Happy Tuesday, guys. Welcome back to another episode of Eat, Train, Prosper. This is episode 163, What It Takes to Get Very Lean. Brian and I thought this would be a cool episode to put together as a lot of the kind of surface level information from pretty popular and big accounts get kind of miscontextually applied in what it actually takes. And there's some trade -offs, considerations, and expectations that we just want to go through. So if you ever have an interest, is you're just a little bit more prepared for things that you will very likely experience. But as always, before we get into today's topic, we will run through some updates and Brian has some interesting ones for us Yeah, I guess I have one main update for those that followed along. I posted on Instagram a few days ago. I had my very first concussion. yeah, that happened on Wednesday last week. I guess that would have been And basically I'll just run through the story and then you can ask some questions and drop an input if you want. essentially at 9 22 a .m. I started out for a bike ride on my normal course that I always take through my neighborhood to leave and go head toward the mountains or whatever I was going to do. I was about three minutes in and I was kind of descending this really short, not steep hill that leads into a left turn into a straightaway. literally in my neighborhood, like right by my kid's elementary school. And so I rounded this corner, had a little bit of speed coming out of the decline, hit the flat, noted that there were two cars parked on my right. There was a black car parked closer to me on my right. And then just ahead of the black car, maybe five car lengths further was a red car, a red Jeep parked on the right. And making that mental calculation of those cars are there and I shouldn't hit them was pretty much the last thing I remember. And apparently I ran into the back of the red Jeep, cracking the glass, denting the frame. And eight minutes later, I was putting the chain back on my bike as if I was going to go continue biking. I remember that. That was my next memory. then immediately after that, the ambulance people are coming, the EMTs, and they're taking me away from my bike, shuttling me into an ambulance, asking me if I know where I am and if I know what happened. And at first, I'm certainly caught off guard because I obviously realized in the moment that I had been in a crash, but I certainly didn't realize that it was bad enough for me to be pulled into an ambulance. Because I was like, Hey, I'm putting the chain back on my bike. Like I'm ready to roll, you know, filled with adrenaline and shock and all of that stuff. And so I really, I lost eight minutes from about two to three seconds before I crashed into the car and up to seven minutes after the crash. Most of that is pretty blank in my mind. A bystander said that they, they're the ones that called the EMTs or the ambulance. And they said that there was this guy stumbling around aimlessly and they think he was just in a crash. I have no recollection of any of that. Like I said, my first memory was putting the chain back on my bike. And, so I was in the ambulance. They're asking me all these questions about like, if I know what happened, blah, blah, blah. They showed me a picture of myself. Like they put a mirror up to me and I was like, okay. Cause I didn't quite realize I think that, that I was in the type of shape that I was in and Um, then I was, I realized I should call Kim. And so from the ambulance at nine 38 AM, so that would be 14 minutes after I left for my bike ride. 10 minutes after I crashed, I called Kim and she said that she was glad to hear from me that it was at least me and not the EMT that she was hearing But she said I was kind of babbling, not making a lot of sense and saying, I think I got in an accident and now I'm in an ambulance. I don't really know what's going on. And then I guess at that point, the EMT took the phone, kind of explained what had happened. She jumped in the car and sped over to the hospital. The hospital was actually point two miles away from where I crashed. So the ambulance basically had to go. you know, a quarter mile to come get me and then turn around and go a quarter mile back to the hospital, which is only funny in the sense and unfortunate. I've been ironic that the cost of getting in an ambulance and being taken to the hospital is the same, whether you go like 20 miles or point two miles. Um, and so I don't know what that bill is going to be. It's my first time ever being shuttled in an ambulance, but I'm pretty sure that, uh, that I'm not going to love the cost for, going a quarter of a mile. So I got to the hospital. They immediately rushed me into a CT scan to make sure that my brain was OK, that there was no bleeding or hemorrhaging, et cetera, going on, excessive swelling. Took me back to the room. Some nurses came in, cleaned me up, shot my wounds with saline. Basically, my wounds were two big jabs on my elbow where I guess I fell. The concussion to my head and a bunch of cuts on my neck. And I actually think the the cuts on the neck are probably the thing that could have been the worst that weren't because whatever glass was shattered when I ran into that car missed all of the vital stuff in my neck and literally just hit the very far right side of my neck. And I don't think any of them went deep enough to cause any significant injury, which is all so, so, so lucky. So I'm guessing that what happened is I somehow lost course in those two to three seconds. I don't know if it was like a animal that ran out in front of me or a bird or if I was literally just maybe looking down at my phone, which is on my handlebars, trying to change a song or a podcast or maybe I got distracted by like an airplane. I mean, it could be like a number of different things. And then I this all I would have to do is slightly veer to the Cause I'm in this line, you know, passing these parked cars on my right. So I'm probably two, three feet from them if I'm doing it correctly. so one slight misjudgment, maybe I veer into like the back right side of the bumper of this red car. And suddenly I'm tumbling down. so let's see in the hospital, they quickly determined that the concussion was, was negative as far as brain hemorrhaging, bleeding, excessive swelling. I got some stitches in my elbow. They glued a bunch of stuff on my neck and on my face. Now six days later, most of it is like, looks like surface wounds. doesn't look, look nearly as gnarly as it was. And I guess I'll talk about the post. Can yeah, I'll let you in real quick for a quick question. Yeah, did did did you get any of the I'm sure like once you got to the hospital or maybe even in the empty like they took your vitals blood pressure all that was anything like out of the ordinary there. Like low blood pressure. Really high. me into the ambulance, they said my blood pressure was 200 over 120. And I guess that that is a factor of like really being injured and all of the adrenaline and I mean, yeah, I there's there's everything like going on in that moment. So I actually wasn't surprised when they told me it was 200 over 120. They're like, that's really high. I was like, yeah, I know I was in an accident. Like I expect that. By the time I got to the hospital and they had me kind of hooked up to the machine and stuff, it had gone down to 140 over 100. And that's obviously still high, but that's in like the manageable range for having a catastrophe like 20 minutes prior. Yeah. Yeah. Did anyone try and offer any plausible exp? Like, I mean, I know it's happened to me one time in my life. I just passed out, like randomly. And I just woke up like I was I was peeing in like a bathroom and I just woke up on the floor like and I was like, like a random school night in high school. And like my pants were like down at my ankles. I literally just passed out for however long and then like woke up and then was perfectly fine. you didn't like hit your head or have a concussion or something? Mm I guess I kind of like fell in a very graceful way and just kind of like crumbled and didn't fall back or anything like that. and