The Win On Purpose Podcast
The Win On Purpose Podcast focuses primarily on health and fitness tips and discussions, but we love to celebrate ALL THINGS in regard to being the best you can possibly be in business, relationships, and personal development. Win on purpose means just that, purposefully taking action to become your best self, and following your purpose to develop the passion needed to excel at anything in life!
The Win On Purpose Podcast
Effective Fat Loss: Preserving Muscle and Enhancing Health
This episode dives deep into the crucial distinction between losing weight and losing fat, focusing on strategies to preserve muscle mass during fat loss. We discuss the significance of protein intake, sleep quality, consistent training, and the importance of a balanced calorie deficit for sustainable health and fitness.
• Understanding the difference between weight loss and fat loss
• Importance of sufficient protein intake for muscle preservation
• Connection between quality sleep and muscle retention
• Role of consistent and intense training in maintaining muscle
• Risks of rapid weight loss and its effects on muscle mass
• Strategies for achieving a healthy fat loss without sacrificing muscle
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What's up everybody? Welcome back to the Went On Purpose podcast. We appreciate you guys for joining us today. In today's episode, we are talking about knowing if you're losing muscle mass or if you're losing body fat, how to make sure that we're losing body fat and keeping as much muscle tissue as possible, because we know that the more muscle mass somebody has, typically the healthier they are, the higher metabolism they have, the better they feel and the longer they live and the higher quality of life they have during that duration. So we cover four important points to think about when it comes to nutrition, when it comes to sleep, when it comes to your training and when it comes to your diet intensity. And if you're focusing on these four points and making sure that you're as solid as you can be in these four points, that you're going to be in the best position possible to lose as much body fat as possible while keeping as much muscle tissue as possible. That's what I call a win-win situation, guys. So I hope you enjoy the episode and we will catch you on the other side. On the other side, welcome to the Win On Purpose podcast. From health and fitness, business, personal development, relationships and more, we promise you will find inspiration to help you win on purpose in all areas of your life journey. Now for your host, adam Kelly. What's up everybody, what's up world. Welcome back to the win on purpose podcast. I appreciate you guys for tuning in once again. Um, we are, you know, in the kickoff of 2025. Actually, we just entered into the month of february, so we're already a whole month into the year. Year is going by crazy fast. The world is going crazy fast. Uh, the weather's been crazy, everything's been a little crazy. So I hope that this finds you well, this finds you in a good place mentally, that you're still checking the boxes, taking care of business, trying to be the best person that you can be for yourself and those that you care about, and just handling business, guys, because no matter how crazy life gets and what we experience, we can always take care of ourself. We can always try to be better than yesterday, and that's really how we went on purpose. All right. So thanks again, guys. So, if you will real quick, um, if you don't mind whatever avenue that you're listening to this on or you're viewing it, if you're watching the actual video podcast, if you guys will please give us some good stars. Share the episode, share any of the episodes, share the podcast, tell your friends and family about it If they're wanting sound, quality, practical information to help better themselves as a person, to help better their health and the way that they feel, the way that they look, and just become an all around better person.
Speaker 1:This is the podcast for all of us. Okay, this isn't just for one group of people. This isn't just for the gym. You know the gym rats, the meatheads, the super hyper. You know health, exercise focus. This is for mom and dad, grandma and grandpa. This is for everybody. There's nobody that should be left out of this. And even if you don't prioritize health and fitness, you can at least take something from this and start applying it into your life.
Speaker 1:Because this isn't just about again, I always try to emphasize this isn't just about the way we look, and it's not even about the way we feel. It's about how responsible we are for ourselves and how we treat ourselves, and that's going to have an effect. That's going to in the way that we look, in the way that we move and operate, but it's also going to show itself in our mood, in our energy, how we treat people, how we look at the world If we look at it from a pessimistic perspective or an optimistic perspective, that really affects the impact that we have with people. So that's what the purpose of this podcast is. Obviously, you know, we focus primarily on health and fitness, but it's all about becoming the best version of ourselves so that we can give that to the world and therefore inadvertently make the world a better place. All right, so if you guys don't mind, like I said, sharing it with somebody that you care about, share it with somebody that you know that needs some good, sound information, and I would highly appreciate it. So today I'm actually behind. I've been ahead this whole time, but you know January was January-ing, so you know, got a little bit behind and I'm actually today is February 3rd and so I plan on recording this, editing it and sharing it today, you know. So we stay on track with our every Monday episode. So that's the plan, but this is my first time recording in like a month, so it's kind of crazy. You know, time goes by fast and life happens fast, but I'm glad to be back, I'm glad to be able to share with you guys and talk with you guys and, you know, just do all that good stuff. So excited to be back.
