Weights and Plates Podcast - #63 - Diet Deloads: Stop the Non-Stop Dieting

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

When people hire Dr. Santana looking to lose a significant amount of weight, it's almost certain this isn't their first attempt at dieting. In fact, what Dr. Santana typically finds with overweight and obese weight loss clients is that they have been dieting for years. They are essentially always in weight loss mode. The problem is, they haven't lost the weight, which indicates that their compliance is spotty at best. Dr. Santana also points out that even if compliance is low and they haven't lost weight, there is a psychological toll from constantly dieting.   The solution? You need to take breaks from dieting if you want to lose weight and keep it off long term. A diet deload, if you will. Losing weight imposes stress on your body, both physiological and psychological stress, and the fatigue from that stress compounds the longer you stay in weight loss mode. In programming we take deloads to disappate fatigue when it has gotten too high and we risk overtraining, tweaks and form breakdown. The same concept works for dieting. Dr. Santana's recommendation is to limit your dieting to 12-16 weeks at a time, then take a break. During the break, raise your calories and eat at maintenance for several weeks. You'll likely gain some weight back -- at the very least from water weight due to the increased food -- but that's ok. You're disappating stress and fatigue, helping your body feel better, and improving your mental state before the next round of dieting, if you choose to continue.   Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana   Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream https://www.jonesbarbellclub.com

Welcome to the Weights and Plates podcast. This is Robert Santana. I am your host along with Trent Jones, my co-host. Yo, what's up, man? Yo, what's up, man? Mang. It's a day here. It's night over there. what's up man man the day here my night over there yeah so I was I was every once a while in the barbell club that I run I'll do like little pop quizzes you know just I try to poke people a little bit so like you know how does this stuff work cuz I think you know they're like anyone else they watch different things across the internet and sometimes get some pretty interesting ideas about how

you know muscles are built or you know how nutrition works and so I'll do like different things across the internet and sometimes get some pretty interesting ideas about how you know muscles are built or you know how nutrition works and so i'll do like little pop quizzes from time to time and uh anyway so this came up this this question came up as a result of uh one of these pop quizzes about you know hey how how do muscles actually grow like how do they get bigger like not what causes them to get bigger but how how do they actually grow? Like what are they made of? And one of, one of the lifters I train asked, what would happen if you ate a hundred percent carbs? to your musculoskeletal system. He's like, I understand you can't actually do that, but like, what if you could, what, what would happen? Like, would your, you know, would, would your muscles, like, could, could they respond to anything? Could they grow?

I have my thoughts about that, but. I mean, you'd still get the insulin signaling, but you wouldn't be getting any amino acids to rebuild those proteins, right? And you can't convert sugar into a protein, you know? You can convert protein into a sugar, you can't do the opposite, so far as I know. So, I don't know, you know, you'd probably get the novice effect and everything will go to complete shit from a practical standpoint. From a biochemical standpoint, we're not fucking biochemists here. Do you really need the answer to that question? I mean, go talk to a fucking biochemist. I'm not going to go there. It's a waste of time. You know, you got plenty of people on the internet going there. We're not going to go there on this show, except when it's a practical use, you know? Right, right. Well, yeah. I'm sick and tired of it. I'm sick and tired of people trying to turn a physical activity

into a theoretical construct. You know, go sit and masturbate in a classroom at a university if you want to do that. Yeah. That's not what we're doing here. We're trying to help. Yeah. They will gladly take your $25,000 or more or far more a year to do that in the hallowed halls of their educational institutions. So, all right. Well, yeah, I will forward that. Knowing the specifics of the mTOR pathway isn't going to get that last

squat up for you. It's not going to get you a 500 deadlift, you know? Are we writing papers for journals that nobody's going to read, but happily cite? You know, read but cite? Not read, but cite? Or are we trying to get bigger and stronger, you know? And, you know, read but cite, not read but cite, or are we trying to get bigger and stronger, you know? And, you know, again, you can sit here and make academic arguments about this shit, but you're sitting on your ass right now and you need to get under the bar, you know? Right. Yeah. Yeah. He's a good lifter. He needs to gain some more weight if he wants to push his lifts up. We've talked about that, but no, he's a good lifter and he gets after it. So, uh, I think he was just, you know, asking a, uh, a for funsies question there. But, uh, the point, the point of my little pop quiz was simply like,

can you gain muscle without gaining weight? No. And, uh, and, and I was trying to illustrate the point that I think I run into this a lot. I know you do as well. I will run into lifters that kind of want to, quote unquote, do hypertrophy. Fuck, I hate that word so much now. I can't stand it. When I hear that word now, I'm like, okay, we're done. I want to do hypertrophy. Yeah, I want to do hypertrophy.

I'm like doing hypertrophy, you know, workout. I'm like, what is that? But my whole point was like. I've been doing hypertrophy. Yeah, I want to do hypertrophy. I'm, like, doing hypertrophy, you know, to work out. I'm like, what is that? But my whole point was, like— I've been doing hypertrophy for 10 years. I think there's this idea that, like, oh, I don't really want to do the work to, like, lift super heavy and get strong. So I'll, like, just do hypertrophy work, and I'll just get, like, bigger muscles and jacked. get strong. So I'll just do hypertrophy work and I'll just get bigger muscles and jacked. And it's like, no, if you're six foot 175 pounds, you can't just do a bunch of curls or day and then your arms are going to grow. No, you have to get to be 205 for your arms to grow.

