Coach's Corner With Justin and Ethan
Welcome to "Coach's Corner with Justin and Ethan," where your health and fitness journey gets a simplified makeover! Join Justin and Ethan, two seasoned coaches with a combined 30 years of experience, as they navigate the labyrinth of health and fitness, unraveling myths from facts to guide you towards success.
In each episode, we dive headfirst into the vast world of well-being, shedding light on weight loss, dissecting diet fads, exploring diverse workout styles, and fine-tuning the often overlooked aspect of mindset. Our mission is to demystify the complexities surrounding health, making your journey not only effective but enjoyable.
Get ready for a lively and informative conversation that feels like a chat with your favorite fitness buddies. Justin and Ethan draw upon their extensive experience, sharing real-life stories from working with thousands of clients. No stone is left unturned as they break down what really works and what's just another fitness fad.
Whether you're a fitness enthusiast or a beginner taking the first steps toward a healthier lifestyle, "Coache's Corner" is your go-to source for practical insights, debunking myths, and embracing the joy of the journey. Tune in for a fun and engaging exploration of the truth behind health and fitness, and let Justin and Ethan be your trusted guides to a healthier, happier you!
Coach's Corner With Justin and Ethan
Can You Get Abs Without Tracking Calories?
Can you achieve a sculpted physique without ever opening a calorie-counting app? We humorously explore this idea by reminiscing about the chiselled bodies of the ancient Greeks and discussing whether they could have achieved their physiques without modern technology. In this episode, we dive into the critical role of energy balance, genetics, and protein intake. With a touch of wit, we debunk the myths surrounding calorie counting and share our personal tales of how consistent, mindful eating and cooking habits can keep you on track without obsessing over every single calorie.
Next, we hone in on the secrets of eating high-volume, low-calorie foods and the myriad benefits of cooking at home. Cooking your own meals is not only a great way to control what goes into your body but also adds to your daily physical activity. We reveal the hidden calories lurking in restaurant dishes and stress the importance of monitoring fat intake due to its caloric density. Furthermore, we discuss how affordable healthy eating can be, debunking the myth that home-cooked meals are costly by comparing upscale grocery stores with budget-friendly alternatives.
Finally, we present a practical guide to achieving a caloric deficit for weight loss without the need for meticulous food tracking or weighing. You'll learn about integrating simple habits like regular walking, moderate cardio, and weight training into your routine to enhance fat loss. We share inspiring success stories of clients who enjoyed small indulgences while still hitting their weight loss targets. Wrapping up, we emphasize that while tracking calories might be the fastest route, maintaining simplicity and consistency can also lead you to those coveted visible abs. Check out our show notes for a handy summary and start applying these methods to your fitness journey today!
Well, welcome to Coach's Corner, episode 23. That's right folks for 23 weeks, ethan and I have been sitting here painstakingly grinding out these episodes. For you, uncovering all the truths For all of our millions of downloads. So this is episode 23, coach's Corner. I'm Justin Scallard, I'm Ethan Wolfe, and today we're going to be talking about do you have to count calories? Do you have to track your food to see abs? Can you even get abs without tracking calories? Oh, can you. Did people have abs before? My fitness pal?
Speaker 1:exactly yeah I don't know, I don't think so. I don't think so actually I think the obesity rate was much higher previously and now, because we have the ability to track food. Obviously you can just look at the data. The obesity rate is just plummeting.
Speaker 2:There's actually all the greek, the greek statues you saw people with abs were time travelers yeah, they were time travelers.
Speaker 1:They actually had scales, but it was like with water buckets and they would put. Put some grapes on one and it gets the standard uh size cup of water, water so they can know how happy it was. But okay, so I think the short answer is yes, of course you can.
Speaker 2:Without question.
Speaker 1:Obviously, people have had abs right.
Speaker 2:You just have to have good genetics.
Speaker 1:You just need to have the genetics.
Speaker 2:And that's it for episode 23 of Coach's Corner.
Speaker 1:We'll see you next time. So here's the thing. So, essentially, at the end of the day, really what we're talking about here is reducing your body fat to the point to where you can see abs, just the most like you know famous way to know that you're lean, but really just like any muscle definition, like your shoulders, your arms, your pecs, like you just want to see muscle instead of just like soft seal blubber over your body uniform layer, yeah, just like. Uh, like a body condom that's like filled with like jello. Then we have to pull, we have there. It is an energy balance, and so that's super important to understand. Yeah, everyone fucking hates this. They think that. No, it's not about like. I have people comment all the time on my, on my uh, social calories in calories out is bullshit. Micros are more important than macros. If you're hungry, just eat and don't worry about tracking your food, and I'm like that's just so. Like it's like you're 99% wrong but 100%. You're 99% right but 100% wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sentiments are correct, but absolutely not the case.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like I get it. Like, if you just like want to say fuck it, I don't care, then sure, like just eat whatever you want and don't worry about it. But that's not why we're here, like just eat whatever you want and don't worry about it. But that's not why we're here. We're here because we would love to see what a little extra effort can yield as far as results go. I would imagine I don't think so yeah anyway.
