7 Solcast - Episode Seven: A Deep Dive into Fat Loss: How to Lose Weight the Right Way

Hello and welcome to the Soulcast. This is episode 7. I am your host, Sol Brah.

Uh, it's been a bit of a crazy few weeks. I did hear that they were gonna open the gyms soon, which is great news, I'm sure, for everyone listening. I know I'm so excited to get back in the gym. I've been a bit lazy with my training, to be honest, not pushing myself as hard, kind of making excuses, not really pushing myself, doing the bodyweight or the, the lower weight stuff that I have at home.

So I need to do better on that, so I'm going to do that, try harder.

But I am definitely excited for when they open the gyms back up. If, if everything else stayed closed, as long as the gym was open, honestly, um, kind of just been doing the same as usual. Beaches are still open, cafes. I haven't been able to go out for coffee, which is annoying. Seeing friends and all that is probably the biggest thing. Uh, but yeah, open the gyms. Did you know that the biggest kind of common factor amongst all the coronavirus patients who are in serious trouble has been obesity? Interesting to think about. Obviously, the higher your weight becomes, your immunity system kind of doesn't function as well. Nothing functions as well in your body when you're that overweight. Unfortunately, that's how it is. Your hormone levels get all stuffed up, your stress levels. There's a lot that goes on behind the scenes rather than just the visual aspect of fat. So that's why I recommend most people, or why I'm against being overweight, as I guess you could say, as passionately as I am, is because it's, it's not just the visual aspect of it, but it's like, why would you want to degrade your health if you have the choice not to? So that's a very big reason that I like to keep in shape, is because the body doesn't work well, as well when you have a higher fat content. So if you care about living a longer life or anything, like, you can theorize it as like, oh, I don't care what my body looks like, uh, if you're convincing yourself maybe why you're eating bad or whatever.

But whether—

just do it for yourself to prolong your life and the life and time you can spend with your friends and family and just helping other people in general. I think it would be— it's kind of important to do just in general. So I decided to spend a proportion of this podcast doing fat loss, or talking about fat loss principles, strategies. How do you promote muscle gain and fat loss rather than weight loss. So I always try and, and get people to think about it when they ask me how to lose weight is, okay, do you want to lose weight or do you want to lose fat and gain muscle so you're losing less dead weight? And they, they think just losing weight in this, in this general sense. You don't want to lose weight. In our society, we're very tied to the numbers on a scale, and we, we assign a lot of worth to that and what numbers show up on the scale when you stand on it. But it's inherently flawed because the weight itself, the number, is just telling you this force of gravity or whatever. It's force of gravity on your mass. It's not telling you what state of health you're in. It's not telling you what you look like. For instance, if you were shredded, you know, ridiculous lean mass everywhere on the body, and you were 100 kilos, let's say, big man, that's way healthier than—

are you gonna say that that guy needs to lose weight?

Because he's 100 kilos?

No, he's fine.

But the guy that's 100 kilos and is grossly overweight and has no muscle mass, you'd be like, yeah, he needs to lose weight. But really, it's, it's not the number of the scale that you should be assigning, you know, your goals to, or your progress. It's first of all, how you feel. Compare how you feel when you lose weight. or how your body feels in response.

What you look like is more important.

It's important to everyone. So looking yourself in the mirror and saying, "Oh, okay, I can see this part of the muscle more clearly now," because you've lost a bit of fat from there. That's more relevant than the numbers on the scale.

You can stay the same weight, but if you put on a bit of muscle and lose a bit of fat, you're gonna stay the same weight and be like, oh no, I'm not losing weight. But if you look in the mirror and actually, okay, I got a bit of arm definition, you may be the same weight, but you're still improving and you're still looking better and feeling better. So don't, like, don't even, don't even weigh yourself really. It's, you know, it's, it's to a point it's useful, but like if you get the general big strategies down, you don't need to obsess about it.

That's my point, is don't obsess over it.

