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A weekly podcast for ambitious individuals to build a Blockbuster Body so they can live life on their terms!
Hello there and welcome back to the powerful performer podcast. The podcast that's helping the creative industry all over the world build an incredible body, unforgettable confidence and relentless energy so they can live life on their terms. Today we're gonna be talking about advanced nutrition methods to optimize body composition. When we talk about body composition, we're talking about bringing the body fat down and the muscle mass up or maintaining muscle mass if you're an intermediate to advanced athlete. And I think these seven principles are gonna be really useful because it's gonna give you a different perspective on what fat loss is.
Speaker 1:There's a generic thing that goes around and it's eat less, move more and it's actually much more than that. If you want a sustainable fat loss journey, if you wanna feel full, if you wanna feel good, if you wanna protect your long term health, there is a few things that you need to be doing instead of just eating next to nothing. What I call rabbit food and getting your steps in that. That is what I call, a sustainable way and nor a healthy way of transforming your, your body composition. So the issue is that we might have had a summer of enjoying ourselves.
Speaker 1:We might have just had a few months off. We might be in a different, realm or a different phase of our fitness journey where we're trying to optimize performance and actually putting on a bit of body fat is is a good idea. But now we've just come and we just wanna drop some some fat. But we don't really want to, we can't be bothered waiting. We don't have the patience and we don't have 2 or 3 months to do that.
Speaker 1:Maybe we've got a film or a project coming up or something like that. So I think these 7 things are gonna be really important to hone in on and almost like in them to some high performance nutrition habits that you can really, and honestly transform your body composition for as long as you want. So let's get into to these method methods. The first thing is prioritizing your protein in in every meal. We're looking for, like, at least 1.8 to 2.8 grams per kilogram of body weight.
Speaker 1:I like to think of it as just double your body weight. So if you're you weigh 80 kilograms, you should be aiming for a 160 grams of protein if you strength train. And this is called the thermic effect of feeding. And what happens is the body heats up and you're going to burn slightly more calories when you're on a high protein diet. So if you're not looking at how much protein you're having, if you don't know how many grams of protein you're having and you are trying to get that athletic lean muscular, look and decrease your body fat, this is going to be a key thing, and you're going to burn slightly more calories doing it.
Speaker 1:As I said, it's called the thermic effect of a feeding and the body heats up and you are going to burn slightly more calories than just having a high carb or a high fat diet, for instance. So you want to be going on to that high protein diet. The second thing is prioritizing fiber. And in particular, I call these bulking foods, fruits, vegetables, things like that. If you are trying to drop, body fat, that the key principle is understanding energy balance and it's putting your body in a calorie deficit.
Speaker 1:And I'm sure you've heard this phrase before, but no matter what anybody else says that the calorie deficit is the thing that is going to make you drop weight. It doesn't matter about your stress levels. It doesn't matter, about insulin and all this sort of stuff. It doesn't matter if you have a sugary Starbucks in the morning. It's all based off of energy balance.
Speaker 1:But your body finds fiber also very hard to break down. You need fiber for regular digestion and you also need it to keep you full. If you have like a bowl of white pasta versus a bowl of whole wheat pasta, you are gonna feel fuller from the whole wheat pasta because it's stashed full of fiber. And I call these bulking foods like vegetables, fruits, all of that sort of stuff. Why?
Speaker 1:Because they're quite low. Well, they're very low in calories. They're extremely low in calories, and it's a hell of a lot of fiber. So when you are on, in a calorie deficit and you're in that fat loss phase of your journey, fiber is gonna help you to feel full whilst you are technically under fueling your, your body. And I won't go too much into maintenance and under fueling all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1:But yeah, effectively you have to under fuel your body by a little bit to be dropping weight slash dropping body fat, and we know that it's purely body fat. If you're eating an adequate amount of protein, your strength training and your inner calorie deficit. Okay, so if you're just in a calorie deficit, you're gonna losing weight, you're going to be losing muscle mass, you're going to be losing body fat as well. But if you strength train, if you get adequate protein, if you're in that calorie deficit, that's when the body composition journey really starts to take a lively journey for itself. The third thing is just staying hydrated.
Speaker 1:Most people in this day and age with all these energy drinks, with all of these accessible coffees, we're just dehydrated and that's gonna make us feel hungry. It's gonna make us feel sluggish. Our training goes off, we we reach for the snacks. We reach for the the cupboard snacks, the sugary cupboard snacks because we're just dehydrated. We feel like we're hungry, but we're not really.
Speaker 1:So just, you know, spreading out those liters of water throughout the day, having 3 to 5 liters of water depending on your body weight, will be an absolute game changer and you feeling great, and also like not feeling hungry trying to suppress that appetite. The 4th thing is you're not gonna like this, but if you're trying to optimize your body composition and you've got a very short window of time to do it, knocking alcohol in the on the head is gonna be a game changer. Number 1, alcohol is empty calories. As we all know, a pint of beer, 250 calories. It does nothing in terms of it's got no nutrients.
Speaker 1:It apart from relaxes us, but it does nothing in terms of fill us up or it's got no nutrients. Also after 2 alcoholic drinks or 2 alcoholic drinks or more, it seriously affects our sleep. So we're gonna release the hunger hormone ghrelin and we're gonna feel really really hungry. I have never been able to stay on plan when I'm hungover because the hunger hormone is is gonna push our body into fight or flight and your body's gonna try and protect us. So it's going to go for those high reward foods, sugary, high fat foods, which feel good.
