Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1537: Why Meal Plans Are Making You Fat

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin discuss why following a meal plan can result in long-term weight loss failure. Making the case that meal plans may be making you fat. (1:47) Mind Pump Reminisces: The silliness of the old Apex meals at 24 Hour Fitness. (3:30) The attractiveness of meal plans. (5:33) Defending the potential value of meal plans. (8:22) Why you must focus on your behaviors to create long-term success. (13:10) Make it real-world applicable. (18:54) The psychological impact of eating the same foods. (20:46) Not all metabolisms are created equal. (23:33) Listen to your body and learn to enjoy the process. (25:58) The importance of undulating your calories for faster weight loss and improved metabolism. (29:48) How to create better behaviors around food. (32:14) Step #1 – Become aware of the foods that trigger you to overeat. (33:05) Step #2 – Add more protein and vegetables. (35:25) Step #3 – Drink more water. (37:00) Step #4 – Create barriers around your trigger foods. (38:11) Step #5 – Build new associations with foods that make you feel good. (40:40) Related Links/Products Mentioned April Specials: MAPS Anabolic or Shredded Summer Bundle 50% off!  **Promo code “APRILSPECIAL” at checkout** Visit Legion Athletics for the exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Code “mindpump” at checkout** What Kind of Diet Plan Should Women Have in Order to Lose Weight? - Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump #1460: How To Lose Fat Without Dieting How To Get Rid of Unhealthy Habits – Mind Pump Blog The Keto Diet is Making People Fat – Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump #1527: The 3 Step Solution To The Obesity Epidemic MAPS Macro Calculator How to Undulate Your Calories for Faster Weight Loss & an Improved Metabolism Mind Pump #1207: Five Ways To Lose Weight Without Counting Calories 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. You just found the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Alright, in today's episode, we talk about the worst diet of all time, meal plan diets. Why they make people fat. Believe it or not, not only are they very much not successful,

but in the long term, they tend to cause more problems. So you'll love this episode. It's gonna teach, by the way, at the end of the episode, we actually tell you what to do. So we don't just bash meal plans at the end we give you solutions. This podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, Legion. Legion makes incredible performance enhancing supplements.

They have Craya Teen and Protein powders and a pre-workout called Pulse, my favorite flavor is bubble gum, which got caffeine and beta-align and other things in there that actually improve performance. Great company, great supplements, especially if you're interested in the more hardcore results,

like building muscle burning body fat. Go check them out, use our code, go to bi-legion.com, that's B-U-Y-L-E-G-I-O-N.com, forward-slash-mind pump, use the code Mind Pump and get 20% off. One more thing, we are running a huge promotion. It's actually one of the biggest promotions we've done in a long time. Maps and Obolic is 50% off, and our shredded summer bundle is 50% off. By the way, that bundle includes maps aesthetic, maps prime, maps hit, and the intuitive nutrition guide.

Both of those 50% off, you can learn about them or sign up at maps fitnessproducts.com. But remember to use the code April special with no space for that discount. I have something for the YouTubers. Wow. Remember when salutes to call me YouTubers? Hey, don't put it on me. You did some old ass shit right there. No, that was exactly, that was your thing.

Well, don't you remember that? Yeah, I might have done it a lot. This is for the YouTubers out there. The YouTubers? Yeah. Maybe. No, we have something that I think is obviously going gonna ruffle some feathers when we say it like this, but meal plans may be making you fat.

You know it's funny. See, wow. This is one of those things that when you first become a trainer, this is what you're sold on. Like this is how you do it. This is how it works. Where's the formula? Go do it.

And then you reverse so hard, you make a 180 with this later on in your career. And there's a few things like that as personal trainers, but this one has to be one of the strongest ones. Like if you told me in the first two or three years I was a trainer that meal plans, not only were they ineffective, but they also caused people to gain weight.

I would have been like, I wouldn't have believed you. Yeah, I would have said you're crazy. There's no way. I mean, that's what we were sold on. In fact, my first certifications, this was part of what they talked about. When I managed gyms, this was the nutrition side

of what we did was exactly this. We would have people fill out a survey and then we would give them meal plans. We'll also think about the hustle of that a little bit, and how hard that they were trying to get us to push supplements and how the supplements were conveniently worked into the meal plan. Always the meal replacement.

And so, yeah, I saw the business end of that for sure, but it wasn't really aware of how that was actually going to affect my clients, you know, not necessarily positively, but negatively as a result. So were you around at 24 when they did, when Apex did the meal plans? I was there when Apex first became a part of a 24. So were you there afterwards, were they like, so we used to have to do this thing where, you know, I think it was God it must have been at least three or four sheets of questionnaires that they had to fill out.

And then part of your job as a trainer was you implemented it in the computer, right? And they figured out if you had more carbs, less fat. Yeah, and you put in all their measurements and then the software, do you remember these meal plans? They were hilarious. Oh my God. You would get, like, and the computer, okay, the way the software worked, it was definitely, this was, you're just trying to fill the macros by the way. Well, yeah, but if you remember, I wish, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, get, and the computer, okay, the way the software worked, it was definitely, this was, you're just trying to fill the macros,

by the way. Well, yeah, but if you remember, I wish, and I bet if I go in, you know, finding my storage, I could probably find some of these old printouts because I printed out so many. The computer just takes their, you know, their weight, their activity level, all the foods that they said they like or didn't like or whatever, you know,

because there was like four bubbles, it was like, you really don't like it, you never will eat it or you kind of whatever. So rarely, like sometimes. So it would kick off like a snack would be something like this. Half an orange, two saltine crackers. Yeah, two saltine crackers. Yeah, yeah, three tablespoons of peanut butter. Yeah.

