Ep 149 – 10 Tips For Keeping The Fat Off

Dani:

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of vegan proteins muscles by Brussels radio. My name is Dani, and this is episode 149. Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Hope everybody is really getting into that holiday season. We just wrapped up thanksgiving as of the time of me recording this and decorated the house yesterday, and it was super fun.

We had the kids help us, and it was the first year that they actually, like, helped us decorate. So Desmond was running around putting ornaments in places I would never think to put ornaments, but it was pretty. It was pretty adorable. I also took them roller skating this weekend, which Daisy has been roller skating once, and Desmond had never been on skates before.

And as soon as we got there, as soon as I got the skates on them and got us situated, they announced, we’re gonna do a race for kids six to nine years old. And Daisy goes, I want to do it. And my immediate reaction was, oh, honey, you don’t want to race. She’d been on skates once before. I mean, she’s taken baby steps. Her arms are flailing around. She’s, like, almost falling over every 2 seconds.

But she said, no, I do. She started to pout. She was like, no, I do want to race. And I was like, go, go, babe. You can absolutely race. And she went out there to that start line. Took her forever to get to the start line, and they blew the little whistle, and those kids took off, and Daisy was last by a mile. Like, it wasn’t even close. Kids were lapping her, literally, but she just kept going.

And it was, honest to God, one of my proudest aunt moments I have ever, ever had, because my instinct, like I said, was to say, oh, honey, you don’t want to do that. Because I. Because I didn’t want to see her come in last place, because I didn’t want to see it. But she didn’t care. She just wanted to do it. And even though it was really hard for her, she didn’t quit.

I. You know, it was just. It was just such an awesome, awesome thing to see. Desmond didn’t love it quite as much, but, I mean, he couldn’t even really stand up. And at one point, all three of us went down together in a pile. It was pretty hilarious. So, okay, this is going to be a solo, solo podcast today. Just me here. Giacomo is going through a family situation at the moment and wasn’t really feeling up to recording, and I thought, hey, what can I talk about that people always want to

hear about, no matter what time of year it is? What do people want to know that isn’t really like a. A back and forth conversation. And I settled on ten fat loss tips for vegans, but specifically so that you can keep the weight off. A lot of people set out on a fat loss journey, weight loss journey, and they do reach their goal. However, keeping that goal is an entirely different beast.

And part of the reason that it’s so hard, I think, is because people actually set up their initial fat loss phase in a really, really unsustainable way that it’s no wonder people can’t maintain it. So this might be a slightly shorter episode than normal, but I wanted to go through and I wanted to chat with you guys about my top ten tips for vegan fat loss.

So tip number one is to give yourself enough time. So many people think that they, you know, we’ve all

heard one to two pounds a week is a safe amount to lose, and it is a safe amount to lose. So that doesn’t mean it’s an easy amount to lose. For somebody to lose two pounds a week, they would need to be in a thousand calorie deficit every day to lose two pounds a week.

So that deficit can be achieved by your nutrition, or it can be achieved by your cardio or the amount of exercise you’re doing. But a thousand calorie deficit is nothing. Small deficit. So picture that. Picture what your maintenance is roughly. Now subtract 500 from that every day. Now add 500 calories worth of cardio every day. That’s going to be like over an hour for most people.

That’s a lot. That’s a lot to maintain. So I actually think it’s a much safer bet to aim to lose somewhere between half a percent and 1% of your body weight per week. You can lose up to one and a half percent. So if somebody was 200 pounds, you know, that could safely be up to three pounds a week. But then we’re back in the same boat, right? So half a percent to 1%, I think, is a really safe amount to lose.

You can lose slower than that. I am very much a fan of, like, slow and steady. Of course, not too slow, because then you lose all your motivation, right? Because you’re like, why am I doing this? Can’t even tell. It doesn’t even matter. But slow enough so that when it’s time to back out of the diet, you don’t have to become an entirely new person in order to do it.

