Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2400: The No BS Guide To Going from 30% To 10% Body Fat (Burn Fat, Get Lean)

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

How can you tell if someone has too much visceral fat? (1:36) What are some of the top things that sabotage somebody on this journey? (5:24) #1 - Most people should AVOID heavily processed foods. (9:50) #2 - Not eating high-protein meals. (16:21) The best types of proteins for building muscle and getting lean. (18:48) Specific strategies on how to achieve this. (23:28) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Legion Athletics for the exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! ** Code MINDPUMP for 20% off your first order (new customers) and double rewards points for existing customers. ** August Promotion: MAPS Bands | MAPS 40+ 50% off! ** Code AUGUST50 at checkout ** The Effect of Exercise on Visceral Adipose Tissue in Overweight Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis The Exercise Paradox | Scientific American NIH study finds heavily processed foods cause overeating and weight gain Processed foods make up 70 percent of the U.S. diet Mind Pump #620: Chris Kresser on the Chronic Disease Equation, the Potato Hack for Fat Loss, the Disease Worse than Being Eaten by a Shark & MORE Mind Pump #1860: Fourteen of the Best Foods for an Amazing Physique Mind Pump #1220: The 4 Best Sources Of Protein Mind Pump #1835: Why Resistance Training Is the Best Form of Exercise for Fat Loss and Overall Health Mind Pump #1282: The #1 Key to Consistently Building Muscle & Strength (Avoid Plateaus!) Mind Pump #2287: Bodybuilding 101- How to Bulk and Cut Mind Pump #2160: Macro Counting Master Class Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources People Mentioned Chris Kresser M.S., L.Ac. (@chriskresser) Instagram  

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump with your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is mind pump. Today's episode had to go from 30% to 10% body fat. Today we talk about the things that get in your way and the steps to getting to that 10% body fat today we talk about the things that in your way and the steps to getting to that 10% body fat. Now this episode is brought to you by a sponsor Legion. They make high-performance supplements for people who are into

building muscle, strength, improving athletic performance, and burning body fat. It's one of the best supplement companies around. What they say is in the bottle or on the bag is in the bottle or on the bag. The integrity of this company is bar none. One of the best. Go check them out. Go to buylegion.com. That's B-U-Y-L-E-G-I-O-N.com forward slash mind pump. Use the code mind pump. Get 20% off and if you're a returning customer you get double rewards points. We also have a sale on some programs this month. MAPS Bands is 50% off and MAPS 40 Plus also 50% off. If you're interested, go to MAPSFitnessProducts.com

and then use the code August 50 for that discount. Alright, here comes the show. 30% body fat for men. This is way too high. This is actually a bit high for women as well. So in today's episode, we're going to talk about how you can go from 30 to 10. What is 10% body fat? This is when you have a visible six pack. Can you go from 30 to 10%? Yes it's possible but not if you guess along the way. So we're gonna talk about how you can do that in today's episode. Now

there's a huge range right of like body types. Yeah some people can run a little bit heavier and or a little bit higher body fat percentage than others. And so there is a bit of a range here. I think we obviously chose, I think, a pretty generic number. But how does someone tell, or how can you tell if someone has too much visceral fat? And explain that, because that is what matters even more so than the actual 29%, 30%,

that type of number, and how that can be unhealthy. Yeah, so visceral body fat is the fat that surrounds the organs. It's under the muscle, typically. The other kind of body fat would be outside, right? So let's say you have a belly, but it's hard. You ever seen someone like this? I have relatives like this.

They have a big belly, but it's really hard. In fact, I'll tell you. That's insane. There's always that uncle ab. Everybody has that uncle who's like, Phil, go ahead, fill it. Fill my head. Mine's a cake.

Look at how hard and solid it is. That just typically means that there's lots of body fat underneath the muscle. And the data on visceral body fat shows that it's far more damaging to the body for your health than the kind of body fat that sits outside of the muscle. Now, if somebody has lots and lots of visceral body fat, not a good idea, getting leaner will get rid of that as well.

But you typically see more visceral body fat as a percentage of someone's body fat when someone has insulin resistance. So you start to see this because there's a ratio of visceral to body fat outside of the muscle or on top of the muscle that you typically will see. I don't know what that ratio is, but there's a general ratio. That ratio starts to become skewed when someone also has metabolic issues where they're insulin insensitive. This is where you start to see visceral body fat start to really build.

