Stan Efferding
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
They take up a little space, just a pad of butter or a tablespoon of olive oil, even a healthy olive oil in preparation of your food. One tablespoon becomes two. That's 200 calories. Do that three times a day. That's 600. And it just accumulates very quickly, and so you have to be kind of careful about
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
about understanding how many calories are in your food, because if you're over consuming, even a healthy diet, even a healthy Mediterranean diet, I said, eating too much cheese and nuts, you know, they're very fatty and that while quite healthy, certainly quantity matters. And so I do want people to become aware of the foods that they're eating.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
My clients send me a picture of each meal that they eat every day. It takes them five seconds. And that gives me an opportunity to see exactly what they're eating, make recommendations based on that.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
There's going to be, you're going to have some level of comfort or discomfort, but that process is going to require that you understand that your client is going to need to be able to make this part of a lifestyle that's sustainable in order for them to do that. They can't constantly be thinking about food.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
I agree. And the big thing there, which I think you're segwaying into, is the energy expenditure side of the equation, which is your exercise. There's many benefits to the exercise, although I've often said that the diet... the calories that you eat are the vast majority of your weight gain or weight loss. That exercise is great for your health. And it's also very good for satiety.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Getting 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 steps a day actually helps satiate you. And lifting weights actually helps you increase your metabolism and store carbohydrates and reduce your blood sugars throughout the day. So all of those things are important. Yes. Thinking you can Burn calories through exercise to lose weight is not a very successful strategy. And I'll tell you why. The reasons are many fold.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
One, you can eat a lot more calories than you can burn. I mean, you can train hard for an hour and a small peanut butter and jelly sandwich would wipe that out or one donut. So it's as far as the math goes, it's not a great strategy to oftentimes when you try and aggressively work out compensation takes over whereby you get tired. I call it battle ropes and burpees.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
You got a coach that wants to blow his whistle and make you breathe hard and sweat. And you leave the gym knowing that you trained hard, but you go home and you sit more and eat more. Part of the energy expenditure side of the equation is what's called non-exercise activity thermogenesis.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And that's where just things like just being on your feet more, just blinking and moving around and cleaning the house and just non-exercise activity. What you see as exercise activity increases, non-exercise activity may decrease. So it kind of becomes a bit of a zero-sum game for some people. You'll burn a few calories, but it's not significant enough
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
The third problem is that if that exercise that you're doing to burn calories isn't enjoyable or sustainable, you'll stop doing it in a very short period of time. As we spoke about, you know, dietary adherence, exercise adherence. Say the best diet is the one you'll follow. Say the best exercise is the one you'll do.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
So I don't believe in prescribing per se, you know, 40 minutes on the treadmill if that's not something somebody enjoys or will consistently do or will be sacrificed for some other activity. A thing that catches them off guard during the day, you know, family obligations, kids, et cetera, working late. I'd rather have them find some sort of activity they enjoy.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
So these satiety signals, this hunger dysregulation, I hate to bring this up right off the bat, but what has made this even more obvious is these new medications, the GLP-1 agonist, the semaglutide, Wagoviozempic, What they are very successful at doing, and this isn't an endorsement by any means, there's certainly pros and cons to any medication.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And it could be a different activity, whether it's pickleball or tennis or they like to go play basketball or like to. Go to a Zumba class. I don't care. I'm not particular. I think exercise is great for your health, but it needs to be done consistently.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And as you know, and as many guests who have been on your show have said, I do think we finally reached the point at which everyone understands and everyone has loudly spoken about the importance of some sort of resistance training. And that might not be enjoyable. Some people really hate that.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And even when I've got a client and I'm taking them to the gym for the first time that don't enjoy lifting, my first goal is to set them up on some sort of program that they enjoy. Do they like the exercise? Does it give them some sort of loading? It doesn't have to be a squat or a bench or a deadlift. It can be any type of exercise. The machines are fine. Body weight's fine.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Anything you can do to challenge the muscles and progress that over time. is very important as we know now.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
But what they're very successful at doing is interrupting food noise. They suppress hunger. And that's why people who go on these medications experience such an incredible success. Average long term weight loss, dietary adherence over two years and in multiple human studies is about two percent weight loss. Not significant. After two years, losing weight isn't that hard.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Absolutely. Yeah. And I ask those questions. When I work with a client, I send them a detailed questionnaire and ask them what kind of what their personal preferences are. Even send them a list, a very long list of foods and have them rank them from one zero to 10 as to which foods they like to eat. I'm not going to give somebody a diet that has foods in there that they don't enjoy.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Having said that, as you just mentioned, oftentimes people don't want to count calories, but calories do count. The types of foods count. And we talked about switching away from ultra processed foods into more whole foods that helps with satiety. Talked about getting sufficient fruits and vegetables. So you go from calories down to macronutrients down to micronutrients.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And many years ago, there were a lot of folks posting about flexible dieting. And I think it kind of got bastardized into protein powders and pop tarts. After a while, as long as you were getting the right number of calories and adequate protein, you could eat anything you wanted. And I think it was a straw man. It was a misrepresentation of what was intended.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
