Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2445: Women, You Will Never Lose Belly Fat Unless You Do These 5 Things

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

 Women, You Will Never Lose Belly Fat Unless You Do These 5 Things The causes of visceral belly fat. (1:10) #1 - Hormone imbalances (insulin resistance and estrogen/progesterone imbalance). (3:15) #2 - Excessive stress (high cortisol). (4:59) #3 - Loss of muscle. (10:02) #4 - Under eating/overtraining. (13:23) #5 - Metabolic adaptation. (15:20) The fix. #1 - Lift weights (not cardio). (18:29) #2 - Eat to BUILD. (24:25) #3 - Have a spiritual practice for stress. (28:02) #4 - Get good sleep. (34:39) #5 - Check hormones (maybe HRT). (38:56) Listener Questions: #1 - How long should I reverse diet before returning to a calorie deficit for fat loss? (41:41) #2 - How can I tell if I am overtraining, and what are the signs to watch for? (45:45) #3 - What’s the difference between muscle loss and fat loss and how do I ensure I’m losing fat, not muscle? (47:08) #4 - How does sleep impact fat loss, and what practical steps can I take to improve my sleep quality? (49:26) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Eight Sleep for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump Listeners! ** Use code MINDPUMP to get $350 off Pod 4 Ultra. Currently ship to United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia ** October Promotion: MAPS Muscle Mommy 50% off! ** Code OCTOBER50 at checkout ** Age and muscle loss - Harvard Health Mind Pump #2187: Why Building Muscle Is More Important Than Losing Fat With Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Mind Pump #1647: Ten Female Fitness Lies Mind Pump #2372: Five Steps to a Faster Metabolism Mind Pump #1547: The Hidden Benefits of Lifting Weights Mind Pump #1142: Nine Signs You are Overtraining Mind Pump #1345: 6 Ways to Optimize Sleep for Faster Muscle Gain and Fat Loss 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 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, we're talking about why some women, large percentage of women will never lose belly fat. And then we give you the solutions. Now this episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors, 8 Sleep. This is the most advanced device you could work with that will improve your sleep

quality and help you fall asleep faster. It goes over your bed and it warms or cools your bed based off of how you sleep. It uses AI technology to adjust temperatures to improve your sleep quality. Like I said, it's the most advanced sleep device you'll find anywhere. Go check them out. Go to 8sleep.com forward slash mind pump. Use the code MINDPUMP and get $350 off their pod for Ultra. Also, we have a sale this month. MAPS muscle mommy 50% off. If you're interested, go to MAPSFITNESSitnessproducts.com and then use the code October 50 for that discount. Alright here comes the show. If you're a

woman with belly fat you will never lose it unless you do the following five things. Alright first let's get into the causes of belly fat because there's excessive body fat that you gain on your body that comes from To put it simply of course more complex than this but to put it simply You're you're you're not burning as many calories as you're taking in or you're taking in more calories and burning So body stores body fat, but what happens to some women is they start to notice that their body fat distribution changes a bit and They start to accumulate more body fat in their belly region or more visceral belly fat, which they might

not have had in the past. Like the classic way that women store body fat tends to be in the hip and thighs area, whereas men tend to store it in the belly. But a lot of women will experience this, especially as they get older or during like a life change, like all of a sudden, like I'm gaining weight, but I'm not gaining like I used to. It's right now around my belly,

and I've had a lot of clients talk to me about this, and as a young trainer, I just said, oh, you just gotta get leaner. I used to think, well, I think it's in your imagination, you just store body fat where you store it. But now we have a lot of data showing that this actually happens, and there's some causes. Yeah, this is actually not just common in women,

it's also common in men for the same reason. I mean, they, whenever, I didn't know this, just like you, early on, you know, my clients would say that and I'd be like, oh, I would say it was unique to the individual, not something particularly going on in your life, right? Like, oh yeah, like some people store body fat around their hips or some people store it more there, some people have low back fat more.

And then they'd say, no, no, no, it's not the same. Yeah. They'd be like, that's how I used to be too. I used to go right to here. But what's weird is that it's now seems to be here. And I just, I didn't have the answer because I didn't understand this until later on. And again, this happens both to men. So if you're somebody male or female that is suffering from this or realize that my body is just storing body fat different than it ever has, it's almost always a clear indication that something is off with your hormone profile. Hormones, yes. Hormones can drive the influence how body fat gets stored in the body. So with women in particular

you start to see this imbalance between estrogen and progesterone and then both men and women you see more insulin resistance in connection to belly fat. So having or developing insulin resistance. So insulin resistance is when your body isn't reacting or it's not being signaled by the insulin you're producing like it used to. So your body has to produce more insulin to give the same effect. So let's say you eat a meal, classic example, you eat a meal containing carbohydrates or sugar, that gets digested, released in the

bloodstream, body releases insulin releases insulin. Insulin tells that that sugar or those carbohydrates to get shuttled into the body or into the muscle or the liver. And if your body's not reacting to insulin like it used to, you need to produce more insulin in order to make this happen. And then of course over time this turns into diabetes. But even before it becomes diabetes, if your body's becoming insulin resistant, this is metabolic illness in essence. Your cells just aren't reacting and responding the way they need to and they've found this correlation for a long time. More belly fat means more insulin resistance but more insulin resistance also means more body fat. So that's one of the main causes is there's a change in your hormones and there's always a route as to why the hormones are changing. Yeah, I mean is this

directly connected also to the stress that can cause that also, right? So it's not just somebody's age at what point in their life, but also they can actually be causing some of this hormonal change based off of all the outside stress or internal stress that they're perceiving, right? Yeah, because, so stress causes a rise in cortisol. Now cortisol, you know, we often hear that referred to as the stress hormone, and it's like this bad thing. Cortisol's not bad, it's a hormone, We need it. But the nice healthy cortisol profile looks

something like this. You see a spike in the morning when you need to wake up and it slowly drops and it's low in the evening so you can go to sleep. When you're under this kind of constant level of stress, low level stress or moderate stress over time, what you tend to see is this inverted cortisol release where cortisol is low in the morning, need lots of caffeine to get up and wake up and then it starts to rise midday and stay high in the evening and now you can't sleep even though you're exhausted and then overall cortisol is just higher for longer periods of time. And cortisol also changes fat storage profile.

