Prepping Your Summer Shredz | ETP#60

[Unknown12]: 0:28

what's up guys happy tuesday welcome back to another episode of eat train prosper today is brian and myself and we are going to be talking about preparing for a summer shred season so the reason that i wanted to do this episode is far too often i see on social media i hear from clients friends et cetera people think that in like may or late april it's time to like start ding to be like super lean and in shape for summer like you've always hoped for and my perspective you're generally pretty late to the game at that point so what i wanted to do and wro brian into helping me or signing off on this and really talking about it is i want everyone to know about getting started early right like with many other things in life getting started early is generally going to provide the best result for you so we wanted to put this episode out super early in march to help all of you out before we jump into the meat and potatoes of today's topic brian what's the latest

[Unknown11]: 1:29

well first off i also have been a victim of starting my diet too late and so two years ago i had a really successful cut and i started it in the end of may last year i bumped it back a month and started it at the end of april and that was way better but i think almost that because i started it earlier i like gave myself more grace in leeway and i i had more like refd days i even took a two week diet break and i actually hit my goal later in the second time than i did the first time so i dieted much harder for like three and a half months the first time versus the second time where i think i died it for four and a half months and it just kind of like neander and felt like it was never ending so so there is that too like maybe the the the lesson is more that the diet should be about three months instead of four and a half months but you can still start it earlier and end it earlier right so like my diet didn't end until mid september maybe starting earlier ending it in like late july and then i'm still shredded throughout most of the summer

[Unknown12]: 2:38

yeah and that's kind of one of the the notes i have here on my end a reason of starting earlier is like let's face it you're gonna have periods where you might get sick you have like a work life family thing pop up there might be re feeds diet breaks like rarely if i seen and like i obviously people like i literally do this for a job rarely do things plan out exactly in the amount of weeks as you or turn out exactly the amount of weeks as you plan them for so for that it's generally like a one thousand two week diet may end up turning into like a seventeen eighteen total like start to finish because there are periods in between where progress isn't made something

[Unknown11]: 3:17

yes

[Unknown12]: 3:18

happened there's diet breaks all of these other things so i'm gonna cover this in a little bit more depth

[Unknown11]: 3:23

yep yep

[Unknown12]: 3:23

but yeah that's it's a little bit

[Unknown11]: 3:25

yep

[Unknown12]: 3:25

shortsighted to think that like those ten to twelve weeks are gonna be all hands on and like really perfectly executed as your plan is laid out

[Unknown11]: 3:34

yeah yeah totally i didn't mean to derail updates into like the actual convo but i didn't want to forget that little piece before we moved on

[Unknown12]: 3:41

of course

[Unknown11]: 3:41

so as far as updates for me though i actually uh don't have a whole lot to say at the moment uh trainings continuing to go well it's actually kind of funny i uh on my follow my program program i uh post five workouts a week but i wrote in the write up that the plan is to try and do six every nine days so it actually ends up being a little less than five a week but just in case i post five a week and i've been without really having to even think about it just kind of following it at the rate that i suggested which was four and a half sessions a week so i'm still having to go back to like last week's in the app to go look at it and people that i know are following the program are like literally sticking to the program and are you know five sessions every week no matter what like clockwork and so it also makes me think that you know maybe the people following my program are going to be ready for a de load potentially sooner than i might be because i'm getting an extra like half rest day each week so for anyone following the program something to keep in mind but just something i thought about as i was doing my workouts this week and realizing i had to go back to the prior week to go fetch those workouts but continuing to get more comfortable with training in the commercial gym i'm actually kind of starting to dig it i like all of the equipment options still not a huge fan of the diagnostic blurring that occurs with having to make equipment swaps here and there and it's actually something maybe we talk about at on an episode i was having a conversation with ishak about it when we were training last week and he was like bro when you train in a gym like this you just don't even worry about it like hypertrophy is super forgiving you hit your target ri rs and like you have a couple movements that you always make sure you prioritize to always do at the same point in your workout but he's like at some level you just have to to be okay with it and you know put in the effort and let the effort kind of dictate your progress so so that's kind of how i'm trying to look at it and as long as i have you know one or two main movements that i do say okay i'm going to do these first each session and then the rest of it can be a little bit more malleable that's kind of helped me keep my head from exploding throughout this whole thing of of this new experience so that's where i'm at

[Unknown12]: 5:51

yeah i feel you there there was um in my current program i have incline barbell bench again for the first time and i don't even know like months and months and towards the end of our time in in arizona i just couldn't get into the gym like during like your empty hours and i couldn't it was always like being used and i had to like just just move on so my gym

[Unknown11]: 6:12

it is

[Unknown12]: 6:12

session and turn into like an hour and forty minutes on waiting on stuff and it was interesting cause i would normally do it like i would do like a warm up exercise which was like an anterior dealt like front raised like cable front race thing and then i would move right into that but like the last session i couldn't get to until like fifth on my exercise list and i was like oh well there goes like any hopeful you know hope for progress but it is kind of interesting to see too i was only i dropped one rep on my top set even

[Unknown11]: 6:41

oh wow

[Unknown12]: 6:41

only after doing it like that and so i was pretty surprised by that and i was like okay there's less uh drop off than i had anticipated because of the increased fatigue of performing you know four other movements first but

