Ep 22 - Fat loss done right the healthy and sustainable way with Luke Leaman

# Ep 22 - Fat loss done right the healthy and sustainable way with Luke Leaman

**Channel:** The JCC Podcast
**Published:** unknown
**Source:** podcast

Hey guys, how are we getting on? Welcome back to the JCC podcast for episode number 22. We have a really special guest on today in the form of Luke Lehman and I hope you guys really, really enjoy the show as much as I did. It was a fantastic, fantastic chat and really just a conversation on all things fat loss, sustainable and healthy fat loss. But what I will say is that if you guys are looking for a little bit more information on fat loss and how to do this in the correct and right way and bring your physique to the next level, the fat loss success formula is still available of course and it will be at all times and if you click into the link in my bio the second um the second section on the list or the second one on the list is going to be a fat loss success formula if you enter all your details you will be able to download that and build your own very fat loss success formula i'll also say guys please keep sharing the podcast i really really really appreciate the support hope you guys really enjoy this one please let me know what you think sit back relax and plug yourself in Hey guys, how are we getting on? Welcome back to the JCC podcast for episode number 22. And we have a really special guest today in the form of Luke Lehman. And Luke is first and foremost, a fantastic educator, a phenomenal coach and the co-founder of Muscle Nerds Health. So welcome to the podcast. Luke, how are you getting on today? Man, I'm good. I'm good. Living the dream, baby. Living the dream. Oh, dear. And this is a little bit of a fangirl moment for me as you're definitely someone that I've looked up to over the years and learned a lot from over the years so I'm delighted to have you on the podcast and the main thing is that I really enjoy like your style and this is why I think that you'd be brilliant for podcast and you are brilliant for podcast is the ease of which you communicate a message and really relaxed and easy to digest and understand the message as well and I try to replicate that in my own coach as well and is this kind of something that you've had for for years or have you picked it up along the way this this type of style of coaching uh you know i mean it's like it's just i'm just being me you know um in an industry where everybody tries to be somebody else um or they're trying to stick to a certain guideline of what they should and shouldn't say or shouldn't shouldn't do i just i'm just myself man and i you got to realize too i got into this industry at a time where it wasn't cool to be a personal trainer right you you tell your parents you're going to be a personal trainer and they want to disown you and say, where have we failed this person? But who could have thought that at some point this is going to be an actual legit career which you can actually have people go, oh, you're a pro-striker. That's actually pretty cool. So it's been a long road for me, but I tried a lot of stuff before getting into this. And at one point I was a computer programmer. I started programming computers when I was a kid because I loved computers and technology. And that was at a time where not that many people had a computer in the house. and we just happened to have one. And then I went to college to become a computer programmer and realized I don't want to do this anymore because I'm the only bodybuilder in my entire class. And no one's going to understand me and this is not going to fare well. So I decided to go to my other passion, which was some form of something in this industry. And, you know, it was going to be, I wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon, but, you know, that wasn't really going to happen because I kind of screwed around a little bit in college and, you know, that's really expensive. And then I was going to be a physical therapist. And then I just I kind of just got fed up with school because some of the stuff we were learning. I knew this isn't really how things work. So I just decided to stop college and travel everywhere and learn from who's the best at each thing. And I just did mentorships and spent my college money on that stuff. But it's you know, I come from an old school personal training background where we just we're just very blunt with our clients. and told them how it was. And so I just kind of carry that through and people seem to either really love it or really hate it. But I'm not going to change the way I am. 100%. I think that you get, even you listen to podcasts and stuff like that and you listen to people talk. We could sit here and talk about mTOR pathways or female physiology. It just makes us try to look smarter when actually just maybe the message is it's kind of like that analogy of the iceberg. We just need to relay the tip of the iceberg rather than giving them all the stuff underneath and something that in my coaching now over the last and while i've started to try and use that a lot more than trying to just over complicate a message and just needs to be that little small thing and that's definitely something that i picked up from you and so a little bit of an insight into you would be fantastic you're kind of your journey i know you touched on a little bit there but your journey working under charles and stuff like that and and the creation of of muscle merits health yeah man i mean look i come from a very small Texas town where there's not a whole lot to do there. It's basically football fucking and fighting. Right. So, you know, we, we, you, when you don't have that much to do, you find other shit to do. And I started training when I was very young for American football. I thought I was going to go to college be a football player which I almost did And I shattered my ankle I thought I was going to be in the NFL and all that Okay none of that worked so I had to find other shit But you know in Texas we start we are basically we start doing things like working cattle building fence and baling hay So you get like this country strong, and then you layer on top of that actual real weight training. And I was lucky enough in my high school to have coaches that actually knew how to train. They were ex-collegiate athletes, ex-powerlifters. So I had a really good early start to that. Plus, when we got the Internet, that opened up the world to people like Charles Poliquin, Charles Staley, Paul Cech, all of these guys back in the day who were the only people really giving really good advice on how to how to train, how to lift, how to, you know, how to get big, how to get strong and all that. So studying all these guys over a long time, doing their courses at a time where you basically you couldn't do an online test. They would send you a binder and a VHS tape. You'd watch the VHS tape. You take your test. You would fax it back to them and then they send your certification. That's how long ago this was. So it was it was wildly different than it is now when you can just go online and do everything and and do Zoom calls and consults and shit like that. I think it's fantastic the way we have it now. And so, you know, I had this, I've always had a thirst for knowledge. I wanted to know what I need to do. But more importantly, I want to know why. If I do a what is the adaptation I get and how do I manage that? How do I layer it into everything else? So for a long time, it was about application. Then I started wanting to know about the physiology. I sought out people to get that information. Then I got into more formal types of education and deeper certifications. and then I thought man it would be fantastic if someone would tell you what to do but also tell you how the mechanisms work and why you would do it and more importantly why you would not do certain things at certain times nobody was doing that so then we started muscle nerds because when I was with Charles and Republican group we were telling people program like this do this do that but because there was no context of when you didn't do that or what you would do if that didn't work because there was no chemistry involved. There was no physiology, no biology involved. You get stuck. It would work for say half your clients, but you'd fail the other half. So when I left Pollack and Group, I looked at my wife and I said, look, let's start our own education company. I was already doing online training. I've been doing that since 2007 when we were using fax machines. And so I said, where is there a hole in the industry? Nobody's really teaching how to train normal people. You're advanced hypertrophy, advanced fat loss, advanced nutrition. What about just basic shit that your next door neighbor needs to actually get where they need to go? Because your next door neighbor doesn't need drop sets, bands and chains, weight releasers. They don't need all this stuff. They need to learn how to move better and then get stronger in movement. And that's a vastly different mindset than what we've been taught up to this point in the industry. They don't need, they don't want to be dick skin lean. They don't want to fucking bench press 500 pounds. They want to take a solid shit once in a while. They want to have a better sex life. They don't want their back to hurt while they're having sex. They want to wake up with a lot of energy. They want to be able to play with their kids. I mean, that's realistically what it's all about when it talks to gym pop. So I said, okay, how do I take all this stuff? I've learned about how to train high level athletes. How do I distill that down into something usable for the gym pop and the mindset that what they're looking for? And so we started muscle nerd six years ago and it's taken off really well. And I think what I'm happy about is that before six years ago, nobody thought about health. It was all about performance. It was all about looking better naked. And we started getting people more interested in taking blood pressure, HRV, heart rate, body temperature, orthopedic profiling, like taking all the stuff that we should have been doing all along and saying, okay, we need to use this with people and figure out what's the best course of action to make them healthier. And then we can layer on performance as an afterthought. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the main thing is that we were even just discussing off air. It isn't just to make someone shredded in eight to 12 weeks. It's so much more than the underlying mechanisms and the physiology that's going on underneath. It's so important to be, yes, we can stand in front of the camera and have a smile on your face, but feel so shit underneath that it's just not worth it. Then it's not worth the buy in. and you just have this yo-yo of gain body fat, lose loads of body fat. It's just this yo-yo across the year that's obviously ridiculously unhealthy to do. I think those kind of basics and those fundamentals is something that you clearly are passionate about and teach very, very well as well. Thank you. Thank you. I am passionate. I'm very passionate about this stuff. I think the problem too is with the internet, everything's so accessible. So people will come to a trainer and they say Hey I want to look like this Instagram model And you looking at it like okay hold on You work 60 hours a week You a single mom with two kids Like you got to be realistic Like all this person that you looking at does all day is eat sleep poop and do steroids Like, that's it. If you want to look like that, you're going to have to quit your job, sell your kids to gypsies, get on steroids, and make this like your job. Like, that's, this is not realistic. And so it's basically selling a pipe dream of what people can do. And they can do this, but it's the irrational, what's the timeframe? Anybody can build a world-class physique, but they have to understand that has to be in the context of your timeline, not some Instagram influencer asshole that isn't telling you about all the shit that they're doing that you don't know about. 100%. 100%. I think that that's something that you can see just so clearly. And then people sell these eight week glute programs because this girl has a massive glutes on thing. And everyone just buys into that where there's just just unapplicable for most people on the planet, to be honest. Yeah. And then you find out that that girl actually got S implants. So it doesn't look like a glute program doesn't work. Absolutely. So in terms of the topic of conversation, I think that the phrase metabolism, I'm sure, is going to come up once or twice. So I did kind of want to just unpack the words or what exactly is a metabolism for the listeners, just so they can put context to it. And why do we need to understand about it? And what does it have to do with overall health and body composition? Yeah, I mean, OK, look, when you look at the metabolism, the way I the way I look at this is you're looking at a coin and you're trying to manage both sides of the coin. On one side, you have anabolic processes and on the other side, you have catabolic processes. So with an anabolic process, you're taking little things and you're putting them together to make big things. With a catabolic process, it's the opposite. You take big things, make them into smaller things. And you need both sides of this. You can't have one exclusively without the other, and your body doesn't. If you understand that concept and understand that you need both, then it's very easy to figure out how much percentage of time I need to spend in each one of those things in order to build a physique or build strength or build health. So, for instance, if you think about all young men when they get into weight training, they get into weight training, as far as I can see, for one main thing. And it's to get more pussy or more whatever, depending on what your sexual orientation is. But that's really what it is. You're either bullied as a young man or you're trying to pick up chicks. Right. So you get into weight training. You say, well, if I get really big and muscular, more girls want me and more dudes will stop beating me up. So you say, well, what do I need to do? I need to eat a lot of food. and train a lot and I need to get really fucking big. And then they do this for a couple of years and they end up just big and fat. Like they look, they maybe look good in clothes, but the minute they take the shirt off, it's like, Ooh, you look like a melted candle. And then they freak out and they, they go the opposite way. So they go from extreme and that anabolic stuff and they go straight into extreme catabolic stuff. And then they, they get shredded, but they lose all the muscle mass they've been putting on. So it's the pendulum. It's a human pendulum thing, right? if we have a choice, we're going to go to one extreme versus the other. So the key is to understand that pendulum needs a swing, but it needs a swing at a certain amount one direction and a certain amount another. And we don't want to go to the extremes if we want longevity and we want to make this a long-term thing. If you look at women, you know, society tells you you're never skinny enough. You need to fit a certain size, all this stuff. And so they do the opposite. They go into extreme catabolic stuff. They do lots of Zumba or running or whatever. They start the shit out of themselves and then they develop a pattern of like binging and purging using exercise, exercise and starving to purge. And then, you know, sitting in their closet, watching Oprah and eating bonbons when they go into purging mode. Right. So all of this stuff is massively dysfunctional. Unfortunately, the industry pushes people into thinking that this is the only way. No one's telling you that you need to do a long-term approach if you want this to last forever. So there are times where you might want to speed it up and kind of dig in, but you can't do that indefinitely. So if I'm going to go into a massive caloric deficit and a lot of exercise, I need to make a date of a start time and an end time and then go back to a cruise. So you can lose fat fast or you can lose it forever. You can't usually do those things at the same time. So I think if people would have a more realistic timeframe and more trainers would promote a realistic timeframe and stop this eight week, 12 week bullshit, the industry would be a hell of a lot better and we wouldn't have to fix so many people to get screwed up by other people. Yeah, 100% absolutely. And probably something that I did fall into the trap again, because I never knew about this kind of stuff when I was early on in my coaching career, first year or so, I used to do these kind of eight 12 week transformations and that like deadline like that what I always used to call it Now I can call it a deadline We had this like deadline it had to be in eight weeks so it had to be really really aggressive where now it that just just not the way we should do things and having a slower much slower tapered approach because that lasts forever so it'd be like the aggressive swinging of the pendulum is those four eight week 12 week transformations where the slower string the pendulum is that kind of slower and better and more ethical process for sure. Yeah, 100% man, slow and steady to me wins the race. Now, you got to keep that in context. Because when you look at the literature, it's pretty clear that if you go really fast, it tends to be more effective. But then when you look more into the literature, they're using obese subjects. Okay, most of my clients aren't that aren't that fat, they're just a little fat, they want to look a little bit better. So there's no reason for them the rush things at the start when we could just have small pockets of rushing and then long pockets of cruising. And it tends to work a lot better and you get a lot less dysfunction, a lot less psychological issues and food, strange food issues and strange exercise addictions and things like that. And then you can work on fixing a lot of things at the same time, like, you know, building certain body parts up. So you have a nice finished product, getting rid of pain, getting rid of dysfunction, moving better, feeling better, getting stronger, get, you know, there's a lot of different things you can work on other than just always focusing on fat loss, which is what 98% of people focus on. Yeah. And even mental fatigue as well. That's one thing that I try and say, like the mental fatigue of dieting and dieting and running these, and we're going to touch on that kind of stuff later of how we can maybe get ourself out of this fat loss phase. And, but the, from a mental fatigue standpoint, like it's just, it's, it gets hard. You get almost into a um i use this phrase a lot you almost get used to feeling shit and it's like you're you're you're you're almost your um psyche is just to feel shit because that's how i'm supposed to feel and then when you pull out of a fat loss phase whatever it is you go oh my god what's going on train performance sex drive energy mood everything all starts to go in a positive direction which is probably what we should be feeling and most of the time anyway it's insane it's insane to me that it's just generally accepted that when you lose fat, you're not going to be able to get a great boner and you're not going to have sex. Or if you're a girl, you're probably going to lose your period. Maybe you spot a little bit like that is not, those aren't really good physiological signs of progression. If you're losing your period, you're becoming pneumonorrheic, that is not a good sign. And it's completely unnecessary if you just play by a certain set of standards and, you know, don't take your energy availability to ridiculously low levels and an understanding what that actually means, right? So if you're losing your sex drive, that's not good. If your sleep's getting disrupted because you're dieting, that's not good. If your ability to recover from training is not great, that's still not good. If your desire to train and be compliant, that's not good either. And so if people would just look at it and say, okay, I need to lose, let's say I need to lose 20 kilos. All right. if i just say okay it's going to take me a year to lose that that's massively easier to sustain long term and do than to say i'm going to try to lose that in 12 weeks yeah right can you do it in 12 weeks yeah you can do that 12 weeks but can you maintain it after you're done or are you going to take 20 off and then put 22 back on which is the yo-yo that most people will do and after they've yo-yoed five six seven times it gets significantly harder to get it off and much easier to put it back on yeah and it's just that uh that want to get everything done just what's the word i'm trying to use it's uh um impatience you know just like just want and you know what i i've been much more than i am now the most impatient person in the world and when probably back in the day when i was doing dieting phases probably going way too fast way too quick and now that we can see and like you just said it's just taking a little bit more time and doing them in maybe more phase approach rather than just trying to rinse it off in that small week period. Yeah. But we've all done it because we didn't know any better, right? But I think there's enough information available now that people shouldn't be doing that anymore. It shouldn't be promoted to do it that way. It should be promoted to do it in a sustainable way and to make sure that you get it off in a way that's not going to promote an unhealthy way of doing it and doing it in a way that's going to promote health. Now, if you're massively overweight, your blood pressure is really high, resting heart rate is really high, and you're super overweight, I get it. Let's go fast because going faster is going to be way better to get some of your health metrics looking better. But once you get to kind of an average body fat percentage, an average weight, average BMI, there's no real inherent reason to rush this process other than that's just inherently what you want. But what you want isn't necessarily what you need, right? And so we have to be realistic about what people need. If I have a woman come in and she's 50% body fat, okay, I'm going to try to get her at least a 30% or below as fast as we can.

