Weights and Plates Podcast - #19 - Part-Time Dieting Is Killing Your Progress (and Your Waistline)

Episode Date: January 14, 2022

It's another New Year, and another chance for millions of resolutioners to finally get fit and lose the weight. Many are destined to fail, as we all know (or may have experienced ourselves), and one of the biggest reasons for failure is part-time dieting. Changing habits to eat less food is difficult, and people often succeed during the week only to come undone on the weekends with restaurant food, alcohol, and various social engagements. Santana offers some strategies to avoid the pitfall of part-time dieting.   Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana   Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream https://www.marmaladecream.com  

Welcome to the Weights and Plates podcast. I am your host, Robert Santana, along with my co-host, Trent Jones. Howdy, folks. It is 2022. Happy New Year. The 22nd year of the new millennia. or the 23rd year. I don't know how you count that. How do you count it? Do you count the first one or not? I don't know, man. So like, you know, Christmas is, uh, some people celebrate it on January 6th, I believe. Okay. Uh, three Kings day. Old Christmas. Three Kings day.

Right. Well, yeah. Well, if you're, if you're West of the Bosphorus, uh, then that would be January 6th would be Epiphany, right? And then if you're east of it, it would be Theophany. Interesting. Yeah. But then there's like, yeah, I don't know. It's, I can't, I can't keep that stuff straight. I don't know. I take my decorations down after the 6th. It's all Greek to me, man. Yeah. Yep. Well, yeah. So we were talking off mic here while we were heating the mics up. Man, you miss, like y'all miss all the good stuff. Like we talk all of this political talk beforehand that I'm sure y'all are just dying to hear from us, but we keep that off the mics.

But we were also talking about some things that are going to be very important for your health and fitness goals in 2022. And one of those is you are part-time dieting and you need to stop doing that or at least realize what you're doing and why that is killing your gains. Yeah, this is kind of a topic that's been on my mind lately, especially with holidays just passed, getting an uptick in clients and current clients also having some undesirable weight gain over the holidays, which is perfectly fine and expected. I kind of coined this term a few years back because when you work as a nutrition coach for probably thousands of people at this point, you start to see patterns. And I'm always getting questions about low-carb or low-fat or low-calorie or Weight Watchers or paleo or keto or my hormones are this or maybe I need more cardio. And then I get a lot of over-exercisers that want to out-train a bad diet. And it seems that people will grasp onto some minute variable that influences diet to maybe a small to medium degree at best to avoid facing the reality that they're only dieting part-time.

So what does that mean? enjoyed facing the reality that they're only dieting part-time. So what does that mean? Part-time dieting, I define as, you know, you go to work Monday through Friday, you're nine to five, you prep all your meals, you eat them as prepared, you don't go over, and then Saturday rolls around and, you know, you skip breakfast, you go out, you eat In-N-Out Burger, you go out for drinks with your friends, and then you have cocktails and, you know, full course meal and all this other fun stuff. And then you gain three pounds, four pounds, five pounds over the weekend, you know, take half the week to go back to where you were and then repeat the cycle all over again, only to tell me two months from now that you're not making progress and why the fuck isn't

my diet working for you? Well, it's kind of like with the training, Y-N-D-T-P. You are not doing the program. That is, you did not follow my diet. You followed it part-time. So I'd say that this is the number one diet killer that if I had to rank everything that people have done to sabotage a diet, this is number one. And I'd say this accounts for probably 95% of diet failures is part-time dieting. Yeah, yeah. And I never thought about it this way until you said that. But yeah, people, they latch on to whatever the latest diet fad is.

Or exercise fad. I thought about it because it's just like people wanting to jump on the fad is. Or exercise fad. I thought about it because it's just like, you know, people wanting to jump on the fad and they don't understand the physiology and how this stuff works. And they don't realize that, you know, the physiology of losing weight and cutting body fat is pretty simple.

You just have to eat less calories. All right. Yes, there are some nuances to that, but like that's just what, that's the condition that has to, the precondition that must be satisfied before it can happen at all. Right. But no, you're, you're saying it different.

You're like, nah, it's actually because these people are trying to sidestep the actual work of doing the simple thing, which is just consistently eating less food, eating fewer calories. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, it makes calories. Yeah. And it makes sense. Yeah. We see avoidance behavior all the time. I'd say that the average diet coaching client wants to, you know, dine out, drink, engage in festivities, whatever you want to call it, two to three times a week and only follow

the diet two to four times a week. And that's, you know, and this is just assessing behavior and observing patterns. Nobody's writing that in their questionnaire that that's what they want to do, but based on their behaviors after following them for several months, this is what I tend to see virtually at least once a week. There is alcohol involved, restaurant food involved that's not balanced out or chosen wisely, desserts, snacks, you name it. All these little problem areas tend to pop up on a regular basis.

And then months pass, money's been spent, and then there's the whole question of, well, why isn't this working? Well, it's like, well, this is not what you're doing. You're actually doing that, you know? And it's hard, you know? So I get tunnel vision on the seven-day rule, you know, no matter what gets thrown at me by my clients, I always say, the first step is you have to follow this for seven days in a row, and then you got to repeat that for several weeks in a row. But first, let's just start with seven days in a row, not even one

day at a time, because most people can do it for a few days. The problem is, like I said, the pattern of behavior that I've observed with many people that hire me as a coach and people that I know that aren't necessarily clients that have weight problems and, you know, have engaged in dieting behavior is that they want to engage in festivities multiple times a week and only follow the diet for a fraction of the week. And, you know, you can't, you know, that's why cheat days are so popular, but they're highly ineffective. They do not work, you know, unless you're a metabolic furnace to begin with, you know? Right. Yeah. And that's the thing, like the problem is, okay, so like if you're trying, if you're trying to lose weight, right, you have to create a caloric deficit. And it really,

if you are consistent, it doesn't have to be that big of a caloric deficit, right? A few hundred calories a day, maybe not even that much, but a few hundred calories a day, which is not that onerous, will produce weight loss for a lot of people, right? Maybe not forever, but that's sufficient to create weight loss for a lot of people. That's not a huge ask, but it is hard to do consistently. Now, on the other hand, though, in the other direction, when you do a cheat day, there's no end to the amount of calories that you can eat on that cheat day. No, it's open-ended.

