Podcast Transcription: Unstoppable in 2025: Part 3 – The Simple 6-Step Nutrition Plan for Men Over 40 to Lose Fat Without Sacrificing the Foods You Love

Ted Ryce: What is up and welcome back to the new year, new you series 2025. I want to set you up for having the best year of your health in this series. And if you haven't listened to my first episode on mindset, I really recommend that you start their mindset is the foundation. And if you're like how I used to be and you roll your eyes, when you hear that term, right, mine's, Oh yeah, whatever. 

Just tell me what to do. Definitely go back because you have a mindset issue. Okay. Took me a long time to realize I had that, but go back, listen to the mindset because it's going to set you up. And if you, and this is how you know, you have a mindset issue with health and fitness. Do you start something, but end up stopping because you get too busy? 

Do you end up hurting yourself with workouts because you want to get in shape super fast? Do you try strict fad diets, even though you know, you couldn't keep them up for more than a few months? Let alone the rest of your life. Go back and listen to that. Then the second one is exercise. That's the first place I recommend people start when they're getting Hold of their health and want to make a measurable difference. 

I go, go into why that is simply exercise pumps you up. I mean, I'm pumped. How do you think I have so much energy? Yes. Partly it's the two cappuccinos I had this morning. The other part though, is that I'm in shape. And I just have energy naturally because I've worked for it. So, so people start feeling better when they get in better shape physiologically, their brain works better, their energy levels are higher. 

They have more mitochondria. So focus then. But today we're going to focus on nutrition and I want to tell you something. I've been in this business 25 plus years now, almost 26 years. Gosh, the time keeps going. It doesn't stop, does it? So you don't have time to, to mess around here, get in shape. So I used to think I knew a ton about nutrition and the reason I thought that was because I knew a bunch terminology. 

I knew complicated words. And I really convinced myself that I knew a lot back when I started and I would argue with people and to win the argument, I would use complicated physiological terms. I don't do that anymore because I ended up getting fat in my mid thirties. And what I thought about nutrition, by the way, I was a low carb, pretty staunch, low carb for at least 10 years. 

Of course, yeah, I would binge eat carbohydrates and sweets, topic for another time. But now, now I don't think that way. And I am, I come across a little bit cocky sometimes, perhaps, depending on how sensitive your cockiness meter is about nutrition. And the reason is now because I don't read popular diet books. 

I don't pay attention to influencers. Actually, I do pay attention to a couple, but even the people who I pay attention to, what I do is, okay, is this person better at reading research than me? Okay, cool. Then I'm going to let them break things down. I'm going to listen to them, but I don't read popular diet books. 

I don't go to influencers for information. I read studies and more importantly, I implement things with my clients and myself and get results. So when it comes to nutrition, If you're in a Western English speaking country, like the United States, where most of my clients come from, you got to probably got a belly fat issue, body fat issue. 

You got to get rid of the belly. And what I want to tell you is I'm going to tell you some things to do. I want you, if you believe me, if you trust in me, then just follow what I'm going to share with you in this episode and enjoy the results. You're welcome. However, if you listen to this and you're like, no, Ted, I heard someone say someone, something else, and I don't believe, okay, cool. 

Prove me wrong. Not by. Counter arguing with something someone else said, follow what I'm going to share, see if it doesn't get you results, and then we can talk about it. Prove me wrong. So let's get into it. Step one, the power of tracking nutrition. This is the thing that was so hard for me to learn because I didn't believe in calories. 

Like it's the tooth fairy or something. Like it's Santa Claus. I didn't believe that calories mattered. Now it's the number one thing I talk about. And I always bring back to bring my clients back to calories. They're like, Oh, but the protein and the nutrients and the sodium, how many calories are you eating? 

Because the most important thing you can do with your, with your nutrition, one of the most important, there's some nuance here, but is to lose excess body fat. Excess body fat causes insulin resistance. It's what leads to diabetes. In fact, how to reverse diabetes, you lose excess body fat. So this is metabolic health is one of the biggest issues facing people, the facing the world, really. 

But in particular Americans, 70 percent of people are either diabetic or pre diabetic. A lot of people don't even know it because their doctors don't run advanced testing because you'll, you would have to pay for it. So anyway, what I want you to do, get on board with this, at least to test it. What gets measured, gets managed. 