Sorry. This is a visceral response to them seeing guys on a bunch of testosterone, Anivar, and a bunch of other drugs that are lean, pumping out curls, veins popping out, and then they think that it's a visceral reaction. They see it and they attribute it to the exercises that are being done or the style of training. And then when you train that way, it's a different type of fatigue, right? You burn, your muscles get pumped up, you feel like you quote unquote got a workout. It's like a, I don't know if hybrid is the best word, but it's closer to an endurance stimulus. And we all know that endurance exercise releases more endorphins than lifting because lifting is

totally different. You're dumping a bunch of adrenaline and you're getting just rocked afterwards. You get that comatose feeling where you just want to pass the fuck out and not move. When you run for an hour and actually run hard, you get that runner's high and you get that with any type of cardio, you know, actually, but they just call it a runner's high. And that's from the endorphins, right? You don't get that from a heavy lifting session. Now, when you do eights and tens and twelves, you might get a little bit more of that. It makes you feel good. You know what else makes you feel good? Cocaine makes you feel good. Are you going to go do cocaine? I mean, if it didn't make you feel good, I don't know from experience, but if it didn't make you feel good, then why the fuck do people get addicted to it? Cigarettes make you

feel good too. So does pizza. So does alcohol. I'm sure heroin does too. I mean, we can go down the list of psychoactive substances that make you feel real good and that people can't stop doing. So just because hypertrophy quote unquote work makes you feel good, does it mean it's what's best for you? I mean, I did it for a year. It felt pretty awesome in the moment. You know, like you could sit as the great Dom Mazzetti said, you know, you could see what you are and what you were all in the same day. I don't know, you could see what you are and what you could be all at the same time. It's a lot to take in. Do you remember that? Right. Yes. That's so good. For those of you who haven't seen it, you need to Google the evolution of the lifting man. So good. But he said that

you've seen what you are and what you could be all at the same time. It's a lot to take in. Oh, the pump. It's a bump. But you know, the net result was I never had more tendonitis than I ever had in my life training that way, you know? And by the end of it, I narrowed down what was productive from it. You know, I've talked about me doing that on this show over the last year and a half, right? I did it for a year, 13 months. Here I am, I'm pretty much transitioning off of it, for the most part, pretty much off of it. I never did it for lower body. I didn't have to, you know? But I still have fucking tendonitis in my left elbow and I'm barely curling these days. You know, it's almost gone. You know, it's gone on my right. You know, it's just the left is still lingering. But, you know, I want to point this out. I did

nothing but the squat, the press, the deadlift and the bench press, and occasionally the chin up for the last 10 years. I think there were periods where I, you know, there's some rows in there during like a four-week block when I was working with a coach and, you know, stuff like that. But, you know, consistently I've done the squat, the press, the deadlift, the bench press, and the chin up. And I never had any joint pain, any connective tissue pain. You know, sometimes, you know, left side of my lower back would feel kind of off. I'd feel like a very, very like one out of 10 dull dullness down there and it'll be gone by the end of the workout. But, you know, it's hard to even consider that any type of serious pain. It's like, okay, I noticed something there, right?

Yeah. Sometimes I noticed something in my neck, you know, like noticing something and having something limit my ability to do things are two different things. I never had the second one from barbell training, just from doing my fives. Sometimes I do tens and eights, and then I work back up to fives. But for the most part, I did five or less reps, heavier weight, and I didn't have anything happen. With the exception of when I didn't know what I was doing my first year and I got coaching, that fixed that. But I never had anything happen that restricted my ability to do things. Right now, for me to pick something up, my left elbow is going to hurt,

and that pisses me off, you know? Yeah, right. And, you know, I'm recalibrating and it's trending in the right direction. The right one doesn't hurt anymore. The elbow, the tricep side, the posterior side doesn't hurt anymore. Now it's all my, you know, brachioradialis area, which is good because at one point I was feeling it on both sides. That tells you something right there. There's a few things that I learned from it. I'll elaborate on that in another

episode, but this hypertrophy shit is just bullshit. Most of you don't need it. Most of you do not need it. That's right. I will say this. Now, I do take a little bit of uh umbrage at i see sometimes lifters being like oh you know i did this program and like and had them doing some like new rep ranges or maybe they you know they did some high bar pause squats or whatever instead

of a low bar squat and uh you know they make some gains on it and then they transit transition back to a program that's based on heavy fives You know a more general strength training program and they're like, oh man, you know fives are the way you know I just wasted a bunch of time doing that. It's like fives or five fives are the only way and They make gains again too. And they're like, oh I'm just stacking weight on my fives and I'm like Well, no, like all the shit that you did before wasn't useless. I'm assuming that they're actually training and not just doing dumb shit, right? This actually was an intelligent programming change.

I'm like, no, you resensitized yourself to fives, right? And I think there is some value in that, right? That, you know, getting away from fives for a time and then coming back to it creates this sort of like new novice effect you know it's like a little a little pop in your training when you're not uh when you're when you're not sensitized let's say to that uh to that rep range again so i i see that happen like every couple years i'll see some lifters that do that and it's you know intermediates and uh and i'm like you know yeah but it's not it's not like fives are the only way it's just

that you know you've you've this is the way programming works all over a long time frame i came into my linear progression squatting 315 i benched 215 for a set of five before i ran it and i deadlifted 325 and i think my press was somewhere in the low hundreds like maybe 125 135 without you know just a strict press. Cause I'm pretty sure I pushed press higher than that, but I think I strict pressed 135 for a single, uh, before that. So I was fucking around, but I always try, I think the thing is I always try to add weight. So because I always try to add weight, you know, I got accidentally got stronger at some of these movements. Uh, I didn't understand the deadlift. And once I understood the deadlift, that went up.

But, you know, I don't know if I want to jump to this topic or stick to our original plan, but, you know, this hypertrophy shit is just weighing on my mind. Yeah. It's just like a wart, you know, is you pop it over here and then it shows up over there and then it just won't go away. You see the doctor to freeze the fucking thing off and get rid of it forever. But that's the problem. We're going to have to be—we're going to freeze it off somewhere else.