[Unknown11]: 6:53

hm

[Unknown12]: 6:53

i totally get what you're saying

[Unknown11]: 6:55

yeah yeah no totally i mean like i maybe i it is man i wish there was a way we had a study like there are studies in in fact discussing like advanced trainees doing auto regulated exercise selection versus like a strict regimented exercise selection i think it was something like you know one group squatted on monday's legg pressed on wednesdays and did leg extensions on fridays or something like that and that was what they did every week and the auto regulated group could come in and choose which one of those three leg exercises they wanted to do on any given day based on like how they were feeling and where their motivation was and i think that the auto regulated group actually had a significant increase in

[Unknown12]: 7:37

see

[Unknown11]: 7:37

response than the group that was forced into doing those movements on those these days but anyway i'll to look into that and i can come back and circle back with that but it is interesting and maybe something we can spend an episode on down the road but i am super curious as i'm sure the listeners are to hear about your cross country trek your birthday and where you're settled at for the moment

[Unknown12]: 7:59

yeah so we have settled into a rural part of virginia we're about like i think ninety minutes maybe like sixty to ninety minutes i don't really know i'm not overly familiar with the area north of richmond i think actually like northwest so we are out there the closest gym is the only gym in the county is twenty two minutes away each direction it the best the best someone commented on my story last night that they said this looks like a high school like a high school football weight room and i'm like you know what like this is exactly what it is so

[Unknown11]: 8:31

six

[Unknown12]: 8:32

it is very like bare bones um dumbbells up to one hundred a leg press a smith machine only once like cable stack and that is what i'm working with but i am i'm excited to just like simplify things and see how creative i can get and still provide you know target stimulus and that sort of thing so i'm very excited for the change

[Unknown11]: 8:56

the the print the principles from n one that we learned would basically say that any movement that you usually use with a dual cable you can just do with a single cable with one arm

[Unknown12]: 9:07

yeah and i have done that in the past for sure like the press arounds and stuff will get a little bit

[Unknown11]: 9:12

yeah

[Unknown12]: 9:12

harder because there's like nothing to create leverage from or to

[Unknown11]: 9:16

stability yeah yeah

[Unknown12]: 9:16

brace against yeah stability but we'll see we'll see what i end up doing but i'm excited just for i think i've gone off in a little side here but i think big big long term right what jenny and i will come call like our forever home and forever life i think i want to live like rurally r

[Unknown11]: 9:34

he

[Unknown12]: 9:34

how you say that word so this is our like test run of like living out in the countryside and seeing how that translates because i've you know aside from like i grew up like living in the suburbs but ever since like literally for the past like twelve years i've lived like in cities so this is an interesting trial run into that

[Unknown11]: 9:56

two questions on that do you still think as of the moment that utah is where you would like to settle

[Unknown12]: 10:04

yeah if you made me i'm sorry if you made me choose right now yeah

[Unknown11]: 10:04

and two yeah and two do you think you're gonna join a a gym in this rural location or potentially try to build out your own home gym

[Unknown12]: 10:16

um so

[Unknown11]: 10:17

yeah

[Unknown12]: 10:17

yes if you ask me like right where i want to live long term it would be the salt lake area in utah and then two i have a gym there that i love i cannot wait to go back to you but long term i want like a uh a detached barn on the property that houses my gym equipment office et cetera and that's my my end goal is to have a basically like a

[Unknown13]: 11:07

okay looks looks like i'm back i have no idea what happened

[Unknown11]: 11:12

yeah you were froze on me in the middle of saying

[Unknown13]: 11:14

i just

[Unknown11]: 11:14

ultimately utah blank

[Unknown13]: 11:18

okay i do you have a time stamp on your end at all

[Unknown11]: 11:25

yeah it says eleven o two right now i'm pretty sure you dumped off right around the ten minute mark like ten o two nine

[Unknown13]: 11:32

okay

[Unknown11]: 11:33

fifty eight something like that

[Unknown13]: 11:35

ten oh two okay i'm making

[Unknown11]: 11:37

or like nine forty five to ten o two would be like my range

[Unknown13]: 11:39

okay i'm making notes to see hopefully what happens with that ins of how it picks back up and stuff okay yeah we'll we'll see what happens

[Unknown11]: 11:44

yeah it's still recording on my end too yeah

[Unknown13]: 11:49

there um it might just be eye drop off and then pop back in and you have like the whatever master thing open

[Unknown11]: 11:55

yeah

[Unknown13]: 11:55

hopefully so ultimately my goal is to have a a detached like barn structure on the property where i will have like a gym and stuff inside of and then spend all of my free time out there doing what i want to do but uh we'll see how that works out in reality once that that time comes

[Unknown11]: 12:19

sweet i like it how was

[Unknown13]: 12:21

but

[Unknown11]: 12:21

the the birthday in in nashville and everything

[Unknown13]: 12:25

birthday was cool it's my first time in nashville so it was we went to jeff black's gym which is iron house strength and conditioning which was out by like the airport super super cool spot like just a really big gym with tons of different equipment all the weights in the world type of thing really really like the exact type of gym that that i really like to find like i love finding gyms like that in any city and stuff we go to it's just so different than you know a twenty four hour golds or or an eos something like that so i love one supporting like friends and their there businesses i love supporting small gym owners and independent gym gym owners and strength and conditioning facilities and the energy and vibe and environment in those gyms is just barn on in my experience

