Transcription
This right here is going to help you to lose weight and keep it off forever. There's going to be no more attempt to lose weight because what I wrote down on this paper actually is exactly what I've done that has helped me to not only get lean but stay there now at the age of 50. So I wanted to put some real thought into this and for you I wrote down 12 actionable things. 12 things that I believe are completely comprehensive step by step that if you follow these you're going to be able to get very very good results and by doing this I realize that I come to you in a state of authority right? I know that I can speak about this not only having done this myself but having done this for pro athletes, having done this for actors whose main responsibility was to get lean for a specific role, and for lots of people just like you that are watching this video right now who just need to lose lose weight and have been frustrated by not being able to do it.
So, that's the premise. Okay.
So, right off the bat, number one is going to have to do with motivation. And for you people that want to just skip this part because you don't really care about the motivation part, you have to listen to this part because it sets the stage for the actionable tips that are going to come next. And I promise you, I'll give you all the actionable tips. The first part about motivation is that you have to realize that it doesn't come necessarily before you start. It can come after you start. So, a good portion of you that watch this whole video are going to wind up becoming fired up and motivated and have a blueprint just like this to be able to go and follow through on and start to see the results that you're looking for. Some will watch this video, see all the things that they know they need to do, and not find the motivation to actually go do it. But that's okay 'cause a lot of us are not going to find that motivation until we start to see the results from actually doing it. And that's the part I think that trips people up. They feel like they should expect to have motivation and it's not going to come until you start to see that.
If you do feel that motivation, you have to be careful because that motivation can sometimes be a wolf in sheep's clothing. In other words, you start extremely motivated, but then the first time something happens, you feel like you're reverting back to your old self again. That you're going to go right back to all the habits that led you to the point that you're at right now and that you're just not destined to be able to follow a list like this that I create for you. That's not true either. All right? So, you have to be careful when it comes to motivation.
The best way to handle this, here's your first actionable tip. The best way to set this up for success is to start by asking yourself why. Rather than telling yourself what you're going to do based off of my advice here or what you're not going to do, which is even worse based off of my advice here, instead say, "Why am I going to do this?" And when you ask yourself why, you will get to the real reason and the motivator that will drive you or anchor you to finally get to where you want to be. That why can actually be determined by asking yourself that question more than once. If you say, "Hey, I just want to get a six-pack." Ask yourself, "Well, why do I want a six-pack?" "Well, because I want to be leaner." Well, why do you want to be leaner? Well, because I have too much weight, and I want to be healthier. Oh, okay. We're getting somewhere. Why do you want to be healthier? Well, because I have kids, young kids, and I want to be healthier and and lead a better example for them on how to live a healthier life. Okay, so you're getting at the true why. And when you start to get down, usually after five askings of the question of why, you usually get to the real motivation. And in that motivation or that anchor, you'll be able to find success.
Point number two, when it comes to getting lean, nutrition beats training every single time. And I know as a trainer, you're probably surprised some of you to hear that, but there's no out training a bad diet. There's no overcoming sloppy nutrition. The results that you will get will always be sloppy if you won't fix the way you eat. Now, here's the good news. There's a way to do that. But we have to overcome a certain mindset first. And that is the mindset, that simple mindset that says you just got to eat less and move more. I can appreciate that, but that's not going to create the type of weight loss that you're looking for. 'Cause I'm not looking to lose muscle at the same time that I'm losing fat. I want you to only lose body fat and maintain your muscle, as you'll see here in a minute, why that's so important. The other thing is it's really less about eating less and more about eating right.
So, how do we eat right? The first thing we have to do is prioritize two things at every single meal. Protein and fibrous carbohydrates. So much so that if you can create a meal that has 80% coming from those two places, 40% protein and 40% of those fibrous carbohydrates, that would fix 80% of your nutrition problems right there, just by simply starting your plate that way. I even go on to show a nutrition partition technique that we use, the plate division technique, where you want to divide your plate in this way. Look at it like a clock and divide that circle up. 40% from protein, 40% from the fibrous carbohydrates, and then leave the remaining 20% for starchy carbohydrates.
