7-Ways To Make A Calorie Deficit SUCK Less

Today, we are going through seven things you can do to make a calorie deficit suck less, because yeah, a calorie deficit is simple on paper, eat less than you burn. But in real life, it's not that easy to execute. But before we get into it, if you've been needing a little bit more structure, especially around this time of year, remember that you get access to every single one of our complete 12 week training programs that are programmed out into Google sheet. So you can track and guarantee that you are making progress in your workouts, all by joining FS premium. And that's just $5 a month. You also get tons of other sick perks like bonus episodes every single Friday, AMA style, where we answer your questions. And it takes less than 60 seconds to sign up for. We'll leave a link to do that in the show notes down below this episode. And real quick, if you haven't already, you can follow us on Spotify to stay up to date on every new episode. You can also comment underneath the episodes on Spotify now. If you have any questions or recommendations, we love to see that. And before we get into the episode, quick shout out to our sponsor, Legion athletics, they are doing a crazy sale through the end of January, where it is by one, get one 50% off the entire site. Don't forget to use the code FS pod at checkout. Reup on all of your staples going to the new year, your protein powder, your creatine, your fish oil, your vitamin D, your pre workout, all that good stuff. We'll leave the link in the show notes below. We made it past national quitter's day, that's January 19th. That's national quitter day because that's when most people quit their new year's resolution. So if you're listening to this and you haven't quit yet, good ups on you. You made it past quitter's day. I just think that's a funny name for a holiday. It's national. We made it so funny. I forgot that that was we made it. Now if you're listening to this and you are any deficit, maybe that was part of your New Year's resolution was to put yourself on a fat loss phase and maybe you are killing it up to this point, but maybe, maybe things are starting to slip through the cracks or it's getting a little bit harder to keep up with because doing it is not as easy as the concept. That's what this episode is all about. A calorie deficit on paper, simplest thing in the entire world, eat less than you burn, implementing it. That's when you start to get in trouble. And there's this mental model that Shane Parish over at Farms Street talks about that. I've mentioned before, but it completely changed how I approach most information, but especially information and fitness is called the map is not the territory. Have I talked about that on the podcast before? Play. That sounds familiar. I feel like I've heard it. It's called the map is not the territory. And here's what it means. A map is just a reduction of reality because if your map had every single detail of the real world on it, it would just be the real world. It would be useless, right? The whole point of a map is that it leaves stuff out so you can actually navigate. But here's the problem because maps are reductions. They're always wrong to some degree. They have to be. They're useful because they are simplified, but they're never perfect representations of reality. And this applies to nearly everything that we talk about in fitness. Calorie calculators, those are maps. The ideal macro splits maps, your training programs. That's a map. Even something like calories and versus calories out, that's a map of how fat loss works. They're all useful frameworks, but none of them are the actual territory of your body, your metabolism, your life. So the calculator says that you should be losing weight at 2000 calories. Cool. That's what the map says. But if the territory, aka your actual results is telling you something different, you don't argue with the territory. You adjust because the map can be wrong. But the territory never is. And this is why I'm so big on testing things instead of just following how things should work. The research, the formulas, the guidelines, those are all maps, very useful starting points, but they're not gospel. And if you don't take into account the territory after you set up a deficit, you are almost guaranteed to fail somewhere along the way. That's where you have to start thinking and putting actions into place to make this easier. Because with the right system set up in place for a calorie deficit, it can feel like a second thought. It could not bother you too much or it could be the hardest thing in the world that you can't get out of your head 24 hours a day. When you are just starving food noises at 110 and you just can't stop thinking about it. It's genuinely the worst. And I mean, that's why so many people are on ozombic is they can't. Yeah. All they do is think about food. Ozombic allows you to be in a deficit without feeling the hunger. Basically, it turns all that down for you. Something like that does make it easier so you don't have to put the effort into set up the systems in your life to do it. But not everyone's going to jump on ozombic at least at least now. Who knows? Right. Like I feel like in 10 years, Tony, I feel like that's going to be a completely different statement, which honestly, like everyone's just microdosing. Does anything could be the first oral pill, not shot like actual needle shot. I saw recently came out. That'll be interesting to do. But that's not what we talking about today. We're not talking about ozombic. We're talking about the seven things you can do to make a calorie deficit suck less. Well, we're like, how do we get calorie deficit suck less? No, I don't want to. I'll take a second. Take a second. That's it. Good episode. Talk to you guys in AMA on Friday. No, but these seven, they're in no particular order, but these seven things you do can make a break. How easy it is to stick to it, which in the end of the day will, will determine whether or not you make it across the finish line. But in no particular order, the first one we got is to protect your sleep like it is part of your diet because it literally is right. You can't simply out discipline bad sleep. A calorie deficit with poor sleep feels just objectively worse, not even emotionally worse, but just biologically worse. And this is exactly what I've been talking about with my recent favorite analogy that I've said probably every episode for the last time, and as episodes of swimming up or downstream and how easy it is to accomplish something, when your sleep decreases, you see a sharp increase in grilling your hunger hormone, you see a massive decrease in leptin production, your