but your physiology changes at that point. And the faster you go, the more, the more you're going to be at exposure to creating some type of dysfunction, losing muscle mass, losing strength, losing sleep, fucking your guts up, fucking your mental health up. And I think that once you've dropped that big amount of weight, if you just, if you're just knocking off a half percent a week, every week, you're going to look a little bit better. And then for women, once you get close to like a true 22, 23%, you're looking really good. Most girls think they're 22, 23% when they're actually 33. Most dudes think they're 10% when they're actually like 20. So for a woman, if you can get close to that 23% mark, you already look vastly better than most other girls. If you just ship away a little bit every week, you look that much better. There's no real inherent reason to, to rush it at that point and for guys once you get close to 15 you pretty much got a four pack and a little bit you're starting to see the lower abs what's the rush to get the 10 percent right what's the you so you want vein in your veins in your abs okay cool but do you want it for a photo shooting and you blow up or would you like to get to the point where i can teach you how to sustain 10 percent year-round with minimal effort yeah 100 and and one thing actually just while it was on my mind there as well or when you just brought it up i think you said like 0.5 i like to run the kind of fat loss phases mainly at like 0.5 to 0.5 to 1 rate of loss of body weight would you kind of differ with that or would you be in any any zones or completely person dependent completely individualized i know but for the average person at an average body fat percentage where would you like to kind of see those numbers so i like if we're using if i don't have the ability to do body fat percentage measurements like uh i have uh i've got i've got a body metric ultrasound device i have i have calipers we use the navy body fat test especially for online people who can't get body fat done i've got a dexa available to me like we can get that and i think that's going to be the best way of doing it but if you don't have that available to you then body mass is probably the next best thing that is circumference measurements. So what I'll look at is for guys 0.5 to 1% of their body mass loss per week. And for girls, usually like 0.4 to 0.8. The fatter you are, or you can't say that anymore, can you? The more the more stored energy you have on your body, you can go a bit faster. So you can go if you have a lot of stored energy, you can go much higher than 1%. Because when you have that much energy, you're not really at any risk of losing bone and muscle mass. Once you get to the point where you are reasonably lean, we probably want to slow that down. So if I get somebody to say 15%, you know, from 15% up, I might focus on closer to that 1%. When we get to 15, we might be closer to about 0.5. And then, then when they start getting close to 10, then it's like, okay, let's just try to knock off a couple of hundred grams a week. There's no, you already look amazing. Let's just chip it away over time because what's the rush? Like, you know, especially at 10%, if you want to get down to 5%, cool. I see that you're a person that likes to suffer and feel like shit all the time. Great. So, you know, why, why, why suffer worse to get there? And like, what's your why of doing that anyways? Like that's, you want to get stage lean, but you don't compete. Okay. If you're going to do it for a photo shoot, great. Let's do it in the slow way where you're still eating plenty of food you don't have to exercise excessively you're going to have a better finished product and then it's easier to pull you back to 10% without you going crazy and hitting a pizza buffet every every day yeah 100% couldn't agree more and actually that kind of leads us into a next point about calories and um that that concept like is a calorie just a calorie um is what something i'd like you to try and unpack and kind of the benefits of a higher quality food diet when it comes to a body fat loss phase or muscle growth for that matter matter as well yeah this is great because i was actually i just i got off a mentorship call and i was talking about this to a guy and i was saying because that's some stuff i was thinking about this morning because all i do is think about this stuff so that's basically my entire life which is sad but you know that's you have to be a little bit obsessed to kind of to keep progressing yourself right um is a calorie a calorie yes a Calorie is a fucking calorie. It's a unit of measurement of heat. Okay, a carb calorie and a protein calorie and a fat calorie, it's the same fucking calorie. Just like saying an inch is a fucking inch. If I measure an inch in Australia or I measure an inch in America, if you think about Australia as being a carbohydrate and America as being a protein, it's still a fucking inch. Now the difference is a macro is not a macro That what people should say It drives me insane when people go you know calories aren all the same If I talking about these calories nutritional calories it the fucking same right It the same It the macro that different, right? And then the thing I was thinking about this morning is, you know, clean foods versus dirty foods. Now, here's one thing that just grates me because the evidence based crowd they get on these concepts of they beat they're very reactive about things and so they hear somebody say detox and they lose their fucking minds they hear somebody say probiotic and gut health they lose their minds um if i say clean food versus dirty food they go there's no such thing as a dirty food what the fuck is that you need to wash it with bleach shut up man here's the thing like you can say clean versus dirty or you can say more beneficial versus less beneficial It's just a matter of semantics. Same fucking thing. You and I can agree that if I'm picking a carb, a sweet potato is probably inherently better than a fucking Twinkie. Now, that's not to say you can't have a Twinkie. You can eat a Twinkie die and lose weight. But if you want to look at health, you know, we're going to agree that, you know, a sweet potato, a steak, a little bit of butter and some green beans is probably a lot better than having Pizza Hut pizza. I've got Pizza Hut on my mind because I just found a buffet near here, and I can't wait to hit it after I get done dieting. But, I mean, it's the thing. We're confusing the general population because we're saying, hey, a Twinkie's not dirty. You can have it. So then they end up, gym poppers, they're just going to eat Twinkies all the time. I'm all about flexible dieting, and the way I look at it is the cleaner you eat, if you're staying within your calorie guidelines, your macro guidelines, the cleaner you eat, the faster the progress is going to be, and the healthier it's going to be. If you want to have treats, there's nothing wrong. You're still going to get there. It's just going to slow. It's going to delay the process down a little bit. And for me, the quality is not going to be as good. You don't have the micronutrients that you need. There are certain things in some of the processed foods that act as anti-nutrients and deplete cofactors and vitamins because you've got to process that stuff out. That doesn't mean that it's a good or a bad food. It just means that one's going to be way more beneficial, clean. One's not as beneficial, kind of dirty. Right. So we tell our clients, look, if you can eat most of the time, really what's considered clean foods, lean proteins, you know, good fatty acids, a lot of fiber, good choices in your in your carbohydrates. And then you say those those that dirty stuff, save it four times where you just really want it. Right. If you're eating clean most of the time and you're like, man, it's Saturday night, I'd really love some popcorn and some fucking ice cream. fucking have it right the problem you just don't want to have that every day because when you eat hyper palatable foods it makes it harder to eat things that aren't hyper palatable because your taste is going to be screwed up so it's a lot easier to stay clean on a diet than it is to do dirty and just use the dirty foods once in a while when you really want to scratch that itch 100 and is there something as well that would like have a negative effect on performance and things like that if the if these quote-unquote like not clean foods or dirty foods will have on our train performance and our day-to-day and blue glucose levels and things like this what's the kind of negative effects that these get these kind of if we're having a if you see these people or see people who would like have a yes i'm eating 2000 calories a day but then you impact their diet and the quality is just really poor of eating crisps and ice cream and twinkies all day, every day of the week, but they think that their calories are in check. So they're okay with what would you say to that person now? Well, and well, here's the, I think first we need to say what the problem is. You know, if we say, okay, calories, a calorie, cool. A macro is different and different macros are different. Like not all carbs are four calories per kilo or per gram. Some of them are 3.7. Some of them are 4.3. Same thing with fatty acids and same thing with proteins. These are all approximations. Now you don't really have to worry about that. But anything that's easier to digest, like something that's already broken down, like a processed food is going to create large increases in glucose or large increases of fats. And sometimes not fats that are very beneficial. If you're eating a lot of hydrogenated oils, that's going to screw up with inflammatory processes that makes it harder to regulate inflammation and recovery and things like that. So again, and it's dose makes the poison. So it's not like you can't have it. It's that, well, we probably want to limit it a little bit. Now, we also have to understand too, that once things get into a cell, bloodstream or the cell, because a fat's not a fat and a carb's not a carb, they can all do different things. Like if you think that's not true, okay, then explain the difference between fructose metabolism