Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Why You're Not Losing Weight

Episode Date: August 21, 2015

In this podcast I talk about the most common reasons people stop losing weight and how to fix it. ARTICLES RELATED TO THIS VIDEO: How to Measure and Improve Your Body Composition: http://www.muscleforlife.com/body-composition/ 10 Proven Ways to Relax Your Muscles and Mind: http://www.muscleforlife.com/ways-to-relax/ Does Alcohol Consumption Affect Weight Loss and Muscle Growth? http://www.muscleforlife.com/does-alcohol-consumption-affect-weight-loss-and-muscle-growth/ The Definitive Guide to Reverse Dieting: http://www.muscleforlife.com/reverse-diet/ Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

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Hey, this is Mike Matthews. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. In this podcast, I want to talk about not losing weight, why people stop losing weight, because it's something I get asked fairly often. And I've commented on things here and there, but I thought I'd make for a good episode. I wrote an article about it, I don't remember, a couple months ago. And that article has been popular, you know, but people keep asking because they don't find it or whatever. So I thought I'd make for a good podcast episode. Now let's talk a little bit about the problem. The most common, you know, situation that I hear is where somebody has been following some sort of diet that usually revolves around cleaning, quote unquote. So,

you know, they're restricting certain foods. They're not eating any sugar. They're not eating certain types of carbs. They're not eating carbs after a certain time of the day, blah, blah, blah. And maybe they lost some weight in the beginning of starting the diet. Maybe they're doing some exercise as well, but then in time, the weight loss has slowed down, slowed down, slowed down. And then it's just plateau. And you know, they've been stuck for however many weeks, um, with no real change in terms of body composition. Or some people, they're not really thinking with body composition, they're really just thinking with weight, so they haven't seen their scale go down and they just don't really

know what's going on. And then you go, they go and they start searching around online and they just find all kinds of strange advice. Some people will say, oh, it's a hormone thing. You're not losing weight because your hormones are now out of whack for one of many different reasons. And in terms of solutions, it could be, oh, you know, you need to try this different diet or you need these supplements or you need to try this different workout program or blah, blah, blah. Another common, you know, uh, culprit that is, that is, is blamed is metabolism. So some people will, will some experts quote unquote, whatever we'll say, Oh, well you stopped losing

weight because your metabolism is, is ruined or damaged or has adapted. And, uh, the solution can be anything from, uh, the standard eat less, move more to other weird shit like, you know, oh, it's your hormones are screwing with your metabolism. It's your thyroid. Um, it's the foods you're eating. It's the type of exercise you're doing, et cetera, et cetera. Another common, uh, thing that's blamed for, for not losing weight is a artificial type of ingredients, artificial sweeteners, uh, just different types of chemicals and things that could be found in food or that we just get exposed to in daily environment, which they usually tie back into hormones, saying those things are disrupting your hormones. And the good news is all of that's not true. All of that is bullshit, basically. As you'll see, if you're familiar with my work and

just familiar with just the basic physiology of weight loss, you know that the underlying problem, if you're not losing fat, the underlying problem is you're not in a large enough calorie or caloric deficit over time to see any fat loss or, you know, whether it's in the mirror or on the scale. You know that that's the bottom line problem, but just eating less and moving more isn't necessarily a solution. It's not, there's a, there are a lot of different factors that are involved that can cause your calorie deficit to become too small or just, you know, disappear altogether. And there are some common mistakes that people make that, that lead to that. And then there are just some issues that you need to be aware of when you are dieting that kind of conspire against you in that way. And it uh, it really, it's kind of built into your body, your body. I mean, just,

just realize that dieting, proper dieting is a mild form of starvation. That is what you're doing. You're starving your body. Uh, now that sounds extreme, but, um, you know, it's not, it's a mild form of starvation, extreme starvation, you know, it'd be like eating, you know, I don't know, half of your TDE and just doing a ton of exercise starvation, you know, would be like eating, I don't know, half of your TDE and just doing a ton of exercise and stuff, you know, that, that obviously would be bad, but any, any sort of dieting, any sort of, you know, restriction of energy intake is a mild form of starvation and your body fights against it. Your body, I mean, if you were to, uh, your body's very reactive in that way. So like if you were to, uh, you know, forcefully starve your body, if you were to, your body's very reactive in that way. So like if you were to, you know, forcefully starve your body,

if you were to keep it in the calorie deficit for long enough, you would eventually die. You can't, even if it's a mild deficit, if you kept on reducing intake, increasing output, reducing intake over time, eventually you would die. So your body, of course, doesn't know your intentions, doesn't know that you know what you're doing. You're not trying to kill it. You're just trying to get a six-pack or whatever. It has different mechanisms built in that it employs to erase your calorie deficit, basically.

So it's kind of you versus your body in that way, although, of course, you don't have to look at it in those contentious type of terms. You can work with your body and you can lose fat without causing any harm to your body, but you're still working against your body. You're doing something that your body doesn't actually want to do, but you can make it do it and you can do it in a way it doesn't cause harm. So we'll talk about those things in the context of not losing weight. So yeah, I think that's a good overview of what we're going to cover. So let's just get into it. So first, let's just talk about, I'm going to kind of run down things in terms of not necessarily seniority, but just what I kind of see that's most common. So the first thing is that people are losing fat, but they're

not losing weight. And we're very programmed to just think with weight. When people say they want to get leaner, what they say is they, what they really are saying is they want to lose fat and not muscle. But the words they say is they want to lose weight. If, uh, if someone wants to gain muscle, they say they want to gain weight. Um, but a better way to think of it is in terms of body composition, which is if you, I mean, we can just keep it simple. If we look at your body composition in terms of, uh, what's your body comprised of, right? So you have fat and you have everything else that's not fat, including bones and muscle and organs and water and all that. So in terms of body composition, when you're wanting to quote unquote lose weight, what you're wanting to do is get rid of fat and not get rid of anything else that's not fat. Basically you don't want to be losing muscle.

