Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2805: How To Know When It's The Right Time To Cut

Episode Date: March 2, 2026

How To Know When It's Time to Cut The #1 reason why people CONSISTENTLY fail. (1:46) What does it mean to go on a cut? (4:01) The definition of a successful cut. (4:22) The reasons you should NOT go on a cut. 1. When you feel you're too fat. (7:08) 2. To get ready for an "event." (9:39) The reasons it's a good time to cut. 1. You are healthy. (11:49) 2. Your maintenance calories are high enough to cut from. (14:12) 3. You have a good plan, which includes how to stop. (23:58) Related Links/Products Mentioned Mind Pump Concierge Coaching (Only 50 spots open) – Visit: www.mindpumpconcierge.com  Visit Joymode for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! ** Enter MINDPUMP at checkout for 20% off your first order. ** MAPS Great 8 Launch - (Retail $127, Code: LAUNCH for 50% off!) ** Launch bonus include: MAPS GREAT 8 Nutrition Guide. ** Visit: http://mapsgreat8.com/  Mind Pump Store Mind Pump # 2187: Why Building Muscle Is More Important Than Losing Fat With Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Mind Pump # 2690: The NEW DIET Everyone Is Using For Fat Loss Mind Pump # 2410: How to Maximize Fat Loss & Preserve Muscle on GLP-1s (Introducing MAPS GLP-1) Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources People Mentioned Dr. Gabrielle Lyon (@drgabriellelyon) Instagram Corinne Schmiedhauser (@mindpumpcorinne) Instagram  

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump. 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. How do you know when it's a good time to start a cut? When you start the fat loss process.

We break that all down in today's episode. By the way, we offer coaching. online coaching with a mind-pumped certified personal trainer who could take you through this entire process, diet, exercise, the whole deal. You meet with them once a month virtually. It's mindpumpconcierge.com. So mindpumconcierge.com is where you go. As long as there's spots available, you can sign up.

Now, this episode is brought to you by some sponsors. Joy Mode. Joy mode has a pre-sex supplement. You can also use it as a pre-workout that has proven ingredients. that are vasodilators. What's that mean? Opens up blood vessels, improves blood flow.

So great is a pre-workout because you get better pumps. It's great for before sex because you get better pumps, if you know what I mean. It's backed by data. It's shown to actually work. Take Joy Mode about 35 to 45 minutes

before activity. Report back. You're going to love it. Go check it out. Go to tryjoymode.com forward slash mind pump. Use the code mind pump and checkout. get 20% off.

All right, real quick, if you love us like we love you, why not show it by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs, or training gear over at mindpump store.com. I'm talking right now, hit pause, head on over to mindpump store.com. That's it. Enjoy the rest of the show. Cutting, it's the process of getting leaner, but it's very difficult oftentimes to determine when it's the right time. In fact, most people make a big mistake.

They start cutting at the wrong time, and this is what really screws them up. So we're going to talk about that. How do you know when it's the right time to go on a cut? I think this is actually one of those things that isn't talked about enough. Agreed. And it's assumed that as soon as you get back into exercising or back into your routine, that you start right off on a cut. And even though this is a little bit different,

talking about competitors, bikini competitors, men's physique, bodybuilders. but I wouldn't take a client on that was trying to compete that had already determined their show until I had a chance to train them in the off-season first before we determine the show for the reasons that we'll probably get into right now because where you're at calorie maintenance-wise, metabolically,

before you go into cut, is so important to the success of that cut. It's one of the, One of the biggest, yes. So here's a deal. Everybody goes on a cut when they work out. I say most people. Like most people work out because they want to get leaner.

It's the number one fitness goal. So it's super common. Everybody tries it. Everybody fails. Like everybody fails. If you look at the data on weight loss, this is some of the best data we have around fitness. We don't have a lot of good data on building muscle or improving athletic performance.

