If you want to lose 20 pounds of fat by the summer, copy this:

If I woke up 20 lb overweight and needed to lose it all by the summer, this is exactly what I do. In fact, this is the exact same protocol we used to help Chris, who dropped 27 lbs in 90 days while losing 50% of his visceral fat and gaining lean mass. Now, I got to warn you, if you are like Chris and you follow this exactly as outlined, by the end of the summer, you will have people accusing you of being on a GLP1. So, if you're ready to get lean and rip off your shirt at the pool by the summertime and have the confidence of a male model, follow this and take some notes. Step one, stop eating at least 3 to 5 hours before bed. When it comes to your final meal, you want to set a hard stop. And the reason is not what you think. First, it's going to prevent horrible nighttime food decisions. I you not, some of the worst decisions that people make, especially when it comes to eating, is at night. And the low-key thing is that it's actually going to improve your quality of sleep. Now, when you improve the quality of your sleep, you actually set off a stream of downstream consequences that actually benefit you the next day by regulating your hunger and appetite. This is a simple rule, but it has enormous benefits that will continue on till the next day. Next up is to multiply your body weight by 12. If you have a lot of weight to lose, and I'm saying like 40 to 50 lbs, then you might want to multiply that by 11. And by the way, most people don't realize like how much weight they actually have to lose. It's usually a little bit more than they thought. Now, this number is going to serve as your daily caloric intake. Next, you want to multiply your body weight by 08. And this is going to be the daily amount of protein you need in order to build or even gain some muscle while you're burning fat. Now, when it comes to protein, I like to set a floor and a ceiling. Now, the floor is going to be 08 g per pound of body weight, and the ceiling is going to be 1 g per pound. I find that when someone is in a calorie deficit, they're trying to get lean, they're trying to lose weight, slightly higher levels of protein intake is going to give you a fighting chance at building muscle and in some cases gaining muscle. The next step is to narrow your focus. Now, the three numbers I want you to focus on for nutrition is going to be simple. First is going to be calories. We already talked about that already. Next is going to be protein, which we already talked about as well. The third one is going to be fiber. You want to be aiming for at least 25 to 35 g of fiber per day. And fiber to me is one of the most slept on nutrients that doesn't get enough love. The first benefit is that it's going to help you improve your gut health, which is also going to help you improve your body's satiety signals. The second is going to be fullness. It's a cheat code to just feel fuller from each meal that you eat because you have more fiber. And the third benefit that not a lot of people talk about is going to be blood sugar regulation. So fiber slows the digestion and absorption of carbohydrates. And when it does this, it actually flattens the post-meal blood sugar and insulin spikes that most people experience. And this has an effect on reducing hunger and fat storage over the course of a longer period of time. And by the way, if you want a free guide detailing the exact protocols I'm talking about in this video, subscribe to the channel and comment healthy and I'll send it to you. Now, that said, the next step is to fill your plate with these specific foods. So, these are going to be your protein anchors, which are going to be the foundation of every meal. It's going to be lean ground beef, extra lean if you can find it, chicken breast, and on the odd occasion, chicken thighs, ground turkey or turkey breast, fatty fish like salmon or sardines, eggs and egg whites, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese on occasion. These are going to be high protein, highly satiating, and every single one of them will support muscle retention, especially when you're on a calorie deficit. Now, the next foods are going to be your volume fillers. These are going to be foods that are going to make you feel full without blowing your calorie budget. We're talking about leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, Brussels sprouts, or kale. And then you have your high volume vegetables which are cauliflower, zucchini, mushroom, peppers, asparagus, cucumbers. You can eat enormous amounts of these and they will take up space in your stomach and they are also loaded with fiber and micronutrients. And then we have what I call the smart carbs. So we have potatoes, which are one of the most satiating foods on the planet gram for gram. You have beans and lentils. And you also have fruits. Berries, apples, oranges, kiwis, and even grapefruit are great for high-fiber options. And for drinks, water, coffee, and tea. Now, if you're wondering, there is no alcohol on this plan. >> Are you serious right now, bro? >> So, drinking alcohol when trying to lose weight is just playing the game on extremely hard mode when you are a complete beginner. First off, your body prioritizes it before trying to burn off anything. It's not even empty calories, it's negative calories. and it's going to ruin your recovery. It's going to make you feel more tired. It's going to make you feel more lethargic the next day. And not a lot of people mention this, but when you drink alcohol and you feel like it gives you the munchies. If you like drinking alcohol and you're wondering, "Okay, so what do I do instead?" I actually have a drink. I call it the sober margarita, or in Mexico, it's called the Swero. It is soda water with lime juice. And the glass cup is rimmed with sea salt. Now, the soda water helps you feel full, and it may improve digestion. The lime juice actually improves the detoxification of your liver and also the sea salt improves the entire hydration process. And if you want some sweetness, you can add a teaspoon of raw honey to it. And this is one of the best alternatives, especially if you're not going to be drinking alcohol during this time period. So now that we know how much to eat and also we know what to eat, we need to build the scaffolding for your nutrition and set the frequency and timing. So for most clients, we start with a baseline of three meals a day and we can go down to two meals or go up to three meals and a snack. These usually work and it depends on a person's schedule. It depends on their lifestyle. Depends on how big they are to be honest. Now we already