Yeah, right? I mean, yes, practically, I'd be impressed if you could eat 20,000 calories, but you could definitely eat 5,000. You could eat 3,000, 4,000, 4,000, 6,000. It happens all the time. It happens all the time. And so you can do so much damage, so to speak, to your plan, your program on a cheat day. And it's tough. And I think, I want to do a separate episode about this, by the way, about alcohol, because there's a lot of hidden traps in alcohol. Oh, big time. Besides the fact that I think a lot of people have no idea how many calories are in alcoholic drinks, especially cocktails. And, you know, cocktails are really popular right now.

Having a cocktail is almost equivalent. Not almost, it's equivalent to eating a slice of pie. Yeah. Yeah. This is very high calorie. But there's another thing, and that's just very simply that if you're out drinking and you're having fun with your friends, A, are you really going to be tracking everything that you're eating during that outing? And B, are you going to have restraint when you've hit your target for the day? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say no and see can you realistically track everything you're eating when you're out right yes yeah that's right that's right i know when i have if i'm two cocktails in like i'm ordering the appetizer

i want the snacks i'm gonna have the the bat if we're at a bar or whatever you know i'm gonna have like the the chips and queso i don't need chips queso but i'm gonna order them and you know i'm gonna have like the the chips and queso i don't need chips queso but i'm gonna order them and you know i might have a burger while i'm there too because i'm hungry and i never i may have not have gone to that bar with any intention of even eating i was just going to go get a couple beers there or whatever yeah that happens all the time when i do it yeah no i mean what you have to understand is because then you you get these, you know, nutrition purists, like, you know, some of the classes I've sat in over the years, that'll say, oh, well, you know, it's a lifestyle. No, no, cutting is not a lifestyle, first of all. It can resemble a lifestyle, but, you know, if you're under eating, under eating is not a way of life. So this drove me nuts when I would sit there in my nutrition class when I was an undergraduate, and I'd hear several teachers sit there and say, I don't like the word diet.

You know, I hear dieticians say this and nutritionists say this, and you probably have heard it on Instagram. I don't like the word diet. It should be a lifestyle. No, under eating is not a lifestyle, and under eating is the condition required to lose weight. Okay. So it sounds nice. You know, it's a great slogan. I don't like the word diet.

It's a lifestyle. There are aspects of it that should be incorporated into your lifestyle. Like, for instance, you know, I typically eat, you know, protein source, a vegetable source, a fruit source, and maybe, you know, beans or oats or something like that. And I'll eat a similar meal like that several times a day, whether I'm gaining or losing weight, or whether I'm just trying to hold on, you know, maintaining, if you want to call it that, although I don't believe that maintenance is a thing with body weight either. I think your weight fluctuates, you know, and you think we tend to gain weight with age, just like a car, your body slows down, you know, you deposit fat easier with age, et cetera. But, you know, the things that I generally eat

day to day don't really change whether I'm going up or whether I'm going down. During the lockdowns and all that craziness the last two years. I did slide up a little bit in body weight. Then I slid back down recently because, you know, I cleaned up my diet, become more active and, you know, I'm working through an injury, so there's no reason to be that heavy anyway. But, you know, I generally have eaten the same breakfast for 20 years, you know. I tend to go to the same restaurants. There was a period there where I, you know, ate a little bit more junk over the last two years. I flushed that out and immediately lost several pounds, you know. But the lifestyle is your food choices, you know, the thing,

you know, your routine day to day, you know, when you're not on a cut, when you're not under eating, because that's what it is. It's under eating. Under eating is not a lifestyle. When you're not under eating, you can get away with a little bit more i mean how many times i think that they think about i think about cut failures for instance i get these people that and this is a lot of by and large everybody who's tried to diet has went through this they go out to eat their weight balloons up four pounds over the weekend then it's back down two days later well just contextualize that to a situation where you're not trying to lose weight. The same rule applies. You know, you dine out, you relax a little bit, provided you don't go completely overboard and just eat till you get sick, you'll probably lose whatever little weight you've gained over the weekend. You have that flexibility. But most

people are not hiring me to maintain. Most people have weight they would like to lose. And when you have weight that you would like to lose, no, it is not a lifestyle. You are under eating. You have to under eat to lose weight. You know, there's just no way around that. And sure, if there's, you know, psychological shit tied in with this, then you have some mental health issues you got to deal with to make it effective and make it stick. In the absence of that, though, there's no escaping the mathematical reality that you have to consume less than you're putting out. You know, I can come up with so many different fad diets and catchphrases to make it sound like I've come up

with something new to accomplish the same thing, but at the end of the day, you got to undereat, you know? The extent to which you need to undereat. We talked about in the last episode that is dictated by set point. You know, if you study famines, not everybody got bone skinny, but everybody lost weight, you know, during a period of famine. And the people that were most metabolically efficient, who also tended to be heavier, tended to survive these things, you know. I think of the Arizona Pima Indians. these things, you know. I think of the Arizona Pima Indians. In the early 20th century, their water supply got diverted up the Gila River because there were communities being established up there. And a lot of them died. And then the ones that survived tended to trend towards insulin resistance and obesity because that's what allowed them to survive, right? You know, they're also

inactive too. There's activity level problems down there, but, you know, and they've compared that to the same tribe on the Mexico side. They tend to farm more and they don't have similar problems. But the big one is, you know, you kill a bunch of people by diverting their water supply. Think about what it takes to survive that, right? So, you know, I'm kind of digressing into a different point, but my point is that during periods of famine, you know, not everybody got down to a BMI of 15. You know, there were some people that still held on to some fat, you know, just because of genetics, you know? So, yeah, no, you have to undereat, and some people have to undereat more than others,