Speaker 1:So so it is an energy balance it is. It is fundamentally like we all have an amount that our bodies can metabolize and we just got to figure what that is. And, uh, the easiest way is if you want to just track your calories. But if you don't want to track your calories, then let's talk about how we can do it. If you get triggered, or just you live, you know, in the boondocks where you can listen to a podcast, but you don't have access to a food scale, you know like, or whatever the case may be.
Speaker 2:So do you?
Speaker 1:track your? Do you currently track your calories?
Speaker 2:I am tracking my calories. I tend to not be down to the gram these days, but I just fundamentally, primarily make sure that my protein goals are met, and that, I find, tends to put me in a pattern where my calories almost always fall where they need to be, which generally is in a slight deficit, at about 24 or 2,500.
Speaker 1:So when you're just like free eating, but you go after a protein target. Then you find that without having to track every meal.
Speaker 2:I said that because what ends up happening is that I fundamentally cook all my own food. Most of the time, all my meals are pretty straightforward. I tend to cycle through a certain amount of animal proteins, maybe some salmon or pork, tenderloin or lean ground beef or lean ground turkey or cod or chicken thighs are probably my mainstay. And so, though the protein portions tend to be similar for whatever I'm working with, my carbohydrate portions tend to be the same. I do two cups of rice in the rice cooker for me and amanda divvy that up, you know.
Speaker 2:So it's just now become habitual, and how I cook and how I prepare my meals, and so the the caveat is that if I don't watch out, then I don't get my protein in.
Speaker 2:Like, if I don't make sure I'm having a certain amount per meal, or having a protein snack, like a yogurt on top of my protein shake, I find that the protein can start to slip under. Yeah, and you know, I don't tend to eat so much rice in a home-cooked meal that I'm really worried about overeating carbohydrate. If anything, I under eat carbohydrates, I find. So I think that for me is it, and it's just, you know, it gives me a little laxity because for my personality sometimes like sitting there and getting down to every gram is annoying and it's not like quality of life goes down. But I can kind of based on where I'm at, get what I want out of my choices understanding what my choices are and get enough out of them where I'm like I'm good. So I'm not completely going in blind, but I'm not necessarily putting every macro in down to a five-gram swing.
Speaker 1:But you've also done this enough where you've participated with tracking food, where you can do that, I feel. Or you can look at a plate of food and, especially because you do cook so much your own food, yeah, you've gotten really good at just being able to eyeball like, okay, this has this, that's a cup of rice well, and I still.
Speaker 2:It's not. You know, it's just one of those things that like, if you have a rice cooker that's filled with two cups of rice and even though it's kind of an eyeball, if I like cut that into four which I've done a thousand times I'll generally know how much a quarter of that rice cooker is at this point. Totally Maybe down, maybe missing a couple grams in either direction, but not enough. Based on how much food I require, based on my activity levels and stuff, that it's really going to make that big of a difference. As long as I'm not chasing a goal, my proteins I do tend to measure, so I will make sure that I have X Y Z amount of ounces of salmon or X Y Z amount of ounces of whatever I'm working with Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that's a big takeaway, that's a big, important lesson, because I think people can listen to that and be like well, if Coach Ethan doesn't fucking track his calories, why should I?
Speaker 1:Well, it's because when you look at the hierarchy of competence, if you're unconsciously incompetent I mean you don't even know what you don't know there comes a point where when you ascend the hierarchy of competence because you've gone through a phase, you've gone through a period of time where you've collected data and you've analyzed data and you've rinsed and repeat and you've put in the boring work over and over again, and now you have that pattern recognition. I know what this looks like. I can spot four ounces of chicken, I can spot a cup of rice, I know exactly how much olive oil to use, like. That's a level of intuition that comes from the proper analysis. But you don't get the proper analysis unless you go through a data collection period where you've done it enough time so you can spot it. And so people can hear that be like oh yeah, well, I hear that you don't even have to. But the reason why he's able to do what he does is because he's acquired, he has the proper analysis to then trust his intuition.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I've been cooking my own food since I was in college, you know, especially my junior senior years. I lived in student apartments that had kitchens and that meant like your meal plan was deduced to like one meal a day, a week, you know exactly. And I wasn't like counting calories then. One meal a day a week, you know exactly, yeah, and I wasn't like counting calories then.
