Cheat Meals vs Free Meals | ETP#181

In episode 181, we talk about the differences between cheat meals and free meals, emphasizing the importance of intent and context. We then explore how these concepts fit into different nutritional periodization phases, covering the significance of meal planning and the psychological aspects of your choices in each phase. Then we wrap up with the importance of meal timing, the psychological aspects of dieting, and the impact of exercise on our aforementioned nutritional strategies.

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro & Personal Updates

10:39 Defining Cheat Meals and Free Meals

15:55 Nutritional Periodization: Maintenance Phase

27:30 Nutritional Periodization: Build Phase

31:46 Navigating Food Choices in a Caloric Surplus

38:23 Nutritional Periodization: Deficit Phase

48:42 Balancing Exercise and Nutrition

57:03 Final Note On Timing Meals

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Transcript

0:25

What is going on guys? Happy Monday or Tuesday, depending on where you are listening from. This is episode 181 and we are talking cheat meals versus free meals. It has been quite some time since we have talked specifically about nutrition. So we figured we were due for an episode and this is something that I see personally as a coach. Just a bit of a refresher out there. Like nutrition coaching is my primary career. That is how I make the overwhelming majority of my money and where I spend the overwhelming majority of my time each week, one-on-one coaching with people. So I have these conversations a lot and it's something that I see really sabotages people very, very frequently. So I thought it would be a great episode topic for ETP. But before that, always, let's jump into some updates. Brian, can you kick us off, please? Yeah, I'm excited about this episode. also agree we need some some new nutrition content on here and I think this is a great idea. as you guys know, I love both free meals and cheat meals. I'm the perfect person to partner with Aaron on this one. Anyways, real quick updates from me. The life reflected podcast, which I mentioned last week is my other new podcast coming out. I just send it out to all of the platforms yesterday. Apparently it takes 48 or 72 hours. So by the time this episode comes out, it really should be out there for you guys. Yeah, that's all I got. I don't know. I'm still trying to figure out this new podcast thing and how to distribute it properly. So that's happening. Really, I don't have a lot to say. Other updates, we've had two days of... I'm What do you got going on, Aaron? So for me, last week I had a bolly belly, which if anyone does not know, it's just a local term for a bacterial infection of the intestine, which is quite common here. It's very, very unpleasant and threw a wrench in me getting my body weight back up to my build levels, which I've been having a frustrating few months of, I get like one good week, 10 good days, something bad happens, something blows everything up and I'm. Reduced again, so as of Saturday, I felt a lot better, could get food in, keep food in, my body weight is now climbing back to where it was. I've had some productive training sessions in. Undefeated private has been a lot of fun, albeit we to get approved for like an increased energy consumption, which has to go through like the government, which is taking... a needlessly long time. So we are training up there with no air cons and it is spicy. And it's I don't know. I'm still like so caught in the joyous, you know, part of like having this this gym that we've put together and stuff. But it's brutal. Like I sweat through literally sweat completely through two shirts today. And yesterday I sweat through my shoes like I didn't think that that was possible. And then I come home. I'm so dehydrated. I can't like get hydrated again before I go to bed because I'm like literally losing has the leaders of water up there. It is wild. So when I was in Costa Rica the last few times, you know, they have outdoor jungle gym that's basically obviously no air con. It's just completely hot and humid. I would assume it's similar weather. It was, you know, 90 degrees and 90 % humidity or something crazy like that. And it was the same thing. I remember like feeling great in the beginning of the workout because you get warm so easily. You know, you don't have to warm up. You're already lubricated. You're good to go. And by like 30 or 40 minutes in, I would be so depleted. that I would wonder how I was going to finish my workout. So it's like you have this very select period of time where you can work hard. And then once it becomes overwhelming, it's just, it's hard to get it back at that point. It's this humidity. I really think it is because we were talking about it's not that hot, right? Like I don't feel that like I can't breathe it so hot, but like my body is just pouring water out of everything. And then like when you're on these longer sets, like it's in your eyes and stuff and like one of your eyes is closed and you're like, you know, finishing your final reps. It's so it's not ideal, but but just a temporary thing. Of course, with building a big project, there's all these unknown things. And this is just one of one of those there. But one thing that's been cool, I am running my latest No Man's Land 2 program that I released a few weeks back. I haven't said anything about it on the podcast. Shockingly enough, we always joke that we're poor at marketing on the podcast, but that is out. I had multiple, multiple people ask me about when a No Man's Land 2 would be done after the first one. I didn't really have a plan to release a second one, but after the fourth person asked me, I'm like, So I will build one for you guys. So that is out. You can get that on my website at strakernutritionco.com and there's a menu link in the main menu for training programs. So that's the first one. Second is my competition schedule has been chosen for this year, which I'm excited about. I'm very nervous. I feel like I'm putting a lot of pressure on myself because I only have a very limited amount of time to do this. So I'm taking it very, very seriously, but I'm excited that dates are finally out. It took a while for all the different countries and stuff to release their show schedule. And because I am an American, but living over here in Indonesia, I basically follow the rules of the Indonesian athletes. So there's like seven Southeast Asian countries which I have to complete my regional qualification in. And then I can go to like the pro qualifier shows after that. So when's the first show scheduled for? June 7th in Thailand. So that will be my regional. Okay, and where is your body weight now and where do think you want it to be? Just kind of a general estimates. I was 228.5 this morning. I will start prep at the end of March. coach said we will do a 16 week prep, but the 16 weeks will be from the pro qualifier. So I'm not going to come in at like peak shape for the regional. The regional just kind of like a check the box. It's a