In the Grand Scheme Of Fitness With Justin and Ethan

Fat Loss Phase: The Blueprint

• Justin Schollard • Season 2 • Episode 62

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Ever wonder why your dieting efforts keep stalling? The answer might surprise you. When it comes to fat loss, most of us are approaching it completely backward—cutting calories too drastically, ignoring metabolic adaptation, or falling into the weekend binge cycle that erases an entire week's progress.

Drawing from our combined 40 years of experience coaching thousands of clients, Justin and Ethan reveal the framework for structuring a fat loss phase that actually works. We unpack the science behind finding your true maintenance calories and explain why smaller deficits (200-300 calories) often produce better results than the standard 500-calorie recommendation, especially for smaller individuals. This isn't just theory—we share why most people dramatically underestimate their body fat percentage and how even fitness professionals like ourselves can accumulate an extra 10-20 pounds without realizing it.

The episode dives deep into practical implementation strategies, from utilizing food scales and simple meal prep systems to understanding when and how to strategically take breaks from your deficit. We explain the critical concept of metabolic adaptation—how losing 10% of your body weight downshifts your metabolism by approximately 25%—and provide actionable solutions to avoid the frustrating plateau this often creates. Most importantly, we share why resistance training isn't optional during a fat loss phase if you want to maintain muscle mass and keep your metabolism as robust as possible.

Whether you're looking to lose your first 10 pounds or your last, this comprehensive guide to structuring a fat loss phase will equip you with the knowledge to finally break the cycle of unsuccessful dieting. Subscribe now and join us next week as we continue exploring the principles that make fitness sustainable for life.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to episode 62 of In the Grand Scheme of Fitness with your host, justin Scallard, and Ethan Wolfe.

Speaker 1:

Today, folks, we're gonna be talking about how to properly structure a fat loss phase how one would want to set themselves up for maximum success with minimizing downside, how long you should be in a fat loss phase, for what milestones you should look for, and how to get yourself out of one successfully so you don't just gain it all back.

Speaker 1:

That's what we're going to be digging into Today. In case you don't know us, we've been trainers, nutritionists, for 20 years, each give or take, and we've worked together in the gym floor. We've owned business together strength rx crossfit gym that did nutrition and crossfit and then now ethan has a studio in west hollywood, california, where he sees private clientele, and I have a nutrition specific coaching business for nurses and health care pros online, and we've come together, we've joined forces once again to create this podcast here, really just to like as an excuse to just hang out with each other. It's true, that's really it, you know, just talk shop for a little bit and, uh, you know, hopefully give you guys the right information so you can avoid so many of the common mistakes and pitfalls that seem to plague most people on their pursuit of fitness. So that's what we're here to do.

Speaker 1:

the tools for the tool belt exactly, and so last week we broke down sort of programming in general like what does this amorphous term even mean? Benefits of a routine?

Speaker 2:

and a program.

Speaker 1:

How to structure it for muscle and for fat loss. And today we're just going to take it one layer deeper and break down fat loss specific programming. Because most people want fat loss, everybody wants to like look athletic, everyone needs muscle. Because most people want fat loss, everybody wants to like look athletic, everyone needs muscle. But most people in this country are considered overweight and I think I I'm of the belief that you know, before you start to try to put on muscle, we should probably lean you out a little bit first. That doesn't mean we're not lifting weights, it doesn't mean you're not going to be a little bit of muscle in the process, but the focus is fat loss, at least for the first two to six months and then you can shift gears.

Speaker 2:

It waxes and wanes, but I think most people would would benefit both from like just a health and metabolic standpoint and an aesthetic standpoint for just tightening up a little bit and and I think, yeah, most people want that when they start to think about participating with their food. Obviously there is a population that wants to like get jacked, but and you can always, and everything waxes and wanes so you can put on some muscle and take off some fat. Yeah, it's always phasing.

Speaker 1:

If you listen to last week's episode of programming in general, I think we touched on that, just like the periodization of your year, where you might have two to four months where you're leaning out, you might have four months where you're just hanging out in maintenance and you might have four months where you're committing to some sort of a you know bulk or building phase, and that could be your year indefinitely. You know just these seasons you go through with a different intention, but so, yeah, so you know my old mentor, Dr Trevor Cashy, who was great. He is great still, but he one thing he always said was that everyone is fatter than they think they are. Oh, ain't it the truth? And it's. I mean, like even you and I right now. I guarantee you, if we were to estimate how much body fat we have on us, we would be wrong, we would be, we would undershoot how much we actually have.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things. Right now I'm in a deficit and I was really thinking about, like, what is a goal weight? How much percentage do I want to drop as a general goal? How much would that look like in weight and all that kind of stuff? And you know, I think most people would look at me and be like you're not overweight at all. But even then I'd probably say I have an easy 10 to 20 pounds that I could lose within that.

