Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1320: How to Eat to Build Muscle & Burn Fat

Episode Date: June 22, 2020

In this episode, Sal, Adam & Justin discuss what you need to know to tailor your diet to maximize fat loss and muscle building goals. How abs are made in the kitchen. (3:48) How people tend to underestimate how many calories they consume and overestimate their activity levels. (6:45) The misconceptions surrounding serving sizes and nutrition labels. (12:05) The law of physics when it comes to losing/gaining weight. (15:50) Step #1 – Learn to track your calorie intake & calculate your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) or Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE). (21:15) Step #2 – Figure out your macronutrients to build muscle and burn fat.  Protein. (29:57) Fats. (37:00) Carbohydrates. (43:25) Nutrition is extremely individualized. (49:05) Related Links/Products Mentioned June Promotion: MAPS HIIT ½ off! **Promo code “HIIT50” at checkout** Mind Pump Macro Calculator Visit Everly Well for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Code “mindpump” at checkout** Chickens four times bigger than they used to be: study Does Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) Actually Help With Fat Loss? - Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump #1072: What You Need To Know About Protein For Muscle Building & Fat Loss Mind Pump #1220: The 4 Best Sources Of Protein The Myth of Optimal Protein Intake – Mind Pump Blog What are Fats? - Mind Pump Blog What are Carbohydrates? - Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump Podcast - YouTube 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 Pumped the World's Top Fitness Health and Entertainment Podcast, we talk all about nutrition, how you should eat if you want to burn body fat or build muscle. I mean, we break it all down for you. We talk about all the aspects of nutrition that are important. We talk about calories, why that's where you should probably start. And then we talk about proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Now, look, we did something for you guys that we've been

working on for actually a very, very long time. A lot of coaches and trainers will charge you to figure out, help you figure out how many calories you burn, how many calories you should eat, your grams of protein, fat and carbohydrates. Well, we wanted to give you that stuff for free. We think this should be available to everybody for free where you could go in, enter your information,

and figure out where you should start. So we put together several pages on the internet, several landing pages or pillar pages, we should call them, with lots of connecting information. And when you go on these, there are macro calculators. You enter in your information, you can put in your weight, your body fat percentage, it'll tell you how many calories you're burning. It'll tell you how many calories you burn with activity. It'll tell you how many calories to eat based on your weight, your body fat percentage, it'll tell you how many calories you're burning. It'll tell you how many calories you burn with activity. It'll tell you how many calories to eat based on your goal, grams of protein, grams of carbs, grabs a fat.

So you can actually go to mapsmacro.com and enter the information, learn all about nutrition, get more detailed information, all the stuff, that'll help supplement what you're gonna listen to in this episode. Now if you eat right, your macros are good and you're still noticing issues with energy, you're still noticing maybe some hormone issues. Well you may have some issues with your micronutrients, your vitamins and minerals, or you

may have some hormone issues. There are some ways you can test for this. Now one way to go to the doctor, get a prescription, go to a lab, get your blood drawn, or you can do a test at home. Now, we work with a company called Everly Well. They produce some of the best at-home tests available for very, very low prices. So you can test things like your vitamin D

or your testosterone or your estrogen. You can even get a general idea of maybe some food intolerances that you may have with tests as well. Now because you listen to MindPump, you get 15% off any of their tests. Just go to EverlyWell.com. That's EV, ER, LY, W-E-L-L, dot com, and then use the code MindPump to get 15% off any test. Now if your goal is fat loss, if you want to burn a lot of calories, one of the best ways

to work out is with high intensity interval training. Okay, these are intense ways of working out, but they burn a ton of calories. Now, we wrote a program called Maps Hit that designed, it's an entire program that is very effective. It's designed to be effective. It's done with barbells and dumbbells. It's essentially a program designed to burn tons of calories, but not cause you to lose any muscle. If anything, you'll sculpt and shape your body with this program. We put it on 50% off sale, so it's half off. Here's how you get that discount. Go to mapshit.com. That's MAPS H-I-I-T dot com and use the code hit 50. That's H-I-I-T 5-0, no space for the discount.

And again, I want to remind everybody, if you want to figure out your calories, you want to figure out your proteins, your fats, and your carbs, and how many calories you're burning, go to mapsmacro.com. That's M-A-P-S-M-A-C-R-O.com. Go check it out, go read all the information, we think it's really gonna help you out.

You guys have heard people say that, what is it? Like 70% of your success in fitness is your diet. How many times have you guys heard that, right? What's that quote of like, you know, you make all your progress in the kitchen? Oh, you don't get your abs in the gym. You don't get your abs in the gym, exactly. You know, there's, so there's a little bit of truth to that. I was gonna say, there's a lot of truth to that.

I think that it's one of those things in the space that was probably neglected, and because it was neglected, so much came out to prove the importance of it, and that's where I think the numbers started coming of, like 70, 80, ever-diving, 90% of all of it. I think what it would, where it's true is not necessarily the impact it has on health because exercise and fitness and training has a very, very big impact as well. I think it's because people say that 70 or 80% number because it's the amount of, if you look at all the effort you put into improving your health, building muscle, burning body fat, most of the effort tends

to have to go to nutrition because it's the hardest part. That's the reason. When you work out, even if you work out five days a week, you're working out an hour, five days a week. You eat throughout the day, every single day, it's a part of who you're working. It's a constant lifestyle thing. It's a lifestyle you eat with other people.

It's not, you know, it's a part of our culture. It's very difficult to change eating habits and to figure out what to eat long term. Far more difficult than it is to figure out, you know, what kind of workout you should do, which is also hard, it just takes more effort. Well, especially when you're talking about how to burn body fat or how to build muscle.