Maintaining a good muscle mass, not having blood sugar issues, not getting diabetes, tends to keep visceral body fat at bay, or at least at the percentage that it should be of your overall body fat. Yeah, because there's obviously examples, and we've talked about this before on the show, of these high-level MMA fighters,

and they obviously carry more than, say say 10% body fat on them. But they're in great cardiovascular health and have a relatively good diet and are strong, have a lot of muscle mass on them, but they may be higher in the body fat percentage. There's an example of somebody who probably has lower visceral fat and they're healthy and they don't have any of the side effects that come with the high visceral fat. Yeah, typically, and you know, strength training, when they compare forms of exercise for fat loss, strength training seems to have more of an effect

on visceral body fat than other forms of exercise. So when you compare them head to head, and people get lean doing, let's say, cardio versus strength training, traditional strength training, traditional strength training seems to be more effective at getting rid of the visceral body fat. But it's probably because the, and this is the theory around it, it's probably because of

the insulin sensitizing effects. One of the fastest ways to get your body more sensitive to insulin is to simply build muscle. Muscle is a storage vessel for glycogen, right? So glycogen is what you get when you eat carbohydrates or sugar. So when you have carbohydrates or sugar. So when you have high blood sugar, it means you have the circulating

sugar in your blood and it needs to go somewhere, it needs to get stored. The liver or muscle. Well, when you build muscle, you've got a larger storage vessel for storing sugar and carbohydrates. And so they think that this is one of the reasons why strength training seems to be more effective for visceral body fat than other forms of exercise. But definitely, definitely being overall healthy

is the best way to do this, even if you're lean. Because you can see people who appear skinny who have a lot of visceral body fat, but they have really terrible metabolic health. Yeah, so taking somebody who is say around 30% and wanting to get down to the 10% body fat range, what are some of the top things that sabotage somebody on this journey? This is where the real conversation starts, right? Because I could give you a simple answer, right?

We all know the simple answer is people eat too much. Too many calories, right? You eat more calories and you burn those calories. That energy needs to go somewhere so it gets stored as body fat. But such a simple, simplistic way of looking at things. Obviously, okay, we're eating too much energy, but why does this keep happening,

and why is it happening more and more often? And why does it seem more difficult for some people than other people? Everybody has an example of their friend who they're like, man, we eat the same stuff, and they look like this and I look like that. So I hate when we just default to the, oh, you're eating too much, you're not burning enough.

Yeah, it's like, why are people suffering from poverty? Well, they don't make enough and they don't save enough. Like, okay, great, thanks. Yeah, it's a blank estate. Yeah, Einstein. How do we fix this? Well, I think, okay, at the end of the day, what we need to look at, the main thing that we

need to deal with, and this gets real complex, but the main thing we need to deal with is, are people eating or behaving in ways that encourage overeating? That's what we need to look at. Are we encouraging overeating? Are we just not burning enough calories? A lot of people say we're not burning enough

calories, but what's interesting about that is the data shows that our metabolic rates adapt to our activity. There's a famous study I've brought up at least 50 times in the podcast of the Hodson tribe. These are modern hunter-gatherers who are way more active than the average westerner. When they test their metabolic rates, they burn as many calories roughly as the average western couch potato. That's because the body adapts. Your body's not trying to get you to burn tons and tons of calories through movement because we wouldn't have survived evolution if that were the case. So most of the problem is in the fact that we just eat a lot more calories.

So again, how do we, what is it about our behaviors? What is it about our lifestyle that's encouraging this over-eating? Is it just that we're gluttonous? Or is there something else? And I'll point to the data on heavily processed foods. These are the best studies that we have on nutrition. You know, most studies on nutrition, the vast majority are not controlled. Most of them are survey-based.

It's like, you know, how many tomatoes did you eat last week or whatever? And those are notoriously inaccurate. The very few studies are controlled where they put people in the labs, they control what they eat, or at least they count what they eat, and then they take measurements from there. The processed food studies are like that.

