Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1737: The Top 7 Reasons Your Diet Is Failing With Jason Phillips

Episode Date: January 27, 2022

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin speak with nutrition expert Jason Phillips as to why diets fail. The Top 7 Reasons Your Diet Is Failing. (2:53) #1 – Scheduling your off days on the weekend. (3:25) #2 – Underestimating your total caloric intake. (12:12) #3 – Diet culture is leading you to failure. (19:01) #4 – Not eating adequate protein. (26:31) #5 – Relying on nutrition labels. (30:36) #6 – Ignoring the behavior piece. (32:10) #7 – Not counting the calories you drink. (41:29) Why some is good, but more is NOT better. (44:38) We were not put on this earth to be 6% body fat all year long. (50:56) The value of working with a coach or trainer, and how NCI coaches stand out above the rest. (53:42) Find an NCI coach near you! (58:33) Related Links/Products Mentioned Special Promotion: Get 50% Off Your Nutritional Coaching Institute Enrollment! Visit Seed for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Promo code “MINDPUMP” at checkout for 15% off your first month’s supply of Seed’s DS-01 Daily Synbiotic** January Promotion (#1): NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS SPECIAL BUNDLE OFFERS January Promotion (#2): MAPS Anabolic 50% off **Code “JANUARY50” at checkout** Why The Scale Is Not Always The Best Way To Measure Progress – Mind Pump Blog The Myth of Optimal Protein Intake – Mind Pump Blog Why do we Need Protein? - Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump #1705: How To Stick To Your Diet How to Undulate Your Calories for Faster Weight Loss & an Improved Metabolism – Mind Pump TV Nutritional Coaching Institute NCI Certifications x Mind Pump Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources Featured Guest/People Mentioned Jason Phillips (@jasonphillipsisnutrition)  Instagram Layne Norton, Ph.D. (@biolayne)  Instagram

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind, pop, mind, pop 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, right? In today's episode, we had special guests Jason Phillips in here in studio. Now, he's a nutrition expert. He's a founder of NCI,

nutritional coaching, one of the best certifications for online coaches and trainers. And what we talked about today were the top seven reasons why your diet is failing. So if you're trying to follow a nutrition plan, it's not working for you. Listen to this episode. We don't have Jason here very often,

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Jason, I'm glad you're here today because I wanted to talk about, it's January, right? Or we're recording this in January, it's beginning of the year. A lot of people starting diets, a lot of people starting to work out. I wanted to talk with you about the main reasons why people's diets fail. Then at the end, I would like for you to go through and talk about, well, stuff that you see that we maybe don't talk about or that we don't normally cover. How does that sound? Absolutely. Absolutely.

You're definitely the guru on this and I know you train a lot of coaches. So in my experiences of trainer, one of the main things, well, the first things that I see when somebody's diet failed, this was a real common one, was that people's, the weekends, they would screw up on the weekends, and they would screw up so badly

that it would completely ruin the, you know, Monday through Friday, right? This is a common one. I gave this as a tip, not that long ago. We were talking on a podcast, and I said one of the most pivotable things for my own personal journey as far as, you know, goal setting and achieving and chain body transforming, right?

That I went through was actually simply just making never scheduling my off days or recovery days on the weekend, like making sure that my diet and my training, I had scheduled on the weekends, and if I needed a rest day, if I needed a day off of just eating whatever I wanted, it had to happen during the week, and just simply making that simple rule,

I saw a huge change, and what I attributed it to is that the weekends are so easy to sleep in and not be physical and active. People are normally watching TV and snacking or you're going out to dinners or these are the times when these things are more tempting. And the weekdays we're on a regular, you get up at a certain time, you get to work

and you work out and you have this tight schedule. And so, and it was like this psychological game I was playing with myself. It was, I'm not telling myself I can't have pizza ever. I'm not telling myself that I can't have a day off. I'm just going to say it has to fall in the week day. And on the weekends, I'm going to make sure that I'm active and I'm dialed. And I made a huge difference.

Can you explain why this happens, Jason, because I guarantee someone's listening right now. And they're going, well, how is that possible? If I'm good five days a week and I'm not good two days a week Why doesn't the five overpower the two right I should still see progress? Well, yeah, so first of all I want to acknowledge what you said I love the psychology Adam of like what you said because it's really funny. I just did a We let Instagram decide what my diet would be for a day and somebody said eat nothing but chick filet And so that's what we went with and I I felt like complete shit, an hour after breakfast. Yeah, we're tired, so we gotta go through this.

We went chicken minis, bacon egg and cheese biscuits, and hash browns for breakfast. So I let Instagram choose every meal. How did you do it with one of those games? Yeah, so I just did a question box. And I was like, what should the diet be? And they said Chick-fil-A for a day. And I was like, all right, cool, you order breakfast. And the next one, we did a question box. It was like, what should the diet be? And they said, Chick-fil-A for a day. And I was like, all right, cool, you order breakfast.

And the next one, we did a bench press challenge. For every rep, short I was on 225 bench of 24. That was the number of my trainer set. For every rep, short I was, it was two nuggets. So I only got 16 that day. So I had 16 nuggets and like a large fry. And then dinner, we let the cashier order. And so they gave me a number one, which wasn't too bad.

And then you felt like trash. And I felt like garbage all day. But I think that like the, I knew I was gonna feel like shit. And so, you know, the weeks for me, money to Friday, I have to be on point. I'm working, I'm talking to clients, you know, if, you know, for the people out there,

if they're going in the office, whatever they're doing, you can't forcibly feel like shit. Whereas on the weekend, if you get up and you go get a dozen donuts or you go get chick fuller or whatever, it's cool. You feel like shit, great, you go take a nap on the couch, you keep feeling like shit and you keep eating more shit. So I think it's really, I love this psychology, I've actually never looked at it that way. But to answer the question in terms of whether it's five days on or six days on and one

day off or two days off, at the end of the day when we look at calorie deficit or a calorie surplus, we're not just looking daily, we're looking weekly. We're always looking at seven day averages, at least you should be. There's so much just propaganda out there. Throw away the scale. Well, first of all, I think we need to stop demonizing the scale. It is data. It's not the only piece of data that matters,

but you do need to know where you're trending. Not saying you have to trend down by any means, but you should know where you're trending. The data can actually tell us a lot of things, especially for people that are, you know, borderline, metabolically adapted. Sometimes you see, wait, go down after significant over-feedings, and that's actually good data as well. So I want to get away from

the notion that you should just throw away the scale. But when we are looking at the scale, we should be looking at how are things changing over seven days. You know, water intake is going to fluctuate every day, electrolyte intake, so sodium intake is going to fluctuate every day. You're not going to hit the exact same nutrients and you're going to be exact same foods every single day. So we're looking for trends. And as long as things are trending the right direction over time, that's great.

But people see on by Friday morning, they're like, oh, I'm down three pounds for the week. Let's go have our cheat meal. And I think that's also part and parcel to the industry promoting cheat meals or free meals or discussing something as if it's completely contrary to your plan. I don't look at anything that I eat as contrary to my plan.

