THIS is How You'll Get Lean Once and For All (GUARANTEED!)

0:00 What's up, guys? Jeff Cavalere, athletex.com and former junk food junkie. That's right. At 15 years old, there was no teenager on the face of the planet that ate worse than I did. So, how did I go from that to now being known for being lean and consistently lean for now over 30 years without fail? Because I followed the exact same steps I'm going to share with you in this video. Literally, I'm going to break it down for you step by step. I don't care how much trouble you're having right now with eating because I know it can be challenging for many. I want to show you the steps to finally unlock nutrition so that almost becomes automatic, right? Where healthy eating can become the addiction, not the food itself. Guys, here's how you do it. It starts number one by making your why bigger than your craving. You see, this is something that

0:46 starts up here before you look for any food or diet plan to follow. Stop following diet plans. I'll tell you about that in a second. Why? Because when you know the why, the how becomes clearer. And the only way to get to the real why is to understand your real motivation for change. In other words, not just that you want to get a six-pack. I'll share with you how I did this. Number one, that was my goal. I wanted to get a six-pack. Why? Because I wanted to get girls. Well, now we start to find out what's really going on. Because when you ask the why question five times, you actually set an emotional anchor. And that will finally propel you to actually stick to this. So, the second question was why. Why do you want to get girls, Jeff? Because I want to feel desired by somebody, especially a girl. Well, why do you want to feel desired by somebody? That's the

1:32 fourth question. Well, maybe it had to do with the fact that when I was 5 years old, my mom left. The only female figure in my life, making me feel maybe a little bit unloved, right? We're getting getting deep here. But this is where it really starts to get triggered. Why does it feel important for you to be loved by somebody else, particularly a woman? Well, now we know why, right? It becomes a real emotional anchor. I want to do this so that I can feel more confident in myself and what I bring to the table for somebody else. Now my motivation is different and it can change. My motivation now is my two nine-year-old boys. I want to be a role model for them, a positive role model. And having had them later in life, I want to be around for a long time to be able to do that for a long time. Find your why. Ask yourself that question five times. You'll find your why. The next thing you need to do is change your mindset.

2:18 Another one up here starts up here. And that is you got to stop thinking that fat loss equals starvation. The fat you want to get rid of is not going to come from starving yourself because that is not sustainable. More so than that, it actually is costing you because in the process of starving yourself, you're probably losing muscle in addition to fat. We know that muscle is metabolically active and protective. You want to do everything you can to preserve the muscle that you have while burning the fat. And to do that, you need to feed it. So, you have to change your approach to how you're going to start to lose this weight. You have to stop looking for these massive deficits, right? Instead, limit yourself to just 500 calories of a deficit in a day from food alone. So, if you're taking in 2500 calories right now, don't go any lower

3:05 than 2,000 calories. Realize this will take some time. be a little less aggressive, but in doing so preserve more muscle and metabolically you'll protect yourself more and increase the chance that you'll be able to stick to this for a lifetime. So what we want to do is again you want to get a little bit extra calorie burn. You could do that through increasing your activity or your output, but not by going any lower than the food that you're taking in your body each day. Next, you got to start putting in your body the things that your body needs the most, and that's water. Everything in your body is triggered off of being hydrated. Every process in your body, especially metabolically, will struggle if you don't have enough water. I can't understate that enough. Dehydration actually also mimics hunger, right? You get confused and you start to eat more. It can impair your training.