Yeah, it just—it's persistent, that little thing. Well, that's not what we want to talk about today. But it was on my mind, so I brought it up. Today, I think you had a topic for us on the diet side of things. Yeah, we haven't done that in a while. Okay. I want to talk about diet deloads. Deloads, okay.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I think that people call this various things. I've heard it called maintenance. I've heard it called diet breaks, you know, but we're lifters, you know. I think the term deload has gotten popular over the last eight years because people figure it out. So, yeah, let's start there. So a deload, I used to think it was different 330 on Wednesday, 340 on Friday, or let's say it's 100, 105, 110.

You know, not everybody's squatting the same weight, right? And then all of a sudden, you know, you miss a rep on Monday the following week. Then you miss a rep again on Wednesday the following week. You can't get that next weight up, right? We would do what's called a reset. We'd take, you know, eight to 10% off, work back up, make larger jumps in the beginning to get back to where you were, and then you should, that should restore linear progress. A deload tends to happen on more intermediate programs or bodybuilding programs because, you know, anyways, you know, you tend to see deloads on intermediate

advanced programs and bodybuilders like to use them too. And it's a reduction stress to allow fatigue to dissipate so that you can resume progressing your program the following week. Yeah. Basically it's, you know, active recovery is another word I've heard. Sure. Back in the day, you know. So deload is the most common one people use now. So you're reducing the load, typically reducing the volume. You're reducing both usually. My favorite permutation of that is reduce the volume by a third, reduce the load by 10% if it's a compound, 5% if it's an isolation exercise. And there's no hard set rule to this, but that seems to work just fine. percent if it's a compound five percent if it's an isolation exercise right and that's you know

there's no hard set rule to this but that seems to work just fine yeah i find that deloads are overused and a lot of people don't need them you know yeah that's interesting okay yeah um i think that you know if you're doing a bunch of stupid bodybuilding shit then you probably are going to need one you know yeah it's a lot of fatigue on the tendons and the connective tissue. It's a lot of fatigue. You know, I'll sit here and argue that a lot of the time the way that that's applied, I think there's a right and a wrong way to do quote unquote bodybuilding stuff. And I think that the most, the traditional programs you find out there are just way more

work than most people need, you know? But if you're doing that as written, you're going to be pretty beat up in about a month. And you're going to need to pull some of that stress back. So you might go four weeks on, one week off. When I have had to use them in the past, I pay attention to the objective data and the subjective data from the lifter. You know, the lifter's making his lifts, going up steadily, not getting any joint pain. Why the fuck am I going to stop adding on week five just because it's week five, which is what a lot of people do. I've had, I think, two to three coaches do this when I've hired coaches in the past.

Interesting. Where it's like, well, it's week five, let's deload, you know? Right, right. I'm like, well, dude, I'm on fire here. I don't want to fucking take weight off. Why the fuck do I got to do that? Then on top of it, another common error there is they take too much fucking weight off the bar and too much volume off the bar. Then the next week I get sore as hell because it's like the first week all over again, you know? Right, right. Yeah. That's interesting. You say that. I was curious how you treated that. I'm the same way. I don't think I've ever just like

programmed a deload as part of a block as part of a training block. I tend to only, and this is part of the way that I program, you know, I don't, I don't send people templates. Um, that, that might be part of the reason some people do it, but yeah, I will, I will use them proactively sometimes for my old guys when I'm, but it's always based on, like you say, that subjective data, whereas, you know, the training is going well. Now I've seen this with old guys where training is going well, they're hitting PRs, hitting PRs, but you got to really pay attention to how they're feeling because even though they might be on a roll, if they start feeling beat up, it's time to hit the deload a little sooner than you think because otherwise

they're going to run themselves into tweaking something and then then then they take a big step back a big step back and it's and it's just it's meant it's demoralizing right you know if you're like crushing your deadlift every week your heavy deadlift and then you tweak your back and then like you're not going to get back to that for six to eight weeks um that sucks so yeah so i i tend to be proactive there for everyone else that's not an old person uh it's more reactive. Like I'll notice, like you said, the objective data will say like, man, you're starting to miss lifts that you had some great momentum on. You were making good progress for the last four to six weeks. And then usually that coincides with, you know, I'm feeling beat up, just didn't have it today. You know, I thought I thought it was strong today, but just, you know, the fatigue is clearly there, even though they're putting a lot of effort into the lift. Well, then I may be like, OK, you know, sounds like you're pretty beat up right now. You run into a wall. Let's take a deload and we'll take a week.

But I do that as needed because I'm with you. If somebody's got great momentum going, I don't want to break that. You know, I've had people criticize me. You know, they'll work with me for a while. There's not even a deload in here. And I'm like, well, who the fuck says there has to be one, dumbass? You've been getting stronger this whole time, you know? Right.

And, you know, I appreciate the people out there that will say something like that. Then I'll explain it and they'll understand it, you know, right. And, you know, I, I appreciate the people out there that will say something like that, then I'll explain it, and they'll understand it, you know, but sometimes it's not always the case. But, you know, as you as you were outlining that I really started thinking about because I've worked, I work with a variety of different people. And for better or worse, I've had a lot of exercise clients in my day, you know, and I still have a lot of coaches that have had to work at a commercial gym. You get a lot of exercise clients. And when you're trying to program exercise clients, they don't know they're exercise clients because their goals are goals that are obtained through training, right? Right.

