Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 244: Why Fat Loss is Hard

Episode Date: December 6, 2022

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down to the show notes and check out using the special link for dynamic dialogue listeners. Welcome in everybody to another episode of the podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matrenga. And in this episode, episode 244, we are going to be talking all about the ins and outs, the intricacies of fat loss, why it's so challenging mentally, emotionally, the way that the human body is constructed, the way that we have evolved, and what you can do on your fat loss journey to make changing your body composition easier. This is a great podcast and a really, really helpful listen for anybody who works in the fitness space as a trainer or coach, or if you're just a fitness enthusiast who wants to share this with somebody else, share getting leaner, share getting in better shape, share building fitness with other people around you who might be struggling with their weight and might

be open to it. You want to maximize how receptive they can be in the best advice position yourself to give the best advice possible, assuming they're ready. This will be a very good podcast for you. So this is not just an episode for those of you who are already committed to body fat loss. Even if your weight's stable, you're happy with your weight, you'll learn a lot from this. And I will also be giving you five tools, five habits that we use with our clients over at Core Coaching Method to make body fat reduction easier here at the end. So I think the first thing we need to discuss about body fat

reduction and losing body fat is just the fact that when it's marketed to us as consumers or as anybody who might be looking to get lean or look a little bit better, beauty standards are often communicated via marketing, via commercials as being easier to obtain than they really are. We see this with cosmetics. We see this with clothing. We obviously see this with fitness, but we see the kind of continued notion, the continual communication of the notion, rather, that body fat loss should be easy. And if fat loss is not easy for you, that you are doing something wrong. And that's just not the case. I think it's really important to remember that the human species, Homo sapien, is 200,000 years old. And for almost all of that time, I'm talking 99.9%

of the 200,000 years, there was no benefit to being super shredded. In fact, the leaner you got, the lower your likelihood of survival as an organism, because it wasn't until the agricultural revolution and some huge changes in how we lived our lives that obesity even became a problem at the national population level, right? Nations where over 10% of the population became obese is like a post-1980 thing. This is a very recent thing. So we do not see obesity across the lifespan or across the species span until 1970, 1980, the way we do now. It is a very new thing. And so, it's important to understand that for 200,000 years, our brain, our eating behavior, our reward pathways have kind of evolved to preferentially lean towards overconsumption of foods for survival and

retention of body fat for additional survival capabilities, be it insulation, be it caloric storage. It was not advantageous for human beings to attempt to lose body fat until more recently, where body fatness and excessive adiposity presents a greater health issue than does the alternative, which in this case would be leanness. I actually heard it. I don't remember who said this quote, but they said a hundred years ago, the principal problem with food was starvation. Today, the principal problem with food is obesity. That's pretty remarkable. At least in most places. There's obviously places where we still see starvation and lack of food availability as a problem right here in America. It's actually startling how many children are

malnourished. And that's more of a socioeconomic discussion than it is like a obesity specific discussion. It's kind of on the other end. But understand that for 200,000 years as a species, our brain, our bodies, our organism, our entire clan, our species benefited from maintaining body fat and consuming as many calories as possible within reason with what we had access to. Enter a hyper seductive food environment like the one we're in now. And that is where things get a little crazy because for 200,000 years, these motor pathways, these, I shouldn't call them motor pathways, these neural pathways were primed for over consumption. And so I could see how it would be really, really easy as somebody who's attempting to lose fat,

who sees all of the marketing gimmicks and all of the marketing ploys being thrown at you constantly, that fat loss should be easy. You just need this pill. Fat loss should be easy. You just need this tip, this trick, this hack. But the truth is, it's not supposed to be easy. And you have a substantial amount of evolutionary hardware kind of working against it. But, and this is the good news, folks, there are a number of tools, tricks, tactics that you can deploy to make losing body fat easier. There's a number of things you can do with your behavior and focusing on how you shift your behavior to actually work with your biology, right? We understand that our biology and our neurology, the way that we receive reward from

food can make weight loss challenging, but there are ways that you can actually work with those same neural pathways, even if it's just understanding them better, that can make fat loss and weight loss a little bit easier. So let's talk about some of the habits and behaviors that are particularly beneficial for working with your biology. And I think the first and most obvious is to work within, I mean, one more biologically relevant realm to start in than physiology, with the human muscle, with exercise science, the best tool we have at our disposal before we even talk about food when it comes to regulating body fatness, when it comes to regulating food intake, when it comes to kind of working with 200,000

years of evolutionary biology is to stay active, to load our tissues skeletally, and to keep our heart and our lungs happy. So one thing we know about exercise, particularly resistance-based exercise, is it regulates blood sugar by opening the GLUT4 pathway. If you're a type 1 diabetic, meaning you don't produce insulin, the only thing you can really do short of taking insulin to pull blood sugar out of the bloodstream is to essentially upregulate the translocation of this GLUT4 protein, send it to the cell surface so that it can open up these portals for glucose. And you do that with exercise.

