one day and you know

You're gonna have to get on stage one day and present your physique the value of Calculating calories and macros is extremely high. I mean, it's, you're competing at the highest level and those details are extremely important. Oh, 1.5% could be first between first place and fifth place. Yeah, exactly.

So that's a no-brainer to me, but when you're... It's a very small fraction of the population, exactly. It is. And the other thing to consider is that calories have been on the back of food now for decades. We've been telling people that, you know, look at the label, look at the calories, try to eat ex-amount of calories.

And we're only getting fatder. Yeah, and it doesn't seem to be working for people. Now, I don't want to, I do want to be clear, I don't want to confuse people into thinking that calories are not important. Calories are still very important. In fact, there is one rule in weight loss or weight gain or weight maintenance that you cannot get around. You absolutely can't get around this. It's actually a law of physics, meaning it's a constant law throughout the universe as far as we know, but definitely here on Earth, which is energy cannot be created nor destroyed.

So what that means is you can't just create energy out of nothing and you can't destroy energy so that it disappears. It gets transferred. So if your body's gaining body fat, you're not gaining body fat out of nowhere, your body has to take energy from somewhere else to create that body fat and that comes in the form of excess calories.

When you eat too much, those extra calories are stored into body fat. Now on the flip side, your body doesn't just burn body fat for no reason. It burns body fat because it doesn't have enough calories to fuel your body. So you can't burn body fat if your calories are too high. And this matters regardless of the diet. In fact, all diets that cause weight loss. I don't care what diet it is. You can go from the reasonable, like the Mediterranean diet to the extreme and crazy carnivore diets

or even crazier, whatever, cellar-reduced diet or whatever, all diets that cause weight loss, whatever diet you've ever done, if it caused weight loss, it was because you were consuming less calories in your body. Whatever form it is, you're reducing your calories at the end of the day. That's right. So that's why calories are extremely important. Now back to what I was saying before,

we've had calorie counts on food for a long time and for a lot of people, now for some people that works, but for a lot of people it just doesn't work. And in fact, for some people just looking at calories can cause problems and cause them a little bit of obsession or they see what they can squeeze into their calorie count and then their diet becomes actually worse. I've actually seen clients do this where they'll cut their calories, but you'll look at the foods that they're eating and they're not the best choices or they'll remove food so they could drink alcohol

to make up for the difference in calories. Actually, that was a quite common one. I'll tell somebody, hey, let's remove alcohol from your diet and I'll be like, well, I'll tell somebody, hey, you know, let's remove alcohol from your diet. And I'm like, no, I'll just eat less food. Yeah. It kind of missed the whole point of this. So calories are definitely very, very important.

Macros are also very important. And if you're in the fitness space, you've probably heard of people saying, count your macros, or did you eat your macro target? Or a calorie is in a calorie. Right. Macros, macros stands for macro nutrients, so short for macro nutrients. Macro nutrients are three of them.

There's proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Now those are important as well. So calories are important, but macro nutrients are also important. By the way, macro nutrients are what make up the calories. So protein and carbohydrates, four calories per gram. So every gram of protein, every gram of carbohydrates, equals four calories. Every gram of fat equals nine calories, so fat is more calorically dense, per gram than protein fat.

Now, those are important as well, especially protein and fat. Protein and fat are especially important because there are essential amounts of either one of those that you need to consume. Meaning if you don't eat enough protein, there's a minimum requirement, or if you don't eat enough fat, you don't eat the minimum requirement of either one of those, your body will fail to thrive, and in extreme cases, you might not even live. You need to eat two of those because your body can't create certain amino acids from proteins from itself, and you can't create certain fatty acids,

you have to consume them. Carbohydrates, they can be important depending on your goals, but in terms of survival, you could go zero forever with carbohydrates, only macronutrient, you can do that with, you can go forever without them, and you'll probably be okay, you can survive without them. You don't need to consume them, in other words.

Back to the calories, one of the main reasons why it became such a popular thing to cut fat out of your diet in the past. High calorie. That's right. If I cut 10 grams of fat out of my diet, I've cut 90 calories. If I cut 10 grams of carbs or proteins out,

I've only cut 40 calories. So the strategy back in the day was, hey look, we know calories, you know, if we take in less calories and we burn, we'll lose weight. Why don't we just tell people to reduce fats? It's easy. It'll cut the most calories.

It's crazy. And on paper, it makes sense. Didn't work that way. Do you think that was, yeah, for fat being so satiating? Yeah, exactly. Do you think that was the original strategy of why we demonized fat?

Do you think it's because of the high calorie intake? Part of it, that was part of it. Then they had the seven, I think it was called the seven country study that came out. Where they cherry picked it. Was it Dr. Anselkees, I believe his name was? Yeah, and left out the other countries.

Yeah, he studied a bunch of, he studied a bunch of countries and looked at the data, tried to figure out why heart disease was rising in developed nations, took out the two countries that didn't follow the same pattern, only included the other seven, and said, hey, it's saturated fat and it's fat. And then, of course, when you look at arteries, there's a clog, what clogs the arteries is fat. So it all kind of made sense. It became a big public policy by the US government.

