Episode Transcription: The Most Effective Diet For Weight Loss with Ted Ryce

Ted Ryce: You might be wondering, did you read the title of this episode right? "The Absolute Best Diet for Weight Loss"? Can that be true? Doesn't that sound like marketing hype? Totally crazy stuff! What is Ted doing? you might wonder.

Well, today, my friends, I'm going to break down the best diet principles on how to lose weight. I'm going to unveil what I use for my coaching clients. So, people usually have to pay to get this information. Today I'm going to give it to you for free! And it's going to be very different from what you think you're getting into.

So, I will say this: you can just listen to it, but you're going to need a paper and pen to take some notes. If you can, pause the recording, get that ready, get your notes app ready and let's get to it!

What is up, my friend, welcome back to the Legendary Life podcast! I'm health expert Ted Ryce, coach to entrepreneurs, executives, and other high performing professionals. What we say we do here, on the show, is we break down science-based information on how to lose fat, prevent disease and live a longer, healthier, legendary life.

And at Real Talk Fridays, we have a bit more of a real conversation if you will, real talk conversation, but on Mondays, we get down and dirty with the details, the scientific details that will help you get into the best shape of your life, no matter how old you are or whatever your problems might be.

If that's what you are into, then you're in the right place! Let's get into it!

I got fat in my thirties, and more specifically, I'm about six feet tall. I was 200 pounds at the time and my body fat levels were 24%. According to BMI or body mass index measurements, I was classified as overweight, but that wasn't the worst of it.

I was never diagnosed with sleep apnea, but let's just say my own snoring would wake me up. So I slept terribly. I felt stressed. I was irritable and on edge all the time, I felt low energy. I just didn't feel like me anymore. And half of the clothes that I had didn't fit me anymore either.

And on top of all the personal issues, let me just tell you I was a personal trainer. Society - kind of funny saying this, because people were always like talking about “Oh, how society judges overweight people!”. Guess what? Same thing happens with personal trainers, except it's worse!

Because if you are an entrepreneur, or an executive, a lawyer, a medical doctor or even, you can be overweight. I mean, people will think stuff about you, but if you're a trainer, if you are in nutrition, that is not good for business! And the truth is people judged me because the way I looked and I lost business over it. I mean, would you want to work with an overweight trainer?

So, enough becomes enough! I decided to commit to get into shape! But I had another problem. I believed in a lot of nutrition misinformation, AKA BS. And I've followed what all the gurus said to do. I cut carbs like crazy, I put butter in my coffee along with coconut oil. I skipped meals. I avoided buying fruits, because fruits are full of sugar and you know, sugar raises insulin and insulin is a fat storing hormone, yada yada, yada... Or so I believe at that time, all those things.

I also believed that I could do super hard 20 minute workouts to make up for the hours of training I did when I was doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu competitions. I thought to myself, hard workouts burn so many calories per minute. And they have this afterburn effect. Have you ever heard of that? The afterburn effect. That means after you're done exercising, you're still burning calories because your workout was so hard. And certainly while harder workouts burn more calories per minute than easier ones, you don't burn so many calories that you can get away with 20 minutes workouts a few times a week. But hey, that's where I was. Again, I was listening to the gurus of the time.

We've also learned that this so-called afterburn effect isn't that big of a deal as we thought. But that's where I was. And that's what I was doing. And I was overweight, irritable, and uninspiring for my clients.

So, I'll tell you this, having the motivation to change wasn't enough. I needed a program that actually worked and got results as fast as possible while, of course, improving my health. I wasn't going to do anything ridiculous, no cabbage soup diets! I needed to figure out what is going on here? What am I missing? I was so lean in my twenties, so lean in my early thirties. And then in a matter of a few years, I got fat.

Let me tell you, at that time that I made this decision, this commitment, it was hard for myself to admit that after, I don't know, 18 years in the industry, that I really didn't know how to change my body. I just didn't know. I thought I did because I was in shape, but I didn't understand how to do it in a reproducible way. I would have had to go back to doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu all the time. And my body was beaten up from all the competitions, all the hard training.

But I'll tell you, once I accepted the truth, that it wasn't my hormones, which I blamed my fat gain on. In fact, I had a hormonal test to even prove it. And my estrogen levels were elevated. Now I know, well, if you're a man and you have elevated fat levels, you probably have elevated estrogen levels too. That's how it works. There's an enzyme in our fat cells that turns testosterone into estrogen. It's called the aromatase. That's a very well-known thing. Doctors give aromatase inhibitor medication to stop this from happening, when they place their patients on testosterone therapy so they don't grow breast tissue, gynecomastia.