It actually changes distribution as well. It's also connected to more, in particular, visceral body fat, and then even if you boil it down even more, visceral body fat in the abdomen area. So that's one of the pieces of that hormone profile that's off is your cortisol is a little messed up because your stress isn't being managed properly. Well, okay.

So in this category of stress, would you also place an event like you're having a child and then going through that whole process in terms of it just being quite a traumatic stress on the body physically like physically, like, and how that would change and shape profile. Cause I mean, in terms of that kind of changing the whole chemistry and then, you know, obviously changing and shifting like a location job, all these other things, like being stressors, you know, that all that kind of stuff is going to play into this. It can, it's mostly connected to chronic stress.

So we're supposed to experience, for lack of a better term, supposed to, right? You know, periods of stress. Yeah, acute stress. But what tends to be damaging is this long, like years of stress or six months or a year of just this kind of like, this higher than normal amount of stress.

Or just my ability to manage stress may be different, right? Where let's say before you had some quiet time in your schedule or you were able to do things for yourself and now your schedule doesn't allow it. So now your normal life is not, you can't manage the stress like you used to. So the normal stress now becomes more than you can manage. And then that causes that cortisol dysfunction.

Yeah, I was gonna say I'm trying to think of a scenario where I've seen these independent of each other like most times they come yeah, they almost come in pairs almost always like you normally if I have a client that has Hormone imbalances that we're trying to get to the bottom of they normally also have some sort of excessive stress chronic chronic stress going on Also, really I'm trying to think of an example where I've seen these independent of each other. Can you, do you recall having a lot of clients like that where like you didn't have both in that scenario? No, it's almost always the case except for cases of like perimenopause or menopause where you start to see hormone changes happen anyway. Which is the inevitable, right? Yes. There's an example, okay, that's a good example.

I've had healthy clients, totally fine, good management of stress most of their life, and then they hit that age. Yes. And then that happens. And that happens these days, sometimes women as young as in their mid-30s, usually 40s, where you start to see this, and then you'll hear them

say like, oh, my body's destroying body fat differently. Now there's a lot you could do, and we'll get to the destroying body fat differently. Now there's a lot you could do and we'll get to the solutions by the way. There's a lot you could do that mitigates this quite a bit but again hormone changes right cortisol, you know estrogen, progesterone, low testosterone. This is another one insulin resistance and low testosterone go hand-in-hand and this is by the way I'm talking about women. So testosterone is you know commonly known as the male hormone, but it's just as important for women as it is for men.

Now there's a difference in how much testosterone is optimal for women and men. Obviously women it's much lower, but if a woman's testosterone is too low, she gets the same symptoms that a man with low testosterone gets. Low energy, low libido, higher rates of depression, brain fog, and loss of muscle and increased rates of

storage of body fat. And then insulin resistance tends to follow because of some of those downstream effects of the low testosterone. Do you recall, so we just had a call last night with our GLP-1 group and Dr. Lauren was in there talking and she went through the list of almost every one of her female clients I got a call last night with our GLP-1 group and Dr. Lauren was in there talking and she went through the list of almost every one of her female clients once they get to a certain age. She almost recommends almost all. There was thyroid, progesterone.

Thyroid, progesterone, and testosterone, and DHEA. Those are the four, right? Tend to be the ones that CC works with the most. Yeah. Yeah, so next, another one of the causes of this is just loss of muscle. So here's an interesting statistic. After the age of 30, the average woman will lose

four to six pounds of muscle per decade. So if she does nothing, if she does no strength training, if she's not trying to offset this, every 10 years she's losing between four to six pounds of muscle. And this doesn't account for the loss of muscle quality. So although the scale may show you lost 5 pounds of muscle, the muscle that you kept isn't the same quality because 1 pound of muscle is not equal to 1 pound of muscle. You see a pound of muscle on an athlete versus a pound of muscle on a sedentary

individual, they are not the same metabolically. They're not the same when it comes to insulin sensitivity. They don't have the same fatty deposits. One pound of healthy muscle is not the same as one pound of unhealthy muscle. So aside from the muscle loss, you also see this degrading of the muscle health every single 10 years. I can't help but think though that that statistic is exacerbated because of the previous two. Oh yeah. It's all, they all in fact feeds into that. Yeah. I would say the loss of muscle plays a bigger role into those two. And then you see the positive feedback loop. Yeah. Cause I, I, the one thing I've never liked about studies like that that show that is the

average person hears that and goes like, Oh shit, this just getting older sucks. Or just this is the inevitable that's going to happen to me as I age, I'm supposed to lose all this muscle. So I never like that because I feel like that sends the wrong message. It's really like, okay, what that is, is decades of not strength training, not hitting your protein intake,

not mitigating your stress, getting good sleep, doing all the big rocks, right? Therefore, because of that, what statistics show is as you age, you're gonna lose four to six pounds of that. So I just think it's so important to talk about how connected those all are. And it's not just because you're getting older, you're going to lose that kind of muscle. It's because of those things you're not doing causes a whole host of things. A hundred percent.

We'll get more into this when we get into the solutions here. But losing muscle means you're losing insulin sensitivity because muscles are extremely insulin sensitive. Losing muscle means that your body is changing its hormone profile to pair muscle down, right? Building muscle, you need a youthful hormone profile. Well, you're losing all your extra gas tanks, right? Like, I mean, that's kind of the simpler way to look at it.