Most people fail at fat loss because they have no clue how many calories they're eating. They'll say something like, well, um, I'd hardly eat, but I can't gain, but I can't lose weight. Okay. What did you have this morning? Why? I went to Starbucks. I had a muffin. That was 400 calories. I'm saying that they're not saying that. 

And then I had a frappuccino. So it was like 1200 calories, right? The 800 calorie frappuccino or 600 calories. And then the muffin was 400 calories. They think they're not eating that much because what they say, what they think is that the volume of food that I ate wasn't that big. I mean, if we measured, if we, you know, measured the three dimensional space that the things that I just ate take up, that's hardly anything. 

And they're right. But that's not what calories are. You can have a huge meal. Okay. Of chicken breast and broccoli, that old chicken breast and broccoli, and it will be 300 calories. And you can have like what I ate the other day, actually it was not the other day, it's back in Portugal. I'm in Buenos Aires now, but when I was in Lisbon, Portugal, I bought a chocolate bar. 

It was 500 calories and change. And after I ate the whole thing in one sitting, actually probably took me five minutes to eat, seven minutes to eat the whole thing. It did nothing to fill me up. So understand you don't know how many calories you're eating and that is the issue. So what do we do with that? 

Start with my fitness pal. What I want you to do, go to your phone right now, unless you're driving or bench pressing, right? Download it and upgrade to premium because premium will allow you to simplify tracking, set up your profile. But what I want you to do, ignore the default calorie recommendations. 

They're not right. And what is tracking work? Because it starts to educate you. What I say is this, imagine going jeans shopping and you're like looking for a pair of jeans. Well, you could go to Levi's and pick something up for 50 bucks. Or you can go into Bruno Cuccinelli's and pick up a pair of jeans for a thousand bucks. 

And what I tell people, what I tell my clients, it's like, imagine going shopping for pants, but not looking at the price tag of what you're buying. People don't look at the price tag of the food. And what I mean at the price tag, because people Very much are money conscious when it comes to the food they buy, but they're not conscious of the caloric cost. 

That's how I like to think of it. There's a cost to eating certain foods and a candy bar or a bar of chocolate will cost you 500 calories. And it's not going to do anything for your hunger. So tracking creates accountability. It's like managing a budget. It ensures that, you know, what's coming in because most people don't. 

Right. And ironically, a lot of, I get a lot of financial guys and CPAs guys who run financial, uh, businesses, investors, and wealth management guys. And CPAs, they do awesome at this because with all the talk about the complicated physiology behind nutrition and fat loss, really, it's just a math equation. 

You need to manage the budget. So if you're good with numbers, you're going to be good with this. If you're not good with numbers, well, you know, you're going to have to step your game up if you want to be lean and still fit in the foods that you love. So step two, now that you have premium, my fitness pal downloaded and no, I don't get a kickback from them just in case someone says something like that. 

I don't have any affiliate code or anything like that. I just use it personally and I use it. Uh, my clients use it as well. Now we're going to set up the calories. So a very simple formula for starting calories is to multiply your body weight by 10. So if you weigh 200 pounds, then you're going to shoot for 2000 calories. 

If you weigh 2, 500, 2, 500 pounds, hopefully not. If you weigh 250 pounds, you're going to start with 2, 500 calories. If you weigh 150 pounds, you're going to start with 1, 500 calories. Because the key to fat loss is simply a calorie deficit. Fat loss happens when you burn more than you consume. Period. 

Exercise helps. But trying to outrun eating too many calories is trying to empty a swimming pool with a bucket. It just doesn't take enough water out. Okay. It just doesn't take, it doesn't balance out the calories. You're talking about a couple hundred calories burned in a workout versus 300 calories burned in the one minute of eating a slice of pizza. 

It's just really hard to out exercise your diet. In fact, what ends up happening usually for people who exercise a lot, the exercise just regulates their hunger. So story for another time. But the point is create a calorie deficit by adjusting your nutrition first and worrying about exercise later. So one thing with this, what we're looking for is around one pound of fat loss per week, or, you know, you're probably not going to be going and getting a DEXA scan every week. 

