Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - The Best of Muscle For Life: Keto and Muscle Building, Calculating Calorie Intake, & Getting Things Done

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

I’ve recorded hundreds of episodes of Muscle for Life on a huge variety of things related to health, fitness, and lifestyle, ranging from the basics of diet and exercise like energy and macronutrient balance and progressive overload and training frequency and volume to fads like the ketogenic and carnivore diet and collagen protein to more unfamiliar territories like body weight set point and fasted cardio. Some episodes resonate with my crowd more than others, but all of them contain at least a few key takeaways that just about anyone can benefit from (that’s what I tell myself at least). And as cool as that is, it poses a problem for you, my dear listener: Ain’t nobody got time for that. Well okay, some people do make the time to listen to most or even all of my podcasts, but my wizbang analytics tell me that while many listeners tune in on a regular basis, they don’t catch every installment of Muscle for Life and thus miss out on insights that could help them get a little better inside and outside the gym. People have also been saying they’d like me to do more shorter, multi-topic episodes, like my Q&As. And so I got an idea: how about a “best of” series of podcasts that contains a few of the most practical and compelling ideas, tips, and moments from my most popular episodes? This way, people who are new to the show can quickly determine if it’s for them or not, and those who enjoy what I’m doing but don’t have the time or inclination to listen to all of my stuff can still benefit from the discussions and find new episodes to listen to. So, in this installment of The Best of Muscle for Life, you’ll be hearing hand-picked morsels from three episodes: Eric Helms on the Ketogenic Diet for Building Muscle (Originally published 2/13/2019) Q&A: How Many Calories Should You Eat to Lose Fat? (And More!) (Originally published 11/7/2018) Book Club: Getting Things Done by David Allen (Originally published 8/18/2017) And we’ll be starting with number one, Eric Helms on the ketogenic diet for building muscle. Timestamps: 3:57 - Eric Helms on the Ketogenic Diet for Building Muscle 10:30 - How Many Calories Should You Eat to Lose Fat? (And More!) 14:34 - Book Club: Getting Things Done by David Allen Mentioned on the Show: Legion VIP One-on-One Coaching: https://buylegion.com/vip

Hey there, and welcome to another episode of Muscle for Life. I'm your host, Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today. And if this is not your first Muscle for Life experience, if you have come back for more, go ahead and subscribe to the show in whatever app you are listening to me in, because one, it'll make sure you don't miss

any new episodes. They will get queued up for you, either downloaded automatically, or you will be notified of new episodes, depends on which app you're using or both. And it will help me because whenever somebody subscribes, it adds to the ranking juice. So as more and more people subscribe to the show, the show ranks higher and higher in the various charts. And that of course helps new listeners find their way to me when they go looking for a popular fitness podcast to check out. All right. So in this episode, you are going to be hearing hand picked morsels from three of the more popular episodes that I've recorded in the last couple of years. And they are an interview I did with Eric Helms on the ketogenic diet for building

muscle, a Q&A monologue that I did where I answered somebody's question about how many calories you should eat to lose fat, and a book club monologue where I share key takeaways from a book I liked and some of my thoughts on each of those key takeaways. And this one was on the book, Getting Things Done by David Allen. Also, if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere,

definitely check out my VIP one-on-one coaching service because my team and I have helped people of all ages and all circumstances lose fat, build muscle, and get into the best shape of their life faster than they ever thought possible. And we can do the same for you. We make getting fitter, leaner, and stronger paint by numbers simple by carefully managing every aspect of your training and your diet for you. Basically, we take out all of the guesswork. So all you have to do is follow the plan and watch your body change day after day, week after week, and month after month. What's more, we've found that people are often missing just one or two crucial pieces of the puzzle. And I'd bet a

shiny shekel it's the same with you. You're probably doing a lot of things right, but dollars to donuts, there's something you're not doing correctly or at all that's giving you the most grief. Maybe it's your calories or your macros. Maybe it's your exercise selection. Maybe it's your food choices. Maybe you're not progressively overloading your muscles, or maybe it's something else. And whatever it is, here's what's important. Once you identify those one or two things you're missing, once you figure it out, that's when everything finally clicks. That's when you start making serious progress. And that's exactly what we do for our clients. To learn more, head over to

