Weights and Plates Podcast - #4 - Nutrition 101 for Training and Fat Loss

Episode Date: June 12, 2021

Today Robert and Trent demystify the nuts and bolts of nutrition for productive training, fat loss, and health.   Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana   Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream https://www.marmaladecream.com

Welcome back to the Weights and Plates podcast. I'm Robert Santana. I am your host, Trent Jones. Our co-host is joining me today. Howdy, folks. So we're going to pick it up from kind of where we've left off the last few weeks. And let's, you know, kind of dig in a diet and kind of get started there on nutrition. I think that's what a lot of my listeners are probably more interested in, given that I'm a RD that also trains, but kind of a rarity in that sense. Right, right. Yeah, it's funny. Man, in the world of infotainment and information, nutrition sells. It's like sex. It's like sex in magazines. Nut sexual performance, gain muscle mass, lose body fat. I mean, everybody thinks they can cure everything with a diet these days.

If I just eat these sweet potatoes, I'll have that six pack. It's better than Cialis. Well, so we left off the last episode talking about the physiology of weight training and why when you train heavy specifically, kind of what different processes kick off in your body, the hormonal response, the muscle building effect that intensity and heavy weights have on your body specifically. specifically, and we kind of hinted at the fact that when you build a lot of muscle mass and you train in the fashion that we're talking about, you actually start to digest, like when you digest food, when you take in food, you actually start to partition those nutrients out to your body parts that need them in a different way than someone who does not train or someone who trains without the strength training component. So muscle mass actually starts to affect the way that your, the stuff you intake, the stuff you eat gets digested, right?

Absolutely. And the way that I like to kind of introduce this topic is I, um, like to talk about activity in general as a general topic and then kind of build from there. So you have a continuum, right? You're laying on your ass, you know, sleeping or maybe just laying on your ass being lazy, right? And that's probably about as light of intensity as you can get because lying down, you don't even need your postural muscles to stabilize you, you know, whereas you're sitting on the couch, there's some sort of muscle activity going on there. So lying down in bed is, you know, probably about as low intensity activity as you can

get. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have, you know, one RM squat or a one RM deadlift, or even, you know, a max clean and jerk. If you're looking at explosiveness, right? We're throwing a shot put, doing a sprint. That will be considered a high-intensity activity. So a lot of the time I find that uninformed readers or uninformed clients or gym members tend to conflate the terms. They think that because something feels hard, therefore it's intense.

And intensity, from the standpoint of, you know, exercise physiology refers to load, you know, how close to your max you're performing. And that could be a max squat, a max deadlift, you know, a max sprint in terms of running, right? You have your low intensity, you know, cardio or low intensity run, which would be a jog, a light jog. And then a high-intensity sprint would be like an all-out sprint. A high-intensity run would be like an all-out sprint. So intensity you really want to think of as maxing out something you can only do once with an all-out effort that can't be sustained. When you start lowering that intensity, the activity gets easier. So that's just the first

thing to understand. There's other terms that we use and, you know, introduce them as they become relevant to the conversation. But how this pertains to diet is, you know, obviously the lower the intensity of your activity, the less additional calories you're going to burn from activity. Notice I use the word additional. Most of the calories you expend come from being a living, breathing, functioning human being. So there are things going on in your body that happen without you doing them intentionally. So when you breathe, you're not going to stop breathing or you'll die. Your lungs contract, but there's also involuntary contractions of the lungs as well. You don't have to make your heart beat. Your heart's just beating, right?

So there's all these things going on in the human body that require energy, that don't have anything to do with your voluntary movements that you perform. So that's one of the other things that I run into is people think that if they're sitting around, they don't deserve to eat. This is kind of one of the disorder eating patterns that have developed as a result of, you know, basically scientific literature taken out of context and anecdotal reports in fitness publications. You know, it's, oh, you know, this mode of cardio is better for fat loss, you know, or if you don't lift, then you don't need carbs, you know, like things like that.

And, you know, I'll clarify some of those things. Yeah, people need to, yeah, a lot of people feel like they need to earn what they eat. Yeah, and, you know, you earn a bulk of what you eat by being alive. Now, you can eat more if you train, obviously. Nobody's denying that. Obviously, activity contributes to your total daily energy expenditure, TDEE is the word or the acronym you'll see on the internet. Yeah, so about 60% of your calories roughly, this is a rough estimate, come from involuntary processes of the human body. I'd say it's higher, but typically the divide digestion from the rest of the things that your body's doing involuntarily. So digestion is said to account

for 10 to 15% of energy expenditure. So right there, just between digestion and everything else your body does without you lifting a finger, you're about 75% of your energy expenditure. Okay. Is that because like, if you're not. Is that because if you're not eating anything, at some point you would stop digesting anything, right? So your energy expenditure would go down a fair bit. Yes. So that's why they split it out? Yes.

If you eat food, you have to digest the food. And depending on how that meal is composed or what types of foods you're eating, you might require more energy to digest that food. So So to be specific, protein tends to have a higher, it's called thermic effect of food or diet induced thermogenesis. So you're generating more heat by breaking down, digesting and absorbing nutrients that generates heat. Heat equals calories. That's what calories are essentially. So eating a higher

protein diet tends to give you a few more calories burned. It's not going to double your metabolic rate, you know. So yeah, you can chomp down protein all day and you'll, you know, burn more calories than, you know, chomping down fat all day and, you know, get to fat next. So fat has the lowest thermic effect of food because it's already in its preferred form. You eat it and it just gets stored, right? And you expend some of it as energy as well. It's your fuel macro, for lack of a better word. But the way you want to think about that is before somebody says,

oh, you're not just storing fat, it's a great energy source. Well, you're constantly turning over fat cells just like any other cell of the human body. You know, you're storing fat, you're pulling fat out. So you have a rate of turnover that happens. If you eat more, if you're in a positive fat balance, which in a positive energy balance, you're going to store more fat than you pull out. That's just what's going to happen. You've taken in more calories than you're burning through this, all of these things we just talked about, existing digestion. Exactly. So this is where it kind of fits in there, right? So carbs have are in between.

So carbs are in between protein and fat. If you're on a higher carb diet, you tend to burn a little bit more calories theoretically than if you're on a high fat. So let's say the, the, if you wanted to get the least bang for your buck in terms of calories burned from digestion or thermic effect of food, you need a high fat diet. That's low in carbs and low in protein.

So protein gives you the best carb, carb will be the next and then fat. So it's kind of like, I always think about it. Is it, you know, you ever get the meat sweats? Like you go to the barbecue joint and you eat like two pounds of brisket.

And then like all night, you're just like, you're incredibly hot and just. Sometimes that's the spices. Maybe it's the spices. Okay. That's it. So, yeah. So there's thermic effect of food and then just, you know, being alive. So that's three quarters right there.