So you can use the scale. A lot of people hate the scale. Reality is the scale is it's not perfect. There's issues with it because it doesn't, when you lose weight, you're not sure what you're losing. And also there's fluctuation that happens. However, Looking at the trend over a week timeframe because you were weighing in every day or almost every day, you can miss a day here and there if you forget, but that's what we're after here. 

Losing around a pound a week. That's not good progress. That's great progress. So now that we've, now that we understand the power of tracking nutrition, now that you've downloaded my fitness pal and upgraded a premium, now that you've set your calories for fat loss. We're going to prioritize protein. So what I want you to do is first understand why protein is key for fat loss. 

It preserves muscle mass during a calorie deficit, because going back to that idea that weight isn't a perfect metric and we don't know what you're losing, what we have to do is we have to do certain things so that we can make sure that we're losing fat and not losing muscle. It's one of the big issues with The new medications like Ozempic, Moncharo, the GLP 1 agonists. 

One of the criticisms, although, you know, it really has more to do with people's lifestyle choices, not necessarily the medication, a lot of people end up losing muscle mass. And if you lose muscle mass, there's a high degree of you regaining the weight. So what we can do nutritionally is to make sure that we prioritize protein. 

Also, protein keeps hunger in check. When it's from a whole food source. And it also increases the calorie burn versus the thermic effect of food. So up to 20 or even 30 percent of protein calories are burnt in digestion. So how much protein do you eat then? Well, if you're obese and if you're not sure if you're obese, because some people aren't, they think, Oh, I'm not obese. 

It's like, no, you're obese. You, you just, you're just around people who are even fatter than you. So you think that you're not obese, but they're really obese and you're just moderately obese. So, uh, do, do your BMI height, weight, Google, or duck, duck, go, whatever you're into, put in your height, five 11, I would put in your weight one 85 in my case and type in BMI. 

And you'll come up with a BMI calculator. Or just Google be in my calculator and figure it out. So if you're overweight or obese, what do you want to shoot for somewhere in the neighborhood of 0. 5 to 0. 7 ground grams of protein per pound of body weight, if you're normal weight, I would say one gram per pound of body weight is where you want to be. 

So, um, for example, a 200 pound overweight person, you want to target somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred to 140 grams per day. And if you're normal weight. 200 pound person, then shoot for 200 because the leaner you are, the higher risk of muscle mass loss. So we want to up the protein to counteract that. 

And that's what I want you to set. Now that you've figured that out, I want you to set that protein target in my fitness pal so that you're tracking it. Because what here's what people do. Oh, I eat protein. I had three eggs today. There ain't much protein in three eggs. Sorry to tell you, you're not even getting 20 grams of protein with three eggs. 

Okay, so you need to start tracking this stuff because people think they know a lot about nutrition, but they think qualitatively about nutrition. Oh, eggs are a good source of protein. No, they're not. They're 60 percent fat. That's not a good source of protein. Okay. Again, you can make an argument there, but it's something that 60 percent something else is not what I would call a good source of whatever that thing is. 

For, and this is a example that I use with my clients. If you and I have a business and you own 60 percent of it and I own 40, whose business is that really? And they're like, oh, okay. I get it now. It's like, yeah, it's yours. Okay. So it's really a good source of fat, a better source of fat. It's not a bad source of protein, but it's a better source of fat. 

Okay. If you want to use qualitative terms, I personally like to use numbers. And so what you're going to do to hit this Is yeah, you can have whole eggs. It's not that you have to take them out. Yes, you can have ribeye steak again, roughly, you know, 40 to 60 percent fat, depending on, um, you know, various things, various aspects, like how fat was the cow, right? 

So basically, you're going to have to track things to make sure you're hitting this target. However, you can use yeah. Whatever foods you want, you can still eat what you want if you love ribeye steaks and eggs, but make sure you learn how to get the right amount of protein in while still hitting your calories. 

So use tracking to learn the protein content of your favorite protein sources. And I think you're going to be surprised. So step four is to balance carbs and fat. And here's what I want to tell you. We used to think that low carb was the key to fat loss. It's not. In fact, the more recent studies that have, it's not just because they're recent, but they started. 