So once I was able to check my ego and figure out, okay, I don't know what I'm doing here! Who do I need to learn from? And I learned, I dove into the science, the real science, not the science who the guys on YouTube say "Aw, this is science!". No, the guys who write, who conduct research, I started learning from them. I started learning from the people who are objective when they interpret the research.

And in a matter of six months, I went from 210 pounds at 24% body fat to 180 pounds at below 10% body fat. Or so my coach and I thought based on my photos, I had veins coming out of everywhere. And today I'm here to share with you that program that I used to get there, along with the improvements I've made to it from working with dozens of coaching clients since I created this.

Now I've had many... I've helped people with nutrition for a long time, and people got great results, but I was never able to figure out, okay, how do you get people, amazing life, changing body transformation results? And then, how do you do that and have them keep it?

So I can't share with you how to keep it part. That's a story for another time, but I'm going to share with you how to get it. The good news is that if you follow what I teach you here in this episode, you'll get better results than you've ever experienced with any diet you've ever tried, because this isn't a diet.

In fact, it's going to be easier than any diet you've ever tried too. It's going to be easier. Don't believe me? Good. I love challenges! And I think you should be skeptical when someone says what I just said, but the good news is there aren't that many steps. In fact, there are just six steps here on how to lose weight fast that we are going to go over. So let's jump into it! Shall we?

Now, the first step is this: what you don't measure or what... let me say it this way: The management guru Peter Drucker said :"What gets measured, gets managed". And so many people, what they try to do is look for a quick fix, a hack: Let me do a juice detox! Let me try intermittent fasting! Let me do keto! Let me just get rid of all the carbs and do a low carb diet! I'm just going to eat zero carbs! Or let's take it to another level! Let's eat nothing but meat! Or you know what? Let's forget about the meat! Let's go in the complete opposite direction and become vegans and get rid of all animal products and start a vegan diet! Now, look, I'm not talking about ethics here. I'm talking about fat loss, weight loss, and what creates results. If you are doing something for ethical reasons, that's cool, I got no problem with it! In fact, I'll even share with you how to do this within the context of whatever diet you want. Pretty much.

Step # 1 - Download MyFitnessPal

Step number one is to download MyFitnessPal.

What gets measured, gets managed. And I want to tell you here, I'm going to tell it to you straight: I know this may come across as a little bit abrasive, a little cocky, but look, I'm telling you what I ended up learning the hard way. You just don't know Jack about nutrition when it comes to fat loss, you don't know what you need to know. And I was in the same position and I was so resistant to downloading MyFitnessPal. I did not want to track things. I thought I was like, man, that sounds like a lot of work! But you know what? Go look at my photos, that photo that you see on the thumbnail, I was able to create that for myself, by tracking my nutrition.

And I'll tell you what I tell all my clients. Cause I get really smart entrepreneurs, and executive clients, actually mostly entrepreneurs. I tell them like this: “Let's say that I am a family member of yours. I'm a in-law, I'm a close someone you care about deeply. And let's say, I come to you and I've got my small business running here. And I say: Frank, (just making a name up, I don't have any client named Frank) my business, I make sales. So I know I'm making money. But for some reason, man, at the end of the month, I barely have enough to pay myself. And I say, Frank, what would you tell that person who came and asked you that? Someone cared about.”

What do they always say? Always, always, always because it is The Answer? - “Oh, well you got to track what's coming in, you got to track what's going out, You need to look at the numbers!”

And that my friend, that's your problem! You don't know your numbers. You have no idea If you are eating 2000 calories or 200,000. Actually you are not eating that much, but you have no idea. Are you eating 5,000 calories? Are you eating 2000?

And some of you are going to say: "You know, I've tried tracking before, I tried tracking, I was eating 1200 calories and I didn't lose any weight." We're going to talk about why that's not true. Okay. And I know again, this may come across as a little bit abrasive, but I just want to say it to you straight. Okay? I'm going to be as nice as possible. And I had to go through the same thing here.

So, here, go to MyFitnessPal, download it! You can do it right now and pause this, then come back when you have it. So, that's the first step.

And then step 1B would be: to set up your profile there. And after you do that, it'll give you calories based on your answers regarding your weight goal and how fast you want to lose weight. It will ask you, okay, what's your weight? What's your goal? Do you want to lose weight or gain weight? And how fast do you want to lose the weight? And then it's going to give you some numbers. I want you to ignore them. Why? Because MyFitnessPal sets you up to fail. I don't know why they don't do a good job and I'm not even interested in thinking about why, but they set you up to fail. People get horrible results when they use MyFitnessPal on their own. And it's because they don't know how to set their numbers up for themselves. We're going to do it here the right way. So that's step 1B set up your profile.