Now we get to activity. So activity, we're not even talking about training yet. We're talking about, you know, us sitting here, our postural muscles holding us up, moving our hands around, walking, sleeping, all your baseline activity, non-exercise activity. And so that could be anywhere from, you know, 10% to 25%, right? And to be on the higher end, you're probably doing some sort of training or vigorous activity, right? But, you know, if you're somebody who walks around all day, you work in a construction yard, you deliver beer, you know, you do something that constantly has you moving, you're going to burn more calories from activity than somebody who sits around all day. So that's what we're really talking about when we're talking about energy expenditure. We're talking about calories expended from activity. You can control that intentionally. You can't really make your body

burn more being alive. That's out of your control. You can eat a little bit more and compose your diet in a way that challenges your intestines more to require more energy. So that helps a little bit, but activities is one that you can modify to the highest extent. So, you know, if you run a treadmill real hard for an hour, it might burn about 400 calories. You know, it's almost a meal, you know, maybe a meal for a small female, you know, or somebody who's untrained, you know, 400 calorie meal, typically, you know, 400 to 700 calories is probably a meal, depending on the size of a person. Somebody who's highly active and has a good metabolism might need 1,000, or a novice who needs to gain weight.

But typically, an average meal is 400 to 700 calories. So you're not going to go from, let's say your basal metabolic rate is about, you know, 1500 calories and your activity without exercise gives you another 500 and you're, you know, 2000. You're not going to go from 2000 to 4000 doing exercise unless you're, you know, in the NBA or the NFL and you're doing hours and hours and hours and hours of, you know, moderate to vigorous training, you know? Right, right. Now it's your full-time job, right? Most of the people that are listening to this probably have a job and exercise accounts for a couple hours a day tops, you know, one to, probably one to three hours, you know, maybe the, you know, competitive lifter, competitive recreational, recreationally competitive crossfitter, you know, somebody like that,

you know, might be in the gym for three to four hours, you know, but most people that hire a trainer of some sort for, you know, general health, weight loss, fitness, strength, you're going to be in the gym for anywhere from one to three hours. That's not a lot of time. A few times a week, too. Yeah, not even every day for a lot of people. It might be three, four times a week. Exactly.

And you're not going to do it seven days a week either. So you're not going to burn 2,000 calories in the gym. Right, right. But you're going to burn more, and there's a cumulative effect of gaining muscle. So you have metabolic activity of tissues, right? So fat has a very low metabolic activity. Brown fat has a high metabolic activity. So we know babies have brown fat, brown adipose tissue.

And it tends to be more metabolically active. It's more vascular and uh also has what's called uncoupling protein so they release more your calories as heat versus um utilizing it as energy and they've done like studies on animals where they've transplanted brown fat and they've seen metabolic changes but uh typically use a lot of that by time you're an adult now some adults tend to have a higher content, and these are the guys that are typically bone skinny and shoveling calories and not gaining weight.

And they tend to run hot. Obviously, you're expending calories as heat, so they tend to feel hot very easily even though they're thin. You expect a thin person to be cold all the time. These people tend to run hot, and they tend to be long-limbed in terms of anthropometry. So, you know, it's pretty interesting. But yeah, when you start adding muscle mass, the way that lifting helps you, when you start adding muscular body weight, muscle mass has a higher metabolic activity than fat mass, which means that you're going to burn

more calories just having more muscle. Muscle is expensive. It requires more calories to sustain it than a fat cell does. The other thing that happens is even in the absence of fat loss, let's say you just gain muscle theoretically and keep 100% of the fat that you had to begin with. Well, now you've put a solid surface, a more dense tissue under a less dense tissue. So you end up spreading the fat out with the larger muscle belly and you appear more lean even though you haven't lost fat so it changes the appearance of the muscle so if you're an untrained person you're typically look flat you know not gonna see a whole lot going on unless

you're one of these naturally lean people but let's say you're an untrained person of normal body fat normal body weight you're just kind of flat everywhere you start pressing and squatting and deadlifting and bench but let's say you're an untrained person of normal body fat, normal body weight. You're just kind of flat everywhere. You start pressing and squatting and deadlifting and bench pressing, doing your chin-ups, and you start to see your shoulder muscles become more visible, your arms become more visible, your pecs become more visible, thigh muscles become more visible. You start to look like someone who trains, you know, for lack of a better word. And that's without any fat loss because gaining muscle spreads out the fat.

Gaining muscle requires more calories to sustain it. And then the activity that you're performing to gain muscle, the lifting, also requires calories to perform it. And the theory is that you're not expending a lot of calories in the weight room, that you might expend a good chunk afterwards. But I think in the last podcast, didn't i go into why those measurement methods don't work yeah right because you're yeah the a lot of the studies are trying to read like how much how much you're respirating yeah in between your sets uh your heavy lifting sets but you know it's not you're not really doing much during the set itself right yeah so they're trying to measure the respiration during the set, which is very little.

It's minimal. Instead of, yeah. Hey, you're not breathing. So there's that. And the assumptions behind that machine are violated because you're not in a steady state, you know? Yeah. So if you want more info on that, listen to the previous episode and I kind of go into

that. So I want to ask you something really quick though, just to kind of clarify this. So you've laid out kind of what happens to, in a basic way, what happens to proteins, what happens to fats when we eat them. But I don't think a lot of people know this. So when you eat fat and you're also in a positive energy balance, so you're in a caloric surplus, so you're eating more calories than you need. That fat gets stored into a fat cell. Like how does that work? So I think most people understand that when you eat protein, that protein gets broken down into, you know, it's constituent like amino acids and they kind of get rebuilt as muscle mass on your frame, right? We can all kind of see that process

happen when we go to the gym and we add muscular body weight. But what about fat? So does fat, like, you know, do you eat it and then it goes, like, straight into the fat cell? Does it have to go through some, like, chemical process to get there? Like, how is that working? I think a lot of discussion on this ends up turning into, again, an argument of nuance. Basically, fat stores as fat. If you overeat calories, you're going to store fat. It's as simple as that. I'm going to elaborate, obviously, but it's as simple as that. I mean, a fat cell has triglyceride in it. When you consume fat from foods, you're consuming dietary triglyceride. So that's why that fat can be easily stored as fat.

triglyceride. So that's why that fat can be easily stored as fat. Now, in order to store more fat than you currently have, you have to eat an excess of calories. So that's pretty clear too. So most people agree on that. You have to eat an excess of calories. Now, you hear some things thrown around like, oh, carbs can turn into fat. That's partially true, but again, we're getting into nuance and I'll talk about that as well. So when you're moving around doing light stuff all day, it doesn't really matter if you eat a high carb or high fat diet. And by that, I mean in proportion to total calories. So let's just use your blanket 2000 calories and you can divide those calories up in various ways. You can have a high protein diet that's low in fat and high in carbs, or you can have a high-protein diet that's high in fat and low in carbs, or you can have a high-fat diet

that's low in both. There's different ways to manipulate this. And the decision that you make when it comes to manipulating those ratios depends on your activity. comes to manipulating those ratios depends on your activity. So typically, and this is, you know, this is kind of the basics of macronutrient partitioning, substrate utilization. When you're laying on your ass, the theory is you're burning mostly fat because it's a very, very low-intensity light activity. Okay? So you're burning close to 100% of your calories from fat. So if I put a mask on you, you would get what's called a respiratory exchange ratio,

and it's the ratio of CO2 expended to O2 consumed. So you've got the respiratory exchange ratio. It's the ratio of CO2 produced, so how much carbon dioxide you're breathing out to the amount of oxygen you're taking in. And that can range from 0.70 to 1.0. And the idea is that 0.70, you're burning 100% of your calories from fat. And 1.0, you're burning 100% of your calories from carbohydrate. Again, this also assumes a steady state. This is one of the main things you got to remember when you're talking about indirect calorimetry or measuring calories using gas exchanger, the air you breathe out. So there are things that influence that.

