Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 335 - Ultimate Guide to Getting Lean:

Episode Date: November 7, 2023

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Hey, everybody, welcome in to episode 335 of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. This episode is titled The Ultimate Guide to Getting Lean, and I stand by that. In this episode, we are going to be discussing nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle habits and behavior, conducive with lowering body fat, building muscle, living leaner with better energy, lower likelihood of disease development, and much, much more. We'll talk about how to navigate an obesogenic environment, what to do with protein, carbs, fats, fiber, and alcohol, as well as discuss the difference between processed foods, ultra-processed foods. We'll deep dive on

diets like keto, intermittent fasting, tracking macros, discuss foods that I think are aligned with living leaner, discuss exercise strategies, both aerobic and anaerobic, and so much more, especially in the lifestyle department where we will even touch on GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic. Should be a very fun deep dive episode that will help you or other people you love get leaner and stay leaner. So all I ask is you sit back to enjoy the episode. As if you have not yet hit subscribe, please do that. If you can leave a five-star rating and review on either Apple or Spotify, and be sure to share this with a friend. Enjoy episode 335. This episode is brought to you in special part thanks to our awesome partners over at Ice Barrel.

If you're like me, you want to get the absolute most you can out of your fitness and out of what it is that you're doing in life. I like to make sure that I'm recovering well and prepped for hard workouts. I like to make sure that my cognition is sharp, and I like to make sure that I'm recovering well and prepped for hard workouts. I like to make sure that my cognition is sharp and I like to make sure that I'm doing what I can to maintain my long-term health. And cold water immersion is a phenomenal tool I use and have used for a while to help me do this. Cold water immersion or taking ice baths is a great way to improve your recovery and performance. Just a few short sessions a week can really make a difference in how you recover. It can increase and improve your heart rate variability. It can enhance performance. It improves mood and brain function. It also provides an awesome boost of energy and focus because when

you hop in an ice bath and you get this amazing vasoconstriction effect and your body starts releasing epinephrine and norepinephrine, it kind of lets you reenter the world awake, energized, excited, and enthused. And I would much rather take an ice bath in the mid-afternoon, especially if I had a hard training session in the morning, than consume more caffeine. Ice Barrel allows me to do this in a super sleek, aesthetically pleasing packaging. It's a beautiful barrel that comes with a matching lid for keeping the ice cold and water inside clean, a nice step-up stool, a cover. It's portable and durable, and it comes in a beautiful matte black and a gorgeous tan. I have the matte black out on my patio and I absolutely love the way it looks with the fencing

I have around the yard, but you can put this inside, outside, on the front porch, on the back porch, in the side yard. It's quite portable. It's very durable. Like I said, the design is super, super sleek, and it's very easy to drain to make sure that you are only getting in to cold, clean water designed to help you improve your performance, improve your recovery, enhance the way your brain feels and functions throughout the day. This is an amazing one-time cost tool that once you have it, you use it a couple of times a week. It is one of the best investments you can make in your health. And again, if you want to improve your cognition and performance, and you have those midday lulls, or you want to be more present for your family or for your

friends when you get off of work and you don't want to caffeinate, temperature modulation like ice baths or cold exposure or sauna heat exposure can be really valuable for increasing that subjective sense of wellbeing and bringing you back to a place of alertness and a really chaotic world. It's also great for just cultivating resilience. I find I'm much tougher. Again, this is a more anecdotal thing, but I find that I am much tougher, ready to face the day's tasks when I am consistently exposing myself to the elements. Call it bromeopathy, call it anecdote, but I will tell you one thing is for sure, cold water immersion has made a huge difference for my health and wellbeing and just a few short sessions a week.

