How to Lose Fat + Keep it Off // How Metabolism Works

welcome back to my channel my friends okay today we're gonna talk about how i lose fat and keep it off but before we start i just i have something i need to confess okay i have zero interest whatsoever in constant cycling sign me out i'm out to me life is for living and if you're constantly putting time and energy and effort into losing weight only to put it back on again then it's distracting you from all the incredible things you can put out into this world and just from living life secondly and just as importantly studies have shown that cycling through diet after diet just to regain the weight has been shown to have some implications on your health and your metabolism going on a fat loss journey is a deeply personal thing it's not for me or anyone else to tell you what you should do you have autonomy over your body it should be your decision to make and only your decision to make and if you do decide to go for it i hope it comes from a place of self-love and care people say a lot of things they talk a lot you're never going to make everyone happy they do it about me too unto this unto that your body is yours your health your happiness your longevity these are the things that matter and when it comes to happiness fat loss isn't a promise of that in fact in some cases fat loss can even undermine your long-term happiness so i hope you stay in tune with yourself and never compare yourself to anyone so i'm going to cover my approach to nutrition to training and anything else that i think makes a difference to long-term fat loss whilst also protecting your health so we've already spoken about the science of why diets fail and why we so often see people lose weight just to regain it what drives cravings in our psychology and behaviors around certain foods the most efficient and effective way to build muscle creating a workout plan that works for you and makes a difference and also the wrong way to go about fat loss and hopefully you'll see all of these pieces just come together so we are going to cover a little bit of science to be honest if we didn't have science it's not me it might look like me might even sound like me but you're in the upside down it's not actually me our bodies are complex anyone who tells you otherwise just hasn't studied them because the more you study them the more you realize that wow for any personalized nutrition support it's so important that you seek out a registered dietitian someone who is fully qualified who's been studying the science for years and years when i'm working on sharing content around nutrition i only work with registered dietitians who have decades of clinical experience and who have additional specialities around the topics i want to cover if you like these types of videos make sure to give me a big thumbs up hit the subscribe button to join our incredible family and the little notification bell as well and let's just dive right in so the first thing i want to talk about in nutrition is metabolism i think metabolism is an element that's so commonly misunderstood scientific studies have shown that people who lose weight quickly have a much higher probability of regaining that weight and even in some cases overshooting and gaining above their starting point weight and understanding your metabolism really helps you understand why that happens to make it simple your metabolism is basically all of the chemical reactions that happen to keep you alive to keep you healthy to keep you moving and these reactions require energy and the total amount of energy that's required in a day is called your total daily energy expenditure and it's made up of four components your basal metabolic rate is the energy required for your body to maintain basic life-sustaining function so if you just laid in bed all day you didn't even fidget you didn't even eat you'd burn your basal metabolic rate just from processes like thermoregulation respiration and blood circulation then we've got physical activity which is the energy that you burn as a direct result of intentional exercise the third component is non-exercise activity thermogenesis or neat and that's the energy needed for all other movements outside of exercise so like brushing your teeth cleaning the house making dinner replicating that tick tock dance i don't even know every activity takes movement and that's all compiled into neat it's pretty neat you know and the last component is thermic affected foods so the energy needed to digest absorb and metabolize food and all of those components together make up your energy out so now we understand the basics of metabolism we're going to try and understand how calorie deficits actually work how calorie deficits work is misunderstood i hear it all the time you guys calories in my calories out done caloric deficit and that is true but it's only part of the story because there's a huge implicit assumption that your total daily energy expenditure is fixed and it doesn't change and that's not true so according to that advice if you're at maintenance and you cut your calories by 200 calories you're in a 200 calorie deficit if you cut your calories by 500 calories you're in a 500 calorie deficit if you cut your calories by a thousand calories you're at don't say it because your body's smarter than that that has done such a disservice to how intelligent your body is your energy out is adaptive your body is a machine honed over hundreds of thousands of years to keep you alive so when you see a sudden drop in food availability your body's not just gonna sit there and start twiddling its thumbs our bodies are experts at restoring energy balance so when there is significantly less food available they achieve that by reducing our energy expenditure one way in which our body does this is to restrict energy available for processes