But satiety signaling is hugely important, which is why you have to start picking those foods that we mentioned, lean proteins, fruits and vegetables, fibers, etc., And then you can include some of your favorite foods. Some people can. Now, what you just said was very interesting. You said that some of your clients can't eat those kinds of foods because they end up binging.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
You know, what's the Pringles commercial? Once you pop, you can't stop. I've had clients. I've told them, why don't you incorporate, you know, a measure of some of your favorite foods into your diet? And they said, oh, no, if I eat one, I'm going to eat the whole bag. And you have to be sensitive to the fact that that's the type of individual that can't stop.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Most people go on a diet, lose weight initially, but gaining it back is the problem. The vast majority gain back. As much, if not more, over 50% for the first year and somewhere north of 80, as much as 95% within two to three years of the weight is gained back. Long-term dietary adherence, about a 2% weight loss on average over two years.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And so what we often have to do is find swaps. You're more likely to eat these kinds of foods at night. You know, Netflix in the evening and you're relaxing. It's kind of that hedonic behavior of just chewing and it might not even be the eating. You might not even be hungry. It's not just hunger that drives people to eat. It could be boredom. It could be stress release.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
It could be childhood trauma, social situations. There's a whole bunch of different reasons why people eat food. And if you're just sitting in front of the TV at night and that becomes something to pass your time, now what's available in the house? And here's where we try and create strategies, again, satiety strategies that help people stay on their diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And so not only do you have to get rid of the things that you're typically overeating that are hyperpalatable to processors like the ice cream. I mean, that's just going to kill you. And if it's sitting there in the freezer, which we learned over COVID as people were sitting in their houses, you're going to eat it.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Uh, so you have to create barriers to entry where if you're going to eat ice cream, you probably should have to get in the car and drive somewhere to get it, which is unlikely to happen in your underwear or with a remote control at the nine 30 at 10 o'clock at night. But you have swaps available. You need to have something in the refrigerator.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And what I commonly recommend is the lower calorie, higher protein foods, uh, One of my favorites is Greek yogurt and berries. You can devour a lot of that and not consume nearly the calories that you would consume from ice cream. You get a cold Greek yogurt, which we've seen in the literature now.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Dr. Stu Phillips, a professor at McMaster University, just recently published some good information saying that dairy has an independent beneficial effect on BMI and performance. And it's an independent effect of protein. It's a dairy effect. And so I do incorporate, and there's the calcium benefit as well. And then the Greek yogurt, of course, has the
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
The fermentation benefit where the Sonnenberg trials out of Stanford showed that 100% of their patients or their study subjects who consumed fermented foods had an improvement in gut microbiome diversity and density. Greek yogurt kind of fits the bill for so many reasons. It's satiating as well. That protein breaks down a little slower.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
The casein protein in dairy breaks down a little slower, so when you go to bed at night, it doesn't tend to raise your body temperature as much as, say, a steak would. That's not that steak's bad. That would be a perfect reference to me that you eat lean proteins at night rather than ice cream. So we work out swaps. A pound of strawberries is only 130 calories.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Uh, but one little pint of Haagen-Dazs is 800 calories. And I know that because I used to eat a pint a night when I was trying to gain weight to get up to 300 pounds as a power lifter. And so, uh, we, we create swaps where you can eat, sit there and eat, uh, as you might normally do, but eat foods that don't have as many calories.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
I think we mentioned earlier something like, uh, you know, popcorn even, uh, it kind of depends on what's on it. Air pop popcorn is a good fiber. It's a, it's a good something to satisfy that kind of, uh, that need to kind of sit there and crunch and eat while you're watching TV. Uh, but what's on it, uh, you know, those popcorns with coconut oil at Costco or 1500 calories a bag.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
With Wegovia and Ozempic, the semaglutide suppressing hunger signaling, the average sustainable weight loss was 17%. Terzepatide was 23%. So you can see how significant the difference is, and the major signal there is suppression of hunger. And I can give you some tools that we use to help manage hunger based on our experience with randomized controlled trials.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And so you gotta be cautious that, uh, you know, what, if you're putting any butter or oil on those things. And, um, another one I like is, uh, sometimes beef jerky, um, particularly, um, The kinds that are low in sugar and low in fat, then you have that, again, that chewing mechanism and you got a higher protein item.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
If you're going to have a snack, you want it to be lower in calories and still satisfy your chewing and if it's hunger that's driving. All of those are options that you can use to replace high-calorie foods with low-calorie foods. and use them as swaps in moments like those when you might overeat.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Yeah, the challenge is we go back to the fact that the most convenient, tastiest foods tend to be the highest in calories and they're easier to overconsume. So people get up in the morning and they'll eat, you know, pastries or pancakes with syrup or something on them. It's just a lot of high calorie foods.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And usually I know people think that it's sugar, but, uh, you know, obviously sugar laden drinks and, and candies are, are, can add to that equation. But the, the, the, the worst ones are the ones that are a combination of sugar and fat because they're the highest calorie things that you can over consume. Uh, and the drinks, you know, drinking calories, not a great idea.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
I talked about the vanilla latte at 700 calories. We talked about sodas, um, and you know, I've got to find swaps for those, you know, try and find a, A low-calorie caffeine drink or an iced tea, try and find even a diet soda.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
I know that creates a whole lot of consternation amongst the Internet folks, but when you're replacing a high-calorie sugar drink with something that satisfies your taste, we see in the research that people lose weight under those scenarios. And so it's kind of a matter of meeting the client where they're at. I mentioned not wanting to too aggressively change someone's diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