Speaker 1:Weather's been beautiful. You know, if you're from this area, you know it's very rare that we start February in the 80s where you're sweating. I'm literally, if you're watching the video, I'm sitting here sweating because I'm in the gym, my office. You know I try to keep the sound down so I keep the air off, fans off, all that and it is warm here. But we know if you've lived in Oklahoma for more than like 12 hours, the weather is going to change. The cold is going to be back because we haven't really hit our true winter. Oklahoma usually February, march and even sometimes in April, is when we see some of our coldest, craziest weather. So definitely enjoying. I hope you guys got out this weekend, hope you guys get out this week.
Speaker 1:While it's still nice, guys do not pass opportunities to get outdoors. This is a complete side note. It has nothing to do with the episode, but very, very important inside buildings, as I say this recording inside one. But we are not designed to be stuck inside of buildings, inside of four walls with no windows or no fresh air, no sun on our skin. We were not made for that, guys. We were made to be outdoors to be. You know, as cliche as it sounds, one with nature, okay, like that's the way that we're designed to be, and a lot of the health issues we see today outside of you know. Nutrition and activity level and sleep I think you know just how detached we are from our origins is a big problem that we see, especially when it comes to the mental health aspect, with depression and anxiety and stress and things like that. Because if you look at some of the data of you know where they observe people in places like Canada or Alaska or places where it's always cold or maybe it's always rainy or they get very little sunshine depression rates and anxiety rates typically are quite a bit higher in those areas and places where, like sunny California or Florida, where there's sunshine, people are outdoors, they're moving around. You know it's so important, guys, so don't pass up those opportunities. It's great chance to get outside, get some steps in, get some movement in, go play with the kids, go sit at the park, you know, watch the animals. Just enjoy the sun on your skin. Get some of that natural vitamin d. So many good things, guys, fresh air, like we should be capitalizing. So take care of your health this week, guys, and get outdoors and enjoy some of this nice weather before it gets rigid, cold again, frigid. Is it rigid or frigid? I think it's frigid, cold either way. You're picking up what I'm putting down. So let's get to this episode, guys, because this is a good one. You know, now that we're in February we're a month into the new year A lot of people started resolutions, or they just, you know, beginning of the year fresh start.
Speaker 1:They wanted to start improving their health. So a lot of people have been at it. I've noticed a lot of people on social media showing transformations already, showing their progress, showing some of the new habits that they've been instilling, and I love that, guys. It's amazing. Definitely keep it up. And then there's always going to be the people who have the best intentions starting out and, for whatever reason, they end up falling off and go back to the same cycle.
Speaker 1:So if that happens to be you, that doesn't mean you failed, guys. We have 365.4 days each year, like 31 days. 34 days of not doing the things that you committed to originally means nothing compared to that 365. Okay, there's plenty of time to start making those changes now. Especially when you look at the, you know the grand scheme of your life. You know, one month compared to 70 years is just a blip, it's just a drop in the bucket. Okay. So you are not too late to start making improvements and start bettering yourself and becoming the best version of yourself.
Speaker 1:So, with that being said, at the point that we're at where you know a lot of people that are a month in month and a half into their diet, into their new habits or picking back up these habits, and one question comes to mind a lot of times when it comes to losing weight that I feel needs to be answered and I want to kind of clear it up for you guys. So you have a good gauge on what type of progress you're making. Because, at the end of the day, there's a big difference, and I could probably do a whole podcast episode, which I might do in the future, but there's a huge difference between losing weight and losing body fat. Now, losing weight can mean losing body fat, but losing body fat is really what the goal should be if we're dealing with, you know, being overweight or obese, not losing weight, okay. So, for context of that, you have different types of weight that make up your body. Okay, you don't just have body fat. You have internal organs. You have connective tissue, you know fascia. You have muscle tissue, skeletal tissue, skeletal muscle tissue. You know fascia. You have muscle tissue, skeletal tissue, skeletal muscle tissue. You have your connective tissue like sorry guys tendons and ligaments. You have veins, arteries. You have, you know, fluids in your body, water. You have so many different things that make up your body weight.