Speaker 2:But fundamentally, like I have just been cooking my own food and you know, following directions and yeah, just you know, putting up a plate of a balanced meal and I gotta give credit to my mom of you know it wasn't always fancy, but it was a starch, a veggie and a piece of protein yep, growing up, and so I think that that's just a big thing, is that? I think so much of the time the hurdle is preparing your own food, even if you're buying a pre-made chicken breast from Trader Joe's, but that even just putting the food on your own plate is a big leap for a lot of people, and it's so set up. I love to cook as well. It's like an actual hobby of mine. But so it's so second nature for me to to to have the things that I ingest come from my own right doing and creation that the the measurement component was.
Speaker 2:Then, once I started, that was not as big of a deal, right but if you're like a total, like bachelor fucking ordering domino's pizza every day frozen pizzas and, yeah, mcdonald's, and all of a sudden you're like trying to fry a chicken breast and measure out rice.
Speaker 1:I mean, I literally had a guy ask me how to cook oatmeal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was like, oh, that's what we're starting yeah, okay, I remember having a client that was like I literally don't have pots and pans in my house yeah, like they're like a grown adult. Yeah, they did like not a single pot and pan. They had plates, but no, I mean so. So I say like like level zero.
Speaker 1:If you're trying to get abs without counting calories, is you just have to start like even just like making your own eggs and toast? Just like make, like go online and google how do I cook a chicken breast, if you have to, but like just start there. I think if you're ordering food you're going out to eat, I don't give a fuck how healthy you think the food you're ordering is. I think if you're ordering food you're going out to eat, I don't give a fuck how healthy you think the food you're ordering is. I am telling you, I've been doing this for so long. If I order takeout and it's just it all it looks like is rice and chicken and some veggie I guarantee I'm up a pound and a half the next day. Yeah, not because I like overate by so much, but just because of all the other shit that you don't know is in there. That's causing water weight retention and you just don't know you just gotta you gotta be.
Speaker 1:You gotta be in the driver's seat, you gotta participate and cook your own food yeah, I think that's just this the primary step.
Speaker 2:And again, it's not to say that you can't measure or create a calorie deficit or participate with your food without cooking. That won't create results, but I just think it's it's. It's going to be a much more challenging path potentially and that is just not going to be as healthy and you're also missing out on a life skill. So I encourage people to do it just because it's like and also like you gotta eat when you cook your food.
Speaker 1:let's say it takes 30 minutes to cook your dinner. That means you're standing up in the kitchen, pacing around, caulking in those steps, and so just the participatory nature of cooking makes you more active, which is also going to help. And then, because you're the one in control of the ingredients you're using, the restaurant might put four tablespoons of olive oil in everything.
Speaker 2:And they do right. They have fat and salt to make everything taste good. So you think you're just?
Speaker 1:eating a chicken breast and some rice and there's some flavors and some garnishing and you're like, oh, I'm making it that could have like 500 calories in oil that you didn't even realize 100% when if you were making it, it might only have one tablespoon of olive oil, for example. So those are like step one, yeah, and just like start practicing. I think step two then you know, kind of going down like the hierarchy here of what's most important, and this is under the context of we're not at a place where we're ready to track calories yet. I think it's fair to say like, if you do want to lose weight or you don't want to take your fitness to the next level and that's the one thing you've been avoiding it probably would behoove you, but for the sake of this podcast, the things that we can do to try to see abs and lose body fat without having to weigh food. Step one you got to cook your own food. I think so yeah, I think step two now food choice.
Speaker 1:Going for those single ingredient foods 100, and I've said this before. But, like we bring people on the first week, you're with us. We do not give you meal plans or macros or calories. We just say eat as much as you think you need. Here's a list of proteins, carbs and fats yep, all the ones that we recommend. Knock yourself out. You can eat until you're blue in the face, but just don't deviate from that list and we'll see people lose 10 pounds in their first week most of its water weight, but still yeah, and so cook your own food. And then then step two the food choice single ingredient food 100 high volume.
Speaker 2:It's the high volume foods, totally you know it's. It's one of those things that, again, fat is so sneaky and it sneaks in everywhere, and it's you know. So you know, I have a client who's making it work because he's tracking his calories. Because if you track your calories, you technically have food freedom.
Speaker 1:Get there faster yeah.
Speaker 2:But he is still doing these like. My battle with him is he's good on his calories, he's religious about his calories. He's religious about his calories. So that's why he's continuing to have success on the scale. He's about 85% on his protein, which means he definitely does get enough, even if he's not hitting his target, but he's definitely getting most of the way there.