3:51 And it also can slow down your metabolism, like I said, to make fat loss and muscle growth more difficult. In almost every case, people have to increase the amount of water that they're drinking right now. Now, I know there's been a lot more awareness about this, so people are doing a better job. But if you actually determine how much you're taking in a day, you still might not be getting enough. Because what I want you to do is get 75 ounces per pound of body weight. So if you're 160 lb person, you should be shooting for 120 ounces of water a day. And I'm talking about pure water. Now, I like to start my day with a 12 to 16 Poland spring bottle right near my bathroom sink just to get myself kickarted off on the right path. It's a really easy thing to do for a lot of us. It's habitual. It's easy to set up. You don't even need to buy the Poland

4:37 spring. You just take a glass of water. But start your day that way to make sure you're on the right path. Next, if water's number one, number two, right behind it is protein. And why is that? Because I just talked about not all calories are the same. The deficit that you're creating, if you maintain higher portions of protein in your meals, you're going to preserve more muscle mass flat out. more of that weight loss can come from body fat versus muscle loss if you prioritize protein. Not just that though, it increases satiety. So, it makes you feel more full. It also helps you again to lean maintain that lean muscle mass and it has a higher thermic effect. So, that means is it takes more metabolic cost to break down

5:22 the calories from protein than it does fats or carbohydrates. So, even just digesting the foods that you're eating here creates more calorie burn, which is going to help you in your pursuit of weight loss or fat loss. What do I recommend? The goal here for you, 1 to 1.2 grams of protein per pound of body weight, particularly if you want to build muscle. Now, there's a lot of different ranges. This just happens to be one of the easiest ones to remember and the one that sort of fits, especially if you're going to add training to the equation, which I highly recommend that you do in order to build up that lean muscle tissue so you can have that more metabolic activity to help you in the in the pursuit of getting leaner. Build every meal around a lean protein. That's the easiest way to do this. Just start the meal with a protein. I'm going to show you how to do that specifically here in a second. Supplement with whey or casein. Every

6:08 single day, I have my Pro30G protein. is 30 grams of protein. I have it with skim milk. That's another 15 grams. It's like 45 grams of protein on my way to getting my 1 to 1.2 grams per pound of body weight. It helps me to get there a lot quicker. And it's going to be a lot easier for a lot of you to do it that way, you know, to contribute. And then think protein first in your snacks, right? Beef jerky, nuts, things that have protein in them in your in between meals can help you to chip away at those protein goals. What you really need to make sure you're prioritizing it if you want to keep that proportion of weight lost to be mostly fat and not that the muscle tissue you're trying to hold on to. Next thing you got to do is you got to learn how to grocery shop, guys. Master whole food focused grocery shopping. The easiest way to do that is just shop the perimeter of the store. You probably heard that before. Why?

6:54 Because in that perimeter we have those whole single food ingredient foods, right? Like protein, chicken, turkey, eggs, Greek yogurt, right? in the freezer section along the back. All the produce for vegetables and carbohydrates, your sweet potatoes, leafy greens, peppers, fruit, mushrooms, they're all on that perimeter. What this does though is by limiting that processed food intake is we're also increasing nutrient density. What that means is the quality of the foods that you're eating because a calorie is not a calorie, right? When we look at creating a caloric deficit, yeah, calories are calories, but what makes up the calories you're consuming? Because sugar is not the same as, let's say, broccoli, which has a lot more micronutrients, vitamins,

7:40 and minerals that contribute additionally metabolically to the equation of making a more favorable environment for you to actually lose weight. You don't want to just treat all foods the same. You want to increase that nutrient density of the foods that you have. So, even if they're the same caloric amount, you're still getting higher quality that's more beneficial to your goals. Here, again, your fats, olive oils, avocado, nuts, make sure you're getting those as well. We'll talk about how to break them all down here in a second. This is the only time I want you to go in between the aisles right here for your seasoning and sauces because these are the secrets to sustainability. There is no way that I or anyone else should expect you to stick to a meal plan if you hate it. If you cannot stand the taste of the foods you're eating, it will never last. Maybe for a month,

8:27 maybe for a few, but never for the rest of time here. We need to find something that's going to last for a lifetime. And you need to be able to like what you eat. Bland food is a compliance killer. Can't eat foods that you don't like. These flavors, these things that you can add come at a really low caloric cost. They're almost negligible calories, but they add a lot to the enjoyment of the food that you're eating. So herbs, spices, vinegar, mustard, salsa. I have citrus or mango salsa, hot sauces, right? Things like that will make these foods taste much better to the point where you actually enjoy them. You can get creative, right? But you actually can stick with them. And when you do, it makes food enjoyable. Now, how are we going to do this? We have to establish your baseline. Where are we