[Unknown11]: 13:09

yep

[Unknown13]: 13:10

so that was really really cool and then saw like downtown of uh nashville that night which is i think broadway street and it was interesting

[Unknown11]: 13:21

did you hear

[Unknown13]: 13:21

just a lot super

[Unknown11]: 13:22

some country music from every bar

[Unknown13]: 13:24

yeah people tons of live music which was cool tons of people people

[Unknown11]: 13:27

yep

[Unknown13]: 13:28

around it's just interesting it i just have zero interest in participating in those types of activities at this point in my life like i like seeing it right

[Unknown11]: 13:38

yeah yeah

[Unknown13]: 13:38

because it's a it's a new experience but i don't want to just i didn't want to like go in any of them or anything like that i was really tired also from like the long driving and and

[Unknown11]: 13:48

yeah

[Unknown13]: 13:49

stuff but it was really cool and the drive was was great you know i was really there was a point in my life for like a a cross country drive it was like this big daunting like stressful experience but it wasn't in in like the slightest bit we use the google search along root feature to find exactly the type of food we wanted and we would just like plan out okay we're gonna be in like little rock in about three hours let's plan for lunch around that time let me look and see if there's like you know i just went down like my my list is there a chipotle is there a cuo ba is there like some asian type of grill mongolian grill we ended up stopping at t zeke's mediterranean cafe in two different cities and that's about like the as best type of food you could ask for on the road

[Unknown11]: 14:36

yeah

[Unknown13]: 14:36

and we ate really really good like there were zero compromises we ate we stopped at a sheet to get like a snack one time and i got a cup of fruit and like a non dairy protein rtd protein drink and that was like the quote you know air quotes worst meal of the entire

[Unknown11]: 14:53

yeah

[Unknown13]: 14:54

four days on the road

[Unknown11]: 14:54

i that would be one of my positive meals on a road chip

[Unknown13]: 14:59

so that's like i've been kind of toying with this this ideas like i would have that mindset around it as well and when i have conversations with clients that's a big big things that come up on like when people are moving or something like that but i was it was like a little bit of planning and that google search along root feature is just a game changer so long as you have like some sort of of planning and you can be okay you know in about four hours we will be in this city let's push lunch from like noonish to tish type of thing it really expands your options which i thought was really really cool

[Unknown11]: 15:35

i feel like that probably works for like hotels and stuff too right

[Unknown13]: 15:39

yeah so what we only we only stayed in one hotel um and we just one we picked one right next to a cuda because we plan the go okay we're

[Unknown11]: 15:50

right

[Unknown13]: 15:50

going to get in late we'll eat dinner at cuda and then jenny picked a restaurant or not a restaurant a hotel that had like a a full buffet breakfast so for breakfast there i had like black coffee i had a little bit of oats they had uh like breakfast potatoes and eggs and ironically they didn't have any fruit so that that was probably the worst meal i had which was like eggs um like red skinned potatoes and and oats with black coffee that

[Unknown11]: 16:18

could be worse

[Unknown13]: 16:18

was probably like the oh it could be so much worse but i was really surprised with how seamless the the meal in eating one with

[Unknown11]: 16:26

cool

[Unknown13]: 16:27

with this with just some basic planning and knowing what we were looking for which is cool okay

[Unknown11]: 17:12

y

[Unknown14]: 17:13

yo

[Unknown11]: 17:14

it was at sixteen o eight

[Unknown14]: 17:16

okay thank you

[Unknown11]: 17:18

there's three screens open on our panel right now there's you frozen there's you in reality and there's me

[Unknown14]: 17:26

yeah i

[Unknown11]: 17:27

there you go now you're gone

[Unknown14]: 17:28

okay the other one

[Unknown11]: 17:29

yeah

[Unknown14]: 17:29

drops i have no idea what's going on um it will like stop and restart my internet iming fast dot com everything looks good i don't know if it's just like

[Unknown11]: 17:43

shitty internet

[Unknown14]: 17:43

dropping real quick and picking back up

[Unknown11]: 17:45

yeah

[Unknown14]: 17:45

but i have no idea um so i have ten o two

[Unknown11]: 17:48

is this going to be able to be edited together we'll just put in like a strike or drop he'll be back

[Unknown14]: 17:53

no i'll have i'll have the video editor do it i'm just that's why i'm writ down on the time stamps to