They've taken groups of people, put them in rooms, observed them, and said, okay, let's see how much they eat when they're exposed to all whole natural foods in this group or all heavily processed foods, right? Foods that come in wrappers or boxes, or lots of ingredients type of deal in this room. And then what they did with these, because they were quite smart with this,

is they actually made the macro profiles similar. So it wasn't like all carbs or all protein, whatever, it was like similar. It was just whole natural foods versus heavily processed foods. And then they observed. And then they took those same groups and switched rooms even better.

Now it's not like maybe we accidentally got a bunch of people who like to eat a lot in this room or whatever. They said, this switched rooms and see what happens. And consistently, consistently, people will eat on average five to 600 more calories a day by eating heavily processed foods. So I think that has to play the biggest role because that's a big jump.

Five to 600 calories a day, that's an extra 3,500 calories a week, which I know that we're about to do some simple math here that doesn't always break down, but there's roughly 3,500 calories in a pound of fat. So technically, is that a pound of fat a week. You'd put that up as the number one contributor over now where would you put something like lack of sleep in terms of the downstream effects from that and you know hormone balance and you know

obviously like just recovery in general. Yeah I would say all those play a role, but if you took a bunch of people who are sleep deprived, again, this group eats 85% of their diet, which by the way, okay, the average American diet is between 70 to 80% heavily processed, okay? If you expose them to heavily processed versus not, you would still see the difference. So everybody eats more when they're sleep deprived.

But the- Well, they especially lean to So everybody eats more when they're sleep deprived. But the- Well, they especially lean to those overly processed foods when they're sleep deprived. Totally. It increases cravings. Sticking with this processed food conversation, which I love because this happens to be one of the more debated topics in our space.

This isn't like a, in fact, I think it's one of the most difficult things to communicate because we tend to have two camps in the health and fitness space that communicate about processed foods. You have obviously some of the people that are on the whole natural hippie, crunchy woo-woo side that would be like, oh my God, it's the worst thing for you. It's the devil. They talk about all the chemicals and the hormones and everything that's so bad about

these processed foods and it's killing us. And it's kind of fear mongering on that side. And then you have the science heavy counter argument in the health space that's going to debate those woo woo people and be like, oh, everything is a chemical. Yes, if all calories are equated for, then all the science points to there is nothing wrong with these processed foods. You could absolutely lose 30% down to 10% down body fat. And so I like that you went this way to have this conversation because I know there's people

right now that are listening to this that are on one side or the other. Obviously you communicating processed foods are your number one. The woo-woo people right away jump on board with you. But there is definitely a group of people that are listening right now that are resistant to that being you claiming that's the number one tip when they're listening to their favorite fitness professional that's telling you there's nothing wrong with those protein cookies. There's nothing wrong with a bag of chips so long as it fits your macros. And so you point out as that being the number one,

if not one of your top reasons that sabotages someone from being successful like that. Yeah, 100%. I mean, look, let me ask you guys when you guys train clients, what was the one step that a client could take that would have the biggest, if you had to pick one thing, what was it?

Yeah, Whole Foods. It was this. Now, it's not, are processed foods inherently unhealthy? No, I mean, although I can make the argument that for the most part they're not as healthy, quote unquote, I mean how do you define that, right? But not as healthy as whole natural foods. But forget that for a second.

It's just heavily processed foods. Most of the ingredients that are in those foods are in there to make them more desirable to eat. So they're just more, for lack of a better term, addictive, more pleasurable, more hedonistic. And so people eat them more. It's just a fact. Look, remember we had Chris Kressler on the show years ago.

I loved the line that he used, or the example that he used. He said, imagine if I put four or five plain boiled potatoes in front of you. No salt, no butter. And I told you to eat them in 30 minutes. Do you think you could? I'm like, oh my god, it'd be hard to choke them down. After the third one, I'd probably gag.

And he said, well, could you eat a whole family size bag of potato chips? It's right around the same amount, right? Except one of them is engineered to be hyper palatable, and the other one is just what you find in nature. So it really boils down to, if you're trying to lose weight and you find it difficult to eat the right amount of food. In other words, do you find it difficult to not overeat? Yes. Avoid foods that make you overeat.

