Mastering Peak Performance Through Intermittent Fasting

24:32Do you fast every month for a day? Are you always doing intermittent fasting? Is there a downside to intermittent fasting? What's your process? Yeah, I usually do a lot of sort of, I rarely eat breakfast. And I'll tell you that it didn't come, I mean, I started this in medical school. And that was mostly because I really wanted to just roll out of bed and go like, you know, I'd wake up literally like five minutes before I left the door. You know, I brushed my teeth, put on some clothes and rolled out the door. I was, you know, it's just a, it's just that the way I was. Right. And so I, I don't eat breakfast now because again, people say you have to eat breakfast.

25:12You have to eat, but there's actually nothing magical about breakfast. If you don't eat breakfast, what's going to happen? Well, my body, which is now burning fat because I've had eight hours of sleep, it's gone into sort of fat burning mode because that's the storage form of calories or it's burning sugar. Um, it's just going to keep doing it right. There's nothing wrong with it. So, um, so a lot of times I try and confine myself to sort of an eating window of sort of six to eight hours. And then once in a while, when I get very busy, I will do a 24 hour fast, which is a one meal a day. And then every so often I'll do a longer fast and the longer fast are actually not as bad as you might think, but they really disrupt your schedule sort of socially.

25:50It's, it's, it's a tough one because a lot of our socialization happens at meals. So I often have dinner with my family, for example, and doing those longer fasts is really, really disruptive to that sort of thing, which is why when you look at traditional societies, like if you look at say, during major religions, for example, there would be a period of fasting that's sort of universal. So, you know, everyone's doing it. So no one's feeling Exactly. Because they smell the food and they're like, ah, exactly. So if you're, if it's like Good Friday or during Lent or during Ramadan for Muslims, or, you know, during Yom Kippur for Jews or whatever, everybody's fasting.

26:30So it's actually terrifically easy because you're not disrupting the sort of social fabric of your life there. Whereas nowadays, if you fast and I've done this, it's just really hard to do. So physically, it's not hard, but it's hard. And I do it mostly, you know, when I, when I've gained a bit of weight, usually after the holidays and after a vacation, I will sort of schedule a longer fast right after because I know that I can lose that weight very quickly. But that means I can enjoy myself. Like a couple of years ago, I went on a cruise and really ate too much. Just a lot. I had a lot and I knew it then I could feel it in my pants were tight and stuff.

27:09So I did sort of a three or four day fast. And I'll tell you by the next week, I was back to my normal weight. Well, that's great because a week and but I got to enjoy the whole week prior where I really didn't look that what I was eating or how often I was eating or anything. I was like, this is my vacation, I'm doing this. And at the same time, I know, hey, I've got this next, you know, after this week, the week after, you know, very little to eat. And it gives you a great tool to use if you need it. Yeah, it's almost like either every day, don't indulge and balance and create a schedule where you're only eating in a certain window of time, whether before six, eight hours, which I'm hearing is kind of the uh which would be a great standard to have between four and eight hours of a feeding time is that right yeah yeah i mean if you want to lose weight you can do very well of course with a sort of standard 70s style sort of 8 a.m to 6 p.m which in a 14 hour fast every single night remember they're doing eight for 12 to 14 hours say every single night without even thinking about it like that's a secret because they don't even think about that that's just a period of time that they're not eating right but now of course the the the traditions are different you can eat anywhere you want you can eat in the theater you can eat at your desk eating in a car like in the 70s stuff like that didn't exist you didn't eat in a meeting in a boardroom for example now you go to a meeting in a boardroom when there's food everywhere donuts donuts and cookies right somebody's ordered a plate of bagels or something like that right it's like well why we're having a meeting here.

28:42Right. So that's the, that's the thing. So you could do very well with that kind of, you know, eight hour eating window for 10 hour eating window. You can do very well with it, but if you're not doing well, then you can extend it. And that's the beauty of it. You could extend it as much as you want. Right. So if you think about fasting, you could go three days, you could go five days, you could go 30 days. People do that all the time, but no food, no food. Yeah. So if look, if you think about, um, fasting, so, uh, the, uh, what the amount of energy that you need, so a pound of fat has 3 ,500 calories, roughly if you need about 1800 calories.