If I want to go and I live in the DC area and I love Georgetown cupcakes, if I want a Georgetown cupcake, that's just part of what I want to have. Maybe I'll have one or two per week, they're only like 300 calories. It's not a big deal. I don't look at it like, oh my god, I just completely went off my plan. So I think that people are like, all right, well, I did my diet, now I'm going off my diet. And let me tell you, a reasonably set up diet should only be 500 to 700 calorie deficit at most, right?

And so when you think about one cheat meal, let's just think about something simple, like pizza. You're probably going over your caloric allotment by 2,3000. Yeah. Now let's tax some alcohol on. Now let's tax on, you know, whatever dessert you have. We're talking about three to four thousand calories over what you should be in one day. And you're very easily erased as the person.

Well, it's completely erased as the other six days. If the other six days were at five hundred calories, you were only in a three thousand calorie deficit for six days. It's very easy to do that. It's super easy. You know where this all came together full circle for me was when the introduction of the body bug, which was like, you know, basically one of those trackers, right?

So 24-O'Fentany, yeah. Yeah, yeah. One of the original ones that came out and it was fairly accurate to your metabolism. And what I found was exactly what you just said, not only did I go over, because I kind of knew. Obviously, if I knew if I over, because I kind of knew, obviously if I knew if I crushed four to six pieces of pizza

and had another, you know, fast food meal or what I thought, I knew I was over, but what I also didn't, taking the consideration was, oh, I slept in an hour and a half. And then the first hour of my day, I watched football. And then, you know, I- So your neat was down. Dude, my movement was 50% of what it was during the week.

So not only did I overeat by about a thousand calories, or what I thought was only overeating by about a thousand calories, because I'm adding that pizza or whatever that other dinner, but I also reduce my movement. So those one or two days on the weekend, even if I was perfect Monday through Friday, training hard, consistent, perfect, never missing the diet.

Just that one or two days was enough to counter all that great work. Yeah, so just to put it plainly, to lose weight, you have to consume less calories in your burn. That's what you're referring to when you talk about a calorie deficit. So if Monday through Friday, you're at a 500 calorie deficit, that's 2500 calories of a deficit. You go into Saturday, you go into Sunday, and on both days, let's say you eat 1500 calories over what you burn, which is really easy. Very easy to do.

It's too easy. Now, you're 3000 calories over on Saturday and Sunday, but you're at a 2500 calorie deficit Monday through Friday. At the end of the week, you're actually 500 calories over. In a surplus. In a surplus. In other words, you're gaining weight, even though Monday through Friday, you felt like you were doing so good. And Saturday Sunday, you felt like you were doing so good.

And Saturday Sunday, you felt like you just went off a little bit. It all breaks down. And you're using an extreme example, and I think what really happens where people get stuck is that it isn't that extreme, but it's enough, right? It's like, I only ate a couple slices. Well, then you also didn't move. I think in an ideal world, you're perfect Monday through Friday, but how many people are actually perfect Monday through Friday, right?

Those bites and those licks, like they add up, as much as that seems like minutia, if you're quote unquote perfect Monday through Friday, we know, okay, there's probably a few liquid calories in there, there's probably a few extra bites of something in there. And then you're like, oh, I was perfect. Then you go into the weekend where you do go into a surplus. Now you're in a really big surplus. You, I mean, physiology says you should be gaining weight. Your body's not working against you.

It's not the diet that's not working. And I think that I'm actually excited to do this podcast because so many people blame the diet. And there's so much buzz around in diet culture, around how diets don't work. And it's really sexy to be a guru in the space right now and say, oh, well, diets don't work and you shouldn't diet. And I'm like, no, actually, like assuming all things normal, like in physiology, diets do work. If you're in a calorie deficit, they work very well. You just can't go out on the weekends and eat like a fucking ass. Right. And into what you were saying, Adam, let's say that it's a small difference.

Well, now for the whole week, you're at a 100 calorie deficit, maybe. Yes. Now you're months into your diet and you lost two pounds on the scale and you're like, okay, this is just isn't worth it. All right, so this next one, I'll never forget when this really hit me. I'll never forget. So back in the day, so I'm going to date myself a little bit, but we didn't have, like, I couldn't go on the internet and look things up. We had the calorie king book or whatever you had to flip through. Yeah, and look things up or whatever.

And remember I would see like medium banana. And they'd be like, okay, cool, I'll get a regular banana and eat that, medium size apple. Oh yeah, no big deal. And then one day I said, it's not really working. Like, what's going on? I noticed my body fat isn't really changing much. And I looked up the weight of a medium banana.

I weighed the banana that I got and apparently I was getting the super extra large bananas. Now we're massive and then I realized I was guessing an estimating wrong and I know a lot of people do this. If I remember I would have clients come to me and say, oh yeah, I have a tablespoon of peanut butter. Show me what a tablespoon looks like and it's like, no that's like a shovel.

That's three tablespoons of peanut butter. I have the best story for you with it. I was, I won't say who I was working with, the W of E athlete. And she was preparing for the cover of the ESPN body issue, where you have to be naked. And I remember like we get started and I was like, all right, like you're tracking your food, right? And she's like, well, no, I'm on the road all the time and I'm like, what do you take a scale? And she said, no, and I was like, okay, I'm going to send you one. And so her food log that she had sent me, it said like three ounces of chicken

at three of the meals throughout the day. And I had sent her this like pocket scale and she goes, holy shit, she's like, I measured my food yesterday. And I was like, well, how much were you eating? Nine ounces. And I was like, holy shit. Like, we're talking 18 extra ounces per day.

At about seven grams of protein, right, per ounce of chicken. We're talking 14 about seven grams of protein per ounce of chicken, we're talking 142 grams extra of protein, but we're also talking 18 to 20 extra grams of fat. We're literally talking 900, almost 1,000 extra calories. Instead of a deficit, she's in a surplus. And she's wondering why she's not losing.

And obviously lots of protein, she's wondering why she's bloated, and I'm like, well, here's the reason. So I mean, it was one of the easiest switches. It's mind-blowing to me too, how many people say, well, it's tedious. I mean, do you still, I don't weigh and measure my food that much because I've been doing it literally for you.