Like there is a difference between just in two to beating and trying to be healthy, like you're alluding to right now, and then there's somebody who says, Adam, I want to build 15 pounds of muscle or Adam, I want to shed 30 pounds of fat off my body. Like when you have a very specific goal like that and you've struggled

most of your life to get there, to me this is where this has a ton of weight, that it is 70, 80 percent because sure I can put you on a great workout routine and make you a lot more healthy than what you are. Like if you were not working out, you weren't doing anything diet wise, you come to me and you just say I want to be healthy, you know, if that person just makes a few better changes. They pay attention. They're asleep, they eat a little bit better than what they were for, I get you on a good program. I can dramatically change your overall health.

I can make you a much healthier person than what you were before you found me. But if you have goals or you say, I want to do that, I want to build this or change my body. In addition to being healthy, this I think is everything. This is where the numbers really start to matter, in my opinion. Totally. I know as a trainer, this used to always, at first I thought people were purposely

being deceitful, you know, and I think all most early trainers think this, they think, oh, my clients lying that they think that they would have. But the reality is we're so unaware, and this is, it took me some years to figure this out, but when you would ask people, how much do you think you eat? Do you eat a lot of sugar? Do you eat a lot of processed foods? Are you getting adequate protein?

People are so off from reality. Hey, not just people, I am. We are. Oh, everybody. That's why I'm so passionate about talking about calculating and figuring out what your macro should be is because 20 years later been doing this forever Very, very in tune with what I could look at a play and give you a pretty good Guestimation if someone challenged me like what do you think that is calorie wise and grams of protein?

I can do that right pretty well and yet if I am not tracking, or if I'm not really, really diligently paying attention, every single time that I start, and that I like reflect on what I thought I was doing, I'm always off. It's just a matter of how much I was off. And luckily, from years and years of experience, it's not as gross of a fender as I was before, but that just always tells me that, listen, if this is my profession, I live and breathe this shit, and I still estimate quite a bit off when I think I'm doing whatever I think I'm doing, that means that tells me all of my clients are off.

What I find that's funny is that people, by the way, there's studies on this. They've done lots and lots of studies on this, and people tend to on a consistent basis under estimate how many calories they eat, and it's usually by a big number. So somebody will say, I think I ate about 2000 calories a day, and it's probably around 27,000, 2800, maybe even 3000 calories.

That's how big of a number of people are. Well, I end over estimate on how active they are. Right, that's what I was just gonna say that are well and overestimate on how active they are right That's I was just gonna say that and then when you ask people how active they are and they're like oh, I'm I'm pretty active You know, I do a 30-minute walk at this time and that time and then you that's the one thing they did that day Yeah, I remember when when those body bugs first came out and I would have people track their activity levels Even on the days that they worked out they were super inactive Because they thought of the workout as being lots of activity,

but really the rest of the day they weren't doing anything on all protein intake. They would always overestimate, oh I ate plenty of protein, I think I ate about 100 grams, and then we would track, you're at 30. You know, it's one third of what you thought you were doing. Well, it was funny because most people that would come in

and we'd talk about nutrition, and they'd be like, well, I eat healthy, I eat salads. And that's like where the conversation ended. It was just the fact that they incorporated salads within their routine that that made them healthy. And it just, it spans all the way across the board in terms of what people know is healthy. Not only just healthy, but in terms of how many calories

they're ingesting, they have no clue. No, we don't have any clue. A big reason for this, by the way, is we just never learned how to look at food this way. We never learned how to value food for all of the different things that it provides us. Most of us who are lucky enough to grow up in a modern society, we learned to value food, mainly for one thing, which is how it makes me

feel emotionally or how well it tastes. I mean, that's pretty much it, right? If you think about all the times you go out and eat with your friends or you choose what to eat for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, be honest with yourself. And the things you tend to think about are, hmm, what am I in the mood for? What tastes good? You know, oh, we're going to eat what's gonna be fun to eat, or hey, this makes me feel better when I'm stressed out or sad, or what tastes really good. So all of our value is placed on that, so we've never really learned how to look at food in different ways. So it becomes, when you're trying to burn body fat or build muscle or change your body,

if you don't have the right information and make yourself aware first, you are gonna live in the unconscious and competent stage. You are literally blind. It is, you're totally guessing the entire time. And this is true for most people. Oh, and not only are you guessing and off for the reasons that we talk about over estimating your activity level,

under estimating. Because then you have outside forces that are working against you. And we've talked about this before on the show with like labels. And then I used to love to show clients, like do you guys remember seeing those graphs or charts to show a burger, fries,

and a soda in the 50s, in the 70s, and then the 90s, and then like today? The portions just got enormous. Oh my God, the portions have just in a few decades has tripled in the amount of calories and servings. And when that happens over the course of decades and we just kind of let it naturally of all of that, a lot of people just don't even notice it.

You don't even notice that. Because that's what tells you a serving. Right, it just becomes the norm. I mean, I remember as a kid, you guys remember, it was in our generation that like the big goal was invented. You know, like that was, that wasn't a, yeah, like if you were a kid,

when soda pop was, you know, soda pop's been around forever, but it was always a little eight to 12 ounce thing. That was it. Max, we should call it soda pop still. Yeah, well some places do call pop still. Yeah, and North too, right? Yeah, I think so, right?