Like muscle is this great storage for all the excess carbohydrates that you consume. And so if you lose four or five pounds of muscle off your body, that was an additional X amount of calories. Your body could actually healthily store that it would store and put to work and use. You now lose that. So what happens now that you, you over, well, if you over consume, now that gets stored as body fat. Where in the past, if you had that five pounds of muscle,

it would shuttle over into the muscles and fill the muscle belly. in the past, if you had that five pound of muscle, it would shuttle over into the muscles and fill the muscle belly. That's a huge difference. Having those five pounds of muscle, that gets shuttled over there, you actually look better, you feel better, you can use that, you lose that. The same calorie intake, don't change anything else,

now that same calorie intake ends up being over spillage and gets stored as body fat. That's right, and muscle is also a stress absorbing tissue on the body. We know this with data. If you go into a stressful situation, a surgery, an injury, an illness, the more muscle you have, the higher the odds of definitely of survival. Much more resilient.

But of coming, yes, so much more resilient with more muscle. So lots of muscle is a big one. The next one is under eating and over training. So, and these go hand in hand. Unfortunately, the message that has been told to pretty much everybody, but especially to women, is that in order for you to be healthy, you need to eat less, less, less, and less, and less.

So as your metabolism's slowing down, as you're losing muscle, oh, you gotta keep eating less, gotta keep eating less. And then, to be fit and healthy, you need to beat the crap out of yourself by over applying the stress of exercise. And so you get these underfed, over trained, flabby individuals with hormone imbalances who don't understand why they're losing a little bit of weight but really it's just their arms and legs

that are getting skinny. They still have a belly fat. They don't feel good. They eat one weekend they go out and eat and again, all this weight and they can't figure out the hell's going on. Even though they're trying to do the right things because they're beating themselves up in the gym. It's because they're over applying intensity with exercise. It's not appropriate. They're not training themselves properly, typically over training, and they underfeed themselves in particular protein.

Oh yeah. This is the classic Karen at Orange Theory or F45. I mean, this is the, they eat two salads a day and a frappuccino is like all the calories they consume. And then they run through these circuit-based types of class and burn, try and burn all their calories off and they just get stuck in this awful cycle of, maybe they're not gaining any more body fat, but they're not losing any,

and they're kind of staying the same place. With all this hard work and no food. Yeah, and then so addicted to the adrenaline and endorphins and cortisol dump that they get from the class, thinking that they're doing something good for their body, because man, after they get done beating themselves up for that hour, I feel so good and so accomplished afterwards,

not realizing that they're addicted to that feeling, because their body is starving of having a good healthy balance of hormones. This is a vicious cycle that I tend to train a lot of clients like this that ran into this and then I have to- And you apply the right things and say everything changes like magic. 100%. 100%. Next up is the metabolic adaptation that happens from all the things that we listed.

Metabolic adaptation literally means your metabolism is adapting. Now in this case, your metabolism is slowing down. What you used to be able to eat, you no longer can. Now you eat it, now you gain body fat. Now your body reacts. You can't figure out why you're eating so little and yet you're still X amount of pounds overweight. You can't figure it out and it's because

your metabolism is slowed down to a snail's pace. And this is real, this is a real thing. We see this with clients all the time. Women that are coming in that are tracking their calories, consuming 1,000 to 1,200 calories a day who still have 20 pounds to lose, who are doing cardio step classes five days a week or orange theory or whatever, five days a week, can't figure out what the hell is

going on, definitely don't want to eat less because I'm barely eating anything to begin with and just feel like garbage. There's just no room for them to go. No. They're so low calorie and this is really where they might eat a cookie and they will feel the impact of that. It's just like that excess amount, a couple hundred more calories and it's going to change their physique at that point because they're so, again, they're over trained, they're low calorie and this is just like something they've gradually adapted to this really inefficient way to metabolize everything. Meanwhile all our peers, this is one of those things that we find ourselves arguing, debating

over when people use words like, oh, your metabolism is broken and then you have the professionals come out. That's not what, your metabolism is broken and then you make people think that, oh, okay, well then my metabolism is fine. When we're really, what's going on is that your metabolism is doing exactly what it's supposed to do. You're starving it, you're pushing it like crazy and you're telling it to survive off of what you're doing and so it becomes efficient.

It learns how to do that. Yeah so you know and it's unfortunate because again it turns into one of these things where all the science nerds want to try and argue over the terminology that's used to explain what's going on but this it's a true phenomenon that happens a lot and a lot of coaches and trainers don't know what to do when they all, they, their only tool, the only tool that they use in their tool belt is the move more, burn, you know, or burn more, eat less strategy.

And this person has got themselves in this situation where that strategy no longer serves them. They are now at such a low calorie to the example you gave. And I've seen this countless times where they are tracking, they are weighing, they are measuring, they are eating 1,200 calories and they are doing stuff activity every single day yet they can't lose that last 20 pounds. No what it tends to look like is they lost an

initial whatever and then plateaued hard and then they have nowhere else to go. They don't know where else to go and now just to maintain the weight loss that they did create they have to maintain this crazy schedule of eating very little and moving like crazy. And your metabolism has adapted. By the way, there's a way to get your metabolism to adapt the other way.

There are things you can do, and if you do them right, you can also speed up your metabolism in effective way. Just like it slowed down, in which case you did that on accident, well we can on purpose speed it up. metabolism in an effective way. Just like it slowed down, in which case you did that on accident, well we can on purpose speed it up. So here's the fix. Let's start with the first thing. Number one, lift weights. There is nothing you can do exercise-wise

that is more effective at reducing belly fat in particular, visceral body fat in particular, like strength training. Now why is that? Well strength training directly builds muscle. Now before I hear you yelling at the screen or saying to yourself, well I feel my muscles burn in my orange theory and I feel my legs burning when I'm going for runs.