No, I think the first, what I, this way, I used to tell clients, at first you have to do it, so you know what your reference point is, and what learning takes. It's like, yes, educational piece. Yeah, like most people have no idea when they see three ounces of chicken. If they guess what three ounces of chicken is way more. And by the way, the chicken breast you get at the store

are like eight ounces, nine ounces, 10 ounces, you know. Well, I remember, this reminds me too, of another situation where I started to really piece this together. So, you know, and this is so silly, right? We used to have this idea, this is trainers, us trainers talking. When I ate a food like a sweet potato,

I really didn't count it, or I'd just low-ball estimate, because it's a sweet potato. It's low glycemic, it's not very many calories. Healthy. Yeah, it's healthy, right? And when I would look it up in the book, like a medium sweet potato would only be like 125 calories. So I'd be like, oh, I'm not with you,

I'll never forget the first time I weighed the sweet potato that I thought was a medium sweet potato. And it was literally like four of them. And that's what I was eating. And I was not counting that. I was just chalking that up as a healthy food that was probably only 100 or something calories. It was really like 600 calories

that I wasn't even attributing to the diet, right? So I think, and I know that here I was a trainer, I understood this stuff and I still made mistakes like that, which is why I would make all my clients track at the beginning. And the goal I would tell them is that, listen, this is not, I don't want you to be tracking for the rest of your life. The goal is that you get to a place

where you can eyeball a piece of chicken and get pretty close to what that is, or eyeball a sweet potato. I know because you've already weighed it four or five times before and you've seen what a big one, a small one in the middle looks like and you've tracked it enough times that now you have a pretty good idea when you're close there. And I think once you're there, I don't think it's necessary to wait, but the beginning is I think so necessary. Yeah, when they do studies on this, there's many studies on this where people will estimate

the chloric intake. They're like 30, 40, 50% off every single time. Now, here's what I think is interesting. If we were to make that statement today, and most people hear it, the popular dietary culture is going to say, they're underestimating, because everybody wants to talk about everyone in the world underneath. I actually disagree. I think that 90% of people would overestimate. Right, like they would be eating more than they're reporting, not eating less.

Well, the fact that obesity's at where it's at would prove that you're right. Our dietary world, our small little fitness world is such a microcosm of what actually exists in the world. Correct. And just because in the fitness world, we see such a metabolic adaptation, the non-million going on right now, and a lot of HPA axis issues, we think such a metabolic adaptation and the non-minion going on right now and a lot of HPA axis issues, we think well that's what's running rampant in the world.

But when Mrs. Jones comes to you and she's 40 years old and she's a hundred pounds overweight, we probably can't look at her and make these assumptions and hey, you know what, you're understabbing. Yeah, one of the things I like about you, Jason, is you work with real people and her coaches work with real people. So that's what you're constantly communicating. Yeah, with this one, like about you, Jason, is you work with real people. And it coaches work with real people. So that's what you're constantly communicating.

Yeah, with this one, like the guessing, I remember, you know, another one that screwed me up was olive oil. I know that's, you know, funny, some Italian, but I would put olive oil on stuff, and I'd calculate two tablespoons. Oh, two tablespoons olive oil. And then one day actually measured it out of like, dude, it's like half a cup.

I'm like, half a cup of olive oil. I was the same, just was like eating and snacking on like peanuts. Yeah, nuts or nuts. That's what gets you real quick, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I always said I was the most hated nutritionist in CrossFit back then. But I used to say there was two types of paleo dieters in CrossFit. There was the kind that they would say, well, almond butter is paleo and they would eat the whole jar of almond butter. It's paleo and paleo didn't have quantity parameters, right? As long as it was paleo, you could use much as you wanted it. I mean, listen, I understand almond butter doesn't spike your insulin very much, but if

you're a hundred pounds overweight and you're eating five thousand calories a day from Almond Butter, you're not losing weight, right? But at the same token, you got these people that are doing insane exercise and they're literally, they're like, well, you know, paleo, I'm eating salmon and broccoli. And it's like, okay, now you're eating 900 calories and you're trying to train like somebody that is, you know, like you're trying to train three times a day, like somebody that's competing at the CrossFit Games. That's not sufficient either. So I don't, you know, it's not even about like overestimating all the time. Sometimes it's about like just getting all the healthy foods in the world, but to some degree, if we want to act with precision, whether it's, you know, performance goals, aesthetic goals, even longevity-based goals, we have to understand to some degree quantity.

It's non-negotiable. It continues to show up in studies. Like, I mean, yes, the types of foods matter relative to like your insulin index. And how you feel and cravings on stuff. Of course. But at the end of the day, if you're eating too many calories, it doesn't matter.

Exactly. Well, you talking about paleo also leads to our next point, which is about just diet culture in general, right? And I just think that that's where we've gone wrong is I mean, how many times this coaches and trainers have you guys got this for someone Hires you and they're like, Hey, my friend followed the paleo or follow the ketogenic diet and I too want to follow that. It's worse all diets fail. They all fail. And even when they are temporarily successful, they fail long-term. I just, I hate this idea of trying to demonize other ways of eating and say that your way is superior than another way. While you're also eliminating these foods that realistically you're gonna want to have some time in your life again. And what you're referring to is just starting off completely unsustainably.

Hey, I'm gonna start on this health and fitness journey. I'm gonna eliminate all carbohydrates or I'm going to eliminate all foods except for meat. And it's like, okay, you're not, you didn't just take a step. First of all, any step is difficult and challenging when you talk about nutrition. You took 15 steps. You went real extreme. And it's just not sustainable. It's a non-sustainable approach. Right. Well, okay, let's, let's put in a completely different perspective. If I asked you today, like, you live a pretty good life, right? How old are you?

42. 42, right? So you live a pretty good life. You've created success in your life. That does not immediately create an assumption that you've never failed, right? Like you've had a lot of things in your life that you fucked up. So right out of the gate, we're basically saying

there's good and there's bad, there's right and there's wrong, and that your ultimate success is going to be defined by whether you only do good, but if you do bad, you're completely fucked up and you're not going to achieve your result. Well, we can all sit in this room and we've all achieved great things in our lives, but we've all fucked up a lot. So why are we telling dieters that if they do something bad or they do something wrong, that that's not going to get them where they want to be.

Like, I believe that whatever result you do or don't create is really just a collection of all of the things that you do. Some are going to be in line with your goals and some aren't going to be in line with your goals. And if we can start looking at a journey that is much longer in duration and we can start seeing, hey, listen, you know what? You had pizza last night, you went over your calories,

you're probably not going to make as much progress in the next three days. Who the fuck cares about three days, right? Because if you're still going to hit your target in 16 weeks or 20 weeks or 24 weeks, why does what happens the next three days matter? And I think that, you know, we talk about keto, carnivore, whatever extreme diets we want to go on,

they're all creating these labels for us that immediately set us up for failure. They're driving home that failure car. Yeah, you have one car and you totally failed. You're over-fault. Yeah, yeah. So I think that that's from a mindset, I think, is the hardest thing people have when it

comes to diet anyway. Totally. They have already conditioned themselves to the fact that they're failures when it comes to diet. Like, most overweight people have attempted, I think the stats are something like four plus diets, and that means they failed four plus diets. So subconsciously, they're already labeling themselves as a failure.

And so I think if you as a coach, or you as a provider, go in and you allow them to now identify with all the things that they've failed at before, you're actually also doing them a disservice. You're immediately transposing their mindset from one of optimism to one of failure. You're taking them back to a place that they have labeled in their life as failure, and you're allowing them to operate from there. And I think that that is the worst thing you can do.