It was like this weird, you know, I make it worth half an English muffin. Yeah, it's one of them. Yeah, oh my God. And like a quarter of a chicken breast. Yeah. And I remember being a really young trainer and just like this is, I mean, at that time,

my level of education and nutrition was very, very minimal. And so I leaned heavily on the Apex certification and this computer's algorithm to tell my clients what to do. I'm just gonna be a cheerleader and take you through your workout. I'm not a nutrition guy. Save the other half of the orange for tomorrow. Well, I clients would come to me and they're like,

Adam, what do we do? Do I really have to eat like this? What am I gonna do with a quarter can of tuna? What am I gonna do with the rest? And I remember going like two tablespoons of orange juice. And I remember having responses like Sal just said, well, you know, save the rest? And I remember going like, two tables, two orders, two. And I remember having responses like, Sal just said, well, you know, save the rest for the next day.

And it's just like, that is the dumbest thing. Now, all joking aside, of course, people these days make meal plans and they make them much more, I guess, realistic, right? But that still doesn't change the fact that they're super not effective. Now, the reason why this is such a, so attractive is because one of the number

one things people say to trainers or at least one of the number one things people would say to me when they'd hire me would be just tell me what to do. I'm going to give you money, sell, and then of course they're coming to me in this state of mind, right? They finally decided to hire a trainer, probably been thinking about it for months, and they just decided they're gonna spend $1,000, $2,000, $3,000. I'll give you money, I literally just, I'm just gonna show up. Yeah, just ask them to tell you.

If you just do it, I'll do exactly what you tell me, and then that's it, that'll solve my problem, and I'll get in shape, and of course, it doesn't work that way. Now, number one, if you haven't guessed by now, a meal plan, well, more time on meal plans what we're talking about are literally plans that tell you what to eat for breakfast, snack, lunch, snack dinner,

or whatever. Everything is very specific. It has all the calories, all the macro breakdown, and you have to literally follow it to a tee. Now, I do have some empathy for the trainers that are new that are put in this position too though, because to your point, Sal about clients come in and they say this, and they're paying, right?

You're a new trainer, you're just starting to build your business, your portfolio of clients, and you're on client 12. You barely getting started here, and the clients like, I want a meal plan. I pay you $80 an hour. Tell me what to eat. Yeah, tell barely getting started here. And the client's like, I want a meal plan. You know, I pay you $80 an hour. Tell me what to eat. Yeah, tell me what to eat.

Like, you have, and more than likely, you haven't been taught how to navigate through that conversation, the right way to get to the place where you want to get them to where you teach them how to do this. It's also compounded though with the fact that you know, as a trainer, if they just ate what you told them, they would lose weight. Now, this is the hard part about this, okay?

The hard part is if you did eat the right amount of calories, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates through eating exactly what your meal plan tells you, you will lose weight. You will see results from that standpoint. Now the problem is not what happens when you follow it perfectly. The problem is what happens when you stop following it. And you're very likely to not follow it to begin with. And this is just in our experience. It's extremely rigid process.

And it doesn't focus on working on people's, the real reason why they have issues with it. Well, it also echoed a lot of the frustration, a lot of trainers I would talk to, like my clients are just not following this, and they're not coming in, they're eating all the wrong foods, and not realizing that it was weird. Like, I eat this way all the time.

I can't understand why they won't do this. Well, before we make the case on, you know, why they are making people fat, I do want to defend where I see value in them still today. So, I mean, I saw you said it only took you a few years. It took me probably a decade before I moved completely away from meal plans. But I do want to talk about the clientele or the type of person where I still see value here.

Right. And the first one that comes to mind obviously for me is competitors. Absolutely. If you're going to, if you have 12 or 16 weeks to get down to 3% body fat, to get on a stage and present yourself, then it makes sense. If you're an athlete and you have a specific goal for a particular season, then it starts to make sense because you have a goal, you know where you want to get, and it's very specific. It's also, by the way, competitors and even athletes in this sense don't have a long-term approach because a competitor is just thinking about getting on stage.

Now if you're listening, you're not a competitor, and you say, well, I just want to get in shape, you got to think about the after you say, well, I just want to get in shape, you got to think about the after. You have to think about the after. Who wants to get in shape only to go get back out of shape? And that's, again, that's the big problem. And I think some people do have that mentality when they're hyper-motivated, and they think

that I'm just going to get through this, lose the weight, do whatever I have to do, and then I'll go right back, you know, it's the way I like to eat, and not realizing that that's completely different and they're gonna have this crazy rebound even. So I learned to set my clients up once I figured out how to move them away from this, right?

So the conversation I'd have, because you hear this all time, I add them, they hire you and they go, I wanna lose 30 pounds as fast as I possibly can. What is it gonna take? What is it, give me the meal plan, whatever. And I say, okay, cool. And I just, I hear that and go about our conversation we move along and then when I circle back to like laying out our plan

And what we're gonna be doing I would always drop this like so no you you want to lose 30 pounds as fast we can right now Do you want to put it all back on afterwards or do you want to actually keep it off for the rest of your life? And of course what do they say to you? Yeah, nobody wants to put it back on. Right, nobody says, oh yeah, I want to lose it and then put it all back on. They have this idea of, I just want to get there as fast as possible,

and then I'll figure it out later, I'll deal with it, but the truth is, it's going to come back on. And that's where I would then make the case, like, well listen, if we go about it with the intent of just trying to do this as fast as we possibly can. It's like 90% chance you're going to put all that weight back on if not more.