that aren't specifically required for immediate survival this plays into the field of research called relative energy deficiency and that research shows that processes like menstruation which isn't required for immediate survival right now get less energy so hypothalamic amenorrhea processes like digestion as well so you might notice increased occurrences of constipation indigestion bloating impaired immune function and less energy for growth and cell repair all of these together drive that basal metabolic rate down and so that deficit you thought you were in isn't really there but you're still eating less food but that's not the full picture because muscle loss also plays a role in how your metabolism adapts and researchers found that people who lost weight more aggressively lost significantly more muscle their weight loss didn't come mainly from fat loss but a combination of the two and that's a problem because muscle isn't like fat when it comes to our metabolism if we go back to our basal metabolic rate muscle is metabolically active tissue it requires energy just to have and so even at rest your bmr will go down if you have less muscle but on top of that the more and more muscle you lose the more likely it is that your physical activity will also go down because it's that muscle that really enables you to have high energy expenditure workouts the amount of strength you have the number of reps you can lift for the amount of explosiveness you have all of these things contribute to a high physical activity and if you don't have the muscle to do it you don't have the strength for it then by definition your physical activity will go down to be honest even before muscle loss which takes a few weeks and months to happen even just feeling low energy and tired from having a large calorie deficit will impact your physical activity because even though you feel like you're pushing yourself and it's exhausting you just won't have the energy and finally when your weight falls your non-exercise activity thermogenesis will also fall so everything you do that walk to the park your grocery shopping it will all take less energy because you weigh less and that means it's really important to retain that useful weight that useful weight is your muscle your metabolically active tissue and on top of that even separate to your weight going down i feel like there's just so many like layers and building blocks on top of that subconsciously non-exercise activity thermogenesis is mostly subconscious whether or not you decide to walk up the stairs whether you get up from your sofa to go and grab your phone charger or just leave it because who cares if you have less energy to give you ain't gonna give it out for free so muscle is our engine for future fat loss by supporting bmr our pa our neet it props up our energy expenditure so what does this all mean this means that blindly making energy cuts isn't the way to go because your body has compensatory mechanisms that can kick in to offset those energy reductions the last thing you want to do is chase your td down further and further until you're eating 500 or 700 or even a thousand calories less than where you started but your body hasn't changed that much and your body composition is kind of the same because you've lost fat and muscle instead we want to lose fat by keeping that tde as close as possible to where we started and that means minimizing those compensatory mechanisms and maximizing the preservation of muscle research is showing us that the best way to achieve both of these things is with small deficits so what's a small deficit well researchers have found that deficits as small as 100 calories a day have been shown to minimize weight regain and in general when i work with vinnie mcgregor who's a dual specialist registered dietitian we agree that that maximum deficit shouldn't be more than 10 of your maintenance caloric intake so for me if i was going to lose fat today i know that my rough maintenance caloric intake is around 2 300 to 2 600 calories if that sounds high it's because i spent years building muscle so i can actually have a high energy expenditure but if i wanted to lose fat i would drop my calories by about 150 to 200 calories max a day i personally don't track my intake even when i'm on a cut if you want to track that's absolutely fine i just personally don't instead what i do is i guide myself gently to that caloric reduction to keep that preservation of muscle i try and get in about 1.3 grams to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight when i can i also like to make a couple of adjustments to my training to increase that energy expenditure and nudge me towards that 10 caloric deficit so not all of my caloric deficit has to come from nutrition it can also come from the training and yeah it just makes it super easy i think the biggest thing that can help people is changing their perspective of time like i know i say it a million times sustainable and if you guys did a drinking game where you drank every time natasha said sustainable you'd be absolutely smashed guaranteed but i'm not just saying it because i care about your mental health i'm not just saying it because i want you to enjoy the journey and i care about how you feel i'm also saying it because i care about your results i recently made fat loss one of my goals and when i started i said i do not care how long it takes i don't care because i'm only doing it once and when i'm done i'm done you know i've got other things to do sticking with nutrition there's a few things i want to talk about in terms of satiety and psychological aspects when i move into a fat loss phase i really prioritize abundance keeping it abundant you know we are losing fat but that doesn't mean that the mentality has to be about restricting it's about keeping in abundance the foods that help you