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March 6, 2026

Why Your Body Is Working Against You For Fat Loss and What the Science Says About It Part 2 - 84

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Are you a business owner, entrepreneur, or a driven man looking to enhance your health and business performance?

This episode of Driven For Health is tailored just for you. We dove into the depths of men's health, focusing on fat loss, energy, and productivity.

Discover how to balance work-life demands while boosting your fitness and nutrition. We explore stress management techniques that can elevate your online business and personal life.

In this episode, you'll learn:

How to maintain energy and focus throughout your busy day
Strategies for effective fat loss without compromising your lifestyle
Tips on improving productivity and achieving a better work-life balance
Insights into fitness and nutrition that support business performance
Stress management techniques to enhance your overall well-being

Join us as we provide actionable advice and real-world examples to help you thrive in both your personal and professional life.

Whether you're looking to improve your fitness, manage stress, or boost your business performance, this episode offers valuable insights to help you succeed.

The Call To Rise is a 100-day Fat Loss Transformation Experience designed for driven men ready to get back to a healthy body, boost their energy, and lead as a powerful man. If you are struggling with some form of chronic illness such as high blood pressure, cholesterol or even Type 2 Diabetes - this program is designed for you too. Through a proven system of strength training, personalized nutrition, and radical accountability, you’ll drop 20–30 pounds and rebuild confidence from the inside out and even improve chronic illness issues. It’s more than a fitness program, it’s an body transformation experience with a Brotherhood of like-minded men committed to showing up, leveling up, and leading in a body they are excited about. This is your wake-up call to rise. 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.

how to see consistent body fat loss from men and what the science actually says about it. There's a study I keep coming back to. When a man tells you that his metabolism is in quotations broken, it doesn't work. The belly fat doesn't budge. research says that the people that ran the study, the research themselves, overfed people by a thousand extra calories a day for six weeks.
This is controlled conditions, meaning that their eating was monitored, their calories were monitored, and on average that people gained around six to seven pounds. when they went back to look at why this is because they were calorie surplus. But one person barely gained two. That person had just started moving more throughout the day without realizing.
He was fidgeting. He's sitting shifting around a lot more in his chair. And their body just burned off a lot more calories. and need non genesis in the background even though they weren't conscious about it. That one finding explains more about why fat loss stalls for busy guys than most programs will ever tell.
Today I want to go deep into real science. Why your body does what it does and what that means to practice. Welcome back to Driven for Hells. I'm Cooper Pirana episode 83 23 years. This is actually my third fourth podcast I've recorded today. Not only for mine, but I've been a guest as well. Sharing lots of experience.
I hope that you get a lot of is going to be a long one. Just buckle up, pause it, take notes, and I just want to be upfront with that. We're gonna run over an hour most likely. I you know I like to talk try and keep them shorter but I wanted to dive into a lot of things deeper level not just surface level better and move more.
I want to make sure that fat loss advice actually gets spoken about and leaves men actually understanding what they need to do. They'll feel stronger. And quite frankly, anyone listening in right now deserves this. I've been in this field, as I said, for 20 plus years, thousands of clients with fat loss, blood work improvement, body composition changes, and their identity, the confidence that they get when their body changes is significant.
And we're going deep on the research because I've literally read the PubMed studies. I've watched the YouTubetubes. I've listened to the podcasts. I've read the blog post. So, let's walk through what the actual science says about how your body works when you're trying to lose fat. Why the numbers break down when you're trying so hard, what your metabolism is doing that nobody's telling you about, and why most popular theories in the fitness space don't hold up when you test real science to real outcomes.
What's this mean? fish are in your 40s and 50s and want to live an exponentially live full lifestyle. Let's pour coffee. I got I got one right here. That my water and off we go. You why you stop trusting nutrition advice and why that makes sense. Let's start there because I think this explains a lot about where we are in our society and what a lot of men are currently juggling and the advice has been wrong.
Not just don't believe but wrong. For decades, men have been told that fat is the enemy. Let's get rid of all the fat as we can. Saturated causes heart disease. Cut the fat and follow the food pyramid. Whole grains, bean, lowfat, everything. And what happened when people cut they swapped the fat for sugar processed carbs flooded the market space and they were hiding under the health well right healthy foods.
