EP41, How To Eat For Progress Without Perfection

Stop letting "food guilt" stall your results. In this episode of Unstoppable by Design, Matt is joined by Juggernaut’s Head Nutrition Coach, Emily Hyde, to break down why the quest for a "perfect" diet often leads to a stress-filled yo-yo cycle that actually prevents you from building muscle.

We dive deep into the recent goal reviews from our members to answer your most burning questions about weight fluctuations, hormonal changes, and how to eat for longevity without spending six hours in the kitchen.

In this episode, we discuss:

• The Guilt Cycle: How stress and cortisol (the stress hormone) keep your body in a "catabolic" state of breakdown rather than recovery.
• The 5-Pound Scale Swing: Why a weekly 5–8 lb weight fluctuation is almost never "real fat" and what is actually happening with water retention and inflammation.
• Menopause & Muscle: The biological shift in estrogen and why prioritizing Muscle Protein Synthesis (MPS) is non-negotiable as you age.
• The Sleep-Sugar Connection: Why "underfueling" during the day leads to 3:00 AM wake-ups and how a small "desserty" carb snack can actually help you sleep better.
• The 1% Kitchen Hack: Realistic meal prep strategies (hello, Crockpots!) that don't skyrocket your grocery bill.
• Metabolic Health: How to move beyond guessing and use labs to see how your body is truly handling energy.

Support & Giveaways

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🙋‍♂️ ASK THE SHOW: Got a question about your specific nutrition or training? Use the link below to send it in for a future episode!

Transcript

Welcome And What We Cover

Matt 0:16

Let's go. Welcome to Unstoppable by Design, where we talk all things fitness, mindset, and what it means to truly be unstoppable inside and outside the gym. I'm Matt Terry, and today I'm joined by our head nutrition coach, Emily Hyde. Emily, how are you?

Emily 0:34

I'm great. Thank you.

Matt 0:35

You guys didn't see it, but she almost did finger guns in the air. And today we're going to be talking a little bit about some nutrition stuff that we've seen come up in our goal reviews. So some members wanted to learn a little bit more about certain things, and we're going to kind of do a deep dive today.

Emily 0:52

Let's go.

Food Guilt And The Yo Yo Trap

Matt 0:55

Let's go. All right. So, question number one. Emily, many members mentioned guilt around food choices in their reviews. Why does that guilt actually stall their progress in the gym?

Emily 1:11

I think guilt is one of the biggest things that impact people because they feel like they need to be, they feel like progress comes from being strict or trying to be more perfect with their diet. But when we have those feelings of like guilt, we tend to swing to extremes. So either the next day we try to restrict more food or we skip meals or we start to overthink every bite. And this can cause, one, this causes a big stress response in our body. And that's kind of the opposite of what we want to do because that's going to impact our ability to build muscle. And then that's going to start to lead us towards where we're underfueling on some days, and maybe subconsciously or naturally, our body will just overdo it on other days. And that kind of gets us in this where we feel like we're out of control with our food. And that can all happen from stemming back to guilt. So I think it's instead of thinking about like how little can I eat or how much can I restrict to lose weight, it's how can I feel myself so I can perform best in the gym, build some muscle, and then with that we have more energy to lose weight and reach our goals.

Matt 2:31

Yeah. And we were talking about this earlier, and you gave it a visual. You said it's almost like a yo-yo.

Emily 2:38

Yeah.

Matt 2:39

Like it could be going back and forth when you're trying to Yeah.

Emily 2:42

This is when we can get in that feeling of like we're we've plateaued or we're stalled, like and nothing seems to work. And we might not realize it, but it could be because we're under over, under over, and from overthinking our food choices. And so it can be helpful to not put so much pressure on us on ourselves, find that like good, good routine and rhythm, and just stick there.

Matt 3:07

Yeah. And you said stress. Yeah, eating shouldn't be super stressful. And then the stress hormone involved with that is cortisol. Throwback to some earlier episodes.

Emily 3:19

Yes. So cortisol keeps our body in it's called a catabolic state. And all that really essentially means is a state of breakdown. So when we think about muscle and recovery from the gym, we we that's buildup, right? Like we want to have the resources to build our body back up. And if we're constantly, you know, yo-yoing in our diet or stressing about our food, we can keep our body unintentionally in like a state where we're just kind of breaking it down all the time.

