2787: The Best Way to Get a Flat Stomach

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. Today's episode, we talk about the best way to get a flat stomach. By the way, we have a free guide, the Flat Tummy Guide. You can get it right now. It costs nothing, and it really instructs you, teaches you how to get a flat tummy. Go to mindpumpmedia.com forward slash flat dash tummy dash guide. Now, this episode is brought to you by a sponsor, sponsor, Haya Health.

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1:53You want a flat stomach. You want a nice-looking midsection. A lot of people do it wrong. They don't have the right priorities. We're going to break it down. We're going to give you the steps so you can get a flat tummy. Let's go. Sweating that tummy. Step one is we have to eat in a way that gets us to a body fat percentage that makes it even remotely close to see it. You have to be able to reveal it. Right? Because this doesn't work if you are 75 pounds overweight. No. This is number one. So these are listed in order. Okay? And number one is you got to eat in a way to get leaner. You can't get around that.

2:31And look, trying to out-exercise a really bad diet is - Futile. Futile. It's really hard to burn calories, you guys. Like 500 calories, okay? I know what the cardio machines say, but they lie. The average person would have to do - They're like half right. Yeah. The average person would have to do like an hour or more of cardio, intensive cardio, to burn about 500 calories. I could drink five calories in two seconds. Yeah. I could eat three bites of something could be 500 calories. It's a losing game, really. It is. And so you have to look at your diet in order to make this happen. And there's really, it boils down to this.

3:10You have to be in a calorie deficit, meaning you have to take in less calories than you're burning. So what we're going to do is we're going to help you do this without having to necessarily count your calories and get all crazy with it. Because you could do that, but there are a few steps you could take with diet that tends to make this happen naturally. So number one with your diet, avoid heavily processed foods. They just make you overeat. So trying to eat in a deficit while also eating a lot of processed foods, very, very difficult. You're going to have a lot of cravings. You're always going to feel like you're starving.

3:41It's always going to feel like you're not eating enough. It's a difficult mode on video games. It is. And those foods are engineered to do that. They're designed to make you overeat. And studies, really good studies, will show this is to the tune of like 600 extra calories a day with the same level of satiety, meaning you feel just as full. as you would with whole natural foods, except you ate 600 more calories. So avoid those. And if you're already eating a lot of those types of foods, naturally calories start to drop. And then the second thing that you would do is eat your target body weight and grams of protein and eat it first.

4:11Those two things right there, for most people, I'd say probably - Especially breakfast. That's it. For about 85 % of people, if you hit your target body weight and grams of protein, ate that first in the meal, avoided heavily processed foods, you're going to be a calorie deficit just doing those two things. Yeah, I want to echo what Justin just said because I'm helping somebody right now with their diet, just a friend of mine, giving them little tips here and there. And I told him this ahead of time. And of course, the thing that is so challenging is breakfast. It is. Almost every breakfast food that is marketed to us is a carb-heavy food.

4:47And even something, a staple like eggs, and you bring this up all the time, It's like you're still only looking at five, six grams of protein, right? But one egg is six grams of protein. Yeah. So it takes a lot of eggs. So two eggs is 12. Yeah. That's not much. We're not getting there. Yeah. Most people are not eating beyond four eggs. A four egg serving for a lot of people or a four egg omelet is huge. So breakfast is a key. And first, just want to give everybody listening the permission that you can have dinner for breakfast. it doesn't have to be a breakfast category and for hundreds of years we did that yeah we had dinner at kellogg's yeah yeah we just breakfast is a made-up word that we that we've been marketed to uh you can absolutely have some ground beef and rice for breakfast and if you want it to feel more breakfasty crack two eggs over it you know i'm saying that's what i do to make it feel breakfasty is i put two eggs over the top of it but that is crucial because if you if you get behind on protein early and you also and or have a high carbohydrate type of breakfast to start your day really difficult to one manage the calories and to hit the protein intake that's right and so uh win the morning by having a high 40 to 50 gram type of protein meal is a good strategy for both men and women and this part will really help you out in this process my daughter was so mad when she discovered that one egg was six grams of protein.

