Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2167: How Losing Weight Can Make You Fatter and Unhealthy

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin cover five things that can indicate your weight loss may not be the kind you want. The challenge of losing weight and thinking you’re doing things the right way. (1:26) We don’t just want to lose weight but change body composition. (3:58) How muscle is EXTREMELY protective. (7:31) Five Things that can Indicate your Weight Loss May Not be the Kind you Want. #1 - You lose muscle. (8:12) #2 - You develop a nutrient deficiency. (18:32) #3 - You do it unsustainably. (24:32) #4 - You do it through dysfunctional behaviors. (31:11) #5 - You feel worse. (39:48) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Seed for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Promo code MINDPUMP at checkout for 30% off your first month’s supply of Seed’s DS-01® Daily Synbiotic** September Promotion: MAPS Symmetry | RGB Bundle 50% off! **Code SEPTEMBER50 at checkout** Association of Grip Strength With Risk of All-Cause Mortality, Cardiovascular Diseases, and Cancer in Community-Dwelling Populations: A Meta-analysis of Prospective Cohort Studies HANDGRIP DYNAMOMETER Mind Pump #1387: Turning Your Body Into A Fat-Burning Machine Mind Pump #2035: Why Diets Always Fail With Dr. Will Cole Mind Pump #1915: How To Re-Ignite Your Metabolism Workout Because You Love Yourself Not Because You Hate Yourself – Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources  

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness health and entertainment podcast in the history of the world. This is Mind Pump, right? Today's episode we talk about weight loss and how it can actually make you fatter and more unhealthy. I swear to God, we're not lying. You're going to love this episode.

We explain it all. By the way, this is brought to you by a sponsor seed. This is the world's most effective, best, best made probiotic period end of story. Check it out. Go to seed.com forward slash mind pump. You can call it mind pump and get 30% off your first month's order. We're also running a sale on some workout programs this month. Maps symmetry is half off and the RGB bundle of programs is half off, both 50% off.

If you're interested, go to mapsfitinistproducts.com and then use the code September 50 for that discount. All right, here comes the show. It's constantly getting hammered into us that losing weight will improve our health. Here's a deal that's not always true. There are definitely cases where losing weight will make you fatter and more unhealthy. We're here to explain how and why,

and then we're gonna tell you how to do it the right way. So today's episode, how losing weight can actually make things worse. I love this topic because it's probably one of the hardest things that I ever had to communicate to a client that was on a mission to lose body fat. I mean, most people struggle with weight, the average American puts on,

what is it, a pound a year or something like that and over time and they get to a point where they're fed up or they're doctor tells them they're unhealthy and they have to fix it. They go to do it and then it's they're so focused on this I got to get this 20, 30, 40 pounds off the scale in order for me to be healthy and the idea that they could actually lose 15 of those say 40 or 50 pounds that they need to lose and know that they're actually digging themselves a deeper hole or going the wrong direction is just mind-boggling for them. And it's so hard as a trainer to try and communicate

what is going on there, especially when you recognize what that person is going through to do that. Yeah. They're like, I mean, they're cutting out all their treats. They're like, starving themselves. They're cutting out all their treats, they're exercising, they feel like they're being so good and disciplined, and then to be told by their trainer, we're failing, or we're doing worse, or we're doing more harm than we are good, is like, it becomes, I'm going

to get there in spite of whatever my body signals are telling me. And you put the horse blinders on. That's such like a intense focus and a lot of times, too. It's driven by like some of those, those meetings with their doctor where it becomes like this alarming thing. Like this is really what's, you know, something to address in my health. I have to take care of this. And so that just becomes the one and only thing that they hyper-foot. Well, you actually address another reason why it makes it really challenging.

Because we talk about the stages of awareness and getting people to become aware of how their body really feels. But a lot of times when you have somebody who's been eating junk food, not moving or exercising at all, and even when they start to do it the wrong way, they actually feel positive benefits. Also, their energy is up, they're lighter, their pants are fitting like-

They're certainly right. Yeah, and so convincing them that you're not better, we're worse, that's again, that just adds to this challenge because everything in their mind is telling them that you're not better, we're worse, is like, that's again, that just adds to this challenge because everything in their mind is telling them that they're doing the right thing or they're heading in the right direction, yet they have no idea that they're actually making it even more challenging. Yeah, the example I used to give people, I would make it so ridiculous that they would kind of understand for a second, right? So whenever I'd have this conversation with a client or a potential member, you know, I would say something like, you know, wait, literally just measures mass.

So I could put a table on the scale, you on the scale, it doesn't tell us what is on the scale. It just tells us the weight. And I'd say we could lose very quickly 20 pounds by cutting your leg off and they would laugh. Yeah, you know, but I think it would illustrate the point that we're not looking at, we don't want to just lose weight.

What we're really trying to do is change body composition. That's what's important. Now this is further clouded and confused by things like BMI. So BMI stands for Body Mass Index. And this was put out by the medical community. God, I would say over the last couple of decades and they showed in this BM, so there's BMI charts you can find online and it'll, it'll show you your height and your weight and then what your BMI number is.