Like, you can just kind of keep cruising where you’re at, increase your food a little bit, decrease your movement a little bit, and maintain. So figure out what half a percent to 1% of your body weight is. So I’m 140 pounds. That would be 0.7 pounds to 1.4 pounds per week somewhere in that ballpark. And if I wanted to lose, say, ten pounds, that would probably be about ten to 15 weeks or so for me to do that and maintain it.

Because, I mean, I could do that in five days if I really wanted to. I wouldn’t maintain it for more than two days beyond that. But you could do it. So, and I don’t recommend it, by the way. So, yeah, ten to 15 weeks for me. But I mean, you figure that math out for yourself, but make sure you’re giving yourself enough time. Tip number two is to track your food accurately.

Everybody wants to skip this step. Nobody likes to track their food. I don’t. I don’t enjoy tracking my food. I wrote a book about it and I still don’t enjoy tracking my food. But it is the only sure fire thing that will get you where you’re trying to go is to make sure that you are actually taking in what you think you’re taking in. You know, every other method is not a surefire thing.

Cutting out carbs. Nope, not a surefire thing. Because you could just eat more fats. Cutting out fats. Nope. You could just eat more carbs. Cutting out any group could work or not. Because you could just eat more of everything else. Even things like going vegan. Like for a lot of people, it’s very easy to go vegan and stay right where you are because there’s plenty of high, dense, high density vegan foods out there.

So, you know, get comfortable with your measuring cups and you’re myfitness pal or chronometer or whatever it is that you use to track what you’re taking in. And be honest with yourself. There’s no point in doing it at all if you’re only going to log your good days. How helpful is that? Not at all. So log the good, the bad and the ugly, and you can learn so much from that and you’re probably going to find out that you’re actually able to eat more than you thought you were able to eat, which

is really nice because then you’re not setting up too big of a deficit, which if you have too big of a deficit, you’re going to overeat eventually. So tracking your food, everybody thinks it’s like this form of restriction, but sometimes it can actually help you to eat more. Tip number three is to hydrate really well. I think that this is important for a lot of reasons.

Right now, it’s, you know, the end of November, and we have the heat on in our house. Now, here in New England, every morning I wake up feeling like a lizard. So I’m trying to find a good humidifier for the bedroom so that I can wake up and not, like, cough up dust the second I wake up. So people should be drinking a lot of fluids for that. But when it comes to fat loss and weight loss specifically, you know, there’s not a lot of research out there about if it’s true.

Do people really confuse their hunger for thirst? I don’t know. I don’t. Scientifically, I’m not sure, but it certainly makes sense to me when I think about it. When your stomach is, like, emptyish, you are gonna reach for the funnest thing to put in there, which is usually not water, but you might very well need water. And when your body is, well hydrated, your body is better at burning fat, your body is better at building muscle.

A hydrated body is absolutely going to get better results than a dehydrated body. I mean, think about it. When you’re dehydrated, your blood is thicker. It’s moving through your body more slowly. That that can’t be great for a lot of things, but also not for fat loss, not for weight loss, and, you know, you could gain energy just from being properly hydrated.

So there’s just so many reasons to make sure that you’re staying hydrated. So what does that look like? There’s a lot of schools of thought on this. Some people like to drink water until their pee is clear. I don’t really recommend that, honestly, because you can over hydrate. So I’m talking about being hydrated. Well, yeah, you can over hydrate, especially if you’re not eating any electrolytes or any sodium.

You can over hydrate easier than you think. Some people say, just drink when you’re thirsty, but I think some people have gotten so good at ignoring their bodies that they don’t even know when they’re thirsty sometimes. So I get the sentiment there, but I need clearer guidelines than that. I like to shoot for half of my body weight in ounces of water every day, and that’s usually what I recommend for most of my clients as well.

Unless they’re, like, endurance athletes, in which case they may need more than that. And it doesn’t have to be exact. You can get in the ballpark, and that’s going to be good enough. Tip number four is to fuel your workouts? Well, a lot of people train fasted. A lot of people get up and go to the gym with nothing in their stomach at all. I don’t recommend it.