6:22She was so mad. She was like, what? That's it? It was like this big moment. I'm like, yeah, honey, you have to eat like four of these. Because we're marketed to that because eggs are considered a super food and a high protein food. It's a high protein as a percentage of its weight and all that stuff. But it's an egg. It's small. It's small. You're not getting a lot of protein. No. No. Next up is to build the muscles of your midsection. Now, notice I said build. A lot of people like to train the muscles of the midsection, but whenever somebody trains their abs or their obliques, they think for some reason that they do a million reps.

6:55Yes. Endurance. It's like, yeah. Oh, tons of reps because that makes everything sculpted and shaped. No, no, the muscles of your midsection are like the muscles of your upper body and lower body. If you want them to be more visible, if you want to look more sculpted in your midsection, you got to build them. How do you build them? Same way you build your biceps, use sufficient resistance so doing 60 reps of you know tons of crunches is not going to do it just like 60 reps of a you know super light dumbbell is not going to give you the biceps that you want you got to do sufficient resistance so 10 reps 15 reps even as low as eight reps with good resistance full range of motion good hard squeeze you'll get abs and obliques that start to develop and then you'll get it'll give you that sculpted midsection that you're looking for yeah it's so ironic i don't know where that thought came from it's a muscle at the end of the day like why would it why would training it be any different and it's either a lot a lot of reps or it's also just isometric focus and that's it and so you know and you could get strong but like if you're going for actual visible definition like we need to actually build them up well complete honesty i'm guilty even as a trainer of teaching this um and i don't know if it just it came out of habit of uh in the culture at that time every ab routine you'd ever seen was bicycle abs and supersets and circuits like conditioning yeah a lot of a lot of ab conditioning type of of movements and you know crazy to think that i i even had the the experience and the knowledge and strength training and still you know you know what i fell i fell for and i remember the same thing this was with calves because this was later for me too with calves was uh oh the the the five muscle fiber difference in your calves and abs need more more volume more uh reps right to get that and i remember thinking that as a trainer that my calves and my abs needed more slow twitch muscle yes and so they needed all these this high reps and it was like and the two biggest things i ever did for my calves my abs was figure out oh i can do five by five yeah exercises for calves and five by five for abs and holy shit my abs built it was such an aha moment it was late in my career this is 10 years after being a personal trainer did i finally unlock that and it was like this complete epiphany i had i what i would get lean and i could i always admired people who look who were lean but had six packs without flexing and I'd get down as low as like 9 % body fat.

9:24And you couldn't see my abs unless I really flexed them. I couldn't figure out what it was when I started doing high tension, treating them like I was building them. Oh, it was like overnight to the point where now my abs are a standout body part. Now my abs, they show I could be a 12 % body fat and I'll look like I have abs because they've built them. And that's what happens when a muscle is built. It looks more sculpted because what you see is the muscle. Next up is to practice exercises that train the transverse abdominis, the TVA muscles. These are the muscles that draw in the midsection. So you have your abs and what your abs do is they bring your lower, your rib cage closer to your pelvis, right?

10:03So that's that, that, that sit up motion, that crunch motion. Then you have obliques that rotate your body. They rotate your trunk and they also do some kind of side bending a little bit. and there's other muscles underneath that do that. But then you have a muscle. A lot of people don't know this. There's an actual muscle, which job of this muscle is to draw in. And so right now, if you're listening to this or watching this, when you try to suck in your stomach, you're using your TVA. This is where you can see the ribs. Yeah, and if you strengthen this muscle, you'll actually shrink your waist a little bit.

10:30I've had, and this is especially true for women postpartum. I've had women postpartum come to me who got fit and all that stuff, couldn't figure out why they still, their midsection don't look the same. We practice TV exercises like vacuums, you know, hands and knees. Oh, yeah. And they shrink their waist by like a half an inch. It's necessary for it to get super elastic. That's right. They have to make room. This is such a cool unlock, too, for a couple things. One, I've seen this with people who can get visible top abs, but then they have kind of a little pooch that kind of hangs out. And so when they start to activate that TV, it kind of pulls everything in.

11:00And then now they can see that. The other thing that's so massive is this is such an important support muscle for the entire body. Oh, that's why it's there. I mean, this is a weight belt. I mean, I know we're talking about visibly seeing your abs and the aesthetic piece here, but this is such a healthy muscle to develop. In fact, I think back to when I was 20, it was the first thing I got excited about. I always tell a story when I'm coaching and developing trainers that like overthink, like, oh, but I'm so new. And I'm like, I knew nothing, like nothing. I remember when I was mind blown by the TVA.