Speaker 1:

you know, and it's like kind of surprising, it's like wow it's just the creep and I want to dig into more of this as we go in this episode but like it is just the creep of, like modern day society and just the luxuries and the conveniences of life where even someone like us, where we are fitness coaches yeah, that's what we do.

Speaker 1:

And we still somehow, over the course of time, have accumulated an extra 10 or 20 pounds of body fat. And anyone would look at us and be like, oh, you guys are healthy and we are healthy. It's not necessarily like saying like it's not a binary, but it's just. The point here is that it's just so easy to just let a dinner out, you know, an extra splash of this, like an untracked meal, like this or that, and next thing you know, over the course of months, you've like completely put back all the fat you've just spent, however long losing you know, it's just so easy, yeah to do.

Speaker 1:

It really is, and so anyway. So, talking about just how to phase out fat loss cycle, like how you, what would want to trigger one to initiate a fat loss cycle? I think is step one. So like, what's the trigger to say, okay, I've had fun in maintenance, or maybe you've just finished a bulk, now it's time to like?

Speaker 2:

peel off anything or you've.

Speaker 1:

Are you starting from scratch? You've never done anything? There's a couple different ways one might need to trigger a fat loss phase. Either you've just like intentionally, want to put on some muscle, which it's fun to do, but then after, like anything in life, after three, four, five months of your life, this isn't fun anymore and you want something new.

Speaker 1:

You know and then you go to maintenance. You do maintenance for two, three months you're like, yeah, this is much fun. And after a couple of while you're like nothing's happening, I need to do something and you go fat loss phase. After like four months of that, you're like this sucks.

Speaker 1:

I've been, I have, I've fucking been hungry for months you know, we always need that newness, which is why I think having seasons is just so important. That's one version of it. Another version is, like you said, you just ain't done shit. Maybe you just like casually work out, but you're like of the mind, like I don't want to watch what I eat because I exercise. But then you realize that you just keep getting fatter over the years.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I just say you're not. You're definitely not getting the most out of your workouts either. I mean, I think that's a situation that most people fall into. It's very easy to be like you know. Oh, I'm healthy. I work out three, four, five times a week. I run.

Speaker 2:

I'm a runner, but they just don't pay attention to what they eat whatsoever and they're just not getting the most out of their exercise, and it's also maybe why they're not potentially at a composition that they want to be, whether it's more muscle or less body fat, the disproportionate amount of calories it takes to burn versus to consume, oh yeah, you learn real quick that it doesn't matter unless you're like running a marathon every day or doing like three hour like kickboxing lessons.

Speaker 1:

But barring that one percent extreme, like the vast majority of us will never clock in enough caloric burn through exercise to offset a shitty diet or even just a normal diet that you're not paying attention to. Yeah, think about it. Like lifting weights for an hour burns a few hundred calories maybe 350 a boot camp maybe burns 45500 which might sound like a lot, but one muffin later and that 400 calories is right back on you, baby, it's not easy.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean a couple slices of bacon or an extra slice of cheese. Yeah, you know, you get extra cheese on something and there's a few hundred calories right there so easy to do instead of, like you, like you know, running into a wall like that.

Speaker 1:

It's just so much easier to go after nutrition and just it really is the only way. It's the only way.

Speaker 2:

I was kind of thinking about like a gas tank, like it takes a couple minutes to fill your gas tank up with, you know, with gas.

Speaker 1:

That lasts for weeks.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, but it takes a were to drive every day, it takes time to burn it and it's like that same thing. It's like you can just eat something real quick. It takes time to burn it off and then if you just stack that over a couple of days or like three days, you kind of have this. Have that. I mean. Even just the other day I was eating ice cream and I was still under my maintenance. But man, I mean by like 100 calories and I was in such an extreme deficit and it's just so easy to do. I mean, it's just like you know I was, I was really hungry because I was in a strong deficit. Then I ate some ice cream and it's like, oh, there goes all that you know, especially like the real ice cream, the good stuff, the french vanilla, the real, the good stuff, just the heavy though, man, totally.