And that's not a knock on keto or carnivore, any of those things. I really, you know, to open up another can of worms would just say, none of the diets are quote unquote bad. They're all horribly misapplied. Like keto as a diet, there's some great benefits to go on keto. There's some great benefits to carb cycling, like some of my WWE athletes

that are getting ready for WrestleMania right now. They're all carb cycling because guess what, they gotta look really good on TV twice a week. And, but they also still gotta be losing body fat, right? When I train an MMA fighter for a fight, they still have to perform during camp. But they still need to be losing weight. The fastest way to do that is a car cycle. So there's no bad diets, but there's horrible application. And application, as we know, is what achieve success. Well, especially when you're talking about the general population, when you talk about very

specific conditions, right? There's obviously diets that make sense, but I think we try to tend to steer the conversation towards the general population that make the mistake of following these diets that are mainly for more specific people. I think that we're the application is better. It's just totally unsustainable. It's an unsustainable way to start. And so like you said, Jason, you're setting yourself up for a near future failure,

almost guaranteed. It's really funny, because I mean, we're three things in seven, seven reasons people are failing. And I think so much of this has, obviously the diet or has to take some responsibility. At the end of the day, you over consume food, that's on you.

You undertake a diet actively, and that's on you. But look what we as an industry are doing. Like, you know, we're, when we talk about eating whatever you want on Saturday and Sunday, how's that been labeled, cheat meals? I mean, do a goal the way back to, I'm gonna date myself, Bill Phillips, body for life, right?

What was body for life predicated on? You know, there was one massive EAS sales pitch, but it was like six days of dieting and then your seventh day free. You know, go all the way back to the days of like Scott Abel and he had a cycle diet. And that was a big proponent for him. You know, six days on your diet and seventh day, whatever the hell you want. You know, here we are creating diets, putting labels on them.

And to be fair, I understand the marketing side of this. We've done a podcast on the marketing of fitness. It's not sexy to go to an overweight person and say, well, it just makes some sustainable changes. Like, they're like, what do you mean? That would, that doesn't sell products. No, that doesn't sell product. It also doesn't create excitement.

It doesn't necessarily create that initial change to get somebody moving forward, which is really what we have to capture. And I think that, I think the best coaches in the world are the ones that can find that, find that middle ground. How do you get somebody really excited about moving forward, but how do you do so without any of the crap that we're talking about? Well, I have another kind of hack that I came into,

I just kind of trial and error with clients. Again, messing with the psychology of how the human brain works, right? I told you that the weekend one, well, another one that I would do when talking about diets, which shook clients up always because you get a lady who comes in and she's gotta lose 50 pounds.

And you know, she's, you know, ready. She's ready for me to tell her, all right, you can't have this. This is what we're gonna follow. Like we're cutting back on this. And I actually would spend no time doing that at all. All I would wanna do is kind of get an idea of what she currently is doing,

which if it meant she was eating McDonald's and ice cream and whatever. I wanna see everything that you're doing. And then instead of telling her she can't have any of those things, I would actually add to her diet. I would look for an area, whether it be a lack of good lean protein or healthy fats or not enough greens,

and I would look at the diet and not tell her she can't have any of those things that she was eating that I know aren't great for her. And I'd say, listen, this is all I want you to do for now. We are gonna have two salads every day in addition to what you do So don't worry about everything else you're doing just make sure you add a salad here And you got a salad there or hey, I want you to make sure that you get an extra chicken breast every single day in your diet because we're not getting enough Lean protein and I would pick one or two things I know that would improve her eating, and

what I knew would happen is she without even knowing it would naturally start to weed out some of those things, because, and she wasn't focused on, oh, my coach said, I can't have pizza, I can't have those things anymore. She was just focused on, oh, I want to make sure I get those two things that Adam said, I want to get every day, and then what would naturally happen, she would already start to make these better choices. And again, it's just messing with that psychology of telling people that they can't do something.

The protein part is a big one, Adam. I eat a lot of clients who just, I mean, they wouldn't, they wouldn't eat essential protein, but they wouldn't eat enough protein to really facilitate lean body mass gains and to help with satiety. And so having people eat adequate protein, sometimes I'll just tell people,

let's just get, make sure you hit your protein targets. And then very naturally, their appetite would drop because it's very satiating. You'd see better lean body mass, better metabolism effects. And the cool thing is now, we have studies that support this. We now show that equal calorie diets, higher protein ones tend to outperform. Yeah, actually, I mean, there's a study

we reference all the time at NCI, you know, because people are like, well, if we set up their protein and their calories, how do we know what carbs and fats to give them? And obviously there's guidelines, but the studies are pretty clear when it comes to body composition, assuming all things are normal.

If you've equated your calories properly, if you've accounted, or if you've allocated enough dietary protein, it shouldn't matter how much carbs and fats you take in. So, that being said, a lot of people that are just getting into the dietary space or a lot of coaches when you're lost with a client, if you can get them to hit their calories and you can get them to hit their protein and not focus on anything else and you say, hey, you just eat whatever else you want. These are the two numbers that matter, you will hit your goals. Now, again, that's scientific research. I think sometimes empirical data does

come into play. And I think that things like stress profiles and dietary histories can certainly come into play. But I agree, I think that, and I don't mean this to be sexist in any way, but I think females in general struggle to hit their protein a little bit more than guys do. But I guess a lot of people would be surprised how much guys have a hard time hitting their protein as well.

But it's very difficult to do. And when you under eat protein and you overeat carbohydrates, we know that's going to signal insulin response. We know high levels of circulating insulin. That's going to lead to a big hunger response. And so now we wonder, why are we hungry when we're dieting? Well, you don't have to always be hungry if you're in an appropriate calorie deficit, if your macros were set up appropriately, but also, we're talking about protein.

I mean, I think back to when I first got into the fitness industry, protein was protein. We're talking lean proteins, high quality proteins. It doesn't mean that every time you sit down to eat your food, you're eating salmon, or you're certainly not doing things like fried proteins, like fried chicken or things like that. Thanks mom to, thanks to my mom,

because the very first time, when I got into fitness at all, she was like, well, chicken tenders are a protein source. So I was like, my mom is the biggest enabler in the world, but I love her to death for it. She was just trying to, you guys know, my background is anorexic. She was just trying to get me to eat, but a lot of people, they do though, man,

like they'll sit down and bacon becomes the protein source, right? I made this mistake. I made this mistake as a trainer. Sal talked about the calorie king book. So I was like in my second year of being a trainer when I really started to get into tracking my food, right? And I was using calorie king.

And up into that point, my choice of fast food was KFC. Yeah. And it was KFC for that reason. Oh, it's a trick source of protein. I protein and I just assumed that it actually was probably better for me until I looked at like the actual macro profile. I'm like, fuck, I'm better off having a big Mac

if it don't know, instead of having fried chicken. How crazy is it? I'm pretty sure this is accurate. I don't want to get it wrong. So I'm going to go to caveat that I think this is the truth, but When you go to Chipotle I've been told that the steak is actually leaner than the chicken. I guess they use some dark meat chicken Oh, I could I could be wrong on that like don't hold me to it Is that right? Yeah, I think you're right right like the steak is actually leaner. I think when they have the car

It was the leanest So and I think a lot of people, they underestimate that. They're like, oh, I'll go somewhere and I'll order chicken or doing what you did. They eat out, they get their meals out. Well, let's be honest, people don't give a shit about your calories or your macros when you're eating out.