and for some people, it's not worth it to try and get skinny. You're a heavier person, you know? So that was the last episode we did. But my point is, if your goal is to weigh less than you weigh now or have less body fat than you have now, then you have to eat less than you're eating now for seven days at a time. And, you know, it might be six, it might be eight, you know, this, this number is not hard set in stone, but it roughly takes about a week to see fat loss reflected on a weight scale or on a measuring tape, you know? Well, and it, and it carries you, I think the important point is that it carries you through the, the three phases of the week, right? Like it's, it's easy to be,

it's easy to be a hero on Monday and Tuesday when the week's boring anyway, but then you've got Thursday, Friday, you know, where, where a lot of people start to go out and the week gets more relaxed, you know, maybe cut out a little bit early out of work on Friday, if it's been a slower week, whatever. And then you've got the weekend as well. Right. So there's, you know, it's, it it if you can do it for seven days that means that you have made the behavioral changes or you've been changed your environment in order to stick to your plan through not just the easy phase of the week but the harder phases a week and you know and that's huge you know yeah and on the macro level you're not just going to lose weight keep

it off forever you're going to gain some back It's probably going to happen at some point in your life because life is not linear. And as you age, it's easier to gain weight, you know, for one. So, you know, the point is you don't want to be constantly cutting or constantly starving that creates all sorts of metabolic disturbances. But like, for instance, I cut in 2016. That was the last time I actually like did a hard cut. And then over the course of, what has it been, five years, you know, I've gotten stronger and gained about 25 pounds back roughly. And then now I'm down another 10, you know. It's the first time I've actually actively tried to do anything and I'm not even tracking anything, you know. I just clean the junk up. And I bet that you're a decent bit leaner at the heavier body weight than you were the

first time you were, or the last time you were at that body weight. Oh yeah, I definitely see that. Before the first cut. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I definitely see that. But yeah, that's, you know, it's, it's, it's been my experience from the, just the strength

coaching side that there are two factors that out, that outweigh just about everything else when it comes to training and getting results in the long term and then maintaining those results. And that is, number one is technique. You need to have good, solid, repeatable technique. And number two is consistency. And if you have those two things, then it almost doesn't matter what your program is. Like you're going to see results. Now, of course, a reasonable program, a rational program and good progression and following the principles of programming is going to get you further. But man, I've seen some people that have like,

frankly, pretty pedestrian programs that are suboptimal, but they just really consistent and they just, they get stronger, you know, bit by bit, year over year, and they maintain that. they just, they get stronger, you know, bit by bit, year over year, and they maintain that. So those are the two most powerful factors. And like, they're in a whole nother league compared to all of the other elements of, they go into your results. No, it's 100% true. I mean, I accidentally got stronger over the last few years, just, you know, doing very little. We talked about the maintenance, right? In the maintenance episode, like, yeah, we're not, it's, we're not actually maintaining, we're still training, we're still trying to add. We're just not doing probably that we're not doing the most

effective programming to add weight to the bar. Instead, we're doing lighter, we're doing less intense programming. But the thing is, like, still, over periods of time, still getting stronger. Yeah, and same thing applies to fatness. You're not just going to maintain body fatness. You're going to get fatter over time. If you do things right, it happens very slow, and you don't have to constantly be gaining and losing weight. But every so often, you're going to carry a few extra pounds, and you have to clean it up. And that's really the situation you want to end up in where a simple cleanup takes you back down.

And you have to do this hard, long, drawn out cut phase, for lack of a better word. But ultimately, it's like the other day I was talking to my girlfriend. And she has great genetics. She doesn't store any body fat on her torso, really. Competitive bodybuilder, by the way. I think we've mentioned that before. She competes in bikini shows. And what she learned the hard way, so she started what, two years ago, probably, 2019, I want to say. And what, you know, she thought, you know, she struggled with powerlifting. She has a torn labrum. She can't push her squat very heavy,

and she's small-framed, so she's not super strong. But she's put on muscle, lifting very little, which is a whole other topic for a different podcast, you know? And, you know, she tried to do these because, you know, she has a good figure for it. She's petite. She's naturally lean. You know, she has visible abs year-round and she eats you know 2,000 calories to maintain that she's um small little lady and she can eat quite a bit however you know when uh when you're when you go into physique competitions you're being evaluated by people who

have body dysmorphia you know and if you're one of these judges, fuck you if you're offended, because at least admit it, you know, when I used to care about my appearance and was into all that, you know, I had definitely had some body dysmorphia myself, most of us do, you know, if we've trained in a gym and have paid attention to how we look, you know, there's a certain level of that. You were talking about like the coach that was guiding you through that cut down to, you know, 13, whatever it was. He was so practical. Yeah. He was telling you, right. It's like, dude, you're never going to be lean enough. You're never going to be big enough. And I just imagine like, since you said

that I've been imagining like, uh, you know, if you just think about all of these other people in the world of bodybuilding are also doing this process at the same time everybody's just nuts like they're just all uh bulking cutting bulking i remember he told me he's like bro you're you're never going to be lean enough that's what happens your brain goes crazy you know yeah but uh you know when you're when you're in a bikini show or a physique show i have no intention of ever doing anything of the sort but god i think the the way these people evaluate the human body it's just disturbing to me you know i like i i never wanted to compete in any of that you know i used to read the magazines and i'd kind of be like well those

guys are super ripped i'm not trying to quite go that low you know like i mean i never bought into that subculture i always thought it was kind of weird. It's hard, and I'll explain how it's hard in a second because it's relevant to this episode. What my girlfriend learned was that in the absence of drug use, which, you know, changes the focus in that sport, if you're a drug user and you're in an untested competition, you know, which is most of the higher level ones, they don't really care about that. And, you know, I don't judge that, you know, they're trying to look a certain way and drugs allow you to change the way you look quite easier than just training and dieting. So anyways, what she learned as a drug-free competitor was that the competition and the training for the competition is really, I mean,

it's competitive dieting is what it is, you know? It's like who can starve the most for the longest, you know? And, you know, she did what a lot of our clients do, and it was kind of funny watching her go through this. She, you know, well, I need to do more shoulder work or I need to do more glute work. And, like, she's just sitting there talking about the exercise portion when I'm like, Christy, you're part-time dieting. 10 o'clock at night rolls around and you're making popcorn, you know? Yeah. And, you know, she has a problem with night eating or, you know, she's done it since she was a kid.