Speaker 1:

So I think that, like, let's just say, okay, if you've never done a proper fat loss phase and obviously this is your trigger, this is your sign, this is time for you to do it If you are in the other camp, or maybe you've been in maintenance for a while, or maybe you've been, you know, bulking for a while, then it's probably time. If you can reach down and grab like a handful of stomach fat, it's probably time to at least kickstart some sort of a fat loss phase. And I think, like for men that might look like 20% body fat. For if you're in that ballpark, like more muscle or bulking probably isn't doing you much good at that point. And you know, once we get to a certain BMI, body mass index and body fat percentage, we start to have some health effects too. So that's why it's always good to like not be so one way about your programming, but look at it as seasons you go through, because there's health benefits of putting on muscle to an extent, and then there's health benefits of now leaning out a little bit and losing some weight. So anyway, so that would be like your trigger, your impetus to wanna switch gears and go into a fat loss phase.

Speaker 1:

How to structure a fat loss phase? I think step one is we have to understand exactly. Well, there's no way to understand exactly, but step one, we gotta get a really good estimate on what our maintenance calories are. Right, yeah, 100%. Right, yeah, 100. You have to know what you're using. Yeah, and the machine of the thermodynamics, so you know, most people on the planet, I think, are somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 calories what they burn over the course of a day give or take give or take.

Speaker 1:

You know people on the other, on the top 10 who burned. You know over 3,000 people in the bottom 10 who burn under 1,500 but like most of us are somewhere around that. You know know 2000 to 2500 calorie mark for maintenance. And so the easiest way to do is just go online, just Google TDEE calculator. So if you just literally just go to Google and type in TDEE calculator, you will get a.

Speaker 2:

BMI calculator right. It stands for total daily energy expenditure.

Speaker 1:

How much energy your body is expending throughout the day.

Speaker 2:

And that includes movement. So versus like a BMR you know, the idea is to try to incorporate some form of exercise if you're exercising, so that's being equated into your total maintenance. Yeah, everything.

Speaker 1:

So you put in your age, your height, your weight, your activity level, your gender, and then boom, it gives you sort of like a pretty accurate estimate. I think it's pretty good.

Speaker 2:

And what I like about it is that it kind of airs in the lower end a little bit.

Speaker 1:

So then what you do is it'll show you right there, like if you get into like a you know 250 calorie deficit per day, you're gonna burn like a half a pound a week, which is super sustainable. And if you're a smaller person or if you have a slower metabolism, I'd recommend staying in that ballpark. On two to 300 calorie deficit, you cut too deep. It's just too much of a overall percentage of your daily calories for it to like be really sustainable long-term, like if you're if you're like a 40 year old woman or plus who has never lifted weights in your life and it's pretty sedentary you're not burning that many calories.

Speaker 1:

Unfortunately, you might only burn 16, 1700 calories a day. So if you get in a 500 calorie deficit, that's going to be rough. You know you're going to be eating like a thousand calories a day. Yeah, that's not a lot. So in that case, aiming for like a half a pound of fat loss per week, which translates roughly into about 250 calorie deficit per day.

Speaker 2:

All right, well, let's. I think we're getting a car above the horse here. So, first things, first let's get, I think, would be sustainable. And so the idea is that there's 3,500 calories in a pound of fat, and so we're starting to create, I think, realistic goals of how fast and how much weight you want to lose, and then I think that's going to be one of the things that's going to determine your deficit. And to what Justin was just saying, I think it's really important to pick a deficit that makes it sustainable, because, again, you have to be consistent. You gotta do this day in and day out, and if picking a longer road to your goal, but something that you'll actually accomplish, is going to do it, then I think that's a better route than like what you're saying, like just chopping off this huge amount.

Speaker 1:

Long story short you just like. If that, if that means you have to be in a fat loss phase a little bit longer for it to be sustainable because you're not trying to cut down on your calories too much, in the long run you're going to be way happier and it's going to be much more realistic than if you try to go off of just everybody online saying, oh, 500 calorie deficit.

Speaker 2:

But that might not work necessarily for that archetype I just described 100 and like let me tell you, being hungry is hard. Like you might have some willpower, but to battle hunger day in and day out for months at a time is really challenging.

Speaker 2:

And if that just ends up to you binging or breaking your deficit by having this late night snack because you're trying to go to bed and you're so hungry that you just end up eating like a quesadilla or something that you make and it just blows it all out of the water, Then like what's the point in the first place?