But I mean, that's just one example of something that has snuck up on us over the last couple of generations that our parents, when they would have pop, they would literally only be drinking that eight to 12 ounces. That's just how it worked. You would have to crush the whole six pack to get what a big goal is today. Well, even in people that are going into the gym and they start this whole momentum of trying

to get back in shape and all this stuff, they think they need a protein shake to add in to what they're already doing instead of eliminating things. So there's just lots of misconceptions in terms of what the health community is promoting. It's like, there's all this excess stuff you need to be taking. And the other big one for me was always to peer into snacks. And one of them that always snuck in was nuts. Like how calorie dense these nuts word that contributing to the overall calorie amount, people had no idea it was like that much. Oh, a serving of almonds.

When people have a snack, It's like 12 for 13 almonds. Who eats 12 or 13 almonds for a snack? Most of us grab a whole handful and so you're having three times the serving that you think, and you're right, this is a big part of the problem because you grow up, you know, understanding what you think a serving is. So if so you're never really fully aware of what's going on. It goes even further than what we're talking about with serving sizes. It even goes to traditional natural foods, right? The average chicken breast in the 1950s was half the size

of the average chicken breast today. You can actually Google this, look up the average chicken size in the 50s, and then look at it through the decades. Now what we've done is we've, you know, we've bred them to be much bigger. We've bred chicken. It's texted them with sauce.

Yeah, and they're just, they're like dinosaur chickens compared. They're yoked. The ones we have, same thing with sweet potato or a potato or a banana or corn. All of these things have been over time changed to become, you know, fruit even. When you go to the grocery store and you buy fruit, and you're like, wow, this fruit is so delicious and so sweet.

You don't realize over time, farmers have bred the fruit to contain more and more sugar because it tastes better. Now there's nothing necessarily wrong with this, but the point is that our serving size is how much we're eating is totally our concept of it for the most part, is totally often so we're guessing this entire time, how hard does it make losing body fat or building muscle? I got something that will blow everybody's mind if they've never done this,

because I have, and I blew my mind when I was, I've shared on the show about the paradigm shattering moment I had with the sweet potato. Never forget that. Years went by of me just using my calorie king book to guesstimate. Back in the day. Yeah, this is a sweet potato that's about 180 calories or what about that. Every sweet potato I had for the next five years was 180 to 200 calories.

It says medium size, this is medium size. Yeah, exactly. And then I put it on the scale and actually weigh out what the ounces or grams was to figure out what it was and it was holy shit. There was three times more than I thought. You want another one that will blow your mind because you brought up fruit, a banana, a large banana. Okay. What is in the grocery store are not large bananas.

They're fucking super dinosaur bananas. Like you're saying, you know, it's a large banana. The large banana are those like little, you know, it's a large banana? The porn stars. The large banana. Are those like little, neuron, germa, tiny bananas? Yeah, no. So when you look at like with the books tell you like,

oh, like a large banana is 32 grams of sugar. It's about 160 calories. What the, no. That's like the little fucking mini banana. That's the jumbo banana most people are biting into is like four x sets. So next time you're gonna get into banana, just for shits and giggles, throw that thing on the scale,

weigh it out and then take the time just to look up to get an idea, it'll blow your mind. It will. And a banana that size, they can be up to like 50, 60 grams of sugar. I would tell clients to stay under 50 grams of sugar in their total for the day. And a banana can just like go up beyond that right away.

Now it has other health benefits to it. Yeah, there's nothing necessarily wrong with a banana, but here's the bottom line. The bottom line is if you and you cannot get around this. Okay, by the way, this is not the only thing that's important. And I think we talk about this a lot on the podcast. If you've listened to us for more than three episodes, you know, we talk about all the different values and all the important aspects that revolve around food that have nothing to do with calories. But at the end of the day, at the end of the day, if you want to lose weight, you have to eat less calories and

you burn. And if you want to gain weight, you have to eat more calories than you burn. This is a rule, this is a law of physics. Yes, it's not going to change. You know, I remember a long time ago, I had a client that, she really wanted to lose weight, really wanted to lose body fat, and I worked with her for a while, and I would always talk to her, you know, we should probably have you track, because I think you're not calculating things right,

and this and that, and she refused, and I said, fine, I never forced people. But she was gaining body fat, and she said, well, this is not possible. She's like, I'm gaining body fat, but my food intake is going down and I'm moving more. And I remember it distinctly having this conversation with her and saying, okay, if you're gaining body fat and you're eating less calories than you're burning, what we need to do is study you.

We need to take you to a university, you're an anomaly. Because you are creating energy, you're creating tissue out of thin air. What you're doing is is nothing short of a miracle Probably a breast-a-terrient. Yeah, so we need to we need to study this and that's because again You can if you're eating more calories in your burning what this means is every time you consume calories, right? This is energy calories are just a unit of energy. It's how we measure how much energy is within the food that we eat. If you're eating 2,000 calories a day and you're only burning 1,000 calories a day, that extra thousand calories doesn't just disappear. It gets stored, it gets transferred. So one of the laws of physics is that energy cannot be created nor destroyed.

So when I light a piece of paper on fire and that paper burns and it disappears, the energy didn't disappear. The energy was converted into heat through the fire, okay? So when you're eating extra calories, those calories, regardless, you can have the healthiest diet in the world by the way. It can be a very, very healthy diet.

You can have lots of whole foods and fruits and vegetables and good high quality meats. But if you're eating more calories in your burning, your body is gonna store those extra calories. So you cannot lose weight unless your calories are lower than your burn, and you cannot gain weight unless your calories are higher than your burning. And you just can't get around that.

And this is what makes strength training in trying to build muscles such a beautiful thing is because that is exactly right. And most people are so off and underestimate. And so at least some of those additional, the thousand calories on it, we hold. Turn into muscle. We hold.