Scale Swings Water Weight Explained

Matt 3:57

Yeah. So like even though you're you have good intent and you're like, I really want to eat well, and you're stressing out about it, you can actually take be taking a step back in the progress. Yeah. So try not to stress about your food. Don't stress. Don't stress about your food. Question number two. We see people fluctuating right around five to eight pounds in a week. Is that real fat or is that a signal that something's off?

Emily 4:25

So this is almost never real fat. Fun fact to gain five pounds, we would need roughly around like 17,000 extra calories.

Matt 4:39

That's a lot.

Emily 4:40

So that's a lot. So most people aren't doing that in a couple days or a week. Typically, when we see fluctuations like that, it's from water retention, can be inflammation from training and just holding more water in our muscles. Anytime we have a little bit more carbs than we're used to, or more sodium, that also causes us to hold on to water. Digestion can be slowing down. And then for women, you know, different times of the month, our hormones are shifting in such a way where we'll hold on to water too. So most of the time it goes back to water retention or inflammation.

Matt 5:17

Yeah. My brain's just going here and correct me, but creatine monohydrate, that's a supplement that does some water retention, right?

Emily 5:27

It can, yeah. Would that would that be something that yeah, creatine can do that? So, so when we think of things like if we break down the word carbohydrate, carbohydrate, like carbs hydrate, they pull water in. Creatine can also have that same kind of effect. So for some, it can cause a little bit of bloating that over time should go away. But it also is helping, you know, to kind of pump up our muscles a little bit. I can we can see so that this is a one reason why it's really good if if someone is mentally okay with weighing themselves every day and that doesn't cause them to go back to that guilt, like we just talked about, or things like that. Yeah, we can see, we can see like the rhythms and cycles that our body goes through. Cause a lot of times, you know, if someone has if uh if I've trained Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, like my weight's gonna be higher on Thursday, Friday, just because there's a cumulative effect of the week of training. This is why either we recommend, like, I would say, like, weigh yourself every day and we'll take the average. And then this also helps us to see how your body responds to different workouts and the way you're eating and stuff like that, or weigh yourself after a rest day to try to minimize some of that water retention.

Matt 6:49

Yeah. So that's good. But the water bloating from creatine, that's not or creatine, that's not a bad it's not bad. It's not bad.

Emily 6:56

Nope.

Matt 6:57

It's pause effect to those gains. Let's go.

Emily 7:00

Let it go.

Matt 7:02

Question three. How do we define mindful eating without it sounding like some sort of nonsense? What does it look like typically on a Tuesday at juggernaut?

Emily 7:14

Okay, so mindful eating is simply gonna be paying attention to what actually works for your body, I think. So that's that can look a couple different ways. It could be, you know, something that's really important is sitting down and eating your food, not just inhaling it in the car on the way to somewhere or on the go in the middle of a meeting. I mean, we all have to do that sometimes. Yep. But when we are so mindfulness in that case, slowing down and taking our time and actually paying attention to our food and how we feel, we're more likely to stop when we're full, to notice when we're full, those kind of changes. But then it can also be, you know, we can be mindful about including protein with each of our meals. We can be mindful about like how do we feel in class? Like what foods actually give me energy and what foods make me feel sluggish or take longer to digest. Yep. And then we can also notice things like does a certain food or food group make me feel gross or cause more bloating? Like so, mindfulness can look, can be any of those things. But basically, I think it would be like not eating on autopilot, which I think a lot of us just get in the habit of doing.

Matt 8:34

Yeah, example of that is like eating while scrolling your phone.

Emily 8:38

Uh-huh.

Matt 8:38

And yes, or doom scrolling, as they as they say.

Emily 8:42

Yeah. Then we're we're just we don't have that connection with with our body or with the food. And a lot of times we'll find like somebody who uh goes out to eat, they're going out, let's say they're going out to eat with their family, yeah, and they're really in the moment and enjoying the dinner, and everyone's focused on the conversation, and that that person will most likely not overstuff stuff themselves or leave feeling like they overdid it because the they're mind they're present, they're mindful not only with the food, but with other people, and then we can pay attention to our our body's cues a little bit better than just shoving it in or scrolling.

Menopause Nutrition And Muscle Protection

Matt 9:26

Yeah, doom scrolling. Yeah, doom scrolling eating. New term. All right, so we'll shift a little bit. I know a couple questions came up about hormones specifically and maybe a generational shift. So our first question here is we had several requests to talk about menopause and training around hormonal shifts. How does nutrition need to change when the biological thermostat starts moving?