In fact, in my experience, it's 100%. 100% yeah. I say it never like 90. There's always exceptions to the rule, but every client I ever trained that just followed a meal plan and didn't learn anything along the process always puts it back in. So then you get them to commit to that part of it. But back to the competitor thing, that is a very sport-specific goal. And that person doesn't care about.

I'm not talking about 10 years later. I'm talking about the show I have in three months that I have to be in the most primo shape. And I have to get there as fast as I possibly can. This is again where I see that I see that value there because we're not talking about, I mean, sports in general are not healthy for you. For long-distance.

Well, you're literally putting your lifestyle on hold in order to get to that goal. And so it's all about discipline. And so this fits right in with that ultimate discipline. Right, so short-term goals, this kind of makes sense. All right, I have this short-term goal of maybe figuring out why I have gout.

Sometimes foods can be attached to that. So I need to reduce this, see what happens, or you have a surgery coming up. That's another short term goal. Believe it or not, I know situations when people have had to lose weight to get particular surgeries. Okay, there's that one as well.

Food intolerance is another one. Like, okay, I can't figure out why I have all these gut issues. I've tried all these different ways of solving it. Can't figure it out. I'm going to do 12 week elimination diet. I'm going to put together a meal plan so I know exactly what's going on my mouth. And I can really start to pinpoint what's my problem. But again, that's very, very short term. There is no long term meal plan that's successful unless you're orthorexic unless you're you have dysfunction where you literally have the exact same thing that you eat every

single day where all right breakfast is a quarter cup of oatmeal and a half a cup of milk and a tablespoon of peanut butter like this is exactly how I live and obviously this is not a very healthy way to be as well and to your point about short term I know there's a bunch of people that are listening right now and they're like well shaking their head I to your point about short term, I know there's a bunch of people that are listening right now and they're like, oh, it's shaking their head, I disagree. When I followed X meal plan, I was in the best shape of my life. And so then I would challenge you,

well, where the fuck are you at right now? Right, it wasn't a long term solution. In that short window, when you were following something to a T, you got in good shape, but then you fell out of shape again. And that's what we see here, because again, it's focusing on the short term, isn't a long-term solution for most the population.

Right, now the main reason why it's not a long-term solution is because it does zero to focus on a person's behaviors. Now the reason why, and I'm gonna challenge people right now, okay, because I remember this was confusing for me early on as a trainer. I used to actually have this conversation with people where someone would hire me and they're 60 pounds overweight or someone would hire me and they can barely sit

in a chair without hurting or whatever. And I remember thinking to myself, like that didn't happen overnight. The person who needs to lose 60 pounds at one point was 20 pounds overweight. At another point was 30 pounds overweight and another point was point was 20 pounds overweight. At another point was 30 pounds overweight. At another point was 40 and 50 pounds overweight. What were they not aware of what was happening

during this whole period of time? And the truth is you kind of are. You kind of are aware of what's going on. You just don't, you don't care. And now why is this important? Why is this important? I know because the information's out there, it's not a problem that's solved with information.

It isn't anymore, it's not a problem that's like, oh, I know why you're obese, you just, you just don't, you need to eat less calories. Everybody knows the eat less calories. Or, oh, you know why you're obese? You just don't know that you need to eat less and that you need to exercise. Everybody knows those things.

Now, their approach is maybe wrong, but the main reason why they're wrong is it's not focusing on the behaviors. Why do I overeat? Why do I have this relationship with food? Why do I have this relationship with movement that makes me not want to move? If you don't address those,

no approach in the world is going to work. Well, you don't learn anything. You're giving them, as a trainer, as a coach, you're giving them the answers to the test. That's imagine if that's how you went to school. No, really though. You're giving them, as a trainer, as a coach, you're giving them the answers to the test. That's, imagine if that's how you went to school. No, really though. You're just in, you're cool. You're gonna need. You're gonna need.

The client comes to you, they hire you to lose 30 pounds. Your job as a coach and a trainer is to teach them how to lose 30 pounds, not to just lose their 30 pounds. Otherwise, that's exactly what you're doing. You're just giving them the answers to the test. Then when they're done, they have no clue on really what got them there other than, oh, if I hire a coach and follow a meal plan,

that's the answer. And that is not an answer for long term solution for anybody. No, and even if you're, let's say you're this billionaire and you have a trainer all the time and you have a chef that cooks you food all the time. So everything is totally planned for you. And that sounds great.

Some people listening right now might be like, I would be in shape. Ooh, what a relief. That would totally get me in shape. No, it wouldn't because you still have to eat the food. You still have to not eat certain foods. You still have to do the workouts. So although people are telling you what to do,

you still have to participate. And this is why we still have to see overweight rich people. In fact, here's the funny thing, people that tend to hire personal trainers tend to be wealthier, personal training is relatively expensive. And yet, these are the people that are running into these problems. So they have the resources to do this kind of stuff. It's still not working. And that's because the answer to this problem is not the, give me the meal plan answer, but rather we got to figure out a way to teach,

we got to lead you in a way to get you to a point where these are the decisions you made on your own. They never really own the experience. You know, it's sort of like this insurance. Like I bought this and so, you know, it's something that they can always lean back on, like why have a trainer to kind of take care of this? And so when they're out in a situation

where they have to navigate certain types of foods, like you know certain types of behaviors where they're not moving quite as much, well, I'll just kind of bring all this back and they'll take care of it. Well, okay, so we've seen now the so many diet. Since the time that all of us have been in the fitness space, right?