So, how much protein are we talking about? I recommend 75 to 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight and up to 1.2 g of protein per pound of body weight if you're training in the gym. So, what I do is I use a protein powder. And I'm not doing this to just promote my protein, though it's the best protein out on the market. But truly, I have a protein shake in the morning, 30 grams plus a little bit extra for the milk, and then I have a protein shake at night when I get back from work. And what that does for me is it allows me to start to chase that, let's say, for me 175 grams of protein per day or even slightly higher by getting 70 grams of protein right there just in the two shakes. It makes it a lot easier to do.
Now, why does that work? Because it helps us to maintain muscle mass. And muscle mass, as you'll see here, is going to be the main driver of metabolism as you age. And as you start to lose muscle when you get older here, a challenge for me at the age of 50, your metabolism will start to slow down. And even staying the same weight you were, even eating the same things can become a challenge.
When it comes to those carbohydrates, and I'm talking about starchy carbohydrates, they are the great consistency caveat. Meaning they are either going to work for you or against you. But you better learn how to handle them because I do not believe that depriving yourself from those starchy carbohydrates, and we're talking about the ones that you like, rice, potatoes, bread, pasta, if you avoid them entirely, then the consistency is going to go by the wayside because in the long haul, and I'm talking about not just in the next one month even, I'm talking about not even just in the next three or six months, but a year down the road, two years down the road, five years, 10, 10 years down the road, I do not believe that anybody can completely avoid starchy carbohydrates and find themselves to be completely satisfied with their eating to a degree that they'll never relapse or find themselves in need of another video just like this again. And I'm not saying that there aren't anomalies and people out there that can actually do this and prefer to do this and feel way better by doing this, but I'm talking about being able to sustain that for a very long period of time. The same token, if you overindulge in carbohydrates, even just by a little bit, you're going to find consistency to be equally difficult because these are the types of foods that we tend to overeat on. It is the carbohydrates that are so enticing that are often eaten in great degrees of excess in large portion sizes that tend to kill the consistency on any type of plan.
So, the way to handle it is to find that nutritional balance. And we've actually just done the math for you because what you want to do is fill that remaining 20% of that plate with your favorite starchy carbohydrates. Realizing that by having them and having them partition to a very specific portion on your plate and not exceeding those, unless you have different goals, like really trying to build muscle or put on weight, then you might want to as an athlete extend those boundaries a little bit more to maybe not just 20% but 35%. So, they're not gone completely, but they still have respectable boundaries that keep us from overindulging and crossing into that zone of being able to kill the plan entirely or lose all consistency. And by not depriving ourselves of them or eliminating them completely, we're able to have long-term consistency because we're also keeping our sanity in the process.
So, what I've just described there was basically the structure of your meals. In other words, on a plate-by-plate basis, meal-by-meal basis, we're talking about the structure and the makeup of the meal. Understand this, meal frequency will never be more important than meal structure. So, a lot of times people ask the question, "But Jeff, how many times a day are you eating? How frequently are you eating?" And my answer can vary. At times, it's five to six times a day, every two and a half hours or so. Other times, when I'm really busy, it could just be three times a day. But the difference is not as stark and not as important as you may have thought it would be. Now, when I'm talking about training athletes who need to have high levels of performance throughout extended periods of the day, it's generally better to have more frequent meals to stabilize blood sugar levels and to be able to stay at a higher level of performance without any crashes. But if we were to equate the calories in that day across those two plans, it wouldn't necessarily make any difference in terms of fat accumulation or weight loss, it would simply just make a difference in terms of how you felt. Some people are going to feel better eating more regularly, smaller meals throughout the day. But again, focusing always on the structure of those meals is going to negate some of the importance of how often you eat during the day.
But there is a catch and that is if you choose to eat the three meals in a day, that means there's going to be more spacing between those meals in terms of the number of hours before the next meal, which means you're going to likely have to have more willpower to be able to make it to that next meal without reaching for something that you know you shouldn't. Now, if you're eating more frequently, willpower is going to be a little bit easier and less of a demand for you. So, it's another consideration that you want to make here.