Yeah, partitioned over into building muscle. And that is extremely beneficial for your overall metabolism and also combating, putting on any sort of body fat. That's what makes strength training so amazing. Where, if it's just a calories in, calories out thing, cardio helps you burn, walking around helps you burn anymore. But if you go over, still that, it does nothing for you at that point.

You still will get body fat if you go over where, if I sent a signal to my body to build muscle because I strength train properly, there's a good chance that at least some, if not all, hopefully, of those calories, get partitioned over to the body. Now, and I'm glad you said that because it's also a little bit more complex, right?

Just because you build more muscle, let's say you gain three pounds of muscle, it doesn't necessarily mean the only extra calories you're burning are the calories that are needed to support that muscle. That's true, but there's also more. Your body actually can become more or less efficient with calories. Part of that is through how it takes these calories and also turns them into heat. And people with more muscle or if

your body's trying to build muscle, your body becomes less efficient with calories, doesn't try to hold on to them as much and burn some of them in the form of heat, which is what you could consider to be less efficiency. But again, at the end of the day, if you don't know how many calories you're burning, and you don't know how many calories you're consuming, you are walking around in a dark room blindfolded. You have no idea where you're going.

You, at best what you do is you could look at the scale, look at your body, try to adjust your food here and there, but it is a very, very big guessing game. Here's the big problem with that. Nice to run into this all the time with clients is that they would do that and not realize that during the week, they would do very, very good with the nutrition in terms of, you know, caloric intake. Saturday and Sunday, according to them, they'd be like, well, I just, I went off a little bit, wasn't that big of a deal.

Breakfast and lunch, I did like I normally do. And then dinner, I went out my friends and had a little bit. Wasn't that much more. But when we would go there and calculate it all, we would find very consistently, this is a super common thing, that the extra calories they had in the weekend made up for all the calorie deficit they had during the week.

So they would end up breaking even, or sometimes even eating a little extra because of that weekend and really screwing themselves over. So this is something you cannot get around. And again, we are the biggest proponents of eating healthy, the behaviors around food, how food affects your energy levels, your health, your muscles, your hormones, bone, all that different stuff. But you cannot get around the fact that calories ultimately

will determine weight gain or weight loss. And so this is something you need to know. It's an important thing to know. And so one of the first steps that I tell clients to do, one of the most consistent steps, if they're ready, is to learn how to figure that out. Let's start to track. Log your food. ready is to learn how to figure that out. Let's start to track. Cog your food.

Let's start to track and figure that out. Now, calories being the big important thing, now that we've got that out of the way, what makes up those calories largely determines how you feel. So think about it this way, right? You're eating the right amount of calories to accomplish your goal, but what your calories are made up of are not balanced, proteins, fats, and carbs.

Your foods are making you feel either low energy or irritable or getting more cravings. Is this a good long-term strategy? No, it's not a good long-term strategy. So when I hear people comparing like, oh, as long as I'm on my calorie deficit, but most I have tons of sugar, that's okay, because I'm still gonna lose body fat.

You have to how do you feel eating all that sugar? How do you feel eating in that unbalanced way? Is that something that's gonna benefit you long term? No. So again, step number one, figure out your calories, figure out what is known as your BMR, your basal metabolic rate, or figure out your total daily energy expenditure.

It's otherwise known as TDEE. Now TDEE takes into account how many calories you burn actively on top of your basal metabolic rate, which is your metabolism. So BMR, how many calories you burn just being alive at rest? TDEE counts how many calories you're burning being active on top of that. So that's the best number.

And to that point, this was another one of those paradigm shattering moments for myself. You brought up earlier when the body bug came out. That was the first pretty accurate wearable tool. And something that I was floored by was when you first log in, they have you fill out all this stuff, your weight, your measurements, and everything like that, and then it asks you your activity level. You know, and I'm like, I'm a fitness professional.

I'm working out seven days a week, hard for an hour and so like that. Like, I'm highly active, you know, so I'm gonna push it all the way over to highly active. Well, after wearing this thing for months on months and even years, what I started to piece together really quick is like, holy shit, based off of what I'm burning for my size and even with my workouts for an hour,

every single day, I'm still considered somebody sent to. And that was like another one of those holy shit moments for me because in my brain, you know, I, man, I broke a heart sweat today. I trained hard today. I've got to be considered a highly active person. But the problem is, if the rest of our day, we aren't very mobile. We're sitting down at a desk and working all day

or sitting in a chair and couch and talking on a mic or whatever it may be. You actually have a very sedentary lifestyle. I have the same realization because I factored in that I trained really intense. And so, you know, that had to plane to the fact that I trained really intense. And so, you know, that had to plane to the fact that I was very active. And to see actually, like, the trends throughout my day of, like, how inactive I wasn't sitting and sedentary, it was just very eye-opening and it was shocking to me to think that, like,

okay, yeah, I do have, you know, this crazy amount of activity just in this one little short window throughout the day. That's not going to carry me the whole rest of the day and, you know, I have to factor my calories accordingly. No, unless you have a job that is very active, and what I mean by that is you work construction, blue collar, you're a male carrier, so you're walking miles and miles every single day. The vast majority of the people listening to podcast right now, 90% or more of you

are at most, you know, light activity. Most of us are not very active throughout the day. Even if you work out for an hour and a half every single day, if your job is at a desk, in your car, if you're maybe just standing, but you're not really doing tons of activity, most of us are pretty sedative. I remember vividly when this all came full circle for me. What client I was training,

how it all came to be, and I was training client, her name was Tony, she'd been with me for a really long time. And this, she had, I had her before, the Body Bug Tool came out, and then I had her afterwards, and she was one of those great clients that like did everything you told them to, like your favorite client to train, then you could really get to challenge yourself and your knowledge of which how you could help somebody when somebody does such a good job of giving you the real good feedback, right? And I remember sitting down with her after,

it was on a Monday and we had a good week of training and then she had her weekend and then I seen her and we're going over her body bug results, like what she'd burned and Cal, I don't know that that, and I'm looking at the days that I train her and we're going over her body bug results, like what she'd burned and call it and I'm looking at the days that I train her. And I know I was kicking her ass. She'd been with me for a while and she was advanced, we had ramped up our intensity, our training.