So you're talking about two decades. I mean, I've seen so many diets hit the market. I've seen the Atkins diet hit the market. I've seen the Atkins diet, hit the market. I've seen the Paleo diet. I've seen Mediterranean diet. I've seen low fat diet. That was one of the first ones, right? Just eating low fat. I've seen vegan diet. I've seen all these diets that have come out and been promoted as the best and next greatest thing. And if you just follow it, here's the numbers. Obviously, if you just eat, you know, like you're supposed to do with the paleo or whatever, you're gonna see good health numbers

and it's gonna work and all that stuff. But none of them made a dent, not even a dent in the obesity epidemic. None of them made a dent in getting people really in long term ways. And one of the main reasons besides what we said earlier, which was the behaviors aren't addressed, one of the main reasons is because,

besides that is because they're all restrictive, right? So they all tell you, don't eat this segment of food, don't eat carbs, don't eat fat, don't eat foods that are brown or white or that are gluten or whatever, they're very restrictive. Now here's the funny thing, and everybody agrees, by the way, everybody watching listening will be like, oh yeah, he's right, restrictive.

What's more restrictive than a meal plan? Not only am I telling you, you can't eat carbs, but I'm telling you, this is all you're gonna need. This food for this specific meal. Yes, you know what's funny about that? You talk about restrictive diets. So let's just talk about keto, and let's talk about how limited you are

in terms of what your options are. And so this brings in other companies to try and market. Now there's like Keto Fudge. You know, there's Keto Brownies. Like there's all these like manufactured ways of like trying to give you something that resembles like what you used to eat. But now it's like that. What do you think they're going to grab the most of versus like,

you know, what they should be? Well, the other thing you have to understand is human behavior. We are rebellious by nature. Like, that's just in our nature to be. We need to feel free. Yes, we need to feel free. And you have to know this about yourself. And by doing that, even though you're choosing to follow this milk plan,

you're putting yourself in this restriction. And then you have that mental game of, oh, I can't have that. We just did an episode not that long ago about changing the way you speak about your relationship with food. And it's not I can't have I don't want it. No, thank you, right? It's isn't but if you keep saying that you can't oh, I can't it's not on my meal plan like you are just setting yourself up for an explosion later on and you were talking about companies meeting demand by the way a meal plans have been around forever in fact, it's probably one of the first ways people died it.

And it's some of the largest and longest running, marketers or companies in this space are based around this. Like, weight watchers used to make all their money with frozen meals. So there's your meal plan. Just eat our frozen meals. Jenny Craig was another one.

Now they have lean cuisine or whatever. Hey, here's our diet and make it even easier for you. You don't even need to cook. In fact, just buy our meals, put in the microwave or warm it up and you have everything perfect. And those again, they fail. They fail and you go it. And those also fail on a long-term basis.

Number, and again, it's literally nothing like real life. Let's talk about real life for a second. You live in a modern society, you have an almost infinite number of things you can eat at any given moment. The variety is incredible. And by the way, you don't just eat for taste or just for sustenance.

You eat for lots of different reasons. There's social reasons, there's emotional reasons, of course, there's taste and enjoyment reasons. So you have to navigate all of this in the real world and a meal plan does nothing to teach you that. A meal plan literally just says, stay on this road. Oh, and by the way, real life involves all these other twists and turns, but you're just going to stay on this particular.

That's almost impossible. And I remember when I would try following meal plans, what a pain in the ass that would be when you'd be out with a friend or Not even going out with just stay home. Yeah, or even just with your family. Hey honey, let's go to the beach today And I like, oh fuck, I got my meal plan. What am I going to do? And whatever? And I can see competitors do it for 12 weeks, but I can't see anybody doing it forever. Can you explain to Sal first, like, you know, Justin mentioned like the keto diet, for example, and I've seen this happen, like,

why is it when someone follows like the ketogenic diet for an extended period of time, and then they come off and they like rapidly put on weight when they start consuming carbohydrates again? Right, well, one of the main reasons is because it creates this psychological phenomenon where, if I stay in this parameter, I'm good, anything outside of it is a fail, right? So it's not like if I have one thing off my meal plan,

then I'm still okay. It's not on my meal plan at all. So now that I've gone off, once you've gone off, you're done, you're off. I already, you know, and how many times have you said have you said, you know what, I already ate bad today. So let's have dinner too. Let's do dessert too. And it's an interesting, obviously it's not logic.

That's the psychological part. Well, what about the physiological part? The part that your body is now adapted to not really assimilating carbohydrates the same way that it would assimilate it when you're on a high fat diet. Feast and famine mentality now where you're introducing and you get now the body's like, wants to store. Well, you remember when I interviewed, what was the ultra marathon runner,

like how he utilized that exact, what I'm talking about. Oh, you're talking about high favorites. In fact, people who go super, super low carb and then introduce carbs later, they actually, if they test them, can look like they're having a crazy sugar response. Because their body's so hyper sensitive to those things.