Speaker 1:Okay, so, just because we see the scale go down does not mean that we're losing the weight that we want to be losing. And society for so long has focused on losing weight. And you see a big shift coming in recent years probably less decade or so where people have started to focus more on losing body fat rather than just losing weight. And that's beautiful Because, like I said, just because the scale is going down doesn't mean you're bettering your health, because if the majority of the weight that you're losing is coming from body fat or even or sorry from muscle tissue, or even a big chunk of what you're losing or even a small chunk of what you're losing is coming from muscle tissue and it could be avoided, this is a negative thing because we know that the more muscle mass someone has, the better quality of life they're going to have. The healthier they are, the better their metabolism is, the better their sleep is going to be. All these different factors that accumulate into a life of good health is just so much higher when we have muscle mass. So that's the last thing that we want to do is lose muscle mass. You know we want to be at least keeping our muscle mass, if not adding to it.
Speaker 1:So it's very important to distinguish between losing body fat and losing body weight whenever we're trying to better our health. Now, you know it's different if you're like an athlete, say like a wrestler, or you know somebody that has to make weight for their competition, and you have 10 pounds to lose and you have to do it in like two days. Now, number one, in my opinion, you shouldn't be that far from your competitive weight two days out. That was a mistake in planning to begin with, but if you are in that situation, you can easily go into the sauna with a sweatsuit on, do some cardio, drop a bunch of body water, drop some muscle, drop a little bit of body fat and dump some glycogen out of your muscle cells and out of your liver and drop your weight in 10 pounds fairly easy. But did you actually better your health doing that? Absolutely not. In the short term you made your health worse, but you did that to be competitive in your sport.
Speaker 1:But when I'm talking to people who are actually wanting to better their health, the only thing we want to see reducing is body fat and inflammation, which does add to body weight. So that leads us to the question of how do we know if we're losing muscle or if we're losing body fat exclusively? Okay, so there's a couple of caveats to this conversation that we need to discuss first. Number one is if you're losing a fair amount of body weight, uh, or just a fair amount of body fat, you're probably going to lose some skeletal muscle tissue as well, and that just comes with, you know, losing quite a bit of weight. Say, if you have to lose 20 pounds and you lose it, you probably. Some of that was probably muscle tissue, but some of that's unavoidable. But we can, you know, do a pretty good job at minimizing how much muscle we lose if not holding all of our muscle, if we strategize things correctly and do things correctly. So that's what the question of the end, at the end of the day, is is how do I know if I'm losing muscle or if I'm losing body fat? Okay, and, like I said, this is a very important question because we want to constantly be improving our health, as we're improving the way that we look and the way that we feel. Okay, just because you feel a little better in the short term does not mean you're actually getting healthy. It sounds weird, but let me kind of give you an example here. Okay, this is going to maybe step on some toes, so no offense to anybody, but this is just what it is.
Speaker 1:So, when it comes to the nutrition side of things, you have diets like more of your extreme elimination diets, which would be like veganism, like more of your extreme elimination diets, which would be like veganism, vegetarianism. You have carnivore, you have keto. You have like the low carb Akin style, even down to like the Mediterranean diet, which is probably better than those far extreme diets. But with those diets, what you happen, what you usually have happen for a lot of people, or at least some people, is they switch to these diets and then they start feeling better, they start losing weight, they start improving their blood markers, they start lowering inflammation. All these good things are happening and they contribute all of that to the way that they're eating and they're like okay, well, you know if, if veganism isn't the best diet for me, how come? When I went vegan? Well, you know, if veganism isn't the best diet for me, how come when I went vegan, I felt so much better and lost weight and had better mental focus and all these good things happen. How are you going to tell me that the vegan diet isn't the best diet? Same thing with carnivore and keto. People say you know, I have my brain fog, my brain, I can't even speak. Today my brain fog has cleared up and you know I've lost weight and I have more energy and all these good things.
