Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1695: How to Lose 100 Pounds

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin cover ten things a person should  do to successfully lose a lot of weight. The psychological challenges of choosing to lose 100 pounds. (2:29) The Biggest Loser distortion of reality. (5:20) Ten Things a Person Should Do to Successfully Lose a lot of Weight. #1 – Hire a therapist or enlist someone you trust & who loves you. (12:34) #2 – Ditch the motivation hype and understand the importance of discipline & good habits. (17:20) #3 – Focus on strength over the scale. (22:15) #4 – Increase activity through daily habits. (25:52) #5 – Eat your calories and NOT drink them. (30:07) #6 – Avoid heavily processed foods. (33:02) #7 – Create barriers between yourself and your impulses. (35:33) #8 – Be mindful and slow down while eating. (39:54) #9 – Prioritize protein. (43:51) #10 – Hire a nutritionist. (46:17) Related Links/Products Mentioned MAPS Fitness Products Black Friday Sale is LIVE! **Promo code “BLACKFRIDAY” at checkout** Visit ZBiotics for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! 6 Years after The Biggest Loser, Metabolism Is Slower and Weight Is Back Up Strength is Protective – Mind Pump Blog What is NEAT and Why Should You Care About it? - Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump #1037: How Ultra-Processed Foods Are Making You Fat, Sick, & Weak Chewing Your Food: Is 32 Really the Magic Number? Mind Pump #1690: Eight Holiday Hacks To Prevent Fat Gain Why do we Need Protein? - Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources People Mentioned Paul Chek (@paul.chek)  Instagram

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 entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Alright, in Teddy's episode, we talk specifically to people who have a lot of weight to lose, specifically 100 pounds or more, very challenging, but all three of the hosts here at Mind Pump have had a lot of success with people in this situation.

And so what we've done is kind of broken down the steps that you should take to lose 100 pounds. And it's not what you think. It's not what you think. We failed often with clients until we really figured this out. And so we give you the winning formula. So if this is you, listen carefully. We've got some great information for you. Now this episode is brought to you by our sponsor Zbiotics. Zbiotics is the world's first and only genetically modified probiotic drink designed specifically

to help your body deal with the toxins and the negative byproducts of alcohol. So if you like to enjoy the occasional drink, but you hate the way that it makes you feel the next day, try Z-biotics. You literally drink Z-biotics, then drink your glass of wine or whatever, and you should notice the next day in improvement in how you feel.

Now, if you want to get them and you want to get Zbiotics at a discount, here's what you got to do. Head over to zbiotics.com. That's Zbi-OTICS.com forward slash mine pump. Use the code mine pump 10 for 10% off your first order. Also, we still have the Black Friday sale going on. In fact, it ends tomorrow. This is the biggest sale of the year that we run for all of our workout programs.

So check this out. If you go to mapsfitinusproducts.com, you'll see all of our individual workout programs and all of our workout program bundles where we combine multiple workout programs. All of them, everything, every single thing at mapsFitnessProducts.com is 60% off. That's right, 60, 60% off. All you have to do is use the code Black Friday with no space. So again, go to MapsFitnessProducts.com, pick your program or your programs or your bundle or your bundles, use the code Black Friday and get a massive 60% off all of those things. I have one for us to discuss today. Cassie's message me a few times about this and I think we've

kind of loosely talked about this topic, but I don't think we've actually sat down in like, I don't know, organized our thoughts on like a methodical approach on how we may help somebody in this case. And that is how to lose a hundred pounds. Oh, yeah. And I know obviously all of us have trained lots of clients in our time of being trainers that have needed to lose a hundred pounds. And I would say that this rule,

even though the title will be like a hundred pounds, it really applies to probably anything 50 and above right I mean I really once you start getting 50 60 70 100 100 pounds plus over it's a little bit more of a special case than somebody who's just trying to shred down 10 pounds that they put on from the holidays or something yeah I know we've talked a lot about like ways people you you know, like negative ways that people have approached this in terms of like the wrong methods applied, but we haven't really been able to take time

to kind of, how would we put all this together? So I think that is important. Yeah, it's just, probably one of the most challenging categories of clients that I would say I'd ever work with because yes, it's a lot of weight to lose and yes, the way you lose weight in terms of the, I guess the steps or the mechanics of it are the same if you lose 20 pounds or if you want to lose 100 pounds, but that completely ignores the real psychological and behavioral challenges that we're dealing

with when you have to lose this much weight. And this is just the reality. And I've worked with a lot of clients. At one point, I had quite a few clients at it. And I know you guys did too. I think the gym that we all worked at at one point was right next to a bariatric clinic. Yeah, so you're dealing with, I mean, at one point,

I think, if you're 30 pounds or over 8, 40 pounds and it starts to climb, you enter into a different mental state and you start to kind of like, okay, I don't care. And this is, this is just how I live. And it's very, very challenging once the person makes a decision and says, okay, this is enough. I want to reverse out of this. It's a hard position to be in because it requires some big lifestyle changes, which are not

easy. I want to be very clear. Changing nutrition is hard for anybody because how we eat is very closely connected to our personalities and who we are and our emotions and how we celebrate. Food is much more than just nutrition and calories. It's connected to so many different things. And activity also, how we move throughout the day, how we structure our day. These are all intricate components of how we live, and changing them radically, and then trying to make it stick.

Very, very, very, very challenging. I'm very passionate to about this specific conversation. And a lot of that has to do with, I think the most popular conversation around this is had by the biggest loser show. And I just... Which is terrible example. Yeah, and I think they do a really terrible job.