No, no, no. They don't build muscle. Those forms of exercise do not build muscle. You'll get a little bit of strength, but mostly what you're getting is endurance, which is fine if that's what you want, but they are not directly affecting your muscles in a build sense, in a gain muscle sense, in a speed up your metabolism sense. Only traditional strength training will do

this. What does that look like? That looks like you do ten reps of something with something heavy, good form, good technique, and then you rest. You rest for two minutes, three minutes. Then you do another set. It is not going from exercise to exercise to exercise to exercise with no rest. It is not running on a treadmill nonstop or doing a class nonstop and sweating your butt off,

you know, whatever. It's not that. That does not send a signal to the body that says build muscle. Only traditional strength training will do that. And when you build that muscle, here's the beauty of this, right? Building muscle dramatically improves insulin sensitivity. It also tells your body to organize its hormones in a way to build muscle. So if you're trying to get your body to build muscle and you do so with a nice, with good appropriate

strength training, the first thing your body does is it changes its hormone profile to do so. And it does this through a few different ways. One is it actually changes your hormone profile, but two, it changes receptor density. For example, strength training directly increases what is known as androgen receptor density. What are androgen receptors? These are the receptors that testosterone attaches to. So if you had good testosterone, as a woman, remember testosterone is important for women too,

if you have good testosterone in your system but there are no receptors to attach to it does nothing. It just just swims around your system and it's like might as well not be there. The only way it can work is if it attaches to a receptor. Well when you build muscle you increase the number of these receptors. So even if your testosterone levels stay the same, for example, if your testosterone stayed the same but you doubled your androgen receptor density, you've essentially doubled your testosterone.

That's how effective it is. And building muscle does it. It also speeds up your metabolism. You gain muscle and you move in that direction, your body burns more calories. Muscle is active tissue that requires more calories to maintain than other tissues. So building muscle, we talked about metabolic adaptation.

You can also get your metabolism to adapt in the other way by simply building muscle. I think it's so important to talk even further. You mentioned it, but further with the mindset that goes into how you lift. Because when I would get this, the same client that's it, that we're kind of describing, right? The avatar. And then can you, you, you drop all the science knowledge that you just did and you say, Hey, let's, we're going to, we're going to lift

weights to build muscle. And they go, okay, you've sold me on that. I'm going to start doing that. They still do it with the wrong mindset. They do it with the idea of still beating themselves up, still trying to accomplish more in the workout, still trying to get good at the workout to where it becomes easy versus going into it with the idea of like, I need to get stronger. My goal is week over week, I want to be able to add more weight to the bar and lift more weight. And the truth is it may never get easier for me. It's just I'm going to be constantly challenging myself and challenging my body to lift more weight to get started. That is going to send the loudest signal to your body to build muscle,

not this doing weights, okay, I'm ready, I can do it again, doing weights again, okay, I'm ready, I can do it again. And this circuit based type of training that I think so many of them are addicted to. So how you go into the lifting weights, I think is so important because many times this client is attracted to the type of weight training that is not benefiting them very much. No, no, and I'll take it a step further. If you look at the data, and by the way,

we know this through anecdote, through training all the clients that we have over the last two and a half decades, but you look at the data on weight loss, when the ways that the people lose weight is through cardio plus calorie deficit. In other words, people who drop their calories and they did cardio. A significant percentage of the weight that they lose is muscle. They will lose 10 pounds, but 40 pounds or 40% of it comes from muscle. Now, why has this happened?

By the way, this doesn't happen with strength training. In those studies where they use strength training, it's almost all body fat or sometimes it's all body fat and they gain a little bit of muscle. So in other words, you lose 10 pounds, it's 10 pounds of body fat, not six pounds of fat, four pounds of muscle. All right. Why does cardio cause us to lose muscle in that scenario? Well it's because cardio is asking your body to improve its endurance, not strength.

Endurance doesn't require bigger, stronger muscles. It requires efficient muscles. Also, cardio on its own does burn a lot of calories, which your body adapts to, but it does burn a lot of calories, so your body learns how to do that activity better, more efficiently, by burning less calories. How does it do that? It pairs muscle down.

The best example I can give you, visual example of the difference between strength training and cardio is a long distance runner versus a sprinter. Sprinters are essentially doing strength training when they run, they're sprinting for short distances. They are muscular and lean versus low muscle marathon runners. So if you want to lose muscle, cardio is the way to go. If you want to keep your muscle, speed up your metabolism

while getting leaner, improve insulin sensitivity, all of the above, then you will lift weights and you will lift weights like somebody who's trying to get stronger and build muscle. Not like somebody who's just trying to burn a lot of calories. I feel like I have to reorder this because with that, it's so important that you pair it with eating in a calorie surplus and eating high protein because this,

even this alone, if you're still trapped in that, eating two salads and a coffee a day is your, cause you're afraid you're going gonna put more body fat on, and which is totally understandable to this client. This client has been eating a thousand calories, doing all this high activity, and you say, I'm gonna cut this activity out from you, and now I want you to slow down your workouts

and strength train and take rest periods, and then you try and tell that client, oh, and by the way, I'm also gonna have you increase calories and bump your protein intake, you scare the shit out of that person, but it's absolutely necessary because what happens when we go to the gym and we lift properly the way we're supposed to, we send the loud signal for us, hey, to go tell the body to go build muscle, but if you don't give it what it needs to actually go do that, then all you're doing is sending a loud signal and the

body isn't adapting, it isn't growing. It isn't building muscle. And so it's imperative that not only do we train a certain way, but then we also feed the body appropriately in order to reap the real benefits of building. It's like sending a bunch of blueprints to construction workers to build a house with no tools, no tools, no wood, no sheetrock, nothing. You can't build anything. It's like it's great, it's great you have all the plans.