Speaker 1:So knocking alcohol on the head is an absolute game changer to really optimize the food that we're having. The 5th thing is having a minimum of your daily calories from from fats. So if you're someone that tracks your calories or you know what you eat, you wanna be going for at the very least and this is the very least 15% of your daily calories are gonna come from fat, from fat, from fat, From fat. It produces, sex hormones which help us burn fat and build more muscle. They help us to recover.
Speaker 1:So you're gonna build more muscle being on like a higher fat diets then your metabolism is gonna increase. Therefore, you can essentially eat the same amount of food per day and you're gonna strip more more body fat. So a kind of round the circle way of thinking about fat. But again, it's just gonna help you feel better. It's gonna help you move better, perform better because you grow more muscle.
Speaker 1:So, having a minimum of 15%. If you're kind of in maintenance calories, if you're, you know, this is going off the body fat now, but if you're looking to you're in a performance phase and looking to optimise muscle mass, you wanna be going for 30 to 40% of your daily calories, from fat. You really do. The 6th thing is then having an eating window. If you're on a strict set of calories or you're on a strict set amount of food, maybe you get meal prep or something like that.
Speaker 1:Back loading calories to the evening is a really good idea because that's when we're most bored. It's when we're less stimulated, When we're working, when we're doing things. I'm trying to think of things. We're going to acting class. We're dropping the kids off at school.
Speaker 1:We're doing work. We're learning lines. We're auditioning. All this stuff. We're very stimulated.
Speaker 1:So it's often that we don't think about food. But when it comes to the evening, when we're chilling out, when watching Netflix or at the cinema, that's when we want food because we're kind of in that in that happy place of back loading those calories. So it might be from, let's just say, 8 p. M. To 12 p.
Speaker 1:M. We've got this eater window which just curbs where us having more calories for instance, and it's where intermittent fasting comes from. Intermittent fasting isn't a magic diet. It just helps us restrict those calories and it's very, very possible that if you are unsure about the amount of calories you should be consuming in the week, intermittent fasting isn't actually working for you because you might, your daily calories might be let's just say 2,000 for a random and you might go out for a pizza and a couple of pints of beer and even and already you've had your 2,000 calories, but, you know, you've ate them all within 1 hour. So it's very, very easy to not drop fat in intermittent fasting, but by using it, I call it an eating window and back loading those calories is a very sensible thing when you're trying to stick to a rigid set of food and trying to drop body fat.
Speaker 1:Then the last and 7th thing is meal frequency, eating at the same time every single day so you aren't left starving and your body's not being put in fight or flight. So if you have no set times that you eat and you go for 6, 7 hours without eating something, your body's then starting to go into fight or flight. And again, it's like wrestling with the beast. It's very, very hard to stick to a diet when you're in fight or flight, and that beast, the beast that you're wrestling with is always gonna win. I'm reading a book at the moment called, what's it called?
Speaker 1:The Chimp Paradox. It just talks about your chimp is always gonna win. You know that, that natural beast inside your head is always gonna win. So you just have to, like, find ways of of managing it and and eating at the same time and meal frequency and being really organized and systemized with your nutrition, is a game changer when you're trying to do abnormal things. So bringing your body fat down, bringing muscle mass up, having that athletic look is a very hard thing to do.
Speaker 1:It's a very abnormal thing to do. We work a lot with with performers and actors who who rely on it for for their career or their character needs to look a certain way, but it's important to to relay the information back to you that it is pretty abnormal to bring your body fat down to to so low. We need a certain amount of body fat, to protect us and we would have we would have of cave, cave folk, cave humans. So again, meal frequency is really important just to get really organized and get the whole, your circadian rhythm which basically runs your body when you go to sleep, when you wake up, when you eat, when you work out. If you can just systemize it all, it's gonna make the process very, very, easy.
Speaker 1:So there's the 7 things. I hope you found it useful. I hope you found it a different viewpoint of looking at fat loss and body composition. Here's the disclaimer. Here is the the kicker.
Speaker 1:You can only drop fat when your body is in a calorie deficit. If you are weighing yourself, if you're measuring yourself, if you're trying your clothes on and your body isn't changing, it's simply because your body isn't in a calorie deficit. So your body will never change in the way that you want it to if in terms of body composition. If the body isn't in, a calorie deficit. It's nothing to do with your genetics.
Speaker 1:It's nothing to do with the way that you're that you're made. It's probably nothing to do with your coach if you're getting educated on the world of nutrition. It's probably, in in most cases eating out chefs, making us making food taste so delightful, tasty and amazing, but that they don't care about our fitness journey. So if your body isn't changing, your body's been taken out of that calorie deficit. And the number one thing that I see is just people eat out too much.
Speaker 1:Doing this will allow you to optimize fat loss whilst preserving muscle mass. And these are all tools. They're not a way of living. Intermittent fasting isn't a way of of living. Meal frequency isn't a way of living all the times because you do want the freedom to eat whatever you want.
Speaker 1:But when you're looking to do abnormal things, it requires abnormal organized behavior and these seven things are gonna seriously help, with that. If you do wanna work out what your calories are and you are interested in tracking calories, reach out to me on Instagram and just put in capital letters free calorie calculator, and I'll send over my free calorie calculator. So you can get on it and you can put all these 7 things into practice alongside being in a calorie deficit and you can just really feel, what that is like and how quick the the results are. If you've got any questions, let me know. But, yeah, hope you have a great week.
Speaker 1:Hope you enjoyed and I hope you have an even better weekend. Take care. Bye for now.