The Rebellion: Episode 7 | How to Get SHREDDED (and still be able to eat Crumbl?) w/ Matt Hoodie

Welcome everybody to episode 7 of The Rebellion. I'm your host Tyson Smith, and today we have on somebody who has personally changed my life in an incredible way. Um, we have on today Matt Hoodie, who is actually the person I've been working with for the past— how long?

Uh, probably going on about, what, 4 months here? 4?

Yeah, that sounds about right. 3, 4 months.

Yeah.

Um, so Matt is the person who I went to when I finally decided to get serious about my health. Uh, for those of you who have been following me on TikTok, watching my lives, you guys will know that a while back I said that I was going to enter into monk mode and I shaved my head as like a symbolic gesture. And I was like, look, I'm cutting out everything that was bad for me. So I cut out drinking, nicotine. I cut out eating bad foods. And I was like, I'm only going to focus on the things that are in alignment with what I want out of my life. And that included fitness. So I reached out to, um, somebody that I was referred to. This is Matt. Who I knew knew what he was talking about and had proven results. So reached out to him and he has been the person who's been kind of my coach in this, in this weight loss journey.

Good way to put it. Yeah. Coach, kind of, you know, kind of get, get, get the blueprint laid out and then kind of, kind of work with you and guide you through that blueprint. Right.

So what I can say is he has been absolutely instrumental. It's one thing to kind of like, no, okay. Yeah, obviously you have to eat less. You work out more, do cardio. But to have an absolute professional who knows exactly what they're talking about and also will back everything he says up with like specific scientific studies, it's, it's the most— it's the craziest, most awesome thing. But anyway, we've been working with him. He's the one who's been able to really help me get shredded and achieve the body I'm looking for, and I'll be continuing to work with him in the future. But anyway, welcome, Matt.

Thank you. Yeah, no, I appreciate you having— I appreciate the introduction. I mean, you've done phenomenal with everything since since I started working with you. I didn't really know that going in, kind of you going into monk mode like you talked about, but I mean that's been reflected in everything you've done. Your discipline has been phenomenal.

Well, it came from the beginning, that I feel like most people don't do this, is I seriously thought about, am I willing to pay the price that it's going to take to get where I want to go? Now it's no secret that becoming, you know, shredded, becoming super fit, It's not a walk in the park, right? If it was, everybody would do it.

Everybody would do it, 100%.

But I consciously made the decision, was like, I'm willing to do whatever it takes to get here. And so I think that that mindset change was something that really allowed me to, you know, have this foundation that I could build on top of.

Yeah, you definitely, you went in with that mindset. And I think that at the beginning, like you said, debunking some of the myths helped a lot, especially with your life. You're such a busy dude. Like you got so many things going on. You're flying around, you're, you're in a different state. It seems like every week you're doing the show, you're doing the podcast, everything. It needs to be flexible for you, right? And I think for as much as, you know, you did, you, you have been phenomenally disciplined and that, that monk mode has been reflected in everything you've done. But I think it's important too to have a program that it can adapt to what you need, you know, your schedule to look like. And I think that was one of the biggest pieces that right from the beginning we kind of went in and we cut a lot of that, that bullshit, right? And we said, look, you probably think you have to do this, you probably think you have to do this, you probably think you gotta do this, you know, eat 6 times a day, Drink your protein shake, all this thing, all these different rules, right? And we went and we cut that and all of a sudden I could kind of see while we were sitting there talking like, hey, wait a minute, I can actually do this with my schedule. Like you're telling me I don't have to walk around with a bunch of Tupperware dishes all the time, right? You're telling me I don't have to put a little powder into a container and put it on the airplane with me. Like it's okay if I stop and get a chicken wrap instead of having the perfect amount of rice and everything. And I think that helped make it something that could work with your schedule, right? [Speaker:TYSON_SMITH] Oh, absolutely. [Speaker:DR_AXE] Because a lot of people I work with, a lot of my clients, they are kind of high-performing people. They have multiple businesses or they have careers that are very demanding. And they've tried to do it, or maybe when they were younger and they didn't have a family or they didn't have as much on their plate, they were able to do 6 meals a day, chicken, broccoli, rice, supplements and everything. And then you start to get busier and you start to realize like, hey, I still want to be in my peak physical condition so that everything I'm doing gets easier, right? My whole life gets easier when I'm in better shape, right? But I can't completely give up everything to be there anymore. Like my life looks different now. I've got a family, I've got a career, I've got multiple businesses, whatever it is for you. And when you really lay that foundation from the beginning, like I'm not going to need you to follow this incredibly ridiculous— you have to be disciplined like you've seen, right? But there's room for flexibility and you've learned how to implement more and more of that flexibility. In your travel and in, you know, your days where you're so, you know, going out and, you know, whatever it is, whether it's date night or whether it's you taking clients out or whatever it is, you've done phenomenal with, I mean, from where you're at in the first week and how you looked at things versus how now you look at going out and how much more realistic it is for you to stay on track with something like that.

Oh, absolutely. And that's one of the biggest things is when I was referred to Matt, I looked at his profile and obviously he's got all kinds of these pictures, he's jacked, he's shredded, but also I see on his story he's eating crumble cookies. So can you talk a little bit about what that looks like? How are you able to balance being shredded, looking phenomenal, but also getting to have these treats every once in a while?