www.buylegion.com. That's B-U-Y-L-E-G-I-O-N.com slash VIP and schedule your free consultation call, which by the way, is not a high pressure sales call. It's really just a discovery call where we get to know you better and see if you're a good fit for the service. And if you're not, for any reason, we will be able to share resources that'll point you in the right direction. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, and if you also want to finally stop spinning your wheels and make more progress in the next few months than you did in the last few years, check out my VIP coaching service at www.buylegion.com slash VIP. All right, so let's start with the highlights from the interview I did with Eric Helms on the ketogenic

diet for building muscle. If you were to sit down and try to do a research review of all the studies on, let's say, resistance trainedtrained or strength-training athletes paired ketogenic diets to normal diets, you'd have a handful of studies. But on balance, they don't look too great for at least the goal of putting on muscle mass. There's been a number of ones that have been published recently. So Vargas et al. 2018, this was a study where they compared two groups, one following a more quote-unquote traditional diet and the other group following a ketogenic diet with the goal to put them on a slight surplus, have them weight train and get bigger. And the ketogenic diet group actually lost body fat and on average lost a non-significant amount of body weight and had no change in muscle mass. Now, that's interesting because it's not all bad. And this kind of goes

hand in hand with some other research on the ketogenic diet, where we've seen that independent of protein intake, although the protein intake is probably a big part of it as well, people tend to reduce their energy intake when they start on a ketogenic diet. And this can last for around a month or so. I think this is part of the reason why you get a lot of anecdotal reports of success with a ketogenic diet is that it typically, one, you're cutting out one of the three major macronutrients. So both your fat and protein typically go up. So you're going to see better muscle retention compared to a poor diet where you're trying to lose weight or you just starve yourself and do a lot of cardio.

So on top of having higher protein and probably greater lean body mass retention compared to what someone had done in the past, they're also getting a suppression of hunger from that higher protein intake and just the fact that it's a ketogenic diet. Something about the ketogenic diet initially does seem to consistently suppress hunger above and beyond just having a higher protein intake. So it kind of feels like the diet's easier. Whether or not a ketogenic diet is effective depends on a lot of things for someone. And it's not simply, hey, carbs are what fuel exercise. And if you cut out carbs, everything's going to go to shit. And it's an overly restrictive diet. So it's bad. I think there are some problems. And that's why we've kind of had this lash back

against them in our community. But we also have to recognize that weightlifting, powerlifting, bodybuilding, they're on the extreme low end of energy expenditure for sports. And if I had to guess out of team sports or endurance sports or power and strength sports, who would be the most negatively affected by a low carb diet? It would not be strength athletes. They're probably the least likely to be negatively affected because there's so little energy expenditure. You have to do a pretty high volume program before you're actually negatively affected by a low-carb intake. And that's why you see so many strength athletes and bodybuilders who do fine on relatively low-carbohydrate diets. I will say that you're going to find very few bodybuilders who do fine on relatively low carbohydrate diets. I will say that you're going to find very few bodybuilders who do ketogenic diets. That's kind of the rare exception,

but you'll run into a lot of high level bodybuilders who do moderate carb diets, even in the off season. And we've got data to back that, you know, people are going, but hold on, you know, bodybuilding is, is, is relies on glycogen. It's primarily anaerobic. I don't get it but it's interesting when you switch to a higher fat lower carb diet it doesn't deplete glycogen as much as you think glycogen is preserved to some degree and also your training doesn't deplete glycogen as much as you might think you do like a really high volume body's part specific like 20 sets for an individual body part it might only deplete glycogen about 40 and even on a moderate carbohydrate diet within 24 hours that'll

come back and so unless you're doing high volume same muscle group every day which is just a bad way to train it probably wouldn't run into any issue so the point is is that you can certainly get away with moderate and moderately low carbohydrate intakes in the off season, probably be fine to feel your training. And so long as you can get in a surplus, I see no reason why that would get in the way. But there might be something about being so low in carbohydrate that you're ketogenic that actually interferes with the muscle building process. And it might be just insulin levels are too chronically low.