[Unknown11]: 17:58

yeah i think that ten o two one was probably a little late cause that's when i

[Unknown14]: 17:58

say hey

[Unknown11]: 18:01

looked at it when i realized you were gone so it's probably earlier than that

[Unknown14]: 18:05

okay so i'll put like nine

[Unknown11]: 18:06

i think it's probably like nine hundred forty five would be my guess

[Unknown14]: 18:09

okay nine forty five

[Unknown11]: 18:11

and sixteen o eight i think it was uh

[Unknown14]: 18:11

and then what is the time right now what is the time right now

[Unknown11]: 18:15

right now it is seventeen fifty four

[Unknown14]: 18:20

okay alright yeah road trip was great and i'm excited excited it's over excited to ho get back into work i have a standing desk which i'm really really excited about too um that is one of the downsides of like the the lifestyle and and the travel is like i'm working at kitchen tables and stuff a lot so uh there was a period oh man like five years ago when i was at a standing desk full time and like my back and hips and stuff felt incredible after a couple months of that so i'm really excited to do that yesterday was my first day like fully standing today will be my second day and i'm excited just to have that flexibility again

[Unknown11]: 19:00

are you standing why you talk to me right now

[Unknown14]: 19:02

i'm standing right now while we're recording this

[Unknown11]: 19:05

amazing you move a lot less than me

[Unknown14]: 19:08

i'm in a power stance so it keeps keeps me kind of locked in

[Unknown11]: 19:12

nice i kind of weighed side to side

[Unknown14]: 19:15

yeah cool are you ready to uh jump into today's topic

[Unknown11]: 19:19

yeah buddy

[Unknown14]: 19:21

cool let's do it so kind of what i alluded to earlier in the episode or when when we start talking about it is so by the time we're record us on on march eighth it will release on march fourteenth by the time you listen to it might be the twenty first something like that and i want to plant this seed we want to plant the seed kind of early to help you get ahead of your plans to be in great shape for the summer as with most things in nutrition and training unfortunately things do not progress quite as fast as we may hope for them to so in doing so brian and i are hoping to get you started early so that you can be at the very worst case ready early and then can feed into summer which will allow you to remain leaner while eating more food what i refer to as the best of both the world and my favorite nutrition periodization so when that is the worst case you are in a pretty damn good spot so what i think is pretty cool when brian and i put together our notes for this episode we have kind of two slightly different approaches and i think these are reflective of the way that brian and i do things um a little bit differently so i am more objective by the book type of approach and brian is a little bit more i'm going to leverage you know the past twenty five years of eating and training and subjective habit routine uh and basically just skill sets that you've acquired to guide you a little bit more in the beginning so for the listeners we'll provide kind of two different approaches and then you can find yourself using you know one or the other or probably a little bit of both what i would imagine most people would do so brian do you want to kick us with your kind of a high level approach

[Unknown11]: 21:13

yeah for sure um many of you guys either seen my post on instagram about this or heard me discuss it on here about kind of my off season society based tracking system that i use so just as a refresher for people essentially when i'm in off season as we would call it where i'm not actually dieting right i'm kind of trying to gain weight i usually follow this method of i tracking three variables so each morning i weigh myself and i make a little note in an excel sheet each day i track my protein grams just roughly in my head because i know more or less within you know five grams or ten grams what each thing i put in my body is going to be have as far as protein goes so i get like a general ballpark number and then i write that down in my excel sheet and then i also have a subjective measure of satiety where i basically define my day as being either underfed overfed or satisfied and the majority of the days just end up satisfied but i do try to skew more to having more overfed days and less under fed days when i'm in this off season period so when i do begin to diet the first thing that i like to do is just track two or three days and get an idea of where my kind of off season calories have been sitting and uh i don't do much with that aside from just acknowledge that's where i'm at and then i go immediately right back to my satiety tracking but now instead of focusing on having more overfed days try to have still the majority satisfied days but i try to have almost all of the days that aren't satisfied just be underfed so i'm eliminating overfed days i don't have any days where i'm like uncomfortably full anymore and then i try to add in one or maybe two underfed days so we're looking at you know five or six satisfied days and one or two days where i might go to bed a little bit hungry at the end of the day which is totally fine and so usually the first thing that i do in this situation is manipulate portion size and the portion size manipulation comes entirely from carbs and fat so i don't decrease my protein at all i just make sure that the uh carbs and fat are slightly lower so an example of this that i often use is to think of like the way that a meal might look for me in the off season and it might have a a double hamburger so like eight ounces of meat some cheese on there and a bun and then i'll have a side of mashed potatoes and a vegetable and that's like kind of a typical off season meal for me well when i begin going into this cutting phase that meal is going to immediately lose the bun that's the first thing to go so now it's two hamburger patties with some cheese on them mashed potatoes and vegetable the next thing that would go down the road if needed would be to cut the cheese off so now i have two hamburger patties some mashed potatoes and some veggies and then if needed down the road from there i would eliminate the mashed potatoes and they might become like a a baked potato of some sort you know i like to cut them thin and bake them for forty minutes or something and they end up kind of crispy so so i'm a huge fan of that so there's kind of these different small steps that you can take over the course of time to manipulate what you're eating and putting into your body as far as total caloric amount without having to necessarily track everything specifically because you just know that not eating this bun is going to make this meal significantly less coolly dense so that's kind of the beginnings of of my setup do you have any thoughts on any of that

[Unknown15]: 25:07

yeah what i like is that you kind of have these you have these these are skills you've acquired right of knowing like hey if i want to easily reduce total you know caloric content on the day something like removing a bun a and generally like a hamburger bun is going to be processed right it's going to be like a white bread style type bunn and it's like a simple i wanna say like it's probably forty or fifty grams of cars right