and carbohydrate metabolism. They're metabolized completely differently and in different areas the body If you look at well carbs are all carbs Cool Eat all sorbitol for all your carbs When you pissing out of your ass all day now tell me that a carb is just a carb I going to have a sugar alcohol which is technically considered a carb, and I'm going to be pissing my brains out all day because I can't metabolize it. Ultimately, I think on one side, you got to agree with them because when you break things down, whether it is dextrose or whether it's fructose, galactose, If you're looking at like a disaccharide, a polysaccharide, it's all going to break down to the same inherent thing in your body. But there are repercussions. The more shit you eat, the more your body has to then do damage control against that stuff. So it's better for health optimization to try to eat as clean or beneficial as possible and limit the treats when you need them. Now, if you're an athlete, a lot of things change because sometimes the only way to get the food fuel that you need is to eat some dirty shit. I don't want people to misconstrue what I'm saying because I do eat a lot of shit and so do my clients. There's a point where it's like you get to the on the clean bandwagon soapbox too much that makes people scared to eat a fucking Skittle. I had a client one time. She played AFL and Gaelic football and she was massively starving herself. I got her eating way more. Her injuries went away. Her performance went up. she was stressing out before a match and she goes what do i eat i don't have enough food and i go okay what do you have available she goes um i'm at this store and i uh i like skittles or skittles i'm go okay grab a family bag of skittles and eat those and she was like really but what about the red dye number 40 i'm like who gives a shit eat the fucking skittles she had a fucking amazing game and every time before her match every sunday it was like what do i eat well skittles tended to work really well but what about all the dyes and just eat the fucking skittles man do you want your performance or not so and that's again the pendulum people can swing too far to clean side dirty side come on guys somewhere in the middle is really the the truth of all this stuff yeah i think that last last sentence really really summarized it and and the the fact even just you saying it there that the macro is not a macro calories the calorie calorie is a calorie but the macro is not a macro i think is is much much much more applicable and in terms of this is one thing that i did really want you to unpack and this is something that we're talking off air i did hear you discuss in a podcast before and i think that once we get to a certain stage in a dieting phase and where we've let's say we've already done 12 let's set up a scenario an average joe is set up i've done 12 weeks 12 13 weeks of dieting at this stage so food is going to be low more than likely cardio is probably going to be a little bit higher than usual and then we've plateaued and we drop food 100 calories training on train day no movement maybe we drop another 100 calories training on train day no movement maybe we add next day cardio no movement we then think the two options then for us is one to push much harder in that pedal or two potentially move away from a diet and phase so what's your thought process about this kind of stuff and what's the negative effect or can you actually move through that fat loss plateau? You can, you can move to that fat loss plateau, but is it really productive? That's the question, right? You know, if you, if you keep removing food and you keep creating a caloric deficit, of course, you're going to keep losing weight. The problem is that your, your body is taking an assessment of everything, right? So I, when I teach in my courses, I teach your endocrine system is kind of like a business structure. So at the top of the business, you have your CEO, which is the hypothalamus, right? And so if you think about what is a CEO, what do they do? Well, they look at financial records, they look at the history, they look at projections, and they direct, they delegate work to other managers that then delegate things to their workers and all the different departments in order to move the business one direction or another. So if I keep removing food, you know, he's talking to his next top guy, which is going to be the pituitary, and the pituitary isn't going to talk to all the departments, thyroid, gonads, adrenal system, all that. And then those different departments are going to send out the workers, which are all the hormones. Now, in a business, you got to look at your run sheet. What's the cash in? What's the cash out? How much do we have in reserves? What can we actually do? If you think about energy, and we can just call it calories, but we're really looking at is it's energy. Energy is cash. Do I have enough cash to run all my departments. If I run out of cash because I'm doing way too much exercise and I'm not bringing enough money in, so I've got too much labor and not enough money, then I have to make an executive decision of how do I save the company? Well, what's the first thing a company does when it losing massive amounts of money And we say the second thing The first thing is they do is they give the CEO a raise which that not how this works in your body which is awful But what they start laying people off So like okay we going to all these all the testosterone we can pay you So we going to have to put you on furlough The thyroid can't pay you either. So we got to cut some people off and we have to, we have to basically make, make our department smaller. So then you get subclinical hypothyroid issues. You get low testosterone. You can't grow pretty hair, skin, and nails, you know, So you can't actually tap into what you need. And so if you think about it, this is good. Okay, I just thought of this. Okay, initially in a diet, you can draw a loan from the bank and the bank is your fat cells. But eventually, bankers aren't going to give you any more cash because you're not paying the cash back. So you get to the point where you're in financial ruins. So the only thing you can do is lay off people and lay off departments until your body catches up. So the only way that you're going to catch up at that point is by getting a loan from a different bank. And that's food coming in. OK, so if you can't get if you can't tap into dodging this food because you've laid off the thyroid, you're going to have to go to an outside source. So maybe maybe if you're in America, you go to China and ask them for some money. I don't know. I'm winging this this analogy at this point. Um, but you know, then if you have to get, if you have to go to an outside bank, like another, like another country or whatever, um, there's going to come with some repercussions and some, some, uh, some, uh, what am I like exceptions for this? Right. So it makes it prohibitively harder to pay that back. So then in the scheme of endocrinology, you start binging because your brain's like, Hey dude, I need some food. So I'm just going to binge. And you're trying to, you're trying to repay the bankers. The problem is the interest rate is super high. So now you have to give the fat sales, the bankers more money, extra money. So all this fat that you've pulled off, you're going to end up with that plus some interest, right? So the key is to manage your run sheet, right? So I have two choices. I can go fast for a small amount of time, or I can go slow for a longer amount of time. If I go fast, I can't go fast for very long. So I have to have a beginning and an end date. So let's say, you know, for a personal trainer's perspective, what time period is the most important thing when you onboard a new client? You have to show them results in this amount of time, or you're not going to be training in the past 12 weeks. The first three weeks, if you don't show them marked improvements, whether that's fat loss or sleep or less pain or muscle or strength, you're probably not going to keep them long-term unless they just really like you. Sometimes people train with people because They like them. They're not getting results, but they just like them, right? It's like buying a European car. You know this thing's going to fucking break down, but you love your car, and you don't care how much you have to pay to keep it running, right? It makes no fucking sense. Or like women who wear expensive shoes. Your shoes look good, but your feet are all fucked up and your back hurts. But you're going to keep wearing those shoes. So that's like somebody who keeps paying a trainer for no results. Now, let's say first three weeks imperative, I get results to show proof of concept. So the first three weeks I might go on a very low calorie diet, give them a lot of exercise. I might pull carbs out to lower some water. They see some weight loss. Maybe their blood pressure gets better. Now you've got proof of concept. But now that has to end and we have to go on a cruise mode for a while. And so we might go three weeks hard and then we cruise for like 10 to 12 weeks and we just chip away. And then we do another drop and then we go another 12. There's nothing wrong with that. The problem is when you say, well, I need to show them in the first six months. So you just put them on this 40, 50% caloric reduction and you make them suffer through that for six months and then they're good for a few weeks. And then all of a sudden they start binging and now they can't sleep well. And now they've got constipation and their guts are a mess and they're sore all the time. And now they've got new niggles. It makes no sense. so um what i prefer to do is show them in the first few weeks and say okay now that you've seen what we can do in a short period of time we're going to cruise and chip away uh and then we're going to do another one of these blasts at a later date okay very nice yeah and that kind of brings it to the the point that we were talking about there of of just taking taking your time with it a little bit more than than just having that that blast and yeah we can make them shredded in 12 weeks but is that longevity and probably the bounce back right after that is going to be quite poor like the binge eating and stuff like that and one thing that you did say that was that was quite interesting was that that thought process of the hypothalamus laying off your testosterone and laying off your hair skin nail health and things like that so you're saying that when we get down to a really low level of food intake and stuff like that all these hormonal and metabolic functions kind of go out the window then for us to continue to lose body fat is that Is that what you meant? You will, but the thing is, you're not just losing body fat. Now you're starting to lose other things. You're losing enzymes that you're going to need