Speaker 1:

You know you try to remove so much and try to get there faster, but then if it ends up just means that you're suffering and you end up breaking, then it's all for naught, and that's almost always how it goes, where most of us can tolerate it for a day, two, three, four, but by Friday that eye is twitching, you know, especially if you did make the mistake. Which I see is there's like two camps the people who cut way too deep and they try to go into, like just an extreme deficit, yeah, and the people who are just like stick a toe in the water and half-ass it and they're in a deficit for two or three days a week, but then they're in a surplus the other half good all the weekends, and then months goes by and they've lost zero weight.

Speaker 1:

They're like, well, dieting doesn't work for me. It's like, well, you didn't really commit, you need to be in the middle where it's a moderate deficit, because what ethan just said happens all the time, where it's like you're good, you're good, you're good, you're good. And then you just go have a friday night where you just whatever like okay, let's just say you were in a 500 calorie deficit for five days. That's 2500 calories. You've almost burned off an entire pound of fat. Yeah, that's great. By being in a 500 calorie deficit for monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday and friday, like congratulations. And then saturday you eat an entire large pizza and you eat 5 000 calories, and that 2500. And that people might be like, oh, that's extreme, that would never happen. It's like, no, oh, it's easy. I've looked at thousands of meal plans and meal logs.

Speaker 1:

I should say this happens to very normal people couple of beers, four or five slices of pizza, a little tiny bowl of ice cream, four or five thousand calories, plus your breakfast and lunch earlier in the day four or five thousand calories, and so that two to three thousand calorie deficit you created in the first five days of the week you just erased on saturday and then you come on monday and you're right back to where you started. You're like what the hell absolutely gotta? Be super aware of that and I think if we were to really go after it systemically, it's like you have to go to the root of the issue, which was you were just in too big of a deficit. Probably had you shrunk that deficit down by a little bit, you might not have had this. The fuck it, I can't take it anymore moment on Saturday.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, because the temptations are always going to be there, Like the Saturdays are always going to come and it's more or less like are you able to meet the challenge of the Saturday? And when you're just starved and you've been super, super strict on yourself to that point, that challenge is going to overcome you. You're not going to have the strength.

Speaker 1:

Especially with your friends. And everyone else is eating pizza, so it's like let's not get it wrong.

Speaker 2:

It's like, even if you're in a quality sustainable deficit, you're still going to be challenged on a Saturday with your willpower and still having to make good choices. With your willpower and still having to make good choices, it'll just be that much easier to make them If you aren't just like chomping at the bit for like a bite of a cheeseburger or something like that, you know?

Speaker 2:

and it's really true to your point. So people don't realize like a classic, like burger and fries. And let's say you had a soda, 2000 calories plus easy in a single day. Easy, yeah.

Speaker 1:

I mean without question. You put breakfast and lunch on top of it exactly.

Speaker 2:

You know, it's a crazy day so it's like it's you know, don't underestimate what you know a classic kind of highly palatable, convenient and delicious, and cheap and cheap highly palatable, convenient and cheap, engineered to be deliciously addicting and good yep.

Speaker 1:

So if, if we we have to rely a little bit on self-restraint and discipline, or else we are just gonna get eaten alive, no pun intended, and so anyway. So those are some things to watch out for. And also, like it just so happens, there's a direct ratio of, like the faster you lose weight, the more muscle you're gonna lose. Yes, right, the slower you lose weight, the more muscle you're gonna retain. So if you're just in this massive deficit 500 to a thousand calorie deficit per day which a lot of people try you're losing weight rapidly, but you're there's just no extra resources, since your body's just dumping muscle mass because there's not enough energy to maintain it, and that's not good either.

Speaker 1:

And so I really encourage people if you're like above 200 pounds, you could probably get away with a 500 calorie deficit, no problem. If you're below, you know, 200, even like 175, you know, I would encourage you to take the longer road. A couple of two 300 calorie deficit per day somewhere in there, yeah, you know, and that might mean you only lose five pounds every six to eight weeks instead of every four weeks, but it means that it's going to be much more sustainable for you in the long run and you're going to retain much more muscle mass when you do hit your weight loss goal. Ultimately, you're going to look way better. You're going to have felt better along the way you know, yeah.