Emily 9:53

So there's not a one-size-fits-all answer to this question. But one thing that, you know, one big factor in menopause is really protecting muscle and paying attention to protecting the muscle and doing resistance training and trying to maintain or build our lean muscle. So estrogen is estrogen dropping off or decreasing is a major component of menopause. And estrogen is very protective to our muscle mass. When it declines, muscle protein synthesis or essentially like how well we we preserve our muscle, it becomes less efficient. So women in menopause need to be more cognizant of how they're training and eating. And so protein needs would be huge, like making sure we're hitting the minimum. I like to for everyone to shoot for a minimum of 100 grams. So everybody's needs are gonna be a little different, but at least shooting for that, that bare minimum, and then also looking at how we're getting that spread out throughout the day. So muscle protein synthesis really gets unlocked, if we want to use that term, around 30 grams of protein. So, like if a woman could aim for 30 grams of protein, breakfast, lunch, dinner, there again, they're gonna be closer to that 100 gram mark. They have room for a snack, and they're gonna be hitting muscle protein synthesis a couple times throughout the day.

Matt 11:31

Nice. Yeah, that was gonna be my follow-up question. Is you said 30 grams of protein. Is that like ideally per meal? Yeah. Or do you, I guess could somebody do that just throughout the day with like, could they fill one of those with a protein supplement drink or something?

Emily 11:46

Yeah, you can. Ideally, you know, and this can look at this doesn't mean 30 grams of protein, which would be somewhere around four-ish ounces of meat. It doesn't mean we have to do four ounces of chicken each meal. You know, we can get, first of all, we can get our protein from a variety of sources. So, you know, that could be maybe some meat, but also some beans and like different things added into the meal to get up to that 30 grams, or it could be a protein shake.

Breaking Old Fitness And Diet Norms

Matt 12:16

Yeah, if you're like short on time or absolutely yeah. Okay, cool. Next question. A member mentioned wanting to go against generational norms for her health. What are those old school norms that we're trying to break here at Jargernaut?

Emily 12:35

You know, I think one of them, kind of going back to the last question that we just answered, is, you know, really prioritizing resistance training.

Matt 12:44

Yeah.

Emily 12:45

And just how important that is for no matter what stage of life you're in, but your hormonal balance and aging gracefully and longevity for, you know, for men and women, I think there's, I think we've seen a big shift just in fitness in general, and in, you know, moving away from it's all cardio, you know, for fat loss and really highlighting the importance of resistance training. But I think, you know, if we really focus on building muscle, we're gonna be stronger, more resilient, more capable.

Matt 13:21

Yeah.

Emily 13:22

And that changes our also from like a health standpoint, like our our blood work and all of those markers that we're looking at to mirror, like to measure how healthy we are, all of those will improve with resistance training too.

Matt 13:37

Yeah, I think I think you you touched on one of the big ones, which is I think historically, some women think that they can only work out by doing cardio or they might be really afraid to touch weights because I I shouldn't say afraid to touch weights, afraid of what touching weights will do to their physique. Yes. And so I think like more than capable, strong enough for sure, but afraid to look very muscular or something like that. So I think that's one of the things that we're trying to break away from here and to show people that it's important for, like you said, biomarkers. Your physique does not get like that unless you're purposefully training like strong woman stuff, or you know, you're you're going for a super insane deadlift or something like that. But just dealing with the weights, doing resistance training, like you're talking about, is very good for like bone density, overall health, and longevity.

Emily 14:36

Yeah, it takes a lot of calories and a lot of hard training to put on a lot of muscle. Right. And so it's it, you know, if someone to get bulky, we have to be very, very intentional to try to get bulky, you know? And so I think I think that that's yeah, just understanding that the toned look that a lot of people, a lot of women aspire to get to is just having a little bit more muscle. And yes, that does come from like we have to fuel ourselves enough, but also we it won't translate into that bulky, like too much.

Matt 15:15

Yeah, yeah. I don't want to be dismissive of the fear because I I get the fear. They don't personally want to see themselves like that, but I don't think that that is really what's on the table with resistance training at like a good place. Yeah. I guess the other one that you kind of talked about was eating. Yes, eating enough. That that is something that I think some people need to overcome as well. They're really afraid that if I eat more, that means that I'm going to blow up physically. We know that not to be within reason.

