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Dec. 10, 2025

10 Must Do Habits to Drop 10% Body Fat for Men in Their 40’s & 50’s - 31

In this episode of Driven For Health, Coach Brian Parana shares 10 must-do habits to help men in their 40s and 50s drop body fat and rebuild control over their health.

Coach Brian explains why fat loss after 40 requires more than motivation or another diet plan. Men need simple habits they can repeat: weighing daily, strength training, planning meals, controlling higher-calorie meals, sleeping better, eating more whole foods, drinking enough water, staying busy, finding enjoyable ways to move, and tracking calories long enough to understand food.

This episode also covers why strength training matters for muscle, metabolism, testosterone, bone density, and long-term function. Coach Brian explains how better planning, whole foods, hydration, and calorie awareness help men avoid the common cycle of overeating, restarting, and feeling stuck.

This is a strong episode for men over 40 who want to lose body fat, improve energy, get stronger, build better habits, and stop guessing with their nutrition and fitness.

Show Notes
Transcript

Most men in their 40s and 50s don’t fail because of effort. They fail because no one ever handed them a clear plan that fits real life.

In this episode, Coach Brian breaks down the 10 habits every man must master to get lean, strong, and energized again. These are the same habits his clients use to drop 20 to 30 pounds in 100 days without living in the gym or eating like a monk.

You’ll learn how to build a foundation you can trust, how to create structure that actually works with a demanding schedule, and how to fuel and train your body in a way that supports testosterone, strength, and sustainable fat loss.

Inside this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why weighing in every morning is the most underrated tool for accountability
• How to use resistance training to protect muscle and lift metabolism
• The simple planning system busy men use to stay consistent all week
• How a controlled cheat meal keeps you sane and supports progress
• Why sleep is a core fat-loss skill for men over 40
• What whole foods actually do for your metabolism
• How hydration sharpens energy, focus, and fat loss
• How staying occupied prevents overeating
• Why active hobbies beat traditional cardio
• How 30 days of calorie tracking can permanently change your results

If you’re ready to rebuild your body and feel strong again, this episode gives you the exact blueprint to start today.

For more support and to join the 100-Day Call To Rise Challenge, visit www.thecalltorise.com.

Want help applying this to your own health, weight, energy, or lab numbers?

Coach Brian Parana offers Health Hot Seat coaching segments for men who want a clear next step with nutrition, fitness, weight loss, blood pressure, cholesterol, A1C, or daily consistency.

Learn more about The Call To Rise, a 100-day coaching program for driven men over 40 who want to lose weight, improve their health, and rebuild confidence:

www.thecalltorise.com

To connect with Coach Brian:
brian@brianparana.com

Disclaimer: This podcast is for education and coaching support only. It is not medical advice. Always work with your physician before changing medication, treatment, or medical care.