prerequisite you have to do. I get some stage presence, hopefully get some of my jitters out, that sort of thing. But I will be... I think that that will only be like week 10 of 16 or something like that, or maybe even week nine. So I'll probably not, I won't be in like the best shape or, you know, as conditioned as I could be. But yeah, where will body weight be? I honestly have no idea. I'm not even going to predict. I have no idea. I would hope at least like 215, 212, something like that, but we'll really wait and see. Yeah, so is that end of July then or mid to end of July? My first pro qualifier will be Taiwan and that's mid-July and then I will do another one in Hong Kong September 6th which is cutting it mighty close to the wedding but that's just where the shows are and when the dates fall. Sweet. That's super exciting, How's your, sorry, real quick. How, how posing I assume is one of the big things that's kind of on the back of your mind that maybe you're not like super excited about, you know, having to practice and perfect. So like, is, what is, what is your current sentiment around posing? How much time are you spending on it? Do you plan on ramping that up? It needs to ramp up immediately. I bought a. Like a opposing course sort of thing by this lady in the UK. It's actually very, very good, very, very helpful. I need to put dedicated time on my calendar for that and then I have I purchased a package with a immense physique pro here. And I have two more sessions with him, which I will schedule soon. Just I just have to like get up to a sufficiency. Stamp standpoint. to where then like I feel confident enough. But yeah, it is definitely the largest thing that I need to work on. And I just keep making like excuses, right? I've always would tell myself like, Oh, when I have this physique, then I'll like feel comfortable with my shirt off, you know, that sort of thing. But it never comes like I feel just as uncomfortable taking my shirt off and posing in like a posing room as I would have when I was like 185 pounds. Like it has not improved at all. Even though I told myself all these little stories that it would, it hasn't like at all. That was certainly the biggest deterrent to me wanting to do it. I remember when I was going through that period of considering doing a show and I went up to meet with Nunez and Miner and we were doing the whole posing thing and I realized just how bad I was at it. And I was like, man, I have so far to go. I just don't have the mental bandwidth to commit to master this thing that seems so foreign to me. so at that time it just, you know, it was a non-starter. Yeah, I think I just have to like, I have to spend the money on it because then it's like the same thing. When you like when you hire a coach and you spend money on something, you're not going to throw the money away. So you will do the thing. But if you're just watching like YouTube tutorials and stuff like I'm never going to dedicate the time for it. But I do need to put it on my calendar because I want to be my prep will not start until the end of March. But I want to be quite proficient. by the time prep starts because starting once I'm in prep, like there's always gonna be all these other stressors and that sort of thing and I would be a fool to not start until prep starts. Yeah. Thank you. And that's it. Sweet, let's talk cheap meals and free meals. Cool, so one thing that I kind of had thought, because obviously I have my biased opinions on this, but what I wanted to do and I thought was a good idea is I popped some simple prompts into ChatGPT and asking for a definition on like cheat meal and then a definition on a free meal within a nutritional context. And I'll just read the two responses to kick us off. So ChatGPT defined a cheat meal as a cheat meal. is a planned deviation from a person's regular diet that allows them to indulge. feel like that's important keyword indulge in foods that are typically restricted in terms of nutrition. A cheat meal is usually higher in calories, saturated fats, sugars, and simple carbohydrate compared to a person's usual diet. Pretty decent definition. A free meal from chat GPT is defined as a free meal, also known as a flexible meal. is a meal where an individual can choose any food that they want. This concept differs from a cheat meal as there is no sense of guilt or rigid rules associated with it. A free meal is often seen as an opportunity to enjoy foods that may not be typically included in the individual's regular diet. So the biggest thing that I personally pulled out of the definitions and to be completely honest, there is a fair level of ambiguity. Mm-hmm. between them was the term indulge, right? Now, the way that I most commonly speak about this with my clients is the major difference is in the intent, right? The word cheat is never used in a positive or a neutral connotation. It is always associated negatively. The very common example that I will also often use is like, If you were to have a free weekend from your family or spouse, you go fishing, I don't know, watch sports and hang out with your friends, something like that. Very, very neutral definition. If you were to have a cheat weekend from your family or spouse, it is a very, very object and negative, negatively defined intent and approach to that weekend. So coming back to that, the key is in the words that we use. And for some of the listeners out there, it might sound like I'm making kind of a mountain out of a molehill, but it really comes to the intent within that. Now, once we get a little bit further into the episode, we're gonna break things down by the contexts relative to the three most common nutritional periodizations, caloric surplus, caloric maintenance, and caloric. deficit. And I think the approach to each is rather dependent upon the nutritional periodization and the opportunity cost that can be associated with each. But before we get to that, Brian, what are your thoughts on the definition of things thus far? Yeah, I want to be a little bit pedantic for a second because when I look at these two definitions, it almost looks to me like the cheat meal is less drastic or significant of a deviation than the free meal. And I think what you're getting at is that it's the actually the opposite, right? Yeah. So the thing when you're focusing on the word indulge, the words I'm focusing on are in cheat meal, says a planned deviation. So in a cheat meal, it is planned, meaning it's part of this master plan that you've created, and you're going to have this cheat meal as part of this planned deviation. In the free meal, it actually doesn't even say that this is planned or that there's any limitation at all to what you consume. It's literally more just like no sense of guilt, no rigid rules. A free meal is seen as an opportunity to enjoy foods that are not typically on. your individual's regular diet. To me, it seems like the cheat meal is less of a deviation than the free meal, given the words planned being used in there. And that would be a very, very astute pickup on that