And it'll show like green, yellow and red is what you'll see. Red meaning unhealthy yellow is like, uh, borderline green is healthy. And if you're above 30 BMI for your height, well, you're unhealthy. And the data shows this. This makes it even more confusing. If you look at the data, a body mass index of 30 higher rate of heart disease, higher rate of cancer, diabetes, joint issues. So they're like, this is a great way to just generally measure someone. Quickly categorize people and create this sort of standard without being able to kind of parse through that and see all the specifics of like, you know, what's healthy and what's

not in terms of your body composition. It's only slightly accurate to people that are only obese or overweight. What I was gonna add is you have any sort of muscle and it throws it off. Well, that's exactly so dizzy. That's what I'm gonna add to that is that BMI is a proxy for being overfat. And it's a relatively good proxy because the average person doesn't work out,

average person needs kind of whatever. So if their BMI is 30 or above, they probably have a lot of body fat. And that's why they use it. And remember, the medical community is always looking for very simple metrics. They're easy to apply. It doesn't require blood test. We can just weigh you real quick. Okay, here you are, and we got to get this down. But I'll give you another proxy that is just the simple that is far more accurate, grip strength. You can measure your grip strength

and that'll give you a better, that's a better predictor of all cause mortality than BMI. Now, how is that possible? How is that even work? Well, grip strength is a proxy for total body strength. It's more accurately gonna tell a doctor or a researcher if you have enough muscle on your body, because

muscle is very protective. Now, neither one is perfect. You want a lot of metrics to get a full complete picture. It's interesting that we actually, because those are, I mean, we have a whole bunch of those. I know they're not expensive when we bought them. Those test are not expensive to have in doctors office. It's strange to me that we haven't

Done that yet where we at least take a combination right here's your BMI No, it's your strength. Oh, because that would be beautiful because it would be simple I be a mind looking at one thing. Well, yeah, because if you had a high BMI, but your grip strength was through the roof very easily Can say yeah, very easy. Oh, probably got and yeah, that's simple. Yes. So at or and or we see like incredibly weak and high BMI. Oh, this is major risk factor. Yeah, let's talk about muscle for a second. Muscle is very strongly connected to longevity, much lower risk of diabetes and insulin resistance, lower risk of cancer. So muscle is extremely protective. Having little muscle is connected to degenerative disorders, brain disorders, heart disease, cancer,

all those other things. So muscle is something you also wanna measure. By the way, the grip strength test, the reason why they don't use it, is I don't think they have a generalized metric yet that they've given the medical community. Right now it's just in research, but they're showing like,

hey, this is a really accurate single metric better than almost any other. So let's talk about body composition because this is really what we want to talk about. It's not about weight. It's about what that weight is made up of. You could look at a picture of a man who's six foot tall, 200 pounds, who is, you know, 20% body fat or 20 something percent body fat versus a 200 pound man who's six foot tall at 12% body fat. Same weight, they look radically different. If you saw them both standing next to each other,

especially with their shirts off, but even with their shirts on, you would look at them both and you could clearly see this person looks fit, this person looks fat, very, very different. So body composition is really what you wanna measure, not body weight. So this is gonna bring us to the next thing,

which is, because obviously I said, how losing weight can make you fatter. That one is even harder to wrap your mind around than the fact that you can lose weight and get more unhealthy. I think some people understand how losing weight can be unhealthy. Oh yeah, if I'm sick or if I starve myself,

I think the average person kind of get that. But if I say to somebody, did you know, you could lose 20 pounds and have more body fat, you have a higher body fat percentage, people don't understand that. How's that even possible? Body fat percentage is a percentage of your overall body weight, okay?

A 100 pound man with 10 pounds of body fat on his body would be 10% body fat, it would be very lean. A 50 pound man with 10% body fat would have 15% body fat, higher body fat percentage because he's much more 20% even though he's half the weight. Because he's half the weight, he has less body mass, same total body fat and pounds. It's now a higher body fat percentage. In other words, if you're a big person with a lot of muscle, you can carry more body fat

and be lean than if you're a small person who carries the same amount of total body fat. So that means literally you could lose 20 pounds on the scale and I don't know, 15 pounds of it could be muscle. So you still lost a little bit of body fat, but most of it was muscle. You're worse off. Your body fat percentage is now higher. By the way, this is not hard to do. This is actually far easier to do than to lose pure body fat to the point where I've done it to myself, I've had trainers do this, I've done this to clients on accident, and it's super disheartening. I've done this where I've lost weight on the scale, doing all this crazy workout.

Oh my God, I think I'm leaner. I get my body fat test and I realize it went up a little bit. Oh crap, I lost muscle. I mean, I think the part, this was actually one of the best things that ever happened to me as a coach and trainer. It was about midway through my career, I know Justin worked with me at that time and I used to do these challenges with my trainers, we put a bunch of money in the pot

and then we'd all compete on it. We had a hydrostatic way, so we had an outside source come in, really accurate way to test body fat, really, really accurate, right? With within like point, I think it's like 0.5% of the best. Yeah, it's like one of the most accurate ways you can test body fat. And we would compete all the trainers like who could make the greatest body composition change in this period of time of like 12 weeks.