Then step 1C would be: Upgrade to Premium. It's going to make your life easier again. This is what I do for all my clients, every single client. Well, not every, every single client. Sometimes we have a little bit of a ramp up into tracking. But if you want to dial things in to ensure that you not only get the best results, but have the best learning experience, because that's what we're going to use MyFitnessPal for.

You're going to learn what you're missing. And you're going to be surprised at how much actually you just don't know about nutrition. Even though you listen to, I don't know, Greenfield or Bulletproof radio, or you know, Sean Stephenson show or whatever other mind pump, whatever other popular podcasts that you listened to and you think you know a lot about nutrition. I'm going to tell you... I'm going to give you... I'm taking you through this stuff right now so that you can get results on your own. No New York Times bestselling diet book needed! So again, upgrade to premium.

That's the first step, right? MyFitnessPal, get it on your phone! It's available for all phones, fill out your account and then upgrade to premium.

Step two, MyFitnessPal has told you how many calories you're going to eat, but we're gonna forget about them and what they say. And what we're going to do now is I'm going to share with you a very simple and fast way to do this.

Step #2 - Determine How Many Calories You'll Eat Per Day

So step two: we're going to determine how many calories you'll eat per day.

Now, I want to say this is the most important factor for losing weight, because everyone wants to know what is the hierarchy here. What should I focus on? And the number one thing you need to do to lose weight and specifically unwanted body fat is how many calories you take in versus how many you burn.

Listen, folks. I used to rail against this, I used to think it was such outdated crap. And then I got fat. And I low carb as hard as I could. And I couldn't get back to that lean stateI was in until I finally forced myself and actually

forced myself. I hired a coach, that is what happened.

I hired a coach and he's going to be on the show soon. Super busy right

now finishing his PhD, but he's going to be on this show soon and we'll dive

into it.

But just know you've got to take in less than you burn to lose weight. And if you take in more than you burn, you're going to gain weight.

And I want you to keep this in your mind because we may run into a situation where the numbers aren't reflecting your results.

We'll talk about that later. We'll come back to it in the final step, which will be the troubleshooting step, number six.

But right now I want you to do this. Well, before we do this, before I tell you (it's going to be really simple math here) before you do this I want to just tell you like this: You may think: " You know, well, I'd rather burn more calories with exercise because I already love to workout. So I'm going to skip the whole calorie tracking thing. If you don't mind, Ted, although it's kind of interesting to listen to you talk about it."

The problem is that to burn more, to burn more calories with exercises is trying to empty a swimming pool with a bucket. You can certainly do it, but it's gonna take more effort than you probably have. Because if you were exercising for two hours a day already, four or five times or six times a week, you wouldn't be listening to this show.

So burning off a slice of pizza is about 30 minutes of running depending on your weight, and other things. But just think about it like that. And how many pieces of pizza can you eat in 30 minutes?

Exercise is great and certainly helps you to burn off calories, but it is a lot easier... You're going to find ... This is all hard, right?I'm not going to say any of this is easy, but it's going to be a lot more easy for you to dial in the amount of food that you eat versus trying to burn it all off with exercise. You can end up with injuries with exercise. Like I did. It is a bad idea.

And I know, I know you may have tried counting calories before and it didn't work for you. Or you heard that tracking calories works, but yeah, you've had a lot of resistance to try it because you can't be bothered. And again, I want to tell you, most people think they know about nutrition, but they have no clue.

How many calories on average are you eating per day? Okay. How many are you eating per week? If you have no idea, then again, you just don't understand fat loss nutrition.

Because it isn't your food choice. It isn't “Oh, I eat a little bit more on the weekends!” No, you just have no clue how much you're eating! And I even have a great post that I have on Instagram, where on one side, it's a meal with a few hundred calories, about 300 calories. And then on the other side, it's the same meal, but it's 500 calories. And I say, okay… and I do this in the coaching group, and I do it, or used to do it in the challenge when we ran the challenge, and people could not for the life of them figure out, okay, well, why? It's the same meal, it looks the same. And that's because you don't understand portion sizes.

This is why you struggle to lose fat. It's not the carbs, sugar, fat hormones in your beef or endocrine disrupting chemicals in your toiletries. Your metabolism isn't broken and your hormones are probably fine. The real issue is this: You just don't know how many calories you're actually eating!

And you don't even need to know exactly. But what I'm trying to say is you are not even in the ballpark, you have no clue! Or you wouldn't be struggling with this.

Now that's the bad news. The great news is that we're going to fix this gap in your knowledge. While there are many ways of determining how many calories you should eat in a day, we're going to stick with a really simple formula. Are you ready?