29:23So that's for like a regular person, not like an athlete or somebody who's working out a lot. It takes about half a pound of fat per day. So if you're dealing with a lot of obese people, like a hundred pounds overweight, You could go 200 days. If you want to lose 100 pounds, you could go 200 days without eating before you get And survive. And survive, exactly. And be okay. Exactly. Be perfectly fine because this is a very efficient, fat is an efficient store of calories. It's very efficient. That's why we developed this. It's to keep you alive when there's no food around. Exactly. So use it. Does it affect your digestive system?

30:01Does it mess with your metabolism if you don't eat after a certain amount of time? Yeah. And what happens when you start eating again? Does that affect your, again, your stomach, your intestines, your colon, your metabolism? What's affected there? And this is the interesting part is that everybody thinks that fasting is like the worst thing you can do. When you actually look at the science of what happens during fasting, it's actually one of the best things you can do for yourself from both a mental standpoint and a physiologic standpoint, assuming, of course, you're not malnourished, right? I mean, I'm assuming if you're the average American who's, you know, 10, 20, 30 pounds overweight, then this is something that actually has a lot of benefits.

30:38So there's a lot of sort of myths around it. One is that you're going to burn a lot of muscle. And the truth is that you don't. I mean, when you, you know, if your body, your body stores energy as body fat. So people say, oh, you're going to burn muscle. It's like, well, you've got to think that our body is so stupid, that it stores energy as fat. But the minute you need it, it starts burning muscle, Right? Like, why would our body be so stupid? And if it were so stupid, how did we survive? Right? And it's like, you know, if you save firewood all winter for the winter, and then as soon as it gets cold, you chop up your sofa and throw it into the fire.

31:14It's like, why would you be so stupid? Right? Our body's just the same. It's not that. So, you know, and I know, and everybody knows that the way that you build muscle is that you exercise, right? So if you have, you know, lift heavy weights, then your muscles become stronger. It doesn't become stronger because you eat, right? That thing does nothing for building muscle. Like otherwise we'd be, you know, the strongest nation on earth, right? But we're not, we're the fattest nation on earth. So that's the whole problem, right? I mean, you're confusing two completely different things. There is a point during fasting where there is a little bit of protein breakdown and that's where people get very confused and say, well, you're burning muscle, but you're not protein is not the same as muscle.

31:58So our body has all kinds of protein, including all the connective tissue, like the skin and stuff that holds stuff in place. And some of that is often burned off. So for example, when you look at those shows where people get surgery and they lose 150 pounds, they get all this flappy skin, that's not excess fat, that's excess protein. So that's, you know, it's functional tissue that you've never used up. So we actually see very little of that problem when people fast, because there's a small period of time where they're actually using up the protein, your body will maintain its musculature based on what exercise and stuff you're using.

32:33So another big myth, so muscle burning is one thing. The other big, big myth is people talk about as a starvation mode or metabolic rate. So metabolic rate is the amount of energy that your body uses in a day, the number of calories you burn in a day. And this is what we see if you simply cut calories. So this is a standard medical advice, cut 500 calories a day, and you'll lose a pound of fat a week. What happens of course, is that you cut 500 calories a day. And then your body quickly reduces the amount of calories it uses by about 500 calories. So now you're actually not losing any weight. That's what happens all the time.

33:11Because why does it stop? Why does it stop burning those calories? Well, it stops burning the calories by reducing its metabolic rate. So the metabolic rate is the energy that your body uses to say, generate body heat, your liver, your kidney, your heart, and so on. And we've known this for 100 years that if you simply restrict the number of calories, but keep the foods very similar, what happens is that your body is going to start using less so because it doesn't like running a deficit, right? It's just like if you normally make$100 ,000 a year and you spend$100 ,000 a year, now you make$50 ,000, you don't keep spending$100 ,000, right?