definition. Yeah. I would, however, say for the context of the episode, we flip them because the cheat meal is typically significantly more of a deviation and detrimental to a week or a plan or a nutritional approach. I feel like if I were to redefine these and take it out of chat GPT's hands, a cheat meal would be like what you were saying, where it's like a completely hedonistic session of food consumption that has no rules or boundaries. And a free meal would be more of that planned deviation where you allow yourself to enjoy some certain foods with restriction. very, very well put again, coming back to the intent of it. Okay, cool. Well, now that we're on the same page there, continue. Yeah, and that's that's safer for the episode purposes that either or it's planned, right? It's not just like, I'm going to take a free meal today like it's previously communicated upon agreed upon whether with a certain number of deviations through the week, that sort of thing. Now, I guess before we jump into the nutritional periodization, how I really like to frame this up with my clients is I will say we're going to plan, you know, depending on the context and how successful we are in our rates of loss really do play into this. I want you to take a free meal, you know, either Friday or Saturday night. Take the wife. Take the husband out to dinner. Here are my suggestions, right? And these are what I typically say. Sushi Vietnamese. Middle Eastern food, Mediterranean food. Those are typically my go-tos. There's probably like one that I'm missing that I can't think of, typically places where we can get simple foods or a steakhouse. That's the one I'm missing. But at the steakhouse, I want a tenderloin, a top sirloin, like a baked potato without all the bullshit on it. Maybe some fries if we're a bigger person and either like some steamed vegetables or a side salad, something like that. places that we can still follow what I like to call a basic meal structure where we have a primary protein source, we have some form of a starchy carbohydrate, and we're able to get in vegetables of some sort. A lot of those types of foods that I mentioned have like kebabs, grilled meats of a various availability, or in some of the more Asian foods, we have rice noodles, fresh vegetables, lean cuts of meat, right? they're going to be higher calorie. but our fats are still going to be relatively well controlled. It's not like if we're having pizza or a burger where we can easily push 50 to 60 grams of fat in a single meal, right? And therefore we're able to have that flexibility and freedom while still controlling what can often hockey stick from a caloric consumption in a single meal. So those are my... guidelines that I like to use with most clients and my reasonings behind. Yeah, I think that makes sense. It's interesting because I know we haven't gotten into the, know, if you're in a clerk surplus or a clerk deficit or whatever, and maybe that changes some of the nuance of the way that you prescribe this. But as somebody that hasn't been in a deficit for like two years at this point, maybe even more. I actually look at going out to eat and getting a relatively lean protein source, a starch and a fruit or vegetable as a high quality meal that's in line with my goals. So at no point would that meal out be a free meal or a cheat meal. I could go somewhere and have a lean steak. a side of fries or mashed potatoes or something like that, and then a fruit or a vegetable with it. And to me, that's checking the box for like, I did exactly what I was supposed to do. If I was eating at home, it probably wouldn't have been much different aside from being cooked in different oils. And therefore this meal checks that box and I'm happy with that, you know? So obviously that changes context if someone's in a deficit, but it is interesting how that does change that perspective a bit. Yeah, and I think that's a perfect segue. Let's let's move into a maintenance, you know, ask phase and actually talk about it. So what these and these are just kind of my definitions. But of course, you know, with with you, we're going to have some some alternative. What's the word for aspects thoughts on this perspective? Yes, thank you. So at maintenance I have this is the best time to have the most flexibility with even like four or five plus free meals per week. Excuse me. And the main reason here is at a period of maintenance, auto regulation is the goal. You're like, hey, I want to keep my body weight in this. I don't know. Like Brian, right now, what would you say your body weight target range that you're trying to stay within is? would say it's been between 193 and 197 for a number of years at this point. Okay, perfect, right? So we have about like a four or five pound window and we can just auto-regulate between that. We have a clear benchmark of body weight stabilization to use as a weekly feedback for how situations are being navigated. Let's say that you came back from, like you guys are coming to San Diego soon, right? Yeah. In a week and a half or so. Okay, so let's say for example, we go to San Diego, we're in a little bit of a different environment, you're eating the way that you normally would minus maybe some extra free meals because you're seeing friends is more social. And you notice your weights floating up to like 204, 205. You would probably be like, wow, weights a bit higher than I want it to be. So I'm going to introduce some auto regulation, maybe. restrict the number of free meals out or maybe some of the control, some of the decadence of the types of free meals, maybe as simple as stop ordering dessert when you go out or something like that. Everyone has their different approaches, but it's again, leveraging that auto regulation and being honest with yourself to say, okay, weight's climbing consistently. I am no longer at auto regulation. I need to incorporate a little bit more stop gaps. so that I fall back within that auto regulatory range that I previously defined. Yeah, that's a good point. I'm actually curious as we get into this, how many of your clients do you feel like when they go on a small vacation like this, inherently end up gaining weight versus those that inherently end up losing weight? Because I know that you are the type of person that when you travel, you can't keep weight on, you end up losing weight. And as you were saying that, and you were like, you know, maybe you're having like a little more indulgence here, you're having meals with friends, blah, blah, blah. When I travel, I also tend to lose weight. And I think that that's strictly a factor of access to food, timing. So when I travel, I'm like, I'm in an Airbnb. I'm not really cooking that much. I'm kind of out and friends. Like I'm probably going to skip breakfast and just have like a lunch and dinner. So I'm not snacking throughout the day. and I almost always will, we'll end up losing weight on these types of trips instead of gaining weight, just because I'm eating fewer meals. have less access to food. doesn't really matter if the two meals that I eat are bigger