You're setting yourself up for failure when you do that. And I also mentioned the same thing with exercise. People get all gung-ho and they want to start these really aggressive programs and they abandon those because either take too much time or it's too much energy and it's just not something they enjoy. And if you do that, you're going to abandon the program and people just won't stick to it.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
They're setting themselves up for failure. So we make small changes. to their habits and provide them some of these, you know, I don't like to call them hacks as biohacking has kind of got a bad name in the industry now. People claiming that these little tricks are more meaningful than they are because the fundamentals are still what's most important.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And I also find that meal prepping or having some consistent system in place. So you get up in the morning and having the most convenient, quickest, preferable on the list of acceptable choices available for you, whether it's buying meal prep or whether it's meal prepping your own meals,
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
We see that in all the research to be, it's one of the things that bodybuilding, figure physique, bikini wellness competitors have done for decades that drives their success. They plan their meals in advance so that if you open their fridge when you're hungry and don't know what it is you're gonna eat, you tend to pick things that are what you want to eat and you overeat them.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
The same thing's true if it's lunchtime and you haven't prepared and next thing you know you're ordering something off of a menu or you're going to a fast food place. you tend to pick the foods that you're hungry for and you will overconsume them.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Yeah, I started a meal prep company for that reason. I prepped my own meals for decades. And when I was able to, I started a meal prep company. I contracted with a co-packer that was able to make my menu for me and ship it to my house and I just kept it in my freezer. So, uh, and now I distribute those meals nationwide under the vertical diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And again, it's, it's not a shameful, uh, uh, advertising scheme here. I just, uh, I, it's very effective whether you use, uh, you know, whether you do it yourself, whether we prep or you prep or you use a local meal prep company, I don't care. It's a very effective method.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Number one for managing hunger is probably going to be eating more whole foods and less ultra-processed foods. That's become quite obvious. We have studies now showing that people tend to eat as many as 500 extra calories a day when they're eating ultra-processed, hyper-palatable, calorie-dense foods. It's important that I make the distinction that it's all three of those things.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And that's conservative. Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
was bodybuilding and powerlifting back and forth since 1988. And I was kind of a skinny kid. In college, I was 140 pounds and I was 18 years old. And so I spent some of the first many years of my competitive career, bodybuilding and powerlifting, just trying to gain weight. And I have a lot of clients out there.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
This includes Lane Johnson from the Philadelphia Eagles, who was 312 pounds and needed to be 330 pounds. Um, it includes John Jones, who was a 205 pound in a UFC heavyweight or light heavyweight champion. And he wanted to bulk up to heavyweight champion at 250. So I do have clients, strong men, the world's strongest man, Mitchell Hooper, of course, is a client of mine and Haftor Bjornsson.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
They worked with Brian Shaw. Those are all world's strongest men as well as power lifters. So that was one aspect of what I did. I worked with people who were trying to bulk and I bulked ultimately up to over 300 pounds at one point in my career, but I also dieted. I dieted down to single digit body fat as a bodybuilder to get on stage as shredded as possible.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And of course, I've worked with Olympia competitors, men and women, both Nadia Wyatt, who took third in the Miss Olympia and trained with Flex Wheeler for many years. And so I've helped people diet. I've worked with a 97 pound ballerina from the Sacramento Ballet Company. So I've worked with a lot of different men and women trying to gain and lose weight.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And throughout my career, I've had to do both. I've had to bulk up and I've had to diet down. So I have some unique experience, obviously personal experience, but I also partnered with many years ago, Dr. Damon McCune, who's a PhD in exercise physiology. He's a registered dietitian who was director of dietetics at UNLV.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And we carefully went through all the recommendations that we made and make sure that they were science-based and provided, uh, links to peer reviewed, published research videos and articles. So everybody that reads our information has access to, you know, the science behind it.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
The big things I learned about bulking was, uh, I, I ate too and too big of a calorie surplus and I gained too much fat at times, which ultimately you just have to die at all office and athlete. Um, and so I, my biggest thing now is to use a smaller surplus to take a longer time course to try and gain as much muscle and as little fat as possible. So that was the biggest thing that I learned there.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
I was doing the, the, uh, uh, the seafood diet, eat every time you see food, it was the gallon, a whole milk a day. And, uh, I used to drink these shakes at night, uh, with, uh, uh, ice cream and, and protein powder and, uh, you know, banana and the whole nine yards. And there would be these giant 1500 calorie shakes that I would slog down.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Whey protein isolate is ultra-processed, but it's not hyper-palatable or calorie-dense. And so the processing itself isn't really what drives weight. uh, those foods to be over consumed. It's the kind of the combination of sugars, fats, and salt calorie density, um, and hyper palatability. And those are, you know, it's not like we don't know what those are.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Uh, it didn't matter whatever it was, pasta, pizza, pancakes, you know, whatever it was just to drive calories. And I found that wasn't a very effective method. I got fatter, and it was very hard to get down all the food, and it caused a lot of digestive distress and diarrhea and soft stool, things that I often see with bulking athletes, a lot of problems with digestion.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And then when I would diet down, I would over-restrict. I would eliminate things like red meat, things like dairy, things like whole eggs, things like... even fruits for some people.