satiety hormone or what fills you up. You see a higher reward response to food, significantly less impulse control and higher cravings for fat and sugar. The same exact calories, but a completely different experience based on how well you slept last night and not only is research clear in all of this that it makes almost every aspect of dieting harder when you get bad sleep, but it's also clear that when you diet on low sleep, more of your weight loss will come from lean mass than fat mass. So not just harder results, but worse results. It amplifies your hunger signals. It's reducing your satiety or how full you feel after these meals, it increases your emotional eating it lowers your stress tolerance. And that's why people say I was fine all day. And then I just snapped at night. Most of the time it wasn't weakness. It was just exhaustion or your battery was just running low. And sleep can be hard to fix. It's not like flipping a switch. So some practical implementation of this would be, I mean, one, I think I've plugged this episode more than anything else. Go listen to episode a three how to fix your sleep full episode on sleep. But some other practical takeaways that you can implement today is to one set a sleep floor, not a perfect goal. So not eight hours or I fail, but more like I don't go under seven in less life, freaking explodes. Right. You want to be more consistent than optimized is a good way to think about it. So don't beat yourself up if you're less than perfect. If you're less than eight hours, but don't let it get so damaging unless again, your life explodes. You have a massive emergency at the hospital or a family emergency comes up. Something explodes in your life, not just because your friends wanted to go out on a Thursday. That does not suffice for ruining your sleep. Number two would be to actually match calories, endure day to your sleep reality. Right. So on poor sleep days, one, start with front loading protein early on in the day. That's probably one of the best things you can do to at least combat the hunger and state ideas, issues that you'll run into front load protein early on in the day, drink about 50% more water than you normally do another huge key that's going to help really bring down hunger throughout the day. And then try to manage your stress on top of that because under eating plus exhaustion. Because you're stressed at work harder workouts, anything else, you're going to run into the likelihood of just bingeing at night and over eating. That's just what happens most of the time. And then I would say three is try not to stack your stressors, i.e. your hardest training sessions of the week or big days at work with aggressive projects after a bad night sleep. If you have the flexibility of your schedule to do something like that. Right. Like if you're biggest day of the week for your workouts is your first or second leg day of the week. And you just slept like crap last night and that was scheduled for today. Try and substitute it for something lighter because when you stack stressors. The probability that you over eat that you banger that you crash is just way higher. Right. That's how diets implode you can even consider pulling your calories up a little bit. If you're on a more aggressive cut on a day that you get low sleep. You slept like crap bump it up by two 300 calories to avoid what you know would come without it. Because most people don't quit diets. Just because they are hungry. Right. Like hunger does ruin diets. That's what it gets in the way. But they quit because they're tired. They're irritable. They're mentally fried. They are craving relief. So sleep doesn't just affect results. It affects how painful the process feels. And if your sleep is an absolute train wreck. Again, I can't recommend enough. Go listen to episode 83. How to fix your sleep for a complete. deep dive on how to fix it. It is one of the most powerful things you can do to not even just 10x how easy this is sticking to a deficit, but any measure of your progress, even your incremental health building muscle losing fat. We could go on and on. But that's number one is to protect your sleep like it's part of your diet. What's the second thing people can do? I said the worst sleep in the world. Like I should have been a case study or some shit. It scared me really. The first like hundred episodes, you would come in off like two hours of sleep. I thought you were functioning fine off like eight and you told me I'm like you're terrifying. The next is eating a high protein and a high fiber diet because what we just talked about like hunger is one of the biggest reasons why being in a deficit sucks and there's always going to be an element of hunger. Like you are in an energy deficit. So you are going to feel hunger. That's a normal response. It would actually be frightening if like you didn't feel it at all because your body should be telling you that you are hungry when you're in an energy deficit. But just across the board, when you just increase protein in your diet without paying attention to quite literally anything else, one thing happens every single time and that is you eat less total food. And I still don't understand why a Maricop thinks that we are eating too much protein. I don't understand that. But protein is one of the most satiating foods you can consume. It slows down digestion. It increases levels of appetite reducing hormones. So satiety hormones like GLP1, which is GLP1's, what they target, peptide YY and some other cytokines while reducing your level of the hunger hormone, Grelin. So this is going to help you naturally consume fewer calories. And also you want to make sure when you're in a deficit, you want to make sure you're retaining as much lean muscle mass as you can. So it's even more important to be eating a high protein diet. Oh, it's also going to increase the thermic effective food. So after you eat your body uses some calories to digest and metabolize the food. And that is the thermic effective food. Also protein like a secondary outcome of it is that it can help stabilize your mood and help with fatigue, which is really, really, really important when you're in a deficit. Like we were just talking about with sleep. And your mood also can influence your your hunger levels as well. So that's just another piece of it. And then fiber as well is different, but it also helps mentally with satiety because it moves slowly through your digestive tract, which is going to also keep you fuller longer. So the combination of protein and fiber like one of the best things you could do, specifically soluble fiber. And like they're soluble and insoluble fiber, but you really don't, if you are eating