I understand it. I understand why people do it because they wake up super early and they have to get to the gym then, and it’s uncomfortable for them to eat that early or it feels heavy in their stomach. I get it, but I still don’t recommend it. Get something in your stomach before you train. Anything. A half a banana, a protein shake, some bcaas in water if you absolutely have to, but something in your stomach.

Because when you start exercising, your body needs to find fuel. And of course, we all hope and pray that our bodies go to our body fat stores and break that down for fuel. But the fact is, it doesn’t have. Our body will break down whatever is easiest. And sometimes that’s fat. Sometimes it’s the sugar, the

glucose that’s flowing through our body.

But sometimes it’s muscle. And you’re working too damn hard in the gym to risk having it be muscle. It is like pulling teeth to build muscle. Guys, losing fat is, in my opinion, it’s easy. It’s not like it’s not easy in practice, but it’s pretty easy. The system is very easy. Building muscle that is not easy. That’s like 3d chess. So every time you train without something in your stomach, you’re really not setting yourself up for success here.

So, you know, when we’re talking about fat loss, generally, we’re talking also about muscle maintenance and making sure that we are well fueled. Going into our workouts is really, really important to not lose that muscle that we’re trying so hard to gain. You know, you could actually lose muscle and not lose fat and end up, yeah, maybe ten pounds lighter, but actually with a higher body fat percentage than you started, looking worse than you did when you started.

Yes, I have seen this happen. We’ll get to other ways to prevent that from happening, but one of them is to make sure that you have some fuel in your system before you train. Tip number five is get into an eating routine. So what I mean by this is eating at consistent times per day is a game changer for weight loss, fat loss, muscle building, building a healthier relationship with food, learning to turn, tune into your body’s hunger and fullness cues.

Again, it is just awesome to actually eat on a schedule. And I hear some people say, oh, well, intuitive eating. I just wait to eat till I’m hungry. Okay, that’s fantastic. But do you know what? One of the first things they do if you go into an eating disorder clinic is even though their ultimate goal is to teach people how to eat intuitively, the first thing they do is they put them on an eating schedule.

Why? Because it trains our body when to be hungry. You know, a lot of people say, oh, I don’t eat till one or 02:00 in the afternoon. And I’ve done that actually. Like, if you look back at some of my videos, I generally don’t like to eat until a little bit later in the day. And I always say, well, I don’t get hungry till then. Well, of course I don’t get hungry till then.

I’ve trained my body not to get hungry till then. But if I were to start eating breakfast at, say eight in the morning, after a few days, I would wake up and be hungry at 08:00 in the morning. So when we push out our times of eating for too long or worse, we eat at different times every day, which is actually called chaotic eating. We are putting ourselves in a situation where we’re going to accidentally overeat, we’re going to accidentally under eat.

We’re going to have a really hard time listening to our body’s hunger and fullness cues because they’re going to be really out of whack. But when you start eating at the same times every day, you start to be able to rely on knowing the next time your body is going to be hungry. You can actually like set your watch to it almost.

And it’s amazing all of the good things that start to happen when you are eating at the same time every day. People are always shocked when I suggest that they do this and then after literally only like a week, they can tell the difference right away on what a difference it makes.

Speaker 2

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Dani:

Tip number six is to set your protein high enough. I know I sound like a broken record, but going back to that story about how, yes, you could be ten pounds lighter but actually have higher body fat percentage from losing muscle the fastest way to lose muscle is probably not what you think. It’s actually not, not training. The fastest way to lose muscle is to be in a deficit and to under eat protein, and that is it.

So when you’re trying to lose fat loss, obviously you have to be in a caloric deficit. That’s, that’s the cardinal rule of fat loss. But if you’re in a deficit and your protein is not high enough, your body will tap into your muscle stores for fuel. And a lot of people do not eat enough protein for their goals. Not even vegans, omnivorous people, meat eating people often are only eating, you know, 50, 60 grams of protein a day.

