What nutrition plan is best?

When people start working on their health, one of the first things they usually want to know is: what is the best nutrition plan? But when it comes to the “best” nutrition plan for you, it really hinges on your own personal health goals. What are you actually trying to get out of the changes that you're making?

For the purpose of today’s episode, we’re going to be focusing on what kind of nutrition plan could be best for losing body fat. Drawing from both clinical observations and key research findings, we'll look at how to optimize your macronutrient intake to support your fat loss goals and ensure they align with your lifestyle for sustainable success.

References

Optimizing Fat Loss and Maintaining Muscle on a GLP 1 Mini-Course

Audio Stamps

01:29 -  Dr. Rentea explains why you need to be very clear on what your health goal is before looking into the best nutrition plan for you.

03:18 - Dr. Rentea discusses findings from a JAMA study on four different diets (including keto) and their impact on long-term weight management.

06:28 - We learn why Dr. Rentea suggests an 'add don't subtract' approach to nutrition, emphasizing personalized adjustments over strict meal plans.

09:55 - We find out about the role of increasing protein and fiber intake to support sustainable weight management, including practical strategies to incorporate these nutrients into your diet.

15:43 - Dr. Rentea summarizes the two most important aspects of a sustainable nutrition plan to achieve long term fat loss.

20:30 - Hear some of Dr. Rentea’s favorite products right now, including a coffee concentrate brand!

Quotes


“You need to get really clear on what you are actually trying to get out of the changes that you're making.” - Matthea Rentea MD

“I'm not ever here to tell you that a plan is good or bad. It's really ultimately about what you can stick with long term.” - Matthea Rentea MD

“Number one, you need to know what your actual goals for nutrition are. And then number two, the path you pick needs to be sustainable.” - Matthea Rentea MD

“There are actually tons of people that can make a lifestyle work where they're going out to eat often or where they're getting lots of prepared foods.” - Matthea Rentea MD

“No matter what your world looks like, you can make it happen.” - Matthea Rentea MD

“You just stay in your own lane. Because most people that are doing this whole extreme keto thing, they're not sticking with it for over a year. And then they're right back to where they started and they feel even more defeated because they didn't learn anything about themselves, about nutrition, about sustainability.” - Matthea Rentea MD

All of the information on this podcast is for general informational purposes only. Please talk to your physician and medical team about what is right for you. No medical advice is being on this podcast.

If you live in Indiana or Illinois and want to work with doctor Matthea Rentea, you can find out more on www.RenteaClinic.com