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And now what I've just mentioned is what a common, uh, the common things that women in particular sacrifice under these guru diets that they get from these, uh, quote unquote physique coaches, uh, for years there, it was, you were just allowed to eat, uh, you know, white fish, boneless, skinless chicken breasts, broccoli, uh, you know, a little bit of, uh, uh, olive oil.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Those were kind of, that was the standard, uh, diet. And what happened was, is that obviously you would get incredibly hungry. Um, but people started suffering from, uh, what we call the female triad. They started suffering from micronutrient deficiencies, chronic calorie restriction, anemia, uh, which is a low iron, um, low calcium, uh, hypothyroidism, uh, those kinds of things were very common.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Uh, you know, especially in that competitive industry, the competitive dieters figure physique, bikini wellness, et cetera. And then what was a shame is, is that your soccer moms, your general population would see these women, these competitive stage physiques in the quote unquote best shape of their life and not understand what was going on behind the scenes.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
All the things I just mentioned, all the health issues I just mentioned, plus depression and the medication that they have to take as a result, many of them are on thyroid medication and Um, and they don't see that. And then they, they embark on these journeys to follow these diets.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And then they start suffering from some of the same problems as sleep loss and the, uh, just the fatigue and depression. Uh, and I think it's, it's a shame. And a lot of the reasons why is they went into too big of a calorie deficit, too much cardio. Uh, and they started eliminating foods that were very important to maintain their health.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Uh, red meat's important for iron, obviously, uh, the egg yolk for biotin and choline for, you know, skin hair and nails and uh, fruits obviously are hugely important, the polyphenols for your health and, uh, and just all this over restriction and, and chronic, uh, uh, dieting started to result in all these health problems.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And I, I think that's why that, that industry gets a bad name and dieting in general gets a bad name because people were over restricting. I did it myself, you know, egg whites and, uh, tilapia and, um, too much cardio and I would lose way more muscle than I should have. And,
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
When I finally figured that out and started adding less fat when I was building muscle and then dieting off less muscle when I was dieting, when I was trying to get the best condition possible, I achieved a better level of fitness. I had more energy. I had maintained more muscle, which allowed me to get into better condition.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
That's your drinking, your sugar laden sodas and your fast foods and your pastries and those kinds of things, the cakes, cookies, candies, and those kinds of things. And we're simply over consuming those foods because they don't satisfy us. They don't satisfy our hunger signaling. And so we eat more of them at one sitting and we're hungry again sooner and eat again as a result.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
So all of those things worked from personal experience and then ultimately understanding the science behind what I was doing wrong.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
that the the type of food and that quality of that food and where that food is grown and where it comes from actually matters a lot what played a role in that journey yeah i think it's the micronutrient some of the satiety was linked to that mostly the blood testing i started doing blood testing many years ago on a regular basis and you would see deficiencies you'd see metabolic syndrome when you gain too much body fat you know be hypertension and maybe liver enzymes or kidney enzymes elevation
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
you start to see LDL go up, your lipids, dyslipidemia. You start to see all these problems when you gain too much body fat, particularly if it's ectopic or visceral fat around the fatty liver, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and ultimately getting all the other problems are kind of downstream of that, all the hypertension, dyslipidemia, and the like.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
So that became important not to gain just too much body fat. And so I was more particular about the types of foods I ate, but it was probably mostly in the dieting with the women and seeing the results with them that made me focus on the micronutrients so heavily, uh, as mentioned with the, uh, female triad and all of those over restrictive diets. I just last summer, I was working with a
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
A softball team, a high school softball team, and two of the girls had significantly underperformed in one of the tests that we were doing to see if they were progressing. We like to measure everything. That which gets measured gets improved. And so we measured speed and strength for athletes, and their 40-meter laser time went down significantly. When everyone else was going up and progressing.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And so we asked, you know, we pulled aside and we talked to the parents, we talked to the kids, find out what's going on. As it turns out, they had, you know, sleep is usually one of the biggest things that goes wrong, especially for high school athletes. But in this case, they just started over restricting. They had gone into a very limited restrictive diet, like the guru diet I mentioned earlier.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And sure enough, we had them get a blood test and they had anemia. And that will cause a significant amount of fatigue and performance to suffer. And so, you know, we had to put some things back into their diet to make sure they had sufficient iron and sufficient calories in general. And they, you know, their performance recovered and their energy levels recovered. So I saw that with women.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
I saw that, you know, as I was in exercise science at University of Oregon, I was working with the UVO track team. And women in particular, you would see a lot of times they would get stress fractures and they would, from bone mineral density loss, from chronic over-restriction for the distance runners.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And there was, I think more recently, just within the last few years, there was a huge drum up in the news about one of the former, or one of the Nike coaches got sanctioned because he was over-restricting the calories for some of his athletes who suffered some of the same problems. So Women are particularly susceptible. They also end up with amenorrhea, a cessation of the menstrual period.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
That's something that one of your listeners has suffered from. That's part of the female triad, chronic calorie restriction and Micronutrient restriction is going to cause those problems. You have to be cautious. That's why we like focusing on performance rather than the scale. We like focusing on, are you getting stronger? What can your body do as opposed to what does it weigh?