33:49You're going to get thrown into jail. So you reduce your expenditure, same as the body. So it's getting less, so it's going to use less. And that's the natural reaction. It's important because it's a survival response. It cannot do anything different. So it's almost like you need to be extreme in your use in order for it to burn and kill off these cells that might be harmful to you. But if you just do a little bit, I'm going to eat a little bit less today. It's not going to be that much. It doesn't work. And people assume that if you go to zero, which is fasting, say you fast for a full day, you have zero calories.

34:27You don't die, right? Because what happens is completely different. Now you've lowered your insulin. So you're changing the hormonal profile of the body. And as you do that, you're now switching fuel sources. So instead of using food as your fuel, you're switching it into body fat, just like those hybrid cars, where you go from gas to electric, right? So it's using food and then boom, it goes, okay, I have no food coming in. I need to switch over now into body fat. And then it goes, whoa, I have like 500 ,000 calories of body fat here. So why do I need to cut, cut it down? And the point is that it doesn't because assuming if you have no body fat, of course, it's a problem.

35:09But for people who have adequate stores of body fat, which is most of us, and truthfully, most people do it for weight loss, too much body fat, then what happens is that there's so much there. Why wouldn't you use it? Because it's a fuel source. That's all it is. That's the way you have to look at the body fat. If you're eating all the time, you can never use your body fat because your, your insulin's here, your insulin's high. You're using food. Then you get hungry. So you eat some more, right? You have a snack, you have a low fat muffin. You stay here. There's, you can only burn food, all that stuff over there.

35:45Those 500 ,000 calories of body fat are completely inaccessible for your body. So if you simply dial it down like this and say, okay, instead of 2000 calories, I'm going eat 1500, but I'm going to eat 10 times a day, keeping myself here. Now you only have 1500 coming in. You can only burn 1500. You can't access that. If you go to zero, you go boom. And then your body burns the full 2000. So they did a study, for example, where they took people and fasted them for four days and measured how many calories they're using. They also measure their VO2, which as you know, is something that it's a measure of how much cellular work your body is doing and what they found.

36:23So they measured the metabolic rate at time zero. Then they measured it at four days of zero food. And they were burning 10 % more calories than they were per day than they were when they were eating. The VO two was 10 % higher. You're doing more work. Your body is actually not shutting down. It's revving itself up. And again, there's a good physiologic reason for that. And we know that when insulin goes down, when you switch yourself into this sort of you know, mode that you're burning fat, other hormones go up, including your sympathetic nervous system, which is your noradrenaline. So you're actually pumping your body up.

37:02The reason for that is sort of, again, it's a survival response. So imagine again, we're cave been, and it's winter, and there's no food. So if you don't eat for two days, and you get weaker, you're never dying again, you're going to die because every day is going to be harder, you're going to circle the drain. So our body is just not that stupid, right? So what they do is that your body says, Okay, there's no food coming in, boom, I'm going to switch you over to body fat. And then I'm going to pump you up so that you have energy, you go out there, you go kill that woolly mammoth, you're focused, you're clear in the zone, everything.

37:37Exactly. And that's, that's the reason that we actually pump ourselves up. And the constant, the mental aspects is actually fascinating because people also say, well, I, I have to eat because I have to concentrate. It's like your concentration is actually much higher when you don't eat. Think about when you had a huge Thanksgiving meal while were you really sharp or did you really want to just lie down on the sofa and watch some football, right? You don't have any sort of focus, but if you think about animals, it's the same thing. Lions, they just eat, they just like lounging around. But if you're the hungry wolf.

38:11That is not that is a very dangerous animal, because he's focused, he's ready to kill you. Same thing for us, our level of concentration, our mental ability, mental agility goes up significantly when we're hungry. Like if you think, oh, you're hungry for this, hungry for that, that doesn't mean you're falling down lethargic. It means you're focused. So it's interesting because there is this book a few years ago called Unbroken, which is a biography of this fellow who went to a prisoner of war camp in World War II Japan. And he was talking about starvation, and they were literally starving. They eat almost nothing for the full day.