And it was overwhelming how many people, how many trainers got smaller and thought they were much leaner and gotten great training like crazy, dieting like crazy for this 12 week period. And body fat percent didn't change or hardly changed or in some cases went up. And it was it baffled so many of the trainers that all the trainers wanted to discredit the hydrosite weight. You have all of them in common. We're saying the same there on the site. It's broken. I was broken. There's no that they're on this like, it's broken.

It's broken, there's no way I was dialed, I was doing this and it's like, that just shows you how, how what a fine line it is of dieting, cardiovascular training and then also trying to preserve muscle mass and understanding too that as you get leaner and leaner this becomes more and more challenging and so there's this really sweet spot of How much activity that you're doing how much your coloric deficit is how how much

Protein you're feeding the body to sustain muscle what kind of signal you're sending to the body in regards to Building muscle through weight training versus doing cardiovascular endurance, which doesn't require that. All that shit matters. Yeah, it's very misleading because you feel like you got more stamina, you feel more energetic. You've lost a bit of weights, you can move a little more effectively, but in a sense, because you haven't been putting more emphasis on weight training and actually like making sure you preserve and then building muscle, you know, your compositions can be changing. You'd be on that path, you're actually losing muscle, which then actually like ends up

changing your body composition towards the negative. Yeah, so I mean, really what we're talking about is you lose muscle. This is the first biggest challenge with just, with weight loss and with the traditional methods of weight loss, which are, cut my calories and do lots of cardio. Now, the question is, why do you lose muscle? Why would my body get rid of muscle?

Is it because it's burning muscle? I remember when we used to think this, like, oh, your calories are so low, your body's burning muscle for energy. That's not what's happening. Your body rarely burns muscle for energy and nutrients unless you're super, super starving. You haven't had food for like over, you know, two weeks.

It doesn't happen. What's really happening is your body, your body's constantly adapting its muscle mass to meet energy demands and to meet the demands of the environment that you live in. So in other words, your body will only keep as much muscle and strength as it thinks it needs. Now, why does it do that? Muscle is expensive. Muscle costs a lot of calories. Your body does not want you to burn more calories than is necessary because your primitive body is the result of thousands and thousands and thousands of years of evolution, and an environment where food was scarce. So your body learned how to adapt to be efficient and thrifty. So if I'm doing a lot of exercise that just burns a lot of calories, and I'm eating very

little, and I don't really have, my body doesn't have a good reason to keep the muscle, you mentioned cardio. Cardio type training doesn't require much muscle, actually requires very little muscle, it just requires stamina. Hence why endurance runners look like the way they look. That's right. So if I do lots of cardio and I cut my calories really low, my body is going to try to meet that new environment. And the environment says, we need stamina.

We're burning lots of calories through activity. We need to become machines that burn less calories. One of the most effective ways to do this is to pair muscle down. This is not a theory. Light and overall load. That's right, this is not a theory. The studies are very clear on this. Cardioplus diet typically results on average

where close to half the weight you lose is muscle, half. And that's a good scenario, by the way. I mean, that's average, just with the stashoso. And we're talking about people who are not working out, they'll have a sudden they work out and they cut their calories. So they even, it could get even worse as they continue down this path, but you lose 10 pounds, seven, or eight of it,

comes from muscle. Oh my God, you lost muscle. You've slowed your metabolism down. Here's where it gets really crappy. Your metabolism is slower, which means you've got to even less to make things go down on the scale. Even more, muscles protected,

where you lost some of it. You lost some of that protection. You lost some of it, you lost some of that protection, you lost some of the ability to become sensitive to insulin, you lost some of the ability to store carbohydrates and sugars, because muscles do that, the cancer-fighting effects, essentially through that muscle loss process, you've made yourself fatter and less healthy. And that's the most common thing that happens

when people do this the wrong way. Well, this is sort of, you know, and the crazy thought is that it's actually probably more advantageous for somebody in a position where they're overweight and their bodies mainly consist of body fat to just focus on building and maybe even adding weight. To build muscles.

So that way too, your body, it has a more protective quality to it, and you're gonna go ahead and also get the benefits of building up your metabolism along the way, which then later on will really help to excel. Look, imagine if you had a four cylinder car, and the goal was to go the same direction. Yeah, build the engine up or start dumping weight

inside the car, which drives as much as you can. Imagine if you had a four cylinder car and the idea was to burn 100 gallons of gas, as fast as possible. Well, one way to do it would be to just drive as much as you could, but let's say you had the option to throw in like a, I don't know, an eight liter V10 engine,

which one's gonna get there faster. I'm actually gonna put that eight liter engine in there and drive down the street and I burned way more gas and I could in the four cylinder engine, driving all the way down to Southern California. So that's essentially what you're doing. Essentially what you're trying to do with muscle is make the engine bigger so your body

burns more calories on its own. Otherwise your body's gonna learn how to burn less calories. You don't want to deal with weight loss or fat loss with a body that's learning constantly how to burn less calories. Good luck. It's gonna be very challenging. You're constantly in this battle where you need to move more.

