Ep 160: Why “Eat Less, Move More” Is Terrible Advice for Your Metabolism, Hormones, and Fat Loss
How often have you been told to “eat less, move more” to lose weight? Does this advice have any merit whatsoever?
Today, Philip (@witsandweights) goes over the real reasons holding you back from sustainable fat loss and optimal metabolic health, and it’s NOT because you’re not doing enough exercise or restricting your calories enough.
Philip explains why the common weight loss advice to "eat less, move more" is terrible. He discusses the importance of muscle mass for a healthy metabolism, how protein and strength training can help maintain muscle, and why simply eating less and doing more cardio isn’t always the best approach. He also talks about the role of carbs in fat loss and the benefits of cardio for metabolic health. Philip also highlights the importance of hydration, good sleep, and stress management for metabolic function. He discusses the impact of alcohol on metabolism and hormones and the importance of whole foods for metabolic health.
Philip bases his notes on the FREE Metabolism audit that you can take on the Wits and Weights website for a personalized assessment: https://www.witsandweights.com/free-metabolism-assessment
Today, you’ll learn all about:
3:25 Five-star reviews
6:32 Misconceptions about the "eat less, move more" advice
8:22 The importance of muscle mass for metabolism
9:53 Supporting muscle growth with protein
11:04 The principles of strength training and overload
14:07 Fueling your body and staying active
21:16 Avoiding sedentary behavior
22:30 Why the "eat less, move more" approach is destructive
25:17 Hydration, sleep, and stress management
30:05 Chronic stress and its effect on metabolism
32:56 Whole/unprocessed foods, dairy, grains, and alcohol
42:17 Personalized metabolism audit for optimal health
43:49 Outro
Episode resources:
When it comes to fat loss and muscle gain, the fitness world is awash with misinformation. One pervasive myth is the oversimplified advice to "eat less, move more." However, this advice ignores the complexities of the human body, particularly how metabolism and muscle mass contribute to sustainable health.
Understanding metabolism is key to achieving sustainable fat loss. It is not just about the calories you consume and burn; it is about the quality of those calories and how they influence your hormonal balance and metabolic rate. The episode highlights the importance of muscle mass in boosting metabolic health, emphasizing that even a small increase in muscle can significantly enhance daily calorie burn. The role of hormones is also dissected, providing a more nuanced view of weight management.
Philip challenges the misconception that carbohydrates are the enemy, explaining why a moderate balance of carbs, proteins, and fats is crucial for peak performance. He debunks the myths surrounding carbs, advocating for their inclusion, particularly around workouts, to aid recovery and provide energy. This balanced approach to nutrition not only supports an active lifestyle but is also key to thriving physically as the years advance.
But what about strength training? Frequency and progression are essential for muscle growth, and this episode provides actionable advice on how to optimize your gym time. The principles of proximity to failure and progressive overload are discussed, teaching listeners how to build muscle effectively. The conversation then turns to the importance of recovery, highlighting how underfueling and overtraining can disrupt hormonal balance and metabolism, ultimately making fat loss more challenging.
Hydration, sleep, and stress management are also covered as essential components of metabolic health. These factors often get overshadowed by diet and exercise, but they are just as crucial. Proper hydration post-exercise is vital, and sleep quality and quantity play a significant role in maintaining hormonal balance.
The episode concludes by emphasizing the power of whole, unprocessed foods in a balanced diet. It encourages a dietary approach that comprises mostly whole foods like meats, vegetables, fruits, seeds, nuts, and grains. The discussion touches on the impact of ultra-processed foods on metabolism and satiety, promoting moderation and mindful eating.
This episode is a comprehensive guide to rethinking health and fitness. It challenges common misconceptions and equips listeners with the knowledge to take control of their metabolic health for a more energized and muscular physique. For anyone tired of fad diets and looking for lasting change, this episode is a must-listen.