Of course, well, you will lose some water and glycogen. So I guess that's not fat, basically. You don't want to be losing muscle. Of course, well, you will lose some water and glycogen. So I guess that's not totally true. You are going to lose a little bit of this. There is a little bit of the fat-free mass that you're going to be losing, but you don't want to be losing organ tissue. You don't want to be losing bone. You don't want to be losing muscle. You want to lose fat, and your water and glycogen levels are going to fluctuate, and which is what we're going to talk about here, which is this is the, the, the, um, the number one most commonly misunderstood thing that people see, especially when somebody goes from, let's say someone starts overweight and then they start dieting for the, for, for the first time properly, they're restricting their

calories, high protein, blah, blah, blah. Um, and then they start lifting weights and then they don't really understand how, let's say three months can go by or two months can go by and they look leaner in the mirror and their pants are fitting looser, but their weight hasn't really changed. And so on one hand they're happy, like they look in the mirror and they go, Hmm, I mean, clearly something is working, but on the other hand, it's, it kind of goes up against that, that just inherent. Well, why is my weight changing though? Like the whole point of dieting is that your weight is supposed to go down. So you have that as obviously a situation where when you are new to weightlifting, you can build muscle and lose fat at the same time. Really anybody can do it. The degree to which you can do it is going to depend on your body, kind of your genetics, your compliance to your diet, your compliance in your workouts. But I would say, I mean, I don't have like, this is more anecdotal. This is just

based on working with a lot of people. I would say that anyone probably in their first six to eight months, if they're in that first six to eight months of weightlifting, they can reliably build muscle and lose fat. Muscle, obviously in terms of volume. So if you took the same volume of muscle and fat muscle weighs more because it's more condensed. So if you're replacing, you know, in the space that was once, let's say had that much fat, if you replaced it with that much muscle, uh, you're actually going to weigh a little bit more. Um, and so this is, this is called body recomposition, right? Cause you're changing the composition of your body And so this is called body recomposition, right, because you're changing the composition of your body for the better.

And it's a good sign. That's where one of those things where I tell people if you are looking leaner in the mirror and, you know, there are some different, like, reliable ways to keep an eye on your body fat percentage and your body composition. The mirror is good. Taking pictures every week or so, front, side, back, and good lighting. Not flexing. That's good. Taking a caliper measurement. I like a caliper made by AccuMeasure.

It's cheap. It's a one measurement on the Super Iliac, which if you search muscle for life for body fat, you'll see an article I wrote on it, and there's a video there. Or if you search on YouTube here in my channel, you'll find a video on how to take a correct measurement. Extrapolating it to body fat percentage, there's going to be a level of inaccuracy really with any method that you use. So you don't even have to necessarily do that. You could know within 1% or 2%. So like I calipered about 7%, but I'm not 7%. I'm probably 8%.

Highest would be 9%. My guess is I'm in the low 8% range. But again, it doesn't matter how I get tested, whether it's bioimpedance or whether I even go get DEXA scanned, hydrostatic, they all have margins of error. So there's really no way to know with 100% accuracy what your body fat percentage is besides like cutting all the fat off your body and weighing it. Basically, that's the only way to really know. So more importantly though, is that you see that caliper measurement going down in millimeters. So if you started at 10 millimeter, at 10 millimeters, let's say 15 millimeters in the super iliac. And then you're now, say you started at 15 and now you're 10, you have lost fat period. I don't care what happened on the scale. I don't

care if you gain 10 pounds on the scale, you have lost fat. So that's reliable. And measuring your waist at your navel, that's also reliable. Again, if your waist is shrinking, you're losing fat. If it's growing, you're gaining fat. And in terms of how frequently to take these measurements, I recommend once a week under the same conditions and weighing yourself. I mean, obviously keeping an eye on the scale is a good idea. I recommend weighing yourself every day in the morning after you've gone to the bathroom naked and take an average every seven to 10 days. Don't pay too much attention about that number day to day because it's going to fluctuate based on water and going to the bathroom and how much food you ate and all that stuff.

So if you take an average every seven to 10 days and then watch the bathroom, and how much food you ate, and all that stuff. So if you take an average every seven to ten days, and then watch that average, that's a much more reliable way to see what's going on with your body. So there's also, I've talked a little about this already, water retention issues that can affect where you are. You can be losing fat but not losing weight. One thing you need to know is that when you're in a calorie deficit, it puts some stress on your body. Cortisol levels are going to be generally higher. If you don't sleep enough, that's going to make it worse training, uh, depending on how

your body responds to training. Um, even depending on your hormones, if you are a lower testosterone person, then you are more prone to have issues with cortisol. Uh, but as cortisol levels go up, water retention goes up. You just hold more water. You'll see it subcutaneous under your skin. You'll look kind of puffy. And that's just a part of the game. And what you can do about that though, is there are some different simple strategies. I mean, cortisol is a stress hormone, right? So also if you have high stress levels, just generally in your life, it's not going to help. So doing things that help you relax are going to help with this, making sure you get enough sleep. I wrote an article on this.