like high fiber foods like vegetables, like gooms, whole grains, your greens, like you don't have to worry about like which type, but it is specifically the soluble fiber that has this effect because it dissolves in water to form this like gel like material in your gut. And the gel slows the emptying of your stomach, which increases digestion and absorption times. So that's a huge piece like protein and slows the speed of digestion just in a different way, which helps with the feeling of fullness, satiety and reduced appetite. And this is going to help with the likelihood of like overeating after a meal, feeling really hungry and like not satisfied after a meal. And that is like the key, like even if you still generally in a deficit are going to have a little bit of hunger, you should still feel satisfied for the most part after your meals, because you really want to prevent benches and getting to the point where you find you're having these meals, we are overeating and you just kind of lose control because you're so hungry. And satiety and satiation are two different things. So satiety is the feeling of fullness that persists after eating. So it affects the length of time between eating events and possibly the amount of energy consumed at the next eating interval. And satiation is the satisfaction of appetite that occurs during the eating experience and causes you to actually stop eating. So satiation is important in controlling the amount of food you're going to eat at that meal or that snack. And both satiety and satiation are increased through regular fiber intake. And I mean fiber, there are so many health benefits from fiber in general. And this is what like I will always I've just been like nothing makes me happier. And like one of the comments I get most on my recipe videos on like TikTok and Instagram is just when I'm making these high protein and high fiber recipes, even though I'm not like always advertising fiber, just how good you feel after eating that. Like you feel good. Like so many people are so used to not feeling satisfied after meals. And once you truly start to like familiarize yourself with what that feels like, it like changes the game even in a deficit because you go from oh my god, I still could eat. I could have a whole other meal after this versus oh, I might be a little hungry or like depending on the time of day, you might be perfectly satisfied. And it really changes the game. I remember when I used to like really, really struggle with my eating disorder and I know it's a little bit different, but I didn't know what it meant to be satisfied. I genuinely did not understand it because I was just so focused on restriction, restriction, eating as little as possible. And like when I started to just really focus on that like taming my hunger piece, it's just like, damn, I always have moments all the time where I'm just like, it's so crazy that in between meals, I'm not constantly thinking about my next meal, once the next meal, once the next meal, and you're going to have moments in a deficit where that happens. Yeah. Sometimes it's just going to be hard, but that's just a part of it. But you shouldn't have this like constant like, which a lot of people do. It's like every single hour is brutal because you're just starving and you're just waiting and you're waiting and you're so hungry and you're trying to stay off that hunger. It's a very time bomb. Yeah, it really, really is. So the fiber and protein piece is going to be and huge. I honestly, not even just how full or satisfied you feel after with fiber. I didn't want fiber to make me feel as good as it made me feel. I tested it out because I was low. Like a lot of people are not getting enough. And like let me commit to this for like 30 days, see if it actually makes a difference. And like it probably won't. It's whatever. Oh, you just said, was I freaking wrong? And not even just how satisfied or full I was because at the time, I wasn't even eating in a deficit. Like I wasn't experiencing a large amount of hunger period. But just how I'm trying to put it, how good you just feel after a meal. Yeah, it's like I didn't feel this constant weighed down or I don't know. Like sometimes after a meal, I would just feel a little brain fog or it would just kind of sit in there. And when I started incorporating fiber through my day, it wasn't just a satiety thing. It was just how good overall I felt after meals, which to me made a huge difference. And one that I did not see coming. Well, that's the piece where it's like the your fiber. We don't digest it. It's non digestible carbohydrates. That's what fiber is. And it is digested. So to say, or fermented as the proper term, by the gut bacteria, our gut bacteria is what ferments fiber. And fiber is what feeds the good bacteria in our gut. And are if we have that like dysbiosis in our gut microbiome, that really impacts energy levels. And like just how you can feel overall. So like if we're constantly like allowing our ecosystem and within our gut bacteria to thrive and have that good bacteria like growing and have that balance, eating a high fiber diet is single handedly the best way you could intervene from like a dietary perspective. It makes such a huge difference. And I feel like people underestimate like how feeling like if you are in a deficit, but you also not just the hunger, but you just feel shitty in general. Like not feeling good. It doesn't motivate you to be good to your body. It's like yeah, I have a little hunger, but like I am thriving. Like I feel like I'm doing really good. Like I'm feeling like I'm being really successful. Like I have a lot of energy. I still feel good. You can still feel good and have a little bit of like hunger from your deficit. Feeling like shit. Like doesn't motivate you. Every single day, like you might have your monomits where you feel really motivated, but every single day to like wake up and be excited about working towards a goal. It's really hard if you feel like crap. That's the piece that just how you overall feel afterwards. It comes down. I think maybe to willpower would be the best way to look at it. That stuff eats away at your willpower like feeling crappy eats away at your willpower. So it might not be directly to your hunger, but that'll show up later in the day when it takes a little bit of willpower. When it's like, oh crap, I got to cook for five minutes if I actually want to hit my schedule you know, like what I'd planned on to hit my protein, my calories, or I could just Uber eats. That's when that shows up. So if you're just feeling like crap because of some aspect of your diet, a 100% if you are new to tracking or you have had a really bad experience