[Unknown11]: 25:36

yeah i think it's forty carbs like a hundred and fifty calories or something like that

[Unknown15]: 25:40

yeah yeah so something like that is like it's a simple it it's kind of like a mindless change that gets gets you moving right and then moving into okay then i will like remove the cheese right things that are just like not very satiated or there's not a ton of volume for the caloric content so these really cool just kind of swaps and modifications you can make without like playing macro or macro math or anything like that yet which is really cool

[Unknown11]: 26:11

yeah so one of the things that i am a huge proponent of it and i don't ever take out even it like the depths of a diet is intra workout nutrition and i know there's arguments for sure of like you know their liquid calories they don't have food value you know you could you could eat a more complex dense carbohydrate source instead of gator aid powder or whatever and i get that but when ultimately the success of your diet is kind of defined by a reaching your goal and then be reaching your goal without losing much muscle performance in the gym is the best proxy we have for ensuring that you've gained muscle or rather not lost muscle and so for me like just having that nutrition something to sip on before during and then after the workout it gives me something to look forward to between sets it keeps me going and i think this is a great time to reference a study that again man i need i need to think about these studies before we get it on air so i can actually be accurate with it because i'm really just like reaching back into the depths of my brain here but they definitely there was a study that was done where they gave some people uh no food before a workout they gave some people like a real food and then they gave some people like a slop that had zero calories in it but it was sweet and so it it spiked you know the internal sensation of having food in you and the people that had the real food and the slop both performed equally as compared to the group with no food that performed not not well so so i think that you know there is something to having that continuous supply of glucose going into the body and then i mix it with way so there's that as well but that's something i never give up on and i think you've stated your opinion on that do you want to remind us real quick what you think about that

[Unknown15]: 28:08

yeah so it's really contextual so people like brian and myself yes i'm going to keep my intra workout in throughout my diet it is liquid calories it is non satiated it will improve performance that being said waving massive asterisk brian and i are people who do not have adherence problems when we are dieting brian will talk about i go to bed hungry when i'm dieting a majority of people an overwhelming majority of people will crash and burn with that approach right i literally just had a conversation with a client and this one's funny he ran out of ma he ran out of macros at the end of the night and when we did our like kind of triage was like w okay so you were hungry at the end of the night you ran out of calories like w what did you do and he was like i had two ice cream sandwiches and i was like why of all the things you could eat like why would you eat ice vi you like okay i'm gonna eat ice cream sandwiches so

[Unknown11]: 29:10

right right

[Unknown15]: 29:11

i think like it comes back to like your skill acquisition your understanding and ultimately your adherence if adherence is not a problem for you and you're like yes i am going to sacrifice satiated foods at the end of the day or some other period of the day so that i can ensure i get that extra uptick in training performance and i'm willing to consciously take that trade off yes i think it is beneficial to keep those those intra workouts in if you're someone who has issues with adherence um i would recommend that being one of the first things you pulled to be completely honest

[Unknown11]: 30:24

he's back so twenty nine fifteen and

[Unknown16]: 30:32

oh

[Unknown11]: 30:33

your comment at that time was if you're someone that has issues that drop

[Unknown16]: 30:38

okay so my whole my whole big thing was gone alright so this i guess next week i am i'm just gonna have to figure it out the ingenue setup somewhere maybe i have to hard line into wherever the wire comes into the house but this is not gonna work and

[Unknown11]: 30:56

no we can't do this constantly it's kind of funny for now though

[Unknown16]: 30:57

yeah no way yeah it's very frustrating for me

[Unknown11]: 31:01

i know i know

[Unknown16]: 31:04

okay so with the in workout if you are someone who has adherence issues to begin with i would one hundred percent recommend removing the intra workout from your diet right and uh pushing those calories those carbohydrates to like a non or sorry as satiated carbohydrates something's going to give you some volume that being said if you are willing to sacrifice a bit of society and sacrifice of or for in addition to preserve your training performance and increase that ultimately i think that is on paper the best move however on paper doesn't account for adherence satiety and the subjectivity of what it means to be human so ultimately depending on where you fall in that context is how i would approach handling that

[Unknown11]: 31:59

yep yep one thing i wanted to as well kind of drop in here because you made a comment about you know me going to bed hungry and one of the best things i did when i began dieting a couple years ago was just except in my brain that i was going to be hungry like i had heard so many stories and talked to so many people that have you know tried all of these like calorie free sweeteners or like quest protein cakes or like whatever sort of wild other concoctions you can try to whip up that are going to give you a ton of food volume with very low calories and it just it ends up almost always backfiring and you just end up being becoming so food focused that all you're thinking about is is the next fake food that you're gonna whip up so if you just go into the diet and you're like look this is twelve weeks or sixteen weeks or whatever it is and at points of this diet i will be hungry and then embrace the hunger one of the biggest tricks that works for me is i don't allow myself to be hungry really during the day so i structure my intake such that i actually feel quite satiated during the day but then i'll just have my last meal at like you know five or five thirty or something like that and i will know that by seven p m i'm going to be hungry and then i'll be hungry until i fall asleep but then i wake up the next day and i'm not really that hungry anymore and i just kind of get to eat again so to be able to relegate that hunger to just this small period of time before bed works really well for me and i know with others you know they can't go to sleep if they're hungry or something along those lines which which i get to but i actually really like that hollow empty kind of stomach feeling before bed it actually helps me sleep a lot better so um the common sentiment of you know your sleep goes toit when you're dieting and stuff like that i know i haven't been three percent body fat lean like a a natural bodybuilding competitor i've been you know seven eight percent but but i haven't noticed any of that so so maybe that's something that's unique to me and i know everyone's different in that way as well but i just wanted to kind of throw that out there as well and then uh do you have any thoughts on that before i move on