Doing a few things differently because in the past, when I was coming up in my nutrition world, my nutrition education, it was all about low carb. And we started getting studies that said, yes, low carb diets lead to fat loss and not just weight loss because you lose water initially when you go on a low carb diet, but they measured fat loss. 

Then here's what happened. The researchers conducting nutrition research on fat loss and macronutrient ratios, they started equalizing protein. And when they did this, No difference. So if you think you need to eat a certain amount of carbs or fat, or you need to cut out it, none of that matters. It, this is about total calories is the number one thing. 

The second thing is protein because it helps you maintain muscle mass because it has a higher thermic effective digestion. And so what I want you to do is fill in the rest. Of your macronutrients with carbs and fat, but it doesn't matter what you set them to because if you're like most people, some days you're gonna eat more fat. 

Some days you're gonna eat more carbs. Some days are gonna be pretty balanced. So don't even worry about it. Just find what works for you based on energy levels, preferences and lifestyle. And only focus on total calories and protein. Don't micromanage macros, no micromanaging. It is a waste of time. And you can say, Oh man, I overate fat. 

When my clients tell me that I'm like, yeah, but how'd you do with your calories? Oh, my calories are on point. Then who cares? No, but no, no, no, but no, shut up and just focus on I don't tell my clients to shut up. But since you know, we're having this conversation, stop worrying about that stuff. Focus on total calories and protein. 

So by now you should have my fitness pal upgraded to premium. You should have figured out, okay, my weight times 10 gives me my starting place for fat loss calories. Uh, you know, depending on if I'm overweight or normal weight, somewhere in the neighborhood of 0. 5 to 0. 7 grams of body weight per pound of body weight for protein to do the math there. 

Or if you're normal weight, somewhere in the neighborhood of 0. 7 to one. Of, uh, protein per pound of body weight if you're normal weight, so you have your starting there. Just fill in the rest of the calories how you want. Doesn't matter. Now we're getting into what does matter. Step five is when it comes to your food choices, you want to people say, well, just eat whole foods. 

I don't like that because nutrition is more complicated. It's more nuanced because you might say, well, are cashews whole foods? Yeah. I mean, they're a little bit processed. You got to get the cashew cashews come from cashew fruit, by the way, they're not even really a nut, but, um, story for another time. And they're from Brazil and the cashew fruit is quite good. 

It's kind of weird, but I digress. What really matters here is foods that satisfy your hunger. I'm going to say it again. Don't focus on whole foods. That's not specific enough. Focus on foods that satisfy your hunger. So, what's a good place for that? Well, what I want you to do is Google the satiety index or duck, duck, go, whatever you're into again, satiety index. 

And when you see that, you're going to see that foods like boiled potatoes and fruits like oranges and lean proteins are the most filling according to the satiety index. Of course, there's going to be some personalization here. For example, on the satiety index, it says that ice that croissants satiating food. 

And ice cream is better at satiety than croissants. That is not my personal experience. Croissants. Uh, I eat regularly, but ice cream, I can't, I have to be really careful. I don't eat a lot of ice cream because I mean, you give me a gallon of ice cream. I'm going to try to finish the thing. It's like crack cocaine and food in food, uh, form for me. 

Okay. So ice cream, I love ice cream, especially Italian gelato, but yeah, I can control myself with. With croissants, but not ice cream. So there's some personalization that needs to happen, but the satiety index, for example, boiled potatoes that score off the chart, that's going to be, that works for most people. 

Okay. That works for most people. And so the satiety index by, by the way, just to talk about it a little bit more, What it really comes down to is that the volume of food matters the most for satiety. And that's why low calorie, high volume foods like cabbage, like watermelon, like strawberries, like low calorie soups can help fill you up without blowing your calorie budget. 

So what's a practical example of that? Um, if you look at the satiety index, which you should have Googled and be, you know, you should be looking at it by now, compare boiled potatoes, Which score off the chart on the satiety index with french fries find french fries down in the hyper palatable foods You'll see that is quite low in satiety. 

But think about this same base ingredient But vastly different hunger outcomes due to the processing and added fat It is not carbs people say Oh avoid carbs Okay. What are carbs? Oh, cookies, ice cream, cake. And this is where the ignorance, it just, this is, you got to pull yourself out of the ignorance because when you start tracking, you'll see that a lot of cookies, they're either equally high in fat. 