It's an ingrained habit. She wants a high carb snack late at night, you know, and then it turns into more eating, especially when, you know, she's actually trying to follow a calorie restricted diet and the hunger is high. She has a hard time going to bed hungry. It goes against decades of habits. Right. And she always did well. She'd go in there and play second every time, but she couldn't win in part because these shows are political for one thing, but the biggest thing is she can't starve enough to look sick.

And some people like that look and don't see it as looking sick. I see it as looking sick. You're getting very low in body fat. It's not healthy. I've seen people try to argue that there's no evidence of that, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So why do people feel like shit? Why do men's dicks stop working? Why is your libido gone why are you tired you know why why are you

foggy in the brain you know why why does your training go to shit why can't you perform at a high level you know ask yourself all these questions before you try to make an argument that low body fat is not unhealthy you know um if you're naturally low body fat and these people exist you know my brother's one of them although he doesn't think he's lean enough because he has Los Angeles body dysmorphia, which is a different type. But, you know, by our standards, he's naturally lean. He has tight skin, veins, you know, visible abs, even when he's quote unquote fat by his own standards. Big capstone delts, just bodybuilder genetics, you know, and he doesn't train. So when he trains, naturally people accuse him of being on steroids because he just has that

physique, right? Those people are pretty healthy at 9% body fat. I think his set point is probably more like 11, 12, somewhere in the 11 to 13 range if I had to estimate. But, you know, there's people leaner than him that are about 9% body fat, 8% body fat, and they eat, you know, there's people leaner than him that are about 9% body fat, 8% body fat, and they eat, you know, several thousand calories a day, and they don't really put on fat until they're in their 40s, you know, or 50s sometimes. You know, my friend Nick was one of these guys. He was very, very ripped, you know, great athlete. So if I had to guess, he probably had a pretty high vertical.

He played football. He wrestled. And when I met him in college, he was a drunk like most college kids and lived off Taco Bell. He used to call it Taco Hell. Horrible diet. And then he had eight-pack abs. I mean, this guy was the most ripped, muscular dude I've ever seen. And when he did start training, if I didn't know him and knew his routine, I would think he was on drugs.

And no, it's just he had tight skin, capstone delts bulging biceps veins and uh when he'd go in the weight room he'd just fuck around doing the same bro workout everybody else was doing and he'd look super jacked and his abs would get bigger you know they get more defined right and uh he talked to me and he says dad was the same way he's like yeah my dad just escalated to a flat stomach after 50 you know he went from abs From abs to like, from an eight-pack to probably a four-pack, you know, still tight skin, vein on the biceps, and fainty forearms, and eats like a normal person. But when you're not naturally like that, and you try to get like that, it doesn't feel too good, you know? Your body will fight you every step of the way because it perceives the situation as starvation. And when you translate this into a

drug-free physique competition, bikini competition, bodybuilding competition, yeah, it's going to fuck up your body physically. You're going to have low energy, low libido. You're going to get weaker. Your training is going to suffer. You're going to lose muscle, you know, especially if you've been lifting a long time. And it's just, you know, it can't be sustained. And this is something that bodybuilders themselves talk about, because even with the drugs, you reach the same point. They're not stage lean all the time, you know. The thing is, the drugs keep the muscle on them and allow them to get through their workouts, you know. But, you know, you talk to anybody who's competed in that sport that isn't naturally ripped.

Um, they kind of say the same thing. They say getting ready for those shows just takes it out of you because of the dieting, you know? So I say for the vast majority of people that enter those competitions, it's competitive dieting. It's not so much the training. I mean, obviously you have to lift and build muscle and be well-balanced. That plays a role in it. But when they're evaluating you, they're looking for these little minute details

in your musculature, much of which is achieved through actual training. And I get worked up with the focus, especially with these female competitors, I've noticed this eight years back. Another coach friend of mine, I met her and I converted her to the book of strength. But at the time she was into bodybuilding, they're obsessed with their posterior deltoids and their lateral deltoids. They're obsessed with this because the judges now in female competitions want to see deltoids. They want deltoid caps and uh a lot of that's genetic you know and muscle that's about to say yeah like i can't imagine a whole lot of bikini competitors have that naturally because it is because i mean the women that i've seen that

compete in bikini are yeah they're very petite yeah very small they tend to have very small shoulder girls a lot of that is genetic but uh but what I have reliably seen work to move the needle is building up your press. And the bodybuilding people will sit there and say, oh, the overhead press isn't a good hypertrophy exercise. You need to do isolation exercises. Face pulls. Yeah, face pulls and you know uh lateral raises no actually presses and chin-ups hit the entire shoulder girdle face pulls are the keto of 2015 they really are i don't think they're in vogue anymore but there was like a couple years where like face

pulls like everybody like it didn't matter yeah you could be a bodybuilder bro you could be a crossfitter you could be a powerlifter everybody's doing face pulls like oh bro dude i tried face pulls my shoulder was kind of hurting and i just did some face pulls just cleaned it right up yeah no i mean they have they gave me some appropriate that movement gave me proprioception so i can kind of figure out how to stop my elbows from dancing on the bench press but sure yeah i'm not to train the face pull, you know? Right, yeah. That's like, I just find it hilarious that certain, like, just like diets, exercises go through fads too. That's a funny, but this coach I'm talking about that I mentioned earlier, and she's listening.

She knows who she is. I had her start doing pull-downs and then escalated to chin-ups, and then she started training the barbell press because with bodybuilder people, it's all about dumbbell press and lateral raises. That's how you build shoulders, right? And reverse delt flies, right? So I took all that shit out and put her on starting strength and, you know, got started with pull-downs, got to chin-ups and added weight to her press every other workout. Then all of a sudden, lo and behold, she had rear delts. And I'm like, well, well, look at that. That's interesting.