38:52And he's talking about how his other prisoners were doing these incredible mental feats. So one guy was reading a book entirely from memory. Another guy learned all of Norwegian in a week. And so the guy says, this is simply the mental clarity of starvation. So it was incredible. It's like it was so widespread. Everybody was starving. And they'd see these incredible feats that nobody else in the world could do all the time. Because your mental ability is ramped up to such a high degree. And then, you know, in the ancient Greece, the ancient mathematician Pythagoras, he would require his students to fast.

39:35How many calories should we be eating a day? What's like a healthy range? You know what's funny about this? Your body is actually pretty good at telling you how much to eat. The problem is we eat, I know your people watching right now are probably like, what are you talking about? That's not true. It is. The problem is we eat foods, about 70 % of our diets are made up of foods that have been engineered, carefully engineered to make us overeat. And there's a lot of money in science that goes into doing this. Ultra-processed foods are very powerful at making us overeat. Snack foods with salt and sugar and yeah.

40:12Just a combination of things that, I mean everything from the texture to the mouth feel. Tastes so good. Yes. Just how it affects your body. So they've done some really good studies on this. They've done studies where they'll take groups of people and not too many controlled studies in diet. So these are really good. They actually put them in a lab and they say, you guys over here, eat as much as you want. You guys over here, eat as much as you want. This group over here has whole natural foods. This group over here has ultra processed foods and they even control for the macro. So proteins, fats, carbs are pretty similar.

40:41Then they take the groups and they switch them. Okay. On average, and now we have multiple studies to show this, people will eat about 600 more calories a day from eating ultra processed foods. So to give another example, if I were to put five or six plain boiled potatoes, no salt, no butter, nothing, just plain boiled potatoes in front of you, and I told you to eat them in 30 minutes, it would be really hard for you. After the second or third potato, you'd be gagging. You'd hit palate fatigue. Yes, just plain, right? But if they gave you a family-sized bag of potato chips, which has – Of course, the whole bag with like 2 ,000 calories or something.

41:16Which has similar amounts of food in it, actually more calories because of the oil, you'd be able to eat them. That's the power of ultra-processed foods and how palatable they are. So I used to do this with my clients, simply telling people the following, eat as much as you want, just avoid ultra-processed foods. You would typically see a 10 to 15-pound weight loss. Wow. Just from that. If you're eating whole foods, there's only so much you can eat. You hit palate fatigue faster. It's far more satiating. You just eat more appropriately. Our bodies, there's this myth that we're wired to overeat.

41:51We're just wired to just eat like crazy and just become obese. That's not true. We're not wired to do that. Overeating was just as bad for us thousands of years ago as it was today. I mean, you could have digestive issues. You could have died from that. Our bodies are pretty good at regulating. This is more complex than what I'm saying, but these particular foods make you overeat. simply avoiding them and even telling yourself, I'll eat as much as I want, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, meats, foods that have one or two ingredients, right? You'll find that your average calorie intake will probably decrease by about 500 to 600, some people even more.

42:27A day. A day. Wow. On average. And that's it. That's it. And then if you want to take it even a step further, if you add to that, here's a couple of behavioral things that you could do that make that even more effective. Whole natural foods, I'm not going to limit myself. And I like saying this because when we're in the mindset of limiting ourselves, it plays a lot of tricks on us and it's really hard. So don't limit yourself. Just eat all natural foods. And then here's a second one. Don't eat while distracted. In other words, when you eat, don't be on your phone. Don't watch TV. Just sit down and eat your meal.