and more indulgent because the total caloric amount is lower. So like, what do you see with people in those situations? I would say the majority gain weight. But that I think is really because the majority of my clientele is still people who are moving towards a healthier lifestyle, right? Who don't have as much muscle mass as us have lived this particular type of lifestyle for as long in those habits are as like grooved and have just the metabolic resiliency that you you and I are fortunate to have. I also think the middle part of what I said about living this lifestyle for as long. Let's say that like you guys are traveling right in you. You go out to breakfast or something like that and it's just like. Just awful food, you know that you really don't want. You're not going to eat it. You know what I mean? Like if it's just like some gross breakfast place and they just have these like super fatty, I don't know, like burritos or something like that. I'm just. covered in like, you know, some sort of icing and syrup with like a side of Yeah. I'm I, I would tend to just, you know, skip breakfast and say, I'll eat some protein at lunch or something like that. Yeah. like that's it's it takes reps and experience to be able to opt for that as opposed to like, well, they didn't have any good options. So I just ate the. Exactly. And I think it too is like, like, we know that French toast with the syrup in the powdered sugar in the hash brown, that's literally like 220 grams of carbohydrate and probably like. 60 grams of fat in that meal with like 15 grams of protein. And unless you're a pretty big dude, you just fucked your day of eating. You know what I mean? And it's 8.30 a.m. So I think. mean, the downstream effect of letting your glucose get that high and then the crash that occurs afterwards, I mean, you're just not going to feel good. Yeah, so I think it takes experience in those situations to make it to the other side and a majority just don't have those enough of those experience yet. Cause like, don't get me wrong. I've lost that battle in the past. That's how I know. It's not like I was just winning from the start there. Yep. that was a question you asked me. So, I mean, maintenance is the, the easiest, I would say the hard thing with maintenance. It's easiest in theory, right? On paper. It's really easy. You have auto regulation. The thing that I find people struggle with the most and even myself, right. And Jenny was actually asking me this the other day. When you don't have a hard set of rule of, when you don't have a hard set of goals or the goals to just stay the same. it can be really hard to choose when you do order the dessert or have the pizza or something and when you don't, right? Because it's easy to be like, well, last trip I had the pizza and dessert and I came back and my weight was 195 right in the middle of where I won. And it's it's really challenging from a human nature to be able to make the right decision without having a lot of like your direct inputs of like what my weight was this morning. If I'm not tracking my food like we know when we're not tracking our food like we're awful at estimating what daily cumulative totals are. And that's the hardest thing there is when you don't have objective goals. Auto regulating can be hard because it's not very it's not a firm win or loss. And that's something that I found with. a lot of clients that will come out of a really successful diet and we shift to maintenance and they really start to struggle and weight just kind of starts like floating up because they're losing a lot of those battles and they'll even say, man, maintenance is and is a lot harder mentally than I thought it would be. It's almost harder than the diet because I don't have any clearly defined rules to. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, I think it's even harder coming from a deficit to be able to accurately assess where maintenance is because you're in this state where you are feeling hungry and there's like a residual effect where even if you start eating at maintenance, you're still kind of going to be hungry because you're not like really in a surplus. But intuitively, you think that because you're at maintenance, you shouldn't be hungry. And I think that's where a lot of the kind of disconnect exists. Yeah, definitely. So maintenance, again, best on paper, potentially the hardest in actual practice because of a fewer definite defined rules or operating guidelines of rigidity there. Next, let's talk about the build face, if that's cool. So the use I typically like here is like, again, including a date night or something like that. I'm very, very big. A lot of a very, very large percentage of my client are They're regular people, right? They're not your physique athletes or something like that. They have wives, families, children. And I like to be very practical, especially with some of my males or females that have very ambitious goals, which I do love. Like the client who's, you know, like a 42 year old mom, has a, she's like a business woman, but she still wants like her physique when she was like 25 or something like that. I love people that really ambitious goal. but I'm always very big on we keep a date night in with the husband or we go out with the family, something like that because of the obvious importance there. So in the builds, I like to use something like a date night to always keep it in. The beauty in that is we should have a significantly less food focus because we are typically in a period of caloric surplus by definition. So hunger is not associated in the same way hunger would be associated in a deficit as a bad thing. If we're in a build and we're hungry, I take that hunger as very, very positively, meaning that we still have ample room to feed without unnecessary body fat accumulation in the process. Now, the actual tricky thing with the free meals or even in a worse connotation, a cheat meal, in the caloric surplus is we have the greatest possibility for body fat accumulation with these acute overfeeding meals because we are already in an overfed state. So if we are already feeding in, let's say, a 200 calorie deficit and we go have that example food from that we used earlier, the 220 grams of carbs from the pancake, 60 grams of fat, we're now pushing like that 200 calorie surplus into like an 800 calorie surplus on a day, you're storing body fat unequivocally on that day. So the depth of the deviations should be more relatively controlled if the client has a desire to mitigate unnecessary body fat accumulation during. build. And please note, I did say unnecessary body fat accumulation because there's always going to be some inherent level of necessary body fat accumulation that comes with the muscle building process. Yeah, no, I fully agree with all of that. think the it's almost like when you're in the surplus, you want to be more cognizant sometimes. And maybe this is the wrong way of saying that more. I was going say more cognizant of the quality of foods that you eat. But it's I think that might actually not