So, I want you to start to consider something that was a huge difference maker for me, and that was timed eating. Literally eating depending upon when the clock told me to eat. And the reason why this is so helpful is this came long before I had any willpower. But I did have enough discipline, and it didn't take a lot, just enough discipline to be able to make it to the next specific time that I said I was going to eat. So basically making a series of appointments with your meals throughout the day, whether that be 3, four, five, or six. And the reason why this works is just like you wouldn't break, let's say, a doctor's appointment or an important work meeting, I don't want you to consider that there be any flexibility around these appointments, right? These meal times, because what that will do is it will start to take all subjectivity out of eating. And a lot of the reason why we trip up is because we treat nutrition very subjectively. It's like, well, I kind of feel like I'll eat right now, or I ate yesterday at this time, but I'm going to eat this time today because I'm hungry. I I think that's where we start to find the pitfalls in nutrition and why we get tripped up as often as we do. If we treat it very rigidly, just in terms of the time, and I'll tell you how to be more flexible on the meals themselves, but in terms of the time, then we'll find that we can stay a lot more consistent because every time 10:00 rolls around and that's your mid-morning snack time, you'll know to have one. And every time 1:30 rolls around and that's your lunchtime, you'll know not to skip that or not to miss that. And again, by having this structure built in already, you're going to give yourself a leg up, especially in the beginning when you're trying to find that consistency that lacks right now.
Now, when it comes to that consistency, I mentioned the word quite a few times already. It's not about not knowing it. It's about how do we implement that? And that's where a lot of us struggle. And a lot of us will swap intensity for consistency. And I'm not talking about in the weight room. I'm talking about in their approach to nutrition, in their approach to following through on what I'm telling you to do here today by going back out next week and saying, "Now, I'm going to do this." But when you do it, you attack it with an intensity that is bound to fail. You're going to go out and you're going to clean your cupboards of anything that you might enjoy right now because it might possibly not be something that's going to fit in this new meal plan that you're going to follow. Or you might tell people that you usually hang out with socially that you're not allowed to go out anymore. You're not going on any more dates with them because you're not going out to a restaurant to eat because it's not going to fit your meal plan. That is likely going to fail 100 times out of a hundred.
So, there's something I wrote down here that I want you guys to understand. 80% effort for three years will be 100% effort for three weeks, every single time. Don't focus on the intensity of your effort. Focus on something that's actually achievable and something that you can do consistently. And that's where the real power lies.
Which leads me now into the other half of the equation, and that is the training that we just mentioned when it came to the intensity of your effort. Well, you're going to need to be intense here. And you're going to need to actually be doing this. And I mean need to actually do this 'cause trying to lose weight and keep it off forever without having this strength training component is an exercise in futility. It's not going to work long term. I promise you. I've seen this enough. I know what the solution is and it has two parts to it.
So, nutrition determines body fat levels all the time. I say that all the time. I don't care what you're doing in the walls of the gym. Nutrition determines your body fat levels. But it's the training that determines the muscle mass that you put on. And ultimately, that muscle mass determines, as I mentioned before, your metabolic efficiency. So, how many calories you burn at rest. Somebody that has more muscle mass is going to burn more calories at rest. Therefore, they're going to have more tolerance in their diet because they have more places to utilize those calories. They have even more storage room for those carbohydrates. So, those that are avoiding those starchy carbohydrates, the more muscle mass you carry, you have more of a depot for those starchy carbohydrates so you can store them in the form of glycogen. There's so many benefits to doing this.
But you might be a little bit lost saying, "But I don't have all that much time." Well, you don't need all that much time. You just have to answer the question, how many days a week do you have to do 30 to 45 minutes of training up to an hour, three, four, or let's say even up to six because you like to be active and that's where you tend to find your consistency. If you have three days, follow a simple total body workout. Meaning, you're going to train all your major muscle groups, your legs, front and back, your shoulders, your chest, your arms, right? Your back. That's all going to happen in the form of one to two exercises per muscle group in the course of a workout. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for instance.
If you have four days, do something called a pull push legs workout. So, here we get to divide things up a little bit. You do a series of pull exercises, which would be for your back and biceps. Your pushing exercises on the next day, which would be for your chest, triceps, and shoulders. And then you have your legs that get trained independently on their own day, front and back, hamstrings and glutes and quads. And then you can come back on the fourth day and just combine them all again like you would in a total body workout and do your total body workout. So you have four days.