And ice barrel is the sleekest, best looking, cleanest, and most affordable way to do it reliably. You can head over to icebarrel.com slash Danny to take advantage of their 100% satisfaction guaranteed with again, a 30 day money back guarantee and save 125 bucks on your ice barrel using the promo code Danny. So again, icebarrel.com slash Danny and check out using the promo code Danny to save 125 bucks. Okay. So as we get into this guide and look to unpack what I think it is that you need to do to get lean, stay lean, you know, regulate body fat percentage across a lifespan so that you're not predisposed to all of the issues that come with

elevated or chronically elevated body fat percentages or obesity, or even just being overweight, whether it's cardiovascular disease, various markers of metabolic dysregulation could be type two diabetes could even be things like pre-diabetes. These things are all associated with having too much body fat. And being able to regulate that can be a very powerful tool. And when I say regulate, I mean maintain a healthy body fat percentage, not maintain a neurotic, absurdly low competition level body fat percentage. I think that can actually be a little bit dangerous, a little bit risky. And I like to keep things reasonable and normal and what I would say are sustainable. So we have to take a three-prong approach to this. We have to discuss nutritional

strategies, exercise strategies, and then lifestyle strategies that enhance the preservation of lean tissue which is to say muscle and help discourage the accumulation of too much fatty tissue uh and again what that looks like for you um and what this looks like for the average person i really think is quite a bit different than what you see on the internet. Um, you know, I'll use myself as an example. I'm not particularly shredded. Um, I have a six pack that's visible, even at like relatively high body fat percentages in large part due to just having genetic, uh, genetically low fat accumulation in my midsection. Um, you'll notice like my arms and shoulders aren't particularly lean, nor is my lower body. I just am fortunate enough that the body fat I have is distributed in such a way that I might even look leaner than I am. I am not encouraging being diced to the bone, shredded

like a bodybuilder, even necessarily being as lean as me. It could be several body fat percentage points higher than I am, um, and still be really healthy. So this just looks like maintaining a body fat percentage. That's reasonably healthy across the lifespan, not achieving, um, a super lean body fat percentage. We'll talk about strategies for that in the episode and how you might leverage pieces of those, but the outcome is not that you get stage lean. That's not the goal of the episode and how you might leverage pieces of those, but the outcome is not that you get stage lean. That's not the goal of the episode. But before we get into it, I need to make it very clear that things like genetics, socioeconomic status, disability will change and modify the advice that I give today about body fat percentage, maintaining healthy body fats, building muscle,

finding food that supports building and maintaining these kinds of compositional goals. It's all going to have to be relative to you. So please don't take anything I say personal if it doesn't align with what it is that you can do at the moment. Okay. So the first thing is you need to understand nutrition. Foundationally, you need to understand energy balance, calories in versus calories out. This is Newton's law of thermodynamics. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only change state. If you eat too much energy in the form of calories, it won't be destroyed.

It will leave the body as heat through movement, as energy utilized by your tissues, or it will stay in the body as glycogen or fat. And it's very easy to store body fat compared to other forms of tissue storage, like say muscle or bone. It's quite economical to pack additional calories away as fat. So you need to understand at the absolute base level, all weight gain, and this is not particularly hard to understand, but at base level, all weight gain is driven by caloric intakes in excess of what a person needs. Nobody ever got fat from eating too few calories. Anybody who's ever gained weight ever got weight from eating more calories than they need, period. Not more calories than they'd like, more calories than they need based on how much they use throughout the day.

And the things that burn calories throughout the day can really be broken down into a few foundational categories. First is your base metabolic rate, how many calories you burn running your organs and such. Your thermic effect of feeding, how much calories you utilize to actually eat and assimilate food, your NEAT, how much movement you do, like me moving my hands, fidgeting, non-voluntary essentially, and how much you exercise. That's it. Those are where the calories that you ingest get used. And if you ingest more than you need, when you spread them across those four categories,

you're going to gain fat or some form of tissue. If you're lifting and eating a lot of protein, you might gain a little more muscle disproportionately, but the human species evolved to store body fat and use extra calories as such. So if those things are a problem for you and you're like, man, I'm gaining body fat too much, you really only have two options. You either reduce your calorie intake, right? That's option one, or you increase your output in areas like exercise, which is only a small component of metabolism anyway. So you're always best when it comes to body fat regulation, starting with nutrition. And a lot of people struggle with this because we want to talk about burning fat in the gym. But the truth is like at its foundational core, fat accumulation is an L is a, an exercise in physics. It's an exercise in energy in versus energy out. The problem is with the human system, the bottleneck

