Mastering Nutrition: A Comprehensive Guide to Staying Lean

I know how tough nutrition can be. People write to me all the time and they say, “Jeff, what can I do to get my diet in check? I’m not sure how to lose enough fat or enough weight to look the way I want.” Guys, if there’s one thing that I know how to do, it’s to be lean. It’s to get lean and, more importantly, to stay lean. I’m going to show you today and prove to you exactly why you might be thinking of all this the wrong way and give you a solution so that this might be the last video you ever need in terms of how to lose weight and how to approach a nutrition plan. And I say nutrition, not diet, for a key reason.

The 24-Hour Commitment

Now, what do these lines up here represent? These represent the 24 hours in a day that you and I have. Okay, now let’s say that we’re doing well and we’re sleeping for seven of those hours. Now, if I were to ask you to work out—because I’m going to, that’s part of the equation here—you’ve got to work out. And I mean strength train. Maybe you get yourself to the gym to do that, and it’s just one hour a day. It’s somewhere in that part of the day; it doesn’t matter. But when you talk about nutrition, it’s not just getting the dedication and commitment to show up for that one hour a day. It’s making sure that you have the dedication and commitment to do the right thing in every single other waking hour of the day. That’s a much larger commitment, hence why people fail quite often when they’re trying to do the right thing when it comes to nutrition and why we can’t get our weight under control.

Understanding the Right Approach

So what do we have to do about this big commitment? Because actually, some of us even extend this into the nighttime hours, getting up in the middle of the night and eating. It’s a problem. Well, I think we’re focusing on the wrong thing. So what is the right thing? A good friend of mine, Dr. Andrew Huberman, talks about a method for losing weight, and it really is simple. Right, this is not complicated. I didn’t say it was easy, but it’s not complicated. Simple. And he says in a diet plan, if you just focused on the following things: eating chicken, beef, fish, fibrous carbs (vegetables like cauliflower, broccoli, asparagus), fruit in unlimited amounts, coffee, tea, and water. Now, what’s missing from this? No alcohol, right? Obviously very low sugar. But if you were to just do this, you’re going to lose weight. There’s no doubt about it. It works every single time.

You’re actually built-in portion control here. You’re not going to eat 10 steaks. You’re not going to eat 10 fillets of fish. You’re not going to have tons and tons of vegetables; they’ll fill you up too fast. And don’t worry about fruit, guys. It’s so calorically low. Eating five bananas is not going to make you fat, okay, given the rest of your diet here. However, the problem is there’s a lot of deprivation in this, right? So my problem is that over time, while it will work, will it work long-term? And likely the answer is no. A lot of the restrictions are based around, again, we mentioned alcohol and carbs, or really starchy carbs, right? Probably put like starchy carbs. And I’ll throw another one in here that’s not present in Dr. Huberman’s diet recommendation but my own, and that would be fats. Because a lot of times we choose fats to be the target of our calorie deprivation to lose weight.

Ranking the Restrictions

If I were to rank these three things in terms of their ease of cutting them down, I’d start right there and say that dietary fats are going to be the ones that you and I could probably most live with because there are swaps that we can live with. If I said, “Hey, no fish and chips, but you can have salmon,” you could probably live with that. If I said to you, “Hey, no fettuccine Alfredo with tons of cream sauce, but you can have pasta with red sauce,” you could probably live with that once again because the carbs are involved. Or if I said to you, “No zesty creamy ranch dressing, but you could have olive oil and vinegar,” you could probably live with that too. You can live with cutting back the fats, and it’s going to help you because of the overloading calories that we get on a gram-per-gram basis with fat. It’s nine calories per gram. Okay, great.

Alcohol and Carbs: The Harder Cuts

The second easiest thing is going to be alcohol. Now, I say second easiest because you’re going to say right off the bat, but you don’t really need to drink alcohol. And as someone who has never really drank alcohol at all, it’s easy for me to say, but I also respect and understand the fact that a lot of people out there watching this do like to drink for a variety of reasons. They just like to drink socially, or they like to drink at celebrations. There’s a lot of reason to have alcohol as part of your normal diet plan, and I think that it’s something that we’re going to have a struggle with if I tell you you can’t do this at all, ever again, in order to remain lean.