Plus, fat was calorically dense. Everybody cut fat, food manufacturers started making foods that were less fat, people started buying less fat. So it's a nice corn. And we kept getting fat. The irony of that is what Justin brought up, which anybody who's followed a ketogenic diet or a carnivore type diet would attest to this,

that it's actually, it's harder than you think to over consume just on fat. Oh man. Pairing fat with carbohydrates, different stories. Right, if you're eating carbs and fat, yeah, you can overeat fat easily, but I would attribute a lot of that to the carbohydrate intake and not so much the fat intake.

Anytime that I've ran a diet that's like higher on fat, like a ketogenic diet or like a carnivore type of style, the struggle I always had was actually building on it, was getting enough calories in to build muscle and sustain the amount of exercise that I was doing because you get a couple, you know, it's for maybe a day or two or it sounds amazing just to have steak or to eat lots of butter.

Eggs, bacon and avocado, and you're not gonna, you don't wanna eat for another four or five hours. Yes, at least. Exactly. No, it's funny. And people kept getting fatter. So then we blamed it on carbs.

And then people cut carbs and foods started coming out. That will low carb and people kept getting fatter. And this goes back to the original point, which is overeating at the end of the day, regardless of what your food comes from, you're gonna gain body fat. So the big, big problem is overeating. Now that doesn't mean that food quality isn't matter.

It definitely does. In fact, food quality contributes to overeating. We'll get to that later in the episode, I'm sure. But at the end of the day, I don't care what your diet is. If you eat too much, or more than you burn, which is too much, then you're going to gain a body fat. Now, it's popular to count macros in the fitness space, just to, hey, just hit your protein

fat and carbohydrates, put the foods in that fit that and that'll work, and that can be a good strategy. There are pitfalls to that too. I've encountered quite a few people who become obsessed about that and get real creative at finding ways to squeeze in junk food or whatever into their diet so long as it fits their protein fat and carbohydrate, you know, model or whatever. You don't find really funny as I was watching you when you were taking notes for this blog right as far as what you were going to write and the points that you're making for the,

you know, strategies for weight loss without counting calories. It's really funny to me how many of those strategies are like these like old-ass things that used to be said forever that you should do. That we kind of scoff that as young trainers. I remember that. Absolutely. I feel really like doing an episode like this

when we talk about this. It kind of also always reminds me of what a terrible trainer I was back in the days because we would take some of this like basic type of advice which we'll go over today and we used to kind of shit on it because oh this new study came out to show that this is more effective to do this and what is just water or sleep that's not a big deal. This is where we need to be focused on. And the irony of that is that these kind of really basic principles are really important.

And if most people spent more time kind of focusing on that, it's funny on how many of them would kind of just fall into suit where they should be colorical. Totally. If you have to consider, you're working with humans here, you have to consider their psychology, you have to consider the human, human behaviors and psyche. I'll give you an example. There was a study done years ago on a small town that passed the law that told all of its restaurants

that they had to post calorie counts on all our foods because the town was suffering from an obesity issue, just like most towns in America. And they thought, okay, people need more information. If we just put the calories up, then people will know to choose this salad over the burger or whatever, because they'll get less calories. So they ran the study for a little while,

and what they ended up finding was that people were actually eating more calories because they were posting calories. Now, on the surface, it doesn't make any sense. You think to yourself, why would they eat more? But let's consider human psyche for a second consider the average person Looking at a menu who's hungry? Okay, think of yourself when you're hungry What kind of psyche are you working with when you're hungry now?

Now imagine you're looking at a menu imagine you're not a fitness expert You're not a fitness fanatic you're the average person. Maybe you're listening right now and you are an average person You're hungry. You're looking at the menu. You see the average person, maybe you're listening right now, and you are an average person. You're hungry, you're looking at the menu, you see the super tasty cheeseburgers, 800 calories. You look at the boring-ass grilled chicken sandwich, it's 600 calories. Are you going to say, oh, I'll take the 200 calorie deficit so I can go 600, or are you gonna say,

wow, that's only 200 more calories. I go with the burger. I'll do the burger without the fries. That's exactly what it is. Exactly. People were making choice, the bigger choice, because to them, they're looking at going, that's only a few more in our calories.

Not a big deal. And consider this, when it comes to how we eat, is our eating at all, often logical, it's almost never logical. It's almost always behavior, emotion, context, who are with, cravings, all that kind of stuff. So this is why calories and macros are important information, but it's also why counting calories and counting macros has just never worked long term for most everyday people.

So I think what we would probably be good is if we went through and this took me a long time to learn as a trainer, it took me, I don't know, five to 10 years, a long time where I finally sat down and said, okay, giving my clients meal plans, giving them calories, giving them all, you know, protein, fats and carbs. It only works in the short term. It never works in the long term. It wasn't really the lack of information.

And I think where we're at now, like it's all available. I think now it's really about figuring out your own behaviors and your own patterns and really honing in on how to add something small that you're not really gonna notice right away that's gonna have massive impact. Totally.

Now here's the first one. And this one was funny to me because I actually on accident introduced this to my client. So, you know, the listeners, if you've been listening for a while, you know that I started working out because I wanted to build muscle. So I looked up to bodybuilders in my early days of working out. And bodybuilders always talked about drinking lots of water, a gallon of water every single day because it fills out your muscles, it gives you better pumps, improves your recovery and strength. So I became an advocate for drinking a lot of water.