for energy out is tiny and the vacuum for energy in is a substantial. There's always energy coming in and you know, the environment in which we live, it can be very energy dense. Like foods you eat are so energy dense that even extremely active people can't offset a bad diet. So it's always worth talking about nutrition and starting with energy balance. Um, everything you eat has calories, but hyper-processed ultra processed foods have the most calories. So that's probably the biggest thing you can do right from the jump nutritionally to help with body fat reduction and the maintenance of a low body fat. If there was a food that was worthy of demonization, like a singular category of food, it's probably, from an obesity standpoint, ultra-process hyper palatable foods with amazing texture, flavor

profiles, and mouthfeels. These are the things that people have a tendency to overeat. It's not the singular carbs in them or the singular sugar in them or the singular fat in them. It's usually the combination of multiple things, sugar, carbohydrate, fat, as well as textures, maybe crispy, maybe crunchy, maybe flaky. These things are appealing to people. And the evolutionary machinery that runs our brain, the regulation of reward, and how we engage with food goes crazy when we eat these kinds of foods, and they're not very filling. So it's really hard not to overeat them. One, because they're not satiating to begin with. Two, because your brain quite likes them.

So these are the foods that if I were to say, if you want to manage your weight across the lifespan, I would say to be very aware of ultra-processed foods that are very easy to overeat. And these might vary. Somebody might prefer to overeat ultra-processed cookies than they do ultra-processed potato chips because they like sweet versus savory, but the point remains the same. These are the foods best monitored. Don't worry about the singular individual ingredients so much as

you do foods that contain multiple flavor profiles and multiple ingredients that will certainly lead to overconsumption. Now, if there are foods worthy of eating, when you are looking to increase your likelihood of maintaining a lean body mass across the lifespan, it's protein and carbohydrates. Protein usually is best sourced from animal sources like meat, eggs, dairy. However, there's plenty of plant-based protein sources like tempeh and tofu. There's lots of options, but you want a higher protein diet because it's very satiating and protein fuels your muscle. It's also a good idea to include a lot of whole grains, fruits, and vegetables because these things contain fiber, which helps keep you full,

helps reduce cholesterol, helps reduce blood sugar. As it moves through the small intestine, fiber actually binds to these things. A lot of people do not understand how fiber works. In fact, I had a guy the other day on my Instagram say something to the effect of like, hey, what does fiber even do? Where does it go? What organ even uses it? It was a trite response. So in an effort to understand more about fiber and communicate better to you guys about fiber, I reached out to my friend, Dr. Joey Munoz, and he told me a little bit about fiber. Dr. Joey told me that as fiber moves through the small intestine and into the colon, or rather as it just moves through the

digestive tract. Let's say as fiber moves its way into the colon, it's actually going to help by binding to glucose and cholesterol, which can help lower those two things in the body, which is a really big deal. And it can help to lower cholesterol as well by binding to bile, which is very rich in cholesterol. And fiber is not supposed to get broken down. It's actually supposed to move through the digestive tract slowly. I'm sure you guys know this. You might know this from studying the microbiome. If you're curious at all about why it is that humans don't digest fiber, I think the answer is definitely in the microbiome. So think about it like this. You can fully digest and assimilate protein, carbohydrate, and fat, but not fiber. It works its way through the digestive system and then you excrete it out. It makes up the bulk of your stool.

And a lot of people who advocate for an animal-based diet or only eating meat and avoiding fiber will make the claim, hey, look, all fiber does is just move through you and you shit it out. But that's not exactly true. You see, the fiber, in my opinion, probably isn't so much for you as it is the microbes that line your digestive tract, colon, etc. You see, as fiber moves through your body, it's consumed by the microorganisms that line your gastrointestinal tract. Those things eat it, produce beneficial short-chain fatty acids. Fiber, instead of things like refined grains, is associated with a better proliferation of different types of bacteria. That means more fiber generally means happier, better, and a more diverse ecosystem of bugs in your gut,

which is very good. But another thing fiber does is, like I said, when it gets to the gallbladder, it can help with removing cholesterol, be a removal of excess bile, and it actually binds to glucose and cholesterol. So it's going to help to remove and reduce those things as well as it works its way out of the body. So it's not just some kind of stool bulking thing. Fiber has a big role to play. And those are the two central things that you need to build your diet around. If you've learned anything from the first six minutes of me talking about nutrition, it should be this.