Hi, my name is Brett. I just wanted to endorse Brian for uh being a great health coach. Brian and I uh met each other about 13 weeks ago and I've had some great results. I'm a working professional. I'm on the road a lot. I'm in airports a lot. I have a lot of business dinners on the move quite a bit.
He's really helped me look at the prioritization of what I'm eating, how to better plan, how to prioritize my health. And that's through not just what I'm eating, but also the exercise. Making good decisions when I'm in business meetings or dinners, when I'm in the airport, drinking more water, getting better rest, better sleep, better exercise.
uh in January I had a shoulder replacement surgery so I was recovering from that as well when we started and by having a better diet it's really helped me bounce back a lot faster that we really worked through you know how best to prioritize the choices that I'm making while I'm recovering gives great feedback frequent feedback and it really has been valuable in helping me lose weight I've lost 12 lbs. Head in the right direction.
Going to keep going. It's just been a really good choice. So, I'm sure it'd be a good choice for you as well. Welcome to Driven for Health, the podcast for men over 40 who are ready to take care of their bodies and get back in control of their health, lose some weight, and feel stronger, especially headed toward their 50s or 60s.
I'm Coach Brian Piranha. If you're listening, you're probably done well in your career. You've taken care of those type of responsibilities. You have a family, but somewhere along the line, you stop taking care of yourself. I do it too. I understand you self-sacrifice for the greater good of your family and therefore you end up with a bigger belly, bad blood panels, cholesterol issues, triglycerides, maybe type two diabetes.
These things don't slide anymore. if you want to be strong, capable, and functional, and alive when you're 50. So, let's stop putting out all the fires around you and start building back that fire inside your metabolism and melt that body fat off. And this episode is the comeback. It's not some flashy kind, a quick fix version, no fat diet stuff.
This is just about rebuilding the foundation of who you are based on your habits, your actual body and your ability to produce the outcomes that you want. Now, today we have 10 habits, simple, clear, and scientifically proven to help you. I love focusing on scientifically proven type activities. Why? because it is wildly important to make sure that you are doing what is capable and responsible and not based on just someone's opinion.
We want peer-reviewed sciencebacked information. And this works for any man that I've ever worked with, any human that I've ever worked with. And I've worked with a couple thousand at this point over 20 years in the game. So, if you've been telling yourself it's time to get back to feeling stronger, get the flat stomach, and for some people, I get them under 200, first time in 20 or even 30 years to their goal ideal body weight.
Then, let's get started in this episode. Now, quick brought to you by the call to rise. Are you a man over 40 and want to take control of your health, your body, your confidence? And that's what the call to rise is all about. It's a 100 day fat loss challenge designed for men like you. You're busy. You're driven.
You focus on making everything happen for everyone around you that you love and care about. Now, we want to lose 20 plus pounds in the next 100 days or more. I regularly have been losing 20, 25, 30 pounds in that 100 day time frame. And love to have you there too. Scienceback nutrition fitness. It's effective, efficient in your time, managing what to eat, when to eat, when, why you're eating it in the first place, regardless of however busy your schedule is, and trying to burn off as much body fat and be really happy with what is
coming at the end of the effort. So, we'll combine that with also the brotherhood of men, like-minded men that are going to be in the trenches with you alongside me, Coach Brian, guiding you every step of the way. You visit the call torise.com and begin your journey today with me. All right, here we go.
Number one, weigh yourself every morning. literally every morning before you eat or drink anything and try to use the bathroom, right? But the reason being, especially if you want to focus on your body weight, and I'm not talking about it being an obsessive type approach, but if you are focused on getting the scale down, what gets tracked gets measured.
And stepping on the scale every single day will allow you to be able to do that and get a big snapshot on the reality of your situation. And [clears throat] yes, you will know if you misstep the day before because the weight won't go down. It might get stuck for a couple days or it might go back up and then you can really self assess what's going on.
Now, there's a study in the Journal of Obesity showing that men who weigh themselves every day are far more likely to lose the weight and be able to maintain it. Now, this simple act of accountability creates that awareness. And the awareness then drives the action that you need to be successful. Just think about if you're trying to save money and manage your money better.
You would want to check your bank account every single day. You want to be clear on what is in there and what you need to do to grow your bank account and be successful that way. Now, most guys and people period don't need another diet plan. They need a mirror held up to their daily habits. And when I'm at my best, ultimately being a coach, that's what I am.