What is that? Heavily processed food. There's another layer to that that I think you have to point out too that a lot of the science fitness people don't point out. They talk about the what the science and the data says about the calories, but then they lack the information or lack the communication around the behavioral psychology related to this. And there's something to be said, this is something that I learned with training so many clients,

is if I told my client they can't or don't, it's just like talking to a toddler. It's like you tell a toddler, don't do that, it. It's like the first thing they go and do versus keeping their mind occupied on something else, right? And distracting them. They don't seem to think or care too much about that. The same thing would work with clients. Instead of me telling them you can't have these things, I would say you can have anything you want so long as it's whole foods. Eat as much as you want. Yeah, eat as much as you want. I'm not gonna tell you that you have to weigh at the

measures, do stuff. These are the foods I want you to choose from. There's something to be said about the power of that psychology and that game that you're playing even with yourself is saying like, hey, my trainer or I'm not telling myself I can't have these things. All I'm saying is, hey, I'm going to make it a goal that I just make choices from whole foods. I've never had a client struggle with weight loss who just didn't want to eat a lot of food. That doesn't exist. Somebody who just you

know yeah it's not a problem I can eat less and I can eat the right amount and in fact I don't have cravings to do more. They don't struggle with this because they're not struggling with the urge or the desire to eat more food. Heavily processed foods are engineered precisely to do to make you eat more and it even includes health foods. Even health foods, quote unquote health foods, you mentioned protein cookies, right, or whatever. When you look at that category, the top sellers in that category of foods

are not the ones that are the healthiest. They're the ones that taste the best. Because people enjoy eating things that they enjoy eating. So that's one of the biggest things that sabotages fat loss. So although it is true you could eat the right amount of calories even though you're eating a predominantly heavily processed food diet, you're going to struggle. It's not going to be easy. Why don't we just make this a lot easier? Avoid that category. Eat as much as you want and then when it ends up happening you end up eating five to six hundred calories less a day on average. This is just just just again

with the data show. In my experience the only client this has ever worked for is the client that is competing. Oh with the processed foods? Yes. The client. They count everything. Because they have to because that's part of this getting into a competition you have to track you have to measure, you have to weigh. And so their ability to insert, you know, protein cookie, their diet cokes, all these different things into their diet is totally fine because they're tracking diligently

and they have to do that in order to compete at this whatever level they're competing at. The clients who are just going off of how they feel or trying their best to track or pay attention to Never succeeded with a strategy like this where you allowed them to eat all these processed foods It was far easier as a trainer to get my clients to reduce this body fat to drop this body fat percentage from 30 down to 10% By just having them stick to whole foods. Oh yeah, it was one of my hacks. It was like a magic trick.

In fact, clients would always come back to me and say, what is it about heavily processed foods that makes you gain weight? Like I'm eating a lot right now, but I'm getting leaner. It's like we're actually eating less calories. You just don't realize it. And then we would track and sure enough, I'd show them. And along the lines of what we're talking about

in terms of eating in ways that promote not overeating, we took whole natural foods that's at the top. Underneath that is high protein foods. High protein foods or high protein in general is very satiety producing. It's one of the fastest ways to get your appetite and cravings to go down is to eat the protein first. Eat a high protein meal, eat it first. You're far less likely to overeat when you do that. So that would be the second thing that I would say is that people when they tend to eat a meal they tend to not eat the protein first. In fact meals tend to be served this way. Carbohydrates first and then proteins last. Eat the protein first.

Yeah I was thinking about you know your original point of whole foods and then versus like processed foods. Like there's a speed issue there in terms of like speed of digestion, speed of delivery, like, you know, just eating chips, you're just constantly kind of, you know, going through the bag pretty quickly versus it takes a while to get through like these boiled potatoes. And plus it's not like super enjoyable on top of that. But I think there's just like unconscious eating that's happening as well when you have those types of foods where you just grab it and you're eating,

you don't realize how many calories you're consuming with that. Without going too deep in the weeds, right? Our bodies evolved with a satiety mechanism to tell us to stop eating. And what combats that is, are all the signals that we're getting from the food in terms of its palatability. For thousands of years, it's been balanced. But then what we did, not that long ago, it's only been six or seven decades where we've really started to push heavily processed foods. It's really only been a few decades where it's become a predominant part of our diets. It doesn't match the satiety. It doesn't match the satiety signal. It's actually offset. So again, five to six hundred calories consistently in the data. That's not a little bit.