Calories matter the most. Energy balance is a physics game. You can't trick it. And when extra energy comes into the body, it's more than likely going to be stored as fat because that's the most efficient. The foods that have the most energy and the most easy to overeat are the ones you should avoid. And foods like protein or foods rich in protein and fiber are going to give you the unique benefits of those two nutrients, as well as a ton of satiety to help you make better food decisions and avoid over-consuming calories.

The easiest way I think to maintain leanness across the lifespan as well is not to gain too much body fat in the first place. If you are fortunate enough to be on the leaner side, I would encourage you to maintain that because there is some truth to the fact that once you gain enough weight, it can become quite challenging to lose. And this has to do with some of the appetite. That's what happens when you get too far ahead of yourself. Appetite dysregulation effects that are associated with higher body fat percentages. Appetite is dysregulated. Blood sugar is dysregulated at higher body fat percentages. So it's harder to get leaner when you're heavier due to things that happen even at the level of the brain.

So another just word of caution before we talk a little bit more about socioeconomics and environmental things, just if you are already lucky enough to be on the thinner side, try to keep that going in a healthy manner. Now, some things you have to be aware of with nutrition. It can be very difficult not to overeat in our current environment. We live in an obesogenic environment in most of the Western world. This means there are a lot of hyper-processed, ultra-processed foods around, including high-calorie beverages that we tend to consume. And our social behaviors oftentimes revolve around food and drink. So we have a greater exposure to a lot of calories throughout the day. So knowing that you have to make good decisions. Now there are pockets of the

world known as food deserts. And if you've ever wondered why poor people or people who are lower in socioeconomic status in other countries are starving, but in America, people who are often of low socioeconomic status or who are more poor are often more likely to be obese, it has to do with this or in large part due to this, the presence of what we call food deserts. in large part due to this, the presence of what we call food deserts. Food deserts are areas of the country where access to things high in protein or high in fiber are actually quite limited. Some people don't live anywhere near a grocery store. They live near convenience stores and stores that tend to sell mostly ultra-processed foods. So even if they could afford healthier foods, foods higher in fiber, foods

higher in protein, it can still be very difficult to access those foods, not just due to the fact that they might have the financial limitations, but also due to the fact that they're quite frankly nowhere around grocery stores or places that you can buy and have more options. I'm lucky. I live in Sonoma County. I live right next to multiple fantastic grocery stores. There's a ton of money in the community that I live in. And there's no shortage of like, we have Whole Foods. We have a really nice locally owned market called Oliver's. We have multiple huge Safeways, multiple huge Raley's. Some people live in areas where they might have to drive 25 to 30 minutes to get to a grocery store.

Maybe they don't have a car or maybe they don't have the means to purchase foods that are higher in fiber and higher in protein. But we've had some of the same, you know, let's call it, I'm blanking on the word here, but the way in which we have kind of stimulated and funded various elements of our food production system, we produce and have greater incentives to produce ultra-processed, hyper-processed foods. The crops that we've invested the heaviest in since World War II have been grains and things that, you know, whole grains are great, but if most of the kind of affordable food is ultra processed, um, you know, laden with oils laden with refined carbs, sugar

are designed to be hyper palatable and that's, what's affordable. That's what people are going to eat. Um, and those are both huge drivers of obesity. And that is of course the macro environment of just junk everywhere, and then the micro environments where it's nothing but junk. Taking a break from this episode to tell you a little bit about my coaching company, Core Coaching Method. More specifically, our app-based training. We partnered with Train Heroic to bring app-based training to you using the best technology and best user interface possible. You can join either my Home Heroes team, or you can train from home with bands and dumbbells,