Speaker 2:But he's just he. The food choices he makes. He's just always so high in fat and fundamentally I can't rag on him too hard. I mean, again, he's he's transforming his body, but it's because he's making food choices like like a whole foods frozen, like chicken strip thing or you know, and he's like there's not a lot of breading on it. And I'm like looking at the nutrition facts and I'm like you know, there's as many calories from fat in this thing as there is protein and it's just like. I think it's just fat is so sneaky and when you start to get away from single ingredient foods or any type of prepared food, like we're just talking about the restaurant, the fat just gets in there. And it's not that fat is bad, people, it's just that it's very calorically dense listen, you don't need more than 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight.
Speaker 1:You don't need more than 0.5 grams of protein per pound of body weight. You don't need more than 0.5 grams of fat per pound of body weight. Anything beyond that is diminishing returns on what the, what the macronutrient even does in your body. And so when you think about it that way and just break your belief systems and you know, just look at it objectively it's like anything past that doesn't affect you in a healthy way. And so if you're 200 pounds, anything, anything over, even a hundred grams of fats kind of a lot, but anything beyond that is just waste. It's just your body's just going to store it. You're just going to shit it out or store it as body fat.
Speaker 1:Like there's no point to that and so, and so that's why you hear, that's why one might hear, to keeping your eye on fat. Not because fat's bad, it's just that A, it's a calorie that isn't very anabolic. And so if you want to keep and build muscle, all that extra fat, once your body hits its minimum effective dose or its quota, it's not like it just goes into your muscle and like makes you stronger. It just like goes into fat because your body can't necessarily turn. It can turn into glucose, it's just it doesn't prefer to.
Speaker 2:Yeah it's not it's where carbs.
Speaker 1:You know, like that's the throttle that you want to hit the gas either up or down on. Like, if you're trying to like, I would say no, we're kind of going off on a tangent here but like, stay, keep proteins and fats kind of stable, no matter where you are, yep, no matter what your goal is, and you just throttle up carbs if you want to put on weight and you throttle down carbs if you want to lose weight. Sometimes it's just really that easy. Yeah, but yeah, so. So single ingredient food. So, for example, chicken breast, chicken thighs, ground beef, fish, uh, even pasta noodles would be considered a single ingredient food. Anything where you look at the ingredients and it has one thing on it, right, chicken.
Speaker 1:Rice, potatoes, lentils, beans, broccoli, you know all these things that Greek yogurt, like those are all single ingredient things that don't have a whole list of things. And the reason why that's important is because, like what Ethan said earlier, it's high volume, typically low calorie density. I mean, okay, six ounce of chicken breast is literally like 60 grams of protein. Six, zero. Probably for most people that's half your day in one six ounce chicken breast of protein, but it's only what like 250 calories at most maybe and so that's what we're trying to say here is like you have a plate of lentil, let's say you have 100 grams of lentils.
Speaker 1:We're not weighing food, so let's just say you have like a portion of lentils, yeah, some veg, maybe a little rice and a chicken breast. That whole thing, without even having to weigh it is probably going to be five or six hundred calories. But it's going to take you a long time to chew all that food, swallow it and finish your plate and by the time you finish that plate you're going to be full. You're not even going to. You'll be like, wow, that was a lot of food. By volume it was, but by calories it actually was very low.
Speaker 2:A hundred percent. One of my favorite foods if I'm looking to reduce my body fat is cod, because it's fairly inexpensive and it is literally just there is zero fat in it. I mean I think it's even more protein to like other macros than like chicken breast. It's crazy. I mean it's crazy. You know you eat like a half pound of cod and you're like, yeah, like eight ounces of cod and it's I I think it's like 180 calories or 200 calories yeah, it's like 60 grams of crazy.
Speaker 2:Yes, he's got the protein. It takes on flavor as well. It's pretty easy to cook, so it's just. I think it's like different choices like that versus salmon. Like I love salmon right, I would say it's a tastier fish but it just has much higher fat content. Even a wild caught salmon, which is going to have less than farm raised, it's still going to have a higher fat content than the cod. So it's a simple decision like that where you maybe just choose to eat some cod for a little while or incorporate that more regularly, where you are having this high-volume food, high protein, but you're not introducing the extra calories from fat Totally. It can be simple choices like that.
Speaker 1:And, by the way, you know when you start eating that way, let's just say you are in a situation where you find yourself eating takeout a lot, even if it's fast food, your DoorDash and McDonald's Like I do that sometimes for my videos and the shit's 15, 20 bucks just to get like one little burger from McDonald's that I'll make a video out of and then throw away. He doesn't throw it away.
Speaker 2:I throw it away after I eat it.
Speaker 1:I throw the wrapper. But you know I'm like damn. I mean, these are people who tell me that eating healthy is too expensive and here, like if I want to just get one big mac which is a five dollar burger but like seven dollars, it's crazy seven bucks, but then a tip and then it's.