I mean, let me put it this way. If you ate at a hundred calories extra a day right now, by the end of the year, you'd have significant fat gain, let alone 500 or 600 extra calories. So that simple thing right there, like I said, for my clients on average, if I had a client that had to lose 30 or more pounds, I could consistently get them to lose 15 to 20 pounds with that step. Nothing else. We wouldn't even touch anything else until we got to 15 to 20 pound weight loss, and it was just from that step right there. So no processed foods. We're starting to eat protein first. What are some types of protein, are there types of proteins that are best

for building muscle and getting lean? Yeah, so in this category, in the context of fat loss, whole natural protein versus protein powders. We just talked about heavily processed foods. So, you know, a lot of supplement companies won't like this, but protein powders are heavily processed foods. So, you know, a lot of supplement companies won't like this, but protein powders are heavily processed foods. You know, you're taking a powder that tastes like chocolate or strawberry or birthday cake or whatever.

It's pretty damn processed. It doesn't affect satiety like whole natural protein does. In fact, protein shakes are great for weight gain. They're convenient. They're convenient and they're really good for people who have a tough time gaining weight. In fact, this is the advice I give people when they're like, I can't eat enough calories, I want to put on size. Try a shake because it doesn't crush your appetite like eating a piece of chicken or something like that. So I would say any whole natural source of protein is gonna be great and the

ones that are a higher percentage of protein per weight are probably best when it comes to appetite. So leaner sources of protein are going to crush your satiety more than fattier sources and more than let's say sources that, maybe vegan sources that come with lots of fiber and carbohydrates. Yeah, I would say things like that, right?

You got your, like your, all your white meats, your fishes, meats like that are going to be high in protein, leaner, lower like that, right? You got your, like your, all your white meats, your fishes, meats like that are gonna be high in protein, leaner, lower in calories, right? Probably better, especially early on when we were at this with phase of reducing our body fat from 30 down to 10, probably less of the tri-tip, the ribeye, even though things like that are okay, it's not that they're demonizing or it's bad.

But if you had to pick. But if you had to pick, you're gonna get a lot more bang for your buck from a satiety, from a high protein and a low calorie by doing things like white meat, fishes, ground turkey, things like that are probably a better. Chicken thighs are great by the way. Yeah, you mentioned white meat, people think chicken breast right away. Chicken thighs are perfectly fine.

They're not that much higher in calories. And they taste a million times better. Way better. Chicken breast is terrible. So much easier to reheat and consistently hit chicken thighs than it is chicken breast. It was probably one of the first hacks I ever taught any of my clients is like, stop wasting your time microwaving on day two, day three

chicken breasts that are dry and chewy. At least enjoy the good fat that's in chicken thighs and it's not that many more calories for the protein. Speaking of the fattier cuts, grass-fed meat is leaner per ounce than the traditional, you know, grain fed. So without getting into like which one's healthier, fatty acid profile, you know, which one's better for the environment, animals, all that stuff. Forget that for a second. An 8 ounce rib eye that's

grass-fed is less calories than an 8 ounce rib eye that's grain fed because it's got less fat in it. So that's another strategy is you could take your red meat and just make it grass fed and eat the same amount, your calories drop. I also want to point out before the keyboard warriors get on here and start attacking you for criticizing protein shakes, the point of the conversation is not that

we're trying to demonize that as like you can't use it. I mean I'm sure- We're talking about going down from 30 to 10%. That's right. And it's also and strategies that we would want to give clients to set them up for success. Doesn't mean that anybody in this room, in fact, I bet everybody in this room in the last week has probably used a protein shake, right? So it's not that. So we have, we do advocate or we do talk about the use of them and they can be very useful in a pinch in a bind, but as a strategy, when I'm taking a client who comes to me with 30% body fat and they're telling me what are the best steps

for me to get down to 10% body fat, and I'm thinking about all the common mistakes that people make, this is one of them is right away, for some reason, people think when they go on a diet, oh, I gotta add the shakes and bars, like it's a healthy choice for them to make, and in fact, they don't realize that they may actually be making it more difficult for themselves

because instead of going and getting a piece of steak or chicken or whole food that's going to produce more satiety, get more nutrients, micronutrients with it, they are going over to these shakes and bars and then they're hungry again another hour to it and it's difficult to do that. So it's not that we're demonizing it or saying they can't have value or we wouldn't use it.