Exercise is very good for managing blood sugar. So that's very good when we talk about, hey, I'd like to control my appetite. Having more regular blood sugar helps with that. Exercise has independently been shown to have a kind of mediating, normalizing effect on appetite. So even though a lot of people report increased hunger with exercise, we have reason to believe that having a more regular exercise routine will be beneficial for maintaining a more favorable caloric intake for normalizing your weight. And if you're struggling with weight loss, I think exercise as a calorie expenditure tool is obviously excellent. But you want to do everything you can to optimize your hormones, to optimize your biology. Hormones would be within a small subset

of your biology known as your endocrinology. So lifting weights, good for testosterone, growth hormone, appetite regulation, increases the amount of skeletal muscles so you can better metabolize insulin. It's a lot of hormonal or endocrinological things going on there that are beneficial for you. So start with some weightlifting. Obviously, we want to do something aerobic as well for our heart, lungs, and blood vessels. So a great thing you can do there is go on some long walks, maybe some hikes or incorporate an aerobic modality that you enjoy for some higher kind of upper echelon aerobic work. If you do enough two to three days a week for your muscles and do enough two to three days a week for your heart, you should be more than fine in the exercise department. We need to kind

of pay attention again to that 200,000 year timeframe where Homo sapien was a very active, very mobile standing, walking, moving, working organism, not the kind of organism that just sits around on its ass all day going on TikTok. If you were to give like TikTok to human beings 200 years ago, they still probably wouldn't have the weight problem that they have now. Not that it's independently from sitting around, but because the food environment was different. But when you take a food environment that's hyper seductive with a lot of hyper palatable, easy to over consume foods, and you add and inject that a lot of

different media and different entertainment options that kind of are best consumed while sitting around doing nothing, especially short form content that's easy to kind of sink into and lose large chunks or small chunks, even that compound of your day, you can really see how, you know, a lack of activity paired with highly, highly enjoyable, hyper palatable, high calorie foods could lead to some problems. And to work against that is essentially the challenge that most people face when it comes to body fat loss. Many people actually understand what it is that they need to do. Many people have a good idea of what healthy eating and healthy behaviors look like. They might even have engaged in some health

promoting behaviors or are currently engaging in some health-promoting behaviors. But the best thing you can do out of the gate, from the jump, is to engage in a regular exercise practice so as to better normalize your hormones, appetite, and put your body in a position where it will be more receptive to other changes because body fat loss in this environment is challenging and you need to win on multiple fronts. And I do believe that exercise is the most motivating front to win on and to start with. So why not do that? Why not put yourself in a position to be as successful as possible, you know, really kind of understanding that, Hey, I know this is going to be tricky, but if I can win in the exercise department, I can really generate some momentum.

Hey guys, taking a break from the show to tell you about our amazing sports nutrition partner, Legion. Legion makes the best evidence-based formulas for sports performance, sports nutrition, recovery, and fat loss. I don't recommend many supplements. In fact, I think you can get the majority of the nutrition you need from a whole foods diet. But let's be honest, many of us are either on the go and need assistance, or quite frankly, we're not going to settle for average and we want to get the absolute most we can out of our training. So Legion is the company I go to for all of my supplement staples, whether it's creatine, which I get from their product recharge, my protein that I get from either whey plus or plant

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multivitamin that contain a few different things that men and women might need for their unique physiology. So when you think of your vitamins, your fish oil, your pre-workout, your protein, all of the things that many of you take every single day, I'd encourage you to check out Legion. They have an amazing line, wonderful products, wonderful flavors, naturally sweetened, no dyes and colors. You can't go wrong. You can shop using the show notes below or by going to legionathletics.com and checking out using the promo code Danny. That will save you 20% and it will actually help you get two times points towards future orders, which you can use the same as cash. Pretty cool, guys. So head over to legionathletics.com and check out using the promo code DANNY to save on all your sports supplement needs. Back to the show. core coaching method, and more specifically, are a one-on-one fully tailored online coaching program. My online coaching program has kind of been the flagship for core coaching method for a

while. Of course, we do have PDF programming and we have app-based programming. But if you want a truly tailored one-on-one experience with a coach like myself or a member of my coaching team, someone who is certified, somebody who has multiple years of experience working with clients in person online, somebody who is licensed to provide a macro nutrition plan, somebody who is actually good at communicating with clients because they've done it for years, whether that be via phone call, email, text, right? This one-on-one coaching program is really designed to give you all the support you need with custom training designed for you, whether you're training from home, the gym, around your limitations, and your goals. Nothing cookie cutter here.

