How Many Sandwiches Until Mayo Wins

One comment about weight loss medication turns into a much bigger problem: strangers throwing out quick fixes while skipping the one concept that actually decides whether weight changes energy balance. We walk through a real-world scenario with “Sally,” who’s already lost weight, trains hard five days a week, and swaps mayonnaise for avocado because it feels healthier. Then we zoom out and ask the uncomfortable question: is that swap helping, or is it just another form of restriction that makes the plan harder to stick to?

We break down maintenance, surplus, and deficit in plain English, then use the mayo vs avocado debate to show how “healthy” foods can still sabotage fat loss if you don’t track the big picture. The deeper point is sustainability: removing foods you love often creates cravings and rebound eating, while learning to budget those foods into your calories keeps you consistent. We also share a practical approach to recreating comfort meals, cutting a few hundred calories without stripping the meal of what makes it satisfying.

Finally, we separate three goals people constantly mash together: weight loss, healthy eating, and body composition. If you want to look lean and athletic, you’ll need a different strategy than just “do more cardio,” including resistance training, enough protein, and realistic expectations about how many calories the gym actually burns. If this hits home, subscribe, share with a friend who’s stuck in the restrict-and-rebound loop, and leave a review telling us what food you refuse to give up.

TUT Radio is a podcast about weight loss, behavior change, and building a healthier life without pretending you’re someone you’re not.

Hosted by father-and-son coaches Brian and Vincent of Time Under Tension, TUT Radio challenges many of the beliefs that have made weight loss unnecessarily difficult: that you need more discipline, that your favorite foods are the problem, or that success requires following a restrictive diet for the rest of your life.

Instead, we explore the psychology behind the way people eat—the habits, cravings, environments, memories, and experiences that shape our relationship with food—and how understanding those forces can help us create meaningful, lasting change.

We’ll talk nutrition, training, obesity, metabolism, food behavior, and the science of weight loss. But more importantly, we’ll talk about how to apply that science to a real human life.

 The goal isn't merely getting someone to lose weight; it's designing the path so they don't have to abandon it once they get there. 

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Transcript

Food Memories And A Better Promise

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Every family has a meal they'll never forget. We don't believe getting healthier should mean leaving those memories behind. We believe you can keep the food you love, lose weight, and keep it off for a lifetime. We are your hosts, Brian and Vincent. Welcome to TUD Radio.

The Medication Comment That Sparked It

SPEAKER_00 0:17

We recently received a comment from somebody asking if she should consider weight loss medication. But before we could even answer, five complete strangers recommended four different medications, and that kind of caught my attention. Today's episode is not about Ozempic, uh it's about something far more important, and that's understanding energy balance. So let me we're gonna call her Sally, this person who commented. So let me introduce you to her to give you some context. This person is 40 years old. She said she lost 70 pounds. She works out 45 minutes lifting, 45 minutes cardio, and that's five days a week. And then she says, I don't even use mayonnaise anymore. I use mashed avocado. And that one sentence tells us a lot.

Energy Balance Basics And Definitions

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Okay, the first thing I think we need to do is talk about what we mean by balance. So this this idea of energy balance. So Vin, you know, tell me how how how do you know, how does anybody know really, whether you're eating too much or too little?

SPEAKER_01 1:20

So yeah, it's it's very simple when you break it down. The body is pretty much always chasing equilibrium. And so maintenance means that if we we watched your body weight for like six months and it barely changed, you were probably eating somewhere very close to what is your maintenance calories, right? And again, just definitions for the rest of this because it's it they get passed around a lot in the fitness whole, you know, stratosphere. A surplus equals you're eating enough calories to gain weight, a maintenance equals you're eating enough calories to maintain your weight, right? And a deficit is you're eating less calories than you actually burn, which would result in weight loss, right? So again, it's very straightforward.

SPEAKER_00 2:01

All right, so let's see if we can make some sense of this.