If you search muscle life for relax, you'll see some just different simple scientifically proven methods to help your body relax, your mind and your body. relax your mind and your body. Um, you know, it can be as simple as like having a night routine of that, you know, involves, uh, bathing, um, reading, um, uh, obviously meditating is a thing that some people are into. I've tried. It's not really my thing. Um, I don't remember in the article that if you search the, if you search the article there, there are some, some good, simple strategies there, but, um, the, the main things are getting enough sleep, making sure that your calorie deficit is not too large. As you know, I recommend a calorie deficit of about 20 and 25%. So you're eating, you know, if you're going to be aggressive, you're eating 75% of the energy that you're burning. But you start going too large of a

deficit and it puts the body under more and more stress. Another common thing that people, another common mistake that people make that really screws with water retention is eating too much sodium and too little potassium. This is probably this and vitamin D and vitamin K deficiencies, like sodium potassium imbalance, vitamin D and vitamin K deficiencies are probably the most common micronutrient issues that are out there with people's diets, at least here in Western diets. Western diets are generally very high in sodium, very low in potassium, which is just not particularly healthy, but it also can mess with your water retention. And generally speaking, most people's potassium levels are low. So potassium pumps water out of cells and sodium pumps it in. So generally people's diets are very low in potassium and sodium levels can be all over the place.

So sodium one day could be five grams. Sodium the next day could be two grams, then three, and then. So those fluctuations can dramatically affect water retention. Again, this kind of depends on your body. I just don't tend to hold much water and that's just my body. Maybe, um, it could be hormonal. Uh, you know, I haven't, I've, I've really actually, I've never even gotten a blood test. I keep on saying one of these days I'll do it. And then I just don't really think of it cause I don't really have a reason to, but out of pure curiosity, I, I would be, uh, I would guess that I'm probably a higher testosterone type

of just person. Um, given how my body responds to weightlifting and even my personality and stuff. Uh, and I know my brother, he tested, he tested really high. His, and he, and he's not on drugs. Definitely not. He's actually skinny little dude. Um, I think his test was at like 11 or 1200. Uh, that wasn't his free test, but that was his test. I don't know what his free was. I think it was pretty high too. Anyways, that's very high for natural testosterone. And he's like not, even when he tested, he got into weightlifting for a little bit and

started taking care of himself, but then just kind of fell off the wagon. So the time he got tested, he like wasn't even lifting, wasn't exercising. I think he was even smoking. He just wasn't a healthy person at all. So, you know, I don't know, maybe, maybe, maybe that's one of the reasons why I just don't really see much change in my water retention. But even that said, I do, I definitely will see a change. If I go out to a restaurant and eat a bunch of food, which if you're eating out in a restaurant, just know that shit is salted to the hilt. And that's because salt makes it like, uh, if you want to be better at, uh,

cooking, make sure you salt your food enough that there's like a simple little tip. And in, in terms of like how much the general kind of rule is, you want to salt your food as much as you can, much as you can take basically because salt brings out flavors. Um, so, um, so when you're in a restaurant, especially when you have a very fatty, savory types of food, there's a lot of salt in there. And a teaspoon of salt has about 2,300 milligrams of sodium. I think it is. That's a lot of sodium. So think about it. That's just a teaspoon of salt. And, and, you know, depending on what you're eating, if you're eating a lot of food, you can easily eat probably, I don't know, two to four teaspoons. So that's in one meal. If you go out and you have an appetizer, entree and dessert, easy, depending on what the foods

are, that could be five, six grams of sodium. And then you wake up the next day, super bloated. And depending on, you know, how your body responds to, to, uh, to responds to the fluctuations in sodium intake and how much water you're drinking and stuff like that, it may last for one day, it may last for two days. But if you are not paying attention to your sodium intake on a day-to-day basis, again, there's basically like rapid fluctuations can cause water retention, both up and down. So what you can have is you can have a situation,

I see this a lot when I ask people to actually track their sodium intake for a week, and it'll be like 2,000, 4,000, 6,000, 2,000, 4,000, 1,500. So basically their sodium level is always fluctuating enough to basically where they're always just holding more water. And so the solution for that is simple. Keep your sodium intake around a good safe range for it, for just the average person would be probably around three to four grams of sodium. And again, there's like, I read some stuff just recently. There's some new research showing that unless you have a genetic little quirk, you can actually, people can go

quite a bit higher than that. And without having hypertension issues and whatever, again, it's not, it's something I haven't really dived into. I was reading, I think it was like, I was reading a paper on something else and it was a link to that. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. So I was, I was kind of looking into it. I didn't like spend a bunch of time diving into it. So I just kind of go with the Institute of Medicine. Their standard, their recommendation is like the standard thing is I think it's about two and a half grams of sodium a day, but then you can go up to three or four grams without any issues. But the key there is that your potassium should be up around four or five grams a day. And that's, that's actually trickier to do. You need to think

with that when you're doing your meal planning. If you want to get it all from food, that means that you need to be looking for potassium rich fruits and vegetables. Really, you can also supplement. Like my favorite potassium rich fruit is obviously banana. I eat a couple of bananas a day. I get about probably about two grams of potassium from bananas. And then I get probably about another 500 milligrams from the other vegetables that I eat. And then I supplement with about a gram. So, uh, and, and when you buy potassium supplements, just know that it's 99 milligrams per pill. That's the standardized, regardless of the form, potassium citrate, gluconate, whatever. Um, you're not going to get, it might say like, Oh, 500 milligrams in a pill. But then if you