And so even as a coach, I was guesstimating about, okay, when we do this, this is about where we should be. And then she had this Saturday where she was double the calories burned than what I, on the training session, I had with her on Wednesday and I was like, what did you do? Are you cheating on me with another trainer? Did you train or just go for a run forever?

She's like, no, she goes and then she starts listening up. Well, I was doing some stuff in the garden and then I actually cleaned the house. It was a beautiful day and then I had to get some groceries. I had to go to Costco and I forgot something so I had to go back. And she starts telling me, and then she goes, but I didn't get a chance to work out. And I was like, whoa, like her calorie expenditure on a non-workout day,

and this just this one example was 2X, so what it was on an extremely hard training day. And so that really enlightened me, like what the discrepancy of people trying to figure out their calories, their burning and intake can be, because she may in her head, those are all like not hard activities for her. It's part of her lifestyle. Now she doesn't do that

every single day, but in her brain, just like the way mine would be operating, is I would think, because I didn't train hard that day. This was not a high calorie burn day. So those things have got to be figured out and factored in and the tracking piece and figuring it out, and at least following it for a while, so you start to learn your behaviors. I think is extremely essential to somebody who has goals. If you have goals to really move and change your body. Totally.

You just want to be healthy, you want to make better decisions, you can strength train, make some adjustments in your diet, and you can be a pretty quote unquote healthy person. But if you have goals, I wanna lose body fat and you're serious about that, and you wanna change that, or you wanna build sort of an amount of muscle, this is tantrum.

So that point too, we, this is why we bring up need as well. Like in terms of just focusing more on your overall activity, like just non-exercise type of activity that you're doing. It's such a more effective approach to get that change because it's not invasive. It's not something like, I think a lot of people think of when they need to change their body has to be this hard push

and this constant hard push, well, I need to do cardio. I need to do crazy cardio for like an hour, an hour and a half and really rigorous cardio. No, it's so much more effective to that point, like I've seen the same thing in terms of the activities and trends of people just being up and moving and washing dishes and going for like light walks

and things that are just very reasonable, but it's frequent throughout your day, you're gonna have much better success. Yeah, and so we're talking about basically knowing your numbers, figuring out your calories burn, that way you can figure out what to eat. And here's the thing, this isn't something that you need to necessarily follow and track forever.

Okay, I talked earlier about walking in a dark room being blindfolded and knowing your calories, figuring out those estimates, figuring out how much you need to eat, that's like turning the light on, taking off the blindfold, now you can see where you need to go. But if you walk that room enough times, just like in my bedroom at my house, okay, if you turn the lights off in my bedroom, I could find my bed, I could find the bathroom, I could find where my socks are, my underwear, all in the dark. When you do this enough times, you start to learn these things about yourself, but this is a very

essential first step. This is a good first step. Now, what if you've been doing this for a long time and you think you know your numbers, but it's been five years since you calculated and figured out your calories burn. It might be a good time to pick it up again. It might be a good time to figure it out again.

I know my body pretty well, but every two years or so, maybe even every year, I start to calculate things out a little because my lifestyle changes, my workouts change a little bit, and I start to reset where I need to go. Now, you can figure out things like TDEE and BMR, there are calculators online. We put one up specifically, we put one up online because a lot of the ones we see online

are not super accurate. They're very, very general. We put one up that's a little bit more accurate. That maps macro.com. So that way you can go and kind of figure that out. But there's a little more to that. You also want to figure out what those calories should be made up of.

Because it's not just about calories. There's also what those calories are made up of. The next block to figure out are known as macronutrients. The first one we'll start with is protein. Protein is very important for anybody who wants to change their way their body looks. Besides being an essential macronutrient, meaning you have to consume a certain amount of protein every single day or your body will fail to thrive. Okay, that means that your body, because your body can make certain amino acids, that's what proteins are made up of.

It can make some of them, but some of them it just can't make. You have to consume them, they're not as essential amino acids, and if you don't eat them, your body will literally cease to function. So protein is so important, you have to eat some, doesn't matter who you are, but the reason why it's so important for weight loss and muscle gain is because for weight loss, it's muscle sparing. So if you eat a high protein diet

and you're eating low calories, you're gonna lose less muscle or if you're lifting weights, you may keep or maybe even build a little bit of muscle. It also satiating, it helps with appetite control. And if for anybody's ever cut their calories, you know that the biggest enemy is, you know, getting hungry. Well, high protein diet tends to satisfy that more than fat in carbohydrates. And then for muscle building, for muscle building, it's very important because proteins are what your body turns into muscle.

