Transcription
This is gonna blow your mind. What if I told you the way you've been dieting since you peaked in high school and slowly got chubbier has been wrong, or at least not as efficient as it could be?
[Music]
Let me guess. If this has happened to you, you get really serious about abs. You crank up your training, you lock in your diet for weeks, if not months, and you get in the best shape of your life. Then one morning, you wake up and realize you're a big fat mess again. What if I told you this is not only common, but based upon the way most people diet, it's predictable? Let me explain.
Let's use these two guys as an example. Guy number one figures out his maintenance level of calories and then decreases that by 500 to eat in a 500 calorie deficit. Guy number two is identical. He has the exact same maintenance level of calories, but instead of decreasing it by 500, he increases his activity expenditure, creating the exact same deficit. The question is, which one loses fat faster? If your answer is, "It's the same because it doesn't matter, calories in, calories out," congratulations, you're just as dumb as I was.
The concept is referred to as a low energy flux versus a high energy flux, and it will change the way you diet forever. To better understand the problems with the traditional low energy flux diet, we need to create one. That way, you can see where the wheels fall off.
This is a person's average total daily energy expenditure, and you can see the bulk of it comes from basal metabolic rate or resting metabolic rate. I'm going to use that interchangeably because everybody else does it. Don't freak out. The calculator you found online to figure out your BMR is probably using this formula. Nope, never mind that. Looks like [ __ ]. The BMR formulas are attempting to give a rough estimate of energy costs based upon how much you weigh, how tall you are, and then subtract that from your age to account for slowing metabolism, and then whether or not you have a penis. Mine works out to be 2102 because I'm 36, not 50, you jerk offs.
To finish figuring out our maintenance level of calories, we can skip over the thermogenic effect of food because that's really not going to change. We need to figure out our physical activity, and to do that, we have to use a very complex questionnaire known as PAL. All joking aside, I do think most people overestimate on this. So to get an accurate calorie expenditure, I would say I'm moderately active. So then we take BMR times it by our PAL, and then we get calories needed to maintain your current weight. Hooray.
Let's say I was tired of being a dumpster fire and I wanted to lose a pound a week to maintain as much muscle as possible. We know that one pound equates to 3,500 calories, so I'd have to average a 500 calorie a day deficit in a week. Pretty simple. Just decrease my calories by 500 every day. And then... no, that's the mistake.
Have you ever noticed how easy it is to lose weight when you first start dieting? It's because you still have so much of your fat self to move around. But as you get lighter, your BMR decreases, and it may not seem like much at first. But as you diet, your body requires less and less calories. So let's say I lost five pounds. Not much. I'm just less of a fat mess. 225 pounds. If we plug that into the BMR formula again, only five pounds, we see I'm now expending 44 less calories per day. Over the week, that's 308 calories, which means I'm not going to hit my pound per week weight loss goal. So to hit the target, you're gonna have to constantly be readjusting your calories lower and lower. Sucks. And that's only a small part of the problem.
If we take a look back at the physical activity of your total daily expenditure, we can break it down even further into EAT, which is exercise activity thermogenesis. That's your weight training, your cardio. And NEAT, non-exercise activity thermogenesis, which is tapping your foot, walking your dog, diddling yourself. All or NEAT. Now, when people think burning calories, they think exercising. The sad truth, though, is that lifting weights don't burn as many calories as you might think. Say I did a 20 set workout where I just killed myself. That's probably 220 to 300 calories burned. Not great. It really just goes back to the saying that you can't out-crunch a [ __ ] diet. When it comes to calorie expenditure, aerobic training will always trump non-aerobic training. But the more muscle you build, the more calories you burn. Look it up. It's disappointing. Every pound of muscle equates to six calories per day. In reality, most the calories you burn through physical activity don't even come through exercise. They come from NEAT. There's a problem with that as well. As you get leaner, your body becomes more efficient. But even worse than that, your body will start to fight the process of losing weight because it wants to maintain homeostasis. It doesn't want to change. So it'll start decreasing your levels of NEAT. Those little micro movements, the energy had to go pick up your mail. [ __ ] your mail, you're going to leave it there for a month. That's why when you're dieting, all you want to do is lay on the couch and watch TV. That's your body's way of preserving energy.
Here's the crazy part. It could be three to four times the calories we saw from when we decreased our BMR. So taking it back to my scenario where I only lost five pounds, it actually decreased in my calorie expenditure by 44 calories a day. Now, if that can be four times that, that means that's 176 calories. Add those together, I almost cut my deficit in half. And as your body mass decreases, your endocrine system freaks out, lowering insulin levels, leptin, thyroid hormones, which are all important because they're appetite suppressants. So as they decrease, you get hungrier. On top of that, ghrelin increases, which makes you angry. So it's easy to see why the traditional method of dieting, the low energy flux, as they call it, is doomed to fail.
