Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 23 - The BEST method to LOSE FAT (What I Do With Clients + The Science)

Episode Date: April 27, 2020

In this episode, we talk about ALL things fat loss. I give my exact formula for reliably losing bodyfat and include exactly WHY each step works. This is a great episode for understanding the fundamentals and science of how to lose fat.Thanks For Listening!---RESOURCES/COACHING: I am all about education and that is not limited to this podcast! Feel free to grab a FREE guide (Nutrition, Training, Macros, Etc!) HERE! Interested in Working With Coach Danny and His One-On-One Coaching Team? Click HERE! Want To Have YOUR Question Answered On an Upcoming Episode of DYNAMIC DIALOGUE? You Can Submit It HERE!Want to Support The Podcast AND Get in Better Shape? Grab a Program HERE!----SOCIAL LINKS: Follow Coach Danny on INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERESupport the Show.

What's good, everybody? Welcome back in to the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. Today, we are talking all of the scientific and practical steps required for you, your clients, your family members, your loved ones, whomever it may be, to lose body fat. I'm going to share with you the exact protocol I use with most of my clients, be it in person or online, to achieve fat loss. Wherever you're starting off, there's going to be some nuance. There's going to be some person-to-person variability. But for the most part, these are the steps you're going to need to follow to lose body fat effectively in the long run.

to lose body fat effectively in the long run, all right? So before we get into that, really quick, just wanted to let you guys in on a few things. If you haven't heard the episodes I did last week with Susie Natal and Eric Helms and Lyle McDonald, I strongly recommend you queue those up for after this because they all work in kind of a nice continuum with what you're about to hear today. So there'll be a nice supplement to this. But without further ado, let's dive into it. All right, we're going to talk about again, all of the strategies,

all the implementation I put forward with my clients in personal online for the most part, I'm letting you in on basically all the secrets. So follow along, do your best, you'll enjoy it. We're talking all things fat loss today. All right, so tip number one, and I guess you could call this strategy or implementation number one, shouldn't be a surprise to anybody who's familiar with evidence-based fitness practice, but we'll dive a little bit deeper, right? So the first one is create a calorie deficit. You're not going to lose body fat unless you are in a calorie deficit for most people. Now, why this works, very, very simply, when we're in a calorie or energy deficit, our body needs to create energy from other sources, and we store a lot of energy in body fat cells. So our body will often liquidate those cells for energy.

Another place we can get it is from stored carbohydrate in the form of glycogen. And lastly, from stored protein, particularly from muscle. Although if you're resistance training, which is really important, and we'll get to that later, your body won't really prioritize that. to that later, your body won't really prioritize that. Now, that nutritionally speaking, okay, we can limit calories in by doing things like tracking our calorie intake or opting to hop on a fad diet. For example, keto dieting and veganism primarily work to create weight loss by creating a calorie deficit by removing higher calorie traditional Western options. So, for example, with regards to keto, you're removing a lot of potentially high calorie carbohydrate-rich options that are easy to overconsume.

And with veganism, we're removing a lot of higher calorie animal products. It's not the products or the contents of the products that we're removing so much as it is the calories that we're removing and the restructuring of that traditional Western diet. And oftentimes, it's easier to just not eat than it is to figure out what the heck can I eat with all these restrictions going on. So that's why those diets have success. But I'm a much greater fan of just having clients track their calories and try to hit some macronutrient targets aligned with performance. That way, we don't have to get rid of any foods. That's really big. Now, obviously, calories in, calories out is what's going to create fat loss, but I'd be doing you a disservice if I didn't let you in on one of the things I do

with my clients, and that is kind of the explanation of some of the factors that can impact calories in versus calories out, right? This is something most coaches don't talk about. And it drives me up the wall, okay? You got a lot of inexperienced coaches in the space who've never worked with anybody or they only work online and all they say is calorie deficit, calorie deficit, calorie deficit. Well, unfortunately, that doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot to people who don't have a thorough understanding of thermodynamics. It's just defeating. And, you know, calories in, calories out kind of works in a vacuum. There's some things that impact the calories in, calories out equation. For example, sleep, stress, exercise, willpower, lifestyle, food choices, okay? All of those things impact the net calories in, calories out.