Transcript

0:28

Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. How are you all doing? Today it is particularly cold outside, so you might be hearing my little space heater in the back every so often. We're at that weird time in the year, right, where it'll be hot, it'll be cold, and so you just never know what you're gonna get. And so I find that I either need to have the window open to get some air to come in, or I need to have the heater on to get it to be a little hotter. So we're just, we're just in the zone. Today, I love the topic that we're going to talk about and a lot of the times when people are embarking on working on their health, they want to know what the best nutrition plan is. They want to get it right. They want it to be perfect. You know, now they're all on board. They're giving a million percent. And today I just want to talk a little bit about what if some studies showed us, what do I see clinically? What do I see practically that really helps people? And we're just going to do just a really high level overview. This is not going to be specific, like go do X, Y, Z. That's not what this is about. This is about just having a little bit of like a global perspective moment. When you think about the quote unquote best nutrition plan, that can mean so many different things for different people. So for some people, it might be a nutrition plan that helps bring down their blood sugar or helps bring down their blood pressure. And there are targeted nutrition plans for things like that. Some people, when they say what's the best nutrition plan, they might mean for optimal body fat loss. And that's a totally different lane. I think number one, you need to get really clear on What are you actually trying to get out of the changes that you're making and usually on this podcast most people are focused on metabolic health parameters improving if they're not already in a great spot or Continuing to improve those over time because we do know that Part of the natural aging process is that sometimes blood sugar can go up. And so sometimes things that worked in the past do not continue to work at this moment. And so you do actually need to change things. I see this most predominantly with my female clients. When they go through perimenopause or menopause, nutritional changes will need to occur. Otherwise they don't usually Maintain the same health level that they had before and so number one. You need to be very clear on what is your actual health goal for today's purpose. I am going to focus on the fat loss lane, but know that I talk about this all the time. Health is not just you losing weight. It just happens to be a percent, a bigger percentage of who's listening here and sort of where people are asking the most. But it doesn't mean that these other things don't matter. In fact, I'm actually very passionate about balancing your hunger hormones and making sure that your blood sugar is regulated. That's a big part of what I do within my clinic. But again, kind of to the masses listening here, that's usually not something that people care. They don't know to care about it. Let me put it that way. Okay, so we're going to focus today on what nutrition plan Could you follow that could be best for you losing? body fat. And here's a fun study that they had. They did a study, this was years ago in JAMA. What they did in this study is they looked at four different diets and one of them was keto. I forget the other three, but it's always usually like a mix of like a Mediterranean, a keto. And there were the two others, I forget. They had these four different eating plans, if you would, and they ran people through them and then they followed them for a year. And what they saw is that initially the people that were on the keto plan, Lost the most weight, but at the end of the year, everybody was in the same spot weight wise as far as how much they had lost. And so the, the things that I gather out of this, number one, let's just take a quick little sidebar moment to talk about the keto lifestyle. I'm not ever here to tell you that a plan is good or bad. It's really ultimately about. What you can stick with longterm. The thing I want to tell you about keto, the reason that people they'll say, I lost 20, 30 pounds the first month when they do keto. So one of the first things that happens when you really dramatically reduce your carbohydrate intake is that you're going to lose a lot of fluid. And you're going to lose a lot of the glycogen that's in your muscle. Glycogen, I want you to think of it as the stores that your muscle's going to use. So you have this sort of instant whoosh effect where the scale goes down five, six, seven, eight pounds within a week or two. And people just love that rapid weight loss. They're so encouraged by it. They're so hyped by it. And really if we were doing a body composition test, which we just talked about that recently, right? It's not good news what's happening. I mean, it's not really, that they lost a bunch of fat. I mean, think about if you subscribed to the fact that a pound of fat is 3, 500 calories, and if you subscribed to the thought process of calories in, calories out, how could it even be possible that you could have lost 30, 40, 50, 60, 000 calories. It absolutely makes no sense, right? Like the whole thing logically in your brain does not compute, but yet you just like that that scale number went down. That's that whole coming back to, Oh, the scales down and you really don't even care the process that goes into it. So initially those people, this is always the case when people radically like, let's say that someone has not been working on their nutrition at all any changes that they make, they will instantly be seeing results, right? And then you have the person that's always been working out, always really been watching their nutrition and they're still struggling. It's going to be a different road for them, but it's because They're not going to have that whoosh effect right away because they don't, they're not going to deplete glycogen right away. They're not going to do these things that other people are going to do. Okay, so anyway, so getting back on track, what this study really showed, and I just loved it, it was the fact that at the end of the year, It's all equal. It didn't