So even in the early days when I was giving clients macro targets and all that stuff, I would always say to them, I want you to drink a half a gallon to a gallon of water every day. And what I would say is, when you go to work or whatever, take your gallon,

bring it with you and use a clear container and watch it. And just, I don't care what else you do, whatever, just drink that throughout the whole day. And without all that, this naturally would happen, very, very on its own. People would start to report less and less calories to me. And what I noticed is when you drink a gallon of water a day, you don't drink too much other stuff. You're busy. You're busy. You're busy. You're busy. This is why it's one of my, and I know that on this show,

even we've razzed, I haven't. The other two guys have. Razz, the bodybuilder guy who carries the gallon jug around and stuff, but I'm a huge advocate for for this exact reason. And you know, it's another one that you don't think about that ends up happening. You're supposed to be a guy like me,

I have a small bladder, I probably go the restroom probably 10 more times than a day when I force myself to drink a gallon. Automatically more steps. Automatically, automatically more steps. And then too, I'm also, my mouth is busy. It's busy trying to make sure I get all that water in for the day and it's not throwing snacks and other things.

And you'd be surprised how many times we think we're hungry, but we're really thirsty. That's actually a huge one. Oftentimes when you're dehydrated or your body wants water, you'll reach for food. That has been established. Here's another one. Here's the other thing about it, I said earlier. People aren't drinking juices, sodas, or flavor drinks, and you think, well, that's not that big of a deal.

Actually it is. The average American consumes generally about 8% to 10% of the calories from drinks. So if you're an average American, and let's say you're consuming, I don't know, 2,500 to 3,000 calories a day, right? Cut 10% off the top because you're not drinking your calories.

That's 250 to 300 calories out of your day just because you're drinking too much water to worry about. Yeah, I wonder too with those flavored drinks. Like if that doesn't just still promote like you're craving for an actual food as a result of like wanting to taste more flavors. They sure do. When they do studies on artificial least flavor,

because you might be think you might be listening thinking oh I'll drink that but I'll just do my branch here like zero yeah calorie drinks or whatever but they still a flavor yeah studies are pretty conclusive on this unless everything's completely controlled and the person's only given the food that they can eat whatever in the real world when people substitute their sugar drinks for their artificially flavor drinks they don't lose in a way because they naturally consume more food as a result because it stimulates your appetite.

Their appetite stimulating and they do change our cravings for more palatable food. So the key here is not to think I'm not going to drink anything else. You didn't have to do that. Just try and drink a gallon of water every single day and watch what happens. Naturally, that's not what's the thing. I would see my clients just naturally drink tons of water but naturally stop drinking as many other calories

from other foods. Well, haven't they linked things too to dehydration was slowing down on the metabolism too? Isn't there some value to just staying hydrated for metabolic reasons too? Yeah, now that's a smaller effect, but if you were to add that up over time, it definitely would have just one more, again,

it's one more little thing that it just continues to add value to why you do that. And again, it's this old thing that we've been saying forever that has went out of favor for me as a trainer early on. And then it's something that I've now has become like a staple thing that I tell clients. By the way, here's some side effects of that. If you ever suffer from irregular bowel movements,

constipation, drink a gallon of water day, oftentimes that solves a problem. Here's the other one, your skin. The number one comment I would get from my female clients when they would start drinking a half to a gallon of water day Is they'd come and tell me how much better their skin looked? It looked younger. Well, it was just to hydrate it before it didn't which causes more wrinkles and it gives it that Different look now when should you be concerned about adding electrolytes in terms of like your activity and like seen like that In terms of your loss of fluid if you you're drinking distilled water, not a good idea, right?

Definitely not. Yeah, distilled water has no minerals. You can drink mineral. Yeah, drink regular water, mineral water, if you don't need to add electrolytes, if you're doing that, if you're drinking distilled water, not a good idea, drink a gallon of distilled water a day, you might cause yourself some problems, some big health problems. So I'd stick to mineral water, regular water. And if you season your food normally, you're probably fine.

The only people that would ever have ad electrolytes are like endurance athletes or people who really sweat, like construction workers. Serious activity, like. Yeah. Yeah, I would have clients who are in construction and I'd tell them to put like a pinch of sea salt. Or you're down like it in that serious humidity and heat and you're just constantly losing, you know, sweating it out.

Totally, totally. Now, here's another one. Changing how people eat. Now, I don't mean changing the foods you eat. I mean, the logistics of how you eat. This one cracked me up as an early trainer. I would have laughed at this for at least the first 10 years. I was a personal trainer.

But telling, here's a big one. This one, I learned this myself, not that long ago. Don't drink any fluids while you eat. Not drinking fluids while you eat, actually, makes you eat less. In the reason, you gotta chew your food more. It's really annoying at first. I'm gonna go ahead and say that firsthand.