So while calories in, calories out, right, and creating a calorie deficit is at the foreground, it's at the base, it is everything that we build upon, we need to understand that there's layers to this shit and there's nuance and that our sleep is going to impact our calories in, calories out, both directly and indirectly. Directly by increasing recovery and helping us build muscle tissue. Indirectly by actually impacting our decision making and our ability to adhere to a diet by impacting things like willpower. Stress can directly impact energy metabolism through things like cortisol, but indirectly by making us want to eat to manage said stress. Obviously, exercise has an

impact both directly and indirectly on calories, but so do lifestyles and food choices. Food choices, for example, opting for more protein will use quite a bit of calories. More vegetables would use quite a bit of calories to break down those more, I guess you could say, structurally dense substrates in the stomach, right? It's a lot harder to break them down because they're a lot more tightly packed. There are a lot more things in there from a chemical perspective than a simple carbohydrate or a simple fat, which break down quite quickly and require very little energy. So there is nuance to this. But at the core, let's not get lost looking for the forest and the trees, as they say. Number one, we've got to create that calorie deficit. So number two, and this is big,

this is at the root of everything I do, is to ensure precious metabolically active muscle tissue is preserved. So we want to save all that muscle and even build it to the best of our ability for fat loss. Now, this is why a lot of people will do a build it to the best of our ability for fat loss. Now, this is why a lot of people will do a reverse diet with the goal of raising general metabolic output up by building a little bit of muscle first. But for most people, if you just want to lose some body fat and you haven't been training super hard, you can certainly build some muscle in a calorie deficit, particularly if it's a novel training stimulus or you've never trained before. But the best way to keep and potentially build that metabolic tissue, and

again, I want to reiterate, it's not optimal in a calorie deficit, but it's not impossible either. The best way to do it is to include adequate dietary protein in the diet, around 0.6 to 1 grams per pound minimum, okay? More might even be beneficial, particularly for people on lower calories because protein can help us feel full. Now, 0.6 to 1 is going to be enough to stimulate what we call muscle protein synthesis and help keep our mTOR high. And MPS, muscle protein synthesis, and mTOR, mammalian targeted rapamycin, right? All of these things are really, really big terms to basically explain keeping that muscle building machinery working around the clock.

So ensuring we're getting adequate protein spread across the day is a really good way to one, stay full, but two, ensure we're keeping that preciously metabolic active muscle tissue going. ensure we're keeping that preciously metabolic active muscle tissue going. Losing muscle is not ideal during a weight loss phase because it does have a pretty moderate impact, moderate to low impact on metabolic rate. And while it's not huge, we definitely don't want to lose it. And we can keep it by simply increasing our protein intake, which will help both directly with managing appetite indirectly by kind of keeping us, it gives us something to build meals around, right? I think for a lot of people, it's hard to figure out how to construct meals. And I think that putting protein at the center and vegetables

at the center is likely a good place to start. A pro tip I have for people particularly looking to lose weight is to try to really load up on protein in their earliest meals. So the reason I recommend this has little to do with nutrient timing, and it has more to do with hitting dietary protein. So let's say you wake up at 6 and you go to bed at 9. If you wake up at 6 in the morning and you get 30 to 40 grams of protein with breakfast, by 7 a.m., if you're a, say you're 120 pound, or let's say you're 160 pound female, you're already, you know, upwards of, you know, you could be as high as 30 to 40% of your daily protein intake all the way down to 25%, but you're getting a huge chunk of your protein intake knocked out right out of the gate, which is a really, really valuable tool. So you're playing with a lead instead of playing catch up. That's how I like to refer to it. And I like my clients to try to play with a lead. So I'll often increase protein in that first

meal, and I like to have quite a bit around the workout. But if you're somebody who trains fasted or likes to train very early in the morning, you might just have a higher protein post-training meal. All right? So that's all really, really important. Now, tip number three is to ensure essential fats are maintained so that the hormonal environment can be preserved while dieting. There's no mistake about it that both men and women are going to see some hormonally deleterious impacts from prolonged caloric restriction. Many women will lose their menstrual cycle, which we want to avoid at all costs, and many men will lose their libido, which is unfortunate, but ensuring that we're getting at least 20% of daily calorie intake from fats, I like to go for around 30%,