When you pile food back on, you're losing muscle mass. If you lose muscle mass, you're using places to put fuel, places to store fuel, places to burn fuel. So it's really imperative that we try to not lose any muscle at all or even do, if you think about a recomp, if I eat sufficiently high amounts of protein, even on a slight caloric deficit, I can still put on muscle tissue because the thing is you're never truly in a deficit. OK, now this is the concept that that that I think I had drank three bottles of wine and started thinking about this again. I never shut this off even when I'm wasted. So if you were in a true calorie deficit, you would be dying. OK, because you've got people think about food as as your deficit, but it's not. If you take food away, you have food you've eaten before that you couldn't use before. you're going to tap into that until you can't tap into that effectively. And then you've got to get it exogenously. So that's what you're managing exogenous versus endogenous fuel, fuel substrates, fuel sources, right? If you were truly in a caloric deficit, you know, you'd have to be at a point where you don't have any more muscle to eat. You don't have any fat to eat. It'd be like, you know, getting out of, you know, getting a Nazi Germany when they found, you know, all the Jewish people in Auschwitz and some of the other camps, you look at them, there's just skin and bone, right? If they survived, nobody these days in a first world is going through that, right? So you're not going to starve to death, but with a compounded stress of living these days, you can push yourself to the point where it's not a starvation mode, but you can get to a point where your brain will desensitize your metabolic rate to the point where everything drops. And then when you go into your maintenance is so low now that anytime you go above that in a binge or like trying to go back to maintenance, your maintenance is not your maintenance anymore. Now your maintenance is a surplus. Right. So what we don't want to do is create that situation where your maintenance is fuck all because you haven't given your body enough food. And it's it's done its job by keeping you alive, by lowering the metabolic rate to accompany not a lot of food coming in and not being able to get it off your body. so um but it's very easy if you just take a long game approach and you say okay i only need to pull enough food out and do enough exercise to get the ball rolling if i have if you have a 15 to 20 deficit when you look at okay what's my bmr now i need to account for thermic effect and any at now i need to look all my exercise if i look at the total tdee if 15 to 20 deficit gets me moving towards that goal, 40% is not better. Not necessarily. It can be better for a short amount of time, but I still have to go back up because the longer I push and very low energy availability, the more prone I'm going to get for osteoporosis, low testosterone, low thyroid, low progesterone, low estrogen, low ability to store glycogen, injuries, thinking, sleep. Like, like I never have people come in and say, you know what? I would really love to get really lean and to lose my erection and have no interest in sex. And you know what? I really love for all my hair to start falling out. Um, like that's, and I'd love to get injuries and you know what? I sleep really well. I'd love you to fuck that up. No one's ever asked me to do all that shit for them, but that's exactly what we do when in an effort to get lean, which is a very, um, ego driven, you know, getting to the levels of leanness that people ask me to get them to it's a very ego-driven narcissistic thing there's nothing wrong with that absolutely but the the it's the way you get there that's the wrong thing like trying to rush it and wanting to be lean yesterday instead of saying well this is going to take 24 weeks or this is going to take 15 or this is going to take 48 like what's your fucking rush yeah 100 i should really really like that that analogy or when with the thing that you said there about people coming in and not saying that they want to lose all these. The main thing that I'm picking up now is more hormonal functions and stuff like that, that we can lose so quickly if we're really aggressive in this approach. And in terms of, again, just another scenario for you, that if we have pushed, again, we've been dieting for, let's say a prolonged period of time, let's say 12, 16, 20, 24 weeks, whatever it is. And we get to a stage where we're getting to a point of diminishing returns and we're starting to feel energy or performance or mood and stuff like that suffer from that do you run diet breaks at that stage or how would you again individualize and completely person specific but what would that kind of approach be at that stage of a dieting phase okay so what we do is we use the basic clinical soap model so so subjective objective assessment and protocol right so the first thing we do is we need to look at the symptoms how do you feel um how do you feel about what going on And then what are the symptomatic things Your sleep getting disrupted You waking up 10 times a night to pee You can't think straight. You're losing things. Short memory's going. You're irritable all the time. You notice that you're not having, like, your fingernails aren't growing like they used to. Your hair's not growing like it used to. Your hair looks dull and not shiny. Your skin's getting flaky. You're cold all the time. You get cold hands and feet. those are the symptomatic things that we look at first. Now we need to line up those symptoms with some type of value. So it needs to have a number that can be attributed to it. So for instance, if I get a baseline body temperature from somebody, like let's say mid afternoon, two o'clock and you're sitting at 36.8, okay. On average, that's normal, right? And then you've been dieting for say three months and all of a sudden you tell me, man, I'm freezing cold all the time. I haven't pooed in three days. I'm super snappy at my partner, man. I'm just not feeling well rested. Cool. Let's do another body temperature. And they find that they're at 35, eight. Okay, cool. We need to go on a diet break because your body temperature is associated with metabolic rate. If you drop a one degree, that's going to have a massive effect on your metabolic rate. Now, can you push forward and push through it? Yes. But what's the point? Because you're struggling to stay compliant, you're struggling to get your workouts and you're not sleeping well, you're probably going to end up in a divorce. Is it worth abs to divorce the person you love? Your kids are miserable because you're miserable. Why not just take a three week diet break or even longer and then work on a recomp? Maybe go back to maintenance, less 10 percent, keep your protein high, get more sleep. You're still going to lose fat and gain muscle. It just you might not may not lose fat as quickly, but at least you'll feel normal. And then when you feel normal and all your metrics look good, cool. Okay. Now we'll go into three weeks, six weeks. We know based on history, how long you can go before the shit hits the fan. So we're going to go that length of time minus maybe one week. And so that might be six weeks and then we take another diet break. Okay. Really interesting. Yeah. And the thing is too, the longer you push yourself into the hole, the longer the diet break has to be. Cause I know like, um, the guys at Renaissance periodization, whatever time you spent dieting, they want you to spend two thirds of that time in a maintenance phase. So here's the thing. If you push it for 20 weeks, okay, now you're going to have to take a maintenance phase for like 12 to 14 weeks. Are you willing to do that? If the answer is no, then maybe you shorter blocks of dieting and shorter blocks of maintenance. So that maybe it's four weeks of dieting with two weeks of maintenance phase. Great. So you make this big drop, you maintain and chip, make a big drop, maintain and chip. And that's going to be a longer, some more sustainable approach for most people. But a lot of it comes down to your psychological state too. Like what is your reason for wanting to do this? If you have an extrinsic motivator that pushes your intrinsic motivation high enough, you can power through it. So, and I'll give you an example. When I decided to start competing in jujitsu, I was sitting at like 112. And I said, okay, I don't want to be one. Because honestly, I don't feel fast at this position. I don't feel well conditioned. And I don't I don't want to I don't want to roll with dudes that are like 140 kilos and have to compete against them. So I took six months and dropped down to about 93 kilos. And then I ate back up to 97, which is the weight class that I compete in. And I found I performed really well and then i had to fight against 140 kilo people anyways because my competition coach is a fucking insane serbian guy that's like you get to compete with everybody i thought i was gonna do the masters with all the old dudes like me he's like no you do younger older all weight class and i'm like okay fuck but luckily it panned out because of the conditioning being more Condition sometimes helps when your technique sucks like mine. So in that time, I mean, I lost about 20 kilos. And the thing is, like, 20 kilos in six months, and somebody who's already kind of lean, I was sitting around 23% body fat, which isn't too lean, but got down to, like, 8% body fat and then ate up to 97. And it sucked. It did. It sucked. But there was a motivational aspect that I wanted it that bad