It could interfere with some things on a cellular level that I can't speak to confidently. But it would be interesting to see more research in this area because we've now seen consistently three studies in 2018 that I'm aware of. We've seen either decrements or no gain in muscle mass when there was an intended surplus. Do you think there's really a big benefit performance-wise or muscle building-wise from going, let's say, from one gram per pound per day to one and a half or maybe even two, as opposed to using those calories, otherwise more fat, more protein? I think there can be, but on average, there probably won't be. So if I was to make a statement based on the research, I would say it probably doesn't matter. I would just say

calories and protein and up calories. When I'm in a coaching position, it's definitely worth trying upping carbs first to see if that does improve performance because upping fat probably won't. It can have some peripheral effects where it might result in a slightly more beneficial hormonal environment if you're on a pretty low fat diet. Which you probably wouldn't be, right? I mean, if you're lean bulking, you're probably getting plenty of fat. Yeah, probably not. You would have to be doing that intentionally. And I only bring that up because I know it's been popular in some circles to do like low fat, high carb bulking as a way to try to minimize fat gain.

And I think that can have negative side effects. There's some research showing that like if your fat's down around like 15% of calories, that can result in a lower testosterone level. Whether or not that would actually translate to better muscle mass gains, these are pretty modest differences in the research and how much that affects testosterone. So probably not much. Yeah. So in a realistic scenario, fat won't be that low. Like you said, I would probably first try to add in some more carbohydrate and see if that had a beneficial effect on an individual basis. There's a good chance it wouldn't, but it might. And I've definitely been in a situation as a coach where I have seen that.

And you get to find something out about that person. Like, oh, they do really well on a higher carb diet. They respond well to it. really well on a higher carb diet. They respond well to it. And that's it for Eric's key takeaways on using the keto diet for building muscle. And if you liked what you just heard and you want to listen to the full interview, it was originally published in February of 2019. So you can go back and find it and check it out. All right, let's move on now to the takeaways from the Q&A I did on how many calories should you eat to lose fat? Okay, next question. My friend says to lose weight, I should be eating no more than 1200 calories per day. How do I know this is the right amount

of calories for me? And the reason why I wanted to answer this question publicly is twofold. First, to address the idea that a certain number of calories is always too low for some people. And this is usually among women. And so what you'll have is you'll have, let's say a woman who's smaller, she's petite and weighs 130 pounds, right? Her body fat percentage, let's say is 25, 26%. She wants to get down to 20%. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing unhealthy about that. But because she has a small body and doesn't have very much muscle, even if she is kind of muscular, there's still in an absolute sense, not going to be much muscle there because she's small. And because she is probably not spending 10 plus hours a week in the gym, she has to eat what sounds like a pretty low

number of calories every day to consistently lose weight and lose fat. Now for that person, it may be 1200 calories. She might be able to eat a bit more, but it would probably range from 1200 to maybe 1500 calories per day. Again, depending on her basal metabolic rate, which is a bit of genetics is in play there as well as body composition. And then of course there's physical activity level. Now my point is some people would hear that. Let's just say it's 1300 calories. That's the number that allows her to lose a half a pound a week, let's say to maybe three quarters a pound a week in the beginning. Some people would hear that and they would say, oh, those are poverty calories, poverty macros. You should never eat,

never have to eat fewer than 1500 calories a day to lose weight, starvation, dieting, blah, blah, blah. No, they're wrong. Some people, especially small people who don't have a lot of muscle and who aren't tremendously active, they don't get to eat very many calories when they want to lose weight. And even if they're just shooting for the standard, you know, about 1%, about a half a percent to 1% of your body weight per week. For some women that does mean eating 13, 1400 calories per day. Whereas others who are larger or more active, or who just have naturally higher metabolisms, they may be able to eat 16, 17, 1800 calories a day and lose the same amount of weight. Okay. How to determine how many calories you should be eating to lose weight. First,

I'm going to mention that I have an article that you may like over at legionathletics.com. If you search for calories, you will find it. It's titled something along the lines of how to know how many calories you should eat every day. And it has a calculator and stuff. So you may want to go over there, but, um, I wanted to say here that for most people, this is equally applicable to men and women cutting calories are going to be around 10 to 12 calories per pound of body weight per day. And so that's a simple rule of thumb that you can use to set up your own cuts. If you want to just keep it simple, you could start at 12 calories per pound of body weight per day and see how it goes, adjust accordingly.