Speaker 1:Then you gotta put a tip on there because you feel bad, because uber eats makes you feel guilty, and then there's delivery fee and then taxes and it ends up being like 15 bucks by the time it's delivered. I'm like you can go and buy like a pack of chicken thigh. You can get five chicken thighs for like six bucks. Five bucks easy, yeah. You could have a bag of rice for a few bucks, a couple cans of beans and some mixed veg. You can probably make five lunches that have about 400 calories each in it for 20 bucks. 100 and that's one takeout yeah, I gotta, I really.
Speaker 2:I think the people that say cooking your own food is as much, is as expensive as eating out or take out, are in a privileged place to say that. Right, because let me tell you, motherfuckers, anybody who actually is low income is cooking their own food.
Speaker 2:There is no choice, there's no other choice, and the reason there's no choice is because it is cheaper and the person who's able to get takeout and then go to Whole Foods or go to probably a nicer grocery store and pay high prices for food. So yeah, like, if you go to Whole Foods and you try to get a couple of items for food, it might cost you $35. And you're like, oh shit, that was really expensive. If you go to Food for Less, you can get like a 50-pound bag of rice for like $8. Oh yeah, dude, it's crazy.
Speaker 1:I went to Food for Less. Yeah, just walking through the aisles the other day and I'm just like, what am I doing at Trader Joe's? Even Trader Joe's is pretty inexpensive. And now here's the thing.
Speaker 2:Like. There is no doubt a range of quality in terms of animal protein, so I'm not going to say that the animal proteins at Whole Foods are exactly the same thing.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:But even at food like fundamentally though we're, we're factory farming, so I'm going to honor that. There is some small variance even within factory farming and certain brands, but fundamentally, unless you're getting like a pasture-raised chicken, which is very hard to do, the chicken is factory farmed. And so you go for food for less. Don't fool yourself. Don't fool yourself. Yeah, let's not. But, there's no antibiotics. It's like fuck off they never have antibiotics, it's like they're all.
Speaker 1:That's all just marketing bullshit. It's all just marketing bullshit. So many studies show that like organic is no effect. Like just because you said your veggies say organic, that means nothing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the price for animal proteins at like a grocery store for food for less, which is just like a kind of an economy, almost like a Costco, for everybody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like it'd be comparable to like a Walmart or like if you're going to go to a shop. Even that it's kind of like bulk.
Speaker 2:They just have like giant boxes of things they don't like. Stock the shelves, nice, but the prices on animal proteins there are I can't like. Sometimes I go in and there is like a 15-pound, like slab of this or that and it's like $6. It's like $1.99 a pound.
Speaker 2:Yeah, six dollars like you know, it's like a dollar 99 a pound, and so it's like I just, I just had to get off on that tangent because, like I, just like they're like the. The reason you want to say it's more expensive is probably because you just don't want to, or you know what I think it is too.
Speaker 1:I think people think it's more expensive because they're trying to follow like recipes and it's like oh, a tablespoon of this. And then you don't have any of that. So you have to go to the grocery store and like, buy eight different jars of sauces and spices to make this recipe. In the ad that ends up being 70 bucks and you're like, well, shit, we could have just went out for that. Yeah. But if you're being smart about it and you and like, listen, we're here to get abs without having to track food, you got to make your own food. You got to make good food choices.
Speaker 1:If you think that like there's some sort of cost barrier, you're just doing it wrong. You're trying to follow some dumb blue apron recipe. You're finding recipes on online. But if you just look at it, like, okay, I have a lean protein, I have a veggie source and I have a carbohydrate source, sweet potatoes are cheap, rice is cheap, fucking lentils are cheap. Like all this shit can be so inexpensive. And, yeah, is it the most amazing like blue apron style recipe? Well, no, because that those kind of recipes are why you don't have a six-pack. Yeah, and so if you want to lose weight.
Speaker 2:You got to keep this a little bit more simple most of the time, most and this is the best way to do that and I think there's a there's, I think, a cultural like there are no. People don't have pantries anymore. Right, like my mom came from like more rural Pennsylvania always cooked her own food and she had a stock pantry. She had like a thousand spices, you know, cooking wine and rice vinegar. And so to Justin's point, if you have to go out and buy a bunch of these kind of flavorings and spices that would traditionally fill a pantry, it might cost you 80 bucks, but then you're also going to have these spices for later use. And I think it's just a culture that's become so departed from cooking their own food all the time, for sure, that they open it up and they got like Lowry's seasoned salt and garlic powder and they're like my food tastes like shit.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm like okay, yeah, we can do something about this. And like your mom probably was, you know, a young adult in the 70s, right, oh yeah. And when you look at the obesity graph, like it was all kind of one flat line until about the late 70s I think we've talked about this when, like fast food and KFC and all that shit started becoming more popular, then it's just like obesity just boom spiking because nobody's stocking their pantries anymore, nobody's buying their proteins in the market anymore, everyone's just ordering in, going out, you know, and it's just like so then if that's the problem, then the opposite's the solution yeah, and I'd also say like now there's no excuses.