As well as easy to follow macronutrition programs that are non-restrictive. You'll get customized support directly from your coach's email, or they'll text you, or they'll WhatsApp you. We'll find the communication medium that best supports your goals, as well as provides you with accountability in the expertise you need to succeed, as well as biofeedback monitoring, baked in accountability support, and all of the stuff that you need from your coach when you check in. We keep our rosters relatively small so that we can make sure you get the best support possible. But you can apply today by going over to corecoachingmethod.com, selecting the online coaching option. And if we have spots available,

we'll definitely reach out to you to see if you're a good candidate. And if we don't, put you on a waiting list, but we'll be sure to give you the best shot at the best coaching in the industry. So head over to corecoachingmethod.com and apply for one-on-one coaching with me and my team today. Hey, everybody, but I have a favor to ask you. If you're a regular listener or somebody who gets value out of this podcast, somebody who's learning from me on your health and fitness journey,

whether you're a trainer, a high-level athlete, or you're just getting started, other people need this kind of advice. And the best way for you to help me grow the podcast is to take a little bit of time, literally one to two minutes max, to leave a rating and review on the app that you listen to your podcasts on. The majority of you probably listen on an iPhone and you probably listen on Apple Podcasts, but many of you listen on Spotify. Both platforms allow you to leave a quick, easy review. And if you could

leave me a five-star review plus a short one to two sentence blurb about what you like, not only will it help more people reach the podcast, it will help me to continue to refine what it is I bring you each and every week. Thanks so much for doing this. It means the world to me. It helps me achieve my dream of helping more people live a healthier life. Enjoy the episode. Another thing that I think you need to be aware of, and we talk about the importance of a calorie deficit here for sure. I think that that's almost overkill at this point, but none of the exercise modalities you might engage with, be it weightlifting, be it anaerobic work that might be more CrossFit specific, be it straight up bodybuilding, be it Zumba, be it running, be it jogging, short of like actually running marathons, you know, short of doing something

that's so calorically demanding, you just can't keep weight on. There are, there are really, and I, this sounds pessimistic, uh, but I, I think it's true. There are really no exercise modalities available, uh, that are at least reasonable on how long it takes to do them. They can keep body fat from accreting, uh from accreting, or they can essentially prevent body fat from getting stored if you're eating too much food. So to put it succinctly, you can try every exercise modality in the world and they will help set you up and help position you for fat loss. But if your caloric intake is not where it needs to be, it ain't going to happen. And that's just the honest truth. Because you need to have a deficit of energy in order to communicate to your body in the 200,000 years worth of neurology and physiology that have

gotten it to this point. Hey, we don't have enough energy available. You need to mobilize fat. Because if you look at the environment we're in, it's very hard to even get to an energy deficit because there's so many hyper seductive foods around us. There's so many high calorie enjoyable foods and it's so easy to be sedentary and sit on Tik TOK. So that is your cross to bear here. You need to find ways to make getting into an energy deficit easier. We start with exercise. We know that that's a helpful tool for this for multiple reasons, but then we need to look at creating that energy deficit through making good food decisions. So I think what you need to try to do, I think you

need to try to avoid a lot of these hyper-processed, hyper-palatable, easy to over-consume foods. You need to avoid eating out at restaurants where portions are huge. You need to avoid eating out at fast food restaurants where calories are kind of a little bit beyond on a gram per gram basis what we get at home because of the way these foods are cooked. And the portion sizes are also quite substantial. I think you need to, in more situations, more often than not, you should be opting for minimally processed whole foods in their whole ingredient form that are rich in fiber, rich in nutrients, rich in protein.

Maybe these are foods you prepare yourself. Ideally, you'll learn to cook and better manage your caloric inputs by having as much control over those things as possible. One of the biggest reasons people struggle with weight loss is they're going out to eat or choosing food options that are just not conducive. Like if you assume that the average restaurant entree is like between a thousand to 1400 calories, if you're like a five foot four inch woman with a sedentary job, that's like literally 70 to 75% of your total daily energy expenditure. You know, you have to exercise on top of that. Of course, maybe you get an extra 100 or 250 from your exercise, but let's be honest here, a 1,400 calorie entree, a 1,200 calorie entree, even a 900 calorie entree can really tank your ability