And this can, by the way, you can actually, if you eat the same thing over and over again, this can actually set the stage for developing food intolerances or immune reactions to food. Because if you have any inflammation at all, you could potentially be having these foods do, what's called leaky guts and drum work, travels through the gut lining. And if every day you eat oatmeal, every

single day because it's on your meal plan, oatmeal is getting introduced in that way over and over and over again. You increase your odds of developing, you know, and I've used a random food, but you develop an intolerance to oatmeal. So eating the same foods all the time, probably not necessarily good for you as well from that particular standpoint. But yeah, the big one is it's just, it's nothing like real life. You know, workouts are different, right?

Because although I will say just, if you're just trying to be more active, the more successful approach is to figure out how to make your life more active, we know that. But if you're going to do your resistance training workout, right, I get that. You got to go in, you follow a plan, it's the most effective thing, but here's the difference. If you're the average person trying to get in shape, your resistance training workout, that structure, it is two to three days a week. If you're really hardcore, fine, five days a week, but that's what, five hours, maybe at the most, you're looking at 14 hours, a week of exercise. How many hours a day are we eating food or contemplating

to eat food? It's a completely different ball game. In fact, as a trainer, it was very easy in comparison to get my clients to work out. It was very hard to get them to eat a particular way because that's what they're dealing with all the time. The other problem I have with them is how grossly inaccurate they can be. So you can go get, I mean, you could go use like our macro calculator and put in like your activity level and your age and how much you're exercising, how much your body fat percentage, your goals, you can enter all this data to get a good idea

of what a meal plan or where you should be at for your goal. But the problem with that, and it goes back to your point about not mimicking real life, is that, have you guys ever had a client that burns the same amount of calories day in and day out for weeks on in? The metabolism doesn't even work that way. No, it's so different.

And I remember, remember when this came together, I remember, this was when Body Bug came out like in the early 2000s, when I realized like, and this was for myself, right? So for the longest time, I had this massive plateau, like I couldn't get leaner than about 9% body fat. And I was a trainer, I understood macros really well, I was training really well,

and I was extremely disciplined Monday through Friday. And then on Saturday and Sunday, I would, I wouldn't eat like an asshole, but I would let myself off the diet, wouldn't be following a meal plan, per se, right? And, or that might be a day that I might take off of training. I was so clueless to the difference in my calorie expenditure. Now, looking back and probably listeners are going like,

duh, you know, when I tell a story here, because I'm a trainer working 10 hours plus a day, okay, which means I'm walking around, picking weights up, training clients, 10 hours in a day, and also training on that day. So I'm burning 5,000 plus calories. Then I could be the guy on Saturdays, like man, I worked hard all week.

I'm sleeping in till 10 or 11. That's my feet up. Yeah, I'm gonna watch football for all the way till six o'clock, you know, then my first bit of activities that go to the refrigerator or whatever. And then also, I look and I, I see that I'm burning 2500 calories. Now, I had a tool eventually to like clue me in on this. But it was enough. I was doing enough damage on Saturday or Sunday or both to counteract all the great work that I was doing during

the week. And so you have to, in order to figure this out, you've got to learn your own patterns and behaviors like that so you can adjust the way you're eating. Well, and to take it even a step further, right, your food, just like your workouts, by the way, if you really want them to succeed for you long term, they should be used like tools and they should be manipulated, modified, to improve your quality.

You gotta individualize it. Yeah, so it makes no sense that I'd have the same food or meal plan week in a week out, whether I'm stressed, whether my sleep is good or not, whether or not my workouts are more intense because I feel better or not, whether my activity's good or not, whether or not my workout's a more intense because I feel better or not, whether my activity's changing or not.

If I have any potential nutrient deficiencies or illness and my sick should I eat the same? This doesn't make any sense. And it's also teaching, really, meal plans, I hate this, that they do this, but they teach you to not listen to your body. They teach you to follow directions, which is terrible.

We're so disconnected from our bodies anyway. What if you issues, and you're still, like, your meal plan says this, I have to keep cramming this in my face because my coach will get mad. But, you know, meanwhile, like your stomach is giving you a lot of information that, you know, this is something that we need to slow down. We need to, you know, adjust our diet and pick a different food. I've actually had people, I'll tell people that, and they'll say, yeah, but then I'll just change my meal plan. It's like, okay, what's the point? What do you mean, change your meal plan every day?

That's called eating normally and figuring out how to listen to your body. Again, we're so disconnected any way from our body, and now what we're telling people is, hey, don't worry about any other signals your body's telling, besides hunger, which you note that's like, just don't listen to anything else. Follow this meal plan.

It doesn't matter how you feel, what's going on. This is what you're eating because we're looking for this particular result. Not only are you not going to get long-term success, but if you do this as your approach, you're probably taking steps back. Now you may be listening thinking, but if I lose 20 pounds, I'm not taking two steps back. Because you're going backwards away from the root, the real way to solve this problem. So then yeah, you lose 20 pounds,

you gain it back, you gain some, and then some, and now you're in a position where you just, you've wasted so much time not listening to your body. In fact, you've learned how to ignore it even more. Well, you also, you miss out on the, the best part is actually the journey. You may not think so. And, but you realize that once you finally get to the destination when you've gone through the journey, right?

It's kind of like you're analogy, you're Mount Everest analogy always talk about, or how we talk about the lottery winners and why they end up broke all the time. It's because you didn't build the behaviors to get there. Right. And that's the part of the process when you're learning about your body,

how your body responds to foods, what food you like, what foods you don't like, what mirrors your lifestyle, that's all part of the journey. And even if it may take you a little longer to get to the goal, it's necessary for you to- It's valuable. For the whole fulfillment part. Otherwise, you do just get in shape.