then after obviously that inspired some some digging of things in from what I remember. And like I'm stretching out. was literally half my life ago. Like blood pressure swings, like abrupt blood pressure swings can cause like fainting and those sorts of things. Yeah, if it goes really low. Similar thing actually just happened to my dad recently. He had a similar situation where he kind of passed out and it was because his blood pressure went super low. No, I don't think that was the case with me. I have quite normal blood pressure. Like Kim has low blood pressure and she gets dizzy and sometimes has to like sit down, you know? Um, that almost never happens to me. So I would say if anything, I err on the side of like, Hey, I'm right on that 120 over 80, 115 over 75 range. Um, and then sometimes it's like 125 over 85. Like I pretty much average normal blood pressure. Um, it's a friend of mine who's a doctor brought up that I could have had a seizure. And that was certainly something I considered too, because my dad has seizures. Um, and he actually had a similar accident. in his 40s, late 40s, when he apparently was hit by a snowboarder on a ski slope and ended up having a stroke six months later from whatever that did to his brain. My mom's theory is that he never actually got hit by a snowboarder and that he just had a seizure and fell. And so there is like this long shot possibility in my mind that maybe that happened from talking to a number of friends of mine and research online over the last few days, as you'd expect someone to do in this case, it seems like most people that have concussions have memory loss on either side of the concussion. And it seems to be a defense mechanism, like a protective mechanism for the brain to not have to relive whatever that tragedy or catastrophe that occurred was. And so I'm not move forward in life thinking that I'm having seizures, given that that was a one -time freak accident and there does seem to be this property of concussions that occurs to people. So I'm just going to assume that it was an error of judgment or something else happened. My friends also told me that memory does tend to come back as the brain heals months later. So like the other day, I guess I'll continue the story here and say that, you know, I'm on day six now, but by day three, I felt almost back to normal. And I was even able to go for like a zone two bike ride and stuff like that, which when you look at the research now on concussion recovery, if you were to look at it five to 10 years ago, it would look different than it does now. Now they actually prescribe low intensity aerobic exercise as soon as you can do it without increasing your headache or whatever, whatever symptoms you might have. They want you to start doing aerobic exercise immediately. and so I started going for walks like the day of the next day, even though I had a headache, I was doing walks by Saturday, day three. I was, felt back to normal. So I did a bike ride, did a, a circuit weight workout on Sunday, did another bike ride on, Monday. And then, or yesterday I went for a run. I have one bike ride, a circuit weight workout. And then yesterday I went for a run and lifted. So it seems like at this point, you know, everything is back to normal. I don't have any more symptoms or anything like that. But the first day after the concussion was really bad. The day of I actually felt fine. Like I was surprisingly okay. I was mostly just worried about my elbow. I thought I had shattered my elbow or something like that because I could barely bend it. But the next day I was in bed till 3 p .m. and I had headaches that felt like they like wrapped around my entire head and they wouldn't go away even with ibuprofen or Vicodin. And then I vomited the next day in the morning as well. Like I dropped Bryson off at school. That was like the one time I got out of bed and I immediately realized I had to get back in bed. I dropped Bryson at camp, got back to my car, puked everywhere. felt a bit better momentarily and then drove home. So the fact that I had puked is like a sign of at least a moderate concussion if they're gonna rank them mild, moderate, severe, it's at least moderate. And then the headache obviously, but the fact that I'm better now, you know, at three days later and now six days later, I'm just very thankful for the way it all played out. And I'm also very thankful for this strong bone density and muscle that I have protecting my body because falling from a bike after ramming into the back of a car at 20 miles per hour, which I'm sure I was going 20 because I was coming from a downhill into a straightaway. I fell hard on the ground. mean, I don't remember it, but I had to have fallen hard on the ground. And I think I took the brunt of it with my elbow. And so the fact that nothing shattered in my elbow and broke in my body is amazing. Like I can I can barely believe it. So I just even more of a promoter of strength training and hypertrophy work than I could possibly ever be. And I think that that you know, is kind of the moral of the story. Okay, so I mean that, kind of scary. I like your attitude of like, hey, it happened, I feel better now. I'm not gonna try and come to any unnecessary conclusion and I'm going to move forward with my life. I think that's a wonderfully kind of just progressive way to think about it. Yeah. The big concern now is just, need to not have another concussion in the next two to three months. so I'm just trying to be careful and I'm not going to go mountain biking, like crazy biking. I'm going to stay on the flats. I'm going to make sure I'm paying really close attention all the time. One of the things that, I was talking to Jordan lips yesterday about is that I just love in zone to work the ability because it's lower intensity to be able to just kind of like zone out and look around at the sky and like take everything in. And I think That was probably why I veered and ran into this car. And so now I have to stay a little bit more focused even during zone two work, which, you know, small compromise to not have another concussion. But, but yeah, like I said, I'm just thankful that I'm here and that I'm functioning and I can still bike and lift and all that stuff. Definitely, definitely. Any other updates on that or shall we dive into today's topic? Yeah, let's dive in. You've prepared quite a comprehensive episode for us, so I'm excited to kind of hear where goes. Yeah. So I think the, like, like I said in the intro, the episode topic is what it takes to get very lean. And, um, obviously the term very lean is a bit subjective, right? So what, what I thought would be helpful is we define what we, you know, what would encompass what we're calling very lean for the purposes of this episode. So what I came up with is, uh, for us males, that would be sub 10 % body fat. And let's call that on a DEXA verification, um, and to provide some anchoring. Bodybuilding contest shape is approximately like four to five percent body fat, potentially even a little bit leaner in certain individuals. So we're defining it as like sub 10. So seven, let's call it like seven, eight, nine, some easily identifiable characteristics to help clear visible six pack in veins visible within that midsection. That's a pretty good detail specifically because as males, with a normal male body fat distribution, we are going to store the majority of the body fat in that androids region, which is the stomach pretty much. For females, sub 18 % body fat. that, again, that would be like a DEXA verification. For, again, some anchoring, a bikini contest shape is approximately like 13 to 14 % for the extreme leanness of like women's bodybuilding. Essential body fat for women is around like the 12 % mark. I'm sure some individuals for very short periods of time, like in a contest, maybe slightly below But for our context, sub 18 is quite lean and some easily visual characteristics, visual upper body musculature, clear definition between some tissue there and some muscle separation between the quads and hamstrings and even within the quads. For a female body fat pattern distribution, it's going to be disproportionately more body fat below the hips as a both. as above to above the hips. So a woman can be very, very lean, great six pack and still have like no visible quad separation. Whereas as males, if you haven't done a lot of like coaching or working with women, that may seem kind of far fetched to you or will be at like 16, 17 % body fat, not have anywhere near, you know, a six pack and still have clear easily definition between the quad. So different hormonal storage patterns where the body fat placement is there. Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I also tend to hold more of my body fat in that like lower body hip area, but not as much in my quads as like upper hamstring, glute, lower love handle, like lower back area, which I think is somewhat typical of males. But I do think that most males, would you agree, tend to hold around the midsection more than the area that I described? Like it's just like slightly higher than where I hold it. Correct, yeah, yeah. I mean, the lower back, yes. Pretty much like right at the belt line, males. That's gonna be like the last place you're gonna have like some like pinchable fat to an appreciable degree. But typically you'll see in males like a lot leaner in the hamstrings and those sorts of things, conversely with women. like for me, like glutes are one of the last things. Like I'll have, I'll have a six pack abs at, you know, 15 % body fat and, and then the, the glutes probably won't come in. I don't know if I've ever had glutes like properly in, but like they begin to come in, you know, half of that. like seven, eight, nine percent body fat. It's crazy. Yeah. there's going to be some, everyone there is individual characteristics within that too. but to try and create a speaking to a large population, right? to, some definable characteristics. Now some considerations that I think is important that we start off with your starting point, right? So a lot of the Let's call them issues for sure, or undesirable effects of getting very, very lean come down to kind of two, two, two sides of the fence. One side of the fence is total time spent in the caloric deficit. So the accumulation of just the weeks and months that it takes to get there. And then the second is the actual time spent at the very low amounts of body fat. Right. So The first consideration is your starting point. If you live a very health focused and forward lifestyle, you will be much closer to that end goal at your start. So your overall duration spent dieting can be significantly shorter, right? If you're, let's say you just are a male living your life at like a 12 and a half, 13%, to get to 9 % is not significantly as large of an endeavor as that male living at 20 % at the end of a bulk and decides now it's time to get like super, super shreddy for summer, that's going to be a considerably longer time spent in the deficit and the accumulation of fatigue and other less desirable effects will accumulate because of that total duration spent and then the next kind of consideration I have around that is, many of the kind of gen pop fitness and health advice that comes out of the super big popular accounts may not contextually apply to you. Right. kind of like the conversation that, that Brian and I just had, I'm trying to make a blanketed compartmentalized statement of how to discern body fat percentages. And Brian's like, Hey, that doesn't contextually apply to me, you know? so understand that. And this is the thing that I would say I speak with clients most often about is sometimes they have a kind of unrealistic expectations of what it takes to get in very, very good shape. And they'll say things like, but you know, what about like balance? You know, and typically I'll say like at 8 % body fat, like there really isn't balance. Once you get there, you can find balance, but to get there. there really isn't a balance when you're pursuing these very ambitious physique goals and body fat goals specifically. The next thing I have on the consideration is your personal value system and what is important to you. This is one that I find is very, very important. For example, if you are like a foodie, someone who really likes trying local restaurants and things like that, this can be just significantly harder for you because it requires you to abstain at least to a more than would be desired degree from things that you really like to do. On the other side of the fence, if you're someone like me, I'm not knocking people who are foodies or by any stretch of imagination. It's just not a thing for me. I just don't care. You're like, I'm the dog food diet guy and I'm happily live my life that way. And like we've talked about many times with the like how, with happiness, right? There's the people who have like the extreme highs and the extreme lows and the Brian and I kind of find that we're both pretty much operating, you know, really close to a midline. That's how I am. Like, I don't hate going out to try to do restaurants, but the joy I get out of it's like I go from like a five to a six pretty much. And I'm like, all right, cool. I, I agree. I agree completely. I feel like with, with our situation, Kim is definitely the one that like wants to be out there and experiencing and like doing the thing, like the hot new chic thing that everyone else is doing, you know? And I'm just like, yeah, I could just do beef and rice again, you know? the other thing as, as you mentioned that it made me think about is the different circumstances that people find themselves in in life. for example, just being a parent. And it's not that being a parent is prohibitive to you getting super lean, if that's your goal. There's plenty of parents that stand on stage and compete in bodybuilding, but it certainly adds another layer of difficulty to the equation. And the thing I've found is like, the way I've always succeeded at getting lean isn't by having great restraint. It's by not having the things around that could force me to cheat. And when the kids are around, there's always that food. It is always present. Even if it's not dessert and we're like, okay, this week we're taking a week off of sugar, which we do sometimes. And then it's like, but at least, there's cheese puffs and there's potato chips and corn chips and white bread. And like, I mean, all of these things that just get in your mouth and... the texture is such that it becomes quite addicting. And so, yeah, circumstance, whether you're a foodie or a parent or work in a corporate culture where there's constantly pizza and candy coming in, I mean, all of these things present challenges that make it difficult and are unique to that person. Yeah, 100 % and some other ones here like relationship status, know, something that like it's, I wouldn't say it's a joke, but something that I see often in and I'm veering a little bit here, people in new relationships, right? It's terrible for your body composition. Horrible, right? People get in new relationships and both people just start to pile on weight. you see that so, so often. And it's one of those times like if you have this, you know goal of getting like super shredded for summer and you start like dating someone new that's a that's a Potentially An unnecessary strain on that relationship, you know if that person doesn't if you don't explain the goals well and communicate openly, right? so I'll use the example way too, just to play devil's advocate. Like you could end up with a partner that has the same fitness oriented lifestyle and mindset that you do. And it can actually improve your adherence and stuff. So I mean, I definitely, yeah, it can work both ways. Yep. So it's there's what I'm really getting at is there's multiple dynamics that I will call. I like to speak to them as they are indirect impacting factors. Right. Your girlfriend, just because you have a girlfriend doesn't mean that your carbs went from like 150 to 300. Right. I'm not saying that that is the case. But if you have a girlfriend who's like, oh, I we got invited to X restaurant with, you know, this person on this date, there's these it's it puts you in a position where you're going to