Speaker 1:Well, when you look at it from the big picture of what's happening, anytime that we reduce body weight in general, you're going to typically see an improvement in a lot of these aspects in the short term, because it's not just what you're doing, it's what you came from. So if you're coming from the standard American diet or the seafood diet of you see food and you eat it, no matter what it is, and you're not controlling your calories, you're just kind of just eating based on pleasure, if you will, then switching to anything that eliminates a lot of that junk and eliminates a lot of those excess calories is going to make you feel a lot better and is going to add some health benefits in the short term. But what happens as we continue to do these diets and these strategies? Well, a lot of times, with these extreme diets, eventually people start having issues and you know people start having issues and people start seeing these deficiencies come up and these different things that go on, these different negative effects that you see publicized. Like I said, in the short term it's easy to change something drastically and see an effect, but it's not just about the short term, it's about the long term and what's actually better for us. So just because you know you're starting to feel better doesn't necessarily mean you're doing the best thing for your health, doesn't necessarily mean you're getting healthier, okay. So, bringing it back to the actual discussion, we need to know if we're losing muscle tissue or if we're losing body fat tissue, because, again, the more muscle muscle we have, typically the healthier we're going to be all right.
Speaker 1:So, when it comes to answering this question, like I said, that's one caveat as far as um, you know what the effect of your different type of diets can have on you. Um, so sorry, my brain's a little scattered, I've had too much caffeine today. Anyways, this question can be a little hard to answer without having you know specifics. So I can't really say just based off you asking me hey, I've lost 10 pounds, you know was I? Did I lose body fat or muscle tissue? I can't give you that answer without doing some sort of studies on you or going to a lab and, actually you know, trying to decipher where this weight actually came from and knowing what you did to lose that 10 pounds, what that looked like and all that. So I can't answer that question in the short term.
Speaker 1:However, there are some things that we can focus on and I can give you some general recommendations and signs to look for to make sure that you keep as much muscle as possible throughout your fat loss phase. Okay, so let's just be clear there. This is very general. This is for educational purposes only. Okay, I'm not prescribing anything, I'm not telling you what to do, just giving you some things to keep in mind to, you know, at least increase the odds that you're losing primarily body fat and not muscle tissue.
Speaker 1:Okay, so number one, and I normally, when I give a list, I don't like prioritize it in number order, like number one's, most important and then down from there this one. I kind of did because I personally feel that Each number is a little bit more significant to make sure you're keeping muscle mass and only losing body fat. So people may argue that the order of importance on these different points that's not what I'm here for. I'm just here to give you some pointers and some things that you can think about. So, number one we want to consider our protein intake, our total daily protein intake.
Speaker 1:So are we consuming enough adequate protein every day? It doesn't matter how hard or frequently you train. If you are not consuming adequate protein daily, you will not provide your body with the raw material to repair muscle fibers and therefore you cause an increase in muscle loss. Also, if you're not consuming the necessary amino acid total needed for crucial bodily functions, your body will break down muscle tissue back into amino acids to use for those processes. So I just said a lot there and I'm actually kind of reading off of my note screen here. If you're watching the video you see me keep looking to the sides. I'm actually looking at my computer screen and reading some of the notes that I took down, but I'm going to kind of break this down because that was a lot of information I just gave you.
Speaker 1:So one are we consuming adequate protein daily? So we know that protein distribution throughout the day doesn't seem to have as much of an effect. Now I can argue based on some really good studies that have been conducted throughout the last several, at least the last couple decades. One of the scientists that I look towards on this discussion is Dr Donald Lehman. He is an expert when it comes to protein and protein metabolism. All that and their lab has shown that. You know, when you start your day with a big dose of protein, at least 30 grams of high quality protein, if not more than that, really sets you up to keep more muscle mass and build more muscle mass than if you didn't do that and you just kind of put protein wherever in your day. So that can be debatable. But overall it looks like it's more about your total daily protein amount rather than where you're getting that protein in throughout your day, how you're dividing that protein up. So we want to make sure we're getting enough protein.
Speaker 1:So the government government recommendation, at least for now, they should be coming out with new recommendations this year. They update the recommendations every five years, the nutritional guidelines, but as of now they recommend 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. So just a little equation plug in the numbers protein per kilogram of body weight. So just a little equation, plug in the numbers. However, this appears to be more of like the bare minimum that someone should be consuming to prevent you know nutrient deficiencies and you know health issues from too little protein. So I wouldn't say that that's optimal, that that's more of like a hey, you better be making sure you're getting at least this much if you want to at least have decent health. But if we're talking about optimization, I recommend a little bit more than that, or you know, that's at least what I do with myself. So if you're aiming for around you know, one gram per pound of desired body weight. So whatever body weight that you feel that you're going to be the most comfortable in your skin, then that's a really good gauge to make sure that you're getting in enough that you're covering all your needs, okay.