It's super simple. Multiply your body weight in pounds by 10 and that will give you your starting calories. And again, starting calories. We're going to come down when we get to number six, the end of this, we're going to talk about how to adjust things, if this isn't working for you.So, body weight in pounds, times 10 equals your start starting calories for fat loss.

For me, I am, Ooh - I haven't weighed myself in a while - I'm probably 185, I would guess. So that would be 1,850 calories, would be a good place to start to lose fat. It might even be too low for me actually, but it's a good place to start now. I'm pretty lean right now. I don't know where I am probably under, under 15, around maybe 12 or 13%. I would love to say 11, but I don't think so. Probably 12 or 13% somewhere around there. I'm getting back down to as lean as I was before.

But anyway, if you're overweight or obese, this is a solid place to start. And even if you can't see your abdominals, cause that really shows you how lean you are, this is a great place to start. Multiply your body weight in pounds by 10 and that will give you your starting calories. So let's move on. And I want you to plug that into MyFitnessPal, of course.

Step #3 - Determine How Much Protein You'll Eat Per Day

So, let's move on to step three: determine how much protein you'll eat per day. And you're like probably thinking of "Oh, diet! This isn't a diet? You're talking about calories and how many grams of protein..."

That's right! Because the flexibility here is you're going to be able to eat the foods you are already eating. All you'll have to do is just dial in eating more of some things, eating less of some things, but you're not going to have to change the foods that you are eating because you don't need to, at least right now.

So,again, step three, you determine how much protein you will eat per day. Dialing in your protein is one of the easiest things you can do to lose the most fat in the shortest period of time.

Why?, you might ask. Well, I've done podcasts on this before, but protein has three major benefits for fat loss.

* Number one: helps you maintain and maybe even build muscle mass when you're in a calorie deficit.

* Number two: it helps keep you satisfied in your hunger levels and check in hunger. As you are going to find out, or probably already know from your past dieting experiences, if you are hungry and struggling with hunger, you're going to lose. You are strong, but not that strong.

* And number three: protein helps you increase the calories you burn through the thermic effect of feeding. Now, what is that? You might ask. And if you've been listening for a while, you know what the thermic effect of feeding is.

If you're new, then let me explain it to you, it's really simple. Your body, when it does things, it costs energy, just like exercise costs, energy, digesting your food costs energy. It's not free. It's not energetically free. In fact, about 10% - and this is just a fun fact here (maybe it's not so fun, I don't know, but it's something that is important to know) 10% of the calories that you eat in any given meal, get burnt up in the digestion of the meal.

So what does protein do then, if any given meal does that? Well, protein can bump that up to beyond 10 to 15, to even 20, or even up to 30% of what you eat, if you're eating a very high protein meal. It doesn't mean that you're taking in less calories, but it means you're burning more than you were. And it's just burned up in the digestion process. It sounds like a small thing, but what I'm trying to…, the point I'm trying to make here is that protein is powerful for changing your body.

So, how much should you eat of it then? Well, luckily we don't have to guess because science, or more specifically, research into this has worked out solid starting points for most of us.

So let's say you're overweight or obese. What you want to do is you want to shoot for 0.5 to 0.7 grams per pound of body weight per day. So what you do is, you take your body weight, you multiply it by 0.5 and that will give you the minimum of the range. And then 0.7 - take your body weight and multiply it by 0.7 and that will give you kind of the maximum range of where you should be with your protein. I know you probably want the exact number, but we want some flexibility here. Just write down those numbers.

Okay, Pause this, do the math, using your calculator on your phone or whatever - if you got a calculator and you like to kick it old school, that's cool too -and figure out those numbers.

Now, if you're normal weight, you can go anywhere from 0.7 times your body weight to 1.1 times your body weight, again, in pounds. So if you're a kilogram user, I apologize that I am metric system challenged, but I'm giving it to you in pounds. So, you got to convert your body weight into pounds first and then multiply it by 0.7. And then again by 1.1, and that will give you the grams of protein that you should eat in a day.

So again, if you're overweight or obese shoe for in between 0.5 to 0.7 times, your body weight in pounds, that'll give you the grams per day. If you're overweight or obese. If you're normal weight, you want to multiply your body weight impounds by 0.7 or 1.1 grams. And that will give you the range of grams per day of protein you want to eat.

I know, I know you're probably rolling your eyes at doing some basic math, but here's the thing: Have you seen my before and after photos? Have you seen the clients have crushed it? That's why my coaching clients are getting great results in three months and you are listening to your thousand podcast about how to lose fat.