is a great way to ensure we're giving our body the metabolic pieces it needs to put together those vital hormones that often get lost at lower calorie intake, particularly for men. Men synthesize the hormone testosterone from cholesterol. So, inadequate dietary fat intake, while it's not a direct pathway that ingested cholesterol turns into testosterone, inadequate dietary fat intake does force the body to partition those fats accordingly, and honestly, the libido will be one of the first things to go. Because a weaker organism, right, somebody who's not adequately nourished, from an evolution standpoint, probably isn't the optimal person to be reproducing. So when people are malnourished and underfed, the

libido, the menstrual cycle typically take a height because your body is in twofold saying, one, hey, I don't want to expend calories for this stuff that's not a necessity to keep you alive. It's a necessity to keep the species alive. But I'd rather have other people who are healthier and more well-nourished be, of course, propagating the species. So from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes quite a bit of sense why the body might just shut down those mechanisms entirely. And we want to diet with some degree of peace of mind and health. So getting enough dietary fat intake is super, super important. Now, while fat does have nine calories per gram and should certainly be monitored,

it isn't in and of itself inherently fattening, okay? Fat does not turn directly into fat. But, again, we want to monitor it because it's very high in calories. And additionally, it's very, very easy for ingested dietary fat to be converted into body fat stores. Fat has the lowest thermic effect of feeding of all of the foods, right? We talked about this. We hinted about this a little bit with protein. Protein has a very high thermic effect of food. So does vegetables. So thermic effect of food basically means, hey, the thermic effect represents the calorie expenditure required to break down that food. So the thermic effect of a food or the thermic effect of feeding is representative of

how many calories are consumed just breaking down and absorbing or assimilating that food. And protein and veggies are on the higher end. Dietary fat is on the lower end. So of those nine calories, we're really going to take in quite a bit of it. So it's worth monitoring our dietary fat intake and really trying to hammer between about 20 to 30 percent of total calories coming from dietary fat, any lower than that, and that's where you can run into a little bit of trouble. All right, so here's one that I don't want you to hear what I'm not saying because I'm not trying to demonize this one, but when trying to lose body fat, and this is tip number four, it's important to use carbs appropriately, okay? And the term appropriately is important here.

Of the two nutrients that we've talked about already, fat and protein, those two are essential. Without enough of them, the human organism will die. Now, a lot of people, particularly the keto zealots, will tout that, of course, what I just said. Oh, carbs aren't essential. You can survive without them. You might even be better without them. Now, while something might not be essential, right, the carbohydrate might not be essential for survival, it's certainly optimal for performance, especially if you're doing a lot of weightlifting. So we want to include them in the diet, but how much we do so is vital, right? I like to have my clients have enough carbs to fuel performance, recovery, and ensure that they can adhere to their diet. That's really important. I think that the removal of carbohydrate,

particularly in a traditional American diet, will lead to a lot of water loss, a lot of weight loss, and that's kind of conflated into this idea that fats or carbs are fattening and that's the thing you have to remove if you want to lose weight. But in practice, a lot of people end up gaining that weight right back. So it kind of just shows, hmm, maybe we don't want to remove the entirety of the food group just in the name of losing weight. Perhaps instead we use it more intelligently and appropriately to fuel performance and recovery, and then we limit that intake to minimize how much we actually end up putting down. A lot of people refer to this as earning your carbs, which I think is fine. So remember, carbs are huge for fueling performance and recovery. The intake of carbohydrates is important for high

output glycolytic resistance training style work. It's what our body wants to use as fuel for that. It's also really good for topping off glycogen, filling those muscles back up with water, and helping blunt cortisol or the stress response to training. So there's a lot of really good reasons to use carbs. We just want to make sure that we're using enough. So when you've calculated your calorie deficit, you've ensured adequate dietary protein is put in place. Then you kind of walk this line of, well, how many fats and how many carbs is going to help my client adhere to their diet? So you find out a little bit about what they like, what they don't like nutritionally, and you try to match it up, just making sure you're getting at least 20%