And then it's like, I don't know what to do from here. You end up falling out of shape. It's a total different experience. Yeah. And really, meal plans encourage this thought as well, which is, this is the plan I'm gonna follow until I get to the school. And what does that mean?

Then I get off. So unless you stay on that meal plan forever, which even then I can argue is not gonna work for you long term, because the points we said earlier were your body changing and stuff, but let's just pretend everything stays the same. And you follow exactly the same for the rest of your life.

Sure, you lose your weight and you keep it off, but nobody really thinks of it that way, right? Do you wanna follow this meal plan forever? No, no, no, just until I get to my goal and then what do you do afterwards? Well, here's what ends up, when you go off of it, the way that it looks is in the opposite direction.

There's a reason why the term binge exists. It's not having one cookie, it's having a whole sleeve of cookies. It's not just going off the meal plan to something similar. It's, I'm off now. Now let's go and go crazy. And this is the behavior that it trains. It's actually training this specific behavior. There's also the danger of this,

and we didn't even list this when we were first talking about this episode, is that of slowing your metabolism down. I've seen this a bunch of times with trainers that work for me where they assess a client, they put them on a meal plan, they see that it's still not working. And so all they do is they go to the...

They keep shaving the calories down down calories down before long. They've got one of our clients on a 800 calorie diet and they're telling they got to stick to this and then the clients doing as they're told because that's what they pay them for. And they follow that diet for months on in at 800 calories, literally just completely destroying this person's metabolism and setting them up for absolute tremendous failure. Yeah, in fact, in my experience, people do better when their calories fluctuate a little bit throughout the week,

and even on a weekly basis. So, and they actually have done studies on this. They've shown where they'll compare two types of people, two groups of people. This group over here is a calorie deficit, the whole eight weeks of people. This group over here is a calorie deficit, the whole eight weeks or whatever. This group over here does a calorie deficit for three weeks and then throws in two or three days

of maintenance or above and then goes back down to the cut. And when they compare the two, the people that fluctuate their calories, of course, trending downward still, result in more fat loss and more muscle maintained. The other group tends to not lose much body fat and actually loses a little bit more muscle. Now real life in the real world, even if you go back to how we evolved, there's no way in hell you ate the exact same thing every single day.

It just wasn't. I mean, unless you were the literally the most successful hunter of all time. In your exhaust so very disciplined, it was very different. Some new world problems. Yeah, some days are very high calories, some days were very low calorie. So our bodies evolved, probably doing best with,

and we've talked about this on other episodes, this mini-cut mini-bulk, and our behaviors work around this as well. A meal plan is so unnatural. It's so anti-human nature, and it so teaches us to ignore our bodies that you actually develop behaviors without realizing it just unintentionally.

Do you develop behaviors that make fat loss or make fitness harder for you in the future? Because you ignore your body, not listening to my body right now, I'm just following this damn meal plan. You are extremely restricted, which leads to a rebound in the opposite direction. So you combine those three things and what you have is a perfect storm for a worse problem in the future. And I've seen that. I've seen that on my own eyes.

So now that we've shit all over meal plans, let's give the audience an idea of what it looks like. So if you guys are coaching somebody right now, and we're talking about nutrition, we don't need to worry about exercise. That's all we're gonna talk about is meal plan type stuff right now. How do you get your clients to have better behaviors around food?

And what is that maybe, let's just say the first couple of weeks to a month process start to look like. Now of course, this is very specific from person to person, right? But we're talking to a big audience, so we're gonna be a little bit more general. So if I have, and this has to be appropriate for the person,

but if I have a person in front of me in, they wanna lose weight, they're motivated, but they have some good discipline as well. So I see this already, and I say, okay, I can definitely restrict with this person. By the way, this is not super common. But if I could, I would just work by restricting the foods that encourage the behaviors that get them to overrate. So these could be trigger foods. These could be foods that they eat at certain periods of time when they're

in front of the TV, or it can become a category of foods like heavily processed foods which tend to make people over. Yeah, I think the first step out of all steps is really the awareness piece, where it's really about cataloging. And know like Adam voices us a lot in terms of like you know writing everything down and having a log and you know it's a bit of a pain in the ass and it's work for the clients but you have to bring it to light. A lot of times people are just unaware. They're unaware that they're consuming bag of chips and their cars or driving. They're unaware that they're drinking certain drinks that actually have calories in them. We have to bring it back to a very, very basic level to start educating that you are introducing

a lot more calories and even realize 100%. This is step one for me. And it is exactly that. It's just bringing awareness to these people. And with no restriction. And so you've got to make sure you're clear with that, if you're a coach and you're helping, and it's like, listen, when I tell them, I want you to track food for the next week, I like a week to two weeks, right? At least a week.

With a week, I can still do a lot. Two weeks is even better. It's just more information for me, right? More data I can look at. And it's long enough that they don't try to fake it. Well, and I make that clear. I say, listen, I want you just to log your food. Now, when I say I want you to log your food,

this isn't like good version of you. This is whatever the fuck you want. Eat like you want to. Yeah, eat like this was two weeks ago before you hired me. Eat what you want to eat, when you want to eat it, all I want to do is track it. And I tell them what I'm looking for is I'm looking for patterns in your behavior.