They wanted to taste good, so now there's oils, now there's calorie, there's just spices and sauces with calories. So, I think you have to be careful, the protein, we got to get adequate protein, but we can't be getting adequate protein with excessive amounts of calories either. So I actually see this on both sides. Well, since you brought that up, I feel like we should talk about this too because this was another mistake that I'd see clients make and I made myself, which is, so you go to

and I use Chipotle as an example, actually, when I teach this because I vividly remember going to Chipotle on certain days of a week, and for a while, there's a train I ate there like every day, right? It was because I could get all this protein, and it was quick and easy. And when Steve worked on Tuesdays,

my double chicken scoops, you would have been able to look so different than when Rachel worked on Wednesdays and Thursdays. And when you go to the website and you look up what the breakdown is, I mean, they base it off of this like standard three ounce scoop or whatever. That nobody does.

That nobody does. And so, you know, I'm getting these, and you gotta understand, that's just, I was just talking about the protein, but that happens with the black beans and the rice and the guacamole and everything else that's going in there. And so when you go to these sites, these things are not heavily policed or regulated.

So it's supposed to give you a general idea of what you're getting, but you're not factoring in when Steve is heavy handed and you've even extra- Not the autonomous. Unless you're going to a place that's actually franchised or those bottom line margins matter. That's how you know when you go to Moses,

Chipotle Moses franchise, so those owners are policing that shit. Chipotle is corporate and they're like, we don't give a fuck. And then you gotta pull the Alex where Mosy pause double. So you go in there and you just ask for single chicken and they over scoop you a little. And you're like, oh wait, I wanted double. And then they give you another big ass scoop.

If they give you half scoop, then you're like, no, no, no, I said double, not one and a half. So they got to like load you the fuck up, but that's what my guy's trying to get gains. That's not loose back, man. Another big challenge is just not focusing at all on the behavior piece of nutrition. So I'll give you a good example of this, right?

So I would work with clients and they would do really well, and but maybe they had a snack in the cupboard that maybe they're kid ate for lunch or whatever, but it was something that was like a trigger food for them. And they're like, it's so hard, so like the food is in my cupboard. It's there. I get stressed out, I get bored. I keep eating handfuls of it. I don't have the discipline. I don't have the, I just can't say no to it. And so I would say, okay, look, here's a deal. We're under, this is good because you're aware of a behavior that you have. So let's do this instead. Instead, don't have that food in the house, but give yourself permission to We're under this is good because you're aware of a behavior that you have. Yeah. So let's do this instead

Instead don't have that food in the house But give yourself permission to eat it You just have to drive the grocery store to get it and it would just create a barrier between them and the food and some space So they could have some awareness between themselves and the impulse and that's just a simple example of Working with your behaviors. Another one would be like, you know I I noticed that when I eat my lunch, I like to be on my phone and when I'm on my phone and distracted, I eat more than I should.

So another behavior strategy would be, you can eat, just make sure you're not distracted. Don't watch TV, don't be on your phone. But ignoring the behavior piece, I think is such a big mistake. You know, I think this is my favorite one, man. I think when I wrote the NCI manual, we talked a lot about biofeedback, which effectively is physiology.

It's your hunger response, your mood, your energy, your focus, your sex drive, your sleep, things like that. I always used to live by the quote that the physical follows the physiology. It was like, if we were trying to create physical change, it always came down to physiological, like creating physiological change and physiological change usually came more about your habits and more about like your lifestyle and the things that you were doing. And, you know, people would tell me all the time, well, I have really crappy sleep. Well, I'm not going to dive into your overall macros about poor sleep, but I do recognize

that if you're not sleeping, well, it's probably difficult to lose body fat. And as a coach, I want to address your sleep first. And so it's like, what are you doing before bed? Well, I have my last meal, like five minutes before I get into bed. Oh, well, does that make you feel like shit? Yeah, I kind of lay there for an hour and digesting it. And it's like, cool, can we try that like three hours earlier?

And they're like, yeah, we could. They do it, they sleep great for a few nights. Oh my gosh, the scale starts to come down. Boom, they're bought in, right? And so there's all these things that, you yeah, we could, they do it, they sleep great for a few nights. Oh my gosh, the scale starts to come down. Boom, they're bought in, right? And so there's all these things that, you know, we've, again, as diet culture, we've allowed people to think that it's only what you eat and it's only the total amount of what you eat

and it has nothing to do with anything else. And like you said, you know, hey, you could have this food, but your behavior has to go the extra mile to actually get it, right? You literally didn't change the habit at all. You just inserted a barrier. I think that's great. You know, on the other side of that is, I think people put food on an island and they remove it from all of the other behaviors in their life.

They're like, well, I can still stay a super stressed out person. I can still not sleep. I can still overexercise. I can still do all of the negative things I do as long as I just change my food. Right. And I don't think that works in any way. I mean, shit, I would rather start somebody

if they're overexercising, if they're under recovering. I would almost say, hey, let's fix those things first before we even address the food because I would argue they'll start making better choices by proxy of simply feeling better. You're right, over training lots of stress, lack of sleep. If you think it's difficult to cut calories

and not eat foods that are your trigger foods or foods that you crave, if you think that's hard normally, you add stress, lack of sleep to that. It's exponentially more challenging. Your body is little, recraving things that you're gonna use as, I don't know, for lack of better term, medications. Well, he's a self-medicate yourself. So, I'm tired and I'm stressed.

I want the food that makes me feel better. You might not be thinking this consciously. This is subconscious, but my brain and my body's like, I want the food that makes me feel good right now. I want the serotonin bump. I want the dopamine bump. So, it's now. I want the serotonin bump. I want the dopamine bump. So it's more challenging to say no to the potato chips. It's more challenging to say no to the pizza

because this, by the way, when you're inhibitions, quote unquote, inhibitions are down, which when you're tired and stressed, they definitely are. If you've ever gone out on a night drinking and then you go get a meal afterwards, you know the food that you choose after you drink is definitely not the kind of food that you choose when you're sober, and that's kind of similar

to what happened. I love that you guys are talking about this right now because there's kind of two camps in the science-based community here, right? You've got the kind of wellness people that are probably talking, speaking towards the behavior a little bit, and they tend to demonize cortisol and insulin

and freak people out. And then you have the other side, like our friends like Lane, that will always be like touting the, a lot of thermodynamics, calories in calories out, that's all that matters. It doesn't matter if you didn't sleep last night, if you ate the 500 calories under your diet,

you'd be fine. So that's all that matters. But you're missing something with that, without explaining what you're talking about. And I remember when this came together for me and it was after many times of fucking up, many times of being on a diet, and then all of a sudden having this crazy craving

of wanting bad food that I was like, man, why would it? And I shouldn't say bad because all food is equal, it's all just calories, right? But craving foods that were fast food, like pizza, hyper-political foods. Yes, hyper-polit is equal, right? It's all just calories, right? But craving foods that were like fast food, like pizza, like, hyper-palatable foods. Yes, hyper-palatable foods, right?

