Transcription
It is very difficult to stay lean year round and most people cannot do it. And that's what I want to do in this video is go into the nuance of it. Because first of all, what we have to do is break down what does being lean actually mean?
I've talked about on this channel how when you hit 10% body fat, that's when a lot of different things change. It's when you get these crazy proportions and you're going to get a lot more attention. People are going to treat you a whole lot differently. But 10% body fat is very low, especially when you are somebody that has been a higher body fat percentage for a very, very long period of time.
You see, your body is an adaptation machine and it longs to create equilibrium at whatever body weight or body fat percentage that you are at. So, people that are incredibly overweight, even if their bodies are very, very unhealthy, they actually won't notice just how terrible they feel on a regular basis because their body has developed homeostasis at that incredibly high body fat percentage. And so, that's why a lot of people don't want to change. You know, they're sitting at 500 lb and they still don't have this motivation to start cutting back their calories and taking their health and nutrition seriously.
In the same way that your body will develop equilibrium and homeostasis at a higher body fat percentage, it will also develop equilibrium and homeostasis at a lower body fat percentage if you are able to get down to that body fat percentage and maintain it. So, when I say lean, what I'm referring to is the ideal body fat percentage to be at for a male, which is 10 to 15% body fat. It's been proven that your hormones, like your testosterone and your insulin levels, all that type of stuff is optimal between the 10 to 15% body fat range. And keep in mind that the average American is closer to like 30% body fat. And a lot of people that are 30% body fat still think that they're lean just because they're not morbidly obese. When in reality, they still have a lot of fat to lose.
Now, when it comes to staying lean year-round, staying at a solid 10% is very difficult. I'm going to go ahead and put up a video right here of me flexing my physique. And you guys can see what I looked like when I was about 17 lb heavier than I am right now. And a lot of people will look at this video and they will say, "Brandon, holy smokes. Like this is your peak bulk? You know, you're super lean still. Your peak bulk is my peak cut." Yeah, if that's the case, if you are somebody who gets lean and says, "Hey, I'm at a 10% body fat." But you look like this, newsflash, you are not at 10% body fat if you look like this video right here. This is me probably closer to 15 to 16% body fat. And I had to lose about 15 to 20 lb of body fat in order to get to where I am right now, which is sub-10% body fat.
Now, I would seriously recommend that for absolutely everybody, you stay within 20 lb at least of being 20 or being 10% body fat. So, if you are at 10% body fat and you get to that point, but it's still very difficult for you to maintain because your body has not accepted, "Hey, this is the body fat percentage that we want to be living at." What you can then do is titrate up the calories to start to increase your caloric maintenance, all right? Your body, once it realizes that calories are plentiful, it is going to start to upregulate your energy expenditure. You are going to start to move more. You are going to start to feel more energized. You will start to burn more calories. But, if you're in a small surplus, you are also going to put on a little bit of fat as time goes on. And so, stay within 20 lbs of being 10% body fat. And try to stay in that area. And just get used to being healthy and feeling good and having good energy and having good hormone levels between that 10 to like 17% body fat range.
Now, as time goes on and your body starts to get used to staying lean, you will be able to maintain a lower body fat percentage for a longer period of time. Right now, I am sub-10% body fat. And it would have been very, very difficult for me 5 to 10 years ago to maintain this. But, now I can maintain it for months on end. And eventually, I'll go back up to 10% body fat. And even if I decide to go over that and go up to about 15% body fat, I will still look really, really good. I will still look better than the average person. So, you don't need to stay at this 10% mark the entire year. But, I recommend staying within striking distance.
Because as soon as you start getting carried away, as soon as you start making the excuses, "Oh, I can eat a little bit more of this. It really doesn't matter." That is when all of your habits start to go out the window. And you start to live the life of the chud, as I like to call it. And pretty soon, after a couple months of that, you are going to be very off track and it is going to take a long time to get back to where you are at.
Now, there are certain things that you can do in order to stay lean year-round. It's funny, I actually had a client I was talking to this morning and he was telling me that he comes from a larger family. All right, and when I say large, I don't mean the number of people in the family, okay? And he had a family function over the weekend and he had come to me 6 months ago or so saying, "Brandon, I want to get a six-pack. You know, I don't want to be like the rest of my family. I want to get in good shape." And we were able to do exactly that. He has a six-pack now, he looks great, and he stands out around his family because his family are let's just say they're behemoths, all right? And he was going to a family function this past weekend and he told me, he said, "Brandon, I was sitting at the table drinking a diet Coke when my sister came up to me." And his sister is very large. And she started giving him crap saying, "Don't you know how terrible diet Coke is? It's so unhealthy for you. The artificial sweeteners in there." And he just couldn't believe it. He was laughing, he was cracking up thinking, "My sister, who is incredibly unhealthy, incredibly overweight, is lecturing me, telling me not to consume my artificial sweeteners." But the truth is if artificial sweeteners are actually going to hurt you, you would have to consume so much of them to the point where you would die of excessive water consumption before the artificial sweeteners would actually hurt you. So, things like diet Coke can really, really help you. Not only the caffeine, is that going to up regulate your energy expenditure and allow you to move more and feel better and burn more calories throughout the day to help you stay lean, but also just the appetite suppressing effect of having like a carbonated sweetened beverage is going to be incredibly useful. So, utilize tools like this.