Why? Because they were low fat and the marketing on the front of the labels was prevalent in that way. marketers were keen on, hey, if I cut out the fat in this product, then I will be able to market it and sell it and make money because people are going to buy it. They do not want that foods. This didn't help metabolic disease.
It kept going up anyways. It's not a minor mistake. And I mean told the generation of people and men that they need to have less. It was a lot of credited credentialed people that and a lot of people that followed along they ended up with worse blood work than their fathers had. Now I really want you to understand when you followed the rules they're wrong.
It wasn't your fault. And this is where it gets dangerous because you're just following what they telling you and the skepticism creates a big opening around not knowing if this is true or not. When that happens, the loudest voices rush right into that opening, start yelling from the pulpit and those are the ones and listen to or they appear to be the loudest in a sense.
You've got guys on YouTube that are telling you that seed oils are the root of all evil. Guys are selling you the idea that insulin is the only metabolic variable that matters. Eat only carnivore diets tools are from or something like that. fasting protocols because autotopagy supposed to unlock metabolic superpowers once you go the past the extended amount of food timing that you not eat need to go 20 hours without food to unlock secret metabolic hack it doesn't work some of the cont content is actually all wrong but a lot of it is
built around the person that's being loud and probably monetarily is impacted by their claims and it's not really about right and that's the big difference with here's what I actually believe about how real science works is everything publish a finding someone else tests it in a different lab with different people if it holds up across must study over time.
You build real confidence in that hypothesis is true. It falls apart. You update your position and that is the method by scientific method. I had mentors early in my career who were researchers and they had a simple rule they'd say out loud. If you keep rerunning your experiment because you do not like the results, you are not doing science anymore.
You're just creating trying to squeeze an outcome out of you're trying to make lemon juice out of a line. It just it's it's lying. You're trying to make the data tell you a story of what it want you want it to do. This isn't a Netflix documentary paid by someone that wants the outcome of themselves and and the data and the experience that someone watching gets the outcome of the end of that video.
Oh, there's so many of them. There's game changers the reforms. the even say the Weight Watchers three parts all telling a story and someone paid to produce them to get to an outcome or to run an underlying theory or thought that which was their agenda for the job is change your hypothesis that fits the data not the data to fit hypothesis and that really stuck Okay. Yeah, this totally makes sense.
Scientific method, something I've learned throughout years that I've been doing this because it is the exact opposite of how most nutrition content gets made. Most of what reaches you already has through someone else's existing group. They stretched it along beyond what might actually be a whole outright miss and what it showed and they packaged it up a way to confirm what the already the audience wants to hear.
And when you hear it like that, then it becomes very believable. I heard a researcher describe it in this way once. If you torture the data long enough, it will confess whatever you want. That is not a knock on science. It's a knock on the people that are doing the science and when they want to sell what I tell you today that fundamentals of fat loss are more consistent than all the norms that you hear that makes it look challenging or confusing.
That's what I'm going to be doing. I'm not dismissing the complexity of metabolism, but this is a real thing. I'm saying that the stuff that actually moves the needle for a guy your age is not buried in fringe protocol. The basics for two decades now I've been running the basics from people and it works.
Calorie deficit have balanced meals you're eating your body sleep water those things matter and I went over that nauseium on the podcast. Speaking of the first one, calories in, calories out is real. And here's why it still feels a little bit understood or or calling it out, challenging that it is not. Let me go straight at this because it does create confusion and I have to deal with it.
Someone was, "Oh, I just watched this Instagram real or this YouTube talking about calories in, calories out, and how I can just eat whatever I want." That food that doesn't cost calories. All food costs calories. There's no negative calories. Burning more calories and eats in calories out is real. If you are in a true calorie deficit, over time you will smack.
There you go. I said it out loud yet again. That is the truth. Every controlled study that accur actually actually equates calories between groups shows this. Meaning group A ate this, group B ate this, and the outcome was that. It's not a debated concept. researchers who are honestly reading the literature and holding to science.
But I understand completely why it feels just confusing for a lot of people because the principle sounds simple and then real life makes the math feel like it doesn't work. Here's the first reason why food labels in the United States are legally permitted to be off by 20%. And I want you to actually sit there and think about that number for a second.