So I use what is called a flexible dieting approach. You might have seen it, a lot of people call it macros or IIFYM, if it fits your macros. That's kind of the more extreme version of it, right? Those are the people who are trying to figure out a way to fit Pop-Tarts and pizza into every meal while still looking shredded. And that's not really the image that we want to convey. Flexible dieting also takes into account things like fiber content and, you know, we want to make sure your fluid intake and we, you know, we need to make sure that you're paying attention to things beyond just simply proteins, carbs, and fats. But at the same time, we understand that not food choices but the nutrition behind the foods is what's going to affect your body, right? And understanding that a pizza is nothing more than some dough, some cheese, maybe a little bit of oil and some tomatoes, right? Rather than viewing it as a pizza that's a cheat food. We understand it's just a bunch of different pieces of food put together. A cookie is no different, right? A cookie is going to have a certain amount of proteins, carbohydrates, and fat, but it's just a bunch of ingredients put together, and most people would not vilify any one of those individual ingredients, but we look at it as a cookie and we suddenly think we can't have it, right? And that just doesn't make sense. The human body doesn't process nutrients. It doesn't know it's a cookie once it gets inside you, right? It's got 40 grams of carbs that your body at that point knows once those have been broken down to their simplest form. It's a gram of glucose. It's gonna use for energy or it's gonna store it, right? So it's understanding how do I find enough room for, you know, how do I give myself enough flexibility without going too far to where I push myself over these parameters? So one of the things that I did with you when we sat down was I had you fill out a form and I asked you a bunch of questions about how, you know, how much do you weigh? What's your body fat? How active are you? Try to get an idea of how much energy you're expending each day. And then I actually have my own algorithm that I use and you can find calculators online. Mine goes a little bit deeper. It takes some additional habits into account and I plug that into the calculator and it kind of spits back a number at me and I look at it and I take, you know, having worked with hundreds of people over the years and having, you know, taken a look at what, you know, what your physique looks like and I might tweak that a little bit based on your lifestyle and things like that. And then I kind of give you those parameters and I think at the beginning it can be overwhelming for a lot of people and that's why the coach is important. A lot of people reach out and say, well, can you just write me up with macros? Like, imagine if I had given you those macros 4 months ago and then you had never heard from me again, right? Right. As soon as you started running into some of the things that you ran into during, during those initial phases, you wouldn't have really known how to handle it, right? There are quite a few scenarios early on that we navigated our way through, and now you don't even need to reach out to me anymore. And those same things come your way. You're probably helping other people who are like, hey man, what do I do when this happens? Like the post you made the other day, right? Now you're having that effect on other people. And when, when you approach it from that educational perspective, with the flexible dieting. And you say, look, we're gonna— I'm gonna teach you how to start looking at food a little bit differently. You need to understand the nutrition behind it, but then once that foundation has been laid, kind of how it has for you, now we start to work towards a little bit more intuitive eating, right? You can now make choices at a restaurant that you would have never known before, right? You were probably picking things that now you look like, oh my God, that was one of the worst choices. I thought I was making one of the best choices, right? And, and little by little, we just kind of work that. We start off with the flexible dieting approach, we educate you on what the nutrition behind food actually looks like, instead of this perception that we have of food. And then as your transformation is occurring, as yours has— I mean, everyone can see where you were a few months ago and what you look like now— as the transformation is occurring, that education is also being laid down. So then when you finish working with me, you're really set for the rest of your life, not only to have this physique you've created, but you actually are going to understand how to keep it no matter what comes your way in life. Whether you're traveling, whether you're busy, whether you have businesses that, you know, go, go upside down or go to the moon or whatever, no matter how busy you get or what comes your way, you're going to understand how to navigate it, as opposed to me giving you a meal plan that says meal 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and as soon as life gets busy, it's going to go right out the window, right? Like, meal plans and meal prep is great until real life sets in. It's great for January 1st to about February 12th for most people, right? And then they realize they got to go out for Valentine's Day. What are you going to do, you're going to take a little Tupperware dish out with you on Valentine's Day? Like, give me a break, you know what I mean? There are too many things in our lives, it just doesn't allow for it. So that was why when I first got into this— I mean, you know, I used to be overweight— when I first got into to understanding weight loss. I'm a fat kid at heart, right? Like, I love cookies. You mentioned I eat Crumbl cookies every single week. I don't think you probably haven't seen a week on my story where I don't post Crumbl since you started working with me. I'm gonna— I need those things to be in my life. That's part of my mental happiness. That's part of— I enjoy food. It's more than just sustenance for me. And I knew I needed something like you mentioned, a flexible approach from the beginning, if I— if this was going to be something that I was going to really do myself. And then it just kind of became obvious that You know what, this is what works for most people. Most of us are not professional bodybuilders. Most of us don't have the ability. And in all honesty, I'll get a lot of hate for this, but even professional bodybuilders don't need to be doing the shit they're doing. Like, you can look pretty— I mean, you're— you'll see how shredded you get, right? Because you're not going to do any of the crap they do, and you're— and you're going to get to, to that same degree. And a lot of people don't, don't like that, but it's the— I mean, that's how the human body works, right?

So Well, that's what I love about it is you, you took this, you took this thing that can be very scary and it's just a matter of implementing a few habits. Number one is understanding like how many calories can I eat in a day?

Like a budget.

100%. Once you start to look at it like a budget and I start to say, okay, I can spend 500 calories at breakfast.

Exactly. Yep.

So you change your outlook on how you view calories, start to view it as money. You have a certain amount of money you can spend every day. And then number 2 is just getting in the habit of weighing out your food.

Yep.

And doing that.

And it's—

people, I think they think it's a lot harder than it is when it comes to tracking your calories, when it's really just— you order a scale off Amazon, it costs you $10.

It's not—

yeah, and it takes a whole extra 2 minutes.

It's not a huge investment, and it's not something you're gonna have to do the rest of your life. Absolutely. Like I said, it's laying down, down that foundation of the education, right? You put 100 and whatever grams of oatmeal on a scale 20 times, you're gonna know what 100 and whatever grams of oatmeal looks like. Yeah. But until you put on a scale 10 or 20 times, you're probably gonna get it wrong, right? So put the time into it, just like any other skill set, right? We should really teach— so we should teach nutrition much differently in schools because we teach people all the wrong things. We teach kids, don't eat the Cheetos, eat the fruits and veggies. Well, every single one of us knows that we should eat the fruits and veggies. Every single one of us knows we're supposed to go around the outside of the store. Yet 70+% of us are still overweight, right? We keep rehashing the same things rather than teaching and actually educating people to understand the nutrition behind their food instead of the perception of their food. That's one of the number one problems. Once you do that, once you kind of sit down and say, "Look, it's a budget. I might want to spend my calories on something different than someone else," right? The example I always use is you take two people who each make $200,000 a year. One of them wants to travel around the world. He wants to take these crazy trips and do all these, you know, exotic different things and have these experiences. This person wants to buy a really nice house, have a really nice car, take 2 family vacations a year. They each spend their money in 2 completely different ways. Neither of them are spending it in the wrong way, right? For me, a cookie might be, might be worth 500 calories to me. For you, you might not like cookies or you might not want a cookie right now, so you don't, you don't want to eat the cookie. And I think that's what people need to understand. And once you start to understand kind of the general idea behind food, food nutritionally, right? You don't need to know a cookie has 46 carbs and 22— you don't need to. But once you start to understand, like, oh my God, and this was something you realize, a lot of foods have a lot more fat than people— yes, that's probably one of the number one things is that the majority of foods have way more fat than what people realize they're consuming.