I think there's one that's, we're watching accelerate before our eyes, that's extremely important. That one, I also probably scoffed at years ago that I think is really, and I catch myself doing it all the time is watching television or being on my phone while I eat. Such a simple thing that if you were to discipline yourself

that eating time is for eating time, separate that from your social scrolling or even if you're justifying as work that you're doing or entertaining yourself and just eat, what a difference that is. It's really easy for me to be sitting on the couch, watching my favorite show or something and watching myself just kind of at a habit,

picking into something and continuing to eat and shovel food into my mouth. And so not allowing yourself to eat while watching TV or be on your phone while you're sitting down there and eating. So yeah, even training clients, I would find myself in between like going from one gym to the other,

cause I used to drive across town, not having much time, so just like trying to cram it in as I'm driving and just getting caught in that sort of pickle where later on I figured out, like if I don't have the time for it, I probably shouldn't eat it and eat later and really concentrate on the quality and slow down

so I can eat my meal. Right, so the brain, the body receives signals when you're eating, that talent, you're eating, we're getting enough food. Okay, now let's send out the hormones and chemicals that say we don't wanna eat anymore, okay? Part of that is chewing your food, chewing your food sends a signal,

saliva production sends a signal. Obviously the food that you swallow that goes in your gut sends a signal. But so does observing the food. The fact that you're watching your selfie is part of that signaling process. There was a report that was published in 2013 of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and they they looked at a bunch of different studies on distracted eating and they found that being distracted tended to make people eat more at every meal. It also was linked to paying attention, excuse me, was linked to eating less later on. So when people paid attention to

eating, they ate less while they ate, and they also ate less later on. When people were distracted, they ate more both times. So it actually makes a significant difference. And what's cool about this is it's, you know, just like the first one, you're not necessarily taking foods out and getting complicated. You're not weighing, you're not measuring, you're not counting anything, you're not making a big, you're not telling yourself I can't have something.

All you're saying is be fucking present when you eat. That's it, don't turn on the TV, don't turn on the phone, sit down, don't drink any water, and eat. Now, there's another way, and this one's really funny, but it's got several studies to back it up, and I've tested it, and for sure it works. Eat with a vanity mirror. No, watch yourself.

It's so good to get you. This one works actually exceptionally well, and I think it's because it causes us to, again, have to become aware and pay attention, and that is to eat your food with your non-dominant hand. Oh, this is like the tip I gave you the day about the switch hand, right? Switching back and forth.

And it's again, it just makes you hyper aware, right? You could, because you could technically be sitting down eating, not having a phone and not having a TV. And for you, be the lost in thought, be distracted doing something else. But try eating with your non-dominant hand or switching between bites every single time that just makes you hyper-present.

Yeah, I've had, I've actually tracked clients use these techniques of eating differently, not having fluids, eating with the non-dominant hand, not being distracted, and usually on average, that alone would equate to about one to 200 calories a day less, which people are like, it does, that alone would equate to about one to 200 calories a day less, which people are like, that's not a lot of, no, that's significant. Do that throughout the whole year. You're talking about pounds and pounds and pounds

of body fat from a very, very simple thing. And these were people that didn't tell them to change what they're eating. I didn't say, changing the house. I literally said, let's change how you eat the logistics of it. And the reason why all these things I think are so important is because more than anything else, it makes us become aware. Even if it's not something you, like, I don't eat right

now. Like, some of these tips we're even, we're going to give. It's not like every single time I eat, I switch hands. But because I've done techniques like this, because I've taught these things, it's made me extremely aware on my habits, and my behaviors, and what I'm capable of, like I brought out the other day, like, man, it really easily, pay attention, when the next time you eat, if you're not someone's ever tried any of these things,

how often you are already cutting and the next bite is shoveling in before you finish swallowing the last one. Even just putting the food on my plate, I know for this is such a, like, like a, like a duh, kind of a thing like I used to eat with these huge plates and just like that, well, that behavior of me just like grabbing some, some rice or putting, making sure like I'm filling the plate up, like just subconsciously, I wanted it to feel like the plate was filled.

And so just having a smaller version of that and just replacing my huge plates was just something a bit smaller tended to help a little bit with the portion size. They actually did a study on that and they showed that people consistently less because the plate was smaller. Yeah, so it's simply, yeah, it's just like shrink it down.

What a great business idea of the weight loss plate. We'll look at what the average dish plates are. We'll make it one inch smaller, Doug. Yeah, this is brilliant. Fill your plate up. Yeah, take this bit. You can eat whatever you want. It just has to fill the plate.

Right there, it's round little spotter. People get created and they'll start stack it up. Yeah, yeah, all vertically. On top. Here's another one that I like. And this one, Adam is a big huge advocate. It's another one that I like. And this one, you know, Adam is a big, huge advocate. It's actually one of the ones you typically will bring up when we talk about this topic, Adam.

And this is that to rather than take away from your diet, because the psychology that happens when you're restricting, when you're taking away, it tends to cause you to want a rebel. Anything that gets taken away or anytime you deny, if it feels like you're denying yourself something, you want to come back and rebel, you want to overdo it the next time. And so diets tend to contribute to that, right?

I'm cutting everything out, and then when you go off the diet, you binge and go in the complete opposite direction. But rather than cutting away, why not start by adding? It's total counterintuitive, right? You want to lose weight. Rather than cutting away, why not start by adding? It's total counterintuitive, right? You want to lose weight. Rather than cutting food out, let's start by adding healthy foods, namely protein, and I like lean proteins

for this particular one, proteins and vegetables. Now, why would adding more chicken breasts and lean steak and vegetables, why would that be a good, how would that help people when they're trying to get lean? Well, it ends up happening. What ends up happening, which is so great, is that's why it's, I mean, I don't remember

what point in my career that I figured this out, but it was, it was, we talked about game changer, pivotal moments, paradigm shattering moments, this is for sure one of those as a coach, trainer that I piece together way later in my career, that when I stop telling clients they can't do something, and I just started to give them, and what's great is they don't even know

you're doing it to them. Like so like right now I'm helping somebody with their diet and I'm all the same process with everybody. I start them off with, I tell them, listen, and she's like tripping out because she's like, well I can go have all that. You said I can have that, I said, yeah, eat, whatever you want, eat normal, whatever normal looks like for you, don't restrict anything, and then I'm like, we're almost on her last, her last, her seventh day of like, food, right?