be true because in the deficit, you want the foods that are more caloric, more more caloric, not calorically dense, but nutrient dense. because you have less total calories coming in. But one thing that I think I always think about in the past when I would be in a surplus is this idea of calories controlling your body weight, macros controlling your body composition, and micros controlling the way that you feel. And it's really easy when you're in a surplus to still get the micros because you're just eating so much food that the micros are there, but the micros being a smaller percentage of the total calories and thus leading to someone feeling less vital than maybe they would feel if they had a better ratio there. And it's just something that like I do with myself. I see with clients that they just sacrifice quality of foods oftentimes to get the total calories. And yeah, what's your experience with that? How do you feel about kind of in people, like how do direct people to eat in the sense that like how much pressure is being put on them to make sure that the micros are being hit along with the macros and the calories? Yeah, I mean the pressure is high I would say in one of the things that I'll explain with clients is that we have a baseline of the type of foods that we eat, right? In a surplus we just increase the volume of these foods in a surplus like we decrease the volume of these foods, but our baseline doesn't really change and there there's certain things that Make a lot more sense. So for example, if we're in a build and it's like let's call it. Let's say like mail 175 pounds is maybe like 12 % body fat there. And once you get up to like maybe the upper 180s or something like that, we're gonna be eating a pretty good amount of food. And one thing that can happen when we are trying to be too dogmatic about the like only eating healthy foods and stuff is we can run into volume problems. And one of the most common volume problems that I run into with clients is clients trying to do a build on potatoes. Potatoes are they're so filling. They're wonderful for calorie deficits because we have the opposite problem in a calorie deficit. But now we're in a build. I'm not saying you can't eat potatoes. But when you're pushing 300 400 grams of potatoes in a meal that's going to sit in your stomach for a long time and you're going to feel full as all hell. it would behoove you to bring in like rice or this is even a good time for pasta. One of the very few good times for pasta. Case example, this I talked about, I don't know if I said it on the podcast or it was you and I speaking before Brian, I'm in, I was sick all last week, had that intestinal infection, my body weight of course plummeted, I couldn't keep any food in. So this week with my check-in, my coach was like, hey, add 500 milliliters of orange juice with your more, with the early meals, right? It's a pretty significant increase in carbohydrate of liquid carbohydrate at times of the day that are non-training. These are things that like, I would never give someone orange juice with lunch in a calorie surplus or calorie deficit because you're drinking your satiety away. You know what I mean? Like it's an opportunity cost on satiety. But when we're in a build, we tend to run into opposite problems around food volume. And I've had clients hyper fixate on not eating any of the bad foods. And we run into like fiber issues too. I've had clients with fibers up into the 70s. And I'm like, we have to get that down because your food's gonna digest too slow because we have to get more meals in. So it's. The micros are always covering a base, then we have, again, it's all client dependent. Typically, the more muscle mass you have, the leaner you are, the more we can get away with, but we can start to incorporate and bend some of these rules around nutrient quality. And I don't have too much issue with that, but again, everything is always needs to be results dependent. Yeah. And then how much is going into assessing like how that client is feeling? not, you know, how are you feeling about your increase in body weight, but literally like your internal being, your sense of, mental focus, lack of lethargy, things like that. Like how much of that discussion goes into the pot as you know, someone's building. Yeah, I mean, I keep the same questions whether someone's in a surplus build and I just vocalize the change of how we would rate like hunger in a build versus a deficit. But each week I want to know about someone's energy levels, digestion, sleep and hunger. Right. And there's one other one stress and those go into if someone's like, I'm really gassy and bloated all week. I'm like, all right, well, what foods are we eating that's contributing to that? I take a look at our fiber. I see if someone's still trying to do 200 grams of vegetables per meal. If we're also, you know, ramping up carbohydrate to a significant degree, I'll ask about energy levels. If someone's really, if we've been pushing food for quite some time and someone's getting like really tired in the middle of the day or like post-training or something like that, we look into like, okay, what body weight multiplier are we at? Like I actually just had that with a client this week. He was at a 20X body weight multiplier. So food was like quite high. He was getting like really lethargic and stuff post post training. So I pulled food back. We're deloading this week and we're going to like reassess hunger and energy and then we'll re approach from there. So I think it again is always results dependent and typically the longer you're in a build the more the more opportunity there are for these things to approach. But if someone's on like week six of a build and we're up two and a half pounds, right? We're not gonna be like assessing, oh, I'm getting really tired from eating too much food. Because it just wouldn't happen that quickly. But it's when you're up eight, 10, 12, 15, 20, 25 pounds. Like I have a client, we're approaching. 30, 25 pounds on his build. So like we run into food volume issues. We run into like, you know, lethargy issues, food timing issues and a lot of that stuff because we've covered such a large gap. Right, right, that makes sense. Cool. in that, build phase, the free meals, we keep them there, but you typically do not have to worry about people going too hard on them because appetite is already typically really well regulated. And the intrinsic desire to deviate very largely is not nearly as high because we're always satiated on. Yeah, that makes sense. can just think back to me being out at like some sort of dinner out with the family and they're ordering all this extravagant like pasta with meatballs and garlic bread and stuff and I'll have much less than I would have had if I was in a deficit and still feel, you know, satiated and like I got what I needed from it. Exactly. Now let's talk about the calorie deficit, which is the main typically talking point of which these cheat meal versus free meal come up. This is where we typically need things to be most