9:12 starting from? Because a lot of us don't know really how to start. So, I'm going to do this for you. Really, really simple. I'm gonna encourage you to start counting calories only early on here because what that does is two things. The counting of the calories increases awareness. So if you're looking at the foods you have right now, a lot of you don't know how many calories are even in the things that you eat, right? You eat chicken parmesan because you think you're eating chicken. It's a healthy food option, but you're not aware that chicken parmesan has a lot more calories than chicken breast because of the breading and also the cheese and the sauce, right? So, you want to make sure that you're increasing your understanding of the foods that you're already eating. The second thing it does though is it starts to make you accountable. Just by counting calories and following along, you start to become more aware of the process and start to

9:58 care. You become invested in it. And that's a great thing, but only to start because I don't want you to become reliant on counting calories for the rest of time because you don't need to. But what it does is it gives you a nice easy starting point. And the way to do this is to keep it really, really freaking simple. 1215. That's it. What that means is you're going to multiply your body weight by either 12 or 15. And here's the simple rule to start. If you can see your abs right now, then multiply by 15. If you lift your shirt in the mirror and you cannot see your abs, go a little bit lower and multiply your body weight by 12. That will give you your target daily calorie range. And you're going to follow that for the next two weeks. And I encourage you to try to be pretty consistent with how you eat over the next two weeks because you want to make sure you have an accurate

10:44 judgment here to make because if you go out and eat, let's say, steak at Applebee's, it's not the same as steak at home. Here it's pretty nice and clean. Here at Applebees, they have a lot of other things that they stuff on top of it and you might think you're just eating steak and be thrown off calorically when you're doing your calculations and one is not the same as the other. If you eat consistently, you'll be able to be a very accurate in terms of determining whether or not you are at your maintenance or not. Because at the end of two weeks, if you've stayed the same weight, you likely are at maintenance right now just by that one little math equation. If you find that you're still gaining weight, then you need to cut back even further. And at that point, all you do is make an additional 10% cut on the calories. So, if you're at 2,000 calories, an additional 200 calories comes off. And now you look to see what happens if

11:29 you're starting to go into a caloric deficit. And again, we never try to get more aggressive than the 500 calorie deficit per day coming from just the changes to the meals that we're eating. You want to do a few extra exercises or some additional running just to burn some additional calories, that's fine. But from a deficit standpoint only, coming from the food that you're eating, try to limit it to that 500 calories. And make sure here again that we see where we're at when we do this little calculation. If you're at maintenance, you don't need to make a change. You can start from there. Or if you're seeing that you actually are losing too much weight, you can actually adjust up if it's too aggressive. Next thing, use your plate because this is the the the segue away from calorie counting to becoming more of a visual assessor of how you eat. This plate over here will

12:16 be your salvation, right? We we just simply divide the plate into compartments. Three of them. Protein, fibrous carbohydrates, and starchy carbohydrates. 40% of your plate started with protein like I said because of all the benefits we know that it brings in terms of maintaining lean muscle mass that's metabolically active then have the same amount 40% of your plate with fibrous carbohydrates the green leafy vegetables the broccoli the carrots the spinach down here and the remaining 20% that's where your starchy carbohydrates go now I'm not one to tell you to not have starchy carbohydrates I believe they're an important particularly of athletes plans to make sure that they not only fuel performance but also mentally can stay in the game because if you cut your starchy carbohydrates out, again, some have found success that way.