That bar that you ate, that thing in the package bag says 180 calories, could actually be 215 without anyone breaking any rules. The package means that says meal that says it's 400 calories closer to 500 right of 400 is 40% is 80. So it could be upwards of 500 calories there. Multiply that margin across a full days of eating and the actual intake can be two, three, 400 more calories than you actually thought because you're just going off of labels.
That's where you end up scratching your head. I see this every single day with people that I'm doing all the things I'm supposed to. I'm not losing weight. Well, let's get a little bit more detailed specific dealing with destructive clients is they're buying low calorie brownies from a fitness brand. The label claims it's 150 calories, 17 grams of protein per who wouldn't want a brownie that's like that and not Betty Crocker.
I mean, nobody wants Betty Crocker. They literally just taste good. But this one checks the crow box. And they were eating three a day and thought it was a clean, compliant treat that fits their macros. Paid $300 out of our pocket to have them independently tested a lab. This is a a test that I saw.
The real numbers came back roughly triple the label calories, almost zero protein. Fat and carbohydrates were nowhere close to what the act said, meaning they are way higher and way less protein. And so you have to be conscious of these all these protein filled foods that are out on the marketplace and buying them and thinking they're a healthy treat, but they might literally just be wrong.
And it's unfortunate because you're thinking and assuming that, hey, the nutrition label says this. I believe that wholeheartedly and you believe that that's not the case. people with type 1 diabetes have been eating things these things and watching their sugar spikes in ways they couldn't explain like why am I experiencing this if it's got so much protein and fiber baked into it company and most food products are not that far off and it depends on the company even if you're hanging out on YouTube recently there's a lot of creatine
issues going on gummies eats creatine gummies. A lot of companies are selling you gummy bears without creatine in them. And there they say there is, but then they're getting independently tested and there is none. You're paying $25 for gummy bear instead of a$150 or something. Haro, I believe, is the the popular gummy bear, right? Those aren't that expensive, but most food products can fall into this.
And the point is that the numer label is an estimate with a legal margin over into it. And when you're precise and that's you want that deficit, then the margin is of error is actually big. You're not losing weight. And that is before we even get to portion estimation. Most men who have ever weighed their food off by more than what they realize.
Serving a peanut butter on a spoon looks like an ounce or tablespoon, which is roughly 100 calories or so for a tablespoon. It's almost two to three sometimes depending on how much of a scoop you put into it. Modest handful of nuts from the kitchen counter should be 100 calories. If you scoop those things out and then start throwing them in your mouth, then bam, you might end up with a very high calorie snack.
That's one reason I love healthy fats. I can't trust my client to measure out a/4 cup of nuts and that's the actual 100 calorie serving. How about a generous pour of olive oil and dopan? feels like a teaspoon or a tablespoon, which a tablespoon is 120 calories. It could actually be could be 300 calories sitting in that pan.
It's just human behavior. We our eyes can't especially if you're unfamiliar with what proper portions actually look like. Spending two weeks actually weighing your food. and we don't want to become obsessed about it. But actually weighing and measuring your food is a way you to create a longterm skill that you can then I call I always ask clients how many times you need to measure out this food that you eat on a regular basis to realize that it very close to approximately this much weight in this calories. Only a couple times
you're paying attention. You throw on six ounces of chicken. Tada. Every time. That's about how much you eat when you have chicken and magic happen. You're eating right food and it works. So this is the which you learn and you're able to create real data and real workflows to get true understanding of what is in the calories, not just estimating what it is.
on top of you're estimating what you think it is and then the company's estimating approximate calories that are on the label and now we're way off. And even think about how you might run a business. You would not manage your budget using guesses or approximations or I think it's this or I guess it's that. look at revenue estimates and trust them without running the actual numbers and looking in the bank accounts numbers ran nutrition should be different and it's a gap that needs to be fixed one of the challenging frustration moments that clients have is
the thing that I know what you're thinking but not actually gonna speak it and you are just running off that business idea. You you run your business. You lead teams. You have managing things. You are very responsible. You solve all your problems in the day and that's just who you are. But then your body isn't the thing that you can manage.
It gets really frustrating for you to be able to show up the way you actually should. This is a conversation a lot of guys don't regardless of how much time they spend in the gym, how much time they think tracking appropriately and they have to just literally be honest with themselves to get the the real truth of if you're in a diet then you need to focus on that being the core outcome.
