Full transcript of “The ONLY Way To Lose Fat Without Losing Muscle!”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 You don't have to be in your 70s to start losing muscle. Most people start losing it decades earlier and it picks up speed fast. And the moment you try to lose weight without the right plan, your body goes after muscle first. That's not just a setback. That's a serious problem because without enough muscle, your metabolism slows down. Your strength fades and you risk injury. And if you don't fix it, it's just going to get harder from here on out. So, to teach you how to start protecting your muscle while losing weight, I put together a simple acronym. It's not groundbreaking, but it works, and it'll help you remember exactly what your body needs to burn fat without burning muscle. It's
0:48 called the lean formula. L E A N. The L in the lean formula is to lift to keep your muscle. Let's walk through it. starting with the L, which stands for lift. Because if your muscles aren't being used, then they're going to disappear. And your body sees unused muscle as extra baggage, something that it can burn to survive. Cardio won't stop it. Walking won't stop it. Even eating more protein won't stop it. Not on its own. So, if you want your muscle to stay, you only have one option, and that's adding some weight or doing some form of resistance training. You don't need to be in the gym every day and you don't need to lift heavy, but you do need to challenge your muscles on a regular basis, especially as you get
1:35 older. Why? Because your body becomes less responsive to food and to movement as you age. This is something called anabolic resistance. And strength training is one of the only things that you can do to fight back against it. So, here's the most simple approach that you can take to make sure you're challenging your muscles enough. First, start with two to four resistance workouts per week. In our challenges, we call this level three. You want to be focused on big functional movements. We do lots of squats and lunges and rows and presses. These challenge more muscle in one single movement, which makes them great for keeping your strength and your
2:22 metabolism as you lose fat. Next, aim for two to three sets. We like to do three sets. You're getting at least 8 to 12 reps, or I usually teach doing it for 50 seconds straight. This range is best for building and preserving muscle without creating too much fatigue or risking injury. Then after each set, take yourself a break, 30 to 90 seconds. We usually shoot for 40. We'll do three different exercises in a row and then take a nice 40 second break to catch breath, calm things down, and go again. Remember, it doesn't have to be heavy. It just needs to be challenging for you. So, we always have a level one, a level two, or a level three. Level three is where you really start to see some
3:09 weight show up. But you could use bands, you can use dumbbells, or just your body weight, whatever you have access to. Just make sure that it matches your current fitness level and challenge your body. The E in the lean formula is eating enough protein. Because when it comes to protecting your muscle, nothing matters more. You might be doing everything right, cleaning up your diet, getting in your steps, lifting, adding some weight a couple times a week, but if your protein is too low, you're still going to lose some muscle. Here's why. As your body ages, it becomes less responsive to protein. And it ties back to that anabolic resistance that we just talked about. And the amount of protein that used to work when you were younger simply isn't cutting it anymore. And the
3:54 data backs us up. One study found that nearly 40% of older people aren't even hitting the minimum protein target. And even if they were, the minimum target is still too low for maintaining muscles, especially later in life. But even those who are getting enough total protein are often still making two big protein mistakes. First, they just eat it all at once, usually in one meal, like dinner. And your body can only process so much protein at one time. So, to maximize the benefits, you got to think about spreading it across your day. 25 to 35 grams per meal if you can get it. The goal, if you want a formula, could be a half to.7 grams per pound of body
4:40 weight. So some quick math, if you're 150 pound person, that's around 80 to 110 grams of protein on a daily basis. Second, people are often not getting enough of a specific amino acid, leucine. That's the one that tells your body to start building muscle. Older adults need about two and a half to three grams of leucine per meal if you really want to keep just your shape. I'm not talking about hulky muscles just to keep nice filled out your skin healthy, your figure healthy to stay strong. In order to hit the lucine mark of 2 and 1 half to three grams per meal, you'll need to eat about 8 ounces of burger. That would give you 3.6 g. So you can probably get away with 4 to 6 ounces of
5:25 burger. 6 ounces of a chicken breast. That's 2.8 gram of leucine. Five whole eggs would be 2 and a half grams of leucine. So you could even get away with three or four. And if you're plant-based, you would combine about a cup and a half of lentils of beans with about a cup of quinoa. And that would get you roughly 2.8 g. So if you want to keep your strength while losing fat, this part isn't optional. Your muscle needs to be fed and the right fuel in the right amount at the right time is super important. Now the A of the lean formula is avoid starvation because eating too few of meals or too little of calories, it's one of the faster ways to