Although people that watch it are inspired and it makes for good TV, I remember very clearly when that show first aired, I was a trainer and the wave of people that I got in. And so there's the positive side, it motivated some people to get off the couch, head into a gym, potentially get a gym membership and hire a trainer, but the only problem is,

I now had to overcome this hurdle of this expectation of, you know, in the next three months, can we drop this hundred pounds? Because they did it on biggest loser and they were so inspired that I want to do that. I saw them do it. I'm tired of, you know, being this way and, you know, I'm here to invest in you and let's do this. And I struggled with that. I struggled with that for the first couple of years on how to communicate this the right way. And over time, I've learned how to do that. But at the beginning, it was a challenge because there was so much energy around that show that people wanted to train that way. Well, we got to be very clear. Okay. Losing the hundred pounds. Okay. And it's going to sound

kind of crazy. That's the easy part. Not saying it's easy, but of the whole formula, that's the easy part. The hard part is keeping it off forever. Way more people, a much greater percentage of people lose 100 pounds than are actually able to keep it off. The fail rate on all weight loss is something close to 90%, 80% to 90%. it's gotta be higher for this kind of weight loss because of its challenge. And all of the things that we're gonna talk about today in terms of all the challenges that you encounter. The biggest loser, in my opinion was terrible

because not only did they do it the wrong way, but they made people think that, the happy ending at the end is I lost 100 pounds, right? We don't know what happened five or 10 years later. And that's the challenge. So how do we fix that? Is it do we lose the weight and then figure out how to keep it off after?

That's what a lot of people do, right? They think, listen, I'll lose the weight first, and then I'll figure out how to keep it off. Oh, I even had people that were like teachers and they came in like literally trying to map it out. Like listen, I don't have to work for the next three days or three months. Yep. This is what I want to do with you Or I even had some people say I have all this time saved up. I'm gonna take my vacation time all together So all I can do is come and they and they wanted me to train them five days a week and as much as possible bubble

No, it did it it really It really did it the positive thing is it got a lot of people to take action and come into the gym. The negative thing that it did is it completely distorted reality. Expectations, reality, and you're absolutely right. And so it's not the wrong approach is, I'll lose the weight and then I'll figure out how to keep it off after. The right approach is the way that I lose the weight is gonna determine how well or how easy or how sustainable it is afterwards. So it's everything depends on how you get there

because that will determine how easy it is to stay where you're at. So it's very important. And I do wanna say this, people are gonna, I know people are gonna wanna know a timeline. Well, then how long should it take? A year at least. Give yourself at least a year to lose a timeline, well then how long should it take? A year at least. Give yourself at

least a year to lose 100 pounds. Now that's not because you can't physically lose more weight faster, but losing weight faster typically results in a far more negative impact on the metabolism and we'll get into that. In other words, at the end of a fast weight loss, you're probably going to end up like a lot of people on the biggest loser where they lost 100 pounds, but now in order to maintain that 100 pound weight loss, they're eating 1500 calories a day and working out like crazy every single day, which is just, it's not sustainable, by the way, that's not sustainable for me and I'm a fitness fanatic, let alone the average person, let alone somebody that's struggled with weight to the point where they had to lose 100 pounds.

So number one, it's got a negative effect on the metabolism. Number two, psychologically, mentally, emotionally speaking, making radical changes all at once that would result in faster weight loss, far more likely to result in weight gain afterwards. So it's a slow, steady process, both for you physically but also for you emotionally and mentally. And again, if you do this the right way, your success rate, long term,

goes through the roof. You do this the wrong way. You can almost guarantee, in fact, if I had to bet money, and if there was a way to bet on this, and if I saw people lose a hundred pounds in three months, I'd be a billionaire because I would always bet that they'd gain the way back. Because that's how, that's how guaranteed it is. Well, it's kinda work. Yeah, piggyback on the whole biggest loser thing that I had the biggest problem with is everything became a race.

And again, to the expectation part is like, there's so much urgency because, you know, they're faced with this realization that I have this weight. It's not, you know, benefiting me. My health is deteriorating. Like, this is all the entire thing that's on my mind right now So if I'm not if I not losing weight almost immediately I feel like I'm I'm not doing well. I'm not doing good enough and so it's a kind of deep program You know that mindset and try to do things that benefit their body for the long term and build strength and you know apply

You know adequate amount of calories. So that way it's not like, you know, this, this crash-dieting situation, like all of these things, you know, we're really hard bears overcome. Yeah, I've had a lot of clients lose a lot of weight and I've had a lot of them gain the way back, but the ones that kept it off were the ones where it took some time, where they took their time, the changes that we made were slow and steady. We came from a good place, which I want to get to as well.

And I mean, I had one woman lose over 120 pounds. It took her over two and a half years, but it was a slow, really good effective process. It came from the right place. Now, this woman became a trainer. She literally became a personal trainer at the end of this journey. I've had people lose 100 pounds with bariatric surgeries and extreme dieting, and they all gained it back. So I really want to make that point. By the way, a year is gone so fast. So don't think it sounds forever. I know right now, especially if you're watching

this and you're thinking yourself like, I'm ready. I want to do this right now and you'll like, oh my gosh, South says it's a year. It's not as long as you think, especially in comparison to the rest of your life. Well, I've seen both case scenarios with different clients who just really would take my advice, but also would add on to that on their own and they would just keep doing an exorbit amount of cardio and would lower their calories substantially

and they'd lose weight really fast versus the other client that would listen and we'd kind of draw it out a little further. The one that drew it out a little further because it was paced out and it was a bit slower, was able to really identify, you know, like their own behaviors. Like a lot learned a lot about themselves

in terms of what the triggers were, like what total, you know, the root of all of it was. And this is something that just gets overlooked when you're just on this horse blinder approach where you're not going to take ownership of the journey. Well, this is the main reason why 85% plus put the way back on is because this wasn't just a calories in, calories out,

problem. And that I think it's looked at like that very often. That's how biggest loser dresses it. Last food, make some Bernatonic calories, watch them lose weight. And the reason why it's not successful long term is because you never address the root cause. And that's why I think it's perfect

that you listed the very first, you know, first tip of the 10 tips on how to do this, is hiring a therapist or enlisting someone that you trust and that you know loves you. And that really is there for that emotional support and to help you do the work, the internal work. Totally. First off, this has to come from a place of self love and self care.

