2720: Metabolic Healing vs Fat Loss: Which Comes First?

0:00If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump, Mind Pump with your hosts, Sal DiStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. In today's episode, we're talking about metabolic healing versus fat loss. Which one do you do first? A hint. Fix your metabolism. Make it work so that fat loss becomes easy and we break it down for you. By the way, if you'd like coaching on this, if you'd like someone to help you do things like a reverse diet, follow good exercise programming so your metabolism gets faster for more effective, easier fat loss that's sustainable and you want to work with a coach.

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1:55That's it. Enjoy the rest of the show. Most people, when they start working out, they start watching their diet, they don't want to lose fat. A lot of people want to lose weight, but here's a problem. It ain't going to happen if your metabolism is broken. Now, I'm being a little dramatic here. It's not actually broken, but you do need to, quote, unquote, fix it before you get the fat loss. Otherwise, this is impossible. So we're going to talk about metabolic healing versus fat loss, which one comes first, and what you should do so that the fat loss is easy and it sticks around. I'm glad you preface it with that because there's typically a knee-jerk reaction from the science community if you use a term like broken metabolism or you need to heal your metabolism.

2:41There's this, that's not how it works. You don't have a broken metabolism. It's not broken. Yeah, it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, which then leads people to think that like, oh, okay, so there's nothing wrong with my metabolism or there's nothing I can do. Or nothing wrong with my methods or my approach. Right. When there's a lot of things that we can do to improve your metabolic rate. In fact, it's kind of like this, you know, it's not this perfect line all the time. It's up and down and sleep and food and hormones and so many different things impact it and affect it on a daily basis.

3:16And there's a lot of things that you can do to negatively impact it. And a lot of people, when they first get into training for fat loss, which is probably the most popular reason why people start working out, actually do a lot of things that end up making it more difficult for themselves metabolically. And so understanding the importance of that is huge to their success. The metabolism is extremely complex. It's essentially, in a nutshell, just to oversimplify, it's your body's ability to take food and turn it into energy. So it's your body's ability to produce energy, to fuel itself, to keep you alive.

3:57And that's the metabolism. Again, it's extremely complex. In fact, I remember seeing a chart of all the things that we currently understand about metabolism and how they interact with each other. And it's insanely complex. But the key to understand here is that your metabolism adapts. It adapts quite well. In fact, when people feel like they have a quote-unquote broken metabolism, which is like, it's not burning. I can't lose weight. I'm eating very little. I don't know why this isn't working. How do I fix quote-unquote my metabolism? What's actually happened is your metabolism is done, like those people would say, Adam, exactly what you asked it to do.

4:34It's adapted. It adapted in a way that has made fat loss very difficult for you. And a lot of people don't realize that what they're doing is teaching or training or stimulating or signaling their metabolism to move in this direction that makes it very, very difficult. In fact, the typical approach to fitness does exactly this. So I'll paint the picture for what the typical approach looks like when it comes to fat loss. What it looks like typically is the person will start from the beginning, decides I want to lose some weight. So like, okay, what do I do? I need to work out a lot. I need to reduce my calories.

5:12I got to eat less and I got to move more. And initially this does work. You create what's called an energy imbalance. So you eat less, you move more. Now your body is utilizing more energy than you're taking in. And in order to make up the difference, it pulls from stored energy reserves, notably body fat. So initially you see some weight loss. And this is the beginning of this process or this road towards a quote unquote, again, this is inaccurate, but we use the term broken metabolism. Initially, I lose the weight, but my body will never allow me to have this imbalance for too long. It figures out a way to adapt so that my energy output matches my energy intake.

5:57And if the signals that I'm sending my body continue to encourage that to happen, it'll happen actually quite quickly. How much can this happen? You would be blown away and surprised. There's studies on people who were prisoners of war who lived on hundreds, a few hundred calories a day. Now, yes, they looked emaciated and whatever, but it shocks scientists to see if these people survived on years. They should have been dead. The ability to survive on that low calories, it's absolutely insane. The body learns how to burn very few calories when all you do is try to burn a lot of calories through movement and reduce your food intake.