But what they're willing to do to achieve those goals is very low. You know, they want to exercise their way to the results of training. you know they want to exercise their way to the results of training and you know you end up developing programming as a business model because that's just that's just the nature of things you know if you program somebody like this to actually train hard and correctly and you you um will end up losing that client more more than likely and then that person may end up not working out so it's a lose-all for everybody so this is a whole other episode we can do on this, exercise versus training. But I want to highlight this because it plays into what I'm about to talk about. So when you have an exercise client and you're a strength coach and you know what's best for them

and you know what will accidentally get them results just exercising, you know you're going to slip those barbell lifts in there somewhere, right? And then you're going to slip those barbell lifts in there somewhere right yeah and then you're going to pepper in the isolation stuff and you know you're going to give some conditioning recommendations because that's what this type of client wants you know and it's going to benefit them better than sitting on their ass or going to work with you know the guy down at the commercial gym who's going to you know have them do something silly that's going to get them hurt you know or get them absolutely nowhere they won's going to get them hurt, you know, or get them absolutely nowhere. They won't even accidentally get rid of it. If you start squatting, you know, the way we teach the squat or deadlifting, the way we, if you, let's just, let's put it all together. If you squat, press deadlift, bench press, and try to get to a chin

up and you do nothing else, you're accidentally going to progress. Even if you skip workouts, you're doing it once or twice a week. I mean, we have data on this. You're going to progress. Your body's going to change. You're going to feel better. Your posture is going to improve. You're going to get strong, right? Even if you don't get really strong at it. So that's, you know, for those of you purists out there that might say, oh, the fuck do you sleep at night? You know, programming exercise clients.

It's like, well, that's how because they're going to build muscle. They're going to get stronger. We've seen this. You know, if you even do the program fucked up, you're going to improve. So my goal is to have more people doing this than not, you know, do I want to program exercise clients as a large base of my clients? No, absolutely not. I want trainees, the bulk of my clients are trainees that

know what they're getting themselves into, and want to work hard, you know, so there's my little disclaimer. So now, back to exercise clients, right? So you're getting a quasi body building workout, quasi lifters workout, you know, strength workout, you know, it's kind of a hybrid of the two. And it's designed to go up real slow, you know. And what I've found is when people want to do lots of exercises, whether you're prescribing them, or they're doing them on their own, you're accumulating a lot of more fatigue, more training volume, more fatigue.

And if you're training in that way, then you're going to need a deload. It's like it's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. And it will fall somewhere in that four to six week range is what I've noticed. I don't think you program like this at all, right, Trent? No, no. Yeah, like I said, I'm only going to take a deload as needed. You know, I assume that we don't need one until we need one. And it becomes obvious. And this is a good point. Because, you know, as you were talking earlier, I'm like thinking of all my strength clients. I'm like, you know, I really don't deload my strength clients very often. It's very rare. Yeah. Because the only time I see a need for a deload is when somebody is doing a bunch of accessory work and supplemental work and their

total training volume is higher, you know? Yes. Which apparently, according to bodybuilders, it's not that high, you know, because I've had people complain, why am I not doing enough, you know? Right, right. And this is the frustrating part about the business when you deal with the general public who's consumed fitness publications or bodybuilding publications, there's this expectation that you have to spend hours in the gym doing lots and lots of exercises. And I can make that work and I can make that productive. I don't like it, but I can. And I've done it myself. I just said I did. And I've done it myself. I just said I did. But you need deloads when you're doing that because you build up more fatigue because you're doing more shit. Just like think of a CrossFit workout for you CrossFitters out there. If you actually train like a fucking CrossFitter and try to progress it somewhere like these, complained that I didn't give enough food. And, you know, at the time I was like, well, this shit's light, you know. Then I had to educate myself on CrossFit. This was like eight years ago. And I'm like, these motherfuckers are crazy, first of all. And second of all, I'm like, okay, I can see why this person needs to eat a bunch of calories, you know. And, you know, they're not lifting heavy, but they need a bunch of

calories because they're doing a whole lot of lifting and they're doing a whole lot of volume and they're doing a lot of endurance work on top of all that, you know? So, you know, I'm not talking about the one hour WOD, I'm talking about the people trying to go to the games, you know? Right. So anyhow, when volume is high, you're probably going to need a deload. And five sets of five is not high volume. It's high volume for. And five sets of five is not high volume. It's high volume for us lifters, but it's not high volume. I'm talking about, you know, four sets of 10 squats and then a bunch of lunges afterwards and knee extensions, knee curls, calf raises, and then cardio at the end. You know, I'm just throwing up a random bodybuilding workout.

And somebody would say it's not enough because I left out the hack squats and the leg press and the fucking sissy squats that should be in there. But I digress, you know. I think today is like the shit on bodybuilder day of our show. Oh, that's every day here. I can't get to the damn point. Okay, let's just jump to the point here. So, okay, so deload. You've built up a bunch of training fatigue and you need some active recovery. You still want to train so you don't detrain and get real sore the next week like I have in the past when this concept was misapplied. So you're going to keep training with enough volume and intensity on there to keep you ready to put a bunch of weight on the bar the next week and or the volume if you're doing that stuff, right. So for

diet, it's the same concept, right? Like if people miss, people minimize how much of a profound effect calorie restriction has on the human body, you know? And, you know, I'd say calorie surplus too, but we rarely run into problems there other than, you know, people just don't want to eat. And, you know, maybe they need to diet deload too, you know? I'll elaborate. I'll talk about that. But, you know, the general rule that I've followed is you shouldn't restrict calories. You shouldn't try to restrict calories because most people don't actually restrict calories through the duration of a diet program. They just are trying to restrict them, you know,

and they end up restricting them a percentage of the time, you know, in practice. So I say three to four months is a good upper limit for when you should take a break and then scale your calories back up to a maintenance level. You know, that's what I call a diet deload. You're actually not really reducing anything. You're increasing. You're reducing the stress. So that's why, you know, it's kind of like a deload. You're still reducing stress.

So let's go back. You're restricting calories. Now you have taken away resources necessary for training recovery, right? Which means training is going to have a more robust effect on you. You're going to be beat up. You can't train as hard. So your volume has to go up because your intensity has to go down. You can't train as heavy on lower calories.