43:00Why? That results in about 10 % reduction in caloric intake just from doing that alone. Why is that? We're not in tune with our body's signals of satiety. We're not focused and present on the food. So we're distracted and we just keep eating and eating and eating. Yes, we actually eat faster doing it that way as well. So what happens is the signal of satiety doesn't get registered quite as quickly when we're distracted. Also, being distracted could cause emotional changes, stress, anxiety, whatever, which also can create bad relationships with nutrition. Like one of the worst things you could do is like eat while watching stressful news or something like that.

43:37You're going to eat more, you're going to be stressed out. Absolutely. Right. So that's the second one. And they sound so simple, but they make such a huge impact on people. A third one you could do even, and this is another really easy one, is when you eat your meals, eat the protein first. Over the vegetables? Everything. Just eat the protein first, then eat everything else. Why is that? Protein is, in comparison to carbohydrates and fats, very satiating. So it produces a lot of satiety, right? It satisfies you. And the second reason is, and we now have what are called CGMs, right? Continual glucose monitors.

44:12The data on them is coming back and it's pretty clear that if you eat protein first, the spike in blood sugar... Yeah, it's blunted. Now, why is that important? A spike and then subsequent drop in blood sugar tends to promote cravings. It tends to make us want to eat more to get that blood sugar back up. So eating the protein first tends to result in, through the satiety and through the blunting effects of blood sugar tends to produce better satiety and make us eat less. So like those are three things right there, Lewis, that if people just did those three things and didn't say to themselves, I got to restrict, I got to cut, I got to whatever, they would find over time that they would just start to lose weight and they would eat more appropriately.

44:55Wow. That's not working out more. That's not moving your body more. That's just through nutritional eating. Yes, and to speak about moving more, the burning calories approach to weight loss is a losing, total losing strategy. Oh yeah, the data on that's very clear. Burning calories manually, our bodies do a terrific job of adapting and of - Storing fat, you're saying. And slowing down its calorie burn. We have a range within our current lean body mass, okay? We have a range of calories our bodies can burn. So there's like more efficient, less efficient. and burning calories manually, at first your body's burning more calories, but eventually your body knows how to make up for that and make you burn less calories.

45:37So the studies on tons of exercise for weight loss are pretty clear. It's a terrible approach. Now, it's not to say you don't get health benefits from moving more. You still get health benefits, but from a weight loss perspective, it's a terrible strategy. Now, there are some forms of exercise, one in particular, that can boost metabolic rate. What's that? Strength training. Lifting, yeah. Strength training is very effective. There was a study done with modern hunter-gatherers, the Hadza tribe of northern Tanzania. So they live the way that humans lived thousands of years ago, right? So they don't have electronics.

46:10They hunt. They gather. In comparison to the average Westerner, they're very active. Scientists went and studied them and through some pretty sophisticated testing, tested their metabolic rates. How many calories are they burning every single day? and what they found was they were burning generally the same amount of calories as the average western couch potato. Really? Yeah and now you think at first well that's crazy they're moving so much but actually it makes sense. Our bodies would not have if we burned 6 ,000 calories a day as hunter-gatherers we wouldn't be here. 6 ,000 calories in a hunter-gatherer society is hard to come by so our bodies learn to adapt.

46:45Now strength training on the other hand tends to have a different effect. The main adaptation with strength training is to build muscle, the side effect of which is, and if you fuel it, you have to also feed your body appropriately to do this, but if you feed your body properly and strength train, the tendency is for the metabolism to boost or to go up. So you can see through this process, and I've done this many, many times with people, where they'll come and hire me, we'll lose 30 pounds and we can eat more at the end of this process than we did before the process. More calories or just more food?

47:19All of it. Yeah. Which... They lose fat. Oh, yeah. They're leaner. They have a little bit more lean body mass, five to 10 pounds, depending on male or female, but they're burning more calories than they went into. Now why is this important? Well, it's a great buffer. If you have a fast metabolism today, this is a wonderful buffer against the challenges of modern living, which is sedentary and food everywhere, super accessible. So fast metabolism today is an asset, whereas 10 ,000 years ago, it might've been a liability. So strength training does that. Now, strength training doesn't burn as many calories as like running.