Mayo Vs Avocado And Diet Failure

SPEAKER_00 2:03

Let's talk about this mayo thing, okay? The question that I have for you is is avocado better than than mayo.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Well, that answer is a little bit interesting because you could argue yes and no, right? It uh kind of depends on what context you're you're using, right? So from a calorie standpoint, two tablespoons of mayonnaise versus half an avocado, what you would expect somebody to use on a sandwich, right? The difference is roughly around 60 calories. So great. So for a weight loss, right? Yes. So avocado would be a better choice in this circumstance, right? But you know, is saving 60 calories worth giving up something that you like, right? So again, if Sally, let's take Sally for example, if she eats one sandwich a day, she would need 58 sandwiches worth of mayonnaise before those extra calories could theoretically equal one pound of fat. And it doesn't really ever work out like that, but that's kind of how that you you you could you could look at it, right? Meanwhile, every single day she's removing something that actually makes her sandwich taste better to her, right? Which is the mayonnaise. And so this is kind of the greater issue that we're we're gonna try and get into here today, because this is why why we believe most diets kind of fail. It's not because people lack discipline or or or she couldn't make the choice to use avocado over mayonnaise, it's because they're you know, people remove foods that they are attached to and that they like. What we find to be true is that when people try to restrict things from their diet that they actually enjoy eating, once that period of restriction is over, they're more likely to then go overboard on trying to eat all the things that they missed. Whereas if you just try to build it into your diet, the desire to go overboard is really not an issue.

Rebuilding Favorite Meals For A Deficit

SPEAKER_00 3:54

All right, let me see if I can give you an example, this energy balance that maybe makes a lot of sense, right? So for me, if you said, okay, cut out chicken parm, right, with fettuccine alfredo, that that's something that I like in particular and that I kind of grew up liking. So what yesterday we did the video, right, where we actually made a different version of the Olive Garden one, which was like 1700 calories. And so by the time we were done with this, with this new the new chicken parm, it was like seven, eight hundred calories less. So that's pretty that's a significant amount. And that's not the goal though, right? Because that's kind of an extreme difference. And truth to be told on that whole deal is it was really because of the fat. We had changed so much of the fat content of it, it went from, I think it was like 91 grams of fat all the way down to like 16. And so that's where all the calories dropped. But that's not really what's important. So when we talk about, you know, re-engineering food or recreating something that you love so that it's a little bit different calorically. I mean, I I would I think, you know, let's look at something that was 700 calories as an example. And 700 calories is like kind of a kind of a big meal. And so if you then took that that meal and said, can I get, can I get by redoing it 200 calories from it? And that's that's kind of highly likely. You're able to, that's pretty simple to do in most cases. And so if you ate three meals in a day, that's 600 calories. So that's a pretty significant deficit over seven days. That's 4,200 calories, which is going to get you certainly one pound. And then, you know, again, if you if you add walking into it or something like that, now all of a sudden, now you're, you know, two pounds a week. And that's a pretty good deal because then in six months, you know, you're looking at somewhere around 50 pounds. That's that's pretty significant. And and if I told you, well, you can get there and still eat chicken parm, you'd be like, no, that's impossible. But it's not impossible if you understand how to actually manipulate the energy balance. So I think that that's one example of how this makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 5:59

Yeah, it's a good point you make. And and I think it's worth kind of mentioning the the how we started the conversation in the first place, which is Sally chose avocado over mayonnaise. So why would she even choose to do something like that? Well, I think it's because the perception of an avocado is that it's healthier than that of mayonnaise, right? And you you could make the argument, and I kind of would even agree with you. However, is it, you know, dynamic for weight loss? Well, again, it's all dependent on your goal, right? So take the avocado, for example. Let's say you she uses avocado on the sandwich, and she doesn't want the other half, you know, going bad. So she says, you know, avocados are good for you, I'll eat the other half too, right? All of a sudden, right, you've now consumed an entire avocado's worth of calories, and it's probably much higher than you would ever anticipate, right? Avocado's healthy fats, it's gonna be super calorically dense. But this decision to be healthier,

Weight Loss Vs Healthy Eating Goals

SPEAKER_01 6:56

right? Every good intention, right? I want to make a better choice when it comes to my food, right? It actually could be working against you if you're not paying attention.

SPEAKER_00 7:06

All right, so let me see if I can clear this up simply, and that is this weight loss and healthy eating are two separate goals. Yeah, can they work together? Yes. But remember, weight loss is kind of like, again, it's a juggling act between calories, making sure that you're in the right place. So you got the right amount in, right amount out. When you're talking about healthy eating, that is a specific strategy, or meaning that there are certain foods that contain certain nutrient values. And if you want to eat healthier, then yeah, that changes your diet from okay, well, I'm gonna just eat the things I like and manage calories in and calories out, to then, okay, wait, no, there are specific foods now I need to actually eat in order to get to a healthier outcome. So, but but again, these get confused all the time, then and and they're not the same. They're they're two separate things. Not to say, like you just did, hey, you can eat a healthy diet and lose weight, but not without understanding energy balance and how to get there.

Gym Effort And The Calorie Burn Myth

SPEAKER_00 8:09

So my next question is why is Sally in the gym? Like five days a week, two different types of things, cardio, weight training. I mean, what I I'm confused about what she's what do you think she's trying to do?