[Unknown16]: 34:14

yeah i it's all it's going to be very individual right because someone there are other people who like that hunger will really impact their sleep so people like that i would kind of swap it and that would be a one pretty much the only time i will recommend people go like an intermittent

[Unknown11]: 34:32

yeah

[Unknown16]: 34:33

fasting type thing because what can we do at eight a m that we don't really want to do at eight p m to help um mitigate hunger caffeine right black coffee

[Unknown11]: 34:42

yep well and self control's higher in the morning too

[Unknown16]: 34:43

appetite suppressant exactly so it's easier to be hungry in the morning for most people as opposed to before bed so that is one of those things that i would generally recommend there

[Unknown11]: 34:54

yep

[Unknown16]: 34:55

but yes depending on what level of leans you are trying to get to let's say let's say fifteen percent in under it is likely at some point you will have to deal with some hunger

[Unknown11]: 35:09

yep totally so just to kind of finish up the way that that i do things right now we're at this period where i've reduced portion sizes from taking hamburger buns off and then reducing cheeses and things like that so i'll usually keep this up for four to six weeks still not really tracking food just monitoring portion sizes keeping protein high and then what's happened in the past is about four to six weeks into this weight loss begins to stall a little bit and and if it stalls for ten or fourteen days or so without you know seeing that kind of catch up in that drop the wh so to speak then i will at that point kind of begin tracking and i'll initially take a baseline and see where i am as compared to like my off season typical day and by this point i'll usually have that five hundred to seven hundred calories below at least maybe up to a thousand depending on wherever i was in the off season so i'll begin tracking and the first week is mostly just data collection making sure that i have the right numbers that i have a good meal structure and set up and that i'm hitting the objective calories that i'm trying to hit and usually just by tracking this has happened the last two years just by beginning to track at all weight loss begins to pick up again because i have that data and i'm just having the nature of having to just write something down is more accountability than just saying i'm gonna take a hamburger bun off or something along those lines so as i kind of get deeper in and have started tracking then i usually begin instituting kind of official structured re feed days where it's like okay you know i've been hungry now for a few days in a row i'm going to add in one day and then over the course of another four weeks that might become two days or something along those lines and as that happens my rate of weight loss slows so that's one piece too is like in the beginning weight loss just happens rapidly and i'm not even tracking i'm just doing this por control thing and i'll probably lose eight to ten pounds in the first four to six weeks just by being cognizant of that and dropping these more like kind of carbohydrates simple carbohydrate sources or fat sources like cheese and so then as i institute these refd days i don't often increase the deficit on the other days to account for the refd days i kind of just keep the deficit the same and i understand that by having these refd days that i'm going to slow my progress down a little bit and that's been valuable for me cause in the past i would try and be like okay well if i'm gonna have ref days i have to keep the weekly caloric total lower and i would then compensate on the other days and then the re feeds would come and i would binge because i was restricting so much so when i finally just decided that okay you know i'm no longer going to get the same rate of weight loss i'm just gonna going to accept that it's going to be half of that or a third of that or whatever it is then i know that i'm kind of in the grind of it and maybe that's why my diets tend to drag on a little bit like when we even look at my last one last year i went down from uh two hundred to one ninety in the first six weeks i think and then i took a diet break and after the diet break i just couldn't get going again i couldn't get the momentum going probably because i was beginning to institute these refd days and just the rate of loss was lower so you know i ended up getting down to one hundred eighty two but it took me like to go from one hundred ninety to one hundred eighty two was like twelve weeks whereas the first ten pounds were like six weeks you know and the whole thing was eighteen weeks so rate of loss i think is in a yes in go ahead

[Unknown17]: 38:51

the only thing i wanted to add there that i don't want people to get hung up on is that first like ten pounds that you did in those six weeks like arguably four to five pounds of that are going to be like shifts in fluid glycogen et cetera it's prob let's say at probably at most sixty percent is like actual fat loss

[Unknown11]: 39:09

y yeah

[Unknown17]: 39:10

and then that next subset of weight is you don't have those again to go through

[Unknown11]: 39:15

i actually would argue that maybe the first four or five pounds like almost none of it is is actual fat loss because i was you know one hundred ninety nine point six when i started my diet last year and within i think eight days i was down to one hundred ninety five point two or something so i'd lost like four pounds in a matter of eight days which really is just a matter of hey you're eating less carbs you're carrying less water and retaining less fluid et cetera et cetera and so so yeah i think you know i probably really lost five pounds in the first six weeks but on the scale it says i lost ten pounds in the first six weeks so so you definitely