enough to power through it. Most gen pop people don't. Wanting to wear a one-piece bathing suit at the beach because you're embarrassed to take anything off is not a big enough driver for you to be able to push yourself into the hole as much as somebody who has a competition coming up or a photo shoot. so when you looking at context of things if you have an athlete somebody getting ready for a bodybuilding show they willing to suffer because they going to get on stage joanne from next door is not going to do that just because she wants to wear a fucking one piece at the beach yeah okay yeah i get you and having that again bringing that back to that deadline having that date for a bodybuilding show where you have a jiu-jitsu date or something in mind and i think it allows the motivation to be a bit higher because you know it's just for that period of time yeah as if everyone's just doing it to be lean all the time it's just it's never going to have that and never going to have that effect and one little question i did have was around the kind of topic of calorie sensitivity and sometimes that i've seen or i've heard and with clients myself when we diet for prolonged periods of time and our kind of our calorie sensitivity obviously gets a little bit much well much lower when you run it and that bring it back to that diet break then taking it out and even back staying in a surplus or in a deficit or bringing it right back to maintenance how long are you trying to run those kind of diet breaks for is there a length of time i know that you said that that was actually a really nice um thought process i can't remember the guys you you said did it but two-thirds of your dieting uh should be that and i actually just put up a post the other day about that the longer you diet the longer you need to get out of that dieting phase in a diet break for is there kind of would you run off those kind of two-thirds of time dieting into a yeah on the person of course i think i think if you're not using any biometrics then that's a that's a pretty good it's very generalized but it's a very good place to start um i think like looking at your symptoms and it really like writing a log down weekly of how i felt this week and then you're going back and seeing how you're declining oh shit man man i'm really screwed up and then then coming out of the diet going on a diet break more of a recomp and then keep journaling and you can see like how you went and how you started going up and you're like okay i've been diet breaking for five weeks i actually feel pretty good let me see how because you're gonna forget how you how bad you felt yeah let me go back seven eight weeks ago oh my god what who is this person that's writing this shit that's not me oh that was you at that time then you're like okay cool so now i i know how long i can diet and then how long you need to diet break But if you're using metrics, I think the body temperature is brilliant for that. And I've gotten a lot of flack with other evidence-based colleagues about this. Well, that's not shown in literature. But, yeah, fuck off. Here's the thing. I can tell you right now, evidence is not just in the literature. It's also what we see in the field. It's a total, yeah. We push somebody down. We have people that lose 25 kilos in 12 weeks, and we see them go from, like, 37 degrees to, like, 35, 6. We pull them out and give them a diet break for a few weeks. within say five six days they're at 36 8 37 we hold that for another week and then now we do another big drop and then we we figure out how long they can go and before we need to diet break and we try to stay ahead of that curve if you stay ahead of it you don't have to diet break as long but i think yeah sorry one last thing i think one of the things that the misconception is that you're going to go on a diet break and get fat. If you stay ahead of the curve and you go on a diet break and you don't go crazy and binge and do dumb shit, you should be able to keep losing body fat. Or you might not lose body fat, but at least you're putting on muscle because you might be in a slight surplus with high protein. Both of those are great things. Whether you barely chip away fat and you're putting on muscle or at least you're holding on the muscle and holding on to fat, you can always do another hurrah and drop back into a deficit. Brilliant, man. Yeah, I really, really like that. And that analogy, I don't know if you know, he's actually an American trainer, Nick Gloff. Have you heard of him? No. Oh, man. If you love watching people train heavy, it is just crazy, crazy strength. Like squatting 600, 700 pounds for reps. Like he's 21 or something. Nick Gloff, an unbelievable, really, really high. He works under Camp Jansen, a coach. anyone who is listening as well please go watch some of his videos just unbelievable motivation but i was listening to a podcast recently on him he talks about this red line understanding how far you can push and noting like we can maybe go over that red line a little bit every now and again but then we know how we know how to pull it back and that analogy that you said there about let's die it hard and now we can almost predict oh when we've done it for this long or this rate of losses speed up sped up or this period of time then we know then let's pull it back out i think that was a really really nice analogy absolutely like i i love cars i love fast cars right and and computers so i do use a lot of analogies like that and look man you can drive if you're racing somebody you can you can redline that thing before you shift yeah but if you were to do that all day every day and constantly redline your car going to start falling apart so you know a car if you think about the way a car produces energy It very similar Like engines make calories You can measure the amount of energy in an engine with calories But if you think about what you need to make a car faster, you know, the first thing you need to do is you've got to get more oxygen in the car. So maybe you put a turbo or supercharger on it or you put nitrous, compressed oxygen. The secondary thing is you need more fuel. So if you want more performance, you have to get more oxygen in. That's your aerobic system. And you need more fuel. That's your food coming in. And you need more transporters for that food. So that's amino acid transporters, fatty acid transporters, glucotransporters. And then you've got to make sure that the structure of the car can handle it. Is the car, is it aligned? Are the wheels on tight? Does it have the drivetrain and the tires to put the power to the floor? So a lot of the same thing can be said of people. If you are doing a lot of exercise and you're increasing the oxygen, but you don't bring enough fuel and you have like poor fuel injectors, well, your car is going to start running rich or lean or whatever. And the engine is going to blow. It's not going to produce the energy you need it to. Same thing happens in humans. If I'm doing a lot of exercise, but I don't support that with enough food, performance goes down. If I do that, then metabolism, metabolic rate goes down. If I add more food and I bring in more oxygen, performance and metabolic rate goes up. And so it's very, very similar. Yeah, nice. Really, really like that as well, actually. And in terms of the, actually, we're going to go two last questions and it won't keep you any longer. So the main kind of thing, or one thing that I did want to touch on was when we do enter an aggressive dieting phase, we know we are entering into it. What are the common mistakes that you might see the average show or general population make when entering a dieting phase? And how would you correct and advise these mistakes? I think one of the things is not taking a global assessment of where you are, because the thing is, you need to look, where are you physiologically? Are you even ready to begin this journey? The second thing is, are you there psychologically? Can you actually do it? Because, you know, pushing hard only works if you have the mindset to push through the tough times. If you're going to break the minute things get difficult, then maybe you should slow down a bit. And another thing is what's your why? Like, why do you feel you need to do this? Because that's important because motivation only goes so far if you don't have a good why. I think a lot of things, identity as well, because people do a lot of this stuff for the wrong reasons. If you're overweight and your doctor says you need to lose weight or you're going to die, that's a big motivator. That's a different thing than somebody who says, oh, I've got the opportunity to be a model and maxim. That's it. There's a complete one of them is I'm going to die versus one of them. Oh, I'm going to get fame and fortune and all this. So those are two different drivers. You need to make sure your driver is good enough to keep you compliant long enough to get where you want to be. A lot of people just decide to lose weight. They don't know how much weight they want to lose. It's usually a lot more of what they need to lose a lot more than what they think they need to lose. I think that people need to stop rushing things. You know, if you were going to go, if you were in a, let's say you had a neighbor that was pissing you off, you know, maybe built his fence too far onto your property and all this. You wouldn't, you wouldn't go buy a fucking pipe bomb and blow his house up. You'd probably just go slap him, right? There's no reason to throw a nuclear bomb on something when words will work, right? So why jump into things and smash yourself when you don't really need that at the start? You use that for when you get stuck. Another issue that I see is in the middle of training, too. So I don't know how much you know about making about Texas barbecue. Nothing. Okay. So Texas barbecue, it's a bit science, it's a bit art, it's a bit passion. It's a bit passion or a bit passion, a bit, a bit, a bit beer, lots of beer. You need lots of beer to go through a long smoke. When you cook a brisket, there's this period of time that's called the stall. OK, so it's cooking, it's cooking and then it stalls and nothing changes and you have to tough out the stall and then it progresses. And the stall can be an hour. It can be 10 hours. Depends on your equipment, your skill. when people hit the stall and in fat loss, they just automatically assume that they just need to do more work and eat less food when actually what might be happening is maybe your maintenance now drop and you are in a surplus, but you're building muscle. And if you just wait out the stall and not do anything crazy, your fat loss will come again. Right. So, you know, in your stall could be a week or three weeks, just if you're taking circumference measures and you're taking a global assessment of things, sometimes you just need to wait out the stall and not worry about that plateau as being an inherently bad thing. And getting this emotional attachment with scales, something