with tracking and restriction and like polio-yoyo dieting, start first with just every single large meal that you eat. Just start tracking your fiber and protein. Make sure that you have a fiber and protein source and make sure you're hitting your protein goal and make sure you're hitting that fiber goal of like 25 to 35 grams of fiber per day. Start there because it's structured, but like I know we're talking about being in a deficit, but for those people who are either beginners and are intimidated by the act of tracking or if you have a bad, bad relationship with just tracking and falling off and restriction stuff, start with just protein fiber before you even worry about the calories. Because especially if you've been low, if you haven't been hitting your like eating enough protein, you haven't been eating enough fiber, you'll naturally be eating less. You will be less hungry. So you're already going to be one step ahead. And so it will make it so much easier once you do start tracking your calories. I would bet for some people listening, if they just hit 35 grams of fiber and their protein goal every single day without paying attention to calories, I bet half of them would hit their calorie goal without even paying attention to it. Yeah. It's still my god. Hard to automatically feel like that to like feel super hungry after. It's really hard. And it takes a lot of mental load off your plate because you have to pay attention to calories, which is that big thing, which leads us, I think, well into number three, how to make a deficit. This one can be done in a lot of different ways. But I can't stress enough how important it is to engineer your environment. So will power barely matters. Will power, yes, it's a muscle. You should train it. You should strengthen your willpower. It will show up not just in a diet, but everywhere in life. But the less friction you can cause by your diet, how you engineer your environment around that, oh, 10 x's your probability to succeed, right? Like if your diet requires huge amounts of discipline from the start, you're just set up to fail. Nobody fails a diet simply because they're lazy. They fail because their environment is working against them most of the time. And most of the time, you don't eat based on what you know, you eat based on what's visible, what's easy and what's available when you are tired or busy. And guess what? Most days of the week, you're probably experiencing a little bit of tiredness or busyness if it's not already all the time. Your willpower is finite. It's stress sensitive. It's sleep dependent and it gets rekt by hunger. And by six to nine pm, most people are just running low. They're under recovered. They're underfed. They're decision-fatee from a long day, especially if it was a work day. And that's when diets die. It's not a character flaw in you. It's just literally neuroscience fighting against you. And obviously you can push past any friction when you first start your diet. When you are the most motivated, if you got a wedding coming up, it's easy to push past any of that friction. Yeah, I'm a little hungry. I can deal with it. But day and and day out because successful diets don't last a couple of weeks, but several months, usually at least. And people just consistently overestimate their self control and the massively underestimate the friction that is caused by their environment. When I say the word friction, I keep saying that. By friction, I just mean how annoying something is to do. The less friction between you and any action, the more likely it is to happen. The more friction and the less likely it is to happen. That's it. That's the game. And research shows that people eat more foods that are visible, that are easily accessible, and are pre-packaged and ready to eat. A really cool review done found that actually just visibility and proximity alone can change people's intake by hundreds of calories per day without changing hunger cues at all. And how you would actually implement this into real life is to one, start by just making lower calorie high protein foods unavoidable. I level in the fridge front of shelves already cooked washed portion like precutting your fruits, having Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, pre-grilled chicken ready to go protein shakes, meals prepped or even this is where ordering a meal prep service could even be worth it in certain cases, because it is taking away any friction between you and the right thing. The second thing to do is the flip side of that coin. It's to add friction to hyper-palatable foods. Not to ban them. You shouldn't be cutting out any bad foods. Just make them more inconvenient is all we're saying. So for example, put snacks in opaque containers in higher cabinets or in the freezer so you have to unfreeze them to eat them. That's an elite move. Put a snack that you like for me like M&Ms or chocolate. Put them in the freezer so you can't just eat them. You have to get them out in freezer. That little 10, 20 minute buffer. At least with my pay dd, I'll forget about it. It's out of sight out of mind. It won't work like that. For less helpful foods, make yourself make them. A dumb example that I did before. I love chocolate chip cookies. And I would buy from Amazon Fresh. They have this, I don't even know what they're called. They're the most beautiful fresh baked cookies ever. And I could eat six, seven of them in a day. I didn't mean to say six, seven like that. But I could eat a ton in a day. Instead, one month when I did this, I'm like, you know what? I can still have cookies if I want. I'm just going to buy the ingredients to make it myself. Do you think I ever made the cookies? Absolutely freaking not. The batter, the eggs, the mix. No, it just sat there. I did not consume any cookies, but it didn't fight my brain because I knew I still had access to cookies. But putting things like that, and that's just one example, in the way to create more friction between you doing the thing that you don't want to do, it works. If you have to stand up, open containers, unfreeze or cook, you just eat less automatically. And then the third tip here would be just to pre-commit your default meals. The decision fatigue is hunger's best friend. So have two to three auto pilot breakfast, two to three lunches. You rotate that you actually like and one to two go to dinners, not forever, but just during a deficit. The less thinking that's required, the more adherence improves. And this is why meal prep, it works. It's not for everybody like for myself, but I also live at home. I live 13 steps from my kitchen. But meal prep works, not because it's magic, because it removes decisions. If your diet feels hard, don't