Emily 15:50

Within reason. Yes. Yeah, within reason. There's always there's a there's a line, right? We can eat too much food for what our body needs, but I also think that a lot of people just underestimate how much energy it takes just to function, like just to do daily life.

Matt 16:09

What's that called?

Emily 16:11

It's like basal metabolic metabolic rate. Yeah.

Matt 16:13

Look at me.

Emily 16:14

Look at you, so so little plug for the in-body, like that's a a great tool that can estimate those needs. We, I mean, we can do equations and stuff to also estimate it, but it's it's cool to see that breakdown of muscle and body fat and see what our our BMR is is approximated to be. And then, you know, I find it's also pretty eye-opening for people when they see that number. And I'm like, okay, now we need to eat above that number. And they're like, what? Like, yeah, that's just to run, you know, your brain and digestion. And you also want to fuel your workouts.

Matt 16:55

So we need to be above that. I think you do a great job. I've heard you talk about that with people with the basal metabolic rate, and they might see that just existing is higher than what they're currently eating in the day. Never mind accompanying with the workouts or the exercise that they do on top of it. So I think I've overheard you talk to people about that. I think you do a great job outlining that to them.

Emily 17:18

Yeah, and it's there, I've had so many people, you know, we get them eating a little bit more. And I, and and I understand there's a fear around that because I I've had people tell me, like, I'm afraid you're gonna tell me to eat more. And we we so first of all, it's always gradually increasing, like, you know, and it's it's amazing. Like, I love when they feel like I feel so much more energy and my workouts feel good. And then, and in it all kind of works in this loop where now you can push a little harder in your workouts because you have more energy and sleep is better because you're feeling better. And it's like this cycle where it actually goes to help you reach your goals rather than just restricting down.

Matt 18:03

Yeah. And you said you said gradually, glad that you said that. That's something else I've heard you say to people is if we are increasing the amount that they eat, or like let's say that we're pulling back the amount that they they eat, it's not a boom, all right, tomorrow you're jumping up 1,000 calories or whatever it may be. But you if they have to get there, you slowly build up over time.

Emily 18:27

Yeah. Yeah. So we we were kind of talking about this earlier before we started recording, but the the minimum effective dose of things. So that goes both ways. Like we want to, we want to find the the whatever change we're trying to elicit or whatever goal we're trying to get to, we want to find the minimum effective dose that will get us to that. So it's not always more deficit, more calorie restriction, more exercise, more, you know, we just want to be, we want to use exercise and calorie restriction or slowly building calories back up, whatever it might be, but in little ways that just enough to put that stress on the body to get it to make the change we're looking for.

Matt 19:13

Yeah.

Emily 19:13

And then we add from there or subtract from there.

Food Sleep And Blood Sugar Wakes

Matt 19:16

Yep. Whatever you need. All right. Next question. Is there a connection between what we eat and how we sleep? Several people mentioned sleep as their biggest hurdle.

Emily 19:28

Yes. There absolutely is. And it kind of goes both ways. So one thing I see, like if if a lot of people, if you're underfueling, especially with carbohydrates, then you're gonna have your blood sugar is gonna be a little bit more unstable during the day. And that's also gonna happen at night. So typically people will, you know, they might have some blood sugar crashes in their sleep. They're not really gonna know that this is happening. But one thing that that does is that it's a like alarm bells are gonna go off internally. Like this is a problem. The body has to fix it. And so we'll get these signaling, you know, the brain will signal to the liver to go ahead and excrete some juice, basically, into our system.

Matt 20:17

Some liver juice. Yeah.

Emily 20:19

Some glucagon is what it's called. Well, we'll turn glucagon into glucose and we'll put it into our system. And that's gonna help to raise up our blood sugar. But in this whole process of the body bringing up our blood sugar, we get some cortisol and adrenaline release. And so that can just kind of lightly wake us up out of our sleep. We don't notice that. We might be like, oh, I gotta go to the bathroom. Okay, and then I go right back to sleep. But typically, if someone's waking up, you know, between 1 and 3 a.m., and they're just like, oh, I just always wake up and go to the bathroom and then go back to sleep. Well, that's probably related back to blood sugar. And so we're sleep can be a little less restful if that's happening during the day. And then also if we don't, if we're not sleeping well, then our body during the day is gonna be more hardwired to like find that energy. We're gonna want more caffeine, sugar's gonna seem extra good, like we're gonna want to be snacky, anything to kind of give us those little hits of energy. And then that can backfire when we're trying to control our food, or you know, we can feel like I just don't have any willpower today.