Which brings us back to the concept of a high energy reflux, which I know looks similar on the surface because there's still a 500 calorie deficit. But it actually mitigates some of the problems I just talked about. This setup is going to be exactly the same. You're going to get your basal metabolic rate and times it by your PAL to get your maintenance level of calories. But instead of decreasing by 500 to get that deficit, you're not. You're gonna leave it. Do you have any clue how much more oatmeal that is? Come on. Instead, we're going to increase our physical activity to a point that it burns an extra 500 calories a day. Because based on research, that creates less of a metabolic adaptation, meaning your body's not going to try to burn fewer and fewer calories. And you get to eat more oatmeal.
The next obvious question is, how do we increase our energy expenditure to a point that we're burning an extra 500 calories a day? And it's critical you increase both. Because if you try to do it with just as structured bouts of cardio, that's 50 minutes of jogging. I'm not [ __ ] jogging. Instead, I do a 30-minute walk after my workout or on my off days and consciously track my NEAT. One of the ways is with this guy I got from Amazon. It's a little pedometer that counts the number of steps. And I know the child that made this thing did a horrible job because it's really inaccurate, but at least gives me a range to shoot for. Because for every 2,000 steps, that's 100 calories. And before you say, "I'm already averaging 10,000 steps a day," [ __ ] you are. Because this thing alone can create the deficit you need. Ten thousand steps, 500 calories.
There's a fascinating study where I wore a weighted vest like this 24/7. And for every pound he lost, he added a pound back to the vest. The idea being that if he artificially replicated his starting weight, that he'd be able to maintain his initial BMR. And it worked. He lost 19 pounds over the course of 16 weeks. And this is important to note that this was a bodybuilding competition, so it was mostly fat mass. And his calories did not change. Now, I'm not going to wear this thing 24/7. But think about it this way. Every time I take my dogs for a 30-minute walk, based upon my huskiness, that burns about 241 calories. Each additional pound of weight is another 0.3 calories per mile. So this is a 50-pound vest, that's an additional 450 calories. So what I look like an [ __ ] walking around the neighborhood? That's a lot of calories.
While cold plunging doesn't really fall into the category of NEAT, and there's no way to quantify how many calories you burn per minute, it does however cause your central nervous system to release norepinephrine, which then attaches to brown fat, which increases mitochondrial activity, which generates more heat. And there's no such thing as an energy-free process. So we know it burns extra calories. We just have no clue how many extra. But it sucks. So hopefully a lot.
Am I the only one that gets served that ridiculous Navy commercial before of a YouTube video? I said my job wouldn't matter. And I understand 500 calories doesn't seem like a lot. But that's just where I started. Since I started meticulously tracking my activity, I'm eating a thousand more calories than I typically would on a diet. If you hear little footsteps, that's that's Junior walking around, who's my blind dog who happened to take a nap on an anthill this morning. Our vet just gave him Benadryl. Doing great, bud.
It's also completely changed my stance on what your macro percentages should be when you're trying to lose fat. Show everybody your face so we don't nap on anthills. I used to be an avid low carb guy because I was a lot dumber. And it was based upon my limited understanding of how insulin works. I assumed since it stimulated fat storage and inhibited fat breakdown and promoted fat synthesis, that the best thing we could do was limit those insulin spikes. The problem is, it's also an appetite suppressant. So by minimizing those spikes, it's going to make you constantly hungry. Is everybody else's tibialis anterior weak as hell? Mine's already gassed. That was seven. I also underestimated how fantastic the human body is when you're a healthy person in a calorie deficit. The amount of time your body stops burning fat from an insulin spike is a very short window after a meal. If we look at a full 24-hour period, it all equals out. And the only thing that matters is the deficit you create. So yeah, having a greater number of carbs is going to lead to more intense insulin spikes, but that's going to lead to you being less hungry and be able to go captain and say no on the weights.
So if anybody wants to play along at home, this is exactly what I'm doing. I'm getting 230 grams of protein, a gram per pound, because scientists and bros have finally agreed that's the perfect amount. 12% of the calories are coming from fat, fish oils in the morning, a little ghee butter, or just random [ __ ] like that. And the rest is delicious, delicious carbs. I track my steps with this little stupid activity monitor, on average about 12,000 steps a day. I do about 30 minutes of walking on the treadmill. And to me, this is amazing because I'm not even hungry. And I used to always be hungry. Why did nobody tell me this before?
You can do either or. High carb, low carb. They're going to get you the same body fat at relatively the same rate. That's not what's important. I'm just sharing my experience. What I found is having higher carbs in the deficit keeps you a little more satiated and makes it easier to maintain muscle and might even make it easier to put on muscle. The biggest takeaway I wanted you to have is the benefit of having a high energy flux diet. It's going to help you get your goal a lot easier, but more importantly, maintain it. Instead of alternating and looking great one month and like [ __ ] the next. Pair that with one of my programs linked below. Again, all 30 days, only 20 bucks. And I guarantee you'll look slightly less awful.