Don't be sad if you weigh in like a kilo over what you thought you would. You know, that's just opening yourself up to stress that you don't need to.

You just kind of look at, oh, how am I feeling today? How strong was I is another thing.

How, how much further could I push this run or whatever? That's a much more relevant and I think mentally healthy way to conceptualize your weight loss journey, I think. So the first steps that I would recommend to anyone who wants to lose weight, anyone who wants to improve their health in general, is it's just going to want to be doing most of, most of these things. So this one: eliminate seed oils, processed food, non-natural sugars. Uh, pretty no-brainer. Seed oils being canola oil, soy, vegetable oils, all those horrific, uh, petroleum offshoots, all those oils that are in everything manufactured these days.

That's a separate topic. I won't go into that.

Any processed foods, it's just better if you cut out these things entirely. Like, there's no, oh, maybe I have one on the weekend as a cheat meal. It's like, no, start viewing these things as actively harmful to your body, not as like a yummy super treat that you get to like have. Like, why would you reward yourself with something that's gonna harm you?

That's it's just a toxic relationship to have because then you want to feel good about something that's harming your health.

And, and over the long term, your brain starts to associate that with that, and it's like, um, that's not a good place to be. So processed foods, anything that comes in a package, basically, uh, I advise only entirely eating whole foods you prepare yourself.

Yes, that might seem hard for a lot of people, but you have to learn some basic level of cooking and get involved with it if you're gonna really improve your health, especially if you want to lose fat. You want to make sure that everything you're consuming is—

you know what it's—

who's prepared it?

You.

You know what's in it because you haven't put anything extra in that you know, you may not know about.

A lot of the vegetable oils in processed foods add calories that are just kind of hidden in the food, so they're not really—

they're not associated with— so people can be vastly overeating by, you know, 600 calories if they have a lot of vegetable oils like canola oil in, say, they're eating muffins or something. It's a common vegetable shortening that they use in mass-produced baked goods and things like that. Instead of like butter or the more expensive stuff.

So they put vegetable oil in there, people eat that, it's extra calories you don't know about, it's all very inflammatory. So producing whole foods only that you prepare yourself and taking the time— it's so, it's so easy to do meal prep, it boggles my mind that people—

it's It's like, man, cook a bit extra at dinner and that's your lunch for tomorrow.

And then breakfast can be oats or something that you could just bap, bap, bap, now it's all ready.

Or eggs, they take, pfft, I've got my egg cooking process down to like 5 minutes now from fridge to plate, which is simple.

It's also way better taste-wise. I think, uh, maybe your cooking skills need to develop a little bit before that happens, but man, you make a homemade meal with, with good quality ingredients, you can't tell me that that stuff doesn't taste better than the, the garbage manufactured processed stuff that's, you know, full of artificial colors, the sweeteners.

Like, it's not food at that point.

It's this weird approximation of food that comes out 100,000 strong on the back of trucks, and it's like, what's going on here?

Anyway, I get—

I don't really like that stuff, but I advise everyone to wean off it.

Uh, if they don't want to cut it out, you can still have yummy treats, just make them in a nice way. That's my point. You want to have an apple pie, just get some good apples, some nice pastry, and just a bit of effort and making an event rather than just pulling one out of the freezer. Yeah, it just, it, yeah, it irks me.

Anyway, fat loss, drinking water/non-caloric liquids. So that's a big one. A lot of people, I'll always say, hey, are you eating any soda? And that's, I would just leave that as a first step to cut out.

The fat loss journey is about a kind of multitude of steps. That you want to be taking and implementing. And it's not all going to happen at once. Same with if you're trying to get into the gym and need a bit more for that or whatever, it's not all going to happen at once, but you can change one thing at a time. As long as you stick with those small things and then, you know, over a few months, a lot of your behavior will have changed. But taking these baby steps helps to make maybe these, these big daunting seeming these daunting goals seem a bit easier to break down because that's all you can do is break them into little chunks and over time you've got a big chunk of change, which is awesome.