And then she gave me the finger. She knew I was right. But I've seen this, you know, people that don't have deltoid caps naturally, people like my brother and some of these people that, you know, do well in these competitions. I have reliably seen the press move the needle on that. Suddenly, they have more visible deltoids. Typically, what we mean by this is, you know, you got people with muscles that insert further up the joint. So in the case of the lateral deltoid, you're talking about the humerus, and the muscle inserts higher up, which makes it look more poppy, more pronounced, you know, shorter and peakier, right? Yeah.

When you have long muscle, it inserts lower on the humerus. Now you have a longer muscle belly. It doesn't look as large and thick, right? What I've noticed, because I'm one of these people, I have long muscle, you know, I was a swimmer, long arms, I have long deltoids. When I started driving my press up, suddenly I have deltoid definition and it stays on up until I'm about 190. That starts to, you know, smooth out a little bit between 190 and 200. But before, I didn't have very much

definition at 165 because I didn't do any overhead work. I was doing every variation of lateral raise you can think of because it worked for my brother who already had the raw materials. You know, he had big prominent deltoids, tight skin, and low body fat. So it didn't matter if he did a lateral raise or a press. What I will tell you is when I did have him train the press, the son of a bitch got to 175 for three sets of five, you know, just doing starting strength. He could have went further and he's like, oh, my arms are getting too big. He likes to be small on the smaller side.

I don't know what the fuck's wrong with him. I'm done making fun of him for it. But, you know, it was interesting was when he did start pressing his freaking arms and shoulders just blew up, you know. I bet. But the point is he looked muscular in the shoulders because of the way the muscle inserts on his joint and his, you know, body fat distribution. And, uh, yeah, for everybody else, the press seems to work. You, you know, this Trent, you've trained a lot of clients. I've trained a lot of clients as the press goes up, you see more deltoid definition. Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And, uh, in, in particular, you know, I've noticed that for people that have gone through,

that have done linear progression and they've gone through a fair amount of intermediate training, um, doing, doing presses and, and bench and bench for that matter in the eight, 10, 12 rep range really, really can help put on some size. Um, you know, I've been doing a lot of that lately myself, you know, just partially because like I'll have workouts where like, I'm going to do two sets today. That's it. That's all I'm going to do. But you know, you do two sets of 12 on the bench at, I mean, it's 24 reps. It's a pretty good amount of volume. Um, and I've noticed since I've, I've been incorporating higher rep ranges into my training mixed in with still, I mean, I'm still doing fives and I'm still doing, you know, doubles and triples real heavy too. But, um, when I've mixed those in, that's really helped

to build those, build my delts and, and pecs. Yeah, no, um, it, it all works. It's just, you know, but it's pressing. Yeah. I mean, I'm not doing, I'm not doing 12s with dumbbells. I'm not doing flies for 12s. I'm not doing cable machine stuff. I'm just doing the press. Well, I want to kind of shift a little bit. And I want to talk about, with this part-time dieting stuff, so I want to talk about some things that you can do, some practical things you can do to help yourself out. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Before I go into that, I wanted to kind of close that point. So the reason I brought Christy up was because, you know, it's been, what, two months now, and I've scaled back on my diet, and I've been more active outside of the gym. And, you know, I've dropped, I think I

was as high as 198. And last time I weighed myself, I was like 182. So, you know, I dropped 16 pounds in two months. And I asked her, I was like, so what'd you learn? You know, I dropped 16 pounds in two months, and I asked her. I was like, so what did you learn? You know, because it was pretty linear. You know, I don't think there was a week where I didn't lose, you know. And she's like, I just have to say no to shit. She's like, that's what you do. She's like, you just turn shit down, you know.

She said this was a few days ago. She said that to me. And I'm like, and that's all there is to it. I'm like, you have to get through an entire week, and then you've got to repeat that, and then you've got to repeat that, and then you've got to repeat that so you're not part-time dieting for 10 months before you decide to get your shit together and then end up overeating after the diet because you've been mentally dieting the whole time. Yeah, right, right. You end up full-time dieting mentally, psychologically when you do that, and that takes a toll on you. And I've seen this happen before where you'll get a part-time dieter for 15, 20 months, which is why I don't do cuts longer than three, four months. I don't care what you've lost. I had years back, I remember this one person I worked with, 20 months of part-time dieting, got her shit together, lost all the weight, and then guess what?

Gained back all of it and then some because she started eating like crazy because her mind was fixated on food for almost two years. Yeah. And you don't want that. And I talked to Christy about that too. She's taking a break from shows now, but I was just like, you start thinking about food all the time and you develop a fucked up relationship with it. Like right now, I don't feel crazy about it at all. And I have every intention of gaining weight back as soon as this leg heals up. And yeah, you know, I'm not going to go past, put the line on it. I'm like, February, I'm done, you know, and I'm not going down to 165 again, you know, high 170s is the absolute lowest. I'm going to go 175. And that's with the intention of going back up, you know. So, you know, much of that is just also driven by, you know, the injury.

You know, I pulled my adductor. It's almost completely healed. So, you know, it's almost time to finish cutting and then got to go back up. That's what you do. You know, you try to gain some more muscle because maintenance is bullshit. That's what you do. You know, you try to gain some more muscle because maintenance is bullshit. But, yeah, no, the key there is you've really got to look at this as it's a cumulative effect, kind of like building muscle.

We were into this with training, too. You know, I remember I had a guy once that would just stop showing up when the squat got heavy because it scared him. You know, he didn't like the way it made him feel. You know what I say about feelings. I think you can figure that out. But, you know, he didn't like the way it made him feel so he just missed three weeks at a time four weeks and come back and say well you know the reason i end up it's not going is because the squats hard then i'm like well then stop trying to build muscle because you don't have the sauce for this you know right i just don't have patience for this bullshit anymore you know like okay basically people want want the results of drugs from exercise, you know?