6:39It will slow its metabolism down. So what this feels like, by the way, and it does this through a lot of different ways. One of the ways it does is it shifts your hormones in a way to promote energy storage and to discourage energy burning. Okay, so what we see in behavior studies is your body will actually send signals to make you move less. So even though you're working out throughout the day without realizing, you start to move less. That's a real kind of basic one. But then your hormones will also shift into a profile that looks like, let's get rid of energy-burning tissue, and let's try to hold on to as many reserves as possible.

7:22So you actually teach your body to burn less calories and you encourage your body to find ways of storing what little calories it can. So it's really, I love this example. Again, this is oversimplification, but Lane Norton likes to use this example. It's like you have a savings account and that's your fat storage. And if your earnings are not coming in enough to support your spending, well, then you'll start using the savings account. But typically what people do is they spend less. They learn how to spend less and less and less. and they'll change their spending habits so that they don't keep tapping into those, to their savings account.

7:57And so what your body does in this situation, very predictably, is it gets rid of muscle. And muscle is metabolic gold. And if you lose muscle, you are setting yourself up. This is the broken metabolism that happens is you start to lose muscle and then your body becomes so resistant that what it feels like is I'm working out so much, I'm eating so little this sucks it doesn't feel good I initially lost 15 pounds I got 20 more pounds to go what's going on this isn't working I also want to address um how common this was now I know and understand that we have a bit of a bias because the people that are coming to me for help have probably gone through a lot of this previously so it's not like if you just took the average of everybody you'd have all these people with you know quote-unquote broken metabolisms but a lot of people that are trying to exercise, trying to eat better and have tried to do it for probably years on end have got themselves in this situation.

8:58And many times they've gotten so frustrated, they realize, okay, I can't do this on my own anymore. I'm gonna go hire a professional. And so I saw a ton of this. And I remember in my early years, not understanding this because at that point, we were taught like thermodynamics was king of everything. Calories in versus calories out, get them moving more, get them burning more, get them eating less. And I remember sitting with these clients that were, you know, some of them over a hundred pounds overweight and then listing off the food they were eating. And it just didn't make sense. I bet you thought they were lying.

9:31I 100 % thought they were lying. And I feel awful because later on, I realized how many, how many people that had, this had happened to, and it wasn't that they were lying and it wasn't that they were, had a broken metabolism. What it was is that they had tried weight loss so many times with this method and their only answer was more activity and less calories more activity and less calories and it always worked a little bit a little bit a little bit and it just and over time it got them in this predicament where they didn't have to eat very much very many calories for them to start to put body fat back on because they had continually pared down muscle and they're told their body that we're only gonna eat this many calories and you're going to be running and moving and doing all this activity to a point where it's like it hangs on to any extra calorie it can get because it's like, I don't know when I'm going to get more and I don't know how much more he or she's going to push me.

10:23And so, so many clients for this predicament. And then when you figure out what you're supposed to do, the next challenge is the rebuilding of that and that process. It's not a short process. And I think this is where clients, I mean, we have a lot of clients underneath Mind Pump now that are training with our trainers that can get discouraged because they've all been taught by us. They know how to, which is great, right? So if we have clients that are, that are training with our trainers, they've been taught by us how to, how to work with people like this. And they come to us with the next step, which is like, okay, great.

10:55I understand what I need to do with these people, but then they're, they, they're, they're struggling because they're not seeing movement on the scale right away. And that can be discouraging for somebody who knows they want to lose 30, 40, 50 plus pounds off the scale but the trainer knows they're doing the right things like we've got to build muscle we've got to build this metabolism back up but then the client is like come on we've been working for like two months and we've only seen the scale move one or two pounds or maybe not at all you know it's insane the same i mean this isn't working it's failing isn't it and it's like getting them to understand that when we've put ourself in this predicament it's not like a you all sudden switch the other way and all of a sudden oh fat loss comes off and it's that easy If it was, they would have figured it out a long time ago.