The honest answer is you have been working with inaccurate inputs both sides of the equations and that's why your intake is actually higher than what the log your max show which and your calorie burn is probably lower than the formula or the amount of calories burned your watch is. So you're just not going the right way to get actual real change what your body is actually doing when you let's explain this.
This is the part that most programs never explain. It's why there are plateaus that get blindsided you and you are just wondering why in the world this happened. Your total daily calorie burn is not a fixed number. It moves up and down. It responds to your body weight. Food intake. Yes, digestion causes calories to get burned.
Thermic effect of food. how much you sleep, the more oxygen, the more that your body can run effectively, efficiently, stress you have, your training history, and it's constantly being adjusted. And when you cut calories, your body will notice and start to move the output side down to compensate. Meaning, I was eating this many, now I eat a little bit less, and now my body actually compensates.
then moves less or your resting metabolic rate can actually drop 15% with your weight loss. So if you're actually losing weight down this is just a biological condition to meant to keep you alive, have a fast metabolism and lose weight and keep that metabolism going because your body you you'll die. This is just evolution talking.
The bigger factor in is that that non exercise activity thermogenesis all those calories you burn from fidgeting I talked about in the beginning here pacing on the call standing while you think taking active walk breaks the day shifting in your chair I've been shifting a little bit not as much as I like been sitting unfortunately a little bit more than I want with all the podcast I've been day that's just part of the thing get on my bike and ride it on some couch.
Things like walking to your car, fidgeting, just playing with your kids. For most men, this accounts for more total calories burned in a day than the workout session. An actual workout session in any range anywhere between 200 to 500 typical calories and is suddenly just subconscious. It's just stuff that your brain's brain is going to control it without you asking about it.
And it's just the the process what it is. Now, here's that overfeeding study I mentioned at the beginning of our podcast. Researchers added a thousand extra calories to the day participants for six weeks in control conditions. Now, on average, people gained six pounds, one guy, and two. That was because he orconsciously his brain turned on and it increased the amount of background movement and now that and this is runs in the other direction of what most people do.
10% drop in body weight can reduce your daily calorie burn by four to 500 calories when you combine the resting metabolism dropping down with the lower amount of meat non exercise activities thermogenesis or you just moving less. This is real. It didn't change anything. It just happens. This is why a plateau can show up if you're not paying attention and thinking through these things.
I sit all day problem and workout can't solve it. It's the what are you doing the other 23 hours of the day. It's a big pattern behavior I find in most guys do. They get so all in on work which I totally understand. I'm in the middle of my workday for work and especially in my 40s. So shoot I need to pay bills.
My my garage door broke the other day of spring just yesterday. Paid some of dollars for that. It's out of nowhere. I go record a podcast and trying to bring in some new clients and such and the pattern of this challenge here. The men I work with are doing all this. They literally are they lay down right overnight.
Then they get up and they're sitting and they drive to work. They sit for 10 to 12 hours. They drive home. They might squeeze in a workout on the way home. eat whatever is possible available in the time that the day and then they end up ultimately sitting their home and going back to sleep. It's literally a life. There's a study that looked at workers across a range of activity levels from sedendary to manual labor.
Even think of Amazon workers where they're just moving crazy or male men, male women. They walk a significant amount burning lots of calories and they track how each group ate. The pattern was Jshaped curve from lightly active up to heavily active. People naturally compensated. They ate more when they burn more calories.
It's a feedback loop that just keeps your body. Yeah. The secondary group ate more than the light active group. Being still all day made them eat more not less because there's no brain wave activity to manage hunger or situation or expenditure in the body. Research believe this happens because movement helps your brain regulate hunger.
Fullness see probably the right when you're stationary for most of the day. that feedback loop starts to deteriorate. It just doesn't send the the patterns back and forth. You stop getting clear signals on if you should be eating or if you're full or not. You end up just eating past the point. Plus, you're busy. You're distracted and you end up just eating.
Whatever you get your hands on is you're rushing around. This is just human behavior. It's the physiological response of how you're living your day. It's got nothing to do with willpower or motivation. Minute workout three days a week cannot fully compensate for 10 hours of nothingness. The math doesn't math.