Right, yeah. They want to exercise and achieve the results of training, which is what drugs do. You know, you could go to any globo gym or college gym, you'll see some jerk-off, you know, college kid, 18 to 25-year-old, that just got on drugs, and he's just doing arms and chest every day, and he looks the way you want to look, you know? And women do the same thing. You know, they take stimulants and certain steroids that, you know, make them leaner. And, you know, the CrossFit bod, per se, you know, that's a good example. We both know CrossFit doesn't build

muscle beyond the first three to six months, novice effect. But, you know, they show people that look like bodybuilders in these advertisements. And you know what's going on there. They naturally look like that because they're good athletes. And people that compete in the games are also not doing CrossFit to prepare for the games. Exactly. Right. Aside from that, you know, you get mediocre CrossFitters that don't necessarily compete at the games. They're just members.

And they look like, you know, physique competitors. I wouldn't say bodybuilders, not that quite that huge, but they look like fitness models, right? And, you know, CrossFit didn't do that shit for them, you know? And you figure this out when you look at the average person who's probably skinny, fat, and out of shape and does CrossFit for five years and just looks a little bit less skinny, fat, and a little bit more in shape, you know? Yeah. Yep. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. The thing about CrossFit is that the competitive nature of it, this is my theory, the competitive nature of the way that most boxes are structured, it selects for people who were good athletes in high school and maybe college too. Oh yeah. And so when you see that, you know, when people look around and CrossFit got really popular

and they're like, oh man, look at all these jacked people that are doing CrossFit. Well, it wasn't the CrossFit. It was just the effect of CrossFit got really popular. It, the people who were already naturally athletic that go to it did well in the competitions there because they're athletic. And, um, CrossFit in a lot of places, doesn't give you the chance to become proficient in a lot of the moves and the exercises

because they're so random. They're constantly cycling in and out. So the people who are going to get it, like if you got to do a bunch of snatches, let's say, the people who are going to get it are the ones who are naturally more coordinated and athletic anyway. So it's a selection bias,

I think. Yeah. But you bring up a really good point. The whole thing about consistency is it's, it's a, it's hard. It's hard. It's hard. And I think what it is, is like, you have to, I think you have to be very honest with yourself. If you're going to try to create consistency in your life, you know, this is, this is January. It's early January. That means there are millions of people out there that have set resolutions for the year, right? And what people tend to do, and myself included, I do this all the time. I was talking about that. Like I used to set numbers for myself. Like I'm going to squat 550 this year. Let's just throw a number out there right we all tend

to imagine ourselves in the future as leaner more jacked stronger whatever than we are now but we we we tend to vastly overestimate how long that's going to take to get there right and we sort of like just the thought of doing this, like the thought of imagining myself being a 500 pound squatter or being at 12% body fat or whatever, whatever the thing is that I'm hung up on. The thought of that gives me, you know, makes me feel good about it without actually helping me accomplish the day-to-day activities that are going to lead me to that goal. And so what you really have to do is kind of like, you know, all these goals and resolutions, they're fine and all. I'm not down on people who are like, ah, you know, set resolutions or

whatever. And I'm like, I'm not really, I just don't care very much about them. They're cool. If somebody wants to set a goal, great, that's fine. But it's just not that important to me. What's more important is being brutally honest with yourself about like, okay, where, where are your problems? You know, what's your mocha? What was it? The mocha ice cream sandwiches. Oh yeah. Snacking problem. Yeah. Yeah. So like if you're, you know, you know, you have a snacking problem. We all do. Right. What is it for you? Right. And, um, you know, so let's, let's set some things that we can do to change your environment so that you're, you're not going to be tempted as much by those things. Right. Like if you're, I was talking to somebody recently who is self, you know, very, very, uh, had a lot of self-honesty. He's like, I'm lazy. He's like,

I will not eat an orange if I have to peel it i'll eat it out of can but i'm not going to peel it he's like i'm not going to chop that vegetable if i buy a head of broccoli there's some broccoli crowns whatever they're going to rot in my fridge he's like if it's not pre-sliced i ain't gonna eat it he's like i he's, I won't even peel a hard-boiled egg. So instead of setting these goals where he's like, okay, all right, here's new year. I'm going to eat better. No more processed food. I'm going to cook every meal, right? How is that going to work? All right. So if you won't even peel a hard-boiled egg, how is he possibly going to be preparing all this food from scratch every day? Not going to happen. So what this guy does, he's like, all right,

you know, I'm just, I buy the pre-cut. I buy pre-cut, pre-packaged vegetables. That's what I do. I buy canned mandarin oranges. You know, is that the best thing to eat? No. It's got all the syrup and shit in it and whatever, but it's something he

will actually do. He will eat oranges instead of Twinkies or whatever if he buys the can of mandarin oranges same here i mean i get frozen bell peppers because i don't want to cut them but i'll cut onions because i don't like pre-chopped onions it tastes like shit right they do why are they so bad um but but yeah it's uh i i think that's that that is a key thing is that change your environment and be brutally honest with the things that you like your your kryptonite and just just give yourself the chance to succeed there because what's what's

important is not that you get to the some gold standard of like oh you know i'm gonna make you know fresh salmon with uh you know freshly squeezed lemon and and broccoli and rice every night. No, the point is being consistent, right? If you ate, you know, the frozen salmon with frozen vegetable mix and your can of Mandarin oranges, right? If you did that consistently, and that means that you're not hitting the in and out burger as a result, that's progress right there. Like that's going to get you to your goal. as a result, that's progress right there. Like that's going to get you to your goal. So that's, I just see, I see people fail a lot in just setting these like impossible goals and just overlooking their weaknesses. And we all have them, right? No, it doesn't have to be perfect, but

the main thing is the sacrifices have to be made. There's some things you just can't do. You know, you can't eat pizza while you're losing weight unless you're going to, you know, have one slice, you know. And most people don't just have one slice. There's just certain things you can't have, you know. There's just certain things you can't have. I lost weight after Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's because I have this thing kind of, you know, automated now. I've done it so many times. And I haven't tracked anything. I haven't used a meal plan. But I also knew, I'm like, okay, I'm going to go and

eat a, you know, Christmas dinner. So that means that I'm, you know, going to take it easy the rest of the day and, you know, scale back. And I actually do scale back. And I do have the dessert. I have everything. I'm just eating in smaller quantities. And you make it work, you know. But what you can't do is you can't follow the diet Monday through Friday and then, you know, go out and have pizza, beer, dessert, and a bunch of cookies and then do the same thing on Sunday, you know. And then, you know, try and expect weight loss the next day and then repeat this for several weeks. And then after several months, complain that you're not getting results. You have to, quote unquote, make it through the week. Rule number one is seven days. You got to get seven days. And you have to figure out how to do that. If snacking is your problem, you got to clear them out. If your spouse is not cool with

that, then this is going to take longer than you think because you're going to have to have a hard conversation. Everybody has all hands have to be on deck for this. You know, if you have a spouse that wants to snack all day and you want to diet, you're setting yourself up for failure by trying to diet. Okay? Yeah. I'm sorry to say that. You know, if you're feeding your kids candy, you're probably going to eat the candy. And why should you give yourself a better diet than you give them?