look, it'll say providing 99 milligrams potassium because, and that's intentional. Um, because if you take too much potassium, if you were just to accidentally, let's say you thought it was 100 milligrams of potassium per pill and it's 500, and you were to take a bunch of pills, your heart can stop. You can die. So that's why it's restricted to 100 milligrams of pill to prevent overdosing. So yes, that means I have to take 10 pills of potassium a day, and that's what I do. And if I you know, if I, if I didn't want to take the supplement, of course I could figure it out with changing up my diet even a little bit more and adding more potassium, but I'd rather just take the pills. It's not a big deal. Um, so if you get your sodium potassium levels balanced, uh, you'll find that the water retention issues will

just, uh, you just won't, you won't be holding as much water and you won't see those fluctuations on a day to day where, I mean, cause you know, you, you've experienced this before, you know, you can go out and go out to a restaurant and let's say you're good. You don't eat a ton of calories and you even save some calories. So let's say you go in there with 2000 calories to spend quote unquote on the meal and you're good. And you, maybe you eat a little bit more, but it's nothing ridiculous. And then you wake up the next day looking like two pounds fatter and you're like, what the fuck that's water. It's just, you know, you ate a ton of, there was a ton of salt in that meal basically. So just, that's fine if you know it's going to

happen. Like I know that if I go out to a restaurant, I kind of expect to just look kind of fatter for the next day or two. And then it gets back to normal. Even if my calories are not, you know, I don't explode my calories. So let's move on to the next, uh, probably the most, one of the most common reasons why people I speak with, why they are having issues, why their weight loss plateaus, not lose weight anymore. And that's, um, they eat too many, too many calories in, in, in short periods of time. Like they'll be good on their diet and they'll maintain their calorie deficit for, let's say five days of the week and the weekends come and then it's like all out, oh, cheat days and shit. And they eat back all the, all that deficit that they accumulated and all that fat they burned

through the week, they gain it all back on the weekend. And I know I've talked about this before, so I'm not going to go on and on about it. But if you just look at it in terms of, uh, let's look at your, your, your, your calories and your energy expenditure on a weekly basis as opposed to just a daily basis. So let's say by the end of a week, on my average daily energy expenditure, let's just say mine is around 3,000 calories, give or take. So I have 21,000 calories that I burn in a week. I probably don't burn that many because I'm less active on the weekends. I'm usually intentionally less active, give my body a little bit of a break. But let's just say it was 21,000 calories.

So that's how much energy I'm going to burn. If I want to lose weight, then I'm going to be eating 75% of that. So whatever that is, 16,000, 15 something, 15, 16,000 calories, that's what I'm going to be eating. So if I did that, then that deficit there of the six, let's say it's a six or 5,000 calorie deficit should be good for about a pound, maybe a pound and a half of fat loss. Now, if I go Monday through Friday and I have that deficit, have that deficit, I go Monday through Friday and I have that deficit, have that deficit, and then I go ham on the weekends and my calorie intake skyrockets back up to by the end of Sunday if I ate – let's just say I pushed it right to 21,000 calories. Not that I would even like that you know what you're doing, but I'm just kind of simplifying it here.

Then I've ruined that deficit. That means that for the whole week, I ate the energy that I burned. So of course I didn't lose any fat. And what you'll see though, and how that will go is you'll go through the week and you'll get a little bit leaner. You look a little bit better. Things are good. And then the weekend comes and you eat all this food. And then you usually see the after effects come Monday or Tuesday. You just don't look any different. Your measurements aren't any different. So you can have this improvement, improvement, improvement, and then you slide back and then you just kind of look the same. That's very, very common. And you just have to be smarter with your quote unquote, with your cheating, right? And that's why I think a cheat meal is fine. That's why I actually recommend just

restricting it to one cheat meal a week when you're cutting is just because, I mean, especially in my books, like Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, Thinner, Leaner, Stronger, they're written more for people that are new to weightlifting, new to dieting. And I don't want to, I don't want to, I try not to overwhelm them with too many different things, try to keep them, just give some simple rules of thumb, some simple guidelines to follow. And the reason why I say one sheet meal a week is because you really, you're just, you're not going to do that much damage in one meal. I mean, maybe you're going to end the day in like a few hundred calorie surplus. And it's not that every calorie that you eat, even it depends on where those calories are coming from. You know,

a 300, 500 calorie surplus of carbs is just going to result in less fat storage than let's say a 300 to 500 calorie surplus of dietary fat. But if you want to look at it a bit more technically in terms of a quote unquote cheat meal, as you know, it doesn't really matter. The foods that you're eating are not the point. It's just the amount.

And the problem with the foods that we quote unquote like to cheat with are usually is that they're usually very high calorie. They're, they're fatty foods. Like probably people the most, you know, what are they, what are your, what are the, what are the most favorite sheet meals? Pizza, ice cream. I mean, those are probably actually the top two pizza and ice cream, right? Very, very fatty foods, delicious, but very, very fatty, which means very, very calorie dense. And also, as you probably know, I've talked about this many times, is that dietary fat is converted, is stored as body fat very efficiently. That's one of the primary purposes of the, that's one of the primary things that the body does with dietary fat is store it as body fat. Whereas carbs are very rarely converted directly into body fat, which is by a process called de novo lipogenesis. You have to eat a lot of carbs, basically, because your body,

the first thing it does with carbs is it burns it for energy, and then it stores, well, you have glucose that gets burned as energy, and then the glucose can be converted into something called glycogen, which gets stored primarily in the muscles and liver. Once glycogen stores are full, then de novo lipogenesis can occur, which is the process whereby then excess glucose beyond those needs would be converted into body fat. Now, the thing is, as someone that if you're weightlifting, your muscles can store more glycogen than a normal person's, the more muscle you have, the more glycogen your body can store. So somebody, you know, my size, I'm 190 pounds, I'm 6'2", have a good amount of muscle. I probably, it's hard to say with like, oh, this is the exact amount of glycogen, but

a good guess is probably 600 to 800 grams of glycogen stored in my body at any time. So if I deplete that, right, which you do with working out, you do with, you know, if I do some low carb type dieting, let's say I wanted to get rid of some water out of my body for a photo shoot or something, you know, you can deplete glycogen stores by quite a bit and then the body has to replenish them. So that's why I recommend that with cheat meals, go high carb over high fat because carbs, what the only quote unquote problem in terms of fat storage and how it relates back to energy balance is carbs, mainly due to the insulin stimulation, it just suppresses fat oxidation. So when you eat carbs, your body starts burning carbs for energy instead of its body fat.