Speaker 2:Like trader joe's has a whole rack of like seasoning blends that are not that expensive and they taste amazing, whereas before you might not want to buy garlic powder and oregano and this and celery you know, but now they like you take a piece of meat, you buy three different seasoning blends that are all completely different flavors and you sprinkle it on and bake it. It's gonna taste great. So it's kind of like no excuses yep, yep, it just, it's just.
Speaker 1:It's one extra layer of effort, but it's going to yield the thing that you want probably most. So what you want now might be to order a burger from mcdonald's and spend another 20 on a meal. You're just gonna, it's gonna give you the shits. Or you spend that same 20 bucks and set yourself up for a lunch every fucking day. Yeah, eating twice as healthy, high protein ratios, saving the hundred dollars you would normally spend a week on lunches. You're only spending 20 of that. You're getting 80 of the value, 80 more of the nutrition. So it's like it's so. It's such a no-brainer that that one thing could solve so many people's problems, but it requires effort so maybe learning something new, which I know is hard.
Speaker 2:It's the days of information. There's so many youtube videos that have amazing recipes or just how to cook. Yep, you know it's crazy. So of information. There's so many youtube videos that have amazing recipes or just how to cook yep you know it's crazy. So I think, fundamentally, one of the things which is a saying that I think many people have heard is that abs are made in the kitchen. You know it's funny. I recently told that to a client and they're just like what do you mean?
Speaker 2:you never fucking heard that before they literally were so exercise oriented towards results that they somehow thought I meant the lifting of the pans.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:That somehow they were like do you stand on one leg while you? It's like what?
Speaker 1:the fuck am I hearing right now? The hardest workout might only burn a few hundred calories, but you can eat that in one like one. Like one chocolate muffins 500 calories.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you just have your food is going to determine your body composition. And here's the thing people everybody's got I was also talking to another client about this they they don't necessarily realize that, like the rectus abdominis is the six-pack muscle and outside of like small changes in shape, everybody's got that muscle and that muscle is that shape. That is why people that are lean all have the six pack. So it's not like it's a muscle you necessarily have to develop. It's just that if you're lean enough, you will have that six pack. Look, it's just as simple as that. So it's really does come down to it all being about body fat. Yep.
Speaker 1:So okay, step one make your own food. Step two food choice single ingredient. Now step three, I think if we were okay, we don't want to count calories, so step three, then portioning it out and I think like in this case, of the hand method is a pretty solid way to go about it.
Speaker 1:For those of you who don't know, carbohydrates and veggies the size of your fist. So imagine a plate. If you're listening in, just imagine there is a normal dinner plate in front of you. Now take your fist and the size of your fist and the wrist up would be like a starch. So imagine like a cup of rice would be like one potato, one cup of rice. You know something like that. Same thing for veg, so get another handful. Another fist of veggie. Great. Same thing for veg, so get another handful. Another fist of veggie. Great, now for protein.
Speaker 1:Open your hand up and your palm, like that fleshy part, minus your fingers, of your palm, would be like what your protein would look like, and that doesn't need to be meat. It could be a tofu, it could be something along those lines, but, like, your protein source on in every meal should be about the size of your palm. If that was a chicken breast, probably be five ounces or so, yeah, um, and then fats your thumb, which would be like a tablespoon of oil drizzled over your veggies, or you can cook your meat in it, or maybe it's a half tablespoon of oil to cook and then another half tablespoon to dress, if you dress it.
Speaker 1:Or, or you can have like a tablespoon of some sort of, like you know, olive oil based or cream based dressing for your salad. Some cheese, even some cheese, yeah, like some. Like a tablespoon portioned piece size yeah, portion out, and so if you just did that for breakfast, lunch and dinner, you're probably going okay, let's put it this way if you made your own food with single ingredient foods like we just listed before and then you did the hand method for each plate, if you were fucking serious about that, you would get shredded.
Speaker 1:You'd probably feel and look amazing in a matter of like months 100%, 100%.