We have some but not a lot. But the one that's measured the most is weight loss because it's the most common goal. And what we see is with any. a year, almost 90% of the people that lose weight, gain it back. And if you extend it out, I've always made this argument. If they extend those studies out by three, four years, I bet you it's closer to 95%, which means you have a point, you know, you have a 5% chance of long term over a few years success with weight loss. And one of the reasons why people consistently fail while you're going to fail is because you do this at the wrong time.

for the wrong reasons. And this is almost always going to lead to failure. So I think we should back up first for people who aren't familiar with the word cut. Like, what does that mean? It means you're pursuing your diet or looking at your diet and trying to change it in a waste to lose body fat. That's what a cut is. A cut is I'm trying to lose body fat.

And the terminology that we're using is cut. Now, I like to extend the, this, this is the way I would communicate. communicate this to my clients, and I'd say, the goal of a cut is to lose body fat, but to keep it off forever. So people don't ever add that second part. It's like, I want to lose body fat. Well, do you want to gain it back? Of course not. Oh, I would add one more to that. Our goal is to lose body fat and maintain as much lean body mass as possible, of course, which I think is very important to add to that. That doesn't get added to that many times. Many times it's, I just need to lose weight. You know, the client comes to you and they say they want to lose 50 pounds.

And I don't care. I just need to get this 50 pounds off me. And they're obsessed with the number on the scale. And they're not coming to you saying like, hey, I would like to lose 50 pounds of just body fat. I just want to lose 50 pounds on the scale. And this, it's, and why it's so important to understand the difference of that is because somebody could theoretically go down 50 pounds on the scale. and actually see their body fat percentage go up or stay the same. If they've lost a ton of muscle, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, body fat percentage is what matters. You know, if you had, you know, someone who was a 100 pounds with 10 pounds of body fat on them, and then they suddenly weigh 200 pounds, they gained 100 pounds of muscle. I'm using crazy numbers here. With the same 10 pounds of body fat, they're much leaner. Okay. If you lose a bunch of muscle with your body fat, you become a small,

same or relatively same body fat percentage version of yourself. You've actually just lost strength and function by losing weight on the scale and losing muscle. Not to mention muscle is so metabolically active that you've made it so much more difficult to maintain that weight loss because you've, in essence, slowed down your metabolism. You essentially reduce the amount of calories your body can run on because you've lost so much muscle. And so now you're in this crazy position, which a lot of people have experienced, I'm sure, There's no runway. There's nowhere to go.

Yeah, a lot of people, I'm sure have experienced this. It's like, oh, yeah, I went out of a really restricted calorie diet. I started running. I lost a lot of weight on the scale. And then to keep it off, it's like I had to eat, like, just keep eating very little. And then when I went to try to eat more or I went off on a vacation or suddenly I gained all this body fat, it's like, well, yeah, you met a bottle. You put yourself in a metabolic disadvantage because of the muscle that you lost. So, so I'm glad you added that, Adam.

The cut is the attempt to lose only body fat, keep or build muscle, and keep that body fat off forever. I think that would be a great definition for a successful cut. Right. And I'm sure anybody listening right now would be like, yes, that's exactly what I want. So I want to start with the reasons why you should not go on a cut, not necessarily why you should go on a cut. And I'll start with the first one where people are going to hear this and you're going to what are you talking about. I thought that was the goal. Don't go on a cut because you feel you're too fed.

Now, yes, the goal is to lose body fat, but if it's just because you think you're too fat and you don't look at everything else with what's going on, you oftentimes will put yourself in a bad position. We have to set you up properly. So in other words, to put it differently, the reason you go on a cut isn't just because you have too much body fat. There's lots of other things you have to look at before you go on the cut. It's not just you have too much body fat. You know, this also reminds me of how much I love Dr. Gabriel Lyons' message. And I think that we need to change the conversation around this. In fact, if we stopped looking at somebody who looks like they're 50 pounds or 100 pounds overweight and said, oh, that person's overweight or fat and said things like, oh, they're under muscle.