You got all the plans and you have all the direction, but you don't give them the tools to work. You have to feed your body the nutrients it needs to build muscle. All right, what does that look like? Let's get specific. Eat one gram of protein per pound of target body weight. Okay, so whatever the weight is that you wanna weigh,

it's 120 pounds, 150 pounds, whatever, that's how many grams of protein you need to eat on an, ready for this, every single day basis. Not sometimes, but every single day. And not an average too, Sal. Somebody brought that up recently, and I was like, you know what, we haven't talked a lot about that on the show,

and we should talk about that more often, because when you talk about calorie average is okay, right, is about how undulating your calories and the average when it comes to weight loss or weight gain is so important, but you can't do that with protein. No, protein needs to be consistent, because we don't really have an effective way

of storing protein, like we do fat or carbohydrates, right? Carbohydrates get stored as glycogen fat, obviously it could get stored in body fat, but protein needs to be consistent. That in other words, you can't have a super high protein day and then a bunch of low protein days and average it out and say it's all the same. Doesn't really work that way.

You wanna have it on a consistent basis. So if your target body weighs 150 pounds and you're eating breakfast, lunch and dinner, guess what? You're eating 50 grams of protein for breakfast, 50 grams of protein for lunch, 50 grams of protein for dinner. Now a lot of people don't know what that looks like. A lot of people listening to this right now is like,

okay, I'll eat a high protein breakfast. I'll have- Shit, that's like nine, 10 ounces of meat. Yeah, I'll have two scrambled eggs. No, no, no. 50 grams of protein of eggs is, what is that? Eight eggs, something like that? It's like around eight eggs.

So it's a decent size. So you need to have like eight ounces of meat or eight ounces of some kind of protein for breakfast. You need to do the same thing with lunch, same thing with dinner, eat it first, prioritize it. That's gonna give you most of the nutrients that you need. Now of course you can't just eat protein, you need to have some fats and some carbohydrates.

But I'm not worried so much about that because when people tend to prioritize the protein, especially if they get it from whole food sources, the other stuff tends to come. So do that and if you don't, you can lift all the weights in the world, you can train perfectly with strength training. If your protein's low, you're gonna build very little

muscle, if it's too low, you'll build no muscle. It doesn't even matter at all. All right, next up is to have some kind of a spiritual practice for stress. Now this could be meditation. It could be obviously prayer, but when you look at the data, now here's why we put this in there for stress management. When you look at the data on managing stress, there are two very powerful ways that you can manage stress. One is to change your lifestyle. Okay, so you got a stressful job, you got a mortgage, you got three kids, you know, you've got a spouse or whatever. You could change all that in hopes that it'll

completely change your stress, although you might switch jobs, find a job that's just as stressful. You probably don't want to get rid of your kids. I think if you did, you'd probably be more stressed out than you were before. So sometimes, the reason why I'm saying this is sometimes our lives we can change to make less stressful, but oftentimes it's just life. Like it's just this season of life, it's stressful. So the data shows us very clearly either you change your lifestyle, but if that's not really something that is possible for you in a big way, incorporating some kind of a spiritual practice, especially starting the day out with it, has significant

impact on how your body manages the normal stress of your life. I mean there's studies that show that people who wake up in the morning and engage in 10 to 15 minutes of prayer or meditation, that's it. The amount, the type of stress that they, or at least the way that they perceive the stress throughout the day, their normal stress is reduced significantly. So for most people, my experience training people, when I did this with clients, it was easier for them to do this than it was for them to do this overhaul of their life. Now sometimes it was something they could do, like you're dating somebody that's toxic,

let's break up with them and then boom, stress is gone. But other times it's like, look, I got kids, I got a job, I can't change it, these are important things for me. Incorporating some kind of a spiritual practice tends to give us a sense of purpose, takes us out of those stressful things, and starting the day out that way,

it tends, the theory is that it primes the central nervous system to receive the stress differently throughout the rest of the day. That's why it's so important to do this first thing in the morning if you're going to incorporate this. And the data shows as little as five to 10 to 15 minutes. Why should it be any different than the body? We do it for workouts. You know, this is for our mind and our mental ability.

And I think, too, like really acknowledging the fact that there's like, we're like control animals like we just want to figure out how to predict things in our environment how to manage all these things but there are factors there's a lot going on here that we have no control over and to acknowledge that right away and to just stay with what you can control. It relieves this excess amount of stress and, and things that can accumulate really fast that really are unnecessary for you to carry around with you that adds to this, this dysfunctional stress that you're going to carry.

I find this conversation really interesting because this has been, this has been in societies and a part of many, many cultures for very, very long time. Thousands of years. Yeah, thousands of years. But it does feel like it is more important today than it's ever been. And I think it's just because- People need to be reminded.

We've created so many things in just the last few decades that causes this, like us distracting and taking us from being present. Like you just, so much of life just a hundred years ago forced you to be present. I mean, just your daily activities, feeding yourself, like the things that you would have to do to get through your day required so many moments of being present in yourself, in your body right there at that time. And today it's so different. I mean, we can't even go to the bathroom or wait in a line or have downtime

between something at work without this, this appendage that we grab right to and distract ourselves with that's so addicting. And it's like, and I don't think that we understand fully what that's doing to our bodies and so these practices whether you believe in a higher power or not I think are it's going to be have to be adopted by everybody so you can deny the the higher power part and the maybe the spiritual, but the practice of not being distracted, being hyper present. And what that does is it takes away,

when we stress out, that's because we're either dwelling on the past or the future. And being present eliminates that. If I'm 100% in this moment, I'm not worried about all the shit that's gonna happen in the future. I'm not stressed out about what happened yesterday or last year. I'm in the moment. And so that practice of getting you to do that,

whether you do that from a spiritual standpoint, or you have some sort of way of doing that, it's just, it's going to become necessary for everybody. It's always been necessary, but what's happened is we've created all these time-saving devices and tools and what's ended up happening is we've actually given ourselves less and less time, made ourselves more and more busy. By the way, this isn't just, I mean, we're not just, this isn't our opinion. The data shows anxiety, not forget depression, but anxiety, which is, you know, stress causes

anxiety, right? It could also cause depression. But anxiety is at peak levels. Like what is on we have more stuff than ever we have more entertainment than ever and a lot of experts believe it's Loss of this this this we're not taking this 10,000 foot view of things anymore Whereas this was a regular practice. This was a part of society. It's no longer part of society And again the data on this is clear. It's like you could try changing the things in your life to dramatically reduce your stress, but if a lot of your

stress is from stuff that you can't change because it's life and life is hard, then changing your outlook and changing yourself will do that. Spiritual practice will do this. It doesn't take much. Again, the data that I've seen shows five, ten ten fifteen minutes a day That's it in the morning Most of us have that in the morning and what we tend to do with that in the morning is scroll through social media Ten minutes social media in the morning by the way that does the opposite that primes a central nervous system for alarm Because social media is all alarm. It's all about what the other person is doing It's all about crazy news political news scary stuff now