So, cut the soda.

That's liquid calories that, uh, you don't need. You know, they have like 35 grams of sugar in them.

That's a lot.

People often see weight loss just from cutting out that as well. You try just a soda water. I liked the bubbles when I used to drink sodas. I always had Coke Zero, which, you know, I don't recommend either, but the bubbles was what was addicting. And so when I swapped to just like sparkling mineral water, I was able to satisfy that kind of burning sensation. Which is refreshing in a way, uh, with that. And you know, that's just water and minerals, much better for you. Juices, of course, if you're trying to lose weight, I don't advise drinking your calories.

Black coffee is fine.

The calories in black coffee are negligible, so don't really make a difference. And black coffee also blunts the appetite, um, a common kind of strategy that I would say if you're trying to lose a bit of weight. Is to fast. So intermittently fast, you do 8-hour window of eating, uh, or even smaller, but 8 hours the kind of starting one, and then 16 hours the day where you don't eat. It gives your body a chance to process the food that you've intaken, but also just as a point of restricting the time in the day that you allow yourself to eat, you're naturally going to be ending up eating fewer calories, which is the main thing. So you can have black coffee fasted in the morning and push back your breakfast, or, or don't have breakfast at all, or just have, have lunch at 12. That can be a good way to reduce your calories if you just get rid of breakfast entirely. And just kind of be hungry for the first part of the day. It's quite a nice feeling once you get used to it, 'cause you feel a bit lighter. I've been fasting a bit more than usual, intermittently fasting with the whole lockdown situation and not training as much. And it's a good way to kind of keep trimmer without changing your diet too much. So what do we have? No seed oils in anything, no processed stuff, no non-natural sugars, whole foods you prepare yourself, drink water, non-caloric liquids, no fruit juices.

This means no alcohol. So alcohol is also a big one.

You know, there's calories in beer. You make worse choices when you're drunk, so you're more likely to kind of cheat on your diet. You feel like shit the next morning, so you don't exercise. You don't do the movement that you were planning to. You feel like shit, so you don't want to— you can't be bothered to prepare food, so you order in. And then you have a night, blah blah blah.

It's like a triple whammy that starts with having a couple beers.

So cut that out if you want to lose fat. It's simple.

You can drink occasionally if you're smart about it, you know, have vodka sodas, not many calories in those, but don't have 10 beers and then expect to lose fat very easily.

It's just not going to work.

Eliminate sauces and marinades.

So I don't know if everyone knows this, but a lot of prepared sauces have either those toxic vegetable oils like we talked about before, or just kind of this hidden sugar. Um, a lot of— if they're lower quality sauces you can buy pre-packaged, they cover up the lack of taste with sugar. And it's like, yeah, if you're trying to lose weight, that's— if you have a lot of sauce or, or sticky sweet marinade on your meat when you're eating, that's a decent amount of calories that you might not be thinking about.

I recommend cutting these packaged sauces and marinades out.

Obviously still have like homemade tomato chutney or something like that, or olive oil, balsamic vinegar, apple cider vinegar can dress some things. Uh, your palate adjusts after a while of eating this way and As long as you stick it out, you benefit from not needing as much just sugar on your food to eat it. You should be preparing nice food where the whole food ingredients don't need a sauce or, you know, a sweet marinade to make them taste good. I've always preferred not really making sauces and marinades unless it's like a, you know, a proper basil pesto that you make yourself or something like that.

Research studies have shown that short-term fasts such as daily and overnight 12 to 16 hour fasts, so not even that bad, actually increase your metabolic rate due to an increase in norepinephrine, one of the hormones that signals fat cells to break down. I fast, been fasting a lot recently because, you know, not training as much.

Fasting further into the day as well, which I really like.

You feel a lot lighter in the morning. You seem more productive in a way. You can get into focus.