Matt 21:35

Yeah.

Emily 21:35

Well, it's probably just because you didn't sleep. And then that over time just drags us down.

Matt 21:41

It's like a never-ending cycle.

Emily 21:43

Yes.

Matt 21:43

If somebody was to end the cycle, what's the first thing they should change?

Emily 21:50

They should look at what they're they're eating during the day. So I I would say, I would say making sure they're eating consistently and not having like really long gaps without food. That would be the first thing that I would change. So not even worried about calories or anything like that. Just make sure you're we're starting the day, we're getting some food in, maybe if ideally within an hour of. Waking up, but if not, maybe within two, having that like as a balanced meal with some protein and then eating every couple hours after that, that'd be the first place I would start.

Matt 22:28

Yeah, great. And then from there, try to control it before bed. Yeah. Not eating that big meal.

Emily 22:34

Yeah. Try not to have your your well, one thing that can be helpful is to not make dinner our largest meal.

Matt 22:43

Yeah.

Emily 22:43

And then also not have it too close to bed.

Matt 22:45

Yeah.

Emily 22:46

But then for some people, okay, they might do that. And then they might be a little bit hungry, or it can be really beneficial to have like a small carby type snack before bed because that's going to help with serotonin levels. That's going to help stabilize blood sugar. It'll help you get to sleep easier. So yeah.

Matt 23:08

When you say carby snack, what's the first thing that comes to mind?

Emily 23:11

Honestly, oatmeal.

Matt 23:13

Oatmeal?

Emily 23:14

A small amount of oatmeal. That's great. Yeah, that's that's what comes to mind first for me, or like, because you can add, you know, you can add a little chocolate chips or something. You can make it kind of like desserty, but you get some fiber and it's it's a more complex carb. I wouldn't do like a breakfast serving of oatmeal, but like a fourth a cup or half a cup, depending on the person. So I I shouldn't even give like sizes. Depends on what you need. But anyway, oatmeal or toast or like a little bit of yogurt, like a yogurt parfait, like yogurt with some granola or something, because you're getting a little bit of protein and carbs that way. Yeah, something like that.

Meal Prep That Saves Time And Money

Matt 23:58

Yeah, cool. You can tell you're a nutrition coach. I've been like, pie. All right. So next question, we're shifting more into kind of like the logistics of eating or how-to for busy professionals or parents. So the first one is how do we make a meal prep menu that doesn't skyrocket the grocery bill or take six hours on a Sunday?

Emily 24:23

Hmm. So I personally, I personally fall in the camp of like batch prepping like protein for a couple of days. Like I might make like two packs of chicken thighs, let's say. And then I have some protein ready, or like a, you know, big thing of rice or something like that, where you can make different meals. So if I have chicken thighs and rice, I could make a like a rice bowl. Or I can also heat up some like corn shells, tortilla shells, or something like that, and make like tacos. Like you can use it in in different ways. And then it doesn't take for me, that's not it is a long process to try to make all of your meals. I know that's what you do.

Matt 25:12

It it is it is long.

Emily 25:13

Yeah.

Matt 25:14

It's so it in the question itself, it's like how not to have it take six hours on a Sunday. Be honest, or to do a couple days, like that's that's probably right around your benchmark. Yeah. If you're if you're cooking and you're putting together your food, yeah. Yeah, six hours is probably Yeah.

Emily 25:31

And I think it's I think this is an individual. It's looking at the individual, like, what do they have? First of all, how busy is their schedule? Are they literally needing to prep breakfast, lunch, and dinner?

Matt 25:45

Yeah.

Emily 25:45

Or are we just talking about we need to have a some something prepped, something small prepped for breakfast, and then every lunch made, right? Like it can be, we have to look at that first and then look at something that I find really helpful and that I recommend to a lot of people. First of all, I love using like frozen veggies. And like like we can we can use like use things that make your life easier.

Matt 26:11

Yeah.

Emily 26:11

This also goes into everybody's budget is different because you can get, you know, chopped up vegetables and cut up fruit, but you're gonna pay a little bit more for that.

Matt 26:22

Yep.