And often, I would say most of the time doesn't. Most of the time this comes from this initial motivation, oh my god, I would say most of the time doesn't. Most of the time this comes from, this initial motivation, oh my God, I'm 100 pounds of a weight, I need to lose weight. Comes from a place of self hate shame, disgust. I can't believe I've let myself get to this point. I'm so impulsive. Why can't I just, why is this such an issue for me?

I'm a bad person or whatever. I'm a bad person, I'm fat, like what? And so it comes from this place of self-hate, and when you approach this struggle or this journey from a place of self-hate, everything you do is a punishment. Exercise is a punishment, diet is a punishment, it's restrictive, I deserve this, I can't eat that,

I have to go move, this is what I deserve and I'll tell you something. Self hate is very powerful in the short term, terrible in the long term. In the short term, you hate yourself, you're gonna make some crazy changes. In the long term, at some point, at some point, you're gonna want to improve your quality of life because you're not gonna want to hate yourself anymore. And that's when you fall off. At some point, you're gonna say to yourself, you know what? I deserve to eat that cake. Or you know what? I need, you know, I just want to live my life. I just

want to enjoy my life. Boy, the last six months have sucked, right? Which is interesting considering exercising, improving your health, eating right to improve your health, should be a quality of life enhancer, not a quality of life destroyer. But if it comes from a place of self hate, that's exactly what it's gonna do. So you gotta say to yourself this, and you can be very honest, I haven't been taking care of myself very well

for a long time, and I'm someone that deserves to be taking care of. I care about me, I'm gonna do what's right for me, I'm gonna take care of myself, and what helps with that is a licensed therapist because you're gonna go back and forth between self-hate and self-love. Sounds easy. The self-love part sounds easy.

It's not. It's really hard. Because you're gonna want to hate yourself. You're gonna want to be shameful. Especially as you start to tackle the challenges that have gotten in front of you in the past. And you're gonna want to say to yourself, like, why didn't I do this before? God, I can't believe I did that.

And why did I screw up on my diet? And so, a good therapist can help you with this. And the clients that I've worked with who've lost a substantial amount of weight, who did very well, got them to work with a therapist. If you can't afford a licensed therapist, by the way, once a week with a therapist would be good for most people.

But if you can't afford that, involve somebody you care about that you know truly cares about you. So who is this person? This is a person that shares in your successes, they celebrate with your successes, and they mourn your losses. This is a person that's not gonna judge you,

but it's gonna be honest to you. They're not gonna give you nutrition and fitness advice. You don't want nutrition and fitness advice from a non-expert, okay, because this person might care about you and they might give you the wrong advice. So don't worry about that, but what you want is emotional support. Someone you can call and I get on the phone and I'm like, man, Justin, you know, this whole journey I'm on, it's really hard and I had a terrible weekend. Let me tell you what I did. I woke up in the morning and I know I was supposed to go

on a walk, instead I watched TV. I opened up a bag of, I went to the store about a bag of cookies, ate the whole damn thing and then it was crazy from there and then I did this and I did that and then Justin, who I know, because I enlisted somebody that really cares about me, it's on the other line saying, look, that's suck. I'm sorry you went through that.

You're gonna do okay. Like I care about you, I know you care about you. Right, you're gonna make it through. You're gonna make it through. That's the kind of support that you're looking for. That makes a big difference. If you can afford it, a therapist is even better than that. Of course.

I mean, that, because you don't want a therapist to do even better than what Justin just said back to you, is a therapist is gonna help you dig deeper into why. Of course. And that's what, I mean, that's their profession. They know how to do that well. And then also how to be that support of some trauma or some other things. 100% and that's so key is that you have somebody that helps you get again to the root cause. The other type of person that I see that's really successful with this too is, and this is the second step is a person that I see that's really successful with this too is and this is the second step is the ditching the motivation hype and understanding the importance of discipline and habits.

Yes. Again, this is another thing, this is another knock at Biggest Loser, another reason why I don't like that show is that it's very, I mean, I've tuned in on it and I get goosebumps when all the hugging and the emotional and the playbacks of the memories and they do such a good job of giving you the feels initially, but the problem with that is it's fleeting. You're the happy, sad, motivated,

that's that ebb and flows all the time. And if you're going to have long-term success, you need to build habits and discipline and routine and rituals in order to be consistent. And I can understand why people are so obsessed with motivation, because it's easy. It's easy. Yeah, like when you're motivated,

you don't need to talk yourself into working out. Like when you're motivated, you're gonna make the best, quote unquote, best food choices, right? Because you're motivated. When I'm motivated, man, I work my ass off, I do everything I need to, I'm a great dad, I'm a great husband, I'm cleaning the yard, like I'm motivated, right?