You need to eat less, I plateaued, move more, eat less, I plateaued, move more, eat less, I plateaued. Oh my God, where am I? And not only that, but it's very disheartening to lose weight on the scale and your body fat percentage hasn't changed. What the hell is going? Now what happened is you're just, and this is just, I'm going to sell this now to people because I know people are interested in how it makes them look. You'll are smaller, same flabby-ness-looking version of yourself. Like, congratulations. You're smaller.

You look to take your clothes off. You're just the flabby as you were before, because you lost half of that weight amongst yourself. The only reason why I don't like to share that, even though that's true, and the same thing that Justin made with the energy thing is, because this is the part where people get deceived. They, because they are so insecure about their way size. And so, we just had a caller.

I'm like, I don't care. We just had a caller the other day that was, you know, claiming to sell that she feels healthier at 13% body fat and he called her out on it. Like, you know, you don't. But that's just how people are. They're so psychologically wound up in being overweight or big that they think they feel better and they think they

look better at that point. But they really, from a true body composition point, they don't at all. Which brings us to the next point of, you know, as you're in this cut mode, restrict, move, move more to try and burn, you also lose sight of how important all your micro and macro nutrients are in this. This is why I don't like the whole message of calories in versus calories out, and we just gotta eat less and move more,

and that's what the science community that likes to tout that so much is like the end all be all, because what people hear from that is, okay, I'm just gonna cut out all these things, I know aren't good for me, move to chicken breasts and salads, go to the gym and work out every single day, and I should get in better shape. And initially, they see weight loss, and they think they're on the right path. Yet, they're missing all kinds of micro and macro nutrients, which you have to understand,

play a role in the body's overall metabolism and how it works. It's not going to function as well. You know, when you're deficient in some of these minerals and nutrients, and that's just inevitably something people don't account for when they start cutting calories. This is uncomfortable part of the conversation because this is where people,

this is where it really gets disartening. But if you're eating a 2000 calorie diet, you are receiving, let's say, 2000 calories worth of nutrients. Okay, that includes macro nutrients, proteins, fats, and carbs. Proteins and fats are essential. You have to consume them. In fact, you have to consume a certain amount of them.

Otherwise, your body will not be able to thrive or continue. And there's also micronutrients, vitamins and minerals, which are essential that you also need. So if you took that same diet and cut in half, I ate a thousand calories now, I've now cut the amount of micro and macro nutrients. Now, why is this something important to consider? Because the average person is already almost borderline nutrient deficient anyway. Now, you can just tell him to eat less.

Now, they get less nutrients on top of it. What's wrong with nutrient deficiencies? Why is that such a big deal? Nothing will make you feel worse than lacking a vitamin and mineral that's essential, okay? You can, it'll cause anxiety, depression, it'll cause bone loss, it can cause pain, it can cause hormone imbalances,

your hair can fall out, skin issues, like all kinds of weird stuff can happen from a micro nutrient standpoint. And macro nutrient, if your protein is below essential or fat is below essential, all everything goes bad. Everything goes terrible. And I've seen this many times. I've had clients come into me who've gone down this path of just cutting calories and moving more. And they have all the signs of a fat intake deficiency. And I look at them and I'm like, oh my god, your skin, your hair, your nails, your hormones. I look at their diet. I'm like, you're eating 15 grams of fat a day. Oh,

you need fat in your diet. Or we do a nutrient panel and we see like your vitamin D is low. You get them, you give them vitamin D and it changes everything. So here's the uncomfortable part, okay? Heavily processed foods, we rail against because they're designed to make you over eat. Here's another part of heavily processed foods. They're often fortified with micronutrients. And this is because there's certain standards and people like to buy things that say they have a lot of, you know, certain nutrients and vitamins minerals.

Believe it or not, and this is sad, there's a better way to do this, but believe it or not, a lot of Americans get their micronutrines from processed foods because they will eat their breakfast cereal and the breakfast-seal company essentially throws in the equivalent of half a multivitamin and every serving. So it's kind of patching the holes. So then the person cuts that out, then they go to like, you know, let's say lots of salad. We are oatmeal for breakfast,

this chicken salad for lunch. Yeah, or, yeah, no, oh, this is healthy. This is salad. Like lettuce is nutrient-devoid, okay? There's nothing in lettuce. It's like water. And there's just some, you know, maybe it'll help you with the roughage and your digestion,

but that's pretty much it. So a lot of people aren't even, they're not fully informed on what is considered nutrient-dense and also they just cut everything. And so what ends up happening oftentimes with the average person, and this is the uncomfortable part, is that they cut their calories to lose weight and then the rate of nutrient deficiencies goes up. By the way, nutrient deficiencies also constipate appetite.