You've primed your central nervous system for worry and anxiety and stress versus priming your central nervous system for purpose and meaning and larger thought and then that sets you up for the rest of the day and then something stressful happens and it's not as stressful. Now your perception is totally changed. Alright, next up is to get good sleep. So we talked about the morning. Let's talk about the night. Alright, next up is to get good sleep. So we talked about the morning, let's talk about the night. Sleep is the most recuperative, rejuvenating thing you can do for your body. Good sleep has a profound effect on balancing hormones.

Bad sleep or inadequate sleep has also an equally profound negative effect on your hormones. I mean, you could lower your testosterone dramatically with two nights of bad sleep or you could throw your estrogen progesterone way off with one or two nights of poor sleep. So what is good sleep? It's about seven to eight hours of good solid sleep every single night. Not six hours or six and a half hours. It's seven to eight of good quality sleep. And the way that this happens, the way that you can get this, and now we could give you the steps and what to do and we'll talk about that, but

really it boils down to prioritizing it. I'm going to prioritize good sleep, meaning I'm going to make sure I'm in bed by this time, which gives me eight and a half hours before I need to wake up because you know it's gonna take you about 20-30 minutes fall asleep. So I'm gonna go to bed at this time and I'm in bed by this time which gives me eight and a half hours before I need to wake up because you know it's gonna take you about 20-30 minutes fall asleep. So I'm gonna go to bed at this time and I'm gonna wake up at this time. I'm gonna keep the go to bed and wake up times the same every single day so I don't jet lag myself Monday morning because I slept in Saturday you know on Sunday because I went to bed so late and then I'm gonna set myself up. What does that mean? An hour before I'm getting ready for bed. What does that look like? I'm

calming things down. I'm dimming the lights or turning them down or going by candlelight. I'm not watching things that An hour before I'm getting ready for bed. What does that look like? I'm calming things down. I'm dimming the lights or turning them down or going by candlelight. I'm not watching things that are alarming. I'm not reading the news. I'm calming myself down. Maybe reading a book, getting myself into that state where now I'm ready to go to bed versus what we tend to do, which is go, go, go, go, go. And then time for bed, hit the pillow, expect to have quality sleep. It doesn't work that way. You know, my favorite part about helping clients

with this hack of like focusing on sleep is that when you look at like trying to be a healthier version of yourself, we look at exercise, we look at diet, we look at sleep, hydration, all these things. And you know, sometimes days get away from us where you get so busy and you didn't eat the perfect meal or you missed a meal or whatever, or you didn't get a chance to make it to the gym.

And so what I love about teaching clients the importance of prioritizing sleep is that it's the thing at the end of the night that it's like, hey, I didn't do this, I didn't do that and this, but I can at least do this. And so, and that is such a big rock in the grand scheme of things when you're trying to get a healthier version of yourself,

especially when we're talking about hormone profiles and belly fat and trying to solve that. It's like, Hey, you know what? Tomorrow we'll get up. We'll try and hit the diet better tomorrow. We'll try and be better about the gym, but you still have tonight. You still have got that. So it's like, and to me, it's like, if, if you're a client of mine and you missed out on those first two things, you still have this opportunity to go, hey, you know what?

I'm still going to make today somewhat of a success by practicing some of these other things. And I think they feed into each other when you talk about a spiritual practice, doing something like that before you go to bed, since you're prioritizing. It's like, hey, I didn't do those other things, but you know what I'm going to do is I had such an overwhelming day. I'm going to make sure two, three hours before I shut everything down I'm actually gonna either do prayer meditation yoga

Whatever it is to be hyper present in the moment And then I'm gonna make sure that I go to bed and get a good night's rest They set me up for success on the next day I just think if people went into their day with that attitude of knowing that They can still win the day by setting their night up and having a good night's rest to set up the tone for the next day. I think maybe they wouldn't beat themselves up so much about maybe the, the, the one bad meal they had or missing the workout for the day,

because that's such a big piece is to get good sleep. And if you, if you screwed up on the other things, it's just going to get compounded by also just riding off the sleep too. Yeah. There's still save that. There was a, there was a study that showed that I've quoted this one many times that they had two groups of people both going to calorie deficit. So both eat low calories, both lost the same amount of weight,

but one group that had them have terrible sleep. So they limited them to I think five and a half hours, six hours of sleep. The other group, they prioritize good sleep. They both lost the same amount of weight, but one group lost twice as much muscle and half as much body fat. So they both lost, I don't remember how many pounds it was, but the group with the bad sleep lost twice as much muscle and half as much body fat and that was the only difference was the bad sleep. Alright lastly, get your hormones checked. Now you

don't want to get your hormones checked by your general practitioner. No. Because they tend to base it off of certain ranges, they don't look at symptoms. You want to go to somebody who works with hormone replacement therapy. This can be a godsend if indeed this is something that you need and that works for you. I now after having spoken to many, many experts in this arena, many of them say, oh, hormone replacement therapy is a godsend. If somebody's exercising and they're trying to eat right, and they're leading

a healthy lifestyle, and they're 43 years old, and we do these tests and we see thyroid is low, your testosterone is a bit low, and we start to supplement with bioidentical hormones, profound difference in the way that people feel, profound improvement in quality of life. And hormone replacement therapy in the context of a healthy person, it improves longevity. Now in the context of somebody who's very unhealthy and inflamed, then you don't waste your time. But if you're doing all the stuff that we're talking about and you get your hormones checked

and you're going to, you know, let's say a functional medicine practitioner or somebody in a longevity clinic and they're like, yeah, we could give you some progesterone, a little bit of estrogen, some testosterone, thyroid really balance things out, you will notice a profound difference in your results in terms of fat loss, muscle gain, libido, energy, sleep,

all of the above. So that would be the last thing that I would say. I mean, I don't even know if it's a last thing for me. I think almost towards the back half of my career, anytime I was training anybody over the age of 40, if they haven't had it checked, I almost always, especially if they were struggling. Especially if they were struggling, right?