Vegans are sometimes eating even less than that. Certainly sometimes they’re eating more than that. I’m always surprised when I get a new client who comes in and they’re eating actually too much protein. It happens once in a blue moon, but it does happen. But in general, I would say probably 90% of the people who come through to work with us need to be eating more protein than they’re eating.

And of course we help them do that. We help lay that out for them. But when they increase their protein, they start to see a shift in the way that their body feels. The protein itself is not going to change the scale. Increasing your protein is not going to help you lose weight, but it will help change the look and feel of your body. It will help fuel your workouts a bit better.

And when you have more muscle and less body fat, you achieve that sort of lean, toned, sculpted look

that a lot of people are looking for. So how much protein is enough? Protein? I say 0.8 to 1.2 grams of protein per pound of lean body massage mass. So, for some people, they like to just do a straight up round number of 1 gram per pound of weight. I think for most people, that’s a little bit too high.

But the. The calculation that I use is 0.8 to 1.2 grams of protein per pound of lean body mass. So, for example, if I’m 140 pounds and I am 20% body fat, that means 28 pounds is body fat, which means 112 pounds of me is lean tissue. So I would take 112 pounds and I would multiply it by 0.8 for the lower end, which gives me 90 grams, or by 1.2 on the higher end, which gives me 134 grams.

Now, I personally like to eat at the higher end of that range, so I do eat about 130 grams of protein a day, and I recommend most people in a fat loss phase do eat a little bit towards the higher end of that, as long as their body is used to it and can tolerate it just fine. What I mean by that is if you’re. If you’re normally eating 40 grams of protein a day and you go to eating 130 grams of protein a day overnight, your stomach’s gonna hurt.

Once you’re used to it, it doesn’t hurt at all. It’s just like when you went vegan and started eating more beans. And it probably was unpleasant at first, but then you got used to it. It’s just like that, but with protein. Tip number seven is to load up on your non starchy vegetables. So, including vegetables that are not starchy. So things like broccoli, cauliflower, kale, collards, brussels sprouts, asparagus, green beans, tomatoes, summer squash, zucchini, lettuce,

spinach. I could go on and on. Loading up on these types of vegetables is, in my opinion, key to a successful fat loss phase for a few reasons. So, the first reason is they are very high in volume and very low in calories. So when we’re in a deficit, generally speaking, there’s just less volume of food going into our stomach. And one of the things that tells our stomach that we’re full is we have stretch receptors in there.

So if we’re eating just these really tiny meals, those stretch receptors might not send word to our brain that we’re full even if we ate a lot of calories. This is why it’s so easy to overeat really dense food like we just had thanksgiving. Very easy to overeat. Say pecan pie when it’s super tiny, even though it’s incredibly rich. Cause you’re just like, oh, yeah, I’m not full yet.

And you just keep eating in order to fill our stomach up, but still stay within our allotted calories. Non starchy vegetables are amazing for this. Not only are they low in calories, but also they tend to be kind of high in protein for what they are. Now, let me explain that. When I look at a cup of broccoli, it only has about 25 calories in that cup of broccoli.

But it has about 2 grams of protein, which that’s eight of those 25 calories are coming from protein. That’s a, that’s a pretty decent amount. That’s like 30 ish percent of the calories in broccoli come from protein. Now, please, please do not take this as me saying, oh, get all of your protein from vegetables, because I don’t think that’s a great idea.

You’re going to have a really hard time and probably some gastric distress, but, you know, it does add up. So it’s great to use as sort of a base of a meal, non starchy vegetables, you can also mix them into your other foods. So things like zucchini noodles. I also grate zucchini into my oatmeal when I’m in a cut. I know that sounds really crazy, but it’s kind of delicious.

Adding pumpkin to smoothies or to your oatmeal. Big, big salads with lots of non starchy vegetables.

It just, it feels so much better to have, like, a decent amount of food in your stomach. Also, when your calories get low, a lot of people really skimp on food fiber, which then makes them pretty irregular. And it’s not unusual for somebody who’s in a deficit to have a harder time going to the bathroom anyway, just because it’s less volume of food.

