June 26, 2026
25 Questions I Got Asked To Help Men Over 40 Lose Fat Part 1 - 118
YouTube Most men I coach are eating half the protein they actually need, then wondering why they're starving by ten at night. If you're a business owner, entrepreneur, or driven man running your day on coffee and grit, this episode is built around the questions you've probably asked yourself but never had answered straight.
(Tired of guessing what to eat? Learn the way that finally makes sense at www.thecalltorise.com)
In this episode of Driven For Health, Coach Brian Parana works through ten of the most common questions he gets on fat loss, nutrition, and fitness from men in their 40s and 50s. These are real questions from coaching calls and client conversations, the kind that come up when a man's body stops responding the way it used to.
Men's health after 40 doesn't follow the rules that worked at 30. This episode covers how much protein actually supports fat loss, why diets that worked a decade ago stop working now, and how to handle work travel and client dinners without losing a week of progress every time you're on the road.
If you're running a business, including an online business, your schedule probably doesn't leave room for hours in the gym or a meal plan that needs a spreadsheet. The fitness and nutrition habits covered here are built for busy men, the kind that protect your energy, your focus, and your performance at work without taking over your day. Productivity and physical performance run on the same fuel, even though most men treat them as separate problems.
Brian also breaks down strength training after 40, muscle loss, and why the same effort stops producing the same results. Work-life balance only holds up when you have the energy to use it, and that starts with what's on your plate and how you train.
This is part one of a two part series. Part two, episode 119, covers blood work, chronic illness, stress management, travel, and staying strong as you age.
Topics covered in this episode:
- The real protein number most men get wrong
- Why keto or fasting works at first and stops working later
- How to handle business dinners and travel without losing progress
- Why a plate that looks healthy can still stall fat loss
- The truth about pizza night and flexible eating
- The minimum amount of training that actually produces results
- Why the scale can stay the same while your body changes
- Muscle loss after 40 and what it does to your metabolism
- Why training in your 40s and 50s requires a different approach
- How walking affects blood sugar, energy, and fat loss
The Call To Rise is a 100-day fat loss challenge for driven men ready to take their body back. It combines strength training, personalized nutrition and real accountability. Most men drop 20 to 30 pounds and rebuild the confidence that comes with it.
This program also works if you are dealing with high blood pressure, high cholesterol or Type 2 diabetes. It was built for those men too. Many men see those numbers move in the right direction alongside their weight loss.
Inside the program you also join a Brotherhood of men doing the same work. Together you build a body you're proud of and start leading like the man you already are at work.
This is your wake-up call to rise. Learn more and apply at 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:
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.
- After 40, you lose 2 to 3% of muscle every decade, whether you train or not. It happens while you're running a business, showing up for your family, and telling yourself you'll get to your own health eventually. I put together 25 questions, the ones that men ask me, they send me in the DMs, and hit me up at the gym while I'm working out.
- 25 questions is obviously too much for one episode, so I so I decided to split it up into two parts. Episode 118 covers nutrition and fitness. On the food side, we're going to go over questions like the real protein number that nobody tells you to hit. Number two, why keto worked at 35 and stops working at 47.
- Number three, how to handle a business dinner without losing the week and tossing it. Number four, why a plate that looks healthy can still work against you. Number five, wrapping up nutrition, whether pizza night actually has to go in your daily weekly life. On the fitness side, we have question number one, the minimum that actually moves the needle.
- Number two, why the scale can drop while the mirror stays the same. Three, the muscle loss after 40 most men never get warned about. Number four, why 20s workouts stopped working in your 40s. And the last one for fitness is how much walking really matters. Episode 119 will pick up after this. It's going to be anchored around blood work, chronic illness, travel, stress, lifestyle, and how to age strong.
- Let's jump into these 10 questions right now. Let's get it. The real protein number that you need to know and no one really shares with you. Question was, how much protein do I actually need to lose fat without feeling starving all day? Well, for most guys that are 30 or above, the minimum amount of protein is going to be probably about 150 g.