matter if you did low carb, if you did high fat, whatever the method was, the four diets were very different as far as nutritionally, what their breakdowns were, everybody equalized. So the biggest thing that I want to say is number one, you need to know what your actual goals for nutrition are. And then number two, the path you pick needs to be sustainable. And this is why a lot of the time I will take this Avenue of add don't subtract where I will first have people do a nutrition audit and what I first do is I say hey I almost stage it out with people and I'll say hey, can we bring in some veggies? Can we up the protein? It's not a hard and fast because everybody that I work with is just so varied Some people already are eating all the veggies and all the lean proteins and doing all those things and other people They might be going out to eat two or three times a day and that's just the norm of what their life looks like and I'm not here to villainize that there's actually tons of people that can make a lifestyle work where they're going out to eat often or where they're getting lots of prepared foods. It just works for them. It's It's their taste preference, it's what they like, it's the stage of life, maybe they're traveling a lot. There are just so many circumstances, right? It's like if you're not working in this all day long, you just haven't come across enough of them. So if you're going to come at someone and say, well, all the meals need to be home cooked and everything needs to be this and everything needs to be that. I remember I felt so bad for this patient. I had a patient come to me that had worked with a chiropractor. This is not a dig on all chiropractors. I have a sister that's one and she's amazing. This chiropractor had a weight loss program where it was, you have to eat these times of the day. It's got to be four ounces of meat. It was however many ounces of veggie. I don't even know how this person was following it. Right. Think like a hundred percent meal plan, a hundred percent. These are the food lists. I remember there were like a few foods in each category. So very, very minimalistic. I really wondered, I was thinking of someone actually could do this and they could stick to it. I wonder what vitamin deficiency is going to have at the end of this. And so of course this didn't work. And actually I remember this was actually quite a devastating story this patient actually was in the middle of an adoption process. It fell through and they were just having trouble sticking on that regimen that this absolutely off the hinge plan was suggesting. And, you know, that program said to this patient, Well, you're not committed. You're not ready for this. So we can't help you right now. And I was just devastated hearing that because I thought to myself, how can you not at this moment give the most support ever to this person? How is this not the moment that you just can't? Lay a lot of compassion on this person for the traumatic events that they're going through. And this is real life. And for you to say that, well, you know, you're done sort of, here's the trash on the side of the road and I'm going to keep going. And I thought this is when this person needs the most in their life, things to nourish their brain, their soul. Like they need help the most right now. So that's another matter. But the point is. That if you can't sustain the things that are being recommended, it is really no good. It doesn't matter how incredible it is. I mean, I would love for everyone to get fresh veggies that are being steamed or done in the oven, or being chopped up raw for them, or salads, and like everything to be the best quality, and let's go pick it, let's go pick it off a vine and eat it immediately, you know, all the things. It's not realistic for a majority of us. And they've done lots of studies, too. There's not that much nutritional difference between you buying a frozen bag of veggies and using a steamer bag in the microwave versus you having it fresh. So you do what you can. You do it how you can. You modify in a way that works for you. But I think overall, the two main things, if I really had to think about nutritionally, what do you need to move more toward so that overall the calories can go down some But in a way where you're not being triggered, you're actually feeling less hungry because you're actually getting all the appropriate things. I think the things mainly that I work with people on are number one, protein intake and number two, fiber intake. And I've got to tell you, the fiber can tend to be easier as long as aversions. Fiber, I say with every meal or snack, I want there to be some fiber. What does fiber mean? Fiber can be veggies, it can be raw. They can be steamed. They can be baked in the oven. Fiber can be fruits, things like apples. Fiber can be legumes, which are beans. So meaning I always think chickpeas, black beans, they've got an amazing amount of fiber, they've also got protein in them. So remember a lot of foods are mixed in the categories and we're not going to get into today to determine which what's a fat protein verse a carb, you know, kind of deciding which one's which, but usually whatever it has most of, that's kind of the category you're going to put it into and. If you're getting some amount of, veggie, a fruit or a, or a bean, if you're getting some, you know, and again, there's other fiber sources, like They'll put it into tortilla wraps. Nowadays, they'll put a bunch of fiber, it's all over the place, but those are kind of the main things. I'm like fiber in some capacity. I want it to show up in every single meal or snack. And then when I think about protein first again, I'm always a fan of you doing your audit initially. And I go through this in much more depth in my mini course, optimizing fat loss and maintaining muscle on a GLP one. So this is just always the podcast is just a little bit more general. If you really want to dig in, it. I go through exactly how to do this, exactly how to up the protein. I go through more specifically, but do a little audit, figure out where you are, and then I want you to see if you're a woman, are you getting at least 30 grams of protein three times a day? If you're a man, 30 grams of protein, four times a day, this is. the average person