And why is that important?

The reason for that is because fat does not occupy space or volume, right? If you make up 8 ounces of chicken in a skillet or you make up 8 ounces of chicken in a skillet with 2 tablespoons of oil, well, you're gonna get the same amount of chicken out of each one of those skillets, but one of them is gonna have an extra 250 calories on it. You're not gonna get any more full off that chicken. And this is what really messes people up. Carbohydrates contain volume, right? We can see them. If I give you 100 calories of potatoes, you're gonna see it. If I give you 200, it's gonna double in size. Fat doesn't work that way. Fat doesn't take up space. So people have not been trained to look for calories that are in fat because they come in the form of butter and oil and really fatty cheeses and fatty cuts of meat and nuts. None of these things contain a lot of space. You think about all these things, it's a lot of calories for a little bit of space. Right. So people can be over-consuming calories but not feel like they're over-consuming food. I get clients all the time who tell me like, oh no, Matt, you don't understand. You know, there was, it was a small burger. And I'm like, well, it was a small burger, but you had it at a restaurant, which means it was probably cooked on a flat top with some oil. And the bun was probably put face down in with a little bit of butter on it. You just added 400 calories to the same size burger you would have had at home. So if it's a 400 calorie burger at home, it's probably 800 or 1,000 at a restaurant, but you didn't get any more food. That is probably the number one takeaway for most people. And I think it probably was for you too.

Oh, absolutely.

It's realizing like, I'm giving up all these calories. I'm not getting anything out of it. Like if I just cut the fat off of that, hey, I can still season it. I can still put the flavor on it, but I'm just not getting the extra butter and oil with it. That was the number one thing I think for you, cutting out excess, especially with going out to taking clients out, going out to nice dinners and steakhouses and stuff. Some of these things add up so quickly, but again, it's not a big giant plate of Italian food in front of you where you think you're eating a lot, right? You cook a small steak in a few tablespoons of butter and oil and you finish it with a little bit of butter and oil. You just made an 800-calorie steak, but it's just a small piece of—

and that was a really simple change, was something that all of a sudden now I can just order my steaks and just say, hey, 'Can we not have that cooked in butter?' Yeah, you still season it, you still throw all your good whatever they make at the restaurant, it's still going to taste—

you probably taste better.

That's—

you're going to taste more of the steak.

Well, you get used to— people are so used to consuming so much of these like shitty fats, so sugary, where when you start to cook, take that out, it's different.

That's a way—

yeah, it's different.

But then you grow and it's like, 'Oh, this is so much better.' This is so much better because they're not relying on these really cheap ways to improve the flavor profile and the palatability. Right? They're not just throwing extra sugar or extra salt or extra fat. They're actually taking the food and they're creating something that's a lot more enjoyable and a lot healthier. I mean, you're going to leave there, you're not going to be like, ah, I wish my steak had been doused in butter. Like, you're never going to once regret it as you're walking out. You're going to be like, damn, that was a really good steak. But you will regret waking up the next day after just saying fuck it and just get, you know what, we're out of there. I'm just going to get whatever I want. You know what? Yeah, put the butter on, put whatever. The next day you're going to wake up and in that moment you're enjoying it, right? It's temporary gratification just like anything else. I can go buy myself a Lamborghini tomorrow and then I'm going to wake up the day after tomorrow and wish I hadn't bought a Lamborghini. But driving that Lamborghini around that day, I'm going to be super happy, right? It's understanding where do I want to give in to temporary gratification and what can I afford myself in terms of temporary gratification while still being happy with the progress I'm making and the life I'm living. And it's going to look a little bit different for everyone and that's kind of what I do is I coach people through through that, that exact thing.

Absolutely. Uh, one of the biggest things that you told me in the beginning, and one of the huge misconceptions, is people feel like they need to eat multiple times throughout the day. Yeah. And so one of my first questions I asked you, I said, Matt, does it matter how many meals I eat in a day, or can I just eat one big meal a day? How will that affect my weight loss?

Yeah, so it's not— so this is a really good question, um, whether or not meal frequency has an impact on weight loss. It 100% does not have an impact on weight loss from a metabolic perspective. Meaning if you take two people, they each eat 2,000 calories a day. One eats 6 meals a day, perfectly spaced out. One eats one meal a day and they do it for however long, a year. They're going to lose the, the exact same. It doesn't affect your metabolic rate. The idea that eating frequent small meals stokes the metabolic fire— if anyone has ever told you a phrase that sounds like that, you should run the other way from that person because they have no understanding of human nutrition whatsoever or how the human body processes nutrients. That being said, obviously when we take extremes, one meal a day is probably not going to work for most people, right? You're probably going to end up wanting to binge because you're going too long. I feel like that's what people tend to do to attack arguments is they go, "Well, you're saying I can eat one meal." Well, the average person is going to eat probably 3 meals. Let's be realistic, right? People love to compare extremes to make things easier to attack. So I'm not saying you need to go out and eat one meal. The whole point is you can eat as many meals as you would like per day. You're going to lose the same amount of weight. You need to figure out what works for you. I think you and I are similar. We kind of are busier during the day, so we don't want to— we're usually doing things, we're usually using brain power, right? We probably don't want to be bogged down with a heavy meal, right? So I eat a little bit more minimalistically throughout the day. Now, I don't follow intermittent fasting or anything like that. If 10 AM rolls around and, you know, my girl wants to go get brunch that day, then we're going to go get brunch that day. And that's the whole point is We're getting rid of all the restrictions. We're getting rid of the 6 times a day rule. We're getting rid of the intermittent fasting. Oh, sorry babe, we gotta wait 2 more hours for me to go eat. Like we're getting rid of all these rules and you're still seeing the same progress. And it's like, holy shit. Those are all what I call unnecessary complexities. I think you've seen, mm-hmm, you've seen my videos, I touch on them. It doesn't mean those things are bad. You can do 'em if you want, but when you already have so many other things on your plate, why give yourself more restrictions? Why give yourself more rules? Because then when life gets crazy, those rules start to fall by the wayside. And then what happens is you go, well, God, I'm not sticking to my 6 meals a day anymore. Oh, you know what? I forgot my protein powder with me after this workout. I'm not gonna— once you realize those things don't, don't have any impact, you go, oh, you know what? That's all right. I'm still going to make— I'm still going to hit all my numbers today at the end of the day, and I'm still going to wake up tomorrow making the exact same amount of progress even though I forgot my protein and even though I'm only going to get a breakfast bar in this morning and then not eat 1,800 calories until dinner, I'm gonna look the exact same tomorrow as if I had done 6 meals a day, right? And then you start to go, okay, even though life has hit me in the face right now, I can stay on track with this and I can, I can keep doing this.