- And most men I coach are eating nearly half that or maybe even 100 g a day and wondering why they're starving by 10:00 p.m. and they're on the food roller coaster by 10:00 p.m. We want to aim somewhere from between 0.7 to 1 g of protein per pound of body weight. Now, it depends on if you have a lot of body weight mass, then we might want to go off of lean body mass.
- So, 150 to 200 lb split across three or four meals most of time lands you about 40 to 50 g every time you eat. I coach clients that work 12-hour shifts. And this guy, he was actually a detective and he was running a protein shake and whatever sat in the break room in the day and we had to change it because he was starving at different times of his shifts.
- We rebuilt the plate around what I call a protein first model. 4 to 6 oz of protein as a minimum amount at each meal. And before he even started to add other things to his plate. Once he did that, his hunger dropped within 2 weeks and the scale started to move as well. Protein will keep you full longer than carbs and fats will.
- 3:00 p.m. will stop feeling like a fight against your will and soul to not overeat. He kept eating roughly the same amount of food. What we changed was just the amount of it at the different times of his day and he was able to maintain a deficit through that. If this sounds like your typical week, we don't need to guess and I can actually give you a free assessment at brianprana.com.
- It takes about 10 minutes and actually gives you a real starting point on your calories and macros. Why keto worked at 35 and quit working when you're 47? The question was, I lost weight on keto a few years ago. Why can't I make it work now? Well, keto can work. You just cut carbs out of your life, but if you're sitting across from your family and they're eating something different every single night, that's why it eventually doesn't work for you because it doesn't fit into your everyday life.
- Keto and fasting are both buzzwords and they do work cuz of creating a calorie restriction, whether it's through cutting out carbs or just not eating in the day for fasting. The hard part is making them actually survive in your day-to-day life past a few weeks or months. I had a client tell me his wife did keto with him years ago and it worked and that would melt off of him.
- The weight just poured off. But every time that he came across a holiday event or a big family dinner, he ended up grabbing some carbs and falling off of the plan for that night, which then it ended up tripping him up. And this gets really old fast if you are trying to stay on the no carb train and then it just keeps tripping you up because you end up eating it.
- Now, with fasting, we need to build a food window with clients. There's a time in the day that you can eat and a time in day that you don't. I'm a big fan of 12-hour gap between your last bite the night before and the first bite in the morning. We don't need to do special meals, no special plates at dinner, or eating separate from the family.
- But, just having that time window alone helps you control how many hours you actually eat food, and it can help control overall calories without having to track a single carb. One client called it first approach that didn't make him feel like he was burdened at his own dinner table with his family, and he could actually find a way to make it work.
- Now, if you want a plan that actually can survive your dinner plate, then we're looking at the health hot seat on my Driven for Health podcast. You can just simply comment hot seat, and I can message you back, and we can start off and talk about how to give you an actual plan that can fit in your real life. How to eat at a business dinner without wrecking your week.
- The question was, "How do I eat out at client dinners and work when I travel without blowing my progress?" One guy I coach used to leave business dinners easily 1,500 calories deep. Usually, as soon as you top it off with a beverage, it's more like 2,000 before he left the table. And that's not even to account for all the other food and meals that are in his day.
- This is a big challenge for him because he needs 2,000 calories or less to be able to maintain his body weight cuz he doesn't move that much. He decides before he sits down what he's eating now. So, in the car, I coach him to pull up the menu on his phone, pick out a protein, let's skip the bread basket, and order double vegetables.
- And with this guy, and a lot of you other guys listening in with busy work professionals, you've been to the fine dining restaurants, you've been out to eat countless times. So, it's not special anymore. But, we need a protein, double vegetables, skip the starch, and that'll keep your calories maybe 800 or less.