I just reflect back to the situation that you're at. And then we start making decisive actions toward those daily habits and improve it. And the scale just being one of them. Remember, this is just a feedback loop. It doesn't have to be full of judgment or drama. It can just be a literal data point on what the scale is.
Gravity pulling on your body's weight that day at that time. And if you write it on a piece of paper right next to it, ideally write it down, not just tracking your phone because it'll be literally there. Then you will be able to connect the dots on what you're doing. You could also take [music] some notes on what you ate, how you slept, trained that day or not.
It's going to [music] give you great focus. It's going to leave you by doing it. This is exactly [music] what I do for clients I have to guys [music] and the system. They really [music] see [music] in [music] [music] [music] strength training, resistance training of some sort to help build and maintain muscle [music] in this process.
You can run, you can ride the bike [music] and jump around while you want, but if you skip the weight just [music] [music] [music] classic examples Yeah. [music] Heat. [music] cardio right now lifting weights [music] of time calories and cardio say burn in that exact time soon as you get done with cardio it stops burning that's an important fact to know if you burn 500 calories you don't really burn much
afterwards whereas in the weights you might burn 250 or 300 calories for the same time but over the next 48 hours the process of breaking muscles down and building them up helps you actually burn more calories over time. Now, I have a client Mark is comes to mind. He's 48 and he ran 5 miles every day and lived on salads. He felt like he was a rabbit.
He he lost 15 pounds, but he still didn't like the way he looked. The what he saw in the mirror just wasn't it. He looked good in clothes. He look better in clothes, but he just take the shirt off just wasn't it. Now, when we switched to having three structured workout days, in the beginning, we started with full body because he wasn't necessarily used to doing that and we were still focused on strength training.
But then we shifted into doing a 4-day split, a chest, back, shoulder, leg rotation. And then we ultimately settled on something that was really effective and efficient for his time and blending some of those four pieces into his workday to allow him to figure out when and what to do in terms of all right I'm going to do back and chest today and then the other day I'm going to do shoulders and legs.
We did a lot of superset and whatnot. [snorts] Now, the structure in getting in 45 minutes of strength training not only kept burning calories because we kept the pace up to fit his timetight schedule, but it also changed his body significantly better. Lifting weights tells your body, keep the muscle, burn the fat. That's the undertone.
That's the signal that's going out for you when you are lifting. And muscle doesn't just look good, but it increases your metabolism. It's metabolic gold in a sense. And for every pound of muscle that you carry, you do burn more calories all day long. So, if you're a guy in your 40s, guess what? It's not optional.
Strength training has to happen because you're in a slow decline just like humans are. you get to say that peak of 20 30 maybe into the 40s but after that human decline just starts happening and it's really essential to keep testosterone levels up bone density and just an energy for life. Science from the journal of applied physiology shows that men who lift regularly have up to 25% higher natural testosterone levels as well.
Testosterone really helps you drop fat and feel younger. Number three, planning ahead. To get to 10% body fat or less requires you to make the right choices again and again, just like saving money in your bank account requires you to constantly put deposits in there or make investments that pay off. I am definitely one of making investments that get a big ROI, not just say saving money.
We want to put that money to use and we want to plan to be able to do that. And same thing here. Of course, you've got work, kids schedules. I literally today is Saturday, December 6th. That's why [snorts] the Christmas Santa hat. I loved wearing Santa hats if you're watching this on video. But today we did a hockey game that took about three to four hours with the family.
That just happened. They won in overtime with 12 seconds left. Like that was that was a tough one because the other team scored with less than a minute left in the third period. Guys, what the heck did you do? Now what happens is we then uh what Friday we did an after school deal with the kids for my son's tuba concert. He's in a jazz band.
Then we also [snorts] on Thursday we did an afterchool theater that took up a couple hours. Then on Wednesday actually and announced talking to another mic at my older twos Levi never they their swim that's probably 15 to 18 hours of time that I was doing family stuff and it leaves me here on a Saturday after evening it's like 5:00 p.m.
and back to work. I totally understand what craziness looks like in the schedule and the travel and all that stuff. It gets a lot and there's constantly fires to be put out. And that's really important to know and understand that we still need a plan. You need to have a plan B or even a plan C.
And that's something that I almost mandatory make [clears throat] my clients do. Come up with more than just here's the all I can eat food onepage PDF. Well, certainly we can do it old hat, old style of Sunday bulk prep, but at the very least we have to have a better understanding of having the appropriate amount of food in the house.