[Unknown17]: 39:50

exactly

[Unknown11]: 39:51

a good point there

[Unknown17]: 39:52

yeah

[Unknown11]: 39:52

yeah and then so as i kind of said earlier i took a diet break last year after the first ten pounds i went to wisconsin and i took a diet break and i didn't do that the first year so it is something that i'm probably going to end up doing again this year because we are doing another trip to wisconsin the potential alternative and i'm considering this though not committed yet is that our trip to wisconsin's a little later this year it's in early july instead of mid june so it's only three weeks but if i start my diet earlier then maybe i can gain four weeks on the front end gain three weeks on the back end and then maybe my diet can just be over when i go to wisconsin instead of that being a diet break so if i were to do that i would need to start my diet here basically as we're saying in this episode at the end of march instead of at the end of april and then if i start at the end of march and then i have through the end of june that's three months plus a couple days in july so if i was were pretty aggressive with it i could probably do it um the other side of that coin is i'm actually not as big right now as i was last year so last year i got up to like i said one hundred ninety nine point six i think i'm right around one hundred ninety five or one hundred ninety six right now so that could also be another tool that i can use to kind of facilitate a shorter cut this year but yeah those are kind of my main points and yeah let's let's hear how you do it a little more objectively

[Unknown17]: 41:21

so i'm not going to actually talk about my personal approach as much as kind of big big impacting factors and considerations that i wanted listeners to take away i generally in my personal life we will take long diets and cover big grounds like i've really only been through three dieting phases in my life the first one i lost like twenty eight pounds and that's when like everything and nutrition really clicked for me um and i was like re lean for the first time uh second was this past year when you know right after we we had started et p i went from about two hundred seven to a seven and a half i think was the highest down to like one hundred ninety one ninety one actually and that was about like pe sixteen week diet the first one was i think about sixteen or eighteen weeks or something like that and then i did like a like a ten week one like a one year in the one but i'm talking like those are three diets from twenty eighteen until now and it's you know twenty twenty two too so i don't even really do one per year um the way i wanted to talk about this is really just in terms of adding some numbers to help solidify your approach so generally speaking about half eight percent to one percent of your total body mass so it's not like lean body mass that's you basically your body weight per week is a really really good target now using some examples here at two hundred pounds that's approximately one to two pounds per week if you're only one hundred and fifty pounds that's approximately half a pound to one pound per week it's also important to note that as your weight will decrease over time that half a percent to one percent will also decrease over time the next i wanted to talk about is estimate how much you think you like want slash need to lose to hit your target body composition and then i recommend realistically adding fifty percent to that it is just human nature to think oh i need you know ten pounds to get you know shredded realistically it's probably fifteen to eighteen or something like that similarly for a timeline right i i alluded to this in the in the beginning of the episode take your basic timeline that you are thinking right a really really good way to create a very rough estimate of that timeline is the plan for one pound of loss per week now i know we have a decent amount of female listeners to this podcast and for you guys that are on the smaller side just note that that one pound per week may be unrealistic if you are one hundred ten pounds one hundred thirty pounds or something like that it might be a little bit unrealistic um in the later parts of your dieting or even in the beginning so let's plan i said with that example if you have like think like i have ten you know ten to twelve pounds to lose and i'll be lean realistically let's make that about eighteen for a conservative effort then we're looking at approximately eighteen weeks to really hit that total goal and then the reason i say that is i'm really i prefer to be conservative with my estimates and the worst case scenario there is you you're ready early and the reason i say that is there are many things that could come up you might get sick and then you might have a week that's a push you might have like a wedding weekend where you're traveling or some family trip plan like brian was just talking about the the weekly e sorry the yearly family vacation that might be another week where it's kind of a push and i think it's just realistically five out of every six or four out of every six weeks might be super consistent progress weeks and then lastly with that worst case scenario if you're ready early and it's the end of may right summer's not even there and you're like hey i'm lean i don't really care to get any leaner and i'm ready for summer you can start your recovery diet process earlier and start increasing your food intake and then you know like i've talked about on the podcasts many times before this is what i consider like the holy grail of periodization you're lean your energy levels are improving your food volumes improving trainings improving your muscles are filling out as glycogen and fluids begin to replenish in them and then you can maintain an overwhelming majority of that fat loss but then return your calories back up to maintenance through summer so that you're not necessarily like living in restriction through summer you are incrementally increasing your food throughout summer while your physique kind of improves throughout it so that is what i would consider the worst case scenario which is kind of also the best case scenario so just some numbers to help you wrap your head around putting together a plan over the coming months

[Unknown11]: 46:39

yeah for sure i love that the the holy grail of nutritional periodization that period of time where you're eating more food and looking better it's amazing right so um yeah i mean i i feel like both of us have have seen this happen in pictures and in our experiences too where you look so flat at the end of the diet and then so even if you do something like you know you have a week long like pe week protocol where you're adding in carbs progressively or whatever your approach is and then you look great at the end of that week but then it's like even the next like two to three weeks after that if you don't go completely overboard and do like cheeses steaks and apple pies and on all that stuff then then you do get progressively like filled out bigger and you still have apps so it really is like the coolest most exciting period and it's one of those things that is is so cool and something so fun to look forward to that it almost like makes the diet worth it with this end in sight thing where you know you get this like uptick at the end it's a it's really a really cool thing and a motivating factor