I find writing comes easier if I, if I haven't eaten too much. Just have a coffee or something.

But not essential for when back in the gym. I find it helps keep you trim, uh, makes you feel just more tight when you're fasting, even intermittently. You just have your calories within that 8-hour window, so 10 AM to 6 PM, and don't eat. And what that's going to do as well is it's going to make you sleep better. When you have a large meal just before bed, digestion isn't is kind of sapping a lot of your body's energy and blood flow. So it's not really optimum to have that heaviness going to bed in terms of your sleep quality. You can still train fasted. I like running fasted in the morning. I don't like training fasted really.

I like to have had a decent meal a few hours before, usually like most of the day of eating, because I train in the afternoon. I feel properly strong and full then. More so than when I do fasted with weights, but some people prefer it.

It's probably not gonna make a difference too much as long as the overall calories you're taking is enough for growth, or if you're trying to lose weight, if the calories are low enough, whether you're training fast or not.

Eh, not really a big deal.

Longer fasts as well, of course, there's that, that That story of the chronically obese man who, who fasted and he only had vitamins and minerals in it, like a multivitamin, water, and I think salt. And because of the amount of fat that was on his body, his body basically went full ketosis, used up that fat, and he lost all of his weight without actually needing to eat because he had this stored energy on his body. And he was fine. It's a scientific study, not a story, I should say.

I'll try and find it, or if you can search for it yourself.

But yeah, he got away with not eating for a long time, several months. I think it took him to lose all the fat, but he did it safely and he was obviously under supervision. I don't recommend people do that unless they're super well, uh, read in it and, and have a doctor involved. But a few day fasts, for sure, I would look into. You want to make sure that your salt intake is still high, uh, so you don't get cramps and, and headaches, uh, and so you can hold on to water more. Salt is essential in the body for actually holding on to the water that you intake, sodium. So have sodium. Bone broth is a good one that some people do for fasts, just to get those vitamins and minerals without many calories.

But I still think the proper way is just to have water.

Can be quite spiritual as well. That's one of the common teachings in the kind of more spiritual side of things is fasting. You know, Ramadan, of course. Has fasts. Pretty much every culture around, at some point in their religion, has something to do with fasting. And it's interesting that it kind of worked out that way. There's obviously something to it in the spiritual side. I think you feel a lot more connected to the baseline if you're hungry and You are just— your body's having to navigate this new area, and you're pushing your willpower, and, and that they're all, they're all spiritual things in a way. It just, it's a way of reducing your calories because there's less hours in the day that you're eating, of course. Start with an 8-hour window, so 10 AM to 6 PM. It's very doable for everyone. And just, you know, cut out those snacks right before bed or, or during the night if you're waking up in the middle of the night. Eating at the same time is a big one. Maintaining a regular eating schedule can improve the metabolic response to meals. Your body kind of learns, okay, we're getting nutrients at this point in the day, starts to prepare for that by maybe getting the digestion ready at these times and secreting certain hormones that make you hungrier and less hungry at those times, because it knows, okay, this is when food's coming. Circadian rhythm is involved with that. Don't skip breakfast one day, then eat it the next. Don't snack late at night. Keep the amount, volume consistent and at the same times each day. And while I— what it's kind of like a few things that make this good is if you're keeping the volume and amount of food that you're eating the same, your body gets used to processing it, whether it needs to kind of get used to processing more meals or less. And keeping it the same size in your meals is going to stop you accidentally eating more or less calories than you need. If you have the same amount that you've kind of measured out before in terms of your calorie goal, you stick to that each day, you know you're eating the amount that you need to eat.

Snacks the same, etc.

It's all another side of keeping a routine, and the easier it is to stick to it once you cement those mental grooves.

Okay, cut up this amount of chicken, I'm going to have 2 bananas, blah, blah, blah, same time every day.