Speaker 1:

So what we recommend is definitely figuring out sort of what your maintenance calorie is. You can going to have felt better along the way, you know, yeah, so what we recommend is definitely figuring out sort of what your maintenance calorie is. You can go to that website, tdeecalculatorcom, figure that out, enter your stuff in there and then at that point, now it's okay. So now you know. But now you got to actually be accurate, because accuracy predicts results.

Speaker 1:

Like one thing that we always do with our clients is whenever they're saying like oh, um, I need, I want to adjust my calories because it's not working anymore. And I look at their stuff and it's almost always like they're only logging like every other day, or they're logging for two or three days and they stop. And I know it's tedious and I know it sucks, but at the end of the day, like what gets measured gets managed and if we're not tracking data, we are truly guessing. Yeah, it's shooting in the dark, and so you have to accurately measure this stuff. Otherwise you're just in this like fat loss, jail forever, yep, and you're just like it kind of works and it kind of doesn't it kind of works just because that's a reflection of the attention and time you're putting into it. Get a food scale. Put the plate on your food scale before you load your plate with food. It's one extra step, but it really just changes the game for you 100%, yeah, changes the game for you.

Speaker 2:

A hundred percent, yeah, and I think it's like it goes down to you know hacking it in some way, but like preparing your own food is going to be the primary way in which you can know what's in it.

Speaker 2:

Now that doesn't mean you can't go and get like rotisserie chicken someplace or go to even a fast food restaurant and get something that might fit your macros. Like you know, as long as you have the numbers, you can do it. But I is, preparing your own food in some capacity is going to be the easiest way to know exactly what's going in. And even if you go to Trader Joe's and you get the sous vide turkey breasts, you know that's pre-cooked and all you have to do is heat it.

Speaker 2:

You know, I'm not saying you got to sit there and chef it up, but just even if it's microwavable, frozen rice, frozen vegetables and a pre-cooked meat. You know, then at least you can still have the numbers and you can still prepare your own food and you can still at least measure what's going in. So you know what's happening in that regard. So 100. You know it can be tedious to take this all on, but there are ways to hack it and I think you know getting behind some simple meal prep, getting a crock pot going, doing things that make this as easy as possible, is huge because, unfortunately, if you don't prepare your own food, it's going to be extremely difficult to measure what's going in.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And we're kind of backlogging it. So you know how much you have to eat. Now, in order to make sure you're actually eating that, you have to measure it. The easiest way to measure it is to prepare your own food. Even if you make it the easiest as possible, you still pretty much have to do it. It's very challenging, otherwise, to make sure you're actually eating.

Speaker 2:

Restaurant you go to has everything listed for calories and you're looking up every item which some restaurants do don't get me wrong and you can do that, but it's still pretty challenging to always yeah eat out, so you just have to start making your own food, and that's where things like getting into a meal prep pattern oh, that's, that's the result.

Speaker 1:

accelerator man, if you're just like in the zone and you're like you've got every week you've got a few chicken breasts, you've sliced up with some veggies and some rice and individual Tupperwares. You've got some ground beef with some beans or whatever and individual Tupperware and you've got like and you open that fridge and it's just like boom, boom, boom. You man. You get results so fast. It's insane. It's like every day you're like dropping a quarter pound. You're, you know, you're seeing movement, you're seeing your body changing. Yeah, so motivating.

Speaker 1:

You know, and to that point I wanted to say, like, occasionally you're going to eat out and that's all right, the better you get at tracking this stuff. Like you know, I could order some, you know whatever. Like there's a pho place next door and it's pretty straightforward Sauce, it's filet, mignon, it's rice, it's veggies. I bet you I could probably guesstimate within 10 or 20 percent is no big deal. Yeah, we all can recover from that. But if it's every meal that you're guesstimating and you're 10 or 20 percent off, that means you're 10 or 20 percent off of your tracking. But the thing is, is that you should only be in a 10 to 15 percent deficit total? Yeah, so if you're 10 to 20 percent off because you're eating out every meal and you're just taking your best guess, you're just not gonna get there.

Speaker 1:

You might get lucky but, like you just don't know how much oil they're using in their cooking and how much is in the sauce and all these different things. It's like you don't know how much meat they're using exactly yeah cut of meat exactly because nobody's like ordering takeout, pulling everything out individually and weighing it.

Speaker 2:

You know there's three ounces of chicken in my pad thai.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no one's doing that yeah, so save the money, because once you start cooking for yourself, man, the bank account goes up and the scale goes down.