If you choose the six day split, you have a lot of options, but the simplest thing to do is that pull push legs, separate it with a day off and do it again. And again, the focus here should be on including exercises that are big in nature. We call them compound exercises. The ones that work multiple joints together to allow you to move a significant amount of weight, you know, which might be light for you to start, but ultimately enough weight so that you can continue to build strength. So, we're talking about exercises like squats, like deadlifts, like lunges, like rows, bench press, pull-ups, just not concentration curls, like those really kind of simple isolation type exercises. The bigger bang for your buck is going to come from these other exercises. And the focus being trying to get stronger at them because as you get stronger, you'll build that muscle that's potentially lacking right now. That's the key to why you're rebounding and not keeping the weight off for all the reasons I just said. And then it gives you the opportunity to also keep yourself feeling more youthful. Because as I mentioned here at 50 years old, the goal should not be to stop doing the things that are hard, but really actually lean into the things that are difficult and learn how to do them. My biggest tip I can give anybody that has their orthopedic challenges that seem to be making doing everyday things more difficult is to just take them a little bit more slowly. So don't shy away from the heavier weights. Just use weights that you can make sure that you can control and take those weights more slowly to ensure that there's a decreased injury risk, but you're still able to do those things because building that strength and holding on to the strength as you approach each new decade. Whereas science shows us there is going to be a natural drop off in our strength of five to up to 10% per decade. So, we don't want to just give in. You want to fight that. This is exactly how to do it.
Now, here's where you start to ruffle a few feathers, but you have to understand the context. We're talking about getting lean and staying lean. And so the next question comes when we talk about training and working out. Well, Jeff, where does the cardio fit into this? Because for a lot of people when I mentioned working out, that's the first and only thing they thought of. They weren't thinking about using weights. And I want to flip that for you. Hopefully with what I just told you. I want to flip that priority there to make sure that when it comes to body composition that your weight training is what you're focusing on. The cardio is always going to help to supplement that, but will never be enough to drive the results that you're looking for. And as a matter of fact, here's where the controversial statement comes in. I believe that cardio is what makes people fat in many instances. And hear me out. That's because they will overestimate their efforts in what they've done at the gym, walking on a treadmill, going for a walk around the neighborhood in terms of caloric burn, and then underestimate the calories and the foods that they eat after they do the work that they just did, feeling as if they have a cushion or a buffer because they put in that effort. And what happens there is this disproportionate climbing and the excess calories start to add up. And even though you're putting forth real effort, and I mean there's no denying the fact that if you go take a run for an hour or on the treadmill at the gym for an hour that you're putting in good solid effort. You're sweating and everything. You feel it. You see it. You know you did it. But in terms of the math of it, it doesn't add up because you're not burning as much as you thought and you're eating too many more calories as a reward for what you did and it winds up in the end adding weight and not getting you to your goal.
Now, when we're talking about heart and the health of your heart, it's a whole different story and there's a really big important part that your cardio plays there. But in terms of body composition, this is how I want you to think about it.
For this next one, you might think that I'm biased, but it's actually very much true. And that is your focus in training should have some element of a focus on performance. And what naturally seems to happen as we get older, and even though I'm 50 years old, and I do have very much a channel based around the aesthetics of looking a certain way, Athlean-X, I always have an eye towards my ability to do things. I've said since day one, it's not just about looking a certain way. If I wanted to just have as much muscle as possible, I either could have jumped on Peds or I could have followed the training routines of some of the guys that have that look but can't do a damn thing if asked to do something functional. That's never been what I wanted to be able to do. Let alone I have to be able to keep up with the athletes that I train anyway. So, I want to be able to do stuff. But it gets a little bit more serious when you start to get into your 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond where you can't do even the things that you used to be able to do. You get down on the floor and then getting up it feels like an effort to get off the floor without feeling aches and pains in some of your joints or all of them.
So, I want you to challenge yourself in something that you can measure. So, even if it is a push-up, find out how many push-ups you can do and try to improve upon that in the next 30 days. Now, I know I'm not all about just stacking up the number of push-ups you can do. Ultimately, you want to get harder and harder push-up variations, but that in of itself could be part of the challenge. Find a different push-up variation that's difficult for you today and work on getting better at that or the number of pull-ups you can do or how long you can hang from a bar or what your mile time is, what your fastest 100 meter sprint is. Like find something that's actionable that you can actually test yourself on and try to improve upon. And what happens is, ironically, as you get better at this functional performance element of training, you actually get two major benefits. Number one, you oftentimes look better. That's the whole part of Athlean-X training is that while you're training like an athlete, you get to look like one, too. The second thing is you become more formidable. You get more averse to injury, right? That risk starts to go down because you're doing some of the things like the corrective exercises that are meant to help to improve the overall function that add up and keep you free from injury. And why is that important? Because the injury risk is the most damaging thing to your long-term consistency. It's the cornerstone of being able to stay in the gym doing the things you're doing, burning the calories you're burning. But also, we all know that when we get injured and we're not going to the gym, we're more likely to revert to old habits where we start eating all over again and start putting all that weight back on. So maintaining a lower risk of injury and maintaining your health while you train is probably the most important element of all of this because when that goes then things change dramatically.