of dietary fat intake minimum. Now, I like to partition a lot of the carbs pre and post training. Again, for people who are training in the morning, you can have more post, especially if you're training fasted. But eliminating them all together is never ideal. And it's particularly important that if you're going to limit them at all, that's where we play with timing. And that's where having them around those intense bouts of training is going to prove particularly more valuable than simply having them happenstance all over the day. If they are limited, timing becomes more important. And this is true of all the macronutrients. Hey guys, just wanted to take a quick second to say thanks so much for listening to the podcast.

And if you're finding value, it would mean the world to me if you would share it on your social media. Simply screenshot whatever platform you're listening to and share the episode to your Instagram story or share it to Facebook. But be sure to tag me so I can say thanks and we can chat it up about what you liked and how I can continue to improve. Thanks so much for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. As we diet more and more, as we get closer and closer to that goal weight, or as we're really fine tuning, that's where timing becomes really important. When we're just getting started and, you know, we're working on just hitting those macro targets, I'm not so huge on clients being spot on with timing all the time.

But if we've really gotten you to a point where we have to limit carbs, I want them to be around training so that they can optimally help you fuel performance. And that's really important. So this tends to be the place where of all of the macronutrients, if you're low on them, protein is going to probably impact your health the most. Fat is probably going to impact your overall hormonal profile the most. And carbohydrate has a potential to impact your mood the most because a lot of people's insulin is pretty dependent on a consistent drip of carbohydrates, particularly the way

that we eat. pretty dependent on a consistent drip of carbohydrates, particularly the way that we eat, mood and energy levels can be variable when adjusting carbohydrate intake at first. So it's important to just be aware of that. We never want to cut them out altogether unless we have a reason to. For some clients, particularly those with PCOS or some degree of insulin insensitivity, I will keep carbohydrates lower, but my approach as a coach is to give the client as many carbs as they can eat while still being in a deficit if they like carbohydrate. If they prefer more fat, we'll lean that way or even towards something more in the middle. But in the name of performance, I tend to want to keep them as high as I possibly

can. I find that works out the best. Excellent. So we've covered most of the nutritional strategies that I implement with my clients. Now let's talk about training strategies. What it is we attempt to develop is really going to be unique to the individual's goals. But at the end of the day, the majority of their training is going to be emphasizing building muscle tissue for the reasons I kind of listed with protein. Building muscle tissue is going to preserve the metabolic rate and it's going to give you something worth looking at after you lose the damn fat. Let's be honest. A good muscular physique, male or female, looks solid.

It looks athletic. It's what most people want. Flopping around on the treadmill is all well and good, and your aerobic health is certainly important. But you don't want to end up with no muscle, and it's certainly going to be much more difficult. Now, a lot of people ask how much I should do of each. Now, that's where it gets a little tricky, but I do recommend about 90 minutes of aerobic work a week. And that can look a lot of different ways. If I've got a client going to the gym, anywhere from three to six days a week, they do a five to 10 minute cardio warmup or five to 10 minute cardio cool down.

That's anywhere from 15% to all of the cardio they'll need to do for the entirety of that week. So just making sure that we're doing an adequate warmup and cool down, at least from an aerobic standpoint, can get in quite a bit of cardio. If you want to do extra cardio, you definitely can. But again, that 90 minutes a week is about all I recommend for most people looking to lose body fat. Depending on how many days you're going to be able to get into the gym will primarily dictate the training split or the style of training you implement. For people going about three days a week, I like to prioritize total body. For people who are able to go four, a lot of times we will go upper-lower. For people who can go five,

sometimes upper-lower, upper-lower, upper-lower, upper-lower, followed by a day in which we particularly highlight either total body or exactly what it is that person wants to prioritize. And for those rare folks who want to go six days a week and can recover from that, that's where we might play with something like a push-pull leg or even what people call muscle group specialization phases. So nothing crazy there. The primary goal and the primary training stimulus for somebody looking to lose body fat should be emphasizing resistance