- Now, at the table's drinking, this will give you a little bit more room to have a little bit of a beverage, not the tallest boy in uh that they serve, but a say a 12-oz could fit in. Also, appetizers run about 50 calories in a bite. So, he treats the bread and sharing these plates like a calorie tax, and not a meal.
- When he takes a bite, he can mentally add up 50 calories at a time. He still enjoys dinners and jokes with his clients and has a good time that evening, but what's changed is how he makes decisions before he goes into that. Not after when he's tired, he's hungry, he's staring at the menu for whatever someone else picks. Now, he's down 28 lb, and 2 years later, he still texts me and says that he is able to maintain this lifestyle.
- If you have client dinners, and you really have struggled to know what to eat when you're eating out or on the go, well, I have an eating on the go guide. Just simply message eating on the go, and I can send you to get it straight away. This all It's a super easy PDF to know and understand.
- can keep it in your back pocket to be able to keep you being successful long term. The healthy plate that you think is working for you, but it's actually not. It's working against you. The question is, why do I gain weight even when I am eating clean? Keeping that in quotations. Salmon and avocado on the same plate look healthy, but they add up to 50 g of fat pretty quickly, and that could be a fat bomb that has a lot of calories.
- 50 * 9 is what? Almost 500 calories, right? It's 400 and 40 450 calories. There we go. But then as soon as you cook the plate or drizzle oil or butter on them, you just multiply it. That's just a lot of fat for one meal. So, that's what the math is. Fat has 9 calories per gram of protein per gram of food, and protein and carbs have four.
- So, let's take an egg, for example. It's about 75 fat calories, even though most guys will think of an egg as a protein source. Avocado and salmon are really healthy, but when you stack them in the same meal, they are fat-dense calorie foods that we will probably want to space out in the day. And unfortunately, fat turns into fat the fastest, easiest, and it just adds calories.
- And usually, fat just shows up out of nowhere. Now, as soon as we can get on a moderate to lower fat approach, we can start to quickly cut calories and not sacrifice fullness, which is important. So, having vegetables on the plate in high volumes can work really well. If your food already looks healthy and the scale won't move, it's probably how much of what you're eating on the plate.
- So, we might have to do a deep dive analysis on what that is. If you DM me the word plate, then I can send you over how to build a healthier plate that is going to work for you. Do you have to give up pizza night to lose weight? The question is, do I have to give up beer, pizza, happy hour with guys to actually lose weight? I've never once told anybody I've ever worked with for the last 23 years to give up pizza night, especially with their family, the kids.
- Say that Friday night fun time. This is usually the fastest way to break the plan, make it fail 3 weeks in. What I like to do is run something close to 80/20 or even 90/10 split for most of my clients. 80% of your meals are built around protein and vegetables, and that allows you 20% of your calories to have other things. One client kept his Friday night pizza night with his kids, and we have a pizza strategy where he'd have a chicken salad beforehand cuz it was super easy to add there.
- He'd have two slices of pizza, and a typical pizza costs about 300-ish to 400 calories. So, he's still able to maintain that whole meal under 800, and that really helps him in the day, still participate and enjoy pizza cuz who doesn't like pizza? Well, if he does this every single week straight for 100 days, and he can still lose 20 lb or more, and you can hear that in episode 117 on Driven for Health.
- Chris and I talk about how he works in family dinner nights such as pizza and traveling and it works for him and that's the whole point of any of the coaching I ever do. The common mistake is trying to replace every single day being perfect Monday through Thursday and never allowing any what I call MBF, moderation, balance and flexibility into the plan so that you just ultimately feel miserable and you don't do it.
- If you're trying to lose weight and you think you have to give up things that you like such as pizza, well, I have a pizza strategy for you. It's in my eating on the go guide and I'd love to give it to you. So just um reply with on the go and I can share that PDF with you and I'll talk about how to create your own 80/20 rule around pizza for your family.