Then we have to have the food cooked and prepared one way. Whether you make it, your partner makes it, someone else makes it, you have you just buy it already cooked for convenience. There has to be some level of planning and preparation to make it easy to have the meals prepared. Example I like to run through with chicken.
We can have frozen uncooked chicken, raw uncooked refrigerated uncooked chicken. We can have cooked frozen chicken, cooked refrigerated chicken, chicken in a can, chicken a pouts, rotisserie chicken, chicken deli meat, chicken jerky. That's nine ways to get chicken and only two of them you have to cook. Okay? And then if you have someone else cook for you, then you don't have to do it.
And that's part of being efficient and managing your food a lot better. The the truth is it's not really about being disciplined or having all the willpower, motivation. If we just look at your calendar and make sure that you have food available when you need it, you're going to win every time. And you don't have to rely on again old hat strategies of I'm just going to push through and just not eat or I'm going to willpower my way because it's not going to work.
And if you think of it as say a lot of business owners I work with and successful like sales pros and whatnot, they are always planning out their workday and they're generally pretty successful and let's carry that strategy into their their nutrition, their health, and their fitness. Number four, controlling [snorts] cheating.
A big one, right? We definitely need to have some fun food and for your sanity and you don't have to be perfect. We just have to make sure that when you do have something there is intention behind it that it fits into your day and it's enjoyable. Having planned in quotations cheat me feel like I'm doing something bad here, but that's not really the case if you eat an appropriate amount.
Now, if you go back to say episode five, we talk about calories. In episode 6, we talk about macronutrients. And in episode 11, we talk about how to put it all together, that nutrition pyramid that I go through. Then those might be good places to check back after you get done listening to this of what is the appropriate amount of calories I should be eating and what are my macros in a sense because I give clear direction on that inside those podcast episodes.
And then as long as you if you're going to eat a thousand calories and it's a in quotation, you know that you need to eat that many less to get to the total day end. We're just doing simple math. Addition, subtraction, it's basic. It's not algebra, which was most people want to try to make this out to be. And when you do have something, you can have ice cream and pizza and beer and all that, but we can't have it be a free-for-all because occasionally you can get away with a high calorie meal and you still magically say you wake up the next day and things
are okay on the scale. I've done it. I felt leaner sometimes after refeed days or cheat meals in a sense, but that's not the norm. We don't want that to be the regular setup. When you plan it and you can enjoy it guiltfree, then that's when you're going to stay in control and not just turn a Friday, Saturday, Sunday into a bingef fastest, feel guilty, and then try and start again on Monday and it's just not going to work.
And research shows that when you have plain refeeds in it, not only helps with supporting leptin, which is a hunger hormone and a thyroid hormonal levels, get more balance and you then take the edge off of the dieting phase or the the fat loss phase that you are in to make it easier for you to manage. So if you have a burger, you you earned it. You planned it and it fits.
Even squeezing in a burger, a 96% lean burger with a low-fat cheese with a low calorie bun with some roasted Brussels sprouts on the side and maybe a a airfried sweet potato fries or regular potato fry. It doesn't matter. That could be a 700 calorie, high protein, moderate carb, lower fat amount and really enjoy it when using the right types of herbs, seasonings, spices, condiments to make it.
And we don't need to just say go to Burger King and get a Whopper. That's that's not going to get you what you want. Number five, constantly always going to circle back to sleep. [snorts] And yeah, we need to get your head on the pillow and make sure you spend enough time in bed. This is a silent pillar a lot of people overlook and don't actually spend a lot of time with.
This is the one out of all of them. This is the one that I'm guilty on myself with having four kids and just a busy life trying to squeeze everything into life. I skip out on sleep sometimes and I usually average about six to seven, but sometimes I wake up I could use eight, nine or 10. That'd be really helpful.
And it just doesn't happen all the time. If you miss a few nights, you can still get some quality rest and make up for it in a sense on a weekend. You can't truly actually make up for lost sleep, but it can help at least refresh your body and get you recharged to go into say Saturday, Sunday, you sleep in and a Monday gets a little bit time crunched because again, it's just super busy in life.
But then your hunger hormones, ghrein and leptin, are gonna be balanced a little bit more when you do get those larger chunks of sleep. Whereas if you don't, then they just you are grein is going to go up like a gremlin in a sense. You can think of it. It's going to go up and make that hunger spike.