11:34Like I didn't know what the transfer stock was. It was, that was all I knew. It was all I knew. It was like I didn't know anything else. Like I literally learned that, but I was so excited because I learned how valuable it was for posture. And before we engage in any movement, that locks us in first and just how important this was. And I just taught everybody that. That was all I knew to teach. And it was valuable to everybody. And I built my first little bit of training client portfolio off of teaching people all about that muscle. And so I think muscles collective that not only is this important for the visible side, but this is so good just for overall health.

12:12And so there's a double win to train this. And I have. I've seen clients that could get lean enough to where they could see like the top four pack, but then they just kind of have this little pooch. I don't understand. I can see my top. I can't see my bottom. and them training that getting a strong uh transverse abdominis would pull that in and doing things like vacuums and uh what's the four point draw and maneuver i love to do this uh i it was just yesterday it was uh walking on the treadmill for an hour and i'll practice the draw and move while i'm walking and so and and i can feel when you do it you can feel your posture activate you get you stand up tall it's just so good for you to do this and we should we should all practice this more, not just for the aesthetics, but you get that benefit too.

12:54So if you're listening, easy way to do this, hands and knees, and you draw your belly button into your spine as far as you can, and hold it, and hold it, and hold it, and then relax, allow the belly to hang, rest in that position for a little bit, and then repeat it. So you're literally just sucking in and squeezing it. The reason why you're on your hands and knees is it gives you a little bit of resistance. Your organs are pushing down, so you have that resistance. Do we have MPTV videos on this? We do. Yeah, I'm sure we do. So you can definitely find this on our YouTube channel, MPTV. We have a lot of cool stuff like this.

13:24That's right. Next up, avoid foods that make you bloated. I've had numerous clients where they would talk about flattening their stomach. And then this is how I'd find out. They'd say, God, my stomach, I just can't get it flat. And then through questioning, I would find out that in the morning when I wake up, I have a really flat stomach. but at night I suddenly have this big belly so what's going on here? I'm like that's not body fat that's not a muscle issue you are bloated that's a digestive issue and so A you could always get tested for things like SIBO and what not but a lot of times it was just foods that cause bloat and the common offenders were like gluten dairy sometimes eggs sometimes lack of fiber gluten was a big one I can't tell you how many times I would cut gluten out to people like this and then suddenly they're like whoa yeah i'm not getting the big belly at night like i used to this is a huge one uh this a lot of times we think because we eat something in our diet on a regular basis and we don't have any other crazy adverse but we're just you're constantly like if you could if this if you this resonates yeah exactly because you're like hey cut this out like i eat that all the time yeah i eat it all the time i'm fine i don't have any problems that my stool is normal i do some of that but i they i constantly feel puffy or i constantly feel bloated It's like, yeah, you're eating something that you can eat, but you obviously have some sort of an intolerance to it.

14:51We were talking earlier on a podcast, and I was just talking about, like, I recognize this with dairy with me. I can have dairy, but I have a certain threshold. I have a threshold, and I could push beyond that threshold, and then I have adverse effects. And then I throw my stool off, or I'll get bloat from it. Same thing with gluten. I can have a little bit of gluten, but if I have a lot of gluten in a day, I'll retain and hold a bunch of water. And so a lot of people just are so detached from their body and their food and that they - Because they're so used to it. Yeah. And this is one of the things why I love to teach like a day or two fast is you take someone who's one day off or two days off of eating and all of a sudden they feel like they lost all kinds of body.

15:32It's like, you didn't lose pounds of body fat. No, you're just not inflamed right now. You're just not inflamed. We literally calmed the digestive system down for a little bit. now why don't we pay attention as we reintroduce foods to when you start to feel that blow and that's the interesting part too is when you reintroduce healthy foods that are like common like i'm seeking these foods out but don't realize that's actually irritating me because my biochemistry is different yeah you're right because uh whole grain you know whole grain oats or whole grain bread this is healthy yeah it's bothering you yeah yeah cut it out and pay attention to that 100 the other thing is regularity um if you're not having a regular uh bowel movement every single day, then you might need to change something.