The third thing, and the most important thing, and the most difficult thing you’re going to have a hard time with, is getting starchy carbohydrates out. Not only from the perspective of a trainer for elite athletes, I’m going to tell you it’s a very important part of fueling their performance, but beyond that, they’re the most satisfying foods. They’re the ones that we crave the most, and they don’t all have to be bad. We’re not talking about highly processed carbohydrates. Things like sweet potatoes, things like rice, pastas, as I mentioned, they’re not things that we necessarily want to avoid or take completely out of our nutrition plan.

Shifting Focus to Positive Actions

Now, I’ll ask you a question. If I gave you a choice of one or the other, if I said, “Hey, you can either take avocados out of your diet forever, or you could take bread out of your diet forever,” which one are you going to say? Likely, even those that like avocado would probably say, “But I really need my bread.” I don’t think this is where you want to go. However, I think what you need is a different approach, and that is let’s not focus over here right now. Let’s focus on the things that we need to start doing, the things that will help these things become much more controllable. Because if all you ever try to do is control the things that you can’t do—don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t do this—it becomes the thing that becomes more the object of your obsession even more, and it makes it harder and harder for you to not do those things.

Increasing Protein Intake

So, what do I want you to do? Here’s what I need you to do. First thing, protein. I need you to increase your protein intake. Now, what does that mean? 1 to 1.2 grams per pound of body weight because I’m assuming that you want to build muscle, you want to look good, you don’t want to just lose weight, but you want to look good too. So, 1 to 1.2 grams of protein per pound of body weight. For a 200 lb person, that’s 200 grams of protein at a minimum.

Training and Conditioning

Next thing, I want you to start training. I mentioned it before, but training comes in two different forms. I want you to do weight training, right? Strength training, resistance training. And I want you to do conditioning, cardio. I want you to do this about three times a week at a minimum for the weight training. I want you to do conditioning two times a week.

Prioritizing Sleep

Sleep. I want you to sleep. It’s not really a big ask, right? We all like to sleep at the end of the night, but I want you to get good quality sleep, and I want you to prioritize sleep. I’m not going to make a recommendation and say you need to get X hours of sleep a night because I really do believe that there are people out there that don’t need the same amount of sleep as others. I think that we can adequately recover, have good energy throughout the rest of the day or the next day, and have it be at a level of, let’s say, six hours versus eight hours for somebody else. I think this is a very individualistic number, but I think we all can agree that there is a bottom lower threshold that you don’t want to try to fool yourself into thinking you can get away with because I tried to do that too for a while. I thought that, “No, five hours is enough for me.” I think you need to prioritize your sleep. That means going to bed a little bit earlier each night, even if it means forgoing, for me, a West Coast basketball game that I want to watch to make sure I get that sleep in.

The Magic of Positive Actions

All right, so now here’s where the magic happens. If you focus on doing the good stuff, right? If you focus on the things you can do, these things become a lot more allowable and capable of being controlled. Because the one thing that’s missing here is you’re still going to need self-control or some degree of self-control to reintroduce these things. You’re going to want to reintroduce them. Remember, nothing long-term is going to succeed if it’s based on depriving yourself completely of these three things. I’m not saying you have to deprive yourself in order to be lean and, not to mention, to maintain optimal health. You have to have these two especially. So, the self-control comes in the following way:

If you increase your protein intake, the first thing that happens is the satiety that sets in in the meals that you have. You want to spread this across every single meal that you have in the day. So, some amount of protein. You can take that total amount that you calculated before, divide it by the number of meals you’re eating—three, four, five, or six. That’s the amount of protein you want to have each meal. That’s going to help you with your starchy carbohydrate intake because the satisfaction that comes from eating the protein, the fullness that you get, is going to help control the portion sizes of the starchy carbohydrates, knowing that you’re still eating the vegetables. We cover that in a whole plate division technique video that I can link at the end of this one if you want to know specifically how to do that.

Financial Commitment

The next thing is, even if you had to, let’s say you bought your protein, which we actually have a tremendous protein powder at Athlean-X. You would have a financial commitment to the goal. So now you’re thinking, “Okay, I got to make sure I use the thing that’s sitting on my counter there to actually put to use what I paid for.”