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Transcript
Philip Pape 00:00
Are you tired of hearing the same old advice to eat less and move more when it comes to fat loss? In this episode, we're going to dive into the science behind metabolism and hormones. Revealing why this over simplified approach fails to give you sustainable results. You'll learn how to audit your own metabolism for improved hormones and fat loss. Welcome to the wit's end weights podcast. I'm your host, Philip pape, and this twice a week podcast is dedicated to helping you achieve physical self mastery by getting stronger. Optimizing your nutrition and upgrading your body composition will uncover science backed strategies for movement, metabolism, muscle and mindset with a skeptical eye on the fitness industry so you can look and feel your absolute best. Let's dive right in Whitson weights community Welcome to another solo episode of the weights and weights podcast. In our last episode 159 Change how you train hard forever with natural bodybuilders Steve Hall, you learned what it really means to train hard, and how to effectively apply scientific research to your own training. We got into the nuances of key training principles like reps and reserve proximity to failure and minimum effective volume and how these concepts relate to muscle growth. We discussed how to bridge the gap between research and practice based on your individual response to optimize your gains while minimizing injury. Today for Episode 160, Why eat less move more is terrible advice for your metabolism hormones and fat loss. We're going over the real reasons holding you back from sustainable results, and optimal metabolic health. And it's not because you're not doing enough exercise, or restricting your calories enough. Instead, you're going to learn why eat less move more is terrible advice and the roll that other factors like muscle mass fueling your body properly and moving the right way among others play in regulating your metabolism, which is everything. I'm basing my notes off today, the free metabolism audit that I have on my website, which you can access by going to Whitson weights.com. And you click the free Audit button, the big blue button at the top right. And you can take this very quick audit, and you will get a an assessment from me and my team as to what exactly it means. And if you wanted to go through that now, while you're listening to the podcast, the details that I'm sharing today are going to align with those questions so that you understand why I'm asking you that I'm going to be totally transparent. If you listen to this show, and you follow along with the audit, you could almost do your own assessment, I encourage you to submit it anyway, because we go into a little bit more detail than that and clue in on the specific things that are opportunities for you, let's say or strengths for you. And so if you want to get that free audit, just have to go to Whitson weights.com. And click the free metabolism audit in the top right or click the link in the show notes. Always in these episodes, I have a section called episode resources right below the text that gives you a concise bullet list of resources that you can go to that we talked about here. So before we get into the whole metabolism discussion, and I think it's gonna be very comprehensive today, sometimes I get into metabolism, and we cover one specific area. Today, it's kind of the whole ball of wax, and will allow you to decide what's important to you, and where are the areas that potentially you fall short that you want to improve. Before we do that, I wanted to share three more recent five star reviews from Apple. And I'm always grateful for these because not only do they give me good insight into how people perceive the show, but they also help others who are browsing, judge the value of it and whether they should listen like is it for them. And if you are listening right now, and you haven't ever submitted a review, this is one of the best ways you can support me honestly, just head over to whatever your app you use. Most of you, that's apple and Spotify and just submit a rating if it's Spotify, or a rating and review. If it's apple, just take you three minutes. If you need any help on what to write, or you know how to write it, I can let you know. But honestly, if you just sent me a testimonial, it'd be that put that in the review and I would really appreciate it. Okay, so the three reviews the first one is from number two, always helpful and insightful. Always learn from this gentleman good presenter of good info. And I just wanted to include that because I rarely get called a gentleman from somebody who calls themselves number two. Pretty cool. All right, the next one is to the point and helpful. I really like Philips approach to the whole body fitness, from muscles to mindset. He's a great podcast host energetic and thoughtful about the content of each episode. Great show. That term Whole Body Fitness. That's great. I don't know that I've ever used that. Some people use the term holistic, which I'm not a huge fan of just because it has some baggage that goes with it, I guess. But Whole Body Fitness, including your mind is a great way to put it. And oh and that's from linsell sorry, I didn't include them. Name, and the last reviews from some phonics, excellent info. I appreciate Philips no nonsense delivery of the facts. As someone looking to lose weight but retain muscle. I feel like I'm in the right spot, great podcasts easy to listen to, etc. Awesome. Appreciate those reviews concise to the point. They tell me how you feel and what you get out of the show and continue to inspire me and the listeners to keep producing these episodes. Alright, let's get into today's topic. Why eat less move more is terrible advice for your metabolism hormones and fat loss. Alright, let's be honest, for years, for years, and even to this day in the diet industry in the fitness industry, we've been told that the key to losing weight and getting healthy, right, and we can question whether even losing weight is the right goal. Let's we can go there. But the key to this is just eat less and move more. I see it all the time I see people posting on I don't know social media, and they ask for some advice. And occasionally we'll get commenters in there and they're like, eat less, move more. It's that simple. Like just do that, you know, like all these other commenters are just going on and on. And you just got to eat less and move more. The problem is this advice. Besides being simplistic like any bad advice, it overlooks the role of your metabolism and your hormones in regulating body composition, and overall health. Because both the eat less and move more sides of the equation can backfire. Big time, we'll get into the details why what you know, piece by