Are you serious about fat loss or weight loss?
Hello everyone, it's been a while. Sorry for not doing a podcast recently. I had to take a break. I've been doing this podcast now for like four years, maybe five, unofficially on the podcast scene. Before that, I was just voice notes to the members.
Speaker 1:So it's been a long time and, nearly a thousand episodes. So there's been a lot for you guys to get through, so I appreciate you going back through. But, yeah, it's been a a good summer, and I hope a lot of you guys have been smashing your goals and sticking to the one day at a time philosophy because ultimately, when I'm looking at the group and people are commenting the success wins and things that helped them, it is really that. New Leaf every day, no matter how bad the day before was, that kind of does help a lot of guys stick to it and doesn't turn one bad day into like a 100 bad days in a row or, let's be more realistic, two or three weeks. So hopefully you're all in good order.
Speaker 1:And I've been getting a lot of questions personally actually on the topic of GLP-one drugs. A lot of talk about the processed food stuff by Joe Wickes saying that ultra processed foods are the killer bar. A lot of people are still confusing one or two pounds of weight gain every other day for fat. And I think it's important that you guys really do realize the truth of these matters, especially the weight gain. One or two pounds every other day is water retention.
Speaker 1:You can't really control it. If you do try and control it, you're just going to pull your hair out because you can do everything you can you think to control it, but then you still gain water and then you go, What am I doing wrong? You're doing nothing wrong. It's just how the body is. On the topic of GLP-one quickly, there's a lot of people that talk about GLP-1s and influencers and stuff.
Speaker 1:Some people say they're bad and they're cheating. Other people are like, go all in, jump all in. And, you know, they are quite expensive to take, basically. You can have a money NHS, I suppose. But I'm not sure how how easy that is and how long term that is.
Speaker 1:They're not for everyone, but the thing is what they do help people do is reduce their calorie intake. So no matter what you think about these drugs, what they prove to us is if you do eat less calories and hit your target, you're gonna lose fat. We know this because that's what GLP-1s actually do. They don't burn more fat than do anything else. They just reduce your appetite.
Speaker 1:So a lot of people eat less calories and therefore lose fat. So that's great news. It just proves again, well, if I could just eat and hit my targets, then I'd get my results, wouldn't I? So whether you can take them or not, if you can say to yourself, you know what? I can't take them.
Speaker 1:It's too expensive. I'm not going to get on them. Maybe I don't want to try them because I don't know long term if it's going impact me. But I can do the same as what people on them do. You can.
Speaker 1:It's just going to be harder, for sure a bit harder. And as a research study that's interesting on this, it looked at does it change what you eat if you're on these drugs as well. And a study worked by having four groups, so people using GLP-one, people who previously used GLP-one, people who've never used the GLP-one but plan to, and then people who didn't plan to use it. Going to groups, looked at them, and then looked at the foods they were eating, like things they thought were extremely undesirable, things were extremely desirable, stuff like proteins, beverages, fruits, whole grains, all that stuff. One of the interesting facts is that people taking GLP-1s currently on the study consumed up to seven twenty to nine ninety calories less a day compared to what they ate previously.
Speaker 1:So that's kind of the impact it has. It's a huge impact on your calorie intake. So maybe before you're eating 2,000 calories, now you're eating 1,000 calories with ease. That's kind of what it puts it in. Danger to this is that you're actually going to be probably eating miniscule protein.
Speaker 1:And that's really what this research shows as well. The only things that people consumed more of or the, increased desire of in this study on the GLP-1s was fruits, greens and water. So you can argue that's good, Fair play. Drinking a lot more water now, eating a lot more greens, and eating a lot more fruits. So kind of like, obviously, fruits is obvious one because it's easy to eat, healthy, it hydrates you also a lot of water, usually in most fruits.
Speaker 1:So it makes sense. But the things that decrease by 30% plus in desirability and actually eating it, some beef, starchy vegetables, fruit juice, milk, chicken. So you can see how people's eating behaviors change. So not only is it okay, it's great for reducing your total calorie intake, but it's clear that your total protein intake is massively impacted by these. And it works in the brain's reward center, stuff like that.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of it. It reduces general desire for things, not just food, but potentially alcohol, potentially smoking and stuff like that, maybe. It definitely changes the reward system of the brain, right? So that's one of the most important things to focus on if you're on these drugs. But if you're not on them, you can see now the pros and cons.
Speaker 1:The pros is your calorie intake is going to come down drastically. The con is it's going to be quite hard to eat the protein you need because you just don't want to eat it. And that's the fact. When it comes all in to not just GLP-one drugs, but in general your fat loss journey, just to update you guys where I've been at in the last month or two working hard on some of things behind the scenes is we've been working with the University of Cambridge, working with Doctor. Paul Rimmer, working with our developers and data science people on this LeanShield algorithm that we're going to bring into the app and it's going to give you a seven day rolling average score.