Speaker 1:Without having to ever pull a food scale out, yes, but if you want to take it one step further, so make your own food. Single ingredient, hand method. Now, now just keep it on snacks, because you could do all that. But then you're thinking, oh, a little bite of this doesn't matter. A handful of nuts nuts are healthy, right. A little bar of chocolate, a little swig of this, and next thing you know, you've added five or six hundred calories unintentionally back to your day. So if you're gonna do it, you gotta really keep an eye on the snacking and the sweets and the alcohol, because that'll fuck your, they just leak in there, fuck your your deficit up real bad 100, so that would think.
Speaker 1:And then just, you know, air on the side of caution, so not too many dinners out, you know that kind of thing. But that would be, I think, like the three or four step framework to lean out, burn up a ton of body fat, possibly even see abs if you gave it long enough, without ever having to weigh or track your food, yeah, and it's accessible for everybody.
Speaker 2:I understand that the whole cooking conversation might be a leap or a skill set. That would be a little bit of a hurdle for many people, but fundamentally that's accessible for everyone. All of those steps are pretty much there without having to really dive into. You know maybe the deep end of the mindset of weight loss Without having to get the food scale out and my fitness pal going and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally stuff, yeah, totally, and that you know, and then, from the exercise and movement standpoint, probably really want to make sure that you're committed to getting out for a big walk every day just to kind of shore up any loose ends. If you're not tracking and you're not 100 sure, then in this case maybe a little cardio a couple times a week or hit might be a good idea, definitely getting out for a walk every day, in addition to what your weight training, um, but yeah, you know, one thing that I'll say too is that, full disclosure, I am a calorie counter. He's staunch. Um, I just I like it, I like just knowing, because you said it earlier, it gives you freedom, it can because now I don't have like yes 80 of the food choices should be single ingredient, whole foods.
Speaker 1:But if I want to eat a fucking chocolate bar and I just want to take that 250 calories from the chocolate bar and just pre-plan it in my day and build it right in, okay, cool, so that just one less cup of rice something I'm gonna opt my dinner might be instead of two cups of rice. It's just one cup of rice, yeah, veggie and and a protein, because the other cup of rice I'm gonna switch. Swap that out for an entire fucking chocolate bar because I track my fucking calories and I know that'll make it fit and I'll still hit my numbers perfectly and that's the same results and I'll still get the same results.
Speaker 1:The other guy will, but I will have the freedom and the sustainability and the lifestyle to learn how to incorporate. So that's my angle on why tracking is important, but I understand why some people aren't there yet. In that case, you follow our previously mentioned steps there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the thing about tracking calories is that it is a science and it comes down to the fact that when you stick to your numbers, you know for a fact what the outcome is going to be. So it's a client I've brought up a couple times because he's had such amazing results. I mean, he's literally lost, basically like 50 pounds this year. It's just incredible, but he for a very long time, he just finally stopped. Not, it's just incredible, but he for a very long time. He just finally stopped, not because I told him to, but because he just eventually got there on his own accord, was eating like a snickers bar four or five days a week, a full fucking snickers, but he incorporated it into his calories.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was one of his old indulgences. He stopped drinking sweet foods, he got rid of all these other candies, but he just loves his snickers. Yep, and he lost the 50 pounds so far and I'm in just about a half a year now, while eating a snickers bar almost every day, you know, and that was his treat. He put it in and he still is just crushing it on every metric for sure, and that's just exactly right, you know, because it's like, what's that?
Speaker 1:a couple hundred calories, yeah, 220 10 of his day. He wants to allocate towards that? Yeah, is it the most?
Speaker 2:healthy food. Am I saying that like snickers are just to be eaten willy-nilly? No, but fundamentally, him losing body fat and getting into a better composition is going to be much healthier than what's happening in the snickers. And you know, it's one of those things that that little bit of of perceived sin is probably what allowed him to stay so strict over and over again during hard times.
Speaker 1:Giving yourself a little indulgence is so important. We have clients that do that with food or maybe they want to have like. I had one girl. She's like I'll do this program but I'm not giving up my glass of wine every night. Yeah, no problem, okay, great. One glass, six ounces, we're capping it there. She's like I can live with that. Yeah, easy peasy. Boom, 20 pounds of body fat. Later had a glass of wine every single night. Yeah, because it's like we just take that 150 calories from the wine, plug it right into her fucking meal plan and then just pull back on other things and it's all good.
Speaker 2:Energy balance is intact and I think it's one of the things that I you know, he's such an amazing individual to reference because exercise is new to him, counting calories is new to him and he used to be very, very overweight. Like he's lost almost, he said he. I think we looked at he's lost 107 pounds total in his journey on his own at least. He did about pounds.