That's not the hard part, okay? The hard part is when that feeling, which is fleeting, nobody's permanently motivated, it doesn't work that way, right? When that feeling is gone, that's when the challenge happens. Now what do I do? So how do we get around feelings? Because feelings were human. We've got all kinds of feelings.

We're wrapped all up in that. Discipline. Discipline means you do it anyway. Okay, so that sounds easy. How do I build discipline? Like any skill, you start very small, and you build upon it. So a good example would be this.

This is how I always explain it, because it's the easiest way to kind of understand it. You want to have a very honest conversation with your unmotivated self. So if you're motivated right now and you're watching this, place yourself in the mindset of what you're not motivated because our motivated selves we overshoot always. You ask somebody who's motivated,

how big do you think you can build your business and it's gonna be some crazy number versus when they're not feeling so hype, right? So put yourself in an unmotivated state of mind and then ask yourself the following. What changes can I make now that I feel relatively confident I can do forever? And also, it still needs to be a little bit challenging. Okay, here's why.

If it's not challenging, it has no meaning. It's not going to mean anything to you. But it also needs to be realistic forever because you don't want to have a lot of failures on your plate. You want to be able to have these little successes. So this means it's different from person to person. Someone may be watching this and may say to themselves, it's very realistic for me to not eat sweets every single day.

So I'm going to avoid sweets. Someone else might say, that is not realistic. For me, I'm going to avoid sweets three days a week. Or someone might say, I'm only going to, I'm going to walk every single day. Or someone else might say, I'm going to walk two days a week. You have to create small habits that are realistic yet challenging. Once that habit becomes

a habit, once it becomes an actual habit and you're doing consistently, then you add upon it and that's how you build the skill of discipline. And that's what the long-term approach looks like in a sense, and that's why it's so important for you to establish the right mindset going in and be real with yourself and realize, is that reasonable? Can I replace all the soda in my diet with something a little bit more healthy for me, more water? Can I just focus on that as one thing I know I can do this every single day, even though sometimes I can want soda, but I know that this is going to be a challenge, but I could definitely do just that one thing. I have to pick what those few things are. And then run with that for a

few months and really see the transformation happen in the momentum. So you build that slow momentum that you can add to and it's going to stay moving forward instead of trying to take it all on at once. And that's where you do need motivation. You really can't take everything on at once without motivation. That's a real difficult. I had a client, just to give you an example of what I mean, I literally had a client

that, and we had this real honest conversation. And the first step was for her to read one page out of a nutrition book. So I was like, we had to go all the way back. Well, can you do this? Can you do that? And she's like, well, that's not realistic. That's not realistic.

Do you think you could read a page out of this book every single day? I'll start there. And here's what happened. She did it. She did it consistently. Then she came to me and said, I'm ready for the next one. And then we slowly built upon it.

By the way, this accelerates. It's a snowball effect. Discipline builds upon discipline. So it's not, it might start off slow, but it start to accelerate and each step becomes bigger and bigger. So that's the, that's kind of the light at the end of the tunnel. The, the third step is probably one of the most difficult or the biggest mind fuck of all the steps. And definitely one of the hardest challenges I had as a trainer communicating this information because you get somebody who comes in and that is to focus on strength and not the weight loss at first. And that's really hard. Getting stronger.

You get somebody who comes in and they're like, Adam, I want to lose a hundred pounds. And especially if they've been watching shows like biggest loser, all they want to do is hop on the scale every week and talk about, did I lose five this week? Oh, next week, which try and lose 10 and try and to beat their weight loss, where I'm trying to get them to completely reframe that and say, hey, we're not really gonna pay attention to the scale.

What I want you to pay attention to, if we're gonna watch any metric right now, is, are we getting stronger in the gym and explaining to them the importance of us building strength, building muscle to speed up your metabolism so that when we do lose this hundred pounds, we keep it off for the rest of your lives. Yeah, they actually did a study years ago where they, there was a belief that if you were

severely obese, you also had more muscle mass and they showed in studies that that's not true. The severely obese also have low muscle mass, just like anybody else who doesn't work out, they still have low muscle mass. So building strength is a couple of things. One, it builds muscle, which speeds up your metabolism. That's very important because it would be wonderful if you had a faster metabolism at the end of your 100 pound

weight loss goal, which is possible, then you went into. Imagine being able to eat more after you lost a hundred pounds, right? Imagine eating more, but you're smaller. Right. It happens often as a reverse. They lose the weight and now they get like nothing and they got to work out a little time to keep it off. Imagine if you could eat more and you could do that by focusing on building strength. The second reason is strength is

a wonderful metric because you have to nourish yourself and you have to be somewhat healthy to see strength gains. Whereas just to see the scale move down, we could do a lot of things wrong and get you to lose weight. We can make you very unhealthy and make you lose weight. With strength, it's a lot harder. If you're in the gym, you're like, okay, I did two push-ups off my knees. And then, oh, I could do three push-ups off my knees.

Like, you're getting stronger. It's a very positive signal that you're moving in the right direction. By the way, one of the biggest challenges that you have when you're when you have a lot of weight to lose is your body starts to lose sensitivity to insulin. Okay, so your body has to produce more and more insulin to get your to do the functions that it does in the body. And this can lead to eventually diabetes and it can definitely contribute to more fat gain and all that stuff.