Speaker 2:

It's the truth, it's just the truth and like a good strategy, I think, is to just get like some staple meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner that you don't mind eating consistently, that are really easy to make, and just have like a couple of them on rotation, and then maybe you swap out and you maybe do something more novel for your meal prep and something that maybe takes a little thinking.

Speaker 2:

But if you just have a couple meals that you can just shoot from the hip or you just don't have to think about it, like overnight oats for breakfast for me is just like such a no brainer. You know, it's like protein powder, almond milk, stir it up, put my oats and my frozen berries in and it's just a nice easy on the go. I don't have to heat it, it just takes me no time to make. It's readily available. I don't mind eating it anytime I eat it.

Speaker 2:

It's totally fine and you can just like make five days worth of breakfast in 10 minutes, totally, you know and so it's like things like that, or like a taco day, like I, like a, like a mexican, like I just, you know, I get a couple tortillas, some chicken breasts, some onions, just simple things by the way, like go to your grocery store and buy the pre-made stuff yeah, Frozen.

Speaker 1:

You know peppers for taco night, Like the pre-cooked chili lime chicken breast at Trader Joe's. It's like six bucks for a whole pound of like pre-sliced, pre-cooked chicken breast. You know some Ezekiel tortillas and boom. By the way, that was my absolute lunch.

Speaker 2:

This today I just described.

Speaker 1:

There is exactly what I ate today. But there is exactly what I ate today. But that's the game and it's like it's filling. It's a no brainer to track. It doesn't have to put anything on a food scale. I can just look at the package and see what the serving size is and just do that. It's two seconds of my life. The whole meal is probably three or four dollars and it was, you know, perfect. So you know, being okay with that says I'm going to take 40 minutes. But two hours later you're still sitting there with 15 different sauce cups and you're like this is terrible. Keep it simple, just like. Take advantage of the pre-made vegetables and frozen vegetables and pre-made meats and stuff at your grocery store and like proteins, couple starches and some veggies.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and then so okay, so that's kind of how you do it. That's your target. It's going to show you how many calories to eat. Easy math one gram of protein per pound of goal weight. So if you're 200 pounds, you want to be 150 to 150 grams of protein a day. You're going to be perfect, great.

Speaker 1:

So now, how long do we stay in this fat loss phase? So, assuming you're accurate and you're weighing yourself in every morning and you're tracking your meals, you know you should be seeing somewhere between about a half pound and a pound of fat loss per week. If you did, but we just recommend it. It almost always works, and if it's not working, I would want to see what kind of foods you're eating and how accurate your tracking is. But assuming you're doing that, that's the trajectory you should be on, and so I think that 10 to 15% of your body mass is a good time to reassess. So if you're 200 pounds, you just lost 20 pounds. You probably want to reassess. Okay, is it time to go build up to maintenance for a week or two and get my body a rest from dieting, a little break from dieting? Or am I feeling good and everything's good and I just want that extra 10, and there's no reason to my mindset's okay, my mood's okay.

Speaker 2:

Keep going, the scales keep moving. Everything's good to go.

Speaker 1:

I would agree with that, because dieting is stressful. I'm in a fat loss phase right now and it's always one of these sneaky things where I've done this tired, I'm just cranky and I'm tired and I'm just like what's wrong with me? Am I getting old? Am I just like? Am I depressed? What is happening? And then I'm like I'm just two weeks into a fallout. This is like the hardest part of it.

Speaker 2:

I'm in the trenches.

Speaker 1:

right now, my body is screaming for me to eat more food.

Speaker 2:

It's not quite used to it, it's not quite acclimated.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you just get like lethargic and that kind of grogginess. You're like, oh yeah, I need to take a little nap. But then you know, your metabolism adapts, you start creating a little bit more of a balance and energy and being in a deficit isn't so hard. But sometimes, like two weeks in, can be tricky, but anyway. So, like I would say, 10 of your body weight that you've lost is a good time to recalibrate and to see do I want to keep going or do I want to build up to maintenance for a couple of weeks and give myself a break?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think that's. It's definitely and it also is just like you said like psychologically it gives you a little break and let your body kind of recoup a little bit. It's a good way, especially if you have a lot of weight to lose. You know, if you're really overweight or obese and you have a really long journey ahead of you, expect the waves to kind of come and go of intensity of how you're approaching it. You know, realistically you probably won't lose all of your weight all in one go.

Speaker 1:

It'll be very challenging.