piece here we are going to break it down. But just at a very high level. And I get asked about this on podcast to where they talk about why doesn't that work? Like what's the biggest misconception. And one of the biggest misconceptions is that number one, weight loss is a worthy goal. And number two, weight loss via a lot of running or cardio and then cutting your calories dramatically is the way to go. The problem is the body is very good at adapting the body is very good at saying okay, you want to run a lot, we're going to get really good at running and very efficient and burn as few calories as possible because you'd like to run and your metabolism goes down. And then you have to run more and more and more, if that's the method by which you're trying to lose weight. And then the eating less side well, the less you eat, the more your metabolism adapts downward metabolic adaptation, and the more your hormones down regulate, and the more your body fights back by being conservative and causing you to eat less and less. So both sides of that equation actually do the opposite of what we're trying to do. But rather than just hype on that theory, or principle or idea, the reason I created this metabolism assessment is to help you understand your individual metabolic health because you might be doing 10 out of 20 things perfectly fine to help you metabolism. And then the other 10 things are the opportunities, you might not know what those are, and why they are contributing to an inability to lose weight. And again, we don't want to just lose weight, we want to lose fat. So that means we're gonna lose weight while lifting weights. A separate topic though. And throughout this topic, we're going to tie the concepts from that metabolic assessment to the theme of like, Eat less move more fails to address all of these complexities. So let's get into some some of the science behind it, you know, behind metabolic health. And we're gonna see what's more, I'll say a comprehensive approach, which by the way, none of this can be explained in a 32nd array on Instagram. So, you know, keep listening to the podcast. Okay, so the first part of the assessment, and I might jump around a little bit questions, one, four, and five, focus on the concept of the importance of muscle mass for metabolism, a few things we have to understand first muscle tissue is metabolically active. And all that means is that it burns calories, even at rest, right, that's not something that fat tissue does adipose tissue. And so the more muscle you have, the higher your resting metabolic rate will be. And this is why building maintaining muscle is crucial for fat loss and metabolic health because it gives you that higher baseline of metabolism. Now, before you say, Okay, I'm just going to build muscle, and that's all I have to do. And I'm gonna burn 500 more calories a day, it doesn't quite work like that. The evidence shows us that maybe six to nine calories per pound of muscle that you add. So if you added 10 pounds of muscle, you would burn up to say 90 extra calories a day. Now that's not nothing. But where that gets compounded is that by having more muscle mass, you're probably able to eat more and live at a higher scale weight. Because the muscles denser, you look leaner, you look great and healthy and you can carry more weight on the scale that burns more calories on top of the muscle and being stronger and fitter means you're healthier to be able to go to the gym more often and push and not be as ill and injured and the list goes on. And all of that also helps with your metabolic health and even just calorie burn because you're more active. Okay, so that's covered by questions one, four and five. Now to support that muscle growth and maintaining your mouth So during fat loss, we have to consume adequate protein very common thing we talk about a lot. But if you're new to the show, it's always good refresher. And this is covered by question two of the assessment. It's about protein. You know, protein is the building blocks for muscle tissue, it prevents muscle breakdown. And here we are just supporting that by including as much protein rich food as we can. The simple rule of thumb is eat protein every time you eat. Like if you don't even if you didn't want to track which I'd definitely prefer you track for more precision. But if you didn't want to just audit a typical day, at a high level, do I have protein in every meal and snack? The answer is no. Add those in, take that first step, whether it's animal products, like meat, dairy, or plants like legumes, or even protein powder, totally cool with all of that include lots of protein rich food in all of your meals and snacks. And you'll, you'll help your metabolism tremendously for a variety of reasons. Protein is more satiating, it burns more calories, it helps body composition and helps with muscle. Alright, so these all work together synergistically. In addition to protein, of course, the big thing that we all want to be doing. And hopefully, it's one of the reasons you're listening to the show, or will stick around is engaging in regular strength training, right resistance training, putting a load on your body. And the best approach to that the principle that we care about here is proximity to failure, combined with progressive overload. And if you want to make it even more simplistic, I call this training hard or lifting heavy is really all it is, it's lifting heavy enough weight, for enough volume, as close to failure as you can. And by close means anywhere from like zero to three reps from failure, and then progressing in one of those training variables over time. That's it. Okay. And questions four and five, focus on the frequency and progression of strength training that is so important, it's not enough to say am I strength training, it's Do I have the proper frequency, and progression of strength training frequency is necessary to give you the stimulus to adapt, and then go into the gym again, and push to the next level. If you don't have the frequency. For example, if you go to the gym on Monday, and you don't go again, for six more months, well, you're not going to be able to progressively overload because you wouldn't have maintained that adaptation. But if you go Monday, and then Wednesday, there's a very good chance that that's the frequency you need as a beginner to progress and get stronger each session. So if you don't have enough frequency, you're not going to do it. And then if you don't actually progress, you're not going to build muscle and then the gym time is effectively going to waist and becoming more of exercise or more of just, you know, cardio. And so if I were to give you a simple rule of thumb here, I would say most people would do well to resistance train at least three times a week, and then challenge yourself by gradually