Okay. One of the best ways to improve insulin sensitivity is just to build a little bit of muscle. You don't even have to lose weight. They've got studies on this, where they get the severely obese, they have them build a little bit of muscle, and they get significantly improved insulin sensitivity scores. So you're also optimizing your hormones to a level

to a degree, excuse me, by building a little bit of strength. So when you go to the gym and you are exercising, focus on getting stronger. It's a much healthier and much more effective approach, especially initially. Well, I think that this type of a client didn't really realize as well that focusing on building strength was a great way to alleviate pain as well. And I get that too. There's this thought that just losing the weight is going to solve a lot of my joint pains,

going to solve a lot of the way that I move because I'll be lighter. But at the same time, you need strength, you need strength support, you need stability around your joints, and if you can work on that, it's going to have an even better long lasting effect of pain relief. Now, the four step, which is one of my favorite things to teach a client, and I think it's one of the easiest things to show them and then to get them to start building the discipline and the habit and the routines around, which is to increase activity through daily habits.

So instead of this one hour session of walking or running on a treadmill, like a hamster on a hamster wheel, I'm encouraging you to do the short 10 minute walks here or park further away at the grocery store when you do this or choose to use the stairs instead of the elevator. This makes a big difference. People don't think it does. It makes a huge difference. It makes a huge difference

because what happens a lot of times when you get a client that has put on this much extra weight along with that has also become a more and more sedentary lifestyle. Where, and I've done this where I've tracked their steps and kind of looked at the average What where they start heading and they're talking about people that are only stepping 1500 to maybe 4,000 steps an entire day which is literally if you were to go outside and walk

For an hour straight just walking you would accumulate more than 4,000 steps. I mean that's how that's the whole day That's for the whole day. They're hitting those numbers or less, right? And they could string multiple days ago. So how, how do I help them find little ways to just add more activity that doesn't feel like they're doing a lot, but I know over time that that will start to add up and it will also start to back to like the last or the two points before is it'll start to help build that momentum off those small, little achievable goals. And before you know it, this person who was sitting around

only moving 1500, 2000 steps a day, is now doing 8,000 steps a day, and it doesn't feel like they're exercising, they've just changed some habits in there. Yeah, the reason why this is so effective isn't because it's some magical, like, new way to burn calories. It's literally the psychological effect.

It's much easier to stay consistent when you've attached increased activity to normal daily habits. So an example would be, I'm gonna walk for 10 minutes after breakfast lunch and dinner, right? That's just a simple example. Now, I eat breakfast and lunch and dinner every single day. So if I attach it to those meals,

I'm more likely to do it versus, oh, I gotta do my 30 minutes of cardio and the treadmill at the schedule it out, gotta put on my sweats, gotta get on the treadmill and block off this time. Instead, it's just I eat breakfast, now I'm gonna go walk around the block for 10 minutes. Another way to do it, like you said,

if you go to the grocery store and you go, let's say you go to the grocery store every single day, by the way, I never thought this made that big of a difference until newer technology came out. We were able to track calories, burn, and steps. And then I had clients start doing this kind of stuff. I used to scoff at this when I would hear trainers say,

oh, take the stairs or park far away, but they're like, oh gosh, that's so dumb, just get on a treadmill. The reality is, it's extremely effective. I would have clients park at the end of the parking lot and they go to grocery store every day and it was like they did, and you'd see. Crazy how it adds up.

It adds up, or yeah, I work on the second floor, I don't take the elevator, now I take the stairs. Or I had a client once, one thing that she did, what I thought was brilliant is she said, I take a bathroom break every other hour or so to go pee. Now instead of going to the bathroom, that's on my floor. I walk up a flight upstairs and go to the bathroom on the next floor. And that's all she did.

And it jumped her steps by a couple thousand a day just from doing something like that. Well, that was the cool part about some of these tools, like Fitbit and Body Bug and all that. It kind of just revealed some of the daily habits and like where you're most sedentary. And so we kind of peered into that a bit and found some of my clients,

like a natural tendency was after working, you know, even if it's a desk job and they're working and they're sitting all day like you get tired, right? And so the first thing you wanna do and you get home is sit down, you know, kick your feet up, wash your feet. And so just, you know just actively making that a priority

to come in, walk around, make sure you don't sit down right away and put things away. And now like your house is cleaner, there's all these like byproducts that happen that reward you as a result. And it builds momentum in terms of activity, just you feel more energized as well.

The fifth one is a tip that I think is pretty easy to implement. And I believe that this is also responsible for one of the number one culprits for people's weight gain is sugar drinks, right? So making it a habit that all I'm gonna drink is either water, tea, black coffee, and avoiding all drinks that are loaded with calories.

You're better off eating your calories than drinking them. And it's a very simple thing to get people to implement. It's not a huge leap to ask them to do that is to cut out all the calorie drinks. But again, it's one of those things. It sneaks up so fast, you don't realize how much of a roll it's playing in this excess calories. I'm gonna add to that, Adam.

And I'll say this, if you hear a say drink only water and you feel yourself cringe a little bit or shrink up a little bit, and I know, look, I understand this. I've had many clients, like I had clients that tell me they didn't like the taste of water, because that's how much soda and flavor drinks that they had. So here's another way to do it. So here's another strategy that I think for some people is even more effective. Instead of thinking yourself I'm only going to drink water, think to yourself I'm going to aim for a gallon of water a day. That's why I

love that out. I love that. So instead of, instead of saying I'm only drinking water, you're saying I have to hit a gallon of water. Now, the side effect of eating a gallon of water is... Natural replaces those other drinks. You're not gonna have room to drink all that other stuff. This is why, on a recent podcast, we talked about that arbitrary number that's been out there forever,

and there's a lot of fitness professionals that have shit all over that advice saying that, oh, there's gallon of water, it's so individualized, and that's more than enough for most people, and it's a stupid piece of advice. And I disagree for that exact reason, that I have found the clients that I made pay attention and track their water,

they're so worried about hitting their target and peeing that they don't have time to drink mocha frappuccinos and sugar drinks, because it's hard to get that much water in it. It also curbs a lot of cravings, which is something that I think people mix signals a lot of times that I'm really hungry right now, or like, you know, when in fact they're actually like thirsty,

and they need to be hydrated. Yeah, so literally what you can do, this is really easy. Again, if that drink only water statement makes you go, oh my gosh, that's tough. Buy a gallon or half half gallon container or whatever. Fill it up and then that's your target. Okay, this is what I'm gonna drink for the whole day and just pay attention to it throughout the day.