baseline minimum. So if you're someone that is in an outlier, okay, so I'm going to define that as, let's say if you're a woman or any gender and you're under four foot 11, you might fit into a different category. If you are, let's say over six, five, if you are over 400 pounds, you might have different nutritional requirements. And so again, you're going to make sure everything on here is just informational, gives you rough ballpark, but then you're going to talk to your doctor and your medical team about what is right for you before you make any medical decisions. But roughly. the protein is usually the thing that it's the hardest for people. People can get more fiber in, but the protein is just challenging for people. And the main reason that this usually is, it's that likely this was not something that you did intuitively before. So I'll give you an example. People that don't struggle with this, like every so often, I'll get someone that actually really liked eating keto, but they couldn't stick to the low carb the low carb ness of keto, but they like getting the meat in. They actually like how they feel with that more protein, if they're actually getting more protein with the keto the way they're doing it. And so they actually already intuitively are getting a lot of protein, so it's not a problem for them. But for people like me, so I'm a vegetarian, and before I started to care about this stuff years ago, I was sitting there 150 pounds overweight and honestly, everything I ate was a carbohydrate and it was just. And this is just me personally, because there's tons of vegetarians that don't have trouble with this, but it has been a very conscious process for me to get more protein in. Nowadays, it is so easy, but I spent years trying to figure out what actually has protein in it. I had to consciously decide every meal, where's the protein? Nowadays, it's like, it's very intuitive to me. Like, okay, I'm gonna balance the plate. I'm gonna make sure I have 30 grams. And I, you know, I know it's in this yogurt. I know it's in that egg. I can make this. I can make that. Lentils. Like, I got it, right? But it took me time and this is the area, this and water intake where I see that don't, don't worry if it takes you time to increase these things because realize this is the thing. You getting enough protein, it's one of the things that's going to bring down the hunger hormone called ghrelin and it's going to keep it down the longest. So carbohydrates bring ghrelin down the quickest. But protein keeps it down the longest and so this is why when you really get to that hangry stage You actually normally intuitively want to carb first. You like want that quick head of energy and yes It's that quick head of energy, but it's also because it actually handles the ghrelin first It brings it down but if you want to keep it down you're gonna need to have protein around and so That is one of the biggest things as far as sustainable nutrition, where it's actually working for you to lose weight and keep it off, it's to get enough protein and the fiber, because fiber is going to provide, it's going to provide some of that stretch that you need in the stomach, so to activate those stretch receptors so that your brain is getting the signal. we're good, we've had enough. So it's not just leptin and insulin and all of that kind of stuff and ghrelin hormone levels. Those are kind of the main three we talk about the most, but also physically the mechanoreceptors, you need the physical stretch to get that sensation. So you could sit there and maybe you're eating, you know, three ounces of chicken. It's not a lot, right? So, okay, let's say you get the protein, but you're actually still hungry. So that means that then You might overeat if you're having whatever other things, but if you make sure to have some veggies in there, it's gonna provide part of that bulk that's gonna help you then to not overeat at that meal or potentially to be able to last a little bit longer until the next meal. If I had to kind of summarize, what would I do for the most sustainable nutrition plan that actually gets long term weight loss and let's say fat loss. I hate the term weight loss. Let's say that it were it's sustainable. It would be Number one, it fits in your world. And no matter what your world looks like, you can make it happen. I think there's just so much misnomer out there that, Oh, you can't go out to eat, you can't do this, you can't do that. I think you can. I think you can go out to eat. I think you can learn that I need to start with, I just recommended to a patient the other day, like, if they're gonna go to Outback Steakhouse, I wanted them to start with, a portion of either a salad or you can get like a side of broccoli, something like that, eat that first and then enjoy whatever else you're having. So you can learn, okay, I'm going to start with some fiber first. I'm going to make sure to get some veggies in and then I'm going to eat the protein and the other things. So you can make, if you, if you want to go out to eat and that's really important to you, by the way, your values might change with time. You might decide like, I really don't care that much about food. I'm not feeling like I need this as much, right? That sometimes as you get further along, you start to develop different friendship circles. Like, I was actually just talking to a patient the other day, and they're going to go axe throwing. And I was like, oh, that's so cool. Where is that? Because I lived in the same city as this person. I'm like writing down the name. And I'm thinking to myself, yeah, with my husband, I don't just want to do dinner dates. I mean, we haven't been on dates in a few months. Like, I feel like it's such a hassle with like child care and everything. But, I'm thinking to myself, I would love to do an axe throwing, this person also told me, apparently, I, and the name's upstairs, so I don't have it in front of me, but there's a sport where you, you have a ball, I think they said a football, but then you're knocking down bowling pins, there's like a name for this, I'm so sorry if I'm butchering this, but the point is this, you might not even care about food as much in the future, but right now, if you connect with friends when you go out to eat, and if that's important