Obviously, if you're sedentary, you're going to burn more fat, assuming that you're on a mixed diet that's not necessarily high in carbs, because diet can influence your respiratory exchange ratio, and specifically, carbohydrates can. If you eat more carbohydrates, your respiratory exchange ratio goes up. So if I just sit here and I have the mask on, and then I drink a bunch of Kool-Aid, my respiratory exchange ratio or RER is going to get closer to one. Maybe not necessarily one, but it might go from 0.76 to 0.89 or 0.9. You might see that, which means I'm burning more carbohydrates just by consuming more of them, right? Okay. Yeah. That's a way that diet can impact it what's interesting about fat is if you start consuming more fat it doesn't change so more carbohydrate consumption equals more

carbohydrate oxidation and acutely obviously you know but more fat consumption does not equate to more fat oxidation if you consume more more fat and your carbohydrates are held constant, most of that fat's getting stored. If you get into a positive energy balance or an energy surplus or a caloric surplus, whatever word you want to use, you're eating more food than you're expending, you're going to store all that fat. You're going to burn off those carbs. That's just the very basic tenet of that. Now, you could flip that. If you reduce your carbs and get into ketosis, you're going to burn more fat and you're going to burn less carbs. So this is where the whole, well, a low-carb diet makes me a better fat burner. If I just eat a

bunch of sugar, I'm just not a very good fat burner. Well, again, this is where these arguments lack context. Yes, that is true, but what are we talking about here? We're not talking about body fat. We're talking about the fat you're consuming, right? Yeah, right, right. Yeah, that's dietary fat versus body fat. So let me make a guess here,

because I actually don't know the answer here, but I can guess that the reason why if you held your carbs constant, but you ate a lot of fat, that you would just store that body fat. And then if you held your fat constant, but you ate a lot more carbs, you would just burn more carbs is because your muscles act as a sort of sink for extra carbohydrates. And your body can sort of absorb those for other uses. Am I right there at all? Somewhat.

If you train vigorously and you take in carbs, you're going to replace your carbohydrate storage depots, which is mostly your muscle. It accounts for most of it. You store about 400 grams of carbohydrate in your muscles and your liver stores about 100 grams and you have a little bit in your kidneys and body fat cells and whatnot and that's called glycogen that's your stored carbohydrate but the reason that you don't burn more fat by eating more fat is because the body's lazy.

The human body's lazy. It likes to be efficient and it's much more metabolically efficient to store triglyceride as triglyceride, you know, undergoes no conversion. You know, you eat it and it goes straight to your fat cells. Yeah.

Well, well, that kind of makes sense. What you just said right there. Like, you know, if you think about what does the body have to do to a carb to turn that into fat? It's possible, but chemically it's got to go through quite a lot of conversion, right?

To take a carb that you eat and turn that into triglyceride that you can put into a fat cell. Absolutely. And that's called de novo lipogenesis. So basically lipo, you know, you think of lipid, think of fat. Genesis, you think of making. So you're making fat from another source other than fat, right? Yeah. And it's a long conversion metabolically.

I'm not really going to go into the biochemistry of that here. That's not what we do here. But I know it. My girlfriend has it memorized. That's like what she lectures on, right? Oh, yeah. She teaches macronutrient metabolism. So she has every step memorized.

I can explain it more generally. Yeah, yeah. But basically, the carbohydrate has to get broken down, and components of that can be used to turn into fat and make fat, to make triglyceride. I would imagine that you lose a lot of energy, though, in the process of doing that. Like, you know, if you take in one gram of carbs and that becomes body fat through this lipogenesis process, you're not getting the same amount of energy as you would have from just burning that carb as fuel. Well, yeah, that's why typically, in theory, in order to induce that, you have to eat. Theoretically, you'd eat more to make that happen.

So in order to trigger de novo lipogenesis, you have to eat greater than 100% of your total daily energy expenditure from primarily carbohydrates. So if you're burning 2,000 carbs a day, then you have to eat 500 carbs. If you're burning 3,000 carbs a day, then you have to eat like 600 carbs or actually have to eat more than that because that just gets you to baseline, right? But typically nobody's just eating carbs, right? You're not just going to sit there and eat, you know, 10 pounds of apples, you know? Yeah, yeah. So that kind of makes sense to me, like intuitively, if the body is looking for the efficient way to do things, why would it take these carbohydrates and try to turn that into fat?

Knowing that you're going to lose something in the process. Whereas, you know, you could just take fat and then turn that easily into fat, much, much, much, uh, cleaner and more energy efficient way to do things. Of course. So, um, if you're one of these people, so you have extremes, right? So if you're one of these people that drinks, you know, a gallon of Coke a day, and there are people that do that, you know, right. Right. You know, case, case of soda, regular soda a day and and there are people that do that you know right right you know case case of soda regular soda a day you know you're probably getting enough sugar there to get some of that but then most people don't just drink a case of soda a day and just have that you know people eat other foods here oh you know most people are on a mixed diet they're not getting

100 of one macronutrient and zero percent of the other two that's just not how it works but typically the guys that are drinking you know two two liters of coke a day are probably eating pizza too you know and they're probably eating hamburgers and french fries um so it's challenging to do that and the point that i was getting to there is if you're you know eating a typical western diet you know regular soda you know and by regular soda i mean like a of it, pizza, French fries, things like that. They have one thing in common. Most people think, oh, well, the carbs.

They're high in fat, too. So French fries are fried potatoes. It's not just the potato. There's all that oil that you deep fry them in. A hamburger is not just the 70-30 burger patty and the cheese. It's also the bun. Right, yeah. The bun that's just soaked in butter and oil. just the 70-30 burger patty and the cheese. It's also the bun, you know? Right, yeah. The bun that's like just soaked in butter.