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
So the first thing is we try and get our clients to move away or to eat the majority of their foods as whole foods. That's your lean proteins, your fruits and vegetables, your nuts and seeds and those kinds of things. are a lot harder to overconsume and they satisfy you longer. Higher protein diets, higher fiber diets are important.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And ultimately form will follow function. Maybe the results don't look as immediate because you can jump on a scale week over week and see a pound or two loss.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
But when you're lifting weights, it can take months to start to see the real difference, to start to see the smaller waist and to start to see the leanness of your physique and to start to feel and appreciate the things that it can do, the strength that it has, the performance that it can accomplish.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
I think it's a wide open palette. And I think that people are very, it's very individualistic. There's no best exercise. I used to, you know, I'm an old power lifter. And so, you know, I'm hardcore, right? Go to failure, squat, deadlift bench, you know, that was the foundation of my lifting.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And back in the 80s and 90s, of course, the harder you trained and the more pain you were in, the more delayed onset muscle soreness you endured, of course, you felt as though you were accomplishing something. But now we understand from the research that that's not necessary, that you don't have to go to failure and that there's no particularly best exercise.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
I would suggest that you train all of your muscle groups. That's going to be a push, pull, and legs. As you're familiar with, push is chest, shoulders, and triceps, and pull is your back and biceps, and then your leg movements, your quads and hamstrings. So I would suggest people do enough variety to get all of their muscle groups worked.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
I do like to see some sort of axial loading, and that would be something that would go down through the spine, Uh, because how do you build bone mineral density? You do that by progressively loading the body. And, uh, so we'd like to see something, uh, of a, like a, maybe a hack squat movement or a trap par deadlift. Uh, those are both reasonably, uh, comfortable movements that most people can do.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Not everybody can enjoy a squat. Um, but something where the loading is coming from the top down. So I like the trap bar for that. It's with the elevated handles. It's a pretty low barrier to entry. There's not much coordination or education involved in that. You can go in day one and put a little bit of weight on there and stand up with it.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
I use this as a strategy, to be honest, and I'll wrap myself out here. But Women who don't generally like to lift and maybe are opposed to the thought of lifting heavy because they feel like it's going to make them bulky, which in fact is not the case. I'll bring them in and have them on their first day do the trap bar deadlift because it's really easy to do. Anybody can do it.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And then when they come back three days later and they do it again, they're able to lift more. They can lift more weight for more reps. And you measure this, you write it down on a card and they see the, what they determine is immediate feedback for, for progress. Now we're aware that that's what we call neural adaptation. They're just getting more practiced at the movement.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
They're learning to coordinate their effort. Um, their body's becoming better at recruiting all the muscles that are involved in the movement. It's not necessarily a strength increase or a muscle increase, uh, but it's more of a central nervous system adaptation. that we call neural adaptation. So you're just getting better, more practiced. It'd be the same as if you were shooting free throws.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Each time you come in, you'll make a few more. A little higher percentage. Your body's getting better at the movement. But it's a fantastic way for people to see progress. And each week, for many, many weeks, if not months, when that client comes in, they'll see an increase in the amount of reps they can lift with the same weight or they'll be able to lift more weight.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And there's other smaller things that you can do, being mindful about your eating, taking longer to eat because there seems to be a time delay between when you start eating and when your body responds to the fullness, the rugae expansion of the stomach sending the signal for satiety. And then also one of the methods we use to kind of
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And we design programs around PRs, personal records. not a single rep max. It could be a five rep max, but we try and measure every movement based on someone's ability to progress that over time. Did you do one more rep or can you add one more plate or five more pounds to, uh, to one of the movements? And that is kind of the key.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
When you ask me what's, what's the, the most, the biggest underlying thing is the best exercises of when you'll do try and find resistance training movements that, that feel good to you. You don't have to do anything that hurts. And then secondly is, Can you progress that over time?