or Elite Physique, which is a female bodybuilding-focused program where you can train at the gym with equipments designed specifically to help you develop strength as well as the glutes, hamstrings, quads, and back. I have more teams coming planned for a variety of different fitness levels. But what's cool about this is when you join these programs, you get programming that's updated every single week, the sets to do, the reps to do, exercise tutorials filmed by me with me and my team. So you'll get my exact coaching expertise as to how to perform the movement, whether you're training at home or you're training in the gym. And again, these teams are somewhat specific. So you'll find other members of those communities looking to pursue similar goals at similar fitness levels. You can chat, ask questions, upload form for form review,

ask for substitutions. It's a really cool training community and you can try it completely free for seven days. Just click the link in the podcast description below. Can't wait to see you in the Core Coaching Collective, my app-based training community. Back to the show. And so you have to know the world that we live in. And yes, we do have things that could be helpful. You could have somebody deliver healthy groceries to you using something like Instacart. But there's also the other end of that sword, which is that you could have people deliver you, you know, Arby's on DoorDash. So with the convenience that comes

in some ways, there's also convenience that kind of works against us. So there's the technological component of the food environment and landscape. So you need to understand the physics, what to avoid and what to eat, but you also need to know the playing field and nutrition is a little bit of a landmine. So moving on to kind of how best to manage dietary strategy, number of meals and things like this, I'd say to stay away from crazy fad diets that are super restrictive and instead build your diet around protein, build your diet around fibrous fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Include a small amount of food that you enjoy in reasonable quantities that are calorie and portion controlled. Try to minimize calories you drink. Try to

minimize alcohol consumption and try to stay away from hyper restrictive dieting because that can create a rebound effect. If you can keep those things in mind, you'll have the tools you need for the most part to live a lean life. Now, you probably won't be able to land on the Mr. Olympia stage someday, but nutrition is extremely nuanced and very layered. But for maintaining lean body composition, it comes down to calorie control, portion control, biasing your food choices towards things that are satiating, stepping back and away from things that are very energy dense and easy to over consume, minimizing booze, and trying to do the best you can with the environment that you live in. Now, when it comes to exercising for fat loss

or for leanness, I do think it makes the most sense to prioritize resistance training. You still want to do aerobic work because it's fantastic for your heart, it's fantastic for your vascular system, and it's probably going to help you lose fat by virtue of helping you burn more calories. However, the hormonal benefits associated with resistance training, the accumulation of lean tissue and muscle associated with resistance training can make dieting easier. And it's very important that when you're dieting to lose body fat, you give your body a stimulus that communicates

the need to hold on to muscle. And resistance training is fantastic for that. So if you built a training program for fat loss, a perfect training program, you'd probably want to allocate more time to resistance than you did to aerobic work because you want to make sure you're stimulating your muscle tissue. If you have lots of time for movement, you can definitely just have a two, three, four day a week lifting program and then do all kinds of cardio on top of it. The interference effect doesn't kick in until very, very high dosages or high amounts of cardio. So I wouldn't worry about doing too much. But the truth is most people have a very limited time.

So if you only had time to do a little bit of each, I would do more weightlifting. I would focus on compound movements that work multiple muscles through multiple ranges of motion and train those muscles to get strong, train them progressively and train them comfortably close to failure. You can do this using CrossFit. You can do this using a bodybuilding program. You can do this using a powerlifting program. You can do this with kettlebells. You can do this with calisthenics. There's so many ways to load your body using multiple muscles at once through a full range of motion that I don't think it's super important to get into the nuances of which program is best. If you took the average American and you had them do any modality whatsoever, whether any exercise modality,

they could do a CrossFit program, they could do bodybuilding, they could do powerlifting. If you took an untrained adult and had them do that, the benefits that they would see in terms of composition, even though it might not be like the best protocol for building the most amount of muscle for an untrained person, any resistance program, even body weight is going to help them tremendously with the accumulation of lean tissue. So long as the training is done thoughtfully and you're working hard. So you've got to find some type of lifting that you can tolerate. Kyle Gillette, Dr. Kyle Gillette's come on the show a couple of times. We love him. I