said that your final meal is going to be around 3 to 5 hours before bed. So we already covered that. Now you want your first meal to at least be 1 to 2 hours upon waking and you want it to be high protein and high fiber. Now for the second meal, we would place that right between the first and the last one. and we would have no snacking between these meals because what we want to do is we want to automate our hunger with the right meal schedule. And this is called the chrono eating protocol. When you eat three meals on a schedule like this and you space them evenly, it aligns with your circadian rhythms and it also automates your hunger. Now, I want to share something really cool with you because this is the breakfast that I've been eating almost every single day and it got me back to seeing my abs at 46 years old and I call it glop and I talked about it on this video over here. It's low-fat Greek yogurt, protein powder, psyllium husk, and frozen fruit. Now, the Greek yogurt is incredible for gut health. We said this before, your gut directly affects your society, your energy, your mood, and your immune system. The protein powder, especially when done first thing in the morning, is going to help you regulate your appetite later on. And it's also going to give your muscles the fuel they need to grow and recover. The frozen fruits are fiber richch and are loaded with antioxidants, especially if you do berries. These are going to have a greater anti-inflammation effect. And the selium husk is one of the most underrated supplements on the planet. It acts as a form of soluble fiber. When it hits your stomach, it forms a gel which actually feeds your good gut bacteria and keeps you fuller longer. Now, the only thing I would add to this particular breakfast and in general is the fact that you want to be drinking more water as a result of taking in more fiber, which leads me to the next point, and that is hydration. For our clients, we want to be aiming for about half our body weight in ounces per day when it comes to water. And the protocol we use is called the lean body water protocol. And it goes like this. Upon waking, you drink 500 to 750 milliliters first thing in the morning. This is also the time I like to put creatine and electrolytes in my water. Now, between your meals, you want to be drinking water as well. And if you want to feel fuller from your meals, you want to be drinking water before and also afterwards. Now, the only caveat to all this is that you want to stop drinking fluids at least 1 to two hours before bed so you're not waking up in the middle of the night wanting to go pee. >> You had an accident. What does THAT MEAN? GOO. And water is one of the most underrated tools when it comes to getting lean. And I don't see most people using it. It suppresses your hunger signals and improves your digestion, keeps your energy stable. And the fact is, most people are walking around mildly dehydrated every day without knowing it. And the brain is reading that as hunger and causing them to eat. Water is cheap. It's available for most people. It's free. Use it. Now, let's get to the juicy stuff, the training. We are doing three full body strength training sessions a week with one day of rest between each session. When it comes to your training program, one of the most important things is going to be the frequency of which you hit your muscles. Training each muscle group at least twice per week is one of the greatest forms of growth stimuli you can give to your body. And if you think about it, it's just logical. If you only blast a muscle group once per week, it may take about 2 to 3 days to recover, meaning that you have about 3 to 4 days where it could be trained again. but it's not getting any growth stimulus. But if you structure your training more intelligently, you can let that muscle recover for about 48 to 72 hours and then you can train it again. You can stack more quality growth signals across the week to build or maintain the muscle. And what most people don't realize is that when you spread your sets over a multitude of sessions instead of just cramming everything into like one marathon workout, the research shows that you actually perform better on each set. you have better technique, you can do heavier loads, and this is exactly what drives muscle gain and retention over the long period of time. Now, for our clients, we like to do only five to six exercise per session with only two sets for most exercises. What we're starting to find across the board is that mechanical tension, not necessarily volume, is what improves muscle growth. And I find that for people who are over the age of 35 where recovery is less than ideal, two sets is actually the sweet spot where you can take your muscles as close to failure as possible while also being able to recover for a second round of sets later on in the week. And this is called the 2X training method. You're doing two sets per exercise and you're hitting up each muscle group at least two times per week. And I've looked at hundreds of DEXA scans and I find that this combination along with the nutrition that we just talked about is one of the most sustainable ways to build, if not maintain muscle, especially as you age. Now, you have to understand that it's not enough to just rely on exercise that you're getting inside of the gym. You need to get your movement outside of it. So, you want to be aiming for at least 7 and 12 to 10,000 steps per day. Now, this isn't considered exercise, and I want to be clear about that, but this is just about being a functional human being. And yes, you may burn a few calories as a result, but walking to me is one of the most underrated tools in existence. DAMN, >> IT'S low stress on the body. It does help you burn calories without tanking your recovery. It actually helps it. It de-stresses you, especially if you sit at a desk for long periods of time, which is what a lot of people watching this are. And I've talked about this so many times, but I would highly recommend getting a standing desk and an under the desk treadmill. This is one of the biggest cheat codes to getting more steps in without thinking about it. And personally for me and a lot of our clients, we do walking meetings. We watch videos while walking. We listen to podcasts while we're walking. I've done this so many times that I've developed a skill where I can type or even use a talk to text app to do writing for the script like I just created. And this is an easy way to hit 10,000 steps without even feeling like you stepped foot outside your door. Now, next, we need to build a recovery system. And I'm talking about sleep. And