- The minimum that actually moves the needle. Well, the question is do I need to work out every single day to actually see results? And a lot of people do. It goes into that all or nothing mindset. I have clients training 3 days a week who don't have to go all out and grind 6, 7 or the Arnold Schwarzenegger 8 days a week program and plan.
- The difference isn't really It's It's not the effort. It's not the intensity. It's the intention that they are able to leverage just basic movement in their day with what I call muscle building activity, some basic strength training and then allowing for you to be able to move your body. I love 10K steps a day.
- What we're looking for is a minimum effective dose and that's usually especially for strength training three to four sessions in a week with a daily step target and making sure you have protein at every meal, 30, 40, or even 50 g to make sure that you stay full enough. That's it. That can be It can be as basic as that.
- I've literally had clients have wild success by single targeting that type of approach. And coaching business owners for who work 60 plus hours a week and think that they have to carve out hours in the gym every week, which is impossible, it's not going to work. So, we have to cut into their schedule and make energy efficient, effective workouts that can burn lots of calories in not a lot of time, and sneak in steps throughout the day.
- This consistency can build days, weeks, months into years, and you'll be more successful at being consistent if you can have a an easier minimum effective dose, so say three days a week of exercise. Now, if you need some more help on building exercise routines, Driven for Health episode 17 starts the exercise pyramid, so you can listen in on that episode and next five to be able to start creating your own strong, muscle-building, fat-burning workouts to change the way you look and feel.
- Why the scale says less and you look the same. The question was, I lost 12 lb, but I still look the same in the mirror. What's going on? Well, 12 lb on the scale sounds exciting, but if your jeans haven't changed, what's actually going on? Are we losing fat and leaving muscle uh altogether or burning it or like what are we doing? Well, when you cut out a lot of calories without eating enough protein or lifting weights, your body can possibly increase the likeliness of burning muscle along with the fat. So, think of it instead of
- say 10% to 20% of your body weight loss across say 20, 30, 40 lb, you might actually end up losing more percentage of muscle mass, 30 or 40%. And that's something that's happening with a lot of the GLP-1s or any fad diets that people fast for long times or just cut calories for a long period of time. You end up risking losing muscle mass, which we don't want to do.
- Goal is 150 to 200 g of protein for most men. When we pair that with some heavier strength training to focus on muscle building activities, then we are in business. Now, if you end up stalling on the scale for 6 weeks 6 weeks straight and the weight hasn't changed, but you drop a full pant size and your body composition body percent fat goes down, then we know that you're actually doing it right.
- We're losing weight, we're burning calories in a really good way. Your waist measurement, your neck measurement, your pant size, the way you fit in the XL going into an X to to an a large or even a a large to medium is going to tell the real difference in how your body's changing, not just stick with whatever the scale does or doesn't say.
- Now, if the scale and the mirror are telling you two different stories, we definitely need to focus on some of the other pieces and the parts of what's your calorie deficit, how much are you lifting? And I have a metabolic assessment that I can give you if you just type in and share metabolism, then I can offer up the metabolic assessment for you to be able to start addressing what's going on in your body and results.
- Muscle loss after 40 that you are not aware of cuz you're not even thinking about it. Question was, should I do more cardio or more weights after 40? Well, after 40, you lose 2 to 3% of muscle every decade whether you train or not. And that's a sad truth of the human existence and the fact that we age.
- Think of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He's not quite the Austrian oak he once was from years prior. Now, that number is the real reason why men in their 40s are feeling their body changes overnight. All of a sudden they wake up and what happened? It wasn't this acute dramatic situation that showed up.
- It's just that your body was losing small bits of muscle. You sat for the last in in your 30s trying to hustle for work and you get in your 40s and sure your career's established, but so is your metabolism and in the slow gear. Now, you could even be eating the same amount of food and maintaining your weight, but it'll add up.
- And now, cardio actually burns calories while you're doing it and strength training protects muscle and burns calories longer even if you end up sitting at a desk a lot. I tell clients to think of muscle as their engine size and a bigger engine burns more fuel even at idle. Most guys in their 40s need three to four strength training sessions a week just to hold their body mass and body fat percentage and muscle mass on their body.