SPEAKER_01 8:22

Honestly, it sounds to me that she's trying her absolute hardest to just try and get the weight off, right? But maybe she's you know spending her time, you know, not as wisely as maybe she could, right? And so I think this also brings to another good point because when people say that they want to lose weight, they want to look better, what they actually want more than likely, increase in lean muscle mass, right? So that's really the the look and the aesthetically pleasing body that most people are really seeking. And so what you will not find through a regular calorie deficit and maybe just cardio alone is this increase in overall muscle mass. Why? Well, because you're not really working out, you're not lifting rate weights, you're not doing any sort of dedicated resistance training that's gonna help you break down the muscle in the gym and then give you an opportunity to go home, rest, recover, and actually build more muscle, right? So for Sally, she's going to the gym five days a week. She's killing it, she's trying to do 45 minutes of resistance training, which is great, right? But it requires a bunch of other things nutritionally to help support that end goal, right? So again, you're thinking, you know, is she getting enough protein in? Is she fueling her workout beforehand so that she has enough energy to actually work hard enough to stimulate enough, you know, muscle protein synthesis while you're in the gym, right? These sorts of things are what we have to consider when it comes to her overall strategy. What I would hope that she's not doing is that she's treating the gym as this opportunity to burn another thousand calories over the day because she's probably not.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

You know me, I'm not a betting man, but if I was, that's exactly what I think she's probably trying to do.

SPEAKER_01 10:05

Yeah, and what you're suggesting is kind of an entirely separate issue of how how people misunderstand the overall calorie burn that you can control over the course of your own day with your own physical movements, right? Because it's really a lot less than what people I think anticipate. There's a, oh, I gotta lose weight, I'll just go to the gym and walk on the treadmill. Meanwhile, it only really equates to like 350 to 400 calories maxed you just burned, which is significant. It can give you a little leeway when it comes to your overall calorie spend over the course of a day, but it is not the solution to overeating. So, again, to recap, she's lifting 45 minutes at a time, 45 minutes of cardio. It's a lot of movement for five days out of her week. And so what ends up happening, and what what what happens as a result of doing that is that, you know, if you do a large amount of activity over the course of the day, you're probably going to be hungrier, which you know increases your likeliness of overeating. You know, more exercise is going to increase, you know, the overall energy requirement needed. Restricting food. And honestly, Sally, she may be fighting herself and her own physiology instead of working with it. And so exercise is a tool. And it is especially important when it comes to focusing on body composition and muscle gain. Obviously, that's how we would always recommend it for people to use it that way. But you know, at the end of the day, if you go on a walk, you know, that often can be enough to burn those extra calories over the course of a day and aid in just

Hunger, Physiology, And Using Exercise Well

SPEAKER_01 11:36

weight loss.

SPEAKER_00 11:36

All

Three Goals: Weight, Health, Composition

SPEAKER_00 11:37

right. So let's wrap this up. There's three basic parts that we talked about today. The first one being weight loss. And so, in order to lose weight, you've got to understand energy balance, right? How to manage calories. And then, you know, don't under don't unnecessarily remove the foods that you love. So that's the first part. The second part we talked about was health. You know, in order to improve your health, this is more of a strategy, and you need to choose foods with greater nutritional value. So, what is that? So, lean meats, right? Fruit, vegetables, beans, whole grains, these are all specific things you can choose in order to improve your health. Those choices can improve your health independent of weight loss. So that's important too. And then the last part we kind of touched on was, you know, body composition. People say, Well, I want to lean out. So you want to have this a lean muscular body. And so that requires a very specific strategy. Remember this weight loss changes maybe the number on the scale, but body composition changes the person uh looking back at you in the mirror. So that that's really an important distinction to make. And yeah, all of them can kind of work together, but I think people oftentimes try and mash them all into one and sum it all up as saying, I'm wanna we I want to lose weight. And it doesn't really, first of all, it's just too much too much to bite off at one time anyway.

SPEAKER_01 13:01

Yeah, I think the the important takeaway for people is that, you know, they shouldn't be trying to build a diet around foods that they think they're supposed to eat, right? Because that's how you can fall into this trap of just selecting health foods, right? You want to build one around the foods that you'll still be excited to eat five years down the line when the weight's already off, right? Your job is not to eliminate the foods that you love, it's to learn how to manage the energy inside of them.

Build A Diet You Can Keep

SPEAKER_01 13:29

And so again, thank you guys so much for listening to this episode of Tut Radio. We post new ones every single Sunday to keep up with us and what we're doing. Follow us on all social medias at Time and Retention PT. And yeah, guys, have a happy Fourth of July. Hope you guys are having a nice weekend, and we'll talk to you real soon.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

Thanks, and happy Fourth of July, everybody.