this is a part I see a lot of people skip because honestly it's not as sexy as the training or nutrition. But honestly, it might be more important than both of those because sleep is where fat loss actually happens. When you sleep poorly, your cortisol spikes, which causes your hunger hormones like ghrein and leptin to get dysfunctional and this causes you to crave sugar and processed foods the next day. There's not even mentioning the fact that your workouts suffer, your recovery suffers, and you just stress a lot more. You can have a perfect nutrition and a great training program, but if you are having horrible sleep every single night, it might undermine all of that. So, what we implement with our clients is called the ERT protocol. The E stands for environment. You want to be sleeping in a cool room because your body needs to drop its core temperature before it falls asleep. You also want to make sure that the room is blacked out. And personally, I use blackout shades and also combine that with a sleep mask. And I even go as far as to get these little tiny black stickers and put them on all the outlets that are emitting a little bit of blue light. We have to realize that exposure to light, especially when you're in bed, has been shown to reduce your insulin sensitivity while also disrupting your sleep. Now, a big part of this environment piece is making sure that I'm also breathing through my nose. So, for the past 2 years, I've been using mouth tape to help me breathe through my nose, especially while I go to sleep. >> Mhm. >> And I've tracked my sleep using both an Aura and a Whoop, and it has shown that my REM and my deep sleep have gotten better as a result of taping my mouth at night. Now, the R stands for routine. You want to have a simple routine before you go to bed that signals to your body that it's time to go to sleep. And for me personally, I put on my blue light blockers when the sun goes down. I also dim the lights inside my house and around 15 to 30 minutes before bed, I read a fiction book. Usually, that's enough for me to go to sleep. And if you do this enough times, it's going to send literal signals to your nervous system that it's time to go to bed. Now, if you want to take this a step further, one of the most underrated ways to get better quality sleep is to take a hot bath or a hot shower at least one to two hours before going to bed. What this is going to do is it's going to cause a rapid drop in body temperature, which will be a signal to your brain that it's time to go to sleep. And then lastly, we have the timing bit. Timing is making sure that you're going to sleep and waking up at the same times every day. and also making sure you're getting the right amount of hours, which from my experience is anywhere between 7 to N hours of sleep a night. Now, the knot that ties all of these pieces together when it comes to training, nutrition, to sleep, to everything that we talked about is what I call the body dashboard. For our clients, we like to have a simple set of KPIs, which are key performance indicators that signal to us whether or not we're on the right track or even on the wrong track to get us back onto track. Now, simple ones you want to track on a regular basis are going to be weighing yourself daily and getting a 7-day average. This is going to be important because daily weight is going to fluctuate based on water, sodium, and digestion. And the 7-day average is going to give you the real trend of where your weight actually is. And we also want to track our body inches, especially around our waistline. Low-key understanding what your waist to height ratio and getting that number down is going to be crucial because that number actually serves as a proxy for how much visceral fat you have on your body. Anything at 0.5 or higher means that you got to get your together fast. And lastly, you want to get pictures done at least every four weeks. And this is what I call the lean body trifecta, where you're not just relying on weight. You're relying on your weight, your measurements, and your pictures to signal progress. Now, if you want to go deeper, like a lot of our clients do, we get them to do DEXA scans. And this is the gold standard for tracking how much body fat you have, your lean mass, and also visceral fat. And we also get them to do their blood work where we track their blood sugar, their insulin, their lipids, liver and kidney function, their inflammation, their thyroid, even their hormones to get a full picture of what's going on inside. Now, along with this, we want to be tracking the foods that are going into your body. That's pretty obvious. And also, I'm making sure that I'm tracking the workouts I'm doing while I'm in the gym. I just don't want to go into the gym and be like, "Okay, I think I did this way and I think I did that weight." No, that is the recipe for not even making any progress whatsoever. Now, there's one more thing that I would do if I'm trying to get my body lean for the summer. It sounds weird, but I would keep a journal. You want to note down your observations of your transformation as it's happening. How did you feel after you eat a certain piece of food or tried something new? How exactly was your sleep and how did that affect what you did the next day? And what this is going to help you do is catch your patterns because you just don't want to get in shape for the summer. You want to be able to get in shape for the summer and keep it that way. And something that you will find as you go through this process is that you're going to run up against so many of your weaknesses and so many of your coping mechanisms that this turns into a self-development journey disguised as a physical one. And you have to understand that there is no path to change that doesn't come without awareness. And you have to catch these patterns. You have to notice what happens every time you sleep 6 hours as opposed to getting eight or why you always overeat on Saturdays and Sundays because of a specific trigger. Awareness is the first step to change. And you just can't keep this in your head. You have to write it down. Now, by the time you're getting this video, it should be around springtime. And that is more than enough time to drop 20 plus pounds off of your body by the summer. And while everyone else is waiting until June to get serious, you're going to get started now. And this system I just shared with you is going to help you hit the ground running. Now, if you want a full guide on everything that I just covered so you can actually follow it, comment the word healthy and I'll send it to you. Thanks for watching. See you at the next video.