Speaker 1:The reason we're really bringing this out is because it is extremely expensive to track your body fat percentage. The only way to do it accurately is a DEXA machine and other machines of that sort, and it's about 1,000 pounds per person. And there's other devices you can use that maybe give you trends, but really not good enough. And we really need to know what your body fat percentage is over time because we need to know if you're losing fat or losing muscle or both. So the problem we have and we face is we can measure weight easily, we can measure protein easily, we can measure calories, which is energy, we can measure many things easily.
Speaker 1:But one thing we can't measure easily, body fat percentage. So how do we move on from here where most people, well, certainly nearly everyone is not going to go to DEXA machine, right? So we need to find a proxy score to tell us that if this score is higher, it's protecting us from muscle loss. So we've looked at all the research we can that's high quality on low calorie diets, low calorie diets with high protein, low cal and I mean very low calorie diets, 800 calories a day. So we know traditionally very low calorie diet, 800 calories a day, high protein, a lot of resistance training.
Speaker 1:If you did follow that, your risk of muscle mass loss is quite low actually because the resistance training stimulates the muscle to like, hey, stay here. The protein is super high, and I mean, we're talking two to 2.5 grams per kilo of lean body mass a day. For most of you guys, it's going to be really, really hard to eat that, so it's kind of out of question for most people. Then 800 calories a day is usually those slim fast shakes. So that's why you see sometimes the NHS or whatever promote this 800 calorie liquid diet.
Speaker 1:It brings in extreme results if done correctly, but the chances are most people are not going to be doing the protein and training bang on needed to protect themselves. They lose a lot of muscle mass. So when you look at all your researches, low calories, low calories with high protein, low calories with training, low calories just on its own, deficit without training, deficit with high protein. So there's a lot of mixes, depends on if you're trained or untrained, it depends on your age, sometimes can depend on sometimes your kind of sleep and genetics. There's a lot of factors that come into all of this to determine whether you're going to lose muscle in your weight loss journey.
Speaker 1:But we do know the standard diet that most people are going after, which is typically nearly 1,000 calorie deficit a day, is really what most people think is right because a lot of people come on to a PowerPal and they're like, Hey, my target is so high, I should be eating 1,003, the app is giving me 2,001. And it's like, if you eat 1,003, that's 500 calorie deficit PowerPal's given you, right, plus another 700 calories from the target Parapal. That's 1,300 calorie deficit. That is extreme, probably between 40 to 50% calorie deficit. Now unless you're hitting two to two and a half grams of protein per kilo a day of lean mass, so say now, just for example, if you weighed, fourteen stone, right, and that is a hundred and ninety six pounds, hundred and ninety six pounds, Okay.
Speaker 1:Eight eight point nine times two point 8.9. That is over 200 grams of protein a day if you were fourteen stone, did I say? Okay. Like, are you gonna do that? Probably not.
Speaker 1:But if you wanna do it, you're gonna need to eat that much protein. And then by the way, are you training three times a week hard with weights that every set or nearly every set you're pushing it to where you can only do three or four reps more? And if the answer is no to that again, forget going that low. Don't do it because you're gonna lose about 30 to 40% of your weight from your lean body mass, which is made up of mainly muscle, organ tissue, connective tissue, glycogen water, but mainly muscle and organ tissue. So when speaking with Nick at the University of Cambridge, who is going to be our chief science officer, which is amazing news, We really looked at the score we've got at LeanShield and we're going to do a research study to confirm if it is going to work.
Speaker 1:So we're going to do an eight to twelve week study in Cambridge. So if anyone is local to Cambridge, let me know. So we're to start people off on, hey, here's your plan, what's your LeanShield score? We're going to look at if you're training, your protein intake, your calories. We're going give you your LeanShield score.
Speaker 1:And over twelve weeks, we're obviously gonna help nudge you towards how do you improve your lean sheath score. And then after twelve weeks, we're gonna measure your body fat percentage again. And Dexa machine is very expensive, but we're gonna do it. And after twelve weeks, if increase in lean sheath score is seen as a link increase to body fat percentage in terms of maintaining muscle mass and losing body fat percentage, losing body fat we then know, that we don't need to spend all this money on Dexa machines. We don't need to spend money on expensive body fat testing if we could put you all on a higher lean shield score because we know just gonna be the higher the LeanShield score, the more protective it is against lean body mass loss, which mainly is muscle and organ tissue.
Speaker 1:Does that make sense? So that's really what we're doing. Can this score reverse engineer all the research, give it back to you guys in a simple manner, like let's try and increase our protective score and then it's going to give you actual things to do each day. Not like, yeah, obviously eat high protein train, like, yeah, we know this, but like how much extra protein today do I need to eat to increase my score? In the next two or three days, what type of training do I have to do to increase my score?