increasing the weight and or the reps over time. Simple. Okay? Simple, but not easy, as are many of these concepts. Now, let's talk about the advice, eat less move more again. Because what it usually leads to is muscle loss. If you're just moving more in the form of cardio, and you're not training, or you're not training effectively, and you're eating less, and you know, I've heard people say, who lift weights, I'm going to go to a fat loss phase, and I'm going to stop lifting weights so that I can burn more fat. And that has asked backward. Okay, that is the opposite, because you're just going to lose muscle and get skinny fat, right. So eat less move more often leads to muscle mass loss, and then that slows down your metabolism because when you drastically reduce calories, and you increase your exercise volume, your body's probably going to break down that muscle tissue for energy, it needs the energy, right. And this lowers your metabolic rate, it also makes hard to maintain fat loss in the long run, right makes you live at a lower metabolic rate. And so instead of focusing on this, let's prioritize building and maintaining muscle through adequate protein and regular strength training, okay, uh, beating a dead horse on that one. But it's got to be the top priority for most people here. Alright, so then we get to the next section of the assessment. And by the way, I'm not sharing this. So even if you're watching on YouTube, I'm not like showing the questions. But again, if you go to Whitson weights.com, and you click the big button at the top right free metabolism audit, you could see the 20 questions, just 20 Questions scale of one to five and you can take the whole test in like three minutes. So now let's talk about the importance of fueling your body properly, and staying active for metabolic health, which is different than eat less move more. We're talking about fueling. And we're talking about activity in general, not not necessarily moving more at all costs, and for all modalities. So question three in the assessment talks about carb intake, carbohydrate intake, and I'll just say it again, if you're new to me, if you've never heard me before, I love carbs, I believe and I believe the evidence supports that they are essential for energy for recovery and performance in your world. workouts, if you're sedentary, if you're not training, yeah, carbs aren't going to do you a lot of good, just like most calories aren't going to do a lot of good and you're just gonna have to try to maintain your weight as best you can keep the protein high and avoid losing as much muscle as you can, that's not a great place to be that's surviving, I want to thrive, I want to be strong fit, till I'm 95. And I croak doing a deadlift, something like that, that's my dream. So carbs are gonna help you do that, because most of the time, you should be spending, building muscle, not losing fat, because that is gonna pay off big time. And carbs are gonna help you do that. Alright, contrary to popular belief, and I don't know why it's so popular other than lots of great marketing, cutting carbs to extremely low levels, is not necessary at all for fat loss. And it can hinder your progress even during fat loss. So when I work with clients, and we get down to, you know, kind of tight calories and fat loss, the carbs definitely come down. And if you're a female who's at like, 1200 calories or something like that, the carbs can be around 100 grams or less, maybe. But it's a temporary state of being, and it's still higher than they probably would have been if they were doing keto, or low carb, if your metabolism is much higher than that, which is I'll say, two thirds of people, it's gonna be higher than that, then you're up in the mid one hundreds or higher for carbs, which most people wouldn't say is low carb, and that's during fat loss. While you're building muscle, you could be up in the 200 304, hundreds or more, you know, the guy might be more than that. And, you know, the more the merrier. As long as you've met your protein minimums, and your fat minimums, all the rest goes to carbs. All right? Having said that, people will say, Well, so are you advocating for high carb? No, I'm advocating for what I'd call moderate carb. It's just most people are used to low carb, same thing with the protein equation, are you advocating for high protein? No, it's actually moderate protein. When you look at percentages of this kind of balanced approach, they're actually all reasonable. They're just different than what we're used to. So aim to include a balanced amount of carbs in your diet, if you want to support your workouts, especially around your workouts. And this could include everything from fruits, to grains, to vegetables, to starches, and like legumes and things that have carbs as well, anything, any carbs, you know, I'm not asking you to consume a bunch of added sugar or anything like that. So that's where you know, people get into these straw man arguments. I'm talking about mostly Whole Foods. Alright. So that's how you fuel your body, you fuel your body with what it needs. We talked about protein, and we talked about carbs. And then in addition to proper, oh, by the way, I don't even know if I covered this in the assessment. But step one for most people is just eating more so that you're not accidentally dieting, and that's part of fueling your body as well is knowing that to perform and to build muscle, you cannot be diet. Alright. Alright, so in addition to proper fuelling daily movement and low intensity cardio with with a little bit of medium and high intensity sprinkled in, can support metabolic health. This is very different from thinking I need to go on the treadmill seven days a week and run for an hour. All right. So questions six, seven and eight in the assessment focus on on this concept. And while high intensity exercise can be beneficial for sure, if your priority is lifting and building muscle, and overall metabolic health, I think it's important that it becomes almost like third on the list after training and low intensity cardio. And by high intensity, I mean both medium and high intensity. So for example, medium intensity would be like jogging, and high intensity might be sprinting, right medium might be going for a slightly vigorous bike ride. Whereas high intense, you'd be like spinning, you know, super intense. So I think the less intense the cardio, the more the body's ability to do more of it, you know, higher volume of it during the week without interfering with the other priorities is simple scale. So if you talk about walking, you could pretty much do as much of that as you want, right? Is there a limit to that even potentially at like 30,000 steps, or something where now it's eating into everything else you're trying to do. But for most people, you can walk as much