It's that when I'm thinking of this client, this avatar who's going from 30 down to 10%, I'm thinking of the most important strategies to teach them. And then down the road, we can talk about like, oh okay, you're short on protein, it's late at night, having a shake real quick before you go to bed, great strategy, great way to make sure you hit your protein intake.

No, very good point. At the end of the day, what we're trying to do is make this as easy as possible. Because going from 30% to 10% body fat is a long road and it's gonna be a bit challenging, no matter what. Okay, I'm gonna tell you right now, follow all of our advice, it's still gonna be challenging. It's just gonna be way less challenging

than if you don't listen to what we're saying. You're gonna make it almost impossible. In fact, the data shows 85 to 90% of people who lose weight gain it back, and it's because they don't follow some of the things that we're talking about. Alright, so let's talk about the strategies, okay? What are some more specific strategies on how to do this?

Number one, you gotta strength train. But strength train to build muscle. Yes. Not burn calories. No, no, real strength training, traditional strength training. Like you do a set, you rest for two minutes, you do a set, you rest for two minutes. Not a circuit. Not circuit training, not where you're just trying to move, but you're literally trying to get stronger and build muscle. Now why? Because you're trying to burn

body fat and not lose muscle. When you cut your calories, inevitably your body will burn, will pair muscle down to slow your metabolism down to meet the new caloric intake. Strength training sends an opposite signal, says no we need this muscle. In fact, if you do it right, you may build muscle in the process, which by the way comes with the wonderful side effect of a faster metabolism. So now you have a faster metabolism which means you can eat more and still eat less than your burning and burn body fat In other words if you could take your body from burning 2,000 calories a day to burning 2,500 calories a day on its own not because you're moving more not because you're doing more stuff

But rather you just have more muscle on your body So it costs more calories to maintain how much easier would it be to get leaner? Strength training is the best form of exercise Not for weight loss for fat loss. No other form of exercise. No other form of exercise shows pure fat loss Like strength training does and again the data supports us now. It's not body. It's not just bodybuilders now It's like you want to lose weight. You got to lift weight. Now There's two very very important tips though that I think that go with this. One, the point you made already about not doing it in a circuit style, giving you actual rest periods, lifting with the intent to try and get stronger, right? I want to lift weights with the intent to try and get stronger. That's obviously the first thing. The second thing that's so important is you got to hit your protein intake.

Yes. Because one of the most common mistakes that I would get from someone who's trying to go from 30 down to 10% body fat is they go right into cutting calories and what comes with them cutting hard calories is also reducing their total intake and many times they were already eating low protein and now they're hitting even lower protein yet they're lifting weights sending a signal to the body hey we need to build muscle but then the body goes and looks for its building blocks to build that muscle and you ain't giving it. Yeah. You ain't given enough protein. You're not giving it enough protein to then take those nutrients to go build muscle that

then go speed up your metabolism. So you going out and just strength training is step one but if you're not pairing that with the adequate amount of protein every single day consistently then your body's not going to build muscle. It's not going to speed the metabolism. No, no. You got to give it the building blocks. That's why we said earlier whole natural foods and then eat protein first. So someone might be wondering, well how much is enough protein for this? You want to eat your target body weight in grams of protein. So if you want to weigh 150 pounds or 130 pounds or 180 pounds, then aim for 180 grams of protein a day. And the best way to do this is to eat that protein first

and have it from whole natural source. By the way, I'm gonna say this right now. If you eat your target body weight in grams of protein, you eat it first and you stick to whole natural foods, the odds that you're gonna be eating enough to lose body fat, or the odds that you'll be eating in a calorie deficit, to put it differently, are high.

They're actually quite high. Most of the time, the vast majority of the time, you will not be eating too much by doing this. It may feel like that, and I'm saying that because protein crushes appetite. A lot of times people when they do this are like, oh my god, I'm at the end of the day, I need to eat 150 grams of protein,

I'm already, I'm at 120, and I can't eat another 30 grams of protein. And why should I? I feel like I'm eating too much now. No, no, no, hit it and watch what happens. Well, especially the first thing in the day, then you realize how your blood sugar's pretty stable throughout the day.