You can have cravings that are so strong with nutrient deficiencies that they can be borderline strange. Okay. In fact, there's studies on pregnant women who will eat paint off the walls and weird stuff because they're lacking certain nutrients. So this is a real issue. Now, someone may think to themselves, I'll just throw a multivitamin at myself while going on diet. Okay, that'll help with some of the micronutrients, but it's not going to help with the proteins and fats, which are essential.

And most people, when they drop their calories enough to lose weight, the average person, his metabolism's already slow and it's slowing down because of the first point, which is their losing muscle, they're eating 12, 14-hundred calories. If you're not actively trying to hit protein and fat and hit those essentials, it's almost impossible.

You're gonna miss out. It's almost impossible to hit. I mean, let's just hit some of the common ones so the audience knows, like, I mean, I's just hit some of the common ones so the audience knows. Like, I mean, I see a lack of fiber in this person's diet. I see lack of B vitamins. I see lack of iron. I see low protein.

I see low healthy fats. When you just cut calories, and if you're missing on all those things, all those things have these like vital signs. Like my skin is off, my digestion is off, my sleep is off, magnesium's another one that's low, vitamin D's another one that's low. All those things are off. And so to think that your body is going to do what you want it to do,

burn body fat and keep muscle is ridiculous. It's fighting and trying to figure out all these other things. It's not getting, meanwhile, you're trying you're going back to your car analogy. It's literally like trying to race this car with the timing belt off, no oil in the engine, no gas, two flat tires, and your diesel now. And you're frustrated wondering like, why am I getting my ass whooped?

And why is this car so slow? It's like, well, all you're focusing on is putting the gas pedal down. When it's like, what you need to do is fix all these things that are deficient and get that running right and then watch how much faster the car is just by fixing that issue. Right. Now the next point is in my opinion one of the most important ones because when you look at the data on this and this is also based on our experience remember we ran gyms and trained clients and trained trainers for two and a half decades.

The most important aspect of losing weight the wrong way and becoming more and healthier is that people do it in a way that's unsustainable. People lose weight all the time. In fact, everybody listening to this show right now, we have millions of listeners. Everybody has lost weight and gained it back. Okay, the hard thing is to keep it off.

It's not losing the weight. Everybody thinks losing weight's hard. If you look at the data, you would look at the day you'd say, wow, losing weight's easy. Everybody loses weight. What's really hard is keeping it off. It's like a 90% fail rate, meaning the vast majority of people at lose weight gain it all back, by the way, typically when they gain the weight back, they don't gain the muscle back that they lost. They just gain it all back in body fat. So you lost 20 pounds, eight of it was muscle, then you go off the diet, you gain back 20 pounds, but you didn't get back those eight pounds of muscle.

Now it's all body fat, and now it makes it even harder down the road. So what makes this unsustainable? Well, if you're burning calories through movement, and that's your primary method of, you know, trying to burn calories is just me move as much as possible, and you're cutting your calories on top of it,

and then your body pairs muscle down to slow your metabolism down. Well, then you hit a plateau, and then you gotta repeat that cycle. You gotta come, my calories again, gotta increase my movement again to make more things happen. The plateau this time comes faster.

So this is what it looks like, and I like to paint the picture to people because then they know that I know what I'm talking about. Typically what happens is the initial, I don't know, 10 pounds of weight loss happens pretty quick. Then you plateau real hard, and then you cut your calories more, and you end up exercising more

to make the next five pounds come off. And then you plateau again. What? Now it's only five pounds. Let's apply that again. I'm gonna move more. I'm gonna eat less. Now I'm gonna lose a few pounds in plateau again.

And at some point you're like, I don't wanna exercise more. And I'm eating so little life sucks. I'm not, I can't maintain this. I don't wanna keep doing this. This sucks. This sucks so bad that, and here's my favorite line. I just wanna enjoy my life,

I'm gonna go off the diet, I'm gonna stop exercising, and we're back at square one. Yeah, and I think the general consensus still is that it's like an equal math problem and it's linear, and this is always gonna be true. That first 10 pounds, maybe I'm just not working hard enough,

maybe I'm just not cutting my calories enough. To the point where they don't realize a body, I mean, it's adapting. It's trying to make things more efficient for you. So you're telling your body, like we need to pair down. We need to make sure that we're using this energy most effectively in this environment.

So that just, that math problem doesn't add up that whole time. It changes and you have to account for that. Along the lines of sustainability too, this is why I always follow up a question with a question with my clients asked me about their diet when they bring me their diet and say, what do you think about this? And I always ask them, well, how much do you love it? Because not only is the, the exercise of cutting cal? Because not only is the exercise of cutting calories and exercise an unsustainable way

for most people long-term, so are diets that are super restrictive. So if I got somebody who comes to me and they're like, oh, I'm falling the carver diet, I've lost 15 pounds and I go, they're like, what do you think of it? And I go, well, what do you think? Do you love it? Do you love eating that way?