And then eventually the effects of that training volume starts to wear on you a lot easier than it would otherwise because you're not eating enough food. So you have a bunch of physical stress here, right? Then restricting calories is stressful. It alters your hormones over time. You know, if you restrict calories long enough, your sex hormones get fucked up, your stress hormones get fucked up, right? Because you're not getting enough food. Your brain's not getting enough food, especially if you start restricting carbs a whole lot, right? So all of this adds up to accumulative stress, right? So if you're on a diet for three, four months, you're restricting calories. Let's say you're compliant 75% of the time. You have restricted calories for three out of those four months if you went to the limit,

right? And I don't care if you went from 300 to 250, congratulations, you still need a break. Because if you keep pushing that for a year to get down to 220, and you've lost 80 pounds in a year or 100 pounds in a year, the likelihood that you're going to come off of that and eat your fucking ass off and gain back everything you just lost and then some goes up with every month you've had of calorie restriction. Now, for those of you outliers that have pulled it off, for about a portion of you, guess what? You're 300 again listening to this. Okay, so it didn't work.

But then for you outliers who have kept off 100 pounds after a rapid 100-pound weight loss for more than five years, congratulations. You're fucking awesome. I want you on the show. Yeah. But, you know, my friend, a good friend of mine made this joke where he's like you know everybody thinks they're an expert you know on everything you know and uh he's like you know morbidly obese people are experts on diet because they have more experience eating than anybody else you know and uh you know he's just being crass being an asshole right but uh i have noticed this and not in everybody who's morbidly obese, but I have had

enough clients and people I've interacted with in that category to where I've noticed a pattern among them. I'm not going to stereotype and say everybody that's fat is like that or that's morbidly obese is like that. But there tends to be this theme of they've tried a lot of different diets, and understandably so, and they, and they have a lot, they've consumed a lot of information about nutrition. So you end up getting into a lot of in-depth discussions about nutrition, physiology, biochemistry, and all these sorts of things, right? And one of the things that I have to teach these people about, and I've been, you know, sometimes the really heavy folks are easier to deal with than people that are modestly heavy, you know, or skinny fat people, you know. Right, right.

Because, you know, by the time they get to me, they've done a million things before. They've learned a lot about themselves in the process, and they're willing to listen a little bit more, you know. I'm not typically getting someone who's 300 pounds and trying to lose it for the first time that that usually doesn't happen. You know, I don't get too much of that. Usually I get someone who's done it like five, six, seven, eight, nine times, you know, and they want to be sustainable. And at the heart of it, the thing that I like to highlight is, if you want it to be sustainable, you have to stop dieting full time year after year, you know, I get questionnaires where, you know, some of these people write, well, I'm always dieting. I've been dieting for 10 years. It's like, well, no, you haven't. You've been thinking about dieting and trying to diet and

maybe actually dieting a fraction of the time for those last 10 years, but you have not been restricting calories week after week for 10 years. However, this is the next point. You have been stressing yourself out about it psychologically, and that's not good for you. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah, go on. Give yourself these huge complexes. Yeah, well, I was about to say, you know, I don't have nearly as much experience at this as you do,

but I would imagine that what happens if you try to continue to restrict calories after 12, 16 weeks is you end up sabotaging yourself, right? I think the average person is going to try that. And by month six, let's say they started and they were at 75% compliance for the first few months. I would bet, I would bet that if they keep trying to diet by the time they hit month six, they're at 50% or less compliance. And if they keep going past that, they're at, you know, 25% compliance. So they're really not dieting at all at that point, you know? Um, and so you really just open yourself up to sabotage and, and we have a way humans have a way of diluting ourselves. We're really good at this. In fact, all of us are, um, we have a way of deluding ourselves that we're continuing to do the thing. And that, that one, that, you know, that obvious

noncompliance, you know, well, yesterday you didn't, you didn't do your diet. Right. And they're like, well, it was just that one time, right. It was just that one time that that happened. It's just, if that's an exception, I've been on the, I've been on the plan otherwise. And then there's the next one time and there's the next one time and then the next one. And sure enough, here you are month six, you're complying half the time and, uh, everything is an exception. And when everything's an exception, then nothing's an exception, right? It's a pattern. So yeah, that that's, I think there's probably just in just the behavioral science of this, you know, there's probably a lot of wisdom in restricting yourself to 12 to 16 weeks.

Because even if you tried to pass that, you're just not going to. Come on. Yeah. I mean, you're not going to. You're going to be thinking about it for month after month, year after year. Right. Have bouts where, you know, you do actually remain in restriction. Have bouts where you do actually remain in restriction.

But I think we tend to think about diet so much as physical inputs and outputs. You're eating food, you're losing fat, right? And it's just all physical. It's all in your body. But yeah, there's an accumulated stress that takes place physically that can alter your metabolism, your hormones, and a vast array of other things. But if you're trying to diet and you never intentionally try to not diet, as in eat like a normal amount and not eat in the context of trying to lose weight, then you're accumulating a lot of psychological and cognitive stress, right? Yeah.

And that will have profound impacts on your body. And eventually you'll get, you know, some of these guys call it metabolic resistance. You know, what I start to observe is people stop losing weight and they keep trying to lose weight. And, you know, by the time they get to me, they've been trying to lose weight for years, you know. And some of these other gurus, if I may, you know, they say, oh, they need to reverse diet, or they need to go to maintenance, or they need to eat more. And then, you know, they don't, you know, I think it's been presented in a way that's not relatable to the client, because I get a lot of overweight and obese people that will tell me, person told me to eat more, and I gained weight, and they're fucking pissed, you know? And, uh, what's happening is I don't think the message is very clear because I, I will always start out by saying you might gain weight and it