Like they're like, Adam, I eat good, I train, I do these things and they're like, still frustrated, I'm seeing results. When did you get your blood work done? When have you had somebody besides the general practitioner look at your blood panels and go over that with you? If you hadn't, I would almost always send my clients first to that. So at least give us some insight because what's tough as a trainer is if their hormones are

really out of whack and really imbalanced and I'm pulling all these levers with diet and sleep and exercise, man, a lot of times you'll see minimal, minimal results from all that great effort because the hormone profile. So simply just getting that healthy in an optimal place, all of a sudden all that effort, and it starts to really pay itself off. So almost always do I recommend somebody that has struggled with weight loss

and feels like they have ate or eating well, they've trained, they've done the things and they're not seeing the results, go see a specialist. And all these things directly impact your body's ability to burn body fat, but in particular the distribution of where you store body fat, like we said earlier with belly fat versus the other areas. All right, I think we have some questions, Doug, in regards to- We do.

The first one is, how long should I reverse diet before going back to a calorie deficit for fat loss? So let's define a reverse diet first. So reverse diet, let's say, let's say you're somebody who, you know, we defined earlier, you're eating 1200 calories a day, you've been working out like crazy. You just listened to this episode. You're like, okay, what do I do? Well, one of the things you do is you start strength training, cut out all the other workouts, get good sleep, the whole thing.

But also we're going to do a reverse diet because your calories are too low. The calories are too low for us to lose body fat with because where are we going to go from 1200 down to 800, 700 calories? It's not going to happen. So what you do is you slowly increase your calories over time while strength training, build muscle, speed up your metabolism until you get to a point where you can then cut from and then burn body fat. So the question is, how long do you reverse diet before going to a calorie deficit?

I like the way you've explained this before, Adam, if you don't mind. I actually have a kind of, so I was waiting for you to say something because I actually kind of have a new way to say this, that it's because of where I'm at currently right now. So my goal of my whole process right now is to reduce body fat. Like I was at 15% I want to get into single digits but I'm coming from a

place obviously not as broken maybe as somebody who's been eating only a thousand calories and is a mess hormonally but I'm definitely coming from a place where my body is adapted to low calorie and so the first strategy was okay go and hit the protein intake right send a loud a loud signal to build muscle, go hit the protein intake. What I have found was as I was slowly increasing protein, because I was so low on that, in order for me to hit my 200 grams of protein, Sal, I've got to be around 2800 calories. So I was only at like 2000, then I was at 2500, then I'm at, and at 2800, I barely get to my 200.

So here I am, I've been creeping up, I'm finally hitting my protein intake, I'm building a,800, I barely get to my 200. So here I am, I've been creeping up, I'm finally hitting my protein intake, I'm building a little muscle, I'm stronger, I feel good, it's like, but I still wanna get shredded, so should I cut right now? Well the reason why I don't wanna cut from 2,800 is if I go down to 2,400, now I'm gonna start

missing my protein intake again. So my goal now is to continue to reverse diet until I'm more like a place like 3,500 calories so that I can pull back to 3,000 or 2,800 without lowering my protein and I'm eating in a place where I feel satisfied. So I think this is a missing piece or conversation that I haven't added to talking about how I reverse diet somebody then cut them back. It's like I want to get them high enough that typically what I'd say before is I would always push a client like I'm going to keep pushing them, reverse die them until they look back at me and they go, Adam, this is just so much food. I can't eat. I don't

want to eat anymore. This is too much for me. And then I go, great, we're at a good place. Now let's go the other direction. That was kind of my generic way of saying it before. But now I have an even, I think, more precise way to communicate this. And it's like wherever you, we've told you precise way to communicate this and it's like wherever you we've told you your your protein is so let's let's use a probably more of a female number of like protein intake probably a 140 150 right if a if a woman wants to be around 140 150 pounds let's just say it gets a healthy weight let's say so 140 is her number well if I tell you I just want you to eat and prioritize protein You have to ask yourself about how many calories do you land at?

in order to hit that 140 and that probably is gonna be somewhere in the 2022 2300 range at least so if you need 22 2300 calories just to hit your minimum protein intake that I want you to hit Well, I want to keep pushing your calories up higher in so that when I cut you I can cut you down to a number that is sustainable calorie wise and also realistic that you can still hit your protein intake. Yeah so I love that and again and to add to that like you want to go up to a place with your calories and what you should notice by the way while you're doing this is you're just getting stronger. You're building muscle, you're getting stronger. You're feeling good.