to you, fine, we'll figure out a way to make it work. So number one, it's gotta be sustainable in your world. And then number two, are we really optimizing the macronutrients with getting that protein, getting that fiber, with the carbs? Are we balancing it? And so what I mean is, let's say you have 30 grams of protein. Can we put next to 30 grams of carb? Can we start to balance things? Because that's gonna help our blood sugar. It's gonna help us feel satiated longer. We're gonna have less urges and cravings. And then in the long run, we're gonna stay in our own lane, as I always say, because we're gonna end up losing the same amount compared to someone that did keto and month one lost an insane amount. And it actually wasn't reality. You just stay in your own lane. Because most people that are doing this whole like extreme keto thing, they're not sticking with it for over a year. And then they're right back to where they started and they feel even more defeated because they didn't learn anything about themselves, about nutrition, about sustainability. They didn't learn any of that as they were doing it. So these things matter. And then my last point here was just kind of you know, being able to stick to it. That you can, the things you're doing, you can just day after day, you can do them because you like them. They work for you. I talk about this a lot on the podcast that. Obviously, it's been a very intentional path, me working on these things, and this is why I like to work in this area, because everyone that comes to me at first, they feel very defeated with how things are, and they think there's not another path. And you know, the difference between me and a lot of other, let's see, either other doctors or health coaches, I'm not giving you a version where I tell you that there's not going to be any pain. or that you're not going to go through struggle or that everything's going to be easy. I'm not saying that because I think that there is going to be struggle along the road. And I think that's a difference between understanding that this is a chronic disease versus just thinking that we can kind of do some fancy journaling and nothing is a problem again. I think that's kind of the difference between the medical understanding of this and just people that are just trying to run away with your money and make all these big promises. But what I can tell you is that You can go from where you did not understand anything. You didn't understand how to listen to your body, what things mattered, kind of what simple things make the most impact. And you can intentionally slowly work on those things and it gets easier over time. I'm to the point where there are just so many amazing options that I have in my house that I love. I zero feel deprived, zero. It does not work for me to feel deprived. Like it's the quickest way for me to literally go out and buy cookies and go do things if I think I can't do it. And so what I've had to do is, is teach myself, okay, we can have one or two. You know, we can we can plan it, or we can just have it, we're going to balance it, like I've tried it all because I needed to try it all to figure out how to make peace with food. And obviously the medications is one tool that I use and the same with patients because it helps to make that easier, but it doesn't mean that you're not still going to have to figure out all these different steps. Okay, I'm going to leave it there. Hopefully this was helpful. Oh, I wanted to leave you guys with one last thing. This is the random information. If you like hearing about different products, I'm trying. Okay, so there's a coffee concentrate brand and it's called Javy, J A V Y, and they sell coffee concentrate. Now, I do decaf because, well, we'll talk about this on another episode. But something when I went up on the dose of Wagovi, I ended up getting heartburn, which I never had in my life. And so I cut out. So I got their decaf coffee concentrate, and it is amazing. And so this, you get this little bottle, it is 6 fluid ounces, but it's a really nice glass bottle. It's a small one, so it sounds really small, right? But it's 35 servings, and I thought, how is that even possible? Because I'm kind of used to the coffee concentrate from the store, when you get it, where it's like you need, I don't know, you need a bigger amount of it. So this little, this container one teaspoon is considered a serving, so I literally busted out, a measuring thing and I did it and it is perfection. So here was my thought heading into the summer. I love having protein drinks with ice. But I still like that kind of like coffee taste with it. Do you know what I'm talking about? Like if you have a vanilla protein drink, like my favorite one is a Fairlife, the elite vanilla. Oh, it's just perfection. And so you can put the smallest amount of this Javi into it. And it's just perfection. So I've been loving that. And then thing two that I tried, I don't even know if you can still order this by the time this comes out, but don't worry, you don't need to. So, Premier Protein, they always have these limited edition flavors. Like, I love over the winter time, they have like, oh my gosh, it was like a chocolate mocha one, a peppermint one that was really good. I still have some in my cupboard. And, And they had this salted caramel popcorn. And in my mind, I'm like, okay, cool. That sounds great. And everyone was raving about them online. So I got a case from Walmart whenever they come, there's 12 if it's a case and I am not digging it. It's almost, it's exactly like you would expect, like. salty popcorn, but in a protein drink and I'm not digging it, but I'm going to drink them up because I've been in a phase recently of just using up all the flavors that I don't enjoy so much. But yeah, I don't think we need to run out and get this one. So anyway, I love if you are loving things or trying different stuff, let me know. I like to try. all these different like limited edition and stuff like that. Cause every so often they're great, but this one, this premier salted caramel popcorn, not my jam. Anyway, I just like to share little things like that. I love always on social following different people and seeing what they're doing. Hopefully you're having a great start to your week and we'll talk soon.