Absolutely.

You know what I mean? And, and that's, that's probably the most important thing. Uh-huh.

Well, and here's the thing, when it comes to weight loss, is there going to be things that come in the way that are completely unexpected, and if you're not educated, you would have no idea about? So Sometimes I'd be feeling like I'm doing everything right, but the scale would stall. It would stay at the same number, and I would reach out to you and be like, "Matt, what's going on here?" And then we would always figure it out, whether it was one of these things.

It would take a little bit of— yeah, we'd go through some different potential causes, right?

So, one of the times it was you asked me, "Well, when was the last time that you took a rest day?" And I started to look at it like, "Well, I've been working out 6 days a week without ever really doing, you know, much of a rest day," or something like that. And then I did an active recovery day, only did cardio and stretched out a bunch. And then the next day I was down like 3 pounds.

Yeah, that's pretty common for people. So, and this, you brought up a really good point. This is the number one people, why number one, this is the number one reason why people fall off their weight loss journeys, right? Nobody ever gives up on a day or a week that they lost weight. Nobody's ever gonna be like, damn, I'm down 3 this week. Fuck it, this isn't working. It's only on the weeks where We're weighing ourselves and we feel like we're putting in the work, but we're not seeing the result because then we become dejected and frustrated. We go, God, I restricted myself all week. I made all these choices for delayed gratification and now I should be seeing the gratification. I'm not seeing it, right? And this is what happens. And this is where having a coach is one of the most important things, or even just an accountability partner, right? Because I feel like nowadays with the coaches are invaluable. I have a coach. It needs to be somebody that you respect. It needs to be somebody that you know they know what they're talking about. I have to work with people. Who I view in my field at least as intelligent or above. It needs to be, otherwise you're not gonna listen to what they're saying. But a friend can do the same thing. So a friend you respect or a family member you respect can be that same thing. And it's important to have that person because we're not gonna be rational when the scale is not seen, right? You're all pissed off. You're like, what the fuck? I've been doing everything right. So I message you and I go, all right, well, let's run down the list. Have you had an excess amount of sodium, right? Which most people probably know "Well, no, I didn't have much sodium last night." Okay, it's not that. You know, how are we looking as far as bowel movement? Everything right? "Yep, everything's right." Okay, well, when was the last time you took a day off? And you're like, "Oh, you know what?" You went monk mode, right? Which means you have been pushing your body harder than you've probably pushed it in a long time, right? And that inflammation starts to build up. And this happens with a lot of people. They don't realize this is a number one cause for scales to go up or scales to stall out during weight loss is when you are exceptionally sore, your body is going to be shuttling nutrients to that area to repair it. Right? So if your whole body is sore, you got to imagine all your different muscles are having nutrients sent to them to repair. Well, how do we transport nutrients? Oxygen, right? Blood flow, which is going to be fluid, right? So we need to send the nutrients to the area to be repaired, but we still need the same amount of fluid to do everything else in our bodies, right? Our liver, our kidneys, our lungs, everything else has to function, or which now temporarily we're going to be holding more water. Think about having like a really sore leg day, and the next day your legs are kind of pumped up or puffy. It's because there's inflammation in there, but that's causing water retention. So sure enough, you're like, hey man, it has been a while since I've had it. So I told you, I said, don't work out today, go do some cardio. You can— that way you still keep your, you know, you keep yourself moving for that day. Stretch out, roll out. And then sure enough, you got a good night's sleep, you drank plenty of water. All that inflammation finally said, okay, he's finally given us a break to where we can go in and finish this. And once all that repair is done, I think you lost like 3 pounds. It doesn't mean you lost 3 pounds of body fat that day. You were losing body fat the whole week, right? You— it just wasn't showing up on the scale. And that's what's really frustrating for people is when they're doing everything right, there's all these other causes that if you're not working with someone who knows how to kind of talk you through— well, it could be this, could it be this, could it be this? Okay, we got to the bottom of it, here's how we overcome that. And if you're not working with somebody, you're not going to know what to do. And you probably, if you were on your own at that point, you would have said, oh, my body has stalled out, I need to adjust something. You probably would have cut your calories at that point. And then the problem is You, you run out of runway when you do that, right? You start cutting calories too frequently because every time we don't see ourselves move, we want to change something. We need to change something, right? And everybody always wants to change things more frequently. And then the position most people— and this is what happens to most people— is they reduce their calories too frequently during a cut. They get to where their calories are too low, but they're not happy with what they look like yet because they had been reducing that whole time. Now you're metabolically in the dumpster. Your metabolism is really low, but but you didn't even get to where you wanted to. So you say fuck it, you give up, and you usually gain back to above where you were at previously, and you did the metabolic damage that you did on your way down. So this is what, you know, this is kind of when we reverse diet with people and stuff like that.

Absolutely, and so that's something I'm really excited about, and another reason why when we first started talking, I got really excited because you told me, you said, well, we don't have to do this extreme cut for very long to keep you looking the way you want. Eventually we're gonna be able to reverse diet you. So can you tell me a little bit about how that works and what the results of that are going to be?