And it's also good for judging advice that other people are giving you. So if somebody is telling you to eat 15 calories per pound of body weight per day, when cutting, it's not going to work unless you are tremendously, tremendously active. It's not going to work. And on the other hand, if somebody is telling you to eat seven or eight calories per pound of body weight per day to cut, that's unnecessary. That is, that would be starvation dieting. That's where I would even say nobody needs to go that low. All right, that's it for the highlight reel from the Q&A episode on how many calories you should eat to lose fat. And if you want to go listen to that whole monologue that was originally published in November of 2018,

so you can go find it and listen to it. Okay, let's move on to the third and final episode featured or the snippets from the episode featured in this episode. And that is the book club that I did on getting things done by David Allen. So if you would like to know how to get more done every day with less worry, confusion, and stress, then you should read this book. I've read quite a few books on productivity and have quite a bit of work experience. And unlike many of those books, one of the things I like about getting things done is it's not so much about changing behaviors, attitudes, or habits. Instead, it's really just about getting organized. And it's kind of ironic because I think the book

itself was actually rather poorly organized and it's far too dry and long-winded, which is pretty standard for these types of books, but it is worth the slog. The premise of the book is simple. The more organized your mind, work, and life is, the easier it's going to be for you to do all the things that you need to do to get the results that you really want. This book doesn't just talk about these things either. It provides you with a simple system that you can immediately implement and see how the principles work for you. Let's now go over my five key takeaways. So here's the first one. There's always more to do than you can do, and you can only do one thing at a time. The key is to feel as good about what you are not doing as about what you are doing at that moment. And my note here is one of the biggest secrets to

high productivity is simply doing what you're doing when you're doing it. This is why multitasking sucks. We know that empirically, scientifically, it sucks. It just makes you less effective and makes you more stressed out. And this is also why the inability to fully concentrate on one task for long periods of time makes it more or less impossible to produce a lot of high quality work. Number two, I suggest that you use your mind to think about things rather than think of them. You want to be adding value as you think about projects, not creating stress by simply reminding yourself that they exist and that you need to do something about them. So my note here is you might be surprised at just how much energy and attention that you waste every day on maintaining a mental laundry

list of to-dos and don't forgets. And remember, that's energy and attention that could be used creatively and productively instead. I've always found that work can be both a refuge from and antidote to the chaoses and complexities of life. No matter what is giving me trouble in my life, staying productive has always helped me better deal with it. And the fifth and final takeaway is you often need to make it up in your mind before you can make it happen in your life. Many of us hold ourselves back from imagining a desired outcome unless someone can show us how to get there. And unfortunately, that is backward in terms of how our minds work to generate and recognize solutions and methods. And my note here is while research shows that positive visualization may or

may not actually help you accomplish your goals. There's no question that clearly and completely outlining and envisioning your desired results before taking any sort of action or even figuring out what action to take is highly beneficial. All right, so much for the high points from the book club episode I did on getting things done. And if you want to go check out my other key takeaways from that book and my other thoughts on the topic, you can find the original episode published back in August of 2017.

Well, I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful. And if you did, subscribe to the show because it makes sure that you don't miss new episodes. And it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people who may like it just as much as you. And if you didn't like something about this episode or about the show in general, or if you have ideas or suggestions or just feedback to

share, shoot me an email, mike at muscleforlife.com, muscleforlife.com, and let me know what I could do better or just what your thoughts are about maybe what you'd like to see me do in the future. I read everything myself. I'm always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.