And we thought from that perspective, which is very true, this person who's got all this way, because it's. Sarcopenia is more common in the obese. Sarcopenia is low muscle mass. There's this myth or this thinking, if someone's overweight, they actually have more muscle. They actually don't. When they do body scans, what you find is people who are obese have less muscle

and their muscles less healthy. Yeah. And it's crazy because it's so contradictory, you know, bariatric treatments, like slim fast, like a lot of these programs for weight loss, they immediately jump into low-calorie situations without considering like what how much lean mass do they even have to begin with and uh you know to to build that is going to benefit them so much better long term well this is why i want to change that

conversation because i feel like if people who are listening right now who think they are they have 50 pounds of fat or they're 100 pounds overweight thought to themselves oh no what i am i'm really under-muscled and you you said that instead your approach towards how you approach exercise and fitness might look differently. Because if you go to the gym... Your cut would look different. Yeah. And you said, hey, I don't have a problem with 50 pounds of being overweight.

I have a problem with being under-muscled. Then the whole mindset and the approach looks completely different, which will serve that person who initially wants to lose that. And we'll get to that. So if you're listening right now and you're confused over that, don't worry. We're going to get to exactly what that means. Here's another not great reason to go on a cut. You want to get ready for an event.

I got to get in shape for Vegas. I'm going to the beach. I'm getting married. I know this is a very popular reason to go on a diet. But when you give yourself this time frame, this event, the odds of failure, which were already dismal, are now zero. Sorry, excuse me, are now 100%. So your odds of failure, which were already 90% are now 100% because you work so hard

for this one event. What almost always happens is when the event is over and the pressure of the event is off, you're out of there. not to mention the means by which you try to get in shape, quote unquote, for the event. You completely disregard any potential sustainability because you're thinking, I just got to get in shape with that event, and then I'll figure out afterwards. And that never leads to good success. Well, I mean, this goes back to my point, how we open this,

is why if someone came to me and they had a date in mind already, they wanted to get on stage, and I hadn't worked with them. And they said, hey, I want to do the show in, you know, July 13th. Will you train me for that show? And I know that's only a few months away. I would say no, no matter what I was looking at. Because I don't know where they're at. And that doesn't give me a lot of options if I have a time frame

on what I think is the most appropriate way to get them in shape. It only leaves you one option, which is to cut calories, increase activity and reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce. And that may not be the most ideal situation depending on where somebody is at metabolically, where they're at lean body mass-wise, where they're at activity-wise, all those things come into play

before I decide to put somebody into a cut. And so giving me a time frame, I wouldn't even take the client. And so this is why this is a terrible strategy for someone to go, hey, I want to get ready for that run, or oh, I got the beach in two months, and they use that external motivator

as the reason why they start a cut and that sets them up for, at the very least, even if they have some mild success of reducing some weight or body fat in that short period of time, you're almost guaranteed to put it back on because of the approach that you went about doing it. Totally.

All right. So let's talk about a good time to start a cut. And then we'll talk about how to get to the place where it's a good time to start the cut. So number one, you're healthy. What do I mean? People are like, wait, I thought cutting was the way to get healthy. No, listen. If your hormones are off, your sleep is off, you don't have good fitness.

Don't sit and try to suddenly reduce your calories. and suddenly dramatically increase your activity. In other words, make sure you're healthy enough to go in a calorie deficit. Now, this might sound crazy to somebody who's like, I thought the point of cutting my calories was to get healthy. But here's what ends up happening oftentimes is people go into these severe restrictions of calories. They were already not very healthy to begin with.

They throw exercise on top of it. And then they wonder why they burn out. They wonder why the hormones go out of whack. I've had so many people in the gyms that I've run. women who start losing their hair because of this. You know, guys whose testosterone goes in the floor. Can't figure out why they're libidos. And, you know, they might have started out strong, by the way, in the first month.