Speaker 1:So if you're, you know, if you're not consuming adequate protein, then you will not provide your body with the raw building material to repair muscle fibers. So this is is very important, guys. That's just one aspect of protein, but that's a big job. That it does is repair muscle tissue damage, but also preserves that muscle tissue that you do have and that you have built. If you're not consuming the necessary amino acid total, then you start to break muscle down back into amino acids. So what does that mean?
Speaker 1:So protein is really just a source of nutrients that we consume. So the actual nutrients that we're getting in from that protein is called amino acids. So when you break protein down to its simplest form, it consists of a group of amino acids in which you have two different groups. You have non-essential and essential. The non-essential, non-essential amino acids are amino acids that we don't have to consume from our diet, because our body is able to actually create these amino acids itself. Then your essential amino acids these are ones that we have to consume through our diet in order to get them, and our body has to have these amino acids to function properly.
Speaker 1:So this is where consuming the animal products comes in, because animals typically have the perfect ratio of amino acids for human beings, because they're also a animal and we are like animals, and so it's it's. Their bodies are designed very similar to us when it comes to muscle tissue. Plants aren't the same. Plant nutrients are based on what the plant needs. Animal nutrient compositions are based on what the animal needs. So we want those complete protein sources because they're going to have all those essential amino acids that our body needs.
Speaker 1:So if you do a vegan diet or a vegetarian diet or something that's very low protein, this can be a this can be a area of concern, because if you aren't getting those essential amino acids you know like, for example, in veganism and and uh, vegetarian diets it's's. It's fairly common to see deficiencies in like b6, b12, um and leucine. You know the amino. It's one of the amino acids, one of the essential amino acids. We tend to see deficiencies in these with these groups, because most plant products, even though they have protein, they don't can, they don't consist of all of the amino acids that our body needs to function. So either you're going to have to eat a wide variety of plant sources all the time, or you're going to have to add supplementation where they're fortified with these nutrients, or you're going to have to consume a ton of plant products in order to get the ratio of these amino acids that we need, and these amino acids have other jobs that they do. They're not just for building muscle tissue and keeping muscle tissue. There's lots of jobs that these amino acids are responsible for. So we just want to make sure that when we're getting enough protein per day, that we're getting high quality protein. And again, that's defined by having the essential amino acids that our body has to consume from our environment. So if they have all of those essential amino acids, it's considered as a complete protein source. If they don't, it's considered as an incomplete protein source.
Speaker 1:Okay, so that's number one, your protein intake. Number two is going to be sleep. Okay, people highly, highly disregard sleep and its importance. Okay, especially when it comes to building muscle tissue and losing body fat and maintaining muscle tissue. So without adequate sleep, our body will resort to breaking down muscle tissue instead of body fat, and there's actually some studies showing that up to 80% of the body weight loss during a fat loss phase comes from muscle. When getting less than six hours of sleep on average, okay. So they compared groups of people that got five and less hours and groups that got seven to eight hours, which is what's recommended, and we see a huge shift in muscle loss with these groups that are getting, you know, on a regular basis, inadequate sleep, versus the group that's getting adequate sleep. Okay, it's, this is a big deal, guys like, uh.
Speaker 1:And then there's there's other things that happen when we lack sleep that can interfere with our diet. It can be our hunger cravings tend to go up, so we tend to crave quick digesting, highly processed foods because it's quick energy for the body. Our willpower goes down, so it makes it much harder to eat healthy and clean. It makes it much easier just to grab what's ever around us, not even because we're hungry and not even just because we need the energy, just because our willpower takes a hit whenever we're not rested. Um recovery from exercise and activity gets hindered when we don't get adequate sleep. A lot of the our immune system takes a big hit when we don't get adequate sleep. So there's a lot of effects of not getting good sleep. But when it comes to the topic at hand of keeping muscle mass while losing body fat, that's a big issue when you can lose up to 80% of the weight that you're losing from muscle mass rather than body fat.
Speaker 1:So if your sleep is trash and you lose 10 pounds. Potentially eight pounds of that could be muscle tissue. Now your health is way worse, you're going to feel way worse. You're going to feel way worse. You're going to look worse. Nothing good is going to come from that because of our sleep. So definitely something to prioritize.