as you want, then you scale up to medium intensity. And I would say you could do several hours of that a week with no issue. And if you're in great cardiovascular health, potentially up to like eight hours a week or even 10 hours a week, if it's like truly just medium intensity where you can do it for a sustained amount of time. And then I would say high intensity, which is like hit training interval training to Bottas. You know, I would limit that to like an hour at most a week. So those are kind of the upper limits. A lot of people are doing too much overall anyway. And you've got to listen to your body, you've got to listen to your recovery capacity. If you're a fat loss, it's probably going to be less of the medium intensity and more of the low intensity. And then the high intensity kind of stays in that same range of up to an hour week. So it's a matter of balance, right? The activities all of this movement definitely helps due to cardiovascular health. Okay, no doubt about that. They can also increase your energy expenditure, which is why a lot of people think they need to do it right to burn more calories and that's true, too. an extent, if you do too much your body will adapt. This is why I like modes of cardio that change up, and where your body doesn't really get used to a particular mode for too long and become efficient at it. Hey, this is Philip. And I hope you're enjoying this episode of wits and weights. I started Whitson weights to help people who want to build muscle lose fat and actually look like they lift. I've noticed that when people improve their strength and physique, they not only look and feel better, they transform other areas of their life, their health, their mental resilience and their confidence in everything they do. And since you're listening to this podcast, I assume you want the same things the same success, whether you recently started lifting, or you've been at this for a while and want to optimize and reach a new level of success. Either way, my one on one coaching focused on engineering your physique, and body composition is for you. If you want expert guidance and want to get results faster, easier, and with fewer frustrations along the way to actually look like you lift, go to Whitson weights.com and click on coaching, or use the link in my show notes to apply today, I'll ask you a few short questions to decide if we're a good fit. And if we are, we'll get you started this week. Now back to the show. The other thing is cardio can support your recovery from workouts. So don't always think of it as as bad thing, cardio is gonna kill your gains, we've got to get out of that old school mindset. And think about a nice balance of having it in there. The other thing I want to mention here, and I'm talking about it more lately is not being sedentary, that's different from moving in, here's why it's different. Think about your typical day or week, if you're a lifter, you might go to the gym three or four days a week for an hour, hour and a half. Alright, great, you got that covered, then you might walk a lot, right? You go for a walk after lunch, go for a walk after dinner. You got that covered. But now how many hours are you sitting in between those activities? probably quite a bit. Most of us who have desk jobs or work remotely, are working at a desk sitting even standing like I'm standing recording this podcast, but I'm in one place and I know I need to fidget and kind of move around and otherwise my back will start to irritate me just standing in one place for too long. So there's evidence that says not being sedentary is independently beneficial, of being active and of course, strength training. So I think of them as three different modes. There's kind of all the cardio modes, there's strength training, and then there's not sitting around for too long at a time. The eat less move more, let's tie it back to that that approach. One of the reasons it's so destructive is it leads to under fueling what you just talked about how detrimental that is just to building muscle, and also overtraining, right? So overtraining, disruption, metabolism, and can lead to burnout and can lead to injury, it can inflame your joints, you know, inflammation, and on and on, you know, tendinitis, all of those things. So when you don't consume enough calories to support your activity levels, your body becomes catabolic. catabolic is the state of breaking down muscle tissue for energy. Protein is anabolic, great the process of building tissue, and carbs are anti catabolic. Let me say that, again. Carbs are anti catabolic, they prevent breakdown, they don't necessarily contribute toward building muscle, but they prevent the breakdown of muscle. So that is why I think carbs are almost as important as protein. This catabolic state, it holds you back in a few ways, it holds back your performance and recovery, it means when you go to the gym, you feel drained, you feel like you can't get another rep. Worse than that, it may cause you to have bad form and get injured, right. But it also leads to hormonal imbalances, it could also lead to metabolic adaptation. And it makes it harder to lose fat in the long run. Now, metabolic adaptation, I've talked about it before it exists, you cannot do anything about it, it exists, it's fine. But you don't want to be causing that adaptation, unless absolutely necessary because you are on a deliberate fat loss phase. And a lot of you listening to this are in a metabolically adapted state perpetually for months and years without really getting the benefit of being in that state. And the benefit would be fat loss, and doing it as quickly as you can and getting out knowing that one of the trades for that is what you're gonna have to eat a lot less. And even less than that because of adaptation. But it's quick, quick meaning a month, three months, you know, even six months could be quick, if you have a lot of weight to lose, but it's not yours. We want to get back to the maintenance and back to muscle building. So instead of pushing yourself to extremes with excessive cardio and calorie restriction, I want you to focus on fueling your body that take a positive approach. If it feels like it's a negative like you are having to do this or I have to cut or I have to say no question it. We want to fuel our body. We want to have a balanced flexible diet incorporating a mix of protein, carbs, fats, and a mix of low and high end tensity activities, right? That's kind of what an athlete does, they balance all these things to train, perform and feel your best. And then ultimately, you're going to look your best as an outward expression of that fitness. So metabolic health, energy, sustainable fat loss are all tied to these concepts. All right, then we get to the next section of the assessment, which focuses on some of the less sexy