Oh, yeah. It's also soaked in butter. So, you know, people like to bash the bun, but the bun by itself isn't quite as hazardous as the bun that's soaked in butter. Right. It's delicious. First rule of nutrition. I've said this before. Fat tastes good. Yeah. So, you know, the easiest way to get fat is a high carb, high fat diet, which is, you know, your typical Western diet. Oreos, you know, high fat, high carb, you know, you're getting a bunch of sugar, you're getting a bunch of fat. So it just cracks me up when these sugars outlets go on and on and on. It's like, how many people do you know that are morbidly obese from eating too much fruit or potatoes? You know, it's rarely

the case. They're usually eating other stuff, you know? Yeah, yeah. So that's kind of where I get into that. So, yeah, you know, if you're a sedentary person and you're eating a diet like that, well, first of all, let's go back to how I started this whole conversation, activity levels, right? If you're sedentary and you're theoretically burning mostly fat, because let's say you're on a mixed diet, and then you start pushing a bunch of carbs and a bunch of fat, as we just said, your body's metabolically efficient. You're going to store all that fat. You're going to burn off most of those carbs. It's probably very hard to convert those carbs into fat, but that's irrelevant. That's a stupid argument to even get into, but yet everybody likes to get into it. You're talking about nuance here, right? Yeah.

It's a stupid argument to even get into, but yet everybody likes to get into it. You're talking about nuance here, right? If you want to induce de novo lipogenesis, you're probably eating 500 plus carbs a day. And I have lifters that don't even eat that. Some do. I've had guys go up to 600 before. I've heard of guys going up to 700. But that's more on the bodybuilding side.

I don't know what kind of drugs they were on. That changes things too. Right, right. But most of the clients that I've worked with have had pretty good success eating under 500 carbs. But that's a different conversation. The whole point here is to consume four, five, six, 700 carbs a day, that requires work unless you're one of these people that drinks a case of Coke a day. Yeah, right. Or eats a cake a day. You have people that have extreme diets, certainly.

But a lot of fat guys I talk to aren't eating like that. They're eating a lot of big portions of meat, potatoes, cheese, eating maybe two, three times a day. And then they're staying fat because they're packing their calories in through a lot of fat because it's more efficient from an eating state. You're chewing less food. If you have a high-fat, high-protein diet that's like moderate in carbs, you can get fat on that, but you're not going to eat a lot of food.

So I remember when I was working in a dialysis center, I'd get the patients would come in, and they'd say, well, I don't eat that much, so I don't know why I'm fat. And I was a new rookie dietician, so I didn't really put too much thought into it. The patient load was huge, and I was still getting used to the job, and I'm worried more about the clinical stuff. Once I started working in weight management and strength training and body recomp type stuff, and the more clients I took there, I started looking at it more closely. If you're eating a bag of Cheetosetos you're getting a ton of calories for a small amount of food you know if you eat like a turtle from fan from what is it fannie mae the

candy the chocolates those turtles oh my gosh 400 400 calories for a little piece of shit you know yeah right right yeah um that that's that's a good thing to point out just because like so a couple just basic things there. It's like carbs aren't making you fat in and of themselves, right? No. But there's a lot of, that's just, that's a persistent sort of myth or idea. Like, people are just scared to eat carbs because they're like, as soon as I start eating carbs, I'm going to get fat. But it's like, no, that's not what's doing it in your case.

But most likely, unless you have an extreme diet, that's not really what's going on. And then I think the other thing that you just mentioned there is, um, it's, it's so easy to eat a lot of calories if you, in a small package, um, in a small amount of food, just because of the processed food that we have access to in our westernized society you mentioned earlier in the show that you know most of your your calorie burn comes from existing and it's you know a an average person let's say on a 2 000 calorie diet that's their that's just sort of their their tde so that's what they need to expend to stay the same weight, you know, they might burn 400 calories by running an hour in the treadmill. Okay, there you go. You have earned, if you will,

you earned one of those chocolate turtles with the nougat inside, right? That's it. That's a one thing. So there you go. There's an hour of work that it took to get to those 400 calories. So yeah, I like to point these things out because I find when I talk to people in the gym that I coach, these are things that people haven't really put two and two together. It's like a lot of people just really,

like they might look at the back of a piece of packaged food and read the chart, but they don't really have a sense of the scale of the numbers, right? Like 200 calories, 400 calories, 600. It's like, ah, I don't know what's a lot or not. Right.

That's just to put it in context for you. Yeah. And when you sit here and try to like look at these macros individually, if you eat a high carb diet and control fat and keep fat constrained, even to a moderate level, like I'm not even saying like go low-fat because, you know, I always get the zealots that, you know, jump at me and say, oh, you're promoting low-fat. And it's like, well, no, actually no, because low-fat has its problems too. Low anything is hard to follow, first of all. Low-carb is hard to follow. Low-fat is hard to follow.

But fat is so intertwined with our commercial food industry. It's in everything. You can't go to a store and buy commercially prepared food without getting what I would consider extraneous fat. Everything has fat in it. It's like, why does it have fat in it? It's like you're going to the fair. Deep fried Oreos, remember those? Oh, my gosh, yeah.

It's like, do you really have to deep fry Ore, but no, that's an extreme case. But like, yes, we do. Exactly. Yeah. Everything's big in Texas. I still want to go to that steakhouse in Amarillo with the 72 on steak. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I wouldn't stand a chance, but I don't think I would. I would love to watch you try that. Have you tried it? No. Anyways, so, you know, if you go to a gas station, convenience store, like, you know, fast food restaurant, like places where people typically can get food quickly, everything has added fat. Everything has added sugar, too. So, you know, I'm not going to sit here and, you know, say, oh, carbs are, you know, perfectly fine in our diet, too. But it's just that carbs are easier to identify. In other podcasts, I've mentioned that fat is the undercover macro. You can't visually see it.

So if you're on a diet that's low carb, it's easy to just brush the potatoes off or not get the sweet, you know, beverage or go for the diet beverage, you know, you can visually see that, oh, that's carbs, you know? But you can't see fat. I mean, you might see the glaze, but it's like you have no idea how much is on that, you know? Right. But you can't see fat. I mean, you might see the glaze, but it's like, you have no idea how much is on that, you know? Yeah. I always like to point out the steamed broccoli that you ordered at the restaurant, you know, it probably has like six tablespoons of butter melted in there too.

Oh yeah. Some of the most, some of the most highest calorie foods are salads. Yeah. Because yeah, the salad dressing stuff. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great point. And it's not, that's a great point.

And it's a very small volume of food because it's invisible, essentially. You can eat a lot of it easily. So that's the whole point there. Volume of food is not necessarily related to the caloric content. Or it's not a good indicator of caloric content. Just because you have a small plate of food does not mean you're eating a small amount of calories. So what I find is when I get people that have been low carb and then they start lifting, and this is where I'm kind of taking all this, I tell them what to eat. They're like, this is so much food.

And then they're like, why am I losing weight? Right, right. And we've got your calories to a good place, but you're also upping your volume because you've pulled a ton of fat out. And remember, carbs are four calories per gram, fat is nine, so you're getting half, you know, you're eating double the amount of food for the same number of calories. That's, you know, one way to explain it. Not always 100% the case, but in general, it's a pretty good analogy. So back to activity. So, okay, you're sitting around, you're burning mostly fat, right? Then you start doing stuff.