Speaker 1:To cover your grounds, like I said, that seven to eight hours is preferred. Some people can function well off a little bit less. Some people need a little bit more. So there's not an exact answer on anything for anybody, but that seven to eight is a pretty good range, especially if you struggle with sleep quality. So maybe you get up several times, you use the restroom or you just kind of toss and turn or you have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep. Really pushing for those higher ends of hours of time trying to sleep is going to be better, because if you're up and down throughout the night and you're down for six hours, maybe you're only getting like three and a half hours of sleep. But if you're shooting for eight, nine hours now, maybe you're getting like six and a half, seven hours of sleep. So you're still getting some pretty good, you know, adequate sleep time. So that's the second point. That's super important.
Speaker 1:Number three is going to be your training. Okay, so this is going to be your. Your weight training, your resistance training things that actually put stress on the muscle damage the muscle, so it has to grow back more muscle tissue to be ready for the next activity, which is how the muscle building process basically works. So are you training consistently throughout the week? So, or are you just showing up on Monday and sometimes you show up Tuesday, but maybe you'll just wait till Thursday and you're just kind of sporadic with your training, where you're not building up that consistency? Are you progressively overloading through your training? So? Are you consistently making things harder? Or every time you show up, you're doing three sets of 10 on everything, regardless if it's challenging or not?
Speaker 1:You're not going to keep muscle mass while in a calorie deficit if you're not stressing the muscle and basically giving your body a reason to keep muscle tissue, because muscle tissue is important for our body, but our body doesn't need a whole lot of it for survival sake. This isn't optimization, this isn't feeling as good as you can and being as healthy as you can. This is just life or death. The body doesn't need a lot of muscle tissue. But, with that being said, when we're losing weight and if we're not doing it, where we're promoting keeping muscle, our body will quickly start breaking down muscle tissue, because muscle tissue is actually easier for the body to break down than fat tissue is, and our body kind of protects itself from starvation by trying to keep body fat a little bit longer because it's a good, steady source of energy. So it'll break down some of that excess muscle tissue because it doesn't have to have it to survive.
Speaker 1:So this is a big problem when it comes to dieting and we want to make sure that we're promoting progressive overload, or AKA we're just making our training harder each week in some fashion. So it can be more reps, more working sets, more weight, less rest breaks whatever that may look like more intensity in your training, and this will help to ensure that you're keeping muscle mass as long as possible or at least minimizing how much you lose. Are you training with high intensity? So this kind of ties into the progressive overload idea. Are you just showing up to the gym and you're just bouncing from machine to machine doing a couple sets, you know, just doing a few reps till you feel it a little bit, and going about your business? Yes, you're moving your body, which is good, but you're not promoting building muscle or keeping muscle.
Speaker 1:Doing that, again, our training needs to be a little bit harder, because if you like, they say, if you don't use it, you'll lose it. But also, as I was explaining, your body is ready to break down muscle tissue at any point if it needs to. So you have to give your body a reason to keep that extra muscle tissue, or it won't so, and that comes through our training and our protein intake and also our sleep, or it won't so, and that comes through our training and our protein intake and also our sleep. And the last one on training are you training each muscle group at least two times per week? So this is more on the optimization side. It's not like you have to train each muscle group two times per week, but we do see in studies that training each muscle group at least two times per week promotes, you know, very, very good quality muscle growth and retention. So you know, rather, if you're going into the gym twice a week and doing a full body workout twice which is what a lot of my clients do, and they get fantastic results from that or you're, you know, increasing the amount of days you're training so you can break down the body you know, mainly for time's or for energy sake, and breaking it down to where you're still training each muscle group around two times per week. If you do that, you're going to have a really good chance of keeping more muscle tissue and losing more body fat than muscle tissue.
Speaker 1:So the last part on this is diet intensity. Okay, so we cover nutrition. Diet intensity is more specific to the way that you're in a calorie deficit. So are you in too much of a calorie deficit and losing too fast of a rate? Okay, so what that means is when we look at fat loss, we look at typically the rate of loss per week. Okay, because it's kind of hard to gauge the rate per day because you can see so many different weight fluctuations on the scale. But per week, when you average out body weight per week, you can get a pretty good idea of your average rate of loss.