And this is what I make clients always focus on first because of that. Because one, it is essential. You made the case for that already. But most people, if you are trying to lose body fat or build muscle, it plays such a huge role in the success of that for the reasons that you just said right now. You do not just build muscle out of thin air. You need the building box for that and protein is essential for that. So it's essential to live,

then it's also essential to build muscle. You're not, if you don't eat any protein and you think you're gonna go build muscle, it ain't gonna happen. So that is something that you have to do for that. And most people that I train, and we're not talking about my bodybuilding clients. Most average people that I've trained

are grossly under eating this macronutrient. So when I first get somebody to work on a macro calculator like this, and then we start to figure out where their calories are, the next first thing I focus on is, okay, let's just really focus on you targeting that number that you need for protein, and then we'll get to the carbs. Totally, I would say eight or nine out of every 10 clients

that I ever trained did well on a high, did better on a high protein diet, eight or nine. Now, the one or maybe two, probably one at a 10 that wouldn't do as well on a high protein diet, just because they would start to get some digestive issues, in which case, we would lower the protein until their digestion felt good. But the vast majority, a high,

I don't care if their goal was to lose weight or their goal was to gain weight. I don't care if it was to build strength or get shredded and burn body fat. A high protein diet, nine at a 10 times, helped in all those ways we talked about. Helped with appetite, helped with building, or keeping muscle, helped keep the metabolism fast.

Here's one of the problems with cutting your calories when you're trying to burn body fat. As you lower calories, your body tries to learn how to burn less calories, because it tries to match the calories coming in. One of the beautiful amazing things about your body is that it evolved to be moldable. It evolved to be to adapt.

So when your calories are low coming in, your body tries to slow its metabolism burn down to try to match that. Well, a high protein diet along with resistance training on a calorie deficit diet, meaning low calories. When you combine high protein with resistance training and low calories, the metabolism slow down is greatly reduced. It's greatly reduced. It's a much lower impact. And in my experience, when I've trained, especially beginners, when I've done it this way,

sometimes I even get their metabolism speed up a little bit. Sometimes I cut their calories, and then I have to bring their calories up a little bit, because the diet and the resistance training actually sped their metabolism up. Now, the best sources of protein are animal sources. Okay, I don't care what the vegan documentary say. Yes, you can get protein are animal sources. Okay, I don't care what the vegan documentary say. Yes, you can get protein from vegan sources.

Yes, you'll be fine with vegan sources of protein. But if you want to pick the best sources of protein in terms of amino acid profile and ability of robotic to assimilate and use them, the studies are pretty conclusive. Animal sources are the best, meaning that 30 grams of animal protein tends to be superior to 30 grams of vegan protein.

Now, you can definitely get decent vegan sources, especially when they're blended, especially when you have different different vegan sources, because they complement each other. But typically, if you want to reap the benefits of a high protein diet, and you're not eating animal sources,

you probably need a little bit more protein just to make up the difference. Best sources of protein, red meat, chicken, eggs, eggs, if you can tolerate them. I have some of the best amino acid profiles, meaning they have the best constituents that make up the proteins, the best balance, dairy is an excellent also source of protein. And if you are somebody that struggles with getting enough protein, protein powders can help a lot. Now what is high protein? High protein is about 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of body weight. I like to tell people this, aim for 1 gram of protein

per pound of lean body mass. So in other words, get your body fat percentage, subtract your body fat. Now, 1 gram per pound of lean body mass. So in other words, get your body fat percentage, subtract your body fat. Now, one gram per pound of that. So, you know, I might, for example, for me, my lean body mass, I might be sitting at 185 pounds of lean body mass. I'm gonna aim for 185 grams of protein every day,

regardless of whether or not I wanna gain or lose weight. And what makes this actually, it sounds a little complicated, like you've never done this before, but this is why, and by the way, we've been talking about this for a while, of all the projects that MindPump has worked on, this has to be the largest year to date, right? Or since we've started MindPump, is building out this pillar page. So it's got a plethora of information

that we're talking about. So there's things that we're saying right now and you want deeper, more information. Not only when you go to the calculator page that Sal already mentioned, but there's also all kinds of links and more free content around these topics. So you can learn about it.

And when you go and you enter in your body fat percentage and your weight, it will figure this out for you. So it'll tell you your lean body mass, and then you just plug in the amount of grams of protein. There's a little... It'll tell you how many calories to eat, based on your goal. It's got a nice little slider on there and everything,

so you can manipulate it a little bit. If you want to be a little lower, a little bit higher, and it does all the math for you. So it makes it very, very easy, and you use it differently. We have calculators on there that'll tell you your give you a good estimate of your basal metabolic rate and we'll give you an estimate of your total daily

energy expenditure. So you can kind of figure out how many calories you're burning every single day and then figure out how many grams of proteins, fats and carbs and calories. Speaking of which, we talked about proteins, the next I would say most important macronutrient are fats.

Like protein, fats are essential. There are essential fatty acids that you have to consume in food, otherwise your body will also fail to thrive. So that means you cannot go on a zero fat diet. You can't do that. You saw, if you guys ever seen that show alone. Yeah, so this guy, he killed a moose,

which that's a ton of me. That could last you like an entire year, but he stripped it down of all this fat and Wolverine came and took all the fat and he ended up basically starving while he had all this excess of meat. So it is an essential thing your body needs to, you know, as a building block for everything.

Oh yeah, hunters in the old days in the Midwest, they would go crazy, lose their mind, sometimes die because all they would be able to hunt and kill sometimes were lean jack rabbits. So they weren't able to get enough fat in their diet. All they had was protein and some of them, you literally starve to death. You have to have fat in your diet just to survive.

Well, the analogies you guys just brought are extreme analogies, but I remember, this was especially in the first five years of my career because we were still right in the thick of the low fat thing. I mean, that when everything was being marketed to us was low fat, low fat, low fat. And now I saw this both in male and female, but I saw it really bad in my, in my female clients.