But then afterwards, aren't feeling great. So we want to get fit and healthy first before we start the cut. This is one of the things that helps lead to sustainability and success long term. This reminds me so much of being a personal trainer because many times we would get the client in an unhealthy state because they had already exhausted all the other ways to get in shape themselves

before they come hire you. At the point they come to you, they've already beat themselves to death. They've already starved themselves calorie-wise. They've already destroyed their homeworm profile and getting terrible sleep. And then they come to you and they're like, I need your help.

And so the first thing I have to do, even though this person may be sitting across from me saying, hey, I want to lose 50 pounds. I've tried all these things. This is where I'm at right now. It's like, well, listen, I know that's your goal right now, but actually our first goal needs to be to get healthy. That's right. The focus needs to be, we need to get your hormones balanced. We need to get you sleeping correctly. We need to get your calories somewhere where you're not in such a deficit. You're deficient in so many micro-macronutrients. Like that has to be our number one priority or else you'll never obtain that goal that you want. That's right. So we're aiming for health. And then once we're in that kind of healthy fit place, then we start to cut obviously success. improves dramatically. Next up, this one of the most important. You want to make sure that your maintenance calories are high enough to cut from. All right. What do I mean by that? Well, I'm going to work on, for lack of a better term, speeding up your metabolism through the process of building muscle, the process of increasing protein intake, oftentimes a process

of doing what's called a reverse diet through whole natural foods or I'm actually having you eat a little more over time to gain the muscle so that we have a place to cut from. there's a huge kind of belief that, okay, if someone needs to lose 50 pounds, they're probably eating 4,000 calories a day, and so we're just going to bring them down to 2,000 to lose weight. That's not actually true. A lot of times people are very sedentary, 50 pounds overweight. I have them track their food.

They're not eating a lot to begin with. We may be playing with 2,100 calories, but it's not good food. They're not active. They don't have a lot of muscle. And so where am I going to go? 1500 calories? Okay, we'll get some weight loss, but then we'll go from there. versus let me see if I could build things up through the process of building muscle,

through the process of a slow reverse diet through whole natural foods, improving your health. Get your metabolic rate up to 3,000 calories, which is very possible in this particular scenario. Now I can go from 3,000 to 2,500, then to 2,000 eventually, and get that body fat, get that body fat off your body. I have runway. And I need runway with a cut because if your, if your metabolic rate is already low,

cutting from there, you're going to fail. It's going to be very difficult. You can get there, though. This is the most frustrating and difficult one for me to talk about because there's a lot of controversy in our space around the science on this. And there are a bunch of talking heads on Instagram and YouTube that want to make the argument that, you know, a pound of muscle only burns a handful of more calories a day than a pound of fat. And so this idea of you adding 10 pounds of muscle on your body, speeding your metabolism up radically is false and it's not true. And I think it's a terrible, terrible thing to tell people because I have seen what happens when you put 10 pounds of muscle on somebody and the amount of calories they then have to eat. Well, here, why don't you give the example of the person you're working with now who's actually one of our coaches?

How much lean body mass has she gained and how different are her calories? And her activity's down also. Well, I won't be able to give you the lean body mass gain yet until we do the body fat test. And I will all update the listeners when we get the results back when we're out. But I will tell you where we're at. Like she was weighing 98 pounds when we started and she was eating 2,000 calories. We weigh in right now at 106 and we're eating 2,800 calories. 2,800 calories.

Yeah. By the way, she's eating PRs in the gym with her lifts. So you know she's getting muscle. And I just, I just increased her to 28 because we were holding steady at 106 at 2,700 calories. I mean, we were not gaining any more weight, but we were holding at that.

And so I've continued to do that, right? So what I've done is I've, I've bumped her about 100 to 150 calories at a time. I wait until I see her weight level off for a while. Then we bump again. And so based off of what we think, and also reduced her volume, by the way.