47:56But remember, I said that really doesn't make a big difference because your body learns to adapt to that anyway. But the strength training does contribute to a faster metabolism over time, or at the very least, help prevent or mitigate the metabolic adaptation or slowdown that tends to happen when we reduce calories to lose weight. And then there's more to that. Because of the muscle building process, you see the balancing of hormones that we're all kind of looking for. Like in men, you see more testosterone, higher androgen receptor density. This is what testosterone attaches to. You see more appropriate levels of cortisol, balancing of estrogen and progesterone.

48:34in women, growth hormone tends to be more youthful because when I tell my body to build muscle, my body organizes its hormones in a way to do so. And the hormone profile that contributes to muscle building just so happens to be the youthful hormone profile that we're looking for. So I tend to, when I recommend exercise to people, average person who I know, like, okay, maybe we'll get them to do this two days a week, you know, if we do a good job, I tell them, if you're gonna pick just one form, do strength training. It's going to be the most effective one. And then if you add something else, then it'd be great if you added some cardiovascular and some mobility or flexibility training.

49:10Wow. So if you can only choose one, strength training or cardio, you're saying strength training all day? 100%. 100%. Building muscle. Yeah. It's far more protective. It's going to boost your metabolism, which will make being obese harder. It balances out your hormones better. Muscle sticks around longer than the calorie burning effects of whatever you're getting from the form of exercise. Once you stop your workout, there's the calorie burn, which like I said earlier, your body adapts to anyway. But when you build muscle, it sticks around for a little while before you start to lose it and you develop something called muscle memory, which I know you understand as an athlete, right?

49:47Have you ever broken a bone or anything like that? Okay. You take the cast off, muscle super or your arms. But very quickly it bounces back. There's something called muscle memory. So if you build muscle and let's say you stop for whatever reason, exercising, and then you go back to working out, you'll gain that muscle back in a small fraction of the time. So it's a more, for lack of a better term, because there's no permanence when it comes to this, but it's a more permanent form of results or fitness, which just so happens to fit perfectly with the challenges of modern life. When you look at the average person and you're saying, okay, what are the challenges that are preventing them from being healthier?

50:28It's okay. I'm surrounded by tons of food. I'm inactive. Is there something that can protect me against inactivity, which muscle does very well? Hormone imbalances now are rampant. And there's going to be times when even the most consistent average person, not fitness fanatic, is going to not work out for a month or two. Is there something that'll help them bounce back faster? Strength training, it just tends to do that. What about training where it's half strength training and half cardio? It's like an orange theory or something like this where you're doing like 20, 30 minutes of lifting kind of like in between different sets maybe not to failure of fatigue but intense you know lifting and then some two or three miles of running with intervals what does that do for the body for weight loss for metabolism yeah so i want to be clear all forms of exercise so long as they're applied appropriately are going to benefit you so all forms of exercise have benefit so long as they're not overdone or inappropriate for the individual so that being said strength training needs to be in order to reap the real benefits of strength training, it has to be applied in a particular way.

51:32Otherwise, it ends up becoming cardio with weights. So if I did like a bunch of circuits, even though I'm doing curls and presses and rows, really what I'm doing is just a lot of cardio, I'm just using weights. Okay, so if you really want to reap the benefits of strength training, you want to train in the way that builds strength and muscle. Now, I do want to be careful because I'm probably invoking images of bodybuilders with veins coming out of their neck and You mentioned it, right? Intensity, failure, lifting, whatever. That's not what most people need to do, okay? Most people would derive tremendous benefits if they went to the gym and strength trained and they did traditional do a set, rest for a minute, do a set, rest for a minute.

52:15But the way that they did their set was practice. So the exercise as a skill, that's what we're going to look at. So rather than I'm going to go in here to beat up my legs, I'm going to go practice squats. rather than I'm going to go hammer my shoulders, I'm going to practice overhead presses. This tends to lead to more appropriate applications of exercise, and you see a more consistent, you know, strength gains, more consistent muscle gains, and far less risk injury. So intensity, although it's an important factor to manipulate, people over-apply it. They think that... You're going to failure on everything.