And I'm talking about the calories coming from fat. Not just how many grams of fat. That's the important distinction here. So you'll see that there's as many calories coming from fat as from sugar. Same thing with cake, same thing with ice cream. In fact, a lot of times it's more fat. So this is not to say that fat is bad, but it's also not to say that carbs are bad or even sugar's bad. 

Because do we see people, do you spoon, do you know anyone who spoon feeds themselves sugar? Probably not. But you know, people who just can't control themselves when it comes to French fries or cookies. So again, same base ingredient, but vastly different hunger outcomes due to processing and added fat. So the combination is low protein, highly processed, I should say, low protein, high in carbs, high in fat. 

That is, those are the foods that you got to watch out for. So step six is troubleshooting. So here's some common challenges and fixes for fat loss. So let's say that you're doing everything that I said, you've got your calories dialed in and my fitness pal, you have the right amount of protein set in your macronutrients. 

You set your carbs and your fat to whatever, you know, looked right to you based on how many calories you had left over after setting your protein. And now what it is, you lost some pounds, but then weight loss stalls. So what you need to do is one, track more carefully, make sure you're weighing your food. 

Does that sound like intense? Does that sound over the top? Well, let me ask you this. When you cook a cake, when you bake a cake or make lasagna, do you pay attention to how much you of the ingredients you add? Do you just throw a bunch of pasta to make a lasagna and a bunch of cheese and a bunch of tomato sauce? 

Like you didn't measure it out. No, of course you measured it out because there's a specific recipe that leads to the desired result. I eat delicious lasagna or delicious cake. You don't just pour milk, sugar, cream, eggs, whatever, flour, all together to make a cake. You use specific amounts. Why? Because the end result is not going to be good. 

And what I'm trying to tell you is tracking and weighing your food for, you know, you don't have to do it for the rest of your life, but just, As in cooking, like maybe you don't have to weigh things and measure things as closely when you first started cooking, but initially you had to, well I'm giving you the recipe for fat loss, but you need to kind of adjust it, right? 

So track carefully, weigh things, and what you might have to do is you might have to adjust your calories downward, or review the portion sizes of the foods that you eat, which will adjust your calories. So another hunger issue is, uh, another issue is hunger. So let's say you're doing everything right. 

You're losing fat, but you are hungry. So here's what I would tell you. You need to start looking at the food choices that you're making, review the satiety index, start choosing foods that are higher in satiety. And of course, start to personalize this. So that you have your own satiety list, high satiety food list. 

Another thing is you might want to reduce exercise volume. If you feel like you're getting hungry due to the amount of exercise you're doing, because what a lot of people do when they start losing fat or get on a fat loss phase is they exercise as much as possible and try to cut calories as much as possible. 

And this leads to this. This, uh, conflict between like, oh yeah, um, I got to exercise a lot. Oh, but now I'm hungry, but I'm supposed to keep my calories low, but now I'm having a hard time doing it. So what I would tell you is if you're running into this, start to reduce the amount of exercise you're doing. 

And of course, prioritize weightlifting. I feel that cardio jacks up my hunger, raises my hunger more than weightlifting. Yeah. Weightlifting just isn't that intense if you're doing it right, not turning it into a CrossFit workout. Another thing you can do is drink more water and or add low calorie soups. 

This is a game changer because drinking water sometimes doesn't feel that filling, but you can have a low calorie soup and it'll be, it'll be a significant amount of soup. And then you look at the calories. It's like 50 calories. And these soups, they can be the instant soups. I'm here in Buenos Aires right now. 

It's very hard to find like prepared low calorie soups, but they have instant soups. Yeah, they're high in sodium. So what I'm, I'm in a fat loss phase, probably not something that I need to worry about. Okay. And I say, probably it's not something that you need to worry about. If you're losing fat, that's going to. 

Offset any negative effects that will happen due to the sodium, unless your doctor says otherwise. Another thing that happens is this. Let's say your weight isn't changing or it's not changing fast, but for some reason, your pants don't fit anymore. Like you literally have to cinch up the belt. Well, celebrate the progress because this means that the muscle is not replacing fat, but you're starting to grow muscle, which is leading to an increase or slowing of weight loss. 