Again, people aren't struggling with fat loss because of all the things that they have heard: the slow metabolism, the one weird trick, the poisons in

the food, all that stuff. Look, I'm not saying it's not important for your health, but we're just talking fat loss here. And people are struggling with fat loss because they lack fundamental nutrition knowledge, like how many grams of protein they should eat per day to lose fat quickly.

So sit down, take the time to do this properly. And you will be impressed with the results. It'll be worth the effort, especially if you tried so many things and that led you to failure. Okay. Or led you to a dead end. This will not lead you to a dead end! This is not following some stupid diet that you're going to have stop doing and then you're going to have to... then you buy the next diet book, hoping that you're going to learn, you know, the next thing, the intuitive, intuitive fasting diet. Everyone's got a diet book out on fasting right now.

Look, if you do this, you can fast or not fast and you'll still lose just as much fat. In fact, you'll get way better results than your friends who are reading those silly books. Look, I like fasting, but not for fat loss. All right. The fat fasting is for another day.So if you're wondering “Well, what about intermittent fasting?” Unnecessary!

So take the time to do this. It'll be worth it!

Step #4 - Decide Your Daily Grams of Carbs and Fat

So, step four is after figuring out your protein, you use the rest of the calories to decide your daily grams of carbs and fat.

So right now in MyFitnessPal, you should have in your calories (you take your body weight, multiply it by 10), then to set your protein I gave you the ranges already. So now you've set your protein.

And so now what you want to do is you want to use those remaining calories for your carbs and fat. And you may be wondering "Oh, well, how should I do this? How do I divide the carbs and the fat?" And what I want to tell you is this: We know from studies for fat loss, it doesn't matter. You can go lower and fats and hierarchy carbs or vice versa. What does matter here is your personal preference.

And if you try to cut carbs because some influencer online told you they're bad for fat loss, got to cut the carbs, but you struggle when you cut them out because you're low energy, your brain's full of fog and you're just craving them, you're just making things unnecessarily hard on yourself.

Same thing goes for preference of fat over carbs. If you enjoy eating more fat, if you want avocado and fattier cuts of meat, go for it! Just make sure it is the thing that you can stick with, because what diet book authors won't tell you is that if you can't stick with this, then it's not going to be a lifestyle.

And if it's not going to be a lifestyle, it is going to be a quick fix and quick fixes are going to lead you to the same dead end that so many people have found themselves in over and over and over.

And I'll even tell you a little bit of a bonus here. When it comes to tracking, when it comes to setting your carbs and fat, just set them equally, but only pay attention to the protein and total calories.

I don't care if you "Oh, I went over my fat grams. Oh, I went... and I under ate carbs!" Doesn't matter! "Oh, I over ate carbs and went under my fat!" Doesn't matter!

Two things you need to ask yourself: Did you hit your calorie target within plus or minus a hundred calories? Yes or no. Did you get close to your protein target? Yes or no. Say within 10 grams or so of your protein target?

Yes or no.

Because if you focus on those two things alone, you're going to be able to make this so easy for yourself, compared to what it might be if you try to get too lost in the details. Okay? So again, don't worry about whether you're eating the carbs or fat, not for right now, dial in that total calories and dial in your protein.

Step #5 - Choose Foods

Now, step five, here's a really important one! This is so critical. Are you ready for this? You gotta choose foods. If you struggle with hunger, that is you gotta choose foods that help you beat hunger and stay satisfied.

Now here's the good thing about this, cause you may say "Well, I thought you weren't going to tell me to eat certain foods and not eat certain foods. I thought you said this wasn't like a diet, like that.” And that's true, because what I'm going to share with you in this step is that there's probably foods that you're already eating that are great with hunger. You just never sat down and figured it out. You never sat down and studied it.

And let me tell you, this is one of the most crucial factors in making your nutrition plan actually doable. What stops people from achieving their fat loss isn't carbs, slow metabolisms or hormones. It's usually hunger.

And some foods help with hunger more than other foods. Luckily we don't have to guess at this because some cool research was done in the university of Sydney, Australia, and they tested the hunger quelling properties of different foods. So what I want you to do right now, I want you to pause this for a second, I want you to look up Satiety Index. That's S A T I E T Y. Index. Google that, press Images and look for the Satiety Index.

What you're going to see is a list of foods and you're going to see a bar graph showing the satiety effects of those different foods.

So I want you to pause this and go look for that Satiety Index right now and get ready to level up your nutrition knowledge, get ready to learn something that usually you'd have to pay me a lot - a lot for most people - to learn this.

But I'm teaching it to you for free because I want you to get great results. I don't want you to struggle with this anymore.

So do you have it up now? Great! Let's look at it! And I want to say this before we dive into it, you can just listen while you're looking it over.