Things that were gonna give me that serotonin dump. And I started to make this connection, like, holy shit. Anytime I would have like a really long day or stressful or really poor sleep all night long, the next day, this is where I would fall off the diet. And I started to make this connection. I'm like, oh, this is what everyone's talking about when you talk about cortisol and insulin

and that being off and then wanting to crave that. And this is why it flies right in the face of people that always, all they talk about is law, the thermodynamics and it's cowers in, cowers out because you're missing the behavior component and how important it is to discuss that because people aren't thinking about that. You know, no one's thinking like,

as soon as they have a bad night's sleep, they're not like, oh, I better be on the defense today because today I'm gonna want fast food and some of that, they just fall into the trap. Well, there's a whole other behavior component that I think goes into this too. You know, we were talking earlier about how dietary culture has talked about,

you know, cheat meals or cheat days. I mentioned, you know, the cycle diet that I did at one point in my life. And for anyone that's not familiar, you basically live in a pretty extreme calorie deficit for six days and the seventh day, you can literally eat whatever you want. You're actually instructed to eat as many calories as possible. I think my days would start with like Dunkin' Donuts on the way to IHOP and then I would wash it down the Frappuccino.

That was my morning. And it sounds great in theory, right? It's like, oh, and I mean, dude, I was ripped to the, I was ripped to the 9s. Like, I walked around with like shredded glutes. Like, that's, that's how the enemy is terrible for hormone profile. But I was lean all the time and I could eat whatever I wanted the 7th day, except it also created a food obsession. And so I stopped measuring food in normal quantities. I stopped measuring hyper-palatable foods in normal quantities. And so like back then, if you told me I could have pizza, well, I had to have it on Sunday,

and that meant I wasn't having a slice of pizza, I was having a pie of pizza. So I don't measure pizza by the slice anymore. I measure it by the pie. To this day, 37 years old, if you put pizza in front of me, I have a very difficult time having one slice. And so we look at people's behaviors, I don't know what they've been conditioned to growing up. You might have been in a family that you eat a whole pizza. You're told

clean your fucking plate, right? Like how many of us grew growing up in this generation? We were told you clean your plate before you get a full dinner table. Well, I have another one that is, that is, I've got another one that highlights this that it took me years. I was in my 30s when I started a piece this together So I grew up in a home where there was on the oldest of four sometimes five right when my stepbrother was there We didn't have a lot of money We my mom would go grocery shopping once a month and beginning the month and she always came home with Maybe there was like one box of twinkies or one thing of ice cream and when you're sharing with five kids

It's first come first serve. So I would always, I would never have a regular serving of anything, I would eat as much as I could because I knew that if I didn't, when my other siblings would eat the rest of it before I could ever come back for a second, helping, that my whole life as a kid, I ate this way, that never ended.

As an adult, I still have those, even though I hit you today. Yeah, even though I could have five gallons of ice cream in my freezer, and I could afford all the ice cream I want, but because I had trained myself that way subconsciously, I still had these behaviors of when I would sit down, I would gorge on something, and that was something that was rooted all the way back in childhood, and how many of your clients think this way and don't even realize. Yeah, those associations are very, very powerful. I mean, fast food place McDonald's knows this. They have a kids play area and fun stuff to do in there

and you create associations. This is why you may have a childhood food that brings you comfort if this has ever happened to you and you introduce your friend and they're like, that's gross, and you're like, no, it's not, it's really good. Not realizing it probably is gross, but you have this association with who knows, you know,

Chef Boyardese, you know, Spaghetti Roni or whatever it is. Because you ate that when you were sick as a kid. These are all behavior things that need to be addressed. And then to your example about, you know, not having any food six days a week and then eating whatever you wanted, that's the equivalent of somebody, like, I'm not going to have, instead of having a glass of wine every night, I'm gonna have seven glasses of wine on Saturday. Like you can see the dysfunction. That's clearly horrible.

Speaking of which, another mistake I think people make is they don't count the calories that they drink. Juice, soda, alcohol, it's because it's liquid, it doesn't really count. People, I've had people very easily consume a thousand calories in a day worth of drink, worth of things that they don't chew. They just wash down their food waste.

Yeah, I mean, I spend half my time, and this isn't to demonize the South, but I spend half my time in South Carolina. I'm just sweet tea, everywhere. That's real sweet tea. Yeah, that's real sweet tea, made with a ton of sugar, and I look around, and I'm like, you know, people are ordering, you know,

go buy a chick-flake, someone's got a grilled chicken sandwich, right, they got a fruit cup, and it's like, what are you drinking? Sweet tea. It's like, you're ordering, you know, go buy a chick fly, someone's got a grilled chicken sandwich, right? They got a fruit cup. And it's like, what are you drinking? It's what you're tea. It's like, you're choosing really healthy things, and then you're gonna wash it down with about a thousand calories in a cup, which is just mind blowing to me.

You know, I think that we get so much demonization of alcohol, and I think people are far more aware of alcohol than anything else. You know, you have an alcohol beverage, you know, in no way. Does that align with what you're trying to do? Right. Right. Like I think every diet or nose that, but at the same token, we talk about juice, we talk about gatorade, we talk about these drinks that are marketed as healthy. We talk about pre-workout drinks that sometimes have extra

carbohydrates. We talk about post workout, protein drinks. I can't tell you the number of times when I used to prescribe post workout carbohydrate, like high molecular weight carbs for high intensity athletics. And they would be like, do I count that towards my carbs? Well, yeah. He's fucking calories. Of course you count it. It's great.

And it's like, it's still a carbohydrate and it's like, I don't care if it's powder form and people are like, oh, I'd rather eat my carbs. And it's like, well, great, you probably should and for most dieters, you probably should aim to, but those still matter and we can't omit those. Yeah, and in one strategy, you know, that Adam used to talk about a lot that I think is brilliant is you give someone a water goal, like drink a gallon of water day, not necessarily because there's magic in drinking a gallon of water, but rather, if you're trying to drink a gallon of water, you're not going to be drinking sodas and juices and stuff like that.

Yeah, if you're drinking carbonated things, you're full, right? And, you know, if you're drinking too much coffee, sometimes that shuts off your desire, your thirst, right? Your desire for more water. And so, yeah, you start the day with water, you stay with water. And a lot of people that will shut off, I mean, we're talking three, four, 500 calories a day in some cases. Well, it goes back to, I mean, all three of the things

that I've added to this conversation are these things that I've picked up over years of training clients. It's a psychological game that I'm playing with them. I've got a client who has to have their, they tell me, I can't cut into my wine, I have my wine every night. Okay, you know, or, oh, I love my sodas, or oh, I have my weekends, Sunday, fun day with the girl, like they have all these rules,

they're not gonna cut this out, they're telling me, and I'm like, okay, it's fine. All I want you to do is hit your gallon of water then every day, and what ends up happening is that they're so focused on achieving that, that they don't have time or room to fit those other things in, and then before you know it, you've eliminated

something out of their diet that you wanted to eliminate, other diet without telling them they can. Along those lines, you ever want to get an office worker to increase the amount of steps that they take every day? I haven't drink a gallon of water a day. That's where to go. Yeah, that doesn't go to the bathroom.