As you start, quote, unquote, doing stuff or becoming more active, you start burning a little bit more carbs. And as that activity becomes more intense, remember what I said about intensity, it's a max effort, whether it's, you know, a squat, a bench press, a sprint, a shot put throw, you know? Yeah. Hitting somebody as hard as you can in the face, you know? Like these are explosive or highproducing bouts of activity. The closer you get to that, the more you rely on carbs. Remember that 0.7 to 1? When you're at 1.00, you're burning 100% of your calories from carbs according to the respiratory exchange ratio, the gas exchange, metabolic cart.

That means you're doing an all-out effort. exchange metabolic cart, that means you're doing an all-out effort. And then once it goes past 1.1, which it could, that suggests that you're an anaerobic metabolism. And they really have no idea what the hell you're burning at that point. That's what annoys me about the metabolic cart. It's over, its utility is overstated often. It's exaggerated. It's like, okay, you don't know what's going on anaerobically. So like when you're lifting, only way you're going to know how much you're burning during a lift or a sprint or anything

like that is if you have somebody in a direct calorimeter that's measuring heat, you know, heat production. But the point is, yeah, so you went from sitting on your ass, now you're going for walks. So you're probably, you know, burning, you know, 50-50 fat to carbs, probably a little bit more fat. So if that's all you're doing all day, okay, yeah, that guy can go on a keto diet. There's other problems with that, but, you know, he can go on it and he can function fine, you know. Body starts producing ketones, you start preferentially burning fat for energy because that's mainly what you're eating. You're not eating many carbs. But if the guy wants to lose weight, he still has to go on a lower calorie

diet. You know, you can't escape that. So, you know, yeah, you're a better many carbs. But if the guy wants to lose weight, he still has to go on a lower calorie diet. You can't escape that. So yeah, you're a better fat burner. You're just using the fuel that you're consuming from your diet. But to lose body fat, you have to create an energy deficit. Whether the diet is low fat or low carb or high protein or low protein, you have to eat less than you're putting out to lose fat. So the better fat burner argument just means that, okay, well, I can, you know, use the fat in my steak, butter, and bacon, you know, to, you know, function and not, you know, collapse. And you could do that because you're mostly, you know, sedentary, you're doing light activity, even a little bit of moderate activity you might be able to get away with. But as that intensity goes up and you get closer and closer to a max effort,

But as that intensity goes up and you get closer and closer to a max effort, you find that you can't train that way. And this is where, you know, macronutrient distribution starts to matter. So what do I promote? I promote weightlifting, typically low rep, high load, you know, five reps or less with higher load. You know, once you've been doing it for a while, you know, I like to go up to 10. I never really typically go up to 10, but even 10 reps with a weight is still fairly, it's a moderate intensity. Um, it's not like a run, you know, it's not like a jog, you're putting weight on you and you're doing it 10 times, you know? I always tell people like whenever I do, you know, I'll have somebody do, uh, eight or 10 reps for an accessory lift, let's say I'm like, look, you know, you need to choose a weight where those last two, those last

two reps should be like pretty dang challenging. So it's not, we're not doing these eight and 10 rep sets light either. They should, they are relatively heavy too. No, they're hard. You start doing 20s and 25s are different kind of hard. There's more of a, you know, respiratory component, but you know, it's not cardio to do 10, you know, I don't, I don't like novices doing 10s because like I said before in the other episode, you know, that it's more opportunities to fuck up the lift. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so when you're strength training, now you're going to be utilizing more carbohydrate. But before I even go into that, let's back up here.

So you have three energy systems. I didn't even mention this. So we've talked about how when you're sitting on your ass, you're burning mostly fat. That's basically your oxidative or aerobic energy system. So that's what's primarily active. The other two that I'll go into next are also active, just at a much more lower amount of activity because you're just sitting around. You don't need to burn up a bunch of carbs because the activity is so light. You can take your time and burn that big complex fat molecule and get all that wonderful ATP out of it.

Then, you know, let's say you do an intense effort like a clean and jerk, you know, a max clean and jerk that happens very quickly. Well, you can't break down a fat molecule during a clean and jerk or a shot put or, you know, one RM squat even. You know, the clean and jerk is more of an explosive expression of strength, strength expressed quickly as we say it. So it's not considered an all-out, let's say, what do they used to call it? It wouldn't be considered like an all-out max in terms of being able to pick something up. That would be a deadlift. But a clean and jerk, you know, if you're doing a PR clean and jerk,

that's a good expression of explosiveness because you're either going to get it or you're not. Right. And you can't do a single pound more than that. So, you know, you got to draw the line somewhere there. That's, you know, max effort explosive event. But anyways, when you're doing that, you're using primarily creatine, your creatine phosphate energy system, your phosphagen system, or your phosphocreatine system, depending on which book you're reading. And you blast through that pretty quick. You could only, that's for like five second bouts of exercise, you know, under 10 seconds.

And, you know, if you do three clean jerks in a row, by the third one, you're probably using a little bit more carbs too, you know? And then if you do, you know, six sets of three or seven sets of three, which is, you know, not atypical for weightlifting, typically at the start of a block. They tend to do a lot of singles and doubles for most of their training. But as you add more sets to it, you're breaking down a little bit more carbs. But this is also why creatine is so popular in explosive type activities. So like sprinting, weightlifting, any type of explosive activity, these guys tend to take creatine because now you have a little bit more. So you might be able to squeeze out a couple more reps with that weight,

you know? Right, right. You know, it's my understanding is doesn't really help you with one RM because there's other factors at play there. There's neuromuscular factors at play there, but you're basically extending that energy system out that normally lasts five seconds. You might get a few more seconds out of it, which may mean another rep yeah exactly another rep and a heavy triple or you know um yeah and so my understanding is that essentially you have a certain amount of atp that's stored in muscle cells so it's like intracellular that's available for like immediate use and and then what you just mentioned that creatine phosphate, it's just a molecule in the muscle cell that, that basically can recharge spent ATP. So you do that first rep, you do that really heavy cleaning jerk, you're relying on ATP that's right there, ready to go like that. Yep, exactly. then that's when that creatine phosphate is going to kick in and recharge that adp diphosphate back into new atp and it's ready to go real fast yeah and then so i'm just kind of stepping down

the the ladder of of energy systems here and then you know but that only you only have so much available there yeah and so eventually you have to start breaking down carbohydrate sources of energy into atp and i think that's yeah yeah so just kind of just kind of set the stage there for uh it kind of there's a ladder or you know speedometer you know however you want to look at it of of this stuff exactly and you're using a little bit of fat too it's not zero percent fat but it's very a very small contribution to that type of activity because it takes longer to break down that fat cell. So then, in terms of carbs, lifting is not a glycogen-depleting activity. You're not going to deplete all your glycogen stores from a weightlifting workout.

You know, if you're a marathon runner, you certainly can because, I don't know if I mentioned this before, but when you're these marathon runners, that's not light activity either. These guys aren't, you know, sitting there burning 100% of their calories from fat unless they're taking it easy, walking the marathon. They're not running 10-minute miles, 15-minute miles. The guys that are running to win are trying to maintain the fastest pace possible for 26 miles, which means they're running pretty hard, but they have to toe that line between aerobic and anaerobic metabolism, which puts you in a place where you're burning mostly carbs. So your RER is typically around 0.9, you know, a little bit higher, right?