And I can see what her average calories is, I can see kind of where she's at, and the very first thing that she's going to get for me is, I already know, so she's challenged on Saturday and Sunday Which is super common right that's a she had a big old bowl of chips and salsa. She had a drink on Sunday Monday with her girlfriends and then I can't remember other than she had some sweets on the other day So instead of me saying you can't have any of those things I'm gonna give her this goal on Saturdays and Sundays I'm gonna tell her I want you to have a giant chicken salad

and then I want you to have a bowl of your favorite vegetables, Brussels sprouts, spinach, whatever you want and that's all I want you to do for now. And I know she's gonna trip out. She's just didn't even got this from me yet. But what I know is that when you do that, all of a sudden it leaves less room for that other shit. So it'll, and but she won't be focused on,

Adam said I can't have chips, Adam said I can't have this, I can't, she'll be focused on, oh, I just need to make sure I get what he said in the day, and what I know naturally ends up happening is it ends up replacing something else, which is normally less like this. It starts altering their palate a bit too. So it's like, you start to naturally crave

these types of nutrients through these types of foods and it brings that to attention in your diet, and I think people start to seek those out a lot more. Well, and then to that point, then the follow-up as a coach for me is, you know, I get her to do those things. And then I follow up with questions like, you know, how do you feel? And how do you feel today? Like the next day and stuff like that. And I start making the connect like, oh man, I felt really good.

I slept really great or I have lots of energy today. It's like, see, you were missing. We weren't getting enough fiber, or we weren't getting enough lean protein in your diet. See what happens when you feed the body, how much better and more productive you are. Now she makes that connection, not to like, oh, when I say no to these bad things,

this is why I'm skinny or feel better. No, it's when I make you eat the things that your body needs and wants, look at what it makes you feel like. And then that what that does is it switches their thought process into this like, I can't or can't think. And like, I want these things in my diet. Oh, shit.

It's really the punishment sort of attitude towards it. And then they start seeking after more of that in their diet. It changes the psychology of everything. Well protein, well foods also have what's called a thermic effect. And now what that means is that in order to take food, turn it into calories, or excuse me, turn those calories into energy, actually cost the energy to do that in the body. And the body's pretty efficient at doing this, but not all foods in macronutrients are created equal in this regard.

Protein has the highest thermic effect. I think the thermic effect is something like 20 or 30% higher for protein than it is for fat or non-fibrous carbohydrates. Meaning, if you wait theoretically, and some studies have actually shown this, theoretically, if you wait the same amount of calories with two diets, but one was very high protein. The others were made up of, let's say, more carbs.

And more fat. So the high protein diet, people tend to lose more weight because the body burns more calories processing and turning that protein into energy. So it's just also, it's a little less. A small effect, but over time may add up. Yes, yes. And same thing with fibers.

So I said vegetables, fibers also have a high thermic effect. They actually burn more calories to turn into energy than other types of foods. These are also two things that are grossly under-consumed by the average person. Not one of the hardcore gym goer bodybuilder competitive person, but the average client is normally lacking in lean protein and veggies, which is, and I know this whole episode is geared around things to do without tracking calories, but I've had tons of success

with actually just telling clients to only track that. Like, all of our protein. Protein, that's all I want you to do. Here's how many grams of protein I want every day, and just make sure you hit that. And I would tell them, like, okay, our goal is to make sure we have a nice balance of chicken, fish, steak, and eggs. And like, so I'd say you try and mix that up and I'd watch that.

But as far as just tracking grams of protein, I've seen clients have tons of success just from following that macronutrient because it's such an under-consuming. Yeah, and it's the most satiating. In other words, it satisfies you and it blunts hunger more than any other macronutrient. In fact, the number one comment I would get from clients when I would do exactly that out of my tell them, okay, I want you to hit, you know, let's say I have a female clients 170 pounds, I'd say,

I want you to 140 grams of protein and it has to come from food where I'm not gonna let you cheat and drink protein powder, so it's gotta come from food. They would always come to me and be like, I can't eat that much. I can't eat 140. How does anybody eat that much?

I'll say, like, eat that first, get that out of the way, and then see what else you can, and inevitably their calories would drop, because that much protein or and vegetables would result in a much lower appetite. Now they're eating less of the other garbage and their calories went down. Not to mention a high protein diet

if you're working out and lifting weights contributes to muscle gain, at the very least muscle preservation. So when you're dieting if you're working out and lifting weights, contributes to muscle gain at the very least muscle preservation. So when you're dieting and you're trying to lose weight or lose body fat, inevitably your body is going to lose muscle. It wants to lose muscle. It wants to make you more efficient with calories. A high protein diet, especially in combination with resistance training, stops that from happening.