either say no, I'm not going, which could potentially not go well, or yes, I'm gonna make the best decisions or, you know, I have a note in here or I'm gonna bring my own like Tupperware food and then that goes horribly, right? So like I said, indirect impacting factors that just force you to make decisions that you may not otherwise even be presented with. Yeah, I'd probably just say YOLO and go eat the pizza at the restaurant, you know, instead of being the Tupperware guy on the second date or whatever it is. Exactly. But then there's the implications of what that does to the rate of loss, how much rebound, how controlled you can be. Because some people can have, hey, I'm going to have the one slice of pizza and just white knuckle some of the hunger until I get home and I'll have my protein shake and go to bed. There's other people, they can't have one slice of pizza. It turns into four. And now we have, you know, 1600 extra calories added to the end of the night. And there goes the last four days of five days of fat loss, like literally gone. So Yeah, I think one of the things that it's obvious and you hear this all the time online, but I think people often don't think about this specifically as they indulge in foods is literally how much working out you have to do to make up for one small deviation in your diet. And so even if it's not, if you're the person that's like, okay, I'm not gonna go try to out exercise a bad diet, well then what you have to do is cut so many calories. that you almost, it would be just as miserable as just doing the exercise yourself. So yeah, that like one piece of pizza that is 400 calories that you have on top of your normal daily caloric allotment, 400 calories to burn is literally like, you're gonna go walk for an hour or you're gonna go run for 30 minutes. Like it's one of those types of things. And so that's a lot of time and or exercise intensity. for one piece of pizza. And most people don't just stop at one extra piece of pizza. And just to give a little bit of more anchoring, when I was doing longer cardio in my diet, I would do 40 minutes on the StairMaster at like a moving pace. My heart rate would be in the like 140s. And in that 40 minutes, I would do like 375 calories from my walk. For me, I'm like, hey, was that pizza worth it? I'm like, fuck no, like 40 minutes is. It's that's it's an effort. You don't feel you feel horrible from that effort, you know, and it's it's 40 minutes versus a little bit of like collective restraint. But, you know, to play devil's advocate there, like it takes you have it takes understanding and like learning those bumps, you know, or having a guide, you know, walking you through it. Because oftentimes on paper, like on paper, yes, you can out exercise that on paper. When it when it comes time to put like foot to pavement, It is a disgusting effort and it's not fun at all and massively time consuming. Yeah, it's time consuming and you get all that fatigue that comes from it too. So it's like the mental, psychological fatigue of like, man, I gotta go stand on this stair stepper for 40 minutes. But then also that fatigue that compounds and now it impacts your weight training workouts negatively. So there's the domino effect of. potentially losing muscle mass as you're cutting as well because you're more fatigued and you're not able to put your output into your strength training as well as you should. So yeah, I mean, it's multifactorial for Yep. So I feel like we've covered the considerations pretty decently and we've even dipped our toes into some of the trade offs as well. But I think it would be kind of dishonest of us not to cover some of the trade offs. And I think when looking at the trade offs, again, it comes down to your value system. Right. And everyone's going to have a little bit of a different value system. So some things may be a larger impact to, you know, your potential overall enjoyment of life or other things, might be like, yeah, I don't really care about that, so I don't care about that trade off, right? The first one I have here is your social life. In Western culture, so much of our social life revolves around food. And in many cases, with family traditions in history, it's around, food becomes part of culture and how families bond and those sorts of things. So that may... potentially weigh negatively on you. If you have the mother that gets offended because you won't eat her pasta dish, that might create a rife probably shortly, like in a family dynamic, depending on what your family dynamic looks like. So that could be a potentially quite large trade off. Another one that comes up is like, what would you call them? The parent, you're in -laws, right? That's one that comes up often that I see with clients, My, you know, my, my wife's mother, loves to cook and she gets offended if I like won't eat her meals and stuff. But of course she makes, I don't know, fucking ribs or something. That's just like blowing your, you're blowing your weak up regardless of what you try and do. so that's a pretty big one and how you personally like to socialize, right? If most of your friend group is not into like the fitness lifestyle, and this is kind of a hobby that you're out on a, on on wing on by yourself like this could create potentially some isolating of your own or potential social issues for Yeah, I guess like it is temporary in a sense. I mean, unless you're trying to sustain 8 % body fat, which I do think has its own implications and challenges as well. But like you kind of alluded to in the beginning, you do kind of find a homeostasis and you're just like, yes, now that I'm here, I've got the habits in place to be able to sustain this, even though there are sacrifices that must take place. But getting there, I feel like getting as challenging as it is, the idea in the brain that it's just temporary and that these sacrifices that I'm making don't have to be forever. I think that it adds an element of acceptance sort of. So even in a situation with in -laws or with grandparents and family gatherings, it's like, hey, I have this four month period or six month period or whatever it is where I'm really dedicating to this thing. And I think that when explained, I don't know too many in -laws and grandparents that would really be legit angry and hold a grudge on something that's temporary like that. I could see it being an issue over time. If year after year, you're like, no, I don't do that. I don't eat that food. And then it almost has this elitist quality to it of I'm better than that. But I think at least as a temporary endeavor, I don't know that it holds the same type of angst in there. I agree. And something that I was going to allude to is with your family or your friend group. What I found very, very helpful with my clients is in how you present it, right? How you portray something to people is how they will accept it or respond to it. I apologize. If you say, I can't, I'm on a diet, you're going to be met with why are you on a diet? You look great the way that you I heard the diets aren't healthy from this new blah, blah, whatever the fuck they listen to, right? Where I like to frame it is you say, hey, I have this very serious, ambitious goal that I am hell bent on achieving. So for this period of time, I'm not going to partake in these things because it will be prohibitive of me accomplishing this goal. And it's very important to me, right? When you present something like that to someone, it would be unreasonable of them to say that's stupid. Don't have big goals. Reduce your ambition. like, so it's the same. It's the same exact circumstance. It's just how you portray it to those that you are presenting the information to. Right. So it's how you speak about things does really. Yeah, for sure. That's a really good point. Anything else kind of on that one before I move on, Brian? No, I do have a question though that I think the listeners would find interesting, which is how many times in your life do you think you've gotten down to that level of leanness? times. two times under Yeah, think, mean, the crazy thing is I've really only dieted like twice, three times in