Your need is when the gut are 23 hours of the day and you can't spend a few hours trying to fix it. That's where some of the biggest plateaus happen. Even for men that are flagged with anemone or elevated triglycerides or cholesterol issues, this is one of the most accessible metabolic available and are able to help menage their blood sugar levels, get healthier when they start moving more.
Even building in 10-minute movement walk break after you get done eating would be highly beneficial for you. Avoidance moments. Okay, these are things that let's ask you something here. When is the last time that you actually had blood work done? There's the percentage of clients that come to me with those.
They are high A1C. They're passing glucose north 120, 150, 180, 125. I think the highest morning blood sugar I've seen is hundreds. Holy cow. When it's supposed to be 100. full lipid panel blood pressure. If you're hesitating to answer when was that time actually did that need to stop and skip something to actually see what those real numbers are and then you have real data upon how to start monitoring measuring.
This is important because when you get your labs done then you have an even better understanding of what you need to do and how to approach it. I have this issue in my body then I can take a direct correlated action to prove it. High blood pressure we can go with low sodium high blood sugar levels we can go with lowering carbohydrate int high cholesterol we can work on decreasing fatty foods.
It's a real thing. carbohydrate insulin model. Why it does sound well? Let's talk about this. Especially for my type one, type two diabetics and people struggling with those fasting blood sugar levels. This is one I want to spend some real time on. A lot of guys show up with this. The carbohydrate insulin model of obesity essentially says this.
We do not get fat because we overeat. We overeat because we are getting fat. mechanism driving that insulin. When you eat carbohydrates, insulin goes up, right? You put carbs in your mouth, rice, breads, pastas, things in that nature, insulin goes up and insulin drives fat into cells. Insulin is a storage hormone, okay? Will elevate your fat levels and that's not good.
Now, this also fat is getting stored into the fat cells. It prevents your body from accessing it as energy. Can't have be a two-way street here. It's just one way. Your cells are actually starved with energy even though you have plenty of fat stored because your body isn't pushing your energy into the right part of your body.
And this makes you hungry, which makes you eat more, which makes insulin further, which this loop. So you get stuck in this loop and then you even get insulin resistance that starts to show up. For a while, it was a very interesting hypothesis worth testing. The problem is it has been tested and thoroughly and it doesn't hold up at the most important level.
So what we're talking about is when researchers actually equate calories and protein between low carb diet and low-fat diet, the fat loss outcomes are essentially the same. I've heard this ad nauseium is that when you have calories most importantly are number one. We want to have protein and fiber foods in the second. I call this a simple six.
Calories one, protein and fiber two. We want to be eliminating the fat because it's very calorie dense. We want to be simple carbs because carbs are always we want to eliminate simple sugars. So, when we're able to bring down the uh bring bring down our carbohydrates and all, then we're able to focus on paying a lot more attention to what matters most here and of making sure that you are at the very least eating the right calories.
Then we can focus on a low carbohydrate approach or lower fat approach. So again repeating that when researchers actually equated calories protein between a low carb diet and a low-fat diet loss outcomes are the same. This is a well constructed meta analysis. That means multiple studies across in one study.
So a researcher will search say 30 studies on this topic and analyze all and then give the research findings of that that looked this analysis actually looks specifically at actual body fat loss and studies where meals were provided and participants were in a metabolic so you could trust compliance data. Compliance meaning that they actually ate what they said and it was measured and it was accurate.
When you control for calories and protein, the difference between low carb and low fat for actual fat loss is negligible. Grams per day differences neither here nor there. If insulin were truly the primary driver of fat storage, you would expect to see a meaningful and consistent advantage or low carb.
This is not where the data shows or talks about. But here is where it actually gets really interesting. This is the part that I think puts the final nail in this simple version of the theory is semigite you know is epic and movie and it's that GLP-1 mimics what that means is it mimics a hormone that your body naturally produces after eating that hormone signal your brain that it has enough food.
So the GLP1 the glucagon one hormone triggers at your actual pool. So when you take a semiglutide your meal secreted insulin goes up your insulin response to your meal is elevated on this medication. The carbohydrate insulin model is correct. What should happen? Well, insulin should trap fat fat cells and high insulin should make you hungry.