things, yet they could be the most important for you. Hydration, sleep, and stress management. Okay, so question nine, is about hydration. And we know that being adequately hydrated, regulates body functions. And that supports metabolism, just think about, if you were, if you were depriving all of your cells of a little bit of water, and they all felt a little bit dehydrated, just imagine they're turning into like little raisins. Okay, not this is not a real thing. But just as a metaphor, how well would those cells perform, right, they would probably say, hey, I need to stop doing certain things until I can get more water just like we as humans at the macro level. You know, if you're in the middle of the desert, and you're, you're, you're dehydrated, you don't have any water, you're gonna start to slow down, you're gonna crawl, you're gonna find shade, and you're gonna just hunker down, imagine yourself doing that. And now that is your metabolism, those cells are the things that are converting your energy and using it. And the more you go into that dehydration mode, even mild dehydration, you're going to slow down your metabolic rate. So people don't think about that. But hydration is not just yeah, get your water and get hydrated like this, this ambiguous concept, it's because all of your cells need that water. And if they don't have them, they're going to start shutting down. And I don't mean that in a dramatic way, but they're just going to be more efficient, the mitochondria becomes more efficient. This has been shown in evidence, they've studied this in petri dishes that these things, they just produce the exchange less energy, okay? So aim to drink plenty of water and electrolytes throughout the day, especially during and after exercise after training. The more I learned about this more I realized the benefits of and not as much during I mean during is important, but especially after, and the electrolytes, I don't like to make it too complicated, like the supplements are, most of them are not that great or even worth the money even though I've recommended them in the past and occasionally take some myself, a lot of them like elements have mainly salt. Some, though, have more of the other things like potassium, I'll tell you what, though, a banana has a lot of electrolytes, like just look at the nutrients, look at the minerals in a banana, go log into macro factor and take a look. And you'll see why I love a banana as a pre workout now, or a post workout. Okay, so enough about hydration, questions. 10 and 11 address the other two big ones here, sleep quality and quantity, right. And I have them separate because they're two different dimensions. But both are essential for particularly hormonal balance, which then again, leads to metabolic function, everything's tied your metabolism. When you don't get enough restful sleep, restful, deep sleep, REM sleep, you don't get up more than at most once a day, once a night. And usually that's just because you have to go to the bathroom. Like for me, it's actually kind of annoying. If I go to bed at 10am I alarm set for six. Like clockwork, my body will wake me up at like 545 teams the bathroom, right and I'm like no and 15 more minutes. But I might as well just get up. So I'm talking about more like closer to insomnia or you get up multiple times a night and you're not really sure why. And all of that is disruptive to your circadian rhythm to your hormones. They lead to increased appetite and cravings as well. We know that sleep deprivation makes you hungrier. But it's compounded by lowering your metabolic rate as well. So it's like two things happening at the same time in the wrong direction. One is you burn fewer calories and the other your body's telling you to eat more calories. Now poor sleep also elevates cortisol levels, right. And this goes back to circadian rhythm. Like if you're waking up in the middle of the night. And then if you're on top of that exposed to blue light in the middle of the night, all of these things can elevate your cortisol. And when you get up in the morning and you haven't had enough sleep, your stress levels higher. So stress and sleep go hand in hand. And this promotes fat storage. This promotes muscle breakdown because your body's like I need the energy from somewhere. And it also what's the other thing I was going to mention? Yeah, I've said this before, but it causes greater fat storage in the visceral fat around your organs, which is belly fat. So if you don't want as much belly fat, two big things for that are gonna be alcohol and sleep. Seriously, just those two things right there are massive for the belly fat. So what's the rule of thumb here? Try to get seven or nine hours of quality sleep each night quality sleep meaning no blue light before bed, you know no screens before bed for at least 3060 minutes. Have some sort of calming ritual. Make it cool, make it dark, use a sleep mask if you have to use a cooling mattress like there's so many hacks I'm not gonna to go through the whole list, but identify the one for you that might be the low hanging fruit. Stress is the other critical factor here. Big time. Okay, and these are addressed in I have three separate questions related to stress question 1213 and 14. We know that chronic stress, life stress, elevate your cortisol over time. And this just wreaks havoc on your metabolism, it promotes more fat storage, it impairs immune function. So all you ladies, but also men out there who have had weight loss resistance, you've had trouble, you know, losing fat, you feel like you're on super low calories, and you've already tried bringing up the calories above maintenance and training and all the other things. Stress and Sleep are probably the things that are still holding you back, honestly. And you may not even notice it, because you are used to you're used to so much stress in your life, being a caregiver, a spouse. And by caregiver, I mean could be your children could be your you know, elderly parents or older parents. It's work, its obligations, its finances, it's all the things. And again, sleep and stress go hand in hand. So this is where finding even 30 minutes a day to yourself for relaxation, or mindfulness, meditation, deep breathing, tech, even just a nap. Like if you have a one hour block, and you got six and a half hours of sleep last night, maybe the best way to reduce your stress is to sleep more, it's just get a 30 minute nap, put your sleep mask on your head set in or earplugs in, set an alarm for 45 minutes, probably take you 10 minutes to get to sleep, and then you get a half hour nap. All right. All of this will lower your stress levels and support your well being and this is translated into your metabolic rate. That means you could eat more food. If I could just say this whole list is do this and you can eat more. Do I