Yeah. And that's if you're a competitive marathoner. You're trying to keep the highest pace you can sustain for 26 miles. So people don't understand this either. I used to be one of these people that would get confused by it. I'm like, well, they're just running. So, you know, they can probably burn more fat. Well, no, no, they're running hard for 26 miles. They're trying to stay right on the edge of anaerobic metabolism to where they're almost to a sprint, but not quite,

you know? Yeah. Yeah. That's a hard fucking run, man. Absolutely. Yeah. I, we, we mentioned this in the previous episode, like some of the paces that these guys, that the high level competitors can run, it's crazy. I mean, they're running sub-five-minute miles the whole time. It's insane. They're gifted athletes, you know? Yeah, yeah. They can't lift for shit, but they can friggin' run and run and run and run and run, you know? Right, right. Well, yeah, so I think that's really interesting, kind of these energy systems, because this is another thing, you know, they don't teach you this in biology class in high school. And I think they probably should. I mean, they should,

because we all move around. Yeah, this is stuff that we all have. We all have experience with this. You know, we all move around. We all exercise in some way, hopefully. And then hopefully if you're listening to this podcast, you're not just exercising, you're also training too. So you do want to understand at least the basics of like, what's going on, you know, when you, when you quote unquote gas out in the middle of your workouts, like why did that happen? Like what's going on there? So this is incredibly frustrating as a high school athlete. I was a swimmer and, you know, my coach came up in the 70s, so he knew swimming. He was a swimmer. He, you know, had several championships at the state level when he was at the other school before mine. And he could program

swimming pretty good, but when it came to diet, he may have had a second person come in. I don't remember if it was him or somebody else and they put the food pyramid up. I was just completely confused. It's like, what do I need to eat here? So I was just like, okay, I just need to eat a lot of food. So I would just grab stuff, probably high fat because it was high calorie, which is, again, this is another problem people have with starting strength. Rip says you have to eat 5,000 calories. And I don't disagree with that advice if you're a 130-pound guy or 150-pound guy and you're young. The problem is if you tell somebody to do something,

they're going to do it in the most easy and efficient way possible. So to eat 5,000 calories easy and efficiently, you're going to eat high fat. And then they're probably going to eat high protein because, you know, Rip also tells them to eat 200 grams of protein, which, you know, I recommend that too. That number's fine. Yeah. But the 200 grams of protein is often challenging.

150 is often challenging. Most people don't eat that way at baseline. But you can get somebody who cares about the lifting to do that. But getting 5,000 calories, if you just let them do that on their own, they'll eat enough protein, but then they'll just eat high-fat protein, and they'll end up bonking and then getting a big squat, but then they have no gas for anything else and come to me with big quads, big butt, skinny arms, big gut. And they'll say, starting strength got me fat. It's only good for lower body.

It's like, no, you only had enough energy for your first lift, dude, you know? Right, yeah. And you could still get fat, eat a lot of calories, and not get stronger. That's where I'm getting at with this. So just calories in and of themselves, if they're not distributed correctly, if they're not partitioned correctly, yeah, you could get fat and not get necessarily stronger from lifting. So that's where the macronutrient distribution becomes important. So, okay, you need enough protein because, as we said last week, you're breaking down muscles.

If you're strength training, you're adding weight to the bar every workout, then every other workout, then every week, et cetera, as you advance. And every time you break down that muscle, muscles are 30% protein and you have muscle proteins in there and you have to build them larger. They get bigger. Those fibers get bigger. So you have to feed the body more protein than you would if you're sedentary. So the recommended dietary allowance of protein for a person who's just of normal activity level, you know, fairly sedentary or lightly active person is 0.8 grams per kilogram, which is pretty low, you know, but that's supposed

to be adequate for somebody who's not doing anything hard, you know, just living normal daily life, right? You start doing hard shit, you need more, obviously. How much more? Well, that depends, you know, like I think that, you think that the ACSM and all those people and the Academy of Nutrition Dietetics, they say like 1.2 to 1.7. That's probably fine, but it's okay to overshoot. Extra protein is not going to give you kidney disease. There's no tolerable upper limit for protein. If you have kidney disease, you should not eat a high protein diet. If you're worried about accelerating that kidney disease to dialysis, that's something you should discuss with a doctor because doctors have different opinions on that. But my point there is, yes,

if you're lifting weights, you need more protein and overshooting isn't necessarily harmful because it also keeps you full, you know, keeps you nice and satiated. It helps with your insulin sensitivities. You're not getting big blood sugar spikes from all the carbs, etc. You know, there's other benefits to eating all that protein and you use it for other body proteins. Your muscles are not the only protein in the human body. You have hemoglobin, you have your immunoglobulin, so, you know, immunity is a big topic right now. All your antibodies are proteins, you know? Yeah, right, right. So, you know, skin, hair, nails, all that's protein. It's not just, you know, your biceps. So that's another misconception. You know, I get these professors,

they'll say, oh, whey protein's the world's most expensive urine. No, you're not just pissing out all that protein, first of all. You're just not using it all to build muscle necessarily. You're using it for other things. You're using it for energy too. It's not a great energy source, but you can use it for energy. Sure. Yeah. So yeah. So you lift, break down the muscle, you got to rebuild it bigger. You need more protein. Next thing, how do you break down the muscle? Well, you train and you train heavy or you train with a lot of volume. There's arguments for that. That breakdown or those training sessions, which are hard, if you're doing high volume training, that's hard too. You have to have enough fuel for that. So that's where the creatine helps,

creatine supplementation helps, but then you also have to eat enough carbs because every time you're doing a set, you're breaking down a little bit more glycogen sure it's not depleting like a marathon if you're running 26 hard miles and then you sprint that last one you know as fast as you can you can deplete all of your glycogen and then you need you know taking carbs that's why some of these guys will sip on gatorade near the end of the race because then they can tap into blood sugar they can get they can pull sugar out of their blood to keep going for a little bit longer. Yeah. Or like those nasty goo packets. It's basically just sugar gel with caffeine in it and sugar. My understanding of it is it's very helpful. Yeah, it's disgusting. That stuff is very helpful at the end of a race because it takes time to deposit glycogen and muscles are selfish.

They only feed themselves. They're not going to feed the rest of your body. So, you know, you could pull glycogen from your liver and, uh, you know, pull it from your liver into your bloodstream to keep your blood sugar high. That's, that's basically where your blood glucose comes from. The liver stores glycogen, releases the glucose into the bloodstream, done. Well, you don't have that enzyme in your muscles. Your muscles like to hoard sugar. They won't share with any other tissue. They'll share with each other. You can go from one muscle to another, you know, cell to cell shuttling. Yeah.