strongly recommend going back and listening to the episodes we've done with him. He put it best when he said, find a movement past time to last a lifetime. So what I like about this is you might actually move through, you know, I know when I started training, I loved powerlifting. Then I started like bodybuilding. Then I got really into sports performance. Now I kind of do a blend of the three, but I know I love lifting. So I leaned really hard into lifting and that's changed, but I've always stuck with it. And so even if you hate lifting and you're like, I'm only going to do cardio, that's still better. Just focus on getting enough protein to preserve your muscle. You're not going to lose muscle from doing cardio, but you are going to do cardio, that's still better. Just focus on getting enough protein to preserve your muscle. You're not going to lose muscle from doing cardio, but you are going to open the door for

muscle loss with over-aggressive, low-protein dieting and high amounts of stress. So be sure to have enough protein at all times. That's why we started with nutrition. But training's important. I don't think there's a certain number of days that you need to train, but I do think you need to pre-schedule your workouts. I think that's incredibly important. So pick three, four, five days that you can get to the gym, get them scheduled. I think you should train whole total body unless you can train more than three days a week. If you can train three days a week, you should train maybe some combination of the upper and the lower. You should do a blend of cardio and weights, but more weights than cardio. And you should try to, again, train compound movements. Those are movements that train

multiple muscles through full ranges of motion. Once you're doing this, you apply a foundational and central principle of weightlifting. And I think a lot of people misunderstand. This is a foundational principle of weightlifting, the genre of literally weightlifting, the sport, Olympic weightlifting, powerlifting. These sports are foundationally the best examples of what is known as progressive overload. You want to apply the principle of progressive overload. And it's fascinating to me how many people who engage in resistance training regularly can't succinctly describe what it is or what it means to be achieving a form of progressive overload. So to put it simply, and I think this will help a lot of people improve their weight

training outcomes. You'll get better results in your training. If you can understand that progressive overload does not only mean adding more weight to the bar, progressive overload also means, or you can achieve progressive overload by doing more reps with the same weight, more sets with the same weight, doing more range of motion on a given exercise with the same or even less weight, spending a longer time in the lengthened position, spending more time when the muscle is actually actively lengthening, adding in pauses, adding in pulses, making reps more explosive, adding intensifiers like drop sets and supersets, training all the way to failure, training beyond failure. There are so many ways to achieve

progressive overload, but I think the best thing to do is to just keep a training log and occasionally do, like I said, hey, I did more reps with the same weight. I did more weight for more reps. I did more weight. It was less reps, but it's more weight than I've ever done. You need to be able to drive progressive overload in more ways than by just adding weight to the bar. And that can actually make your training career last a hell of a lot longer because you'll make way better decisions and be hurt way less. So try to train multiple muscles at once. If you only have so much time, do more lifting, train through a full range of motion to the best of your ability without pain,

and apply progressive overload. That is the kind of basic. You get away with as few as one to two workouts a week. Now, the last piece, the most important kind of tie it all together piece when it comes to fat loss is lifestyle. And I thought it would make sense to start by talking about these GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic that everybody's talking about because these drugs do a fantastic job of helping people lose weight. I will probably be one of the few trainers who's not afraid to tell you that I don't think Ozempic is evil. I actually think the mechanism by which

Ozempic works is really fascinating and can teach us a lot about fat loss for those of you who might not want to take Ozempic. So Ozempic kind of works by helping food move slower through your digestive tract. So you spend a longer time digesting it. You feel fuller. It also works a little bit on the brain. But just purely from a foundational standpoint, Ozempic makes you feel fuller longer by slowing the rate at which food moves through your body. And that can be really, really helpful

from a fat loss perspective. I mean, honestly, we spent the first part of this podcast talking all about ways to encourage fullness and feeling fuller longer when we talked about protein and fiber and avoiding processed foods. But a reason many people are skeptical about taking Ozempic is they are worried about gaining the weight back if they have to stop taking it. And it is a very expensive drug. And that is reasonable to worry about because I think anybody who takes Ozempic or anybody who's tried to lose weight in the past knows that your lifestyle will kind of be the glue that holds it all together. So, you know,