13:01 And if you can do it long term, then go ahead and stick with that. You can keep doing that. I don't believe that there's a lot of long-term success by completely eliminating anything and by eliminating some of the most rewarding foods or starchy carbohydrates. I think you're setting yourself up for failure. So, try to have a way that you can partition them and control their portion sizes. You could do that with the plate in this sort of 2:2 to1 ratio. It's going to automate portion control for you and also kind of figure out your macro distribution for you. And most of all, it's going to be help you become a visual assessor, not a calorie counter lifelong, you know, and if you have to, you can adjust your carb quantity. Let's say if you're looking to kind of again add a little bit more muscle or you're trying to support performance a little bit more, you can add a little bit more of the starchy carbohydrates and and dig

13:48 into that fibrous carbohydrate percentage just a little bit maybe by an additional 10%. The incidental fats very important. They come sort of on top of the plate, how you prepare your foods, the oils that you cook with or the oils and olive oils and vinegars that you add on top of your foods, right? They're very very important, but they because of their caloric impact, they don't need to really occupy a portion of this, they wind up becoming a significant portion just because of cooking with them. And the incidental fats are very important as well. They usually come in the form of how you prepare these foods, how you cook them with olive oil, right? Or olive oil and vinegar on a salad. They're going to be part of this as well. They're important calories. You just don't want to over consume them because of their caloric density. Now, when you prepare your meals for the week, do this for me. Please create a

14:34 go-to meal rotation. Don't worry about becoming Julia Child for crying out loud, cuz we don't need to. You don't need to become a chef to be able to support a healthy eating lifestyle. All you need to do is create a rotation of those go-to meals that you really like. And you're likely doing this right now because you're likely only eating about four or five variants of breakfast every week. you're likely only eating four or five variants of dinner across a week or or even a month. So find what those are and it will help you to reduce decision fatigue. You have to keep thinking about what you're going to prepare. It also saves you time and it keeps your meals consistent. Again, consistency here is the key with nutrition. You have to make meal prep simple, predictable, and repeatable if it's going to be sustainable. Now, what do we do again?

15:20 four to five options for breakfast, four to five options for lunch, and four to five options for dinner or snacks. And they all have to meet these criteria. They have to hit your protein target. Remember, we start each meal with your protein. They have to meet your protein target. Number two, they have to be easy to make, provided that time is sort of one of the things that you're fighting against. And also, they have to taste good. If they don't taste good, throw them out because I or anybody else cannot expect you, as I said, to to want to stick to a meal plan if you hate the foods you're eating. Throw out the foods that don't fit in terms of the ones that you like. They have to be something that you enjoy. Next thing in this meal prep side of it, reframe meal prep and instead think more meal assembly. Because when you do this, everything

16:06 becomes a lot more flexible, less rigid. Because preparing a meal in full can feel a lot more challenging and again a lot more involved. A lot of us don't have the time to do that. But instead, if we think of it like that plate and components, we can become flexible with these interchangeable parts. And when we become more flexible, it becomes more customizable. However, I feel that week I can make the changes on the fly a lot more easily. And again, that keeps me more consistent because I actually enjoy it. So, I'm talking about your action is to prepare or cook your protein and then freeze it if necessary. So, I'll go to Stew Leonard's Catering and I'll get a tray full of lemon chicken or mango chicken and then I'll put my plates together for the week and then I'll freeze the rest. So, I'm not committed to have to have that for the next 28

16:52 days. I can take that back out again and thaw it out simply by making my plates and putting them in the refrigerator. They'll dethaw on their own and I can have those like two or three weeks later. I don't have to have it all week after week after week. So, it's more flexible. The same thing can happen with my vegetables. I can have my frozen vegetables. They freeze really nicely. Or I can take my sweet potato, even my carbs. I put them in little individual Tupperware containers and I take them out as I want them and I put them on my plates and they defrost on their own in the refrigerator. I don't have to leave them out. Just prepare them on a Sunday and they all defrost over the course of the week. They'll be ready when you need them. What's good about that again is there's an interchangeability about it. If I want sweet potatoes, I can actually put some other carb on my plate. Now, when it comes to pasta, I wouldn't recommend freezing that. You just make it, you divide it up on your plate, and it stays for the week. It's really easy.