But it ain't going to give your heart any glucose. You know, your liver might, but your muscles won't. Yeah. So when you're lifting or when you're doing a marathon, per se, you're continuously contracting these muscles. Then you're just burning up that sugar, right? Well, to deposit more, that's a time-consuming thing. that sugar, right? Well, to deposit more, that's a time consuming thing. So, you know, taking a bunch of sugar during a workout isn't going to really deposit that into your glycogen stores, per se. But what it can do is if you're running a long race, and you're at the end, you're about to

bonk because you're, you know, tapping out what's left of your glycogen stores, you're taking that sugar, you know, goes the liver, raises your blood sugar, you can pull out of your blood now, and use some of that and get a few more, you know and get a few more miles out of that, so to speak. Sure, yeah. And go faster for a little bit longer. So that's kind of how the carbohydrate supplementation works. But the whole point here is you need carbs to fuel your workouts. You need protein to rebuild your muscles.

You still need fat for all your cell membranes and all the anti-inflammatory processes that go on in the body. There's a place for healthy fats in the diet, and I don't recommend a very low-fat diet. It's just lower than your Western diet. You might easily eat 150 grams or 200 grams of fat without thinking about it if you haven't talked to me yet. And then when I tell you to eat 90 or 80, you're like, holy shit, that's low. Well, yeah, relative to what you were eating, but that's not actually a low fat diet. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And so I'd say that, you know, in my personal experience, most people don't have, don't seem to have a lot of problem hitting a carbohydrate target. If you're like, Hey, I want you to eat 200 grams of carbs. Most people that's, that's okay. That's easy to

do. Um, they have a very hard time eating enough protein, as you mentioned earlier, because it takes some work. If you're a guy and you are trying to eat 200 grams of protein, it's not just gonna happen by choosing some high protein stuff during your meals. You actually gotta sit there and think about it,

measure it. Like, okay, how am I gonna get to 200 today? It takes some work. It's not just going to happen by accident. Um, by the same token, that 200 grams of fat can easily happen by accident. Oh yeah. So easy to notice. Yeah. I didn't eat that much. Yeah. Right. Um, I had one guy as, just as a little example, I had one guy I was helping, you know, just do some basic diet cleanup. And we were talking about some of the snacks he was choosing during the day while he's working at the office and he liked sunflower seeds. So I'm like, okay, I can see how you'd say that was a reasonable choice. He's trying to not eat junk food. He's trying to eat, you know, natural things.

But I'm like, well, let's go look up the calories in that. Cause I immediately knew it's like, Hmm, that can be high in calories. So he was eating like about a cup of sunflower seeds, shelled, just the seeds, not including the shells, about a cup of these as a snack. It's big guy. So we looked, we went and looked it up. That's like 700 or 800 calories and like 80 grams of fat. I just had a few nuts. Yeah. And he's like, that's my snack that I had. You know, that was a five minute snack he has in the middle of the day.

Well, there you go. That could be, you know, that might have been what he needed for the entire day that he got in one snack. Oh, yeah. So easy. And, you know, then he's going to go, you know, squat and deadlift and complain that he's fat and not strong. Right, right. Why did he gain all this weight and not get strong? So diet plays a big role in that, and that's how.

So fat doesn't directly contribute that much to your training. So that's the one you probably want to watch the most in terms of not eating too much of it and also the one that you can eat too much of very easily. Yeah, yeah. the most in terms of not eating too much of it and also the one that you can eat too much of very easily. I'd say that carbs, especially for male clients, carbs tend to, once you get over the protein hump and you can get them eating 150, 200 grams of protein, it is hard for them to eat enough carbs because most male clients need to eat at least 300. And you're already at one and a half times the amount of protein they need. And the And the volume is very high. And it's, you know, got a lot more water in it. And there's a lot more fiber in it. Fiber fills you up as well.

And, you know, you start eating 300, 400 grams of carbs a day. You tell somebody to do that, they don't want to do it. So that's what I've noticed. Like the guys, you tell them 200 grams of protein a day, they might struggle for a month, you know. And then they'll figure it out. And then they'll eat a bunch of steaks, right? And then drink whole milk or eat whole eggs. And they'll look at out and then they'll eat a bunch of steaks right and then drink drink whole milk or eat whole eggs and you'll look at their carbs and it's like 200 right and i'm

like no no dude you need to eat at least 300 or 350 carbs a day every day yeah when they do that they're like i'm just eating all day i'm chewing all day so you know i'd say that they're both equally hard but i'd say long term the carbs are harder than the protein once you get somebody into a routine of eating enough protein, they tend to stick to it, you know, once they kind of figure out how to game that. Sure. But these guys that have to like, they're eating to train, eating to get strong, eating to gain weight, they complain about the carbs. It's hard to hit three, four, 450 carbs a day.

Yeah. Yeah. That's true. That's true. While keeping fat low. Yeah. Yeah. It is.

Yeah. You try to eat a whole bunch of rice or, you know, that's, at some point, it's hard. So, you know, let me bring it home here for a second. Basically, what we're saying here is, once you start doing anything hard, and it progressively gets harder, whether you're a runner or a lifter or a shot putter or a football player, you know, once you start incrementally overloading yourself. So in our case, we're strength coaches. We'll talk about lifting, you know, but this applies to other sports too. Once you start squatting heavier and heavier and heavier, you need to eat more carbs and eat more protein and need to watch your fat if you don't want to become a fat guy.

Some guys don't care and they'll become a fat guy to squat 600 in a year, you know? Yeah. And I'm not going to knock a guy for that, but most people that call us don't want that. They want their waistline to be under control. And if that's what you're concerned with, then, yeah, you squat, deadlift, bench press, overhead press, and do your pull-downs, and then you follow a diet that's predominantly high in protein, high in carbs, and moderate to low in fat. And that should get the job done without getting you a big belly because that's what people ask me.

How can I get stronger without getting too fat? Well, there's your answer. Now, what about keto? Well, okay. If you're a couch potato, then yeah, it's fine if you can follow it. The other problem people run into is they can't follow it. So they'll start keto. They'll lose 80 pounds. is they can't follow it. So they'll start keto. They'll lose 80 pounds.

Then they'll gain 100 because they can't stick with keto. They want pizza again. They want French fries again. They want cakes. They want ice cream. All these things have both carbs and fat. So that's my problem with low-carb or keto. I know other guys that they'll have steak and eggs for breakfast,

and they won't eat all day. And then they'll make themselves a burrito for dinner. And that diet is probably low-carb, high-protein, high-fat. They might have a protein shake during the day. I've seen guys that do that. And they're not training hard, and I'm like, that's just how they eat every day. And it's fine. I have no problem with that.

But if you're going to train hard, I'm sure there's outliers out there that can do it. But by and large, most people need a lot of carbs. Some people don't. Yeah. There's always outliers. I'm not saying this is 100% the case. Sure. But it's generally the case.

Like if you put this on a bell curve, I'd say most people in the middle probably need to eat a lot of carbs. Yeah. Then when you add fat loss into it, I mean, we'll do a whole episode on that later. But now you're, you know, you need to restrict calories, as we said earlier, to lose body fat. And when you restrict calories, you are, by definition, in a state of under-recovery. So you're creating conditions for you to fuck up your lifting. It's just nature of the beast. By design, you are under-recovering, so it's going to be hard to train.