may not be a bad thing. In fact, you are going to gain body weight because you're going to gain water weight from eating more. Okay. That is not a bad thing that is expected. And you might gain a little bit more because you've been restricting so much. But you're not going to keep gaining weight forever if you do it the way I'm telling you to do it and do this in a balanced, manageable way. But zero weight gain, if you expect zero weight gain, you need to hire somebody else because I can't promise you zero weight gain. What I can say is, yes, you do need to eat more because you have stressed yourself out beyond reason trying to lose weight for so long, trying to restrict calories for so long, and turning it into a binge restrict cycle. That's what's actually happening. So you sit here and you tell me, I'm eating 1,100 calories and not losing weight. I think I saw 800 calories before. Well, what's actually happening is you're doing that three or four days a week, and then you're

binging out of your fucking mind the other three to four days a week. Or if you're not quite that bad, you're eating well, you're eating 800 calories or 1,100 calories or whatever the number, plus a certain percentage because your counts aren't going to be accurate. Sorry, mine aren't either. And then on Saturday and Sunday, you're going to eat triple that or quadruple that or maybe six times that. You're not eating that amount of calories seven consecutive days a week

for five consecutive years. That is not what's happening. You know, be honest with yourself about this. It's not physiological. What you're saying is not physiologically plausible. So what I always try to explain is, you know, going through that, you know, low calories to high calories, that's what's happening. You know, you're under-eating, over-eating, under-eating, over-eating. And you do that for months and months and months and years and years and years.

We already talked about the physical effects of that. There is a accumulation of psychological stress that happens. And that also plays into your inability to lose body weight. So yes, the solution is more calories. And not because more calories is going to make you lose weight, by the way, it's going to get your body back to baseline, it's going to get your mind back to baseline, if you commit to it, you know, if you go into it with the mentality that you cannot allow your body to gain a single ounce of body weight, then you're going to stress out more than you're not ready, you know, you're not ready, you need to call me back later when you are, but you're going to have to eat a normal amount of food, you know, and I'm not saying you're going to have to bulk, but I'm also not saying you're going to gain zero pounds. You're going to gain some body weight. You're going to eat more. Your lifting is going to be better.

You're going to feel better as a human. And overall, your overall health is going to improve. Are you going to stay heavy? Yes, for a period of time, maybe three months, maybe six months. You know, it just depends, right? And then you could revisit dieting, you know, and you can pull calories back later. And guess what? The weight loss will probably start moving again, you know.

But this idea that, you know, I have 100 pounds to lose, therefore I need to lose weight until that 100 pounds is completely gone and not stop. You're setting yourself up for failure. You know, you might do it on a crash diet. It's been done. You know, people have lost large amounts of body weight fast. So I'm not saying that's impossible, but very few people keep it off for more than five years, you know? Yeah. That rebound effect is huge with those crash diets. Yeah. This is one of those areas where the professional research and the anecdotes line up. You know, we've seen it out in the field, and there's a lot of professional research out there on it. There are journals published on this. They've looked at biggest loser contestants. Most of them gained back the weight, the ones that have won. Most of them gained back the weight and then more weight. this was back in 17 or 18, I think, 18, 2018, I took a class where we learned about this.

There was one person who kept most of it off, still gained some back, but kept most of it off past five years. And this person didn't win, by the way, she was not the biggest loser. So that's what was interesting. She lost it over a much slower period of time, and still gained some weight back and then, you know, kept off most of it. Now, I don't know what's going on now with that person. But that was a research article observing a pop culture show of the time. I don't even know if that show is still a thing. But we see it on the ground. The researchers are seeing it in the lab. It's pretty obvious that having weight loss until there's no more weight to lose in your mind is not healthy.

You know, it's going to drive you insane and it's going to interfere with your life. You know, your ability to be productive in life is going to interfere with your relationships. It's just not a good way to live. And you know that. I don't have to tell you that. It doesn't feel good to stress out about weight loss. You know, it just takes away resources that could be allocated to other things. And, you know, here we have a bias towards getting strong, you know.

But it can interfere with your job. It can interfere with your friendships, your relationships. I mean, people go out to eat all the time. It's a social culture here in America and in the Western world and lots of places, actually. Food is a big part of culture. So you sit here and, you know, you're trying to restrict, restrict, restrict to a point where, you know, you're causing disruptions in your daily life. You know, you want to live like that? You know, I mean, you may, you know, if you may, that's your right as a human, if you may. But I just find that most of the people that hire me with this problem are stressed out. And

this is how I present this to them. I'm like, you know, the further you go down this weight loss rabbit hole, the more sacrifices will need to be made, the more disruptive it is to your life. And anybody who's gotten super ripped will not deny that. Go talk to a stage contest bodybuilder, right? They will talk to you. You know, it's a lifestyle that most people will consider very weird. Yeah, it's extreme. It's extreme, yeah. It's normal in that subculture. But, you know, I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about, let's say you're a lady and you're 180 pounds and you're 5'2", you know, and, you know, your settling weight might be somewhere between 120 and 140. You know,

you've got 40 to 60 pounds to lose. You may not lose that in three months. You know, you may lose 10 because you're busy in the first cut or fat loss phase. You may get down to 170. And guess what? You have to take a break. Then you might settle into 173, you know, for a few, for a couple of months. Then you might lose 20 pounds the next time and go down to 153, you know, and settle at 155. And then maybe at the end of the year, you'll get down to like 140. Then all of a sudden, you know, you're restricting and it's interfering with your life and you just can't seem to get below that then that's just your weight now you know you're somewhere between 140 and 150 and that's that's that's where the cookie crumbles you know because getting lower than that is going to require a degree of restriction that's disruptive to your lifestyle yeah you know piss off your spouse piss

off your friends you're going to be irritable at work you're not be able to concentrate you'll be malnourished because you're not getting enough nutrients. You know, all choices you can make. People make lots of choices that are bad for their health, and I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm here to tell you what the consequences are, the risks, the benefits, and the rewards, you know? Yeah. We've talked about on this show many times that understanding the trade-offs that you're making with training and diet, uh, it's, it's important just to understand what the trade-offs that you're making and being okay with that. Um, that's, that's a harder, it's a harder thing to do.