try harder, just make it harder to mess up. That's the overall takeaway from this. And that can be implemented in a million ways. If you're having a hard time finding practical ways to do this, this is one of the best things to think tank. I use AI for like a chat GPT, a cloud, tell them your scenarios, tell them what you got going on, take a picture of your fridge, whatever, and just ask it to think tank for you. Say, hey, I'm having a hard time engineering my environment to make these things harder or easier. Give me 10 different approaches that I could take. Some of them, most of them will probably be BS, but you'll get some good ones to take away from that you can actually use. If you have a hard time figuring out very specific examples for your scenario, I think that's a really good use of AI there. I know not a lot of people are fans AI, but can really help, which leads us into number four, though. What is number four? Number four is to, oh, this is a good one. Oh, this is a good one. I actually did it right. Is to not cut out all the foods you enjoy being in a deficit doesn't mean like you have to be perfect 110 million percent of the time. It doesn't mean that you can't ever touch a sweet again. It doesn't mean that you can't eat processed food like it doesn't mean that. In fact, if you have that mentality, it's going to make it so much worse like instead of following these diets that cut out entire like not just foods you enjoy palatable foods, but even entire food groups like carbs and fat like it's just not helpful. And also like significantly slashing your calories is another piece of this like having a realistic calorie goal is also important here, but making focusing on making realistic and specific changes to your eating behaviors like we just talked about like adding and protein, adding in fiber, focusing on what you can add in versus what you're going to take away. It is the most counter intuitive when you really sit for a second and think about it. If you are putting all of your energy into what foods you cannot eat, you have do not have you're not focusing on what you can eat and what you want to eat and what you can enjoy and all that piece like it is why nobody understands who have fallen into this cycle what it means to eat things in moderation. If you line up 10 people who have dieted in their lives and are not really in like haven't mastered it yet and you're like hey do you think you could have this bed and Jerry's and your freezer and not eat the whole thing when sitting I'm sure half of them would just like laugh at you and be like okay I could not have more. You know what I mean really it makes it hard to enjoy the process because okay you're in a deficit you know your calorie goals you know your protein goals you're trying to hit your fiber and you are planning out your meals for the week leave a little bit of room for the foods that you know you crave all the time and your cravings are going to naturally naturally be a little bit heightened that's a part of the energy deficit piece because our brain is going to make us crave like more calorie dense foods foods that are going to give us more energy quicker so a lot of that like the time that is going to be the more palatable foods that aren't providing any nutrition for us and that's normal. Tame that, tame those signals from your brain by throwing in a few if your Oreos your favorite cookie, throw in a few Oreos at your lunch like fill them into your calories. If you love ice cream and you know sometimes for people the protein ice creams are like great and they fit in and they're easy that's totally fine if that works for you but for some people it's like oh I can only eat so much halotop until I am stuffing a bed and Jerry's to my face because I'm sick and tired of pretending like this tastes like ice cream and like bed and Jerry's super high calorie like it's not always going to be the smartest decision I'm not going to lie. Certain foods like it's like damn like you do want to be smart about your calories because you're going to be hungry but every now and then it's like no I want to have a serving yourself and Jerry's and I know I can it's that knowing you can allow yourself is the biggest piece because then it doesn't become as enticing you do not want to make these foods so off limits that your brain wants them more it's just what happens and then you fall into this binge restrict cycle if you're like I need to go cut out all sugar I can't touch sugar ever again you're going to want sugar more it's just how our brains work and that restriction with the chronic dieting piece that cycle is like so hard once you get stuck in it. It can lead to like if you're restricting foods, it can lead to just super obsessive thoughts about those foods. It leads to binging and it leads to restriction again. And it can awful, I mean so many people I'm sure listening have fallen into that. And just really making sure that we're not focusing on cutting out all these food groups. And let's say obviously you have like a health need to do so. And we're allowing some of these foods and moderation within to our like our diet. Because then also I think a huge piece of that is like this calorie deficit people forget, especially if you've been in this diet cycle for so long, it's temporary. It's temporary. Do you think that you're just gonna, oh, I'm not gonna have like foods that are just purely satisfied taste? They're not satisfying anything other than taste. I want to taste them. I want to enjoy them. I want to just eat this food for enjoyment. You're just gonna cut that out completely. And that doesn't mean that you're not enjoying the healthy foods too. But there are certain foods that yeah, they're not providing much other than like I love the taste of this food. It's one of the reasons why people travel to go enjoy different foods and palettes and tastes and it's a cultural experience. It's something you do on holidays. Like do you think you're just gonna cut that out forever? Be really realistic. Oh, this is my favorite food on the planet. I'm never ever ever eating it again. If I think like that, like how are you gonna feel once you're out of this deficit? You do, you want to prevent that crash as much as possible into I'm burnt out. I'm eating everything and allowing those foods and moderation, whatever they may be is going to be huge and is going to make your experience so much more enjoyable. Like so much more enjoyable. And people will argue, I can see this popping up in the head and because I've heard this before, people will argue and try to convince themselves with it just because they're so conditioned to this, you have to cut out foods to be healthy mindset