And that's just how the body works. You have every day you eat food, insulin levels rise. Your body burns the food for energy. It's not burning its own fat. It's storing the dietary fat and not burning its own fat. Eventually that process is done. It processes, it burns through all the energy that you ate. It processes all the energy, all the, all the nutrients that you ate. Then it has to go back to its body fat for energy. And it has to do that until you feed it again. And it just, you have that cycle. And at the end of the day, uh, fat loss or fat gain is really just the difference between the amount of fat that you burned when your body didn't have food,

when it had to go through its own fat stores, versus the amount of fat that it stored after you ate. So you have on this hand, you ate all this food. It stored all this fat. On this hand, you did whatever you did in terms of activity. You made it burn energy, and it had to this fat. On this hand, you did whatever you did in terms of activity. You made it burn energy and it had to burn through, you know, if it had to burn through more fat than it stored, you lost fat. If it had to burn, if it got to burn less fat than, than you ate, then it stored, uh, then you, then you gain fat. Um, so, uh, with carbohydrates, they,

they blunt when you eat carbs, your body stops burning fat. So that's how it relates to your total fat mass. It's not that when you eat carbs, it gets directly turned into fat. That rarely happens. And protein, that very rarely happens as well. So bringing this all back is when you're going to cheat, I recommend what I personally like to do is I just like to save up my calories for the day. Like if I'm going to go out to a restaurant and I don't really, I want to, when you're going to cheat, I recommend what I personally like to do is I just like to save up my calories for the day. Like if I'm going to go out to a restaurant and I don't really, I want to, I know that I'm going to want to eat a lot of food, then I'll just eat protein throughout the day. That's it. I'll have my post-workout, like my post-workout meal will really just be protein. I'll, I'll come into that meal with maybe, you know, having eaten, uh, 80%

of my day's protein, 75% of my day's protein, as little fat as I could get away with because I want to eat it in the food that I'm going to eat. And it basically is little carbs too. Maybe I'll have, you know, I have some vegetables at lunch and stuff. So maybe I'll have eaten 50 carbs by the meal comes. So then that gives me a big buffer. Now I get to eat, you know, a couple thousand calories and not gain any fat in terms of by the end of the day, so you might, that's just bring it back to that, to the, to the kind of scale example there. So I haven't fed my body very much food throughout the day. So it's had to rely on its body fat for, for basically the entire day. So technically speaking, if we were to like, you know, say I,

I have, it has burned through, let's say, I don't know, 50 grams of fat, let's just say, or maybe that's high, maybe that's low, whatever. The point is it's burned through a good amount of fat. Then here comes this big meal. And this big meal then, uh, is going to result in yes, the storage of a fair amount of fat, but it's going to, if I, if I have my energy balance, uh, if my, have my energy intake and output balanced, if by the end of the day, if I burn 3000 calories and then, you know, I ate, uh, 2000, uh, calories at dinner and then a thousand calories, even more of a 2,500 of my daily calories at dinner and 500 throughout the day previously, that doesn't matter in the end I'm in balance. And again, what that means is the

amount of energy, the amount of, uh, you know, energy that my body has pulled from body fat is then replaced with the fat that, you know, is stored from the meal. Um, so that's a good way to, to just kind of minimize the damage of cheat meals. And you don't have to do it that way again, but that's more if you want to, like, I can eat so much food. I, it takes like, I'll eat, I mean like 1500 calories of food for me is like, yeah, whatever. Like I barely even feel full. Like it's so weird. I don't get hungry and it takes a shitload of food to make me feel actually full. Like I don't have to eat more than 1500 calories in a meal. I mean, I can eat a small meal or a big meal, but for me to like eat to that point where I'm like, damn, that was a lot of food and feel like really satisfied, I have to eat so much food.

So that's just the way I like to do it. So let's move on to the next problem that really a mistake that people make is trying to eat on feel by too much, trying to eyeball macros or instead of just making a meal plan that's very precise, you know, weighed in terms of like, okay, it's going to be a hundred grams of this, 50 grams of that. So many ounces of this terms of like, okay, it's going to be 100 grams of this, 50 grams of that, so many ounces of this liquid, blah, blah, blah. Instead of doing it that way, where people go, well, that's about this many calories, that's about that many calories. If you're trying to do that and you're not losing weight, then that could very well be the problem,

just because people are generally very bad at estimating the calories that they eat, the amount of calories they eat. I don't know if it's like a psychological bias where we just want to tell ourselves that we ate less than we did or what, but when I hear that somebody is doing that and not losing weight, my first thing I tell them is, trust me, just make a meal plan, very precise. Every single thing that goes in your mouth is on that meal plan, and everything is quantified exactly, not a fist of this or two fists of that or whatever. Very precise, like measured. And then do that for the next 10 to 14 days, and let's see what happens. In a lot of cases, that's it.