Speaker 1:So if we're losing weight too fast, we can almost guarantee that we're going to be losing a a good amount of body, of muscle tissue, because the body can only burn through so much body fat each week. It's not like if you just starve yourself, you're going to only burn through body fat at a much faster rate. That's not the way the body works. If that was the case, we would see we probably wouldn't even be here as humans because we would have starved out a long time ago. Our body's a lot smarter than that. Okay, but if we're losing too fast, we are almost guaranteed to be losing muscle tissue. So a good rule of thumb is you want to aim for at most like 1% of your body weight each week. So if you're 200 pounds, be aiming for no more than around two pounds per week of loss puts you in a pretty good place to maintain muscle mass if you're following these other points that I said. But if you're losing three, four or five pounds per week, there's a very good chance that you're losing quality muscle tissue with that, and then that changes based on how much you weigh. So if you're 100 pounds, you know a pound per week is very aggressive, but that's still within that 1% of your body weight. So we just want to make sure we're not dying to dieting too hard.
Speaker 1:Okay, because it may sound appealing. You know it's like oh, I'm super motivated when I start. I want to lose as fast as I can, because I want my goal yesterday. And so you know, in the very beginning hunger isn't high or body's not fighting against our diet. So it's kind of easier to drop calories lower and just eat less because we're motivated, our body's in a good spot. But as the diet continues, as diet, fatigue starts kicking in, as exhaustion starts kicking in, as stress, you know, starts elevating and our hunger cues start intensifying, things like that. It's going to get much more challenging. And then also you know you're at a higher rate for losing more muscle, muscle tissue. But not just that, you're at a higher rate of backsliding and of binging and things like that, because you're putting your body in a state of fight or flight, survival, because it thinks that you're starving. It doesn't understand that you're dieting to try to lose weight and get healthier. It just knows if it's losing body tissue too fast, there's a good chance if, if we're to keep this up, that we're going to starve to death and die, so your body's going to want to try to fight against that. So just make sure you're not losing too fast. You know, like I said, that 1% per week should put you in a really good place. Are you eating enough to fuel hard training. So this is one problem I see.
Speaker 1:Now, before I even really touch on this point, I'm going to start by saying the whole starvation mode idea is a complete myth. It's been proven wrong so many times. It does not exist. If you don't believe me me, just don't eat for like a month and tell me that you're still the body, same body weight or that you gain body fat. It's not possible, guys. Your body cannot create energy and create substance out of nothing to put more body fat on you. So you know you can see metabolism down. You regulate a little bit through the dieting process, which it will bounce back once you're out of your diet for however long needed, but you're not going to see your metabolism just drop off and be broken. Okay, broken metabolism is not real and I hope that people don't still believe that. But if you do now you know that's false.
Speaker 1:But with that being said, we have to always keep an account of fatigue that's built up through the dieting and exercise process. Exercise creates physical fatigue, dieting creates physical and mental. Well, both of them create physical and mental fatigue and this will affect how dieting affects your body and if you're going to be losing muscle mass or body fat. So if we're under eating, we're again. It ties into that first one of being in too aggressive of a diet and we start tapping into that muscle tissue. But also if we're not fueling our body enough and we're dieting too hard, we're probably going to have lower energy, which therefore is going to affect our performance in the gym to where we can't push as hard, where we can't get as many reps, where we can't progressively overload our training, as we talked about before, and so we're not actually getting better, we're not pushing ourselves because we don't have the energy to do so, and so we're at a much higher risk of losing muscle tissue rather than just body fat.
Speaker 1:So make sure that you're eating enough to train, to fuel your training and to fuel your lifestyle. So if you're super active you work like a physical construction job and then you go train at the gym afterwards and then you're busy on the weekends you're going to need quite a bit more nutrients and quite a bit more calories than someone who's sedentary and all they do is go to the gym a few times a week and then they sit around the rest of time. So you got to keep these things in mind if you want to keep as much muscle as you can, and the last part on that is, if you have less body fat to lose, you are at a higher probability of losing muscle, especially with an aggressive calorie deficit. Okay, so for people that are obese morbid obesity they have so much mass, so much body fat mass, that the body doesn't really need to take from muscle tissue because it has such a high supply of stored energy in the form of adipose tissue, body fat, that it's a little bit more comfortable from pulling from the body fat primarily. But as we get leaner and leaner or say, maybe you have like five or 10 pounds to lose you're at a higher chance of losing muscle tissue because your body has less resources to pull off of you while still keeping you alive. So if your body fat is super low, the body's like well, I don't want to keep losing body fat for energy and keep utilizing body fat for energy, because if I do that we're already so low we're going to die pretty soon. So we need to take some of this excess muscle tissue and just slowly take that body fat because we really don't want to risk death. So you tend to see this a lot more regularly with.