Do you see yourself eating that way for the rest of your life? Because if you don't, then it's a terrible diet for you. So it's so important that not only the way people decide to cut calories and move more as their way of training, they can lose body fat, but also the diet that they choose to follow, that's more important than anything. Like, we get in these camps of, this one's better for this reason, that's like the number one reason, a number one factor of if it's's better for this reason, that's like the number one reason, a number one factor of if it's a successful diet,

is if it's something that you could sustain for the rest of your life. Because you can't just go on carnivore diet, lose your 50 pounds and then go back to eating a regular diet and think that you're gonna maintain the physique that you just busted your ass for. In fact, it's harder than that, and you normally put on even more weight.

So sustainability is super important, which is also why when we talk about exercise like less is more. Finding a way to get a client and this is definitely one of the things that has changed for me as a trainer from my early career, early part of my career, some of the later part of my career is I found myself early on calling people out if they couldn't commit to three, or four, or five days of training, or mocking, walking is like,

oh, that's not real exercise, where now someone will tell me what they can do, and I always try and convince them to do less. Not because it's necessarily always a better choice because it's gonna burn more calories or be better for them. It's that I want them to be able to sustain this. So if you're telling me you can commit to four days a week of training, let's start with two.

And let's commit to that and then build on that and build on that because I'm always thinking of sustainability over what is the fastest or best thing that I can do right now. Look, it's a fact, if you can make your metabolism faster, in other words, you burn more calories all the time, not doing anything extra. That's more sustainable than you having to get up and having to move all the time to burn those

calories. It's a much more sustainable approach. The build muscle method, building muscle path, is a much more sustainable way of keeping fat off your body. Plus, it's healthier like we talked about earlier. So you wanna build muscle, speed up the metabolism. It does start off slower on the scale. Okay, I'm gonna be very clear. You're not gonna lose that initial 10 pounds as fast, but you're not gonna plateau. And the way you do lose is pure body fat.

It's not muscle. In fact, you'll probably gain some muscle. But the body fat will start to snowball off your body. You'll start to get this accelerating path of fat loss, where at the end of this journey, you're eating as much or more than you did before. So you have to ask yourself, again, what's more sustainable? Eating a lot of calories and being lean, or eating a little bit of calories and being lean. Obviously, eating more calories. You want to be able to eat more. It's a bigger buffer that allows you to do that. By the way, when people say, you know, yeah, I know this is an unsustainable way,

but I'll figure it out when I get there. When I get there, then I'll try to fix it exponentially harder once you're there. That's literally no different than someone saying, drop me off in the middle of that massive lake. I'll figure out how to get to the shore once you drop me in. You're like, you probably should figure that out before you throw your legs away. You should have built a boat. Yeah, because you're going to drown and that's 100% of what will happen. All right, next is just the fact that people can do this through dysfunctional behaviors. All right, what does this mean? Even if you do everything right, you follow the steps according to what we say, but you do it through this.

I hate my body. I'm gross. I'm going to beat myself up. I'm disgusting. You know, no, I can't eat those foods because I'm so bad. I'm so undisciplined. If you approach this through that way, you will develop dysfunctional behaviors, which either A, you maintain these dysfunctional behaviors, in which case, this is an unhealthy way of doing it,

or B, what eventually happens is somebody gets sick and tired of doing this in a way that doesn't feel good, and then they stop. This has to be, you have to do this in a way where it improves the quality of life, and you find it enjoyable, you find it valuable. By the way, I didn't say easy, okay. People confuse enjoyment with easy.

That's actually not true at all. Easy is not the same as enjoyable. Enjoyable means you know where you're going, you've got some meaning and purpose behind it, and it's something that you wanna do. That's enjoyable, okay. So this has to be a process where you see what's going on. It feels good in the sense that this is this is pro growth. I'm taking care of myself. I

feel good about this because then you're going to want to keep doing this. If you develop dysfunctional behaviors around diet and exercise and body image through this process, regardless of what you're doing at some point, you're going to want to escape that. And that's when things go back to where they were. Which by the way, I don't know, I would say north of 75, 80% of people come from this place, including myself, including everybody that's in this room. The things that drive us most of the time are our insecurities.

That's what got us off the couch to get into the gym to start doing this, which coming from a place of insecure feelings or hating yourself will always lead to dysfunctional behaviors. You'll take shortcuts, whether that be steroids and drugs to do it, you'll do extreme diets to get to it, you'll over train intensity because you ignore your body's signal.

Yeah, your beating up yourself, ignore the body's signals. So this is a tough one. This is the one that this is where really good trainers and coaches separate themselves from their peers, is the ability to break through with a client that is training this way, is to be able to get them to recognize the root cause of these behaviors and understand that what the way that they're training is unsustainable and that there is a better approach. And we first have to fix the root cause.

We have to first come from a place of loving ourselves, as you would say, sell on the podcast, like finding a way to do that first so that it doesn't result in all this dysfunctional training. Right. And by loving yourself is not the warm fuzzy feeling, you know, romantic love or any, you know, that kind of stuff.