And I could, and I did, this was before I, I knew all of this, and I was still bought into the low fat type of diet too. And I had a lot of clients, I had a lot of female clients that had hormone issues. And it was because they were eating such a low fat diet that they had all these problems going on. And I just assumed like, man, I just keep getting these ladies that have got hormone issues. It's so weird. That's just that common.

I didn't know that what was causing it for so many of these women that I was training was that they were grossly under consuming fats. And that was one of the first like game changers for me was piecing that all together. And then after I figured out protein, just like you said, this is the next place I go, is okay, now let's look at your fat and make sure you're getting adequate grams of fat per day because of the hormonal benefits.

And what I would notice right away, I mean, they would see things in their hair, their skin, their mood would be better. So they would energy would come up right away. They'd be sleeping better, strength. We'd be putting on all these things started to happen just by me like taking a client and going like, oh, let's just boost your 20 more grams of fat as it would be almost double of what they're you staying if you'd be eating 25 grams, 30 grams of fat in a day, be given them 50 would be like a huge game chain. In my experience, most people do best

if they're fat as a percentage of their calories doesn't go below 20%, 15% at the lowest. Okay, so if you're looking at your total calories, try not to eat less than maybe 20, 15% at the lowest. If you're somebody that tends to thrive off of higher carbs, wants a little bit less fat, 15% would be the lowest, I'd say, but about 20% for most of my clients is what they did best. Now, if you're having trouble figuring this out again,

you can go to our site maps macro.com. And then what you do is when it figures out your calories, you can slide the percentage so you can say, okay, 20% fat from my calories, that's what my fat grams are gonna be. But remember, fat, very important for hormone production and health. Nerve production health, your brain,

your brain thrives off of fats, it's built off of fats. They're very, very important. Good sources of fat, healthy animal sources of fat are perfectly fine. Eggs are perfectly fine, dairy is perfectly fine. But you also have great vegan sources of fat, avocados, coconut, oil, nuts and seeds, olive oil, also excellent, excellent sources of healthy fat.

The best sources of fat, in my opinion, come from fish. Fish have some amazing fatty acid profiles. I had so much success with increasing my clients fat and take early on, and it was such a game change for me that what I started to do was, okay, still, we made protein the number one macro. First we focused on, we nailed that down. And that was roughly 20% of their intake.

Then what I would do is I would actually play with the remaining percentage, the other 80% and I would divide it with carbs and fat. And let them, like sometimes I'd say, hey, let's have more carbs today and see how you feel and then let's get feedback. So let's let you have 60% of the intake come from carbohydrates and only 20% come from fat.

And then the next day I'd say, hey, let's do 60% fat and only 20% carbs. And I would ask for my client to give me feedback. How did you feel? How was your workout? How would you sleep and like trying to help them connect that. And what I found was a lot of my clients actually thrived in a nice more even split and did really, really well.

In less they were like an athlete, where they needed a lot of that quick sugar from carbohydrates. Most of my clients actually did really well by dividing the percentage up between fats and carbs. I agree. For the rest of the makeup of their calories, and that's what's cool about this calculator, is you can slide that, right? You can slide it, it makes it really easy for you to say, okay, let's today, let's try

me having a higher percentage of fat, and you just slide it up five or 10%. It'll take it away from you, right? It'll take it away from the carbs, and then it'll naturally give you the, it's super cool how this works, and it really helps you by yourself. If you don't have a coach, you don't have a trainer who's doing your diet for you, it'll teach you how you can manage and manipulate that. And personally, I do this all the time,

where I notice that on days, when I'm not training, I like to have higher fat days. And I do that because it satiates me more. And it doesn't, and I don't need the The quick fuel because I'm not exercising right and I'm more sedentary on the days. You're not training right I actually like which is seems counter right because most people would think oh god You're not moving around very much maybe lower fat that day. No not at all I actually like more fat on the days that I'm not moving as much

I'm not exercising in lower carbohydrates on my days when I'm training hard as much, I'm not exercising in lower carbohydrates. On my days when I'm training hard or I'm going for a big hike or something like that, that's when I allow more carbohydrates because I want that quick fuel because I'm gonna be exercising and I feel better that way. So that's what's neat about this calculator is you guys have the ability to manipulate that up and down

to figure out what your body feels best. Totally. Now, we talked about carbs, let's get into carbs here. Now carbohydrates are not essential. Okay, that means you could go the rest of your life without eating a single carbohydrate. It wouldn't be ideal, but you'd be fine.

Your body would function just fine. It could produce all of the glucose that it needs through the amino acids and fats that you'll be consuming. It'll produce energy through the fats, through something known as ketones, so you don't have to eat carbs at all in order to survive. But does that mean that you shouldn't?

And I'm gonna say no. I'm gonna say sure, some people do well. I'm very, very low carbohydrate diets, but most people don't. Carbohydrates, not long-term. No, not long-term. Most people perform best when they have some carbohydrates. If you want to build muscle,

very hard to do in my experience, again, this is with training lots of people, and I'm not saying this is true for everybody, but for most of the people I've worked with, it's very hard to build muscle and strength on a very, very low carbohydrate diet. Very, very low carbohydrate diets can also cause hormone problems in some people. It can cause cortisol issues in women. It can believe it or not cause insulin issues. You think, oh, insulin will be good on low carbohydrate, but sometimes being too low all the time causes you become so sensitive that you eat the slightest bit of carbohydrate and you looks like you have diabetes.