And leptin is the satiation hormone that keeps you just more content. and you're going to end up craving a lot more carbs, sugar, caffeine to fill your energy needs, and that's going to wreck your sleep. Now, there's another study from the Annals of Internal Medicine found that men that slept only 5 hours a night lost 55% less fat than guys that slept eight hours even when eating the same calories.
Okay, huge huge understanding here. So, your body is not rested. There's cortisol, there's stress, there's challenges coming up that really provide just difficulty. Now, if you're serious about dropping this 10% body fat from wherever you're at right now, sleep has to be part of the plan. Consistent bedtimes, consistent wake times, blackout curtains, limited blue light, the hour or two before bed, you shouldn't even be ticking your screens into bed.
Magnesium glycinate helps, too. or melatonin. I love Suduku. It gets me to think about numbers and not let my head roam around on whatever the thoughts of the day are, the challenges or the things I need to do tomorrow. That helps me a lot. Plus, I just move my body enough and that and that keeps me physically tired and then I'm able to sleep.
Those are some physical obvious shifts for nighttime, but also the mindset shift is that sleep is time for growth. If you just crush it in the gym, you need to be able to replenish your body and your muscles and all that hard work you just put in in bed. That's when you your testosterone peaks and your muscles rebuild and your brain resets for the next day. And it should be bull gout.
All right, we're halfway through there. That's five complete. Number six, eating whole foods. Of course, if your food comes in a package with 20 plus ingredients you can't pronounce, it's it's not going to help you. It's a lot of man-made or man concocted type stuff that doesn't jive with your body. We want whole foods as much as possible to make it simple and easy for your body to burn 10% body fat.
Whole Foods give your body all the micronutrients. In episode number seven covered micronutrients. Talked a lot about vitamins and minerals and their what what happens in the body with them. Now also think about if you're eating fewer calories quality becomes more important critical in a sense. And if you're eating 500 calories less a day to that's a reasonable calorie deficit.
And then you have 500 calories of processed junk food that doesn't really fill you up. It might be easier to overeat more of that junk food than it would be if you had 500 calories of lean protein, vegetables, some healthy starchy carbs, and a controlled portion, right? Super important to know and understand there.
Men in their 40s need to fuel like they're adults and not trying to be kids again eating just a bunch of white food. Uh chicken tenders and French fries, you know, stuff like that or just ice cream or beer, alcohol things, sugar, that stuff unfortunately doesn't help. Now, research from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition shows that whole foods increase thermogenesis, meaning that your body actually burns more calories digesting them.
Protein being the highest level of them. And carbs and fats, carbs burn more calories in digestion process than fats do. Fats become fats pretty regularly and easy. And it's something to just make sure that you aren't consuming too many fats. But junk food is going to not have a lot of processing at all. Sugar quickly elevates blood sugar levels and stores into belly fat or the increased likeliness that it would.
If you want to be lean, strong, clear-minded, you eat like a man who respects their body, their engine. Don't be wanting to be that Ferrari and then filling up on unleted or kerosene or something like that. It just doesn't work. Number seven, of course, water. It's what I took a drink a little bit earlier on. If you're watching video, this is my 40 oz water. I carried around all the time.
Fill it with water, salted water, put little droplets in it. I [snorts] uh I put a bunch of different things that make water taste good without calories, allowing me to be able to drink a lot more of it. This is the lowhanging fruit. And if you're not drinking 100 ounces of water in a day, you might not deserve to be 10% body fat down from where you're at right now.
It's such an easy win and it's free. You just have to be a little more focused on making sure you get it in. Now, I carry my water around all the time and I don't have a problem with that. It just makes it easier for me to be able to drink more, but occasionally I do and not drink as much as I should, but the next day I definitely won't.
And especially in the winter time, my hands, my lips, my face, it will tell me that I'm dehydrated. Now, think of this, you business go-getters, you entrepreneurs out there that listening in, dehydration, just by even one or two% can drop your strength endurance by 10%. So going into the gym trying to hit a big lift, you're just not going to have the go because your muscle tissue quality is just not good.
Your your body can't communicate clearly. It can't produce power fast. The muscle isn't as capable of handling the load that is on the muscle itself. And you're just not going to win. Now, of course, the simplest way is start your day with a big gulp of water. that works. I love my coffee hack. I put my my water container that you just saw next to my coffee.
I chug the water, sip the coffee. When I'm done drinking my coffee, I will have my water. Now, I personally in my coaching for years, I always include coffee in the strategy as long as it's not swimming in calories. Okay, super important there. So drink co the cal exc excuse me drink water in one way or another that doesn't have a lot of calories and make sure it works. Okay.