High insulin should drive weight gain. So if the insulin is higher, then it ends up causing to actually gain weight. But people on some glute are losing an average of 15% of the body. Appetite drops dramatically. Most effective. These are the most effective pharmacological results on obes obesity medication that we've seen ever produced which is great for people in really dire needs of actually losing that but it's also we she lose 10 20 pounds please let's not use the drug we can just not overeat because then you
don't want to know whatations after challenges that coming off of it actually make sense. These things are these are two things that cannot both be true. Say a drug that raises real time insulin cannot also produce fat loss in medical history if insulin is truly the primary driver of fat accumulation. Logic completely here.
Now there's a version of this theory that keeps moving through goalposts to explain way the results like this and that is also worth paying attention to on its own. When the theory has to keep updating its explanation every time a contradicting in that's a sign that you're something that is more of a belief system than science and hormones real insulin sensitivity matters and why your body directs energy how it does it where it does it is important and that's a simple story and one that is being sold loudest
And a lot of the corners of your supermarket, the internet does not survive comes to real data. That's super to understand here. So next up is the methodology problem that we need to explain a little bit deeper. Going deeper here because it matters on how you evaluate the information you're getting from any source, including myself.
Their research seems to show that low carb diets produce greater energy expenditure than high carbohydrate diets even when outer equated. Claim was that people on low carbs were burning two to 300 more calories per day, sometimes more. That claim got a lot of attention because if true it could be a significant find. But the problem is that how the data was collected.
So again, we go back to saying that the claim was that the research showed that low carb diets produce greater energy. Meaning say had 100 carbs or less got more energy. Someone that ate 300 carbs as an example. But the data you want to measure how many calories person in daytoday life outside of a lab. So you've got the block chamber which is a direct measurement someone lives in sealed room and you measure oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide output precisely and you can literally orly label water which is the indirect method in which you can give water to with
stable isotopes in it and measure those isotopes against urine and breathe for the tongue to establish Energy expenditure important. Now doubly label waters validated against metabolic chamber normal mixed diet and the correlation between the two met a mixed diet is technically around 08. That's the correlation here.
This is a solid correlation. trust number is well but on low calorie carb diet the correlation between doubled water and metabolic chamber drops to around five. The reason is that on a low carb diet, your body produces carbon dioxide through certain metabol to estimate energy expenditure. It's more efficiently inflated.
When the studies claiming superior energy expenditure more on low carb diet, they use that doubly labelled water instead of the metabolic chamber which said that provides an error and the correlation is actually lower than is the name metabolic. Same study showed no meaningful difference fat loss between groups. The conclusion is clear.
The measurement method is built in has a built-in error on low carb that made that group look like they were burning more calories than they actually were. And the outcome of the data, which is the only thing that actually mattered, showed that. This is where people would say, oh, that look it they burn more energy on low carb diets and your keto living liido low carb.
People are going to show up and start saying stuff. This is just how the measurement works and you have to use the right tools the job and when the most direct measurement available shows no difference in energy expenditure and the body composition data confirmed no meaningful difference in fat loss and the finding just doesn't hold up.
I go through all that not to make your head spin or get confused or anything. It's a little I told I warned you this is going to be deeper because I think that it's important to understand how research can look convincing on the surface and fall apart when you examine that is used.
The headline said low carb burns more calories but that explained carefully and said actually something different. So let's go into reverse dieting now. What is actually happening? Reverse dying is a very powerful concept, a topic that gets coaches repeated on both sides. And some swear by it and some say there's no mechanism for it for a reason.
I'm going to give you my honest opinion of it. Here the idea behind reverse signing is that after a prolonged deficient of calories, you're eating a low. your metabolism can adapt downwards and round down by slowly and incrementally increasing calories that raise your metabolic rate back without gaining significant amount of fat. That's important.
So say you are at 2,000 normally and you diet down to 1500 and slowly add 1500 for a week, 1,600 for a week, 1,700 week to get back to 2,000 it takes you five or six weeks. The idea is that it helps you rebuild your metabolic ceiling or the high amount of that you need before your next cut without costing you gaining fat.
And here's where I land after working with real people for long. I don't think that raising reverse dieting meaningfully raises your metabolic rate in a direct physiological sense. data on actual resting metal block rate changes from incremental calorie increases is not particularly convincing. And here's what I actually think happens when it works for people and does work for some people.