my life. I did, you know, around COVID, I did one where I was probably about 10, maybe right about there. That one, but that one was like, couldn't really train and stuff. I was just bored and was like doing some Lyle McDonald's extreme diet, ultimate diet, because I literally had nothing else to fucking do because we were in the house all day. In Utah, I was very lean. I had two DEXs at 8 % within like four months apart. I was very lean there. And then this past January, December and January, before I started my TRT, and that was like the ultimate push. In there, I was definitely leaner than I was in Utah. So I potentially was like 7%. Yeah. I think I've done two. diets to photo shoot that were certainly under 10%. One, I've done three diets to photo shoot. One, I'm not entirely sure if it was under 10 % or not. I would guess not. And then I definitely got lean, that lean for the men's physique show that I did when we were doing CrossFit. had like 10 abs, it was insane. And then, Then we, as we were discussing off air before starting last year, I didn't do my diet, but I biked myself to 180 pounds, which is as lean or leaner than I would get on any of my diets. And so I would guess that at that point I was probably just under 10 % as well. So I think I've got like four or five times doing that. And that doesn't count even like, you know, being a teenager in high school and stuff like that, Yeah, I wouldn't know how lean I was, but it's possible I was under 10 % at points as well. Yeah, until I was like 15 years old, I'm pretty sure I lived my life at under 10%. I was like alien skinny as a kid. I think it just, I just grew so fast. I couldn't, my body could not keep food in me to have body fat. Like I was disgustingly skinny. When I, I remember there was, we got like a physical thing done as we left middle school to enter high school. And I was five foot nine hundred and thirty pounds when I left, when I left middle school. Then remember like seeing that paper and be like, that is absurd. You know what's funny is I was 5 '2", 130. So I was kind of the opposite of you. Like you were the kid that couldn't hold weight on and I was the kid that wouldn't grow tall enough. So I kept like just growing out. But yeah, I mean, this is interesting. We both weighed the same at the same point in our lives, just different height. Yeah. Now where was I? OK. Yes. The next trade off, food variety. Now. Depending on your skills, you can still keep a decently high food variety, but there's always going to be trade -offs with like cuts of meat, carbs that are also pretty high in fats, those sorts of things. if you have skills and understand your macros really well and have... have spent a decent amount of time in this and understanding food selection and the trade-offs of which fruits are higher in carbs than other fruits relative to volumes. Same thing with cuts of meats, et cetera, et cetera. You can still keep a decently high food volume. I would just say because there's more decisions to be made, there's an increase in the amount of variables and therefore an increased likelihood that the wrong decisions are made or you don't make enough or you don't I don't want to say the proper decision, but you don't calculate enough of a food and you run out and then you need to make, you know, swap in something on the fly, those sorts of things. So the note that I have here, less variables means a more predictable outcome. And this is something where personally with, with, shouldn't say person, guess, professionally with my coaching, I really try and steer people towards who are really hell bent on the goal. And I conceptualize it as if you're good with the dog food diet, it will get us to our goal. the fastest and the most predictable, but it comes back to that client's value system, right? If they're like, yeah, give me the fucking dog food diet. I just want to be shredded. And then I will increase my variation. Once I get there, then that's what we do. And we have the most predictable fat loss rates of loss, et cetera, et cetera, because we just have fewer variables and they, as the client have fewer decisions to be made, right? I know three weeks ago, I bought this amount of beef, this amount of chicken. this amount of rice and it got me through to this day, it was a wonderful week and we just kind of repeat that. It just becomes less decisions to be made and that obviously, you know, lowers the barrier to the rate of loss that we're looking. Yeah, so I know we did a whole episode on this topic, but what foods are you leaning on the most when you feel like you really need to dial it in and be lean and you want food volume to be high so that you're not hungry, like, you know, typical being, you know, sweet potatoes and vegetables and that stuff. So with that question, the second part being like, when does rice get cut out along the way or does Sometimes, yeah, you know, it depends on the person, right? And some people I find kind of just intrinsically have higher hunger than others. For whatever reason, I just kind of have low hunger. know, even when looking back on my last diet, when I was like very, very lean, there were the only times where I truly was like, fuck dude, my stomach hurts. I'm really, really hungry was when we trained, when training went too and I didn't have my next scheduled meal because we were just behind the ball training. That was the only time I really was like, fuck it hurts. I'm really, really hungry. So it depends. The foods, the top of the food chain in terms of volume to satiety, strawberries, number one, easily. Number two, it's going to be the winter squashes, your Kubota squash, butternut squash, acorn squash, delicata squash, spaghetti squash. There's probably one or two other ones. Those are this kind of like hybrid fruit, not fruit, starch slash vegetable where you can just eat such a high amount of it for the same carbohydrate and calorie cost as opposed to rice, right? So I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but it's like, let's say 50 grams, to get 50 grams of carbs of white rice, it's about, I believe like one, 185, 185 to 200 grams cooked white rice will provide about 50 grams of carbs. That same amount of like a acorn squash is gonna be like 600 grams of acorn squash. So you can eat like three fold the weight for the same. And obviously that's just weight comparison. The volume is probably gonna be 4X. So this is where these like understandings of nutritional science in certain foods can really, really help Most people, they're like, okay, I'm gonna get really shredded, right? They're still gonna keep eating rice and they're like, fuck, I'm really hungry and not realize there's these other foods that will get you three X the volume. satiety is not a factor of calories. It's largely a factor of volume. So that's like one. I typically with my clients who are very, very insulin sensitive, who digest carbohydrate well, I like to take a lower fat approach because it's again, low volume. You know, so I'm typically going to use as lean of meats as we can. Chicken breast, wonderful. Like a ground beef, like if we can get a 95 five ground beef where we drain some off to make our beef as lean as possible there. Eggs, egg whites. I typically push the, the push the proportion of eggs over to egg whites, you know, based on the amount of fats in those sorts of things. Um, in terms of fruits, less bananas, more berries. berries are gonna be the biggest kind of bang for your buck. Watermelons, another decent one there. And then fats, avocado, I'll keep in. I try to do less of the oils, but still, like some, I'll use extra virgin olive oil as like a salad dressing. I try and give people salads as well from a volume standpoint. But those are off the top of my head, some of like the major polars that I'll use. Cool. That's great. And then the last kind of trade off I had here is time spent doing other important things to you, other things that are important to you. As you know, as the cardio increases to continue to facilitate these further levels of fat loss, it's time costly. You know, if we're doing 15 ,000 steps per day, like you're