training with the goal of adding muscle tissue with adequate cardio respiratory activity to support aerobic fitness as well as increase caloric expenditure. That extra 90 minutes of cardio a week, even if it's low intensity, is going to keep you healthy. It's going to help you maintain your aerobic fitness and it will be additional caloric expenditure. All right, so we've covered the nuts and bolts of nutrition. We've also covered the nuts and bolts of training. Let's cover the kind of bare bones, nuts and bolts of lifestyle stuff. And I've got two, maybe three big points here. So the first is ensure you're getting adequate sleep. If you are in a calorie

deficit and you are getting inadequate sleep, the amount of tissue you lose from muscle is disproportionately higher than if you're getting adequate sleep. To the tune of, and I will butcher and misquote the study here, but to the tune of having two groups in one study, one of whom slept less than six hours, the other who slept eight. The group that slept less than six lost about 60 to 70% of the weight they lost from muscle. And the group that got enough sleep lost about 80 to 90% of the weight from fat. So a lot of things are happening mechanistically while we sleep beyond simply just recharging the batteries. Okay, we're synthesizing testosterone, we're synthesizing growth hormone, we're really laying the foundation for Okay, we're synthesizing testosterone, we're synthesizing growth hormone,

we're really laying the foundation for maintaining, if not building a little bit of muscle whilst in calorie deficit. However, if sleep is inadequate, we're unable to synthesize those hormones, we're unable to go through that reparation process, a lot of that tissue will likely be lost from muscle, which is really, really unfortunate. So some of the things I recommend to optimize your sleep. Get into a nighttime routine. Make sure you turn the lights off one to two hours before bed. If you're not going to do that, wear blue blocking glasses. Practice belly breathing or nasal breathing that we can use to get into that parasympathetic rest and digest state. You may want to do something like supplemental magnesium or valerian, and even tart cherry juice has been shown pretty profound

or has been shown to have a pretty profound impact on sleep, particularly with women. But yeah, look into those things, magnesium, valerian, and tart cherry, but only after you've already, again, turned those lights off, put the phone away, blue blockers, belly breathing, maybe even some reading. That can be really, really powerful for laying the foundation for a quality night's sleep. Now, another lifestyle factor that is huge is managing stress. The exponential amounts of stress are far from ideal when it comes to losing body

fat. It's very, very important that we actually work to manage stressors, particularly those that are going to impact cortisol when we're looking to lose body fat. And even existential stressors, things that don't directly impact our fitness, but things like family drama, work drama, friend drama, all those things, they take a toll on our willpower. And willpower has been shown to be a finite resource. So if you're stressed and having to abstain from drama all day or you're involved in drama all day, the likelihood of making poor dietary decisions is certainly going to increase. So managing your stress is really, really important. And the best way to do that can be really, really simple. If you have people who are stressing you out in your life, personal life or work, you're

not off base saying, hey, this situation is really stressing me out and I'm trying to focus on my health, so I am going to step away. Or choosing to deliberately not engage with people or situations that are going to bring you stress. And again, not getting enough sleep is really stressful. And we'll talk more about some other ways that stress can creep in in a second here. But managing your stress is big. The last lifestyle, and I guess you could lump this in with nutritional thing that I have my clients focus on with regards to fat loss, is taking the right supplements. And you don't need to take a ton. But the big three that I really recommend

with a bonus too is first and foremost, I'm big on protein for people who want to lose weight. Having it around is a great way to actively have stuff waiting in the wing if you're running low on protein, if you need to hit it later in the day, if you're on the go and you need a lower calorie meal, you can always mix up a protein shake and grab an apple. Is it perfectly healthy and micronutrient focused? Perhaps not, but it's certainly a great, easy, low barrier option for people who are active and on the go and might use the excuse of, oh, I just didn't have the time. If you have some quality protein powder around, you will have the time. Creatine is the second supplement I recommend. Again, it indirectly and directly increases performance directly by helping muscles stay saturated