When you get to a place that you can drop calories from and feel comfortable, that's the other thing to consider. It's like, okay, I'm at 2,000 calories. I could go down to 1,500 to be good or I'm at 2,200 calories. I can go down to 1,700 calories and be okay. Then you know you can start to cut. But if you're at a place where you're like, I've dropped calories from here, I'm going to feel terrible, you got to keep reverse dieting. Next question, how can I tell if I'm over training and what are the signs to watch for? Excessive fatigue, stiffness, soreness, insomnia, you're not getting stronger in the gym,

you just don't feel good, hot, cold, intolerance, you feel rundown, these are the signs of overtraining. Insomnia being the first one, by the way, once you start overtraining, you'll notice your sleep is just off, and it just means you just need to cut down on the volume and the intensity. Yeah, I mean, I feel like one of the first is chronic soreness, I feel like that's normally

the first one I notice is just like I'm sore all the time. I'm going into a workout and I'm still sore from, yeah, I'm still sore from the previous one, it's like, okay, to me, to me, the way I look at my training nowadays is that I want to feel the workout that I did the day before, but that's it. I just want to feel that I trained that muscle. I don't want to feel to where I'm so sore,

it's time to go work out again that month, and I still feel like I'm really sore. Otherwise, I have to really scale back on the intensity in that workout coming forward. So to me, that's always like the first sign of probably over training is that, but definitely disrupted sleep, definitely insomnia. Those are classic signs of that happening.

But even just chronic soreness, like people tend to chase soreness as this metric of you'd had a good workout. And I don't believe that at all. I think it's actually normally a sign of you overreached and you did more than you needed to do. And so that to me is one of the first signs you see before you start to see the other ones that are really debilitating. Next question, what's the difference

between muscle loss and fat loss and how do I ensure I'm losing fat not muscle? Alright so the the difference on the scale you can't tell right? You lose ten pounds on the scale of muscle, ten pounds of body fat, looks the same so how do I know if it's muscle or body fat? Well, it's two things. Change it by strength. Yeah. Yeah.

One is that exactly. Like are you losing strength? Then you're losing muscle. Are you gaining strength and you lost some weight on the scale? You probably didn't lose muscle. The second way is a body fat percentage test. And you want to do these on a semi-regular basis, maybe every two weeks, doing them at the same time of the day, same amount of food and water, keep things consistent, and then pay

attention to the trends. And that'll tell you if you're losing muscle or body fat. That's one way to decipher it. Yeah, another thing is this is like, so this is why the first point I made about getting your protein intake up and making sure that even when you're in a cut you're still hitting your protein, right? Because chances are if you're lifting, if you're if you're strength training, you're hitting your protein intake and you're losing weight on the scale, you're still hitting your protein, right? Because chances are, if you're lifting, if you're strength training, you're hitting your protein intake and you're losing weight on the scale, you're probably losing fat.

I mean, if you're doing those things, hitting your protein, unless you're doing some- Especially if you're maintaining strength. Yeah, especially if you're maintaining, even if you're not gaining strength, because it's normal to lose a little bit of strength sometimes when you're in a deficit. So it's not totally like the,

just because you lost a little bit of strength means you definitely lost muscle. But typically, if you're hitting that protein intake that your body needs your strength training at least three times a week and the scale Weights going down slowly. That's normally a pretty good sign But I think another way is when the when the scale moves fast scale just you don't lose body fat fast You do not lose five six pounds of fat at a time. It just doesn't happen. Our bodies don't work that way So normally if you see fast weight loss on the scale, you're not only losing fat You're also paring down muscle because that's just how it works

You're not I don't want to see that scale move more than about one to two pounds a week with a client That's doing perfect any more than that aside from the initial water weight loss Because that's of course there, that's factored in. Yeah, you lose water right away. Yeah, for the very first week you can see a major fluctuation up or down and changing a diet for sure because of water. But I mean after you've been training for a while, if all of a sudden I see a five, seven pound drop in a week, I'm adjusting my client's calories.

I'm like, oh shit, that we cut too much. We got to go back up because you're certainly not losing seven pounds of fat in a week. That's just not happening. Next question is how does sleep impact fat loss? What practical steps can I take to improve my sleep quality? Well, I mentioned that study earlier. It could cut your fat loss efforts in half and double the muscle loss that may potentially happen if your sleep is poor. So good sleep dramatically improves your your ability to burn body fat and maintain or keep muscle in both directions. So if it's good sleep, you're gonna get great better results. You get bad sleep, you're gonna get far worse results. Now, how do you improve your sleep quality? Black out your room. Make sure the temperature is very cool. Make sure you didn't eat any food

about a couple hours before. You're not on electronics about an hour before. And sometimes white noise can help people out. And go to bed at the same time every night. Those are the big rocks that can, and then no caffeine past a certain point for most people's past. Yeah, it's so interesting to me because it's like,

one of the easiest ways to impact sleep quality is to treat it the same way you treat getting up. Yep. I mean, just like- It's the ritual of it. Yeah, it's like we just, we have, it's so, our culture has no ritual around getting ready for bed, but we have definitely a strong ritual around getting up.

I mean, we have, there's fucking a thousand books written about how to make millions of dollars by your morning routine. I mean, there's all kinds of that shit, but there's like not a lot written around that. Like just care about it. Like literally just think about it. The way you think about getting up to get ready for work,

to brush your teeth, the shower, to be out the door by a certain time. Like you know, everybody listening to this right now knows exactly what time that alarm has to go off in order for them to do the things they need to do before they go out the door, whether that's getting kids ready or yourself or lunch or whatever it is, you have figured that out because you've put enough time

thinking about it. If you just apply that same attention to the evening of I got to do the XYZ, I have to have my dinner by this time, I turn off my television by this time, I'm in my bed by this time, I like my temperature around here and I do that consistently, you're going to get great, you're going to start to get great sleep. Whatever that formula is that works best for you. You just have to be intentional about it. That's it. And consistent. So that's the other part of it is just like once you nail it to just ritualize it so that way too you can duplicate it and then this becomes something that you know really you know has a massive effect on everything else something that you know really you know has a massive effect on everything else leading forward. Perfect. Look if you like the show come find us on Instagram

Justin is at Mindpump Justin I'm at Mindpump. Is Stefano and Adam is at Mindpump? 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 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 to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs. With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB Super Bundle is like having Sal, Adam, and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price.

The RGB Super Bundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at mindpumpmedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five star rating and review on iTunes and by introducing Mind Pump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support and until next time, this is Mind Pump.