6:10 lose muscle if you do too much of it. Now, I really like fasting. It's a very good tool to be used to pick up while we're getting the fast fat off. But to maintain muscle after fat has come off, we've got to take a little bit different approach or long-term think about it a little differently. When people want to lose weight, they cut hard. And so people are very quick to starve themselves, skip lots of meals slash lots of portions, and try to eat as little as possible. And the weight does come down, but you can lose muscle in the process. So, if you're looking to try to maintain that muscle, even if you're lifting and even if you are eating some more protein, we want to watch this step because if your body doesn't get enough energy, it's hard to
6:55 function properly. And it will start breaking down muscle, your body will to make up the difference if we're lacking too little. And so, that muscle becomes a fuel source. And once that muscle's gone, your metabolism starts to slow down. It does take quite a bit to build it back. So, how do we maintain some of this while we're trimming up? Because we don't want our body just burning fewer calories and when you go back to eating normally, then suddenly you're in a calorie surplus and didn't even know it. Now, this doesn't mean that calories don't matter. You still need a little bit of a deficit to lose and to lose fat, but the deficit needs to be smart, not extreme. Okay? Studies show that the best results come from just doing it gradually. We call this our advanced challenge eating plan. And we use the tool of rotational fasting if we're
7:42 going to incorporate fasting where you ease your body into lowering these down. It's more gentle on the metabolism. And at the same time, we want to protect muscles by finding sources of adequate protein that don't spike insulin, that don't throw you completely out of your fasting mode. We call this dirty fasting. And of course, we want to get resistance training like we just talked about. So, here's the right way to do it. You can still create a deficit. If you're watching calories, that would be 3 to 500 calories that you're going down per day. It's simple. In order to do this, stop snacking. Just eat clean, healthy meals balanced with clean fats, clean protein, and proper fibers, which eat each meal. And don't eat in between. Eating in between is going to spike insulin levels. And it's a quick way,
8:27 whether you're drinking calories or eating calories, to add those three to 500 back in. Just simply quitting snacking is the first step that we teach people to do in our eating plans. Then we start to work our way into rotational fasting where we can incorporate smaller consumption. If you're skipping solid food and fasting, you can still add in some clean protein or clean fats through liquids. I love doing it through coffee. That's protein coffee that I'll sometimes also add butter or coconut oil to it mixed with a protein powder. you're going to get very little spike in insulin. So, it still keeps you in a fat burning fasting mode. Hardcore fasters might not like that approach. It's dirty fasting, but it is an easy way to still
9:12 get protein, still get some clean fats without consuming a big calorie meal or really spiking your insulin. The goal isn't to eat as little as possible. It's to just eat enough to burn fat without sacrificing the muscle that holds your health together. So, if this is a main focus for you, you can still use the tool of fasting, but really cut down on the snacking side of things and let's just make sure we're getting quality food in. Let's go to the N in the lean formula. And that stands for never skip sleep because what happens overnight plays a bigger role in your weight and in your muscle than most people realize. It's when you recover. So the research shows in one study, people who slept 5 hours instead of eight lost the same
9:59 amount of total weight. So we're comparing two groups, the amount of sleep that they got, following the same regimens, but the people who only slept 5 hours lost 60% more muscle. Let that sink in. Same diet, same workout, same weight loss amount, way more muscle gone just from getting less sleep. That's not all. Sleep loss also increases cortisol, your body's primary stress hormone. And when cortisol stays high, the body breaks down more muscle and it holds on to more fat, especially around the belly. Poor sleep also messes with your hunger hormones. your brain starts craving sugar. Your willpower drops and
10:46 suddenly that clean eating plan that you're committed to becomes a lot harder to stick to. So don't treat sleep like a luxury. Treat it like a part of your plan. And here's how to do it. Aim for 7 to n hours of sleep per night. Keep your room cool. Keep it dark. Keep it quiet. And power down the screens. Try to an hour before bed, especially your phone. Because if you want to look better, you want to feel stronger, and you want to recover faster, you've got to let your body enter healing mode, and that comes during sleep. All right, now you know how to protect your muscle with the lean formula. What's next? How do you
11:33 actually lose the fat and lose it fast without doing more harm than good? I'm going to break it all down in my other video, the 30-day blueprint to lose 20 pounds of fat. In it, you'll get the full plan, the meal timing, the food lists, the recipes, and the exact boosters that I use to make fat loss easier, faster, more sustainable. The best part, it's not just a diet. It's a lifestyle that you can stick with long after the weight loss is gone. I'll include a link to that video here. Click to watch it now and get started burning fat the right way.