Think about this because I tell my clients often, you're not in a weight loss program. You're in a fat loss program and in a fat loss, a weight loss program. You want to lose as much weight as possible in a fat loss program. You want to lose the least amount of weight possible while losing as much fat as possible. 

If that's a bit of a twist and you need to think about that for a moment, that is what we're after here, because what's going to happen. Think about this. Let's say you lose. This happened to a client. Let's say you lose four and a half pounds in four months. I'm sorry. In two months, this happened to my client. 

He lost four and a half pounds in two months. And imagine in those two months you worked hard. That sucks for progress. However, because we did a DEXA scan, he lost 10 pounds of fat and then put on six pounds of muscle. So what is the net change on the scale? Four pounds, but his pants were barely fitting him. 

He had to change his wardrobe from losing 10 pounds of fat and putting on 10 pounds, uh, I'm sorry, six pounds of muscle. So keep that in mind. Make sure. You track your progress. So scale, weight, weigh yourself every day, but take the weekly average, look for trends. It's like the stock market. You don't care what it does today. 

You don't care what it does tomorrow. You care. What is the trend? Monthly trend, yearly trend. 10 year trend, five year trend, of course, when it comes to stocks, but for, for weight, you're, you're, you're, you're concerned. What is your weekly average? What is that trend? Take waste measurements. Especially if that's where you put your weight for some women, it might be better to measure your hips. 

If you store your weight around the glute and hip area, but for most of the people I work with, who are mostly men, they keep their weight around their waist. So take waist measurements and also take before and after photos. And pay attention to how your clothes fit. That's everything. So let's just, so we went over the power of tracking because what gets measured gets managed. 

People think they know about nutrition, but if you're not losing fat and you're making good choices, you simply don't understand how many calories you're eating. So what you want to do, step two is setting your calories for fat loss. Get my fitness, bow, upgrade a premium, set your calories. Fat loss calories, 10 for every pound of body weight. 

So again, 200 pound person starts with a 2000 calorie day budget. Then you want to prioritize protein, set your protein based on whether you're obese, overweight or obese or normal weight. Then fill in the rest of the calories that you have left with carbs and fat doesn't matter when you're choosing the foods that you're going to eat to hit these targets, make sure you're focused on foods that satisfy your hunger, use the satiety index for that. 

And then, of course. It's normal to have challenges with that loss. My clients have challenges with that loss. So just be on top of it. You may need to adjust your calories or exercise. If your weight loss stalls, you're going to have to adjust your food choices. Or drink more water or add low calorie soups. 

If you're, if you get too hungry, if you're not losing weight, but you're losing inches, right, you need to track everything you need to make this data driven so that you get the results you want. Now, I know it might sound like a lot of work, but here's the thing. What if. All this work puts you in control like never before when it comes to your weight and your body fat and how you look because that's where I am. 

If I know exactly what to do, I'm never confused about what to do. Sometimes I'm more motivated, sometimes less like right now. I'm pretty motivated. I'm getting lean again, but I always know what to do. I'm never confused about what to do to lose fat. I know exactly what to do exactly what to change. If I hit a plateau. 

I'm And that doesn't just go with me happens with my clients to every time they have a problem. We have a conversation about it. We adjust the program and we find something that works for them so that they can continue getting results. So let me ask you, do you truly know how much you're eating and how it aligns with your goals? 

In terms of the calories, not just the amount, right? Not the food volume, but the amount of calories you're eating. And then what's one step you can take today. If, if this was a bit much for you, what's one step you can take that you heard? I'd prefer you to follow everything that I shared today. But for those of you who are like, Oh man, that's, that's too much for right now. 

Okay. Step by step it, download my fitness pal, setting your protein target, choosing high satiety foods. What's one thing that you can do to get you closer to achieving not just the body you want, but the health that is going to serve you longterm. That is it. Well, I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I hope this shed some light on not just why you haven't been losing fat, but giving you a step by step process. 

So that you can get into the best shape of your life, get leaner than ever before without giving you up your favorite foods and starting to put yourself in control of your weight and your body fat like never before. That is, that is what I do with my clients. And that, if you follow this plan that I've laid out for you, that's exactly what you're going to get. 

Hope you've enjoyed it. And I'll see you on the next episode.