191: How I Locked In and Got Leaner in 90 Days

24:25These last 90 days, I have been locked in on getting leaner. I think for a lot of people, when you say, I'm approaching a cut, a caloric deficit, I want to lose body fat, I want to get leaner, their minds immediately go to restriction, Rigidity, meaning no flexibility, no fun. Removing and avoiding all social situations. Just a non-fun period of time. You look good, but feel miserable. To get leaner and to lock in does not have to come with a negative association.

25:24Nick Bare:and I want to share with you how I locked in over these last 90 days and got leaner. I lost about 10 pounds and I would say it's primarily body fat, not just weight, body fat. I didn't get a DEXA scan, which I should get a DEXA scan. I'd be curious what my body fat percentage is right now. It's definitely single digits for sure. If you've never done a DEXA scan, I highly recommend it. It measures body fat percentage. It also measures lean tissue, muscle, and it will show you where you're holding that lean tissue and body fat specifically. So you lay down on this table. It looks like an x-ray or MRI machine and this arm goes over top of you and scans you.

26:16Nick Bare:You got to sit or lay as still as possible. And this machine goes over top of you and it does a full body analysis. And once they print it out, the tech will go over it with you and it'll show you body weight, body fat percentage, where you're holding specific amounts of body fat, your lean tissue, muscle tissue. And you can do this a few times a year, once a year, every couple of months. And it's cool because you can look at how the data changes in trends. What you ideally want to see is that your weight stays the same or increases and body fat stays the same or decreases, but muscle mass increases.

27:11And this is one objective way to measure. Body fat, disbursement, lean muscle tissue.

27:22Nick Bare:Are you gaining muscle or are you just gaining weight? You feel bigger, you look bigger. Is that actual muscle? Or is it just body fat that just makes you look a little bulkier? A DEXA scan is one of the most accurate ways to measure body fat. I personally am not a big fan of, you know, they have scales. They have like these, I think they're called in-body tools where you stand on the scale and you hold these two arms and it'll give you a deep analysis, objective report of body fat and all these data points. And they're just not as accurate as a DEXA scan. So if you have it available, they're pretty inexpensive.

28:16I would recommend get a few scans a year,

28:19Nick Bare:one scan a year. It's just really great data to have. But how did I drop 10 pounds primarily fat and get leaner over the last 90 days? Some call outs prior to. Could I have done it in less than 90 days? Yes.

28:42Goes for running a marathon too. You know, people come to you all the time.

28:49Nick Bare:Hey, I want to run my first half marathon. I want to run my first marathon. And I want to do really well. I want to PR. All right, cool. When is it? 30 days.

29:04Man, how much running have you been doing leading up to this? Zero. This is going to be tough. And I would recommend that you choose a race

29:17Nick Bare:that's a few months away. So it gives us time to build into a prep. So you can actually put forth a great effort in performance and minimize reduce of injury. I meet people all the time who they do a crazy crash diet and they lose 15 pounds in a month. And then you see them in the following month and they've gained all of it back and then some. It's crash dieting. It's not sustainable. Could I have lost 10 pounds in less than 90 days? Absolutely. I could lose 10 pounds in a week if I wanted to, but it's definitely not going to be primarily fat and it's not going to be done in a sustainable way.

30:08Nick Bare:So 10 pounds, 90 days, that's roughly 3.3 pounds per month. that's a very conservative and sustainable, realistic approach. About one pound of weight loss per week is a great baseline of where to get started. You can do it faster, yes. But is it going to come with sustainable, long-term, manageable results? Probably not. This is one of those things, losing body fat and weight, you want to really take your time with it. Because when you allow yourself the right amount of time, yes, it's more sustainable. You can keep that weight off for longer, especially the body fat, but it allows for a more flexible lifestyle.

31:12Nick Bare:In my case, especially with a family and traveling and kids during the summer, It really didn't affect our lifestyle, our vacations, our travel, our social situations at all. I don't even think most people knew that I was in a dieting phase because it was so non-intrusive. There's less risk to performance impact. So if you go into too large of a caloric deficit too fast, it will definitely affect your performance, your training, your workouts, your sleep, your recovery, your mental capacity and concentration and mood. And when you do it slow, when you lose weight slow, you can target fat loss, like I said, instead of just weight loss.

32:07Nick Bare:And that includes muscle. If you lose fat and wait too quickly, you will burn muscle. You will probably most likely be in a catabolic environment where, yeah, you're losing weight, but all that hard earned muscle that you built over time, you don't want to lose that. You want to preserve that at all costs. And the last thing I want to share is that we know in order to lose weight, you need to be in a caloric deficit, which can be achieved by both dieting and exercise, caloric expenditure. So reducing caloric intake and increasing caloric expenditure. Caloric deficit means that we need to be burning or expending more calories than we are consuming.