Good point. You don't get these big swings up and down, and which create cravings and create all these other hunger signals. So it's actually like, if you do that first thing, you notice the whole rest of your day's set up. What a good point. They actually showed that in studies

when people eat a high protein breakfast, high protein would be like a good 30, 40, 50 grams of protein for breakfast, they're less likely to overeat throughout the entire day. Probably because of what you said, Justin. You also highlighted, this is a perfect example of where I would actually introduce a shake to somebody is somebody who says that exact same thing back to me.

They know that their target protein they need to take every single day is 150 grams. That's what we've decided based off of their body weight goal, okay, we need to hit 150 a day. They're coming to me, Adam, I'm so full at the end of the day. It's seven o'clock at night. Yeah, now it shakes me to death. And I'm only at 110 or 120 grams of protein,

and I don't want to eat anymore. But should I just, and since I want to lose weight, shouldn't I just not eat? And I would say no, not in this case. We're strength training to build muscle to speed up the metabolism. You are missing your protein intake consistently. Here's the situation where I want you

to get that protein shake in, so we definitely feed that muscle. And it is definitely not gonna keep you from leaning out. It's going to go to building muscle, and that in turn is gonna speed the metabolism up, which ultimately will help you lean out and get down to the 10%. Awesome and now with strength training, we'll go back to that right, one of the

fundamental rules of strength training is known as progressive overload. Meaning if you, and this is very true especially in the first few years of training, later on it gets more complicated but in those first few years your body continues to progress because you're progressively overloading it. You're doing more or lifting more than you were previously so you continue to progress. In other words, when you strength train it's a stress on the body and the way that the body adapts to that stress is by becoming strong enough so that that stress is no longer stress. What do you do? You add more stress.

That's the progressive overload. One of the best ways to do that or to do that consistently is to track your training volume. What does that formula look like? Well, it's sets times reps times weight that you lifted. So if you did three sets of 10 reps of bench press at 100 pounds, it would be three times 10 times 100, that's your volume for that exercise. And then slowly over time, while you're going from 30 to 10%, see if you can either keep that volume the same so long as it's appropriate,

if you're over training back off, but if it's appropriate, keep it the same and or slowly inch it up when the time feels right. When you feel strong, you feel healthy, slowly inch it up and that's how you progressively overload your body throughout this process.

I even used to give the advice of just maintain or I used to say hold the line. Hold the line and hit at least your volume every week and then allow your body throughout this program. I even used to give the advice of just maintain, or I used to say, hold the line, hold the line and hit at least your volume every week, and then allow your body to tell you when it's ready for more. Meaning, you're gonna have these workouts, and everybody's experienced this before, where you feel good.

You feel rested, you feel well fed, you do that first warmup set, and you're like, wow, the bar's moving real easy. Like, here's the time where I'm going to go ahead and stretch my capacity a little bit, go ahead and add a little bit of volume, just a little bit more than what you were doing previously, and then again, we're gonna go back to that hold the line.

Now we're gonna stay there again until I have another one of those days where I'm feeling good, and then I'm gonna add more, and you just do it incrementally like that over time, and you'd be so surprised on how much that starts to compound over weeks and weeks. Now you combine that with high protein and then you combine it with this next point

which is feed muscle gains. In other words, if your calories are too low, you'll suffer in the gym. Now they need to be low for you to lose weight, but if they're too low, you're gonna go to the gym, you're gonna feel like garbage. So in other words, one of your number one goals here with this is I need to also kind of get stronger.

If I'm getting stronger and I'm sticking to whole natural foods and I'm hitting my protein, I'm on the right track and what'll probably happen, especially initially, is you'll get leaner while building a little bit of muscle. The scale might not even move that much initially, but what's happening is you're boosting your metabolism. Over time, your metabolism starts to speed up. Now your calories that you're currently eating become more of a deficit and more fat starts to come off your body. Eventually, eventually you get to the point where you start to track and cut your calories. Now why am I saying that? When you go from 30 to 18, 16, 17% body fat,

it's pretty consistent. It's not nearly as hard as going from 16 to 10. When you get down to 10, when you start to get down to the 10, where you want to see your abs, you want to see that six pack, now you need to get a little bit more granular. Now you need to start tracking and then cut from there. But most people, most people in my experience,