I've had it work for people. People eat a lot more over a long time. When you have been in a deficit for a long time, your testosterone can be suppressed. Your thyroid hormones are just sitting on the lower end of the range. sleep quality definitely suffers and your training drops. You're neat. You're you're fidgeting. You just literally move less.
You have less calories in you. You bring the calories up slowly. A lot of these things start to normalize. Your training improves. You move more, sleep better, your hormones respond better. None of that directly address your resting metabolic rate dramatic way, but the extreme effect on your total daily energy switch through the improved training performance and improved need and a better hormone environment can be great.
It allows you to set up it allows you to set up a deficiency a sustainable deficit the next time around. value is real when even in the not exactly what original theory was say like slowly adding to get your metabolism up it's important you know so when people ask me about reverse dieting I say this the strict theoretical version of why it works probably does not hold up perfectly under scientific scrutiny but the practical outcome for a lot of people who have been grinding in a deficit said for months worth something
real. If it helps you reset and want a better next phase, then that is a that's what you need to do. Meaning that if you also people overestimate what they eat and underestimate what by slowly adding some back in can be a great mechanism to get them to be eating more over time but putting too much calories in their body to then cause them to body fat.
Nothing like working so hard for months and months and you gain a lot fat. Intermittent fasting, the honest version. Ben asks me about this constantly. Breakfast, eat in a window, one meal a day. Let me give us a straight. When research actually controls calories and protein between fasting groups and regular eating rates, the balance outcomes are similar over time.
That is what the controlled research shows. Intermittent fasting is not a metabolic advantage. You don't get autophagy. You don't get all this mapping. It's just a way for you to manage calorie intake. So you can lose fat. It's a structure. So if I don't eat after dinner time after dinner, that's it.
You just don't have to worry about extra calories coming in later. that what we have next is uh understanding the specific problem for men in their 40s and 50s is that when you compress your eating into a window without paying close attention protein almost always drops. It's really hard to eat 100 grams of protein in two meals in a six or eight hour window.
It's just protein, let alone enough vegetable fiber as well. So, when you drop protein, and it's not optimal for a guy to lower protein, as we've gone over a lot, you want adequate amounts of protein in your day-to-day so that you are maintaining as much muscle mass as you possibly can and losing the fat.
You want to specifically lose fat. And the older you get, the body is less efficient at maintaining muscle, especially in deficit. So you actually need more protein as you get older. Now there's research labs out there that when they resistance both groups and actually created protein between meaning that they were equal over 12 weeks, there was no meaningful difference of lean mass outcomes.
Intermittent fasting can work for body composition, but those subjects were eating three sagefully high protein meals instead of in their eating window. They were not that they were not doing the skip breakfast and eat whatever you want and then whatever fits before 8:00 p.m. in the night, which is what most guys actually doing.
It's like, well, I'm just not going to eat between noon and have no plan on what I'm eating and I hope my wife makes something good for me at dinner. Yeah, that's not it. Now the more extreme fasting protocols midday fasting that means that one day you don't eat the next day you eat normal one meal a day om these show less favorable means outcomes in the research and in one whole study finding comparing these alternately fasting straight calories with no equated calories is not The calorie restriction with those created calories. The alternate day
group lost meaningfully more lean mass over the time that in the study. Now one study is not definitive but the trend of the research shows that the more aggressive the passing window is not favorable attention which is goes on everything that we've always talked about is making sure you have adequate amounts of protein spread out throughout the day and that will help you actually maintain muscle mass at most favorable way.
So eat normal low calorie deficit, lower calories than you should and be in a deficit and spread it out. Be more balanced throughout the day and you'll be fine. Let's talk about depression and exercise. This is true. I want to spend some time here and sits with a lot of guys because they don't want to admit any of this out loud and that they might be only pressed or anything like that.
There's a meta analysis published fairly recent researchers describe as strong enough to support exercise that they first line treatment of lone depression and anxiety meaning that let's exercise first over supplement to patient as a primary intervention and the the reason for study at that level of severity this is a significant statement and I think most guys hear this because here's what I see in my cushion practice all the time who are technically fine.
their good job, family, home, and things seem to be normal and but they're not clinically depressed necessarily, but they just have low energy, low libido, lowation, just going through the motions that say smart on first think nothing to do about it and they can just ignore their head in the prolong. What I want you about is what's actually happening in this situation.