11:41It's quite the process, not just the time that it takes, but also the psychological discipline that it takes to stay the course when you're probably doing the right thing. 100%. So here's what the data shows on weight loss with just diet. Let's just stick with diet for now. When you take people and you have them lose, let's say, 25 pounds on the scale or 30 pounds on the scale, and the way that you would do this with diet is you would take their average caloric intake and you would just reduce it. So I would take these group of people and let's say this person's averaging, you know, 2 ,200 calories a day or 2 ,300 calories a day.

12:16I'm going to put them on a 1 ,300 calorie diet. Okay, which by the way, if you look at the studies on diet, the typical caloric intake they'll put people on for weight loss is usually around 12 to 1 ,300 calories. It's typically where they put people, which is very low by the way. So they put people on this diet and they'll get them to lose, again, in a study, so controlled, they'll get them to lose 20 or 30 pounds. But then when they go and look at body composition, where did this weight come from? Like, what did they actually lose? What we see in the data is on average, 40 % of that weight came from muscle.

12:51Almost half. 40 %? Almost half. Now, there's a myth out there that you're burning the muscle. That's not what's happening. Your body's not burning the muscle. It's just adapting to meet this new caloric intake. and if you look at the human body and you look at all the parts of the body and you had to reduce the parts of the body that were burning the most calories. In order to just keep surviving. Muscle's there. It's reprioritizing. Muscle's a wonderful place to pare things down because it burns so many calories. It's this very metabolically active tissue. And so you see this 40 % of their weight comes off as muscle.

13:30So what ends up happening is they lose 30 pounds and now they end up with a metabolic rate that's much slower than when they first started. What does this look like long-term? Well, I was eating 1 ,300 calories. I lost 25 pounds. Now I have to eat 1 ,300 calories forever in order to keep this amount of weight off. And 1 ,300 calories a day for the rest of your life is very difficult to maintain. It's a miserable place. It's not a great place to be. By the way, here's the other side of it because I've heard people argue this before and it's so silly to me. If you just look at, and I'm talking healthy food, if you just ate really healthy calories, 1 ,300 calories of really healthy food, it's actually quite difficult, if not impossible, to get the micronutrients that you need from that few calories.

14:19So you actually start to see our nutrient deficiencies, actually the risk goes up from that low a calorie. It's not a sustainable approach whatsoever. Now here's where it gets worse. This is, I'm going to add an element to this. I'm going to throw a little wrench into this and make this a little worse. Let's say that person or that group, we put them on a low calorie diet and then we're like, no, no, no. We're going to also have them exercise. Let's do that. The form of exercise that tends to be picked for weight loss tends to be the forms of exercise that burns the most calories. That sounds logical, right?

14:53I'm trying to get the calories out. I'm trying to eat less calories. What kind of exercise should I do? Let me pick the one that burns the most calories. That sounds logical. The problem with that is that the forms of exercise that burn the most amount of calories while you're doing it typically are cardiovascular type exercise. Running. Running burns a tremendous amount of calories. If you were to run for an hour, there's pretty much no other form of exercise that would come close to the amount of calories that you burn while running. I mean, you could choose other things, but it would look like running in terms of the expenditure.

15:26It would be the same thing. Rowing, Stairmaster, all those things. Yeah, or just doing crazy circuits or whatever, right? You're burning lots of calories. And it makes a lot of sense, but the problem is not understanding another adaptation signal that you're sending to your body, which is I need endurance. I need endurance because I'm running. I'm taking in low calories, and I also simultaneously need endurance. Well, here's what your body does, and this is crazy. You're sending another signal to your body that says, become even more thrifty with energy because you need to be able to continue doing this activity.

16:03Your body doesn't know you're working out. It thinks you're trying to survive. And so it learns how to slow down its metabolism even more. And because endurance training requires very little strength, your body pairs more muscle down. In fact, if you did running plus a low-calorie diet, you'll probably see more muscle loss than if you just did diet alone, or at least the same amount, which is pretty remarkable. And so then there can be an argument can be made that you'll get an even worse metabolic adaptation in the context of slowing it down by doing that. And this is exactly what people do. And like you, Adam, when I was an early trainer, I thought this was the formula for fat loss.