So a reverse diet is basically going through what I call metabolic rehab, right? So you have to understand that when you're in a calorie deficit and you are underfeeding yourself consistently day over day, your body does start to go into starvation mode. I know there's a big movement now that says starvation mode doesn't exist. It doesn't exist in the way we thought of it 10 years ago, where if you don't eat for the whole day and then you eat a big dinner, it's going to store because you're Starvation mode does not set in within days. Starvation mode sets in over weeks and months, right? And what it is, is it's a changing of your hormones as a response to your weight loss. Because in order for us to lose weight, we have to starve ourselves, right? So when we underfeed ourselves, our body says, oh, he's not able to find enough nutrients. When that happens consistently, your body starts to say, we should start making some modifications so that he hangs on to things because he clearly is in a position where he can't find enough food right now. Again, this happens over weeks and months, but it does happen during the period of cut. It's already happened to you. We've already had to make a couple caloric adjustments to keep you dropping, right? So what's happening here is some of your hormones, your testosterone, things like your leptin, your ghrelin, things that affect not only metabolic rate but hunger signals and, and, and, and things like your T3, your T4, your TSH, your thyroid, those things are gonna start to move in a position that slows down your metabolic rate while making you more hungry. And what your body is trying to do is trying to keep you alive longer while sending stronger hunger signals so that you'll go to a more extreme measure to go and get food. Basically trying to keep you alive, right? Again, this is weeks and months, but it does happen during a deficit. So the mistake a lot of people make is if you diet for 12 weeks and then let's say you're dieting for a wedding and then in one weekend and one honeymoon after, you gain all the weight back in 7 days or 10 days, which is not unrealistic for people to do, right? You get back from vacation, you're like, "Oh my God, it's as if I didn't work for the last 3 months at all," right? The problem with that is you did 12 weeks worth of time of metabolic damage, but you really only fed your body to a point of satisfaction for 1 week, meaning you were above what your body needed to survive for one. So now you're back at the weight you were at, but you did 11 more weeks of metabolic damage than you've done metabolic rehab. Well, you probably wanna look the way you did right before you left for your trip, so you start dieting again. Right? But you're leaving this position now in a negative metabolic position because you dieted for so much longer than you rehabilitated and fed yourself enough food. When people do this repeatedly, they push their metabolic rate down more and more and more each time and this is the position most people get in. So most people I talk to have been lean before and then lost it, right? I mean pretty much everyone has gotten abs before and then they couldn't keep it, right? So what I do with people is when we do finally get you down to a body fat you're happy with, we're gonna bring your calories up. What we're gonna do is we're gonna take you out of a deficit, we're gonna take you up to maintenance, and when we consistently feed your body at maintenance, your body's gonna start to say, okay, it's been 14 weeks of him dieting and he has not been giving himself enough food every single day. Now he is giving himself enough food every single day. Let's start to take some of these hormones back and we— he's actually giving us enough to survive. Let's start synthesizing the right amount of testosterone again. Let's start pumping the thyroid back up, right? Let's start getting the thyroid cranking, getting the metabolic rate cranking. Let's decrease the leptin. Let's start to push the hunger back down, 'cause he's obviously no longer in a position where he's unable to feed himself. So when all these things start to change, they start to go back in the right direction, what's gonna happen? Your metabolic rate's gonna start to increase. So let's say we brought you up to 2,600 coming out of your deficit. Well, if 2,600 was barely above your maintenance, within a week or two, it's not gonna be above your maintenance anymore, 'cause your maintenance is gonna start to move up, 'cause those hormones are going back up. So now we gotta feed you 2,650 or 2,670, kind of depending on how the body responds, right? And we wanna do that by feeding you an influx of carbohydrates because we know that you're gonna benefit more. We're gonna see a greater increase in leptin from feeding you more carbs as opposed to just funneling a bunch of fats in or a ton of protein. We know your, you know, your muscle protein synthesis rate is only so high, so you can only benefit so much from that and such. So there is a science behind the composition and how we re-add things back in, right? But the idea is essentially we metabolically rehabilitate you all the way back to where you should have been if you had never yo-yo dieted ever in your life. And for a lot of people I work with, especially a lot of ex-competitors and stuff, those are usually the people who get the most gain out of it because competitions are usually, let me diet hardcore for like 12 to 16 weeks and then the competitors have these like cheat meal planned for like weeks after and they go all the way back up to their weight before they were, right? So competitors usually regain the most metabolic rate working with me. I've had some males who competed in the past who they finished their cut around like 2250 and they're maintaining now around 3600, and they're the same weight they were when we finished their cut at 2250. And we're able to bring them up 1300, 1400 points, or, or, you know, calories, without seeing virtually any body fat gain. It's kind of crazy if you do it the right way and you do it step by step. Then these people just basically have to never do it to themselves again, and you get to see stay, you get to stay shredded. And that's, that's, if you've ever, if you know someone who it seems like it's effortless for them to stay lean, they either never went through the metabolic yo-yo because they were just one of those people who was always lean, or they've gone through kind of where I'm at or where someone else who has gone through this is at, where we have rehabilitated ourselves and kind of put ourselves back to factory settings. And it's really not hard to maintain a six-pack when you can eat 3,500 calories a day. Right, you know, so, um, that— then that's kind of— that's kind of what a reverse diet looks like. Again, you can get a lot— it's going to look different for every person, right? Like, not everyone's going to be the same numbers or anything like that. You're really analyzing week over week. Um, you've seen with some of my clients the data sheets that I keep of them and things like that. There's a lot of information that you're looking at. You have to know what you're looking for as far as changes. But if you know those things, you can help. I mean, I, I've brought women up 900 calories. Like I said, I have a couple guys who have gone up over 1200. On average, I would say the average person ends up from, from the point that they finish their cutout to the end of their reverse diet, they probably end up— males about 800 to 1000 above, um, and females probably about 500 to 750 above where they were at.

So that's amazing.

Yeah, so it works really well for people. Um, there's not a lot of research behind it. More of it's going to be anecdotal. We have mechanistic research to support things like the, like improvements in leptin and decreases in ghrelin and stuff. But there's not a lot of large-scale studies cuz it's a really hard thing to control for on a large scale, you know, a large scale of participants because you would have to track everyone every single day coming out of a deficit. So it's a lot, but we do have a lot of individual anecdotal examples that we can, we can look to. And that's kind of what I have based my own practice off of. And now I base it off of the results I've seen, you know, with, with my clients. Right. Yeah.

So one thing I want to point out to you guys, because since I've kind of undergone my transformation, a lot of people have reached out and been like, hey, Tyson, can you help me do this? And every single time I tell the people, you need to go to somebody like Matt Hoodie. Listen to the way he talks and obviously how knowledgeable he is in his field. He's talking about things that I don't understand when he's, when he's talking about these different hormones.

Yeah.

And some of these other like scientific terms.

And that's not you, that's not your field, right?

But it That's just a testament to how educated you are, and this is why you're able to produce these crazy transformations, is because you know what you're talking about, and it's all backed up by actual scientific research. It's none of this Instagram bro science.