controlled, right? And the simple reason there is calorie balance. Uninformed choices during the week in free meal can completely erase a week's fat loss effort. And in many cases, the opportunity cost is on time because now we spend the next week just getting back to where we were before the epic cheat meal happened. And we've now burned effectively two weeks of dieting just to get to where we would have been at the end of week one if the deficit or sorry, if the overindulgence didn't occur. So that's the biggest thing. It's the time opportunity cost there. Yeah, I also think that there's a component of when you're in a deficit and you indulge, you give into that hedonistic desire to eat these foods that are highly caloric. It does something in the brain that makes it harder for you to go back to eating the normal foods again without constantly thinking about more of that highly caloric food. Yeah, it's I, I don't have any research on this. So this is you're getting just purely conjecture from Aaron. And but I am of the firm belief of approaching a calorie deficit from a from a very matter of fact standpoint, right? And again, when I opened the podcast with like your words are important, especially to yourself. And when people say things like, I'm trying fat loss. If you try it, you're likely to fail because you're approaching it with a, if it doesn't work out, I'm just gonna get out of it, right? And it's like, oh, it wasn't my fault. My body's not doing it sort of thing as opposed to like, I'm doing this, right? And that changes, doing versus trying changes your approach to things. And as I've become more successful with clients, I've used firmer kind of approaches. with them because again, it simplifies our decision making tree. So we're not trying fat loss. We are entering in fat loss. There are going to be trade-offs that we make for a certain number of weeks. And then you go back to having a lot more of that freedom once the job is done. And instead of dieting for 30 weeks with one foot in and one foot out, with having a lot of frustrating weeks, we diet for 16, and then you can go back to your every other week, or sorry, every other night glass of wine. And instead of having that mental battle for 30 weeks and losing it, you only have to commit for 15, and then you can have your wine for two thirds of the year, no issue sort of thing. Yeah, I think this kind of speaks to, at least for me and what I've seen with some clients is that I can IIFYM myself through maintenance or surplus. But when it comes to deficit, the if it fits your macros approach just doesn't really seem to work. I just need to eat more of those satiating foods that are considered clean, bodybuilding foods. because that keeps me full enough that I don't want to constantly indulge in cheats. Whereas if I I F Y it and I'm like, okay, I saved some calories, I can have 200 calories of some sweet or whatever at the end of the night, then that 200 can easily turn into more than 200. Or it can just spark my appetite to the point that in subsequent days, I'm always thinking about that 200 calorie indulgence that I get at the end of the night. Yeah, it's another one of the things like, can it work on paper? Yes. Are there certain individuals that can pull it off? Yes. What is the likelihood that you are one of those individuals? It's unfortunately pretty unlikely, right? And in the people that can pull it off, if they didn't, they would still produce greater results. And I just see it time and time again in What's really ironic is kind of the best clients that I have. I don't want to call them dumb because that's very just kind of mean. The uninformed clients are oftentimes the most successful. For example, I have two clients that come to mind. One of them that was wildly successful. I haven't shared this or anything on social media because I'm super behind on sharing client stuff. He didn't want to track macros, whatever. He said, just tell me how to operate. Tell me what rules to operate by. And he was, I mean, I he's like 55, something like that. He travels all the time for work, like back to Europe and L.A., New York, all over the place. And we went from like one eighty five to like one fifty five and he's shredded, absolutely shredded and navigating one of the like hardest schedules with like traveling to Europe, being on a different schedule back to L.A., to New York. And because there was no like IIFYM or he just picked simple rules that worked. And I mean, they worked tremendously coupled with like, have a fair portion of my coaching roster is other coaches who are very well informed. They often struggle to produce consistent fat loss week over week because they quote unquote, like they know too much to be dangerous and make their swaps, their deviations, things like that. And it really just bites them in the ass. like, I'm fortunate where I just don't do that. I'd literally just follow what my coach tells me and I turn my brain off. And the joke that I always make is like, I make nutrition decisions for dozens of people every single week. The last person I want to make them for is myself, you know? And I've just found that to be so, so, so, so true. And it's very, very different from like the I F I am the flexible dieting thing that has become popular and more like the last decade or so. but it just does not produce as good of results or as quick of results. Now, back to the free meals, something I really want to talk about is using free meals in a calorie deficit. It depends drastically on the individual and their approach to dieting, right? So the meal plan versus the flexible dieting that we just talked about, other facets such as sleep duration and quality, training volume, training intensity and how much or how little cardio is being done all contributes significantly. So for example, with my diet at the end of, man, that was like already over a year ago. was really wild. The end of 2023. I think my lowest calories were like 2,500 in my final week, but I was training for three hours per day doing cardio two to three times per week. sauna five days per week and I was sleeping like really, really well. So I was able to have a free meal every single week where I ate pretty much as much sushi as I could handle. And which would have these like very large over feedings, but it did nothing because the deficit was so great because of the very, very large energy expenditure. Unless you are someone who's younger, has a lot of free time on your hands, or maybe is an also like a multi-sport athlete, that approach is probably not going to be the case for you because from a time investment, it is a much better time investment to reduce calories than to spend five and a half hours at the gym every day. go ahead. I was just, I just was musing on the, 20 pounds that I lost two seasons ago biking where I was trying to eat in a surplus and I was eating all sorts of palatable foods. And yet I was doing so much activity that I just could not keep the weight on. And that's obviously not like the most optimal way to go about this, but, it is