33:00Nick Bare:So if it takes 2 ,500 calories a day to maintain our current weight, technically anything less than that is a caloric deficit and we are on our way to losing weight, burning fat, getting leaner.

33:20Nick Bare:And if you're trying to lose weight and get leaner, I would encourage you to just change one variable at a time, allow time to assess the results and then make changes. What do I mean by this. Well, the flip side to that advice would be you decide you want to lose weight. So you add on three extra cardio sessions per week. You increase your daily step count from 10 ,000 to 20 ,000. You reduce calories by 500 a day. You stop going to social gatherings, birthday parties, events, business dinners. You isolate yourself. Those are a lot of variables. That is throwing the kitchen sink at trying to lose weight.

34:23Nick Bare:and when you do that, one, you can't measure what's actually working and it makes it hard to continue losing weight because you have nothing to pull from as you get deeper into a deficit. I was just having this conversation with someone here at BPN a few weeks ago. They've been trying to lose weight for the last couple of months and they've been very successful. They've lost a lot of weight over the last couple of months. by going to a very deep, aggressive caloric deficit. And it worked. But what happens when you go into a deep caloric deficit too fast is you get to a point where you can't pull any more calories away and you plateau.

35:11Nick Bare:So if you're usually eating 2 ,500 calories and you drop calories to 1 ,800 overnight and you start doing additional cardio on top of that and you start losing weight and fat really quickly. And then eight weeks later, you plateau. You stop losing weight. Your body has acclimated to that new caloric intake and energy expenditure. And what are you going to do from there? You're going to drop calories to 1 ,500. You can do an hour of cardio every single day on minimal calories or you now have no energy. So you want to really stair-step this process of losing weight, losing fat very slowly so it's sustainable and only changing one variable at a time.

36:11What did I not do in these last 90 days to get leaner?

36:15Nick Bare:I didn't starve myself. Like I've said, I didn't avoid social situations or events. I didn't overdo cardio or increase my caloric expenditure to an excessive level. I didn't experience any decreases in performance output or sleep quality. I haven't had any insane food cravings or desire for cheat meals. that can sometimes be a problem. If you go into a caloric deficit that is too deep, you're too restrictive, you change all these variables overnight, you start having cravings and temptations and you want to binge and you become food focused and eventually you burn out and you give up on the diet, you're unmotivated, you go back to your old ways of living and eating and being sedentary and you gain it all back.

37:13That didn't happen in these last 90 days. So what did I do to get leaner? It's simple.

37:24Nick Bare:Simple does not mean easy. And I want to make sure that we don't confuse that because I'm not saying that getting leaner, losing body fat, getting fit and in shape is easy. Because for a lot of people, it is one of the hardest things they ever try to do in their life and they've tried many times over and over and over again and they continue to fail

37:54and I feel bad for those people who can't commit, who can't make the change sometimes it's their mind

38:02Nick Bare:that is just holding them back and then sometimes they just don't know you know sometimes people don't know that there's things you can do to get leaner and it doesn't have to be super restrictive and it doesn't have to affect your social life and your performance and your sleep and your mood and all these things because a lot of people believe that to lock in you gotta be miserable and that's not true locked in, sharpens performance. It removes the noise. It is intentionality. It is focused. It is managing our time efficiently. It's eliminating decision fatigue. So here's what I did. And here's what you can do too.

39:03Nick Bare:Number one, I kept protein and carbohydrates consistent, fairly high. Protein for me is always one gram per pound of body weight. And carbs, I keep high because I train a lot and carbs are energy. And my output, my performance is dependent on energy, carbohydrates. But what I did is I slightly reduced dietary fat over that 90-day period. So I decided I wanted to start getting a little bit leaner. I just started making some intentional decisions around my diet to start reducing dietary fat. Doesn't mean I took my dietary fat intake on a daily basis from 120 grams to 50 grams overnight. But I just slowly, every couple of weeks, I'd make more intentional decisions.

40:05Nick Bare:I stopped eating eggs for breakfast. I used to eat like five whole eggs for breakfast and that's 30 grams of fat. So what I started doing is my morning protein shake with a little bit of peanut butter. So I went from my breakfast having 30 to 40 grams of fat to my breakfast having 15 grams of fat. Some of the other changes I made, instead of consuming a fattier cut of meat, like a ribeye steak or a New York strip, we ended up eating more tenderloins and chicken thighs and chicken breasts and leaner fish for dinners. I stopped adding as much olive oil and butter onto vegetables or potatoes and rice as we were cooking them for dinner.

41:05These small little changes I made by reducing dietary fat a little

41:11Nick Bare:bit every couple of weeks reduced my daily caloric intake quite significantly over a 90-day period. We also know that fats are more calorically dense than proteins and carbs. So for each gram of protein and each gram of carbohydrate, there's four calories per gram. Fat has nine calories per gram. So there are more calorically dense macronutrients in foods than their counterparts. So I kept protein and carbs consistently high while slightly reducing dietary fat over time. Number two, I didn't track calories, but I used a food scale at every meal to stay consistent with my portions. There have been seasons before why I've tracked everything I've eaten, everything I prepared, everything I put in my mouth, tracked in MyFitnessPal.