get there the first thing i do is make sure that my fridge is full of micronutrient rich foods so fruit veg complex carbohydrates i make sure that those are all readily available i really try and let myself get full and satisfied on these foods and since these foods are less calorie-dense that makes the meal times more substantial and it gives you enough time so that you feel that feeling of fullness wave over you and that's nice because it means that when i'm fancying my lint lindor or my salted caramel popcorn ice cream or i don't know why i'm feeling like hawaiian pizzas lately like i just but it's nice because i just get to enjoy them for what they are and not have to rely on them to get full in my science explained video about cravings i explained how it's not the calories that drive whether or not you feel full during a meal there are so many other cues like the length of your meal the volume of your meal the water content of your meal your expectations of fullness so it's easier to eat extra calories when you're eating energy dense foods to get full because those extra calories aren't making you get a fall faster in general though i don't put any foods off limits because the power of reactants is strong it's like the power of the force reactance is basically just an unpleasant motivational arousal that emerges when people experience a threat to or lost off their free behaviors it serves as a motivator to restore one's freedom in tests subjects who are cut off from particular foods fill significantly more cravings towards that food and actually end up consuming more than those who weren't restricted from that food in the first place obviously we're all different and these studies find general relationships it's just worth thinking about if that's how it feels for you whilst we're on the topic of psychology studies have also found that we're all elite at hunting out food when we're deprived of it during large caloric deficits all our brain wants to think about is food our attention is biased of foods our senses are heightened and they do these studies on dieters by using neuroimaging eye tracking and nasal performance tests let's just say we get looking and we get sniffing and we get finding this will suggest that smaller deficits with an inclusive mindset around food aren't just easier they're disproportionately easier than large caloric deficits with a restrictive mindset that's how it feels for me it doesn't matter if it takes me a little longer because it's that much easier i'm chilling okay i don't know if you've been able to hear my stomach but i'm gonna go make myself some lunch i'm gonna make a lunch that will kind of reflect what i eat when i'm on a fat loss journey and after that we'll talk about the training and other aspects that are important as well we're gonna make kebabs because tasty [Music] okay now let's talk about training so we already know two key things the first is that muscle preservation is crucial the more muscle we protect the more we protect our metabolism and the easier it is to sustain those long-term fat loss results the second is that we can support our target of creating a roughly 10 caloric deficit by increasing our energy expenditure through physical activity and that way any changes we make around food can be kept small research has shown that concurrent training so mixing resistance training with cardio is a great way to lose fat while preserving fat-free mass let's start with what i don't do i don't try and increase my total training volume because i'm at four to four and a half hours a week of training already and that's that's sustainable for me above that i feel like i would just struggle to recover and over the long term wouldn't work out for me you know i've got life to live i've got other things to do so i try and keep it to within what already fits in my lifestyle instead in the four to four and a half hours of training that i do have i just make small changes that can make a difference so i keep the majority of my sessions for resistance training and in those sessions about 50 of the moves are hypertrophy moves mostly because i want to be preserving muscle and i use the same techniques that i showed on the science explained video talking about building muscle where i'm pushing close to failure for around six to twenty reps with about one to two minutes of rest in between each set this isn't so much about progressive overload it's more about preserving your strength and keeping an eye on what you're lifting to make sure it's not going down to support with maximizing my total body fat free mass and for upping my energy expenditure i basically only focus on compound moves and try and use free weights as much as possible moves like squats barbell rows lunges you guys know i love my lunges lat pull down bench press hip thrusts etc i try and minimize the amount of isolation work that i do on small muscle groups because a small amount of mechanical tension and a small amount of energy expenditure isn't really going to help in a fat loss journey i also tend to cut back on any strength work that i'm doing so anything which is in the one to five rep range because i feel like it lowers my total volume load and that's because strength work is disproportionately fatiguing so for example if the load goes up by about 10 to 20 percent the reps will go down by about 50 to 70 percent and i'll need to take longer rest times so overall my sets of reps have fallen disproportionately fast for how much weight i've added now the other 50 of these sessions is focused on dynamic movements i'm using a lighter resistance but i'm moving quickly and this helps exert a lot of energy so here we rely way more on fast switch muscle fibers moving at speed to exert maximum or very close to maximum output in every single rep some of my favorite exercises that allow this are