I've had to have a conversation the last number of weeks actually is is about that with one or two clients and just like it depicts our mood like if we have lost 0.2 kilos on the scales this week we're not at that one percent rate of loss that we're looking for like it's changed our whole mood yeah that kind of emotional connection with this it's just because it's just such an objective number that they quantified we say this is the only way I'm moving forward is if that scale is moving forward where maybe it might be something else like maybe maybe we have done other things outside that like our sleep is better or um resting heart rate has dropped or we've probably added more tissue something like this and that could potentially have been there so i think there's some fantastic um uh definitely things that people we can advise people on what to do if they are entering a diving phase yeah look it's and that's the thing right it's identity politics people identify their self-worth with a skill because commercialism and capitalism tell you that that's your thing, right? But it's not. I mean, here's the thing. If you want to weigh less, cool, let's go into outer space and stand on the scale. You're not going to look any different. You're going to weigh different. You're going to be happy, but you're going to look the same. You're not training to look for that scale weight to be down. You're training so you look better and clothes feel better. So what we need to do is look, let's look at some other metrics that show success. It's like, I only lost 400 grams of weight in the last two weeks. Yeah. But your squat went up 10 kilos about that. And you look like, oh yeah, I only lost 400 grams over the last two weeks. Yeah. But you just told me that you had to go buy another size pants down. Shit. I didn't think about that. Yeah. There you go. You know, so there's, we've got to use other metrics like um like um if you're doing cardiovascular conditioning it's like hey look your 5k time went down 15 seconds and you put 10 kilos on on your squat that's how about that like i didn't and you can actually do your workout without whinging and you can actually put your shoes on without having to fucking sit down and put proper foot onto something how about that so we need to look at more more positives progression isn't just losing weight it's also building strength getting more conditioning, sleeping better, pooping better, feeling better, moving without pain. Those things are probably more important initially than just the weight loss. 100%. And so a phrase I like to use them as well as I'm not a scale weight coach. I'm a body composition coach. And that's it. Chase that number and the scales when, like you said, there can be so many positive factors that has had an unbelievable week from the lens of someone else. But we're so narrow minded into that one number that we step onto every single morning that that just it goes overhead then and i think that's the again the beauty of having a coach that they can pull these things your weight hold on a second if uh if you told me like josh your your digestion is much better your bowel movements are better your sleep is better these kind of things where maybe i might have just narrowed into that one thing for sure yeah i mean look if you if you only use the skill that's that's very easy right like i'm not paid to get people to lose weight And I'm like you, I'm paid to make you have a rock star body. That's the thing. Like anybody can lose weight if you starve yourself and do a shit ton of cardio. That's easy. If you can just do that and not deviate, all right, cool, you're going to lose weight. But are you going to have a nice finished product? So if you look at, if you ever saw the Subway commercial with Jared, and we won't get on to Jared's pedophile stuff, which he's in prison for right now. Apparently eating Subway makes you a pedophile or something. But, you know, the whole thing was 600 calories a day or whatever, eating Subway sandwiches. And he went from being really big and fat to small and fat. He didn't look any different. He just lost a lot of weight. No one comes to me for that. And no one's going to pay a trainer to take them. I want you to take the way I look right now and just make it smaller. People have an image in their head of what they want to look like. And it's usually not that. it's usually you know here's an instagram person or this uh victoria's secret model or i want to look like fucking arnold schwarzenegger that's a different thought process than just losing weight body composition and losing weight are two completely different things they're inherently intertwined but they're also compartmentalized 100 couldn't agree with you more there on that one i think they're really nice analogies as well and again one of the posts that i put up the other day was that kind of thing where we can just make you, like you said, dick skin lean and just hammer you into the floor. But if it isn what we want to try and achieve then there no reason to do so And I you know I when I got into industry I was just like everybody else I had I love the lift weights I love the squat I love the deadlift I love to do all this stuff And I just thought people are stupid if they don't want to do this. So I'm going to make all my clients want to want to do this. And it's like, I failed a lot of people the first, first half of my career because I wasn't listening to what they wanted. I was trying to give them what I wanted for them and they might not want that. So if a woman came and want to be trained, I'm like, I'm thinking you're going to be on stage in six months. She doesn't want to do that. Or I get a guy come in. I'm like, I see his potential. I'm like, you're going to be the next world strong man. This dude only wants to look down and see his balls. He hasn't seen in like 15 years. He does not care about doing Atlas stones and log press. And here I've got this dude with a crib back doing that because that's what I like to do. And so anytime, the way I look at training too, whoever's writing the check is the boss. Okay. So kind of going back to the CEO business model, the CEO is hired to manage things and make sure it's run. But realistically, he has to do that in the context, the owner who's writing the checks wants him to do. So in a personal training scenario, the client is the own business owner and they're hiring you as the CEO to manage their business, which is their health and their fitness and their body composition. So we have to say, if they're writing the check, we have to say, okay, what do you want? I want to lose weight. Okay. How much weight do you want to lose? This much. Okay. Now it's my job to educate you on what that weight needs to be and how much you actually realistically need to lose. And then, you know, I have to look, listen to what type of exercise do you like to do? I like to do Zumba and body combat. Oh yeah. That's not going to work for me. Okay. You're going to have to lift weights. I hate lifting weights. I get hurt. Okay, cool. You're going to lift weights. That is not the way this is going to run or they're going to find some other CEO to run the business. Yeah. Somebody comes in and says, I'm a vegan. Ooh, that's bad. You have to eat meat. Now you're challenging their belief system. You're not going to be training them much longer, right? So you have to match up what the client says they want because they're the boss with you being paid to manage how they get this done within the context of what they want to do in the confines of what they're wanting whether that's a religious diet cultural diet belief system diet and what type of exercise they like to do because that's what they're going to actually be compliant with and stop trying to change their belief system 100 and this sheet it's funny you said that i just put up a transformation of jesse i think it was no no longer than two days ago captioned like clients once over my once and it's the exact same thing that's like like we got to a stage where yes i could have just put the foot on the floor and gone to a different different level of body composition but that's not what she wanted we don't that's not our goal here that wasn't our goal when we jumped onto consultation first so we we shouldn't we shouldn't push to where we want to and like i funny you said the Zumba thing as well. So if a client comes in and says they want to do Zumba and their heart rate is 10 higher than where I want it to be for this perfect zone that I want them in, so be it. It's just a matter of what they want because, like you said, that's going to allow them to adhere to it and enjoy the process a lot more. That's right. But you're going to get a much better result at the very end. That's right. I mean, if an athlete comes to me, it's my way or the highway because that's more dedicated thing. if it's gen pop, okay, cool. Let's figure out what you like to do and what you're willing and not willing to do. And let me work around that. And I think for a long time, you know, I was anti-vegan and I'm not anti-vegan. I don't think it's optimal if it's, but if you're doing it because you love animals and all this, then cool. If it's a religious thing, cool. If it's because you watch Game Changers, I'm still going to go cool, even though I don't agree with it. But one of my, One of my best friends in the world, a woman named Marge, who is in Perth, she's a vegan. And so we have a lot of long discussions about this because