If you are sweating a lot and certainly in December in Ohio, you're not going to sweat much at all. Even if you are on an intense run or something outside, you'd have to be inside. Of course, you might need to add some electrolytes and that could be a fun way to flavor water. I'm a big fan of emergency, the stuff for the colds. It has a large electrolyte profile that I think would be beneficial for you.
Now, one trick I give my clients before every meal, take some water. 20 minutes before, that's how long it takes your stomach to start feeling full. And then you will be less likely to eat as much or maybe go up 4 seconds because you can just say, "I'm content. I'm good. I don't need more calories." All right.
It's not really actually hunger that you want. It's just this need to put food in your face. You have to stay hydrated. And if you don't, your digestion even won't thank you. Number eight, stay busy, stay distracted. Idle hands and empty minds are fat loss killers. When you're bored, your brain looks for stimulation to fill it.
And in our ADHD, a constant attention seeking situation, your brain and your body is is just looking to be occupied. It's actually okay to just be bored and not put food in your mouth. It's okay to just be bored and just be content. You don't need this constant need to be doing something, seeking out dopamine. And I think a lot of us have dopamine, as my wife would say, her dopamine's broken, [snorts] right? because we just have this instantaneous connection and opportunity to get a little bit more of some say juice and
our dopamine system is just drained. Now, if you haven't been doing anything that's say not just workrelated or kid-related and you just don't have any other hobbies or anything like that, that's a big problem. You need to find something that would work better for you in that way. Okay? So please, please, please make sure that you find something.
And a good example is is Jason that comes to mind. 52 just empty neester. I I'm 42, my daughter's 10. At 52, I should be an empty neester. I work from home and that's what he did. And he realized that a lot of snacking happened just because there was nothing going on. There's no stimulation. and he really wasn't hungry. He just was bored.
I unfortunately think this is going to be a big issue for me when I become an empty neester. There's constant stimulation. My kids always need something. They need to go somewhere. We're always doing stuff. And then when they are out of the house, it's going to be a a very interesting experience to not just have a schedule loaded with kid activities.
Now, if you are an empty neester, you let me know in the comments. Let me know what you do to fill your time. I'd be interested to hear. I don't want to just work more. I do want to do fun things with that extra time. But soon, going back to Jason, as soon as we found some activities that he used to like doing but hadn't done in actually years and started putting them in, he actually really enjoyed that experience of doing it.
And he didn't eat, which then meant he controlled his calories and he was able to stay sustained and be successful. Takeaway here is is there an activity that you could do that isn't staring at another screen that would allow you to have some energy, some feel sense of purpose and ideas and things that you'd want to do in your everyday life.
So activity is the antidote to not being bored. Okay, number nine. And we're getting close to the finish here to tips to drop 10% body fat and burn calories for fun. Okay, we don't have to just go out on a run. We can find activities that are playful. A great example, one I'm already missing a lot of is my kids and I, we would play hockey in our backyard.
Absolutely loved playing pickup hockey back here. and just the memories, the the exercise, the activity, and it would be Dan and I, my one of my best friends, and and my three to four kids and his two to four kids would play, and we'll just have a blast. And some people love hiking, basketball. I've got a couple jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai clients out there.
But when you get engaged in an activity that you love, the calories just burn off. You don't have to think about it. And and I'm going to call you out right now. Push pause. Think about what's one activity that you could put into the week that might make things more engaging. A lot of clients will do pickle ball as an example.
That's a obviously rising trend. It creates a lot of engagement, but also community. You're around people, too. And it can be a lot more fun. And if movement is enjoyable, you could likely burn 30% more calories over that time in the week because you enjoy it. Get outside, move your body, do a workout that isn't just boring, repetitive.
All right, and number 10, wrapping up our 10 tips to drop 10% body fat. track every calorie at least for a season. I know what I know through nutrition because I tracked for four years, but I also have coached thousands of people through it. I literally live, eat, and breathe this stuff and I can tell someone what they are or aren't doing with real quick.
Boom. I understand quickly because I know what's in food. A simple thing. Just think about this right now. What is an egg? Think of your answer. Is it a protein? Is it a fat? Is it a carb? Is it a combination? [snorts] Well, let's break it down. When you look at a typical chicken egg, an average one, is about 70 calories.
Has about five grams of fat and five grams of protein. Well, you're like, Brian, there's protein and fat. Yep. Exactly. But we go back to episode five and there I told that you there at nine calories per gram of fat and four calories per gram of protein and carb. 5* 4 is 45 fat calories out of 70ish. And 5* 4 is 20.