17:39 But become thoughtful and mindful of not just full plates, but interchangeable parts, following that plate division I just showed you before, and it becomes a lot easier. Now, something else I want you to do here, because it's really, really helpful. It controls one of the biggest problems people have with food, and that is grazing. People become grazers. They walk by uh the kitchen at work and they're grabbing food mindlessly and all those little calories add up and you know they do. But if you start to eat when the clock tells you that becomes a thing of the past. It's one of the most successful things that I did to get me on track. It's going to regulate your appetite by doing that because you're not really guessing when you're going to eat. You have defined times already available and known to you of when you're going to eat. So it controls those subjective cravings of

18:25 when I just feel like I might be hungry, right? And it reduces the mindless eating. So what do we do? Number one, don't skip your breakfast, right? Start the day with a timed breakfast at 7 a.m. or 6:00 a.m. or whatever time is convenient to you. Have a breakfast. Kickstart the day. Get your body fueled. And then realize that you'll get to space your meals throughout the rest of the day every 2 to three hours. And by spacing your meals so that a snack comes after breakfast, every two to three hours, you're not going to have to go that long to get to your next meal. If you had an adequate breakfast, it's likely going to keep you full for at least an hour and a half or two hours. So the next time you start to get hungry and you look at the clock and you realize you get to eat in a half hour or an hour, it actually lowers the need for willpower. Willpower is tough. If it was

19:11 so easy, you wouldn't be in a situation where you're really watching a video in need of good nutritional advice. Your willpower is going to be tested if you have to last for an hour or two hours or three hours or god knows how long because you have no planned time for when you're going to eat again. But if you have a time that you set for how you're going to eat throughout the day and you know that you only have to go a short period of time to get there, your willpower demands will be easier and you'll be able to do this much more consistently. Next thing, try to attach your meals to anchors in your daily routine. There's got to be things that you're doing right now that are already part of your habitual day, things that you automatically do. So, if you can start to anchor nutritional habits around the things that you're already doing, for instance, if you go for a morning walk, it's actually a good way to start the day. If you go for a

19:57 morning walk and sometimes skip breakfast, make sure the breakfast immediately follows the walk, right? So, you're not a breakfast skipper anymore. If you do it at work, you have little work blocks that you do. One leads up right till around noon or so. Well, have your lunch immediately after that particular meeting you have every day or that work block that you set aside every day or even when you're going to wind down at the end of the night. Your dinner can come in conjunction with the time that you start to do that. Like start to anchor your eating around particular things that you would never skip in the day. I've actually done this in an exercise standpoint by doing my ab training immediately before I eat dinner. Why? There's no magic to it. It's just I know I'm never going to skip dinner. So, if I actually just attach my ab training right before my dinner, then I never skip ab training either. It really helps to try to ingrain habits of

20:45 food around habits that are already here and healthy habits at that. This is really, really important. If you want this to work, you got to be give yourself some grace. You got to realize that there is no such thing as perfection. I myself who've been as lean as consistently can be for all these years. I'm not perfect and I don't try to be. And it has nothing to do with my once a year carrot cake. That doesn't count. That's a little bit more on the perfect side. What it does have to do with is the fact that I have chocolate chip black raspberry yogurt every single night. Every night without fail 365 days a year if I can. If I don't have that flavor, it's something else because it helps me to maintain and sustain the way I eat because I really enjoy that and I look forward to it and it gives me something to look forward to. Even though I like the foods I eat, it's the

21:30 treat side that we all can use to give us a little bit of mental relief. Sustainability is going to come from that and it's much greater than perfection. You can be perfect for a 100 days. I'll take the sustainable approach that lasts a lifetime. Perfection causes burnout or the pursuit of perfection for sure and it does not create sustainability. This will help you to get a little bit of mental relief as I said some social flexibility so you feel like you can go out every now and then and also reduce your rebound risk. So what you're looking to do is allow yourself 20% of the time or if you want to be a little bit more rigid 10% of the time but at minimum 10% to deviate from your plan. Have those foods, have those treats. If you think of it this way, you're eating five times a day, seven days a week, that's 35 meals in a week.