In some cases, actually, reverses it, even on a low calorie diet. So you don't get the metabolic slowdown that you would get from other low calorie diets. So high protein in a diet, regardless, has lots and lots of different benefits. Of course, there's individual variances. But yeah, if you're aiming for protein and veggies and don't worry about anything else,

naturally your caloric intake will probably drop. Well, and again, back to circle back to what I was talking about, most people under eat this. This is sometimes why people struggle with building muscle is because they're just not getting adequate protein to build that, which in turn ends up speeding up everybody's metabolism. So, you know, your ultimate goal may be weight loss or body fat reduction, but when you're under consuming protein and you're also lifting weights, and that's part of what,

because you've heard from Mind Pump or whatever, that's one of the best ways for you to do that. Well, it's important that you're getting the protein intake to support that so that you can build muscle, which then in turn can help speed your metabolism up. So the benefits of targeting protein like that, and I also highly recommend doing it early, early and often it's hard, like it's part. It's got doing it early. Early and often it's hard.

It's hard. Yeah, prioritize it. Yeah, prioritize it early in the day, especially since breakfast foods are built around carbohydrates, really is trying to focus on getting some good protein in early in the day and you'll see huge benefits. Well, just to give you an example, let's say you have a 130 pound female,

not obese, maybe a little overweight, but not obese. 130, 140 pounds, and I tell her, I want you to eat 120 grams of protein a day. If you're listening right now, the target should be anywhere between about maybe 0.6 to one gram of protein per pound of body weight. If you're not obese, if you're obese, then you might want to go more towards the lower end. If you're not obese, then you go more towards the higher end. But 120 grams of protein, how many chicken, how many four ounce or three ounce chicken breasts

would someone need to eat to get about 120 grams of protein? Well, you're getting about 32 in a six ounce. In a six ounce, right. So you'd have to eat a lot. Yeah. You'd have to eat quite a bit, three and four, four of those chicken breasts a day. Yeah.

So now, how many 130 pound girls do that? Right. So now think about it this way. You're eating that, you're prioritizing it. It's naturally gonna make you eat less food. So this is why it's such a great first step. Okay, here's another one. And this one is actually much more impactful

than you realize. Improve the quality of your sleep and get adequate sleep. This one is actually a huge one. I was just looking up studies earlier on the impact of lack of sleep and researchers find that people will consume on average up to 300 more calories a day when they're not eating, when they're not getting

good quality sleep. Well, I don't, I think it was Justin who brought it up a while back. I don't know what we were talking about, but it just had fallen on some days where I mean, we're up with the baby and had some like long days of no sleep and running them back to back. And I remember I had had this like junk food craving

that I hadn't felt in a long time. And it like dawned on me like, oh shit, you know, I'm running on like no sleep the last couple of days. Pay attention to that if you're listening right now on days when you know you didn't get adequate sleep or you've been stressed at work all day long or up late hours and pay attention to your eating habits from the time almost always,

that's when those worst cravings come in and you haven't got good sleep. Now there's two hormones that help regulate hunger, Grellen and Lepton, and so Grellen stimulates appetite, makes you hungry or Lepton decreases it, but when the body is sleep deprived, the levels of Grellen spikes, while the level of Lepton falls,

leading to an increase in hunger. Now why would that happen? You might be asking yourself, like why would a lack of sleep, why would that send a signal to my body to raise the hormone that makes me hungry and lower the one that controls my appetite, so giving me a kind of, you know, one-two punch? Well, lack of sleep for most of human history, well, it's a stress on the body, but for most of human history, you're in survival mode.

You probably were looking for food. You didn't have enough food, so you're not sleeping because you're looking, you're foraging, you're trying to feed yourself. And so your body's saying, driving you to get that food so you can get that rest. So lack of sleep, just plain and simple makes you hungry. Then there's this other simple effect from losing sleep. When you look at, so years ago, I learned this tip from another trainer, and I saw that it was remarkably successful, but it was counter to what I had learned in the early nutrition certifications I had gotten. And the advice was this, Doni passed 6 PM.

So he would say, Doni passed 6 PM, and clients were getting leaner. Now I had learned in my nutrition certification that didn't matter what time you ate, it was all about the calories in versus calories out. So it's like, that's weird. Why would the time that you eat making a difference? Now, the studies do show that the time you eat,

you know, has an impact on your health and all this stuff. But when it comes to weight, calories do matter. So why is it that when people stop eating at six, that they end up losing weight, when people who don't lose weight? They get better sleep, they're better digestion, like all of them. It's not just that. It's that people who don't lose weight. They get better sleep, they're better digestion, like all of them.

It's not just that, it's that people who don't stop at six or whatever, eat more meals. And so they find that the extra bad calories that people tend to eat tend to be late at night. Well, there's something happened late at night. A lot of those, I mean, I think it's a combination of everything, even with Justin saying, I think it's true also because I've seen huge benefits by simply just walking after.

Yeah, if you eat, try this, if someone hasn't done this before, eat a massive meal over consume when you know it and then lie on your couch or go straight to bed. And you've now do that exact same thing, over consume whatever, but then go for 45 minute hour walk. And you'll see, you'll feel the digestive process happening, but it definitely takes that, if you overrate that much, you can feel it happening and taking that entire time. So imagine you not doing that and going straight to bed, like of course it's going to affect sleep. But besides that, because that's for sleep quality,

just staying up late, you stay, let's say you should be in bed by 10, you stay up till midnight, that's two more hours, you're awake, watching TV, board, whatever, the odds that you're gonna eat are far higher than if you were sleeping. Well, it's part of the reason why there's such great results for intermittent fasting

for fat loss results is because it's just a shortened window. You're shortening the window, this window up, you're not eating past six o'clock, which again, like to you, a tip that I used to scoff at because the research came out later on to prove that didn't matter when you ate the calories. Calories are calories and your body will either gain or lose based off of where your maintenance level is.