Although it was only one study that was done, we can use it as a starting point to plan with food choices you're going to rely on, if or when hunger becomes an issue. So I want you to look at it. So you see a lot of different foods.

Now, the graph I have, cause there's many of these out there, I like the ones that separate the food category. So the proteins, fats, carbohydrates, refined carbohydrates and hyper palatable foods. So if you don't have that one, I recommend getting that one because I'm going to talk to you about the different categories. So again, just pause, if you need to go back to the Satiety Index on Google, click Images and look for the one that separates the foods based on the food categories. Again, proteins, fats, carbohydrates, refined carbohydrates, and hyper palatable.

Are you back now? Cool! So what can you tell me about this? What are you taking away from right now?

When I teach this in the challenge people love it. They are like "Whoa, this is awesome! I've never seen this before!"

So, notice again that there are five categories of food that were tested: proteins, fats, carbohydrates, refined carbohydrates and hyper palatable foods. Which is defined there as hyper palatable foods is refined plus carbs plus fat.

So the things that I find most important about this are number one. Proteins and carbohydrates are the two categories with the most satiating foods, at least the ones that were tested. And they didn't test every food.

You may not see some of your favorite foods here, but you probably see some foods that you eat or maybe have been wanting to eat, but you've been staying away from them. Like, Oh, you got to stay away from oranges because, you know, fruit has sugar and sugar makes you fat, even though it's great for satiating your hunger.

Or potatoes. Look at potatoes how high they score! Now that's boiled potatoes. We're going to talk about that in a second. You may also see that hyper palatable foods are the category that is the worst for satisfying your hunger. Croissants, cakes, donuts, chocolate bars, potato chips, ice cream, french fries, cookies, and popcorn and butter.

Now I want to ask you this: How many of you or have you ever said no, I've got to cut the carbs out, I got to cut the cake out. I got to cut the carbs from the donuts?

Guess what? Those aren't carbs. Those are carbs and fat. And that's one of the things you're missing about food. Fat actually has nine calories per gram of fat, carbs only have four. And people will say, well, no, I ate cake, it's just too many carbs. I ate donuts, too many carbs. That chocolate bar, too many carbs. Those potato chips are just full of carbs, ice cream, full of carbs.

And in a lot of these situations, if you look at the nutrition ingredients, the labels, actually the majority of calories are coming from fat, not carbs. I hope a little light bulb went off there, or maybe even a huge light bulb.

So what else do we see? I see that potatoes, boiled potatoes perform the best for satiating hunger. Whoa! Off the charts! It's like you have a boiled potato or a couple and you're good. Put that with some white fish or red meat. And again, chicken isn't up here, but it performs, I would imagine it performs somewhere in the neighborhood of, you know, red meat, white fish.

Well potatoes were the best food for satisfying hunger. Croissants were the worst for satisfying your hunger. And let me tell you something, I love croissants! So delicious! Bread with butter! And then, you know, put some chocolate on it. Oh, I'm all about it! However, I could probably eat two or three in a sitting and guess what? Croissants have about 300-ish calories each. So you could sit there and eat three croissants. Now you'd feel like crap afterwards, right? You'd have a stomach ache, but you would eat that. It would be 900 ish calories or even more!

And that's why we talk about calories! Because you can eat those three croissants, nearly a thousand calories or more, and you're hungry after. Then you say “Man, you know, I can't stick to my diet. I mean, I eat some croissants, but I'm super starving right now!” Or people who say “Oh, I can't lose weight! I hardly ever eat! I just had three croissants. That's not a meal!” Yeah! But it's a thousand calories.

And as you see, it performs really poorly for satiating your hunger. So does cake. So does donuts. So does chocolate bars. So does potato chips.

Now I want to show you something else. Look at this. So let's look at potatoes. We're going to learn about what processing does to foods. Now let's go back to boil potatoes and look how high it scores on this Satiety Index.

It scores, not off the charts, but it's the highest on their chart. Now I want you to go down to French fries. So what if we took those potatoes, what if we cut them into fry shapes and fry them in oil? We'd have French fries and look how that changes the satiety properties. And guess what? We haven't just - and we're talking about one potato here. What did we do? We took a potato. We ate a boiled potato.

Now we took that same boiled potato. We cut it into fried pieces and fried it in oil. What does that frying and oil do? Well, it does a number of different things, but it adds calories from fat. There's a lot of fat that you're going to eat that stays with the French fries, even though they get taken out of the oil. And because it's hyper palatable, the refining, the carbs plus the fat, it's not going to help your hunger as much.