16:10Here's an easy fix. I don't think this is ideal, perfect. It's better to get this from food. But I've done this with clients. I've done this with myself, especially when I go really high protein. Use psyllium husk. Psyllium husk is a fiber. It's got some health benefits. It's very inexpensive. Taking psyllium husk once or twice a day, for some people, take it with each meal, and suddenly you're regular, and you'll notice the bloat go away. Get rid of all the microplastics, too. There's a theory, right? That it binds to the microplastics. Is that true? Yeah, there's a theory that because it's a bulking fiber, that it'll bind to the microplastics in your gut.

16:44So when you eat and it helps get rid of it. I didn't know that. I know. It's another excellent win. Yeah, I hope that's true. So I've been experimenting with it. Because I don't really use that. I have once or a few times. I haven't really noticed it. I use it every day. You guys see me every day. Oh, interesting. Like Doug's using something right now. That reminds me. A reminder for him. And then lastly, manage your cortisol, but to put it more, just more clear, manage your stress. Now, I said cortisol because here's what happens. When you're in this kind of chronic stress state, which can come from a lot of different things, it can come from lack of sleep, poor diet, it can be normal stressors like kids, work, whatever.

17:23It could also be lack of purpose sometimes or lack of meaning. Sometimes your job is stressful because you don't see the meaning behind it or your family life is stressful because you just haven't reframed the season of your life. And there's data on this, right? Where their life doesn't change, but they change how they view it and suddenly their stress drops dramatically. So this is more complex. But when it comes to cortisol, consistent high cortisol levels change how you store body fat. And it is associated with higher levels of visceral body fat, especially in the midsection, and higher amounts of body fat around the midsection in general, in particular for women.

18:01In particular for women where you'll see women typically don't store around the belly like men do, but when their cortisol is chronically high and they gain body fat, suddenly they're like, this is weird. I typically don't store in my belly. Now I am. I can't tell you how many clients, especially my female clients, were trying to lose the last 2 % or 3 % body fat, so they thought these last two were the big offenders right here. The foods that bloat and the managing stress? Yes, where they were like, they were in good shape, but they always felt like they just felt bloated or they couldn't get that last bit of leanness that they were trying to obtain.

18:38And literally, stress and some foods that they were eating was just causing this, they were constantly mildly inflamed and holding on to water, which gave them this look as if they were carrying a little bit higher body fat. and they really weren't they were in great shape and you and i could always tell because their arms and shoulders that everything else would look more defined and i i knew they were in good shape and they had a good everything else was good but like just they're managing their stress level finding the one or two foods that might have been offender and all of a sudden stomach flattens out completely like that and so a lot of times especially if you're a listener and you would consider yourself a fitness person but you struggle with that last couple percent and you think you eat really good, sometimes it's a simple one or two things in the diet that you're eating that you would consider a health food that your body just doesn't agree with you very much and or you've got a lot of stress going on in your life and then you're also pushing it hard in the gym so that you're just inflamed a lot and then your body retains water.

19:39I had a trainer that worked for me who was always trying to, she was always struggling to get that last few percent down. Same thing, fit, healthy, ate right. Broke up with her boyfriend and suddenly got leaner. She just had a toxic relationship. And they broke up and she suddenly got more fit. And it was like, duh. I remember reading somewhere that the body, when it's inflamed like that, either due to stress, overtraining, all the things, or even digestive stuff, can hold water for up to 72 hours from whatever. So I always, whenever I'd have a client that would tell me that they look like that, and I knew I was controlling their diet, it would be like, hold on, let's see what the next three days looks like.

20:18And let's eat these things and see. And a lot of times I would see that come right out in like two or three days. So, and I noticed this with myself during competing and measuring and watching all the water stuff. Like there'd be times where I'd eat foods that aligned with my macros. And so I was good on the diet, but I ate a food that I was a little bit, had a little bit of a tolerance to. And then I'd be like, oh my God, I look like I gained all this weight and the scale went up. And I'd be, and then about three days later, I'd stay, avoid that thing. And then all of a sudden water would get rid of it.

20:46Well, I mean, for me, just going back, if I eat gluten two days in a row, three days in a row, I look like I go up 3 % body fat just from water retention. Yeah. 100%. Look, we have a free flat tummy guide that breaks down what you can do to get the midsection you want. It's free. I wrote it. Go to mindpumpmedia.com forward slash flat dash tummy dash guide and download it now. Also, you can find us on Instagram. We'll see you. It's at Mind Pump Media. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Super Bundle at mindpumpmedia.com.

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