And again, the side effect of that, and I've seen it time and time again, is that people just don't drink their calories because they gotta hit that gallon of water every single day. It makes it, for people who drink calories, avoiding the calories and drinks in my experience results in hundreds of calories cut from a person's diet. But you don't have to think of it that way.

You don't have to think to yourself, I'm cutting calories. All you're thinking is I'm only drinking water or I have to hit that gallon of water target. Well, it also helps with the point that Justin actually just alluded to, which is the avoiding heavily processed foods. So the sixth tip is to avoid and stay away from that, drinking the water throughout the day does start to curb those cravings, and that's one of the worst things that someone will do. And it's one of the best things that I've ever got a client.

I'm not going to make you count calories, I'm not going to weigh and measure food. I'm simply just going to say, stop eating the shit that's in a wrapper. I'm not gonna make you count calories, I'm not gonna weigh and measure food. I'm simply just gonna say, stop eating the shit that's in a wrapper in a box. Make sure you make your food, eat whole foods. I'm not worried about how much of it you're consuming right now when you're hungry, eat, just choose from those whole foods. And it's amazing how much weight people just just simply by doing that.

Now there's nothing inherently magical about whole natural foods or processed foods in the sense that you're cutting heavily processed foods so now your body wants to burn body fat, although whole foods tend to be healthier, that's true. But that's not the reason why we're saying this. The reason why we're saying avoid heavily processed foods is because processed or engineered foods are specifically designed to make you eat more and they're super effective at doing so. And we have studies now to support this. There's several studies now and they're well done studies that show when people are just eat until they're satisfied.

If their diet is comprised of a lot of heavily processed foods, they eat on average 600 more calories a day versus when they're also told eat until you're satisfied but you can only eat whole natural foods, they eat 600 calories less. So rather than counting calories and cutting your food intake, you can say to yourself, I'm gonna eat until I'm satisfied, I'm just gonna avoid the foods that are designed to make me overeat, so I'm just gonna avoid heavily processed foods.

So now instead you're eating baked potato or chicken or steak or tuna fish and you're having some fruit and some vegetables and you can make it tasty. I don't care do whatever you want with it, but you're going to eat less naturally because it doesn't, it isn't engineered to make you overeat. You'll naturally cut your calories. The best part is you don't have to think about cutting your calories. The best part is, you don't have to think about cutting your calories. You don't feel like you're restricting. You don't feel like you're restricting.

I've done the same thing, Adam. I've literally told clients, and I love it because it's like a magic trick that I pull and I'll say to them, hey, look, I want you to use as much as you want. All you gotta do is not eat heavily processed foods and they look at me like I'm crazy. I can use as much as I want, but absolutely.

You do as much as you want, just avoid heavily processed foods and they always come back with weight loss as a result because, again, those foods are engineered to make your ovary and they're really good at doing so. So, now brings us to the next one. Now, this is a very important piece of the self-awareness that is required to do what we're about to do.

And that's create barriers between yourself and your impulses, okay? So think to yourself, what are my impulsive tendencies when it comes to overeating? Well, if I have snacks at my desk, while I'm working, I tend to eat a whole bunch of them. Like, if I have a bowl of peanuts

or if I have crackers or whatever, while I'm working, I end up eating a whole bunch of them. So what you need to do in that scenario, and there's many scenarios where people have impulsive kind of behaviors, is you just create a barrier. So rather than saying to yourself, I can't snack, say to yourself, if I want a cracker, I gotta walk all the way

over the break room and have some. Or better, I have to go all the way to grocery stores. I don't care about my house. And I'm gonna call out some people that I guarantee that are thinking in their head, because this used to be the number one excuse when I tell my clients this, because they'd always would blow my mind.

By the way, I don't know if you guys did this or not, but with this client, I would actually a lot of times go to their house and go through their cupboards and help them actually shop and say, this doesn't belong in your house, and it always would blow my mind when I look at these clients that tell me that they're struggling with weight loss and they can't make these decisions

and I go look at their cupboards and I go, well that's because you don't fucking have a single good choice. Like everything in here is a bad choice. And then the number one response I would get is I have kids, which used to drive me crazy as a trainer, is that what a terrible reason for you to excuse having nut butters, and ice cream, and all the chips, and all this stuff like that, like you should be feeding your children.

Now, your kids should be eating what you're eating, and there's nothing wrong with them eating whole foods, and they're gonna eat whatever you eat, and one of the easiest barriers that you can start to put up is simply not buying it, by not putting in your house. And you're not telling yourself you can't have it. Right, if you really want that bag of chips, get off your ass, drive the grocery store, up is simply not buying it by not putting in your house. And you're not telling yourself you can't have it. Right. If you really want that bag of chips, get off your ass, drive

the grocery store, park far away, walk into the grocery store, go get your chips and go back. And you know what? Watch how many people won't do it. But you know what? Sometimes you will. But most of the time you're not going to. And when it comes, look, I'm glad you brought up

the whole kids thing. Here's a deal. One of the biggest challenges with this is that you, you probably have a family or you live with people. You're making these changes for yourself, everyone else is going to be like, why do we got to make these changes, right? So it's challenging and you're going to get complaints. There are other snacks you can get that aren't nearly as impulse creating or nearly as engineered to make your over eight.