52:51Yeah, no, no, no, no, that's not the case. Like I said earlier, you need to have more energy at the end of your workout, and you probably shouldn't feel sore or if you do feel a little sore the day after. And so for most people, that's just like go in and get really good and practice these exercises that we know to be very effective. You're squatting, you're deadlifting, you're rowing, you're pressing, you know, maybe some kind of a split stance exercise like a lunge, some kind of rotation. And just practice them and get good at them. And naturally over time, people will apply more intensity, add more load, and they'll see the results that come from that.

53:25But that's a very, very, it's a much more effective long-term approach versus the go to the gym, beat myself up attitude. Yeah. What about, I'm sure you've answered this, I don't know, a thousand times, but, you know, belly fat seems to be the thing a lot of people want to eliminate, right? Is there a formula for eliminating belly fat? Yeah. Or can you do it lots of different ways? Or what's the best approach to doing it? Yeah. So for the most part, where we store or lose body fat is determined by our genetics. So a good rule of thumb is the first place that I store it is probably going to be the last place that I lose it.

53:59Now, that being said, hormonal changes can change the distribution of body fat on your body. So if you see like women with very, very high cortisol, estrogen, progesterone imbalances, they'll start to notice more belly fat than they normally would. Men whose, let's say, testosterone is low, estrogen levels may be too high, they'll see more body fat level, more body fat storage in maybe the upper body, back of the arms, maybe in the lower body. So you'll start to see different patterns. But that's really a small percentage of where we tend to store body fat. It's largely determined by genetics.

54:37So the question is, how do I get rid of body fat? Well, it's the same way that you get rid of any body fat. you have to create an energy imbalance, which to put it simply, and again, it's more complex than this, but to put it simply, you have to be able to burn more calories than you take in. And we already talked about some of the effective ways of that, but if you can burn more than you take in, then you'll see body fat loss as a result. And building muscle is a great way to make that formula work for you. Because if you don't, what ends up happening is you cut calories, You do tons and tons of cardio.

55:13You cut calories. You lose 15 pounds. You're stuck. Okay, I guess I cut calories more. And you lose muscle too. Well, that's what happens, right? Your body's adapting. So you end up losing some muscle. So now you got to cut even more to lose that next 10 pounds. And then at the end of it, it's like, okay, I'm eating 1300 calories a day to maintain this 25 pound weight loss. This is unsustainable. And then you gain it back. So what you want to do is you want to say, okay, I definitely want to eat healthier, but not so little that I can't fuel muscle growth. And I want to strength train so that I can get my metabolism to learn how to burn more calories on its own.

55:47And in the process, it looks more like a snowball effect rather than this quick weight loss with plateau. So you start to see the scale move a little bit, and then it happens faster and faster and faster. And then you feel better. And, you know, I like to communicate this as well, which is, especially to women, muscle is a lot more dense than body fat. So don't get too obsessed with the scale. You know, if I could have everybody watching this lose 10 pounds of body fat and gain 10 pounds of muscle, their weight on the scale wouldn't change, but everybody would be smaller. And their body composition would look a lot better too.

56:19Oh, you're going to look different, but you're going to be smaller because body fat just takes up more space. I used to have this trainer that worked for me. I used to love this. This is a great sales technique when I was a general manager. I'd have, if I had a new member, especially a woman who was apprehensive to lifting weights, I would invite this trainer that worked for me. And I'd say, if you could guess her body weight within 10 pounds, I'll give you a free membership for a month. Wow. And she was very petite. She was like 5 '1 or whatever. And they would always guess like, oh, she's 100 pounds.

56:50She's 110 pounds. And I'd get her on the scale and she was 130 pounds. And it would prove my point. Like she has a lot of muscle, but she's small because muscle is very dense. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well.

57:28Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.