to get into a deficit. So sometimes it's just better to eat a little bit more food that you prepare yourself where you have more control over the cooking modalities, the ingredients that are used. It can still be very nutritious and tasty. And it's not to say that you can't enjoy going out every once in a while. In fact, I think you ought to learn how to do that to make weight maintenance easier after you lose the weight. Um, but damn, is it hard to do it? Man, is it hard to lose weight if you're eating out all the time because of the portion sizes, not to mention eating out is a little bit more expensive. So there might be a financial incentive to dial things back there. It could make it substantially easier on you. Um, as it

pertains to kind of positioning yourself, uh, and getting to a place where you're in the deficit, you need to be in to lose weight. Uh, you know, food wise, we know the deficit is important. We know the food environment is important. And we talked a little bit about eating out, but I think it's also important to understand that you need to make sure you don't have too much of the wrong stuff in your home environment. Cause that's probably the place where you're going to be spending the most time. So if you have like a bunch of high calorie, hyper palatable snack foods in your house, it's going to be really hard to say no to

that. It's going to be really hard to kind of win those battles all the time if you're constantly looking at really delicious, yummy snack foods that are highly intriguing and very seductive and kind of make you want to eat them. Not that those foods are independently fattening, but we know that if you eat them in large amounts based on their energy density, you'll probably gain fat. And that's really, really hard. That's really, really challenging to deal with. So if you can try to essentially put a little bit more of a barrier around yourself, if you can try to kind of, you know, insulate yourself, for lack of a better term, from

those food exposures by having less of those things in your house, that will really help a lot. And then from a behavioral standpoint, I would caution you from getting rid of those things entirely. So don't remove them from your diet entirely. I think that can be problematic. You know, I would actually go so far as to say, I think that, I think that a lot of the diets people engage with and have early success on where they lose a lot of weight rapidly have a ton of guardrails and extraneous rules and all of these things that people have to do. So in other words, like keto, I think keto is a great example for this. K keto becomes extremely, extremely hard to stick to the longer you're on it because of

that compounding effect of seeing all the food that you can't have. In the initial stages, sure, ketogenic diets work great because you've removed so many different food groups that are traditional in the standard American diet because of their carbohydrate contents, you restrict what you eat to mostly protein, vegetables, and what's easy. But the longer you stay on the diet, right, the harder it is to say no to having those foods because the food environment, the food landscape just kind of pushes them in your face. And so diets that don't have some built-in level of flexibility can make it really hard to avoid the binary of I'm doing it right, I'm doing it wrong. Because if you know you're not supposed to have carbs on your ketogenic diet, and you're constantly surrounded by carbohydrate-rich foods that are highly seductive, you're going to feel or you're going to actually fail to meet the goal or the constraints of the

diet more often. So why not bake a little more flexibility into the approach if we know on a calories-equated basis, as long as the calories line up, as long as the protein's there, you can lose fat eating plenty of carbohydrates. So, you know, I do believe it's important to include some laxity and some flexibility in your diet planning. And the best way to do this is by, in my opinion, I've seen this over the years saying, Hey, nothing is really off the table. Maybe with the exception of like alcohol and a particular trigger food, as many people like to call them, uh, this would be like foods that you like have in the house that once you start eating

them, you simply can't stop. So chips are a good example. I have a really hard time not eating more than a, you know, three servings of chips or not eating more than three servings of chips or not eating less than three servings of chips. Oreos are another example. For some people, I know that they crack open the sleeve, they're going to eat the whole sleeve. And so if you keep those out of the mix and you keep the alcohol out of the mix, because that can be a slippery slope in terms of what the reduced inhibitions will lead to on the back end of the consumption standpoint, I think you're in a really good position to still enjoy a lot of the right things and a lot of the foods that you really like. You avoid the trigger foods, stay somewhat distanced from things that

are calorically laden from a beverage standpoint. So sodas and alcohol, I think are generally good to remove, but if you're going to enjoy them, enjoy them occasionally. So like that rule of 80, 20, you always hear people talk about, I love that. Okay. So here's another one that I think is really, really important. We've covered resistance training. We've covered in including aerobic and anaerobic work, uh, meaning some type of lifting, some type of walking. We've covered that it's important to probably eat more whole foods that are minimally processed, foods that are high in protein, foods that are high in fiber, foods that are nutritionally quite rich that provide a lot of vitamins and minerals. But we also want to practice balance

and avoid hyper rigidity. But that on its own isn't enough. And I think a lot of people actually know about this much. And this is why they get so frustrated and so defeated because they know a lot of these things. They've done a lot of these things and even done a lot of these things together. Like they've combined a lot of these good behaviors and habits, but they're still not losing weight as fast as they'd like. And I have to caution you and I have to communicate to you that it's important to know that weight loss isn't a fast process. And this again ties back to what we talked about earlier on in the episode, which is for 200,000 years, rapid weight loss was not beneficial. It was not good for a human to lose a ton of body fat right