interesting to just kind of note the, the numerous different ways in which one could lose weight. and activity being, you know, one of those components. It's definitely there. I think it incorrectly gets relied upon because someone will be like, well, can I just add 15 minutes of cardio? I'm like, you can, but that 15 minutes of cardio won't even burn a banana. You know what I mean? Yeah. And it's like it again, when I said like, it's a return on your time invested, it will work. It's going to cost you hours and hours of your week to leverage it to like a significant degree. Now, don't get me wrong. You may need to leverage cardio with your caloric deficit. It does work. But again, if when it comes to can I reduce 100 calories in my day from dropping 25 carbs with dinner or something like that, or am I going to add that cardio in each day? It's typically a better return on your time to drop the 25 grams of carbs at dinner. I mean, absolutely. Yeah, because like to have to be a slave to, know, making sure that you're getting out and moving is something that most people don't want, especially when you're in a clerk deficit, meaning your energy reserves are low anyways. So it's going to be even harder to get you motivated to get out the door to go run or bike or whatever it is. So yeah, I mean, I always tell clients the same thing. And the other consideration here, too, is the intensity of the exercise that you're doing in that, like if you're doing a ton of hit cardio, Yes, you're going to burn more calories from hit, but there's an extremely high fatigue cost from that. It's going to have trickle down effects on, your diet. might make you more hungry, but also on your energy reserves throughout the day. thus, you know, I tend to. Advise my clients in a deficit to stick more to like walking in zone two cardio, but now we're looking at having to increase durations. So no, you're not working extremely hard, but now you're looking at having to do hours of this potentially instead of minutes of it. And I just, I don't think that there's a great solution when it comes to trying to maintain muscle mass in a deficit and trying to include excessive amounts of cardio. Agreed, right? And the kicker in what you just said there is excessive there. Now, one kind of final note that I have is like in a perfect world with clients, I always like to diet clients with at least one weekly free meal, right? Date night with spouse being the example. However, it needs to be results dependent. And this is the thing that oftentimes people will forget and someone will have like a setback week. You know what I mean? Like, let's say, like I speak in terms of relative, percentage decreases. At a minimum, I'm looking for half of a percent total body mass loss per week. Optimally, we're looking at 1 % so that we don't spend half the year dieting. In some small cases, if someone is like very overweight and we're trying to aggressively lose weight to get them closer to health faster, we might move it like 1.25 % or something like that. Things that can happen semi-regularly is like someone won't have a really adherent week. they will, they get a little bit cocky and deviate and think things are going to work and they don't. And we'll completely miss our target of half of a percent rate of our loss. Or maybe we were sometimes even up weight from the previous week. And we'll say, Aaron, you what about a free meal this week? And I'm like, no, adding, adding more calories into a week in which you already have gone over and we've regressed is only going to further our regression. So That is one where, again, everything needs to be results dependent or our 12 week diet turns into a 24 week diet because we're unable to commit to the kind of guides, sorry, boundaries and guidelines of which to operate within. The one thing I don't love and I do wanna bring this up is it also sounds like I'm rewarding someone with food. Right, and I want to make it clear that that's not really what it is, but it's in a perfect world at baseline, I wanna keep a free meal in. That free meal needs to be results dependent because if we are not making the results and we're adding a free meal in, we're only then increasing the calories and we're trying fat loss because we're not agreeing to the guidelines of which were said we would operate within. You have to be careful there with the rewarding of food, especially if someone's coming from a less healthy lifestyle, trying to get to like, I'm using air quotes because healthy is very much a weasel word. It's subjective. It's hard to objectively define, but you get what I'm saying. If someone has a past of like overindulgences, be very intentional with your word-choicing around the free meal gifting. because you don't want to reward things with food for obvious reasons. Yeah, it's as I think about, you know, my deficits in the past, I would still have at least one meal a week where I would go out and I guess it would fall into the category of your free meal. But I think the difference is that that example I used in the beginning where I said, I don't even consider it a deviation from my normal eating if I have, you know, a fillet, some fries and a side of vegetables at a restaurant. That's true in my maintenance or surplus phases, but in a deficit, I feel like maybe it's because I have the knowledge and the experience, but I could go out to that same restaurant and instead of getting a filet and fries, it could be a sirloin with a baked potato with nothing on it, like you said, or with like a side of rice with trying to tell them not to put like a ton of oil and butter in it, whatever you need to do there. But having some sort of starch that's lower in fat, it's not fried, still having the vegetables there. choosing that leaner cut of meat. Now we've almost turned what could be considered like a free meal into just a regular meal that happens to be eaten at a restaurant instead of in your house. Yeah, and it again, everything is always like progress dependent, right? Because let's say, let's say you are in a deficit and you go have this like regular meal, right? And you're like, Hey, I ordered a lean cut of steak. I asked them not to use sauce and you know, I made it fit, fit our plan. And you know, yesterday your weigh-ins like a 180.0 and after the steak day, you're up to like a 182.5, right? So we've got 2.5 pounds from eating. Even with best intentions, it looks like things did not transpire in the way that we had hoped. Now I'm not saying you ate or like, I mean, it could have been volume, like food volume. I mean, there's a number of factors that go in there. Exactly. But it's it all depends on the how it obfuscates our data, right? Because in a perfect world like that, that meal you ate is great, right? I think the meal that you propose, right? It's a very, very wonderful solution. But say we do that three times per week. And the interesting thing with sodium is it doesn't it doesn't clear really quickly, right? Like you might get that sodium spike and it's not one day and sodium is back down. Sodium type tends to like linger a little bit. And let's say we have it two days later and we have another bump and now it looks like we have a regressed week. But you're like, no, but this meal was good. You know, it checked the boxes, but our weight's now climbing. So what happens is it just obfuscates our ability to really assess. And typically if we have, if you find like the good spot that's like local where, you can speak, you know, you're your server and that sort of thing and you're able to typically tailor it to fit your needs, it's less of a potential problem. But if you're bouncing around, the likelihood of things being as controlled as you would hope are significantly less leading to greater obfuscation and variables in the Would you expect though in that situation if someone's up 2.5 pounds from like a high sodium meal that in a matter of days you would see that then plummet back down to the range that you would expect it to be? Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't. It's really, it's really, really challenging, especially I would say in women, because there's different women have more monthly fluctuations in their hormones, obviously, that also have like impacts on the renin angiotensin aldosterone system, which impact kidneys and water retention. it's, it really does depend. on the client, but I'll ask greater questions around things. And I typically have them provide me a little bit more contextual information around their monthly cycle so that I can look for those things. But yeah, some people have like they'll go get pho or something like that, or like a soup that's going to be higher in sodium. We spike, we dump. And I see others where it stays up for like three or four days before it finally starts to trend back down. So the coaching has been so wild and that like you see so many different. things, you know, and you have. Like like there's general pretty good baselines and kind of I've said this before kind of like avatars that you can create and put people into. But then you do get some people who are just these wild outliers, you know, like some people in a build. I can really only feed him at like a 16 X bodyweight multiplier or rate of gain is too fast, you know. And then I have this other guy that I mentioned earlier. We're at like a 20 X bodyweight multiplier and he's only put on like 200 grams per week. Yeah, yeah. And it's just vastly different. then obviously, you know how honest people are with their food choices and their adherence to our agreed upon protocol and stuff comes into it, but it is pretty vast. Yep, that makes sense. Okay, cool. That is all I had for free meals versus cheat meals. Is there anything that you wanted to add to wrap this one up? No, my only, I guess, last thought is just the timing of where it is in relation to your activity. And if there's any consideration there in that, you know, is it best to have this meal before a big workout after a big workout? Does it matter if it's before weights versus before cardio or after cardio or after weights? If there's any factor consideration in that. Yeah, I mean, based on things we know of the hormonal changes that take place during training, we get improved caloric partitioning post-workout. So if we are going to have a higher calorie, higher carbohydrate indulgent meal makes most sense on paper to put in post-workout. How that fits into the frame of life. You probably don't want to go like super sweaty and, you know, in your gym clothes to dinner with her. you know, significant other post workout, but on paper, that would be the best time before training. It can work, but that depends on how the food makes you feel right. If it's like sitting really heavy in your in your stomach and you have like leg day, that's going to be pretty miserable and potentially disastrous. So you have to kind of weigh it in with the types of food and how you feel digesting those. I've heard that something like 15 to 45 minutes after a big meal is when the food is finally kind of making its way through your body and can be utilized for a workout. to me, like maybe it's because I'm still relatively young at 40 something. Obviously this has changed since I was 20 something where food would digest way faster. But I usually find by 45 minutes after a pretty big meal that it's usually digested enough where I feel like I could work out. And I usually have a sense of increased energy from the caloric burn that's occurring in my body from the energy kind of disseminated out to the various portions of my muscular system. So I don't know, I personally love having a really big meal, waiting 45 minutes and then doing some kind of workout, whether it's weights or cardio, because it feels to me like that food is then being used for good. Whereas sometimes it's the opposite if I do it after the workout where I feel like at that point, then the food kind of sits heavy in my body because I'm not actually using it to move my body after. So we'll open a few more cans of worms now, like fat contents, right? If that indulgent meal is like high in fat, which with like free meals or cheap meals, that's typically what's happening, right? And your food's going to digest so much slower and it'll just kind of like sit in there. I also think it matters proximity to other meals, right? So if you, like for example, right now, like if I'm training at 3 p.m., I eat at like, 8 a.m. I eat it like noon and then I eat it too that noon and to overlap super hard so I'm typically like that food still sitting in there I don't ever feel like it's digested and I'm using it feels like things are stuck in there whereas a ton of food before you train. Like, you're front loading your food to be before you train, meaning it's getting kind of used for the training versus not to say that you're not eating a lot after training, too, because you probably are. But yeah. But I typically find the the training duration, so the time just spent, and then also the activity, I'm using a very unscientific term, like freeze up space so that when you eat that large meal after, assuming that you have efficiently or decently shifted from sympathetic to parasympathetic, which plays an important role. and you don't get pretty dehydrated to where your food digestion will significantly slow, I find that the body will really suck up food post-workout much better than at other times of the day. So if I had to pick, I would preferentially choose post-workout. Do you feel the same with cardio versus weights there? Are you speaking more specifically about weights? More specifically about weights, think, but it depends. If we're talking about one of your two and a half hour bike rides, I think it would probably have an equal response to a weight training session. sense. Cool, so this was fun, hopefully for you guys. I love talking about nutrition because like I said, it's my bread and butter, but it's not as sexy as geeking out on training, but I enjoyed this one. Yeah, I always enjoy these conversations too. Thanks for putting it together. Of course, always guys, we will talk to you next week.