The more novice you are, the more you can get through it. The more advanced you become, the harder you can get through it. So maybe we can dedicate a whole episode to that. Oh, gosh, yes. Yeah, that's the whole thing. The whole point that I want to drive home here is if you're not doing any type of training, it doesn't really matter which diet you follow. You should probably keep your protein up regardless, obviously.

It's never good to lose muscle mass. So even if you're sedentary, you should probably still follow a fairly moderate to high-protein diet. It's going to keep you fuller, keep you from eating a bunch of junk. Those types of diets tend to be beneficial for people whether they lift or not. There's a lot of data on it, and it kind of checks out with what I see in person. So there's problems with nutrition research. I'm not going to be those double standard guys that says, hey, it's all self-reported, it's bullshit, and then cite it. Well, you know, you use common sense too. You read a paper,

you say, okay, they're saying this, saying, okay, high protein diets are good to keep you full. Well, that actually sounds about right, you know, because people I talk to say this, I've experienced this. Okay, that one I believe, you know? So, you know, kind of checks out reality. But yeah, you know, if you're a couch potato follow whatever diet you want keep your protein high take a multivitamin if you need to and there you go you know and then if you're somebody who's training seriously yeah you're gonna need carbs you need creatine if you're you know an explosive athlete and you're gonna need a lot of protein and that's that's just the name of the game yeah so we can you know dig into that, we can, you know,

dig into that as we go on, you know, this topic kind of comes up a lot and different discussions, but you know, there's your basic nutrition one-on-one right there. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing how, um, I don't know, before I discovered starting strength, before I started strength training seriously, before, well well before I ever decided to become a coach I I had read a fair amount of books on diet on food on the culture around both of those like I remember the the Michael uh who's the bald guy you know he wrote in defensive food Michael Pollack is that right I can't remember his name exactly but but yeah it's like you know that guy that kind of guy and this was around the time that crossfit was big and and uh the the paleolithic eating paleo eating became popular michael pollen pollen pollen yeah that's

who it was uh but but you know it's funny because like i never like all this stuff i never got any of this information in a clear and systematic way until I started working with people like yourself that have this kind of organized. So there's so much information floating out there and so much of it is completely irrelevant. So if you've listened to this podcast, congratulations. You now know more about nutrition than the vast amount of people out in the world. Most of these guys want to be biochemists, you know, and they're not very good biochemists because they don't have a chemistry background. They don't work in a lab, but they want to sound like they're biochemists. They want to, you know, dazzle people with their bullshit. Some of which is correct, you know, from a biochemical standpoint.

There's value in that if you're working in a lab, but people that are hiring coaches don't need that. A lot of them don't want it. They're overwhelmed by it. You know, I'm not going to sit here and talk to a client about the damn Krebs cycle. You know, I get clients that, you know, think they know more than the coach and that's a whole nother ball of wax, but, you know, I find myself answering stupid questions like, what about my protein synthesis? It's like, okay, how much do you lift? Oh, I'm squatting 185, and you're a young man. And I'm like, why the hell are you asking me about protein synthesis? You don't need to ask about that. The problem is he heard some other guy on Instagram talking about it, probably shirtless, and decided that he needs to worry about that.

Or, you know, what about carbs are going to give me insulin resistance? And it's like, do you even know what that means, dude? You know, like when I first got into this as a coach, this is what I kept seeing. Like, questions like that about biological mechanisms, about biochemical pathways, and things that don't really address the fact that this person is eating like shit every weekend. He's eating a pizza, drinking 10 beers, and getting drunk with his friends. Yeah. Or, you know, eating an entire cake, or whatever, drinking too much wine during the week before she goes to bed. You get different problems with different people. But sitting here and talking to you about de novo lipogenesis isn't going to help you get your habits in order, right? But that's what I

was seeing when I first started going into coaching. And social media expanded from just Facebook and way back with MySpace. It's expanded to Instagram and Twitter and all these other platforms. I just started seeing all these infographics about why carbs don't turn into fat or why carbs do turn into fat and then all these little diagrams with all these little carbon-hydrogen bonds and whatever. with all these little carbon-hydrogen bonds and whatever. And I'm just sitting there thinking, wow, first you're overwhelmed by it because you're like, well, I can't teach this stuff. I can't now. I've been through a doctorate. Essentially, I'm almost done.

And I've taught these classes, and I've written these articles, and I've gotten myself to a point where, okay, back in the day, I memorized regurgitated four tests for the RD exam, forgot it. Well, now I'm teaching it a lot, so now I can speak to those things. But after having to write all that out and teach myself that and run lectures on it, and I started doing nutrition camps and getting feedback from the attendees, I'm like, none of this is really necessary to help somebody lose their belly. It's overkill.

You're basically creating a circle jerk of guys that just want to talk about this shit, which is fine. We do that all the time, but that's not what the clients need. That's right. Now it's come to the next level. So first it was, we're going to dazzle you with all this nutrition science, all this training science, all this exercise science, to now we're going to argue about which one's better.

And that doesn't help either. So you got all these guys that are just, oh, I'm going to debunk this guy, debunk this myth, debunk that myth. And meanwhile, you got a bunch of fat people that need help, you know? Yeah, that's right. Or out of shape people, you know what I mean? Sure, sure. Yeah. And, you know, as it turns out, it's really not that hard. You know, you need to understand some basics, which we've covered in this episode. And, um, and then you, you need to just start doing it. Like it really is so much of it comes down to actually implementing this. Like you said, it's actually building the habit to eat those 200 grams of protein or 150 or whatever, you know, the number is that you need to, to actually learn

how to track your fat and manage that and not eat too much of it. Yeah. I think that that's where the bulk of this comes down to is just understand a few basic principles and that's all you need to know. But, um, I hope this has been a good overview of, of, you know, the basics of macronutrients and how they work in your body. Like what's going on when you eat this or eat that and when you train and how you use energy. And I think, you know, this is, uh, I think we've got a lot more episodes in front of us about, you know, how to, how to put these principles into practice with training, with fat loss, with weight gain, um, muscle gain, all sorts of stuff. Yeah. So, all right, man. Well, we want to,

we want to kind of put a bow on that. Yeah. That's, that's a good place to stop for this Yeah. So, all right, man. Well, we want to, we want to kind of put a bow on that. Yeah. That's a good place to stop for this week. So yeah, let's just sign off here. You can find me at weightsandplates.com or on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana. You can find the gym at weights double underscore and double underscore plates also on instagram and uh yeah what about you trent so i i want to know who has weights single underscore and plates like who's who's the guy what asshole has that name i don't know all right and listen we need to know who that is and you need to give this to the robert santana. Please do. In the meantime, while we're tracking that guy down, I am marmalade underscore cream on Instagram. You can follow me and see my lifting

exploits there. I also offer online coaching. So if you have any questions about lifting, you can hit me up on the DMs there on instagram or you can send me an email at trent at marmaladecream.com and i'll try to help you out excellent Bye.