Right, not the TikTok, and yeah, so my background is in dietetics. Just, that was what my first degree was, was to be, I originally wanted to be a registered dietitian, which usually would work. I actually wanted to work in an eating disorder clinic because I have a background struggling with binge eating disorder and that was originally what I wanted to get into. So I went to ASU and I— that's where I got my bachelor's in dietetics. Then I stayed in school once I kind of realized it was a two-prong attack with exercise and nutrition and I ended up tacking on another degree in exercise and wellness and then that was when I opened the gym. But the majority of what we discuss and everything we've done is rooted in that dietetics background because really unless— unless you have an understanding of clinical human nutrition, unless you have a basic understanding of human nutrition, you shouldn't be working with a wide range of population, right? Maybe if you understand how to get yourself shredded and you're a bodybuilder, you're a competitor, then work with other competitors who have very similar hormonal profiles to you and very similar lifestyles. You probably can take what you learned from yourself and impart it on that person, but you shouldn't try to take on a 52-year-old female who's dealing with hormonal issues and you know, might, might have some sort of deficiency that you're unaware that it's just outside of your scope of practice. And I think so many people in the field want to be able to help everyone. They don't even do it necessarily from a point of malicious intent or greed or anything, but they feel like, hey, I got through this, I can help people get through this. And you might not be equipped with the tools to help that person through that thing. And that's, and that's okay. It's just important that people stay, stay within their scope of practice, right? I don't work with, uh, with, with certain populations because that's That's not my expertise. I'm terrible with athletic training. I'm not, I refer it out every, I get people because I own a gym and I'm a personal, you know, personal trainer. I get people all the time who ask me, you know, hey, my son does this. And I always refer it out because that is not my specialty, right? Physical therapy, rehab, not my specialty. I'm also not great at it. I've had a lot of it done to me, but it's not what I've studied. It's not, you know, I might be able to help someone with a knee issue because I've had a lot of knee issues, but that doesn't mean that you, you're having issues with ankle mobility and I'm going to be the best person to to talk to. So I think that's one of the biggest issues in this industry is you have people, especially with the emergence of TikTok, who have no— they know how to get— they got themselves there, right? They— maybe he got— that guy got shredded or whatever doesn't mean he's going to be able to get you there, analyze you and your body and your hormones and your lifestyle. And that's, and that's one of the, the biggest things, I think.

So let's talk about like with my— with our scenario. I came to you and I basically told you, I was like, look, I've worked with other people before, is what I'm looking for is help on the nutrition side. I like what I do in the gym. Yeah, it's fun for me. I've got it figured out. What I want you to tell me is how to eat. And then you came and then you said, all right, here's what we're going to do. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Can you talk about what that was and why it's had success?

Yeah, so I don't— and I don't do a lot of exercise programming, you know. I told you that up front. I don't write programming. I don't write— I don't do, you know, progressive. If you want periodized training, again, I have someone else I refer that out for. I just handle the nutrition and then the cardio side of things. So when I took a look at you, I kind of took a look at where you were at, what your past dieting history looked like.

And I was, when I came to you, I was between, like I was floating between 220 and 225 pounds.

You were right, high mid-220s. Yeah, you were mid-220s. And I said, all right, we'll throw up a picture right now.

Yeah, whoever's listening, you guys will see what I did.

See the, see the before and after because it's kind of crazy for, for the time. Um, and, and more so than anything, I kind of took that information. I took your activity level, what you're doing in the gym. Again, we didn't change any of that. You've done the exact same thing in the gym the whole time. I don't even know what you do in the gym. I mean, I know what your program looks like on a weekly basis, but I don't know what you're going in. I don't write any of that. I don't do any of that. You've handled that yourself. And that's what's crazy when you look at the two pictures of your physique is how different you look with the same, the same training. You're doing the same exact—

if anything, honestly, my training has gone down.

You're probably doing a little bit less, right? You're probably saying, hey, I don't need to be as crazy controlled and crazy strict with stuff, you probably learn a little bit of the same stuff as you did with the nutrition. Like, hey, if I focus on the really important stuff and I take care of that, I don't need to be perfect with this, right? So what I did was I took a look and I said, all right, his activity level's here, he does— he knows.

And also, as far as my activity level, I'm probably gonna fall in that more sedentary—

yeah, with your job, right? That when I say activity level, that's what I mean, right? Because we, we already know how many times you're going to the gym, and, and that really doesn't account for a whole lot of the calories you burn each day. I know it's important to go to the gym, it's important to build muscle, it's important to maintain muscle mass, but your workouts are not going to be the majority of the calories you burn each day, right? Honestly, somebody who's working out consistently 5 days a week is probably— who's sedentary is going to burn less than somebody who's serving at a restaurant and not working out at all. They're moving, their calorie expenditure is going to be way higher. So when I talk to you, a lot of people be like, what do you mean you're sedentary? You work out all the time, Tyson Smith, right? But your job, you're mostly, I think, on the phone, you're doing calls, you're doing—

my ass is sitting down, you're doing stuff like this, right?

So I took that into account accountant. I said, you know what, his calories aren't gonna be as high as somebody who I got who's a personal trainer, who— I mean, you look like a personal trainer, right? But there's a lot of, there's a lot of people who would be the exact same height, weight, muscle, and everything I would get who would have a completely different lifestyle. Their program would've looked completely different from the jump. Their macros would've been different. The cardio I prescribed for them would've been different. All that would've been different cuz we're not needing to supplement certain aspects cuz they're already getting that in their daily life, right? So there, there are different things that get plugged into that algorithm. There's medication uses. Get— I mean, that could take— I asked you, I asked you about medication, um, SSRIs, uh, benzos, things like that have a, have a big impact on metabolic rate. That's another part of, of the calculator that I've built in there, especially with the prevalence of anxiety and, and depression and stress-based disorders that, that are, that's emerging right now. A, a good percentage of my population are working with a decreased metabolic rate because they're taking those things that needs to be taken into account. You go to a calculator on MyFitnessPal, it's not gonna take into account, you know, that you're taking 50 milligrams of, of whatever. It doesn't, you know, it's not taking into account that you have a slower than, than normal metabolic rate. You might put your age, your height, your weight, and everything in, but the person right next to you who's not taking that medication is gonna be able to eat a little bit more than you. All of those things need to be considered when you're setting up that initial plan. And then like I said, I do really think it's important to at least have that initial phase of walking you through what that plan's gonna look like. As different life scenarios hit you. What did it look like for your first travel? What it— what's going to look like for your first— the holiday, the first time you got to celebrate your girl's birthday or go on a vacation to Cabo for 4 days? How do we navigate those times? Because people don't mess up and gain weight— it's kind of what we opened with— people don't mess up and gain weight when life's perfect. It's when it's the holidays, we're vacationing, we're being social, or we're stressed. That's it. It's the only time we mess up. So if what you're doing is not going to work during those times And when you think about it, a meal plan doesn't work during holidays, doesn't work on vacation. It probably doesn't work when you're stressed, right? It really doesn't work during any of the times that we tend to mess up. It really only works when life is going well, which is really not when we need the most help anyway. And that's why structured meal plans tend to fail and people are always needing to get back on track, right? And when is it usually? It's usually after one of those scenarios I mentioned or the weekend. Yeah. Right? Because they don't wanna follow their meal plan anymore. They're tired of following their meal plan. So why, why restrict yourself 5, 6 days out of the week, right, to then be frustrated because you want to enjoy yourself for one day out of the week and then make no progress at the end of those 7 days, right?