Speaker 1:You know physique competitors, like bodybuilders, things like that, where they're super duper lean, you know beyond what the average person is, but yet they have to get quite a bit leaner than that to where you're like that exotic lean where you can see like every vein and muscle fiber and everything in their body. That's a whole different level and at that point you're probably going to lose some muscle mass during that last dieting process up until showtime. So you can kind of try to mitigate some of that, but some of it you just can't. Now, if you're an enhanced athlete, you are taking substances that help prevent that even more. But as a natural athlete you're probably going to lose some muscle tissue there towards the end, and that's just the cost of being competitive. But if you're at a higher body weight, your body has, like I said, so much energy that it can take from, and never really needs to pull from, your muscle tissue until you get lean enough. Or if you're just dieting extremely hard. So all these kind of tie into each other, as you see.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we have four points that you can really focus on to not necessarily excuse me, not necessarily determine if you're losing primarily body fat or if you're losing muscle tissue, but four things that you can focus on to at least promote as much muscle retention as possible and as much body fat burn as possible in a healthy range. Okay, so keep things simple, guys. You don't have to get super crazy with it. You don't have to super stress out over this because, at the end of the day, say, you're somebody that's been training for quite some time, you've built quite a bit of muscle and you've just got a good amount of fat on top of it. Well, as you lose that body fat, even if you happen to lose some muscle because you're leaner, because the muscle is closer to the skin, it's going to push against the skin more. It has less of that, you know, subcutaneous fat, that fat that's under the skin covering it. So you're actually going to look bigger as you get leaner, even if you're losing some muscle tissue. So don't let that be a concern of oh, I don't want to diet, I don't want to get to a healthy body fat range, I don't want to get leaner or whatever, because I'm afraid I'm going to lose muscle tissue, like, if you do it right, you'll still lose a small amount. But, like I said, there's that illusion factor of the leaner that you are, the bigger that you look. So don't let that be a concern. If your goal is to get leaner, you just if you focus on these four things, you're going to put yourself in the best position to keep as much of that muscle mass as possible.
Speaker 1:All right, so I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. We would love to work with you. If you guys need help with any of this, we do online coaching. We do in-person training at our private facility here in Moore, oklahoma. So if you're in the area or if you're not, we can do online coaching where we help you formulate your diet plan. We help you formulate your exercise. We make sure we stay on top of your progression so that you are performing progressive overload.
Speaker 1:You're constantly getting better and better each week, that we're not losing too fast and we're not losing too slow and that we're doing all the things that it takes to be a healthier person at the end, because a lot of people will lose weight. You know, especially with these glp1 drugs or like ozempic manjaro, those drugs people are losing massive amounts of weight but they're not always ending up healthier at the end. You know. They just become a less healthier, skinnier version of themselves, and that shouldn't be what our goal is. Our goal should be to have the best health and to fill our best and look our best and have high energy and function properly and be strong and fit and active and all these good things. That's what we should be after, and not just becoming smaller. So we just want to make sure that we're prioritizing the things that matter most, and you know there's going to be.
Speaker 1:There's so much information out there, people saying, oh well, you have to do this, you have to do that. You know, if you're not taking these supplements, then this is going to happen. There's so much stuff out there, guys, that is not important and sometimes it's just flat out lies and really good marketing and it's just not important. Guys, if you focus on the main things eating right, getting good sleep, training hard and effectively and smart and minimizing stress okay, that's one that we didn't touch on here, but minimizing your stress and making sure that you're not over dieting or dieting too hard or for too long of a period then you're going to cover all your needs and you're going to feel your best and look your best, okay, so, if you guys need anything, feel free to reach out.
Speaker 1:I'm always up for questions. So if you guys have a question and you're just like, hey, this is what I'm dealing with, what should I do, or what would you do or what do you think, feel free to reach out on social media Coach Adam Kelly on Facebook and Instagram. Also the YouTube channel, the Win On Purpose podcast YouTube channel. We also have the website, wwwtransformedhealthcoachcom. You can reach out there Lots of different ways. Guys, feel free to reach out with your questions. We'd love to help you guys out, because that's what this is all about spreading sound, good information, helping as many people as we can to win on purpose. So, with all that being said, guys, whatever you do today, make sure you do something good for yourself, something good for your health, something good for those you care about, and whatever you do, make sure you win on purpose. Talk at you next time.