Right. But, but yeah, that, that's a big part is just the acceptance of like what you're capable of doing in your life. And I would say for the vast majority of people that I work with, almost everyone, there's maybe a couple exceptions. People have limitations. They do not have all of the resources in their life to devote towards health and fitness. No, we're not pro athletes. Right. And I'm thinking of like, I've trained a few college kids who, you know, they don't have a hundred percent of their resources to vote this, but they have an awful lot. You know, it's, if it's a hobby of theirs and it's a, it's a strong interest of theirs,

they don't have as many responsibilities as older people that have kids and families and businesses and all that stuff. But yeah, that, I think that's a big part of, frankly, that's a big part of being an adult is understanding the resources that you have and what you're reasonably able to allocate to this task. And then just being okay with that. You know, like, hey, I've got a busy life. I've got a bunch of kids. I've got this job. I have these other responsibilities. I've got a busy life. I've got a bunch of kids. I've got this job. I have these other responsibilities. I've got a social life as well. All those are very important things. Some of them are much more important than training, in my opinion. available resources to devote to this task. Fine. That's great. Work on that, work on that first 10 pounds. And that's a fantastic goal. And then, you know, maybe it takes you several years to get there. It's okay. You know, that's okay. Um, I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but, uh, but it's, but that I think I've found in my life, um, I've struggled with this in different

areas, but I found in my life when I, when I can take a good look at the resources that I have and understand this is what I'm willing to allocate, this is a choice that I'm making, I'm going to allocate this amount of my life to this thing that I want to do, then I'm much more happy with the outcome than I would be if I'd never really do that calculus. And I'm never really clear with myself about the trade-offs that I'm making. Because usually I'll feel like for me, I always want to be the best at everything I do. And that's just not realistic with where I'm at in life. I can't be the best at everything. I still want to be, but I'm not going to be okay. So, but, um, but as long as I'm clear about that trade-off I'm making, it's easier for me to accept like, but as long as I'm clear about that trade off I'm making, it's easier for me to accept like, okay,

you know, I put 10% effort into this and I got a modest result. Hey, that's, that's fine. Cause I, cause I know what I did. Yeah,

exactly. You know, we accept that, you know, for those of you who are in sports, there's always the guy that barely does anything. There's a fraction of what you do and improves year after year. We've all seen that.

In academics, there's the guy that doesn't study and walks in and gets A+. We've seen that. There are people that do your job faster than you do. So we acknowledge this variability between humans in our daily lives. We see it all the time. Look at, put an NBA game on. You're going to do any of that shit? Probably not, right? Yeah, never. So the same thing applies to all this stuff, you know?

It applies to all this stuff. Like some people are going to get stronger faster than others. Some people are going to have an easier time losing weight. Some people are going to have an easier time building muscle, you know? And that's where you just have to level with yourself and have realistic expectations. If weight loss is hard, why would it happen fast? Come on. You know, like the thing that I think of is drawing, right? For me, like I can't draw worth piss. I just can't.

It's like the hardest thing for me to do. You know, I used to doodle in class when I'm spacing out. That's the extent of my art experience and I have no interest in it but let's say that suddenly I've got the bug and I'm like I want to learn how to draw right it would take me probably 10 to 20 fucking years just to get slightly below baseline of a pretty decent artist not even a gifted artist like I'm pretty fucking bad you know yeah but you know I understand that I'm like can i get less shittier at drawing absolutely you know if i got you know a teacher or a coach you know whatever you'd call that art teacher right something like that a

mentor sure and they taught me how to draw and i put the time in and worked my ass off i'm going to spend probably at least a decade just to get almost mediocre. Right. Like, I think it's that bad. You know, maybe a teacher would have a different opinion on it, but, like, just given how much I've struggled, I'm like, I can't even see myself getting mediocre at this, you know? Yeah, sure, sure.

But, you know, I've seen my brother, my stepbrother. He, you know, he's an animator at Disney. And, you know, he was drawn at age, you know, what, six, seven? I can't remember the first time I saw him draw something, but early 90s, I'd say, and he was drawn at age you know what six seven i can't remember the first time i saw him draw something but early 90s i'd say and he was born in the early 80s so he was like 10 years old and you know he drew the fucking tiger from jungle book because i asked him to and you know to me as a you know naked to the naked eye i'm like damn it looks pretty fucking good you know and uh fast fast forward you know 13 years later later, he's in art school, and 15 years later, he's at Disney, you know?

Yeah. So, you know, he's pretty gifted. He doesn't, you know, he will sit there and say he's a workhorse, and he is. You know, there's guys that are even better than him out there, you know, but his baseline was certainly above average, just, you know, maybe a standard deviation is the way he would describe it in terms of, you know, our audience understands is he probably says one standard deviation, not three, you know? Right. Yeah. And, you know, that's kind of what that's what I'm getting at. You know, like some people will drop cream out of their coffee and skip the donut in the morning and lose a bunch of body weight and have abs. You know, these people exist. You know, they were lean in

high school. They diet went shitty when they started working, clean up the diet and they're ripped again, you know, just like their high school self. We hate these motherfuckers, they should all burn in hell. But then you have other people that, you know, just smell a donut and they gain five pounds, you know? If you're one of those people, guess what? You're fucking pissing upstream and I'm sorry for that, you know, but you're real of those people, guess what? You're fucking pissing upstream, and I'm sorry for that, you know? But you're real fucking strong, stronger than me. You have more muscle mass than I do, so fuck you too, you know? But you can lose weight, you can benefit from cleaning up your diet, and you could be less fat, you know? You may not have visible ripped abs,

you may not even be a reasonably skinny person. I've worked with people of all shapes and sizes, and there is a certain weight or weight range or body composition range that you're going to settle into. For some people, it's real skinny and ripped. For some people, it's chubby. And for other people, it's somewhere in between. You look pretty good in clothes, but you're not ripped. You're not fat. You're not skinny fat either because you've been training. You look like you train, but you're not ripped. You're not fat. You're not skinny fat either because you've been training. You know, you look like

you train, but you're not like a ripped bodybuilder. You're not a big fat guy. So we all settle into certain ranges and you figure that out as you start putting in work and changing things. You start changing your habits and changing your lifestyle. Your body's going to change, but there are limits to that, right? And getting beyond those limits, if it's even possible, requires very weird, strange behavior that is at a time, you're going to see a body fat loss, you know, pretty easily. You know, most of you. Yeah. You know, the vast majority of you will see a loss of body fat just from cleaning up the fucking diet. And number two, there's a limit, you know.