They just didn't realize that they were eating more than they, than they thought they were, which kind of brings me to the next issue where there are, uh, good and bad ways to, to count calories basically. So the bad way is let's say you make a meal plan and you say, okay, a cup of oatmeal, and then you go to do your cup of oatmeal and you scoop it and you're a little bit generous. And so it's like a heaping, you know, a heap your cup of oatmeal and you scoop it and you're a little bit generous. And so it's like a heaping, you know, a heaping cup of oatmeal and you go, you know, whatever, it's a little, whatever, it's not a big deal. But what you didn't know is, so then you, let's say, you look on the back of the package and the label, it says a cup of oatmeal is, you know,

X number of calories. And you put that into your MyFitnessPal and then move on. And then you do that with, let's say you have some peanut butter and it's a one tablespoon or two tablespoons of peanut butter and the tablespoons are a bit bigger. Um, and you put those calories in though. And what you don't realize though, is the, on the label there, when it says a cup of oatmeal, you know, it's, that depends. Like if a heaping cup, that's different than, than a cup, or if it's a cup of sugar, let's say when you're baking a cup of sugar that, excuse me, that is packed into there is as much as, you know, where it's like a hockey puck of sugar. That's different. That's a different amount of sugar than, you know, a loose kind of even a little bit less full cup.

And so it's much better when you are creating your meal plans instead of just going by cups are fine. I like, you know, I use fluid ounces. But if I'm talking about anything other than that, I'm going by grams. That's much more precise. So if you're going to eat, you know, let's say 80 grams of oatmeal, that's, that's when you, when you look on a supplement or the nutrition facts panel and oatmeal, and it says one cup there, that's what they're, that's what they're referring to actually is about 80 grams of oatmeal. But if you have that cup packed and a little bit heaping, you might get up to 100 grams of oatmeal. You might be increasing the calories there by 25% just in that one food.

And then same thing with your peanut butter. Your peanut butter might be 25% more peanut butter than you actually think it is. And you can imagine you rinse and repeat this and you know, that's plus 50 calories there, plus a hundred calories there, plus 25 calories there. You do that enough. And by the end of the day, you can easily have eaten, you know, an extra three, 400 calories that you don't even realize. And then, you know, you wonder what the hell's going on. You're sticking to your meal plan. You're, you're eating the way you're supposed to eat. So, um, that's, that's also very, very common. And

obviously I've already given you a solution is work in absolute weights. So you kind of remove that element of human error. It's also worth mentioning, I get actually asked this very often, I like to weigh my foods raw if I'm making one meal. So like if I'm going to make chicken, whatever it is, I weigh everything raw because weights can change based on, you know, what you're cooking it with, how much moisture absorbs or how much moisture it loses or whatever. But if I'm making, like, a one-pot type of meal, which is – that's really the way that I cook these days is every Sunday I make a big one-pot something and then portion it out and just eat it throughout the week because it's easy and I don't mind eating the same foods every day. throughout the week because it's easy and I don't mind eating the same foods every day, is I take all the ingredients and work out all the numbers for the entire thing and then weigh that total amount of how much food it is cooked and then portion that out. I find that better because then you just know. And for simple math, let's say you have, I don't know, a thousand

grams of food and it's X number of calories. And so then you just go, cool, I'm going to eat that. You know, there's, there's my four dinners. I'm going to do 250 grams of food of this stuff, whether it be a chili or, you know, I've been doing a lot of chilies recently, but also you can do some delicious, you know, I wouldn't say they're necessarily desserts, but some rice dishes or even like a rice pudding type stuff and whatever. But it's easier if you just work, have the numbers for everything that went in that pot and then weigh the amount of food that it gives you and then portion that out. Another thing worth noting is alcohol. This is more in conjunction with cheating. Alcohol is uh, is, is actually similar

to carbohydrate in the way that it doesn't get converted into body fat, uh, really at all. Actually. I mean, it's like, there's basically no conversion from alcohol into body fat, but it blunts fat oxidation like carbohydrates do. So, um, unfortunately when people go out and, you know, if they're, if they're going to cheat, it's usually going to be a high fat meal. Like we already talked about burgers, pizza, ice cream, that kind of stuff, French fries, blah, blah, blah. Plus alcohol equals maximum fat storage basically. Um, and, uh, so that, that's a, it's not that you can't have alcohol, but if you're going to do that, I would recommend keeping the day that you're drinking alcohol or that

you're going to have alcohol, make that a low-fat day. That's really the key. And, yeah, so you eat a lot of protein. You can have some carbs, but you really want your fats to be as low as possible if you're going to be drinking alcohol. And that will basically minimize the fat storage that's going to occur as a result. fat storage that it can, that's going to occur as a result. So the next area that of error here with people that aren't losing weight is they usually think they're burning more energy than they are. The most common mistake actually is just poor, just bad calculations. Either, you know, I'll regularly hear from girls that they'll say like, oh, my BMR is, you know,

2000 calories. So I'm multiplying that by 1.35 and working my deficit from there. And like your BMR is not 2000 calories. My BMR is 2100 calories and I'm a guy and I'm, you know, six, two and 190 pounds. And I have a lot of muscle. Trust me, your BMR is not. And, you know, usually the vast majority, they go, oh, yeah, and they made a mistake. Like their BMR is like 1,400 calories and they thought it was 2,000 or they thought it was 1,900. Sometimes, though, sometimes, strangely enough, I've had people argue with me. And I'll send them, I'm like, here's the formula. Your BMR is not because, you know, like, I don't know, someone in their CrossFit gym pulled them, did the math for them or some shit like that.