So one of the ways that we can mitigate this is by increasing our fiber a little bit in the form of vegetables. So that’s another good reason to keep it in there. Of course, fiber is fantastic for you. Can’t recommend it enough. Big fan of fiber over here. If, if there was like a miracle macro, I guess I would say it’s fiber. The other reason why I like to load up on non starchy vegetables is, again, when you’re not eating as much food as your body technically needs, which is what a deficit

is, it’s really easy to short change yourself on certain vitamins and minerals. And eating lots of whole vegetables can really help to make sure that we’re checking some of those boxes off. That said, I usually recommend taking a multivitamin anyway, just as an insurance policy. Some people think that’s silly. I do not. So that’s why I’m a huge fan of non starchy vegetables in a fat loss phase.

Along that same line is to just look for higher volume foods in general. So I was just talking about non starchy vegetables, which are probably the most voluminous foods that you could find. But there are other things as well. So I’ll give you some examples. Kind of learning what is calorie dense and what’s less calorie dense. Let’s talk about fruits.

Right? Fruits are great for you. I love fruit, but some of them are very, very dense. And you would eat up your calorie allotment very quickly with certain fruits. For example, dates. One little medjool date is almost 30 grams of carbohydrates. That’s 120 calories of just pure carbohydrates in dates. Now, I love dates. I’m actually recording a YouTube video upstairs of me cooking a orange cranberry loaf.

You should definitely check that out on YouTube. And I used dates as the sweetener in there. So I love dates. But they’re very, very dense. I would say bananas are also pretty dense. Pineapple, mango, these sweet tropical fruits, pretty dense. But so you might say, oh, you’ve heard people say it. I know you’ve heard people say it. Oh, I don’t eat fruit.

I’m on a diet. Like, okay, sounds dumb, but you do. You at the other end of that density spectrum, we have things like berries, strawberries. A whole cup of strawberries is, I think it’s like 25 calories. Again, it’s like the same as broccoli for a whole cup of strawberries, sliced up melon, apples, peaches, nectarines, all pretty voluminous and still like, man, when you’re in a deficit, that’s like candy.

Some other things that I think a lot of people avoid. Potatoes. Potatoes are the most satiating food as backed by science, by themselves, they measured all of these different foods, and white boiled potatoes were the most satiating. If you’ve ever watched any of my, what I eat in a day videos, when I’m on a cut or on prep or whatever, I’m eating potatoes.

Regular old white potatoes, not sweet potatoes, not rice, not quinoa potatoes, because to me, they are much, much more filling. And also, they are too loaded with vitamins and minerals. So I know potatoes get a bad rap, but that’s another example of a high volume food that maybe you haven’t thought of, puffed cereals rather than granola.

So, like a puffed kamut cereal versus granola, you’re gonna get so much more bang for your buckley that way. If you are a sweet potato lover and you love that particular flavor, try a butternut squash

instead. More voluminous, similar flavor. So these are just some ideas here. Tip number nine is to refeed properly. So refeeding is when you have days of eating at your maintenance calories, even while you’re in a deficit.

So when I’m working with my clients, we often have two refeed days per week. So we’ll be in a deficit for five days, like a clear deficit, and then two days a week, we eat up at maintenance. And this works on multiple levels. One, mentally, it is so much easier to stick to that deficit Monday through Friday when you know that you have two days that are going to be higher calories and more food to play with on the weekends.

Monday through Friday is a breeze when there’s a light that close at the end of the tunnel. Also, it makes sense for people’s social lives generally. Generally, people have stuff to do on the weekends. If there’s going to be a party, it’s going to be on the weekend most of the time. So this allows people to still have, like, a normal social life and still be actively pursuing their fat loss goals.

But also, physiologically, we start to have a hormonal shift after only 72 hours of being in a deficit. So three days of being in a caloric deficit, and our bodies pick up on it, and they start to kind of shift things around to prevent us from losing weight or body fat. Our bodies like to stay right where they are. So when we have these metabolic downshifts, which is what happens after just 72 hours, it’s not great, it’s not ideal for fat loss.