You might, you know, lose enough weight and have a reasonable lifestyle and still be a little chubby. And how you get to a place of acceptance of that is up to you. I can't tell you how to do that because I can't tell you that, yeah, you can go lower than that, but it's going to disrupt your life. Do you want to disrupt your life? So that's the second message. How much disruption are you willing to tolerate within your lifestyle to lose that weight? And number three, and this was the whole point of the episode, don't do it all in one shot. If you have a large amount, if you can't, if you lose what you lose in three to four months, you take a fucking break. Even if you were noncompliant most of the time, because that's the next question I get, you take a break because, you know what, it's taking a toll on your brain, too. You have to take a break. That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. It's not going to magically improve. Your compliance isn't going to magically improve with another month or two. No. You know, yeah, you can't white knuckle your way through anything. No. And some phases, you know, just like some training cycles are better than others.

You know, it's the same thing. Some weight loss phases are better than others, you know? Yeah. I wanted to point that out. So if we go back to like kind of the deloading in a training context, in a programming context, one of the reasons that deloads are even necessary in the first place is because fatigue and recovery are dynamic. They're variable. They're not easy to predict and they change from week to week, especially, as I said, with people with busy lives. You know, you just can't, we've talked about this a lot of times before, you can't predict when your, you know, when your toddler is going to be up all night till 4am and you're up with them. Okay, well, that's going to ding

your recovery. Sorry. And, you know, enough of those type of things can add up to where your program otherwise would have been going fine, but you need to take a deload to let all that fatigue and stress dissipate. Well, and, you know, the same thing I think is true of dieting, right? It So those psychological factors plus all the life factors, they can add up. And so sometimes some phases of life are worse than others, right? The phase of life I'm in right now with a young child is not a great phase of life for training. I've had much better years of training. It's fine. I, you know, it took me a while to accept it. I've accepted that. And once I did, I started making progress again. Now it's nowhere near PRs for me, but I'm doing a lot better than I did six months ago. And I've added weight to the bar on a pretty consistent basis. So I'll take it. That's

good momentum. That's good. That's a good trend. Last thing I would say about, you know, that I think is kind of underrated and I'm not really qualified to speak about this in any detail, but I think this is underrated part of cleaning up your diet. Um, it, I think it's gonna make you feel better. I think it's going to contribute to your health in a way that's entirely separate from your body composition. Right. Um, I, I suspect, and I'd like to do an episode about this someday. I suspect that a lot of people out there, because of their poor diets, have terrible GI systems. Like their digestion sucks. And they've probably done a fair amount of damage to it. Some of that's stressrelated too. Some of, yeah, stress plays into this. Absolutely. But, you know, there's a lot of different things that can ding your digestive tract, right?

And you probably don't have good gut flora and all that stuff. And so I bet when you get people eating real food, not a bunch of fake shit, eating a decent balance of food in terms of a decent macro balance, enough fiber, enough water, that kind of stuff, I bet that your gut flora improves and you start digesting the calories that you do eat and you get more out of them. You know, you're actually extracting more energy from less food, right?

That's probably right. Yeah. I bet there's something there and you feel better in the process because you're, you know, your digestion suck, right? There's, there's like a, this sort of probably a lot of inflammation in balled up in that, that you're not feeling anymore. And that, that is, I think that's super underrated because when you feel good, it makes you feel more positive about the body you have today. Yep.

And it makes it a lot easier to walk through life and not be stressed out all the time. I would agree. So, yeah, you know, I couldn't couldn't I can talk to you about the science of all that But I see it telling you there's there's a big pattern out there I see a lot of people that have poor diets also have horrible digestion and they feel like shit all the time So, um if you can fix that Hey at the very least even if you don't lose any weight you feel better. I would take that. Yeah, would too. Yeah. So, all right. I think we've done enough on this. What do you think? All right. Yeah. I think we've hammered that pretty good. So, you know, let's close out. Thank you for tuning in to the Weights and Plates podcast. You can find me at weightsandplates.com on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana.

You can find my gym in Phoenix. If you're Metro Phoenix, I am just south of the airport, so conveniently located about 10 minutes from Sky Harbor, maybe five. And we have an Instagram page that I need to update. It's weights double underscore and double underscore plates. You know, I think you need a deload from saying that you're going to update the weights andates Instagram page. I do.

I've noticed your compliance has dropped. Yeah. I'm getting joint pain in my orbital muscles. Yeah. So maybe you should just like stop saying that you're going to update the Weights and Plates Instagram page for a while and come back to it in different phases. This is good. Work deloads. Work deloads, yeah. and plates Instagram page for a while and to come back to it in different phases. Yeah. Well, uh,

work deloads. Yeah. Uh, well in the meantime, at marmalade underscore cream, that's where you can find me on Instagram. Hey, I joined Twitter. I don't know.

I don't know what I'm doing there. Uh, not much, but I'm going to do something with it. I guess at marmalade underscore cream as well. Pretty easy. And, uh,

if you want to ask me any questions about training, you can email me jonesbarbellclub at gmail.com. All right, catch you in a couple weeks. Bye.