22:16 Give yourself the grace, if you go for the 20 rule, the 8020 of 20% of the time, seven of those meals don't have to be perfect. And even if they're not, you're going to look really damn good. If you want to get a little bit more chiseled, a little bit more dialed in, then limit it to 10%. So, three meals or so, three or four meals in the week where you deviate off plan. Not only will they probably actually be more received by your body because it tends to react better to actually not always being so rigid, but it also gives you the opportunity to plan ahead for events, right? To focus on better and not perfect, like I said, and also gives you some of that relaxation and enjoyment added to the plan so that you stay consistent. Next thing, when you eat out, just eat out strategically,

23:02 right? Because again, social flexibility is important here. You can't be expected to sit home all the time and eat and count every single calorie. That's not how we are as humans. We want to interact with people and live. So, I want you to I want you to be able to do it and you can. You can stay consistent without becoming antisocial. You got to create a balance between your goals and your social life. So, how do you do it? Preview the menus ahead of time. If you know you're going to a restaurant, almost every single one of them has the menu available online. Preview what it is. see what you're going to maybe eat so you don't feel uncomfortable having to make those decisions in front of others. And don't be afraid to ask for what you want. I just spent the whole weekend away. I ate out many times. Not once was I denied a request. They weren't crazy requests, but there were

23:47 requests. And there was never a weird look in return for what I was asking for. Every restaurant really wants to help accommodate you. Don't be afraid to ask. Gear that meal choice if you can around the protein. Make sure you're choosing a protein meal to sort of set the stage for a successful one. And again, ask for the sauces or dressings on the side. We're not talking about the same ones earlier that were calorically light. These are usually a little bit more calorie dense, but you can ask for them on the side so you can control how much you put on them. And if you have to eat a little protein snack before you go out to further control your cravings if you feel like you need that. The last two here are really, really important. You can't overlook them. You got to build a supportive food environment if you want this to work long term. And what I'm talking about is you can't rely on willpower always because even those that

24:34 are truly locked in are going to have their moments of weakness. So the best thing you can do is try to control your environment a little bit more. So keep your kitchen stocked with only those foods that are supportive of the plan or including those 10% foods or those 20% foods we talked about before. And if you have to store them out of sight, right? If you have to get them visually out of your sight to make sure that you're not overindulging in them, then so be it. but it's going to lower your temptation risk and offset the need to have really, really high amounts of willpower. Lastly, embrace the long game, please. It did not take me one week to become the biggest junk food eater in the world. That was a process. It also did not take me one week to reverse it. It took me a series of small changes year after year

25:20 after year. Modifications, some success with each modification, a little bit more visible muscularity with each modification, getting me inspired and excited about the change, finding that why, letting it sink in even more mentally to where it actually became automatic. And the same exact thing is possible for you. I promise you the same exact thing. If you find a way that's enjoyable, and I mean it, find a way that's enjoyable for you to eat because it's necessary, then the rest of this stuff can become automatic, right? The addiction to healthy eating could become almost as powerful as the addiction to unhealthy eating if you trigger your mind the right way and set the stage for success. You'll stop looking for 30-day diets and instead you'll find a lifelong nutrition plan that teaches you the skills that you need to make this

26:05 automatic. I promise you guys, this will help you follow these steps. Please share it with somebody else that you know struggles with eating. If you're looking for a meal plan, you can find it over at ax.com. The same supplements I recommended before, the protein powder is also available over there. And if you haven't done so, guys, make sure you click subscribe and turn notifications so you never miss a video when we're putting out. I hope this helps you guys. Again, share with somebody else that you think it can. See you.