Eating high fiber is something that I do year-round. I eat a lot of vegetables. I eat a lot of carrots. I eat a lot of celery. I eat a lot of fruit. I'll have one to two apples every single day, and that helps keep me full. But, you will not be able to maintain a lower body fat percentage if you do not keep those habits in motion throughout the entirety of the year. And like I said, it's a skill that you have to develop. You're not just going to be able to get to 10% body fat your first time and then maintain it year-round. That's kind of a pipe dream. The chance The thing This is always how it works. You get down to 10% body fat, and then you want to do some sort of a reverse diet in order to get yourself back up to feeling a little bit better to upregulate those expenditure levels, and then you can start to either going back down to 10% body fat or you can just practice hanging around the lean body fat percentages until you feel really good and healthy again.
Now, body image is something that is very, very important. Like when you feel that confidence when you look in the mirror every single morning, that just makes you want to stay more on top of your nutrition and more on top of your habits, which is why a lot of people really struggle to maintain a lean physique year-round is because when you stay lean over a long period of time, you start to kind of become desensitized to it. And you're like, "Okay, I've been lean for a while." And you start to kind of slip up and you kind of start to make mistakes. You start to eat things that maybe you shouldn't eat because you're starting to take that leanness for granted. And so, what I personally do is like around the holidays or in the middle of the winter, I will put on about 10 to 15, sometimes 20 lb of body fat on from where I am right now. But what I will make sure of is that I am still shredded compared to the majority of people. People look at me and you can still see my abs coming through my shirt. You can still see all my bicep veins. You can still see my shoulder striations and my face is still lean. I'm still at a good healthy body fat percentage. And like that video that I showed earlier, other people look at that and they think, "Dude, you're shredded in that video." They don't really know what it means to be truly shredded. But it's true when you take that and you compare it to the general population.
Most people have no respect for their bodies. They don't know the habits that are ultimately going to get them to where they want, let alone keep them where they actually want to be. So you should really keep this in mind if you're somebody that's looking to get down to a low body fat percentage and then try to maintain it.
Now, if you guys are interested in working with me one-on-one to help you get lean, I know that the summer is almost here. A lot of you guys are probably looking to cut off some excess body fat percentage. You can make sure to go check out the link in the description to apply for my one-on-one coaching or the pinned comment down below. But what I want you guys to understand is that this is a process. It's not something that automatically all of a sudden you're good, you got it, you're there. It requires constant discipline, constant dying to the flesh year-round in order to keep things in check.
I watch people get sloppy every single day. I watch somebody fall off of the wagon. A lot of guys will get into relationships. It's called the relationship effect. As soon as they get into a relationship, they start to put on a lot of body fat. Usually because, you know, being in a relationship, they start to get comfortable, they start to develop these bad habits, and then as time goes on, they find themselves very obese. And that's how most of America works. Like, they don't put on all this fat immediately. They put on all this fat slowly, incrementally, over time. 2 lb of fat every single month at the end of the year, that's going to be 25 lb of fat that you gained.
So, you have to stay active. You have to make sure that you're moving your body every single day and that you're getting your steps in. Currently, I'm averaging 15,000 steps every single day. And people will come to me and say, "Brandon, I don't understand how you stay so lean." And then I ask them about like what their job entails. And they'll say, "Yeah, I pretty much just sit at a desk all day." I was like, "Oh, okay. Well, that makes sense. It makes sense." And a lot of these people also have problems with their mind. I wonder why. It's because your body was meant to be moved. You feel so much better when you are moving throughout the day. When you intake calories, those those calories are meant to be burned. You're not just supposed to sit in the same chair all freaking day. Get up and move your body.
If you think about it, if you can burn an extra just 2 to 300 calories every single day just from moving more and walking around, that adds up to a ridiculous amount of body fat at the end of the year that you have successfully kept off of your frame. Let's say you actively go out and get more steps throughout the day. Let's say you end up burning 300 calories. 300 calories every single day times 365 is about 110,000. And if we divide that by 3,500, which is the number of total calories in a pound of body fat, you get 31 lbs of body fat that you proactively kept off throughout an entire year because you decided to get in more activity just moving your body around every single day. It's these little things played out over a long span of time that ultimately end up benefiting you.
And it's funny because most people feel like they're low energy when in reality it's just because they're not putting themselves in situations where they can expend that energy, okay? I had a somebody tell me the other day, one of my clients, that he was having trouble finding the energy to go to the gym after his 9-to-5 job every single evening. He sits in the desk all day long. And I grabbed it. I was like, "Dude, do you realize what you are saying right now? I cannot let you get away with this. You are telling me that you don't have energy to go train in the gym when you have done nothing but sit your ass in a chair all day." I said, "I've got other clients that are out doing blue-collar manual labor jobs where they're uh carrying around 100-lb bags of cement all day. That's what they're doing and they still go to the gym after afterwards and they still go train. What is this excuse? It's because you are not putting your body in a situation all day where it is actively expending those calories, so you feel tired. You feel bogged down. You feel crappy. But when you start to move more, your body will start to burn through calories faster. It will give you more energy, all right? So, put yourself in those situations. Keep yourself locked in.
And if you found this video helpful, make sure to drop a like down below. Drop a singular thumbs up in the comment section if you enjoyed and I will see you guys all in the next one. Peace.