So the idea is we have two days where we eat at a higher level of calories now, not a high level of calories, just maintenance. And that helps to sort of reset us so that we’re kind of primed for fat loss again by Monday. Now, some of the data on this is not conclusive. It was conclusive then. It wasn’t conclusive. This is just how science goes, right where it’s always right, until suddenly you learn it’s not.

But in my practice with our clients, this has been a very successful method. So I really recommend it because when you just are in a deficit, like, to the end of time, it is really easy to just, like, lose your willpower to do it because it’s so dreadful. So when you have a few higher days to look forward to, it really helps a lot. And tip number ten is to reevaluate regularly.

So if your fat loss phase, your weight loss phase is going well, you’re going to have to alter your macros eventually, because eventually you’re going to be a smaller person, you are going to hit a stall at some point and you’re going to have to tweak your macros or tweak your calories. Maybe the ones you set up initially are just not working.

Maybe you set it up at a deficit that’s too steep and you can’t adhere to it. So it would actually help you to lose fat better if you increased your calories a little bit. That sounds backwards, but that is often the case. So reevaluating regularly is so important when the goal is fat loss, because what worked for you on day one probably won’t work for you on day 70.

So you have to know when to tweak that. And honestly, this is when it can be incredibly helpful to have a coach because we all second guess ourselves so much. And if left to our own devices, I feel like we all make changes way too often. You know, our weight doesn’t change for two days and we’ve cut 150 calories, and that’s not a very smart way to do it.

Having a coach helps. Like, I feel like it just helps remove your crazy a little bit. Like you. You kind of,

you offload that to the coach. They are the ones who get to stress about looking at your pictures and your numbers and your measurements and your plan, and you don’t have to do that anymore. That work is completely outsourced. So your head space is so much more freed up to focus on the things that are really important, like executing the plan and focusing on other areas of your

life. So having a coach, I think, is an absolute game changer. And so many, I feel like, of our clients, we’re not going to get to their goal without having some kind of a coach in their corner. And I know because they all tried this on their own first, right? We’ve all tried this on our own with varying degrees of success or backtracking or no success.

So having a professional in your corner, it’s something that, you know, anytime I want to do something that I know I don’t actually know how to do at this point in my life. I hire a professional. I always do when it comes to building websites or anything pertaining to money or any particular skill I want to learn. Like I like DIY to a point, but I’ve spent so many hours and dollars trying to diy myself to XYZ position, I realize I had to hire a professional anyway.

So anyway, that’s just my two cent. If you are looking for a coach, that’s what we do. That’s what we do full time. We have four full time vegan coaches here. So if you are interested in having like a very custom laid out plan, your nutrition completely custom. Your training completely custom, weekly video check ins, weekly accountability mindset, work lifestyle work weekend planning, the whole kit and caboodle, check out the links in the description and go.

Or go to veganproteins.com and click the one on one coaching page and you can read about it. You can fill out the form and you will get a video message back from myself or Giacomo within a business day like probably that day to give you what we think our next best steps for you would probably be see if your goals are realistic. See if we think we could help you get there because we’ll never take on someone we don’t think we can actually help.

So anyway, that is, that’s what I’ve got for you guys today. I hope that you enjoyed this. I know it was a shorter episode, I know it was a little bit different than what we normally do, but I hope you enjoyed it. I don’t think I’ve spoken this much to myself in a very long time. And if you guys have any questions or stuff you want to hear about, we are currently mapping out 2020 four’s podcasts and YouTube and all the topics that we’re going to do next year.

And we would love to hear your feedback. And also, if you are enjoying this podcast, go ahead and leave it a review wherever you listen to podcasts. If you take a screenshot of that review and email it to us coacheganproteins.com comma, we will send you a little something in the mail. So anyway, I think that’s gonna be it. Hope you guys have a great day. My name is Dani and I’ll talk to you soon.