with water by regenerating ATP. And again, it has some indirectly awesome benefits for the brain. All of it is good. And creatine is generally really inexpensive. So it will help you maintain your performance whilst in a calorie deficit. The last one is caffeine. Caffeine may help with fat mobilization, but primarily just for helping give you a kick before training. For people who have a hard time sleeping, I recommend cutting off caffeine before noon, so I really recommend it for morning trainees. Now, all three of these supplements are completely and entirely optional. But of the ones I'm recommending, these are the three I would focus on first. The next two that, again, are even more optional, number one is going to be a multivitamin. Multivitamins are particularly important for people on a calorie deficit

because when you're limiting calorie intake and food decisions, you might also miss out on some macronutrients. While most people do not eat healthy, when you eat enough, you will pick up trace minerals, trace vitamins, all these things and get a little bit closer to optimal. But when you start restricting things, even if you focus on eating healthy, there might be a few things you miss simply by virtue of not being able to get them in adequate amounts because you're eating less. So while eating a lot of vegetables is a really, really important part of a fat loss diet for multiple reasons, one of which is getting the adequate nutrition, a vitamin on the back burner certainly won't hurt. And the last one is a fish oil for many of the same reasons. Getting adequate

omega-3, EPA, and DHA in the diet might be difficult as they usually tend to come from fatty fish or marine sources. So supplementing with some fish oil is important. Now, it's worth noting that fish oil supplements do contain dietary fat, so they will impact your bottom line. And if you're very serious about your weight loss, it might be worth tracking your fish oil in your total calories. So again, guys, to wrap things up, these are the exact tools and structures I implement with clients to help them lose fat. Number one, controlling the caloric environment, creating a calorie deficit, finding a dietary protocol you can stick to, and using some

form of accounting that helps you understand exactly how many calories you're eating. Number two, get adequate dietary protein between 0.6 to 1 gram per pound minimum for maintaining muscle and staying full. If you're really getting deeper into a diet, that's when you can look at going above one. If you're not that deep into a diet, going above one is a little bit silly in my opinion because you're leaving a lot of performance on the table. Ensure essential fats are maintained. We have to get at least 20% of dietary calorie intake from fats to maintain that hormonal environment to stay healthy. Fats are essential for the joints, for the hormones, for the brain. We need to have them going. Fourth tip, reminding you to use carbs

appropriately. They're very, very valuable as a performance tool, but if we're limiting calorie intake, that's probably the place we can afford to remove the most calories from. So as you get further and further into a diet and partition your calories closer and closer around your workout, you'll be able to make them work for you. Use them appropriately. Use them intelligently. Don't demonize them. And I like to have my clients eat as many as possible unless they really have a preference for increased dietary fats. Number five, ensure you're getting adequate sleep, right? That has a huge impact on the type of tissue that we lose when we're in a calorie deficit. And losing a lot of muscle is never a good thing, particularly if we're trying to develop or rather show a high quality body at the end of a diet. Like,

what good is that diet if you have no muscle to show? Tip number six, manage your stress and your stressors. And tip number seven, take the right supplements, particularly protein, creatine, and caffeine. So that's it, guys. That's really that simple. Those are the things that I implement with my clients to help them lose body fat. I'm giving you the secrets not because I think it's going to ruin my coaching business, but because I think that people really just need to hear it from somebody who actually knows what they're talking about. And a lot of people may implement these on their own and never hire me or never work

with my team. That's fine. That's awesome. More power to you. But a lot of people need help with the implementation. They need the support. They need somebody whose job it is to hold them accountable to following those tips plus the many other things we implement with the one-on-one coaching. So again, if you guys are interested, you can find the link for one-on-one coaching in the show notes below. All of these strategies are also included in some part in the programs that I sell on my site

that are available below as well. And if you are looking to lose body fat, it certainly helps to have someone along for the ride to provide you with support, peace of mind, and accountability. So you guys, thanks so much for tuning into the podcast. If you could do me a huge favor, leave me a five-star rating and written review on iTunes.

It helps other people just like you find the podcast, and it will help other people reach their fitness goals. Thanks so much for tuning in, you guys. Have a great day. Appreciate you a ton, and be awesome.