Loving yourself is this is an action. Okay. It's the actions you take. In other words, you're trying to care for yourself. Not that you have these warm fuzzy, that's impossible. You're never going to have, you're not going to have warm fuzzy feelings about yourself all the time. You know yourself better than anybody. You know how imperfect you are. And if you're looking for that, that's not going to happen. It's an action. Okay. It's an action. And look, it's the difference

between exercise. So here's a difference doing this functional versus dysfunctional looks like this exercising in a dysfunctional way is punishment. I'm gonna beat myself up. It's cathartic when I get real sore. I feel amazing because I almost killed myself because you feel good when you hate yourself to do that to yourself. Versus, I'm exercising to care for myself.

This is self-care. I want to feel better. I deserve to be fit. With diet, dysfunction looks like this. This is restrictive. This is, I can't, I can't have that. I deserve to be fit. With diet, dysfunction looks like this. This is restrictive. This is, I can't, I can't have that. I can't do that. I have to be this way.

Versus, I want to be this way. And no, I don't want to eat that. I actually don't want to eat that way. By the way, you recognize that cookies and cake and pizza taste good, but you recognize that that's not really caring for yourself most of the time. Sometimes it is, but most of the time it's not. So you wanna care for yourself.

It's very different. Now imagine a world for yourself where you go, you want to exercise because you want to care for yourself. You want to eat right because you want to care for yourself. What a wonderful place to be. And by the way, balance is baked into that. There's a natural balance when you're care for yourself. What a wonderful place to be. And by the way, balance is baked into that. There's a natural balance when you're caring for yourself. Because sometimes it does mean I'm gonna go to a birthday

and have some cake with my family. Usually it doesn't, but sometimes it does. Sometimes it means I am gonna skip the gym because I didn't get good sleep last night and I feel really crappy and my knee hurt, so I'm gonna take some time off. That's also caring for yourself. Balance is

baked in. When it's from a self-hate standpoint, it's always extreme. It's always in the wrong direction. And at some point, you'll rebel against it. And this is why when people stop working out, they don't stop for a couple days. They stop for months or years. Or when they go off their diet, it's not one or two things or not supposed to be. It's like they binge. They have a whole day of binge. This is a hard one because it's really's really like it has you have to change the conversation in your own mind in your own decisions and the way that you Like you say that you talk about things about yourself the way you look at yourself

one being more slightly parallel to victim or empowered and and what what do I choose to do in that situation? What am I telling myself? Am I empowering myself or am I just loathing and dredging my way through it as a victim? And these are just conversations you need to have about, I choose not to have this kind of food. I wanna empower myself to be healthier.

Yeah. I'm trying to search for the words for this one because this is definitely one of the hardest for sure to communicate on a podcast to the masses and not have the specific individual in front of me that I could point out these things. How do you help somebody who's listening to this right now recognize that they potentially have dysfunctional behaviors and they don't even know it. The level of self-awareness that that takes.

How many times have you guys had people tell you how much they love something that they're doing and it's very dysfunctional, or think that it's really good for them, not recognizing the place it's coming from. The best, that is hard, super hard at them. The best way that I found for myself and for clients, but this helps me too.

Because I struggle with this, everybody struggles with this, okay? This is a human challenge. Is to separate myself and imagine that I'm caring for someone that I really care about. So I'm a father, so it's really easy for me because I can think about one of my kids. Would I treat my kid this way? Would I force my kid to do this workout, even though they're sore and tired? Or would I make them eat this particular way

or in a different way? When I separate myself and say, would I treat someone I care about in this way? Would I force them to do these things in this particular way? Cause you know, when you take care of kids, there's things you do that they want, and there's things you do that they don't want, right?

It's like sometimes you gotta make your kids do the things they don't wanna do, because you love them. You care for them. If I let my kids pick whatever food they wanna eat, especially my little ones, it ain't gonna look too good, right? So that's the best way I can think about it. I can't, I don't have a better example,

but if there's somebody in your life that you really care about, like truly, truly care about, ask yourself, would I do this to someone so? And if the answer's no, then don't do it to yourself. Or if the answer's yes, then do that. And that I think would help with what you're saying, because you're right, some people have bad habits or behaviors like drinking alcohol or drugs

or overeating or gambling or whatever. And if you, a lot of times I can't even see it. Yeah, and if they put another person they cared about in that place and they were honest with themselves, they're like, no, I wouldn't want my kid to have these behaviors. Yeah, that's probably the best.

I mean, we just, like I said, I'm referred to the lady that we had as a live caller recently who made the comment about her feeling better at 13% body fat and you have an, it's like, man, you know, how do you get that person to recognize that what they're doing is dysfunctional? It's like, obviously we have pictures of the person, we see body composition, we know what they're doing,

how extreme they're dieting and training. So as professionals, we can point that out to that specific person. But how many people, it's a spectrum, and how many people are on that side of the spectrum as she is, but maybe not as extreme that are hearing this right now and going like, I don't have dysfunction.