have you? I have you there? Tell yourself that but this entire list any of these things improve, you can eat more food. So the Eat less move more often looks overlooks the importance of these as well. Because when you're chronically under fed, and you're over exercised, how can you prioritize these? You're just kind of dragging? How do you even prioritize these things, right. And so neglecting hydration, sleep stress can definitely sabotage your fat loss efforts and have other health costs consequences that we touched on. All right. So I think those lifestyle factors are just as important as nutrition and training. I mean, they're all important, it's what we have to say, and it's going to come down to what's most important for you right now, the lowest hanging fruit, that's why I encourage you to go to Whitson weights.com, click the button at the top rate free assessment, take the assessment, what you'll get is by email, you'll get a rating of your metabolic assessment, and you'll get an understanding of why. And then you can go from there, decide what you do about it. Okay, so the next section is about nutrition or food quality, as well as alcohol. So now we get into more of the food stuff, questions 15 and 16 focus on the importance of consuming whole unprocessed foods. Now, the importance of it means the majority of your food like 80 to 90% is whole unprocessed foods, it doesn't mean you're 100% clean, quote unquote, or you are cutting everything out that's processed, it doesn't mean that at all. In fact, most people in the Standard American Diet consume something like 70% of their food from processed sources, ultra processed sources, this could be everything from fast food to packaged foods to like cured meats, and the list goes on. And unfortunately, they're the population that we get a lot of our data from that, where we correlate with, say, for example, red meat, when you see studies that, you know, there's this persistent myth that red meat is, quote unquote bad for you. And yet, when you tease it apart from the standard population who eats a lot of processed red meats, you realize No, actually it's if it's part of a healthy dietary pattern is perfectly fine. And if anything, red meat is highly nutritious, so we get into these dichotomies in our brain, and we start cutting out foods or food groups. And that can be actually detrimental. Also, from a practical perspective, any living and enjoying life perspective to be so acidic monk like about this, and requiring the sheer discipline and willpower to do that is definitely a massive problem. Because it doesn't align with just living and enjoying your life and feeling like Food is fuel. Instead, you're feeling like it's, you're punishing yourself in some way. Anyway, so when I say the importance of consuming whole and unprocessed foods, it's like 80%, which doesn't take a lot of effort once you think about it. And if you're tracking your food, just you go to the grocery store, you buy some things around the edge of the store, animal products, plant products, and starches and grains even and you start to mix them together in some meals, and you enjoy yourself and then hey, I want ice cream for dessert. I'm gonna have ice cream for dessert. That's my process, food allotment or whatever and bilott minutes pretty big allotment 10 to 20% So I wanted to get that out of the way. But going back to the importance of Whole Foods, these are foods that are just minimally processed or not processed. So we're talking, you know, meat, vegetables, fruit, seeds, nuts, grains, all of that. Now, some people might argue that grains are processed. And so this gets into the whole subjective argument of what do we mean by processing? There's levels of processing? And people would say, well, protein powder that's processed. Yeah, it's minimally processed, for sure. But then you could argue that every single food in the grocery store is processed, because you didn't go and slaughter the cow, did you? You didn't go and pick the carrot out of the ground, did you? It had to get quote unquote, processed along the way. So let's not mince words, or let's not be semantic about it. And just just assume that if it came out of the ground, or came from the animal, and had minimal processing, or no processing, that it's more on the whole side. And so grains, you know, yeah, we farm the wheat, and then we mill it into flour, and then you bake bread that is all processing, but you haven't really altered that, you know, chemically. And then people are like, Well, yeah, but they enrich it and this and they bleach it, and this, okay, I get it. So I'm never gonna win the argument. 100%. But I think you know what I mean, a piece of bread is probably less processed than a Dorito. Okay, that's where I'm getting it right to read all comes from corn that has to get mixed with other ingredients. And it's a bunch of macros thrown together from different sources. All right, I can go on and on and on, I better shut up about this. Whole Foods. Why do we like them, they are rich in nutrients, they're rich in fiber, and they're rich in other compounds, other compounds that are not on the food label, folks. Okay, if you look up nutrition facts, for an apple, there's a whole bunch of stuff in an apple, that's not in the nutrition label. Don't forget that. I was talking to my wife the other day about it, because we were saying how like, it's so great to have a variety of these fruits and vegetables in your diet, even though many of them look the same nutritionally, right, from a macros perspective, and even a micros perspective. But then they have specific compounds that complement each other. And it's nice to have that variety, because you just never know what's gonna be great for you, you know, have the blueberries have the apples have the bananas have the kiwi, like have it all in there. And then of course, the fiber and the nutrients are really important as well. So we want to aim to have at least 80% of our diet consists of whole unprocessed foods, so that vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, healthy fats, but I am going to throw in dairy and grains in there, folks, I'm sorry, you know, anti gluten folks and anti dairy folks, if you can tolerate those things, have them in your diet. That's my position. Now, if you notice issues with digestion, with gut health, with your skin with anything, and you can pinpoint it to a specific food, then great, that's information for you that you can act upon. I'll be honest, I probably have some mild intolerances to things that I eat. And I may not even be aware of it, because I haven't done the elimination diet to get that down in detail. But it also hasn't prevented me from enjoying my life. Now I also have an autoimmune condition. So Could somebody argue that if I cut out a whole bunch of foods that would