And I'll try to show them them like, here is the BMR formula. Trust me, your BMR, like you do not have the same BMR as me. You're 150 pound girls. It's just not possible. Um, and, but, but most people are receptive to it and they, they're, you know, they realize like, Oh shit, there's the problem. So, uh, that, that, that's very simple. Just make sure you're calculating your BMR correctly and calculating your total daily energy expenditure. This isn't really people's fault. It's just unfortunate that, you know, one of the more common, basically the most common, uh, methods that are used to do this, like catch McArdle. And, uh, you know, there are a few other, a few other formulas.

The activity multipliers are just too high. Like they're just not applicable to a person with an average type of metabolism. For instance, according to the catch McArdle, I should be multiplying. I exercise about five to six hours a week, which I believe it's like a 1.5 multiplier on the catch, which would mean that my TDE would be over 3000 calories. And it's just not. And I've worked with thousands of people and I know for a fact, this is also just a thing that's kind of known in the bodybuilding world. Many bodybuilders that just kind of know what they're doing, they really never go over 1.3 or 1.35, regardless how much exercise they're doing. And sometimes, I mean, if you're doing a lot of exercise, some of these guys are also

running large calorie deficits because they can, because they're on enough drugs to make it, it just doesn't matter. Like they cannot lose muscle and their hormones are so blasted out the roof. There are, there's nothing and they're taking thyroid hormone. They're just doing so much to their body that they might as well just basically starve the shit out of themselves because why not? The only reason to really eat enough food, eat a good amount of food is, is to have enough energy for their workouts. They're not really worried about losing muscle or anything else, but it is just a known thing that those activity multipliers that you see are just too high. So,

uh, I, the general rule is take whatever, you know, if whatever you wear, wherever you fall in the like sedentary one, three hour, four to six hour ball or four,

whatever it is, whatever that multiplier is, reduce it by, by one 10th. Uh, so if it's a 1.3 multiplier, make it a 1.2. Unless you know you have a very fast metabolism, unless you're one of those people that's been lean your entire life,

you've always had trouble gaining weight, you've always been eating a lot of food, then you probably could actually just stick with the normal multipliers, or you may even need to go higher. Again, I do run into people every once in a while, I run into guys, very fast metabolisms. They have to eat a lot of food to gain weight. But for the average person, if you take that activity multiplier and just reduce it by one tenth in terms of decimal points, like reduce the tenth slot by one, then that will be more accurate.

Another kind of common mistake regarding energy expenditure is just assuming that you're burning more energy while exercising than you are. So I like to use the activity multiplier method for determining my calories. It's simpler. You don't have to try to adjust things on a day-to-day basis. At the end of every week, you can get the job done. There's just, I don't see a real reason to make things more complex than they need to be where you're like, let's say you're doing one hour of exercise on one day, you're doing two hours the next day, an hour and a half the next day, 30 minutes the next day to try to change your intake every day and do it that way. It's just, I think it's unnecessary complication, but some people try to do that. And then they run into the problem of accurately estimating calorie expenditure during exercise and like Fitbits and all those machines and all those little gadgets and, and, uh, you

know, on cardio machines, the calorie calorie output, you can't trust those things. Like they're going to be wrong. Um, you can, you can just bet on that. So then you're just kind of left to guesstimate how much calories you're burning. And, uh, and then you have to, you know, you're eating a certain amount and you just don't really know. Um, so instead of that, I do recommend just go with a simpler method, calculate your BMR, um, multiply it by an activity multiplier that, that is, uh, based on how much exercise you're doing per week and just do that. And of course, that means that on certain days, your deficits can be a little bit larger than other days based on how much exercise you actually did. And even other things based on like spontaneous, any activities, did you walk more that day? Did you take the stairs,

uh, you know, a couple of times at the office cause the elevator was broken. Um, you know, all of these things add up to energy burned. So it's never just going to be a flat deficit every day, but that's fine. It doesn't matter. That's not the point. The point is as long as you're not starving the shit out of yourself, if your deficit is good by the end of the week, which it will be if you're just using this simplified method, you can lose fat and not really have to do more math every day and then adjust your meal plans every day based on what you're doing. And I'd say the exception to that is if you're doing

a lot of exercise. I email sometimes with people that do a lot of biking, for instance, on the weekends. They go and bike a bajillion miles and burn a ton of energy. Well, then, yes, it makes sense. We want to increase their intake at least a bit. I think it's fine if you're in a, let's say, you're in a 25% deficit. You say you set your deficit for 25% for the week. Um, and then you have on top of that though, you have this, all this biking and you, and you can go look online and approximate maybe that you're burning 2000 calories, let's say per biking session. And you want to eat a thousand of those calories back, leave yourself a good margin there. Don't try to eat right back up to 2000 because you might not burn 2000. It depends on your body. It depends on your muscle mass. It

depends on how conditioned you are, how adapted it is to the exercise. You might only burn 1500 calories. So then you've calculated 2000, you eat 2000 back and now you've overeaten by 500 calories. So in that case, I usually kind of play it safe, quote unquote, and just say, eat half of your calories back. And then if you're in a little bit larger deficit, one or two days a week, great. You'll just lose more fat. It's not like it's going to be a problem. And one of the things you should know about energy expenditure is, and I kind of, I mentioned this spontaneous activity, right? So you have this non-exercise type of activity level that it varies from person to person. Some people are very high in this regard. They fidget around a lot. They're always moving. Like little kids are a good example