at any level of that game. They'll convince themselves, well, okay, I know it rationally doesn't make sense from a craving standpoint, but if I cut out the Oreos or the bowl of ice cream after dessert, it will give me better results or it will be healthier for me. And that's where we try to cover this again. It's not in moderation. It's not health comes from coverage. It doesn't come from subtraction. These poisonous chemicals that the government's putting into our food, that's not real. That does not exist. Having two Oreos isn't actively harming your health. It's what that is replacing your diet that is potentially harming your health. Health comes from coverage as in your body has requirements for vitamins for nutrients for minerals that if not met, that's where health problems come from. So if yes, you are eating sleeves of Oreos. That's all you're eating and you are not getting any vitamins, any minerals, any nutrients. That's where the lack of health is coming from. That's where the damage to your health is coming from. Not because the Oreos are actively doing it. So it's BS2 trying to reason that in. It's like, no, I'm just doing this because I know it's better. No, it's not. If you hit the same calories, the same protein goals and you're getting your nutrients, your body will change identical to someone who's cutting out whatever but eating the same calories, same protein. So that I just wanted to cover is a backup reason because I know some people will still try and kind of re-sale their selves into it by saying and justifying it with that. You know what I'm saying? This little tip if you do really struggle with binging on certain foods that like you really love and would love to eat again. If you have someone in your life, this was like a helpful tip for me when I was like really working on my binge eating. Peanut butter was my bias. It was so frustrating. Like I would eat a whole jar of peanut butter if I had one bite of it. Like it was that bad. That was like my whatever. But so my task when I was working through it psychologically was I would have one or two tablespoons of peanut butter at each meal. Regardless of what the if it didn't mix in with the meal, I would eat it after. Like I would just prime my brain and I would my and I was looking with my parents at the time. Like my mom, like the peanut butter wouldn't be out. She would like hide it somewhere which sounds extreme. But like in the timeline where I was trying to not binge on it, like I know people listening to this like can can relate like the types of people who know I can't have that in the house because I'll eat the whole thing. It's like okay, I didn't know where it was, but I was allowing my brain to get used to the fact that this is normal. This is not super enticing. I don't need to eat at all. And like it helps with whatever food if you have someone that can help you with that. And it sounds silly. It really does, but our brains do the stupidest things sometimes and how to retrain them. Like you go back to super trivial behaviors. That really, really works because you're changing the pathways in your brain, you're changing how you view that food and how you respond to it. So that's like can be really helpful. If you start going to butter, uh, the peanut butter, I haven't had peanut butter in a minute and that made me really want it. And we'll get some of that today. Thank you. We'll be in the next part. This one sounds stupid. And I've talked about it before how much of a difference this can make. And you can back me up because of all the type of content you make the next on the list. What are we at? Five ish somewhere around there. Learn how to legitimately cook and understand your way around the kitchen. I am not playing when I say this. You are like five YouTube cooking videos away from being an exceptional cook. Five YouTube videos. That's it from being a great cook. I used to think that just being fitted just was eating chicken eating broccoli brown rice the most boring things in the world and that food is not allowed to be fun or to taste good. But that's just not true. Like healthy food doesn't taste bad. You just can't fucking cook. Respect. That's the whole reason why I started my cooking. Exactly. And it helps so much because when you learn how to make healthy food taste good, you're like, I prefer this to crappy like the more vice tasting foods start to taste worse because you're like, Oh, this just tastes synthetic to me now. When you learn how to actually cook healthy foods, you don't just have to fight hunger when you're dieting, but you fight cravings too. And if your diet is just monochromatic or it's flat and it doesn't have different flavors, you won't just be hungry, but your brain will start to crave good foods like we just talked about. If you learn how to cook and season things properly and not to overcook your proteins and you learn how to prep your veggies and you can make healthy foods start to taste freaking bomb. It will change the trajectory of any dieting phase you ever do again in the rest of your life, right? If you're a dude, nothing's more attractive to a girl that's someone who knows how to cook their way around the kitchen. It'll improve over other aspects of your life, even if you just nail down a few good foods. Some YouTube series that are bomb. The basics with Babish YouTube series is phenomenal. He does a lot of other YouTube food videos, but basics with Babish is phenomenal. Life by Mike G's YouTube channel, where he has a couple different series taking you from basics to pro-level cooking techniques. Fantastic. Ethan, Claibousi, another great page. These are all on how to learn to cook like the act of cooking, but then there is now probably infinite pages on social media for specific recipes to follow and do now on TikTok and Instagram that you can just search it up. I've gone through two different kinds of cuts or fat loss phases. One, where I legit had not joking, just chicken breasts, white rice, and cycled through two to three different low calorie sauces. I had for lunch and dinner every day with a protein smoothie for breakfast, and a few others where I knew at least the basics of cooking and could have different meals throughout the week and could actually be satisfied after I ate and the cuts where I knew how to cook not only lasted longer, but they just felt better. I had more energy. My mental health was better. My body didn't hurt as much. They just sucked less. So if you want to take it to another level, learn how to cook. And there's even data on this that supports it. People who regularly cook at home and know how to eat hundreds, if not thousands, of fewer calories through each week. It makes