Speaker 2:

It'll be hard on your body, and you know so. It depends, I think, a lot of it on how much weight you have to lose. But 100%, yeah, I think it's just beneficial to kind of wax and wane with it, depending. And I think, yeah, the 10% is a great marker.

Speaker 1:

Also too like is. Let's say, someone wants to lose weight and they're 150 pounds, so maybe we want to recommend that they eat 1800 calories, right? But then maybe there's somebody who's 200 pounds, they want to lose weight, we recommend that they eat 2400 calories. So why do we have a person who's heavier eat more food? It's because the smaller our body gets, the lower our metabolisms go, and so it's called metabolic adaptation. Every 10% of body mass that you lose, your metabolism downshifts and sort of adapts downward, regulates downward by 25%. So if I'm 200 pounds and I lose 20 pounds of just aggregate mass, then my metabolism is now downshifted because I'm a smaller person moving throughout space and

Speaker 1:

time, and so I'm just requiring less energy to propel my body because I'm just a smaller person now. Yeah, so when you do lose 10, like what might have worked for you? Maybe 2200 calories worked for you when you were 200 pounds, but now that you're 175, you're realizing like I'm not losing any weight anymore. You have two options you can take a little bit of a break from your diet for a second, but when you go back into it you're gonna have to, like you can't eat the same that you did at 200. It's not gonna work, because that was your 10 deficit 25 pounds heavier, but 25 pounds lighter.

Speaker 1:

Now that might look like 1900, and that's just the reality of different body sizes and how much energy they require, and so be conscious of that. If you are a bigger person, you do have a bigger journey that you might need to break it up into, like you know, multiple 10 chunks to get you ultimately down to where you want to go. So just know that, like at the very beginning, 2,500, 3,000 calories might be a deficit for you, but then, as you get closer to your goal, that might be more like 1,900, you know 100%. So be conscious of that as you go through your process. You know, absolutely yeah.

Speaker 2:

And one of the things I'd recommend which is like we obviously we always recommend this is but it's to include resistance training. Oh, for sure, you have to do it. You know you can do no exercise and still get in a proper participation with your food and change your body composition.

Speaker 2:

So don't think that exercise is required and again, you can't exercise, exercise a bad diet, but the bottom line is that our skeletal muscle is the biggest consumer of calories.

Speaker 2:

It's the thing that's going to affect our metabolic rate the most, and so a resistance training is as we kind of just was saying earlier is going to limit how much lean mass you lose. If you're in a deficit, it's going to at least help you maintain and therefore keep your metabolism up and keep all the benefits of having lean mass on us. But then also, just in the journey in general, whether you go into a maintenance or in the ebbs and flows, but in a certain sense, just having the more lean mass you have, the better. And I think that over time, if you commit to a good exercise regimen, you will put on some lean mass, especially if you're hitting your protein goals and especially if you're not always living in a deficit. And over the long game, if you're treating this as a lifestyle and you've got multiple years under your belt, as the time will pass, no matter what you do. So you might as well just like make it part of your identity and make it a lifestyle.

Speaker 2:

But if you start increasing that lean mass over time, your metabolic ability to consume calories will kind of be fluffed up a little bit totally, and if you're able to keep some mass on you, then you won't necessarily just like continually have to also just reduce calories forever as you get leaner and leaner. And they'll kind of be this moment where, if you can have some good mass on you that's lean and your body fat's pretty low, you'll kind of be like this little fat burning machine because metabolism is revving up and you're not necessarily just becoming a smaller and smaller person, because it's true, the more weight you lose, the less calories you get to eat, and so it's kind of like a I don't want to say punishment, but it's kind of like a shitty situation sometimes.

Speaker 1:

It's the often overlooked aspect of fat.

Speaker 2:

Put all this, work and you finally get to a place that feels good. And now you get to and you put all this calorie restriction and now you get to even less calories.

Speaker 1:

Your reward is less calories and the only way to mitigate that is, to resistance train yeah and burn calories by adding more lean mass to your resistance training.

Speaker 2:

It's the only way.

Speaker 1:

That is essentially what recomposition means. It's not like you just turn fat into muscle. It means that you lose fat and you build muscle and you lose it and you sort sort of this like hitching motion, where you slowly build more lean muscle up. So you know, maybe if you're 200 pound, if you're 200 pound guy, this is like the goal for every guy that I know at least. It's like 200 pounds, like 10% body fat. That's hard because I'm 200 pounds right now and I'm probably like 16% body fat. So if I were to lose, get down to 10 body fat, I'd probably be more like 185 pounds. Yeah, there's a 15 pound delta. Now I'm not gonna build 15 pounds of muscle without putting on any fat. It's this like game of like.