Speaker 1:We're gonna give you those exact things to do. And we're gonna prompt you as well, like, look, your Lean sheet score dropped a bit because of this, try this today. So you're always going be nudged one or two key things a day and I think it's super, super exciting and it's going to be obviously personalized to you guys and your stats because there are differences in different stats. Nick obviously is wanting to review everything again and make sure it's good, so we're still at that stage. A few questions he asked which are important, looking at the research, can users maintain muscle during large deficits at home right, without going to the gym, and you can as long as you do two workouts a week, two to three workouts a week, where you do four to six hard sets per muscle group, and I mean like you're pushing it where three reps after the set is gonna be tough, you can use body weight for this.
Speaker 1:As long as you're doing that, you're doing the training part. Protein in extreme deficits is super important. When you're not in a deficit, protein becomes less important. Why? Because your body has the energy it needs and it's not going be breaking down protein at such a rate.
Speaker 1:When the body's in a deficit, it doesn't have the energy it needs, your rate of muscle protein breakdown increases, so your muscle might be getting utilized for energy, so that's why you need to eat way more protein to protect that from happening, so don't do this. But eating high protein in the deficit reduced lean body mass loss by up to 80%. So lean body mass loss say would be 10 pounds over six months if you didn't do high protein and if you did high protein you go down to two pounds, it's huge. And one more thing to cover here just to give you guys motivation that sometimes it's not too bad if you're near your target or just going over your targets is that you're going to be in a high lean shield protective score band essentially. So this is another factor as well, you're not always going to be aiming to be in a huge deficit and all that.
Speaker 1:Sometimes you might have had a weekend like you have now where you've gone over your targets, your protein has been okay, you haven't trained maybe, but your deficit is tiny or maintenance, your protein is good, your LeanShield protective score over this weekend is probably brilliant. And that's not something to look down on because we don't want to lose muscle mass. We really, really don't want to lose muscle mass. I've covered this study before, but the Minnesota starvation experiment done a long time ago showed that in extreme weight loss you lose a lot of weight, you lose a lot of muscle, you gain all our fat back, but you keep regaining fat until the lost muscle is gained back and the lost muscle takes a longer time to gain back than the lost fat. So you overshoot, so you basically come back to your original weight but then you go heavier but then you've got more fat and less muscle and you rinse repeating this what we call skinny fat.
Speaker 1:A lot of people have suffered through this because of the diet strategies they followed. So we need to look at sometimes being in maintenance as a super positive because as human beings we're not going to be able to stay in a deficit every day unless you're on GLP-one drug which reduces your appetite massively. And if you're not careful and your dose is too high and stuff, it's going to be so drastic of a suppression that you're not going to be interested in eating many foods, which is good, such as junky foods that we know about, like high fat, high sugar foods, but also it seems unfortunately meats and proteins as well. It seems the strategy has got to change. Whether you're on them or not, there's a pros and cons there.
Speaker 1:Everyone has to be serious about protecting a lean body mass whilst they're on their fat loss journey. So please guys, if you have had a weekend or even a few weeks or summer where you haven't been hitting your targets and your weight has maybe gone up a few pounds, just rest assured likely because of your calorie intake's good, your LeanShield score's been decent, you've been protecting your muscle mass, you probably haven't lost any, and that puts you in a strong position now to get back into another phase of weight loss, but doing it with clarity that I'm looking for fat loss, no weight loss, and the scale might not show my fat loss for a while because you could be losing fat, you could be losing fat, slightly gaining muscle and water retention might stay elevated, so your weight might not change for a while, but this is why you should take photos and measurements because so many of you say, Scott, can't believe it, I haven't lost any weight, but after eight weeks I feel different. People tell me I look like I've lost weight, my measurements have come down, I look at my photos and stuff, can see the changes but my weight doesn't come down.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's fine, you've lost fat, that's the goal. We're not looking to maximize weight loss but you will have the whoosh effect where eventually a lot of the water retention that you're holding onto will drop down and overnight you'll go down three or four pounds. Again, worry about it, don't even celebrate it so much because it's just a whoosh effect, it's just the water leaving that's been there for a while, revealing your fat loss. You know you're obtaining because you're nearby your targets. So that's it.
Speaker 1:It's a long one. Thanks, guys, for the wait. Hopefully, you're all in a good position, but take this advice that whether you've been great or not over the last few months or weeks, there's always a benefit to be in a maintenance and above. A lot of it to do hormonal stuff as well, but mainly protect our muscles. So now let's get back into a phase of I don't know how to term it, whether it's healthy fat loss or just fat loss, but that's the goal for all of us looking forward that maybe other plans are not focusing on, and they'll celebrate total weight loss.
Speaker 1:But really down the dark side is a lot of these people are losing a lot of muscle mass, and you can see it in their body and their faces and stuff when, they come to the end of their program. So have a good day. I'll speak to you all soon.