So every once in a while throwing in carbohydrates is a good idea there as well. And that's what you have to keep this into consideration because I know it's and I'm glad you win this direction cell because the ketogenic diet and the carnivore diet is so popular right now and there's people that are raving all about it. And hey, you know what, if it works for you and that's a lifestyle you like to live long term, that's fine. But you got to be careful because if you get used to that, you teach your body to actually utilize different sources of fuel. And then if all of a sudden you have a weekend or a birthday come up and tip the scale like

this and you splurge on carbohydrates, you know, just this one day, but because you've been so consistent with having zero little to none, and then all of a sudden you have a day to go over. Now your body ends up hiling that on more than it would had you been used to being able to metabolize carbohydrates. Oh, the biggest, the biggest swings I've ever seen in my entire life with clients were the ones that went from no carb, a low carb diets, to then trying to eat a more balanced diet and then just going so way off. And you see their weight going the opposite direction because those carbs triggered such a strong hunger response. They start out holding water

and their bodies don't respond very well to it because it was all at once. So yeah, it's a little extreme to go low or no carb long-term. There's even some studies that show that sometimes women can have thyroid issues from going low carb for too long. So there are some cases where low or no carb is perfectly fine. I know there are people with gut health issues that do well

with this, some autoimmune issues that do well. Aging populations, they get cognitive performance boost when their carbs are real low and their fats are real high. So I'm not saying this is true for everyone, but for the most people, you wanna have some carbohydrates in the eye. Well, I think too, that's where you need to do some detective work personally and kind of like cycle through like the different variations of carbohydrates, which ones, you know,

are best for you to digest. And I know that that's a big factor in performance as well is like, how well I can digest this food. And if I have like any reaction, if I have any bloat, anything else that, you know, I sort of get as a byproduct of that. So, you know, carbs themselves, you know, they're not the demons that a lot of these other methods are promoting. It's just a matter of how your individual body is going to respond. Right.

Now carbs can, for me they are, they're a trigger for hunger, so I know when I'm trying to get leaner, I don't tend to go zero carb, but I'll go lower carb mainly because it helps control my appetite. Carbohydrates should increase, they tend to make me hungry. But if I'm trying to build muscle, I use that to my advantage and I eat a little bit more carbs to boost my appetite. And of course, I said earlier, I do notice strength gains.

Now, the best sources of carbs are the unprocessed sources of carbohydrates, the ones that don't come in a box or a bag or a wrapper. Fruits are fine, starchy vegetables, fine, white rice is my favorite source of carbohydrate. It's very, very easy for me to digest. It's gluten-containing carbs, sometimes cause people problems. I know they do for me, so I tend to stay away from breads and cereals and pastas that's contained gluten. But for other people, those are perfectly fine. In my experience, training clients, rice and potato and sweet potato tend to be the easiest

digesting kind of best sources of carbohydrates. Fruits are good too, but in my experience, you can overdo fruit, and I don't mean it in the sense that they're bad for your health. I mean, in terms of digestion. You ever eat a ton of fruit all at once, you know overdo fruit. And I don't mean it in the sense that they're bad for your health. I mean in terms of digestion. You ever eat a ton of fruit all at once, you know exactly what I'm talking about. So the hack for fruit for me was learning about the different types of fruits, the benefits that come from them and figuring out how to recommend that client. So I would tell clients that like really enjoy fruit,

want it in their diet. I like it in their diets. Good. I like berries. I would tell them. Oh, high fiber. Yes, it's high fiber, high antioxidant low calorie. So it's like the triple threat for you.

Like when you dabble in things like apples, bananas, pears, all these things are great watermelons, but you don't get nowhere near the bang for your buck when you consume those fruits. And so I'm not gonna demonize or say those ones aren't good. They're good, they're fine. But you get way more value from going after berries. And so I would typically push clients towards the berries

when they're eating fruits. And maybe we have the occasional apple pair, things like that, as I could treat for them. But their staple fruit in their diet would be all the different types of berries I found the most value. Right, so quick recap, figure out your goal, you want to gain or you want to lose, determine what your calories burned are so you know how many calories consume, figure out your protein,

high protein works best for most people, and then fats and carbs you can, you can mess with those a little bit. There are essential amount of fats that you need to eat, but aside from that, you can play around with it a little bit. Now if if you go to mapsmacro.com, we have different macro calculators, we have calculators that can tell you your BMR, your total daily energy expenditure, then we have ones that will just tell you, here's the calories you need to eat, here's what your proteins need to be at, here's what your fats need to be at, here's what your carbohydrates are at, set the protein to one gram of protein per pound of lean body mass, and then have fun messing with the carbs and the fats and see how you feel, see how you respond.

And then here's my next piece of advice. Follow those numbers, and based on how your body responds, tweak them to make them as individualized as possible, because there's always an individual variance. The most accurate calculators in the world, and I believe the ones that we have on our site are some of the best ones. We really did our due diligence and figuring out the best algorithms. No matter how accurate they are,

there's always an individual variance. So as you're following the guidelines and you're watching your weight on the scale change and your body change, if things are happening too fast, bump your calories up or change things around based on how you feel because at the end of the day, nutrition is extremely, extremely individualized. And look, mind pump is audio and video recorded. So you may be listening to us through your headphones or in your car, but you can actually

watch us on YouTube as well. Go to YouTube Mind Pump Podcast, go check that out. I mentioned the macro calculators we have that's at maps macro dot com and then if you want to check us out on instagram you can find all of us uh... you can find just an at mind pump justin you can find me at mind pump sell at my my pump at them and dug at mind pump dot thank you for listening to mind pump

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