Speaker 2:

Okay, let me get back up let me put some muscle on, then I yeah then I get back to 200.

Speaker 1:

But then I got fat again. I'm like damn it. It is sort of like yeah, assuming we're drug free, if you're on steroids, that happens a lot faster for everybody.

Speaker 1:

Of course, yeah, we don't want to do that because it has its own side effects. But you know, ultimately, like if we were to reach this place where you're, like you are for a guy, you know 200 pounds, same weight, but you're 10% body fat versus that is that means you got like 10 or 15 more pounds of muscle on oh yeah, you're going to be a monster. Yeah, yeah, I mean that's huge and you're burning way more calories. When you were at 200 pounds with less muscle mass, exactly.

Speaker 1:

And so you know, some version of that is what you're explaining there 100%.

Speaker 2:

That's literally what I was just doing, because I was looking at what my body fat percentage is, how much I weigh. Now, if I were to drop down 5%, 6%, how much weight would that take off of my body and then take off of my body?

Speaker 2:

and then if I were to then put on like five pounds of muscle which is an insane doable, but a mission for, like the, course of a year and I basically was doing my tdee and comparing how many calories I was using basically at the different compositions and what to expect and how long it might take me, and just playing that whole game of like oh okay, so if I lose 10 and gain five, where does that put me? And this and that, that, this and that.

Speaker 1:

So all back and forth, it can really be a fun hobby to really just like master the skill set of like recompositioning your body. And then the good thing is is you are healthier, you're stronger, you look better. You know it's a win-win.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you got to gamify it a little bit, I think.

Speaker 1:

Totally.

Speaker 2:

I think that's really the way calories and logging your food it can be tedious, like, trust me, it's. It's definitely annoying sometimes, but then I'm right now I'm in a place where, like, I'm opening up my food logging app like five times a day, oh yeah like I've already logged everything like it's already done, but like I'm always like, oh where it feels good, though, yeah it feels good. I'm like oh, I hit my numbers and it's almost like this gamification, like, oh, I've got 300 extra calories right now like oh, I can I can make a quesadilla with some reduced cheese I'm like great great.

Speaker 2:

Oh, I can even put some sour cream on there. We'll put some hot sauce like, oh, I got a snack now or this or that, and yeah, it's, it's. I'm in the place right now where it's very rewarding totally, and it's still tedious at times, but it's like exciting and I'm kind of like kind of checking my aura ring. I'm like, well, how many calories?

Speaker 1:

did I burn today? Yeah, what's?

Speaker 2:

how many did I eat? What kind of put me in totally.

Speaker 1:

Oh, it's like yeah, exactly, and then and then. The consequence of that is you, just one morning you just wake up, look in the mirror, you're like, oh, wow, I'm pretty shredded right now wow, yeah, this is great.

Speaker 1:

I always look at like, okay, a month, so you know june 1st like where am I starting at with weight, where do I want to be? And then I really just look at like each month is like okay, what's the mission for this calendar month and what needs to happen, and really just kind of like you know, pace it day to day from that. And then also I always try to get my protein in as early as I can. So if I can just have dinner, just be dessert, like perfect, you know, because if I've like basically like got all my protein in by like 3 or 4 pm and then dinner can just be like something super, like pasta just something super low protein and high carb.

Speaker 1:

Got it all in, but I still have like a thousand calories left.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you saw, you could have all the parmesan cheese you want on there exactly and like that's like a great reward at the end of the day for practicing a little restraint. Everyone has this like reward behavior syndrome and so just lean into it. So then like okay, practice restraint for the first three quarters of the day by eating just all your veggies and fruits and proteins only so you can save, you know, 30 40 percent of your calories for dinner that you can just like have fun with and just have pizza and pasta and ice cream. Obviously you got to keep it under your calorie targets. You still got to play the game, playing the game still, but like you're just not having to just like sit there at 8 pm and eat a chicken breast and spinach because you blew your load on lunch and had a big bowl of pasta when you should have probably had, you know, something a little bit leaner. So now dinner is like meh, sucks. Yeah, all right, guys, that was a longer one, but I think we hopefully covered it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you know, we got something out of there.

Speaker 1:

That was episode 62. We'll see you guys next week for another episode of In the Grand Scheme of Fitness with Justin and Ethan. Peace out.