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
If you do 10 reps and you could have done 20, probably not a significant enough stimulus to yield an adaptation so you can get stronger or get more lean muscle mass. Initially, for newbies, Anything will make you grow. Even the example I just gave, 10 reps when you could have done 20. If you're a newbie, you'll get benefits from that.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
But as you train a little longer over the course of a number of months and you're consistent, which is the most important thing, you'll want to start challenging yourself a little bit more and getting closer and closer to where the repetitions become harder. You don't have to go to failure, but if you can go until the weights move a little slower, so if you're
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
If your tempo is one, two, three, four, five, you're done. You can rack it. You don't have to do any more reps. Your tempo slowed down, right? The speed, the acceleration of the weight slowed down. You've maximized, you've maximally recruited the muscles that were necessary to perform that movement. And that's a sufficient stimulus and you'll get results from that.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Now you keep doing that over time, five becomes easy and you'll do six a little slow. And then you do that for a few more weeks and six will become easy and you'll do seven a little slow and you could choose to do one more rep or you can choose to add five more pounds and make five hard again. And that's the progression.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And ultimately if you can build enough strength, you don't have to get stronger forever, but be strong enough so that your body's durable enough to be able to perform, you know, many years into the future or to just hedge your bets against what's going to be ultimately the unavoidable decline in strength and lean mass over the years, you want to have built up some sort of reserve.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Same thing's true for bone mineral density, much of which is obtained in your teens. And I don't think that a lot of women realize that, that most of your bone mineral density is accumulated by the time you're in teens and early 20s. And from there on out, You can see a decline, a gradual decline in that in the absence of some sort of resistant stimulus to keep that bone minerals density strong.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
help with that fullness, expanding the stomach and taking more time is we ask that they drink fluids before and during, lots of fluids before and during their meals to help with filling the stomach up. And then obviously the fibers, the salads, they're just not very calorie dense, but you can eat a lot of them and they'll fill you up and keep you full for a longer period of time. And so
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Yeah, we did talk. We touched on a lot of them. I don't want to be too repetitive, but uh, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And if you're, um, trying to get the best results, you're going to want to shore up the things that the big rocks, the things that matter most, uh, sleep optimization, that's the biggest, you can't, uh, out supplement or out train, uh, or out diet, uh, poor sleep. It's, uh, as, uh, uh, has been said, it's the foundation upon which everything else rests. Um,
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Dr. Matthew Walker, a sleep scientist, said that to Joe Rogan. It's just sat with me ever since because I have clients that constantly contact me about their current state of condition and their level of fatigue. Fundamentally, it's rooted in high-quality sleep.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
I open up my book, my e-book, The Vertical Diet 4.0 e-book that I've been expanding upon over the last seven or eight years and adding more and more information as I can ask questions. It's now 250 pages with over 200 references to articles and videos and peer-reviewed research. But it goes through step-by-step all of these things that we've discussed today and much, much more.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
But sleep is the foundation and optimizing sleep, not just sleep quantity, but sleep quality. And that can include getting a sleep study if necessary for people who suffer from apnea, whether that's due to overweight or just a thick neck from lifting or a genetic predisposition. But that's huge.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And apnea can have an enormous effect on blood pressure, on cardiovascular disease risk, on insulin, blood sugar metabolism, on lean mass retention and body fat. When you're dieting, your body, people with apnea or poor sleep end up losing more muscle. So it has a huge impact on all those things. So sleep is the foundation.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
We really work hard on trying to optimize that, giving yourself, and I have a whole, we call a sleep hygiene program.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
list of things to optimize sleep, you know, cool room, quiet room, dark room, you know, not too much fluids before bed, you know, a whole list of things, whether, you know, a CPAP for apnea, all those kinds of things that can help optimize your sleep, giving yourself enough, an opportunity to be successful, you know, not too much of those TV or electronics right before bed,
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
A lot of folks will go to bed at night and they'll surf the internet until midnight and then have to be up at 5.30 in the morning. And that's just, you're not even giving yourself an opportunity to get your seven plus hours. That's generally burning the candle at both ends is the primary cause of the problem. Sleepy train.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
So the sleeping I just discussed, the eating we spent a lot of time on, but one of the big things with eating is just consistency. Again, compliance is the science and I tend to track, I still track. It helps hold me accountable is the biggest thing. And if I've got something I can glance at and if, you know, I still weigh daily, I don't compete in anything anymore.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
It's been a long time, but I still want to perform at a high level so I can. You know, play sports or lift or do the kinds of things that I want to do. So I still measure these things. And so, of course, eating is important. We discussed that. And then the exercise components, of course, and just being consistent there. Again, compliance is the science. Those are the big rocks.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And then, you know, just. The other one would be stress management, but the biggest thing about stress management is your sleep habits, your diet, and your exercise. I read a book many years ago when I was going through a difficult time with a new business that I started and started having some anxiety and stress over the business. I was sleeping four hours a night and working too many hours.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
I hadn't been to the gym in a while. I was eating My college food again, fast foods and top ramen because it was cheap and quick. Drinking too much caffeine to get through the day. And I went to the library and I read a book about called Stress for Success by Jim Lower. I thought it was going to give me some hack to manage stress.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
I thought there was going to be something, you know, like a massage or a sauna or something, you know, a supplement. And the whole book was about the very same thing we've been discussing here. It was about optimizing your sleep, exercising regularly, stop, you know, eating like an a**hole. I had been competing for, you know, since 88 through 97. I competed in
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