at once. And so that's why we have all these regulatory mechanisms in the hypothalamus, which can dictate our appetite and our body fatness to a certain degree. We have all of these regulatory mechanisms baked into how we interact with food and our appetite to try to help make it somewhat challenging to lose weight, to make it slow. We see our metabolisms adapt downward when we start eating less in the same way that we see them adapt and regulate slightly more to be a little less efficient when we're eating more. But one way or another, it's very clear that the body is kind of linked together to promote or at least make

weight loss somewhat challenging. It's not just going to fly off easily, even if you do the right work, because it was never beneficial for the body to lose a ton of weight right away all at once. Because for 200,000 years, that usually meant something bad was going on. So you've been dieting for like a month really hard and you only lose two pounds and you're super pissed because it should be happening faster. And I have to always challenge people on this, which is, should it be happening faster or do you want it to happen faster? We know that transforming your body means changing your lifestyle.

That takes time to do with a high degree of execution most days. It means maintaining discipline. So you do it in the face of all these external stressors and seductions. It means you have to adjust your expectation and be honest with yourself. Ask yourself these questions along the way, because it's going to be slow, but it'll be slower if you don't check all these boxes. You got to ask yourself, am I sticking to the amount of exercise I know I need to be doing to set my muscles, my heart, my vessels, and my appetite where it ought to be? Okay. Am I working hard and making progress in the gym? Am I progressing? Am I working hard and making progress in the kitchen? Am I sticking to these big rock habits, the habits that help me

get where I want to be? Do I know that I'm in a deficit? Have I perhaps started just assuming that because I've been saying that I'm in a deficit? Have I perhaps started just assuming that because I've been saying that I'm in a deficit, I'm in a deficit, but am I actually tracking? We see this a lot with our clients, which is they kind of become mindless in their tracking. They assume the identity of being in a deficit, but they're not actually in a deficit. And then my adding in more health promoting behaviors like walking, like going to the sauna, like seeing a therapist. Now, are you taking care of yourself? Because the truth is the more days that you can say yes to those questions, then you say no, the faster you'll get there. But the road remains a slow one. The road remains a slow one. I know that we want it to be fast and we want it to be fast for good reasons. Everything we have

societally at this point kind of conditions us to expect things to be fast. You buy something on Amazon, you get it in two days. You want to stream a movie, you can download that in under a minute. Even new gen, next gen game consoles don't have loading screens anymore. Things have sped up for us so fast that it's hard to fathom something like fat loss taking a long time. And it almost seems unfair, but you need to remember that biology evolves more slowly than technology. And for 200,000 years, there was no evolutionary advantage to human beings getting super lean really fast. In fact, it was disadvantageous to do that. So be patient with this process. You need to do that at all times, folks, but it absolutely can be done and you can

keep it fun while you do it. But know that part of the reason that weight loss is hard is environmental. Part of it is nutritional. Part that weight loss is hard is environmental. Part of it is nutritional. Part of it has to do with exercise. Part of it has to do with evolution. And we know scientifically where we need to be. We need to be in a calorie deficit. We need to try to maintain as much muscle as possible. We know behaviorally that we need to be disciplined and have the ability to sustain discipline around food to maintain a deficit. We need exercise. And then we need to remember that it's going to take time. If you can do all of that, guys, I guarantee you can lose weight. I'm super confident. I know you can. It's just almost a guarantee that it's not going to happen as fast as you want. And if you're okay with that,

I am okay with that. And so I want you guys to be successful on this journey. I want you guys to enjoy it. I want you guys to know that it's allowed to take time and you're allowed to learn and you grow. Don't give in to the expectation that it should happen fast because of what you see in the media. Just lean into, hey, I know this is going to be a slower process

because I've got to really dial in a bunch of different behaviors and practice being kind to yourself. This is stuff we say to clients at the studio. We work on this stuff with our clients online all the time. This is normal. I don't want you guys to think that you're failing just because it's taking a slower than perhaps you'd like. I think it's a really, really good idea to lean into a little bit of kindness and a little bit of patience with yourself, in my personal opinion. Okay. So best of luck on your fat loss journey. If you

have any questions, you can always slide me a DM on Instagram. Don't see all of them, but I try to, you can send me an email at Danny at corecoachingmethod.com. And if you haven't yet, there's a good chance you've been listening to the show, but you're not subscribed, hit that subscribe button. So we can give you more good fitness information, help keep you fit and help keep you growing. Thanks so much for tuning in and I'll catch you on the next one.