The more you can get the things locked into your routine, the easier they're going to be. Starvation mode myth, wanted to touch on quickly. Takes 3 days or 4 weeks of extreme calorie restriction for the body to downregulate metabolism. There is no real need to snack throughout the day if your goal is to lose weight. You don't have to. It's not gonna— some people say if you starve the body throughout the day of calories, like, rather than a constant flow, that it downregulates metabolism and doesn't burn as many calories. That's not really an issue on a day-to-day basis if you're doing your longer fasts.

That's when that would— might come in and something to think about.

So you don't have to snack throughout the day if you're trying to cut weight. Doing low-carb or keto. I know a few people that have had success with keto because of its simplicity in a way, and it makes sense. When I want to lose weight, I manipulate my carbohydrate intake that's— the fats and the proteins are what have the majority of your nutrition. So when I lose weight, the calories that are the least nutritious really are the white rice, the potatoes—

the potatoes are still nutritional, but not essential compared to the meats and other fats.

So my approach to cutting is kind of, you Yeah, lowering my carbs, but I still have some carbohydrates for athletic performance, and I feel better having some level of carbohydrates. But keto can be super good if your goal is to, is to purely lose fat. Your body basically changes to burning fat as a fuel source instead of carbohydrates and glucose. That you're consuming can result in many inflammatory markers reducing, especially if the source of your carbohydrates aren't too good.

Really good for people that are very overweight, looking to cut a lot of weight.

You can basically drop all of your carbohydrates, have things like eggs, fatty meats, steaks, and basically that's it. And if you keep your carbohydrate intake very, very low, your body will shift into this fat-burning mode. Some people feel better once they fully keto-adapted. If you're going full keto, it does take like up to 2 weeks around there for your body to adapt, sometimes longer, to the keto kind of diet, and you might get headaches and experience experience things like that, but just know that that's, you know, part and parcel of it, and to push through if your goal is to get to ketosis. You might feel low energy, but if you stick at it, your body will eventually adapt. Increasing protein intake is another strategy if you're looking to lose fat. So protein is thermogenic. It means that your body burns more calories to process it than other food types, so it's, it's harder to break down. So increasing your protein intake relative to carbohydrates again can help increase calorie expenditure, which, if you go to the table of— the main goal of fat loss is to lower your calories. So all of these little things that we can slot into and strategies that we can employ. If they're all reducing 50 calories here, so-and-so calories here, it adds up at the end of the day as long as you're incorporating all these little things. And the other thing is that little, little steps are important as well because they add up, but they're also easier to implement than these big huge steps. So my goal is, or my advice to people is to— if you want to have a long-term change in your life and your— maybe your health and fitness, you just day by day do a little bit better and increase your output, or, or do another strategy here, so that it all sticks. Because you can focus on little bits at a time, and, you know, years down the track you've completely overhauled everything and you've stuck to it, and it's It's easier to kind of wrap your head around in these little things that we can implement. So, moving on. Movement. Yeah, no-brainer. For most people working full-time, sitting 8 hours a day does not expand enough energy to counterbalance the huge breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks that they might be having throughout the day. Despite any exercise performed at the beginning or end of the day. So if you think you're moving enough by doing like a 20-minute run before you go to work, but you're still having snacks, you're still sitting down for the 9 hours of your day, you know, you might think you're exercising, but you're still not doing enough, considering a lot of your day is spent sitting still, which does not expend as many calories. One thing I would try to do to remedy that at work throughout the day. Every hour or so, get out of your chair. If you're in a place with stairs, run up and down some stairs. You can even go into the handicap stalls, like the toilets, and do 50 bodyweight squats. That's something that I'll do a lot, is, oh yeah, just go fill up my water bottle, go for a walk, go to the toilet, and just do 50 bodyweight squats. And you can actually get a good bit of blood flow re-energize yourself for the next bit of work. Finding a tree to do some pull-ups, that's a great one that I like to do on my lunch break, is I'll walk to the park nearby. If you're working from home like a lot of people are now, kettlebell swings, if you have a kettlebell or a dumbbell or something you can swing between your legs, they're another one, another good one to just every hour or so just get up, just boom, do 10 of those. It all adds up. So you have your main workout, but then don't be afraid to, throughout the day, add extra bits of movement. You're not gonna overdo it. You know, overtraining's not really an issue here. Anything just to get the blood pumping and over time increase caloric expenditure, which is, you know, at the end of the day, you wanna lose weight, you have to decrease your calorie intake, really. Tipped to your output. Brown fat is stimulated by cold exposure to burn white fat. So one of your primary fat burning techniques should— could be daily cold thermogenesis. So cold showers, an ice bath, or a cold plunge if you have it, the local river if you're in a cold area. So brown fat versus white fat, what I mean by that So brown fat is derived from muscle tissue and has a high number of mitochondria than white fat. So they use more calories to generate heat. Um, when you have a high proportion of brown fat, it's actually just a healthier kind of state to be in, as well as helping you to stay warm. Obviously Your exposure to the cold stimulates accumulation of brown fat relative to white fat because your, your body is adapting to the cold exposure. White fat is your body's main type of fat found under the skin and around your internal organs. If you have too much of this type of fat, you get metabolic dysfunction.