not doing 15 ,000 steps in 45 minutes per day. Like you might be walking for upwards of like two hours per day. There, you when you have job, depending on the dynamics of your family, like it may be time consuming to the point where you don't have time to do, I don't know, let's say you're into gaming and you like put the kids to bed and game. I mean, I guess you could put a treadmill in your gaming room and that would be killing two birds with one stone. Like that would be pretty cool, right? But, but it may become kind of time prohibitive on other important things in your life, which is definitely a trade Yeah. Also, I've found personally that steps, they just like they're great in every way. Like I'm not hating on steps, but I feel like steps for whatever reason don't seem to increase caloric expenditure a whole ton. And like that going from 12 ,000 to 15 ,000 steps doesn't really seem to move the needle much, but it adds 30 minutes of time that you have to move. And so when I, when I look at that calculation, like, yeah, if I have the time to walk, I love walking because a, it is at some level increasing caloric expenditure, but it's also time that you're not thinking about food. And so I think walking has that tangential benefit that people don't often focus on. But yeah, as far as just using steps as a way to just increase caloric expenditure, I think it's kind of a, an exponential decline in benefit that you get the higher you go with the steps. I agree 100%. What I passed like 12, 12, five, 12 ,500, I typically will just increase like structured cardio with clients. There's certain clients who have just a very natural high step count where like 13, 14,000 steps for them is literally like a regular Monday or Tuesday. And they typically have like dogs or something like that that require walking and. That's easy, that's like literally status quo for them. So for them I might bump up to like 16, but it doesn't, it's not a large additional intake on your life. Where like me, I shit you not, my average step counts like 3 ,500. It's piss fucking poor. For me to go to like 12 ,000, I'm like, I have to go spend time doing things. And everyone's a little bit different, but like you said. I remember I'm looking, you know, really jogging my memory for when we had Brandon D 'Cruz on the podcast and we were talking about the, there's a specific word he would use to like flex, energy flux. Yes. Brilliant. In the Herman Poncer study on the Hadza tribe, I want to say it was around like 17 ,000 steps where their energy expenditure like didn't really. linearly increase anymore with the extra additional steps. So I really try and cap clients around like 15 and then I'm just increasing like structured cardio on the StairMaster or something like If you remember the Stronger by Science episode from years ago, Eric Trexler did a breakdown of some of the Herman Ponzer work on energy compensation. It was something like, if you're in a caloric surplus or maintenance plus, then you actually burn all the calories that you think you're burning through movement. But when you're in an energy deficit, you're burning something like 50 to 70 % of the actual calories that you think you're burning. So you could, like you're saying, you could go out for that walk and think you're doing 200 calories and you're really getting credit for a hundred and you're just causing a bunch of additional fatigue through forcing your body to move for really no reason. And you could be resting, recovering and putting that energy into strength training. So yeah, think that there's that Herman Ponser work is really good and anybody should go back and check into that or check the episode out with Brandon D 'Cruz. But essentially the idea being that as we increase our exercise or our movement past a certain point, our body legitimately will compensate for that movement and stop giving us credit for the calories that we're burning, so to speak. Yep. Yeah. The last thing I will say there is your body's smart, There's depending, regardless of your views on evolution or religion or anything like that, your body is intelligent, right? There's a reason that we are the primary kind of predator, whatever you want to call it, on the planet. The body's smart and does what it needs to to kind of rob and steal and outpace what you try to do to it. One thing that we feel decently confident in saying is in that the compensations that your body adjusts to with cardio are decently fast. So if you're leveraging that cardio lever for your fat loss and you just keep trying to stack it up, you get a diminishing return on X minutes spent as you continue to turn it up. So if you're starting your diet with know, cardio seven days per week, like, you 45 minutes by like week seven and eight, like what that 45 minute session nets you in terms of caloric expenditure is already starting to diminish. And if you're only like 40 % of your way through your diet, like it's only going to further work against you. So that's an important consideration Yeah, I always like to keep cardio as a tool in the toolbox that you can add in when things stagnate. So I think that's important. And then to kind of just further hammer home your point, as you become a smaller human, you actually burn fewer calories for that same time commitment to your cardio. there's a lot of kind of depreciating benefits to including cardio from the beginning of your diet. Yeah, yeah. And then the last one in terms of trade offs training performance. So this is largely is I'm not sure I'd pronounce this word mitigatable. that would that be right? Yeah, I don't know if mitigatable is a word, but I think the idea is... whatever. Everyone gets what I want to say, right? You can mitigate that by some intelligent shuffling of your macronutrient distribution, the timing of things. But once you get lean enough, your performance will start to suffer. One of the most prominent things, well, you'll probably notice it is in your pressing, especially like dumbbell pressing. It pretty much just will dry up. And then before you know it, you're fighting just to match. previous performances and then at some point limit the regressions. And that's just kind of the nature of the beast Yeah, pressing movements or whatever reason we've touched on so many times on this podcast, but pressing movements are always the first ones to Yeah. And then kind of shifting the conversations into expectations. So, I mean, we've covered a lot of the trade -offs in the circumstances and those sorts of things, but some expectations. The first one that I always like to say is, unfortunately, it will take you just longer than you think. And the unfortunate reality is we all just carry a lot more body fat than we think we do. Something that I will say if someone's at, you know, a client. And fortunately for me now, I have like my fat loss models and stuff that I I use to help illustrate this. But a lot of people think like, OK, you know, about 15 pounds down and like I'm going to be shredded. And I'm like, you need to double that, unfortunately, or more, depending on how much muscle you can hold on to double that or more. And that's really just the unfortunate reality. of Yeah, I agree, for And I would say in terms of a time investment, I can almost guarantee it's gonna be a minimum of about 12 weeks. Maybe 10 if you're someone that you're like, I'm gonna put everything on hold for these 10 weeks, jump into a very large deficit and like flip all the switches at once and like kind of white knuckle it. You can move pretty quickly, but it's again, the faster you move, the deeper the trade offs are in that regard. But then, you know, like I said, a minimum of, you know, probably about 12, but realistically 20 plus, like the last time for me, it was a full six months to get shredded. I mean, it just depends where you start to like you said in the very beginning, because getting from 15 % to 10 % in most cases for a male, that's that's 10 pounds, 5 % of body fat is going to be about 10 pounds thinking about a 200 pound male. And so if you're talking one pound a week, that's, in my opinion, about as high as you would want