constantly throughout those years and then it was probably in 1999 or 2000 that i was going through this challenging time and i just had kind of fallen away from the discipline uh had replaced work had replaced all the training with work and uh it was kind of an either or proposition for me at the time and i discovered that it's uh it needs to be and again the whole being greater than the sum of its parts it needs to you need to pay respect pay yourself first i said
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
That's what we try and do with our clients and understanding also that I've often said that there's many paths to the same destination and there's no one best diet and everybody responds differently. And I think this is a good thing. Although my clients say, Stan, just tell me exactly what to eat. That's their demand of me as their coach is tell me exactly what to eat or what's the best diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
You know, respect the machine that's doing all the work or it's going to break down. And so I just resolved to get more sleep to join the gym again. I hadn't been in the gym in a year at that time, probably led to all of those. all those problems, the stress and anxiety that I was experiencing.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And ultimately, you know, I became more successful as a result, working less, but being more effective at work, the work that I did.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Yeah. And you sum that up by saying, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. There's many times where people, as I mentioned, they set themselves up for failure by creating this big, long list of things that they think they need to do to take themselves to the next level. And it's not that complicated. The basics will get you 98% of the results.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And a lot of the things on that list that you think you need to do probably aren't very meaningful. And that's where the vast majority of social media swims is in that pool of the 1% that is probably not too terribly meaningful, but they tend to exaggerate it or overemphasize it. And we see that.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Name any names, we all know who the influencers are that tend to be biohackers or claim that some new thing is going to give you some extraordinary result. And that's not the case.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Well, I have a lot to say here, but I'll keep it short. You can be great at anything, but you can't be great at everything. I think in today's era of social media, we look around and we think that everybody's doing everything better than we are. And they're doing a lot more than we are. And in fact, when you start to spread yourself too thin, you'll do everything worse.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And so really, it's a matter of setting priorities. What are your primary goal that you want to achieve? Writing those down, declaring them, whether it's on a whiteboard or you write it in lipstick on your mirror in your bathroom, whatever it is. You need to identify what those goals are.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And the best diet's the one you'll follow. And exactly what to eat is going to depend on What seems the least restrictive to you? What makes you the least hungry? Clearly those tools are higher satiety foods like whole foods and protein and fiber. But now we get into all these different types of diets. We've got, which I'm going to categorize in one of three ways.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And then the daily habits that you're going to accomplish in order to move you in that direction towards those goals. And then anything that's distracting from those goals, you should quickly identify and seek to eliminate that. And then get help where needed. And I've run a number of successful businesses throughout my career. And I didn't try and be a Jack of all trades, master of none.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
I hired a computer guy to do my computer stuff. I hired an attorney to do my legal work.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
I hired an accountant to do my, you know, maybe not in the position to hire a staff of people, but you can, uh, seek whatever kind of professional advice you need or whatever kind of assistance to do things that I just are a distraction or not, uh, might take more time for you to accomplish than someone who's experienced in those matters. Um,
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
I've recently started using an app, Fiverr, F-I-V-E-R-R, where you can seek help doing things. Like just if I had a simple thing to reprogram on my Shopify account. Normally you'd contact somebody and you'd just get charged an enormous amount of money for it for such a simple project.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
But I'd go on Fiverr and I would type in what I needed and somebody would be able to fix that for me in a very short period of time for an extremely low price. But I didn't have to have a full-time staff person. You know, I don't have the kind of business that requires the full-time computer guy. It's just one example. And then I economize a lot of the things in my day.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
I suffer from decision fatigue, if you've commonly, I'm sure, talked about. If you're just trying to do too many things,
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
uh, you have to, uh, streamline some of those things, whether it's the clothes that you wear or the food that you eat, like you said, the undertaking of meal prep, or whether you hire a company to do that, or, uh, whether you use a, uh, a shopping company to go get your groceries and drop them off at your house. Here's one of the challenges.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
People often think that they create this checklist of things that they need to do in a day. And they often think that they're by checking all these things off that they're accomplishing something. But it may come at the sacrifice of spending the time doing the thing that's the most important, that would take longer.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And you kind of judge your progress throughout the day by the check marks or crossing off all these little things that probably didn't make you any money and didn't get you any closer to your goal. So oftentimes when I take out my yellow pad of paper and I'm writing down the things I need to do during the day,
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
I might put dollar signals next to the things or dollar signs next to the things that I should be working on as a priority. Then I'll be able to spend more energy moving those things. But the things that make you more successful in life always take longer. We just talked about that's the truth with dieting, it's the truth with exercise, and that's the truth with business as well.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
The things that make you the most successful aren't going to materialize in one day. You're going to take a constant investment. It might take a couple, three hours a day for months before you start to see the rewards. The same thing would be true of your lifting or your nutrition.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
It's going to take a while, and you'll have to have some delayed gratification and be able to identify that goal and go about
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
There's only three kinds of diets really for weight loss. And this is coined by Dr. Peter Atiyah. I got him credit for this. CR, DR, and TR. Those are the three paths that you can take, the three diets that people can choose. CR is calorie restriction. That's where you count calories. Look at the labels. Use an app. Weigh and measure your food. That's an option.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Yeah, everything's under my name, Stan Efferding. My website's stanefferding.com. And on there, there's a link to the Vertical Diet Meal Prep Company. On there, there's an e-book, The Vertical Diet, currently the 4.0 version. I give a free update to anybody who's bought a previous version. So since I came out with The Vertical Diet 1.0. seven years ago.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