Heart disease, certain cancers, or diabetes.

So brown fat's better than white fat. Your body still needs some white fat, but cold exposure can help increase your brown fat. It's also a bit of a mental thing, forcing yourself to get in a ice cold shower straight in the morning is one, an amazing way to wake up. I guarantee you'll feel more awake having an ice cold shower right upon waking than even a coffee. Will— the willpower of exposing your body intentionally to that kind of thing and conquering that little voice inside you that's like, no dude, don't, you know, we're all warm and cozy. And if you kind of say, nope, we're doing this, and you force yourself to do it, you feel energized by that because you got your, your body goes, oh shit, or you consciously recognize that you've kind of beaten that little voice down and gone, nope, not today. And that's like another energy boost as well, which is cool to do. Obviously the cold water, the plunge pool is the best. Do that for several minutes, cycling on and off. I think I do 1 minute in the cold and then I'll go to the shower for 20— for a minute and then just do that on and off. I guarantee if you consistently force yourself to do cold showers, you get this kind of mental edge and less dilly-dallying with your brain when you have to do something that might— like a chore or or exercise, it's just like, oh, okay, we're doing it. There's less, less of a fight from that little voice inside you that seems to pop up when you want to push yourself not to be lazy or do something that might be hard. Training in a fasted state, another few things. I would recommend taking some amino acids, so the calorieless, before training, just so that you kind of can repair those muscles without expending those— sorry, without intaking many more calories. So there are some other reasons as well that you might not be losing fat other than the calories. I kind of dealt with that side of it. Uh, the best long-term strategy for keeping body fat lower is to increase your body's resting metabolic rate. The resting metabolic rate is the amount of calories that your body burns at rest, doing nothing else. So the energy that is required to keep your body ticking along, even if you're not doing any movement.

The body needs calories to repair itself, for digestion, for all of the processes that are going on behind the scenes that we don't see.

That requires energy. So even if it's not affecting your fat or anything, so even if you're not moving around, if your resting metabolic rate is high, then that can be a good way to use up calories. When you increase the amount of muscle on your frame, your body needs more calories to maintain this tissue. Muscle is metabolically more costly to maintain than other muscle— than other body tissue types. This is why bodybuilders with enormous amounts of muscle can consume 4,000+ calories and not put any fat on. You might think that's strange if you don't understand the biology behind it, that some people if they're bigger, more muscular, they can have these enormous meals and not put a shred of fat on. So I would always recommend trying to increase the muscle on your body. It'll go a long way to longer term— that's just for the rest of your life, as long as you keep the muscle to some degree— more calories used up without you having to not eat anything or or do more running or exercise, that's just energy that your body is using up in the background.