Has nothing to do with if I ate it at midnight or eat it at 10. So this was something I scoffed at and would tell clients not to worry about, but later on, again, circled back to, it's just a good habit for most people. It is. Most people, like you said, they are either one, you're pretty sedentary then, and you're not gonna be moving around

to help the digestive process, you're sitting down, you're lying down, or you're doing things like watching TV, which can turn into mindless type of eating. So there's a lot of behavioral things that happen from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. that probably shouldn't be coupled with also eating more food. Yeah, and also around dinner, that's always my hearty meal. That's the one where I got the most, the protein, the fast stuff that's very satiating

versus the start of my day. If I was to include more carbohydrates, I'm going to want to eat them more towards the beginning of my day, if I was to include more carbohydrates, I'm gonna wanna eat them more towards the beginning of the day, so I'm more likely to expend energy and get through that throughout the day. But if you look at, let's say we were take 100 random people and track all their food and look at what they ate throughout the whole day, I would bet a lot of money

that the vast majority of the quote unquote, bad foods were done in the late evening. That's when the food choices tend to get a little bit worse throughout the day. Part of it is a psychology, part of it is your willpower, actually starts to wing down. So if you've had good control, good willpower, you're at work, you've got to deal with this stress,

that stress, what do I do, by the end of the night, as you get tired, that starts to wane. So if you don't get good sleep and go to bed on time, the odds of eating food and more food and crappy food, go up to bed when you're tired. Then yeah, and you're prolonging that, you're gonna want to end up eating something. Well, evenings and weekends, right?

And we've talked about this in just a recent episode that it's how important it is to try and attach new behaviors with old behaviors. And we do really good with stuff like that. Humans do really well with, oh, it's the new year. I'm starting a new diet. During the work week, I'm really good. Because I'm on a regimen's good.

I got to be at work by 8 a.m. Then I take a lunch break or a snack, whatever, 15 minute break at 11 o'clock. And like, oh, so I'll just, I'll pair this meal with that time, I'll pair this meal with that time, and they're all good, but oh, then come past off of work, 6 p.m. or the weekend, that's where shit goes awry. So a lot of that has to do with just, again,

the psychological piece of behavior. Now here's a good strategy if you wanna improve your sleep. Set yourself up a sleep routine. So give yourself seven to nine hours of sleep at night. So you know yourself. So if you only need less, that's fine. If you need more, that's great. And in other words, okay, I need to wake up at this time.

That means I need to be in bed by this time. So let's say you've decided you need to be in bed and you need to be falling asleep at 10 p.m. Okay, two hours before that is stop eating. So 10 p.m. is bedtime. 8 p.m stop eating. So 10 p.m. is bedtime. 8 p.m. is the absolute latest I'll eat. I even recommend more than that, but two would be the minimum. At that two hour before bedtime minimum, Mark, also turn your lights off in your house or where blue blocking glasses get off electronics, start to wind down, prepare your body for sleep.

Studies are very conclusive on this., makes a difference. You actually produce more melatonin, you get better sleep. And then when you go to bed, here's what happens. When you go to bed, you fall asleep faster, so you do get that seven or eight hours. Because I think sometimes people are so wired in jazz before they go to bed, electronics, lights on bright, they're eating right before they go to bed. Then they go to bed expecting eight hours of sleep, but the problem is that they don't fall asleep or they don't get good sleep. So now they're in bed for eight hours, but bed expecting to get eight hours of sleep, but the problem is that they don't fall asleep or they don't get good sleep. So now they're in bed for eight hours, but they're not getting the quality of sleep for

eight hours. All right, the last one, this one's the biggest one by far. In fact, I will confidently say that this is the biggest contributor to the obesity epidemic in modern societies. It wasn't fats, it wasn't carbs, it wasn't sugars, it was heavily processed, hyper palatable foods. As the market grew for food, as more and more people were buying food at the grocery store, two things became very apparent to food manufacturers.

If they made food tasty, they made it really, really enjoyable to eat. So, palatability refers to the hedonistic value of food. So, when you eat it, how good it makes you feel. That includes the flavor, the smell, the feel, everything, right? Food manufacturers figured out, if I can make it hyper palatable,

I'll outsell everybody. And if you don't believe me, look at every food category, even look at the health food categories, and the top sellers of the top are the top because they're the most palatable. So that's number one. The second thing they realize was convenience.

If I can make it taste really good and make it super convenient, that's what people want. So more and more of our food was turned into hyper palatable food and more and more of us started eating more of this. Now why is this bad? This food is literally designed to make you eat more and the recent studies, this is by far the biggest single step you can take.