could get into the high to mid teens just by leading, living kind of a healthy lifestyle with some of those steps. That's been my experience coaching people is simply by following all the other strategies, we never really had to aggressively cut until you try to get down to like single digits. When you start getting down to single digits, and by the way too, you didn't hear us mention

anything about cardio. No cardio, you don't even need to do that to get down to that 10%. You can go from 30 all the way down to 10. And in fact, I'm advising my clients to not do cardio, especially until we get to that 10%. You can go from 30 all the way down to 10. And in fact, I'm advising my clients to not do cardio, especially until we get to that point. And we want to get down to single digits, 9, 8, 7, 6, getting really, really low body fat percentage. Then maybe we start talking about cutting for longer periods of time. We start talking about doing things where we're getting on cardio. Because you

know why? Because we're now entering into an unhealthy place to be. And I don't want you to be there for very long. But if you're trying to get there just to prove a point I can get down to six or seven percent body fat Then it makes sense to introduce some of these extreme things But the average person who's going from 30% to body fat down to seeing their abs Can absolutely do that through all the tips that we talked about and never touch a piece of cardio I want to clarify right this doesn't mean don't be active every day. You want to be healthy and you want to be active every day. I like tracking steps. I like making sure you're getting, you know, a nice 10,000, 12,000 steps a day,

which is a lot more than most people will get. So make sure you're moving throughout the day. But what Adam's talking about is structured cardio workouts. Now, why are we saying, I'd rather you not do it? Well, number one, cardio doesn't build muscle. Yes, it does burn calories, but your body adapts to that very quickly, but also, but ultimately it's like, look, if you're gonna spend time in the gym,

you're much better off spending it strength training, and most people are not gonna work out consistently from the journey of 30 to 10, more than three days a week on average. So I would rather you spend that strength training, not doing 45 minutes or an hour. The focus has to be on muscle, preserving it at all costs. And I think that's the biggest misconception with trying to lower your body fat in general. It's like to do that, we need to replace it

or preserve the muscle mass that you have. And so it's really, every step that you take has to be towards what it takes to build muscle. And that's the focus of it. And then we just manipulate the nutrition so it provides just enough for the preservation, but also now to cut down so we can start carving into that excess energy store. Well, and to piggyback off the steps, one of our favorite ways,

I've heard you all communicate this before, is to add steps post meal. Yeah. Because just walking 10 to 20 minutes post meal is a great way. One, you're pairing it with another behavior. All the research supports that if you want something to be consistent, one of the fastest best ways to do that

is to pair it with already another habit. You have to eat every single day. Everyone's already made a habit around breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so easy. Now I'm going to start to set a goal of I'm going to walk for 10 minutes. And start small. If you've never done it before and you

can't commit to 20 minutes of a walk after a meal and that's not feasible for you, start with five. Then go to 10. Then go to 20. But that's what I would like to get up to is where you're doing for a 15 to 20 minute walk afterwards. Not only are you getting the benefits of the the activity, the movement, the blood flow, the digestion, you're going with that, you're burning

more calories, you're not sending a loud signal that's catabolic like doing cardio, you're just creating more movement that's overall healthy for you and it's something that's sustainable so that once you do get down to this 10% it's a habit that's not hard for you to keep going which is always important when I'm communicating a goal like this to somebody. It's like, yes, I know you want to go from 30 down to 10% body fat and see your abs, but I bet you want to continue to keep that and see that, right?

You don't want to just get there and then go all the way back to the 30%. So I have to, my goal is to keep in mind that whatever we build into this routine, everything from eating habits around exercise and movement, it needs to be something that you can sustain for the rest of your life. Otherwise, you're just gonna push your body so hard and you're gonna discipline yourself to do all these things.

You're gonna get there and you have to have it for a moment in time and then you go right back to that old way. 100%. Look, if you like what you're hearing now, go to mindpumpfree.com, check out some of our free guides. We have a guide that can teach you how to build better shoulders. We have a guide that can teach you how to build better shoulders we have a guide that could teach you how to squat better we also have a fat loss guide go check it out you can also find us on instagram justin is at mind pump justin i'm

at mind pump de stefano and adam is at mind pump adam thank you for listening to mind pump if your goal is to build and shape your body dramatically improve your health and energy and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Super Bundle at mindpumpmedia.com. The RGB Super Bundle includes maps anabolic, maps performance, and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal, Adam, and Justin

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