You don't have to think about that.

So if you try and employ strategies to increase this resting metabolic rate, that's another great way. I think the best long-term way to, to keep fat off is to do that. Additionally, resistance-based training, lifting weights, is the only form of exercise that continues to burn calories even after you've stopped working out a significant amount. So your metabolism gets fired up, your muscles kind of send more signals to the body that they need calories and amino acids to repair themselves. So lifting weights is going to be better bang for your buck than going running because you'll burn calories even after you've stopped and also put on muscle, which is going to increase your resting metabolic rate. Doesn't really happen in cardio-based activity.

You get—

there are benefits of cardio, but as far as continuing to burn calories after you've stopped, not as good as weight training. If your stress levels are super high, your cortisol is always spiked, that's not a very good environment for your body not to— for your body to lose actual fat. Your body releases cortisol when you're stressed. Cortisol turns on essential functions for your survival, such as higher blood pressure, rapid decision-making. When your body feels like it's in a stressed environment where there might be a danger to your survival, it kind of goes, "Boo boo boo, let's activate all the things that make us react to things and be in that state of awareness." But when you're in that state, you inhibit nonessential functions such as immune function, digestion, and protein synthesis. These are things that your body considers to be not as important in a fight or flight, uh, environment where there's a perceived threat. Doesn't even have to be dangerous. If you're constantly stressed, it's the same kind of outcome. When your cortisol is high, you're inhibiting your digestion, immune function, and that is not a very good state to be in if you want to operate at an optimal level, which would mean your body reducing its fat content. If you're not sleeping enough, this is a huge one for fat loss. If you fix your sleep, you often see an increase in muscle mass and a decrease in fat content from, from this alone, because everything's working better in the body just as a base level. Minimal sleep causes insulin resistance and also high glycemic variability, which can lead to diabetes, appetite cravings, so more feelings that your body wants to cheat the diet that you're on, and also weight gain itself is caused by not getting enough sleep. So it's really critical that you're getting 8 hours minimum depending on what kind of person you are, your own sleep genetics in a way. Most people need 8 hours minimum. If they're training, more every night. Uh, you know, it is important that it's every night. It's not something that you can— it should just be consistent. One night every now and then is not going to kill you, but it is going to lead to higher cortisol levels or, or cravings, which are gonna make it harder for you to lose weight in the long term. Sleep deprivation also reduces hormones— leptin, a hormone called leptin, which is satiate— satiety-inducing, how to say that— and increases your hunger-stimulating hormone ghrelin, if you've heard of that before. So there are a lot of mechanisms that are going on that make sleep a super important one if you're trying to lose fat. If you're doing too much exercise, excessive exercise can lead to elevated levels of cortisol and inflammation. A good level of inflammation from exercise is important because that stress stimulates your body to adapt, increase muscle or improve your cardiovascular fitness. Overtraining does not just happen to athletes. You may be in the category if you're not recovering properly, you undernourish your body, or you're failing to get quality sleep. I'm not saying, obviously, don't lie on the couch and stuff your face because I said, you know, don't do to do too much exercise. Just don't be going balls to the wall training every single day without the proper nutrition and sleep, otherwise your cortisol is just gonna be all over the place all day and your body isn't gonna return to that optimal environment where it can lower your fat content and increase your muscle mass. Kinda a corollary to that of too much exercise is too much cardio. A lot of people will try and do more cardio to lose fat. When you engage in aerobic exercise, your body wants to work as efficiently as possible while producing the greatest amount of physical output in terms of moving your body along a distance. So as you perform these hugely long cardio sessions with increasing volume and frequency, because You think the more you do, the lower your fat content will be. It basically tells your body it wants to shed unnecessary excess weight while storing usable energy for these long cardio bouts. Do you know what type of weight is more than less unnecessary when you run due to its need to be carried and cooled? Is muscle. You don't need too much muscle to perform form of running motion, so to a point it's seen as less optimal by your body. So it reduces muscle tone, and a great source of stored usable energy for the body for those long cardio bouts is body fat. So if you're doing hours and hours of cardio, your body is gonna get rid of the muscle and, and store the fat. You also are downregulating anabolic hormones such as testosterone and growth hormone, as they are paradoxical to extreme endurance efficiency. Marathon runners are never the biggest guys on the athletics track. It's usually sprinters. The short bout of extreme force results in a higher muscular tone in the sprinters than it does the marathon runners. So don't do too much cardio. The S.A.I.D. principle—specific adaptation to imposed demands principle. So this means that your body will eventually adapt to the demands you place upon it, so much so that if you're repeating the same exercise routine, your body adapts to it and eventually uses less calories receives less gain from the same workout. Even if you're lifting the same amount of weight and doing the same amount of reps, your body gets efficient at whatever you put it through, so it will eventually end up using less energy for the same amount of output because it gets used to it. So a few things that you can do to modify your routine if you're not seeing any results to try and lower your fat is combining exercises, supersets, Active rest periods. If you're not doing anything and just waiting on the bench press or something in between sets, is to just walk around, walk around the gym or, or wherever you are, rather than being completely at rest. Training outside. Change the center of gravity in some exercises, different angles, or work out at a different time of day. All of these things shake it up and impose a higher energy demand on your body, increasing your caloric expenditure, and that can be optimal if you wanna decrease your fat. Hormone imbalance might be the reason that you're not losing as much fat as you want. Endocrine disruption and hormonal imbalances can be caused exposure to chemicals such as pesticides, in plastics, external stress such as relationship or financial stress, internal stress such as viruses, heavy metal accumulation and blood sugar swings, dietary contaminants in general, deficiencies in critical micronutrients, or poor digestive health. The reason why anabolic steroids work is because they're increasing the ratio of testosterone in the body, and I get a super boost of that. So if you can raise your testosterone to the point through changes in your diet or changes of nutrition, digestion, reducing your stress, that overall is going to create a better environment to store muscle mass and lose body fat. Body fat on the body. So make sure you're eating high-quality animal fats. The cholesterol in that is critical in the production of testosterone and other hormones. So eggs is a big one, fatty animal meats, steak with, with actual fat marbled through it. Dairy is another good one. Filter your water to remove some of the contaminants that might be in that. I just have a ceramic filter that you fill up the top and then it trickles through a gravity, this kind of stone filter thing. That's a relatively cheap one, or you can get a full filter system put into your sink.