it easier. It makes a hearing to your plan easier. It's just, it's across the board the best thing you do. And I think I'm preaching to the choir with you sitting across me because I think you know this better than anybody else, how much of a different second make. But learn how to cook at least a little bit. In you change the structure. I mean, you need to be that it's just like the basics too. And I mean, especially like if you have never cooked, cooking can be super intimidating and combine that with trying to be in a deficit and having like really like having more trying to just improve your diet in general. It could feel really overwhelming, but like you're truly killing two birds with one stone by learning how to cook because already like you homemade meals are just generally better for you. And you're learning about food naturally while you're cooking. And I also like it's very when you're doing something for you and you put a little bit of effort into it, it is more rewarding for your brain. It is. It just like naturally is. And I mean, like I say this all the time, like especially at the end of the day, like sometimes the last goddamn thing you want to do with the end of the day is cook yourself a stupid meal. It's so annoying sometimes. Just make it simple. Like it doesn't have, but it also can still taste good and be stupid simple. I actually just came across a tick tock the other day of someone saying like, I got the best physique once I started eating the same thing for breakfast lunch and dinner every single day. That's what she said. It's like, okay, there's an element of that that's actually not good because then for your overtime, you're going to get a bunch of micronutrient efficiencies because if you were eating the same thing, you're not eating a very diet. And you really limit yourself and you inevitably can get really sick of that. But there is a truth to it in the sense of, okay, this week I am going to eat or like the next two weeks I'm hyper fixating on this same lunch that I have for meal prep and then I do something different. Like, and if you have something different for breakfast, you're not eating the same. Having that routine is actually makes it so much easier. That's why people love to meal prep because it's just like I don't have to think about it. I don't have to think I know what I'm going to be eating and I know at the end of the day this is what I'm going to have and it just makes life so much easier. Yeah, that's where I'm like finding two to three automatic meals that fit your goals that you just dig just zero in on them and cycle through them. If you can do that, that's automatic. Like I don't know many successful people who diet and have a different dinner every single day of the week and a different lunch every single day of the week. That doesn't happen often because of how much when you just make those meals more automatic, how much easier it makes everything else fall into line, but just zone in on a couple and it can make your life different. You don't need to be Gordon Ramsay and know how to cook chicken in eight different ways to start on the mat. But if you can know one way to cook it really damn good, it can make a difference. Yeah, it can make a difference. What's next? And then the next thing is just playing around with meal timing. People think that there's like like this ideal time to eat the ideal time for you to eat and how many meals for you to eat is what works best for you. If you naturally wake up and you're not hungry at all, don't eat breakfast. That's not saying skip meals like some of the person people might hear that and freak out is like, no, if you are not hungry and especially if you are trying to be in a deficit, like don't just force feed yourself eat when you are naturally hungry. It makes it so much easier because then you are leaning into the times where naturally people's bodies like you are hungry are at certain times of the day. So if you are leaning into that, if you are putting your calories into the times when you are hungry, that's going to make it so much easier. If you naturally wake up if you're a breakfast person, I'm a breakfast person, you wake up hungry no matter what. Eat a good satisfying breakfast that will hold you over until later in the day. Don't you dare start intermittent fasting because you're trying to lose weight when you are a breakfast person because all you're doing is making your increasing that hunger, prolonging that hunger until you get way too hungry and you're going to end up that's why you're going to lose control at the end of the day and stuff your face with food at the end of the day and you're wondering why you're not seeing any results. It infuriates me when people are naturally hungry in the morning that I'm going to enter my fast. So you can make yourself miserable. There is simply no point if that naturally works for you. You naturally aren't hungry in the morning. Yeah, definitely wait to eat as long as you're getting in your calories and you're getting in your microbes and macros. Yeah, that works. But when you are hungry, don't just, oh, I'm just going to skip lunch today even though I'm really, really hungry so that I can eat a big meal for dinner. That sounds right. Yeah, that may sound like it makes sense, but if you are in a deficit, that's only going to make you more likely to overeat. And it might work for a little bit, but you can only stave off your hunger for so long until you crash. So the goal is to just keep hunger from getting too high. We're trying to avoid those extremes. And if you are skipping meals, it's just do what works for you. Eat at the times that work best for you. Some people with work their jobs, they have to eat at a certain time. So obviously that unfortunately doesn't apply to you, but yeah, it's wild. It's different. Every individual is when it comes to this too. Like working with all of my clients, so many of it, it's all across the board for what works best with some people. Yeah, yeah, like smaller, more frequent meals through the day. Some of my clients eat five very more portioned out meals throughout the day, because that keeps them satisfied 24/7. They're locked in. It's easy for them where people like myself or other clients, same thing. I need to feel really full and satisfied after a meal, or I'm going to want to keep going back. So I need two or three bigger meals to actually fill me up through the day. Or I've even mentioned this a hundred different times to play around with skipping things around. I'm just naturally not hungry when I wake up. I think a lot of it's because I lift weights early in the morning and that blunts my appetite naturally, for some people it does the