people know intuitively that whether I nail my caloric restriction via a juice cleanse, via a diet, via the strategies mentioned in this podcast, or with the assistance of a GLP-1, if I cannot make this a lifestyle, if I cannot make this stick, I'll probably end up right back where I started. And so this isn't for or against GLP-1s. I think GLP-1s could be very beneficial in the fight against obesity. In fact, we know how effective they are already. And as far as things that people take go, I know, I'm not going to tell people what they should or shouldn't take. I'm just saying, I think at any level, no matter what strategies you use to get lean, if you can't get the lifestyle stuff in check for the long run,

you're going to have a hard time maintaining it. And what that means is acknowledging that factors like stress, sleep, and your habits play a humongous role in your ability to do this long-term. This is not just some quick fix thing. You have got to get a real, real, like 10,000 foot view of your sleep, of your stress, of your habits, and tweak as many of those as you can slowly in the direction of living leaner. those as you can slowly in the direction of living leaner. This is a long-term game and anybody can get in shape for three to six months. Maintaining it is really hard unless you get your lifestyle

lined up with it. You need to have practical strategies for stress reduction. Maybe that's going on a walk. Maybe that's listening to a podcast. Maybe that's doing yoga. Maybe that's spending time with your friends, okay? Chronic stress is very much correlated with overeating and can make it very difficult to sleep and stick to a routine, okay? Sleep plays a critical role in body fat loss, appetite regulation, overall health, cognitive health. You need to be able to get as much sleep as you reasonably can with kids,

with no kids, with early work, with late work. You need to try to prioritize getting your sleep. That doesn't mean you need to get the seven to nine hours everybody recommends. You need to do the best you can with the tools that you have access to, to get as much sleep as you reasonably can to improve your likelihood of being successful with weight management. It's just the fact. Sleep is critical. And if you don't take it seriously, it will make things much, much harder. I'm a huge fan of small micro habits like tracking your calories, weighing your food, weighing yourself, logging your workouts. These are habits that I think are incredibly aligned with success

in fitness, weight management, et cetera. That's why we build our online coaching on these strategies. Programs built for you. Macronutrient protocols built for you. Please track them. Monitor your weight. Monitor your sleep. Engage with the details most likely to help you be successful. These things are critical for success. Another lifestyle habit, I guess you could call it a nutrition habit too, is staying hydrated. Remember the old biology thing, your body's 70% water. Yeah, that's a big deal. You should probably drink some more water. People need to do that. Other habits that I love, behaviors that I love, preparing food in

advance, finding places you can eat out that have healthier options, learning what fast food restaurants even have healthy options. These are all things you can do to improve your chances in the long run that don't have anything to do with your exercise or maybe your immediate food choices. They're bigger than that. They're macro, they're meta. And I think if you really have the lifestyle thing down and you make gradual, sustainable changes that are aligned with moving more, eating foods that are more nutrient dense

and eating less crap, you have got a serious shot at this. But again, managing your weight in the long run means coming to terms with the fact that you can eat whatever you want whenever you feel like it. In most cases, you'll probably have to move quite a bit, not just in the form of planned exercise, but in the form of things like walking, stepping, hiking, swimming. It helps more to move. In fact, I could put it even more succinctly, try to sit a lot less than you're sitting.

Make sure you're building your diet around calorie and portion controlled meals that are built on fiber and protein and engage in planned movement that hopefully has resistance. And again, a one, like a half to a pound a week of weight loss is good. That's 50 pounds a year. One to two pounds of weight loss is great. That's 50 to a year. One to two pounds of weight loss is great. That's 50 to 100 pounds per year. Don't overcomplicate it. Stick with it if you're trying to get down or get your weight down. And if you're already lean, all of these strategies should help you maintain it across the lifespan.

All right, guys, I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you did, leave me a five-star rating and review on Spotify and Apple podcasts, share this to your Instagram story, and hopefully share this with somebody whom you know is struggling with getting lean, who might benefit from some of the knowledge shared in the episode today. Thanks so much for listening and I'll catch you on the next episode. you