I really encourage anyone to do that, to get a water filter.

Use glass or stainless steel products instead of plastics. A frying pan, the non-stick material can actually leach into your food and isn't too good to consume as far as, as a possible endocrine disruptor. So if you want to just eliminate all external sources of those things as much as possible, eat off glass, don't microwave in plastic, don't use plastic at all. Stainless steel frying pan, that's what I use. I know cast iron ones are a are good as well. Key micronutrient deficiencies that you might have that's impairing your hormonal production. Research has shown that specific micronutrient deficiencies are associated with weight gain and obesity. Among these micronutrients, the most significant are vitamin D— make sure you're getting sun— chromium, biotin, thiamine, B vitamins and some antioxidants. Metabolism and resistance to weight loss are also negatively affected by deficiencies in magnesium, boron, vitamin A, vitamin K2, and choline. So that can be—

those can be things you can investigate if you want to Google those and see, or maybe get some blood panels to check your levels of these particular nutrients, because if you're deficient in those, it's going going to be impairing your fat loss journey in a way.

I hope you gathered a lot of information from this podcast talking about fat loss. That's going to be it from me. I thank you again for listening. We're going to have some proper merchandise out soon, so if you want to support the show, you can buy some of that. Are going to be sick once I get them finalized, so keep your eyes peeled for that. Uh, otherwise, it's been a pleasure, and I hope you have a great rest of your day. See ya!