I think that just comes down to a huge, like, systemic change in people where, for me, like, when I quit out— when I quit drinking, I stopped living for the weekend, right? Where so many people do that and then drink.

That is a huge— that's a huge aspect of it, is the way you changed your thinking about what am I wanting to get out of life. Yeah. And people really do need to do that. And that's the problem I feel like with If It Fits Your Macros is they almost try to encourage you to be as lazy and get away with as much gluttony as possible. That's why I hate the IFYM and the pizza and the pop. As soon as I tell people I do flexible— oh, you do that macros thing, that's what everybody says, right? So you're going to tell me to eat pizza for— no, no. But that, that's, that's the issue I feel like with that is, is it takes it to that extreme. And rather than do that, we really just want to educate people about, all right, this is what your life looks like, this is going to be the best way to handle that, that situation.

Yeah, absolutely. Um, so talk to me about the cardio that you prescribe. So for me it was, hey, we're going to be walking on the treadmill at 12 incline, 3 speed, 3 miles an hour. And then it depends, like, you know, for different people. So I've been doing 75 minutes weekly, right? And so how is that going to adjust or change depending on the person? And also depending on, right, when we start this reverse dieting?

Yeah, so it kind of depends on a couple different factors. It partially depends on what you want your schedule to look like. There are certain people who they want to include a certain amount of cardio. We tend to forget, but it does improve our cardiovascular health and it does make us look— right, it gets made fun of on Instagram all the time, we all hate cardio, but there is a huge benefit to doing cardio. Not only what you're able to do in life physically, right, but longevity, which is really what we should all be chasing in health, is how do we live highest quality life for the longest period of time with the people that we love. That should really be our goal, those, those 3 things, right? And cardio can be a big part of that. So just because you're not cutting doesn't mean you shouldn't do any cardio. And I feel like that's a lot of people go, oh yes, I can stop doing cardio now. Challenge yourself on your cardio. Shit, make your cardio harder. Make your cardio, you know what I mean, do something that's a challenge. Or like what we did with you, do something where you can get something else done so you're not just throwing that time away, right? I'm a huge fan of incline walking. I love 3:12, right? I call it 3:12 because you walk at a 3-speed with 12% incline. There's a really popular program, I think, online called 3:12:30 where they encourage you to do that every day for 30 minutes. But the reason I like it is because you will burn as many calories as somebody running at 6 miles an hour on a flat surface, but you can be on your phone the whole time, right? And somebody like you or myself where you own a couple businesses, you always have someone you need to be emailing back that you're not emailing back. So now you can hop up at the gym, 75 minutes. Well, shit, go to the gym 5 days, do it for 15 minutes after each day and plug that time in as time that you use to edit a reel on Instagram.

That's exactly what I do.

And you literally— there you go. You just knocked out two birds with one stone. The other benefit is, guess what? Nobody can fucking distract you while you're on the treadmill. Exactly right. Which means you're not— nobody's going to walk up and tap you and ask you this or that. I get more shit done during those. Sometimes I'll look up and I'll be at 25 minutes and I was only supposed to go for 15. Because I got caught up responding to clients or editing videos or I got caught up doing something. So now it's like, wait a minute, I just took care of all these calories I burned, I made myself healthier, I improved my longevity, and I actually kind of buckled down a little bit more than I would if I was sitting on the couch at home.

I think it's just like the blood flowing, like I swear my brain is working as well.

It's working better, yeah, and you're more positive too, I notice. I'm more commonly, when I'm walking on the treadmill, I'm like positively reinforcing people on Instagram Instagram as I like— I'll get on and I'll be like, God, that your picture looks great, man, because your endorphins are up because you're happy. And I'll be like, I'll be like, shit, I should talk like that to people all the time. But it does, it puts you in a place where I think you feel like you're doing something productive. And we know that exercise increases endorphins and it increases your likelihood of doing other positive and beneficial things for yourself.

Absolutely. One thing I've noticed about it, and it's happened several times, is I'll be walking on the treadmill doing my normal 15 minutes, and I spend that time sometimes to like visualize and just kind of think about my day because I do in the morning and I'll think about, you know, somebody on my team closing a huge deal or making a new relationship. These different things, like these kind of like fantasies will happen in my head, and I have legitimately almost brought myself to tears out of like pure joy and happiness just walking on the treadmill.

Yeah, just walking in that visualization. Yeah, 100%. I'm the exact same way, man. I think, I think it goes hand in hand with you just improving so many different aspects of your life. You know, when we start taking steps forward in one thing, especially when it's something related to our body, and our health, it's gonna impact our mind, it's gonna impact our productivity in business, it's gonna— every single one of my clients I work with, whenever they start working with me, not only do they see an improvement physically, but improvement in their confidence, in their productivity at work, in their relationships with their family and their friends, because you're just happier, you're just in a better— you know that you're doing good things and you're putting good things in your body and you're taking steps in the right direction to live a long and happy and functional life, and you just end up emitting that to everyone around you and other people start telling, hey man, you've been in a really good mood lately, or hey, you've been getting a lot done. It seems like you're really— you're probably hearing that all the time from people right now, right? And it starts with your body physically, right? If you had been drinking this whole time and been whatever, nicotine, drugs, anything else, any bad habits, you would be feeding into those things and you wouldn't be doing a podcast right now and you wouldn't be doing all these other things, right? It starts with you getting yourself physically in shape, which then in turn benefits the mental, which then everything benefits everything.