So 5* 9 for fat is 45. 5* 4 for protein is 20 calories. An egg is a fat source that has protein in it. Once you see that, oh, I know how to manage eggs better in my day, right? Very simply put, when you track, you become way more attention of what you're eating. You look at nutrition labels, you can actually start to understand proper portions.
Can't tell you how many guys are blown away of how much food they used to eat and how many calories it was. And soon as we shift the perspective of how to build a better balanced meal of protein, of fibers, carbs, search of carbs, again, I've gone over these in the nutrition pyramid, even episode 11, the lifestyle piece, then you're able to actually get a balance meal with lower calories, but stay even more full for longer.
So, tracking teaches awareness. It doesn't have to be a forever thing, but even if you do it for a week or a month, you're going to get a lot out of it. All right? And you'll even be able to eyeball a plate. It's a transferable skill. Meaning, how often do you need to measure out 6 ounces of chicken breast, cooked chicken breast to know that it's roughly going to be six ounces? That's only going to be five to 10 times.
You're like, "Yeah, this is about right." which is the whole point. A 2019 study from the Journal of Behavior Nutrition found that people who track their intake, even just 15 minutes a day, lost twice as much fat than those who didn't. So, we didn't have to necessarily obsess, but they had to pay attention to get the results.
And you can again go back to episode five and six to plug in the numbers that make sense for you as I tell you what to do there. We've wrapped up our 10 tips for dropping 10% body fat. I hope that you're able to get some inspiration from people there. I hope that you're able to take some insights and see which one is the biggest challenge for you.
Now, we're going to move on to our fast five questions as I like to have some real quick rapid response type questions that you, the audience, submit to me and I just pick and choose which ones. Question number one. What is the single most important habit for dropping body fat over 40? I think it just goes right back to the very first tip that I dropped today, which was weigh yourself every morning.
If you track what how much money is in your bank account, then you know what to do to influence that. If you step on the scale every single day, then you know that you either ate in a calorie deficit, you ate in a calorie maintenance, or you ate in a calorie surplus, and you will learn quickly. Question two, do you prefer tracking calories or tracking macros and why? Just want to point this out, people.
Calories and macros equal the same thing. Okay, that's obvious there. Okay, nine calories per gram of fat and four calories per gram of protein and carbs. But if we were to do a hierarchy, let's work on calories first and then track the macros second. You will learn so much just by understanding how many calories are in a portion of food, which is important.
Question three, what is your go-to strategy for sticking to a nutrition plan when life gets busy? I have this model PPA. Plan, prepare, act. If you're planned out, then it's easy to be prepared and you can act on it a lot easier than if you're unplanned because you and me as well. When you're hungry, you'll eat whatever is closest in in larger quantities than you probably need.
Number five, wrapping us up here. How did you get started in fitness and coaching? Well, this is a personal one. Uh, I love Rocky. The training montages, Rocky Balboa, right? When that music came on, he started working out. Just Oh, I loved it. And I just fell in love with that type of training.
And my whole life has just been some form of exercise. I've actually worked out this morning. And I didn't work out yesterday, but the Thursday and Wednesday and Tuesday, I worked out as well to help make sure that I stayed accountable to myself and my body, my goals for my body and my health. But that was it. It was Rocky. Well, dropping 10% body fat isn't being perfect.
It's about balance, moderation, and flexibility. Three words I say all the time in busy schedules. We stack small wins. And that's where the consistency over time plays out to be long-term successful. My guys will measure themselves. They will lift. They will eat. They will plan. They will rest. And they will be held accountable. And that's what we do in the culture rise.
It's really just doing repetition right in a way and a lifestyle that works best for you. You don't need to overhaul your life. You don't need to do anything crazy. You just need to pick one or two habits this week and improve upon it as you go. That will help you longer in your life. Now, if you need some help and you want to get more clarity on this and a specific plan for you, that's where the call to rise comes in and visit the call to rise.com.
Check out some of what we do with the five pillars. I did that episode a little ways back on what the five ep the five pillars were around episode 25 26 but it really gave you a clear understanding of identity of who you are and the food of what you eat and the exercise and activity of how you move your body and the mindset of how you think and feel and the brotherhood of the support and the accountability. So check that out.
But I really want to thank you and I hope that you took at least one little snippet here, a habit that you can work on dropping 10% body fat [music] for you and your goals here soon. Thanks. Catch you next episode.