Oh yeah, there's steps to go to the kitchen. We're getting sure. Alright, so now here we're at the point now where I want to really tap into your expertise and experience. Again, for people who don't know, you founded NCI, you train and coach coaches on how to be effective. And there's gonna be people listening to this right now who we just went through six reasons why

their diet's failing, it's not working for them. But there may be people listening who are like, I don't do any of those things. I'm not doing any of those things, it's still not working for me. So now I want to hear from you like what could possibly be going wrong? Yeah, you know, I think this is Adam, you kind of alluded to it earlier. This is, it's

almost becoming a controversial topic because people are saying, you know, a lot of thermodynamics. If you're in a 500 calorie deficit, you're going to lose weight. And I think to some degree that's true, but I think that, you know, as with all things, diaculture, some is good, more is not better. And so metabolic adaptation got really popular in the last decade. Now you got people trying to say, oh, no one's metabolic-ledapted. Like, no very clearly adaptive thermogenesis is a thing. And I would argue if you're consuming under 18 or 1600 calories, and you're not losing weight, There's a good chance you are experiencing

some form of metabolic. Let me pause there for a second. When you talk about metabolic adaptation, what you're talking about is somebody's metabolism changing because of the way that they're eating. What are you doing what you told us to do? Right in other words, right. In other words, in this example,

you're eating 1600 calories a day, you were losing weight, and then the reason why it stopped working is because your metabolism went from burning 2,000 calories to now burning 1600 calories a day, you were losing weight, and then the way the reason why it stopped working is because your metabolism went from burning 2000 calories to now burning 1600 calories. So now the 1600 calories are eating isn't a deficit. It's effectively maintenance But here's here's the crazy part that's supposed to happen. Yeah, right. I think anybody that's like oh my god Notable like adaptations are a bad thing. No, they're very normal. Yeah I was a human being Metabolic adaptations are great. They're normal. They're supposed to happen, right? You put yourself in a deficit. You're supposed to get hungry. You put yourself

in a deficit. Your affinity for meat will come down. Over time, you stay in a deficit. Your strength will likely come down. That's normal. We expect that. The state of being adapted, right? Decreasing metabolic rate from 2016, like you said. Well, that should try to be avoided. And so the question then becomes, how do we actually avoid that? And if you're a dieter that's experiencing issues with it, how do we fix that? And so one of the principles that we introduced with NCI like five years ago was what we call nutritional periodization. And when I sat down, I started looking at high level athletes because that's what I was

working with at the time. And I, you know, it was everything from NFL to, you know, any regular sport. And we understand that as a strength coach, you periodize their training, right? So like, you can't just work out hard all the time. You have to, for instance, like, so we're in the NFL playoffs right now. Do you think those guys are going max effort in the gym on in Friday? No, no, like our injury prevention. It's all injury prevention. It's all movement mobility. It's it's movement restoration from how fucked up they were at the game, right? And so now, what are they going to do immediately once the season's over? Are they going

to go in and immediately go balls to the wall like the week after the season? No, like they're going to recover, right? So all of their like performance oriented like playing in the game, now they need some recovery because we know over the course of 18 weeks 20 weeks They're taking a lot of bruises a lot of nicks a lot of you know bumps Whatever it is and they got to restore that now until they're back to some level of maintenance or some level of like restoration Do you think that they can make any sort of adaptations to make them better for next year? Probably not right if if they leave the playing field and they feel it complete shit

and they're nursing a hamstring injury, they can't go in and try to hit a super heavy back squat to increase their power for next season. So it stands to reason that when we look at those phases, why are we not doing that with our diets, right? And so what we started to realize, there's actually four very distinct phases that every single person goes through. When we hear the word diet, we think of it as a very binary term. Yes, you're dieting, no, you're not dieting. I don't disagree with that, but then I would add the question, well, what phase of your diet are you in?

Are you actively pursuing goals? Are your goals? Are you recovering from that active pursuit of goals? Are you in an effort to potentially make your next diet a little bit easier? Or are you preparing for that active pursuit of goals? And so from a sport, nomenclature, that would be, are you in season, postseason, offseason, or preseason? And so the problem is most people have had this very binary, I mean, they're actively in season,

I'm pushing really, really hard, and they've done that for months or years on end. Or they've done what's oftentimes worse. They've yo-yo dieted. And we all know body fat overshooting, right? Not only, because when you body fat overshoot, you don't just make your fat cells larger. You actually increase the number of fat cells you have in your body.

And so now you're fighting an even bigger demon and you're making it even harder to lose weight in long term. So I believe that probably 80% of people right now that if they were to go undertake a diet, when we look at them where they're starting in a periodized setting, they should consider the notion that maybe they need to start in the recovery phase, the postseason phase, and we say it in CI, everyone's going to say, well, how long do I do? How long do I do the post season? It's to restore homeostatic balance, right?

If we restore homeostasis, if your hormone levels are normal, if your biofeedback is normal, if you're able to consume maintenance calories without gaining weight, and all things are normal, there's zero reason you shouldn't be able to lose weight. The problem is most people that aren't losing weight, if we were to give you maintenance calories right now, it would be willing to, that you gain way. And if we went through all of your biofeedback and all of your physiology, I'd be willing to bet we could find things that are not normal or not what we would consider at homeostasis. Therefore why are we trying to start a diet? That's analogous to a football player, nursing injuries, and trying to create better performance next year.

Yeah, what a great point. And you know, by the way, there are studies that compare diets head to head. The same general caloric deficit for the week or for the month. And the differences, one group undulates their calories or magnetizes. And the other group keeps everything exactly the same every single day.

The group that changes things, which is similar to what you're talking about, ends up burning more body fat and keeping more muscle and actually prevents or mitigates that metabolic adaptation that tends to happen with a diet. By the way, bodybuilders have known this for decades. Bodybuilders have done this, obviously, some of the ways that they talk about it, maybe not so great, but they've known this for a long time where they go bulking and cutting and cycling, carbs and that all came from that kind of physique sport

from that world because they saw that it worked. We now have the data and the science to show that this is. Well, out of you used to work a lot of the Keeney girls and this was like, I mean, this was like an epidemic in and of itself. Well, we would see girls go to these coaches and these coaches would chase pro cards all year and what would they do?

They'd start at the first show of the year junior USA is in March And they would go junior USA is junior nationals USA is North Americans national diet diet It's literally 800 calorie diet from March to fucking November and then they go back to eating 1800 and they put on 40 pounds and they don't know why yeah And it's like, well, you never had a postseason between diets and by the way, you probably need to put that back on. That's what your body needs to effectively survive right now.