of this. Like my son Lennox, he's turning three and he's literally always doing something. He's always running around, moving, talking, playing with his toys, jumping around. And like, yeah, he's not quote unquote exercising, but he's burning a ton of energy because he's, he never is sitting still. He's always doing something. So as we get older, obviously we're, you know, that, that we don't, we're not so all over the place, but still some people, I mean, they just, they, they burn more energy than through just non-exercise activity than others. Some people are just more sedentary in general. Some people, they walk fast. They take the stairs instead of taking the one

floor elevator. They fidget around a lot. They move their hands when they talk a lot. Like all these things realize burn energy and it adds up. And research shows that it can actually add up to quite a bit. Like one study, like if you look at the lowest non-exercise activity thermogenesis, that's what it's called, NEAT, N-E-A-T, lowest to highest was like a 2,000 calorie a day difference. 2,000 calories, that's crazy. I think the average was like maybe around 350 calories would be a more like when you're talking, you start looking at the middle of the distribution of people where you go, okay, so you have people a little bit on the low end, a little bit at the high end, you could be a three, 400 calorie a day difference, but three to 400 calories a day difference, that's huge. And a lot of people don't realize that, that all the extra activity that occurs outside of the gym burns energy. So, you know, that's why you'll see little weight loss tips to take the stairs instead of the elevator and walk the extra block or two instead of getting in the car and stuff like that because

it actually adds up. Even if you're cleaning the house, then dance while you're cleaning the house. It sounds stupid, but it increases energy burning. So in that way, it helps. So those are all the major points that I wanted to cover in the podcast. Those are usually, you know, by the time someone runs through all that, someone comes to me, I'm not losing weight, what's going on? And they run through all that. That's really the rarely do I, you know, do we have to even go any further than all these things that I've covered? The last thing that's worth mentioning would be there is a point where if

you've been in a calorie deficit for a long time, your body, and this kind of brings you back to the beginning of the podcast, how it fights back, quote unquote, is it tries to reduce your energy, its energy expenditure. And the major way it does that is it reduces the non-exercise activity thermogenesis. So naturally you just will move less. You just will not want, you just are not going to do as much fidgeting. You're not going to want to take the stairs. Your body wants to conserve energy and that manifests in different ways. There also can be a bit of a adaptation that can occur with your basal metabolic rate. It's not nearly as extreme as some people will say. If you go look at the

research that came out of the Minnesota starvation experiment back in World War II, these are guys that were starved for months and months and months. I think it was up to a year, actually. And about 1,500 calories a day. They were burning about 3,000 calories a day. It was a simulated prison of a POW camp, basically. So they were doing physical labor all day. physical labor all day. And, um, in that whole period, I think the largest metabolic, uh, down, like adaptation down regulation that they saw was about 14, 15%. So somebody who's BMR take me, my BMR 2,500 or sorry, 2,100, then, you know, it, it, it maybe drops by 300 calories or so,

which is significant, but it's not, you know, that's, that's like straight starvation status working on, uh, uh, pretend, you know, they, they, they were, it was research done to see like with these prisoners of war, they're going to be coming out of, out of the war. How do you wean them back on the food, you know, when they've been starved for a year. So these were, these were, that was real starvation eating, eating half your TDE for months and months and months, that's starvation. And even that didn't completely wreck people's metabolism. So there is a bit of adaptation that can occur. Just know that in terms of working with people, I'll see it. Also, I'll see it in my body where I have to start reducing my calories a little bit, which isn't necessarily because of my BMR changing, but I'm just burning less energy through exercise, which also can happen as well with your body, depending

on what the exercise is. If it's low intensity, kind of just endurance cardio, over time, you are going to burn less and less energy doing it because your body is going to be more efficient, which is one of the reasons why I recommend high intensity cardio, high intensity weightlifting. It's one of the smaller reasons, but it is kind of a side benefit. But, you know, over the course of about, I'd say two to three months into dieting is when you can expect to see a bit of this adaptation where you can be good on everything else that we just talked about. And weight loss can slow down, slow down, slow down. And you can be good on everything else that we just talked about. And weight loss can slow down, slow down, slow down. And you can expect it to slow down because as you get leaner,

you're going to be dealing with more and more stubborn fat, which is just slower. It just takes longer to get rid of. Where in the beginning, you might be able to lose two pounds of fat a week if you're quite overweight. And then at the end of your diet, let's say you're a guy, you're now down to about 10% body fat, or you're a girl down to about 20% body fat, and you want to keep it going, you know, you can expect maybe a half a pound of fat a week. You can maybe get that up to a pound

with some supplementation and doing every everything right, but it slows down. But you just know that there is going to be a bit of metabolic adaptation. And the solution there is if basically of all the, everything we just talked about, if all that, none of that fixed the problem, the weight loss is still too slow. It's still just grinding. You're not feeling good. Then it's time to reverse your calorie intake. Now, one of the problems with, one of the many problems with dieting is when you're in that state. So you've, you've kind of mildly starved your body for several months. You've gotten lean. It's, and I won't get into the details here because this video has already gone quite long. And, um, but basically you're in your body's in a state where it can rapidly store fat. So what

you don't want to do is do what many people do. And that is just start slamming down calories, uh, because you finally are like the diet's finally over and you just start eating everything. You're going to gain fat very quickly. Instead of what you want to do is reverse diet, which is where you slowly increase your calories over the course of a month or so. Um, and just to prevent that binge effect, basically. And I'll link an article down below on reverse dieting that goes all into it. And you can just go check that out. Or if you're listening to this, um, you're not on YouTube, then, you know, you just go to muscle for life and search for reverse diet and you'll see it. Um, so that's

everything. I hope you find this video helpful. Um, and you know, let me know what you think in the comments below, subscribe and do all that good stuff. And I will see you next time.