I've updated it based on the thousands of questions that I've received from people all over the world and I wanted to expand and answer those questions in the book. So it's now grown into the Vertical Diet 4.0 iteration with clickable links and to again research videos and articles to help people take a deeper dive into the kind of things that they're interested in.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
My Instagram is Stan Efferding and my YouTube, I have a series of rants that I did that are somewhat entertaining. is also Stan Efferding. So that's where you'll find everything.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
Well, I think that's an important topic because a lot of people presume to think that weight gain or weight loss is is really a matter of discipline. And in fact, while it's your responsibility, you are, you meaning people in general, are kind of dealt a different deck of cards. And not everybody has the same hunger signaling. This is one of the biggest underlying problems with weight loss.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
That's a very viable pathway that people can be successful in dieting. DR is dietary restriction. That's your eliminating food groups or macros. That's your keto folks, your vegan folks, your carnivore folks, your whole 30s. All of those diets that tell you to good food, bad food, eliminate these. That's a perfectly reasonable path. There's pros and cons, of course, with all of these avenues.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
But that is a type of dietary pattern, dietary path. The other one is TR. That's time restriction. That's obviously your 16-8, your OMADs, your one meal a day, your alternate day fasting, anything that incorporates diet. limiting the window under which that you consume food. That can be a successful pathway for some people, not all.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And on all of the research on each of these different types of diets, we see inter-individual variability. We see people that are successful on these diets and we see people that are unsuccessful on these diets. In comparing them to each other, we don't see any winner amongst them. We see that long-term dietary adherence
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
is a challenge with all three diets and no diet rises to the top as being the best. And so you kind of have options here to choose which one feels the best to you. And people's success or failure on those diets is going to depend on whether or not they're able to adhere to those diets long term.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And I said this many years ago in a rant that I did about the Samoan population and the obesity epidemic here. Genetically speaking, some people tend to respond to like ghrelin, the hunger hormone, or leptin, the satiety hormone, leptin resistance, differently. Somebody might think it's easy for them to maintain a calorie deficit or maintain a normal body weight. Other people struggle.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
People like to demonize calories in, calories out. I think it's a straw man argument. They try and simplify it as meaning that 100 calories of carrots is the same as 100 calories of cookies, and nobody's ever said that. It's a oversimplified term for really the energy balance equation. And that's total daily energy intake. That's all of the calories you consume. And total daily energy expenditure.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And that's all of the activity and energy, the calories that you burn. It's a more complex equation. It accounts for things like fiber, like hormones and satiety, which can drive overconsumption of food, which would affect your energy intake side of the equation. And it accounts for how hormones affect Things like your energy, your ability to exercise and burn calories.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
So all of those things are accounted for in that energy balance equation. At the end of the day, if you want to lose weight, you have to get into a calorie deficit. Calories do count, whether you're doing keto or whether you're doing intermittent fasting or whether you're counting calories. If you're going to lose weight or if you're losing weight, you are in a calorie deficit just by definition.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And that's not to say that you have to count calories. Those are other methods or ways that you can put yourself in a calorie deficit by eliminating food groups or by eliminating the amount of time that you eat in a day. The end result of that is that if you lose weight, you created a calorie deficit, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
But whether or not you can maintain that type of diet long term becomes still the most important. Like you said, adherence is important. I coined the term compliance is the science. And ultimately, whichever diet path that you choose, being able to adhere to it long term, make it part of a lifestyle that you can sustain is going to be the most important thing. But calories do count.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And it's important to learn about calories, just like you learn about budgeting your money. If you spend more than you earn, you're going to be in a deficit. And if you earn more than you spend, you're going to have a surplus. which with money is a good thing. With calories might be a bad thing. The surplus can lead to weight gain.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
A lot of people just aren't aware of how many calories are in foods that they eat. I've been training clients since college. I studied exercise science in the University of Oregon, and I worked at a box gym and worked at many gyms. I've owned three different gyms over the years, and I've been training people since I was a young man, since the late 80s. And I still train people.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
With a term that's been coined recently, ghrelin, called food noise. And some people just think about food. It just overwhelms them constantly throughout the day. And if you're going to successfully diet, you can't set yourself up for failure by constantly being voraciously hungry.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
I still have clients. I still work with not just famous athletes as many people are familiar with me for, but I work with dad bods and soccer moms and Jen pop on, on simple weight loss. And as you mentioned now, a lot of women, as they get into their forties and fifties, you're struggling with weight to largely because of either PCOS or some sort of paramenopausal or postmenopausal symptoms.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
things start to change for them very aggressively. I want them to be educated as to the kind of foods they eat. So I think it's a good idea, just like you'd learn to budget your money. It's a good idea. Balance your checkbook. It's a good idea to use an app for a little while. So you familiarize yourself with some of the quote unquote hidden calories that are in some foods.
Dhru Purohit Show
No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
A vanilla latte at Starbucks can have 700 calories. And you might not know that. It seems like a coffee. You know, it tastes good. It's got a little vanilla in it. Uh, things like, uh, but a Cheney Alfredo, it's at a cheesecake factory is 2200 calories.
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No BS Guide For Losing Fat & Building Muscle with Stan Efferding
And we should probably be pretty aware that that's going to be a calorie bomb, but even things like little sauces, um, salad dressings, things with, uh, Very calorie-dense oils, generally speaking. That's not to speak specifically to what type of oil, but just fats in general. They're nine calories per gram.