That's it. So I'm not judging you I'm not saying you can or can't do anything This is gonna give me insight on where I'm gonna take us from there So you tell them go for go to town on what you would normally do and from there You can pick up on the things that Sal was kind of alluding to before of like what are some of their your their big offenders? Oh, wow she drinks three coaks every single day. Or, oh wow, she hasn't had a single vegetable in five days

or he doesn't get enough protein. Or to even go deeper, like, wow, I notice when you have your glass of wine, you tend to really overeat. That looks like it's a trigger for you. So let's see if we can separate the two. You can have your wine, but don't eat any food. So, you know, those types of behaviors.

Or, and this is more common, by the way, more often than not, the first place you start is by adding. By adding something. Now, the reason why you add something is this actually encourages better behaviors. Give you an example, studies show relatively consistently that when people start exercising,

they also start to watch what they eat and they start to naturally eat healthier. Well, it also just, just automatically pushes something else out. Right? Like if you add, if somebody you looked at, and they don't like, make sure you eat this many grams of protein. Right. Exactly. Just by telling them, it's such,

it's was one of my favorite hacks when I pieced this together because it's so, when you do, when you play the whole, you can't thing with people. It's just a terrible rabbit hole to go down So start and reversing that on somebody who needs to lose like 40 or 50 pounds or they come lose 40 50 pounds They already think like oh, he's gonna tell me I can't do this can't do that What a way to flip it on ahead as a coach and be like listen? I'm not gonna tell you can't have anything

But I do notice that when you do your weak looks like this So I want you to do this right and that could be adding a chicken breast or two every single day. And what's beautiful is they don't even realize what you're doing is, but you're adding something that a diet which will naturally push something else out in. Now you don't just leave it that right.

When it happens and they see the weight loss, you tell them, this is what happened. Right. Wow, why did I lose weight when I didn't eat heavily processed foods? I was full all the time. Well, the reason why that happened is those foods actually encouraged over eight,

or why did I lose weight when I added protein to my diet? Well, because protein's very satiating. You also were aiming for good foods, which crowded out the bad foods often times. Here's one, this was a funny one for me, and I remember when I first saw this, I thought there was something magical about what I told people to do,

but the reality was it just encouraged better behaviors. I would tell people, all right, here's what we're gonna start with. I tracked your stuff, you've tracked yourself for the past couple of weeks. Let's start with this for now. Just drink a gallon of water every day. I was gonna say, drink a lot. Yeah, just drink a gallon of water.

And people would lose weight. And the funny thing is people kind of like, I didn't know water sped up in my tap. I was so energetic. Yeah, and then I would educate, I was like, I didn't know water sped up your metabolism. I was just energy. Yeah, and then I would educate, I was like, okay, no, actually here's what happened. I mean, that happens a little bit, it's definitely good for you,

but here's what actually happened. Did you notice what you weren't drinking as much when you started drinking a gallon of water? Or did you notice your calories naturally dropped because sometimes we eat when we're thirsty and or the fact that drinking water makes you not so good. It also gives them something to focus on and a lot of times people eat just because they're bored.

Yeah. Because they're mindlessly eating in their bored where if you'd give them a goal if they're watching this gallon where they're like marking it off, like I have clients market off of what time it was at so they know where they need to be and they're focused on that

and they're thinking about that and they're probably peeing like five times more than what they're used to. Yeah. Those two things alone already gives them something to do so they're not munching on stuff. Yes, now the other thing I like to do is I like to help people develop behaviors around,

especially foods, you can call them trigger foods or these are challenge foods for people. Everybody knows what they are for themselves. For me, it's salty starches, so like potato chips or french fries, like those for me are just so, so triggering. Tasty. I go crazy with them.

And so what I'll do with them is, we'll identify some of these things, and I'll say, okay, here's what we're gonna do. You can have them. Let's just create a barrier between you and that food. So what does that mean? Okay, so potato chips that's challenged for you, don't have them in the house.

Now, if you want them, you can drive to the store and grab yourself a single serving of potato chips. And you can do that every single day. I did. It doesn't matter to me, it's all good, but don't have it in the house. Now, I didn't have to say anything else, but I knew when I would create this barrier,

this gave them the opportunity to become a little bit more aware. You drive to the grocery store four or five times, you start to think to yourself, do I really want these? Why do I want these? I have something else on that. I try to wrap in these snacks with your actual meals,

so you don't actually eat in between the meals. You're eating the meal, and so, and into the, I remember you talked about so long time with kids is like, presenting certain foods in the beginning, so it's like if you have your protein at a time, you have your fibers. And then, yeah, now we have some chips.

But, you know, look at how much more, how much less I should say that you're gonna eat as a result. I also like to go back and address like awareness thing too, and not allowing you to be distracted. So another easy rule, again, not putting restrictions on them, not saying you can or can't have these foods. But all I'm asking you to do is anytime you eat, cannot be in front of a computer on a phone.

And just, you be in a... Or maybe, yeah, any sort of, like, any sort of tool like that, you need to be at your dinner table, right? Or sitting at your counter, eating with no distractions. Yeah, not even a magazine or book. I would have people, I said, no, no, nothing. Yeah, just focusing on your food.

This is your time to eat. It's amazing how much, if you're just focused on that, how much you don't overeat, just by simply not being distracted by the thing. Now again, what are we talking about? We're talking about things that modify your behaviors naturally, right? So if I'm eating, and I can, no, I can eat whatever I want,

I had them to my trainer. He said I could eat whatever I want. All I gotta do is not have anything else in front of me while I'm eating. Here's what naturally happens. You naturally eat less. Or you naturally start to become more connected to your body. This makes me feel this way.