It's— I mean, I say all the time that everything that you want to do in life first needs to start with your health, because the habits that you learn to become healthy, to start eating right, to commit to exercising regularly, these start to ripple out in all the other aspects of my life, all other passions. Like, once you can control what you decide to put in your body and you can control yourself to go and make it to to the gym every single day, it makes it that much easier to control yourself to just get started on that business idea.

100%. Yeah, absolutely. I love working out in the mornings for that exact reason. It just gets the juice, it just gets everything flowing, right? If I can't, I worked out at, I got up at 4:30 this morning, went and worked out, right? Because I knew I was gonna be here and then I've gotta be filming later, I'm shooting a couple videos and stuff. But my whole day has just been like, I've been walking around like talking to everybody like, hey, you look great today, you doing? But you start it, you start off with, hey, I took a positive step in a positive direction and that's gonna impact the rest of my day. And it really, it does. Not saying everyone needs to get up and work out. And I'm not saying I want to get up every morning. There are mornings that I definitely go, you know what, snooze. I will figure out a way to fit it in later today. That's another one. There's no difference between exercising in the morning or at night. You don't, you don't do what works for your schedule and what you're going to be able to get in. Right. So it doesn't mean I'm going to force myself. Right. And that's, and that's the thing. I'm not going to require myself. If one morning I'm really exhausted, I didn't sleep late or sleep great, or I was out late the night before, I'm not going to work out at 5. I'm probably going to put it off until after I get off work. I might get a little bit of a subpar workout in, but that's a trade-off for maybe I was, you know, out on whatever dinner date with my girl that night, we had fun or whatever. So you got— you got to make those trade-offs. But 100%, when you start making one positive decision, it's going to impact everything positive.

Well, and I feel like when people are beginning, they want to make a new habit So they say, I want to commit to becoming healthy. I want to start working out. I want to start dieting. They go way too extreme. They're like, I'm going to wake up every single day at 5:00 AM and I'm going to start doing this.

Everybody.

Where it's like, I didn't just one day wake up and I'm going to the gym every single day and eating right. It was like, there's a collection, like all of this time of me building up these habits slowly. Now that I've done it for so long, it's like most of the time automatic.

Yep.

But it doesn't start that way.

No, they have to become habits and you do, you're right. You need to introduce them. Um, usually one at a time for most people, right? We mentioned you didn't change a single thing about your training this whole time. If you had tried to take on a whole new training protocol while taking on a whole new nutrition protocol, that would have been probably twice as stressful, right? For you, for you to try to be learning, you'd be, you'd be constantly hitting up whether it was me or somebody else writing your routine, uh, trying to keep up with this and trying to learn the nutrition. Now we're 3, 4 months in, you don't need nearly as much support. But during those initial phases, usually is just too overwhelming. And if one thing hits you that's the wrong way, a medical issue hits you, a family issue hits you, you're gonna fall right off because you've already got too much on your plate.

Yeah.

And then what are you gonna say? You're gonna say, hey, let's shelf it all until I get through this. And then you're gonna get through it, you're gonna start, take on too much again. One thing's gonna hit you. I got news for you, life's gonna keep coming. So you got to figure out a way to do something that works even when life is not perfect. Yeah. And that's— and I think that's what I a big part of taking things on one at a time is that when you're working on improving one skill at a time, you can handle that even through a stressful situation. Yeah. When you're trying to take on 7 new habits at once and then something comes your way, you're just immediately going to collapse.

It's a house of cards.

Collapse in on yourself. It's not, it's not going to work.

Well, and that's another thing that I think is so important, and whether it's building a business or becoming healthy, is you need to have somebody who can help keep you accountable. Because I've always had Matt where I can reach out anytime I have a question or anything like that. I don't know what's going on and he can help walk me through it because he's a professional in that area is what has allowed me to have the success that I have. It's the same thing within real estate. I have people that I can reach out to and ask questions to, to help me get where I want to go. But it all starts with one, deciding exactly what it is you want and then making the commitment that you're willing to do whatever it takes to get there. Um, Matt, if somebody wanted to work with you, they're listening to us now and they're like, holy shit, I'm ready to transform my life, how can they get in touch with you?

The easiest way honestly is to message me on Instagram. It's just @MattHoodie, first name, last name. Give me a little bit about yourself and your situation, what you're looking to do. I am not the right fit for everyone. I'm always happy to hop on a call with anyone and, you know, kind of dialogue about your situation. Situation and where you're at, give you a little bit of my own background, um, because it needs to be a good fit not only from an education perspective but from a personality perspective too, right? You got it, you got to mesh well together.

Um, but messaging me on Instagram is, is going to be the easiest one, and that's @MattHoodie.

@MattHoodie.

Yeah, M-A-T-T-H-O-O-D-I-E.

Correct. Perfect, sir.

All right, well, Matt, it has been incredible having you on. Um, every single time I talk to you, I feel like I'm getting smarter just because You are obviously so well-versed in everything that you talk about, and it's very refreshing from a world that is so full with people that are just repeating different fitness platitudes and, and, you know, all these other things, to somebody who clearly has taken the time to learn, become an absolute professional in their craft, and now you're out here helping. You know, you've changed my life, and there are hundreds others just like me. So thank you so much for that.

Yeah, no, I appreciate, I appreciate working with you. I appreciate you know, you have me on here and it's, it's been nothing but a pleasure. I mean, you are the exact reason why I do what I do, right? People like yourself are going to take it, you're going to run with it, you're going to educate yourself, and now you're impacting all sorts of other people. There are going to be dozens of people who are positive, who probably already have been by your videos, positively affected. And that's, that's how we're, you know, I feel like I can have the most reach and positively impact.

Well, you, and you absolutely have. I mean, so you take one thing, you know, Matt's become a master and it's this ripple effect where he helps me and now I come in, I talk about what I've learned, and then there's all these other people that it's reaching that all stemmed from him deciding that he was gonna make positive transformations for other people. So again, thank you so much for coming on, Matt.

Thank you, man.

Anybody who wants to work with Matt Hoodie, go ahead and send him a message on Instagram. You can find him @matthoodie, and that's H-O-O-D-I-E. Thank you guys so much for listening. Can't wait to see you guys next time.