Cheese sticks, you can have some nuts. I like nuts and shells. so rather than buying peanuts, I'll buy peanuts in the shell. Why? The shell is a barrier. I have to break it open before I eat it, right? High quality beef jerky. Yeah, beef jerky, fruit, so your kids are like,

I want snacks. You can go in the cupboard and see what we have. Where's all the cookie? I don't have any today, but we got the cheese sticks. We got some of these nuts, and they may complain, but that's okay, they still have those snacks, but it does create a barrier between you and that impulse. Another one would be just like trigger foods.

I'll use myself as an example, potato chips. Potato chips for me, and you guys know this, you've seen me on trips we've gone on. If there's chips around, it's like I'm an alcohol, I'm recovering alcoholic and I'm at a bar. Like it's just, it's so, it's just calling my name. I wanna have them and it becomes a test of willpower. So I never have chips in my house.

Does that mean I never buy a bag of chips? No, if I really want them, I'll say, you know what? I don't say to myself, I can't have them. I'll say, I'll go to the grocery store and buy myself a serving. I'll buy myself a small serving bag of potato chips, not the big family bag. So there's lots of ways you can create barriers between yourself and certain behaviors.

So you're not telling yourself, no, what you're doing is you're creating space. Now why is the space so important? Because impulsive behaviors happen before awareness. They happen before you have the time to logically think about something. because if you say to yourself, man my trigger foods are cookies It's in my house get up eat it by the time I'm done. I think to myself. Oh, man What did I do that? But if I if I say they're not here. I got to go to the store You know what I'm going to the store. I want those cookies. Yeah, I gotta go put my shoes on put on my jacket Getting the car by the time I'm doing all this I I have time to think, I have time to process,

I have time to say to myself, do I really want those bad enough to get them? And oftentimes, the answer is no. Yeah. And you got to be mindful about, you know, when you're actually eating food. And so, the speed at which you're eating the food. So we're talking about a lot of these types of snacky food where it's really easy to just like wolf it down, like super quick or I go and I do what you say and I create that barrier, but I go get it and then I'm eating it in my car super fast and I always feel like I have to have something on hand. But to really take that time out and devote special time

to slow down, to slow your breathing down, to chew all your food all the way through. And I've said this a couple times, but it made a big impact on me. So I used to eat food so fast I would choke and have to wash it down. Same here. And so it's just taking that extra amount of time.

So your body catches up and gets the signal that, oh, actually I'm full and I don't need to keep cramming in anything else. They've made an entire diet around chewing your food. So there's, I forget. It works. I forgot what the name of the book was, but I don't never forget the first time that I saw it.

And it's like, it's like 52 choose or something like that where if you chewed every bite like 52 times, like you would lose weight just from that. It's a mindfulness practice. That's a mindful, it's the mindful practice that that's really doing. It reminds me also of the Paul Chek experience that we had where he prayed before, where he wasn't praying because the guy doesn't pray really,

but his meditating above his food before we ate, it also reminds me to the tip that I used to give clients where I'd say, listen, I'm not gonna tell you what you can or can't eat. All I'm gonna say is don't do it in front of your phone and in front of the TV. And it would be mind blowing. Yeah.

How much that would restrict people from eating them, they would restrict themselves just because they simply see what they're doing and they become aware of what's going on. You do. When you're distracted, when you're distracted by the television, you're distracted by your phone. You know, they've done studying on this.

You'll eat something like 15 to 20% more calories when you're watching TV on your phone or distracted while you eat. You also eat faster when you're doing those things and you have food. A very easy way to be mindful is to say to yourself, when I eat, I have to sit down at a table, so I'm not at my desk or on the couch,

I'm at a table, no phone, no television, me and my food and I chew my food and I put my fork down and I eat mindfully. And even if you say to yourself, I'm not gonna cut anything, I'm not gonna restrict anything, I'm gonna eat as much as I want. Studies are consistent of this. They show that you eat less as a result simply by being

mindful and if you really are honest for yourself, really honest, and you think of the times you over ate, you were not being mindful in those periods of time. So all you had to create that space for mindfulness to happen. Well, also consider your digestive system. And I know for me, I used to suffer from acid reflux a lot.

And yes, it was partially due to certain types of foods and grains and sugar and whatnot. In the diet that I was able to parse out, but a lot of it had to do with speed and also being in a stressed state. And so if I'm hovering over my food and I'm trying to get it in while people are yelling and that affected me to where I would actually

feel the effects almost immediately. I would get acid reflux. Well, this is part of the digested process, right? That's the first initial part is the chewing up of the food. In fact, the Doug just pulled up the book. The book was 32 choose, not 52. And it's not only to improve for weight loss, but also the digestive process. And it's amazing.

I remember the first time I saw it, I'm like, that's so silly. And then I started kind of counting just to see like how many and I was like, holy shit, I don't chew my food anywhere close to 32 times. And it just feels weird to be able to take some while. Oh, it does. It takes a while to do it. But what an interesting hack, right? Of just, hey, I'm not going to tell you what you can eat or whatever, just literally chew every bite 32 times, go to town. Whatever you want. You just got to chew it 32 times before you swallow it, watch what happens and I think that's just amazing. You know, along the lines of food, something that I think is, and we talked about this recently in our Thanksgiving tips and stuff that we gave and I think, and I think I alluded

to this in that episode that I said, this is something that I've adopted year-round for how I eat. And that is to prioritize protein is when you sit down and you're about to eat and you look at your plate, regardless if you're eating out or you're eating at home, is to eat first protein, which is very counterintuitive with how Americans are served food. Like, we typically go starch first.