I didn't really understand why someone would not want a big fucking Wagyu steak. And I come from Texas, so that's what they do. When you're a baby in Texas, you get breast milk and then your parents cook steaks and then they blend it and then put in a bottle and you suck on steak, right? So we had a lot of discussions about this. She says, look, you're never going to change someone's belief system. people that go into veganism for reasons like loving animals or thinking that's the healthiest way, you're never going to change that. All you're going to do is make people not want to work with you. And I went, fuck, you were right. So I just decided to learn how to write vegan diets and help vegans Right And you know she she teaches body combat and I said okay she said come to the body combat and went absolutely not i not fucking doing that and so eventually i said okay i gonna go to body combat so myself and zoe my wife went in the body combat i was fucking destroyed destroyed i'm in the back of this class and i'm seeing girls that are massively overweight fit as fuck never seen that before these girls are killing it and I looked at that and went man I've been a real asshole being against this type of thing like look at how much joy they're having doing this and this is probably the only thing they'll do over the week this is fantastic so now I'm like pro les mills like I'm still I don't want people to think I'm a cardio bunny I'm still still love to smash the weights I think people should do blend of weights and conditioning but I'm no longer that guy and I haven't been for a good number of years of like, you don't need to do that. That's bad. You need to do this thing. Right. And so you got to work with what they're willing to do and you got to match your expectations with their abilities. Yeah, 100%. I love that. And that's probably something that I have picked up from you over the years is to be that kind of chameleon and just work around the client's needs and wants. And in terms of the last question, the last question before I let you go is going to be to every guest that I come on, I always talk about non-negotiables a lot in my own content and in my own life. So what are the three things that you must either practice, do, or have on a daily basis, and what are your non-negotiables? Yeah, okay. All right. Oh, man, I've got to think about this. I should have thought about this before. Let me think. Look, people don't understand this about me. My wife does. And people go, no way. Everybody thinks I'm a massive extrovert because of what I do. But I'm actually a massive introvert. So I need a lot of alone time being around people and teaching. All that just wipes me out. So I have to spend a lot of time just by myself doing doing things I like to do, like playing World of Warcraft. I still I played World of Warcraft since the start. I still play it. I've got lots of hobbies that are non-negotiable for me like I'm into learning about like electrical engineering now because I love car stereo and I'm learning how to work with wood so me time is a big deal where nobody bothers me because I'm always there's always somebody that needs something from us so we're always like with all these people or teaching or lecturing and performing and all that but that's a big thing for me um that's important yeah like spending time with my wife and my dogs, hugely important. We stay at home a lot. We don't really go out much. You know, we just enjoy being home, being around the dogs. That's a big non-negotiable for me. Yeah, man, I really don't have a whole lot. Being a workaholic is a non-negotiable for me because look, you know, I went into computer programming, decided that wasn't for me. If I stayed in that, I would be miserable. But like I decided to follow my passion and try to be the best version of myself in that in this industry that I can be and help as many people as I can so when I get up every morning I can't wait to work and there are some times where I'm like and I just can't do this anymore because I'll put in you know a 15 hour day 16 hour day and then so I'll work until I feel like I'm getting run down a stick and then I'll take a few days off but yeah like that's that's kind of non-negotiable for me you know 100% and you're definitely doing a good job in leading the way for us and regarding the health and fitness industry and obviously a parent at the level of of coaching you guys do provide with muscle nerds so where can people find more about luke layman and also muscle nerds and also the courses and that's one thing i can't wait to get up to you guys i had a plan for this this year i was actually in ben uh ben pokolsky's and one over in melbourne during the year and then my other one that i want to try to get up to is you guys so we'll be up there and when all this craziness is gone yeah yeah it's the craziness right uh so we look we've got a few different ones and we've got some more that that i'm working on building out right now we started with our foundations course which is basically um digestion assimilation gut issues how to fix things um in a way that's practical not crazy like uh you know gut the gut box you get at your local supplement store like how do i understand what's wrong and fix this stress, how the brain controls everything with biochemistry and carbohydrates. And it was a big, like nutritional foundations course. And then, so that was a live one that we can do So now I making modules out of each of those so that people can learn that So I revamping them putting them on video We got we just released a nutrition one which I really proud of. We packed in probably more information I've ever seen anybody pack into a seven or eight hour course. And so basically went through things like we did the normal stuff, like low energy availability, reds, how to set calories, all the different macros, biochemically what they do, and then how to choose what to do and frameworks of dieting at different levels of stored energy levels we'll say instead of we'll say fatness and then it went through like periodization of that stuff and then it also did something which a lot of people don't do is we went into kind of the psychology of things and things like cultural and religious exclusions and food exclusionary diets like i look i'm i'm i'm a white dude you know you know i've got like Jewish ancestry, Ashkenazi from Europe, understanding how Jewish people eat, especially if they're religious is a different thing than other people. I was raised Catholic. So I've got this thing like this religion has certain dietary exclusions of things they can and can't do. So does this one. If I need to train somebody who's cultural, like someone who's from India, I've got to know different things about Indian cuisine and how their, how their culture revolves around food. If I don't understand that about other religions or other diets, then I can't really help that person effectively because I may write something that offends them or I might write something that they can't actually do. So we go into a lot of that type of stuff. Like if you're going to pick up clients like that, you must research their situation so that you don't cause offense and that you don't also give them things that are outside of what the zone of what they can do. Right. So go into a lot of that stuff, how stress, how stress impacts mitochondria and how you move energy through the body. And so it's, yeah, that one's massive. So in that one, people can just get on muscle nerds.net and they can just buy it and it's go at your own pace all online with quizzes and a little certification and completion at the end. And then we have our big flagship one, which is the program design course. So that one is massive. You pay for it want you go through as many times as you want and we keep adding more stuff to it um so it started out like it's of course dude it's massive it started like eight weeks and then we i just me being me i can't help but just keep adding stuff to it yeah so um we've added like a sales and marketing one we've added a video library we've added um three days of live lecture in Holland because now we can't do the live stuff. So when you do that program, there's also a three day live workshop you go to when the world opens up. Um, and we teach everything from stress, uh, exercise metabolism, traditional periodization, sets, rest, time and attention, uh, rest programs on order of exercises. We teach all the assessments you need, like length tension tests, manual muscle testing. We teach, fuck man, we teach pretty much everything you need to know that you're not going to learn in your basic certifications. And then there's a form you have for questions. We have during each of the three intakes a year, we have fortnightly calls where I'll do another lecture. We just did one on excessive kyphosis and what you do to fix that and what you don't do. So yeah, it's massive. We record all of the calls and we timestamp them. And so whenever you get in, you still have all the other calls we've ever done for the last four years. And you stay in that program forever. Brilliant. And the very theoretical, a lot of practical, but how to actually apply it is the golden ticket. And you guys do that probably the best in the world. So I will definitely, definitely be up to you guys for sure, if not joining a couple of the online courses. But Luke, thank you so much for taking this time out of your day. I really, really appreciate it. Obviously, your passion is ridiculous for this, and hopefully that I can take a leaf out of your book and try to drive that into my own coaching business. Thank you very much. Ah, I forgot. Instagram, musclenerds underscore health. Websites, musclenerds.net. If you like memes, especially inappropriate ones, you can follow me on Instagram at Luke Lehman, L-E-A-M-A-N. But don't expect any science-y shit. Don't message me on there asking me questions. message muscle nerds because that that is basically my account for when i'm taking a shit and i upload all my memes so i can vouch for luke here he puts up a lot of memes it's good content it's good funny content anyway for sure but uh thank you so much again appreciate you taking the time and we'll catch you soon you bet thank you