to go. When you talk about getting really aggressive with it, I don't think you can sustain two pounds a week 10 straight weeks. That's at least without like exogenous help of some sort. I don't see it often. I do have one client right now. We started at 212 and we just wrapped up week seven and he has put two plus plows every single week. But I'm talking about an exception. He's like a one out of 40 client sort of thing. I just don't see the body fat at 212, do you think? He was probably like 18, 19%. Like we pushed him up to that. We pushed him up like, and we built him up, you know, through like a build. We probably pushed the build a little bit longer than we should have, but we got food up like really, really high. we did it right to set him up for a very easy fat loss. I mean, we're pissing weight off at 2 ,700 calories, know? Yeah. great. Yeah, so that's just rare. You just don't see that too often. And so if you account for one pound a week being the norm, and then I think as you get under or near 10 % body fat, even a pound a week is probably a little bit too aggressive. I know for myself, and I think you as well, that as you get to that 10 % and less range, It's hard to even get half a pound. Like sometimes the scale will stagnate for like two weeks and nothing will happen and then you'll drop a pound and it's like, great, like so cool, you know? And then it stagnates again for like another two weeks. So yeah, it's, it's tough. It's very individual for And I don't think I covered this too much in here. So I think now is a decent time to talk about as you start getting to those leaner levels like Brian said, like sub 10, the scale becomes not as entirely reliable as it was at higher body fat percentages because you start to be more susceptible to some of the physiological impacts of being that lean cortisol, right? Maybe just patterned sleep from the cortisol rising too early. Things like that. So that's where like photos really come into play and some of the other what I like to call like my biofeedback factors. But those are some of those other indirect impacting factors. But I did. electrolytes and sodium and stuff like that stuff starts to play more of a factor and can manipulate your scale weight as well, even though you may or may not actually have lost or gained weight. Exactly. Now the next one, and this is one I find myself kind of like joking, I guess, about with clients and I feel kind of like a dickhead sometimes, dealing with some instances of hunger is pretty much guaranteed. I think there some mis -patterned information or expectations that like, I'm gonna get shredded and never have to deal with hunger. There are like tips and stuff to help, but at some point it's just a factor of life and you will have to accept that there's gonna be some hunger that you just have to manage. And it's just, it's not really a pain. I like to kind of conceptualize it almost kind of akin to an emotion, although that's objectively false. Um, but it's not like you're not going to die because you're nine and a half percent body fat and you have like an hour stretch of hunger from like five to six PM. But oftentimes people think like hunger bad, something bad is going to happen. That bad is like, you just got to wait or fill your mind for 60 minutes until your next meal sort of I feel like sometimes though. man, hate that I lose my train of thought right in middle of saying something like this. But the I was gonna say all right, continue talking. It'll come back to Yeah, sure. And I was going to touch on some mitigation strategies. Intense training helps blunt the hunger response. So this could be something where maybe you in those latter stages, you kind of increase your training time a little bit, maybe incrementally adjust some volume so that you can spend more time training, which then suppresses that hunger response. You also increase slightly caloric expenditure from the additional sets, reps, et cetera. And that helps blunt little bit. If you're someone that who's fortunate to be able to manipulate your schedule around your work and training, you can strategically place training at times that may help you bridge that hunger in those sorts of things, or adjust your meal timing. For example, it's easier to be hungry in the morning as opposed to in the evening because you can do things like include coffee, caffeine. things like that that will help blunt the surging of that appetite as well where you can't, I mean, you could have coffee at 9 p .m., but then you pretty much curb stomp your sleep, which then only further elicits poor responses in the subsequent days. I remembered. So I was gonna say embrace the hunger is kind of like one of the biggest things that really helped me in dieting. And I think it just helps clients to be reminded, to be reminded that you are going to be hungry, like you said. And so just embrace it and expect it. And I think the thing that always was hardest for me, and what you said is you just need to kind of tread water until your next meal and then you're gonna be okay. But I think you reach a point where you're at that like 10 % and under range and your meal doesn't actually fill you up. Like you finish your meal and you're like, I could eat another seven of those exact same meals. And so I think that understanding that there's going to also be a point where you are treading water till your next meal and then you eat the next meal and you're immediately hungry again. That's super unfortunate. and also somewhat commonplace as you begin to get Yeah. And this is one where I think food selection can really help not completely solve for. And there's different approaches to it. Like this most recent diet. I just I was training so long that it gave me like, you know, between training post workout meal and sauna, like that was literally like five and a half hours of my day sucked You know, my previous diet, I didn't do that. I really leveraged vegetables a lot more. You know, in this most recent diet, I was probably only eating 250 grams of vegetables per day, like pretty small amount considering that previous diet. I remember it was over 800 grams per day. And I leveraged that for a lot of that. I was basically just having like beef stir fry or chicken stir fry. daily, you know, and I would get a large amount of satiety through just the sheer volume of the vegetables I was eating. different techniques, you know, both pretty much got me the same place. I dieted for longer this time, had a bit more of a refined approach and was able to get leaner. But both do And then I agree just to double down on what you said about working out, kind of helping to blunt appetite. I totally feel that. And it's kind of in line with what I was saying about walking being a distraction where you're not thinking about eating. So walking's not really a workout in the same way, but it does kind of similarly accomplish the same idea, same task. We hammered this one home, so I'll just kind of touch it briefly. Movement for the sake of caloric expenditure. Like that's just an exception, or sorry, an expectation of the circumstances you will be moving just for the sole purpose of burning calories. A couple more we have here, periods of low energy. This is one that people will kind of want to expect, it makes sense. It's controlled starvation to generally a safe degree. Your body down regulates things, right? You are much more encouraged from your physiology to take a nap and to not do things that expend energy because you're pretty freaking tired. So you will feel that you might need naps. daily, you may really just like have zero energy to go walk the dog. When your kid wants to play whatever you might be like, dude, I, you know, really would rather sit on the couch instead. Right. So these are very real circumstances once a certain amount of body fat is is achieved. Yeah, for Irritability is another one. Reduced resistance to stress and moodiness. So the one that always hits me the highest, which is very strange, is the irritability. I will get like, someone will just say something that I don't like and I will just like look at them and disgust about