Yeah, bread comes out, chips and guac come out. Like all these starchy foods come out first and then you get to the protein and you're already stuffed from all these appetizers. And so it's just a switch and it's not saying you can't have the chips. It's not saying you can't have the bread. It's just saying, hey, eat all of your meat first, eat all of your protein first, and then go there. And it's amazing how few of calories you consume just because you went that first.

Protein is satiating. Again, studies are clear on this, that on a gram-program basis, when you compare protein to carbohydrates or proteins to fats, proteins create more fullness and more satiety in the body. So prioritizing it sets yourself up to not overeat later on. Not to mention, proteins are very important macronutrient for building that strength and that metabolism that we're trying to build. And protein often comes with a little bit of fat, so if I'm eating steak or chicken or

fish, it's gonna come with some fat. Which are both essential. Proteins and fats are essential macronutrients, meaning you have to eat them just to be alive. Carbohydrates are non-essential. Now I'm not saying that they're not desirable or they don't have their own benefits,

just saying they're not essential. Like if you had to only pick two macronutrients to survive would be proteins and fats. So proteins first, then move on to everything else. Prioritize those proteins. You'll hit your protein targets. You're going to be satisfied faster and you'll eat less calories. Not only that, by the way, and this is a small effect.

So I'm always tread lightly when I communicate this. But protein also has more of a thermic effect than other macronutrients, meaning your body burns more calories through protein than it does through fats and carbohydrates. Now, it's a small effect, so this isn't the answer. It's just another little thing that sells, you know, eating protein first and prioritizing it. Now, I want to make the point that we've gone over nine different tips for you to lose

a hundred pounds, and we have yet to address any sort of tracking food or macros or calorie counting whatsoever. And I do like that, we put this in here, but we put it in as the tenth in the final tip or final step to this whole process. And there was a reason behind that because I think you can get pretty damn far, if not all the way for a lot of people without ever having to weigh, measure, or track calories whatsoever. Now that being said, I do think there's tremendous value if you have the affordability to hire a nutritionist to help you with your relationship food with food during this process and make sure that you're getting what your body needs. Yeah, it's good to know what's in food, what's not in food, what portions, how many calories

typical portions look like. The reason why we didn't say track your calories, because it could have been like this, right? We could have done this very mechanistic approach and said, okay, figure out how many calories you're burning, you know, cut your calories by this much, burn extra, you know, X amount more calories, you lose weight. The problem is that counting calories and tracking is very triggering to people, especially people who need to lose over a hundred pounds.

It's very much, oh, I do it now, I hate it, and I don't wanna do it ever again, and I'm gonna go in the opposite direction. So the nine steps we said before, help work on the behaviors. They help work on the relationships you have with yourself, with food and with exercise. Once you kind with yourself, with food, and with exercise. Once you kind of feel good with that, then you can get into starting to track and really

understand macronutrients, proteins, fats, carbs, and calories because it is an important thing to kind of know what's in your food, but you do want to build a little bit of a base before you get there. Hiring a nutritionist or somebody who is a professional that works with people like yourself. So somebody that is experienced working with people who need to lose 100 pounds who does very well, who will also work with your therapist ideally, is a good approach at this.

Not an online bikini coach. Do not hire fitness influencers. I'm so glad you said that. Yeah, I'm serious. You want to damage your body, hire an influencer, or you want to make your relationship to yourself with yourself and food worse Higher one of those those you know idiots. Plus educating yourself in general. I mean, that's empowering right you need to

All of these steps bring about self-awareness and this is just another piece to that that helps you to really identify What you seek out, you know where that lines up in, you know, the amount of calories you're consuming, you have more leverage going forward in terms of how to navigate your way around a lot of these things. And so it's just, it does take more discipline and that's why it's at the bottom, right? And so this is one of those things. It scares a lot of people, it seems daunting,

but you'll find going through this process like, wow, I can do a lot, and I can take more on now. And so this is just one more thing that will help to, you know, make everything else seem easier because you really have the knowledge now going forward. The irony of this is that the science would support that this would be the first thing that you would do. Of course, because the science is all about losing

the hundred pounds, but not about keeping it up. We've got a metabolic rate, we've got a needle at down, and then we go from there, and we've got to figure out our maintenance calories. And that's why I love that we agreed that it obviously plays a significant role. All the studies wouldn't support it if it didn't have a significant role

in the success of losing 100 pounds. But as far as the priorities from our experience of training, lots and lots of people in the situation, the nine steps before are far more important that you get those established and you hit those out the park before you move into this space and not the other way around. Yeah, I'm glad you said that. And you know, before we sign off, I do want to say one more thing, right? Be kind to yourself. You're probably your most harsh critic. And the person that's probably mean is to you can be you. So be very kind

yourself because this is not going to be a linear progression. You're not going to get better and better and better every single day. There's going to be setbacks. That's what you need to forgive yourself. Be kind. Forget the shame part. It's a hard journey, but you will get there. Look, if you like our information and you want more free information from Mind Pump, head over to MindPumpFree.com and check out all of our free guides. You can also find all of us on Instagram. So just to be found at Mind Pump Just, then you can find me at Mind Pump Sal and you can

find Adam at Mind Pump Adam. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at Mind Pump Media.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballac, maps for performance, and maps aesthetic.

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