- But cardio can actually get you into a catabolic state where strength training is an anabolic state. Catabolic meaning breakdown, anabolic meaning build up. So we do want to make sure that we focus on that muscle building activity. Now, if you're s- feeling like your metabolism is really slowing down, then I would challenge you to listen to Driven for Health episode number two.
- I talk about how fast can you men in their 40s actually lose fat. Check it out and start applying the information you learn there. By your 20s and you're doing workouts doesn't work when you're in your 40s or 50s. The question was, I used to lift heavy in my 20s. Why does my body respond so differently to how I train now? Training like you're 25 and at 47 is how you end up hurt and not strong.
- Even myself at 43, I'm starting to feel these and I don't really like it. I identify as being a strong, fit individual and I'm getting some aches and pains that are lingering longer than I want or show up faster than I think they should, which is sad but true. Recovery is a huge game changer when it comes to different times of your life and focusing on training hard in your 20s can be fine and sleep 5 hours and eating poorly and fast food and all this, you still will recover because the human body will do that at that time.
- But, 40s, 50s, you need more time to warm up your joints, your nervous system needs more rest in between your lifts, your harder sessions, and sleep needs to be top priority, and especially mobility. You have to stretch and and bend and and be flexible to be able to keep your joints moving and your body open.
- So, we can't get hurt. We need progression over time around your strength training and add small amounts of weights from 1 week to the next, and you will be surprised at how fast you actually do stack weight just being consistent in the gym, which is most of the hardest battle anyways. If your body isn't responding the way you want it to, and we need smarter progression in your workouts and your exercise program, then listen to the strength pyramid in Driven for Health episode 5 17 through 21. It's going to go break down
- different sets, reps, all sorts of different exercises, how to pick them out, so that you end up learning how to exercise appropriately for your life and your body. How much walking actually matters? The question was, does walking actually do anything, or am I just out here walking around, spending way too much time trying to move my body, or should I run or lift weights to lose fat? The the real answer is 10 minutes of walking frequently throughout the day, especially after meals, can do significant amount of adding in small
- amounts of steps, but it also helps balance out blood sugar levels and and keeps your blood sugar levels more stable, which affects your energy. So, that after you get done eating, you can go walk and your glucose doesn't go way up into your bloodstream and get pulled out through insulin, which causes you to then possibly be tired afterwards and even want more food, sugar, and stuff.
- That's not what we want. So, walking after a workout can or a meal, excuse me, is the easiest way to help you manage glucose and keep your muscles ready for the fuel that they need. Having smaller blood sugar spikes also affects your fat storage and it will keep it a lot easier to manage your fat throughout the day.
- So, we definitely want to set a daily target for eight or I like 10,000 steps as a minimum and you can break it up and get it throughout the day if you have a desk job or you don't move so much in the day. It is really important and so many clients, they just start walking more in the first 2 weeks.
- I see this all the time with my guys in the Cult to Rise program, they end up losing fat and they end up having more energy because movement is energy. Now, if you need help with some accountability and some structure around how to get the actual things done that you need in your day-to-day life, then the Cult to Rise program might be for you.
- It's a 100-day fat loss challenge that really focuses on proper nutrition, the right type of movement, and fitting it into your lifestyle for sustainable long-term outcomes. That's five questions on food, five on training, pulled straight from real clients, real people messaging me. The next episode 119 covers blood work, labs, travel, stress, lifestyle that wrecks a good plan, and how to stay strong as you age.
- If today hits home, then certainly head to the call to rise.com and check out the 100-day fat loss challenge and how it can be built around your specific life, or any one of the other words that I said or the other lead magnets, you can definitely check them out for the just emailing me. Just send me an email, Brian at brianprana.
- com and I'll be able to send them over to you. Catch you next one.