16:44And it wasn't until I ran gyms for long enough and I would see members coming in who every day they'd be on the treadmill, every day they were coming in and every day their body weight, their body fat didn't change. And I thought, man, they must be eating tons and tons of calories. Their diet must be absolutely terrible. And then I got to know these people and they would tell me like their diet. And I'd be like, yeah, but you're probably lying. I'm sure on the weekends you're eating really crazy. And then some of these people I got to really respect and I saw like, oh my gosh, this is really difficult for a lot of people because they don't, something else is happening.

17:17Something else is happening. That's when I started to understand metabolic adaptation. You know what also becomes really challenging for the client that's going through this is that when they've done this for a long enough time and they've got their metabolic rate to come down to some really low numbers, say like 1 ,300 to your point because that's kind of the average where these diets tend up being and all this expenditure. And then they kind of like, even if they don't fully throw their hands up, they're just like, oh, I need a break. I need to have a night. It feels terrible. Yeah, I need to have one night of wine or a pizza or just one thing.

17:47Or go on vacation. Yeah, like they just need a small break or that one piece of pie that they hadn't had in forever, they've been restricting for so long. What it feels like to them is that one thing sticks to them right away. And part of why that feels that way is one 700-calorie or 1 ,000-calorie slice of pie is literally 80 % of their daily intake. whereas if they had a metabolic rate say that was up towards 26 2800 calories that same person could afford to have a little bit of flexibility in the diet and not feel like it gets stuck right to them but almost every client that i've ever had that's been through this would express that they'd be like oh my god that's what exactly i feel i feel like i have a little bit of cheese on something or i indulge a tiny bit and then the next day i feel like i i put on a pound or two body fat they didn't put on a pound or two body fat but they feel that way because of where the their metabolic rate is and how much their body is wanting to store calories.

18:43That's right. And what it feels like for this person is it starts to throw your hormones off because they're adapting again towards this direction that we're talking about. So typically what you see in men, this is pretty well documented now, is your testosterone goes down. By the way, women's testosterone goes down as well. And women need testosterone just as much as men do. It's just a different ratio. In women, you'll see estrogen and progesterone get thrown off. Cortisol, which is a stress hormone, starts to become out of whack. So we'll say elevated, but really what it starts to look like is an inverted cortisol release where it's a little low in the morning, high at night.

19:15Why? Because cortisol is this kind of energy producing stress hormone. It's what it does, right? If I were to give you a shot of cortisol right now, you'd feel this kind of wired type of energy. And cortisol also promotes muscle loss and fat storage. It's correlated or connected to visceral fat. So your hormones are off. My libido's down. I'm not getting enough nutrients because my calories are so low. Plus I'm throwing all the stress on my body with all this exercise. I'm getting not great sleep. I've got low energy. I got signs of too much stress. My hair doesn't look good. My nails don't look good.

19:47I just feel worn down. And at this point, the person says, why am I doing this? I give up. I don't want to do this anymore. This doesn't make any sense. This sucks. Of course it sucks. It's because you're doing this in such a challenging way. And it makes it impossible to maintain. It makes it impossible to maintain. So what's the fix? All right. How do we fix this? Well, first, let's look at exercise and rather than judge it by its calorie burn, let's look at it as a way to signal the body to adapt. What adaptation are we looking for? What would be the most beneficial adaptation for somebody who wants to be able to lose body fat and keep it off?

20:26Well, something that's going to make my metabolism faster, to put it plainly. Again, I'm oversimplifying, but what signal could I send to my body that would speed up my metabolism? Well, the most effective signal is the one that tells you to build muscle, not the one that burns the most calories. Why build more muscle? What's that going to do? Muscle is very metabolically active. It burns more calories at rest. It burns more calories at activity. It's insulin sensitive. It's got androgen receptors in there. So it makes your testosterone more effective. In fact, if you build muscle, we start to build muscle, we tend to see a balancing of hormones.