dumbbell thrusters ball slams plate snatches which i love kettlebell swings ballistic rows and dumbbell cleans when i'm doing hypertrophy my rest time is about one to two minutes of rest and then for the dynamic and explosive moves i give myself about one and a half minutes to two minutes of rest and then i've got one session for cardio and it can be whatever i like it can be hit but it can also just be and to be honest sometimes i just prefer going for a walk just grabbing a coffee going with mario for about an hour and just talking about maybe getting a dog that would be kind of fun i just read my body i go by if i have enough time if i have enough energy and if i have enough energy but not much time because i'm going out of the weekend then i'll just do like a 20-minute hit session and really go all out the one thing i will say though is that the way that it is tested in the scientific literature that brings about all those benefits that we hear about is quite different to what i'm seeing more and more hit workouts being posted online in so many places people say hit just to mean any body weight circuit and it might be interval training but hit true hit is intense like these scientists are testing their subjects to 85 percent of their heart rate max above 90 percent of their vo2 max so when i see hip moves that are just like a plank or body weight squats or an ab move they're great moves and i'm really glad to see people doing them but it's important not to confuse that with what hit really is generally researchers agree that you need to be hitting at least 85 percent of your heart rate max and i don't use a heart rate monitor but that would mean for me hitting about 170 beats per minute at a minimum so really exploding quickly on moves moving really fast and it's gonna feel intense but that's where you get the time saving from if i find a way around that you will be the first people i let know okay so that's training now i just want to talk about two more things the first being tracking your progress so you guys have all seen my video on the classic weight loss mistakes if you haven't then i basically explain how using weight as a metric of your success is basically setting us up for failure weight comprises of both fat and fat-free mass and losing one of them goes towards achieving the goal that we're picturing in our head and losing the other is a serious problem plus our weight is really easily manipulated by things that we don't even think about like water retention which can be caused by increased glycogen storage or inflammation so to give you an example if i've been on a fat loss journey for a month and there's two versions of me in two different universes one of me has lost one of me one of me has lost four kilograms half from muscle half from fat and the other has lost 1.5 kilograms all from fat you know which one i'm choosing you already know okay so instead progress pics are my besties every time i'm starting a new journey i get snaps all round you know i just set the little camera there we do a front we do a side we do another side we do the back we do tensed we do untensed we do candid we do pouting i'm really bad at posing but we play around with it i always do my progress picks first thing in the morning before i've had any breakfast to try and control for that and then i give it at least another week before taking a fresh set of progress picks i'm preferably following a rest day so that i'm recovering and i've got less inflammation as well and because there are so many variables i make sure that i'm not comparing two photos unless they're at least one month apart the other thing i do is notice little changes in how my clothes fit in one month maybe two months do my clothes feel different do they fit differently last year there were a lot of clothes that didn't fit me at all and i my wardrobe was basically leggings and mario's t-shirts that was it now the last thing i want to talk about is sleep sleep is amazing sleep science is amazing i'm a sleeper that's honestly my biggest flex that i can probably average around seven and a half hours to eight and a half hours of sleep solid by the way sleep plays a massive role in regulating our hormones and it's our hormones that control our hunger cues and satiety levels we have research now that shows that just three nights of sleep deprivation significantly increases ghrelin levels which then significantly increases the amount of calories we eat per day and on top of the general hunger and satiety levels research has also shown that sleep deprivation increases our cravings for high energy dense foods neuroimaging studies have shown us that when we're sleep deprived the part of our brain which is associated with hedonic function aka pleasure lights up in response to high energy dense foods the intriguing part is that they're not even restricting the subject's sleep that much just a couple of hours some of the subjects are still getting six and a half hours sleep and they're still noticing those changes i've been a six and a half hour on myself and i thought that was although that was good if i hit six and a half hours i was happy so so that's sleep which is the last thing that i think is going to make a massive difference for you on this journey and like i mentioned at the start of this video i hope that whatever decision you make is coming from a place of self-love i've said it before in other videos but if you hated the journey to a healthier you then by definition that isn't healthy so i hope that it's coming from a place of love and care and yeah thank you so much for watching this video please give me a big thumbs up if you enjoyed it hit the subscribe button if you want to join our incredible family with the little notification belt as well so you don't miss a video and i will see you guys very soon i love y'all bye [Music]