Emily 26:22

And that might be worth it for somebody. But I like to have, you know, the same kind of structure for lunch where I batch cook some protein, make some rice, and then use frozen veggies, and I just mix it together and do this, change up the sauce or something and do the same thing every day of the week. And then, you know, another good re another good thing to do is depending on the family and the size, just make more at dinner. So you always have enough for leftovers.

Matt 26:55

Yep.

Emily 26:55

The next day, that's a way to cut down on the big prep on Sunday. You're still pre kind of prepping every night if you're making dinner every night, but you're like making the next day a little easier.

Matt 27:09

Yeah. It kind of like, are you somebody who can sit down for a period of time and prep ahead? Or are you like, hey, listen, I'm bored, I hate cooking, whatever it may be. I would rather prep that hour each night instead of doing six hours all at once.

Emily 27:24

Yeah.

Matt 27:25

There's yeah.

Emily 27:26

I will say this though, because I hear this a lot. When we want to make healthier choices and when we want to reach, if we have a specific goal in mind, food prep in some capacity is a non-negotiable. Yes. Like I hear a lot of times, I understand people are busy and they just don't want to do that. It's going to get very hard to reach your goals if you're not willing to put some time in. So I do think, I do think we can find a compromise in that. And it doesn't have to be six hours on Sunday.

Matt 28:04

Yep.

Emily 28:04

But if we think it is going to take some time, it is going to cost you some time each week. And it is going to cost you at least an hour or more. Yep. But that's we have that's where we weigh like how much do we want the goal.

Matt 28:21

Yeah. Yeah. What does the goal mean to you? How is it going to change your life? To your point, like family size could play a factor in that. So if you're just food prepping for yourself or another person, then yeah, maybe six hours is too much. But if you're prepping for like a family of four, a family of 12, then good luck. It's going to take some time.

Emily 28:43

It's going to take time.

Matt 28:44

Yep.

Emily 28:44

It's going to take time. But that's where also putting your, I don't want to say I don't want to sound selfish and say putting yourself first, but also like if you need like if someone might need to prep a little bit of something extra for them to keep themselves on track. So I'm all for taking care of the whole family. And, you know, a lot of people have to have larger families and need to think about everybody in there and how we're feeding all of the kids or whatever. And also don't like leave some energy, I guess I'm saying for yourself too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Matt 29:18

Yeah. And then like everything else, choose your hard. Yeah. It's always going to be hard one way or the other. If you don't do food prep and you make poor food choices, that's hard. It's hard on your life. Or you could put the time investment into the food prep, which we think is kind of like a non-negotiable, that might be hard, but is it a healthier hard? Yeah.

Emily 29:38

Yeah.

Matt 29:38

So just choose your hard.

Emily 29:40

And don't be afraid of like the crock pot. Let's bring crock pot back.

Matt 29:43

Crock pots? Amazing.

Emily 29:45

They're amazing.

Matt 29:46

You just put whatever in that thing.

Emily 29:48

Put whatever in it, walk away, and then you have food. It's magic.

Matt 29:51

Yeah. We should, you know what? If people try a weird recipe, throw a banana in a crock pot. See what maybe not. Maybe not.

Emily 29:58

Maybe not. But you can put like maybe not. There's there's lots of things. Crockpot does not have to just be for meat. We can do a lot of other things, but it's it is, you know.

Matt 30:07

Throw carrots in there.

Emily 30:08

There you go.

Matt 30:10

All right. So next question. What should a member eat 60 minutes before a heavy barbell session versus a long aerobic biathlon prep session? Doesn't even does it change.

Emily 30:24

Oh, so not all that much, to be honest. So it a lot of this comes down to timing. And this is also, you know, if we want to throw the mindfulness piece back in here, this is kind of learning your body because everybody's digests at a different pace. But typically I would say before before either form of training, we want to have a good, balanced meal with some carbs, protein, a little bit of fat, like 90 minutes to two hours beforehand. And then because that's going to give us like sustained energy, we're making sure we're going into the session with our tanks full, essentially. And then right before, maybe 30 minutes before, unless you're someone who's like, I don't feel good. Like, gotta kind of know your body. We want more fast digesting carbs. So that could be most people know I love dates before a workout. I think they're fantastic. They're small, they give you a good amount of sustainable energy, but they don't jack up your blood sugar. So it's fantastic. But like a banana, some toast with honey, something like that where you're you're kind of you're giving your body some some fuel to quick fuel to tap into. For longer endurance sessions, we kind of want to look at what is the, like what are you going for? If you're going, what's the what's the demand you're placing on your body? Because if it's if it's a slower zone two session, we don't need as we don't need as much fuel right beforehand. A good meal, an hour and a half beforehand would be sufficient, versus like, are we trying to sprint or hit lack, you know, like a threshold training or something, then we would want the carbs the same as lifting.