So let's look at potato chips. So what if we took a potato, sliced it into very thin chips, like into potato chip sizes, fried the hell out of it. Now we got potato chips! Those score even lower for helping your hunger than French fries! Incredible! Same food, potatoes. But when it's processed the way it's refined. In other words, the cutting, whether it's in a fry shape or a thin chip, a potato chip or crisp shape, has an effect on the satiety.

So those are some lessons that I teach my clients. Now I want you to see this. Look at fruit, look at potatoes, look at porridge, look at oranges, look at apples, look at grapes, look at bananas! And even look at some of the refined carbohydrates. Brown pasta, beans, and sauce, grain bread, rye bread, long grain white rice. They're not terrible. The fruits score higher, especially the oranges and apples, but white bread and white rice doesn't score that poorly. It's decent for satiety. Whereas all the items in the hyper palatable category, with the exception of popcorn and butter, score extremely low for satiety.

So I want to ask you now: What are you taking away from this? What stands out to you that's relevant to your food choices and your struggles with hunger? Because that's the real question for you that you need to answer to get results with this. Those are the things that I want you to study when you're making food choices, when you're trying to stick to your calories and you find yourself hungry, guess what? This is how you get rid of the hunger! Okay? At least one of the main ways you can get rid of hunger. You can also drink more liquid, you can also make soups, but it's the volume of the food here.

So you can eat a lot of vegetables, which aren't even on here because they are not worth testing, because they're just really powerful for.. I mean, nobody overeats vegetables. They're there. They're good. But they are not that great, right? They're not that tasy. I like vegetables, but you know, it is what it is. Right?

Step #6 - Troubleshooting

So let's get to step number six, which is troubleshooting. So you may get into this situation where, let's say, you've got your calories dialed in, you've got your protein dialed in. Then you're hitting your calories more or less within that hundred calories plus, or minus, you are getting closer and closer to hitting your protein target - it's such a challenge for my clients to come close to hitting that protein target - but you're making a concerted effort and you're getting better all the time.

But let's say this, let's say number one, you're not losing weight, and it's starting to freak you out, and starting to bring up ideas like, Ted was wrong, didn't know what he was talking about, just another dumb ass podcaster who said that he had the answer, and here I am doing everything right, and it's not working!

So here are some questions for you: How long have you been following the plan? That's the first question, because you might be impatient or have unrealistic expectations.

Here's what I tell people: If you lose a pound a week on your own, that's good progress. If it's more than that, great for you! But one pound a week on average, that means, let's say you lose two pounds the first week, and then you don't lose any weight the second week, and then lose one pound the third week. That's an average of one pound per week. Or let's say you don't lose weight for two weeks, and then you've dropped down two pounds in the third week. .. I am getting mixed up here, my math is bad.

Let's see, you don't lose any weight in the first week and you drop down two pounds in the second week. Okay. That's again, that's one pound per week on average. So keep that in mind.

And the next question I ask is: Okay, so you're not losing weight, but are you losing inches? Because if you're training with weights, which we haven't really talked about, the training part, but if you're training with weights and you're losing inches, but you're not losing weight, then you're putting on muscle. And that's a great thing!

So, what I'm telling you here is you can't use weight. We can use it, but we can't use it as a sole measure.

So what I would recommend is track your results! Track your results here! Take before and after photos, take measurements of your waste. Or just use your clothes! Are they fitting looser or not?

And finally, if you've gone through all the things that I just talked about, and you're still not losing weight, and let's say it's a month into it, four weeks into it, time to drop your calories down by a hundred.

And you may say "Well, what about? Ted, I've been tracking my calories and you told me 10 times my body weight! And that's what I've been doing!" Listen, this is not a bank account. Even though I made that analogy with one.

This is different because here's the thing: When you track your food with MyFitnessPal, or even write it down on a spreadsheet, you're not scanning that chicken breast tha you ate, you're going by some premade data that is within the realm of being right.

So, what I'm saying is the measurements are off, drop your calories down by a hundred and keep going! And see if that puts you in the right direction. And if it doesn't work after one month, try, you know, let's say a month, you didn't lose any weight and you dropped it down to a hundred for a week and you still didn't lose any weight, drop it another a hundred and then give it a couple of weeks.

There's always a way to make sure that you can lose body fat or you know, weight. And it is by adjusting the numbers. It works a hundred percent of the time, for every single person. You will get to a place where you're losing weight.

Now, let's talk about hunger, because what will happen to some people is like: "Okay, Ted. So I'm losing weight. I'm following the calorie recommendations, I'm losing weight, I'm hitting my protein more or less, but I'm starving, man! I'm hungry! So it might be that you're not eating enough calories, or you're exercising too much.