The next thing you have to focus on if you want to have long-term sustainable leanness is your levels of hydration. 'Cause throughout the day, even periods of dehydration can have a significant impact. We know that remaining hydrated helps you to maintain more energy. It helps you to maintain a more efficient metabolism. It's what our muscles crave throughout the day, but it also can lead to lowered levels of focus that can decrease your ability to execute that willpower that we talked about that you're going to need. So, when you don't have the willpower because you're feeling dehydrated and you reach for something that you know you shouldn't, well, then the whole plan can kind of go off the rails. And it even gets worse when sometimes we confuse that feeling of dehydration for hunger and then we lead to eating foods that we don't really necessarily need because we weren't even hungry in the first place. The key is just maintaining hydration levels throughout the day. And whether that's just bringing a water bottle with you everywhere that you go, which a lot of people do these days and it's pretty acceptable, or you just simply follow the tip that I always give, which is to put about six rubber bands on a bottle of 20 oz bottle of Poland Spring water. Every time you've finished that bottle, you just take off one of the rubber bands and fill it back up again. And at the end of the day, you should have no rubber bands left on that bottle because you will have gone through all those bottles of water. It's just sort of a visual reminder of how much you need to take in throughout the day and it allows you to be more consistent in doing it.
The next non-negotiable here is going to be related to sleep. And we do it every single night, but a lot of us don't do it well. If you were able to harness your ability to sleep well, then all of this stuff becomes easier because when you don't sleep well or you have interrupted sleep, you raise levels of cortisol. Your hunger hormones will become increased. You will have issues with recovery. All things that lead to a physique that's not going to be optimal and certainly not one that can sustain the test of time. So, what I need you to do is just develop a simple sleep habit. And there's so many things that we can do, but here's some of the things that could be very helpful for you. Number one, set two alarms. The first one is going to be the one to go to bed. And we know that on our phones now, it makes it so easy to set multiple alarms. You set one for your bedtime because if you don't have that little gentle reminder, a lot of times we can drift a little bit later and later into the night before we actually get ourselves or find ourselves in bed. The second alarm should actually go for the morning. And now I'm somebody who used to be against setting an alarm, but if I had somewhere to be or if I had to be somewhere that next day, I find that I would wake up too many times because I was fearful of oversleeping. And all those times you're waking up are interrupting your sleep and the quality of your sleep. So having the alarm knowing that it's going to wake you when you need to be woken should allow you to have more restful undisturbed sleep. Getting away from these phones for 30 minutes or so before bed because the blue light can affect the quality of sleep. Whatever you do, please adopt just one change starting tonight that's going to give you a step in the right direction that when you start to stack them together, that sleep of yours will become a lot easier to sustain, maintain, and then again benefit from each and every day when you wake up feeling refreshed and able to do all the things I've asked you to do much more easily.
And perhaps most important of all, don't confuse perfection for discipline. Discipline does not mean having to do everything right because there's going to come a day where you slip on a meal, you don't get the workout in. You don't want to let that day break you from the overall plan here because the overall plan does not require perfection. Like I said before, I'll take the 80% over 3 years versus 100% effort for 3 weeks. The only one that's going to be sustainable is the one that has some built-in room for making some mistakes along the way and realizing that those mistakes aren't even going to have a big impact on your level of leanness when you look at the big picture in the long run. You can course correct after one mistake and get right back on track.
If you're looking for a plan so you don't have any guesswork, guys, you can find them over at AthleanX.com. We have all the workouts that I mentioned before, the meal plans. Also, we have the supplements, the exact protein that I use, Pro30G over there. And if you're looking for a video, guys, make sure you check out these two. This is an approach that people should take over 40 when they're lifting weights. And if you wake up stiff in the morning, well, these five stretches will do a great job of helping you to feel looser. All right, guys. Click subscribe, turn notifications so you never miss a video when we're putting out. See you soon.