And we have to remember, we've all made the statement, you know, we're not put on this earth to walk around at 6% body fat. We're put on this earth to survive, thrive and procreate. So when you give your body food relative to wherever it's adapted to, which again is a normal thing, it's gonna do what it needs to do with that food, not what you want it to do.

Well, to put it differently, if you've died at that hard from March to November and then you dramatically increase your calories 800 to 1800, your body is like, I'm gonna prepare for the next eight month period of the next fam. No fam. And I'm gonna store as much as possible. And then you talked about how we actually add to 7,000 calories surplus for the week. Yes, which is pretty significant And you're talking about adding fat cells your this is your body's literal your body's attempt at Being able to it's struggling to capture the all the extra energy and so it's improving its ability to capture more energy

So what does this mean? It's harder to get leaner later on. Back to the physique sports. This is when you would hear bodybuilders, physique competitors, bikini competitors say, it's so much harder to get in shape than it was before, or my body just doesn't look sharp like it used to. What's going on? It's because your body's getting better and better at storing body fat. You're literally teaching it to do this. Anyone that listens to this, you got to remember it, you can starve a body one time. Right? And so this is where I love to hear people say, oh, well, 800 calories diets don't work.

Well, they do the first time. Because you don't have any pre-existing metabolic adaptations. So they work the first time. Because let's be honest, 800 calories is a deficit. You know, and like I said earlier, everyone in diet culture loves to throw around this crazy notion that diets don't work. That's bullshit.

Diet's do work. If you're in a deficit, you're in a deficit and your body will lose weight. I mean, we've proven this with McDonald's diets and twinkie diets, but you know, at the end of the day, like you said, they're metabolically adapted. They're no longer in that deficit. It's just, it's not going to work out. And now, so, so when you, when people are listening to this and they're like, okay, this is kind of challenging, confusing, how do I work with this? This is where you get the value of working with a coach

or a trainer and what a coach will do is walk you through this process. And one of the most important things a coach will do is they'll tell you what to expect. And here's what's going to happen over the next three weeks. And this is great because when you're doing this and your coach tells you, you're going to feel a little hungry, you you're gonna have more energy, less energy, you're gonna know the cravings, and then they happen, you're like, okay, I'm ready, I know what's going on. And this is the value of a coach.

Now, you own one of the, we consider to be the best certification courses for coaches. How do you coach your trainers and coaches to do this? What does that conversation look like? Yeah, I mean, this is actually, so ironically when we wrote this certification, I asked myself the simple question, how can we be different? Because physiology hasn't changed since we were born, you know, since not in our lifetime, not the lifetime before us. It hasn't evolved

that much, right? Our bodies are going to work the same way. And so the science is science. Now, I think that we continue to uncover more science, but I think that the real magic is in the way in which you apply it. You know, if we were having this conversation a decade ago, 10 years ago, none of us would have been sitting here, like with any real inclination that the majority of dieters should be starting with some sort of recovery phase. We would have just been talking about reactive dieting. We might have been talking about dieting as a binary term, as a yes or a no thing. Whereas today we have that understanding.

And so I actually think it's one of the hardest things for new coaches is to feel confident going to their clients and saying, hey, you're gonna lose 30 pounds, but you're gonna have to gain 10 pounds first sometimes. To recover. Yeah. I tell a story in level one, I worked with a lady. She came to me and she was eating 800 calories a day,

and she was training five times a day. And she wasn't losing weight. And she was, I mean, we're talking mid to late 50s. And I was like, I had the very difficult conversation. I said, hey, if you want to work together, I know you're hiring me to lose weight. You probably won't lose weight for at least a year. And you'll probably gain a reasonably significant amount over the course of that year. And I told her, I said, I need you to think on it. I need you to sleep on it and make sure you're comfortable

with this process. I said, you're welcome to hire whoever you want. But anybody that tells you you're going to lose weight immediately is completely full of shit and you should run the other way. I was really expensive at the time, like I was $500 a month coach, and she agreed to work with me. And so for 20 months, it took us to get her back to like a homeostatic balance. No, a lot of people are like,

well why did you take so long? I believe there's a psychology aspect to reverse dieting as much as there's a physiology aspect to reverse dieting. You know, me being a former anorexic, if I had to reverse diet and I gained 20 pounds of body fat, I'd jump off a cliff. So I think there's a psychology aspect that I observed with my clients as well.

And so we took 20 months, which means, you know, do the math, she gave me $10,000 to gain something like 12 pounds. And then it took us another year of actively dieting to then get her to like her net loss of eight pounds. But ever since then, we've been working together seven plus, almost eight plus years now. And it's sustainable. She's not working out five times a day.

Every year we do a recovery. Every year we do a time where she completely takes a break. Every year we ramp up for her cut because she likes to cut around her birthday. And then every year we cut around her birthday and she achieves a new best every year. And this woman isn't her early, she's like 63, 64 now. And she achieves a new personal best

for her every single year. Now, the really cool part, man, is she's actually undergone some, you know, she had cancer over this time, and she's undergone some serious health issues over this time. And she will openly tell you, she credits her ability to fight through these things to me getting her healthy,

not just her metabolism healthy, but her physically healthy as well. And so, you know, man, like when we teach this to coaches, we teach it as a non-negotiable. If your client is not willing to go through with a periodized process, that means you as the coach are actively participating in hurting them, right?

If we know this to be the way to create maximal levels of results, you are ethically bound to do it this way. And so if your client or your prospective client is not wanting to do it this way, you got to walk away. I don't care how much money is on the table. I don't care how much you need that money or you know, you have to walk away and you have to say, hey, you know what, try it your way, more power to you, lots of people do. I'll be here when you're ready for me, but this is the way we're gonna do it. And, you know, I really, I like to think

we've made a reasonable dent. Obviously, there's a massive problem with obesity and issues in our world, but I know obviously I'm very in tune with our community. We've certified over 6000 coaches now and just watching the success stories of people doing it the right way, man, it's super cool.

That's why you're the only nutritional certification course for coaches that we work with. That's why. So let me ask you a question. Is there a way somebody can find an NCI coach? Is there a general way? Actually, there is. As we're recording today, there's not.

But in the, I promise in the next 45 days, we have a full database. We've actually gone through, we have completely databaseed every coach that has gone through NCI as well as where they're located. So I know that like distance coaching is a big thing now, but I also know some people like to see their coach. And so we are actually going to have a coaching registry on our site. So if you haven't been to our site, it's NCIcertifications.com.

You can go there. The registry should be updated in the next 45 days. We have a brand new director of education. You actually headed this up for this reason, because a lot of people are looking for that potential now. So yeah, we're pretty pumped about it. Oh, very cool.

Well, hey, man, thanks for coming on. It's been a lot of fun. Always is when we have you on the... I always enjoy coming out, man. I appreciate you guys having me on. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy,

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