You're the one who controls that economy. You know, I've said this in that other episode about snacking. You control the economy of food in a house with dependent human beings. So if you believe that eating healthy is valuable, you should pass that on. That's just my two cents on that. But ultimately, you have to create an environment for success. And dining out at restaurants, eating heavy meals multiple times a week is a recipe for disaster. Having snack foods all over the house is a recipe for disaster, you know? Yeah, yeah. So I work with a company called You Need a Budget, YNAB for short.

And I edit their podcast, which is also called You Need a Budget. And they're having right now, this is january so they sell a budgeting software essentially they sell a really nice budgeting tool to help you get control of your your money and um i like the way they do that one of one of the ways they do it is actually they they they make you assign the money you have right now in your checking account in your wallet a job or stuff you have to pay for in the future you You don't get to, you don't get to do future income planning, right? You're like, we'll have a paycheck coming on Friday. They're like, nah, can't count it yet. It's not in, you don't have it. So they do get you thinking and planning ahead, which I think there's some analogs there

to planning your environment, like we're talking about, but this is January and they're running a thing that they do every year right now. It's a January, you know, sort of a monthly, you know, kickstart challenge. So let's just kickstart the year. Let's just have a, we're going to have a hard month. We're going to cut down to kind of bare essentials here and just get the year started off right. And they're like, this is not sustainable. We're just going to do it for a month. And then, you know, we'll kind of go back to a more sustainable pace of saving. And there's

really, the rules are pretty simple, but there's one thing that they do. They have a rule in there. There's no eating out, no eating out. And if you understand the, you need a budget community, they never tell you what to spend your money on. Like they do not like these conversations. Well, you know, should I buy this or should I not? There's like, we don't care what to spend your money on. Like they do not like these conversations. Well, you know, should I buy this or should I not? There's like, we don't care what you spend your money on. That's up to you. We just want you to be spending your money on the things that you value and not wasting it on things you don't value. But they're like, there's one thing though, that they've found consistently across, you know, millions of people who have used this software now that they all have in common. And that's that they spend too much money eating out.

It's just, it's one of those things that if you're going to try to save money, you just can't eat out. Not forever, but you just like when you're starting, you just cannot eat out. And I find it funny. There's the analog here. If you're trying to lose weight, you can't eat the pizza. And really, frankly, you just can't eat out very much. I bring that up because I have found in my personal life that when I start hanging out with people that just don't go out to restaurants very much, I'm leaner and healthier. I eat better. It takes me less mental effort to maintain a reasonably low amount of body fat. And I'm not shredded or anything. I don't have visible abs, but I have a reasonably

low amount of body fat. I'm probably like, I don't know, 15, 16% and I'm fit. And it doesn't take me, it's not hard to do that and to eat the way that I do because I don't think about it. And part of that is I just, when I go out with friends, we bring food to each other's houses. We invite people over here. We have a glass of whiskey. I'm not going to a clubby dinner place and having multiple cocktails or whatever. And that's just, you know, not everybody's going to agree with that, but it's kind of one of those things where it's like, I just don't put myself in that environment. And it becomes, it's not only that I'm not tempted, it's that it's a lot less mental overhead for me. I don't have to worry about overeating because I don't put myself in those

situations very often. Yeah. And, you know, to echo that, you know, I've had to have these hard conversations with people that just are unwilling to give that up for whatever reason. Sometimes there are good reasons. I just say, hey, your goals are incompatible with your lifestyle. So you got to change your goals, got to lower the standards. You're not going to look like a fitness model and eat at freaking pizza places and hamburger places. And you're not not gonna be able to eat these densely packed restaurant entrees several times a week and look like that. It's just not going to happen. You know, you're also, you know, it's just, it's not going to happen. I had a guy once, you know, he loved to dine out. He was into like, you know, all sorts of obscure foods, you know, it was his thing, you know,

and I got him down pretty low. I mean, he was in his fifties. He got down to the mid one eighties and he really didn't need to get any lower than that. But, you know, he got to a point where he was like, I can't restrict any more than this. It's not worth it. And I'm like, good. But I laid that out in the beginning, you know? But, you know, if you're one of these people, it's gotten too heavy, and it's legitimately a problem, then you have to weigh it out, you know? What's more important, eating out several times a week or being lighter,

you know? Uh, yeah, I don't think, yeah, go ahead. I'm going to, I'm going to go a little bit further here. I'm going to go a little bit further. I'm not done with this point. Um, okay. I, I, I am, I am very blessed to have a wife that's an excellent cook. Um, she's, she's really good. She's kind of, um, she, she's cooked professionally in kitchens before. Now, she's not like a trained chef or anything like that. She didn't go to culinary school, but, you know, she's scrappy and she can cook and she's done it in a bunch of different environments. And she really understands like the principles of how to put together flavors and textures and stuff. All right. I don't understand how to do that. I can follow some recipes, but I don't understand the principles of cooking like she does.