So reduced her, her volume of, training and and moderated her steps. I told her I don't want her stepping more than 10,000 steps today. So reduced activity. So based off of what the talking heads on social media would tell you and the math of, you know, one pound or, you know, of muscles only a handful more calories. Even if every pound she gained was lean body mass, which it could very well be,

you know, what is she getting seven pounds? Right. It should only be an additional what, according to the numbers. Right. A hundred calories? Right. And 50 calories. Yeah.

But somehow we're magically eating. six, seven hundred more calories a day and not putting on any weight on the scale. And so what does I tell you? And I, again, that's happening right now as we're going through that process. I've done it a hundred plus times with clients before. And so I've seen it. And so I have a lot of theories on why that science that they use doesn't math. I mean, that's basically taking a piece of muscle and a piece of fat in a lab and testing. That's right. Testing it. What you're not accounting for is, you know, how much, now that she's added, say, and we're just used numbers until I get the actual numbers, let's say she's added five pounds, okay? How much more weight does she

have to lift to keep that five pounds? How much stronger and intense are her workouts because she has five more pounds of muscle? She's now moving a body around that's got five more pounds of muscle. So there's more to that formula than just that meets the eye and that terrible study that they tout to try and make people believe that building five or ten pounds of muscle doesn't make that big of a difference metabolically. No, and it's not even just that, Adam, because her steps you're moderating, she's reduced because he trained like a lot. We're talking about somebody who was underweight and we're trying to get her comfortable

with eating more food. Here's a deal. Like the metabolism is so complex. Human metabolism or mammalian metabolism is one of the most complex things we've ever identified in the universe. And your body can become more or less efficient. the same lean body mass. Even if you don't gain a pound, if you simply eat more, change the macronutrient profile, eat high protein, and send a signal to your body to build muscle,

with the same lean body mass, there's a range of calories that your body will learn how to burn. And that's not even without building muscle. Now you add a little bit of muscle, and it's not one to one with the numbers. And so this, what you're talking about is super reliable. We've done this many, many times. So for somebody listening right now who's like, I want to go on a, I need to lose a bunch of weight. Here's what you want to do. You want to figure out a way.

And part of this is reverse dieting, which is slowly increasing your calories. Stick to whole natural foods, high protein, lift some weights. You want to set yourself up so that when you cut, you're cutting from a high caloric intake, a place that you can cut from. Because wherever you end up is right around where you're going to have to stay when you're at your target body weight. And you don't want to end up at 1,200 calories. Good luck trying to maintain, you know, your weight loss at 1,200.

By the way, the biggest loser contestants are great examples of this. These are people who crash dieted, beat the crap out of themselves on these shows, lost tons and tons of weight. And they found themselves afterwards in this like impossible to maintain scenario where they had to move like crazy and eat very little. And that's what happens when you don't protect muscle. But if you build muscle, man, it moves things in a very sustainable place. So the good time to start cutting is when your maintenance calories are high enough to cut from. Can I cut from here and still eat an amount that feels good? That's a great place.

A generic answer to that because it's going to look so different for every body type and person and how much you like to eat. But I've always liked to take my client to a place to where they look at me and they go, Adam, this is just a lot of food. It's a lot of food. Yeah. I want to keep going so long as I can until they come back to me, it's like it's almost like it's effort for them to reach that calorie intake so much.

Then it makes this real easy like, hey, don't push that hard, just make sure we have the protein intake. And then the calories naturally fall to this little deficit where they feel comfortable eating. And then they see this beautiful, nice weight loss while they don't feel like they're restricting any food whatsoever. Oftentimes eating more calories than when they started while they're in the cut. What a great place to be. This is the other example that we give.

The last person that I trained before Corinne was Melissa Wolf, also another bikini competitor. And I share the story with her. She was actually a very similar calorie intake as where Corinne was. We went all the way up to 2,900, almost 3,000 calories. When she hit stage, she was higher than what I got her at. So she was at the leanest she ever been enough to take first place on stage when you are absolutely, arguably starving your body to get lean. and then, but able to eat 22, 200 calories. It's just so you can get to this place where you build your caloric maintenance up to where a cut is somewhere where you feel comfortable eating.