We evolved to move our baseline status activity. Not gym activity in the modern sense like what we have now, but physically engage with world like all day long like get in and move your body. We used to hunt, build, farm, walk long distances. Our nervous systems and our hormonal regulation systems and neurotransmitter systems are all developed and that exactly what baked into our biology literally by our whole lifetime.
When you remove that constant physical activity, daily life of running around the business, running around with kids, and having a hard time regulating your emotions, your mood, your motivations based on the external stressors that you end up getting in your day-to-day life, then yeah, you're going to feel worse.
It's not that exercise cures depression, but it gets us back to a lot of what we normally have identified with as being part of who we are is that not exercising chron is a chronic issue if you don't really don't move. And that's a big challenge that we have to pay attention to for guys.
So the baseline expectation for how the body is supposed to be used and it's not being met day in and day out. you talk through that for years and years. And so that's a big challenge that you're not going to be able to overcome anytime soon. So when you add concentration back in, the results go beyond a composition. Men tell me they sleep better.
Men tell me that they work better, they manage stress better, that they have more patience at home with their kids. the hair more focused because they're actually burning and they don't need to necessarily call lifting a therapy session, but it feels that way. And it matters for fat loss, too, because you're moving your body, you're burning calories, and you feel literally better.
That's so important. Now, the personal responsibility question, just spend a couple minutes here, too, going over every serious conversation I have about why people struggle with their health long term. that never gets addressed honestly. There are two extreme positions in this conversation. On one end, you have the the view that it is entirely personal responsibility.
You choose what you eat. You choose whether you exercise. Nobody's forcing you to put food in your mouth. Own it and fix it. Right? That's on the far left. And on the other hand, on the right, the end of it, you have the viewpoint that individual choices barely matter. that it's in the environment and trauma history, social circumstances, food access, stress load, and are those are the real drivers responsibility on them instead of the individual.
Now, here's where we want to actually land 20 years working with people. things are wrong in ways that make useless. The full personal personal responsibility position falls apart when you have work. So people and coaching men who generally could not moderate their eating around certain foods that way the way other men could.
I've seen this and the research on how early traveling affects eating behaviors and how you are how food rewards us and the pathways different for each person and how appetite regulation and it generally works differently in people who have been chronically obese for years. And then also those telling those someone that they just need to want it more and be work harder and is actually lazy culture.
So we have to find these circumstances, the situations in which we can monitor the environment, the history, biology, the challenges someone faces and the stress that they are under for them to be focused on what it is. As a real coach, we have to understand it's all of those things. We have to take personal responsibility, but we have to pay attention to the actual situations that come into play.
So, that's super important. I want to share one more thing with you that I believe that the the main point of this conversation today and I'm probably going to break it up into a second one is that episode because I still have a couple more things. I don't want this to be a huge huge power episode but hopefully you've gotten a lot of impact of the the talking points that we talked about today.
I don't have them in broken down show notes on the different topics of the conversation we had. so that you can go through and listen to each different one. The main point being is that you are responsible for your own health and wellbeing. You have to manage calorie intake knowing that whether you fast or you have just eat all day or you have a higher carb or a lower fat calories and protein or equated that your meat body's movement all stuff matters to get you to the outcome that you want.
And my goal in any coaching that I ever do is helping people understand what it is, how it is, why it is, and the easiest possible way. And I hope that our conversation today helps you shape what is the best route for you. We'll jump in a couple more because I have a couple more pieces on this topic that I talk about that I had in mind, but we're out of time.
That's it for episode 83 of Driven for Health. And if you need help figuring out what the right approach is for you, that's what the call to rise is. It's a 100 day fat loss challenge for men that want to lose weight, that want to improve their blood panels, that want to have a sustainable life, a lifestyle that they can share with their kids, they can share with their their spouse and their everyone around them and and live in excitement and energy and and really in the best body they've been at in the last 5 to 10 years. So check out the calltorise.com
and fill out a form if you're interested. We have like-minded men. You listening in literally you're dealing with the same challenges as they are. They're just doing something about it to change their outcome. That's it for this episode for health. Thanks so much. Offer you.