Recent studies show that when people are given unlimited access to heavily processed food and they compare them to other groups who have unlimited access to whole natural foods, they eat on average five to 600 more calories every single day. That's incredible. Five to 600 more calories a day. That's roughly could equate to about a pound of body fat,

give or take a little bit per week, per week, just from that. Well, this is the one of the five that you've listed. This is the one by itself. If you ignored everything else and only did this that most people would have probably tremendous success. Tremendous. Just from simply from doing that. This is something that, again, later on, pieced this together where, I mean, I could tell

a client, go whatever and as much as you want, as long as it's not processed. Oh, if it was whole foods, I'd say. That became my go-to. Yeah, it was my favorite thing to tell the clients that used to kind of bitch and whine about diets or having to restrate. And I want to get in shape, but I really don't want to follow some stupid diet

as okay, I got something for you. You need all the foods you want. Just make sure they're all whole natural. Stay away from all the heavily processed foods, and that's go to town. Eat as many potatoes as you want, and sweet potatoes as you have. You have as much chicken breast and steaks as you can get.

Like go for it. I always just, I immediately think of chips. Like chips, that is like the most, like fantastically processed food item that they just created, where you just, you can't eat just one of those things. It's crunchy, it's light, it's salty, it's novel, it's got like every texture and thing that like sparks this, this desire to keep going.

And like if you add that, if somebody just ate a big ass meal and you put chips out there, those two eat the chips. It's totally true. And then they go right back to eating, you know, another meal after they ate the chips because now just stimulate a whole new thing. Here, I'll give you on that note, I'm going to give you guys a great example. This is phenomenal, right? I just found this right now. So a large bag of Lay's potato chips, okay? If you're listening right now, be honest with yourself. Could you sit down in front of the TV by yourself and eat a large bag of Lays potato chips. Probably yes, I could throw it. I could blow through three of those, no problem.

Inside every Lays, a large bag of Lays potato chips is about five potatoes. Could you sit down in front of the TV and eat five plain, plain baked potatoes? No way. There's no possible way. You say yes you're lying. You're most people, go look.

This is good luck with two. Yeah, you would gag by itself. No butter, no salt, nothing, just plain white baked potatoes right in front of you. You got five of them, you got to eat them. It would be a challenge. Most people would fail. Didn't they run a diet? Wasn't there a popular diet for a while there?

Is it a potato diet? No, it's a thing. It's a thing, right? It's a thing. It's a thing, right? It's a emotional. No, no, no. My people, that's serious. The average should have gets emotional. No, it's a thing, right? It gets emotional. No, no, no. My people, that's the average. The average should have gets emotional. No, the idea they read, that's like a...

On memories of potatoes. That's like a thing that they've done before where I've seen people do that challenge where they just, hey, I'm gonna try and eat potatoes. You wanna know what the irony of it this is? Five plain white baked potatoes has less calories than a bag of Lays potato chips. Think about that.

So the Lays chips has more calories yet far easier to blow through and eat than five plain baked potatoes. Now that's because of the palatability factor. And your body naturally evolved this kind of, this limit that you'll hit when you eat certain foods. You feel it when you eat steak or potato or vegetables. When you eat normal whole foods. Now when you eat certain foods. You feel it when you eat steak or potato or vegetables. When you eat normal whole foods, now when you eat processed foods, it hijacks that.

It gets haywire, it goes haywire. And so you consume way more calories. This is why avoiding, simply avoiding heavily processed foods by itself. Now you're not gonna get shredded like a body builder, but most people listening, if you just did that, you would probably get all natural, all by yourself, into a far more normal, average body weight.

You find yourself losing body fat. It's a double edge sort of science. Totally. I mean, it's, and I don't think actually a lot of people, chips are delicious. I don't think a lot of people realize that your body was created with these things built in. That if you were just roaming the earth

and growing your own food and raising your own food and that's the way you ate always, it actually would be way more challenging than you think to over-consume because of all the body's natural signals that tell you, okay I'm full, that's enough. But because so much of the American diet is these heavily processed foods, it hijacks that. Totally, and it's this mentality, we have this idea that we're just because humans evolved

where food was scarce, that we've turned into these eating machines and all we need is food in front of us. Over-eating in the past was just as bad as it is today. And so we do have these natural breaks that we turn on that tell us to stop eating. In fact, you've probably experienced this at a friend's house when you've had dinner where you eat a meal and you're stuffed and then you yourself hijacked your own sedate, satiety signals by reaching for dessert,

a change in flavor, oftentimes we'll get that palatability signal that what's called palat fatigue to go away. Now processed foods are foods that come in flavor, oftentimes we'll get that palatability signal that what's called palate fatigue to go away. Now processed foods are foods that come in bags, wrappers, boxes, sometimes they're frozen, they have ingredients, this is what makes processed foods, processed foods, they have lots of ingredients, so if you look at the back of a box, if it just says broccoli, it's not processed,

if it just says meat, it's not processed, but if you look at the back and there's you know 10, 15, 20, 30 different gradients, most of those ingredients were not put in there to add nutritional value or to give you really any of the benefit other than increasing the hiddenistic value of that food and be aware, be aware of that. Eliminate your heavily processed foods and watch your calories naturally drop. And with that, go to mindp processed foods and watch your calories naturally drop. And with that, go to mindpumpfree.com and download our guides. They cost nothing. They're all

totally free. We have books and resources there for free. You can also find the three of your favorite hosts here at Mind Pump on Instagram. Three amigos. All of us, you can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin, add him at Mind Pump Adam and you can find me at Mind Pump South. 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 Ebola, MAPS for Foreman and MAPS aesthetic.

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