21:03And so you start to move your metabolism in a more favorable direction because your strength training, you're lifting weights. By the way, you have to lift weights like somebody who's trying to build muscle, not like somebody who's just trying to burn a lot of calories. Cause you could use weights in a way that make it like running. Okay. Make it like cardiovascular training. So now you got to lift weights, but there's another side to this equation, which is, okay, I'm lifting weights to get stronger. So I'm doing straight sets, you know, 10 reps, I'm resting for two minutes, doing those, and I'm trying to get stronger.

21:33But now I have to feed and fuel that adaptation. I have to do something with my food intake that actually allows me to add that metabolic tissue, which looks like I'm eating a little more, and I'm eating high protein, and I'm fueling and supporting this adaptation now that's moving in a positive direction. And you're right, Adam, this takes some time, especially when you're coming from the other direction where I've been over training and under eating. Now we do what's called a slow reverse diet with strength training. And this can take for some people, some people react really quickly. So you're looking at 60 days.

22:09Other people could take six months, some people a year. On average, I'll say between around three months is when we start to see really positive effects. And then we're in a position where, well, now if we cut calories, I can bring it down to 2 ,000 calories instead of 1 ,300 calories. We also have to address the, and I hate the trainers that tout the study that compares the calorie burn at rest of muscle versus fat, because in a lab comparing muscle tissue versus fat tissue, the difference of calorie expenditure in the day is negligible. It's not what we see in real life. And it doesn't tell the full story.

22:45And I can't stand when I see trainers that tout that study, because then the message that you're sending right now about how incredibly beneficial it is to go build muscle to speed the metabolism up all of a sudden goes, wait a second. It's only 10, 15 more calories. Yeah. 10, 15 more calories. I'd have to build copious amounts of muscle. 40 pounds of muscle. And that's what it looks like under a microscope in a lab in a, in a resting position. You have to understand that there's more that meets the eye. There's when you add five pounds of muscle to a person's body, first of all, that person organically becomes more active.

23:19That person organically becomes stronger. Volume increases. Again, you talked about this the other day of how in these studies where they control volume. Well, you don't control volume. No one's in a lab controlling their exact staying. When they get stronger, you lift more weights. When you lift more weights, you're now increasing your volume, which sends that loud signal. Plus, how much more training does it take just to sustain that extra muscle on you? There's the extra calories expenditure there. So I cannot stand when we use that as a way to tell people it's not that big of a difference when it is life-changing.

23:51I've seen countless clients firsthand that I've taken from eating 1 ,300 calories. We've added, say, 10 pounds of muscle, and that person is eating near 3 ,000 calories. That doesn't math based off of what the research says comparing muscle tissue to because there's more going on. No, we do it all the time. It's predictable. We have callers all the time that call in that take our advice, they come back on, oh my God, I went and I've added a thousand calories to my diet and the scale hasn't moved. I haven't gained any weight. It's like your metabolism went up. By the way, the studies will also show that you could have the same lean body mass and dramatically slow down or speed up your metabolism.

24:27Cause there's a lot more that's going on, uh, that we don't understand things like mitochondrial uncoupling, uh, things like, um, you know, how your body's utilizing hormones. Um, and again, it's so complex, but routinely, routinely and i can say this with all confidence i could get a person's metabolism to go up by five to eight hundred that's like a routine average yeah oftentimes i'd see much higher depending on the person i'm working with crazy i'll tell i'll tell a personal story the first time that i really got this and applied it i had a young lady that hired me who was running 25 miles a week so she liked to run plus she was lifting weights but looking more like circuits and she's doing that three days a week.

25:05And she was eating about 1500 calories a day. So consider 1500, plus she took a lot of steps every single day. She had a pedometer. So think about this 1500 calories while running 25 miles a week, while doing circuit training a few days a week, while taking something like 12 or 15 ,000 steps a day. And she just couldn't figure out why she couldn't get her body fat per se. She wasn't not fit. So she wasn't like super overweight, but she couldn't get her body fat below. It was like 24, 25%. So I took this individual and I immediately said, we're going to take your running from 25 miles a week to five miles a week.