Yeah, so well, okay, that takes us to the next point, actually, which is this. And I wish I said this to her too when we had it on the phone. Do you feel better or do you feel healthier? Because there is a difference. I can make myself feel better by numbing myself. Yeah, psychologically you feel better. I could feel better by doing behaviors

that aren't good for me are unhealthy because I'm avoiding, I don't know, challenge or I'm avoiding struggle that I know I should, right? So are you getting praised by other people in peers? Yeah, so, or am I feeling healthier? Ask yourself that. Do I feel healthier or do I feel less healthy? Not, do I look healthier? Do I look less healthy? Do I feel healthier or do I feel less healthy? Not do I look healthier, do I look less healthy,

do I look better, do I look less better? No, no, no. Do you feel healthier and you have to be honest with yourself. So you're like, yeah, I lost weight, but my God, my sleep is crap. Or yeah, I lost all this weight, but I'm irritable with my husband or my wife or my libido went into the floor.

Sometimes that'll happen to people when they do this the wrong way that I do. Yeah, I lost weight, but my God, I have no sex drive. Or I have less energy. I'm working out like crazy, I cut my calories, but man, I'm dragging ass, I need more caffeine, to keep myself up throughout the day or I feel less sharp.

Ask yourself that, do you feel healthier through this process or do you feel less healthy through this process? If you feel less healthy, then there's something wrong. You should feel healthier through this process the entire time. That doesn't mean it should feel easier, that doesn't mean there won't be struggle and challenge.

It just means you're gonna feel better. And this is an honest conversation, you have to have everything. Yeah, you have to take the reflection in the mirror and the scale out of this equation because they're irrelevant. Yeah. And that's really tough to do because, again,

most of the time you're driven by those two things to get you into the gym. People must sacrifice health there. Yeah, they sacrifice health for that all the time. Right. And so when you're asking somebody how they feel, they have to automatically carve that out. That doesn't matter what the scale says and what I see in the time. Right. And so when you're asking somebody how they feel, they have to automatically carve that out. That that doesn't matter what the scale says

and what I see in the reflection right now. It meet all the other things you're listing off. The stool, the digestion, the sleep, the mood, the energy, the skin, the hair, like those are the things that I wanna measure. And I wanna be honest with myself and say, okay, before I started doing all those things, let me check in with all that. How did all those things feel? Lebedo, you also mentioned, how did all those things feel before?

I started this diet exercise plan. Okay, I've been doing it now for three months. I've lost 15, 20 pounds of scale. Let's check back in on all those things. And if I've been doing this right, all of those markers should improve. Yes. All of them. Some of them more than others, but all of them should go in the right direction. None should go in the wrong direction. If any of them go in the wrong direction, then the diet and exercise plan is off. Yeah. Because diet and exercise done the right way improves all of those things. Improves, skin, hair, mood, sleep, sex, all that things.

All those things should go in the positive direction. And if any of them, certainly if multiple of them are off or negatively impacted, something needs to get you out of it. It's not a trade. I'm so glad you said that Adam. That's such a, it's so clear because what people often do is they may even notice. Something like, well my sleep's off, but I feel great.

But I look better. So they think it's a trade. Like, well, I lost weight. My sleep is worse and my libido's gone, but hey, I'm losing weight, so it's all good. No, no, something's off because you're 100% right. If you apply those things properly, there isn't a single thing in your life

that will not improve physiologically and even psychologically. Everything gets better when you apply those properly. I said psychologically because anxiety, depression, you know, you're just your positivity. All those things improve if you do those things right. So if you feel worse in any of those metrics of health then something is off and that's something you do. And by the way, saying that,

I don't want to shame somebody there. This is, I use this to steal to this day, check back in. Totally. And it's a constant process of getting better and better figuring these things out. And that's how you need to be is like, it's okay to like list all those things and go like, man, you know what, I am doing it. And this does still happen where I think I'm dialed the way I should be. And I'm like, man, but you know what, my sleep has been off.

I'm not getting good sleep at all, or I notice my libido's down a little bit, or I notice something in my skin or hair. It's like, it's not like I go, like I throw the whole thing out. Like, oh, well, I just gotta stop exercising and dying. And then what I do is I go investigate. That's it.

I go, oh, something is off here. Maybe I'm not getting enough calories, or, oh, maybe I'm missing my protein targets, or, oh, maybe I actually need a little bit of rest and recovery. Maybe I've been pushing the intensity too much. You're not using it to judge yourself and then throw the whole exercise and diet thing out the window. It's, you're always checking in with that list. It should always be moving in the positive direction when it's not something is off.

Bottom line, this is a learning process. And as you go through this journey, you iterate it constantly to match your life, the context of your life, and to make sure that it's working for you. This is something that should improve the quality of your life entirely, not take quality away. Look, if you love the show, head over to MindPumpFree.com, and check out some of our fitness guides. They're free. They're all totally free. There's a bunch there. Go check them out. You can also find us on Instagram. Justin is at MindPump. Justin, I'm at MindPump de Stefano and Adam

is at MindPump Adam. Thank you for listening to MindPump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at MindPumpMedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes MAPS and Ebola, MAPS Performance and MAPS aesthetic, nine months of phased, expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs. With detailed workout blueprints in over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having

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