go away? Maybe? Do I want to make that trade off? Probably not. So you got to decide for you. It makes sense. All right. Now, ultra processed foods, if you have too much of them, they are definitely going to disrupt your metabolism disrupt hormone balance, for a number of reasons. The main reason with Ultra processed foods is just because they're so calorie dense and devoid of nutrients that you're just you're consuming a bunch of macros, so a source of energy but not getting any other benefit out of it. And they tend to not fill you up. So you over consume. Even if you're tracking and you don't over consume, you're going to be then hungry, you're either going to over consume, or you're gonna be hungry, right? It's one or the other. The reason we over consume is because we're hungry. So the more whole foods and nutrient dense foods, the less hunger becomes an issue. And then alcohol is the other thing I want to talk about because that definitely, there is no positive to alcohol. Okay, I'm not saying that to shame you. I still drink alcohol, even having talked to experts over through the podcast about, you know how, again, there's no positive to alcohol, why do we do it? And there's a lot of social stigma. There's a, there's a lot, I have clients who have had these conversations with and they're like, I just can't do it. I have to have a drink with my friends and get that buzz and that's part of the enjoyment. I'm like, okay, that's your choice, do it. I'm not going to judge you at all. Can you still meet your goals with drinking alcohol? Yes. And all I want you to do is evaluate how it makes you feel and achieve those goals. And experiment with the alternative experiment with not having alcohol in your diet for a few weeks, just from a health perspective, even if it's just for fat loss. Just try it out. That's all I'm saying. Obviously, alcohol has a bunch of what some people call empty calories, which is kind of a misnomer because there's both carbs and alcohol. The alcohol gets metabolized. It does create energy. But guess what that energy just gets stored as fat, which can of course be offset if you're just in a negative energy state if you're in a calorie deficit. So it's not like you can't lose weight while drinking alcohol. It's This doesn't help that much. And then it also causes other hormonal disruptions that do affect fat burning and fat storage, your sleep your hormones, that is the part of it. That is, I think, more serious, I have an expert coming on the show, specifically to talk about thyroid and your health. And now I know my audience, a lot of your listeners want to know a lot about the supplementation, which will be a tiny piece of that, but mostly, it's gonna be about lifestyle, which is I think, what we have the most control over who wants to be on a bunch of meds, right? So we're gonna talk about thyroid, other hormones that affect the metabolism, or, of course, cortisol, the stress hormone, and your reproductive hormones. And all of these need to be in some sort of balance. And oftentimes, that balance is driven by the stress you place on your body stressors, like under eating, like overtraining, right. And then those hormones, not only do they affect your weight management and inability to lose fat, they cause fatigue, they cause mood swings. And who knows what else, there's many other symptoms, right? So, muscle mass, nutrition, sleep, stress, et cetera, all of these contribute to your hormone balance and the hormones themselves, right. Of course, if you have a hormone imbalance from because of a medical condition that needs to be looked at, I'm not a medical provider, I don't dispense medical advice. But if you've got everything else dialed in, and you know, for a fact that you're just your lifestyle is on point, there may be a medical situation under there that needs to be addressed as well. The point with this whole thing is we want to address the factors that cause our metabolism to go up or down in a comprehensive way. Because that is going to directly correlate with hormone function, and your ability to regulate your metabolism and live a fun, fit life where you get to eat a bunch of food, train feel great, and you know, be the fittest person on the block for decades to come. It's what we all want. Alright, so eat less move more, I hope you have gotten the message that it's over simplified, and it's also totally ineffective. It is terrible advice. Right? Building maintaining muscle mass fueling your body properly, staying active managing stress, prioritizing sleep, focusing on nutrition, quality, these actually make the big difference in optimizing your metabolism and your hormones. So the metabolism audit or the metabolism assessment that I've referenced throughout the episode, it's going to help you identify areas for improvement and create a personalized plan for you, which I think is where the rubber meets the road. It's taking this information on this podcast and applying it to you directly. And so I want you to go to Whitson weights.com, click the button at the top for the free metabolism audit. And you're going to answer the 20 questions. This is going to help you gauge your metabolic health. This will help you identify specific strategies for you. The cool thing is if you want to do it while listening to this podcast, you can then think about your answer. Still be honest with yourself about where you are, you know, be brutally honest, that's the only way to get help. But now you put it in the context of what I was sharing today. Okay, I think that covers it again, go check out the metabolism audit by going to wwe.com Clicking free metabolism audit at the top right or click the link in the show notes. And in our next episode 161 The bioenergetic solution to low energy and chronic health issues. With Jay Feldman, you will learn about bio Energetic Health. What is that exactly? You're gonna have to stay tuned to find out. Jay is going to discuss the impact of maximizing cellular energy on mental health, metabolism, longevity, and more. He will address modern diet, culture, stress and lifestyle in the context of your health, and offer practical solutions for adopting a sustainable energy boosting diet without relying on restriction or willpower. Make sure to hit the Follow button in your podcast app right now to get notified of that and all future episodes when they come out. And as always, stay strong. And I'll talk to you next time here on the wits end weights podcast. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of wit's end weights. If you found value in today's episode, and know someone else who's looking to level up their wit's or wait. Please take a moment to share this episode with them. And make sure to hit the Follow button in your podcast platform right now to catch the next episode. Until then, stay strong.