And that's really where you want to. And that's how you make sure that somebody not only loses the weight, but then can maintain it because anybody can go from where they're currently at, cut their food in half. This is what GLP ones are doing, by the way. I mean, GLP ones, what they're doing so well is it doesn't matter. how you eat, whether you eat good or not, you take that gLP one and you all of a sudden have half of the appetite or less. And if you give anybody, half the eating half the calories, no matter where they're at, whether they're cutting from 1,500 calories down to 700 calories or 4,000 to 2,000 calories, that person is going to lose weight. It's just, it's, that's science. It's going to

happen. But then where are you left? Yeah. What do you do, though, with somebody who went from the person who takes that gLP 1 that was only eating, say, 2,200 calories and you cut them down to 1,000? By the way, what the data shows, because their metabolism does adapt, it does slow down, and a big part of the way it does this is it pairs muscle down. So that's what you see in the data with GLP-1s is 30 to 40% of the weight that they lose comes from muscle, which is why it's so important if you're on a GLP-1 to make sure you strength train, eat a high-protein diet, don't cut your calories too much. But again, you want to be in a place where your maintenance calories, the amount of food that is required to maintain

your body weight is high enough to where you can cut from and still be in a healthy, comfortable place. And then finally, here's a good time to start is when you have a good plan. You have a good plan on how to get to the place where it's time to cut. You have a good plan on what the cut's going to look like. And then you have a good plan on how to come out of the cut. Without a plan, here's what it looks like. This is what it looks like for most people because they don't have a plan. I'm going to really cut my calories. So I'm going to weigh less. I'm going to do tons of exercise. And my goal is to lose 30 pounds. And then first off, very few people make it, but you may be one of the people that makes it. I lose it 30 pounds. Then you have

no plan to get out of it. Your calories are low. You're working out like crazy. Your odds of sustaining that are almost sure. You're an abandon ship. Abandon ship. Well, this is, this is the most popular way that people are using our concierge program. So we don't talk a lot about the mind pump concierge program, but we have a training program where you basically just meet with a trainer once a month. A mind pump trainer once a month. Yes. And so what they do is they're going to set up, set them up on a maps plan. Then they customize the workout for them. And then they set them up on a nutrition plan. Normally, for most part, not everybody, but most people, it's helping guide somebody through what is like a reverse diet. And they normally have to set up for the car. Yeah. And then every

month, this client is logging in their information and the client and the trainer is tracking it. And then they're making their adjustments every single month until they get them to a place where it's like, okay, now this is a great place for us to start cutting from. And just like what I'm going through with Corinne, this is how I check in with her. She's doing most of the work. I'm setting her on the plan and then I and then I see I get all the check-ins. And then when we meet, I sit down and go, okay, this is what I want you to do. I want you to add this many calories or I want you to add this to the training. And so I just make these micro adjustments and just remind them when they're doing a good job. And that's probably the number one way that people have been using the concert.

It's just the nice thing to offload and be like, am I on track or am I not on track? That's right. So look, if you want no guesswork, you want to work with a real good coach. and we know they're good because they work for us. We handpick them. You meet with them once a week, oh, excuse me, once a month. They'll figure out the plan for you. They'll coach you through the plan.

And every month you meet with them to make sure you're on track and you're all set up. And you've got somebody who knows what they're doing working with you through this. And we're opening it to the public. It's mindpumpconcierge.com. So that's mind pump,

C-O-N-C-I-E-R-G-com. As long as we have slots available. I was just going to tell you, Until the trainer slots are filled up. Yeah, yeah. So go there and first come first serve, work with a Mind Pump coach, and get this all set up for you.

Look, if you like the show, come find us on Instagram. We'll see what's at Mind Pump Media. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle

at Mind Pumpmedia.com. The RGB Superbundle 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.