opposite. But where I'll have just a double protein shake in the morning, no other food other than that. My first big meal is lunch and when it dinner and it satisfies me perfectly. Like you were just saying, though, for a lot of other people, that will wreck you. So pay attention to your hunger cues and don't feel like it's wrong to just change and adapt to that. So many people apply those things like intermittent fasting to everybody. Like, oh, this made my life easier when I started skipping breakfast. That's perfect for you. But that's not going to work for everybody. So let yourself listen to your own hunger cues. And don't feel like you're wrong for doing it a certain way. If it works for you. All the way down the list, this is the last one that's sad. Now this is an option. And this is a little bit more macro of a set. Not macro is in macro nutrients. Macro is in like 30,000 foot few. Consider doing a mini cut versus a normal cut. We've mentioned this here and in different episodes before. But the idea of a mini cut is very short but aggressive style cut that only lasts about four to six weeks, maybe eight weeks compared to a more typical cut that can be up to 24 or 36 weeks at a time. Because of how short this mini cut is, you can usually handle more aggressive diet cuts and harder training because you just don't have to do it for that long. This is where you're aiming to lose about one to one and a quarter percent of your total body weight per week compared to about half a percent to one percent on a typical cut. So it's a lot more aggressive. You're going to be a lot more hungry. You're eating a lot less food. But for some people's psychology, that helps them lock into it and be consistent because they're like, okay, this sucks, but I only have to do it for four weeks. The date is at the end of this month and I get to return back to my maintenance and I'm done dieting because some people just hate dieting. And the longer you stretch it out, even if it's a small diet, they just are miserable. And for some people, not all people, being in handling a lot of suck for four to six weeks is better than handling a little bit of suck for six months. That's what it comes down to of why that might work for you. And the main reason why you would do one is to one, lose as much fat as possible in a very short period of time knowing it doesn't have to be sustained for long because you can get away with more aggressive deficits, lower calories without losing muscle, without your hunger adjusting too much, and without your fatigue or energy draining too much because it's such a short time frame. And as a midpoint of a bulking phase, this could often just offset any body fat that you gain. We just talked about lean bulking. If you end up gaining a little bit of body fat, this might be a perfect time to do a little course correction four to six weeks to trim down anybody fat you gained and continue your bulk before things get too bad. The past the point of no return. So this is an option to do. And the only reason we bring it up is because not a lot of people consider it. They just think entering a diet or a deficit just means one thing and depending on how far away you are from your goal, that's how long it's going to take you to get there, you can do these little sprints and pullbacks where you sprint for four to six weeks and then come up to your maintenance for two weeks taking a diet break. This really just comes down to your motivation and your psychology as an individual. Again, someone myself, I just hate having to pay attention to my calories. I hate having to experience hunger. I hate it. So I would way rather take six weeks knowing it's going to suck to just put my head down, then lower my hunger cues, but still have them for months and months and months at a time. That's for me. Other people, it drives them crazy. They've got too much going on. They got to balance kids and work and life and having an aggressive deficit on top of that just kills them. It puts them over the edge. That's not for you. But that's why we bring it up is because there's more than one way to do a deficit and these many cuts, these sprints work for a lot more people than I think realize. But it's something to consider. And I say if you're also one that tends to like yo-yo diet, if you're that type of person, this isn't for you. Don't do it. This isn't for you. I know the fast results you're like your brains like lighting up. It's like, oh, that's exciting. No, that's what's failed you 100 times before. Don't do that. You have to come out back to maintenance. You can't just diet for six weeks and then just go overboard. But it's like, I think people don't consider. And those are our official seven. Do we have any runner-ups? I mean, I feel like meal prepping would be a runner-up even though that's like almost for cramps. Because it's also included in so many of these. If you can figure out how to meal prep, that can change the game for so many people. I said learn how to cook meal prep. Yeah. Just being prepared. Just be prepared. Be unit and grow up. Be an adult. Literally. Well, it gets to a point where it's like you yeah, there's going to be certain things you don't like. But like, I have no tolerance if you're a grown adult and you refuse to eat any vegetables. Like I just you're a loss cause in my opinion, like go away. Because I don't know what to tell you. Or maybe they just don't follow Mariana's pantry on TikTok. And they don't know how to cook vegetables. And they're just eating cucumbers like a pickle. And that's why it sucks. I'm also curious. I wonder how many people listen to this show that are followers of us on social media. And how many are just true organic, like podcast listeners? They're like, oh, wait a second. These guys have social media. Have you ever thought about that? Yeah, but I feel like people just feel like people's social media's. I think so. Let us know comment below. I'm actually very curious if there's a single person who's like, wait a second. No, I just do podcasts. I don't do social. That's interesting. I thought, but that's what we got. We'll talk to everybody in premium this Friday. For this week's AMA, like we do every single Friday. So if you're over on premium, we'll check out in a couple days. If you're not in premium, it'll want to be it's five bucks in the sign up. It's down below. It takes less than 60 seconds. And you don't only get those bonus episodes every single week, but you also get access to all of our training programs. So take the jump. It's five bucks a frickin' month. What a deal. And we'll see y'all on Friday. Everybody else, we'll catch you back next Monday. It's microdust Monday. Yeah. Be ready.