Or maybe I am full, I don't want to eat as much. And you end up finding you eat less as a result. So the next step after you're doing that with behaviors is to now start to connect the dots, right? So on how these foods make you feel. So now starting to change the relationship that you have with different foods, right? So I hated vegetables. They were tasteless for me. It didn't have a, did not have a good relationship with them for most of my life. And then I started to really pay attention to how I felt when I introduced these foods into my diet. And a

lot of clients just are unaware of this. They eat it, they don't realize, or they eat bad food, and they don't connect the dots that the reason when they were shitting themselves on the toilet all night long had anything to do with their dinner or their choices. They made in the last 24 hours. So the next step for a coach is to start to give them ways or ways to help them make the connection

that this is making you feel better. Build new power with associations. And that's the thing. With the whole popcorn at the movie theater, the whole, you gotta build these new associations with foods that are good for you and what they're actually promoting. They actually make it actually.

And by the way, marketers do this already. If you do this well enough, you'll start to want these foods. Naturally, your natural behaviors will be to be- Oh, I crave vegetables now. From a person a decade ago that would say, I hate them and rarely eat them, to now somebody where there's times where I tell Katrina, like, let's just do our Brussels sprout recipe tonight.

I want that for a whole dinner sometimes. That's how much I crave them, because I've made that connection of how good my gut feel. How good my gut feel. And at first it was a very like, I'm here aware connection. Oh, it makes me feel good. But then now it's an unaware.

I want one. I want to have a bowl of broccoli or whatever because it makes me feel good. Yeah, or what I notice now is like, like so part of what made me say this is all of actually just from this last week and last week and we had Katrina's mom's birthday. I had a big old slice of cake and enjoyed myself

and paid for it for the next day. And I said, and I knew it, knowing and going into it going like, I haven't had cake in a while, I'm gonna enjoy this, whatever. And then the next day just, oh, just did not feel myself. That feeling now makes me crave the foods

that I know give me the opposite result. And it wasn't, I didn't actively think about it. It wasn't like, oh, that made me feel but it was all subconsciously. It was like, that was the reason I wasn't feeling very good. I know in my head, like, oh, when I eat these foods, my body feels this way and you naturally just gravitate. It does.

I remember when I was a kid, I hated the taste of cooked spinach. I mean, spinach is bitter. Nope, no kid likes it. And then I watched Popeye. Now, for people who don't know, Popeye was his cartoon back in the day where he would eat the spinach. He'd get these big muscles and he'd be super strong and he'd beat up the bad guy. So then I wanted to eat spinach. I watched Popeye. Now for people who don't know, Popeye was his cartoon back in the day where he would eat the spinach, he'd get these big muscles and he'd be super strong

and he'd beat up the bad guy. So then I wanted to eat spinach. I still didn't like the taste, but because I associated it with strength, I started to want it. Until this day, I like spinach. But the truth is, it's the association. So what you're doing is you're connecting the dots.

Both negative and positive. Man, you know, I notice when I eat cookies that it affects my skin, I start to break out a little bit. I've actually seen this with certain foods, chocolate, in fact, for some people will cause them to break out. I know dermatologists say that that doesn't happen, but I think it's full of shit.

I've seen it with my own eyes, right? And so they connected. My dermatologist never said that sugar was affecting my psoriasis for years either, so. Yeah, and you see it. Yeah, that's it. So people will eat this thing, notice that, oh, my digestion's off, my sleep is off,

I feel irritable afterwards, my energy crashes, and you're just being aware, you're connecting the dots, what you'll find is over time, you'll stop craving those foods as much. Same thing with the positive associations. I notice when I eat beef, I feel energized. You know, maybe you're lacking some nutrients or whatever, maybe you're lacking iron. So beef and you feel energized. Maybe when you eat vegetables, your digestion improves. And you notice this, and over time, you start to want those

foods. This is how you start to mold and shape your behavior in a way that allows you to find success long-term, because up until now, our behaviors have been directed around hyper palatability. How are tastes the best? Whenever tastes the best. Whenever tastes the best, this makes this taste the best the most enjoyable. Completely ignoring what I said earlier in the podcast

by being disconnected from our bodies. Do you know how many people don't even realize that they're bloated, that they're sluggish, that they're whatever? This is just how they feel. I know people, I used to have clients that would take, you know, antacids just every single day. Oh, I just have harper. Like, did you know that you're not supposed to have that?

And maybe what you're eating is causing that kind of stuff. So meal plans are the most restrictive diet. They train the wrong behaviors. And in our experience, people not only fall off the wagon, gain the weight back, but they actually gained weight on top of it, making it much worse. Look, if you like our experience, people not only fall off the wagon and gain the weight back, but they actually gained weight on top of it, making it much worse. Look, if you like our content, head over to MindPumpFree.com and check out all of our guides.

We've got a lot of great free information there, things that can help you burn body fat, build muscle, and become more fit. You can also find all of us on Instagram, you can find Justin at MindPump Justin, me at MindPump Salon, Adam at MindPump Adder. 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 Mind Pump Media dot com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballac, maps performance, and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs. With detailed workout blueprints in over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainer, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can get it now plus other valuable

free resources at MindPumpMedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review on iTunes and by introducing MindPump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support and until next time this is Mind Pump!