42:13Nick Bare:I really don't like tracking calories. My diet doesn't change too much from day to day, but I use a food scale to ensure consistent portions. We have a food scale in our pantry. We have one in our kitchen. I travel with one. Steph and I use it all day, every day and we don't even think anything of it. For example, dinner. We'll prepare some sort of protein, chicken thighs. We'll make rice or potatoes and then we'll make a veggie. That's typically what we're having for dinner. Protein source, starch, carb, vegetable. I'll get a food scale out. I'll put it on the table, put my plate on top. I tear the food scale so it goes to zero.

43:07Nick Bare:I'll add eight ounces of protein, tear it back to zero, do 300 grams of rice or 10 ounces of potatoes, tear it, and I'll just fill the rest of the plate with veggies. I don't weigh the veggies. I just load it up with veggies to fill me up. But I'll weigh my carbs and I'll weigh my protein for portion control, but not to track it into a macro and calorie counting app. I didn't track calories, but I used a food scale at every meal to stay consistent with portions. Number three, I added two high rock style, high intensity interval training sessions per week alongside my regular training split. So right now my training split with these changes, because I'm preparing for some high rocks competitions this fall.

44:00Nick Bare:And I was just excited to add in some variation to my training again. These high rocks workouts are fun, especially when you do it with partner. So Monday, six-mile run in the morning, push strength in the afternoon. Tuesday, six-mile run in the morning. And then high rock session in the afternoon. Wednesday, six-mile run in the morning, lower body strength in the afternoon. Thursday, six-mile run in the morning, pool strength in the afternoon. Friday, six-mile run in the morning. High rocks session in the afternoon. Saturday, long run, Sunday off. That's my current split. And then during those two high rocks style hit sessions twice a week, I burn anywhere from 750 to 1 ,100 calories in one of those sessions.

44:57Nick Bare:And they're anywhere from 60 to 75 minutes, but it is high intensity. Heart rate is high. It's typically a circuit. I'm sweating profusely. I'm burning a lot of energy. They are high calorie demanding workouts. It is revving that engine. So those two sessions a week increase my caloric expenditure quite significantly. Number four, I simplified my diet by eating more of the same meals and reducing unnecessary decisions. You want to get lean? Make your food boring. Make it boring. Viewing food for what it is, it's fuel. So I'm not concerned with variation for flavor. I don't get burnt out over the same meals.

46:00I can eat the same meal every day. every time, over and over, and probably never get tired of it because food can be noise.

46:15Nick Bare:When we're constantly needing more variation, more flavor, more excitement, I'm hungry for this, I'm hungry for that, I'm not hungry for this, I'm not hungry for that. We waste time on thinking about what we want, what sounds good, what doesn't sound good. simplify your diet by eating more of the same meals and reducing unnecessary decisions. Make your food boring. If you eat a bunch of boring food, you start craving the boring food. You don't crave the ultra processed, super indulgent, high fat, high savory type foods. and number five I learned to separate what I wanted from what I actually needed food noise drives what we want and if you can separate what you want from what you need it's a game changer like when it comes to the evening sometimes I can hear this little birdie on my shoulder speaking into my ear saying, you know what sounds really good?

47:28Nick Bare:A bowl of purely Elizabeth granola, a bunch of honey and peanut butter, maybe some chocolate chips. That does sound good, but it's probably also like 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 calories. On certain days, when I burn a lot of calories, I probably could consume that. But in the past, I'll be honest, when I've had a bowl of purely Elizabeth granola at night in the evening, it has led to two bowls and then three bowls and then four bowls. And before you know it, the bag is gone. And there's like 11 servings in a bag, which is depressing. You ever weigh out a serving of dense granola? That serving size is sad.

48:15Nick Bare:So instead of being tempted towards what I want, I consume what I need. and that is usually dried figs, good healthy carbs and fiber, plain Greek yogurt, some cacao nibs and berries, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, blackberries. Sometimes I throw some honey or maple syrup on top, hits the spot. It's a perfect sweet treat. That's what my body needs. Not necessarily always what it wants, some nights, yes, it's exactly what I want. But some nights I want that purely Elizabeth bag, the entire bag. So if you can learn to separate what you want from what you actually need, it can be a game changer for you.

49:05It's how you lock in. You want to lock in, start by identifying what you want versus what you need. So that's what I wanted to share with you guys today. how to lock in, why to lock in,

49:24Nick Bare:the power of locking in and how to get leaner in the next 90 days. Like I've just done with some pretty simple changes to my life, my diet, my training. Take it slow, make it sustainable. It's adaptable. But I'm telling you, lock in, find something, choose something identify something and lock in get it done go one more