Metabolic Health Signs And Lab Clues

Matt 32:18

Makes sense. Yeah. Makes sense. So not something completely different, like only pasta for strength or something. Like it's not, it's not like that. So all right. And what is in plain English, what is metabolic health? And how do we know if ours is trending in the right direction?

Emily 32:37

So metabolic health is basically this is kind of hard to put in in plain English. But essentially it's it's how your body is like handling and using energy. And that's that's like, you know, we we can see this reflected in lab work. So a good gauge of our metabolic health is what what how are your labs looking? A good gauge of metabolic health is how well you're sleeping, how much energy you have. This is all telling us like, is your body using the energy sufficiently? Do you have enough energy on board? Basically, if if someone is, if someone has low energy, is crashing in the afternoon, not sleeping well, feeling bloated, their metabolic health probably is not very good. And we have some work to do. Someone on the other hand, that's like, man, my labs are looking good. I only had one marker that's a little off. I'm feeling my sleep is good, I'm feeling energized. They probably have pretty good metabolic health.

Matt 33:48

Let's go.

Emily 33:50

Yeah, does that answer that question? I think so.

Matt 33:52

I think so. And I like how you brought up labs. Because I think that's a way to check to see if you're heading in the right direction with your metabolic health, because there's those different indicators. I think it's not something that's so easily observed without something like labs. Or you know, you could see signs, like you mentioned, low energy, but that could be a result of a bunch of other reasons. And so getting a more definitive, measurable approach and doing some labs so you can see the different things and kind of go from there is is your safe bet.

Emily 34:27

Yeah, it's huge. Yeah, it's it's it's very helpful. We can we can get we can go pretty far with guessing, but yeah, we can really take control of our health and our metabolic health when when we really know what's going on.

Matt 34:43

Yep. Dive in.

Emily 34:45

Dive in.

The 1 Percent Nutrition Challenge

Matt 34:46

Get science. All right. I think it's time for our unstoppable challenge. So, Emily, if someone's listening and they feel overwhelmed by their diet right now, what is the one 1% shift they should make today?

Emily 35:04

The one thing I would do today is first, I would write down everything you ate. It doesn't have to be super specific with the sizes, it doesn't have to be fancy in like a tracking app, just on a piece of paper or on the notes app on your phone, just write down what you ate. And then look at that. Like how many of those foods were processed? Can we change one? Can we change one processed food for a whole food? So either a fruit, a vegetable, an egg, nuts, I don't know, whatever it might be. And then the next, if you're feeling motivated the next day or the next week, can we change another one? And we just start making those, those changes to foods that are going to fuel our metabolic health, give us more nutrients, more vitamins, more minerals. Our body's gonna be able to use it easier. And that's gonna help us make sure we're we're watching the calorie piece too while still being consistent with our food.

Matt 36:07

Yeah, I love it. Do it by next week. It's a it's a 1% change. So it's we're not asking something drastic. Just change something very small and then let's do it again. And that'll eventually come compound.

Emily 36:19

Yeah.

Matt 36:20

Let's go.

Emily 36:21

Sweet.

Listener Questions And Support The Show

Matt 36:21

All right. So for the listeners out there, if you have a question for us, use that send us a question link that's in our episode description. Want to hear from. Send us in whatever it is that you want to learn a little bit more about. Maybe something that's been burning in the back of your mind, but you don't know who to ask, send it in to us. We will answer that question for you. And just a reminder that you can hit that support the show link for as little as $3 a month and get entered into a raffle. Next drawing is going to be on April 4th. And win a full seat to the Ultimate Bootcamp Challenge here at Juggernaut. And if you're not local, if you're one of our listeners over in the UK, let's go. I will give you remote coaching instead for four for four weeks. So hit that, support the show, join our our supporting crew. We got actually a couple people on there now, and and let's get to doing it. Do you got anything, Dad?

Emily 37:13

And let's go get some food.

Matt 37:15

Let's get some food. Let's get some food. So until next time, be well, be unstoppable.