So I'm very blessed in that regard. But here's something else I've learned about eating out. Unless you live in like New York city, restaurant food is not good. It's not very good. No. I'm sorry to tell you that, but like your favorite places, like it's just not good. And I, and I don't mean that like PF Chang's is not good. Well, we all know that I'm talking about like your, your, your $80 steak place that you go to. It's not that it's not that good. It's okay. And I'm sure this, I'm sure the meat's good, but their sides aren't very good. Like I think about the nicest steak place that I know of in Fort Worth, um, you know, which is that's steak central, you know, in Texas, it's a really

nice steak place. I mean, it's, it's an, it's an easy $80 meal. The steak's good, but the salads, they kind of suck. The sides are okay. The drinks are decent, but like if, if you actually put in some time and learn how to cook, you can make all of those sides better. And you can make a steak that's almost as good. Yeah. You know, so, so with that, that's the other thing about eating out for that, for our family, we've just found over the years that like, you know, we've, we've, we've been to restaurants that are extremely good and then we, then everything else pales in comparison. So we just don't want to go out. It's just not even worth the time and the money. Yeah, I concur. If I go out to eat, I'm either going to do breakfast where I can pretty much get what I get at home, and it's mostly because it's a social aspect, which is why a lot of people eat out.

And then I go to sushi, but I'm not getting tempura and all these maki rolls. A friend of mine once said that's not proper. It's not proper. I get nigiri. I get sashimi. I get, you know, edamame without salt. And I don't do the soy sauce. I just use wasabi, and it's pretty good.

It's got some pretty good flavor to it. I eat the pickled ginger. And that's typically what I stick to. I'm like a seaweed salad or miso soup. You know, all this stuff is pretty low-calorie and pretty delicious to me, but that's not what a lot of people are ordering when I'm looking at diet logs. They want to get the roll with all the mayonnaise or cream cheese or tempura. Again, it's the triple S, right?

Saturated fat, salt, and sodium. When you get these extremely flavorful, loaded up items, your palate gets used to that. And then you just want more and more fatty, sweet, salty food. And then it's hard to moderate calories with a diet like that. We had Chick-fil-A a couple days ago for the first time in three or four months. It's just been a while since we had it. And I was kind of shocked. I mean, I knew this, but I've been so used to the food that we've been cooking. Man, that was so

freaking salty. It was ridiculous. And we always get the same thing. I get the 12-piece nugget meal, the fries, and I get a diet lemonade because that's the best drink they make. It's better than the regular lemonade. I have to try it. It's pretty good. But yeah, man, even the nuggets, right? You just leave out the fries. Even the nuggets are just like, I mean, it like burned my tongue after the box because there was just so much sodium.

And you don't realize that when you get used to it, right? If you hit the Chick-fil-A once or twice a week, you're just used to it. That's the level that you need to get your fix. But, um, yeah, man, you pull that away. And like, we always put a lot of salt in our food here at the house. Like, you know, my wife will salt it while she's cooking it. And then the first thing I do, a lot of times I put more salt on it before I even taste it. So we're not scared of salt or anything around here, but I mean, the magnitude is not even close to the same. That's why I started making my own burrito bowls. I got sick of Chipotle being so damn salty. Yeah. Yeah. 14,000 milligrams of sodium. Yeah. Mine are way better. Yeah. But

so anyway, I just, I point that out because I'm like, I just want to challenge your assumptions because a lot of people, they're just like, well, you know, but I go with there with my friends and it's like, but it's really good. It's just my favorite place to go when we want a date night and like look i i get it it's not it's i'm not saying don't have the date night don't hang out with your friends i'm just saying like i want to challenge your assumption like the restaurants aren't very good no so you know so why go to them all the time then yeah go out for a drink you know it's easier to moderate sure you. But don't get a cocktail. Get a spirit.

Get a beer. But the biggest thing is just understanding whether your goals are compatible with your lifestyle. You have to answer that question first because this is what it entails. You're going to have to scale back on this stuff. I've eaten out. I've had holiday dinners the last two months, and I've done just fine. I've been doing this a long time. I call myself an advanced dieter, I guess, for lack of a better word. I haven't had a diet in five years, which is nice. But, uh. It's damage control, though.

Yeah. When you're eating out, right? I don't think holidays are damage controls because they're limited by definition, right? You know, there's only one Thanksgiving year. There's only one Christmas a year. But yeah, if you're eating out a lot, it's at best, it's just damage control, I think. So yeah, I think that's probably a good place to stop, huh? Now that we've rained on everyone's parade. Yeah, we're pissing people off. But you know, this is the reality of it. That's when you're cutting weight,

the priorities change. There is a level of intent required. You know, it is a diet. It's always a diet. If you're losing weight, it's a diet. You are under eating. It is a diet. Don't eat that much differently than you plan on normally eating. Now, if you're eating crap all the time, then you're pretty much committing to changing that lifestyle of yours.

But if you're eating crap all the time and you're going to diet and you're going to go back to eating crap all the time, it's not even worth it, you know? Yeah. of yours. But if you're eating crap all the time and you're going to diet and you're going to go back to eating crap all the time, it's not even worth it. You know? Um, you know, this, the lifestyle part of it is your food choices, you know, they're, they're just things you can't eat all the time. But, you know, along the way there, there is a way to change your food environment. And I think we should, we should explore that a little bit more. You know, I, we need to talk about cooking too, at some point, cause I find a big, a big thing with people who struggle with, with this sort of like, you know, uh, changing their food environment and getting away from snacking and getting away from eating out is they just don't understand how to cook. You know, they maybe can follow a recipe, but they don't understand the basics of like

how to put together a tasty meal that they're going to want to eat. So, um, we'll explore that some more, but you know, just think about ways that you can change your food environment. Go back and listen to the snacking episode again. Just throw out those mocha ice cream sandwiches and the crumpets. But by the same token, if mandarin oranges is what it's going to take to get you to eat some fruit, that's okay.

Just be consistent with it. Yep. Yeah, and I think that's probably a good stopping point there so well thank you for tuning in to the weights and plates podcast you can find me at www.weightsandplates.com or on instagram at the underscore robert underscore santana or weights double underscore and double underscore plates. All right. You can find me at marmalade underscore cream. And you can go to marmaladecream.com to find my website and my contact information. Yeah.

Send me a message if you're interested in coaching. I do online coaching. I also offer form review and custom programming. So if you're interested in that, give me a shout. I'd be happy to help you get started.