Speaker 2:50 pounds on his own, nice, just from cutting out sugary drinks, no calorie counting, but just starting to make steps in the right direction, with obvious fundamental choices of like, all right, I'm going to eat less candy, I'm going to not drink soda anymore, yep, and then another 50 pounds with me in a half a year. And one of the things that he's commented is that, like once he bought in all the way, he knew that it wasn't not going to happen. In other words, that, like once he committed to counting calories and started to have a month or two under his belt and, even though the scale might go up and down a little bit here and there that the trend was starting to develop where it was unquestionable, he could now believe, so cool that his choices will unquestionably get him there. And as long as he continues to make those choices. It's not a guessing game, it's not by chance that factually he will get to his like 170 pound goal.
Speaker 1:Dude. Your results are fucking guaranteed if you just stay on the plan.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because it's not a guess, it's. That's what I'm saying, it's not just like oh, I hope this works it's like no, no, no, exactly you work, because this is guaranteed exactly if you follow it you like. There, here's the path to the mountain top and it's a very well-worn, visible path. You just got to follow it, man, man.
Speaker 1:And you'll fucking get there. If you veer off and chase a squirrel into the forest and have to start back at the bottom again, that's your problem. But like, if you stay on that path, you hit that calorie targets. You hit your steps, you do your work, your results are guaranteed.
Speaker 2:That's the thing and you know to those hearing it, I understand it might not be easy. I'm not saying it's an easy path per se, but it is simple and it does work totally. No, you're not special and I, you know, I told him that in the beginning of like oh, people think, oh, it just doesn't work for me. And he would kind of go through like little phases and he's like I now understand that p that nobody's special.
Speaker 2:He's like the friends I have. They're like oh, I go on a diet just then. He's like I see right through their bullshit now because I have proven to myself that I'm not special. I just have to do X, y, z, and sometimes it's really hard to do. Sometimes I have to challenge myself, sometimes I don't want to have to do this, but he's like, as long as I know that I do, I'll get the results. And he's like. So when I hear peers start to say like, oh well, this doesn't work for me or I've tried dieting, he's like I know that they're still in that facade of a mindset that somehow they're an exception.
Speaker 1:They diet for a few days and they go off the rails and they think I think I'm doing well and understand why I'm not seeing results. It's because you're not actually doing it. You average all of everything that you're doing. You might be in a deficit for two days a week, then you're in a surplus for two more days a week, and then a deficit for one, then a deficit for one than a surplus for one. But your average is probably a 10 surplus on average and you're like, well, I diet, nothing's happening. It's like no, no, no, you're not actually. I know, we see it constantly.
Speaker 2:But, and so one of the things I'd say is, like the the big you know, to drive at home, you have to be in a caloric deficit or you have to do something different. If what? If you're gaining weight or you're not losing, something has to be different in your dietary habits to make change, and that there are several options, I think, to make change. That doesn't have to be counting calories. I think I've mentioned it once before, but I saw this strategy where you write down everything you ate for a week and I think most people can name choices that aren't serving them. Totally Right. So if you drink seven sodas throughout the week or you drink, totally Right. So if you drink seven sodas throughout the week or you drink, let's just keep it simple. So you write down everything you eat and drink out the week and you notice you're drinking seven sodas. You know that probably only drinking four sodas in a week would start to move you in the right direction. That's not counting calories, that's not doing anything, it's just making a change.
Speaker 1:The obvious choice. Yes, that's laid out in front of you. That's laid out in front of it's. Like it's analogous, like, let's say we, I need to, I need to get better saving money. All right, let's let's just look at all your expenses for the month, lay everything out on the table, point to the ones that probably aren't good. No, I don't need that. Yeah, that was a mistake. You don't need to order the, the cat, uh, sound machine from amazon.
Speaker 1:That was 40 bucks, you know what I mean, and so it's like so there you go, you start to to eliminate it. You just eliminate that, and now you've already. Now you've just found a few hundred bucks a month to start saving with. Yes, and it's the same thing with calories. Like Ethan said, just lay it all out and just take the obvious stuff out without having to track anything.
Speaker 2:It's just like that's immediately going to make improvements and even if it's just one change at a time, if, if you can normalize that and to bring that down to three, you're moving in the right direction. I'm not saying just don't drink soda, if that's going to be something, that's not going to make you be consistent with it, but that you can just make a single choice every week, little by little, and at least start to move towards where you want to go.
Speaker 1:I think we'll, we'll, we'll, call it there, call it there. I think that was a fun one. I hope you guys got a lot from that. Um, read the show notes if you didn't. Um, everything that we talked about we summarize below um, but, uh, keep it simple, guys, and you know, if you can track, it's probably the fastest way to get there. Otherwise, follow the framework that we laid out, but, um, it's not. Don't make it over complicated all right team.
Speaker 1:So that's episode 23 of coach's corner how to burn fat or get abs without tracking calories. Peace out, see y'all next time later.