[Unknown17]: 47:48

yeah i mean to me i think like i look at the diet is like the ha like the calorie deficit right the the the bottom the lowest amount of calories during your calorie deficit is kind of like i want to call it the halfway mark i would call it maybe like your sixty sixty five percent mark now we have like another thirty to thirty five to forty percent left to like complete everything and when we released this episode next week maybe i'll put some stuff up on my story but like last year when i i wrapped my diet the last week of july last year twenty twenty one my calories were the lowest that was like one ninety one ninety one inch in change um i wrapped my recovery diet in the like man probably early october and i look better i'm eating like nine hundred calories more per day and my weight is within a pound of of the dieting phase so it's like i and i went and i got dex and i got lab work and all that

[Unknown11]: 48:40

i know it's insane

[Unknown17]: 48:45

stuff um so it it's this is something that i don't find a lot of people coaches and stuff in the space talking about it's generally like oh after the diet return to maintenance as fast as possible and there's there's trade offs in any direction but i personally and this is what i generally do with my clients as well take the approach of reversing more slowly so that we can you know keep greater control and a more fat loss over that period

[Unknown11]: 49:42

hm yeah i think that as as we've discussed in prior episodes that the the way in which you decide to implement calorie increases after the diet depends on how lean you got and if you're

[Unknown17]: 49:55

yes

[Unknown11]: 49:55

at seven eight percent that's that's that's lean that's super lean um but it's not like three to five percent and like the

[Unknown17]: 50:03

exactly

[Unknown11]: 50:04

way that you had to dig to get those last couple percentage points off so so i fully agree like at eight percent body fat like you're just beginning to catch on fire so you can kind of put that fire out just with a little bit of calories but when you're straight up burning for like weeks at a time you need to just like pummels with food and and can do this use the sledgehammer approach

[Unknown17]: 50:26

i agree a hundred percent yeah the context of getting on stage versus not getting on stage really does change the game in that final like ninety percentage of the diet even

[Unknown11]: 50:35

hmm

[Unknown17]: 50:35

maybe eighty five the nine hundred or whatever like

[Unknown11]: 50:38

yeah

[Unknown17]: 50:38

yeah very really good point there

[Unknown11]: 50:41

so last year before my diet you encouraged me to do that full blood work panel and then uh i did it again after the diet and so i'm going to do the same thing again this year through the life extension and you also sent me the link to the dea place in boulder that you found so aaron's been doing all my research for me so that we can actually get like some real data here and uh so hopefully before i actually officially start dieting here whenever that is i have some blood work and ad dea for us to kind of cover on the show

[Unknown17]: 51:18

very cool yes yes i i just love the data i love the the decisions it helps you make and some of the um like subjective subjective fear and in what's word i'm looking for it just helps so i love it and so i'm all for it so i'm glad glad you take you take you appreciate the my interest

[Unknown11]: 51:39

for sure

[Unknown17]: 51:39

in it

[Unknown11]: 51:40

no no and i think it'll be good content for the show too especially considering i've never had a dex i'm actually kind of nervous that like maybe i'm actually way fatter than i think i am you know so maybe i'm like sitting at a hundred and ninety five pounds and i think that um you know fourteen percent body fat or something cause i still have a six pack and then the freaking dex comes back and says i'm like eighteen percent body fat you know

[Unknown17]: 52:04

if as long as so i actually had this happen with a client really recently where he's man i would put a lot of my money on that that dex is just wrong and the hard thing is is like sometimes the dex are like old and they're at like a university or something like that and maybe they haven't been calibrated in a while but this client is like lean like his checking photos full o bleak things like that his like in his like his like separation between back muscles and stuff like that and it put him at like seventeen point

[Unknown11]: 52:35

whoa

[Unknown17]: 52:35

six percent or whatever and he was like super bummed out and i was like listen it's wrong like i will i will

[Unknown11]: 52:40

does he hold it in his glutes and legs maybe

[Unknown17]: 52:43

no he's lean

[Unknown11]: 52:44

yeah

[Unknown17]: 52:46

and and i was like i just you i was i was i told him i was like at the highest i think you're probably like maybe high thirteens

[Unknown11]: 52:53

yes

[Unknown17]: 52:54

um but uh as long but i found with like the newer more like you know people like you and i like fat loss you know body composition aimed like privatized dex type stuff those places the machines are generally newer and they're generally more reliable

[Unknown11]: 53:12

sweet well i'm excited and when i get back to boulder i'm gonna i'm gonna go get that done and we'll get some data

[Unknown17]: 53:18

definitely anything else you want to add on this one brian

[Unknown11]: 53:21

no man all good

[Unknown17]: 53:24

all right as always guys thank you for listening i hope you guys find this episode helpful and can get started and timeline out your diets a little bit so that you can be ready for whatever look you are looking for this summer if you have any questions about any of this feel free to reach out to brian and i or leave some comments on this episode on youtube where we can find them easily and get you as always context appropriate and nuanced responses thanks for listening have a great week