the words that they just chose, right? And I'll have to like walk myself back down to like, Erin, it's just cause you're dieting and you're super lean. Like what they said is that far out of the norm like fucking cool it sort of thing. You'll just find like your fuse gets a little bit short. And I do think that's just the accumulated stress response from a lot of things that can also show up poor sleep as that you get that your cortisol curve gets a little bit dysregulated in there. Fortunately, there are some things that they can help. I don't wanna say solve for it, it can reduce the effects, like there's certain adaptogens and things like phosphatidylserine and ashwagandha, rhodiola rosea, things that can help, by no means will they solve it, but typically in acute circumstances, they can help restore decent nights of sleep that I've used with numerous clients very, very successfully. So there are things that you can... incorporate to help this, do expect you to your I want to I don't want to say like your personality will change but your response to identical situations and this would be a wonderful time for you to understand this to kind of pay attention to your your mood response but then also to share with your family your significant other right let them know that like hey once I get super lean I might get really pissy and things like that as so things are people have expectations of what may occur. If you just start, you know, snapping at your girlfriend or something like that, and she just has no idea why, or one that I completely forgot to put on the list, when your sex drive disappears, and if your significant other doesn't know why and then internalizes it and thinks that you don't think they're pretty anymore, they make up stories, but really it's just like, you just don't wanna have sex because you're too fucking shredded, which is very realistic thing for a lot of people. Communicate these things, right? Get out in front of them so that they don't turn into a larger issue than they might otherwise I will say, and this might be unique to me, I don't really know, I don't think you've experienced it as much as I have, but as I get down to like 12 % body fat, like for me it's like mid to high 180s, I feel like these things all improve. Like my energy gets better, my sleep gets better, my focus gets better, like all of these things improve. And then there's like this point not so far after, like another two to four pounds later and all the things that you mentioned. begin happening at that point. So it does seem that some body fat lost, even though it requires you to be in a caloric deficit and energy restricted state, seems to have positive impacts, at least temporarily. And then there's like this ledge that you kind of fall off at some If you were to ask me like, Aaron, what is the optimal body fat percentage for a male, like all things considered, I would say 12%. I think you will have like the best quality of life. You will have health improvements and things like that. You'll get pretty good hormone production, like all things considered, like living at 12%. Some people can probably get away a little bit leaner. I remember a couple of years ago seeing, there was research published on what levels of body fat that you will endogenously produce, like optimal levels of testosterone. It was quite leaner than I was expecting. I don't remember the specific facets offhand, like greater than like 13 or 14, it started dropping off pretty considerably at that point. Yeah. Yeah. So, like I always figured that unless you were obese or overweight, that the testosterone production would almost increase with body weight because you have more body fat to pull from, et cetera. So yeah, I don't know. That's so interesting, yeah. I remember it being like a lot lower than I thought it would be. Yeah, and I would say, again, all things considered, you're like once you are living at 12% body fat, like having some beers with your friends, if that's something that you do, you know, going out to dinner a couple of times per week, as long as you like your training, still doing some form of like a cardiovascular movement, like that could just be playing like a rec league sport, you know, let's call it like basketball or soccer like twice, but you can. live a pretty good best of all worlds around that 12%. Health should be very, very, very good as well. That would be my vote if I were to be asked. And then strange cravings. This is one, like even if you're not a foodie person, like your body will start throwing you signals that it wants the energy back in. I've always remember going to the grocery store and I'll be looking at like a peanut butter, like cracker sort of thing. And I'm like, man, I really want one of those. I'm like, I've never bought that in my entire life. And like your body will just start sending you signals for things. So strange cravings is one. And then the last one that I think we can can wrap up on and I hate that this is really the truth but the ultimate realization that you just don't have as much muscle as you thought you did and You're like this I'm gonna look so sick when I'm shredded and let me get let me get let me point it out you get Shredded and you get a nice pump at the gym. You look great. You're like, I'm a monster I have everything I've ever wanted that pump's gone and you're just in that shirt again and you're like, I look like a fucking swimmer. And that is not fun. It's the vascularity that goes for me. It's like, so I'm used to having like a vein in each bicep and a cross vein and like I'm walking down the street and I see these veins popping out and I'm like, yeah, like everything's good. And then you're in the caloric deficit deep enough and no matter what it's like hot out and you have your shirt off and the sun shining on you and you're like, wait, where'd my veins go? Yeah. body fat, right? It's like, where'd everything go? Yeah. So that one is Yeah, it's the cost of playing the game, per se. It's, yeah, and I'll also say similarly that losing the first like five to 10 pounds sometimes like doesn't make a difference in your physique. Like I'll be 198 and I'm like, yeah, like I look pretty good at 198 and then I'm like, man, if I lose 10 pounds and I'm 188, like this is gonna be insane. And I go down to 188 and I'm like, depending on how I look at myself, I kind of look the same as 198. So yeah, it's all the same idea. Yeah, there's like a, you were to break it up into kind of like, I guess, quadrants, like the first 25%, the 25 to 50, the 50 to 75, like that kind of 25 to 75, things kind of look the same for quite some time for a while. And I mean, there's a few different facets of why that is your flat, right? Unless you're using like a refeed strategy, which you could, but you're then again, typically extending that timeline if you're using it in that kind of middle frame. But yeah, I would agree. You're not really seeing large, tangible changes until you've crossed quite a percentage of a total body mass lost. Yeah. But like you said, the refeed does really bring it out and it kind of, it's almost like a tool to use as a coach to instill confidence in the client that what they're doing is in fact working because it's really easy to get discouraged in those first five to 10 pounds and realize you just look like a smaller version of the same person you were before. Yeah, I mean, I always explain it and I personally use refeeds mostly from a psychological standpoint. That's one thing we didn't really get into because we didn't talk too many strategies. But when cortisol is peaking, when sleep starts to get dysregulated and those sorts of things, I'll bring in refeeds that can help from a psychological standpoint. And if you are super lean, we get acute physiologic changes and improvements from that. A lot of clients will ask for that. I'm like, listen, we're 13%. We're still 15 pounds away from that sort of thing. cool. So hopefully this was informative. I'm sure we'll probably get a couple of questions on YouTube, hopefully some good ones. But as always guys, thank you for listening. Brian and I will talk to you next week.