For this I would really check in because exercise can stimulate hunger. And if you're exercising like crazy because you're hoping that it will make things move faster, but it's causing you to get hungry because Hey, when you burn energy in your body, your body's like, “Hey man - or a woman, whatever - Hey, eat some food! We're starving over here! We need energy! You can't just, you know, do the spinning class and yoga class and go to powerlifting, the five-three-one method or five-by-five method and expect us to eat. .. you know, what you're eating. You need to eat more food!” So you can either, eat more calories or you can drop down your exercise.

Again, if you're struggling with hunger, you can also look at the foods that you're choosing and make better choices from that Satiety Index.

So, those are the two things that I want to talk about here. In terms of troubleshooting. There are some other things.

Some people will be gaining weight again. That's ... you're going to have to lose, drop your calories down, if you're gaining weight. And again, if you're gaining weight, but you're not losing inches, if you're gaining weight and gaining inches. So these are the things that you'll need to adjust and it takes time and it takes experimentation.

And again, the best way to do this is to work with a professional, but at least you can get your feet wet. You can try this on your own and see the results.

And some of you are going to figure it out. Some of you are gonna... this is going to make so much sense to you when you start doing it, you're going to get results and all your friends are going to ask you, like they asked my clients: "Oh man! So did you just stop eating carbs? Is that what you did, did you stop eating carbs?" And you're going to look at them, then you're going to try to explain it, what you did, and their eyes are going to glaze over because they're not going to want to hear it. But I'm hoping you are here for the next level and you're not expecting the quick fix. You're beyond that, I hope.

And this isn't a quick fix. It's an investment. It's not getting your weekend certification in nutrition, which is what a diet plan is. This is like doing your executive MBA. You're learning. You're having to work the numbers. You're having to make the numbers work. You're having to put effort.

There is no easy way to lose fat, but this is the easiest way, because what seems easy in the short term ends up being the hard way in the long term. What seems hard at first, in case you view this as difficult, you're like, “man, that's a lot of steps, a lot of tracking and craziness!”. If you view this as the hard way, then you just might not be ready.

Because what people are missing isn't the shnazzy one trick, cut out all the carbs or just do keto and pee on ketone strips, or the one weird trick, or do the juice detox.

You don't know about food! And how do you learn? Well, you need an education. That's how you learn anything. Education. That's how you get good at math, is how you get good at writing, is how you get good at law, is how you get good at medicine. There's no way around it.

And people are lacking nutrition education. What they know now is "Oh, broccoli has sulforaphane in it". Okay, great! How come you're so overweight? Right? I mean, I was in that. I make jokes and if it seems like I'm harsh, I'm like talking to myself there. Because I was that person, I would just say "Oh, well, you know, butyric acid and the butter that has butyric acid in it. The sulforaphane and the broccoli." It's like, yeah, but how come you're 24% body fat, and you're in health and fitness, man?

What was going on there? I was missing an education. And that's what I give to my clients. And they're never the same again, when they go through my coaching program. Because then they know, and they may not be able to do it a hundred percent of the time, they may fall back into some bad habits - habit changes are a whole nother conversation - but they know they don't have to ... If you do what I'm telling you, you won't need another keto diet book. You won't be left wondering: "Is it my hormones? Is it the pre-menopause, or the post-menopause, or the andro-pause, cause I'm a guy?

We gotta make words up. Women have a menopause, guys need something too, we'll call it andro-pause, even though it's because I sit on my ass, have too much stress, drink coffee in the morning, drink scotch at night to go to sleep, don't exercise and go out and eat steak dinners and say "Oh, I'll be in a lot of proteins!" Then your steak is like... like half the calories are coming from fat. All right, I'll stop. But I hope you got a little bit of a laugh there.

All right, my friends, so that is it for this. If you do this, I promise you, you will get results. It will fill in the gap that you're missing.

So what I want to tell you now is we are doing a survey. So if you've got something on your mind, when it comes to this podcast and you have something that you got to get off your chest, you've got to let me know! Or if you've just liked to take some of your time and participate in making this podcast better, that's cool too!

Go to www.legendarylifepodcast.com/survey and fill out this survey. Let us know! We read all of them, we want your feedback. How are we doing, what can we do better, what do you want more, or what you want less of? And that is it.

Stay tuned for Friday! Got a really cool RTF - coming to Real Talk Friday, for those of you who aren't in the know. And listen, have a great week! Put this into play, get some results! Start to learn what you're missing!

Even if you give up halfway, because you're just like "Man, I just don't know how to do this!", at least try! Because you will get, if you do any of it, you're going to learn something that's going to take you to the next level! And you can get to the next level! You can do this! That's the thought I want to leave you with, love your lots! Speak to you on Friday. Have an amazing week and talk to you soon.