Benefits of Weight Training

Now, weight training. What does weight training do? Weight training increases the amount of lean muscle mass. The more lean muscle tissue you have, guess what? You have a greater depot for carbohydrates. It’s like increasing the storage space of your warehouse. Now you’ve got more room to store. The amount of muscle that you carry makes you more metabolically active throughout every single day. So, your basal metabolic rate will go up. The amount of calories that you burn just sitting down is going to be higher if you carry more muscle mass. That’s going to allow you to increase calories from any source here: calories from alcohol, calories from starchy carbohydrates, calories from fats.

Cardio Conditioning

The other thing that comes also from the weight training is with more metabolically active tissue from muscle, you’re going to have a higher insulin sensitivity. So, your reaction to the carbohydrates is not even as severe, better blood sugar control. Conditioning. Conditioning is going to also increase the number of calories that you burn just in a single session. Now, they’re not mind-blowing numbers if you’re not doing this for a long period of time or at a super high level of intensity, but they contribute in the long term. And if you start to introduce two sessions of cardio conditioning in a week that you haven’t been doing at all up till now, you’re going to accrue a lot of calories over the course of the year, meaning you’re going to be able to offset any of the reintroduction of these things that you’re really having a hard time avoiding right now.

Importance of Quality Sleep

And sleep. Sleep, we know, will improve a lot of things. Sleep is going to improve our entire body’s efficiency metabolically. We know that when you deprive someone of sleep, metabolically they see some negative effects to the point where they start to accumulate more body fat, especially around the midsection, when their sleep is impaired, mostly because of the impact on cortisol. So, all the positive effects that come from here allow for these things to be reintroduced. You don’t have to deprive yourself. Your long-term success relies on these things somehow being present to the amounts that you require to keep your sanity, but at the same time, you have to have that element of self-control to prevent overdoing it.

Achieving Long-Term Success

The self-control is going to come from doing the positive thing, not from taking away or threatening yourself with the repercussions of the negative. That’s not how you develop self-control. When you start to do these things, I promise you instantly you’re going to see changes in body composition that when you look in the mirror, you’re going to be rewarded for. You’re going to like what you see. And the fact that you bought a protein powder, that you showed up at the gym and put in the effort, that you showed up at the gym again and put in the effort, that you got to bed early—all those things that you know you’re putting in the effort for, you’re getting rewarded for by simply looking in the mirror and reaching the goals you haven’t been able to reach till this point. And when you get that, you become motivated, and the motivation becomes self-motivating to where that self-control becomes much more possible. And when you have self-control, you’re not going to have an issue with these things.

I’ve been eating carbs for 30 years, lots of them. I don’t have an issue with overeating them. I have healthy fats now back in my diet. I’m a lot healthier because of it. I don’t overeat them. I choose the right types of fats. I don’t go for the fried foods. I realize that that’s not the way to get to where I want to be. And when you find that solution, guys, that is the long-term fix. I promise you, I promise you, there’s no magic. I’ve done nothing magical here. I’ve never taken a steroid; I’ve never taken a drug. I don’t need assistance to do what I do. I literally am locked in here. People always wonder, “How do you do it?” Through unbelievable consistency. But the consistency doesn’t come from being some kind of a robot or a cyborg that can do these things that others can’t. It came from the fact that I adopted a plan that actually worked for me. I’m still able to reward myself in the ways that I need to reward myself mentally, but I still allow myself to achieve the things that I want to achieve physically. And when I get to that point, you can too. All this is going to become simple, guys, and I promise you, you’ll never ever have to seek out a diet plan or another eating video ever again because this is how you get there. The right approach, by flipping how you’re thinking about things, is going to get you where you need to be.

If you’re looking for a meal plan, guys, and how we do this day by day, specifically meal by meal, you can either check out the video I’m going to link that shows you my eating plan, or you can actually get the full eating plan over at athleanx.com. If you’re looking for more videos about how to get in shape and stay in shape forever, guys, that’s what this channel is about. Make sure you click subscribe, turn on your notifications, and never miss a video when we put one out. All right, guys, see you soon. Try this. I promise you it will work.

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